trust the bluer skies Meditations on Fatherhood
paulo da costa
University of Regina Press, 2024
Review by Irene Marques
trust the bluer skies Meditations on Fatherhood is a memoir that recounts, in vivid detail, da costa’s six-month stay in Portugal, the country of his youth, with his four-year-old son, Koah. da costa’s intention, as stated directly at the beginning of the account, is to record these experiences, so that Koah, now still too young to retain most of them, can, when older, relive them, reflect back, and anchor himself in cultural and familial experiences from the paternal line. In that sense, the narrative is an act against forgetfulness, like many other narratives. However, given that Koah spends most of his time in Canada, and is thus less exposed to his father’s Portuguese cultural inheritances, da costa’s narrative also functions as a reminder to Koah that he has multiple cultural inheritances and should acknowledge and critically reflect on them. This memoir aims to honour the cultural plenitude of our beingness, and, at the same time, be critical of that very “plenitude”.
Using the second person point of view of epistolary correspondence, allows da costa to address his son directly, creating an intimate and emotionally impactful narrative that reads like multiple love letters. This father does not shy away from directly expressing his affection toward his son, moving away from unhealthy cultural inheritances passed on to him by his own father and a society generally not fond of open displays of emotion, especially between fathers and sons. As I note in a blurb that I wrote for this book, the narrative “call[s] for change”, prompts us to “turn away from traditions of masculinity and its recanting of emotion, which have plagued men the world over, and certainly Portugal, a country where manhood has been deeply ingrained in the social fabric, creating a homosocial ethic difficult to abate.”
But da costa’s narratives move well beyond fathers and sons’ relationships and a critique of masculine toxic traditions, encapsulating all sorts of other relations between humans of different or hybrid cultural backgrounds, humans and non-humans, self and others. He summons us to see affiliation between ourselves and all the “others” of the planet, ultimately reminding us that we are responsible for what happens—and for what could happen. If we just would see, relate, do: differently. The author is critical of traditions, institutions and social mores that keep us caged, constituting impediments to our consciousness expansion, realization and the creation of a more just world.
Animal cruelty, class privilege, empires and the pain that ensues from losing loved ones to suicide or cancer are also addressed by da costa. Individualism and breakdown of family and community relations as a result of modern lifestyles and hyper consumerism are other topics addressed in the memoir with a sensitivity and lucidity guided by wisdom and common sense. Long living traditions and modern ones are examined and we are invited to keep some and renounce others. da costa points to the positives and negatives of different cultures (namely Canadian and Portuguese), inviting us to reflect on our own conduct, open up to change, learn from others, and let go of cultural baggage that is preventing us from becoming better.
Portuguese cultural traditions of bullfighting and other forms of animal cruelty are reprimanded. The idea that such traditions should be defended because they are part of national identity is refuted: “A culture that promotes bullfighting as a reflection of national identity, and where torturing an animal has been a public enjoyment and an equestrian skill proudly displayed for centuries. As if tradition excused torture.” Tradition is not, cannot be, static and humans have the responsibility to let go of behaviours that inflict pain on other beings. “Cultural blindness” and “cultural conditioning” affect us all, and we must make efforts to be self-aware and step out of our harmful habits. This is something that da costa’s returns to constantly in the book:
“Ti Zé and Ti Fernanda are not conscious of the harm they inflict on animals, having been born into farming practices carried out for centuries. The absence of day-to-day moral dissent also permits unchallenged behaviour to flourish. You and I are also at the mercy of our cultural blindness, and it is our obligation to peel away such blinds to make our choices free from obvious social and cultural conditioning.”
da costa’s work calls on humans to expand their empathy and sympathy toward non-human entities as the way to create a better, more ethical world of collectivities—human, vegetable, animal—entangled, learning from and respecting one another. Koah’s sensibility and goodwill towards the natural world parallels da costa’s call for a return to a way of seeing that cultivates respect for all life, what we might call an ethic of holism that can pave the way for a more wholesome world. The boy’s sensibility is often juxtaposed to the cruelty directed at animals by the adults, as if to remind us that we should regain the innocence of our younger years.
The Canadian aversion to physical touch or the public displays of friendliness are also rebuked. da costa mocks a school teacher in Canada that crosses her arms when Koah comes to hug her because that goes against school policy—a policy that denies tenderness, reflecting a society that is afraid of physical touch, intimacy. Meanwhile, in Portugal, the teacher or other adults (even those who are not family members) touch and hug children naturally—a bodily love needed, healthy, unencumbered by taboos, “You had tried to hug your day teacher goodbye, and uncomfortable, she blocked your approach. School regulations forbade her to touch a child. This is the cold weather of a Canada that is less known abroad, which frostbites the spirit, not merely the tip of your nose.” Physical touch is presented as necessary for humans to grow, love, live with joy, and suspend loneliness.
This need for physical touch is ever present in the book and especially between da costa and Koah. This ‘new’ father wants to undo the habits of the ‘old’ father, specifically his own father, who seldom displayed affection openly toward da costa. da costa wants to break harmful traditions that can crush our spirits:
“I do not have a memory of voicing the word love to my father in the many nights he stayed up worrying about my childhood illnesses, which were many. The mutual devotion lived between us, yet the words were never found. My father and I lacked the initiative to carve our own love language, even though he is among the gentlest of men in his generation anybody could encounter. As an adult, I write letters to my father and my mother about my love for them, especially when I am about to return to Canada.”
When Koah is asked if he wants to live in Portugal or Canada, he candidly responds, “I want to be where my father is going to be” pointing to the loving bond between this father and this son. The boy wants to be in/with the father: inhabit a vocalized love, a physical proximity, stepping away from Agosto’s (the grandfather) unexpressed tenderness for his own father. This new father and son are breaking down the chains of unhealthy masculinity, paving the way to a healthier manhood.
Just as paulo da costa has taught his own father to free the caged melros, blackbirds, he is also calling us to free ourselves from traditions that do not serve us well, dismantle our own cages, and, in that process, come to love and really see other beings: “‘They are never far, anyway,’ he told me, pointing out a nest in the tall ornamental cedar beside us. In the ensuing quiet, the chirping of baby melros trickled down. Soon, a mother darted in with a wriggling worm on her beak. Your grandfather smiled.” In this case, the father learned from the son, not the other way around, and the latter can now appreciate the beauty of the birds in a nearby tree, without needing to curb their freedom and beingness. Both man and bird share a habitat, freely enjoying each other’s company and respecting each other’s way of being. Sometimes though, we are asked to recover and value older traditions that are more communal and practice inter-aid, aspects now dwindling with the modern, fast-paced life, whose God is materialism—loneliness and disconnection from what matters, coming as the cost. We can all learn: old and young and from old and young. No one has the monopoly of knowledge and we are here to become conscious, change and do better. The pulsating world in front of us, in its many manifestations, is the very platform that can teach us and move us to change.
In an engaging and affecting poetic language, characterized by an existentialist philosophical ethos that asks us to examine the way we live, trust the bluer skies Meditations on Fatherhood pushes us “to let go of the chains that reduce our beingness” and listen to “those voices that inside us call to become a person” as I further note in the aforementioned blurb. da costa quotes Jean-Paul Sartre in that regard, “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.” What we need, the book intimates, is to rescue the sacred energies that pave the way for genuine beings to emerge—beings beyond labels or enclosures, always seeking illumination and consciousness expansion. Fathers and sons birthing other fathers and sons, other mothers and daughters too, other worlds—in a giving, cyclical wave of relational learnings that question traditions, opening us all up to the ‘Yes’ of love, of life.
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Irene Marques is a bilingual writer (English/Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, Masters in French Literature and Comparative Literature (University of Toronto) and a Bachelor of Social Work (Ryerson University/TMU). Her published creative works include three collections of poetry and the novels Daria (Inanna Publications, 2021) and Uma Casa no Mundo (Imprensa Nacional/Portugal, 2021), which won Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet will be out in September, 2024. She was born in Portugal and moved to Canada at the age of 20.