Fighting Against Traditions of Silence: The Year in Portugal

Apparently, some invisible but persistent barrier (social, political, or religious) prevents people from revealing their thoughts, feelings, and personal experiences, and only prominent figures (mainly in sports, medicine, and politics) seem to feel the need to advertise their abilities or to justify their actions, seeking to come to terms with themselves. Contradicting this trend, Portuguese writer Rita Ferro released the third volume of her diary. Rita Ferro is the daughter of António Quadros, a wellknown writer and philosopher, and the granddaughter of Fernanda de Castro, a famous poet, and António Ferro, writer, politician, and member of the Salazar Government. A former marketing and design expert, Rita Ferro began writing in 1990, when she was thirty-five years old. Her genuine and straightforward style openly displays her shifting moods and her contradictory feelings, ideas, and opinions. Aware of the difficulties of the genre and conscious of stepping into a delicate field, Ferro is neither naïve nor new on the ground, as she has written a series of biographies, chronicles, novels, collections of letters, and an autobiography entitled A Menina é Filha de Quem?, which was awarded the Pen Club Prize in 2011.

Ferro's diary trilogy began in 2014 with Veneza Pode Esperar, followed in 2015 by a second volume, Só Se Morre Uma Vez. It took her five years to produce another volume, which appeared in July 2020 under the title Os Passáros Cantam em Grego. Going beyond mere reflection on aging and women's struggles in a traditional and sexist society, the author situates her daily life and intimate details about her family, her lovers, and her friends into some of the most significant events in contemporary Portuguese politics and culture. Although she has confessed that the process of writing a diary is cathartic and helped her out of a personal crisis, Ferro has said that she decided to write a diary simply because she loves the genre and realized that there were very few in Portugal. Other than that, she felt the need, after a twenty-four-year writing career, to offer her readers a more honest portrait of herself. She wanted to challenge the general idea that Portuguese readers weren't fond of diaries, and she was tired of distorted public perceptions of her personal life and decided it was the time to reveal herself and fight the traditional silence around Portuguese women's experiences. While she has stressed that her life is far from extraordinary, on the other hand, she has stated that her purpose is not to leave a writer's testimony but rather the record of a woman who felt and lived in a particular time and place (Martins). Avoiding any label, political correctness, and especially the idea that a writer is somehow different or special, Ferro tries to demonstrate that although writing does help develop self-reflection and critical skills, the truth is that a writer is just like any other person struggling to survive.

Ferro's aversion to routine and inclination toward an intense social life is evident in the first volume of her series of diaries, which starts with the recognition that for her "a normal life" is still associated with being part of a couple. In the following diaries, Ferro shares what she considers to be her biggest challenge: the decision to live alone. For Ferro, coming to terms with being single means recognizing that what one gains in freedom largely outweighs what others imagine to be loneliness. However, in a mixture of irony and self-pity, she shares her struggle to define someone in that condition, suggesting that "alone" might signify a choice, a curse, or even a problem, and—much worse—a resignation. Assuming that "o inominado está para além da condição" [what one cannot name, lies beyond any condition] (Veneza 11), she is determined to find "um nome excepcionalmente adequado" [an exceptional designation] (12). And this is indeed the author's quest: to find a comfortable place for herself in the world. Once she acknowledges that reconciliation is the key to getting older, she...