EDITORIAL

WHERE ARE YOU HEADING TO, MACAO?

"Where are you heading to, Macao?

To whom will you belong tomorrow?

No longer you belong to Portugal

But neither do you belong to China...

Ou-Mun, yes, is Chinese

And Macao has been Portuguese.

But nowadays, my dear land

Where am I supposed to thread?

Sons of Macao, abandoned

Orphans of a surviving mother; so...

My people cry in silence.

Wondering about the days to come...

Sons of Macao, abandoned...

What will be your tomorrow?"

Graciete Batalha

From all numbers of RC Review of Culture, this will probably be the most sentimental. At least, for the Portuguese, because it is dedicated to the Macanese - the greatest living survivors of the heritage of the City of the Holy Name of God - when the decline of their Community is already foreseeable.

The harrowing inquisitiveness of Graciete Batalha — herald of the true spirit of the Macanese — in the above poem, says it all: tomorrow foreigners in another land, tomorrow foreigners in their own land.

And, despite all, during four centuries, they were the founders, the generators and the builders and of a nucleus of increasing prosperity; they were makers of a most spectacular Cultural meeting in the History of Civilizations; those which, belonging to a frail community amongst the giant Colonial forces of History, braved numerous assaults, stood firm over so many a disgrace, and remained always unbeaten and faithful in times requiring the greatest of masteries for survival.

Themselves a result of miscegenation, they perpetuated their breeding throughout the centuries. Always faithful to the earthly King of Portugal, always confident in the celestial Holy Father. In the Occident, the Spirit, in the Orient, the Blood! Oscillating between these forces, they were the protagonists of the most formidable policy of alliances in the History of Diplomacy. Always, the equipoised pointer between the metal scales.

Their hybridism became the generator of their downfall; nowadays one can sense them as vexed by the stigma of being devoid of a Motherland.

Faced with their drama we stand in latent anxiety, knowing how sorrowful is Man in the absence of his Home as well as distant from his Woman.

History shows us — as a chronicle of Locke's State of Nature or an unfolding alchemical procedure — that the survival of Motherland is precarious. They endure and outlast as an Entity, because the concept of Motherland is Spiritual. The concept positions itself in the category of Time, in the perpetuating of Tradition and in the renewal of Culture, which always presupposes the idealization of a myth. In the Historical narrative of the Occident, the decadence of the concept of Motherland is anchored to 'Militarization', when War spreads chaos and submission operates in the spatial boundaries of Territory.

Language, a primordial and subordinating element, is by far more fundamental than Territory. One can say that Motherland without Language is an impossibility!

In Macao, the status of Territory has always been precarious. In their common verbiage, the native Macanese expresses a miscellanea of varied Languages. Truly, for the Macanese, Macao only became a 'Small Motherland' when, in a passionate of solidarity gesture, the Community unanimously expressed itself in the patoá — presently almost extinguished.

Nowadays Macanese society is composed of some twenty to thirty-thousand souls, of which only about ten-thousand really live in Macao and Hong Kong, the others being scattered throughout the world, in Portugal, Australia, Brazil, Canada and the United States of America.

Successively bruised by the British Ultimatum, the Pacific War, the Military occupation of Goa, and the consequences of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, the Macanese Community still residing in Macao actually suffers the purge of an unavoidable and fatal exile.

It will, inexorably, become a Diaspora. Still, distant from their native and self-identifiable habitat and having to submit to novel living conditions and to the demands of their new Countries, we truly believe that the Macanese, will always express their notable character of adaptability, maintaining their Cultural 'identity' distinct from the Portuguese and the Chinese, and recovering their hybrid facets as identifiable traits of personality and individuality.

It was this, and because Homeland is Spirit, that moved us — in solidarity with the Macanese Community and, facing their spatial explosion — to edit this first volume of divulgation, a resumé of their roots, of their memories and traditions, of the Cultural factors of their consonant identity.

We take this opportunity to emphasise that, making the most of the fortunate possibility of publishing in three different Languages it is also to the readers of the English edition and, most specifically, to those of the Chinese edition, that we address this issue.

We humbly venture to introduce to China the first explanatory sketches of a Community about which this Country is still mostly ignorant, but which is also part of its Historic heritage, by confluence of Race and Culture.

We hope, therefore, to see in the future further in-depth and analytically-sound researches on the status of the Macanese 'nationality', on the present-day characterization of its Community, structuring in theory its Territorial redefinition, and on the reinforcement in the cohesion of the Diaspora.

We look towards the future, towards the differences, towards the greater prosperity of Macao. Out of the past and as a formidable example, has come the acquired Glory of the Macanese, that will remain forever recorded in History.

Luís Sá Cunha

Editorial Director