Moving on with saudade : On bordered countries and vague terms

Abstract

This article is about how people moving along state borders – I call them wayfarers – refuse the assumption that they ought to live either a sedentary or a nomadic lifestyle inside or outside states, whether as citizens or as Others. In particular, it looks at how the term saudade helps mobile people to manage friction without falling back into such binaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines saudade as a desire ‘for something’ and describes it as a characteristic of the ‘Portuguese or Brazilian’ people. Here, we shall attend however to the saudade evoked by Venezuelans and Warao (defined by the same dictionary as ‘members of a South American Indian people inhabiting Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela’). This article patterns a contrast between two ways of evoking the term in comments about movement made by my informants: the first, Precise Saudade, asks for precision about that of which people feel saudade. The second way of evoking the term, Vague Saudade, is, as its name suggests, more comfortable with being vague. The argument put forward by this article is that scholarly and policy texts on ‘migrants’, ‘nomads’ and ‘refugees’ need to make more room for Vague Saudade when translating the talk of wayfarers. It may be tempting to dismiss vagueness as showing ambiguity and imprecision. Yet, as the stories that follow are meant to highlight, Vague Saudade can be useful to wayfarers in several ways: to engage in care, to protect others, to protect themselves and to engage in conversations about alternative worlds. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade, it is argued, risks hindering wayfarers’ ability to do these things. I find this is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research.

Keywords

border migration nomad refugee translation vagueness

This text is about the term saudade – a word found in many Portuguese languages, including the Brazilian version I was raised to treat as my own. In particular, it is about how Venezuelans and Warao evoke saudade to talk about their journeys between Venezuela and Brazil. These people – I call them wayfarers – are my source of inspiration. Priests and nuns, UN and army envoys, clerks and police officers, as well as experts on ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’ and ‘nomads’, also show up in the narrative. Even a Portuguese king plays a role. And I am also present, in the middle, stitching ethnographic snippets to texts about vagueness in translation to build a plot.

That plot is simple. I contrast and rebalance two ways of evoking saudade. The first – I call this Precise Saudade – is saudade about this or that. It is saudade of Venezuela,¹ of a home,² of a lifestyle,³ of a ‘traditional habitat’⁴ or of a family left behind.⁵ The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2018) evokes it to translate a Venezuelan girl as saying, ‘I miss Venezuela every day. I miss my mom, I miss my friends and I miss my school.’ Along with this first saudade about this or that, a second way of evoking the term – I call it Vague Saudade – is much more difficult to translate into English because it allows the term to wander. Vague Saudade is both about a lot of things and about nothing in particular. Put into English literally, it would lead us to a phrase like but not quite the same as, ‘people feeling missing’ – full stop.

This article argues that writings about migrants, nomads and refugees need to make more room for Vague Saudade. To push people to be precise about saudade helps authorities to ‘triage immigrants’ (Silva et al., 2018, p. 20), ‘profile those leaving Venezuela and overview key migration drivers’ (Mixed Migration Centre [MMC], 2019, p. 7). It helps humanitarian agencies to classify wayfarers according to the global ‘Glossary on Migration’ (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2019). To attend to Vague Saudade is not so useful for these practices. Still, it does seem to be used by wayfarers – as a form of politeness, to engage in care, as a shield to avoid religious conversion and as a way of doing mobility that I did not know how to translate. To write about wayfarers feeling saudade of home, being homesick or missing the Orinoco would foreclose these uses. In short, I argue that to grant hegemony to Precise Saudade would jeopardise the wellbeing of Warao and Venezuelans who rely on Vague Saudade to ‘fare’.⁶

To support this claim, I first cut a way through debates that look for precision about saudade. I also explain why I use the word ‘wayfarers’ – a term I borrow from the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2007, 2011, 2018).⁷ Next I explore a series of ethnographic vignettes in which Vague Saudade makes space for faring that would be blocked by Precise Saudade. Finally, I do not so much conclude as suggest how the conversation could go on along with studies about the role played by vagueness in texts about ‘other terms’.

To cut a long story short, there are many reasons why aiming at precision is desirable in research, but there are reasons to be vague too. Some forms of scholarly writing seek to curtail vagueness at all costs, even though they cannot completely succeed, but research writing does not need to move towards perfect precision as its pole star. As researchers-qua-translators, we might want to be vague not because we are unable to be precise. We might want to be vague to foster multiple arts of living (Omura et al., 2018; van de Port & Mol, 2015). The next sections seek support for these arguments in the streets of the Venezuelan town of Santa Helena.

Two ways of evoking saudade

Santa Elena de Uairén is a busy frontier town linking Venezuela with Brazil. The diamonds that made it a mining centre in the 1930s have long since disappeared, but languages fared better. Spanish, Pemóng, Warao, Portuguese and Global English are all spoken there. The wayfarers speaking these languages are also multiple. A UN survey counted fewer than 4000 Venezuelans entering the state of Roraima in 2016 (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2018b), but by June 2018, when I got to Santa Elena, a second survey had counted more than 100,000 (Brazilian Federal Police [BFP], 2019). According to the Brazilian authorities, some were Venezuelan asylum seekers, others were Venezuelans migrants and others still were not primarily Venezuelans. These were identified as Barí, Yukpa, E'ñepa and Warao – described as ‘the largest indigenous group from Venezuela in Brazil’ (UNHCR, 2018).

Choosing terms to write about these wayfarers is neither neutral nor simple, but for now I simply want to give a sense of their hardships. Within Brazil, federal, state-level and municipal authorities were locked in skirmishes (Magalhães & Silva, 2018). After Roraima’s governor appealed to the Supreme Court to close the borders, a Brazilian court temporarily suspended entry in 2018. In 2019, Nicolas Maduro also found reasons for closing the border on the Venezuelan side (Magalhães & Silva, 2018). As both countries tightened controls, wayfarers continued to move to and fro on paths and waterways in the Parima mountains and the Orinoco river, as they had been doing for years (Magalhães & Silva, 2018).

That is not to say that those journeys were easy. Some wayfarers managed to share houses in Pacaraima, Boa Vista and other Brazilian cities, but many were sleeping under bridges and on cardboard at street corners. Human trafficking, prostitution, drug smuggling and the collapse of food and medical supplies were all issues before they arrived, but some newspapers and politicians nevertheless blamed the wayfarers. During 2018, xenophobic attacks were almost routine: improvised barracks were destroyed, shelters were attacked, and wayfarers were beaten on the streets. It was difficult to talk to them after reading the sad news (El País, 2018a).

For better or for worse, newspapers also told tales of solidarity. The armed forces started building shelters and the UN sent envoys to coordinate a humanitarian response among local charities. American and European money funded much of the work. It was used to buy medicine and food, and it was also used to classify people as migrants or refugees. I was an active cog in this machine. I followed wayfarers as they looked for shelter, and I worked as an impromptu interpreter in registry offices and police stations. I met UN and Army envoys in local headquarters and situation rooms. I listened while priests and nuns told me of their good intentions. And I tried to learn from wayfarers too. I shared meals and words with those I met on the streets and tried to help however little I could. Sometimes this help included following them back and forth along roads. I met Ms J on one of these trips, along the road between the Venezuelan Gran Sabana and Pacaraima.

Ms J:

I wasn’t expecting it. I really just called my husband and ran. I couldn’t say goodbye to my mother, to my grandmother, to my family, to anyone. We had to leave it all there, the few baby clothes we had . . . the crib. I will feel saudade, but what could I do? It was not long before I graduated. But it couldn’t wait. If my son had been born there, he might not be alive today. They don’t have incubators . . . no surgical gloves, no equipment. And he was born at 32 weeks! He had to go straight into the incubator. And I had to wait quite some time. He is finally feeling better now. He is finally with me.

Here it is, saudade. Reading this conversation in retrospect, I still find it hard to tell how many versions of this weird Portuguese word there are in this little extract alone. For Ms J does not specify what she is going ‘to miss’. Instead, she navigates the need to translate her Spanish ‘extrañar’ (‘to feel the absence of’, perhaps) using the word saudade associated with Portuguese. She tells me, all in one go, about her university, her mother, her father and her grandmother, about the crib and clothes she had bought for her baby, and about the son she was eager to meet. Because we can both say saudade, Ms J and I engage in this translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013). To evoke the term vaguely helps us to go on chatting without having to pin down any one thing of which she feels saudade.

Not all wayfarers I met talked about saudade and, those who did, did not always evoke it like Ms J. Instead, they spoke in ways I would feel ok translating as being saudade of this or that, such as family or home. For instance, take this remark by Mr E, a Venezuelan wayfarer I met in the main and only square in Santa Elena de Uairén. We were sitting side by side on a bench, trying to hide from the sun in the shade of an almond tree and waiting to board the dodgy lorry that was to take us to Brazil. ‘Você não vai sentir saudade?’ I ask him, making conversation in Portuguese. Or, in one translation, ‘Aren’t you going to miss it?’ Mr E answers me, mixing words in Spanish and Portuguese as he plays along.

Mr E:

Sí. Sure, I’ll miss home (por supuesto, voy extrañar a casa) but I’ll try not to think about it. Leaving is easy. What is hard is not to get sad. Venezuela has many problems . . . but I will feel saudade of it, for sure.

Mr E and I get to share a bench and talk. Mr E gets to tell in Spanish about feeling saudade (‘of Venezuela’) and about missing home (‘voy extrañar a casa’). I could translate Mr E’s reply as ‘Yes, of course I’ll feel saudade of this and that’ without giving a second thought to the terms being used. In one way, this translation would be practical. It would allow me to tell the story of a homesick Mr E missing his home and his homeland to a bigger English-speaking audience.

Maybe this is why Precise Saudade is becoming widespread in writing about the plight of wayfarers. In a newsreel in Portuguese, Brazil’s broadcasting company tells us the reception granted to Venezuelans ‘is not enough to stall the saudade of home’ (Empresa Brasil de Comunicação [EBC], 2019). Reporting on a festival in Roraima, the UN office for refugees says in Portuguese that Venezuelans got together ‘to kill a little of their saudade of home’ (UNHCR, 2019a). Also in Portuguese, the Associated French Press (2018) describes ‘“Venezuelan Indians in Roraima” rebuilding life in Brazil while “Saudosos do Orinoco”’. Curiously, even in interviews in Spanish, saudade comes up as saudade of things. Asked why he left Venezuela, one interviewee replies: ‘I would not stay in Venezuela starving to death.’ And he concludes: ‘I feel saudade of my family, but I will not leave’ (Costa, 2019). It is impossible to know whether the word was smuggled in by the translator, but it shows up as saudade of relatives.

Precise Saudade has also found its way into the work of some Brazilian scholars. In a chapter on Forced Migration Present in the South of Bahia (Santos & Santos, 2018) the authors interview Ramon, a young Venezuelan. Ramon’s saudade is big, the authors tell us (p. 269), but not just big of nothing in particular. The authors make a point of saying that ‘Saudade is big, mainly of his grandmother’ (p. 269, my emphasis). In another text, a Venezuelan named Sonora is interviewed. The author tells us that ‘saudade and suffering mark the life of Venezuelans who migrate to Brazil’ (Costa, 2019). Vague Saudade appears briefly but is not allowed to stay for long. The author asks Sonora what she misses most and, sure enough, Sonora is able to pin things down. ‘I miss my home’, she says. ‘I had a house I struggled to build with my husband. I feel saudade of my home and of my mother’ (Costa, 2019).

In all these snippets, Precise Saudade tries to settle things down: saudade of a person, a place or some other thing isolated, distinguished from others, and said to be important. Yet, though Precise Saudade can be evoked, it does not have to be: commenting on her journey, Ms J talks about baby clothes, college, cribs, home and parents and then she tells me she is feeling saudade. She does not single out anything – and neither do I push her to do so. Vague Saudade helps to keep the conversation going by giving space to wander around the term. The next section continues the case in favour of Vague Saudade by interfering with the search for precision about mobility and about the word saudade.

On not being precise about saudade (and mobility!)

Precision has lurked over writers since the first attempts to turn saudade into a concept. It is said that a Portuguese monarch, the fourteenth century king Duarte, was the first philosopher to seek a precise meaning for saudade. Dom Duarte’s take on the word involved building a border between ‘suydade’ as a pleasant feeling,⁸ and other feelings he framed as inferior, such as nojo (‘disgust’) and pesar (‘sorrow’). But it was also about borders in a literal sense. Portugal was trying to assert its independence from Castille and create an identity as a European nation (Teletin & Manole, 2015), and Duarte almost single-handedly established the distinction between Portuguese and other languages (Cerqueira, 1991). The book in which he seeks to define suydade – celebrated by many as the first philosophy book in Portuguese – is full of remarks about ‘our costumes’ and ‘our language’ (Cerqueira, 1991). Ironically, Dom Duarte reserved suydade for the Portuguese quite literally by royal decree (‘it seems to me this name of suydade so unique of the Portuguese language that neither Latin nor another language that I know of has a name for such similar feeling’) (Cerqueira, 1991).

Duarte was long dead when the Portuguese carracks arrived on the Indian coast. He was alive, however, when his father led the Portuguese fleet in its attack on Ceuta, starting the Portuguese expansion along the African coast and across the Atlantic Ocean. I guess saudade helped to spread the Portuguese colonial empire. Thus philosopher Afonso Botelho (1990) argued that the sociotechnical array that made Lisbon’s long distance control possible would have been of no use if ‘souls’ had not been equipped by saudade (‘If any person by my service and a warrant from me breaks, from her I feel suydade, certain him that from such departure I bear no resentment and . . . that I would be sad if he did not go’) (Cerqueira, 1991, p. 457).

I do not want to go into etymology, but I find it revealing that the desire to be precise about saudade has walked hand-in-hand with attempts to set borders. The continuing discussion of the origins of the concept, Latin or Arabic, is telling in this regard. Philologist Barbara Cassin and her colleagues argue that ‘the origin of soidades is the Latin plural solitates (solitudes)’. Portuguese scholar Michaelis de Vasconcellos (1922) might concur. Vasconcellos does not write of saudade though. She writes (proudly, perhaps?) about ‘The Portuguese Saudade’. On the other hand, we have scholars that defend an Arabic origin of the word in saudah. Deonísio da Silva (2014) notes that, in Arabic, the expressions suad, saudá and suaidá mean blood trampled and black inside the heart. Apparently, Arabic medicine diagnoses a liver disease making patients melancholic as as-saudá, and the Arabic سُوَيْداء (suwayda) influenced saudade.

I have little Latin and no Arabic at all. Neither am I a philologist, so I am not defending any side. Instead, what I am protecting is doubt. We might say that the word comes from Latin, tout court! And this might well be so. But maybe we would be losing something with a clear-cut statement like this. We might be losing the vagueness in saudade that helps speakers to fare well without caring too much for these things we now describe as ‘Arabic’ and ‘Latin’ cultures.

Did ‘the erudite’ turn saudade into a concept, or did ‘ordinary speakers’ give the term its meaning by mistaking solitate (solitude) with saudar (to greet) (Cassin et al., 2014)? Is saudade in Brazil the same as in Portugal (DaMatta, 1993)? Is it felt in the heart or understood in the mind (Farrell, 2006)? Can it be translated into other languages or not (Matos & Truzzi, 2015)? All these debates about saudade seem to be driven by a concern to divide and clarify. Perhaps there are good reasons for looking for answers to these questions. But I am pretty sure that attempts to tame the vague in saudade have fed inside/outside distinctions, with violent consequences for those on the losing side.

Against this background, I take joy in learning that none of these attempts at clarification has been very successful. The multiplicity of saudade is illustrated by studies of how the word was evoked by Portuguese settlers in Brazil in correspondence with their families in Europe. In it, we find saudade of clothes, utensils, musical instruments, salt cod, sardines, cheeses, parents, wives, siblings and children and of the smell of rosemary infused in love letters (Matos & Truzzi, 2015). Saudade, I suggest, never seems to have been about any one thing. Neither, or so George Monteiro (2013) has argued, does it translate into a single word in any other European language. For Monteiro, the German ‘sehnsucht’ would be limited to people. French ‘souvenir’ would leave too much space for sad memories (2013). The Greek ‘nostalgia’ would reduce saudade to the absence of the homeland, as would the English ‘homesickness’ (2013).

Is Monteiro saying that other languages need several words to catch the meaning of saudade? Maybe, but I prefer to read him in other terms. My preferred reading is that there are all kinds of things persons may relate to in a saudade way, and that these do not need to be pinned down; that what is poetic in saudade is the room it gives for wandering and that – perhaps – this is how we should leave the term.

I would like to take this way of reading into texts about mobility as well. Precision also seems to lurk in policy and scholarly texts that use terms such as nomads, migrants and refugees. Consider, for instance, how Brazilian scholars and UN agencies working at the border feel the need to ‘disentangle’ the ‘mixed nature of Venezuelan migration flows’. The International Organization for Migration (2011, p. 82), defines ‘regularization’ as ‘any process by which the authority in a State allows non-nationals in an irregular or undocumented situation to stay lawfully in the country’. A UNHCR officer adds that ‘the purpose of regularization has been primarily to clear processing queues, to resolve fait accompli cases of long-term migrant residence and to bring migrants back to the formal sector so that they can be protected and taxed’ (Papadopoulou, 2005, p. 2). Both agencies suggest this is particularly challenging for Venezuelan and Warao wayfarers. ‘Venezuelan migration to Brazil presents features of “mixed” migration, given the motivations and expectations of migrant groups, which include, at least, economic migrants, migrants for humanitarian reasons and asylum seekers’ (IOM, 2018a, p. 82). Adding to the complexity, ‘the issue of indigenous refugees has distinct components from non-indigenous ones, especially related to their cultural habits, which must be respected’ (UNHCR, 2019b, p. 17). Allegedly, migration flows (of this kind), classified as ‘mixed’, ‘hold a strong connection to irregular migration, and present a major challenge to States’ (Silva et al., 2018, p. 20; see also M’charek, this volume).

No doubt categories are often important for humanitarian work and may help to protect wayfarers (IOM, 2018a, 2018b; UNHCR, 2019b). Nonetheless, the terminology is suspect. In Refugee Law, if you cross an international border because you chose to do so or find a better job then you are counted as a migrant. Against this, if you were forced to leave your country or are afraid to return for fear of persecution then you become a refugee (Scheel & Squire, 2014). To make things more complicated, in Brazilian law you are also a refugee if you have left a country in which there are grave and generalized human rights violations, and you are entitled to a humanitarian visa if fleeing an economic and environmental crisis.

States have been classifying people as migrants and refugees for so long that these distinctions sound almost common sense. But the binary division has also attracted criticism. Some criticize the migrant/refugee divide for neglecting ‘internally displaced people’ (Cohen, 2007), for helping less to protect people than to sustain bureaucracy (Scalletaris, 2007) and for making migration sound opportunistic or even criminal (De Goede, 2018; Huysmans, 2006). Yet others ask whether this binary divide makes sense: in short, they note ‘there is no clear border between mobility that is forced or voluntary, driven by economic drives or by fear of persecution’ (Scheel & Squire, 2014) and that this is better understood as a continuum (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015).

And there are many more binaries in texts about mobility. For example, Brazilian authorities and humanitarian agencies also distinguish between ‘settled and nomadic peoples’. This is explicit in texts on Warao ‘nomadic mobility’, but also in comments about ‘temporary’, ‘circular’ or ‘pendular Venezuelan flows’.⁹ The problem here is that the division is taken to be a difference between natural lifestyles. One that is sedentary is said to involve production in one place: people become sedentary when they live in fixed territories. In turn, a nomadic lifestyle involves travel(ling) from place to place, with no permanent home (Gilbert, 2014). This has recently been nuanced: having a ‘home’, ‘habitat’ or ‘abode’ for part of the time does not mean you are not nomadic, if this does not become fixed or permanent (Gilbert, 2014).

As with the migrant/refugee binary, this nomadic/settled divide is central to humanitarian and border policies, but it is suspect. Critics note that some mobile peoples have actively resisted settlement and have been coerced into staying put, while many have used contact with settled people to move more rather than less. Despite the progress narrative which sees homo sapiens starting as hunter-gatherers, moving into nomadism and finally settling into civilization, critics also remind us that settled people have lived in towns with no agriculture and that nomads may stop to harvest before moving on (Scott, 2017).

The terms that policy writers use to sustain the migrant/refugee and the nomad/settled binaries are not the same. But both express a proclivity to think of people as if they were in need of native soil and fixed roots like trees. Treating the inside as the norm and being outside as exceptional (Walker, 1993), they take also settlement to be the norm against which nomadism is to be contrasted (Isin, 2018; Scott, 2017). Perhaps this is why some scholars caution that versions of migration theory fall prey to ‘methodological nationalism’, assuming nationalist belonging as an ‘invisible background for research’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, p. 302); or that some versions of citizenship theory reduce belonging to formal citizenship and reduce agency to action mediated through representative politics (Isin & Nielsen, 2008).

I want to steer away from these divisions by formally introducing the notion of wayfaring that I have used above. I borrow this from anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2007, p. 75) remarks on how different persons – I have in mind his contrast between ‘Inuit’ and ‘British’, in particular – relate to the world in which movement occurs. Ingold claims that the Inuit engage in movement as ‘an ensemble of itineraries’ (Collignon, 1996, p. 98, as cited in Ingold, 2007, p. 172, fn. 1). By contrast, for the British sea lords, movement is ‘a course determined by the latitude and longitude of successive points en route to the intended destination’ (Ingold, 2007, pp. 75). Inuit move ‘along paths’ while British sea lords sail ‘across’ oceans. For the English-speaking sailor, ‘every destination is a terminus, every port a point of reentry into a world from which he has been temporarily exiled whilst in transit’ (p. 77). For the wayfarer, movement has no final destination, ‘for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go’ (p. 77; see also Ingold, 2011, pp. 148, 154–155; Ingold, 2018, p. 71). This is why my protagonists are wayfarers. In my eyes their movements are not about arriving or re-entering ‘normality’, but rather about faring well along the way, feeding their bellies and their spirits through active engagement with their paths. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade would hinder their ability to do just that.

Moving along with saudade

Vague Saudade may be useful to wayfarers in several ways. The next vignette hints at one of these uses I found while crossing countries. As we enter the next scene, I am sitting in the back of a small car being driven at high speed, squeezed between a Venezuelan woman on my left and a father carrying his child on his lap on my right. Piles of bolivars¹⁰ used to pay for the ride were partially blocking the drivers’ view. I am not sure if he noticed I was apprehensive or if he wanted to pass the time, but the man with the child, Mr D, started talking to me. He told me he had just been back from Brazil to pick up his daughter, who was staying with her aunt in Ciudad Bolivar. He told me that he had finally got a job as a construction worker in Boa Vista, and was bringing the girl to stay with him and her mother. I said that it must have felt good to see her again.

Mr D:

Oh my God! When I was getting close, my heart started to beat faster. Tum! Tum! Tum! [He gestures in what seems to me as a heart beating strongly in his chest]. Oh, my god [smiling]! It was nine months now: nine months without seeing her. We couldn’t bring her before. It was hard! . . . When we finally got the money, the army people said they were closing the border and I couldn’t go through. I had to call and tell her she couldn’t come yet. I thought I would die of saudade [stressing the s, as he says the word]. But here you are, my daughter [hugging her]. And how big you are [he says while tickling her]. ¿Extrañaste mucho a su papá? ‘Sentí saudade’, she replies with an accent. He insists: ‘Did you say you missed daddy?’ She does not say a word. She looks at him, and she smiles.

How to read this? If I were asked if I missed a particular person, I might use the word saudade to give a generic reply, ‘I felt saudade’, full stop, without saying what I was feeling saudade about. I might do this not because I really missed the person concerned but because I wanted to be polite. I would be evoking Vague Saudade as a politeness device. Or I might evoke Vague Saudade as an affectionate way of teasing the person for whom I actually felt saudade: to show care for my interlocutor by pretending half mockingly that I did not miss him at all, even though I was thinking about him all the time.

I cannot be sure about what Mr D’s daughter was doing. Translating her words in retrospect makes it hard to know what went on. It also raises questions about whether it is possible to do justice to emotions and gestures in research texts. Even so, I think there is a lesson to be learned from Mr D and his daughter, even if we take it as a hint: that evoking Vague Saudade – without isolating, distinguishing or ranking that of which I feel saudade – is valuable. Though Precise Saudade could be expressed, to translate Mr D’s question as ‘have you missed your father?’ and the daughter’s reply as ‘I have missed you’ would block the possibility of evoking the term to be polite or engage in care.

Vague Saudade seems to help Mr D and his daughter to engage in these practices. And there are other possibilities, like using it as a shield against religious conversion or avoiding being fitted too tightly into categories about ‘cultures’ and ‘lifestyles’. For instance, for Ms V, a Warao wayfarer, Vague Saudade seemed to act as a shield in conversations about religion. When I met Ms V, she was living in a football stadium re-purposed as a public shelter by the municipal government in Boa Vista. Claiming shortage of funds, little had been done to adapt the stadium’s infrastructure. Whole families were sleeping on thin mattresses while others slept in hammocks hung between columns and walls. In the overcrowded accommodation fights regularly broke out. A video recording shot inside the stadium shows a group of Warao sitting in a circle, praying in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese under the guidance of nuns (Empresa Brasil de Comunicação, 2017, 31:17). Looking at this, one of the priests in charge remarked:

There are fights, skirmishes, naturally. That’s why we ask the sisters to put these prayer circles together at least once a day. Praying together helps to create a sense of solidarity among them.

Maybe I am overstating the benefits of politeness between fathers and daughters. Sometimes, politeness comes from fear of being hurt or hurting someone (Cutting, 2007). Though I hesitate to be precise, I found hints of this in my conversation with Ms V. In my next vignette I was talking to Ms V as she held a little TV set against her stomach, watching a show and swinging gently in a hammock.

The friends, they told me that here they gave clothes and food. Sometimes they ask us to pray to say thanks. And we pray. But sometimes, when they tell us it is time to pray, I know it is nice, but I don’t want to do it because the saudade makes me sad. It makes me want to go back. But there is not much to do now. I have to wait here and see. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to be sad. I don’t want to say anything.

I did not witness Ms V talking of saudade to nuns and would not want to turn her use of saudade into a grand theory about migrants’ autonomy or indigenous resistance. Even so, to be polemical, I would say that being vague about saudade did seem to help Ms V to be polite while protecting herself from some not-too-polite attempts to convert her to Catholicism. Ms V did not tell me about confronting the nuns. Instead, she talked about refusing to pray in non-confrontational terms by evoking Vague Saudade. These first stories were meant to highlight the potential in Vague Saudade: if it can interfere with the way people show care and pray to Gods, maybe it can also interfere with the way people draw borders around ways of living.

Categorically stuck

I had read in anthropological accounts that some Warao sing to ward off evil spirits. It is not difficult to find verses on this, called ‘Hoa’ in Warao, translated into Spanish or English. When I met Mr T, a young Warao, not much older than I am, I could not resist asking if Warao songs really described the snakes turned into the demons of which I had read in books. This is how Mr T got to tell me about the risks of the road. We talked sitting on the pavement beside a highway in Roraima, eating a plate of rice, and nothing else, cooked over an improvised pot from which 12 other Warao were being served. Mr T was kind enough to offer me a bowl.

Me:

I’ve talked to some [Warao] living on the streets. You don’t like the shelters?

Mr T:

It’s not that the shelters are not nice. It’s just that there are too many Venezuelans . . . Everywhere I looked, there was a Venezuelan. It is not that the shelters are bad. It is just that we have a different attitude. Somos viajeros [‘we are voyagers’].

A 2017 report by Brazil’s Federal Attorney’s Office describes the Warao as ‘a single ethnic group with seasonal practices’ (Ministério Público Federal [MPF], 2017, p. 7). Quoting an ethnographic study in Spanish, the report says that they live a ‘a transhumant life between the “morichales” and channel banks’ (Garcia Castro & Heinen, 2000, as cited in MPF, 2017, p. 13).¹¹ It notes that archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the Warao have always moved as groups searching for food, visiting and bartering. It is only the distances and directions of movement that have changed since the 1920s as a result of state interference, disease, oil drilling, mining and environmental degradation. In the 1990s, the Warao started to move to Venezuelan cities to sell fish and handicrafts and to buy food and medicine, and more recently, with shortages in Venezuela, they have begun to seek more goods in Brazil (IOM, 2018a).

Although this art of living seems to work for some of the Warao, humanitarian agencies consider it a challenge. In 2018, the IOM published a report commenting on Warao’s ‘mobility patterns’:

. . . in general, there appears to be no clarity or concern of the Warao natives in relation to the choices or options available for the regularization or definition of their stay in Brazil. Many of the indigenous people only communicate issues related to the need to have food, receive health care and provide basic consumer goods for their families. For the authorities, there are doubts as to the attempt to fix and internalize the Warao in Brazil, especially if confronted with the manifest desire for continuous, pendular return to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. (IOM, 2018a, p. 66)

I assume the warning is well-meant, but it reveals entrenched notions about how wellbeing is to be achieved. More ‘precise official information’ is required. Are Warao nomads, do they have a ‘pendular’ form of mobility that will lead them back to Venezuela, or do they want to stay in Brazil? Here is Mr T:

Mr T:

The Brazilians, like that, in general, they complain a lot. They speak like that: ‘you can’t stay here, you can’t stay here’. But then, again, if we go and move somewhere else, they complain too. I tried to talk to go the forest there for a while, but you should see . . . the government came straight for my throat. There are lot of protocols you need, a lot of studies, they said. They arrived and already started asking a lot of questions . . . They came with all these rules and resolutions and conventions. They surround you from all sides . . . and then it is better to just keep moving.

For those used to thinking of life as happening in one place, Mr T’s way of living adds fuel to fire. ‘If they are refugees, why do they keep going back?’ or ‘they are using the shelters as holiday camps’ – some Brazilians I met used phrases like these. At the beginning of this section, I mentioned how Mr T reacted when asked about shelters. Vague Saudade shows up when he tells more about the ‘different attitude’ of viajeros (voyagers, as I translate it).

Me:

I read that Boa Vista’s mayor said you should not go to the forest because you might interfere with other tribes there. Was that it?

Mr T:

Yes. The mayor said we needed an anthropological study. We needed a report to know the differences between our cultures. And then I saw them showing to us, the anthropologist showing to us we were already living like that, floating, for many years, and always like that. Then, when I went back to my people, I said: ‘If we want to float through Brazil we need to stay in Roraima. Because that’s how you will dialogue with the mayor here’ . . . I said, ‘listen . . . I know we will feel saudade, but how can we get help today if we are going on the road tomorrow? Power doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t float with us, no.’

Both reports note the Warao talk of themselves as ‘viajeros’ (Spanish) or ‘voyagers’ and ‘canoeiros’ (Portuguese) or canoe-people. Both stressed the risk of imposing sedentarism on the Warao. The IOM (2018a, p. 118) is careful about this:

Nomadism denotes a mobile way of life, organized around cyclical or seasonal patterns, but carries a strong stigma of incivility. However, mobility can be established to enhance the well-being and survival of the indigenous peoples involved and therefore constitutes a life strategy related to differentiated cultural identities and dignity protected by numerous human rights instruments. It is always important to know the reason why indigenous peoples move and then apply these definitions.

Again, both reports say that the best way to protect wayfarers is to allow them to live according to their ‘culture’s life strategies’: nomadic people should not be forced into settled living. They tell us to be careful not to classify the Warao wrongly, but they do not question the need to ‘apply these definitions’. I am not out to pass judgement. Maybe these authors try to apply labels like nomadic and sedentary because they believe this will help the Warao. And maybe it would do this for some Warao, if not for all. But this is the problem right there: by writing like this, these texts foster a habit of thinking, a form of speech and way of acting that insists that people are either Warao in a precise way, or they are not culturally Warao at all. This way of writing freezes frame, so to speak. Comments of this kind make it sound almost as if they are saying that the Warao move today as they always have and as they always will.

Engin Isin (2018) has argued that the assumption that persons form ‘peoples’ and live as ‘a people’ is problematic. Mobile persons might refuse settling and still relate to states in such unique ways that it makes little sense to group them as wholes. Think of the differences between hunter-gatherers, slaves and pirates. And even these categories are too encompassing. Strangers, outsiders and aliens have been ‘Other’ to ‘Citizens’, but their ways of being political were very different and subject to change (Isin, 2002). As Isin (2018, p. 121) reminds us, ‘barbarians included various peoples whose relationships to states were always in flux’. Such peoples, as he puts it, playing with binary thinking, ‘came in and out of various barbarian positions’ (p. 121).

This helps me explain why I do not want to translate Mr T as talking of saudade about something, even if that something is the road. I do not want to make it sound as if being on the road is some kind of lyrical condition, a symbol of the Warao’s supposedly ‘more natural lifestyle’ – as if even when he is ‘forced to abandon’ his lifestyle, Mr T is actually treasuring the ‘Warao tradition’ of floating freely. Sometimes, I guess, being on the road can be emancipating. But this does not allow us to assume that that is always the case. As the Hoa songs hint, being on the road can be dangerous. There are snakes that turn into devils that I cannot even understand. A Warao who only feels saudade of the road, and does this all the time, does not strike me as a wayfarer moving along paths, but as an epic hero in a scary book, insisting on moving on against all odds.

More generally, this is also why I hesitate to translate my informants’ stories, equivocating against Vague Saudade and in favour of Precise Saudade about this or that. To do so would be to turn the road – or Venezuela, or home, or a lifestyle, or a ‘traditional habitat’ or a ‘culture’ – into yet more criteria for setting people apart. It would foster the association between inside/normal and outside/abnormal that Mr T seems to avoid. Yes, crossing self-made and state-made borders can be tough. But the act of walking across, along or around these divides is not essentially anything, either good or bad. It depends on how much room we give people to live, not as problems to be fitted into categories, but as wayfarers moving along their paths.

Saudade: Instead of a recap or a stopping point, talking vaguely about new stuff

In this article I followed the word saudade in the talk and texts of Venezuelans, Warao, journalists, Brazilian authorities, Portuguese monarchs, scholars and humanitarian workers. I took issue with a way of evoking saudade that strives for precision and contrasted this with ways of evoking saudade that are comfortable with being vague. It is tempting to dismiss Vague Saudade as showing ambiguity and imprecision alien to seeking the truth. But Vague Saudade seems to help wayfarers in other ways: to care for others, to protect others, to protect themselves and to tell me about worlds I will never fully understand.

There is a hint in this: as researchers-qua-translators, if we care about a topic that we find difficult to talk and write about, we can give up. Or we can go on talking using placeholders, approximations and other words that make it possible to hedge meanings. The hint is as simple as it is easy to ignore. Vague language is often enough. Too much precision may be alienating. When talking about things that are new or sound strange, vague language may help to keep conversations flowing. Certainly, it is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research.

Lest we forget, not too long ago it was perfectly fine to write about ‘other cultures’ without paying attention to how texts came to count as knowledge of those ‘Others’. Things changed when scholars started to explore the authority of texts. Over time, the notion that authors are able to represent the way informants ‘actually behave’ has been unmasked as a stylistic accomplishment. Banishing the ‘I’ in writing and sanitizing reports of all things emotional are also among the literary techniques shown to sustain textual authority (Clifford, 1983; Clifford et al., 2010). Recently, critics of the literary norms of detached and impersonal writing have become more vocal in defence of emotionally invested forms of storytelling about international relations (Doty, 2004; Inayatullah, 2011; Leander, 2015; Vrasti, 2008). Yet there is much writing about how people move across borders that gives the impression that authors are not present. Stylistic assumptions of ‘ethnographic realism’ are still very much in vogue.

Taking precision as a default goal for research is one assumption that is proving hard to shake off. Yes, some authors have come to appreciate that not all textures of matter have sharp shapes. Some things are messy, and striving for precision risks distorting them into clarity (Law, 2004). Yes, there are now fascinating ways of thinking about methods and terms and texts and meanings. But, for all the lip service paid to change and fluidity, it is not hard to read about the death of the author, subject positions, discursive devices and reader-response theories and then, ignoring it all, to insist on learning what authors ‘actually mean’.

This might sound like a matter of concern for half a dozen academics, but, at their worst, realist readings close down the space for multiplicity, for deliberate imprecision, for controlled equivocation, and for writing that does not try to determine the truth but seeks rather to move on with what is multiple. All these ways of relating to research, not to mention alternative arts of living, risk being subordinated to a search for ‘the point’.

Guy Cook (2007, p. 24), the British applied linguist and defender of poiésis in writing, has described readers who obsess with quickly getting to the point as being like old-school theologians, devoted to finding God’s true voice in endlessly many and endlessly cryptic scriptures. Cook quips caustically that ‘... like some religious exegetists, [readers of this persuasion] can be dogmatic, narrow-minded and fundamentalist’. This is a strong phrase. It is harsh. I would not put it so bluntly myself. I would find a vaguer way of saying it. But I would not disagree.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Warao, Venezuelans and all the informants who agreed to talk to me and encouraged me to translate their stories into text. I could not have had more luck with the editors, reviewers and copy desk professionals who so graciously and patiently took part in shaping this narrative. If these words can even hope to save space for vagueness in writings about saudade and mobility, it is only because they allowed the text to move quite literally along with the terms.

Funding

The author declared receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 682317).

Notes

Author biography

Bruno Magalhães is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI, PUC-Rio) and an executive director of PUC-Rio’s Digital Humanities Laboratory (#dhLab, PUC-Rio). He was also a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the University of Amsterdam, as a member of ERC-funded ‘Project Follow’, led by professor Marieke de Goede. He holds a PhD in Political Science and International Studies from the Open University, UK. His research focuses on how borders – inside and outside, normal and abnormal, good or bad, valuable or worthless, welcome or unwelcome, dangerous or safe – are practically accomplished, sustained, questioned, played with, circumvented and otherwise made irrelevant. For his doctoral research, he carried out an ethnographic study amid eligibility officers formally responsible for the work of Refugee Status Determination in Brazil. RSD is the work of the legal inquiry on which the Brazilian government, and most government these days, rely to set apart men, women and children classified as ‘genuine refugees’ and ‘others’ deemed deportable. The resulting monograph (Inverting Skepticism: An Ethnography of Asylum Decision-making, Palgrave, 2020, forthcoming) is a study of the practices on which the migrant/refugee binary lies, as in attempts to assess the legal fit, empirical support and narrative coherence of asylum applications, Bruno’s current obsession is with following people, things and terms, like saudade, as they acquire different values in chains of translation.

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