Macau Literary Festival – A Trip down Memory Lane

The 10th edition of The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, to be held from December 3 to 5, will focus on local authors and their books. Due to the pandemic constraints, the event will not be able to invite guest writers from abroad, as it has done in the past, but there will still be a lot to celebrate.

 

The festival will present tributes to the life and work of preeminent authors from the past, such as Zheng Guanying, who died 100 years ago. Zheng was a pioneering thinker, industrialist, educator, literary writer, humanitarian, and patriot. Words of Warning in Times of Prosperity, which he wrote while living in his Macau residence – today known as the Mandarin House – has been called a masterpiece. It shaped the thinking of Emperor Guangxu and the views of millions of people, influencing generations of statesmen, including Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong.

 

Other anniversaries that will be marked during the event include: the first Bible translation into Chinese and opening of the Protestant Cemetery of Macau (100 years ago); the foundation of Pen Club International, the major writers’ association in the world (100 years ago); the death of John Thomson, one of the earlier photography artists to visit Macau (100 years ago); the births of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert and Richard Francis Burton (200 years ago).

 

The 10th Macau Literary Festival will also present the books released by local authors throughout the year of 2021, and will look at a significant number of novels about Macau that have been published by foreign authors in recent times. Films, exhibitions and performances will again be included in the event’s program. Local theatre group Step Out will perform their latest theatre piece Title to be determined which finds inspiration from the Polish female writer Olga Tokarczuk’s first picture book The Lost Soul.

 

 

 

The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival will hold its tenth edition this year and has created a decade of building bridges between Chinese and Lusophone culture, bringing together great names of prose, poetry, cinema and music over its ten-year history.

 

 

 The Script Road, which is now open to writers and people from many other artistic fields, is a tribute to the role that Macau has always played in bringing people and their cultures closer together – an authentic genetic code contained in its centuries-old identity – and also the recognition that strengthening relations between China and the Portuguese-speaking world, politically assumed as a priority, will lose meaning and dynamics if it is unable to free itself from merely economic and mercantile logic.” 

 

This is how, in January 2012, at its inaugural edition, The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival was presented by its director, Ricardo Pinto.

 

 

The Festival is now on its tenth edition and continues to seek to bring Chinese and Portuguese-speaking cultures together. Professor and poet Yao Jingming, who has been the sub-director of The Script Road since the second edition of the festival, explains that the initiative “is very important for Macau’s culture, since it is an event held by Portuguese and Chinese working hand in hand,” something rarely seen in Macau, he admits: “Few things have been done jointly by Portuguese and Chinese. We talk a lot about cultural exchange in Macau, but in fact this exchange is very superficial”.

 

The Script Road serves then, to put into practice the label that Macau has adopted, as a platform between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries of the world. 

“This event crosses that boundary that exists between the Chinese and Portuguese communities,” says Yao, who stresses, “Macau never previously had such an international literary event. It is an event with a very open vision.”

 

 

Yao Jingming observes that the Chinese community was initially apprehensive of the event and kept its distance. However, this has changed due to the efforts made by the organizers, points out the director of the Portuguese Department of the University of Macau. For Yao, “the promotion of Macau’s image abroad” and the “interaction between the Chinese and Portuguese communities” have been the initiative’s two core values.

 

 

 

Alice Kok took over as executive director of The Script Road in 2019 and she too highlights the bridging nature between Chinese and Lusophone literature. But more than this, the festival also has an interdisciplinary component: “Artistically, it is very interesting, because the literary festival is not only about books. It is also about theater, music, and visual arts. In the name of literature, all these arts can be combined and have an exchange.”

 

“This is a very representative cultural event” that matches Macau’s identity. Macau has this genetics of being a bridge between Chinese speakers and Portuguese-speaking countries. In addition, we have also created a window for international writers to come here. I think Macau having an international literary festival is very fitting,” she comments.

 

 

Hélder Beja was one of the original co-founders of the festival and remained as program director until 2018, an edition that was marked by some added challenges.  In that year, the organizers were unofficially warned that the presence of three of the guests would not be opportune in Macau. They ended up cancelling the visits of Suki Kim, Jung Chang and James Church to the territory. “It was a clear intervention in the festival’s policy,” comments Beja, justifying his decision to step down from his position thereafter.

 

Even so, the journalist points out that “the role of the festival remains important today, simply because “there is no other festival with such a special DNA”.  The confluence of Portuguese, Chinese and English is the “basic idea” of the festival. 

 

According to the co-founder, another aspect that has made The Script Road a “special festival” has been the annual publication of collections of short stories and poetry. “For several years we were able to publish collections that made many authors, who probably wouldn't have otherwise written a line about Macau, produce some very interesting texts about the territory,” Beja says.

 

Hélder highlights the inaugural edition in 2012 edition as being particularly memorable for him.

 

“I would highlight the first year because it was the year of the amateurs. We loved the idea of the festival, but didn’t know how to make it happen. Despite all the problems we had to deal with, I think it was a very special edition”. 

 

Renowned writers like Rui Cardoso Martins, Tatiana Salem Levy, and José Luís Peixoto, for example, all attended the festival that year. “It was a green year, but, in spite of everything, it was the right seed that we had to plant,” Hélder stresses, concluding: “I miss that festival of the first years. I like to remember the best that the festival gave to Macau and those who made it happen”.

 

 

 

Precisely in its first edition, The Script Road had more than 30 sessions, including panel discussions, film screenings, concerts and exhibitions. The festival, which took place between January 29 and February 4, 2012, brought together novelists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, musicians and artists from China, Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique, from different generations and a wide variety of artistic genres. 

 

José Rodrigues dos Santos, who, in 2012, had just released his novel O Último Segredo (The Last Secret), was one of the guests. Jade Y. Cheng, Taiwanese novelist, journalist, director and playwright, also visited Macau, as did Brazilians João Paulo Cuenca and Tatiana Salem Levy, as well as writers Marvin Farkas, Rui Cardoso Martins, Xu Xi, and José Luís Peixoto.

 

In an interview with our sister publication Ponto Final newspaper, José Luís Peixoto commented that coming to Macau helped him to better understand the territory: “The impression I have is that this history we share with Macau is really very important, for us and for Macau. We must strive for this awareness to exist, since this is an encounter between two civilizations, which, even in an era of globalization, still have many misunderstandings.”

 

The winner of the 2001 Saramago Prize also said he hoped the initiative would increase interest in writing about Macau, “so that we in Portugal can also get to know this place a little better.”

 

Fado singer Aldina Duarte and Portuguese musician Noiserv also performed in Macau as part of the first festival. In addition, works by artists such as André Carrilho, Alice Kok, Carlos Marreiros, and Lai Sio Kit, among others, were exhibited. 

 

At the closing of the first edition, Hélder Beja gave a speech that pointed to the future: “Literature is an option, it should be an option. Millions of people have lived without literature for centuries and millions of people continue and will continue to do so. Some because they don’t have access to it, others because they choose to. And it is this power of choice that matters. If The Script Road manages to show a handful of people per year that in Macau this option exists, if it manages to show to one person per year that this option exists, then The Script Road will already make sense.”

 

 

 

The second edition of the festival opened on March 10, 2013, and ran for ten days at the D. Pedro V Theater. Like the first edition, it was attended by authors, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists. In this edition, more than 30 authors were present including Bi Feiyu, winner of the Asian Man Booker Prize, and Hong Ying, internationally recognized Chinese author, as well as Han Shaogong, Yi Sha, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Valter Hugo Mãe, Rui Zink, Ricardo Araújo Pereira and José Eduardo Agualusa, just to name a few. Filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata also attended, while the musical guests included Joan Chen, Camané, and Dead Combo.

 

Murong Xuecun

 

 

Afonso Cruz, Bei Dao, António Graça de Abreu, Andréa del Fuego, João Paulo Borges Coelho and Clara Ferreira Alves were guests in 2014 for the third edition of The Script Road, while musicians Cat Power, Arnaldo Antunes and the Omnipotent Youth Society performed at the Cotai Arena. The 2014 edition was also marked by the presence of poet Hu Xudong, who passed away recently at the age of 47.

 

Cat Power

 

 

For the fourth edition, the festival moved its base to the Old Courthouse building. There, between March 19 and 29, 2015, names like Ondjaki, Ann Hui, Francisco José Viegas and João Tordo attended discussion panels. As the festival is not only about books, 'rapper’ Gabriel o Pensador packed the Cotai Arena, together with LMF from Hong Kong, and local band Blademark. Maestro Vitorino D’Almeida even treated the audience to an improvised piano concert.

 

In 2016, The Script Road decided to pay tribute to the poet Camilo Pessanha and Tang Xianzu, Chinese playwright of the 16th century. José Pacheco Pereira, Pedro Mexia, Ricardo Adolfo, Paulo José Miranda, Matilde Campilho were some of the Portuguese authors highlighted. Brazilian authors Luiz Ruffato, Marcelino Freire, Carol Rodrigues, and Felipe Munhoz were also in attendance, as well as Guinean Ernesto Dabó.

 

Adam Johnson

 

Adam Johnson, 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for The Orphan Master's Son was also in Macau to talk about the North Korean regime and said he was curious about China. “But I would leave that topic to Chinese writers in exile: in Hong Kong, in Macau or other places, who have the experience, the cultural knowledge that I don’t have, I would leave it to writers who know the topic much better than I do before I try to do anything,” he indicated in an interview.

 

At the time, Pedro Mexia was surprised by the city: “I couldn’t imagine that there would be so many streets, so many signs in Portuguese, the bus routes and all that. At the same time, I also didn’t expect that there would be so much colonial architecture, as far as I can see, from that period. I was also surprised that the Portuguese community – and I already had some notion of this – had such vitality in terms of, for example, newspapers, the Portuguese Bookstore, and of course, the Literary Festival”. Mexia noted that The Script Road stemmed from “pro-activity and interest in not letting the trail of Portuguese culture in Macau completely disappear.”

 

 

The Script Road continued in 2017, attended by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yu Hua, the Canadian writer selected for the 2016 Manhattan Prize, Madeleine Thien, Scottish Book Trust Foundation award winner Graeme Macrae Burnet, and Hong Kong-born Australian author and academic with Portuguese roots, Brian Castro. José Manuel Simões, Inocência Mata, and Lu Aolei were some of the local authors present. Sérgio Godinho and Taiwanese singer Xu Jingchun were the musical acts. 

 

Sérgio Godinho commented on his time in Macau in 2017, saying, “It gives me great joy because my relationship with this community, with this land, is beginning to cement more and more.” In an interview with the Macau Daily Times, Brian Castro referred to Macau as “an enclave of the past” and said he hoped that “the old Macau” would be valued.

 

The seventh edition in 2018 intended to have North Korea as its main focus. The organizers had invited Suki Kim, an author who spent six months undercover in North Korea, however they ultimately had to withdraw the invitation. The same situation arose for James Church, a former CIA agent and writer of detective novels, and Jung Chang, a Chinese writer forbidden to enter the country. Instead, Julián Fuks, Ana Margarida de Carvalho, Han Dong, A Yi, Maria Inês Almeida, and Bao Dongni all attended. Also in the spotlight was Portuguese historian Rui Tavares. From Mozambique came Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and from Hong Kong came Chan Hou Kei. 

 

The 2019 edition, which saw The Script Road setup its base at the Old Navy Yard, focused on authors Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jorge de Sena, Adé dos Santos Ferreira, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. The Festival prepared a tribute to Sophia and invited the writer’s son, Miguel Sousa Tavares, to talk about his mother’s work. The cultural association D’As Entranhas prepared a dramaturgy based on her poems. Children’s author Adélia Carvalho also presented a biography of Sophia. 

 

 

Jorge de Sena, who would have turned 100 in 2019, was honored by Frederick G. Williams. And to celebrate the life of Herman Melville, The Script Road screened Melville in Love, a 2018 biography of the author of Moby Dick directed by Seth Newton and written by Michael Shelden. Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday, meanwhile, was marked with the screening of the documentary Whitman, Alabama by Jennifer Crandall.

 

At the 2019 edition, José Luís Peixoto returned to Macau to present, alongside Chinese poet Jidi Majia, the translation of Words of Fire. The organizers also honoured Macanese poet Adé dos Santos Ferreira with a recitation in patuá. Meanwhile, Raul Leal Gaião took the opportunity to launch a patuá dictionary. Authors Pedro Lamares, Eduardo Pacheco, Hirondina Joshua and José Luís Tavares also participated in this edition. The 2017 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, Salvador Sobral, performed at the Broadway Theatre on March 17 as part of The Script Road’s musical program.

 

Ahead of the 2019 festival, Jidi Majia spoke about the importance of The Script Road: “I hope it can be a platform without barriers allowing communication between all writers and poets, in the sense of opening a wider space for freedom of spirit. I believe this can be achieved through the efforts of the organizers.”

 

 

 

Arriving to 2020, The Script Road also suffered from the impact of the pandemic and therefore had to be resized to a shorter format, held on the weekend of October 2-4. The ninth edition mostly included sessions with local authors, with Eric Chau, Wang Feng, Jenny Lao-Phillips, and Konstantin Bessmertny discussing the challenges of confinement for artists. 

 

In this edition, poet Camilo Pessanha was again the focus, with a tribute to the 100-year anniversary of the release of his anthology Clepsydra through a recital of poems directed by Maestro Simão Barreto. The festival closed with a tribute to Henrique de Senna Fernandes, marking the 10th anniversary of the death of the Macau author. Miguel de Senna Fernandes, his son, also launched his first book of short stories, Crónicas à Sexta – Estórias e Ironias do Comum dos Dias.

 

 

“We should insist on having a trilingual festival, not only in Chinese, but also in English and Portuguese. I think this is something to be continued, because without languages we don’t have access to the thoughts of other cultures, because the barriers between peoples begin with the difference in languages,” noted Alice Kok at the end of last year’s edition of the Festival. “If I don't know Portuguese it will be difficult for me to know the spirit and the thinking of the people. So the festival is bridging and translating all these differences, and I think this is the most important thing. In this festival, languages are the vehicle, because without them, no message can be sent”.