The director of the “only active theater” in patuá (Macau Creole), which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary, believes that Portugal should “invest more in the study” of this Macaan Creole, Portuguese-based and endangered.
“Portugal can even give us answers to many questions that we often don’t know. How did a certain form of expression appear linguistically, for example”, Miguel de Senna Fernandes, head of the theater company Dóci Papiaçám di Macau (Macau’s Sweet Words) .
The Macau Creole language, preserved mainly through this group of amateur actors, who put on one play a year, was heavily influenced by the Portuguese language. “If it does not reach 80%, it is 70% Portuguese,” said the also president of the Associação dos Macaenses.
“There is a lot that comes naturally from other influences, from Malay, from Konkani, but the bulk, for example, in the formation of verbs, is a lot from Portuguese (…). There is a great influence from Cantonese as well, not in the spelling, but in the semantic aspect,” he explained.
Listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as “severely endangered,” the level before extinction, the Patuá was created by Portuguese immigrants in Macau over the past 400 years, and has been disappearing due to the obligation to learn Portuguese in schools, imposed by the Portuguese administration.
Miguel de Senna Fernandes does not know how many people speak Creole, in the small Chinese territory or in the diaspora, but he admits that they are “very few.” He argues that the patuá “has its value,” giving the Maca community a “dimension of tradition, a dimension of depth in historical terms and in terms of experience.”
The term Macaense is commonly used to refer to this Eurasian community, most of whose members are of Portuguese descent, with roots in Macau.
“We have to know who we are, what past we have. (…) We cannot forget where we come from. And Patuá is in a somewhat contradictory situation. When we talk about language, it is necessary for the language to have dignity when it is used. And the contradiction is that nobody speaks patuá ”, he pointed out.
Portugal, Senna Fernandes also considered, “can always do more”, be it through Casa de Macao, the Scientific and Cultural Center of Macao -“which is doing a good job”- or “a community of Patuá-speaking Macao”. resident on the territory: “And why not rebuild it from there or at least preserve it?”.
“It would be ridiculous to talk about a language museum, but it is almost like that, a kind of room, a museum device,” he said.
Referring to the fact that “many initiatives are now starting to exist” in Macao to “promote patuá outside the Doçi”, specifically through the Macao Youth Association and the newly created Macao Cultural Studies Association, Senna Fernandes stated that has a personal project: “I’ve been writing for 30 years and I haven’t published anything, but I’m going to do it”, he stressed, pointing out that “up to now the only patuá that is seen [publicado] é do Adé”, as the Macaense poet José dos Santos Ferreira (1919-1993) was known.
“I am going to do it because it is another interpretation of the patuá,” he said.
In 2021, China included the Patuá Theater in the list of national intangible cultural heritage.
The Dóci Papiaçám di Macau group, “the only active theater” in this Creole, was born on October 30, 1993, the year of Adé’s death and on the occasion of the visit of the then Portuguese President Mário Soares to Macao and the reopening, after the restoration works, of D. Pedro V, the first western-style theater in China.
Miguel de Senna Fernandes was part of the project from that first moment, staging the play “Olâ Pisidénte” (See the President), presenting “to the President of the Republic the concerns” of the Macanese community: integration into the ranks of Portugal, after the transfer of the administration of the territory to China in 1999, and issues related to nationality.
“The group has been a good promoter of its own language”, stressed the director when taking stock of three decades of work. “Theater is a fantastic way to learn any language.”
This year, the playwright brings to the stage of the main auditorium of the Macao Cultural Center, between the 26th and 28th of this month, the portrait of a city free from the pandemic. Macao got rid of pandemic restrictions, but not the Doçi satire. With “Chachau-Lalau di Carnaval” (Oh, what a festival), a new neighborhood revitalization program is created in the territory and a block is selected as a pilot experience. There will be a trial. Or rather, a carnival.
“Macau wants to be a happy place and always throws that carnival or fairground subterfuge, whatever you want to call it. It’s carnival here, carnival there. The word carnival is even included in grant applications, it’s the craziest thing to be,” she says.
The play, which this year will feature several musical numbers and video works, is presented in Patuá, with moments in Portuguese and Cantonese. Mandarin will be heard for the first time, through the voice of a character who comes from the interior of China, “but who quickly begins to speak Cantonese.”
Senna Fernandes draws attention to “a new reality” in Macau.
“There is so much talk about the Great Bay and I still don’t know what it is, it is necessary to integrate this element in another way in a piece of patuá,” he added, referring to the Beijing project that aims to create a world metropolis from Macao, Hong Kong and nine cities in Guangdong province, with more than 60 million inhabitants.
“Regardless of what people may think, Mandarin is a non-Macauian language (…) but, of course, for official reasons, for reasons of State and everything else, it is obvious and legitimate to expect that the community also speaks the national language,” he said.
Source: TSF
