The Luis Sepúlveda Memory Center, dedicated to the Chilean writer, will open in 2025 in Póvoa de Varzim, announced today the Councillor for Culture, Luís Diamantino, at the closing of the 25th edition of the Correntes d’Escritas Literary Festival.
“We’ve moved his entire office to Póvoa de Varzim, with all the furniture, with his entire library, with his entire estate, which will be at Casa Manuel Lopes,” the city’s garden library, said the mayor, adding that there will be space for research and exhibitions about the writer, who died in 2020 and is one of the founding names of the literary festival.
Taking stock of the festival’s 25 years, and on the eve of the 50th anniversary of April 25, Luís Diamantino highlighted the main warnings left by the various writers and artists who took part in the debates.
“It was a common thread in all the speeches, the dangers that freedom is facing at the moment, the fact that we think that freedom is a given and that there is no going back, there is no return. There is a return, there is the danger of a return,” said the councillor, referring to the past dictatorship.
Freedom also has many dangers surrounding literature, Luis Diamantino pointed out.
“When the writer is writing, he also starts to think about what he can say and what he can’t say, which is self-censorship, which is much worse than censorship. The writer doesn’t know if he can say this word or that, if his books will be truncated or not. We also run these dangers,” he added.
The person responsible for creating and organizing Correntes d’Escritas highlighted the importance of the festival as a space for reflection on freedom and the risks to democracy, in which the public also participates.
“The 25 years of Correntes d’Escritas speak for themselves, we’ve managed to hold a meeting of writers of this nature, with this massive turnout of spectators, who fill rooms to hear writers speak, to hear the texts that writers write. It’s been like this and it’s been growing.
At the last table, on the theme “And a blank verse waiting for the future”, writer Hélia Correia revealed the same concerns, asking “if we will be jubilant at this celebration of April”, only to reply: “We’re not”.
“If the gestures are the same, if the carnations are the same, we are not the same. And if we don’t deny ourselves, if we look with courage, if our ears pay attention, we will realize that the songs no longer sing, they babble, and that the pages have lost their splendour.”
In the words of Hélia Correia, “it was all a dream and we woke up to the real when the heels of our boots hit us, and now we can’t find any measures, words or internal grids of understanding to organize and make what we’re facing somehow familiar.”
“We see on the horizon the worse truth, the competence for evil of human beings, their territorial instinct once again aroused, the taste of the crusade making saliva, and we see how thought is in danger, we see how words are under threat and how this threat arrives from various fronts: that of fascistic censorship, it is true, but also that of ‘woke’ intervention and that of the most frightening threat, because it dazzles the one who is threatened, as if he were drinking a potion, the threat of the extinction of language, of creation in the image of the single party, of the single language, making dead languages, our living languages and living literatures.”
Speaking at the same table, writer José Eduardo Agualusa regretted that 50 years after April 25, Angola and Mozambique are still fighting for that freedom.
The writer Germano Almeida, for his part, revealed that he is about to finish a novel that is a crime thriller, taking place in Póvoa de Varzim, at the Correntes d’Escritas festival.
He recalled his experiences in Lisbon in April 1974 and pointed out that although freedom is increasingly present in societies, “we insist on systems of oppression in the most basic forms.
