The Poetics of (Queer) Fado

I always return to Lisbon.

It's October 2021, and I am back in the city for the “Vulnerable Bodies” assembly curated by Andrea Bagnato and Ivan Munuera at the Museum of Art and Technology. I am jet-lagged, reeling after a hard conversation right before my plane ride, and far from my hometown of NYC. Directly outside the museum walls, the Tagus river is uncharacteristically stormy and torrential. Somehow this city always reflects back to me what I am feeling, which is meaningful since we only get a few places in the world that can mirror our skewed interiorities. 

Sitting on the floor next to my friend, Anjuli, I take in the room. There is a stage before us, backlit in alternating neon pinks and greens, an occasional soft blue. We curl up against a wall, hug our knees towards our chests, disassociate in the safe womb of darkness, marvel in the showy lights. Here, in my childlike configuration next to my friend, I consider time and yesterday. I am disoriented, which is another way of saying that I’m porous enough to receive something, to be moved. To consider distance: the leap of where I was sitting ten hours ago and where I am now, and the waters and wind and imperial history that lead me to this city, again and again.  

Two figures take the stage. Song begins. 

* * *

The first time I heard fado, without understanding the lyrics, I felt, in its hoarse vocal delivery, a desperation about distance. After all, this straining of voice, which is deliberate in fado, is a form of measurement. It tells us how far away our beloved is as we agonize over whether we can be heard and the perils of being out of “earshot.” As a non-fado expert and a non-fluent Portuguese speaker, my interpretations of the emotional registers of Portugal’s iconic song form were amatuer. Yet in the tunes of Portugal’s most famous fadista singer, Amália Rodgrieus (mid-century “queen of fado” fadista), there was an aura of fatalism, a “too lateness,” a hopelessness about a loss that could neither be resurrected nor resolved, a grief that one maybe didn’t want to give up on. It turns out this is a pretty universal interpretation (fado literally means “fate”) and there is consensus that fado encapsulates the Portuguese and Brazilian feeling of “saudade,” a supposedly difficult to translate melancholic or wistful affect common in music from Brazil, Cape Verde, Portugal, etc. In an article about this term for NPR, Jasmine Garsd points to the definition offered by the Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo: “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” The Portuguese mystic poet Teixeira de Pascoaes described it as a mix of grief and desire. The more I engage with fado, the more this elusive feeling resonates with me. Its pleasure principle about pain. Its dramatized audacity to dwell in longing for irrealities.

Fado’s origin is hotly contested. Some researchers of the “Brown Atlantic,” trace fado back to the first half of the 19^th century, through Afro-Brazilian influences. Others, more nationalist and territorial in their beliefs, insist fado is linked to the emotional valences of sailors at sea, a longing for the motherland that Kimberley DaCosta Holton and others argue glorifies Portugal's era of colonization and empire. This imperialism is also part of the complex history of my own diasporic family from Portuguese-colonized-India. 

Today, in the Alfama district of Lisbon, you can find fado for tourists through the winding, labyrinthine streets of one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. You can find the image of Amália on a mural in Montreal. Fado’s iconicity is linked to a political history it wants to tell. Yet even as fado has become professionalized, censored under its long dictatorship, and usurped as a form that reified Portugal’s nationalist interests, this art form, as Daniel Da Silva has argued in his work on fado as queer praxis, was historically relegated to “peripheral people and places: ports, docks, brothels, taverns, and ethnic enclaves," and is a form ingrained in social protest. Indeed, the “saudade” of fado was likely originally sung by the misfits, poor, or outlaws of society, or revered as a spiritually emotive practice, though some argue it is now being recirculated as a celebratory nationalist form of nostalgia for Portuguese imperial exploration. Analyzing the cultural history and vocal ornamentations of Maria Severa (19th century fadista), Amália Rodrigues, and António Variações (gay singer songwriter who blended 1980’s rock with Portuguese folk and fado), Da Silva makes a compelling argument about how fado plays with gendered affects of unruly, illicit desire and folkloric femme performance that have always been queer. 

* * *

Lila Fadista. Photo courtesy of Fado Biche.

While it storms outside, a duo takes the stage. They call themselves Fado Bicha (meaning “Queer Fado”). Fado Bicha is made up of Lila Fadista (she/they, on vocals) and João Caçador (he/they, on guitar and other instruments). Lila Fadista is tall and wears black stilettos and a black bra with only a translucent, gauzy overcoat. They sing fado, but unlike other fadistas who remain stationary, Lila Fadista writhes and moves. They take off her heels. They strip and fall to the floor. And João, instead of playing a traditional acoustic guitar, plays electric and stays seated with Bowie glam eye makeup and a studded leather jacket crowded at the neckline with pink fabric roses. Lila Fadista begins every song with a short and moving anecdote. They are a storyteller and I learn that the duo rewrites famous fado pieces to call attention to issues of racism and homophobia in Portugal. For example, a video of their rewriting of “Lisboa, Não Sejas Frances” (“Lisbon, Don’t Be French”) by Amália Rodrigues to “Lisboa, Não Sejas Racista” has already received thousands of views. They write an homage to a loved one in the audience, emphasizing queer friendship over the romantic dyad. They talk about growing up gay and being bullied and about how the music of Amália saved them, how they left the traditional fado school after a teacher told them they could not sing a woman’s part. When I ask Fado Bicha, in an interview a month after their performance, if fado has always been queer, they answer: “Everything has always been queer, as well. The suppression of queerness is millennial and endemic.”

If “traditional” fado is interested in distance, then maybe queer fado is more interested in compression. In collapsing the histories of conquest and nation-making through the rewriting of long-sung lyrics. What might it mean to explore an imagination that is polytemporal? That can undo violent historicization and world-build through a playful fabulation of gender, erotic performance, lyrics, audience, sung rhyme, and vocal accentuation, and that is not situated in rigidity? This is a poetics. This is not just formal experimentation, it’s asking us to reorganize our understandings of time and space, distance and intimacy, or what Fado Bicha might call, as they did in our interview, the summoning of an “early universe,” of a 19th century, multicultural Lisbon.

If “traditional” fado is interested in melancholia and nostalgia, queer fado might be more on the side of optimism and fantasy through opening up old lyric forms to contemporary critique, demanding answers and accountability to ongoing violence, making a “home” in the songs for ways of loving that are less standardized and more socially peripheral. After all, if one’s desires have always had to be sublimated into subtext (in our interview, Lila mentions that many of the original fado poets were gay), and one’s grief of being unaccepted has to be internalized or repressed, what forms of longing are aspirational? Or realized? Who is listening on the other side of your hoarse voice, your straining into the distance? Who is waiting to receive you? 

* * *

Anjuli and I stumble through the streets of Lisbon talking about what we have seen and about our own messy lives. We sit under a dying bougainvillea with its half magenta, half brown blooms. We look out over the dramatic, iconic vistas of the city. I point out all the ordinary, self-curated landmarks where something important has happened: an epiphany by a jacaranda tree, a kiss on a bench, an inelegant tumble by a statue, a cafe where I read an essay about Goa being the “crown” of the Portuguese empire. I tell her about my compulsion for distance, that distance, like a beloved in a poem, is an easy way to keep an abstraction or idea “at bay.” That with distance, the “idea” of a person can be easily contained or fictionalized. I also say maybe I want less distance these days. We have each had some recent turbulent years and yet, somehow, our messy lives feel less messy together. As we climb towards the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte, I’m still thinking about time and the fantasy of early universes, about how many stories go untold, and of the many types of knowledge that do not get to count as such. When we part, we make a collaborative playlist called “fuckbois and dreamgirls.” We cast a wide, unruly net of songs.  

* * *

Below is an excerpt from my conversation with Fado Bicha, which took place over email in November 2021:

What is your understanding of “saudade”? Is any interpretation of it part of your song-making or performing? 

It's interesting to know where the word comes from, given that there isn't a cognate for it in close Latin languages, like Spanish or Catalan. Saudade comes from the Arabic word for black bile, something like sevdah. The Greek synonym is μελάνια χολή, which originated the word melancholy. Saudade and melancholy have the same semantic root in different languages. So much for its supposed untranslatability.

Portuguese speakers use the term saudades on a common basis, to say we miss someone or a city or even chocolate, for example. It's not as much erudite as it's prosaic. And fado was, originally, the most prosaic of music genres, born out of a melange of influences in multicultural early 19th century Lisbon, and cradled by some of the most destitute among its inhabitants: criminals, sex workers, migrants, precarious workers, queers. We draw inspiration from the fantasy we create of this early universe, not the conservative and rigid derivative that fado became in the last 100 years. Our saudade is one of a place we have never experienced, one where we'll be utterly free. 

Can you talk a bit about your process of changing the lyrics of famous fado songs? Does this feel like a subversive or transgressive act? What does it mean to change the language but keep the form? Or does changing the lyrics change the form?

Changing lyrics, creating new lyrics for existing melodies is the basic creative process underlying traditional fado. Each of the old melodies, recognised as traditional fados, has had many different poems attached to it throughout time. What's subversive about what we do is not the method but the content. We refuse to accept the policy of silence and modesty regarding the lives and experiences of sexual and gender non normative people writing and performing fado—or just existing as a public figure in Portugal, to be honest. It becomes subversive as it clashes with the traditionalist and pseudo-dictatorial rules and rites that govern the community of fado creators and consumers. 

Do you have any poetry influences? Can you talk about your own creative process for writing your own songs?

Yes, of course, poetry is a central aspect of our lives and of our work. Contemporary Portuguese writers like Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Raquel Lima, Patrícia Lino inspire us and get interwoven in our aspirations for literature and society. Queer poets who have written fado poems, like Ary dos Santos or Pedro Homem de Mello, are also a major source of inspiration for us, because they constitute the few footprints of queerness that can be effectively traced in the herstory of fado. Our creative process draws from two main channels: dreams and anger. Sometimes, they go together. Sometimes, the dreams are restless and the anger is sympathetic. But we can't do without any of them.

Works Cited and Further Reading on Fado

Da Silva, Daniel. “Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis.” Journal of Lusophone Studies: 3(1) (2018):124-147.

Gray, Lila Ellen. “Memories of empire, mythologies of the soul : Fado performance and the shaping of Saudade.” Ethnomusicology 51 (2007): 106-130.

Holton, Kimberley DaCosta. “Fado Historiograhy: Old Myths and New Frontiers.” Portuguese Cultural Studies: Vol. 0: Iss. 1, Article 1.  (2006). https://scholarworks.umass.edu/p/vol0/iss1/1.

Further Reading on Fado Bicha

Catarina Fernandes Martins, "Fado Bicha is forcing traditional Portuguese fado 'out of the closet.'" The World (2018).  https://theworld.org/stories/2018-10-29/fado-bicha-forcing-traditional-portuguese-fado-out-closet

Beatriz Negreiros, "This Machine Kills Portuguese Fascists: how Fado Bicha are rewriting the rules of musical tradition." Front (2020).  https://fr-nt.nl/2020/12/01/this-machine-kills-portuguese-fascists-how-fado-bicha-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-musical-tradition/

"All of this Exists, All of this is Queer, All of this is Fado." Divergente. divergente.pt/en/fado-bicha/