AEMI

32 AEMI JOURNAL 2015
someone who willingly or unwillingly
was led to reside away from his homeland.
It also applies, in a more restricted
sense, to people of a very high social profile
that at some point had to reside in a
country other than their own, as happened
with previous rulers or members
of Royal families, as well as prominent
politicians, generally by government enforcement.
As a relevant example, the Exiles
Memory-Space (Espaço Memória dos
Exílios)1, a museological oriented space
located in Estoril (Portugal), documents
the presence in Portugal of a large
number of crowned heads of European
ex-monarchies. There is Spain (Don
Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, the son of
King Don Alfonso XIII of Spain and his
wife Queen Victoria Eugenie, Counts
of Barcelona), France (Counts of Paris),
England (Duke of Windsor Edward Albert
and Wallis Simpson), Italy (King
Umberto II and Queen Marie Joseph
of Italy), Luxembourg (Grand Duchess
Charlotte of Luxembourg), Austria
(Otto and Joseph of Habsburg), Romania
(Carol, son of Ferdinand, King
of Romania), Bulgaria (Queen Giovanna,
accompanied by her two sons,
King Simenon II and Princess Marie
Louise), Serbia (Princess Helena Karageorgevitch)
and Hungary (Archduke
Josef Árpád von Habsburg Lothringen).
All linked by ties of kinship, shared the
same space that served as a refuge from
the war that had broken out in Europe
and reached the countries from which
they originated.
Another example refers to the famous
group of expatriates, who, willingly and
as the result of their free choice, moved
from one continent to another: the renowned
American writers and intellectuals
who chose Paris for residence,
between the 1920s and 19440s: Ernest
Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, John
dos Passos, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Henry Miller,
among many others.
Portugal served not only as a space
of shelter, it was, in the best of senses, a
bridge of passage for thousands of people
of various nationalities that were persecuted
by German Nazis and later managed
to reach the American continent.
In the year of the invasion of France
by Germany (1940) during World War
II, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Consul
of Portugal in Bordeaux, defied direct
orders of dictator António de Oliveira
Salazar, who acted as Minister of Foreign
Affairs. For five days thousands of
entry visas for Portugal were granted to
fleeing persons (including an estimate of
ten thousand Jews).
In a very different perspective from
the previous one, any resident outside
its area of origin, in his own country
or abroad can then feel «exiled». The
literary productions that refer to the
nostalgic feelings of those who compare
the memories of a land they consider
their own with the reality of where they
went on to live are widely known 2 . Let
us recall the «Song from Exile (Canção
do Exílio)» by the Brazilian author
Gonçalves Dias 3 written in Coimbra in
1843, taking this idea as a leitmotif:
God forbid I die,
Without me getting back there;
Without enjoying the perfections
I can’t find here;
Without seeing the palm trees,
Where the Sabia bird sings.