Visiting Luxembourg’s annual Festival des Migrations in early 2024, near the entrance I chanced on the Portuguese stand and its book display aimed at the Grand Duchy’s largest migrant community, Browsing there, I came across a black-covered book entitled ‘Esch, Lieu de Mémoires’ (‘Esch, place of memories’), which intrigued me as I live in Esch-sur-Alzette, second city of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, onetime ‘iron metropolis’ and now the seat of the country’s university and, let us not forget, European Capital of Culture in 2022.
I bought the book and within a few days read it. It turned out to be a multilingual volume, arising from an initiative linked to the Capital of Culture celebrations and published in Germany under the auspices of the Luxembourg/Portuguese cultural association PESSOA, with the support of various local institutions. The book combines photographs and text: four photographers have works included, and there is a total of ten contributors of texts, written mostly in Portuguese but with the English and French languages also represented.
The contributors were asked to submit previously unpublished texts with a bearing on Esch-sur-Alzette, the aim being, as contributor and editor São Gonçalves puts it in her introduction, to ‘célébrer la ville, sa diversité et son multiculturalisme’ (‘celebrate the city, its diversity and multiculturalism’), but also to ‘diffuser la culture dans sa conception universaliste’ (‘disseminate culture in its universalist conception’) (8). The result is a highly readable collection of writings of various lengths, in multiple registers and embracing both non-fiction and fiction. Some of the authors prefer a straight narrative of their experience as immigrant workers and their discovery of a new culture; others evoke Esch as physical space, its squares, cafés, concert halls and parks; others again choose the route of genre fiction: there is a love story, a mystery story and a ghost story (the last-named located in the municipal library).
We thus have a labyrinth of diverse texts with the city of Esch-sur-Alzette as its guiding thread: to quote the contributor Cidália Rodrigues, ‘As cidades são como as casas. São aconchego e abrigo, história e memória!’ (‘Cities are like houses. They are comfort and shelter, history and memory!’) (67). The multilingual nature of the volume underscores the motif of multiculturalism. The texts are complemented by the excellent interspersed photographs, with their eminently local subject-matter, from bus station to industrial landscape. All in all, the book is attractively presented and a pleasure to handle (though I have one cavil, namely the lack of a table of contents, which detail would, especially given the diversity of the texts, have facilitated reading).
The volume concludes with a paean to ‘Esch-sur-Alzette, la grande ville amie’ (‘the great city and friend’) by Paulo Lobo, son of Portuguese immigrants, for whom Luxembourg’s second city remains ‘la ville de la culture et des rencontres, la ville des événements festifs et culturels pour tous publics … la ville des jeunes et des vieux qui embrassent la vie dans un meme élan généreux‘ (‘the city of culture and encounters, the city of festive and cultural events for all audiences … the city of those both young and old who embrace life with the same generous élan’) (109-110). I would suggest that although the Portuguese language is predominant in the volume, it is very arguably of interest to those who do not read Portuguese – this thanks to the quality of the material in French and English, not to speak of the excellence of the photos! Those whom the multicultural city of Esch interests will decide!
PESSOA asbl, Esch, lieu de mémoires. Lünen, Germany: Oxalá Editora, 2022. Various contributors, 124 pp.
Dr Christopher Rollason: BILINGUAL CULTURE BLOG - ENGLISH/SPANISH - CASTELLANO/INGLÉS 