Growing Up with Massa

I grew up in a predominately Portuguese neighborhood in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Each year, I attended the Holy Ghost Feast and walked alongside the processional to the place where widows wearing black mantillas served chourico and peppers, grilled linguica, caciola, and malassadas.

I brought home a Portuguese sweet bread called massa, or massa sovada (meaning 'punched or beaten dough'), and ate it toasted with unsalted butter.

Men traveled in entourages, bearing gifts house-to-house. They sang as they walked, offering bread and wine. Everywhere they went, they were greeted with "Oi!" The men shook hands several times, as if one handshake could not contain enough sincerity.

On Feast Day, everyone took a nip of wine. Voices rose to the occasion with ecstatic feeling... It was a different world-- a world where there was a rainha da festa (literally a “festival queen”), and an army of maidens dressed like brides marching through the streets. It was a beautiful otherness-- a sensibility that stretched from across the vast ocean like a rainbow and a tether. It connected us to the "Old World."

I heard in my friends names a kind of poetry. Names like Octavia, Claudia, Fatima, Marco, and Vosco were not only familiar, but there was something more that connected us-- it was a rich history that could only be understood through knowing each other.

What was familiar was our assimilation. There was the awareness that being a first or second generation American meant a certain kind of distance from the past.

Even those who lived in a bilingual household with the structure of old values had the freedom to be hip to the trends of clothing and music, and to learn fluent English. The main constant then, was not language, but religion. The majority of us were raised under the deep religious beliefs of our parents and grandparents.

As a result, all of us were heavily influenced by western art. The music, prayerbooks, paintings, sculptures and stained glass windows we were exposed to, on a daily basis, became the bedrock for our aesthetic appreciation.

It wasn't until art school that I become familiar with Eastern art-- an aesthetic just as mystical and illuminating. It wasn't until then that I realized that our roots have such a profound stronghold on our perceptions. These judgements of sentiment follow us. They form our ideals.

As an artist, I have an appreciation for representational art and stylized iconography.

I didn't learn to appreciate "beauty for beauty's sake" right away. At first, art had a moral sensibility steeped in western values. This made me lean toward figurative rather than decorative art.

Like the work of Jorge Afanso, the Portuguese Renaissance painter, whose religious images captured moments of transcendence, I became interested in the power of icons and symbolic images to convey a deeper meaning behind an image. I wanted to understand how such images help us to explore the depth of human experience in relationship to the Divine.

After all, it is what all art hopes to achieve regardless of it's origin. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the geometric patterns of Mosques (the domicile's of Allah), art seeks to praise what is Holy, to fill us with wonder.

Art has no boundaries. We are constantly surprising ourselves, finding wonder in unusual places. I think my personal aesthetic has deepened. It has grown furtive roots to my past, and branches that reach toward an infinite sky.

Art does this miraculous thing. The camaraderie and poetry of friendship does this miraculous thing. We are opened through our varied experiences, and through our willingness to share "who we are" with others.

In this way, I offer massa...

The bread I share is golden brown on the outside, the color of straw when sliced. It is buttery and a little salty. It transmits the joys and sorrows of the past. It is, perhaps, a taste of something more to come.

It is good when paired with other (unexpected) flavors.

Like my mother's Syrian ancestors who left Syria for Haiti, who then finding the political climate had changed once again, fled with only the shirts on their backs on a boat bound for the United States, we never know where our journey will take us... or how that journey will alter the recipe of the future.

We are fortunate to be here at all.

Like the Chamirita (a Portuguese folk dance) where each dancer eventually dances with everyone else, I hope to move through many whirls and worlds with vision and breathless abandon.

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