Author shares global experiences at discussion
By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Associate Editor A “Meet the Author” conversation was held in the Alumni Room Sept. 23 and featured Eva Michelle Wheeler, an African American woman and author of “Alfacinha.” The day before, she spoke about raciolinguistics, the connection between race and linguistics, at the University as well. Wheeler shared the creative process that led to writing this book, including the experiences she had across the world. The first draft of the memoir was written in July 2020, when she had extra time available due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she said. In her house, there is a small nook under the stairwell, which she now calls the Book Nook, she said. She writes there, and on the wall she hung some inspirational quotes. She said a couple of these quotes include Isabel Allende’s “Write what should not be forgotten,” and Ernest Hemingway’s “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” When the pandemic hit, Wheeler had been to Portugal eight times in eight years, she said. In that time, she also continued her education. “A lot of life happens in that time. I had quit my job as a lawyer. I had started grad school, I had graduated my PhD, I had started teaching as a professor - so much of my life was happening in conversation with these visits to Portugal,” Wheeler said. She shared some stories from “Alfacinha,” including one about her experience shopping for books in Lisbon. While there, she went to a student-run bookstore in the University of Lisbon. The man in charge welcomed her warmly while also immediately directing her to books about Africa in Portuguese, she said. At first she was confused as to why the man immediately assumed she wanted to read about Africa, she said. “Looking back, I guess I did know what was happening. What I didn’t understand at the time was the local racial logic,” Wheeler said. People in the U.S. didn’t immediately connect her to Africa just because she was Black, she said. In Portugal, it was treated as her “motherland,” she added. “Being connected to Africa like this wasn’t negative for me, but it caught me off-guard,” Wheeler said. She compared it to how racists in the U.S. sometimes tell Black Americans to go back to Africa, though it was something she rarely experienced herself. She said she was more used to racial microaggressions that stereotyped her. “What I didn’t understand at the time was that the bookstore clerk, for all his best intentions, was telling me something about Portugal’s colonial past and present, about who was considered Portuguese, and who was perpetually an outsider,” Wheeler said. She didn’t originally consider writing a book about this and her other experiences in Portugal, she said. At first, Wheeler decided on writing a book about living in the Dominican Republic, where she resided for six months of graduate school, she said. One of the experiences she had there included having to climb over an iron gate carrying groceries because everyone in the house was asleep and couldn’t let her in, she shared. Another time, she had to enter a bus through a window because of how full it was, she added. While on the island, she even developed feelings for a priest, she said. “That was the book I wanted to write. This book took me six years just to be able to sit down and write the words. That was summer 2019,” Wheeler said. Once she got that done, she felt as though she could do it again for her time in Portugal, she added. She had planned on returning to Lisbon in April 2020, but because of the pandemic that didn’t happen, she said. She said people kept asking her why she kept going back to Portugal. As of this presentation, she has been to Portugal 23 times in 14 years. “Alfacinha” was originally going to be more of a love letter to Lisbon, she said. But when people started reading it, she often got the feedback that she should lean more into the tension she mentioned. Her Portuguese friend told her about the official history of the country, she said. “I got the version of Portugal that was about the heroes and about the discoveries and about the victories,” she said. But she also went on a tour that shared the history of the transatlantic slave trade, she said. “I started to feel tension about how I can love a place that has such a troubled history,” Wheeler said. She shared that in her first chapter of her memoir, she went to an ice cream shop and the vendor asked her where her family was from and wouldn’t take the U.S. as a real answer. The vendor kept asking what part of Africa her family was from, but all Wheeler knew was that she was from Louisiana and California, she said. Later on, in chapter four of the book, she went to Egypt as her first African country, she added. She knew her ancestors were likely from West Africa, but she still felt as though she was connecting to her motherland, she said. She went to a local vendor and told him about how she was excited to finally be on a trip to Africa, she said. The vendor asked her if she was going to Africa after Egypt, she said. While this did confuse her, she had previously felt she didn’t feel that connection she was looking for anyway, she added. This led her to thinking about what it meant to find the connection she was looking for, she said. “Do I need to find the exact place where my ancestors are from in order to feel a connection? How do I recover that information, like 300 or 400 years later?” Wheeler asked. Even ancestry DNA tests only told percentages, which didn’t translate into conversations and connections, she said. “Is home just the place where you were born? Is home the people, like the family you were born into? Or is home something or someone else?” Wheeler asked. There is also the question of whether people get to choose where their home is, or if it’s really up to the country, she said. While traveling, she realized she was in a privileged position just by being from the U.S. During her stay in Tunisia, she was in an Airbnb with her Tunisian hosts, her Libyan roommate, and a man from Tennessee, she said. They spoke about U.S. politics, which they knew out of necessity, she said. Some of them were closed off to several parts of the world because of where they were born. They told her U.S. foreign policies have direct impacts on their lives, she said. When she was in Brazil, everyone kept getting put off by how she was a Black woman speaking European Portuguese instead of Brazilian Portuguese, she said. That was the way school taught her. They acted like it was impossible for her to be Portuguese and assumed she was just speaking weirdly, she said. “They thought I wasn’t from there, or they thought I was trying to put on airs, and [that] I was trying to connect myself to Portugal,” Wheeler said. The title of her book, “Alfacinha,” literally translates to “little lettuce,” though the word is used to describe people from Lisbon, she said. Many people would say she can’t call herself that because she wasn’t born there, she said. Wheeler said she spoke to some African-Portuguese people, who told her they don’t get to use the word either, even though they were born there.
