The Middle

Maria João Maciel Jorge’s The Hyphen is a poignant exploration of Portuguese Canadian identity. In eighteen short essays, she takes the reader to Faial, her home island in the Azores, and Toronto, where she arrived at the age of eighteen. She is interested in cultural duality and the way it complicates her sense of self. “Since leaving the Azores for Canada, I’ve spent years grappling with my identity,” she writes. “I was caught ‘between the dock and the ferry,’ as they say on my island. I felt neither Portuguese nor Canadian, and my Azorean roots fragmented me further due to a complicated relationship with my place of birth.”

In her essay “Between the Dock and the Ferry,” Maciel Jorge recounts the reasons she left Portugal’s volcanic archipelago. She remembers society on the nine islands as stifling: “I was born at a time when it was still very challenging to be a woman, and there was a level of scrutiny, social expectations and behaviours that conflicted with my desire for unrestrained freedom.” Maciel Jorge describes Toronto, home to a large Azorean community, as a metaphorical tenth island. For the author, who came in 1989, the city was a beacon of unprecedented educational opportunities; she studied literature at the University of Toronto and went on to become an associate professor of Portuguese and Luso‑Brazilian studies at York University.

Written with candour, The Hyphen describes the obstacles and discrimination that defined her first few years in Canada. Being from the Azores comes with its own set of prejudices within the Portuguese Canadian community, which intensified the isolation she felt: “The worst yet is when we internalize that we are less than others and avoid revealing our true selves. We conceal our accents and don’t speak of açorianidade”— Azoreanness —“for fear of being further ghettoized.” Still, Maciel Jorge resists stereotyping Azorean people as she writes about their cultural nuances, spirituality, literature, and diaspora.

Throughout the collection, she considers the spirit of the Azores and outlines the “historical, geographical and social conditions that shape Azorean identity.” She attributes traditional steadfastness and resilience to shared experiences of insularity and social disparity along with natural disasters, earthquakes, droughts, and famines. Her intellectual interest in Azorean culture began with her discovery of the author José Dias de Melo, the topic of her fourth essay, “Return.” Dias de Melo’s book Pedras Negras (Dark Stones) centres on the tragic story of a young whaler who is caught in an endless “cycle of poverty and oppression.” She explains how the novel from 1964 revealed something intimate about her heritage, how it was “transformative and became the conduit to understanding the feelings of sadness that had haunted me since childhood.” Upon reading it for the first time, Maciel Jorge “was flooded with memories from my childhood, recalling the stories of those island people and my beloved grandmother, and a new-found appreciation of my açorianidade took root.”

Dias de Melo’s writings altered the course of Maciel Jorge’s career. She studied his entire body of work, which gave her a new understanding of the Azores and the Azorean diaspora. “I welcomed the rollercoaster of emotions,” she recalls, “realizing for the first time that the silence and sorrow I experienced in my formative years came from a place of intergenerational poverty.” She began corresponding with the celebrated author via letters and phone. Their connection culminated in a meeting in 2008 on the island of São Miguel. Dias de Melo died later that year, but Maciel Jorge writes of the enduring impact he had on her life, her writing, and the community of Azorean thinkers his work introduced her to.

Other essays consider Toronto’s Little Portugal, the author’s grandmother, Azorean folklore, a Portuguese Renaissance novel, and the word saudade (longing). Although her subjects are varied, the essays form a composite portrait of her fractured identity. She traces the salient feeling of not belonging — of being neither Canadian nor Azorean — and how it shaped her life and career. Ultimately, with the help of the community she finds in both literature and Toronto, she learns to enjoy her background. “The space between the dock and the ferry is pregnant with possibilities,” she realizes. “My hyphenated identity celebrates the possibilities of feeling at home in the space between here and there.”

The Hyphen asks readers to consider the unassuming titular punctuation mark. Maciel Jorge reframes it as an important symbol for multicultural knowledge and the immigrant experience. The hyphen itself is “a third identity, a middle space where a broader and better-informed person rises above their identities.” This collection of personal essays makes a larger, empowering claim: to have a hyphenated identity is to have a uniquely wide-ranging perspective on the world.