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...