by Esmeralda Cabral
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2023/$27.99/320 pp.
Canada is a country made up largely of immigrants. While multicultural policies are designed to help newcomers bridge the gap between their newfound Canadian identity and the traditions and cultural characteristics that shape them as human beings, many new Canadians feel a disconnect between who they are, where they once lived and life in this new land. This back-and-forth between place, identity and the feeling of saudade—a Portuguese term encapsulating sentiments of longing and nostalgia—forms the heart of Esmeralda Cabral’s memoir How to Clean a Fish.
Cabral was born in the Azores, an archipelago off the coast of Portugal, but she moved to Edmonton with her family as a child and eventually landed in Vancouver as an adult. This book finds the author in middle age, married to a university professor and parenting a high-school-aged daughter and a son at university. When her husband, Eric, is offered the opportunity to work on sabbatical in Portugal, Cabral jumps at the chance to immerse herself in the culture of her childhood. Over some 300 pages she details the challenges and joys of living in Costa da Caparica, a seaside community just outside Lisbon.
On the surface, How to Clean a Fish is a travel diary, with Cabral describing her family’s daily grind and glories, from the pitfalls of bringing the family dog along and her frustrations with having to translate for her non-Portuguese-speaking family and visiting friends, to praising the wonders of life in Portugal, often through detailed descriptions of food and regular trips to the market. Cabral’s prose is linear and straightforward, relaying small details almost too precisely. At some points it’s natural to wonder if the reader needs a laundry list of everything she and her daughter ate and drank on a day trip to Lisbon. But that plain, matter-of-fact quality ultimately yields to something deeper and more compelling.
The title of the book refers to Cabral’s inability to butcher and remove the guts of a fish, a task considered a hallmark of Portuguese cooking and culture. As she moves through her stay in Portugal, Cabral becomes bolder with her fish selections and desire to master the cleaning process. She also becomes bolder in sharing her memories, digging into stories of her initial move to Edmonton, her relationship with (and loss of) her parents, and her feelings of being an outsider both here in Canada and in Portugal. All those seemingly mundane details of her trip lose their sharpness and meld together to form the picture of a woman finding meaning in the small things, creating an impression of the places and people that speak to her heart and a fluid definition of what she calls home.
Elizabeth Chorney-Booth is a writer and editor in Calgary.
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