How do you define your identity when you navigate between two cultures and two worlds? Through the voice of his character, Michael Gouveia, a young author born in Montreal to Portuguese parents, tells with sincerity the identity conflict of a son of immigrants.
João is sort of his alter ego; he grew up in Quebec while immersed in his parents’ Portugal. But he feels neither faithful enough to his parents’ culture nor integrated enough.
“I did not feel completely Portuguese, not completely Quebecois, but I continued to cling to just one of my dimensions to forget this confusion that was my life. No one had told me that I could inhabit the in-between, or that identity didn’t have to respond to binary principles,” he writes.
Looking back on his life, from primary school to university, João shamelessly expresses this mixture of shame and pride which passed through him throughout his childhood and adolescence, pushing him to isolate himself, unable to find his place elsewhere. than in these moments of joy and pure communion around the successes of the Portuguese soccer team.
With this touching first novel, Michael Gouveia (who studied literature at UQAM and previously published a collection of poetry) places himself alongside authors like Dimitri Nasrallah to embody the ultimately universal questions of an entire generation from the ‘immigration.
