Moving on withsaudade: On bordered countries and vague terms

Abstract

This article is about how people moving along state borders – I call them wayfarers – refuse the assumption that they ought to live either a sedentary or a nomadic lifestyle inside or outside states, whether as citizens or as Others. In particular, it looks at how the term saudade helps mobile people to manage friction without falling back into such binaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines saudade as a desire ‘for something’ and describes it as a characteristic of the ‘Portuguese or Brazilian’ people. Here, we shall attend however to the saudade evoked by Venezuelans and Warao (defined by the same dictionary as ‘members of a South American Indian people inhabiting Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela’). This article patterns a contrast between two ways of evoking the term in comments about movement made by my informants: the first, Precise Saudade, asks for precision about that of which people feel saudade. The second way of evoking the term, Vague Saudade, is, as its name suggests, more comfortable with being vague. The argument put forward by this article is that scholarly and policy texts on ‘migrants’, ‘nomads’ and ‘refugees’ need to make more room for Vague Saudade when translating the talk of wayfarers. It may be tempting to dismiss vagueness as showing ambiguity and imprecision. Yet, as the stories that follow are meant to highlight, Vague Saudade can be useful to wayfarers in several ways: to engage in care, to protect others, to protect themselves and to engage in conversations about alternative worlds. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade, it is argued, risks hindering wayfarers’ ability to do these things. I find this is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research.