From the city of heroes to the city of Ilhas: the Ilhíada by Alberto Pimenta

Abstract

This paper reflects on the latest poem published by the Portuguese author Alberto Pimenta, Ilhíada. Even if it creates an explicit dialogue with the poem attributed to Homer, the Iliad, already from the title, it can be seen that Ilhíada is the polar opposite of the Homeric text. The story Alberto Pimenta introduces us to is a tale of the ilhas, an idiosyncratic urban organisation from the city of Porto (Portugal), usually linked to the poorest sectors of the population. As soon as the city became an important tourist destination and “the imaginal engineering” (Hiernaux, 2012) started to create a tourist hotspot narration, successive administrations began to find these ilhas a problem that had to be dealt with. In the poem, the lyrical voice remembers the everyday life that existed before their inhabitants began to be besieged by the building companies. We move, then, from the tales of Troy, an important urban centre of ancient times where heroes fight in a war, to the margins of Porto, where common people just try to live their everyday lives. In this essay, I will argue that the location in which Pimenta chooses to set this story – with the excluded ones, the “subalterns” (Spivak 1985) – challenges the categories of “city”, “hero”, “History” and even “poetry”. To that effect, I will use a comparative perspective that will allow me to uncover the main differences between the two texts.