Lisbon, Manitoba

By Barbara Romanik

What should you read? Graffiti. But not all graffiti. Just like any art, not all graffiti was created equal.And not all graffiti lends itself to comprehension. But Lisbon’s did: NATO Fabrica De Morte!, Resistencia, There’s no love in Coca-Cola, Real Eyes Realize Real Lies, Too Drunk To Fuck. If you pay attention to where it’s written you might find another layer. The hurried fuck in the crevice of Santa Engracia, one of the oldest of Lisbon churches. Or facefuck, the Facebook logo transformed and defaced, above the telephone in an old-fashioned phone booth. A rusty metal pole near the Monument to the Discoveries. In scratches: Mario e Alberto Amor Gay—the new frontier.

Yes, I know there are better-read citizens who will recommend you excellent books, but besides reading those, read graffiti. Try to read your world. And if you’re worried that my sense of geography is fucked, that I’m not speaking about your world: I know Winnipeg is not Lisbon but I think Winnipeg can learn something from it.

This June, post a cousin’s wedding in Poland and last minute research in England, I got a cheap flight to Lisbon. Broke and homesick, I landed in Portugal on a half-baked inspiration: the newest album by the New York band the Walkmen, simply titled Lisbon.

Lisbon, the city, was all it promised to be. Great architecture, colour, and beauty but also shabbiness and decay. If you looked closer at the patterned tiles adorning the facades they were chipped. Other buildings were peeling mortar and the bright paint was stained or fading. Garbage flew toward Teatro Nacional across Rossio square. Just off the shopping Chiado district, in the tiny cobbled streets, lay broken bottles, pigeon shit and refuse. All you had to do is take a walk and the decrepitude was everywhere.

Being homesick in a foreign country can do strange things to your perception but it wasn’t just crumbling buildings that reminded me a lot of Winnipeg, the people too. I remember watching a group sitting among the tourists on the steps leading down to the Tagus river from Praça do Comércio. Three men and a woman laughing and talking quietly drinking from two bottles of alcohol they brought with them. She tiny, the men bigger, bearded, Turkish looking. Something about their laidback attitude on a Friday night reminded me of my friends in Winnipeg. Next day on a Saturday evening in late June, I was able to find a pocket of ease in Praça da Figueira watching skateboarders who overtook the area underneath the statue of King John I. A young black man came over and asked for a light, or what I think was a light, not knowing Portuguese. It was no different than if I had sat down at the feet of the Louis Riel statue near the Legislature by the Assiniboine.

Lisbon, although still Portugal’s capital and one of the biggest cities in Europe, will never live up to its golden era of sixteenth-century colonial exploration. Without trivializing its complex history, the city seems to be at peace with that. Enough at peace to allow political and obscene graffiti to sneak up on its churches or downtown walls.

Hundreds of years later and on the other side of the world, Winnipeg’s growth resulted from the same colonial impulse. Meant to be the gateway to the west, the city never lived up to its expectations or early glory. It’s a history that Winnipeg and its people need to come to terms with, equally with respect but also irreverence and ingenuity. Learn how to live with shabbiness, ugliness and beauty whether it comes to rebuilding stretches of Main Street, buying hockey teams, or not taking shit from random strangers who love taking digs at Winnipeg.

Unlike Lisbon, Winnipeg has allowed itself to be defeated by its past, has internalized a strange inferiority complex. While its inhabitants claim to not give a damn, there seems to be a permanent shame about how decrepit the city’s downtown buildings now are or how many homeless walk its streets. This inferiority complex has led to extremes, inertia or drastic action, city planning decisions that often create more problems than they solve. My stance is contrary, I admit, I’m advocating for Winnipeggers to both take themselves and their city more seriously but at the same time to retain a sense of humour, cheekiness and laidbackness about its imperfections. Give themselves, their buildings and their city a break for not living up to expectations that were neither achievable nor even that desirable in the first place.

Of course there is a certain risk in reading all kinds of texts, graffiti and the city included. But I can’t imagine not trying….