Carlos Oliveira Santos

The Impertinent Ones

I would not expose my affairs to the knowledge of readers, were it not for certain very peculiar questions posed by my contemporaries about my way of life, questions that some would consider impertinent, although others, notwithstanding, but given the circumstances, quite natural and pertinent.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Originally published in Portuguese as: Carlos Oliveira Santos. “Os impertinentes.” A Ideia: Revista de Cultura Libertária, vols. 104–106 (2024): 187–192.

Visiting a community created on the slopes of Marvão, these Impertinent Ones are not, as in Walden, those who ask, but those who, faced with so much rot in our societies, refuse to reduce to mere nostalgia or abstraction the potential of the libertarian spirit. They respond!

Early in the morning, the Sun already leaps over the rock of Marvão and floods the valley, ripple by ripple of mountains and valleys, in this time of year when now rain, now light animates the land, the people, the flora, the animals, and everything else along the way. The Sun is not. Yet Stephan is: not in an academic milieu. One day, Jeff French sent me a message. Jeff is, in English, one of the greats in the world of improving social behaviour, in fields such as social marketing, which is, essentially, his area and one of mine. We were both members of the board of the International Social Marketing Association, he as president.

The message was that there was someone in Portugal whom I should meet. Here is Stephan Dahl. German, from Wuppertal, born in 1971, he came with the title of associate professor at James Cook University in Australia and already carried a hint of Iberia, for having studied in Spain, while the academic world had seen him pass through Colombia and Hong Kong. Portugal had, in fact, already been part of his mother’s trajectory, for she had been sent here, still very young, to be protected from the disasters of the Second World War.

“I came with a lot of baggage, but without a plan.” First in 2016. Among the essentials, beyond the inherent will to live, he brought his condition as an LGBT rights activist. Volunteer in organisations such as The Foodchain, Globe Centre or the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, Stephan was awarded, in 2015, the #PrideHeroes prize from Pride in London.

His academic welcome in Lisbon was at Universidade Nova, in a Santander Chair, but Stephan’s authentic Akadémeia (where “one acts independently of the people”)(1), lay in other directions. “My purpose was based, above all, on the idea that the gay community, in general, was becoming very exclusive instead of inclusive, leaving many people out, generating little diversity of relationships and more focused on increasing consumption than on creation. What can I do? How can I create a space where a greater number of people can meet and think differently, or try to think differently?”

There was a first attempt, in 2019, to buy a space for that purpose, in Elvas. It did not succeed. Stephan returned to Germany in what he expected would be a very short interval, but COVID, delaying things, nonetheless opened the way for an online community reflecting on the project. His return to Portugal ended up being in 2021 and in his luggage the flight continued to be that of creating an “open space, affirmatively anarchic, without rules, without societies, still very centred on a queer (2), non-binary (3) community.” Here lies the question. “Sex”, Whitman wrote in A Woman Waits for Me, “contains it all, bodies and souls.”

The target was this slope of the São Mamede mountains, some five and a half hectares, what had once been Monte de São Sebastião do Vale do Alcaide, with about three houses, ending in a stream embroidered with trees. In the first year, 2022, ninety people gathered in this Quinta Project, as the enterprise was baptised. “It was interesting and fun, but it soon became clear that it was something problematic. On one hand, the initial idea of a queer community quickly gained an ecological dimension. The anti-patriarchal sexual aspects were important, but they themselves had to extend to ecology, rethinking the relationship with nature.” Thus emerges eco-sexuality.

As we speak, the 24 planted species of tomatoes gaze at us. The olive trees fill with their oily fruits and vegetables, vigorous, lend freshness to the observer. The cork oaks, stripped in 2017, renew their bark, with no intention by the current residents of stripping them again at the customary nine years. Along the path to the stream, in full freedom and alongside permaculture practices, arise unforeseen but carefully placed manifestations, in harmony with the trails, for example, of wild boar. Not to mention birds, snakes, deer and many wildcats. Everywhere, the rejection of colonising and imposing purposes, and instead an egalitarian relationship with nature. Between reality and desire, Stephan longs for this “carpet of diversity, a place where joy, respect, admiration and delight converge; sanctified or embraced not as a return to nature, but as a moving forward, with and for nature. The idea is to create a sanctuary of fruit trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and vegetables, requiring minimal intervention.” As for water, it comes from their own springs and the energy is solar. When we walk on this slope, urged by multiplicity, we find small plastic tags with QR Codes, which link to poems. Master Whitman, again, is there (in Song of Myself): “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren.”

Power, in the Quinta, being participatory, is enabled by a guiding group: “It’s not necessarily me who organises,” says Stephan. The main purpose is to listen, to integrate each person and, importantly, there is a total absence of money. No one has to pay anything. “You come, you work, you are part of the community. Everything is exchanged directly, but any monetary contribution is rejected. From the start, this anti-capitalist stance was very clear to us.” The Quinta has a significant relationship with the Radical Faeries, the network created in the 1970s, affirming clearly, in communal spaces of connection, a dimension of confrontation with patriarchy, but also with commercialism. This influence also translates into sexuality, into the eco-sexuality of the Quinta.

Like the Faeries, the Quintas firmly assert themselves as anarchists and adore liberating rituals. Anarchy subscribes, as Emma Goldman argued (in Anarchy and the Sex Question), to a liberating power of sexuality, and here it is expressed and motivated. The Quinta’s abundant wardrobe provides clothes capable of such expressiveness. Among trees and lush herbs, two tall, athletic men, in flowery, so-called feminine dresses, embrace and kiss under the gaze of a short, round shepherd passing by, there because of the transhumance of his sheep, who the next day will bring his wife to see such apparitions, all under the total indifference of the sheep and the surrounding nature. There, of course, is Alberto Caeiro: “I believe in the World as in a daisy, / Because I see it. / But I don’t think about it” (in Poem II of The Keeper of Sheep).

And so, in work, planting, harvests, encounters, conversations, silence, reading, wandering, parties, flows the daily life at the Quinta. “It is very curious to see how people react to a system where they are not mere expectant consumers. Here, they are not told what they have to do. It is they who must ask their questions and make their judgments and choices… In fact, I myself am surprised at how well things go. We have a check-in every day, usually before dinner, a way of addressing open issues. But they are also given enough space not to speak. What most surprises me is achieving a certain depth of communication.”

At the Quinta, certain aspects of people quickly reveal themselves deeply: questions of gender, individual struggles, relationship issues, social oppressions, all of this emerges here profoundly. For some people it is even a surprise, for themselves, how deep and how quickly they can go and how they establish relationships, despite there being no rule whatsoever about being with others.

Returning (always) to sexuality, it is clear that freedom and alternation never devolve, at the Quinta, into debauchery, that anarchy never deteriorates into the degraded form with which its detractors rail against it. “That’s not my orgy place!”, is the conclusion that unwary observers soon draw. Another decisive aspect of a community like the Quinta is not to fall into the same discriminatory processes with which society has sought, and still seeks, to treat its members. “Is the Quinta an island? No, absolutely not!” Soon, alongside it, appeared various people and local communities, some heterosexual, some linked by other causes, such as education, others simply by cycling…

We talk over a bottle of Frei Körper Kultur Weiss, 2020, which Bianca and Daniel Schmitt produce up in Flörsheim-Dalsheim, in Rheinhessen. A natural, biodynamic white of cloudy yellow, releasing notes of peaches, apples, pears and who knows what more. For indeed, Bacchus and bacchantes also knock on the door of the Quinta Project. “Wine, a great passion!” On a terrace, far away, three hectares are visible, born of this vineyard extension, naturally intense, far from the dozens of artificial additives that the European Union allows to be injected into what is called wine, that farce that is the industry. Not this one! This wine, like the Schmitts’, rejects all of that. “And it’s a beautiful wine.” There is even a Vineyard Disco Party to celebrate it.

Meandering my thoughts, descending the sinuous slope of Marvão to Portagem, along the Sever, near the Old Bridge, opening towards the tower where dozens of Sephardic Jewish women, expelled from Spain, were sheltered in 1492 “thanks to the divine royal right” and remained. I carry with me the weight that both nostalgia and liberation bring.

Historicism and general ideas, abundant abstractions, while around us sprout living signs that the libertarian spirit blossoms in experiences like that of the Quinta Project, but also in actions of climate-environmental struggle or against various discriminations, whether of sex, race or class; in acts of solidarity with Palestinians and other tortured peoples; in new experiments and union attitudes, like those of teachers, nurses or police officers; in protests by immigrants; in new forms of publishing, of magazines, of bookstores; in the persistence of the social economy; in new housing solutions; in heartfelt revolts against the media web and cultural stupefaction; in renewed critical awareness of the political space of democracies, with all their burdens of distortion, corruption, manipulation of votes, institutions and people, I could go on… These are so many signs of an underground railroad (4) in our societies, with the same question posed by Voltairine de Cleyre (in Direct Action): how can the chains be broken?

To be is to act. Libertarian thought will never be mere thought and must live, to be strengthened through approaches such as – among others, of course – Stephan’s in his Quinta Project. More interested in gathering and encouraging present and active forces than in reissuing countless editions of classics or in polishing and repolishing abstract references of anarchism. In short, to look at what emerges and see, as Cesário Verde (in In a Modern Neighbourhood), a head in a watermelon, injected among cabbages, the turnips – bare bones, milk-coloured, and the grape bunches – rosaries of eyes… Helen and Scott Nearing, after all, said it (in Living the Good Life):

We do not seek an escape. On the contrary, we want to find a path where we can put more into life and draw more from it.

Notes

Akadémeia was the land of Academus, the Attic hero who prevented the invasion of Athens by Helen’s brothers, indicating where she was held captive.
Queer encompasses a broad spectrum of sexual and gender orientations other than male or female.
Non-binary people do not identify as exclusively male or female.
Network of routes and safe houses for escaping slaves, in the United States of America, 19th century.

References

Cesário Verde, O Livro de Cesário Verde, Lisbon, Edições Ática, 1945.
Emma Goldman, Anarchy and the Sex Question, The Alarm, September 27, 1896, p. 3.
Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Lisbon, INCM, 2015.
Helen and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life, Maine, Social Science Institute, 1956.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1854.
Voltairine de Cleyre, Direct Action, in Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, ed. Alexander Berkman, New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914.
Walt Whitman, Canto de Mim Mesmo, Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, José Agostinho Baptista’s translation of Song of Myself, 1992.
Walt Whitman, The Complete Works of Walt Whitman, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions, 1995.