Tanha morrê na bandera de porta
Tanha died by the flag at the gate
C’se fome de maçã travessode na boca
With the apple hunger stuck in her mouth
Oh pove de Rua de Craca
Oh people of the Rua de Craca
Alimentode
Fed
nesse cold d’pêxe de 16 toston
on fish-broth for 16 tostãos
Boçes bem ovi
You all gather to hear
viola de Patrada
Patrada’s viola
ma
and
violão d’Antonzin
Antonzin’s guitar
Ta rasgâ na sangue de Tanha
Open in the blood of Tanha
Um silêncio de tantas portas
A silence made of many doors
Boçes bem oiâ
You gather to see
mostre de navi
the ship’s mast
ma
and
vela de navi
the ship’s canvas
Rasgode
Torn
quebrode
Breaking
na oi de Tanha
In Tanha’s eyes
Paquê! Konde Djosa
Why! When Djosa
Abri na morada
Opened in the city
camim de sol aberte
The sun’s open road
Tanha plantâ na vente
Tanha sowed the wind
Se boca de maçâ mordide
with the bitten apple in her mouth
Junzin! ’m tem três cosa
Junzin! Three things
marrode n’alma
are bound to my soul
Três rios para nunca mais
Three rivers for nevermore
um scrite na mon
first written on the hand
dôs scrite na boca
then written in the mouth
três scrite na sangue
then in the blood
ê sol ta quebrâ na rotcha
on the rock the sun breaks
se fome de gema d’ove
the egg of hunger
ê vente ta mordê na pedra
the wind grinds the stone
se grite de farinha bronque
with the flour’s white cry
ê pove ma dede de pove
the people and the people’s hand
ta screvê na tchon sentença de mon compride
write the longhand sentence in the earth
E long time ago
And a long time ago
Notcha
Notcha
já dizia
was already saying
Ao contrário de Saint-John Perse
Saint-John Perse notwithstanding
Que nem sempre
That it is not always true
“O remo rebenta na mâo do remador”
“That the oar will break in the oarsman’s hand”
Mantenha da Bibia
Greetings from Bibia
Bena
Bena
Garda
Garda
Vavaia
Vavaia
E tod’esse pove de Rua de Crava
And all the people of the Rua da Crava
Everybody
Everybody
JILL SCHOOLMAN
Empty Boat
The problem is not what is seen but seeing itself.
(José Angel Valente)
Oh deep and ancient river
guided by tides and tongues and buried winds
you who are not blessed with rest
but with song and sight and fierce feeling
I glide in memory’s empty boat
a burning eye on the horizon where earth meets light
navigating a landscape rooted in dream
through fertile dunes and mountain jaws
You decipher the white noise of quarreling angels
light torn dark – answer their rhythms, howls
journeys unfold within journeys, moments flood
I bow to you with a smile, nameless relation
To you who belong to no one, no place, no word
As we find the poems we need, stray spirits find us
I dive heartfirst through your dark reflection
toward a tremor of sunlight and open sky
JOÃO MELO
Translated from the Portuguese by DAVID BROOKSHAW
An Edifying Story
Born in 1955 in Luanda, Angola, JOÃO MELO is a founder of the Angolan Writers Association. His works include poetry, short stories, chronicles and essays. His books have been published in Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Italy and Cuba. His work has been included in various anthologies in Portuguese, English, German, French, Arabic and Chinese. He was awarded the 2009 Angola Arts and Culture National Prize (in literature) by the Ministry of Culture of Angola.
THIS STORY can be told in three brush strokes. That’s why the narrator will avoid descriptions, diversions, flourishes and unnecessary adornments. The account will therefore be nude and crude, like life.
Apart from that, I’m tired of this story’s theme. It’s as ancient, perhaps, as humanity, but it keeps getting repeated down all the ages and in every place, which, for a start, doesn’t make it very original.
In truth, everyone, without exception, has experienced it. And in the same way, everyone has suffered the greatest distress because of it. It’s true that some seek to monopolize the status of being its victims, but the story of humanity has a habit of unmasking them brutally and without any right of appeal.
Many have succumbed to the temptation of switching from being victims to becoming executioners. It seems easier to imitate former oppressors than to invent a new civilization.
That’s why I’m tired and haven’t got the energy for grand digressions, I’ll get straight to the point.
Margarida was a racist mulatto woman. She didn’t like blacks. She’s not the only one, but I’ve decided to tell her story because of the fate that awaits her. Though predictable, I ask you to wait a little in order to find out what happened to her. As promised, I’ll be brief.
Unlike other narrators, I don’t believe that literature is history, much less sociology or psychology. I therefore won’t waste time trying to explain the origin and fundamentals of the racial problems in Angola.
I’m not interested in the reasons why many Angolan mulattoes are racist. Just for the record, the same sentiment also drives many black and white Angolans. Just as in the first instance, I’m not in the slightest interested in their motivations.
All of them make me sick.
But I promised to tell you Margarida’s story in the most succinct, direct way possible. I should therefore let you know that she was born in the Bay of Tigers. Her mother was black and her father a white Portuguese, who disappeared without a trace the moment she was born. In the history of Angola’s formation, this is a common story.
However, unlike what happens in other, possibly more edifying stories than this one, Margarida didn’t start out hating her unknown coward and fugitive of a father. She spent her whole life trying to find him. She chastised her mother – who wanted to forget everything – to such an extent with questions about her father that she even consulted the saints, to see whether there was some problem that transcended her meagre human understanding. The answer, as always, was not conclusive.
In spite of her daughter’s blatant lack of gratitude, Margarida’s mother looked after her as best as she could. Margarida grew up healthy and pretty, thus becoming a mulata worthy of universal racial mythology. She also studied, and completed her secondary vocational qualifications at the Namibe Commercial School. Her mother, although unable to forget the white Portuguese man’s dastardly behaviour, took pride in the direction their lives had ultimately taken. Her heart, at least, was at peace.
However, Margarida quietly wanted to create a different destiny for her
self. Her secret was so terrible that she couldn’t even put it into words. There was no need.
One day, Margarida married a white Portuguese. Her mother wasn’t invited. Margarida left her alone in the old house. She began to appear once a week with a big bundle of dirty clothes. Her mother was turned into a washerwoman. That’s the term she used to describe her, when she asked her husband to give her a lift to the house to deliver her bundle of clothes.
Her husband would wait outside in the car. But he never had to wait long. Margarida’s visits to the washerwoman were brief. She was a simple, practical woman. He’d been lucky.
Her mother couldn’t bear it. One day, she died as silently as she had always lived. Her body was discovered by a neighbour, who became suspicious when her door remained shut for three days.
Margarida received the news at the front gate of the house where she lived with the white Portuguese man. The bearer of the tragic tidings was prohibited from bringing the bad luck inside the world she had built and which she protected with a zeal that greatly pleased her husband. “Tragic” is my word, not hers.
When her husband got home, Margarida told him they would have to find another washerwoman, as this one had gone off to Huambo. What was worse, without a word of warning. Ungrateful. Like all blacks. Her husband didn’t like the comment, but kept quiet.
Margarida didn’t go to her mother’s funeral.
Independence came. Gradually, blacks began to take charge. Margarida suffered.
She told her husband they should leave for Namibia, like all the others had done. It would be better for him. The blacks hated the Portuguese. She didn’t want to become a widow sooner than necessary.
Her husband refused. Yes, he was Portuguese, but he’d been in Angola for so long that he felt truly Angolan. He was from an anti-Salazar family, which had emigrated to Angola for political reasons. Because of this, he had always wished for independence. Like all Angolans. His duty was to remain and help build the new country.
And apart from this, he had a lot of black and mulatto friends. Was she not mulatto herself?
Margarida suffered more and more.
How was it that the world had become so unnatural all of a sudden? Her husband now entertained his black and mulatto friends in his home. She was obliged to cook, serve them beer, and worst of all, listen to their delirious conversations about the Revolution, socialism, the New Man. If she were another sort of person, she would have noticed that her husband was now much more passionate in bed, but even this transformation left her horrified. Such habits could only come from blacks.
She yearned for the father she had never known. Where might he be?
Margarida was horrified beyond belief when her husband told her he was going to join the People’s Liberation Army in order to help expel the South Africans, Zaireans and the Portuguese mercenaries who had invaded the country. He had already done his military service in the Portuguese army. And besides, this wasn’t his war. The best thing to do would be for them to go to Namibia, to Portugal, to Brazil, anywhere really, except for the chaos which Angola had become because of the blacks (this time, she didn’t actually articulate this word). If he didn’t want to, she would go alone, with the children.
She didn’t say as much, but she also thought she might find her father in Portugal, and he would certainly help her settle there, along with her children. They were beautiful, almost white, with smooth hair, which was why Margarida had no doubt that her father would love his grandchildren, and by extension, her. She decided to ask for more details from the friend who had told her about a Portuguese television program that helped interested Angolans reunite with with their relatives in Portugal.
In the meantime, life took Margarida by surprise. She didn’t need to go to Portugal or any other country. But just as I promised at the beginning, her story unrolled in keeping with her personality.
Her husband was killed at Cunene, the victim of an aerial bombardment by the South Africans. When she received the news, all Margarida could think about was her father. Strangely, she came to hate her mother even more. Human nature is, as you know, extremely complex.
After this initial reaction, she had to acknowledge that the only person she really loved – her father – was nothing but a grotesque illusion. Margarida was alone in the world.
I think it must be fairly obvious that I detest her. That’s why I feel like punishing her.
Nevertheless, I can’t distort the facts.
Six months after her husband’s death, Margarida continued her daily routine, which consisted of taking the kids to school every morning, going on to the office, picking them up at noon, having lunch with them at home, leaving them with her neighbour, going back to the office, leaving there at five in the afternoon and going back home, but all this without a trace of emotion, be it sadness, anger, willingness or any other human feeling. She had turned into a kind of walking, living corpse.
Just as it suddenly rains up in the highlands, without anyone predicting it, one day everything in her life changed.
Pedro Kalepete phoned and invited her to dinner. He was black, but she felt so mistreated by life that she didn’t even notice. She accepted.
It was a pleasant dinner. He took her to an elegant restaurant, where she would never have imagined going. He treated her at all times with great delicacy. It was obvious he was an educated black. But the proposal he made her after they had finished their dinner left her fuming, although she didn’t show it.
Pedro Kalepete wanted to woo her. He was divorced, had three children, but had been keen on her for a long time. He knew she was a widow. They could begin by seeing each other and, if they got on, he was willing to go the whole way: to marry her.
Margarida began to weep inwardly. Was this some divine punishment? The washerwoman’s revenge?
She accepted.
Pedro Kalepete was a government minister. Maybe that explains it. Or am I just being perverse because I don’t like her?
The fact is that Margarida became another person. Three months later she married the minister, Pedro Kalepete, and this led to her being reborn. But now she no longer thought about her unknown father. Her life improved, she acquired a new status, cultivated new relationships, learned a whole range of skills in keeping with her new position. The shadow in her eyes, that had been there since she was born, disappeared completely. Her heart burst with joy.
An undeniable proof confirmed how radical and complete her transformation had been: Margardida now hated whites once as vehemently as she had once hated blacks.
She began to wear a little gold medallion round her neck, which contained a photo of the washerwoman.
She adopted Mrs Catarina João António, the old market woman who was the mother of Pedro Kalepete, as the mother she claimed she’d never had.
Pedro Kalepete – who was a man without any complexes – didn’t understand these displays of racism coming from the mulatto woman who had become his second wife. But he soon gave up trying to dampen down such displays, for the truth was that he loved her as he had never loved anyone before.
Love, as you know, has no explanation. Nor does hatred.
ALI JIMALE AHMED
The Litigant
ALI JIMALE AHMED, poet, academic, cultural critic, and short story writer, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Queens College-CUNY. His books include Daybreak is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia, Fear is a Cow, Diaspora Blues, and When Donkeys Give Birth to Calves. His poetry and short stories have been translated into several languages.
HE WAS frail, emaciated, and gaunt from years of harsh life that had made him trek the length and breadth of the Somali deex plains. It was a Friday morning when he came to visit us in our village, in one of the corners of the capital. We used to call our corner a dark alley, because all the surrounding, more affluent areas were lit, while our village, in the heart of the town, was thirsty for electricity. An older friend of mine used to
call it Harlem. I didn’t understand his meaning at the time, but nevertheless it sounded exotically appropriate. Harlem. My friend had heard about Harlem from an old Mennonite teacher. A congenial old lady with freckles dotting the landscape of her still-pretty face, my friend would reminisce. At times, he would flaunt a song or two he had learned in her class. My favorite was “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” which, to my utter surprise, my mother, through me, also liked. Tell your friend, she would say each time I did a rendition of the song, complete with gestures and onomatopoetic grunts, to sing his teacher a song of the Arlaadi. And without waiting for an answer, she, in her crooning voice, would sing of the virtues of beans, and of the daunting task of warding off a neighbor’s cattle from scouring the field.
To us kids, an ode to beans was the furthest thing from our minds, and did not ignite our imaginations. I vaguely remember my older friend’s Mennonite teacher’s comment on my mother’s ode to beans: she described it, he said, as a kind of graffiti. That was a strange kind of comment, I thought, since graffiti was what I saw splashed on walls with chevaux de frise on top to discourage trespassers. (Cheval de frise was, I learned in high school, an ingenious idea to embed razor spikes into the top of the wall surrounding a house for protection. For some odd reason that I cannot explain, the spikes reminded me of my mother’s description of scarecrows.) My mother’s stories of beans and scarecrows did not appeal to me or my friends. We liked to hear stories spun about faraway places. And Harlem was one such place. Sometimes, I pronounced it as Harram, the Arabic word for “sinful and forbidden.” Harram, excuse me, Harlem, was in America, and it sure sounded like a sinful place, a forbidden corner in the midst of the Big Apple. The Apple, according to my knowledgeable friend, was another name for New York City. Anyway, it intrigued me that our corner had similarities with other corners of the world. After all, we weren’t alone living in the midst of darkness, squalor and filth. There was something international about squalor and filth-dwelling, I reasoned.