Deux doigts, toujours les mêmes,
Two hands, always the same,
Qui s’ennuient sur un cadran,
Feeling bored on a clock face,
Toujours le même.
Always the same.
Et l’on prétend que j’ai vieilli ?
And you claim I’ve aged?
Frobénius, j’en appelle
Frobenius, I’m calling
A toi qui me découvris
You who discovered me
Par le brûlant soleil du Bénin;
In Benin’s burning sun;
Regarde-moi
Look at me
Ai-je vieilli ?
Have I aged?
N’ai-je pas gardé la même ride au front,
Have I not kept the same wrinkle on my brow,
La même souffrance dans les yeux ?
The same suffering in my eyes?
Ami, le temps ne vieillit guère;
Friend, time hardly ages;
L’année, le siècle,
Year, century –
Ce sont deux doigts, toujours les mêmes,
Two hands, always the same,
Qui s’ennuient sur un cadran,
Bored on a clock face,
Toujours le même.
Always the same.
Le masque d’Ifé
The Ifé mask
Vit avec le temps
Lives with time
Et reste jeune de par les siècles,
And stays young through the centuries,
Aujourd’hui tout comme
Today just as
A l’heure humide de la terre
At the earth’s misty hour
Un jour modelée
Modeled one day
Par la magie ancestrale de l’art.
By art’s ancestral magic.
L’esclave ne se vend plus à la douzaine de manilles
Slaves are no longer sold shackled by the dozen
L’air monotone de la mélopée n’accompagne plus
The monotonous plainchant no longer accompanies
La sirène infecte des négriers quittant le port
The foul siren of slave ships leaving port
La vie s’habille d’autres vicissitudes
Life clothes itself in other vicissitudes
Et l’allure heureuse des jours décerne à l’art
And the happy semblance of days awards art
La médaille bourgeoise de l’éphémère.
The bourgeois medal of the ephemeral.
Qu’il est beau, ce masque,
How beautiful this mask is,
Dit le snob sans y croire;
Says the snob without believing it;
Beau ? demande le supersnob, ne voyez-vous pas
Beautiful? the super-snob asks, don’t you see
Qu’il lui manque un trait, là,
It’s missing a feature there,
Juste au-dessus de l’œil droit ?
Just over the right eye?
Et la savanterie de discourir sans vergogne
And pedantry shamelessly discoursing
Sur les mille caractéristiques de l’art nègre.
On the thousand characteristics of Negro art.
Malheur à vous, qui croyez comprendre
Woe unto you, who think you understand
Le sens profond du mot caché
The profound meaning of the hidden word
Au plus profond d’une cervelle de masque.
In the deepest depths of a mask’s brain.
Hideux hier,
Hideous yesterday,
Honoré et imité aujourd’hui
Honored and imitated today
Profané du matin au soir
Profaned from morning to night
Par le chercheur qui lui-même s’égare,
By the scholar who himself goes astray,
Art nègre,
Negro art,
Vieux comme le monde et sans cesse redécouvert !
Old as the world and unceasingly rediscovered!
Malheur à vous, qui croyez deviner
Woe unto you, who think you can discern
Le mot que l’esprit n’a pas prononcé,
the word the spirit has not pronounced,
Malheur à vous, tous, interprètes minables
Woe unto you, all you pathetic interpreters
D’une langue qui n’est pas la vôtre
Of a language not your own
Et qui vous restera inconnue au siècle des siècles
And which will remain unknown to you for centuries on end
Tant que la raison guidera vos recherches.
As long as reason guides your research.
Le masque d’Ifé pose son front bois du temps brun
The Ifé mask rests its wooden face of brown time
Sur la table encombrée de souvenirs
On the table laden with souvenirs
Et dit au pèlerin attardé sur ces lieux saints :
And says to the pilgrim lingering in these holy places:
Ami, toi qui m’honores de ta visite,
Friend, you who honor me with your visit,
Regarde-moi,
Look at me,
Admire ou me rejette,
Admire or reject me,
Mais de grâce ne me juge pas,
But please do not judge me,
Et surtout, je t’en supplie,
And above all, I implore you,
Ne me classe pas dans les rayons absurdes
Do not classify me in the absurd compartments
De la science d’un autre monde.
Of the science of another world.
MIA COUTO
Translated from the Portuguese by DAVID BROOKSHAW
The Frontier of Culture
Born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955, MIA COUTO is among the most prominent writers in Africa. After studying medicine and biology in Maputo, he worked as a journalist and headed the AIM news agency, the daily Notícias de Maputo, and the weekly Tempo. In 2013 Couto received the Camões Prize for Literature and, in 2014, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
FOR YEARS, I taught classes in various Faculties of the Eduardo Mondlane University. My teaching colleagues complained about the progressive decline in the preparation of students. I noticed something that, for me, was even more serious: an ever greater remoteness among these young people from their own country. When they left Maputo to carry out fieldwork, these youngsters would behave as if they were emigrating to a strange and hostile universe. They didn’t know the languages, they were ignorant of all the cultural codes, they felt dislocated and yearned for Maputo. Some of them were haunted by the same spectres as the colonial explorers: wild animals, snakes, invisible monsters.
These rural areas were, after all, the space where their grandparents and all their ancestors had lived. But they didn’t see themselves as inheritors of this patrimony. Their country was somewhere else. Worse still: they didn’t like this other nation. And what was still more serious: they were ashamed of being linked to it. The truth is simple: these young people are more at ease in front of a video clip of Michael Jackson than in the garden of a Mozambican country dweller.
What’s happening, and this seems inevitable, is that we are creating different citizenships within Mozambique. There are various categories of these: there are the urban citizens, inhabitants of the upper city, those who have been to Nelspruit more often than they have the suburbs of their own city. Then, there are those who live on the periphery, the inhabitants of the so-called lower city. And then there are the rural dwellers, those who are a kind of distorted image of how the nation portrays itself. These people seem doomed to have no face, to speak through the voices of others.
This creation of different citizenships (or, more seriously, of different degrees of the same citizenship) may or may not be problematic. It all depends on our ability to keep the different segments in our society in dialogue with o
ne another. The question is: do these different Mozambiques speak to one another?
Our richness derives from our willingness to carry out cultural exchanges with others. President Chissano, in a very recent text, asks what special quality Mozambique possesses that attracts so many visitors. This special je ne sais quoi does, indeed, exist. This magic is still alive. But no one thinks, perfectly reasonably, that our power of seduction derives from our being naturally better than others. This magic originates in our ability to exchange culture, to produce hybridities. It originates in our capacity to be ourselves, while being others.
I’ve come here to talk about a very private dialogue, which I very rarely talk about. I am referring to our conversation with our own ghosts. Time has shaped our collective soul by means of three elements: the past, the present, and the future. None of these elements seems to have been made for our immediate use. The past was badly packed and has reached us damaged, loaded with myths and prejudices. The present comes dressed in borrowed clothes. And the future has been commissioned by interests that are alien to us.
I’m not saying anything new: our country isn’t poor but it has been impoverished. My argument is that Mozambique’s impoverishment doesn’t begin with economic explanations. Our greater impoverishment derives from our lack of ideas, from the erosion of our creativity, and from the absence of productive debate. More than poor, we have become barren.
I am going to question these three dimensions of time merely to kick up a bit of dust. Let us begin with the past. In order to conclude, in the end, that that past has not yet passed.
What we were – a portrait made by borrowing
Colonialism didn’t die when countries became independent. There was a change of shift and of crew. Present-day colonialism has dispensed with colonials and has become indigenized within our territories. Not only has it been naturalized but it has come to be jointly administered by a partnership between former colonizers and former colonized.
Much of the vision we have of our country’s and our continent’s past is dictated by the same presuppositions that went into constructing colonial history. Or rather, colonized history. What happened was that a positive sign was placed over what had been a negative one. The idea persists that pre-colonial Africa was a world beyond time, without conflict or disputes, a paradise made only of harmony.
This romantic image of the past feeds the reductive, simplistic notion of a present condition in which all would be good and function marvellously if it weren’t for outside interference. Those to blame for our problems should only be sought outside. And never inside. The few insiders who are bad are so because they are the agents of those outside.
This vision was already present in the discourse of those in the armed struggle, when the enemy were referred to as ‘infiltrators’. This happened in spite of the poet’s warning, which stated, “It is not enough for our cause to be just and pure, but justice and purity must exist within us.” Our ranks, in those days, were seen as being composed exclusively of pure folk. If there was a stain, it emanated from outside, the place where the enemy dwelt.
However, this simplifying, Manichaean approach to “the time that has passed” had another consequence: it perpetuated the idea that sole and exclusive responsibility for slavery and colonialism fell to Europeans.
When the European navigators started to fill their ships with slaves, they weren’t the first to traffic in human beings. Slavery had already been invented on all continents. The Americans practised it, as did the Europeans, Asians and even Africans. Slavery was the invention of the human species. What happened was that the slave trade was converted into a global system, and this system was developed in order to enrich its centre: Europe, and later, North America.
I’m going to tell you about a curious episode involving an African lady called Honoria Bailor-Caulker, which occurred while she was visiting the United States. Honoria Bailor-Caulker is the mayor of the coastal town of Shenge, in Sierra Leone. It’s a small town, but one that’s full of history. Thousands of slaves left from there to cross the Atlantic for work in the American sugar plantations.
Honoria was invited to give a speech in the United States. Before a distinguished audience, the lady stepped up on to the podium and insisted on exhibiting her vocal resources. To the astonishment of those present, she sang the hymn, Amazing Grace. At the end, Honoria Bailor-Caulker allowed a heavy silence to descend. In the eyes of the Americans, she seemed to have lost her train of thought. But she began her speech and said: the composer of this hymn was born into slave system, a descendant of a family from my little town of Shenge.
It was like a stroke of magic, and the audience was split between tears and applause. Those present got to their feet, and possibly out of a mixture of fellow feeling and a modicum of guilt, they acclaimed Honoria.
Are you applauding me as a descendant of slaves? She asked those listening.
The answer was a resounding “yes”. That black woman represented, after all, the suffering of millions of slaves to whom America owed so much.
Well, said Honoria, in fact I’m not a descendant of slaves. Neither I nor the composer of the hymn. In fact, we are descendants of those who sold slaves. My great-grandparents grew rich selling slaves.
Honoria Bailor-Caulker had the courage to assume, with all honesty, the opposite role of the usual stereotype. But this is such an isolated case that it risks being lost and forgotten.
Colonialism was another disaster whose human suffering cannot be alleviated. But just as in the case of slavery, there was also inside help in colonial domination. Various African elites connived in and benefited from this historical phenomenon.
Why am I talking about this? Because I believe that the official history of our continent has been subject to a number of distortions. The first and most heinous was the one formulated to justify exploitation as enriching Europe. But other distortions ensued, and some of these sought to conceal internal responsibility, to assuage the guilt of certain African social groups that participated from the outset in the oppression of the peoples and nations of Africa. This twisted reading of the past is not merely a theoretical diversion. It ends up giving sustenance to an attitude of eternal victimhood, it suggests false enemies and unprincipled alliances.
It is important that we shine a new light over our past, because what is happening now in our countries is none other than the recasting in a modern context of old connivances between internal and external interests. We are reliving a past that is so distorted upon reaching us that even we are incapable of recognizing it. We are not far removed from those university students who, when they journey outside of Maputo, do not recognize themselves as the heirs of the elders.
What we are – a mirror in search of its image
If the past reaches us deformed, the present flows into our lives, its form incomplete. Some experience this as a drama. And they rush off nervously in search of that which they call our identity. In the vast majority of cases, this identity is a house furnished by ourselves, but the furniture and the house itself were constructed by others. Others believe that the affirmation of their identity stems from denying the identity of others. What’s true is that our affirmation of who we are is rooted in countless misconceptions.
We must affirm that which is ours, some people say. And they are right. At a time when we are all invited to be Americans, such an appeal has every justification.
It therefore makes absolute sense for us to affirm that which is ours. But my question is this: what is truly ours? There are some misunderstandings here. For example: some believe that the capulana is a mode of dress that originated here, that is typically Mozambican. On various occasions, I have posed this question to university students: what fruits are ours, as opposed to strawberries, peaches and apples? The answers are once again curious. People believe that the following originated in Africa: cashews, mangoes, guavas, papaya. And so on and so forth. Now, none of these fruits are ours, in the sense that they are nativ
e to the continent. Other times, people suggest that we should affirm what is ours by citing the vegetables used in our cuisine. At this point, our emblem of what is typically Mozambican includes coconut, manioc, sweet potato, and the peanut – all products that were introduced into Mozambique and into Africa. But here, another point needs to be made: these things end up being ours because, independently of their origin, we have transformed them, refashioned them in our own way. The capulana may have originated outside, but it is Mozambican in the way that we fasten it. And in the way this cloth now speaks to us. Coconut is Indonesian, and manioc is more Latin American than Jennifer López, but the dish we prepare is ours because we have been cooking it our way.
Concepts must be vital implements in our search for our own image. But much of the conceptual framework we use to look at Mozambique is based on catch phrases which, because they have been repeated so much, have ultimately failed to produce any meaning at all. Let me give some examples. We talk a lot about the following:
traditional power structures;
civil society;
rural communities;
subsistence agriculture.
Forgive my offensive incursion into these domains. But I have heartfelt doubts about the operational viability of any of these concepts. I have my doubts as to how these categories may be controlled by us and produce real changes.