Looking at the other

By Anna Fresu

Rosella Clavari and Giulia De Martino (African Literature Association)

Anna Fresu's island origins shine through this collection of stories that impose a look at the "forgotten people of the world".Sardinian "Saudade" perhaps even before the Portuguese one, where her personal life had encountered before reaching Mozambique where she has lived for 11 years. It was in that distant land, a battered by the war land, where she engaged in humanitarian aid through social projects in education and culture like literacy, theater, music and dance. It is original the overlap of the childhood on the Sardinia island, the green and blue sea that opens to mysterious and painfully attractive spaces, the sailor father, the tireless storyteller mother with African and South American characters situations.

An empathy for the land and the African people that translates into the ability to sum up a life in the life of each and every one of us, including its own; to be reflected in the solitude of the one who passes you by or of the person you meet all mornings. They are different lives, but they share a destiny of marginalization, of violated childhoods, eternal love stories or those that never started, soliloquies seeking dialogue. The protagonists are also men, but mostly women, who face the adversities of life with the innocence of those who become mother even before becoming a woman, with the dignity of those who, trampled, leverages its inner forces. The stories unfold in short and rhythmic periods or melt in a bitter and disenchanted chronicle, mixing myths and old stories told by elderly villagers to glimpses of everyday life. Here then emerge miserable interiors of houses with can roofs, adorned with lush gardens and flower gardens, plastic shoes and poor clothing, washed and re-washed till they fall apart only to maintain a dignified decorum of the person, tiring hours of work in the fields or factories, wiped out villages and environments destroyed to make way for corporate interests, semi-colonial attitudes held by foreign aid workers, especially against women.  

But peer out even large rooms and crowded cafes where you can drink, dance and listen to music, views and stunning colors, seas and undertows that sing their eternal song.   

The author travels with her writing between Italy, Africa and Argentina, the land that currently hosts her. The theme of the "South of the world" is also present in the form of "South of the moving world " from the places of origin to lands of wealth: here the Pakistani greengrocer appears, the African girl that ran away from the poisons of the massive cultivation of roses in Kenya, but also a humble Sardinian man who spends time on the benches pretending to read the newspaper, who returned to Italy after years of emigration to Argentina to seek his fortune, and where the xenophobic attitude of some Italian results incomprehensible to him. A harsh and sad world but a world in which poetry always lived in and marked the literary and theatrical skills of our writer. Hers is a poetic prose that can translate into images the discomfort of the "forgotten", the poor rich only in hope, of those who know how to live and wait, of the disappointed people who consider their own life no longer tolerable. The collection sees in the recent stories the existential experience of the author to prevail: the illness, death, the figure of the dead mother evoked with sadly consolatory accents, the image of the personification of death with the traits of so much imaginative visionary literature and opera dear to the writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jan 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781507127100

Book preview

Looking at the other

Looking at the other

––––––––

The other is everything that we don’t know

and try to understand, it is what we strive for,

what waits us at the corner of the street; the country

we don’t know, the faces we don’t know, but which

for a moment pass through our lives; it’s, at times,

what we fear and try to avoid;

It’s what sleeps in the deep and, only occasionally,

manages to the surface. It’s whoever that may be, or simply, ourselves.

A Judite ficou sozinha

(Judite is left alone)

Djixile ua anja, Anna. What are we doing today? Judite greets me as always with a broad smile that begins in the heart is reflected in the eyes and only in the end blooms on the lips. The market is closed at this hour, empty of people and goods, some piles of oranges and green tangerines, very sweet and juicy, some mangoes, three or four papayas, a peanut can ... Judite, Felismina, Margarida, Aida and the other traders have not gone home like the last customers. Those two hours before opening again are not made for resting, they are filled with learning, dances, stories. Theatre. And this is where I come in. Judite and her friends never get tired; but I would like to relax because I can barely stand from fatigue that afternoon still too hot in early March getting up at the insanely early hour of six in the morning to start lessons at seven thirty.

Judite gets up at four. She doesn’t wait for the cock's crow. Nothing is more unreliable than the roosters of Maputo; they sing at all hours, they have no clocks. But she is up as soon as it’s daylight: she goes to the yard, she checks if there is still water in the can under the gutter how beautiful the summer is when perhaps it rains at night and saves you from having to line up at the fountain and from the weight of the can on your head she prepares the fire heats up the water for the bath and the tea I bought the sugar yesterday with the money from the piles of oranges that I sold, Naima stood  in line all morning for the bread; luckily she had school in the afternoon that day then she will wake up the kids, first Naima who will help Zé and Carlitos to wash and dress. Judite takes her time, she likes being in the yard alone, before chaos breaks. See checks if there’s any new papaya fruit on the tree, if there are any tangerines to pick, if baby bananas are growing well, if the once blue uniform of Naima has dried, if the pink on the door which she is so proud of needs retouching, the pink and brown lozenges painted with some paint thrown away by some mulungo

A fat child blew up the balloon,

the balloon blew up blew up ....and burst

skinny children gathered the pieces

and made balloons

She likes this poem by Zé, Zé Craveirinha, our poet o nosso poeta, that's why she named her son Zé.

The first time she heard his poems was in Msaho, there at Jarim Tunduru what was