Lusophone African Short Stories and Poetry after Independence: Decolonial Destinies

By Anthem Press

In 1975, after much resistance, Portugal became the last colonial power to relinquish its colonies on the African continent. The tardiness of Portuguese decolonization in Africa (Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe) raises critical questions for the emergence of national literary and cultural production in the wake of national independence. Bringing together the works of poets, short story writers, and journalists, this book charts the emergence and evolution of the national literatures of Portugal’s former African colonies, from 1975 to the present. The aim of this book is to examine the ways in which writers contended with the process of decolonization, forging national, transnational, and diasporic identities through literature while grappling with the legacies and continuities of racial power structures, colonial systems of representation, and the struggles for political sovereignty and social justice. This book will be the first of its kind in English to include canonical, emerging, and previously untranslated authors of poetry and short-form fiction to a new public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785276217

Book preview

Lusophone African Short Stories

and Poetry after Independence

Lusophone African Short Stories

and Poetry after Independence

Decolonial Destinies

Edited and Translated by

Lamonte Aidoo and Daniel F. Silva

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2021 Lamonte Aidoo and Daniel F. Silva editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-619-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-619-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I. ANGOLA

Chapter 1.Boaventura Cardoso

Introduction

The Pompeu e Costa Family (from Dizanga Dia Muenho, 1977)

Chapter 2.Ana Paula Tavares

Introduction

Ceremony of Passage (from Rites of Passage, 1985)

Harvests (from Rites of Passage, 1985)

Untitled (from Rites of Passage, 1985)

Untitled (from The Moon’s Lake, 1999)

Untitled (from The Moon’s Lake, 1999)

Origins (from You Tell Me Things Sour as Fruit, 2001)

Voyage (from You Tell Me Things Sour as Fruit, 2001)

Foreigner (from You Tell Me Things Sour as Fruit, 2001)

Between Light and Shade (from Like Thin Veins on the Earth, 2010)

Chapter 3.Ana de Santana

Introduction

Epiphany (from Flavors, Scents, and Reveries, 1986)

Girl (from Flavors, Scents, and Reveries, 1986)

Nuptials (from Flavors, Scents, and Reveries, 1986)

Chapter 4.Amélia da Lomba

Introduction

The Song of Silence (from Antologia da poesia moderna angolana, 2006)

In the Millesimal of Time (from Antologia da poesia moderna angolana, 2006)

Hands (from Antologia da poesia moderna angolana, 2006)

Death’s Heritage (from Antologia da poesia moderna angolana, 2006)

Time’s Inversion of Value (from Poemas Soltos, Mulemba vol. 2, no. 2)

Spikes of Sahel (from Spikes of Sahel, 2004)

Chapter 5.Ondjaki

Introduction

Jika’s Flight (from The Kids from My Street, 2007)

We Cried for Mangy Dog (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Part II. CABO VERDE

Chapter 6.Onésimo Silveira

Introduction

Grand Hour (from Grand Hour, 1962)

Waters (from Grand Hour, 1962)

Portrait (from Poems of Darkness, 2008)

The Suicided (from Poems of Darkness, 2008)

Emigration (from Poems of Darkness, 2008)

Return (from Poems of Darkness, 2008)

Chapter 7.Vera Duarte

Introduction

Oh, If One Day … (from Tomorrow Dawned, 1993)

Words (from Bai’s Destiny, 1998)

The Primordial Poem (from Archipelago of Passion, 2001)

Desires (from African Poetry in Portuguese, 2003)

Poem Only (from Prayers and Supplications, or the Songs of Hopelessness, 2005)

Chapter 8.Rosendo Évora Brito

Introduction

Every Afternoon and Again (from The Flight of the Swallows, 1982)

Far Beyond … (from The Flight of the Swallows, 1982)

Escape (from The Flight of the Swallows, 1982)

Black Drum (from The Flight of the Swallows, 1982)

Chapter 9.Orlanda Amarilis

Introduction

Nina (from Cais-do-Sodré to Salamansa, 1974)

Chapter 10. Silvino Lopes Évora

Introduction

What Is Poetry? (from Rhymes in the Desert, 2009)

Tarrafal (from Rhymes in the Desert, 2009)

People of My Homeland (from Rhymes in the Desert, 2009)

After the Beyond (from Rhymes in the Desert, 2009)

Cabo Verde, Dry Land (from Rhymes in the Desert, 2009)

Part III. GUINEA-BISSAU

Chapter 11.Domingas Samy

Introduction

Desired Peace (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

Child of Africa (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

Why Do You Cry, Mother? (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

The Heart Burns (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

Demolished Memory (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

Chapter 12.Agnelo Regalla

Introduction

Poem of an Assimilated Man (from Greetings to Those Who Fight: The New Poetry of Guinea- Bissau, 1977)

Five Hundred Years of History (from Greetings to Those Who Fight:The New Poetry of Guinea- Bissau, 1977)

Comrade Amílcar (from Greetings to Those Who Fight: The New Poetry of Guinea-Bissau, 1977)

That Tear of Blood (from Greetings to Those Who Fight: The New Poetry of Guinea-Bissau, 1977)

Chapter 13. Félix Sigá

Introduction

The Sidewalk’s Archaeologist (from The Sidewalk’s Archaeologist, 1996)

Self-Portrait (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea- Bissau, 1990)

Anonymous (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea- Bissau, 1990)

Time for Transformation (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

Relief (from Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau, 1990)

From Siga-mania to Felix-ment (unpublished 2008)

Chapter 14.Tony Tcheka

Introduction

Guinea (from Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep, 1985—Written in 1973)

A People Asleep (from Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep, 1985)

Anthem of a New Day (from Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep, 1985—written in 1977)

Batuque at Night (from Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep, 1985)

Concert for Guinea (from Guinea—Painful Pleasure, 2008)

Luso Language (from Guinea—Painful Pleasure, 2008)

Chapter 15.Odete Semedo

Introduction

And They Approach (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2007)

The Forewarning Finds History (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

The Fright of Bissau (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Lost, Disoriented (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Remembrance (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Under the Shadow of Justice (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Metamorphosis (from At the Bottom of the Song, 2011)

Part IV. MOZAMBIQUE

Chapter 16.José Craveirinha

Introduction

Hamina ‘Performs Hara-Kiri’ in the Temples of Araújo Street (from Harima and Other Stories, 1997)

Painting (from Harima and Other Stories, 1997)

Chapter 17.Mia Couto

Introduction

The Flag’s Sunset (from Blessedreamt Stories, 1994)

Chapter 18.Paulina Chiziane

Introduction

The Scars of Love (from The Hands of Black People, 2001)

Chapter 19.Tânia Tomé

Introduction

My Impossible Poem (from The Sun Grabs Me from Behind, 2010)

My Mozambique (from The Sun Grabs Me from Behind, 2010)

Poem in Pity Major (from The Sun Grabs Me from Behind, 2010)

Kianda (from The Sun Grabs Me from Behind, 2010)

Chapter 20.Nelson Saúte

Introduction

The Apostle of Disaster (from The Apostle of Disaster, 1999)

Part V. SÃO TOMÉ E PRÍNCIPE

Chapter 21.Alda Espírito Santo

Introduction

Angolares (from The Sacred Soil of the Land Is Ours, 1978)

Over in ‘Água Grande’ (from The Sacred Soil of the Land Is Ours, 1978)

Beyond the Beach (from The Sacred Soil of the Land Is Ours, 1978)

Naked Island (from The Sacred Soil of the Land Is Ours, 1978)

Chapter 22.Tomás Medeiros

Introduction

Poem (from In the Kingdom of Caliban, 1975)

My Song to Europe (from In the Kingdom of Caliban, 1975)

From When the Cucumbas Sing (excerpts, 2016)

Chapter 23.Olinda Beja

Introduction

Vision (from Do You Understand? 1992)

Who Are We? (from Weightless, Light, 1993)

Identity (from In the Land of the Tchiloli, 1996)

Corporal Form (from In the Land of the Tchiloli, 1996)

Earth (from Scents of Ambarella, 2009)

Darkness (from Scents of Ambarella, 2009)

Chapter 24.Conceição Lima

Introduction

Motherland (from The House’s Uterus, 2004)

Heroes (from The House’s Uterus, 2004)

1975 (from The House’s Uterus, 2004)

Obscure Song to the Roots (from The Painful Root of the Micondó , 2006)

The Shepherd (from The Country of Akendenguê, 2011)

Chapter 25.Albertino Bragança

Introduction

Solitude (from Rosa of Riboque and Other Stories, 1985)

Further Reading

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLE: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LUSOPHONE AFRICA

In 1974, after a decade-long struggle for independence against Portuguese colonialism on three fronts (Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau), Portugal became the last colonial power to relinquish their colonies on the African continent. Indeed, in colonial Angola, a consolidated armed struggle began in January 1961 through an uprising in northeastern Angola in opposition to colonial labor conditions on the cotton plantations operated by Cotonang, a Portuguese-Belgian company. A concerted armed struggle for independence in Angola was followed by the beginning of the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence in January of 1963, and the Mozambican War of Independence in September of 1964. In discussing the anticolonial struggle, it is important to note not only the conflicts that led directly to political independence, but also the longer history of resistance on various scales—local and national. As some of the literary contributors to this volume emphasize, though, anticolonial struggle is seldom a teleological matter. Rather, the events of resistance of the past bleed into the present and the history of colonial expansion is also marked and destabilized by the specter of struggle. In thinking of a history of anticolonial action, even cursorily, a crucial distinction to make is in examining the consolidated and broad geographic scope of anticolonial coordination, when looking at the armed struggle for independence. In the case of the Angolan struggle for independence, this involved different movements with differing ideological positions regarding social alternatives to colonial reality and forged political alliances with foreign states.

For instance, the Movimento Popular the Libertação de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA) coordinated the attack on the São Paulo prison in the Sambizanga zone of Luanda in February of 1961 to free political prisoners of the colonial police, while the União das Populações de Angola (Union of Peoples of Angola, UPA) organized an armed incursion on Portuguese plantations in northern Angola on March 15 of the same year. This sort of coordination and cooperation was also true on a larger scale of anticolonial work across movements located in different Portuguese colonies in Africa, as well as with movements and groups working continentally and transcontinentally. The aforementioned Angolan movements during the armed struggle, for example, maintained important political and military ties with the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Leopoldville); while the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambican Liberation Front, FRELIMO) held collaborative ties with Julius Nyerere’s government in Tanzania; and the Partido Africano de Independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde, PAIGC) established early headquarters in Conakry, Guinea, during Ahmed Sékou Touré’s presidency.

The history of collaboration among anticolonial movements in Portuguese colonies includes, in addition to many strategically invisible gatherings and events, key moments and circles of coordination. As is the case with numerous writers included in this volume, many leaders of anticolonial movements in Portuguese colonies came together as university students in Lisbon in the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (House of Students of the Empire), an organization created in 1945 and funded by the Portuguese government in order to support students matriculating from Portugal’s colonized territories. The numerous meetings and correspondence between movements led to PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral’s founding of the Frente Revolucionária Africana para a Independência Nacional das Colónias Portuguesas (African Revolutionary Front for the National Independence of the Portuguese Colonies, FRAIN) in Tunis in 1960, which included the three aforementioned movements plus the Movimento para a Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe, MLSTP). A year later, in Casablanca, the name of the alliance was changed to the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies).

For Eduardo Mondlane, first and founding president of the FRELIMO, this sort of transnational or transcolonial collaboration was urgently required for both anticolonial political and epistemological reasons. Mondlane, especially following his time in South Africa during the 1940s which witnessed the implementation of apartheid laws, envisioned anticolonial struggle for freedom as a regional endeavor due to the interconnectedness of colonies/colonial settler states, economies, and flows of bodies. Political sovereignty for Mozambique, in other words, could not be sustainable if neighboring states continued to be ruled by pro-capitalist, imperialist, and apartheid structures. His foresight and concern eventually proved accurate with the military interventions led or sponsored by apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa against Angola and Mozambique following their independence from Portugal in the late 1970s.

Cooperative anticolonial sovereignty in the region was deeply intertwined, moreover, with the historical and epistemic resistance of imagining regional cartographies beyond those carved out by Europe. The shaping of anticolonial consciousness as the foundation of widespread and sustainable social transformation thus hinged on an epistemological project that could not merely undo European colonial cartographies of Africa, but had to forge vital terrains of solidarity and collaboration beyond the borders and divisions (political or otherwise) instituted by imperialist Europe. Herein lies a crucial theoretical dissonance between Mondlane and Che Guevara, for instance. While the latter argued in favor of the primacy of armed struggle as an ideological means of popular mobilization, Mondlane found that mobilization depended most importantly on a particular project of knowledge production on a grassroots level that could imagine and disseminate a vision of social transformation that could uproot the exploitative and extractivist systems of colonial rule (Mondlane Struggle).

On a transcontinental level, many anticolonial leaders forged political and military alliances with anti-capitalist states like Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. It is also important to note the participation of such leaders and representatives of the Lusophone African anticolonial struggle in broader anti-imperialist collaborative efforts such as the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 that spawned the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Prior to the 1966 conference in which Cabral delivered an early iteration of his seminal essay, The Weapon of Theory (Return to the Source), the movement leaders had close contacts with other internationalist collectives such as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization and the Casablanca Group.

These sorts of efforts speak to an integral and often overlooked component of nationalist anticolonial struggles—their inherent internationalism, which reveals a fundamentally and philosophically radical stance toward imperialism. Though the political, economic, and military importance of such alliances has not been overstated nor understudied, these networks of solidarity and collaboration bespoke a larger global project against empire and a radical imagination of social reality beyond the parameters of life articulated and bestowed by imperialism. This concerted imagining implied particular epistemological shifts in envisioning new terrains of struggle and collective life to be founded on anti-imperial ways of being and knowing the world. In other words, this work included a profound and critical revision of Eurocentric humanism, in addition to anticolonial reworkings of Marxist critiques of capital accumulation and class formation.

In The Weapon of Theory, Cabral develops a decolonial notion of the human, homem novo (New Man), an ontological site through which to know and signify anti-imperial struggle and also inaugurate anti-imperial/anticapitalist relationships between body, land, and time. This was, for Cabral, a profound long-term collective and institutional project encompassing a decolonial state, education policy, economic restructuring, and a rethinking of cultural life. As Delinda Collier uncovers, Cabral’s urging and philosophical call to arms would be taken up by political figures, social theorists, and artists across Lusophone Africa and beyond, as part of an everyday anticolonial praxis through which subject/object relationships could be reordered (192). The first artists’ union of Angola, União Nacional de Artistas Plásticos (National Union of Plastic Artists, UNAP), explicitly states their objective in identifiable Cabralian terms in the declared mission of their first meeting: contribute to the progressive transformation of the legacy of colonial domination, which made the values of African culture a mere bourgeois commodity, so that art can be harnessed in the creation of the New Man (cited in Collier 192).

Relatedly, Agostinho Neto, the first president of the MPLA and of independent Angola, pondered extensively and publicly on the role of cultural production—as a means of meaning-making—in forging the new Angolan person who has resulted from the historic victory over one of the elements of the colonial contradiction (9). In this regard, cultural production, especially the formation of a national literature, was to take a mediating role vis-à-vis the epistemological and historicizing project of forging a new collective subjectivity as well as anticolonial forms of being as everyday praxes. This implied, for Neto in his address to the Angolan Writers’ Union, a particular decolonization of the concept of literature to integrate the broader arts as well as forms of meaning-making and cultural production marginalized by colonial notions of literature—namely, the oral and performative forms of expression and signification (10). This artistic terrain should, he felt, mediate and center worker-peasant epistemologies at the service of socialist transformation, while also doing the important work of traversing and undoing colonial divisions of regions, ethnic groups, and languages. The new Angolan person was thus to be radically multilingual as integral to the formation of a multiethnic and multiregional national consciousness.

Cabral’s deep revision of Marxism, developed during the 1960s, laid an important foundation for the advancement of anticolonial theory. His extensive writings encompassed and contributed critical analyses of the labor structures, epistemologies, and discursive terrains of racial capitalism, while laboring toward alternative modes of collective life. In this regard, and as theorist Robert J. C. Young argues, Cabral’s work can be situated within a particular Third World Marxism developed during the 1940s and 1950s, reaching its most consolidated form following the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 and applied to postcolonial nation-building projects through the 1960s to the ’1980s (Young 5). Young credits Cabral and his anticolonial contemporaries like Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Mondlane, Agostinho Neto, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro of not only leading the struggle against empire through political work, but also for crucially upending the Eurocentric and paternalistic bases of Marxism to form a broader philosophical and political project. Both Cabral and Fanon offered important contributions to the critical interrogation of, and opposition to, the philosophical, political, and economic tenants of European colonialism; approaching these aspects as parts of the whole machinery of colonialism and empire. In such conceptualizations of anticolonial struggle and its imperialist object of contestation, significant critical attention is given to long-standing and strategically fluid operations of imperial power, particularly the upholding of economic extraction through racializing and gendering processes—placing bodies into hierarchies of value, categories of exploitability, and objects of surveillance.

Cabral notably framed the contestation against imperialism in materialist terms while delineating the role of cultural production in liberation. For him, anticolonial struggle was about upending a colonial state and imperial divisions of labor as much as it was about dismantling a global project of knowledge, culture, and power. In Cabral’s view, the Portuguese state (especially in its fascist period under António de Oliveira Salazar) was an oppressive vehicle of a larger force. Defeating it militarily would grant a particular form of sovereignty to five African colonies while also liberating the Portuguese from their repressive capitalist government, but anti-imperialist freedom was a larger endeavor. Within this, Cabral was especially concerned with the role of cultural production in reclaiming historical processes from the grips of imperialism, and in the process, creating a space whereby the colonized bodies become