We are talking about training in citizenship, and we are thinking about our situation as the inhabitants of a country, but our principal citizenship is that of a nation that lies within each one of us. We often lack the courage to seek out our demons within ourselves. We need to learn to tame our ghosts and overcome our inner fears. I, who am addressing you here, have my own fears, my own anguish. I have brought some of these to your attention, in the form of doubts and aspirations.
My hope, my greatest hope, is that amid so many workshops we may learn to know, to recognize, and to resist the demagogy of those who are after votes. There are some things that are resolved by governments, but there are things that no government can resolve. It is we who will resolve them in the time accorded to us, through our developing sense of citizenship.
Mozambique has become the champion for conferences and workshops. There’s nothing bad about so much “workshopping.” But it is dangerous to assume that talking is action. My hope is that, with so many seminars, we may bring ourselves closer to one another in spite of all our differences. And that we may know and acknowledge each other as citizens of a common nation.
As a writer, the Nation that interests me is the human soul. I wrote a book which I called Every Man is a Race. I can tell you now: each person is a nation. We here are a kind of assembly of nations. And I feel honoured for having had this opportunity to talk with so many nations, with so many diverse worlds that have come together in the same hope, and knowing that this hope is called the Mozambican nation.
Address to the Tambor Seminar,
Pemba, Mozambique, July, 2004.
The Brazilian Sertão* in the Mozambican Savannah
I shall begin with a story. A true story. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a Mozambican woman by the name of Juliana lived in the peace and quiet of her little island, and in the serene contemplation of the waters of the Indian Ocean. Her life’s limited world would be changed one afternoon when her father, a prosperous merchant called Sousa Mascarenhas, brought home a sick man. The guest was burning with fever and in order to ensure his treatment, he was accommodated in a room in their large townhouse. Juliana became his nurse, responsible for the intruder’s gradual recovery.
During his convalescence, Juliana and the man fell in love. Juliana’s tender care was returned by means of verses scrawled on loose sheets of paper. Not long afterwards, the two were married. In the long soirées held in the colonial mansion, the educated people of the island would come together and the man would recite his poetry. These soirées witnessed the birth of the first nucleus of poets and writers on Mozambique Island, the first capital of colonial Mozambique. That man was a Brazilian, and his name was António Gonzaga. Years later, he and his beloved Juliana died and were buried in the island’s little cemetery.
The birth of Mozambican poetry was heralded by an encounter, or more appropriately, a marriage, between two people. What happened was a premonition of the wider union of minds that would later prevail.
More than a century later, an intellectual trend was born concerned with defining Mozambican identity. By this time, there was a clear need to break with Portugal and European models. Writers such as Rui de Noronha, Noémia de Sousa, Orlando Mendes and Rui Nogar, practised a form of writing that was linked more closely to the land and to the people of Mozambique.
What they needed was a literature that might help them to discover and reveal their native land. Once again, Brazilian poetry came to the assistance of Mozambicans. Manuel Bandeira was possibly the most important figure on this second journey. But Manuel Bandeira wasn’t the only one. Along with him came others such as Mário de Andrade, sharing their homeless homeland together, but what they all had in common was a desire to seek out what they called “the Brazilianization of their language.” The Mozambicans discovered, in the work of these poets and writers, the possibility of writing in another way, closer to the speech patterns of their homeland, without falling into the temptation of exoticism.
What these writers from Brazil were doing wasn’t just a stylistic exercise. Their writing was a result of their willingness to be possessed by and to take possession of Brazilian culture. It was a question of writing being conquered by speech, and of territories, formerly the preserve of so-called high culture, being flooded by popular culture.
Mário de Andrade wrote, “I care little whether I am writing just as the Portuguese do; what I write is the Brazilian language: for the simple fact that it is my language, the language of my country, Brazil.”
Bandeira didn’t react against Portugal. He just wanted to forget it. The Brazilians were now yielding to the luxury of forgetfulness. But this detachment from memory wasn’t possible in the Mozambican case. Mozambique was still a colony. It was necessary to be “against.” How, then, to find in the art of writing, a weapon that promised a fertile future? The question asks for some new encounter, some nourishment with which to gain strength and hope in order to move History forward.
For this, authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz and poets like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto, served as sources of inspiration. Mozambique drank from the spirit of another continent. Two oceans couldn’t separate what culture and History had made neighbours. Jorge Amado was banned in Portugal, but the Portuguese colonial authorities didn’t believe that anyone read in Mozambique. For them, the book was a seed with no soil. They were mistaken in their calculation; the seed germinated and bore fruit. José Craveirinha (our greatest poet, who died recently), Rui Knopfli, Luís Carlos Patraquim and so many others, all confessed to being influenced by him and the distinct way in which Brazil helped us to find our own way forward.
Apart from these writers and their skills, other much more far-reaching, telluric phenomena were occurring. The Mozambican and Brazilian peoples didn’t just share the same language but also shared that which developed out of the language, distinguishing it from the Portuguese of Portugal. In both cases, the development of the language was influenced by those of Bantu origin, which introduced affinities between our variant and that of Brazil.
At a deeper level, however, cultural and religious influences were at work. The Brazilian cultural matrix is profoundly influenced by the contribution of African slaves. We tend only to acknowledge isolated aspects of this influence. But its origin is deeper: it embraces the realm of religious thought. Our relationship with the divine is the bedrock of our spirituality, both as individuals and as a collectivity. Although there are clear differences between East and West Africa (from where Brazil received most of its influences), the truth is that we share gods and the same religious logic, far more than we do language and culture.
I shall leave it for others to talk about my own case. My trajectory has been one marked by poetry and I must pay homage to poets such as João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and above all, Adélia Prado. But my most important influence is essentially João Guimarães Rosa.
João Guimarães Rosa and I
My country contains within it various countries, profoundly divided among a wide variety of social and cultural universes. I am Mozambican, the son of Portuguese immigrants, I lived under the colonial system, I fought for Independence, I lived through radical social change from socialism to capitalism, from the revolution to civil war. I was born in a pivotal period, between a world that was being born and another that was dying: between a country that never was and another that is still being born. This situation of living on a frontier left its mark on me. The two sides of me require a medium, a translator. Poetry came to my rescue to bridge these distant worlds.