In this way, Rosa carried out a project to free writing from the weight of its own rules. To achieve this, he made use of everything: neologisms, disrupted catchphrases, reinvented proverbs, and reclaimed material from oral culture placing all of it not merely in footnotes, but at the heart of the text.
Word magic and the narration magic are not two separate processes. Guimarães Rosa works outside common sense (he creates an uncommon sense), he evokes the deep mystery in simple things, he gives us the pure quality behind everyday concerns.
This fascination with the creative power that a reinvented language can exert over us was expressed by Rosa when he wrote about Hungarian: “From his earliest understanding of it, every Hungarian writer aspires to create his own ‘language,’ with its own vocabulary and syntax, its written personality. More than this: it is almost impossible for every Hungarian writer not to have his own, personal idiom. Its range is magical.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Chico Buarque makes himself an apprentice and a writer in Hungarian in his 2003 novel, Budapest.
A narration’s territory isn’t a place, but consists of the journey itself. Its discourse is in constant mutation and the different characters are different voices in dialogue. Narration isn’t the privilege of one sole entity, invested with the responsibility of organizing the wisdom and knowledge of others. Riobaldo isn’t just the protagonist-narrator of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, but a kind of smuggler between literature, urban culture, and the oral culture of the inhabitants of the sertão. In his writing, João Guimarães Rosa undertakes a fusion of feelings and meanings, a bridge between modernity and rural tradition, between the modern epic form and the logic of the traditional story. This, at heart, is Brazil itself.
This is the challenge behind the unceasing search for a pluralistic identity that still faces Brazil. Mozambique faces the same challenge. More than a turning point, what we need today is a medium, someone who uses powers that don’t come from science or technology, in order to connect these different universes. What we need is to be connected with those whom Rosa called “the folk on the far side.” That side is within each and every one of us.
Address to the Brazilian Academy of Letters,
Rio de Janeiro, August 2004.
Animal Conservation: A Noah-Less Ark?
Introduction
It’s bad form to begin with a question. Yet I have no choice but to share my first concern with you: when we discuss matters relating to conservation and tourism, do we know exactly what we are talking about?
This is an area in which words and concepts are a slippery, moving pavement. Conservation, ecotourism, local communities, participatory management of natural resources: all these are concepts that need to be questioned. They reach us like some imported fruit: we must peel them, taste them and judge whether they will be productive in our own soil. It’s not a question of refusing influences or closing our doors against global trends. The question is: How we can build our own agenda from fragments of others’ agendas.
I have to confess I feel some misgivings about beginning this talk in such a way, given that it may provoke a certain apathy among us all. We can’t remain indecisive on the grounds that we don’t know enough. We don’t have the right to such a luxury. However, worse than not having knowledge is thinking that one does. That’s why I’ve chosen to speak to you about mistakes, simplifications, and mystifications.
1. Philosophical Fallacies:
Dancing Words and Flying Concepts
I have already had occasion to recount this true incident: some years ago, President Chissano presented the members of his government at a political rally in Nampula. His speech was in Portuguese, but translated into Makua. When he got to the point of introducing his Minister of Culture, the translator hesitated and said: This is the Minister of Jokes.
All of us have experienced this kind of misunderstanding. In most of our Bantu languages, there isn’t a translation for the word “culture,” just as there isn’t a translation for “nature,” or for “society.” This absence of an equivalent term doesn’t stem from any inadequacy among our languages. Rather, it comes from a different philosophical stance, another vision of the world. For most rural Mozambicans there isn’t a frontier dividing that which is “cultural” from that which is “natural.” What there is is an interconnected world, that can only be understood and defined in one way.
What we need to remember is that our discussion today is not based on a holistic view of the world, but on a dualistic philosophy propounded by Descartes in the first half of the seventeenth century, from which strong dichotomies later evolved: between “natural” and “social,” between “conservation” and “utilization,” between “man” and “nature.” We remain prisoners of false conflicts, between the “exploitation” and “preservation” of that which is “impure” and “virgin,” between that which has been “transformed” and that which is “untouched.”
There never has been a natural world that hasn’t included the participation of human societies; uncultivated vegetation has always occurred with human interference (for at least the last 250,000 years). We were intervening in the ecological process long before there were workshops on tourism and conservation. We are both a product and the producers of our environment. We are both nature and society.
I’m talking of words and concepts, some of which appear and contest each other like passing fashions. If we aren’t careful, we may merely be dressing what are really much older concepts in new words. For example, “local communities” may be a new name for what began by being known as “natives,” in order to later become “indigenous people,” and then later “peasant masses,” and still more recently the “population.”
2. The Fallacies of History
When we talk about the environment in Mozambique, we often lose historical perspective, as if everything began with colonialism. We know almost nothing about the environmental changes that occurred during our pre-colonial past. We never study the impact made by the communities of iron makers, or of agricultural practices inspired by the use of fire, in phenomena such as the Mfecane, which brought waves of Nguni migration to the south of Mozambique.
The model for the term we now call “conservation” was born during the British Empire in the middle of the eighteenth century. During that period, there were the first signs of severe industrial pollution and urban growth. A nostalgia for “pure,” “virgin” Nature became predominant, as did a perceived need to protect natural spaces as if they were fortresses. For these territories to be restored to their “natural” state, all human presence was to be withdrawn, and they were to be protected by guarded enclosures. In the end, they were trying to recreate a lost paradise, to re-enact the biblical myth of Noah’s Ark.
Reserves, parks and botanical gardens were created during the course of that century in various parts of the empire, from the East Indies to the Cape. Our region witnessed the birth, in 1892, of the Sabie Game Reserve. After this, various other conservation areas emerged in southern Africa.