The moment had a contradictory effect on me: on the one hand, it nurtured me, while on the other, it excluded me. I couldn’t share entirely in that conversation between gods and men. I was already burdened with Europe, my soul had already imbibed a way of thinking, and my dead resided in other soil.
When I ask myself why I write, I answer: to get to know gods that aren’t mine. My ancestors are buried somewhere else far away, somewhere in the north of Portugal. I don’t share their intimacy, and what is still more serious, they have no knowledge of my existence.
My two sides demanded an intermediary, a translator. Poetry came to my rescue, to create a bridge between two worlds. And the city, my home, my family: these nurtured the poetry that was born in me.
An Unsuccessful Escape
In 1972, I left Beira to go and study medicine in Lourenço Marques. There, I settled in like someone disembarking from his own adolescence; for the first time, I was leaving my home behind and facing “life” on my own. This change of locality helped me to understand the various Mozambiques contained within Mozambique. My Chissena was little use to me. The south speaks other languages. Other cultures were produced within a very different historical framework.
I lived through the last four years Lourenço Marques went by that name. I witnessed the deep changes that led not just to another name for the city, but another reality. Ever since then, Mozambican cities have had to create their own urban space from the inside. Urban space was (and still is to some extent) the space reserved for the others, the whites and assimilated Africans. With Independence, urban space tended to become more Mozambican. Cities were occupied progressively, not just by people who arrived from the countryside, but by rural life itself.
Lourenço Marques, however, didn’t draw me away from my hometown. In both places, I witnessed how the rural soul takes possession of cities and appropriates a network of relationships that is foreign to it, and what is more, that is contrary to its spirit. This is the tension that exists in Beira and in all African cities. Beira was constructed initially according to a different type of logic. It emerged as a transplant of Europe on foreign soil. The continent’s body received these insertions without converting to the rationale behind this. But beyond this tension, there was a certain seduction that the rural world was unable to resist.
Mozambican cities are almost all of recent construction and, until 1975, they were administered according to a foreign modes of thought. They were cities in Mozambique, and not cities of Mozambique. Nowadays, the urban spirit has only partially become woven into the first generation of Mozambicans born and brought up in cities. This process of appropriation by the city is still going on. And it will take various generations.
Inventing Destinies
Beira, like all our cities, wasn’t born “ours.” It became ours gradually. One of the dynamics that turned it into a Mozambican space was migration. Beira is a space of arrival. People enter the city as if they were crossing a frontier. On this side lies citizenship, the place where cultures are made and exchanged and where, with much greater intensity, a sense of Mozambicanness is forged.
The city isn’t just a physical space but a location where relationships are welded together. It is the focal point of a time when Mozambique’s own identities are made and remade. Nor, as a native of Beira, am I the only one to be permeated by dualities. All Mozambican citizens share this same condition: they navigate between cultures, forever adapting to enable more lasting political exchanges that are ideologically more convincing, technologically more well thought out, and socially more promising.
In the end, we don’t have much more than this: the city of our childhood. We talk in capital letters of the Nation, the Country, the Global Village. These are ideas. We don’t live in them. Nowadays, I don’t even yearn for a city. What fills me with yearning is a tiny urban area, a wall where I can once again sit with my childhood friends. And Beira, my Beira, the one I remember from my unfinished childhood, that’s the place invented to fit my dream and my nostalgia.
Published by the Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon, Portugal,
in Tabacaria, October, 2003.
Languages We Don’t Know We Know
In an as-yet-unpublished short story of mine, the action is as follows: a terminally ill woman asks her husband to tell her a story so as to alleviate her unbearable pains. No sooner does he begin his tale than she stops him:
“No, not like that. I want you to speak to me in an unknown language.”
“Unknown?” he asks.
“A language that doesn’t exist. For I have such a need not to understand anything at all.”
The husband asks himself: how can you speak a language that doesn’t exist? He starts off by mumbling some strange words and feels like a fool, as if he were proving to himself his inability to be human. But gradually, he begins to feel more at ease with this language that is devoid of rules. And he no longer knows whether he’s speaking, singing, or praying. When he pauses, he notices his wife has fallen asleep, with the most peaceful smile on her face. Later, she confesses to him: those sounds had brought back memories of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.
When we were children, all of us experienced that first language, the language of chaos, all of us enjoyed that divine moment when our life was capable of being all lives, and the world still awaited a destiny. James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world “chaosmology.” This relationship, my friends, is what breathes life into writing, whatever the continent, whatever the nation, whatever the language or the literary genre.
I believe that all of us, whether poets or fiction writers, never stop seeking this seminal chaos. All of us aspire to return to that state in which we were so removed from a particular language that all languages were ours. To put it another way, we are all the impossible translators of dreams, for dreams speak within us what no word is capable of saying.
Our purpose, as producers of dreams, is to gain access to that other language no one can speak, that hidden language in which all things can have all names. What the sick woman was asking was what we all wish for: to annul time and send death to sleep.
Maybe you expected me, coming as I do from Africa, to use this platform to lament, to accuse others, while absolving my immediate fellows from guilt. But I prefer to talk about something of which we are all victims and of which we are all guilty at the same time: how the process that has impoverished my continent is in fact devitalizing our common, universal position as creators of stories.
In a conference that celebrates the value of words, the theme of my talk is the way dominant criteria are devaluing good literature in the name of easy and immediate profitability. I am talking about a commercialism that is closed to other cultures, other languages, other ways of thinking. The words of today are increasingly those that are shorn of any poetic dimension, that do not convey to us any utopian vision of a different world.
What has ensured human survival is not just our intelligence but our capacity to produce diversity. This diversity is nowadays being denied us by a system that makes choices solely on the grounds of profit and easy success. Africans have become the “others” once again, those who have little to sell, and who can buy even less. African authors (and especially those who write in Portuguese) live on the periphery of the periphery, there where words have to struggle in order not to be silence.