Contribution to the debate “Don’t Kill Culture,
Don’t Kill Craveirinha,” Maputo, 2008.
The Tangled Ball of Wool
One of my earliest memories is this: I am sitting, my arms held out, in front of my mother, who gradually winds a ball of wool from a length of yarn hanging from my wrists. I was a child, but the task was more than a responsibility: I was giving life to an ancient ritual, as if, before me, there was another child from whose arms the same infinite ball of wool was being wound. This persistent memory that I savour, like an eternal patch of shade, almost serves as a metaphor for the work of memory: a delicate thread, joining other threads, being rolled up into a rounded belly.
I revisit that moment in my life by way of an introduction to the theme of this text. This is a meeting about memories and I begin with a recollection that establishes me as a producer of memories and other untruths. I shall return later to the ball of wool and the boundless peace of my childhood home.
We have been summoned here to talk of history and of memories, of peace and of wars. As if, as writers, we had a particular skill in such matters.
In a novel I’m currently writing, there’s a character who is asked: “Where are you going to be buried?” To which he replies: “My final burying place doesn’t dwell in the future. My grave is my past.”
Each one risks entombment in our own past. It takes effort to avoid becoming imprisoned by memories, which are the simplified depictions of us that others have made. We all carry a book written in us, and this text seeks to impose itself as our source and as our destiny. And if there is a war within us all, it is a war of resistance, in which we refuse to be confined to a single and predictable narrative.
To speak of wars isn’t a peaceful matter at all. And to speak of memories is a subject full of forgetfulness. It is strange to perceive a writer as someone who guards his past like a dockside watchman, someone who checks a ship’s moorings. In fact, a writer is someone who unties the ship and invites us to set off on a journey. Every time he invokes the past, the writer is constructing a lie; he is inventing a time outside of Time. Liars who lie in order to be believed must be accorded a special mention in a debate like this.
Dear friends and colleagues, true colleagues in the craft of lying:
On the first day of this Congress, José Luís Cabaço asked why it is that our writers don’t use the war of national liberation as a source of inspiration.
Fortunately, he raised this question on an earlier panel in which the topic was different; and the answer was postponed. If I had had to answer on that particular occasion, I would have said: because it’s too near in time and because it’s too near the dream. I would have said that the war was felt like a piece of fiction, that it was lived like an epic narrative. We are faced by a situation in which the character swallows the narrator, and the hero devours the author.
But his question was asked two days ago and, at home, I began to wonder whether there might be other reasons. I think there are. One such reason is this: the armed struggle for liberation has become removed from its previous affective proximity. The narrative of this historic process was gradually appropriated by a discourse of exaltation and became too grandiloquent. The epic lost its appeal; it was led by the heroes who gave their names to streets and squares, but have neither faces nor voices. We have inherited a heroic history of history-less heroes. Superhuman characters have ousted the common people, those humble folk who were scared, who hesitated, who fell in love, who became like all of us.
In truth, my friend Cabaço’s question can be extended to other wars and other epic episodes in our country’s history. Where are the histories of that History with a capital letter? They don’t exist. Or maybe they exist in secret, remote hideaways, but we may need to cross deserts to find them.
In fact, we haven’t just forgotten our country’s war of independence. We have forgotten the far more recent war of destabilization, the drama of which still echoes in our daily lives. We have forgotten the wars of colonial resistance, we have forgotten the wars of regional occupation (such as the one waged against the Nguni invaders), we have forgotten the wars of the Prazeiros, or land leaseholders, against the colonial authorities. And we have forgotten with proven efficacy, the never-ending war against slavery. This disremembering has a long history and is proof of our skill in the art of dismissing things from our mind.
Why are we so competent when it comes to forgetting, why are we so systematic in wiping away the footprints of time? The simplest answer lies in the absence of writing. In terms of temporal register, we are in no-man’s land: oral witnesses have either never come forward or have been lost. This is certainly a major justification. But the absence of writing cannot explain everything. It can’t explain, for instance, the alarming collective amnesia that has wiped away the external and internal signs of the recent civil war.
I believe we need to find other answers. It’s not just the overwhelming power of orality that prevents us from recording deeds that caused us to be undone and then done up again. There must be another explanation for this strange need to exclude the past of our homegrown mythology. In the good old African way, we do not know how to transform our past into our prehistory.
I think this alternative explanation can be summed up as follows: we forget our wars because, in all these conflicts, we weren’t all on the same side. We forget these conflicts because, in every one of them, we were scattered among the vanquished and the victors. We forget because at the time, we were not yet the entity we are today (Mozambicans, residents of the same existential home that is the Mozambican nation). These others that we once were find it hard to make the transition to what we “are” now. We were “them” and we keep ourselves in the third person in order to go on being “us,” that collective entity born of wars, that people who have forgotten themselves. We don’t know how to bury within us the part of us that gradually died. We don’t have room in our soul for socially accredited memories, for those living cemeteries.
Let us start with the war of national liberation. When FRELIMO unleashed a general armed uprising, a call for mobilization was circulated that, at a certain point, went like this: workers and peasants, labourers, intellectuals, officials, students, Mozambican soldiers in the Portuguese army, men, women. .
This particular reference to Mozambican soldiers in the Portuguese army deserves to be explained. There were up to 60,000 soldiers in the Portuguese colonial army. Of these, more than half were Mozambican. I am certain that, over the course of the ten-year war of national liberation, there were more Mozambicans fighting in the ranks of the colonial army than there were in the ranks of the nationalists. During the same period, tens of thousands of Mozambicans were not only in the regular colonial army, but also made up the bulk of the paramilitary forces such as the Flechas (Arrows), the Special Groups, the OPVDC (Provincial Organization of Volunteers and Civil Defence) and the Special Paratrooper Units. Not to mention the PIDE, or secret police. Let’s not beat about the bush: we were on both sides in the war, we were victims and perpetrators, angels and demons.
But this distribution between paradise and the inferno didn’t just occur in the war of national liberation. It occurred in the wars of resistance in which whole nations often allied themselves with the Portuguese in order to defend themselves from internal and external threats. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the vast majority of the colonial troops consisted of black soldiers. The hero of anti-colonial resistance, Ngungunyane (so well portrayed in Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s Ualalapi) was also a colonel in the Portuguese army. A Portuguese flag flew over his general headquarters. The deeds of many other potential resistance heroes (such as Farelay in Angoche), cannot be sung without risk of arousing the ghosts of those enslaved by them.