Literature and Identity
Germano Almeida
Introduction
Cape Verde is a very small country made up of ten islands off the west coast of
Africa. It currently has about 500,000 inhabitants, with another million estimated to be
dispersed throughout the world.
The islands were discovered by the Portuguese around 1460; they were
uninhabited. The largest island, Santiago, was originally used as a transit station for the
slave trade for various destinations around the world, and ended up being settled by a
reduced number of Europeans, mostly Portuguese, and a considerable number of people
of African descent who came from a number of different parts of Africa. After Santiago,
the other islands were gradually inhabited as well. Cape Verde has been an independent
country since 1975.
In spite of the majority presence of black people on all of the islands, the culture
that ended up being presented as dominant was that of the white settlers.
Even so, this fact is more apparent than real, because Cape Verdean culture
became so mixed that it would be more realistic to consider it something completely new,
a culture that resulted from a fusion of Africa and Europe on a rather small laboratory lost
in the Atlantic.
The question that many people continue to ask has been this: how could it be that
out of this culture, made up of so few people in a land so desperately poor and lacking
practically everything, a group of works could emerge whose sheer volume could
legitimately allow one to speak of a separate literature?
I personally respond that yes, there is indeed a Cape Verdean literature. I say this
because one cannot deny that the Cape Verdean exists. Born out of the miscegenation of
black and white, forged in the hardship of a poor land and dependent on the rain from
God and the help of Man, but where he learned to adapt in order to survive.
One particular characteristic of the Cape Verdean people is a natural, perhaps
visceral, optimism; Cape Verdeans live off hope. A hope renewed each year in the rainy
season, the reason why each year the earth is prepared as the rain is awaited, with the
same devotion of peasants in other parts of the world where the rain can be expected with
the same certainty as the day or the night. Most of the time the rain does not come, but
that is not enough reason not to repeat the work of sowing the seeds in the dry soil the
next year and in the years after that, in the hope that in one year it will end up raining.
And if it happens for that very reason, Cape Verdeans are a happy people, lovers of
parties and jokes, of an enviable humor even at their own expense. It is this people that
had to be at the origin of a literature of its own.
I
The middle of the 1930’s marked the appearance of the first Cape Verdean
literary movement that could be called truly autonomous.
It’s true that long before this period there was already a lot of writing going on
among us, as a preoccupation with the art of writing had always been noticeable among
the elites of our island societies. All the same, there is one detail that determines the
specificity of this writing; it appears essentially as a way of affirming one’s place within
the Portuguese space, or as a form of speaking out against injustice: against famine,
against social inequality and unrest, or abuses of power.
One can better understand this reality if one delves further into our history; Cape
Verde was settled more because of an interest in exploiting its strategic position in the
slave trade than for its quite meager natural resources. So much so that in order to assure
the settlement of European colonists, special incentives had to be awarded to them,
namely in the way of trade with the African coast. The island of Santiago was a slave
post, which was why there were always a large number of slaves on hand to be bought by
traders and taken away across the world. When the slave trade was finally abolished,
these slaves stayed in the country, eventually making up the majority of the population.
On the other hand, the whites men and women who came to Cape Verde mostly
from Portugal, were on the whole not people from the upper classes of society. On the
contrary, we know that the islands were settled primarily by convicts found guilty of
various crimes and subsequently sent overseas.
This had its advantages, nonetheless: they were people who were not at all
prejudiced and not reluctant to mix with the black women and men they found there, thus
resulting in a mixed people, not only ethnically but above all culturally.
Then in the mid-1800s an intellectual elite of great knowledge and valor came to
emerge at the heart of this mixed-race culture, one that nonetheless carried an inherent
and irresolvable contradiction: it wanted to be Portuguese at all costs, on equal footing
with those in mainland Portugal, but by law such status was rejected.
It should come as no surprise that it was like that. The different Cape Verdean
intellectuals who appeared in Cape Verde up to the 1920s, although born there, were
almost entirely direct descendants of Portuguese people who had moved to the islands.
Now brought up in an environment that was already Cape Verdean, but educated in
accordance with the guidelines of the Portuguese mother country, they lived with the
contradiction of feeling like Portuguese from Cape Verde, but with an unequal legal
status to that of mainland Portuguese. Even so, they demonstrated great care and effort to
show that they were in no way inferior to their metropolitan counterparts; in fact, their
writing, whether in prose or poetry, is no different in formal terms from that poets and
prose writers from Portugal. Guilherme Dantas, Loff de Vasconcelos, José Lopes,
Cónego Teixeira and others proved to be excellent cultivators not only of the Portuguese
language but also of the topics that were dear and in fashion in Portugal.
Politically, all of them defended the idea that Cape Verde should be given the
privilege of adjacent island status accorded to Madeira and the Azores, precisely because
of their acceptance of the condition of being Portuguese and not a people colonized by
Portugal.
That lasted up to around the year 1900, the point at which the hypothetical notion
was raised in Portugal to sell off the colonies, especially after Spain’s loss of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
In my opinion, this simple idea sent the Cape Verdean intellectual bourgeoisie
into a state of crisis. I say “bourgeoisie” because, in general, the ordinary people were
not really all that worried about such things; they were unconcerned with who their ruler
was, as they were more preoccupied with ways of getting food to stave off their hunger.
All the same, the bourgeoisie and the intellectual elite felt looked down upon,
treated as if they were merchandise: “objectos de factura” (“a bill of goods”), as the Cape
Verdean poet Eugénio Tavares wrote.
It is undoubtedly at this point that the rupture in elite Cape Verdean intellectual
culture begins between being Portuguese and being Cape Verdean. Pereira Marinho, the
first governor of Cape Verde from the liberal regime of Sá da Bandeira, had already
written in 1836 that the reason that Cape Verde was still Portuguese was because the
bourgeoisie and the elite were friends of Portugal, as the ordinary people didn’t care at
all. With this attitude circulating, the bourgeoisie began to question whether it truly
belonged to Portugal, even if it didn’t make too much of an issue of it.
II
The so-called Nativistas or pre-Claridosos left behind a literary archive that
deserves to be considered valuable. For example, Luis Loff de Vasconcelos, who was
born around 1860 and who dies in 1923, left behind pamphlets of a political nature, such
as A Perdição da Pátria (The Loss of the Fatherland) and O Extermínio de Cabo Verde
(The Extermination of Cape Verde). Eugénio Tavares (1867-1930), a figure of intense
political activity as a Republican and a Socialist (the reason why he ultimately led a
restless life), left a considerable legacy that came to be collected in three volumes of
prose, verse and correspondence. Some others, especially in verse, for example,
Guilherme Dantas, left behind a valuable work.
But the group that would come to leave an indelible mark on the autonomy of
Cape Verdean literature with respect to Portugal, not only in terms of form but also of
thematic content, appeared in 1936 with the literary journal Claridade.
Without a doubt, the growing awareness of the inhuman social conditions found
on the islands since the beginning of the 20th century contributed considerably to the
appearance of this journal, but particularly in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s.
At this point, the so-called “Golden Age” of Mindelo, São Vicente, had already
been over for some time—that is, the period of English coal ships docking in Porto
Grande—and once again the archipelago suffered a general state of misery of drought
and famine. São Vicente, the island where a mirage of available jobs had attracted
masses of people from other islands, now found itself drowning in unemployment and
alcoholism, so much so that around 1924 the Workers’ Association on the island had
requested and obtained a kind of law from the government that prohibited the importation
of all alcoholic beverages. Hunger among the population grew to such an extent, along
with the indifference of the government for its fate, that on June 7th, 1934, the people on
the island were driven to revolt against that that wretched way of life and took to the
streets with a unfurled black flag of hunger, pillaging the warehouses where the
merchandise of the businessmen were stored. This is the famous uprising known as the
Revolt of Captain Ambrósio and the subject of one of the most beautiful poems ever
written in Cape Verde: “O Capitão Ambrósio” by Gabriel Mariano.
Two years later, in March 1936, the first issue of the journal Claridade appeared.
Twenty years after that, Baltasar Lopes, the author of the first Cape Verdean novel
Chiquinho, would come to sum up the purpose of the group: “I and a group of friends
began to think about our problem, that is, the problem of Cape Verde.”
Directly influenced by authors from the Northeast of Brazil, such as José Lins do
Rego and Jorge Amado, along with the southern Brazilian novelist Érico Veríssimo, it is
the problem of Cape Verde and its people that the Claridosos are concerned. Showing
how Cape Verde is in no way the “Garden of the Hesperides” described by the poets from
the previous era: a place where the gods come to rest. On the contrary, Cape Verde is
represented as a disdained and forgotten land where men struggle on a daily basis against
a wicked stepmother called Nature, live in utter misery, and die of hunger, abandoned by
those who called themselves their brothers. “The drama resides in the painful statement
of fact that in Cape Verde, Nature is so rebellious and diabolical that man cannot
vanquish it, and that man is first and foremost its victim,” wrote the poet and novelist
Manuel Lopes, one of the most politically committed national figures from this group and
the author of books such as Os Flagelados do Vento Leste (The Ones Whipped by the
East Wind), Chuva Brava (Wild Rain), O Galo que Cantou na Baía (The rooster that
Crowed on the Bay), etc.
Manuel Lopes also coined the phrase that in my opinion could be considered the
political slogan of the group: “A natureza que envolve estas dez ilhas desqualifica o
homem!” (The nature that envelops these ten islands negates Man!)
But this idea of disqualified Man has to do with the political stance of generations
of intellectuals that preceded their group, as well as with their own political positions.
Because it is clear from history that the generations that come before Claridade
never imagined the idea of an independent Cape Verde. It is true that they fought against
and denounced the humiliating conditions of life in Cape Verde, the famines and other
forms of misery, but they always did it within the framework of a Cape Verde that
belonged to the Mother Country Portugal! And that is why it was such a scandal when
the idea of selling off the colonies in Portugal was discussed, because for them, above all
in relation to them, it was as if a mother had tried to sell off her own children. The
outraged cry of Loff de Vasconcelos, who confesses that his pride both as a Portuguese
and an African has been hurt—“if they don’t want us either as colonies or as adjacent
islands, then let us go our own way”—explains to a certain extent a espoused political
position with a view toward independence.
So one can say that these generations were Portuguese first, and Cape Verdean
only second.
Now it is still this same stance that characterizes the Claridade group. While
becoming more aware of its condition as Cape Verdean, that is, not of Portuguese people
born in Cape Verde but rather Cape Verdean under Portuguese rule, they begin, as
Baltasar Lopes said, to think about our problem, that is, the problem of Cape Verde.
This group was still not mature enough, however, to cut the umbilical cord that connected
it to Portugal as a colonial power, and take the quantum leap that the struggle for
independence represented, as well as what that struggle would have to mean, namely, a
collective effort so that the Cape Verdean could live in his country with dignity, free from
the constant threats of crisis and hunger.
And that is why the literature that he produces ends up summarized as a bitter
condemnation of abandonment, drought and famine. Paradigmatic of this stance is the
novel Chiquinho by Baltasar Lopes, which presents a portrait of the abandonment of
Porto Grande in São Vicente along with the steamship route for international commerce,
and the subsequent unemployment, hunger and disease among the island’s working class.
The countryside is no better off, however. The main character Chiquinho himself
mirrors this situation, as he returns to São Nicolau where he finds only drought, misery
and people who have starved to death. Chuva Brava and Os Flagelados do Vento Leste
also develop this theme of life in the countryside: his eyes fixed on a sky that has
forgotten the men below, who beg for a drop of rain. The writer of personal novels
Aurélio Gonçalves tended to portray the individual as if isolated from his environment,
almost always on São Vicente, experiencing personal dramas even when surrounded by
the poverty of his community.
III
It was without a doubt the Claridosos and their works that forged a path for the
leap that would be made with the appearance of a literature that challenged the colonial
regime and drew young people into the struggle for liberation. This literature included,
among others, poets such as Ovídio Martins, Onésimo Silveira, Gabriel Mariano, and also
Corsino Fortes, perhaps the most committed poets of his generation. Fortes, who in a
volume published under the title A Cabeça Calva de Deus (The Bald Head of God),
brings his entire work together, continues to denounce the preoccupations of his literary
precursors, but no longer limits himself to a mere contemplation of our shared misery.
Instead, he goes to “beber da água da nossa secura” (drink from the water of our dryness),
above all as a way to give a positive and pragmatic meaning to what has been a centurieslong struggle of disenchantment—as if to say, in the very course of the struggle for
national liberation unleashed meanwhile at the start of the 1960s, that our solution lies
here, in our soil, in our heads: “mesmo sendo, já não somos os flagelados do vento leste/
que o digam os braços do povo no povoado” (even so, we are no longer the ones whipped
by the east wind/ may the arms of the people in the village tell it), he says.
And in this way, even if by different paths, Gabriel Mariano, Ovídio Martins,
Corsino Fortes, and others followed Eugénio Tavares, Loff de Vasconcelos, and also
Manuel Lopes, Baltasar Lopes, António Aurélio Gonçalves, and all the others who
dreamed that one day we would have a land free of hunger and misery through the efforts
of the Cape Verdean himself.
Already since independence a new generation of writers is emerging, but now
with a new thematic emphasis and style of writing, one that tends to valorize what is
playful about the Cape Verdean, setting aside the topics of drought and famine of the
Claridosos and the poetry of political contestation of the post-Claridosos. Those who
stand out, among others are Arménio Vieira and Vera Duarte in poetry, and Dina
Salústio, Fátima Bettencourt and Mário Lúcio in prose.
(Translation: Christopher Larkosh)