Friday 1 October 2010

A Pioneer of Women's Writing in Macau

A Pioneer of Women's Writing in Macau: Deolinda da Conceição*

It is often the case in emerging literatures that one work assumes a particular importance when a country’s literary history comes to be written. One only has to think of Mozambican author Luís Bernardo Honwana’s lone collection of short stories, We Killed Many-Dog and Other Stories, and the special place it has in the literature of Mozambique, or Alan Paton’s iconic novel of apartheid South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country. In Macau, Deolinda da Conceição’s collection of stories, Cheong-sam – A Cabaia (Cheongsam – the Kebaya), published in 1956, occupies a special place, not only in the literature of Macau, but in the wider world of lusophone literature and, arguably, of the literature of China. Six of the twenty-seven tales included in the collection were translated into English and feature in the anthology of Macau prose writing, Visions of China: Stories from Macau, published by the Hong Kong University Press in 2002.

Deolinda da Conceição was a unique figure in a number of ways. Born in Macau in 1914, like many Macanese she migrated to Shanghai in the 1930s in search of better opportunities than the Portuguese territory could, at that stage, provide. In due course, and by that time the mother of two children, she was forced to flee southwards before the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai, and headed for Hong Kong, where she taught in a school for Portuguese refugees. In 1941, when the Japanese overran Hong Kong, she was briefly interned in a concentration camp. After the end of the war, and by this time a divorcee, she joined the staff in 1947 of the newly established Macau paper, Notícias de Macau, whose editor, Herman Machado Monteiro, was a Republican exile from the Salazar dictatorship. Her colleagues on the paper included other Macanese intellectuals, such as Luís Gonzaga Gomes, the author of unparalleled studies on the popular Chinese cultural heritage of Macau, and José dos Santos Ferreira, the main exponent of literature in ‘patois’, the local creole language. Deolinda da Conceição was the first female journalist in Macau, and was responsible for the women’s page of Notícias de Macau, but some of the stories subsequently published in her sole collection, originally appeared in the newspaper. She was therefore very much of her time, in the sense that she lived through a period of considerable social change and political conflict in China, while also witnessing first hand the brutalities of war. She was also in advance of the age in which she lived. As a divorcee, at least until her second marriage in 1948, and a journalist at a time when there were few women in the professions, and living in what was still a highly conservative society (as a divorcee, she was even barred from teaching), she must have seemed a disturbingly free spirit in the sheltered world of post-war Macau.

Her stories reflect, in their themes, the cultural fusions and confusions of Macau and China during the first half of the twentieth century, and her particular focus is the situation of women, very often caught between traditional expectations of their role in society or within marriage, and the new possibilities open to them as a result of Western influences in China’s great coastal cities. To some extent, the very title of the collection symbolizes the multicultural background against which these female dramas are enacted, for the cheongsam, the one-piece dress adapted from the northern Chinese qípáo, and worn by upper-class women in Shanghai from the 1920s, came to synthesize the process of modernizing East-West fusion in the area of women’s fashion and became a symbol of feminine allurement. On the other hand, the kebaya, a type of long blouse, was the product of a much earlier process of fusion. There is a debate about the origins of this garment, but what we can be reasonably sure of is that it was introduced by the Portuguese into Southern China from Southeast Asia not long after the foundation of Macau. By the time the cheongsam was developed, the kebaya was therefore a traditional, native form of clothing among Chinese women, so that the journey undertaken by Deolinda’s female characters, is also a journey between the kebaya and the cheongsam, between tradition and modernity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title story of the collection, ‘Cheongsam’, which was also one of the stories included in the anthology mentioned above. It centres on a young Chinese couple who had married in obedience to their parents’ wishes. The young wife, educated in the West, has unwittingly grown away from her traditional Chinese cultural roots, and to some extent is on a journey of no return. As a consequence of this, there is a likelihood of later incompatibility with her traditionally educated Chinese husband, and this begins to occur following the Japanese invasion and the couple’s forced flight southwards, first to Shanghai, and then to a city we assume to be Macau. The husband’s inability to provide for his wife and their children obliges her to look for work as a nightclub hostess, which enables the family to eat, but has a severe effect on the husband’s self-esteem, eventually leading to jealousy, resentment and murderous instincts. If the outcome of the story is tragic, Deolinda concentrates both on the social and economic influences leading to this outcome, and also on the moral issues surrounding the wife’s actions, not to mention the husband’s initial acceptance of them. The more the wife frequents rich foreign men in what amounts to high-class prostitution, the more she despises her husband and forgets her duties as a mother. And yet what is the underlying cause of her behaviour and the ultimate tragedy? Is it the war and hardship? Is it the fact that they have married to fulfil their parents’ rather than their own wishes? Or is it the wife’s pursuit of a dream for which her Western education is partly to blame? It is this more universal, moral problem that we find ourselves reflecting upon, and which transforms this story into an exemplary tale that we can all somehow identify with. The same could be said of other stories in the collection, from the tale of a Eurasian fashion model who, as a result of a disfiguring accident, is forced to give up her glamorous lifestyle and rethink her mission in life in a positive way, to a poor girl’s obsession with possessing a jade ring, and the moral price she might be prepared to pay in order to do so. Other tales focus on the theme of inter-racial love, and the tragedy of shame and prejudice besetting the offspring of such relationships in what was still a profoundly colonial society. As a product herself of Macau’s melting pot, the theme was particularly close to the author’s heart.

We cannot tell how Deolinda da Conceição’s work might have developed over the years of profound change that were to follow, for she died prematurely in 1957, not long after returning from her only trip to Portugal, a country with which she, like many Macanese, strongly identified as her fatherland. We cannot tell whether that loyalty might have been subtly re-defined if she had lived to witness, albeit at a distance, the long drawn-out colonial wars in Africa, and the growing obstinacy of an ailing dictatorship that only came to an end in 1974. More probably, she might have continued to chronicle the lives of the Chinese and Macanese during the topsy-turvy years of the Cultural Revolution, whose effects were felt so closely in her native city. What we are left with, however, is a collection of stories that form a unique contribution to literature in Portuguese, as well as chronicling the moral choices faced by those who are the victims of social injustice or of war, or occasionally the perpetrators of it. They are stories that still have a relevance today, and upon which we can all ponder.

* First published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 July, 2009.

Tuesday 7 September 2010

The Portuguese of Malaysia and Singapore

The Portuguese of Malaysia and their novelist, Rex Shelley.*

The Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula are close historical cousins of the Macanese, Macau’s native sons (and daughters) of Portuguese and Asian ancestry. For nearly one hundred and fifty years after its seizure by the Portuguese in 1511, the port city of Malacca was an important commercial hub in trade between Goa and China and Japan. Early Portuguese settlers in Macau inevitably came through Malacca, and very often they brought with them Malay women. Unlike Macau, of course, Malacca was seized by the Dutch in 1641, before coming under British control in the early nineteenth century. But the Portuguese creole language, Kristang, which has affinities with Macau’s Patuá, continued to be spoken by the Portuguese Eurasian community, albeit with some Dutch and later English influences. The city lost much of its previous commercial status even under the Dutch, whose main centre of operations in the region was Batavia. But it was during British rule that the centre of commercial power shifted away from Malacca to Penang and then Singapore. Malacca’s importance therefore dwindled, rather like Macau’s decline after the foundation of Hong Kong. Like the Macanese, who migrated from their tiny homeland to seek employment in Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Chinese Treaty Ports, the Portuguese Eurasians in British-ruled Malaya spread out from Malacca, seeking employment in other, more thriving metropolitan environments, in particular Singapore. They took with them their language, their cuisine, and of course, their Roman Catholicism, along with the cultural memory of their heartland. Like the Macanese, the Portuguese Eurasians of the Malay Peninsula constituted a buffer group, a frontier ethnicity whose position within the colonial order was ambiguous. They occupied the lower to middle ranks of the civil service and the police, and they worked for banks and trading houses. They were the most Oriental of the Westerners, but the most Western of the Orientals. Finally, during the volatile years of the 1950s and 60s, which witnessed the rise of Malay nationalism, the communist insurgency, and eventual independence, these Eurasians began to migrate and form diasporas elsewhere. Many went to Australia. So once again, like the Macanese, the lives of these Malay Portuguese were affected by the profound political changes that followed the end of the Second World War.
Rex Shelley is the novelist who has done most to highlight in his work, the life of the Eurasian community in Malaysia and Singapore during the most turbulent period of the region’s recent history, beginning with the Japanese invasion of 1941 and culminating in the tensions between Sukarno’s newly independent Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore as they lurched towards their own independence, a period known in regional history as 'Konfrontasi'. Shelley, who died in 2009, was himself of partial Portuguese Eurasian origin. Born in 1930, he experienced the Japanese occupation of Malaya, took degrees in Singapore and in England, and spent his professional life in the civil service and in business. He began publishing novels when he was in his sixties, which is why it is tempting to see an analogy with Macau’s Henrique de Senna Fernandes. Perhaps both writers wanted to explain to a wider world the history and drama of the community from which they sprang, but that was becoming increasingly vulnerable to change and the forces of dispersal in the post-war world. Shelley wrote four novels in which characters in one are mentioned or feature in another, thus enhancing the notion of a communal history and an inter-related set of individual and family experiences. The novel for which he will be most remembered is probably The Shrimp People (1991).

The prologue to Shelley’s first novel explains in almost mythical terms the origins of the Portuguese Eurasians. A wounded Portuguese sailor, a survivor of the initial expedition to Malacca in 1509 by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, is tended to by a native woman, after the Portuguese have been driven back by local forces. The man’s name is Rodrigues, the woman’s, Bedah. Together, they settle by the seashore, and devote themselves to catching shrimps to make the paste that will become a culinary mark of the Portuguese Eurasians of Malaya. This is the celebrated 'belachan', which of course appears in Macanese cuisine as 'balichão'. From the depths of the sixteenth century, the scene then switches to a bar in present-day Australia, where members of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora are talking of the folks back home. From these conversations, the novel gradually focuses on the story of its heroine, Bertha Rodrigues, daughter of a policeman in Singapore, a direct descendant of the original Portuguese pioneer. The story traces her passage from youth to adulthood, her exploits on the hockey field, her failed marriage following an unhappy love affair, and her involvement in espionage and the nationalist struggle for Malaysia and Singapore. Bertha is intuitive rather than intellectual, she is active, a doer, someone who is adaptable to changing circumstances, but ultimately places loyalty to her country above her attraction to Hartono, the Indonesian infiltrator who seeks to destabilise British-ruled Malaysia in the name of Sukarno’s revolutionary nationalism. At once a novel of social customs and of history, it also incorporates elements of spy fiction. But above all, it is a novel that evokes the life and culture of a small community that straddles and fuses a variety of cultural influences. Linguistically, Portuguese (or at least its creolised form) has been lost, except in Malacca, but religion and the social life that revolves around the church continue to be important for the Eurasian community. British culture, including the English language, but with a local Malay flavour, has long supplanted Portuguese, at least among Bertha's generation. At the same time, food is an important feature of the community’s identity, and The Shrimp People is littered with references to dishes and to eating. Indeed, the Eurasians, apart from attachment to their own ethnic cuisine with its blend of Portuguese and Asian influences, seem at home across the various food tastes of the Malay peninsula, which perhaps underlines their cultural adaptability and therefore their claim to a sense of belonging to the country.
Another of his novels, People of the Pear Tree (1993), is set during the Japanese occupation, and has as one of its themes the relationship between the invaders and the Eurasians, through the romantic attraction of a Japanese officer for a young beauty by the name of Anna Perera. For Captain Junichiro, the Portuguese Eurasians are a mystery, a kind of exotic 'other'. More generally, the Japanese authorities found it difficult to classify this group: were they Asian, and therefore potential allies, or were they alien Europeans, and therefore enemies? Anna's predicament is that she will have to choose between the sensitive, artistic, and scrupulously polite Japanese who is her suitor, and the English officer who is sent to liaise with the local guerrillas fighting the occupying forces in the jungle near where the bulk of the Eurasian community from Singapore has been effectively interned. Her brother, Gus, on the other hand, joins the resistance. Here then, we have what might be termed a war novel, but like Shelley's other work, it engages with the concerns of his own Eurasian community, and the question of where its loyalty lies. If the Pereras are 'a noisy family of all brown bodies interspersing their dreadful English with Portuguese', Anna's Britishness emerges when she finds herself singing along with her brother the old wartime favourite, 'There'll always be an England'. On the other hand, in discussing their future, they are torn between the choice of being absorbed into the wider Asian population and thus losing their specific identity, or reaching out to other Eurasian groups in a bid to create a homeland of their own. Historically, the third possibility of migration emerged in the 1950s and 60s, bringing with it further problems of adaptation, integration, and the preservation of a unique cultural identity. Shelley touched upon this in his first novel, but migration and the experience of the Portuguese Eurasian diaspora in the wider world has been a theme taken up by other writers from Malaysia and Singapore. I look forward to returning to the subject of these writers in the near future.

DAVID BROOKSHAW

* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 July, 2010.

Tuesday 3 August 2010

Poetry without borders: translating Macau

Poetry without borders: translating Macau*

A decade after the handover, it is encouraging to see that the question of Macau as a literary space, is becoming a point of discussion and debate, and all the more so in the place where it matters most: Macau itself. The Association of Stories in Macao is a non-profit making publishing operation, the aim of which is to disseminate the fiction and poetry of Macau-based authors in English or in translation. Many of the works published so far are by young writers attached to the creative writing programme of the University of Macau's English Department, a programme that has been developed and led by Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Kelen is an Australian poet, artist and critic, who has lived in Macau and in Hong Kong for over ten years, and is a leading light in this latest editorial initiative, having published some of his own work in the series, including his beguiling collection of stories and poems, Macao: a Map of the Seasons (2006). But it is in his coordination of a team of translators that Kelen has sought to bridge the gaping abyss between the linguistic communities in Macau, namely those who write in Chinese, in English and in Portuguese. Two recent anthologies of Macau poetry, I Roll the Dice – Contemporary Macao Poetry (2008), and Portuguese Poets of Macau (2010), are testimony to these efforts. To these, one should add Kelen’s own City of Poets (2009), in which he dons his scholar’s hat to write the first interpretative study of poetry produced in Macau, a kind of companion volume to the anthologies. In the study, he sets out to explore common themes and concerns suggested by authors from different linguistic backgrounds, but who are drawn together by the fact that they inhabit the same geographical space and experience the same everyday preoccupations, but from different cultural perspectives.
There have, of course, been concerted attempts to evoke Macau through literature before. During the ten years leading up to the handover, there was a considerable amount of literary activity in the city, and even one or two attempts to cross the linguistic divide by producing anthologies of poetry containing the work of both Portuguese and Chinese poets, such as that organised by Jorge Arrimar and Yao Jingming under the title of Antologia de Poetas de Macau, and published in 1999. But what proved to be quite a prolific period in the emerging literature of Macau came to a sudden end after the handover for a number of reasons, not least of which was the scaling down, if not outright disappearance of subsidies for publication. Literary movements that seek to evoke a particular place tend to mirror and reflect upon issues of profound change. Macau during the late 1980s and 1990s was on the cusp of such change as Portuguese rule drew to a close, and the city skyline began to emulate that of Hong Kong during what, in retrospect, was a modest construction boom. The decade since 1999 has seen even greater change with the arrival of unbridled casino capitalism, even more spectacular building on ever larger areas of land reclamation, and genuine examples of Macau’s UNESCO-protected architectural heritage rubbing shoulders with postmodern kitsch, whether in the form of lotus-shaped casinos or re-creations of Venetian waterfronts backed by proliferations of mosaic pavements in the Portuguese style. The time has come for literature again, and Kelen and his group are showcasing it through the intermediary of English.
At the same time, there has been a subtle change in approach since the publication of I Roll the Dice. The particular focus for this first anthology was the work of contemporary poets in Macau, most of whom were Chinese, some from Kelen’s creative writing programme. Other poems were by Portuguese or English-speaking residents of Macau. As the editors explained in the introduction, ‘… this is an important book for Macao poetry – precisely because it is in English, because it thus introduces a wide range of current Macao writing in the genre to an international audience’. The confident assertion is true, of course, but not unconditionally so. There is the small matter of distribution and marketing, which plays its part in determining readership. Internationally known lusophone writers such as José Saramago, Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa have undoubtedly broadened their readership by being translated into English, but they are probably read more consistently by greater numbers of lusophone readers in the world than they are by anglophones, and one should not forget their popularity among readers of their work in French, Italian, German, Spanish and other translations. Ultimately, the English-speaking world is still a linguistic prison, if only larger and with more inmates than most others.
This brings us to the position of English in Macau, where it is understood and spoken more widely than the region’s second official language, Portuguese. As we all know, the encroachment of English gathered pace with the expansion of British and American commercial power into the Pacific and South China Sea in the Nineteenth Century. There is nothing new here, for English has been familiar to the Macanese ever since the establishment of the East India Company in their city over two hundred years ago. But what seems to be happening now is that the special Luso-Cantonese character of the city is being squeezed, on the one hand by China’s main dialect, Mandarin, and on the other by the pan-European dialect of English. Yet it is precisely the Portuguese heritage that gives Macau its specific character in relation to other cities in China, and its linguistic complexity is far richer than, say, Hong Kong, its postcolonial neighbour. With Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and a creole language of long tradition, which, even if no longer spoken, is still a mark of Macanese identity, Macau is a peculiarly multi-lingual space. Nor have we even mentioned Thai, Filipino, Tetum, and languages from the Indian subcontinent, that are spoken by minority communities. Macau is a place of translation in more ways than one, but for its writers to have any hope of dialogue with one another, there must be a to-ing and fro-ing between and among its constituent linguistic parts. In this sense, English should just be another tool for expressing Macau rather than the language of coalescence. Kelen and his team seem to have sensed this: it is, for example, no coincidence that the latest anthology, Portuguese Poets of Macau, features the Portuguese original alongside the English translation. Containing examples of poems by early writers to have left their mark on Macau, such as Camões, Garrett and Pessanha, the collection also covers a broad range of contemporary poets who have resided in the city, or others who were born and raised here. In all, the anthology contains work by over forty poets, rendered into English by a team of fifteen translators. At the same time, single-author collections published during the last two years include Kelen's As from the Living Page – One Hundred Poems for Yao Feng, in English, Portuguese and Chinese, John Mateer's Republic of the East, featuring Portuguese translations alongside the English originals, and Agnes Vong's Glitter on the Sketch, in English and Chinese. The overall effect is of poetry being relayed from one language to another and back again in an exercise of poetic give and take.
It has often been argued that multi-cultural, and pluri-lingual environments have a special role in equipping people for the challenges of globalization. Mia Couto, the Mozambican writer, claimed in a speech to an international conference in Stockholm, that Africans 'may be better suited to modernity than even they themselves think' because of their ability to speak more than one African language in addition to a European one. In reality, many Mozambicans speak excellent English in addition to Portuguese, and the country’s recent adherence to the organization of francophone countries, suggests that some, at least, will be adding French to their linguistic repertoire. What could be said for Couto's native country, with its long coastline, and its openness to outside influences from the Atlantic world and from across the Indian Ocean, could be articulated with even more certainty for Macau, which was born out of international trade, and has never quite lost the cultural personality that goes with that position. The Association of Stories in Macao reflects this personality in literature, enabling, as it does, writers to acknowledge each other across linguistic borders, and to understand both their common experiences as well as their differences in relation to the city they inhabit. As Kelen so aptly states in his study, the new Macao poetry ‘reveals a place-based poetics deeply concerned with Macao identity, its evolution and potentials’. Part of this potential surely lies in the very languages used to express its poetic self.

DAVID BROOKSHAW

*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 19 June, 2010.

Monday 19 July 2010

Fiction awaiting the arrival of history: Martin Edmond's Luca Antara.*

The cover of the 2009 British edition of Martin Edmond’s beguiling book, Luca Antara, features the outline of a face of indeterminate ethnicity upon an image of the Australian interior, and a sixteenth-century sailing ship with a large red cross on its billowing sail. We could be forgiven for assuming that the book is a literary re-enactment of the old debate surrounding the supposed ‘discovery’ of Australia by the Portuguese nearly two centuries before the arrival of James Cook, and indeed, if that was what we were looking for, we would not be disappointed. However, Edmond’s book is far more than a mere contribution to the theories put forward by Kenneth McIntyre and more recently Peter Trickett, based on their readings of the so-called Dieppe Map, and refuted by various Australian academics.

Luca Antara defies genre. It interweaves elements of autobiography, biography, bookish criticism, history and fiction. It includes a quest motif, and to cap it all, it was located by this reader in the ‘travel literature’ section of one of his favourite local bookshops. Edmond is the author of a number of books, and has lived in Sydney since 1981, when he left his native New Zealand. In Sydney, he has worked as a taxi driver, but the persona he reveals in that part of Luca Antara that might loosely be termed a memoir, is one that has an abiding interest in the remote history of travel in the Pacific, an obsession that is fed by a Borgesian fascination with the labyrinthine world of second-hand bookshops, from where his own personal library is re-stocked with a regular stream of bibliographical curiosities. It is this that leads him eventually to the figure of Manoel Godinho de Herédia, the Luso-Malay cosmographer and supposed sponsor of an expedition from Malacca at the beginning of the seventeenth century to discover the fabled southern continent. But Edmond, the bookish taxi driver, is a more general bibliophile who has his own favourite authors, one of whom is none other than Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s greatest poet of the twentieth century and who, rather as Edmond inhabited the demimonde of migrants and the unsettled in inner-city Sydney, led an apparently anonymous life around the bars and cafés of central Lisbon in the 1920s and 30s, while inventing an alternative world through the creation of his heteronyms. Indeed, it is the relationship between the artist and his invention, the plausibility of the hoax that fascinates Edmond. Following this line of argument, for Edmond, Ern Malley, the literary creation who fooled the worthies of the Australian literary establishment in the 1950s, is as real as Pessoa’s fictitious personalities such as Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares, and Álvaro de Campos. And when Pessoa’s other heteronym, Ricardo Reis, appropriated by José Saramago in his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, declares his independence from his original inventor, the act merely underlines Edmond’s attachment to the importance of reader reception in determining the authenticity of character. What is important is not that people are deceived by the hoax, but rather the inner truths of what the hoax, or in the case of Pessoa, the heteronyms, might have to impart, and this consideration will become important in what goes on to constitute the central quest of the book.

As the narrative meanders along, Edmond develops an obsession with the figure of Herédia, after obtaining an English translation of his works from the Kuala Lumpur branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. His curiosity about Herédia’s supposed commissioning of a voyage of discovery to Luca Antara undertaken by his servant in 1610, leads him to wonder whether, to quote him, ‘it would be possible to fabricate an account of this voyage in such a way as to give it not just credence as a work of fiction but the unmistakable aura of truth’. In the end he decides against the attempt, but instead is put in touch with the enigmatic Henry Klang, in Malacca, who claims to have seen and copied the account of the voyage of Herédia’s servant, António da Nova, to Australia, while he was working in the national archive of Malaysia. It is his English rendition, or summary, of the supposed document that is fed to Edmond via e-mail, and then re-spun into the book, Luca Antara. So he has ended up doing what he had decided against doing, that is, he has fabricated a story based on supposed archival evidence, but which he later discovers has mysteriously disappeared. We are back to the author’s professed fascination with Pessoa, for we are unsure whether the oddball Klang is not merely Edmond’s heteronym – another obsessive misfit like himself, a Portuguese Catholic Eurasian, and therefore like Edmond in Australia, a kind of outsider within. But even if Klang exists, and we are led to believe that he does, for Edmond tracks him down on an investigative trip to Malacca, then we are still left in little doubt that António da Nova is, after all, Klang’s invention, a spiritual ancestor, as Klang himself terms him, a kind of heteronym from the deep history of Portuguese expansion in Southeast Asia. As for António da Nova, what does his story say about the supposed arrival of the Portuguese in North-western Australia at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Nothing beyond providing us with an enthralling, but plausible tale of romance. Stranger things happened in Portugal’s far-flung empire. António’s contracting of a sea-going ‘prahu’, or fishing boat, to take him further south than any European had ventured before, his abandonment on the coast of Luca Antara, his astonishing encounter with a Portuguese New Christian degradee, and his flight with Estrela, the degradee’s mixed-race daughter on another vessel carrying a cargo of the prized sea-slugs for the Chinese market, all come as no surprise to those who are familiar with historically verified incidents in Portuguese overseas history. Portuguese adventurers ranged far beyond the confines of their main commercial hubs of Goa, Malacca, Macassar, and Macau, cropping up around the coasts of the Bay of Bengal and throughout the so-called Spice Islands. The arrival of a lone Portuguese in Australia is an intriguing possibility that clearly appeals to Edmond’s romantic sensibilities.

In the final part of the book, which takes on the characteristics of a travel narrative, Edmond returns from Malacca to Australia, but attempts to follow the route of António da Nova through Java, Bali and on to the island of Flores, on a succession of ever more decrepit ferries, and in the company of various more or less picturesque travellers. His encounter with the myths of local pygmies on the island of Flores, the residue of some prehistoric population dating from the time when the islands were joined to Australia, before the seas flooded and destroyed the lands between these islands, lead Edmond to surmise that perhaps Herédia’s depiction of Luca Antara was no more than the lost continent of his sixteenth-century imagination. To put it another way, Herédia was his own heteronym, and Luca Antara a lost paradise waiting to be regained: Luca Antara was fiction awaiting the arrival of history.

DAVID BROOKSHAW

* Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), on 8 May 2010.

Saturday 19 June 2010

Teolinda Gersão, The Word Tree

The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão: a novel of colonial Mozambique.*

Last month saw the launch, in English translation, of Portuguese writer Teolinda Gersão’s novel, A Árvore das Palavras, first published in Lisbon in 1996. The Word Tree, rendered from the original by prize-winning translator, Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Dedalus, is the first novel by Gersão to appear in English. It is set in Mozambique during the late colonial period, but unlike Lídia Jorge’s The Murmuring Coast, or António Lobo Antunes’s South of Nowhere, set respectively in Mozambique and Angola during the height of the colonial war, Gersão’s novel has as its background the city of Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo) in the early 1960s, on the eve of the conflict that would only end with the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974.
The novel’s central character is Gita, a young girl born in Mozambique to white parents from Portugal. It is about her growing up and coming of age, but it is also about her own identification with the country and continent of her birth, facilitated in part by the presence of the black maid and Gita's former wet nurse, Lóia, and her daughter Orquídea, a kind of adopted sister with whom Gita finds the freedom from the inhibitions placed upon her by her biological mother, Amélia, who is obsessed with being accepted into the higher echelons of colonial society. Indeed, in some ways, Amélia is the novel’s most intriguing character because she represents an attitude towards her surroundings that is generally overlooked or dismissed by mainstream postcolonial literature. Amélia arrived in Lourenço Marques as a mail-order bride to Laureano Capítulo, a surname that translates into English as 'Chapter', the significance of which becomes apparent as the story progresses. ‘Casamento por procuração’ (marriage by procurement) was a common practice in Portuguese Africa, for it allowed impoverished women in Portugal to exchange hardship and lack of prospects back home for greater comfort and privilege in the tropics, through marriage to a white colonial male. What she discovers is that Laureano cannot match her ambitions to rise socially and enter the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of the colonial capital. Instead, all she can do is live on its fringes as a seamstress, while compensating for her lack of status by dyeing her hair blond, enrolling her daughter in ballet classes, and eventually entering into a correspondence, under the fantasy name of Patricia Hart, with an Australian Portuguese who is looking for a wife, and takes her back to Sydney, so closing her Mozambique ‘chapter’. More suburban Madame Bovary than Moll Flanders, and certainly less raunchy than Defoe’s distant heroine, Amélia nevertheless illustrates the interface between home and empire in her journey from the stagnant gloom of Salazar’s Portugal to the open possibilities of a wider colonial world.
By the time Amélia abandons the family, Gita is in secondary school. She experiences romance with a wealthy school friend who lets her down, dabbles in student politics, and as the colony lurches towards its remote bush war, leaves for Portugal to stay with distant relatives and work her way through college. It is perhaps a paradox that while Amélia had left the imprisonment of rural Portugal in pursuit of freedom, Gita abandons the cosmopolitan freedoms of her native land, for the constraints of a motherland she has never known, but which inevitably now represents the next chapter in her own life, and a possible route to her own freedom as a young woman. And if Gita’s mother, resentful and fearful of blacks when in Mozambique, has taken flight to Australia, the last bastion of white settler safety, the abandoned Laureano, whose lack of social ambition was only matched by his love of Africa, has gone native in the autumn of his existence, by fathering a child with the local woman who has taken over as his live-in housekeeper. Unable to cater for Amélia's aspirations in the highly stratified society of colonial Lourenço Marques, Laureano has also unwittingly embarked on another, perhaps final chapter in his life. The novel is a snapshot of Portugal and Portuguese Africa in the middle years of the twentieth century as the country’s elderly and embattled regime sought to maintain order at home, and its ailing empire intact.
Above all, The Word Tree is an atmospheric novel, which evokes a time and a place in impressive detail. The contours and topography of the city are precisely mapped, and there are myriad references to neighbourhoods, streets, squares, buildings, shops, cafés and beaches, which lend the narrative greater authenticity. Gersão never lived in Mozambique for any length of time, but only visited it during long summer holidays in her youth. The narrative is therefore, to some extent, an exercise in memory. Perhaps its most abiding quality is its evocation of the space, freedom and open possibilities that Africa represented for the sons and daughters of a colonial population that has now largely been displaced, and who, like Gersão, only have memories of the environment in which they grew up. In recalling Africa, it is simultaneously recalling the innocent idealism of youth. Gita’s thoughts, as she embarks for Lisbon, speak to the memories of many who, like her, identified more with the land of their birth than they did with that from where their parents had originally migrated, a mother country they had only heard about: “The world that I’m leaving behind. Rivers, plantations, savannahs, palm groves, wide open spaces, broad horizons, and a tree that used to grow in my dreams and that reached up to the sky – what do they know of all that, how can they understand?”

DAVID BROOKSHAW

* Publsihed in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 April, 2010.
Monkey kings and other picaresque heroes: the novels of Timothy Mo*

Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950, to a British mother and a Cantonese father. He was educated from the age of ten in England, and took a degree in History from the University of Oxford. After graduating, he worked briefly as a journalist before re-locating to his native Hong Kong, which served as a springboard for his growing interest in the hectically hybrid world of Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, which form the backdrop to his most recent novels, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), and Renegade or Halo2 (1999). He is a writer of considerable wit and colour, who possesses a strongly satirical eye. His characters often border on the picaresque, and through them he examines the effects of migration, psychological loss, cultural hybridization and social and economic exploitation, which are the stock-in-trade of what we have come to know as postcolonial literature.

Three of his novels relate in some way to the Portuguese presence in this hemisphere. His first novel, The Monkey King, published in 1978, is set in Hong Kong, and in the figure of Wallace Nolasco, we have a type of blueprint for the hapless, outsider/insider hero that will be a feature of his later novels. Wallace is a Macanese, or Hong Kong Portuguese, with links back to an impoverished but blue-blooded Macau family. He has married May Ling, the daughter of the rich Chinese businessman, Mr Poon. But his expectations of a life of luxury are disappointed when he discovers that the mansion he thought he was going to live in is no more than a flat in a tenement building, and that Poon is as miserly as he is wealthy. As for Poon, he has other plans for Wallace as his ambitions turn increasingly towards the construction boom during the Korean War, and he finds his son-in-law a clerical position in the Public Works Department where he hopes the family interests will be defended by Wallace’s signature being strategically appended to contracts approved by the government. When things go suddenly awry, Wallace and May Ling are bundled off to an isolated village in the New Territories to lie low until the scandal blows over, and it is here that Wallace redeems himself, showing leadership and flair in a series of projects that will improve the lives of the village inhabitants, while paving the way for his eventual return and taking command of the family business from the increasingly frail Mr Poon. Wallace’s journey from slothful, impotent and resentful son-in-law at the very base of the family hierarchy, to minor civil servant (a traditional occupation of the Macanese and Hong Kong Portuguese), to self-confident entrepreneur and diplomatic healer of village rivalries, is narrated with satirical irreverence and comedy, which places the novel well within the picaresque tradition. Wallace is a survivor, like the monkey king of Chinese tradition.

Mo’s second novel, Sour Sweet, was published in 1982, and was the first literary work to focus on the Chinese diaspora in England. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in the same year, and turned into a film in 1988, directed by Mike Newell and starring Sylvia Chang and Soon-Tek Oh. But it was in his third work of fiction that Mo again highlighted the inter-relationship between his native city and Macau: An Insular Possession (1986) was described by Tariq Ali in the Guardian as a ‘powerful, beautifully written narrative… a potent amalgam of history and fiction’. The novel, which again featured on the Booker shortlist, is set in the Pearl River estuary during the Opium War in the years leading up to the British occupation of Hong Kong. Like James Clavell’s blockbuster, Tai-Pan, coincidentally published exactly twenty years before, the novel is partially set in Macau and contains Portuguese characters. But here, any comparison with Clavell must end, for while Tai-Pan contains all the features of an empire-building novel, with strong plot line, omniscient narrator, and relationships driven by romance, lust and entrepreneurial rivalry, Mo’s work moves forward at a leisurely, occasionally light-hearted pace, blending different literary forms, including newspaper accounts, letters, and straight narrative. It is a period piece, in which Mo demonstrates sensitivities and skills obtained from his academic training as a historian, as well as considerable linguistic versatility. Moreover, our view of events leading up to the seizure of Hong Kong, is filtered through the eyes of two young American expatriates who, to some extent, incarnate Mo’s attachment to the figure of the outsider, the observer who is not centrally involved in the business of militaristic, colonial conquest.

His fourth novel, The Redundancy of Courage, published in 1991, is set in the fictional island of Danu during the invasion and occupation by the neighbouring expansionist ‘malais’, and is a scarcely disguised account of the Indonesian military invasion and occupation of East Timor after the Portuguese effectively abandoned the colony in 1975. Adolph Ng is a Chinese Timorese, who has returned to his native land to run a hotel after being educated in Canada. Adolph, rather like Mo’s other fundamentally placid heroes is swept up in the resistance to the invaders, rubbing shoulders with ex-seminarians turned Marxist guerrillas and experiencing the dangers, cruelties, betrayals, and moral adjustments of an insurgency hidden from the international limelight. Captured by the ‘malais’, he becomes the servant of an army colonel, eventually negotiating his release into exile away from Danu. The end of the novel sees Adolph fail to adapt to life in the former imperial capital, as he comments, ‘I wandered up the maze of cobbled alleyways to the city’s most venerable quarter. This was the old world, and you could keep it’. Eventually, he chooses to settle in Brazil under the name of Kawasaki, thus suggesting an intention to blend into the country’s large Japanese community. The novel, which involved a considerable amount of research on the part of the author, was praised by none other than the future president of East Timor, José Ramos Horta, who makes a cameo appearance as Joaquim Lobato, the penniless representative of the Danu nationalist movement in New York. The Redundancy of Courage was a unique novel for its time, the only work of literature to engage with a brutal military campaign on the extreme periphery of a former European empire, which is why it also has a special place in the development of East Timorese literature.

Mo’s most recent anti-hero is Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, son of a black American GI and a Filipino bar-girl who herself was ‘half-lowland Malay, half-highland aboriginal, with a trace of philandering Chinese trader somewhere in the family tree’. Castro, the protagonist of Renegade or Halo2, is educated by an eccentric Jesuit, and forced to leave the Philippines in a hurry after being scapegoated for a crime. His travels as a sailor take him to Hong Kong, the Middle East, England and Cuba. He experiences violence and semi-slavery, but as a kind of postcolonial everyman and observer of the world around him, his life is one of continual cultural adaptation and re-invention, even though he never loses the central core of his personality. It is a rich, mesmerising literary tour-de-force that coincidentally ties together two extremes of an old Iberian empire: the Philippines and Cuba, which Rey finds strangely familiar, and where he rapidly learns to make himself understood. Mo’s interest in the Hong Kong Portuguese, Macau, East Timor and the Philippines, suggests some sort of an affinity with the hybrid cultures of these ancient corners of empire on the part of an author who identifies them as mirroring his own experience as a person through whom flow the cultures of Asia and Europe. Wallace, Adolph and Rey, ever more flamboyant intermediaries between mutually misunderstanding cultures, are both survivors and victims, but also the recipients and agents of modernity on their journey through life.

DAVID BROOKSHAW

Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 28 November, 2009.
LOVE AND BETRAYAL IN OCCUPIED HONG KONG: JANICE Y.K. LEE’S THE PIANO TEACHER*

The continuing thematic appeal to contemporary English writers of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, in particular the Second World War, has often been the subject of debate among critics and scholars. War as a watershed phenomenon, during the course of which, old routines are turned upside down, or as a result of which, major social changes occur, seem to offer writers opportunities for comment about social conundrums or national history, while introducing dramatic tensions, unforeseen romance, episodes of brutality and betrayal, that make for strong story lines as well as providing readers with reasons for reflection about the nation’s present in relation to its past. War as an agent of drama and of change is also a feature of some of the literature set in Macau and Hong Kong, not to mention other parts of Asia that have experienced widescale conflict during the last century. It is, of course, present in the short stories of Deolinda da Conceição and of Henrique de Senna Fernandes, Macau’s two main Macanese fiction writers . It is also the subject of a recent bestselling novel set in Hong Kong, The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee.

Lee’s novel featured as a New York Times bestseller earlier this year, and has been translated into no less than twenty-four languages. It is the first novel by this Hong Kong-born, American-educated writer of Korean parentage, who has returned to live in the city of her birth. The Piano Teacher is ostensibly about Hong Kong in the early 1950s, and focuses on a love affair between Claire Pendleton, a recently-married Englishwoman, who has fled the grime of post-war England to live in Hong Kong, and Will Truesdale, a colonial who had arrived in the city on the eve of the Japanese invasion of the territory at the end of 1941. The dramatic tension and interest of this atmospheric novel are maintained through a series of flashbacks to the years of the Japanese occupation, and the slow progress on the part of Claire in uncovering the truth about Truesdale’s involvement with the enigmatic Eurasian beauty, Trudy Liang, the daughter of a Shanghainese father and a Portuguese mother. As this split-level novel develops, it becomes apparent that while Claire is perhaps the heroine of the story in so far as she goes through a life-changing set of experiences, she could hardly have achieved this without her growing understanding of the personality and motivations of Trudy, her lover’s wartime lover.

As the author stated in an interview, Trudy is ‘the truest symbol of East-West culture because she’s Portuguese and Chinese’. It is not entirely clear whether Lee was merely referring to Trudy’s multi-cultural identity, or whether she meant to highlight the historic role of the Portuguese in the encounter between Europe and the East, but something in her words seems to suggest a recognition of Portugal’s position as the first bridge builder between China and the West. Certainly, no one who knows the history of Hong Kong or the Chinese Treaty Ports of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can deny the pivotal role played by the Portuguese from Macau as intermediaries between colonial administrators and the Chinese population. Trudy is the result of this melting-pot. Brought up in Shanghai, she is fluent in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, while possessing ‘conversational’ French, and a ‘smattering’ of Portuguese. Abandoned by her Portuguese mother as a child, she and her father fled Shanghai for Hong Kong, where she lives the life of a wealthy socialite, while her father has retreated to a large mansion in Macau. She is a woman in transit between worlds, but is conscious of not being fully accepted, either by the Europeans or the Chinese, for to the Europeans she looks Chinese, while for the Chinese, she acts too much like a European. This is the root of her ambiguity and, for Truesdale, the mark of her allure, for he sees in her the misfit that he, deep down, would like to be.

When the Japanese arrive, the lovers are separated, for Truesdale is interned in a concentration camp, while Trudy, as a Portuguese Eurasian, remains free, to survive as best as she can in occupied Hong Kong. It is from this point on that Trudy allows herself to be sucked deeper and deeper into a web of deceit and betrayal, involving the Japanese police chief, Chinese collaborators, and European civilians, a process that will transform her into a tragic heroine. It is the truth behind what happened and why, that Claire Pendleton sets out to establish as part of her own journey of self-discovery. In so doing, the author is able to raise questions about the nature of cowardice and betrayal. Was Trudy a coward for appearing to collaborate with agents of the occupying power? Or were the real cowards those who adapted too comfortably to their imprisonment, protected at least notionally by the Geneva Convention? Was it more dangerous to be imprisoned in a concentration camp, or to live by one’s wits in the bigger prison of the occupied city governed by whim? The Piano Teacher is a novel that begs to be made into a film, and one can well imagine Ang Lee, the director of ‘Lust, Caution’ rising to the challenge, for Trudy’s dilemma bears some resemblance to that of the enigmatic Chia Chi in Lee’s film: deep down, hers is a conflict of loyalty in a world that appears to offer her none, and the novel suggests that the final outcome of her life may be the result of her own failing as much as it is the failing of other characters.

As the novel draws to its close, and Claire uncovers a plausible truth about Trudy’s life, she abandons both husband and lover, and resigns from her job as piano teacher to the daughter of an upwardly mobile Chinese couple, who are also linked through kinship to Trudy and therefore party to the secret surrounding her fate. But she decides to stay in Hong Kong, to disappear into its Chinese but cosmopolitan society, while turning her back on the constricting circles of the British colonial elite. Is it Hong Kong that has changed her, given her a new lease of life, or is it her association with the story of Trudy Liang? The book allows us, the readers, to decide, but at the end it is perhaps no coincidence that Claire Pendleton, the blond Englishwoman, has somehow taken steps to enter the culturally hybrid, international world once inhabited by a lively, forthright Portuguese Eurasian woman with a Chinese face.

DAVID BROOKSHAW

*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 October, 2009.

Austin Coates, City of Broken Promises

Where history meets fiction: Austin Coates’s City of Broken Promises*.

This year has seen the welcome re-edition by the Hong Kong University Press of books by Austin Coates, an author who lived and worked for many years in Hong Kong, and who wrote a number of seminal works on Macau, a city whose history fascinated him. Born in 1922, Coates, after serving in RAF Intelligence in South East Asia during the War, later became a magistrate in Hong Kong, after which he briefly joined the British colonial service in Malaya. In 1962, he returned to Hong Kong in order to devote his time to writing, and indeed, his books on Macau and other works, such as his biography of the Philippine nationalist, José Rizal, date from this period. Like the older Charles Boxer and the younger John Villiers, Coates represented a breed of British ‘gentleman scholars’, whose interest in the history of the Portuguese in East and South East Asia stemmed from their direct experience of living and working in that part of the world. It is perhaps fitting that Coates should have spent the last years of his life between Hong Kong and a home near Sintra, in Portugal, where he died in 1997.

A Macao Narrative, which was originally published in 1978, is still the most readable account of the history of Macau and an excellent introduction for students or the interested visitor. His later work, Macao and the British, 1637-1842, focuses rather more specifically upon British involvement in the city, from the first recorded visit by the Cornish traveller, Peter Mundy, in 1637 through to the opium wars and the eventual seizure of neighbouring Hong Kong by the British. But perhaps Coates’s most fondly remembered work relating to Macau is his City of Broken Promises, first published in 1967 and now re-issued with the two other books just mentioned, for it is the product both of the author’s energy as a scholar, involving research undertaken in the libraries of Macau, Portugal and Britain, and of his imagination, being a re-creation of stories heard in Macau. His interest in the figure of Martha Merop is said to have stemmed from having seen her portrait on a visit to Macau’s Santa Casa da Misericórdia, or Holy House of Mercy. This same painting is reproduced on the book’s cover. City of Broken Promises is a historical novel set roughly between the years 1780 and 1795. The age of Macau’s great prosperity, when it was the hub for the trade in silks and silver between China and Japan, has long gone. But it has assumed a new, cosmopolitan character, with the arrival of the British East India Company along with other Europeans who have been allowed by the Chinese to establish themselves in Macau so as to limit their presence in Canton to the trading season.

In this at once international and provincial environment, European expatriates and Portuguese and Macanese lead largely separate lives, at most viewing each other with suspicion, while the Chinese who service the settlement during the day, leave it at night to an uncanny silence. Behind the shuttered windows of Macau’s Mediterranean villas and mansions, intrigues and conspiracies abound, and foreign traders consort with their local mistresses or ‘pensioners’, whom they will abandon when they return to Europe, thus breaking their promises of marriage. These promises, along with those of quick profit, give the novel its undertow of deceit, and of course justify the title of the story. Into this social pot pourri step the two main characters, Thomas and Martha, both of whom are, to some extent, outsiders and therefore exceptions to the norm. Thomas van Merop is an Anglo-Dutch functionary of the East India Company, an organisation that proved to be the proverbial cuckoo in the nest, breeding resentment among the local Portuguese, but at the same time guaranteeing Macau’s continuing status as Europe’s main commercial entrepot in the Far East. Through his English mother, Merop is cousin of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and therefore a man of liberal, reformist pedigree. His relationship with his fellow functionaries will be strained by his opposition to the opium trade, in which many are privately involved, among them, Abraham Biddle, a country trader of Dickensian proportions, whose fall from grace is as disastrous as are his attempts to accumulate wealth and improve his lowly status.

Martha da Silva is a Chinese orphan, who has been brought up by the Abbess of the local convent. At a certain age, she has been attached to a local Macanese family, has been mistreated, and has fallen out with the woman who is supposed to protect her, but instead resents her. Unable to return to the convent, she has ended up as the pensioner of Thomas van Merop’s predecessor. She is therefore passed on to Merop along with the Company house and servants. In this unusual domestic arrangement, Martha stands out as a teenager of unusual intelligence and initiative, while also possessing a type of childlike innocence. She speaks fluent French and Portuguese, and has an insatiable curiosity about the world beyond the narrow confines of Macau, and it is this ambition, coupled with one or two strokes of luck, and her own savvy, not to mention a secret marriage to the dying Merop, that result in her becoming Macau’s first native trader, shipowner and wealthy benefactress. The way she achieves this is, of course, the substance of the tale, with all its twists, turns and moments of drama.

One of the novel’s most abiding qualities, apart from its vivid depiction of a particular place and time, is the way it demonstrates the inner workings of colonial society in Portugal’s overseas empire. In the manner of Chica da Silva, the Brazilian slave woman who ended up free, rich and powerful, Martha manages to short-circuit the colonial hierarchy based on class and colour, allowing her to slip into a social role that would normally have been denied her. This is not to say that the Portuguese were by nature non-racist, as thinkers like Gilberto Freyre would have led us to believe, but that caste systems based on race and skin colour were, in pratice, unsustainable in distant realms and at times of social change. In the context of Macau, Martha, the illiterate Chinese orphan girl brought up on the fringes of colonial society to speak its languages and worship its God, is, in any meaningful sense of the word, Macanese, and this reality flies in the face of those whose definition of this group insists on the presence of a Portuguese blood line. Like many intermediary groups that emerged during colonial rule, the determining power of culture over genetics is a reality that Martha readily exemplifies, and this in itself produces a profound identity crisis that she has to overcome in order to survive socially and gain the respect of both the Europeans and the Chinese. Nowhere is this process of learning more vividly illustrated than in the episode in which Martha allows herself to be taken to a Chinese temple in the city, with a view to rejoining the world of her biological parents, and escaping the insecurities of life among the Portuguese and the British, for whom her only use is as a bed mate. It is this struggle between how she is outwardly perceived as a Chinese girl, and how she feels as someone whose upbringing has propelled her into the creolised world of the Macanese that is handled so perceptively by the author. Equally, the ties of kinship between Chinese ‘adopted’ children and extended Macanese families, are amply illustrated in the links between Martha and Teresa da Silva, whose surname she is allowed to adopt, and who is herself in cohabitation with an expatriate French trader, and Teresa’s cousin, Pedro Gonçalves Siqueira, whose commercial dealings and social aspirations in turn link him into the world of the Portuguese administrative elite on the one hand, and the British traders on the other.

This elegantly written novel evokes the multi-cultural roots of modern Macau, but it also offers us a glimpse of the East India Company in its declining years, as old state-backed monopolies gave way to the demand for free trade that would pervade notions of liberalism in the following century. It is also not unreasonable to assume that Coates’s novel formed a type of blueprint for Portuguese writers in Macau in later decades to tap the rich vein of oral history, the tales of forbidden love and scandal that abound in this city. Macau may be a small world, but it contains within it the world.


David Brookshaw

*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine, 5 September, 2009)

Sunday 16 May 2010

Poetry of Agostinho Neto (Portuguese)

Agostinho Neto: um poeta na encruzilhada*
(David Brookshaw, Universidade de Bristol, Reino Unido)


É talvez inevitável que o nome de António Agostinho Neto tenha sido referido como sendo a mais alta expressão poética de ‘angolanidade’ e, de certa forma, o fundador da moderna poesia angolana. A sua posição como líder do MPLA, o partido histórico nacionalista, e primeiro presidente de Angola o torna incontestavelmente o pai político da nação. Porém, a noção de angolanidade como expressão cultural e literária é mais problemática numa época como a nossa, caracterizada por conceitos de multi-culturalismo e de pluralidade, e quanto mais dado que a ideia de uma nação angolana, cujas fronteiras foram impostas pelas potências colonizadoras no século 19, quase não existia até que Agostinho Neto e os intelectuais da sua geração começaram a imaginá-la. Não devemos esquecer que esta noção da angolanidade nasceu numa altura muito específica – 1948 e a criação de um movimento cultural cuja frase chave era “Vamos descobrir Angola” –, num lugar - Luanda (desde o século 16 a capital e ponto de encontro das diversas culturais angolanas e a cultura portuguesa . Esta ideia de angolanidade evoluiu mais tarde em Portugal, primeiro na liberdade vigiada da Casa dos Estudantes do Império em Lisboa, depois na cela das prisões pelas quais Neto passou. É significativo, portanto, que a angolanidade de Neto se baseia naquilo que ele via como denominador comum para todos os angolanos, mais do que as diferenças culturais e étnicas: trata-se de uma Angola vista essencialmente do exílio e através da memória. É uma nação víctima do colonialismo, mas culturalmente, é uma Angola de compromisso, baseado no cadinho cultural do litoral e centrado em Luanda. Era esta ideia de uma Angola como síntese que facilitou, para Neto e a sua geração, uma visão da angolanidade como processo, do que como um estado de espírito já existente e à espera de ser atingido. Poderíamos acrescentar que esta visão cultural se encaixava com o marxismo político de Neto mais, fundado em noções de evolução histórica e a luta dialéctica – isto é uma Angola em gestação.

Ao considerarmos a angolanidade de Neto como processo, convém recordar a organização editorial da colecção Sagrada esperança, já que a sequência de poemas segue uma ordem ou uma evolução cuja prioridade é política, começando com poemas sombrios que focalizam o sofrimento do contratado (“Partida para o contrato”), o escravizado que perdeu a “noção de ser” (“Velho negro”), a quitandeira (“Meia-noite na quitanda”), e o povo explorado e discriminado dos bairros de lata dos arredores de Luanda (“Sábado nos musseques”). Segue-se aquilo que se poderia denominar secção central caracterizada por poemas que oferecem alguma esperança no meio das crueldades do colonialismo, ou evocativos de uma ira suprimida mas pronta para estalar e induzir transformações (“Para além da poesia”, “Desfile de sombras”, “Aspiração”), ou que invocam a energia e vitalidade da cultura africana, como nos poemas “O caminho das estrelas” e “Na pele do tambor”. A colecção atinge o seu impacto maior com poemas como “O içar da bandeira” e “Havemos de voltar” (este um dos últimos que escreveu durante a sua estadia na prisão do Aljube em 1960), que referem explicitamente à futura independência nacional. O motivo desta sequência editorial e de certa forma cronológica dos poemas é de mostrar a evolução de um processo de conscientização política e social em que o sentimento de alienação é vencido, e a luta iniciada rumo a um sentido mais pleno de angolanidade.

Convém agora ponderar o caráter da alienação que afetava Neto. É relativamente fácil distinguir a alienação dos contratados, das mulheres obrigadas a vender laranjas na rua à meia-noite por uns magros tostões, e dos habitantes dos musseques que buscam no alcool alguma consolação pela dureza da sua vida. No entanto, Neto, como assimilado, sofre de outro tipo de alienação – um desenraizamento cultural. Não estamos a minimizar o patriotismo de Neto ao dizer que, culturalmente, ele pertencia a dois mundos e que talvez se sentisse, por formação mais perto do mundo urbano ocidental. Outros críticos já apontaram as especificidades do colonialismo português, mais parecido com o modelo francês no valor que dava à aculturação total de uma intelectualidade indígena, como a principal razão porque a luta de libertação das colónias portuguesas começou com movimentos literários e uma tentativa de criar uma consciência cultural . Neto não era excepção, mas a ambiguidade que ele sentia em relação à expressão poética do desejo de libertação é complexa e interessante. Aqui temos Neto, o maior poeta de libertação angolana, e um dos mais conceituados poetas africanos daquela era, escrevendo poemas sobre as limitações da poesia. Por um lado, tinha uma atitude romântica, muito próprio do século 19, em relação ao poeta como bardo profético, alguém com uma sensibilidade única, atitude implícita em alguns dos seus versos, incluíndo o poema “Adeus à hora da largada”, que abre a coleção. Com maior frequência, o poeta é visto implicitamente como falso, insincero nas suas protestações de solidariedade com o povo (como, por exemplo, em “Velho negro”), ou então angustiado ao pensar na incapacidade do seu compatriota iletrado de entender os seus versos (“Mussunda amigo”). Por outro lado, a incapacidade da poesia de expressar aquilo que o poeta pretende, paradoxo muito típico dos modernistas – sendo o caso de Fernando Pessoa talvez o mais explícito – aparece em outros poemas, tais como “Além da poesia”, em que Neto aproxima a noção da poesia à da acção concreta de uma futura revolução africana, ou nos versos mais meditativos de “Poema”, escrito na prisão, em que pondera sobre a capacidade da poesia de comunicar uma mensagem clara e inequívoca. Para manter a analogia com Pessoa, ou mais propriamente com o heterónimo pessoano, Alberto Caeiro, a poesia é inimiga da claridade, um instrumento que cria confusão. Afinal, para Neto, a poesia só teria sentido quando a guerra já tivesse sido ganha, quando a alma dividida dos colonizados tivesse sido reunida e a “noção de ser” readquirida. Nessa altura, a poesia poderia ser reincorporada numa Angola livre e independente (imaginada, por exemplo, em “A voz igual”).

O mesmo se poderia dizer da ciência e da tecnologia. Durante o colonialismo, tal como a poesia, a tecnologia funciona como instrumento de opressão. O “Comboio africano” metaforiza a penetração colonial do interior angolano, mas é também um microcosmos da Angola sob dominação estrangeira, constrita entre os ‘rails’ e a seguir o seu percurso lento e caricato. Por outro lado, as ciências, postas ao serviço da liberdade e do progresso, são outras. O contraste é evidente entre a visão irónica em “O comboio africano” ou em “Civilização ocidental”, e “Um aniversário”, um dia cuja finalidade é celebrar a formatura de Neto em medicina, mas colocada contra um pano de fundo de opressão em Angola e em outras partes do mundo. Apesar disso, a aparente inutilidade desse dia é vista como necessária, já que constitui um passo no caminho da liberdade ao criar mais um angolano qualificado daquela geração de angolanos “por quem se espera”. A ideia da construcção concreta da independência, mesmo dentro de um contexto de negação, ocorre como tema consistente na poesia de Neto, mas atinge uma expressão mais explícita em “A voz igual”, poema em que a indústria e energia dos angolanos são apresentadas como sendo mais poderosas do que o chicote dos capatazes colonialistas. Trata-se da vitória de valores permanentes de justiça e igualdade sobre o estado temporário de escravidão: os primeiros são naturais, o segundo artificial. Da mesma forma, a busca do conhecimento e do progresso científico é um instincto natural humano, que contrasta com a civilização tecnológica imposta em Angola para oprimir os angolanos. O mesmo se poderia dizer da poesia: dependendo da causa e das condições, é uma força para o melhor ou para o pior.

Quais são as raizes culturais que foram perdidas? Qual é a poesia que não é produto da alienação? Para isso, Neto recorreu a várias fontes literárias, em particular, a poesia negra americana que surgira do renascimento afro-americano dos anos 20 e produzira figuras como Countee Cullen e Langston Hughes, a poesia da negritude dos países francófonos, tudo filtrado, pelo menos no início, através de Francisco José Tenreiro, presença incontornável para os jovens estudantes africanos que chegavam a Lisboa nos anos 40 e 50. Nem devemos esquecer a influência do afro-cubano, Guillén, e especialmente da poesia afro-brasileira dos modernistas, entre os quais podemos incluir um poeta há muito esquecido, mas bem conhecido de uma certa geração de angolanos: Solano Trindade. A angolanidade poética de Neto tem como prioridade a valorização dos ritmos e da musicalidade africana-angolana, a natureza africana, e a solidariedade com a diáspora africana e com os escravizados no mundo. A sua poesia é resposta à situação no seu país e à tendência anti-colonial, expressada do exílio, em Portugal, e influenciada pelos modelos literários e poéticos africanos ou afro-americanos então prevalentes, o que não subtrai nada da originalidade ou do impacto dos seus versos.

Ao mesmo tempo, a organização dos poemas em Sagrada Esperança, empresta à colecção uma qualidade de narrativa pessoal e autobiográfica que acompanha o desenvolver do drama angolano rumo à guerra e à independência. Começando com a partida do poeta (que é também a partida de toda uma geração de assimilados) para o exterior, presenciamos Agostinho Neto na sua graduação, no seu romance com a pessoa que viria a ser sua esposa, na nostalgia que sentia pela terra-mãe, na consciência que tinha de eventos marcantes em outras colónias africanas (“Massacre em S. Tomé”, “Bamako”), nas mudanças que notou ao voltar para Angola (“O içar da bandeira”), e por fim no seu segundo exílio e encarceramento.

Em conclusão, a angolanidade de Agostinho Neto é a manifestação de uma luta complexa entre a experiência pessoal do poeta e o drama da colectividade de oprimidos, numa época crucial de formação da nacionalidade não só em Angola mas em outros territórios ainda sob dominação imperialista. A cultura angolana é comunicada no ritmo e nas referências culturais de muitos dos poemas. As referências à cultura brasileira e muito especialmente afro-brasileira na sua obra colocam Neto dentro de uma tradição afro-lusa/atlântico-tropical, e se há remanescentes brasileiros nos seus versos, a corrente de influências tem se movimentado no sentido contrário desde a independência política de Angola em 1975, com o reconhecimento de Agostinho Neto por parte de toda uma geração de poetas negros brasileiros. Ao mesmo tempo, a presença de uma voz profética e quase bíblica nos seus poemas, atribuída por alguns à sua formação protestante, mas que no entanto tem talvez outra origem no romantismo libertário do século 19 (a poesia de Castro Alves, por exemplo), o questionar pessoano do valor e da capacidade da poesia para representar a realidade, e até num poema como ‘Partido para o contrato’, algum eco da lírica medieval portuguesa (as cantigas de amor e amigo), tudo coloca a obra deste poeta dentro de uma tradição poética lusófona e ocidental . Com isto, não estamos a tentar recolonisar a angolanidade de Agostinho Neto, senão apontar a sua riqueza polifônica.

*Text of a paper given at a conference dedicated to the figure of Agostinho Neto, and held at the University of Rome La Sapienza, November 2002.

Brazil's Myth of 'Mesticismo' and its Cultural Contestants

Brazil’s Myth of ‘mesticismo’ and its Cultural Contestants: The Nature of Race Relations in Brazil and Future Challenges*
(David Brookshaw, University of Bristol, England)

To a significant section of the Brazilian public, the idea that their nation could be discussed at a conference on racism and xenophobia would be unthinkable, unless it were presented as an example of a country where such problems did not exist. The myth of Brazil as the worlds’ only true racial democracy is predicated upon a long history of miscegenation, which has produced one of the largest populations of African origin in the American continent, and according to some, the largest Black population of any country outside Nigeria. Sentimentalists (mainly Brazilians of Portuguese descent) explain this as deriving from the cultural predilection of the Portuguese male, himself of African descent because of the centuries of Moorish domination of the Iberian Peninsula, for dark-skinned women. Sceptics (often, but not exclusively, Brazilian intellectuals of African descent) attribute it to the widespread sexual abuse of African female slaves at the hands of Portuguese or Luso-Brazilian planters. More generally, social historians have commonly explained the emergence of mixed populations wherever the Portuguese planted their far-flung empire as originating in the preponderance of lone Portuguese males and the lack or total absence of Portuguese females. In the specific case of Brazil, where plantation slavery formed the backbone of the colonial economy, this sociological factor, coupled with the planters’ total reliance on the Atlantic Slave Trade, has also served to explain the emergence of a mixed population. Perhaps it would be true to say that nowadays, the myth of a racial democracy in Brazil is not so important for the fact that we can demonstrate its shortcomings and inconsistencies, as it is for the fact that so many Brazilians believe it. Brazil as a racial democracy is part and parcel of Brazilian nationalism, which means that the very mention of the possibility of its opposite in Brazil is deemed unpatriotic. Most nations buy into myths of collective values and cohesion. In the United States, it is the American Dream; in Britain, which has probably undergone more profound changes in the last half century than either Brazil or the United States, the (all too slowly) receding myth of Britain’s glorious imperial past is gradually giving way to a new myth of a modern multi-cultural society (the struggle perhaps best incarnated, on the one hand, by Thatcher’s attempt in the 1980s to emulate Churchill and Blair’s invention, in the late 1990s, of a Cool Britannia on the other) . It is important to remember, then, that whether we are talking of Brazil’s national colour blindness or the American Dream, or the ‘imagined community’ presided over by the British Crown, this vision of cohesion is designed by a political elite to maintain and strengthen the prevailing social order and the culture that underpins it, and is believed by many who will never actually derive any benefit from it. Those who queued in the rain for hours to catch a glimpse of the British queen in 2002, her jubilee year, are, in many ways, the same social unfortunates as the millions of Brazilians who will have social reforms delayed for having willed their national soccer team to victory in the World Cup in that same year. And just as African Americans have been largely marginalized from the American Dream, African Brazilians have not benefited from any racial democracy in their country. On the other hand, this uniquely Brazilian myth has also been successfully exported as an emblem of Brazil’s national identity, to the extent that, apart from numerous European and North American visitors to the country who extol the apparent informality of race relations, at least one African American show business personality who has settled in Brazil, has declared that she sees no sign of racism in her ‘adopted’ land, unlike the New Jersey where she was born and raised.

If the specific characteristics of race relations (or racial abuse) in Brazil hark back to its early colonial past, the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy – that is, as an essentially mestiço nation – is largely a creation of the twentieth century, following as it did on two interrelated modernizing changes: the abolition of slavery in 1888, and the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy in 1889. From then on, members of the Brazilian elite – men such as Joaquim Nabuco, who made the transition from imperial senator to defender of the republic - perceived their country as following its national destiny as the southern hemisphere’s version of the United States. The function of the millions of Portuguese, Italian and Spanish immigrants who flooded into the country between 1890 and 1914 was, among other things, to ‘whiten’ the Brazilian population, thanks to, paradoxically, its long history of miscegenation and therefore benign racial relations. A profoundly racist solution to Brazil’s social problems – one that would nowadays not fall far short of ‘ethnic cleansing’ – was attributed to the absence of racial confrontation (unlike the United States). Buttressed by the Social Darwinist theories then in fashion, which foresaw African Brazilians disappearing through the effects of poverty and deprivation, and race mixture occurring between immigrant males and mulatto women, extravagant predictions as to when Brazil would become a white country were made. These varied between fifty years and a century. The pseudo-scientific premises upon which this development would take place even recur in the thought of Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist profoundly influenced by the cultural theories of Franz Boas in the 1920s, and who did much to re-evaluate the cultural influences of the African slave in Brazil. By the early 1950s, Freyre’s ideas were popular for different reasons with both the Brazilian and the Portuguese political establishments, especially his development of what he envisaged as the science of ‘Lusotropicalism’, which had two main effects: firstly, it further appeared to rationalize the myth of Brazil’s racial democracy, and secondly, it brought together two strands of Brazilian nationalism that had emerged in the second quarter of the twentieth century: the Modernist/Regionalist idea of Brazil’s cultural uniqueness as being founded upon the bedrock of Portuguese tradition with due (selective) recognition of the African and Amerindian cultural contributions; secondly, it provided a paternalistic structure within which Brazilian ‘mesticismo’ might find expression. In this sense, Freyre’s further elaboration of the mestiço myth could be exploited as much by populists in the mould of Getúlio Vargas (significantly the politician who had ‘modernised’ carnival into an organised popular festival in the 1930s) as it could by the authoritarian generals of the 1960s and 70s.

Myths, of course, may serve to control and alienate (control by alienating) groups of people, but ultimately history is made by those same people. The proponents of whitening, or ‘branqueamento’, failed in their calculations because it was individuals who contributed to race mixture not the opinion makers. Nor did the theorists of Brazil’s social and ethnic evolution bargain for the widescale internal migration of people of mainly African descent from Bahia to Rio in the aftermath of Abolition, and from the North and Northeast to São Paulo and the cities of the South during much of the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from this, as Marilene Felinto has pointed out, miscegenation has only taken place among the poor in Brazil, the white middle class remaining defensively ethnocentric . Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, it could be argued that the population of Brazil has probably got darker. Nor did Black Brazilians disappear en masse as the followers of Herbert Spencer had predicted: less than twenty years after Abolition, the first Black newspapers appeared in the State of São Paulo, followed less than two decades later by the emergence of the first mass movement of Black Brazilians, the ‘Frente Negra Brasileira’. The message of the main literary voice connected to this movement, the poet Lino Guedes, was that African Brazilians should integrate by imitation of values perceived as white and bourgeois. Modern-day African Brazilian activists might regard Guedes’s message as a sellout, but seen in the context of the time, when the struggle for ‘respectability’ meant survival, it was positively subversive. Nor was Guedes alone. Further North, Manuel Querino had long extolled the qualities and contributions of the African to Bahian culture, in a series of short studies that complemented, if they did not contest, the supposedly more ‘scientific’ studies of the establishment anthropologist, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues . The important fact is that there was a Black Brazilian voice, which sought to inculcate in the descendants of slaves values of self-esteem and recipes for social advancement. This voice, independent of white literary tradition, has continued, intermittently, sometimes affected, like other group expressions of solidarity, by the political realities of the day (dictatorship, censorship), sometimes flourishing (during periods of liberalization and relative democratic debate), often responding to currents of cultural and literary inspiration elsewhere in the African or African diasporic world. It is present in the verse of the forgotten poet of Brazilian Modernism, Solano Trindade. It is there in the theatrical activity of the Teatro Experimental do Negro in the 1950s, the brainchild of Abdias do Nascimento, in the neglected Afro-Brazilian novel of the 1950s, A maldição de Canaan, by Romeu Crusoé, in the negritude poetry and fiction of Oswaldo de Camargo and Eduardo de Oliveira in the 1960s and 70s, in the literary output of the writers associated with Quilombhoje and the Cadernos Negros, published with regularity since the late 1970s. It has flowed into the women’s voices of the diarist, Carolina Maria de Jesus, poets like Miriam Alves, and more recently the novelist and journalist, Marilene Felinto. Last but not least, the renewed contact between Brazil and Angola over the last twenty-five years, since the end of Portuguese colonialism, has produced a literary traffic between the two countries, whose two most recent embodiments are the writers, Alberto Mussa, a Brazilian, and the Angolan, José Eduardo Agualusa .

If the last seventy years have witnessed the slow flowering of an African Brazilian literature, the same period has also witnessed the slow and apparently inexorable infiltration of Afro-Brazilian musical culture by the white Brazilian middle classes, a process that has, in turn, caused Black Brazilians to preserve and develop their cultural heritage on their own terms, as exemplified in some of the carnival schools of Bahia, which are closed to white membership, the development of new musical forms seeking their inspiration from other African diasporas within what Gilroy defines as the Black Atlantic: reggae and rap, reworked into samba-reggae and Brazilian rap, and given national and international expression by groups such as Oludum or Afro-Reggae. Whether or not one regards this as the Black wing of Anglo-American globalisation (the White counterpart for which might be Britney Spears), it is the aggression of contemporary Black urban music emanating from the U.S. that appeals to the alienated African Brazilian youth of the slums and prisons of Brazil’s large coastal cities.

Clearly these processes do not correspond to the ‘mesticismo’ envisaged by thinkers of the Gilberto Freyre school. Indeed, in spite of the pioneering thoughts of the Brazilian Modernist, Mário de Andrade, or the Peruvian novelist and anthropologist, José María Arguedas, for whom there were different degrees of ‘mesticismo’, more generally traditional views of the racial and cultural mixture in Latin American have to some extent been surpassed or forced into re-interpretation by more recent concepts of ‘hybridity’ as defined by Homi Bhabha and other post-colonial cultural analysts. According to these new theorists, often the products of the migratory flows of the last half-century from former colonies to former metropolises and beyond, cultural ‘hybridity’ is not a tidy, ordered process, but rather a battleground in which mutually contradictory elements adapt, survive and overlap. The emphasis, then, is on process rather than finality, plurality and a proneness to escape definition rather than monolithic control from above, and is inherently more democratic and creative than the assimilationist ‘mesticismo’ of Freyre and his acolytes, which, as I have already suggested, is the handmaiden of a traditionally paternalistic social and political order. The fact is that, contrary to what many believe, traditional Brazilian ‘mesticismo’ does not envisage a proudly and tolerantly multi-cultural society. It is perhaps significant that the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso began to recognise the existence of an African Brazilian voice within Brazilian culture and society, through the creation, in 1995, of the ‘Grupo Interministral para a Valorização da População Negra’, the purpose of which was to analyse and advise the government on matters relating to discrimination, education, employment and culture. More recently still, in November 2001, the Order of Cultural Merit, the annual honour for cultural recognition by the State, had as its theme African Brazilian culture. In his address, Francisco Correa Weffort, the Minister of Culture, justified the choice of this theme as follows: “In literature as well as in samba, our objective in this year’s Order of Cultural Merit is to cast some light on Black culture as one of the cornerstones of our mestizo culture (…) Brazilian culture has such strength that it is able to achieve the greatest sophistication without losing its roots. But we know, too, that it is a mestizo culture that is more prone to recognise our whiteness than our negritude. The illusion of our whiteness, and, worse still, that of others, have been almost as long lasting as the scars left by four centuries of slavery. To highlight the Black matrix of our culture is a way of fighting prejudice and racism, and gaining a clearer sense of our identity as a nation” . It is, of course, hard to criticise the well-intentioned efforts of a government, after all led by a president who, along with fellow Marxist sociologists Florestan Fernandes and Octávio Ianni in the 1960s, was responsible for producing a corpus of studies on race relations that effectively debunked the racial democracy myth. Nevertheless, Weffort’s words are littered with the familiar language that extols the roots of Brazil’s mestizo culture, a language that had begun with historians of literature and culture such as Sílvio Romero at the end of the nineteenth century, and included the later Modernists of the 1920s along with their Northeastern regionalist offshoots of the 1930s. Moreover, the suggestion of the ‘heightening’ of a root culture to ‘sophisticated’ levels suggests that that root culture is inherently ‘primitive’. Weffort’s choice of words indicates how difficult it is for the Brazilian elite to avoid the language of ‘branqueamento’ – in this case cultural bleaching - , which is apparently contradicted by his next statement that Brazilians have failed to acknowledge their ‘negritude’. Perhaps most significant of all, it is using the language of cultural integration to respond to the growing demands for social justice voiced by members of the African Brazilian community, expressed most poignantly, and in almost apocalyptic terms by Sueli Carneiro, the leader of a Black women’s group in São Paulo: “Increasing racial tension is inevitable as a racial consciousness develops in the country, for the relationship between Blacks and Whites is a violent one, historically rooted in expropriation and dehumanisation, and that is profoundly brutal. If Blacks have not yet been able to organise themselves sufficiently to provide a political solution to this, they need to continue along this road. No people have been oppressed indefinitely. My understanding of the matter is the following: there are organised Black groups in the country seeking to resolve the racial problem by peaceful means, but if society does not respond, there will be no way of preventing other forms of struggle. It is a question of legitimate defence. We don’t know how the next generation will respond to their exclusion”. This forms the epigraph to Agualusa’s novel, O ano em que Zumbi tomou o Rio (2002), a modern-day re-enactment of the Palmares uprising of the seventeenth century, which centres on a revolt in the Rio favelas against the authorities, and which takes over the whole of the ‘Zona Sul’ of the city before eventually being put down.

Carneiro’s words suggest, by omission, that culture – that is the acceptance of African Brazilian culture into the Brazilian pantheon – is not the problem, for the African contribution to Brazilian culture is a self-evident fact, and has manifested itself in an evolving continuum over the centuries. For Carneiro, it is discrimination, prejudice, and urban deprivation that are the reality of everyday life of most African Brazilians, rather than the acceptance of their culture . Brazil is not a racial democracy because it is not a social democracy. Its most urgent problems lie in the following structural defects in society: notwithstanding the growth of an urban middle class during the course of the twentieth century, the disparity between the wealthy elite (of mainly European descent) and the poor (who are largely of African descent) is one of the most extreme in the Western world. In a United Nations survey of Human Development Indices, Brazil currently occupies 79th place, but if this is broken down racially, whites rise to 49th, while Blacks sink to 108th, which, according to Carneiro, is worse than the situation of Blacks in immediately post-apartheid South Africa . The lack of access to education (Black Brazilians constitute a tiny proportion of those in tertiary education ), health care, reasonable housing and employment, all result from Brazil’s obscenely uneven distribution of wealth that affects African-Brazilians more than any other ethnic group. Moreover, even within the world of employment, there are discrepancies in pay along both racial and gender lines. Finally, discriminatory practices mean that African Brazilians are under-represented in more high profile jobs requiring high-level contact with the public (for example, in banking, executive appointments etc), in the officer ranks of the armed services, and in the diplomatic corps.

These grievances, of course, have been regularly brought to public attention by Black movements in Brazil since the 1970s at least. More recently, however, debate has turned for the first time to the question of quotas and affirmative action, all the more heated in Brazil because this appears to go against the country’s national foundational and formative myth. Opponents of affirmative action cite the impossibility of deciding who is and who is not Black in Brazil. On the other hand, if affirmative action helps to break down the alienating psychology of ‘branqueamento’ within Brazilian society (and which Weffort sees as negatively affecting even white Brazilians), then this would perhaps be the best outcome of such action. It might then be that the best intentions of ‘mesticismo’ could flourish in a more mutually tolerant environment. It is generally accepted, after all, that all countries need some sets of common values to hold them together. The alternative to this is balkanisation: in Brazil, Monteiro Lobato’s prediction at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Southern states of Brazil might ultimately join Uruguay and Argentina in some sort of white federation, leaving the poorer North to the predominantly Black and ‘mestiço’ population, might still come home to haunt Brazilians in the context of Mercosul. If affirmative action is to work in Brazil and to transform the national ‘mestiço’ myth into one of real egalitarian integration, if it transforms Brazil into a real social democracy, it must be seen as a process rather than as a finality, a righting of the wrongs of the past and the present until such a time when all cultures and skin colours are valued as equal and affirmative action is, perhaps, no longer necessary. At the beginning of the twenty-first century then, the biggest challenge facing Brazilian policy makers is how to enable African Brazilians to buy into the national myth in a meaningful way, and to create structures of opportunity for their citizens of colour, even if these contradict the myth of ‘mesticismo’ that has been nurtured by the Brazilian elite for more than a century.

* Text of a paper given at a conference on Racism and Xenophobia in Europe and the Americas, held at Howard University, Washington DC, November 2002.

Friday 12 March 2010

Brazilian-Lebanese fiction: Salim Miguel

Between three worlds: the Old World, the New World and memory. Salim Miguel’s Nur na Escuridão

The most well known representative of the Middle East in Brazilian literature is probably Nacib, the bar owner lover (and briefly husband) of Gabriela in Jorge Amado’s most famous and most filmed novel. Yet the migration of Lebanese into Brazil ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, Lebanese who were often referred to as ‘turcos’ or occasionally ‘sírios’, has produced a greater number of writers than any comparable migrant group. This may have something to do with the fact that many of the migrant generation were involved in retail trade, which to some extent facilitated their integration into the new country. Jospeh Lesser even suggests that Lebanese immigration was actively encouraged by some early twentieth-century commentators in Brazil on the grounds that they were phenotypically similar to the average native Brazilian of Portuguese or mixed origin (olive skinned and dark hair), added to which most of them were, contrary to what might be assumed, Christians of the Eastern Catholic or Orthodox persuasion. If one remembers too that they were dispersed in their migratory patterns, more so at least than the Italians, Germans and Japanese, and far more reminiscent of the Portuguese who could be found all over Brazil, then we can see that there is no one region associated with Lebanese colonization. The literature of Lebanese migration into Brazil inevitably reflects this dispersal. That is not to say, of course, that the corpus of literature does not have some common characteristics, but it is also defined by region. The first two of Milton Hatoum’s novels are about the Lebanese migrant experience in Manaus, but they are also about Amazonia and the interface between the urban island, with its mixture of alien cultures, and the surrounding ocean of the jungle and the residual aboriginal cultures contained within it. Most of this migrant literature is set in urban milieu, with the exception perhaps of the novels and short stories of Raduan Nasser. Occasionally, the focus is on generational struggles and attempts to express self identity on the part of a first, Brazilianised, generation: this is the case of Hatoum’s Dois Irmãos and Nasser’s Lavoura Arcaica, while Betty Milan’s O Papagaio e o Doutor focuses on a woman’s attempts to come to terms with her upbringing in a Lebanese family environment and her status as an educated Brazilian. There are, perhaps inevitably, given the specific environment in which these novels are set and the ethnic identity of the authors, strong biographical undertones. However, the novel that is most closely autobiographical is Salim Miguel’s Nur na Escuridão, first published in 2000 to considerable critical acclaim. Indeed, it is both fiction and autobiography, recalling the words of Tobias Döring, for whom, ‘Autobiography is a threshold genre. It traces and crosses boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and history, selves and others, images and texts – sometimes drawing these distinctions, but more often blurring them.’

Salim Miguel was born in the Lebanon in 1924, but was taken to Brazil by his parents at the age of three along with his two younger sisters. After a short stay near Rio, their port of disembarkation, the family eventually settled in Santa Catarina, first in the small town of Biguaçu, and then in Florianópolis. In the 1940s, Miguel was a prime mover in the Grupo Sul, a literary movement rooted in Santa Catarina, which was a somewhat tardy response to Modernism and Northeastern regionalism of the previous decades. He was also active in journalism and eventually , along with his wife, Eglê Malheiros, wrote and produced films, an experience that may have proved influential in his writing of Nur na Escuridão. He was politically active during the 1960s, and was heavily critical of the military coup of 1964, which saw him briefly imprisoned, the subject of one of his books, Primeiro de Abril – Narrativas da Cadeia.

Written as a homage to his parents, Salim Miguel’s Nur na Escuridão, is firstly an illuminating insight into migration, the reasons that seem to motivate people to abandon their native land outside the obvious contexts of war, natural disasters, famine and so on. Secondly, it casts light on the apparently fortuitous reasons why people sometimes end up in the destinations they do, along with the fortuitous ways in which new, hyphenated identities, including name changes, are given or assumed. Thirdly, it also offers an insight into the function and characteristics of memory among a diasporic community, especially when those memories are fundamentally recorded by word of mouth, and prone to have stories bolted onto them as the links between the individual and his/her recollection are loosened over time. In this way, Miguel demonstrates the close ties, indeed interdependence, between memory and forgetfulness, recollection and invention, history and story telling.

By the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire had finally collapsed, and the Middle East had fallen under the influence of European colonial powers. Lebanon became a protectorate of France, which meant too that the Christian population, from whom Miguel’s family sprang, although a minority, were informally favoured. There were therefore no threats of violence against Christians that might have provoked an exodus of persecuted refugees. The marriage between Miguel’s father, Yussef, and Tamina, his mother, was not approved by her family, largely because Yussef, from a neighbouring village, had the reputation of someone who resolved problems with his fists. The novel refers to problems of unemployment in the area, and Yussef seems to have had an array of jobs as a shepherd, but also as someone who, unusually, could read, he also aspired to be a teacher. Tamina, too, knew how to read and write, and had two brothers who had migrated to the United States, and whom she had visited at some undisclosed time in the past. Destitution is therefore not a reason for their leaving Lebanon, but possibly some social aspiration that neither feels can be satisfied in their native land, and it is this underlying feeling behind the ultimately unstoppable dynamic leading up to their departure for the New World. But what is this New World? Upon departure from Lebanon, bound for Marseille, where they hope to pick up the necessary visas for the Atlantic crossing, it is assumed that they will be making for the United States via Mexico1. However, upon arrival in the French port of transit, Yussef’s brother, Hanna, who is accompanying them, develops an eye infection, which means that he will not be allowed to enter Mexico. In order not to split the family group up, the decision is made to go to Brazil, which has fewer restrictions, and where Yussef has a sister and, supposedly, a brother whom no one has heard from in recent years. Their eventual destination is consequently a second choice, and one that Tamina initially hopes will only be another transit point on their way to the coveted United States. Miguel’s depiction of the reasons and motivations behind this presumably typical migrant family’s journey to Brazil is one in which chance and mistake play a part, and it runs counter to the traditional narrative of Brazilian immigration as resulting from a conscious and willing choice – Brazil as the land of opportunity, the Brazilian dream. Their dreams are adapted to a country about which they know very little, and which, in spatial terms, they can hardly imagine.

Certainly, when Yussef, Tamina and their children arrive in Brazil, it soon becomes apparent that the only occupation open to ‘turcos’ is peddling, selling cheap goods from door to door, ‘mascateando’, a skill that Yussef has to pick up himself. The story then chronicles the family’s survival, based as it is, on the urban retail trade, and the struggle to bring up a growing family. It is here that the other fallacy about the Brazilian dream (and no doubt many other migrant dreams) becomes evident – for throughout the long years of effort, Yussef does not own his own home until the end of his life, but even then, he is still paying off the mortgage. So this family, which has, in one sense, ended up in the wrong place, a country whose dimensions they have only the vaguest notion of, forsake family in order to lead a life that is no better materially, than the one they would have led, had they remained in Lebanon. Moreover, in crossing the ocean between old and new worlds, divided by language and culture, the family’s name changes in accordance with local bureaucratic misunderstandings: Miguel is the Brazilianization (perhaps) of Michel (the family name on their French travel documents), while Yussef gradually metamorphosizes into José. Salim Miguel is acutely conscious of the loss that occurs in the process of transculturation, as their ancestral culture goes through the inevitable process of fragmentation, while the first generation of Lebanese-Brazilians (or Brazilian-Lebanese), people such as the author himself, have an imperfect or Brazilianised view of their ancestral culture and language2.

So what were the reasons for migrating, and how was this loss compensated for through memory? To answer this, we need to say something about the polyphonic narrative technique employed by Salim Miguel. The novel is developed in fragments, the narrative voice fluctuating between the author and his characters, in particular his father, while also shifting between periods of time and geographical area. There is the Lebanon depicted through the author, prior to 1927, in which the reasons for leaving are evoked. There is the narrative of their Brazilian experience, first in Rio, then in Biguaçu, and finally in Florianópolis. Interspersed in all this, are excerpts from the father’s ‘autobiography’, written in Arabic, but translated into Portuguese, and which purports to be a factual account of his life. In contrast to the prosaic nature of this account, are the father’s recollections, filtered through the author, of the Lebanon left behind. These recollections incorporate oral tales and ultimately are the re-creation of a native land no longer recollected, but imagined through a process of hybridization between fact and fiction. And just as hybridization is an area of blending but also conflict, the fictional side gains the upper hand with the passing of time, and the father’s actual and irreversible integration into Brazil. There are, in addition, further fragments of memory corresponding to the author’s own recollections of growing up in Brazil, as well as evocations of local characters who had some sort of an effect upon him in his childhood and youth, but I shall return to these later.

In her book, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym refers to changing notions of time during the early modern period of industrialisation, when representations of time changed from allegorical human figures to the impersonal language of numbers, as traditional values based on the church and community gave way to spatial dislocation and individualism. The new temporality was internalised, according to Koselleck, in the form of the twin notions of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, one of which allows for the incorporation of the past into the present through memory, while the other is directed towards the future, the not yet experienced. But this presupposes that the horizon of expectation is the portal to something better. When it is not, the shrinking space of experience (shrinking because it belongs to the receding past), becomes more and more subject to the historical emotion of nostalgia. Nostalgia is, and always has been, part of the human condition, even if we explain it in terms of the diaspora of old age looking back at lost youth, but with the beginnings of what has been termed the global narrative (coinciding with the age of European imperial expansion), nostalgia became a side effect of the ‘teleology of progress’, that is, progress was not only a narrative of temporal progression but also of spatial expansion. Perhaps this is why Yussef’s narrowing horizon of expectation (as mentioned before, Brazil did not really deliver the dream they dared to have on departure from Lebanon), gives way to an enlarged ‘space of experience’, necessarily enlarged through invention and fantasy: memory becomes a story, and the story, based on fluid orality takes precedence over the written autobiography, leading the narrator to comment as follows:

‘… embora a versão do pai, em sua autobiografia Minha Vida, seja a real, durante décadas outra versão foi inculcada na mente dos filhos. É a que acaba por prevalecer, mantém-se presente, ganha foros, de verdade. Recusa ceder o lugar que lhe cabe na história e no seio da família.’(61)

By the end of his life, Yussef’s space of experience has expanded to encapsulate the whole of the Arab world, it has broken out of the restrictive limits of Lebanon. Fiction, myth has taken him and his memory over:

‘De repente não era apenas o seu Líbano dos tempos de criança e adolescente que lhe surgia íntegro, era todo o mundo árabe que lhe tomava o peito de orgulho, mescla de vários mundos árabes, era o Líbano de muito antes dele, um Líbano que nem existira como tal, era uma fabuloso país retirado de livros, histórias, de narrativas orais, era um Líbano de antes do Líbano.’ (163)

Exalting a civilisation that spread to the Iberian Peninsula is compensation for ending up in Brazil running a dry goods store, the owner of a house that has still not been paid off. We can well understand how, in other circumstances, drudgery, a sense of alienation and absence of agency, can lead to fundamentalism. But by this time, Yussef has become so dependent on the vision of his own private Lebanon that he declines the chance to re-visit it as an old man, for even he knows that, without a horizon of expectation, if his space of experience were destroyed by the reality of his native land, he would have no more reason to live. He prfers the relative intimacy of the diaspora (to use Boym’s term), to the shock of a country he would no longer recognise and, perhaps more to the point, that would no longer recognise him.

In other ways too, memory is a product of a creative urge. It is as much about forgetting, about the need to fill lacunae as it is about recording and preserving the past. To their school friends, Yussef’s children invent grandparents they have never known: ‘Iam, aos poucos, inventando avós, dando-lhes personalidade, uma fisionomia própria, só que, por vezes, mutável, adaptada às circunstâncias’ (119). Similarly, when Yussef’s mother dies, news of their grandfather who had disappeared into Argentina, also dries up, possibly because he no longer sees a reason to maintain contact, or because he and his letters had been a product of her invention anyway: ‘Morta a mãe, nem mais notícias do misterioso avô da Argentina, que com certeza não via motivos para dar notícias – ou sera que a mãe, tanto por ela mesma como pelas crianças, inventara aquele avô e as cartas?’(120-1)

Memory, as the author says himself, does not follow the logical lines of our conscious state. It defies chronology and even our will to evoke it. Memories come to us unprovoked and are never a faithful reproduction of a place, time or event. Moreover, sometimes what we receive is someone’s else’s memory that has somehow been incorporated into our own. Memory becomes part of the narrative or journey of life. In Nur na Escuridão, it is symbolised by the journey of their dog, Taira who, abandoned by the family as they move from Biguaçu to Florianópolis, follows them from one house to another, guided only by a ‘sense of smell’ (memory), ‘por um sexto sentido, ao encontro dos seus’(105). And yet, was it Taira, or another dog that somehow looked like Taira, which descended upon them in their new home? The important thing is that the dog becomes Taira, is incorporated into their life’s narrative, through a father whose need for a story goes hand in hand with his need for nostalgia.

The father, however, is not the only one to have memories. The novel also focusus on the author’s own recollections of characters he encountered as he was growing up. In the chapter ‘Perfis’, Miguel underlines the proximity of memory and fiction in his profiles of the small-town characters who had an effect on him during the years spent in Biguaçu. Chief among these is the old black man, Ti Adão, whose memories of slavery (which bear scarcely any sense of chronology and therefore historical credibility), and whose linguistic creativity bear a strong resemblance to the tales of Yussef, who himself, acknowledges the role Ti Adão had in integrating him into Brazilian life and culture. There is the story of João Mendes, the local poet, who also wrote his autobiography in the form of a children’s story to somehow compensate for the suffering experienced in his past (he had gone blind as a result of a swimming accident when he was a boy) and the impoverishment of his present situation. Geraldino Azevedo was another small-town poet, who, as a young man, had been forced into commerce, like Yussef, and who dreamt of something else: a life of the mind and of inventiveness and imagination, necessary, as the author comments, ‘para preencher vidas que não têm o que fazer, como matar o tempo – antes que o tempo as mate’ (223).

Memory, the telling of a story, is therefore an act of liberation from the mundane reality of their surroundings. Autobiography has a performative side to it that invites the magic of invention. In the case of Yussef and Tamina, they left Lebanon to make a new life for themselves, but ultimately, life made them, molded them in accordance with the limitations and social conventions of their adopted country, where ‘turcos’ could only peddle cheap goods and maybe run a shop. Yussef seems uncertain as to whether migration has brought happiness or not, as he wonders whether personal fulfilment is not more important than material gain: ‘… alguém ser aquilo que sempre desejou’(82).