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.
Tuesday, 3 August 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
(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.
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