Other Atlantics:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.2.246
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Development and Societal Issues
ResumoIn the early pages of Chiquinho (1947), Baltasar Lopes's seminal novel of Cape Verdean life, we read of the importance of slavery and its culture to the islands' past, of the droughts that mark and mar their present, and of the vast array of relations that those who live there have had to cultivate at various points around the Atlantic in order to make their way in the world. Taken together, these influences are said to form Chiquinho's “alma de crioulo,” a creolized Cape Verdean soul in which it is hard not to discern the image of what Paul Gilroy has famously called “the black Atlantic.”1 Indeed, the set of transnational cultural and economic relations the term is used to name seem to be at issue everywhere in the novel and in the broader history of which it is a part. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the Atlantic world, the tiny archipelago Lopes memorializes in Chiquinho owes its culture to the processes for which Gilroy's highly influential heuristic tries to account—and yet the idea has had almost no significant impact on the relevant scholarship in the field.There are, to be sure, passing mentions of it in some recent accounts of the islands' politics, history and culture. Fernando Arenas, for example, makes reference to the black Atlantic at various points in Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence, though the term is never brought into direct dialogue with the book's interest in Cape Verde itself.2 Rui Cidra, writing in another book, explains that the “cultural reality” formed by the remarkable mobility of Cape Verde's citizenry “alludes to the transnational space that Paul Gilroy called ‘the Black Atlantic.’”3 And Elizabeth Pilar Challinor, writing in Bargaining in the Development Marketplace: Insights from Cape Verde, makes brief mention of the black Atlantic as a helpful paradigm for thinking through the local-global relations that have defined much of the islands' history.4 But we remain as yet without any extended examination of the relationship between the two. The best that has emerged at present is Kesha Fikes's informative but rather narrowly focused work on Cape Verdean migration and racial identity formation.5 As she shows, race in the Cape Verdean social imaginary becomes visible not in relation to island of origin, as is often assumed to be the case, but instead in relation to differing practices of labor migration throughout the islands' history.6 The difference between “blackness” and the racial hybridity often associated with Cape Verdean identity is thus always a function of where and why one moves, with “black” tending to name those who moved, or were forced to move, as laborers elsewhere in Portuguese Africa. Fikes's chapter thus makes a series of compelling claims about space and the production of racial difference in Cape Verdean society, but many of the consequences that might be drawn for thinking more broadly about Cape Verde together with the black Atlantic world go unexplored.In searching through the literature on the black Atlantic, one finds, moreover, that the approaches developed by scholars working to revise the conceptual foundations of Gilroy's original work often overlook the islands and their history and culture as well. Methodologies that seek to overcome Gilroy's prioritization of black diasporic communities through an emphasis on the role of African agency in erecting the black Atlantic world tend not to treat Cape Verde as part of the Africa they have in mind.7 The approach that emphasizes the rich history of south-south Atlantic movements in contrast to Gilroy's original emphasis on north-south trajectories has a similarly difficult time bringing Cape Verde into the picture.8 And even those scholars that have actively sought to overcome the overtly Anglocentric bias of most black Atlantic studies through an emphasis on the Lusophone cultures of the region have tended to deemphasize Cape Verde and to focus instead on Angola, Brazil, and Guinea-Bissau.The problem is not merely that Cape Verde has been by and large forgotten in the flurry of writing on the cultures of the black Atlantic world, though I do submit that it is a place that deserves much more attention than it has yet received from scholars working in the field. More significantly, the relative lack of attention given to Cape Verdean culture has deprived scholars engaged in the ongoing revision of Gilroy's original work the opportunity to develop a sense of how the historical circumstances that define Cape Verde can inform our sense of what the black Atlantic is or of what its limits might be. I therefore propose to read Chiquinho through the lens of the black Atlantic, and the black Atlantic back through Chiquinho, in order to bring into view the distinctly Cape Verdean account of the Atlantic world we can find therein. I focus on two key terms—double consciousness and diaspora—and on how they get worked out in the text at hand. I argue that each of these terms is fundamentally important to Lopes's imagined Cape Verdean community but in a way that cuts across the decidedly Anglophone black Atlantic narrative that comes out of Gilroy's work. As I show here, this is important, first, to our understanding of Lopes, a writer whose work has been foundational for much of Cape Verdean culture both past and present. But the dissonance I hope to bring out is also critical to our understanding of the relationship of the black Atlantic to Cape Verde and to the study of its culture in this vein. A text that finds its genesis in the complex history of immigration and displacement that defines modern Cape Verde, Chiquinho represents a powerful challenge to Anglo-North accounts of double consciousness and diaspora, and thus provides an opportunity to explore a world that the hegemony of the black Atlantic has to this point occluded from view.The key to understanding the way these terms work in Chiquinho lies in the problem that gives rise to the novel, a problem that goes hand in hand with the islands' long history at the heart of the Atlantic world. First colonized by the Portuguese in the middle of the fifteenth century, early attempts at widespread farming on Santiago, the largest of the archipelago's ten islands, produced little in the way of economic growth, and by the year 1600 the importation of slaves for the purposes of farming was halted altogether.9 Instead, the islands became a refueling stop for ships moving around the Atlantic and an important slave-trading depot as European powers moved slaves from West Africa to South America and the Caribbean. The fortunes of Cape Verde have shifted significantly throughout the ensuing centuries—the advent of the steam engine made the northern port city of Mindelo, at least for a time, a critical port for ships in need of coal—but the population that developed out of the intermixing of Portuguese settlers and freed and runaway slaves has never been able to support itself on the resources of the islands alone. Acute drought and desertification have always been a problem, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Cape Verdean men, driven by famine and a lack of rain, signed on as crewmembers on whaling ships based out of New England in order to support families in the islands, a practice that gave rise to the substantial Cape Verdean population still in the United States.10 Still others moved, or were forced to move, as laborers throughout the Portuguese empire, in particular to plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe. Thus while the islands had long been colonized by the Portuguese, the islands themselves have never been the site of significant foreign investment or of large human settlement—by some estimates, more Cape Verdeans live outside the country than within its borders today.11As Lopes's novel suggests, the early twentieth century in Cape Verde was a time of perpetual economic and environmental crisis. Drought loomed large over the archipelago throughout the first half of the century, as did the threat of global economic decline, both of which collude in the text to produce a constant drain on the population of the islands and on the willingness of those who lived there to think of themselves as Cape Verdeans in any meaningful sense. This is, moreover, a crisis that Chiquinho attributes in large part to the thoroughgoing neglect of the Portuguese who were the islands' ostensible colonial masters. If, as Basil Davidson suggests, Portuguese rule in the islands was predicated on a “system of ruin” meant to force Cape Verdeans out of their homes and onto the plantations elsewhere in Portuguese Africa, Lopes's text, with its constant emphasis on the misery that afflicts its protagonist from beginning to end, suggests that it seems to have worked.12 The Portuguese themselves are almost entirely absent from day to day life as Lopes represents it and make a rather pathetic showing when they finally do appear. After a brief early mention of two books on Portuguese law and grammar in Chiquinho's childhood home (9), the colonizer shows up only twice in the remaining text: first in the guise of a distant and unhelpful colonial governor whose arrival on São Vicente never translates into the economic aid that Chiquinho and his friends hope it will (91) and then again as a terrified administrator on São Nicolau forced to stare down a mob furious over the beating of a starving child who tried to steal food (164).Part of the reason for the absence of the Portuguese in Chiquinho, to be sure, has to do with the power of Portuguese censorship at the time in which Lopes was writing: too direct a condemnation of the Portuguese state might have angered the censors Lopes needed to appease if he ever wanted to get his work into print.13 But limiting a reading of this absence to an effort to appease Portuguese censors risks overlooking the full significance of the manner in which Lopes writes the Portuguese state out of this colonial text. At least in part, the absent Portuguese colonizer—along with all the other absent fathers to which I return—is another iteration of the famous absent father of Portuguese fiction, treated in depth in Philip Rothwell's recent book, A Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative.14 Lopes, however, also transforms this common Portuguese literary trope in the way he deploys it here. Rather than a sign of his fidelity to the Portuguese canon—and thus an indicator of his interest in situating Cape Verde within an entirely Portuguese version of modernity—the absence to which the Portuguese are consigned in the text reconfigures the way it represents the workings of colonial power in Cape Verde. The lives of the Cape Verdeans in whom Lopes is interested appear to be deeply affected by the machinations of the metropole to which they are inextricably tied but not in precisely the way that the dominant vein of Anglophone postcolonial theory might suggest. If this is colonial power, it is not a power whose violence lies in the immediate colonial presence so rigorously theorized by thinkers like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Instead, it functions more in its withdrawal, in the abandonment of its colonized to the vagaries of the weather and the global economy which collude to produce the desperation and misery that define so much of the text.Though this absence is easy to overlook, the lack of direct influence that Portugal has in the novel structures the whole of its narrative and indeed that of the broader literary project of which it is a part. It makes possible, for instance, the devastating consequences of the droughts that seem to hang over the whole course of Chiquinho's life, a fictional version of a series of historical events that killed tens of thousands of people throughout the islands in the early part of the twentieth century. It also makes necessary, moreover, the links that Cape Verdeans are forced to cultivate to survive the difficult economic and environmental conditions to which they have been consigned. Already on the first page, for example, we read of Chiquinho's memory of his house, the “morada coberta de telha francesa e emboçada de cal por fora, que meu avô construiu com dinheiro ganho de riba da água do mar” (6) (“home covered with French tile and plastered lime that my grandfather built with money earned from the sea”). Here the important detail is less the French tile that formed the roof of the house than the place from where his grandfather earned the money to buy it, namely the sea. It is hardly surprising that a group of people who live in the middle of the Atlantic would have important ties to the ocean, but Chiquinho's grandfather was not a fisherman. Rather, he was a sailor on one of the innumerable ships that used the islands as a refueling point throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The novel is vague about what exactly Chiquinho's grandfather did before he met his untimely death at sea—it is probable that, like many of the other sailors who move in and out of Chiquinho's youth, he worked on a whaling vessel, which functions in Chiquinho, as in Moby Dick, as a trope for displacement, so important to the representation of Cape Verdean life. The text is substantially more forthcoming, however, about where Chiquinho's father earns his meager income. In the same passage, Chiquinho mentions remembering “a partida de papai para a América” (6) (“departure of father for America”) and the consequent “ansiedade quando chegavam cartas” (6) (“anxiety when letters arrived”), sentences that indicate that, like so many other Cape Verdean men, Chiquinho's father has sought better fortunes in the industries of the northeastern United States.Most importantly, however, Portugal's absence also spreads throughout the novel, and indeed throughout much of the rest of Lopes's work, producing a pervasive anxiety over what precisely Cape Verde is and what its people are supposed to be. This facet of Lopes's emergent Cape Verdean consciousness is significant since it is precisely the question of consciousness—or, more to the point, the question of double consciousness—that becomes important to Gilroy's now-canonical account of the black Atlantic. For Gilroy, double consciousness names the constitutive mode of black modernity, that which results from “living both inside and outside” the modern European world. It emerges, moreover, out of what he describes as “the unhappy symbiosis of thinking, being, and seeing” a triad he explains as follows: “The first is racially particularistic, the second nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than from their aspiration toward a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic, or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist.”15 To be a part of the black Atlantic in this view is thus to be constitutively divided, to belong and not belong, and to have a self inevitably fractured between the African and European poles whose interactions throughout the history of the modern West have produced this uniquely transnational form of community.Despite the clear implication of Lopes's world in this sphere—Cape Verde is arguably the historical center of the systems of exchange that gave rise to what we call the black Atlantic today—the mode of consciousness at issue in Chiquinho is different from the account of double consciousness that Gilroy and the scholarship that follows from him tends to offer. As the neglect of the Portuguese suggests, it is hard to grasp the Cape Verde of the novel as belonging firmly to any meaningful part of the Portuguese state, and indeed Chiquinho does not try to articulate any such connection: the lunar calendar we find in Chiquinho's house alongside the books on Portuguese law and grammar seems to suggest that, from a firmly Portuguese foundation, the islands have developed a rhythm of life that is very much their own (9). Chiquinho does not, however, turn this apparent distance from its Portuguese origins into a wholesale affirmation of an African present either. For Lopes, the precise relationship between the Cape Verdean present and its slaveholding past is unclear: I argue that the islands' forebears are more often represented as slave owners than as slaves themselves, even though the history of miscegenation these relations imply suggests that Chiquinho owes its genesis to both in equal terms. And as for the United States as another pole for the novel's understanding of Cape Verdean culture, Lopes works to cut off that suggestion too. Though the Americas are certainly important, Chiquinho's distaste for the way that Cape Verdeans in the United States are drafted into a kind of double consciousness—they are known, in the parlance of the novel, as “black Portuguese” (150)—is made abundantly clear. Unlike many of the narratives of the black Atlantic canon—such as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953), to name one of the most important—this colonial bildungsroman consistently refuses to resolve itself into anything resembling transnational racial solidarity.Instead of double consciousness, then, Chiquinho confronts us with something rather different, namely a profound ambiguity over what “consciousness” is supposed to mean in this marginalized, downtrodden sphere. The issue is not one of being both black and European but of being neither black nor European—double consciousness, but in reverse.16 As in Eduoard Glissant's influential account of “Caribbeanness,” the unique situation of island life makes clear elaborations of identity and difference difficult, to say the least.17 For Glissant and other theorists of this insular condition, such as Frantz Fanon, the ambiguity inherent in this mode of being opens onto uniquely transnational forms of attachment that form the basis of an ideal political community. In Lopes's Cape Verde, however, this insular island condition, coupled with a long history of environmental catastrophe and economic neglect, produces the possibility of wholesale cultural collapse. As the mother of Andrezinho, one of Chiquinho's friends, tells the young boys in the middle of the novel as they try to write their own fledgling Cape Verdean fiction, “Oh, rapazes, para que tanto escrever? Não vale a pena, vocês não melhoram a situação desta terra. Daí a dez anos não haverá gente aqui” (89) (“Oh boys, why do you write so much? It's not worth it, you won't improve the situation of this place. In ten years there won't be anyone here”). Since Cape Verdeans, as she understands them here, have no clear cultural identity in her view, there is little point in fighting to save the memory of a place that is rapidly being washed into the sea. This is, moreover, an ethos that infects not just this woman but many of the other characters we find throughout the text. Whether in the form of outright fatalism or the hopelessness that leads young men to overindulge in drink (138), the Cape Verde of Lopes's imagination appears to be in danger of vanishing under the weight of its own ambiguous identity.It is precisely this paralyzing form of insularity that Chiquinho sets out to overcome. As Andrezinho tells his mother in response, “É isso mesmo! Vocês já morreram…. Mas deixe-me escrever, por favor” (89) (“That's right! You're already dead…. But please, let me write”). Though the project of cultural and political awakening that Chiquinho, Andrezinho and his friends embark on while at school is somewhat short lived, it seeks to chart the foundations of an autonomous Cape Verdean culture, making the ambiguity that defines their condition into the decisive feature of an emergent national consciousness. Thus the boys, through their writing, want to “sintonizar Cabo Verde com o Universo” (“attune Cape Verde with the Universe”), which means that “precisamos de escrever coisas que nao pudessem ser escritas senão em Cabo Verde, coisas que nao pudessem ser escritas, por exemplo, na Patagônia…. Interessa-nos o carvoeiro que não trabalha em S. Vicente, há muito tempo” (83) (“we need to write things that couldn't be written anywhere other than Cape Verde, things that couldn't be written, for example, in Patagonia…. What matters to us is the coal handler in Sao Vicente who hasn't worked in a long, long time”). The work of attuning Cape Verde with the universe thus also amounts to the task of producing a uniquely Cape Verdean fiction and in it a uniquely Cape Verdean cultural identity. Having no definitive sense of themselves as Cape Verdeans, Chiquinho and his friends decide to narrate the nation into being.The project that Lopes represents in this scene is at the same time his project in Chiquinho, one that comes out clearly in the novel's early moments, in which the story of Chiquinho's upbringing in a tiny farming village called Caleijão offers at the same time a window onto Lopes's views about the foundations of Cape Verdean culture. The place is almost entirely rural and agrarian. While Chiquinho and his family, clearly better off than the people who work in the fields around them, live in a “casa grande” (6) (“manor house”) built with money sent from abroad, most of the people there are poor. As Chiquinho, the narrator, notes toward the end of the first section: Todos tinham os seus casais de terra. Trabalhavam nas hortas dos companheiros, que, em troca, lhes dariam os mesmos dias de trabalho. Era assim, assistindo-se mutuamente, no sistema de mão trocada, que de geração em geração iam agüentando o cativeiro, levando sempre açoites de Nhanha Terra, dona de uma grande escravatura. Todos nós éramos escravos. Para ser escravo bastava prantar a enxado no chão e partir em viagem para a época das as-águas com uma grande fé em Deus. (59)(They all had their houses of earth. They worked in the fields of their companions, each of whom gave the same number of days in return. It was in that way, everyone helping each other, in the system of labor exchange, that they survived captivity from generation to generation, always being whipped by Mother Earth, lady of a great slave plantation. We were all slaves. To be a slave it was enough to put one's hoe in the ground and go, with strong faith in God, on a voyage to the rainy season.) The Cape Verde of his youthful memories is thus one marked by deprivation and loss, the whole community appearing here as bound in solidarity to a land that refuses to return all the toil they invest in it. So bad is it that slavery becomes an important metaphor for the conditions in which they find themselves: to live in this place is to give up one's freedom to a nature over which one has absolutely no control.The metaphorical slavery invoked here, however, is not the only way the image of slavery informs the sense of Cape Verdean culture at issue in this early portion of the novel. While Chiquinho's repeated descriptions of the farming community in which he lived and the significance it has for the growth of “o sentimento crioulo” (56) (“creole feeling”) are certainly important, the stories about actual slavery he hears from his elderly grandmother and her friends are critical as well. Thus, in a moment that Antonio Sobrero identifies as the first reference to slavery in Cape Verdean literature, a village elder named Nhá Rosa Calita recalls a noteworthy story of her youth about an infamous slave trader named Nhó Quinquim Soares: “Certo dia, só por desaforo de corpo, deu dois lanhos na cara a um escravo da Guiné, rapaz brioso e decidido. O negro soportou a afronta em silêncio, mas à noite, em companhia de outros negros, entrou feito um leão no quarto do senhor e amarrou-o. Levaram Nhó Quimquim para o fundo da tabuga, abriram uma grande cova e ali o enterraram vivo” (21) (“One day, merely for insolence, he gave two lashes to the face of Guinean slave, a courageous and determined young man. The black man endured this affront in silence, but at night, in the company of other slaves, he entered the room of his master like a lion and tied him up. Then they took him to the back of the cemetery, dug a large grave, and buried him alive there”).18 The significance of the story in the context of the events of Chiquinho's youth is merely that it seems marvelous and entertaining to the group of children gathered at night in Chiquinho's house, a seemingly common occurrence in a place where telling stories is one of the only reliable means of entertainment. But in the context of the novel and the narrative about the origins of Cape Verdean culture it wants to produce, this bit of folk history also has the purpose of emphasizing the importance of slavery to the islands' past and the particular features that defined it. The emphasis seems to be on the extraordinary nature of the violence that structured the relationship between Soares and his slaves, which thus implies that masters and slaves otherwise enjoyed relative tranquility in their dealings with one another. As Chiquinho remarks, “Mas, de uma maneira geral, os escravos eram tratados quase como família” (21) (“But, in a general sense, the slaves were treated almost like family”). In contrast to the brutality of Soares and the other memorable slave owner who Calita mentions, then, Lopes inscribes in the Cape Verdean past an account of slavery meant to seem entirely innocuous: Soares may have been brutal, but in general slaves were treated like family, treatment that no doubt is supposed to lay the foundations of the ostensibly Afro-Portuguese culture on display in the novel. Hence the following passage, which insists on the relative liberty of the slaves who populate these stories and also serves to stress the role they play in forming the foundations of Cape Verdean culture: Tinham as suas festas e era um gusto vê-los nas danças. Sua grande festa era a Páscoa do Espírito Santo. Nesse dia tinham liberdade. Saíam em procissão, mas tudo com governo: havia reis, rainhas, pajens. À frente ia o meirão com a vela encruzada ao vento, segura por uma linha a servir de escota. A noite os negros iam foliar para casa de Nhó João Tomé, na Ladeira, onde dançavam lundum e outras danças trazidas da costa de África. (21)(They had their festivals and it was a pleasure to see them dance. Their greatest festival was the Easter of the Holy Spirit. That day they had their liberty. They left in a procession, but everything was ordered: there were kings, queens, and princes. At the front was the leader, with a candle shaking in the wind, secured by a string to serve as an anchor. At night the negros went to the house of Nhó João Tomé, in Ladeira, where they did lundum and other dances brought from the African coast.)These stories of slaves and their liberty, as well as accounts of devastating droughts, attacks by pirates, lore about ghosts who haunt the steep island valleys, and memories of Chiquinho's education at São Nicolau's seminary school thus come to form the roots of his Cape Verdean self, a Cape Verdean self made to stand in for the version of the nation at issue in the novel. As Chiquinho recalls, “Estas histórias das ilhas impressionavam-me profundamente. Era a vida da minha terra que ressurgia para mim nas palavras pausadas de mamãe velha. E delas desprendia-se este não se sabe o quê que a pouco e pouco ia formando a minha alma de crioulo” (22) (“These stories of the islands made a powerful impression on me. It was the life of my country that rose up for me in the halting words of mamãe velha. And from them was released this who knows what that was little by little forming my creole soul”). Many of these early stories are also, as Ellen Sapega argues in her compelling account of Chiquinho, deeply indebted to the image of Brazil that Lopes gleans from Gilberto Freyre.19 “‘Infância,’ … the opening section of Chiquinho,” Sapega argues, “is a fairly straightforward attempt to translate to a Cape Verdean context Gilberto Freyre's theories regarding the colonial master-slave relationship.”20 Thus the “casa grande” of Chiquinho's youth is clearly an allusion to the casa grande of Freyre's historical imagination, and the rural tranquility of Chiquinho's home is an homage to the much sentimentalized rural scene that is so important to Freyre's conception of Brazil in Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves [1933]). But most important, of course, are the accounts of slaveholding and intimate relations between masters and slaves that Lopes wants to position as the engine of early Cape Verdean culture. The free and quasi-familial relationship that Chiquinho learns about from his grandmother and Nhá Rosa Calita thus forms, or seems to form, the conditions of an authentically Cape Verdean crioulidade, though Lopes is somewhat more reserved about the sex lives of his forebears than Freyre: Chiquinho has none of the fascination with sex between masters and slaves that defines Freyre's early work, even though the intimacy with which he presents the relationship between slaves and those who owned them can be read as an oblique reference to it.21In Sapega's reading, however, Lopes's use of Freyre has a significance that goes well beyond our understanding of the genesis of these early scenes. As she proceeds to argue, in order for Lopes to represent Cape Verde as “a colony imbued with a conservative patriarchal culture,” he has to engage in the aforementioned “conceptual sleight of hand” so as to translate the tropes of Freyre's Brazilian historiography into the situation of Cape Verde in the first part of the twentieth century.22 Thus she writes that “in the Cape Verdean case … Lopes could only interpret Freyre's ‘casa grande’ metaphorically, given that the neglect of the archipelago was so great that the family patriarchs, who were to have taken the place of the state, had long been forced either to abandon the islands or to accept a social demotion that robbed them of most of their authority.”23 The absence of the father figur
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