Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities

Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic

Margarida Rendeiro, Federica Lupati, Margarida Rendeiro, Federica Lupati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367338442
• eBook ISBN: 9781000546873
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking an original approach, Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities: Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic explores a selected body of cultural works from Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa. Contributors from various fields of expertise examine the ways contemporary writers, artists, directors, and musicians explore canonical forms in visual arts, cinema, music and literature, and introduce innovation in their narratives, at the same time they discuss the social and historical context they belong to.

1 Bridging Borders

Traveling through Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s Life and Works

Hilarino Carlos Rodrigues da Luz

This chapter approaches traveling in Ruy Duarte de Carvalho as a way of bridging borders inside and outside of Angola. This is more than a question of geography. As an author, Duarte de Carvalho left Luanda and traveled through the southeast of Angola, France and Brazil before returning to Luanda. His literary works reflect his traveling through these places, and this chapter offers a few notes of discussion of the concept of traveling through Carvalho’s works.

Ruy Duarte was born in Santarém on April 24, 1941, and was found dead on August 12, 2010, at the age of 69, in Swakopmund, Namibia. His love for adventure and his huge curiosity shaped his personality and were reflected in his artistic and academic work. He spent his childhood in Moçâmedes (currently Namibe) and returned to Santarém in 1955 to study Agricultural Management [Regência Agrícola] at the Higher School of Agriculture [Escola Superior Agrária], where he was a boarding student. Angolans of his generation who wanted to get higher education degrees came to Portugal to study at Portuguese universities; there, they also gained political knowledge. After completing his education, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho returned to Angola.

He highlighted two major consequences of his life course as he drew up his biography: his birthplace, Portugal, which stood as a reference of his voluntary exile, and the quickness of everything that happened in his life (Carvalho 2011). As an agricultural expert, he began working when he was only 19 in the forests of Uíge, and survived the nationalist uprising that erupted around him in the north of the country in March 1961. He became involved in the underground guerrilla struggle against the Portuguese colonial regime, whereby he had tasks that included typing protest poems for distribution in the musseques.¹ However, his political activities were interrupted briefly when he was sent to Gabela and Calulo by the Institute of Coffee [Instituto do Café].²

Yet his political activism made him a persona non grata by the Libolo administration, which motivated his transfer (together with a Basque priest and a Portuguese doctor) to Catumbela, where he found a new job as a cattle breeding manager. Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was transferred, but fortunately because of his brief political actions he was not arrested or killed (the colonial regime tended to punish its opponents). In 1961 he witnessed a major event in Angola with the massacre of a large number of Angolans in the Cassange Basin.³ Images of bodies spread out on the ground were disseminated in magazines, books, newspapers and on television around the world, and the author manifested his position of disgust and distress through autobiographical texts and interviews. Another landmark event in his life was when he obtained Angolan citizenship in 1983. He stopped considering himself European and preferred to see himself as an African.

Most postcolonial studies stem from the reaction of the diasporic intellectual elites against the political functioning of their countries of origin, often dominated by corrupt elites who did not in fact bring to their countries the anticipated social, political and economic dynamics idealized with independence (Ribeiro 2004). Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, when incorporating this postcolonial thought, examines, among other subjects, the position of Angolan politicians. He argues that they think mainly about their own interests and those of the people who are close to them, when they should think about the whole. Carvalho is an author who experienced both the colonial and the postcolonial periods in Angola, that is, two very different contexts. However, as the author himself noticed, they sometimes intersect and there are times when the colonial past continues to work as a reference. Carvalho argued himself (Carvalho 2002, 2004) that the colonial perspective continued to influence the perception of the Kuvale nomadic herders, and this was recovered in the contemporary era. I also highlight this as an example of Carvalho’s aim of dismantling certain stereotypes that persisted in the postcolonial context, namely the idea that the Kuvale people were all thieves.⁴ In fact, these stereotyping narratives were what pushed him to travel within the country and rearrange the imaginary while bridging cultural frontiers: from the colonial perspective, the Kuvale were a nomadic movement, a population that only set off in search of pasture for their oxen, while the author saw them as a people in a movement that conveyed true ‘poetry’ for him.

In 1971 Carvalho managed a brewery in Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), Mozambique, and in 1972 he traveled to London to study television and filmmaking. In 1983 he left Angola once again to take a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the École des Hautes Études de Sciences Sociales in France, which he completed with a thesis on fishermen from the Luanda coast entitled Ana a manda: os filhos da rede (1989). These data are fundamental to understand the work of this author, who has published poetry, fiction, essays, narratives, chronicles and films. His literary and cinematographic production shows how he captured and recorded the image of a still unknown Angola, turning his attention to the south of the country, in an attempt to enhance and legitimize the local identities. To him, the south was a place of dialogue, learning and interaction, which was evoked in almost all of his artistic and literary work. An example of this is his poem ‘O sul’ [The South, 2005]:

The south // The sun the south the salt // the hands of someone in the sun / the salt from the south in the sun / the sun in hands of south / and hands of salt in the sun / and salt from the south in hands of sun / and hands of south in the sun / a sun of salt to the south / the sun to the south / the salt in the sun / the salt the sun / and hands of south with no sun or salt // For when at last in the south / in the sun.

(Carvalho 2005, 13)⁵

Reference to the south can also be found in other texts, such as in the poem ‘Venho de um sul’ [I come from a South, 2005]:

I came to the east / to size up the night / in wide gestures / I invented in the south / tending mulolas and anharas/ bathed in light / like thighs remembered in May. // I come from a south / lightly measured / in transparency of fresh water of tomorrow. / From a time that is round / and freed from seasons. / From a nation of transhumant bodies / confused / with the colour of the aculeus crust / of a black ground elaborated on embers.

(Carvalho 2005, 35)⁶

Hence, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was an author committed to understanding and sharing his knowledge of the southeast of Angola with his readers, a disposition grounded upon his experience as a traveler; an observer; and, above all, upon his ‘condition’ as an anthropologist, a specificity of his that also brought him close to written sources, as he explains:

The written sources (to which the need of situating the populations I deal with historically and ethnically refers me to), when confronted with the results and the treatment of a questionnaire, as well as with an observation, end up often appearing (and perhaps it could not be otherwise) more revealing of the subjects who gave their testimony, and of the conditions in which they did so, than of the object they referred to. This also is common knowledge and the only interest in insisting on the question is because I think sometimes that can be a starting point for the possible clarification of some misunderstandings referring both to the present and to the past.

(Carvalho 2008a, 189)⁷

In this sense, his ‘condition’ of anthropologist underlays his position as an observer, allowing him to observe and decipher reality in the name scientific objectivity and to the detriment of emotion, beyond any dynamic of competition, exclusion and offense that could harm it.

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho established a border between Luanda (urban and cosmopolitan) and the south (with pastoral societies established in the regions in the Namib desert), conveying his ambition to examine a part of Angola that was removed from the center of attention and decision-making as he sought to understand the country as a whole, in its human, social, cultural and geographical amplitude. In this sense, he saw Angola in a decentralized way, as a vast territory with great ethnic diversity. Subsequently, his ideas allowed him to offer a broader vision of Angola, with the main objective of shedding light on its more remote areas, those that were far away from the big decision-making centers, in other words, far away from Luanda. His ultimate purpose enabled him to understand group behaviors, as well as the sociological, anthropological and cultural particularities of Angola. They have played a fundamental role in the country’s frontier differentiation, which is both physical and human.

An important aspect of his travels was the fact that he transcended the urban environment of Luanda through distinctly differentiated actions and thoughts; he entered new spaces, with the aim of observing, analyzing and disclosing them (Carvalho 2008b). In this line of thought, he considered traveling a fundamental life experience. In other words, to him life itself was a journey. Hence, I consider his reinterpretation of Angola a way to highlight the similarities between the two – life and travel – as a universal aspect. Also, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho differentiated between types of travel: business, exile, sports, spying, emigration, pilgrimages, political, humanitarian, missionary and romantic travels. Travel is portrayed in his writings as an opportunity to cover spaces, or as way to define lives lived in other spaces – inside and outside of Luanda – as well as it outlines the chance to see other continents. Therefore, his wanderings across Angola can be seen as part of what he intended as his project, that is, making the life of other Angolans known to readers, familiarizing Angolans with their country and stressing the idea that leaving Luanda was a way to broaden perspectives through the eyes of a traveler.

At the age of 58, Carvalho found himself ‘sleeping on stones’ among the Mucubais and the Kuvale, ‘those who share the oxen and have milk, the herders no one remembers’ [Os que partilham bois e têm leite, os pastores de que ninguém se lembra; Coelho 1999, 1].⁸ Angola is a culturally heterogeneous country, and this heterogeneity is considered impossible to bypass ‘both horizontally, in terms of the geographical extent of the country and the different human groups that inhabit its territory, and vertically, in terms of the behaviors of the several layers of its social composition’ (Carvalho 2011, 78).⁹ The settlement of many Angolan populations in the interior of the country, which ensured their vital and social viability over the last decades, also proves this cultural diversity (Carvalho 2011, 78).

As far as the Kuvale communities are concerned, it is worth mentioning that their social organization is founded on a tripartite system of clans: the Kwangombe – of the oxen –; the Kwatyite – of vegetables, foliage and corn; and the Kwambwa – of the dog and the lion. Yet Ruy Duarte de Carvalho hinted at another form of social organization of this people, without excluding their tripartite system. According to him:

another clan, or another lineage of another clan that, like all the others, exceeds the Kuvale group, is mentioned: the Kwambila – of the rain. In the first table, these are mentioned as belonging to the Kwangombe, in the second the Kwamba are left out and are mainly understood as people of Kwanyoka origin, Herero too that over time came to integrate the Kuvale group.

(Carvalho 2008a, 213)¹⁰

As the selected text shows, Carvalho reinforces the idea of the Kuvale’s tripartite social stratification, yet offering a different view of the clans involved. According to his analysis, the Kuvale’s identity wasn’t strictly linked to their geographical space and their social organization crossed boarders, while the previous attempts to classify them showed the influence of a Westernizing eye. As Alexandra Lucas Coelho points out, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho returned to the south of Angola ‘with diaries and tapes, because “he still has things to say out here” to the decision-makers, to those who “accumulate cars in the backyards of Luanda” and to those who repeat the mistakes of “so-called humanitarian aid”’ (Coelho 1999, 1).¹¹

The month of June was considered by the author as the perfect time to go to Namibe. Many of his publications resulted from those travels, and one in particular is worth highlighting for my study: Vou lá visitar pastores [I go there to visit shepherds, 1999]. Besides being written in prose, this work reveals his ‘condition’ as a poet. It also situates the Kuvale/Mucubais in a historical and geographical context. This is the standpoint of the author: besides having an anthropological approach, Vou lá visitor pastores is also a study of Angolanness. Like Cape Verdeanness or Mozambicanness, for instance, this term is based on the notion of national culture, that is, on sociocultural concepts. In fact, the concept of Angolanness refers to the notion on identity as part of a modern ideal. As a humanist postulate, it was created on values of fraternity and solidarity, and it aimed at offering cultural roots. To Carvalho, the idea of Angolanness had to take into equal account all the various ethnic groups that lived in the country and that were still developing there, and not be limited to the cultural practices of the people living in Luanda only. Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s life and works show precisely this effort: that of making Angola known as a heterogeneous space. For these purposes herein, we must take into account that Angola has two great extremes, according to Ruy Duarte de Carvalho:

on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bridging Borders: Traveling through Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s Life and Works
• 2 Spousal Violence: Violent Masculinity in Ferréz and Marcelino Freire
• 3 An Infernal Eden: Postmodern Apocalyptic Tone in Deus-dará and Its Use as a Critique of Lusophone Racism
• 4 ‘To decolonize is to perform’: The Theory-in-Praxis of Grada Kilomba
• 5 Recognition on the Walls: Street Art and Pixo in São Paulo
• 6 Streets of Revolution: Analyzing Representations of the Carnation Revolution in Street Art
• 7 ‘Dance is a Disguise’: Batida and the Infrapolitics of Dance Music in Postcolonial Portugal
• 8 The Luso and Rap: The Political Reinvention of Language
• 9 Revolution and Poetry: Portuguese Rap as a Contemporary Practice of Protest Songs
• 10 Tragic Revolutions on Screen: Decolonization revisited in Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money, 2014] by Pedro Costa and Virgem Margarida [Virgin Margarida, 2012] by Licínio Azevedo
• 11 Scaring the Canon, Criticizing the Country: The Politics of Brazilian Horror Film in the 21st Century
• 12 Filming Ghosts: Reviving Memories in Haunted Spaces, Personal Reflections
• Index