Book 188: Cape Verde (English) – Chiquinho: a novel of Cabo Verde (Baltazar LOPES)

I started seeing my island as a vast laboratory of human experience. People who refuse to be crushed by despair, who possess a crucial will to resist, regardless of the outcome of their efforts. Above all of this, there was the constant presence of escapism into the spaces of dream, distance, unknown destinations always offered up by the restless blue curve of the ocean. Moral resistance. What other name could describe the faith of my people, always planting seed, and replanting again, endlessly? The struggle against the Lunário’s forecasts, against earthworms that ruin the corn, against the absence of rain every October, against the harmattan and all bad weather. The sailor Chico Zepa’s struggle against the destiny that prevented him from taking a boat to São Vicente and from there escaping on any convenient steamer to those distant lands that would steal him away for good from the hoe. Nhô João Joana’s tattooed arms. On his right arm, a long-haired woman with a warm, seductive gaze, offering him the delights of never-ending love. And my grandfather, who died so young aboard the whaling ship that was taking him back to Cabo Verde. Mamãe-Velha must have loved him very much, this grandfather with his sparkling eyes, his dark skin, and his black, silky hair that now only a mermaid could caress in endless hours of almost unnerving love. How much he would have liked to come above the waters, back to the deck of his ship, to hunt whales, fight against the treacherous Sargasso seaweed, and defeat, with the force of his youthful courage, storms, cyclones, and uncontrollable winds! 

 

Well, we’re getting towards the pointy end of this project! Mostly, all we have left to cover are the European micro-states, and several island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific – and two (former Portuguese colonies) in Africa. Today, we’re in Cabo Verde.

For us in Australia, this group of islands off the west coast of Africa is almost totally unknown. I knew little myself, apart from the haunting morna “Sodade” (”Longing”) sung by Cesária Évora. It is much better known by Europeans, who have flocked to its beaches in recent years. So for me, this is just the kind of novel that fits my current project perfectly. I learned so much about life and history in the Cape Verde Islands. In following the career of the eponymous hero before he (like so many of his compatriots) is forced to emigrate, Young Chiquinho is torn between his longing for adventure and his ‘sodade’ for his homeland, especially the island of Sao Nicolau made famous by the above-mentioned song. He becomes a writer and gets involved in politics in the early stirrings of the movement for independence from Portugal, establishing a Grémio (Society) influenced by South Africa’s ANC.

I was fascinated by the apparently close relationship of the locals with mythology and folklore, and history – Charlemagne is not forgotten here, nor the Paraguayan war, nor the Chanson de Roland epic. The many shipwrecked sailors can look forward to meeting mermaids. Life in the beautiful islands seems incredibly tough, both for the sailors and the disregarded farmers, even between the recurrent severe droughts and locust plagues. It was heartbreaking when as a teacher Chiquinho sees his students dying one by one. It is hard to blame them for leaving for the supposed paradise of the US where the islands’ intelligentsia ends up buried in mind-numbing factories.

I would have liked to learn more about the close relationship between the independence movements of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, and what happened between them after they gained freedom in 1975 but this is outside the timescale of the book. There were also a lot of names to remember – too many for me. But apart from that minor quibble, I found this a really enjoyable and enlightening novel.

 

LOPES, Baltazar (1907 – 1989), Chiquinho: a novel of Cabo Verde, translated from Portuguese by Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues and Carlos A. Almeida with Anna M. Klobucka, Dartmouth, Mass., Tagus, 2019, ISBN 978-1-933227-85-6

(originally published in Portuguese 1947)

Book 72: Xinjiang (Esperanto) – Loulan [楼蘭 Rōran] (INOUE Yasushi)

 

Within two days Loulan seemed to be a wholly unpopulated walled city. The town seemed to have suffered decades of decrepitude in those two days. This was hastened by, on the one hand, the furious blowing of the wind; earthen walls were destroyed, strata of ash-like sand were deposited on every street, and the whole town went ruinously pale. On the evening of the third day, when the wind had hardly fallen, from across the desert came a Han cavalry of several hundred riders to reside there. The depopulated walled city suddenly became filled with voices and neighing. It was on that day when the water of Lop Nor changed into yellow darkness and waves jumped noisily across the entire surface.

 

[my translation]

 

As mentioned I haven’t yet been able to find a novel by someone from Xinjiang, so to go with my Uighur short story I’ve added this book which includes the novel Loulan and the novella Fremdregionano (as well as an afterword by the translator), by the Japanese author INOUE Yasushi. Inoue was deeply interested in this region. It is an area that I’ve long been fascinated with, but I couldn’t help being disappointed with this one. Both stories read more like straight histories rather than novels. Perhaps that is almost inevitable considering the vast span of time that ‘Loulan’ covers. Loulan itself is the name of an abandoned ancient city on the southern Silk Road which has been reclaimed by the Taklamakan Desert, and also the name of its kingdom (later renamed Shanshan). It had a brief life of half a century, 2000 years ago. Its inhabitants were neither Uighurs (who arose a long time later) nor Chinese, but it seems they may have been Indo-Europeans and did speak an Indo-European language, Tocharian, so related to English. This unfortunate country was squeezed to death by the Han Dynasty Chinese on one side, and the ‘barbarian’ people they called the Xiongnu (who may have been identical to the Huns who later attacked Europe – Inoue calls them Huns ((hunnoj)) here). There was a third destructive force, the desert which finally claimed the city, and perhaps a fourth, the spirit of the Konche River which abandoned it. (Throughout history the rivers, and the mysterious salt lake Lop Nor which they fed – now notorious as the site of China’s nuclear tests, and non-Chinese are almost never allowed to visit the ruins – have moved around the Tarim Basin). In this story, the Chinese force the abandonment of Loulan in 77 BCE for another city called here Shanshan, actually Yixun (which has not been positively identified); in fact more of the tale takes place in ‘Shanshan’ than in Loulan. (Both of these are Chinese names; Loulan’s real name was Kroraina). This is on the pretext of protecting them from the Huns; Loulan becomes a Chinese military base until it is mysteriously abandoned. As Shanshan, the country remained loyal to China but had to struggle to keep the latter’s interest (and eventually failed, leaving them to the Huns). ‘Loulan’ follows how the kingdom tried various survival strategies, trying to keep both powers on side, then trying to get the Han to protect them from the Huns, all unsuccessful.

Fremdregionano takes part of this history and concentrates on one person, Han governor-general Ban Chao (sent to establish a Chinese protectorate but only temporarily successful) and is perhaps more successful for this. Even so, you don’t really get any idea of his character, let alone any character development. He died almost as soon as he returned to the Chinese capital Luoyang, and the Han abandoned what they called the Western Regions within five years.

The trouble with historical novels, while I love both history and novels, for me is that I find it annoying not knowing what is historical fact (or opinion) and what the author has fictionalised. I got the impression that very little was fictionalised, but it is impossible to be certain.

I found it rather jarring that the place and personal names were taken wholesale from the Chinese Pinyin transcription system, and then the Esperanto morphological endings added on. Even sounds that could be easily transcribed (and thus made pronounceable) in Esperanto orthography, such as ‘sh’, were left in Pinyin form. For example, Shanshan-anoj (inhabitants of Shanshan) could easily have been written ŝanŝananoj. There are some typos and (possibly controversial) neologisms. Some of the names are anachronistic (e.g. the kingdom of Former Cheshi). There are some very long quotes from the Chinese Silk Road travellers Faxian and Xuanzang and the Swedish archaeologist-discoverer Sven Hedin, all of whose full accounts are definitely worth reading if you’re interested in this area.

 

INOUE Yasushi 井上靖 (1907 – 1991), Loulan kaj Fremdregionano, translated from Japanese into Esperanto by Miyamoto Masao, Serio Oriento-Okcidento 20, Tokyo, Japana Esperanto-Instituto, 1984 [no ISBN].

Book 63: Niger (French) – Camisole de paille = The Straw Camisole (Amadou IDÉ)

              

   ‘Mother, I’ve come to find out what’s happening. For a few days now, people have been coming and going here. Especially Old Gôro whose shadow hovers over all the marriages in the village. Have you been charged with preparing a marriage without telling me?’

                ’It’s because of you, my daughter. Only because of you’ answered the mother after a long silence.

                ’Because of me, mother? What’s it got to do with me? No one has spoken to me of marriage here, not even my friends.’

                ’That doesn’t surprise me, my daughter. That’s because it’s a matter of your own marriage’, her mother sighed.

[my translation]

 

Fatou and Karimou are lovers and want to get married, but Fatou’s mother doesn’t like him and forbids her only child from wedding him. Her parents force her to marry the ‘Koumandaw’ (the regional authority) against her will – her weak husband Old Mazou having been bribed by giving him his dream of a hajj to Mecca – but she quickly escapes him and her drought-desiccated village for the city, where she is taken under the wing by a house of kindly prostitutes and grows into an independent young woman. When Fatou and Karimou meet back in the village, they find they have grown apart. Fatou, like everyone, has to find a way of accommodating the pressures of family and of changing ways of life, and she does.

It is a slim novel, but I loved it! It’s such a shame that it (or any other of Amadou Idé’s novels) hasn’t been translated into English.

 

IDÉ, Amadou (1951 – ), Misères et grandeurs ordinaires, Ciboure, Le Cheminante, 2014, ISBN 978-2-37127-016-9