Book 166: Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese) – A última tragédia = The Ultimate Tragedy (Abdulai SILA)

 

Where exactly was this hope?

Those who knew her earlier would easily understand, it wouldn’t take many words. For the others, it would take patience to explain. She said that it went with her everywhere, ever. Sometimes, it even appeared in dreams, when she was about to fall asleep. It filled her heart with happiness and her head with ideas. New ideas and dreams, and others recussitated, that had been born in her adolescence and had died at some uncertain date in her youth. It was everywhere, even in Obem’s smile, which was also one of her [or: its] fruits. Hope was in everything she did, by day or by night, standing up or lying down. Anyone who didn’t want to believe it must be completely blind or very jealous. Or else someone who had never lost hope…

 

[my translation]

 

As Guinea-Bissau heads towards independence from Portugal, village girl Ndani nervously heads to Bissau to work for a Portuguese family as a maid. She is unlucky and seems not very intelligent; she starts with no knowledge of the world of the ‘brancos’ (’Whites’).

Like so many colonies, Guinea-Bissau ended up with colonists who were mostly poor fishers or peasants back home, and who hope the locals won’t know (the housemistress Linda can barely read).

Linda discovers religion and makes Ndani go to church. But her husband rapes house-girls.

Ndani is expelled and returns to her village; the chief force-marries her (his sixth wife), and builds a big house for her, but he abandons her when he finds she’s no longer a virgin. Régulo is also not very intelligent but does get good advice. The chief thinks about thinking all the time (the brancos’ secret) but he doesn’t really think.

She finally finds love with the school teacher and has a child with him. But all is not destined to end well, as he gets unwillingly caught up in the rivalry between Régulo and the colonial Administrator.

I learnt a lot about local attitudes, for example that ‘White’ medicine is thought to work on ‘Blacks’ but not vice versa… Another very enjoyable African novel.

This Portuguese language edition has a vocabulary full of great words (which the English translation apparently doesn’t have).

 

Sila, Abdulai (1958 – ), A última tragédia, Rio de Janeiro, Pallas, 2011, ISBN 978-85-347-0398-7

(First published in Guinea-Bissau 1995)

Translated as: The Ultimate Tragedy by Jethro Soutar, Sawtry, Dedalus, 2017