by Rob Spillman
Cultures survive for as long as they remain productive, as long as they are subject to change and can dialogue and mingle with other cultures. Languages and cultures do what living organisms do: they exchange genes and invent symbioses in response to the challenges of time and environment.
In Mozambique, we are living in an age when encounters and disencounters are occurring within a melting-pot full of exuberance and paradox. Words do not always serve as a bridge between these diverse worlds. For example, concepts that seem to us to be universal, such as Nature, Culture, and Society, are sometimes difficult to reconcile. There are often no words in local languages to express these ideas. Sometimes, the opposite is true: European languages do not possess expressions that may translate the values and concepts contained in Mozambican cultures.
I remember something that really happened to me. In 1989, I was doing research on the island of Inhaca when a team of United Nations technicians arrived there. They had come to carry out what is generally known as “environmental education.” I don’t want to comment here on how this concept of environmental education often conceals a type of messianic arrogance. The truth of the matter is that these scientists, brimming with good faith, had brought with them cases containing slide projectors and films. In a word, they had brought with them educational kits, in the naïve expectation that technology would prove the solution to problems of understanding and communication.
During the first meeting with the local population, some curious misunderstandings emerged that illustrate the difficulty of translating not so much words but thoughts. On the podium were the scientists who spoke in English, myself, who translated this into Portuguese, and a fisherman who translated the Portuguese into Chidindinhe, the local language. It all began when the visitors introduced themselves (I should mention here that most of them happened to be Swedish). We are “scientists,” they said. But the word “scientist” doesn’t exist in the local language. The term chosen by the translator was “inguetlha,” which means “witchdoctor.” In those folks’ eyes therefore, the visitors were white witchdoctors. The Swedish leader of the delegation (unaware of the status conferred upon him) then announced: “we have come here to work on the environment.” Now, in that culture, the idea of the environment has no autonomous meaning and there is no word that exactly describes such a concept. The translator hesitated and eventually chose the word “ntumbuluku,” which has various meanings, but refers above all to a sort of Big Bang, the moment when humanity was created. As you can imagine, these island folk were fascinated: their little island had been chosen to study a matter of the highest, most noble metaphysical importance.
During the course of the dialogue, the same Swedish member of the delegation asked his audience to identify the environmental problems that were of greatest concern to the islanders. The crowd looked at each other, perplexed: “environmental problems”? After consulting among themselves, the people chose their greatest problem: the invasion of their plantations by the “tinguluve,” or bush pigs. Interestingly, the term “tinguluve” also describes the spirits of the dead who fell ill after they had stopped living. Whether they were spirits or pigs, the foreign expert didn’t understand very well what these “tinguluve” were. He had never seen such an animal. His audience explained: the pigs had appeared mysteriously on the island and had begun to multiply in the forest. Now, they were destroying the plantations.
• They’re destroying the plantations? Well, that’s easy: we can shoot them!
The crowd’s reaction was one of fearful silence. Shoot spirits? No one wanted to talk or listen anymore, no matter what the subject. And the meeting came to an abrupt end, damaged by a tacit loss of trust.
That night, a group of elders knocked on my door. They asked me to summon the foreigners so that they could better explain the problem of the pigs. The experts appeared, astonished by this interruption to their sleep.
• It’s because of the wild pigs.
• What about the pigs?
• It’s because they’re not quite pigs . . .
• So what are they, then? they asked, certain that a creature couldn’t exist and at the same time not exist.
• They are almost pigs. But they’re not complete pigs.
Their explanation was going from bad to worse. The pigs were defined in ever more vague terms: “convertible creatures,” “temporary animals” or “visitors who had been sent by someone.” Eventually, the zoologist, who was by now getting tired, took out his manual and showed them the photograph of a wild pig. The locals looked and exclaimed: “Yes, that’s the one.” The scientists smiled, satisfied, but their victory was short lived, for one of the elders added: Yes, this is the animal, but only at night time. I have few doubts that by this time, the experts doubted my ability as a translator. In this way, they didn’t need to question what they were saying or query how they had arrived in an unknown locality.
Whatever the correct translation might be, the truth is that the relationship between the experts and the local community was never good and no manner of modern PowerPoint presentation could make up for the initial misunderstanding.
On another occasion, I was accompanying a presidential delegation on a visit to a province in the North of Mozambique. The President of the Republic was introducing his ministers. When it came to the Minister of Culture, the translator, after a brief pause, then announced: “This is the Minister of Tomfoolery.”
In some languages in Mozambique, there isn’t a word for “poor.” A poor person is designated by the term “chisiwana,” which means “orphan.” In these cultures, a poor person isn’t just someone who doesn’t possess assets, but above all it is someone who has lost the network of family relationships, which, in rural society, are a support mechanism for survival. The individual is considered poor when he or she doesn’t have relatives. Poverty is loneliness, family rupture. It is possible that international experts, specialists in writing reports on destitution, don’t take sufficient account of the dramatic impact of destroyed family links and social mutual help networks. Whole nations are becoming “orphans” and begging seems to be the only route to torturous survival.
By recounting these episodes, I wish to reinforce what we already know: the systems of thought in rural Africa are not easily reducible to European processes of logic. Some who seek to understand Africa plunge into analyses of political, social and cultural phenomena. To understand the diversity of Africa, however, we need to get to know systems of thought and religious universes that often don’t even have a name. Such systems are curious because they are often rooted in actually negating the gods they invoke. For most of the peasantry in my country, the issues surrounding the origin of the world just don’t exist: the universe quite simply has always existed. What is the role of God in a world that never had a beginning? This is why, in some religions in Mozambique, the gods are always referred to in the plural, and have the same names as living people. The problem with God, according to a Makwa proverb, is the same as the one with the egg: if we don’t hold it properly we drop it; if we hold it too hard, we break it.
In the same way, the idea of the “environment” presupposes that we humans are at the centre and things dwell in orbit to us. In reality, things don’t revolve around us, but along with them we form one same world, people and things dwell within one indivisible body. This diversity of thought suggests that it may be necessary to storm one last bastion of racism, which is the arrogance of assuming that there is only one system of knowledge, and of being unable to accept philosophies originating in impoverished nations.
I have been talking about the various cosmovisions found in rural areas of Mozambique. But I wouldn’t want you to look at them as if they were essentialities, resistant to time and the dynamics of exchange. Today, when I revisit the island of Inhaca, I see that campaigns have been mounted to kill the wild pigs that invade plantations. And local chiefs prepare for the visits of foreign scientists, using their mobile phones. Throughout the
country, millions of Mozambicans have appropriated the words “culture” and “nature” and have absorbed them into their cultural universes. These new words are working on top of the original cultures, in the same way that certain trees invent the ground out of which they appear to be growing.
In short, cultural phenomena aren’t stopped in time, waiting for an anthropologist to turn up and record them as some proof of an exotic world, outside modernity. Africa has been subject to successive processes of essentialization and folklorization, and much of what is proclaimed as being authentically African is the result of inventions made outside the continent. For decades, African writers had to undergo the so-called test of authenticity: their texts were required to translate that which was understood to be their true ethnicity. Nowadays, young African writers are freeing themselves from “Africanness.” They are what they are without any need for proclamation. African writers seek to be as universal as any other writer in the world.
It is true that many writers in Africa face specific problems, but I prefer not to subscribe to the idea that Africa is a unique, singular and homogeneous place. There are as many Africas as there are writers and all of them are reinventing continents that lie inside their very selves. It is true that a high proportion of African writers face challenges in order to adjust their work to different languages and cultures. But this is not a problem that is exclusively ours, those of us who are African. There isn’t a writer in the world who doesn’t have to seek out his or her own identity among multiple and elusive identities. In every continent, each person is a nation made up of different nations. One of these nations lives submerged and made secondary by the universe of writing. This hidden nation is called orality. Then again, orality is not a typically African phenomenon, nor is it a characteristic that is exclusive to those who are erroneously called “native peoples.” Orality is a universal territory, a treasure rich in thoughts and sensibilities that is reclaimed by poetry.
The idea persists that only African writers suffer what is called the drama of language. It is true that colonization induced traumas over identity and alienation. But the truth, my friends, is that no writer has at his disposal a consummated language. We all have to find our own language in order to demonstrate our uniqueness and unrepeatability.
The Indian sociologist André Breteille wrote: “Knowing a language makes us human; fluency in more than one language makes us civilized.” If this is true, Africans—assumed down the ages to be uncivilized—may be better suited to modernity than even they themselves think. A high proportion of Africans know more than one African language and, apart from these, speak a European language. That which is generally seen as problematic may after all represent considerable potential for the future. For this ability to be polyglot may provide us Africans with a passport to something that has become perilously rare nowadays: the ability to travel between different identities and to visit the intimacy of others.
Whatever the case, a civilized future implies sweeping and radical changes in this world that could be ever more our world. It implies the eradication of hunger, war and poverty. But it also implies a predisposition to deal with the material of dreams. And this has everything to do with the language that lulled the sick woman to sleep at the beginning of my talk. The man of the future should surely be a type of bilingual nation. Speaking a finished language, capable of dealing with visible, everyday matters. But fluent too in another language to express that which belongs to the invisible, dreamlike order of existence.
What I am advocating is a plural man, equipped with a plural language. Alongside a language that makes us part of the world, there should be another that makes us leave it. On the one hand, a language that creates roots and a sense of place. On the other, a language that is a wing upon which to travel.
Alongside a language that gives us our sense of humanity, there should be another that can elevate us to the divine.
Thank you very much.
ONDJAKI
• Angola •
DRAGONFLY
for Dr. Carvalho
if from these stones one announced what creates silence: here, close by, [ . . . ] this would open, like a wound you would have to plunge into
—Paul Celan, “The Power of Light”
A FLUID SOUND ran through the house, brushed against the dust on the garden vines, swayed the mangoes and the papayas as they ripened, terrified a drunken dragonfly that was dozing there, made the sun diminish, and settled still strong, still distinct, at the woman’s ear. Followed by a smile.
From the stereo the sound flowed continuously, without interruption. The doctor was locked into this Sunday habit of sitting outdoors on his veranda listening for long periods to the Brazilian singer Adriana Calcanhoto. Now he slept, now he read, now he wrote, now he simply lay back with teary eyes contemplating the fat clouds fleeing the sky. For him nothing more anointed a Sunday than his own peace. “Sunday” was, for the doctor, a deeply personal word, a wellspring.
Knowing this—that the doctor appeared deep in his Sunday routine—the woman hesitated. She lay her head against the iron gate and wanted to believe the impossible: that she was not thirsty. Her head throbbed; her eyes truly wanted to close, to forget the world, to stop rendering their visual services. The cold gate brought pleasure to the fingers and the heart. The music invaded her pores. Right then she and the doctor shared a common sensation. At the same moment he thought: This voice, yes, it can be shared. The voice of Adriana, purring into the afternoon: “People will be crazy, or sane . . . when they want everything to become music.”
When the voice fell quiet, the dragonfly decided to wake up, moving in an open zigzag and landing near the doctor’s notes. Scratchings, denied memories, fragments of more sensitive times that he did not need to accept as his own. “I forget the ground, I don’t find the words,” the voice sang on. It had been years since he settled accounts with the animals and settled into a balanced relationship with them. He maintained a still-conflicted relationship with the cockroaches and the lizards, but he was no killer. Instead, he used to smile. In the morning he often yearned to see Angolan antelope running like he used to see as a child in the southwestern province of Namibe; sometimes at the beach he found sweaty horses and was held back by eyes that wanted to shut, savoring the strong scent of lathering horse flesh. He was happy only on the eve of a trip, when he dreamt of white or delicately yellow butterflies, and never got an interpretation of the dream. It had been years since he made peace with the animals, including the Dengue cat that he had dealt a mortal wound. The cats, mainly cats, brought the insects back to mind.
It was after the dragonfly that he noticed the woman resting at his gate with closed eyes, listening, it seemed to him, to the music of Adriana: “On principle I never close doors, but . . . keep them open at all times . . .”
He uncrossed his legs and slowly released them from the other chair: he slipped into his sandals. Walking, he was looking at the tranquil dragonfly strolling over his letters, over the smell of his Violet #971 ink. The ink was so sticky that he had to write at a furious pace, since it dried quickly once it met the air. But the dragonfly, not particularly curious, couldn’t reach the bottle and couldn’t drink. One step, two. He was near the gate and the woman, despite his wishes, didn’t open her eyes. But she did speak.
• Forgive the interruption . . .
It was neither a shock nor anything really describable. The doctor simply hadn’t counted on that feeling of closeness.
• I recognize the smell of the ink . . . Sir, do you write with a quill?
• No . . . It’s . . . Well, OK, it’s a kind of quill.
The gate was unlocked. He mentioned opening it; she opened her eyes, taking her eyes off the grillwork.
• Forgive the interruption, but I’m so thirsty—maybe hoping that the doctor would reveal whether or not he forgave the disturbance, she shifted tone.
The gate was opened by the doctor’s precise hand, while his other offered a f
riendly gesture. He was not easily ruffled. “Right there I forgot that destiny always wanted me alone,” sang Adriana.
• Water or soft drink?—the doctor.
• Water, please.
The woman noticed the still dragonfly. Its heart was too alive for it to be dead or embalmed, but it was totally immune to the wind that ruffled the sheets of paper. The woman approached the table but didn’t sit down. Out of curiosity she looked at the inky letters against the whiteness without intending to read the message, but more in appreciation of the beauty of the masculine handwriting. It was, she later saw, a “type of quill,” as the doctor told her, that had produced those enchanting scratches. It offered no resistance and came to her nearby hand; it seemed crystalline.
• It’s glass. Yes, glass. Isn’t it lovely?—the doctor.
• Very . . . It’s a very special quill—the woman.
He brought the water, in a normal glass, to her hands. The doctor still kept the pitcher on a long side of the table, without disturbing the dragonfly. He invited the woman to sit down.
• Thank you. You must be surprised, hmm?
• Surprised?
• Asking for water. No one has rung the bells to ask for water, right?
• That’s right. You’re not from here, no?
• No.