Top Quotes: “História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands” — Eleanor Stanford

“Even after a few weeks in Cape Verde, I also could tell that Portuguese was largely irrelevant. It’s the official language of Cape Verde, but Creole is the de facto one. Cape Verdean Creole is roughly ninety percent Portuguese-derived, and yet the two are nonetheless mutually unintelligible.

We did need familiarity with Portuguese for any official purposes — to read a bank statement, to understand the news — paper or fill out forms for school. Teachers were supposed to use only Portuguese at school, too, but I quickly learned how unrealistic this was, given that it was a foreign language for everyone, teachers and students alike.”

“The word for maid in Creole is empregada. Literally translated, it means simply ‘employed.’ There is no stigma attached to the job. Any employment is better than the alternative, and a respectable way to put food on the table. Many Cape Verdeans are day laborers, piecing together a living setting stones on a new road or putting up roofs or cleaning houses. “What do you do?” Americans ask each other at parties, in bars, on the bus. A Cape Verdean would be baffled by this question as a means of introduction. I drive a truck, I clean houses, I work in the fields. But what does this tell you about me? Here the important questions are: Who is your father? Who is your mother? Where do you live? Where were your parents born? And, perhaps most fundamental: A bo e kuze? What are you? Meaning, which Portuguese soccer team do you root for?”

“História, história: once there were ten islands scattered in the sea. No one lived there: no stone houses leaned into the volcanic cliffs. No goats browsed the rocky hillsides. Only the call of the tchintchirote echoed in the dry ravines. Then the Portuguese came with their machetes and their sweet tongue. They brought people from Africa and built a village around a stone pole with iron shackles. Pirates patrolled the coast. Cholera crept in on silent feet.

The islands grew barren feeding the men with their large bellies, men who sat in the shade, playing cards, spooning papaya flesh from soft rinds. The hills dried up to indifferent husks. Dust storms picked up the earth and threw everything into a confusion. Ground and sky, Africa and Europe, origin and destination, mingled in a dust-colored haze. The men played Portuguese fados on their guitars and longed for a homeland that no longer existed. In that place a man named Salazar with a thick mustache and large jowls came to power. He wrote a blueprint for fascism called Estado Novo, and stretched the reigns to the breaking point. The fascists fell, and the empire scattered like beads from a snapped chain: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde. Suddenly Portugal was only a sliver of moon on the Atlantic, waning.”

“Cape Verde was a slave trade post, a transit point between Africa and the New World. The Portuguese used it as a holding station for slaves, and established a protectorate there for this reason. There was slavery on a small scale on the islands themselves, mostly on Santiago, where Africans worked on the latifundios, growing bananas and sugar cane in the few valleys that held water.”

“After the slave trade dried up, Cape Verde regained its economic value as a port. Later it became a refueling stop for airplanes traveling between continents. For many years, South African Airways still stopped in Sal on its New York-Johannesburg flight, a nod to Cape Verde from the days when it was the only African country that was not boycotting the apartheid government.

Today there are few Cape Verdean who are not mixed race. The population is roughly seventy-one percent mestizo, twenty-eight percent African, one percent white.

The Northern islands, whose Creole is more similar to Portuguese, and whose people have a lighter skin color, disdain the southern islands. A bo é burru o bo é badiu? they say. Are you stupid, or are you from Santiago? A bo é dodu o bo é di Fogo? Are you crazy or are you from Fogo? They insist it isn’t racist, yet there seemed to be no equivalent put-downs for northern islanders.

This land has always been plagued by droughts, farming here close to untenable. Many people leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The first Cape Verdean emigrants left for the United States on whaling ships in 1790. They worked in cranberry bogs in New England, loaded freight on the docks in Providence. They were among the first Africans to settle voluntarily on U.S. soil. The first Cape Verdean became a naturalized citizen in 1824 in Nantucket.

Today there are as many Cape Verdeans in Boston as there are in Cape Verde. Many work on assembly lines and in construction; the women clean houses, cook katchupa on their days off. Cape Verdean Americans count in their number politicians, professional athletes, actors, theologians, and various well-known musicians, including jazz pianist and composer Horace Silver and the late Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes of the group TLC.

There are Cape Verdean enclaves in Rhode Island and in the Boston area, whole neighborhoods where you can spend years and never speak English. The schools run bilingual education programs for Kriolu speakers. It is the mythical tenth island, the missing piece.”

“Cape Verde drifts against West Africa’s curved ear, which listens only to its own internal rush of blood. Still, it is the closest land mass. Pilots daily pierce the cloud cover in Dakar, thread the islands again and again through a prick of light. There is a certain shame associated with Africa. After Cape Verde won its independence in 1975, the new flag bore the colors of African solidarity: green, red, and black. At the time, the islands’ ties to the continent were more difficult to ignore, as the country had just emerged from a joint war of independence fought in Guinea-Bissau. Pan-Africanism was also in vogue, perhaps making it more acceptable to identify with the continent. However, when an opposing political party, Movimento Para a Democracía, came to power in 1991, they adopted a revised version of the Portuguese flag, in red, white, and blue, those more staid colors favored by Western nations.

In Praia, there are increasing numbers of immigrants from the continent. Families from Guinea-Bissau came fleeing the civil war there in 1998. Men from Senegal come on the ships, bearing masks and fabrics to sell to tourists. They line the curb with wooden faces they have carried almost four hundred miles. Mandjaku, the Cape Verdeans spit. It’s because of the mandjaku that this city is becoming dangerous. Those mandjaku, they steal, they’re dirty, they’re dark as sin. Pretu, feiu. These words are uttered by people themselves the gleaming black of volcanic ash.”

“Thin blue aerograms from my family and friends arrived months after the postmark date, misdirected through Taipei, Saudi Arabia, Brazil. Even the U.S. Postal Service did not always recognize Cape Verde. Sometimes I began to doubt the existence of these islands myself. Distance was a bone in my throat, my body an archipelago of disconnected parts. This geography transcends maps.”

“To be alone for just a little while, I would go running in the mornings. I ran down the mountain and walked back up. “Dja bu kansa?” people called from the back of pickup trucks when they saw me walking. Tired already? Little children on the way to school ran behind me. It was the day’s big excitement. Who could keep up with the branca longest? Sometimes it was a scrappy little boy with a Boston Red Sox cap. Sometimes it was the tall lanky girl in the pink crinoline dress with a crooked lace collar and torn skirt.

Once two old women, coming in from the fields with baskets of beans on their heads, joined me for a half-mile, their loads so perfectly balanced they didn’t slip. Every house I ran by, people came to the door and waved. “Ellie! Ellie!” the children yelled. How did they know my name? As fast as I ran, I could not escape. I only wanted an hour to myself, to be alone without thinking or speaking. “Wait here!” the children called. But I didn’t want to be greeted and laughed at, admired, loved. I didn’t want the gifts they came to the door bearing, a mango or papaya, a fresh egg, a piece of bread.

In some ways, the fora was turning out to be exactly what Dan and I had wanted: we were absorbed instantly into the community. There were no more lonely evenings staring up at the ceiling, wondering what we were doing in Cape Verde. When they saw that we had a tape player, Nelinha and Filomena appeared at our door with a stack of tapes. In the evening, neighbors came from as far as Campana Baixu to watch and clap and take a turn teaching the foreigners to badja dretu, to dance right. The kerosene lamp on the table shook from the stomping.

In other ways, though, living in the countryside was harder than I’d expected. It wasn’t the lack of running water or electricity so much as the complete lack of privacy or solitude.”

“It was bruma seca season — dust storms that blow in from Africa and obscure the sky. The wind pulled up a deep anger in me, its roots suddenly uncovered. I was angry at everything and nothing — the weather, the complete lack of privacy. A line from an Emily Dickinson poem repeated again and again in my head: “The dust did scoop itself like hands / And throw away the road.” The bed sheets rose in wrinkled hills and the dirt mapped new roads overnight. Flights in and out of the island were cancelled for days. The dust wrapped me in its soft arms, scuffed its feet across the fields.”

“The word for fat in Creole is forti, same as the word for strong. In Cape Verde, fleshiness does not have a negative connotation. When I taught my students adjectives, and asked them to describe their best friends, several wrote, “He is fat.””

“In Cape Verde it is rude to eat in front of other people without sharing, whether you know them or not. One does not eat on the street. There is no McDonald’s (not yet, anyway). There are no portable meals, no energy bars or yogurt in a tube. This act that had once been unremarkable to me — a man loudly unwrapping a sandwich on the train platform, girls in the park licking ice cream cones-ain retrospect seemed shockingly impolite.

Children in Cape Verde did not bring lunch to school. Many of them left home at six a.m. without breakfast, and did not eat their first meal of the day until they returned in mid-afternoon. It was custom that dictated this, not lack of food; one could not bring lunch unless everyone else did. There were faintings at school, nosebleeds. Students drooped in class like plants in need of water. When one child had five escudos for a piece of gum, she’d bite it in half or thirds to share.”

“These islands have a history of famine. Fomi: the words for hunger and famine are the same. As though each time it recurred this growling in the stomach could last indefinitely. In Cape Verde, drought and famine arrived in cycles, regular as the tides: 1580, 1592, 1610, 1719, 1748. As recently as the 1940s, lack of food took the lives of a significant percentage of the population. Between 1941 and 1942, twenty thousand died; between 1946 and ’48, another thirty thousand. Over half the population was lost. In January of 1942, the death toll in the capital was reported at one hundred a day. This is in a city of some tens of thousands.

Others went south, to the country of São Tomé and Príncipe, to work as indentured servants on the coffee plantations there. From 1940 to 1973, 120,000 left. They still sing songs about it: Kaminhu longi, kaminhu pa São Tomé — that long road, long road to São Tomé.

The cycle of droughts and relatively fertile years continues, but since the forties there have been no more famines. There is no political turmoil, no civil war to hinder food distribution; the markets are stocked with sacks of USAID rice, with flour from Portugal and tins of powdered milk from Holland. The global economy somehow keeps Cape Verde afloat, barely.

Even if it doesn’t rain, even if the soil does not yield enough corn to last all year, there will still be food. The islands provide less than five percent of their comestible needs. Even corn, the staple and largest crop, is imported.”

“Seven women for every man: it rang with rationalization, a demographic justification for male irresponsibility. As though it proved something inherent and irrevocable in the nature of Cape Verdean men. A nos é diferenti, I heard them say. We’re not like American men. We can’t help it.”

“The town in the crater of the volcano on the island of Fogo is called Chä das Calderas, and was founded by a Frenchman named Montrond. He came from Burgundy in the nineteenth century, carrying grapevine seedlings with roots wrapped in wet cloth. He arrived on the shore and started walking, people directing him up the steep incline toward the serra, the peak. He knew he had arrived when the earth flattened and turned black. The crater walls reached around the village like an enormous arm. Châ das Calderas: the bottom of the pot. The soil nothing but fine black gravel. He dug a hole and put in his plants.

With his broken Creole he showed the people who lived there how to tie the vines to stakes, how to harvest the fruit and crush it into wine. He spoke with his body, with his blue eyes and small hands. He fathered children the color of the sky when dust storms blew in, with thick, pale hair and washed-out eyes, but with the African features of their mothers.

There were tremors and there was calm. The volcano erupted in 1564, 1785, 1816, 1951. A total of thirty times since the Portuguese set foot there. The road into Chä was cobbled; trucks came in with canned milk and sacks of rice and left with baskets of grapes and squash and apples.

The volcano erupted most recently in 1995. Lava flowed over thirteen houses, burying them in ash. The German government, in an act of misguided generosity, built new houses down the mountain, near Tchada Furna. They stayed empty. When the smoke cleared, everyone moved back, rebuilt their stone huts in the same spots.

The grapevines, gnarled as old women, lean into the wind. Their tragic postures tear the passing clouds to shreds. The grapes they bear are tiny and thick-skinned, full of seeds. They make a wine that is dark and acidic, that stains one’s teeth purple. After the ’95 eruption, the government declared Chä das Calderas a danger zone and closed the elementary school there.

Now the children grow wild as the stand of pines beyond the village. They gather pieces of volcanic rock to sell to tourists. They appear silently with bundles of firewood on their heads, then sink back into the fog like ghosts.”

“Preguisoza, Filomena called her sister, lazy, but she said it without bitterness. Most negative qualities, it seemed — laziness, arrogance, drunkenness — were accepted with a shrug. El é komplikadu, one says about someone who is mean or difficult or touchy. Literally, complicated: there is no direct judgment passed on their character — they are just hard to deal with.

After half an hour or so of singing, Cesária paused. She sat down in an armchair on stage and sipped from a small glass of whiskey that was on a small table beside her. “What’s going on?” I whispered to Dan.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. But no one else in the audience seemed to find it strange. Cesária’s backup band, a drummer, guitarist, and bass player, commenced an intricate, accomplished instrumental, and Cesária sat back and thoughtfully smoked a cigarette, listening.

“Preguiça dja dan,” Nelinha often sighed, when she didn’t feel like shelling more peas, or sweeping the eternally dusty floor for the billionth time: laziness has struck me. I heard students use this phrase as an excuse for not doing their homework, heard teachers utter it in the faculty lounge when they didn’t feel like planning another lesson. This laziness was considered as inevitable as any other impulse; it was the same phrasing used when hunger or thirst or tiredness overtakes one. I could think of no equivalent in English. Isn’t that how it works though? These forces befall us, and we are at their mercy.”

“Education in Cape Verde often means physical dislocation. Many of our rural students commuted hours each way to school by dump truck; others moved in with relatives in town, since there were only two high schools on the entire island. But Cape Yerde demands of all its students a separation in some ways even more jarring and irrevocable. This is the switch from Creole, the mother tongue, to Portuguese. Beginning in the first grade, children are thrown into an environment where all communication takes place in a foreign language.”

“Each island has its foreign patron: people from Fogo and Praia go to Boston; from Mindelo, it’s Holland or Providence, Rhode Island. The men from Boa Vista emigrate to Bologna, Italy. There is an Italian resort half a mile outside of the town of Sal Rei. A paved road cuts across the dunes.”

“The town of São Filipe was famous for its sobrados, old houses that the Portuguese built for themselves along the cliffs overlooking the ocean. They painted them in pale blues and pinks, and governed the island from behind their cool stone façades, sat in the quintais, the enclosed patios shaded with papaya trees, and read month-old papers from Portugal. The maid brought coffee in small cups.

The Portuguese left in 1975. The news came over the radio that the war in Guinea-Bissau was over, and Cape Verde was independent. Too bad for this country, they shrugged. Why stick around and watch it sink into a swamp of mismanagement, laziness, and inefficiency? They packed up their books, ruined from the humidity of the rainy season, and the collared shirts, never suited to the climate to begin with.”