the poetics and politics of seduction
by Douglas Messerli
Corsino Fortes, Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and Sean
O’Brien (Brooklyn, New York:
Archipelago Books/Island Position, 2015)
The central objects and images of
Cabo Verde poet Corsino Fortes are deceptively simple: sun, moon, sea, stone,
bread, drums, guitars, blood, palm, fist, thumb, and mouth, along with the
colors red, yellow, and green appear time and again throughout the book. At
times this poetry collection even takes on the quality of a series of
postcards, stanzas that lay out the details of daily life in the archipelago of
the ten islands that lay off the West African coast, as if perhaps the poet
were attempting to seduce us to his tourist-dependent land through a series of
pleasant travelogues:
The disturbance of the crows on the
cliff
Announces us
In the mouth of the village
On the fat wind that smells of ham
of fresh bread
At the seaside we stand our ribbed
boats up
Before the public promise of the
sea
And on the shore we navigate
With fewer hands
With fewer feet
And
short of protein
The people the sunset the bread in
between
(“Barefoot on the
Bread of Morning”)
Yet even this seemingly picture post-card paradise, the author betrays
some of the central problems with his homeland. The “fewer hands” and “feet”
suggests the vast diaspora that has occurred to the islands over the last
centuries. So many people have left the islands that today the country contains
fewer citizens (about 525,000 individuals) than those who now live elsewhere:
about 500,000 Cape Verdeans live in the United States alone, and large
populations have moved to Portugal, Angola, Senegal, the Netherlands, France,
Spain, Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, and even Argentina. Indeed one of the
poet’s most touching poems, “Postcards from the High Seas,” discusses precisely
this grand diaspora:
I
Crioula, you will tell the guitar
Of the night, and the dawn’s
small guitar
That you are a dark-skinned bride
With Lela in
Rotterdam
**********************
II
In the morning
It snowed in the temples of
Europe
The lamp of my hand is a caravel
Among the
fjords of Norway
*********************
III
I used to sell Karnoca
On the streets of New
York
I’ve played ourin among the
girders
Of skyscrapers under
construction
In a building in Belfast
Remain the skulls and bones
Of my
contemporaries
The blood remains
Alive in the
telephone’s nostrils
It is a culture, accordingly, that is thoroughly genetically and
linguistically mixed, the latter about which the poet seems particularly
concerned in his first book, Bread and
Phoneme, in which the act of eating (of survival) is equated with the act
of speaking (a making of a reality that permits that survival). As Fortes
writes in the poem “Emigrant”:
Go and plant
In dead Amilcar’s
mouth
This fistful of watercress
And spread from goal to goal [porta em porta, in the original, goal seems an odd choice]
A fresh phonetics
And with the commas of the street
and syllables from door to
door
You will sweep away before the night
The roads that go
as far as the night-schools
For all departure means a growing
alphabet
for all return in a nation’s
language
Food as survival is another important aspect of Cape Verdean life,
moreover, as the poet hints in the first poem I quoted above (“Barefoot on the
Bread of Morning”) in which he suggests the country is not only short of hands
and feet, but also “short of protein.” Because of the volcanic creation of the
islands, most of the land is able to support only the most basic of foodstuffs,
and over 90% of food consumed in Cape Verde must be imported.
In the early years of its existence the island populations were
regularly sacked by pirates such as Sir Francis Drake; and during the long
Portuguese rule of the islands, particularly during the Salazarist dictatorship,
the Cape Verdeans severely suffered from hunger and, coincidentally in the
early 1970s, endured a severe drought. Along with other Portuguese-ruled
African countries, particularly Guinea-Bissau, rebels from Cape Verde, led by
the Amilcar (Cabral) mentioned by Fortes above, fought against Portuguese
garrisons. In 1975, the publication year of Fortes’ Bread and Phoneme, the islands gained independence from their
former colonial rulers. Fortes, formerly the ambassador to Portugal, published
this early work in Angola, where he was serving as a judge.
The conjoining of food and language, accordingly, is perhaps an
inevitable phenomenon for a poet in Fortes’ position. Both things, dependent on
the mouth, make existence possible and give rise to the survival of a
victimized population, many of whom had been forced to leave their homes simply
to find enough to eat. Today the island country, despite its dependence upon
imports, has one of the highest standards of living and the most democratic of
governments in Africa.
It has been precisely their abilities to connect one thing and another,
to bring food and people into their somewhat isolated world that has resulted
in the contemporary citizens’ continued existence. And Fortes stresses this
interrelationship of things in his other books as well, originally published
with titles like Tree & Drum and Stones of Sun & Substance. In fact,
one might describe the poetics of this writer as representing a kind of
engagement with conjunctions.
Time and again in Fortes’poems, instead of proclaiming and separating
opposing arguments, he conjoins its elements, as in the beautifully balanced,
yet distinctively disjunctive work, “The Pestle and the Grindstone”:
The man And his female
That table and its tabernacle
The sun in the pregnant mouth
The bread of blood on the
table
The man And his female
The source and its phoneme
The alarm in the revolted
mouth
The cry of the artery over
the map
And bread stone
Palm of the
earth’s being
May it be
time & tamara
Over
Time and temples
And
gallops
The dialogue the dialect
Which
Gallop
Over the palate
Bringing
a
e
i
o
u
in its
feijãos verdes
In a selection from “The Fisherman the Fish and the Peninsula,” Fortes
employs the conjunction “E” (“AND”) as a major structural device:
AND
In the calm of the prow
On the warlike waves
The boats carry in their souls
The final morna of the island
AND
From the volcano to the sunset
candle in the west
The thunderclap bursts into
flower
On the tree of smoke
The living root
of the harmattan
AND
The oar is a lightning flash
across the face of night
It burns
in the mirror of the
waves
Ripples of blazing coal
AND
[etc.]
This poet’s world is one of accommodation, a society in which things
must be joined together in inclusionary embracement, like that of food and
language, or with regard to seeming oppositions which were originally of the
same origin, “Tree and drum.” His countrymen represent a culture of combining
things, having a long history of bringing people and provisions to their shores
not only for their subsistence but for their very identity. Cape Verde is a not
a world that can afford to stand aloof from any “other.” It might even possibly
be perceived as representing a kind exemplary American-like acceptance of other
cultures without all of our following racial and cultural oppressions, even
though Cabo Verde history, like ours, is inextricably intertwined with slavery,
and—unlike the U.S—has had to suffer centuries of colonial repression.
Perhaps nowhere in his work is this philosophy better summarized than in
the short poem, “Art of Culture,” a work which through its title suggests that
“culture” itself is a kind of cultivated act (“Acto de cultura,” as the
original poem is titled):
How the sound swells in the
fruit: the drum
Is on the tree
And opposed to erosion: the
politics of seduction
And
“If the destiny of man is
ceaseless labour”
And
The word love has no mouth to its
river
Culture! Is entirely
Old chaos given dynamic
expression
And it is the seductiveness of that
“dynamism of expression” through which the reader will best remember this
significant translation.
Los Angeles, April 9, 2015
Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (May 2, 2015).
