Tag: Portuguese

Of that which is left unspoken: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

He knew how to sign his name, he had no reason to keep the ID card with just his thumbprint and a red stamp on top of it, illiterate. He had to change it, he was somebody else now. Knowing how to read and write was doing that him. Raimundo Gaudéncio de Freitas. Literate, alfabetizado.

The stories of those pushed out of their homes and communities when their sexuality or gender identity becomes known—or even for fear that their hidden truths might be revealed—have been, and are still, commonly echoed in societies around the world. For that reason alone it is important that such stories continue to be told. The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel, a writer who was born in a rural part of northeastern Brazil, is an ambitious addition to the growing body of international LGBTQ literature.

This debut novel tells the story of an illiterate man who has carried a letter he has been unable to read for some fifty years. But, because it was written by the boy with whom he fell in love as a youth, he is unwilling to let anyone else read it to him. Now in his early 70s, he has learned the basics of reading and writing and yet the unread letter weighs heavily. The only son of a poor farmer, Raimundo was needed on the farm so he was denied the opportunity to go to school. As his father told him “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table.” Why then, when Cícero was well aware that he couldn’t read, did he insist on this form of communication rather than meeting at the river as planned so many long years ago? As he looks back over all the decades that have passed, Raimundo recalls his passionate affair with his childhood friend, hidden for a time from their families and their small agricultural community, and the violent, unforgiving reactions of their parents when they are exposed. When it becomes clear to him that he is no longer welcome in his family, Raimundo leaves, his final undecipherable message from Cícero carried close to his heart.

He makes his way to the Capital where he lives, closeted, for a quarter of a century. He supports himself picking up work with truckers, a life that allows him to enjoy the freedom of the open road and hide the fact that he is a man who likes men. His sexual indulgences are limited to the dark, dingy interior of a porn theatre when the opportunity arises. It is through the most unlikely friendship that he develops with a tough transgender sex worker named Suzzanný that he finally comes to peace with himself and settles into a new form of self-employment with a found family arrangement that, if not what he once imagined as a lovestruck young man, offers stability and affection. And, finally, the courage to learn to read and write.

There is much to like about this book and its intention, but the execution does it a disservice at times. Although he employs passages of third person narrative in setting the stage for this tale, it seems that Gardel is trying to achieve an immersive experience, pulling his reader into the world of a doubly marginalized man—gay and illiterate—by relying heavily on often fragmentary dialogue-driven scenes, in concert with extended passages of internal monologue that land somewhere between stream of consciousness and first-person remembrances. The chronology is choppy. Details from much later in the protagonist’s life are introduced early and out of context, whereas other events, such as the death of Raimundo’s twin brothers, are revealed awkwardly, some way into the story, leaving one to guess when it occurred. The result is a narrative that feels, especially through the middle third of the book, oddly pieced together, stretched thin. Overly simplified even.

With the final third, the narrative becomes much tighter and the timeframe starts to fall into place. Suzzanný, who is a wonderfully realized transgender character, acts as the catalyst that the protagonist needs to finally come into being as a fully fleshed person, a fact that then is also reflected in the storytelling. For someone who has been living in denial, in hiding  and filled with shame for so much of his life this is understandable, but in Raimundo’s personal story a certain depth is lacking until he finds companionship—a different kind of love that brings meaning in more ways than one.

In the end, sadness and joy blend together in The Words that Remain to paint a moving story of LGBTQ existence that does not attempt to hide the alienation and loneliness that marks the lives of so many people who do not fit into the expectations of their societies. Opportunities are lost perhaps, but resilience and self-acceptance prove more important in the long run.

The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel is translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato and published by New Vessel Press.

Folktales for a new world: Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto

In the preface to his newly translated collection, Rain and Other Stories, Mozambican writer Mia Couto tells us that the stories we are about to read were written after his country’s long and bloody civil war. The conflict which erupted in 1977, two years after the African nation achieved independence from Portugal, would last for fifteen years, leaving over one million dead and devastating the country’s infrastructure. As the majority of the white Portuguese fled, they left behind an impoverished, uneducated population. Yet, where Couto had anticipated total ruin and destruction, he found that seeds of life and hope had survived. Not all was lost.

These tales speak to this land we are remaking and where we soak our faces in this rain of hope, this water of benedreamtion. Of this land where each man is the same, like this: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, imagining his return.

The twenty-six stories that follow are very short—most are but a handful of pages—and although they spring from the immediate aftermath of a contemporary battle, signalling the end of both Soviet-backed Cold War alliances and white domination in Southern Africa, the roots and spirits of these tales seem to run deep into the very bedrock of the earth. They are uniquely Mozambican and yet timeless. These are the fables, folktales, comic and magical imaginings of human folly and resilience. They are a telling of a shattered world back into being.

Couto, the winner of the Neustadt International Prize, and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, has an uncanny ability to create miniature worlds peopled with wonderful characters, images and happenings. In some tales war is still a present quantity, in others it is past but only barely. These are the people caught in the “transition from the tragedy of war to the misery of peace.” We encounter ordinary folk trying to deal with love, its loss, infidelity, old age, even an errant hippopotamus. Some tales are apocryphal in tone, others tragic, yet others simply enchanting. Throughout the collection, the accounts are seasoned with witticisms, aphorisms, and gentle wisdom.

“Blind Estrelinho” is an early and particularly captivating example. The title character is a “man of no moment,”entirely dependent on his guide Gigito Efraim to lead him through the world and open it to his unseeing eyes. And what a world it is! Little Gigito:

described what wasn’t there. The work he detailed was fantasies and fine-lacery. The guide’s imagination bore more fruit than a papaya tree. The blind man’s mouth filled with waters:
—What marvellousity, this world. Tell me everything, Gigito!

When his young guide is taken away to war, the blind man’s world falls dark. Gigito’s sister arrives to take her brother’s place but she describes the world as it truly is, and Estrelinho’s loss is magnified. Until he discovers that a girl offers other, shall we say, insights. But the story does not end there.

Some tales are disturbing, like “The Flag in the Sunset” about a boy who, needing to bleed to dream, would ask his grandma to cut him. For his failure to salute the flag he meets an untimely and bloody end, taking another life with him, and haunting all who pass where the flagpole once stood—a resounding comment on forced allegiance, and the degree to which flags “detract from the celestial blues.” “Lamentations of a Coconut Tree” recounts the report, verified by the Nation’s newspaper, of the experience of the narrator’s friend Suleimane Ibraimo who, upon splitting the shell of a coconut finds that:

the fruit didn’t gush the usual sweet water, but blood. Exactly so: blood. But that wasn’t the only astonishing thing. The fruit cried and lamented in a human voice. Suleimane took no exaggerated measures: his wide-open hands dropped the coconut, the red stains spread. He stood there, dumbfounded and overwhelmed, spent. The shock made his soul vanish into the low tide.

The narrator rushes to help, finding his friend sunken but with all traces of the incident cleaned away. Naturally he is distrustful: “Doubt, we know,” he says, “is the envy that the unbelievable hasn’t happened to us.”

One of Couto’s real strengths lies in his ability to sketch out larger-than-life characters in the span of a few pages, like the man who worries about what his enjoyment of his formerly frigid wife’s newfound manly intensity says about him, the night watchman who confronts a hippopotamus ravaging a schoolroom or Professor Novesfora, the protagonist of “The Hapless Calculus of Happiness,” a mathematically minded man who weighs and measures everything, allowing algebraic operations to guide his world view:

He also divided out his affections in calculated doses, limiting love to its numerical equivalent. Love affairs, women, children: all those things were null hypotheses. Feelings, he was fond of saying, have no logarithm. For that reason, there was no reason to even solve the equation. Since he was a child, he’d abstained from affection. From an algebraic point of view, he would say, tenderness is absurd. Like a negative zero.

Until the day he falls for an underage student and all the calculations change!

Rain and Other Stories, is a rich and rewarding collection of fables that capture the cultural and ethnic diversity of post colonial Mozambique rebuilding itself after prolonged conflict between the Marxist government and right wing insurgents, each backed by outside players with their own agendas, had nearly torn the fledgling nation apart. Translator Eric M. B. Becker captures the sheer magic of Couto’s playful Portuguese, and his simple but powerful imagery. This is writing toward healing, toward a celebration of life, but with a clear caution that darkness is never far away.

Rain and Other Stories is published by Bibioasis.

 

I am a horror in the face of things: The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

Take it as a warning. Clarice Lispector prefaces this metaphysically intense novel with a short address to her “possible readers” that states:

This is a book like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed. Those who know that the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly—even passing through the opposite of what it approaches. They who, only they, will slowly come to understand that this book takes nothing from no one.

She does not want your existential “blood” on her hands, dear reader. You have to be willing to surrender it freely, to engage with G. H.’s passion on your own terms, experience her horror and joy as she struggles to make sense of, and give voice to, the “truth” that she has just come to understand. And, if you do, you may well find that the journey is unforgettable.

GHIt is clear from the stuttering opening sentence of The Passion According to G.H. that the narrator, a woman known only by the initials embossed on her suitcases, is uncertain, fragile, and disoriented. It is only by recounting the events of the previous day, by shaping them and giving them form, that she can make sense of the radical transformation she seems to have experienced. This is not a conventional narrative. In her retelling, addressed to the invisible owner of a disembodied hand that she imagines she is holding—the “you” who is at once the reader and, as the monologue progresses, a stand-in for an intimate from her past—she pieces together a superficially simple encounter that unleashes in her a torrent of thoughts, images, and emotions. She spirals into a very vivid personal hell, suffers a crisis of vast existential and spiritual dimensions, and emerges a decidedly changed being. But what of it? As the novel opens G. H. has no clear idea, she must start with who she was to discover who—or what—she has become.

One day earlier, she had arisen late with the intention of cleaning and tidying the room where her former maid had lived, a task she anticipated to be arduous yet satisfying. Assuming the room would be dirty, dank, and disordered, she would exercise her talent or, rather vocation, for “arranging.” G. H. is a wealthy sculptress living in Rio de Janeiro, who paints a portrait of herself as an independent woman, with no husband or child; she admits to a certain measure of vanity, but confesses that hers was a rather referential existence, one that in essence left her ripe for the events that would soon unfold:

My question, if there was one, was not: “Who am I,” but “Who is around me.” My cycle was complete: what I lived in the present was already getting ready so I could later understand myself. An eye watched over my life. This eye was what I would probably now call truth, now mortality, now human law, now God, now me. I lived mostly inside a mirror. Two minutes after my birth I had already lost my origins.

G. H.’s rapid descent to the brink of madness, begins when she enters the maid’s room and discovers a stark, nearly barren chamber. Most unsettling is the sight of three charcoal figures etched onto the whitewashed wall: a man, a woman and a dog. But the unexpected calm and order of the entire room catches our narrator completely off guard. The bed has been stripped, the curtains are gone from the window, three monogrammed suitcases are stacked along one wall and the narrow wardrobe, stands cracked and bleached by the harsh sunlight. She describes the room as “the portrait of an empty stomach.” And as she ventures into the room, she feels as if she has entered a nothingness, a formless space that cannot contain her. To gain some control she decides to wash down the wardrobe, and that is when her nightmare begins.

Cracking open the wardrobe, she confronts a cockroach, emerging through the door. The sight of the roach ignites a primal reaction, tied to memories of childhood poverty, but ultimately bound to a much deeper fear for G. H.—the cockroach is a prehistoric creature, durable and enduring, holding in its being the horror of unformed eternal existence. However, it is her response to the situation, her decision to kill the roach, that triggers what will escalate into an all-consuming metaphysical crisis.

To trace out G. H.’s tortured passion, one step removed through the limitations of a relatively brief review, one can only vaguely approximate the actual experience of revelling in Lispector’s haunting, sensual language. Through the agony and ecstasy of her protagonist’s journey of self-discovery we are invited to bear witness, to share her joy, to feel her pain, to taste the dawning strangeness of it all. And her awareness is startlingly acute. For instance, in her act of violence against the roach she instantly realizes that she has violated something in herself:

Because during those seconds, eyes shut, I was becoming aware of myself as one becomes aware of a taste: all of me tasted of steel and verdigris. I was all acid like metal on the tongue, like a crushed green plant, my whole taste rose to my mouth. What had I done to myself? With my heart thumping, my temples pulsing, this is what I had done to myself: I had killed. I had killed! But why such delight, and besides that a vital acceptance of that delight? For how long, then, had I been about to kill?

The terror that drives the narrator toward the breaking point is grounded in her acknowledgement of a kinship between herself as a human woman and the despised roach. As someone accustomed to defining the self only in the context of the other, it is conceivable that to see herself reflected in such a primitive, base creature could provoke a crisis of Biblical proportions. It shakes her admittedly superficial self-identity to the core. To recognize herself in the face of the roach is to acknowledge the potential annihilation of the self. “—Hold my hand” she implores her invisible listener, “because I feel that I’m going. I’m going once again toward the most divine primary life, I’m going toward a hell of raw life.”

During the hours that follow, G. H. will wrestle with questions of heaven, hell, morality, humanity and, most critically, the troubling reactions that these metaphysical problems provoke in her. She fears her own ambivalence, and discovers that the promise of hell is not a torture of pain but a torture of joy.  In what she will insist are not hallucinations but “visual meditations”, her awareness of being is stretched and exploded, extending back beyond the Cradle of Civilization across deserts and oceans to reach beyond the time of the dinosaurs. To encompass the humble origins of the primeval roach. Gradually, slowly, she will begin to fashion a reformed, redefined spiritual sense of self, to approach her own salvation, to embrace life in all of its uncertain terms.

From its opening passages, The Passion According to G. H. is propelled forward with a relentless intensity that builds as the narrative proceeds. The final sentence or phrase of each chapter is carried forward to open the next, as if with each chapter the narrator is reorienting herself, gathering her resources to move on with her story. The revelations advance in fits and starts, more noticeably as her questioning becomes increasingly obsessed with the nature of being. There seem to be things she can only come to terms with piece by piece, as she attempts to reconstruct and express an understanding of a world in which she can exist. In the end, she must come to an acceptance that being is a process, an act of trust in the unknowable, a continual active re-engagement. Her creator, Clarice Lispector, knows intimately that language—words—are essential to articulating, not just the emotional journey G. H. endures, they are essential to articulating the truths of human existence, once being has been stripped to its most fundamental elements.

Although I have read many of her short stories, this was my first encounter with one of Lispector’s novels. I had wanted to read this particular title for years, but had not realized how closely her theme ties into the existential questions that drive my own most personal writing project. And in a timely instance of serendipity, my finishing this work dovetailed nicely with joining the editorial team of The Scofield in time to copyedit and proofread 70 pages of the upcoming Lispector issue which will be out very soon. The opportunity for some very focused, close reading of some wonderful Lispector inspired writing, including a number of detailed critical essays, has left me eager to read the rest of her work. I can fully understand why she was (and is) so beloved in Brazil, and such a powerfully influential writer.

The Passion According to G.H. was originally published in 1964. This evocative translation from the Portuguese by Idra Novey (2012) is published by New Directions.

Update: The Scofield Issue 2.1 Clarice Lispector and the Act of Writing is now available and can be downloaded for free as a PDF. You’ll find it here. You will find a wealth of Lispector related and inspired reading, including two short stories and much, much more!

Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susan Moreira Marques, a reflection and review

We obsess over lasts as we do over firsts. Last days, last images, last words. We want signs.

Last month, my brothers and I made a most difficult decision about our father who was, at the time facing a cluster of serious complications resulting from a stroke and car accident. Four days earlier we had gathered around our mother’s bedside as the respirator that was barely keeping her breathing was removed. Within four hours she was gone. After agreeing to discontinue treatment of our father, he would continue to live, slowly dying, for another week. As I kept vigil day after day I tried to remind myself that there was a time when death was allowed to take its course, in the home, even as so-called “normal” life would begin to spin, a troubled satellite, around the dying person. Death was part of life, not something that happened elsewhere, surrounded by tubes and machinery. Although my dad remained in the hospital until the end, he was moved to a quiet, private room where he was kept comfortable, free of pain, and cared for by the nursing staff. As a family we were supported and respected. It wasn’t easy, and we’re all still numbed and distorted in our grieving, but if there is such a thing as a good death, I think that both of my parents had good deaths, if good means having a chance to say I love you, over and over and over until the end.

nowdeathWhen I first started to read Susana Moreira Marques’ Now and at the Hour of Our Death, I wondered if I was too raw, too plagued with second thoughts about the decisions we had made, to be able to surrender to a lyrical and experimental essay about death and dying. This book had been sitting on my shelves since it arrived last year with my And Other Stories subscription, several times I had opened it but somehow the time was not right. I suppose the book was waiting for me.

Over the course of five months in 2011, Marques made several visits to a palliative care project in rural north-east Portugal. She accompanied a team of health care professionals as they traveled from village to village to assist those on their final journeys, allowing them to be able die, as comfortably as possible, in their own homes; and along the way she recorded her own observations, collected anecdotes, and listened to the stories of the people she met. The result is powerful meditation dying, as a lived experience shared by a family, a community.

The first half of the book is fragmentary in style and form, blending facts and definitions, character sketches, brief stream-of-conscious like passages, pieces of wisdom—all presented with a quiet dignity in lucid, affecting prose:

The swallows have already built their nests above the back door; this is how they do it every year. They are useful birds, and beautiful, and have always been a favourite of his. But now he watches them as he never has before, because he might not see another spring.

*

AGONY: 1. The last struggle against death. 2. [Figurative] Anguish, affliction. 3. An imminent conclusion (preceded by a great disturbance).

‘Agony,’ the dictionary does not note, is a technical term.

*

Immortal in the morning. At night, the fear of never waking.

*

Lands, roads, people, time, time, people, roads, land. What matters here is different, very different.

The second half of the book, entitled “Portraits”, offers a closer look at three individual stories. Here Marques becomes a gentle presence as she describes each situation, then she steps back and lets those involved have their say. There is Paula, a woman with a young family, who is dying of cancer. She speaks with a brave spirit about how she and her husband had taken their time, waiting to have their second child, assuming they had “all the time in the world.” She will only have another year to live at the time that her thoughts are recorded. Then we meet João and Maria, a couple in their 80s who reminisce about their years in Angola. Both are ill, yet neither feels that they are ready to die, they live for visits from their children and grandchildren, and each one fears being the one left behind.

Finally, in the third portrait, the dying person is silent by the time Marques meets the family. While their father Rui lies on his death bed, his adult daughters, Elisa and Sara, each respond in their own way in his final months, the latter driving home from France every fortnight to spend time with him and her mother. Their own accounts follow his death, capturing the early weeks of grief, anger and regret. Very different in temperament, the sisters respond in their own ways to the loss, but for each of them it is the first time they have come up against the close experience with death and it is a leveling experience. Sara realizes she had never appreciated the magnitude of what others she had known would have been going through when they lost a parent, regretting that she had failed to say anything. I can’t help but feel that that is a common occurrence. Nothing but the death of a close friend or family member prepares you for the experience. Elisa, on the other hand, is surprised to find that she is unable to shriek and scream in anguish the way her sister and mother do when her father finally passes:

. . . I couldn’t react. It must have been two months before I cried. It’s really hard for me to cry. And now I’ve finally started crying, but only because I’ll get all worked up over something minor, and then I might cry a little out of frustration. But when it happened – and the atmosphere at our house was just so strange . . . It took me a long time to realize what was going on.

The final section, a single page long, is a guide for “When you come back from the journey no healthy person wants to take,” a list of the ways “you”, that is anyone who survives the death of a loved one, can be expected to act. . . paying attention to time, the things and people that are precious, the bridges that need to be mended and, simply, endeavouring to live well. I hope I can follow this wisdom even if, at the moment, I am inclined to relate to Elisa’s reaction, with grief coming in angry outbursts more than tears.

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Now and at the Hour of Our Death is translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches and published by And Other Stories.

 

The pursuit of happiness: Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto

“If happiness is not where we are, we must chase her. She sometimes lives very far away. You must have the courage to be happy.”

When it comes to the depiction of transgender individuals in literary fiction, I will confess that I am a rather cynical customer. Lets just say I know the reality too well. So much of what I have read does not even come close to scratching the surface of what it means to be at odds with one’s own birth-assigned gender. Intentions are good and, of course, the transgender or intersex character always allows for an interesting twist but the results can be misleading, even distressingly off base. That’s why Sergio Y. by Brazilian author Alexandre Vidal Porto is such a refreshing and original read. Here is a novel that treats the subject with intelligence and compassion—quite the feat for a book in which the transgender character meets an untimely and unfortunate end before the story even gets started.

SergioThe title character, Sergio Y. is the son of a wealthy businessman in São Paolo, Brazil, and the great grandson of an Armenian immigrant who escaped the tragic fate of so many of his countrymen, including the rest of his family, when he crossed the ocean in 1915, seeking his happiness in the Americas. The narrator is Armando, a well-respected seventy year-old psychiatrist. Sergio had been referred to him for therapy at the age of seventeen, described simply as “articulate, intelligent and confused.” They meet regularly for several years. This mature young man—so handsome, wealthy and talented—intrigues Armando and yet, in spite of all of these advantages, he professes to be possessed by a deep and abiding unhappiness.

Following a visit to New York City one Christmas, Sergio informs Armando that he wishes to discontinue therapy. He has had a revelation, he says, and he believes he has found a way to be happy. Our narrator is a little disgruntled to be dismissed as such but, as the years pass, Sergio Y. fades from his mind until a chance encounter with his former patient’s mother. She reports that her son has moved to New York where he attended culinary school and is now about to open his own restaurant. Armando is surprised, but pleased by this news and the praise he is afforded for his role in helping Sergio find happiness at last. However, this boost to his ego is short lived. Armando’s world begins to crumble when he learns, quite by chance, that Sergio Y. has been murdered at his home in the West Village.

Obsessive by nature, Armando becomes haunted by the need to know more. What he discovers with the help of a private investigator is completely unexpected and sends him reeling. The murder victim is identified as Sandra Yacoubian, female. Sandra and Sergio he soon learns are, in fact, one and the same person. His young patient had found his happiness as a woman and now she was dead at the age of 23! How could he have failed to recognize that Sergio was transsexual? And, even more serious, was his failure in some way responsible for this tragic outcome?

The main source of my frustration was not having detected any hint of Sergio Y.’s transsexuality. I felt I had been duped solely and exclusively by my own incompetence. I had always though that the secret to transsexuality was not all that deep, that it revealed itself in all of the individual’s attitudes, at all times, in all the decisions he or she took, since early childhood. As far as I was concerned, the pain in the patient’s soul and their inner confusion would be so visible that one did not need to be a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst to make the diagnosis.

Armando’s search for answers and his personal quest for understanding lie at the heart of this book. He begins with a handful of stereotyped assumptions. He labels them, admits to them, and lays them out. In the end, as he comes to a clearer,more nuanced appreciation of the decision his patient chose to take to find happiness and the determination with which she pursued it.

The narrative tone is highly idiosyncratic, dictated by the analytical, mildly obsessive-compulsive, immodest character of Armando. Even when he begins to doubt and second-guess himself as the account progresses, he maintains the matter of fact, dry, clinical delivery of a psychiatric report. The attention to detail—his clothing choices, his tendency to note the approximate height and weight of people he encounters, even his reports of his own emotional ups and downs—all create the illusion of a sterile account. But when the careful veneer cracks from time to time, we see a moody, somewhat petulant character, prone to bursts of pride, mixed with episodes of guilt and shame. He is continually measuring himself against his own successes and failures. His internal machinations are fascinating.

Ultimately, Sergio Y. is novel that approaches the transgender experience from the inside and the outside, allowing for the comfort with names and pronouns to vary, over time and from person to person, reflecting the complexities of relationships that others, even loving family members, can have when an accepted and assumed identity is challenged. In his own journey to understand and set his mind at ease, the questions Armando raises and the answers he finds serve to create a moving and compassionate portrait of the transgender person’s conflicted internal experience and the search to find a way to be happy in the world.

Happiness may be an ideal; comfort or contentment might work as well. From my point on this same journey I would hasten to add that it can be a difficult and lonely path, but that does not mean it is not worth following. In fact, if it is the right path, there is no other. Semantics aside, this novel is an important, engaging read. It deserves to be written about and it needs to be discussed.

Sergio Y. is translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd and published by Europa Editions.

Uncovering a treasure in translation – Ondjaki

“Is that what tales from before were like a long time ago?”
“Yes, son.”
“So before is a time Granma?”
“Before is place.”
“A place really far away?”
“A place really deep inside.”
-Ondjaki

Last week I had the pleasure of reading Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by the young Angolan author Ondjaki. This exuberant, magical tale re-imagines a dramatic event set in the community of Bishop’s Beach in the city of Luanda in the early years of Angolan Independence. The country’s first President, Agostinho Neto, has died and a curious, threatening project is rising on the beach. The Soviets are constructing a Mausoleum to the deceased President and, it is rumoured, the surrounding neighbourhood is scheduled to be demolished.

indexOur unnamed narrator is a young boy who lives with his grandmother in a community where a cluster of eccentric granmas are important and valued elders. Together with his friends Pi (known as 3.14) and Charlita, he embarks on a mission to save the day drawing on a worldview informed by spy movies, Spaghetti Westerns and Portuguese language soap operas. A colourful cast of supporting adults round out their adventure including Comrade Gas Jockey who mans a station with no fuel, crazy Sea Foam who is rumoured to have a pet alligator, the Cuban doctor Rafael KnockKnock and a Soviet official christened Gudafterov by the children as a result of his awkward use of the local language.

I learned of this book through the CBC radio program Ideas. In this extended interview, recorded live at the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal this spring, Ondjaki spoke of his childhood from which so much of this fantastic tale is derived. He insisted that in his early years, the socialist presence was simply a fact of life – they had a lack of electricity and running water – but it was normal and his childhood was happy. He talked with infectious enthusiasm about his family, his very early introduction to literature and fondness for Marquez, and the deeply ingrained understanding of the magical in the reality of everyday life in cultural mindset of his homeland. Within the week I had obtained and read the book. The tale was every bit as engaging and entertaining as I had expected.

But the greatest find for me personally is the small Canadian publishing house Biblioasis behind Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret. This book belongs to their small and select series of books in translation. Although he is recognized as one of the rising stars of African literature, Ondjaki’s work is not widely available in English to date. Biblioasis has published two of his novels, both translated by Stephen Henighan. I am very impressed by the results. A work like this depends so heavily on playing with language. Puns and intentional misrepresentations that work in Portuguese have to be re-imagined to work well in English and fortunately the translator was able to work closely with the author to bring the work to life with all its magical energy intact. As a Canadian I am embarrassed that I am only just discovering Biblioasis. I definitely intend to explore more of their offerings, both in their international series and in their English language Canadian titles.