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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2008
This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.
2 Gaonkar, Dilip and Povinelli, Elizabeth, ‘Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition’, Public Culture, 15, 3 (2003), p. 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The authors respond to Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
3 Gilliam, George C. and Bond, Angela, ‘Introduction’, in idem, eds.,Social Constructions of the Past: Representation as Power (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 4Google Scholar.
4 Under the umbrella of the Portuguese Ministry of Affairs, Cooperação Portuguesa provides economic and structural support to Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa. It has been a consistent supporter of the Mindelact Festival in recent years. Mindelact also receives substantial support from Cape Verde's private industry, as well as foreign cultural institutes and ministries, many of whom finance travel to Cape Verde for theatre groups from their countries.
5 Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. iiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See especially pp. 12–13, 25 and 202.
7 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 110–11Google Scholar.
8 Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar.
9 hooks, bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 21–39Google Scholar.
10 Madison, D. Soyini, ‘That Was My Occupation: Oral Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought’, in Della, Pollock, ed., Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 319–42Google Scholar, here p. 319.
11 da Silva, T. V., ‘Tradições Orais: antes e depois da Independência’, in Veiga, Manuel, ed., Cabo Verde: Insularidade e Literature (Paris: Karthala, 1998), pp. 95–107Google Scholar, here p. 99.
12 Filho, João Lopes, Cabo Verde: Subsídios para um leventamento cultural (Lisbon: Plátano Editora, 1981), pp. 108–10Google Scholar, and idem, Defesa Do Património Sócio-Cultural De Cabo Verde (Lisbon: Biblioteca Ulmeiro, 1985), p. 82. All translations from Portuguese-language texts are my own.
13 Da Silva, ‘Tradições Orais’, p. 99.
14 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Filho, Cabo Verde: Subsídios, p. 109.
16 Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 14Google Scholar.
17 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in idem, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Appadurai gives the example of the theft of a family heirloom: the object's destiny as an inheritance willed to succeeding generations is interrupted when the thief sells it for money.
18 Richards, Sandra L., ‘Remembering the Maafa’, Assaph: Studies in Theatre, 21 (2007), pp. 171–95, here p. 176Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., p. 175.
20 Crioulo, Cape Verde's local language, derives primarily from archaic Portuguese vocabulary and grammar, which is blended with Mandingo and Senegambian lexicons. Lobban, Richard and Lopes, Marlene, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde, 3rd edn (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995), p. 67Google Scholar.
21 Narciso Freire, personal interview, 3 October 2006.
22 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’, Man, 16, 2 (1981), pp. 201–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 218.
23 Mindelact 2004 festival programme, p. 41.
24 Ibid., p. 40.
25 See Branco, João, Nação Teatro: História do Teatro em Cabo Verde (Praia, Cape Verde: IBNL, 2004), pp. 173–80Google Scholar.
26 In Crioulo, ‘Homi faca, Mudjer Matchado, Mininus Tudo ta Djunta Pedra.’
27 Rokem, Performing History, p. 25.
28 Ibid., pp. 12–13.
29 Nilda Vaz, personal interview, 3 October 2006. All quotes from my interviews on Santiago and Maio Islands are my translations from Crioulo.
30 Freire, personal interview, 2 October 2006.
31 Freire, personal interview, 3 October 2006.
32 All quotes from Alverino Monteiro and Amélia Sousa are from an interview on 2 October 2006.
33 Cláudio Alves Furtado, A Transformação das Estruturas Agrárias numa Sociedade em Mudança – Santiago, Cabo Verde (Praia, Cape Verde: ICL, 1993), pp. 48–58. José Carlos Gomes dos Anjos defines morgados as white landowners who tried to maintain the status and privilege they had accrued during the slavery era. See his Intelectuais, Literature e Poder em Cabo Verde: Lutas de Definição da Identidade Nacional (Praia, Cape Verde: INIPC, 2002), pp. 42–8. Yet António Carreira points out that this rent-sharing system actually well pre-dated slavery's end, since Cape Verdean society had long included freed and escaped slaves who nevertheless lacked the socio-economic power to own land. See António Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação e Extinção de uma Sociedade Escravocrata (1460–1878), 3rd edn (Praia, Cape Verde: IPC Estudos e Ensaios 2000), p. 346.
34 Gottfried Stockinger, Crónicas de Campo II: Ilha de Santiago (Praia, Cape Verde: ICL, 1992), pp. 7–12. Cape Verdean independence leader Amílcar Cabral stated that the rural renter could be a prime mover in a national struggle for liberation, since he could be mobilized easily by the idea that ‘the land belongs to he who works it’. Stockinger, pp. 7–8.
35 Alverino Monteiro and Amélia Sousa, personal interview, 2 October 2006; Crisálida Moreira Correia, personal interview, 4 October 2006.
36 Freire's distrust of the colonial narrative is evident in the written description he gave me of the agrarian abuse that inspired Tchom di Morgado. The document abounds with imagery of ‘savage beasts’, which is how, according to Freire, colonial authorities and landlords viewed their black workers.
37 Senna Barcelos, Subsídios para a História de Cabo Verde e Guiné, vol. II, parte III, 2nd edn, (Praia: Cape Verde, IBNL 2003), pp. 240–3.
38 Ibid., p. 241.
39 Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação, p. 336.
40 Manuel Semedo Tavares, who was a guard for Serra at the time, recalls that a group of farmers were exiled in the 1950s for protesting against the sharp rise in the cost of renting the Morgado's machinery for refining sugar cane. Personal interview, 2 October 2006.
41 In Crioulo, ‘Ma genti, pamodi? Pamod es é branko? Pamod es ta papia Potugues?’
42 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 48.
43 Ibid., p. 52.
44 Eunice Ferreira, ‘Mindelact: The Tenth Annual International Theatre Festival of Mindelo’, Theatre Journal, 57, 2 (2004)pp. 272–77, here p. 273.
45 Teresa Sofia Fortes, ‘Revolta de Rubon Manel: O espírito reivendicativo do Cabo-Verdiano’, A Semana, 23 September 2005, sec. Kriolidadi, pp. 1–3.
46 Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação, pp. 360–1.
47 Yet two of my interviewees, formerly employed by morgados, downplayed this violence. For example, when I interviewed Henrique Mendes Correia (4 October 2006), who was raised in the morgado's house, his daughter Crisálida Correia was there. When she prompted him to talk about worker beatings, he said, ‘O que passa, djá passa!’ (‘What has passed, has passed’).
48 Alverino Monteiro, personal interview, 2 October 2006.
49 Group interview, 3 October 2006. Actress Crisálida Correia offered another interpretation: Edimilson's waggling is a form of resistance; he taunts the guard right back. Unfortunately, Edimilson Sousa was away at the time of the interview, so I was unable to get his explanation.
50 Edimilson Sousa, personal interview, 17 September 2004.
51 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. ii.
52 Elam, Harry J., ‘The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness: The Escape; or, a Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown and No Place to Be Somebody by Charles Gordone’, in Elam and Krasner, David, eds., African American Performance and Theater History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 288–305Google Scholar, here p. 289.
53 Educação: Censo 2000, Praia: Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 2002.
54 Freire, Personal interview, 13 August 2005.
55 For centuries, the island's vast salt mines made it a hot spot for ships passing through to Europe and the Americas, but the salt trade declined in the mid-1800s and the economy never recovered. Textual accounts of Maio history are scarce, but see Almeida, Germano, Cabo Verde: Viagem Pela História das Ilhas (Cape Verde: Ilheu Editora, 2003), pp. 113–28Google Scholar; Meintel, Deirdre, Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism in Cabo Verde (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), especially pp. 38–9 and 171Google Scholar.
56 Arsenio Bettencourt and Ney Tavares, personal interview, 6 October 2006. Bettencourt gave me a thorough verbal account of the island's history, since there is such little published material.
57 As a recent editorial in a major Cape Verdean newspaper states, ‘When we couldn't produce anything because of drought and multitudes of people died, the highest authority of command in these lands, instead of ordering foodstuffs for the people, ordered them to expand the cemeteries.’ Firmo Pinto, A Semana, 10 November 2006, p. 19.
58 Carreira, António, Cabo Verde: Aspectos Sociais. Secas e Fomes Do Século XX (Lisbon: Bilbioteca Ulmeiro, 1984), pp. 117–18Google Scholar.
59 I have pieced together the following summary of the two men's interactions from an interview with Custódio on 11 June 2006 and conversations with Tavares during my four-day stay on Maio, 6–9 October 2006.
60 Eduino Santos, ‘Gostos não se discutem, aceitam-se ou não’, Expresso das Ilhas, 21 September 2005, p. 29.
61 Freire, personal interview, 3 October 2006; and Herlandson Duarte, personal conversation, 24 September 2006.
62 The text of Mãe Preta is accessible online at http://esteteatro.home.sapo.pt.
63 Tavares, personal interview, 6 October 2006.
64 Mindelact 2005 programme; ‘Festival Mindelact 2005’, A Semana, 9 September 2005, sec. Kriolidadi, p. 2. A voice-over on Hulda Moreira's documentary on Mindelact 2005 introduced the segment on Mãe Preta with a similar phrase. Mindelo – Palco das Ilhas, an RTP África production, 2005.
65 Ness, Sally Ann, Movement and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia, Philadelphia University Press, 1992), p. 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 In a personal conversation on 24 September 2006, filmmaker and cultural promoter Tambla said that ‘Suffering Mother’ or ‘Mother of All of Us’ would have been better choices.
67 Tavares, personal interview, 8 October 2006.
68 Custódio, personal interview, 11 June 2006.
69 Custódio, personal conversation, 18 September 2005. In an interview on 11 June 2006 he explained that Horta originally chose the title ‘on the level of instinct’ and he agreed because it captured the spirit of the piece. He admits that in Cape Verde the title ‘Black Mother’ makes as little sense as a Portuguese play entitled White Mother would if performed in Portugal.
70 Johnson, E. Patrick, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 3–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Tavares, personal interview, 8 October 2006.
72 Carreira, Cabo Verde: Aspectos Sociais, p. 124.
73 Albertina Tavares Silva, personal interview, 7 October 2006.
74 Custódio, Personal interview, 11 June 2006.
75 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 49.
76 Gilman, Sander L., Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 85Google Scholar.
77 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 95.
78 hooks, Black Looks, p. 21.
79 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, pp. 240–1.
80 Dany Santos, personal interview, 17 September 2005.
81 Herlandson Duarte, Personal conversation, 24 September 2006.
82 Albertina Tavares Silva, personal interview, 7 October 2006.
83 In her documentary of Mindelact 2005 (Mindelo – Palco das Ilhas), Hulda Morreira observes that Mãe Preta ‘touched Cape Verdean mothers’, interviewing one such spectator afterwards who attested to this. In 2006 I asked a regular attendee of Mindelact to talk about the show from 2005 that she remembered most. A mother herself, she said Mãe Preta because it dealt with the anguish of losing a child.
84 My thanks to Sandra L. Richards for pushing me to examine this angle on misreadings of the production.
85 ‘Teatro alastro no Maio’, A Semana, 7 October 2005, sec. Kriolidadi, p. 6; Ney Tavares interviewed by Pedro Miguel Cardoso, A Semana On-line, 18 February 2006.
86 At Mindelact, ‘Festival Off’ is a more informal performance venue that runs parallel to the main stage. ‘Off’ is designed to prepare newer and less experienced Cape Verdean theatre groups for eventual performance on the main stage.
87 The authors are explicitly referencing Habermas's theorization of the public sphere and Anderson's notion of the nation as imagined community. See Gaonkar and Povinelli, ‘Technologies of Public Forms’, pp. 389–90.
88 My thanks to Daniel Smith for helping me make this theoretical connection.
89 See the conclusion to Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
