PAULA TAVARES AS READER: “Your Face Is a Hill of Shadows”
Abstract
This essay offers readers an overview of
the lyric poetry written and published under the name Ana Paula Tavares, or
simply Paula Tavares. Its reflections arise from an understanding of her as a
transitive writer and reader in transit, engaged in a dynamic border semiosis
that is at once situated, ecological, personal, and intimate. As a preliminary
step, the essay compares the earlier volumes with the anthology Poesia reunida seguido de Água selvagem,
while also considering Manual para
amantes desesperados in its entirety. The opening discussion draws
attention to the potential interpretive implications of changes in the poems’
graphic presentation in the anthology.
Keywords: Angolan literature; post-independence literature; Paula Tavares;
reading and creativity.
The 2023 Anthology and the Earlier Poetry
The publication of Poesia reunida seguido de Água selvagem enables an illuminating
overview insofar as the whole sheds light on its constituent parts. It allows
us to trace the author’s lyric development and to see how Paula Tavares has
continually recast a border semiosis almost as old as the world itself. A fuller
understanding will, of course, also require us to consider Manual para amantes desesperados, a distinctive initiation through
the Namibe to which I shall return (Tavares 2007), not least because the author
says that there she found the secret and slowly closed the doors…
Two differences immediately stand out when
we read this anthology alongside the earlier volumes.
First Comparison and Point
The first surprise concerns seemingly
technical matters: changes in the spaces between stanzas, line breaks, and the
indications of when and where the poems were written. Although purely graphic,
these changes transform our understanding of the work and contrast with the
absence of revisions or variants at the syntactic or strictly verbal level. The
author does not alter her poems after publication, unlike David Mestre and Ruy
Duarte de Carvalho; the editions nevertheless rearrange their graphic presentation,
bringing significant features into focus or eliding them.
The disappearance of the places and dates
recorded in the early editions of Ritos
de passagem provides a measure of the interpretive consequences. In the
1985 and 2007 editions (Tavares 1985; 2007), we can see that only one poem was
composed in 1983, in Benguela; the others were written over the next two years,
while one is undated and located in “havana – for são.” Almost all were written
in Luanda, including the opening and closing poems, both from 1985. The
exceptions are the Benguela poem from 1983, one from Cabinda dated 1985, and
the undated poem composed in Havana.
This means that Paula Tavares developed her
intergenerational poetics over a number of years (Wieser et al. 2024, 20) but
committed it to writing at a specific moment. At that moment, its in-between
character became more pronounced because her first poems appeared after the
earliest signs of the new generation of the 1980s. There is more to it,
however.
It also means that, viewed through certain
strands of cognitive science and the constructivism of the turn of this century
(Le Moigne 1998; 1999), the book matured as a kind of project: it possesses a
forward-looking, densely articulated unity of theme, motif, and reference, and
was written continuously over two years.
There is still more. The locations indicate
that the rural references and motifs, particularly those associated with the
traditional cultures of Cuanhama and Lunda, arose less from contemporaneous
experience in those places—which did exist and continued in the historian’s
life—than from reflection at a distance, though one still savored: a deferred
engagement, perhaps supported by reading and rereading works available in
Luanda.
Thus, when she joined Luanda’s small
literary community in 1985, ten years after independence, Paula Tavares offered
a mature poetry in which pauses and reflection counted as much as the duration
of inspiration. This hypothesis takes me back to the dates. The overwhelming
majority of the poems are from 1984. Interspersed among them, at the beginning,
middle, and end of the book, are the 1983 poem already mentioned—the second in
the volume—four poems from 1985, and an undated one, making five from 1985, since
the author has told us that the Havana poem was composed that year. On the one
hand, this shows that the poems were not arranged solely, if at all, by date of
composition: their sequence follows an order, a disposition, of themes and
motifs that takes precedence over the succession of moments of “inspiration.”
On the other, it shows that the collection was reorganized as a whole, its
sequence assembled to lead the reader through a progression. Finally, it shows
that the project and its exploratory work took shape primarily in 1984, with
implications for the reading the author undertook while writing. Removing the
dates and places of composition, as the collected volume does, deprives the
reader of the evidence for these conclusions—a practice I would advise against.
Alongside the abrupt removal of dates and
places from Ritos de passagem, there
were, as noted, other changes, some potentially just as significant. I would
particularly emphasize those involving line breaks and the insertion or removal
of blank spaces between lines. In the first three poems of the “Mukai” sequence
in O lago da lua, for example, spaces
have been introduced between lines, emphasizing particular parts and semantic
fragments, increasing the number of stanzas, and suggesting a different
division of the poem into sections. In other words, graphic changes entail
differences of interpretation.
Dates, places, biography, and changes in
graphic presentation are neither liabilities nor limitations, as we can see.
Rejecting biographical readings—whether Romantic, racial and contextual, or
psychoanalytic—or resisting commentary confined to graphic and technical
details does not require us to dismiss the relevance of a person’s history or a
poem’s publication history. Genetic criticism demonstrates this, and its scope
now extends to transformations in verbal composition through networks and
digital media (Silva 2010). We can instead summarize the evidence and identify
the relevant differences. Let me add a few biographical details pertinent to Ritos de passagem. The writer sought to
deepen her connection with Angolan anthropological and ethnographic roots and
their bearing on identity while reflecting on her own condition. Here was a
woman, environmentally attuned and situated, ancestral and modern, whose book
appeared through the Union of Angolan Writers on the first day of the month in
which she turned thirty-three, with a cover drawing by Luandino Vieira.
Essential though these details are, they contribute to a reading of the poetry
rather than determining it.
In this essay, I focus on the in-between
character of the oeuvre, to which biography is by no means extraneous; indeed,
it partly clarifies it. To recall a recent conclusion concerning the books
written collaboratively, “the fruits of Ana Paula Tavares & Company do not
always reveal the hands that produced them. And this poses no problem
whatsoever; quite the contrary” (Topa 2023). Since “from the amount of
information and its ordering in art flows the improbability that, in itself,
surprises and inspires wonder” (Willemart 2023, 204), the cause may lie less in
isolated authorships than in authorial procedures and reading practices—in this
instance, in directed transfusions. Willemart also seems to suggest that the
authorship that matters to us is determined by choices concerning reading and
the arrangement and presentation of the elements incorporated: “combining
Flusser’s definition with Sloterdijk’s, the artist is the one who orders the
accumulated information” (Willemart 2023, 201). This does not invalidate
genetic criticism; it broadens it. Nor does it validate any theory of
genius—creative work “will take the artist to the top, but will not thereby
make the artist a transcendent being” (Willemart 2023, 201)—or the image of a
cultivator defined by a single root, trunk, flower, and fruit. The
intermingling of hands in these fruits was woven from the womb onward and has
always continued in good company. It is therefore naturally impossible to
distinguish every confluence and, ultimately, I think, pointless. In this
sense, I found it appropriate to quote the statement above: “this poses no
problem whatsoever; quite the contrary.” Yet for precisely the same reason,
attention must be paid both to graphic transformations and to the removal of
seemingly paratextual elements.
Identifying a particular authorship may
become secondary, and the totality of convergences cannot be discerned;
awareness of the personal and structuring role of mixtures and choices is
nevertheless crucial, both in textual genesis and in the text and the “protocol
of literature” (Topa 2023). Consider Willemart’s summary definition of “Loop
Quantum Gravity”:
It is a fundamental phenomenon of quantum
mechanics that occurs when two or more quantum objects, such as subatomic
particles, are inseparably correlated, even when separated by great distances.
This correlation means that the quantum state of one object cannot be described
independently of the state of the other object with which it is entangled.
Art does, of course, arise “almost always
from an individual activity,” as Paula Tavares’s poetry makes very clear—a girl
with eyes for reading (Topa 2023)—and this, too, is why biography must be
studied. But I ask: how much of that personal activity enters the text, and how
do the hands weave it together? The answer takes account of the use of “Loop
Quantum Gravity” as a metaphor. Authorship selects a set of suggestions and an
arrangement within the discursive sequence, creating wonder over time by rendering
two or more topics, themes, motifs, or simply aesthetic devices inseparable,
“even when separated by great distances.” These individual choices establish a
personal signature and provide the structural basis for interconnected
readings, in contrast to the old “textual engines” and contemporary “artificial
intelligence.”
Let us therefore consider the lyric poetry
bearing the author’s name through the multiplicities and rearrangements of the
symbolic territories it appropriates, while recognizing that we will never
delimit them as we would on a map or a calendar. Nor would this pose “any
problem whatsoever; quite the contrary,” as Francisco Topa aptly stresses.
Second Comparison and Ellipses
A second kind of change becomes apparent as
we move from the earlier volumes to the anthology. It concerns the lyric,
intimate, conscious, and personal development of artistic procedures. The
imagery and language become increasingly “universal”: they require
progressively less precise knowledge of the initial circumstances, motifs, and
topics situated and symbolized in particular times, places, and languages. This
does not entail severing the connection with traditional roots or sap, but
rather reformulating it. I am inclined to distinguish two types, more useful
for reception than for creation. The first predominates in Ritos de passagem and Manual
para amantes desesperados; the second in Água selvagem. Taking these two extremes, let us examine how the
author’s poetry binds them together in a nonlinear progression.
This connection is reformulated, for
example, through the increasing use of short poems akin to Japanese haiku, but
also, and above all, to the ancestral structures of aphorisms, proverbs, and
riddles. This preference, which establishes affinities with Arlindo Barbeitos,
was already present in the first book but becomes more pronounced—with another
interval in Manual para amantes
desesperados. In Ritos de passagem,
three poems can be read as four-line compositions, a number doubled by line
breaks that isolate segments against the page’s white space. The next two books
broaden the stanzaic breath. Several three- and four-line poems return in Ex-votos. In Dizes-me coisas amargas como os frutos, which completes the “Mukai”
sequence, we find one four-line poem and, at most, two five-line poems. Como veias finas na terra offers several
poems of three or four lines. In Água
selvagem, as in Fernando Pessoa’s uncollected poems, some pages contain
only one or two lines, amounting to a single verse.
I must stress once again, however, that
this progression is a tendency. Paula Tavares’s ruler is made of water, not
wood, still less iron or steel. Yet water can be kept cool in a moringa, an earthenware water vessel, as
she learned in adolescence: “I want to become capable of writing a poem that
can use few words and say a great deal” (Wieser et al. 2024, 24). There is,
then, a tendency that develops through extended intervals while accentuating an
earlier concern. As in a river’s course, the water from the spring does not
reach the sea in a straight line or without receiving tributaries.
Alongside this undulating progression, the
textual expression of that connection increasingly dispenses with directly
naming traditional objects, customs, rites, and beliefs, refining them into
metaphors that any reader can readily interpret within their own context. The
connection with identity now seldom calls for ethnographic research to
understand the meaning of “the ox for which they will exchange me.” We still
occasionally encounter “pemba” and other markers of geographical and
anthropological location, but it is the time for “licking one’s wounds” that
comes to dominate the analogies.
Consider, by way of illustration, two brief
poems of three lines each (Tavares 2023, 232–33):
Of the ear of grain I am the seed eaten
By time and the beaks of the birds
That come most often
and
The shepherd’s hours seethe
When night descends gently
Down the mountain
We do not need ethnographic or biographical
contextualization to read them. Any reader can readily imagine a familiar
landscape from these lines; yet they remain connected to a traditional Angolan
frame of reference.
This does not emerge suddenly; rather, the
use of a kind of elliptical metaphor gradually intensifies. Consider another
example from Ritos de passagem
(Tavares 2023, 30):
THE MABOQUE
There is a philosophy
of
whoever has never eaten
has
still to resolve
some difficult problems
of
the libido
An unprepared reader at a distance must
look up the maboque: an image of the
fruit, its scientific name, the areas in which it spread, its principal
characteristics, and its symbolism in local traditions. Even this is
insufficient. The reader must also understand the fruit’s relationship with the
libido in the specific context of Angola, where it is also associated with
music—the marimba—and women’s adornments. The reader then attends to the
fragmentation of lines, also common in David Mestre’s lyric poetry, and to the
language with its Freudian resonance (“of / the libido,” a libido with
“difficult problems” “still to resolve”). By connecting these parts, the reader
discovers an overarching thread of meaning. But let us try removing the title,
and nothing else. What remains is a poem that can readily be read anywhere in
the world, opening onto a wider range of possible interpretations and
intertextual connections, even without knowing who wrote it, where, when, or
what a maboque might be.
Book by book, Paula Tavares’s poetry has
moved toward this kind of poetic construction, less explicitly tied to visual,
geographical, and anthropological circumstances and therefore more open to
multipolar readings. In O lago da lua,
though not only there, we find examples of this second type (Tavares 2023, 87):
You arrive
I say thirst the hands
I remain
from the air you breathe drinking
the brevity
thus the waters
the waiting
the weariness.
The sequence entitled “Mukai,” in the same
book, is closer to the first type (Tavares 2023, 78–81).
Turning to Dizes-me coisas amargas como os frutos (Tavares 2001), we should
remember that its title derives from a proverb that could be Lunda, referring
to those unripe fruits, but is presented here as Cuanhama in the epigraph to
the book’s first poem: it circulates throughout Angola. A little after the
eyes’ tranquil lake (Tavares 2023, 117), we observe the same multipolar
tendency (Tavares 2023, 119):
CHAOS
CACTUS
SHARDS
hands wounded
by thorns
resting birds
on my face.
The poem readily accommodates a local and
historically situated reading—indeed, several. Equally clearly, in any country
with even a modest degree of global connectedness, it lends itself to multiple
international readings detached from its circumstantial meaning. This is less
true of a poem such as “Tecidos” [Fabrics] (Tavares 2023, 112):
My body
is a vertical loom
where you left interwoven
the colors of your life: two bands a lozenge
marks of the plague.
My body
is a closed forest
where you chose the path
After losing your way
you kept the key and the proverb.
It lends itself to less context-specific
readings, supported, for instance, by the poetic treatment of “plague” in
twentieth-century poetry, or by the motif of the key. Yet the proverb, the two
bands, and the lozenge suggest the value of looking to ancestral traditions to
understand more fully the roots of its local meaning. Indeed, the proverb, the
inscribed name, language, and signs open Dizes-me
coisas amargas como os frutos itself.
Poems such as “Conto Pende” [Pende Tale]
and “O cercado” [The Enclosure] (Tavares 2023, 116, 121) require
anthropological research if we are not to miss a thread of meaning constitutive
of their textual construction. Moving through the books in this way, we find a
gentle progression in the direction I have described: allusions become less and
less dependent on particular circumstances, although they remain rooted, or
potentially rooted, in a geographically situated ancestry. The trajectory is
not linear: in 2007, Manual para amantes
desesperados restores the demand for a context-specific reading. Even
there, however, we can read poems such as this (Tavares 2007, 23):
Adélia holds my hand
Inside the temple
Moves her lips forcefully
Says:
We, conceived in sin
Enclosed in glass
On the altar of the world.
Adélia reads the stelae
The writings in the sand
Carefully washes
The wounds
Says:
Dreams are deserts
With stranded ships.
It is beautiful and offers an overarching
way of reading the book: crossing the desert is like crossing a dream “with
stranded ships.” It does not oblige us to read it through the specific Namibe
that breathes through most of the other lines and remains sheltered within
these.
In Água
selvagem, the most fully realized of the author’s more elliptical books, we
nevertheless encounter both kinds of composition and analogy. Consider page 226
of the anthology, for example: headed by an epigraph from Akhmatova, it calls
for context-specific knowledge of the “termite tower,” the “woodlouse,” and the
“bonfires,” rendered intertextually “eternal.” On encountering these two lines,
isolated at the top of another page (234),
Tune my body to the force of fire
As you do the wooden keys of the marimba
we readily understand, our reading
accelerated by the absence of punctuation, that they can be read in any country
where the marimba has resonated across generations: Japan, for instance, as
much as ancient Egypt, which witnessed the instrument’s birth, or India,
Indonesia, and so on. Yet contextually informed readers recognize that the
force of this fire and the wood of this marimba are local: perhaps even keys of
maboque wood and fire with the force
of fogope. The same applies to the
aphoristic poem “The earth had wounds in its skin,” alone on page 237. We know
how much this sentence can mean in Angola, but we also know that it retains
meaning and intensity when read outside our context. Seven pages earlier,
another aphoristic poem illustrates the methodological transformation in the
artistic interweaving of Paula Tavares’s poetry with Angolan rural oral
traditions:
What wanders through my veins is
the sap.
With these diverse veins and threads, the
weaver composes her cloths, interweaving the sap. Let us therefore try to
photograph or film some specific procedures.
The Weaver of Colored Beads: Adélia Reads the Stelae
Alongside the constant, uninterrupted
presence of Angolan rural oral traditions, chiefly from the south, east, and
center of the country, Paula Tavares’s poetry is, to an even greater extent
than many others, a poetry of transitivity and transition, shaped by
intertextual connections and hands that do not always reveal themselves. As
Francisco Topa observed, it is no coincidence that she has published several
important works written collaboratively, through coauthorship or a fusion of
authorships (Topa 2023). The girl from Huíla enacts the “sliding process”
(Padilha 2012, 219), above all between reading and landscapes, between
oralities and writings, between localities and forms of conveyance:
even so I shall walk […]
I shall separate sadness
care for myself
and truth.
(Tavares 2023, 246)
Ancestral inheritances and present
realities thus travel at a calm, measured pace, on a journey in which
separation is made translucent through weaving.
Her lyric poetry might appear intransitive,
even hermetic to some, given the suggestive intensity of its concentration on
the cultural inheritances of a particular rural world, combined with seemingly
very personal references. In this sense, it would be intransitive because it is
difficult to interpret without knowing every landscape and biographical
reference, every work read, and their respective ancestral inheritances. We
cannot expect such knowledge from most readers outside Angola, or even within it.
Yet Paula Tavares’s poetry is appreciated by readers who lack even partial
command of these references. Why?
There are several answers. One is that we
are dealing with a reader of works belonging to a globalized literary
patrimony—and matrimony—perhaps as early as her encounters with the
secondary-school library (Wieser et al. 2024, 15). We can perform a simple
experiment: choose a phrase, a fragment of a line or stanza, and copy and paste
it into a search engine. It might be a familiar expression such as “Beloved, my
beloved,” or something related—a soul or person “wounded by love” (Tavares
2023, 71). But it might also be a seemingly unremarkable phrase in common use:
not “in the middle of the road,” where we already know there was a stone, but
“on the middle way.” We will encounter surprising results. Prejudice leads us
to suppose that no poem concerned with the middle way could come from Angola,
and so we are perplexed, much as we are when reading Segalen’s Stèles, “attentif à ce qui n’a pas été
dit” [attentive to what has not been said], particularly those du milieu. I am not referring merely to
cutting and pasting, but to books absorbed, internalized, and made structurally
significant through the ways in which they reconfigure ancestral references and
arcana and bring them into the present. The writer responds with her own verses
and her own project of Angolanness, her contribution to an expanded identity.
Her poetry’s evidence of intensive reading cannot be explained simply by her
many years abroad: “a basket is made of many threads,” even before her birth,
as the Umbundu proverb says at the threshold of the Kalahari. What matters,
beyond her curiosity as a reader, is her concrete understanding that, if a poem
is a basket, the basket needs many threads. It is therefore essential to draw
on the weavers’ mastery to compose a verbal art of colored beads, including
those newly arrived at the monhé’s
rare shop.
Other procedures contribute, such as
transforming ancestral and geophysical evocations into symbolic operators
(Padilha 2012, 220), articulated with the primary, basic, archaic, and
fundamental structures of humanity’s “imaginary.” Today, however, with access
to digitized sources, and even allowing for precarious internet connections in
many parts of Angola, it should not surprise us that someone takes an interest
in one of the possible middle ways, seeks the true name, the clay eyes, the
marks of guilt, or the wide-angle lens and 400 ASA film, or speaks of solitude
in black and white. We all know that today we can be far away, outside,
off-center, without ever leaving the neighborhood. It is time to take this into
account when discussing the reading of poetry. Poems are made from fragments
capable of carrying both global and local connotations, transliterations and
translucencies, some already consecrated by the Bible within the volcanic,
prophetic magma of the traditions it synthesizes—traditions that may have
contributed to the early, presumably Catholic, upbringing of the girl among
settlers. Today, however, these fragments are often combined with others from
digitized books, or print books purchased after hearing about them or reading
an online comment, and so forth. Through them, any Angolan reader can grasp the
degree of globalization present in Paula Tavares’s poetry from her very first
book—as can any non-Angolan reader. All it takes is the willingness to do so.
Reading her poetry constantly evokes
intertextual connections, from titles to passages, allusions, and minute,
enriching structures. The publication of almost all her previously published
poetry, together with a new book, Água
selvagem, makes it easier to confirm what I am arguing, something already
discernible in Ritos de passagem and
that initiatory journey through the desert. Yet Paula Tavares’s extensive
reading is not the only basis for her appeal to communities of reception far
removed from the original ones. Beyond what I have already discussed, there is
the suggestive, open-ended construction of her poetry, raising senses and
meanings to leave a trace one does not wish to lose, like the taste of fruit
lingering in the mouth after swallowing. As we turn the anthology’s pages, we
become aware that this is an important and frequent procedure in Paula Tavares.
One of its supports is elision.
The use of carefully prepared elisions is
one of the secrets or tricks of composition and operates through various
devices. Images, for example, are defined just enough for us to imagine them,
but not enough to become excessively specific and distinct. This is another
form of elision among the author’s compositional principles. A third, closely
related type can be described through photography: the kind of photograph that
focuses our gaze on a sharply defined detail while blurring the rest of the
image, rendering the language of the rest of the sentence indistinct.
Elision as a vehicle of suggestion is also
structured by an artistic knowledge of the traditional repertoire of rural
oralities, read for more than their content. Proverbs and riddles, in which
Mário António early discerned an essential poetic quality, help train us to
read and compose what seem to be minimally defined images, subtle analogies,
and agile connotations. Arlindo Barbeitos’s poetic work opened the way, from
the earliest years of independence, to the maturation of a poetics at once
local and universal, incisive and suggestive. Another discerning connoisseur of
Angolan traditions, including those of the east, and of universal traditions,
he too was a master of elision. In his own way, Mário António pursued a similar
poetics, developing an art alternative to pamphleteering discursiveness.
Another poet emerging chiefly from the 1970s, David Mestre, explores the same
suggestive concision in an urban, cosmopolitan idiom, perhaps reaching its
fullest realization in Obra cega. All
these names, together with Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s (Padilha 2012, 219–20),
must be considered when reading Paula Tavares’s poems, not least because they
prepare the reader for her work, including its elisions. Consider the
composition beginning “On top of the termite mound” (Tavares 2023, 159), from Ex-votos, inspired, though not
exclusively, by the cult of Saint Anne of “Pedra Preta,” described by Manuel
Alves de Castro Francina in 1854 and cited at the beginning of the book
(Tavares 2003, 7). There are many other examples, which I leave readers to
explore. I shall still glean lines from a few subtle allusions along the short
stretch of road that remains, wearing these modest sandals, their leather and
rubber worn, but the only ones I have.
The art of suggestive concision allows
reading to operate differently, playing more flexibly on the partial mismatch
between the reader’s encyclopedia and the author’s. Paula Tavares the reader
had been preparing for this almost from the cradle, because her situation, her
placement from birth, constituted an in-between position of enunciation,
transitive within a geography of transition, if not of superimpositions: ex-votos offered by someone who hears,
from the place of “the oldest men,” “‘It is not your place,’ they told me”…
“after so many worlds traveled and still to travel.” The poem remains, “against
the direction of the wind,” a “bulb” preserved “to give water to the thirsty,”
as she writes under the inspiration of the Namibe. Through the desert’s
purification, her poetics discovers transparent water with sap in that living,
breathing house-moringa (Tavares
2023, 239).
It is time to consider what it means to
have grown up among several “worlds,” cultures, languages, and worldviews. It
is time to consider the consequences of an almost invariably intuitive,
automatic perception: for subjects who inhabit the in-between, transferring
contents, expressions, and devices from one “world” to another leaves some
things by the wayside; others travel only with us, while still others are
transmitted. When translating between two languages, for example, transferring
their contents involves a kind of elision that combines indistinct lines with
defined contours, as Paula Tavares’s metaphors do. Here too, in these
transverse passages, one learns the art of the suggestive residue.
What particularly interests me in the
writer’s biography is what she says about others in her own words (Tavares
2008, 163):
A system for communicating, circulating,
transporting, receiving, and decoding information entails control over a
considerable number of people and possession of a set of codes belonging to
different symbolic systems and representing particular political and social
hierarchies.
This is also the system of the verbal arts
and, in the case of ancestral writing practices, of the verbal-visual arts. I
am speaking of someone who commands “a set of codes belonging to different
symbolic systems”: for example, codes of the visual and verbal arts, cinema and
poetry, photography and music, or sand drawings and the Portuguese repertoire.
Once the differences between symbolic systems are recognized, writing
increasingly proceeds through images, metaphor more frequently replaces
denotation, and transdisciplinary combinations are brought into play (Tavares
2008, 166), such as those enacted by Luandino Vieira’s “figurations” in Paula
Tavares’s books. These differences tell us that only part of each image is
clear; the rest remains elided, indistinct, potential. Let us now consider the
context more specifically (Tavares 2008, 163):
The relationship between information,
decoding, and response adds a body of knowledge, fixed by the protocol of
writing, to the constant movement between coast and interior that had operated
for centuries. The interests of all participants were safeguarded in the
written information, which thus largely ceased to conform to the rigid
framework of formal correspondence between political hierarchies, allowing
information of interest to all parties involved in this long process of
exchange—goods and words—between the coast and the interior of a territory to
pass through.
In the nineteenth century, bearers of the
spoken and written word never ceased to astonish European travelers, who
recorded such phenomena in their journals.
The objects at departure do not coincide
with the “same” objects on arrival. Fruit changes along the way after it has
been picked. We should therefore not be surprised when I write that, from the
cradle, indeed from the ancestral inheritances she evokes, Paula Tavares’s
biography was woven within a semiotic border, and that her itineraries have
extended that border beyond the African continent: “Berlin with the breath of
angels […/…] desert with drawings in sand / very fine / I trace the labyrinth”…
“in Nefertiti’s head” (Tavares 2023, 186). In this, you may say, she is no
different from most people. Perhaps that is true. If so, it is time to consider
this shared human condition, visible everywhere, including in written poetry.
What distinguishes Paula Tavares, as it does all poetry worthy of the name, is
a creative awareness of the process, of this “long process of exchange—goods
and words.” A trader will use imprecisions and shifts of meaning to generate
profit; a fool, a stubborn person closed in on themselves, or someone unaware
will not engage with differences, at most lamenting or attempting to erase
them. Poetry recognizes that they can generate a virtual profit, potentially
inexhaustible. To facilitate this, it uses elisions and other maneuvers, works
of the hand.
Beyond these strictly biographical aspects,
we should recall her position in the chronology of Angolan literature to
complete this profile of in-betweenness. Without diminishing her strong,
distinctive poetic personality, that of an incomparable woman, her lyric poetry
emerges between that of the poets of the 1980s and the preceding decade. Its
aesthetic features are neither those of Ohandanji nor, strictly speaking, those
of Archote or any Young Literature Brigade. David Mestre rightly hailed her
first book as “the most promising poetic debut of our first decade of
independence” (Mestre 1987, 128). This singles her out without making her a
generation unto herself: it situates her within a civil—and, as it happens,
military—time shaped by unique and diverse hands. Nor does Paula Tavares’s
poetry belong to the urban voice and libertine kernel of the kindled language
of Do canto à idade (Mestre 1977), or
to the Luandan blues, in part later and already laconic, of Rua da Maianga,
revealed through David Mestre’s caustic, intertextual photographic booth, his
verbal photomaton (Mestre 1996,
81–83). Neither could it be reduced to Ruy Duarte’s rural filmmaking or
experimental intermittency in the volumes published between 1972 and 1982.
Finally, it does not belong to Arlindo Barbeitos’s proverbial Lunda, seemingly
surrealist, in his angolemas
(Barbeitos 1977) and troubled dreams (Barbeitos 1979). And although it can be
connected with that more distant ancestry, it can hardly be said to derive, or
even to have derived, from Mário António’s sophisticated lyric poetry, spare
yet flavorful, in the anthology 50 anos
50 poemas (António 1988). Her poetry certainly arose from the slow,
restrained chewing of many of these books, but the result cannot be assigned
either to the Angolan generation of the 1970s or to the next. It remains
between them, in its own space of house and moringa.
This transitivity in reading extends beyond
our literary chronology from the very first book. As David Mestre sensed, “the
aphoristic tone of the ethnological references […] calls for the dynamic of
multiple, simultaneous readings that characterizes contemporary poetry.”
Indeed, Ritos de passagem already
reveals powerful affinities, complicities, and intertextual connections drawing
on widely varied sources. Following the Luandan critic’s initial reading, we
hear in “Navegação circular” [Circular Navigation] “a voice” to which “the
surrealist legacy is not foreign,” entering “without friction into the wake of
our finest poetry” (Mestre 1987, 128). I have selected these fragments of David
Mestre’s review deliberately. He was the literary chronicler of his generation
par excellence and saw Ritos de passagem
as a natural (“without friction”) and distinctive continuation of the
immediately preceding legacy. It also enriches that legacy through intertextual
connections to the south, east, and center, recognizing the mechanical martrindinde on its four-thousand-year
journey between Egypt and Sumbe, south of which we find Egito-Praia, by mere
coincidence. This older critic was already concerned about somewhat premature
new debuts, which also explains why he regarded Paula Tavares’s poetry as a
salutary reminder to “present and future generations” of “the level of
exactingness required of any newcomer who aspires to the status of Angolan
poet” (Mestre 1987, 129). This “sense of aesthetic exactingness” was perhaps
the most important legacy of the poets of the 1970s.
That early map of 1985, typed from A to Z
by alien hands, already contains the sheer wonder of the scars of other wings,
glass rings, silks from India, the Song
of Songs, an expanded conversation:
we colonized life
planting
each in the other’s sea
the nails of distance of the word of madness
These lines are, moreover, headed by a
Cabinda proverb: “weep or do not weep / the plain remains the same.” Let us
therefore move on.
By 1985, the writer was already exchanging
words with the landscapes, customs, and rites that shaped this woman of the
south—“songs that marked me deeply from an aesthetic point of view”—alerted by
the sixties to the north, difficult problems of the libido at 380 degrees
Celsius cooking ancestral voices, a profile taking shape through multiple
anthropological and lyric transits, while “two old flags / at half-mast /
salute each other, solemnly” (Tavares 2023, 53). Like almost all the poems,
this one remained unchanged from edition to edition; in the first (Tavares
1985, 33) and second editions, however, it is located: “luanda, 84.” It is no
coincidence that two old flags were saluting each other at half-mast, with
implicit ellipses.
For all these reasons, attentive to the
“nature of the whole” (Topa 2023), Laura Padilha could aptly conclude that the
lyric poetry of the first book circulates “between the poles of tradition and
modernity which, from that point onward, the poems contained in the rites will
bring into play, intensifying the aesthetic pact” (Padilha 2012, 219). With
such assurance, Paula Tavares answers, in her distinctive way, the question
born of independence: who will I be for the literature of the new country? What
shall I carry to it in the quinda
basket on my head? What lineages shall I offer it to shape its future face? An
inescapable question—
(Segalen,
Stèles du milieu)
Works Cited
António, Mário. 1988. 50 anos 50 poemas. Lisbon: Átrio.
Barbeitos, Arlindo. 1977. Angola, angolê, angolema. 2nd ed. Lisbon: Sá da Costa. Cover and
illustrations by Sebastião Rodrigues.
———. 1979. Nzoji
(sonho). Lisbon: Sá da Costa.
Mestre, David. 1977. Do canto à idade. Coimbra: Centelha.
———. 1987. “Paula Tavares: Ritos de passagem.” Colóquio-Letras 96 (March): 128–129.
Review of Ritos de passagem, by Paula
Tavares.
———. 1996. Subscrito
a Giz: 60 poemas escolhidos (1972–1994). Lisbon:
IN-CM.
Le Moigne, Jean-Louis. 1998–99.
O Construtivismo. 2 vols. Lisbon:
Instituto Piaget.
Padilha, Laura. 2012. “Sobre mulheres, cânones,
silêncios e enfrentamentos.” Diadorim
11 (July): 209–23.
Segalen, Victor. 1914. Stèles. Beijing: n.p.
Silva, Maria Ivana de Lima e. 2010. “Crítica
genética na era digital: o processo continua.” Letras de Hoje, October–December, 43–47. PUC-RS.
Tavares, Ana Paula. 1985. Ritos de passagem. Lavra & Oficina 55. Luanda: União dos
Escritores Angolanos.
———. 2001. Dizes-me
coisas amargas como os frutos. Lisbon: Caminho.
———. 2003. Ex-votos.
Luanda: Nzila.
———. 2007a. Manual
para amantes desesperados. Lisbon: Caminho.
———. 2007b. Ritos
de passagem. 2nd ed. Illustrations by Luandino
Vieira. Lisbon: Caminho.
———. 2008. “A escrita em Angola: Communicação e
ruído entre as diferentes sociedades em presença.” In Angola on the Move: Transport Routes,
Communications and History, 163–72. Frankfurt am Main: Lembeck. Proceedings
of the conference held at Goethe University, Berlin, September 24–26, 2003.
———. 2023. Poesia
reunida seguido de Água Selvagem. Lisbon: Caminho.
Topa, Francisco. 2023. “Os frutos e as mãos: Ana
Paula Tavares & Companhia.” Lecture delivered at “Viva no tempo e no
espanto”: homenagem a Ana Paula Tavares, Porto, October 25. Text supplied by the author on request.
Wieser, Doris, and Ana Paula Tavares. 2024. “Entrevista a Ana Paula Tavares.” In “Viver e escrever em trânsito
entre Angola e Portugal: Entrevistas e ensaios,” edited by Doris Wieser. Portuguese Literary and
Cultural Studies 40–41: 11–24. Published March 28.
Interview conducted in Lisbon on November 15, 2020; transcribed by Paulo
Geovane e Silva.
Willemart, Philippe. 2023. “Os processos de
criação decorrentes da Crônica de Nuremberg e da Gravitação Quântica em Laços
(GQL).” Manuscrítica:
Revista de Crítica Genética 51: 190–208.
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