Before 1936
It's customary to give birth to Cape Verdean literature in 1936, but as the list of "patronos" drawn up by the Academia Cabo-verdiana de Letras, founded in 2013, reminds us, there were writers who marked their era long before the beginning of the 20th century. The first seat is occupied by André Ivares de Almada, born in 1555 to an African mother and a Portuguese father. An explorer, he brought back treatises on geography from his travels inland - more specifically in Guinea and Sierra Leone - for which he was made a Knight of the Order of Christ. Adventure again guided the steps of António Pusich (1760-1838), a Croatian nobleman who, after a stay in Portugal where he found a wife, settled in Cape Verde, where he became Governor in 1818. One of his daughters, Antónia Gertrudes - who was born on the island of São Nicolau in 1805 - dedicated a remarkable biography to him, a veritable epic fresco of the power games of the court at the time. The young woman's literary talents didn't stop there, however, as she in turn moved to the metropolis and became Portugal's first female magazine editor, as well as publishing romantic poems(Olinda ou a Abbadia de Cumnor-Place) and dramatic plays(Constança ou o amor maternal).
In 1856, he published O Escravo, considered the first Cape Verdean novel. Surprising as it may seem, given that the author had no connection with the archipelago other than having spent a few years there, José Evaristo d'Almeida nonetheless demonstrates unfailing accuracy and subtlety in portraying the demons of slavery and the excesses of colonialism. Its two main protagonists, a black man and a half-breed, also become symbols of an emerging Creole culture. Although Portuguese is the official language, and still is today, the majority of the population comes from Africa and has developed its own dialect, Creole, which itself is divided into "variants" according to the islands where it is spoken. The speakers, however, understand each other.
Eugénio de Paula Tavares, Cape Verde's most famous and influential poet, used the Creole of Brava, where he was born in 1867, to such an extent that his face has long appeared on banknotes and stamps alike, and the house where he was born - Vila Nova Sintra - has become a museum. Yet he was born into a modest family, and it is said that his father died of hunger. As an orphan, he was adopted by a doctor, but the teaching he received from José Rodrigues Aleixo, a reclusive philosopher about whom little is known, was certainly more decisive than the school he attended, which, as a self-taught man, he didn't seem to attend much. His poetry is in the vein of the "morna" - a movement that is often associated with music, thanks to the international fame of Cesária Evora (1941-2011), born of oral tradition, perhaps around the 18th century on the island of Boa Vista, according to some uncertain sources. In any case, all agree that Tavares added a romantic, lyrical, even sensual touch to the great themes already explored by these songs with their gentle melancholic accents. The poet also experienced exile - another recurring theme in morna - which he put into words, in Portuguese, in the Alvorada newspaper he founded in 1900 in the United States. Believing that the proclamation of the Portuguese Republic ten years later would give him a peace of mind he had not previously enjoyed because of the societal criticisms he had voiced in his articles, he decided to return to his homeland, where he resumed his journalistic duties, without ever ceasing to write poetry, a few plays and short stories, until his death in 1930.
Two other poets, José Lopes da Silva (1872-1962) and Pedro Cardoso (1890-1942), also left their mark on their country's literary history. Both worked as teachers and also published in newspapers; the former became a poet and was even admitted to the Académie française, notably for his translation of the sonnet Viva a França! which won him honors; as for the latter, he was a collector, publishing a work entitled Folclore caboverdeano in 1933, and gained a certain esteem for his mornas, among which Nha Codé should at least be mentioned. In retrospect, these three authors have been assimilated to the "pre-Claridade" generation, because in 1936, a magazine was to significantly change the literary landscape of Cape Verde.
Claridade
Jorge Barbosa (1902-1971) was hardly an unknown when, in 1936, he co-founded the magazine Claridade(Clarity) with Baltasar Lopes da Silva and Manuel Lopes. Indeed, the previous year he had published an anthology - Arquipélago(Archipelago) - which already made him a pioneer of Cape Verdean poetry, both in form and content. He evokes the very essence of the soul of his people, traumatized by the yoke of slavery, but also ambivalent about the feeling of being a prisoner that sometimes comes with being an islander in a hostile natural environment. To leave or to stay, the eternal leitmotif. This search for a common identity, combined with a strong desire for literary and political emancipation from Portugal, formed the basis of the famous magazine, which appeared nine times between 1936 and 1960. This number is not significant in terms of impact, on the one hand, and openness, on the other, for between these pages the talent of many authors would unfold, working as much to compose original works as to carry out ethnographic surveys of their country, the publication being intended to be cultural in every sense of the word. A fine overview of the work of the founding members and their many guests - Antonio Aurélio Gonçalvès, Gabriel Mariano, Teixeira de Souza, etc. - can be found at Chandeau. - can be found at Editions Chandeigne.
Like Jorge Barbosa - who was awarded the Camilo Pessanha Prize in 1955 for Caderno de um Ilhéu(Notebook of an Islander) - Manuel Lopes and Baltasar Lopes da Silva never stopped writing. The former published three major works - Chuva braba (1956), O galo cantou na Baía (1959) and Os flagelados do vento leste (1960) - while the latter brought out Chiquinho, still considered Cape Verde's greatest novel, in 1940. It's hard to deny that the story of the boy who gives his name to the book is not dissimilar to that of the author, since both were born and lived in São Nicolau and Sāo Vicente. However, in the third part, powerless in the face of droughts that lead to famine and decimate his people, the hero finally bets on a better life by going into exile in the United States, a choice not made by Baltasar Lopes da Silva, who died in 1989 in his native Caleijão.
Independence
To a lesser extent, two other magazines would influence Cape Verdean literary life - Certeza, created in 1944 but banned in January 1945, and Suplemento cultural, which appeared in the 60s - but both would have a decisive importance as a sign of the hardening contestation against colonial rule, and as a symbol of a country now pursuing its quest for identity by drawing on its African roots. Henrique Texeira de Sousa's perception of this faltering world, and his prescience of independence to come, are embodied in Ilhéu da Contenda, completed in 1974. This novel - which became the first volume of a trilogy that would continue with Xaguate and Na Ribeira de Deus - was not published until four years later, and was adapted for the cinema in 1996 under the title Un Domaine au Cap-Vert, a title that Actes Sud took up in its French translation in 2002. On the island of Fogo, the reader meets a family of whites who share an inheritance, some of whom refuse to sell the estate because they still hope to regain the power their ancestors once wielded, but times have changed and the new generation of mestizos no longer seems determined to give in.. Still in 1974, Corsino Fortes, born in 1933 in a poor Mindelo neighborhood, published Pão e fonema, which in 2001 became part of A cabeça calva de Deus, a three-part epic poem recounting a people's long road to freedom. His commitment went beyond literature, as he clandestinely joined the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands), which Amílcar Cabral had co-founded in 1956. All that remained was for history to be written..
Since independence in 1975, the country's writers have gained in perspective, and are just as much at liberty to evoke their own reality, sometimes with a certain bite, as to open up to the rest of the world. Orlanda Amarílis (1924-2014), for example, put the same force into questioning the condition of women in the archipelago as she did in denouncing the racism suffered by Cape Verdean emigrants. Having traveled extensively with her husband, Portuguese writer Manuel Ferreira, her tales were translated into many languages. Recognition is also beginning to spread internationally. Proof of this is the Camões Prize - the biggest in Portuguese-language literature - which has so far been awarded twice to writers born in Cape Verde. This was the case in 2009 for journalist Arménio Vieira, born in Praia in 1941, praised for his poetic work, and then in 2018 for Germano Almeida, four years his junior. The latter has been publishing since the 1980s(O dia das calças roladas in 1982, O Meu poeta in 1992), and has rapidly established himself as a publisher. His most acclaimed novel - O Testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo(The Testament of Mr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo, published by Sépia, 1995) - surprised both by its cruelty and its sometimes crude humor. Finally, José Luís Tavares, a writer for young people, has received regular awards since 1999 for his writings in Creole and Portuguese.
