Pensativities: Selected Essays

Waters of My Beginning

A city isn’t a place. It is the frame of a life. A frame in search of a portrait, that’s what I see when I revisit my place of birth. It’s not streets, or houses. What I see again is a time, what I hear is the speech of that time. A dialect called memory, in a nation called childhood.

In spite of everything, a map puts us at ease: there is the city, the second biggest in Mozambique. That’s where concrete, iron, asphalt, the usual vestments of an urban space, were instated. But all this wasn’t enough to dismantle the illusion: what dwells in the place of my childhood is the untameable, that which will forever remain ungovernable.

I speak of my Beira, the little city where I was born, located in the centre of Mozambique, on the left bank of the River Pungué. Beira is a place that was stolen from the waters of an estuary, lined with mud and mangroves. A liquid city, on a ground that flows. So much so that when speaking of it, I call it my native water.

Here is the prime example of its audacity: the settlement built on marshland earned the name of a prince. It was named after an obscure Portuguese nobleman — the Prince of Beira, somewhere in Portugal. But at least he was a prince. The people of Beira never knew the identity of this patron whom they had to thank for giving their city its name. The city was invented out of shadows, beginning with its name.

To create a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake in urban planning — it’s utopic, a million-to-one bet. Was Beira dreamt up by an anarchitect?

A Place of Fiction

Small towns dream of being something else. They dream of being villages, or they aspire to be great cities. My hometown was an introverted place, where the world arrived second hand.

We were a place in dispute with the world, and we needed to affirm ourselves in order to exist. The capital, Lourenço Marques, was our shadow. What we had that was good wasn’t just good: it was the best. We had the best airport, the best train station, the best sense of community. Whatever weakness we had was compensated for by our collective ability to create fiction about ourselves.

Had Lourenço Marques built a bullring? Well, without any bulls, we invented bullfights and bullfighters. Lourenço Marques had South Africa? Well Beira had Rhodesia. But this proximity merely aggravated our fictional condition: Rhodesia was a country that didn’t exist, an entity seeking some impossible recognition. In this struggle to invent itself, my hometown was turned into my first book, with it I learned the pleasure of creating roots that were, at the same time, the wings of my imagination.

I remember the colonial houses, ringed by verandas on all sides, offering little by way of defence against the surrounding continent. Africa was there, impossible to avoid or deny, giving us our hybrid soul. In the evening, as the sun went down, I would go out and sit under the huge mango trees. Bats would flutter swiftly through the air and the houses were bathed in a kind of nostalgia. Beira, which proclaimed itself “the city of the future,” in the end, appeared not to want to be a city. Much less a future. As if the place bemoaned its terrain, as if it were avoiding its destiny. As if it knew that, in order to reach the future it claimed for itself, the city would have to correct the distance that separated the concrete town from its reed shanties, and the centre from its impoverished suburbs.

Among Herons and Vultures

It wasn’t the time of day that counted there. What time and men wanted to know was the cycle of tides. My parents would warn me when I should get home:

“Make sure you come home before the tide!”

The city was governed by tides, and the tides were controlled by the birds. That’s what people said. A little grey bird summoned the tide in. Another bigger one, with white wings, called the tide to go out. I was fascinated by the power of such simple little creatures to command the huge ocean. I wasn’t guided by a clock. As a child, I lived like those birds that wait for the waves.

The birds were always my postmen, messengers awaiting a message. In Beira, flamingos, herons, and storks, didn’t inhabit the periphery: they patrolled the centre of town, pecking at little bits and pieces in the mud. And I asked myself: were birds all long-legged, or was our ground too low?

Today, I have plenty of experience of visiting other countries. I’ve become acquainted with many of the world’s oldest and most genuine cities, and in all of them, I have noticed the inevitable presence of pigeons. In squares, on pavements, on balconies, pigeons are proof of a city’s authenticity, a measure of its degree of urbanization.

Beira didn’t have pigeons: it had herons. Like white handkerchiefs flying from an invisible mast, the herons revealed a territory guided by a logic that as yet scarcely pertained to humans. There were also flamingos, storks, pelicans. And above all, there were vultures circling in the sky, reeling over the slaughterhouse. These birds of prey fought each other for the leftovers of our future meals. In what other city might one have witnessed such complicity?

The Sea Dripping Memories

There weren’t any pigeons and, also, there was no fear. Along with pigeons, fear is another indicator of the extent of urbanization. And it was without any fear that I would return home, when night had already fallen, along paths that hugged the ocean shore. My bare feet trod the landward side of darkness. Our walking barefoot reflected the influence of our Rhodesian neighbours. The “beefsteaks,” as we used to call them. But I wasn’t aware of this. My feet felt the skin of the soil as we acknowledged each other with a mutual caress.

Our house was on the edge of a wide beach. I would choose the back steps but didn’t get as far as the garden door. I would dally in the servants’ hut, sharing their mealie flour. My fingers were my cutlery mixing the flour with the dried fish sauce. Tired and smelling of curry, I would sink into the folds of the bedsheet as if being welcomed by waves. In the living room, the Bahian, Dorival Caymmi, sang “it’s sweet to die at sea.” My parents would watch the flamingoes flying into the setting sun. For me, the life we led was the stuff of poetry.

I recall ghosts from my childhood to show how my hometown never freed itself from the sea, how it remained subject to a delicate harmony between Nature and Man.

Now, as I sleep, there is no scene that doesn’t contain the ocean in it. The Macúti lighthouse persists as a solitary sentinel, striped black and white like a zebra’s leg. The mangroves of Praia Nova resist like salty veins, irrigating the body of my memory. The little boats — the pirogues and dinghies — ride the muddy waters of my forgetfulness. The Indian Ocean became my soul’s shore. It was out there that I was born. So much so that nowadays my dreams are amphibian. The past is a shore where everything turns to foam. And my hometown is made of sea air and spume.

Dualities, Enlightenment

But it wasn’t just memories that Beira gave me. The city taught me how my country has various countries within it, scattered deeply between varied social and cultural worlds.

Beira always had difficulty organizing its space in the colonial manner. It was inundated by unmanageable rains, and bordered by impenetrable mangroves. In such circumstances, it was difficult to expel Africa from the place. The settlers would like to have pushed the Africans far away. But the blacks invariably remained there, on the other side of the street. My hometown was doomed to be a borderland — between the sea and the continent, between Europe and Africa, between Catholicism and the religions of the ancestors.

Deep down, the city and I shared the same condition: we were both creatures of the frontier. I am Mozambican, the son of Portuguese immigrants, I was born at the height of the colonial system, fought for Independence, lived through radical changes from socialism to capitalism, from revolution to the civil war. I was born at a pivotal time, between a world that was nascent and another that was dying. Between a nation that never was and another that is coming to be. The city is an umbilical cord that we create after we have been born.

I grew up in this hybrid environment, listening to the old storytellers. They brought me the magic of a sacred moment. I was the son of an atheist poet, and that was my first mass, a message from the divine.

I wanted to know who the authors were of those stories and the answer was always the same: no one. It was the ancestors who had created those tales, and the stories remained as the legacy of the gods. The elders were buried right there in the soil, conferring both history and religion upon our relationship with them. In such a dwelling place, the ancestors turn into divine entities.

The moment had a contradictory effect on me: on the one hand, it nurtured me, while on the other, it excluded me. I couldn’t share entirely in that conversation between gods and men. I was already burdened with Europe, my soul had already imbibed a way of thinking, and my dead resided in other soil.

When I ask myself why I write, I answer: to get to know gods that aren’t mine. My ancestors are buried somewhere else far away, somewhere in the north of Portugal. I don’t share their intimacy, and what is still more serious, they have no knowledge of my existence.

My two sides demanded an intermediary, a translator. Poetry came to my rescue, to create a bridge between two worlds. And the city, my home, my family: these nurtured the poetry that was born in me.

An Unsuccessful Escape

In 1972, I left Beira to go and study medicine in Lourenço Marques. There, I settled in like someone disembarking from his own adolescence; for the first time, I was leaving my home behind and facing “life” on my own. This change of locality helped me to understand the various Mozambiques contained within Mozambique. My Chissena was little use to me. The south speaks other languages. Other cultures were produced within a very different historical framework.

I lived through the last four years Lourenço Marques went by that name. I witnessed the deep changes that led not just to another name for the city, but another reality. Ever since then, Mozambican cities have had to create their own urban space from the inside. Urban space was (and still is to some extent) the space reserved for the others, the whites and assimilated Africans. With Independence, urban space tended to become more Mozambican. Cities were occupied progressively, not just by people who arrived from the countryside, but by rural life itself.

Lourenço Marques, however, didn’t draw me away from my hometown. In both places, I witnessed how the rural soul takes possession of cities and appropriates a network of relationships that is foreign to it, and what is more, that is contrary to its spirit. This is the tension that exists in Beira and in all African cities. Beira was constructed initially according to a different type of logic. It emerged as a transplant of Europe on foreign soil. The continent’s body received these insertions without converting to the rationale behind this. But beyond this tension, there was a certain seduction that the rural world was unable to resist.

Mozambican cities are almost all of recent construction and, until 1975, they were administered according to a foreign modes of thought. They were cities in Mozambique, and not cities of Mozambique. Nowadays, the urban spirit has only partially become woven into the first generation of Mozambicans born and brought up in cities. This process of appropriation by the city is still going on. And it will take various generations.

Inventing Destinies

Beira, like all our cities, wasn’t born “ours.” It became ours gradually. One of the dynamics that turned it into a Mozambican space was migration. Beira is a space of arrival. People enter the city as if they were crossing a frontier. On this side lies citizenship, the place where cultures are made and exchanged and where, with much greater intensity, a sense of Mozambicanness is forged.

The city isn’t just a physical space but a location where relationships are welded together. It is the focal point of a time when Mozambique’s own identities are made and remade. Nor, as a native of Beira, am I the only one to be permeated by dualities. All Mozambican citizens share this same condition: they navigate between cultures, forever adapting to enable more lasting political exchanges that are ideologically more convincing, technologically more well thought out, and socially more promising.

In the end, we don’t have much more than this: the city of our childhood. We talk in capital letters of the Nation, the Country, the Global Village. These are ideas. We don’t live in them. Nowadays, I don’t even yearn for a city. What fills me with yearning is a tiny urban area, a wall where I can once again sit with my childhood friends. And Beira, my Beira, the one I remember from my unfinished childhood, that’s the place invented to fit my dream and my nostalgia.

Published by the Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon, Portugal,

in Tabacaria, October, 2003.