By Alberto José Mathe[1]
Sunday is, for me, a sacred day. Regardless of the circumstances, I reserve the day to spend more time with family and indulge in the sounds of jazz coming from various corners of the world. At six in the morning, I received news of the physical disappearance of a friend in neighboring South Africa. Moved by the anguish of the day, I decided to change my musical repertoire to listen to the Blues and thus, mourn my friend. It was an afternoon of the blues. While I indulged in classics like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Gary Coleman, Sam Myers, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, among others, I wondered about the scope and meaning of the Harlem Renaissance or precisely the melancholic depths of the blues rhythm, the painful experiences faced by African Americans who came to create this musical style.
This process was essential to confront the pain I felt and lean on the collective experience of African peoples and their diasporas. Thinking about how painful the sensation of losing someone we love can be disturbing, but it can also be humanizing. Suddenly my alarm went off, reminding me to read the book "Kwashala Blues," of which I was tasked with the difficult mission of presenting today. Those who live amidst tragedies cannot be shaken and fail to fulfill the missions they receive because "life is short and needs to be lived without closing ourselves off to our stories, experiences, and dreams" (Cacinda, 2023, p. 45). So I began to read and ponder the title of the text: why Kwashala Blues? Is it a book that talks about my favorite masters or finds in the blues a literary motive?
I have the impression that we are facing a book that suggests more than inter-artistic dialogues between literature and blues. In reading this book, I was left with the same feeling of melancholy caused by the sad lyrics and rhythms of the blues, which in this case represent "kwashala" death. In this Kwashala Blues, death and melancholy are explored in a visceral way. It's as if the melancholy of the blues is so intense that life itself is about to "die" in an emotional sense. The progressions of slow chords and expressive guitar solos amplify the sensation of anguish and despair that the various interconnected texts explore.
It is possible to feel, along with the autodiegetic narrator, the intensity of the sadness and anguish caused by the shocking discovery that the father died, in part because of the son who underestimated the affective value of his relationship with his father, replacing it with gifts:
"My father had confided to his that he would die and that he had realized the wound of my sorrow. He became increasingly sad when he received my gifts. First, he received a dozen chairs, because I wanted to pay for the one that had broken; and I didn't stop there, I kept sending other goods, but never having been present.
The emotional lyricism, direct language, and simplicity with which diegetic events are described engender a dramatic discourse and create powerful images that involve its reader (call and response of the blues) and allow them to see themselves in the plot and feel the pains of the characters, so that there is a synchrony between the melancholy that the blues can convey with the emotional death represented by Kwashala. This emotional experience can be awakened by the death of Professor Sapato, an exemplary man, cultured, dedicated to great causes and his family, but who found death on the fateful day he caught his wife with another man in their bed, incidentally the wife's nephew who lived with the couple.
So, Sapato looked at the man. It was Paulo, the wife's cousin. The same one who had arrived two years ago at his house asking for shelter, so he could fulfill his dream of graduating in Industrial Mechanics.
(…)
Paralyzed, Paulo and Muarema dressed quickly. He saw the two leaving the room like two wild animals. At twelve-thirty, his son arrived from school and found his father's lifeless body on the living room floor. Under the coffee table, a note hinted: men cannot be trusted, goodbye! Signed: Carlos Sapato. (Cacinda, 2023, p. 27).
This Kwashala Blues is an evocative metaphor for the intensity of the sadness and anguish caused by premature deaths, in various situations, and under strange conditions, but which are recurrent in Mozambican daily life and we can identify with them, regardless of the associated causes. It is as if the ghost of premature death haunts the characters and, simultaneously, the readers, leading them to question their place, their origins, their memories. Ah, memory, both of the narrator and of the other characters, despite being painful and rooted in the collective experience of loss, seems to be the antidote that can heal us from this condition of Afro-pessimism.
In this sense, it is memory that comforts the autodiegetic narrator when he is attacked by a group of bandits in the Namicopo neighborhood and they put a knife to his neck. This flashback of people whom the narrator hurt serves as an expiation of the soul in trouble, aimless and rudderless.
The memoir writing project is sustained by committed, socially engaged writing that processes like a sociology of customs or an anthropology of the everyday. However, this social commitment, which can be well discussed within the scope of the Mozambican literary field, or precisely, in relation to the boundaries of literature, ends up sparking another debate: after all, what genre does this Kwashala Blues fit into?
Now, if the literary field can be defined by its social, historical, and aesthetic dimensions, it is in the latter that the greatest difficulty lies in answering the question raised above. Let's see, the aesthetic dimension of literature appeals to a system and its respective code, whose literary language allows the materialization of its aesthetic qualities. In this sense, the literary discourse, with all the elements that comprise it, functions as an antechamber that guides the reader of the text.
By opting for a simple, objective, and direct language that can easily capture and awaken the reader's emotions, operating deviations that go beyond literary language. Note that the text seeks to resignify the Namicopo neighborhood, which slowly rises as a living character, with its memories and stories. The later references to this neighborhood and the Made in Namicopo movement can be inserted into this effort to shift the metaphor of death to the act of resistance, of a neighborhood that insists on falling into oblivion, despite all the dramas that take place there.
The dramas of daily life are explored in other chapters of the book, abandoning the initial perspective on memory, sometimes returning to it in order to collectivize experiences and problematize human drama.
It is a book to be read slowly. Enjoy the sounds, emotions, and earthy, melancholic images in a simple, apparently improvised, raw, and authentic language like in the blues. It is a text that challenges literary criticism, and I hope it will provoke debates in various areas of knowledge.
[1] Cultural critic and Professor of African Literatures at Save University.
