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Coming
of Age in Guinea Bissau
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Sometimes it is important to be personal. Despite the calls in the scholarly
world to retreat to a safe distance from subjectivity, we know, as women,
that it is the submerged life which orchestrates both our strengths and
our difficulties. We do not confront prejudices, ignorance and resentment
which seek to silence our voices and prevent our development by pretending
to operate within the same intellectual constructs which have long served
male control of the world. Disclosure becomes, then, a vital political
touchstone of our work, and a means of bringing to the open many hidden
aspects of experience which are the secret referents in any conversation,
any judgment passed, any alliance made. -Carol Boyce Davies
In a world where gender boundaries and binaries are gradually dissipating,
articulating women's experiences and the intersections of race, gender,
class, and sexuality- understood and codified through a cultural lens-
is exceedingly difficult. Moving across cultures enables (and disables)
a variety of options available to women from their specific location.
The goal of my paper is to explore the range of choices in the construction
of a gendered identity across a diasporic panorama, reflecting on and
drawing from both feminist theory and lived practice, by exploring my
experience working cross-culturally on an artistic and intellectual project.
Through the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University
of Michigan, I was afforded the opportunity to spend a month in Guinea
Bissau, Africa, working with prominent filmmaker Flora Gomes and his cast
as they prepared for his upcoming film. The film for which they were preparing,
entitled Nha Fala (which can be loosely translated as "My Voice"
and "My Destiny"), is a romantic musical comedy about the coming
of age of an African woman who, through finding her voice, is able to
transcend traditional gender norms in Bissauian culture. Interestingly,
it is not until she leaves Bissau for musical training in Portugal, and
falls in love with a young Portuguese man, that she is able to find and
share her voice and her identity as an African woman. Her voice becomes
her destiny, not only because she becomes a successful singer, but also
because her ability for self expression is enabled by her voice as catalyst.
The story offers interesting commentary on the status of women and on
gender relations in Guinea Bissau, and demonstrates possibilities for
other avenues for expression of gender and ethnic identity.
I spent my time in Bissau interviewing Flora and his cast, working alongside
them as they prepared for the film, navigating Bissau, and taking photos.
Our interviews explored at length such themes as the role(s) that gender
play in Bissau, courting, romance, sexuality, polygamy, (post)colonialism,
and African and Diasporic culture(s). We also discussed the importance
of film and artistic expression in Guinea Bissau, issues of being an artist
or actor in a country of extreme poverty, questions of audience (in a
country with no movie theaters), and the possibilites that film offers
both them as individuals and their relatively anonymous country. I spent
my days learning the songs and dances that the cast worked on, and facilitated
workshops on poetry and Negritude, among other themes.
Flora is a mentor, father figure and teacher to his cast, and his work
with them serves as a furthering of their- and my- education. As an African-American/Caribbean-American
artist and scholar, my reception into the lives of Flora and his cast
provided invaluable insight into the voices and visions of African womanhood.
The title of my paper, "Coming of Age in Guinea Bissau," will
be explored not only in terms of what it means to be a woman in Guinea
Bissau, but my own coming of age through my journey as well. Through the
poems, songs, and stories of the people I met, and my photographs and
commentary, I hope to offer a politically engaged and intellectually rigorous
examination of questions of identity, gender and transcendence for woman
of the African diaspora, filtered through a feminist lens. Ultimately,
I hope to engage and critique feasible means of understanding and expressing
gender and ethnic identity that will facilitate new and unexplored possibilties
for what it means to be a woman in the new millenium.
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What will Guinea Bissau smell like? What will night sound like? What will
people look like? How will they perceive me? What kind of architecture
will there be? How useful will my Portuguese be? These were some of the
questions I was asking myself on my long flight to Guinea Bissau. I was
unsure of what my role was to be in this adventure. I am not an anthropologist
by trade, but I was being sent off to do anthropological work in a little
country in West Africa that few had heard of. I was anxious, nervous,
excited to go somewhere that I could not even imagine.
As an African-American, Caribbean-American, I have always felt some sort
of connection to Africa, however tenuous. I remember learning about Africa
in my predominantly white (Jewish) and Asian high school, gazing at people
with faces the color of mine through the ethnographic lens with which
American education frequently turns its eye to Africa. At that time, I
felt ashamed by what I saw as the primitive existence of Africans, which
I felt reflected on me as an African-American. In one semester during
ninth grade, we studied Asia and Africa, learning about various Eastern
philosophies and doctrines which seemed rich and complex, then examining
the poverty and conflict of Africa. At that time in the eighties, many
countries in Africa were struggling to gain financial and political autonomy
at that time. Their plight was presented to me as my African heritage,
cultural baggage that didn't jibe with or facilitate my fledgling attempts
at understanding my own identity as an African-American young woman.
High school was the period where I felt most unsure of what my relationship
to my education was supposed to be, of what exactly my education was meant
to provide and how my uncertain understanding and persistent questioning
of who I was was supposed to be guided by my studies. I thought that my
education was supposed to provide me with equipment for living. I thought
that the books that I read in school were supposed to instruct me, somehow,
on how to live my life, govern and conduct myself in this world, or, if
not, that my interaction with these books and concepts would be mediated
by a learned way of understanding them which would make my experience
of them conducive to growth. I think that schools miss out (perhaps intentionally)
on the opportunity to educate students when they don't try to open up
dialogue between students about race and racism, gender and gender inequality,
sexualities, class, etc. I wouldn't have been as frightened of racism
and its power if it wasn't left hidden and embedded in our educational
system, present but unexplored.
As an African-American and a Caribbean-American, my experience of the
canon- including texts by African-American authors- offered few livable
models of ways of understanding the world and our/my place in it. The
only novel written by an African that was included in our English literature
curriculum was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, in which Okonkwo, the
tragic hero, is trapped in and emasculated by his ideas and beliefs, which
ultimately leads to his humiliating downfall. More than anything, I was
aware of being "other"- not white, but also not enslaved, not
poor, not miserable in my blackness, as were- it seemed to me- all of
the protagonists of texts by African-Americans included in our curriculum.
I now see that my feeling of "other" actually came from existing
within an in-between (only magnified by the insecurities and transitions
natural to the teenage years). I was mestiza, as Maria Lugones defines
it in her essay "Purity Impurity and Separation" (Signs, 1994):
If something or someone is neither/nor, but kind of both, not quite either,
if something is in the middle of either/or, if it is ambiguous, given
the available classification of tings, if it is mestiza, if it threatens
by its very ambiguity the orderliness of the system, of schematized reality,
if given its ambiguity in the univocal ordering of things it is anomalous,
deviant… (459)
The
intersecting vectors of race, gender, and class (and, sexuality, religion,
culture and countless others) rendered me both ob-scene and inter-scene,
and necessitated my circumnavigating a variety of understandings of the
world and their lived results through literature. I was not- I insisted-
cursory to the main story, to life, simply because the uniqueness of my
experience as an African-American, Caribbean-American upper middle class
young woman (dis?)placed in predominantly white educational settings meant
that experiences similar to my own were not represented . But I was also
not willing to forsake or ignore some part of me in order to more easily
accept and apply one or another way of understanding and, hence, way of
living.
Those experiences shaped much of my scholarly pursuit. I spent much of
my time at Amherst College studying Africa and other diasporic locations,
trying to unlearn what I had understood in high school. In graduate school
I have occupied my time with learning theories that helped me comprehend
my own and other's experiences of identity, particularly those that encompass
and include marginalized peoples. Before my trip to Guinea Bissau, I had
traveled through much of Europe and the Caribbean, visited India and Morocco.
I had never, however, been to Africa, and was filled with excitement and
trepidation at the idea of spending six weeks in Bissau, the capital of
Guinea Bissau.
Guinea Bissau is a small country on the west coast of Africa, located
beneath Senegal and above Guinea. Guinea Bissau, like Angola, and the
Cape Verde, had been colonized by the Portuguese in the 15th century,
shortly thereafter establishing trading posts and exporting slaves from
this territory. Their war for independence began in 1961 and ended in
1973, led by Amilcar Cabral and the African Party for the Independence
of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Their official independence was granted
by Portugal in 1974. The country was led by Luis Cabral until a coup in
1980, at which point Joao Bernardo Vieira assumed control and maintained
his position, mainly because the PAIGC was the ruling and only official
party. The 1990's saw Guinea Bissau attempt to establish a multi party
system, culminating in a civil war.
In 1961, 99% of the population was illiterate. In 2000, 80% of the people
are still illiterate. 52% of the current population is young, under 15.
One of few sources of information I had prior to going to Bissau indicated
that there are "at least 13 major [ethnic] groups with distinct languages,
customs, religious beliefs, and forms of social organization. The largest
of these groups include the Balanta (27 percent), Fula (23), Mandinga
(13), Manjaco (11), Papel (10), Beafada (3), Mancanha (3), and Bijago
(2.5)" (CulturGram, 1995). The language used in daily interaction
is Kriolu, a creole based on Portuguese and various African languages.
Portuguese is the official language, but is reserved mainly for business
and governmental interactions
I found that French was spoken quite prevalently in Bissau, whether fluently
or in some rudimentary form. . French is also spoken because of contact
with French-speaking neighboring countries. I spoke mostly French and
some Portuguese while there, as very little English is spoken. I recorded
my notes in English, usually translating from French, because it was the
fastest and easiest way to record all of the conversations and ideas that
were thrown at me. In retrospect, my methodology should have taken into
account the difficulty of recording their words. However, because I have
studied French since second grade and have attained near fluency in it,
and because I asked for clarification and explanation of words and/or
ideas that I didn't understand, I feel that there is an accurate fidelity
in my translations.
Guinea Bissau is a place that few have heard of. The people of Bissau
reminded me frequently that they "don't exist
On
my way to Guinea Bissau and on my return to the United States, I stopped
in Lisbon, Portugal for a few days to meet with Eunice, Flora's niece.
She talked to me about Guinea Bissau, about people who don't read, who
don't have access to books. How does that affect their identity, I wonder.
Eunice doesn't believe in identity, feels the word is outdated.
It's
beautiful here. Crazy red and dusty. The buildings are a mix of new buildings
and hut-like houses, carribean-esque houses, houses destroyed by the war.
People always seem to be everywhere. The earth is vibrantly red and warm,
the people are the most delicious shades of brown, covered in red dust
and warm. Beautiful people, full of kindness.
At
night there are only shadows. No lights (no electricity) because of the
war in 1997-8. No wind. The city is lit up by candlelilght.
I
practice with Flora's actors, who make up little plays, sing beautiful
songs and dance.
It's the faces of the people that really got me.
When life is easy, like in the U.S., it's us who destroy ourselves. Here,
it's life that ruins people. But the light, "the black light,"
as Flora would say, tha tilluminates us, it seems to burn brighter behind
these pained faces.
I
had to figure out what kinds of pictures I wanted to take, what type of
composition would capture what I was seeing.
La
nuit ne se bouge pas. Il y a peu de vent. Enfin, il n'y a pas de vent.
Il n'y a que les etoiles, les "crickets," les ombres et moi.
Flora
was talking to me about women yesterday. How you can see the suffering
of a people in their faces. He talked about how one can see slavery and
pain and poverty on the faces of young girls. He gives women central roles
in his films because "they deserve them."
The
market. Oh, lord, the market. Dozens of people selling the same thing.
Meat covered in flies. Hundreds of people pushing their way through. Buy
my stuff, they all say. Boys come up selling plastic bags, boullion cubes,
oil in ziplock bags. You have to argue with every person for a better
price, even though you already get 4 mangoes for $0.70, 5 or 6 fish for
$1.30. When you buy too much though it wastes.
Amelia
was a refugee in Senegal during the war. She was only able to go there
because she spoke Wolof and told tremendous lies to be able to enter.
She had only the clothes on her back and a few cents of Bissauian money.
She told me that she cried every day that she woke up.
"Ici, la pauvrtete est plus riche que la richesse." -Chico
They
want to send the idea of solidarity, in spite of poverty. Black, white,
yellow, green.
A way to show the indescribable. Rainbows. Paintings. Live. Sickness.
I
felt taken advantage of at times, because I wasn't really aware of what
life was like there.
I
didn't get invited to anyone's house. People have lost family, homes,
ways of life in the war. They want to show me their lives, but they have
been displaced/misplaced.
They are all amateur actors with limited education. Many of them see their
work with Flora as the next level of their education. Amelia said "It's
a school for the arts. We learn to sing, dance. We learn a lot."
Rehearsing gives them the opportunity to discuss and disseminate information
and ideas.
Uka
Star explained, "You need a strong foundation for creating art. There
isn't a university here. What one learns at high school, one forgets,
or one never uses it and one's studies stop after high school. What we
learn here gives us an idea of how to navigate art. One feels more at
ease with culture and art and society. With Flora, we receive a preparation
for discussing with anyone."
Technical problems, problems with actors, electricity. How can one prepare
a film here? Flora doesn't have answers, only propositions. He hopes to
leave space for answers.
Discussions
African
family is very important. Aunts have lots of power over nieces. Protection
is important. Solidarity. Share with one's extended family. Everyone is
always around you. Power comes from others rather than from money. When
parents darents die, aunts and uncles become responsible for the children.
The
family of the bride and the family of the groom become one. Richness is
something that comes from inside the family. Your problems become the
family's. Family must be kept together. People don't spend much time alone.
Your problems become the family's.
Elders
are seen as important contributors to the wealth and wisdom of the family.
Oral tradition is a large part of the role of elders, and a form of education.
Griots serve as instructors for recounting the past. Sometimes one family
can include more than 1,000 people. Television and radio are seen as part
of education.
In
some traditions, such as the Fula tradition, if a man marries the woman
and they have a child together, the brother of the father is seen as the
"little father," but his sister would be considered an aunt.
Likewise, the mother's brothers are uncles and her sisters are the "little
mothers." In some traditions the sister of a wife who dies will become
the wife of her brother-in-law.
Po'
di Sangui demonstrates the importance of family and the extensiveness
of family, using myths.
When Flora is not around, the group is less motivated. The actors aren't
interested in discussions on themes. There is a lack of enthusiasm and
respect that didn't exist when Flora was there.
I
got to see most of the places were, "in principle" (meaning
that he's not completely certain), the film will be shot. It was interesting
to see how Flora looks at places. He asks, what purpose will this place
serve? Is it aesthetically pleasing? We stopped to gaze at the Air Afrique
office because Flora thinks it resembles the Eiffel Tower!
I
really enjoyed the zen-like experience of preparing all food from scratch.
Here, when you want chicken, you buy a live chicken and take him home.
I couldn't do that, but fish, soup, salad dressings, spaghetti sauce,
everything was made as a process, from beginning to end, with care.
Toward
the end, I had to admit that I was glad that my stay was coming to an
end. I missed the luxuries I took for granted at home. I had a lot of
fun though and I learned a lot too. I also learned about being direct
with people. I thought I was before, but there it seemed you had to be
downright crass at times.
I
felt like I was living while there. Washing clothes by hand, eating mangoes
that hung down from the heavens and landed within the hand's grasp. Cooking
over an open fire, buying food as it's needed. I never thought about how
digitalized my life is in America. How microwavable, how electrical, how
artificial life is. Me, with my big city ways, my fancy clothes and my
love for getting my fun on, I must have seemed like an alien. I see how
unnecessary so much of what we have is.
I
think people need to suffer in life, in order to know that they're alive.
I'm starting to think that life without suffering, well, it ain't living.
That's why we create suffering in our own lives and observe suffering
in the lives of others. Sometimes we have to see the suffering of others
to feel alive ourselves.
Suffering, by George Quintino Biague
To
suffer is not to break the law
Nor is it the price of the sinner
If today I suffer because I love you
It's only because I believe that
The one who suffers learns to live happily.
Today
I am a sufferer
Something I've never been
But because I'm bold
I'm beyond suffering
Because you are the reason
Of my life
And the light of my existence.
When I see you
My sadness turns into happiness.
Unfortunately, my time and space
Is limited
And that's the reason for my suffering.
One
of the most beautiful things in this city is its people. It sure isn't
the filthy streets, the clothing fashions, the dust covered everythings.
No swimming, so bowling, no pool, no art museums… no lights or electricity
for goodness sake! But imagine, if you can, the romance of a city lit
up by candlelight…
One
doesn't have much here at all.
Everyone
was so kind to me. Very curious and respectful and a bit timid.
I
also saw some of my boundaries while I was there. I found ways to express
my limits when they had been reached. I never had any confidence in my
ability to set and adhere to limits before, but being there changed my
opinion of myself and gave me more confidence in myself.
So
what does it smell like? Dusty, sweaty stillness, urine at times, lunch
at others. Fish and fruits rotting in the African sun. Deoderant and no
deoderant. Exhaust fumes and smokers. Fires and burning garbage.
What
do nights sound like? Cicadas, people sitting outside watching the street.
Restaurants with their soccer and their long waits. Squished frogs, horns
and passing car headlights. People hoping to make love.
Misti vivi.
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