Embodying Diaspora: Ambivalence and Utopia in Contemporary Cape Verdean Theatre

\ Embodying Diaspora Ambivalence and Utopia in Contemporary Cape Verdean Theatre —CHRISTINA S. MCMAHON In September 2004, the Cape Verdean theatre group Dionísios performed Um suco natural for the country’s annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival. The piece commingled a traditional Cape Verdean dance form, batuque, with Western ballet, and enacted the Cape Verde Islands’ ambivalent relationship with continental West Africa by alternately evoking and obscuring the memory of forced migration from the mainland ¤ve centuries earlier. In July 2005, Burbur , a Cape Verdean diaspora group based in Portugal, premiered O intruso, an adaptation of a classic Cape Verdean literary work, at four cafés in Oporto, Portugal . Confounding the idea of a diasporic identity de¤ned exclusively by ties to a Cape Verdean homeland,O intruso featured moments of linguistic improvisation in Portuguese,Cape Verdean Crioulo,and indigenous Angolan languages. O intruso situates Cape Verdean national identity within the panoramic scope of Lusofonia, a utopic vision for a transnational community of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) countries held together by a common language and colonial past. Although these two troupes adopt divergent approaches to national identity , both use theatrical improvisation to disrupt traditional notions of diasporic culture. These improvisatory methods allow Cape Verdean performers to imagine the intellectual, cultural, and psychological landscape of “home” differently . Since the space of “home” constantly shifts among the Cape Verde Islands , mainland Africa, and Portugal, Burbur’s and Dionísios’s theatrical performances rede¤ne “home” as solace in global circulation rather than in one { 110 } stable place. This demands a more dynamic conception of diaspora than the standard formula of migration from homeland and resettlement in host country .1 Analyzing diasporic relationships in tandem with performance compels us to think about diaspora as something enacted rather than merely espoused, as an act of doing rather than being, as a process rather than a product of migration .2 Historical Background Cape Verde’s unique history makes it a compelling case for diaspora studies. From the ¤fteenth to the late nineteenth century, Portuguese traders transported Africans from the Senegambian region of West Africa to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal, where some remained and others were “baptized and civilized” and reexported to various New World locations.3 Because the islands were both a destination and a stopping-off point on the historical transatlantic slave route, Cape Verde’s history has more resonance with the Caribbean islands, for example, than with countries on the African continent.4 Portuguese colonial policy reinforced Cape Verde’s disconnect with mainland Africa: Cape Verdeans were considered “assimilated” Portuguese citizens because their Creole complexions (a result of centuries of Africans and Europeans intermingling on the islands) made them look more “Portuguese.” Thus, Cape Verdeans were accorded voting privileges and educational rights denied to colonial subjects in Portuguese colonies on mainland Africa (Angola, Mozambique , and Guinea-Bissau).5 One of the legacies of this complex colonial past is that Cape Verdeans have historically asserted cultural distance from mainland Africa—a far cry from diasporic subjects who valorize and revere their African ancestry. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Cape Verdean intellectuals were reticent to situate themselves within any kind of pan-Africanist discourse. In the late 1930s, when Aimé Césaire coined the term negritude to designate a universal black aesthetic, Cape Verdean poets writing for the literary review Claridade were developing a more insular concept: Caboverdianidade (literally, “Cape Verdeanness ”), a uniquely Cape Verdean cultural identity de¤ned by the isolation of island-dwelling, the despair of persisting drought, and the con®icting desires to leave Cape Verde for one’s own survival and to remain attached to one’s beloved home. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did a new wave of thinkers, among them Manuel Duarte and Gabriel Mariano,urge Cape Verdeans to regard their culture as part of Africanidade, the oral traditions and folkloric music and dance from EMBODYING DIASPOR A { 111 } mainland Africa that “survived” in spite of forced removal to the islands and subsequent isolation from the African continent.6 Contemporary Cape Verdean performers embody these historically shifting articulations of national identity: from the insularity of Caboverdianidade, to the renewed links with other West African...