Ribeiro, Margarida Calafate

Estudo Geral

A heritage of one's own: a conversation with Ana Paula Tavares

  
A HERITAGE OF ONE’S OWN: 
A CONVERSATION WITH ANA PAULA TAVARES1 
 
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro 
CES, University of Coimbra 
 
MCR: Who is Ana Paula Tavares? 
APT: I am an Angolan poet, but I’m also a historian, and 
as such, sometimes everything about me gets all mixed up, 
to echo Camões, it’s a case of the lover transforming into the 
beloved, and utter confusion ensues… I have published 
several collections of poetry—Ritos de Passagem (1985), O 
Sangue da Buganvilia (1998), O Lago da Lua (1999), Dizes-
me Coisas Amargas como Frutos (2001), Ex-Votos (2003)—
and I also like to write prose. In 2004, I published A Cabeça 
de Salomé (2004), a collection of chronicles, and recently, a 
novel written with Manuel Jorge Marmelo, Os Olhos do 
Homem que Chorava no Rio (2005). 
 
MCR: You began to write in Angola in the notorious 
1980s. So what is your literary heritage, what would you 
consider to be your autobiographical literary memory?   
APT: In Angola, our relationship with the literary and 
historical past is not that neat, calm sea so common in other 
literary histories, with their dates of birth and baptismal 
certificates. For us, there are in fact several possible “birth 
certificates.” Indeed, the doubts begin with unanswerable 
questions: did our literary history begin in the 1840s, when 
Maia Ferreira published Espontaneidades da Minha Alma—
às Senhoras Africanas? Or maybe earlier, with Cadornega, 
who wrote the História Geral das Guerras Angolanas? I am 
not going to enter into the loaded and charged debate about 
the history of Angolan literature. I prefer, instead, to reflect 
on the way in which my generation, who lived the intense 
experience of independence and began to publish in the 
1980s, tackles the past, and how the past functions in the era 
after independence. 
Immediately after independence, there was a scramble to 
fix a mythology that could reference us as Angolans. At that 
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro 
148 
time, the classic psychological tactics of nations killing their 
cultural fathers and mothers, and of including some people 
while excluding others, were rife. Let’s not forget that 
writers like Pepetela had work already written but they were 
not able to publish it in the immediate aftermath of indepen-
dence. Apart from a stack of documents that have been 
published, as testimonials, Mayombe is, to date, the only 
thing written about the history of the struggle for national 
liberation. Prior to the 1980s, our heroes had to be great, 
unimpeachable heroes. We couldn’t portray freedom fighters 
with a human face and human foibles as Pepetela did in 
Mayombe, with its depiction of a freedom fighter who steals 
other men’s women, and a man who doesn’t share the 
household chores. That image was totally incompatible with 
the socialist New Man. It was unthinkable for the book to 
have been published prior to the 1980s, and even when it 
was, there was an almighty fuss. In the same decade, Manuel 
Rui’s Quem Me Dera Ser Onda was also published—a small 
book which did a huge amount for the country. At the time, 
no one had realized that you could play with the present the 
way he did, and actually, this book shows us how literature 
can anticipate history. It isn’t possible to write a history of 
the present, but it is possible to write literature about the 
present. If we still remember that a demijohn was called a 
“Ramalho Eanes,” or that a glass of beer was referred to as a 
“Búlgaro,” or that there was such as thing as the “Carnaval 
da Vitória,” it is because of that little book by Manuel Rui 
and all the tales that were told and did the rounds about it. 
It was around then that the voices of some women began 
to be heard. There is, of course, a tradition one inherits, 
despite all the problems of the baptismal certificate which I 
mentioned. There were the voices of great contemporary 
writers like Luandino Vieira, Pepetela, Uanhenga Xitu, and 
Manuel Rui; there was a whole literature that glorified the 
New Man, the Revolution, and everything that rhymed with 
it, all shibboleths which at the time were cultivated without 
question. This is all part of our heritage, but some of us 
combined it with the difference of a younger outlook on the 
world, an outlook which tried to speak of the country 
Interview with Ana Paula Tavares 
 149
without always having to speak of the Revolution or of the 
New Man. That difference engendered the poetic voice of 
some women in the 1980s. 
 
MCR: What was different about publications in the 1980s? 
APT: There were publications by the youth yearning for 
autonomy that came out of the União de Escritores Ango-
lanos, the only non-party organization created in Angola 
during socialism. That was how the Brigadas Jovens de 
Literatura came about, a group of poets with a project that 
still had a revolutionary name and statutes, but which tried to 
forge its own path. The Brigadas arose first in Luanda, and 
its first manifestations were actually in honor of Agostinho 
Neto. But then little newspapers started to pop up—small 
papers, just pamphlets really—with poems by the Brigada 
Jovem de Luanda, or the Brigada Jovem do Lubango, or the 
Brigada Jovem do Huambo, or the Brigada Jovem de 
Malange. Their aspirations were very ambitious: autonomy, 
liberty, things like that, and most of them were not fulfilled, 
but it was starting there that some poets managed, through 
their own personal trajectory, to demonstrate that some 
things were possible. In this regard, I would highlight João 
Maimona, Lupito Feijó, and Luís Kandjimbo. It was thanks 
to Lupito Feijó, who published the anthology No Caminho 
Doloroso das Coisas, that these movements from the 1980s 
grew and took on a more important dimension. At heart, 
what these young people were saying was that there are 
other ways of saying things! 
 There were three women in this wave, who had published 
small books through a series from the União de Escritores 
called “Lavra e Oficina.” They were women who really had 
begun to think differently. They were Ana Paula de Santana, 
Liza Castelo and Ana Paula Tavares.  
 
MCR: So that was where you published your first book, 
Ritos de Passagem? 
APT: I always wrote, always took notes, but never felt the 
need to publish. It was as if the “collective self” was so 
important—at the time, it was vital to write minutes and I 
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro 
150 
was a great writer of these. Publishing under one’s own 
name was, for me, something linked to those already conse-
crated like Arlindo Barbeitos and Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. 
However, just at that juncture, Luandino Vieira, who was 
then the president of the União dos Escritores Angolanos, 
noticed me and that was how I came to be a published poet. 
But I caused a huge scandal. At the time, I had a great need 
to put a name to the land, the fruits, to call things by their 
names, in the midst of an Angola devastated by a war that 
went on and on, and so it was actually said that “this isn’t 
poetry, it’s pornography.” Somehow, I never managed to get 
free of the label, a label the content and intensity of which I 
never really understood. Then I forgot all about the book, 
and now, thirty years later, it returns to life, once again 
through the auspices of Luandino Vieira. 
 
MCR: What led you to write that book, or rather, what 
leads you to write at all? 
APT: At the time, I looked at Angola and thought, “this is 
a country of women, but where are the women? There is 
such a gaping silence, even of poetry by women.” Alda Lara 
wrote, and started a poetic project she has yet to finish, but 
she always wrote as if she was looking or needed to be the 
partner of someone who was going to create the promised 
land. 
I didn’t really invent anything, but I did have many advan-
tages. I was born in a colonial society formed just when 
colonialism really began, that is, after the Berlin Conference, 
when Portugal was forced to occupy its territory, and began 
a policy of populating Angola with whites. For Lubango, this 
meant groups of dirt poor whites from Madeira, who wan-
dered barefoot, something many people from the society into 
which they arrived no longer did. There were half a dozen 
richer whites, who were the proprietors and businessmen. 
There was also a class of herdsmen, who really existed on 
the margins of that society. They were the owners of live-
stock, some had enough head of cattle to be declared rich 
men by the standards of their culture. But that was never 
really said aloud, and nor did the livestock owners 
Interview with Ana Paula Tavares 
 151
themselves want the whites to consider them rich. They 
themselves knew they were rich, and that their livestock 
gave them status. So, you see, it was a society fragmented 
into many groups, and I grew up in the midst of all that 
confusion, without really perceiving what was going on 
there. Also Lubango is in the south of Angola, and at the 
time, what is now Namibia was a colony of South Africa, 
and Apartheid crossed the border really quickly. In my high 
school, I only had one black colleague—today he’s a big wig 
in UNITA—and we were three mulatoes. The privilege of 
having been born there, of having a Kwanyama black 
grandmother and a white one from Castelo Branco, gave me 
the speech I have, this Other speech. What was it those two 
women spoke about at night? Somehow, there was a 
profound rumbling I went after. And as luck would have it, I 
discovered that in the nineteenth century, some missionaries 
had also gone after that very same rumbling. For better or 
worse, they had set down these rumblings in narrative form, 
in poems, in foundational myths and epics... That is how I 
could read—knowing that there was treason there—I could 
read the memory of those peoples. I thought, that is the way 
I should go. If I manage to do something, that’s the way I am 
going to do it. 
I do not produce ethnographic poems, but fiction. I don’t 
see my land the way Sembene Ousmane, the great Sene-
galese film-maker, explained it to Jean Rouch, the grandee 
of Other cinema. “You film Africans as if they were locusts, 
and we will only reach equality when one day I manage to 
film Europeans as locusts.” I don’t see my land, these 
women and men, these herdsmen, as locusts. My land and I 
are inseperable. I do not use all this material to which 
thankfully I’ve had access, as a source, from which I extract 
a little here and there. I try to incorporate a lot of this mate-
rial and to know how it was… 
I am not a woman who passed through any rite of 
initiation. I am a woman who only speaks imperial 
languages... but I have heard the sound of these other 
languages, and so, I don’t copy them: I work them, 
canibalize them, devour them, as many other Africans have 
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro 
152 
done before me. That is the work I try to do: the incorpor-
ation of various heritages, and while my outlook on the 
world is from that land, that space, I am not blind to the rest 
of the world. I read poetry from around the world, and am 
open to the experiences of the world. What I try to do is not 
confuse things, not to confuse registers, and to work with a 
legacy that fate put at my disposal. 
 
Notes: 
 
1. Translated by Phillip Rothwell and Margarida Calafate Ribeiro. 
 
 
 
 
 
 


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A heritage of one's own: a conversation with Ana Paula Tavares

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