Olá!
bem, não sei como ainda não fui parar a famigerada linha dos paxás voyeuristas :-), com o meu silêncio e a minha falta de contribuição. Serve a presente acha de fogueira para pedir desculpa pela falta de participação. O tempo anda muito escasso, mas não queria deixar de dizer o quão gosto de ler as vossas conversas blogueiras :-). Confirma a certeza de que há tanta coisa gira para ler, para ver, para ouvir, para saborear, às vezes dou por mim a pensar se não vou ter de esperar pela reforma para gozar de tudo em pleno direito - espero que não !!! :-)
Li o "mais alta solidão", e embora também me tenha desagradado o modo de escrita - há inclusivé partes difíceis de ler! - , acho que o livro vale pela experiência que conta. impressionou-me imenso a fragilidade da vida humana, a confusão a que chega o cerébro quando não há oxigénio e como se misturam as prioridades. Enfim, o relato fez-me confusão. Mas o que é certo é que o João Garcia lá continua nas suas sendas, mais fote do que nunca, subindo agora o Aconcágua, depois algum dos outros picos dos Himalaias. Fica uma certa admiração, talvez um bocadinho misturada com o resto: a confusão da vontade de .... *sofrer*...? não sei exprimir-me. whatever .
Acabei de ler um livro no outro dia. Recomendo vivamente. Quanto mais penso nele, mais gosto das imagens e das ideias que deixou na minha cabeça. É o "The Poisonwood Bible", da Barbara Kingsolver. Encontrei-o na secção de livros em inglês da FNAC. É comprido e, à laia de narrativa, conta um bocadinho da história do Congo / Zaire (anos 60 a 80), e retrata no fundo a confusão que são as tentativas de democratização dos países africanos. Fala das diferenças (anos luz!) do modo de vida dos africanos para o mundo ocidental, e deixa a grande questão: onde fica a solução para estes países? Tenho a mania, já muito antiga, de copiar as frases que mais gosto de cada livro que leio. Cá ficam, no final do meu post, os excertos de que mais gostei ou que me chamaram mais a atenção. (são compridos, bem sei, mas o livro também o é). Se alguém quiser o livro emprestado, força. Está na estante à vossa espera :-).
De resto, amigos que conheço e que não conheço, nunca é demais agradecer a vossa companhia :-))).
É um verdadeiro prazer estar sentada à volta desta lareira :-)
(233) What Aunt Tess loved to say was: “Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace”. And that is more or less what we believed in.
(399) In the hazy heat Tata Ndu paused to take off his hat, turn it carefully in his hands, then replace it above the high dome of his forehead. No one breathed. “White men tell us: Vote, Bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n’est pas necessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. Á bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.”
(457) What does Okinawa remember from its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on. The great Delaware rolls on, while Mr. Washington himself is no longer even what you’d call good compost. The Congo River, being of a different temperament, drowned most of its conquerors outright. In Congo a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn’t matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own.
(502) Thirty whites killed in Stanley, two Americans among them – we heard that over the shortwave radio and knew what it meant. By night fall the United Nations would launch their answer, an air and land attack. The Combined Forces, they’re calling this invading army: the U.S., Belgium, and hired soldiers left over from the Bay of Pigs. Over the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three languages: Radio France, The BBC, and Mobutu’s Lingala newscasts from Léopoldville, the news was all one. Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-out invasion against the pro-Independents. How many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN soldiers, we will never know. They’ll go uncounted. Or count for nothing, if that is possible.
(538) The Congolese have an extra sense. A social sense, I would call it. It’s a way of knowing people at a glance, adding up the possibilities for exchange, and it’s necessary as breathing. Survival is a continuous negotiation, as you have to barter covertly for every service the government pretends to provide, but actually doesn’t. How can I begin to describe the complexities of life here in a country whose leadership sets the standard for absolute corruption? You can’t even have a post office in Kinshasa; the day after you rent it, the postmaster may sell your box to a higher bidder, who’ll throw your mail in the street as he walks out the door. The postmaster would argue, reasonably, he’s got no other way to support his family – his pay envelope arrives empty every week, with an official printed statement about emergency economic measures. The same argument is made by telephone operators, who’ll place a call outside the country for you only after you specify the location in Kinshasa where you’ll have to leave l’enveloppe containing your bribe. Same goes for the men who handle visas and passports. To an outsider it looks like chaos. It isn’t. It’s negotiation, infinitely ordered and endless.
(…) Anybody who needs anything in Kinshasa – a kidney-stone operation or a postage stamp – has to bargain for it, shrewdly. The Congolese are used to it and have developed a thousand shortcuts. They sum up prospects by studying each other’s clothing and disposition, and the bargaining process is well under way before they open their mouths to speak. If you’re deaf to this subtle conversation, it comes as a shock when the opening bid seems to be, “Madame, I request from you three thousand zaires.” I’ve heard foreign visitors complain that the Congolese are greedy, naïve, and inefficient. They have no idea. The Congolese are skilled at survival and perceptive beyond belief, or else dead at an early age. Those are the choices.
(543) “I thought you said the Congolese don’t believe in keeping riches to themselves,” I told Anatole once, inclined toward an argument.
But he just laughed.”Who, Mobutu? He is not even African now.”
“Well, what is he then?”
”He is the one wife belonging to many white men.”
Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from me who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature”
(545) I taught at a special school in the compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line. This was the great nuptial gift from the U.S. to the Congo – financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Léopoldville to the distant southern mining region of Shaba. The project bought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who lived outside Léopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and complained of missing their dire-souding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and the pure snake-infested jeopardy of a jungle. The compound was like a prison, all pavement and block, enclosed by razor wire. And like any prisoners, these kids fought with anything sharp they could find.
(…) In the course of a year I watched these rough-and-ready foreigners go out to build thousands of miles of temporary roads for carrying cable, machine tools, and sheet metal, past villagers who’ll live out their days without electricity, machine tools, or sheet metal. The Shaba Province, incidentally, roars with waterfalls, more than enough to generate its own electricity. But with all the power coming from the capital, the mines could be lit up by Mobutu’s own land, and shut down at the first sign of popular rebellion. At the time I was working there, we believed that was the justification for this strange project.
Since I quit, we’ve learned more, enough for me to curse my small contribution to the Inga-Shaba. It was not merely a misguided project; it was sinister. The power line was never meant to succeed at all. With no way to servie a utility stretching across the heart of darkness, the engineers watched the monster’s tail crumble as fast as the front was erected. The whole of it was eventually picked clean in the way a forest tree gets gleaned by leaf-cutter ants: nuts, bolts, and anything that might serve for roofing material trailed off into the jungle. Anyone could have predicted that exact failure. But by loaning the Congo more than a billion dollars for the power line, the world Export-Import Bank assured a permanent debt that we’ll repay in cobalt and diamonds from now till the end of time. Or at least the end of Mobutu. It’s a popular game, wondering which will come first. With a foreign debt now in the billions, any hope that was left for our Independence is handcuffed in debtor’s prison. (…) Foreign bootlegging of minerals is so thorough that our neighbor the French Congo, without a single diamond mine in its borders, is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of diamonds.
(565) Our union has been difficult for both of us in the long run, but what union isn’t? Marriage is one long fit of compromisse, deep other, a squeaky wheel crying out. –but hasn’t our life together meant more to the world than either of us could have meant alone?
(565) One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs.
(606) “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here.”
(607) I live in a tiny house piled high with boys, potatoes, fetishes, and books of science, a wedding cloth, a disintegrating map of the world, an ancient leather suitcase of memories – a growing accumulation of past crowding out our ever-narrowing future. And our waiting is almost over. It’s taken ten years and seems like a miracle, but the Americans are losing in Angola. Their land mines are still all over the country, they take off the leg or the arm of a child every day, and I know what could happen to us if we travel those roads. But in my dreams I still have hope, and in life, no safe retreat. If I have to hop all the ay on one foot, damn it, I’ll find a place I can claim as home. (Jan 1985)
