Just Another Mos in MOZ

Sodade Revisited

for Kimberly Susan

Forsa, Kimi

I don’t know about other Cape Verde Transfers, but I find myself still making plenty of references to Cabo Verde. I’m sure my sitemates here in Cuamba, and other PCVs in Mozambique who have talked to me, are sick and tired of me doing it, but these references belie not just a sense of loss and longing, what Cape Verdeans call sodade. No, these references also attest to my integration in Kabu Verdi. You see, sodade pervades Cape Verdean culture: it’s the theme in much poetry, art, and music. Understandably so, since more than half of the population is absent from the country, living and working abroad. More than half! This means that probably all Cape Verdeans living in the archipelago experience some sense of loss and longing for those who’ve left, and those who’ve left also experience loss and longing for their homeland, in addition to their feelings and experiences of immigrant otherness. And yes, I’m sure other multi-nationals who have left their country of origin probably feel the same. Indeed, you don’t have to be a multi-national at all to experience sodade. But I know of no other country, save for Kabu Verdi, that sings so much about it.

Sodade, I suppose, can be related to loneliness, the feeling of sadness due to absence of friends, and to nostalgia, the sentimental pining for some happy past. I suppose it’s the loneliness and nostalgia that other PCVs are sick and tired of hearing. “Get over yourself already!” they seem to be thinking. “Get over it! You’re in Mozambique now!”

And yes, sodade is a kind of sadness. It is not, however, as sentimental as nostalgia. No. It is a mourning, a grieving for one’s loss—hence the popular, plaintive “morna” songs of Cesaria Evora. The loss is so immense, the rupture between past and present so deep and vast, that one not only feels loss but is also lost, to the world, or in the world.

I’m no Cape Verdean, but I can relate to this rupture. What startled me the most when I first arrived in Cape Verde on July 15, 2011 was how being there brought me back to the Philippines. I would look down a street in the city of Assomada, where we had our training, and in my mind I would see streets where my grandparents used to live in Batangas, places I hadn’t visited in 14 years. The experience was like looking through reflections of my past, or reading a palimpsest of my life. I would look at my host-mom and images of my aunts would come to me without forethought or premeditation. And how could I forget the sign for respect that Cape Verdeans would show to their elders, the "Da-m benson (or "Bless me)? They would hold an elder´s hand and touch the back of it to their forehead. (Catholic) Filipinos show their respect to their elders in the same exact way, except they say "Mano po" or ("Your hand please). It wasn’t just the place or the people that took me back—the hot and humid weather, the very palpable sticky and tropical climate took me back.

Towards the end of Pre-Service Training, what with all the language classes and the technical sessions and the role plays and the malaria meds, and the Funana, and the weird insect bites, and etc., etc.. . ..I think I started coming off the hinges. I think I went through not just culture shock, but also something else. I wasn’t just different or other or separate from Cape Verde, because I saw it strangely as a part of me already. A part of me that I had forgotten and/or lost. I was so disoriented and depressed at times during PST, I thought, what the hell was I doing there? I should’ve just gone to the Philippines—that country needs a whole lot more help than Cape Verde, after all. I should’ve just gone back to the country of my birth, and tried to cobble together something whole from my disconnected personal history. I did not expect that I was still working through some unresolved issues of being un-American and American, Filipino and un-Filipino. What the hell was I doing in another island nation that doesn’t even see me as an islander, that sees me as some Chinese other?

I had to learn to manage my feelings of affinity and indifference, my ambivalence for Cape Verde. I had to re-learn to manage and move on, just like some 23 years ago, when we first moved to the U.S., just like last year when we first moved to Mozambique.

My housemate Rich has told me, on more than one occasion, that he is ready to create “new memories.” I can see he is creating new memories here with his Mozambican and Portuguese friends, but he also wants to re-visit Honduras, which, to him, is like Cape Verde to us CV Transfers. What's most interesting to me is the phrasing, “new memories,” because it is such a great oxymoron. Memories, by definition, relate to the past—they are never new because they always refer to something old. What’s new, I think, are the thoughts and perspectives that memories can sometimes bring about, if we’re lucky, if we work hard and intelligently enough. They are “new memories” because we ourselves are re-newed. We truly re-see the past in another light, because we approach it from a different point of view. Our recollections are not merely of past events, but re-collections of ourselves.

Now, I’m no Cape Verdean, but I wouldn’t be a proper Cape Verde Transfer in Mozambique if I didn’t feel sodade. Despite my complaints about Cape Verde—and I did complain in Praia—I was, to some extent, integrated. I was a part of Cabo Verde, and now it is still a part of me. More important, I am glad and grateful for our time in Kabu Verdi, the country that takes up a great part of sodade in my heart, the island nation that brought me back to the Philippines, and brought Pilipinas back to me.

I hope you enjoy the following collection of photos from 2011-2012 in Cape Verde. Bob Toomy deserves credit for the ones that are better and of professional quality, so his authorship is cited for the photos he took. If any would like me to take out a photo, just let me know. Or if the caption to a photo is inaccurate/insufficient, I would very much appreciate your informing me. Some captions will definitely need revision. They are photos of some of my favorite people and places in C.V., arranged in chronological order.