Sea (and sex) in Cape Verde

O Mar na Lajinha
Germano Almeida
2004
Caminho (outras margens Series); Lisboa, Portugal
275 pages

Reviewed by Tony Simões da Silva

O Mar na Lajinha [The Sea in Lajinha] is Germano Almeida’s latest novel, a rambling excursus into the labyrinthine world of memory; through the voice of a single narrator, who acts here partly as a facilitator for other people’s stories, but also as a medium engaged in a reification of the past, Almeida’s novel tells of the lives of a varied body of individuals who frequent the Lajinha over many decades. Not surprisingly, given the time period it covers, the novel alludes, through brief reference to particular events, dates or moments in the small town’s past, to Cape Verde’s distant and recent history. At one stage it registers its political and temporal setting through a comment on the present drive in Cape Verde, as elsewhere in the developing world, for the full privatisation of the economy.

Although at heart a story of the ‘human condition’ in its most unpredictable and banal manifestations – at one level it consists of no more than a portrait of the foibles in the human character – Almeida’s novel cannot avoid mentions of colonial and postcolonial history. The political dimension of Cape Verde, however, is so superficially explored that it is possible to read the work without being aware of it. Similarly, for a nation as deeply marked by the mass exodus of its people to the USA and Europe, in search of better economic opportunities, the novel refers only sporadically to the way the community at large deals with the comings and goings of its people.

"It grows more incestuous as each new character adds to the web of love affairs, of pet hatreds, betrayals and random acts of kindness"

Rather, O Mar na Lajinha is a novel concerned with recreating in detail the intricate fabric of a small but tightly-knit community. The novel comprises a large cast of characters, and the story grows progressively more complex as each person’s recollections invite new names on to the scene, then more incestuous as each new character adds to the web of love affairs, of pet hatreds, betrayals and random acts of kindness. In the mode of a narrative built with solid reference to the oral culture of a community of people, Almeida produces in O Mar na Lajinha a cultural and historical document. Although we are to read it as a work of fiction, the Lajinha functions here almost as sociology, invoking in all its multiplicity the changing nature of a place over generations.

Almeida’s narrator records in detail the conversations of a group of friends and acquaintances laboriously recalling their lives in earlier times. It is perhaps not coincidental that the characters whose stories we read, and whose voices we hear are now all in what might be termed, if somewhat unkindly, the sunset phase of their days. The image of a bay, with its tides perpetually coming and going, serves thus to evoke the natural flows and ebbs of life. The conversations take place either in the water or on the beach, rarely moving away from the bay.

As a narrative device, this focus on a small group of people is potentially a rewarding one, and Almeida frequently rises to the challenge, allowing his characters to tell their stories without seeking to pass judgement. This is especially the case in the earlier half of the novel, where the narrator frequently comments insightfully about people with lives so dull and unimaginative that it is hard not to wish them away. The point, I suppose, is to suggest that the life really is about largely repetitive and unexciting events, the world populated by multitudes with pretty ordinary experiences. Rather than the extraordinary, the novel explores the common ways in which most people make sense of the life-terms they have been allocated. The beginning of the novel is especially well handled, developing both the setting for the story and the core group of characters at the heart of the novel with great care and considerable success. Almeida is good at conjuring up the little bay of Lajinha as place-memory, the smell of the sea, the searing midday heat, and the cooler breezes of an early afternoon. At its best, the writing can be quite mesmerising, seducing the reader with the attention to the tiniest detail, with the languorous monotony of a story well told; for most of the narrative, characters are brought on to the page in a persuasive manner, their foibles, vices and weaknesses rendered with great tenderness.

Such a limited narrative scope belies the fact that this is actually a very ambitious work. O Mar na Lajinha does for Mindelo, and through it partly also for Cape Verde, what writers such as James Joyce did for Dublin in Ullysses (1922), Alasdair Gray for Glasgow in Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Paul Auster for New York in The New York Trilogy (1988). Each character and their stories constitute a tiny speck in the broader canvass that is the bay, the town, but also the island-nation.

The novel tells the story of a place, of a people, of a generation of men (mostly) and of a few women who meet and talk, love more or less passionately, part acrimoniously but more generally while away their lives to the comforting sound of the waves lapping gently on the sand. Over the years, they meet to go for a swim, to rehearse intricate courtship performances, sometimes to initiate or seek to resolve never-ending quarrels; to each other they disclose a part of themselves, in turn holding out on the more intimate and revealing aspects or confessing much more than one might wish to know. Of Génio, for instance, we gain the most thorough familiarity with his bowel movements, though also of Norberto’s colic; of Maria that an irreprehensible flatulence does little for an already dull sex life (in desperation she resorts to vaginal irrigations with water and vinegar); of Pantcha every aspect of a love life that even a scabrous sensibility might hesitate to inquire about. Both the narration and the dialogue regularly hover around the nether regions of the scatological, with Almeida’s use of language signalling yet again the influence of work such as Joyce’s.

This is obviously a well-crafted novel, the work of an intelligent and well-read mind; Almeida is a sophisticated writer, possessed of a strong and engaging style. The narrator’s random recollections of different people and events, his mapping of the web of relationships that links each character to the group, are an especially clever way of drawing the reader ever deeper into the vortex of their existences. Ironically, the chummy, if bigoted and unreliable narrator, poses some interesting problems, not least because as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly tempting to read his opinionated views as in some uncanny way reflecting those of the author.

The obsessive attention to the group’s sexual life, the persistent allusions to male potency, to female gullibility, the casual reporting of less than consensual sex between older and influential men and 13 or 14 years old pubescent girls, begin to make for a rather irksome narrative. There is no doubt that the narrator is at least partly critical of some of these actions, if only by mockingly hinting at the fact that some of the men’s virility is delusional. It is possible, moreover, to trace the crass treatment of sexual politics to the fact that these are not exactly the most complex people. Figures such as Miguilim, Luizão and Agiota have little in their lives other than their real or fantasised tales of sexual prowess. Their inclusion in the novel seems designed to allow us all, and most of all, the narrator, to experience a sense of superiority. Yet, I think that at half its length, and with considerable fewer people cluttering its pages, O Mar na Lajinha might have been a reasonably strong work.

At 275 pages, it is just a little too long; plot-wise, there is only so much one can do with a bunch of old priapic men, a sprinkling of aged and dotty women and a few nubile girls. After a while, the repetitious use of a single narrative device – each character’s story begets another story and so on, and so on – grows as lukewarm as the waters in the Lajinha bay. Worse still, rather tedious, too. To an extent this is the result of an odd predilection for women assembled in terms of ‘luscious breasts’, ‘delicious bums’ and pretty faces, with little between their ears; and for men who, though mostly hopeless drunkards and failures in every department of social skills, remain till the day they meet their maker remarkably desirable virile studs, forever in search of easy prey.

Yet, there is actually little sex as such in the novel, and perhaps that is what I resented. O Mar na Lajinha privileges the nudge-nudge, wink-wink variety, the persistent rumours about pregnancies out of wedlock for which, obviously, only women are to blame, and the cheap laughs one is supposed to enjoy at what always seem curiously (un)invited sexual violations (the fact is that I am not sure how else to put it, the frequent bedding by men of virginal young girls whose only purpose on earth seems to be to become unvirginal as soon as possible, preferably making some useless Lajinha troll happy in the process).

If I tell you that after such a momentous sexual awakening most of these women then appear unable to escape the clutches of this posse of impressive specimens of the male gender, you get the gist of the story. Indeed, you will then not be too surprised to discover that they frequently do battle over these men, despite the fact that they have little more to offer than a few tired old lines about the temptations women pose. By the time the Koran is invoked to pad this old refrain, I wondered what cliché might have been left unused: "Louvado seja Alá que criou as mulheres na sua beleza, formou o seu corpo que desperta o desejo, fez os seus cabelos tão belos, modelou a sua garganta e a preciosa redondez do seu seio". (Blessed be Allah who created women in all their beauty, shaped their bodies which awaken desire, made their hair so beautiful, moulded their necks and the precious roundness of their breasts"). Amen?

In sum, then, my impressions of this work are mixed. I thought that O Mar na Lajinha began well, and thoroughly enjoyed the early care to attention in the construction of place and characters, the simple narrative structure and the ambitious attempt to create for Mindelo an imaginative map of a period of time that spans most of the 20th century. The incidental use of political context, rather than the most conventional framing of a story in relation to colonial or postcolonial politics that frequently mars African writing, reflects a sophisticated literary sensibility. In many ways, Almeida captures in O Mar na Lajinha the strong, caring and tender sense of community of Mindelo, but also the claustrophobia, the hypocrisy and narrow-minded bigotry of small towns. He is especially good at bringing to life old people’s memories – full, dense, cloudy, repetitive, confusing, nostalgic, delusional – and occasionally characters do convey an old-fashioned sense of ‘roundness’. That said, it is difficult not to be irritated by the unbalanced representations of gender and sexual politics in which the novel engages; even a very generous reader will struggle to make sense of some of the simplistic portraits of men and women I noted above.

Tony Simoes da Silva is a lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK