Macau to Maputo via Melaka

Ana and Leanda are coming to Melaka from Macau on April Fool's Day (Primeiro de Abril). The old colonial connection therefore somehow lives on in the postcolonial time. I am glad I will be seeing them quite soon. They both represent a part of Macau Malaysians never see as they take the AirAsia daily flight which lands them right next to the reclaimed Cotai Strip where most casinos now are. Macau is so tiny that they can start gambling practically right after disembarkation. If we add shopping and eating seafood, that is almost certainly all they will do throughout their stay. Ana in particular has a background that comes right out of the old Macau. Her husband, together with a Brazilian musician who used to be well-known locally as well as a couple of other entusiasts ran a jazz club for years. It is also quite probable that the first jazz club in China was founded in fact in Macau (Macau boasts many of China's first's: its first daguerreotypes, for instance, its first oil paintings, the first Western-style 'naïf' landscape and cityscape paintings, and so on. A visual history of modern China is simply impossible to write without Macau's pioneering role). I remember Ana showing me an old pamphlet advertising one of their performances after I told her I was interested in the history of the club. The musicians went to a good deal of trouble to keep the club going for years on end. Everybody in town who was interested in jazz or live music knew them. Now this is all history. If you want to listen to jazz in Macau you have to keep a tab on the programmes advertised by one of the casinos. You will then go to a very posh venue, say on the top floor with a view of the city, and listen to great jazz imported directly from the States together with a dozen other guests. The band will then leave after a week or so and perhaps go play somewhere in Shanghai, Hong Kong or Seoul.

Jenny in Melaka who is George Fernandes's widow (he was the local Portuguese intellectual) also remembers that other Macau, and so does Dolly, my doctor in Kuala Lumpur. It was a completely different city back in the 1980s. A small provincial colonial town a stone throw's away from the Chinese border over water and land. Quite a few people got shot over the years trying to swim across from the Chinese side: if you go to Macau you understand why right away. Coloane was before the extensive land reclamation of Cotai a somewhat far off island, for instance, and nowadays it still keeps to some extent the airs of a quaint old fishing village. The Mainland is only a very short boat ride away from it. Though buried fairly deep under the stacks of casino money the old Macau therefore still survives, though my impression is that a good deal of its vitality is slowly ebbing away as Macau is further 'integrated' into its motherland. I wonder whether Macau and Mainland will eventually manage to turn it into yet another nondescript Chinese provincial city. I am sure then many Macau Cantonese will be among the first to regret it. Whether or not they are Portuguese passport holders (about a third of the total population supposedly has passports from Portugal), in spite of the narrowness of life in Macau, they know they have enjoyed privileges and freedom which are virtually unknown in the Mainland to this day, uncensored internet access and untrammeled foreign travel among them (even Macau residents who have a Macau SAR passport go to Europe, Brasil and elsewhere without the need to apply for a visa. The girl friend of a French colleague however had to wait a bit when they arrived together in Paris because the immigration officials on duty had never seen a Macau SAR passport in their life). I cannot say this aloud in some quarters in Macau but another privilege Macau residents enjoy is unlimited access to Hong Kong, something Mainland Chinese can only dream of in spite of the easing of restrictions in recent years. Macau is also the only other place in the world where Taiwanese are welcome without visas (the other is Japan, the former colonial power). Taiwan of course reciprocates in kind especially as it is less than an hour away from Macau by plane (I was only given a ten day nonrenewable visa after a good deal of questioning at the informal Taiwan consulate in Macau). Unfortunately most Taiwanese still just use Macau as a useful entry point to China proper.

The Creole city. I have been discussing it with Denise who is now in Cairo, that weirdest of cities (like Delhi it is not one but several cities, each from a different century. I like the feeling of moving through different urban spaces from several time frames). The discussion came about because Ana had sent me 'The City,' the translation of one of Cafavy's famous poems. He lived his entire life in Alexandria, but he was not Arab. I also wonder whether he ever had an Egyptian passport (I doubt it as he was born in the colonial era). I do not believe his poetry is now considered to be part of Egyptian literature. Greece of course claims him. However Greece was not his country and he was keenly aware of the fact that he was a Greek in the Eastern Mediterranean world. He saw himself as rooted in an ancient Hellenic world that knew not the current borders. His poems mention Syria, Lybia, Egypt, today's Turkey, in fact almost everywhere except for the postcolonial Greek state. People also came and went in his Alexandria. He wrote at least one poem about a departing friend - a lover in fact - who was immigrating to the United States. It is a somewhat heart-rending poem about separation, though it ends on a light note: the lovers will stay forever young in each other's minds as they have parted in their youth. There is melancholy in his poems but seldom, it is my impression, outright sadness. Also, the ancient world of the Hellenistic Levant was not history as it was clearly very much alive to him. Rather than a provincial, or someone stranded in foreign surroundings - say as a Greek man in Egypt - Cafavy therefore was a cosmopolitan man of the world who did not care much about current borders and travelling, and not only because he lived modestly. 'The City' even though it does not name Alexandria - or any other place - is in this way quite an appropriate poem for Ana to quote, she who has been living in Macau for half of her life now (the other half was spent in Lisbon and Angola). One day she will go back to Portugal but that day has not dawned yet. I guess many people in Macau will one day go back. Meanwhile there are new arrivals from the home country practically every other day: Macau, in spite of its tiny size, has a buoyant economy that churns out an amazing amount of cash, whereas Portugal is once again an economic backwater just as when I was a child and the Portuguese kept coming to Brasil for a living well over a century after the colonial tie had been formally broken. Just like the Greeks, the Portuguese have been for centuries immigrants and seafarers many of whom have lived abroad more often than they have in their own homeland.

In the postcolonial time Macau is a Chinese city and Alexandria an Arab one. However, perhaps because of the different trajectories of Egyptian and Chinese nationalisms (not to mention the enormous difference in power between both countries), Greek Alexandria is now long gone, whereas Portuguese Macau still hangs on. The Creole port city full of longing, anseios and melancolia, containing within itself the fragments of other places some times very distant ones. Life in a Creole city must be like living life through a string of memories and partial belongings none of which can be made good in conventional understandings of indigeneity. Ana has never learned Cantonese, but her best friends are Cantonese; these in turn have never learned Portuguese (though a surprisingly high number of people in Macau have tried to learn Portuguese at one point or another or else have learned a little Portuguese. I doubt Cavafy spoke anything but Egyptian Arabic. Moreover he was most probably illiterate in Arabic). The common language of Macau however was Patuá, the local Creole, a relative of Melaka Portuguese. It is now moribund in the public and even the domestic space but it used to be quite widespread. Perhaps Melaka Portuguese was once also the common language in Melaka, though it is now hard to say (if that was indeed so it must have been the public language next to the local varieties of Malay. These are of pre-colonial origin and are so entrenched nowadays that it is hard to believe they were not important in Portuguese times. Hokkien must also have been around for a very long time. Melaka must therefore have been somewhat more multilingual than Macau and also for a longer time).

Among the shadows that haunt Macau - and in ancient times certainly also Melaka - is that of Moçambique. There used to be a boat that plied the route Macau-Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo). It was therefore virtually a boat that crossed the entire length of the Indian Ocean. Macau also used to have until the 1960s at least soldiers from Moçambique. Even in more recent times it still had African bars and clubs (they are now all gone). In fact late colonial Lourenço Marques also had a very lively night life - though of course it must have been far more varied than Macau's. I know about it because another immigrant, Patricia in Cape Town, has fed me information about that strange city over the years. I have never wanted to go there in spite of South African fascination for Moçambique (and Maputo). Juliana who is only Kiswahili specialist in the whole of Brasil (and probably the whole of South America as well) told me Maputo is a city that feels like Ribeirão Preto. That is a wealthy though provincial medium-sized city in the interior of São Paulo. My parents in fact come from a small town right next door. I have never visited this last and have only passed through Ribeirão on a long car trip from São Paulo to Brasília once in a blue moon. However Juliana's mentioning it was quite significant. It means Maputo is something familiar, also in an unappealing way. I am not exactly looking forward to coming across the interior of São Paulo in Southern Africa. There is more to Maputo than that, however, as I would learn later. The interior of São Paulo is very white today in spite of its past of plantation and slavery and has never had at any rate an Indian Ocean city.

Patricia is from the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and is of Irish origin but has been living in Cape Town for many years now. She must be practically the only person in Cape Town who is so interested in Maputo's history (I may be mistaken however: there is now even a direct flight between both Southern African cities). She showed me reproductions of Ricardo Rangel's - a Moçambican photographer - amazing black and white photographs of the nightlife in Lourenço Marques. Existential tourists and even refugees from apartheid South Africa would relish in it (and a couple of them also made it into some of Rangel's photographs). When the socialist postcolonial state was ushered in, it sent the prostitutes to re-education camps and generally suppressed the old quarter where so many had enjoyed life for so long. Macau instead has brought in even larger numbers of prostitutes though there is nothing remotely bohemian about nightlife in the postcolonial city. It is just business.

Morality and the nation-state. In Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar set in late Nasserite Alexandria the only Greek is a woman who is running a decadent lodging house. She is considered a procuress by her boarders and one of her young wealthier guests is actually quite scathing of her. Her house can be seen as a kind of microcosmos of Nasserite Egypt with all its attendant hypocrisies and longings. It can also be seen - and is depicted as such in the novel - as a direct link to a past that is presented as glitzier, more enjoyable and pleasure-ridden than the dour socialist postcolonial era. It is funny - not to say altogether tragic - how the postcolonial state stamps down on sheer existential freedom and hedonistic pleasure that is not tie up to big money as in the case of the casino ladies in Macau (even there however enjoyment is not really always out of reach. As a matter of fact, upon closer inspection the old Macau stubbornly refuses to die out among the rising debris of newly found wealth). Rio de Janeiro is another old colonial Creole city that also comes to mind here (the middle-classes there often consider the women who have foreign boy friends as all-out prostitutes. It is actually funny that a city which has earned for itself internationally a reputation as a Mecca of unbridled sexuality is often inhabited by prurient people who are more than a trifle conservative and provincial. In this Rio is at bottom just like Macau, Melaka, or Maputo). Patricia has also introduced me to the poetry of José Craveirinha. Rangel took a photograph of Craveirinha holding a photograph of his late wife: she seems to have been an African woman. He wrote a large number of poems mentioning Maria. His poetry is often sensuous and even downright erotic, though even more than in the case of Cafavy it is quite difficult to sum it up in a nutshell. It is however poetry that is suffused with sexuality. However, Cafavy comes out as almost a prude next to Craveirinha's much more outspoken verse. This last was a man of another time, another disposition - and another Creole port city.

Nasci a primeira vez em 28 de Maio de 1922. Isto num domingo. Chamaram-me Sontinho, diminutivo de Sonto.  Isto por parte da minha mãe, claro. Por parte do meu pai, fiquei José. Aonde? Na Av. do Zihlahla, entre o Alto Maé e como quem vai para o Xipamanine. Bairros de quem? Bairros de pobres.

Nasci a segunda vez quando me fizeram descobrir que era mulato…

A seguir, fui nascendo à medida das circunstâncias impostas pelos outros.

Quando o meu pai foi de vez, tive outro pai: seu irmão.

E a partir de cada nascimento, eu tinha a felicidade de ver um problema a menos e um dilema a mais. Por isso, muito cedo, a terra natal em termos de Pátria e de opção. Quando a minha mãe foi de vez, outra mãe: Moçambique.

A opção por causa do meu pai branco e da minha mãe preta.

Source: Wikipedia 

I was born for the first time on May 28, 1922. It was a Sunday. They named me Sontinho, which is the diminutive of Sonto [Sunday in Xironga, a local language]. Of course that name came from my mother. From my father's side I was made José. Where? On Avenida do Zihlahla, as when you go from Alto Maé to Xipamanine. Whose neighbourhood? Poormen's quarter. I was born a second time when I was made to find out that I was a mulatto...Next I was born again and again after circumstances imposed by others. When my father finally went, I had another father: his brother. At each birth I was fortunate to see one problem gone and another dilemma coming. That is why since an early age the homeland became both Fatherland and choice. When my mother was gone, another mother came up: Moçambique. That was my choice because of my white father and black mother.

Twentieth Century Egyptian Art    Source: برجل