Claridade
Encyclopedia
Claridade was a literary review inaugurated in 1936 in the city of Mindelo
Mindelo
For the parish in Portugal, see Mindelo, PortugalMindelo , is a port city in the northern part of the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde. Mindelo is also the seat of the parish of Nossa Senhora da Luz, and this island's municipality...
on the island of São Vicente
São Vicente, Cape Verde
São Vicente , also Son Visent or Son Sent in Cape Verdean Creole, is one of the Barlavento islands of Cape Verde. It is located between the islands of Santo Antão and Santa Luzia, with the Canal de São Vicente separating it from Santo Antão.- Geography :The island is roughly rectangular in shape...
, Cape Verde
Cape Verde
The Republic of Cape Verde is an island country, spanning an archipelago of 10 islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, 570 kilometres off the coast of Western Africa...
. It was part of a movement of cultural, social, and political emancipations of the Capeverdean society. The founding contributors were Manuel Lopes
Manuel Lopes
Manuel António de Sousa Lopes was a Cape Verdean novelist, poet and essayist and a founder of modern Cape Verdean literature. With Baltasar Lopes da Silva and Jorge Barbosa he was a creator of the paper named Claridade...
, Baltasar Lopes da Silva
Baltasar Lopes da Silva
Baltasar Lopes da Silva was a writer, poet and linguist from Cape Verde, who wrote in both Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole. With Manuel Lopes and Jorge Barbosa, he was the founder of Claridade. In 1947 he published Chiquinho, considered the greatest Cape Verdean novel...
, who used the poetic pseudonym of Osvaldo Alcântara, and Jorge Barbosa
Jorge Barbosa
Jorge Vera-Cruz Barbosa was a Cape Verdean poet and writer. He collaborated in various reviews and Portuguese and Cape Verdean journals. The publication of his poetry anthology Arquipélago in 1935 marked the beginning of Capeverdean poetry...
, born in the Islands of São Nicolau, Santiago and São Vicente, respectively. The magazine followed the steps of the Portuguese neorealist writers, and contributed to the building of "Cape Verdeanity", an autonomous cultural identity for the archipelago.
Claridade revolutionized Cape Verdean literature
Culture of Cape Verde
The culture of Cape Verde features literature including Claridade, Negrume and others and writers including Sergio Frusoni, Manuel Lopes, Ovídio Martins and more. The culture also has music proprieties including morna, funaná, coladera, tabanka and more...
. It set new standards of literary aesthetics and language, overcoming the conflict between Portuguese Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
- dominant during the nineteenth century - and the New Realism
New realism
Nouveau réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...
. Its founders aimed to free Cape Verdean writers from the Portuguese canons, awaken the Cape Verdean collective conscience and recover local cultural elements that had long been repressed by Portuguese colonialism, such as the Cape Verdean Creole.
The project was a facet of the political and ideological unrest that existed in Cape Verde in the 1930s during Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar, GColIH, GCTE, GCSE served as the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He also served as acting President of the Republic briefly in 1951. He founded and led the Estado Novo , the authoritarian, right-wing government that presided over and controlled Portugal...
's the fascist regime, caused by widespread misery and colonial mismanagement, and exacerbated by severe droughts.
Claridades editors had to deal with the Portuguese colonial censorship system and the surveillance of PIDE
PIDE
In 1969, Marcello Caetano changed the name PIDE to DGS . The death of Salazar and the subsequent ascension of Caetano brought some attempts at democratization, in order to avoid popular insurgency against censorship, the ongoing colonial war and the general restriction of civil rights...
(International and State Defence Police). Subversive activities could lead to torture and to the political prison of Tarrafal, on the Island of Santiago
Santiago, Cape Verde
Santiago , or Santiagu in Cape Verdean Creole, is the largest island of Cape Verde, its most important agricultural centre and home to half the nation’s population. At the time of Darwin's voyage it was called St. Jago....
.
The founders of Claridade had considered creating a newspaper, but found the required deposit of 50 thousand Portuguese escudo
Portuguese escudo
The escudo was the currency of Portugal prior to the introduction of the Euro on 1 January 1999 and its removal from circulation on 28 February 2002. The escudo was subdivided into 100 centavos....
s excessive, and settled for a magazine. The title reflected the hope that the publication would become an intellectual "beacon". Its founding can be viewed in the context of nineteenth century liberalism.
Endogenous and exogenous elements
Prior to the foundation of Claridade, certain literary and cultural elements had been developed both within and outside of Cape Verde, which to some extent influenced directly or indirectly the magazine. As the endogenous factors, stood out:- During the 'pre-Claridade' generation, later named classical-romantic generation , the three literary and cultural figures of Cape Verde, Eugénio TavaresEugénio TavaresEugénio de Paula Tavares was a Cape Verdean poet. He is known through his famous poems , written in the Crioulo of Brava. His name is honored in the name of the town square in Vila Nova Sintra along with a statue.-Mornas:***...
, Pedro Cardoso and José Lopes, from the Islands of BravaBrava, Cape VerdeBrava is an island in Cape Verde. It is the smallest inhabited island, but at the same time the greenest, of Cape Verde, in the Sotavento group. First settled in the 1540s, its population grew after Mount Fogo on neighbouring Fogo erupted in 1675...
, FogoFogo, Cape VerdeFogo is an island in the Sotavento group of Cape Verde. It is the most prominent of the group, rising to nearly 3,000 m above sea level at Pico do Fogo.-Geography:...
, and São Nicolau, respectively, contributed immensely to the appreciation of Cape Verdean people and language; - the publication of the book of poems by António Pedro, named Diário (1929);
- the hidden speech among the founders of Claridade;
- the publication of Jorge Barbosa’s book, Arquipélago (1935), which opened the door to modern Cape Verdean literature, demonstrated a complete change in rhetoric and thematic poetry of Cape Verde.
With regard to the exogenous elements, the following are highlighted:
- the personal presence of some Portuguese writers in Cape Verde in late 1920 and early 1930, as in Augusto Casimiro, António Pedro and José Osório de Oliveira;
- the Portuguese magazine, named Presença, published in 1927 in CoimbraCoimbraCoimbra is a city in the municipality of Coimbra in Portugal. Although it served as the nation's capital during the High Middle Ages, it is better-known for its university, the University of Coimbra, which is one of the oldest in Europe and the oldest academic institution in the...
; - the Brazilian modern literature and Northeast realism.
Publication history and contents
Claridades articles were written in Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole. Nine numbered issues appeared between 1936 and 1960. They can be divided into two distinct periods, with an interval of a decade, due to financial difficulties and the dispersal of members of the group throughout the islands. The first three issues, from 1936 to 1937, were written almost exclusively by the founders, while the works of the remaining seven, that took place between 1947 and 1960, were primarily conducted by Baltasar da Silva, because during this period, Jorge Barbosa had been stationary on the Island of Sal, and Manuel Lopes was already on Faial IslandFaial Island
Faial Island , also known in English as Fayal, is a Portuguese island of the Central Group of the Azores....
, Azores
Azores
The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...
, where he had been transferred to, as a Western Telegraph
Western Telegraph
The Western Telegraph is a Welsh regional newspaper covering Pembrokeshire and bordering Carmarthenshire. Founded as the Haverfordwest & Milford Haven Telegraph, it is published on a weekly basis and is currently split into three editions...
operator.
The first issue of Claridade presented three poetic texts of oral tradition in Creole - Lantuna & 2 reasons of finaçom (finaçõm being a drum musical style from the Island of Santiago). The second issue had the morna (Capeverdean poem) called Vénus by Francisco Xavier da Cruz of São Vicente, better known as B. Leza, and other literary and cultural artciles also in Portuguese. The remaining issues, predominantly in the Cape Verdean language, featured finaçom and batucu, the poetic folklore of Santiago, and Ana Procópio’s songs of the Island of Fogo; the novelistic folklore of the Islands of São Nicolau and Santo Antão; ethnographic studies of peoples from Santiago and Fogo; and studies on the social structure of the latter island and on the human originality of the other islands.
Collaborators of Claridade
Besides the above founders of Claridade, we should mention two other very important contributors: painter and critic Jaime de Figueiredo and writer João Lopes, who cooperated immensely at early stages of the magazine. Additionally, throughout the existence of Claridade several other bilingual writers contributed greatly to the magazine’s development, in particular, and to modern Cape Verde literature in general. They were Pedro Corsino de Azevedo and José Osório de Oliveira on the first issues, and Henrique Teixeira de SousaHenrique Teixeira de Sousa
Henrique Teixeira de Sousa was a doctor and author from Cape Verde.-Biography:...
, Félix Monteiro, Nuno Miranda, Sergio Frusoni
Sergio Frusoni
Sergio Frusoni was a poet and promoter of the Cape Verdean Creole language.-Biography:...
, Abílio Duarte Arnaldo França, Corsino Fortes, Tomás Martins, Virgílio Pires, Onésimo Silveira
Onésimo Silveira
-Biography:As a young poet, Silveira was one of the most prominent critiques of the literary elite in Cape Verde. Silveira was associated with the views o f the Claridade group, and argued in favour of an African cultural identity of the islands....
, Francisco Xavier da Cruz, Artur Augusto, Virgílio de Melo, Luís Romano de Madeira Melo
Luís Romano de Madeira Melo
Luís Romano de Madeira Melo was a bilingual poet, novelist, and folklorist who has written in Portuguese and the Capeverdean Crioulo of Santo Antão....
, among others, in other published magazine issues.
Intellectual development and national sovereignty
The establishing of the ecclesiastical and secular Advanced School (Liceu-Seminário) of Ribeira Brava, on the Island of São Nicolau, was one of the most fundamental building blocks in the development of modern Cape Verdean literature. Years later, the Advanced Schools in the cities of MindeloMindelo
For the parish in Portugal, see Mindelo, PortugalMindelo , is a port city in the northern part of the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde. Mindelo is also the seat of the parish of Nossa Senhora da Luz, and this island's municipality...
and Praia
Praia
Praia , is the capital and largest city of Cape Verde, an island nation in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal. It lies on the southern coast of Santiago island in the Sotavento Islands group. It is the island's ferry port and is home to one of the nation’s four international airports...
were founded, which, in addition to form the ruling classes of the Cape Verdean administration, were responsible of creating crucibles from where came successive generations of intellectuals, who have led the reaction against the strong hand of colonialist process. Such a process would then open the door to political demand, so the History of Cape Verde
History of Cape Verde
- Early records :The first written record of Cape Verde can be found in the works "De choreographia" by Pomponius Mela and "Historia naturalis" by Pliny the Elder...
would reach its apogee with the National Independence
African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde
The African Party of Independence of Cape Verde is a former socialist party and presently a social-democratic political party in Cape Verde. Its members are nicknamed “os tambarinas” in Portuguese , and they identify themselves with the color yellow.-Forerunner:In 1956, its forerunner, the African...
on July 5, 1975, and with the affirmation of Democracy, the social and economic development, currently enjoyed by the Cape Verdeans.
Literary publications
Claridade has further awakened and illuminated the Cape Verdean intellectuality and the vestiges of this effect can be verified in the masterpieces released by the founders of Claridade, which remarkably enhanced the Cape Verdean literature, such as ChiquinhoChiquinho (novel)
Chiquinho is a Capeverdean novel written by Baltasar Lopes da Silva in 1947. The probability of the literary work is the most common in Cape Verde, it marked the beginning of the typical literature in Cape Verde along with local themes in Creole culture, Along with Claridade, Baltazar Lopes...
, Chuva Braba
Chuva Braba
Chuva Braba is a Capeverdean novel published in 1957 by Manuel Lopes. The book was awarded the Fernão Mendes Pinto award....
, and Os Flagelados do Vento Leste
Os Flagelados do Vento Leste
Os Flagelados do Vento Leste is a Capeverdean novel published in 1959 by Manuel Lopes. The novel was one of the most popular, it was adapted into a movie directed by António Faria in 1987....
.. Similarly, the same literary magazine released literary seeds that would germinate in other major Cape Verdean publications, such as, Certeza (1944), Suplemento Cultural (1958), Raízes (1977) and Ponto & Vírgula (1983), which featured brilliant writers, such as Gabriel Mariano, Ovídio Martins, Aguinaldo Fonseca, Terêncio Anahory, Yolanda Morazzo, Leão Lopes and Germano de Almeida.
External links
- From classicism to realism in Claridade by Alberto Carvalho
- The Creation of a Creole Literature (pdf)
- Cape Verde Fiction (pdf)