Cesária Évora

The Lament of the Sea

Cape Verde, an archipelago of ten volcanic islands arranged in a horseshoe shape in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Senegal. A dry, sunny tropical climate, barren and often rugged terrain, with green bursts of vegetation interspersed among beaches and rocky mountains. The blue sea dominates on every side, adding to the sense of being cut off from the known world, and the local inhabitants have developed a natural resilience in the face of the elements looming over them, often making do to survive as best they can. In the face of nature's forces, there reigns a frugal simplicity that borders on the philosophical.

On the other hand, from those latitudes, the rest of civilization really does seem far away, and Cape Verdeans have watched with a certain detachment the coming and going of historical events that have unfolded around their shores, starting in the late 1400s with the arrival of the Portuguese and their first human cargo bound for the slave trade in South America. Over the centuries, Cape Verde has been a waypoint for sailors, smugglers and whalers, who shaped its economic fortunes under Portuguese rule, even though the bulk of the population is still made up of the descendants of those poor Africans torn from their homelands. The meager living conditions of the place, which persisted throughout the twentieth century even after political independence was achieved in 1975, make the nation a relatively poor and very isolated country: there are more Cape Verdean citizens scattered around the world, especially in Brazil, France and Portugal, than there are left in the homeland - the last census, in 2013, counted just over half a million people.

And yet, Cape Verde maintains a distinct cultural identity, shaped precisely by that shared sense of belonging to a past in which people had to cope with whatever little was available, making the population homogeneous and largely free of deep class divisions, which is certainly unusual for a country with a colonial legacy. This melting pot of different experiences and cultures, shipwrecked together on the same handful of islands, makes Cape Verdean artistic expression particularly distinctive, split between a Latin-European tradition and ancient African roots passed down orally, a blend of Christianity and indigenous spiritual practices that is also reflected in the everyday use of Cape Verdean Creole spoken by all the islanders, even though Portuguese is the official language taught in schools and used on television.

But when it comes to music, the genre that best represents the spirit of the nation - born as a popular vernacular form enjoyed communally in the bars and squares of its small seaports - is the morna: a lulling, melancholy variation on Portuguese fado and Cuban son, blended with East African inflections, often built on a simple circle-of-fifths progression and accompanied by guitar, piano and hand percussion. When sped up in tempo and used to tackle more lighthearted themes, the morna also turns into coladeira, its younger, more festive counterpart, though it never fails to slip in a fair share of sarcasm and political satire between the lines.

Several artists helped develop these Cape Verdean musical idioms into their current forms, from the poet Eugénio Tavares and the songwriter Armando Zeferino Soares to musicians Francisco Xavier Da Cruz, known as B. Leza, and above all Adriano Gonçalves, known as Bana, considered by many to be the King of local morna. But the best-known figure, as well as the symbolic face and source of pride for the entire nation, was undoubtedly Cesária Évora, affectionately known as Cise, a woman whose aching, richly nuanced contralto voice managed to convey all the love and the poignant melancholy of her people, crossing borders to reach the rest of the world.

La Diva Aux Pieds Nus

But Cesária did not have an easy life, either as a woman or as a singer, and this is not a story of glittering record sales and public redemption, but rather a tale of quiet, hard-won endurance in the face of life's hardships and pitfalls - struggles that make her music something all the more devastating and cathartic at once.

Born in 1941 in Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, into extreme poverty alongside six other brothers and sisters, Cesária spent her childhood moving between various homes; her father Justino, a violinist, died when she was still a little girl, and her mother Joana, left on her own, did what she could to look after her seven children, but it was a losing battle; Cesária was often sent to live with her grandmother, and then, around the age of ten, ended up in the local orphanage.

But Mindelo is a lively seaport, a stopover for fishermen, adventurers, drunken troublemakers and newcomers alike, and its nightlife guarantees plenty of fun. From the age of sixteen, Cesária performed in various venues, particularly at the Café Royal, singing the songs of her people with real feeling. It was a life full of emotion, and certainly a very communal one, since everyone in town knew her name, and before long her voice was even ringing out over the local radio waves. But being a singer was also a profession in which no money changed hands, especially for a woman: the rest of the music scene, in fact, was made up entirely of men, the only ones allowed to even consider such a way of life.

So what had begun as a youthful passion back in the late 1950s gradually faded in the face of the hardships and torments of a life that always presents its bill. Three different husbands, three divorces and three children, one of whom sadly died in infancy, and a lifestyle bordering on the self-destructive: Cesária drank whisky and cognac every night, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and was afflicted by deep bouts of depression, visible in the dark circles under her eyes and the vacant look that comes through even in promotional photographs. By the time the 1970s arrived, now weary and visibly worn down, Cesária had retired from the stage and gone back to live at home with her mother in order to provide a roof for the two children she had left. These were her "dark years," a time when the pain of a life poorly spent weighed on her shoulders like a boulder. Worried, the people of Mindelo even organized a collection to help her out.

Her comeback, both artistic and personal, would indeed be slow; in '85 she was asked to record a track for a historical compilation of Cape Verdean music dedicated to female performers, an important first attempt at returning to the stage, above all because, to carry out the work, Cesária traveled to Portugal. Then, a few years later, once again in Europe, in Paris, during a performance at a restaurant alongside her fellow musician Bana, with whom she had also toured the United States, Cesária was noticed by José Da Silva, a Cape Verdean musician and producer based in France, as well as the founder of Lusafrica, an independent label created specifically to give voice to the Lusophone Atlantic diaspora.

On stage, Cesária cut a singular figure: composed yet commanding, she embodied the spirit of the morna naturally, with barely any gestures at all, so effortlessly did she convey its aching, inconsolable languor. And she insisted on performing barefoot, a gesture in honor of all the poor women like herself — hence the nickname La Diva Aux Pieds Nus. It was France, in fact, that would fall for her first, over the course of three albums released between 1988 and '91 under Da Silva's guidance, partly because the flow of the morna also faintly recalls the tradition of the chanson — in the quiet drama staged by Cesária Évora, one can almost sense an Atlantic version of the unforgettable Edith Piaf. The third of these records in particular, "Mar Azul", marks the beginning of this new, fortunate phase. But it would be the following album that turned her into a legend.

Atlantic sodade

By the time "Miss Perfumado" arrived, in June 1992, Cesária was a fifty-one-year-old woman who had already seen too much, who had felt life run through her like a speeding train, and who had painfully learned to face it with philosophy and small pearls of matriarchal, ancestral wisdom — despite what the French made of her with that word "diva", she was in truth a woman of innately frugal spirit. No posturing, no frills, just boundless love, backed by decades of experience as a performer: Cesária immerses herself in her songs, weighing every word, avoiding artifice and offering nothing but raw emotion. A sorrowful, quiet figure, gracefully accompanied by a handful of local musicians, such as the brothers Toy and Paulino Vieira and violinist Malaquias Costa, in an entirely acoustic setting with a timeless sound. "Miss Perfumado" is a simple collection, containing songs written by the very same celebrated Cape Verdean composers already mentioned — Soares and B. Leza — as well as Manuel De Novas, Dany Mariano and Teófilo Chantre. But it is Cesária's voice that best captures the spirit of the morna and the coladeira, letting through both the resilience and the melancholy of a woman who, amid poverty, alcoholism and depression, speaks to the feelings of anyone who has ever felt lost, at least once in their life.

Here we find her signature song, originally written by Soares himself: "Sodade", the Cape Verdean version of that saudade so dear to Brazilians. It's a story of whalers swept away by the flow of life and the ocean currents, who left their homeland with a heavy heart, and who now find themselves consumed by the sweet melancholy of a home that, in memory, seems perfect but that, in practice, will probably never be so again:

Who showed you this distant path?

Who showed you this distant path?

The path to São Tomé

I miss it, I miss it

My village of São Nicolau

São Tomé is another small Atlantic island, located thousands of kilometers further south in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of present-day Gabon.

The connection between Cape Verde and the African continent is naturally profound. That's the case with the famous "Angola", a splendid, moderately successful track set to a coladeira rhythm, with piano in fine form and lively hand-clapping, in which Cesária celebrates the nightlife of the Angola of the title, a land from which many Cape Verdeans originally came before being torn away by Portuguese slave traders; aside from the festive atmosphere paying tribute to the smiling, indomitable spirit of that African people, there are various interpretations of the song's lyrics, since it isn't entirely clear whether Cesária, in mentioning her "return ticket", is referring to her own longing to go home, or to the dangers of the Angolan civil war, which raged from the 1970s into the early 2000s. There is, in any case, a beautiful black-and-white video for "Angola", which illustrates the spirit of communion in Cape Verdean music in all its simplicity, while also putting Cesária in the spotlight as a gentle yet intense performer and ambassador for her people:

The constant ebb and flow of tension running through the grooves of "Miss Perfumado" recalls the sea's waves, sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, but always inescapable, before which human beings can do nothing but surrender.

On the more achingly poignant side of the collection, there's the melancholy romanticism of "Luz dum estrela", a veritable moonlit sonata born of a moment of particular emotional introspection, and examples of splendid traditional morna such as "Vida tem un so vida" and "Morabeza". Truly evocative is "Lua nha testemunha", the longest track on the record at over six minutes: amid threads of harmonica and a plucked-string solo, it's a tale with a faintly progressive flavor.

Then there's the rippling, vibrant piano, lid wide open, of "Bia", which almost carries the scent of whisky and small hours, and the vivid, coladeira-paced portrait of "Cumpare Ciznone", among the most sardonic moments on the tracklist.

Truly evocative are the acoustic songs of "Barbincor" and especially "Recordai", underscored by layers of cavaquinho, an ancient stringed instrument from European tradition sitting somewhere between a lute and a guitar, whose sound will remind many listeners of recordings by the Argentine Mercedes Sosa or the Chilean Inti-Illimani, revealing a bridge between distant cultures, united throughout history by Latin-European domination, before each was able to reclaim, painfully and not without struggle, its own social and cultural independence.

Despite coming from a tiny nation that has always remained on the margins of the world's great geopolitical movements, Cesária Évora interprets the stories of her people with an honesty that places her alongside other famous singers of the twentieth century: the peoples of South Africa championed by Miriam Makeba during apartheid, the laments of Cuba voiced by La Lupe, the Arab world stirred by the astonishing power of Umm Kulthum, the deep sorrow of American blues told by Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, and many others besides.

It's no coincidence that the album closes with a torch song of rare emotional power: "Tortura", a universal lament of love, accompanied by a haunted, off-key violin that skillfully underlines the agony of the lyrics without ever tipping into melodrama, instead lending the track a sparse minimalism that makes it all the more effective:

I sent out an SOS

For my loneliness

Because in this darkness

I feel almost on the verge of death

Only God knows my agony

Caused by your absence

An absence that tortures me, tortures me

Torments my entire soul

With the international success of "Miss Perfumado", Cesária put herself on the map as an interpreter of a "world music" faithful to her roots yet able to captivate listeners of every culture. There would be many more examples of morna from her voice, from the reissue of the previously released "Cesária", featuring the celebrated "Petit pays", to the brighter, more upbeat "Café Atlantico", in which one finally glimpses a woman who has overcome alcoholism and gives herself over with renewed passion, backed by a rousing band — though she categorically refused to give up smoking cigarettes. In 2002 came a duet with Mali's Salif Keita, while in 2004, with "Voz d'amor", Cesária would even win a Grammy.

Her death in December 2011, at the age of seventy after a life that was certainly no easy one, was met with national mourning in Cape Verde and among all those listeners around the world who found comfort in her inimitable voice. Though at times somewhat overlooked, Cesária Évora's figure carries something eternal about it — her music will always be with us.

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17/12/2023