Caboverdianidade e Africanidade: Batuque's ec(h)o poetics and maroon reverberations

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the ec(h)o-poetic (re)productions of Caboverdianidade that may lead to further questions on Blackness and Africanidade as experienced through the afterlives of slavery, famines, revolutions in Cabo Verde and explicitly expressed through poetry and music. Music echoes poetry and vice-versa; thus, I take these two as interlinked in the cultural production of Cabo Verde. I utilize a combination of “structures of feeling” via Raymond Williams (1977) and sentiment–thinking—with the sensibility of Saudade/Sodade, a form of deep yearning for something or someone that is not that or does not exist—as modes of reading and understanding the ecological circumstances that position Cabo Verde “on the frontlines of existential crises.” I rely on these two modes to make sense of Cabo Verdeans’ relationship with climate change, highlighting an ec(h)o-poetic orientation in the relationship between climate crises and survivance. Methodologically, thinking with structures of feeling and sentiment-thinking considers “meanings and values as actively lived and felt,” which are the core aspects of geo-sonic experiences (Williams, 1977, p. 132). I rely on these modes to speak to the emergent articulations and orientations in light of capital extraction through the colonialization of the islands and the establishment and facilitation of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In attempting a sonic and aural orientation to geography via Williams, I engage Batuque poetics that flow with, through, and by Cabo Verde and take animated sensibilities such as refuge, mourning, healing, and pain alongside pleasure as structured/ing sounded resistances to Portuguese imperialism and imaginaries beyond. My analysis thus works on mapping out an “affective landscape” that resounds in an Afrodiasporic space by emphasizing Batuque as an echoed ecological sounding that reverbs Caboverdianidade with Africanidade resistance.

Bio:

Sibahle is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the role of sound—in its production as music and as African Diasporic Black expressive discourse—and how it (re)shapes how we understand the geographies of the Black Atlantic. He examines how Cabo Verde’s drought-ridden interiors and globally connected shores (re)produce geographic imaginaries through the interconnections of music, poetry, sound, and place-making. He explores ways to map out affective landscapes emphasizing mourning, longing, and pain alongside pleasure. Outside academia, Sibahle enjoys cycling, painting, catching up on reality TV shows he missed many years ago, attending to my plants, and learning to crochet.