KINO SLANG

Teaching Symmetry:

On Pedro Costa’s

As filhas do fogo

(The Daughters of Fire)

by Rinaldo Censi

We don’t know in which port in the Antilles archipelago the cargo ship SS Glencairn is docked. It might be St. Thomas. On the ship’s deck two men are talking. There’s a party going on. The cargo ship will depart soon, loaded with munitions. Destination England. The native women have brought rum in abundance. One of the two men drinks. The other one no.

If he had continued to, he'd be dead. The Long Voyage Home is a film made by John Ford in 1940. Gregg Toland’s photography here seems roughly to anticipate the depth of field that Welles will use a year later in Citizen Kane. Smitty drinks and looks distracted. A song is heard from the mainland. Is this what makes him nervous?

“If I didn’t know we were in the West Indies, I’d imagine we were anchored off some island for the dead. The ghosts are wailing, Donkeyman.”

“What’s bothering you, Smitty?”

“Oh, memories, Donkeyman.”

“Every time we get near the land you get that look on your face. When a man goes to sea, he ought to give up thinking about things on shore. Land don’t want him no more. I had me share of things going wrong, and it all came from the land. Now I’m through with the land, and the land’s through with me.”

Islands. Memories impossible to forget. The Cape Verde archipelago, so present in the films of Pedro Costa, is moved decisively closer to Africa. But the parallel is roughly the Antilles. Those songs Smitty is hearing, have they the same origin? It may be the same stories of vampires, witches, gardeurs. Stories that could have been sung by old Sidone, writes the Creole writer Derek Walcott, originally from Santa Lucia, Antilles. Christian and African songs. Stories about children lost in the middle of a forest. Mythological stories of snake skins after their shedding. “All these sank like a stain. And taught us symmetry.” Folktales that conceal a structure that is tripart, universal. “Sprung from hearthside or lamplit hut door in an age when the night outside was a force, inimical, infested with devils, with demons, a country for the journey of the soul, and any child who has heard its symmetry chanted would want to retell it when he was his own storyteller, with the same respect for its shape.” The first minutes of O nosso Homem (Our Man), which Pedro Costa made in 2010, seem to be summarized here. In Cape Verde a man delivers death letters without being noticed. A mother tells this to her son. They live on the margins of Lisbon. She continually remembers Cape Verde: her house. She wants to return there, to rest her bones.

The islands. The mainland. The stories and the songs. The symmetrical movement: that of the stories told, handed down; that of the memories, and of the space which separates the emigrant population from its native soil. Even if distant, something carries them back there. Maybe, truly, the only way to forget is to voyage by sea and never stop. In Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) a woman (Clotide, Ventura’s wife) throws the household furniture out the window, into the darkness of what remains of the Fontaínhas quarter. Then, grasping a knife, she recalls her youth in Cape Verde. The ocean. Her skill at swimming. None of the boys had the courage to follow her.

“The sharks, Clotide!”

But not even the sharks would come near. The children on the rocks, in tears.

“I never wanted to return. But I always did.”

Her gaze drops. The story, the word, is a song.

Since Casa de Lava, Pedro Costa’s films revolve around this Cape Verdean immigrant community. It is starting with this film that a letter begins to circulate from Robert Desnos to his wife Youki. Again and again. This text begins to pass through other films: altered, modified, interpolated. And it’s as if a mechanism had been triggered, starting from that letter. The thought comes that his films basically are transformed into missives, material gathered into the form of stories, songs. Perhaps another way of staging that symmetry Walcott talks about. Sent to a recipient that is no more (the letters often have to do with ghosts, memories, dead people). Missives addressed to a future past: the recipient will be someone who, in turn, will collect them, recount them, adding his own story. Vanda, Ventura, Pango Vitalina, Clotilde, the three young women in the latest, the magnificent As filhas do fogo (2023), are all figures who put memory in movement again in the form of letters sung, recounted. The hardness of the work, the reproaches to the husbands, the fatigue and the fear, the mourning, the nostalgia, the memory of the wild nature of the islands. The movement is quasi metronomic. In As filhas do fogo, three young women have left the island to reach some European port. What they now face is just fatigue, pain. Three voices stretch a sort of polyphony of the memory on a tripartite screen. The film is yet another missive that Pedro Costa collects, like a postman. Past future. The memory. The song as paradigm of the exchanges that never cease to take place. How not to think of that passage in the eleventh chapter of Augustine’s Confessions:

Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory. What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that psalm is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are parts of a whole, and of the total history of ‘the sons of men’ (Ps. 30: 20) where all human lives are but parts.

So far as I know, Pedro Costa is the only one who has known how to gather, with patience, dedication, and a form––which is that of the attention––, the memories, the stories, the songs, in sum, the story of these children of men. These letters reach us. The memory of these human lives. They reverberate like an unquenchable fire.