Tem morna, tem coladeira

notacesaria

 

 

Cesária Évora on the Cape Verdean 2000 escudos bank note. This brought to mind a ten-year-old scholary piece of mine on her roots in the  popular music of this marvelous archipelago, which lies about an hour’s flight in a turboprop off the west coast of Africa.  Downloadable here: Tem morna.

Yes, this article is in one of the Deity’s favoured languages, Portuguese. Wait, strike that: the Deity actually loves all languages equally, or if the story in the book of Genesis is to believed, she hates them all equally. But on the first page there is a summary in English, a language you readers manifestly love, especially if it is your mother tongue and exerts all the powers maternal love entails.

(There are a few occasional readers of this site whose mother tongue is not English, which doesn’t mean they don’t love it too. In fact, it might be argued they love it more than we who have been born into it, since they adopted it. Adoption, now that is true love.)

There are many references to Cesária and to Cape Verdean Crioulo in my book Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures, still available at what some might think is an extortionist price, even when sold second hand. But then it is only #8,848,231 in the Amazon sales list, so not to worry too much about that aspect of things.