Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab: A memoir of home, migration, and African liberation (Nonaligned)

Description

A memoir of a mother and daughter’s return to Cabo Verde reveals the legacies of national liberation, a story of memory and migration, and the psychic and physical landscape that colonialism has wrought. When Sonia Vaz Borges accompanied her mother, Maria Isabel Vaz, home to Santiago Island, Cabo Verde, it was the first time she experienced the island where her mother and family were born, and where her mother left forty years earlier. As a historian, documentarian, and a Black Cabo Verdean young woman born in Portugal, she booked a trip to a native land she’s never been to in order to conduct research on the history of militant resistance to Portuguese colonialism, of the education initiatives of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), and the lessons for freedom available for today. What she discovers are lifelong lessons as illuminating as anything her PhD revealed to her. The fragments of memories, episodes, and encounters in Cabo Verde that she assembled in this travel diary reveal an experience of “homegoing” that is rich with the legacies of national liberation, the story of a Black woman’s migration during the height of colonial oppression, of separation from family and nation, and memories of an island transformed since Independence, and the psychic and physical landscape that the legacy of colonial rule has wrought. As mother and daughter travel home together for the first time, they embark on a journey that takes them to new places in their relationship to each other, a return and a rediscovery of a place and people imagined and conjured through memory, where history and place blur and where stories are created and shared. Ragás is a Cabo Verdean creole word for the space created between the waist and the knees when seated: the lap. Here, it is a place to find nurturing, a place to be embraced, protected, and cared for, a place for reconnection and return to the memories that others carry for you when migration means both leaving and being left behind. Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and socialpolitical organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges coauthored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). Vaz Borges is also the author of the book Na Pó Di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, de Santa Filomena e da Encosta Nascente (2014), and editor of the Zines, Caderno Consciência e Resistência Negra (2007–2011). Vaz Borges is currently an Assistant Professor in the History and Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia (USA). Vaz Borges continues to write on education and liberation struggles and is now working on her concept of the “walking archive.” Maria Isabel Vaz was born and raised in Cabo Verde in the Santiago Island, in the municipality of Santa Catarina. She migrated to Portugal with all her family in 1972 during the colonial occupation in Cabo Verde and the PAIGC liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau. In Portugal she worked as a domestic worker, where she married and became a mother of five. A humble and caring woman with strong values and beliefs, she made sure to transmit her knowledges, life experience, and social justice principles to her daughters. Gardening and farming are her passions, an inheritance brought from her life in the countryside in Cabo Verde. Maria Isabel Vaz is now retired and lives in Amadora, Portugal. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, and the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York. Craig Gilmore is an organizer with the California Prison Moratorium Project, which he cofounded in 1998. He was an editor of Prison Focus and is coauthor with Kevin Pyle of Prison Town in The Real Cost of Prisons Project. He has been active for years in Californians United for a Responsible Budget, the No New Jails Coalition, and LA Prison Times newspaper. Gilmore was a board member of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles and in 2003 was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism. Advance Praise “Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab is the documentation of the ‘homecoming’ of a mother and a daughter to Cabo Verde, and to the possibilities of themselves, the encounter with family members, who they had never met or had not seen for more than four decades. These two dimensions brought them to a (dis)comfort that made them realize that the vibrant silence of memories unveiled would actually trigger a sense of personal and historical growth and appeasement. It is a journey that anyone can identify with, as it sparks the universal feeling of the need to both embrace our roots and to nurture our own paths.” —Carla Fernandes, journalist, host of Rádio Afrolis, and founder of Afrolis Cultural Association “Ragás is an amazing text that breaks the silence of thousands of lives whose mental and social life was disrupted, distorted by colonial violence and Portuguese hegemonic history. More importantly, it is a story of love and resistance, revivified tracks, a living bouquet of herstory, which escapes from the prison of biography and offers wonderful paths for our diaspora in Portugal and beyond to walk as we reorganize the foreclosures of memory by official narratives, and become protagonists once more.” —Flávio “LBC Soldjah” Zenun Almada, emcee/rapper, writer, and general coordinator of Associação Cultural Moinho da Juventude at Cova da Moura “It is often said that ‘memory is the key to liberation,’ but what happens when memory is dormant, suppressed, misplaced, seemingly lost? How do we search for what has no form? Maria Isabel Vaz and Sónia Vaz Borges’ Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab is a clear meditation on this process. A thesis on unpacking and mapping a living archive.” —James Pope, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Winston-Salem State University and founding director of Educational Initiatives for Africa World Now Project “I can think of no other work that provides such deep insight into the lived intimacies of the afterlives of national liberation struggles and their diasporas. Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab is to be savored in stillness, discussed in study groups with comrades, and taught in classrooms where militant education for home-grown anticolonial liberation remains on the syllabus.”—Jodi Melamed, author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism “Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab provides a beautiful and deeply felt memoir of migration, diaspora, belonging, and returning home. Maria Isabel Vaz and Sónia Vaz Borges bring us along on the intimate journey they take together back to Cabo Verde, a homecoming after forty-two years as complex and emotional as one could imagine. This book provides rich personal insights into the paradoxes of memory and the legacies of colonial histories and traumas. It is a must read for those interested in learning more about the innermost and constant struggles that hinder individual and collective liberation across time and space in the African diaspora.” —Keisha-Khan Perry, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania “Situated at the precipice between history and memory, Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab brings the reader into everyday life in Cabo Verde. The worlds women build through community become tangible and visceral through the portal of mother-daughter travel. This book is an unforgettable journey.” —Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, Wayne State University “This work is both a declaration of love and a generous and rare testimony in the first person of the contemporary Black experience between Cabo Verde and Portugal. As mother and daughter set off on this fascinating journey of ‘return’ to their ‘root,’ they know that no one ever truly goes back anywhere—and that in the harshness of women’s (post)colonial lives, there is no place for romanticization. It is both a search for themselves and each other that they have embarked on, traversing a sea of memories and affections. Continuing the work Sónia Vaz Borges began with Na Pó do Spera (2014), but with a newfound and moving intimacy, Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab also provides a personal insight into the network of affections behind Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness, The PAIGC Education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). A must-read for anyone interested in the resistance and resignification of belonging through an Afro-Portuguese prism.” —Cristina Roldão, Professor of ESE-IPS and researcher of CIES-IUL – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa