The Joyful Song of the Partridge

by Paulina Chiziane

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A roiling chronicle of motherhood and colonization from a writer who “alternates between a dramatic, high-octane style and a terse and humorous frankness” (Sheila Heti)

Recipient of the 2021 Camões Prize, the most important award for literature in the Portuguese language

A potent whirl of history, mythology, and grapevine chatter, The Joyful Song of the Partridge absorbs readers into its many hiding places and along the wandering paths of its principal characters, whose stark words will stay with you long after the journey is done.

No one knows where Maria des Dores came from. Did she ride in on the armored spines of crocodiles, was she carried many miles in the jaws of fish?

The only clear fact is that she is here, sitting naked in the river bordering a town where nothing ever happens.

The townspeople murmur restlessly that she is possessed by perverse impulses. They interpret her arrival as an omen of crop failure or, in more hopeful tones, a sign that womankind will soon seize power from the greedy hands of men.

As The Joyful Song of the Partridge unfolds, Paulina Chiziane spirals back in time to Maria’s true origins: the days of Maria’s mother and father when the pressure to assimilate in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique formed a distorting bond on the lives of black Mozambicans.

Release date: May 28, 2024

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 496

Sample

A collective cry. A refrain.
There is a naked woman on the banks of the River Licungo. In the men’s area.
“Eh?”
There is a woman in the solitude of the waters of the river. She looks as if she is listening to the silence of the fish. A young woman. Beautiful and resplendent like a Makonde sculpture. Her eyes fixed on the sky, she seems to be awaiting some revelation.
“Who is she?”
A black woman, as black as sculptures carved from ebony. Jet black, with tattoos on her belly, thighs, and shoulders. Naked, stark naked. Hips. Waist. Navel. Belly. Breasts. Shoulders. Everything on show.
“Where has she come from?”
In the sky over the town, the news spreads like radio waves. In this sleepy little town, almost nothing ever happens and everything is news. People talk of the foreigner who turned up and then left. Of the administrator’s wife who got pregnant and gave birth. People talk of the rain that fell and the seeds that sprouted. Of the husband who did not fulfil his marital duties during the night that has only just ended. A naked woman is headline news. So everyone leaves their own little corner and joins a procession. They are going to see in order to believe.
“Who is the woman with enough courage to bathe in the private spot reserved for men, so breaking all the local norms? Who is she?
The naked woman looks at the horizon. The horizon is a curtain of palm trees. She sees a stain. It is a swarm. Of bees? No, it must be hornets. Or chickens driven crazy by a grain of corn falling onto the granary floor. But the stain is gaining height, shape and a shadow’s evolution. It is a stain that kicks up clouds of dust, like a stampeding herd over dry soil. From this babbling stain, she hears sounds of destruction, like subterranean dragons ordering earth tremors. Sounds that used to tell her things. Things she could understand. Other things that she could not understand. She senses the smell of milk. She hears a child crying – ah, so it is a band of angry women. She doesn’t understand why they are there. She doesn’t understand the reason for their procession, their fury. What do they want? To kill her?
The group of irate women rush toward her like birds of prey greedy for blood. A sizeable group. The march was driven by an instinct for self-defense. Anxiety. Within those frightened minds, myths emerge as the only truth in order to explain the inexplicable. They imagined plants withering up and rain falling and sweeping away all their crops. The cattle growing thin. Roosters becoming sterile, hens having no eggs to hatch or chicks to fledge. That presence was an omen predicting the disappearance of poultry. The naked woman’s curves sent out messages of despair.
“Hey! What are you doing there?”
The crowd sees the woman seated on a throne of clay, by the river. She is in the lotus position, her intimate parts in the cool of the river. It sees her inner being budding, like a red anthurium edged with clay. It sees the tattoos on her mature woman’s belly. It sees her slim, small body, full in the front, full at the back, sculptured by the gods. It sees her smooth skin. The hue of toasted coffee. Her thick lips like a medulla, full of blood, full of flesh. The eyes of a cat. It sees her smooth, full eyebrows, and her hair like silken skeins, like drops of water flowing down her back, like pearls of tears on a bride’s garland.
“Disgusting! Be off with you!”
The naked woman’s feet have counted many a stone on their journey. They have trudged here, there and everywhere, in her search for treasure. Like a woman condemned to a lifelong trek. They threw stones at her wherever she went. They chased her away with sticks and stones, as if she were some strange animal invading the property of others. Their voices willed her to disappear. But disappear where, if she had nowhere to go? She compares people to hyenas, vultures. She sees no difference. There is someone in the abyss begging for help. Human society rushes to hurl sticks and rocks, to stamp on the hand with which someone expresses their last wish.
The naked woman has raised her head. She adjusts her eyes between sky and skyline in the visionary gaze of a poet.
“Hey! What are you doing there?”
“Who are you?”
She looks at the multitude, her eyes vacant. She must be listening to the music of love. She must be re-living secret passions recalled from the other side of the world. Maybe she sees moving images. Or talking shadows. Within her, there must be jumbled up feelings, thoughts, voices, dreams, stories, lullabies, sowing confusion in her mind.
“Where have you come from?”
She is solitary. Exiled. A foreigner. She emerged from nothingness in the solitude of the waters of the river. She has come from nowhere. Her feet seem to have travelled through the entire universe from pole to pole. She seems to have been born there, a twin of the waters, the grasses, the corn and the mangroves. Vegetation has given birth to a being.
Rage and astonishment mingle in the same emotion. Lucky are the sightless eyes, who will never see the color of the terror inspired by this naked woman. Some women shield their eyes from such immorality. Such infamy. They look down at the ground. The profane utter loud, crude curses. The puritans cross themselves and place the palm of their hand over their face like a fan. They pretend they cannot see what they nevertheless manage to view through the cracks between their fingers.
“Where have you come from?”
The women prepare an apt sermon for the occasion, consisting of moral pronouncements and threats. She listens. She vanquishes their threats with a smile.
“Who are you?” The furious women insist.
People love identities. They even demand a birth certificate from someone they can see in front of them. Is there greater proof than my presence to confirm I was born?
“Why are you naked?”
The naked woman is too tired to answer. Too deaf to hear. She despairs. How many reserves of strength should a woman have in order to bear her torment, her anxiety and her hope, how many words will the eternal prayer for clemency have to an unknown god, whose response will never come?
“Put your clothes on, stranger.”
Her clothes are wet. Draped over the bushes like a parasol.
“Go on, put your clothes on right now, woman!”
“Woman, aren’t you ashamed to show your face? Where did you sell your shame. Don’t you have any pity for our children, who will be rendered sightless by your nudity? Aren’t you scared of men? Don’t you know they can use and abuse you? Oh! Woman, put those clothes of yours on, for your nakedness kills and blinds!”
She answers in the language of the river fish. She smiles. She looks at the ground. At the sky. With gentleness. With candor. Her eyes emanate a strong light and a myriad of colors. She is pleasant. She is agreeable. She has very white teeth. A full set of them. She is pretty. She has the smile of an angel. What is it that she can see beyond the horizon?
“Hide your shame, woman.”
The image of Maria distorts the magical significance of the nudity of mermaids. She seems to carry the portent of a storm on the surface of her skin. Hearts dilate with pity. With fear. There are messages of danger hidden in the bare lines of her body. In the grains of sand. In the Milky Way. In the sun’s beard. In the moon’s eyelids. In the footsteps of some fisherman at the river’s edge. In the gusts of wind. This woman has not turned up by chance. She is the messenger of ill fortune.
“Listen, woman: if you don’t put on your clothes of your own free will, you’ll put them on against your will.”
They threatened her. Maybe like that she would be scared and get dressed. But she has settled down even more comfortably, there where she sits, a mermaid queen on a throne of clay. She sees the eyes of the crowd. Darker than the night, the rays of the dying sun dwell in those faces. Eyes full of tears and anguish. Hostile faces. She sees their feet sown in the soil as if the ground has given birth to shadows. Walking shadows. Moving shadows.
“Woman, get dressed!”
But the army of women is powerless. They were relying on the weapon of language. Of persuasion. Negotiation. It was a peaceful army. One of the women unleashes a yell to awaken her. Another looks for a stone to lash her. Another looks around for a stick to beat some morality into her. A wave of violence is generated on the water’s surface. There are no sticks, nor stones. Only wet sand, clay, and mud, which the crowd brandishes as a weapon against this defenseless woman.
The voices of the crowd ululate furiously, breaking like a wave. It is superstition and fear bound together like threads from the same rope. Handfuls of sand fall on the naked woman’s body like hail. Her breast swells with the strength of her fear. She exhales the air that the wind then gathers and hurls toward infinity. Then, she plunges into the river and navigates the swirling waters, like a nymph rolling through the waves. She dives down to the riverbed and then shoots up to the surface in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t shuffling of moon and cloud. The water releases rainbow rings in a myriad of waves. Now far away, the naked woman hisses a venomous laugh that falls like a sword on the enemy’s spears. And she celebrates her triumph over the multitude.
There goes the heroine of the day. Protected inside the fortress of the river. On a throne of water. A heroine who vanquished an army of women and threw public morals into disarray. Who defied the habits of the land and sullied the menfolk’s sanctuary.
 
*      *      *
 
When the crowd leaves, the mad woman returns to the same spot as before. She wants to listen to the voices lost in the waters of the river. The message would arrive, she was sure of that. At the same time as she sent it. By telepathy.
Maria das Dores – Mary of the Sorrows – is her name. It must be the name of a saint or a white woman because black girls like simple names. Joana. Lucrécia. Carlota. Maria das Dores is the most beautiful name, but it is sad. It reflects the day-to-day lives of women and blacks.
Ah, dear mother of mine! Here I am by the wayside. With only my friend the wind for company. On the banks of an unknown river. Persecuted by unhappy women. In their cries, I also heard yours, dear mother. Mother, were you in that crowd? Why is it that I didn’t see you? Why didn’t you show me your face, mother? It was you, yes, in that group of ghosts who were buzzing in my ears like a swarm of hornets. It was you and your group of ghosts, wanting to hit me, hurt me, hidden so as to rain their rabid blows down on me, but they were unable to, for I was protected by the waters. Because I am a daughter of the water. Am I really naked, mother? The nakedness they saw is not mine, it is theirs. They say I do not see anything and they are mistaken. They are the ones who are blind. They scream their own wretchedness at me and call me mad. But they are the mad ones, prisoners, covered in a thousand items of clothing like the skins of an onion. In the midst of all this heat.
I no longer quite know where I came from or where I am going. Sometimes, I feel that I was never born. Can it be that I am still in your womb, mother of mine? Everyone asks where I have come from. They want to know what I am, because I am nothing.
I am going where the wind goes, and my life is caught in the web of an unknown hope. The compass rose. My destination is that of the birds. To fly and fly until the final fall. My destination is that of the water. Always flowing in ever-changing shapes, sometimes a spring, other times a river. And yet other times sweat, or else tears. A flood. A drop of dew in a bird’s throat. I am vapor warmed by life. I am ice and snow in a freezer compartment. But always water, movement is my eternity. I am an animal wounded by all things. By the song of birds, by the red of anthuriums, by violets in bloom. Wounded by dreams, by illusion. By hope and by longing.
Who am I? A statue fashioned from clay, in the midst of the falling rain. I hate clothes which limit my flight. I hate the walls of houses that stop me from hearing the music of the wind. I am Mary of the Sorrows, Maria das Dores. The woman who defies life and death in the search for her treasure. I am Maria das Dores, and I know that a woman’s weeping has the strength of a river at source. I know how many steps it takes for a woman to walk the perimeter of the world. How many pains it takes to make a life, or how many thorns it takes to make a wound. But I have no name. Or shadow. Or even existence. I am a deformed, colorless butterfly. When it comes to words, I recognize insults, and when it comes to gestures, I know aggression. I have a broken heart. Silence and solitude inhabit me. I am Maria das Dores, the woman no one sees...