8 - Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio's O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial Categories

Summary

Writers from across the Lusophone world have formulated ways to grapple with and against Empire's field of meaning, ranging from allegories of consumption to dealing with colonial specters and poetics of intersectionality. Mário Lúcio Sousa's novel O Novíssimo Testamento [The Newest Testament] (2010), in combining the religious, spiritual, and the fantastic, offers yet another path against Empire.

Sousa was born in Tarrafal on the island of Santiago, Republic of Cabo Verde in 1964, 11 years prior to independence from Portugal. Aside from being an established writer of fiction, poetry, and theater (which he also directs), Sousa is a renowned musician. He is founder and lead singer of the Cape Verdean musical collective Simentera, an acoustic group fusing popular national musical genres such as Coladeira, Morna, and Funaná. Like his literature and dramaturgy, his music is also politically engaged. In addition to integrating the genres mentioned above, for instance, the group's repertoire includes slave hymns from both Cabo Verde and continental West Africa. Beyond evoking colonial violence, this practice breaks with elitist constructions of Cape Verdean popular music of the early and mid-twentieth century, which sought to evoke a cultural and racial separation between ‘Europeanized’ Cabo Verde and the African continent. We can thus consider Sousa's work in music, literature, and theater to be undergirded by artistic engagements with power and cultural politics. In addition to artistic endeavors, he earned a law degree from the University of Havana and served in the Cape Verdean parliament for five years.

While Sousa may have few recollections of direct experience of Portuguese colonial administration given his date of birth, he is arguably part of what we may consider a generation of Lusophone writers who grapple with the specificities and legacies of Portuguese colonialism, as well as with broader contemporary forms and manifestations of power based on race, gender, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability. This sort of engagement is very much evident across his entire artistic œuvre. Sousa was forced to confront one of those legacies head-on as an adolescent. Following the death of his parents when he was 15, he lived as an orphan in the Cape Verdean military base in Tarrafal, a building that had been Portugal's concentration camp for colonial dissenters.