By: Beni Dya Mbaxi
I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I still don’t know how to speak Portuguese, and I don’t know when I’ll learn.
I’m from an area where the Portuguese language has had to wear other guises, I mean, it’s had to cohabit with another language, it found another language in the throats of the tired old men and women who rested their bodies in the first musseques of Luanda, one that they could say everything, absolutely everything!
I remember my grandmother saying to me that she didn’t like speaking Portuguese because it wasn’t a language that would give her the freedom to say everything.
I also remember when she got a small piece of land and the settlers came and asked her who had given her the land, my grandmother said she wanted to answer, but the language wouldn’t allow her, so she spoke what she remembered in Portuguese, the strange thing was that some people understood her, but she said that those weren’t the words she wanted, but she didn’t know that she was being understood, and she said that later she began to speak a scratchy Portuguese mixed with Kimbundu, she didn’t even realise at the time that later on a linguistic offspring would be born, which today feeds the neo-musseiros, however, I want to say that my grandmother wasn’t the only one who was giving life to another way of speaking Portuguese. Not even the Portuguese knew that a new way of communicating would be born.
When I arrived in the world, I found a different way of speaking Portuguese, in fact, it’s a linguistic heritage! In the short time that I’ve been in this world, I remember that my grandmother spoke to me in various ways.
At no time have I thought that Portuguese on its own in the Musseques doesn’t exist. I think that those of us who were born after my grandmother and my mother also have many ways of communicating: my grandmother would say something in Kimbundu and then add a bit of Portuguese at the end.
So, without many realising it, the Portuguese language in the place where I live is not 100%, we had a need to be understood, and we ended up using everything that is a mechanism to be understood, with this text, I present here my boldness and warn that the Portuguese language in the place where I live is not 100%, I still think that my grandmother wanted to say that our mother tongue is our national languages and the linguistic variations are the father, but they didn’t realise that another language would emerge that would be the stepfather, today, we neo-mussequeiros are the stepchildren of the Portuguese language.
That’s why I say, I still can’t speak Portuguese.
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