Rogerio Manjate (Mozambique)

Rogerio Manjate is a professional actor and theatre director, a poetry and fiction writer, and a filmmaker. He studied Agronomy at Eduardo Mondlane University and currently lives in Maputo . Rogerio's first published work Amor Silvestre (2001) was followed by Casa Em Flor (Poems for Kids) (2004), Choveria Areia (2005) and Mbila + Dinka (2007). A highly accomplished writer, he won the 2002 International Short Story at the Guimarães Rosa/RFI in Paris with the story ‘ À Imagem
e Semelhança' . Rogerio was the publisher of the Mozambican Writers Association's magazine Luanova and currently publishes Maderazinco which focuses on Mozambican literature.  

As a filmmaker, he directed and produced My Husband's Denial, a film about AIDS denial and disclosure while his short film I Love You won the 2008 Durban International Film Festival award for Best Short Film. Rogerio is currently the head of his own theatre company Galagalazul, where he is both actor and director. He has toured widely with the play Na Solidão dos Campos de Algodão (In the solitude of the cotton fields) which was written in 2005.  

Speaking on the relevance of poetry in the world, Rogerio comments: “Maybe life today is how it is, because it misses poetry. When poetry happens it needs publicity because many people are not able to feel or see it naturally, one must show it, pointing at it, so they can also see, feel and enjoy. But its power is there, once one gets to it and enjoys it. It means the place of poetry is becoming smaller in the world, but its ‘minuteness' is its importance, like the dew drop and the moon: the moon receives the astronauts and their spaceship…and the dew drop suspended on the rose petal is so so small. However, the moon and its brilliance fits on the dew drop. So we need to teach the astronauts to explore the dew drop instead.”
 
 

I, dressed like a man in a landscape

I was at home
sheltering beneath the cup of my memories
waiting, as if a tree…
well, like one waits in the heart of the matter.
 
The house – how can I put it? – a house
the heavens' root
plenipotentiary
coming to an understanding with
January and February's
rains
its sweet dreams
of July and August's
mist and dew…
while the sun, eternal!
 
house!
the dances our tenants and
our stories / our selves
love from the same drum
moonlit on the magnificent nights
drawing tight the capulana
sitting around one bonfire
in the same embrace, on the same flowered ground
 
****
 
It was I, the house in the heart of the matter
and memory, drip-dropping from the walls of silence:
forks and knives, scratching the plates
the chairs, tired of the table
weeping it's dinners.
flowers, embroidered on tablecloth
(even if tattered and stained),
making a point of being flowers
 
I greet you, jug!
but the glasses in the china cabinet
ask for wine only in between the traces
of my mother's voice in the kitchen, bawling out the
mackerel, cabbage and mealie-meal
just before my father:
I want to eat! I want to sleep!
a gale blowing out her
french-fries and pan-of-chicken-stew dreams,
but not the miracles
sprouting from her hands:
on the table, roses fro the whole family at dinner:
roses picked on her rose-dreaming capulana.
Whoever directs their gazes to my mother's hands
sees not the mysteries
(looking to the kettle, one looks inside,
outside reigns the black sorcery of the firewood.)
 
***
I, house of flowers,
paper, coal and water, enough to start the poem,
but before the whiteness of morning
the rubber entered by the window
and I am surprised by the forgetting:
 
The gust of things passed through my head
And I had the deepest certainty of elation's limits:
 
At the limits of elation:
I, dressed like a man in a landscape:
Dust | road | end | light:
in vain I stand before the mirror,
which having drunk in the sun whole,
explains to the silence
on my face lain fallow
that I will be no more than shadow.
 
The words I feel like being
in the language of me-the-poem
perform no miracles:
if the past us sufficient
a glow worm to the darkness is not!
 
***
 
The finger touches the landscape
to see the future reclining in the mirror:
hesitation and forgetting
peek inside my head
then put the frightened hands
into my stomach looking for rain where
the blood light and gushes out
(Fear falls inside the dream)
*
Death breaks out through the bleeding mirrors
and unreflexively sits upon the night
looking at me where the bolts of fear
tear the sky from my head.
 
Sleeps spreads out tremendous roots through my eyes
if I sleep, the dream transmutes memory's flowers
into deep dark nights
faces, faces, more faces
old faces I see as mine
my countenance transformed into the grimaces of those faces:
 
terrible smiles and guffaws and wailing
within my face
lost in the reflection on another
face I do not know, thumbing its nose at me
 
without the amazement multiplied in the mirrors
stopping the hesitation and forgetting
when I
only fancied myself flower in memory
 
***
Death like that seated is the very
god silencing the cry in the night's throat.
like a tear, released to seek its pain
I rehearse the mirror's crossing:
inside, vertigo gnawing the future
and the wind comes in and gets used to it.
 
*
Day and night
Death releases a new word
in the roots of the multitude, to breathe
a tremendous breath
its breath clouding Malanga's afternoon sky:
it invents cracked gestures for each new word,
and then, a flower fro each absence
time leaks out of space
and sprouts a flood of dead, running dead into
the mirror before another mirror
 
 
 

all poems' rights remain with the authors