Sodade
Ratik Asokan on Cape Verde’s improbable World Cup run
Sodade
Ratik Asokan
The bar is no more than a narrow hall. There is barely enough space between the stools and the wall to walk through to a larger room at the back. Beyond the drawn curtains separating the spaces, two musicians are conducting a mic check before rows of mostly empty chairs. No one is paying attention to them; everyone is glued to the saloon television, which was specifically installed for the World Cup.
A bartender announces the next performance. A piano-and-vocals duo will be playing updates of Latin American nueva canción and tunes of kindred nobility from Cape Verde. The setlist was presumably designed to complement the game, which should have ended by now. Instead, the island nation—debutants, the second-smallest competing country, a squad largely drawn from diaspora, including one player recruited via LinkedIn—have taken the reigning champions, Argentina, into extra time.
We are invited to gather our drinks and relocate to the back room. Chair legs creak and arms ruffle tote bags for two agonizing minutes. Ultimately almost no one moves. When a bartender mutes the television out of decency to the artists, a muffled gasp of dismay goes up.
This is bad behavior, as we are acutely aware. Barzakh Café is a performance space, not a sports bar. You come here to learn about other cultures, or at least that is the proprietor’s intention. El Atigh Abba fled Mauritania in 2013, when his freethinking blog came to the attentions of a senior imam, whose literary criticism took the form of a fatwa (the document, with bureaucratic stamps, can be found online). After making his way to the Caribbean stretch of Crown Heights, he decided to set up a kind of Partisan Coffee House for similarly beleaguered Arab intellectuals. No one quite knows how, but within a few years it transformed into a Soviet House of Culture for Brooklyn internationalist hipsters: book discussions and poetry readings, language classes and film screenings, Ramadan and Passover celebrations, DSA fundraisers, and, more to the point, “world music” concerts nearly every night: Qawwali, Flamenco, Greek folk revival, Moroccan Gnawa... (The booking logic seems to be: (i) you will need to look this genre up on Wikipedia; (ii) you will not be subjected to a 4/4 rhythm.)
The clientele, as should be obvious, is self-selecting: thin men with every combination of facial hair, women in long dresses and elaborate scarves, someone always muttering about connecting disparate “local struggles,” graduate students struggling to connect their dissertation to said local struggles. Until tonight we have always been ready to listen to “songs of the left.” We even read translated lyrics that are passed out.
Now we abandon our principles with exuberance, even righteousness. An auntie wonders why a show was booked during such an important match. In her preamble, the vocalist stresses the enduring relevance of nueva canción and ponders the multifarious significance of the term sodade (longing for home, nostalgia for the pre-imperial past, island epistemology, general spiritual melancholy, et cetera). The audience score: five for music, maybe thirty-five for sports.
Ibou, a soft-spoken bartender, is from Lumumbashi. I learned this during the group stage, when the Democratic Republic of Congo were setting one national precedent after another: first World Cup goal, first point, first knockout appearance clinched. In the spirit of cross-cultural understanding, I enquired about the dashing celebration led by Yoane Wissa: hands spread apart in both directions, the right rising far higher than the left, before meeting again near the waist. Was it connected to traditional drumming? “No, man,” he set me straight. “It is a beating, a whooping.”
He is supporting Argentina, which I find unconscionable. What happened to standing up for underdogs? To pan-African unity? “Not Argentina,” Ibou clarifies. “I’m for Messi.” A few others admit to the same disposition. “If I could transfer Messi to Cape Verde, I would,” the guy behind me offers. He is met with glares from the newly minted Cape Verde fans. Our Messi is Vozinha, the forty-year-old goalkeeper, who made seven saves in an opener against the European champions, Spain. Few of us could name another player.
An already tense game is made tenser still by the unusual audiovisual configuration. Instead of the crowd noise—which has been noticeably lacking in this gold-plated edition—or the oafish American commentary, the players are accompanied by the unseen duo, who open with spare compositions by heroes of the left: Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra. Against these somber tributes to hope, to solidarity, to the future, the Argentine assault appears hectic, disjointed, petulant. In the absence of a proper ball-carrying midfielder—Enzo Fernández only comes to life when someone is defending beside him—they aim long for wingers, who run a few meters down the channels and then, what else: pass to Messi. Let no one claim this is an attractive brand of football.
The goal comes, as it increasingly does these days, from a corner. Or was it a cross? In any case the ball sails over the box, eluding wrestling attackers and defenders before finding its way to Lisandro Martínez, who has had a rough few years: if playing for Manchester United under the dour Dutchman Erik ten Hag were not taxing enough, successive injuries have almost ended his career three years in a row. All that turmoil is forgotten as he stops the ball dead, takes a touch to get it out of his feet, and rifles it into the roof of the net from a tight angle.
What explains the mysterious felicity that all footballers from the southern cone possess, even center-backs like Martínez? Eduardo Galeano’s explanations—the culture of the backstreets, sublimated anarchism—were always romantic and are now surely out of date. These gladiators are scouted in their preteens and paid millions. They are creatures of global capitalism. Messi earns more every five minutes he wears an Inter Miami shirt than Vozinha did all season in the Portuguese second division.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
