:10:33
I have returned from a country where death
is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow.
:10:37
The great ancestor of the Bijagós archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead
:10:43
and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach
:10:49
where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world.
:10:52
If by accident one should meet them,
it is above all imperative not to recognize them.
:11:01
The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau.
:11:03
In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves
a gesture of good-bye to the shore;
:11:07
he's right, he'll never see it again.
:11:10
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later
on the canoe that was bringing us back.
:11:15
Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president.
:11:20
All those who remember the war remember him.
:11:24
the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was
of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,
:11:28
and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
:11:33
which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle
wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
:11:38
I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who had fought in conditions so inhuman
:11:45
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.
:11:49
That I heard.
:11:50
And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly
:11:54
even if inadvertentlythe word guerrilla
to describe a certain breed of film-making.
:11:59
A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates
and also to bloody defeats on the ground.