Pigs in Delirium

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>First published in Cabo Verde in 1998 Jorge Carlos Fonseca's </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Pigs in Delirium</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> (Porcos em Delírio) charted and continues to chart a new vision not just for Cabo-Verdean poetry but for all of Lusophone poetry. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Pigs in Delirium</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> begins with a 10-page biographical timeline of the allegedly deceased author's life compiled by an old enemy turned posthumous admirer. The grandiose surreal and self-deprecating document includes recognizable elements from Jorge Carlos Fonseca's known biography alongside a fantastical and metaphysical one. Spicerian in tone it recounts the poet's strange birth several body parts at a time over the course of his first 19 years; a 27-day argument with René Char already long dead over the best title for the book; and even a failed heist of the Louvre. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Paginated in reverse Fonseca's poems sprawl across multiple pages sometimes crossed out by large Xs. Though they read from top to bottom their typesetting from the bottom margin upward suggests levitation or the rising of a tropical mist. As these innovations suggest </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Porcos em Delírio</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is not an easy book. Fonseca delights in difficulty-Joyce being another influence cited by fellow poet Arménio Vieira-and reflects this pleasure in a playful intellectualism that can at times approach the abstruse. Indeed a perfect understanding of the poems may not be merely impossible but beside the point. And yet the book remains as legible as it is imagistic lyrical and hyper-referential. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In this the strangest book of Lusophone African literature the poet devours and regurgitates influences from Breton to Buñuel Ginsberg to Garbarek with a recurring fondness for Archie Shepp occasional incursions of Kriolu wordplay and a talent for mimicking (and skewering) the language of postcolonial island politics. This searing skepticism of overwrought political language is run through with Utopian faith in the power of poetry. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Pigs in Delirium</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> marks the English-language debut of an essential postcolonial African voice.</span></p><p></p>