Introduction

Rosendo Évora Brito was born on the island of Santo Antão, Cabo Verde, in 1937. In 1962, he emigrated to the United States, moving to East Providence, Rhode Island, and residing in close contact with the large Cape Verdean-American community in southeastern New England. The Cape Verdean community in the United States is regarded as the first immigrant group of African origin to establish itself in the country outside of context of the African slave trade (Halter 2003). Nonetheless, the development of Cape Verdean enclaves in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is deeply entrenched in a globally racialized division of labor and colonial surplus labor utilized for the benefit of extractive capitalism. In specific terms, the economic and infrastructural marginalization that characterized Portuguese colonial authority in Cabo Verde during this period led to a significant portion of the population seeking employment on the ships of the whaling industry that circulated across the Atlantic and stopping in Cabo Verde.

Brito has published three collections of poetry. His first anthology was published in 1966 by Brazilian publisher Edições Ática and titled As Hespéridas e Eu (The Hesperides and I). His second collection, O Vôo das Andorinhas (The Flight of the Swallows), was published in 1982, and comprised of poems he had written over the span of 20 years. The book was notably published in New Bedford, Massachusetts—a residential and cultural hub of Cape Verdean-American and Portuguese-American life in New England. He published his third and most recent collection, A Voz Bucólica do Cipreste (The Bucolic Voice of the Cypress), and translated it into English in the same year.

The poems below are from O Vôo das Andorinhas due not only to the crucial personal period that they span, but most importantly because of their singular nuance in approaching the many intersections of diaspora, postcoloniality, and contemporary empire. Throughout his poetic oeuvre, Brito has engaged in articulating the longue durée modes of power and exploitation that characterized his life in relation to empire, while also rendering poetic modes of resistant knowledge.