Pigs in Delirium

First published in Cabo Verde in 1998, Jorge Carlos Fonseca's Pigs in Delirium (Porcos em Delírio) charted and continues to chart a new vision not just for Cabo-Verdean poetry, but for all of Lusophone poetry. Pigs in Delirium 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. 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, Porcos em Delírio 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. 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. Pigs in Delirium marks the English-language debut of an essential postcolonial African voice.