Submerged Saudade: Aspirating Fado’s Shipwrecked Slaves

Born in the port of Lisbon in the early 19th century, fado is the quintessential music of Portugal, and was added in 2011 to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The word fado means “doom” or “dreadful fate,” and its songs are alive with melancholy portraits of terrible seascapes and desperate sailors facing death on fragile boats. This paper takes a perennial favorite, “Naufrágio,” as a starting point for thinking about the relation between shipwreck and aspiration. Suffused with what the Portuguese call saudade, a famously untranslatable emotion described as a mixture of grief and acceptance of cruel fate, or of nostalgia and unrelieved longing, the lyrics throb with the narrator’s frustrated desire, invoking a lost hope that has gone down with the ship. (“Vai morrendo o meu sonho/Vai morrendo dentro do navio.”) If shipwreck is cast as a symbol of failure, thwarted ambition and aspiration, the drowned dream is no mere metaphor. My point here is to underline the strangely cargo-less-ness of the crafts that populate fado, and resurface the myriad ways that these ships are not empty vessels. Reading the História trágico-marítima(1736), with special attention to Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque vindo do Brazil, I ask, paraphrasing Douglass, What is shipwreck to a slave? This dramatic account of the 1565 shipwreck of a heroic and pious sea captain, who battles storms, French pirates, starvation and madness to make it home to Lisbon, is steeped in many classic themes of the genre. Mentioned only once, in a brief list of survivors at its close is “uma escrava de Jorge de Albuquerque, por nome Antonia, e outros escravos mais.” In this reflection on Antonia’s fate, I aspirate, or “put breath back into the body” (Christina Sharpe) of the shipwrecked slaves submerged in fado’s narrative.