Cesaria

Regardless where you’re from, even when you couldn’t understand her Verdean patois, but felt instead the pathos of her voice, Cesaria Evora belonged to you. Her death this past weekend from physical ailments due to smoking and excessive drinking was not a shock for people who knew her. She ended her concert career just three months prior to her death, hospitalized in Cape Verde — an island archipelago she made famous through her music.

There’s a resonance in my connection with her — a similarity. We come from somewhat the same backgrounds though in different countries, under different circumstances and in different environments in which to flourish. Her mother was a cook and her father a musician. My parents were both cooks and musicians as well — mama sang and dad played slide guitar and violin. She was a late bloomer, and so was I. We both grew up poor, though the isolation of a new American immigrant’s child in America is far different from the people of the Cape Verde islands off the western coast of Africa. Hopes and expectations can rise, no matter who you are, if in the right place at the right time, and eventually Cesaria’s hopes and dreams rose through her music.

There is always something of a ritual playing Cesaria in my house. I need her, especially when cooking big feasts and the day was going to be long. The backup band always provided a groove where I could perform my sous chef duties with ease, cutting, chopping, mincing and singing the morna — the Cape Verde version of the Portuguese fado, making everything fly from my hands in the pulled-back-yet-incessant Verdean rhythms. But it was her voice — that voice — full of weary joy and longing, which made me feel I had a soul companion in the kitchen. She made the tasks of the day sweeter. My feet would shuffle just like Cesaria’s did in her performances, where she was always barefoot, smoking cigarettes, taking shots from an ever-present glass of spirits while the band took their solos and riffed.

But more than ever-present longing and the persistent will to survive weaving through her music, what attracted me most to Cesaria’s music was her aloneness. I felt her pull on the hearts of lonely women everywhere, women waiting on the shores of an island for a love lost, with fading hope and wry recognition of the vicissitudes of life, its hardships.

Perhaps because her early Virgo Sun was close to my descendant I found a kinship with someone who understood the world as a wilderness, a place often hostile to poor women like we were, with nothing more than the music in our hearts to keep us going, to lift us up. Today in honor of her life, I offer for all the cooks, the singers, the players, and all those lonely women and men everywhere in the world still waiting, a very big “Thank you Cesaria,” for being part of this world of ours. You and your music carried us safely home.