Cesária Évora

Cesária Évora: The Barefoot Voice of Cape Verde

Midway through a concert she would stop singing, walk to a small table set on the stage, sit down, light a cigarette and pour herself a drink while the band played on without her. No other performer of her international standing did anything like it. It was not provocation; it was a habit carried unaltered out of the bars of Mindelo, where she had sung for thirty years before the world had heard of her. By the time she died, her face was on the 2,000-escudo note.

The Port That Made Her

Évora was born on 27 August 1941 in Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, then a possession of colonial Portugal. Her father Justino was a violinist; he died when she was a child, leaving her mother Joana, a cook and maid, to raise seven children alone. There was no money and little schooling. Around the age of ten Évora was placed in an orphanage, while a grandmother took a share of raising her.

Mindelo was the accident that decided her life. A deep-water port on the Atlantic crossing, it received ships, sailors and foreign music continuously, and it kept an unusual density of bars for a town of its size. At sixteen, drawn in by a relationship with a guitarist, Évora began singing in them. She sang morna, the slow national lament of the archipelago, and coladeira, its faster and more sardonic cousin. She became a headliner at the Café Royal, and her voice reached the islands through Radio Mindelo. Across the 1950s and 1960s she acquired small followings in Portugal and the Netherlands, recorded songs for radio and released two singles. None of it paid.

The Dark Years

By her own account the 1970s were her "dark years." Three marriages had ended. She was raising three children, of whom only two reached adulthood, on an income music could not supply. Alcoholism, depression and malnutrition closed in, and against the background of Cape Verde's convulsive passage to independence she simply stopped performing. Admirers in Mindelo passed round collections to keep her alive. She was, in the most literal sense, a local singer who had failed.

Rediscovered at Forty-Seven

The return began in 1985, when the Organization of Cape Verdean Women invited her to Portugal to sing on an anthology called *Mudjer* — "Woman." In 1987 she toured the United States with the Cape Verdean singer Bana, and at Bana's restaurant in Lisbon she was heard by the producer José "Djô" da Silva. Da Silva signed her to his label, Lusafrica, and in 1988 released her first album, *La Diva aux Pieds Nus* — The Barefoot Diva. She was forty-seven. *Distino di Belita* followed in 1990, *Mar Azul* in 1991.

Miss Perfumado

The record that broke her open was *Miss Perfumado*, released in 1992. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, established her in France and Portugal, and carried her to the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and then to stages in Brazil, Canada, the United States, across Africa and throughout Europe. *Cesária*, issued in 1995 through the American label Nonesuch, brought international critical standing and the first of six Grammy nominations. *Cabo Verde* (1997), *Café Atlantico* (1999), *São Vicente di Longe* (2001) and *Voz d'Amor* (2003) followed; *Voz d'Amor* won the Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album in 2004. *Rogamar* came in 2006, *Nha Sentimento* in 2009.

The honours accumulated late and quickly. In 1997 the KORA All African Music Awards gave her Best Artist of West Africa, Best Album and the Merit of the Jury, and added a second Merit of the Jury for lifetime achievement in 2010. Portugal made her a Grand-Cross of the Order of Prince Henry in 1999; France gave her the Legion of Honour in 2009. She became a World Food Programme ambassador in 2004 and travelled on a Cape Verdean diplomatic passport as her country's cultural ambassador.

What She Actually Sang

Évora sang almost entirely in Cape Verdean Creole, occasionally in Spanish, and made no concession to listeners who did not understand it. The songs concerned love, homesickness, nostalgia and the condition of a people scattered by emigration, along with the colonial and slaving history that scattered them. Britannica describes the morna as a "sorrowful emotion-charged" chronicle of the country's "long and bitter history of isolation, slave trade, and population loss due to emigration" — which serves equally as a summary of her repertoire. Her material came from Cape Verdean composers: Manuel de Novas, Nando Da Cruz, Amandio Cabral, and her uncle Francisco Xavier da Cruz, among the most prolific writers the islands produced. Her band, led by Nando Andrade, consisted entirely of younger Cape Verdean men.

The Image and the Woman

The bare feet were merchandised into a symbol of solidarity with the island poor, and Évora declined to endorse the story. By her own explanation she had once taken her shoes off on stage because her feet hurt — the audience filled them with tips — and she went on doing it because it was comfortable and because it matched the title of her first record. She refused to supply anything more elaborate. On stage she wore a boubou. She bought jewellery from people who needed to sell it, and wore that too. She gave up drinking in 1994 for the sake of her health and never gave up cigarettes.

Why Cesária Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to her interpretation, not her invention, and the distinction matters. Évora wrote almost none of what she sang; the songs belonged to de Novas, to Amandio Cabral, to her uncle Francisco Xavier da Cruz. What she supplied was a particular refusal. Morna is built for pathos, and a singer can wring it dry; Évora declined to. She sang low, level and unhurried, withholding the ornament and the climactic lift the material invites, and let the grief sit in the words rather than in the delivery. Critics reached repeatedly for Billie Holiday and Édith Piaf to describe the effect — two singers likewise praised for doing less than they could. The stage table, the cigarette, the flat refusal to perform an emotion she was not feeling, were all of a piece with the singing.

The counter-case is real and should be stated. She was not a composer, an arranger or an innovator. Her records were shaped substantially by José da Silva and by arrangers who framed her voice for European ears, and the later albums drift toward a smoothed international sound. Her instrument was not large, and its limits are audible. What she had was an unfakeable authority over a repertoire she had sung nightly for thirty years, and the discipline not to oversell it. Whether that is genius or the highest grade of craft is a fair argument. It is certainly not a trick that can be taught.

Legacy

She died in Mindelo on 17 December 2011, aged seventy, of respiratory failure and hypertension, after cardiac trouble that had included a stroke during a 2008 Australian tour and a heart attack and surgery in 2010. She had retired that September. A posthumous album, *Mãe Carinhosa*, appeared in 2013.

Cape Verde put her on its stamps and its 2,000-escudo banknote, and in 2012 named Mindelo's airport for her, where a three-metre statue by Domingos Luisa stands. Stromae recorded "Ave Cesaria" in her honour in 2014. Caetano Veloso named her an inspiration, and Madonna credited a meeting with her as a starting point for the 2019 album *Madame X*. She had done what no Cape Verdean had managed: made a language spoken by half a million people legible, as feeling, to everyone else.