Luís Romano de Madeira Melo

Luís Romano de Madeira Melo (10 June 1922 in Ponta do Sol on Santo Antão, Cabo Verde – 22 January 2010 in Brasil) was a bilingual poet, novelist, and folklorist who has written in Portuguese and the Capeverdean Crioulo of Santo Antão.[1]

Luís Romano de Madeira Melo
Born(1922-06-10)10 June 1922
Ponta do Sol, Santo Antão, Cape Verde
Died22 January 2010(2010-01-22) (aged 87)
Brazil
Occupationpoet, novelist, folklorist
NationalityCape Verdean

Biography

Born in the northernmost town of Ponta do Sol in the Capeverdean island of Santo Antão, he prefers to refer to the Capeverdean language as "língua cabo-verdiana". He collaborated along with additional publishers and founded the Morabeza review.[1] An independent idealist, he edited local and international literary reviews.[2]

In the late 1950s, Luís Romano joined the ideas of independence and became member of the PAIGC, captured by PIDE, he went to exile in Senegal, then Mauritania and Morocco where he travelled with an engineer from the salt industry,[3] Algiers and Paris, Romano lived in Brazil for the remainder of his life. He visited his home country in Praia during the country's independence in 1975 and returned to Brazil.[1]

In 1985, he wrote a historical book Cem Anos de Literatura Caboverdiana (Hundred Years of Cape Verdean Literature) relating to the past hundred years of literature of his country, it included notable writers of the time such as Eugénio Tavares, Baltasar Lopes da Silva (Osvaldo Alcântara), Jorge Barbosa Manuel Lopes, Henrique Teixeira de Sousa, Sergio Frusoni, Francisco Xavier da Cruz (B. Leza) and Ovídio Martins as well as the Claridade review in which some of the greatest writers took part, as well as Certeza and Morabeza.

He established the official linguistic material of Kriolander in the whole archipelago. He published his first novel Famintos (Famine, Hunger), about the deaths of several Cape Verdeans during the drought of the 1940s, it was written in 1940, as it was censored at the time, it was published in Brazil in 1962.[4][5] He also wrote poems especially Negrume (Lzimparim)[1] which was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.[6]

One of his poems can be found on the CD Poesia de Cabo Verde e Sete Poemas de Sebastião da Gama (2007) by Afonso Dias.[7]

Publications
  • Famintos, Romance de um povo (1962, novel in Portuguese)
  • Clima (1963): Poems in Portuguese, Crioulo and in French
  • Cabo Verde-Renascença de uma civilização no Atlântico médio (1967): Collection of poems and short-stories in Portuguese and Crioulo.
  • Negrume/Lzimparin (1973): Short stories in Crioulo with translations in Portuguese
  • Cem Anos de Literatura Caboverdiana [Hundred Years of Cape Verdean Literature] (1985) - historical work of national literature from Eugénio Tavares to 1985
  • Ilha (1991): Short stories from "Europafrica" and "Brasilamerica"; in Portuguese and partially in Crioulo)
  • Kriolanda - Estigmas, 1999, São Vicente
  • Kabverd Civilização e Cultura, 2000, Rio de Janeiro

Short-Stories
  • "Nho Zidôr" (in Ilha), "Pasaport Kabverd" (in Ilha), "Daluz" (in Negrume), "Tánha" (in Negrume), "Destino" (in Negrume), "Estórias de Tipêde i Tilôbe" (in Cabo Verde-Renascença de uma civilização...)

Notes
  1. "Luís Romano morreu hoje no Brasil" (in Portuguese). A Semana. 22 January 2010. Archived from the original on 2012-03-03. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
  2. "Luís Romano: patrimônio intelectual caboverdianobrasileiro (Word)" Archived 2014-02-03 at the Wayback Machine
  3. In 1965, he wrote Aspectos do sal, na histoŕia e na antropologia cultural, atraveś dos tempos, Mossoro, 1965, p. 15 (in French)
  4. Chalendar, Pierrete and Gérard, no. 27
  5. SATO, Maria Helena e Romano Luís. O Poeta Além-Vale António Januário Leite. Campinas: Editora Komedi, 2005. p. 208
  6. Catalog at SUDOC (in French)
  7. "Objectos do quotidiano de Cabo Verde mostram-se em Lisboa na "Casa Fernando Pessoa"". A Semana. 25 June 2007. Archived from the original on 3 February 2016. Retrieved 11 February 2016.

Further reading
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