Some episodes of José Afonso’s life are told in a Portuguese-Galician comic strip, by Teresa Moure and Maria João Worm, published this week, when the 94th anniversary of the birth of the Portuguese singer is marked.
“Balada do Desterro – Zeca Afonso” comes out with the seal of the Portuguese publisher Tradisom, but results from a partnership with the Galician publisher aCentral Folque, from which the idea of the editorial project came, as editor José Moças told Lusa.
The book was written by Galician author Teresa Moure, a lecturer at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and designed by Portuguese Maria João Worm.
In the last pages of “Balada do Desterro” it is explained that this book romanticizes the life of José Afonso: “Everything written in a fiction is necessarily false. It can be supported documentally by research books, by events that really happened, by interviews, by the memories of the living, but it is false. It mentions real figures, but it is false. It tries to follow the accuracy of what happened, but it is doomed to be false.”
The narrative follows a chronology of José Afonso’s life, but is balanced mainly between the relationship with Africa, in particular Mozambique, and Galicia, in Spain, whose appreciation for the music of the Portuguese singer remains to this day.
Crossing fiction and reality, the authors of this comic strip also underline the female figure in the musician’s life, namely with reference to the two daughters he had with two women, or with the illustration of the songs “Teresa Torga” and “The seven women of Minho”.
With a visual work that resembles a shadow theater, “Balada do Desterro” also refers to the censorship of the Estado Novo, the imprisonment of José Afonso in Caxias, the revolution of April 25, 1974, the importance of “Grândola, Vila Morena”, both in Portugal and in Galicia.
In the book, José Afonso is portrayed as having a “melancholic character”, who lived the concerts as “if placed in a shop window for public contemplation”, who loved Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Jacques Brel, but who hated “fashions and modernities”.
In the presentation note of “Balada do Desterro”, Teresa Moure and Maria João Worm say they feel “fascination for that man who sang political causes”.
“But, between words and silhouettes, both weave a net to support a Zeca more intimate than his comrades usually remember,” says Tradisom.
José Afonso was born on August 2, 1929, in Aveiro, began singing while a student in Coimbra, having recorded the first records in the early 1950s with fados from Coimbra.
Considered an inescapable name in 20th century Portuguese music, José Afonso recorded, among others, the albums “Cantigas do Maio” (1971), “Venham Mais Cinco” (1973), “Coro dos Tribunais” (1974) and “Com as Minhas Tamanquinhas” (1976), which have been reissued.
Author of “Grândola, Vila Morena”, one of the songs chosen as the password for the April 1974 Revolution, José Afonso died on February 23, 1987, in Setúbal, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
