Lucia de Carvalho

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, my name is Lucia de Carvalho. I was born in Angola. I live in France and my music has a lot of Brazilian Afro influences.

In the first six years of my life, I lived in Angola and I still have some memories. For instance, at school we had no chairs, no tables. Every day before we start school, we used to sing the Angolan national hymn because it was still a civil war in the country. We had no choice about what was going on and sometimes we had no food at all.

I was telling my little boy when he doesn't want to eat, that when I was young, when I was five years like him, sometimes I... when I used to play, I had a little book with some pictures of cakes and delicious things to eat. So I used to take a little piece of paper, put it in my mouth and say, "Oh, that's delicious. Oh, I like it." You know, just to make my imagination and, you know, I think to be happy in this. My mom used to say when we are in times of war, we cannot choose, you just have to do what you have to do. So, okay, we just did it.

But it was a full of happiness too, because my mother and my sisters – my mother has five girls. And we used to sing a lot together. My big sisters used to sing on the radio. So when they come back home, we sing together. We used to dance together. My mother liked to dance and sing on the street. And it was very... It was very happy, actually.... Full of love.

When my mom decided to go to Portugal and leave Angola, I really don't remember how she told me and my two sisters. I just remember that one day she took us to an airport. It was a kind of military helicopter. When we arrived in Portugal, I was about six. My eldest sister was seven. and the smallest one, three. We used to stay in a kind of hotel, me and my sisters alone, all day long. And she would come back only at night, so it was not a very simple moment.

And what she told us was that she wanted to put us in an orphanage because she was making studies, pastry. She told us that it was better for us, that it would enable us to make studies, and it was a better life for us. So once again, okay. (laughs)

So we went to this orphanage, near Lisbon, and actually when we were there, we didn't like it. It was. "oh no." They want us to work and to wash and to participate in daily, you know, daily things we have to do. But now that I look back, I realize that it was one of the most beautiful years of my life. Because there were a lot of children, we spent a lot of time playing together, once again dancing and singing. It was a little Africa in Portugal, actually. And I think this is where I started, in a way, to build my artistic identity.

When we knew we were to be adopted, my mother and the director told us that we would go to France – to have a better life, to make studies, and to be someone. That's the words that I remember about it. So... Okay! At that time for me, it was just... I was 12. They made a little party to say goodbye and it was... okay we were going to France. For me at that time I was kind of “oh that's great I'm gonna learn French I'm gonna eat big big big breads like they do over there.” And it was for me it was just okay, you go there and I go live here.

France was different. No dancing, and we lived in a very, very small village. My sisters and I, we were the only black girls. And my adopted mother said that before we arrived, people thought that people would go around in the streets with bananas around our heads. And, you know, with nothing on top and things like that, you know They really thought we were savage people who knew nothing. And it made us laugh so much. And it was strange that there was nobody on the streets. It was so silent. You were used to have noise all the time, to have laughs, to have dancing and singing. And now it was so calm.

What was helpful, I think, is that I was adopted with my sisters. So we were really together all the time. And at that school, it was really, it was really cool because teachers and the children, they were really careful with us. As we could not speak French, there was always someone who was, "Oh, do you need something? is it okay?" And it was really... really lovely. And by the end of the school year, I had one of the best grades of my class. Because I was really motivated to learn French. My adopted mother told us, "You cannot speak Portuguese anymore in this house until you speak perfectly French." So, it took us six months to learn French, so it took us six months to learn French. it was really... But of course we used to speak Portuguese when she was not there.

It was just a few years later, two or three years later, that I started to feel I was just living a normal life. I didn't feel like black person. I felt I was just living a normal life as teenagers.

In this little small village where we used to live, they used to make every year a festival of world music. That year, they invited a Brazilian traditional band. And it was really funny because when we saw the band coming, my sister and I, we were kind of "Oh my God !" We were so happy because it reminded us so many things about Angola. Because in Angola, on the radio, we used to hear songs from Brazil, from Cape Verde, from all the Portuguese-speaking countries. So, when we saw this band, playing and singing, we knew a few songs, we were so happy that we were singing, we were dancing.

At the end of the show, the singer came to see us and asked, "Oh, we're looking for some dancers for our band. I saw that you were really happy about our songs, about our dancing. Would you like to be part of our band?” And I was 15 at that time. In France, we cannot work before 16. So I had to wait a year before I started working. Of course, we asked my adoptive mother if she was okay. And it was really great that she agreed.

So when I was 16, I started dancing in this Brazilian traditional music and dancing band. And it was really great. It really started to make my culture, my knowledge about Brazilian traditional rhythms. And it was really great for a teenager. We used to, you know, to go around France. During the week we were at school and during the weekend we were off, on the roads to make some shows. It was really... it was really.... Ah, it was magic. Yeah, it was magic.

It was music actually who enabled me to realize what was going on inside of me, because during all these years when it was a children, a teenager, I was just living, I was just doing what people would tell me to do – to go where people will tell me to go. And after 18 when I was free to do what I want, to go where I wanted to go – this is where I started to realize – “Okay, where do I go? Where do I come from?” And this is when this kind of question started.

And I was – at that time as always I like to sometimes to talk with strangers that you know just some conversation – and there was I was talking with an African guy who has just come from Africa few months. We were talking about things, about the ideas about our vision of the world, and at the end of the conversation, he said “Oh, really you're not African anymore. You're like a Bounty chocolate. You're black outside and you are white inside. I was kind of “Oh, my gosh.” I laughed kind of “hahahah.” But then he made me thought “Oh my god, if I'm not from Africa, where am I from? What am I? Who am I?” And this is where the question started.

I used to write down my feelings. And when we were on tour with this traditional Brazilian band. the words start to came to my head with melodies and rhythm, but at the time I wasn't planning to be a singer.

And two years later, the singer of the band decided to go back to Brazil. So we were looking for someone who would sing for the band. And as I was a dancer I was not supposed to be the singer but we say, “Okay I start singing just until we find the real singer for the band.” And it lasted actually seven years, seven years I was there until I started to make my own project.

Being part of a Brazilian tradition band connected me with this Portuguese part and Brazil as an Afro-traditional music. There was something really praising Angola too, praising mother Africa. I think in a way it helped me to start the connection with this African part of me, but at the time I didn't realize it was these effects. It was just later with my first EP called "Ao Descubrir o Mundo” which means "discovering the world." I put some of these questions in the album. For instance, there was a song called "Quem Seu". It means “Who I Am.” And the song says that “Only the sun knows who I am. I am alone in this road. I don't know where I'm going, but the sun knows.”

And then later I met another African guy. I was telling him, “Well, I'm not African anymore. I don't know who I am. I'm not French. I'm not from Angola." And he said, "Do you know what? You cannot say that. Don't let nobody tell you that because it doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter where you go. Nothing will ever ever change where you are from.”

My first album is called Kuzola. Kuzola means "love" in Kimbundu. It's an Angolan language. By the end of this project, I realized how much I love I had, I lived with the audience and in my life. When we were recording this album in France, in Brazil, in Angola, we went also to Portugal and because it's part of my story. It was a moment in my life that I really felt the need to go back to Angola. It had been 35 years I hadn't gone there. And I was really feeling the need you know just to go there to feel the ground of my country, to see how people live, how people walk in streets, how they talk, how they laugh, how they cry. I wanted to, in a way, to take back a little part of me, a little part of Angola since that guy told me that nothing can change where we come from. I realized, okay, then I can take back a part of my identity. If I go to Angola maybe there was something special that would happen to me. And then, after all these trips, I thought I was going to to change, that something in me would be really radically different. I was going to go to Africa. Something should change.... Actually, when I came back, I was still the same.

But two weeks later, I woke up with this image of a flower. I felt like a flower with the roots from Angola, the stems were Portugal, the flower itself it was a rose for Brazil, and France was the ground that enabled this flower to grow. And just this image gave me a way to see my identity, that it was not cut into pieces, but it was something unique. It was one thing. And after this image I felt okay. This is my identity, I am from everywhere. And now I just felt that there was really no boundaries. We are all the same, well there's something that can really unite us, this energy of love, of Kuzola, who brought the pieces together, all the pieces of my identity together, and made me realize how close I can be from any human being I can meet. It really made me realize that I have a third home, that is a home inside of me. That is, it's a home that does not depend on my nationality, where I am from, where I live, my color, it's something inside every human being. Because love goes beyond the frontiers.

No frontiers, only love.