#Rabida - Parenthesis in conversation with Celeste Fortes

In this podcast, Patti Anahory and César Schofiel Cardoso (Storia na Lugar) join anthropologist Celeste Fortes in conversation on the concept of ‘rabida’ as it relates conditions of islandness and the bidon, a barrel filled with products sent from the diaspora, which becomes a mobile unit of aspirations, a spatial and temporal object of desire(s/d) commodities and geographies.
Rabida – a term in the Cabo-Verdean language can be loosely translated to turning, rotating, flipping and is linked to notions of circulation, movement, transformation and valuation. It is a concept that crosses temporalities and spatialities. The bidon becomes a link between here and elsewhere/s, complicating the oftentimes fixed boundaries of island geography and imaginings.
The expression “Si ka badu ka ta biradu”, an ode to Cabo-verdean emigration, is a double entendre meaning both “If one does not leave one cannot return” and “If one does not leave one cannot be transformed”. The expression is a reference to aspirations of social-cultural, economic mobility.
Together, the notions and the motion of turning and returning also alludes to a process of change, inherent transformation. This turn is deeply connected to the diaspora and its promises, those of transformation and of homecoming. In the current moment of restricted mobility and a time of reconsidering geographies of value, perhaps the expression should be updated to “si ka fikadu ka ta rabidadu”: if one does not stay, one can’t trade/ revalue.
Anahory and Cardoso discuss with Fortes her documentary work, in which she uses the bidon as the vehicle that connects those who stayed and those who are far away. The bidon transports affections and brings “things” sent by those who managed to make it far away, a symbolic and material embrace, which is also feminine, and which shortens distances and keeps alight the commitment of connection between here and there.