| Guest at the ilb 2002
Pedro Rosa Mendes was born in Cernache do Bonjadrin in Portugal in 1968 and worked, after his jurisprudence studies, as a journalist, including for the Portuguese newspaper 'P�blico'. He initially became well-known through his reports on the war in Zaire, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia for which he was twice awarded the 'Feature-of-the-year-Prize'. With 'Ba�a dos Tigres' (Engl: Tiger Bay) he presented his first novel in 1998 which was voted as book of the year 2000 by the Portuguese P.E.N.-Club.
The book describes the three and a half month journey which Mendes made in 1997 from Angola to Mozambique. With this, he travelled through a part of Africa which only a few months earlier had been left by the UN troops, previously stationed here, because of the lack of security. On the tracks of the explorers Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens, Mendes travelled over 10,000 km of the continent between the two former Portuguese colonies. The civil wars after independence from the former colonial power left behind, particularly in Angola, areas where there were more mines than people. Not only the landscape but also the political relationship was a testimony to the ravages of war. As he was held captive for a while during his travels he had to personally experience the fear like many before him of vanishing without a trace.
With this journey, Mendes depicted the people, whose individual destinies are often not visible in the television pictures which are well-known to us. With this he never falls into a kitsch, pitiful view of the "Third World" but instead guards the dignity of the people he meets. Fictional stories are mixed with real encounters and so indirectly reflect the very personal view and way of experiencing of the author. Part travel report in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and part novel and script, 'Ba�a dos Tigres' moves between the genres. A linguistic cartography of Africa is created which is literarily convincing. The author can�t reach the 'Tiger Bay' during his travels, which has been cut off from the rest of Angola by war and destruction. This 'Tiger Bay' becomes a wish and fantasy picture which clearly shows the restrictions which are imposed on such a literary access. Pedro Rosa Mendes initially saw his path from war reporter to writer with mixed feelings.
"I was scared of the change. It was a great challenge but the result was then very satisfying. It was nice to depict deep reflections about all these things which you can�t write in a newspaper report, for example, your own view of the war, how you cope with the violence and the fear and how you describe the living together of people in all this atrocity. You can�t explain all this in a newspaper."
Rosa Mendes worked on "Waystation", a project about the situation in West and Central Africa, with foto journalist Wolf Böwig. "Schwarz Licht" (2006) is the first part of this documentary work. In he same year his novel "Lenin Oil" was published. Rosa Mends lives in Lissabon.
� international literature festival berlin | 
