Poetry
Sangue negro
Not translated into English
Noémia de Sousa · 1951
Synopsis
Forty-six poems, from “Notre voix” to the scattered pieces. In “Si tu veux me connaître”, the poet declares herself African from head to foot, marked by slavery; in “Laisse passer mon peuple”, sitting at her table, she hears the Black voices of America on the radio and begins to write; the “Poème de l'enfance lointaine” goes back to the games of Catembe with friends of every condition, and “Shimani” to a poor friend whom the narrator's doll sets dreaming. Other pieces speak of the mother, the land and the condition of the Black brothers under colonial rule.
Context
Written between 1948 and 1951, the poems appeared one by one in O Brado Africano and in journals, among them the Brazilian Sul; mimeographed copies circulated them in the Portuguese colonies of Africa. They were only gathered in a volume in 2001, in Maputo, from the writers' association, in six parts. The collection was reissued in Maputo in 2011, published in Brazil in 2016 and translated into French in 2024.
Who it is for
In Portuguese, mixed with Ronga words; translated into French. The blues and jazz run through several poems, often spoken in the first person.
Prizes and reception
Its author is called in Mozambique the mother of the country's poets; her poems, copied out by hand well before the book, carried the anticolonial literary movement.
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