São Tomé and Príncipe / All works
Poetry · A way to begin
É nosso o solo sagrado da terra
Not translated into English
Alda do Espírito Santo · 1978
Synopsis
Poems written during the colonial period, from the author's youth until 1970, and gathered after independence. They speak of the women of the island, the mother who sells fish at dusk to feed the little ones, the child who carries his brother on his back, the contract workers torn from their land and fixed on a plantation. Facing the “sharks of the seas”, the masters of capital, the man of the tropics raises his hands to buy back the land. The author opens the book with the slogan of total independence.
Context
The collection appeared in Lisbon in 1978 from Ulmeiro, a small independent publisher, with the subtitle “poetry of protest and struggle”; it followed a first book that the author had published herself in São Tomé two years earlier. In 1975 she had written the words of the national anthem. Recent studies read in it the bodies of the women and children of the islands, painted without exoticism, and the denunciation of contract labour and of the monoculture of cocoa and coffee; one section brings together poems from her youth.
Who it is for
Poems in Portuguese, in a direct language, often close to song; no French translation of the collection.
Prizes and reception
Author of the archipelago's anthem, she is studied in Brazilian universities as a major voice of São Toméan poetry.
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