São Tomé and Príncipe / All works
Poetry
Versos
Not translated into English
Caetano da Costa Alegre · 1916
Synopsis
The collection gathers the poems the young São Toméan wrote during his eight years in Portugal. In them he speaks of his colour, “My colour is black, it signifies mourning and sorrow”, but he also celebrates black women and his African origins; he sings of his longing for São Tomé, of the feeling of being a stranger in Lisbon and of the pain of a love refused by a white woman, with an irony that at times mocks racism, as in “Eu e os passeantes”.
Context
His friend the journalist Cruz Magalhães gathered these poems in 1916, twenty-six years after their author's death. The book was well received at once and reissued in 1950, in 1951 and in 1994, this last time by the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda; an edition appeared in São Tomé in 2012. Critics place him among the late Romantics, and Naduska Mário Palmeira, in the review Crioula in 2017, judges that the reading of a “painful colour” exaggerates his suffering.
Who it is for
For reading one of the first Portuguese-language African poets to write about the colour of his skin.
Prizes and reception
The collection is regarded as one of the first attempts by an African poet to take up the question of race.