Postcolonial Poetry in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique: Some Contemporary Considerations

Postcolonial Poetry in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique:

Some Contemporary Considerations

trans. by Russell G. Hamilton

Focusing on Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique, we intend to reflect on the space occupied by postcolonial poetry in those lusophone African countries. We have in view the contemporary disenchantment resulting from a sense of social dystopias. On the basis of our understanding of the latter, our intention is to investigate whether or not the Cape Verdean, Angolan, and Mozambican works of poetry to be analyzed are instituted as "revolutionary sites" that affirm themselves as literary products of political and aesthetic compromise. In the final analysis, we wish to verify whether, although fragmented, present-day poetic consciousness, expressed in these literatures, is offered up as "spaces of new memories."

In the aftermath of independence euphoria, at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, in their works the new generations of Cape Verdean writers begin to denounce the archipelago's cultural void and verify that political liberation has not ended poverty and hunger. What is delineated is a strong sense of disappointment as relates to the "combatant-celebrative" values that inspired so much of independence poetics. Postindependence euphoria poetry no longer celebrates only collective social patriotism, it also has proceeded to operate with individualist feelings within the context of the existential and universal. What has emerged is a new lyricism, replete with metapoetic constructions that rethink social paths as well as those of poetry itself.

Mirabilis de Veias ao Sol (Mirabilis Foliage in the Sun, which also can be freely translated as Admirable Trends in the Sun), is an anthology, organized by José Luís Hopffer Almada and published in 1991, that brings together works by the Novíssimos Poetas de Cabo Verde (Cape Verde's Most Recent Poets), this being the volume's subtitle, and divulges a lyric output of the period of the post-25^th of April (this being, of course, the date, in 1974, on which the Portuguese fascist dictatorship was overthrown). The unfulfilled promises of social justice after political independence have generated a sense of deception on the part of some. Nevertheless, recalling that even in the desert there grows a plant called mirabilis, the mirabilia generation, i.e, the "admirable generation," emerges and offers itself as poetic resistance to those preceding years of what some think of as "bad literary times." In the anthology's introduction Hopffer Almada defines these youngest poets' profession of faith. Their works, as a whole, undertake to be a profound reflection on the Cape Verde present:

Fustigada pelos ventos (da incompreensão!), pelo sol (da hipocrisia!), pelos tempos vários do mau tempo literário, desse tempo querendo-se vegetação literária. No deserto, cresce a geração mirabílica, feita signo na margem desértica do mar. De velas ao sol. As veias da indagação. As veias alagadas da terra das estradas, da poeira do dia-a-dia, do masapé dos campos do lixo dos caminhos suburbanos, do desespero recoberto de moscas, baratas e outros vermes. As veias loucas do mar, do marítimo lirismo dos dias afogados nos ciúmes dos montes. As veias, veias de vida, de morte, de desespero, das quatro estações místicas do que se medita no refúgio do silêncio. Veias docamponês e da enxada neste coito de séculos com a terra. Ao sol, hipócrita por entre a bruma e os cerros. Sol, signo de luz. Sol que ilumina. Sol que queima e ofusca o caminhar. Sol dependurado da perseverança secular. Mirabilis de veias ao sol. Geração mirabílica indagando o sol. "No Deserto cresce a Mirabilis". Diz o poeta Orlando Rodrigues. "Embora de veias ao sol". Adita Rodrigues de Sousa, para que das imagens do deserto cresçam as palavras da nossa geração...