African women Poetry: memories and witnesses of the lived

Abstract

The article analyzes the poetic production of women, published after the independence of African Portuguese- speaking countries, in 1975. This production recreates not only the memories of historical conflicts that took place in the homeland of their authors, but also reflect on other forms of violence faced by women in the colonial past and still at this present marked by neocolonialism, as well predicted by Amílcar Cabral. We chose, among others, the works É nosso o solo sagrado da terra (1978), de Alda Espírito Santo (São Tomé e Príncipe) e Sangue negro (1951/2001), de Noémia de Sousa (Moçambique). These authors are today one of the bases of the female poetic canon of African writing in Portuguese. This is achieved by the aesthetic values and the combination of these values to the ethical, political and historical-cultural of their time.