Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Birago Diop's Poetic Contribution to the Ideology of Negritude

2002; Indiana University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/ral.2002.33.4.101

1527-2044

Sana Camara,

African history and culture studies

In his only collection of poems, Leurres et lueurs, Senegalese author Birago Diop (1906-89) offers a dense and penetrating poetry on the states of consciousness of the poetic "I" and on African ontological conception, two thematic axes that reveal a paradox in the writer. Birago Diop's poetic activity was marked from its very beginnings primarily by an eloquence found in the French masters, such as Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. As a Romantic poet, Birago Diop did not seek to diverge from his impassiveness before the exactions of the colonial regime: his sensitivity was trained instead upon the profundities of the "I" immersed in the sentimental life; thus his first compositions define the poet plunged in burning sorrow caused by disappointments in love. His inattention to the dramatic issues that affected his people, and preoccupied his literary confreres, therefore caused Birago Diop to be a marginal poet, until he finally understood that he had to make amends for the shortcomings in his poetic genius by turning to his own cultural heritage.