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Women, Bodies, and Nation in Angolan Poetry of the 1950s

2007; Indiana University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ral.2007.0016

1527-2044

Phyllis Peres,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

Women, Bodies, and Nation in Angolan Poetry of the 1950s Phyllis Peres The Silence of Women's Bodies In her article on three lusophone African women poets reprinted in Novos Pactos, Outras Ficções (2002), Laura Padilha argues that until the 1980s, there was a profound "silêncio na representação do corpo feminino" 'silence in the representation of women's bodies' among women writers. This silence extended even to consecrated and relatively prolific poets such as Alda Lara from Angola, Alda do Espírito Santo from São Tomé e Príncipe, and Noémia de Sousa from Mozambique (175). Additionally, this silence contrasts sharply with the gritos (cries or shouts) of postcolonial women writers such as Paula Tavares from Angola whose poetic paths express women's bodies and sensuality within highly contextualized sociopolitical verse.1 Interestingly enough, the poetic gritos of anticolonialism and oftentimes nationhood were expressed in varying degrees in the works of the above-mentioned women poets who emerged in the 1950s as part of revindicatory literary-cultural movements in the then Portuguese colonies and among students from the "ultramar"2 who were associated with the Casa dos Estudantes do Império3 in Lisbon. And, more important for this study, representations of women's bodies are not absent in the writings of lusophone male authors and, indeed, form essential parts of the contested cultural and poetic terrains, particularly in 1950s Angola. This present work will analyze those oftentimes ambivalent and contradictory representations and tropes of women's bodies in 1950s Angolan poetry by such important writers as Agostinho Neto, Viriato da Cruz, António Cardoso, Mário António, and Luandino Vieira. These writers, and others, whose poetry and prose are at the nexus of emergent Angolan literary expressions of the period, were linked to several key literary-cultural movements that Ana Mafalda Leite argues were essential to the "revival of African and Creole cultural expression" in Angola (142). Creolized writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries oftentimes were melioristic rather than resistant, and until the late 1940s and early 1950s, the notion of Angola as a "nation" did not figure in literary or journalistic critiques. Literary works by writers such as António Assis Júnior (1877–1960) point to a conscious assimilation of Portuguese cultural values, but also are marked by aspects of the same cultural ambivalences that characterized that period's urban creolized society as a whole. This is not to say that writers such [End Page 35] as Assis Júnior were not equally conscious of their own ambiguous subjectivity, but that these creolized patterns emerged in spite of assumed textual positions of cultural purism, separatism, or even proto-nationalism. More important, even in the writings of this period, women's bodies oftentimes became the literary battlefields, particularly evident in Assis Júnior's 1935 groundbreaking novel O Segredo da Morta (The Dead Woman's Secret), in which the title character literally embodies the contested cultural terrain. The literary-cultural movements of the late 1940s and 1950s may have had some roots in an "African and creole revival" but were centered in more explicitly political motives. Russell Hamilton, in Literatura Africana, Literatura Necessária, traces the contested history of these movements whose initial grito was "Vamos descobrir Angola" or "Let's Discover Angola."4 Hamilton contends that such cultural manifestations, whether those of the late 1940s musical group Ngola Ritmos or of the emergent literary journals of the early 1950s, in fact were metaphors for nationalist sentiments and in certain cases actually shields for clandestine political activities (80). Of course, this is not surprising, particularly given the strategies of acculturation developed by Portugal beginning in the 1930s with the consolidation of the fascist New State (Estado Novo) regime of António Salazar. The colonial policies of the New State promoted wide-scale Portuguese settlement particularly in Angola and Mozambique and were intended to erase the boundary between empire and an imagined panlusitanian nation. The failure of that colonial strategy left the boundary intact, as indeed in practice it always was, but more important, for Angolan writers of the late 1940s and 1950s, that boundary was not between empire and...