Women, Bodies, and Nation in Angolan Poetry of the 1950s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250377 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Phyllis Peres (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-45 |
| Publication date | 2007-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/ral.2007.38.1.35 |
| OpenAlex | W1970895097 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
Pactos, Outras Ficwqes (2002), Laura Padilha argues that until the 1980s, there was a profound silencio na representagao 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 Espirito Santo from Sdo Tome e Principe, and Noemia 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 abovementioned women poets who emerged in the 1950s as part of revindicatory literary-cultural movements in the then Portuguese colonies and among students from the ultramar2 who were associated with the Casa dos Estudantes do Imperio3 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, Ant6nio Cardoso, Mairio Ant6nio, 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 Ant6nio Assis Juinior (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
Art · Literature · Poetry · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies · History · Literature, Culture, and Criticism
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2023 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |