“Take everything from us, but leave us the music!”: The testimonial nature in the poetry of Noémia de Souza

Abstract

Noémia de Souza's poetry presents traits that reveal themselves as an instrument of denunciation of the system and the violence suffered by the African people. Most of his texts were written between 1948 and 1951, a period marked by blatant racism and his exile in Lisbon (1951). In this context, the author assumes a fundamental role for Mozambican Literature, not only as a black woman who occupies a space dominated by whites, but as a writer who speaks about exploitation, racism and brutality against her people and their culture. His writings are presented as a symbol of resistance and testimony against the current power and in favor of the black minority. Based on the writing of this poet, specifically the poem “Súplica” written around 1951, during the Portuguese fascist regime of António Salazar, we aim, a priori, to understand the context of the formation of Portuguese-language African Literatures, focusing on that of Mozambique , and subsequently, outline an analysis from the perspective of testimony theory, pointing to the aspects present in the poem that reveal how “historically silenced groups and ethnicities appear suffocated” (Pachêco de Souza, 2024, p. 20). For the construction we propose, regarding Portuguese language literature, we are based on Souza e Silva (1996); Meloni and Franco (2015); Fonseca and Moreira (2017); And regarding the Testimony Theory, we use Pachêco de Souza (2024); Salgueiro (2010) and Ferraz (2022).