Antonio Jacinto

António Jacinto do Amaral Martins , short António Jacinto (born September 28, 1924 in Luanda , Portuguese West Africa , † June 23, 1991 in Lisbon , Portugal ) was an Angolan poet, storyteller and political activist. He is known under the pseudonym Orlando Távora . He is one of the most famous authors in the country and is an example of the generation of authors from the 1950s and 1960s who dealt with the creation of their own Angolan identity ("Angolanidade") and thus in the resistance against the Portuguese colonial regime.

Life

Youth and education

António Jacinto was born on September 28, 1924 in Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola. Both his father, José Trindade Martins, and his mother, Maria Cecilia Amaral, came from the northern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes and had moved to the colony in 1912. Jacinto's father worked there as a trader and businessman. Jacinto and his family grew up first in the village of Cambombo and then in Golungo Alto in the Angolan province of Cuanza Norte . The family later moved to Luanda, where Jacinto attended Liceu Salvador Correia Secondary School . During his school days Jacinto is said to have begun to devote himself to poetry and literature, among other things he is said to have collected Oral Angolan history.

Editor of Mensagem and Cultura

After finishing school, Jacinto began to work in the cultural sector of the Regional Association of Angolan Born ( Associação Regional dos Naturais de Angola , ANANGOLA), together with other intellectuals such as Humberto da Sylvan and Leston Martins . The three were the main initiators of Mensagem magazine , of which they published four issues between 1951 and 1952. The magazine is regarded as a turning point in the intellectual discourse about an Angolan identity and, among other things, led to the already existing, non-Portuguese culture of Angola being valued more strongly. This was particularly crucial for the Angolan literary scene. Intellectuals such as Viriato da Cruz , Agostinho Neto and Alda Lara took part. As part of ANANGOLA, Jacinto established connections to other Portuguese-speaking intellectual movements and their magazines, such as the Mozambican Itinerário , the Portuguese neorealists from Coimbra around Augusto dos Santos Abranches , and the Brazilian magazine Sul from Florianópolis .

Due to increasing tensions within ANANGOLA about the question of political orientation towards Angola's independence, Jacinto left the organization and joined the Sociedade Cultural de Angola , and began to publish in their magazine Cultura . The Cultura II with their 13 issues from 1957 to 1961, the discourse-defining role was assumed by the Mensagem . Together with others, such as Uanhenga Xitu and Agostinho Neto, Jacinto was involved in the Movimento dos Novos Intelectuais de Angola, which he co-founded .

Fight for the independence of Angola

In 1955 Viriato da Cruz, Ilídio Machado , Mário António and António Jacinto founded the “Communist Party of Angola” ( Partido Comunista Angolano ), which one year later became the “Party of the United Struggle of the Africans of Angola” ( Partido da Luta Unida dos Africanos de Angola ). In 1956, the party joined the newly formed popular movement for the liberation of Angola ( Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola , MPLA). Because of his political activities, the Portuguese secret police arrested PIDE Jacinto for the first time in 1959 - along with numerous other Angolan nationalists.

After he was released, he was arrested again in 1961 after a group of nationalists around the MPLA had attacked several colonial institutions on February 4, 1961 and officially started Angola's liberation struggle. After a trial in 1963, Jacinto was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in the concentration camp in Tarafal (Cape Verde), where other political writers such as Luandino Vieira , Uanhenga Xitu and António Cardoso were also held.

After an international campaign for his release, the regime decided to release him in 1972 - with the obligation to stay in Lisbon for at least five years. However, he fled to Algeria, where he joined the MPLA, whose members were trained there by Algerian nationalists. From then on rose in the party, among other things was a member of the central committee of the MPLA. After Angola's independence in the course of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, the party appointed Jacinto Secretary of the National Council of Culture and Deputy Minister of Education ( Secretário de Estado da Cultura ), and later Minister of Culture. He was a co-founder of the Angolan writers' association União dos Escritores Angolanos , which the Angolan state sponsored authors in Angola.

death

In 1990 António Jacinto retired from politics for reasons of age. He died in Lisbon on June 23, 1991 and was buried in Luanda.

Literary work

António Jacinto's work is a special example of the political, anti-colonial intellectuality of Angola in the 1950s and 1960s, which dealt with how an “Angolan identity” could be created. He belongs to the so-called second generation of authors in Angola. In his poems and stories, Jacinto dealt with the realities of colonialism in Angola, including forced labor, racial discrimination, illiteracy and widespread poverty, especially in the Musseques , the slums of Luanda. He saw himself as the "voice of the voiceless".

As early as 1946 Jacinto wrote his first fictional work entitled Vôvô Bartolomeu , which was only published considerably later, around 1960, in the anthology Contistas Angolanos of the student house Casa de Estudantes do Império. The work impressively shows how Jacinto dealt with the contradictions of Portuguese colonialism in Angola as early as 1946, and also expanded the Portuguese vocabulary to include numerous words and expressions that mainly came from the local Angolan language Kimbundu .

In 1953 Jacinto published numerous anti-colonial poems in the anthology Caderno de Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa , edited by Francisco José Tenreiro and Mário Pinto de Andrade of the Lisbon student house Casa dos Estudantes do Império , which had developed into a center of the anti-colonial student movement. The poets Noémia de Sousa (from Mozambique), Alda do Espírito Santo (from São Tomé and Príncipe) and Agostinho Neto (from Angola) published in the collective association.

His best-known work is Sobreviver em Tarrafal de Santiago , an anthology of poems in which he describes his imprisonment in the Tarrafal concentration camp and deals with his suffering. Albert von Brunn writes that Jacinto's work is also “[...] an occasion for the introspection and search for identity of a white African poet who fights for the freedom of his native Angola.” The anthology, created between 1964 and 1975, was published in 1985 by Jacinto. For this he received the Angolan National Prize for Literature in 1985. On October 3, 1986, Johannes Rau , board member of the Society for the Promotion of Literature from Africa, Asia and Latin America, presented the Noma Prize for African Literature to António Jacinto, represented by Agostinho André Mendes de Carvalho , then President of the Frankfurt Book Fair in the press center of the Frankfurt Book Fair Angolan Writers' Association. According to von Brunn, the award was "[...] both a tribute to a hitherto little known and hardly translated poet as well as recognition for a publishing achievement under the most difficult of conditions."

The Angolan state media institute Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco has been awarding the literary prize in his honor ( Prémio de Literatura António Jacinto ) since 1993 .

Published works

Edited volumes / complete works

Jacinto published his poems in numerous anthologies, including:

• Antologia dos Poetas de Angola (1950), Caderno da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1953), Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1958), Contistas Angolanos (1960), Estrada Larga ( undated ), Poesia Africana di Rivolta (1969 ), Antologia da Poesia Pré-Angolana (1976), No Reino da Caliban. Antologia Panorâmica da Poesia Africana de Expressão Portuguesa II (1976).

In addition, he published the following complete works:

• Poemas (1961/1985)
• Vovô Bartolomeu (republished in 1979, first published in 1960)
• Em Kiluange do Golungo (1984)
• Sobreviver in Tarrafal de Santiago (1985)
• Prometeu (1987)
• Fábulas de Sanji (1988)

Well-known poems

• O grande desafio
• Poema da alienação
• Carta dum contratado
• Monangamba
• Canto interior de uma noite fantástica
• Era uma vez
• Bailarina negra
• Ah! Se pudésseis aqui ver poesia que don't have!

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Albert von Brunn: Review: Sobreviver em Tarrafal de Santiago by António Jacinto . In: Iberoamericana . tape 1 , no. 33 , 1988, pp. 66-68 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Jessica Falconi: Jacinto, António . In: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Eds.): Dictionary of African Biography . tape 3 . Oxford Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-538207-5 , pp. 183 ff .
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} António Jacinto do Amaral Martins. In: ueangola.com. União dos Escritores Angolanos, accessed January 13, 2019 (Portuguese). 
4. ↑ James, W. Martin .: Historical dictionary of Angola . 2nd Edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2011, ISBN 978-0-8108-7458-9 , pp. 85 f .
5. ^ Stuart Rees: Passion for Peace: Exercising Power Creatively . UNSW Press, Sydney 2003, ISBN 0-86840-750-X , pp. 93 .
6. ↑ Fred S. Moramarco / Al Zolynas (eds.): The poetry of men's lives: an international anthology . University of Georgia Press, Athens 2004, ISBN 0-8203-2649-6 , pp. 358 .