Noémia de Sousa

Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares , or Noémia de Sousa for short (born September 20, 1926 in Catembe , Portuguese East Africa , † December 4, 2002 in Cascais , Portugal ) was a Mozambican poet and journalist.

biography

Origin, youth and education

Noémia de Sousa was of multicultural and multiethnic origins, a very typical feature of families of the middle and upper classes in the then Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Sousa's father was a civil servant, the son of a white Portuguese naval officer and a mestizo mother of Goa-Portuguese, Jewish and Macua origins. Sousa's mother was the daughter of a white German father and a black mother from South Africa.

Noémia de Sousa described her youth as relatively privileged and culturally and socially diverse. She attended a Catholic mission school in Lourenço Marques and was constantly surrounded by Portuguese, Anglophone, Ronga and Swiss Protestant influences. Her mother tongues were Portuguese and Xironga , and later she also learned English and French.

The death of Sousa's father in 1934 brought economic and social decline for the family, so that they had to move from their ancestral home in Catembe to the Laurentine district of Munhuana. Sousa attended a trading course at Escola Técnica so that she could start earning money for the family at the age of 16.

Anti-colonial engagement

Later Noémia de Sousa joined the Associação Africana , a colonial cultural organization for mulattos and mestizos in Lourenço Marques. Sousa was heavily involved in the organization, both literarily and politically. She also got to know the later FRELIMO founder Eduardo Mondlane through the Centro dos Negros , an organization for blacks in the colony . Sousa got involved in the development of the so-called "MUD Juvenil", the youth wing of the Movimento Unidade Democrático , a Portuguese opposition group close to the Communist Party . The group also brought out the magazine Itinerário , among others .

Sousa created her main poetic work between 1948 and 1951. She was in charge of the “women’s page” of the O Brado Africano magazine . Originally a site that dealt exclusively with household and marriage tips for women, Sousa politicized it strongly and created a forum for letters to the editor, poetry, political and intellectual debates as well as poetry and prose. The “women side” alternated with the children's side O Brado Infantil , which Sousa also looked after. She also wrote for Itinerário magazine . She mostly used pseudonyms for her journalistic activities, the pseudonym "Vera Macaia" she used particularly often.

Little by little , the Portuguese secret police PIDE became aware of the magazine and Noémia de Sousa herself. In particular after an article about Eduardo Mondlane's expulsion from neighboring South Africa, a brief imprisonment and further censorship measures, Sousa decided to leave the colony in 1951 to study in Lisbon.

Move to Lisbon

When she arrived in Lisbon, she soon attended the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI) student house . This was originally founded by the Portuguese state in order to "Portuguese" the students coming from the Portuguese overseas provinces. The house developed into the nucleus of the Luso-African liberation and resistance movements, especially in the 1950s, where Sousa met Agostinho Neto , later President of Angola, and Amílcar Cabral , leader of the Guinea-Bissau / Cape-Verdean PAIGC . Sousa republished some of the poems she had previously published in Mozambique in the Mensagem student magazine . In addition to the CEI, Sousa also attended the discussion forums and debating salons at “Tia Andreza” (Aunt Andreza), the aunt of the Saotomé poet Alda do Espírito Santo .

Exile in Paris, return to Portugal

In Portugal, she married the poet and dissident Gualter Soares in the 1950s . Fearing repression by the state, Soares fled to Paris in exile. Sousa followed him there in 1964. In Paris, she first worked for the Moroccan consulate, until she later mainly worked as a journalist. As a writer and journalist, she traveled across Africa on behalf of international news organizations during the wars of independence in several countries.

After separating from her husband, Sousa returned to Portugal in 1973 - before the Carnation Revolution. She continued to work for the Reuters news agency and later for the Portuguese agency Lusa . She stayed in Portugal until her death in late 2002.

plant

Noémia de Sousa was a poet who thematized the relationship between blacks and whites in her poems. Influenced by the Négritude movement, she advocated a separation of European and African ideas. By returning to her own Africanity, she wanted to create an awareness of the fundamental otherness of blacks. A central motif in her poems was that of Mãe-África (Mother Africa). Through her poetry, she had a significant influence on the Mozambican writers of the 1950s.

Significant poems by Noémia de Sousa are:

• África de cabeça aos pés
• Negra
• Sangue negro
• Deixar passar o meu povo

Her poems have appeared in various magazines: Mensagem , Itinerário , Notícias do Bloqueio , O Brado Africano , Moçambique 58 , Vértice (Coimbra) and Sul (Brazil). At the time of her flight to Lisbon in 1951, she left a typewritten notebook called Sangue negro , which contained 43 of her poems. It was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York. She never published her own book. Not until 2001 did she agree to the publication of her works in an anthology entitled Sangue Negro , which was published by the Mozambican Writers' Association .

See also

• Mozambican literature
• List of Mozambican writers

Web links

• "Magaíça"

literature

• Noémia de Sousa: Sangue negro. Maputo, Associação de Escritores Moçambicanos, 2001.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Hilary Owen: Mother Africa, Father Marx: women's writing of Mozambique, 1948–2002 . Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., Cranbury, NJ 2007, ISBN 978-0-8387-5657-7 , pp. 43 ff .
2. ^ Gerhard Schönberger: Mozambican Literature Portuguese Language: Origin and Problems of a National Literature. Frankfurt a. M. 2002. ISBN 3-927884-59-6 , pp. 81f.