Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

When I began to prepare the lecture recollections came flooding back. Tashkent, now the capital of the Islamic Republic of Uzbekistan, is a most enchanting city and it provided a magnificent architectural backdrop to the gathering of writers from Africa and from Asia.

I was speaking to a class of undergraduates and thought that, rather than speaking about well-established francophone or anglophone writers such as Senghor, Chinua Achebe or Amos Tutola, I would concentrate on the less well-known writers from former Portuguese colonies, particularly Mozambique.

Fortunately, just before arriving in Philadelphia I had bumped into Marcelino Dos Santos, poet, freedom fighter and, following Mozambique's independence, a minister in the government.

I had known Dos Santos for many years and together we attended many writers' conferences, in Cairo, Tokyo, Bali and other places.

Portuguese colonies tended to produce poets rather than prose writers to the extent that the history of poetry in Angola and Mozambique is in essence the history of national struggle. Both poetry and the national struggle grew from the same roots -- premised in the colonial socio-economic oppression that sought to efface the African personality and culture.

The freedom fighters carried a pen in one hand and a gun in the other. They fought, and they wrote poetry, and it was in the latter that the hopes and frustrations of an entire generation of Africans were articulated. In Mozambique Noemia de Sousa, Jose Rui Nogar and Gowenha Vaslents produced what they described as subversive poetry.

Poetry suggested themes which were to be essential to the revolution; it aspired to freedom and rediscovered African history and culture.

"Sangue Negro", by Noemia de Sousa, addresses Africa in a beautiful manner:

O my Africa, mysterious, natural/ My violated virgin/ My mother/ How I was for so long exiled/ from you, alienated, distant, egocentric/ Through those streets of the town pregnant with strangers/ My mother forgive me/ I cannot, CANNOT deny/ The black blood, barbaric blood/ Which you passed on to me.

This poem was one of many that Marcelino Dos Santos recited to me during an Afro-Asian Writers' Conference held on the beautiful Indonesian island of Bali.

As we sat on the magnificent sands, looking out towards the ocean, he would begin reciting, often chanting the lyrics first in Portuguese and then in English. Later, I remember, we were to publish many of these poems in English translations by Nihad Salem, among them the following extract from a much longer poem:

Barefoot child/ Child of my native land/ Green is the world and bitter too/ In its desperate loin cloth,/ And the Negro bent upon the sand./ A black child just like you/ Was murdered/ Broken/ On the fleshless mire/ Of racial hatred./ A black child/ Just like you/ Whose eyes were green/ As the rising sun/ Whose whistle was purple/ As that of a bird at dawn./ A black child/ Who ran barefoot/ Just like you/ Opening his arms/ To the sonorous arch of dawn.