Noémia de Sousa ‘I Will Rise Lucid’ – A Translation

You beat me and threaten me 

Now I lift my enlighted head

And scream: ‘Enough!’(…) Condemning me to eternal darkness

Now my African soul is illuminated

And discovered the fraud and screamed, screamed a thousand

times:_’Enough!’.

You put me in this cage and now you want to crucify me

Now I’ve drawn the rosy tint from my eyes 

And screamed: ‘Enough!’ 

Condemning, me to eternal darkness now my African 

Soul is illuminated and discovered the fraud 

And screamed, screamed a thousand times: _Enough!_

The cross-eyed executioner

With sharpened cannibal teeth,

And brutal orangutan hands: 

Come with your truncheon and threats, 

Lock me in your cage and crucify me, 

Bring your instruments of torture 

And amputate my limbs, one by one…

Wring out my eyes and condemn me to eternal darkness… 

As I, more than ever, 

From the remnants of my soul

I will rise lucid, bellowing against everything: Enough!

Enough! Enough!

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Commentary

Born in Catembe, Mozambique in 1926 Noémia de Sousa was a writer, poet and journalist, as well as the Mother of the Mozambican literary canon and the

‘founding mother of Moçambicanidade, the putative cultural nationalism of the 1950’s.’ (1)

She published her only collection of poetry Sangue Negro in 1990, although her writing was widely distributed through newspapers and literary journals during her lifetime. Her vibrant, stimulating poetry draws you into an intensely unsettling world of mistrust, injustice and oppression; her dynamic poetic voices rattling in protest against the banality of colonialism in Africa. Yet her poetry rings with examples of human strength, dignity and pride.

Noémia de Sousa died in 2002 in Cascais, Portugal and remains one of the most notable poets from Mozambique and one of the most popular and loved Lusophone African poets embodying a generation of courage and resistance.

Notes:

1. Hilary Owen, Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948-2002, Bucknell University Press (2007) pp. 43 – 56

2. Literatas, ‘Relançando ‘Sangue Negro’ de Noémia de Sousa’

3. Afreaka, ‘O Sangre Negro de Noémia de Sousa’

Liked it?

Read another translation of Noémia de Sousa on a more recent collaborative project, da terra.

Read more of my original work here. And do read the beautiful original poem by Noémia de Sousa.