Noémia de Sousa

Noémia Carolina Abranches de Sousa Soares (born 20 September 1926 in Catembe, Mozambique, † December 4, 2002 in Cascais ) was a Mozambican writer and journalist.

Biography

Noémia de Sousa was Portuguese and Bantu descent. Her father was a civil servant with Portuguese, African and Indian roots. He brought her four years old in reading. During her school years in Lourenço Marques she associated in intellectual and literary stakeholders who agitated against the Salazar regime. Between 1948 and 1951 she published all her poems. In order to avoid political complications she lived from 1951 to 1964 in Lisbon, where she worked as a translator. She was married to the poet Manuel Gualtar Rodrigues Soares, who also suffered from political repression. Because of their oppositional attitude to the Estado Novo she had to go into exile, where she worked in the Moroccan Consulate in Paris. At that time she slept with the pseudonym Vera MICAIA. As a writer and journalist, she traveled on behalf of international news organizations during the wars of independence in several countries throughout Africa. After the Carnation Revolution in 1975, she returned to Lisbon, where she worked in the Portuguese news agency Lusa. She died in 2002.

Work

Noémia de Sousa was a poet, the relationship of blacks and whites thematized in her poems. Influenced by the Negritude movement she advocated a separation of European and African ideas. With the return to one's own Africanness they wanted to create an awareness of the fundamental otherness of the blacks. A central theme in her poems was the Mãe - África (Mother Africa ). Through her ​​poetry she had considerable influence on the Mozambican writer of the 1950s.

Major poems Noémia de Sousa are:

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

Her poems have appeared in various magazines: Mensagem, Itinerário, Notícias do Bloqueio, O Brado Africano, Mozambique 58 Vértice (Coimbra ) and Sul ( Brazil). At the time of their flight to Lisbon in 1951 she left a typewritten Notitzbuch entitled Sangue negro, which contained 43 of her poems. She herself never published a book. Only in 2001 they agreed to publish their works in an anthology entitled Sangue Negro, which was issued by the Mozambican Writers' Association.