Nelson Saúte’s biographical work tells the poet’s human and political career

“ A my family is very attached to the Noahmia of Sousa, myself, my wife. For many years we visited her often, while we lived here in Portugal. We spent almost every Sunday with her,” Nelson Saúte recalled, in statements to the Lusa agency, pointing out his personal relationship with the writer as one of the main reasons for writing this book.

According to the author, Noémia de Sousa, which marks the centenary of birth on September 20, is seen as “a figure elusive in biographical terms”, because “he did not talk about himself [and] there are few interviews”, which presented as one of the main obstacles in the research.

Faced with this shortage of records, Nelson Saúte went looking for the “poetic trail” left by the author, including the texts he published in the press and the few interviews granted in order to reconstruct his profile.

“I had to reconstruct what I knew about her life, what I had read about her, reconstruct her profile a little to write this literary biography, which is a testimony of someone who met Noémia de Sousa and someone who, in family terms, lived with her,” she explained.

In addition to the personal dimension, the work aims to make known to readers the historical, political, literary and journalistic importance of the writer.

In historical terms, Saúte pointed out that the Mozambican poet was “one of the first anticolonial militants”, having written, alongside the poet José Craveirinha, photographer Ricardo Rangel and Dolores Lopez y Lopez, his friend and daughter of an anti-Franquist, “one of the first manifestos to demand the independence of Mozambique”.

The political relevance of the so-called “mother of Mozambican poets” is also the persecution of the International Police and State Defense (PIDE), its involvement in the Anticolonial Movement (MAC) in 1957, and the invitation to go to “a clandestine congress of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP)”, these being examples of episodes of the writer’s life documented in the book.

The work also demonstrates how Noémia de Sousa has always been linked to the lyrics, both in poetry and in journalism, stating herself as one of the “founders of Mozambican poetry” and “the first figure to write truly African poems”.

The author considers “scandalous” the fact that there is no publication of the author in Portugal, denouncing the lack of interest of the Portuguese publishing market for the great figures of African literature.

The book celebrates the centenary of the birth of Mozambican Noémia de Sousa (20/09/1926 – 04/12/2002), author of 46 poems, written between 1948 and 1951, which were first published in the journal The African Brad and then gathered in the only published book, “Black Blood”.

“ It is an unusual biography, in which Saúte combines the rigor of documents with the emotion of affective memories, the result being a sensitive biography in which the poet, while being revealed as a person and artist, emerges as an activist in the political and social context of Mozambique and Africa ", reads on the page of the Brazilian editorial Kapulana, which launches the work on September 1 in Brazil.

The Mozambican edition, which will be published by Marimbique soon after, and in Portugal will be presented on September 20 at the headquarters of the Lusa agency in Lisbon.