Introduction
In the early 1960s a wave of African students arrived in Brazil on scholarships. Brazil’s political elite primarily created these opportunities to open economic relations with emerging African countries (Dávila Reference Dávila2010; Lima Reference Lima2021). These students found themselves, against the intentions of the Brazilian government, enmeshed in a milieu of Brazilian-African activism that sought to pressure Brazil to support the independence movements of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. As these students arrived in Brazil, many of them brought cultural products that inspired and reflected their national struggles for independence. Many Brazilians, especially Black artists and activists, were motivated by the form, content, and ethos of the subversive literature and artwork that circulated as a result of this network.
One such Brazilian was Thereza Santos. A relatively understudied figure, Santos pursued an extraordinary life as a communist, feminist, pan-Africanist, actress, playwright, and educator (Rios Reference Rios2014). Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1938, she began moving in artist and organizing circles from a young age. By the age of fifteen, Santos had joined the União da Juventude Comunista (Union of Young Communists), and by twenty-two had acted in the film, Black Orpheus, winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960. She often sought ways to merge her interests, and her cultural and political worldview only expanded when she encountered students from the African continent in the early 1960s. As a university student in Rio de Janeiro, Santos began to immerse herself within the social and political activity of African intellectuals from the Portuguese colonies. One of the most important influences on her thinking at the time was the poetry that these young intellectuals brought with them. This was especially true of the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (Anthology of Black Poetry in Portuguese), edited by the Angolan writer and revolutionary, Mário Pinto de Andrade in 1958. It was this poetry that introduced Santos to the emerging struggles for independence and solidified her sense of connection with these movements.
Inspired by the Antologia, Santos began to fuse her growing racial, anti-colonial politics with her work in acting and political organizing. However, these activities began to draw the attention of the Brazilian military dictatorship’s repressive forces.Footnote 1 In March 1974, sensing her impending imprisonment, Santos decided to flee abroad. She found asylum with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). In addition to asylum, she was offered an opportunity to teach theater at a school of the PAIGC. She accepted this offer, and with a passport set to expire in just twenty-five days, she headed to Africa as a political exile.
Over a decade after encountering the Antologia, Santos arrived at the Guinea-Bissau Senegalese border in Alto Casamance, where she would work as a theater teacher, guerilla fighter, and general youth caretaker. In the early weeks, Santos recalled that she struggled to communicate with her students and comrades who spoke various languages and dialects. After finally shaking off her notions of Guinean Creole as “bad Portuguese,” she resolved to learn the language, which, she recalled “was the only language common to all.”Footnote 2 Drawing on the relationship between the Antologia and Thereza Santos’s experience in exile, this article explores the relationship between the poetic and this notion of a common language across the Black diaspora.
I wish to highlight two main ideas by framing this article around Santos’s story. The first idea is an abstraction of what she perceived as “the language common to all.” In this article, I read this “language” neither as the Portuguese-language used in the poetry that inspired her to escape to Guinea-Bissau, nor as the Creole she later learned in order to communicate with her comrades. I contend that both the engagement with the Antologia and the use of Creole are actions of translation from/into the grammars of a global blackness. Brent Hayes Edwards argues that “the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation” (Edwards Reference Edwards2003, 7). Scholars tend to highlight this work of translation by writing about the cultures of Black internationalism across languages and imperial regimes (Guridy Reference Guridy2010; García Peña Reference García Peña2022). My work furthers Edwards’s claim by exploring the notion that even within an imperial matrix with a presumed shared language (Portuguese in this case), the work of translation is still necessary. I argue that these acts of diasporic translation offer an acute register of the grammars of modernity’s global (anti)blackness that transcends national and linguistic borders.
In this article, I deploy “grammar” in the literal and figurative to explore the ways Andrade, Santos, and their comrades communicated ideas of solidarity. Here, grammar offers a double meaning that indexes the linguistic enunciations and the register of meaning-making marked by an abstracted, structural position. Through these scenes of poetic and linguistic encounter, we see how global grammars of blackness facilitated particular forms of transnational solidarity in cases of both a shared language and language barriers. As such, this onto-epistemic grammar of black, (post-)colonial subjectivity was the grammar that offered Santos and her comrades a mutual recognition even when linguistic relation might have been what facilitated solidarity in the first place, and especially when that linguistic connection failed them. Thus, a Black grammar of solidarity, as articulated in this article, challenges the colonial conceptions of their bonds as Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, subjects and reformulates the geography of their relation away from empire and toward a Black world.
The second idea I highlight from Santos’s story is that her earliest interactions with African intellectuals of the Portuguese colonies were through poetry, something that was not uncommon at the time. I frame this idea in relation to other scholars of resistance literature and poetry who have argued that this circulation was possible for several reasons. Firstly, poetry’s brevity and concision allow it to be written, reproduced, and circulated quickly in short magazines, newspapers, and anthologies (Suhr-Sytsma Reference Suhr-Sytsma2017). I would add that this anthologizability also allows it to be read, in bite-sized pieces, more quickly than many other forms of protest writing. Secondly, poetics offered a medium through which these intellectuals could explore not only the content of their ideas but also the ways in which form inspires other modes of thinking about the problem of colonialism (Harlow Reference Harlow1987). Poetics offer the possibility of layering meaning; the ability to communicate ideas that resonate personally and universally, locally and globally, mundanely and spectacularly.
While the notion that the poetry of Portuguese Negritude (what I refer to here as poesia negra) was legible in the Black world and within its national contexts is not new (Laranjeira Reference Laranjeira1995), this article explores the production and circulation of poesia negra to think through the reach, legacies, and limits of this poetry within a Lusophone context. Andrade himself was not only deeply aware of the role of culture in the struggles for national independence, but incredibly reflective on how that culture manifested, traveled, translated, and evolved to meet the needs of specific peoples (Andrade Reference Andrade and Millar2024). He noted particularly how literature, especially poetry, was key in both the consciousness-raising and armed struggle in the wars against Portuguese colonialism. He also understood how this poetry could extend beyond the national contexts of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Andrade had a sustained interest in a literary relationship with Brazil; and though he never physically visited, his writing left an impact on Brazilian racial, cultural, and political thought (Scaraggi Reference Scaraggi2024). Furthermore, the poetry of the Antologia was especially key in developing forms of negritude poetry in the Global South (Millar Reference Millar, Enjuto-Rangel, García-Caro, Newcomb and Faber2019; Reference Millar, Bystrom, Popescu and Zien2021). Thus, the article unpacks the ways in which the Antologia offered poesia negra as a grammar for Black solidarity in the Portuguese-speaking Global South.
In order to analyze how this anticolonial literary culture expressed a grammar for Black solidarity, my methodology is guided by an engagement with Fatoumata Seck’s (Reference Seck2023) concept of “the cultural underground of decolonization.” Seck argues that cultural products of twentieth-century African liberation movements present “a productive category for historical and literary inquiry” (Seck Reference Seck2023, 289). More specifically, these textual, visual, and sonic productions offer alternative archives and possibilities for enhancing our studies of African and African diasporic cultures, liberation movements, and intellectual history. Seck contends that this literary archive is not only defined by protest literature, but also by its clandestine modes of publishing and circulation under colonial structures of domination. Seck’s conceptualization of the cultural underground as a methodological approach is useful for reading a cultural and intellectual history of Brazilian solidarity with Portuguese-speaking African liberation movements. I explicitly highlight that this poetry did not circulate by happenstance but rather within and by a network of travelling intellectuals as an expression of a cultural underground. In this article, I trace the clandestine and subversive production and circulation of the Antologia as a representation of the cultural underground of decolonization.
Constructing a grammar in the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa
The production of Mário Pinto de Andrade’s Antologia was based on clandestine networks of political education in 1940s and 50s Portugal. As a group of students and young intellectuals in Lisbon, Andrade and the poets included in the Antologia engaged in a number of hidden literary networks that shaped and inspired their own cultural activity and political thought (Alfieri Reference Alfieri2023; Sadlier Reference Sadlier2016). In 1948, the nineteen-year-old Andrade arrived at the University of Lisbon from Luanda, Angola to study classical philology on a scholarship. As a member of the “Cabral Generation” it didn’t take long before he was enmeshed within the cultural, social, and increasingly political scene of students from the colonies (Mata Reference Mata2015; Moreno Reference Moreno2016). This generation of students, also known as the “Literary Generation of 48,” included figures such as Amilcar Cabral, Noémia de Sousa, and Agostinho Neto among many others (Kandjimbo Reference Kandjimbo, Mata and Padilha2000). As students from the African colonies of Portugal studying in the metropole, they would go on to become leading figures in the movements for national independence of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Many of them would also become luminaries of African literature as they developed their anti-colonial analyses and literary styles in this network. During his time in Lisbon, from 1948 until 1954, Andrade actively contributed to a racialized, anti-colonial radicalization with his peers. These young intellectuals formed several cultural and political organizations over these years, but the Clube Marítimo Africano (CMA [African Maritime Club]) stands out as a key site for thinking about the Black diasporic circulations of this cultural underground.Footnote 3
In 1954, the CMA was founded in Lisbon by a group of merchant ship and dock workers alongside the university students from the African colonies studying in the metropole. These workers included those working on the docks, cooks, kitchen assistants, waiters, and even laundry staff (Zau Reference Zau2020). While the CMA purportedly began as a sports club, it wasn’t long after its founding that it became a key site of radicalization and political education against racialized, settler-colonial exploitation. A key aspect of the partnership between these students and maritime workers was that those who worked on the ships could traffic subversive literature through the docks, as they traveled between Portugal’s imperial trade routes. This literature, especially those with Marxist leanings, was unavailable in Portugal’s bookstores due to political censorship (Tomás Reference Tomás2019, 43). The censorship infrastructure of the Portuguese empire was well developed. The Portuguese dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar censored press, books, cinema, theater, and other written and visual materials in Portugal and its colonies (Melo Reference Melo, Garcia, Kaul, Subtil and Santos2017). The goal was to prevent the publication and dissemination of material they believed would challenge the ideologies or political structure of the regime. Thus, it was necessary for Andrade and his peers to circumvent these censors in their pursuit of critical forms of culture and thought.
Mário Pinto de Andrade, in an interview with Michael Laban, adds further details to the activities of the CMA:
We ordered many books through the sailors. The sailors were not only young proletarians that we had to make literate … Some were literate, were men who already had a political consciousness … the books were brought from Brazil, the United States … we also read poets of the West Indies … it was a mandatory part of our heritage, part of the baggage of a progressive and informed African intellectual in Lisbon at that time: one must have read the Anthologie de la poesia nègre et malgache by Senghor—my example. (Andrade and Laban, Reference Andrade and Laban1997)
This extended quotation highlights a range of Black internationalist sources that these intellectuals drew upon, as well as how this underground circulation inspired Andrade and his comrades. To access this literature, they relied on a network of workers along the Portuguese trade routes to transport texts filled with concepts that transformed and animated their political ideologies. These ships carried more than just cargo across the Atlantic, they carried subversive ideas. This group of intellectuals drew upon this fount of Black cultural production as they developed their own texts that critiqued colonialism, imperialism, and anti-blackness. Further, this quotation offers a clear picture of not only the activities of the CMA, but also the ways in which those activities were deeply embedded within a Black world and class-conscious organizing.
The fact that “the baggage” of these intellectuals required them to contend with the radical ideas across the Black world helps us contextualize the foundations of the Antologia as part of a Black diasporic cultural underground. The Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa, which Andrade edited and published in 1958, captures his commitment to exploring the power and potential of poesia negra. The Negritude writers of the Francophone world were among the most influential groups of writers to shape Andrade’s thinking during this period (Sanches Reference Sanches and Nash2016). Thus, it is of little surprise that Andrade sought to construct a Portuguese-language version of the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (The Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French), edited and published by Leopold Senghor in 1948.Footnote 4 Andrade’s engagement with Black literature, especially of the Francophone Negritude movement, furthered his deployment of poesia negra as a grammar of global blackness in the Portuguese language.
After years of reflecting on the relations between African cultures and Black diasporic literature, Andrade finally edited a 106-page collection titled the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa. This anthology included thirty-seven poems from Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Brazil. It is worth noting that the Antologia reflects the increasing nationalist sentiments of the time. The poetry of the Antologia is organized by national territory with anywhere from one to seven poets included in each section. While organization by territory mirrors that of the French Antologie, Andrade clarifies his reasons for this format. In the introduction, he states that “possibilities of a Black African renaissance can only be envisaged in a political situation of national independence” (1958, viii). Of the twenty-one poets in the Antologia, Alda do Espírito Santo and Noémia de Sousa are the only two women featured in the collection. This gender imbalance not only reflects women’s limited mobility and access to the university system through which the Antologia was birthed, it also draws our attention to the masculinist horizons of poesia negra and the nationalism it seeks to represent. In thematic terms, many poems in the Antologia reflect leitmotifs of sorrow or rage at the conditions of Black subjects in the colonies. Other poems meditate on concepts of love, childhood, or occasionally stolen moments of peace and joy. However, what thematically binds the entire collection is a critical awareness of the ways in which colonial violence and its legacies structure the experiences of Black life in Africa and abroad.
At the same time that Andrade was inspired by the Francophone Negritude movement, it was important to note how the racial discourses used to justify Portuguese colonialism presented unique challenges for the poets of this anthology. The fact that this collection is nominally an “Expressão Portuguesa” (Portuguese expression) must be considered. In the preface to the Antologia, Andrade goes to great lengths to explicitly distinguish his project from that of the colonial project of “lusotropicalism.” Coined by the white Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, the concept of lusotropicalism refers to the idea that the Portuguese people were uniquely equipped to adapt to life in tropical places and to reproduce with the darker races of indigenous populations.Footnote 5 Building on this idea, Freyre published O Mundo que o Português Criou (The World the Portuguese Created) in 1940, and used the concept of lusotropicalism to argue that all current and former Portuguese colonies constitute “a unity of sentiment and culture” defined by harmonious racial-mixture (Freyre Reference Freyre2010). Lusotropicalism not only framed the Portuguese as good at colonizing, it framed them as good colonizers. For Andrade, it was crucial to position poesia negra against the idea of lusotropicalism by highlighting it as Black-African culture. As the editor of the Antologia, and author of several texts that speak to poesia negra’s meaning, Andrade makes a unique contribution to broader studies of poetry in the Black diaspora by introducing the particularity of the Lusophone context.
By naming the Antologia as a Black project that uses the medium of the Portuguese language, rather than as a product of Portuguese culture, Andrade highlights how the relations he sees, and seeks to forge, through poesia negra exceed that colonial legacy even while using the colonial language it enforces. One way he makes this argument is based on the linguistic realities of living under Portuguese colonialism. He argues that “the percentage of illiteracy in the ‘Portuguese overseas’, among the Black populations, especially in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique,” is a factor that challenges, at the very least, the successful reproduction of a Lusophone culture “if the Portuguese language must be considered as the only vehicle of Luso-tropical thought and feeling” (Andrade Reference Andrade1958, IX). Beyond the practical fact that the Portuguese had not invested in educating the masses of their colony, he argues that this politic of cultural assimilation is better understood as a “superposition of values.” In doing so, he situates both Portuguese language and notions of Lusophone culture, as an imposition of European cultural values onto its subject persons rather than an integration or harmonization. Andrade’s elaboration clarifies that while this anthology of poesia negra uses the Portuguese language, it is, as Black poetry, a challenge to the idea of “The World that the Portuguese Created.”
While the entire Antologia reflects this challenge to lusotropicalism, one of the starkest challenges to this notion comes from Andrade himself. His only poem to be included in the Antologia, “Muimbu ua Sabalu” appears twice: first, in Kimbundu, a Bantu language spoken in Angola, and then fully translated into Portuguese with the title “Canção de Sabalu.” In a footnote, he hopes that “the reader will excise the immodesty of including [himself] in this anthology with a song in Kimbundu, whose value is more symbolic than poetic.” By including a poem in a native language of Angola, Andrade makes the symbolic gesture that the Portuguese language is but one expression of poesia negra’s Black grammars (Andrade Reference Andrade1958, 57).
The idea that the Black grammars of poesia negra’s authors and readership transcend nation, region, and language is one that Andrade built on from his earlier thinking. In the introduction to the Caderno de Poesia Negra de Expressao Portuguesa (1953), an earlier attempt at publishing poesia negra, Andrade demonstrates this idea by drawing on a number of Black expressive cultural forms as examples. From the eighteenth-century “work songs” and spirituals of the African slaves in North America to the African folklore at the heart of Cuban Pan-Africanism, he demonstrates the transnational and historical tradition at the heart of poesia negra. “With English, French or Portuguese expression, the new Black-African poets are oriented towards an authentically Black literary search, and a claim to the scandalous pride of the quality of being Black” (Andrade Reference Andrade1958, XIII). The formulation that “Black-African” poets produce “authentically Black,” rather than African, literature is an important distinction. In this articulation, blackness is not necessarily Africanness, it is something born out of the modernizing project of colonialism. Through this framing, Andrade claims that poesia negra is the negation of the negation, and particularly the imperative of the Westernized subject who has been conscripted into colonial modernity. In doing so, he situates it as a global project, one not tied solely to the precolonial traditions of the peoples of the African continent.
Andrade’s claims about who can author poesia negra are not without contradictions. One of the most glaring inconsistencies is the incorporation of the white Angolan, António Jacinto. Despite being the child of Portuguese settlers in Angola, he was among the anti-colonial cadre of students in the Portuguese metropole in the 1940s and 50s. He is the only non-Black author included in both the Caderno and the Antologia. In the Caderno’s (1953) introduction, Andrade notes that António Jacinto is “a little less experienced than the rest in the rhythms of Black poetry.” He then contrasts Jacinto’s poetry with Black Angolans, Agostinho Neto and Viriato da Cruz, who, he argues, know Black alienation and its realities through their own experiences. Yet, this openness to include a white poet in the anthology of poesia negra—and his need to explain it—provides an early glimpse into the ways in which the nationalist movements would continue to rethink racial categories as a foundation for organizing (Andrade Reference Andrade and Millar2024).
Many of the poems included in the Antologia often reflect the transnational characteristic of poesia negra’s Black grammars by deploying references from varying geographies, people, and events associated with anti-black violence or resistance. For example, Kalungo (nom de plume of the Mozambican Marcelino dos Santos) deploys the strategy of Black referencing alongside repetition in his poems in order to insist upon a diasporic connection. In “Onde estou” (Where I am), he draws on references to other Black geographies alongside the use of epistrophe, repetition at the end of several stanzas. I argue that this repetition is intended to emphasize the connections the author is making between the conditions of Black subjects across the Atlantic. His repetition of the first-person subject, “eu” (I), as the speaker of the poem refers to various geographic and social positions to situate Black people, globally. For example, midway through the poem, after not specifying any particular geographic location through which the speaker experiences various forms of colonial violence and duress, he states:
Through repetitious pronouns, in this case in the first person, Kalungo is aggregating a chorus of Black voices which embody, know, and speak from the same place of blackness on “the path inscribed / by the whip.” By bridging the Americas with Africa, through the phrase, “yes, I am also here,” this poem doubly asserts Kalungo’s argument that there is an interconnectedness of Black struggle on the continent and in the diaspora.
By the end of the poem, Kalungo seeks to reclaim this position not just as one of violence, but also of brilliance and resistance forged from that position:
The speaker contends that the essence of who they are has been misunderstood by posing a rhetorical question. Rather than look for him in the culture of a universal humanism that has been defined by white cultural aesthetics and values, you will find him in Black cultural values. These values are expressed among elite intellectuals just as much as they are among the cries of millions of exploited laborers. The list of Black intellectuals ranges from Langston Hughes to Amié Césaire. Kalungo’s emphasis on men limits who he considers Black intellectuals, and also reflects a common male-centered approach throughout many of the poems in the Antologia. Kalungo also references Godido, a novel written by Mozambican author João Dias. In doing so he situates the Portuguese-speaking literary scene within the canon of Black writers across linguistic and geographic formations. He concludes the poem clearly. It is in those men, “who composed the poem / / of life against death,” where you will truly be able to find Black being. This diasporic reading of a Black(ened) epistemology from a Black(ened) ontology echoes throughout the poetry collection.
The Antologia reflects how its authors drew upon a cultural underground of the Black diaspora to offer poesia negra as an articulation of a grammar of global blackness. Andrade’s decisions for editing the Antologia formulated a challenge to the colonial and imperial logic of lusotropicalism by articulating poesia negra as an expression in the Portuguese language within—and toward—a broader Black world. These Black grammars of poesia negra circulated through revolutionary communities over the years following the publication of the Antologia. Next, I will demonstrate the way in which this circulation and reception in Brazil reflects the resonant grammars of blackness at the core of poesia negra.
Registering Poesia Negra’s Black grammars in Brazil
Poesia negra and its constitutive grammars of blackness traveled to and through Brazil by way of a cultural underground. The arrival of the Antologia in Brazil was a subversion of the geopolitical aims of the Brazilian government, which sought to establish political relations with independent countries in Africa while maintaining its close ties with Portugal (Dávila Reference Dávila2010). One of the most developed of these programs was a cohort of federal scholarships from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Itamaraty). During the years leading up to the wars for independence in Portuguese-speaking Africa, several young intellectuals from the African colonies of Portugal also made their way to Brazil as part of this program.Footnote 6 By offering scholarships to African students, the Brazilian government hoped to introduce these students to a country with which they would want their emerging nation-states to develop political and economic trade relations. However, many of these students used this opportunity to build support for their liberation movements, which resonated with many Brazilians directly and indirectly (Pereira Reference Pereira2013; Hanchard Reference Hanchard1998; Lima Reference Lima2021; Alberto Reference Alberto2011). While Santos’s relationship to this cultural underground resonates with experiences of other Brazilians, her story offers a unique window into the specific impact of the Antologia in Brazil.
By the time these students arrived in Brazil, Thereza Santos had already entered university at the National Faculty of Philosophy (now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). In addition to her studies, she started participating in political street-theater and joined the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), a leftist student organization. Despite her busy intellectual and political life, she often felt lost in this period. In large part, her emerging racial consciousness began to enter her political worldview more centrally. However, she felt that the majority of her organizing opportunities within the Communist Party fundamentally neglected questions of racial inequality:
I spent years believing that we had a common cause, but their cause did not include black people, and in my search for a more just society, black people were a vital part of confronting the situation of misery, discrimination, and prejudice that they lived and still live, and I was part of that reality. (Santos Reference Santos2008, 27)
Santos’s struggle of political organizing within the majority white Brazilian communist party was beginning to take its toll on her. Perhaps this is why, when Santos found herself among the students arriving from Africa, she eagerly integrated into this group. She hoped to find political perspectives that understood the connections between class struggle and racial discrimination.
In 1961 “o lado africano” (the African side) entered Santos’s life (Santos Reference Santos2008, 36). It was at this time, through her work with the UNE that she met some of the African students who had recently arrived in Rio de Janeiro. In her memoir, Santos recalls this period as more than just a social or political development; she developed as an intellectual in this network as well. This group of students engaged in cultural and political activities in support of African decolonization. Specifically, Santos and her new comrades were part of an organization known as the Afro-Brazilian Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MABLA) (Santos Reference Santos2014) This organization was an aggregate of Brazilian fronts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo advocating in support of African independence from Portugal, with its primary focus on the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Some of these students brought with them literature and poetry that inspired their own anti-colonial, nationalist stances. Among those texts was the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa. As a result, Santos began to admire poets such as Geraldo Bessa Vitor, Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Francisco Tenreiro, among others (Santos Reference Santos2008, 37). Santos’s choice of the word “lado” to describe how these intellectuals entered her life is illuminating. It frames the Atlantic as a partition of a single, or connected, entity. In this formulation, Santos and her African peers are located on opposite sides of that single geography. I contend that poesia negra bridged these two sides by way of its Black grammars.
“Descobri a África por meio dessas poesias” (I discovered Africa through these poems), Santos recalled. This was her first introduction to these African intellectuals and revolutionaries, and it had a lasting impact on her. In fact, the Antologia was so precious for Santos and her comrades in this Brazilian network that Santos detailed a story that highlights its value in her memoir. She recalled that:
This anthology belonged to José Maria, and I devoured it every time I was at his house. I was always there because he lived in Catete next to Flamengo, where UNE was headquartered. This book has a story because I ’stole’ it from Zé Maria, who ’stole’ it back (it was his!). One of the times I ’stole’ it, I showed it to Ferreira Gullar, who also stole it from me, and I had to go to the National Bank, where Gullar worked, to recover my ’theft’. So, every time I managed to hijack the book, I didn’t show it to anyone, because it seemed to have a magnet. Everyone wanted to get hold of it. (Santos Reference Santos2008, 37).
This recollection on the desperation to read a text of Black-African poetry offers a grounded reading of its circulation. In doing so, it helps situate the circulation of poesia negra as a practice of the cultural underground. When Santos got her hands on this sought-after text, it moved her emotionally, intellectually, and politically. “I had never read anything by Brazilian poets that was so poetic, lyrical and at the same time blunt and revolutionary about the search for emancipation, for freedom,” she recalled (Santos Reference Santos2008, 37). By reading poesia negra’s diasporic reach as an intentional and embodied underground practice, I highlight the profound impact that registering its Black grammars had on Santos.
While a direct connection between any individual poem and Santos’s reception is mostly impossible, by reading the Antologia and Santos’s personal and political journey as part of the cultural underground, we have access to a literary archive that helps us understand Santos in relation to a broader network. Doing so suggests ways she might have seen herself reflected in, and been inspired by, poesia negra. One way the Africa that Santos discovered by way of the Antologia might have drawn her in would have been its direct references to Brazil. In “Mamã Negra (canta de esperança)” (Black Mom [song of hope]) by Viriato da Cruz, Santos might have been intrigued and affirmed by Cruz’s direct reference to Brazil. The poem addresses “Mother Africa” regarding her children in Africa, the Americas, and beyond; and what our inheritance is from her. The speaker addresses his “Mother” as an anthropomorphic Africa whose voice reaches the speaker in distant lands:
As a Brazilian reader, Santos could recognize herself as a child of Africa in this multinational list. Further, in framing the voices of Africa as coming from the Americas and toward Africa, the poem might have inspired in her the idea that she, too, could reach the continent from “distant lands.” In the same ways that she was discovering Africa through these poems, she might have been discovering Brazil and herself as part of a larger Black world.
In addition to direct references to Brazil, Santos might have also been affirmed by seeing the inclusion of poetry by Solano Trindade, a Brazilian, among these African poets. The fact that some of the African students arriving in Brazil in the 1960s brought poetry by a Brazilian with them is a rich, diasporic irony. What does it mean that Trindade might have been (re)introduced to these Brazilians by Africans? Reading Trindade’s line “A Black moan is a song, a Black moan is a poem…” in his poem “Quem tá gemendo?” (Who’s moaning?), likely affirmed for Santos that Brazilians were also part of the Black grammars of poesia negra. This might have contributed to her belief that she was part of the revolutionary nationalist fervor as a Black-African searching for new articulations for her own political struggles.
In other ways, the Africa that spoke to Santos might have been found by resonating with experiences of antiblackness expressed in the poetry. The poem “O menino negro não entrou na roda” (The Black boy did not enter the circle) by Geraldo Bessa Victor offers one example. It is a short poem about a Black boy being denied from playing with white children:
These feelings of desolation and isolation resonate with Santos’s own childhood experiences as much as her organizing experiences as an adult. In her memoir she recalls growing up in the Eugenho Novo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro as one of very few Black families in the area. As a child, her friends were the white girls in her neighborhood, and she states that it was the malice of these children that politicized her early on. “I owe my Black consciousness to the cruelty of the whites in relation to the blacks” (Santos Reference Santos2008, 18). Seeing the racist experiences of her own childhood reflected in the poetry of an Angolan presented a racialized resonance that strengthened her sense of relation with Africa and African people.
The Antologia also could have spoken to Brazilian readers, such as Santos, through its calls to react to oppression. For example, another poem that likely animated Santos as a creative was “Criar” by Agostinho Neto, which highlights the work of creating in the midst of hate and violence:
The anaphora, repetition at the beginning of lines, of “criar” (to create) throughout the poem offers a call to action that commands the reader’s attention. The epistrophe at the end of each stanza, of “criar com os olhos secos” (create with dry eyes) provides solace through the struggle of creating in hard times. No doubt this poem spoke to Santos’s creative tendencies as an actress, playwright, and dancer. That the antidote to violence might be to create, reflects Santos’s own path as a creative. Having merged her creative and political worlds, Santos also understood the stakes of creating under such contexts. The poem may have offered her that solace it expressed. She was already busy forging connections between her creative work and her political commitments during these years, so to see her work as part of a global movement for Black and African liberation offered her a diasporic context for her commitments.
Lastly, the Antologia would serve as an inspiration for the theater work she would do in Brazil. A clear example of how poesia negra’s grammars of Blackness moved Santos is in her 1973 production, E Agora … Falamos Nós (And Now We Speak…). She coproduced the play with Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira, the Black queer cultural worker, intellectual, and activist from São Paulo (Trapp Reference Trapp2020). Together, they cofounded the Centro de Cultura e Arte Negra (CECAN [Center for Black Art and Culture]), and used it as a vehicle in search of Black “identity and self-esteem” (Santos Reference Santos and Hanchard1999). The play was a “colcha de retalhos” (patchwork) that offered a series of vignettes, scenes, and performances that when layered together offer a history of Brazil told from a global Black perspective.Footnote 7 The play draws directly from the Antologia.
Among the many “patches” of the play, Santos and Oliveira e Oliveira included the poem “Monangamba” by António Jacinto, which was published in the Antologia. The poem, named after a war cry that Angolans used to warn of approaching Portuguese slave traders, reflects on many of the themes common throughout the Antologia: the formation of Black colonial subjecthood, racialized labor exploitation, and a turn to African folklore and tradition as inspiration for anti-colonial resistance. Jacinto paints a clear picture of a Black man who weeps in the fields and drinks to forget his exploitation. In the end, he uses the natural elements of the land (the birds, the backcountry, the streams) to suggest that the spirit of resistance is not lost. “Monangambééé” these figures shout in unison. In Santos’s playscript, the narrator recites the entire poem to highlight how “before the Black man was sold abroad, he was made slave of his own land.” Placing this poem in the middle of a play aimed at renarrativizing the history of Black life in Brazil demonstrates that not only had Santos resonated with the Black grammars expressed in the Antologia, she also saw that her own story was inextricably linked with the anti-colonial struggles on the African continent.
Black grammars, African politics: The legacies and limits of the Antologia
To conclude, I return to Santos’s story as an exile in Guinea-Bissau. Her story presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the legacy and the limits of poesia negra’s Black grammars. In March 1974, Thereza Santos arrived in Dakar, Senegal after fleeing arrest by the Brazilian military dictatorship. After several days in Dakar, she was informed that she would take a position to teach theater at the Escola de Teranga. The school was a pilot school of the PAIGC in Alto Casamance, and was built by UNICEF for children who were orphaned by the war or whose parents were engaged in the armed struggle. While the PAIGC had unilaterally declared Guinea-Bissau independent on September 24, 1973, the country would not have that independence globally recognized until a year later. Thus, the school remained an important site in the final days of the struggle for independence. For example, Fátima Cabral and Iva Cabral, the sister and daughter, respectively, of Amilcar Cabral were among the school leadership and were quickly within Santos’s immediate circle of friends and comrades.
Despite insisting on receiving armed training and spending several days a month closer to the armed front, Santos’s primary role was as an educator of over 400 students of all ages to make theater. For Santos, this period was incredibly eye opening in terms of understanding the reality of the war for independence and the daily experiences of Bissau-Guineans. “I learned more than I taught,” she recalled in an interview.Footnote 8 Once Guinea-Bissau had its independence recognized on September 10, 1974, the war ended and Santos moved to the capital, Bissau, where she worked in the Ministry of Youth and Sports, conducting cultural activities for the new Republic. Within the Ministry, Santos created the Department of Culture, where she brought in art and dance programs, founded the Escola de Teatro, and organized several theater productions, including original works.
Santos’s theatrical work as an exile is difficult to recover in traditional archives. However, reading the descriptions and receptions of her theatrical work of this period alongside the cultural underground as an archive, we are presented with some sense of how her encounter with the Black grammars of poesia negra continued to shape her theatrical work as an exile. One place this legacy manifests is in the subtle, but complex way she used theater to theorize nationalism in Guinea-Bissau. In September 1974, Santos and her students were tasked with staging a production for what was both the one-year anniversary of the declaration of independence and a celebration of global recognition. Travelling for five days via caravan to get to Futa Djalon, Santos and her students staged the national history of Guinea-Bissau (Santos Reference Santos2008). A year later in Bissau, Santos and her students, again, presented a national play at the second annual Independence Day celebration. This time under the title Africa-Liberdade. Footnote 9
In these plays, Santos staged a national origin story from the precolonial era, through the violence of colonization, through the independence wars, until their present moment. With a similar style to her previous patchwork play, she celebrated those who fought valiantly for national liberation, and offered a national origin story in the exact moment when the country was deciding how to represent and define themselves as a sovereign nation. The play opens with a number of poems.Footnote 10 She includes the work of poets such as David Diop, Cecília Meireles, Paul Elouard, Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira, Ribeiro Couto, and Hélder Proença, whose national and ethnic origins from Brazil to Francophone West Africa to France to Guinea-Bissau. Santos’s use of a collection of poetry not only echoes her Brazilian play E Agora … Falamos Nós, but also echoes her resonance with the Black grammars expressed in the Antologia. The fact that Santos includes poetry from poets with a range of national backgrounds reflects the grammars of blackness she encountered in the Antologia years ago. Her decision to include these poets in a play aimed at staging Bissau-Guinean nationalism suggests her continued belief that while these poets may come from different national (and racial) origins, their ability to speak to and through the grammars of Blackness offer a useful reading for understanding Guinea-Bissau in national and global contexts. This is only heightened by the fact that Santos herself, a Brazilian, was tasked with some of the earliest productions of the national heritage. In one sense, Santos brought these ideas full circle as they had come from African poets in Europe, to Brazil, and now to Africa through her theater and her revolutionary commitment to building a new nation.
This brief example registers her use of poesia negra as a mode of communication on the stage. By the time Thereza Santos fled from Brazil in 1974, it had been over a decade since her first encounter with the Antologia. Yet, this poetry reflects the core of Santos’s personal and political aspirations for working with the PAIGC. So even prior to her arrival, her affective connection to Guinea-Bissau, and Africa more broadly, had been formed through the ability to share in the poetry written in a “Portuguese expression.” While this might initially be read solely through their shared relation to a colonial language, her experiences in Africa suggest a deeper resonance that transcends common colonial and linguistic history. As I’ve demonstrated, it was a shared Black onto-epistemology that Santos found reflected in the poesia negra as one articulation of a structuration of relationality that operates through, but beyond, Portuguese imperialism. This clarity refines her claim of “the only language common to all” as an enunciation of the grammars of blackness she initially registered through poesia negra.
In fleeing to Bissau, Santos brought some of the ideas inspired by these revolutionary poetics with her. However, to organize in the day to day, Santos had to learn a new language to solidify relations that she had imagined were established via their commonality as (former) Portuguese-speaking subjects. Thus, the “only language common to all” in Santos’s case was quite literally not Portuguese. This illuminates that Black internationalist relations forged in the Lusophone world, such as those between Santos and her African comrades, were not solely through their historical relations as Portuguese (post-)colonial subjects. These relations, and their linguistic registers, I argue, represent a challenge to the idea that these militants were (solely) Portuguese-speaking subjects by registering the grammars of blackness offered by poesia negra. I argue that blackness, both its Lusophone-specific and global articulations, acts as the hinge on which Santos’s solidarity plays out in this context. I abstract from Santos’s experience to read it as an active and changing moment of solidarity, rather than as an a priori connection based on a presumed shared language. While Anani Dzidzienyo has described Santos’s story of exile as “an unusual example of Afro-Brazilian identification with continental Africa,” I theorize her experience as one with broader reach within and beyond the Portuguese-speaking Black diaspora (Dzidzienyo Reference Dzidzienyo2002, 135). In thinking of the encounters with poesia negra as an articulation of the Black grammars of solidarity, we see the discursive, intellectual, cultural, and affective conditions that made acts of solidarity possible for Santos and her comrades who were invested in challenging imperialism.
While foundational for building a certain form of solidarity, this legacy of poesia negra’s Black grammars would be short lived. As Santos continued to communicate her solidarity through these grammars, her comrades on the continent were shifting toward other articulations for their politics. Mário Pinto de Andrade had certainly developed his cultural analysis in the years since publishing the Antologia (Millar Reference Millar, Bystrom, Popescu and Zien2021). Often reflecting on the evolution of the cultural politics of African liberation movements, by the mid-1970s, Andrade named major shifts in the evolution of poesia negra:
We were influenced by Brazilian literature: Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Manuel Bandeira, Drummond. And also by the poets of blackness: Senghor, Césaire, Damas. But that’s the past. Now there is a certain autonomy, we are directing influences. The war was a determining factor in this change. It is a period in which the writer reads little, is separated from external sources. So, in the new poetry, there is an appeal to one’s own roots.Footnote 11
By the time Santos had arrived to support the liberation movements in Portuguese-speaking Africa, Andrade and his comrades had come to the conclusion that the grammars of blackness that had animated their struggles were only the first phase. As a result, the poetry that expressed their movement had to evolve with, and through, the armed struggle against Portugal. In doing so, poesia negra turned further inward toward the national context rather than outward looking expressions of the Black diaspora.Footnote 12 This inward turn toward national cultural roots ultimately left Santos’s ideas on the outside of the political terrain. She remained in Bissau until January 1976, when she decided to accept an offer to work with the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), during the government of Agostinho Neto in the newly independent Angola. There she hoped to find greater resonance with her use of poesia negra’s Black grammars.
The grammars of blackness presented through poesia negra were profoundly impactful on Santos’s life, but limited and temporary in its ability to effectively communicate solidarity. By studying these grammars, we have a better understanding of the possibilities for transnational solidarity and the pitfalls that certain configurations promise. By analyzing poetry produced by and shared within a cultural underground between Portuguese-speaking Africa and Brazil, this article argues that poesia negra represents a Lusophone specific articulation of the grammars of global blackness. Through its circulation in Brazil, that articulation was able to inspire Thereza Santos’s culture of Black internationalist solidarity. Ultimately, this article recognizes the ways in which poetics were used as a tool to not only reconfigure language, but to configure a form of transnational solidarity, even if fleeting.
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