Poesia em conflito: marcas identitárias na poesia guineense contemporânea de Odete Semedo, Saliatu da Costa e Tony Tcheka

Abstract

This paper examines how the poetry in Guinea-Bissau's Portuguese-language portrays literarily the recent conflicts over which the country has undergone and how such literarily elaborated conflicts have been shaping the Guinean identity in some respects. Seeking to present a review about the concepts of identities and nation as well as an exposition of the elements that represent this question, whose historiographic basis, from this research starting point, initiates in the conflicts dating from the struggles for independence to the present day. Thus, by carrying out a poetic analysis we seek to unravel how this narrative unfolds in the works of Odete Semedo's No fundo do canto (2007), Saliatu da Costa's Entre a Roseira e a Pólvora, o Capim (2011) and Tony Tcheka's Desesperança no Chão de Medo e Dor (2015), given that these poetic works are marked out in a context of intense conflicts in Guinea-Bissau. The reason for these choices is that when producing poetic works that depict the conflicting moments of the motherland, the authors contribute to the contestation and negotiation of the identities in the country, since it is in the arena of conflict that it becomes an issue. The narrative of a conflict is first and foremost to rescue and revive a memory. It is to remind the individuals of a "nation" of the hardships of a bitter, intractable and unforgettable past, in order to create a mark of resistance that will prevent this past from becoming a future threat. Thus, we observe that in producing such poetics these authors contributed to create a sphere of identity-sharing and forge a national unity, as Amílcar Cabral seems to have done quite so convincingly. We observe that the depicted conflicts described literarily in Guinea-Bissau are significant in order to understand the dynamics of production of a resistance literature, as well as to evidence the retelling of history of wars, coups and national shocks, and, in its limit, negotiate and forge a national identity and re-signify the meaning of the nation.