AMILCAR CABRAL: REWRITING HISTORY THROUGH POETIC DICTION

Abstract

The discourse on Africa, particularly from an African perspective, challenges the dominant narratives shaped by European glorification since the 15th century. As articulated by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, writing about Africa necessitates a corrective approach to the narratives that glorify the European endeavor that has lacerated the African continent for centuries. History over history, landscape over landscape; thus, the European domination that obliterated the existing order must, in turn, be disavowed, exposed, and redacted in the rewriting that corrects it. Mbembe highlights the importance of restitution and reparation—sine qua non, the effects of the “colonial wound” (W. Mignolo, 2005) cannot be resolved: “Reparation, furthermore, is necessary due to the cuts and scars left by history” (Mbembe, 2017). We will explore how this necessary reparation of history is reflected in some poems by Amílcar Cabral, which grapple forcefully with the myths arising from the “dreamily imperial” vision (Eduardo Lourenço, 2014) that has shaped much of the literature written in Portuguese. Paradoxically, writing about Africa and reclaiming its history from the epistemology of bad faith, constructed by a hegemonic Eurocentric perception, has required many African authors to engage with the symbols that embody this ideology. Committed to the liberation struggle of his homeland and the African continent from the bonds of colonial oppression, Amílcar Cabral understood the struggle for emancipation as an act of culture, rooted in the reclamation of the cultural identity of the oppressed. In a time very different from today, and for a spirit mobilized by what would become the effective struggle—the revolution and the war to be fought, both in the minds and on the fields—against colonial oppression, as experienced by Cabral, the time is not (yet) one for demanding reparation in the terms proposed by Mbembe. However, in his poetry, one recognizes a subtle but persistent gesture of rewriting or correcting a mythical vision that supports a particular history and the epistemology it entails. We will reflect on the significance of the symbols that emerge from this puzzle of reconstructing a historical narrative, articulating it with more recent poetic expressions that elaborate on the theme of the need for reparation as a cornerstone for identity building.