Black Women: The Poetics of Micro-Histories (Part 3)

Available until June 23, 2023

Christina Sharpe in her text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being speaks of the wake of slavery to understand the life and death of black people in our present. She asserts that the past does not always reappear to fight the present; rather, it is a taking over. So in no case, we can identify it as a chronological past.

That idea is extremely powerful because it speaks to how current everyday disasters are linked to unwavering black exclusion and its ontological negation since modernity. Throughout that text, she mentions a key point: “I include the personal here to connect the social forces on a specific, particular family’s being in the wake to those of all Black people in the wake; to mourn and to illustrate the ways our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery.”¹

Sharpe understands microhistory as an autobiographical example, as Saidiya Hartman says, “which is is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes”.² Her reading confirms the power of microhistory to reformulate History—with a capital letter—and generate knowledge. This is a power that has gripped me since 2017, when I carried out at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge de Barcelona program entitled Microhistories of the Diaspora: “Embodied” Experiences of Female Dispersion, which sought micro stories to account for something much larger, uncontrollable and overflowing. I am fascinated by this method of knowledge that displaces the grand narrative of history, questioning the dominant contents, gazes and languages from singular perspectives and placing the body at the center. This exercise also involves approaching everyday life to subvert the secular principles that categorized some as men and others as primitives, semi-men expelled from humanity.

Giovanni Levi,³ makes a clear analogy to understand microhistory: it is like using a microscope, the scale of observation is modified to see things that, in a general vision, are not perceived. Looking at a reduced and specific scale, as in a laboratory, it is possible to pose general questions and answers that have relevance in other contexts and realities, opening the possibility of linking processes and intertwining perspectives of very different kinds. An arduous exercise when information is not available. Saidiya Hartman resolves this conflict with critical fabulation, that is, she proposes fictional reconstruction to account for the gaps and voids that appear when archiving the history of people affected by racist violence, and in particular, that exercised against black women during slavery.

Carlo Ginzburg develops another proposal of microhistory that attempts to recover the problems from “the very perspective of the victims”. Ginzburg states that it is impossible to understand the space of mental or cultural realities of a society without starting from the essential division between hegemonic and subaltern cultures, the latter being understood as the cultures of the marginalized sectors and the lower classes of societies marked by the division of labor and the context of colonial production. Contexts that have molded subaltern individuals without history or voice, alienating them to the point of minimizing them, especially when it comes to poor and black women. While these women increasingly emerge with greater force appealing to their state of subversion, speaking unchained from social rules and reclaiming women as the source of life, power and energy, a timeless voice comes from the hand of intersectional microhistory, and from very disparate places and perspectives. Microhistories question historiographical versions and bring visions of everyday life, struggles, pleasure, suffering, dreams, desire or mental health, and above all, they reveal how the violences of slavery and colonization emerge in contemporary existences.

The Dialogue With the Ancestresses – Kalunga
Lara Sousa

Few people know Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares, a poet who was born in the middle of the colonial period, on September 26, 1926 in Catembe, on the other side of the bay of Maputo, capital of Mozambique. Noémia de Sousa is one of the most outstanding poets in the Portuguese-speaking world, a fighter whose weapon has always been words. She began to work and publish poems at a very young age, preferring to publish them in newspapers, weeklies, magazines and political pamphlets—this way they would better reach the hands of black Mozambicans, whom she wanted to awaken and open their eyes to Portuguese oppression. Her resistance against colonial occupation gave meaning to her life and work. She wanted her poems to be photocopied and distributed hand to hand. In fact, they were widely distributed in manuscript form, becoming a vital influence in the formation of Mozambique’s national consciousness. But her childhood, marked by the premature death of her father, never left her.

“That wooden house, with a large colonial-type railing, was a starting point, a meeting place… That house marked me for the rest of my life. My father was an intellectual and my mother was almost illiterate, but she had all the richness of a culture… In that house you could find intellectuals or the people …. those women who knew that Milidansa (my mother’s name) lived there, who in turn was the daughter of Belenguana, from Maputo, and in the house of Belenguana’s daughter they had to be welcomed. I didn’t t plan to start writing poetry. It happened because, after all, in our society everything rested on women. The woman was the slave of the slave and lived that way in society. However, she had an influence on society, because she was the one who raised the children, she was the center of the family and, above all, she was overburdened with work. I felt that a lot. I lived at home with many siblings, cousins and other relatives, many people at home and everything revolved around my widowed mother. I lost my father when I was 8 years old and I was the youngest of six siblings. And she was the father and mother of the family. And she wasn’t the only one…”

In 1951, her activities against the colonial regime led her to exile in Portugal. Almost twenty years later, in 1975, after Mozambique’s independence, her poetic work began to be studied in schools, by which time she was already a myth. In 1984, when she returned for the first time to Maputo, she went to visit her house in Catembe, but decided not to stay and returned to Portugal, where she lived until her death in December 2002, a year after the publication of her collection of poems Sangue Negro, which gathers 49 of her poems written between 1949 and 1952.

Kalunga is a short film in honor of her life, produced by Lara Sousa, her great-niece, years after her death. In the film, Lara dialogues with her great-aunt’s poetry, and raises questions such as the return to the country of origin or the need for such a return. In these dialogues, the resilient spirit of her great-aunt emerges through the verses of Sangue Negro, the place where the commissures of her struggle reside. The video is an invitation to travel through family memories, from a place far from home, from Cuba, Lara is led by enigmatic dreams to fulfill a spiritual birth ritual, a ritual of Palo Monte, an Afro-Cuban religion of Bantu origin from the Congo region, that will take her and her dead aunt back to Mozambique.

Sousa’s work transcends the search for an identity, to detach itself from the personal history that folds in on itself. As Sadiya Hartman says, it is a window into social and historical processes where Lara Sousa’s life intersects with that of Noémia de Sousa, who pushes her to return to her origins. It is a full-fledged microhistory. As Danúbia Tupinambá Pimentel states in her text Kalunga: uma saudação à ancestralidade: “it remains as a peak inside the family, motivated this time by the estrangement from her land, the self-exile she experiences when she travels to study and which, in a way, recalls the exiles of her great-aunt, Noémia de Sousa, one forced by political circumstances due to the struggles for independence and, at another time, when she decides not to live in Mozambique anymore”.⁴

To watch the video click here.

Kalunga
Directed by: Lara Sousa
Production: Matheus Mello
Cinematography: Guillermo Argueta
Sound: María Alejandra Rojas Garavito
Editing: Juliano Castro