certainly were, here and there, poetic expressions never recorded because
they were confined to the humble sphere of everyday living; folk songs,
stories, poems, expressed orally by the people who created theip. All
this is part of the heritage the ordinary people produce over the centuries
and which may be lost if it does not receive recognition from the dominant
classes and their dominant culture. But it exists, and some of it will be
saved, to enter history through the revolution.
Just as the oppression in Mozambique was resisted sporadically through
limited local revolts, so the silence of art was at first broken by isolated
cries of sorrow and despair. It is not difficult to see that all the early
ihanifestations of protest in Mozambican society and poetry have the same tone
if hopelessness, the same feature of brief and spontaneous explosion, bound
to die as suddenly as they arise. The same aspects of uncertainty, of incoherence and inconsistency appear in all.
The most significant example of this is to be found in the poetic work of
Rui de Noronha, whose lifetime (1909 - 1943) covers exactly the period
being considered. Most evident in his poems is the conflict experienced
by the African people who were torn between the old and the new world. His
morbid insistence on the theme of an ambiguous divinity reflects the"unresolved contradiction between the imported religion and traditional beliefs, as one example of a larger clash.
Where are you, who are you, 0 powerful God
Whom I cannot know nor understand....
(StCplica)
and doubts tormenting the new faiths
If God is just and good, why do I know      	
Evil and injustice?.,,
(Deus)	
Noronha1 s poetry, unable to find a real balance and often a genuine inspiration, is typical of the situation of the Mozambican man, who restlessly looks for a new world, but without any real hope,-as if looking for
a Utopia which will never comes
,..in the mortal anxiety which devours us... .. ]	
hopes broken, the spirit killed
in this restless longing we are v/aiting
our whole lives until the last   :
hour which heaven will send us
asking In doubt if one day
that divine moment, that Utopia
has passed us by...or will never come.
(Duvida)
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