A weapon of responsibility: the lyric cry in Alda Espírito Santo’s and Maria Manuela Margarido’s negritude poetics

Abstract

As a symbolic enunciation of Black subjection and resistance, the cry has functioned as a central trope in negritude poetics. This essay revisits the trope by focusing on another geography of the negritude imagination beyond the francophone world. I analyse how the work of two women poets from the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, Alda Espírito Santo (1926–2010) and Maria Manuela Margarido (1925–2007), reorients the cry as a modality of decolonial critique. I argue that they intentionally mobilize the sonorous force, intensity, and frequency of the cry in their poetry to grapple with the colonial ritual of terror in the Portuguese empire. In the intersection of mourning and resistance, the cry functions as both a critique of colonial violence and the voicing of radical hope for a decolonial future. This essay brings postcolonial and decolonial thought into conversation with lyric studies as it maps out the connection between Espírito Santo’s and Manuela Margarido’s poetry, intellectual work, and political activism. It illuminates the entanglement of the voice, power, and resistance in negritude poetics.