Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares' “If You Want To Know Me": Poem Summary
Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares was born on the 20 of September 1926. She was a poet from Mozambique who wrote in the Portuguese language and was also known as Vera Micaia. Carolina was of mixed Portuguese and Bantu descent. She worked with several newspapers and magazines throughout her life and also working as a translator in Lisbon. I was immediately drawn to her melancholic poem ‘If You Want to Know Me’. It’s an angry and powerful poem drawing on her conflicting emotions where she proffers her body as a medium for Africa’s struggle for freedom. It can’t also be helped to try and find hope in between the lines because the power of the poem lays, in its words and images of wounds. So let's research this poem more deeply in "“If You Want To Know Me" Poem Summary" paper.
It seems to me she wrote this poem to show the duality of the colonization and post colonization of Africa and the oppression of its people. It portrays the physiological and psychological impact of colonization the scars left along with hybridity. . In the beginning of the poem, she expresses her lost identity by using the metaphor “empty sockets”. The eye being a part of the body that best expresses emotions as well as special metaphor for her inability to see what comes next in the future nor what her past was really amounting to in the greater struggle. She doesn’t hide the fact that her harsh past experiences and marks will live with for the rest of her life and not just her but her people and the continent itself. Her usage of words like magnificent and torture together, beautiful and marred shows her resistance and only form of voicing her opinions. She proudly goes on to say “Africa from head and foot and this is what I am”. She uses language as a device to protest against slavery and gain liberation.
The colonization, slavery, all forms of violence, abuse, every single experience that she has ever gone through is what gives her identity. Even though it has distorted her life to a great extent, she still proudly believed in liberating her country and also for being an African. This powerful poem has well described and contributed to the identities of all Africans, created a bond against the hegemonic colonizer. If you want to know who I am, Examine with careful eyes. Ah, she is who I am: Empty eye sockets despairing of possessing lifeA mouth slashed with wounds of anguish Raised as though to implore and threatenBody tattooed with visible and invisible scars By the hard whips of slavery Tortured and magnificent, Proud and mystical, Africa from head to toe,-ah, she is who I am!If you want to understand meCome and bend over my African soul,In the groans of the Negroes on the docks In the frenzied dances of the Chopes In the rebelliousness of the Shaganas In the strange melancholy evaporating From a native song, into the night …And ask me nothing moreIf you really wish to know me…For I am no more than a shell of fleshIn which the revolt of Africa congealedIts cry swollen with hope.
