Poetry
Sabores, odores e sonho
Not translated into English
Ana de Santana · 1986
Synopsis
The author's first collection, whose sensual voice speaks of desire, waiting and the prohibitions that hinder love, in images drawn from the sea, the river and birds. Poems of intimacy, such as "Núpcias" or "Barco aberto", mingle with the everyday traumas of a country at war, rendered through a hallucinated language, broken sentences and an imagery of the senses in which a very real body suffers.
Context
The collection appeared in 1986, in the midst of the civil war. The critic Luís Kandjimbo places its author in the "generation of uncertainties", alongside João Maimona and José Eduardo Agualusa, whose books express anguish and disillusionment at the country's fate; Inocência Mata likens it to Paula Tavares's Ritos de passagem for its intimate, dreamlike quest. Ana de Santana's poems appear in the anthologies No caminho doloroso das coisas, in 1988, and Todos os sonhos; the collection has been translated into neither French nor English.
Who it is for
To read a woman's voice which, in the Angola of the eighties, makes the body and desire heard.
Prizes and reception
Oyekan Owomoyela counts her, with Paula Tavares, among the major poets of an Angolan decade long dominated by men.