Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja

Abstract

This chapter considers how Beja, born in 1946 in the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, seeks to produce a signifying chain that emerges from the centuries-long impact of imperial power on the world, particularly on disenfranchised peoples and spaces. Beja, in this sense, takes a further step by reflecting on ways to enunciate identity and collective struggle in a decolonial fashion. The chapter reads select poems from three of her collections spanning her poetic trajectory and oeuvre: Bô Tendê? [Do You Understand?] (1992), No País do Tchiloli [In the Country of Tchiloli] (1996), and Aromas de Cajamanga [Aromas of Ambarella] (2009). In doing so, we shall examine what we may call a decolonial remapping; one that Beja carries out, I argue, in a poetic narrating/signifying of movement through time and space that re-orders imperial signifiers.