"Supplication" by Noémia Sousa

Take us all,
but leave us the music!

Take away the land we were born in,
where we grew up
and where we first discovered
that the world is like this:
a chess maze...

Take away the sunlight that warms us,
your xingombela lyrics
on mulatto nights
from the Mozambican jungle
(this moon that sowed us in the heart
the poetry we find in life)
take away the hut ̶ humble hut
where we live and love,
take away the machamba that gives us bread,
take away the heat from the fire
(which is almost everything to us)
̶ but don't take away our music!

They can banish us
take us
to far lands,
sell us like merchandise,
chain us
to the earth, from the sun to the moon and from the moon to the sun,
but we will always be free
if you leave us the music!
That wherever our song is
even slaves, we will be masters;
and even dead, we will live.
And in our slave lament
will be the land where we were born,
the light of our sun,
the moon of the xingombelas,
the heat of the fire,
the hut where we live,
the machamba that gives us bread!

And everything will be ours again,
even if chains on the feet
and lash in the back...
And our complaint
it will be a release
spilled in our corner!
̶ Therefore we ask,
on our knees we ask:
Take us all...
but don't take our lives,
don't take the music away!

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Noémia de Sousa was born in 1926, and lived for a long time in the capital of Mozambique, which at the time was not yet Maputo. She lived through the revolution, was one of its exponents, and recorded in world history what happened in the form of poetry. His work, "Sangue Negro", first arrived in Brazil in 2016, by Kapulana. A revolutionary, she declared that she did not want her poems sold in book form while her people did not have money to buy food.