The poetics of relation in Conceição Lima’s work

Abstract

The current article aims to study the poetic work of Conceição Lima,a writer from São Tomé and Príncipe, under the readings’ perspective of Édouard Glissant’s (2005) Poetic of Relation. An analysis will be performed over the way a poet self-defines in the midst of cultural multiplicities in diaspora movements, which enables the poet to turn a skeptical look on his homeland, at the same time as it raises the possibility of symbolically creating new communities. In the multicultural society, the subject becomes a hybrid, and the dominant and supposedly homogenizing discourses start being disputed. Therefore, this why it is unsustainable, nowadays, to think of a national identity as pure and unique in nature, as the world is creolized and unexpected cultural and linguistic microclimates are created. Places where repercussion of the overlapping cultures is abrupt and unpredictable, predominating in the totality-world, for Édouard Glissant (2005), the creole reality, constantly resembles with other origins and is capable of disclosing the essential Utopia - the missing people – in order to wreck certainties and to make the micro, the unique, the multiple and the inextricable emerge.