The sing in the city silenced: symbolic power in Mozambican anticolonial poetry

Abstract

From the poems of José Craveirinha and Noémia de Sousa, icons of Mozambican anticolonial poetry, the forms of struggle for symbolic power will be discussed. Analyzing the poetry of the Mozambican writers in question, it is possible to observe that the struggle is built both in the objective field (explicit struggle, material and political), and in the symbolic field (struggle for space, culture and social symbols). According to Pierre Bourdieu (1989), the fields – be they political, literary, religious or scientific – are in constant dispute, which is derived from the inequality of capital between the agents (dominant or dominated), that fight for the conservation or subversion of the structures. In this way, it is sought to analyze in the poems how the struggle for the word occurs that was imprisoned by the dominant agents during the colonial period.