Happy New Year from #CiteBlackWomen - Women's Voices

The New Year is a time for beginnings and reflections, cleansings, renewals and new hopes. We open 2019 with a poem and novelist from Brazilian poet Conceição Evaristo. She is widely respected as one of the foremost contemporary writers of Brazil, and one of the foremost of our time. Born in Belo Horizonte (MG) in 1946, she is the author of Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), Becos da Memorial (2006), Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos (2008), Insubmissas lágrimas de mulheres (2011), Olhos d'agua (2014), Histórias de leves enganos e parecenças (2016) and Canção para ninar menino grande (2018).

​Women's Voices
 
The voice of my great-grandmother echoed
child
in the ship's holds.
echoed moans
of a lost childhood.
 
The voice of my grandmother
echoed obedience
to the white people who own everything.
 
The voice of my mother
echoed softly in revolt
in the backs of other people's kitchens
under the bundles
of dirty clothes of white people
on the dusty road
in the direction of the favela
​

 ​My voice still
echoes perplexing verses
with blood rhymes
                        and
                        hunger.
 
My daughter's voice
collect all our voices
collects itself
the voices mute silent. 
choked in the throats.
 
My daughter's voice
collects itself
speech and act.
Yesterday - today - now.
In my daughter's voice
resonance will be heard
the echo of life-freedom. 
 
- published in Cadernos Negros 13, p. 32-33 (1990)