It's a contradiction for you to construct a discourse of liberation based on the discourse of the actual oppressor. And we, the black writers, began to perceive that there exists no social movement without literary expression, and there was no room for the political discussion of the issue of black literature within the Black Movement. So we started the black writers movement, which surges from the Black Movement as a whole. Our aim was to address specifically the issue of black literature, but we also wanted to fight alongside the community, upholding its poetry, its stories, its theatrical works. Throughout the 1980s, my work was very much aligned with this issue of denouncing racism, racial relations, the way in which black people are excluded, but this does not express all of the necessity of art.
Literature is essentially art.
If you read contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature, you discover that each poet or each short story writer deals with the issue of race. So I began to write about love, about caring, and I began to write children's poems. And the same thing happened in Germany, when I went to represent black writers during the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the European invasion of the Americas. The issue of race is always in my text, but not necessarily explicit in my poetry, saying that I am black or that you are white or that the system does not oppress. Now, all my texts are works of profound questioning of the context in which people live.