Paper short abstract:

How is the Angolan rapper speaking truth to power (cf. Edward Said)? How does a post-independence generation view the role of poetry in political activism and cultural resistance? RAP (Rhythm and Poetry) will rhyme to and for a new generation of Angolans while addressing power structures.

Paper long abstract:

In his work, "Speaking truth to power", Edward Said asks what he considers to be "the basic question for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?". This essay will try to answer these questions by learning how the Angolan rapper, the organic intellectual, is speaking truth to power. In this process, we also intend to comprehend how this post-independence generation views the role of poetry in political activism and cultural resistance in Angola.

Once independence was achieved, a fratricidal civil war frustrated Angolan dreams. The poet took exile into his inner world (cf. Laranjeira), looking for his individual voice while dwelling on metapoetic issues, thus creating a hermetic poetry that, differently from pre-independence poetry, no longer understands itself as a venue to represent the subaltern (cf. Gramsci). João Melo denounces the post-independence poet´s "profound detachment from lower classes". This posture relegates the subaltern to silence and invisibility in Angolan poetry.

The urban subaltern has no other option but to speak for himself, thus breaking the silence of its subalternity and that of Angolan poetry. His poetry, RAP (Rhythm And Poetry), will not only rhyme to and for a new generation of Angolans, but it will also address power structures - demanding to be heard. The rapper uses new technologies to guarantee freedom of expression in order to exercise his critical function with greater plenitude, therefore protecting "the secular intellectual's main bastion" (cf. Said) from the constraints of hegemonic power structures.