Kumina

A performance in which memory, childhood and poetry struggle to ward off borders.

What anger does an exile carry within him? What poem can express the fears and doubts inherent in being uprooted? In the gloom of modern times, a man gropes for words. They come in French, Portuguese or Changana. They plunge us into an intimate story torn apart by colonisation and bring back to life the language of Pessoa, that of Kamau Brathwaite, the immense poet from Barbados, or even that of Virgil, Dante, Camoes...

Playwright and director, the Mozambican artist Victor de Oliveira was born in an African colony. The grandson of colonisers and colonised, he writes and performs this captivating one-man show. On a sand-covered floor, between shadow and light, poems and stories take on a singular force and fragility. The words mark out the sufferings and hopes of exiles, questioning relations between North and South. A rare, universal and necessary voice.

Text, performance and direction: Victor de Oliveira.