The 1953 poetry notebook Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa is a groundbreaking work that brings together negritude poetry from across the Lusophone African world. Edited by Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade and Sao Tomean poet Francisco Tenreiro, the short collection declares itself an anti-colonial intervention into the negritude movements underway elsewhere in the black world since the 1930s. Little has been made, however, of the notebook's dedication to Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén or the inclusion of his “Son Número 6” as the first poem in the collection. By 1953, Nicolás Guillén was internationally renowned for his original contributions to avant-garde experimentation, and since the 1930 publication of Motivos de son, was foundational in the Spanish-language negristapoetic movement. Rejecting the portrayal of African-derived poetic forms and content as “picturesque” local color, his poetry defends the place and importance of Afro-Cuban cultural forms within broader discussions of Cuban literature and Spanish-language poetry, as well as within the construction of a Cuban national identity around notions of mulataje(Maguire 2002: n. pag.; Kutzinski 1987: 164).

As Poesia negrawas published well after the seminal Francophone negritude texts, it has been read at times as a derivative repetition of the debates around negritudeand negrismo. In other cases, the poets included in the 1953 work—Sao Tomeans Alda do Espírito Santo and Francisco Tenreiro, the Angolans Agostinho Neto, António Jacinto, and Viriato da Cruz, and Mozambican Noémia de Sousa—have been subsumed under the rubrics of emergent national literatures, as the political priority of the national independence movements in Lusophone Africa solidified between 1961 and independence in 1975. However, moving beyond these spheres of criticism, this essay argues that the juxtaposition of Guillén's “Son Número 6” with the Lusophone poems, and Lusophone poets’ paratextual commentary on Guillén and other negritudefigures, consolidates an alternative transatlanticism that shifts the circuits of collaboration to the south. The metropole-colony vectors that formed the early configurations of both Transatlantic Studies and Postcolonial Studies, though in no way irrelevant, are insufficient as framings to make sense of this collection. This essay will focus on poetic techniques such as call-and-response and the socially embedded, metonymic construction of blackness shared by Guillén and Lusophone poets Agostinho Neto, Noémia de Sousa and António Jacinto to examine how the notebook establishes the origins of both negritudepoetry and negritudeidentity in the transatlantic poetic conversation itself.