10 The New York ReviewAn Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance
Larry Rohter
Palmares
by Gayl Jones.
Beacon, 492 pp., $27.Song for Almeyda
and Song for Anninho
by Gayl Jones.
Beacon, 189 pp., $23.During the last decades of the six-
teenth century, enslaved Africans es-
caping from sugar plantations began
to congregate deep in the untracked
interior of northeastern Brazil. In the
lush uplands of what was then the Cap-
taincy of Pernambuco, they established
clusters of villages, fortified them with
palisades, created a polity of their own
based on African models, and named it
Palmares, after the palm trees that grew
in profusion there. By the middle of the
seventeenth century the population of
Palmares is estimated to have exceeded
20,000 —at a time when Rio de Janeiro
had only 7,000 inhabitants. Throughout
the 1600s Portuguese colonial authori-
ties, rightly fearing that Palmares was be-
coming both a threat to their hegemony
and a beacon to those still enslaved,
sent one expeditionary force after
another to try to eradicate the com-
munity, but they succeeded only after
more than a century of effort, in 1695.
In longevity combined with size, Pal-
mares is thus probably the most spec-
tacular example in the New World of
marronage, the term scholars apply to
enslaved people fleeing their servitude
and creating their own settlements in
isolated or hidden places. Yet the Qui-
lombo dos Palmares, as it is known in
Portuguese—the fugitive haven of Pal-
mares—remains largely unknown and
understudied in the English- speaking
world, despite the increasing attention
paid in recent years to similar exam-
ples of slave resistance in the southern
United States, such as the Great Dis-
mal Swamp maroons, and in the Ca-
ribbean. So in writing a novel called
Palmares, Gayl Jones, recognized since
the 1970s as one of America’s most im-
portant black writers, is breaking new
literary ground and performing a laud-
able act of historical redemption.
Palmares is an audacious work,
and on multiple levels. The composer
Antônio Carlos Jobim was fond of say-
ing that “Brazil is not for beginners,”
and there is no denying that something
about the place makes it easy for bedaz-
zled foreign newcomers to trip them-
selves up, as demonstrated by works
as different as John Updike’s Brazil
(1994) and Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land
of the Future (1941). But beyond that
danger, which Jones largely avoids, lies
a larger issue. The Palmares episode is
a cornerstone of Afro- Brazilian pride
and identity—akin to Masada for Jews
or the Battle of Chapultepec for Mexi-
cans—and November 20, the date the
last leader of Palmares was killed and
his head stuck on a pike to be paraded
through the streets of Recife, has since
2011 been a national holiday known as
Black Consciousness Day. The Brazil-
ian government has also created the
Palmares Foundation, charged with
promoting black pride and cultural
awareness, and in 2018 the Palmares
period figured prominently in an exhi-bition called “Afro- Atlantic Histories”
at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and
the Instituto Tomie Ohtake.*
There exists, in other words, a certain
sense of proprietary self- esteem asso-
ciated with Palmares that could make
it risky for a foreigner to take up the
story. How might Americans react if a
Brazilian were to write a novel about
the Underground Railroad? It is yet
another variation on a question heard
more and more frequently in recent
years: To whom does a story belong,
and who has the right to tell it? But
Jones makes a convincing argument for
seeing Palmares as a story to which all
descendants of Africans brought forci-
bly to the Americas through the Mid-
dle Passage—and even, by extension,
other victims of colonialism and racial-
ized oppression—can lay claim.
Jones’s willingness to move beyond
a specifically North American canvas
is salutary, for much in Brazil’s expe-
rience merits the attention of anyone
interested in the history of slavery. The
country has the largest population of
African descent outside Africa: of its
210 million citizens, more than half
claim some degree of African heritage,
according to the most recent census.
During the three hundred years of
the Atlantic slave trade, at least four
million people were transported from
Africa to the Portuguese colony of
Brazil—ten times the number taken to
what became the United States.
Slavery began in Brazil nearly a cen-
tury earlier than in British North Amer-
ica, lasted until 1888, and was not limited
to a particular region but was truly na-
tional in scope. The color line was not
binary: instead of the American “onedrop” rule, Brazilian Portuguese devel-
oped scores of words to describe skin
tones, as whites, blacks, and indigenous
people (joined after abolition by Asians
and people from the Middle East) com-
mingled to a degree rarely seen else-
where. Slavery’s impact was thus even
more overwhelming than in the US, and
Brazilians have had to devise different
ways to confront—or not—its legacy.The main character in Palmares is Al-
meyda, whom we first encounter at age
seven as a slave girl living on a planta-
tion with her mother and grandmother,
a sorceress who still prays in Arabic
and clings to remnants of the Islam
of her African childhood. The atmo-
sphere is a mixture of fever dream and
repressed dread that readers of Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea will rec-
ognize, but thanks to a relatively pro-
gressive priest, Almeyda learns to read
and write and is brought into the Big
House. When puberty comes, though,
she is sold and, after a grotesque sexual
encounter with her new owner, rented
out to work at a shoe factory, where
she first hears rumors of a place where
black people can be free. The factory
owner’s wife, jealous of Almeyda’s sex-
ual allure, seems intent on making the
younger woman’s life hellish, and when
warriors from Palmares unexpectedly
appear, Almeyda eagerly joins them.
In captivity, Almeyda “dreamed
of Palmares, where one’s true place
in the world was said to be the same
as any free man’s or woman’s.” But
when she arrives there, she confronts
a more complicated reality. Women,
she quickly finds, remain subordinated,
and any hope for true racial equality
also proves elusive. Different African
ethnicities live and work in harmony,
as do indigenous people and white de-
serters from the Portuguese army. But
Zumbi, the king of Palmares, has not
fully done away with slavery: blacks who
do not want to be liberated from plan-
tations are nonetheless forcibly removed
and, on arrival in Palmares, subjected toa continuation of their servitude. In ad-
dition, there are class distinctions: resi-
dents who were born free or made their
way to Palmares on their own have a
higher standing than those who, like Al-
meyda, were liberated by a raiding party.
At this point, Palmares acquires the
trappings of an epic love story, with
echoes of European romances like
those of Abelard and Héloïse, Robin
Hood and Marian, El Cid and Ximena,
or Tristan and Isolde. Anninho, one
of the king’s savviest counselors, spots
Almeyda in a group of new arrivals,
and she also notices him; it is love, or at
least mutual enchantment, at first sight,
and soon they are a couple. But after a
Portuguese attack interrupts their idyll,
they become separated and Almeyda is
captured by Portuguese scouts, sexually
mutilated, and left for dead. The re-
mainder of the novel recounts her strug-
gle to be reunited with Anninho, as she
roams northeastern Brazil searching for
him, crossing paths with fools and sages
of all races, evading danger and temp-
tation, and picking up bits of wisdom
from each encounter. It is almost like
an Afro- Brazilian Pilgrim’s Progress—
Jones mentions John Bunyan’s moral
tale early in Palmares—with macumba,
the Brazilian counterpart to Santería,
taking the place of Christianity.Palmares is Jones’s first novel in
more than twenty years; its immedi-
ate predecessor was Mosquito (1999),
in which Sojourner Johnson, a black
woman truck driver working along the
Mexican border, becomes involved in
what she calls “the new underground
railroad” offering sanctuary to Mexi-
can immigrants. But the origins of Pal-
mares go back more than forty years:
in 1981 Jones published a book- length
poem called Song for Anninho, in
which she introduced her main male
character and some of the themes she
develops in greater detail in Palmares.
That poem, long out of print, has now
been paired with a more recent one
about the novel’s female protagonist,
Song for Almeyda.
Palmares is thus not a work created
in isolation but rather the main compo-
nent of a larger long- term project that
also includes The Ancestor: A Street
Play (2020). The novel, the poems, and
the brief theatrical work are of a piece:
even more than actual history, they are
interested in what Jones calls “the leg-
end of Palmares” as an eternal symbol
of black resistance. The epigraph for
the two poems is an excerpt from the
report sent to the Portuguese throne by
the functionary who finally vanquished
Palmares, in which he warns that even
though the settlement’s leaders have
been killed and the survivors scattered,
“one should not therefore think that
this war is ended.” That phrase is cru-
cial to understanding Jones’s Palmares
project, for she sees the conflict that the
Quilombo dos Palmares embodied as
one doomed to repetition.
“They destroy one Palmares, we
scatter, we form another one,” An-
ninho tells Almeyda in the novel.That one is destroyed. We scat-
ter, those who are not capturedGayl Jones; illustration by Leanne Shapton*A scaled- down version of the exhibi-
tion, with the same title, is on view at
the National Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, D.C., through July 17, after
which it will travel to Los Angeles and
Dallas. A majestic adaptation of the
Brazilian catalog has been published
by DelMonico Books/MASP in English
as Afro-Atlantic Histories.Rohter 10 15 _alt.indd 10 5 / 26 / 22 3 : 37 PM