12 The New York Reviewor killed, we come together again.
New fugitives come to us, and free
blacks like myself who will risk
their own freedom. Generations
of destroyed villages, new villages,
and new destructions. I know the
cycle by heart.In the poem that bears her name, Al-
meyda declares, “Destruction of / The
old Palmares / Is the spark that builds
the / New one,” while in The Ancestor, a
character proclaims: “Everything hap-
pens again in this world.” This is not
literary reverie: quilombos still exist in
Brazil today, especially in the northeast
and the Amazon: the national govern-
ment puts their number at 3,524, and
their rights were finally guaranteed in
the Brazilian constitution of 1988. But
Jones is also clearly suggesting that it’s
not that far from Palmares to, say, Tul-
sa’s Black Wall Street massacre in 1921.
Brazil has fascinated—or appalled—
Jones since the very beginning of her
career. The title character of her first
novel, Corregidora, published in 1975
when she was twenty- five, is a Kentucky
blues singer whose Brazilian ancestors
were slaves repeatedly raped by their
Portuguese owner, and the themes of
sexual violence, memory, trauma, and
female resistance and resilience found
in Palmares and much of Jones’s other
writing were introduced there. All told,
I count a half- dozen of Jones’s works
that reference Brazil in some fashion,
including Xarque and Other Poems
(1985), a collection that takes its title
from a type of beef jerky popular in the
northeastern region in which Palmares
takes place.
“I feel a kinship with Latin Ameri-
can writers,” Jones said in a rare in-
terview in 1978, later republished as a
kind of preface to a compendium of her
first three novels that Griot issued in
the late 1990s. “The Latin Americans
have helped me in making movements
between different kinds of language
and different kinds of reality. They’ve
helped to reinforce my own traditions.”
In their rebellion against the Spanish
and Portuguese spoken in Europe and
their “taking in the Indian (Amerin-
dian) and African—the American her-
itage,” Jones added, she saw mirrored
her own struggle to write out of an oral,
storytelling tradition. “Their influence
has to do with the use of language, the
kinds of imagery, the relationship be-
tween past and present with landscape.”In Palmares, Jones demonstrates an
especially deep awareness and under-
standing of Brazilian history and a re-
markable ability to synthesize it with
her story; the same can be said of her
knowledge of Afro- Brazilian and in-
digenous folklore and mythology. She
has clearly done a prodigious amount
of reading and research in historical
documents and contemporary accounts
of life in colonial Brazil, including ma-
terial that, as far as I know, has never
been translated into English.
As an inside joke, she even repur-
poses the names of authors of re-
nowned travelers’ accounts from that
period, bestowing them on white char-
acters in the first of the six sections
that make up Palmares. The priest
who teaches Almeyda to read, for
example, is named Tollinare, which
evokes Louis- François de Tollenaere,
a French sugar merchant who was so
disgusted by the slave trade and theabuses of plantation life in Brazil that
he supported a plot to topple Portu-
guese rule; he wrote a fascinating and
disturbing book called Notas Dominic-
ais (Sunday Notes) about what he saw.
Similarly, Rugendas, a cartographer
who took Almeyda’s grandmother as
a concubine, recalls Johann Rugen-
das, a nineteenth- century German
painter who specialized in canvases of
slaves and was one of the progenitors of
“tropical romanticism,” a style of naive
exoticism that is to Latin America what
Orientalism is to the Middle East.
Palmares also features an artist
named Johann, who appears to be a
composite of the Dutch painters Frans
Post and Albert Eckhout—both active
in Brazil in the 1640s as members of the
retinue of Johan Maurits van Nassau-
Siegen, governor of Dutch Brazil; and
there is a plantation called Marcgraf,
seemingly a reference to the German
naturalist, astronomer, and cartogra-
pher Georg Markgraf, another of Nas-
sau’s auxiliaries. Jones is aware that the
Dutch ruled much of northeastern Bra-
zil for a quarter- century beginning in
1630, and astutely works that neglected
fact into her plot. She also uses archaic
Portuguese spellings appropriate for
the time—like Almeyda instead of
Almeida—and incorporates Hispani-
cisms that indicate she is aware that
Spain and the Habsburgs ruled Por-
tugal from 1580 to 1640, thus making
Brazil the colony of a colony.
Without ever mentioning Gilberto
Freyre, the Brazilian sociologist who
was his country’s most influential an-
alyst and ideologist of race relations
during the twentieth century, Jones
challenges—and implicitly rebukes—
his rather rosy views on the subject. She
has obviously read his Casa- Grande e
senzala, literally “Big House and Slave
Quarters,” first published in 1933 and
eventually translated into English as
The Masters and the Slaves, for her
novel is full of oblique reflections on
Freyre’s work.
Considered revolutionary when first
published, The Masters and the Slaves
encouraged Brazilians to exalt the wide-
spread miscegenation that until then had
been a source of shame and to embrace
the African components of their culture
and history. But in doing so, Freyre, the
descendant of Pernambuco sugar grow-
ers, also provided the seed for the myth
of a “racial democracy” that came to
dominate Brazilian thought. According
to this theory, slavery in Brazil involved
less segregation and violence than in
the United States, resulting in a more
mild and charitable form of captivity
and, in modern times, an absence of
structural, institutionalized discrimi-
nation. Or as the novelist Jorge Amado
once said to me: “The United States
has millions of people who are not rac-
ists, but it is a racist country. Brazil has
millions of people who are racists, but
it is not a racist country.”
In recent years, though, that position
has been attacked by thinkers such as
the black feminist philosopher Djamila
Ribeiro, who in 2019 wrote that
Freyre’s work “romanticizes the vio-
lence suffered by the black population”
and has been “exported to the global
North as if it were sugarcane.” Jones
clearly endorses Ribeiro’s view, for
Palmares contains scenes of hideous
brutality, unbearable suffering, and the
inhumane indifference of slave owners
toward their chattel: “The final act is
always an act of mutilation and blood,”“Gideon Rachman outlines
the shared tactics of the
authoritarian ‘playbook’ in
this wide-ranging analysis.”
—new york times book review“A VALUABLE AND “A VALUABLE AND
ENGAGINGLY WRITTEN BOOK...ENGAGINGLY WRITTEN BOOK...
CONCISE AND TRENCHANT”CONCISE AND TRENCHANT”
—ruth ben-ghiat, author of
strongmen: mussolini to the present“Drawing on a wide range of sources, and
providing a truly global perspective, Rachman
ILLUMINATES THE COMMON ILLUMINATES THE COMMON
INSTINCTS, TACTICS AND BEHAVIORSINSTINCTS, TACTICS AND BEHAVIORS
THAT LINK LEADERS AS DIVERSETHAT LINK LEADERS AS DIVERSE
AS TRUMP, PUTIN, XI, AND MODI.”AS TRUMP, PUTIN, XI, AND MODI.”
—anne applebaum, author of
twilight of democracyother press otherpress.com
fromGIDEON RACHMANGIDEON RACHMAN
winner of the
orwell prize
for political
writingRohter 10 15 _alt.indd 12 5 / 26 / 22 3 : 37 PM