Palmares by Gayl Jones

This is the first book that I have read by this author, but in reading reviews of this book I discovered that she is well known for reimagining the lives of Black women across North, South and Central America, living in different centuries, and in a way no other writer has done. That assessment certainly holds true for this book. Palmares begins in the 1670s when its narrator, Almeyda, is a child. Almeyda lives on a Brazilian plantation with her enslaved mother, as well as a grandmother who still speaks Arabic and is called a witch, reviled and feared in equal parts. Young Almeyda observes the world around her keenly, and notices that women are enslaved and used for sexual purposes, even by the village priest. Palmares is named for the largest and best known of Brazil’s quilombos, communities established by Africans who had escaped slavery. First documented around the 1580s, it was home to between 6,000 and 20,000 people and was a more or less autonomous state located in the north-east of Brazil. The scale of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil is often underestimated: of the nearly 11 million Africans taken by force to the Americas, 5 million disembarked in Brazil, over 10 times more than in North America. Almeyda's journey to a nd from Palmares in a winding one, and she encounters every immigrant to Brazil at the time, Black Muslims, Black witches, women with “wives”, Christians, Jews, Tupis, Guaranís, miners, female English journalists, voyeuristic Dutch painters, mercenaries and free Black men and women. She also finds Palmares, which had a governance structure based on that of contemporary west African states, to be complicated and not altogether free of democratic. There were still slaves, and women had few choices. The story meanders, and is rich in both details and it will definitely make you think. It is a reinvention of 17th-century Black Brazil in all its multiplicity, beauty, humanity and chaos.