Three Stories of Forgetting
-
- $249.00
-
- $249.00
Descripción editorial
“Three Stories of Forgetting spells out the nightmare of history in the beautiful language of dreams.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book
A Must-Read: NPR, Ms., Literary Hub, Book Riot, Foreign Policy, and Brittle Paper
From the award-winning writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, a haunting exploration of the memories of three men and the reverberations of slavery, colonialism, and empire.
Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature.
In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The protagonists of this contemplative triptych from Pereira de Almeida (That Hair) wrestle with the legacy of Portuguese colonialism. In "Vision of Plants," Captain Celestino retires from the African slave trade in 1833 to tend to the garden of his childhood home in a village outside Porto. Known among locals as a pirate who plundered the African coast, he finds solace in plants who know nothing of him: "They didn't care if he had found in them a reason to live or that he loved them." "Seaquake," set in the early 2000s, follows Boa Morte, a security guard in Lisbon who's haunted by memories of fighting fellow Africans in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence and missing the young daughter he left behind in Angola. "Bruma," the collection's most heart-wrenching and uplifting entry, follows an aging enslaved man who decides to build a cabin of his own beyond the boundary of the plantation he works on. Toward the end of his life, he finds respite in his imagination, which brings him to faraway lands. Pereira de Almeida sustains a melancholy mood across the stories, each of which is infused with the regrets and yearning of its main character. The result is a well-crafted depiction of the hidden bonds between individuals and empire.
