Palmares by Gayl Jones review a long-awaited vision of freedom – The Guardian

Gayl Jones is a literary legend. In novels and poetry, she has reimagined the lives of Black women across North, South and Central America, living in different centuries, in a way no other writer has done. Jones made her name with her first novel, Corregidora, published in 1975; through an intimate, fragmentary narrative, it follows the life of Ursa, a blues singer in 1940s Kentucky. The title is the surname of the man who raped and enslaved Ursas grandmother a century earlier in Brazil, a surname Ursa still bears. Toni Morrison, who published it, said: No book about any Black woman will ever be the same after this. James Baldwin called it the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women.

Although Corregidora was followed in 1976 by a second novel, Evas Man, her third and fourth, The Healing and Mosquito, were not released until the late 1990s. Publishers Weekly reports that at that time, Jones showed her editor a draft of another novel one set in 17th-century Brazil, which she had spent the last 20 years writing. That was Palmares, and now, after 40 years in the works, it is here. It is the first of five books including a rerelease of her 1981 book-length poem Song for Anninho, also set in 17th-century Brazil that will be published in the next two years.

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 crazy and a witch. Young Almeyda observes the world around her keenly, asking her mother if the local priest makes love with Mexia, his indigenous housekeeper. Almeydas mother denies it; her grandmother laughs. Three hundred pages later, long after Mexias escape, Almeyda at this point an adult with no illusions about the church acknowledges what her mother refused to: that Mexia was the priests slave.

One day a Black woman arrives at the plantation in a carriage. Her bare feet peep out from a long silk gown full of pleats and folds and ruffles. Almeyda asks if she is a slave or a free woman, and the woman replies with disdain either for the distinction or the categories themselves: I am neither kind. The woman is from Palmares.

Palmares is the largest and best known of Brazils 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.

Almeydas journeys to and from Palmares are winding and wild, and so is Joness writing. Six long sections are broken into short episodes resembling Brazilian contos (tales), with titles such as The Russian and A Man of Wealth and Light Skin and a Woman Convicted of Casting Love Spells. Almeyda meets Black Muslims, Black witches, women with wives, Christians, Jews, Tupis, Guarans, miners, female English journalists, voyeuristic Dutch painters, mercenaries and free Black men and women. She learns the healing properties of plants and animals, including lizard testicles.

If you try to read the book over a weekend, you may find yourself overwhelmed. Palmares is a grand epic, in the west African and Afro-Brazilian oral traditions, to be savoured in parts, night after night.

Jones doesnt romanticise Palmares, which had a governance structure based on that of contemporary west African states. Once there, Almeyda meets a still-enslaved Black woman, Nobrega, who explains to Almeyda: You are a free woman. I am a slave. Almeyda collapses the distinction: I said that [Nobrega] could oil and wash [my hair] only if I oiled and brushed hers in return.

Palmares takes us to a key moment in the invention of race and gender. Almeyda repeatedly asks what a woman is, revealing, through her encounters, the influence of unstable constructs such as race. Joness narration is similarly fluid, moving with beauty and abundance between meticulous documentation and surrealism, singing with Portuguese and Indigenous words and phrases.

Palmares reinvents 17th-century Black Brazil in all its multiplicity, beauty, humanity and chaos. It is a once-in-a-lifetime work of literature, the kind that changes your understanding of the world.

Yara Rodgrigues Fowlers Stubborn Archivist is published by Fleet. Palmares by Gayl Jones is published by Virago (18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Palmares by Gayl Jones review a long-awaited vision of freedom - The Guardian