Palmares
Jones began her celebrated literary career as the protégée of Toni Morrison, and in the last fifty years has written a handful of challenging, intense novels and books of poetry. A scholar of the African American oral tradition and a stylist of “magical realism,” she explores themes of Black and Indigenous identity, immigration, spirituality, and women’s history in a style she compares to jazz improvisation. Her books are not easy to read but offer an inspiring, dizzying vision of the long history of cultural boundary crossing that is part of the African Diaspora.
In Palmares, she creates an unforgettable protagonist in Almeyda, whose life the novel follows from infancy to adulthood in Brazil in the late 1700s. The novel unfolds in hundreds of brief vignettes: conversations Almeyda has or overhears, stories told by the people Almeyda meets, fragments of manuscripts written by European explorers attempting to make sense of the vastness of the land and peoples of Brazil.
Almeyda begins life enslaved, a mulatta girl who can see and hear spirits and voices from the past and future. The dizzying array of characters she meets represents the complex populations of Brazil at the time: European, Indigenous, and African; free and enslaved; colonizer and colonized; Christian, Muslim, and pantheist. Almeyda journeys from slavery to freedom in the legendary fugitive community of Palmares, and from silent observer to trained curandeira. Throughout, she is guided by a vision of her destiny to understand and document Brazil’s people of color, traveling at the side of her beloved Anninho, a freedom fighter, and aided by powerful women of all races and walks of life, each of whom offers a valuable lesson about survival and resilience. The result is a quilt of many colors and textures, held together with patterns of incantatory language and vivid description.
