My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.
Newly translated into English, Crooked Plow — originally released in 2019 as Torto Arado — won its author, Itamar Vieira Junior, several international literary awards and brings attention to the history of Brazil’s Quilombola population (descendants of enslaved Africans brought to work on Brazilian plantations until the abolition of slavery in 1888). Covering the lives of three generations of the “Chapéu Grande” family, Vieira tells of the hardship of tenant farming, the persistent effects of racism and colonialism, and the meaninglessness of “freedom” when a people have nowhere to go. This is also a story of perseverance, family love, and the spiritual and community supports that keep a people going against incredible odds. With a blend of social and mystical realism — encantados (spirit beings) interfere in the physical realm and have very real effects — Vieira intriguingly captures a time and place that I knew nothing about. I didn’t totally vibe with the storytelling format — there is very little dialogue, just a series of three different narrators telling us that this happened and then this happened — but I am delighted that Torto Arado has been translated into English and that I had an opportunity to learn from it; I hope that many more readers find their way to this tale. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slightly spoilerish.)
My father was holding the tongue, wrapped in one of the few shirts he owned. Even then, what I feared was that the tongue would cry out on its own to tell on us. That it would turn us in for our meddling, our stubbornness, our transgression, our lack of concern and respect for Grandma and her things. And, worse, our irresponsibility in putting a knife in our mouths, knowing very well that knives bleed the beasts we hunt and the animals in the pen, and they kill men.
As Crooked Plow opens, two sisters — Belonísia (6) and Bibiana (7) — have discovered a beautiful ivory-handled knife under their grandmother’s bed, and entranced by its shining silver blade, first one and then the other girl puts the knife into her mouth, and one of them loses her tongue. Both the knife and Belonísia’s voicelessness are major motifs in the book, and Vieira will take the unfolding of the entire story to explain where the knife came from, and how it will ultimately be put to use. The accident sets the sisters on different paths, but with limited options available (and especially for girls) in their community, it will also bind them together. And in the background, is the unending toil and precarious predicament of their community of tenant farmers.
Zeca Chapéu Grande was a respected healer, his name renowned throughout the region. But here, within the confines of the plantation, under the rule of the Peixoto family — who barely set foot on those fields except to give orders or pay the manager or remind us that we were forbidden from building brick houses — under their rule and that of Sutério, my father was just another loyal tenant farmer, grateful for the opportunity he’d been given after searching so long for work and a place to settle down.
As Vieira describes it, Quilombolas may have been officially freed with the abolition of slavery, but with nowhere to go and nowhere else to work and support their families, people would show up at white-owned plantations and consider themselves lucky if the owners allowed them to work the fields for no pay — just permission to build a mud hut (Vieira tells us probably ten times that tenant farmers’ homes could not be built of bricks or have tile roofs; impermanence was enforced), and while they were allowed to plant a small garden (the only food they had to feed their own families), the owners were owed one third of their harvest, and in fact, could help themselves to as much of their fresh produce as they liked. The tenant farmers (although they worked “Sunday to Sunday”) would also fish in the river and harvest forest fruit in their off hours to sell in town for the cash for small supplies. Despite living on and working this land for generations, the Quilombolas understand that they have no right to their property; and when the plantation is sold and the new owner seems to resent their presence, the community needs to decide whether to keep their heads low or find a way to finally stake a claim. (I couldn’t quite figure out the timeline. A character says at one point: We knew that the land had had tenant farmers on it since at least the arrival of Damião, the pioneer of our community, who showed up during the drought of 1932. And by the end, some huts had televisions and satellite dishes, so it’s recentish.)
As I said, there’s much social realism here — I liked everything I learned about how these people lived, from the traditional healers to the modern activists — and while Vieira wonderfully captured the historical time and place, I appreciated the mystical and spiritual bits that brought this particular community to life:
In moments of heightened emotion, I lose myself, I overflow, unable to hold myself together. If I could still mount a horse . . . but no one remembers Santa Rita the Fisherwoman. No healer calls to me, no house of Jarê. Slowly the people unlearn what they once understood; so much has changed.
This encatado, Santa Rita the Fisherwoman, is the third and final narrator of Crooked Plow (after Bibiana and Belonísia take their turns), and like in many tales of oppressed peoples (I’m thinking Song of Solomon, The Master & Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude), sometimes it takes a bit of magical realism to create something like justice in this world.
The blood of history flows like a river. First, it flows through dreams. Then it comes galloping as if on a horse.
Again: I knew nothing of the plight of the Quilombolas, and Vieira’s novelisation of one such family’s history was compelling and enlightening. Certainly worth the read.
