Set in 17th-century Brazil, this wild and winding epic about a community of Africans who have escaped slavery is a revelation
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 Ursa’s 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, Eva’s 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.
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