Race Relations in Brazil from the Perspective of a Brazilian

African and an African Brazilian: José Eduardo Agualusa's O

Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio and Francisco Maciel's O
Primeiro Dia do Ano da Peste

David Brookshaw

Research in African Literatures, Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 163-171
(Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ral.2007.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/209530

Access provided at 20 Aug 2019 23:46 GMT from University of Warwick

Race Relations in Brazil from the
Perspective of a Brazilian African and
an African Brazilian: José Eduardo
Agualusa’s O Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o
Rio and Francisco Maciel’s O Primeiro Dia
do Ano da Peste.
David Brookshaw
University of Bristol, England

T
he cultural links between Brazil and the former colonial territories of Por-
tugal in West and Southwest Africa, most notably Angola, are uniquely
robust and have only recently been explored by Portuguese and Brazilian
historians in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s study of the African Atlantic, in which the
Lusophone African diasporas are scarcely mentioned.1 These links, established
during the slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, are as alive
today in a different contemporary context. It is no surprise, for example, that the
independence of Angola in late 1975 after a long colonial war that had helped
bring down the Portuguese dictatorship, should have coincided more or less
with the beginning of the slow process of “abertura” ‘opening’ that was to lead
to the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship and the eventual re-establishment of a
parliamentary democracy. Nor is it any coincidence either that Angola’s struggle
for democracy was to take as long as Brazil’s, and many would argue has still not
been achieved. A destabilizing war during the 1980s and ’90s helped entrench a
one-party authoritarian regime, and marred elections in 1992 during a brief lull in
the fighting, at virtually the same time that Brazilians demonstrated a newfound
democratic power when President Collor de Melo was impeached for corruption,
only three years after winning the first mass election since the 1950s.2 In Angola,
many would claim, as José Eduardo Agualusa does, that the party in power has
long become corrupted and somehow forgotten its roots in a democratic tradition
of creole struggle for freedom of expression that has its roots in the nineteenth
century, and that Agualusa himself exploited as the subject matter for his first
work of fiction, A Conjura (1989; The Conspiracy).
Over the same period, and in particular during the 1980s, the black move-
ment in Brazil became more vociferous as the country returned to democratic

•  REsearch in african liter atures, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring 2007). © 2007  •
164  •  Research in African Liter atures

debate while simultaneously sliding into economic recession, a process that hit
African Brazilians especially hard. The emergence of new African literatures in
Portuguese, nationalistic and in some cases revolutionary in its message, encour-
aged many black Brazilian activists and aspiring writers to look to countries like
Angola as models of a type of free, black African sovereignty, much as an earlier
generation of Afro-Brazilian writers had looked to the example of Negritude in
the early 1960s. The assumption among some African Brazilians during the 1980s
that the Angolan intelligentsia was somehow a natural ally of the black Brazilian
movement was, however, destined to lead to disappointment. The problem had,
of course, been summed up with pungent irony by Oswaldo de Camargo in one
of his short stories dating from the 1960s, “Esperando o Embaixador” (Waiting for
the Ambassador), in which the awaited appearance of the Nigerian Ambassador
at the launch of a book of verse by a black Brazilian author does not materialize
because, it is explained, he is still on the country estate of the white owner of the
apartment where the launch is taking place (Camargo 77–83). It is this aspect of the
black movement—the “return” to Africa and the assumption of perceived African
values based on skin color that José Eduardo Agualusa, perhaps because he is an
Angolan of European extraction, comments on laconically in his controversial
novel O Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio (2002; The Year Zumbi Took Rio), but it is not
absent either from the novel O Primeiro Dia do Ano da Peste (2001; The First Day of
the Year of the Plague), by the African Brazilian writer Francisco Maciel, a novelist
who has broken new ground in Afro-Brazilian fiction. In many ways, both these
novels approach common issues in slightly different ways: they are set in both
Brazil and Africa, they both comment on themes common to postcolonial society
in Africa, and they both focus on the race issue in Brazil.
When Agualusa’s novel was first published, it received adverse comments
from some critics, most notably Pires Laranjeira who lambasted it for its postmod-
ern irresponsibility towards the truth and its internal historical incoherence, its
intertextual references (some of which Pires Laranjeira claimed were invented) and
for its wanton stereotyping, in particular in the name of the main Black Brazilian
character, Jararaca, because of its reptilian connotations, an insult, in the critic’s
view, to Afro-Brazilians and to the black movement in Brazil (Pires Laranjeira
23). Whether or not Pires Laranjeira was aware that Jararaca is not unknown as
a nickname among Brazilians of African descent, and that at least one villain of
colonial literature is called Jararaca, thereby suggesting that Agualusa was using
the name by way of parody, is perhaps neither here nor there: Agualusa’s posi-
tion as a white Angolan and, perhaps more to the point, as a ferocious critic of its
current regime, possibly explains this type of hysterical reaction. Whatever the
weakness of the novel—and this may lie paradoxically in its thematic originality in
trying to bridge the worlds of contemporary Angola and contemporary Brazil—it
is deeply and fundamentally about Agualusa’s homeland, even though it is also a
re-enactment of the Zumbi myth set against a background of contemporary Rio.3
In order to explain the transformation of the main Angolan character in
the novel, Francisco Palmares, it is important to reflect for a moment on aspects
of Angolan political history that Agualusa has focused on elsewhere. One of his
major criticisms of the MPLA is its growing association with authoritarianism
that some claim to have dated from 1962, when Agostinho Neto first assumed its
leadership. In its struggle to represent multi-ethnic Angola, the movement was
 David Brookshaw  •  165

perhaps inevitably prone to factionalism from the outset, but events came to a head
just before independence, when members of a group known as the Revolta Activa
(Active revolt), claiming to be both more democratic and more radical than the
institutionalized leadership were sidelined. Most of these, among them the widely
respected Angolan intellectual, Mário Pinto de Andrade, went into exile. The next
crisis occurred in 1977, when a faction led by the populist, Nito Alves, attempted
a coup against the Neto government. This led to massive bloodletting and impris-
onments, which further strengthened Neto’s hold on power and alienated many
of Angola’s intelligentsia, whether or not they supported Alves. If one adds the
inconclusive general election of 1992, as a result of which the MPLA remained in
power amid further conflict and bloodshed, one can see that the distant origins of
Angola’s oldest and multiracial nationalist movement in Luanda creole opposition
to colonial rule have, as far as people like Agualusa are concerned, been betrayed.
Francisco is from such a Luanda creole family. His father had joined the national-
ists fighting the colonial regime, but had sympathized with the Revolta Activa and
become an exile in Lisbon. But Francisco had later returned to Angola to become
a colonel in the armed forces of the newly independent country. He had become
a creature of the regime and lover of the President’s daughter until a car crash,
for which he was responsible, crippled her, causing his rapid departure for Brazil,
where he has surfaced as an arms dealer and instructor. Francisco is therefore
a man without a mission, “um príncipe sem trono, sem súbditos, sem nobreza
alguma de propósitos” ‘a prince without a throne, without subjects, without any
nobility of purpose’ (48), haunted by guilt, in a limbo between life and death, his-
tory and myth. He finds his mission in the insurgency of the favela dwellers led
by Jararaca, to whom he has been supplying arms, and which uncannily foresees
the very real events that were to take place in Rio after the book was published,
in which the drugs cartel succeeded in enforcing what amounted to a general
strike in Rio’s Zona Sul. Pires Laranjeira sees Francisco as Agualusa’s modern day
personification of Zumbi, and indeed, his sense of mission and the manner of his
death (he leaps over a cliff much as Zumbi and his followers had in the legend)
suggest that he sees himself in this role. Indeed, the fact that he does this from
the insurgent refuge on the Morro da Barriga (Belly Mountain), reinforces the
idea of his re-birth into myth. It is far more likely, however, that the real leader of
Palmares resembled Jararaca, for Zumbi was a warlord and astute political figure
who managed to trade with surrounding communities while preserving his own
intact. Like Zumbi, Jararaca is a pragmatist, not averse to killing his rivals while
giving interviews over national television, and turning a drugs-related uprising
into a political and media event. Jararaca, too, is presumed dead after the military
onslaught on the favela, but no body is ever found and he is sighted at various
points of Brazil after the events of the story. Perhaps Francisco and Jararaca are
two halves of the same myth, or to revert to contemporary Angolan history, two
halves of the opposition to the post-independence dictatorship: Jararaca, the man
of the people (Nito Alves), Francisco the intellectual, whose grandfather had once
boasted that the family had been wearing shoes for seven generations (56), allied
in some common cause, which they have opportunistically adopted.
Counterbalancing Francisco Palmares, burdened by guilt and memories,
is Euclides Matoso da Câmara, orphan son of a Brazilian priest and an African
woman, and in keeping with Agualusa’s fascination for the cultural flows between
166  •  Research in African Liter atures

Angola and Brazil during the nineteenth century, descendant of the antislavery
lawmaker Eusébio de Queirós, who was born in Luanda. Euclides is a journalist,
a free spirit unattached to and independent of any oligarchy, while his condition
as dwarf is perhaps symbolic of the lack of power enjoyed by journalists in dic-
tatorships. As a journalist, he has suffered, while Francisco has avoided trouble.
Arrested, tortured and imprisoned in the wake of the events of 1977, he is assumed
killed in the violence following the 1992 election. In common with that of Francisco,
however, his is a metaphorical death, and he is reborn to fight another day, resur-
facing in Brazil. He represents to some extent Agualusa’s ideal of an identity that
is fluid and untrammeled by too much definition, and above all capable of survival
through re-invention. Similarly, his homosexuality reflects an unconventional
power that stands in opposition to Francisco’s military background and hetero-
sexuality. Finally, the differences between these two characters are underpinned
by their regional origins: Euclides, the semi-Brazilian is from Huambo, perhaps
not unsurprisingly Agualusa’s birthplace, in opposition to Francisco’s status as
a “caluanda” (a native of Luanda). If there is a regional dimension to Agualusa’s
Angolan characters, one must also mention Bartolomeu Catiuvala, another of the
mercenaries helping Jararaca, representative of the southern ovimbundu group,
and the sinister figure of Monte, Portuguese Angolan security chief and feared
torturer, dispatched to track Palmares and establish the whereabouts of incrimi-
nating documents in his possession. The overflow of Angolan “stereotypes” into
contemporary Brazil, and the various intertextual references to Angolan literature
on the part of certain Angolan exiles, reinforces the notion that this is as much a
novel about Angola as it is about Brazil, and one could argue that even Jararaca’s
uprising of “sans culottes” favela dwellers bears some resemblance to what hap-
pened in Angola in the late 1970s. The difference is that this uprising brings about
democratic change in Brazil, giving the lie to Francisco’s words that everything
will remain the same in Angola (despite the dictator’s death at the end), while the
prospects for change in Brazil, given the country’s more established democratic
tradition, are far more likely: “Em Angola talvez seja possível derrubar o regime,
mas não vai mudar nada. Aqui, ao contrário, podemos até perder esta batalha.
Mas depois da nossa derrota, acredita, nada será como antes. Mesmo derrotados,
teremos vencido” ‘In Angola it may be possible to bring down the regime, but it
won’t change anything. Here on the other hand, we may even lose this battle. But
after our defeat, nothing will be the same as before. Even in defeat, we will have
won’ (248). In short, Brazil has the democratic hope, while Angola has none of the
Brazilian racial complexes.
The Brazilian characters are similarly a mixture of historical figures, inter-
textual references to literature, or modeled on contemporary media stereotypes.
Agualusa’s re-incarnation of Zumbi, Jararaca’s “real” name is Sandro do Nascimento,
the invented identity of the young black “marginal” who had held up a bus in Rio
and been involved in a stand-off with police becoming an instant media figure
and “lead role” in the film Bus 174 (2002). Jararaca also has clear affinities with the
despotic drugs baron, Zé Pequeno, in the Brazilian cult movie Cidade de Deus (2002;
City of God). The Rio police chief, Domingos Jorge Velho, bears little relationship
to his illustrious ancestor, the “bandeirante” ‘colonial explorer’ responsible for
the final destruction of Palmares, for he is relatively liberal: married to a black
activist, Bárbara (once again a reference to the slave beauty who is the subject of
 David Brookshaw  •  167

Camões’s “endechas à Bárbara”), he attempts to broker a peace between Jararaca

and the Brazilian authorities, and ultimately joins Francisco in jumping to his
death, in emulation of the seventeenth-century rebels of Palmares. There is a cer-
tain ambiguity in Agualusa’s treatment of the race question in Brazil. On the one
hand, Jararaca’s rebellion, though inevitably put down by the Brazilian army, leads
to the resignation of the president and the army chief, and the implementation of
“quotas,” an issue that has led to a heated debate among Brazilians over the last six
years because it seems to contradict the country’s national myth of a racial democ-
racy. Moreover, while Jararaca may have entered the eternity of myth, his revolt
indirectly leads to the election of Bárbara as a deputy. Much of the novel therefore
reflects the debate about race in Brazil, and this is confirmed in the epigraph by
Sueli Carneiro, in which it is suggested that unless racial inequalities are addressed
in Brazil, there will be massive civil unrest. On the other hand, the mixed marriage
between Domingos Jorge Velho and Barbara suggests a certain warmth towards
a Luso-Brazilian tradition of integration that stands in contrast to the out-and-out
racism of the army chief, General Weissmann, inevitably, not to mention stereo-
typically a “gaucho,” who predictably believes that Brazil’s backwardness derives
from its having been colonized by Portuguese and Africans. It is perhaps natural
that Agualusa, whose fiction has sought to evoke the historic and cultural links
between Portugal, Africa and Brazil, should ultimately see the old Luso-Tropical-
ist tradition of superficially harmonious race relations through miscegenation as
a positive legacy, and this seems to be confirmed by Domingos Jorge Velho, who,
having resigned his post, confronts a group of black policemen on the front line
between government and rebel held parts of the city: “Podíamos ser todos de uma
única raça. Um povo da raça Brasil. Os portugueses iniciaram este país, afinal,
fazendo-se jantar pelos índios. Pode existir assimilação mais completa? E depois
disso fomo-nos todos comendo uns aos outros—e eu acho lindo! Mas sabe o que
aconteceu? Alguns de entre nós se descobriram negros porque não os deixam ser
brasileiros. Eu não quero que isto se transforme numa guerra racial” ‘We could all
be of one race. A people of the Brazilian race. The Portuguese began this country
after all, by turning themselves into the Indians’ dinner. Can you have any more
complete assimilation? And then we began to eat (have sex with) each other—and
I think that’s beautiful! But do you know what happened? Some of us found out we
were black because they won’t allow us to be Brazilian. I don’t want this to turn into
a race war’ (251–52). In an interview to the Brazilian magazine Época, Agualusa is
reported to have talked of the Brazilian elite as still possessing a colonized mental-
ity that prevents its members from appreciating the originality of Brazilian culture,
which is a “súmula de África e Europa” (the sum of Africa and Europe).4The idea
of a unique and authentic Brazilian mixed culture that is ignored by an alienated
elite, and the exaltation of race mixture and the formation of a united Brazilian
people, is strongly reminiscent of the establishment nationalism promulgated in
Brazil ever since the Vargas presidency between 1930 and 1945, and in the thought
of generations of Brazilian cultural nationalists from Gilberto Freyre through to
Jorge Amado. This in itself is not problematic, as long as it does not develop into
some sort of Brazilian essentialism, which brushes aside as somehow less important
the very real existence of color prejudice and inequality in Brazilian society.
In conclusion, O Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio is unique in its attempt to
focus on issues specific to both Angola and Brazil, while also straddling the vast
168  •  Research in African Liter atures

maritime border between the two countries. In keeping with its epigraph, it is
a warning of the dangers of ignoring the race issue and social exclusion based
on color prejudice, including the range of petty hypocrisies in terminology that
underpin prejudice, such as the polite form “Moreno” ‘brown-skinned’ to avoid
using the term “negro,” and which both Francisco and Euclides criticize as Ango-
lans. At the same time, the novel appears to pay some homage to a creole legacy of
interracial sexual relations that is common to both the Angolan and Brazilian sea-
board cultures. Within the fluid, anticorporative concept of identity that Agualusa
seeks to promote, these apparent contradictions can perhaps coexist: as Bárbara
says in her admonition of Jararaca, what is needed is time for Black Brazilians to
achieve the desired goal of equality.
It is now time to turn briefly to Francisco Maciel’s O Primeiro Dia do Ano da
Peste. Rather than a novel in the traditional sense, Maciel’s narrative is a succes-
sion of stories, its fragmented structure reflecting the disintegrating personality
of its main protagonist and internal narrator. The external narrator, we are led to
understand from the outset, is white, a scholar of Afro-Brazilian literature, whose
obsession is to obtain the dispersed manuscripts of a black writer, Aloísio Cesário,
referred to throughout as AC. It is this editor who tries to imprison AC within
an identity based on skin color—a “black” identity, by classifying his writing as
“black literature.” To some extent, then, AC is an invention of his editor, and by
extension the (fictional) editor an invention of the (fictional) character he has cre-
ated. Both are hemmed in by stereotype, the editor by his obsession with blacks
as “Other,” and AC by the role created for him by “white” society, and which
eventually drives him mad.
One can discern similarities between Maciel’s novel and that of Agualusa. To
begin with, both focus on the race issue in Brazil and on problems facing newly
independent African countries. AC’s alter ego, Quirino També, is a man who sets
off on a journey of self-discovery, to find his “blackness.” Rather like Macunaíma’s
meanderings from Amazonia to São Paulo in Mário de Andrade’s Brazilian Mod-
ernist classic, it is a journey that leads to another type of discovery: during his trav-
els, Quirino encounters no spiritual home in Africa, where he finds himself work-
ing as a cook for a band of white mercenaries and catches chronic diarrhea. Later,
he encounters a generation of “déraciné” African intellectuals who feel alienated
in the land of their birth, from the Paris educated doctor who was unable to com-
pete with the village medicine man back in Africa, to the educated woman whose
struggle to put her female compatriots on the same footing as men, was doomed
to failure. It is the power of tradition and its manipulation by the urbanized politi-
cal elite that are the insurmountable obstacles to progress, or it may be that the
so-called progressives are merely the slaves of a foreign model. Whatever the case,
both Pierre Mbala and Janine Touré, rather in the manner of Agualusa’s Angolan
intellectuals, have taken refuge in Bahia—the third space they were unable to
inhabit in either Africa or Paris, where they had been educated. As for Quirino,
his conclusion is: “ser negro é uma missão impossível. Mais ainda: ser humano é
uma impossibilidade. O homem é queda e perda. E não há retorno ao país natal”
‘being black is an impossible mission. Worse still: being human is an impossibility.
Man is fall and loss. And there’s no return to one’s native land’ (39).
It is probably true to say that both these writers are interested in defying fixed
notions of identity, Agualusa in relation to corporatist notions of “angolanidade”
 David Brookshaw  •  169

‘Angolanness’ and “afro-brasilianidade” ‘Afro-Brazilianness,’ but also in what

actually constitutes an Angolan: at Rio airport, a member of the black movement,
in full West African regalia, awaits the arrival of a delegation of Angolan writers
off the flight from Luanda, only to find, to his disappointment, that the Angolans
in question are blond and blue-eyed. In Maciel’s novel, the science fiction metaphor
of the Iabluts, a race that seeks refuge in a parallel universe and thereby becomes
poisonous, could apply as much to the exclusivist retreat of apartheid whites as
it could to the black Brazilians of the “quilombista” movement. Ethnic masks are
not a route to authenticity. Both create a racial gulf that only serves to entrench
both negative and well-intentioned stereotypes. Or as AC (or AC’s black character)
sums up the problem to a young white female well-doer: “Você quer me salvar.
Mas eu não preciso de salvação. Não faço samba, não vou à macumba, não gosto
de candomblé, não curto futebol. Não preciso que ninguém me diga o que devo ser
ou deixar de ser” ‘You want to save me. But I don’t need salvation. I don’t do samba,
I don’t go to macumba, I don’t like candomblé, and I don’t dig football. I don’t need
anyone to tell me what I should be or what I should stop being’ (79).
Proponents of national liberation in Africa and elsewhere seldom aspired
that their countries, once independent of European colonial rule, should return
to some precolonial cultural purity. Fanon, among others, accepted that once the
liberation struggles began, mutations occurred which affected both the culture
of the colonizer and that of the colonized (Gandhi 130). And yet, one of the more
insidious tendencies that has emerged over recent decades, since the ideological
emphasis in the West turned to concepts such as multiculturalism and globaliza-
tion, is what Gandhi terms the “preservation and perpetuation of essentialised
racial/ethnic identities”, as a way of preserving mainstream cultural identity
intact—“Englishness” in the context she is referring to—and marginalizing all
else (Gandhi 126). It is therefore only a small step from multiculturalism, not-
withstanding its good intentions, to exoticization and the maintenance of the
border between “Self” and “Other.” According to Graham Huggan, this even
affects ideas in the West of what constitutes postcolonial literatures and what
makes them marketable. One of the messages that underpins both of the novels
discussed here is that African Brazilians have no power or agency over them-
selves because they are somehow trapped in roles devised for them by whites.
In Maciel’s novel, AC is a creation of his white editor, the obsessive collector of
“black literature,” while AC himself has his role circumscribed to some extent
by his white circle of friends. In Agualusa’s fiction, the problem is put rather
more in social and economic terms through the observations of Euclides, as he
sits on the shore of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas in Rio’s beach area: “Um barco
flutua, ancorado, um pouco à frente. Uma dezena de grandes aves pretas, biguás,
permanecem em pé e imóveis, no seu interior, bem alinhadas, o bico voltado na
direcção do vento. À proa resplandece uma garça. Euclides descobre naquilo
uma alegoria do Brasil: um país de negros escravizados, remando, remando
sempre—e sempre, sempre, um colono branco à proa” ‘A boat rocks at anchor,
a little way ahead. A dozen large black birds, biguás, stand motionless inside it,
all lined up, their beaks pointing into the wind. At the prow stands a gleaming
white snipe. Euclides discovers an allegory of Brazil in the scene: a country of
black slaves, rowing, always rowing—and always, always, a white colonial at
the prow’ (49).
170  •  Research in African Liter atures

Leela Gandhi refers to the convergence occurring nowadays between post-

colonialism and postnationalism, a tendency that is reflected in the new focus on
diasporas and cultural hybridity, as well in the widespread disillusionment with
national cultures. It may well be that Agualusa’s hidden nostalgia for the creole
worlds that issued from the Portuguese imperial encounter can be attributed
to their being anti-essentialist, pragmatic and chameleon in both their cultural
expression and in their cultural and political affinities. They do not, for it is against
their nature, hark back to some pure, supposedly authentic state. But here, it is
appropriate to distinguish between hybridity as a creative force, in the words of
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “a destabilizing hybridity that blurs the canon, reverses
the current, subverts the centre” (56), and the assimilationist model enshrined in
Luso-Tropicalism and which served the purposes of Portuguese colonialism even
as this was dying on its feet. Pieterse is talking of a hybridity that defies defini-
tion and as such remains independent of categorization and pigeonholing adding
credence to AC’s already mentioned claim: “I don’t need anyone to tell me what I
should be or what I should stop being.”

NOTES
1. Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (1993) was the first
serious study on the Atlantic as an integrated cultural entity. However, the lusophone
component is barely mentioned. The balance was rectified by the Brazilian historian
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro in his seminal study, O Trato dos Viventes: formação do Brasil
no Atlântico Sul, séculos XVI e XVII (2000).
2. In the Angolan election of 29 and 30 September 1992, the MPLA, led by the presi-
dent José Eduardo dos Santos, won 54% of the vote, while Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA won
34%. Savimbi refused to accept the result and went back to war. In Brazil, on 2 October
1992, Collor’s vice-president, Itamar Franco, took over following Collor’s impeachment
on the grounds of corruption.
3. Zumbi was the leader of a community of runaway slaves that existed for most
of the seventeenth century in the area of Palmares in Northeastern Brazil. Palmares
adopted many of the social and cultural characteristics of a central African, Congolese
community, the region where most of the slaves had originated. It has been described
as a type of independent black republic within colonial Brazil. It was eventually over-
run by a military expedition led by Domingos Jorge Velho in 1694. Agualusa recreates
Palmares in a Rio favela, reinjecting the native African presence in the form of Angolan
weapons experts who lend their skills to a revolt led by a local drugs baron.
4. A report by Sueli Carneiro of an interview given by Agualusa to the magazine
Época, published on the web at: www.afirma.inf.br/htm/colunistas/sueli/colunistas2.
htm

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Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. O Trato dos Viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul, séculos
XVI e XVII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.
Camargo, Oswaldo de. O Carro do Êxito. São Paulo: Martins, 1972.
Carneiro, Sueli. Report of interview given by Agualusa to Epoca. www.afirma.inf.br/
htm/colunistas/sueli/colunistas2.htm
Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: a Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
1998.
 David Brookshaw  •  171

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard
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