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SAUDADE TORONTO
Under Our Skin
$26.00
SAUDADE TORONTO
Under Our Skin
$26.00
A well-written, deeply personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our present lives." --KIRKUS REVIEWS
1570: A street teems with activity in Renaissance Lisbon: boatmen unload passengers as jugglers entertain the crowd and vendors hawk their goods. The crowd is large, and more than half of it is Black. Most are enslaved African people performing an array of duties, but there are free Africans too, and somebody else: a Black knight astride a horse.
Four hundred and fifty years later, novelist and journalist Joaquim Arena stands in a museum, transfixed by the character depicted on this canvas by an anonymous Flemish painter. He doesn't know it yet, but the knight is Joao de S Panasco, a one-time slave who nevertheless became an Afro-Portuguese nobleman. So begins Under Our Skin, a wide-ranging investigation that seeks to know the people of the early African diaspora, and tell their stories.
Arena was born in the tiny state of Cape Verde, a small chain of islands off the West Coast of Africa which were uninhabited before Portugal chose them for a slave-trade post--a place made famous in part by Herman Melville's essay on the nature of Cape Verdeans (known as 'Gees') who were common fixtures on whaling vessels.
With this awareness, Arena creates a hybrid text of travel writing, memoir, and history, filled with portraits of complex and fascinating characters. There is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave raised a gentlewoman in England; Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, abducted from Africa as a boy, only to be groomed as a nobleman under Peter the Great; Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a Haitian slave, who became a French general in the Napoleonic Wars; Jacobus Capitein, from Ghana, who studies at a European university only to become a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands; and Carlos Marcelino
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