Read: Captains of the Sands

Last night I finished re-reading one of my favorite books from my youth: Captains of the Sands (Capitães da Areia), by Jorge Amado. Published in 1937 in Brazil, the story follows a gang of street children in Salvador de Bahia. The boys sleep in an abandoned storehouse, and live by stealing and begging.

I found the book extremely gripping now, just as I did when I was young. Amado’s perspective relentlessly stays with his protagonists. The rich people and the police are sometimes antagonists, but more often just the background for the children’s daily fight to stay alive.

Amado’s storytelling is raw and unflinching. He doesn’t even try to pretend that his protagonists are perfect. These are children growing up in extreme poverty, with no protections. The police brutalize them whenever they get the chance. The kids have a moral framework to match. There’s a lot of routine violence, including rape, on the part of the protagonists.

The language reflects the deep-seated racism of Brazilian society. For the most part, this strikes me as simply descriptive: In 1930s Brazil, the color of your skin determined very much how others saw you — and that is still the case almost everywhere today. A lot of the kids, and of the adults that sometimes help them, are Black. Still, Pedro Bala, the leader of the gang and the book’s main character, is a white kid with blonde hair.

A couple of strong female figures notwithstanding, there’s a lot of routine misogyny, too, again reflecting the social status of women at the time. The boys see young girls mostly as sex objects. Yet the female sex workers among the secondary characters get equal billing and full agency.

It’s fair to say that most of the ugliness in the novel stems from the society it describes, not from its characters. The writing is often beautiful, though sometimes a bit clumsy. The editing is somewhat rough, particularly towards the end, where formulaic repetitions creep in.

If you can get past these very real weaknesses, the book is quite powerful. The authorities at the time certainly thought so: In 1937, the Brazilian military publicly burned over 800 copies of the book, and put Amado in prison as a communist agitator. He later went on to become one of Brazil’s most celebrated authors.

Upgrade your reading list with this one weird trick

A couple of years back on the Fedi, I came across a few people discussing how white men were hogging all the attention in literature. Though the point was expressed a little more subtly than that, someone came up with an interesting challenge:

For a while, try to read only books that aren’t written by white men.

Back then, I wasn’t getting much time for reading, and felt a bit bored with my usual fare. The idea stuck with me. I remembered how much I had enjoyed Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James not too long ago, a Black author from Jamaica. How different that that book had felt – how much more alive. Reading it, I could feel the heat of a mythical Africa on my face, full of demons, and of and heroes with tall tales.

So I figured that I could try my luck again. Through a library, I got hold of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata from Japan. A woman recoils at the perspective of a typical lifestyle, and opts to pass her life working in a convenience store, where there is a rule for everything, and every day is predictable.

A little later, I happened upon My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Short, punchy, and very smart, this was excellent reading, despite the heavy themes.

Somewhere around this time, I came across Nnedi Okorafor, again on the Fediverse. A Nigerian-American author who defines her perspective as Africanfuturism, she writes mainly SciFi. Having read a fair number of the classics of the genre, her novella Binti felt incredibly refreshing. Her most recent novel Death of the Author is masterful. (Even so, it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page? What gives?)

The latest adventure was Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The Zimbabwean author published this incisive, powerful novel in 1988, and I only learned about it recently. “I was not sorry when my brother died” is the opening sentence; and the pressure on the reader never really lets up as the narrator recounts what it was like being a teenage girl in a patriarchal and deeply racist Zimbabwe under colonialism. A book, hard and sharp-edged like a piece of crystal.

Sometimes I don’t feel like challenging myself. Then I give myself a break and read some Terry Pratchett. Or I let Thomas Pynchon take me on a head trip with one of his classics. (They made Vineland into an excellent movie, One Battle After Another. Both very enjoyable, in slightly different ways.) But eventually, I feel like I need to come up for air. And then, the first direction I look to is south, towards Africa’s excellent female authors, who are just waiting for me to discover them.

Note to the sceptically inclined

If, having read all this, you feel like shouting “identity politics”, then yes, please go ahead. I’m not interested in stopping you from being wrong. Just know that there are so many brilliant, sparkling identities out there. Maybe go read a book.