Portuguese reading group, 2019

José de Arariboia is a 35-year-old artist with a relatively well-established career. His series of paintings on Rio de Janeiro have garnered some success, and he’s preparing for his first solo exhibition. Everything changes, however, when he enters the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela. An unexpected performance drives people into a frenzy. What could have been a catastrophe turns into a media sensation. Filmed by pedestrians, the event goes viral online, and Arariboia strikes up a partnership with Biribó, a favela drug dealer, who is willing to help the artist with a bold, new idea: turn the favela into a work of art, shining a light on daily life in the community. Blending biting satire with social criticism, A Vista Particular is a book that takes readers to the limits of—and makes them question—the absurdities of everyday life.

A young girl grows up in Mozambique surrounded by daily scenes of brutality. The white colonisers hold all the power, and maintain control of the black population through a combination of physical violence and damaging, dehumanising stereotypes. For the young Isabela Figueiredo, nobody embodies this ruthless power more than her own father, who thinks nothing of dealing out insults and beatings to his black workers. But as Portugal’s colonial empire starts to crumble, the whites find that power has begun slipping through their fingers. Sent back to ‘the metropolis’ for her own safety during the violent aftermath of Mozambican independence, Figueiredo is confronted by a perception of the former colony as having been some kind of exotic paradise where blacks and whites lived in harmony, a narrative completely at odds with her own lived experience. In order to address the shame she feels over her colonial past, Figueiredo will have to break ranks with other retornados – who still claim they would be welcomed back in Mozambique with open arms – and risk betraying the memory of her own beloved father in an act of enormous honesty and bravery.

An orphan girl stumbles into a romantic entanglement after another. A stripper contemplates the possibility of love. A plain girl decides to join the convent after a traumatic incident. Gente Melancolicamente Louca (Melancholically Mad People) is a masterful story collection about power, innocence, trust, and imagination, set in a world at once mystical and utterly mundane.

When a chance encounter with a painting of a Lisbon street scene from 1570 leads author Joaquim Arena to the discovery of João de Sá Panasco, a black knight who was born a slave but became a nobleman under Dom João III, this begins an investigation into other former slaves who overcame racial prejudice to become prominent – and often forgotten – figures in European history, including Dido Elizabeth Belle (an influential English gentlewoman), Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal (a distinguished member of Peter the Great’s imperial court and great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin), Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (a celebrated French general in the Napoleonic Wars and father of the famous writer), Jacobus Capitein (one of the first black Africans to study at a European university before becoming a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands) and Anton Wilhelm Amo (a prominent German philosopher). While conducting this investigation, Arena learns of the death of his estranged step-father, providing the springboard for reflections on his own family life and, by extension, the Cape Verde immigrant experience. Encompassing autobiography, travel writing, essay, journalism and fiction, Debaixo da Nossa Pele has been described as the closest thing Portuguese literature has produced to the narrative style of W.G. Sebald.