GONÇALVES, Ana Maria. Um defeito de cor. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2006.
Maria Aparecida Cruz de Oliveira
Illustrated by Ruben Zacarias
Translated by Leila Santos
The production of Um defeito de cor (A Color Defect), by writer Ana Maria Gonçalves (Ibiá, MG, 1970), involved 24 months’ worth of documentary research and a three-year process of writing and rewriting. In September 2022, 16 years after the first edition, the press Record published a special re-edition with new graphic design and artworks by the award-winning artist Rosana Paulino. It also features a visual itinerary at the beginning of the book and the start of every chapter, which acts as an interactive proposal for reading and interpreting the book. It also includes a collaboration: a fictional piece by the writer Cidinha da Silva, replacing the traditional book blurb. The special edition presents the reader with the new Afrofuturistic story “Ancestars” that dialogues with the book, with stories from the past, the present, and the ancestral future. “Ancestars” is Gonçalves’s first and long anticipated narrative since the release of Um defeito de cor. As evidence of the book’s success, in February 2024, one of the editions sold out twice in quick succession after the work served as the basis for Portela’s samba-enredo, a narrative type of samba song that is part of competitive Carnival parades. Portela won the Estandarte de Ouro for the best samba school, theme, and personality of that Carnival.
This 947-page Brazilian novel mixes fiction with historical facts. The historiographical elements are embedded in the characters’ daily experiences. In the book’s dedication, the author leaves clues to her ties to the historical novel by expressing gratitude to historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, all of whom served as sources of inspiration and reference for the work. This record is repeated in this edition through paratextual elements at the end of the book, especially the bibliography of texts that guided the author’s writing.
Although the work can be read as a historical novel, its plot is narrated in the first person from the perspective of an elderly Black woman. Her presence brings an innovative element to the genre of the historical novel that, traditionally, men narrate, leaving women without a voice. In the novel, the language is a highlight and immediately invites the reader to enter a different cosmogony, whether through the simple use of ten epigraphs with African proverbs at the beginning of the chapters or through the strategy of footnotes explaining terms that connect the reader with the linguistic and cultural world of the African narrator, such as: ibêji, abiku, malame, olorum, agontimé, Ori, obi, omi, oriki, ayo, Ayzan, Sogbô, Aguê, eguns, etc., as well as expressions such as Kao kabiecele oba Sango, a special greeting to Xangô.
The literary work also stands out for its portrayal of a complex heroine, Kehinde, a victim of colonial capitalism who can also take advantage of it. It is a saga of an elderly African woman, almost 90 years old, who returns from Africa to Brazil in search of her son, who was stolen and sold by his Portuguese father. Throughout these crossroads, she writes her memories, marked by kidnapping, abuse, rape, loss, violence, and slavery; in short, all of the elements that constitute a colonial experience. Kehinde was inspired by a historical figure named Luísa Mahin, the mother of poet Luís Gama and a participant in the Malê Revolt, an important movement led by enslaved Muslims in favor of abolition. However, the character was not merely constructed with elements of Mahin, but functions as a mosaic of many other Black Brazilian women. In these circumstances, fiction expands the field of Black interpreters of the nation and is inscribed in an important historical context for the formation of the Brazilian people.
The book is divided into ten chapters. The first part is shorter and has 15 subsections, but has an intense narrative: Kehinde introduces the reader to the origin of her forced territorial displacement, beginning the process motivated by colonial violence, by the brutal attitudes that sustained the colonial project, which brought her to Brazil on a slave ship. The narrative begins in 1910, when a 6-year-old girl from Savalu, the kingdom of Dahomey, Africa, is forced to leave her land with her sister, Taiwo, and her grandmother, Dúrójaiy, after her mother, Dúróorílke, and her brother, Kokumo, are killed by the “Warriors” of King Adandozan. They travel to the coast, Uidá; however, there they are not free from colonial violence, as seen when the twin sisters are captured to be taken to Brazil.
The other chapters trace a series of events, beginning with the protagonist’s arrival on Ilha dos Frades and her subsequent sale on the market, to a farmer José Carlos, followed by her childhood and adolescence in the main house and the small slave quarters, where she gets to know the harshest aspects of enslavement. Her life then continues in town, in Ana Felipa’s mansion. The book also relates her son Banjokô’s consecration and naming ceremony, a Yoruba baptismal ceremony,. The narrative then moves to the beginning of the events that lead Kehinde to gain autonomy and freedom, her work as a street vendor selling cookies. Finally, the narrative presents the progress and developments in Kehinde’s achievements and autonomy, as well as their limitations.
Um defeito de cor is an invitation to get to know Brazil. The book’s title demands our attention if we want to develop an accurate understanding of the work and the country because the novel denounces the systemic racism that denies Black people the right to experience subjectivity. This racist structure in Brazilian society is problematic because it views some people merely by “race” and makes them “incomplete subjects” in the sense that they are excluded from certain spheres of subjectivity, such as the political, social, and individual. In contrast, stories of Black people are at the center of this novel.
Through this intricate narrative, the work, winner of the Prêmio Casa de las Américas, promotes awareness about a core wound that has never been properly treated: racism. It is a narrative of the Brazilian colonization presented in its raw state, with projections of problems that persist in contemporary Brazilian society, given that in this work, racism functions as a reference to the colonial past and a traumatic reality that has continued to be neglected. As a narrative of the genesis of a fundamentally colonial Brazil, the novel traces a long history of imposed silence, silenced voices, tortured people, broken African languages, imposed colonial language (Portuguese), and interrupted, prevented discourses. Furthermore, this work brings together voices of resistance and seeks to present a history that has been continuously silenced. To read Um defeito de cor involves engaging in dialogue with the political, cultural, and historical manifestations of a diverse country. It involves contemplating the exaltation of ancestral African memory in Brazil, which, despite a history of violence, has been an example of cultural, religious, and artistic resistance. Thus, the reading offers us the hope of envisioning a just country for all.
Further Reading
OLIVEIRA, Maria Aparecida Cruz de (2021). Meninas negras no romance afro-brasileiro. Brasília: Edições Carolina.
OLIVEIRA, Maria Aparecida Cruz de (2019). Representações decoloniais: as meninas negras no romance afro-brasileiro contemporâneo. Tese (Doutorado em Literatura) – Universidade de Brasília, Brasília.
MIRANDA, Fernanda Rodrigues de; OLIVEIRA, Maria Aparecida Cruz de (Orgs.) Ana Maria Gonçalves: cartografia crítica (2020). Brasília: Edições Carolina.
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