The Dark Side of Skin - Softcover

Jeferson Tenório; Bruna Dantas Lobato (translator)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1913867730 ISBN 13: 9781913867737

Publisher: Charco Press, 2024

Synopsis

"Life under Brazil’s brutal “cordial racism” comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons.

How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for his murdered father in the objects he left behind―an archeology of affections. Investigating and retracing his family’s trajectory through the streets of the city of Porto Alegre and the morass of Brazil’s pervasive racism, violence, and bankrupt institutions, Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found."

About this title

About the Author

Jeferson Tenório, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, in 1977, lives in Porto Alegre. He is currently doing a PhD in literary theory at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul. His debut novel O beijo na parede (The kiss on the wall, 2013) was named Book of the Year in 2013 by the Associação Gaúcha de Escritores. Jeferson’s texts have been adapted for the theatre, and some of his stories have been translated into English and Spanish. His second novel Estela sem Deus (Godless Estela) was published in 2018, followed in 2020 by O avesso da pele, which was celebrated by audiences and critics alike in Brazil, Latin America and France.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sometimes you’d have a thought and go live inside it. You’d push everyone away. Build a home for yourself that way. Someplace far. Deep inside you. That was how you dealt with things. Now I choose to believe you left so you could come back to me. I didn’t want your absence to be your only legacy. I wanted your presence, some form of it, even if it was painful and sad. And despite everything, here in this house, in this apartment, your body will always be dying, over and over. You’ll always be a father refusing to leave. You were never really that good at leaving. To the end, you believed books could make a difference. You stepped in and out of life, and it stayed bitter. Objects still hold memories of you, but what’s left of them hurts me and comforts me, because they’re just remnants of affection. Silently, these objects tell me about you. It’s through them that I imagine and recover you. Through them that I try to find out how many tragedies a person can take. Maybe I’m reaching for some truth. Not as a starting point. But as some kind of journey that will sweep through these rooms and give me the first piece of a puzzle. A puzzle that begins behind the front door, where I find an orange terracotta bowl, and inside it, a stone, a sacred ocutá, wrapped in red, green, and yellow ribbons. I study it with care. That’s how you enter a life that’s already gone. I take the ocutá out of the bowl. I remember the day you told me your head belonged to Ogun, which was very lucky, because Ogun was the only orisha who could handle an abyss. I remember hearing the word abyss for the first time from your mouth. There are words we hold on to as kids because they bring us comfort. I remember now what aunt Luara told me to do when I met her Ogun. Wrap it in a cloth, hold it in your hands, and carry it to the river , she’d said. But before leaving, I head to you room and look in from the doorway. There are clothes all over the floor, some more tossed in the closet. On the table, inkless pens, unmatched socks under receipts from the grocery store, notebooks and sheets of paper, folders filled with student tests and essays. Your chaos moves me. I look at all this and realize these objects will help me narrate who you were before you left. The same tools that defeated you now speak of you. Your objects will visit me as if they were your ghost.

Edition details

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1913867730
• ISBN 13: 9781913867737
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150