The first large group of captured and enslaved Africans arrived in Lagos, a maritime town on the southern coast of Portugal on August 8, 1444. The shipment of 235 men, women, and children marked the establishment of the earliest slave market in Europe, and a segment of that initial African population would end up in Lisbon. A century later, Black Africans would not be an uncommon sight in the city, as colonial Portugal became a major player in the growing trans-Atlantic slave trade. A street scene painted in 1570 depicts a busy plaza in the capital in which half of the people pictured are Black, some socializing, others working, and in the middle of it all, a Black knight passes through on his horse. This image, and the conference where he first sees it, will serve as a catalyst for a journey that will take Cape Verdean-born writer and journalist Joaquim Arena into the Portuguese countryside following the family history of an older woman he befriends who is the descendant of a freed slave. Alongside this narrative, runs the author’s meditation on his own personal history in light of the death of his estranged stepfather.
The hybrid essay is a delicate balance—a common focus must lie at the root of seemingly disparate threads or it feels awkward and forced. With his first nonfiction effort, Under Our Skin: A Journey, originally published in Portuguese in 2017, Arena manages to weave history, memoir, and travel writing, into an idiosyncratic and entertaining exploration of the early roots of the Black African diaspora in Europe. The thematic mix along with the inclusion of grainy black and white photos will remind some of Sebald (to whom he has been compared), but although both writers blend a personal story with historical and landscape writing, Arena’s story is not fictionalized and his literary style, if at times digressive, is generally more direct.
Under Our Skin opens with Arena’s first encounter with Leopoldina, a retired school teacher, at a conference on Lisbon’s history to which he, much to his surprise, has been invited to represent the ethnic minorities of the city—he, a man of mixed race born in Cape Verde and raised in Lisbon who had until recently been living back in his homeland. While discussing the painting described above, Chafariz d’El Rei, this striking older woman rises to speak, seemingly with a particular sense of intimacy, of the Blacks, slaves and Moors who would have been living in Portugal in the sixteenth century. Several weeks later, Arena and Leopoldina happen to meet again on a train. They are both returning from an exhibit entitled Blacks at the Heart of the Empire and, as they talk, she confesses that since her retirement, research into the history and social conditions of Africans in Portugal has become a passion of hers. He’s inclined to wonder if this hobby has a personal meaning. Her response: “It’s in the blood.”
Since he is back in Lisbon, at least for the time being, Arena begins to visit Leopoldina on a regular basis, to help her out with occasional tasks and listen to her stories about her family which she can trace back to her great-great-great-grandmother Catarina, a slave in the first Count of Belmonte’s estate. She was apparently treated so badly that she took advantage of an opportunity to escape with a group of slaves who disappeared one morning early in the nineteenth century, making their way south across the Rio Sado valley to settle near the village of São Romão where they found farm work alongside poor white and Black families already in the area. Leopoldina, who would be born there a hundred years later, came to understand her bond to Catarina through the memories and accounts passed down by her female descendants and now she shares this history with her new, younger friend. However, when Leopoldina has a stroke, she asks Arena to go one step further. Unable to speak, she puts her thoughts down on paper, as strength allows, expressing regret that she cannot be buried in her village cemetery because it has been closed for years:
These words make me realize just how much of her life has been spent, that few joys remain for her, and she knows it. I think of her village as a corner of the universe and about time deferred, about permanence and eternity, about all the moments that contribute to a life. I feel an incredible longing for the Sado valley, a nostalgia for heaths, woodland, and rice fields I’ve never seen.
She starts writing again: “Will you go there for me . . .?”
Against Arena’s account of his friendship with Leopoldina, her family’s past and the journey it inspires, is the story of his own family history. Chapters numbered in alphabetical form tell the first story while the latter unfolds in unevenly alternating chapters designated with Roman numerals. Arena’s is a distinctly Cape Verdean story. It is also a search for identity. Born on the island of São Nicolau, to a local woman and a Portuguese temporary worker, Arena grew up with only an imagined picture of his birth father who left when he was two. Four years later he found himself bound for Lisbon, as part of a migration of Cape Verdeans drawn to the city in the early 1970s with the strange man his mother intends to marry. But as a child he initially greeted this new land with a sadness and longing for his island home while his new stepfather, a seaman, essentially remained a stranger who disappeared for months at a time. Now, after years living back in Cape Verde, Arena has returned to Lisbon to help settle his stepfather’s affairs. Can the city’s streets lead the middle-aged man to the boy he once was and, in the process, to himself?
These intertwined journeys, one through the landscapes, villages, and historical sites in an area south of Lisbon reaching, ultimately, all the way to the site of that fateful landing in 1444 and the other exploring the author’s own heritage, as a mixed race Cape Verdean, both include fascinating detours to include eccentric relatives and Black historical figures who started life as slaves, only to find themselves rising to positions of influence in European and Russian society—even if such transformations had their limitations. Arena’s journalistic skills are evident in his ability to transition between historical details and present day encounters. Although they do not explicitly play off one another, the two strands of his journey are necessarily connected, or rather, it seems as if he needs to trace Black African history in Portugal to complete a piece of himself that is missing, a piece that connects him back to a distant African homeland that generations of Cape Verdeans have sought to deny. Cape Verde was discovered and settled by the Portuguese to serve as a base for cross-Atlantic slave trade and, as a result, most of the local population are mixed race and were, historically, afforded a better education than other colonized populations in mainland Africa. This enabled them to play a more active role in the structures designed to exploit African peoples. Such a legacy can foster a complicated relationship—or rejection of a connection—with others of African origin.
Of course, following the stories of others, tracing their lives, and visiting the places they lived is one piece of a much larger puzzle. To understand himself, Arena will also have to come to terms with his own experiences growing up in Portugal and attempt to understand those closest to him, even the one man he feels most estranged from. The journey he will take extends far beyond the Lisbon city limits and reaches far back in time, and it’s conclusion is as rewarding and as nebulous as any historical/existential exploration can be. But it does make for a very rich reading experience.
Under Our Skin: A Journey by Joaquim Arena is translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, and published by Unnamed Press. It is Arena’s first work to appear in English.
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