Palmares Summary
Gayl Jones

Palmares Overview

A moving coming-of-age story about an Afro-Brazilian girl born into slavery in the late seventeenth century, Gayl Jones’ Palmares captures the cruelty, mystery, and madness of its time and place. As a work of historical fiction, it imagines the pains, struggles and deepest hopes of the diverse peoples in the Portuguese colonial empire at its zenith. Told in the first-person and borrowing numerous tropes from the magical realist writing of Latin America, the novel captures the spiritual tumult of its age, and offers a vivid reflection on the forging of identity as well individual and collective agency in the face of the unfathomable trials of history. The scope of the book is both cosmic and minute, erudite and intimate, as it explores how dreams and reality meld in the minds of extraordinary individuals. The novel is structured around many different themes and motifs. These include: silence and voice, fertility and virility, the search for lineage and its weight on the present, the power of the religion, the elaborate use of deception and disguise, and the trauma of trans-Atlantic slavery.