Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho - Gayl Jones (Hardback) 14-04-2022

Jones's great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them' Anna Wiener, The New Yorker Two poems twine around each other in this volume - they are the love songs of two fugitive slaves in 17th-century Brazil. Their voices continue the unforgettable journey recounted in Gayl Jones's masterwork, Palmares (2021). Jones renders the saga of Palmares, a foundational tale in the annals of colonial terrorism and Black resistance, in verse, told in the voices of the characters in her epic novel Palmares. In the late 17th century, the fugitive slave enclave of Palmares was destroyed by Portuguese colonists. Amid the flight and re-enslavement of Palmares's inhabitants emerges the love story of Almeyda and Anninho. In Song for Anninho, Almeyda moves between a dark present, in which she is once again enslaved by a terrible captor, and memories of her lover, Anninho, whom she believes to have been killed. Song for Almeyda is told in the voices of Anninho and his fellow warriors. Brimming with intimacy, history, and revolution, the poems collected serve as a declaration of decolonial love.