Maria Jose Silveira's HER MOTHER'S MOTHER & HER DAUGHTERS (tr by Eric M.B. Becker)

All this is very sad, I know, but as I said in the beginning, I have no intention of glossing over the less savory aspects in this story.

So observes our narrator fairly early on in Her Mother's Mother & Her Daughters, an example of my favorite kind of historical fiction that both celebrates and decries the very complicated racial and sociopolitical make-up of the modern nation of Brazil as it, and its people, transform through over 500 years of history.

If you really enjoy big fat historical novels by the likes of Edward Rutherford and Ken Follett, the kind that tell the story of a place through multiple generations of the families that call it home, but you're tired of the exclusively European/North American settings, I may have found the perfect book for you!

Brazilian author Maria Jose Silveira explores her country's history through the lives of twenty generations of a single family, traced matrilineally. She begins with a young native woman, Inaia, in 1500 or so, right when Europeans are first starting to plunder South America, and continues all the way to the present as she sketches in the experiences of Inaia's descendants and those the various men of various races and nationalities who father those descendants. It's an incredibly cool way to tell the story of any place, but it really comes into its own when, as in, say, Sarum or Russka, the locale is one that has seen multiple invasions over centuries, diversifying the culture, the language, and the DNA -- all definitely the case in Brazil!

The accounts of each woman are brief but involving, with each character given just enough time to catch your sympathy, make you share her love for her daughter (usually), and break your heart as she fades into history. The quote I pulled to begin this entry, for instance, is from the story of Maria Cafuza*, the first seriously enslaved member of this family -- for while her mother and grandmother were both in conditions of semi-servitude, they chose their own baby daddies and enjoyed a degree of freedom that Maria, also the first of the family with an African daddy, can't even dream of; even her early childhood is cruel as she watches both of her parents die under torture at the hands of an infamous slave-catcher who believes in making a fatal example of would-be escapees. The description of Maria's parents' deaths drives home Silveira's point about Brazilian history having plenty of unsavory bits, and is fairly graphic so, content warning; translater Eric M.B. Becker didn't pull any punches, either.

Later generations see the establishment of cattle ranching as an economic powerhouse for Brazil, the first gasps of an independence movement, civil wars, the arrival of the Portuguese royal family after they run away from Napoleon, the design and building of a newly independent Brazil's national capital city of Brasilia, finally visit the Old World (especially France) and hit the ground running in the 20th century, with the most recent daughter of the family anticipating the birth of twins even as she struggles in that very Generation X way to figure out what to do with herself in a world that doesn't really know what to do with her, either. Things change, but also remain the same: the women of Inaia's line don't just witness history but actively participate in it, display qualities of courage and of selfishness, creativity and vanity, and always putting at least a little hope in the next generation. So while the book frequently made me wince at the violence and cruelty on display, it left me, too, with more than a little hope for the future, or at least curiosity about it -- though of course the novel ends before Bolsinaro rises to power. But hey, Brazil has seen all this shit before...

Exceptional stuff, this!

*Cafuza is a term used by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to denote people of mixed indigenous and African ancestry. If nothing else, this novel is a great guidebook to the bewildering array of racial designations used in colonial South America. In Maria's case, when she's called a cafuza, people are ignoring the fact that she has a white grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather, but nobody in her world is very interested in the pedigrees of their slaves.