Jeferson Tenório (2020) The Dark Side of Skin, translated by Bruno Dantas Lobato.

Winner of the Jabuti Prize (2021), Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin picks apart that old maxim, ‘the personal is political’. To be a black man (and woman) brings with it structural racism—at every level—based on stereotypes. White is always right. Even when it’s wrong.

Lobato offers as evidence some statistics that should surprise no one. In the year the book was published 78% of people killed by the police were black (50% of Brazil’s population are classified as black).

I’d four hours’ waiting time and I read most of the 150 pages. Not all the book stuck and the use of the second person you as narrator sometimes confused me.

The point of view shifts, for example, to the cop that shoots the narrator’s dad, his worries and tiredness in a system that grinds him down.

The protagonist, Pedro, is trying to process his death, in back-to-front plotting. His mum was a virgin when she married him. She thought he looked like Rivaldo. Pedro thinks himself an ugly black man. Not a player, like his dad.

Henrique, a school teacher in run-down public schools, had done his thirty years and is broken, but still turns up. His love of English literature is who he is. Continually turning up to teach is what he does. But he’s tired. Very tired of the same old. He’s shot and killed by the police during a routine street stop and his tiredness plays a part in a routine misunderstanding that doesn’t happen if he wasn’t black.

To survive this loss, Pedro embarks on what Tenório describes as an ‘archaeology of affections.’ He garners objects his father left behind—notebooks, books, old photos—to reconstruct Henrique's life and create meaning, but I guess that should be plural, since what we see is not what we get.

Through this personal lens, Tenório exposes the reality of Brazil’s myth of a ‘racial democracy’ or what is often termed ‘cordial racism.’

I watched Brazil’s team in the World Cup. The team mostly black. The fans mostly white. My dad bought me a Brazil top when I was wee. I wasn’t too bad at football, but it was a hint I should leave home and give him peace. Father son relationships are often muddled.

 This is not just a fiction about racial hate. The kind we’ve become largely blind to with the Trump’s and Farage’s of the world using ‘refugee’ as rally point around the white-man flag. It’s about the everyday watching and exhausting being watched, cumulative weight of everyday hits the black man and women are expected to take and shake off. Institutional failures as lived experiences. The constant threat of violence that a black man faces simply walking down the street in Porto Alegre—a predominantly white city in southern Brazil. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6