Three Stories of Forgetting

A haunting exploration of the memories of three men and the reverberations of slavery, colonialism, and empire.
The discrete yet overlapping tales in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's Three Stories of Forgetting explore the lives of three men-perhaps already dead in the eyes of God-who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the spoils of the Portuguese Empire. They are all incarnations of our despair in the face of the questions that history does not answer. In "The Vision of the Plants," Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. In "Seaquake," Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes to his daughter asking for forgiveness. And in "Bruma," an old slave initiates a young Eça de Queiroz into the world of French literature, even as he finds himself trapped by his own demons.
Left to their agony, remorse, and guilt, or undeserved peace, the three men may be tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. Perhaps the land they aspire to, their home in this world, is a place hidden in their souls, somewhere between nowhere and goodbye. Their lives are unstable chapters in postcolonial history and allegories of the reading and rereading of that history, and of literature. All three have been expelled from their lives, sent on a solitary journey into the night.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda, Angola, and was raised in Portugal. She is the author of several prizewinning novels, including That Hair, a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She holds a PhD in literary theory from the University of Lisbon.
Alison Entrekin is an award-winning translator from the Portuguese. Her translations include Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, Paulo Lins's City of God, and João Guimarães Rosa's modernist classic Vastlands: The Crossing. Her work has earned her the PEN medallion for her body of work and the 2022 AAWP-UWRF Translators' Prize.