In Every Wound is a Beauty (“Toda a Ferida É Uma Beleza”) the author sets out to discover the most mysterious of mysteries, that of how a little girl has fun.
The little girl in this story is possessed by an uncontainable desire to write and laugh, which comes up against her godmother’s desire to make her a normal, quiet and, if possible, even sombre child.
Her godmother thwarts Maria’s desire to write, in the impetuous way she does it. She often chastises her cruelly, but she can’t get her to give up her desire to write, even when she cuts off her hand and the girl has to imagine the life she leads separated from her body. But she has never forgotten the hand she had, so she will eventually return.

Zion (“Três Histórias de Esquecimento” ) is a “triptych” of novellas about the agony and guilt of men who must live with the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the spoils of the Portuguese empire. The trilogy includes Vision of the Plants (“A Visão das Plantas”), Seaquake (“Maremoto”), and Bruma.
The project was born of a statement by the British philosopher Peter Geach: „Perhaps a man may lose his last chance when he is young, and then live to be old: live contented and at home with the world, but in God‘s eyes be dead.“ Who saves us from the possibility that, early in life, we have wasted our time? This triptych reflects on this waste of opportunities by looking at the lives of three men. Three men, incarnations of despair when faced with questions that history does not answer. Celestino, a slave trader returning home, walled up in a garden, in Vision of the Plants; Boa Morte da Silva, a car valet, ex-colonial war combatant, left to his fate on a Lisbon street, in Seaquake; Bruma, the fanciful double of the black squire who read stories to little Eça de Queiroz, in Bruma. The lives of Celestino, Boa Morte da Silva, and Bruma blur certainties and embrace contradictions. Ghosts kept inside books, allegories of writing and reading, which these Three Novellas try to bring back to our astonishment.

The novella Bruma is named for the protagonist, who is a mirror image of an actual mysterious historical figure, the Black servant who taught the young writer Eça de Queiroz (considered the greatest Portuguese novelist of the 19th century) his love of French Literature. It is imagined here that Bruma is the proud owner of a ramshackle cabin in the woods near his master’s house, where he goes to enjoy his precious moments of freedom. The cabin is a symbol of his own desires and of the idea that no one can imprison a man’s imagination. Set in the woods as a metaphor of the man’s mind, the cabin is both a refuge and a liberation, and the place where, after many misfortunes, Bruma finally dies, old and free.

In her novel Seaquake (“Maremoto”) the author deals with existential questions of humanity such as transience, guilt, and memory, but also the need for closeness and affection. The main character is an Angolan named Boa Morte (Good Death), who fought against the liberation movement in the Portuguese colonial war and burdened himself with guilt. But he can never escape the guilt, nor can the country that reluctantly gave him his citizenship but nothing else. Now he lives as a parking space attendant in Lisbon and tries to preserve a bit of humanity despite his precarious situation. He takes care of a stray dog and a young homeless woman who lives at a tram stop and, at times, in her own world. More than anything else, writing a long letter to his daughter Aurora, who he barely knows, keeps him alive. But he is sick, and the end is inevitable. So he waits for a seaquake that will cause a great tidal wave swallowing everything. One day, Boa Morte does indeed disappear into the sea of people at a metro station.

With empathy and clarity, in a simple, oral, but at the same time often poetic language, de Almeida creates in Seaquake the image of a man who struggles with himself at the end of his life. And who, in his daily struggle for survival, finds a little dignity and a conciliatory end in his love for his daughter and for the marginalized creatures, like himself, around him.

In Vision of the Plants (“A Visão das Plantas”), the author tells the story of the old captain Celestino, once a pirate and slave trader, who, after an eventful life, returns to his parents’ abandoned house in the Douro region. There, Celestino, who is said to have committed terrible crimes, is transformed into a devoted gardener. Under his care plants flourish, and he grows the most beautiful carnations. He prefers plants to people: their gaze does not judge, unlike the accusing eyes of Father Alfredo, who tries to persuade the old man to confess his sins. But Celestino does not give in. He remains alone with his demons until his world falls further and further apart, and he gradually slips into oblivion. Pereira de Almeida’s touching novel does not ask for guilt and atonement, but seeks in poetic words an image for inner peace, for reconciliation with oblivion and death.

In Luanda, Lisbon, Paradise (“Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso”), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida tells a migration story that ends ups in the poor suburb Paraíso. In 1985, the Angolan Cartola travels to Portugal with his son Aquiles to have surgery finally performed on the teenager’s deformed heel bone. Further operations become necessary, the money is soon used up, and Cartola begins working as a day labourer on a construction site. Time passes, first months, then years. Returning to his wife Glória, who is ill and bedridden, slips ever further into the distance. Only letters and rare telephone calls keep the connection alive. After five years Cartola and Aquiles move to the suburb of Paraíso, which proves to be anything but paradise. But they make friends, above all with the innkeeper Pepe, and despite all adversity they never completely give up hope. In poetic yet sober language, the novel looks for the condition of the diaspora, focussing on the touching balance of three simple lives. Hope and pessimism, waste and redemption appear side by side in a sequence of dark, sweet and tragic elements, making this novel so human and touching.

Mila is the Luanda-born daughter of a black Angolan mother and a white Portuguese father. She arrives in Lisbon at the tender age of three, and feels like an outsider from the jump. Through the lens of young Mila’s indomitably curly hair, her story interweaves memories of childhood and adolescence, family lore spanning four generations, and present-day reflections on the internal and external tensions of a European and African identity. In layered, intricately constructed prose, That Hair (“Esse Cabelo”) enriches and deepens a global conversation, challenging in necessary ways our understanding of racism, feminism, and the double inheritance of colonialism, not yet fifty years removed from Angola’s independence. It’s the story of coming of age as a black woman in a nation at the edge of Europe that is also rapidly changing.

In her new novel Ferry, Pereira de Almeida describes the unusual love between Vera and Albano, a love that lasts a lifetime and has to overcome the greatest of dangers. For Vera suffers from a severe mental illness from which there seems to be no way out. She wrestles with the demons within her that seek her destruction. But Albano always stays with her, even when she spends several years in a clinic. The journey there becomes a crossing into the unknown for both of them. They board the ferry and leave their old lives behind. All these years Albano believes in Vera, gives her support in the world through his love. Until one day the improbable happens and Vera finds her way back from the illness. Love has conquered the demons.
The author gets completely involved in this love, showing the hell of self-destruction from the inside and celebrating the overcoming of a death wish in unique poetic images. Her literature questions the foundations of human existence.