Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho

Song for Anninho (1981) is Gayl Jones's tribute to the memory of Palmares, a seventeenth-century African state located in the Barriga Mountains between Alagôas and Pernambuco in Brazil.¹ Although it began as a quilombo—or what some scholars refer to as a mocambo, much like the maroon communities in the Caribbean and outlyer communities in the United States—at its zenith in the mid 1670s, Palmares is said to have boasted between twenty and thirty thousand inhabitants.² Its rulers were called Zumbis; the last was Zumbi Sueca. With the exception of about two decades' time during its almost one-hundred-year existence, Palmares was under almost perpetual assault from Dutch or Portuguese colonial forces. Government-sponsored forces would seek out and destroy the physical site of Palmares; surviving Palmareans would rebuild in a new location. Jones's long narrative poem compliments the contemporary cultural movement and excavation project that Abdias do Nascimento helped to organize on behalf of Brazilians of African descent worldwide.³

The long absence of factual written records from within the destroyed nation of Palmares means that historical narratives have been based on a factual record provided by invading colonial forces. Jones is left with the project of representing a Palmarean perspective through the commingling of history and folklore, including the oral history kept alive through Afro-Brazilian folk tradition. Thus, her long narrative poem about the final destruction of Palmares showcases her meticulous attention to Brazilian history, her knowledge and use of African and African-American folk traditions, and her use of black women writers' revisionist strategies. The specific factual event that is the focus of this essay reveals Jones's use of the blues and the Myth of the Flying Africans to imagine the Palmarean version of a specific factual event: the collective deaths of some two hundred Palmareans during the final destruction of their nation. Thus, some attention to the factual record is appropriate before turning to Jones's poem.

Available information dates the origins of Africans in Brazil from around 1532. By 1580, there were at least 10,000 Africans in Brazil; and by 1630, the sugar plantation system in the region where Palmares flourished contained some 150 engenhos (sugar mills). Africans were being imported at the rate of some 4,400 annually, and many of them escaped and sought refuge in the Barriga mountains where they formed communities. Palmares was the largest, best organized, and most enduring of these communities (Kent 170). Ernesto Ennes correctly acknowledges that some authors treat the history of Palmares as "no more than a tiresome revolt of slaves," and others treat it as "a strong and well-organized republic" (201). Regardless of treatment, the original inhabitants of Palmares were most likely Bantu speakers from Loanda in Angola. Arthur Ramos writes, for example, that the

customs and usages of Palmares were modeled on those of Bantu origin with such changes and adaptations as the needs of a community in the new world required. On this, as well as many other points, our sources of information are inadequate. The best data are obtained from the accounts and chronicles of members of the expedition sent against the Negroes.

(Ramos 65, my emphasis)

In time, the ethnic makeup of Palmares would include Amerindians and members of other groups as they became integrated into Palmares society through various means. The word Negro did not only apply to blacks in this context; rather, it

included some pardos or gente do cor, people "of color" not easily accepted as either pretos or brancos ("whites"). It also applied to crioulos or those born in Brazil of African or mixed parentage, to ladinos or those who spoke Portuguese and usually espoused the Catholic faith, and the Africanos or those who were neither Portuguese-speaking nor native to Brazil.

(Ramos 65)

Some confusion surrounds the original date and location of Palmares. We can attribute discrepancies about its origins to inconsistencies among extant contemporaneous references, including Jesuit Father Pero Rodrigues's 1597 statement that "'foremost enemies of the colonizer are revolted...