A Árvore das Palavras inscreve-se entre as grandes obras da ficção contemporânea.

FÁBIO LUCAS, O PRIMEIRO DE JANEIRO

Regresso a uma Lourenço Marques do tempo das colónias (…) sem qualquer espécie de saudosismo ou nostalgia colonialista, perpassa o olhar de quem conheceu e viveu esses tempos. (…) Sabe bem ler relatos como este, lúcidos, verdadeiros, sentidos, atentos.

PEDRO TEIXEIRA NEVES, SEMANÁRIO

Mestria narrativa, suprema arte da simplicidade. Lourenço Marques a emergir por magia, intacta do passado.

 LINDA SANTOS COSTA, PÚBLICO

(O romance) evita uma visão europeia (e eurocêntrica) de África, e para não cair na tentação contrária, (… ) insiste nas imagens pluralizadas e mesmo fragmentárias de um espaço que não é um, mas vários, (…) estrutura-se a partir de discursos diversos e por vezes contraditórios.

Na nossa literatura, África parece ter sido um lugar relativamente vago. A Árvore das Palavras vem responder ao relativo défice a que tenho vindo a referir-me. A Árvore das Palavras é um romance a reter.

CARLOS REIS, JORNAL DE LETRAS

Uma narrativa de tensões cruzadas. Um belo depoimento de um mundo não totalmente findo e infinitamente sedutor.

ASSIS BRASIL, ZERO HORA

No romance de Teolinda, além dos conflitos, mas imiscuindo-se neles, está a força irresistível de suas palavras.

MARCELO PEN, FOLHA DE SÃO PAULO

Nos últimos anos surgiu um punhado de romances de tema moçambicano (…), mas talvez nenhum tão consequentemente político como A Árvore das Palavras de T.G. Quando um romance português chega à 6ª edição numa década, isso significa que tocou numa corda sensível.

PEDRO MEXIA, PÚBLICO, 2008

This is the only one of Teolinda Gersão´s 12 novels available in English, and it has just been chosen as the best novel translated from Portuguese in the last three years.

You can see why: it´s as acute about childhood as it is about adults, and the writing is as sensuous as it is sad.

Amélia has left Portugal for pre-independence Mozambique, escaping her family and a failed relationship. She answered a newspaper advert from a man who “seeks a decent young woman aged 25 max”. He promised her beaches with pale sand. She got a lonely life as a dressmaker instead. The section of the novel dedicated to her is the most moving in the book, a series of pin-sharp revelations of envy and isolation. She wants to join the elite, and buys perfume she can´t afford. In the sizzling African heat, she dreams of owning fur coats to give the world she left behind a slap in the face. As a portrait of a desperate colonial it´s worthy of V.S.Naipaul.

But Gersão does youthful exuberance as well as she does middle-aged desolation. Amélia´s daughter Gita experiences things, as children do, in a sensory cascade. “Yes, everything in the yard danced”, she says, “the leaves, the earth, the spots of sunlight, the branches, the trees, the shadows.” Hers is an open-hearted, child´s-eye view, of the kind that sees pain as clearly as pleasure. “Go away and never come back”, Gita says of her mother.

Amelia´s resentment is the worm in the apple. Gersão´s skill is to make the apple sweet and the worm sympathetic.

SIMON WILLIS, INTELLIGENT LIFE, March/April 2013

Salazar’s forty-year dictatorship in Portugal and that country’s colonial wars in Africa cast their long shadows over Teolinda Gersão’s The Word Tree.

ADRIAN TAHOURDIN, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

In The Word Tree, Gersão has created Gita, a post-colonial hybrid subject, who in many ways stands in direct opposition to her nation’s colonial images: She is female, she is poor, she is disinterested in power, and at the close of the novel, she voyages to Portugal for the first time, taking her love and admiration for Africa with her.

KAREN SOTELINO, REVISTA DE LETRAS

The Word Tree is an atmospheric novel, which evokes a time and a place in impressive detail. Gita’s thoughts, as she embarks for Lisbon, speak to the memories of many who, like her, identified more with the land of their birth than they did with that from where their parents had originally migrated, a mother country they had only heard about: “The world that I’m leaving behind. Rivers, plantations, savannahs, palm groves, wide open spaces, broad horizons, and a tree that used to grow in my dreams and that reached up to the sky – what do they know of all that, how can they understand?”

DAVID BROOKSHAW, LUSO BRAZILIEN STUDIES

Before reading Teolinda Gersão’s vivid evocation of a girl’s coming-of-age in Africa,  I knew little about the history of Mozambique, its Portuguese colonisers, the crushing poverty and its fight for independence. Gersão’s achievement is to use the personal stories of one family to shed light on Mozambique’s troubled past and the immigrant experience in Africa.

LUCY POPESCU, PURGE REVIW

The Word Tree, Dedalus, UK, 2010 (e-book, 2013)