Reviews The Word Tree, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

The Word Tree (A Árvore das Palavras)

Teolinda Gersão

Novel, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Gulbenkian Foundation Translation Award

FACT SHEET

Lisbon, Porto Editora, 1997 — 220 pp. 10 editions in Portugal
Translated into: English, Spanish, Italian

SYNOPSIS

The Word Tree is a portrait of Lourenço Marques — the capital of Mozambique before independence — on the eve of the colonial war and just after its outbreak. Set against the stark contrast between warm, lush, ebullient Mozambique and the bleak, poor, priggish Portugal of Salazar, it follows Gita, who loves Africa, and her mother Amélia, who longs to join the wealthy Portuguese élite. A book about the fascination of Africa and the blending and clashing of cultures — and a disquieting story about paradise turning into nightmare. A magical book about childhood, to which one cannot return except through the miracle of literature.

“The Word Tree ranks among the great works of contemporary fiction.”

FÁBIO LUCAS, O PRIMEIRO DE JANEIRO

“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. Amélia’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, THE ECONOMIST GROUP, 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


Gersão's assured hand is evident throughout this convincing story of division. Mother and daughter, black and white, old and new worlds – the narrative perspective shifts effortlessly, returning each time to a fundamental question: why should anyone think they are worth more than anyone else?

SARAH GILMARTIN, THE IRISH TIMES

“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 BRAZILIAN 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 REVIEW

A return to Lourenço Marques in colonial times (…) without any kind of longing or colonial nostalgia, but through the gaze of someone who knew and lived those years. (…) It is a real pleasure to read accounts like this one: lucid, truthful, deeply felt, attentive.

PEDRO TEIXEIRA NEVES, SEMANÁRIO

Narrative mastery, the supreme art of simplicity. Lourenço Marques emerging as if by magic, intact from the past.

LINDA SANTOS COSTA, PÚBLICO

The novel avoids a European (and Eurocentric) view of Africa and, so as not to fall into the opposite temptation, (…) insists on plural, even fragmentary images of a space that is not one, but many, (…) structuring itself through diverse and at times contradictory discourses. In our literature, Africa has tended to be a relatively vague place. The Word Tree responds to the deficit I have been pointing out. The Word Tree is a novel to be remembered.

CARLOS REIS, JORNAL DE LETRAS

A narrative of crossed tensions. A beautiful testimony to a world not entirely gone and infinitely seductive.

ASSIS BRASIL, ZERO HORA

In Teolinda’s novel, beyond the conflicts – yet thoroughly intertwined with them – lies the irresistible power of her words.

MARCELO PEN, FOLHA DE SÃO PAULO

In recent years a handful of novels with Mozambican themes has appeared (…), but perhaps none as consistently political as T.G.’s The Word Tree. When a Portuguese novel reaches a sixth edition in a single decade, it means it has struck a sensitive chord.

PEDRO MEXIA, PÚBLICO

The Word Tree ranks among the great works of contemporary fiction.

FÁBIO LUCAS, O PRIMEIRO DE JANEIRO

«La lectura de El árbol de las palabras… es una verdadera ‘filosofía de la memoria’…»

MARIFÉ SANTIAGO BOLAÑOS