The above is a scene from Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Charco Press, 2024). The excerpt speaks of the politics involved in an interracial relationship in Southern Brazil. Henrique, a black man and the you addressed in the passage, is in his first relationship with a white woman, Juliana, and is steadily becoming aware of his blackness. He notices the stares the two get on the street, how he is treated better by salespeople when she is present, and the invasive questions they are asked. Juliana’s family wonders if Henrique has a higher pain threshold while her friends want to know how intercourse with a black man feels.
The racial dynamics bleed into the couple’s bedroom and relationship as Henrique develops his consciousness as a black man. “You believed race didn’t exist, only humanity,” the narrator tells us about the protagonist prior to his understanding of racial dynamics. “When you first heard of black consciousness, you didn’t understand yet how society could care more about your skin colour than about your character.” However, at a college entrance exam preparation course, Henrique comes into contact with Senhor Oliveira, a black teacher who becomes his role model. In class, he quickly realizes that “being black was more serious than [he’d] imagined.” Juliana does not handle the changes Henrique undergoes very well and their relationship implodes.
Fragments like the ones quoted above were recently cited by a Brazilian public school principal in an online video advocating for the book’s removal from the school curriculum. Isolating the excerpts from their textual context, the principal and others argued that the language in the novel was inappropriate for minors and that no copies of it should be in schools’ classrooms or libraries. Amid the uproar, the education boards in two separate states decided to collect the copies circulating in schools. The public outcry was immediate.
To understand the public reaction, it is important to know that Brazil is barely thirty years removed from a dictatorship. After a coup in 1964, the military controlled the country until 1985, establishing a broad system of censorship. Furthermore, in the last ten years or so, the far-right has been advancing in Brazil. In certain aspects, this fits into a larger movement occurring across the globe (Donald Trump’s election in the United States, for example), but in this Latin American nation there is a specific characteristic shared among the supporters of the far-right: a yearning for the return of the dictatorship.
With this history, Brazilians can be quite sensitive to censorship. The Dark Side of Skin’s defenders contended that the fragments must be read in context. The scenes highlighted by the principal as inappropriate address the politics of interracial relationships and the ways black bodies are stereotyped. More importantly, supporters wondered, why do the sex scenes in the book cause more shock than the descriptions of police brutality? As Tenório stated in an interview about the situation, “That is what is incomprehensible to me. How these words cause more discomfort than the death of black people . . . how racism and prejudice is not taken into consideration.”
Amid this controversy, The Dark Side of Skin is now reaching an English-speaking audience. It was translated into English by Bruna Dantas Lobato, winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for Stênio Gardel’s The Words that Remain (New Vessel Press, 2023), another Brazilian novel. As in her award-winning translation, here she does not lose sight of the tenderness of Tenório’s prose despite the novel’s heavy topics of racism and police brutality.
Lobato’s awareness of the intricacies not only of language but of Brazilian culture is what makes her work so strong. In the fragment above, for example, she chooses not to translate the words nego or negão. No expression in English quite captures the intimacy in the use of nego as a term of endearment and how Tenório turns it on its head through the political dynamics of the scene. In this sense, the translator’s note at the end of the novel provides an interesting insight into Lobato’s process. Her discussion of choosing the title and her decision “not to impose [American racial] expectations and conventions on the Brazilian text, on the characters’ world and experiences” are particularly compelling. With this argument, Lobota displays an understanding that blackness is not monolithic and, importantly, that the American black experience is not universal: a point that is easy for American readers to miss.
The Dark Side of Skin is narrated by Pedro, a young black man, in the aftermath of his father Henrique’s death. Family dynamics are at the center of the story. As Pedro goes through his late father’s things, he narrates the story directly to him. This structure allows for the exploration of a child’s point of view (a substantial part of the book is also about the mother, Martha), resulting in a poignant account of Pedro coming to terms with his parents’ humanity:
You both realised at some point that your relationship problems came from the fact that you didn’t know how to deal with your own ghosts. I was there in the middle of all this, trying to balance my affections, without you even realising it, because I didn’t want to disappoint you, because I learned very early that you were both good people. You two were just lost.
Pedro’s empathy for his parents sets the tone for the book. He is able to see beyond their roles as father and mother and recognize them as hurt people. Tenório has previously stated that to escape the trap of his work being labeled panfletário (a term used by Brazilian critics for literature that takes on social issues and disregards linguistic merit), he decided to focus on family dynamics. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of The Dark Side of Skin is the complexity of the characters and their relationships. No issue in the novel is presented as clear-cut. An example of this is the marriage between the narrator’s parents. Tenório does not show one character as right and the other as wrong. Rather, he explores their complexity as humans and how both are to blame for the toxicity of their relationship. The author understands that life is complex and people are complicated, capturing this beautifully in the book. Henrique and Martha garner readers’ sympathy because they make mistakes, say the wrong things, and hurt each other, all the while just wanting to be loved.
Martha is a standout character in this sense. The novel is mainly about Henrique—he is the one who has passed and it is he whom Pedro addresses. A recent adaptation of the book into a play, for example, focuses almost entirely on the father-son relationship and leaves most of the mother’s scenes out. However, she is an integral part of the novel. Martha is overbearing, manipulative, and spiteful. Having been orphaned at a young age, her need for love makes her hold on to people too tightly. They, in turn, feel stifled and pull away. But her desire is also to love, and that is where the character captivates the reader. Through the eyes of her son, Martha’s love feels overbearing because it is too big. It is heavy and overwhelming. After Pedro’s birth, she loses herself completely. “She threw herself into motherhood, and I, though involuntarily, had turned my mother into a slave . . . I was the center of her world.” Martha’s over-protectiveness as a mother, not allowing people to touch Pedro and believing nothing is good enough for him, sheds light on how much she wants love in her life—something that was not always afforded to her. Readers come to realize that Martha’s abrasiveness is the symptom of her desire for love, which is what makes her such a compelling character.
Martha also challenges Henrique’s beliefs about racial politics. As a black woman raised in a white family, Martha’s views on race differ from Henrique’s. Unlike him, she believes discussing racism leads nowhere:
The Black movement never did anything for me. The black movement thinks it all comes down to skin colour. They forget that being a black man is very different from being a black woman. … I want to know where the black movement was when I was sexually harassed at the beach when I was thirteen. Where the black movement was when no one stopped my mother from dying drunk in an alley. … I don’t mean that blackness is unimportant, it’s not that, but this kind of movement would have us all in the same boat, but black people are different. We are not all the same.
The clashes between Henrique and Martha remind readers that black people are diverse. They do not have the same experiences and do not share the same beliefs. Tenório does not make the mistake of flattening blackness in the novel, treating it as universal and ignoring the complexity of black individuals. As the book reaches an international audience, the diversity of blackness is important to keep in mind. The American experience is often centered in debates about racism and one can easily make the mistake of projecting American dynamics onto other national spaces. But as Lobato points out in her translator’s note, The Dark Side of Skin needs to be read from the Brazilian racial context and its intricacies, not the American one.
Brazil’s cordial racism is on display in the novel. The country has long thought of itself as immune to issues of race because of miscegenation. Brazil, however, is a deeply racist country. Police brutality is a serious problem, and their treatment of black citizens is often lethal. Data shows that the vast majority of people murdered by the police in Brazil are black. Tenório expertly builds this theme throughout The Dark Side of Skin. Henrique has encounters with police officers in several moments in the novel. What at first may appear to be isolated incidents quickly show themselves to be a pattern constructed by Tenório. When the author introduces the first-person perspective of a police officer, readers become apprehensive about what the abrupt change in the narrative structure may bring. This leads to an impactful, albeit unsurprising, climax.
In April, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, the main higher education institution in the state where the controversy over removing The Dark Side of Skin from the school curriculum originated, stated that the novel would now be part of its entrance exam. High schoolers in the state aiming to study at the university will therefore have to read the book. When we consider that Henrique is a high school literature teacher, The Dark Side of Skin remaining in students’ hands seems a fitting ending. From racism to complex family dynamics, an important reading experience awaits these high schoolers or anyone who picks up the book.
