One might reasonably assume that all three works similarly center Black women protagonists. Our Nig follows the travails of Frado, a domestic worker in New England. Stella retells the history of the Haitian Revolution through the myth of Romulus and Remus. In Bergeaud’s allegory, two enslaved brothers avenge the death of their mother, Marie the African, by escaping to a maroon community and waging war against the slaveholding elite—all the while aided and abetted by the eponymous heroine, a poor woman from France who finds common cause with the brothers’ struggle against colonial power. The reception and repackaging of Úrsula would suggest much of the same: long hailed as an abolitionist novel, Úrsula is now available in English for the first time thanks to translator Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey, in an edition whose striking cover features a portrait of a Black woman looking over her bare shoulders, her voluminous Afro taking up almost half the image.
Readers might be fairly surprised to find upon reading the novel, then, not only that the titular character is not a Black woman (and certainly not the woman gracing the cover of the book they’re holding), but also that the novel’s plot does not fundamentally center slavery—a seeming prerequisite for any putatively “abolitionist” fiction. The narrative instead unfolds as a romance plot involving Ursula, the daughter of a deceased plantation owner, and Tancredo, a heartsick bachelor whose traitorous fiancée has just married his own father. When Tancredo takes off on his own, he succumbs to fatigue and is found unconscious by the slave Tulio, who brings him to convalesce at the home of Ursula and her infirm mother. Tancredo and his caretaker Ursula expectedly fall in love and plan to marry, but as soon as Tancredo leaves to handle business before the wedding, Ursula’s conniving uncle Fernando appears on the scene to steal her affections. The young lovers ultimately manage to foil Fernando’s machinations, but immediately after their wedding ceremony, Fernando fatally shoots Tancredo. The end of the novel finds Ursula a muttering madwoman and Fernando seeking repentance at a monastery.
Outlining the basic plot in this way is not intended to question the author’s abolitionist bona fides, but instead to reevaluate the terms of her most famous work’s reception. Though arguably not central to the novel’s plot, questions of slavery and freedom recur throughout Ursula. Tulio’s first appearance occasions a condemnation of his condition. “Slaves endure a life of sorrow and torment, with no hope or joy!” Reis writes. “Oh, hope? The wretched only find it in the final refuge of their tomb. Joy? Only in eternity can slaves finally experience it!” Tancredo ultimately grants Tulio his manumission as thanks for having saved the weary horseman—a trajectory starkly contrasting that of another key enslaved character in the novel, Aunt Susana.
Susana’s presence in Ursula is particularly significant, Pinto-Bailey notes in her introduction, because she “narrates her childhood and youth in Africa, her kidnapping by slave hunters, her confinement in the hold of a slave ship, and the horrors of the Middle Passage.” Indeed, Tulio’s celebration of his newfound freedom initiates a sudden narrative reversal whereby Susana, who attends to Ursula and her mother, recounts in depth her captivity. The ensuing frame narrative is perhaps the most extended passage of the novel dedicated to describing and condemning chattel slavery. Susana is further central to Reis’s political critique, as the old woman eventually falls prey to Fernando’s masochistic whims: When Susana refuses to disclose the whereabouts of Tancredo and Ursula, Fernando whips her and orders her to be thrown in a cell, where she is left to die.
Enslaved Afro-Brazilians thus crucially populate the novel as secondary characters. It is largely on the grounds of this inclusion—as well as the way Reis “foregrounds each enslaved character’s humanity and individuality”—that Úrsula is championed as a pioneering contribution to abolitionist literature in Brazil. Pinto-Bailey even suggests in her introduction that other contemporaneous works like Bernardo de Guimarães’s novel A escrava Isaura (The Slave Isaura, 1875), José de Alencar’s play O demônio familiar (The Familiar Devil, 1858), and Joaquim Manoel de Macedo’s As vítimas-algozes (The Victim-Executioners, 1869) fail as abolitionist texts because they either rehearse Afro-Brazilian stereotypes, focus on the particular plight of individual characters rather than broader institutional critiques, or privilege the corrupting influence of slavery on white Brazilians over the suffering of the enslaved themselves.
Of course, these tendencies characterized mainstream abolitionist discourse across the American hemisphere. One need look no further than the most famous work of abolitionist fiction anywhere, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to find versions of all of the above. This reliance on racist stereotyping and on the denunciation of white moral depravity, however, is not sufficient to disqualify the abolitionist politics of such a novel. It rather registers how mainstream abolitionism and anti-Black racism often went hand in hand. What makes a novel abolitionist, I would venture, is not whether its depiction of enslaved characters is especially virtuous or generous but instead whether the text’s plot and narrative action first and foremost advance an argument for the ending of slavery. It remains unclear to me whether Úrsula fulfills that criterion.
Pinto-Bailey has still done a huge service by finally making Ursula, as well as Reis’s later short story “The Slave Woman” (1887), available and accessible to Anglophone readers for the first time. Certainly, this moment is long overdue. One cannot but hope that the belated appearance of Ursula in English will spur further translation of Reis’s work, of which the novel is only a single part. As Pinto-Bailey remarks in her introduction, Reis authored another short story, “Gupeva” (1861), musical compositions, diaries, and poems, as in her 1871 volume Cantos à beira-mar (Songs by the Sea)—much of which was included in Filho and Nascimento’s initial 1975 facsimile edition marking Reis’s recovery from obscurity.
Perhaps this additional time lag is partly explained by the politicized terms of Reis’s reception, which has clearly privileged the elements of her work which can be reasonably deemed abolitionist. Pinto-Bailey addresses this question in her introduction when considering Reis’s place in Afro-Brazilian literary history. “Although Ursula is not the first novel by a Black Brazilian writer, it is the work that truly initiates an Afro-Brazilian literature, or a ‘literatura negra’ (Black literature) in Brazil,” she writes. Pinto-Bailey engages the work of several Brazilian intellectuals to suggest that “an author’s skin color does not sufficiently characterize his or her work as Afro-Brazilian or Black Brazilian literature.” Quoting scholar Zila Bernd, Pinto-Bailey further notes that this literary history cannot be based solely on the inclusion of a “‘Black theme’ (Blacks as object) or the writer’s skin color (the phenotype criterion).”
I raise no major objection here, except to note that these restraints have the potential to lead us into troublesome territory, where the work of Afro-Brazilian writers is abstracted from Black Brazilian literary history for failing to adequately consider or center what is understood by later readers as a “Black theme.” One hopes this constraint does not further hinder the reception and translation of Reis’s work, especially her “Indianist” story “Gupeva,” and non-abolitionist writings. This welcome edition of Ursula, at the very least, should be praised for revealing how much work remains in its wake.
Since Reis’s renderings of enslaved Afro-Brazilian characters at least partly explains the historical import of her best-known work, their English translation merits close attention. One expected road bump would be the use of substantive adjectives in Portuguese, whereby an adjective stands in for the noun it modifies—for instance, o negro literally means “the Black (man),” a negra “the Black (woman).” There are a few options for translating these substantives into English: simply using “man” or “woman” and letting context indicate the character’s race; using a term like “Negro” where historically appropriate; or using the clunkier phrases “Black man” or “Black woman.” Pinto-Bailey perplexingly opts for the latter, which can read awkwardly when repeated as often as they are in Ursula.
The chapter in which Aunt Susana recalls her personal experience of enslavement, for example, begins with Tulio’s preparations for his journey with Tancredo. In Pinto-Bailey’s translation, the opening paragraph concludes, “The Black man felt nostalgic.” Since the entire paragraph concerns Tulio, however, there is little need here for the clumsy racial designation—one could simply note that “he” felt nostalgic. Later in the chapter, Tulio and Susana debate the merits of painful memories as he looks forward to his liberated future as Tancredo’s right-hand man. “‘Ah! For heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed the young Black man with pity. ‘Really, for the sake of God, what are these memories good for!?’” Here, again, we already know the racial identities of both speakers, and “young man” would be sufficient to describe Tulio. The title of this chapter, meanwhile, is rendered by Pinto-Bailey as “Black Susana,” which similarly seems redundant and stilted. We already know Susana is Black, so either her name alone or “Aunt Susana” would have made more sense as a chapter title.
I do not mean to suggest that phrases like “Black man” or “Black woman” are ethically or politically troublesome, but merely clunky and unidiomatic in English. The historical term “Negro,” which was used in contemporaneous African American and Anglophone fiction not as a slur but indeed as a descriptor and term of empowerment, would be an apt substitute. In Pinto-Bailey's translation, characters (usually Fernando) utter this term only as a racist epithet. This choice bypasses semantic options that might have made for a smoother and more succinct translation.
The profusion of redundant epithets also adds to the verbiage already inherent in some phrases. In one chapter, for example, we find phrases like “harsh bitterness” and “ardent passionate love”; Ursula herself is described as “apprehensive, as if some imminent danger threatened her,” “Frightened, nearly fainting from fear,” and “cherubic, angelic.” Portuguese, like Spanish, tends to heap descriptors on top of one another in lengthy strings of adjectives and adverbs; rendered in English, this wordiness needs to be condensed to avoid the kind of verbal excess and redundancy that otherwise detracts from a major contribution to the corpus of Afro-Brazilian literature.
