Family Dishes

Forged in the reddish soil stained by cow blood, on the border between Brazil and Uruguay, where, like in a china cabinet, tyrants and subordinates, Black people and white people are jumbled together, this story begins with the death of Aunt Eluma, a domestic worker in a city called Ana. 

Who is responsible for her death? Who will pay for the funeral of this woman of the people?

Taking Aunt Eluma's life (and death) as a starting point, the narrator pulls the thread that extends back to her first known maternal ancestor, passing through other relatives of hers who, to get there, wiped their feet on the stones of the streams and washed the dirty laundry of white people.

Among the highlights of this Louças de Família, which uses plates, teacups, goblets, bowls, or mere shards as markers of family memory and generational passages, is the very language of the author Eliane Marques, which mixes Portuguese, Spanish, and Yoruba in an overwhelming and dense literary diction.