Tongue, Lover, Baby Between: Sisterly Trauma-Bonding in Crooked Plow (2023) by Itamar Vieira Junior.

HELP. I don’t understand!

*Warning: Contains Spoilers.*

What I don’t understand: Twinning, Halving, Gendered Violence, and Sisterly Trauma-Bonding.

When morning arrived, she was certain of one thing: God would never forgive her wickedness.  Worse, he’d pay her back twofold.

~ Crooked Plow

I don’t really want to do a review; I’d much prefer to have a book discussion.  The review is just an excuse to ask the burning question about a textual motif that I can’t figure out on my own.

Edit: this song would have been less obscure and more obvious, ha.

What song(s) do you associate with Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior? Here’s my choice: “What is Freedom?” by Sima Lee.

Since I love Hurray for the Riff Raff, I’m including this one, too:

This song is more culturally appropriate, and I did just watch Black Orpheus.

Also, I can’t resist.

If you haven’t read the book and don’t want any spoilers, please read no further.

Have a lovely day! 

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Crooked Plow (2023) by Itamar Vieira Junior centers on an Afro-Brazilian ex-slave community of tenant farmers living on the Água Negra plantation in the Bahia region of Brazil. The book is a Bildungsroman that follows the lives of sisters Bibiana and Belonísia: their hardships during drought and years of privation; their loves, joys, and frustrations; their syncretistic Afro-Brazilian-Catholic religion called Jarê (with its saints and encantados, spirits); and their struggles to be free, sovereign beings.  In parallel to the sisters’ story, the novel also follows their community’s struggles for land sovereignty and their dream to be a free people on their own land, neither subject to the cruel whims of a landlord nor doomed to the wandering of the itinerant homeless.  

On Água Negra, the tenant farmers whisper legends of ancestral quilombos (ex-slave cooperatives) and quilombolas (maroons, or slaves who revolted and won land reform through resistance and sometimes violent struggle); these histories, elevated to myth, become the sustenance that feeds the people.  They are kindling the revolutionary spirit. As Fred Hampton said, “You can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.” Midwifing a utopian ideal that refuses to die, the people will have its fate decided either by collective struggles for liberation or through a self-appointed champion.  Will they succeed or fail in their quest for land redistribution and sovereignty?  What will become of the subterranean fire?

For many years, I’ve been captivated by stories of maroons and marronage.  I can’t pinpoint where this started, but I think it was from reading Black utopian anarchists such as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten and listening to an interview with conscious rapper Sima Lee.  Maroons are escaped slaves, and marronage is the state of living as a free fugitive, either by creating an egalitarian society under the radar (off-grid / invisible to the oppressor society) or by living in continual fugitivity.  Maroon societies are also called quilombos and palenques. Assata Shakur, who wrote the Black radical liberationist memoir Assata, escaped to Cuba and referred to it as one of the biggest palenques in the world. 

As Sima Lee explains, the Great Dismal Swamp is a site in the US where escaped African-American slaves and Native Americans went into hiding to create a maroon society / quilombo; together, they found creative ways to survive and live differently and deliberately in obscure, dense forested swampland areas with treacherous terrains.  Slavery’s Exiles details this dream of freedom, and the film Free State of Jones (2016) portrays a maroon community / quilombo / palenque living in the Great Dismal Swamp. There are also all kinds of poems, myths, and ghost stories written about Great Dismal, but I digress.  Back to Crooked Plow.

In the infamous opening scene of Crooked Plow, two sisters, six-year-old Belonísia and seven-year-old Bibiana, are playing with cornhusk dolls that they pretend are their babies in their mud house on the plantation.  The curious sisters are waiting for their grandmother Donana to wander into the woods behind their home so that they may rummage through her suitcase of possessions explicitly forbidden to them.   Grandmother Donana’s mind is addled by dementia and haunted by the long-ago disappearance of her daughter Carmelita, whom she sees everywhere; she talks to herself, “recit[ing] her prayers and incantations aloud with [a] distracted air” (5).  The girls find “something mysterious” that “attract[s] [them] like a stone”: a glowing knife (5).  As if under a spell, transfixed and enchanted by the “metal’s radiance,” Bibiana and Belonísia put the knife in their mouths, taste blood, and one of them cuts her tongue clean off.

The novel is split into three parts: I – Edge of the Blade (narrated by Bibiana), II – Crooked Plow (narrated by Belonísia), and III – River of Blood (narrated by Santa Rita the Fisherwoman, one of the encantados).  The brilliance of the book lies in having the three co-conspirators of liberatory violence narrate the story.

In the first part of the narrative, Bibiana does not initially divulge which sister lost her tongue, instead explaining that they have developed their own system of signs and body language so that the speaking sister can communicate for the mute one:

[O]ne of us would have to speak for the other.  One would be the other’s voice.  From then on, when we interacted, one of us would need to become more perceptive, read more attentively a sister’s eyes and gestures.  We’d become one.  The sister who lent her voice studied the body language of the sister who was mute.  The sister who was mute transmitted, through elaborate gestures and subtle movements, what she wanted to communicate.  […]  That’s how I became a part of Belonísia, just as she became a part of me.  In the meantime, we were growing into young women, learning to cultivate the fields, studying the prayers of our parents, caring for our younger siblings.  And so the years went by, and we felt like Siamese twins, sharing the same tongue to make the words that revealed what we needed to become (14-15). 

The two sisters have been fused and tethered by this wound, until they become adolescents.  Their cousin Severo arrives on Água Negra, and like the radiant knife, his presence enraptures both sisters.  

Bibiana and Belonísia’s parents are important in the community; their father Zeca acts as community healer and medium to the encantados (manifest spirits) in the Afro-Brazilian community’s religion syncretizing Catholicism with African indigenous spirituality, and their mother Salu is the midwife (“baby catcher”).    Zeca attends to the supernatural, and Salu attends to the natural.

Late at night on the Feast of Saint Sebastian, Bibiana looks for Belonísia and jealously spies her emerging from darkness out of the shadow of a tree at the moment when Severo splits the shadow and emerges on the other side.  Bibiana tells their mother that she has seen Belonísia and Severo kissing, and Belonísia receives a severe beating for this transgression (39).  Later, when Belonísia shares her perspective, the reader learns that she wasn’t kissing Severo but was merely catching fireflies with him (page?). Belonísia confesses that she does not feel seduced by Severo but rather admires him for his charisma, natural leadership, and political consciousness (133). 

When Bibiana comes of age, she and Severo fall in love; they run off together after Bibiana falls pregnant.  Believing they will make money elsewhere to buy their own land, the couple leaves Água Negra.  Years later they return to Água Negra, having failed at their first freedom dream.  When they return, Severo focuses his efforts on agitating and organizing the tenant farmers on Água Negra to form a union.

Intertwined in the story of Bibiana and Belonísia’s emerging rivalry over Severo is the story of Crispina and Crispiniana, identical twin sisters on Água Negra.  Their father, Saturnino, is pulling one daughter on a rope, while the other trails behind.  Like the incident with the severed tongue, at first we don’t know which daughter is being dragged against her will (22).  We learn that Crispina descends into madness and despair after she catches Crispiniana having an affair with her husband (28).   Later, Crispina and Crispiniana fall pregnant at the same time, and it is rumored that Crispina’s husband has fathered both babies.  Crispina gives birth to a stillborn baby, while Crispiniana’s baby thrives.  Crispiniana’s milk dries up, so Crispina nurses her sister’s baby. 

So now we have a motif emerging. 

Two sisters, one tongue between them.  While both Bibiana and Belonísia are wounded, Bibiana initially obfuscates which sister loses the tongue so that the sisters merge temporarily and then finally individuate.  When Bibiana leaves, Belonísia is rendered illegible; no one comprehends her signs.

Two sisters, one husband between them.  Crispina descends into madness.  Zeca and Salu nurse Crispina back to health, while Crispiniana denies and gaslights about the affair with Crispina’s husband.

Two sisters, one love interest between them.  A jealous Bibiana has Belonísia beaten for the presumption of kissing Severo. 

Two sisters, one stillbirth, and one living baby between them.  Only Crispina, who birthed a dead baby, can nurse Crispiniana’s living baby.  The twins reunite. 

Two sisters, one nuclear family – a husband and set of children — between them.  Bibiana’s husband Severo dies.  A child leaves.  Belonísia attaches herself to Bibiana’s family, and Bibiana and Belonísia forgive each other.

My question: WHY?

Why do we have this motif of twinned women with shared trauma and shared half portions (half lives)?  Why do we have sisters who alternately share a tongue, a lover, a baby, and lots of wounds around these rivalrous episodes?  Why are Crispina and Crispiniana suffering a similar fate to Bibiana and Belonísia?  Why do these sets of sisters in the text suffer these losses and traumas?

In my reflection, I tried and failed to come up with an adequate explanation.

Theory 1. Life mutilates all of us, and sisterhood is about sharing and overcoming that mutilation. (Others have presented this more convincingly as the novel’s insistence on establishing the forced interdependence of the sisters, that they are situated in traumatic and impoverished conditions and have to rely on each other and get over nonsensical and petty squabbling. I can be persuaded on this theory.)

NOPE. 

Theory 2. This is divine retribution for Grandma Donana’s sins: first, of having boyfriend who, unbeknownst to her, was raping her daughter, and second, of murdering him.  It’s still her sin because she should have known he was a rapist, and she should have remained chaste after the death of her previous lover.

NOPE.

Theory 3. The ghosts of diamond-hunters and legacy of diamond hunting haunt Água Negra.  The sisters are living “in the shadow of that violence” and madness (185) that mining for diamonds engendered.  Since women are drawn to shiny objects, like diamonds and ivory-handled KNIVES, their desire is sinful and needs to be punished by mutilating them and killing their babies. Plus, it’s the only way to get them super bonded.  Maybe metals that were extracted in the hunt for diamonds have created an airborne toxic cloud that has polluted the sisters’ minds, preternaturally magnetizing them to shiny metal objects.

NOPE!

Theory 4. Maybe this is a text about queering motherhood through alloparenting and committed, hardcore aunting.

I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation of the mirroring effect and shared trauma between sisters. Do you?

Theory 5. Echoing the Biblical sibling rivalries of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers, it’s establishing a new mythos. Ultimately Bibiana and Belonísia end the rivalry by inverting it through a conspiracy, a final act of sisterly cooperation that births their community’s collective freedom. Santa Rita the Fisherwoman entered through their shared wounds — “where the light enters” them.

Closer? Maybe?

I can’t figure out an answer to why without veering into insipid didacticism, but I really want to know why this motif is present in the text. 

Back to what worked:

What really worked for me in this book was the shift in perspective.  I especially loved hearing from Belonísia and getting a sense of how different her character is from that of Bibiana.  I felt sorry for Belonísia.  She is constantly worried about Bibiana and takes care of everyone else in her family and community, and Bibiana doesn’t worry about her; Bibiana doesn’t write her or ask about Belonísia in her letters. Belonísia seems to embody the archetype of the isolated enlightened being, but then at the end she achieves reunion with her sister and a somewhat restored closeness with her family.  Through Belonísia, we also learn of Bibiana’s jealousy (she’s hypervigilant of other women being near Severo) and petty instincts.

I also loved Belonísia’s rejection of colonial indoctrination (“emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ none but ourselves can free our minds”) in favor of learning from her father.  I also love that Belonísia’s sense of meaning and purpose is not occulted from her or hard to find (no need to squeeze blood from a stone); all she has to do is listen and be sensible to the signals from the universe. (All any of us needs to do is listen to the semaphores.) It reminded me of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonising the Mind.  Zeca teaches Belonísia to plant and harvest by the phases of the moon, to be attuned to the land, and to develop a symbiotic relationship with the land. He imparts spiritual teachings: the wind doesn’t move; the wind is the movement (this is a metaphor for their people).  He conveys astral literacy, cosmic literacy, and an array of natural and supernatural literacies.  The text, sagely, does not romanticize the land or the back-breaking work of the tenant farmers. Belonísia also muses that she could have become a writer. How I wanted that for her, in addition to land sovereignty. Did she through the text, ultimately?

Crooked Plow is bookended by violence; it begins as personal tragedy – a mutilation that cuts off Belonísia from the wider world and evaporates her prospects – and ends, possibly, in collective liberation, but will the women become liberated from their halved existence?