The Black President

A pre-modernist writer in an art deco setting sees a future interlocked by computers and anticipates that technologies will become commonplace in our daily lives as the Internet has become. Radio-transportation will turn traffic jams into a thing of the past. Instead of going every day to the office and hang back in a tram that glides on noisy wheels of steel, employees will do their work from home and broadcast it to the office. Lobato also foresees a world in which printing no longer exists and news instantly appear, in bright characters, on the walls of the homes.

Anticlimax, sentimental scores and the irresistible screen kiss.

For the feminist candidate, the "mammalian rebels" have been abducted from another species; therefore, they are not the natural Homo Sapiens female.

Jim Roy, the black candidate who acquired the status of a hero, makes an introspective journey recalling the humiliation and degradation suffered by the ones of his own race: … far away, blurred by the mists of centuries, the humble African kraal a target of the fierce white enslavers, the fragile slave brigs rolling over the waves like poisonous ocean foam. He saw the robbery, the slaughter of naked villagers, the blood flowing, the fire swallowing the huts. He recalled the endless torment of the crossing: hunger, thirst, disease darkness, moans and voices in the slaveship.

... The initiatives of Abraham Lincoln made the shackles fall off their wrists, but the stigma remained.

Strong fighter against the imitation of the habits and customs of others, Lobato's thesis was that to ignore one’s roots means to become a mere unsuccessful copy of others. This novel is not a hymn for the sake of racial purity, but a metaphor of segregation and acculturation, a story that tells how the black community is driven to assuming the ethnical values of the whites. To the detriment of their African ancestors, submitting themselves willingly to a radical “depigmentation process”, making them "horribly" whitish. Depigmentation uncharacterized a race and took away a key element of identity. With their self-esteem decreased in the artificially cleared skin and straightened hair, blacks reproduce the white model; by giving up physical characteristics and adopting a feature that is not theirs, they become, in essence, a weakened and vulnerable link in an eroded chain.

Beyond a futuristic fable, The Black President reaffirms the visionary talent of Monteiro Lobato.

Thaïs Lips Zenthon,

Translations Decoder LLP, is contracted for translation and copyrights for publishing in the US.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

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