The Dark Side of Skin

March 4, 2024
Brazilian author Tenório tackles in his intimate and artful English-language debut the dysfunction and racism experienced by a family in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Pedro, the 22-year-old narrator, finds a sacred Yoruba stone among the belongings of his recently deceased father, Henrique. Throughout the narrative that follows, Pedro addresses his father directly as he reconstructs Henrique’s life (“I didn’t want your absence to be your only legacy. I wanted your presence, some form of it, even if it was painful and sad”). Touched on are Henrique’s career as a teacher, his childhood, his teenage loves, his marriage and its dissolution, his experience of fatherhood, and his run-ins with racist police who routinely stopped him because of his dark skin color. Pedro blends touching accounts of his parents’ failed marriage (“Living together quickly brought to light all the ghosts that haunted the pair of you”) with a poignant and bracing depiction of Henrique’s lifelong harassment by law enforcement (at 50, after he’s stopped and searched just like he was as a teen, he’s left “feeling the gaze of suspicion.... Because a suspect is always a suspect, even if the police let you go”). This slim volume packs a stinging punch.

March 15, 2024
A Black architecture student named Pedro searches for the truth behind his father's murder while enduring Brazil's "cordial racism." In the act of narratively retracing his family's winding path of difficult decisions and dramatic consequences, Pedro must come to grips with the legacy of his father, Henrique, a public school literature teacher in Porto Alegre. In an environment of institutional racism, a disastrously poor education system, and the constant threat of random--or not-so-random--violence, Pedro maintains a life of intelligence and genuine sympathy, but underneath his surface roils an agitation of emotion, a lack of understanding stemming from his--and, as he discovers, his father's--encounters with white Brazilians who would define his character by the color of his skin. Ten�rio has crafted a subtle, bluntly percussive novel that reverberates with the punches and kicks of Pedro's family's uneasy life, one that focuses on the question of identity. How can Pedro better know himself, know the tragedy that was his father, without painfully running headlong into the bitter facts of his and his country's history? Amid a variety of torments, leveled occasionally by a passage of poetry or piece of good music, he learns there is no easy way to truth. When walking down the rough roads or passing by, even living inside, the concrete buildings of his hometown, he must experience what his father also lived through, endured: the feeling of loss, the struggle with the uneasy sense of not belonging, of living outside time and place, no matter how desperately he wants to fit in. A novel that successfully examines the appalling fallacies of racism.

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