Reading guide: Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz

A fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region. Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. 

Itamar Vieira Junior was born in Salvador, Brazil in 1979.

He holds a doctorate in Ethnic and African Studies. Before Crooked Plow, he published a collection of short stories entitled The Executioner’s Prayer, which was nominated for Brazil’s biggest literary award, the Jabuti. Crooked Plow won the prestigious 2018 LeYa Award in Portugal.

Oliver Basciano, Art Review

‘While Crooked Plow carries in its DNA the early books of Jorge Amado, the famed modernist writer who also took Bahia as inspiration, many of Vieira Júnior’s themes are drawn from his day job of 15 years at INCRA, a government agency dedicated to rural land-reform and the legacy of the quilombos (the settlements established by runaway enslaved people). At one point, Bibiana’s boyfriend notes the slippage of identity in response to the vagaries of Brazilian law: “we started calling ourselves Indians. Because we knew there was a law, even if it was regularly violated, that forbade Indians to be expelled from their lands.” In the final third of the book, the story takes an even darker turn, one that again reflects wider Brazilian history, as the disenfranchised begin to grapple not just with state violence and economic exploitation, but with that of criminal parastates in which the lines between legitimate business and gangs, politician and kingpin, are blurred. This is a saga that tells not just the story of two siblings, but the enduring dysfunction of a nation.’

Angel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

‘Since the publication of Crooked Plow, Vieira Junior has been hailed as an heir to a tradition of Brazilian storytellers from the north-east including Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego and Joaõ Guimarães Rosa. A geographer and ethnographer by training, Vieira Júnior conducted academic research into the plight of Afro-descendant communities in Brazil’s north-east. Yet the prose is far from academic. It is rooted, instead, in the voices and languages of the sertão, in the names of the animals and plants, in the oral storytelling traditions of ancient communities, in the richness of the spirit world. That is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. An impressive first novel by an important literary voice.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Among the laudable feats Vieira Junior accomplishes in this novel is the way it gradually moves from a highly specific story to one with implications for a region’s entire working class. In a book that often concerns itself with voices both singular and collective, it’s a stirring progression. This is a stirring, lived-in novel of struggles both personal and societal.’

‘Bibiana and Belonisía are two sisters whose inheritance arrives in the form of their grandmother’s mysterious knife, which they discover while playing, then unwrap from its rags and taste. The mouth of one sister is cut badly and the tongue of the other is severed, injuries that bind them together like scar tissue, though they bear the traces in different ways. Set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately one third of all enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade, the novel invites us into the deep-rooted relationships of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples to their lands and waters – including the ways these communities demand love, gods, song, and dream – despite brutal colonial disruptions. An aching yet tender story of the origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.’

The loss of one of the sister’s tongues draws on a long lineage of literary history featuring women without tongues. Discuss what this could be said to symbolise, and in particular, how it intertwines with gender roles within the novel. 

Bibiana narrates the first section of the book, but after the sisters’ accident, the prose is carefully positioned in such a way to avoid revealing which of them has lost their tongue: ‘the one who was the other’s voice, the sister who spoke for both,’ Vierira Junior writes. It is only revealed at the very end of this section which sister has been rendered mute. Why do you think the author chose to keep the mute girl’s identity a mystery for so long?

Bibiana and Belonísia are young daughters of indentured farmworkers, just three generations out of slavery, which was abolished in Brazil in 1888. Despite this, their Afro-Brazilian family still work on a plantation, unpaid. Discuss why, despite no longer being enslaved, little progress has been made in liberating the family, or others like them. 

Crooked Plow is a novel written in three parts, with the first two sections being narrated by each sister whereas, in the final section, an ancient spirit tells the story. This section begins in first person, but then switches to second person. What did these perspective switches offer you as a reader, and do you think the novel benefitted from the adoption of these techniques? 

Many reviews have called Crooked Plow a work of magical realism. Writing in the Oxonian Review, Cate Farr called the label an ‘awkward fit,’ adding that this catch-all term distracts from ‘the complex insights and aesthetic effects opened up by the narrative’s interest in possession, kinship, doublings, and blurred agency’. Would you agree Crooked Plow is more than a work of magical realism? If so, why? If not, why not? 

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