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The Word Tree
The Word Tree
The Word Tree
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The Word Tree

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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'A masterly narrative,the supreme art of simplicity."'Linda Santos Costa in Publico

' In our literature, Africa has seemed a relatively vacant place. The Word Tree has appeared to fill this gap. It is a novel to remember.' Carlos Reis, Jornal de Letras

'Salazar's forty-year dictatorship in Portugal and that country's colonial wars in Africa cast their long shadow over Teolinda Gersao's The Word Tree. This is the first of Gersao's novels to be translated into English. As the Mozambican Laureano reflects,' the men crossing the sea from Lisbon didn't want that absurd war either'. Laureano's wife Amelia had come to the country from Portugal in search of a better life, but mentally never leaves her homeland, whereas her daughter Gita loves the country and grows up to resent the colonial presence. There are lush descriptions of the country, while the racial order is starkly spelt out: Amelia 'clings to the belief that fair-skinned people are the very top of the racial hierarchy, and that dark-skinned Portuguese people are almost at the bottom, just above the Indians and the blacks'.
Adrian Tahourdin in The Times Literary Supplement

Margaret Jull Costa's translation was awarded The Calouste Gulbenkian Portuguese Translation Prize for 2012
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 26, 2013
ISBN9781909232570
The Word Tree

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm sorry to see that this lovely book has only 14 copies on LT. In three very different sections, it tells the story of a young woman in Mozambique. In Part One we see her as a young child. The style of this section is lush, colourful, with a tinge of magical realism. The girl is very close to her father, who loves life in Mozambique - much less close to her mother, who spends most of her time policing young Gita's life to make sure she doesn't pick up too many habits from the 'natives'. Given that, Part Two is very unexpected - we are suddenly with the mother's story, and how she came to emigrate from Portugal to Mozambique - and so we come to understand the roots of her bitterness and resentment. In Part Three, we are back with Gita, now a young woman, and forced to make a difficult decision about where she belongs. We will walk down the streets, which we know by heart. In a way, they are inside us, like lines engraved on the palms of our hands. Some are parallel, perpendicular, geometric, while others follow their own course, like the paths carved out by wind or water. The city is a living, breathing body, mine, yours, other people’s, the world’s; it’s an endless intersecting of bodies, caught in the uncountable moments of time, repeated over and over like the waves of the sea.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gita grows up in colonial Mozambique with her beloved father, Laureano, and her distant mother, Amélia, who left Portugal dreaming of wealth and can't stop resenting not being part of the upper echelons of white Mozambique society. Gersão's story, told from different viewpoints, beautifully (and terribly) describes the varying ideas and ideals that exist in this world, contrasting white and black society, poor and rich, and young and old. As usual when it comes to any literature she touches, Margaret Jull Costa's translation is flawless.

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The Word Tree - Teolinda Gersao

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