Review of Pure by Nara Vidal, 5 minute Read, Translated by John Knych
Featured Image Credit: Ombres au Pico do Papagaio (Minas Gerais, Brésil) CC-BY-SA-4.0/Acauã Heuruel Cabral/WikiCommons
Kill them all! This is the unspoken command, implied yet clear, almost trumpeted, that runs through the entire book, thought, whispered, and carried out by the powerful characters of a Brazilian city—the doctor, the priest, the rich white bourgeoisie.
But kill who? Anyone who is not pure, that is, white: kill Black people, those who are slightly Black, and all those with deformities, regardless of their color. There are Black people at the very beginning of the book, adults and children. The children gradually disappear. We don’t know where or how. This is the suspense of this unique and multifaceted story, which states the facts and distills them sparingly until the grim ending.
The city, Santa Graça, is located in the state of Minas Gerais, known for its rich gold and diamond mines, and is also where the writer was born. She therefore knows it well. The events recounted in the book took place almost a hundred years ago. In other words, in a time unrelated to our own, she seems to suggest.
In fact, the story she tells us, although rooted in space and time, is nonetheless timeless and unplaceable. It belongs as much to the Brazil of the 1930s as to Nazi Germany or to the tales and legends evoked by the characters’ names: Làzaro, Icario, Arcanjo, and Isis…
First, it should be noted that Brazil is a federal republic composed of 26 states and a federal district. With the exception of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), “never before today,” write Guilhermo Roman Borges and Mariana Silvino Paris in an article published in Droit et société on July 16, 2021, has the legal system [of Brazil] been so thoroughly used for ethnic, racial, sexist, and class-based,“ which, they point out, ”is not unusual in a country where miscegenation hides systematic sexual violence against black and indigenous women and girls, for the benefit of the white population.” And yet, they add, the current government was democratically elected by a significant majority of Brazilians. While this violence and cleansing are very real, they are carried out quietly.
This is what Pur describes, a story that is quite unique in its narrative device. We learn what is happening in the town of Santa Graça through the voices of its characters and only in this way. This is reminiscent of William Faulkner, particularly Absalom, Absalom!, where the protagonists recount the same events, but each in their own way. In Pur, the originality of the device is accentuated by its graphic dramatization, with the book becoming a kind of stage on which voices, printed in capital letters, appear, are heard, and are exposed:
“DELPHINA LOCK
the door
DELPHINA SPREADS
her legs
DELPHINA LONGS
for Raquel.”
However, the theater we are dealing with is a motionless theater, or at least that is the impression the reader gets, a chessboard on which the pawns, light or dark, play their game without moving, although with the intention of defeating or resisting their opponent, the battle ending in “checkmate,” the victims here being the non-white characters.
This in no way prevents these voices, these characters, from having their own particularities, from being lively and moving or scandalous and terrifying. In the first part of the book, the little boy Ìcario, a disabled child whose parents are white and wealthy, and Isis, the black maid of the house, occupy much of the stage and hold the reader’s attention. Both speak in an unrealistic language, identical to that of their educated employers. Ìcario learns nothing at school, Isis has never been to school, but this is not a problem, as the truth lies in the relationship they have with each other and in their understanding of the fate of those like them, the fate that awaits them. Ìcario is white, Isis is a maid, and yet neither of them has any doubt about the threat hanging over them. We tremble, we grow impatient with their words, their embarrassed sagacity. “Iris told me,” Icario recounts, “that my grandmother, my mother, and my father are disgusted by all black hands, but they find it normal to eat the food they prepare, sleep in the beds they make, and wear the clothes they wash and iron.”
We want them to be more decisive and less docile. Because they are endearing, and they are the only ones in this terrible book who are. Without betraying their own or their condition, they escape through their thoughts, draw closer to each other, and protect each other tenderly in a world where love is excluded. “He takes too much medicine,” thinks Ìris of Ìcario. “People think he’s a little crazy, but this kid just has fixed ideas. He thinks too much. I found a pencil at home and gave it to him so he could draw.”
The story loses some of its critical power when Icario leaves and Helga appears, the female counterpart of the villain Làzaro, who claims to know how to take care of children and professes unlimited eugenics. Her convictions, coupled with radio reports about the bright future of a model city in terms of purification, are too repetitive and turn the text into a political pamphlet. This wasn’t necessary; we got the point.
Nevertheless, this tale, which is not quite a tale, bears a striking resemblance to the reality that surrounds us, whose alarming news we hear day after day. “Since the story of the disappearance of the boys with caramel candies spread in Santa Graça, those wretches in Mata Cavalo have started keeping their little black children at home. They say they’re in danger, and some even claim that they didn’t go to the neighboring village, but were kidnapped,” says Olavo, Ondina’s husband and Icario’s father. Olavo has two sides: he is in favor of exterminating Black people, but dreams only of Iris; he professes absolute love for his son, but wants only his death.
“OLAVO THINKS:
Fly away, Icaro, fly away. Die, Icaro.
IRIS PICKS UP
the dirt from the ground.
OLAVO WATCHES
Ìris on all fours.”
Similarly, the priest, Father Arcango, whom everyone takes for a saint, to whom Ìris confesses everything in the confessional, is a donor, a hypocrite, obsessed with the love of boys. He satisfies his desires on Làzaro, the villain of the gang, the self-proclaimed “pure” one, the child from nowhere, taken in and raised by three disturbing old women, the three Fates of the story. “Yesterday,” remarks Ìcario, “I saw him cut off a frog’s legs and stick a chicken bone on each side. I’m afraid of Lázaro, but I don’t want him to know.”
Nara Vidal has given us a powerful, original book, superbly translated by Mathieu Dosse. The genocide she describes is similar to many others that arise or persist across the planet. It is not only horrifying, it is a canvas, a kind of sample, and in this sense it sends a chill down the spine. The Brazilian writer convinces us that evil is rampant, insidious, and that the murderers are already among us.