UNDER OUR SKIN

A personal story bound up in six centuries of Black European history.

After his stepfather’s death, Arena returned from his birthplace and home in Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa, to Portugal, the country where he grew up. Chronicling his explorations of Lisbon and the surrounding landscape, the author weaves among the arcs of his personal history and the histories of Black lives at the heart of European empire. Arena, a journalist by trade, is particularly interested in people whose “life stories were rescued from oblivion by the miracles of literature—eventually by biographers, but initially through works of family fiction.” He pursues the family history of his friend Leopoldina, whose enslaved ancestors rebelled against their oppression in Portugal. Alongside such intimate sagas are brief biographies of Black people who, despite rigid and racist social structures, rose to great prominence in the white Western world. These stories often draw on the unlikely immortality of literary success; their subjects include Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the great French novelist; and Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, confidante of Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather. Arena also has a gift for lyrical object history. The book opens with a close reading of a technically “mediocre” but informationally rich 16th-century painting of a fountain where Lisbon’s African population—enslaved and free alike—gathered. Later, visiting the site of the fountain, Arena reflects on the continuities of history and place, the relation of the scene around him to the one depicted in paint: “My ancestral trajectory was both personal and typical—one more family of Cape Verdean immigrants—and how, in some abstract way, perhaps through that sense of melancholy we Portuguese speakers call saudade, my own journey was connected to that first voyage, in 1444, when 235 Africans were brought to Portugal with shackles on their feet.”

A well-written, personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our lives.