Translated by Alejandro Álvarez Nieves
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s writing blends research and fiction to summon voices silenced in archival records. The protagonists actively dissent from their condition as slaves and, more importantly, from their condition as negras—an identity constructed by and under Eurocentric epistemology. It doesn’t matter whether the slave owners’ initials inscribed on their flesh with blazing iron ever disappear; there won’t be a way to identify them if they don’t have a say. No wonder it’s “the historians, for leaving us out,” to whom Arroyo Pizarro dedicates Negras, aware that the stories of Wanwe, Ndizi, Tshanwe, and Petra burst into and fill historical lacunae that have been deliberately ignored. This bilingual edition also includes an anthology of Arroyo Pizarro’s poetry.