What is at stake in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s book are the living, human ruins of empire. No longer based on the figure of the veteran or the returnee, but on someone from the other side of the line colonialism traced: a black man and, in this case, the complex figure that colonialism generated, the assimilated African who, here, for the first time in Portuguese literature, is at the centre of the narrative.
Gabriel was born in 1988, in Colombia, and was adopted by a Norwegian family in 1989. Growing up in a small, pretty little town in east Norway, he was the only brunette among the blonde kids. "You can spot this darker kid in the middle of blue-eyed, blond kids in our class photo for kindergarten. I was aware of how different I was when I was a kid.
There is something poetic in a city cut through by a river, like the imperturbable flow of the Mondego between the banks from which Coimbra sprawls. The river is the image of continuity and impermanence, its time a tangent to infinity. Our existences, as fleeting as the people who cross it, the bridges that cut across it and the waters that pass through it, are the height of discontinuity; our time is minuscule compared to the river.
They create a network of different approaches to the rural and simultaneously call attention to ecological concerns. The works constitute potent signifiers within a global discourse of regionalism as well as representing a call to (poetic) action within our natural environment.
Jimmie Durham brings to the surface the issue of the truth of the artwork, probably one of the most relevant themes in a world that is constantly forgetting about the fictional nature of art – not necessarily implying that it lacks an intrinsic paradoxical truth in its materiality and representational nature.
What is at stake in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s book are the living, human ruins of empire. No longer based on the figure of the veteran or the returnee, but on someone from the other side of the line colonialism traced: a black man and, in this case, the complex figure that colonialism generated, the assimilated African who, here, for the first time in Portuguese literature, is at the centre of the narrative. 
Gabriel was born in 1988, in Colombia, and was adopted by a Norwegian family in 1989. Growing up in a small, pretty little town in east Norway, he was the only brunette among the blonde kids. "You can spot this darker kid in the middle of blue-eyed, blond kids in our class photo for kindergarten. I was aware of how different I was when I was a kid. 
There is something poetic in a city cut through by a river, like the imperturbable flow of the Mondego between the banks from which Coimbra sprawls. The river is the image of continuity and impermanence, its time a tangent to infinity. Our existences, as fleeting as the people who cross it, the bridges that cut across it and the waters that pass through it, are the height of discontinuity; our time is minuscule compared to the river. 
They create a network of different approaches to the rural and simultaneously call attention to ecological concerns. The works constitute potent signifiers within a global discourse of regionalism as well as representing a call to (poetic) action within our natural environment. 
Jimmie Durham brings to the surface the issue of the truth of the artwork, probably one of the most relevant themes in a world that is constantly forgetting about the fictional nature of art – not necessarily implying that it lacks an intrinsic paradoxical truth in its materiality and representational nature. 
