Gayl Jones's 'Song for Anninho': History and folklore

Song for Anninho is a tribute to the memory of Palmares, a seventeenth-century African state located in the Barriga Mountains between Alagoas and Pernambuco in Brazil. The poem reflects Gayl Jones's meticulous attention to Brazilian history, and it is part of a larger cultural movement begun in 1980 on behalf of Brazilians of African descent. As author, Jones executes a number of tasks simultaneously. She uses African, African American and Brazilian folk traditions to write a revisionist history of Palmares. As an outgrowth of that overall project, she uses folklore to reveal the "interior life" of the people of Palmares, in contrast to traditional linear history. She includes in the poem a micro-focus, deriving from the other two projects, which provides a close up, personal and intimate portrait of the loving relationship between two imaginary lovers, Almeyda and Anninho, husband and wife.;Jones's project is one of resistance because it serves as a challenge to traditional histories of Palmares, especially the reliance upon a record that colonial agents created. She also engages traditional linear history to illuminate its relationship to fiction. In many instances, her project is similar to Toni Morrison's work in Beloved and Song of Solomon.;Jones uses her own trademark techniques--endowing a female subject with the name of a historical enemy, depicting a healing relationship between two women, and an aggressively heterosexual female protagonist--in conjunction with practices common to other black women writers to present the story of Palmares through the lens of a seventeenth-century black woman who has experienced New World slavery.