The Water House     by Antônio Olinto, Translated by Dorothy Heapy Original title: A Casa de Água Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Carroll & Graf Publishers, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1985 Format: Paperback ISBN: 088184229X List Price: $9.95, £6.33 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.33 Published by Carroll: NY Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: USA,UK List Price: £7.50 Not available for ordering

In The Water House and its sequel book King of Ketu, Olinto tackles the Afro-Brazilian experience, particularly exploring the connections of Black Brazilians with West Africa, where many originated and from where they were transported to Brazil to be plantation slaves.

The Water House is the story of a freed slave making the —journey back to Nigeria to find relatives left behind and their original homeland. It makes it a Brazilian ‘Roots’ book written years before Alex Hailey’s Roots which followed the story of a contemporary African-American tracing his family line back to an African ancestor.

Different from Roots too is that Olinto tries to stay close to the forms of African speech and oral literature, ‘the voices of the people’, to tell the story, making it a more poetic, more difficult but also more interesting literary work.

I do not know how she spent her last days, I cannot find anything in her memories which sets aside these days from others, each the same as the next, going down to the river, milk and salt corn-cake in the morning, black beans and cabbage at midday, now and then dried salt meat and black beans, conversations about things that hid themselves in the cellar, the mula-sem-cabeça, the priest’s mistress who, when she was dead, turned into a mule without a head and came out of the cemetery in the middle of the night, dead people who came back to tell you what heaven was like, or hell or purgatory, the little girls playing ring games, here comes Margarida, Olé Olé Olà, I am poor, poor, poor, the night fell suddenly and the stars twinkled with happiness, when everything was dark the talking in the kitchen went on until very late, the stove crackling, the lamp lighting the way along the passage full of mystery. But yes, she does remember the last day, or rather not the whole day, but the moment of departure, four horses, her mother, her grandmother, her brother and sister herself and a man who was going to look after them, from early morning... 7