Brazilian literary phenomenon slaps Portugal's far right in the face

First: hi.

How are you?

Um Defeito de Cor (A Defect of Color), Ana Maria Gonçalves's novel published in Brazil in 2006, reached Portuguese bookstores through Bertrand on September 17 of this year, 2026. Like me, the author is a mineira — from the state of Minas Gerais — born in Ibiá in 1970; it's always worth acknowledging a mineiro's mineiridade, their Minas-ness.

In 2024, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, then president of Portugal, said the country should "pay the costs" of its colonial past. In response, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro's government refused to start any reparations process, and Chega—a far-right party whose name means "Enough"—proposed charging the president with treason.

The "reasoning" behind this goes more or less like this:

Premise: the colonial past stayed in the past.

Conclusion: nobody in the present owes anything to anybody.

Premise: whoever suggests otherwise offends the nation.

Conclusion: they're a traitor, then, pá.

Yeah, I know. We're not looking at a particularly sophisticated chain of reasoning. And who would expect anything like that from Chega? "Chega," the best name they could come up with.

Chega. Yeah, well.

But let's do our part for the sake of some depth, because the past in question (colonial violence and the slave trade) carries an undeniable weight.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, millions of kidnapped Africans crossed the Atlantic on Portuguese-flagged ships, most of them bound for Brazil. That crossing is where Um Defeito de Cor places Kehinde, a character kidnapped at age 8 in the Kingdom of Dahomey, present-day Benin, and enslaved on Itaparica Island, in Bahia.

In 2024, the book became the theme of Portela’s Carnival parade, one of Rio de Janeiro's most traditional samba schools, and, according to its publisher, Record, sales in the week after the parade were ten times higher than in the week before. In 2025, it received the most votes from the hundred experts the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo invited to name the best Brazilian books of the 21st century. On November 7 of that same year, Ana Maria was inducted into the Academia Brasileira de Letras (the Brazilian Academy of Letters) as the first Black woman to join its ranks.

In her induction speech, Ana Maria Gonçalves pointed out that the exclusion of women from the Academy began as "a gentlemen's agreement," since nothing in its bylaws required such an exclusion. I filed the phrase away at the time, and now I think it also suits Portugal’s prime minister, who remains in office: the refusal to make reparations strikes me as yet another of those agreements doomed to self-inflicted shame, struck by those who have always stood on the more comfortable side of history. And of the sword, too.

Well, this was supposed to be a piece about the publication of Um Defeito de Cor in Portugal.

In practice, Kehinde is now in the bookstores of the country whose ships tore millions of people from their homes. Telling her own story, in the first person. A slap in the face to the morally defenseless Portuguese far right — in that respect, so much like its counterpart back in Terra Brasilis. And an invitation to the discomfort of reading, of course.

Emanoel.