PinT Book Club 15th session

Welcome to the 15th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss Under Our Skin with Cape-Verdean author Joaquim Arena and translator Jethro Soutar. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese).

Under Our Skin was first published in 2023 by The Unnamed Press.

About the book

Under Our Skin is one journalist's wide-ranging investigation into the people of the early African diaspora.

1570. A street teems with activity in Renaissance Lisbon: boatmen unload passengers as jugglers entertain the crowd and vendors hawk their goods. The crowd is large, and more than half of it is Black. Most are enslaved African people performing an array of duties, but there are free Africans too, and somebody else: a Black knight astride a horse. Four hundred and fifty years later, novelist and journalist Joaquim Arena stands in a museum, transfixed by the character depicted on this canvas by an anonymous Flemish painter. He doesn’t know it yet, but the knight is Joao de Sá Panasco, a one-time slave who nevertheless became an Afro-Portuguese nobleman. Arena was born in the tiny state of Cape Verde, a small chain of islands off the West Coast of Africa which were uninhabited before Portugal chose them for a slave-trade post―a place made famous in part by Herman Melville's essay on the nature of Cape Verdeans (known as 'Gees') who were common fixtures on whaling vessels. With this awareness, and the death of his adoptive, seafaring father, Arena begins to interlace the stories of historical figures with the complex and fascinating characters from his own childhood in Cape Verde and Lisbon to create a hybrid text of diasporic travel writing, memoir, and history from Europe to the US, and finally, back to Africa. With a skillful translation by Jethro Soutar that captures Arena’s insightful, accessible style, Under Our Skin is a story unlike anything else. Of it, the Jornal Económico, a leading newspaper in Portugal, has called it “the closest thing” the Portuguese language has to W.G. Sebald.

Joaquim Arena was born in 1964 in São Vicente, Cape Verde. He moved to Lisbon with his family as a young child, going on to study law, before moving back to Cape Verde in 1998, where he worked as a journalist and writer. He now divides his time between Lisbon and São Vicente. He has published three novels, A Beacon in the Desert, The Truth about Chindo Luz, and Where the Turtles Fly. Under Our Skin (Debaixo da Nossa Pele), which has been widely covered in the Portuguese and Cape Verdean press, is his first full-length work of non-fiction, and his first book to be translated into English.

Jethro Soutar is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish. He has a particular focus on African literature and has translated novels from Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Equatorial Guinea - including By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, shortlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize - and short stories from Angola and Mozambique. His translation of the narrative non-fiction work Under Our Skin by Joaquim Arena, from Cape Verde, was published by Unnamed Press in 2023.

He also writes fiction, non-fiction and journalism in his own right, and he's a co-founder of Ragpicker Press and an editor at Dedalus Africa. Originally from Sheffield, he now lives in Setúbal, Portugal.

Praise for UNDER OUR SKIN:

"This ambitious, polyphonic text moves between travel writing, deep observations of Renaissance art, and searing reflections on the meaning of home... Quiet and somber scraps of evidence and memories are drawn into a glittering whole that evokes history’s forgotten voices. Under Our Skin is an enigmatic story about how pain and struggles reverberate through the generations."

— Foreword Reviews

"Arena manages to weave history, memoir, and travel writing, into an idiosyncratic and entertaining exploration of the early roots of the Black African diaspora in Europe... [his] journalistic skills are evident in his ability to transition between historical details and present day encounters."

— roughghosts

A well-written, deeply personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our present lives."

— Kirkus

"Arena’s book reminds us that what was made can be unmade if we, like his friend Leopoldina (also profiled in this book), understand how things came to be."

— Alex Aguayo, Words Without Borders