Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Luanda, 1982) is the daughter of a black Angolan mother and a white Portuguese father. Raised in Lisbon, one of her usual problems was her hair, which she did not know how to tame, and this strangeness was the backbone of her first novel in 2015, Els meus cabels, which Lletra Impresa has just published in Catalan (Edhasa published it now a year ago in Spanish).
The novel reviews the adventures and misadventures of a girl like her, Mila, from hairdresser to hairdresser. Written in a tone between essay and memoir, Pereira de Almeida explains how he makes hair problems a metaphor: “The book is not so much about hair, but about how this girl, Mila, tries to accept herself and to his body, and accepting himself as he is while trying to decipher what it means to be black in a European society”. “I grew up in Portugal and I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do my hair, but around 2013 a global movement started of girls talking about their natural African hair, and that helped me make peace with myself , and at the same time, after years of not thinking at all about my origins, I was beginning to have a certain curiosity”, recalls the writer, who from these two elements was born with the need to find out certain things about her past: “Writing the novel was the way to face it”.
Although she retraces part of her biography, she assures that it is fiction: “I invented a family just by remembering, because when you start to remember you start to make fiction”, she clarifies. Grandparents are very important in the family of the book, who spice it up with their stories: “I wanted to write a book that looked like a collection of old photographs from the family album, and I tried to recreate with writing the experience that you have when you look at a photo album”, and that’s why “each chapter tries to be a different photo”.
In addition, despite the fact that it reflects everyday racism, it is not a manifesto: “I wanted to write a story that allowed me to approach a life experience that is very similar to my own, and make it reach readers who do not have hair so curly and no notion of what it means to be part of a minority in European society”. “I would love for my books to contribute to widening and broadening the world view of my readers”, he insists.
This was her first novel, which made her a revelation author of Portuguese letters and opened her doors to the whole world with translations of her books into eight languages. “Seven years have passed, but for me it’s as if a lifetime had passed. It’s a long way off, because my writing has evolved a lot and my latest books have a very different style,” he explains. Even now, “they are often stories about the periphery and the fringes of the city, but I write them hoping that my readers, regardless of who they are or what color their skin is, can relate to this particular kind of emotion and sensitivity”, but not only that: “For me it is important that a black writer can write about anything, like any writer. I just want to be free and write stories. These problems emerge as part of the concrete lives of the characters, because what interests me is literature”.
