On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel of Bragança, the heir presumptive to the Brazilian throne, signed a “Golden Law” that freed 700,000 people from slavery in Brazil. The country, which had declared independence from Portugal 66 years earlier, had received close to half of all enslaved Africans brought to the New World by European colonizers. Isabel’s formal declaration of abolition came decades after the precedents set by countries such as Great Britain, which outlawed slavery in 1807; facing pressure in the form of port attacks and slave ship seizures by British forces, Brazil’s parliament passed an 1871 law that freed all children born to enslaved parents (though not guaranteed before they reached the age of 21). But this blanket implementation, and even Isabel’s later decree, did little in the way of truly liberating those upon whose bodies the country’s economy had been built. By the dawn of the 19th century, Portuguese colonizers had shaped Brazil via the vast and often violent industries of coffee and gold in the South and sugar in the Northeast. To maintain this infrastructure, landowners conspired to keep enslaved men and women—most of them from West Africa—unfree. After abolition was implemented, the formerly enslaved were still at the mercy of landowners who would grant them permission to live on their property in exchange for free labor, leaving them indebted to their former employers and without much more freedom than what they’d had before.

First published in Brazil in 2018, and recently translated into English by Johnny Lorenz, Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow takes place during the transitional years when freed slaves and their descendants sowed and harvested land that they were prevented from owning. Set in the hinterlands of Bahia’s Chapada Diamantina region in the early 20th century, the novel follows three generations of a family caught between the pull to remain in a familiar system of servitude in exchange for stability, and the post-abolition push toward claiming the land they knew—and loved—better than their former masters.

The book’s success in Brazil exemplifies a trend in the country’s literary landscape toward novels told from the perspective of the historically oppressed. In the past five years, Vieira Junior has been an integral member of a group of Brazilian writers who, in depicting racism and slavery through the viewpoint of racial minorities and enslaved peoples, remind us of Brazil’s painful colonial history while returning agency to those who suffered under its one-sided narration. In the wake of the Bolsonaro presidency, which sanctioned the intrusion on Indigenous territories and denied the prevalence of racism in the country, Viera Junior and his cohort’s mission has been particularly remarkable; by reimagining Brazil’s past, these writers are committing themselves to reimagining what Brazil can become.

Crooked Plow opens with two sisters rushing to the hospital, covered in streams of blood. Curious about a knife their grandmother keeps concealed in a bloodied rag, twin sisters Bibiana and Belonísia unwrap the weapon during her absence and take turns playing with it. While doing so, one of the twins ends up losing a tongue. In a testament to their inseparability, Bibiana, who narrates the first of the book’s three sections, doesn’t reveal who is rendered mute until the end of her narration. “It was my tongue that had so often delivered my sister from the prison of her silence,” she recounts, recalling how she would interpret all of her sister’s gestures after the accident.

The twins grow up under the roof of their father, Zeca Chapéu Grande, who is a renowned traditional healer, and witness exorcisms and treatments administered to members of their community on the Água Negra farm. Owned by the Portuguese-descended Peixoto family, the farm has been home to Zeca and his extended family since he arrived there as a young man fresh from the throes of his own exorcism; for a short period in his young adult life, he had lived as a jaguar, roaming the wild naked and cursed after his mother refused to become a healer despite the indications of fate.

Eventually Zeca is cured and arrives in Água Negra seeking to start a new life. Though subject to mistreatment by the Peixoto family and their minions, Zeca demands dignity: He is respected by his neighbors, who attend the syncretic Afro-Brazilian Jarê rituals in which he summons West African deities with dance and song. Some time after Belonísia’s accident, a young woman named Crispina goes mad after witnessing her husband sleeping with her twin sister. She is brought, roped like an animal, to Zeca’s home. For several nights, Bibiana and Belonísia endure Crispina’s screams and moans as she is treated with Zeca’s prayers and tinctures, though it is unclear what has gotten hold of her: an evil spirit, as some surmise, or perhaps the anguish of knowing that “even a sister could go too far.”

An eerily similar division tests the sacred bond between Bibiana and Belonísia when Bibiana finds her sister alone with their cousin, Severo, under the shade of a withered umbu tree at night. When she reports this to their mother, Salustiana, the latter beats Belonísia with a sandal so violently that Bibiana feels like “every slap of the sandal…burned my skin.” Jealousy over Severo’s attention splits the girls apart; while Belonísia is drawn to his kindness, Bibiana finds, in Severo’s earnest dreams to till his own land away from the constraints of Água Negra, an escape from the only life she has ever known. When Bibiana becomes pregnant with his child, she elopes with him in search of a future beyond the “oppression as workers bound to the plantation”—and, in freeing herself, imprisons her sister.

Without Bibiana to interpret her gestures and expressions, Belonísia’s life becomes a misery. Their estrangement causes the sisters to move through their lives in dramatically different ways. While Bibiana seeks to become a teacher, Belonísia is bullied in school and lags in her studies, finding respite only in learning about the ways of animals and plants from her father. Eventually she marries an itinerant worker named Tobias, who, though a promising match at first, abuses her and her silence. To both her pain and her surprise, Belonísia discovers her grandmother’s missing knife among Tobias’s possessions, seeing in its intense gleam the knowledge that “life could be split again.” In that moment, the knife that robbed her of her tongue might grant her freedom from a life defined by servitude, either to a husband or a master.

Vieira Junior’s novel is filled with many such surprising turns. Though tragedy repeats itself between one family and the next, there appears a force that gives these occurrences the heft of fate. The knife was the weapon that Zeca’s mother, Donana, used to murder her husband after she learned that he was raping their daughter. Two generations later, it is returned to her granddaughter—whose tongue it cut off. Why hold on to the relic at all, if so cursed? “She didn’t want our innocent hands touching the source of her anguish,” Bibiana says of her grandmother and the knife. But “at the same time, she didn’t want to let go of her memories completely—they were keeping her alive.”

The patterns of history are at once the family’s ruin and their salvation. After Tobias’s death, Belonísia returns home to find that Bibiana has also returned to Água Negra with Severo and their children. Though they have found no luck elsewhere, they have decided that home—where their lives began—is also where their resistance begins. An idealist, Severo advocates for an overhaul of the land and labor system, reminding his neighbors that their ancestors had “no other option” but to become tenant farmers after abolition; that they deserve proper homes instead of “mud huts whose walls [need] to be rebuilt after every rain”; and that as a collective, they can resist their own exploitation. But in response, Severo is shot dead on his doorstep.