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Under Our Skin
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. So begins Under Our Skin, a wide-ranging investigation that seeks to know the people of the early African diaspora, and tell their stories.
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, Arena creates a hybrid text of travel writing, memoir, and history, filled with portraits of complex and fascinating characters. There is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave raised a gentlewoman in England; Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, abducted from Africa as a boy, only to be groomed as a nobleman under Peter the Great; Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a Haitian slave, who became a French general in the Napoleonic Wars; Jacobus Capitein, from Ghana, who studies at a European university only to become a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands; and Carlos Marcelino da Graça or ‘Sweet Daddy Grace’, from Cape Verde, who became an incredibly influential and successful church leader and faith healer in the United States.
Triggered by the death of his adoptive father, Arena interlaces the stories of historical figures with those of his own childhood in Cape Verde, as well as his early years in Lisbon. Like many Cape Verdeans, his step-father was a seaman and heavy drinker whose death provides a springboard for connection to the Cape Verde immigrant experience at large. Arena ties these stories to the wider diasporas connecting the island to Europe, the US, and finally, back to Africa. In the end, the author heads to the southern tip of Portugal, known as the Algarve, where 230 Africans were brought in 1444, marking the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade.
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.
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. So begins Under Our Skin, a wide-ranging investigation that seeks to know the people of the early African diaspora, and tell their stories.
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, Arena creates a hybrid text of travel writing, memoir, and history, filled with portraits of complex and fascinating characters. There is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave raised a gentlewoman in England; Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, abducted from Africa as a boy, only to be groomed as a nobleman under Peter the Great; Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a Haitian slave, who became a French general in the Napoleonic Wars; Jacobus Capitein, from Ghana, who studies at a European university only to become a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands; and Carlos Marcelino da Graça or ‘Sweet Daddy Grace’, from Cape Verde, who became an incredibly influential and successful church leader and faith healer in the United States.
Triggered by the death of his adoptive father, Arena interlaces the stories of historical figures with those of his own childhood in Cape Verde, as well as his early years in Lisbon. Like many Cape Verdeans, his step-father was a seaman and heavy drinker whose death provides a springboard for connection to the Cape Verde immigrant experience at large. Arena ties these stories to the wider diasporas connecting the island to Europe, the US, and finally, back to Africa. In the end, the author heads to the southern tip of Portugal, known as the Algarve, where 230 Africans were brought in 1444, marking the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade.
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.
- GenresNonfictionPortugalAfrica
210 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2017
About the author
Joaquim Arena
9 books4 followersJoaquim Arena was born on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde in 1964 and moved with his family to Portugal aged 6. After studying Law, he worked as a journalist, first in Portugal, then in Cape Verde. He has written four books: the novella Um Farol no Deserto [A Lighthouse in the Desert] (2000), the novels A Verdade de Chindo Luz [The Truth About Chindo Luz] (2006) and Para Onde Voam as Tartarugas [Where Turtles Fly] (2010) and the non-fiction Debaixo da Nossa Pele – Uma Viagem [Under Our Skin – A Journey] (2017). He is currently the Culture and Communications Advisor to the President of Cape Verde.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 26, 2023
In an impressive hybrid essay that will remind some of Sebald (in blend of subject and imagery, not sentence form), this is Arena's personal journey to understand his stepfather and trace the history of Black African diaspora in Portugal all the way back to the arrival of the first slaves in 1444. As a native of Cape Verde, settled by the Portuguese as a slave trading port, he has some fascinating insights into the complex and complicated relationship his ancestors—and mixed race Africans—have had with those from mainland Africa. Many interesting historical persons make an appearance and some wonderful travel writing make this an immensely engaging read. Highly recommended.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/11/26/in...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/11/26/in...
February 7, 2026
A beautiful book around the presence of Africans in Portugal, in two journeys: one is the author’s journey up the Sado river in search of the last remains of African slaves that were brought to this region of southern Portugal in the seventeen Century to work in rice plantations, the other is the author and his family life experience when they decided to migrate from Cape Verde to Portugal in the 1960s and settling in Lisbon’s suburbs, when the author was a young boy. The two stories are distinguished in the book by the numbering of the chapters (with Arabic numerals for the first, and Roman ones for the second) and they are mixed with a large number of stories related to the life of Africans (or African descendants) in Africa, Europe and America, and their relations with Europeans. Some of these are about historical personalities, such as the French general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (father of the famous writer Alexandre Dumas), or Abraham Petrovich Gannibal (the “Tzar’s Negro”), the African great-grandfather of Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, others are about somewhat less prominent personalities, and anonymous people from the author’s family. Accompanied by some photographs, the book constitutes a very enjoyable experience, and a very enlightening too. To me, it sounded a bit like Sebald's books!
December 28, 2025
impressive autobiographical dive into cape verde and portugal's intertwined history and (rare) honest writing on being mixed race
November 8, 2024
Fascinating mix of memoir, history, and travel journal. The author does a good job of mixing these three genres; the pages are filled with interesting historical facts about slavery and outstanding Cape Verdeans. He explores his family background and shows us a glimpse of what it is like to be mixed-race in racist societies. I just wish he would have explored that concept a bit more.
November 28, 2019
A good idea, in need of some “polishing”.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews