Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s “Bruma,” Eça de Queirós, and the Specters of Nineteenth-Century Portuguese Realism

In this chapter, I read the 2021 short story “Bruma”, by the Angolan-Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, as a literary “séance” of what I call the specters of nineteenth-century Portuguese literary realism, namely, the specters of slavery and race in the realist fiction of Eça de Queirós (1845–1900). “Bruma” fictionalizes the spiritual life of Matheus, a Brazilian-born Black servant who worked for Eça de Queirós’ paternal grandparents during his early childhood. The only extant information about this person comes from an essay called “Francesismo” that was posthumously published in 1912, where Eça de Queirós tells us that it was on Matheus’ lap that he had his literary initiation, through night-time oral renderings of French chivalric and mariner narratives. I argue that in her short story, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida sheds light on how slavery and race cast a deep shadow over the social reformism inherent to Eça de Queirós’ cultivation of literary realism, at a time when Portugal attempted to develop a modern colonial project for its territories in Africa. In order to develop my argument and shed light on the stakes of Pereira de Almeida’s short story, I provide a critical reading of key passages of Eça de Queirós’ fictional oeuvre where the issue of race as a form of otherness is foregrounded as an index of literary realism, and compare that fictional treatment to its critical reception in literary circles and the contemporary Portuguese debates on race and literature.