Daniella Jinkings Special Dispatch for Agência Brasil

Palmares, Pernambuco – More than two hundred years of history and local culture disappeared last weekend when an overflowing, raging Una River washed away a large part of the city of Palmares. The city was founded around 1862, and named in honor of the Quilombo dos Palmares in Alagoas (a city founded by escaped slaves – “quilombos”).
Palmares, Pernambuco, is known as “Land of the Poets” because of the many writers born there. Among them, Ascenso Ferreiro (1895-1965), Hermilo Borba Filho (1917-76) and Jayme Griz, who died in 1981. Griz wrote knowingly of the rains that punish the region regularly.
“Suddenly, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain that batters one’s patience/ So much rain that even frogs beg for clemency from the heavens/ Mother Nature gone mad/ And if She has lost Her mind/ She who knows so much and is a mother to so many/ Little wonder that the rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain drives me crazy”

Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English
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