“Bruma” was, for me, the standout novella in the excellent collection, Three Stories of Forgetting, by Djaimilia Periera de Almeida. The “forgetting” in this collection is oftentimes a deliberate erasure of colonial wrongs, and each story investigates memory as process, both conscious and unconscious. Bruma was sold into slavery at age thirteen, and has been encouraged to forget himself. The saudade that he feels is not the longing for some gauzy, soft-focused Beulah. No, Bruma longs for his own life. In this story, Perieria gives him the chance to reclaim interiority in a semi-sacred space. The cabin becomes a Walden, but far more powerful because it is the only place where Bruma, often fog-like or spectral, is able to condense into full personhood. In the other “home,” Bruma is reduced to the bare life of enslavement. All this alters what might appear to be a scene of bushcraft or wilderness survival into a transcendent effort of one man making his own space for selfhood—specifically the selfhood that was erased in Portuguese colonialism.