Tonight my girlfriend took me to a poetry reading. The poet was John Keen, who had written some extremely elaborate narrative which started with a news article about a man in Brazil who had been found naked and with his head chopped off. This man was the descendant of an old Portuguese family which had been extremely wealthy for a very long time. He then went back into history, into the 17th century, and told this very long story about two families.
I have NO idea how to spell these names. I’m going to write them phoenetically as I heard them. The families were “Figeroash” and “Londonia.” I think one of them, he said, was supposed to be “converso” (Jews who had converted to Catholicism.) These two families were united by a marriage, and the son produced by this union went on to become a Colonel in the army who was sent to fight Indians and was notorious for his brutality. He then retired and established a gigantic plantation where he was extremely cruel to his slaves. His slaves rebelled several times, and each time he killed all of them.
THIS guy’s son also went on to become an army officer and was, I believe, fighting the Dutch and their allies. John Keen went into this lengthy story about how this officer (I think his name was Londonia) had encountered a colony of free Africans and sent his scout up ahead to investigate them. The scout, who was a mulatto, spoke with them and told the Africans that their regiment had come in peace. However, as soon as the commander and his troops arrived, they attacked the Africans, massacring most of them, taking the rest prisoner, and then burning the village.
This familial lineage continued up until the 60s, in Keen’s narrative, and then the son, who had been sent to boarding schools all over Europe and America but kept getting in trouble, got addicted to heroin, took up residence in a Favela (slum) and was eventually killed and decapitated.
The one common thing that all of these men of this family had, in each successive generation, was the nickname “Innocencio.” Not sure if I spelled that right, but some Latin form of “innocent.” I guess this was supposed to be ironic because they were all horrible people.
I cannot find a lick of information on this family online. It could be because I’m not spelling it right. Or it could be because Keen made the whole narrative up.
Does anyone know anything?