Frances E. W. Harper’s “Death of Zombi”: A Palmares for North Americans

Frances E. W. Harper was likely the first US Black writer to take up the story of Zumbi, seventeenth-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a fortified settlement, Palmares, that fought off European colonial power for almost a century. Harper’s treatment of Zumbi’s story not only rewrites European histories of Brazil for African American readers but, in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, also reinterprets Palmares as a potential model for Black self-governance in North America. Her 1871 poem, “Death of Zombi,” focusing on the women left to carry on after the loss of Palmares, shows her creating a feminist poetics of resistance that may have informed her later work, even her masterpiece, Iola Leroy.