On May 13th 1888, Brazil became the last nation in the Americas to formally abolish slavery. Over 130 years later, hundreds of thousands of people are still living in modern slavery across the country.

Itamar Vieira Júnior is a writer from Brazil's north-eastern state of Bahia. His multi award-winning debut novel Torto Arado (Crooked Plough) is a beautifully written tour de force that unflinchingly gives a voice to the country's silenced Black, Indigenous and Quilombola communities who have been fighting for their land rights for hundreds of years. 'Quilombolas' is  the name for residents of Quilombos: settlements originally formed by fugitive slaves. There are roughly 3,000 Quilombos in Brazil today.

Vieira Júnior is a writer who has experienced first-hand many of the themes explored in Torto Arado. Over the past 15 years, he has worked for Brazil's land reform agency INCRA (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform), which led him to live intimately with the Quilombola communities depicted in the novel, getting to know their stories, rituals and struggles. In an interview to news portal UOL talking about his work with INCRA, Vieira Júnior said "they are communities that resisted, made up of slaves who went from place to place and, after abolition, formed families, communities, in a system of solidarity which is an example for all of us. It's not a perfect system, but it stopped the State from decimating them."

The novel has been making waves on the literary scene both at home and abroad, and it is very deserving of the many accolades it has won. When Torto Arado was first published in Portugal in 2018, itwon the LeYa Prize, Portugal's most prestigious literary prize. And in 2020, Vieira Júnior won two awards: he received a Jabuti Prize, the most traditional and prestigious literary prize in Brazil; and the Oceanos Prize, one of the most important literary prizes for books in the Portuguese language.

Torto Arado "portrays our current reality. I would love to say that it is a novel about a bygone period of our history, but that wouldn't be true. Brazil today is the Brazil that is depicted in the book, which continues to kill those who dream of emancipation and social justice," Vieira Júnior said in an interview with Portugal's Público newspaper. Itis an urgently powerful and personal manifesto against the silencing of Black, Indigenous and Quilombola communities in Brazil.

NORRIS, Isaac. 'Torto Arado' by Itamar Vieira Júnior: The Fight for Land Rights in Brazil's Northeast. Sounds and Colours, 24 fev. 2021.

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 19 nov. 2023. (Adaptado).

Considering the context of the novel "Torto Arado", by Itamar Vieira Júnior, and the provided text, how can the main characters of the book be best described?