The Violent Land (2 page)
Amado abandons his original intentions and paints a picture of Brazilian cacao country that seems idyllic, effectively leaving behind his indictment of commodity-based economies doomed to be tools of the international market.
If we read
The Violent Land
in the context of 1943, we see a very different novel. The novel creates and resolves a number of literary-political issues. First, fidelity to history: Amado does not, as he seems to do in the preface, transform Brazil's cacao country into a fantasyland, a version of the U.S. “Wild West,” but he does turn it into a self-contained reality. That is, the novel opens with a paddle-wheel boat making the trip from the port of Bahia to Ilhéus, sailing, as it were, out of one kind of reality into another, much in the way Joseph Conrad's Marlowe sails up the Congo River in
Heart of Darkness
(1902) to a more primitive world. What Marlowe finds is a civilized man (Kurtz) who embraces the savage world and dooms himself. This is certainly one way to understand the voyage that inaugurates
The Violent Land,
a shift into a reality where the ethical norms of civilization do not apply.
Amado's ship carries two kinds of passengers: Juca Badaró is returning to his plantation and, in the process, casting an eye over the human stock aboard to pick out both likely workers and attractive women. He will find both. The other passengers are laborers, eager to get rich but ignorant of the hell they are about to enter, and opportunists (cardsharps and con men) looking for potential victims and profit. We readers are on the boat with them, so we, too, are leaving behind our familiar reality and entering the world of cacao. When we move beyond Ilhéus to the town of Tabocas, we are beyond civilization.
This very effective opening itself contains problems the author must solve. First, if the Ilhéus territory is different, it must have its own rules. It does: the colonels use raw, violent power or legal chicanery either to kill competitors or to cheat them out of property. Amado makes no specific references to actual dates, only to months and the growing season. Readers of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) will immediately recognize this technique. GarcÃa Márquez reinforces the self-contained, fictional nature of the community he creates (Macondo) by eliminating all references to real history. In
The Violent Land,
when we are in cacao country, we live its reality and no other.
And because everything is subordinated to cacao, there can be no dominant protagonist. This, too, is a technique used by GarcÃa Márquez, who subordinates all his characters to the story of Macondo. At first glance this technique seems to contradict Amado's ideological program: not having a protagonist to embody the contradictions of cacao society might seem an artistic error, but since everyone in the novel is smeared with the “cacao slime,” all are involved in the drama of the colonels. This is precisely the point Amado seeks to make: in submitting to the power of cacao, his characters willfully shed their individuality and become slaves to chocolate. Naturally their psychological development is compromised: Amado does not explore his characters' inner lives, preferring to substitute action for deep personality.
This technique of making characters embody ideas (cacao production, in this case) was pioneered in Brazil in the late nineteenth century by Machado de Assis (1839â1908), whose characters are also two-dimensional. Psychology gives way in his work, as it does in most of the Spanish American novels of the twentieth century, to stereotype. Amado cannot let his characters become too human, because that would make them interesting in themselves and not a reflection of the history of Brazilian cacao. His characters may have idiosyncrasiesâthey may believe in black magic, go insane, or become sexually infatuated with one anotherâbut we do not find the narrator delving deeply into their minds to reveal hidden facets of their personalities.
This reduction of character is also reflected in the plot. There can be only one story in
The Violent Land,
the clash of the colonels. And Amado pursues it relentlessly, passing from one colonel to the other, describing their foibles, their crimes, and the basic traits of all those who follow them. Complications are few, so once set in motion, the novel rushes inexorably to its climax. In this, too, Amado showed Latin Americans a way to write fiction that would define specific moments in national history. In such texts neither psychology nor plot intricacies has any place. At stake is defining a world as it passes from one phase to another.
Amado ends his novel on an ironic note. The last colonel standing, Horacio da Silveira, announces the dawn of a new era made possible by his violence. Colonel Horacio makes a pious speech regretting the fact that his wife, Ester, and his legal councillor, Virgilio Cabral, could not witness this great eventâthough everyone present knows that Ester and Virgilio had had a love affair, that Horacio might have killed her if plague didn't, that he did in fact have Virgilio assassinated. “
Today,
” he says, “
all this is no more than a painful memory.
” Even the old name of the village, Tabocas, has been discarded: the town has been renamed Itabuna. The past must be repressed from memoryâunless a novelist like Jorge Amado appears to preserve and explain itâbecause in the land of cacao there can be no tragedies and no painful meditations on past sacrifices and crimes. The only reality is cacao: “
Nothing of the kind had ever been seen before; for this was the best land in the world for the planting of cacao, a land fertilized with human blood.
”
ALFRED MAC ADAM
On Latin American History
Williamson, Edwin.
The Penguin History of Latin America
. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2010.
On Latin American Literature and U.S. Culture
Cohn, Deborah.
The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S.
Nationalism During the Cold War
. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.
On the History of Chocolate
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe.
The True History of Chocolate
. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
On Jorge Amado and
The Violent Land
Brower, Keith H., Earl E. Fitz, and Enrique MartÃnez-Vidal, eds.
Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays
. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Chamberlain, Bobby J.
Jorge Amado
. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
Vincent, Jon S. “Jorge Amado.” Vol. 3 of
Latin American Writers,
edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, 1153â62. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989. (See also Nelson H. Vieira. “Jorge Amado.” In
Latin American Writers, Supplement I,
15â30. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002.)
Blood Fertilized These Lands
The cacao lands, a region embracing all of the southern part of the state of Bahia in Brazil, were fertilized with blood. They were conquered foot by foot in ferocious struggles of indescribable violence. They were barbarous lands, where banditry and death, implacable hatred and the cruelest revenge flourished; there was a time when they were the symbol of anti-culture and anti-civilization in Brazil. Men had set out to conquer the forest, to clear it and transform the landscape and the economy of a vast area. But those who set out were many, and they went armed. As though there were not land enough and to spare for all, they fought one another, disputing each foot of that humid earth, ideal for the planting of cacao. At the very time that the seedlings were being planted, crosses were being set up to mark the spots where the brave had fallen, victims of ambushes or of encounters between hired gunmen.
All this happened only the other day, at the end of the past century, at the beginning of the present. When I was five or six years old, in 1917 and 1918, shootings were the daily fare of those cities, of Ilhéus and Itabuna, and of the hamlets recently sprung up in the woods. I saw the birth of the village of Pirangy, which today is the city of Itajuipe; my father was one of its founders around 1920. I witnessed encounters of the cacao “colonels,” fights to the death, when bullets whistled through the night in both jungle and cities. My father was wounded when I was a year old. I was with him on the veranda of his plantation house on the land that he had conquered, cleared, and planted to cacao. I saw the end of those struggles; I could say that I was born amidst them, was nourished on them, and that they made me a novelist.
Very little time was requiredâfifty years at mostâfor the cacao trees to come to maturity and bear fruit, for the plantations to grow, for the living conditions and economy of an immense area to change, and it is curious to realize how in such a brief period a civilization and a culture grew out of so much spilled blood.
At a given moment in the last pages of this novel, one of the characters says that cacao produces everything, even a bishop. Today I can add that cacao also produced a literature. In the complex of Brazilian letters and within the limits of the literature of Bahia, there is a genre with its own well-defined characteristics, with its own unmistakable brand, born of cacao, bearing a certain flavor of blood in its pages, a certain bitter aftertaste of death. It is the literature of cacao, a product of the cacao civilization, its finest product.
As for me, I was the first of these writers and, perhaps for that reason, slightly barbarous, like those lands at the time of my birth; I led the way. Then came the young masters of today: Adonias Filho, with his densely packed novels on which weighs the solitude of man in the midst of new lands; James Amado, in whom the sea and the forest are mingled with the tragedy of children and workers; Jorge Meduar, with his stories of the zone of Agua Preta, his immigrants, and his
fazendeiros;
Helio Pólvora, the storyteller of Itabuna; Emo Duarte, with his city of Ilhéus. They are the flowers of a literature that grew out of blood, flowers of cacao which come to re-create the reality of yesterday and of today, to give us the exact measure of the extraordinary saga lived by the men who built that civilization.
Many of those men came from the backlands or from the neighboring state of Sergipe; they were avid for wealth, disposed to build a world. And they did so, but not before traversing the roads of hell. Others came much greater distances, from the faraway Orient, from Syria, Lebanon, Arabia, following the trails of the
conquistadores,
carrying their trunkfuls of baubles and gewgaws, setting up trade. Men came from many other lands and established themselves there. All made their contribution.
In a series of novels I have tried to tell the stories of those cacao lands and of how a culture was implanted there, and of how that culture gained strength and originality. In
The Violent Land
I told the beginning of that great adventure: the thrust into the forest where men struggled with one another as enemies. It was the epoch of the cacao colonels, indomitable, titanic men of unlimited courage, for whom life had no value. It was worth exactly the price of a swig of rum, sufficient pay for the hired gunman who hid behind a guava or breadfruit tree, waiting for his designated victim to come into the sights of his repeating rifle. In other novels I have told of the growth of the cities and of progress, of the twilight of the colonels, of the appearance of the urban bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat, of the new problems, the new world of conflicts much more subtle than the primary conflict between the colonels and the land or among the colonels themselves.
No other of my books, however, is as dear to me as
The Violent Land:
in it lie my roots; it is of the blood from which I was created; it contains the gunfire that resounded during my early infancy.
Today the cities have grown; the country is so well cared for that it is like a garden. But I know that cities and plantations alike were built on the blood of men. Generous blood. Never have the cacao trees flourished so rapidly, never have they borne fruit so early as here, in these lands of killing and death.
A motion picture has been made from this book, which has also been adapted for the stage, television, and radio. Editions of it have appeared in twenty-five languages; some twenty editions have appeared in Portuguese. I believe that all this is owing to those colonels of indomitable courage who took up arms and went to face the forest and the phantoms, the other armed men, and the future's challenge.
JORGE AMADO
1965
Translated by Harriet de Onis
THE BOAT
The boat's whistle was a lament, piercing the twilight that lay upon the town. Standing upon the deck, Captain João Magalhães surveyed the jumble of old-fashioned houses, the church spires, the dark roof-tops, the streets paved with enormous cobblestones. His gaze took in the roofs of varying shape, but he had no more than a glimpse of a bit of street where no one passed. Without knowing why, he found those stones, with which the hands of slaves had paved the street, deeply moving in their beauty. Beautiful also were the dark roofs and the church bells which were just beginning to chime, summoning the pious city to benediction. Once more the boat's whistle rent the twilight that shrouded the town of Bahia, and Captain João extended his arms in farewell. It was as if he were taking leave of a loved one, some woman dear to his heart.
Aboard ship men and women were engaged in conversation. Some distance away, at the foot of the gangplank, a dark-skinned gentleman, felt hat in hand, was kissing the lips of a pale-looking young woman. At João's side a fat fellow, leaning back in a deck-chair, was striking up an acquaintance with a Portuguese travelling salesman. The latter glanced at his watch and announced in a voice that all could hear: “Five minutes yet.”
João reflected that the salesman's watch must be slow, for the whistle now sounded one last time, and those who were staying behind left the boat, while those who were sailing took their places on deck, crowding about the rail.
A sudden rumble of the engines, and he was certain they were under way; and then it was that he turned to gaze at the city once more, with a strange emotion as his eyes rested on those ancient roof-tops and the bit of street paved with huge blocks of stone. A bell chimed, and João fancied that it was a call for him, inviting him once again to make his way through the city's streets, to look on at its solemn processions, to take his early morning
mingau
*
in the public square, to drink rum with aromatic herbs, to play a game of cards in a corner of the market-place of a forenoon, to play seven-and-a-half of an afternoon at Violeta's place, where there was always a good gang, to play poker of an evening in the café with those rich fellows who treated him with so much respect. And then along toward daybreak, to come out into the streets once more, his mop of hair down over his eyes, and to gibe at the women as they passed, arms folded over their bosoms on account of the cold, in quest of male companionship and the strains of the guitar in the Lower Town. Afterwards there would be Violeta's sighs as the light streamed in through the window of her room, with the wind swaying the branches of the two cocoa trees in the garden outside. The sighs of love would be wafted on the wind, all the way to the moon, perhapsâwho knows?
The sobs of the pale young woman distracted his thoughts. She was saying, with a tone of infallible certainty: “Nevermore, Roberio, nevermore.” The man was kissing her, in great excitement; he was deeply grieved, and it was with difficulty that he replied:
“I'll be back in a month, my dear, and bring the children. And you're going to be a good girl. The doctor told meâ”
The young woman's voice was full of pain, and João shared her anguish as he heard her say: “I know very well that I'm going to die, Roberio. I'll never see you nor the children again.” And dropping her voice, she repeated: “Nor the children.” Then she burst into sobs.
The man wanted to say something, but could not; all that he could do was to shake his head, eye the gangplank, and let his gaze wander in João's direction, as if seeking aid and comfort there. The woman's voice was a sob: “I'll never see you again.” The dark-skinned man continued to gaze at João; he was alone with his grief. João remained undecided for a moment; he did not know how he was going to be of help; he felt like running down the gangplank, but the sailors were already drawing it in and the boat was getting under way. The man barely had time to kiss the young woman's lips once again, a prolonged, ardent kiss, as if he wished to contract the disease that was gnawing at his wife's bosom. Then he leaped aboard. His grief, however, was greater than his pride, and the sobs burst forth; they appeared to fill the departing ship, and even the fat colonel left off conversing with the travelling salesman.
From a distance someone was calling, shouting almost: “Write to me. Write to me.” And there was another voice: “Don't forget me. Don't forget.”