Jorge Ahmad
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.3.0395
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoA writer whose works have been translated into forty-nine languages journeys through world literature along different trajectories. The roads traveled by his works, however, do not lead to any one capital of a supposed republic of letters. Indeed, when such a writer belongs to a tradition marginal to the purviews of North American and Western European metropolises, he proves that “world literature” is no republic. Just as the real world of “world literature” comprises diverse kinds of uneven, nonfederated, though interconnected polities, so too its literatures form many different and overlapping networks of relations that are unbounded by any one system.Jorge Amado's work illustrates this through his participation in at least one network in which Europe and the United States do not play a primary role: the relations between Arabic and Latin American literatures. An example of what may be described as South-South relations, the Arab-Latin American connection is manifested in Amado's depiction of Arab characters in many of his novels and in the reception of Arabic translations of his works. These two aspects are related, but given the scope of the topic, I focus here on the first one. I would like, first, briefly to situate Amado within the larger context of Latin American–Arab literary and cultural relations.There are at least four kinds of relations between Arabic and Latin American literatures that current paradigms of world literature obscure. First, Muslim rule in Iberia had a direct and lasting impact on the cultures of Spain and Portugal, and through them on Latin America, with important implications for literature—from Borges's writings on Averroes and The Thousand and One Nights to the flying carpets in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and the crucial element of the fantastic in magical realism more generally. Second, the mahjar (immigrant) writers in the Americas in the early twentieth century who wrote in Arabic, in turn, had a major influence on modern Arabic literature, but the role of the immigrant experience and of the specific social and cultural contexts of immigrant destinations on the formation of their projects remains to be studied. Third, the writings of Arab immigrants and their descendants in the languages of the Americas—English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish—remains a vast and fertile field for comparative study, both within the emerging field of American hemispheric studies and between it and Arabic literature. There are now several studies of U.S. Arab American and Arab Canadian literatures, but very little has been written on its Latin American counterparts.1 Fourth, there are prominent Latin American writers with no Arab ancestry who have taken interest either in Arab culture or in Arab immigrants or both and who can, therefore, be studied in this context. I have already mentioned Borges and García Márquez; we can add to them the names of Amado, Ana Miranda, Malba Tahan (Júlio César de Mello e Souza), Angela Dutra de Menezes, and Alberto Ruy-Sánchez. Those four types of relations between the Arab world and Latin America represent a South-South dimension of world literature that I would like to illustrate with the example of Amado.The title of this article is, of course, a joke. Paloma Amado reports that while she was living in Brasilia, her father once asked her to contact at the embassy of an unspecified Arab country regarding one of his novels that had just been translated there. When she identified herself to the cultural attaché as the daughter of Jorge Amado, the reaction was immediate: “Amado não, minha senhora, o nome dele é Jorge Ahmad, pois ele é árabe e nós temos muito orgulho disso” (“Not Amado, madam. His name is Jorge Ahmad, for he is an Arab and we are very proud of this”).2 Like all sophisticated jokes, this one works on more than one level. First of all, it is the diplomat's way of signaling his appreciation of the Brazilian author's highly positive portrayal of Arab immigrants, humorously suggesting that he must himself be an Arab. Second (and this is not something Paloma would have necessarily known), it is an allusion to an older Arab joke that ridicules the assumption of literary supremacy: given the illustrious literature of the Arabs, any literary genius must necessarily be Arab, including Sheikh Zubayr, whose identity was stolen by those treacherous colonizers who Anglicized his name to “Shakespeare.” Therefore, Jorge Ahmad is simply another lost Arab, like the Bard, and his name is irrefutable proof of that: “Ahmad,” pronounced “Amadi” in Portuguese, was easily Brazilianized because it sounds so close to the Portuguese word that means “beloved.” As such, Jorge Amado is not just an honorary Arab but a real one!Amado must have been highly amused by the joke about his supposed Arab ancestry, especially given that one of his novels seems to support the notion that any great writer must be Arab. Farda fardão camisola de dormir (1979) (Pen, Sword, and Camisole) opens with the death of the talented and enormously popular poet Antônio Bruno, who supposedly inherited both his poetic gift and the “romântico perfil de beduíno” (“romantic profile of a Bedouin”) from his maternal grandfather, Fuad Maluf, an Arab immigrant and poet in his own right.3 In a novel that, among other things, satirizes the Brazilian literary establishment, Amado depicts Bruno as something of an autobiographical figure and even an idealized version of himself: both author and fictional poet enjoy tremendous appeal and popularity but are condemned by leftist critics for their supposed disengagement from politics—a charge leveled at Amado after he resigned from the Brazilian Communist Party (Farda, 32).4 It is as though Amado himself claims (fictional) Arab ancestry through the characterization of Bruno.Jon Vincent argues that humor is a stylistic and structural feature of Amado's novels from Gabriela cravo e canela (1958) (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) onward, many of which are structured like jokes, with plots typically driven by “a comic imperative … a kind of world view that defines scene, situation, and character in terms of an implicit opposite that makes the texture of the entire text comic.”5 A case in point is the title of A descoberta da América pelos turcos (1994) (The Discovery of America by the Turks), a joke about the quincentennial commemoration of Europe's discovery of the Americas. Originally drafted as an episode in Tocaia grande (1984) (Showdown) and then edited out when it became much too long of a subplot, Amado returned to the story when invited by an Italian publisher to contribute, along with Norman Mailer and Carlos Fuentes, to a commemorative volume that was to gather together prominent writers in the three major languages of the Americas and that would be distributed to airline passengers between Italy and countries of the Western hemisphere between April and September 1992. With his subversive politics and satirical humor, it is not difficult to see why Amado found the invitation irresistible, and he proceeded to turn the once discarded pages containing the story into what became both the culmination of his depiction of Arab immigrants and a not-so-subtle mockery of the Columbus celebrations. Everybody else, Amado suggests, also discovered America when they first arrived there, even turcos, notwithstanding their arrival there in “1903, quatrocentos e onze anos após a epopéia das caravelas de Colombo” (“four hundred and eleven years after the epic of Columbus's caravels”).6 In doing so, Amado at once deflates the aura of exceptionalism surrounding Columbus (for anybody who goes to a new place discovers it, in a way), and turns the spotlight on his favorite immigrants. Needless to say, the story of two immigrants—a Syrian and a Lebanese, a poet and a merchant, a Muslim and a Maronite, the one an atheist and the other caught between Allah and the devil—multiplies the jokes through implicit and explicit opposites, among other comic effects.On a more serious note, Amado's interest in Arabic literature and Arab immigrants relates to some extent to his biography—his childhood friends and neighbors included Arab immigrants—but more importantly perhaps to the social milieu of Bahia in the early decades of the twentieth century, which he depicts in his novels. His interest in the Arab-Brazilian connection also has much to do with a critique of the Eurocentrism of Brazil's cultural elite that he articulates in his preface to Mansour Challita's A literatura árabe, fonte de beleza e de sabedoria (1962) (Arabic Literature: A Source of Beauty and Wisdom), a brief survey of Arabic literature: É tempo de voltarmo-nos para essas fontes de cultura, que tanto marcaram nossa formação. A atitude de beata admiração pela cultura européia ou norte-americana, guardando os olhos fechados para o resto do mundo, implica ainda numa posição colonial, provinciana e estreita. Por que saber tudo sobre a França e nada sobre a Síria ou o Líbano, por que ser tão culto sobre a Itália e desconhecer o Égito ou as novas nações africanas às quais estamos ligados pelo sangue? É tempo possuirmos uma verdadeira política cultural à altura da batalha em que nosso povo está empenhado por sua industralização e seu desenvolvimento, contra a sujeição econômica.7(It is time we went back to those cultural sources that had so much influence on our formation. The attitude of pious admiration for European and North American culture while continuing to close our eyes to the rest of the world keeps us in a narrow, provincial, and colonial position. Why should we know everything about France and nothing about Syria or Lebanon? Why be so cultured when it comes to Italy yet ignorant about Egypt and the new African nations to which we have blood ties? It is time we developed a true cultural politics at this point in our people's struggle for industrialization and development and against economic subjection.) In insisting on “returning to those cultural sources,” Amado alludes to Arab civilization in Iberia (which Challita discusses), while the reference to “industrialization and development” emphasizes the vital links among culture, economy, and geopolitics and the need to strengthen relations with countries of the global South.Arab immigrants embody one of those relations: O sange sírio e libanés está hoje misturado aos varios sangues que formam a nação brasileira. Centenas de milhares de homens vieram dos países distantes trazer a contribução de seu trabalho e de sua cultura para a formação e o desenvolvimento do Brasil. Integraram-se por completo em nossa vida e seus filhos são brasileiros dos melhores, dos mais profundamente brasileiros.8(Syrian and Lebanese blood is today mixed with that of the various races that make up the Brazilian nation. Hundreds of thousands of people came from faraway countries to contribute with their labor and their culture to the making and development of Brazil. They integrated themselves completely in our lives, and their children are among the best and the most profoundly Brazilian.) Their presence in Bahia was especially remarkable: Na Bahia, tinha muito sírio, muito libanês. A região em que eu nasci, a região do cacau, a região grapiúna, foi colonizada por sergipanos, como o meu pai, que foi um dos coronéis do cacau. E havia os árabes, os turcos. A quantidade de árabes era enorme. Eles tiveram uma influência muito grande na formação da civilização do cacau.9(There were a lot of Syrians and a lot of Lebanese in Bahia. The region where I was born, the cocoa region, the Itabuna region, was settled by people from Sergipe, like my father, who was one of the cocoa lords. And there were the Arabs, the Turks. There was a huge number of them. They had a great influence on the formation of the cocoa civilization.) Many of Amado's Arab characters illustrate this idea, but it is important at this juncture to address the question of stereotype, which haunts discussions of the representation of Arab immigrants in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. Amado's use of stereotype in his depiction of Arab immigrants is rather complicated in view of his valorization of them, his repeated efforts to correct their misidentification as “turcos,” and his insistence on more than one occasion that they are (or have become) “brasileiros dos melhores” (A descoberta, 15).10 In other words, in contrast to the majority of other representations of Arabs, Amado's stereotypes are very positive.Amado was not the first Brazilian writer to introduce Arab characters in his fiction. Such characters appear in the work of other writers, almost always as the unsavory figure of the turco—the deceptive pack peddler or shop owner who is often greedy and unscrupulous, who cheats his clients, and who is above all a foreigner but not the desirable kind of immigrant (i.e., the European). Resulting from the fact that many Arab immigrants traveled to Brazil with Ottoman passports and achieved great success in commerce, this largely negative stereotype has been widespread not only in literature but also in popular culture and persists even today: from the store owner Elias Turco in Monteiro Lobato's immensely popular stories for children, Sítio do picapau amarelo (1920–48) (Yellow Woodpecker Farm), which has been repeatedly adapted for television since the 1950s, to the present-day figure of Califa Babá, the fez- and caftan-wearing hawker of counterfeit merchandise on the weekly comedy show Zorra total (“Total Mess”), Globo TV's answer to Saturday Night Live. Amado took the turco figure and made it both Brazilian and rather likeable. Moreover, seen in the context of his characterization techniques in general, his Arabs are as two-dimensional as the majority of his other characters.Humor often depends on stereotyping, and as one of Brazil's greatest humorists, Amado's narrative strategies require two-dimensional characters that can easily be mapped onto preexisting stereotypes (for example, Gabriela as the sensuous mulatta who is also an excellent cook), or the reverse of those stereotypes, as he does with the turco. This reversal works in two ways: by the juxtaposition of two stereotypes, the poet and the merchant, and by the replacement of the negative attributes with positive ones. The first stereotype comes from the fetishization of the Arabic literary tradition that Amado lauds in his preface to Challita's survey of Arabic literature. Amado employs this stereotype in the characterization of Antônio Bruno and in the fetishization of Arabic as the language of eloquence par excellence: characters like Nacib, Fadul Abdala, and Raduan Murad resort to it when carried away by passion, political enthusiasm, religious devotion, anger, or storytelling fervor (Gabriela, 203, 332; Tocaia grande, 151, 169, 222; A descoberta, 27); such declamations never fail impress their uncomprehending audiences by their “sincerity” and “inspiration” (Gabriela, 332) and sometimes bring them to tears! As for the second stereotype, it is preserved in some of its most recognizable outlines—love of money, shrewdness—but is emptied of negative content; instead, positive traits such as hard work, skill, and astuteness are highlighted.Many of Amado's novels contain minor Arab characters, but the principal ones are Nacib in Gabriela, Fadul Abdala in Tocaia grande, and Jamil Bichara and Raduan Murad (along with several others) in A descoberta. I focus briefly on the most famous of those characters, Nacib, the owner of Bar Vesúvio, where much of Ilhéus's social scene is depicted in Amado's best-known novel. Nacib is at the thematic center of the novel's preoccupation with the development of the “cocoa civilization” in southern Bahia. As the only character who evolves over the course of the novel, his development registers a break with the murderous code of honor that dominated in the era of coroneis and jagunços (the strong-arm plantation owners who relied on thugs and mercenaries in their bloody conflicts over land in northeastern Brazil in the era of the cocoa boom), and as such he serves as the novel's moral compass. Indeed, Nacib is declared “o homem mais civilizado de Ilhéus” (365) (“the most civilized man in Ilhéus”) by the worldly Mundinho Falcão, the agent of progressive change in the city. What earns Nacib that distinction is that he is the first to break one of the “laws” of the lawless era of bloody conflict over land: Certas leis … regularem suas vidas. Uma delas, das mais indiscutidas … : honra de marido enganado só com a morte dos culpados podia ser lavada. Vinha dos tempos antigos, não estava escrita em nenhum código, estava apenas na consciência dos homens, deixada pelos senhores de antanho, os primeiros a derrubar matas e a plantar cacao. Assim era em Ilhéus, naqueles idos de 1925, quando floresciam as roças nas terras adubadas com cadáveres e sangue e multiplicavam-se as fortunas, quando o progresso se estabelecia e transformava-se a fisionomia da cidade. (xiii)(Certain laws … regulated their lives. One of the most indisputable [was] … : the honor of a betrayed husband can only be restored with the death of the guilty ones. Handed down from olden times, this was not a written law, but it was engraved in the minds of men, inherited from the lords of bygone times who were the first to clear the forests and to plant cocoa. This is how it was in Ilhéus back in 1925, when the fields fertilized with corpses and blood flourished and fortunes were multiplied, when progress set in and the physiognomy of the city was transformed.) The novel describes the building of an infrastructure to spur the economic development of the region (new roads, imported vehicles, construction of a harbor, establishment of social clubs, and so on) but is more concerned with the social change that accompanies that process: “Mais lentamente porém evoluíam os costumes, os hábitos dos homens” (xiii) (“The customs and habits of men evolve more slowly, however”). The novel begins with a double murder by the powerful plantation owner Jesuíno Mendonça of his wife and her lover (xi), a crime that no one expects to be punished by the law. However, the final sentence of the novel reports that “pela primera vez, na história de Ilhéus, um coronel do cacao viu-se condenado à prisão por haver assassinado esposa adúltera e seu amante” (363) (“for the first time in Ilhéus's history, a cocoa lord found himself convicted and sentenced to prison for the murder of his adulterous wife and her lover”). Between the first and the final paragraphs of the novel, a fundamental shift in values takes place: as he elaborates the theme of “civilização e progresso” (“civilization and progress”)—obviously a variation on the national motto “Ordem e Progresso” (“Order and Progress”)—the district attorney declares at the trial that “já não era Ilhéus terra de bandidos, paraíso de assassinos” (363) (“Ilhéus was no longer a land of bandits, a haven for murderers”).The abandonment of the violent code of masculine honor, which serves here as an index to the country's gradual realization of the promise inscribed on its flag, is due to many factors, one of which is Nacib's reaction when he finds Gabriela, now his wife, in bed with someone else: he does not fire the pistol in his hand; instead, he allows his rival to escape shamefully naked into the street and beats Gabriela black and blue. Having regaled his customers, at the beginning of the novel, with tall tales about spectacular revenges taken on cheating wives and their lovers “na terra de meu pai” (107) (“in my father's country”), Nacib's “restraint,” such as it is, impresses rather than dismays Ilhéans, as he had feared it might, and elicits the praise of friends and customers. The next time a violent cocoa lord finds himself betrayed by his mistress, he, too, refrains from murder, to the astonishment of the customers at the Bar Vesúvio, one of whom explains that times have changed “por causa da Biblioteca da Associação Comercial, dos bailes do Progresso, da linha de marinetes, dos trabalhos da barra…. Por causa do filho quase doutor, da morte de Ramiro Bastos e por causa de Mundinho Falcão…. Por causa de Malvina, por causa de Nacib” (340) (“because of the Library of the Commercial Association, the parties at the Progress Club, the bus line, the work on the sandbar [blocking the harbor]…. Because of his son about to become a doctor, the death of [cocoa lord] Ramiro Bastos, and because of Mundinho Falcão…. Because of Malvina, because of Nacib”).In this way, Nacib is placed at the center of the Ilhéus's history as one of the agents of its “progress,” a key word in the novel. Part of the humor of the novel results from the contrast between Nacib's and Gabriela's perceptions of marriage, and part of it arises from Nacib's earlier boastful fabrication of stories about Lebanese machismo and his confession that “nunca soube matar[,] … [n]em galinha” (315) (“I've never been able to kill anything, not even a chicken”), and even from the fact that later, he hires Gabriela back as his cook (and lover)—something that elicits another observation from Mundinho Falcão: “Esse turco é um mestre do bom viver” (353) (“This Turk is a master of the good life”). Vincent perceptively argues that this statement “indicates a shared value system” between the two.11 This coincidence of values in turn indicates that Nacib is no alien in spite of being a turco, a label that evokes the stereotype only to redefine it and that is being used here with that mixture of affection and admiration reserved for a “mestre” whom one wishes to emulate. The label comes to designate a surplus of desirable qualities that contribute to “civilization and progress.”Amado's redefinition of the stereotype must be seen here not so much as a failure to undo it than as a strategy that conforms to the overall narrative techniques of a “master caricaturist.”12 Moreover, he emphasizes for the first time the cultural contributions of immigrants previously known only for their commercial activities, and in so doing he underscores Brazil's connections to the Arab world. Uncovering such South-South connections can add a rich dimension to current conceptions of world literature.
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