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Jorge Amado:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.49.3.0382

1528-4212

Eduardo de Assis Duarte,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

In 1946, Jorge Amado was elected federal representative for the Brazilian National Assembly as a candidate of the Brazilian Communist Party. This assembly was in charge of bringing democracy back to Brazil after the end of Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship. Amado's electoral victory, at the age of thirty-four, proved his position as a novelist of great popular prestige. However, two years later, he was impeached, and he chose to exile himself and his wife to the French capital, where the leftist press received him as a hero. Once there, he unknowingly followed the same steps as those taken by Nísia Floresta: he lived in the Latin Quarter and established relationships with other exiled Brazilians and Latin Americans as well as with European intellectuals and artists, such as Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso, and many others.1Upon his arrival, Amado was not entirely unknown to the French public. Before World War II, Jubiabá had appeared in France as Bahia de tous les saints (1938), and it had several illustrious readers. In his Journal, André Gide severely criticizes the text written by the then twenty-three-year-old Amado, stating that “I have not been able to become interested in this linear narrative, it is without breadth, simply discursive, although it may admit the presence of certain qualities, albeit vulgar ones.”2 Albert Camus, however, is more attentive to the fact that this “vulgarity” was a strategic part of Amado's project of “writ[ing] for the masses.” He sees the “moving use of melodramatic themes as a surrender to life and its immensurable excesses.” He adds that in the novel on n'y discute pas sur l'amour. On s'y suffit d'aimer et avec toute la chair. On n'y rencontre pas le mot de fraternité, mais des mains de nègres et des mains deblancs (pas beaucoup) qui se serrent. Et le livre tout entier est écrit comme une suite de cris ou de mélopées, d'avances et de retours. Rien n'y est indifférent. Tout y est émouvant.3(there are no arguments about love. It suffices to love and to love with all of one's strength. [In this book] the word fraternity cannot be found, but one finds the hands of blacks and (of a few) whites holding each other. And the entire book is written as a sequence of screams or melodies, advances and returns. Nothing is indifferent. Everything is moving.) Camus was correct in detecting the fundamentals of the roman feuilleton as the basis for Amado's project. In fact, the melodramatic procedures and strategies Amado uses constitute the dorsal spine of a novel whose target readership is the popular masses. Moreover, these same procedures and strategies are largely responsible for the work's excellent reception in almost the entire world. It is a work of fiction that largely dismisses the paradigm of the modern novel, marked by introspection and wordplay. Instead, Amado revives the old romantic plot and invokes action, playfulness, and sentiment.French editors soon assimilated Amado's tirelessly repeated trademark phrase “I am only a storyteller.” After the war, francophone readers were given access to the adventures of colonels and peasants in Terras do sem fim (The Violent Land), Terre violente in the French translation, which was published as a book in 1946 but also as feuilleton, in the Femmes françaises magazine, the following year. The novel, written under the Estado Novo censorship, avoids politico-ideological proselytism, and as a result of its good critical reception and reviews by Maurice Nadeau and Guy Leclerc, among others, constitutes one of the highest points in the author's career.During his political exile from 1948 to 1949, however, the author Jorge Amado also became the militant Jorge Amado. The newspaper L'humanité, an official organ of the French Communist Party, published interviews and articles in defense of the Communist regime and denounced the repression suffered by militants (not only in Brazil) within the context of McCarthyism in the United States and the Cold War between Western countries and the Soviet Union. The weekly Les lettres françaises, which Aragon edited, focused on culture and published a translation of Seara vermelha (1946) as Les chemins de la faim (1949) (The Paths of Hunger) in 1949–1950. The serialized edition occupied all of the journal's inside cover for twenty-eight successive issues, always accompanied by woodcuts created by Carlos Scliar, a Brazilian artist linked to the Communist Party who was also exiled in Paris.Amado, a writer trained as a journalist, availed himself of the literary industry in order to further his party's political agenda. Although set in the Brazilian backlands, Les chemins de la faim, suggests homologies and makes allusions to post–World War II Europe, where landless individuals wander through “the paths of hunger” and deprivation in an attempt to reconstruct, not always successfully, their lives and families. Exiled within their own countries, Amado's migrants embody the drama of uprootedness—a recurring theme in several forms of literature during the twentieth century and peculiar to the modernist era—and as such gain a universal dimension.Seara vermelha features the narrative paradigm that had been consecrated since Jubiabá. In this text, the multiplicity of characters and actions, of times and spaces, converges into a consecutive and progressive narrative in which the didactic novel frames the historical novel. The plot links one family's fate to the fate of the nation in an attempt to demonstrate the path toward socialism. The oppression the landowners exert over the peasants begins when Jerônimo and his fellow workers are obligated to leave the farm where they worked in northeastern Brazil and are forced to seek employment in São Paulo, thousands of miles away. During their travels, the narrator expands his camera lens, providing a panoramic view of the country where events of past peasant revolts—the messianic Canudos movement and the cangaço—return to the narrative's present and prepare the way for Amado to fictionalize, and at the same time, criticize the failure of Brazil's 1935 Communist uprising.Seara vermelha was written as if to be serialized. It is divided into two large, manicheistically opposed sections, and each of these sections is then separated into three parts. In the first block— “‘Os caminhos da fome’: O sertão, o grande rio e a cidade” (“‘The Paths of Hunger’: the Backlands, the Great River, and the City)—the characters wander the country unsuccessfully in search of land and work. In the second block—“As estradas da esperança” (“The Roads of Hope”)—each one of the main couple's three children serves as a protagonist in one of three attempts at social revolt: messianism, social banditry, and communism. After their loss, the “positive hero,” the communist militant, reflects on the errors of the past so that he may return to the backlands to reinstill social activism among the peasantry. Amado also appropriates ideological elements consecrated within the Christian imaginary, making use of biblical metaphors to relay a message to the novel's readers: the fruit of revolution will issue in the backlands of inequality.The novel's text, clearly social realist, diverges little from the insurrectional rhetoric present in the congressman's speeches and the militant's proclamations and articles. Even before the landless peasants' drama entered French lives on a weekly basis, it already provided a discourse for the exiled. In February 1948, only a few weeks after his arrival, Amado gave an explosive interview to Pierre Daix, published in Les lettres françaises, in which he declared: Chez nous, la pression de l'impérialisme americain est incomparablement plus forte qu'ici est. Elle devient chaque jour de plus en plus cynique, de plus en plus ouverte. Non seulement le gouvernement du dictateur Dutra n'a plus d'indépendance véritable, mais il n'y a même plus une apparence d'indépendance.4(The pressure from American imperialism is stronger for us [in Brazil] than it is here. Each day it becomes more cynical, more overt. Not only have we lost our independence with Dutra's dictatorship, but we have also lost any semblance of independence.) The inflamed and polemic tone is characteristic of his “proletarian novels,” as well as certain interventions from the Brazilian press in the 1930s. The quote also clearly demonstrates the posture the exiled Amado assumed after the war. He did not accept the role of indifferent refugee who distances himself from what occurs in his host country, nor did he avoid publicly commenting on France's and Europe's political situation. In response to a question about Brazil, the writer uses his criticism of North American foreign policy in order to insinuate that in France there was also “imperialist pressure.” As an intellectual organically connected to the Communist Party apparatus, Amado continues to act as a militant who, even in exile, does not stop taking a stand and who is political at all times.In his “Message d'espérance” (1948) (“Message of Hope”)—written from Natal, Brazil, and addressed to Luis Carlos Prestes and printed on the cover of Les lettres françaises—Amado appeals once again to religious discourse and appropriates it dialectically.5 He writes of the rich who waste and the poor who suffer from hunger and deprivation. Seemingly a critique of Brazilian politics and economy, the text fits perfectly within the postwar French context because of the country's well-known problems with employment and supply of goods and resources. In the midst of calls for solidarity among the oppressed, Amado often alludes to socialism and connects it to the Christmas spirit: “Un jour, tous les jours seront comme celui de Noël” (“One day, every day will be like Christmas”).Along with Zélia Gattai and other exiles, Amado fulfilled his obligations to the party: he wrote, he traveled, he lectured, and he attended workers' assemblies and meetings that the party organized. In less than two years, he also visited other countries, including Eastern European ones, always as part of activities related to the international communist movement or explicitly linked to Soviet foreign politics. He became friends with Lukács and other leftist writers, such as the German Anna Seghers and the Russians [Aleksander] Fadeyev and [Ilya] Ehrenburg, among others. At this point, the Soviet strategy was to maintain the borders of what would later become known as the “Iron Curtain,” which included East Germany. The world peace movement surged within this context as a way of mobilizing public opinion against new armed conflict, above all in the West, and in this way, guaranteeing the territory the Red Army took from the Nazis.Amado joined the World Peace Council and collaborated in the organization of its first World Congress, which took place in Paris in 1949. During the event, the city walls were covered with Picasso's Palomas de la paz, and later the palomas would give their name to both Picasso's and Amado's daughters. The two friends did everything they could to bring Pablo Neruda to the congress. Neruda was a fugitive from the Chilean government and did not have a visa to enter France.Amado occupied a small apartment in the Hotel Saint-Michel that became a meeting point for exiles and activists. Since this was during the Cold War, such activities awakened suspicions. However, as Zélia Gattai wrote in her memoirs, it would be years before the group would discover that the Amados' washerwoman was a secret agent for the political police.6Also, according to Gattai, soon after returning from vacation in Eastern Europe, the couple was summoned to the police station, where they were informed that they had fifteen days to leave France.7 The country of liberty and fraternity did not listen to the appeals other artists and intellectuals made in their favor over the following two weeks. Under suspicion of being Soviet agents, Amado, his wife, Neruda, and other Brazilians were to be expelled from France. Those fifteen days turned into fifteen years during which the couple was unable to renew their residency permit. The couple was prohibited from returning to France even after Amado refuted Stalinism and left the Communist Party in the mid-1950s. Only in 1965, thanks to the intervention of Guilherme Figueiredo, the Brazilian cultural attaché in Paris, and André Malraux, minister of culture, would the couple regain the right to return to Paris, the city of their libertarian loves and dreams. It was upon this return that opportunities arose for the academic recognition of Amado's work and for its success among French readers.O presente é tão grande, não nos afastemos.Não nos afastemos muito, vamos de mãos dadas.(The present is so grand; we must not stray.We must not stray too much; let's go with hands held.)—Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Mãos Dadas” Amado's situation exemplifies a special case of exile. To begin with, Amado was forced to leave Brazil not because of the content of his writing but because of his politics. Just like Neruda in Chile, Amado was not exiled for being “the people's novelist”; instead, he was exiled for being a member of a proscribed political party. In spite of “Dutra, the dictator,” the rule of law was installed in Brazil after World War II, and as such, Amado's books, even the propagandist biography of Luiz Carlos Prestes, were no longer confiscated by the police nor burned publicly.Nevertheless, when he arrived in Paris, he arrived as a representative of the international communist movement, literally as a travel companion to many other victims of Cold War intolerance. We must not forget that he was a federal representative who would receive the International Stalin Prize less than three years after being exiled, a prize comparable to a Nobel Prize within the communist world of that time. It was in this condition that Amado lived during the months in which he stayed at the Hotel Saint-Michel. As a member of the “red wave,” which was spreading throughout the world and would soon reach China, Amado did not suffer the isolation characteristic of those expatriated, at least according to Edward Said. Instead, Amado surrounded himself with old and new friends and comrades, claimed his space within the newspapers, became involved with politics and with the police. In the narrative he later published about his travels within the Soviet block, Amado broached the new meaning of fatherland as defined by utopic discourse: Há quase vinte anos, pela primeira vez voltei meus olhos para o novo mundo que se constrói ao leste, e desde então não deixei de fitá-lo com esperança e com amor. Eu era naquela época um jovem de 18 anos que iniciava sua vida de escritor. O inconformismo que marcava a geração surgida com a revolução de 30 fazia-me buscar o farol pelo qual me orientar.8(Almost twenty years ago, I saw the new world being constructed in the East for the first time, and since then, I have not been able to gaze at it without hope and love. At that time, I was a young eighteen-year-old who was just beginning his life as a writer. The revolutionary spirit of the generation that surged with the revolution of 1930 led me to search for my guiding light.) Optimism and a somewhat naïve good faith keep the text moving along; furthermore, it becomes explicit how the ideological light relativizes and enlarges the borders of socialism's imagined community for the author. The image of the lighthouse dialogues with the suffocating darkness of the “sad fascist night”—and here we return to Drummond de Andrade—and displays what ideological discourse generates in terms of belief and fervor. Through this discourse, which is transformed into the motor that keeps “faith” and “love” running longer, and through political action, the landless worker finds his companions and escapes his solitude.Within this context, a question arises: what is the impact of militancy and exile on the circulation of Amado's work?Amado's presence among leftist militants led to persecution on both sides of the Atlantic.9 This persecution, however, did not prevent the counterpart to this presence, which took a calculated risk, from asserting itself in the reception of his work. This reception was a product of his adherence to Communism and the fact that he wrote a proletarian novel. The police apprehended Cacau (1933) (Cocoa) as soon as it was published. However, once it was released, two thousand copies were sold in forty days. This was a significant feat for that time, especially for an author new to the literary world. To be sure, Amado was not new to the press. He had been working as a writer for several newspapers in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro for a decade, and in 1935, he became a writer for the newspaper A manhã, an institution of the Aliança nacional libertadora (National Freedom Alliance), which placed Amado right in the middle of the political happenings of that year.Amado's political engagement and the consequent repression he suffered because of it—whether in the form of the apprehension and burning of his works or the burdens he bore as reporter for the Communist Party—served as amplifiers and sounding boards that helped his narratives to quickly gain notoriety. This was in addition to the undeniable merit of the texts themselves, which were written for a wider audience. Soon, Amado's name would cross national borders. In 1935, Cacau and Suor (1934) (Sweat) were published in Moscow and became, I believe, the first Brazilian novels to be translated into Russian. After that, Amado's first novels were also translated into Spanish and reached Brazil's neighboring countries. The leftist Editora Claridad in Buenos Aires published Cacau and Mar morto (Sea of Death), Imán, also in Buenos Aires, published Jubiabá, and Ercília in Santiago published Suor.In 1937, Amado and his first wife traveled extensively throughout Latin America. This allowed him to escape the repressive climate preceding the installation of the Estado Novo. At the same time, Amado's presence within Spanish-American countries gave him good exposure as an author because it added political persecution to the reception of stories about landworkers in southern Bahia and lumpen in urban Salvador. Amado's political engagement elevated the writer onto an international plane. On the one hand, utopian novels served the objectives of the Communist movement. On the other hand, Amado's condition as travel companion to an international revolution exposed his texts to a greater number of readers. At the time, the author declared, O mundo já começa a se interessar pela literatura brasileira. Livros novos são traduzidos e agradam. Há poucos dias um escritor norte-americano, Samuel Putman, escrevia numa revista dos Estados Unidos um artigo onde de repente dizia uma coisa mais ou menos assim: “por mais incrível que pareça os melhores romances de massa que se fazem hoje no mundo são os brasileiros.” E citava a Érico Veríssimo e a mim.10(The world has become interested in Brazilian literature. New books have been published and have pleased their readers. A few days ago, a North American author, Samuel Putnam, wrote an article for a magazine in the United States in which he said something like this, “As unlikely as it may seem, the best popular novels written today are Brazilian ones.” And he cited Érico Veríssimo and me.) Putnam's statement accentuates what the idea of nation gains in terms of literary homeland at this time. As is known, Amado's work is part of a socially engaged, neorealist current that flourished in the Western world after the Revolution of 1917 and that gained momentum with the ideological radicalization of the 1930s. As such, international leftist camaraderie was added to the aesthetic identity of the social realist novel. A literary and political network thus surrounded the young Amado, who, at the age of twenty-four, saw his stories reach other countries. However, the “boy with peach fuzz,” as Oswald de Andrade called Amado, did not permit his newfound popularity go to his head. In 1936, the year after he visited Buenos Aires, Amado published, along with translations of his novels, an explosive article in the Argentine journal Pan. In this article he declared the end of the modernist movement in Brazil and classified himself as a member of the “postmodern” movement, denouncing artistic absenteeism and categorizing the novel as a “political being” and a “weapon for fighting”: Nos encontramos num momento angustioso. E transformamos a revolução puramente literária dos modernistas num movimento de literatura social…. Nós nascemos da guerra e da revolução russa. Somos uma geração de romancistas.11(We find ourselves in a distressing moment. And we have transformed the modernist's purely literary movement into a social literary movement…. We were born from the war and from the Russian Revolution. We are a generation of novelists.) As such, in addition to an identification with form and thought, we must add another link to the chain of affection around Amado: a generational one, one that allowed the individual to find its counterparts in other lands, leading the authorial I to find comfort in the collective and solidaristic we. Enveloped by utopia, the literary homeland blurs the lines between geography and history. The boy born in the cacao plantations in southern Bahia becomes an integral part of a generation present in many countries and conforms his identity as a writer to the successful events occurring on the other side of the planet.The countries Amado visited in the Americas included Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico, with a quick trip through the United States and Cuba on his return. In his chronicles about this voyage, later published in Dom Casmurro and Diretrizes, and recently compiled into a book, Amado mentions his visits to publishing houses, interviews to the press, and contacts made with other writers and artists. He also describes the vigorous editorial initiative in Argentina and Chile, countries that, at the time, were publishing centers supplying the entire Latin American readership. Mexico's position was fragile because it greatly depended on the Spanish editions of works, whose publications were interrupted by civil war at that time. He ends by stating that “the Mexican writer prefers to publish his books in Argentina and Chile instead of in Mexico. Mexico continues to be a market for foreign publishers and not a supplier to foreign markets.”12 The young author's comments thus exposed the conduct of a man determined to learn the profession's artifices in order to make them profitable for himself.Around this same time, Roger Bastide defended the notion that Amado, while penetrating the roots of injustice ruling workers' relations in his texts, transformed the Brazilian northeast into a “universal category.” Even if we consider this interpretation of Amado to be correct, we must point out that the internationalization of his work does not make it cosmopolitan. It is true that Capitães da areia (1937) (Captains of the Sands) was composed almost entirely during his trip through the Americas, but this does not interfere with the regionalism portrayed nor does it impede Amado's work from becoming more Brazilian, more regional. Mar morto and ABC de Castro Alves, to continue with works published in the late 1930s, early 1940s, make the city of Bahia the urban counterpart to the works set in the “violent lands” of the plantations, where wealth sprouts from the ground irrigated with the sweat of workers and the blood of those who refuse to accept the mandate of the colonels.The police state of the Estado Novo led the author to cross the southern Brazilian border once again in 1941, who this time took refuge in Buenos Aires. According to Rosane Carneiro and Maried Rubin, the author maintained his presence in the press by writing for Sud and La critica.13 Additionally, he promoted the adaptation of Mar morto for the radio, which aired on Buenos Aires's El mundo station. It was there that Amado wrote A vida de Luiz Carlos Prestes (The Life of Luiz Carlos Prestes), a propagandist biography destined to publicize the campaign for the communist leader's amnesty that was also published by Claridad. Later, the book was apprehended and burned by the Argentine police at Juan Domingo Perón's command. Once again, repression created an aura of heroism around the book, whose pages, sometimes typed and sometimes photographed one by one, were smuggled by militants throughout Brazil and other countries. These events remind us of how Gregório de Matos's satires were publicized and even how Tomás Antônio Gonzaga's Cartas chilenas (Letters from Chile) were disseminated and carried with them a literature written in the heat of political struggle. At the same time, it points to how the actions of organic intellectuals contributed to the expansion of frontiers throughout the twentieth century.In 1951, Amado published one last work of utopian literature, O mundo da paz (The Peaceful World), a piece of propaganda written for the countries within the Soviet block, which the author later renounced and forbade further editions of. The text solidified Amado's authorial reputation as a member of Moscow's post–World War II political movement. He was more of a member on an intellectual front than a political one, a fact that made him a “party writer” and expanded the international market of his work even more. In the optimistic chronicle of a trip that started in the winter of 1948, the “popular democracies” are here inscribed as a peaceful world seen through Amado's rose-colored glasses and come together as the crowning moment of two decades of literary populism, indicating to Amado the path to the official recognition of the Soviet establishment: No avião pensara na URSS, na sua importância para todos nós, milhões e milhões espalhados pelo mundo, militantes do progresso e da felicidade do homem sobre a terra. Pensara em quanto são vastos seus limites, não apenas os geográficos, que vão das regiões polares ao centro da Europa, das montanhas do Cáucaso ao mais profundo da Ásia, mas aqueles que passam pelo coração de cada homem, em qualquer país do mundo, por mais distante que ele se encontre das muralhas do Kremlin.14(On the plane, I thought of the Soviet Union, of its importance to us, the millions of us spread throughout the world, militants for progress and for the happiness of men on earth. I thought of how vast our limits are, not only the geographic ones, which extend from the polar regions to the center of Europe, from the Caucasus Mountains to the deepest parts of Asia, but also those that pass through the hearts of each man, in any country of the world, no matter how distant he may find himself from the wall of the Kremlin.) In discussing the condition of those exiled, Edward Said has evoked the phenomenon of dislocated subjects who, moved by their desire for integration, set aside their own individual autonomy, repressing discord and criticism. Said's claim that “exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being” enlarges the messianic aura surrounding revolutionary militance and turns communism into a rigidly hierarchical political religion.15 Throughout his chronicle, sectarian enthusiasm blinds Amado to the existing problems within a proletarian dictatorship. The new world in the East will only later reveal the painful and cruel face of true socialism to him.After his expulsion from Paris, Amado, along with his wife and son, were received at the “writer's castle” in Dobris, former Czechoslovakia. It belonged to pre–World War II aristocrats and at that moment housed social realism's “engineers of the human soul.” There, the author lived with several intellectual comrades, mostly from Eastern Europe. It is there that his daughter, Paloma, was born and the trilogy Os subterrâneos da liberdade (The Undergrounds of Freedom) published. In this trilogy, neither geographic nor temporal distance impedes Amado's fictionalized memory from penetrating the dark undergrounds of the Vargas period. The text proposes a narrative “from within” the repression Brazilian militants suffered but does not forget Olga Benário or the foreigners who sacrificed themselves there in name of an imagined utopia.Later, Dobris witnesses the author's critical spirit slowly return to the roots of the regime, since the talk among some of the visitors began to revolve around the gulags and the repression those diverging from Stalinism faced. Among the political uprisings on either side of the Atlantic, the power of the “guide of the people” was deteriorating, the police state against leftist Brazilians was alleviated, and conditions were created for the author's return. In 1952, the Amados left the refuge of their Czech “winter garden” and returned to Brazil.16 Following the end of his exile, Amado continued to struggle with doubt for three years, until, after a few voyages, and after Stalin's crimes were revealed, he left the party for good.The return home represented Amado's later disembarkment from the revolutionary convoy. The end of the decade that saw Communism arrive on the continent also saw the author coming to understand the people differently, through a new perspective that would be unveiled with the publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) in 1958. It is at this moment that Amado affirmed he was thinking “with his own head,” but he did not become a dissident or anti-Communist, as did some of his famous comrades. He abdicated his role as organic intellectual in order to, as he has often declared, dedicate himself “only” to literature. His entry into the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961 marked his definitive farewell to militancy. At this point, his international prestige had been consolidated with approximately three hundred international publications—a feat never before seen until that moment and that made Amado Brazil's most well-known and translated novelist, at least until the end of the twentieth century, when Paulo Coelho appeared on the literary scene. But that is another voyage.