Backlands (3 page)

In other words, da Cunha is living proof of Walt Whitman’s legendary statement in
Leaves of Grass
: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” As such, he exemplifies the modern thinker who wanders and wonders at the same time.
Os sertões
, because of how the publishing industry in Brazil worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, didn’t have an in-house editor. What the reader sees on the page—chaotic, rowdy, moving in different directions, at times giving the impression of erupting like a stream of consciousness—is unadulterated, as the author placed it, and, in subsequent editions, somewhat reshaped it. Indeed, this is a book about Brazil’s emergence as a contemporary country. It expresses the author’s postcolonialist angst about the relationship of the former colony, Brazil, with the “civilized” world and, in turn, that of the new republic with the “barbaric” peoples that populate the remote backlands. Da Cunha pointedly denounces the Canudos campaign as a crime. He breaks the sharers of responsibility into four: the Catholic Church, the Brazilian republican government, the government of the state of Bahia, and the Brazilian Army.

Da Cunha tried to combine foreign and autochthonous elements in his work. He celebrated European culture. He was equally fascinated with the flora and fauna of Brazil, its folklore, its religious practices, etc. On one occasion he referred to himself as a Tapuia—a member of the Tapuia Indian nation—with Greek and Celtic elements. Yet
Os sertões
is undoubtedly a racist, xenophobic book, in which da Cunha describes the
sertanejos
, the dwellers of the backlands, in derogatory terms. In the second chapter of the book, “Man,” he depicts them thus: “The backlander is above all a strong person. He does not have the rickets-riddled feebleness of the chronically fatigued mestizos of the coast. At first glance he appears to be just the contrary. He does not have the good looks, the bearing, and the perfect build of an athlete. Instead he is unsightly, awkward, and hunched.” Da Cunha continues:

Such rhetorical tools, to contemporary readers, are decidedly passé. They belong to a period in history in which, regardless of how sympathetic an author was to the underclass, the language he used was nothing short of dehumanizing. However, they not only need to be seen in the context of the time but their approach must be understood in relation to the way da Cunha’s understanding of the
jagunços
changes. They might be unwieldy, graceless, and outright delinquent, but they are an essential component of the Brazilian nation.

Human affairs, in da Cunha’s view, are all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Reframing the debates on the intimate relationship between Brazil’s physical landscape, its people, and culture,
Os sertões
is a handsome example of da Cunha’s encyclopedic knowledge. He makes numerous references to travel literature and the work of geologists, botanists, ethnologists, and social scientists in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. His training as a military engineer and his personal ties with the scientific establishment provide him with the intellectual framework he needs. Still, he argues that a social melting pot is the foundation of a nation’s strength and creativity. And he reasons that good stewardship of the land is essential to human survival.

The title
Os sertões
, plural of the term
o sertão
, refers to the drought-plagued scrublands of the Northeast, particularly the interior of the state of Bahia. The backlands are much more than the stage on which the epic drama of Canudos plays itself out. The land is a character in the book, and it is passionately portrayed as savage and abundant, treacherous and protective, deadly and life giving. In Brazil, da Cunha’s book is the precursor to a whole genre of writing on the
sertão
with a broad influence, from the regionalist literature by the modernists to the work of Gilberto Freyre and the intellectual Darcy Ribeiro to the masterful post-modernist novel
Grande sertão: Veredas
(1956), by João Guimarães Rosa, known in English (in J. L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís’s translation) as
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
, through which da Cunha’s ghost invisibly roams.

Da Cunha’s baroque style, as contradictory as the author himself, mimics the rough topography of the backlands, as well as its palette. His imagery is colored with the earth tones of the desert, the blood reds of its sunsets, the blacks of the mudholes, and the grays of its rock formations. His terminology comes from a wide spectrum of fields, including geology, geography, botany, biology, ethnology, anthropology, meteorology, and climatology. He might be said to have been an ecologist and environmentalist before his time, and one who gave a symphonic voice to the land. In fact, the figure of Conselheiro is described in a geological metaphor: He is an “anticline” that has been “cast up” by “deep-lying layers of ethnic stratification.”

All of which makes da Cunha’s writing sensuous. Alfredo Bosi, in his introduction to a didactic edition of the book that appeared in 1973, remarks how the narrative diction is structured according to the classical precepts of rhetoric: intensification and antinomy. Da Cunha abuses superlatives and antitheses. Alongside passages of intense poetic quality sit rugged, unsentimental segments by a war correspondent whose mission is to impress his reader with the immediacy of the conflict, which he perceives to be an unprecedented travesty. Like the works of Machado de Assis, with whom da Cunha has been compared,
Os sertões
often addresses the reader in the first person, offering asides, personal opinion, and sarcastic commentary on the events and personalities.

Not surprisingly, the book has, at times, been described as a novel. This is an offense to a war correspondent whose passion for truth was undeterred. But it might also be understood as a celebration of fiction—especially in Latin America—in its capacity to change reality.
Os sertões
has itself inspired a number of novels, among them, my favorite,
La guerra del fin del mundo
(
The War of the End of the World
, 1981), by Mario Vargas Llosa, thanks to which a new generation of readers rediscovered da Cunha’s masterwork at the end of the twentieth century;
A casca da serpente
(
The Serpent’s Skin
, 1989), by José J. Veiga;
As meninas do Belo Monte
(
The Meninas of Belo Monte
, 1992), by Júlio José Chiavenato; and
Canudos
(1997), by Ayrton Marcondes.

Plus, there is a cinematic quality to the entire thing. Like a moving camera’s eye, the narrative point of view shifts from wide-angle panoramic shots of the landscape to intense, almost unbearable close-ups of the human suffering wrought by the war. The structure of the book exhibits features of good screen writing, from the setup to the breakpoint and then the slow, agonizing denouement. In fact, the pace and length of the book, with its retelling of the same story from different perspectives and time frames, with its replay of key events and the agonizingly lengthy description of the last days of the campaign, forces the reader to suffer through the battle along with the protagonists. A rather mediocre 1997 movie version, produced by Mariza Leão, was one of the biggest productions in the history of Brazilian film.

But while
Os sertões
can be read as a novel, and many readers describe its gripping effect on them, it is surely not a novel. The portrait da Cunha offers us of Conselheiro is, arguably, the most daring aspect of
Os sertões.
The leader’s brilliance and criminality are juxtaposed. He and his habitat are seen as one. Da Cunha portrayed him as a bandit as well as a martyr, a giant and a dwarf. In psychiatric terms, Conselheiro is seen as having “tara hereditária” (hereditary retardation) and “degenerescência” (degenerative disorder). Obviously, da Cunha can’t make up his mind whether to love the
jagunço
leader or to hate him—and neither can the reader. We view Conselheiro as a retrograde monarchic conspirator attempting to reinstate a feudal system of government that stopped, once and for all, the progress achieved after independence. But we also feel attracted to him as a multifaceted character, one no novelist would have been able to create of his own accord.

Samuel Putnam’s translation of
Os sertões, Rebellion in the Backlands,
was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944. Putnam was a left-leaning intellectual (he wrote a column for the
Daily Worker
) who died in 1950, at the age of fifty-eight. He also rendered into English Cervantes’s
Exemplary Novels
and
Don Quixote de La Mancha
, and he injected a love for the Cervantean paradox in da Cunha’s narrative. But Putnam’s version, in spite of its colloquialisms, feels somewhat archaic. The task of re-translating the Portuguese original is burdensome. The translator needs to make it relevant to a contemporary audience while preserving its barbarous artistry and tropical exuberance. Joaquim Nabuco, the Brazilian abolitionist thinker, offered what is considered to be one of the greatest tributes to da Cunha, in saying that he wrote “com cipó
,
” or with a liana stalk. Da Cunha himself described his writing as the issue of the “crude pen of the
caboclo
,” the Brazilian Indian.

The strategic approaches of Putnam and Elizabeth Lowe, responsible for this rendition, are philosophically different. Herein a sample from the chapter called “Last Days,” in which da Cunha comes to a dead stop in his quest to describe the atrocities. Putnam:

Lowe:

Putnam is more formal in his delivery. He has a tendency to slightly alter, maybe even embellish, da Cunha’s style, as he didn’t quite trust the Brazilian author’s command of the action. Lowe is more direct, less artificial. Her lexicon is decidedly modern. She doesn’t want to use language to alienate the reader from the narrative. On the contrary, her objective is to make us feel, as if the Canudos campaign was unfolding before our eyes. She seeks to capture the multifaceted contradictions in da Cunha’s style, while Putnam tries to turn him into a polished man of letters.

At the end of his life, da Cunha had misgivings about
Os sertões
, referring to it as “this barbarous book of my youth, this monstrous poem of brutality and force.” Yet the narrative had consolidated his reputation as a public figure. His opinions were sought on a number of different matters. Still in his early forties, he was looked to as a model intellectual. Da Cunha accepted an invitation to travel to the Amazon, to the region of Alto Purus, to prepare a report for the Ministry of the Exterior. It came out in 1906 under the title of
The Amazon: Land without History
. It was followed by two more books. The first was
Contrastes e confrontos
, a collection of essays on an assortment of topics, such as Germany under the kaiser, the devastation of the Amazon forest by rubber planters, the ideas of the American Revolution, and the future of civilization. The second book was
Peru versus Bolivia
, about the territorial limits between these two nations, done at the request of the Bolivian plenipotentiary Eliodoro Villazón.

In contrast with his success at the literary level, da Cunha’s personal life was a mess. And it was that mess that colored his end, tainting it with melodrama of the type that Brazilian telenovelas traffic in and which, unfortunately, has followed his reputation to this day. He himself referred to his life as a “romance mal arranjado,” a badly structured novel. The tragic incidents are an outgrowth of his marriage. In 1890 da Cunha wedded Ana Sólon Ribeiro, the daughter of General Frederico Sólon Ribeiro, one of the founders of the Brazilian Republic, who in 1889 was assigned the task of issuing the monarch Pedro II his exile orders. The fact that he was an army man and his wife came from a distinguished army family is essential, because it was the concept of military honor that drove the different players into action.