Euclides da Cunha and the epistemological turn of the Brazilian sertão

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Euclides da Cunha and the epistemological turn of the Brazilian sertão Sebastião Edson Macedo - University of California, Berkeley

In the introduction to her critical edition of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, Walnice Nogueira Galvão refers to the well known success of Brazilian journalists and politicians in profiling the inhabitants of Canudos as criminals in order to justify the use of whatever means necessary to stop them. Galvão aims to point out the key role played by da Cunha’s book in changing the public opinion about the legitimacy of the Canudos War, which took place in the Brazilian backlands between 1896 and 1897. According to many scholars, da Cunha’s work was decisive in questioning the image of the sertanejo — the backlanders — as dangerous people given that the book’s ambivalent rhetoric managed to incorporate categories imported by Brazilian intellectual elites from Europe, such as barbaric and civilized, good and evil, strong and weak, and displace biased perspectives on the conflict. With this context in mind, Galvão moves on to an intriguing statement: “Repentant, the opinion of the country was shaken by having incurred a mistake, throwing open its bloody rage against a handful of poor people who did not threaten anyone” (9).1 What intrigues me is not Galvão’s use of the word “handful” to refer to the mass murder of 25,000 sertanejos perpetrated by the Republican forces. Not even the conclusion in which, apparently, the sertanejo could not pose a real threat to the dream of a modern nation because they were basically poor people. What I find intriguing here is the notion of poverty itself. Where is it coming from? How was it established? When, and through which kinds of processes?

1

“Arrependida, a opinião do país estava abalada por ter incorrido num equívoco, escancarando sua sanha sanguinária contra um punhado de pobres que não ameaçava ninguém.”

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In da Cunha’s own words, although the backlander was considered, above all, a strong type— “O sertanejo é antes de tudo um forte” — he was essentially um retrógrado. He was trapped in a backward mentality framed by a primitive technology and attached to a colonial economic system. Directly drawing from da Cunha’s perspective of the backlanders’ worldview, Galvão’s conclusion that the sertanejos of Canudos were nothing more than poor people suggests that poverty has persisted as an unquestioned category in the vast majority of discourses about the Brazilian sertão produced since the late 19th century. In other words, this image of the sertanejo within a space of poverty has not been carefully challenged in the last hundred years of either primary works on the sertão — like da Cunha’s book — or in critical approaches to those works — like Galvão’s 2009 introduction. It seems as though poverty were a self-evident aspect, inherent to the lifestyle of the sertão, an ontological category and, therefore, not a circumstance historically dated or, in particular, politically constructed. In 2014, João Camillo Penna wrote the essay “A Imitação da Guerra,” about the fictionalization of historical fratricidal wars pervading Brazilian literature. Penna concentrates on three major works: Paulo Lins’ Cidade de Deus (1997), João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) and, again, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.2 In each of these narratives, the war takes place in the sertão or the favelas — the slums —, spaces that Penna addresses as heterotopias, referring to Michel Foucault’s concept to describe places of social invisibility and political exception. According to Penna, the link between the sertão and the favelas is no other than poverty: “The heterotopical matrix of the slum, the city within the city, is a transformation of ‘the

2

Translated as “City of God”, “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands” and “The Backlands,” respectively.

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sinister city of error’ (da Cunha, p. 291), like a mirror of poverty, of non-citizenship in the city, as a reversed image, or distorted version of the city seen and experienced by the good Brazilians.”3 Penna’s phrasing recalls a mise-en-abyme, a mirror before another mirror, since both the sertão and the favela mutually reflect one another. They reenact their own disadvantages, lack of civil rights, invisibility or, better put, a negative visibility within a larger landscape, an undesirable face of the city or the nation. Penna was not the first scholar to unpack this mirror image of poverty as represented in Brazilian literature, but his essay clearly articulates these connections and informs the geopolitical structure between hegemonic and non-hegemonic spaces in Brazil that has been appeared in a number of intellectual and cultural works about poverty and exclusion. For instance, in studies like Nísia Trindade Lima’s Um Sertão Chamado Brasil (1999)4 and Licia Valladares’ “A Gênese da Favela Carioca” (2000),5 the social conditions of both places are situated within a historical continuum of ideas and practices. Also, documentary films like Eduardo Coutinho’s Santa Marta - duas semanas no morro (1987) and Sergio Rezende’s Sertão, Sertões (2012), reinforce the connection between the sertão and the favela by suggesting that the people from these places look alike and, more importantly, revealing that most favela residents are actually sertanejos who migrated or whose families had migrated from the backlands to big Brazilian cities in order to pursue a better life but remain in a similar precarious situation.

3

Penna, 2014, p. 3. (my translation)

4

Rio de Janeiro: Ed. IUPERJ: 1999

5

Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, vol. 15 nº 44, outubro/2000

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While precariousness has always been a central trait of favelas as a place strongly intertwined with poverty, the same is not true of the sertão. In 1875, only a few decades before da Cunha’s book appears, José de Alencar published O Sertanejo, This novel also unfolds in the Brazilian backlands, but Alencar creates a more diverse representation of the sertão and the sertanejo’s lifestyle than da Cunha. The plot moves through desolate and barren landscapes created by frequent drought, yet the sertão of the novel is not reduced to the starkness of this dry setting. The narrator constantly reminds readers of the colorful landscape that reappears when it rains, or that existed more extensively in the not-so-distant past. Alencar gives dramatic intensity to the adverse landscape undergoing a process of desertification by contrasting the space where the action happens to memories of an immense meadow — “imensa campina” — with scattered vivacious trees — “árvores vivazes,” a whirlwind of loquacious birds whose brilliant plumage glowed under the sunlight — “turbilhões de pássaros loquazes, cuja brilhante plumagem rutilava aos raios do sol”. These descriptions, along with references to pleasant weather, suggest an earlier epoch of an enchanted atmosphere in the backlands. Generations after generations, the sertanejos have adapted to the region’s environmental conditions and developed a material culture in perfect synchrony with local rhythms and needs, regardless of class and ethnic differences. In this sense, poverty is out of sight for Alencar’s narrator. The difficulties faced by the sertanejo in the backlands, including environmental hardships and human violence, are seen as intrinsic to life rather than as a result of economic disadvantage. Since Alencar’s work is traditionally framed within Brazilian Romanticism, his representation of the sertão tends to be read as an idealization that mixes European heroic fantasies with nostalgia for his homeland. For that reason, literary critics like Roberto Schwarz claim that: “[...]

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his work is never properly successful, it always has a delirious touch and, carefully employing the word, a nonsense.”6 This line of argument suggests that Alencar ultimately lacks a sense of realism that, apparently, will only fully satisfy the modern reader at the turn of the 20th century, when Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha become widely known. At this point, I would like to insist on the question of what are the deeper literary and historical origins of Alencar's images of the sertão? I propose that they are not only a product of his European influences nor result from his own imagination. By examining the work of naturalists, travelers, and explorers who looked into the sertão before Alencar and did science according to their own times, that is, in another epistemological key, I contend that the region had a sharply different history of representation than the vision captured by da Cunha. Works like Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s Tratado Descritivo do Brasil (1587), Fernão Cardim’s Tratado da Terra e Gente do Brasil (1583), and Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo’s História da Província Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil (1576) suggest a different experience and depiction of the sertão. Soares de Sousa’s treatise, for instance, is a thorough account of the land and the people in the interior of Northeastern Brazil, including the area around the river Vaza-Barris where the Canudos War would take place three centuries later. His work depicts an impressive number of bodies of water of all dimensions amid green and rich landscapes that contrasts with the late modern idea of a barren land. Moreover, Soares de Sousa records the lifestyle of the region’s native people. Their knowledge of nature and how to live in accordance with it does not suggest any sort of material misery. A very similar perspective is 6

Originally: “[…] sua obra nunca é propriamente bem-sicedida, e que tem sempre um quê desequlibrado e, bem pesada a palavra, de bobagem.” Schwarz, R. “A importação do romance e suas contradições em Alencar”, in Ao Vencedor as Batatas. São Paulo: Duas Cidades/Ed. 34, 2000, p. 39.

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found in Cardim’s work, where the only misery mentioned is the native’s spiritual misery. As a priest, Cardim viewed Paganism with prejudice. Among these three works, Gândavo’s account is the earliest and most enthusiastic one when it comes to describing the appearance of the Brazilian backlands. Entitled “On the great riches to be found in the land of the sertão,” the last chapter of his book sheds light on the existence of gold and precious stone mines, and encourages further expeditions to explore it. Gândavo also mentions rivers and lagoons and the great fertility of the land, “wealthy of all the supplies necessary for the life of man,”7 His description of the region creates an atmosphere of hope as a place where people are guaranteed to earn a living. These 16th century texts have later instigated naturalists and explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries, resulting in a body of knowledge about the sertão that Alencar later retrieves in the middle of an ongoing process of decolonization. da Cunha’s work, in contrast, represents the sertão by blending social and political sciences, philosophical speculation, journalism, and literary virtuosity. His particular style of realism seems to have cast a shadow over the work of writers before and after him, especially those who have not managed to approach the sertão through the lens of a new model of governmentality in which the rule of law may be a mere justification to a sovereignty whose power depends upon the military technologies funded by economic wealth. The modern sovereign’s number one concern, therefore, is to expand its capitalist system and reconquer control over forgotten regions and certain forms of life whose autonomy from capital represents a threat to the sovereign. If one considers Canudos as a synecdoche of the whole sertão, Adriana Johnson’s words make pro-

7

Originally: “abastada de todos os mantimentos necessários para a vida do homem” Gândavo, P. de M. de, 2004, p. 121.

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found sense: “Canudos became intelligible almost exclusively through a discourse whose central problematic is the security of the state.”8 The sertanejo, in his endurance, autonomy and lifestyle, had to be regarded as the poor in order to be intelligible to the rest of a society obsessed by its own national identity. Since the late 19th century, poverty inconspicuously became a broad category whereby the Brazilian Republic has been justifying a war against any trace of unwelcome forms of life and identity, namely, black, LGBTQ and native peoples, sertanejos, monarchists, evangelicals, and homeless. It should be in this very particular sense that one could say that Os Sertões gave rise to the modern idea of Brazil, whose persistent quest for national identity has ascribed poverty to spaces and people that did not entirely fit into a normative lifestyle demanded by the modern capitalist order. However, by doing so, this quest for national identity has actually created to the sertão its very poverty by reinforcing regional economic governmentality over non-hegemonic spaces and forcing dispossessed people to line up with sovereign interests. The resistance to these national reinforcements are at first seen as resulting from backward mentality and often ends up being criminalized, like the indigenous in the Xingu river who fought to protect their their homeland and their way of living from the Brazilian government’s project to construct the Belo Monte Dam. Finally, I would like to suggest that, at the bottom of the debate about Brazilian regionalism (that not by chance began to dominate the intellectual scene exactly after the publication of Os Sertões) lays an intrinsic relationship between regionalism and modernity: modernity is a totalitarian mentality that forges regional identities as expressions of a local mentality to be militar-

8

Johnson, A. 2010, p. 6.

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ily or discursively encapsulated, controlled or defeated. There is no condition of possibility for a nation to advance into modernity without declaring and proving powerless unique forms of life that do not line up with the state’s economic power. Poverty thus plays a central role in the relationship between regionalism and modernity; it is the label under which regions like the sertão are included within and excluded from the nation’s interest at the same time. Backwardness, separatism and insanity are just a few masks designed by a modern governmental and capitalist discourse in times of an epistemological turn to push regions and people lacking sovereignty into a self-evident, criminalized and categorical image of poverty.