Pensativities: Selected Essays

Dreaming of Home

I come from afar and I bring you what I believe is a shared message from my writer colleagues in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé & Príncipe. The message is the following: among us, Jorge Amado wasn’t just the most widely read of foreign writers. He was the writer who had the greatest influence upon the birth of literature in those African countries where Portuguese is spoken.

Our literary debt to Brazil goes back centuries, to the time when Gregório de Matos and Tomáz Gonzaga helped create the first literary nuclei in Angola and Mozambique. But these levels of influence were restricted and bear no comparison with the deep and lasting impressions left by the author from Bahia.

It should be said (by way of a secondary confession) that Jorge Amado did more for the projection of Brazil as a nation than all the country’s diplomatic institutions together. It’s not a question of improving the work of such institutions, but of acknowledging the huge power that literature has. In this room, there are others who have also contributed to the grandeur of Brazil and built bridges with the rest of the world. I am speaking, of course, of Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso. To Chico and Caetano go our heartfelt thanks for the light and inspiration we find in their music and in their poetry. And to Alberto da Costa e Silva, our gratitude for his magnificent study of the historical reality of our continent.

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Jorge Amado’s books crossed the Atlantic and had a huge impact on our collective imagination.

It must be said that the Bahian writer didn’t travel alone: along with him came Manuel Bandeira, Lins do Rego, Jorge de Lima, Érico Veríssimo, Rachel de Queiroz, Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and so many others.

In my house, my father — who was and is a poet — named one of his sons Jorge, and another one Amado. I was the only one to escape such a reference. I remember that in my family, passion for Brazil was shared between Graciliano Ramos and Jorge Amado. But there was no conflict: Graciliano revealed the bare bones and stones of the Brazilian nation, while Amado exalted the flesh and spirit of joy of that same Brazil.

In this brief statement, I would like to consider the following question: why this absolute fascination for Jorge Amado, why this immediate and lasting identification?

I should now like to go on and talk about some of the reasons for our love of Amado.

Clearly, the first reason is a literary one, and resides wholly in the quality of the Bahian writer’s texts.

I happen to think that a writer’s worst enemy can often be literature itself. Worse than not writing a book, is overwriting it. Jorge Amado knew the precise dosage to give his literature, and apart from the text itself, he knew how to remain an excellent storyteller and a notable creator of characters. I recall Adélia Prado’s astonishment when, after publishing her first book of poetry, she confessed: “I wrote a book, and my God, I didn’t lose the poetry.” Jorge too wrote without ever ceasing to be a poet of the novel. This was one of the secrets of his fascination: the natural quality of his creativity, his elaborate spontaneity.

Today, when I reread his books, the intimate tone of his conversation stands out: it’s a conversation in the shade of a veranda that begins in Salvador da Bahia and extends all the way across the Atlantic. In his fluid, relaxed narrative, Jorge writes away, and his characters leap from the page into our daily lives.

The Cape Verdean writer Gabriel Mariano wrote the following: “For me, the discovery of Amado was a revelation because I would read his books and I was in my own country. And when I came across Quincas Wateryell, I could see him on the island of São Vicente, on my street, the Rua de Passá Sabe. .”

This existential familiarity was certainly one of the reasons for the fascination we felt for his work in our own countries. His characters were our neighbours, not in place, but in our lives. Poor folk, folk with the same names as ourselves, folk with the same racial backgrounds as ourselves, paraded through the Brazilian author’s pages. There were our own loafers, the temples where we spoke with our gods, the aroma of our food, the sensuality and the perfume of our women. Deep down, Jorge Amado made us return to ourselves.

In Angola, the poet Mário António and the singer Ruy Mingas composed a song, the words of which go like this:

When I read Jubiabá

I believed I was Antônio Balduíno

My Cousin, who never read it

Was Zeca Camarão.

And so this was the feeling: António Balduíno was already living in Maputo and Luanda before being given life as a literary character. The same happened with Vadinho, Guma, Pedro Bala, Tieta, Dona Flor and Gabriela, and with so many other incredible characters.

Jorge didn’t write books, he wrote a country. And it wasn’t just an author who reached us: it was Brazil in its entirety returning to Africa. So there was another distant nation, but one that wasn’t foreign to us. And we needed this Brazil like people who need a dream they have never known how to have before. It might have been a stereotyped, idealized Brazil, but it was a magical space where we could be reborn as creators of stories and producers of happiness.

We discovered this nation at a historical moment when we had no nation. Brazil — so full of Africa, so full of our language and our religious spirituality — gave us a shore that we lacked in order to become a river.

I have spoken of literary and almost-ontological reasons that help explain why Jorge is so loved in African countries. But there are other, possibly more circumstantial reasons.

We were living in a colonial dictatorship. The works of Jorge Amado were banned. Bookshops were closed and publishers persecuted for distributing his works. Our encounter with our Brazilian brother therefore had a taste of adventure in its affront to authority and its clandestine nature. The circumstances in which we shared his subterranean aspirations to freedom also contributed to the mystique of the author and his writing. The Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, who was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment in the Tarrafal concentration camp, passed a letter through the bars of his cell in 1964 in which he made the following request: “Send my manuscript to Jorge Amado to see if he can get it published over there in Brazil.”

In fact the nationalist poets of Mozambique and Angola raised Amado like a flag. There’s a poem by our own Noémia de Sousa called “João’s Poem,” written in 1949, which begins like this:

João was young like us

João had clever eyes,

His hands held out,

His head directed towards tomorrow,

João loved books that had soul and flesh

João loved the poetry of Jorge Amado

There is one last reason, which we could call a linguistic one: on the other side of the world, the possibility of another side to our language was being revealed.

At the time, we needed a Portuguese without Portugal, a language that while belonging to the Other, could help us find our own identity. Until we found Brazilian Portuguese, we spoke a language that didn’t speak to us. And having a language like that, merely half a language, is another way of remaining speechless. Jorge Amado and the Brazilians gave us back our speech, in another Portuguese, sweeter, more rhythmic, more in our style.

The greatest Mozambican poet, José Craveirinha, had this to say in an interview: “I should have been born in Brazil. For Brazil had such an influence on me that as a child, I even played football with Fausto, Léonidas da Silva, Pelé. But we were forced to go through João de Deus, D. Dinis, the classics from Portugal. But at a certain point, we broke free with the help of the Brazilians. And all our literature became a reflection of Brazilian literature. When Jorge Amado reached us, we had found our way home.”

Craveirinha was speaking of that great gift which was our ability to dream of home. That’s what Jorge Amado gave us. And that’s what made Amado ours, an African, and made us Brazilian too. For having turned Brazil into a home made for dreaming, for having turned his life into an infinite number of lives, we are grateful to you, Jorge, our companion.

Speech on Jorge Amado, São Paulo, Brazil, 2008.