Graphic design Kiko Farkas / Máquina Estúdio e Mateus Valadares / Máquina Estúdio
21.00 x 14.00 cm, 184 pp. ISBN 9788535917260 79,90
Cacau Novel, 1934 | Afterword by José de Souza Martins
Son of an industrialist in Sergipe, José Cordeiro, known as Cearense, does not want to be a boss: he’s a worker, and proud of it. But when he is fired from his job for having a fling with a female colleague, also coveted by the boss, his own uncle, Cearense decides to look for work elsewhere. He has two choices: São Paulo or the cocoa coast in southern Bahia. Cearense opts for the latter and heads for Itabuna and Ilhéus, like so many of the men and women he meets on the boat ride to the region. It is there, on the Fraternity Farm in the Pirangi zone, that his story unfolds, set against the backdrop of the working conditions on the cocoa plantations, where the workers are forced to accept a regime of semi-slavery. White, blonde and literate, Cearense stands out from the other workers and catches the eye of Maria, the owner’s daughter. His relationship with the girl puts him once again before the possibility of rejoining the ranks of the moneyed elite, but Cearense remains true to the side of the workers, allowing his conscience to speak loudest. Coloured by the author’s youthful political engagement, the novel charms for its blend of social criticism, biographical narrative and portrayal of time and place.
“I first read Cocoa in my early teens: it was the medium through which I discovered that literature could be more than just a vehicle of entertainment, but a privileged route to discovering the world; in this specific case, the Brazilian reality.”
José Paulo Paes
According to Jorge Amado – after The Country of Carnival -, Cacau assumed the worker’s view of social relations in the form of the first-person narrative of the protagonist, Cearense. This perspective is a reflection of the author’s own political engagement at the time, as the epigraph makes clear: “In this book I have tried to tell, with the minimum of literature and the maximum of honesty, the life of the workers on the cocoa plantations of the south of Bahia. A proletariat novel, perhaps?” This banner of socialist literature or proletariat novel meant that the book was branded subversive in its day. The first edition, a print run of two thousand copies, sold out in a month, largely due to a brush with the censor: the entire run was seized by the police, only to be released the following day thanks to the intervention of the then Foreign Minister, Oswald Aranha. Besides the echoes of Jorge Amado’s communist militancy, the novel also recalls his childhood. A trader from Sergipe, his own father had become a landowner in the cocoa region. The book opens a series of panoramas upon life in the cocoa lands of Ilhéus that also includes The Violent Land and The Golden Harvest. Translated into Spanish in 1935, Cacau was the first of Jorge Amado’s books to be published in another language.
In the south of Bahia, cacau is the only word that sounds good. The plots look pretty when decked in its little yellow fruit. At the beginning of every year the colonels look out onto the horizon and predict the weather and the harvest. Then come the empreitadas with the workers. The empreitada, a kind of contract for the reaping of a harvest, is usually given to the married workers, men with wife and kids. These agree a deal to gather the harvest on a plantation and can hire hands to help them do it. Other workers, the single ones, are left to the odd jobs. They work at a daily rate and they work with everything: the reaping, gathering, at the bins, at the rakes. These were the vast majority. We got three thousand five-hundred for a day’s work, but in the good times you could get as much as five thousand reis. We’d set out in the mornings carrying long scythes, the small blades glimmering in the sun, and we’d disappear into the cacao stands to reap. A large group worked João Evangelista’s plot, one of the best on the farm.
