21.00 x 14.00 cm, 280 pp. ISBN 9788535912524 79,90
The Violent Land Novel, 1943 | Afterword by Miguel Sousa Tavares
The promise of a quick fortune is heard far and wide: those returning from Ilhéus say that the cacau bean is now worth more than gold. Waves of adventurers set out from Salvador and the countryside towns and make for the “the endless lands” of the Bahia coast. The small hamlets of the region, like Tabocas and Ferradas, are ripe for settlement and cocoa tillage. Greed populates and feeds the dreams of farm hands, but the dangers of setting up in this still-virgin land are many: thick bush, poisonous snakes, smallpox - or bladder, a mysterious fever that kills -, ghosts, ambushes, gunfire and spilled blood. Sinhô Badaró and his shy brother Juca Badaró are the owners of a ranch on those lands, next to the property of Colonel Horácio da Silveira. The bushland of Sequeira Grande, perfect for plantation, becomes the object of a dispute between the two powerful families. However, to reach Sequeira Grande, you have to cross the plot of the peasant Firmo, and he is intent on holding on to his land. The Violent Land describes the formation of the cocoa coast, the lust for cacau gold, the battles for land tenure, the establishment of the plantations, and the construction of small towns in the environs of Ilhéus, in the south of Bahia, in the early 20th Century. The world of oligarchs, farmhands, foremen, ladies from good families and the cabaret whores acquires an historical and autobiographical backdrop with an added touch of epic. A narrative that occupies a formative place in the work of Jorge Amado, The Violent Land portrays the social ties of the region, reworks the author’s childhood memories and exposes the violence and exploitation that marked the period.
Launched in 1943, The Violent Land was the first book published by Jorge Amado after six years of censorship and political persecution. The writer had been imprisoned twice, once in 1936 and again in 1937, after the publication of Sea of Death and Captains of the Sands, respectively. Given his intense activities in politics and in the press during the Estado Novo, the writer was obliged to seek exile in Uruguay and Argentina. The novel was started in Montevideo in 1942 and completed in Salvador the following year. The Violent Land sees Jorge Amado return to some drafts published in newspapers in 1939 under the title Sinhó Badaró. The work dates to the same period as his politically-engaged biographies, The ABC of Castro Alves (1941) and A vida de Luís Carlos Prestes (1942), published in Spanish in Buenos Aires and later republished in Brazil under the title O cavaleiro da esperança. The Violent Land is considered by many critics, including Antonio Candido, to be Jorge Amado’s highest literary achievement. The novel’s narrative force is channelled into a profound social portrait, inspired upon the experiences of the author’s childhood and youth in Ferradas, Itabuna. Alongside Cacau (1933) and The Golden Harvest (1944), the book is part of the series of novels on the culture of the cocoa boom. The pioneering forays along the Bahia coast, the battles over land and the social life of the region’s towns had such an impact on the writer’s life that he would return to this world from different thematic angles and perspectives in the novels Gabriela, Clove e Cinnamon (1958), Showdown (1984), and the childhood memoir, The Grapiuna Boy (1981). The Violent Land was Jorge Amado’s first work adapted for the silver screen, in 1948. Produced by the company Atlântida, the movie was directed by the American Eddie Berboudy. There were also two TV soap-opera versions made of the story, first by the Tupi network, in 1966, and again by Globo, in 1981.
The two men stood in the doorway; it was the black man who spoke. “You sent for us, colonel?” Juca Badaró was about to tell them to come in. but his brother made a gesture with his hand to indicate that they should wait outside. The men obeyed and sat down on one of the wooden benches that stood on the broad veranda. Juca was pacing up and down the room, from one end to the other, puffing on his cigarette. He was waiting for his brother to speak. Sinhô Badaró. the head of the family, was taking his ease in a high-backed chair of Austrian make, which contrasted strangely not only with the rest of the furniture, the wooden benches, the cane chairs, the hammocks in the corner, but also with the rustic simplicity of the whitewashed walls. Sinhô Badaró was thinking, his eyes half-shut, his black beard resting on his bosom. Raising his eyes, he glanced at Juca, pacing nervously with his riding-whip in one hand and the puffing cigarette in his mouth. Then he took his eyes away and let them rest on the single picture that hung on the wall, a chromolithograph depicting a European rural scene.
