The Grapiuna Boy Memoir, 1981 | Afterword by Moacyr Scliar
Having heard his mother tell it so often, the scene became almost a real memory for the boy: the mare collapses dead, and the blood-stained father lifts the baby from the ground and carries him back to the house in his arms. It is 1913, and Jorge Amado is only ten months old. The image evokes an ambush the author’s father narrowly escaped during the bloody disputes for land on the cocoa coast in the south of Bahia. It is with this description that Amado begins his childhood memoir. . In addition to his father, João Amado de Faria, and mother, Dona Eulália, Jorge Amado recalls other figures that were central to his personal and literary formation: his uncle Álvaro, the mould for the oligarchic landowners that feature in his novels; Father Cabral, who represents the world of books and the beauty of the Portuguese language; and the caboclo Argemiro, who would sit the boy in his saddle and take him to Pirangi on fair days. The author also rekindles the memory of the freedom of the streets and stands of coconut trees in Ilhéus, his period of “incarceration” at the Jesuit school and how he was introduced to the poker tables and houses of ill repute. In addition to recollecting his boyhood, Jorge Amado also casts light on some core elements of his literature, identifying love and death as the grounding themes of his work and describing himself as less like his leaders and heroes, and more akin to the fishermen, street peddlers, capoeira dancers and the people of candomblé. Like the grapiuna boy, the writer makes no distinction between memory and imagination. Steeped in literary confabulation, the memories of which The Grapiuna Boy is made stand in defence of liberty, imagination and dream, the defining characteristics of Jorge Amado’s work.
Grapiúna is a term the people from the hinterlands use to describe those that come from the coast. The fact that Jorge Amado chose the term for the title of his childhood memoir – The Grapiuna Boy - says a lot about his life and work. The author was born on Auricídia Farm in the Ferradas district of Itabuna. At the age of one, the future writer and his family moved to ilhéus. He grew up on the coast of Bahia during the height of the cocoa boom, among oligarchs, gunmen, workers, adventurers and gamblers. Not only this biography, but the entire oeuvre of Jorge Amado stems from those fledgling experiences in the “grapiuna nation” that flourished on the cocoa coast in the early 20th Century. The city of Salvador, the Bahia quays and the sea are recurrent settings for the author’s fiction, making the coast the natural habitat of both the writer and his literature. Written in 1980 for a special issue of Vogue Magazine to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the author’s literary career, The Grapiuna Boy was published a year later in a non-commercial edition of eleven thousand numbered copies. That same year was the centenary of the town of Ilhéus, and Jorge Amado was selected for special tribute, with a plaque and bronze sculpture erected on the street that bears his name. The world remembered in these musings is reminiscent of that encountered in the author’s earliest books, such as Cacau, 1933, and The Violent Land, 1943, and which would continue to echo in his later works, especially Showdown, 1984. In 1982, when Jorge Amado celebrated his seventieth birthday, the book was republished in a commercial edition. The Grapiuna Boy was also launched in Portugal and translated into four other languages.
On the infinitely beautiful Pontal beach, the boy gallops among a stand of green coconut trees, takes to the air and soars above the port and the ships; living somewhere between reality and imagination. With him in the saddle of his improvised steed rides the fairy, the princess, the star, his ragged neighbour, in whose eyes and smile he learns the first notions of love. The girl holds a powerful fascination for him. Coy and crafty, she leads him on, only to flee and return. Her father is a ferryman; he spends his days at the keel of his canoe, shuttling people and cargo from one side of the bay to the other, from the poor suburb of Pontal to the rich town of Ilheus. Moored at port, the small ships of the Bahiana Company look like transatlantic liners, pirate ships aboard which the boy travels to the ends of the earth, fighting and overcoming the Terror of the Seas to save the enslaved princess. His ruined parents, cocoa lands and plantations lost, cut and tan leather to make clogs.
