The Violent Land Read Free

Communists, both authors of laudatory texts about Luis Carlos Prestes, both forced into exile at about the same time. In 1971 Neruda would win the Nobel Prize, which eluded both Amado and Brazil.) Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Amado remained in the party, though he began to distance himself from it after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s excesses and the Soviet invasion of Hungary that same year.
    Amado remained a man on the Left, but now focused more on his art rather than his ideology. His 1958 novel,
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon,
the first Latin American novel to hit the
New York Times
best-seller list (in 1962), marked a turn away from militancy and a renewed emphasis on the Afro-Brazilian culture of Bahia. The post-Stalin era enabled Amado to abandon socialist realism (which subordinates all literary activity to party dictates) and immerse himself in the popular culture and sensuality that had always been at the heart of his writing.
    It is useful to compare Amado, in political and literary terms, with three of his Spanish American contemporaries, because their careers differ so markedly from his: Octavio Paz, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Julio Cortázar (all born in 1914). Paz (d. 1998), a Mexican poet and essayist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1990, was on the Left until he became disillusioned with Stalinist Communism after visiting Spain in 1937, during the Civil War. He eventually became a centrist. Bioy Casares (d. 1999), except for his firm opposition to the Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974), remained conservatively aloof from politics and literary realism and pioneered Argentine fantastic literature. Cortázar (d. 1984), also Argentine, was an apolitical aesthete during his youth who championed the revolutionary governments of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1960s and 1970s. He published only short stories in the fantastic mode until 1960, when he began to publish novels about existentialist explorations of human destiny. All three were great writers, but none had the almost religious fervor that enabled Amado to harness himself to Communism—that is, to sacrifice his individuality to the party—while surreptitiously reshaping that ideology in his own image. In doing so, Amado somehow managed to maintain his artistic integrity despite his ideological commitment.
    Amado’s 1965 preface to
The Violent Land
shows just how much he had changed since 1943. He makes no references to the class struggle, nor does he bother to denounce colonialism. Instead he describes his novel in terms that link it to epic literature, as if the battles of the colonels were the necessary, violent prelude to progress:
    Very little time was required—fifty years at most—for the cacao trees to come to maturity and bear fruit, for the plantations to grow, for the living conditions and economy of an immense area to change, and it is curious to realize how in such a brief period a civilization and a culture grew out of so much spilled blood.
    Amado abandons his original intentions and paints a picture of Brazilian cacao country that seems idyllic, effectively leaving behind his indictment of commodity-based economies doomed to be tools of the international market.
    If we read
The Violent Land
in the context of 1943, we see a very different novel. The novel creates and resolves a number of literary-political issues. First, fidelity to history: Amado does not, as he seems to do in the preface, transform Brazil’s cacao country into a fantasyland, a version of the U.S. “Wild West,” but he does turn it into a self-contained reality. That is, the novel opens with a paddle-wheel boat making the trip from the port of Bahia to Ilhéus, sailing, as it were, out of one kind of reality into another, much in the way Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe sails up the Congo River in
Heart of Darkness
(1902) to a more primitive world. What Marlowe finds is a civilized man