The Violent Land Read Free Page B

Horacio makes a pious speech regretting the fact that his wife, Ester, and his legal councillor, Virgilio Cabral, could not witness this great event—though everyone present knows that Ester and Virgilio had had a love affair, that Horacio might have killed her if plague didn’t, that he did in fact have Virgilio assassinated. “ Today, ” he says, “ all this is no more than a painful memory. ” Even the old name of the village, Tabocas, has been discarded: the town has been renamed Itabuna. The past must be repressed from memory—unless a novelist like Jorge Amado appears to preserve and explain it—because in the land of cacao there can be no tragedies and no painful meditations on past sacrifices and crimes. The only reality is cacao: “ Nothing of the kind had ever been seen before; for this was the best land in the world for the planting of cacao, a land fertilized with human blood. ”
    ALFRED MAC ADAM

Suggestions for Further Reading
    On Latin American History
    Williamson, Edwin.
The Penguin History of Latin America
. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2010.
    On Latin American Literature and U.S. Culture
    Cohn, Deborah.
The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S.
Nationalism During the Cold War
. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.
    On the History of Chocolate
    Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe.
The True History of Chocolate
. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
    On Jorge Amado and
The Violent Land
    Brower, Keith H., Earl E. Fitz, and Enrique Martínez-Vidal, eds.
Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays
. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
    Chamberlain, Bobby J.
Jorge Amado
. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
    Vincent, Jon S. “Jorge Amado.” Vol. 3 of
Latin American Writers,
edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, 1153–62. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. (See also Nelson H. Vieira. “Jorge Amado.” In
Latin American Writers, Supplement I,
15–30. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002.)

Preface
    Blood Fertilized These Lands
    The cacao lands, a region embracing all of the southern part of the state of Bahia in Brazil, were fertilized with blood. They were conquered foot by foot in ferocious struggles of indescribable violence. They were barbarous lands, where banditry and death, implacable hatred and the cruelest revenge flourished; there was a time when they were the symbol of anti-culture and anti-civilization in Brazil. Men had set out to conquer the forest, to clear it and transform the landscape and the economy of a vast area. But those who set out were many, and they went armed. As though there were not land enough and to spare for all, they fought one another, disputing each foot of that humid earth, ideal for the planting of cacao. At the very time that the seedlings were being planted, crosses were being set up to mark the spots where the brave had fallen, victims of ambushes or of encounters between hired gunmen.
    All this happened only the other day, at the end of the past century, at the beginning of the present. When I was five or six years old, in 1917 and 1918, shootings were the daily fare of those cities, of Ilhéus and Itabuna, and of the hamlets recently sprung up in the woods. I saw the birth of the village of Pirangy, which today is the city of Itajuipe; my father was one of its founders around 1920. I witnessed encounters of the cacao “colonels,” fights to the death, when bullets whistled through the night in both jungle and cities. My father was wounded when I was a year old. I was with him on the veranda of his plantation house on the land that he had conquered, cleared, and planted to cacao. I saw the end of those struggles; I could say that I was born amidst them, was nourished on them, and that they made me a novelist.
    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