O Sertão
O sertão is rough semi-arid badlands—one of the harshest places in Brazil. When we foreigners think of Brazil, we imagine endless beaches, vast cities, tropical jungles, the Amazon. Perhaps these landscapes are part of Brazilians’ self-conception as well, but I would add to this list the sertão in Brazil’s northeastern states. Its existence threads through Brazil’s history, folklore, and its art. I am thinking about the sertão because it was the setting of a movie I saw last night, Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol) by Glauber Rocha. It was made in 1964. It is a story of religious fanaticism and banditry in the sertão at some undefined point in the past—the characters continually refer to the destruction of Canudos and its prophetic leader, Antonio Conselheiro as something that happened in their past that they don’t want to see repeated, which tells us that it has to be post 1897—the year that Conselheiro and his flock were massacred. Canudos was a weird religious community that attempted a royalist revolution against the Brazilian government. The movie’s vague plot somewhat echoes the Canudos story.
In the late 19th century, and possibly for some time into the 20th, there were in Brazil semi-outlaw guns-for-hire called jagunços. Mostly they worked as muscle for the big landowners, but some became outlaws. As outlaws, they became figures of folklore, with lurid stories told about their exploits. They were the subjects of popular folk poetry, the literatura de cordel.
My favorite literary encounter with jagunços was in a book called Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa. I read the English translation, called The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. (Long out of print, alas.) It is sometimes considered the modernist masterpiece of Brazilian literature, but when I read it, what I encountered was a dense series of blood and thunder adventures carried out by jagunços in the rough, thorny badlands of Brazil’s Northeast.
These rural tough guys wore distinctive leather hats, that have the shape of an orange slice. The front and back of the brim are folded up. These men appear as characters in Jorge Amado novels such as Showdown and The Violent Land. Canudos is the subject of a classic non-fiction account Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands in English) by a journalist named Euclides da Cunha. This story is so compelling that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote War of the End of the World based on it. The story of Canudos is echoed in Black God, White Devil. The protagonist, Manuel, is attracted to the cult of Sebastião, a rural preacher with an apocalyptic vision of a future in which the land turns to ocean and vice versa. His congregants gather at the top of a small mountain for outdoor sermons. The local clergy and landowners send a killer, Antonio Das Mortes, to deal with them. In a hilariously unbelievable scene, Das Mortes alone, armed with a rifle, kills dozens of pilgrims climbing the holy mountain.
Jagunços occupy a place in Brazilian culture a little similar to cowboys in American culture. They are dangerous gunmen who live in the rough, wild country of the sertão. They are a symbol of a kind of frontier lawlessness.
The sertão can evoke a kind of nostalgia from contemporary Brazilians. Noites do Sertão (1985) by Milton Nascimanto has a beautiful and sentimental ballad sound, but the lyrics are ambiguous. It starts,
Não se espante assim meu moço com a noite do meu sertão
Tem mais perigo que a poesia do que o julgo da razão
Which translates as: “Don't be so surprised, my boy, by the night in my backlands/ There is more danger than poetry than the judgment of reason.”
A landscape where reason and poetry fail. One can see how a country would build a national myth around it.
I always like to link my cultural activities to visual art, and I was surprised to see Lygia Pape in the credits. Lygia Pape was an avant garde artist in Brazil, best known for severe neo-concrete artworks. She designed the titles for the movie. The MFAH has a single untitled work by Pape.
[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]