Jorge Amado & The Myth of the Brazilian Soul
I. What is a Country?
“Jorge Amado didn't write books, he wrote a country” – Mozambican author Mia Couto.
There are more than 200 million Brazilians who will never meet one another, living through totally different landscapes, classes, races, religions, and histories. What exactly makes all of us a people rather than simply inhabitants of the same administrative territory? I’m not sure flags, passports, or borders are enough to satisfactorily tell me what being Brazilian means. That question leads us to a broader one: What is a country?
That may seem like it is easily answered, at least at face value: geographical lines, a shared language, a government with laws, a particular culture, a shared currency. But the more you start to investigate those constituent parts, the less clear they come out as definite rules. Borders (besides with the ocean) are imaginary lines. Governments and laws and what they represent change over time. A single country may have many languages spoken within it; the same is true for culture. Shared currency might be the closest one to being definite. But most of all, what makes a country a country is collective belief. So how can someone write a country, as Mia Couto says of Jorge Amado?
It appears that Jorge Amado’s novels helped create the dominant imaginative version of ‘Brazil,’ at least to non-Brazilians if not Brazilians, too. Of the writers of the twentieth century, he is the one who, above all, helped create the international impression of the Brazilian soul. He helped mythologize Brazil. And I want to investigate the nature of that mythologization, because Amado’s notion of brasilidade has been resisted by many critics as overly simplified and idealized.
II. Jorge Amado: Marxist, Not-Modernist, and U.S. Soft Power Vessel
Born on August 10, 1912, Jorge Amado is one of the best-known modern Brazilian writers. His writing has been translated into 49 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies and have been adapted into telenovelas and films, and he’s been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times—although, he never was awarded it. At the age of 12, enrolled at a Jesuit school in Salvador—the capital of Bahia—he wrote an academic essay called “O Mar,” “The Sea,” which impressed his teacher, Father Luiz Gonzaga Cabral. Cabral began giving the young Amado Portuguese authors as well as Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, and Walter Scott. The writer said that Dickens’ David Copperfield was the first book to excite his social conscience, and after a year at the school, ran away to his grandfather’s cacao plantation. He called it “dois meses de maravilhosa vagabundagem,” or “two months of marvelous riffraff” (Quincas 106).
At 16, Amado founded the Academia dos Rebeldes, the Rebels Academy, a group that privileged “uma arte moderna sem ser modernista,” “a modern art without being modernist.” On that note of modernism, it’s interesting that lots of places, like Wikipedia or literariness.org, label Jorge Amado as a modernist writer. In founding the Academy of Rebels, he points out an important distinction that we should note when we speak of literary movements and literary artists. Just because someone produced a piece during a particular moment at which there is a predominant literary movement going on does not entail that they are part of that moment. So we should importantly refine Jorge Amado from a “modernist” writer to a “modern” writer insofar as he wrote in the 20th century.
Amado was also quite a Marxist. In the 1930s, he joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). In the 40s, he actually served as its deputy. Because of his political affiliation, his books such as Cacau, Suor, Mart Morto, Capitães de Areia, and Terras do Sem Fim, were burned in the public plazas of Salvador during Brazil's first authoritarian regime under Getúlio Vargas. The texts deeply contemplated the oppression and promoted the causes of particularly brown and black Brazilian workers, children, and peoples within Brazil and Bahia. He ended up self-exiling in Paris and Uruguay during this time, and while he was there, his house in Rio was invaded by the police, who took his books, photos, and documents (106 Quincas). Despite that association with communism, in the 1960s, Jorge Amado’s works became famous in the United States, partially because of politics, and partially because of literary interest.
In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a foreign policy initiative called the Good Neighbor Policy—a diplomatic strategy aimed to improve U.S. relations with Latin America. It ended direct military operations and interventions and focused instead on economic cooperation, trade, and mutual respect for national sovereignty. Of course, that’s partially coded language for indirect control, economic dominance and, when the Cold War started, covert operations—including the U.S.-backed 1964 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president João Goulart and put in place a brutal 21-year military dictatorship in Brazil. (If you’re interested in learning more about that, I Am Still Hereor Eu ainda estou aqui is a rather famous Brazilian film based on a book (so you could either watch the Oscar winning movie or read the memoir written by the son of Rubens Paiva) that retells the story of Rubens Paiva who was arrested, tortured, and murdered by agents of the dictatorship. Or watch O agente secreto, The Secret Agent which is a fictionalized account of that time as well.)
Nonetheless, as part of that, the US State Department sponsored efforts to publish international authors in the US market; this includes the publishing imprint that brought Amado’s works to the American public through the Alfred A. Knopf publishing imprint—now an imprint of Penguin Random House. Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and his wife Blanche Knopf founded the eponymous Alfred A. Knopf publishing imprint in 1915. The Knopfs traveled abroad regularly and became known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers. In 1942, the government sponsored Blanche’s trip to Latin America to find and buy the rights to regional literature as a means of continually gaining soft power in the region. Three years later in 1945, the Knopfs published Amado’s Terras do Sem-Fim (The Violent Land). They were the first to publish Jorge Amado in the United States. Amado and the Knopfs became friends after that, and they later published many of his other novels, including Gabriela Cravo e Canela, Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon in 1962. That novel landed on The New York Times best-seller list, a seat it occupied for an entire year.
Gabriela Cravo e Canela is noted among critics as an important turning point in Amado’s career because it is generally agreed that he starts departing from the staunch Marxism present in his earlier works—although it is clear from my reading of it that his social critiques are still ever-present. It is thus perhaps not surprising that that is the novel that brought him American critical acclaim. What’s more, however, is that according to scholar Marly Tooge from USP (Universidade de São Paulo), the English translators of Amado’s works both softened its social critiques and amplified its sensual appeal. This kind of sanitization was also done with other Amado novels published in the US, like Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, she adds. With McCarthyism just having been over, that sanitization may not be that surprising, but it is important to hold in consideration when we get to our discussion of mythology. An interesting distinction she upholds is that American “publishers placed an emphasis on the ‘exotic’ side of his stories in marketing campaigns. In contrast, Amado’s ideological works saw more success in Europe.”
Another interesting and… sad? to note that Brazil and Brazilian Portuguese, despite getting this original recognition, is still overlooked and misunderstood: on the Penguin Classics website that speaks to Amado’s works and biography has the titles of his books listed in… spanish, not Portuguese, which makes no sense beyond my speculation that someone clearly didn’t understand that they were not written in Spanish but Portuguese.
III. The Invention of Brazil, Brasilidade, and the Myth of Racial Democracy: Historical and Sociological Perspectives of the 20th Century
In the introduction of the 2015 sprawling history Brazil: A Biography, historian Lilia M. Schwarcz argues that Brazil is a land of paradoxes, caught between illusions and aspirations. It has a ‘multicolored soul’ born from the deep-rooted mixture of races and ethnicities, which provides it a unique diversity that resists typical binary categorization, such as the ‘dominator’ and ‘dominated’ in typical western history. This categorical resistance does not imply, however, that the mixture which created it did not arise out of measures often violent and exclusionary. This hybridity creates a ‘multiplicity of meanings’ of Brazilianness, or brasilidade, which straddles the ambiguous abyss between being a source of cultural wealth and a reflection of a society that’s struggled to reconcile hierarchies and that same diversity.
The question of brasilidade, or Brazilianness originated in 1822, when Brazil got its independence from Portugal. I have a whole other video and essay discussing the history of Brazil through its contemporary moment, so I’m not going to give a history start in 1500 when Pedro Alvarez Cabral landed on Brazil’s shores. The historical facts that we do need here are that Brazil is the country that imported the greatest numbers of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade—although estimates vary, it’s anywhere between 4.8-6 million enslaved peoples. It was also one of the last countries to abolish slavery, only fully doing so in 1888, more than 20 years after the United States, for example. After the abolishment of slavery, the Brazilian economy which depended on slave labor for the harvest of sugarcane and later mining, white elites and slaveholders devised the idea to import white European workers. But, this outsourcing of workers wasn’t merely to replace labor; they sought European workers in order to whiten and ‘civilize’ the population.
During the more than 340 years of slavery, various cultural and religious practices that the enslaved peoples had brought with them became popularized—samba, candomblé, and capoeira, for example. These same practices had been suppressed by the government in order to ‘civilize,’ in other words whitewash, popular Brazilian culture. Contrary to these policies and the scientific racism that was happening in Brazil and around the world, a 19th-into-early-20th-century intellectual, ethnographer, and activist, Manuel Querino (1851-1923) wrote a book called O colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira (The Black colonist as a factor of Brazilian civilization). In it, he argues that the Africans in Brazil were actually the civilizing forces and constitutive creators of Brazil.
We’re going to focus mostly on the 20th century because that was a main time period spent by writers, including Jorge Amado, and theorists intensely trying to figure out what Brazil was or who Brazil was and what Brazilian literature was. That is, the question of Brazilidade, or Brazilian-ness. Where the exact term came from, from my research, is not clear. Various sources cite different people. But in 1922, the Brazilian modernists, particularly Oswald de Andrade, concerned himself with the conceptual question of what constitutes authentic Brazilian culture and how we should value it.
In the 1930s, some years after Querino died and Oswald de Andrade and the modernists asked about the representation of Brazil-ness in literature, Gilberto Freyre, a historian and sociologist, entered the conversation of brasilidade in a very influential way. In 1933, he published Casa Grande e Senzala (translated The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization). Like Querino, he argued against the general racial discourse dominating the 19th and 20th-centuries, which depicted the mixing of races and cultures as a degeneration or a negative thing. He argued against those within and without Brazil that Brazilians were an “inferior race” because of mestiçagem that occurred between the indigenous peoples, Portuguese and European people, and Africans that co-occupied the country. Freyre, by contrast, celebrated this mixture and contended Brazil’s unique tripartite racial/ethnic mixture central to the paradigmatic understanding of Brazilian civilization itself. Consequently, Casa Grande revolutionized how both Brazilians and non-Brazilians viewed Brazilian national identity, as something to be celebrated rather than looked down upon.
Freyre also, however, dubiously claimed that this cultural mixture was a result of the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil being unusually adaptable to the tropics and predisposed towards cultural and sexual mixture—unlike the Anglo-Protest colonizers in Hawaii, for instance. Brazil, in his theory, underwent a unique form of colonization, later termed “Luso-tropical(ism).” On this point, contemporary academics criticize Freyre for romanticizing colonial race relations and downplaying the extreme violence, cruelty, and systematic brutality suffered by the enslaved Africans and their descendants who played a part in this system precisely because of their enslavement, not by choice. This discourse highlights that the strengths and weaknesses of Freyre’s arguments arise from the same contention: that one cannot understand Brazil as a nation if one pretends that its current state and culture isn’t a result of a profound mixture of African, Indigenous, and European cultures (and later Asian cultures like Japanese and Chinese immigrants).
However, as cultural historian Ana Lucia Araujo argues in her essay “The Mythology of Racial Democracy in Brazil,” we ought not be tempted to say that, as a result of this mixture, race relations were overwhelmingly harmonious, nor that they created a racial democracy. Simply because Brazil “never enshrined segregation in law” unlike the United States or South Africa does not entail that inequalities weren’t present and didn’t carry over generations. This myth of racial democracy suppressed the possibility of actual progress towards greater racial equity. Leaders and elites claimed that racism didn’t exist so to speak of it was unnecessary, which allowed systemic inequalities to continue to deepen behind a façade of harmony. In his 2024 doctoral thesis, historian Geferson Santana explained how: “In the 1920s, the [Brazilian Communist Party] denied that racism existed in Brazil—and even embraced the notion of racial whitening.” When Amado joined the party in the 1930s, he was among the key figures who pushed the PCB to take up racial issues…included fighting racism and religious intolerance, and increasing Black workers’ representation within the party.’” So, clearly, racial democracy was not what was—or is—happening in Brazil.
But, partially as a result of Freyre’s work, Brazil, up through the 50s continues to be seen as a state of predominantly harmonious race relations. In 1951, UNESCO commissioned study of racial relations in Brazil because it found that “Brazil suffers less than other nations from the effects of those prejudices which are at the root of so many vexatious and cruel measures in countries of similar ethnic composition” and wanted to know what “make[s] possible the harmony which exists in Brazil” (4). The study concluded that, actually, instead of racial democracy, racial and social inequalities prevailed in Brazil (Araujo). Regardless of the actual state of Brazilian race and class relations, Araujo writes the ideal and ideology of racial democracy was, and in some ways still is, very powerful in Brazil.
Where does Jorge Amado and his writing fall in this whole discussion racial mythologization?
IV. Jorge Amado, Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, and The Brazilian Imaginary
Brazil is a very big country. Like many countries, especially very big ones, it’s culturally diverse and ethnically diverse. Brazil is one of the most racially and genetically diverse countries in the world, in fact. Living in one part of Brazil, especially before wide-spread access to the internet and information like we have today meant inhabiting an utterly distinct reality to someone else living in the same country. Amado belonged to the generation of writers that came after the modernists, or who are sometimes counted as the second-wave of modernism (even though we know Amado didn’t identify himself as a modernist), the Geração de 30. The writers of this movement—like José Américo de Almeida, Rachel de Queiroz, Graciliano Ramos, and Jorge Amado himself concerned themselves with regional particularities and the social questions pertinent to those regions. So, Ramos wrote about the sertão (interior) of Alagoas and the broader Northeast in works like São Bernado and Vidas Secas, de Queiroz about that of Ceará state (extreme northeast) such as O Quinze (The Year Fifteen), and Jorge Amado of Bahia’s. Consequently, the Brazil Amado most identifies with and writes is only one part of Brazil, which complicates the notion of him being the one who depicts the entire, hugely diverse nation.
Race, race relations, and their complications are central considerations in basically all of Amado’s corpus. His thoughts and treatments of the subject changed over time, but I think that many critics oversimplify his depictions and thematic considerations. For example, Amado’s obituary in the Guardian by Sue Brandford and David Treecereads:
The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.
They go on to criticize his contribution to the proliferation of the myth of a racial democracy and argue that “the celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform.” According to Juan de Onís in his New York Times review of Gabriela, the novel represented “artistic liberation…from a long period of ideological commitment to Communist orthodoxy” after the shocking “Hungarian bloodbath [and…] Soviet handling of the Pasternak case” (qtd. Tooge 249). Although Amado stepped away from Marxism and the enormous faith he had in collective class struggle in his early works like Cacau, it’s unfair to conflate moving away from Stalinism to a total romanticization of race relations.
Similarly, in her article “Discursos Sobre A Democracia Racial Em Cuba E No Brasil: Tramas De Gênero, Raça E Sexualidade Na Literatura,” historian and activist Giselle Cristina dos Anjos Santos reconstructs historian Lilia Schwarcz’s argument that that “Amado não foi apenas influenciado pelo pensamento freyriano de defesa do mito da democracia racial, ele se tornou o ‘grande’ ‘divulgador’ de tal concepção que entendia o Brasil como sinônimo de um paraíso racial, e Gabriela teria sido um grande estandarte para a divulgação deste imaginário” (9). Gabriela (1958)is the novel that many critics see Amado taking a turn away from political concerns and the argument is that his consequent works are also less overtly political and overly sensualized. However, in Tenda dos Milagres (1969), written nine years after Gabriela, Amado depicts a Brazil with problems of racism. It discusses how elite Eurocentrism promotes harmful practices like racial whitening and depicts the persecution of Afro-Brazilian culture. And the text explicitly condemns them; the epigraph of the book is actually a quote by Querino, whom we mentioned earlier. In an interview, Amado stated that “Querino was one of the inspirations behind the character Pedro Archanjo, from Tent of Miracles.” If we’ve defined a “racial democracy” as a sociopolitical ecosystem whose state of equality is predicated on the fact racial mixing, we’re clearly not seeing Amado depict that as the case here.
So, I agree that Amado, like or following Freyre, believed that mestiçagem is a positive force in Brazilian society, and even at times embraced the ideal of a racial democracy and something Brazil should strive for. Amado himself said: “ligam-me, a Gilberto Freyre, estima e admiração, não fui vassalo de sua corte,”“I am bound to Gilberto Freyre by esteem and admiration; I was not a vassal of his court.” But believing in an ideal is not the same as believing that is the current state of affairs. In fact, even the word ideal denotes it is not the case. Furthermore, calling the sociohistorical and cultural setting of Gabriela “um paraíso racial” is an oversimplified conclusion resulting from an overly schematic reading of the novel. The Ilhéus in Gabriela is emphatically not paradise: the entire novel is structured around conflict, and the violence that underlies the founding of the city is repeatedly emphasized. For example, in explaining Ilhéus’ history, Amado writes, “Quando os homens, chegados em busca de fortuna. Atiraram-se para as matas de disputaram, na boca das repetições e dos parabéluns, a posse de cada palmo de terra…Quando as matas foram derrubadas e os pés de cacau plantados sobre cadáveres e sangue” (21). People came to this place seeking money and founded the consquent society on violence. The society itself is also full of class hierarchy, patriarchy, and political corruption. That’s what the entire first part of the novel concerns itself with.
With the characterization of Gabriela, Amado has explicitly said: “eu queria criar uma mulher que fosse símbolo da mulher brasileira, uma mulher do povo” (Dos Anjos). As such, she was consciously conceived as a symbol of a Brazilian woman. What he does choose to symbolize is a woman who represents what he sees as female brasilidade, and his selection is of a poor, mestiça woman who is spontaneous and sexually free. She’s also indifferent to bourgeois convention and reluctant to possession. I believe his choice of her as a mixed-race woman represents his larger investment to mestiçagem as a positive part of Brazil’s character and history that a history of whitening and aspiration towards European and bourgeois respectability attempted to erase.
Moreover, her sexual freedom puts her beyond a patriarchal and fetishized typification because her sexuality is something men fail to control. She resists her husband Nacib’s attempts to control, categorize, and restrict her into accepted bourgeois social roles. After they marry to conform to local expectations, Gabriela is unhappy and constrained and has an affair. Gabriela’s bodily autonomy is antagonistic to the social and political institutions who attempt to police it, and in the end she gets what she wants: to be with Nacib without feeling she is possessed by him. Again, the writer himself said, “Dizem que as minhas figuras de mulheres são lutadoras e simbolizam a luta da mulher brasileira por uma condição melhor, menos oprimida. É verdade.” Amado reverses the denigration historically attached to the poor mixed-race Brazilian woman. But reversing the value of a stereotype does not necessarily destroy its underlying structure. And there is a massive gap between authorial intention and critical reception, and even if Amado chose her to represent Brazil, she’s still from one region: Bahia. These abysses are important to us in this discussion, because the underlying stereotype of the exotic sensual latin woman, even if the value of the sign inverts from negative to positive, gets perpetuated by the reception of the work internationally. Which brings us to the question: How did Amado's depiction of Bahia become a mythologized notion of Brazil as a sensual and exotic place?
VI. The Mythologization of a Nation
In his essay Myth Today, Roland Barthes discusses myth as a way of making meaning, one that makes historical and contingent phenomena appear as ‘just the way things are,’ natural, obvious, and inevitable. He writes that myth “naturalises the concept and transforms history into nature” and that it “deforms and dehistoricises the original connection between the signifier and the signified” (Mambrol). Barthes finds that many cultural symbols possess connotations normalizing bourgeoisie reasoning, capitalism, and empire.
Amado saw literature in Latin America as a tool of resistance to imperialism, so it’s perhaps somewhat tragic that his work was employed, consciously or not, as a means by which Brazil’s essence was mythologized. And, ironically, it may be that Gabriela, a novel that discusses the impossibility of possessing and fixing the protagonist became itself possessed and fixed into a national imaginary of sensual harmony between races and classes. In order to be precise, I believe that we need to distinguish that there are perhaps two myths at hand. First is the myth of racial democracy, whose status as descriptive has been invalidated. Second, the myth that all of Brazil is portrayed within Amado’s Bahia. Barthes discusses how, for myth to appropriate a sign, the original sign’s multiplicious and rich meaning doesn’t actually have to disappear entirely. A thorough impoverishment and hollowing out that allows for a second meaning to become available is enough.
As part of research for this topic, I made a post on youtube asking people for their first associations with Brazil. The answers ranged across broad categories and images like food, samba, bossa nova, beautiful women, food, violence, carnival, the Amazon to specific associations of friends’ or personal stories with particular phenomena. I have the same experience when people learn I’m Brazilian; the first things that then they tend to bring up are football or particular players, music, carnival, the beach, etc. We could do the same for the United States. The various impressions and signs that stood for the United States were examined and shifted over the 2026 world cup. Historical and contemporary dominating media narratives and geopolitical friction brought one particular side of an incredibly large and diverse country to international public perception. But many people online described how they came to see the United States in a new light; by not just visiting New York or LA or getting to know the U.S. by way of Hollywood, people got to experience the breadth of the country and its people. Mind you, neither of these observations are scientific study, and I’m not treating them as such. But I think they can go to show that some aspects of a country and people become something of a hyper-nationalized cultural product, and how not everything produced by any country is equally available to symbolize and signify it. This gets at one of our original questions: to what extent can a national myth be constructed without therefore being false? Following Barthes, a myth when a partial truth stops appearing partial rather than when a representation takes on a totally false character.
If we follow Barthes, myth is always constructed, but it was particularly the cultural circulations of Amado’s novels rather than the inherent nature of his own work that did that. The linguistic sanitization of Gabriela alongside covers, visual media adaptations, and other things all detached Gabriela from the complicated system of relations that gives her meaning in the novel. Upon reception in the U.S., American journalism immediately turned Gabriela into: “An Impulsive Child of Nature,” by the LATimes who wrote that “The café au lait Gabriela is as sweet and spicy as the title of this bestselling Brazilian novel implies” (Tooge 249). The New York Times reviewer wrote: “If its other translations are expertly smooth, racy and natural as the English translation by James L. Taylor and William Grossman, Mr. Amado’s “cinnamon colored” heroine has a chance of becoming as internationally famous as those other Latin charmers, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren” (Orville Prescott, The New York Times de 12 de setembro de 1962) (Tooge pp. 248-249).
Barthes claims myth as a type of speech that lies in linguistic, visual, and symbolic representation. And the mythologization of Gabriela, as Barthes says, falls prey to a simplification of complex social dynamics. We see that operating right before our eyes: the complicated Gabriela—a poor migrant, worker, mestiça, resistant to possession, situated within a violent and politically transforming cacao society—is transformed into an interchangeable “Latin charmer,” detaching her not only from her particular bahiano context but also Brazil in this description. So this Brazil of Amado’s is real, to some extent, and it’s a regional depiction, it’s bahiano. Yet its mythologization made it a seductive synecdoche of an entire country. While Barthes gives us a helpful framework in understanding how something becomes a myth and the repercussions of treating myth as a pathology of ideology, I think that there is still a place for myth in our relationship to nations.
So what is the proper place?
VI. Meanings and Uses of The Myth of the Brazilian Soul
I think that stories are essential for how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. The founding myths of a country are the narratives and legends that organized society uses to understand its origins and explain values, unity, and the right to exist. An origin story allows a community to answer the fundamental question of identity that connects disparate peoples in disparate places all connected by the singular and tenuous idea of nation and nationhood: ‘who are we?’ However, who writes that story is an important consideration, for not everyone is afforded equal myth-making power. Certain stories, like Amado’s, acquired sufficient institutional and cultural power to be the stories Brazil told of itself.
Jorge Amado is a particularly interesting character: he was born into a cacau-plantation-owning family, but believed in communist politics and wrote what I think are generally and genuinely counter-hegemonic works. His fiction foregrounds and celebrates people, traditions, and cultures typically marginalized within elitist representations of Brazil. He depicts workers, poor people, sex workers, vagrant children, dockworkers, agricultural laborers, Afro-Brazilian religion, and more as central Bahiano and Brazilian figures. Yet, again, Bahia is just one region of Brazil. And in the success of his depiction of this one marginalized aspect of Brazil, other regions, peoples, and beliefs also necessarily disappear: the many indigenous Brazils, the South, the Northeast, the various communities of immigrants, different constructions of Brazilian femininity, evangelical Brazil, etc. etc. And this is not to blame Jorge Amado himself; no novelist can ever have written or depicted everything. But it appears that his Bahia became one of the dominating depictions of “Brazil” in the international eye.
An answer to the question of ‘who are we?’ for Brazilians could be: “we are a people born of encounter and mixture,” which does not have to serve as an obfuscation of the violent nature of that encounter nor promote its results as a democratic ideal—Brazil has a long way to go in terms of socioeconomic equity and equality. It’s historically been and is currently ranked among the most inequitable societies in the world despite being one of the largest economies in the world. Although, according to Oxfam, a global confederation of NGOs working across 70 countries for socioeconomic equity, the last decades have demonstrated significant progress, there is still a long way to go. The function of answering the identity question is that it can provide millions of radically different people in different situations a shared account of belonging.
VII. Conclusion: Why do we want there to be such a thing as a Brazilian soul at all?
“Brazil” is an abstraction. “The United States” and “Mozambique” and “Laos” are, too. Even if a sense of belonging is also something abstract, it’s something much more personal that we seek as inherently social creatures. The idea of a Brazilian ‘soul’ suggests interiority, something that is not measured by way of institution like the Brazilian state or measure like the Brazilian economy but a way of being in the world. We find a unique iteration of a Brazilian soul within each Brazilian and we seek something within that connects us. As a nation, Brazil doesn’t literally have a soul, but thinking about a nation the way we do a person allows us to ask and answer questions like: who are we? Where did we come from? What do we value? What might we become? So, we tell stories.
Literature can fill this desire for belonging of ours in a uniquely powerful way—so, too, oral histories, films, and other means of storytelling. They provide us answers by way of characters, landscapes, conflicts, and resolutions. And within Brazil, as perhaps within many other colonies, the question of identity held(holds?) a particular urgency. We aren’t Portugal, so what are we? Each generation tries its own answer at that, so each time we ask that question perhaps we get a new answer, which suggests that there isn’t an essence of the Brazilian soul being slowly uncovered the same way there is a tomb being archaeologically excavated. But it seems we keep wanting to seek out and create the story anyway. Humans naturally compress, I think; nobody can clearly hold centuries of Brazilian history in their head. And symbols help us compress, and each person compresses it differently. That’s why in conversations, Brazil becomes Pelé, samba, Macunaíma, the Amazon, saudade. Perhaps wanting a “Brazilian soul” is partly an unavoidable consequence of trying to make sense of something too enormous to comprehend. We give a nation a soul to have a relationship with it.
Gabriela in Gabriela Cravo e Canela tempts us to make her into a symbol of Brazil because she gives Brazil an embodiment: it can smell like cloves and cinnamon, cook, desire, change, be loved. But that exact moment that Gabriela becomes Brazil, stands in for it, we lose something in the compression of a character into a symbol or a representative totality. We all have our own symbols for Brazil. For me, it’s my father, suco de acerola, pão de queijo, and my grandparents’ sítio. Mythology produces and excludes. And I think that relationship to nation, the answer to the question we started out with, is always going to involve some level of mythologization and loss. As we’ve more than established, no single representation of Brazil can exhaust Brazil. But we are lucky because we can continue getting to know Brazil through accumulation and comparison. We have access to a rich and ever-expanding understanding of what Brazil is each time we read a work about it. And there isn’t a ‘complete’ understanding, by the way, that a single person can achieve. I think as with almost anything worth knowing and learning about, we never arrive at a completed understanding. For, the more we read, the harder it becomes to mistake any one representation for the entire thing, yet the more we know about that thing.
So, read on, always.