Wanderlino
Arruda
Only
the divine can be more important and have more
worth than man and the earth on which he lives.
Beneath the divine, rests the power of creation,
great in itself…cosmic plasticity and
telluric mortar. But of even greater worth than
the transcendental and divine…is the poet!
Only he is able to discern and make clear, completely
new viewpoints on life. So great are poets,
that Benedeto Croce suggests that they are not
just interpreters of their time or country,
but to quite the contrary, are critics of their
age and surroundings, always in ferocious discord
with the accepted standards and common mentality,
as were Dante Alighieri, Miguel Cervantes and
Johan Wolfgang Goethe. That is also how Euclides
da Cunha stood. He was the eternal inconformist,
perpetually transubstantiating the miserable
human condition of that time in pure art, both
social and literary.
Euclides
da Cunha, the great poet of “The Sertões”,
never surrendered. He was a man of the earth,
a humane, but fighting man. He was a scholar
and an able cartographer; dissecting the parched,
destitute lives of the impoverished in northeastern
Brazil. An implacable witness of strength and
weakness, geologist and geographer of the arid
desert land and souls of its inhabitants. He
was a genial magician, hypnotizing us with his
words, a far-west explorer of the mysteries
and mysticism of Canudos and of the medieval
spirit of Antônio Conselheiro. Euclides
da Cunha was a harsh man belonging to a harsh
land, to the fauna, flora and desert of his
long suffering hinterland. Euclides, denizen
of that barbarous, inhuman land, personified
both hope of rain and the despair of implacable
droughts. Euclides was the ethnologist, the
sociologist, the historian, the eternal traveler,
devourer of horizons. He was at the same time,
worst enemy of the hated military soldiers and
the greatest ally of the northeastern desert
bandits.
In “The Sertões,” the earth
is an analysis, a panoramic view of the northeastern
region, in the saddest part of the state of
Bahia, graphic upside-down funnel formed by
the dry soil of Pernambuco, Alagoas and Sergipe,
a dried, and cracked stretch of Vasa Barris.
Canudo is an unknown land, entrance to the forbidden
hinterland, a hell of dryness of the land and
of the men, a secular martyrdom of hunger and
ignorance. The cracked surface of the scalding
clay carries the same biblical mark that with
the years of life and work marked the faces
of the Hebrew slaves of the Egyptian deserts
with; the eternal traces of purgatory suffering
of human existence. It’s the land of the
convulsion of the rough, of the sharpest, cutting
angles, of the most aggressive landscape, of
the jagged, splintered edges of rocks: the gravel,
the nude stone, the rocky escarps, the towering
cactuses, the spines and daggers, the tree trunks,
twisted by unending thirst, the rending hardship,
and finally…the dust. There are clay walled
huts, the houses made of mud and lathe, humble
straw serving both as roof and as shelter.
In
the interior of the terrible land,…man:
the mulato, the bandit, and the cowboy. Inside
the man in his soul and in his flesh, rest his
superstitions. There is slavery, and mystic
madness, driven even madder by the ascetic madness
of Antonio Conselheiro, rude preacher of the
desert wilderness. There exist no adjectives
with which one can qualify the war of Canudos,
just as there are no adjectives to describe
the works of Euclides da Cunha. In Euclides
there are no sweet words or domesticated phrases.
Everything in him comes straight up to the boiling
point at white heat, everything merging together
in the tremendous force of violent emotions,
the heat of effervescent tragedy. Only in Euclides,
does the impossible, become reality. Canudos
did not surrender. It was struck down while
standing. The “Sertões” of
Euclides da Cunha will never fall, to the contrary,
they will live forever!
