Backlands: The Canudos Campaign #3

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign [Os Sertões] (Penguin, 2010)
by Euclides da Cunha [translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe]
Brazil, 1902

At this point we must interrupt our search through the debris and focus our attention on a certain similarity between the events at Rua do Ouvidor and an incident in the caatinga, both of them equally savage.  Backlands violence was making its mark on history and was a harbinger of social unrest that was not just found in a corner of Bahia but was spreading to the capitals of the Brazilian coast.  The man of the backlands, a crude figure in leather, had partners in crime who were potentially more dangerous than he was.  Do we need to be more blunt?

This environment was producing, through the process of heredity, a generation of new, albeit developed, cavemen.  They wore gloves and had a veneer of culture, but they were complete troglodytes.  Civilization generally weeds out such peoples but occasionally a traumatic event will bring them back.  When they return, new lawlessness ensues. These people lack significance other than to give us perspective.  They remind us to stress this point:  To attribute the crisis in the backlands to a political conspiracy is to show ignorance of our race.

This situation is much more complex and interesting.  It has to do with circumstances that have nothing to do with dreams of returning monarchies.  Not understanding these facts has worse consequences than wiping out three expeditions.  It proves that we are not much more civilized than our backward countrymen.  At least they were logical.  Isolated both in space and time, the jagunço could only behave as he did.  He was compelled to put up a terrible fight against the country that, after having ignored him for three centuries, tried to civilize him at gunpoint.

(Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 280-281)

At great personal cost to me in terms of the overall quality of this post, I've decided not to lead off with a perfect quote from Euclides da Cunha on the finale of the Canudos campaign--just in case any of you choose to read da Cunha yourself some day.  It will make a great surprise for you if you ever get around to it.  In the meantime, I hope you appreciate my discretion!  While I'll return to the extended passage above in a moment, my goals today are rather simple: to provide an idea of the flavor of da Cunha's writing on the battle in his own sublimely visceral words.  Before I start, though, I'd like to clarify a few things that may not be evident from my two previous posts on the work.  First, I think I've already mentioned that da Cunha was an eyewitness to the campaign.  Although this is true, in reality he was only at the front for about a month or so in his guise as a war reporter.  However, he apparently saw enough in that short amount of time to traumatize him: Os Sertões might be seen as his attempt to write himself out of that profound psychological funk.  Secondly, speaking of a single "campaign" in relation to Canudos isn't really accurate.  The Brazilian government sent out four armed expeditions, increasingly larger in size, from 1896-1897 to subdue the rebellion, and the first three were crushed against all expectations.  The passage above touches on the coastal elites' reaction to the defeat of the "invincible" Moreira César campaign and how this supposedly inexplicable setback led to false rumors that outside agitators with monarchist sympathies must have been supporting the backlanders in an attempt to overthrow the republic.  While the fourth army expedition finally achieved its objectives--wiping a settlement of some 5,000 mud huts off the map--da Cunha tells us that the resistance was so fierce that it took three months for this modern army to subdue the last 100 yards of Canudos' remaining holdout.  Finally, I'm not sure I've emphasized enough just how much I enjoyed Elizabeth Lowe's translation of this work.  It reads beautifully and captures nuances of tone that I imagine must trace back to the original.  And while I hope I don't cost Backlands any new readers by saying this, there was more than one occasion where I felt that the da Cunha/Lowe writer/translation team in combination with the theme of the senseless horrors of war reminded me of nothing so much as Thucydides on the Sicilian expedition.  I won't, but I could easily spend another week posting on this new favorite of mine.  A few sample da Cunha quotes to follow.  (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Canudos and the sertão in NE Brazil (click to enlarge image)

Da Cunha's attitude to the enemy seems as if it were in a constant state of flux throughout the work.  However, the six chapters in Part II on "The Battle" reveal a writer who increasingly comes to esteem his opponent despite his obvious distaste for their backward ways.  In the passage above, da Cunha subverts his caveman/civilization comparison to declare that the national war frenzy was just as retrograde as the backlanders' lifestyle.  In the two passages that follow, he'll maintain that the army's goals and actions were just as "mad" as Antônio Conselheiro's.  Who is more at fault for the War of Canudos then?  A lone individual or an entire government that's willing to massacre its own citizens?  Da Cunha spends much of the second part of Backlands grappling with these questions.  I'll give you two hints as to his possible answers.  The first passage comes from page 363.  Having already described rebel leader Pajehú as "evil and childlike, instinctively chivalrous, a hero without knowing it" and "an excellent example of recessive atavism, stalking his prey straight on two feet with the same drive with which he defended his cave with a stone hatchet" (227), da Cunha here lauds the backlanders as a whole for their primitive tenacity in defending what he elsewhere calls a "Babylonian weed patch" in "a biblical landscape" (342).  The second passage appears on pages 453-454.  Da Cunha uses this moment to describe the brute force required to subdue the besieged backlanders during the last days of their resistance to the inevitable :

(1) But the jagunço did not know anything about regulation fighting.  He was not really an enemy, which in this context was a euphemism for "bandit," as he was called in the form of martial literature titled the orders of the day.  The sertanejo was simply defending his home.  As long as his aggressors kept their distance, he would simply surround them with traps to stop them.  But if they crashed through his gates and attacked him with rifle butts, he would confront them face-to-face with all he had, unblinking resistance, both for self-defense and to uphold his honor.  Canudos could only be taken in a house-to-house search.  The entire army expedition would take three months to cross the hundred yards separating them from the new church.  On the last day of this unimaginable resistance, which has few like it in history, the last defenders, three or four starving, nameless Titans dressed in rags, would spend their last cartridges on an army of six thousand men!

(2) It was not enough that [the army soldiers] had six thousand rifles and six thousand swords; the strength of twelve thousand arms, the thud of twelve thousand boots, six thousand revolvers and twenty cannons, thousands of grenades and shells--all were of no use.  The executions and fires, the hunger and thirst they had thrown on the enemy were not doing the job.  What had they gained in ten months of fighting and one hundred days of endless bombing?  What use to them were the mountains of ruins, the destroyed churches, and the rubble of broken images, crushed altars, and shattered saints?  All of this had occurred under a bright, serene sky that cast doubt on their obsession with crushing a form of deeply rooted religious belief that brought comfort to their fellow human beings.

Other measures were needed.  The opponent was immune to all the forces of nature and adept at havoc and destruction.  They had made plans for such an emergency and had foreseen this awful epilogue to the drama.  A lieutenant, an orderly of the headquarters staff, ordered up dozens of dynamite bombs from the camp.  This was the only thing left to be done.  The sertanejos had defied all the psychology of ordinary warfare.  Their resistance was emboldened by defeat and they were strengthened by starvation.

The troops were attacking the very bedrock of our race.  Dynamite was the only suitable weapon.  It was a tribute.

Prisoners of war from Canudos

Da Cunha concludes Backlands: The Canudos Campaign with a particularly wrenching account of how the last four fighters ("an old man, two full-grown men, and a child") chose to die facing "a raging army of five thousand soldiers" rather than surrender: "Should we test the incredulity of future generations by going into detail about the women who flung themselves on their burning homes, with their children in their arms?" (463).  Canudos was then leveled, and prisoners of war were beheaded en masse with the complicity of army leaders.  Antônio Conselheiro's body was exhumed, and the decomposing head was decapitated before being taken in triumph to the coast by the victorious army.  There, da Cunha writes, linking one man's folly with a nation's, "it was greeted by crowds dancing in the streets in impromptu carnival celebrations.  Let science have the last words.  There, in plain sight, was the evidence of crime and madness" (464).

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign #2

"We are condemned to civilization.  Either we progress or we will become extinct.  That much is certain."

(Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 62)

As anyone who has seen Antônio Conselheiro's infamous death photo can attest, the apocalyptic firebrand and spiritual leader of the backlands rebellion didn't survive the final siege at Canudos.  But what inspired this itinerant ascetic to take on the Brazilian army?  And why was he so successful at rallying the poor and the criminal to his cause?  Euclides da Cunha's answers are fascinating both for their ambivalence and for what they tell us about the Brazil of his time.  Classifying Conselheiro as "a second-century heretic in the modern age" (143), the writer presents the urban/victors' side of the story by diagnosing the zealot as a religiously deranged product of his backlands environment.  "Antônio Conselheiro was a type of antihero whose sick mysticism was a compendium of all the superstitions and errors that have debased our nationality," he writes.  "He attracted the people of the backlands, not because he dominated them, but because their aberrations dominated him.  The environment worked in his favor, and he had a grasp of the practicality of the absurd.  He obeyed the irresistible finality of old ancestral impulses and while gripped by these impulses he had the outward appearance of a confident evangelist.  It was this confidence that disguised his insanity" (147).

Elsewhere, as in this opening salvo from a section titled Antônio Conselheiro: A Misfit Turns Back the Historical Clock, da Cunha is even stronger in his denunciation of Conselheiro as an atavistic lunatic:

It was not surprising that our deep ethnic strata pushed up the extraordinary figure of Antônio Conselheiro, "the Counselor."  He is like a fossil.  Just as the geologist can reconstruct the inclination and orientation of very old formations from truncated strata and build models of ancient mountains, so can the historian deduce something about the society that produced this man, who himself is of little worth.  Under normal circumstances, this man would have been diagnosed as a neurotic with progressive psychosis.  However, in his social context he becomes an alarming anomaly.  The stages of his career do not parallel a serious illness; however they do give us the profile of a grave social disorder.  This man was driven by forces larger than he was, to lead a conflict with an entire civilization and to go down in history when he should have gone to a mental hospital.  For the historian, however, he is not someone with mental illness; he represents the integration of various social traits, which would not be perceived had he remained anonymous, but were forceful and well defined when this man came to represent a social movement (124).

I've quoted this paragraph in its entirety because it says quite a bit about da Cunha's aims, biases, and methodology.  Note that he doesn't just dismiss Conselheiro as a madman--he argues that the Counselor represents a non-mainstream stratum of Brazilian society that's out of time with the present.  While it's easy to take da Cunha to task today for his 19th-century, Sarmiento-like civilization and barbarism biases, dismissing those tendencies out of hand does a real disservice to the investigatory nature of his efforts.  Da Cunha seems to have seen the Canudos war as a horrific example of two worlds in collision, and his "scientific" attempt to understand both sides of the story is responsible for much of the moral tension that informs the work.  Reading him, I sometimes felt like I was in the presence of a Brazilian Thucydides.

To give you a better idea of what I mean, I'll close for now with a couple of examples of da Cunha at work late in Chapter II ("Man").  This part of the work is the anthropological and cultural set-up for the six chapters on the battle that will follow.  Da Cunha begins with a typical Euclidean assertion, bold and to the point: "We must insist on this truth: The war of Canudos was a regression in our history.  What we had before us was the unsolicited armed insurgence of an old, dead society, brought back to life by a madman.  We did not recognize this society; it was impossible for us to have known it" (168).  With one fell swoop, the author has stigmatized the backlanders as primitives in opposition to an army that represents the forces of republicanism and modernity.  It's a charge that will be repeated throughout the work, often with racist assumptions attached.  And yet just a single page later, da Cunha's ambivalence is revealed when he attacks the "greed" of the victorious army by contrasting it with the humble lifestyle of the vanquished--a people so poor that their defeat resulted in "one of the most unrewarding spoils of war in history" (169).  The prize spoils in the sacked settlement?  Scraps of paper recording the preaching of Antônio Conselheiro.  "These scraps were worth everything because they were worth nothing...and as one read them over, it was evident just how harmless his sermons really were: They simply reflected the poor man's confusion.  Every line was imbued with the same vague and incongruous religious doctrine.  There was very little of political significance to be found in any of them and nothing that would have supported his messianic cause" (169).  To top it all off, da Cunha even offers a totally unexpected apology for Conselheiro's actions: "If the rebel attacked the government, it was because he believed that the promised kingdom was near at hand" (169).  Suffice it to say that with perspectives like these, this isn't run of the mill history at all.

*****

Given the gripping military narrative I plan to take a look at next, one of the great ironies of Backlands: The Canudos Campaign is that it was written by a pro-army but anti-war observer who felt conflicted about this clash between civilization and what he called "the Jerusalem of mud huts" (176).  Fast-forwarding to the violent end of the conflict from the relatively safe vantage point of Chapter II, da Cunha hints at and finally admits that Conselheiro's provocation "demanded another kind of a response" than the war that would wind up producing thousands of casualties: "Meanwhile we sent them guns and the final, incisive argument of the moralist--bullets" (172).  Gotta love this stuff!

Antônio Conselheiro:

"This man was driven by forces larger than he was, to lead a conflict with an entire civilization and to go down in history when he should have gone to a mental hospital."



Backlands: The Canudos Campaign #1

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign [Os Sertões] (Penguin, 2010)
by Euclides da Cunha [translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe]
Brazil, 1902

"No hubiera escrito esta novela sin Euclides da Cunha, cuyo libro Os Sertoes me reveló en 1972 la guerra de Canudos, a un personaje trágico y a uno de los mayores narradores latinoamericanos" (Mario Vargas Llosa, Prólogo a La guerra del fin del mundo).

"I wouldn't have written this novel without Euclides da Cunha, whose book Os Sertoes in 1972 revealed to me the war of Canudos, a tragic character, and one of the best Latin American narrators" (Mario Vargas Llosa, Prologue to The War of the End of the World).

Although I'd been wanting to read Euclides da Cunha's 1902 Backlands: The Canudos Campaign ever since I first saw Mario Vargas Llosa raving about it as the source of his 1981 La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] last year, I had no idea what a treasure was in store for me.  Wow!  Wow, wow, wow, in fact.  Da Cunha's idiosyncratic epic, a work of nonfiction devoted to the nascent Brazilian republic's brutal putdown of a millenarian revolt in 1897, is part geography, part anthropology, part military history, and part political treatise.  Doesn't sound like your cup of tea?  I hear you.  But as trying of my patience as the first third of the work turned out to be (50 pages of extremely dry background info on the nature of the Brazilian backlands followed by another 100 pages or so on the bandit culture of the north), the last two thirds of the book on "The Battle" were just about the best thing I've read all year.  An absolutely riveting narrative.  A story about another unnecessary war pitting haves and have nots against each other due to a mutual misunderstanding.  A firsthand account of an apocalyptic civil war in which the "credulous rustics" of a "backwoods Troy" resisted four expeditions from a modern army with faith and primitive weaponry as their only defense against an unyielding future.  From my perspective, da Cunha is every bit the great narrator and master stylist Vargas Llosa made him out to be.  With any luck, I'll be able to prove this to you over the next few posts.  (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Euclides da Cunha

Chapter 1 ("The Land") is tough sledding from an entertainment standpoint.  However, da Cunha's arresting style can still be observed from this excerpt from the Some Unique Hygrometers section on the Canudos region and drought:

The setting sun has cast the broad shadow of the foliage across the ground, and under its protection, arms akimbo, his face turned to the sky, a soldier is resting.

He has been resting for...three months.

He died during the attack of July 18.  The butt of his Mannlicher rifle had been cracked, his cartridge belt and cap tossed to one side, and his uniform was in tatters.  All this pointed to the fact that he had died in hand-to-hand combat against a powerful adversary.  He had fallen, most certainly, from a blow to his forehead, which had left a black scar.  And when the other dead had been buried, days later, he had not been noticed.  He did not share, therefore, the common grave, less than three feet deep, into which, together in one last formation, his comrades fallen in battle had been buried.  The fate that had taken him away from his abandoned home had given him one last concession: It had spared him the gloomy closeness of the repugnant ditch.  It had left him lying there for three months, arms outspread and face to the sky with its burning suns and its pale moons, its gleaming stars....

And he was intact.  He had only withered.  He was mummified, his facial features preserved in such a way as to suggest a weary warrior getting his strength back with a bit of sleep in the shade of that beneficent tree.  No worm, that most common of tragic analysts, had damaged his tissues.  He was being returned to life's whirl without any repugnant decomposition, imperceptibly flushed out.  He was a sort of apparatus that was showing in an absolute but suggestive way the extreme dryness of the air" (Backlands: The Canudos Campaign [translated by Elizabeth Lowe], pp. 28-29).