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!
