Rebellion in the Backlands     by Euclydes da Cunha, Translated by Samuel Putnam Original title: Os sertões Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: August 1985 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 1.17 x 8.06 x 5.36 in. ISBN: 0226124444 List Price: $21.00, £15.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £15.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $21.00 Published by Chicago, U. of Chicago Pub. Date: 1959 Not available for ordering

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Described variously as ‘our finest book’, ‘the great national epic’ and ‘the Bible of Brazilian nationality’, Rebellion in the Backlands is an extraordinary, impassioned attempt to explain one of the most traumatic events in Brazil’s modern history: the civil war that, between 1893 and 1897, pitted a self-styled rebel community of devout Christians in the Northeastern interior against the massed forces of the Republican state. The refusal of this Canudos settlement to bow to the will of what it considered to be the godless, illegitimate authority of the regional government, its resistance through four successive military campaigns against professional soldiers and modern weaponry, and its final annihilation amidst acts of barbaric cruelty, struck at the heart of the nation’s moral sense of self and unity. How, asked Euclides da Cunha, could a country aspiring to stand shoulder to shoulder with the modern, civilised nations of the twentieth century declare a war to the death on its own sons, its most ancient, founding peasant forbears?

Da Cunha, very much a product of the science-obsessed intellectual milieu of the early Republic (declared in 1889), started out with the prevailing perspective of the time, as defended by the most of the press, public and government sources: namely, that this was a legitimate struggle of the progressive, French-style Republic to suppress a reactionary, superstitiously Catholic, Monarchist-inspired revolt of savage, backward peasants under the fanatical thrall of a crazed lay-preacher, Antonio the Counsellor. By the time he published his book, in 1902, however, Da Cunha had witnessed first-hand the final stages of the conflict as a newspaper correspondent, and had seen for himself both the stoic heroism of the rebels, ‘titans’ superbly adapted to their native terrain, the semi-arid backlands or sertões, and the incomprehension and brutality of the Republican forces who, as they stepped off the train at the end of the line, seemed to be entering an alien, foreign land.

This immediate, empirical evidence strained against the ideological framework of Positivist and Social Darwinist orthodoxy with which Da Cunha had approached the war, as the inevitable sweeping aside of a degenerate, mongrel race of primitive throwbacks in the country’s march to progress. Unresolved to the very end of the book, that tension exposed dangerous contradictions deep within the psyche of the nation as a whole, whose premature and violent imposition of a ‘borrowed’ Western model of civilisation had failed to take into account the vital contribution that its oldest and most marginalised cultures — the «bedrock of the nation» — had to offer. It is a tension that also explains the peculiarly hybrid character and style of the book, combining the languages of scientific materialism, ethnography, journalism and political commentary, whose result entirely justifies its unique place within the literary canon, despite its being a work of non-fiction.

Rebellion in the Backlands amply repays the dedication it demands of its readers, in this fine, classic translation by Samuel Putnam; from the opening chapter ‘The Land’, a detailed geographical survey of the region’s landscape, through the often dated but always fascinating account of its people’s ethnic and social evolution in ‘Man’, to ‘The Rebellion’, whose dramatic unfolding leads us relentlessly to Da Cunha’s own concluding words of dismay at the ‘acts of madness and crimes’ committed by nations.

Canudos was appropriately enough surrounded by a girdle of mountains. It was a parenthesis, a hiatus. It was a vacuum. It did not exist. Once having crossed that cordon of mountains, no one sinned any more. An astounding miracle was accomplished, and time was turned backward for a number of centuries. As one came down the slopes and caught sight of the enormous bandits’ den that was huddled there, he well might imagine that some obscure and bloody drama of the Stone Age was here taking place. The setting was sufficiently suggestive. The actors, on one side and the other, Negroes, caboclos, white and yellow skinned, bore on their countenances the indelible imprint of many races — races which could be united only upon the common plane of their lower and evil instincts. A primitive animality, slowly expunged by civilization, was here being resurrected intact. The knot was being undone at last. In place of the stone hatchet and the harpoon made of bone were the sword and the rifle; but the knife was still there to recall the cutting edge of the ancient flint, and man might flourish it with nothing to fear — not even the judgement of the remote future.

But, nevertheless, for the light of a future day, let this passage stand, even though it be one marked by no brilliance, uncompromising, angry, unedifying by reason of the subject matter, brutal, violent, because it is a cry of protest, somber as the bloodstain that it reflects. 665