Captains of the Sand     by Jorge Amado, Translated by Gregory Rabassa Original title: Capitães de Areia Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Avon Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 248 pages Not available for ordering

Captains of the Sand is a fine book from Amado’s early more politically and socially focused period of work and was first published in Brazil in 1937. Seventy-odd years later it becomes a book with a new relevance — as a lively portrait of a gang of ‘street children’, now seen as a rising social problem in Latin America’s cities. It is clear from Amado’s sympathetic and well-thought out narrative that this is not a new problem: children were already detaching themselves from, or being abandoned by, fractured families existing in such precariousness that even minimal care for children was impossible.

Although there is a documentary intent in Captains of the Sand its romantic title already suggests that Amado wanted to create a lyrical, ‘legendary’ form for his story of a group of abandoned, mainly Black, children in Salvador da Bahia in North-Eastern Brazil. Amado’s legend is linked in with the legendary bandit Lampião, a backlands Robin Hood, reminding us that fashionable ‘Afro’ Bahia has, like Brazil in general, a large hinterland of maltreated peasants and labourers, whose heroes have often been ‘social bandits’ like Lampião.

The boys of the ‘Captains of the Sand’ gang, so-called because they live on the silted-up waterfront where sailing ships used to dock, are described with lyricism: although the victims of political and economic harshness Amado encloses them within the (culturally) rich world of Afro-Bahia. Especially at the time of writing this celebration of Black and ‘syncretic’ (i.e. the mixing of European, Indian and African religious and cultural elements as practised in Brazil) culture was scandalous: below the surface the book seethes with its black priestess mãe-de-santo, the Yoruba Gods Xangô and Ogun and the Sea-Goddess Iemanjá. Apart though from letting us in on something of the famous candomblé syncretic religion of Bahia, Amado stresses that this little gang of thieves are children, with tender, wounded hearts, who have been forced into crime and not the squad of delinquents and monsters that the police, newspapers and establishment see them as.

The format of Captains of the Sand is episodic with illustrative micro-stories within its longer narrative and Amado also uses a pastiche technique with cod newspaper articles and letters. This reflects literary experiments of the 1920s and 30s such as the work of John Dos Passos in the US. One of the best of the little narrative tracks is the story of the carousel when the captains take over a battered merry-go-round. Amado’s description of the children’s harsh joy in it demonstrates one of the reasons for his immense popularity in Brazil and the rest of the world; his ability to evoke and share pleasures with us, whether childish or, as often in his work, less innocent sexual ones.

The ‘Great Japanese Carrousel’ was nothing but a small native merry-go-round that arrived after a sad pilgrimage through inland towns during those winter months when the rains are long and Christmas is still far off. So faded was the paint, paint that had once been blue and red, that the blue was a dirty white now and the red was almost pink, and so many pieces were missing on certain horses and benches that Nhôzinho França decided not to set it up in any of the main squares of the city but in Itapagipe. The families there aren’t so rich, there are a lot of streets where only workers live, and poor children would appreciate the faded old carrousel... It had been beautiful once, it had even been the pride and joy of the children of Maceió in other days. At that time it stood alongside a Ferris wheel and a side-show, always on the same square, and on Sundays and holidays rich children dressed in sailor suits or like little English lords, the girls in Dutch costumes or fine silk dresses, came to claim their favourite horses, the little ones sitting on the benches with their nannies. The fathers would go on the Ferris wheel, others preferred the side-show, where they could push up against women, often touching their thighs and buttocks. Nhôzinho França’s carnival was the joy of the city in those days. 49