The collection of critical essays “Torto Arado” em Dez Dobras [“Torto Arado” in Ten Folds] will be released in 2023 in Brazil by Mercado de Letras. The anthology, organized by Francisco Neto Pereira Pinto, Rosemere Ferreira da Silva, Naiane Vieira dos Reis Silva, and Luiza Helena Oliveira da Silva, is divided into four sections entitled: “Color, Representation and Power Relations”; “Criticism and Literary Analysis, Gender, Ancestry and Struggle for the Land”; and “Religiosities,” with the collaboration of authors in order of appearance: Rosemere Ferreira da Silva, Fernanda Felisberto, Benedito Antunes, Rauer Ribeiro Rodrigues, Hércules Tolêdo Corrêa, Ester Denise Tavares Lourenço and Elizabete Barros de Sousa Lima, Florentina da Silva Souza, Naiane Vieira dos Reis and Francisco Neto Pereira Pinto, Luiza Helena Oliveira da Silva, Walace Rodrigues, and Priscila Araújo Fraga Castro.
The indicated sections cover the ways in which the grouping of texts was thought out and, consequently, dialogue with each other, which should suggest to readers that some of the main aspects inserted in the work can be analyzed and discussed from different points of view. It is possible to point out that each author in the collection took an analytical approach present in the specificity of the approaches developed, bringing to the anthology a critical versatility committed to broadening the perspectives to other interpretations of the novel Torto Arado, on which the essays are based.
The essays gathered in the anthology aim to discuss aspects of the novel written by Itamar Vieira Junior, published in Brazil in 2019 by the publisher Todavia. Torto Arado is winner of the Leya, Jabuti, and Oceanos Awards. Assertively, the authors listed what they consider fundamentally important in the context of reading the work to elaborate the body of literary criticism according to the themes: the denial of Black existence, white people and whiteness, the invisibility of the subject, social and racial, the identity character in the textual plot, the differences between common readers and critical readers, domestic violence and harassment experienced by female characters in the novel, the connection between memory and ancestry, the feminine in the struggle for territory, the power of religious practices, and jarê in the family practices of Afro-descendant communities.
In the presentation of the collection, each theme is described from the perspective of the critical approach of the texts. In the Brazilian literary scene, Torto Arado has become almost obligatory reading for readers willing to get to know Brazil and Brazilian social history better. The following excerpt shows how the editors pronounce, at the opening of the presentation of the collection entitled “Critique of the fractures of a deep Brazil in Torto Arado,” in relation to the book project:
O projeto do livro “Torto Arado” em Dez Dobras começou com o nosso interesse em dedicar-nos à tarefa interpretativa de um romance que, desde seu lançamento, alcançava uma avassaladora adesão por parte de leitores no mercado editorial nacional. Torto Arado, obra à qual fazemos referência, corresponde a muito mais do que números de venda. É um livro que propõe uma “interpretação” para o Brasil profundo, ainda distante da realidade de muitos de seus cidadãos, alheios a sua história, a orientações de ordem econômica, política e ideológica que definiram os rumos de um país desigual.
[The project for the book “Torto Arado” in Ten Folds began with our interest in dedicating ourselves to the task of interpreting a novel that, since its launch, had achieved overwhelming adherence by readers in the national publishing market. Torto Arado, the work to which we refer, corresponds to much more than sales figures. It is a book that proposes an “interpretation” for the profound Brazil, still far from the reality of many of its citizens, alien to its history, to economic, political, and ideological guidelines that defined the course of an unequal country.]
The foreword to the collection, entitled “A Broken Plow and the Power of Wet Soil,” written by Lewis R. Gordon, shows the paradox of human existence in relation to the commitment to life, highlighting the ancient African feminine powers of sky and water and their transformation into earth and soil, through which is manifested the deep roots of colonization in agriculture. In a poetic way, Gordon recalls the cradle of humanity in the meeting of water, earth, and sky represented by the goddess Nut and the god Geb in West Africa and by the patriarchy of the god Ouranus in relation to the goddess Gaia in the north of the Mediterranean, where submission of woman was chaotically distorted. The preface is provocative in the sense of guiding the reader to realize the invisibility and rejection of human beings in the field of critical reflection on the Euromodern world based on the story of the sisters Bibiana and Belonísia.
Gordon goes further in highlighting how the work shows how the agrarian elements of “colonization” maintain themselves through exploitation, condemning, dividing, and racializing, above all, women. The condemnation of living in a dry land and without its possession seems twofold. The damned are those who fight so that the earth does not perish in its scarcity. On earth, one does not want to be invisible or rejected. The lives of Bibiana and Belonísia are not only symbolic. These are lives that also represent the strength of the feminine that communicates a Black existential and literary thought through dignity and freedom. Gordon uses the meanings of the myth of the “warrior twins” to explain the symbiosis between the two sisters in the narrative. The ten folds announced in the collection of critical essays, according to Gordon, refer to what he calls the “structural doubling of the same/difference.”
Torto Arado deals with the story of a quilombo community on the fictional Água Negra farm, set in Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, Brazil, where the family of sisters Bibiana and Belonísia lives. The community has a memory of deep ancestral relationship represented through the experiences of the characters Zeca Chapéu Grande and Donana intertwined in the narrative. In Água Negra, the quilombo community, even after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, collectively struggles against the state of permanent oppression that still exists in the region today. Domination comes from the still strong colonial relationship of the oppressors, those who consider themselves to be owners of the land, over the oppressed, those who work the land, in relation to the indelible and deleterious marks of slavery.
The novel makes a scathing critique of the identity ties that define the characters in their form of representation with their surroundings, specifically in relation to the figure of the colonizer. Each character is marked by characteristics that seek to interrogate the reality they experience throughout the narrative, one totally distant from the fundamental questioning of what it is to be human among the visible and invisible characters in the narrative.
Torto Arado reveals the portrait of a Brazil trapped by colonialism and the way in which social and racial relations are explored between quilombola characters and those who secure power through land ownership. Land ownership is configured in the dispute for survival, on the one hand, between the families living in the quilombo, and on the other, within the nucleus that carries with it the ills of colonial exploitation.
“Torto Arado” em Dez Dobras expands the discussions toward the critique of power relations in the novel, showing how each theme selected by the authors opens the possibilities of reading and interpreting the work in the concerning the Brazilian social and racial reality. The idea of an anthology brings with it the insertion and analysis of the fictional text as a relevant element in the field of literary criticism in its due approximations with philosophy, sociology, and history.
Among the various aspects to be addressed in the fictional text, the core of Torto Arado’s narrative, which also appears strongly in the essays of the critical anthology, is the symbiosis between Bibiana and Belonísia. Taking as a starting point the lives of the two sisters, almost represented in the life of a single character, the story is told from a totally female point of view. The work is polyphonic but marked by the narrative of two sisters, one enchanted. Female voices express collective and troubled memories of racial, social, and gender inequalities. The feminine runs through the middle of the novel, connecting with the stories of the other characters in their conflicts and conciliations.
To tell the story of Bibiana and Belonísia and the community in which they live, one must first understand how these characters are situated in the line of their ancestors. Ancestry is understood as the link of responsibility and commitment to be born and live in the quilombo land with the certainty of preserving its traditions, following the principle of dealing with nature over the effects of human nature. The sisters, therefore, carry the intentions between two worlds: the ancestral world, commanded by the strength of the memories of the stories of those who lived there before, and the real world, in which they are inserted in the struggle for existence and dignity of life.
Bibiana and Belonísia are the protagonists and the outstanding voices in the announcement of the non-submission of the feminine in the hegemonic and patriarchal context left by colonial violence in the lands of the Brazilian Northeast. Both are hit by an accident with grandmother Donana’s knife. The knife, as a cutting and magical object, divides the destiny of the characters. Both have their tongue cut out. Bibiana recovers her speech, and Belonísia, hit hard, falls silent, creating a certain dependency on her sister to communicate. “The cutting edge” represents the divider of responsibility in the ancestral line of the two characters. Bibiana is the one who ventures into the narrative to discover a world outside the quilombo. Belonísia is the one that stays, almost like a protective entity of the Água Negra community.
But what exactly does the story of Bibiana and Belonísia want to tell us about the human condition of Black existence? The story of the two sisters shows the dynamics of the local community of Água Negra against exploitation and colonial domination. Those who live in Água Negra do not live in a forgotten land, they live in a quilombo land. During the colonial period in Brazil, the quilombo land, represented by Palmares, sheltered the fugitives from slavery, different people, but with the same desires for freedom. Africans, African descendants, indigenous peoples, and abolitionists lived together and built the idea of a state of union with differences, where they could be free. In the quilombo lands, the mixture of coexistence between different people was forged and raised to the level of resistance. The people of the quilombo—that is, the quilombolas—carry within themselves the strength of Black existence and the strength of resistance in the face of the atrocities of slavery.
For historian Beatriz Nascimento (2018), quilombo represents the idea of a historical continuum that exists through the dynamics of cultural exchanges between Africa and Brazil. According to Nascimento, quilombo is the physical territory of refuge and preservation of memory, of resignifications of the Afro-diasporic and psychic context, of self-care of life, through which the African and indigenous heritage lives on in Brazilian lands. The quilombo, more than the representation of the place of escape of enslaved Africans and indigenous people in Brazil, is the place where different cultures came together in the struggle for justice and freedom. This struggle is based on ancestral memory, on the denunciation and confrontation of ethnocentrism and the affirmation of human life.
The quilombola community in Água Negra represented in the novel lives in conditions analogous to slavery in the contemporary period. The story portrayed in the present time takes readers back to a thread of the past that is totally exploitative and negates the humanity of Afro-Brazilians. Amidst the many conflicts with the “owners of the land,” brought up in the update of the narrative, the community fights for what it considers to be rightfully its own. On the land, there are marks of the ancestral trajectory that reflect the knowledge of those who lived there before and the clashes they had against colonial domination. Água Negra is not only past, but also not only present. The present in the lands of Água Negra, in its connection with the past, is decisive for the continuum of the community.
The earth is the element of continuity of life in Água Negra. Everything springs from the earth and on the earth the characters have their stories marked in the fight against colonialist practices fueled by the pain of the oppressed. The mission left by the ancestors to the people of Água Negra is in the commitment to freedom, fertilized in the intrinsic relationship of the characters with the legitimate state of rejection of oppression. In the relationship between dominator and dominated, the effects of oppression exercised by a dominant culture that violently tries to eliminate the existential condition of black identity in Água Negra are evident.
What would Frantz Fanon say about “the damned of the earth” in Água Negra, paraphrasing the author himself about those who are damned? Fanon argues that the compartmentalization of the colonial world divides the world of the colonized in two. “The colonial world is a Manichaean world,” Fanon would answer (2005). In the division of what seems to have only two sides, the violence of the colonial world destroyed indigenous societies and the forms of reference to the human condition in relation to African societies. When analyzing the condition of the colonial world, Fanon clearly focuses on tensions of politics, society, and the individual, demonstrating to exemplary effect the dominant power over the subjects.
In the white, brutal, and totally racist logic, the dehumanization of the colonized is the result of the Manichaeism of the European colonizer. Fanon argues vehemently about the importance of building a new thought, starting from a new world, where the “damned of the earth” are the inventors of their own lives. Água Negra is the quilombo that reinvents itself in the strength of ancestry and towards the new directions of a people who see in the community the way to challenge the political responsibility implied in the existence of the human being, emerging for a world not objectified by anger, pain, and madness of the colonizer.
The quilombo of Água Negra is a clear example of transition from the supremacy of the colonial world to a world that strategically gropes forward, making the colonized way of life and thinking prevail. The Black existential condition unites lives in the quilombo community in Água Negra through the identity bond, as indicated by the following excerpt from the novel about Zeca Chapéu Grande’s relationship with the land narrated by his daughter Bibiana:
... Meu pai olhava para mim e dizia: “O vento não sopra, ele é a própria viração”, e tudo aquilo fazia sentido. “Se o ar não se movimenta, não tem vento, se a gente não se movimenta, não tem vida”, ele tentava me ensinar. Atento ao movimento dos animais, dos insetos, das plantas, alumbrava meu horizonte quando me fazia sentir no corpo as lições que a natureza havia lhe dado. Meu pai não tinha letra, nem matemática, mas conhecia as fases da lua. Sabia que na lua cheia se planta quase tudo; que mandioca, banana e frutas gostam de plantio na lua nova, que na lua minguante não se planta nada só se faz capina e coivara. Sabia que para um pé crescer forte tinha que se fazer a limpeza todos os dias, para que não surgisse praga. Precisava apurar ao redor do caule de qualquer planta, fazendo montículos de terra. Precisava aguar da mesma forma, para que crescesse forte. Meu pai, quando encontrava um problema na roça, se deitava sobre a terra com o ouvido voltado para o seu interior, para decidir o que usar, o que fazer, onde avançar, onde recuar. Como um médico a procura do coração. (Vieira Junior, 2019 p.100)
[... My father would look at me and say: “The wind doesn't blow, it is the breeze itself,” and it all made sense. “If the air doesn't move, there's no wind, if we don't move, there's no life,” he tried to teach me. Attentive to the movement of animals, insects, plants, it illuminated my horizon when it made me feel in my body the lessons that nature had given it. My father had no literacy or mathematics, but he knew the phases of the moon. He knew that in the full moon almost everything is planted; that cassava, bananas and fruits like to be planted on the new moon, that on the waning moon nothing is planted, only capina and coivara [cutting and uprooting weeds] is done. He knew that for a foot to grow strong, it had to be cleaned every day, so that the plague did not appear. He needed to clear around the stem of any plant, making mounds of earth. It needed to be watered in the same way, so that it would grow strong. My father, when he found a problem in the fields, would lie down on the ground with his ear turned inwards, to decide what to use, what to do, where to advance, where to retreat. Like a doctor looking for the heart]. (Vieira Junior, 2019 p.100)
For the colonized, Fanon (2005) would say, “the most essential value, because it is the most concrete, is first the land: the land that must guarantee bread and, of course, dignity.” Fanon warns that the dignity he refers to is not that of the “human person.” The colonized have never heard of the humanity of the human person. For Fanon, in his own land, the colonized experienced imprisonment, beatings, and hunger. What is intended in Água Negra is to prevent violence against humans from continuing and that the questioning of human existence is perpetuated in the political relationship of society with the subjects, as advocated by Fanon.
The people of Água Negra know that the struggle impelled in favor of liberation is against the arrogance of colonialism in its attempt to dominate and hierarchize the human person in non-western societies. The land in Água Negra, in its deepest degree of fertilization of plant and animal life, is the place where human genesis takes root and multiplies. There is no way to escape the meaning of work on the land for those who cultivate it. Indigenous peoples know, and have repeatedly stated, that the earth is the mother, the genitrix, the one that protects the unfortunate from the misfortunes. In Água Negra, the meaning of life of the quilombo community is planted under ancestral protection.
In Torto Arado, a non-fiction story is fictionalized about the unequal reality present in the contemporary Brazilian social context, which has its ills in colonialism. “Torto Arado” em Dez Dobras questions, among the topics addressed, the permanence of the colonial past and the founding marks of slavery in the formation of society and the Brazilian state. Undoubtedly, to exist in Água Negra is to fight for the emancipation of the exploitation of servitude in the latifundia in a world still full of contradictions and injustices.
References
Fanon, F. 2005. Os condenados da terra. Tradução Enilce Albergaria Rocha, Lucy Magalhães. Juiz de Fora: Ed. UFJF.
UCPA, União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas. editors. 2018. Beatriz Nascimento, Quiolombola e intellectual: possiblidade nos dias da destruição. São Paulo: Editora Filhos da África.
Vieira Junior, I. 2019. Torto arado. São Paulo: Todavia.
Rosemere Ferreira da Silva
Dr. Rosemere Ferreira da Silva is is Titular Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia / UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. Dr. Da Silva is author of the forthcoming Black Intellectual Experiences: Fourteen Conversations and is a Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs, where she is part of the editorial team of Black Issues in Philosophy and the research group Philosophy and Global Affairs, which is a joint project with the Philosophy Department and UCONN’s Global Affairs. She is a specialist in Brazilian Literature, Afro-Brazilian Literature, Comparative Literature and Ethnic and African Studies. Her research focuses on Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean Literature. She is the coordinator of Literatura and Afrodescendência research group at UNEB.
