Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides Da Cunha
A True Brazilian Story With Enduring Global Relevance
Rebellion in the Backlands is one of those books whose reputation and relevance lingers despite its failure as a read.
Small Scale Rebellion Requires Big National Response
It is the story of a rebellion in the small town of Canudos in Brazil’s Northeastern Bahia province little over a century ago that required four military campaigns and a finale of house to house, or rather shack to shack ,fighting to see the national government re-establish its authority.
It is Brazil’s Stalingrad an epic tale one with the nasty but fascinating twist that rather than fight invaders Brazilians fought each other.
Damned Hard Going
The first part of the book “The Land” is a description although over-description is a better way of putting it of the conditions in this part of Brazil as they were then. His prose style is as hard and as barren as the place he is trying to describe.
To make matters worse in section two “Man” he categorises the people, although it dwells much more on the men than the women, in the kind of terms that are racist. Like so many of his generation Da Cunha was in thrall to Social Darwinism and saw the people of this region not as victims of their harsh environment and times but as lesser and an obstruction to progress that needed to be dealt with as firmly as possible.
“He was damned to life,” Da Cunha wrote of the locals (just as we are damned to read) in what is the first good punchy line in the book. It occurs on page 92 of the Phoenix Books edition. The second incidentally occurs on page 203. The gap is noticable.
Burdened by his prose style and these attitudes Da Cunha simply fails to tell the story in an accessible way of how Antonio Conselheiro, a charismatic Catholic mystic built a renegade community that attracted the poor, desperate, just plain curious and on occasion downright criminal. Worse still Da Cunha only describes but does not explain in the depth it deserves how and why the infant Brazilian republic responded to what it saw as a challenge to its authority.
There is a great deal of how military expeditions fared and failed, usually dwelling too much on the hardships faced by the troops but the broader politics and personalities that brought armies to this point defeats him. Balancing this towards the end of the book he moves away from his earlier views and admits there was valour and skill in the tenacity of the rebels who held out for as long as they did against the eventually better-armed, trained and fed government forces.
Compare to Iraq, Afghanistan
And its relevant. As a society as stratified and divided as Brazil starts to lead more in the region and the world its history is of more, not less, importance. But it goes beyond that. With American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq contemplating sometimes uncomfortable precedents their histories and their costs is not time wasted.
Published by Phoenix Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1902 No ISBN Number in this edition but wikipedia reports it as 0-226-12444-4
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles