Mystifying the Brazilian Northeast

In his controversial polemic The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast, Albuquerque argues that the idea of the Brazilian Northeast was formulated during the twentieth century around questions about Brazil’s evolution as a nation. He makes a case that politicians, intellectuals, writers, and artists “invented” the Northeast as a region and calls upon historians to abandon the static categories of regionalism in favor of national unity. His thesis of the Northeast as an “imaginary landscape” early in the twentieth century appeared a decade ago in Latin American Perspectives (Albuquerque, 2004). Without serious consideration of the region as a space defined by power relations, his concern then as now was largely with the carving out of a region from the colonial designation of a Brazil divided geographically into North and South, partially an outcome of public policies aimed at alleviating the dire conditions emanating from droughts dating to the late nineteenth century but also attributable to a pervasive vision and discourse “provided by others who considered it only natural to live always in the same way.” His piece ended with a plea for “people to take command of their own history” and not to abide by the routine and submissiveness, the injustices, and miseries reflected in the region’s literature, art, and music. In his book he elaborates upon this obsession with the past with a strong indictment of intellectuals who celebrated traditional life and cultural influences in their defense against industrial capitalism and the modernist trends that appeared in the South of Brazil, trends that were also evident in the Northeast but that he largely ignores.

What seems to have motivated this obsession with the past? At the outset Albuquerque disparages the stereotyping of the Northeast and Northeasterners as marginalized in national cultural production and attributes a negative character to self-deprecation: “We are agents of our own oppression and discrimination. These are not imposed on us from afar; they circulate within and through us” (3). Drawing on his childhood in the Northeast and advanced education in São Paulo, he argues that “intellectuals connected in various ways to the local dominant classes were summoned to produce knowledge that would give breadth and depth and texture” and fabricate “a region in decline compared to the rest of Brazil” (220). His goal is to counter Northeastern identity and distinction and “to question the existence of these regions at all, and how they are constructed in art, mass media, popular culture, academic production.” Arguing from a perspective of both Northeasterner and Southerner he seeks to overcome the “stultifying mechanisms of domination that prevent us from seeing other possibilities, other arts, other futures” (229). For him the paradox is ”why the Northeast and nordestinos are marginalized and stereotyped in national cultural production and by the inhabitants of other areas” (2). His mission is to bring history “back into a central place” and to pursue “modernity to its ultimate consequences” (228).

The book is broken into three long chapters. The first, entitled “Geography in Ruins,” traces a shift from the traditional regionalism of the nineteenth century to the period beginning in the 1920s when European immigrants were attracted to the urbanization and industrialization of the Center-South around São Paulo and the modernism shaped by new forms of artistic and cultural production. Pointing to Euclides da Cunha’s seminal work Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), he argues that the sertanejo (a person from the dry backlands [sertão] of the Northeast) was “sort of a national hero whose essential paulista character would help assure the possibility of constructing a shared nationhood” (27). He goes on to show that in the press and culture the discourse of persistent droughts, banditry, and messianic movements shaped the imagery of “travails and misery” and the need for intervention and investment in the modernization of the Northeast “as a place whose inferiority seems ordained by environmental and racial conditions, even though it was also maintained that state investment could resolve the problems and modernize the region” (35).

The second chapter emphasizes nostalgia in a look at the influences of old colonial Brazil upon the Northeast and the challenges of end of slavery, the collapse of the sugar economy, and clan feuds for political control of towns and states in the countryside. He draws on the work of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the writers José Américo de Almeida, José Lins do Rego, and Rachel de Queiroz, and the painters Cícero Dias and Lula Cardoso Ayres to illustrate the depiction of the Northeast “as a place of past glories, of longing for the amiability of the sugar mill, of plantation elites and their almost-family slaves as well as the contrasting environmental purity and starkness of the desiccated interior” (13).

He makes much of the emergence of the Northeastern reaction to nationalist strategies defined by public works and policies aimed at mitigating extreme poverty and drought, with coastal Recife as the center of journalism and legal training for the sons of the dominant families of the region. In this milieu Gilberto Freyre emerges early on as a journalist and later sociologist and defender of regional identity in the face of “world capitalism” and “the nationalization of relations” and “centralization of power in a cohering state.” Albuquerque singles out Luís Câmara Cascudo for “idealizing the popular elements of northeastern identity” and for “collections of material referring to the precapitalist, rural, ‘authentic’ Northeast with folklore posed as a shield against the encroachments of cosmopolitan culture.” He says that the major writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, and painters “all share this vision of the Northeast and participated in its construction” (46–47) and demonstrates this assertion with examples from their work.

The third chapter shows how writers such as Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, João Cabral de Neto, and the artist Cândido Portinari linked the Northeast to the Brazilian left, beginning in the 1930s, as they “inverted” the conservative and traditionalist understanding of the Northeast into the framing of a new national society able to contain capitalism itself. Here Albuquerque blames “revolutionaries” who joined “conservatives” in their visions and voices around a “marginalized identity for the Northeast that has endured to the present day” (13). He turns from chastising Freyrean sociology for its emphasis on the traditional Northeast to criticism of “the direct influence of Marxist thought in both its politics and its artistic production,” with its “messianic appeal” and its “certainties based in the myths of science and technical progress” (131–132). He questions Marxist writers for characterizing the Northeast as a victim and a place of ruin and poverty, creating “their own mythology of the Northeast” (138), and attacks the left for its “ethnocentric vision” and for “reducing [its] analysis to economic explanations” 141). He condemns filmmaking, singling out Lima Barreto’s classic O Cangaceiro as a stereotyped image of “the bandits’ milieu, devoid of historical or social analysis” (149). He characterizes the writing of Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos as idealizing the Northeast as a victim of capitalist exploitation and a place of revolt and revolution, but he does not delve into the real challenges to domination represented, for example, during the early 1960s, by Francisco Julião’s Ligas Campesinas (Peasant Leagues) and the Movimento de Educação de Base (Base Education Movement) that successfully implemented Paulo Freire’s adult literacy program. He argues that “Brazil needs to renounce all of the continuities that we acritically receive and reproduce, above all those lodged in the terms of tradition, identity, national and regional culture, development, underdevelopment, and evolution, so that we can start to think and act differently” (228–229).

What are these continuities? First, the “pseudo unity and pseudo identity” of the Northeast, in the face of the diversity of the coasts of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Paraíba, the sertão of Ceará, and the Amazonian stretch of Maranhão (228). Yet one does find unity through the coastal mata forested lands and the interior agreste between the coast and the dry interior, through which runs the magnificent São Francisco River. Second, the timelessness of Northeastern culture and its reliance on past rather than present values as a defense against national and international influences—which, in my view, may not only preserve tradition but serve the people in their quest for a better life. Third, the depiction of a region in decline, backward and reactionary in the face of changes in the rest of Brazil, including the search for a national identity and an escape from dependency, underdevelopment, internal colonialism, and regional inequality. Fourth, the notion of the Northeast as “a machine that mass-produces texts and images.” And finally, an alleged disdain for “the real people in all their multiplicity and complexity,” with understanding of them replaced by “abstract constructions that the elites want to declare into reality” (227).

I question Albuquerque’s characterization of the Northeast as invented. In a foreword to the book James Green suggests that this approach will serve as a model for writing about other regions in Latin American countries. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Albuquerque’s strong polemical stance obscures sensitivity to a Northeast that has shaped my outlook on life and my understanding of inequality, poverty, and backwardness everywhere and challenges my thinking on and my experience of the region. He draws on a culture he knows well as a Northeasterner who teaches there, whereas my enthusiasm and love for the region arise from more limited experience. He seems to be searching for some idealistic, perhaps postmodern and unattainable outcome for the region. Understanding of the conditions he abhors must be grounded in reality and in concrete analysis, but his emphasis on culture marginalizes any serious consideration of some important contributions of social science, especially political economic understandings that he abruptly discounts. For example, he barely mentions (134) the São Paulo Marxist economic historian Caio Prado Júnior (1967), who challenged the assumptions of his Brazilian Communist Party and its old view of the Northeast, drawn from the Third International premise that backwardness was a consequence of semifeudalism not unlike what Europe had experienced long ago. Prado influenced both dissidents of the party and younger progressive scholars who turned to new understandings around capitalist dependency and underdevelopment while confronting the old ideas in the evolving Brazilian context. At the same time, his São Paulo Brasiliense publishing house printed much of this progressive work. Rather than showing how Prado helped us to understand that capitalism, not feudalism, explained backwardness in Brazil, especially in the Northeast, Albuquerque dismisses both Marxism and the left for their emphasis on class struggle and analysis of a bourgeoisie or a patriarchy as the source of villainy and disdain for the masses of impoverished people. Marxist discourse is condemned for reducing the analysis of banditry and messianism to “economic explanations” (141).

Indeed, there are no economic explanations whatsoever in Albuquerque’s approach, not even a reference to the renowned economist Celso Furtado, himself born in the Northeast and a planner who elaborated an approach for the recovery of the Northeast. Furtado (1963) not only refined Prado’s historical analysis but identified cycles of prosperity and decline, for example, the rise and collapse of the sugar industry, that led to the backwardness of the Northeast. Nor is there any mention of the Pernambucan geographer Manoel Correia de Andrade and his classic work (1964) focusing on the people and ways to overcome poverty and inequality in the Northeast.

Albuquerque is at his best in his critical look at the work of the novelists Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos. Initially rejecting Amado in his early novels for “submitting local expressions to international Marxist schemes of interpretation” (156), he welcomes Amado’s later rejection of “socialist realism” and assimilation of cordel literature as “a model of the genuine public voice” while revealing “the falsehood of bourgeois ideology”(158). Discussing the painter Cândido Portinari, whose early paintings were influenced by his childhood in rural São Paulo and whose large murals celebrated the Brazilian nation but whose “canvasses became peopled by gaunt, wrinkled wanderers” reflecting his “changing view of the Northeast, a transformation suggestive of the influence of 1930s fiction” (182), he argues that Portinari’s distorted depiction of the Northeast persists today. He illustrates with 27 of the works of the Recife painter Lula Cardoso Ayres showing “relations between people and nature and the degrading impacts of civilization they suffered.” His view that the artist “painted the past as haunted dreams that could actually scare the inhabitants of the present” (112). Popular art influenced another Recife artist, Gilvan Samico, whose woodcuts were influenced by rural Northeast life, but Albuquerque does not mention him or the internationally recognized Recife ceramicist and sculptor Francisco Brennand. Nor is there any reference to the important naturalistic imagery of Chico da Silva and his school of artists in Fortaleza or to the art naïf or street paintings and popular images of people in urban and rural settings.

Albuquerque also overlooks the influence of Northeast politicians upon national life, conspicuous examples being Luiza Erundina de Sousa, originally from João Pessoa, who served as mayor of São Paulo (1989–1993) and as a federal deputy, and Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a labor leader and a founder of the Partido dos Trabalhadores and president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011. During my years in the Northeast I came to know most of these intellectuals. I was influenced by their sensitivity to the backwardness impacting the mass of peoples in all parts of the Northeast. I did not necessarily agree with them; indeed, I criticized Freyre’s thesis of Lusotropicology as political nonsense supportive of Portuguese propaganda under the Salazar dictatorship in its imperial outreach, alongside the claim of racial harmony in its colonies. I also learned from the poets and troubadours who roamed the primitive markets of the Northeast, singing their verses mostly about love and romance but also alluding to problems and popular movements of protest and resistance in the countryside. By 1960 Brazilian historians had largely ignored these movements, thereby obscuring the history of traditional rural life in the Northeast. While Albuquerque’s argument draws on the work of these intellectuals, he berates them throughout for their defense of traditional society and their resistance to emerging bourgeois society in the face of a crumbling patriarchy.