sectors and social activities of the country, and has received in the works of Amado a most solemn and at the same time delightful disavowal. We were not ignorant of the historic Portuguese immigration, nor, on a different scale and in different periods, of the German and Italian ones, but it was Amado who laid before our eyes how little we knew about it. The ethnic fan that cooled Brazil was much richer and more diversified than European perceptions had it, always contaminated by the selective habits of colonialism: After all, one had to include the multitude of Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, and
tutti quanti
who, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, almost right down to the present moment, left their countries of origin to turn themselves over, body and soul, to the seductions and also to the perils of the Brazilian El Dorado. And also so that Amado could open wide for them the doors of his books.
I take as an example of what I have been saying this small and delightful book, whose title,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, is capable of immediately arousing the attention of the most apathetic of readers. Here will be told, in principle, the tale of two Turks—who, as Amado says, weren’t Turks but were Arabs—Raduan Murad and Jamil Bichara, who had decided to immigrate to America for the conquest of wealth and women. It’s not long, however, before the story that seemed to promise unity subdivides into other stories, in which dozens of characters are involved—violent men, whoremasters and tipplers, women as thirsty for sex as for domestic felicity; all of this in the district of Itabuna, Bahia, precisely where Amado (a coincidence?) happens to have been born. This Brazilian picaresque is no less violent than the Iberian ones. We are in the land of paid gunmen; cacao farms that were gold mines; fights decided by the stabs of a knife; colonels who exercised a lawless power, the origins of which no one is capable of understanding; and whorehouses where the whores were fought over like the purest of wives. These people think only of fornicating, of piling up money and lovers, and of drinking bouts. They are meat for Judgment Day, for eternal condemnation. Nevertheless, all through this turbulent story of evil counsel there breathes (to the reader’s distress) a kind of innocence as natural as the wind that blows or the water that flows, as spontaneous as the grass that grows after a rainstorm. A wonder of the art of narration,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, in spite of its almost schematic brevity and apparent simplicity, deserves a place beside the great novelistic murals such as
Jubiabá
,
Tent of Miracles
, and
The Violent Land
. It is said that you can recognize a giant by his finger. Here, then, is the giant’s finger, the finger of Jorge Amado.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Preface
Roundabout the end of May 1991, I was in my house in Rio Vermelho, Bahia, when I got a phone call from Rome. The director of a public relations outfit was filling me in on a project and making me a proposition.
An important Italian official had decided to commemorate the fifth centennial of the discovery of America with the publication of a book consisting of three stories by authors from the American continent: one in English by the American Norman Mailer, one in Spanish by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and one in Portuguese by me. The project called for the book to be published in four languages: Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, three hundred thousand copies of which would be given out free to all passengers on flights between Italy and the three Americas on the various airlines between April and September 1992, the year of the fifth centennial.
The agency would acquire the rights for the texts of the three writers for a period of three years in the four languages. They asked me whether or not I might have some piece of a story tucked away somewhere of the anticipated length (they told me the
tutti quanti
who, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, almost right down to the present moment, left their countries of origin to turn themselves over, body and soul, to the seductions and also to the perils of the Brazilian El Dorado. And also so that Amado could open wide for them the doors of his books.
I take as an example of what I have been saying this small and delightful book, whose title,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, is capable of immediately arousing the attention of the most apathetic of readers. Here will be told, in principle, the tale of two Turks—who, as Amado says, weren’t Turks but were Arabs—Raduan Murad and Jamil Bichara, who had decided to immigrate to America for the conquest of wealth and women. It’s not long, however, before the story that seemed to promise unity subdivides into other stories, in which dozens of characters are involved—violent men, whoremasters and tipplers, women as thirsty for sex as for domestic felicity; all of this in the district of Itabuna, Bahia, precisely where Amado (a coincidence?) happens to have been born. This Brazilian picaresque is no less violent than the Iberian ones. We are in the land of paid gunmen; cacao farms that were gold mines; fights decided by the stabs of a knife; colonels who exercised a lawless power, the origins of which no one is capable of understanding; and whorehouses where the whores were fought over like the purest of wives. These people think only of fornicating, of piling up money and lovers, and of drinking bouts. They are meat for Judgment Day, for eternal condemnation. Nevertheless, all through this turbulent story of evil counsel there breathes (to the reader’s distress) a kind of innocence as natural as the wind that blows or the water that flows, as spontaneous as the grass that grows after a rainstorm. A wonder of the art of narration,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, in spite of its almost schematic brevity and apparent simplicity, deserves a place beside the great novelistic murals such as
Jubiabá
,
Tent of Miracles
, and
The Violent Land
. It is said that you can recognize a giant by his finger. Here, then, is the giant’s finger, the finger of Jorge Amado.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Preface
Roundabout the end of May 1991, I was in my house in Rio Vermelho, Bahia, when I got a phone call from Rome. The director of a public relations outfit was filling me in on a project and making me a proposition.
An important Italian official had decided to commemorate the fifth centennial of the discovery of America with the publication of a book consisting of three stories by authors from the American continent: one in English by the American Norman Mailer, one in Spanish by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and one in Portuguese by me. The project called for the book to be published in four languages: Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, three hundred thousand copies of which would be given out free to all passengers on flights between Italy and the three Americas on the various airlines between April and September 1992, the year of the fifth centennial.
The agency would acquire the rights for the texts of the three writers for a period of three years in the four languages. They asked me whether or not I might have some piece of a story tucked away somewhere of the anticipated length (they told me the
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