welcome back to the deep dive today we are setting
the coordinates for somewhere hot somewhere humid
and uh somewhere incredibly complex we are going
to brazil and not just the brazil of postcards
we are going to the brazil of the soul right
we're looking at a figure who is well he's a
paradox wrapped in a riddle seasoned with i don't
know Cilantro and dende oil. That's a very Bahian
way to put it. We're talking about a man who
started his career documenting the most brutal,
violent, muddy realities of cocoa plantations.
And somehow he ended up being the guy who defined
the smiling celebration of an entire nation.
It's a massive ideological and literary journey.
We are talking about Jorge Amado. And to simply
call him a writer feels like a drastic undersell.
Oh, completely. He's the giant of Brazilian modernism.
A giant. I was looking at the stats before we
started recording and they are just staggering.
They really are. His work has been translated
into what, 49 languages? 49 languages, yeah.
He's published in 55 countries. It's unbelievable.
If you, listening right now, have a mental image
of Brazil, that specific smell of cloves, The
taste of cinnamon, the heat of Bahia, the complex,
beautiful mix of cultures. There is a very, very
good chance that image was planted in your head
by Jorge Amado. Precisely. He is the lens through
which much of the world learned to see Brazil.
But what makes this deep dive so fascinating
to me isn't just his success. No. It's the tension.
At the absolute center of his life. Because today,
you know, we think of Amato as this grandfatherly
storyteller. Yeah, the guy who wrote these colorful,
sensuous books like Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon,
the cozy national treasure. Exactly. The cozy
national treasure. But if you dig into the sources,
if you go back to the beginning, you find a man
who was a fierce communist militant. A militant
who was exiled. A man whose books were publicly
burned in a city square. By the military police,
no less. Right. And yet this same man ends up
winning the French Legion of Honor. He's getting
multiple Nobel Prize nominations. And he becomes
this beloved icon who collects toy frogs. The
frogs. We have to talk about the frogs later.
We absolutely have to. So that's our mission
today. We want to figure out how he pulled off
this magic trick. Yeah. How do you go from being
a dangerous enemy of the state to being the smiling
voice of the country? How do you reconcile the
violent lands with the celebration? It is the
central question of his legacy. Yeah. And to
understand it, we can't start with fame. We can't
start with Gabriela. We have to start with the
mud. You've got to go back. We have to go to
the source of the violence. Okay, let's do it.
Let's unpack his roots. So Jorge Amado was born
on August 10th, 1912. The location is a farm
in a place called Ferradas near the city of Itabuna
in the state of Bahia. So paint the picture for
us. When we say Bahia in 1912, what are we looking
at? Well, today we think of Bahia as, you know,
the vibrant center of Afro -Brazilian culture,
music, tourism. But the specific region where
Amado was born, the cocoa growing region, was
something else entirely. It was the Wild West.
Literally, like gunslingers and everything. Culturally
and violently, yes. This is the era of the violent
land, which, of course, later became the title
of one of his most famous books. It was a rush
economy. Oh. Think of the gold rush, but instead
of gold, it's cocoa. And instead of the dry California
hills, it's the dense, sweltering Atlantic rainforest.
It's muddy. It's hot. It's brutal. And where
there's a resource rush, there are usually guns.
Exactly. The region was controlled by Coronese
colonels. Now, don't let the title fool you.
These weren't necessarily military men. Right.
It's more like a land baron or a warlord. Precisely.
They were powerful, wealthy landowners who commanded
private militias. They were the law. They control
the politics, the police, and all the land through
just, through brute force. So Amado is born into
this environment, but he's not born a peasant,
right? His father, João Amado de Faria, was a
landowner himself. Correct. And that's a crucial
detail. Jorge was born on the side of power.
He was the son of a fazendeiro, a farm owner,
a coronel in a sense. But, and this is the key
to his entire psychology, he wasn't shielded
from the horror of it. He saw it firsthand. He
saw it. The sources are very specific here. They
mention that even as a child, he witnessed misery
and people living in almost enslaved conditions.
Almost enslaved. That phrase is so heavy. You
have to remember slavery in Brazil was only abolished
in 1888. Just 24 years before he was born. I
mean, that's a single generation. The structures
of slavery, the economic dependence, the brutality,
the absolute lack of rights were still fully
intact on these plantations. It was serfdom,
basically. So he's a little boy looking out the
window of the big house and he's seeing the workers
in the mud. He's seeing the violence used to
maintain his own family's lifestyle. Can you
imagine what that does to a child's mind? It
creates a fissure in his identity. You often
hear about writers who discover social justice
in like a university classroom, right? Yeah,
they read a book and get angry. Right, they read
a theory. For Amato, it wasn't theoretical. It
was visceral. It was right there in the dirt.
It was the air he breathed. He didn't need to
read Marx to know that the system was fundamentally
unfair. He just had to look outside. Precisely.
Those childhood observations planted the seeds.
You cannot understand his later political militancy,
his joining the Communist Party, without understanding
that he saw the human cost of that cocoa wealth
from day one. It's the foundation. It formed
the bedrock of the social realism. that defined
his entire early career. He wasn't making up
stories about the poor. He was reporting on what
he saw. Now, he didn't stay on that farm forever.
And the reason for the family's move is, well.
It's intense. It feels almost biblical. A plague.
A smallpox epidemic. Yes. When he was just one
year old, a massive smallpox epidemic swept through
the region. It was devastating. The family was
forced to flee the farm and move to the coastal
city of Ilgeas to escape it. And Ilgeas becomes
his home base, right, for the rest of his life.
He considers himself a citizen of that city.
He does. Ilgeas is central to his identity and,
of course, to many of his novels, like Gabriela.
Yeah. but he didn't stay there for his education.
No, he was sent to the big city, Salvador, the
capital of Bahia. And this is where we start
to see that this wasn't a normal kid. I mean,
looking at the timeline, he seems incredibly
precocious. Precocious is putting it mildly.
By the time he's attending high school in Salvador,
he's what, 14? 14 years old. At 14, I was trying
to figure out how to... you know, ride a bike
without falling over. Exactly. He was already
deeply embedded in the literary scene. He was
helping found something called the Rebels Academy.
The Rebels Academy. It's such a perfect romantic
name for a group of young modernists, isn't it?
It really is. It shows that he was already looking
to shake things up. He wasn't interested in the
status quo or the dusty old academics. He wanted
to create a literature that reflected the Brazil
he knew, the messy, real, mixed -race Brazil.
And he didn't wait around for permission to start
publishing. No. He published his first novel,
The Country of Carnival, in 1931. He was only
18 years old. 18. That is just... Okay. It's
wild. And just two years later, in 1933, he publishes
Kecko Coco. That second novel really increased
his popularity because it went right back to
those roots we talked about. It was a raw, unflinching
look at the lives of the plantation workers.
And his personal life was moving just as fast.
The sources say he married his first wife. Matilda
Garcia Rosa, and had his first daughter, Lila,
that same year. So by the time he's 21, he's
a best -selling author, a husband, a father,
and a literary rebel. It's a lifetime of experience
packed into just a few years. But there was technically
a plan B, right? He was in Rio de Janeiro to
study something a bit more traditional. Right,
the classic parental expectation, law school.
Of course. He attended the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law, but... And
that's a classic Amado detail. He never actually
became a practicing lawyer. The law degree was
just a backdrop, a cover. It was a prop, a good
excuse. It got him to Rio, which was the political
and cultural capital of Brazil at the time. But
his real job, his true calling, was activism
and writing. And this is where we get into the
militant writer phase of his life, because you
have to remember the political context of Brazil
in the 1930s. It's everything. You can't separate
his work from the politics of the era. This is
the era of Getúlio Vargas. Correct. The Vargas
regime. And let's just say Vargas was a complex
figure, a populist dictator. A nationalist. Very
much so. And he had absolutely no patience for
leftist agitators. Amato's activities, his writing,
his associations, they put him directly in the
crosshairs of the dictatorship. And when we say
crosshairs, we aren't speaking metaphorically.
He was arrested for the first time in 1935. He
was for his political activities. But then comes
1937. This is a moment that I think defines a
generation of writers under authoritarianism.
It's the moment of the book burning. I always
stop cold when I read about book burnings. It
feels so archaic, like something from the Middle
Ages. But this was the 20th century. Imagine
being 25 years old. You've poured your soul into
these novels about the poor, about the struggles
of your region. And the government piles them
up in a public square in Salvador, your city,
and sets them on fire. 808 copies of his books
were burned by the military police. It's an act
of symbolic violence. It's an attempt to erase
the ideas. But as history shows us time and time
again, book burnings often have the opposite
effect. They backfire. Massively. They validate
the author. How so? Well, they send a message.
They say, this person is dangerous. This person
has power. We're afraid of what this person is
writing. By burning the books, the Vargas regime
was admitting that Jorge Amado was a threat.
It's the ultimate bad review, but also the ultimate
compliment. In a dark way, yes. His works were
also banned in Portugal, which was under the
Salazar dictatorship. But interestingly, while
Brazil was burning his books, Europe was starting
to pay attention. Right. He published a book
called Jubyaba, and it got great reviews in France.
I read that even Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize
winner, reviewed it enthusiastically. So you
have this incredible dichotomy. At home, he is
a criminal, a subversive element whose books
are literally fuel for a bonfire. Abroad, he
is being hailed as a significant new voice in
world literature. And he wasn't just a writer
with some leftist sympathies. He was all in.
He was a card -carrying member of the Brazilian
Communist Party, the PCB, from 1932. He was a
militant. There's no other word for it. In the
early 40s, he even edited a literary supplement
for a political newspaper. But the pressure from
the government just became too much. So he had
to get out. From 1941 to 1942, he was forced
into exile. He had to go to Argentina and Uruguay
to stay safe. It's the classic James Bond writer,
life on the run, crossing borders, living out
of suitcases. But he comes back. And here's the
part that just blew my mind when I was reading
up on this. What's that? He doesn't just come
back to write. He comes back to run for office.
And he wins. He wins. In 1945, there was a brief
opening, a democratic window, after the fall
of Vargas' Estado Novo. Amato ran for the National
Constituent Assembly as a representative of the
Communist Party. As a communist. As an open communist.
And get this. He received more votes than any
other candidate in the state of Sao Paulo. That
is staggering. A communist writer getting the
most votes in the country's industrial powerhouse.
It really shows that despite the censorship,
or maybe because of it, the people loved him.
They saw him as their voice. Yeah. And his time
in office wasn't just symbolic. He actually left
a legislative legacy. He was the author of a
law that is still in effect today. What was it?
He signed a law granting freedom of religious
faith. OK, let's pause on that. You have a communist
and strictly speaking, communists are atheists.
Religion is the opium of the masses, right? That's
the classic line. So why is a communist championing
a law for religious freedom? It seems like a
total contradiction. It is a beautiful contradiction,
isn't it? But if you look closer. It makes perfect
sense for Amado. It foreshadows his entire later
career and his deep fascination with Brazilian
culture. Because Brazilian culture is religious
culture. Exactly. Specifically, the Afro -Brazilian
religions like Candomblé and Umbanda. These religions
were constantly persecuted by the police, by
the Catholic establishment. They were seen as
primitive or subversive. So he saw it as a freedom
issue. He understood that for the people he wrote
about, the working class of Bahia, their faith
was essential. It was their culture, their identity,
their resistance. You couldn't be a free person
if you weren't free to practice your religion.
So the atheist fought for the right to pray.
It's a humanist stance over a dogmatic one. He
put the people before the party line. I think
so. But his political career was cut short. That
democratic window slammed shut pretty quickly.
Yeah, it did. The Cold War was heating up. In
1947, the Communist Party was declared illegal
again in Brazil. And its members were persecuted
and arrested. Amado, as a high -profile former
deputy, was a major target he had to run. Exile
round two. And this one was longer. Went to France
first, from 1948 to 1950. Imagine that scene.
He's in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Sartre
and Picasso. He's part of the post -war intellectual
scene. But even that didn't last. No. The paranoia
of the Cold War catches up with him there, too.
He was expelled from France. He was too hot to
handle even for the French. So he went behind
the Iron Curtain. He eventually settled in Czechoslovakia
with his second wife, the writer Zelia Gatai.
They lived there from 1950 to 1952. And during
this time, he's traveling the Soviet bloc. He
goes to the Soviet Union. He even wins the Stalin
Peace Prize in 1951. Which, looking back, is
a heavy title to carry. A complicated award,
to say the least. Very heavy, especially with
what we know now about Stalin. Of course. And
while he is accepting prizes in Moscow, the CIA
is watching him. Documents released in 2016 confirmed
that he was under surveillance during this period.
They considered him a major cultural asset for
the communists in Latin America. So let's just
recap. We have Jorge Amado. International spy
target, communist deputy exile, Stalin prize
winner. It's a very serious, very intense, very
political life. If he had died then in the early
50s, he would be remembered as a political revolutionary
who wrote protest novels. Absolutely. A footnote
in the history of socialist realism. Yeah. But
he didn't die. He returned to Brazil. And then.
1954 happens. That's a great shift. When he comes
back to Brazil in 54, everything changes. He
makes a conscious decision to abandon active
political life. He steps back. He leaves the
Communist Party a year later, in 1955. He's had
enough. Why? Was he disillusioned with what he
saw in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death?
Or did he just want a right? The sources suggest
it was a mix of both. The revelations about Stalinism
certainly played a part. Primarily, I think he
wanted to dedicate himself solely to literature.
He was tired of the dogma. He was tired of having
to write books that fit a political checklist.
He wanted freedom. He wanted artistic freedom.
And the literature itself changed dramatically.
He stopped writing strict social realism, books
that are purely about the class struggle and
the misery, and he pivoted. This is the Gabriella
moment. Exactly. In 1958, he publishes Gabriella,
Clove, and Cinnamon. And it is a revelation.
It's a phenomenon. Jean -Paul Sartre, of all
people, calls it the best example of a folk novel.
It's a totally different vibe from his earlier
work. Instead of just misery and exploitation,
now we have humor. We have sensuality. We have
food. We have these incredibly strong, unforgettable
female characters. He moves toward what he called
a smiling celebration of Baha 'ian traditions.
He is still writing about the people. the poor,
the mixed race population, but he is looking
at their joy. Right. He's looking at their love
lives, their cooking, their gossip, the resilience.
This is the era that gives us Dona Flor and her
two husbands and Teresa Batista, home from the
wars. This is the Yamato the world falls in love
with. But not everyone was happy about this celebration
at first, and this story is honestly hilarious
to me. It is iconic. Gabriela is set in El Geas,
his hometown, the city he loved. But when the
book came out, the locals were scandalized. Scandalized.
Mortified. Was it the politics? Were they mad
he wasn't a communist anymore? No, no, it was
the sex. Specifically, his depiction of the sexual
customs of the town. He wasn't hiding the affairs,
the desires, the messiness of relationships.
He painted the town exactly as he saw it, warts
and all. And the local high society did not appreciate
the portrait. Not at all. The Society of 1950s
Brazil, especially in the provinces, was still
very conservative, very Catholic on the surface.
So the Cornets were okay with him writing about
cocoa prices, but not about their mistresses.
Precisely. The sources say he literally could
not enter the city of Ilhias for years because
of threats. That is wild. So he went from being
persecuted by the national government for being
a communist to being threatened by his own neighbors
for being too spicy. Essentially, yes. Locals
felt he had offended the morality of the city's
women. It really highlights this incredible tension
between a writer's job, which is to tell the
truth about human behavior, and a community's
desire to maintain a proper image. He was a political
exile, and then he was a moral exile from his
own home. But despite the local backlash, this
new style is what launched him into the stratosphere
globally. This is where he builds the Amado universe.
And at the core of that universe is the idea
of a Mestizo Brazil. Mestizo meaning mixed race.
Yes. He wasn't just writing about white settlers
or black workers in isolation. He was writing
about the mixing, the blending of races, cultures,
languages, and crucially, religions. His work
is defined by religious syncretism. That brings
us back to that contradiction we talked about
earlier, the atheist communist who fights for
religious freedom. Later in life, he received
an honorary title in Candomblé, right? He did.
He was given the honorary title of Oba de Xango.
Jungo is the orixa or deity of justice. It shows
the deep respect the religious community had
for him. Because he took their beliefs seriously.
He validated their culture and high literature.
He treated the Orixás, the gods of Candomblé,
with the same reverence, the same narrative weight
that European writers treated the Greek gods.
For him, they were real forces in the lives of
his characters. I want to run through a few of
his key works just to give our listeners a sense
of the incredible breadth here. We mentioned
the violent land. That's the cocoa struggle,
the mud and blood of his youth. Pure social realism.
A brutal, powerful book. Then we have Captains
of the Sands from 1937. Captains of the Sands
is a masterpiece of his early period. It depicts
the life of a gang of street children in Salvador.
It's heartbreaking, but it has so much heart.
It shows the solidarity among these kids who
have nothing. The book was actually banned and
burned. Of course it was. Then we have The Shift,
Donna Flor and her two husbands in 1966. Which
brings in magic realism and humor. The premise
itself is just genius. Yeah. A woman, Donna Flohr,
marries a respectable, boring pharmacist after
her wild, gambling, passionate first husband
dies. She chooses stability. She does. But she
misses the passion. She misses the chaos. So
her desire literally summons the ghost of her
first husband back. And she lives with the both
of them. One in the streets, one in the sheets,
so to speak. It's the ultimate have your pick
and eat it too fantasy. But it's also a metaphor
for Brazil, isn't it? Yeah. You need the order.
And you need the chaos. You need the respectable
pharmacist, and you need the passionate gambler.
You can't have one without the other. And then
there's Tieta in 1977, another epic focused on
a strong female protagonist returning to her
hometown, and one with a great title, The Double
Death of Quincas Waterbray. A fantastic, hilarious
exploration of mortality and humor. It's about
a respectable man who dies to his family and
becomes a bohemian drunk named Quincas Waterbray.
When he actually dies, his respectable family
tries to give him a proper burial. But his friends
have other plans. His bohemian friends steal
the corpse to take him out for one last party.
And in a way, he dies a second, much more fitting
death at sea during a storm. It sounds like Weekend
at Bernie's, but with profound literary merit.
Laughs come out. It has a bit more depth, I'd
say, but yes. What ties all these together, from
the street kids to the ghost husbands, is his
tone. He depicts a cheerful, optimistic country.
And this is so important. He doesn't ignore the
poverty. He doesn't whitewash the problem. No.
And that is the magic trick. He shows the deep
social and economic differences. He never lets
you forget the inequality. But he refuses to
strip the poor of their joy. He refuses to paint
them only as victims. That's it. They are vibrant,
complex people who love and eat and dance and
gossip and fight and scheme. I love that. He
refused to let poverty be their only defining
characteristic. He gave them agency and More
importantly, joy. Precisely. Now, we promised
some oddities, and I have been waiting patiently
to get to this. We have to talk about the frogs.
The frogs. Jorge Amado, serious literary giant,
Nobel contender, former congressman, was a frog
collector. He was a lifelong frog enthusiast.
Right. But to be clear, not live ones. He collected
frog -themed souvenirs. Like little ceramic frogs
for the garden. Ceramic wood, glass, crystal,
everything. Frogs from all over the world. Whenever
he or Zelia traveled, they'd bring one back.
He had a huge collection. If you go to his house
in Salvador today, which is a museum, you can
still see them on display in the garden and all
over the house. I just love the image of this
man who sat in the constituent assembly and debated
the future of the nation, coming home and, you
know, arranging his little toy frogs. It adds
such a human, whimsical touch. It softens that
communist, militant image significantly, doesn't
it? Completely. And the scientific community
actually recognized this passion, which is the
best part. part of the story. Oh, it's wonderful.
In 2017, a new species of frog was discovered
in Bahia. Please tell me they named it after
him. They did. It is called Philodite's amidoi.
The scientists who discovered it noted in their
paper that not only was it found in the region
he wrote about, but they knew about his collection.
So now there is a real frog hopping around the
Atlantic rainforest carrying his name. That is
better than a Nobel Prize, in my opinion. A species
is forever. Well, speaking of the Nobel Prize.
That is a sore spot for some Amato fans. He was
nominated, right. Many times. The Nobel records
are sealed for 50 years, but the released archives
show he was nominated at least seven consecutive
times from 1967 to 1973 and probably more after
that. And he never won. He never won the Nobel.
There's always speculation why maybe he was seen
as too popular, too readable. Maybe the early
communism spooked the committee. Maybe the genre
shift confused them. Who knows? However. He cleaned
up almost everywhere else. What are some of the
big ones he did win? He won the Camons Prize
in 1994, which is the most prestigious award
for the Portuguese language. Yeah. Sort of the
Booker Prize for Portuguese. He won the International
Nonino Prize in Italy. He got honorary doctorates
from universities in Israel, France, Italy, just
all over the world. And the French Legion of
Honor. Yes, awarded by President Francois Mitterrand
himself. This is the same country that expelled
him as a dangerous communist a few decades earlier.
What a turnaround. It really shows how he outlasted
his critics. The governments that once banned
him eventually had to give him medals. He also
became a fixture of the Brazilian establishment
in his later years. He occupied the 23rd chair
of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1961
until his death. A true... Immortal, as they're
called. And there's a sweet detail about that
chair. When a member of the academy dies, there
is usually a fierce competition and vote for
who takes the empty seat. Right. When Amato died
in 2001, who do you think took his place? I have
a feeling I know. His wife, Zelie Gatai. She
was elected to replace him in the academy. That
is beautiful. It kept the seat in the family.
A literary dynasty. It did. And speaking of family,
he had some other interesting connections. His
cousin was Vera Clouseau. Wait, the actress from
Diabolique? The one and only. The star of Diabolique
and The Wages of Fear. Great. Classic French
cinema. And his cousin Gilberto Amato was a well
-known politician and writer himself. Creativity
and public service really ran in the blood. So
let's look at the final chapter of his life.
He lived a long, full life. He did. He lived
to be 88. But his final years were marked by
health struggles. He suffered from diabetes and
had serious heart and lung issues. He passed
away on August 6, 2001, just four days shy of
his 89th birthday. In Salvador. Yeah. He died
in the city he loved and immortalized. And in
a fitting tribute, his ashes weren't put in a
cold mausoleum or a cemetery. No. They were spread
in the garden of his house under a mango tree.
Wow. Cementing his connection to the land he
wrote about right to the very end. Exactly. He
returned to the soil of Bahia. And the honors
kept coming even after he was gone. They did.
He received the Order of Cultural Merit posthumously.
And the Jorge Amado Foundation continues to operate
in Pilarino, the historic center of Salvador.
It's a living museum that preserves his estate
and promotes Bahian culture. It's a pilgrimage
site for readers. Absolutely. So if we look back
at this whole journey, we started with this angry
young man in the Rebels Academy fighting against
the system. Yeah. We saw him. burned in effigy,
exiled, hunted by the police. And we ended with
this smiling grandfather figure, a meritorious
citizen of freedom and social justice. It's a
remarkable arc. And I think the key takeaway
for me is that his greatest political act wasn't
his time in parliament. It wasn't the laws he
signed. I agree completely. What was it, do you
think? It was his insistence on portrayal. He
insisted on portraying the Brazilian people,
specifically the mixed race, working class people
of Bahia, as complex, valuable and above all,
capable of joy. He refused to let them be invisible.
And he refused to let them be just statistics
of misery. He didn't just want the world to pity
them. He wanted the world to love them. That
is a powerful distinction. Pity versus love.
Yeah. And in doing so, he really did define the
soul of a nation for the rest of the world. It
raises a provocative thought for us to maybe
leave with you, the listeners. We often think
you have to choose, right? You're either a serious
activist or a popular entertainer. We think social
critique has to be dry and angry and, well, violent
like his early books. But Amado did both. He
started with the violence, but he ended up with
the celebration. He did. He seduced the world
with the scent of cloves and cinnamon. And once
he had their attention, he showed them the reality
of Brazil, good and bad. So maybe effective change
doesn't always require violence in the text.
Maybe sometimes you catch more flies with honey
or in this case with muquica and carnival. Did
he achieve more by celebrating the culture than
he did by just denouncing the system? I think
he would have argued yes. He found a more powerful
and maybe more human way to tell the truth. So
do yourself a favor. Go pick up a copy of Gabriela,
Clove and Cinnamon or Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.
Step into that world. See the Brazil that Jorge
Amado built. You won't regret it. Thanks for
diving deep with us. We'll see you on the next
one.