Questões Militares

Read Your Way Through Salvador 

By Itamar Vieira Junior and translated by Johnny Lorenz. July 19, 2023.

I was born in Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and lived in the general vicinity until I reached the age of 15. But it was when I left that I really came to know my city. How was I able to discover more about my birthplace while traveling far from home? It might sound rather clichéd but, I assure you, literature made this possible: It took me on a journey, long and profound, back home, enveloping me in words and imagination. 

To understand the formation of our unique society and, consequently, the cityscape of Salvador, one should read, before anything else, “The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom and Islam in the Black Atlantic,” by João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Marcus J.M. de Carvalho. Rufino was an alufá, or Muslim spiritual leader, born in the Oyo empire in present-day Nigeria and enslaved during his adolescence. “The Story of Rufino” is an epic tale, encapsulating the life of one man in search of freedom as well as the history of the development of Salvador itself, a place inextricably linked with the diaspora across the Black Atlantic. Another book for which I have deep affection is “The City of Women,” by the American anthropologist Ruth Landes. It offers an intriguing perspective, focusing on matriarchal power in candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian sacred practice, and revealing how the social organization of its spiritual communities reverberates across the city.

If you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador, these two books, both by Amado, are indispensable: “Captains of the Sands” and “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.” The first is a coming-of-age story in which we follow a group of children and adolescents living on the streets and on the beaches around the Bay of All Saints. Written more than 80 years ago, the book was banned and even burned in the public square during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in the first half of the 20th century. As a portrait of Salvador, it is still relevant and reveals our deep inequalities. “Dona Flor and her Two Husbands” is one of Amado’s most popular novels, translated into more than 30 languages and adapted many times for theater, cinema, and television. The book is a kind of manifesto for a woman’s liberation. Dona Flor possesses great culinary talent, and oppressed by a patriarchal society, finds herself divided between two men, one being her deceased husband. While the novel captures the daily life of the city in the 1940s, it is also a wonderful guide to the cuisine of Salvador, with its African and Portuguese influences.

I invite readers to travel into the interior of Bahia, many hours by car from Salvador to the region known as the Sertão, whose name translates loosely to “backwoods.” Two books can also transport you there, and they are sides of the same story: “Backlands: The Canudos Campaign,” by Euclides da Cunha, and “The War of the End of the World,” by Mario Vargas Llosa. 

“Backlands” is one of the most important works in the history of Brazilian literature. It is a journalistic telling that introduces us not only to the brutal War of Canudos, but also to the intriguing landscape of the Sertão, a place so full of contradictions. In his writing of the conflict, da Cunha tells the story of the genesis of the tough sertanejo: a mythic, cowboyesque figure of the drought-stricken, lawless interior. “The War of the End of the World” is an essential epic that amplifies the narrative of “Backlands,” bringing a more imaginative, creative aspect to the story of Antônio Conselheiro, the spiritual leader of a rebellion, and of the multitude that followed him to their deaths.

[Fonte: “Read Your Way Through Salvador”. In: The New York Times, 19/07/2023,<http://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/books/salvador-bahia-brazil-books.html> . Adaptado. Data de acesso: 01/09/2023.]

      “It’s a very nice book and very lively, but in the section on ‘Processes’ for example all the exercises are about unusual things for our country. We are a hot country and also have many Muslims. The exercises are about snow, ice, cold mornings, and making wine. I can tell you I can’t do making wine and smoking pot in my country!” (Experienced school teacher from the Ivory Coast, Africa)

      “Previous materials were not based on life in Brazil which is why I don’t think they worked very well …” (Brazilian teacher of English in school)

      “Sir … what is opera?” (Iraqi student in mixed nationality class using materials designed to practise reading narrative)

     The implications of these three quotations are not simply linguistic; rather, they address the problem of appropriate contextual realisation for materials. For the teacher in the Ivory Coast, the materials offered would be outside the cultural experience of his students (possibly even threatening) and thus effectively useless; conversely, for the Brazilian teacher, the choice of Brazilian settings and familiar mores would have clear advantages over distant foreign contexts as they are essentially more motivating. The quote from the Iraqi student suggests that complete unfamiliarity with the notion of opera may reduce the efficacy of the reading exercises, but in this case the student is curious and likely to regard the material as exotic rather than merely alien.

        Many assumptions of a communicative orientation towards language teaching need questioning in a global context. Ozóg (1989) discusses the idea of the ‘information gap’, which is supposed to induce students to speak. ‘Are we as Europeans’, he asks, ‘not making a cultural assumption that speakers the world over are uneasy in silence and that they have an overwhelming desire to fill gaps which occur in natural discourse?’ (p.399). Silence is a salient feature of conversation in the Malay world, he points out, a feature that has also been noted in Japan and a number of other cultures.

       Indeed, the whole question of requiring others to speak needs to be questioned in terms of both cultural and gender differences. The point here is not to exoticize some notion of cultural difference, but rather to suggest that language is a cultural practice, that both language and thinking about language are always located in very particular social, cultural and political contexts. How language (including silence, paralanguage, and so on) is used, therefore, differs extensively from one context to another, and thus any approach to language teaching based on one particular view of language may be completely inapplicable in another context. If particular language teaching practices (advertised and exported as the best, newest and most scientific) support certain views of language, then such practices clearly present a particular cultural politics and make the English language classroom a site of struggle over different ways of thinking about and dealing with language.