Barren Lives

by Graciliano Ramos

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in the back country of northeastern Brazil some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century; published in Portuguese (as Vidas Secas) in 1938, in English in 1965.

SYNOPSIS

A downtrodden cattleman and his family struggle to survive in a region plagued by drought and deep-rooted social injustice.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Born in the Brazilian state of Alagoas in 1892, Graciliano Ramos spent his first years in the sertão, the semiarid northeastern interior where Barren Lives takes place. One of his earliest recollections, recorded in his memoirs of youth, Infdncia (1945), is of a parched, burnt landscape seared into memory by a feeling of unquenchable thirst. The author’s later personal history informs Barren Lives’s concern with the profound social inequities of the region. Ramos wrote the novel shortly after his release from prison in 1937. Two years earlier the increasingly despotic government of Getulio Vargas unleashed a campaign of mass persecutions in response to a communist uprising. Although he was not a member of the Communist Party at the time and was never formally accused of anything, Ramos was swept up in Vargas’s repressive campaign and spent ten months in prison, experiencing the perversions brought on by an unjust dictatorial regime. The novel’s moving representation of extreme deprivation and the unequal distribution of power in Brazilian society can thus be read as a vehement indictment rooted in the author’s own intimate understanding of social and political oppression.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The other Northeast

Neither time nor place are explicitly indicated in Barren Lives. Certain details, such as the use of kerosene lamps, suggest that the events narrated take place sometime in the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. Regional terminology and a focus on particular economic activities reveal the novel’s setting to be somewhere in the northeastern cattle-raising interior. In 1937 the northeastern scholar Djacir Menezes published a book entitled The Other Northeast. As he explains in his preface, his book is not about the Northeast featured in the renowned works of his contemporaries, sociologist Gilberto Freyre and novelist José Lins do Rego. It does not concern the coastal Northeast of sugarcane plantations and African cadences—but rather the “other,” inland Northeast, of “ranch hands and corrals” and a stronger Amerindian presence (Menezes, p. 15).

When Portuguese colonizers arrived in Brazil in the sixteenth century, they founded their settlements along the coast where they soon set up prosperous sugarcane plantations. The interior held little interest for them during this early stage, and it was only in the late seventeenth century that they began full-scale exploration and colonization of the sertão. Penetration into the backlands came largely as a response to the need for more land on which to raise the cattle that provided plantations with work animals, meat, and leather. The Portuguese Crown encouraged the exploration of the interior by donating immense land grants or sesmarias to those who could prove they had sufficient assets to successfully carry out the arduous enterprise.

Unlike the plantation system, cattle-raising as practiced in the northeastern interior was not labor-intensive and thus did not require large numbers of slaves. The labor force consisted mostly of a mestizo or mixed-race population that arose through European contact with various Amerindian groups. White men, however, at times also occupied the lower rungs of sertão society, as we see in the case of Fabiano, the red-haired, blue-eyed protagonist of Barren Lives. Although they were not based primarily on African slave labor like those of the coast, the sertao’s social structures were—and still are—quite stratified.

SERTÃO

The word sertão has more than one meaning in Brazil. Kempton E. Webb describes its “open-ended connotation” well: “One definition is geographic, referring to the dry lowland interior of Northeast Brazil; the other definition means sparsely populated backlands, hinterlands … the ‘outback’ of the Australians” (Webb, p. 112). The subject of Grailiano Ramos’s novel is the specifically indicated northeastern sertão of the first definition, although the novel’s setting is, in many senses, a universal space.

Sharp distinctions were drawn between those who owned land and those who did not. The owners of the huge sesmaria properties, forer-unners of the modern large landowners or latifundistas, were at the top of the hierarchy and possessed almost unlimited authority during the early stages of colonization. Such authority was due to their isolation from the colony’s administrative centers. Although eventually the Portuguese—and after independence in 1822 the Brazilian—government attempted to rein in the power of these backlands strongmen, the early colonization pattern established authoritarian social relations that became deeply ingrained and would prove difficult to change. In Barren Lives, the internalization and passive acceptance of authoritarianism surfaces again and again. It comes to the fore in many of the characters’ thoughts and actions, as when Fabiano, after being arbitrarily thrown in jail by a belligerent petty police officer, is reminded of words of consolation he used to offer those in similar situations: “Don’t worry. It’s no disgrace to take a beating from the law” (Ramos, Barren Lives, p. 30).

Working for the sesmeiros and later the latifundistas were the cattlemen, the vaqueiros who oversaw much of the work on the ranch. Their payment usually consisted of one out of every four calves and foals born under their management; a division of the herd was made at the time of payment. While at first some cattlemen managed to save up the resources to rent land from their bosses and establish their own smaller-scale cattle-raising businesses, such social mobility became increasingly rare over time. Traditionally the vaqueiro was allowed to raise his own animals alongside the landowner’s herd. Absentee landlords later modified this tradition, forcing vaqueiros to sell their animals soon after the division of the herd, out of fear that their own animals might be neglected in their absence. Any possibility that the vaqueiro would someday become a cattle-raiser in his own right was thus removed. In Barren Lives, this situation is depicted in Fabiano’s hopeless predicament:

In the division of stock at the year’s end, Fabiano received a fourth of the calves and a third of the kids, but as he grew no feed, but merely sowed a few handfuls of beans and corn on the river flat … he disposed of the animals. . . . Once the beans had been eaten… there was no place to go but the boss’s cash drawer. He would turn over [to the boss] the animals that had fallen to his lot for the lowest of prices. . . .

(Barren Lives, p. 93)

Other classes composing sertão society were the ranchhands, wage earners who were allowed to cultivate small plots on the rancher’s land, and tenant farmers, who also lived on the landowner’s property and cultivated subsistence crops, paying rent in money, crop yield, or labor. Smallholders or minifundistas, owners of their own, miniscule plots, hardly fared better than tenant farmers, for their small holdings barely allowed them to produce enough for their own subsistence. None of these other classes appear prominently in Ramos’s novel, which is focused primarily on the figure of the vaqueiro. The harsh living conditions faced by the cattleman Fabiano and his family, however, seem to encompass the difficulties faced by all the lower classes of sertão society.

A barren land

At one level, the title of Ramos’s novel refers to the problem of drought in the northeastern backlands. Barren Lives opens with Fabiano and his family crossing a bleak landscape of dry riverbeds and thorny brushland dotted with heaps of bones. Starved and exausted, they are fleeing the latest drought and have reached the end of their strength when they spot gathering clouds in the sky. It eventually rains and Fabiano is hired at a local ranch, but the cyclical nature of the drought in the sertão will not let them rest for long.

The drought zone of northeastern Brazil covers a large area, spread across eight states. While the region is often depicted as a barren desert, it is in fact topographically and climatically quite diverse, and includes six major river systems and a number of fertile upland zones. Barren Lives is set in the caatinga, the part of the sertão that is more properly defined as semi-arid. The word caatinga is an indigenous term meaning “white forest,” an evocative image for the drought-resistant vegetation that characterizes this landscape: cacti, thorny shrubs, and small trees, many of which shed their leaves during the summer months to minimize water loss.

Droughts of catastrophic proportions occur in the sertão about once every century; milder droughts occur more frequently, at varying intervals that can be as short as two years. During the early period of colonization, the human impact on the sparse population was small. It was greatly exacerbated, however, by a population growth brought on by the introduction of drought-resistant cotton in the late nineteenth century. A cotton boom ensued and other crops were sacrificed to make way for the profitable cotton business. By the early 1870s, however, prices had declined, and when drought hit the region in 1877, not only subsistence crops but even the drought-resistant cotton crops failed, and a huge, starving population was forced to emigrate. It is estimated that 500,000 drought refugees, or retirantes, perished from hunger and disease in the 1877-79 drought (Hall, p. 4). This disaster was followed by others, prompting successive waves of emigration from the sertão to coastal cities and other areas, in a movement that has become a notorious feature of northeastern—and national—reality in the twentieth century. When Fabiano and his wife decide to try their luck in the city at the end of Barren Lives, they are doing what millions of other sertanejos, or sertão dwellers, have done since the late nineteenth century.

The proportions of the 1877 calamity finally led to direct government intervention, but the projects devised were largely focused on water-supply issues. Reservoir-building became the centerpiece of drought-relief action for the next several decades, a strategy that tended to benefit large landowners but had little if any impact on the predicament of the lower-income population. Of course, the landowners managed to control the reservoirs and therefore water distribution in the region. In times of drought, they could keep the water from reaching pockets of the population and sell it at high prices. The ineffectiveness of government policy in the sertão underscores the fact that the harsh climate is not sufficient to explain the calamitous extent of the damage provoked by recurring droughts. As Anthony L. Hall notes, the roots of the problem lie elsewhere, in unequal social and economic structures (Hall, p. 15).

BALEIA

The English translation of Ramos’s novel inexplicably omits the dog’s name. However, the fact that the dog is given a name (Baleia, which means “whale”) in the original text while Fabiano and Vîtôria’s children remain nameless—referred to simply as “the older boy” and “the younger boy”—is not a gratuitous act on the author’s part. This apparently odd narrative gesture highlights the human characters’ dehumanization, while it privileges Baleta’s perspective as a full-fledged character. By not naming the boys, the text emphasizes their lack of status and power, their facelessness in a society that devours poor people like them. While in real life human beings generally have names, this is not necessarily the case with anim mais. The novel, however, reverses this truism. Humans and dog are placed on the same level in the story: they are all an-imals struggling to survive in an unjust, brutal world. Many parallels are set up between Baleia’s experience as a dog, subject to her masters’ whims, and the characters’ positions within sertão social and familial hierarchy.

The lower-income rural population of the backlands is particularly vulnerable to drought effects because it has no economic safety nets of any kind. The legacy of the colonial sesmaria system was one of profoundly unequal land distribution: in 1950 less than one percent of northeastern property holders owned over one-third of available land area, a situation that was probably worse when Ramos wrote Barren Lives and that to this day has not changed in any significant way. A majority of the sertão population thus has access to but a tiny fraction of the area’s resources and cannot produce and save the necessary food stocks to survive in times of crisis. It is this underlying social and economic inequity that Ramos sought to expose in writing his novel. Drought is not the primary agent of his characters’ deprived existence rather, it is the skewed distribution of wealth that keeps both the land and people barren, stripped of even the most basic necessities.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Barren Lives is composed of 13 chapters that can be read independently of one another. Many of them, in fact, were initially written and published in newspapers as short stories, a strategy Ramos used to earn more money from his writings. The composite, loosely structured character of the novel has prompted at least one critic to call it a “modular novel” (romance desmontável), and indeed, the order of most of the chapters could be rearranged without significantly affecting the text’s overall meaning or impact (Rubem Braga in Candido, p. 45). The first and last chapters are an exception, for they mark the cyclical movement of the characters’ lives, trapped in the endless recurrence of drought and its social consequences. The other chapters describe various events in the lives of a typical sertanejo family. Several chapters focus on the perceptions of an individual character, viewing events from his or her particular perspective.

“A New Home.” The novel opens with the vaqueiro Fabiano, his wife Vitória, their two young sons—who remain nameless throughout the narrative—and their dog, Baleia, crossing an inhospitable desert landscape. Fleeing the latest drought, they have already eaten their parrot and are on the brink of starvation. Significantly, Vitória justifies the parrot’s sacrifice “by telling herself the bird was quite useless—it didn’t even talk” (Barren Lives, p. 6). The bird’s silence, a product of the family’s silence (he has no one to imitate), is the first manifestation of the central theme of language in the novel. Coming upon an abandoned ranch, its owners and cattle driven away by the lack of water, the family stops to rest. As they gaze up at a thickening cloud and eat a cavy that Baleia has caught, Fabiano feels a surge of hope and decides to stay on at the ranch.

“Fabiano.” We listen in on the vaqueiro’s thoughts as he goes about his daily work on the ranch. He has been working at the ranch for some time, hired by the absentee ranch owner who returned briefly to reclaim his property after the first thunderstorms. While he tracks down a missing heifer, superstitiously intoning a prayer he believes has magical powers to cure the heifer’s sores, Fabiano ponders his new life. His pride at having survived the drought and finding a job is tempered by a consideration of his lowly social status. The perspectives of the third-person omniscient narrator and of the character Fabiano are intermingled here, as they are throughout the novel, allowing for the emergence of important issues that Fabiano himself only confusedly understands. Among them are his dehumanized status as a landless worker, the authoritarian behavior of the landed gentry, and his belief that as a mere cattleman he has no “right” to ask questions and to aspire to knowledge that is a privilege of the wealthy folk (Barren Lives, p. 18).

“Jail.” Fabiano has gone into town to buy household provisions and is roped into playing a card game with a local policeman. When Fabiano, having lost all his money, abandons the game in frustration, the policeman feels insulted and provokes a scuffle that ends in Fabiano’s arrest. In jail, the vaqueiro laments his fate, vacillating between anger at the policeman’s injustice, frustration at his own ignorance and consequent impotence, and acceptance of such abuse as his lot in life.

“Vitória.” The perspective shifts to Fabiano’s wife, Vitória, whose thoughts revolve around her desire for a leather-bottomed bed, a “real bed” to replace the tree-branch bed she and Fabiano sleep on (Barren Lives, p. 44). As she goes about her household chores, her thoughts return obsessively to the object of her desire. Her yearning for a “bed on which a Christian [can] stretch his bones” encapsulates a general longing for a stability and dignity that seem perpetually out of reach (Barren Lives, p. 43).

“The Younger Boy.” The omniscient narrator adopts the point of view of the younger son, focusing on the child’s awe of his father. Having watched Fabiano break a horse, the boy attempts to ride a billy-goat to emulate his father’s feat. Within the realm of the child’s experience, Fabiano appears as a powerful figure and the highest model he can aspire to. The narrator’s perspective, however, implicitly conveys the bleakness of the child’s future prospects: a repetition of the pattern of poverty and ignorance in which his father and forefathers have been caught for centuries.

“The Older Boy.” Having encountered a word with which he is unfamiliar—“hell”—the older son questions his parents as to its meaning. He receives no reply from his father. Vitoria gives him a curt, vague explanation that does not satisfy him, for it seems to have little to do with the world he knows. When he questions her further, she strikes him, punishing the child for his curiosity, whereupon he takes refuge with Baleia. There is more than an ironic touch here in the fact that the meaning of the word (inferno in Portuguese) whose sound enchants him—“a word with so musical a ring”—eludes his understanding, for he and his family may be said to live in a “hell” far more real than the place “full of red-hot spits and bonfires” his mother describes (Barren Lives, pp. 59, 56).

“Winter.” The family huddles around the fire-place on a rainy winter night. A nearby river has flooded and is creeping towards the ranch, a common event in the caatinga, where the rivers often flood in the rainy season. With the threat of an immediate drought removed, Fabiano expresses his contentment by telling a “tall tale” in which he appears as the main hero (Barren Lives, p. 68). He has trouble making himself understood, however, and the other characters pursue their own fragmented thoughts.

“Feast Day.” Dressed in their best clothes, the family heads into town for the Christmas festivities. They are uncomfortable in shoes and clothes they are not used to wearing and feel out of place in the bustling town atmosphere: “The two boys stared at the street lamps. . . . They were afraid, rather than curious. . . . How could there be so many houses and so many people?” (Barren Lives, p. 74). Feeling inferior to the city folk, Fabiano gets drunk and grows increasingly aggressive. He has fantasies of revenge against the officer who threw him in jail, makes incoherent threats, and finally collapses on the pavement.

“The Dog” (“Baleia” in the Portuguese original). This was the first chapter Ramos wrote and published as a short story, and might be considered the original starting point of the novel. It narrates Baleia’s death, seen partially from the dog’s perspective. She is terribly sick, and Fabiano, suspecting rabies, decides to kill her with his flintlock rifle. As Vitoria restrains the children in the house, the vaqueiro goes after the dog, shooting her in the hindquarters. She dies slowly, and her last moments are narrated in moving detail, conveying her innocent, uncomprehending perceptions as she struggles to make sense of what has happened to her.

“Accounts.” Fabiano goes into town to receive his payment from the ranch owner. As traditional payment for his services, he is entitled to a quarter of the calves born under his care during the year. In order to make ends meet, however, he has already sold his share of the animals back to the ranch owner and has even had to borrow money from him. Utterly befuddled by accounts, he is certain he is being cheated, but cannot grasp the idea of interest on money he has borrowed. Although he knows Vitória’s accounting is different from the ranch owner’s, he withdraws his protest and capitulates to the owner after being threatened with the loss of his job. Once again Fabiano is left vacillating between rage against authority, self-recrimination, and a fatalistic acceptance of his lot.

“The Policeman in Khaki.” While tracking down an animal in the caatinga, Fabiano unexpectedly encounters the policeman who jailed him. The vaqueiro instinctively raises his machete to kill the man before the policeman even recognizes him, but manages to stay his hand. He realizes he has the trembling policeman utterly in his power, but after struggling with opposing impulses he finally lets the man go, concluding, “The law is the law” (Barren Lives, p. 108).

“The Birds.” Signs of an imminent drought are everywhere, most visibly in large flocks of birds of passage. In an attempt to pinpoint a concrete cause for the impending tragedy that looms over her family, Vitória blames the “cursed birds [who] drank up what was left [of the water], trying to kill the stock” (Barren Lives, p. 109). Fabiano marvels at his wife’s logic and shoots at the birds, giving vent to his rage. The birds are too many, however, and he cannot fight them or his fate. He decides to store some for food to take on the long trip he knows is ahead of them.

“Flight.” No longer able to deny that the drought has arrived and unable to settle their debt to the ranch owner, Fabiano and his family flee under cover of night, setting out across the barren caatinga. Desperate and fearful, Fabiano and Vitoria wonder what will become of them. Vitoria asks if they might not go back to being what they were before the drought. They finally agree it would be fruitless, or impossible, to return to their old selves. The couple discuss their possible future, as well as that of their children. They try to imagine a better life in the city, even though they are ignorant of what it might hold for them. The narrator’s voice takes over in the final, concluding lines:

They were on their way to an unknown land, a land of city ways. They would become its prisoners. And to the city from the backlands would come ever more and more of its sons, a never-ending stream of strong, strapping brutes like Fabiano, Vitória, and the two boys.

(Barren Lives, p. 131)

A note about the translation

The translation of Ramos’s novel conveys some misimpressions when compared to the original Vidas Secas. In the English translation above, Fabiano and his family are, for example, described as “strong, strapping brutes.” However, brutos, from the original, refers to their ignorance, not their physical appearance; moreover, the translation’s addition of “strapping”—no such word appears in the Portuguese original—connotes a physical robustness that contradicts the rest of the novel.

Barren tongues

The title of Ramos’s novel is richly suggestive, and can be read as a reference to multiple forms of barrenness. One of the central preoccupations of the narrative is education or the lack of access to it. Fabiano, his wife, and his children are illiterate. They do not know how to read or write, and can barely express themselves in speech. With only the most rudimentary linguistic tools at their disposal, they struggle at a basic cognitive level: they cannot even articulate fully-formed thoughts because they do not possess the vocabulary and hence the conceptual framework with which to give shape to complete ideas. This fundamental lack is a grave handicap that keeps them at the margins of society, unable to understand or communicate with the world around them and therefore unable to defend themselves from it because they do not control one of the most crucial instruments of power: language. When Fabiano is unjustly imprisoned, he is confusedly aware that his lack of linguistic knowledge is largely to blame for his situation:

He had never seen a school. That was why he couldn’t defend himself. … Sometimes he came out with a big word, but it was all fake. … He didn’t know how to set his thoughts in order. If he did, he would go out and fight policemen in khaki uniforms who beat up harmless people.

(Barren Lives, pp. 32-33)

The deficiencies and inequities of the Brazilian educational system have a long and tortuous history. The original Constitution of 1824, while paying lip service to universal education as a civil right, failed to establish a system of free public education because of public disinterest and a lack of resources. Access to education remained extremely limited: throughout the nineteenth century the rate of illiteracy did not fall below 85 percent (Haussman and Haar, p. 32). Brazil’s shift from a monarchy to a republican state in 1889 brought the development of a public network of primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions. Access to public education, however, was largely limited to urban centers; the quality of education in rural areas remained extremely poor.

An 1883 report on educational progress in Ramos’s native state of Alagoas identifies obstacles:

It is truly cause for surprise that, while it is calculated that the province has a school-age population of 80,000 … little over one-twentieth of this population attends the public schools. The causes of this fact are complex … a) the lack of resources of parents who are dayworkers [or] who eke out scarce resources for subsistence from small crop cultivation… b) the dissemination of the population across a vast territory and the lack of roads … to the towns where the schools are located.

(Moacyr, pp. 615-16)

When Barren Lives was published, this situation had not seen significant change. A 1949 study on education in the interior of the northeastern state of Ceará affirms that 80 percent of the school-age population in the 1940s did not attend school at all (Barreira, p. 57). Even today, the illiteracy rate in the rural Northeast as a whole is shockingly high. Data collected in 1982 indicates that at that time fully two-thirds of the northeastern rural population remained illiterate, and almost as many of the region’s inhabitants had less than one year of schooling. Outside the Northeast one-fifth of the population was illiterate (Harbison and Hanushek, p. 31).

In making the question of language and literacy a core problem in his novel, Ramos thus touches on an issue that is still highly relevant and urgent today. As a writer, and most notably as the former Director of Public Instruction of Alagoas, he would have been painfully aware of the problem. The poignant force of Barren Lives does not derive solely or even primarily from a technical knowledge of the issue, however. Rather, it is the product of a narrative exploration that manages to render, by way of the written word, the impoverished reality of an existence without knowledge of words.

Sources and literary context

As he admits in his memoirs, Ramos’s image of the natural and human devastation caused by the periodic northeastern droughts is informed as much by habitual, generalized notions as by personal memory. When Ramos wrote Barren Lives, there was already a considerable body of literature on drought and hardship in the northeastern backlands; this literature may have shaped his own narrative vision as much as personal experience did.

Barren Lives is a classic of what has been called “the Northeastern Novel,” the term used for a body of politically oriented regionalist novels that exploded onto the Brazilian literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Generally, Ramos is placed alongside Jorge Amado (see Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times), José Lins do Rego, and Rachel de Queiroz. All are northeastern writers who purportedly used realist narrative techniques and focused on northeastern themes to denounce social ills endemic to the region. Ramos’s novel fits specifically in a body of works on the drought problem, among which one of the most well-known is de Queiroz’s 1930 novel O Quinze (Fifteen).

Most of Ramos’s work, however, does not fit comfortably under this rubric, for it tends to focus more on the complex psychological workings of its characters and less on overt descriptions of regional settings and problems. Of his four novels, Barren Lives may be said to be his most regionalist work, focused as it is on the perennial problem of drought and emigration and on the specific geographic and human space of the sertão. Even this novel is somewhat anomalous in relation to other Northeastern Novels of the period, however, in its use of narrative techniques such as indirect free-style discourse to convey its ignorant characters’ psychological processes. In Barren Lives, as in his other novels, Ramos is most concerned with exploring the effects of a given social reality on the individual psyche.

Aside from its association with the northeastern regionalism of the 1930s, Barren Lives has been read as culling from an older tradition of writings about the Northeast; most notably, a number of critics have identified parallels between Ramos’s novel and Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões; also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times), a 1902 account of the sertão and its inhabitants that became tremendously influential in shaping subsequent writings on the region. Such a comparison should be undertaken with caution, however, for there are significant stylistic and ideological differences between the two texts. Da Cunha’s style, for example, is dense—full of adjectives and terminology—while Ramos’s style is deliberately sparse. He prided himself on cutting his writing down to the bare minimum.

Aside from literary influences, Ramos’s personal and political plight in the 1930s can also shed light on the novel. He wrote Barren Lives shortly after being released from jail, and much of the novel can be read through the prism of this grueling personal experience. During his ten-month incarceration, the writer witnessed and was victimized by the excesses of an authoritarian regime. Ignorant of what he was being accused of, awaiting a trial that never came, he was sent from one prison to the next, and at one point was confined to a “correctional colony” for end-of-the-road criminals that took away every last shred of his dignity. Barren Lives’s focus on power and its abuse, seen perhaps most clearly in the chapter “Jail” but present in all the major interactions between the novel’s various characters, comes into razor-sharp focus when viewed within this personal context.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Political change and the sertão

The early decades of the twentieth century were a tumultuous period in Brazilian socio-political history. By the beginning of the century the republican government established in 1889 was riddled with corruption, controlled by coffee politics and a handful of rural oligarchs who governed solely with their own interests in mind. Indignation with this state of affairs grew throughout the 1920s, most visibly among the middle ranks of the military, who promoted several unsuccessful revolts. This rebellious movement, known as the tenente, or lieutenant movement, expressed a more general dissatisfaction on the part of those who felt marginalized by the republican political system, most notably the growing urban middle groups (Burns, p. 340). Although attempts were made to stir up feeling in the countryside, the rural population remained largely uninvolved in the revolts of the 1920s. In fact, as Bradford Burns notes, during this period “[t]he masses, rural and urban, fatalistically accepted their menial position” (Burns, p. 343).

Political discontent within the army and among the urban middle classes deepened further with the 1929 worldwide economic crisis and eventually led to the successful Revolution of 1930 that placed Getulio Vargas in power. During the early years of his administration, Vargas attempted to create a power base but formulated no clear political ideology. He did nonetheless introduce some significant political and social laws: among these were the extension of suffrage to working women, the guarantee of voting by secret ballot, the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18, and a host of labor reform laws. The repercussions of these laws were largely limited to urban centers, however. Rural Brazil saw little change in traditional social relations.

In 1934 the Constituent Assembly promulgated a new constitution, expanding the powers of the executive and promptly electing Vargas to office. However, pressures on the president were mounting, coming both from politicians linked to the pre-1930 regime and from emerging extremist political doctrines: fascism and communism. Fascism appeared in Brazil in 1932 in the guise of the Integralist Party (Ação Integralista Brasileira), a frank imitation of European fascist parties. In the mid-1930s Vargas forged a temporary alliance with the Integralistas, which ended in 1938, when the fascists were shut out of Vargas’s newly minted Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship. Meanwhile, the Communist Party, founded in 1922, gained ground steadily in the early 1930s. In 1934 one of its factions began to organize a popular front to combat fascism, the National Liberation Alliance (Aliança Nacional Libertadora). Most supporters of the ANL did not consider themselves communists but saw certain social changes as necessary for modernization and development. In 1935 the ANL was outlawed by Vargas, after the organization’s honorary president called for the defeat of the Vargas regime and the establishment of a popular revolutionary government. This was followed some months later by three communist uprisings in the capitals of the northeastern states of Rio Grande do Norte and Pernambuco, and in Rio de Janeiro. The uprisings produced outrage among the general population and, because of the violence, discredited the Communist Party. Riding on the wave of public anger, Vargas used the situation to his advantage, strengthening his power. From 1935 to 1937 he pursued a virulent anticommunist campaign, in which anyone rumored to harbor communist sympathies was threatened with imprisonment. Ramos, then the Director of Public Instruction of Alagoas, was swept up in the campaign, despite his lack of involvement with the ANL or the Communist Party. Politically, Ramos at this point remained unaffiliated, an independent thinker.

The repressive crescendo of the Vargas government culminated in a coup in 1937. Presidential elections were cancelled, Congress was dismissed, and Vargas proclaimed his authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo, which would last until 1945. It was in this repressive political climate that the recently released Ramos wrote Barren Lives. Small wonder then that the novel should be so profoundly concerned with power and its victims. While it does not openly refer to the Vargas regime and the political convulsions of the period, its portrayal of the radically dispossessed of Brazil indirectly denounces the contemporary political scene and questions Vargas’s promise of change, progress, and advancement for all in a “New State.”

Reviews

The initial critical response to Barren Lives ran the gamut from enthusiastic acclaim to a more tempered and even openly negative assessment of the novel’s value. Lúcia Miguel Pereira, for instance, a well-respected critic of the period, praised Barren Lives for the structural originality of its modular chapters and for its ability to convey the humanity and “hidden [psychological] wealth” of those occupying the lowest rungs of society (Pereira in Candido, p. 104). On the other end of the spectrum, Olivio Montenegro criticized the novel for endowing “rustic” characters with an unrealistic psychological depth (Montenegro, p. 221). Adopting a more moderate position, one of the most prominent critics of the period, Alvaro Lins, praised the book for its moments of “poetry” and for its Brazilianness, but echoed Montenegro’s view in his reservations regarding the novel’s structure and the “excess [ive]” psychological introspection of its “primitive” characters (Lins, pp. 151-53). Critical opinion has since shifted overwhelmingly toward Miguel Pereira’s positive position. Among the general reading public in Brazil, Barren Lives remains Ramos’s best-known and most popular novel. The fact that it has become a household name is perhaps the most significant confirmation of its enduring social and poetic value.

—Sabrina Karpa-Wilson

For More Information

Barreira, Américo. A Escola Primària no Ceará. Fortaleza: Clã, 1949.

Burns, E. Bradford. A History of Brazil 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Candido, Antonio. Ficção e Confissão: Ensaios sobre Graciliano Ramos. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1992.

Hall, Anthony L. Drought and Irrgation in North-East Brazil Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Harbison, Ralph W., and Eric A. Hanushek. Educational Performance of the Poor: Lessons from Rural Northeast Brazil Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Haussman, Fay, and Jerry Haar. Education in Brazil. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978.

Lins, Alvaro. “Valores e Miserias das Vidas Secas.” In Vidas Secas by Graciliano Ramos. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1992.

Menezes, Djacir. O Outro Nordeste. Formação Social do Nordeste. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1937.

Moacyr, Primitivo. A Instrução e as Províncias (Subsídios para a historia da Educação no Brasil) 1834-1889. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1939.

Montenegro, Olívio. O Romance Brasileiro. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1953.

Ramos, Graciliano. Barren Lives. Trans. Ralph Edward Dimmick. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.

Webb, Kempton E. The Changing Face of Northeast Brazil New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.