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Terror in the Twin Towers: The Events of September 11 in the Brazilian: Literatura de Cordel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
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Brought to the New World by the first Portuguese colonists and, with time, increasingly associated with the Northeast's vast, dry interior, the pamphlet stories in verse known as folhetos or as literatura de cordel have continued to change along with Brazil. Long associated with semi-literate poets who composed for the Northeastern masses, these “stories on a string” have become increasingly popular among middle-class writers and consumers. Today, contemporary compositions by educated authors who rely on the Internet mingle with folheto classics—love and adventure tales with names such as The Mysterious Peacock, Lampião in Hell, and Green Coconut and Watermelon. This article explores one cordel author's vision of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Terror in the Twin Towers (Terror nas Torres Gêmeas) by Azulão—the nickname of Rio-based author João José dos Santos—is noteworthy not just for its immediate subject matter but also for its clear mingling of time-honored cordel elements with other features foreign to most earlier stories. These less traditional aspects of the folheto reflect both the particularities of the events about which the poet is writing and a number of larger changes that have taken place since the late 1950s in Brazilian folk and popular culture.
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References
1. The bibliography on the Brazilian literatura de cordel is extensive. For a summary introduction see Gilmar de Carvalho with Sylvie Debs' “Dossiê Cordel,” Revista Brasileira de Literatura 5, no. 54 (2002): 43–48. For more complete overviews see Literatura popular em verso: estudos, ed. Manuel Cavalcanti de Proença (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa/MEC, 1973); Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Vaqueiros e cantadores (Porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo, 1939); Mark J. Curran, Literatura de cordel (Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1973); Mark Dinneen, Listening to the People's Voice: Erudite and Popular Literature in North East Brazil (New York: Kegan Paul, 1996); Candace Slater, Stories on a String: The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, c1982); Márcia Abreu, Histórias de folhetos (Campinas: Mercado das Letras, 1999); and Ana Maria de Oliveira Galvão, Cordel: leitores e ouvintes (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2001). In addition, various studies of individual authors are: Gilmar de Carvalho, Patativa do Assaré: pássaro liberto (Fortaleza: Museu do Ceará, Secult, 2002), and Mark J. Curran, A presença de Rodolfo Coelho Cavalcante na moderna literatura de cordel (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1987), also the new Biblioteca do Cordel collection of the Editora Hedra in São Paulo. The number of books, theses, and articles on the cordel is growing steadily.
2. These older poets often had little formal education and might even be illiterate, composing stories in their head which a literate son or daughter then wrote down. The most successful stories went through multiple editions of as many as ten thousand folhetos. At its height in the early part of the twentieth century, a large and effective network of cordel publishers and distributors existed across the Northeast.
3. O Pavão Misterioso by João Melquíades Ferreira is the story of a pair of lovers who manage to escape an angry father in an airplane-like giant peacock. Lampião no inferno by José Pacheco tells the story of the celebrated backlands bandit. Côco Verde e Melancia by José Camelo de Melo Resende tells of a couple nicknamed Green Coconut and Watermelon. While exact dates are hard to ascertain in the literatura de cordel, most of the stories that continue to be reprinted today date from the end of the nineteenth century into the early 1970s. For some of the many anthologies of cordel stories see Átila de Almeida and José Alves Sobrinho, Dicionário bio-bibliográfico de repentistas e poetas de bancada, 2 vols. (João Pessoa/Campina Grande: Editora Universitária/Centro de Ciências e Tecnologia, 1978); Sebastião Nunes Batista, Antologia da literatura de cordel (Natal: Fundação José Augusto, 1977); Manuel Florentino Duarte et al., Literatura de cordel: antologia, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Global Editora, 1976); and Manoel Cavalcanti Proença, ed., Literatura popular em verso: antologia, 4 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa/MEC, 1964–78).
4. Prof. Gilmar de Carvalho estimates that there are some fifty cordel poets and three major cordel associations (CECODEL of Fortaleza, the Academia dos Cordelistas in Crato, and the Sociedade dos Cordelistas Mauditos in Juazeiro do Norte) living in the state of Ceará. Many of these poets have high school or university educations—a striking change from the not-so-distant past (e-mail communication, Prof. Gilmar de Carvalho, 16 February 2003.) For an excellent overview, see José Erivan Bezerra de Oliveira, Literatura de cordel no novo espaço urbano (Master's thesis, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 2001).
5. Scholars have long debated the differences between “folk” and “popular” culture—the cordel, by most definitions, is both since it is a hybrid oral/written art form found in both rural and urban locations. The shifting identities of both the poets and their buyers make it difficult to establish any single set of narrative or social parameters today.
6. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. For a complete translation of the folheto, see http://larr.lanic.utexas.edu/slater.htm. I thank Azulão for his permission to reprint the Portuguese original in this article.
7. Folheto or the more colloquial folhete was the term used by cordel poets until the 1970s, when growing interest in these stories on the part of scholars led these poets to start using the more erudite cordel or literatura de cordel. Today, folheto often applies to a single published story while cordel is used for the tradition as a whole. By “traditional” folhetos I mean stories that conform to the metrical patterns and thematic conventions of the cordel classics. For a fuller discussion of these patterns and conventions see Slater, Stories on a String.
8. The other folhetos I have obtained are Arievaldo and Klévisson Viana's O sangrento ataque que abalou os EUA (Fortaleza: Tupynanquim Editora, 2001); Zé Antonio's O Terror do taleban contra Bush do Terror (Art'Silva, n.p., 2001); Gonçalo Ferreira da Silva, Reação americana ao atentado terrorista (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira da Literatura de Cordel, 2001); Olegário Fernandes, O atentado terrorista e o nosso sofrimento (Caruaru: typeset by poet, 2001); Pedro Américo de Farias, A dolorosa peleja de Osama Bin contra Bush (Recife: Língua de Poeta, 2001); Marcelo Soares, A guerra do fim do mundo entre o povo talibã e os Estados Unidos que para eles são tidos como o “Grande Satã” (Recife: Língua de Poeta, 2001), Jair Moraes, O cachorro bucho e o peba Ozama Bin (Fortaleza: Centro Cultural dos Cordlistas do Nordeste, 2001), João Pedro C. Neto, Besta do horror (Fortaleza: n.p., 2001), Paulo de Tarso, Da ficção a realidade: Nova York em chamas (Fortaleza: Centro Cultural dos Cordelistas do Nordeste, 2001), Guaipuan Vieira, A visita de Bin Laden ao inferno (Fortaleza: Centro Cultural dos Cordelistas do Nordeste, 2001), and Vânia Freitas, O mundo abalado pela tragédia da guerra e do terror (Fortaleza: Centro Cultural dos Cordelistas do Nordeste). I thank Azulão, Roberto Benjamin, Maria Alice Amorim, Sarah Portnoy, and Gilmar de Carvalho for their help in obtaining copies of these texts.
9. The accounts were composed at different points during the days and months following the attack on the United States. (The Vianas, for instance, write on September 13; Gonçalo Ferreira da Silva on October 11; and Zé Antônio, almost certainly sometime in October, after the anthrax scare made international headlines.) In addition, their authors vary in terms of regional provenance and education. Zé Antônio, for instance, is a history teacher in Sergipe. Olegário Fernandes was a long-time cordel vendor who lived all his life in the Pernambucan market town of Caruaru, Marcelo Soares is the son of a well-known cordel poet, and the Vianas are younger, middle-class authors who live in Fortaleza where they run a cordel priting press. Nonetheless, the similarities in outlook that mark these folhetos are at least as striking as their various differences.
10. The single biggest cordel collection open to the public is that of the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro, which also has published a number of studies and anthologies of cordel. Other important collections include that of the Museu do Folclore e Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo, the Fonds Ramond Cantei in Poitiers, and the collections of Átila de Almeida (Campina Grande) and Joseph Luyten (São Paulo). In the United States, smaller cordel collections can be found at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Library of Congress.
11. Cordel stories are almost always in multiples of four. Some classic love and adventure tales reached sixty-four pages and were printed as two folhetos.
12. For an overview of the history of the cordel blockprint, see Mário Souto Maior, “A xilogravura popular na expressão gráfica da literatura de cordel nordestina,” Remag: Revista Métodos de Arte Gráficas 15 (Rio de Janeiro) (1965): 19–23.
13. A number of early European chapbook compositions are in prose. For a discussion of some of the principal differences between the Portuguese and the Brazilian cordel, see Slater, “Why One Evil King Could Not Be Brazilian: A Comparative Study of the Brazilian Literatura de Cordel,” Luso-Brazilian Review 18 (1981): 279–94.
14. Verbal duels in verse date back to the Greeks and Romans, and the repentista/cantador tradition has or had parallels throughout much of Latin America. For an introduction to Northeast Brazilian poet-singers see Gustavo Barroso, Ao som das violas (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Editora Leite Ribeiro, 1923); Francisco das Chagas Batista, Cantadores e poetas populares (João Pessoa: Editora F.C. Batista Irmão, 1929); and Leonardo Mota, Cantadores, 2d ed. (Fortaleza: Imprensa Universitária do Ceará, 1961).
15. The first letters of each line spell out MAZULÃO, for M. [Mestre] Azulão. “Mestre,” or “master,” is a popular term used for a skilled practitioner of a craft such as carpentry or violin-making.
16. The large cordel presses of the past—including those owned by Leandro Gomes de Barros (later João Martins de Ataíde) in Recife, José Bernardo da Silva in Juazeiro do Norte, and Francisco Lopes in Belém have long since vanished. (José Bernardo da Silva's press, now called the Lira Nordestina, was acquired by the government of Ceará in 1980, but produces little.) Contemporary cordel publishers include Luzeiro (formerly Prelúdio) of São Paulo, which publishes primarily cordel classics in both comic book form and traditional folheto guise; Tupynanquim in Fortaleza, and Editora Coqueiro in Recife.
17. For a good discussion of these, see Ariano Suassuna, “Notas sobre o romanceiro popular do Nordeste,” in Suassuna: seleta em prosa e verso, ed. Silviano Santiago (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio/Instituto Nacional do Livro/Ministério da Cultura, 1974), 162–90.
18. Azulão's choice of the word roteiro or “script” for his account underscores the effect of television and movies on the folhetos, not just in terms of content, but also of the poet's conception of the folheto's purpose and form. The “impassioned invitation” which Azulão mentions was on the part of Steven Zeitlin, who had asked me to find a cordel poet who could perform at the City Lore Poetry Festival in April 1999.
19. Various authors have attempted to catalogue the themes of the cordel. See, for example, Liêdo Maranhão de Souza, Classificação popular da literatura de cordel (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1976). For an excellent example of how poets rework existing material to fit a particular moral framework, see João Martins de Ataíde's transformation of Shakespeare's play in Slater, “Romeo and Juliet in the Brazilian Backlands,” Journal of Folklore Research 20, no. 1 (1983): 35–53.
20. Journalistic folhetos go back to the beginnings of the literatura de cordel. The early poet Leandro Barros de Gomes, who did much to commercialize and disseminate cordel stories, wrote on themes including the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1910 and the problems with English-manufactured trains. For an introduction to the joumalistic folheto see Raymond Cantel, Temas da atualidade na literatura de cordel (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, Escola de Comunicações e Artes, 1972) and Joseph Maria Luyten, A notícia na literatura de cordel (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1992).
21. An English translation of one cordel version of a poetic duel appears in The Warriors: Peleja between Joaquim Jaqueira and Manoel Barra Mansa, trans. Ernest J. Barge and Jan Feidel (New York: Grossman, 1972).
22. The patron-client relationships in the literatura de cordel are clearly idealized versions of actual social relationships that prevailed in the Northeastern backlands throughout much of its history. For an introduction see Shepard Forman, The Brazilian Peasantry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975) and Allen Johnson, Sharecroppers of the Sertão (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).
23. Some writers have seen this code as a variant on the Mediterranean honor code laid out in the essays in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. Jean G. Péristiany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and in Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, ed. David D. Gilmore (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association 22, 1987).
24. See Alicia Mitika Koshiyama, Análise de conteúdo da literature de cordel: presença de valores religiosos (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, Escola de Comunicação e de Artes, 1972).
25. See note 15.
26. The back cover usually sported various announcements of new or previous titles, as well as the addresses of cordel distributors.
27. Japeri is a community within the Baixada Fluminense, in the gritty industrial outskirts of Rio de Janeiro where large numbers of Northeastern migrants reside.
28. The two cordel authors and popular artists who have long signed their block prints—J. Borges and Dila (José Soares da Silva)—have had exhibitions in major international museums, including the Louvre. Today, the sons and grandsons of cordel poets often enroll in municipal art courses and make a living or partial living from their work.
29. Two of the best-known cordel authors to use the term “poet-reporter” were Cuíca de Santo Amaro of Bahia and Zé Soares of Recife. See Mark J. Curran, Cuíca de Santo Amaro: poeta-repórter da Bahia (Salvador, Bahia: Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, 1990) and Maria Edileuza Borges, “A história do poeta-repórter que não foi agricultor, não deu para pedreiro e vive feliz escrevendo cordel,” Jornal de Commercio (Recife, 1 February 1978), sec. C, p. 8.
30. Some of Azulão's other folhetos make heavy use of urban slang. See, for instance, his “Zé Matuto no Rio de Janeiro,” which reappears in Slater, “Joe Bumpkin in the Wilds of Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Lore 6 (1980): 5–53. For two illuminating though quite different studies of urban folhetos, see Joseph Maria Luyten, A literatura de cordel em São Paulo: saudosismo e agressividade (São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1981), and José Erivan Bezerra de Oliveira, Literatura de cordel no novo espaço urbano.
31. Azulão also makes money giving classes to grade school and high school students about the literatura de cordel. The cordel itself, however, presently accounts for only a small part of his income which, though modest, far outstrips that of a vendor and subsistence farmer such as Olegário Fernandes. Today, there is far more money in improvised poetry than in cordel sales. Successful repentistas who succeed in making CDs or who have their own radio and television programs can make considerable incomes.
32. The single most famous of all of these dream-journeys is almost certainly Manuel Camilo dos Santos' Viagem a São Saruê (Campina Grande: Estrella da Poesia, 1956), based on the erudite poet Manuel Bandeira's “Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada.”
33. Zé Antônio, the pen name of José Antônio dos Santos, is one of the founders of the Workers' Party in that state. Among his other folhetos are 500 anos de história da dominação do Brasil, O Manifesto Comunista em cordel, and A violência legal no contexto social.
34. See Cantei, Temas da atualidade.
35. Azulão (José João dos Santos), personal interview, New York City, 9 April 1999.
36. A similar sentiment is expressed by Gonçalo Ferreira da Silva when he states that Afghanistan is “not a war/that will end in a week/but rather months, years, decades/ and this insane battle/may be the beginning/of the end of the human race.”
37. These catastrophes include a host of natural disasters, which are routinely viewed as divine punishment for human misbehavior. Often, these include passages that hark back to the “Oh, tempora! Oh, mores!” diatribes of classical antiquity.
38. During the poetry festival, in the intervals between Azulão's appearance on stage, he would amuse himself and everyone around us by reciting whole folhetos stories to guitar accompaniment, including O mal em paga do bem ou Rosa e Lino de Alencar by Leandro Gomes de Barros (Juazeiro do Norte: Tipografia São Francisco, 1950) and A princesa Maricruz e o cavaleiro do ar by Severino Borges Silva (Recife: Luzeiro do Norte, n.d.).
39. As such, the events of September 11 are very unlike other, more local news events which the poet shows no compunction about radically altering. See, for instance, Apolônio Alves dos Santos' reworking of the story of an infamous kidnapping of a small boy named Serginho as discussed in Slater, Stories on a String, 112–40.
40. The creation in the late 1950s of the SUDENE, a governmental development agency for the Northeast, signals a multi-faceted push towards progress and modernization in which the folhetos began to appear increasingly archaic in the eyes of many longtime buyers. The SUDENE did not destroy the folhetos, any more than did radio or television, but the deeper social and economic transformations which it heralded could not help but affect regional folk culture.
41. For one perspective on the present-day literatura de cordel see Alda Maria Siqueira Campos, Literatura de cordel e difusão de inovações (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Ed. Massangana, 1998).
42. One could argue that the middle classes have been interested in the cordel since the nineteenth century, when traces of it began appearing in the work of writers such as Celso Magalhães, José de Alencar, and Sílvio Romeiro. This interest intensified in the second part of the twentieth century with the establishment of the first National Folklore Congress organized under the Vargas dictatorship in 1951, and the creation of the Campaign for the Defense of Folklore by Juscelino Kubitschek seven years later. The military governments of the 1960s and 1970s then sanitized and commodified folk forms in a systematic fashion that went far beyond earlier attempts.
43. Virtually all early cordel poets were male; however, women sometimes published folhetos under pseudomyms. See, for instance, Maristela Barbosa de Mendonça's Uma voz feminina no mundo do folheto (Brasília: Thesaurus, 1993), a study of a folheto which Maria das Neves Batista Pimentel, a member of the Chagas Batista family, known for its large number of poets and repentistas, published under the name of “Altino Alagoano.” Today, a growing minority of cordel authors are women: note the September 11 folheto by Vânia Freitas (O mundo abalado pela tragédia da guerra e do terror).
44. Azulão (José João dos Santos), personal interview, Rio de Janeiro, 27 July 1997.
45. See the chapter on “The Poet Sings to Please Us” in Slater, Stories on a String, 187–205.
46. Slater, “I Sing for Everyone,” in Stories 164–86.
47. Manuel d'Almeida Filho, personal interview, Aracaju, Sergipe, 7 June 1978.
48. Manuel Camilo dos Santos, personal interview, Campina Grande, Paraíba, 6 March 1978.
49. Azulão (José João dos Santos), personal interview, New York City, 10 April 1999.
50. Kathryn Shattuck, “Oral Traditions Converge as Poets go out for a Drink,” The New York Times, 12 April 1999, sec. E, 1, 4. The article makes specific reference to Azulão.
51. Writers such as Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz (O campesinato brasileiro: ensaios sobre civilização e grupos rústicos no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1973) have shown convincingly that the myth of the remote “medieval” backlands unconnected from the rest of Brazil was always a fantasy. If, however, the interior was always part of larger political and economic frameworks, its insertion within these has become increasingly apparent over time.
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