Itamar Vieira is a young and upcoming Brazilian writer. Crooked Plow (Torto Arado) is his first novel. He has earlier written a short story collection.
Although Itamar Vieira is a new author, the theme and characters of his novel are familiar to me. They are similar to those of my favorite Brazilian writer Jorge Amado whose famous novels include titles such as “Dona Flor and her two husbands” and “Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon”.
Crooked Plow is the story of struggle and misery of the substance farmers in the rural areas of Bahia, the northeastern part of Brazil, poor in development but rich in culture. The main characters are the seven and six years old sisters Bibiana and Belonisia. They find a knife in the old suitcase of their grandmother. Bibiana puts the knife in her mouth trying to taste the glittering metal. Belonisia pulls out the knife violently from her sister’s mouth in order to taste it herself. In this childish fight, Bibiana loses her tongue while the other’s is hurt badly. After this, the sisters become the voice of each other with a muted bond. Here is how the author describes, “When they interacted, one of them would need to become more perceptive, read more attentively the sister’s eyes and gestures. They would become one. The sister who lent her voice studied the body language of the sister who was mute. The sister who was mute transmitted, through elaborate gestures and subtle movements, what she wanted to communicate. For this symbiosis to occur and endure, their differences had to be put aside. They devoted their time to gaining a new understanding of each other’s bodies. At first, it was hard for both, very hard—the constant repetition of words, picking up objects, pointing here and there so that one sister might grasp the other’s intention. As the years passed, this shared body language became an extension of their individual expressions until each of them almost became the other, but without losing herself. Sometimes one would get annoyed with the other, but the pressing need for one sister to communicate something, and for the other to translate it, made it so that they would both forget what had annoyed them in the first place”. The silenced sister symbolizes the voiceless poor Afro-Brazilians.
Later, the sisters would fight with each other over a boyfriend. Bibiana used the same knife later to save a woman from her drunken husband and then to kill the owner of their estate who tries to evict the tenants and sell the land.
Itamar Vieira narrates in detail the struggles of the tenant farmers in the rural estates called as Fazendas in Portuguese. “They could build houses of mud, but not brick, nothing enduring to mark how long a family had been on the land. They could cultivate a small plot of squashes, beans, and okra, but nothing that would distract them from the owner’s crops because, after all, working for the owner was what enabled them to live on this land. They could bring their women and children; the more the merrier, in fact, because eventually the children would grow up and replace whoever was too old to work. The owner of the plantation would have confidence in them, trust them; they’d be his godchildren. Money, there’d be none of that, but there’d be food on the table. The workers could make their home on the plantation with no problem, without being harassed. They just had to follow the rules”.
The tenant farmers are forced to buy necessities from the overpriced estate shop which make the tenants perpetually in debt. Their children join the workforce to pay off the debt. They are expected to be grateful to the estate owners for letting them a place to live. When a young rebellious farmer tries to ask for more rights he is killed by the hired assassins of the owner. The police close the case alleging falsely that the farmer was growing marijuana and got killed in a fight with drug traffickers.
The subsistent farmers would smile and some would even jump with joy when they “noticed rain clouds finally looming, and from the land rose a freshness that farmers liked to call a bit of “luck.” They said you could dig a little into the dry mud and actually feel the moisture arriving, feel that the earth was a bit cooler, a sign the drought was coming to an end. The women would put empty buckets out to catch the rain. The plantation would resound with the old songs of the local women bringing their laundry down to the widening river or carrying their hoes to clear their small plots and do some slash-and-burn farming. The men could join the women only after they’d cleared the vast fields for planting the landowners’ crops”.
The tongueless sister did not like the teaching in the new school opened in the estate. She preferred to “immerse herself in the woods, walking up and down the trails, learning all about herbs and roots. She learned about clouds, too, how they’d foretell rain, all the secret changes of sky and earth. She learned that everything is in motion—quite different from the lifeless things taught in school. She walked with her father watching the movement of animals, insects, and plants. Her father couldn’t read or do sums, but he knew the phases of the moon. He knew that under a full moon you could plant almost anything, although manioc, banana, and other fruits liked to be sown under a new moon; under a waning moon, it wasn’t time for planting but for clearing the land. He knew that for a plant to grow strong, you needed to weed around each one every day, reducing the risk of pests. You had to be vigilant, protecting the stalks, making small mounds of soil and watering carefully so they’d flourish. Whenever he encountered some problem in the fields, he would lie on the ground, his ear attuned to what was deep in the earth, before deciding what tools to use and what to do, where to advance and where to retreat. Like a doctor listening to a heartbeat”.
The father of the girls, Zeca Chapeu Grande, is a tenant farmer and a healer for the community. He would use local herbs to heal physical wounds and African ceremonies to heal the souls. Most of the people here are of African origin. They practice their ancient rituals and religious practices. They are used to seeing stoically their neighbors going mad, teenage girls getting pregnant by estate officials, drunken husbands beating up wife and kids, broken families, orphaned children and hopeless existence. Their precarious lives are made worse by periodic droughts, floods and natural calamities. During these times, they survive by faith in their African gods and rituals, and offerings to please them. They would mix up their African gods and rituals sometimes with the Christian faith imposed by the Catholic Church.
This novel has won several literary prizes and was shortlisted for 2024 International Booker prize. In an interview, the author says, “ For me, to write is an experience of surprise. I never know in advance the path my story will take”. He is already into writing of his next novel.
The novel is available in English translation.
