Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil

Afterlives

163 I have used the term sentencing to keep visible the relationship between power and representation. Those who have been sentenced to history have been inscribed in history, overtaken by it, condemned to take part in it, turned into its subjects. If power relations are (mis)translated into epistemological structures so that condemnations (one sort of sentence) become descriptions (another sort of sentence), what reconciliations can representation afford? The community of Canudos was etched into the archive under a particular face that is intimately bound up with the representational politics of the modern nation-state and the place of intellectual mediation within that configuration . Canudos was turned into a symptom of larger problems in the postcolonial nation-state—an unknown people and territory, imported models of government—that ostensibly would be solved only when intellectuals, if not the state, perfected representational politics, aligning the state with its people and representing those people whose voices had not yet been captured. This structure cannot be undone. Canudos can never simply be Belo Monte. It is now the name of this surface of inscription. aFterlIVes Commemoration . . . fixes the dead in the past, where what the dead require is a place in the futures that were denied them. Only in remaining out of joint with the times to which the dead are lost is there any prospect of a redress that would not be concomitant with the desire to lay the dead to rest. —David Lloyd, IrishTimes johnson text-3.indd 163 9/27/10 10:54 AM 164 aFterlIVes But what of this sentence’s afterlives? On the one hand, Canudos is sometimes understood as having failed to survive except as it was absorbed into the modernizing drive; on the other hand, it is sometimes seen as “living on” in new and different ways. In Irish Times David Lloyd suggests that colonization erases the potentiality of a colonized people, denying them an orientation toward the future. To insist on the truncated potentialities of different cultural formations is not to indulge in mythic or utopian illusions, he argues, but simply to “acknowledge that each cultural formation and moment envisages its own potential for transformation in its own materially available terms . . . in ways that cannot be contained by a single historical narrative or canonical path to development.”1 Lloyd urges us to understand those elements of a colonized culture incommensurable with modernity not as “melancholy survivals” but as forms of “living on” that do more than simply preserve belated practices, as “potentialities for producing and reproducing a life that lies athwart modernity .”2 This is a narrative of transformation, not recovery, since “to pass on is to be changed. And the changed live on in strange ways.”3 I cite Lloyd here not to take up the challenge of investigating how inhabitants of the area lived on in changed ways after the Canudos War. Instead, I read Lloyd’s remarks as a call to recognize how Canudos is either denied or granted a futuricity, how the dead are either laid to rest or summoned to take part of a future, and what this may tell us about the political projects evoking the name Canudos. To do so, I will pass through one final comparison of da Cunha, Benício, and Arinos and then consider two contemporary filmic iterations on the theme: Sergio Rezende’s Battle for Canudos (1999) and Antônio Olavo’s PaixãoeguerranosertãodeCanudos (1993). Ends Inafamouspassageneartheendof Ossertões,daCunhapicturesfivethousand soldiers fervently roaring before the last four survivors: “Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on October 5, toward dusk—when its last defenders fell, dying, every man of them. There were only four of them left: an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand solders.”4 At first glance this passage is exceptional for the visibility of the state’s violence against Canudos , a visibility created by the grotesque contrast of four people, one old, one a child, standing before the rabid cheers of five thousand victorious soldiers. johnson text-3.indd 164 9/27/10 10:54 AM 165 aFterlIVes This visibility is exceptional if one supposes that a prose of counterinsurgency isorganizedbytheteleologyofcertaininevitablehistoricalprocesses(progress, modernity,thestate),makinganyviolencedonebyorintheseprocessesmerely unfortunatebutnecessaryfalloutorresidue.Theirviolenceisthereforeinvisible asviolence,whiletheviolenceoftheseothersisglaringlyvisible.Ifweapproach the...