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MLN 120.2 (2005) 355-382



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Subalternizing Canudos

University of California
We assassinated thousands of Brazilians in Canudos . . . all that remained was Rebellion in the Backlands: deposition, pamphlet, sentence that will punish, on the day we realize what we did, the cruelty of our administrators and the incompetence of our leaders.
Afrânio Peixoto

Ordinary, Extraordinary

When a contemporary of the Canudos war (1896-97) penned the following words in a newspaper he could not know both how wrong and how right he was to be: "There on the mountain peaks and gorges, on the darkened walls of abrupt rocks, the story of a resuscitated people was written with the blood of the men of the backlands. There the whistling of the wind or the bellow of the wild bulls forever utter the epic of Brazilian heroism" (cited in Galvão, No calor da hora, 105).1 The history of Canudos would be, for this man, forever inscribed in the bloodied rocks, the whistling of the wind or the hoarse bellowing of the wild bull. Yet it is perhaps an uncertain inscription and the images of wind and voice may unwittingly reveal its fleeting side, as if this story were only etched into the landscape, as if there were no place for it in history books. The Canudos war, however, far from being remembered only by the wild bulls of the Brazilian sertão has had no lack of written testaments and detractions, from the letters, poetry, articles and novels of those who lived [End Page 355] through it to any number of historical interpretations up to the present day.2

The persistence of the memory of the Canudos war—fought in the backlands of the state of Bahia between the still fledgling Republican government in Brazil and followers of the lay prophet Antonio Conselheiro—may be one of its first enigmas since it was, after all, not that unique. One could draw up a catalogue of comparable rebellions and revolts around the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, all tied to the same hybrid and uneven processes of modernization that brought the Republic to Brazil in 1889. Although such processes meant a shift in the configuration of power from one based upon a slave economy centered on the sugar-producing northeast to a new capitalist-industrial bourgeois society based in the coffee-producing southeast, they did not break up the power of the great landowners or diminish the political and social marginalization of vast portions of Brazilian society. Instead, the domination of the landowning class was deepened through what Martin Lienhard has called the "second conquest" in Latin America. (Lienhard 77-85) To take one example, the Republic's fiscal reform which turned over a greater share of tax collection to municipalities resulted in a heavier tax burden, a fact that was to be key in Antonio Conselheiro's rejection of the Republic. The popular Quebra Quilos (1874-75) protest in the Northeast against the introduction of the metric system is one example of resistance to the intensification of modern structures of governmentality. On the other hand, as late as [End Page 356] 1912-16 the backlands of Santa Catarina and Paraní witnessed a peasant-based movement (the Contestado Rebellion) attributed by the historian Todd Diacon to disruption in their subsistence by changes in the system of land tenure. Much like Canudos, in the Contestado Rebellion a prophet preached the evils of the Brazilian Republic and called for a return to the monarchy. In many ways, therefore, Canudos was no more exceptional or just as exceptional as any of these. And yet, Lizir Arcanjo Alves asks: "A century later, when so many of the other nineteenth-century revolts have been forgotten, why have we still not forgotten all that happened in Canudos?" (Alves 178). The enigma is the memory of Canudos. Or perhaps Canudos is the memory of an enigma.

What I mean by this is that Canudos has acquired the face of the extra-ordinary so that even today historiography is hard-pressed to undo the...

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