A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 2

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A Short Prelude
From Os Sertões to As Selvas
Euclides Who? Narrating the Brazilian Nation
Euclides da Cunha is not known as a player in the pivotal moments of the creation of
the first Brazilian Republic. His exploits as a rebel firebrand, as an Amazon explorer, as
an intimate of Brazil's greatest diplomat, the Baron of Rio Branco, and as a central ideo-
logue and field surveyor in Brazil's “Scramble” for western Amazonia, are largely for-
gotten. His Amazon time is especially obscure, given only footnotes and short chapters
in his biographies, in spite of the fact that most of the last years of his life were taken up
with urgent Amazon concerns. Da Cunha resides in, indeed dominates, a quite different
realm: Latin American literature. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers Brazil has
produced, and among the most luminous stylists to ever have written in Portuguese, due
to his masterpiece Os Sertões ( Rebellion in the Backlands ), published in 1902.
Da Cunha's ideas shaped the rhetoric of national politics from the first moments of
revolutionary insurrection to his last days in Rio Branco's court. Da Cunha was deeply
engaged in the political, ideological, and geographical construction of the young Brazili-
an republic, whether in uprisings in Rio, in rebellions in the Northeastern backlands, or
in imperial contest on Amazon frontiers. His biography mirrors the signal events of the
Brazilian republic in three key periods. He is situated at the heart of the revolution that
overthrew Emperor Pedro II—through his mentors such as Benjamin Constant Magal-
hães, 1 his own dramatic actions, and his exile to São Paulo where, as a journalist, he
became an antimonarchist propagandist for the young republic. Later, after the relat-
ively bloodless revolution, da Cunha married Ana de Ribeiro, daughter of General Solon
Ribeiro, one of the instigators of the republican coup. This further helped da Cunha's re-
volutionary standing, but set into play a deep domestic unhappiness whose denouement
in a modest Rio suburb was a defining scandal of Brazil's Belle Époque.
Os Sertões
The Canudos rebellion in 1897 was a pivotal moment for da Cunha and the republic. In
the outback of Bahia (the “Sertões” of the his title), a motley group of peasants, natives,
ex-slaves, and devout followers of the backland prophet Antonio Conselheiro had suc-
cessfully defeated several Brazilian military campaigns. The movement was portrayed as
millenarian, backward, royalist, and implacably allied against the godless, secular nature
ofthefirstrepublic.DevotedtothepiousPrincessIsabel(whohadendedslaveryin1888)