Jorge Amado, a communist to his very roots

I'm jealous of one heck of a sentence by that genius Jorge Amado, author of Captains of the Sands (Capitães da Areia) and Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (Gabriela, cravo e canela).

First: hi.

How are you?

As I was saying, I'm jealous of that sentence by Jorge Amado. I wish I'd written it. It's at the beginning of Cacau (Cacao), from 1933:

I have tried in this book, with a minimum of literature for a maximum of honesty, to recount the life of the workers on the cacao plantations of southern Bahia.

A minimum of literature for a maximum of honesty. Did it land?

No, read it again. With the proper intonation, with your eyes closed, with your hand on your heart.

A minimum of literature for a maximum of honesty. How about now?

Writers know all too well the temptation to embellish, to pile on the adjectives... And in Cacau, right at the outset, we run smack into a warning that the pretty stuff can wait.

Jorge Amado was born in 1912 on a farm in Ferradas, in southern Bahia. He was the son of a coronel, a powerful landowner and local political boss. Given where he came from, it would have been reasonable to expect a book from him about the boss's house, but he chose to write about the people who worked the land.

In 1932, already radicalized, Jorge joined the Communist Party, moved by Brazil's inequalities. The word radical comes from the Latin for "root," and that's where the radical left (the communists) gets its name: it points to capitalism itself as the root of inequality and, for that reason, argues that capitalism should be overcome.

For that matter, using a minimum of literature and a maximum of honesty is, to me, a radical stance too: stripping raw reality of the frills and romanticization that oppressors find so useful as a distraction.

Karl Marx wrote that what shapes a person's consciousness is the material reality of their life. In other words: employer and employee see the world from different standpoints, with divergent and sometimes even opposing interests. Silent or not, there's a conflict, and it won't be ignored.

Jorge Amado knew that many people weren't yet conscious of this. And I don't think that consciousness—also known as class consciousness—has come very far since. For example: a worker who votes for a politician opposed to ending the six-day workweek is defending the interests of a class other than their own. Judging by the first round of Brazil's 2026 elections, there are more than 61.7 million of those workers, not counting the others (a mere 33 million) who felt they had no settled opinion on everything at stake and therefore stayed away from the polls.

Well, come to think of it, Jorge Amado also defended the interests of a class that wasn't his own. The difference is that he knew it.

Elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1945, the writer got a clause written into the 1946 Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of religious worship, a provision the 1988 Constitution repeated in almost the same words.

Many generations later, Jones Manoel, born in the Borborema favela in Recife, was elected to Brazil's Chamber of Deputies in 2026. He openly advocates an end to capitalism in his books and on social media: a minimum of frills, a maximum of honesty.

I'm so jealous of that sentence. Even more of what Jorge Amado did with it.

Emanoel.