Title: Memórias sangradas: vida e morte nos tempos do cangaço
Photographer(s): Ricardo Beliel
Writer(s): Ricardo Beliel, Luciana Nabuco
Designer(s): Daniel Brito
Publisher(s): Editora Olhares, São Paulo, Brazil
Year: 2021
Print run:
Language(s): Portuguese
Pages: 320
Size: 18 x 25 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Edition:
Print: Ipsis, São Paulo, Brazil
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Brazil, 1920-1940
ISBN: 978-6588280225
With text and photos by the author, the book weaves together the stories of 43 people who experienced cangaço with the imagery of the movement that dominated the interior of north-eastern Brazil between the 1920s and 1940s, aspects of country life and the experience itself in pursuit of these stories for more than a decade. There are also a number of historical photos, presenting reported scenes and honouring the work of the photographers who recorded the cangaço. The book was selected and supported by the Rumos Itaú cultural programme. There were nine long trips to the region between 2007 and 2019, in a relentless investigation to piece together the puzzle of this history. With his extensive experience in important journalism, Ricardo Beliel searched for the remnants of cangaço memories. While there was still time - in a history about to turn a century old - I wanted to hear them directly from the source, from those who lived with the movement
In the text, the various testimonies and the author's personal experience in the search for his characters are presented through a narrative in which elements from theÂ
languages of the chronicle, the historical record and, in part, the travel diary are mixed. In each character we witness a flow of memory and forgetfulness and a powerful and epic narrative of personal memories involving traditions and places is revealed. The interviewees, the vast majority of whom are almost centenarians, are descendants of the cangaço era, characters from a cycle of Brazilian history, whose verses have been saved in the book so that they do not remain in oblivion, like silent stones in the middle of the road. With the semantic richness of the oral tradition that characterises them, the testimonies collected in the book contribute to recovering for the historiography of our country a path of redesigning the memory and mysticism of the peasant peoples, their stories intertwined with the era of the cangaço, their and religious spaces.