Review by Oliver Redfern

The first edition of Captains of the Sands, published in 1937, was seized by the Brazilian government and burnt in public. Jorge Amado’s novel, depicting the story of street children in Brazil who rape, steal and kill (much like their future counterparts in Paulo Lins’ 1997 novel City of God) was an attack on the rich oligarchy that controlled and exploited Brazil and the corrupt church that turned its attention away from the poor and the needy.

The street children, who sleep at night in a disused building on the beach and work the streets during the day, have a sixteen-year-old blonde boy, Pedro Bala, for their leader, who also happens to be the son of a union leader killed during a protest. Pedro’s followers are a mixture of children with various criminal skills and broken pasts, who for one reason or another became homeless and will now do anything to survive. A priest with communist leanings tries to protect and help them, together with a Mãe-de-Santo (a priestess to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé) and an old friend of Pedro’s father who works in the docks.

Some passages in the novel are still controversial today: boys sexually abuse one another, or seek to rape girls on the beach at night for sport; one of them develops a love affair with a prostitute in her thirties; another one sleeps with a woman in her late forties though he secretly wishes to kill her. The boys are precocious beyond their years - brutally turned into men by the streets they live on and the type of life they follow.

Despite Amado’s forceful presentation of Communism as a saving ideology – his use of the characters as representations of what either works or not in society – as well as his excessive sentimentality at times towards the “little brave heroes”, the boys’ exploits and adventures are enough to keep the reader’s interest and paint a bleak picture of the lives poor children led in Brazil in the first half of the 20th Century.

Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado is currently out of print, but can be found on sites such as www.abebooks.co.uk

Oliver Redfern is a writer currently living in London, dividing his time between the theatre and Victoria Park.