Twenty years ago, I lived in a friend’s apartment in São Paulo, Brazil. The building’s superintendent was also living there at the time. “Senhor Olinda” was small, suntanned, and had a rather contorted figure; he had three children and lived together with his family in a tiny apartment that was connected to the building’s entrance. He was always cheerful, markedly polite and was always pleased to see me – whether I was coming or going. Mornings and evenings he would wash down the sidewalk wearing his yellow rubber boots and a blissful facial expression. And he always greeted me in that strong sertanejo dialect: “Herr Doktor, how are you?” After the first week I was quite astonished about my new academic title and the seemingly lavish usage of water, so I called my friend and apartment owner Fausto Chermont. I asked him whether the superintendent and his choice of words are common in Brazil, or whether Mr. Olinda was especially well educated. Fausto laconically informed me that Mr. Olinda was simply a typical “Nordestino”, which is the derogatory expression for all people from the hinterland in the northeast of Brazil. Many of them leave their poverty behind and try their luck in the big cities.
Since the seventies, my superintendent Senhor Olinda is only one of millions who have moved into the suburbs and slums of São Paulo, Rio and Recife. They live and work in precarious circumstances. Many work for minimum wage as a zelador (superintendent) or empregada (domestic help) for the upper middle class. It is said that the majority of all of these cities’ small-time criminals are Nordestinos. My Senhor Olinda was a typical Nordestino in every way. Like most adults of his generation, he was illiterate and spoke a very slow Brazilian Portuguese laden with unintelligible words lacking inflection. He had great respect for people in uniform and those of white skin color, addressing each and every one of them as “doctor”. Although small in form, he had the build of a wrestler, and one could instantly see the hardships he had endured in life. And there was nothing and no one that could faze him. Words like “hectic” and “stress” were just not in his vocabulary. And so it was that he watered the walkway day in and day out and greeted all those that came and went.
O Nordestino, O Nord-Este, O Sertanejo und O Sertão: these words became my companions. At first only as swearwords that my friends used when they made disparaging remarks about the state of Brazilian society. The northeast in general is to blame for everything – for the bad economic situation, the lack of building construction, the dirt on the street and the daily traffic jams.
1994: My first trip into the sertão took me to the “Chapada Diamantina”. High mesas with such poetic names as O Camelo (the camel) and Esker Dentes (the teeth) jut out several hundreds of meters from the plain. Farms and small towns with colonial charm are scattered throughout the far-reaching valleys. It was and still is striking that many buildings stand empty; in remote valleys, farms have been abandoned and the majority of the remaining people live their lives in a fight against nature. They wrest fodder from the earth for the animals or try their luck as garimpeiros (prospectors). A little tourism in the summer helps to make ends meet. I compared the people on the streets with my image of the sertanejo; this was formed by stories from the book “Grande Sertão” by João Guimaraes Rosa, who was the region’s legendary bandit in the 1930s – he and his wife Maria Bonita were role models for the dispossessed in the sertão. I realized that the present and the past are similar – yet different. Many that I met were characterized by poverty, malnutrition and hard physical work; at the same time, however, they were friendly, cheerful with an almost exuberant will to live. They have something to strive for; they can read and write, the major landowners have been disempowered. Many young people go to university and prepare for life as a doctor or agricultural economist.
It was this sertão that I wanted to investigate. I wanted to become acquainted with its inhabitants, to taste its dust, to withstand its summer heat and to make my way through all of its incongruities – in order to understand how people survive under the most adverse conditions, cultivate a future from nothingness and master their everyday lives – while avoiding all romantic clichés. I chose the period from 2012 to 2017, based on a UN weather projection for the northeast of Brazil. From 2011 it was foreseeable that the weather phenomenon El Niño would be very strong for a longer period. El Niño not only causes heavy monsoon rains in Asia – on the other side of the Pacific there are long periods of insufficient precipitation. I have taken these additional difficulties for the inhabitants of the sertão into consideration in order to stress how fragile the planet’s semi-arid areas are and what economic and social consequences our actions have.
I needed help in order to avoid the typical colonial perspective of the European. This work would not have been possible without the mayors, padres, trade unionists, professors, writers and small farmers who answered my countless questions even after the third time asking. Some took me into their world and families like a lost son – they let me sleep in their beds, eat from their plates and chat with them in the evening together on the veranda – all over a period of five years.