First impressions review: Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon, by Jorge Amado
This 1958 novel paints a funny yet also sensually evocative portrait of a Brazilian town in 1925. Ilhéus is a cacao town, settled by immigrants from across the country and the world, that has grown large and prosperous enough to have dreams of modernity and sophistication – if the old guard will let it!
“Many thing still reminded one of the Ilhéus of former days. Not the days of the sugar mills…of the Negro slaves…but the more recent past…after the Jesuit priests had brought the first cacao seedlings, the period when men in search of fortune invaded the forests and with rifle and pistol disputed every foot of soil…when the forests were felled and cacao was planted over corpses and blood…But little by little these vestiges were disappearing…not without resistance, however, especially from customs that time had virtually transformed into laws of conduct.”
The book has two main story-lines/themes. The first is a fairly straight-forward political drama between the men of Ilhéus and their support for either the upstart exporter Mundinho Falcão, who wants to modernize the town by, for example, dredging the sandbar in the harbor, and the old “colonel” Ramiro Bastos, who has been the political boss for decades and doesn’t see what all the hurry is for. The second is an exploration of Ilhéus’ women and their subtler dissatisfactions with the restrictiveness of their lives. They may have little opportunity to talk politics, but many know that they are unhappy, and begin to rebel in small or large ways.
The character who connects these two parts of the story is Nacib Saad, a Syrian-Brazilian who runs the Vesuvius bar. Despite his imposing size and the large black moustache that causes the townsfolk to refer to him as “the Turk” (much to Nacib’s annoyance1) he is a gentle soul at heart. Though much of the political discussion takes place in his bar, he tries to remain neutral as long as possible, since he has friends on both sides. At the beginning of the book, his main concern is finding a new cook. There isn’t a competent one to be found anywhere, and Nacib is practically tearing his hair out in frustration – especially since he had agreed to cater a large dinner the next day.
1. “Maybe your mother’s a Turk. I’m not.”… “Arab, Turk, Syrian – it’s all the same.” “All the same, my ass. You’re showing your ignorance. You don’t know history and geography. The Turks are bandits, the rottenest people in the world…” “Hell, Nacib, don’t get mad. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that these foreign differences are all the same to us.”
Then everyone is distracted by Jesuíno Mendoça shooting his wife Sinházina and the dentist Dr. Osmundo after catching them together: “For, despite the town’s much vaunted progress…nothing pleased the townspeople so much as a good juicy story of love, jealousy, and violence.” Most of the town approves of this murder, at least at the start, because of what the author refers to as a cruel unwritten law: “There was heavy betting on the outcome of almost every trial…No bets were laid, however, when the crime was the murder of an unfaithful wife by her husband. Everyone knew that a unanimous acquittal would be the inevitable and just result.” It is only the relative newcomer, Mundinho – echoing Nacib’s unspoken thoughts - who says anything out loud against it: “A beautiful woman is sacred.” Though even that values the woman more as an object than a person! Malvina, the teenage daughter of a planter, makes her own protest by laying a flower on Sinházina’s coffin.
Malvina is the character who will likely be most relatable to modern female readers. She has examined the lives of the married women in this town and concluded that she wants to go to Rio and get a job in an office…and maybe a lover, but definitely NOT a marriage anything like her mother’s! Gloria’s frustrations and ambitions are more typical for her status and time. She is the mistress of a much older planter who isn’t around much but is also very jealous. As a result, she is mind-numbingly bored and lonely, and spends a lot of time leaning languidly out the window, hoping that some young man will get up the courage to come visit her. This, as one of the characters points out, is an important public service, as it gives the old maids something to tut over and the married men a bit of fantasy-fueled passion to bring back to their wives. Finally, someone does overcome his fear. Gloria has no intention of leaving her current patron – and the comfortable life he provides –but is more than willing to lavish her new beau with fancy new clothes. The result is that the “kept” woman gets her own kept man!
The titular Gabriela arrives in town as a filthy, penniless migrant. She’s the only hireable woman who is confident in her cooking ability, so Nacib hires her, only to be shocked at how lovely she is once she’s washed off the dirt. I don’t know quite what to think of Gabriela. I liked right away her determination not to give up her own goals to follow some man simply because she happened to have enjoyed sleeping with him for a bit. But then she started to seem more like a dryad – some kind of wild creature unaccustomed to civilization – than a period-accurate mulatta peasant woman. However, I think that might be the point of her character. She is unaffected by fear of poverty or of society’s rules because, while she is vaguely aware of the rules, she doesn’t understand them on a gut level. She lives in the moment for the joy of simple pleasures: playing with a stray cat, making love, cooking something delicious and seeing someone else enjoy eating it, and dancing barefoot whenever it suits her2. While she is a bit of a proto-manic-pixie-dream-girl, I can’t say I was immune to her infectious charm either!
Nacib falls for her very quickly3, and she is immediately fond of him…but she doesn’t really get why he starts acting jealous and unhappy about the way the other men at the bar look at her when she brings his lunch, or when various people make offers to her to be their cook, or mistress, or both – after all, she turns them down because she likes where she is. Gabriela does understand the rules enough to know that Nacib “should” be aiming to marry someone richer and whiter than her. He surprises her by asking for her hand anyway. But this is only the beginning of their problems. Gabriela could dance in the street and laugh out loud, but Mrs. Saad must be a proper lady who wears tight shoes, goes to poetry readings instead of circuses, and absolutely doesn’t walk around with a rose behind her ear or flirt with other men. And Nacib is no Henry Higgins; Gabriela tries, not wanting to hurt him, but she cannot keep up the act. The murder at the start suggests this could turn tragic – we’ve seen what society decrees the fate of a straying wife must be – but this book has a happy ending featuring a legal loophole worthy of a Shakespeare comedy. The political drama too has an unexpectedly harmonious resolution.
2. I do wish the author hadn’t included the detail that she’d been molested by her uncle, though. That can’t help but make one wonder if her oddly childlike nature is in some way a response to that. But, then again, trauma doesn’t generally make people as happy as Gabriela in her natural state seems to be. So that bit of her history just makes understanding her more difficult.
3. I must admit, wandering into the bedroom of the young woman with no money who works in his house is not something I’m going to put on his list of good qualities! Gabriela seems to know her own mind in these matters – you can tell from other evidence that she’d walk away if she didn’t like him, money or no money - so it doesn’t seem quite as icky as it might otherwise. But it definitely still keeps me from putting this on my “best romances” list!
As one might expect for the time period, the townsfolk are fairly homophobic as well as misogynistic. For instance, the town has two “official homosexuals”, who are more or less tolerated: Machadinho “a launderer by trade, into whose delicate hands the families entrusted their white linen suits” and Miss Pirangi, an “ugly negro”– but clearly not everyone thinks so and there is more than one “unofficial” gay in town, given that he is confident of finding them on the beach! There’s a Portuguese chef who pretends to be French that Nacib hires later in the book who attracts more ire, but that seems to be primarily due to his snootiness and only secondarily because certain characters think he’s hitting on them. And he only gets run out of town because someone wants to do Gabriela a favor by making sure Nacib has to re-hire her! There’s also an American woman who (along with pretty much everyone else who has seen her and tasted her cooking) tries to hire away Gabriela; this lady smokes cigars and is rumored to be bisexual. Overall, while these bits are a little uncomfortable to read, they aren’t too actively upsetting – none of these characters get beaten up or arrested or anything like that!
The racial dynamics will be very recognizable to anyone familiar with Brazil, or Latin America more broadly, but perhaps might seem odd to American readers. Like Brazil more broadly, Ilhéus is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society and we see characters of different backgrounds interacting all the time; It isn’t as spatially or socially segregated as many areas of the US in the 1920s. However, colorism is absolutely a thing. It is quite easy to tell from how this is written that the whiter you are, the higher the status you tend to have, with black characters clearly on the bottom rung. Mulatta women are in a particularly vulnerable position, being considered more desirable than black women but less worthy of respect – or at least the dubious form of security and respect represented by marriage in this society! – than white ones. However, education and money can tweak that ranking. A visiting mulatto poet with dual degrees, for example, is the toast of the town, invited to all the rich white guy’s houses, and treated like any other distinguished guest. Likewise, Gabriela gets treated differently when she marries Nacib, though not with quite the level respect they might prefer. However, based on the nature of the snubbing I would estimate that is 40% due to having been her husband’s live-in cook and mistress, 25% due to her obvious discomfort in her new role, and only about 35% due to her cinnamon skin tone! Interestingly, Nacib seems to have a similar kind of status as light-skinned Latin Americans receive in the US, being exotified a bit and not 100% considered “one of us” but treated with more respect than someone of equivalent wealth and education with African ancestry.
The structure of the book is interesting, with humorously wordy section headings that sound like something written in the 17th or 18th century: How Mrs. Saad became involved in politics, in violation of her husband’s traditional neutrality, and of that lady’s adventurous night.
There are also occasional pieces of poetry, usually about the various female characters and their woes. ‘Lullaby for Malvina’, for instance, outlines her worries if she stays in town:
My husband, lord and master,
Would my life control:
Control the clothes I wear,
Control my scent, my powder,
Control all my desires,
My sleep, my body, even
My very soul.
His the right to kill,
And while I live,
My only right, to weep
…as well as her desire to “sail away”.
Overall recommendation: The lush writing style and the town full of colorful characters – I didn’t even get to mention the Spanish anarchist – reminds me a bit of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. However, while I’m not sure this 100% counts as a feminist tale, I was so much happier with the depiction of women in this than I ever have been with Garcia Marquez’s books! It is overall a charming, optimistic story, and I liked that many of the townsfolk of both genders have their own POV sections and/or story arcs over the course of the novel. So, if you like Latin American literature or stories about quirky small towns, definitely give this a look.
