My father and I share a love for the Jataí, a tiny stingless bee in Brazil. These native bees have stunted stingers. To defend themselves and to protect the hive, some of these indigenous species–also known as meliponines–can bite, tangle in one's hair, invade the nose, mouth, ear, and even cause burns. They are smarter than other species of bees that have stingers connected to their intestines. Soon after stinging an enemy, the bees sadly lose their life.
Abelha (bee), in Portuguese, is a feminine noun and I use the word “she” when I refer to the Jatai. I don't exactly remember when I saw a Jataí for the first time–I was probably very young–but I know who introduced the little bee to me. Jataí is the most common bee in my father's birthplace, the Northwestern area of Minas Gerais state. My father held a Jataí in his rough hands and said: "Olha a Jataí, Juliana, ela é mansinha, mansinha." "Look at the Jataí, Juliana, she is really, really meek." A bee that you can hold in your bare hands without either the human being or insect being hurt is precious.
My father and the author João Guimarães Rosa share a birthplace in Minas Gerais state. In 1956 João Guimarães Rosa published Grande Sertão: Veredas, his most important book, one of the masterpieces of Brazilian Literature. There is an English translation from 1963 with the title The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. This is not a literal, word by word translation of the original title. "Grande" means big, while "Sertão" means backlands--in this particular case, a Brazilian backland. "Veredas," in this context, is a specific type of vegetation in central Brazil, a kind of oasis in the middle of a very dry area. In 2021, a new and, conceivably, better translation by Alison Entrekin will be published: Bedeviled in the Backlands. Entrekin has apparently been working on this project since 2016. In an essay for Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature, the translator stated that, during her first attempt in bringing Grande Sertão: Veredas to English, she was able to translate only 860 words in three weeks, i.e., 41 words per day. This previous sentence has 45 words.
Guimarães Rosa was born in June 27, 1908 in Cordisburgo–one year and 12 days before my paternal grandfather, Cirilo. Cordisburgo is a town in Minas Gerais with a population today of 8,000 people . Besides being a writer, Guimarães Rosa was also a physician and a diplomat. He spoke eight languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, English, French, German, Russian, and Esperanto. He was also able to read Swedish, Dutch, Latin, and Greek, and he studied Tupi (an Indigenous Brazilian language), Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, among others.
In his literary monument, Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa chose to use all his knowledge about the world, languages, and cultures to write about what was inside his own country and, in many ways, what was inside himself: the Sertão. If we think about Brazil as a body, the Amazon may be the lungs, but the Sertão is certainly the heart. It is not a coincidence that the Sertão is also called the "Deep Brazil."
If you don't speak Portuguese, you are going to learn another word now: Cerrado. These double RRs plus A are pronounced as Ha – Ce-HA-do. Cerrado is the biome of the Sertão. Both words can be read as synonyms. Cerrado, in my mind, is not only about vegetation and geography. Like Sertão, Cerrado is about its people, the state of being, and life.
My father was born in the Cerrado. For at least four generations, my paternal family has been children of the Sertão, the exact same land where Guimarães Rosa chose to set his masterpiece.
But how can I explain the Cerrado to you if there is nothing like it in the world? If there is no word in the English language that can exactly translate the physical beauty of its landscape as well as its metaphysical power? Maybe the best attempt in English is to call the Cerrado "the Brazilian Savanna," a combination of grasslands, shrubs, and woodlands in a tropical area. This description fits the Cerrado in an interesting way, because the Cerrado is certainly many intricate things in one. Its trees have rough, crooked trunks. Unlike the rainforest, where trees are huge and densely packed, the trees in the Cerrado are smaller and dispersed throughout the landscape. They look like elders.
The Sertão is more than a geographical area. The Sertão carries ancient wisdom, and magical stories about oppression and the resilience and strength of its people. If we divide the syllables of the word in Portuguese, we may gain a better (if not etymologically correct) explanation: "Ser" means "to be;" "tão" can indicate that something is big, or grand. Sertão, therefore, is full of different dimensions. It is vast, but also deep, complex, and beyond comprehension.
I have known the Sertão since I was 9 months old. In June 1985, my parents took me back home for the first time. With the exception of a few years during the recession of the early 1990s, we have returned to the Sertão every year. When I look at the Sertão, I see its many contrasts, shades of yellow, brown, and blue are everywhere. I feel it’s extreme heat, with temperatures of 105 ºF during the day. At night, it is cold and windy. The Sertão is small and huge. Dry between April and October, with a rainy season from November to March. The Sertão is both person and god. A person when it is waiting patiently for the rain, wanting relief from the heat. A god because it has the kind of life force that simply cannot be contained.
Grande Sertão: Veredas is narrated in first person by Riobaldo, a former hinterland thug known by critics as the "Hamlet of the Sertão." In about 600 pages, he remembers his days as a thug, describing this tough land and its people, and reflecting about life and some of its most primitive dualities: good and evil, God and devil, love and hate. Riobaldo also describes his complex relationship with Diadorim, his best friend and member of the same gang. On the surface, the main plot involves the dispute between warring factions. There is violence, betrayal, and vengeance. Riobaldo, the philosopher of the Sertão, even makes a pact with the devil to win a war against his enemies. During a decisive battle in the book, Diadorim – the love of Riobaldo's life – dies. That is when the protagonist finds out that Diadorim was, in fact, a woman. Her true name was Maria Deodorina da Fé Bettancourt Marins, "que nasceu para o dever de guerrear e nunca ter medo, e mais para muito amar, sem gozo de amor..." – "who was born with the duty to war and never have fear, and even more to love a lot, without love's enjoyment..."
Grande Sertão: Veredas was born after Guimarães Rosa had traveled 150 miles in the Sertão in 1952. During this journey, he wrote down stories, descriptions of the landscapes, and, most importantly, the words and expressions used by the people from that land. He wanted to deeply understand that world and its society. Knowing them as I did since I was a kid, I can safely say that he succeeded in his mission. Part of the acknowledged originality of Guimarães Rosa's works is the way he subverts the language. The writer rearranges the syntax, adds prefixes and suffixes to words, creates new ones from onomatopoeias, plays with diminutives and augmentatives, and uses the dialect of the people from the Sertão. That is why translating his books is a Herculean work.
In 2001, the Brazilian scholar Nilce Sant’Anna Martins published O Léxico de Guimarães Rosa (The Lexicon of Guimarães Rosa), a 536-page book with 8,000 words, with their meanings and all the works in which they appear. "Nonada," the first word in Grande Sertão: Veredas, for instance, is the union of "non" ("no," "not" in French and Italian) and "nada" (nothing, in Portuguese). "Nonada," therefore, means "something with no importance." In the same book, Guimarães Rosa turns "cachorro" (dog, in Portuguese) into a verb: "cachorrar" (to dog), meaning "to wander as a mutt." It took Nilce Sant’Anna Martins ten years to research, organize, and write this volume; a decade-long dive into letters, syllables, names, sounds, interpretations, and meanings. With Guimarães Rosa, one needs to be willing to walk through the depths. Never an easy task, for sure.
"Viemos pelo Urucuia. Rio meu de amor é o Urucuia."
"We came through the Urucuia. My river of love is the Urucuia."
Grande Sertão: Veredas (page 71)
There is no sea near the Sertão. Rivers rule the region. In my father's birthplace, the Urucuia is the main watercourse, 249 miles long. His name comes from urucum (achiote, in English), the fruit of the urucuzeiro tree (Bixa orellana) that provides red dye and spice. The pigment has been used by native Brazilian people since ancient times. During the rainy season, the redish waters of the Urucuia remind us of the color of the urucum.
The Urucuia River drains into the majestic São Francisco, one of the biggest and most important rivers in Brazil. The Urucuia is the first watercourse mentioned in Grande Sertão: Veredas, the most beloved by Riobaldo; probably the favorite of Guimarães Rosa, too. In the book, the Urucuia is cited by name 42 times, 10 times more than the São Francisco.
Throughout the pages, the Urucuia also materializes itself as a particular kind of people, the urucuianos, natives of the river basin. My father is an urucuiano. I am half urucuiana.
But dangers can exist even for natives of the river basin. When I was a teenager, we almost died in the Urucuia. I had gone fishing on the river with my father, my brother, and a cousin. We saw an abandoned wooden canoe and decided to board it. We realized too late that there weren't any oars. The canoe started moving away from the riverside, but luckily it was still tied to a tree trunk. After a moment of despair, we were able to reach a piece of wood and make our way back to the riverbank. We got off the canoe and then fell into the mud, with almost half of our bodies buried. Eventually, with the help of vines and one another, we came back home – without any fish, of course. We never played with the Urucuia again. The encounter with the river taught us that we could not handle him.
My encounters with the butterflies of the Sertao taught me a valuable lesson as well.
"De qualquer pano de mato, de de-entre quase cada encostar de duas folhas, saíam em giro as todas as cores de borboletas. Como não se viu, aqui se vê. Porque, nos Gerais, a mesma raça de borboletas, que em outras partes é trivial regular – cá cresce, vira muito maior, e com mais brilho, se sabe; acho que é do seco do ar, do limpo, desta luz enorme."
"From any piece of woods, from almost every two leaves touching each other, fled in twirl all the colors of butterflies. As you have never seen, here you see. Because, in the Gerais, the same breeds of butterflies that in other places are trivial, regular, here they turn to be much bigger and brighter, everybody knows; I guess it is because of the dry air, clean, because of this huge light."
Grande Sertão: Veredas (page 28)
I am terrified of butterflies and moths. I don't know the origin of this fear, but ever since I was a little kid I would run away screaming whenever they tried to approach me. I was only able to let my fear of butterflies go after I fell in a grota and almost drowned. A grota is a natural deep trench in the Cerrado which is surrounded by trees and fills with water during the rainy season. I was walking from side to side on a big, old tree trunk, that connected one margin to the other, when I slipped and fell into the water. I sank down and reached the bottom. I was lying on the ground when I thought: I can't die here; I won't die here. I was already very attached to life. Even without knowing how to swim, I started flapping my legs and was able to make my way to the surface. A cousin on the trunk reached me and pulled me out.
I was crouched on a rock under the shadow of a tree, crying and trembling, when I saw her: the biggest and brightest butterfly I've ever seen in my life, with those grand sky-blue wings. She passed by in front of me with her slow movements, no more than 15 feet away. It was the first time I let my fear of butterflies go. This butterfly is called Silk-Blue (Morpho menelaus) because of her metallic, iridescent wings. She is one of the 1,000 butterfly species in the Cerrado and has a wingspan of about 4.7 inches. In the Sertão, the Silk-Blue is usually sighted in the beginning and the end of the rainy season. Because of her unique features, she was extensively hunted and turned into ornaments in museums and private collections around the world. I often wonder if Guimarães Rosa was thinking about a Morpho menelaus when he wrote the passage above.
On another occasion, I walking down a dirt road with my parents, my grandmother and my brother. We were headed towards a relative's house. Midway, I was paralyzed because of a swarm of butterflies, dozens of small black and deep red ones, also glowing and blocking the path. I was a teenager by that time. I started crying and saying I wasn't going to pass through them. "Vamo, Juliana. Passa correndo, rapidinho." "Come on, Juliana. Run quickly," said my father. "Não," I answered. I don't know how long we stayed there, my father trying to convince me to go through the swarm because there was no other available way to reach our destination. Ashamed that my grandmother would consider me spoiled, I ran through them in hysterics.
On both of these occasions with butterflies in the Cerrado, I clearly remember the light and brightness mentioned by Guimarães Rosa. When I saw those lines in Grande Sertão: Veredas, I had to stop reading. I couldn't hold myself. Some years ago, a couple of close cousins bought the small farm that belonged to my grandparents. At that time, I found out the nickname of the place: Borboleta (Butterfly, in Portuguese). My cousin pronounces it as "Braboleta," with a lovely mistake in the first syllable – something like Brutterfly.
"De noite, se é de ser, o céu embola um brilho. Cabeça da gente quase esbarra nelas. Bonito em muito comparecer, como o céu de estrelas,
por meados de fevereiro!"
"At night, as it's supposed to be, the sky entangles itself in brightness. Our heads almost brush against them. As a sky full of stars, beautiful in its appearance, by mid-February!"
Grande Sertão: Veredas (page 32)
When I was a kid, my grandparents used to live on a small farm without electricity or plumbing, in the middle of the Cerrado. My grandfather's well, one of the few in that area, supplied water for many families. "Você nunca pode negar água pra ninguém." "You must never deny water to anyone," my grandfather used to say.
At night, before going to bed, we sat on chairs and stools and looked at the sky. "Parecia que dava pra pegar com a mão." "It seemed we could catch them with our hands," my mother always said about the stars of the Sertão. They were arranged in multiple layers, moving, and alive. It was in the Sertão where I found out that stars have different colors.
Each night we counted all the shooting stars we saw cutting across the sky. There were so many of them that it was hard to have a wish for each one. That starry sky was maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. It might be the reason why my brother and I love the space so much and everything related to it. Now I constantly wish I could go back in time to look at that sky once more.
Guimarães Rosa mentions many bees throughout Grande Sertão: Veredas, but none by the name of Jataí. About 15 years ago, my father came to me and said: "Juliana, I have an idea! Pay attention to my plan. I'll build a little box to bring some Jataí from Minas. We’ll raise them in the backyard." I celebrated his idea with an "Ebaaa," the Portuguese version for "Yaayy."
The honey of Jataí is delicious, not too sweet. It is also believed to have medicinal properties, indicated to strengthen the immune system and treat different types of infections, stress, and even heart diseases. No academic study has proved its efficiency yet, but I do believe that this deep amber honey can cure souls.
When my father came up with that idea, at no time did I question if his plan to bring little tiny bees to our house, in the city, was right or if there was any chance it would be successful. And I am the groove killer in my family, the one who likes to inform others about everything that can go wrong, whether it is a purchase, a trip, a birthday party, or a wedding. The idea of having Jataí in our backyard just made me so happy, mainly, because my father was very happy.
My father built a little wooden box, made a tiny entrance where the bees would get in and out, and painted it black to mimic a hole in a tree trunk, one of the places where Jataí usually build their beehives.
We generally went to Minas Gerais in the rainy season, December and January, summer, when it is school break in Brazil. That trip was probably our last time in my grandparents' small farm. My grandfather had already passed away, but my grandmother (my father's stepmother) lived there for a few more years, before moving to Arinos – the biggest city nearby, where many of our relatives still live.
One day my father spent hours in the backwoods by himself. He didn't invite me to his expedition, making it clear that the Jataí plan was more his than ours. But I saw him coming back from the woods, holding that black box with both arms. I saw this scene because I probably spent the whole time waiting for him. "Juliana, vem ver." – "Juliana, come see," he said. There they were, those gentle, tiny bees.
Some days later, we returned to São Paulo with the black box inside the trunk of the car. I saw my father protecting it with some cloths to prevent the box from moving and upsetting the Jataí. Then we drove 900 miles. At our house, he suspended the small container in the corner of the cemented backyard, hoping the bees would get used to the new place and feel at home.
I loved going to our backyard to see the Jataí coming in and out their wooden house. I was proud of them venturing in the big city. My father was glad, too. On the weekends he climbed on a stool to watch his hive working. My father and bees share a tireless commitment to work. But I don't think it is about loving it; what they have, instead, is a huge awareness of duty. Once, joyful, my father called me to show what seemed to be a miracle. He opened the top of the box and pointed: "Olha." – "Look." There was honey. We were both thrilled.
Jataí is one of the most common species of stingless bees in Brazil. Actually, they occur in most countries of Latin America. Aside from the woods, they adapted themselves to live in the cities, where they frequently build hives in the walls. That is why it wouldn't be impossible for them to thrive at our house.
My father's bees endured for about a year – maybe a little more than that. But he was really sad when, little by little, they disappeared. He believes that the fumigation trucks that circulate throughout the city to kill mosquitos (among other diseases, they carry the zika virus) also killed his Jataí. Every once in awhile he still talks about the empty black wooden box. I was devastated by the loss too. But maybe it wasn't the fumigation. Maybe they missed the Cerrado and went back home.
Today, I think that I should have prevented my father from bringing the bees, that I should have realized that they wouldn't adapt to our house. They belonged to the Sertão and that is a sacred thing. At the same time, I understand my father's wish to bring a little piece, something so precious, from his original home. If I could and if the Sertão allowed me, maybe I would also bring Jataí to the United States, where I live now. But I know they wouldn't be happy here. They would also leave, disappear, trying to go back to their home.
My father embodies the melting pot that many people claim Brazil is: Native-Brazilian, African, and European ancestries – everything visible in only one person. The youngest of ten children, my father left his home, in the Sertão of Minas Gerais towards São Paulo, in 1972, when he was only 17. Until then he didn't have a birth certificate or any other document. To be able to travel alone, he told the notary public that he was 18, the age of majority in Brazil.
When I ask him about leaving Minas Gerais, he answers that he doesn't have much to say, that he hadn't thought about anything before his journey to the city. "O que eu sabia naquela época? Nada. Não tinha nada lá." "What did I know then? Nothing. There was nothing there." But I think there were many things there. Forty seven years after his migration, he asked me to write about the Cerrado. We were on a video call and had been in the U.S. for nearly three years. "Eu vou," eu disse. "I will," I said. I am not sure if he overcame leaving the Sertão; neither am I.
I have noticed that my father is a different man in his birthplace. His smiles are broader, and he is much more talkative. In the Cerrado, my father shines as much as its butterflies. Maybe he feels truly free in the Sertão. I don't know how leaving home so early really affected his life. I left my country when I was almost 31 and in a completely different situation. I am educated and privileged. At that point in his life, my father had only studied until the 4th grade and had lost his mother when he was only a toddler. Unlike him, I have the internet to communicate with my parents whenever I want. I don't know, for instance, how long it took for my dad to give news to my grandfather after his arrival in São Paulo. Electricity was only established in that region about ten years ago. What I am still learning, however, is the effects that his migration had on me. For many years I wondered why I couldn't make my father as happy as he was in the Cerrado. Maybe that is why I love and care for that place so much. Loving that land is a way to understand my father, to be connected to him, and make peace with myself.
Guimarães Rosa was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters – the highest literary institution in Brazil – in 1963. For four years he postponed his official induction because he feared that he wouldn't bear the emotion during the ceremony. He also sensed that to become an Immortal – the title granted to all members of the Academy of Letters – could be a bad omen. Guimarães Rosa, unfortunately, was right. He died on November 19, 1967, three days after taking over his chair, victim of a massive heart attack. During the induction to the Academy, in the final part of his speech, Guimarães Rosa said: "A gente morre é para provar que viveu" and "As pessoas não morrem, ficam encantadas." – "We die to prove that we lived" and "People don't die, they become enchanted."
These two phrases touch me profoundly, because it seems that Guimarães Rosa was trying to find solace in a fact that he wouldn't be able to change. He was saying goodbye to the world he loved so much and telling everyone that there is beauty even in this. I imagine Guimarães Rosa writing those phrases with resilience and humility towards something that is bigger and more miraculous than any other thing in the world: existence. Existence fascinates and terrifies us. Sertão has the same effect upon us.
Sagarana, published in 1946 – ten years before Grande Sertão: Veredas – was the first book by Guimarães Rosa that I have ever read. I was a teenager then. A collection of nine stories that are set in the Sertão of Minas Gerais, the book fuses the sacred and the profane, realism and mythos, universal and existential themes, and the core of Brazilian identity: Indigenous, African, and European.
I was really moved while I was reading this book, because Guimarães Rosa was describing with precision the place that I knew, to which I was profoundly attached. I remember thinking about how was it possible for him to know so much about the way people talk and behave in that land and how that landscape looked like. I was moved because Guimarães Rosa understood the depth of that universe.
But I was unable to finish Grande Sertão: Veredas. I tried to read it when I was a teenager, and I tried again, unsuccessfully, some months ago. I sob with almost every sentence. It is impossible to control the tears. Like Guimarães Rosa, I am very superstitious, but I am not afraid to die after finishing the book. What I am afraid is that I don't know what will happen when I finish all those 600 pages. Who will I become? There is something else: I don't like endings and I hate to bid farewell to the ones I love. As I realize now, isn't it a kind of death?
The last time I visited the Cerrado was in 2011, months before my grandmother –my grandfather's second wife–passed away. I spent only six days there, the length of my holiday break.
Work prevented me from going more to the Sertão. In 2015, I moved to the United States. Since then, I visited Brazil twice, again without enough time to travel 900 miles to see the Cerrado and my relatives. My parents, on the other hand, still travel to Minas Gerais almost every year, so their house is full of things from that land. They have, for instance, a freezer reserved only for the cheese produced in that region (that you cannot find in any other part of the world). It is a hard, yellow, and salty cheese, made from unpasteurized milk. This cheese is the main ingredient of another specialty from Minas Gerais: pão de queijo, a kind of baked cheese bread.
My parents also bring baru–the nut of the Cerrado, my favorite one–and cassava flour handcrafted there. In my last visit to Brazil I didn't see the Cerrado, but I tasted and felt it.
Diadorim–the love of Riobaldo's life–was born on September 11, only one day after my own birthday. In Brazil, September 11 is also the National Day of the Cerrado. A coincidence that our birthdays are so close? Who knows? Again, as Guimarães Rosa, I am terrified when facing the divine and its manifestations.
The author ends Grande Sertão: Veredas with the following lines: "O diabo não há! É o que eu digo, se for… Existe é homem humano. Travessia." "There is no devil! That is what I say, if it is… What exists is human man. Crossing."
Although crossing is the direct translation for travessia, its meaning is a little bit different from the word in Portuguese. Travessia is not only about going from one side to another. It implies a journey. Maybe "journey" is a better translation for this end, because, for me, Guimarães Rosa is referring to the huge Travessia–Journey that Life is.
Lastly in the final page of the book there is the infinity symbol. Grande Sertão: Veredas ends, but life – again – doesn't. I cry every time I see it. How am I not supposed to? Without any words Guimarães Rosa is saying that Existence and the Sertão will keep flowing endlessly through their rivers, stars, butterflies, bees, and people.
Contributor Notes
Juliana Ravelli is a Brazilian writer, journalist, and MFA student in Creative Writing Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago. In 2019 she received the Stories Matter Foundation Masters Award, which recognizes graduate students in the Chicago literary scene. In her works, Juliana explores themes of memory, family, identity, migration, and immigration.
