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** spoiler alert ** Jorge Amado wanted to speak against the poverty and misery in Brazil, about all that made those young boys homeless thieves. But he romanticizes these boys in everything they do, even when they rape young black women for sport. In Amado’s books, men always seem to think in poor black women like objects, beings, there just for their pleasure, to cook and to have sex.
In a deeply disturbing scene, the hero [sic] Pedro Bala annaly rapes a fifteen years old black girl after she claims to be a virgin. He menaces her, and she realizes that if she won’t consent [sic] to that, he will take her virginity, and then he tries to rape her anyway because he is still excited. At the end, he lets her go, making her promise that she will meet him in the following day to be annaly raped once again. If she doesn’t show up, he will take revenge on her. Amado writes that she cried of fear, but also that she felt desire, and he actually uses the words “She consented�. He also writes that she behaved as a mad woman, crying and screaming, with terror in her eyes. And that all she felt was pain and fear, and desire to run away. Pedro Bala hates her because she keeps crying, thinking in the end that she was just a kid and regretting ever meeting her, even though he later rapes other girls. He states that he did nothing to her, because she was still virgin. And many people wondered if Amado wrote about her desire because of the image that black girls are always sexually available.
They also try to gang rape a little girl, giving up not because one of them points out repeatedly that she is a child, but because Pedro Bala, who initially stated that it was their right to rape her, gets fascinated by her blond hair. They then stop seeing her as a sexual being, thinking in her as a sweet mother. There is an old prejudice, that women can be either whores or wives. In 19th century Brazil, there was a racist saying: “A black woman in the kitchen, a mulata in the bed and a white girl in the altar�. Amado’s characters sometimes seem to live in these times.
Amado may write in a very poetical manner, but that doesn’t change the facts: if we lived in that city, everyone would be terrified by those boys. It’s an awful cycle: the police brutality makes the boys crueler; their cruelty makes people support police brutality. As terrible as that sounds, when crime rates are too high, people feel safer if the police is killing teenage rapists and murderers, since Brazilian laws state that teenagers can’t be in prison for long, regardless of the crime they committed. Of course they suffered a lot, and I believe that misery justifies petty thefts, but I have always felt that to say that this is a justification for their actions or its reasons is an offense to all those who suffered but never committed rape and murder.
And I believe that, to some extent, to believe that black women are always sensual, always willing to have sex, is a form of racism.