Frances de Pontes Peebles: Recreating Historic Brazil
Today's guest blogger, Frances de Pontes Peebles, goes behind the scenes of a writer's life and talks about some of the challenges of crafting a historical novel. The Seamstress, her debut novel, is the story of two sisters who follow separate paths in 1930s Brazil. Emília dos Santos marries the son of a wealthy and politically powerful doctor, while Luzia becomes involved with a band of infamous outlaws.
Fiction is fabrication. Most readers pick up novels with the understanding that we will be invited into what the writer John Gardener called a "vivid and continuous dream." Good novels provide an escape from our daily reality, and a glimpse into imaginary lives. But when writing a novel about historical events, how much fact should be included in the fiction? I struggled with this question when writing my first novel, The Seamstress.
The book is set in Brazil in the 1930s, which was a decade of extreme transition both in Brazil and throughout the world. From 1928 to 1940, Brazil experienced a series of transformative events: a revolution, a new president, a terrible drought in its northeast region, the beginnings of women's suffrage, a world-wide economic depression, the rumblings of a second World War and, to top it off, outlaws called cangaceiros causing trouble in the northeast countryside. Bandit gangs existed for centuries in rural Brazil, but in the early 20th century, cangaceiros truly dominated the northeast. These cangaceiros stood apart from history's long list of organized outlaw groups in one vital way: they accepted women into their ranks.
This practice might seem interesting to those of us living in 2009, but in 1930s Brazil, it was another story. In 1934 --- two years after literate women got the right to vote in Brazil --- an average of 500 families per year in Rio de Janeiro alone were forcing their daughters to undergo "purity exams." The medical exams served several purposes: to prove to a suitor that his future wife was a virgin, to dispel rumors about a girl's reputation or to pressure overly passionate boyfriends into marriage. In this social climate, the idea that a young girl would leave her family (either voluntarily or by force) to join a gang of male outlaws was not just interesting, it was scandalous.
Any child in northeast Brazil grows up hearing stories about cangaceiros. When I was little, my uncle gave me a cangaceiro rag doll, complete with leather holster and cloth gun. By the mid-1940s, nearly all cangaceiros had been killed or captured, and a centuries-old element of Brazilian life was extinct. But in the 1960s, cangaceiros were resurrected as popular folk heroes, becoming the subjects of biographies, films and popular ballads. Today, their images appear on t-shirts and mugs, and tourists can buy clay figurines of cangaceiros at airports.
Eventually, I wanted to know more about female cangaceiras, but information was hard to find. Only one woman --- the famous bandit-bride named Maria Bonita (Mary the Beautiful) --- was studied, although sparsely. When I began writing The Seamstress, I'd wanted to base the book on real cangaceiros, and be extremely faithful to their lives. I moved back to Brazil, searched through libraries and newspaper archives and created elaborate timelines. But it seemed that the more I searched, the less I found.
Even historians admitted that some of the most famous stories told about cangaceiros could not be verified. There were many facts, but just as many myths. Each time I sat down to write, I felt claustrophobic. I was bound by facts I did not know to be true, and by dates, times and personalities I had no interest in re-creating. Other characters --- ones of my own creation --- crept into my imagination, and I shooed them away. Thankfully, they were persistent. One day, I stopped resisting. I invited these fictional cangaceiros and seamstresses and politicians into my story. They were real to me, and that was what mattered. So, in order to write The Seamstress, I gave up being faithful to facts, and began writing fiction.
---Frances de Pontes Peebles
Fiction is fabrication. Most readers pick up novels with the understanding that we will be invited into what the writer John Gardener called a "vivid and continuous dream." Good novels provide an escape from our daily reality, and a glimpse into imaginary lives. But when writing a novel about historical events, how much fact should be included in the fiction? I struggled with this question when writing my first novel, The Seamstress.The book is set in Brazil in the 1930s, which was a decade of extreme transition both in Brazil and throughout the world. From 1928 to 1940, Brazil experienced a series of transformative events: a revolution, a new president, a terrible drought in its northeast region, the beginnings of women's suffrage, a world-wide economic depression, the rumblings of a second World War and, to top it off, outlaws called cangaceiros causing trouble in the northeast countryside. Bandit gangs existed for centuries in rural Brazil, but in the early 20th century, cangaceiros truly dominated the northeast. These cangaceiros stood apart from history's long list of organized outlaw groups in one vital way: they accepted women into their ranks.
This practice might seem interesting to those of us living in 2009, but in 1930s Brazil, it was another story. In 1934 --- two years after literate women got the right to vote in Brazil --- an average of 500 families per year in Rio de Janeiro alone were forcing their daughters to undergo "purity exams." The medical exams served several purposes: to prove to a suitor that his future wife was a virgin, to dispel rumors about a girl's reputation or to pressure overly passionate boyfriends into marriage. In this social climate, the idea that a young girl would leave her family (either voluntarily or by force) to join a gang of male outlaws was not just interesting, it was scandalous.
Any child in northeast Brazil grows up hearing stories about cangaceiros. When I was little, my uncle gave me a cangaceiro rag doll, complete with leather holster and cloth gun. By the mid-1940s, nearly all cangaceiros had been killed or captured, and a centuries-old element of Brazilian life was extinct. But in the 1960s, cangaceiros were resurrected as popular folk heroes, becoming the subjects of biographies, films and popular ballads. Today, their images appear on t-shirts and mugs, and tourists can buy clay figurines of cangaceiros at airports.
Eventually, I wanted to know more about female cangaceiras, but information was hard to find. Only one woman --- the famous bandit-bride named Maria Bonita (Mary the Beautiful) --- was studied, although sparsely. When I began writing The Seamstress, I'd wanted to base the book on real cangaceiros, and be extremely faithful to their lives. I moved back to Brazil, searched through libraries and newspaper archives and created elaborate timelines. But it seemed that the more I searched, the less I found.
Even historians admitted that some of the most famous stories told about cangaceiros could not be verified. There were many facts, but just as many myths. Each time I sat down to write, I felt claustrophobic. I was bound by facts I did not know to be true, and by dates, times and personalities I had no interest in re-creating. Other characters --- ones of my own creation --- crept into my imagination, and I shooed them away. Thankfully, they were persistent. One day, I stopped resisting. I invited these fictional cangaceiros and seamstresses and politicians into my story. They were real to me, and that was what mattered. So, in order to write The Seamstress, I gave up being faithful to facts, and began writing fiction.
---Frances de Pontes Peebles
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