"Terra Roxa de Sangue: A Guerra de Porecatu" (Blood-Purpled Soil: The Porecatu War) by Joaquim Carvalho da Silva, is a historical-fiction novel detailing the real-life tensions and fights between squatters, land grabbers and farmers over supposedly-devolved lands in the state of Paraná, some 80 years ago. That land is today the small town of Porecatu, Brazil, (population 10k and falling) where I grew up.
I first heard of the book (and the banger sentence "blood-purpled soil") as an early teen, from my history teacher. This was an interesting point in my development as a person, not only did I learn that there was some war in the founding of my town, but I learned that, yeah, places don't just come into being, they have reasons to be here. I had experienced my first real interaction with history, not the worldly type that explains the big picture, but the local one, the one that surrounds my personal life. I was living on grounds where blood was spilled, how would that change things for me?
Surprisingly, nothing at all. I asked authority figures (older relatives) and they didn't knew much, they knew there was some fighting and that some of the families involved were still in the town. But that was it. 70 years is a long time, and big things can be lost in the smallest places, it seemed.
I promised myself to read that book one day, never did, and just went on living.
That spilled blood became a hazy memory, a one-liner to vaguely explain why things were that way at home, but nothing real in any meaningful way. Turns out I hadn't interacted with history at all, what is the point of knowing events but not people? Of knowing titles and dates but not seeing a single picture of the dead names in the gravestones? History really is "big things get lost", and we can only hope it's not too late when someone tries to find them.
Josh Sawyer's Pentiment brought me back here. Under promises of a fun Medieval Whodunnit, I found a sensitive, emotional, human story about the effects of history in the personal pains and hardships we're expected to go through, how we write it and are written by it.
Inviting us to visit a small town for two-or-so generations, we are first asked to meet and love the inhabitants of Kiersau, then we're asked to go through horrible things with them, and finally, we're asked to tell their history, as best we can. The last act of Pentiment (and where the game really begins) is what elevates it to something special that will be talked about forever. After giving you blood to spill, it finds an even more stressfull task: trying to faithfully represent the histories of a place, and all the people in it.
Writing history is straightening a whirlwind, it's an abstract thing based on real, material events, but it's the collected lives of all of us, all the joy and pain and love and hate and births and deaths and lost hopes and dreams achieved, all of it, how could it not be hard to do? It's arguably the hardest thing to do.
Pentiment's last masterstroke is living for the future. A story truly obsessed with the past, with what happened and how it shaped people in the present, can only be meaningful if it understands that there's more coming, forever. By just going through the bits of life, you're writing history, consequences bleed consequences until the end of humanity.
People will always keep going, they have to, come peace or war, so it's important that they try to remember who kept going before them, in the most truthful and open way possible. Remembering things before us is a powerful thing, it can be used as means of control, but when left to be itself, with honesty and vulnerability, it can have the role it was always intended to have, which is saying that "despite all things, maybe you're going to be fine". If things were better then, there's hope of going back to how they were, if they're better now, then it is possible to improve things, you can have hope.
And it does this softly and sensitively, with the feeling of say, a young kid leaving their small town to try and go into the big world, with all the anxiousness and excitement that brings.
I have found that book (and some others detailing the early years of my town), and will now go through them. I think it's the least I can do for all the people who have lived here. It might not change much in me, but they deserve to be remembered nonetheless. Someone has to remember them.
Thanks for reading all this mush.
I first heard of the book (and the banger sentence "blood-purpled soil") as an early teen, from my history teacher. This was an interesting point in my development as a person, not only did I learn that there was some war in the founding of my town, but I learned that, yeah, places don't just come into being, they have reasons to be here. I had experienced my first real interaction with history, not the worldly type that explains the big picture, but the local one, the one that surrounds my personal life. I was living on grounds where blood was spilled, how would that change things for me?
Surprisingly, nothing at all. I asked authority figures (older relatives) and they didn't knew much, they knew there was some fighting and that some of the families involved were still in the town. But that was it. 70 years is a long time, and big things can be lost in the smallest places, it seemed.
I promised myself to read that book one day, never did, and just went on living.
That spilled blood became a hazy memory, a one-liner to vaguely explain why things were that way at home, but nothing real in any meaningful way. Turns out I hadn't interacted with history at all, what is the point of knowing events but not people? Of knowing titles and dates but not seeing a single picture of the dead names in the gravestones? History really is "big things get lost", and we can only hope it's not too late when someone tries to find them.
Josh Sawyer's Pentiment brought me back here. Under promises of a fun Medieval Whodunnit, I found a sensitive, emotional, human story about the effects of history in the personal pains and hardships we're expected to go through, how we write it and are written by it.
Inviting us to visit a small town for two-or-so generations, we are first asked to meet and love the inhabitants of Kiersau, then we're asked to go through horrible things with them, and finally, we're asked to tell their history, as best we can. The last act of Pentiment (and where the game really begins) is what elevates it to something special that will be talked about forever. After giving you blood to spill, it finds an even more stressfull task: trying to faithfully represent the histories of a place, and all the people in it.
Writing history is straightening a whirlwind, it's an abstract thing based on real, material events, but it's the collected lives of all of us, all the joy and pain and love and hate and births and deaths and lost hopes and dreams achieved, all of it, how could it not be hard to do? It's arguably the hardest thing to do.
Pentiment's last masterstroke is living for the future. A story truly obsessed with the past, with what happened and how it shaped people in the present, can only be meaningful if it understands that there's more coming, forever. By just going through the bits of life, you're writing history, consequences bleed consequences until the end of humanity.
People will always keep going, they have to, come peace or war, so it's important that they try to remember who kept going before them, in the most truthful and open way possible. Remembering things before us is a powerful thing, it can be used as means of control, but when left to be itself, with honesty and vulnerability, it can have the role it was always intended to have, which is saying that "despite all things, maybe you're going to be fine". If things were better then, there's hope of going back to how they were, if they're better now, then it is possible to improve things, you can have hope.
And it does this softly and sensitively, with the feeling of say, a young kid leaving their small town to try and go into the big world, with all the anxiousness and excitement that brings.
I have found that book (and some others detailing the early years of my town), and will now go through them. I think it's the least I can do for all the people who have lived here. It might not change much in me, but they deserve to be remembered nonetheless. Someone has to remember them.
Thanks for reading all this mush.