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As if we were here in the world of the “third space” as the thinker Homi Baba wrote about the hybrid culture that results from its fusion with another culture a new identity and being. It is a special moment in which we find ourselves between two intertwined worlds, the limit between them is Amadou’s way of making us accompany the characters to their own world, where reading becomes a discovery of this country and its people.
But the Turkish discovery of America, as the book is titled in English, is an adventure to tell the story of the Arab immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the 19th century, with a flavor that differs from that narrated from Brazil through the eyes. of the Spanish or the Portuguese who discovered it before, because “the ethnic range that softened Brazil was richer and more diverse than European behavior tinged with eclectic colonial customs” in the words of the novelist José Saramago when presenting the book.
Amadou’s camera moves to focus on important moments of two Arab personalities, who were called “Turks” because they came from the Ottoman Empire, Jamil Bishara, the Syrian from the Shiite community and Radwan Murad, the Lebanese from the Maronite community. Their accompaniment was a sign of religious fusion within Brazilian society. Religion is not an obstacle to full integration into Brazilian society, it is difficult to quickly discern Arab customs, because “coffee women” fill the stage where the homeland of lust is filled with erotic stories and bodily pleasures. Amadou speaks of this unique world in a tone understandable for its peculiarities. It suggests to us that it is a character within the novel, conversing with these characters that he saw and lived in Bahia. He thinks like a beautiful one when he says: “After God abandoned him and left him to the temptations of Satan, he spent two months fighting his battle alone without making a decision.” The novelist assimilates the spirit of the character and lets her tell her own state of mind by herself, to reach the height of her inner dialogue, where she appears in her true and contradictory form, so we feel that the narrator does not look at us from outside.
Thus, fictional architecture is based on a fact that constitutes the point around which the characters revolve, which is the marriage of the girl Adma, the daughter of Ibrahim Jaafar, who is single and ugly. Her father Ibrahim Jaafar wants to marry her in exchange for his son-in-law running and supervising his shop, and Radwan Murad, Ibrahim’s friend, Jamil Bishara, the Syrian, has eyes, while Ibrahim wanted to marry her to someone else, Adeeb ( Brazilian of Arab origin). The events take place in parallel with Adeeb’s rejection and acceptance of Jamil, but the ending ends with Adeeb falling in love with Adam the moment Jamil agrees to accept the deal that transforms him into someone who accepts and tolerates ugliness in return. of being the owner of his father’s store.
This decision that Jamil contemplates is the one that turns the novel into two parallel worlds, women and commerce. Despite the culture and knowledge of Radwan Murad, he is also immersed in these two worlds, which are open to human and universal issues of masculinity, standards of beauty, ugliness and love. So softening the ugliness and seeing it in a more beautiful way, it became a beautiful target who was eager to possess the Makhzen, and his acceptance of this marriage is nothing more than seeing the woman as a tool to enter the world of the wealth. But Amadou does not describe this world except from a balanced perspective that sees it as one of the diversity of life in Bahia and its social richness that opens up to other cultures.
Amadou does not make us fall into the judgments we give to the characters despite our opinion about them, but rather to reflect on the story that follows the tight narrative line, that as if he wanted to say something else, about the human being and its belonging to more than one place in a small region of Brazil.
The ethnic spectrum that calmed Brazil was much richer and more diverse than European behavior tainted by colonial customs.
There is interest in the details and parallel conversations that the characters circulated and in the language in which they spoke, Amadou claims that the conversation between Adib and Murad began in Arabic and ended in Portuguese. But others said that the conversation started in Portuguese and ended in Arabic, as if it were a signal from the owner of the “Brazilian Zorba” as the two notes flow, and the Arabic and Portuguese languages to the point of harmony as if they were one. world, even in gossip, hadith and gossip. Something that makes us think about the ending. Will it end in Portuguese or Arabic, or do the two languages overlap?
It is an experience in which we see how everything intertwines, love with desire, religion with life, commerce with marriage, Arab poems with Brazilian coffee, injustice with ignorance, and that is the skill of the Brazilian leftist novelist who has always been going to marginalized areas where the real stories of ordinary people are found that Reveals the true face of the country, which is what the Mozambican writer Mia Koto expressed when she said about Amadou that “he does not write books, but write the country “. Although Amadou left his political career in the Communist Party in 1956, the politician and the writer maintained a close relationship. The owner of “The Red Harvest” had admitted that it would encourage fantasy and imagination when he once said of his mission as a writer that “the writer leaves an impression on readers, and this in itself is a political act.”
It is not the first time that Arab characters attend Amado’s novels. In his famous novel “Gabriela, cinnamon and clove,” we also see the Syrian relative who falls in love with the Brazilian caliphate, Gabriela, whom people have dubbed “Turkish.” Here too Amadou delves into the investigation of the male mindset. But in “Coffee Women”, Amadou investigates a different reality, where the content is not about finding solutions or imagining salvation, but about the harmony between the different mentalities that coexisted during that period in which the Arabs discovered that amazing region of the world.
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