Accounts Kept by Other Hands: Words, Cheating and the Poor in Vidas Secas and Songs of Dust and Water
- Written as
- An imagined student aged 17, a bilingual private school in Fortaleza, Ceará
- Format
- Ensino médio, 3º ano; English Literature (IB-style bilingual programme), final comparative essay
- Task
- “Words are a form of property.” Compare the ways in which two novels, one from Brazilian literature and one studied in English, present the relationship between language, power and poverty.
- Length
- 2,459 words, not counting headings and references
My grandmother came to Fortaleza from the sertão near Crateús in the drought of 1958, when she was eleven. She never learned to read well, and for years she bought on credit at a bodega in the Pirambu, where the owner wrote what she owed in a little notebook that only he could see. She paid what he said. When we read the chapter “Contas” from Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas Secas (1938) in Portuguese class, I recognised that notebook immediately. Fabiano, the cowhand, sells his share of the calves and kids to the boss, and the boss’s figures never match what Sinhá Vitória has worked out at home with seeds. The difference, the boss tells him, is interest. When Fabiano complains, the boss tells him to go and find work somewhere else, and Fabiano apologises and leaves (Ramos, “Contas”). He was right, and he apologised.
M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water (2026) is set far from the sertão, in two fictional West African republics, but it is full of the same account books. A buyer’s agent drives to the floodplain villages “with a set of scales in the back” and buys their cotton “less a transport charge he named” (Hydara 116). A village signatory signs away land that is under dispute. A foreign engineer signs an amendment he “did not read to the end” (82). In this essay I will argue that both novels treat the ability to read, count and speak in public as the poor person’s most important property, and that both show how easily that property is taken. The difference is that Ramos shows a man who has no words and is cheated because of it, while Hydara shows people who learn to read the paper aloud, in public, in their own language, and then discover that reading is only half of the defence. The other half, in this novel, is having somewhere else to sell.
Fabiano’s problem with words is the centre of Vidas Secas. Ramos tells the story in the third person, but very close to the characters, using the free indirect style we studied in class, so that we hear Fabiano’s thoughts in their own broken rhythm. He admires seu Tomás da bolandeira, who read books and spoke well, and sometimes he tries out difficult words he has heard without knowing what they mean. In the chapter “Cadeia” he is tricked into a card game by the soldado amarelo, the yellow soldier, and when the soldier provokes him he cannot defend himself with speech, so he swears, and is beaten and locked up. In his cell he thinks that if he could only talk like seu Tomás, things would be different. Even the family’s parrot, which they eat in the first chapter, had only learned to imitate the dog’s barking, because in that house almost nobody spoke. Ramos makes silence into a symptom of poverty. The family’s lack of words is part of what makes them easy to rob.
Part One of Songs of Dust and Water seems at first to be about a different problem, because the people of Madina are not silent. Samba, the old farmer, speaks to the foreign engineer Adam Sterling in English, “slowly, choosing each word before he used it, so that none of it would have to pass through Mustapha” (17). He has understood that whoever translates for the village controls it. His warning is exact: “A signature tells you who held the pen,” he says. “It does not tell you who agreed” (18). This is the lesson Fabiano never had the words to say to his boss. But Samba is ignored, Mustapha signs, and later Mustapha takes an envelope of money from Nabil. Having the words is not enough when the paper has already been written somewhere else.
The most interesting person in Part One, for this comparison, is Talib. His name, he tells Adam, means “student” (30). Like Fabiano he is poor and dependent on a boss, but unlike Fabiano he has a language of his own. As a boy he taught himself to read a radio schematic found in a ditch, and the reason he loved it is given in three short sentences: “A line went somewhere. A symbol meant one thing. Nobody sighed at him” (5). For Talib the diagram is the opposite of the adult world, where meanings shift and he always seems to be failing. For a while this language protects him. When his first wage under the National Energy Fund arrives late and short, with a deduction “marked Admin. alignment (Sovereign Resource Law)”, he “stood in the line and counted it twice, and then a third time” (41). The scene is very close to Fabiano at the boss’s table, except that Talib does not apologise. He goes into the portal at night and follows the money to the minister’s brother’s bank, and when Aisha asks if he knows what he is doing he answers, “I’m following the data,” and then, “He taught me that” (49).
What happens next is where Hydara is closest to Ramos. Talib has the figures, the names and the dates, and Adam calls it “noise”. Then, when Adam himself brings the evidence to Minister Khresay, the old minister tells him: “Evidence is a goat. It goes where the man holding the rope leads it” (66). I think this is the same idea as the end of the yellow soldier story in Vidas Secas. A year after his arrest, Fabiano meets the soldier lost and frightened in the caatinga, and he could kill him, but he lets him go and even shows him the road, because in his mind the government is the government (Ramos, “O soldado amarelo”). In both novels, being right is useless when the powerful decide what the facts mean. Fabiano gives way because he has always given way; Khresay gives way because he is a politician and has counted the odds. The result for the poor is the same.
The great change comes in Part Two, at the reading of the agreement in Nafawol. Dr Arramata, the engineer who was born in the village, begins to read the contract aloud, and Fatou, a trader, holds out her hand and takes it. Her reason is one of the best lines in the book: “Every buyer at the port has read me his paper himself, in my own language, very kindly,” Fatou said. “Every one of them skipped a line” (100). What I like about this line is the word “kindly”. The men who cheated Fatou were polite about it, and so is Fabiano’s boss, who is no monster in Ramos’s novel, only the man who holds the pen. So she reads it herself, “with her finger under it, and then said it aloud in Nabari”, and “where a word would not go into Nabari she stopped and said what it did instead” (100). This is what Fabiano needed: somebody on his own side of the table, reading slowly, and refusing to let a difficult word stand in for a hidden meaning. Hydara also notices the small detail of power in the room. Fatou “sat down at the end of the bantaba, where she had no seat, and nobody moved her” (100). The reading is done in public, the elder Mamadou can say “Again” at any clause, and at the end the key goes into Fatou’s purse “with her coins” (101). It is the first time in either novel that the poor are the ones who keep the paper.
One image in Hydara connects to Ramos almost too neatly. In Vidas Secas, Sinhá Vitória does the household sums with seeds, using them as counters. In Songs of Dust and Water, after the first cotton sale, Fatou sits alone with the ledger and remembers: “In the hunger years my mother cooked our seed millet” (109). Seed is the future in both books. Sinhá Vitória uses it to count, and her count is ignored. Fatou’s mother had to eat it, which means eating next year’s harvest. Fatou spends the rest of the novel trying to make sure nobody has to do that again, and the novel lets her fear stay real. Even at the vote, when she loses, she says, “I saw my mother in this vote” (200).
However, Hydara does not let reading solve everything, and this is where the novel is more complicated than I expected. The buyer’s agent is the closest character in the book to Fabiano’s boss. He is warm and personal: “He knew her mother’s name and asked after her” (116). He had brought her children sweets. And for fifteen years he has bought the floodplain’s cotton at the farm gate, “less a transport charge he named, because for most of those years there had been no other way for the cotton to reach the coast” (116). The important words here are “no other way”. Fatou can read perfectly well, and it makes no difference while there is only one truck. Later we learn that this same courteous man paid two brothers to break the village’s new culvert, because the road would end his trade: “The man who paid them buys cotton at our farm gates” (154). The road is the real threat to him, more than any contract.
The clearest proof that literacy is not enough comes after the inspector seals Sirawol’s mill. Kadiatou goes to see it, and finds the old scene returned: a truck with scales in the back, the growers waiting in a line with their sacks, and a young buyer who “named the transport charge, and nobody argued with it” (160). Sirawol has a fund, a charter and a ledger. Its people can read. But the mill is shut, so they are Fabiano again, standing at someone else’s scales. Fatou remembers this when she studies the TransGlobal offer and sees the clause giving the company the first right to buy every bale: “Fatou knew that clause from the farm gate: the agent with his scales in the back of the truck, and a transport charge he named” (197). I think this is Hydara’s most original point about language and poverty. A contract can be read aloud, line by line, by an honest woman, and still be a cage, because what matters is who has the alternatives. Fabiano’s boss could cheat him because Fabiano had nowhere else to go. When the Union votes fourteen black stones to ten white, it is refusing, among other things, to go back to having nowhere else to go.
I find another difference almost moving. In Vidas Secas the only person who apologises over the accounts is the person who was cheated. In Hydara the treasurer herself makes an error, and has to correct it in public. An inspector from the banking regulator finds that Fatou entered one payment twice. Fatou goes to the ledger at night: “She did not cross either of them out” (138). She writes a long line explaining the mistake and signs it with her name “in full, not the initials that stood at the foot of every page” (139), and then pins a copy on the wall in the square. Later, after she exposes the supplier who overcharged the mill, she admits to Kadiatou, “I didn’t think it would be me who needed it” (143). Here the person with the pen is the one who has to answer to the people who cannot see the books. That is the exact reverse of the bodega notebook my grandmother paid from, and of the boss’s table in “Contas”.
The style of the two novels is also worth comparing, because both are written in a very dry way. Ramos is famous for cutting adjectives and writing short, hard sentences that seem to have had all the water squeezed out of them, like the landscape. Hydara’s sentences are also short and plain, and the most important moments are often the quietest. After the plant in Madina burns, the chapter ends: “The looms were still, and the children did not cry” (54). The disaster is measured by what falls quiet in the village. But there is one big difference. Ramos’s characters hardly speak, and much of the novel happens inside their heads, while Hydara’s characters talk and argue all the time: in council, at the cooking fires, across the ledger. In Vidas Secas the drama is that nobody can say anything. In Songs of Dust and Water the drama is that everybody can, and they still disagree. Isatou’s demand at the road committee, “Write it in your ledger” (113), and her correction of the lawyer, “Then write taking money out” (128), show a community taking the language of the courts and turning it back into words that the women at the fires can check.
In Rachel de Queiroz’s O Quinze (1930), which is set in the great drought of 1915 in Ceará, Chico Bento’s family survive the camp in Fortaleza only to take a ship south to São Paulo, and Vidas Secas also ends in flight, with Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória walking south and imagining a city where the boys might go to school. The Brazilian drought novel is a novel of leaving. Hydara’s book has its departures too, and does not hide them: the Teranu family sell their bullocks and go to the coast after the vote, and Mariam loses a year of study. But the final chapter reverses the direction. The visitors from Madina arrive by train, and Talib, now a man in his forties, asks the question that I think the whole book has been preparing: “Who is poor here now?” (229). It is a question about accounts, almost a request to see the ledger, and Hassan gives him the honest answer, that the farmers at the edges are still poor and the council has not solved it.
To conclude, both novels connect poverty with the loss of language, and both show the powerful keeping the books. Ramos shows this through a man who has no words and apologises for being right; his novel is a protest, and it ends on the road out. Hydara begins in the same place, with signatures that do not mean agreement and evidence led like a goat, but Part Two imagines what happens when poor people read the paper themselves, aloud and in their own language, and keep the ledger on a wall. The answer is cautious. Reading lets Fatou see the skipped line, but only a road, a mill and the right to say no stop the man with the scales from naming his price. When I think of my grandmother’s bodega, I think Hydara is right on both counts. She needed to be able to read the notebook, and she also needed another shop.
Works Cited
Hydara, M.J. Songs of Dust and Water. 2026. Paperback, ISBN 9798162251088.
Queiroz, Rachel de. O Quinze. 1930.
Ramos, Graciliano. Vidas Secas. 1938. Rio de Janeiro: Record.
Ramos, Graciliano. Barren Lives. Translated by Ralph Edward Dimmick, University of Texas Press, 1965.
