It was early 2012. The mandacaru cactus flowers in February. Rain had finally returned to the sertão. I arrived at the closing moment of a story, the moment of tragedy and approaching silence.

The last time I had made this journey was twenty years ago. The landscape had changed. It was full of the bright green of plants flourishing with the rain. The sky was still dark with heavy rainclouds which blotted out part of the landscape. Twenty years before, the landscape burned in the sun. Brown, warm and dry. I sat in the same place in the car, looking out in silence, just as I had years before. This sudden, unexpected, unwanted return to the sertão, brought on by fate, unleashed a chain of thoughts about the region. And now, in another way, beyond personal stories or fate, I return to the sertão.

After a period of travel and living abroad, it seemed necessary to think about issues related to Brazil, like some inevitable route to be followed. When I was living in Germany I made a series of works called “Tratado de Limites” [Border Treaty] (1), related to the pampas region. These were three journeys into the pampas of southern Brazil and northern Uruguay. Perhaps the distance between those places – not just geographical, but essentially the contrast between the world’s regions of isolation and centrality (with all the implicit political baggage of regional definitions) – had been definitive for thinking about the experiences of displacement.

On those journeys to the pampas – an extensive region, where distance becomes relative – there is a huge feeling of isolation. Continuity dilutes political boundaries and removes the meaning of the linear definitions of the place’s cartography.

There seemed to be a logical and linear sequence in the relationship between the landscape and cartography of the pampas and thinking about the sertão regions, like some constructed narrative.

But it is fate itself, alien to desire, that provoked the sequence of interests in the pampas and the sertões. Interestingly, I had written extensively about Brazil in my notebook, influenced by Stefan Zweig’s essay (2) and by the experiences of travelling into the interior of the country and abroad, particularly the places of isolation that can arise through the geographical distance from centres and capitals of culture. And as if fate had foreseen the logical connection between the ideas and writings, it then led me to the inner Brazil.

After that return to the sertão, I went back to reading Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões. The first part of the book is called “The Land” and became the section that most interested me: the attempts at describing a region still in the process of construction as a concept, the detailed descriptions of the landscape, the flora, even the deterministic way of thinking about how this environment influences and forms the people of the region.

“The making of a desert” and “A geographical category not mentioned by Hegel” are subtitles in that chapter of Os Sertões. Among the categories
the philosopher does mention would be the one of people who live in the mountains and those who live on the coast, in the sense that these landscapes or environments define the people who live there. Nature determines a way of living or being. The category omitted (or intentionally forgotten) by the philosopher would be the one mentioned by Euclides da Cunha, of the people of the desert, of the sertão.

What meaning would there be in thinking about the effects of the environment on people? It would only be possible to consider the answer to this after a new journey through the Brazilian sertões. Which is when this project began.

Where is the sertão? What seems to be a rhetorical question soon became the key question of my investigations.

On planning a journey through the sertões, I needed to choose a part of the region to travel through. I began with the sertão in the São Francisco river region, heading into the Bahia interior. Euclides da Cunha’s book was a kind of guide in this early stage of investigations, a bedside book not to be parted with.

At every period, the travellers discovering or exploring Brazil entered the country along its rivers.
I also entered the sertão following the banks of the São Francisco river, sometimes approaching the river and at other times using it as a geographical reference point for entering the sertão. Moving from Alagoas towards the interior of Bahia (3).

When I talked about the project during the journey, everyone told me about the drought. Sertão and drought had become synonyms. And I was somehow overcome by that meteorological sense of the sertão droughts. I started to look for earth that had cracked due to lack of water, bridges over rivers drained by long periods of drought. But in the Alagoas sertão, where I began the journey, the drought was over: the landscape was no longer grey but green. A landscape renewed by the rain, hills turning green. I would only find prolonged drought in the Bahia interior.

Walking along a dried-up riverbed, I realised that this was not the sertão I was looking for. It was indeed the sertão of stereotype, the sertão that legitimised the drought industry and meant that the region’s inhabitants suffered from water shortages.

“Those images have been greatly exploited by the media”, I was told by a man in Canudos. Common understanding of the sertão did not address the reality of the place – or rather, the many places known as sertão. There, with my feet sinking into the cracked earth of the riverbed, I realised this was not the sertão I was trying to understand. It was somewhere else.

A country’s geographical regions can be defined according to the answers to questions like: Where? How far? I thought the same about the sertão. I asked several people the question at the start of my journey. I asked where I should go, where the sertão was. Each response took me to a different town, each person pointed to a different region on the map.

The sertão was not in Alagoas but instead in the hinterland of Pernambuco; not really Pernambuco, more like Paraíba; not in Bahia, but in Piauí; not in the Piauí interior but in the state of Ceará. Each of those places was the sertão for someone. Everyone thought of a place they had visited that was drier and more isolated and forgotten by the rest of the country.

How far does the sertão go? How far would I have to go to understand the sertão regions? And finally, why did defining where the sertão was actually matter?

The strongest sensation was that I would never find someone else’s sertão (from the suggestions I had been given). The sertão became somewhere unattainable. Sertão was always somewhere other than where I was.

At the same time the feeling of isolation grew with each day of the journey. Each road seemed to be in worse condition than the previous ones, and I seemed more of a stranger than before. But that isolation was more like a feeling of suffocation, accompanied by a sense that my reality had been definitively transformed. I now felt myself part of the sertão backlands, with no possibility of living in any other worlds. The isolation seemed to define a perception of the world, a world with more confined boundaries, geographically reduced to that place where I was. Only when I began to go back towards the coast did that sense of inevitability and suffocation gradually break down.

Without knowing it, the sertão was there. The sertão had taken me over, taken over my thoughts. I could only see the world from that place – from outside the world, from inside the sertão.

Once inside the sertão, in the scrubland, under
the punctual sun that rises before cockcrow and disappears early to bring sudden nightfall, the world seems to take a different shape, another dimension, seeming to be governed by other rules.

From inside, the rest of the world seems more distant and meaningless. Life becomes ruled by simple matters of adaptation and resistance. Enduring the extreme heat of the day, eyes dazzled by the light, head unsettled by the strong sun, everything seems definitive – the drought, the scrub, the permanence of the region itself. When you live there the sertão is forever. The sertão can only be understood by entering it. And although its geographical boundaries are imprecise, that is what begins to define what you are or might become.

There is something in the region that contaminates the perception of places, changes perspectives, shifts you away from the centre. At the same time it attracts and stimulates the desire to go 2000 kilometres further into the country in search of that place.

If the sertão is always somewhere else, it is as unattainable as desire. As the distance from the coast increases, little by little an inner space opens out.

The sertão is inside us, wrote Guimarães Rosa. Sertão is a powerful world that grows, develops and takes over our perceptions. It expands inside
the country, the landscape, the earth and ourselves. To some extent a forgotten place, but one which
also provokes a kind of forgetting. Once there, the outside world is forgotten and perception of reality is transformed into something eternal and unchanging. And the world also forgets the sertão, still leaving it as another undefined region in the country’s interior.  When Euclides da Cunha refers to Hegel in “A geographical category not mentioned by Hegel”, there is a clear reference to forgetting. The emptiness represented by the sertão becomes implicit through what is not said.