Homage to Jorge Amado

The Amado family home, Salvador Bahia

For a number of years now I have been exploring the diverse relationships between architecture and literature, and most recently edited the Routledge Companion to Architecture, Literature, and the City (2019). It is probably safe to say that just as there is no work of literature that doesn’t have some architectural or spatio-temporal dimension, there isn’t a single work of architecture, which as a practice is explicitly concerned with the manipulation of space, that doesn’t possess a plot. Both architects and novelists in this sense are jugglers of space, time and narrative. One of the more obvious ways of understanding this connection is through the way certain novelists become associated and defined by particular cities. Dostoevsky- St Petersburg, Emile Zola - Paris, James Joyce - Dublin, and so on. Similarly, Jorge Amado, one of Brasils greatest novelists is synonymous with Salvador and Bahia, and his novels the Tent of Miracles, Shepherds of the Night and Violent Land marked my introduction to Brasilian literature. A master of magic tinged social realism, I can think of no better urban and social history, than to journey through his  novels and encounter the vital and sensual landscapes of everyday life. A member of the communist party and arrested eleven times, his novels reverberate with the dramas of prostitutes, tricksters, and the emancipatory struggles of ordinary people. His lifelong literary devotion to both Bahia and social justice, is celebrated in the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado in Pelourinho. A more intimate portrait can be found in the home that he shared with his  photographer-writer wife, Zélia Gattai, author of Anarquistas, Graças a Deus, Thank God for Anarchists. Perched on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, it has been converted into a museum and amongst the cookbooks, collections of coloured shirts and other memorabilia is a library composed solely of translations of his work into an astonishing forty-nine other languages. A devotee of Candomblé from the age of fifteen, the house is protected by the Yoruban god Oxosse, the guardian of the people and renowned sage whose bow and arrow adorns the top of the gable end wall.