To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jorge Amado, the Municipal Library of Lagos has prepared a special program between the months of November this year and February 2013. The celebrations start today, the 27th, with the Literary Exhibition “Seu Jorge , Beloved of Bahia”.
A Literary Exhibition, a Film Cycle and a Bahia Night are the main initiatives, through which the Municipal Library intends to honor the writer and the work, but also the man and Bahia, the land of Todos os Santos and Todos as Gentes , stretching from the recôncavo to the sertão, and from the coast to the interior, a land that he so masterfully portrayed and recreated in many of the nearly 40 books he wrote.
Son of cocoa and the sea from Bahia, atheist and Obá de Xangô do Terreiro Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, “Jorge Amado did not write books, he wrote a country”, said Mozambican writer Mia Couto, in a lecture given in 2008, in which he attests to strong author's influence on African writers.
Indeed, his fluent, mestizo, sensual, good-humored writing, with sharp criticism of the customs, mentalities and society of his time, offered the world the knowledge of a universal, heterodox Brazil, destined to fulfill the utopia of to harmonize opposites, to respect differences, to love the richness of the mixture of colors, creeds, cultures.
Through their stories we are invited to “the universities” of life. In a colloquial, visual, musical way, we came into contact with the men and women of the people, many of them unlikely protagonists of good and evil; we live with blacks, mulattos, whites, caboclos; with the simple and the powerful, with the disinherited and the marginal. Everyone learning to live life, and trying to know how to live it well; everyone learning the taste of freedom and joy, the values of simplicity and humility, never letting go of the ability to dream and fight for a better future.
The scheduled initiatives are inscribed in this spirit of Amada and want, in a simple but judicious way, to be associated with the centenary commemorations of one of the most famous and translated Brazilian writers of all times.
The start of the celebrations in Lagos is scheduled for November 27, with the opening of the Literary Exhibition “Seu Jorge, Amado da Bahia”, which will be on display until December 14, at the Municipal Library of Lagos.
For the month of February, a Film Festival is already planned, in which every Wednesday, there will be sessions exclusively dedicated to Jorge Amado.
The closing will be marked with a Bahia Night, still on a date to be defined, with which it is intended to celebrate, on the street, Jorge Amado and Bahia. It will be one more way to honor the writer and the man who had the street as his favorite space of freedom.
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