Remembering José Francisco Borges’s Literatura de Cordel

Oliver Basciano

09 September 2024

ArtReview

Will the death of Brazil’s most celebrated exponent lead to the demise of a once-popular vernacular artform?

I was informed about José Francisco Borges’s death, appropriately enough, via the newspaper. By which I mean a physical newspaper – inky print and paper – which I’d picked up just before descending into São Paulo’s metro on a cold day at the end of July. The Brazilian poet and woodcut artist, the most famous of the literatura de cordel authors, was aged eighty-eight, the report said.

Emerging back aboveground and onto the streets 20 minutes later, I thought I’d see if the banco in Praça da República had any of Borges’s folhetos de cordel – little unbound booklets of thin coloured newsprint, almost always 10.1 × 16.5 cm and pegged onto a string (like clothes drying on a line), from which the name is derived, that tell a single story in poetic form. On the front cover would be a black-and-white woodcut illustrating the folk or religious tale, comedy or occasionally, but not in Borges’s case, pornography that would spread across 8, 16, 32 or 64 pages.

The kiosk owner shook his head: no, he didn’t sell cordels. You used to, I say, and remind him that I bought some here a few years back: strung down off the racks that were otherwise full of puzzle magazines, gossip and hobbyist titles. The supply dried up, the kiosk owner says; the demand too. It is hard enough selling the mainstream titles, he says, let alone something so old-fashioned.

Borges was born in the countryside of Pernambuco state in 1935, long the hotspot for cordel production. His father was a farmer and José helped him on the land as soon as he could walk. He went to school aged twelve, but just for ten months: the teacher moved away and no replacement was found. “In those days, there were no newspapers, magazines or radio where we lived. All we had for distraction were cordel booklets,” Borges would recall. “Stories of romance, of legends, of love, of struggle, of suffering. The news of the region, events, accidents, catastrophes, everything becomes a cordel. It was journalism of the countryside,” he told The New York Times in 2017.

Borges sold herbs, became a bricklayer, a farmhand, a carpenter and a potter, and along the way – from cordel of course – learned to read and write. He started selling the booklets himself at the weekly market – just another hustle to survive. In 1964, however, he decided to pen his own tale: The Encounter of Two Cowboys in the Petrolina Hinterland, the cover illustration provided by another artist. He didn’t know it at the time, but the literary history Borges was joining is as hybrid as Brazilian identity itself. Cordel, which became established in Brazil during the nineteenth century, around the time weekly markets became regularised enough to provide a concentrated public, has its roots in the Iberian romanceiro tradition as well as the corridoscompositions of Spanish-speaking South America and the African oral tradition of akpalô. The cordel seller was a performer too: reading the story to potential customers as they bought their fruit and vegetables; enticing them to buy the booklets so that they could do the same at home.

As a salesman, Borges turned out to be a pro, pausing to comment on the texts, interacting with passersby, often ending the story short to entice a sale from a listener anxious to know how it ended. His first attempt at writing a cordel sold well, but he nonetheless had insufficient funds to pay an artist to illustrate his second story. Consequently, Borges set about learning wood- block printing himself. The True Warning of Frei Damião tells the story of a popular Italian missionary in the northeast of Brazil, the cover emblazoned with a wonky-looking church in the colonial-architecture style. Over 200 stories followed, each selling in their thousands. His best-known, however, The Arrival of the Prostitute in Heaven, published in 1976, sold over 100,000 copies. Readers were lured by the story of a charismatic prostitute who goes to Hell, only to persuade her captors that she should be transferred to Heaven. Once through the pearly gates (the woodcut on the front shows her being given a leg-up by the Devil himself ), she seduces a range of holy characters. One lyric goes: ‘One night on St John’s Day, she danced with Saint Expedito, was scorned by Saint Blaise, dated Saint Carlito and at the end of the party went to sleep with Saint Benedict.’

I try a few more kiosks in São Paulo, to no avail, returning instead to the cordels I have already collected. They remain more easily found in the northeast of the country, but elsewhere the vernacular tradition of gossip and jokes has been devoured by social media and memes, and Brazil’s insatiable appetite for these. Perhaps this is just progress – Brazilians are easily the best meme- makers out there, displaying a modern-day creativity and adeptness at humour and engagement – but I hope the tactility of cordel isn’t set to die with its most famous proponent.