[In the following interview, Amado discusses his presentation of women in his novels and his relationship to his home region of Bahia.]

A regionalist who calls himself a materialist, Jorge Amado also describes himself as "a chronicler of the lives of the poor people of Bahia," a state in the northeast of Brazil. American readers know him best as the author of Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; now, with the publication shortly by Knopf of his latest novel, that audience will discover a different kind of liberated woman in Tereza Batista.

He is a stocky man of medium height, with leonine features that could easily belong to a Greek statue; however, he is not Hellenic but Brazilian—and strongly contemporary in his views about women and men and their sometimes loving, sometimes loathing dialogues. And, perhaps ironically, in Portuguese, the language in which he writes, the word for novel is "romance" and the name Amado is literally translated as "beloved."

"It is becoming more difficult each year to publish fiction in Brazil," he told PW in a recent interview at his home in Salvador, Bahia, speaking in Portuguese and being translated by Ivanka Ajdaric, a Yugoslavian Iady now living in Bahia. "Yet I consider myself more of a journalist than a novelist, because I do not add anything to my writing about the people of Bahia that does not already exist in their lives. I simply transfer the reality of their lives to a literary plane and recreate the ambience of Bahia, and that is all."

Like Willy Loman, he knows the territory. Born in the city of Ilheus in southern Bahia 63 years ago, Amado grew up on his father's cocoa plantation, edited a self-published neighborhood newspaper when he was 10, became a full-time reporter at 15, and had just turned 19 when his first novel, Land of Carnival, was published. His latest, Tereza Batista, is book No. 19 in Brazil but only the eighth to appear in America. And despite his comment on present publication difficulties, he possesses a literary stability that must be envied by publisher-changing Norteamericanos. His Brazilian books have always been brought out under the imprint of Livraria Martins Editora in São Paulo, and only Knopf has published him in this country—the result of a serendipitous encounter with Blanche Knopf when she was traveling in Brazil after World War II. To the U.S. audience, his best-known books concern themselves with the tragicomic adventures of highly individualistic, extremely outspoken, uncompromisingly independent and definitely desirable women. Gabriela in 1962 … Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1969—and now …

"Tereza Batista is an orphan living in a small town in the interior of Bahia," Amado explains in his rich voice. "At 13, she is sold as a common-law wife to a man who prefers to sleep with girls no older than 15. She then becomes a prostitute when she becomes a woman." He pauses, adding, "Yet she still earns the respect of the people in her community and, most important of all, she respects herself." It is almost as if Amado is a closet feminist in a macho country, an exponent of women's liberation in a land where divorce is still illegal.

"My feelings are that women have the same rights—and responsibilities—as men," he says. "Sometimes I treat the women in my books with more sympathy, but that is because they are often more interesting than the men." As for the marital situations of several of his heroines, "Thousands of Brazilians, due to the laws against divorce, are living together without benefit of marriage, most of them happily, I think."

And Bahians even more so. For Amado, like [William] Faulkner, is essentially a regional writer who extrapolates universal values from local characters. As he points out, "Brazil is like India, more a continent than a country, for regional differences here are very great. I feel that I know more about life in Bahia than in any other region, for I have lived here almost all of my life."

Bahia is also the Brazilian state where the true integration created by intermarriage is more evident than elsewhere. This theme is fully developed and strikingly demonstrated in Tent of Miracles, published in 1971. The protagonist, Pedro Archanjo, is a self-educated, street-smart mulato who achieves great renown—and recriminations—for the author-ship of, among other self-published works, "Notes on Miscegenation in the Families of Bahia" and "African Influence on the Customs of Bahia." This is another unifying theme in Amado's writing, what he calls "the magical force of the people, being the result of the mixed blood of all Brazilians, including myself. It is the black people who have provided the thrust for our Brazilian culture as we know it today."

Not exactly a rallying call for black power, yet scarcely likely to endear him to those who pretend to be whiter than white. Nor do his views on power endear him to politicians, for he believes that "whoever is in power in any system often confuses the interests of the people with his own." Such realistic opinions did not sit well with Brazil's military government when Amado was a Federal Deputy in the 1940s. As he wryly comments, "I was obliged to leave the country in 1948. I lived in France and Czechoslovakia until I was allowed to return four years later."

And when he did, he returned to his daily writing ritual, six to 10 hours every day of the week, typing out draft after draft, month after month, until another book is finished. He was then, as he remains, the best-known author in Brazil, and was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961. However, Amado considers Machado de Assis "a better storyteller, a man who knows all of Brazil and thus is more of a national Brazilian author than myself." The young writer Joao Rebeiro has also attracted his attention. As for other South American writers, he describes Jorge Luis Borges as simply "a Spanish fantasist in the tradition of [Miguel de] Cervantes," though of course Borges is from Argentina. But his favorite writer and close friend was the late Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda, of whom he says, with great affection, "I wept with joy when he won the Nobel Prize." (Of contemporary American writers, Amado had little to say; his favorite remains Mark Twain and, no doubt for political and socioeconomic reasons, he mentioned the 1930s radical writer Mike Gold with approval.)

He has much to say, however, of candomblé, the religious ritual indigenous to Bahia in which Catholic saints are syncretized with African gods. Amado calls candomblé "the principal religion of the poor people of Bahia. From a historical point of view, it has helped the black people who came here as slaves to keep their African culture intact." Then he confides, "My father took me to see my first candomblé when I was 14, and I have been participating ever since." He is now one of twelve Obas de Xango in Brazil; a minister of Xango, the god of thunder.

Such exoticism no doubt contributed to his popularity when he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Pennsylvania State University during fall 1971 (his first American visit since the Depression). Professor Stanley Weintraub was instrumental in persuading the Brazilian author and his wife Zelia to leave their beloved country for 10 weeks in America. There Amado participated in a weekly lecture series on his writing, speaking, as always, in Portuguese, with a different translator for each session selected from the students and faculty. These exchanges were less lecture than conversation, with questions and answers, culminating in late evening talking and drinking bouts that left no doubt that Amado needed no formal translation to communicate his feelings. (He seems unconcerned about translation of his works into other languages, for he has never met any of his translators into the many languages in which his books are on sale.)

In closing, the PW interviewer asks Amado if he would care to sum himself up in one word. He answers, "I am a materialist." Further clarification is immediately requested. "I am a historical materialist; I believe in the reality of history in shaping people's lives. But in America you have a different meaning for that word, so perhaps I had better say that I am an optimist." He smiles knowingly: "In this world, you are either an optimist or you believe the world is going to end, and in that case it makes no difference."