Campos de concentração no Ceará: uma realidade retratada por Rachel de Queiroz em O Quinze (1930)

Abstract

When we talk about concentration camp, we automatically think about the Nazi death camps. Many of us never have never imagined that we had them among us, milder, it is true, although equally unhealthy, during the droughts of 1915 and 1934. For the Nazis, in World War II, and for us, a century ago, the strategy of concentration camps served as an ethnocentric excuse. In our case, the ones who suffered with the drought that took place in 1915 terrorized Fortaleza, which at that moment was architecturally structured according to the French ideas spread by Belle Époque. Since the idea of isolating the miserable sufferers has succeeded, when the next drought came, the concentration camps were extended to other counties within the state. This fact related to the phenomenon of seasonal droughts we have been punished with was shown by Rachel de Queiroz in her first, innovative and award-winning novel, O Quinze (1930). One hundred years after this emblematic drought, the political reality that deals with this issue has not changed as it should have and the picture printed in O Quinze keeps on being present in many aspects. This article tries to show this dark reality that the Drought of 1915 caused: the creation of concentration camps, containment fields that meant the final stronghold for a large portion of their confined ones. Therefore, in this bibliographical research, we firstly focus in the concentration camps per se, then we turn our attention to the contextualization of these concentration camps in this masterpiece, the one from one of the most important Brazilian writers of all time, the first woman writer to be accepted in the Brazilian Academy of Letters and who proudly belonged to our harvest, to our Ceará.