The Evolution of Nationhood in Brazilian Literature - Essay Example

Identity and Ambiguity: The Evolution of Nationhood in Brazilian Literature I. As a product of Brazil’s Belle Epoque, Euclides da Cunha grew up reading about Euro-centric racial dogma, which asserted that the Caucasian races were inherently superior to the indigenous or mixed-race inhabitants of Brazil’s interior. An educated and brilliantly articulate man, da Cunha was much taken with the racial arguments of men like Charles Darwin and Herbert Smith and early on adhered to theories such as social Darwinism. In the span of a few years, however, da Cunha went from spouting the scientifically reinforced dogmas of his period concerning the supposedly “sub-human” mestizo and dark races, to asserting that the peoples of his Amazonia were the key to Brazilian national identity and his country’s future. “I should have seen in those sturdy caboclos the hardy nucleus of our future, the bedrock of our race,” meaning the special and unique race of people that had come together in Brazil (da Cunha, 1944, p. 481). This was his vision of Brazil’s future, a future inextricably linked to and sustained by Brazil’s great Amazon wilderness. Da Cunha was passionate in his belief in the uniqueness of “Amazonia” and the singular way in which the people who lived within its verdant grandeur defined Brazil’s heterogeneous racial identity. His epics, Os Sertoes and O Paraiso Perdido, exploded the “national ‘foundational fictions’ of the young Brazilian Republic by exploring the environment, economy, Name 2 and empire of the Brazilian Amazon in its complex geophysical and biotic majesty, its emergent societies, and its brutal exploitation of man and nature” (Hecht, 2004, pp. 43). Da Cunha’s experiences in Acre and the Canudos revolt brought about a change that transformed him from an elitist intellectual who was imperialist when it came to relations with other South American nations, and colonialist in his views toward Amazonia, which he had believed should be civilized by the Brazilian government. Thus, da Cunha’s personal awakening, which the context of his interactions with the indigenous and mestizo peoples of Amazonia provided him, is a microcosm of an expanded national consciousness of the fact that the Amazon wilderness had forged a nation which stood beyond the facile reckoning of European and American observers. As a hero of this national identity, the sertanejo of da Cunha’s essays, the Brazilian of mixed race who carves a world out of the Amazon wilderness, who survives despite the depredations of the rubber industry, is the epitome of Brazil’s “unlikely modern nation” (da Cunha, 2006, p. xxi). Part of this “heroism” is the sertanejo’s tacit acceptance of a brutal and unjust economic system, which will provide the emergent Brazil with the power and resources it needs to dominate the region and to define itself as the true Amazon nation-state, an identity earned by the sacrifices of a sub-group profoundly separated from the educated and worldly class from which da Cunha came. The essays in The Amazon: Land Without History do not offer a “thorough or detailed account” of the Amazon of da Cunha’s time; they are, instead, paeans to Brazil’s colonial enterprise (2006, p. xii). For da Cunha, this national initiative was all the more remarkable and notable for the inhospitable nature of the wilderness he traversed in 1905. It was the result not of Name 3 a pro-Portuguese, European mindset but of a natural melding of Brazil’s racial multitudes, a reflection of the incredible biological diversity that da Cunha witnessed during his Amazonian journey. Ultimately, the most powerfully rejuvenating resource with which the Amazon animates Brazil’s sense of identity is the feeling of infinity, in which there will always be a quest for the Amazon’s “unknown lands,” which has been the aim of countless expeditions since before the colony was founded (da Cunha, 2006, p. 11). II. The Canudos revolt took place at a time when the United States of Brazil had only lately been created. This was a heady time, when the political and economic possibilities of Brazil’s colonial expansion were only beginning to be fully appreciated, a kind of informal but widely cherished “manifest destiny.” To da Cunha, this was a much-desired goal, the logical extension of Brazilian nationhood. In that belief, he held that “the mere existence of autonomous movements not subject to state control was antithetical to the national interest” (Levine, 1995, p. 15). To the nascent Brazilian state, Canudos “stood for such autonomy, and therefore had to be destroyed” (Ibid). It is symptomatic of the times and of Brazil’s nationalist aggressiveness that da Cunha should have cast Canudos within a European context, lyrically declaring that “Canudos was our Vendee” (1944, p. 162). By thus describing it, da Cunha could rationalize the systematic brutality with which the government sought to stamp out this impediment to its self-aggrandizing ambitions. In Rebellion in the Backlands, da Cunha’s employment of language serves as a propagandistic tool. However, it also reveals the ambiguity within da Cunha, which on one hand assures that such risings cannot be tolerated, while on the other predicts that Name 4 Brazil’s “backwards” populations, though different, will one day help make up an even stronger, more diverse Brazil. “We do not possess unity of race, and it is possible that we shall never possess it. We are predestined to form a historic race in the future, providing the autonomy of our national life endures long enough to permit it” (da Cunha, 1944, p. 54). At the time, however, no such lofty aspirations occupied the minds of officials in Sao Paulo, or in nearby Bahia, where officials clamored for government action against Canudos, which was siphoning off Bahia’s labor pool. Worse, the Canudos rebels were positioned as vicious separatists, determined to divide what had only recently been consolidated into a new nation seeking its own identity. It is interesting to note that the fall of the Brazilian monarchy, and the government that replaced it, created no serious consideration among Brazilians that truly representative political diversity could prevail, since it would mean the empowerment and legitimizing of peoples being exploited for profit in the rubber fields and those the government sought to wipe out at Canudos. The notion of such “broad public participation in government was unthinkable…” (Levine, 1995, p. 15). Da Cunha also utilizes geographic descriptions to indicate the physical separation of the rebels from the political entity that comprised Brazil. The simple contrast of topography “disturbed our social development and had become an obstacle to our national unity” (da Cunha, year). This was unfortunate for the rebels, for it only served to alienate and villainize the people of Canudos. The government’s “fighters were in a strange country now, with other customs, scenes, and a different kind of people…They felt that they had left Brazil” (Ibid). For da Cunha, this was the paradox of Brazil, “whose own native sons invaded it, armed to the teeth…” (Ibid). Name 5 The troops were made to feel that they were invading a foreign land, which da Cunha called a “geographical fiction” (Ibid). III. Macunaima is a convergence of Brazilian folk culture and European literary modernism. As with da Cunha, Mario Andrade is concerned with cultures in his native Brazil; specifically, with what happens when cultures come into conflict. The story’s hero is a product of the jungle, who comes into contact with the urban environment. The novel is uniquely Brazilian, reflecting as it does the country’s dynamic combination of modern, pseudo-European sensibility, primal indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the mixed-race peoples whom da Cunha praised in his works. It is also a contemplation of what it is to be of mixed race in a pluralistic society. Macunaima’s complexion is deeper than those of his fellow villagers, and has a child’s head. There is also a strong element of alienation in Andrade’s novel. Macunaima is a member of a tribe, but is always on the move, searching for some place where he can belong and be accepted as himself. Andrade wrote his master work not long after the period of racial ferment and conflict of which da Cunha wrote. Brazil was a nation without a solid national identity. Any notion of acceptance by the Portuguese upper classes of the peoples of the country’s interior lay in the distant future. It is significant that Andrade was himself a mulatto, who came from a family that had not been accepted in Brazilian society. Macunaima is a fantasy tale, involving gods and fantastic beings, and yet it is also a story to which the dispossessed peoples of Brazil could identify. In this sense, it can be considered a truly pan-Brazilian tale, a story that has no real temporal bounds, no spatial restrictions and, in that sense, is a place of limitless imagination and potential. Macunaima, then, is identifiable today as both a Brazilian fairy tale and national Name 6 epic. Andrade sought to create a language that was purely Brazilian. In his day, most Brazilians spoke a combination of Portuguese and a hybrid native tongue, though social convention made Portuguese the only acceptable written language. It was this “true” Brazilian language that Andrade wanted to capture, and which he wanted to use to convey the spirit of his fantasy epic. After Macunaima is born, he goes for six years without saying a word, then one day exclaims “Ai que preguica!,” which means “What laziness!”, a representation of the spoken Brazilian of Andrade’s day (Andrade, 1988, p. 24). Having said his first words, Macunaima proceeds to express himself at length in the richness of the Brazilian language, a “babelic discourse made up of proverbs, fragments of fairy tales and old legends, folk and popular songs, jokes, riddles, expressions of high culture, as the ‘son of a mixture of texts’…a linguistic cocktail” (Kangussu, 2010). Andrade set out to create a Brazilian “rhapsody,” the word he used to describe the novel in his preface. There is a liberal use of Brazilian words and expressions that allude to rivers and various locales during Macunaima’s odyssey, which takes him from his tribal home to Sao Paulo, to Rio de Janeiro and back home. Andrade’s use of Brazilian to describe Macunaima’s birth pairs mythic story and the country’s true language in a way that had never been imagined. “There was a moment when the silence was so great listening to the whispering of the…(river), than an Indian woman Tapanhumas gave birth to an ugly child. This child they called Macunaima…” (Andrade, 1988, p. 5). Just as Brazil itself is a cultural and linguistic heterogeneity, Macunaima is a composite of mythic elements comprised of inventive linguistic Name 7 elements. IV. Manuel Antonio de Almeida’s Memoirs of a Military Sergeant is another example of Brazilian literature expressed through the speech of ordinary Brazilian people. This gives the story’s third-person narration a jaunty, jocular bounce that helped make de Almeida’s novel one of the most popular works in the Brazilian literary canon. The protagonist, Leonardo, lives a haphazard life, bouncing in and out of mishaps, an endearing rogue whose attitude toward life and toward the conventions of the society in which he lives evoke the most charming aspects of the Brazilian national character. Though he is a committed “ne’er-do-well,” Leonardo is a product of circumstance rather than an oppressed, and oppressive, personality born with a disposition naturally at odds with the world around him. The characters with whom Leonardo interacts are of Brazil’s middling and lower classes; mestizos, mulattos and a gypsy girl come and go, but it is Leonardo’s interactions and relationship with his father, the elder Leonardo, that gives the reader a sense of proportion when it comes to Leonardo’s perspective on the world and the consequences that result from his natural inclination, inherited from his father, to perhaps give in too readily to his own passions. “Leonardo…had apparently received from his father the fate that misfortunes always came to him through the vagaries of his heart” (de Almeida & Sousa, 1999, p. 134). Leonardo and his father may be rogues cut from the same cloth but theirs is a simple, intuitive faith in the efficacy of their impulsive, passionate natures. Leonardo and his father are both trying to find their way in the new social order that has replaced the unwieldy administrative structure of the king’s reign. As a bailiff, Leonardo-Pataca Name 8 had occupied a position that was “important in positioning (him) in the social and political hierarchy of Rio” (Almeida & Sousa, 1999, p. xiii). The novel begins with a satirical description of Leonardo-Pataca’s mock-important position. The bailiff, or meirinho, was little more than a non-salaried errand runner, an appointee who was most often to be found hanging around a street corner or tavern waiting to serve some writ or citation (Ibid). It is a lifestyle that fits well with Leonardo-Pataca’s indolent nature, a responsibility that didn’t impart or require much responsibility. It is this same essential state of languor, of deferred obligation and personal accountability that pass for the younger Leonardo’s true inheritance. Yet he will eventually emerge from it a stronger and wiser person. Leonardo and his father both symbolize the love of life that defines the Brazilian character, particularly the common people. They both are inclined to “love first and ask questions later,” a live-for-today ethic that one may easily identify with Rio de Janeiro, the setting of de Almeida’s story. Neither Leonardo is overly concerned with the consequences of tomorrow. Watching as young Leonardo orchestrates the fight at the gypsy girl’s party, one has the impression that he is as motivated by the sheer thrill of raining down chaos as he is by the achievement of any personal goal. Leonardo and his father both appear in the guise of hapless buffoon, as star-crossed individuals who seem incapable of making things go right. When Leonardo-Pataca kicks his son out of the family home, it is as though he is somehow trying to jettison his own helpless ineffectiveness, that by sacrificing his son to the world he will somehow be purged of his shortcomings. In this, he and young Leonardo share a Quixotic naivete that is at once unworldly and disarmingly, almost childishly simple. Name 9 Works Cited Da Cunha, E. (2006). The Amazon: Land Without a History. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Da Cunha, E. (1944). Rebellion in the Backlands. New York: Samuel Putnam Publishing. De Almeida, M.A. & Sousa, R. (1999). “Memoirs of a Military Sergeant: A Novel.” New York and London: Oxford University Press. De Andrade, M. (1988). Macunaima. Tele Porto Ancona Lopez. Hecht, S. (2004). “The Last Unfinished Page of Genesis: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon.” Historical Geography. Vol. 2, pp. 43-69. Kangussu, I. (2010). “Alogy and Love in ‘Macunaima.’” Web. http://www.ufop.academia.edu?. Levine, R.M. (1995). Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Read More