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In Brazil someone who has been brought up a Catholic, in the usual way, left the church, and then returned to it again, is called a “convert.” In somewhat the same sense of conversion, Brazil is now re-discovering the values of its earlier provincial, romantic, and humorous literature, just as we have been re-assessing our Hawthornes and Twains, although on nothing like our stupendous and costly scale. Even allowing for the inevitable differences, almost all Brazilian literature is sympathetic to us: one colonial understands another. With all its naïveté, religiosity (sermons and more sermons), and sentimentality, — it has many of the characteristics of the literature of our own first three hundred years. And as American literature has been divided into “paleface” and “redskin,” so can Brazilian be divided roughly, in the same way, into that of the city and that of the country, those who looked to Europe, tradition, and “correctness,” and those who were drawn to the wilderness, the Indian, the regional, and felt that only new forms could be used for the experience of a new country. Sometimes, as our own literature, the two strains are oddly woven together.
The poets of the “Inconfidentes” sang of cupids and swans and such un-Brazilian fauna. Yet here are a few lines from the best of them, Thomas Antônio Gonzaga, that Manuel Bandeira quotes in his Anthology of Brazilian Poets of the Romantic Phase. Gonzaga is addressing his great love, Marília de Dirceu:
“You shall not see the skillful Negro
Separate the heavy emery from the course sand,
And the nuggets of gold already shining
In the bottom of the bateia.
You shall not see the virgin forest destroyed,
Nor the burning of the still green underbrush
To fertilize the ground with ashes,
Nor the seeds being sown in the furrows.
You shall not see them rolling the black packets
Of dry leaves of fragrant tobacco,
Nor pressing out the sweet juice of the cane
Between the cog-wheels…”
This is a rare moment of realism and accuracy, as evocative of rural Brazil today as when it was written. A bateia is the wooden bowl used for panning gold. It is still used, as is the destructive system of slash-and-burn farming. Tobacco, fumo, is still sold in long black ropes in the markets, and sugar cane juice, rather like a watery, grassy, molasses, is still a popular drink.
The two outstanding characteristics of the Brazilian romantic poets are their saudades and their anti-slavery sentiments. The fact that they were all sent to Coimbra to be educated probably has something to do with the former. They missed the easy, indulged life of young Brazilian gentlemen and suffered from homesickness as acutely as Brazilian students seem to do now at Boston “Tech” or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg. Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864), one of the greatest of the romantics, is responsible for the “Exiles Song,” the “My Country ’Tis of Thee” of Brazil.
“My country has palm-trees
Where the sabiá sings.
The birds don’t warble here
The way they do there…”
And Casimiro de Abreu (1839–1860) repeats:
“If I must die in the flower of my youth,
My God, let it not be now!
I want to hear the sabiá sing
In the evening, in the orange tree!..” etc.
The sabiá, a rather fat, brown thrush, is, precisely, to Brazilian poetry what the nightingale is to English poetry. Carlos Gomes uses its song in the interlude of his opera THE SLAVE; Brazilian literature is full of sabiás.
Castro Alves (1847–1871) was the most famous Abolitionist poet. His long dramatic poem, “THE SLAVE SHIP,” was given in a form of group-recitation last year, in Rio and São Paulo, and stood the test very successfully; even lines such as:
“Exists a people whose banner serves
To hide such infamy and cowardice!..
My God, My God, what a flag is this…?”
have recovered significance and dignity, a hundred years later.
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Brazil’s “modernismo” movement began with the now-famous “Week of Modern Art” in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, in 1922. Beginning with the influence of the Dadaists and Surrealists, it, too, soon divided between the European-minded and the Indigenous-minded. There was even a small movement within it that called itself Cannibals in their desire to be native Brazilians and nothing else, and issued the “Anthropophagite Manifesto.” The name of Mário de Andrade cannot be omitted — starting as a poet of the “modernismos” he became one of the greatest forces in the Brazilian artistic renaissance. In music, folk art, poetry, and prose — almost everything in contemporary Brazilian artistic life owes a great debt to Mário de Andrade, and although he died in 1945 his name is mentioned constantly.
The two greatest personalities in Brazilian literature are prose writers, and both are fortunately available, at least in part, in English. The first, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), is the greatest writer the South American continent has produced; some critics think the greatest of both American continents, ranking him with our own Henry James. Child of a poor Negro house painter and a Portuguese woman, born in Rio on one of the morros, or hills now covered by the favelas, he worked as typographer and journalist, married a middle-class Portuguese woman, and published book after book of poems, stories, and novels. He grew famous, was highly respected and respectable, and in 1896 founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, whose president he was until he died. He is a deeply pessimistic, sceptical, reserved writer; there is little of the Latin rhetoric and nothing of its romaticism about his style. His best works are Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (published in English under the title of The Diary of a Small Winner), Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba, and some of the tales. Although the period is always the late Empire, and the setting Rio de Janeiro, Machado de Assis’s world is universal and his characters are real — as Tolstoy’s St. Petersburg is universal and Natasha not just a Russian girl.
The other great prose-writer, Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), is the author of one of the world’s strangest books, Os Sertões (published in English as Rebellion in the Backlands). Da Cunha was a military engineer; his book is an account of a military expedition made in 1896 against a religious fanatic, Antônio Conselheiro, “The Counselor,” who had fortified himself and all his followers in the little town of Canudos, far in the interior of the State of Bahia. They managed to hold out there for a year against repeated attacks by Brazilian regiments. The book is partly accounts of futile military manoeuvres, dry reports of suffering and atrocities (which remind one of Hemingway’s famous retreat), and partly a long geographical rhapsody. The whole first half, although not a novel, does for the backlands what James Joyce’s Ulysses does for the city of Dublin. Anyone who wants to get the feel of Brazilian life and landscape at their grandiose and disparate best and worst should read Rebellion in the Backlands. It is reminiscent of one of the Brazilian churches — solidly, almost crudely planned, but covered with a profusion of rich ornamentation and extraneous life, even to the point of being repellent.
It is perfectly true that in Brazil culture and the arts are more respected than in our own industrialized and middle-class country. Perhaps this is due not so much to European tradition as Brazilians like to think, as it is to the fact that, as in government, Brazil is one big family. In spite of examples of the democracy of the arts, — Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, and Portinari — most writers and artists come from the small educated, inter-related upper-class; in various degrees they are all cousins, and a mutual admiration society is apt to result. As in government, feuds become family quarrels; first names are used — even in serious critical articles; everything is taken too personally, and the atmosphere is curiously “feminine.”