Brazil's influence on African writers

Researcher examines how Portuguese-speaking African writers such as Mia Couto absorbed landscapes, characters and innovative language from Brazilian literature.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – The main twentieth-century works of literary criticism conceived of Brazilian literature as a grand transformative receptacle for European literature. Described from the perspective of “anthropophagy,” as defined by Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), the Brazil that resulted from these formulations was a devourer of foreign culture, which once digested gave rise to the national culture.

A new research project sets out not to refute this interpretation but to invert it. The idea is that Brazilian literature occupies the opposite side of the relationship in the sense that it was devoured and digested by others. The project, supported by FAPESP, is Alfredo Cesar Barbosa de Melo’s “The internationalization of Brazilian culture and the global South”.

Melo is a professor in the Department of Literary Theory at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo State, Brazil. He began work on his project by investigating the impact of Brazilian literature on Portuguese-speaking African writers in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

“Cultural anthropophagy and the paradigm for our literary criticism in the twentieth century tried to respond to the cultural cringe produced by Brazil’s inferiority complex, especially in the nineteenth century, when the idea was prevalent that we were incapable of being original owing to our colonial past. We were colonized by Europeans, so we were condemned to have a culture that would always be derivative. In contrast, cultural anthropophagy and the twentieth-century critical paradigm gave a positive slant to what had previously caused this anxiety by asserting that our derivativeness was creative and that we were capable of transmuting what we received,” Melo told Agência FAPESP.

“I set out to investigate the new situation that took shape when our cultural products began to be exported. This new reality, which can be summed up by the phrase ‘the Anthropophagi devoured,’ was one of the assumptions for my research. Another key premise was the need to escape the usual dichotomies between metropolis and colony, center and periphery, developed and underdeveloped, which have always oriented our thinking about Brazil’s place in the world. I wanted to take an entirely different angle, which could be called South-South, and to compare Brazilian production with African productions.”

Melo said the idea occurred to him when he was reading essays by and interviews with Portuguese-speaking African writers. “I saw how enormously they admired Brazilian culture. At a time when the former Portuguese colonies were gestating their own political and cultural nationalism, Brazilian writers like João Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Amado, José Lins do Rego, and even Gilberto Freyre represented an inspiration, a model of cultural autonomy, for Angolan, Mozambican and Cape Verdean intellectuals,” he said.

Melo cited the examples of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho and José Luandino Vieira in Angola, José Craveirinha and Mia Couto in Mozambique, and Gabriel Mariano and Baltasar Lopes in Cape Verde. “All these writers referred at some point to the importance Brazilian literature had for them,” he said.

José Luandino Vieira discovered Guimarães Rosa in prison. The Angolan was twice arrested by the PIDE, the Portuguese dictatorship’s secret police, in 1959 and again in 1961. He remained behind bars for 11 years and was released on parole in 1972. In a famous interview, he recalled how he had read Sagarana during his imprisonment and how important this collection of short stories published in 1946 by Guimarães Rosa had been to him at that time.

“In Brazilian literature, these African intellectuals found a literary correlative of a reality that wasn’t at all alien to them – a reality that gave them a feeling of familiarity, of socio-cultural contiguity,” Melo said.

Baltasar Lopes, for example, expressed admiration for Manuel Bandeira’s poem “Evocação do Recife,” a touchstone of Brazilian modernism. He said he had projected the reality described in the poem onto the Cape Verdean context, seeing Recife in Ribeira Brava, a town on Cape Verde’s São Nicolau Island, an old acquaintance, Pedro António, as a double of Totônio Rodrigues, a character mentioned by Bandeira, and the nude girl bathing, who gave the Brazilian poet his “first ecstatic vision,” in the Dom João river.

“The feeling of familiarity aroused in these African intellectuals by the settings and characters of Brazilian literature was so compelling that Brazil seemed to them to be part of their own reality,” Melo said. “Mia Couto, for example, albeit part of a later generation, said his first reading of Guimarães Rosa reminded him of listening to storytellers in Mozambique when he was a child.”

The familiarity of Guimarães Rosa’s universe was also lovingly recalled by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. “In the landscapes Guimarães Rosa described to me, I recognized those I was familiar with. This was because they so closely resembled many landscapes in Angola – I recognized some of Angola’s landscapes as I read – and also because the people he described, denizens of forests and grottoes, peasant farmers in their fields and in the bush, were all that I had learned to live with in Angola for so many years,” he said, referring specifically to Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas.

“Finding this type of emulation made me think immediately of the birth of Brazilian literature as described by Antonio Candido,” Melo said. “It was similar: themes and modes from European literature were inserted into Brazilian settings. Cláudio Manoel da Costa and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, for example, projected Arcadianism onto the natural and human landscapes of Minas Gerais. But comparing Brazilians who took inspiration from Europe and Africans inspired by Brazil led me to realize there’s a fundamental difference between these two movements, however structurally similar they may be.

“This is because of the deep-seated idea in Brazilian culture that Brazil is always under construction, always developing, and never becomes what we want it to be or what it ought to be. Europe presents us constantly with an unattainable ideal. For Africans, the relationship with Brazil is quite different. They don’t see Brazil as a model to be followed. They don’t want to be like Brazil. They think they already are like Brazil. Their societies are just like Brazilian society. They see a kind of existential contiguity between Brazil and Africa.”

Thus, the Angolan pop song “Poema da farra,” for example, refers to the black heroes of Jorge Amado’s Jubiabá not as unattainable ideals but as immediately recognizable and appropriable types: “Quando li Jubiabá / me cri Antonio Balduíno / Meu primo, que nunca o leu / Ficou Zeca Camarão” (“When I read Jubiabá/I thought I was Antonio Balduíno/My cousin, who never read it/Became Zeca Camarão”). The song was written by Mário Antônio and Fausto Bordalo Dias, and it became a hit in the voice of Ruy Mingas.

“We can learn a lot from this – a lesson that should never be overlooked. It should be uplifting for our self-esteem, our image of Brazil’s place in the world,” Melo said.

Ironically, the Portuguese and Brazilian dictatorships did most to encourage connections between Brazil and Africa in the 1940s. The Luso-Brazilian Cultural Accord signed in 1941 by representatives of Salazar and Vargas, both of whom had proclaimed themselves leaders of a “New State” (Estado Novo), opened up the Portuguese market to Brazilian books. In subsequent years, these books were to fall into the hands of young Africans, who would later become political and cultural leaders of their nations. In the 1940s, they were in Lisbon, where they rubbed shoulders at Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a Portuguese government-funded cultural center and publishing house for students from the colonies.

The Salazar dictatorship expected these intellectuals to become a colonial elite on returning to Africa. They would be Portuguese in culture and identify with the values of the metropolis. What happened, of course, is that many of them became leaders of independence, as exemplified by Agostinho Neto and Mario Pinto de Andrade in Angola, Marcelino dos Santos in Mozambique, and Amílcar Cabral and Gabriel Mariano in Cape Verde, to name just a few.

“For these young Africans who had been reared by the colonial system of education and obliged to read the Portuguese classics – Camões, Herculano, Garrett, Camilo, Eça and so many other writers they associated with colonialism – discovering Brazilian novels like José Lins do Rego’s Menino de engenho (1932) or Jorge Amado’s Capitães da areia (1937), and other books of fiction like Sagarana, must have been an extraordinarily liberating experience,” Melo said. “The lives and places described resembled their own. The books were in their own language, but it was totally transfigured. Even Gilberto Freyre, who was considered conservative, affected them intensely with his orientializing, Judeo-Arabic reading of the history of the Iberian Peninsula, so different from the conventional reading.”

It is not necessary to assume that the African intellectuals entirely understood the language of Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), a complex work with many words coined by Guimarães Rosa or picked up in his conversations with peasants who spoke a variant of Brazilian Portuguese peppered with archaisms and local dialect. Few Brazilians would profess to understand it completely. This should not prevent readers from enjoying the novel without having to look up every neologism or coinage. “José Luandino Vieira said he read it and didn’t understand a great deal but realized it offered a path to be followed by Angola literature, a way of making it different. The main question that arises for the leaders of an independence movement is how to be different from the colonialists. This is what Guimarães Rosa offered the African intellectuals: the possibility of writing in Portuguese yet writing a completely different language from the one they learned at school,” Melo said.

“Brazilian literature’s influence on Portuguese-speaking Africans is well-known and well-documented. My research set out to show the consequences of this influence for comparativist studies in Brazil.”