Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 54

In 1549, almost half a century after the landing of Cabral in Brazil, the Jesuit Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–70) arrived in Portuguese America. He came as part of the expedition led by Tomé de Sousa (ca. 1503–79), the first governor of the colony. The Jesuits were the first missionaries charged with the catechization of the Brazilian natives. From the second half of the sixteenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century the Jesuits not only worked among the natives, but also helped to shape the educational and cultural development of the new society. As Luiz Francisco de Alencastro points out, the company also became one of the wealthiest institutions in Portuguese America owing to its careful administration and the management of businesses that linked Brazil and Africa, particularly the slave trade. Dauril Alden also explains that because the company was free from taxation and received many donations, it was able to accumulate a great deal of wealth. Its patrimony included land, sugar plantations in rural areas, and lavish buildings and schools in urban centers.

Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–70), José de Anchieta (1534–97), and Antonio Vieira (1608–97) are the most distinguished Jesuits of colonial Brazil. Like other Jesuits who were engaged in missionary work, these three members of the company saw themselves as direct successors of the first Christians who sought to convert Romans and barbarians alike. The first Jesuit to arrive in Brazil, Father Manuel da Nóbrega, landed in the colony in 1549 with the royal governor, Tomé de Sousa. On his arrival, Nóbrega started to work directly with the natives in their villages, or aldeias. His major contribution to colonial Brazil consisted of his missionary work among the Indians, in which he promoted literature. His interest in finding effective ways to teach the natives led him to encourage José de Anchieta to write and direct theatrical plays aimed at facilitating the catechization of the natives. Nóbrega also added his own contributions to the literary field. His Diálogo sobre a conversão do gentio (1556) presents arguments both for and against the conversion of the natives. In the text, Nóbrega considers the American Indians to be no better and no worse than any other people, and he had no illusions about their inherent innocence. According to Nóbrega, the salvation of the natives would not be accomplished by divine miracle, but only by hard work and sacrifice on the part of the missionaries. In addition to the Diálogo, Nóbrega wrote an extensive number of letters to his Jesuit colleagues overseas, most of which was not published until the twentieth century. Those letters relating to his missionary experience in Brazil seem to alternate between optimism and pessimism. Although at times they express a gentle affection for the Indians, at other times Nóbrega seems to despise them and see the need to treat them with violent authoritarianism.

José de Anchieta was the most distinguished literary and religious figure of sixteenth-century Brazil. Because of his work among the natives, he became known among them as the Apóstolo do Brasil (Brazilian apostle). His literary work consists of poetry and plays. Born in the Spanish Canary Islands and educated in Coimbra, Portugal, Anchieta arrived in Brazil in 1553, three years after Manuel da Nóbrega had started his missionary work among the Tupi Indians. Anchieta’s writings were influenced by medieval and renaissance tradition, and he is best known for his theatrical production aimed at the evangelization of the natives. However, Anchieta is also famous for his two epic poems, De Beata Virgine Dei Matre and De gestis Mendi de Saa. Both poems link Anchieta to Medieval Marist epics and to the tradition of Virgil. De Beata Virgine was first written on beach sand during Anchieta’s captivity by the Tamoios Indians in 1563. After his release he reconstructed the whole epic. De gestis Mendi de Saa was dedicated to Mem de Sá (ca. 1500–72), the third Portuguese governor sent to Brazil. Mem de Sa played an instrumental role in freeing Anchieta from captivity. Unlike his epic poems, which were written in Latin, Anchieta’s lyric and verse plays were written in a combination of languages that included Tupi, Portuguese, and Spanish. They were primarily designed for presentation in Indian aldeias.

Anchieta’s plays were simple and straightforward. Since there were no formal theaters in the colony, his autos were performed in churchyards or in the central areas of small towns and Indian villages. The tropical forest was very often used as a backdrop, and the casts were always all-male and made up of local residents and natives who lived in the missions. Severino João Albuquerque, a literary critic of Brazilian and Latin American drama, has observed that although Anchieta’s theatre was introduced in Brazil as an instrument of indoctrination, “it had undeniable dramatic qualities” (107). Anchieta’s theatrical production consisted of tragedies written in Latin and autos based on Gil Vicente’s didactic t heater. The auto da pregação universal, written around 1567 and first published in 1672, is considered to be the first dramatic text written in Brazil. Written in a combination of Portuguese and Tupi, the auto was intended to appeal to natives and settlers alike. The auto was could also be performed in different places of the Portuguese America by changing the names of individuals and references to local events and geography. Due to the fact that early theatrical production was aimed at conversion and not publication, only a few of Anchieta’s works have survived. Of his surviving autos, Auto representado na festa de São Lourenço, written about 1583, reveals Anchieta’s talents as a playwright. According to Severino Albuquerque, Anchieta’s autos “reveal a remarkable feeling for spectacle, calling for the use of body paint, native costumes, song and dance, fights, torches, and processions” (106).

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bento Teixeira (1561–1600) wrote the first epic poem written in Portuguese in Brazil. Teixeira was a “New Christian,” or a descendant of converted Jews, who immigrated to Brazil as a young child and studied with the Jesuits. His epic, Prosopopéia, was written in the last years of the sixteenth century, at a time when Teixeira was being scrutinized by the Inquisition for suspicion of secretly practicing Judaism. The poem was published in Portugal in 1601, shortly after the writer had died in the jails of the Portuguese inquisition. The publication of his epic poem indicates that Bento Teixeira had connections with influential people, as the Inquisition generally prohibited the publication of texts by those persecuted as heretics. The poem was dedicated to Jerônimo de Albuquerque Coelho (1548–1618), a relative of Duarte Coelho (ca. 1485–1554), who was prestigious and influential both in Pernambuco and in Portugal. Teixeira lived in Pernambuco prior to his imprisonment by the Holy Office in Lisbon. It is possible that Teixeira dedicated the poem to Albuquerque in an attempt to gain his protection. It is also possible that Jerônimo de Albuquerque had something to do with the publication of the poem in Portugal.

Using Camões as his model, Teixeira describes the beauty, wealth, and safety that new immigrants would find in Pernambuco. He also praised the bravery of noble Portuguese men such as Albuquerque Coelho, who fought the French and the Indians in Brazil. Because Prosopopéia was modeled on Camões’s Os Lusíadas, some critics tend to see Bento Teixeira as an insignificant and mediocre poet. However, if one pays attention to the poem’s content, it is possible to detect Teixeira’s hidden message of resistance. He was persecuted because his ethnic and religious background did not fit mainstream European society. In terms of style, Bento Teixeira’s Prosopopéia can be situated at the crossroads of the renaissance and of the baroque.

In the seventeenth century, the best representative of the Baroque rhetoric among the Jesuits was Antonio Vieira. Vieira was born in Lisbon in 1608 and at the age of 6 moved with his family to Bahia. At 15 he ran away from home to live with the Jesuits. At the age of 17 he was sent to study with the Jesuits in Olinda, Pernambuco, to teach rhetoric. Vieira is considered to be one of the great preachers, writers, and missionaries of the seventeenth century. He was also “a key actor in European and Ibero-American politics of the period,” as the historian Thomas M. Cohen has shown in his book António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Vieira’s work differs from that produced by Nóbrega and Anchieta in quantity and style. His writings consist primarily of sermons to be given in churches in Brazil and Europe. His sermons are typical examples of Spanish baroque culture, both in content and in form. Some address questions related to the political situation that he experienced in Brazil when Portugal and its colonies were part of the Spanish Empire. In 1640, Portugal once again became independent from Spain, but there was still conflict in Brazil, this time with the Dutch. His sermons after this date deal with political questions and express a sense of what he considers Portugal’s fall from divine grace. These themes are particularly obvious in his Sermão pelo bom sucesso das armas de Portugal contra as de Holanda (1640), in which he questions God for having deserted his chosen people (the Portuguese) in favor of Protestant Dutchmen.

In 1641 Vieira was sent to Lisbon as part of a delegation of Brazilians to the court of King João IV, the new monarch who had been chosen to rule the independent Lusitanian Empire. Vieira became João IV’s adviser and one of the most powerful men in Portugal. In 1652, he gave up his role as a diplomat and advisor to the King in order to return to Brazil and work among the natives in the northern region of Maranhão. Vieira and other Jesuits strongly opposed the exploitation of the natives by Portuguese settlers and colonizers. The subsequent conflicts between Jesuits and the Portuguese colonizers resulted in the expulsion of Vieira and his fellow Jesuit missionaries from Maranhão in 1661. Marked by the contradictions of the Baroque era, many of Vieira’s sermons reveal a crisis of faith and a kind of subversive disregard for religious and social orthodoxy. His open defense of subaltern groups such as the Indians of Brazil, the poor of Portugal, New Christians and Jews brought him to the attention of the Inquisition. Prohibited from preaching, he returned to Bahia in 1681 and remained there until his death in 1697.

Other writers who produced Baroque texts are the Portuguese New Christian Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão (1555–ca. 1634) and the Creoles Frei Vicente do Salvador (1564–1636?), Sebastião da Rocha Pita (1660–1739), Gregório de Matos Guerra (1636–96) and Manuel Botelho de Oliveira (1636–1711).

Brandão’s Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (1618) seems to have been written with the purpose of attracting European immigrants to Portuguese America. The book consists of six sets of dialogues that celebrate the greatness of Brazil. Brandao establishes a dialogue between Brandonio, a long-time resident of Brazil and Alviano, a skeptical newcomer from Portugal. Gonsalves de Mello considers Brandão’s text a significant work of Brazilian literature and one of the foundational documents in the history of the Brazilian Northeast. The discussion between Brandonio and Alviano typifies the conflict that extended over several centuries between those Europeans who saw the New World as a land of innocence or promise and those who considered it savage, dangerous, and degenerate. This controversy gave rise to a vast literature on both sides of the issue, as Frederick Holden Hall observes in the introduction to the English translation of Brandão’s Dialogos das grandezas do Brasil. The book also speculates about the possible Hebrew origin of the Indians, and describes the different social groups and customs of the region. It also suggests that the immigrants who come to Brazil should not seek fast profits and return to Portugal. Instead, Brandonio argues, they should stay in Brazil and work for the benefit of the new society. An incomplete version of the Diálogos was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, and a complete and definitive edition was not published until 1966. This later edition also contains a detailed analysis of all theories of authorship, an account of the known facts of Brandão’s life, and a history of the various editions by the Brazilian critic José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello.

Gregório de Matos Guerra, a major baroque poet and a contemporary of Antonio Vieira, was born in Bahia into a wealthy family of sugar planters. As a member of the colonial elite, Gregório was sent to Portugal to pursue higher education. He studied at the University of Coimbra, and upon completing his education in 1661 he married a local woman and became a judge in Portugal. As a result of personal and political problems, Gregório lost his position as judge and returned to Brazil 1682. The cultural and material changes he experienced during his lifetime make him one of the best representatives of the Brazilian baroque poets. His models included the Spanish poets Quevedo, Calderón, and Góngora. In contrast to Vieira’s elegant sermons defending the interests of the Jesuit order, the satirical verses attributed to Gregório de Matos depict the economic and social upheavals that he experienced in Portugal and in Brazil.

Gregório de Matos wrote religious and lyrical poetry, but he is best known for his satirical poetry. These satirical verses describe the contradictions of colonial Brazilian society. Gregório focuses on what he saw in Bahia upon his return from Portugal and portrays the colony as an upside-down world. Like Quevedo, Gregório de Matos sought to correct the excess of liberty that he believed was the cause of the decadence of society through satire. Many of his aggressive and pornographic verses were directed towards the governor of Bahia, Luis Alves da Câmara Coutinho, and led to Gregório’s exile in Angola. Later on, he returned to Brazil on the conditions that he give up writing satirical verses and no longer live in Bahia. He died in Recife in 1696, a year before the death of Antonio Vieira in 1697. In the last four decades, particularly with the neo-baroque and tropicalist movement, Gregório’s poems have been recycled by poets like Harold de Campos, and also by the popular singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. João Adolfo Hansen’s book, A sátira e o engenho, is one of the best critical studies of the satirical poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos. James Amado’s edition of Obras completas de Gregório de Matos (1969) is the most complete collection of the poetry attributed to the most important baroque satirist of Brazil.

Botelho de Oliveira was a contemporary of Gregório de Matos and Antonio Vieira. Although critics such as Varnhagen and Antonio Candido feel that Botelho’s baroque production does not compare in quality to the writings of Vieira and Matos, Botelho de Oliveira’s Música do Parnaso has the merit of being the first volume of poetry published in Portugal by a native-born Brazilian poet. One of the most celebrated poems found in the collection is entitled “Ilha da Maré.” The poem is a good example of the ufanista spirit that characterized writings such as the Carta by Caminha and the Prosopopéia by Bento Teixeira that glorified the Brazilian land and all its resources. Música do Parnaso praises the natural beauty and delicious foods found in Bahia, the poet’s homeland.

In the fields of history and historiography, some names stand out in colonial Brazil. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, a Portuguese historian who lived in Brazil around 1570, is thought to be the author of História da privíncia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil and Tratado da terra do Brasil. Gabriel Soares de Sousa, a plantation owner who lived in Bahia at about the same time, is believed to have written Tratado descritivo do Brasil, published in Rio in 1851. The work of these early historians can also be considered exemplary of ufanismo. They portray Brazil as a land of beauty and wealth.

Not all historians were so positive in tone. Frei Vicente do Salvador’s (1564–1636) Historia do Brasil details the political and military crisis that he observed in Brazil during the period that Portugal and its possessions were part of the Spanish Empire. Rocha Pita’s baroque História da América Portuguesa, published in Portugal in 1730, comprises ten volumes. The first two volumes describe the geography and the inhabitants of Brazil. The remaining volumes describe the political and administrative aspects of Brazilian colonial society.

The Baroque style did not end with Gregório de Matos, Antonio Vieira, and the other writers of the period, but rather extended far beyond the chronological frontiers of the seventeenth century. The Baroque influence remained strong not only in literature but also in architecture and art. In the first part of the eighteenth century, the town of Vila Rica de Ouro Preto became the center of the baroque architecture, sculpture, and other forms of visual arts that characterized the Portuguese Empire at that time.