CastroAlves is considered the main poet of the Third Generation of the Brazilian Romanticism and is among one of the most renowned writers of national literature. His work is divided into two main thematic axes: a lyrical-loving theme, in which the influence of the ultra-romantic poetry of Lord Byron and Junqueira Freire, among other poets; and the abolitionist theme, whose social vein is a trace of the last period of the romantic movement.
Were these poems inspired by revolt against slavery that made him famous among Brazilian writers. He is now the patron of Chair No. 7 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Biography
Antonio Francisco de Castro Alves born on March 14, 1847, in the village of Curralinho (BA), a place that today houses a municipality named after him. His father, doctor and professor, had been invited to teach at the Faculty of Medicine in Salvador, which led the family to move to the capital in 1854, where the poet began his studies at the Gym Bahia, showing early appreciation and vocation for poetry.
It was in 1860, at 13 years old, that Castro Alves recited in public, for the first time, a poem of his authorship, on the occasion of a school festival. The aptitude for working with letters was also perceived in Victor Hugo's translations, in which the child poet, still a teenager, worked diligently.
His mother having died in 1859, his father remarried in 1862, the year in which the couple, Castro Alves and his brother moved to Recife, where the poet began the preparatory course to enter the Faculty of Law of City. He failed twice before being able to enroll in the course.
You abolitionist and republican ideals they swarmed in the capital of Pernambuco at the time, and saw an even more fertile field in the Faculty of Law, where the poet found the readings and theoretical support for his most famous compositions. The students were always at Teatro Santa Isabel, seen as an extension of the faculty itself, for hosting tournaments and championships – and it was there that Castro Alves first saw the actress portuguese Eugenia Infante da Câmara, with whom, at age 16, he fell madly in love.
Date of 1863 the publication of his first abolitionist poem, entitled “The Song of the African”, published in the newspaper The spring. That same year, his brother José Antônio was diagnosed with a mental illness, and the poet himself began to show symptoms of tuberculosis. The following year, despite his brother's suicide and illness, he was finally able to enroll in law school.
In October 1864, tuberculosis became more complicated, which led the poet to write the verses “Mocidade e Morte” and lose his exams in college. The following year, however, he resumed his studies, being invited to speak at the ceremonies at the beginning of the school year, declaiming to the public republican and socially appealing verses.
In 1866, Castro Alves lost his father and started a love affair with actress Eugênia da Câmara, which had so long aroused its charm. The following year, they left together for Salvador, where she performed on stage a play written by him, entitled The Gonzaga or the Minas Revolution. The couple sparked the gossip and buzz of the city: he, a 20-year-old; she, a 30-year-old woman, separated, mother.
Still in 1867, the poet went to Rio de Janeiro, where he met Machado de Assis, which helped him enter the literary circles of the time. He transferred to the Largo São Francisco Law School, in São Paulo, still always more concerned with verse than with a bachelor's career.
In 1868, he broke off his relationship with Eugenia, already very troubled thanks to the jealousy felt by both parties. That same year, during a hunt, he had an accident, injuring his left foot with a shotgun blast, a complication that led to the amputation of his limb.
In 1870, he published his only work edited in his lifetime, entitled Floating Foams, whose main theme is the lyric-loving poetry. The abolitionist poems would be published in another book, under the title the slaves, but tuberculosis prevented the poet himself from seeing this work released. Castro Alves died on July 6, 1871, in Salvador, at the age of 24.
Read too: Biography of Machado de Assis: life of an icon of Brazilian Literature
Historical context
Castro Alves lived between 1847 and 1871, period of Second Brazilian Reign and of several political unrest. The national scene was marked by the Paraguay War, which lasted between 1864 and 1870, a conflict that lasted longer than expected and contributed to diminish the popularity of Dom Pedro II, making grow republican ideals.
England, already in advanced industrial development, pressured the Brazilian government for the abolition of slavery, enacting laws such as the Bill Aberdeen, August 1845, which authorized the British to arrest any ship suspected of smuggling slaves in the Atlantic Ocean.
Brazilian legislation, in 1850, used the Eusébio de Queirós Law, definitively prohibiting the trafficking of slave labor in the country. However, the powerful and influential agrarian elites still found ways to bring in new slaves in Brazil. It was only after the Nabuco de Araújo Law, of 1854, that the Brazilian government managed to enforce the Eusébio de Queirós Law.
Even if new Africans could not enter the country in a situation of slavery, and even if the abolitionist debate was on the agenda, slavery was still official in Brazil, perpetuating the inhuman and racist cycle of colonial times. An urban culture slowly grew and rural Brazil saw itself increasingly worn out, bringing to light the disgust at master-and-servant politics and increasing the yearnings for a democratic ideal. This heated event directly influenced the work of Castro Alves, whose social engagement it was mainly concerned with the urgent abolitionist need.
great name of Condorsing, the last generation of Brazilian romantic writers, Castro Alves finds peers in Tobias Barreto and Joaquim de Sousa Andrade, also engaged in social issues, a main characteristic of the literary production of the period.
Know more: Abolitionist laws: the route taken to the Golden Law
Construction
• Poetry
♦ Floating Foams (1870)
♦ The Waterfall of Paulo Afonso (1876)
♦ The Slaves (1883)
♦ Hymns of Ecuador (1921)
• Theater
Gonzaga or the Revolution of Mines (1875)
Slave Poet - Slaveship
Castro Alves' direct involvement with the abolitionist cause earned him the epithet of slave poet. There were numerous poems dedicated to denouncing the situation of enslaved blacks in Brazil, material that the poet intended to compile in a publication entitled the slaves, released only in 1883, twelve years after the author's untimely death.
The best-known poem in this publication is called “O Navio Negreiro (Tragedy at the Sea)”, probably the most famous among the abolitionist verses ever written. Divided into six parts or corners, the composition has poignant tones of indignationand yearning for justice, in a construction that surprises for the images, worked with diligence.
Articulating the theme of slavery as the main problem of the newly independent Brazil, Castro Alves started from the scene of a ship that, in abject conditions, it brought Africans shackled to slave labor, emphasizing sometimes the dialectic freedom-slavery, sometimes the tragic and dramatic descriptions, the inhumanity and injustice of slavery, from the imprisonment of Africans to their arrival in ports Brazilians. See some excerpts:
the slave ship
I
'We are at sea... doudo in space
Moonlight plays — golden butterfly;
And the vacancies after him run... get tired
Like restless infant mob.
[...]
Very happy who can there at this hour
Feel the majesty of this panel!
Below — the sea above — the firmament...
And in the sea and in the sky — the immensity!
[...]
III
Descend from immense space, O eagle of the ocean!
Go down more... even more... can't look human
Like your dive into the flying brig!
But what do I see there... What a picture of bitterness!
It's funeral singing... What grim figures! ...
What an infamous and vile scene... My God! My God! How horrible!
[...]
V
Lord God of the bastards!
You tell me, Lord God!
If it's crazy... if it is true
So much horror before the heavens?!
O sea, why don't you erase
Like the sponge of your vacancies
From your cloak this blur...
Stars! nights! storms!
Roll from the immensity!
I swept the seas, typhoon!
[...]
Yesterday Sierra Leone,
The war, the hunting of the lion,
sleep for nothing
Under the big tents!
Today... the black basement, bottom,
Infectious, tight, filthy,
Having the jaguar plague...
And sleep is always cut off
By the pull of a deceased,
And the thud of a body overboard...
Yesterday full freedom,
The will for power...
Today... cum it with evil,
Nor are they free to die. .
Attach them to the same chain
— Iron, lugubrious serpent —
On the threads of slavery.
And so mocking death,
Dance the dismal cohort
At the sound of the flogging... Derision...
[...]
Greater emphasis is given to the last part, in which the poet exhibits the slavery as a Brazilian problem, in grave lament and revolt:
[...]
SAW
There is a people that the flag lends
To cover so much infamy and cowardice...
And let her become that party
In the impure cloak of a cold bacchanal...
My God! my God! but what is this flag,
What impudent in the crow's nest?
Silence. Muse... cry and cry so much
May the pavilion wash in your tears...
Auriverde flag of my land,
That the breeze from Brazil kisses and sways,
Standard that the sunlight ends
And the divine promises of hope...
You who, from freedom after the war,
You were hoisted from the heroes on the spear
Before you were torn apart in battle,
That you serve a people in a shroud...
Atrocious fatality that the mind crushes!
Extinguish the filthy brig at this time
The trail that Columbus opened in the vacancies,
Like an iris in the deep sea!
But it's too infamy... from the ethereal plague
Arise, heroes of the New World!
Andrada! Tear down that banner of the air!
Columbus! close the door of your seas!
(The Slaves)
Know more: Black Literature: Literature Produced by Blacks in Brazil
Examples of poems by Castro Alves
• Lyrical-loving
Representative of the collection of loving-lyrical poems floating foams, the following poem presents characteristics more found in other phases of Romanticism.
to two flowers
There are two flowers united,
are two roses born
Maybe in the same afterglow,
Living on the same branch,
From the same dewdrop,
From the same sunbeam.
United as well as the feathers
of the two small wings
From a little bird from the sky...
Like a couple of doves,
like the tribe of swallows
In the afternoon in the loose veil.
United, as well as the tears,
That in pairs go down so many
From the depths of the gaze...
Like the sigh and the heartbreak,
Like the dimples in the face,
Like the starfish.
United... Oh who could
in an eternal spring
Live, what lives this flower.
join the roses of life
In the green and flowery branches,
In the green branch of love!
(Floating Foams)
• Social and abolitionist
the captive's mother
O mother of the captive! what a joyful scales
The net that you tied to the branches of the jungle!
You'd do better if the poor child
You dug the hole under the grass.
O mother of the captive! what are you doing at night
The son's clothes in the straw hut!
You'd do better if the poor little one
You weave the cloth of the white shroud.
Miserable! And teach the sad boy
That there are virtues and crimes in the world
And you teach the child to be brave,
To avoid the deep abyss of vices...
And crazy, shake this soul, still in darkness,
The goddamned hope... Cruel irony!
And you send the bird to infinity,
While holding you in dismal jail! ...
[...]
(the slaves)
By L. da Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/literatura/castro-alvespoeta-dos-escravos.htm
