THE representation of blacks in Brazilian literature it reinforces various stereotypes in the works, which brings a disservice to this part of society, which has been treated with contempt and contempt for a long time. The presence of black characters in literature, when there is, occurs, most of the time, in minor supporting roles or villains. Black representatives in protagonism are not often found and, when they are, they are almost always tied to predetermined environments.
Read too: What is racism and what is structural racism?
The representation of blacks in Brazilian literature
According to the 2015 Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) blacks and browns make up 54% of the Brazilian population. Amidst this scenario of diversity, it predominates in the common sense, the widespread theory of racial democracy, which frames Brazil as a so-called non-racist country.
However, the numbers of the Continuous Pnad of 2017 point to another reality: while the average salary of blacks is R$1570, that of browns is R$1606 and that of the white population reaches R$2814. At
disparities they don't stop there: in the group of the richest 1% of the Brazilian population, the percentage of blacks and browns was only 17.8%.
This context evidences a social abyss in Brazilian society. THE abolition of slave labor, a little over a century ago, did not guarantee, as these figures demonstrate, the insertion of the population black and brown as a citizen in Brazilian territory, at least not on par with the population White.
Among the various factors that contribute to this racial inequality, based on the logic of colonization, which kidnapped millions of Africans to condemn them to slavery in Brazilian lands, the literature appears as a great carrier of prejudice, whether naturalizing negative stereotypes linked to blacks, or the absence of black characters as a whole. This is the case, for example, of the nationalist project of romanticism Indianist, who understands Brazilian genealogy as a result of the racial encounter between Europeans and indigenous people, subtracting the black presence of the national population.
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O contemporary literature scene is no different. According to a survey by the Contemporary Literature Study Group of the University of Brasília, 70% of works published by major Brazilian publishers between the years 1965 and 2014 were written by men, from which are 90% are white and at least half of them are from São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. The portrayed characters themselves approach the reality of these authors: 60% of the works are carried out by men, 80% of them white and 90% heterosexual.
Also according to the same survey, between 2004 and 2014, only 2.5% of published authors were not white, and only 6.9% of the characters portrayed were black. In only 4.5% of the stories they appear as protagonists. Between 1990 and 2014, the five main occupations of black characters in the analyzed works were: criminal, domestic servant, slave, sex worker and housewife.
"In Brazilian Literature, the black character occupies a smaller place, often inexpressive and almost always supporting role, or villain in the male case, maintaining in the characters the inferiority given to them as a reflection of the era slave.”|1|
See too: November 20 - National Day of Black Consciousness
Black characters in canonical Brazilian literature: stereotypes
The black appears in Brazilian literature much more as a theme than as an authorial voice. Thus, most Brazilian literary productions portray black characters from points of view that evidence stereotypes of the dominant, Eurocentric white aesthetic. It is a literary production written mostly by white authors, in which black people are the object of a literature that reaffirms racial stigmas.
Researcher Mirian Mendes reminds us that stereotypes are “the ideological basis for the domination of blacks by whites”. Professor and researcher Domício Proença Filho points out as the main stereotypes:
the noble slave
Here the black would be the one who is faithful, submissive, who overcomes all humiliations and overcomes the cruelty of the lords by bleaching. This is the case of the main character of Slave Isaura, in Bernardo Guimaraes, published in 1872 and adapted as a television soap opera by Rede Globo in 1976 and by Rede Record in 2004. Isaura is the daughter of a black mother and a Portuguese father, and has fair skin. See an excerpt from the novel, in which Isaura converses with Sinhá Malvina:
“- I don't like you singing it, Isaura. They will think that you are mistreated, that you are an unhappy slave, victim of barbaric and cruel masters. In the meantime, you spend a life here that would make many free people jealous. You enjoy the esteem of your masters. They gave you an education, as they didn't have many rich and illustrious ladies I know. You are beautiful and have a beautiful color, that no one will say that a single drop of African blood swirls in your veins.
[...]
– But lady, despite all this that I am more than a simple slave? This education, which they gave me, and this beauty, which I am so proud of, what they serve me... They are luxury items placed in the African's slave quarters. The slave quarters doesn't stop being what it is: a slave quarters.
– Do you complain about your luck, Isaura?
– Not me, ma'am: despite all these gifts and advantages, which they attribute to me, I know my place.”
The dialogue transpires and reaffirms the current paradigms: whiteness as a synonym for beauty, African heritage as cursed, benevolence of the masters towards the slave, the perpetuation of this state of affairs that ends with Isaura's speech “I know my place".
the black victim
Created to exalt the abolitionist project, here the black is also portrayed with the servile submission, victim of an inhuman system. This is the case of several poems by Castro Alves, such as “A Cruz da Estrada”, in which death appears as the only chance of liberation of the enslaved black, or even the famous “The slave ship”, in which the poet he recalls the perverse years of the slave trade and mentions great European names such as Colombo and Andrada, but there is not even a mention of the black resistance, the quilombos, the Zombie or Luiza Mahin.
“Walker! of the disgraced slave
Sleep has just started!
Don't touch him on the betrothal bed,
Freedom just married him.”
(final verses of “A Cruz da Estrada”, Castro Alves)
This stereotype is also associated with the faithful and passive slave, present in several works, such as Mother Mary, children's tale of olavo bilac, published in the book Country Tales (1904):
“Buying and selling slaves was, at that time, a natural thing. No one asked a purchased black man about his past, just as no one tried to find out where the meat he fed on or the farm he dressed himself in came from. Where did old Maria come from when, shortly after my birth, my father bought her? I only know that she was African; and she had perhaps a terrible past: because, when asked about it, a great terror his eyes dilated, and his black, glistening, callused hands were shaken with a tremor. convulsive. With us, her life was almost happy.”
(Olav Bilac, Mother Mary)
see the slavery naturalization and the complete erasure of the character's past, in which "African" hides her origins and all terms lend themselves to a indefiniteness From Maria. The absence of the family contributes to framing it under white paternalism, “almost happy”.
Read too: Three great black Brazilian abolitionists
the infantilized black
Characterized as subaltern and servant, is the stereotype that puts him as unable. Present in works such as the familiar devil (1857), of José de Alencar, and the blind (1849), of Joaquim Manuel de Macedo. Domício Proença Filho also associates this stereotype to animalization of Bertoleza, character of the tenement (1900), of Aluisio Azevedo:
“Bertoleza was the one who continued with the crooked strain, always the same dirty nigger, always clumsy on duty, without Sunday or holy day: this one, nothing, nothing absolutely, she participated in her friend's new perks: on the contrary, as he gained social status, the wretch became more and more slave and creeping. João Romão would go up and it would stay below, abandoned like a horse we no longer need to continue our journey.”
(the tenement, Aluisio Azevedo)
This is also the case for Aunt Nastasia, character of Monteiro Lobato, confined to the kitchen where she works at the service of a white family, presented as “a pet black woman who carried Lúcia as a child” (Monteiro Lobato, Reigns of Little Nose), whose stories are often disqualified by the other characters:
“Well, here with me,” said Emilia, “I only put up with these stories as studies of the people's ignorance and stupidity. I don't feel any pleasure. They're not funny, they're not humorous. They seem to me to be very rude and even barbaric - something even with a swollen black woman, like Aunt Nastácia. I don't like it, I don't like it, and I don't like it!
[...]
– Well, you can see she's black and pussy! It has no philosophy, this devil. Sina is your nose, you know? All living have the same right to life, and for me killing a lamb is an even greater crime than killing a man. Facinator!”
(Monteiro Lobato, Aunt Nastasia's Stories)
In addition to being considered ignorant, the characteristics of their black phenotype, such as skin color and mouth size, are arranged to also become offensive, synonymous with ugliness and inferiority.
Read too: Carolina Maria de Jesus, one of the first black Brazilian writers
The animalized, hypersexualized and perverted black
Present in the good nigger (1885), by Adolfo Caminha, is the black character who embodies homosexuality, taken at the time as perversion. This is also the case with the novel The meat (1888), work by Júlio Ribeiro, which associates the sexual instincts of the (white) protagonist Lenita with promiscuities with the slaves. It also appears in the figure of Rita Baiana, from the tenement (1900), and in several works by Bernardo Guimarães, such as Rosaura: the foundling (1883):
“Adelaide was, as the reader already knows, of a plastic beauty and more provocative. Her turgid breast, always heaving in a morbid undulation, seemed the nest of tenderness and pleasure; her gaze, at the same time full of sweetness and fire, as if it spilled divine sparks over her entire figure; the rosy cheeks the purple lips were like those sealed snouts, which in paradise seduced the progenitors of mankind and brought about their first guilt; and the carriage endowed with natural elegance, with its voluptuous undulations and graceful waving, seemed to be eternally singing the hymn of love and voluptuousness; the features, not quite correct, were animated by a countenance of such a charming expression, which imposed adoration, without giving time to observation.”
THE eroticization and objectificationof the black woman is one of the most common stereotypes not only in Brazilian literature, but also in the representation of black women in general – since Gregory of Matos, 17th-century poet, to the recently extinct character from Globeleza, a vignette that was on the air for 26 years on Rede Globo, always showing a naked black woman as an icon of Carnival.
Let us compare, below, two excerpts from poems by Gregório de Matos: the first, one among many dedicated to D. Angela de Sousa Paredes, white maiden; the second, to Jelu, the “queen of mulattos”:
"Angel in the name, Angelica in the face,
This is to be a flower, and an Angel together,
Being Angelica Flower, and Angel Florent,
In whom, if not in you?
[...]
If as an Angel you are of my altars,
You were my custodian, and my guard,
Delivered me from diabolical misfortunes.
[...]”
Compared to an angelic being, to flowers, to an amulet against evil, D. Angela is the portrait of beauty and virtues. Regarding Jelu, the same poet says:
“Jelu, you are queen of mulattos.
And, above all, you are queen of whores.
You have command over the dissolute
Who live in the grocery stores of these cats.
[...]
But being you mulatto so graceful
So beautiful, so dashing, and playful,
You have an evil, that you are very crappy.
For in front of the most inclined persona
Unwinding the revolting gut,
What white you gain, you lose shit.”
Far from the spiritualized idealization of platonic love inspired by the white D. Angela, Jelu is easily transfigured in "cat", in animal figure, in a prostituted woman, unlike the angelic portrait of the first. Besides eroticized, objectified, taken as impure, Jelu still has to compare its beauty to a sordid, fetid setting.
There are countless productions that perpetuate this eroticized stereotype of the black woman. This is the case of mulatto women from Jorge Amado, with special emphasis on Gabriela, protagonist of Gabriela clove and cinnamon (1958), described with sensuality and beauty that drive men crazy and as a woman who surrenders to passion, but not to the continuation of an affective or loving involvement:
“She attacked a melody from the backlands, she had a lump in her throat, my heart was afflicted. The girl began to sing quietly. It was late at night, the bonfire was dying in embers, when she lay down beside him as if nothing had happened. Such a dark night, they almost didn't see each other. Ever since that miraculous night, Clement had lived in terror of losing her. He had thought at first that, having happened, she would no longer let go of him, she would run her luck in the woods of this cacao land. But he was soon disillusioned. [...] she was naturally laughing and playful, she even exchanged graces with black Fagundes, distributed smiles and got what she wanted from everyone. But when night came, after taking care of his uncle, he would come to the far corner, where he would go, and lie down beside him, as if he had not lived all day for something else. She gave herself up all, abandoned in his hands, dying in sighs, moaning and laughing.”
Luís Fernando França, in his master's thesis, lists, based on the analysis of Roger Bastide, more than twenty stereotypes associated with blacks in Brazilian literary production. Among them, those of the rogue, of drunk or addicted to Sorcerer or "macumbeiro", of the evil etc.
"Some examples: who doesn't remember the verses of Manuel Bandeira, “Black Irene, Good Irene, Irene always in a good mood”? Or the wild mulatto woman, who is never a day woman, only a night woman; it is never spirit, only flesh; is it never family or work, just pleasure? And we are well acquainted with the male complement of this white costume: the roguish mulatto, who has come to party and to many vices, a factor of degeneration and social imbalance. These and so many other ghosts emerge from our slavery past to still inhabit the Brazilian social imaginary, where figurations such as the “good lord” or the “good boss"; of the “contented slave” or of its opposite, the bloodthirsty and psychopathic marginal, naturally turned to crime. These and so many other distortions of the Afro-Brazilian identity are inscribed in our lyrics, as much as in the film, on TV or in the popular programs that spread over the radio waves. These are social stereotypes that are widely spread and assumed even among their victims, stereotypes that work as powerful elements for maintaining inequality.”
(Eduardo de Assis Duarte, “Afro-Brazilian Literature: a concept under construction”)
Read too: Conceição Evaristo: another great exponent of black-Brazilian literature
black literature
It was mainly from the 1960s, with the strengthening of social movements organized by black men and women, that this scenario began to change. Seeking to break with this century-old collection of prejudices and stereotypes conveyed by Brazilian canonical literature, which often diminishes or erases black characters, black and black authors and authors began topublish your own works as an instrument of subjectivation and cultural determination.
Figures like Luiz Gama, lawyer and romantic poet abolitionist 19th century, or Maria Firmina dos Reis, the first female author to write an abolitionist novel in Brazil, are often relegated to the forgotten by the Brazilian literary canon, but taken up as precursors of the movement for literature black.
Conceição Evaristo, for example, has most of his works starring black women, and it is from the substrate of his experiences and his interiority that the verses and plots of his work are built. Solano Trindade claims blackness and the black phenotype with pride and presence. Ana Maria Gonçalves resumes the theme of the enslaved black woman as a conscious and revolutionary subject, recalling real uprisings and resistances in Brazilian history. Jarid Araes, mainly using the twine, also highlights the quilombola warriors.
![Portrait of Conception Evaristo. [1]](/f/21382b1e0572bcf1f65df6038879b52d.jpg)
There are countless authors and authors engaged in retake the black's point of view, continually disregarded by Brazilian literature. This involves a rescue of black ancestry and identity, as well as the denunciation of oppression:
Mahin Tomorrow
The conspiracy is heard in the corners
low voices whisper precise sentences
the blade of the daggers runs down the alleys
Crowd stumbles over rocks
Revolt
there is a flock of birds
whisper, whisper:
“It's tomorrow, it's tomorrow.
Mahin said, it's tomorrow.”
The whole city prepares
male
bantus
geges
nagos
colorful robes hold hope
await the fight
The great white overthrow is set up
the fight is plotted in the language of the Orixás
"it's tomorrow, tomorrow"
whisper
male
bantus
geges
nagos
"It's tomorrow, Luiza Mahin I speak"
(Miriam Alves, in Black Notebooks: Best Poems)
Future
what africa
is printed
in the pupils
from the black grandmother
what dance
the congada?
how many zombies
will arise
in poetry
from the battered periphery?
it's nasty
what dance
and occupy the hug
of the braided girl?
what an orisha
look
for this boy
which loves
play soccer?
an ancient breath
of drums and voices
protect us
of evil
the modern, the new
flow into the river
traditional
there are no people
no story
without memory
collective
and it's on the skin
that this memory
still alive
(Marcio Barbosa, in black notebooks, vol. 31)
know more: The concept of black literature and more examples of works
Yet, this literary production still faces challenges in being incorporated into the canon and it is continually relegated to marginality. Thus, there is a complete difficulty in dispelling these stereotypes and in conveying a literature committed to representing the Brazilian population as a whole. The relationship between literature and reality is evident when surveys such as those by UnB reveal that the profile of the writer Brazilian has remained the same since 1965, maintaining the privilege of publications by major publishing houses for men whites.
Grades
|1| Maria de Lourdes Lopedote, “Literature and the Afro-Brazilian image”, 2014.
Image credit
[1]: Paula75/Withmons
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
