The Black Butterfly

Introduction
The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination is, as the title suggests, a tripartite study of one narrow but intensely fertile subject area in the writing of three of Brazil’s most important and formally audacious authors. Alves was writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but his major poems on slavery discussed in this book were all published after his death (1871) in the late 1870s and into the 1880s. Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), technically Assis’s most experimental work, and also the work containing his most subtle and devastating treatments of slavery, came out in 1880, eight years before the Lei Áurea, the Brazilian Abolition Law, was passed in May 1888. Assis died in 1908. Two other novels containing significant material on race and slavery were published in 1904, Esaú e Jacó (Esau and Jacob), and 1908 Memorial de Ayres (Counselor Ayres’ Memorial). Da Cunha published his masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands) in 1902, although he worked on the manuscript for the previous five years. The Black Butterfly provides the first comparative extended study of how slavery and its cultural legacies have been creatively approached in very different intellectual, formal, and political ways by three exceptionally bold experimenters. The three sections of the book provide detailed introductory considerations of why and how each author has been constructed around the aesthetics of Atlantic slavery. This short introduction serves a different function and provides a brief and more general consideration of the cultural gulf The Black Butterfly is designed to fill, globally.
One reason this book happened is because Brazilian literature, even the very greatest Brazilian literature, is still not very widely known outside Brazil, and it should be. Terry Caesar stated quite simply in 1999: “If the country of Brazil has an extremely marginal place in American literature, the literature of Brazil has none. Machado de Assis, remains virtually unknown (as he is in the rest of the world).” This was even then a bit of an overstatement and in the first two decades of the new millennium things have improved a little, but not that much. It remains true that all three of the figures I consider here have been, and continue to be, largely marginalized and ignored outside Brazil. This study hopes to change that state of affairs.
Another reason I wanted to write the book relates to my obsession with slavery and cultural representation. Compared to North America, Brazilian slavery studies are still in their infancy. The most important literary responses to Afro-Brazilian culture and the inheritance of slavery remain almost unknown outside Brazil. Given the undeniable strength in imaginative and creative depth of Brazilian literature, it is odd that these writers have no global profile. Alves, as a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, deserves to be as famous as William Blake or Lord Byron; Assis as an experimental modernist deserves to be as well known as Marcel Proust or James Joyce; da Cunha as cultural fantasist, mythographer, and narrator of revolutions deserves to be as celebrated as Thomas Carlyle or Victor Hugo.[ii] Each of these Brazilian authors forged a quite distinctive creative space around slavery and its inheritance in Brazil, and yet the works in which they achieved this have not been integrated in any meaningful way into the Atlantic slavery archive, or indeed into the literary canon of Atlantic Slavery studies, and the passionate and increasingly voluminous debates it has generated. The Black Butterfly was written in order to inaugurate a sea change in the form of a book that explains, from my inevitably European perspectives, the unique contribution of each of these Brazilian geniuses to our understanding of cultural and social life in Brazil under slavery. The book is also written in the knowledge that Brazilian cultural responses to slavery have insights that can teach Europe and America in profound ways about our inherited blindness and closure. There is reluctance within Europe’s first Slave Power Nations (Portugal, Spain, Holland, Britain, and France) to see the memory of slavery as a bleeding wound. It is a wound that we have not begun to search, let alone staunch, a wound that remains open and toxic; the infection is only scabbed over. That the negative white energies that gave rise to slavery live on is evident in the precise forms of discrimination, racism, violence, denial, and sexual fetishizing of the black body that continue to thrive and to be sanctioned.
Brazilian Cultural Memory and Colonization: Jorge Amado as a Test Case
What does the rest of the world demand from Brazilian literature, and why does it seem to translate so badly to other cultures? Only one Brazilian author from any period has popular “Super Star” status outside Brazil, and that author is Jorge Leal Amado de Faria, commonly known as Jorge Amado. In terms of sales, number of novels translated, and film and television adaptations, Amado has no competitors inside or outside Brazil. Since his death in 2001, this popularity has continued to rise. Without doubt Amado is the author who has traveled best without being completely lost in translation, yet the terms of his acceptance and “translation” are illuminating. The version of Amado Europe and America embraces in many ways is the Amado they demanded and created.
Amado began his career as a serious political novelist with a passionate agenda directed at exposing the suffering of Brazil’s poorest agricultural workers, and at sympathetically treating aspects of the Afro-Brazilian culture of the North East, and its Africanist elements in particular. Working as both novelist and journalist, Amado’s early hard-hitting political work climaxed with Terras do sem fim (1942; translated as The Violent Land the title means literally Lands Without End), a brutal treatment of Brazil’s cacao laborers. Yet this work, and this opening phase of Amado’s career, did not make him popular in Brazil, or internationally well known. The exception was his recognition by leftist intellectuals in Paris, and his novel Jubaiabá was favorably assessed in a short review by no less a figure than Albert Camus. Amado’s early books were dangerous enough to be burned publicly in Brazil by the Vargos dictatorship in 1937. He was deemed too political, too extreme, and a little too difficult, and he ended up with several stints in prison and lived for various periods in exile in Argentina, Uruguay, Czechoslovakia, and Stalinist Russia from the 1930s through to the 1950s, as repayment for his pains. Amado then, for whatever reasons, changed direction during the period 1954 onwards and started writing politically less heavy, and culturally more playful crowd pleasers. The work started to have an eye open for the exoticist fantasies of Brazil’s North East that would go down well not only with Brazil’s white elite readership (influenced by the proclivities of the “Regionalist” movement) but with the expectations and demands of liberal European and North American audiences. These were large novels; rather reassuringly old fashioned if not backward looking, and almost Dickensian or Hugo-esque in terms of plot and character construction.
It was the publication in 1958 of Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon) that Amado hit the big time in Brazil, selling 800,000 copies in six months in what remained a largely illiterate country. The television series based on this Romcom paean to the cult of the spicy mulatta had an audience in Brazil of over twenty-five million. The book became Brazil’s first novelistic global hit, becoming a bestseller in translation in Europe and North America. Amado’s international reputation was then cemented with a series of subsequent titles, none of which hit the sales and distribution heights of Gabriella. The most popular of these late works were Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands; film, 1978) Tenda dos Milagres (1969; Tent of Miracles; film 2011), O Sumiço da Santa (1993; The War of the Saints). In these books Amado had clearly abandoned the hard-line politics and style of the early work and turned himself into a sort of living fantasy of what the ideal Bahian, Brazilian author should look like and read like. Amado was a self-publicist of genius, who presented precisely the type of comforting patriarchal white North East Brazilian liberal whom Western liberal readers desired. He packaged black Brazil for an international clientele; indeed Amado the man has a claim to be the ultimate Brazilian cultural export package. He was a self-described Communist who confessed or at least publicly claimed that he had never read a word of Marx, and who had no problem befriending extreme right-wing politicians in Salvador Bahia. He was an antiracist who saw the solution to Brazil’s racial divisions to lie in unlimited miscegenetic free love, and who had a capacity to create mulatta heroines with a highly predictable, delectable, and mildly pornographic soft core. He was a celebrant of Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian cultures, but he celebrated them in ways that could be easily absorbed and patronized by white elites in Brazil, America, or Europe. He was above all a reassuring cultural presence, a Bahian vade mecum, dishing up cultural stereotype after cultural stereotype, and operating hand in hand with Gilberto Freyre’s homemade regionalist anthropology. Freyre hailed from just up the Slave Coast in Recife, and his sensualist take on mixed-race Brazil also traveled well in translation to Europe and North America. Amado and Freyre boiled Brazilian Africanity down to the stereotypes desired by international readerships—African cooking (arroz com feijão [black beans and rice], bacalhau [the salt cod dish of the slaves], the feijoada [which in traditional form involves cooking every part of the whole pig but which European celebrity chefs have now murdered with over-refinement]). They also prioritized African-evolved dance forms (Bossa Nova, Bahian carnival and samba queens, batuque), African art (miracle painting, the paraphernalia of Candomblé [[AU: this word appears sometimes uppercase roman type, sometimes in italics with lowercase . Please indicate here which you prefer and adjust to one or the other throughout manuscript.]] ceremonies, costumes of the Gods, “ethnic” sculpture) and Afro-Brazilian religious intellectual gurus and capoeira masters (the libidinous, autodidact, intellectual Pedro Archanjo, hero of Amado’s novel Tent of Miracles, is the locus classicus).[iv]
Amado did not by any means go uncriticized for his chameleon cultural changes and ambivalence. In old age and after his death there was some coruscating criticism accusing him of being a cultural sellout. Yet to give him his due Amado had a much more biting critical presence than Freyre, and never completely lost his political teeth. Indeed he remained something of an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing and actually smuggled in some rather radical satiric agendas in the later work, particularly the whacky Tent of Miracles. This is an attack on Brazil’s increasing cultural subservience to the United States. It is also, however, an attack on the American imposition of its cultural fantasies of Brazil, onto Brazil, and of Brazil’s absurd alacrity in embracing this parodic version of themselves.
What is finally educative about Amado’s international celebrity, and the reason I have called him up as an introductory contextual backdrop for this book, lies in the way he is clearly split into the two halves of his literary life, before and after 1958. The difficult early work, with its committed hard-line Communist agenda, remains neglected even within Brazil. The comfy rehashing of Bahia as an all singing all dancing exotic, erotic, cultural melting pot in Gabriella and the novels that followed, is what made Amado into the current cozy custodian of Bahian international identity. It seems then that it is only when Brazilians start to travesty and to parody their national culture in accordance with the demanded fictional expectations evolved in Europe and North America, that they get noticed, accepted, and digested by Europe and North America. This is an old story, as applicable to Carmen Miranda, or the Euro-American cultural colonization of capoeira, as it is to Jorge Amado. This process, whereby the Western center kidnaps the cultural iconography of Black Brazil and then re-injects it into the country of origin in grotesquely simplified versions, is not a form of Creolization but of racist distortion. None of the authors I analyze in The Black Butterfly produced texts open to such processes of possessive assimilation. Alves, Assis, and da Cunha remain, in their very different ways, true to their Brazilian cultural agendas and resistant to caricature. Ironically, it is their very “Brazilian-ness,” together with the comparative obscurity of the Portuguese language, and the difficulty of each author’s uniquely complicated style, that explains why they have not as yet been embraced by mass readerships in Europe and North America.
One motive for writing The Black Butterfly is then didactic and educative, a desire to break the cultural mold still surrounding, delimiting, and conditioning how English and Americans want their Brazilian poetry and fiction served up, particularly in the areas of Afro-Brazilian culture and slavery. Yet there are several other reasons, beyond a commitment to familiarization, why I felt that it was necessary to write this book.
Brazil’s Creative Resistance to the Myth of the Emancipation Moment
Brazil has consistently responded culturally to the memory of slavery in ways very different from those of Europe and North America. Outside Brazil these differences have not been thought about very much, and are indeed difficult to carry over cultural divides. Europeans and Americans have grown up with, and grown into, their own established fictions of slavery and post-slavery culture. As I have argued at great length elsewhere, these fictions are often predicated upon a sort of “Moral Big-Bang” theory of origination. In this narrative the foregrounding of emancipation as a beautiful gift from the slave power, to the slave populations, is of paramount importance. An explosive Emancipation Moment is foregrounded that emerges as both a legal and mystical instant of an-nihilistic cleansing, a process of closure and paradoxical rebirth. The Emancipation Moment is overseen by a series of “Great Emancipators,” white patriarchal moral colossae, the Wilberforces, Schoelchers, Lincolns, and Nabucos embedded within the nationalistic mythologies of each of the Atlantic slavery superpowers. The story goes that after an agonistic battle, the slave powers of Europe and the Americas travel through a moral “dark night of the soul” in which they confront their sin. They then emerge into a triumphant form of cultural apotheosis, often configured as a variant of the biblical Jubilee, in which they “give” the slaves their freedom and a new post-slavery age of enlightenment and universal freedom begins. Brazil of course provided its own potent variations on this theme, and yet the work of Alves, Assis, and da Cunha ingeniously, committedly, and terrifyingly refuses such clean-cut fictional options. The Black Butterfly is concerned to think about how these authors evolved a uniquely honest creative legacy that denied Anglo-American abolitionism’s mythic norms. Alves, Assis, and da Cunha were each driven to confront the most unspeakable elements of slavery and memory. As a result, their work occupies a unique space within the cultural archive of Atlantic slavery. Each writer develops a personal vision and style in which slavery emerges as an ungainly, horrifying, and above all a living legacy. Slavery emerges as a confused and confusing inheritance in which Brazil will always have to negotiate and re-approach how slavery’s buried and obscured enormities can be uncovered and reinvented.
I have been working on Brazil’s cultural responses to slavery for a long time, and much of my work in this area so far has focused on visual culture. I have now written at length about the popular woodcut and lithographic print culture of nineteenth-century Brazil, and what elements in this tradition stand for if compared with Europe and North America. I have done a similar comparative study of nineteenth-century photography in Brazil and what it is that separates this slavery archive from any other. I have also thought about Afro-Brazilian culture, and syncretic religion in particular, and again about what is unique here in terms of how slavery and Africanity are remembered. This work has taken me into museum studies and into thinking about which institutions remember slavery in Brazil and how they do this. Yet I have not, up to this point, tackled Brazil’s major writers of poetry and fiction in terms of what they have to say about slavery that is different from anyone else. Assis, Alves, and da Cunha, the crème de la crème of the Brazilian literary canon, emerge as the creations of an energized set of vital and combative literary experiments, reinventing the cultural memory of slavery in ways that we are still trying to come to grips with.
Over the last thirty years I have read and re-read the three greatest writers working in Brazil during the latter stages of slavery and in the two decades immediately following the emancipation law of 1888. The more deeply I absorbed their work, the more it became evident that each of these authors poses unique problems when it comes to responding creatively to Atlantic slavery and its workings and inheritance in Brazil. They also pose a series of perhaps unsolvable problems in terms of making their work comprehensible to literary markets outside Brazil. I wanted to solve, or inaugurate the process of thinking through, aspects of these problems. The importance of such work lies in the fact that da Cunha and Assis have not, so far, been seen as centrally engaged with race and slavery in their work. I decided that the best way to do this was through immersion and propinquity, and good old-fashioned close reading. Alves, Assis, and da Cunha are each inimitable and untranslatable; they draw on Brazilian Portuguese as a language and as a space of cultural intermission in ways that cannot easily be moved into any other diction or idiom. In trying somehow to uncover the layers of meaning locked up in each author’s words, I hope to pluck out at least a part of the heart of their mystery, and bring it into the English-speaking world.
Slavery, Memory, and Brazil’s Intimate Ambiguity
I would argue that ambiguity, and profoundly humorous or seriously ludic ambiguity, is a key element in each author, but an element approached very differently by each of them. Slavery and laughter is one deeply disturbing lowest common denominator which these great writers share. With Castro Alves the ambiguity shades into a furious satiric black humor that evolves out of intense crafted word play, and is the result of working a poetic diction hard, fully aware of the complete range of etymological implications contained in each word. With Assis the ambiguity is of a more Borgesian type and comes from playing games with narrational dependability and with apparently stereotyped and stable plot structures and character set-ups, which are suddenly bent beyond recognition. With da Cunha the ambiguity comes out of terrific formal transplantations. He toys with form and formal expectations in ways that uproot, morph, ironize and re-constitute whole genres and narrative typologies.
What all three authors also share is an ability to achieve an extraordinarily heightened intimacy around their artistic investigations of slavery. With Alves this intimacy comes out of the narrational persona of the poet himself. His passion, be it outrage, love, empathy, or hatred, could easily become absurdly self-indulgent melodrama. Alves as narrational entity constantly stands on the brink of catastrophe, both in terms of what he writes about and how he writes about it. It is the way in which this Alvesian hyper-intensity destabilizes not only language but symbolic structures that takes the verse beyond conventional effects of hyperbole and into a new frighteningly unstable visionary linguistic world. The instability is generated around a single pressure, namely the intense psychological sorrows that saturate slave societies. Yeats, thinking about political commitment and the zeitgeist in Europe just after World War I, warned with a somewhat fatuous arrogance that: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Alves confounds such easy distinctions: he is all reasoned conviction yet full of passionate intensity.
What saves Alves’s verse from sentimental self-indulgence is his insane emotional commitment to moral outrage. Alves puts wrath and high seriousness center stage; he not only claims but he constitutes the moral high ground. The destabilization of meaning within his poetic diction comes from the intensity of his feeling for the slave body, and his outrage puts language under such pressure that it sucks up contradiction and becomes capable of articulating opposing fictions simultaneously. His ecstatic fury over the question of slavery has a distilled intensity that is unique within the Romantic canon. His rhetoric takes us into a space of maniacal outrage and raw moral agon that remains distinctive. Alves can call upon the stripped-down diction of Greek tragedy at its moments of most extreme suffering, yet also often anticipates the necessary stylistic excesses of Negritude Surrealism. Alves’s O Navio Negreiro moves into a territory of ironic bleak comic extremity that is close to René Depestre and Aimé Césaire. In many ways Alves also enabled the experimental symbolism of Cruz e Souza. Alves seems to share with the Césaire of Notebook of a Return to my Native Land the sense that in order to write through, and do justice to, something as mad, incomprehensible, and emotionally unprecedented as Atlantic Slavery, a new, mad, unstable, unforeseen creative diction must be evolved. Whitman asked “Do I contradict myself” and happily concluded “Very well then I contradict myself”: for Alves the unique horror of slavery demands that it be configured in a new horrible creative language where contradictions live together symbiotically.
With Assis the intimacy is very different, generated around the precise exploration of social conditions within the sophisticated center of what was then Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. Assis gets into the banal affluent capitalist environment of mid- to late nineteenth-century Rio. He explores the uncomfortable tensions around how the superficially benign and civilized social sphere of Rio’s emergent middle class relates to the extremes of suffering, disempowerment, and poverty in which slaves, and disempowered poor whites, are forced to exist. The sudden violence, and occasionally full-blown Gothic horrors, inflicted upon slaves by their owners are presented and announced by urbane white voices in affluent town houses, complete with gas lighting and good plumbing. In these apparently advanced social settings, the most horrible things happen but appear as reasonable, indeed inevitable, and often as all but invisible. It is the delicacy, urban sophistication, moral self-blinding, and astounding hypocrisy of his white characters that make Assis’s anatomization of the Slave Power uniquely valuable. Assis’s slave owners are terrible in their normality, morally outrageous in their snide contentedness. Slave owners appear as distinctively modern urban creatures— sophisticated, sympathetic, rich, rather bored, tired, feckless, sarcastic, and above all civilized gentlefolk. They whisper, rather seductively, the most terrible things into our ears. Assis creates a ghastly social and characterizational environment, as if Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and the Marquis de Sade could all be fused around the ownership and persecution of slaves, in a single suburban drawing room, in fin de siècle Rio, or come to that a modern Saudi household in a mews in South Kensington or Marble Arch.
Da Cunha is even harder to work out than the other two. On the face of it he seems to want to excise black bodies, miscegenation, plantation slavery, slave rebellion, and the torture of the slave body, from his account of the Canudos Rebellion and the life of Antonio Conselheiro in the barren backlands of North East Brazil. Yet as his peculiar literary edifice progresses, it becomes apparent that his approach to slavery, and its dominance of the North East coast of Brazil, is at the center of his artistic vision. It is, however, through indirections, and through vast transformative, indeed genuinely epic metaphor, that his mystical meditation on slavery and Afro-Brazilianism emerges. At the climax of Os Sertões it is through chains of imagery growing out of precise, sensual, and extended landscape description that an intensely emotional engagement with slavery suddenly shoots up and comes into sharp focus. Da Cunha finally, ironically, almost it seems in despite of himself, fights through to some of the most uplifting rhetoric ever created to celebrate violent slave resistance. His tortured and suffering landscape descriptions emerge as terrific manifestations of the agony of the slave body, and of the social upheavals Brazil underwent in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of slavery and monarchy, and the introduction of a tenuous Republic. He uses the gorgeous minutiae of the natural world to take us into the darkest places of slavery.