David Brookshaw

Black writers in Brazil

The student of Brazilian literature cannot fail America, for it was from this institution that such
to be struck at some point in his career by the relations were to develop.
conspicuous absence of black writers in that Firstly, it must be said that slavery was far
country. Indeed, it is strange that Brazil, with more widely based in Brazil than in North
perhaps the largest black population outside America, in terms of duration, area and the
Africa, has apparently produced no poet with the uses to which slaves were put. Slavery, which had
resonance of Langston Hughes, or novelist of the been quite common in medieval Iberia, was intro-
fame or calibre of James Baldwin, Richard duced into Brazil in the early sixteenth century
Wright, or Ralph Ellison, all of whom have and only abolished in 1888, some sixty years
made their mark on North American literature. after the country had obtained its independence
The reason for the absence of significant black from Portugal. As an institution, it existed
writers in Brazil and their presence in North throughout the territory. Slave labour was crucial
America lies undoubtedly in the greater economic to the sugar economy of the North-eastern plan-
advances made by blacks in the United States tation belt, which experienced its boom period
compared with those in Brazil and other Latin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
American countries. However, the explanation It was vital to the gold boom in the central re-
would not be complete if one did not mention gion of Minas Gerais during the course of the
that the relative progress made by blacks in the eighteenth century. Later, slaves again formed the
United States stems in part from the more overt backbone of the coffee economy in the area of
nature of the adversities which they have suffered. Rio and Sao Paulo for a brief but highly active
Greater segregation, ratified by law, has led to period in the nineteenth century. Slaves were also
greater racial cohesion, and consequently produced employed in cattle raising in the far South of the
a stronger, more united voice against the bru- territory, in the cotton plantations of the North,
talities of racial discrimination. It has also stimu- in transport as well as in a multitude of urban
lated the development of autonomous organs for and domestic occupations.
black social progress, such as businesses run by Manumission of slaves was far more frequent
blacks for blacks, colleges for black students and, in Brazil than in North America and can be
in the literary field, black publishing houses. In attributed partly to the definition of slavery in
Brazil, the absence of this original negative factor Portuguese law, and partly to the unstable nature
of legal discrimination has delayed the emergence of the economy. What is important is that a
of black writers, and certainly of writers of the population of free blacks and mulattoes develop-
calibre of those mentioned. ed during the colonial period, many of whom
This initial comparison between the black ex- were engaged in artisan industries and other ser-
perience in the United States and in Brazil is, vices which white settlers, attracted by promises of
perhaps, sufficient to explain the absence of a wealth, were not prepared to soil their hands on.
literature by black writers concerned specifically Blacks, therefore, participated in a wider range
with the problem of discrimination. However, of activities than did their counterparts in North
it does not explain why there have been writers America, who formed part of a more manageable,
of marked African descent in Brazil who com- more isolated minority, efficiently shielded from
pletely ignore such problems. This latter factor the contemplation of freedom or revolt and
requires a more detailed examination of how directed specifically towards plantation labour. In
race relations operate there, which in turn de- Brazil, blacks were instrumental not only in the
mands some mention of the characteristics of running of the colonial economy, but in a vast
slavery in Portuguese as opposed to British range of subsidiary activities, which made their
38 DAVID BROOKSHAW
presence a far more formidable one.
African culture
The second characteristic of Brazilian slavery
is important when determining the cultural in-
fluence of native Africa on the country. Because
of the high mortality rate among slaves in Brazil,
landowners relied heavily on the Atlantic Slave
Trade for new supplies, preferring to import
slaves rather than pursue a policy of slave breed-
ing. Indeed, the trade in slaves between Africa
and Brazil reached vaster proportions than ever
before during the first half of the nineteenth
century, despite pressures by the British govern-
ment to stop it. During the same period in the
United States, thanks to the more even sex ratio
among slaves, landowners concentrated on a
policy of slave rearing. As a consequence, the
African cultural imprint on Brazil was far greater
than on the United States, where slaves were
more effectively severed from their cultural heri-
tage because so many of them were American-
born. Also, the presence of' large numbers of
African-born slaves in Brazil meant that the
authorities were forced into a laxer attitude to-
wards manifestations of a religious and cultural
nature among the slaves, it being believed that
a degree of liberty in this direction reduced the
likelihood of revolt. It was for this reason, for
example, that the use of the drum, the most
basic element in African religious cultures, was
never banned as it was in North America.
The cultural influence of West Africa on the
North-eastern seaboard has, over the years, be-
come the distinguishing feature of this area of
Brazil, to the extent of infiltrating even the higher
strata of society. Whites participate with blacks
in Afro-Brazilian religious rites and can be seen
enjoying cuisine of a markedly African origin in
the restaurants of Salvador. In such a situation,
it is far more difficult for blacks to feel the
extreme racial alienation which they have ex-
perienced in North America. African cultural in-
filtration has not, on the other hand, occurred
in the southern part of Brazil, a factor which
will be examined more fully later.
The mulatto
The third feature of slavery in Brazil is crucial
for the consideration of the country's present
social and ethnic structure and germane to an
understanding of Brazilian race relations. In a
situation where most white settlers were men,
and most females were black, it was inevitable
that a high degree of miscegenation should occur.
Whether the mulatto, who was the fruit of this
structure, was kept as a slave, manumitted or
educated depended of course on circumstances.
Suffice it to say that miscegenation soon bred
the notion of mulattoes as constituting a social
group which was subordinate to the whites, but
at the same time their ally against the black
slaves who formed the vast majority of the popu-
lation. This tendency to assimilate the mulatto in
Brazil stands in stark contrast to North American
tradition, where race mixture never achieved the
same proportions, where mulattoes were less fre-
quently manumitted and where they came to be
considered black.
The separation of the mulatto and the black in
Brazil is, for the American historian Carl Degler,
the central difference between race relations North
and South of the Rio Grande. In his book,
Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Re-
lations in Brazil and the United States (Mac-
millan, New York, 1971), he claims that the pro-
vision of what he terms a ' mulatto escape-hatch'
in Brazil has facilitated the rise of the mulatto
into white society and has, as a result, taken the
lid off any movement towards black revindica-
tion by taking away possible mulatto leadership.
While the truth of this interpretation cannot be
denied, Degler's implicit opinion is that the
United States can learn from this seemingly more
benign relationship between black and white. But
the ' mulatto escape-hatch' in Brazil does little
to protect the individual from discrimination and
the humiliation which this causes. It could be
argued, indeed, that the mulatto suffers more
from prejudice than does the black, because he
represents a greater danger to the stability of the
social and ethnic structure, which is manipulated
by a predominantly white elite. Moreover, great
emphasis in white-dominated Brazil is given to
the adulation of white physical characteristics.
Hence the Brazilian concern with colour as
opposed to race, and the preoccupation with rid-
ding descendants of kinky hair or a negroid
nose by marrying whites. Thus Degler's positive
' mulatto escape-hatch' is cancelled out by the
ideology of ' branqueamento' or ' whitening',
which depends on the conditioning of the mulatto

and the black to an inferiority complex and to a
culture of self-hatred.
The difference between Brazil and the United
States in this respect was best summed up by
the French Brazilianist, Roger Bastide, in an
article in a Sao Paulo newspaper. He wrote:
•In Brazil, it is by ascending into a pattern of
bourgeois morality that the black passes what in
the United States, is called the colour line . . . the
racial struggle in Brazil has assumed the ap-
pearance of an opposition between two morals, or
between morality and immorality'. Bastide's
statement is a lucid one, for it dispenses with
the notion that only the mulatto can rise social-
ly, but it does hint at the extreme price which
the black or mulatto - let us say the Afro-Brazil-
ian - has to pay in order to rise. The rigid North
American colour line is replaced in Brazil by what
one could call an equally rigid comportment line.
This comportment line separates two incompati-
ble cultures: the culture of a morality which is
enshrined in the European or Europe-loving
Brazil, and which aspires to a white civilisa-
tion for Brazil, and the culture of immorality,
which is embedded in the Afro-Brazilian sub-
stratum. The culture of morality is the Noble,
that of immorality the Savage. In order to stake
a place above the comportment line, an Afro-
Brazilian must possess the same cultural interests
and affinities as the white, taking great care to
behave like a noble, while implicitly apologising
for his savage appearance!
The price of ' escape'
It is not surprising, given these considerations,
that Brazil should have produced in the nine-
teenth century a novelist like Machado de Assis,
who was a mulatto but whose work is never con-
cerned with the question of race, or the issue of
slavery, the abolition of which occurred during
his lifetime. On the. contrary, most of his novels
are set among the higher ranks of the Rio bour-
geoisie. Machado, who was elected the first Pre-
sident of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, is the
classic example of a mulatto who devoted his
life to being accepted above the comportment
line, and therefore studiously avoided any re-
ference to his origins. The complex which
Machado must have felt is illustrated in a letter
from the aristocratic Joaquim Nabuco to the
literary critic Jos6 Verissimo, shortly after the
BLACK WRITERS IN BRAZIL 39
novelist's death. The letter also serves to show
up Nabuco's prejudice as a white and gives us
an idea of the cost to the mulatto of his
' escape': ' Machado, for me, was a white, and I
believe he considered himself as such; if there
was any alien blood in him, this did not affect
in any way his perfect Caucasian appearance. For
my part, I only saw the Greek in him. Our poor
friend, so sensitive, would have preferred to re-
main unknown rather than achieve glory at the
cost of having his origins made public'
Machado was, however, bitterly criticised by
more outspoken defenders of their race. One
such critic was another mulatto novelist, Lima
Barreto, who was a younger contemporary of
Machado. Lima Barreto could best be classed as
a conscientious objector to the comportment line.
He wrote about the largely mulatto inhabitants
of suburban Rio at the turn of the century, and
devoted at least one of his novels to a facet of
racial discrimination. At one time, he even went
to far as to propose a ' negrista' movement, which
was to be a hymn of praise to his race. Lima
Barreto and Machado de Assis are early exam-
ples of the non-conformist and conformist options
open to the Afro-Brazilian intellectual. Gilberto
Freyre, a well-known supporter of Brazil's
apparent racial democracy, has attributed Lima
Barreto's attitude to the fact that he was poorer
and darker than Machado, and therefore obliged
to project his colour. There is, no doubt, an
element of truth in this view. In gratitude for
his position as an honorary white, Machado was
sufficiently conditioned to the requirement not
to mention his colour. Silence, however, is not
a privilege for those who cross the comportment
line, but a price, whether the candidate is a
mulatto or a black. An example of the latter
was Cruz e Souza, a black poet of the nineteenth
century, whose references to his colour are care-
fully veiled by techniques which have made him
Brazil's leading exponent of Symbolism. Lima
Barreto, for his part, had little to be grateful for.
His life of poverty and his early death from
alcoholism were perhaps caused by his honesty
on the subject of race.
European influence
Just as Machado de Assis, the writer of Afro-
Brazilian descent wrote about the white bourgeoi-
sie, and the black poet Cruz e Souza wrote in
40 DAVID BROOKSHAW
The forgotten ones
The International Organisation of
Journalists, based in Prague, has started a
campaign for the liberation of journalists
imprisoned in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay
and Chile. No mention is made of
journalists held for 15 and more years
in Cuba . . .
IAPA (Inter American Press Association)
newsletter No. 12, 15 March 1977
the style of the best French symbolists, so various
white writers have sought their inspiration from
the heritage which lies below the comportment line
in the culture of ' immorality'. Many would re-
gard this as further evidence of Brazilian racial
democracy, arguing that only in Brazil can one
find blacks with white souls and whites with
black souls. It is a view which is very difficult
to deny, and yet reference must be made to the
sociology of such a phenomenon in order that
it should be properly understood. Brazil, like other
Latin American countries which are in varying
stages of development, has depended on indus-
trialised countries for its manufactured goods, and
more recently for its capital investment. This
economic dependence on Western capitalist coun-
tries has been reflected in its continuing cultural
dependence on intellectual and artistic currents
emanating from Europe. The backlash against
Europe, or more precisely, against the conserva-
tive, Europe-loving establishment in Brazil, has
invariably occurred in cycles of cultural nativism,
which have coincided with the accommodation
of new elements in the expanding urban bour-
geoisie. The most recent and most significant of
these cycles was that represented by the Modernist
Movement of the 1920s. Modernism, influenced
ironically by the European avant-garde, was the
first concerted attempt at artistic innovation in
Brazil, which dredged the hitherto untapped mate-
rial of sub-comportment line culture for its origi-
nality. Various poets of the movement like Raul
Bopp, Murilo Mendes, and Ascenso Ferreira, tried
to incorporate Afro-Brazilian rhythm into their
verse, and experimented with the musicality of
Afro-Brazilian words, in the same way that cer-
tain Cuban and other Antillean poets of the period
were doing. It was in the wake of Modernism
that the North-eastern regionalist novel developed.
Here, the main protagonist of Afro-Brazilian
nativism was and still is Jorge Amado, whose
novels centre on the lives of the black inhabitants
of Salvador and their culture. The Modernist
revolution was significant, therefore, in that it
served to some extent as a cultural rehabilita-
tion of the black Brazilian by middle-class whites,
who used Afro-Brazilian material in a display of
anti-elite, and by extension, anti-foreign cultural
nativism.
The absence of a similar movement of cultural
revindication by racially Afro-Brazilian writers
can be understood if one bears in mind the myth
of ' branqueamento' and the rules of the com-
portment line, above which the Afro-Brazilian
seeks to be accepted. The fact is that his social
development is several stages behind that of the
white. He aspires to the social values of the bour-
geoisie against which the white nativist expresses
his reaction. Consequently, black writers drawing
their inspiration from popular culture are rela-
tively scarce, but are invariably products of urban
areas where Afro-Brazilian cultural influences
are strongest, and where a petite bourgeoisie of
black origins has been allowed to develop in an
atmosphere of stability, without being thrown
into the disarray which industrialisation brings.
Recife and Salvador, the major cities of the
North-east, fulfil these qualifications, as do the
suburbs of Rio, where many North-eastern
migrants have traditionally settled.
Solano Trindade, a native of Recife though
resident for many years in Rio and Sao Paulo,
wrote during the 1940s and 1950s. As an exponent
of ' negritude', but with a fundamentally Marxist
message, Trindade could be considered the Brazil-
ian equivalent of black Cuban poets like Regino
Pedroso and Nicolas Guillen. More recently, Nei
Lopes, a poet from Rio, who is better known as
a composer of ' sambas', has written with the
rhythm, simplicity, and subtlety of meaning
characteristic of this form of Afro-Brazilian
music. Indeed, his collection of poems entitled
Feira Livre (' Open Market'). carries a dedication
to ' all the poets of samba in Rio', thus implying
a connection between the concept of poet and
popular song writer, the erudite and the vernacu-
lar. The work of both these poets expresses
through its form and content the vitality of black

culture, which is pitted against the stifling con-
formity of white bourgeois life. Blackness is there-
fore treated as a symbol of liberation, but a
liberation which is both cultural and social. In
a sense, their poetry is similar to that of the
Modernists in that it expresses a desire not to
conform. However, it differs in what can only be
termed its authenticity. The Modernists embarked
on an essentially artistic experiment in order to
shock the literary establishment. Afro-Brazilian
themes were no more than a phase. Moreover,
their treatment of such themes was motivated by
the white man's stereotype of the black as being
a basically picturesque, folkloric figure. Trindade
and Lopes aim at a similar target, namely the
power of conformity, but from inside their ethnic
class, the Afro-Brazilian petite bourgeoisie of Rio
and Recife, which straddles the comportment line,
and is therefore the meeting point of the two
conflicting cultures, the ' moral' and the
' immoral' of Bastide's statement. It is perhaps
significant in this respect that both Trindade and
Lopes dedicate poems to the black Cuban,
Guillen.
Racial solidarity
The area of Brazil where the situation of blacks
comes closest to that of their counterparts in the
urban ghettoes of North America, is in the cities
of the industrial South, particularly in Sao Paulo.
Here, the Afro-Brazilian element is in a minority.
Also, the African cultural influence, so prevalent
in the North-east and even in evidence as far
South as Rio, was never eradicated in Sao
Paulo. This can be attributed partly to the
nature of slavery in the area, which developed
late and rapidly during the second half of the
nineteenth century, and partly to the chaotic
growth of the city of Sao Paulo in the first
decades of the present century, during which vast
numbers of European immigrants settled there,
effectively swamping the native Afro-Brazilian
proletariat, many of whose members had only
recently been freed from bondage. Indeed, blacks
in Sao Paulo passed directly and without any
preparation from slavery into a highly competi-
tive industrial system. For this reason, it is in-
teresting to examine the work of black ' paulista '
writers who, while black, do not have the cultural
base of Trindade or Lopes, nor do they resort to
it as did the Modernists.
BLACK WRITERS IN BRAZIL 41
No censorship
Colombia's Minister of Interior, Rafael
Pardo Buelvas, has rejected the possibility
of press censorship ' in spite of the
irresponsibility of certain publications '.
He said: ' The government feels it is less
harmful to the country's institutions to
allow irresponsible newspapers than to
establish censorship.' But sooner or later,
he added, the country would demand
enactment of a press statute, which he
said would be drawn up with the help of
' responsible journalists '.
IAPA (Inter American Press Association)
newsletter No. 12, 15 March 1977
At the time when the white Modernists were
representing the black as symbolising vitality and
irreverence, the first cohesive black social move-
ment was taking place in Sao Paulo. Indeed, the
1920s and 1930s were decades when the city
boasted a conscientious and vociferous black
press which exhorted its readers to follow the
example of white immigrants by learning to
compete, and by adopting those patterns of bour-
geois behaviour which would give whites less
reason to discriminate against blacks. It was dur-
ing this period that the ' Frente Negra Brasiliera'
(Brazilian Black Front) was formed as a move-
ment of racial solidarity. Between 1930 and 1937,
it attracted a membership of over 200,000, and
from its headquarters in Sao Paulo, created a
network of branches which covered large areas
of the country. As a movement, it was designed
to aid and encourage blacks to cross the com-
portment line and, by so doing, react against the
traditional negative stereotype of the black as be-
ing a ' no-good'. The literary mouthpiece of this
generation of black ' paulistas' was the poet Lino
Guedes, whose work is devoted to the moral
elevation of his people, advocating the adoption
of essentially puritanical values and modes of
social comportment. Great importance is, for
example, attached in his work to marriage within
the Afro-Brazilian ethnic group and the consti-
tution of the nuclear family, to modesty in dress
and behaviour, to thrift and financial responsi-
bility, and to literacy and education generally.
42 DAVID BROOKSHAW
The contrast between the approaches of Guedes
and Trindade, who were contemporaries but who
doubtless never met, is an interesting illustra-
tion of the totally conflicting ways in which
blacks have interpreted the meaning of libera-
tion. Freedom for Guedes was to be obtained
by the adoption of virtuous social conduct and
bourgeois values. He preached a revolution within
an ethnic class, but not against the status quo.
He accepted the rules of the comportment line,
and aspired to integration with the white bour-
geois world. The poetry of Trindade, on the
other hand, is Marxist in its identification with
all oppressed people, but at the same time is
artistically rooted in Afro-Brazil. In both its form
and content, it therefore represents a subversion
of the comportment line. Once again, one is re-
minded of Bastide's theory of the conflict in
Brazil's race relations between 'morality' and
'immorality'. Guedes and Trindade reflect this
antithesis within black intellectual tradition.
Colour line
The themes of contemporary black poets in Sao
Paulo hinge on an attempt to express a black
consciousness. In terms of economic and social
advance, many of the objectives of the 1930
generation have been achieved, and blacks have
risen to social positions which would have been
inconceivable forty years ago. At the same time,
Brazil is officially more committed to multi-
racialism than ever before, legislation outlaw-
ing discrimination having been passed as long
ago as 1951. These seemingly positive factors
compel one to ask the reason for an incipient
black consciousness. The answer, of course, lies
yet again in the actual process through which
blacks have to pass in order to rise socially. The
crossing of the comportment line is only the gate-
way to the competitive world. It is beyond the
comportment line that the black social riser
encounters problems, for in his daily life he con-
fronts whites who may humiliate him by ignoring
his bourgeois status and seeing only his colour.
He then discovers that beyond the comportment
line, there lies a colour line, which is possibly even
more sinister than that which is legally defined,
for it is a line which takes the form of a stereo-
type in the white mind.
It is in this way that Brazil masquerades as a
racial democracy. In fact, there operates a sys-
tem of what can be best described as internal
colonialism, in which the black social riser per-
forms the function of an assimilated native,
but with no guarantee of racially democratic treat-
ment despite his assimilation. Guedes represented
the will to obtain the initial certificate qualifying
him for assimilation. In more recent times, how-
ever, the educated black, unable to fulfil his social
expectations because discrimination has halted
his progress, has translated his frustrations into
a self-conscious expression of his ' negritude'.
Poetry of the last twenty years represents the
development of such a consciousness. One can
mention, for instance, the highly intimist sonnets
of Eduardo de Oliveira, which are full of sym-
bolistic allusions to the problem of being black
in a white industrial world, and which owe much
to the technique of Cruz e Souza, the solitary
nineteenth-century black poet already mentioned.
Whiteness, light, the sky, morning, are all asso-
ciated with the ideal, the pure, that which the
poet has been conditioned to aspire to, while
blackness, expressed as shadow, night, darkness,
slime, is associated with suffering on one level,
and with impurity on another. In his earlier
poems especially, Oliveira writes of the pain and
humiliation of being culturally conditioned to hate
his colour and love its opposite, while at the same
time having to carve out a niche in the class
which enshrines that opposite.
During the 1960s Oliveira, together with other
contemporaries in Sao Paulo such as Carlos de
Assumpcao and Oswaldo de Camargo, produced
verse of an angrier, more declamatory tone. This
was partly due to events in Africa, then in the
process of decolonisation, and in the United
States, where blacks were embarking on their
campaign for civil rights. Of the three writers
mentioned, only Camargo has progressed be-
yond this stage. He has evolved away from
poetry to the rather more demanding task of
prose fiction. In 1972, he published his first
volume of short stories, entitled O Cairo do
Exito ("The Road to Success'). The stories
combine to form a chronicle of life within the
black community in Sao Paulo, the contradic-
tions of which are viewed objectively, but not
without a gently ironic humour. Individual stories
focus on such themes as the cultural alienation
of blacks in a white industrial society, the econo-
mic dependence of blacks upon whites, the

attempts by groups of black intellectuals to
ameliorate the situation of their people, and the
rivalries among such groups. Since the publica-
tion of O Carro do Exito, Camargo is known to
have been working on a novel and on a play.
He is undoubtedly the leading figure of his
generation in Sao Paulo, and may yet provide
a Brazilian answer to James Baldwin.
White patronage
The major difficulty is encountered by a black
writer when he comes to trying to get his
work published in a white society in which there
is a good deal of nepotism. Further consideration
must therefore be given to the initial points made
in this article, in order to clarify the practical
problems of being a black writer in Brazil.
The radical difference between Brazil and the
United States, as said before, involves the factor
which has enabled black North Americans to
command a position of strength, and caused black
Brazilians to remain economically dependent on
whites. This is the factor of capital. Just as the
black job-seeker in Brazil has to rely on the de-
gree to which his employer may be the victim of
a stereotyped view of blacks, so the black writer
has to rely on the patronage of white intellectuals
and white publishing houses. Publishers, of course,
have commercial interests to defend, apart from
having to guard their reputations, especially when
confronted by literature which may call into
question the national creed of racial democracy,
or, as the sociologist Florestan Fernandes has
put it, the official 'prejudice against prejudice'.
Consequently, black writers have invariably had
to resort to smaller publishing houses, which
print limited editions and do not have a nation- -
wide distribution. Copies of their work are there-
fore hard to find, and when one is able to con-
sult them, one notices more often than not, a pre-
face by a white intellectual figure, or a dedica-
tion to white patrons. The result of all this is that
most writers are restricted to a small reading pub-
lic within their own area. As their works are
seldom republished, they are destined only to
semi-fame within their own lifetime. Admitted-
ly, a poet like Lino Guedes, whose work was be-
gotten of a certain epoch, would probably not
stand the test of time. However, poets like
Eduardo de Oliveira and Solano Trindade, not
to mention Nei Lopes whose poetry has only
BLACK WRITERS IN BRAZIL 43
appeared in the press and in an anthology, are
all worthy of wider acclaim. In prose fiction,
only Camargo has had his work published by a
well-known firm. On the other hand, ,the novel
Ifigenia estd no Fundo do Corredor (' Ifigenia is
at the end of the passage'), by the Rio writer
Nataniel Dantas, can only with a considerable
amount of searching he obtained second hand,
although it was published in 1969. Yet the novel,
which is a highly skilled and sensitive portrayal
of alienation and loneliness in a white world and
the tragic origins of such alienation, should rank
as a major contribution to contemporary fiction
in Brazil.
Efforts by blacks themselves to create their own
vehicles for the expression of ideas have been
hindered by poor finances and the lack of racial
solidarity, which can be attributed at least in
part to Degler's ' mulatto escape-hatch'. Attempts
were made, for example, during the fifties and
sixties to resurrect something of the press which
had existed in Sao Paulo in the inter-war period,
but the journals were essentially ephemeral and
did not run to more than a few numbers. Pos-
sibly the most promising organ of the post-war
period was the 'Teatro Experimental do Negro'
(Black Experimental Theatre), which was the
brainchild of one of Brazil's more outspoken
black personalities, Abdias do Nascimento, now
resident in the United States. The theatre was
created in order to train black actors for roles
outside the traditional stereotyped parts allotted
to them in white plays. At the same time, it was
hoped that its existence would stimulate black
playwrights. In the event, while the theatre put
on a production of Hamlet and several plays
by black North American dramatists, most of its
Brazilian plays were written by whites expressly
for it. In a sense, the Experimental Theatre, which
operated in Rio and Sao Paulo during the forties
and fifties, was ahead of its time. It was designed
to create a consciousness within a black popula-
tion which was economically and educationally
not prepared for it. As a result, it found itself
performing to largely white audiences. Ultimate-
ly, it was obliged to close through lack of money
and inadequate professional organisation. Nearer
to the grass roots was Solano Trindade's ' Teatro
Popular Brasileiro' (Brazilian Popular Theatre),
which toured Eastern Europe in 1956, but which
was criticised as being too folkloric by urban
44 DAVID BROOKSHAW
blacks from Sao Paulo, and therefore conform-
ing too closely to the white stereotype of blacks.
Finally, lack of funds put an end to the short-
lived ' Associacao Cultural do Negro' (Black
Cultural Association) in Sao Paulo in the late
fifties, which ran a magazine, organised lectures
on Afro-Brazilian topics, housed much of the
library of the old Black Front and even embark-
ed on publishing activities.
Regional differences
Apart from the problem of lack of solidarity and
poverty of funds, there is a further hindrance
to the development of a black consciousness on
a national scale, which can be put down to re-
gionalism. The distance in Brazil between the
North-east and the South is increased by dif-
ferences in cultural tradition as well as economic
development. The North-eastern axis, which
spreads as far South as Rio, is the breeding
ground for a black-based nativism, a sort of
black counterpart to the Modernist ethic of
the 1920s, but which flows over from poetry into
contemporary popular music. It represents the
expansion of a culture, hemmed in for centuries
below the comportment line. In its purist form,
it may manifest itself as a totally African con-
cept of cultural identity. Deoscoredes dos Santos,
the son of the high-priestess of a voodoo sect in
Salvador, has, for instance, written folktales in
a brand of Portuguese Creole which is strongly
reminiscent, as the critic Antdnio Olinto has
pointed out, of the Pidgin English used by the
Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. Poets, however
like Solano Trindade and Nei Lopes, attempt to
cross the boundaries of race. They value their
black culture as a reaction against the stifling
impositions of the comportment line and the
continuing dependence of the urban bourgeoisie
upon Europe for a cultural model. Meanwhile,
in the predominantly white South, blacks have
been concerned with trying to counter stereo-
types which have consistently isolated them. Their
reaction stems from a consciousness of race
rather than culture. The different approaches of
black writers from the North-east and from Sao
Paulo respond to different priorities: the cultural
independence of Brazil, and the social indepen-
dence of the black and white industrial society.
Both must ultimately serve to re-educate white
Brazilians away from cultural attitudes which are
the legacy of a long colonial history, and from
social attitudes left over from slavery. •