The Voice of Brazil: The spirit of a nation in search of itself
By: Adonai Braga
Tags: Nationalism, Literature, Books, Brazil

The Voice of Brazil: The spirit of a nation in search of itself Adonai Braga Sep 9·4 min read

Translation from portuguese to english by: Marion

Understanding the Jungian conception of archetypes, we observe these constantly disappearing and reappearing in our society.

The tyrant, the sage, the bohemian, the libidinous, the hero, ad infinitum we see these garments being used during the ages, and the purpose of this text is to highlight one of these archetypes observed in the history of Brazil, which would be the erudite nationalist, a specific and unusual figure for the average brazilian reality, which can be observed from the levels manifested in Brasilia lands, to the absurd and exacerbated level of the ideal world, the art world, as seen in the book “Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma” (in english translation by Francis Johnson, “The Decline and Fall of Policarpo Quaresma”), by Lima Barreto.

Assuming that the reader does not know the work of Lima Barreto, I say that the character Policarpo Quaresma is a very unique figure in national literature.

He is presented to us as a man of almost 50 years, of short stature, who tried to be a military man in his youth, but due to physical incapacity, he went to work in the administration area and opted for the military segment, because “that was where he was well”.

“In the midst of soldiers, cannons, veterans, paperwork heaped with kilos of gunpowder, names of rifles and technical terms of artillery, he daily aspired that breath of war, of bravery, of victory, of triumph, which is just the breath of the homeland” (chapter 1, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma).

Nevertheless, the love of books, books that told everything about Brazil, and some others about abroad, knowing several foreign languages, is added to Policarpo Quaresma’s personality set, but his main focus was on books that talked about Brazil, from the history of the nation to its geological and botanical study.

At a certain point, the character proposes, through an official document, and after much study of the Brasiliense indigenous culture, and even self-literacy in indigenous languages, that the official language of Brazil was no longer Portuguese, which he said was a language borrowed from Europe, but Tupi-Guarani, which was Brazil’s own language.

For this reason, and consequently a struggle with a superior, Policarpo Quaresma is committed to a mental institution.

The book ends its first part, of three, exactly in the hospitalization of Policarpo Quaresma, and I won’t bring the other parts, as they address different moments and aspects of Quaresma’s life, so let’s focus on what was presented.

First of all, we must understand that the book was written in the second half of the 20th century and takes place at the end of the 19th century, during the government of Marshal Floriano Peixoto.

With this in mind, we were able to understand various exaggerations, satires and criticisms by the author, not only with Quaresma (who throughout the work begins to place himself in a different way in the society he lives in), but with all the military and high-level people that appears in the book, but there is an archetype that Lima Barreto placed in his work, even unconsciously, that continues to this day, which is what is manifested in Policarpo Quaresma.

We can find Policarpo Quaresma, in a real way and without the exaggerations that fiction gives us in several people during the history of Brazil.

Beginning with Dom Pedro II, a erudite figure, who valued study and a great nationalist, with massive educational and national development projects, he always proved to be a nationalist.

A few years later, we have the figure of Plínio Salgado, a small-bodied man, but endowed with general knowledge and a vast collection of his own books in which he exalted and studied Brazil.

Even the movement he created, the Brazilian Integralist Action, greeted itself with a word (or short phrase) of indigenous origin, Anauê, which there are several studies on, but is always understood as a greeting.

Plínio Salgado represents this aspect of a Brazilian voice that has been sought after for centuries.

Finally, in more recent times, we can observe the figure of Enéas Carneiro, one of the last, perhaps the last, great exponent of Brazilian nationalism, with his treatises on the wealth of Brazil, criticisms of modernity and the national political system, being a true polymath, writing treatises on cardiology and lecturing on other sciences and, just as Policarpo Quaresma was at the end of the first part of the book, Enéas Carneiro was treated like a madman, only not having been thrown into a madhouse because for the time he lived it would be immoral and people laughed on his serious, firm, unafraid, almost aristocratic way of speaking.

There were, and are still alive, many other men who, beyond mere material understanding, manifested the same spirit that was represented by Policarpo Quaresma, one who is not just a man, he is the voice of a nation that struggles to understand itself as a nation, which struggles to understand what unites those people living in the North of its territory with those people who live in the South, always seeking, and always teaching more and more, as it is a perennial essence, as we could observe, what separates each of these figures are decades apart, but they will always be there to be heard.

To finish this text, I must say that I chose not to call this spirit the “Spirit of Policarpo Quaresma” because those who know the work and the idea dealt with here only from the surface would understand that this would be a mockery, an offense, when in fact it is the opposite of that.

It would be better to just call it “Voz do Brasil”, never forgetting the natural differences that each man who carries it will have, after all they are men, they differ among themselves, but are united by something in common.