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From Orality to Writing: The Reality of a Conversion through the Work of the Jesuit Father José de Anchieta (1534-1597)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jean-Claude Laborie

Extract

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We are in 1563, somewhere on a Brazilian beach about 100 kilometres north of what is now São Paulo. A young man in a cowled robe alone on the beach is writing a poem on the sand with the point of his stick. The hostage of a savage tribe for weeks, he struggles daily against manifold carnal temptations, personified in the voluptuous native women who come to visit him every evening in his hammock, and addresses his Latin verses to the Virgin Mary in order to fortify his virtue. The threat of being killed and eaten by cannibals is nothing to him by comparison with the loss of his virginity. Recourse to his own original culture is the ultimate bulwark against contamination, the sign of resistance and strengthening of his identity. The definitive rejection of the Other is, in these circumstances, a survival reflex.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 48 , Issue 191 , September 2000 , pp. 56 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2000

References

Notes

1. This scene is definitely not documented in the primary sources for the episode, that is, essentially the letters of Brother Anchieta. No mention of the poem is to be found in the first biographer, Quiricio Caxa, the Jesuit father who gathered the first biographical elements together on Anchieta's death in 1597. But from Pero Rodrigues's version (1606-9) onwards, the task of composition on the beach and that of memory made their appearance. It was the Jesuit chronicler Simão Vasconcelos who was to ennoble the scene by describing the process of parto da memoria, the labour of memory. The motif was to give rise to an abundant iconography thereafter.

2. José de Anchieta (1595), Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil (Coïmbra: Antonio da Mariz).

3. There is a recent edition of Anchieta's complete works: (1970), Obras completas, 13 vols. 1: De rebus gestis; 2: Poemas eucarísticos; 3: Teatro; 4: Poemas; 5-I: Lirica portuguesa e tupi; 5-II: Lirica espanhola; 6: Cartas; 7: Sermões; 8: Dialogo da fé; 9: Textos históricos; 10-I-II: Doutrina cristã: 11: Arte de gramática (São Paulo: Loyola).

4. In a letter dated from the month of August 1549, known by the title, ‘Information concerning the lands of Brazil', the Superior, Manuel da Nóbrega, described the customs of the Tupinikins and the Tupinambás, their cannibalistic rites which took place just a few hundred metres away from the colony. Monumenta Brasiliae (1956) compiled by Father Serafim Leite, pp. 145-54.

5. There are only a few Portuguese accounts of the voyage and the thin correspondence of the captain-financiers. It is reproduced in its entirety in Carlos Dias Malheiro (ed.) (1921-4), Historia da colonização portuguesa no Brasil (Porto).

6. The regimento, a sort of register of commands given by the king to his governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, is a long document divided into forty-seven paragraphs, which specifies the objectives and the means of putting them into practice in the territory. It is published in Malheiro, Historia da colonização, pp. 345-50.

7. This fort was the French settlement built in 1555 by the Knight of Malta, Nicolas de Villegagnon, in the bay of Guanabara. It was what was called ‘Antarctic France'. In March 1560 the troops of Mem de Sá drove out the hundred-odd French who were still there. A thousand or so Tamoios, allies of the French, against a comparable contingent of Tupinikins on the Portuguese side, supplied the manpower in a bitter combat which put an end to the dream of French Brazil.

8. There are some twenty letters, reports of what has been done and letters of edification, which are entirely impersonal. They are published in the Monumenta Brasiliae series, op. cit.

9. De Rebus Gestis Mendi de Saa Praesidis in Brasilia (Coïmbra: apud Johannem Alvarum typographum regium, 1563). This text is accessible in the Loyola edition of 1970 already cited (above, note 3).

10. These observations have already been essentially made by Frank Lestringant (1988), ‘Au rendez-vous brésilien, ou l'agonie de la France Anarctique, d'après le De Rebus Gestis Mendi de Saa (1563)', in Portugal, Brésil, France: histoire et culture (conference proceedings) (Paris: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), pp. 25- 40.

11. Primeiros biografias de José de Anchieta, edited and annotated by Hélio Abranches Viotti, S.J. (São Paulo: Loyola, 1998). This edition reproduces the two first biographical texts, that of Quiricio Caxa (1597) and that of Pero Rodrigues (1607). The original of the quotation translated is at p. 64.

12. Primeiras biografias, op. cit., p. 66.

13. Simão de Vasconcelos (1663), Chronica de Companhia de Jesus, third edition (Petropolis: Vozes, 1977), Book II, pp. 14-5 (author's translation).

14. Lying behind this opinion is the certainty that all peoples received the revelation of the message of Christ from the apostles, who divided the world on the death of Jesus. It was St Thomas who received what was to become America as his share. The Jesuits in Brazil recognized traces of this first evangelization by making an amalgam of ‘Zomé', one of the great civilizing heroes of Tupi mythology, and ‘Tomé' (‘Thomas', in Portuguese). Every year, the Jesuits organized a procession to footprints imprinted in a rock in Porto Seguro, tracks believed to be those left by Tomé when he ascended to heaven.

15. Obras completas, op. cit., volume III. This volume reproduces the texts rediscovered in Anchieta's manu script notebooks.

16. This text is the third part of a poem reproduced by Batista Caetano (1882), in the appendix to his Curso de literatura brasiliera, second edition (Melo Morais Filho). The text was translated from the Tupi by Father João da Cunha.