Machado de Assis's African Descent

This article, the result of a rereading of the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, investigates the manifestations of African ancestry expressed mainly through the author's positioning with regard to slavery and the inter-racial relations present in nineteenth-century Brazil. To research the matter of African descent with respect to such an outstanding individual as Machado de Assis, one of the great writers of the Portuguese language, may seem rather peculiar to some. The lusophone literatures of the nineteenth century have long been considered an essentially "white world" whereby revered heroes are constructed from a European perspective nearly always based on a Christian axiology. Moreover, the Brazil's literary tradition leads to Europe rather than to Africa. Furthermore, the literary profile and the social configuration of Machado de Assis, the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, remain in our notions of intellectual history as having been of an exemplary member of the above alluded to "white world": a scholar familiar with "universal" literature and culture, a polyglot translator of Dante, Victor Hugo, and classic writers, and an author of works on a par with those by Shakespeare, Sterne, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Gogol. In short, some considered Machado a "Hellenist"; for others he was "Proustian before Proust."

The Citizen and His Public Image

The literary profile was made so Western that it would end up leaving its mark not only upon the public image constructed throughout time, but even upon physical appearance, which became transformed into an emblematic effigy of the process of identity whitening that occurred in lands south of the equator. It has been established by some biographers and scholars that Machado de Assis not only sought to integrate himself into the Brazilian white upper-class, but also that as a citizen he was much more present in the territory of the elites than he was in that of the lower class, from which he had come. For this reason, not a few have been surprised by Harold Bloom's assertion that Machado de Assis was "greatest black writer in the history of universal literature." If Machado de Assis is indeed what the "canonical" tradition identifies him as, then where would one find traces of African descent in the man, let alone in his literary works?

As is known, Machado de Assis was born in 1839, in Morro do Livramento, Rio de Janeiro, the son of a mulatto working-class father and a white mother who had emigrated to Brazil from the Azores. A poor child, who was orphaned at an early age, Machado had a limited formal education, which he in part compensated for by means of an autodidactic effort that helped him to overcome the restrictions imposed upon him by his ethnic, social, and economic origins, visible not only in his condition of a "freeman in a slave society" but even more because of his swarthy skin, a sign of mixed-race heritage. During his childhood he first worked as an apprentice to a typographer at the National Press and eventually became a member of the editorial staff of the Diário Oficial (Official Daily) as well as a columnist for various periodicals, to which he contributed throughout his life. As an adult he climbed the ladder of success as a governmental bureaucrat.

To the upward trajectory of the citizen can be added the success of the writer whose works appealed to a sophisticated, upper-class readership. Machado de Assis's biography thus reveals the ascension from an Afro-descendant of modest socio-economic origins to an individual who became a member of the journalistic, governmental, and literary elites of his time. Some populists have disparaged Machado's entry into the upper bourgeoisie, which for them was equivalent to assuming the social, as well as literary, practices of the dominant group. A few critics have gone so far as to assert that a beard and moustache, nearly mandatory among upper-class men of that period, served to help mask Machado's Negroid features. There also exist allegations that photographers retouched shots of Machado so as...