Rain Forest Literatures: Indigenous Texts and Latin American Culture (review)

One of the most important debates in Latin American literary and cultural criticism has been the equivocal and ambivalent place of the "indigenous" in the national cultural imaginary. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various prominent writers, politicians and intellectuals called this the "indigenous problem." Moreover, the centrality of the symbolic place of the "Indian" has historically functioned as an idyllic cultural face for the economic and political oppression of peoples dispossessed and exterminated, meanwhile the monuments of their commemoration were being erected. The writing of the "indigenous," as Ángel Rama once said thinking about indigenismo, has often been a necrologic gesture that "celebrates via writing its funeral responsibility."

Written "by a literary critic, about literary texts," Lúcia Sá intends to examine "the impact of rain forest texts on literature that has been written over the last 150 years in Brazil and neighboring Spanish American nations" (p. xiv). In a very erudite exposition, Sá presents four cultural traditions and textualities (the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak) and convincingly alleges the deep intertextual presence of those traditions within several examples of Latin American literature, such as in the case of Brazilian romantic indianismo (Gonçalves Dias, Alencar), modernist works such as Mário de Andrade's Macunaima (1928) or Cobra Norato (1931) by Raul Bopp, Darcy Ribeiro's Os índios e a Civilição (1970) and Maíra (1976), and Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Storyteller (1986). This is of course a problematic project, as most of the "indigenous textual traditions" are accessed using texts produced and published in translation, in written printed form, in European languages, mediated by the work of missionaries, ethnographers and anthropologists, and for the consumption of a market of readers that did and does not include the indigenous communities that produced these "rain forest texts" in the first place. Adding to this apparently impossible number of methodological problems, the idea of intertextual transculturation that guides the study could be characterized as a hierarchical epistemological operation, through which vernacular or indigenous texts supposedly find their way into modern literary products and national literatures. Sá's excellent book overcomes these difficulties in several ways: by a critical acknowledgement of the aforementioned mediations; through a sharp, close reading of the ideology at play in specific literary projects; by means of a solid theoretical approach to notions such as writing, text and translation; and by presenting a politically charged analysis of the indigenous textual traces in canonical literature.

In Sá's study, such traces are not limited to appropriations of the "indigenous" as cultural artifacts or nationalistic fetishes, but rather constitute a form of indigenous writing within the heterogeneous national, Latin American and western literary traditions. Informed by this poststructuralist and postcolonial notion of writing, national literatures appear, in different instances and through diverse examples, written in part by indigenous communities and cultures. The political consequences of this are very important, as canonical novels can and perhaps should be read not only as celebrations of victory over the defeated, but as the stubborn defiance and resistance to oblivion of the supposedly vanquished. These literary monuments, then, should not be read only as triumphant or funerary gestures, but somehow as evidence of more compelling histories and stories: despite centuries of violence, genocide, dispossession, and marginalization against indigenous communities and cultures, they have managed to survive, as Sá puts it, "to recreate and reinvent themselves amid the worst adversities" (p. 276). The so-called intertextual presences or transcultural impact of these "rain forest texts" on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures are literary symptoms of the incomplete triumph of coloniality, indications of what, outside of literature and also outside Sá's book and spectrum of analysis, still resists and writes the world against colonial erasing.