Lima Barreto, one of the most exciting observers of Brazilian social issues, died in a situation of poverty, in a suburban house in Rio de Janeiro, a hundred years ago.

He was the writer of some of the most revealing texts about the new political environment that took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Brazil. Change of the political system, the abolition of slavery, and emerging industrialization in the Southern portion of the country were some features of the new world in the biggest nation in South America.

Back then, when the nineteenth century’s curtains were closing, a republican coup d’état demolished the secular monarchy, and, at least in its ideals, that movement brought with it an equalitarian system in which every person should be free to achieve their dreams. This was 1889.

Although that was not the real deal.

Not far from that year, when our First Republic started, the legal system of slavery had ended. Actually, it was one year earlier, in May, and historians are used to saying that the end of slavery in Brazil was the main reason for the end of the empire itself. As you can imagine, however, an entire system does not change just because some politicians intend it to, especially in our case, where the law that freed black people had just two short articles that barely informed the extinction of slavery. In that document, there was nothing about the next steps that should provide social security to former enslaved people. Regarding the social arrangements around the end of the captivity system, Lilia Schwarcz had written in her Barreto’s biography that “the Brazil where Lima was born was constructed around slavery, not only in numbers but in the feelings of the elites as well”[1].

Afonso Henrique de Lima Barreto was a black man, a descendant of former enslaved people, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1881. His mother was a teacher in elementary school and died when he was a boy. His father was then a typographer, and later in his life, he worked in an asylum. They lived in a region characterized as a mix of sumptuous palaces, and simple worker’s houses.

Due to the brief and incipient influence of his father, Barreto could study at a middle-class lyceum where an effervescent political and social environment was established. As mentioned before, the First Republic replaced the monarchy, and with the “new era”, a bunch of new ideas invaded the public sphere, such as positivism, anarchism, socialism, social Darwinism, etc. After elementary school, he prepared himself to get into the famous Polytechnic School, a place that had formed notorious intellectuals and politicians like André Rebouças and Euclides da Cunha. Regardless of the effort applied in the annual exams, year by year, graduations did not come, and Lima Barreto drops out of school to get a job as a government employee, in order to help his family after his father’s death.

The new century had just started, and by this time, our character had already published some chronicles and satirical texts in evanescent magazines that circulated in the capital of the country. His bohemian style and particular humor all together with his life experiences in the poor side of society, plus the influence of other multiple factors,  the racial relations being a major one, forged Barreto’s worldview, in a way that can be seen in his novels and personal impressions registered in his diary.

In terms of literary discussions, his work was commonly placed in a questionable category labeled in many school manuals as “pre-modernism”. The logic here considers a chronological understanding that establishes prominent periods and underestimates what is out of their boundaries, not attributing to them the same concept such as “romanticism” and “modernism”. Not only Lima Barreto, but also others were reunited as “pre-modernists” as well, like the poet Augusto dos Anjos and the already mentioned Euclides da Cunha. What is common among them is the “transitional” features, some style characteristics that could be found in the former category and in that one which would emerge.

Lima’s books and newspaper texts prove to be more than a “pre” something although the manuals intend to accommodate him there. In his characters and plots, we observe lots of Brazilian issues such as white privilege, misuse of the public sphere by oligarchies and opportunist individuals, social inequalities, innocuous proselytism, and so forth. Long story short, he brought us elementary issues that should be considered in any sociological and historical analyses about our development as a country, and aspects that remain – with due attention to their historicity – unavoidable problems today.

In “The sad end of Policarpo Quaresma”, one of his most famous novels published through a newspaper during 1911 – often used in high school literature classes – Barreto depictured a stubborn nationalist, a man with good intentions toward the future of his country, who thinks the “Tupi-Guarani”, a large family of indigenous languages, should be the official idiom of the nation. A man who eats only national food, and that died in prison disheartened with what their country became under the republican new regime. The similarity with reality is not casual.

In a description of a promenade that a character called Olga had taken, a not-so-colorful picture of the countryside was displayed by the writer: “what has most impressed her in the walk was the general misery, the lack of cultivation, the poverty of the houses, the gloomy air of the poor people”[2]. After that, the author establishes an encounter between Olga and Anastácio, a former enslaved man. In the scene, Barreto utilizes a composition that unveils the contrast between the “well-educated” woman and the “uneducated” man, and he does so through the way Anastácios speaks, a grammatically incorrect Portuguese. Answering Olga’s question about the uses of a large amount of land around them, he misused pronouns and articles and even mispronounced very common Portuguese words. In a unarticulated way, the character said: “Terra não é nossa…E frumiga?…Nós não tem ferramenta…isso é bom pra italiano ou alamão, que o governo dá tudo…governo não gosta de nós…”[3].

The use of “frumiga” and “alamão” instead of the grammatically proper words “formiga” (ant) and “alemão” (german) intends to demonstrate how badly assisted by the Brazilian State black people were then, and the mention of nationalities ( Italians were mentioned too) exemplifies a historical dynamic where the migration of Europeans peasants was seen by the public opinion as “healing” of the work markets in the country at the same time that slavery was abolished. What apparently seems like a form of depreciating a certain social group by revealing its mistakes and poor vocabulary, according to formal Portuguese grammar, was in fact an attempt to evidence a deeper Brazil, a truer one, with idiosyncracies, a Brazil that the Republic didn’t want to admit.

Before The Sad End… disappointments toward society already featured Barretos’s creation. Two years earlier of publishing his most famous novel, a friend took the originals of Reminiscences of the registrar Isaias Caminha and carried them to Lisbon with the intention to publish them there, under Barreto’s name. Such willingness found results, and in November of 1909, the book was printed under a Portuguese editor’s house and arrived in Rio in the same year. It truly was the entrance of Barreto into the Brazilian literary scene.

What we call, today, Lima’s “fate” occurs again over this novel: nobody really cared about the book. At least in terms of critics, it was poorly reviewed, and, as mentioned by Schwarcz, the main opinion then was that the book was just a roman a la clèf, a way to construct a story using real persons and situations as a base to create intrigue[4].

In Reminiscences, we face a character narrating his tribulations dealing with issues such as racial prejudice, the unequal environment in state services, and the elitism of intellectual circles.

We actually can speak about a book à clef, especially because we can identify similarities between the fictional plot and character, and the picture of sociopolitical Rio de Janeiro back then. Factually, it probably was why the critics didn’t like the book at first: too many things of reality were brought to light on those pages. One of the people responsible for the rehabilitation of Lima Barreto in Brazilian literary history, Francisco de Assis Barbosa, reflecting on Reminiscences, wrote that in the book there was nothing of “uninterested art” and “verbal artificiality”. There was, instead, “literature, yes, but with a direct and defined objective, establishing between the author and the public a commitment, to help them know not only the intimacy of everyone but also the competitions, mistakes, and misery of the society in which we live”[5].

In the book, it is possible to find scenes in which we face open mistreatments justified by racial bias. For example, in a moment when the character Isaias waited to give his testimony in a police station, an inspector asks him about his profession, and, once he answered “student”, the man unbelieves him. Barreto, through Isaias Caminha, tells us: “This time I understood him, full of hate, full of a sacred hatred I had never seen come my way before. It was a variation of those foolish humiliations I had already suffered: it was a general sense of my inferiority, decreed a priori, that I divined in his question”[6].

The episode of the police station goes forward in displaying the anguishing environment that smashed the black man, and at a particular point, the humiliation toward the character Isaias Caminha touches its peak. A moment before questioning the “real job” of the character, the inspector asked a colleague, just in front of Caminha, if the “little mulato” had shown himself right there. The bare mention of the color of a person, in our character’s mind, was so outrageous, so opposed to his egalitarian ideals, that he confesses to us, the readers:

“I have no embarrassment in confessing today that when I heard myself being treated this way, tears came to my eyes. […] Today, now, after so many offenses like this that I can’t even count, even more brutal, I’m another person, insensible and cynic, stronger maybe; to my eyes, however, my sense of self made smaller, my primitive ideal as well, fallen from my own dreams, dirty, imperfect, deformed, dilacerated and muddy”[7].

Knowing some more elements of Lima’s worldview, we can imagine how this sort of situation, real or fictional, could impact his perspective of the sociopolitical future. The reference to some color-based category was not only a racist option here but a demonstration that the once-called equal space provided by Republicanism, where people were supposed to find a horizontal treatment, was an illusion. As sustained by the historian Nicolau Sevcenko, feelings of discontentment and revolt demark that literature, mainly because “the intended State-nation of the First Republic was in fact a State for few beneficiaries”[8].

Keeping in mind the due historical distinctions, we can visualize the episode with the same bitter feeling that we experiment with the reading of some passages depicted in Black Boy, the autobiographical book written by Richard Wright, in 1945. And similarities here can be found precisely when the main characters are hit in their humanity, which means when the strategy of the white world is to depreciate black people in their achievements, talents, and success, or even promote a tense atmosphere where fear plays an effect of inferiority.

Multiple moments in the narrative of Black Boy offer us such ambiance. In one of them, when Richard tries to learn more about his new job in the optic factory of Mr. Crane, the reluctance and aggressivity of the characters Pease and Reynolds are elements of oppression, operating in a way of destroying any dignity of the primary character. The result of this behavior was the quitting of the job by Richard and the statement which seems to replicate Isaias Caminha’s as well: “for weeks after that I could not believe my feelings. My personality was numb, reduced to a lumpish, loose, dissolved state. I was a non-man, something that knew vaguely that it was human but felt that it was not”[9].

It is well known that the hellish life that Richard had been through wasn’t bad only in the South of the country, the “free” north being a place of trauma too. In some way, the issue here is the dynamic of promise-illusion which encompasses the character. Furthermore, the touching point between Richard Wright and Lima Barreto presents itself.

The case of the Brazilian writer, however, was complicated in a different way, once we never officially elaborated a “Jim Crow” environment in any portion of our country. Looking from a certain perspective, it was precisely the problem because, for the record, we hadn’t been feeding a segregated society.  Not officially. Lima Barreto proved, although, that the Brazilian society was and still is an invisible cell in which iron bars are every sort of racial comment, unjust workplace, political non-fulfilled promises, and lack of opportunities for black people. He could publish books and newspaper texts and be known around the high society of the city that was then the capital of the country, but he never achieved the success he wanted as a writer and a man of respect.

In his diary, precisely on 16 June 1908, he wrote about suicide, a feeling that had followed him since his youth. Reflecting on the matter, he wrote:

“What annoys me the most is feeling that I am not intelligent. Mulato, unorganized, incomprehensible and misunderstood; being very, very intelligent is the only thing that would please me. Humanity lives for intelligence, and by intelligence, and I, intelligent, would forcibly get into humanity, that means, into the great humanity of which I want to be part”[10].

In 1922, the celebrated year of the Brazilian Modern Art Week, being and not being in the humanity that characterized his time, the writer died on his bed, reading the acclaimed Revue des Deux Mondes. At the time, he was suffering from alcoholism and heart arrhythmia.

We have a word in Portuguese for something that is out of rhythm which allows us to encompass a wider meaning when we talk about the heart: “descompasso”. Maybe that is a proper word to summarize the life and death of Lima Barreto, a man with a heart in descompasso not only clinically, but socially too.

Fortunately today, we recognize the greatness of that man, which makes his end not as sad as that of one of his most famous characters. Currently, we are seeing a new beginning of public knowledge of his work and life. Are we talking about a “classic”? Maybe, yes. But, before tagging Lima Barreto with yet another categorization, let’s instead stay with the thought that we are talking about a “present”!

[1] SCHWARCZ, Lilia M. Lima Barreto: triste visionário. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017, p. 26.

[2] BARRETO, Lima. O triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma. Jaraguá do Sul: Avenida Gráfica e Editora Ltda, 2005, p. 110.

[3] Ibid., p. 111.

[4] SCHWARCZ, Lima Barreto: triste visionário, p. 213.

[5] BARBOSA, Francisco de Assis. Prefácio. In: BARRETO, Lima. Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1968, p. 13.

[6] BARRETO, Lima. Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1968, p. 116.

[7] Ibid., p. 110–1.

[8] SEVCENKO, Nicolau. Literatura como missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 2003, p. 262.

[9] WRIGHT, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): a record of childhood and youth. [s.l.]: HarperCollins, 2008, p. 294.

[10] BARRETO, Lima, Diário Íntimo: memórias, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1956, p. 135.