Literature and the Formation of Brazilian Portuguese: A Historiographic Metafiction of Linguistic Contacts

ABSTRACT

Studies and discussions about the contacts between peoples and languages in Brazil have often been the subject of study in linguistics, especially Contact sociolinguistics, and History. However, by taking literary texts as a way of glimpsing the past, albeit through the eyes of fiction, literature has a lot to contribute to how we see the past, especially because of historiographic metafiction that is interested in gaps in official historiography, (re)presenting historical events and/or facts, but through the eyes of characters who have been marginalized. Bearing this in mind, this article proposes an analysis of the novel Um defeito de cor, by the author from Minas Gerais, Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), to illustrate how literary writing can contribute to understanding the forms of interaction that have shaped Brazilian society, giving rise to “Brazil” and, especially, to “Brazilian Portuguese.”

KEYWORDS:
History; Metafiction; (Socio)Linguistic

RESUMO

Os estudos e as discussões sobre os contatos entre povos e línguas que se deram no Brasil têm sido frequentemente objeto de estudo da Linguística, principalmente da Sociolinguística de Contato, e da História. Entretanto, tomando os textos literários como possibilidade de entrever o passado, ainda que sob os olhares da ficção, a literatura tem muito a contribuir com a forma de se ver o passado, tendo em vista principalmente as metaficções historiográficas que se interessam por lacunas da Historiografia oficial, (re)apresentando acontecimentos e/ou fatos históricos, mas sob o olhar de personagens que foram marginalizados. Considerando isso, este artigo propõem uma análise do romance Um defeito de cor, da autora mineira Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), a fim de ilustrar como a escrita literária pode contribuir para o entendimento das formas de interações que moldaram a sociedade brasileira, dando origem ao “Brasil” e, especialmente, ao “português brasileiro”.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
História; Metaficção; (Socio)Linguística

Introduction

The relationship between literature and history is sometimes close and sometimes distant, but it is constantly established, especially considering that both build discourses based on a given historical event. In this way, as Linda Hutcheon points out, in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988),¹ it is necessary to think that the intersection between literary discourse and historical discourse is in the narrativization of a “historical event,” transforming it into a “historical fact,” which can be converted into a “historical truth,” if we understand it as a discourse of a dominant part of society, that makes its reality, which is loaded with its ideological vision of the world, a “single truth.”

Considering this discursive perspective of literary and historical narratives, in this paper, we propose a return to the discussion made in Por uma metaficção historiográfica dos contatos linguísticos na formação do português do Brazil [For a Historiographic Metafiction of Linguistic Contacts in the Formation of Brazilian Portuguese], by Jacson Baldoino Silva (2023a),² that presents literature as a historiographical metafictional resource, that makes it possible to get closer to (socio)linguistic interactions during the intense periods of linguistic contact that took place in Brazil. Discussions on this topic have predominantly taken place in the History and Linguistics fields - mainly (Contact) Sociolinguistics - however, the eccentric perspective of historiographical metafictional narratives makes it possible for excluded or marginalized characters in literary texts and official historiography to take their place (Hutcheon, 1988)³ and, like the Moirai in Greek mythology, bring a new “life” to the society history.

Thus, this article aims to unfold the historiographic metafiction theory proposed by Hutcheon (1988)⁴ based on the approaches of (socio)linguistic theories, particularly Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva (2004) and Dante Lucchesi (2009, 2017, 2019). Hereby, we intend to explore the historiographic metafiction viability on language contacts, highlighting how literary narratives can be used to create verisimilar representations of the linguistic and “povolístico”⁵ interactions that took place in Brazil over almost four centuries, following the forced displacement of Africans to Brazilian lands by the Portuguese.

This verisimilitude is evidenced in several contemporary novels such as Água de barrela [Cleansing Water], by Eliana Alves Cruz (2018) - which tells the generational journey of an Afro-descendant family in Brazil over 300 years, beginning with their abduction in Africa -, Um defeito de cor [A Defect of Color], by Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021) - which presents the story of an African woman from her abduction in Africa to her wanderings in Brazil in the 19th century - and An Invincible Memory, by João Ubaldo Ribeiro (1989),⁶ which tells four centuries of Bahia’s history, with a narrative that mixes memory and fiction, and features numerous eccentric characters from official historiography. As Margarida Petter (2020) indicates, the terms African and African languages need to be used carefully, as they conceal a wide range of meanings and are intended to be a generic designation. Here, we will use them while acknowledging the diversity of peoples and languages they cover.

Thus, given the limits of this text, as well as the discussion already begun in Silva (2023a), we intend to carry out a literary analysis of the novel by Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), published in 2006 and now in its 26th edition, by considering the credible narrative constructions of (socio)linguistic interactions in 19th century Brazil, possibly between the years 1822 and 1878. As Ana Maria Vieira Silva (2012, 2014) highlights, the novel is woven through the writing of memories and, as a result, the exact beginning and end dates of the narrative are difficult to determine. This imprecision in dates is also, as Hutcheon (1988),⁷ points out, a feature of the historiographic formal writing metafiction, which “[...] incorporates data, but rarely assimilates them” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 114).⁸ That is, the historiographical material is there, but, it becomes the narrative substance, being almost a secondary element, indicating the paradox of the “reality” of the past, as this is, in fact, only accessible textually.

However, in the novel, some inferences are possible, such as the year of the narrator’s abduction to the African continent, since Kehinde mentions her first menstruation cycle at “almost twelve years old” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 136)⁹ and says she has been in Brazil for four years. If we consider the year 1822, the last chronological reference that the narrator made before that, we will infer the year 1818 as the period of the kidnapping in Africa and the forced journey to Brazil, since Kehinde was trafficked when she was 7 years old and was 11 years old at the time of her first menstruation cycle.

Um defeito de cor (Gonçalves, 2021) presents the narrative of a black woman over her 63 years, 12 of which were spent enslaved, as she obtained her letter of manumission “when she was turning into her twenties” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 372).¹⁰ Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), in the Prologue and Bibliography, presents the double face of the novel: fiction and reality. The narrative’s fine line between these poles is a consequence of the encounter with historiographical sources - a pile of papers written in old Portuguese - and the difficulty in reading them due to their condition, which leads the author to fill in the gaps in history. Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), in the Prologue, presents the criteria for organizing the material found:

It’s worth remembering that some original pages were missing or illegible, and it was not always possible to comprehend everything written on them. I chose to leave some words or expressions in Yoruba, a language that was spoken by many slaves, even though it was not their native tongue. In this case, I wrote a footnote presenting their translation or explanation. The original text is also very rushed, written by someone who wanted to keep up with the speed of thought, without punctuation or line or paragraph breaks. To improve readability, I have punctuated the text, divided it into chapters, and, within each chapter, into subjects. I hope Kehinde approves my work and that I have not created anything out of the blue. I do not think so, because many times while transcribing, and especially while writing down what I could not understand, I felt her blowing words into my ear (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 17[Prologue]).¹¹

The author’s description of the organization is very close to the treatment of diachronic writing data in Linguistics, especially Historical Linguistics stricto sensu (Mattos e Silva, 2004; Paixão De Sousa, 2006). This encounter with unpublished sources exemplifies linguists’ constant search for Portuguese roots, especially, popular Brazilian Portuguese. The text “written in old Portuguese, the small letters and very well drawn” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 15)¹² and the writing on a porous surface, which also compromised reading, indicate the writing and production conditions of the document, which was so old that “it did not even seem to be written in our language” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 15);¹³ relevant socio-historical data when working with old written documents.

Therefore, the encounter with the pile of papers deconstructs the generalization that, during the slavery period, black people and women, as characters on the margins of history and fiction, did not know how to read and write. This indicates that it is necessary to insist on research in institutional and private archives, considering the diversity of historical sources available, as well as research in less obvious collections to be able to identify valuable information about women and black people’s history, as well as other characters that have been minoritized throughout official historiography.¹⁴

However, as is typical of fiction, the author indicates that she had to invent some elements to give the narrative a logical sequence, given the context and based on the material she had studied, which is why there is a Bibliography at the end. However, the description of the encounter with a pile of paper “about 30 or 35 centimeters high” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 15)¹⁵ - about the height of a vertical school ruler - and the presentation of the organization criteria used by the author create an idea of “truth” within the text itself. In the sense that, the historical event, even if documented, may not be so “true” in the literary text, since the latter is more concerned with aesthetics than ethics.

The verisimilitude (Hutcheon, 1988;¹⁶ Silva, 2012, 2014; Silva, 2023a) of the novel by Gonçalves (2021) is reinforced by the almost predominant use of the first person singular (I) throughout the text, as the original manuscripts are close to the personal letter genre, providing the reader a unique experience of understanding the narrator’s experiences of capture, trafficking, and enslavement. From the perspective of historiographic metafiction, the use of the “I” indicates a demarginalization of the literary text, through a clash with history, in not only thematic but also, formal terms (Hutcheon, 1988).¹⁷

Silva (2023a), considering the proximity to the personal letter genre, proposes that the narrative of almost a thousand pages should be divided into two large parts. The first is when the narrator writes letters to herself as if they were a diary (Gonçalves, 2021, pp. 404-94), and the second consists of letters to her “lost” son, resembling an emotional testament (Gonçalves, 2021, pp. 404-947). Therefore, Kehinde’s memoirs allow the uniqueness of official historiography to be questioned, bringing to the center the multiplicity of voices of those who have been silenced by it, generating, as is typical of historiographic metafiction, a dispersion of historical truth(s) (Hutcheon, 1988).¹⁸

With this in mind, after this introduction, we discuss the encounters between historiographical and fictional discourses, situating historiographic metafiction on the fine line that separates them. Next, we address the proposal of historiographic metafiction of language contacts, proposing an analysis of Gonçalves’ work (2021) based on (socio)linguistic theories. Finally, in our final remarks, we re-emphasize the viability of historiographical metafictional narratives as a credible means of analyzing the linguistic and “povolístico” contacts that took place in Brazil during the colonial period, since the truth(s) they bring can help us to glimpse the Indigenous and black face in the Brazil formation.

1 The Discourses of History and Fiction

To what, though, does the very language of historiographic metafiction refer? To a world of history or one of fiction?

Linda Hutcheon¹⁹

The fine line between the writing of History and fiction is perceived when new sources are discovered and other truths come to light, demonstrating that the relationship between them can be peaceful and/or conflictual (Hutcheon, 1988;²⁰ Silva; Souza, 2020). In Gonçalves’ novel (2021), the paradox between these writings becomes clear when, in the prologue, the author, who calls herself the organizer, points out how she established the material she found, but also, that something of the text was blown into her ears by Kehinde, when the papers would not let her read what was written. Therefore, in the organization of the text she found, Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021) established a historical order and then subverted it through fragmentation by indicating that the division into paragraphs, line breaks, and division into chapters and subjects, as well as the placement of punctuation, are hers. In other words, as is typical of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, 1988),²¹ an order is established, but then, its fragility is pointed out, highlighting its discursive construction. However:

This self-reflexivity does not weaken, but on the contrary, strengthens and points to the direct level of historical engagement and reference of the text (cf. Bradbury 1983, 159). Like many postmodern novels, this provisionality and uncertainty (and the willful and overt constructing of meaning too) do not “cast doubt upon their seriousness” (Butler 1980, 131), but rather define the new postmodern seriousness that acknowledges the limits and powers of “reporting” or writing of the past, recent or remote (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 117).²²

Thus, the narrative of Um defeito de cor (Gonçalves, 2021) calls into question the certainty of “historical events,” demonstrating that they only became “historical facts” because of how History was narrativized. In other words, the historiographic metafiction of Gonçalves’ novel (2021) demonstrates that it is necessary to deal with the problem of the status of evidence and documents because there are subjective, referential, and ideological issues underlying them (Hutcheon, 1988).²³

In this way, the critique of the veracity of the facts present in historiographical metafictional texts has a double function. It establishes its referent with reality - “it is the text’s major link with the “world,” one that acknowledges its identity as construct” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 119)²⁴ - and questions it, making it possible to understand the “real” of History was built by conditioning the way we know it (Hutcheon, 1988).²⁵

This dual function of historiographic metafiction allows the reader to question historical discourses and, consequently, their unique truths. However, it also makes them doubt literary discourses because they know that the “reality” there is an invention. If in literature the real is fictional, in history the real is a construction, understood as a limited cut-out of a certain event, which has been transformed by discourse into a fact, demonstrating that the past representation is permeated by ideological implications (Hutcheon, 1988).²⁶ Therefore, historiographic metafiction emphasizes “the discursive nature of all reference - both literary and historiographical” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 119).²⁷

The narrative construction of Um defeito de cor (Gonçalves, 2021) demonstrates the discursive reality of knowledge, mainly due to its continuous but fast-moving nature of reminiscing, which in a way, creates instability in the way we know it. Gonçalves’ (2021) narrative is fast and, like a memoir, not always so continuous, for example, in 10 pages - in a novel of almost a thousand - countless facts happen: the narrator is placed, “on the street, as a wage slave, at almost one thousand seven hundred réis²⁸ a week” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 241),²⁹ goes through difficulties to establish herself, finds a place - a priest’s house - where she can cook her cookies and another where she can sleep and can get her “first three steady customers” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 251).³⁰

Kehinde comments that, if counted by years, the narrative was not very long - considering that she only spent 12 years enslaved - but, “taking into account the events” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 375),³¹ it seemed like a long time. Despite being fast-paced, the narrator is very detailed in what she tells, because she (the author or the narrator?) is concerned with giving a veracity tone to past events, which makes the story long. She describes the peeling walls of a two-story house “that had once been painted green, [as well as] the façade, continuous with the neighboring two-story houses, differentiated only by two long cracks from top to bottom” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 257),³² in addition, there are descriptions of the characters themselves - which come close to psychological realism (Moisés, 2001, 2016) - such as that of the English housekeeper, Miss Margareth, who “was a woman of not very well-defined age [....] [and] one thing that was striking about her was her prudence in gestures, words and expressions” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 241).³³

The narrator’s descriptions - which make the scenes plastic and visible - are close to those of Realist novels, which were interested in describing and criticizing real space, thus establishing their narrative through an external verisimilitude with reality (Moisés, 2001, 2016; Sant’Anna, 2012). The detailed descriptions of the places in Um defeito de cor (Gonçalves, 2021) are close to those that appear in The Athenaeum: A Novel, by Raul Pompeia (2015),³⁴ and in A Brazilian Tenement, by Aluísio de Azevedo (1926):³⁵

Sir José Carlos asked me if it had been a while since I had showered and if I had never even slept with a man. Both answers were affirmative, nodding, and then he ordered me to take my clothes off while he watched. In addition, to the room where he was working, there was an office with a secretary, a cupboard with a few piles of yellowed paper and other objects, and many things lying around. Still, there was a bedroom, where he told me to enter. Boxes and boxes climbed up the walls, lighted by a lamp hung from the ceiling, the only light in the room, since it was impossible to see a single window, perhaps covered by all that junk. On the floor, there was a large mat covered with an incredibly white quilt considering the place, clean and beautiful on which he told me to lie down (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 168).³⁶

Throughout the 947-page novel, we find detailed narratives of this kind. Following Hutcheon’s (1988) theory,³⁷ we can state that, even though detail is insignificant in historiographic metafiction - since historical aspects can be deliberately falsified - it is used in a way to achieve some possible historical veracity. This highlights the different roles of the writer and the historian because, while one is committed to the truth, the other is committed to art and existing truths, narrating not what happened, but what could have happened (Hutcheon, 1988;³⁸ Silva; Souza, 2020). Therefore, the details in the narrative function as this referent of a real that points to a narrativized truth.

In addition to the constant description and reference to places in San Salvador - which further establishes its link with the real space in which the narrative takes place - such as Vila de Itaparica, Corredor da Vitória, Rio Vermelho, and regions further away from the city center such as Candeias and Cachoeira, there are also historical characters who also appear, such as Zeferina, the woman who ruled the Quilombo Urubu [Vulture Quilombo Community], which was the theme of Viviane Carla Bandeira Santos’ Master’s research (2019); the presence of a woman as the head of a quilombo problematizes the narratives surrounding Zumbi dos Palmares, the main black man narrated by official historiography. Another historical character who appears, but is not named, is the narrator’s son, who is the great link between the two sides of the novel - reality and fiction. As the organizer, Gonçalves (2021) tells the reader that what she has in her hands “may be the story of the mother of this man who was respected and admired by the greatest minds of his time, such as Rui Barbosa, Raul Pompeia and Silvio Romero. But [that] it may also not be” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 17[Prologue]).³⁹

The narrator’s unnamed son could be the Brazilian writer Luiz Gama, since Kehinde’s Christian name was Luísa Gama, the surname she inherited from the man who bought her - José Carlos de Almeida Carvalho Gama. Commenting on this, Silva (2012, 2014) points out that the narrative considered, creates a historical verisimilitude, as the narrator refers to Luiz Gama’s mother, a character marginalized by official historiography. She also points out that Luísa Gama was built through intense documentary research by Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021) - as the author points out by adding a Bibliography at the end - creating, as Silva (2023a) also comments, a stable meaning for the narrative.

Two observations are necessary here, the first one is the narrator’s Christian name is only mentioned at this point in the discussion. This was our choice, since if we were working to demarginalize the characters relegated to the ghettos of official historiography, we could not, as Silva points out (2023a), call the narrator by a name that was imposed on her and from which she did not recognize herself. As Silva (2023a) mentions, we could not call the narrator by an imposed name, which she did not recognize herself, because she said that “for the whites I remained Luísa, Luísa Gama, but I always considered myself Kehinde. The name that my mother and grandmother gave me and that was recognized by the voduns [...]” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 73).⁴⁰ The second observation refers to the difference in the spelling of Luiz Gama’s mother’s name. Ana Maria Vieira Silva (2012, 2014) and Silva (2023a) have referred to in the official historiography, she appears as Luiza and, in the novel, the name that appears is spelled as Luísa; which may have been a strategy by Ana Maria Gonçalves to question the narrative of the official historiography.

However, the baptism of Banjakô,⁴¹ the narrator’s first son, as José Gama indicates that their children received the Christian surname of the man who bought her, reinforcing the narrative’s historical verisimilitude (Silva, 2012, 2014) and the link between Luísa Gama and Luiz Gama, despite the graphic differences in the latter’s name. However, the oscillation of the spelling also indicates the fact that “historiographic metafiction, like both historical fiction and narrative history, cannot avoid dealing with the problem of the status of their ‘facts’ and of the nature of their evidence, their documents” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 122),⁴² so in the narrative, a historical fact is established and then its fragility is pointed out.

Gonçalves (2021) also dialogues with characters from other historiographical metafictions, such as the Baron of Pipapuama, who owned the Engenho da armação de Bom Jesus in Vila Itaparica, and his employee Amleto Ferreira who is also in João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s narrative:

“What did you say your name was?”

“Amleto Ferreira, at the monsignor’s service.”

“Is it a Christian name? Amleto... I never heard it before.”

“As far as I know, it originated from an English legend, and English poem or tragedy.”

“An English tragedy, a poem? We have something here, then, we do have something! England is excessively benevolent towards poets and frivolous arts. If she had musicians too, she would be lost. So your parents read English profane book, is that it? What books are those?”

“I do not really know, Mosignor, but my father is English.”

“Your father is English? Now we really have something, we really do have something! But you are brown, are you not? The ordinances that used to bar brows from public service are not in force any longer, you may speak freely, for it will still be possible for His Lordship the baron, after you have served him well, to place you in a good position, as a bailiff or, who knows as the parish mule tender, so you can spend your old age in clover and with nothing to do, hah-hah! And where is this English father of yours; what is his trade?”

“He lives in England; we have had no news from him in a long time.”

“In the company of your dear mother, of course Tell me.”

“No, Monsignor, my mother liver here in Bahia by the grace of God; she is an elementary-school teacher.”

“No doubt. She is a freedwoman [...]” (Ribeiro, 1989, pp. 43-44).⁴³

Amleto Ferreira’s dialog with the Baron of Piapuma, Perilo Ambrósio, who will have his engenho described later in the Bahian’s narrative, is questioned by Gonçalves’ narrative (2021). In Ribeiro (1989),⁴⁴ Amleto Ferreira claims to be the son of English people. However, the characters in Um defeito de cor (Gonçalves, 2021) question his origin, as they do not know the truth of his English origin but, they do know that he “used a thousand tricks to appear lighter. She slept with her hair greased with aloe vera and tied up with a bonnet, and every morning she spent hours in the bonnet, disguising her African origins” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 339).⁴⁵ The reference to the character’s African origins calls into question his English origins, which had already been questioned when he presented his mother as “a poor thing, a black outcast who he did everything to keep hidden” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 338),⁴⁶ and not as a teacher of first letters (Ribeiro, 1989).⁴⁷

Thus, we can see that literary writing dialogues with official historiography in various ways, from the presence of historical verisimilitude that creates a stable meaning (Silva, 2012, 2014; Silva, 2023a) to detailed construction that works as a kind of real-world reference, but at the same time indicates its fragility through the possibility of falsification (Hutcheon, 1988)⁴⁸ - as happens in Gonçalves (2021), when the author says that something was blown into her ears by the narrator.

In short, the narrative of Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), challenges the dichotomy between history and fiction by highlighting the fluidity and, at times, conflict in the relationship between both. The historiographical metafictional work reveals the complexity of the historical narrative construction, highlighting its discursive and subjective nature. The author establishes an apparent order in the text organization, only to subvert it later, highlighting the inherent fragility of discursive construction. Therefore, Gonçalves’ novel (2021) demonstrates the significance of questioning both literary and historical discourses, highlighting the importance of recognizing the constructed and conditioned “historical facts” nature.

2 The Historiographic Metafiction Perspective of Language Contacts

The dynamic departure of Brazilian society Dante Lucchesi (2009, 2015) has called sociolinguistic polarization needs to be analyzed from the social dynamics to the linguistic situation since it was the diverse realities of the formation of Brazil that allowed it to become a plural society. Brazil has formed a plural society, which, as Mônica Maria Guimarães Savedra, Beatriz Christino, Karen Pupp Spinassé, and Silva Silvana de Farias Araujo (2021) point out - contrary to popular belief - remains multilingual. According to Carlos Alberto Faraco (2019), the myth of Brazil as a monolingual country needs to be dispelled, as it makes it impossible to understand ourselves as a multilingual and multicultural territory and makes it difficult to understand the heterogeneity of Brazilian Portuguese from its history, through its polarization, to its current configurations.

Commenting on multilingualism in Brazil, Mattos e Silva (2004) differentiates between two phases in the formation of Portuguese: generalized multilingualism and localized multilingualism. According to the author, the first phase is characteristic of the first years of colonization in Brazil, when several languages were spoken in the same region, predominantly of indigenous and African origin. Over the years, due to an ethnocidal and glotocidal⁴⁹ path, we have seen Brazil losing its ethnic and linguistic diversity; however, some peoples and languages have resisted in certain localities, making localized multilingualism possible.

This localized multilingualism, according to Mattos e Silva (2004), refers mainly to the indigenous tribes and quilombos that, because they were far from the major centers of the colony, managed to retain a native language. The only traces which remain are what we know today as secret languages or altered varieties of Portuguese since they are the ones that bear the marks of the contact between the colonizer’s language and that of the colonized: Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, in Helvécia, in the Bahia countryside, studied by Carlotta Ferreira (1984) and Dante Luchesi, Alan Baxter and Ilza Ribeiro (2009); the secret language of the Quilombo do Cafundó [Cafundó Quilombo Community], in São Paulo, researched by Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry (1996); and that of the Tabatinga quilombo, in Minas Gerais, investigated by Sônia Queiroz (1998).

However, because the narrative takes place predominantly in the city of Salvador, Gonçalves (2021) draws attention to what can be defined as a localized multilingualism - the use of Yoruba by some of the city’s enslaved Africans:

Huge black men, the like of which I had rarely seen before, carried everything on their shoulders, alone or in pairs, or even more than pairs, depending on the object’s size and weight. They would have been naked if it had not been for a piece of cloth covering only the area of their member, their sweaty bodies glistening in the sun, strong and with muscles that danced under their skin making very similar movements, as if they had rehearsed them. When they passed each other, they greeted each other, like in Africa, and I heard some of them saying Oku ji ni o [I hope you got up well] (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 66).⁵⁰

It was also in Yoruba that the narrator, upon arriving in Bahia, was asked about her baptismal name - even though she had not been baptized. This shows that, when we talk about multilingualism located in the socio-history of Brazilian Portuguese, we must also think about the reality of the cities’ formation, since the colonizer language, without knowing it, may have coexisted with the languages of the enslaved. Discussing the process of enslaving Africans in Brazil, Emilio Bonvini (2008) points out that many Yoruba speakers were concentrated in the state of Bahia and places this language, along with Quimbundo, as one of the main African languages that influenced the Portuguese that was formed here. In the same sense, describing the stories of contact in Brazil, Lucchesi (2009) points out that Yorubá was used in Salvador as a lingua franca and was popularly known as Nagô.

If the Yoruba language, in a given context, managed to resist the colonizer in some way, that did not happen with other African languages, since, as Jefferson Evaristo (2021) points out, there was an African linguicide in Brazilian lands. This was due to the idea that the languages that came with the black people on the ships were used for witchcraft and the Africans were soon taught that they should not use their “black language”:

She started talking to me in Portuguese and I answered in Yoruba, I do not remember exactly what, but I must have understood. It was not difficult to understand Portuguese, I just could not speak it yet. While I ate, with enthusiasm and hunger, she looked at me with pity and affection. When I returned the empty glass, she said in Yoruba that I had to learn Portuguese soon, because sir José Carlos didn’t allow black languages to be spoken on his land, and that anything I needed was to talk to her who is called Esméria (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 74).⁵¹

The account of Kehinde’s arrival in Brazil shows that some Africans had already arrived in our lands, in a way, familiar with the Portuguese language, which is why the narrator mentions “understanding Portuguese” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 74).⁵² This may be because “the whites of Uidá were not just travelers; most of them lived in the city or nearby and had a lot of money” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 34).⁵³ Whites who lived in the country and “merchants who sold people” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 33)⁵⁴ are the signs of the presence of Portuguese colonizers in Africa, particularly in the coastal city of Uidá - now Benin, in Africa - indicating that the Portuguese “were unable to penetrate the kingdom countryside, being dependent on village chiefs, kings and merchants to obtain goods from the countryside, such as gold, ivory, amber, and slaves,” as Talita Teixeira dos Santos (2010, p. 2) indicates.

According to Santos (2010, p. 8), the commercial relationship between Portugal and present-day Benin was due, among other things, to the trade in people for enslavement, predominantly between the 15th and 17th centuries. Gonçalves (2021) mentions this post-prohibition trafficking when he talks about the baptism of black people still in Africa, considering that, as Erika Melek Delgado, Telma Gonçalves Santos, and Nina Maria de Meira Borba (2022) comment, baptism was a strategy used by traffickers in Brazil to circumvent international bans on black people trafficking:

It was then that we learned the reason for the delay in boarding the men; the whites had baptized all of them with names they called Christian names, white names, and that man with the injured leg, according to another man who was right behind him in the queue, had been given the name John. We learned that the priest who baptized had arrived late after the women had boarded. The guards put the men in a line and, one by one, they had to say their African name, which could be revealed of course, and the place where they had been born, which was written down in a book where they also added their white name. It was this name that they had to say to the priest, who then poured water over their heads and said a few words that nobody understood (Gonçalves, 2021, pp. 49-50).⁵⁵

Gonçalves’ (2021) subtle narrative about the Portuguese presence in Africa, like a historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, 1988),⁵⁶ places the colonizers as supporting characters and demonstrates that the Portuguese language was transplanted to Brazil not only through Europeans but also with the Africans themselves - eccentric characters in the history of the Portuguese transplantation to Brazil - who worked as “black porters [and] who, sooner or later, [....] would become sheep in foreign countries [...] the black people who went abroad became sheep [...]” (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 34).⁵⁷

Lucchesi (2009) indicates it when he comments that Africans had contact with Portuguese from an early age and Silva Neto (1963) himself affirms that black people arrived in Brazil speaking some kind of Portuguese Creole. The language of the Portuguese people served as a general language on the African coasts between the 15th and 17th centuries, and Africa, along with Asia, was Portugal’s first colonial empire (Faraco, 2019). Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo (2021) and Margarita Petter (2020) point out that the Africans who arrived in Brazil were classified as Ladinos [Rogues] or Boçais [Crooks] according to their command of the Portuguese Creole spoken on the African coast. However, Castro (1990) says that the number of Africans who spoke Portuguese was small concerning the total number of black people trafficked.

However, even with this contact with Portuguese before arriving in Brazilian lands, we cannot help but think of a “precarious acquisition [of the language] and its mestizo nativization” (Lucchesi, 2009, p. 42).⁵⁸ Therefore, we need to consider that, concerning the Portuguese acquisition by Africans, there are two socio-histories, one corresponding to the trafficking of adults who, because they had already passed the critical period of acquisition, would acquire the Portuguese language defectively - as argued by Dante Lucchesi and Alan Baxter (2009) and Jacson Baldoino Silva and Araújo (2023) - and another that concerns the trafficking of children, such as the narrator of Gonçalves (2021), who were being exposed to the language at a time when their mental grammar was sensitive to another language acquisition, in other words, during the acquisition critical period.

This ease of acquisition for trafficked children is demonstrated by the narrator when, in her first days in Brazil, she already understood Portuguese, even though she had some difficulty speaking it:

After lunch, the gentlemen went to bed for a while and I went back to where I had been in the morning as if I had not left. [...] And so it went for four or five days, while at night, and until necessary, the black women of the house taught me Portuguese, as did Tico and Hilário [two children who were also captives], with whom I played from time to time. I already understood almost everything they said, and it was not too difficult to start speaking either. I did not have the slightest difficulty communicating with the little lady when she finally talked to me, showing me a doll and two dresses, one yellow and one white, and asking me which one I preferred (Gonçalves, 2021, p. 79).⁵⁹

The narrator speaks as a child, about her ease in acquiring Portuguese, but we must also consider the context in which she is inserted. As Dante Lucchesi (2019) and Hildo Honório do Couto (1996, 1998) affirm one of the factors for the non-creolization of Portuguese in Brazil is the inclusion of Africans in the country’s social structure. In other words, the black people in Brazil were not all isolated on plantations; many were employed in other jobs, especially in the big house - like our narrator - which allowed them better access to the colonizer’s Portuguese language. This contact with whites was higher than the percentage stipulated for creolization to occur, which, according to Lucchesi (2019), was a maximum of 20% of the dominant population. In the same sense, but considering social issues, Katia Mytilineou de Queiroz Mattoso (2016) points out that one cannot place all enslaved Africans in a homogeneous group. This is because, due to the social conditions to which they were subjected, one cannot place “[....] in the same social group the African bent over the heavy soil of the sugar cane regions and the mestizo, herdsman [...]” (Mattoso, 2016, p. 33).

Similarly, the African individual who worked in the big house and slept in the small slave quarters, separated from the other black people, cannot be placed in the same group as those who went to the sugar cane plantations or foundry whale meat. These two distinct black social groups appear in Gonçalves’ narrative (2021) and the narrator, at different times, belonged to both - demonstrating the social mobility of black people in colonial Brazil. However, while the black people in the small slave quarters were concerned with their physical appearance and learning Portuguese because they served the big house, the slaves in the large slave quarters were subjected to “almost sixteen hours of work” (Gonçalves, 2021, p 117),⁶⁰ without any direct concern for the Portuguese language acquisition, since they just had to obey orders.

Therefore, following Dante Lucchesi and Dina Callou (2020), it is necessary to think of different sociolinguistic scenarios in the formation of Brazilian Portuguese. Both from a macro-social perspective, as proposed by the authors - i) occupation by settlers; ii) plantation societies; iii) mining societies - and from a micro-social perspective, situating black people within the societies where they are inserted concerning greater or lesser access to the colonizer’s language. These scenarios can be visualized in narratives based on historiographic metafiction, as they present history from a different perspective(s).

Final Remarks

The intersections and dialogues promoted in this article have demonstrated the proximity and distance between literary and historical discourse. It pointed out that the proposal for a historiographic metafiction of language contacts dialogues directly with socio-historical studies of the Brazilian Portuguese formation (Mattos e Silva, 2004; Lucchesi, 2009, 2017; Callou; Lucchesi, 2020; Silva, 2023), as it brings to the center of the discussion the figure of the African who, together with the Indigenous, participated in the social and linguistic formation of the country, but who for a long time were marginalized, looking for the phenomenon of change only in their internal dynamics, comparing the Portuguese spoken in Brazil with the European variety.

Thus, in building different narratives about the same “historical event,” highlighting that it only becomes a “historical fact” through discourse, historiographic metafiction, and studies on the socio-history of Brazilian Portuguese show that “there are many stories to be reconstructed about the Indigenous and black faces of Brazil” (Mattos e Silva, 2004, p. 20).⁶¹ These different stories problematize the document’s veracity, indicating that the narrative, whether historical or fictional, is permeated with subjective and ideological issues and will depend on the referential that guides it (Hutcheon, 1988).⁶²

It is from historiographical metafictions such as Gonçalves’ (2021) that we can construct other narratives about the transplantation of the Portuguese language to Brazil, as well as its expansion here since the colonizers are placed as secondary characters in the narrative. In other words, the truths that emerge from this story, albeit based on verisimilitude (Silva, 2012, 2014; Silva, 2023a), can also function as a methodological resource for teaching History, Literature, and (Socio)Linguistics in undergraduate courses (Silva, 2023a).

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• At present, the research is funded by the Foundation for Bahia State Research Support Foundation and is being conducted within the Graduate Program in Linguistic Studies at the State University of Feira de Santana (Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil).

• Research Data and Other Materials Availability

  The contents underlying the research text are included in the manuscript.

• Reviews

  Given the commitment reinforced by Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso with Open Science, the journal only publishes opinions authorized by all parties involved.

• 1
  HUTCHEON, Linda. A Poetic of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988 [original version].
• 2
  The proposal is a possibility of interdisciplinarity in the author’s master’s (Silva, 2023b) and doctoral (Silva, in progress) research, which is currently being supervised by professors Silvana Silva Farias de Araújo and Huda da Silva Santiago, with funding from the Bahia State Research Foundation (FAPESB).
• 3
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 4
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 5
  As we defined in previous research (Silva, 2023a, 2023b), this neologism refers to the forced displacement of the African peoples to Brazil, and the consequent contacts between them in that territory.
• 6
  RIBEIRO, João Ubaldo. An Invincible Memory. Translated from the Portuguese by João Ubaldo Ribeiro. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
• 7
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 8
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 9
  In Portuguese: “quase doze anos.”
• 10
  In Portuguese: “com vinte anos incompletos.”
• 11
  In Portuguese: “Nunca é demais lembrar que tinham desaparecido ou estavam ilegíveis algumas folhas do original, e que nem sempre foi possível entender tudo que estava escrito. Optei por deixar algumas palavras ou expressões em iorubá, língua que acabou sendo falada por muitos escravos, mesmo não sendo a língua nativa deles. Neste caso, coloquei a tradução ou a explicação no rodapé. O texto original também é bastante corrido, escrito por quem desejava acompanhar a velocidade do pensamento, sem pontuação e quebra de linhas ou parágrafos. Para facilitar a leitura, tomei a liberdade de pontuá-lo, dividi-lo em capítulos e, dentro de cada capítulo, em assuntos. Espero que Kehinde aprove o meu trabalho e que eu não tenha inventado nada fora de propósito. Acho que não, pois muitas vezes, durante a transcrição, e principalmente durante a escrita do que não conseguia entender, eu a senti soprando palavras no meu ouvido.”
• 12
  In Portuguese: “escrito em um português antigo, as letras minúsculas e muito bem desenhadas.”
• 13
  In Portuguese: “nem parecia escrito na nossa língua.”
• 14
  Some documentary collections of these groups projects in the Sociohistorical linguistics field have been made available, such as the Mulheres na América Portuguesa [Women in Portuguese America] - M.A.P. (University of São Paulo, 2024) and the “Corpus” Eletrônico de Documentos Históricos do Sertão [Electronic Corpus of Historical Documents from the Hinterlands] - CE-DOHS (State University of Feira de Santana, 2024). In addition to these, the researcher Klebson Oliveira (2006), in his doctoral thesis, provides the edition of 290 minutes written by Africans and Afro-descendants in Bahia in the 19th century, belonging to the collection of the Sociedade Protetora dos Desvalidos [Society for the Protection of the Devaluated] Santiago (2019). Oliveira (2006) also presented in his doctoral thesis, the edition of 131 letters written by the poor writers of sertanejos [hinterlands’ people] during the 20th century.
• 15
  In Portuguese: “mais ou menos 30 ou 35 centímetros de altura.”
• 16
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 17
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 18
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 19
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 20
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 21
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 22
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 23
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 24
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 25
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 26
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 27
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 28
  A Brazilian old currency.
• 29
  In Portuguese: “na rua, como escrava de ganho, a quase mil e setecentos réis por semana.”
• 30
  In Portuguese: “três primeiros fregueses fixos.”
• 31
  In Portuguese: “levando-se em conta os acontecimentos.”
• 32
  In Portuguese: “que um dia já tinham sido pintadas de verde, [assim como] a fachada, contínua com os sobrados vizinhos, diferenciada apenas por duas longas rachaduras de cima a baixo.”
• 33
  In Portuguese: “era uma mulher de idade não muito bem definida [...] [e] uma coisa que chamava a atenção nela era a economia de gestos, de palavras e de expressões.”
• 34
  POMPEIA, Raul. The Athenaeum: A Novel. Translated from the Portuguese by Renata R. M. Wasserman Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
• 35
  AZEVEDO, Aluísio. A Brazilian Tenement. Translated from the Portuguese by Harry W. Brown, New York: Robert McBride and Company, 1926.
• 36
  In Portuguese: “O sinhô José Carlos perguntou se havia pouco tempo que eu tinha tomado banho e se nunca mesmo tinha me deitado com homem. As duas respostas foram sim, num balançar de cabeça, e então ele mandou que eu tirasse a roupa enquanto observava. Além do cômodo onde ele estava trabalhando, um escritório com uma secretária, um armário com algumas pilhas de papel amarelado e outros objetos, e muitas coisas jogadas pelos cantos, a casa ainda tinha um quarto, onde ele mandou que eu entrasse. Caixas e mais caixas subiam pelas paredes, iluminadas por um lampião que pendia do teto, a única claridade em todo aquele ambiente, já que não era possível ver uma única janela, talvez coberta por aquela quinquilharia toda. No chão havia uma esteira grande coberta com uma colcha incrivelmente branca para aquele lugar, limpa, bonita, sobre a qual ele me mandou deitar.”
• 37
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 38
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 39
  In Portuguese: “talvez seja a história da mãe deste homem respeitado e admirado pelas maiores inteligências de sua época, como Rui Barbosa, Raul Pompeia e Silvio Romero. Mas [que] também pode não ser.”
• 40
  In Portuguese: “para os brancos fiquei sendo Luísa, Luísa Gama, mas sempre me considerei Kehinde. O nome que a minha mãe e a minha avó me deram e que era reconhecido pelos voduns [...].”
• 41
  It is an African name.
• 42
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 43
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 44
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 45
  In Portuguese: “usava de mil artimanhas para parecer mais claro. Dormia com o cabelo untado de babosa e preso com touca, e toda manhã passava horas no toucado, disfarçando as origens africanas.”
• 46
  In Portuguese: “uma pobre coitada, uma preta forra que ele fazia de tudo para manter escondida.”
• 47
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 48
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 49
  The marginalization process of a language that makes it disappears throughout time.
• 50
  In Portuguese: “Pretos enormes, como eu pouco tinha visto antes, transportavam tudo sobre os ombros, sozinhos ou aos pares, ou até mais que aos pares, dependendo do tamanho e do peso do objeto carregado. Estariam nus se não fosse um pedaço de pano que cobria apenas a região do membro, com os corpos suados brilhando ao sol, fortes e com músculos que dançavam sob a pele fazendo movimentos muito parecidos, como se tivessem ensaiado. Quando passavam uns pelos outros, eles se cumprimentavam, como em África, e ouvi alguns dizendo Oku ji ni o [espero que vos tenhais levantado bem].”
• 51
  In Portuguese: “Ela começou a conversar comigo em português e eu respondia em iorubá, não me lembro exatamente o que, mas acho que devo ter entendido. Não era difícil entender o português, eu apenas ainda não conseguia falar. Enquanto comia, com gosto e fome, ela me olhava com pena e carinho, e quando devolvi o copo vazio, falou em iorubá que eu tinha que aprender logo o português, pois o sinhô José Carlos não permitia que se falassem línguas de pretos em suas terras, e que qualquer coisa de que eu precisasse era para falar com ela que se chama Esméria.”
• 52
  In Portuguese: “entender o português.”
• 53
  In Portuguese: “os brancos de Uidá não eram apenas viajantes; a maioria morava na cidade ou nas vizinhanças e tinham bastante dinheiro.”
• 54
  In Portuguese: “comerciantes que vendiam gente.”
• 55
  In Portuguese: “Foi então que ficamos sabendo o motivo da demora do embarque dos homens, pois os brancos tinham batizados todos eles com nomes que chamavam de nomes cristão, nomes de brancos, e àquele homem da perna machucada, de acordo com um outro que estava logo atrás dele na fila, tinham dado o nome de João. Soubemos que o padre que fez os batizados tinha chegado atrasado, depois do embarque das mulheres. Os guardas colocaram os homens em fila e, um por um, tiveram que dizer o nome africano, o que podia ser revelado é claro, e o lugar onde tinham nascido, que eram anotados em um livro onde também acrescentavam o nome de branco. Era esse nome que eles tinham que falar para o padre, que então jogava água sobre suas cabeças e pronunciava algumas palavras que ninguém entendia.”
• 56
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 57
  In Portuguese: “pretos carregadores [e] que, mais cedo ou mais tarde, [...] virariam carneiros no estrangeiro [...] os pretos que iam para o estrangeiro se transformavam em carneiro [...].”
• 58
  Dante Lucchesi and Dina Callou (2020) point out that indigenous people also experienced an imperfect acquisition of Portuguese, which was marked by strong “[...] influences from the indigenous substratum, generating, in São Paulo, for example, the historical antecedent of what would come to be modernly called the caipira dialect” (Lucchesi; Callou, 2020, p. 165).
• 59
  In Portuguese: “Depois do almoço, os senhores foram se deitar um pouco e eu fui para o lugar onde estivera durante a manhã, como se não tivesse saído de lá. [...] E foi assim durante quatro ou cinco dias, enquanto à noite, e até que fosse necessário, as pretas da casa me ensinavam português, como também o Tico e o Hilário [duas crianças também cativas], com quem eu brincava de vez em quando. Eu já entendia quase tudo o que falavam e não foi muito difícil começar a falar também. Não tive a menor dificuldade em me comunicar com a sinhazinha quando ela finalmente conversou comigo, mostrando uma boneca e dois vestidos, um amarelo e ouro branco, e perguntando qual deles eu preferia.”
• 60
  In Portuguese: “quase dezesseis horas.”
• 61
  In Portuguese: “há muitas histórias por reconstruir sobre as faces indígena e negra do Brasil.”
• 62
  For reference, see footnote 1.

Review I

About the reviewer SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

Review I

The text is well-written, and has a pertinent, authorial, and partially unpublished proposal; the references are sufficient and the theory is well-explored. These elements would justify the approval and the text publication. The article’s discussion shows the approximations between literary and historical discourse, passing through an interesting intertwining of literary and historiographical metafiction, literary and historical studies, linguistics and sociolinguistics. The articulation between the areas and knowledge takes place efficiently, bringing the fields of knowledge together and making them as if they were one in favor of a perfectly justified methodological construction. Add to the fact that the analysis is “in the timing,” with the book “Um defeito de cor” being widely discussed and referenced in the media. For these reasons, I recommend approval of the text (with some corrections to be made as per the attached file). MANDATORY CORRECTIONS [Revised]

• peer review recommendation: revision

History

• Peer review received
  23 Mar 2024

Data availability

The contents underlying the research text are included in the manuscript.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  30 Sept 2024
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2024

History

• Received
  18 Mar 2024
• Accepted
  30 July 2024