Maira     by Darcy Ribeiro, Translated by E.H. Goodland and T. Colchie Original title: Maira Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Vintage Books Pub. Date: March 1984 Format: Paperback, 353 pages ISBN: 0394722140 List Price: $7.95, £5.05 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £5.05 Published by Vintage Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

Published in 1976, Maíra dramatises one of the most urgent social issues of the late twentieth century: the survival of traditional peoples and cultures, especially the tribal Amerindians, in the face of globalisation and industrial development. Ribeiro was well qualified to write about the Brazilian Indians; during fifty odd years of a distinguished career as an anthropologist (as well as educator and politician), he researched among and wrote on numerous tribal groups in Brazil. In 1970 he published The Indians and Civilization, a masterfully comprehensive work originally commissioned by UNESCO to assess, in the words of the book’s subtitle ‘the integration of the indigenous populations into modern Brazil’. What in fact emerged was a depressing account of the failure of any such assimilation, and it is that failure which lies at the heart of Maira.

The story of the central character Isaías Avá is based on the real case of a Bororo Indian from Matto Grosso who, in 1910, at the age of twelve, was removed from his community by Salesian missionaries and eventually sent to Rome and Paris to become a priest. On attempting to resume his tribal role as hunter and farmer by marrying a Bororo woman, he discovered that he had become alienated from the society of his birth. For the rest of his life he occupied a cultural and psychological limbo between two worlds.

The real achievement of Maira, though, is its location of this individual struggle for personal self-integration within a complex yet skilfully constructed picture of Amazonian society and of the political, economic and cultural forces trying to transform it. The voices of the principal characters in the drama each contribute their own perspective: the voice of tribal tradition, recounting the story of the creation of the world, and the beautiful funeral ritual of the Mairun chief; the voice of the river trader Juca, himself a detribalised Indian determined to seduce the remainder of his people into the economic slavery to which the local non-Indian population is condemned; the voice of the police inspector sent to investigate the mysterious death of a white woman, and who in the process reveals the negligent role played by FUNAI (the Brazilian government organization that deals with Amerindians) as intermediary between the Indians and white society; and the voice of Isaías himself, resigned to the eventual disappearance of the Mairuns as the conclusion of an inexorable process of acculturation.

The chapters devoted to the Mairun culture and mythology are the most memorable, not least because of the painful irony they bring to the whole question of the survival of the tribal communities. For the strength of the Indians’ highly sophisticated systems of kinship, social organisation and cosmology, their self-containment and self-sufficiency, also contain the seeds of their vulnerability. The duality that divides the Mairuns into two clans, and thereafter penetrates every aspect of tribal life, must necessarily include the duality of within/without, here/there, Indian/white. Most significantly, it extends to the book’s title, whose several related meanings — Maira the universal creator hero of Tupi mythology; Maira the ‘transformer’; Maira the bringer of civilization; Maira the foreigner; Maira the white man — attest to the Indians’ high expectations of a society that has not proved itself worthy of them.

But soon the heavier rains fall, raining for many days, weeks, and months. The world then seemed to dissolve under the mantle of widespread water. Black clouds darken the horizons; as they break, rain pours in white curtains on to the thatch of roofs, mud unto the dancing ground. The people, consumed by sadness, huddling around little fires, now are eating dry cassava bread or roast or boiled potatoes, almost always without meat or fish, and are drinking nothing but plain cassava beer. Mosquitoes come out and multiply. Fierce midges, gnats, and punkies sting, annoy. They are the lords of the world. The beaches disappear, inundated by the cold and turbid water of the paranã. With them fish, birds, and large and small game also disappear.

So it was for months until little by little the joyfulness of summer began to return. This year the first to arrive were the spotless white ibis and the dusky herons, serene in flight, perching on the crowns of trees, afraid of dirtying their feet. Then came the toucans and their cousins, the toucanets and, finally, flocks of macaws and parrots. All life renews itself.