An Invincible Memory     by Joâo Ubaldo Ribeiro, Translated by Joâo Ubaldo Ribeiro Original title: Viva o povo brasileiro Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 0060156228 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $25.00, £15.90 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £15.90 Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £12.99 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering Published by Harper & Row: NY Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s An Invincible Memory promises us something that contemporary Brazilian fiction has tended to shy away from, but which is nevertheless an endeavour worth defending: a coherent and meaningful vision of his country’s historical experience ‘from below’, challenging the ‘Great Men’ theory of Brazilian history ‘as it was taught to me in school’ (to quote the dust jacket). Indeed, the novel’s moral weight undoubtedly derives from its identification with the oppressed of Brazil and its insistent call for their liberation.

But An Invincible Memory doesn’t so much offer the Brazilian people a way out of their oppression, as condemn them to an eternal search for a mysterious national consciousness whose discovery is forever postponed. As one of the book’s heroes, General Patrício, reveals in the closing pages: ‘You’ll only be able to be anything after you are you!’. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Ribeiro’s characters make little progress in their striving for a sense of identity, given the contradictory, ambiguous and ultimately indeterminate nature of this idea on which the entire novel rests. ‘Long live the Brazilian People!’ is the ubiquitous slogan which the plot’s two entangled dynasties of masters and slaves struggle to interpret for themselves. But who is the Brazilian People if, as Ribeiro rightly suggests, the ruling, Europhile elite of sugar-planters and slave-owners has no legitimate claim to the title? For the visionary militia commander, Maria da Fé, the descendent of an Indian mestiça (‘mixed race’ individual), a Dutch soldier, an emancipated slave and a tyrannical baron, the Brazilian People is ‘the dispossessed, the oppressed and the wronged’ or, in a rare moment of precision, all the ‘workers’ of nineteenth century society: the artisans, tradesmen, farmers, millers, innkeepers and musicians.

However, as the blood of one dynasty contaminates that of the other, and individuals even renounce family loyalties to fight alongside the rebels, it becomes clear that Ribeiro cannot and does not want to make up his mind: blurring the boundaries between class and nation, his notion of the spirit of the people is less a matter of social identity and more an attitude of mind, a belief in freedom. Thus the members of the mysterious Brotherhood are only recognisable by an intuitive sixth sense: ‘There was something in certain people, the way they walked, the way they talked, their type of voice’.

Meanwhile, by reducing a complex history of class, ideological and ethnic antagonisms to a single idealistic struggle for national identity, Ribeiro has effectively exchanged one set of myths, those of racial degeneracy and pathological underdevelopment, for another — Gilberto Freyre’s myth of mestiçagem. The mestiça heroine, Maria da Fé, embodies the spirit of a permanent struggle for social and racial democracy, in which contradiction, plurality and difference are the vitalising ingredients of a dynamic, but essentially integrated, harmonious society. Outright elitism is exchanged for a more subtle, and sinister, populism, whose exhortation to freedom becomes an end in itself, because there is no real end.

This is the central message of a novel that, for all its wealth of material, carefully dated chapter titles and panoramic sweep of Brazilian history, is in essence profoundly anti-historical. It is not by chance that seventeen of the book’s twenty chapters are concerned solely with events from the nineteenth century. Besides marking the independence and consolidation of the Brazilian nation-state, this is the period in which the notion of a Brazilian ‘people’, let alone a working class, with distinct common interests, is most problematic, given the centrality of slavery to the country’s economy and society. Da Fé’s list of ‘workers’ corresponds much more closely to a pre-industrial petite bourgeoisie, straddling an uncertain, ambiguous terrain between the slaves, whose material oppression they often shared, and the masters, on whose patronage they were socially dependent.

Ribeiro’s version of the ‘people’s’ democratic struggle therefore remains, for the most part, rather distant from the new and complex social reality of twentieth century industrial Brazil, which merits only two chapters. Stopping short of the exciting new popular and working class movements that have remerged since the 1970s, the book instead retreats to the safety of a mythical Golden age and place, the nineteenth century North-east, which stands for a timeless national-popular consciousness. A succession of slave rebellions, Liberal revolts, regional uprisings and messianic movements is subsumed, often by means of contrived circumstantial connections, into the history of the (Bahian) Brazilian people’s search for its identity, losing in the process their specific social and political character. Most important of all, in Ribeiro’s essentially Hegelian view of the struggle between oppressor and oppressed, it is only the people’s consciousness which is ever transformed. Moments before his death, General Patrício speaks of the Spirit of Man, which ‘yearns for perfection, that is to say, Good’.

‘Souls do not learn anything, but they dream uncontrollably’, we read in the first chapter of An Invincible Memory, as the spirit of the Brazilian people resumes its journey of self-realisation, a journey that, if Ribeiro is to be believed, is likely to remain unfinished for a long time to come.

Lord in heaven, who was that statue of glory, beautiful in countenance and speech, if not the warrior Maria da Fé, bursting forth through incomprehensible arts, emerging from the clothes of a mean looking captain like an obscure worm turning into a triumphant butterfly, shining like a sun amid all the rain, coming to unleash the pride that had been rotting away in their fearful hearts? Here she is in flesh and bone, not a legend but a truth you could touch, not distant but near, leading not soldiers but a squad of militiamen — the Militia of the People, whom so many had heard of and so few had seen. 288