Portugal, my grandpa (Manuel Bandeira)

Carlos Fino’s book Portugal-Brazil: Roots of Strangeness presents a very well documented and grounded historical analysis of an undeniable factual reality, which are the manifestations of anti-Portugueseism present, latent or expressed in Brazilian culture. The reaction of lively negation that this book found, in Portugal and in Brazil, illustrates the idea that I will try to develop here of the truly “double negation”, on which a Luso-Brazilian relationship is based that, paradoxically, finds in this double negation the passionate roots of the their encounters and disagreements.

Noel Rosa, in one of his songs, reminds us that “everything that the rascal pronounces / with a soft voice / is Brazilian, has already passed from Portuguese” (does not have translation, 1930). Moving from Portuguese to Brazilian was the manifest and natural destiny of the Portuguese in Brazil. But this denial of Portuguese has its origin (as Carlos Fino shows) in the very project and dream of the Portuguese in relation to Brazil: to create a true homeland worthy of an empire beyond the Atlantic, far from the cramped bit of Europe that was ours. The King of Portugal himself said it when he decided to establish in Brazil the seat of an empire that, not having the same luster and wealth as in the past, still dominated a commercial maritime network that connected four continents, Asia, Africa, America and Europe. How strange that the court of Rio de Janeiro, facing this grandiose project, preferred to abandon Portugal to the government of an English marshal? When we were a colony of Brazilians, we were actually a colony of the Portuguese dream itself, as formulated by António Vieira or Luís da Cunha and applied by the Portuguese administration and diplomacy, until it culminated in the United Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil, which could only have its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.

Being an independence of Portuguese colonists pre-tension of the Portuguese of Portugal against the Lusitanian turf of Europe the seat of the empire, the date set for the Brazilian identity, which belonged to the Indians and the blacks, could only be achieved through the process of denial. And this denial that the Brazilian Portuguese of Brazil will necessarily have to make of Portugal echoes today in the denial that the Portuguese and the Portuguese can now express from reality this definitive decision of original revocation. Denial of negation, therefore.

in your rehearsal the denial (1925), Freud, as “the content of an explained or repressed image can come to consciousness, on condition that consciousness is denied”, accepts that “denial is a way of becoming aware of what is repressed, although, of course, without accepting it. what was suppressed”. In the same way, the repression of Portuguese content, so nativism present in Brazil, was a condition of the current independence, but it gave rise to a false consciousness, which came to contribute to the differences of this reality not being expressed in anything for a better understanding between Portuguese and Brazilians.