Comvest coordinator, José Alves and the edition's organizer, Sheila Hue, talk about the important historical record that is also mandatory reading for the Unicamp Vestibular
Caminha's letter is very rich in details; In the 19th century, it was already designated as the document of the Brazilian national foundation. The narrative descriptions of the land we today call Brazil and the encounter between its original inhabitants and the Portuguese make evident the differences between the expectations of these peoples when they met.
The Permanent Commission for Unicamp Entrance Exams (Comvest) established this writing as a mandatory literary work to all university entrance exam candidates from this year. It is important to have contact with this historical record that announces the latent tension between indigenous peoples and Europeans, whose colonial consequences echo to this day in Brazil.
At the time that Pero Vaz de Caminha wrote the letter to King Manuel, there were no unified grammatical norms; This fact, combined with the typical language of the 17th century, makes the original text difficult to understand. Editora da Unicamp recently launched the commented and modernized version of the Letter of finding from Brazil, making the writing more intelligible and enriching it with comments from specialist Sheila Hue, thus allowing contemporary readers to better understand the themes and nuances of this document.
To introduce the reader to more details about this launch, its current nature and its importance, Editora da Unicamp spoke with José Alves, director of Comvest, and Sheila Hue, commentator on the work.
Unicamp publisher: What are the objectives that Comvest has in mind when choosing the mandatory works for the Unicamp Entrance Exam?
José Alves: The existence of a mandatory list of texts serves multiple objectives. The first and most important thing is to make candidates have contact with the works, train themselves as readers and expand their cultural and literary references. The lack of a list of mandatory readings favors the reading of summaries and impoverishes the reading experience, also meaning that access to works is not a priority. Comvest, with its list, signals the opposite: fewer works, but which are read, debated and known by candidates. The second objective is that, if there is a list, it is possible to say that the selection process is clearer and less random, that is, a question will not be asked about any work of Portuguese literature, of any genre or from any period. This way, people know that the questions will be related exclusively to the ten works that must be read throughout the three years of high school.
Unicamp Editor: Why was Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter chosen as a mandatory work for the Unicamp 2022 Entrance Exam?
José Alves: The choice of Pero Vaz de Caminha's Letter of Finding addressed to King D. Manuel is to present to the student a historical-literary document that refers to the view of a European on lands and people that, over time, were presented as being the origin of Brazil. The perspective of 1500st century students problematizes notions such as “discovery”, the vision of the original peoples and the flora and fauna found in this territory. It is a reading experience that, with the excellent introduction by Sheila Hue, contextualizes the letter and allows the reader to connect with the type of vision, concerns and enchantments of the trip led by Pedro Álvares Cabral and with a detailed description of the back to XNUMX and, at the same time, you can observe issues specific to the current political debate, such as the exploitation of nature and threats to indigenous peoples.
Unicamp publisher: In the preface, you say that, in the 16th century, the letter served as an “instrument of governance and communication”. How did charts articulate these two functions during the navigation period?
Sheila Hue: The letter was an instrument widely used in the 16th century, both by men of letters of the period, the humanists, who cultivated this genre of writing in an erudite way, and by agents of oceanic navigation, who connected distant parts of the globe, creating routes on which they circulated. roles of the most varied types. Relations between royal officials in the Portuguese colony and the Crown in Lisbon occurred through papers sent on ships, such as regiments and other types of documents, and letters that dealt with the government of the territory, such as those written by governors-general, by example. We also know of missives written by merchants, with analyzes of the territory from the point of view of trade and business opportunities, Jesuit letters, written to be disseminated and then published, and various types of exchanges of information about the territories reached by Europeans; epistles written in Congo, Japan, Brazil, India, etc.
Other members of Pedro Álvares Cabral's crew sent letters written in Bahia to the king of Portugal, D. Manuel, but the only ones that reached us were those of Pero Vaz de Caminha and that of master João, a cosmographer, who drew the oldest known representation of Cruzeiro do Sul. The other text written by a member of the trip, the Anonymous pilot's report, was not produced in Brazil but at the end of the navigation, when they returned from India to Lisbon. Caminha states in the letter that he will not discuss navigation or technical and scientific aspects, because such data was contained in the charts that pilots and captains had prepared. The object of your text is different. He takes great care in describing the people he encounters. They are visual descriptions of men and women, of their body ornaments, and also of the artifacts he found there, true moving pictures, painted by his expressive narrative. The letter has an interesting structure because it is composed of excerpts from the logbook, being a kind of collage of passages from the diary, proceeding chronologically, day by day, and also containing specific sections of the letter genre, such as the introduction and the final petition.
Unicamp Editor: Why is it important to read Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter?
Sheila Hue: The letter was written in 1500 and sent to the king, for whom it was intended. Unlike other letters that mention the “discovery” of Brazil, Caminha's was not published in the 1817th century, nor in subsequent ones. It was only in the 22th century that the letter was published in a book, in XNUMX, transcribed in a long footer, spanning XNUMX pages. After Brazil's independence, it gained another status. Capistrano de Abreu coins an expression that will last a long time and that will mark the interpretation of the letter: the document written by Caminha would be Brazil's “birth certificate”. This is the symbolic place that it occupies and has occupied since the XNUMXth century. There were many cultural and political interpretations and appropriations of the letter, which was read as an emblem of conciliation between indigenous peoples and Europeans, an image reproduced in literature and painting, as in the ever-present First mass in Brazil by Victor Meirelles, from 1860, and constant in textbooks to this day. In our edition of the letter, we included a contemporary reinterpretation of the XNUMXth century painting A first mass, by Luiz Zerbini, canvas from 2014, and a figure of Pedro Álvares Cabral, by Denilson Baniwa, titled Decolonize the discovery of Brazil, from 2017, which dialogue with the document from 1500. Caminha's letter, due to its centrality in representations and discussions about national identity, can be a productive interlocutor for the discussion of acute issues today, such as the lack of control over illegal mining, the devastation of the Amazon, the constant armed attacks on indigenous populations and even the recent crimes against indigenous girls and women.
Unicamp publisher: How does Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter dialogue with other letters of the time? What narrative elements did the author use that are characteristic of these 16th century writings?
Sheila Hue: Caminha was a member of the literate upper bourgeoisie, he inherited an important position from his father, he was a knight of the king and was appointed clerk of the first Portuguese trading post in India, from where large profits were expected and where he died in 1500. He was an official Royally versed in the arts of writing, he knew how to make, as they said at the time, a painting with words, bringing the things described before the reader's eyes. Caminha's extraordinary narrative capacity makes his letter unique among the documents relating to Cabral's trip. It is a text that is still beautiful today. Another peculiarity is a certain intimacy demonstrated between the author of the missive and the king, evident in passages with a double meaning of an erotic nature. In fact, compared to other documents of the period, it is a very unique document, also due to the irony used in the narratives of interactions and misunderstandings between Portuguese navigators and the inhabitants of the land.
Unicamp publisher: The threat to indigenous existence is institutional and constant, as the advancement of PL 490 shows. Do the finding letter and the cultural tensions present in it dialogue with our present? What reflections does reading Letter of finding from Brazil you can take it?
Sheila Hue: Caminha highlights, in his narrative of contacts between the Portuguese and indigenous people, the inequality of intentions and expectations. At a certain point, he states: “they are much more our friends than we are of them”. European capitalist mercantilism was completely foreign to Tupi culture. What do the “commodity people”, as Davi Kopenawa calls it in the fall of the sky, understands how lands to be conquered for the king and for the expansion of the Catholic religion represent the invasion of territory for the indigenous peoples who had been there for thousands of years. Caminha still does not describe the colonial violence that would ensue and which today seems more than ever present in the constant attacks against indigenous populations and in the many bills that aim to undermine rights and promote devastation. He does not describe, but announces. In this way, reading the letter can be an important tool for reflection on our present and the possibilities for the future, in a political context as serious as the one we are experiencing today.
On the other hand, today, we can “hear” in Caminha’s letter the speeches that are silenced or not understood, such as the exuberant feather art, the oratory of the ancient Tupi, and painting and body ornamentation. On the cover of our edition we could count on drawings of ancestral graphic patterns, part of the work Hunger of Resistance by artist Jonathas de Andrade with a collective of Kayapó women, with the support of the Kabu Institute, carried out in 2019. The drawings are “earwig paw” and “anteater”, painted respectively by Ngreboj and Ireranti on historical maps of the demarcated territory.
Service:
Degree: Letter of finding from Brazil
Author: Pero Vaz de Caminha
Organizer: Sheila Hue
ISBN: 978-65-86253-82-5
Edition: 1a
Year: 2021
Pages: 136 p.
Format: 18 x 10,5 x 1,5 cm
Learn corn informações on the Unicamp Publisher page.
