In Search of a Vanished Afro-Brazilian Novel

Manuel Bandeira’s poem “A Morte Absoluta” (“Consummate Death”), first published in Portuguese in 1940 and newly translated by Candace Slater in 2018, contemplates the relationship between death and oblivion. The piece concludes with:

To die without leaving a furrow, a trace, a shadow,

the memory of a shadow

in any heart, in any mind, in any skin.

To die so completely

that one day on seeing your name on paper

they’ll have to ask, ‘Who was he?’ …

To die more completely still

—without even leaving so much as that name.

The speaker imagines what it must be like when death leads to complete loss of one’s living memory, from lifelong contributions, commitments and day-to-day pursuits to the loss of even one’s name, no longer documented, preserved, or traceable. Indeed, Bandeira’s poem tests the limits of oblivion: to what an extent can someone’s life be forgotten and how does death intensify this process?

In 1991, Francisco Maria Bragantino, a member of the “Grupo Negro” (“Black Club”) of the University of São Paulo, framed his search for author Romeu Crusoé by citing this poem in a letter to a newspaper. Bragantino wrote, “It is not uncommon among us for an important man to ‘disappear without leaving behind even their name’ … Is Romeu Crusoé alive? Does he still live in Rio de Janeiro? If alive, he must be 76 years old, an important witness. If dead…”

Bragantino’s letter raised questions about the disappearance of the Afro-Brazilian author from public life. Aside from asking for leads, the letter invited readers to ponder: How can someone seemingly vanish without a trace? And, in particular, someone whose critically acclaimed novel had reached its forty-year anniversary at the time of Bragantino’s published note?

As a scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard studying Afro-literary continuities in the Black Atlantic, I have continued the search for Crusoé. My first encounter with Crusoé’s name occurred while reading Oswaldo de Camargo’s O Negro Escrito, in which he offers a genealogy of Afro-Brazilian writers from Brazil’s early colonial years through the 1970s. In the book, Camargo observes the prevalence of Afro-Brazilian poets over that of novelists, attributing this to the fact that novel writing requires greater freedom of time and financial resources, which Afro-Brazilian authors often lacked at the time. Because of this, “the black writer has been and continues to be a poet, predominantly a poet,” Camargo concludes.

Camargo’s mention of Crusoé and his novel caught my attention particularly because the critic frames Crusoé as bridging a roughly 30-year gap in Afro-Brazilian novel publications, from Lima Barreto’s last novel in 1919 (excluding those published postmortem) to the release of A Maldição de Canaan in 1951. Although Camargo’s analysis misses other Afro-Brazilian novels that were indeed published during this time, his point nevertheless invites us to consider an important question: in a country with a large Afro-descendant population, what factors contributed to the near absence of Afro-Brazilian novel writing between 1920 and 1950—decades after the abolition of slavery, and in the midst of prolific publication of Afro-Brazilian newspapers and magazines, known collectively as the “Imprensa Negra” (“Black Press”)?

If Crusoé represented a watershed moment in Afro-Brazilian fiction, it also seemed incongruent that his fiction writing has scarcely been studied today. With this in mind, I embarked on a research trip to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the summer of 2023, supported by a DRCLAS Brazil Research Grant, with the objective of uncovering more details about Crusoé’s oeuvre and biography.

Scouring through the archives of the National Library in Rio, I found information on Crusoé’s biography and political views, on the critical reception of his work and the existence of a second edition of his novel. The book reviews of A Maldição de Canaan suggested that Crusoé’s novel had had a large enough impact upon publication to survive the roughly 70 years that lay between its first edition and my search.

Façade of the National Library, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by author.

The National Library requires all publishers in Brazil to deposit a copy of a newly published book. The database confirmed that the National Library indeed held a copy of Crusoé’s novel, although at the time of my visit it was unavailable for consultation. Having learned that it had long run out of print, I contacted university libraries, collaborated with librarians and research institutes, and even hired a service that combs bookstores throughout the country looking for a requested book. Other than the copy at the National Library, A Maldição de Canaan was nowhere to be found.

It was at this time that I found Bragantino’s note in search of the vanished Romeu Crusoé, which revealed to me that the author had been missing from public life for far longer than I had anticipated. Even in the 1990s, when Crusoé was likely still alive, scholars had had trouble locating him and his oeuvre. Furthermore, the fact that Crusoé’s novel had not been preserved in libraries in Brazil raised a series of questions about the status of Afro-Brazilian literature in the country, and the challenges of preserving Afro-Brazilian literary and cultural memory. What challenges did Crusoé face when trying to break through as a novelist, when trying to advance his work, in a context where his contributions may have been downplayed and dismissed?

Inside the National Library, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by author.

Ultimately, I left Brazil with more questions than answers. In the fall, I arrived in Paris to conduct research for my dissertation as a Fulbright Scholar. My goal was to explore the transatlantic literary ties between Brazilian and French writers during the time of the 1968 social movements and Brazil’s military dictatorship. It was while conducting research in the archives of the Institute of Latin American Studies (IHEAL) that, to my great surprise, I found a first edition copy of Crusoé’s A Maldição de Canaan. Inside the book, there was a dedicatory note that revealed the copy had been gifted to Roger Bastide, a French sociologist and anthropologist who specialized in the study of Afro-Brazilian religions and who taught at the University of São Paulo for twenty years.

Book cover of A Maldição de Canaan by Romeu Crusoé taken in Paris, France. Photo by author.

I had found the novel. A Maldição de Canaan, once a part of Bastide’s personal library, was now safeguarded in a French archive. What’s more, the dedicatory note was not signed by Crusoé but by Guerreiro Ramos, a Brazilian sociologist who pitched a collaboration between the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Brazil’s Black Experimental Theater) and UNESCO in carrying out studies on race relations in Brazil.

In my dissertation, I investigate the relationship between Crusoé, the Black Experimental Theater, and UNESCO, in order to reconstruct a historical context that gives important clues into Crusoé’s approach to literary explorations of racial identity in A Maldição de Canaan. I also offer insights into the reasons why Crusoé’s novelistic rendition of race relations in Brazil may have further spurred the novel’s slow disappearance.

In exploring the reasons why Crusoé’s novel disappeared and, more broadly, the factors that contributed to the near absence of Afro-Brazilian novel writing in the first half of the 20th century, I have also come to learn that it is less about the absence of novels than it is about their preservation. Afro-Brazilian literature has always existed but, until a few decades algo, has seldom been published and preserved on a large scale. Archival work allows us to restore the voices of underrepresented groups whose literary contributions have been lost over time, often due to socioeconomic and political forces that denied them the readership they deserved.

It is my hope that, through this research, Crusoé’s literary legacy may be revived and that, in re-engaging with this important Afro-Brazilian text, we scholars and interested readers may also continue the search and ponder: What other works in the Afro-Brazilian tradition are “missing” because they have not been preserved, and what will the rediscovery teach us?