Letters to the Amazons

This chapter concentrates on a series of letters as solutions to problems of origins by emphasizing the context that produced one fictional letter, supposedly written by Macunaíma, the black Native Brazilian protagonist of the modernist novel Macunaíma: The Hero Without Any Character, published in 1927. The novel’s author, Mário de Andrade, also led the planning of Brazil’s national heritage bureaucracy. It argues that national memory is absolutely dependent on the intimacy of home and family, not as metaphors writ large but as spaces for defining essential national qualities.