One of the most frequently read of the Brazilian classics, perhaps the best known literary title in the country, the Indianist prose-poem Iracema is a ‘foundational romance’ about the colonial birth-pangs of the nation. Published in 1865, at the height of the Romantic Indianist movement, it formed part of a project to fictionalise the totality of Brazil’s early and contemporary history — something like Balzac’s Comédie Humaine — undertaken by the country’s most important novelist before Machado de Assis: José de Alencar. As well as its extravagant lyrical language — Alencar’s pseudo-indigenous phraseology and vocabulary got a hostile reception from contemporary purists — the main innovation Iracema brought to the Indianist tradition was its depiction of a ‘marriage’, albeit a tragic one, between a Portuguese soldier and a tabajara tribeswoman, who gives birth to the country’s archetypal, ‘first’ mixed-race son.

Alencar was the first writer to propose miscegenation, the idea of national identity and unity built upon a colonial legacy of mestiços, (people of mixed Amerindian and European descent) as a fictional means of papering over the huge contradictions left untouched by Brazil’s independence from Portugal, not least that of black slavery (Afro-Brazilians did not enter his interracial equation at all). And while the regional scenario of Alencar’s native province, Ceará, and certain principal characters in the novel, such as the military commander and colonist Martim Afonso and his Potiguara Indian ally Antonio Felipe Camarão, are drawn from the history of early conquest and settlement in the Northeast of the country, this is not a historical novel as such. For here the violence of conquest, the sexual as well as military subjugation of the indigenous population, becomes mythologised as a pre-eminently erotic affair, a ‘fatal attraction’, responsibility for which is shouldered implicitly by both parties. The seduction — in which Martim persuades the priestess of the tribe to break her holy vows, only to discover that during his drug-induced dream of sexual possession Iracema has actually joined him in the hammock — involves duplicity, guilt, irresponsibility and betrayal in equal shares.

Alencar was not such an idealist as to believe that a marriage on these foundations could last — now that Martim’s fantasy of the dark-skinned exotic temptress has lost her virginal charm, he prefers the male company of his fellow warriors, while the clinging, all self-sacrificing Iracema inexorably fades away in her grief-stricken abandonment. His rather more subtle point was that their mixed-race son, Moacyr, will survive the mother of the nation, free to live out his life as neither Indian nor colonist but as a true Brazilian, obliged to acknowledge his parents’ sacrifices and failings yet also leave them behind him, to remember but never to avenge them.

In this sense Alencar was giving his nineteenth-century bourgeois readers, with their liberal pretensions yet their determination not to relinquish the benefits of slavery, just what they needed: a fantasy that could allow them to come to terms with their history without contemplating the need for change. After reading this extraordinarily lyrical narrative with its accumulation of metaphors and similes linking the characters’ inner and outer lives to the endless cycles of nature, it is difficult to resist Alencar’s own, literary seduction, the illusion that the tragedies of human history are as natural and inevitable as the falling away of the leaves from the jacaranda tree.

The arms of the sleeping warrior opened, and his lips; the maiden’s name was gently intoned.

The juriti, wandering through the forest, hears the tender cooing of its mate; it beats its wings and flies to find shelter in its warm nest. So did the maiden of the interior nestle in the warrior’s arms.

When morning came, it still found Iracema enfolded there, like a butterfly that has slept in the bosom of the shapely cactus. On her lovely countenance, abashment had kindled a vivid scarlet, and like the first ray of sun glittering among the red clouds of morning, on her burning cheeks shone a wife’s first smile, the dawn of a love come to fruition.

The jandaia had flown with the break of day, never to return to the hut.

Seeing the maiden united to his heart, Martim thought he was still dreaming; he closed his eyes and reopened them.

The warriors’ battle cry, reverberating through the valley, plucked him from the sweet error: he sensed he was no longer dreaming, but living. His cruel hand stifled on the maiden’s lips the kiss that fluttered there.

‘Iracema’s kisses are sweet in dreams; the white warrior has filled his soul with them. In life, the lips of Tupã’s virgin are bitter and wound like the jurema thorn.’

Araquém’s daughter concealed the happiness in her heart. She became shy and restless, like the bird that foresees the tempest on the horizon. She moved quickly away and departed.

The waters of the river bathed the chaste body of the new bride.

Tupã no longer had his virgin in the land of the Tabajaras. 50-51