The Confluences between Brazil and Africa updating Mario de Andrade's Macunaíma from the perspective of African literary criticism endorsed in Amadou Hampâté Bâ's Kaydara

Abstract

The dialogue between Brazilian literature and Francophone African literature can result in such a significant exchange that language becomes the only obstacle to be overcome, allowing access to a horizon of mutual readings and interpretations. It was in this context that we chose the initiatic oral text and founded African identity, Kaydara, by Amadou Hampâté Bâ, to shed African light on the debate about the intelligibility of Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade. And, at the intersection between two major literary works, such as Macunaíma and Kaydara, there are two artistic-literary worlds that mirror each other, two authors who take turns, in a spiral, on the springboard of their artistic projects. But, much more than that, they are two peoples, Brazilian and African, who will enter into permanent dialogue based on one of their cultural roots, which is orality, or the culture of the word in its most traditional sense. It is Kaydara who brings within his lines the power of the sacredness of the word, dignifying the supremacy of knowledge, and it is Macunaíma who works, rearranges, revisits the Portuguese of Portugal to point in the undisputed direction of the Brazilian language, rather than the Portuguese language. It is against the backdrop of this intense dialogue that this chapter seeks to revisit and update the debate on the urgent need to redefine the contours and importance of Macunaíma's work within the multi-identity scenario of Brazil. After all, was the Afro-Brazilian marginalised in the work? Can the same be said of the indigenous people? Or rather, were these two components of Brazilian society treated in a way that made them inferior to the European Brazilian class? Or, on the contrary, are we in fact dealing with a work featuring a hero of character? And above all, what does the African oral tradition, typified by Kaydara, teach us about these existential problems in Brazil?