Love for the Colonizer: Literary and Psychoanalytic Investigations of Brazil's Foundational Trauma

Abstract

The Brazilian cultural and political project began in 1822 with the end of colonization. At its outset, colonization stood fictitious in its enormous power to shape reality. In Latin America there was a confluence between the politicians and writers of the 19th century that guaranteed wholly pervasive foundational mythologies—the people building the legal-political state were also setting the mythological ideology of the nation in stone. As such, foundational myths served to unify the people under a common national banner. However, in their attempts to overcome the ghost of colonization, they ended up guaranteeing a wholly pervasive structure wherein the repressed trauma could fester. In Brazil, foundational works, like José de Alencar's Iracema, instead of rejecting the trauma of colonization, engendered myths that repressed it, romanticizing a narrative for the people to fall in love with their colonizer. This love, I argue, led to a specific cultural complex that induces a repetition compulsion of the original traumatic event up to this day, guaranteeing unconscious entrapment and a constant return and submission to the figure of the colonizer.