The "Letter to the Icamiabas": or the lack of character of an imperial hero

Abstract

In Mário de Andrade's second novel, Macunaíma (1928), one comes across a very unique and dissonant letter addressed to the Icamiabas, or Amazon women; the letter is, signed by the hero of the saga, the "hero without any character". Transformed into the Emperor of the Virgin Jungle, Macunaíma addresses his subjects in a letter in which Andrade parodies the written discourse and postcolonial rhetoric of national lettered elites. That epistolary text might be constructively read as an example of the type of "writing" that "emerges between mimesis and mimicry", to say it with Homi Bhabha; a writing that defies the "the epic intention of the civilizing mission". In Andrade's novel-rhapsody, the letter constitutes, in addition, a moment of the hero's metamorphoses, the first of a linguistic nature, and an enthronization, that is to say, a moment previous to the carnivalesque desenthronization.