Iracema

Iracema came out in 1865, forty-three years after Brazil's independence, at a time when the country had practically no mythology of its own to tell about its origins. Europe had the Iliad, it had the Aeneid, it had founding heroes sung in verse for centuries. Brazil, newly separated from Portugal, had nothing like that, and José de Alencar decided to solve this problem all by himself, with his own pen.

That is not a figure of speech. Alencar belonged to Romanticism, in a strand called Indianism, which chose the Brazilian Indigenous person to take the place that the classical European hero held in other literatures. Instead of a hero founding Rome, Brazil got a love legend founding, in fiction, the territory where the state of Ceará now sits.

It is worth reading Iracema knowing this from the first page. It is not just a sad love story, it is a deliberate project to give a young country a literary identity. The rest of this summary tells the story in a few sections, without fear of giving away the ending, because what really matters here is what this project reveals, and also what it hides.

Iracema is a young warrior of the Tabajara tribe, keeper of a sacred secret tied to the jurema, the tribe's ritual drink. The book opens with one of the best-known lines in Brazilian literature, 'Far, far beyond that mountain range, still blue on the horizon, Iracema was born.' Right in that line Alencar blends landscape, poetry and birth in a way that repeats throughout the whole book.

Martim is a Portuguese warrior allied with the Pitiguaras, the enemies of the Tabajaras. He gets lost in the forest during a battle and is found by Iracema, who secretly takes him to her own taba, defying the rules of war between the two peoples. From this meeting grows an attraction that will break one rule after another.

It is almost a colonial fairy-tale beginning: the lost foreigner, saved by the local woman who falls in love at first sight. But this meeting carries, inside the plot itself, the clash between two worlds that Brazil's real history never resolved so poetically.

To help Martim, Iracema breaks the sacred secret of the jurema that she was charged with guarding, one of the most important roles a woman could hold in the tribe. The breach has consequences: she loses the right to remain its keeper, and loving a foreigner costs her dearly inside her own community.

Irapuã, a Tabajara warrior who also loved Iracema, does not accept her choice and becomes a direct threat to the couple. The mood in the taba turns unbearable, and Poti, a Pitiguara warrior and friend of Martim, helps the two escape before the conflict turns into tragedy right there.

The escape takes Iracema far from everything she knew, family, social role, the whole tribe, in the name of a love that the story itself will make her pay for until the end. They settle by the sea, in a region that the book ties, in fiction, to the future birth of the city that would become Fortaleza.