THE BODY THAT REMAINS, THE VOICE THAT IS MISSING: MEMORY, METAMORPHOSIS, AND ALTERITY IN MACUNAÍMA

Abstract

This article examines Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, through the relations among body, memory, voice, territory, and alterity, approaching metamorphosis not as a fantastic ornament but as a narrative procedure that problematizes the conditions of the hero’s belonging and recognition. The study is qualitative, bibliographic, and interpretive, grounded in close reading of the novel and in critical dialogue with scholarship on modernism, orality, memory, coloniality, territoriality, and relations between human and nonhuman beings. The analysis focuses on scenes in which Macunaíma learns to speak amid labor and kinship, separates consciousness from the body during travel, undergoes whitening that interrupts his social legibility as a son of the Tapanhumas, witnesses his son’s body becoming guaraná, and relies on the parrot’s voice for his story to survive the disappearance of the tribe. It also examines the protagonist’s astuteness as situated social action, constructed through disguises, techniques, improvised narratives, and a contingent reading of others’ expectations. The article concludes that the novel constructs fractured memory, transmitted through bodies, landscapes, plants, animals, and narrators, rejecting fixed images of national identity while making visible tensions among loss, transformation, and persistence, without reducing its conflicts to a conciliatory cultural synthesis across distinct temporal and symbolic registers.