Brazil Searching for Information About

Brazil Searching for Information About Brazil Researching Brazil: Brazil is an enormous country, covering 3.3 million square miles, with approximately 183 million people living within its sprawling boundaries, according to the BBC News (http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk).In fact Brazil is the largest and most influential nation in South America, and it takes up nearly half of the entire continent.

It is the eighth largest economy in the world, and is a major producer of soybeans, sugarcane, coffee, rice, wheat, cotton, oranges, cocoa, and Brazil supplies the world with beef from its large cattle ranches in the south and western regions of the country. The Brazilian coastline is 4,500 miles long, and much of this region consists of very fertile land suitable for farming.

The major language spoken in Brazil is Portuguese, due to the fact that Portugal explorers arrived in Brazil many years ago and basically colonized the country, bringing their culture and language along with them. Portugal's influence on Brazil began in 1500 when Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived, the first European to find this country.

A year later Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci landed on the Brazilian shores; he had been paid by the Portuguese to explore Brazil, and he brought back to Portugal a shipload of Brazilian wood that was a "hard, reddish wood" (Margolis, et al., 2001). This wood was quite similar to a tree product in East India called "pau brasil," which was very popular in Europe at that time and was used in making cabinets and bows for violins.

There were many things in Brazil that Portuguese would later exploit for profit and for power, but this wood was the first of those exploitable products; they called it brazilwood, and that became the name of the country Portugal had "found" - Brazil. In the northeast coastal region of Brazil, there are very rich soils that are ideal for growing sugar cane. And so, besides the harvesting of existing brazilwood, the Portuguese also planted large sugar plantations.

They needed human hands in order to plant, cultivate and harvest the sugar cane (sugar was in great demand in Europe so it helped make the Portuguese a lot of money), so in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese colonists went to Africa and brought back slaves to do the work (Margolis 285). Margolis' article asserts that the Portuguese brought "millions of slaves" (Margolis 286) from West Africa to Brazil over a three hundred year period of time.

There were many African slaves put to work by the Portuguese in the southeast portion of Brazil, as well, because the Portuguese discovered gold in the eighteenth century and they needed help to dig the gold out of the ground. The authors of this article in the journal Countries and Their Cultures write that the slave trade from Africa to Brazil had begun a hundred years prior to the first slaves being brought to what later became the United States.

Up to three times as many African slaves were brought to Brazil than were brought to the British colonies in the United States, according to the article. What many people immediately think about when the subject of Brazil comes up is the Brazilian rainforest in the Amazon basin, which occupies one-third of the country.

The trees in the rainforest rise to 120 feet above the rich soil, and there are thousands of species of plants along with thousands of species including the "red eyed tree frog," insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals, the Save the Amazon Rainforest Web site explains (www.amazon-rainforest.org).Exploitation of the rainforest has been severe; a strategy to move settlers into the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s - during a period when Brazil was ruled by military dictators - caused "considerable damage to vast areas of rainforest" the Web site points out.

Indeed, continuing deforestation by cattle ranchers and logging interests is having a negative impact; the Brazilian government's own report in 2005 asserted that upwards of one fifth of the Amazon forests had been cleared due to massive deforestation. Personal Reflective Response: Meanwhile, the student approaching a research project which embraces the fascinating and powerful country of Brazil, its history and culture and economy, should also be interested in the literature of Brazil. Literature offers a kind of historical review of a nation and its peoples.

There are in fact novels written by Brazilian writers that offer good information about the country, which is a very good reason to explore this genre. A brief look at the first novelist in Brazil sheds some light on Brazil.

He was Manoel de Macedo, and critic Erico Verissimo - writing in Brazilian Literature: An Outline - insists that the only reason one would read a novel by Macedo is for "literary curiosity" (Verissimo) or to have a look at the middle class in Brazilian society in the late nineteenth century. Macedo describes his characters "without any psychological shading," Verissimo explains, and treats subjects in "sugary and sentimental" ways - always making sure there is a happy ending.

A far more well respected novelist from Brazil is Jose Martiniano de Alencar; although his novels may be "too crammed with improbabilities, sentimentalities" they are also rich with color, beauty and drama, Verissimo claims. Another critic, Isaac Goldberg, explains that Alencar's work has a "rich palette" and that the author is really a poet who has chosen narrative as his medium. As good as his novels are - Guarany and Iracema in particular - Brazilians don't speak of his.