Poetic-critical rereadings of Jesuit letters:

creation of the poems "Bestiais Customs and Evil Customs", "There will be many who will say the newest of the earth" and "The medicine of the forest".

Abstract

Given the evaluation of the Curricular Unit "Culture Literate in Brazil from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century", offered in the first semester of 2020, three poems were made based on the Jesuit priests letters’ who came to Brazil in order to catechise the native groups who lived here before this ‘arrival’. Catechism, as we know, became a strong arm of the domination and colonization of lands taken from native groups by the Portuguese crown. In addition, the letters were an instrument for registration and information exchange about the lived experience and of detailed disclosure, among the ecclesiastical and aristocratic layers, of what was found here. It is substantial to highlight that those letters were produced through the European bias regarding the "Brazilian lands" and, in view of this, a work of deconstruction and criticism of the colonizer's gaze was done.