Three Glad Races: Primitivism and Ethnicity in Brazilian Modernist Literature

Joy is the proof by nines.

—Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibal Manifesto”

December 24, midnight—Christmas dinner. The European tradition was imitated in everything: the music, the large illuminated pine tree adorning the back of the drawing room and even in certain delicacies: chestnuts, dates, apricots. This lack of authenticity irks the purists of customs, who demand a tropical expression of the Christmas celebrations. I don’t know whether they’re right and if a substitution is really possible. I’m inclined to believe that all this might even be more powerful, here, than in its countries of origin.

—Osman Lins, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece ¹

Antropofagia (cannibalism), an iconoclastic movement within Brazilian literary modernism, drew upon the theme of cannibalism as a central motif for its theoretical and artistic program in the insouciant Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine) (1928–29); its principal figures, the writer-intellectual Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) and the painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), have long been recognized as powerful artists of major significance and international status. Brazilian cannibalism created one of the most innovative theories to be derived from the modernist fascination with the primitive, ² and was characterized by its mocking appropriation, inversion, and local application of European models, among them the rhetoric of manifestos and the primitivist discoveries of the European avant-gardes, both transposed to the spaces and races of Brazil’s vast interior. Antropofagia exploits its avant-garde posture to address the question of Latin American cultural autonomy in dialogue with the primitivism then attracting attention in Europe. Vitally engaged with the question of Latin American cultural autonomy, Antropofagia was a bold, provocative, if also ambiguous, attempt to respond to the conflicting imperatives of cultural nationalism and pluralist cosmopolitanism in a post-colonial context. Yet ever since the movement was first formed in the late 1920s, and continuing to the present, their work has been repeatedly taxed with charges of impurity and inauthenticity, with being essentially a derivative imitation of the European avant-gardes and lacking genuine roots in the soil of Brazilian culture. Moreover, since the revival of interest in “cannibalism” in the 1960s, antropofagia has been accused of failing to offer a cultural program with serious social or political consequences for Brazil, a charge that indirectly reinforces the earlier complaints about cosmopolitan uprootedness. While these claims usefully acknowledge certain limitations inherent in antropofagia from the beginning, they also slight the genuine ambivalence of the movement’s responses to European culture and neglect the complexity of the Brazilian socio-cultural setting in which that response was formulated. The choice that faced the cannibalists was not so much between imported art and indigenous practice, or between cultural colonialism and native resistance, but between one version of nationalism, itself already saturated with European notions of the telluric and soon to prove all too amenable to the spurious nationalism of the Vargas regime, and another more nuanced sense of cultural autonomy that explored the cross-relationship of primitive Brazil with modernist Europe. ³ Antropofagia owed little to ideas of recovering a lost authenticity and instead adopted a more self-reflective and theoretical concept of national identity as constructed difference. Largely forgotten, or even studiously neglected by official cultural authorities in Brazil, this notion of identity may prove to be a strategy of enduring value. Moreover, it may also help us reconsider the increasingly reductive dichotomy between European derivatives and indigenous authenticity. In the fractured world of post colonialism, the choice is not between purity and its opposite, but between competing kinds of impurity whose values are inseparable from settings and circumstances.

To be sure, the origins of antropofagia are inseparable from contemporary European fascination with the primitive. One of the crucial lessons the Brazilians learn from the Parisian movements is how to value the ethnic diversity and racial heterogeneity that would allow Brazil to claim a primitivism of its own. The modernists from São Paulo assert the primacy and superiority of man and nature in the New World, in a reversal of nineteenth-century ideas about race and climate. Their position is strengthened from their Parisian vantage point, where Amaral’s studio is a center of euphoria and exoticism in the world of primitive art in the 1920s. ⁴ Surveying Brazil from their urban and erudite perspective, they come to equate indigenism, folklore, and ethnicity with an authentic national cultural definition. Although not indigenous or folkloric themselves, the artists find it natural to incorporate indigenous and folkloric themes into their works and to claim them as their own, as equally valid representations of Brazilian reality. In Paris, the Brazilian artists appropriate the expressive qualities of European primitivism and art nègre, and especially the themes of excess and appetite that they recognize as apt for Brazil. They use the forms provided by the plastic arts, the manifesto, Freudian theory, and primitivist ethnology aesthetically to model these themes into their own “primary materials.” Through a calculated reformulation of these common forms and themes, the Brazilians place themselves in a position both to rewrite their national history and to cast themselves as the rejuvenated descendants of the “sad races”—a term popularized by poet Olavo Bilac that reflects the late nineteenth-century social Darwinist and racialist theories of inferiority that had been applied to Brazil’s non-European and multiracial population. Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade embody the modernists’ counterconception of racial diversity as strength in the figure of the cannibal who sits at the origin of natural philosophies, perfectly in harmony with them. ⁵

Antropofagia will be described here in terms of avant-garde aesthetics as an avenue to postcolonial intellectual autonomy. ⁶ The cannibal artists reject an intermediary identity that would cross Europe with Brazil, and instead rebel against Europe, while at the same time, paradoxically, drawing on their European experiences and education to define Brazil as pure difference. In the cannibal, the Brazilian group finds an aggressive symbol capable of subverting the primitivism then in vogue in Europe, in order to rewrite colonial history and invert the relationship between center and periphery. They exploit primitivism conceptually by constructing a wild cultural and philosophical theory, in which primitivism reconstructs national identity. Antropofagia replaces the predominant colonial models with primal, indigenous, Amazonian scenarios.

The central document of the cannibalist movement is Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropofago” (Cannibal Manifesto), ⁷ which begins by declaring that the birth of logic was never permitted among the cannibals. The manifesto follows a disorienting method of inversion, incorporation, and metamorphosis, by which any entity can become its other by subjection to the cannibalistic metaphor of ingestion, symbiosis, and change: “Cannibalism.... The world’s single law. Disguised expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.” The dynamic is one of transformation, in which the concepts of race and ethnicity are ultimately brought to bear on questions of identity, legitimacy, and authenticity. By allying themselves with cannibalism in a gesture of playful exuberance, Brazilian avant-garde artists reinvent primitive society from a New World perspective. They explore cannibalism as a metaphor, broadened to include other ritual practices, in a theory of national autonomy and development opposed to Europe. First, they reverse colonial Brazilian historiography: “Down with all the importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.” ⁸ They question the ethics of discovery: “Down with the antagonistic sublimations. Brought here in caravels. Down with the truth of missionary peoples.” Second, substituting periphery for center, they propose indigenous society as a mythical locus for renewing Western social philosophy, ethnography, and art: “We already had Surrealist language. The Golden Age. Magic and Life.” The cannibal occupies a remote site to which the West is perennially and unconsciously returning in search of social and economic utopias. Thus, antropofagia’s rediscovery of the primitive New World is also placed in counterpoint with colonial texts of discovery. Working with an avant-garde vocabulary, they devised a clever point-counterpoint that was influenced by the logic of anti-art manifestos.

Figure 1.

Illustration from Hans Staden, Varhaftige befchzeibung evner Landichafft der wilden nacketen grimmingen menschfresser leuthen in der newen welt America gelegen...(1557). Photographic source: Augusto de Campos, Revista de Antropofagia (Sao Paulo: Editora Abril/ Metal Leve, 1974).

Two artworks, separated by four centuries, introduce and orient the interpretation of antropofagia in the 1920s, with respect to both its effort to recast national cultural history and its attempt to establish a complex, reflexive relationship with Europe and the European avant-garde. The first work consists of fifty-six woodcuts printed in the original 1557 edition of the travels of Hans Staden, a German adventurer who was captured during his first trip to Brazil by the cannibalistic Tupinambá tribe. The woodcuts illustrate Staden’s experiences during his eight years with the tribe, which he called wild, naked, fierce, and cannibalistic. Several woodcuts depict an orgiastic banquet in the central ground of the village, where tribal maidens are greedily devouring roasted body parts (fig. 1). ⁹ The primitive style of the woodcuts enhances the impression of barbarity given by the cannibal scenes. While some victims are being dismembered and devoured, others are shown awaiting their fate, creating an account that could be called “black” anthropology. In Brazil, these scenes were reprinted and popularized in a deeply ironic vein in the first “dentition” of the Revista de Antro-pofagia, used to illustrate the first printing of Andrade’s manifesto.

The second work is a painting by Tarsila do Amaral, dated 11 January 1928 and titled Abaporu; see cover illustration). ¹⁰ It depicts in brilliant colors a featureless savage with crossed legs, a large foot, and a small head sitting in a stylized tropical landscape of cacti and sun. With their static forms and dynamic undercurrents of color, Amaral’s paintings suggest a neoclassical modernity of simple yet excessive elements that is visibly linked to her apprenticeship with Fernand Léger. The indigenous figures are depicted as pure form and volume without movement, as massive sculptures of bodies that are all color and shape, and possess a neoclassical balance. Excess is conveyed aesthetically through giant forms that defy the canvas’s capacity to contain them, and is expressed culturally in the symbol of a prolific nature, a lemon slice of sun. Prepared for her husband Oswald de Andrade’s birthday, Amaral’s canvas becomes the most significant piece in her antropofagia phase and, predating the manifesto, founds the icon-ography of Brazil’s avant-garde primitivism, anticipating the ideological tenets of Andrade’s literary manifesto. ¹¹

The relationship of these two works epitomizes the creative tensions governing antropofagia. Staden’s cannibalistic story, embedded in Brazil’s colonial background, foregrounds the modernists’ paradoxical relationship with European culture, from distaste to fascination, and shapes their reception of European primitivist currents. ¹² Through primitivism, the Brazilian modernists resolve an intellectual dilemma that concerned Latin America in general: the desire to maintain close connections to European intellectual culture, and to preserve the racial and cultural heterogeneity that characterized their own societies. Antropofagia carves out a space between these desires, claiming descent from two primal fathers, Staden and Abaporu: the new primitivists would take pleasure in reading Staden’s diary while eating him. Andrade would later write, “Since Bilac, we are internationalists and junior Portuguese.” ¹³ The manifesto’s outrageous claims against Europe acquire an uncanny verisimilitude because of Brazil’s dual nature as a primitive and independent New World and as a colonial vice-world of Portugal. In the ritual banquet of incorporation, the abaporu absorbs the sacred enemy to assimilate his virtues. ¹⁴ For the modernists, the symbolic meal is gratifying yet ultimately ambiguous, since it represents both overcoming and becoming Europe.

If cannibals belonged to Brazil, the cannibal text had originated in Europe; ¹⁵ since Montaigne and Staden, cannibal tales have been a prime source for the Western imagination, documenting indigenous barbarism with judgments and perspectives ingrained in most of Brazil’s elite. The desire of antropofagia to affirm cultural autonomy, political decolonization, and emancipation from European literary traditions leads the learned cannibals to invert the primitive banquet text. Andrade quickly perceived in the near devouring of the German traveler a liberating metaphor that would, if inverted to the Tupinambá per-spective, exorcise the national appetite for all things European. The goal of his inversion, in its shock effect, is to replace the oppressive patriarchal system identified with Europe, which Andrade saw both as legacy and disease, with the utopian matriarchy of the tribe: “The paterfamilias and the creation of the Morality of the Stork.... In the matriarchy of Pindorama [a Tupy word referring to the land now known as Brazil].” Through this substitution, the cannibal not only appropriates the technology of the discoveries through ingestion, but at the same time remains a mythical source for these positive qualities of civilization that Europe had lost: “Joy is the proof by nines.” European primitivism is therefore marshalled against itself, its meaning inverted in favor of Brazil. Antro-pofagia repatriates the cannibal library, while posing as a pseudocatechism of salvation. In view of Brazil’s lack of pre-sixteenth-century history, antropofagia further provides a subtext for the missing mythical, epic fable of national origins. Abaporu is Ulysses posing as ethnographical hero. The savage hero, an explorer invented in Europe, returns as the native son of a more original civilization, organized from the heartland and governed by the powerful icons of nature’s luxuriance.

Though European paradigms and intellectual traditions are explicitly used as reference points in the formulation of Brazilian modernist theories, much of their work also derives from unsung antecedents in their national historiography. These include works on ethnography, Tupy-Portuguese grammars, early religious drama, sermons, travel accounts, writing about the Amazon, and epic poems on Indianist themes. ¹⁶ One can also perceive in antropofagia a recasting of stereotypes of romantic Indianism and Amazonian exoticism, both remote enough from contemporary awareness to be mythical. Is the abaporu not a distant relative of the noble savage Peri, hero of Alencar’s novel O Guarani and Carlos Gomes’s opera? ¹⁷ Does the utopian matriarchy of Pindorama in the “Cannibal Manifesto” not suggest the myth of the Amazons, rumored in texts of discovery to be a jungle tribe of female warriors who sacrificed their male offspring? Interest in the Amazon is shared in works by other Brazilian artists in Paris. ¹⁸ In this sense, primitivism is a national movement that could be equated with traditional symbols of an autochthonous Brazilian culture, located in the timeless, vast interior, and emanating from the racial and geographic diversity of the population. Primitivism, seen as a higher form of regionalism, is thus placed at the service of ethnology, while the assertion of the superiority of miscegenation and cultural diversity replaces an earlier prejudice concerning the racial inferiority and degeneracy of Brazilians on a national level.

Motifs representing vastness and fecundity, long a part of national histor-iography, are reformulated as part of an ambitious aesthetics of excess. “In a radiant land live three sad races,” repeats the São Paulo intellectual and planter Paulo Prado in his 1928 “Portrait of Brazil,” as if it were a truism. Prado’s phrase first invokes references to radiance, grandiosity, and sensuality commonly used by Portuguese chroniclers to describe the qualities of the newly discovered land, which the modernists themselves still considered pure, inexhaustible, and ahistorical. ¹⁹ In contrast to the races saddened by history and genetics, nature’s radiance contributes to the Brazilian modernists’ aesthetic of excess. The implications of this concept are crucial to our understanding of the role of the non-European intellectual in constructing a peripheral primitivism. First, excess is an aesthetic that is derived from the European avant-garde movements themselves, in their rejection of the past and the status quo. Through primitivism, antropofagia transforms this relationship to the past into an enhanced, imaginative, and paradoxical treatment of national primitivism, whose aggressive components are turned against their European sources. Furthermore, in a move that is decisive for the aftermath of the movement, the Brazilian cannibals seek to associate avant-garde primitivism with national identity through the metaphor of devouring. Finally, this move also strengthens the idea that Brazilian or Latin American art is fundamentally characterized by excess, whether it be found in colonial chronicles, in the whimsical local baroque style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in modernist manifestos, or in the graphics of concrete poetry. Excess is linked with themes of utopia and libertinism, both of which apply to readings of Andrade’s literary cannibalism.

Antropofagia locates excess in a telluric primitivism, and illustrates it in the extravagance of its ringing claims: “Down with the vegetable elites. In communication with the soil.... Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” To promote a different historical awareness, the manifesto also ridicules the prophetic texts of Western discovery: “Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. The Carib instinct.” The “Cannibal Manifesto,” with its extravagant claims, becomes the Brazilian avant-garde’s epiphanic recapitulation of epic texts such as the colonial chronicles that recount miraculous and unexpected discoveries. The cannibalists’ critical writings displace the chronicles and reclaim the land in the name of indigenous cultures. Language itself is also carried to excess, whether in the invocation of untranslated Tupy verse garnished from Couto de Magalhães (“Catiti Catiti / Imara Notiá / Notiá Imara / Ipejú”) ²⁰ or in the reduction of Shakespeare to comic paranomasia: “Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question.” The destruction of the colonial text through parody and rewriting wipes out colonial historiography and amounts to an atavistic declaration of independence, whether in the name of indigenism or of avant-garde techniques. By appropriating the metaphor of discovery, the cannibal modernists create a new tropical vocabulary and a mythology of nature’s riches that are shaped by the indigenous cultural perspectives they have invented.

Prado’s lyrical description of the sadness of Brazil’s native Americans, Africans, and Europeans recapitulates the synesthesia of a verse by poet Olavo Bilac (Brazil’s music was the “amorous flower of three sad races”); both reflect different degrees of assimilation of the racial theories and concerns prevalent in Brazil since romanticism. Various theories exist to explain racial sadness: perhaps it stemmed from existential anguish resulting from a history of conquest and slavery; or it was the result of “scientific” racialist theories of inferiority and degeneracy that had been applied to the majority of Brazil’s multi-racial population. ²¹ The racial ideals and attitudes of the modernists, in spite of their explicit alliance with indigenism, were of necessity imbued with the positivism, materialism, and evolutionism that were widespread in Brazil after 1876. Centered in the Recife school of Tobias Barreto, materialist theories fed a reaction against Catholic humanism and in favor of applied science, through readings of Comte, Darwin, Taine, Renan, and Haeckel. ²² Skidmore notes that positivism was attractive to a largely white elite interested in economic development without social change, and was bolstered by the general belief that the historically multiracial society of Brazil was free of racial prejudice (BW, 13, 22). Miscegenation and evolutionary processes, it was thought, were acting in favor of “civilization” through a successive “whitening” of the general population over time, a result of the long-term effects of European immigration; racial fusion, whose end result would be a unified Brazilian population, could be promoted because of confidence in eventual white predominance. As Andrade dryly observed in his poem, “Capital of the Republic”:

The pride of being white In the swarthy conquered land... The artificial Sugar Loaf. ²³

Liberal ideas of the late nineteenth century, however, were propounded in a society not essentially different from what it had been in the early days of the century (BW, 27). A contradictory state of affairs was created whereby liberal reformers first advanced theories of social Darwinism, and many intellectuals were affected by categories of scientific racism. ²⁴ Brazilian intellectual circles were in fact dominated by concerns with backwardness, inferiority, and degeneracy that had been put forth in racialist theories of Brazil, found in the works of such European and North American figures as Henry Thomas Buckle, Arthur Comte de Gobineau, and Agassiz or the Argentine José Ingenieros. Critic and essayist Sílvio Romero, while unsure what miscegenation would ultimately contribute to the nation’s future, gave a pessimistic assessment of the three major racial groups: “the senility of the Negro, the laziness of the Indian, the authoritarianism and miserly talent of the Portuguese had produced a shapeless nation with no original or creative qualities” (BW, 36). ²⁵

Partially echoing Romero forty years later, Mário de Andrade’s multiracial character Macunaíma, ²⁶ emperor of the jungle Amazons, is vaunted as a new national symbol in the novel’s subtitle, “a hero without any character,” even though his talent for racial metamorphosis and his sexual prowess are presented as magical, positive qualities. Through Macunaíma, modernist primitivism asserts that indigenous societies lack a history or a blueprint for the future, and occupy a space that is vacant of organized culture, save what repeats or replies to the West. ²⁷ The primitive is conceived through difference and inversion, qualities vocalized in Macunaíma’s endearing cry of pleasure, “Ai! Que preguiça!” ²⁸ Macunaíma serves Mário de Andrade’s desire to satirize modern culture by subjecting it to the Amazon hero’s critical eye. In the chapter “Letter to the Icamiabas,” for example, Macunaíma writes from São Paulo to his subjects, the Icamiabas, using the latinate language of Lisbon and signing himself “Imper-ator.” Playing on the themes of culture and barbarity, Macunaíma reveals to his female subjects that they are spuriously called “Amazons” by the uncultured inhabitants of the city. Parodying discovery texts, the letter cast Macunaíma in the role of classicist, defending the humanism of the Amazons against the nascent materialism of São Paulo’s industrial modernization. Thus, while modernists such as Mário de Andrade brought folklore into being as a discipline in Brazil, indigenous traditions and cultures were at the same time inevitably read with modernist eyes and shaped by the literary desire to transpose and filter the primitive hero into Western terms. ²⁹

Mário de Andrade begins his novel by describing Macunaíma as “the hero of our people, born in the depths of the virgin jungle as black as the son of the fear of night.” Racial difference in Macunaíma is profoundly connected both to nature and to mythology; it is not a fixed quality, but rather is subject to sudden transmutation. In the chapter “Piamã,” Mário de Andrade constructs a modern myth of race and society. When black Macunaíma and his brothers Jiguê and Manaape leave the jungle village of Tapanhumas on their way to São Paulo to recover the goddess Ci’s magic amulet, they encounter a river in which Macunaíma spots a massive rock in midstream, creating a pond shaped like a gigantic foot. Shouting because the water is so cold, Macunaíma reaches the grotto and takes a bath, not knowing the water is enchanted because the footprint was made by a saintly missionary who had been evangelizing the Indians. The water’s effect leaves Macunaíma white, blond, and blue-eyed. When Jiguê witnesses this magical transformation, he too rushes to enter the water. But so much blackness has been washed off Macunaíma that the dirty water leaves him only bronzed. When Manaape goes to bathe, there is so little water remaining that he is able only to wet the soles of his hands and feet, which become reddened because of the holy water. While as a result of this episode Macunaíma is the best prepared to enter “civilization,” Manaape is said to be the true son of the Tapanhumas: a combination of black and red. Racial “whitening” as an ideal is parodied as the occult desire of Catholic evangelicals to change indigenous peoples into themselves. The saint’s gigantic foot, ironically, finds an unexpected ally in the cannibalistic metaphor of Amaral’s Abaporu, whose enormous foot symbolizes being in nature. Mário de Andrade’s command of the primitive, magical powers of metamorphosis brings mythology and linguistic virtuosity into contact with the magical transformations of the folktale. Notwithstanding the flaws of their times, these modernist writers and artists succeed in counteracting the pervasive influences of the sad theories of the past by placing the primitive at the top of the human scale and by inverting racialist theories, affirming supposed defects as superior features. Through modernism’s literary and largely fictional ethnographies, the Indian, the black, the mestiço, ³⁰ and the European immigrant become the glad races, sources of national strength and definition.

Modernism’s Glad Races

Oswald de Andrade’s “Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto” (1924) and the volume of Brazilwood Poetry (1925), ³¹ illustrated by the colorist, geometrical “brazilwood”-style paintings of Tarsila do Amaral, are crucial predecessors to the “Cannibal Manifesto,” for they attempt to redefine Brazil by assimilating mechanical modernization to telluric ethnicity. When Andrade proclaims, in his first manifesto, the symbiosis of “the forest and the school” in a new Brazilian society, he places shamans alongside military airfields and electric turbines in the National Museum. In a modernist world, Brazil’s savage territory is the most modern of all, drawing deepest both from nature and mechanization and ultimately demonstrating their interdependence. European traditions are more deeply felt in Brazil because their coexistence with indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures brings them closer to the dark heart of their own primitive origins and occult meanings, where their symbolism is made more glaringly apparent as ritual and artifice. The 1924 manifesto, for example, reacts against the false erudition of the Empire: “Misfortune of the first white brought over, politically dominating the wild wilderness. The alumnus. We can’t help being erudite. Doctors of philosophy. Country of anonymous ills, of anonymous doctors.” Pero Vaz Caminha’s letter of discovery of 1500, quoted in Andrade’s poetry, relates how European food and eating habits were imposed on the astonished Indians, who had no interest in Portuguese fowl; the raising of a giant cross on shore with the participation of the Indians convinces the conquerors that religious conversion was all but complete. In this world of assimilation, European customs are taken out of their milieu and melded with indigenous and African practices. The Afro-Brazilian religion, condomblé, unites African, indigenous, and Catholic religious practices and beliefs. Macunaíma performs a macumba ritual in order to punish the villain who possessed his magic amulet; and Mário de Andrade quotes widely in his novel from the cordel literature of Brazil’s Northeast, a literature that was printed in popular chapbooks, and combined features of the medieval Iberian folktale, the chivalric epic, and performed lyric verse. Such fusions yield a nationalized tropical folklore, later claimed and authenticated by the purists of local tradition mentioned by Osman Lins.

The “Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto” advances an iconography of cultural transformation whose modernizing ambitions are confirmed in Amaral’s paintings, and whose purpose is, in Andrade’s terms, a general reconstruction of society. Their shared vision flashes exuberantly with the bright colors observed in popular society: “shacks of saffron and ochre in the green of the Favela, under Cabralin blue.” Tropical nature and a hybrid culture, colored by race and ethnicity, generate images of ostentation and excess that incongruously unite opposites and appear out of context: “Rui Barbosa: a top hat in Senegambia.... Negresses at the jockey club. Odalisques in Catumbi.” Brazilwood poetry, agile and candid like a wandering kodak—to borrow its own striking simile—was to be the country’s first exportable structure in a new poetic mercantilism. Promoting a national style through a program of simplicity, irony, ingenuousness, and naturalness, this new perspective humorously describes and justifies what amounts to an excessive penetration of modernity into land and society at all levels. Brazil’s past, epitomized by a lawyer citing Virgil to the Tupiniquins, becomes but a painful and anonymous memory; the present, under the slogan “barbarous and ours,” is constructed from a synchronic cultural perspective using the techniques of modernist art: synthesis, invention, and surprise. Both as a way of life and as a modern style, Brazilwood’s carefully constructed naturalness cultivates a self-conscious tropicality: “Pau Brasil poetry is a Sunday dining room with birds singing in the condensed forest of cages, a thin fellow composing a waltz for flute and Mary Lou reading the newspaper. The present is all there in the newspaper.” Those cultural images that had been selected to constitute the modernist style are transformed into enduring scenic and sensual icons of tropicalized Brazil: carnaval, sertão, and favela. Andrade locates the luxuriance of Brazil’s modernity partly in its open ethnicity, from the vatapá of Afro-Brazilian cuisine to the dance, and partly in “brazilwood” nature: the silent, tranquil energy of botanical and mineral wealth under an enervating sun. Ethnicity resembles nature in its sensual, energetic, and indolent wisdom; the portraits of the glad races are redrawn using the pure lines and colors of modern art. ³²

Figure 2.

Tarsila do Amaral, Carnival in Madureira (1924), 76cm × 63cm. Photographic source: Sérgio Milliet, Tarsila (Sao Paulo: Lázara Gráfica, 1966).

One of Amaral’s finest works is Carnival in Madureira (fig. 2), another canvas in the style of geometrical cubism that she learned in Paris from Léger and used to depict cultural landscapes that document Brazil’s modern identity as it was being theorized in Brazilwood Poetry. Amaral employed this style in some forty paintings from 1923–27, known as her Pau Brasil phase. The painting succeeds in creating a particularly rich fusion of European structural elements (geometric cubism) and American realities (folklore, popular culture, rustic folk from the interior), with the resulting incongruities that give the work its characteristic Pau Brasil identity. The scene of a popular Brazilian rural celebration of carnaval by the town’s black inhabitants, a world summarized by the shapes and colors of a village of the interior, is invaded by a strange and overpowering central structure that we recognize as the Eiffel Tower with its geometric cubism. It overshadows the only other figure rising above the village houses and hilltops, a palm tree representing tropical nationalism. The tower was perhaps built by the celebrants as a carnivalesque fantasy originating in the village. But as an allegory of the carnivalesque imagination, its strangeness suggests a transposition of the technological, civilized city of its origin to the animated space of the primitive village of mulatto or black Brazilians. In the same fashion, the villagers carry their Afro-Brazilian and primitivist roots to the European carnival, itself transposed to a propitious environment of tropical excess. In an inversion justified by the “Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto,” the native women dominate the Eiffel Tower by appropriating its geometry, in the shape of an inverted V, for their own bodies. In the foreground, an extremely tall, thin woman assumes the same position as the tower, which now becomes a popular projection of tropical playfulness and folkloric nationalism. There are still other levels of significance and irony, in the choice of the Eiffel Tower. Paris had been the center of Brazilian cultural aspiration since colonial times and, further, was the source of inspiration of Amaral’s painting. The painting’s excess stems from the incongruity of its juxtapositions, whatever historical and cultural antecedents may justify them; for the viewer, this creates an effect of ethnographic surrealism, as a modernist icon is transformed into a fetish that infiltrates and dominates both imagination and society.

Language is also subjected to brazilwood simplification and synthesis. Andrade’s goal is to Brazilianize the Portuguese language, rejecting archaisms and erudition while proclaiming the naturalness of neological forms, which should come into everyday usage from contact with languages such as Tupy-Guarani and Yoruba. Taking a position against normative linguistic rules and Jesuit grammars, Andrade praises “the millionaire contribution of all mistakes.” He thinks popular speech will contain the mythical truths of indigenous lore, which should be capable of totemizing mystery and death when uttered by the glad races as pure sound. In the poem “Brasil,” the nation is defined by ethnic speech that conveys meaning exclusively through chant, rhythm, and incantation: “Tetteray tettay Keezá Keezá Kaysay!” (the Guarani); “Uuh! Uah! Uuh!” (the jaguar); “Canyem Babá Canyem Babá Cum Cum!” (the Negro). In the manifesto, the excessive, sensual, and alogical qualities of pure language express the two symbolic extremes of human activity: carnival and prayer.

The crucial role of Afro-Brazilians in modern society is another central theme of Andrade’s manifesto and his poetry: “You have the train loaded, ready to leave. A Negro churns the crank of the turn-table beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination.” The black engineer supplies not only the physical labor for this allegorical train ride into the interior but also guides the controls that will keep it on track and determine its destination. ³³ In the poem “sabará,” the name of a colonial city in the mountains of Minas Gerais, Andrade contrasts the sun and the metallic gold of the streams to the black wave of human slaves whose mythical strength was continuously sifting the riverbed: “There used to be black men lined along the shore, to siphon the metallic river.” “Combat” brings to life a match between black and white prizefighters: “Benedito attacks and lands / right-hand punches / He’s pushed the white man against the ropes.” ³⁴ In “On the Plantation,” “a roça,” Andrade ties the strength of the slaves to the linguistic rhythm and musicality of their food (lost in the English translation): “os cem negros da fazenda / comiam feijão e angu / Aban against the ropes.”erbed: “There usema roda de carro / Nos braços” (The plantation’s hundred negroes / Ate beans and mush / Chickory squash and squash greens / They could pick up a wagon wheel / In their arms). Andrade’s retrospective constructs a panoramic vision of Negro civilization during slavery, with all its attendant mixture of horror and humanity, seen in “Incident,”

The mulatto girl died And appeared Shrieking in the mill Pounding the pestle

as well as in “Old Black Man,”

Full of splotches On his face on his crutches Begging the same alms twice Because all he sees is a cloud of mosquitoes. ³⁵

Antropofagia also includes claims about race and gender in its reordering of national priorities. In the poem “Portuguese Error,” Andrade sets up nudity as the opposite of colonization, referring to the manifesto’s association of dress with oppression: “Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality.”

The Portuguese arrived During a heavy rain

And dressed up the Indian What a pity! Had it been a sunny morning The Indian would have undressed The Portuguese. ³⁶

The nudity of the tribe represents both a return to the golden age and an inversion of Freudian repression. As one of the natural “goods” of Pau Brasil nature, nudity has a dialectical role, simultaneously symbolizing an unclothed, alogical mentality and intimating a subversive, prohibited sexuality.

A mulatto woman in a carnival procession links race to eroticism, as the ritual’s primitive forces spill over the boundaries of propriety and reveal a sexuality that further challenges European norms. In Brazilian historiography, as in modernism, eroticism is often expressed through the paradisiacal theme of libertinage; here, the dancer’s rhythmic vitality originates in a languid sensuality that connects the depths of colonization with the modern present:

  “Rio by Night” A mulatto woman struts down the avenues Like a star on stage There are a million sambas In the resident laziness... From the heart of the colony. ³⁷

In “The Girls at the Wharf” Andrade similarly returns to the founding letter of discovery by Caminha to cut out ready-made passages in which the Portuguese scribe projects the shame engendered by his own culture onto the open, tropical sexuality of naked indigenous maidens:

There were three or four in number very young and very fair With very black hair draping their shoulders And their shame so straight and tall That when we stared at them We felt no shame at all. ³⁸

Through his ready-made history of Brazil, Andrade equates the luxuriant eroticism of nature with cultural and racial heterogeneity; the erotic encounter of nature with race thus drives the paradisiacal vision of the glad races.

Manifesto Art Excesses

The first declaration of the “Cannibal Manifesto” in which cannibalism is extolled as a universal metaphor for societies at large is its most excessive and subversive: “Cannibalism alone unites us.... The world’s single law.” The “Cannibal Manifesto” sets forth an ideological framework for the Brazilian avant-garde, borrowing from the language of European manifestos in order to proclaim a new Brazilian cultural cannibalism. ³⁹ Jumping across boundaries—whether the law, the text, or society—is a practice directly advocated by the metaphor of cannibalism, in that it evokes a contagious, ritual, and obsessive devouring of limits. Since the cannibal had been relegated to the status of alien by Western society because of his forbidden yet hypnotizing taste for human flesh, Andrade strikes a sensitive chord in probing the forbidden, consuming desires sanctioned by cannibal “law,” which becomes a central point in the modernist critique of society, psychology, and art. The Brazilian is incorruptibly indigenous, Andrade hints, and has always harbored primitive impulses under a playful veneer of European politics and vestments: “The Indian dressed as senator of the Empire.” The perverse intermingling of racial boundaries implicit in Staden’s woodcuts—indigenous eaters and European victims—becomes a matter of justice in the “Cannibal Manifesto.” Cannibal justice is even more eagerly applied to questions of gender through the supremacy of matriarchy. An unsublimated sexual instinct is the revenge of the matriarchs; it is also the sublime limit of the cannibalistic metaphor that symbolizes a Brazilian utopia that is carnal both in the undressed flesh of the tribe and in the dressings of the banquet. The cannibalistic metaphor thus becomes an aesthetic that reaches across the boundaries of race, gender, and ethnicity by representing the nature and laws of the glad races through their difference from colonial realities. ⁴⁰

Figure 3.

Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (1929), 126cm ×142cm. Private collection, Rio de Janeiro. Photographic source: Mário Carelli, Art d’Amérique Latine, 1911–1968 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992).

In Amaral’s 1929 painting, Antropofagia (fig. 3) primitivism is an aesthetic, a theory, and the source of a modernist national mythology. This canvas in effect synthesizes the forces of her earlier treatments of ethnicity and cannibalism, A Negra (1923) and Abaporu (1928). Amaral works with forms that are icons in the semiotics of tropical indigenism as rediscovered in its modernist luxuriance. Her 1923 portrait of a black woman is already a complete realization of the antropofagia style: a gigantic sitting figure occupies a landscape of geometrical forms and colors, dominating the foreground with her outlined presence. She is all shape, with a few large features symbolizing race and social function. A prominent breast with nipple is draped over her arm; thick, protruding lips and a broad nose intimate African ancestry. The woman is almost pure form, sitting in her habitat in an eternal pose. The painting Antropofagia repeats the gigantic images that threaten to overflow the margins with their volume and presence. Once again, the black woman is a plain figure whose only attributes are a small head, an enormous foot, and one suspended breast, but now she is accompanied by the abaporu, whose giant foot crosses her own. The sun, now overwhelmed by monolithic forms of green tropical foliage, is a more clearly drawn lemon slice than in the previous painting.

Everywhere the painting gestures toward excess—the energy in the gargantuan forms; the power of natural forces conveyed in the serendipitous hyperbole of form and concept; and the tiny heads and enormous feet that represent a rejection of ideas and a oneness with an exuberant nature. Out of the jungle’s “spectacular tranquillity”—to quote Pau Brasil—comes an irrepressible vitality. Eternal and depersonalized, the human figures are icons of primordial space and embodiments of the newly discovered “primitive mentality.” Cannibalism vitalizes the serene iconography into a visual and “theological” feast, an appetite for an ethnographical ambrosia of flesh, sun, nudity, and foliage. Color, like language in poetry, connects force with simplicity, and in this painting, it is revitalized through the radiance and excess of a constructed tropical purity. Containing parody, stylization, and habitat, the painting is self-reflective about its construct-ivist and postcubist borrowings. Tropicalization of form, space, and color adds to the myth of excess and to the ideology of luxuriant emptiness that characterizes primitive space and culture in the modernist imagination. Like the subsumed cannibal banquet, the painting is a celebratory ritual of voracious and predatory expansiveness; the scene orates an epic fable of erotic, exotic, and unconscious geographies. Being and acting instinctually, the black and the Indian look out of the painting at the Western observer, not with the longing of saudade (a medieval Portuguese word, considered untranslatable, conveying a kind of intense longing and melancholy), but with what the observer imagines to be unalienated joy, ritual fulfillment, and unrepressed appetite. Amaral’s iconography enhances antropofagia’s portrait of the primitive as a young, glad, racially mixed Brazilian.

Eating the Heart

Two Europeans, Bishop Sardinha and Hans Staden, serve to set the emblematic parameters of the cannibal banquet seen as a rebellion by homo ludens. Antropofagia, like the French Revolution, establishes a new calendar dating from the devouring of Bishop Sardinha (Sardine) by the Caetés in 1556; Staden’s woodcuts and narrative give the revolutionary dinner ethnographic credibility. In view of its debt to Staden, the “Cannibal Manifesto” can be read as the transatlantic bridge between a New World “savage utopia,” rooted in the body and developing as an erotic perversion of origins, and a traditional pagan neoclassicism, represented in the earthly paradise. It is a dialogic banquet of culture and food, eating and reading, raw and cooked, speech and text, in which one discursive domain passes into another.

In the “Cannibal Manifesto” primitivism and ethnicity are joined to reveal an alternate, savage eldorado: ⁴¹ “The Golden Age heralded by America. The Golden Age. And all the girls.” The manifesto’s inventive key phrases can be considered parallel to the giant feet in Amaral’s paintings:

Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question. Joy is the proof by nines. We can only answer to the oracular world.

In these synthetic, capsule inscriptions, Andrade cannibalizes European cultural and theoretical statements and opposes the rationality that sustains them; antropofagia digests its European referents. The voices of the glad races call out from the depths of Brazil’s interior, at once echoing and correcting Europe with the newly found authority of primitive and mythical origins: “I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal.” Excess and allusion are the subversive tools used to invert European practice and replace it with a revolutionary primitivism based on nature and instinct: “We want the Carib Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution. The unification of all productive revolts for the progress of humanity. Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the rights of man.” Andrade’s goal is modernist autonomy not only in literature but in society as well.

Since the language and logic of historicism have failed, they are to be substituted by the alogic of ethnographic surrealism. Guaraci and Jaci are the goddess-matriarchs of the new order in which rationality is supplanted by instinct:

We already had justice, the codification of vengeance. Science, the codification of Magic. Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu into a totem.... We already had Communism. We already had Surrealist language.... We never had speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social system in harmony with the planet. The Golden Age.

In an imagined “Carib Revolution,” the glad, strong races, secure in a sane land isolated from Old World diseases identified by Freud, mock Europe while appropriating the occult objects of its desires. Freudian psychology, in fact, is Andrade’s main source for describing the defects of the European mind: “Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud.” His task is a complex and utopian rediscovery of origins and rewriting of history: “reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama.” Whether read socially, economically, philosophically, or ethnographically, the cannibalistic metaphor cuts across all boundaries. It answers Europe’s dialectical obsession with heavens and hells by combining in the Tupy feast of cannibal rhetoric the leisure and eroticism of natural luxuriance, the joy incarnated in an icon or a totem, and the technology of social and psychological machinery. Primitive gladness replaces Western themes of utopia and salvation.

Antropofagia’s program stages an attempt to use modernity for the purpose of subverting European primacy and paradigms. For the Brazilian cannibals, the primitivist idea is a useful catalyst for changing the relationship between national literature and art and their European background. As a program for local authenticity, however, the cannibal enterprise contains inherent contradictions and paradoxes—limited contact with Brazil’s racial and geographical diversity, the manifesto’s dependence on literary sources, and the use of cosmopolitan models to construct a national modernity out of Brazil’s primitive world of the interior. Although one of their major contributions is to legitimize the positive values of race and ethnicity as lasting components of national identity, the modernist program as a prototype for contemporary art can be criticized for an excessive confidence in its ability to speak for native peoples; the massive destruction of ecology and extinction of tribes in Amazonia since 1960 shows that the modernists never questioned the ability of the tribal primitive—the new heart of national identity—to survive the forces of modernity and modernization that they endorsed. They are neither sufficiently aware of the implications of their highly centralist and reductionist concept of national autonomy, nor wary of the power of cannibalism to consume Brazil’s own interior. Albeit ingenious, the movement’s position was thus inauthentic because, to use Clifford’s terms, it was “caught between cultures, implicated in others.” ⁴² Perhaps this is simply to say that it was international. It was, after all, in the rebellious atmosphere of the continental avant-garde movements that Amaral and Andrade learned to value primitivism as part of their Latin American domain. The tensions in their intellectual position, denoting constant exchange between self and other, reflect their own historical moment. The dynamic but unstable dialectical system of antro-pofagia is likewise descriptive of Brazil’s own past, which had depended upon both telluric and metropolitan traditions.

Referring to North American authors who portray another race, John R. Cooley condemns the simplification of the primitivist subject, the lack of regard for the reality of primitive life, and the exploitation of the primitive as a sounding board for the writer’s own perspectives. ⁴³ In the Brazilian case, although the writing ascribed to the primitive voice from the outside is similarly feigned and inauthentic, the illogic and surreality of a cannibal’s manifesto falls within the spirit of Andrade’s project and thus constitutes a convincing text. Andrade seems keenly aware of the irony of his appropriations as an outsider; he justifies them by changing European prime materials into a different language, a savage discourse: “Children of the sun, mother of the living. Discovered and loved ferociously with all the hypocrisy of saudade, by the immigrants, by slaves and by the touristes. In the land of the Great Snake.” On a rhetorical level, the manifesto can be defended both as a parody and as the apotheosis of the genre. It begins by mocking Marx—“Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically”—and ends by suggesting the rediscovery of an actual pagan paradise through cannibalism.

Yet the limitations of avant-garde indigenism are betrayed by a superficial familiarity and romantic identification with the tribal primitive. Why do the Tupinambá cannibals eat so much European food? Staden is necessary to authenticate the description of a national cannibal (re)past that, for antropofagia, had no historical presence. Given the founding role assigned to his “fieldwork,” one may ask whether antropofagia’s symbolic modernist ritual is really a barbarous transgression or just a synthetic, if also subversive, self-renewal. In this sense, the elite urban cannibals never really escape the ambiguous heritage of their colonial education, since by adopting the characteristics of Europe’s imaginary other—albeit in an aggressive ingestion—in order to define their new self, they tacitly accept the identity that the West has foisted upon its primitive other. ⁴⁴ Acts of supposed anticolonial incorporation or devouring, in effect, leave the Brazilians in a position more equivocal than ever before. ⁴⁵ Situated between cultures, antropofagia runs the risk of erasing the narrating self by removing the distinction between self and other, between subject and object. What remains is only the tedious vagueness and timelessness of an “artificial Sugar Loaf” para-dise. Ironically, by consuming the pristine interior of Brazil, the modernist can-nibals are eating their own hearts. From our contemporary perspective, the enduring contribution to modernity of this movement in favor of indigenous artistic autonomy resides less in its dynamism and more in its instability—the tension of its double desire to situate cultural autonomy in Brazil’s ethnicity and to stand at the cutting edge of the cosmopolitan avant-garde.