Imperfect Harmony: Coca-cola and the Cannibal Metaphor in beba coca cola, Sangue de Coca-Cola, and A Hora da estrela

IMPERFECT HARMONY: COCA-COLA AND THE CANNIBAL METAPHOR IN BEBA COCA COLA, SANGUE DE COCA-COLA,AND A HORA DA ESTRELA by Thomas P . Waldemer Iowa State University COCA-Cola’s famous 1971 “Hilltop Commercial” represented the soft drink as a product that not only crosses but erases international boundaries. The 30 second spot featured an international assembly of young people with Coke bottles in hand, lip-synching in “perfect harmony” as they professed their collective desire to “buy the world a Coke.” The message was clear: the world was now one seamless market and Coke, the planetary beverage of choice, was the perfect icon for the global village of transnational capitalism.1 A logical implication of this triumphant “coca-colonialization” might be an inexorable trend towards global cultural uniformity. Around the time the Hilltop add appeared Marshall McLuhan was questioning the whole notion of a passive or homogeneous reception of cultural phenomena. McLuhan asked “whether the same figure, say Coca-Cola, can be considered as ‘uniform’ when it is set in interplay within totally different grounds from China to Peru” (41). In the light of McLuhan’s question this article will examine Coca-Cola’s often antagonistic relationship with Brazilian culture,2 focusing on three literary examples of Brazil’s dialogue with Coca-Cola: Décio Pignatari’s 1957 poem “beba coca-cola,” Roberto Drummond’s novel Sangue de Coca-Cola (1980), and Clarice Lispector’s penultimate book, A hora da estrela (1978). The figure of Coca-Cola will, in turn, be viewed through the prism of Brazil’s “quintessential cultural metaphor” of antropofagia cultural.3 As Randal Johnson has written : “Since the 1920”s Cannibalism has become a major cultural metaphor in 97 Brazil, constituting a reflection on the possibility of creating a genuine national culture, an attack on uncritical imitation of foreign models, and a critical metaphor of cultural relations between First and Third World nations” (42). By the end of the 20th century the concept of Brazilian cultural dependency came into question as Brazil itself became a net exporter of culture, especially of popular music and television programs (Arenas 37). However, writing before 1980 Pignatari, Drummond, and Lispector approached their work with a different set of assumptions. In their literary-historical context questions of modernization and cultural identity were still sharply focused on “defending the “national-popular” rather than “exporting the “international-popular” (Ortiz 205). In this context, the Cannibal metaphor is a vibrant, highly relevant vehicle for analysis, proving to be particularly appropriate when addressing the cultural impact of Post WWII consumer culture epitomized by Coca-Cola. I Décio Pignatari’s 1957 concrete poem, “beba coca-cola” both anticipates and subverts new forms of communication, most particularly television commercials , which did not become culturally significant in Brazil until the 1970s (Perrone 46).4 Appropriating the industrial language of commercial propaganda , Pignatari creates an “anti-advertisement” by turning the soft drink’s advertising slogan against itself. The poem begins with the command beba (drink) and then rewrites the imperative to babe (drool). The word “coca” is isolated from cola, creating a clear reference to coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine and original ingredient of Coca-Cola (Solt 14). Through a simple vowel shift, Coca is then deformed into caco or glass shard. (Coke was bottled in glass at the time the poem’s composition). Next, separating the word cola from coca, Pignatari produces the Portuguese word for glue, which is then combined with caco to form (cola caco or glue shard). Finally, the poet scrambles the letters of Coca-Cola to form the word cloaca, meaning a “filthy place” or cesspool. Playing with the limited possibilities of the ad slogan, Pignatari’s poetic satire manages to reflect the nationalist spirit of the Kubitsheck era (1956-61). The poet equates the command to drink Coca-Cola with idiocy and dependency (drooling) and the production and consumption of the product with cultural poisoning and pollution (coca-cocaine, cloaca). Pignatari’s stranger reformulation , cola caco (glue shard) has provoked Rosemarie Waldrop’s transnational concern as to what future archaeologists might say about modern civilization if the shards we leave are not fragments of fine pottery, but rather...