Anthropophagic Manifesto | Oswald de Andrade

From: MARQUES, Pedro N. (ed). The Forest & The School: where to sit at the dinner table?, pp. 99-111. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, June 2020. Available as a pdf here.

Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) originally appeared in the first issue of the first “dentition” of the Revista de Antropofagia. A paradigmatic text of the Brazilian twentieth century, it followed Oswald’s more decolonizing, even nationalistic, “Manifesto Pau-Brasil” (1924). In its verses and aphorisms, it set the stage for the interminable and ambitious program of Antropofagia. Several English translations of the manifesto are in circulation, yet none is particularly correct or annotated. This translation acknowledges in part Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro’s translation in Antropofagia e histórias de canibalismo as well as the version found in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader.

Anthropophagy alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The world’s one and only law. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question.

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi.¹

I am only interested in what isn’t mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagous.

We are tired of all those suspicious catholic husbands made into drama. Freud put an end to the enigma of women and to other frights of printed psychology.

What hindered truth was clothing, the impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. The reaction against the dressed man. American cinema will inform.

Children of the sun, mother of the living. Found and ferociously loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing, by the immigrants, by the slaves and by the tourists. In the country of cobra grande.²

This was because we never had grammars nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, limitrophe and continental. Idlers in the world map of Brazil.

A participating consciousness, a religious rhythm.

Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.

We want the Carib revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all effective revolts in the direction of man. Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its poor declaration of the rights of man.

The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.³

Filiation. The contact with Carib Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre.⁴ Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, the Surrealist Revolution, and Keyserling’s⁵ technological barbarian. We walk on.

We were never catechized. We live by a somnambular law. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.

But we never admitted the birth of logic among us.

Against Father Vieira.⁶ Author of our first loan, so that he could earn his commission. The illiterate king had told him: put it on paper but don’t be too wordy. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was taxed. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us the wordiness.

The spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without a body. Anthropomorphism. The need for an anthropophagic vaccine. For an equilibrium against the religions of the meridian. And external inquisitions.

We can attend only to the auracular world.⁷

We had justice, the codification of vengeance. Science, the codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of the Taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Cadaverized. A stop to dynamic thought. The individual as a victim of the system. The source of classical injustices. Of romantic injustices. And a forgetfulness of inner conquests.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.

The Carib instinct.

The life and death of hypotheses. From the equation self part of the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos part of the self. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy.

Against the vegetative elites. In communication with the soil.

We were never catechized. We did Carnival instead. The Indian dressed up as senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or featuring in Alencar’s operas, brimming with good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had the Surrealist language. The golden age.

Catiti Catiti

Imara Notiá

Notiá Imara

Ipejú.⁸

Magic and life. We had the relation and distribution of physical goods, of moral goods, of dignified goods. And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the aid of some grammatical forms.

I asked a man what Law was. He replied it was a guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.⁹

Determinism is absent only where there is mystery. But what does that have to do with us?

Against the stories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterre. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress by way of catalogues and television sets. Only the machinery. And the blood transfusers.

Against antagonistic sublimations. Brought over on the caravels.

Against the truth of missionaries, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagous, the Viscount of Cairu: It is a much repeated lie.¹⁰

But those who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization we are now eating, for we are strong and vengeful like the Jabuti.¹¹

If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of plants.¹²

We did not have speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social planetary system.

Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against the Conservatories, and tedious speculation.

From William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of the Taboo into totem. Anthropophagy.¹³

The pater familias and the creation of the fable of the stork: real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + authoritarian attitude before the curious progeny.

To arrive at the idea of God, one must start from a profound atheism. But for the Carib this wasn’t necessary. Because they had Guaraci.

The created objective reacts like the Fallen Angels. Afterwards, Moses rambles on. What have we got to do with that?

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.

Against the torch-bearing Indian. The Indian son of Mary, godson of Catherine de Medici and son-in-law to Dom Antônio de Mariz.¹⁴

Joy is like casting out nines.

In the matriarchy of Pindorama.¹⁵

Against Memory, source of custom. Personal experience renewed.

We are concretists. Ideas take over, react, set fire to people in public squares. Let us suppress ideas and other paralyses. Exchange them for routes. To follow the signs, and believe in the instruments and the stars.

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of Dom João VI.

Joy is like casting out nines.

The struggle between what one could call the Uncreated and the Creature— ilustrated by the permanent contradiction between man and his Taboo. Everyday love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. The earthly aim. Only the pure elites, however, were capable of realizing a carnal anthropophagy, which carries the highest meaning of life and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechist evils. What occurs is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers itself. We reach vilification. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of catechism—envy, usury, calumny, murder. Plague of the so-called cultured and Christianized peoples, it is against them that we’re acting. Anthropophagy.

Against Anchieta¹⁶ singing the eleven thousand virgins of the sky, in the land of Iracema—the patriarch João Ramalho founder of São Paulo.¹⁷

Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. A phrase typical of Dom João VI: My son, put that crown on your head, before some adventurer puts it on his! We expelled the dynasty. It is necessary to expel the spirit of Bragança, the ordinations, and Maria da Fonte’s snuff.¹⁸

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, recorded by Freud—reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without the penitentiaries of the matriarchy of Pindorama.

In Piratininga.

Year 374 of the swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha.¹⁹

The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Roman plebeian nobles who served as tribunes in the late second century BC, and who were assassinated for their attempt to pass major land reforms that would have redistributed patrician landholdings among soldiers and plebeians.—Ed.
Cobra grande, literally meaning big snake, is a mythological creature of Amazonian cosmologies, and is spoken of throughout Brazil. It is associated with many myths. The most common depicts a nocturnal black snake that can shape shift into many forms (canoes or a woman). It is feared as the most powerful underwater creature of the Amazon river, and is also seen as a threat to the Amazonian land itself (e.g., the city of Belém). Myths of Tupi origin usually term the creature Boiúna (black snake) or Boiaçu (big snake). Raul Bopp, editor of the second “dentition” of the Revista de Antropofagia, wrote his seminal poem “Cobra Norato” inspired in the myth of cobra grande.—Ed.
In the original Manifesto, “girls” is in English.—Ed.
“Oú Villegaignon print terre” is a quote from Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals.”—Ed.
Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946) was a German philosopher and writer.—Ed.
Father Vieira (1608–97) was a Portuguese Jesuit philosopher and writer.—Ed.
Oswald de Andrade uses the pun, “auracular,” joining the word aural (relating to the ear) to oracular.—Ed.
“New Moon, oh New Moon, breathe into Everyman memories of me.” Couto de Magalhães, O Selvagem (The Savage) (Rio de Janeiro, 1876). Written upon request of Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil for the Centennial International Exhibition of Philadelphia, O Selvagem is an anthropological and linguistic study of Amerindian peoples; it is structured in two parts titled, “Program of General Language According to Ollendorf, including Original Texts of Tupi Myths,” and “Origins, Customs, and Region of the Savages: Methods to Tame them through Military Colonies and Military Interpreters.”—Ed.
Galli Mathias refers to the word of unknown origins gallimaufry, meaning gibberish; the term was used by Montaigne in his essays, and is linked to the invented “story of a lawyer who had to plead in a (law)suit about the cock of a man named Matthew, and in whose confused speech the frequently recurring Gallus Mathie became Galli Mathias.” See the glossary of Henry Morley, ed., The Essays of Michel Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: Routledge, 1886). Oswald de Andrade implies that European epistemology and discourse cannot apply to America, and thus that it can only be eaten and transformed.—Ed.
José da Silva Lisboa, Viscount of Cairu (1756–1835) was a Brazilian politician, economist, and historian, as well as supporter of Dom Pedro I in the struggles for the Independence of Brazil. He was a follower of the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, and supported the opening of trade with Brazil, which was highly restricted by the Portuguese crown until the early nineteenth century.—Ed.
Turtle from the forest regions of Brazil and the Amazon.—Ed.
In the Tupi-Guarani cosmologies, Guaraci refers to the Sun spirit or God who gives life to all things, while Jaci refers to the Moon spirit or God, protector of life and reproduction.—Ed.
Serge Voronoff (1866–1951) was a French surgeon who gained fame for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on the testicles of men for therapeutic purposes.—Ed.
Dom Antônio de Mariz is the character of a Portuguese nobleman in the novel O Guarany (1857) by José de Alencar. In these verses, Oswald de Andrade is referring to Indianism, Brazilian nationalist art movement professed by the royal academies of Emperor Dom Pedro II in the late nineteenth century.—Ed.
Pindorama is a word of Tupi origins, meaning “land of good harvest” or “land of palm,” used to refer to Brazil.—Ed.
José de Anchieta (1534–97) was a Spanish Jesuit missionary to Brazil.—Ed.
Iracema is one of the major novels of Brazilian Indianism, written by José de Alencar, and published in 1865. It narrates the romance between a Tabajara indigenous woman, Iracema, and the Portuguese colonist, Martim. In Tupi, the term Iracema means “bee swarm,” and was used by Alencar as an anagram for America.—Ed.
“The spirit of Bragança” refers to the Portuguese royal dynasty that ruled from the Discoveries until the end of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, including the royal bloodline of Brazil. Maria da Fonte was a Portuguese woman famous for igniting the people’s revolt (The Revolution of Maria da Fonte) of 1846–47 in Northern Portugal. The revolt was a consequence of social tensions lingering from the Portuguese liberal wars of 1828–34 between the constitutionalists and the absolutists, which saw Dom Pedro I leave the Brazil he had made independent to return to his home country.—Ed.
Fernandes Sardinha, the first Portuguese bishop in Brazil, was sent to Salvador da Bahia from July 1552 to June 1556. On July 16, 1556, after suffering a shipwreck near Alagoas, he was eaten by Caeté Indians. Piratininga is a municipality in the state of São Paulo.—Ed.