Cannibal Manifesto
by Oswald de Andrade
Cannibalism: An Introduction to Oswaldo de
Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto”
The starting date for the Brazilian modernist
movement, which advocated a return to the soil, is usually given as 1922, when
the major impulse was given by the Week of Modern Art. This revolutionary
approach was announced by a woman painter, Anita Malfatti, “the protomartyr of
modernism,” whose forward-looking paintings in her second exhibition, in 1917,
were derided by Monteiro Lobato (He claimed that she simply contributed her own
“-ism” in her paintings where a horse and rider fall over: “I call this genre
topple-ism”). But he himself had a great influence on Brazilian modernism’s
most celebrated text, Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928. Also
called the “Brazilwood Manifesto,” because it champions the use of native
material and turns against artifice, this manifesto takes its name from the
cannibalistic Tupi Indians of Brazil who disposed gastronomically of an unloved
Bishop. It is outrageously satirical, reading in part: “Only cannibalism unites
us... Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.” The manifesto shares the title
of a Dada publication of two issues, Cannibale, whose lively primitivistic
spirit is joined to the Russian Rayonists, with their Why-We-Paint-Our-Faces
manifesto against the sophisticated and over-civilized society. Andrade’s
preface to Seraphim Ponte Grande is another modernist manifesto that repudiates
Modernism: “The Modernist Movement, culminating in anthropophagous measles,
seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon.” Elsewhere, he distinguishes between
the two: “Simultaneity is the coexistence of things and events at a given
moment. Polyphony is the simultaneous artistic union of two or more melodies
which have the fleeting effect of clashing sounds as they contribute to a total
final effect."
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Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
The unique law of the world. The disguised
expression of all individualisms, 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 Gracos.
I am only interested in what’s not mine. The
law of men. The law of the cannibal.
We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic
husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent
psychological seers.
What dominated over truth was clothing, an
impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction
against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this.
Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures.
Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation,
exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake.
It’s because we never had grammatical
structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from
suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil.
One participating consciousness, one religious
rhythm.
Against all the importers of canned
conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study
prelogical mentality.
We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the
French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the
sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry
declaration of the rights of men.
The golden age proclaimed by America. The
golden age. And all the girls.
Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian
Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau.
From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist
Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right
along.
We were never baptized. We live with the right
to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata.
But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth
of logic.
Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made
our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on
paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was
accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the
talk.
The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without
body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance
against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions.
We can only be present to the hearing world.
We had the right codification of vengeance.
The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of
taboo into totem.
Against the reversible world and objectified
ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a
victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And
the forgetfulness of interior conquests.
Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.
Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.
Cariba instinct.
Death and life of hypotheses. From the
equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I.
Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.
Against the vegetable elites. In communication
with solitude.
We were never baptized. We had the Carnival.
The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or
playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings.
We already had communism. We already had a
surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju*
Magic and life. We had relations and
distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we
knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical
forms.
I asked a man what was Right. He answered me
that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was
called Galli Mathias. I ate him.
The only place there is no determinism is
where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us?
Against the stories of men that begin in Cape
Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without
Caesar.
The fixation of progress by means of
catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions.
Against antagonistic sublimations brought over
in sailing ships.
Against the truth of the poor missionaries,
defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo – It is a lie
repeated many times.
But no crusaders came to us. They were
fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up, because we are strong and
as vindictive as the land turtles.
Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated
Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of
vegetables.
We never had any speculation. But we believed
in divination. We had Politics, that is, the science of distribution. And a
socio-planetary system.
Migrations. The flight from tedious states.
Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatives and speculative boredom.
From William James and Voronoff.
Transfiguration of taboo into totem. Cannibalism.
The pater familias is the creation of the
stork fable: a real ignorance of things, a tale of imagination and a feeling of
authority in front of curious crowds.
We have to start from a profound atheism in
order to reach the idea of God. But the Cariba did not have to make anything
precise. Because they had Guaraci.
The created object reacts like the Fallen
Angel. Ever since, Moses has been wandering about. What is that to us?
Before two Portuguese discovered Brazil,
Brazil discovered happiness.
Against the Indian de tocheiro. The Indian son
of Mary, the godson of Catherine of Médicis and the son-in-law of Don Antonio
de Mariz.
Happiness is the real proof.
No Pindorama matriarchy.
Against Memory the source of habit. Renewed
for personal experience.
We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we
react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds
of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our
instruments and our stars.
Against Goethe, against the mother of the
Gracos, and the Court of Don Juan VI.
Happiness is the real proof.
The struggle between what we might call the
Uncreated and the Created – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man
and his taboo. Daily love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Cannibalism.
Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human
adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal
cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud
identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the
sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibalist instinct. Once
carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love.
Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter
vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate – envy, usury,
calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized,
it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals.
Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand
virgins in the land of Iracema – the patriarch Joa Ramalho the founder of Sao
Paulo.
Our independence was never proclaimed. A
typical phrase of Don Juan VI – My son, put this crown on your head, before
some adventurer does it! We expel the dynasty. We have to get rid of the
Braganza spirit, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte.
Against social reality, dressed and
oppressive, defined by Freud – in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are
prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.
___
Endnote
*“The New Moon, or the Lua Nova, blows in
Everyman remembrances of me” in The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes.
Reprinted by permission of Mary Ann Caws.
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