One semester in the making, my translation of Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 modernist classic, “The Cannibalist Manifesto.” A call to arms for cultural anthropofagites everywhere. Significant grammatical liberties have been taken because Andrade’s abruptness does not translate well out of the compact Portugese verb structures into English’s more expansive ones. Ending notes (not proper ones, because I don’t have the stupid WordPress footnote plug-in, so if you don’t get a reference check the bottom or Wikipedia) with cultural references are also mine.
The Cannibalist Manifesto
Only cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
It’s the singular law of the world. The sentiment masked in all individualisms, in all collectivisms. In all the religions. In all the peace treaties.
Tupi*, or not tupi that is the question.
Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchae.
I am only interested in that which is not mine. Law of man. Law of cannibalism.
We are tired of all the suspicious Catholic husbands caught up in drama. Freud solved the Enigma of Woman and other scares of print psychology.
What destroyed the truth was the clothing, the impermeable barrier between the interior world and the exterior world. The reaction against the well-dressed man. American cinema will inform.
Children of the sun, mother of the living. They met and loved ferociously, with all the hypocrisy of nostalgia, as immigrants, as traffickers, as tourists. In the country of the great serpent.
It was because we never had grammars, or collections of old-world plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, backland and continental. Lazy men on the world-map of Brazil.
A participatory conscience, a religious rhythm.
Against all the importers of canned consciousness. The tangible existence of life. And the pre-logic mentality for Mr. Levy-Bruhl to study.
We want a Caribbean revolution. Better than the French revolution. A unification of all successful revolts for the rights of man. Without us, Europe would barely have had their paltry declaration of human rights.
The golden age trumpeted by America. The golden age. And all the girls.
Descendants. The contact with Caribbean Brazil. Ori Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The Natural Man. Rosseau. From the French revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik revolution to the Surrealist revolution and the barbarous technics of Keyserling. We’re moving right along.
We were never baptized. We live under the right to sleepwalk. We made Christ appear in Bahía. Or in Belém do Pará.
But we never allowed the birth of logic among us.
Against Padre Vieira. The author of our first loan, to gain his commission. The illiterate king told him: sign here on the form, but without sweet talk. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was ground. Vieira left his sugar money in Portugal and brought us the sweet talk.
The spirit refuses to conceive of the spirit without the body. Anthropomorphism. The cannibalism vaccine is necessary. For a counter-balance against the religions from within. And the inquisitions from without.
We can only answer to the orecular world.
We’ve had vengeance codified as justice. Science codified as Magic. Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of Taboo in totem.
Against the reversible world and objectivized ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought which is dynamic. The individual victim of the system. Source of the classic injustices. Of the romantic injustices. And the forgetting of the interior conquests.
Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes
The Caribbean instinct.
Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I am part of Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos are part of I. Subsistence. Recognition. Cannibalism.
Against the elite vegetables. In communication with the soil.
We were never baptized. We made Carnival. The indian dressed as the senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or appearing in Alencar’s* operas filled with good Portuguese sentiments.
We already had communism. We already had the surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju.*
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 help of some grammatical forms.
I asked a man what a Right was. He told me that it was the guarantee of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias*. I ate him.
There is only no determinism where there is mystery. But what have we got to do with this?
Against the histories of man that begin at Cape Finisterre. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.
The fixation of progress through catalogs and television sets. Only the machinery. And the blood transfusions.
Against the antagonistic sublimations. Brought in caravels.
Against the truth of the missionaries, defined by the sagacity of one cannibal, the Viscount Cairu. It was a lie told many times.
But those who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive, like Jabuti.
If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of the vegetables.
We didn’t have speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics which is the science of distribution. And a social-planetary system.
The migrations. The escape from tedious states. Against urban scoliosis. Against the Conservatories and tedious speculation.
From William James and Voronoff. The transfiguration of Taboo into totem. Cannibalism.
The patriarch and the birth of the Moral of the Stork: real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + feelings of authority over the curious proles.
A break from a profound atheism is needed to arrive at the idea of God. But the Caraiba don’t need this. Because they’ve had Guaraci.
The objective born reacting like the Angels of the Fall. After Moses wandered. What have we with this?
Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.
Against the Indian torchbearer. The Indian son of Maria, godson of Catherine de Medici and son-in-law of Don Antonio de Mariz.
Happiness is the proof of nine*.
In the matriarchy of Pindorama*.
Against Memory as source of custom. The renovated personal experience.
We are concretists. The ideas take count, react, inflame the people in public squares. We suppress the ideas and other paralyses. By the routes. To believe in signals, in the instruments, and in the stars.
Against Goethe, Cornelia, and the court of King John VI*.
Happiness is the proof of nine.
The battle between what may be called Uncreated and the Creature – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of Man and his Taboo. The quotidian love and the capitalist way of life. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem. The human adventure. The final terrain. However, only the pure elites will come to realize the carnal cannibalism, which brings with it the highest sense in life and evades all the evils identified by Freud, the evil catechisms. What he gives is not a sublimation of sexual instinct. It is the thermal scale of the cannibalistic instinct. From carnality it becomes elective and brings affection. Love, effective. Science, speculative. It deviates and and transfers itself. We arrive at the debasement. The lowly cannibalism agglomerated in the sins of catechism – envy, usury, slander, murder. The plague of so-called cultured and christianized peoples, it is against her we are agitating. Cannibals.
Against Anchieta* canting about the eleven thousand virgins of heaven, in the land of Iracema, – the patriarch John Ramalho founder of Sao Paulo.
Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. Typical phrase of King John VI: My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does! We are expelling the dynasty. It is necessary to expel the spirit of Braga, the ordinations and the rape of Maria da Fonte*.
Against the social reality, well-dressed oppressor, cataloged by Freud – a reality without complexities, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries of the matriarchy of Pindorama.
Oswald de Andrade
in Piratinga
374th Anniversary of the Feast of Bishop Sardine*
(From Anthropofagy Review, Year 1 Issue 1, May 1928)
*1.The Tupi were an indigneous tribe of Brazil. Unfamiliar non-Western proper names are deities from the Tupi language.
*2. Alençar – Portuges writer and composer who wrote stories romanticizing the “noble savage.”
*3. Indigenous chants.
*4. galimatias – Nonsense talk.
*5. prova do nove – simple proof used to teach children mathematics, colloquial English translation would be “proof of the pudding” but I hate that term.
*6. Pindorama – indigenous term for Brazil – “land of palms”
*7. Last Portuguese king to reign over Brazil.
*8. Anchieta – Portuguese colonial missionary, responsible for producing some religious works in indigenous languages.
*9. Leader of an 1848 popular revolt (crushed) in Northern Portugal.
*10. Bishop Sardine was sacrificed and eaten by the Tupi in ritual veneration in 1554.
