Cannibal Manifesto
Oswaldo de Andrade Cannibalism: An Introduction to “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.” ————————————- Cannibal Manifesto Only 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,