“Tupi or not Tupi”: Representations of the Cannibal in Brazil

                                      By Bianca Biberaj

 

      In his 1928 essay-poem “Manifesto Antropofago,” Oswald de Andrade describes a strategy of “cultural cannibalism” for his native Brazil that is once a re-signification of anthropophagy and a repositioning of the country’s modernist movement. Filled with linguistic jokes, puns, and references to various European intellectual movements, “Manifesto Antropofago” presents a vision of of violent self-consumption in which Brazilian society recognizes itself as inherently composed of American and European influences, but not subordinate to these cultures. Andrade uses ritual cannibalism as a symbol for the historical and systematic oppression of colonized people by European colonizers. Though the proposal of cannibalism as a viable strategy for Brazilian society, Andrade argues against stereotyped binaries of good/evil, civilization/barbarity, north/south, and modernity/tradition.[1] In its original publication in the Revista de Antropofagia, Andrade chose Tarsila do Amaral’s O antropófago (image 1) as a visual accompaniment to his written work. Amaral’s drawing depicting a cannibal likewise revises the the Western-defined stereotypical cannibal through a radically divergent visual depiction of the figure in Brazilian society.

     

      The original cover of Revista de Antropofagia featured a sixteenth century woodcut by German soldier Hans Staden (image 2). In the mid-sixteenth century Staden traveled to Brazil, where he claimed to have been captured and sentenced to sacrifice by the Tupinambá people.[2] The sensationalized narrative of Staden’s capture included the soldier’s invocation of Christian prayer to cure members of the Tupinambá community, amongst other scenes.[3] These episodes were memorialized in Staden’s 1577 tell-all book, True History and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, which included original woodcuts depicting the culture and practices of the Tupinambá. The book became an international bestseller, with 76 editions. The use of one of Staden’s woodcuts for the cover of Revista de Antropofagia constitutes an appropriation of the previously canonized depiction of the “native American” cannibal. The reader of Revista de Antropofagia is first asked to confront an image that has come to define Brazilian society for Western Europeans, before delving into often absurd and tongue-in-cheek texts and images.

     

      Tarsila do Amaral’s drawing published with Andrade’s text diverges from the spectacular representation of Hans Staden’s woodcuts. O antropófago is related to a painting completed earlier in 1928, Abaporú (image 3), and in both, a gender-neutral human figure fills a majority of the composition, its body proportions exaggerated and lengthened. Amaral depicts the figure viewed from its side and sitting with its legs bent and right hand resting on a ground surface. The figure’s left hand rests under its cheek, with its face aligned toward the viewer. The figure's body parts increase in size from top to toe, with its foot as the largest component of the drawing. On the right side of the composition is a cactus with an equal height as that of the sitting figure. A sun bisects the space between the cactus and the figure, its form reduced to a circle with eight lines representing rays.

 

      Andrade uses the metaphor of cannibalism to call attention to the reality of “la brasilidad” and the multilayered identity of his society.[4] If Andrade’s text can be characterized as a provocative call for this recognition, Amaral’s O antropófago is an attempt to visually represent the cannibal without the connotations of brutality and subordination commonly attached to this figure in Western literature and culture. This vision of the cannibal is stripped of any spectacle, violence, or rage. Instead, Amaral imbues the figure with the tension of tensions of disproportion that can be compared to Andrade’s description of the flow of influence between colonizer and colonized—ever-changing and constantly morphing. Amaral’s cannibal, with an energy extending beyond the confines of the picture plane, is simultaneously too large in some places and too small in others. The figure represented in Amaral’s earlier Abaporú gives the impression of being capable of bursting through the confines of the physical canvas and, similarly, Amaral’s drawing in Revista de Antropofagia seems to be crunched on the page between Andrade’s words.

 

      “Manifesto Antropofago” proposes the re-signification of the cannibal in the Eurocentric narrative of modernism and development. Andrade dates his text “Year 374 since the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha,” a reference to the ritual sacrifice of Bishop Sardinha of Bahia in 1556 by the Caltis people of Brazil.[5] With a sense of pride, Andrade emphasizes the European contracted immorality of cannibalism and calls for its reclamation. With this reference, Andrade questions the intellectual basis for the Western trajectory of modernism. As Rodrigo Lopes de Barros has argued, for Andrade, cultural cannibalism is transculturation: all cultures are inherently plural and are transformed by the absorption of each other’s knowledge, morality, and violence.[6] Amaral’s cannibal recognizes this figure of contestant transformation and contradiction, corroborating Andrade’s description of the historical tension inherent to Brazilian society between colonized and colonizer

 

 

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Endnotes

[1] Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” in Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,ed. Elaine O’Brien et al. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013).

[2] Donald W. Forsyth, “Three Cheers for Hans Staden: The Case for Brazilian Cannibalism,”Ethnohistory 32, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 17.

[3] Neil L. Whitehead, “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism,” Hispanic AmericanHistorical Review 80. no. 4 (November 2000): 724.[4] Victor Hugo Adler Pereira, “La antropofagia como actitud: en las vanguardias, en el tropicalismo y en la literatura periféria,” Cuadernos de Literatura 18, no. 35 (January 2014): 135.

[5] Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 44.

[6] Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, “From Underworld to Avant-Garde: Art and Criminology in Cuba and Brazil,” Comparative Literature Studies 49, no. 2 (June 2012): 235.