José Oswald de Andrade [Translated by Leslie Barry] 

 

from THE CANNIBAL MANIFESTO

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Only cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

 

* * *

 

Only law in the world. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

 

 

* * *

 

Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.

 

* * *

 

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

 

* * *

 

It was because we never had grammars, of collections of pressed plants. And we never knew what urban, suburban, frontier, and continental were. Sluggish in the mapamundi of Brazil.

 

* * *

 

Against Father Vieira. Architect of our first loan, to earn commission. The illiterate king said to him: Put that on paper but without much chatter. The loan was done. Brazilian sugar was signed away. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us the gab.

 

* * *

 

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

 

* * *

 

Against vegetable elite. In communication with the soil.

 

* * *

 

We already had communism. We already had surrealist language. The Golden Age.

 

* * *

 

I asked a man what law was. He answered that it was the guarantee to the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.

 

* * *

 

There isn’t determinism only when there is mystery. But what does that have to do with us?

 

 

* * *

 

Against the histories of man that begin on the Cape Finisterre. The undated world. The un-initiated one. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

 

* * *

 

To arrive at the idea of God, it is necessary to depart from a deep atheism. But the Carib didn’t need that. Because they had Guaraci.

The created react like the fallen angels. Later Moses rambles. What does that have to do with us?

 

* * *

 

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.

 

 

* * *

 

Joy is the proof by nines.

 

* * *

 

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchis, and the Court of D. Joao VI.

 

* * *

 

Joy is the proof by nines.

 

* * *

 

 

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, registered by Freud – reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutes and without the prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.

 

 

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Selected translator’s notes:

 

-       The Tupi are indigenous Brazilians.

-       Galli Mathias is also a pun, referring to the Portuguese word Galamatias, which means nonsense.

-       Pindorama is the Tupi term for Brazil. Guaraci is the Tupi sun god, mother of all men. Jaci is the Tupi moon god, creator of all plants.

 

 First printed in the Revista de Antropofagia, Year 1, No. 1, 1928. Annotated translation by Leslie Barry in Latin America Literary Review Vol. 19, No. 38 (July-Dec 1991) the translation reprinted in Bengal Lights Autumn 2013.

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