1. Brasilwood Manifesto
(forthcoming)



2. Anthropophagite Manifesto

[First published in Teething no. 1 of The Anthropophagite Review, May 1928, São Paulo, SP, Brasil. Translation in progress; endnotes* by translator. Use browser back-arrow or right-click-back to return to text. Back-links will be provided in the future]

Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The world’s only law. Masked expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. All regions. All peace treaties.

Tupi or not tupi,[1] that is the question.

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi.

I’m only interested in what’s not mine. Law of man. Anthropophagite law.

We’ve had it with mistrustful Catholic husbands in plays. Freud put an end to the Woman Enigma and other alarums of published psychology.

What trampled the truth was clothing, the rubberized layer between the inner and outer worlds. Reaction against people in clothing. Tell us all about it, North American cinema.

Children of the sun, mother of living beings. Wildly encountered and wildly loved, with all the hypocrisy of saudade,[2] by the immigrated, the trafficked, the tourists. In the country of the great snake.

It was because we’d never had grammars or collections of old vegetatation. And we never knew from urban, suburban, frontier and continent. Loafing on Brasil’s mapamundi.

One participant consciousness, one religious rhythm.

Against all importers of canned consciousness, we are for the palpable existence of life. And pre-logical mentality for Mr Levy-Bruhl to study.

We want the Caraíba[3] revolution, greater than the French Revolution. Unification of all effective revolts on the side of humankind. Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have that poor declaration of the rights of man.

The golden age heralded by América. The golden age. And all the girls.

Kinship. Contact with the Caraíba of Brasil. Oú Villegaignon[4] print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, the Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s[5] technicized barbarism. We’re on our way.

We were never catechized. We live through a somnambulist law. We have our own Christ. He was born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.[6]

But we never allowed logic to quicken among us.

Against Padre Vieira,[7] our first loan broker. He got his commission. The illiterate king told him: Put this in the contract and don’t wag your chin about it! The loan approved, our sugar was marked SOLD. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us his chins.

The spirit refuses to conceive of itself without the body. Anthropomorphism. Need for the anthropophagite vaccine against the meridian religions and inquisitions from overseas.

We can only attend to the oracular world.

We had a codified justice of vengeance. A codified science of Magic. Anthropophagy.

The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Cadaverized. The halt of dynamic thought. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classical injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetting of inner conquests.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Caraíba instinct.

Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation self part of Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos part of self. Subsistence. Knowledge.

Anthropophagy.

Against vegetable elites. In communication with the ground.

We were never catechized. We had Carnaval. The Indian dressed as an Imperial Senator. Make-believe Pitt. Or as characters in a libretto by Alencar,[8] filled with good Portuguese feeling.

We already had communism. We already had surrealist language. The golden age.

          Catiti Catiti
          Imara Notiá
          Notiá Imara
          Ipejú.[9]

Magic and life. We had the relation and distribution of physical, moral and dignitary goods. And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the help of some grammatical forms.

I asked a man to define Law. He answered that it was the guarantee of one’s ability to exercise possibility. That man’s name was Galli Matias.[10] I ate him.

There is no determinism only where there is mystery. But what does that have to do with us?

Against the histories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterre.[11] World without dates. No rubrics. No Napoleon. No Caesar.

The fixing of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And blood transfusers.

Against antagonistic sublimations brought to us in caravels.

Against the truth of missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagite, the Viscount of Cairu:[12] Truth is an oft-repeated lie.

But the people who came weren’t crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating. We are strong and vengeful, like Jabuti.[13]

If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci[14] is the mother of living beings. Jaci[15] is the mother of vegetation.

We had no speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of Distribution. And a social-planetary system.

Migrations. Flight from states of boredom. Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatories; against speculative boredom.

From William James to Voronoff.[16] The transfiguration of Taboo into totem. Anthropophagy.

The paterfamilias and the creation of the morality of the stork fable:[17] Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + feeling of authority before the curious gens.

It’s necessary to start from a profound atheism to arrive at the idea of God. But the Caraíba didn’t need it. Because they had Guaraci.

The created objective reacted like the Fallen Angels. Then Moses started wandering around. What does that have to do with us?

Before the Portuguese discovered Brasil, Brasil had already discovered happiness.

Against candlestick Indians. Against the torch holder Indian. Against the Indian as child of Mary, godchild of Catherine de Medici and child-in-law of Dom Antônio de Mariz.[18]

Happiness is the living proof.

In the Pindorama[19] Matriarchate.[20]

Against memory, the source of custom. We are for personal experience renewed.

We are concretists. Ideas take hold, react, burn people in public squares. Let us supress ideas and other paralyses. With routes. To believe in the signs, believe in the instruments and in the stars.

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of Dom João VI.

Happiness is the living proof.

The struggle between what would be called Uncreated and the Creature — illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his Taboo. Day-to-day love is the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into Totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite realize fleshly anthropophagy, which carries within itself the highest meaning of life and avoids all the ills identified by Freud. All the catechistic ills. What happens is not a sublimation of sexual instinct. It’s the thermometric scale of anthropophagite instinct. The fleshly becomes elective and creates friendship. Love is affective. Science is speculative. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at abasement. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of the catechism — envy, usury, calumny, murder. A plague from so-called cultured and Christianized peoples. This is what we act against. Anthropophagites.

Against Anchieta[21] going on about eleven thousand virgins from the sky in the land of Iracema,[22] we are for the patriarch João Ramalho,[23] founder of São Paulo.

Our independence still hasn’t been proclaimed. A typical sentence out of Dom João VI: My Son, put that crown on Your head, before some adventurer does! We expelled the dynasty. Now we need to expel the Braganza mind-set, the ordinations and the snuff of Maria da Fonte.[24]

Against social reality, the clothed oppressor surveyed by Freud, we are for a reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries. We are for the reality of the Pindorama Matriarchate.

Oswald de Andrade
In Piratininga[25]
74 years after the tricentennial
     of the deglutition of Bishop Sardinha[26]

*Aggressive Translator’s Endnotes to Anger Nationalists and Brasileiros com Zed, Scramble Academic Squadrons in Periphery and Metropolis Alike and Propel Apologists for Empire into an Ecstacy of Denial

These notes put on public display the opinions of the translator, who, while he is wrong often enough, at least has the courage of his convictions. Notes by Benedito Nunes and Jorge Schwartz from Schwartz’s Vanguardas Latino-Americanas will be incorporated in the near future.

A more correct translation of the title might be “Cannibalistic Manifesto”, but I want to make a strong distinction between cannibals of the metropolis (i.e., Picabia) and the Brasilian Anthropophagites, who were ravenous europhages.

Some have suggested that Oswald de Andrade really meant “digerir” (to digest) when he used the verb “comer” (to eat). While the two verbs are intimate indeed, OA’s violence was always precise and unrepentant.

1. Collective noun; name of formerly hegemonic language group. “Aborigines, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.” Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dicionary.

2. Seldom understood emotional characteristic much coveted and therefore derided by certain non-Lusophones, as well as by some Lusophone expatriates (brasileiros com zed) in the metropolis.

3. One who speaks a language in the above-mentioned formerly hegemonic group; also, shaman. Originally, a word meaning “any foreigner”.

4. (Nicolas Durand, Chevalier de) 1510-1571. Sea-going warrior in the Catholic jihad decreed by les Enfants du Capital. Assiduous extirpator of peoples rich in epidermal melanin. Leader of failed aquatic colonial adventure off the coast at Rio de Janeiro. Driven into disgrace and retirement by Protestant ministers along for the ride. They didn’t fare any better, in the end.

Accompaning Villegaignon was one Jean de Lery, a clergyman who wrote a tract entitled Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite Amerique (1578), which was to figure in the unfortunately never realized Bibliotequinha Antropofágica.

In living memory, Mr President Charles de Gaulle is said to have paid Brasil the highest possible compliment when he asseverated through quivering molossoid jowls, “Il nést pas un pays serieux”.

“Trample one anthill, up spring another million: / God’s a gringo, but the people are Brasilian” (Glauco Mattoso, Soneto 2.335, Catastrófico, in Panacéia, Nankin Editorial, São Paulo 2000).

See also Montaigne I, 33; and see n. 26, below.

5. (Count Hermann), 1880-1946, Austria by way of Estonia. Originary New Age cultural imperialist. Tutelary saint of pseudo-philosophical-psychological-physiological School of Wisdom. Popular between the first two World Wars, his ideas influenced the Anthropophagites. Technology will free us only when the capitalist system is abolished and technology is made to serve human needs, not profit.

6. City located at the mouth of Rio Amazonas. Capital of the northern state of Pará. “Belém” is Portuguese for “Bethlehem”. “Pará” is also a word which means any Afro-Brasilian religion and its place of worship.

7. Religious fanatic with a magnificent prose style. Renowned homilist. Imperial bag man.

8. (José de), 1829-1877, Ceará, BR. Outstanding 19th-century novelist who discovered the essentially European subconscious of all decent folk, irregardless of class, creed, nationality or DNA. His novel O Guarani was adapted by him for the libretto of the opera Il Guarany by Brasilian composer Carlos Gomes (1836-1896).

9. “New Moon, New Moon, breathe memories of me into Everyman.” From The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes. [This note is in most Brasilian editions.]

10. Galimatias, galimatia, gallimatias, galimathias: confused language, meaningless talk, nonsense. French word of unknown origin, first encountered in the 16th century. Used by the great Scottish polemicist, translator and jailbird, Sir Thomas Urquhart, who reputedly died during a fit of uncontrollable laughter, in the Netherlands, after hearing of the Restoration of Charles the Second.

11. Rocky promontory on the Costa da Morte, prized by sport sailors, British military historians, pilgrims who burn their clothes, Spanish monarchists . . . and beloved by Galicians, for whom it is Fisterra, a part of their homeland (thanks to Erin Moure); see n. 26.

12. Bahian-born José da Silva Lisboa (1756-1835). Political journalist, politician and jurisconsul. Voracious polymath who flourished under João VI and Pedro I. Author of Observations upon Free Trade in Brasil, Moral Constitution and Duties of Citizens and a great deal of journalism. His title, conferred late in life, explains most of whatever else we need to know about him.

Not to be confused with Field Marshal Garnet Joseph, Baron Wolseley and 1st Viscount of Cairo, 1833-1913, a more or less competent (and extremely lucky) imperial hitman and proud member of a once overwhelmingly powerful national elite at long last creaking into silliness and futility. While Wolseley claimed to have suffered considerable anguish upon arriving in Khartoum two days too late to prevent Gordon’s so-called martyrdom, it did not stop him from accepting his second title. Like all government-sponsored mass-murderers, Wolseley believed wholeheartedly in the supremacy of his civilization. Needless to say, that aristocratic faith was not held by OA and associates.

13. Land tortoise. Legendary trickster, long-lived and persistent. Invited guest at the great celestial party. National symbol of a people most lovely.

14. The sun. Lover of the moon. OA calls this male god “mother”.

15. The moon. When she and her lover were forced to separate, her tears formed Rio Amazonas.

16. (Serge), 1866-1951, Russian-born Director of Experimental Surgery at Collège de France. Proponent of testiclular transplant for rejuvenation of libidos atrophied by life-long addiction to the methamphetamine of the bourgeoisie and their superiors, accumulation; in other words, the first monkey gland doctor.

17. Famous fable of childbirth. Another possible translation: “moral of the stork fable”.

18. Fidalgo in São Paulo circa 1560 who lived his life according to the highest moral principles. Celebrated miscegenist in the best High Colonial style. Also, a character in Alencar’s novel, O Guarani.

19. Ancient name for the region now known as Brasil. From Tupi “pindórama”: land of palm trees.

20. See Fredrick Engels’ dated (and problematic) but still essential The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. See also Sharon Smith’s Engels and the Origin of Women’s Oppression and n. 26.

21. (José de). Jesuit missionary. First important Lusophone poet in América, author of much-anthologized poem, Quando, no Espírito Santo, se recebeu uma relíquia das onze mil virgens.

The first important Luso-Brasilian poet was the great Grégorio de Mattos e Guerra (1636-1695) aka Boca do Inferno [Mouth of Hell or Devil’s Mouthpiece]: “Enormous usuries in the market. All who do not steal are impoverished. And there you have the city of Bahia”; “If you ask me, the city runs on the Two Effs: Fleece and Fuck”.

22. Tupi ingenue with an entirely European inner life in the eponymous novel by Alencar.

23. Shipwrecked colonial adventurer. “Natural father of all legitimate Paulistas [sic],” according to OA, in the Pocket Dictionary.

24. “Mary by the Fountain,” name given to an 1846 tax revolt of Portuguese small land owners with elitist aspirations, waged largely by women, which sold out to church and aristocracy.

25. “Piratininga” is the ancient name for the area now known as São Paulo. Tupi “pi’ra”, “fish” + “(mo)tininga”, gerund of “(mo)tining”, “to dry”: place where fish dry out on the riverbanks, according to some philologists. Also name of a river in the state of São Paulo.

Pero Fernandes Sardinha, the Portuguese-born Bishop of Bahia, headed back to Lisboa after quarreling with Bahia’s Governor-General. On June 16, 1556, this particular Imperial bag man was eaten by a band of presumably wise-cracking Tupi after his ship sank off present-day Alagoas near the easternmost tip of the Pindorama Matriarchate.

On March 9, 1500, Pero Alvarez Cabral set sail from Lisboa. After a short stopover at Cabo Verde, Cabral veered southwest and made a beeline until land was sighted on April 22. Clearly, OA considers this date to be less important than the date of the aforementioned example of a “peripheral” people putting their money where their mouths are and talking back to the “metropolis” with unvanquishable eupepsia and good, tasty, black humor.

26. Oswald de Andrade joined the Communist Party of Brasil in 1931. A luta continua.

3. from The Crisis in Messianic Philosophy
(forthcoming)



4. from Pocket Dictionary (1930’s, posthumous)

CAIN: The first burgher. Partitioned the land and built the first fence in history. Creator and defender of private property.

ADAM: Eve’s first husband.

NOAH: Proprietor of the Great Aquatic Circus, which drifted all over the world and finally broke up due to lack of audience.

MOSES: The Eternal Father’s stenographer.

ISAIAH: Great voice. Like Jeremiah, Hosea and Ezekiel, other great voices from the depths of History, he proclaimed social justice. Author of this little Bolshevist imprecation: “Cursed be ye who decree iniquitous laws and inscribe unjust orders to oppress the poor and those hungry for justice, violate the rights of the disinherited and make widows and orphans into spoils for the rich! Cursed be ye who accumulate house upon house and hectare on end until there’s nowhere left for anyone else and the whole country’s bought and sold!”

JOB: Penniless Jew.

SOLOMON: Composer of the waltz “Canticle of Canticles” and author of the final proclamation of the Communist manifesto: “Workers of all countries, unite!”

JOHAH: Whale vomit.

HERODOTUS: He started the lie.

PLINY THE ELDER: Author of the economical epitaph of Rome: Latifundia perdidere Italiam.

JOHN THE BAPTIST: Blood-soaked mask hanging on Christianity’s door.

SAINT JOSEPH: Putative father of Christ.

SALOME: Belly dancer.

VIRGIN MARY: Miss Nazareth.

CHRIST: Little communist crucified by both upper and lower classes, under the eye of Imperial Rome in Jerusalem. Figure in an anecdote central to a religion of an oppressed and suffering people. Said religion took hold in the transformed Western world and ended up the major pretext for slaughter, oppression and theft.

MAGDALENE: Joan Crawford in the life of Christ.

SAINT PETER: Secretary of the Bethesda Fisherman’s Union (BFU), chief of the self-defense committee that met in Gethsemane, first Pope, crucified head down, etc. etc.

JUDAS: Petty-bourgeois intellectual swinging from a fig tree in Judea.

SAINT THOMAS: Visionary who saw with his fingers.

AUGUSTINE: Great Church intellectual. Lost in the idea of an international world called the spiritual city of God, he authored this crimson asseveration: “Not by virtue of divine right, but by virtue of the right of war, can one say: this house is mine, this servant is mine!”

MUHAMMED: Organizer of the theocratic state as a form of mass exploitation by means of a warrior elite.

GENGIS KHAN AND TAMERLANE: Nomad society out to crush sedentary economies.

JEANNE D’ARC: Female saint burned by priests having a careless day.

THOMAS MORE: English humanist who came to an end on the gibbet. He put this in the mouth of one of his characters: “As long as private property endures, the greater part of the nation will be condemned to poverty and too much labor.”

SHAKESPEARE: Renaissance toy-box.

AMERICO VESPUCCI: Celebrated navigator who gave his name to the lands discovered at the end of the 15th century. These were lands “where men live according to nature, there is no private property, everything is held in common and nobody suffers oppression by kings or authorities.”

PEDRO ALVAREZ CABRAL: It’s all his damn fault.

MACHIAVELLI: A learned man who, in an era of widespread religious idiocy, discerned that religion is a simple instrument of mass oppression, by the clergy, in the service of the powers that be.

MONTAIGNE: French humanist who noted with lively enthusiasm this retort from an Indian from Brasil who was brought to the court in Rouen in the 16th Century: “I wonder immensely at thy luxury and well-being, but that which causes me most to wonder is that the people who live in the cold mud do not burn thy palaces and distribute thy riches!”

LEONARDO DA VINCI: Creator of the bourgeois smile.

LOYOLA: Christ’s bad company.

CERVANTES: Literary debut of the bourgeoisie.

LOCKE: Liberal grandfather of modern conservatives.

PASCAL: Catholic thinker who left this revolutionary gift for pious little girls: “Mine. Thine. This dog is mine!, say these poor little children. This is my place under the sun! Such is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of the whole earth.”

VOLTAIRE: Idealist who realized all his ideals. Said of religion: “When it’s not madness, it’s charlatanry.”

ROUSSEAU: Renovator (he didn’t really know what he was doing) of original sin. Man is born good and society corrupts him. Obviously, in Eden, as now, society was full of snakes.

GEORGE WASHINGTON: Slave owner who declared liberty for slave owners.

KANT: Metaphysical terrorist who died before he could be apprehended.

RICARDO: Theorist of value.

FEUERBACH: Pope of Atheism. Discovered that it was man who created God, not vice-versa.

FOURIER: Described the civilization in which he found himself thusly: “Men consider each other enemies and act accordingly. Everywhere there is speculation, maneuvering in the stock exchange, shrewdness, fraud, hypocrisy, enrichment for the few, impoverishment for the many, disdain for the unfortunate, competition, economic anarchy, sons fighting fathers and workers fighting bosses, capitalists exploiting workers, governments dominated by the wealthy, revolt of the poor and, worst of all, the buying and selling of women on the marriage market.”

GOETHE: Bourgeois classicist who invented romanticism.

MARX: History’s corner.

ENGELS: The future’s contemporary.

BALZAC: Family photo of the bourgeoisie.

MAX STIRNER: Modern father of anarchism. Had the courage to say, “I’m uninterested in God, humanity, truth, goodness, justice and freedom. I’m interested in myself!”

BLANQUI: Red conspirator. Spent a third of the 19th century in jail because he loved liberty.

DISRAELI: Creator of the Gandhi Affair.

NIETSZCHE: Super-Hitler.

SCHOPENHAUER: Pessimist who preached universal suicide after the loss of bourgeoisie reason.

MONROE: Annexer who discovered that América is for Américans... well, North Americans, that is.

CHOPIN: Lover of George Sand.

GEORGE SAND: Lover of Alfred de Musset.

EHRMAN: Egyptologist who discovered an Egyptian text verifying that in antiquity there was an attempted dictatorship of the proletariat that lasted some three hundred years.

COMRADE ROSA LUXEMBURG: Assassinated by Berliner praetorians during the communist ferment of January 1919. With Karl Liebnecht, one of the leaders of the movement. Her corpse was thrown into a river.

COMRADE LENIN: Arm that cranked the motor of the proletarian revolution in the world.

COMRADE STALIN: Steel point driving humanity into the future.

TROTSKY: Trotskyite. [The translator does not share OA’s opinion of Leon Trotsky.]

FOCH: Murderer who died in bed after leading over five million men to death in the trenches of WWI. Dragged from their houses, Foch’s soldiers, like those of Hindenburg and Pershing, were thrown into battle to defend with their lives the patrimony of the wealthy and the dominion of capital.

CLEMENCEAU: Author of the error-laden Geographical Tractate signed at Versailles.

BRIAND: Dead beacon of the international whorehouse who, in Geneva, exploited nations as well as women.

HITLER: Little steel mustache.

SPENGLER: Last will and testament of the western bourgeoisie.

MUSSOLINI: Pasta with blood sauce.

GANDHI: Taught his people freedom using the Berlitz method.

MACDONALD: Falling star of the 2nd International.

FREUD: Spiritual Advisor to the bourgeoisie.

KRISHNAMURTI: God repentant.

HOOVER: Usurer who hocked the world and barred the pawnshop door.

EINSTEIN: Pastime lost in space-time.

PROLETARIAT: Those who rent out their hands by the day in order to eat badly and sleep worse; who nourish the enemy that exploits them; who will finally revolt and unleash upon the world a revolution enabling them to dig deep the grave of the bourgeoisie; those who are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth.


•—•—•—•—•

• First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 4.21.2006


• Under continual revision and augmentation


• Reproduction rights granted upon request