The Anthropophagist Manifesto (3)
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THE ANTHROPOPHAGIST MANIFESTO
(sections 8-14)
Children of the sun, mother of the living. Found and loved fiercely, with all the hypocrisy of saudade, by the immigrants, by the trafficked, and by the tourists.* In the land of the giant snake.
It was because we never had grammars or collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, frontier, or continental. Laziness on the mappa mundi of Brazil.
A participatory consciousness, a religious rhythm.
Down with all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the prelogical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.
We want the Carib Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all revolts effective in directing humanity. Without us Europe wouldn’t even have its poor little declaration of human rights.
The Golden Age proclaimed by America. The Age of Gold. And all the girls.**
Parentage. Contact with Carib Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution, and to Keyserling’s technicized barbarian. We walk.
We were never catechized. We live under somnambulant laws. We birthed Christ in Bahia. Or in the Bethlehem in Pará.***
But we never accepted the birth of logic among us.
* Although I don’t agree with claims that “saudade” is untranslatable, I have left it in Portuguese here because it often (as here) does refer to what is held up as a particularly Lusophone combination of nostalgia, longing, and yearning. Also, the last word in this sentence (“tourists”) is in French in the original (“touristes”), presumably because Oswald felt that had a special resonance in early 20th century Brazil, a resonance I don’t think translates into 21st century America.
** “Girls” is in English in the original.
*** The city of Bethlehem in the Middle East is translated as “Belém” in Portuguese. There is a city called “Belém” in the Brazilian state of Pará.