Português
Clarissa Diniz: We are still “at war”
In December 2017, at a meeting held at the Goethe Institute in São Paulo with the intention of discussing the ethical, political and cosmological limits and attention involved in the relations between art institutionalities and indigenous perspectives, Ailton Krenak denounced: “Mário de Andrade managed to successfully abduct Makunaima. Up to now, everything that is reproduced still comes from this source. He seems to have done something unbeatable and that’s why it’s interesting to revisit this, to engage in a street fight with Mário de Andrade. (…) The appropriation of an egg from someone else’s nest is a monumental battle that deserves to be confronted. It is necessary to denounce modern art”.
When Brazil reached a century of “political independence” declared in 1822 by D. Pedro (the very son of the metropolis’ emperor who in a coup became king of our nascent constitutional monarchy), in the midst of the modernist movement that unfolded in São Paulo – a city on its way to become the country’s economic center– the novel Macunaíma, a hero without a character appeared. Published in 1928, its author, Mário de Andrade, considered it a rhapsody: the crossing of ideas, narratives, images and quotes of various kinds, mostly belonging to other authors, languages and cultures.
In the following decades, the novel would become one of the central icons not only of Brazilian literature but also, later on, of the nation’s identity narratives. Its hero, Macunaíma, understood as a trickster in the eyes of the Euro-Christian literary tradition, has historically been considered a “representation of a typical Brazilian”: a mixed-race (in the rhapsody, Macunaíma is an indigenous man born black, who later becomes white), mischievous, indolent, sexually insatiable man, among other characteristics that expose racism, fetishization and other primitivist fantasies.
Mário was a reader of Theodor Köch-Grunberg, a German ethnographer who came to Brazil four times at the beginning of the 20th century and who “collected” and published, in De Roraima ao Orinoco (1916), stories about Makunaima – an indigenous entity that inhabits Mount Roraima and which, subsequently, the writer from São Paulo appropriated to create what is certainly one of the main allegories ever produced about Brazil.
Throughout the text, we see a narrative emerging supported by the production of distance. While, in the well-known beginning of his rhapsody, Andrade geopolitically throws Macunaíma away from the narrator’s point of view, placing him “in the depths of the wild forest”, in the course of a hero without a character, time is also constructed as distance. This is what the little acclaimed end of the narrative demonstrates: “[the parrot] told the man everything and then took flight towards Lisbon. And the man is me, folks, and I stayed to tell you the story. That’s why I came here. (…) There is no more to it”.
Without Macunaíma and without the parrot – therefore, between the hero’s original and mythical past and the unimportance attached to the wandering future of the living document of his memories, the parrot –, the author-narrator Mário de Andrade emerges, speaking, at the end of the book, in first person. In doing so, he occupies the point of convergence of what would have “come before” and what “would come after” Macunaíma’s narrative present by incorporating, onto himself, the rhapsody’s space-time perspective. A perspective that is embodied in an infinite present, updated in the reading of the last words of the book – “there is no more to it” –, firmly anchored in the verbal tense of a now that renews itself at every time it is read.
From this gesture, it follows that, in Brazil, we are widely acquainted with Mário’s Macunaíma, but not with the indigenous entity that originated it, Makunaima. By appropriating and reinterpreting Makunaima at his leisure, Mário – and the incalculable legacy built from his work – ended up replacing what he intended to represent.
Despite the death attributed to him by Mário de Andrade, Makunaima resisted and, through macuxi artist Jaider Esbell, his grandson, warns us that, having recognized “the importance of icons in the culture that had arrived”, in the face of the invaders, in order to save his own, he chose “maximum exposure”. He “let himself go”:
“I stuck to the cover of that book” by Mário de Andrade: “They say that I was abducted, that I was wronged, robbed, mistreated, that I was betrayed, deceived. They say I was dumb. Not so! I was the one who wanted to be on the cover of that book. I was the one who wanted to accompany those men. I was the one who wanted to go and tell our story. There I saw all the chances for our eternity”. (…) “I saw you in the future. I saw it and threw myself in it. (…) I was placed there to bring us here”.
Because he belongs to another time regime, different from its colonial, linear and progressive version, Makunaima survives the modernist ultimatum and, alive, remains in time, ancestralizing himself: “The ancestor is not the one who dies. The ancestor is the one who remains”, explains Leda Maria Martins based on the banto cosmovision according to which, “in the spirals of time, everything goes, and everything comes back”.
This is how, at the turn of the third decade of the 21st century, his grandchildren arrive from all sides not only to correct the mistaken readings of the invaders who have long been committed to their capture – “it would be a risk if we were pleading for understanding” – but to affirm the inexhaustibility of Makunaima’s transformations, the impossibility of reducing or capturing them and, therefore, to enjoy the power of being an inextricable part of this movement of life and creation: “both my grandfather Makunaima and myself, a direct part of him, are artists of transformation”.
Informed that Makunaima “let himself go”, we are faced with a narrative that is radically more complex than the commonplace hypothesis that the abduction of the indigenous entity would have made him an “object and victim”. Without denying, obviously, that the politics of appropriation, expropriation, extractivism, exoticization, invisibility, objectification, among others, have in fact victimized the indigenous people, we are introduced, however, to the way they have constituted an ethical project of life within the most absolute and widespread violence.
The revelation of Makunaima’s agency by attaching himself to the cover of Macunaíma disturbs the decolonial protocols of a certain contemporary analytic by displaying an ethical project of life where we thought there was only subordination. It is not only about elucidating how the violence of which we are agents has victimized the other, but also about educating ourselves in order to dismantle the humanistic lens of “victimization” that invariably keeps us in the ambivalent, hypocritical, “civilizing” and, given its preservation of centralities, comfortable position of being simultaneously the executioners and the allies of the indigenous peoples. After all, as Pierre Clastres demonstrated, “the ethnocidal attitude is above all optimistic. (…) Ethnocide works for the good of the Savage. (…) From the perspective of its agents, ethnocide could not be an enterprise of destruction. On the contrary, it is a necessary task, demanded by humanism, inscribed at the heart of Western culture”.
For this reason, despite the urgency of alliances between indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives and their best ethical-political intentions, as Ailton Krenak puts it in the documentary Guerras do Brasil.doc, “We are at war. I don’t know why you’re looking at me with such a nice face… We’re at war. Your world and my world are at war. Our worlds are all at war. The ideological falsification that suggests that we have peace is for us to keep the machinery going… There is no peace anywhere. There’s war everywhere, all the time.”
The indigenous occupation of the hegemonic art universe is not intended as a white flag and, therefore, intimidates this privileged territory of whiteness – contemporary art – with a countercolonial movement that reacts to the violence of which indigenous cultures were and continue to be targets. Such intimidation is more than a strategy of resistance to the processes of appropriation, extractivism, exoticization, invisibility, surplus value, etc., which until then have identified the approximation, almost always in a primitivist way, perpetrated by art in relation to indigenous ontologies. It intends to effectively threaten, as shown by Denilson Baniwa in a text (2018) that serves as his presentation:
Who am I?
I am the fear of white people
I am the one who sits at the PhD holders’ table
Who disturbs and embarrasses everyone
Who laughs at the verbose vocabulary and the academic resumés of the white people
I am the new cabano
I am resistance through anthropophagy
I am the one who decapitates Tarsila do Amaral
I am the one who impales Mário de Andrade
I am the one who eats the heart of Oswald de Andrade
I am indigenous art
I am the contemporary indigenous person
Pleased to meet you
The cosmopolitical willingness to avenge the violence produced by modern art is the backbone of the painting ReAntropofagia (2019), an allegory by Denilson Baniwa about the ongoing process: on a tray, we see Mário de Andrade’s blackened severed head, arranged with manioc, corn, coffee, pepper, the 1st edition of Macunaíma and a note that reads “here lies the Macunaíma simulacrum. Together lie the idea of a Brazilian people and anthropophagy spiced with bordeaux and pax mongolica. May Makunaimî be reborn from this long digestion, along with the original anthropophagy that belongs to all of us indigenous peoples”. For Denilson, ReAntropofagia “re-emerges” as a “Manifesto, an urgent cry about the art produced by the original peoples, thus breaking centuries of silencing and exoticization of those who have always been here”.
The presence of violence in this rupture seems inevitable because, as Frantz Fanon taught, “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” insofar as, to “change the order of the world”, decolonizing is “a program of absolute disorder, [not] the result of a magical operation, a natural shock or a friendly agreement”. In this sense, the indigenous artists who are decapitating Mário de Andrade and re-anthropophagizing Oswald de Andrade or Tarsila do Amaral do so as a kind of revenge that, more than annihilating us, makes us responsible by projecting on our “positions hitherto exempt from marks and, therefore, unequally inscribed as a privileged part of the world as we know it, the responsibility to confront the violence that shapes [our] ontological comfort”, as the artist Jota Mombaça elucidates.
Thus, facing the indigenous presences in the Euroethnocentric territories colonized by art not as a calming process of “inclusion”, but as a continuation of a process of struggle and political occupation perpetrated by them through different forms of agency – of “letting oneself go” to combat – can, in turn, help us understand that, despite the contingently established alliances, as elucidated by Krenak, we are still “at war”.
Clarissa Diniz, 2021
[1] ANDRADE, Mário. Macunaíma. O herói sem nenhum caráter. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1987, p. 126.
[2] ESBELL, Jaider. Makunaima, o meu avô em mim! Iluminuras, Porto Alegre, v. 19, n. 46, p. 11-39, jan/jul, 2018.
[3] Excerpt from the lecture Tempo em performance, by Leda Maria Martins, given on December 17, 2020. Available here. Accessed on December 20, 2020.
[4] MARTINS, Leda. Performances do tempo espiralar. In: ARBEX, Márcia; RAVETTI, Graciela (orgs). Performance, exílio, fronteiras: errâncias territoriais e textuais. Belo Horizonte: Departamento de Letras Românicas, Faculdade de Letras/UFMG: Poslit, 2002, p. 84.
[5] Ibidem, p. 11.
[6] CLASTRES, Pierre. (1977) Do etnocídio. In: CLASTRES, Pierre. Arqueologia da violência: ensaio de antropologia política. São Paulo: editora Brasiliense, 1980, p. 54-58.
[7] Excerpt from the curatorial text of the exhibition, signed by Denilson Baniwa and Pedro Gradella.
[8] FANON, Frantz. Os Condenados da Terra. 2º ed (2010). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1979.
[9] MOMBAÇA, Jota. O mundo é meu trauma, 2017. In: Não vão nos matar agora. Galerias Municipais / EGEAC, 2019.
