Hero of Our People

Mário​ de Andrade said that he wrote the first draft of Macunaíma in six days. It was December 1926 and he was staying at his uncle’s place outside São Paulo, lying in a hammock, smoking cigarettes and listening to the cicadas. The novel tells the story of the Pemon trickster Macunaíma, whom Andrade had read about in Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s five-volume anthropological study, Vom Roraima zum Orinoco, despite his limited German. Even more limited was Andrade’s contact with Indigenous people themselves. But Andrade was growing uncomfortable with this. He was elegant, cultivated; he lived in Sāo Paulo, where he wrote essays on Brazilian music and art. In 1922 he had participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna, which offered far-out poetry and art to the São Paulo bourgeoisie gathered in a plush theatre. That same year he formed the Grupo dos Cinco with the painters Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral and the writers Oswald de Andrade (no relation) and Paulo Menotti del Picchia, and acquired the pleasant notoriety of the avant-garde. But Andrade’s idea of writing was becoming more and more uncertain. Like his great predecessor Machado de Assis, he was delicately mestiço, but he was also bourgeois like his friends – the inheritors of plantation wealth. He felt something was missing. It was his country. Brazil was vast, and he knew only a minuscule part.

If you were a writer or artist in São Paulo a century ago, it might seem that you were on a periphery, in a country that was only just becoming a country. For a while, the avant-garde’s strategy was to copy what the avant-garde was up to in Europe. Tarsila studied painting in Paris and returned with dutifully precise Cubist canvases. Andrade tried out Surrealist poetry and wrote an ironic novel with the painfully abstract title Amar, Verbo Intransitivo. It was quickly apparent that these methods would not work or were not appropriate – they felt cramped and insincere. Instead, the avant-garde looked not outside the country but inside it – not to the ocean, but the forest. To modernise art, the logic ran, they needed to include Brazil’s Indigenous and Black communities.

It was Tarsila who moved fastest. In 1923, back in Paris, she painted A Negra (‘The Black Woman’), her first picture in a new method that used flat colour and long biomorphic lines. One way of looking at the painting is to see it as an exciting moment, when a new subject for representation overwhelms a European avant-garde technique. Another way of looking at its cartoonish emphasis on the woman’s lips and single breast and giant limbs is to see it as racist. For Andrade it was just a primitivist portrait of an urucaca, an ugly woman. He had other ideas: ‘Abandon Paris!’ he wrote to Tarsila. ‘Come to the virgin forest, where there is no art nègre, where there are no gentle streams either. There is virgin forest. I have created virgin-forestism. I am a virgin-forester. That is what the world, art, Brazil and my dearest Tarsila need.’

Of course there was no such thing as virgin forest. The Amazon had been cultivated and inhabited by Indigenous communities for centuries. The idea was as artificial as art nègre. And yet Andrade and his friends desired a confrontation with alterity, and that wish for identity dispersal remains seductive. In April 1924 Andrade, Tarsila, Oswald de Andrade, the historian Paulo Prado and the French poet Blaise Cendrars – accompanied and funded by their patron Olívia Guedes Penteado – went on a three-week trip through the colonial towns and landscapes of Minas Gerais, the large inland state to the north of São Paulo.

When they returned, Tarsila’s pictures began to feature creatures from Indigenous folklore such as the saci, a black figure with a row of teeth and two-fingered arms, who stands on a single tapered leg with three toes. And Andrade in 1926 wrote the first sentence of Macunaíma: ‘In the depths of the virgin forest was born Macunaíma, hero of our people.’ In a preface Andrade wrote just after completing the first draft, he explained that ‘what got me interested in Macunaíma was undoubtedly my constant preoccupation with delving into and learning as much as I can about the national entity of the Brazilian people. Well, after an arduous struggle, I have confirmed one thing that seems certain: the Brazilian has no character.’ The novel was about Brazil, it was an allegory, and its methods were a double contamination: a mestiço plural language and a mestiço blurring of place. ‘One of my aims was to disrespect geography and geographical flora and fauna in the manner of legends. In this way, I deregionalised creation as much as possible, while also achieving the merit of literarily conceiving Brazil as a homogenous entity – an ethnic national and geographical conception.’

This was partly true, and partly a way of defining his oddly artificial project, since Andrade had never been to the Amazon. A few months later, in May 1927, he got his opportunity, when he joined Penteado on a three-month steamboat cruise. He imagined it would be a repeat of the 1924 trip to Minas Gerais, a raucous modernist party. Instead, it was just him, Penteado, her niece and one of her niece’s friends. Disappointment and irony became the journey’s motifs. He wrote a diary of the trip, which he picked up again in 1943 (he planned on revising and publishing it, but died of a heart attack in 1945, at the age of 51). ‘The whole thing wafts of modernism and has aged a good bit,’ he wrote regretfully. By then, Andrade had become a professional ethnologist. From 1935 to 1938 he was the director of São Paulo’s Departamento de Cultura, and he founded the Sociedade de Etnografia e Folclore, which funded much of Dina Dreyfus and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s early research. The self he had inhabited in 1927 embarrassed him, but the diary is both charming and exacting precisely because it is a record of his inhibitions and reticence, his lack of the multitudinous capacity he desired:

Departure from São Paulo. I bought an enormous bamboo cane for the trip, what a silly thing to do! It must’ve been some vague fear of Indians … I know full well there’s nothing adventurous or dangerous about the trip we’re about to take, but in addition to our logical faculties, each of us possesses a poetic mind as well. Half-remembered readings spurred me on more than the truth – savage tribes, alligators, bullet ants.

The savage tribes, alligators and bullet ants aren’t just from half-remembered readings: they also feature in Macunaíma, which he was revising on the trip. He gave the diaries the title The Apprentice Tourist, but he was a very natural tourist. What he was really trying to learn was how to be an inhabitant. On 23 May: ‘Bought a hammock, a Braque in its colour combination.’ Later, this sentence troubled him: ‘“A Braque!” I exclaimed, and I bought the hammock. In fact, I’ve been travelling mainly around myself, selfishly applying my experiences instead of enriching myself with new ones.’ He liked the way the landscape ‘wrecks the neat grey European I still have in me’, but even in the Amazon he felt that Brazil, like him, was still too European, ‘without a culture and a civilisation of our own’. (His own appearance seems to have been a source of confusion: ‘In Tefé the Portuguese man from the shop swore I was Portuguese born and bred, in Tonantins I passed for Italian, and now, here in São Paulo de Olivença, Brother Fidélis asks me hesitantly if I’m English or German!’) The only anthropology Andrade felt capable of producing was comic: ‘I believe that based on the Indians I’ve come across, whose morality is different from our own, I could write a humorous monograph, a satire of scientific and social expeditions and ethnographies. It would be the tribe of the Do-Mi-So Indians.’

Then he returned to São Paulo, finished his novel and published it in 1928 – to the usual modernist mixture of bewilderment, indifference, disbelief and glory.

One effect​ of modernism was to make plot description only intermittently useful, since a summary of events is irrelevant to the experience of reading, which lies in the texture of the sentences. This is partly true of Macunaíma, but much of Andrade’s energy went into the fantastical careering plot. The book begins with the birth in the Amazon rainforest of Macunaíma, a member of the fictional Tapanhumas tribe. He has two older brothers, Maanape and Jiguê. He sleeps with his brother Jiguê’s wife, and will continue to sleep with as many women as possible. Famine strikes the village, then the fields are flooded because ‘the cunauaru toad called Maraguigana, Father of the Dolphin, was angered’ after Maanape in desperation kills a river dolphin to eat. Macunaíma accidentally kills his mother, whom an Anhanga spirit had disguised as a doe, and so in grief the three brothers set off into the forest. There they meet Ci, mother of the forest. She and Macunaíma fall in love and he becomes emperor of the forest. They have a son, but he soon dies; in her grief Ci ascends to the sky and becomes Beta Centauri. The only memento Macunaíma has of her is a muiraquitã, an Indigenous protective amulet. But he loses it in a battle with a water snake and thinks it has gone for ever, until a bird tells him that it ended up with a trader called Venceslau Pietro Pietra, who is in fact a giant demon, ‘Piaimã the Giant, eater of men’, and lives in São Paulo.

The brothers make their way out of the forest and head to São Paulo. There are scenes of trickery and violence, slapstick sex, two moments when Macunaíma is pronounced dead, long meandering stories and high-speed chases, until finally Piaimã is killed:

The giant fell into the boiling pasta and such a powerful stench of cooked leather wafted into the air that every last sparrow in the city dropped dead and the hero keeled over. Piaimã put up a good fight and was now hanging on by a thread. With a gargantuan effort he lifted himself from the bottom of the vat. He swatted away the noodles streaming down his face, rolled his eyes upward, licked his bristling moustache:

‘IT NEEDS CHEESE!’ he shouted …

And breathed his last.

Macunaíma returns to the forest in triumph to claim his empire. There his libido continues to upend him and various things try to eat him. At one point it seems that he will die by being tricked into eating his brother’s leprous shadow, yet he survives. By now, everyone around him is dead. Even the parrots have disappeared, except for one ‘chatterbox aruaí’. Macunaíma ‘spent his days wallowing in tedium and amused himself by making the bird repeat in his tribe’s language all the hero’s adventures starting from childhood’. (This detail sounds fantastical but comes from Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of Nature, in which he describes meeting a parrot which spoke in the extinct language of the Atures people.) A final fight with Vei, the sun, leaves Macunaíma dismembered, ‘missing his big toes and his Bahian-coconuts, missing his ears his nose all his treasures’. He tries to put himself back together:

Macunaíma went searching searching. He found his two earrings found his toes found his ears his nuqiiris his nose, all those treasures, and stuck them all back in their places with sapé grass and fish glue. But neither his leg nor the muiraquitã turned up, nossir. They’d been swallowed by the Ururau Gator Monster that can’t be killed by any club or timbó.

It is all too much for him. And so, like many of the characters in this novel, he becomes a constellation. With his single leg he climbs up into the sky and is transformed into Ursa Major.

In an epilogue, we learn that the Tapanhumas tribe has been wiped out: ‘Nevermore would anybody know all those wonderful stories or the language of the long-gone tribe. An immense silence slumbered along the riverbanks of the Uraricoera.’ But then one day ‘a man went there’ and was addressed by the parrot to whom Macunaíma had taught the dialect of his tribe. ‘It was that lone parrot who preserved in the silence all the sayings and feats of the hero’:

He recounted it all to the man then took wing for Lisbon. And that man is me, folks, and I’ve stayed behind to tell you this tale. That’s why I came here. I crouched down on these leaves, picked my ticks, started strumming my guitar and in this ragged tune and impure speech, I’ve sung these cares to the world, telling all the sayings and doings of Macunaíma, hero of our people.

And that’s all.

In​ 1928, the year Macunaíma came out, Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago and founded the Revista de Antropófagia. The magazine promoted his new theory of the cannibalistic, inspired by an incident in the 16th century when the Caeté people ate Pero Fernandes Sardinha, the first bishop sent to Brazil. Instead of being influenced by Europe, Oswald de Andrade thought that the art of Brazil should be equal to its multiple identity and absorb European, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous forms: ‘The only thing that interests me is what isn’t mine. Law of mankind. Law of anthropophagy.’ The ‘absorption of the sacred enemy’ extended to a notorious joke in the manifesto, which chewed up the most famous line in European literature: ‘Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.’ (The Tupi were an Indigenous people, with an estimated population of around one million when the Portuguese arrived.) The main problem with this ideal of primitive violence, however, wasn’t that it was condescending, but that it was itself borrowed from Paris. In 1920 Francis Picabia set up a Dada magazine called Cannibale, with its own aphorisms of plurality: ‘Je suis de plusieurs nationalités et Dada est comme moi.’

For Andrade and his novel, it’s as if the Indigenous is the site of the authentically surreal: it possesses what Europe wants. To put it differently: he wanted two things to overlap in a form of pure resistance – his own bourgeois ressentiment at the perceived snobbery of Europeans towards his work, and an Indigenous refusal of colonisation.

Macunaíma can easily be read as a cannibal text. Everyone wants to eat Macunaíma, and they almost succeed:

The hero who’d been diced into twenty times thirty bits of crackling was bubbling in the boiling polenta. Maanape picked out the bits and bones and laid em on the concrete to air out. After they’d cooled, Cambgique the sarará ant poured the blood he’d slurped over em. Then Maanape wrapped all the bloody morsels in banana leaves, threw the bundle in a saddlebag and doubled back to the boarding house.

Within the sentences themselves, Andrade’s strategy is to absorb an enormous variety of languages and registers. Flora and fauna are given their Indigenous names: ‘In the branches of the ingas the aningas the mamoranas the embaúbas the catauaris growing along the riverbank the capuchin monkey the squirrel monkey the guariba howler the bugio howler the spider monkey the woolly monkey the bearded saki the tufted cairara, all the forty monkeys of Brazil, all of em, gaped drooling with envy.’

Andrade described his novel as a ‘rhapsody’. It was a kind of improvisation, he wanted readers to think, as though created by one of the travelling singers in the far north-east of the country in a tone of ‘light-hearted amenability’. In this mode borrowed from Indigenous storytelling, anything can happen, including resurrection: ‘Maanape was a sorcerer. Straight away he asked to borrow two Bahian-coconuts from the landlady, tied em in a double constrictor knot to where the crushed toaliquiçus had been and puffed smoke from a pipe over the deceased hero. Macunaíma started sitting up weak as can be.’

It cannibalises language, it cannibalises Indigenous stories and most of all this novel eats up mementos of a national history. In his wayward journeys across Brazil Macunaíma encounters little reminders of invasion and resistance. He ‘leaves his conscience on the Isle of Marapatá’, just as the rubber hunters in the Amazon were said to do. At another point ‘he leaped from the raft in a flash, went off to salute the statue of Saint Anthony, who was captain of the regiment, then started coming on to girls all over town.’ (The statue of Saint Anthony of Padua, credited with saving Rio de Janeiro from French invasion in 1710, was given a salary and made infantry captain.) During his battle with Piaimã, Macunaíma decides to use macumba, the magical African religion that arrived in Brazil with the enslaved Black population. This episode, Andrade wrote in an unpublished note, was emblematic of his method:

All it takes is seeing how deliberately the Rio de Janeiro Macumba ceremony has been deregionalised, combined with elements from Candomblé in Bahia and Pajelança in Pará. I constructed that chapter with elements from published studies, elements that I gathered from an ogã in Rio, ‘a pockmarked fado musician by profession’, and from an expert on Pajelanças, to which I further added elements of pure fantasy.

After finishing the novel, Andrade began another preface he would never publish. A year earlier he had written that his interest in Macunaíma stemmed from wanting to understand ‘the Brazilian’, but he now backtracked: ‘I don’t want you to imagine that I set out to make this book into an expression of Brazilian national culture. God forbid. It’s only now, after having made it, that I seem to find in it a symptom of our culture.’ After all, ‘you can’t even say [Macunaíma’s] from Brazil,’ since Pemon territory spans the colonial borders of Brazil, Venezuela and Guiana. In Pemon myth Macunaíma is a cosmic force who caused the Flood. Andrade’s version is much less grand, more comical. If Macunaíma embodied the Brazilian character, Andrade thought, this was because he had no fixed character at all, ‘in the double sense of an individual with no moral character and with no set characteristics’. Like Andrade, he grandly refuses the idea of Europe: ‘I’m an American and America’s where I belong. European civilisation most indubitably mucks up the integrity of our character.’ But the only piece of writing Macunaíma produces is written in a hopelessly dated form of literary Portuguese.

It’s no wonder that Macunaíma wasn’t entirely welcomed by Andrade’s circle. An attack under the title ‘Miss Macunaíma’ appeared in the Revista de Antropófagia in 1929, as if the novel’s waywardness not just with language or culture but also with gender was too disturbing. In one episode, Macunaíma dresses up as a ‘French lady’:

So then Macunaíma borrowed from the boarding house madam some pairs of froufrou things, a rouge machine, a silk-stockings machine, a slip machine scented with sacaca bark, a girdle machine fragrant with lemongrass, a décolleté machine spritzed with patchouli, lacy fingerless glove machines, all them froufrou things, then he dangled two pointy banana flowers from his chest and got dressed up like that.

Andrade himself operated outside the conventions of machismo. His sexual identity, like his racial one, was complicated. He wanted to know where he was situated, and couldn’t find a way of describing it. Early readers too struggled to situate the novel, some of them accusing him simply of plagiarising Koch-Grünberg.

The novel often seems joyful, but it ends in emptiness and failure – and maybe it did for Andrade too. His utopian ambition was an encounter with the other that would also situate himself within a place and a culture, but it seems he concluded that a novel could not do this. To be truly modern would mean no longer being a modernist. Macunaíma was his last published work of literature. Instead he devoted himself to ethnology: the true form, he thought, for figuring multiplicity.

The​ theory of translation has had its own avant-garde cycles. An ideal of full naturalisation, where the guest is converted into the host, has been replaced by an ideal of the foreign, where the host allows itself to be altered by the guest. Macunaíma was first translated in the 1980s by E.A. Goodland, a retired British engineer living in north-east Brazil. His version followed the old-fashioned logic of full naturalisation. Almost all of Andrade’s deliberately Indigenous vocabulary, those little spikes of obscurity or even incomprehensibility for readers in São Paulo, were flattened out into ordinary sentences, while the syntax never deviated from the conventional. Goodland’s translation was dedicated more to some notion of the readable than to any recreation of Andrade’s effects. Katrina Dodson’s new translation instead attempts to be as high-strung and versatile as the original. She has made two major stylistic decisions: to reproduce Andrade’s estrangements of vocabulary, and to narrate the novel in a version of down-home American speech, as a way of signalling his disruption of literary Portuguese. She also adds about fifty pages of endnotes, untangling many of the cultural and historical allusions, and a selective glossary.

Reading this translation of a novel that was itself a major effort of translation becomes a way of thinking about the foreign. It’s a novel that asks how it might be possible to talk about a people, and whether a people might fail to recognise itself, precisely because many of its members can’t see one another as people. Macunaíma’s antic linguistic display might not be thought to amount to a true form of racial representation. There are throwaway racist moments, like the guajiru fruit ‘that smells like a black woman’s armpit’. More centrally, there is an episode where Macunaíma and his brothers wash themselves in a pool formed by a ‘humungous footprint of Sumé [São Tomé], from way back when he went around preaching the gospel of Jesus to the Brazilian Indians’. Macunaíma comes out ‘white, blond with the bluest eyes, the water had washed away all his blackness’. Jiguê sees this and throws himself in too, but the water is now so dirty from Macunaíma’s ‘darkness’ that he only turns ‘the colour of new bronze’. By the time Maanape gets in there is so little water left that he only manages ‘to wet just his soles and palms. That’s why he remained a black son of the Tapanhumas tribe through and through.’ The story is a retelling, Dodson notes, of ‘an Afro-Brazilian folktale … about God’s transformation of three Black brothers into the “three races of Brazil”’. But in making Macunaíma white, and asserting a myth of brotherhood over the actual historical facts of invasion and enslavement, the novel begins to align with the Brazilian nationalist ideal of ‘racial democracy’.

As for Andrade’s sentences, the danger, in both the original and for the translation, is that the foreign becomes the exotic. This novel loves lists, and in them the helter-skelter of incomprehensibility is contained by context. So, Macunaíma, fishing:

However he couldn’t catch a thing, not with arrows or poisonous plants, not timbó not jotica not cunambi not tingui, not in macerá or pari traps, not with line or harpoon or juquiaí or sararaca or bobber or sinker or cacuá or itapuá or jiqui or trotline or jererê, guê, trammel trawl weir lure snagger snood fyke gillnet scoopnet dropshot fishpot hook-n-rod, all them implements traps and poisons, seeing as he didn’t have a single one.

This is delightful in its stretching out of the usual limits. But when the Currupira, a figure from Tupi-Guarani mythology, tells the young Macunaíma ‘you go this-a-way, child-man, go that-a-way, cut in front of that tree, hang a left, turn around and head right back under my uaiariquinizês,’ why does he say uaiariquinizês and not testicles? According to Dodson, the word is from ‘the language of the Nambikwara people from the Amazon and central-western Brazil’. Andrade’s use of it feels less like an assertion of multiplicity than a personal phonemic pleasure.

Andrade wanted a space for whatever the true Brazil might be, and he imagined it as a style. This style would be able to move between languages and registers, sentence by sentence, as in this sequence: ‘He gestured fiercely at the Sun, shouting: “Eropita boiamorebo!” All at once the sky went dark and a reddening cloud rose up from the horizon, dusking over the calm of day. The reddening came closer and it was that flock of scarlet macaws and jandaya parakeets, all them chatterboxes.’

‘When I started to write wrong Portuguese,’ Andrade wrote, ‘didn’t I immediately announce that I was making a Brazilian grammar, with which announcement I simply intended to show that I was not improvising, but doing something thought out and systematic?’ Making a style from a systematic wrongness is the pure modernist project, and Dodson’s translation is itself admirably modernist in its effort to achieve this, but I began to experience her notes, so rich and absorbing, as a sign of an anxiety. This was partly an anxiety about the kind of knowledge Andrade might have expected the novel’s original audience to possess, but it was really an anxiety about style. Macunaíma isn’t written from a place of fluency, but with many dictionaries and works of anthropology. And so its style is always in danger of being revealed as pastiche.

Macunaíma has become a myth. It says something complicated about Brazil, but also about what modernism meant. And eventually it made me admire Andrade’s decision to look back on his modernist youth with detachment. Isn’t it time, a hundred years later, to see modernism as old-fashioned? Even if it’s difficult to leave its forcefield – the idea that style will do magical work, that the manipulation of sentences will save you. It seems so grand! But it may be that founding a style is not a useful way of solving the problem of identity. Founding a people may be no solution either.