Titty, or not titty, that is the question

Some things you just can’t metabolize. Half translated, half transformed, tied together with thin threads, strings of spit or milk or acid, ambivalences and concepts circulate throughout this text, which merely examines them instead of digesting. Here, I’ll eat you up [ick-fress-dich] is more an enthusiastic, ferocious ekphrastic, and more time to invent(ory), incompletely.

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Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928

To pi honest: reading manifestos bores me to tears. Their potential for progressive action is often exhausted by gestures of pro and con, scantily clad in a rhapsodic form. The image interests me more than the text. And something about it confuses me. On January 11, 1928, the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral gave her then-husband Oswald de Andrade a birthday present of a painting of a disturbingly unproportioned and nude figure next to a gigantic cactus. Oversized foot, colossal hand, the much smaller, melancholic arm resting on the knee, and the head tiny beneath a tropical sun or cactus blossom. The picture is untitled. In order to come up with a name, Oswald and his friend, the poet Raul Bopp, ingested the Tupí-Guaraní dictionary by the Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya from 1640 and invented – spat out – a neologism from abá, “person,” poro, “people” and -u, eats – Abaporu, the cannibal. Even before it is named, nakedness (primitiveness), feet (connection to the earth), and the sun or blossom (sun god) signal that the figure depicts an indigenous person, a gesture of harkening back to the roots, that was to become groundbreaking for the creation, so the story goes, of a modern Brazilian identity independent from European colonization. Naming it Abaporu first draws the connection to the European figuration of indigenous Brazilians as cannibals – the sleight of hand that would give Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto antropófago (Anthropophagic Manifesto) its centrifugal force, through the proud identification with the cannibals that eat Europe (in return). In other words, in the beginning was the picture and the picture inspired the name and the text. Adding emphasis to his proclamation, do Amaral contributed a drawing based on the painting for the publication of Oswald’s manifesto: “children of the sun, mother of the living.” – “what clashed with the truth was clothing […] The reaction against the dressed man.“¹

Oswald de Andrade: Manifesto Antropófago, 1928

So there is an interesting retrospectivity and perhaps this is what caused my confusion: the melancholic figure from do Amaral’s painting only becomes anthropophagic much later. Yes, perhaps it is hungry. Yes, perhaps she is ruminating about something that is missing. But does she looks like she wants to chew up a colonial ruler anytime soon? Perhaps the figure also just swallowed something that we are not permitted know anything about – an oracle, the ear of a shrew-mouse, some milk? Perhaps she is listening to the sun, the pressed grooves of her golden B-side? Luis Pérez-Oramas, the curator of the Tarsila do Amaral retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (2018), wrote that to escape the banal truth of the manifesto – namely the fact “that cultures—all cultures—have always constituted themselves by symbolically metabolizing elements from outside them” – one has to put aside the text and consult the pictures.²

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Perhaps I also want to look at the pictures due to the fact that, for me, neither the manifesto nor Haraldo de Campos’ expansion of anthropophagy to translation theory, nor the transfer of the cannibalism trope to the literary translation theory of recent years make sense as a decolonial metaphor. There are very basic reasons for that: perhaps I am a sensitive scaredy-cat. Apparently I struggle with the fact that an appendage-mangling violent metaphor remains an appendage-mangling violent metaphor even after multiple rounds of classification, conversion, and re-appropriation. Even if it was originally – but what does “originally” mean? We don’t have reports from the Tupinambá describing their practice in their own words, we only have interpreting, deforming texts and pictures from European travelers and colonists – the description of a ritualized, socially sanctioned and purposeful cultural practice, which naturally makes the word “violent” clunky here. And yet, so far there has been no symbolic abstraction, theoretical interpretation, decorative discursive garnish or other kind of intellectual fusion cuisine magic able to convince me to see a pattern of cultural, much less translational practice worth imitating in the dissection, gluttonous consumption and partial elimination of the “Other”. Shock - for sure, erotic - for sure. But what I’m interested in as a translator are the figures of thought and metaphors that make translation comprehensible as an ethical act (I act in such a way that the Other becomes a subject), and for that reason the colorful cannibalistic cauldron over the fire of supposedly anti-European gesture of emancipation doesn’t do it for me. What’s also unclear to me is how anthropophagy can be conceived of “as the experience of a radical, reciprocal transformation,” “as a reciprocal devouring of oneself and the Other in which it is no longer easy to differentiate between the consumer and the consumed,” as Melanie Strasser writes in this dossier. I’m not just a scaredy-cat, I also have a terrifyingly childish and limited pictorial logic: I always only see one person in the cauldron (in chains, in flames) and the other person in front of it. How can the person being eaten simultaneously eat their eater? I’m more convinced by a piece of meat walking around and asking, “what’s up, what’s up?” – as Douglas Pompeu kindly demonstrates for us. And yet, I’m dubious about the leftovers, the excess that remains when pictures/metaphors of violence are circulated with critical, emancipative intention.

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It should be noted that within the anthropophagic discourses of the two Brazilian modernities – Modernismo with the manifesto from Oswald de Andrade and the Concretismo/ Tropicalismo with the anthropophagic translation of Haraldo de Campos – the boundaries between experiences and concepts of cauldron/devourer, colonized/colonizer, Western/non-Western, native/non-native, of color/white are so entwined, so specifically connected to the development of a Brazilian national culture that it hardly seems applicable to power dynamics and resistance in other cultural regions, much less the decolonization of translation (which happened primarily through the essay by Else Ribeiro Vieras in the volume Post-Colonial Translation³). At the end of the twenties, it was not Black or indigenous artists and writers proclaiming the concept of anthropophagy to liberate them from the dominance of European cultural and identity formation, it was mostly white representatives of the upper and middle classes, the plantation agra-oligarchy – like Tarsila do Amaral – who were trained in Paris and drew upon the cannibalistic tropes for the creation of an independent Brazilian modernity, at a point in time when the primitive and drawing on national, ethical identity were en vouge in Paris. In this dossier, Simone Homem de Mello in particular shed some light in the darkness and created relief for my confusion:

“After all, Anthropophagy cannibalized indigenous America more than the allegedly cannibalized Europe, since the latter was not only much closer (and proper) to it, but also provided it with the discourse (of 17th-century travelers), the reference (of the vanguards of the early 20th century) and the (colonizing) action against which it would react bellicosely (avantgarde, a military term) as an "evil savage." […] While the Amerindian origin is reduced to the object of the Manifesto's discourse, the European colonizer is the interlocutor subject, target and addressee of the “Cannibalist Manifesto,” written from the fictitious point of view of the one who would not have allowed himself to be colonized.” (trans. Hilary Kaplan).

According to Homem de Mello, this carnivalistic twist and irony espouses a “de-hierarchization of relations between dominant and dominated cultures.” It is precisely this de-hierarchization, coupled with a de-historization of cultural concepts that paradoxically contributed to anthropophagy in the concrete poetry avantgarde of the 1950s and 1960s being rediscovered “as an anti-colonialist rhetorical gesture, as an alibi for the adaptive or interpretative appropriation of other artistic works and as a legitimation of the aesthetics of mélange, of the de-hierarchizing and dehistoricizing mixture of elements and references that originally had no relation to each other.” While the theoretical writings of Haraldo de Campos encourage this reading and spread “the erroneous image, which still exists, that a ‘transcreation’ would be the creation of a text ‘unfaithful’ to the original,” according to Homem de Mello, the actual translations of the concrete avantgarde instead produce fidelity with regard to the letters, the form, the independent reproduction and not obliteration of the original.

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Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (1929)

Even if there is no reference to eating or being eaten in Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu from 1928, a different, closely connected piece contains something else that pushes its way into our field of vision: a body part that stands for nourishment –  a gigantic breast. I am referring to the painting Antropofagia from 1929, in which the figure from Abaporu is seated, entwined with a second, feminine figure. Numerous references have asserted that there is a strong connection between Abaporu, Anthopofagia and a third painting, specifically the portrait A Negra, which do Amaral painted in Paris in 1923. Luis Pérez-Oramas goes so far as to formulate “the idea that A Negra was devoured by Apaporu, and that from that swallowing, that (symbolic) digestion, arose Anthropophagia.”

Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923

A Negra, one of defining paintings of modern Brazilian art, is a portrait of a Black, naked woman with monumental appendages in front of an abstract backdrop, a banana leaf over her shoulder, her large breast front and center. Even if the depiction of naked Black female bodies were a typical primitivist trope that was especially fashionable in 1920s Paris – one only has to think of Gaugin ⁴ – the painting’s progressive and socially critical side cannot be denied. Even before the reorientation around indigenous roots with Abaporu and the Manifesto, here a white upper-class artist tried to center a Black woman, as if saying that the modern Brazilian identity could not get around building upon Afro-Brazilian reality and coming to terms with slavery (which was only a few years in the past – Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end slavery, in 1888). However, beyond the association with the sculptures of the Yoruba goddess Yemanjá, there is a more revealing implication, a connection made by do Amaral herself and that leads back to her childhood on her parents’ fazenda. In an interview in 1972, she recalls “that the black maids talked about how slaves would stretch their breasts with heavy stones.”⁵ This was done so that the slaves could nurse children – their own and others’ – on their backs while they went about their work. In an essay well-worth reading, art historian Grace Sparapani explains that the trope of the large, Black breast not only evokes associations with the cruel deformation of Black bodies in colonial exploitation, but also with the “Black wet nurse,” mãe preta, who had to nurse the children of the slave owners – and who was forced to give up her flesh – translated into blood, translated into breast milk.⁶ In other words, this is a practice of white, institutionalized cannibalism. Seen in this light, anthropophagy not only cannibalized indigenous America, as described by Homem do Mello, it also cannibalized Black America while pretending to devour white Europe⁷ Against this backdrop, who would seriously attempt to defend the idea of anthropophagic translation or generalize it as a cipher of multidirectional devouring – seeing as it contains so much undigested, unacknowledged potential for violence by white power beyond the obvious cruelty that cannot be saved by any kind of carnival approach? The manifesto’s proclamation: “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically […] The world’s single law,” reveals itself to be not only banal, but unmistakably brutal and, unfortunately, still colonial.

„Re-Antropofagia“ von Denilson Baniwa (2018)

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Digression: The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who spent extended periods living in Brazil starting in 1951, including a period with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, is not known for being strongly committed to the interests of the indigenous or Afro-Brazilian people. We encounter an almost uncanny echo of Oswald’s “only law in the world” – an expression of white cannibalistic energy – surprisingly revealed by “In the Waiting Room” from Geography III, published in 1976. Like the poetic persona, Bishop describes how – shortly before her seventh birthday – she leafed through the National Geographic in the waiting room of a dentist’s office in Worcester, Massachusetts. Among other things, she encountered pictures of African women: “Their breasts were horrifying.” These ethnographic pictures, together with the screams of her aunt coming from the examination room, trigger a shock of realization, a reeling perception of her own subjectivity in connection with everything else, expressed by falling out of the world – “the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world.” Being rescued from the reeling and calming the scream, which also seems to come out of her own mouth, happens because of those very Black breasts – the poem nurses itself on them, in a manner of speaking:

What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?⁸

The Black breasts are simultaneously rejected and usurped, they become a trope of connectedness, the center of the world, as in do Amaral’s picture – without the patronizing, racist gaze being made conscious in the process. End of the digression.

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Lygia Clark, Baba Antropofágica, 1969

More than forty years after Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade had collected the inspiration for their anthropophagic declarations in Paris, interacting with their European colleagues, in studies, in discussions about cubism and primitivism, about color and subject matter, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark picked up those threads again. Clark taught at the Sorbonne after studying with Fernand Léger in 1950 – just like Tarsila do Amaral in 1923. Her piece Baba Antropofágica (Cannibalistic Drool) from 1969 consisted of guiding students toward action that would very carefully undermine or literally confuse the dichotomies of subject and object, inside and outside. People with spools of thread in their mouths kneel around a person lying on the ground, eyes closed. Then the thread is unrolled from their mouths and spread over the person, saliva-soaked lines, loops, piles, knots, until a layer covers the person’s body like a cocoon. The layer is then lifted, removed, torn apart by the spool people, who now open their eyes.

Clark regards herself as an initiator of transgressive logics or devouring and vomiting, not happenings or body art. Logics of the abject that seem to only be tangential to anthropophagy, i.e. man-eating.⁹ Despite this, Clark named this work, which has been retained in a nine-minute excerpt in this documentary film “O mundo de Lygia Clark” by Eduardo Clark (1973), with a direct reference to the anthropophagic concepts of her predecessors. Why? Watching this documentary reminds you of devouring or even symbolic cannibalism. And yet, perhaps the threads unwound from the mouth indicate vomiting that was preceded by devouring: then the person on the floor would have been collectively vomited up by the spooling mouths, that is, first devoured and now created, and the threads that lie on the body would correspond to the gastric juices that the convulsions are still producing. Or, perhaps on a symbolic level, the devoured person did not previously exist, but the coil mouths begin to unroll their insides outwards, creating a collective corporeality and subjectivity? Lygia Clark said that it initially felt as if people were pulling thread out of their mouths. But you increasingly have the feeling you’re pulling out your guts ¹⁰ If, according to Luis Pérez-Oramas, Tarsila do Amaral initiated the period of modern Brazilian art, then Clark brought it to an end.¹¹ I think that this can perhaps be read in this performance: Clark brought (threw up) modernism’s cannibalistic signature to an end by not having the gastric juices, the saliva, serve the purpose of digesting what was ingested (the influence), but of creating a collective body (through effluvia), a manifold entangled relationship, a linking of inside and outside, own and foreign, of artistic and social spheres.

Lygia Clark, Baba Antropofágica, 1969

However, to be perfectly honest, when I saw the pictures, it wasn’t gastric acid and swallowing that came to mind. A black and white photograph documenting the action and showing the delicacy of threads and the oddly contemplative expression on the face of the women lying below, involuntarily brings to mind another association: childbirth. Vernix caseosa. Placenta. (But who was it that wrote that the widespread practice in some cultures of letting the mother eat the placenta after giving birth is a kind of cannibalism?). In 2008, there was a re-enactment of Baba Antropofágica at a gallery in TriBeCa, New York. The author Mary Carter participated, and describes the observations of the participants, who talked about what they had experienced after each ‘round.’ – This was because the situation was repeated several times with different roles so that no single experience was remembered as the quintessence of the situation, not as original, so to speak:

One person who took a turn lying on the floor said she felt as though she was being birthed. The layers of thread made her feel as though she was encased in a womb: when the mesh was pulled away it was as if she were birthed into the light. Later in the evening, I noticed that the discarded string from previous performances began to look like a placenta.¹²

As a translator, I am interested in something else about this situation, which I essentially am reading (to go far out on a limb) as anti-anthropophagic. Now I’m pulling a possible thread out of my mouth, as it were: the “birth” of a translated text as a third thing – not as the person in the middle, not as the collective, surrounding droolers & spoolers, but the emerging fabric that mimics the contours of the person… and as links in space that are developing in the present. Routes and threads, uniting the most varied of influences. And where ‘that’ all comes from, what I put into the translation – the vomit, or the delicious disgorged comet – who even knows! Whether the translation ate it as an enemy, whether gleaned as a false friend, whether it crawled through the eyes, nose, or ears like a delinquent flea, a strange or cosmic dream, stumbling in space, a pre-uterine melody from travels, a line that appeared without my being able to remember ever having read it – what does it matter! After all, the translation is not a digested original, but the original is a digested translation. And where all “that” comes from, which went into it – whether it ate like a false friend, whether it crawled through the eyes, nose, or ears like a delinquent flea, a strange or cosmic dream, a stumble in space, a pre-uterine – you get the point. Lose the dichotomy of cannibalistic concept as a metaphor for translation, it only offers two roles: eating or being eaten, “Tupi or not tupi” (or milk from whose titty?) – I prefer taking the many spools of thread from Lygia Clark, action that gives birth to constellations. Although translating is frequently a solitary and desperate undertaking, struggling for the right sound, the right word, there are many translators who undoubtedly know that moment when in that searching you multiply, hallucinate, simultaneously pull several lucid linguistic threads from your teeth, and sometimes aren’t so sure which language they’re from, the target or source, native or natal or spittle or baba/babel. As if, when translating, you are constantly translating yourself into a language very similar to your own, but still unfamiliar and unconsciously collective. And that doesn’t mean having to abandon blood and suffering. Mary Carter reports how, the faster she tries to pull out the thread, the more the spool in her mouth rubbed her gums: “I could feel my gums beginning to bleed as they were hit continuously by the spool. The sound of the spool clomping against gums and teeth was the most curious sound—like horses’ hooves clopping, but quieter and with a slight echo.” The painful unwinding of a foreign object from my own mouth: I also know this side of translating, it belongs to it. Just as the superb smashing of tiny, invisible hooves in my mouth – whether I’ve swallowed the corresponding horses or not, whether I’m going to nurse them the very next moment or not.