post-colonial_translation

98 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
paradox of origin. Tupi, to be: the attempt in the 1920s to discontinue
mental colonialism through the desanctifying devouring of the Western
legacy.
A further reading of the play operating within ‘Tupi or not Tupi’
arises not from a minor phonological but from a major theological echo.
For the ontological question of the sixteenth-century ecclesiastical
debates as to whether the Indian had a soul, and the concomitant
Aristotelian-derived debate regarding the permissibility of his or her
enslavement, effectively asked whether the colonist or his legislators
could or should, either morally or economically, allow the Tupi to be.
To be, Tupi – through language, permission for the voicelessness of the
Tupi to sound out, allowing difference to disrupt homogeneity.
The devouring of Shakespeare and the revitalization of Hamlet’s
dilemma in the Manifesto points to the assimilative perspective of
cannibalism both as a programme and as a praxis: foreign input, far
from being denied, is absorbed and transformed, which brings
cannibalism and the dialogical principle close together. However, it
stands to reason that Oswald de Andrade’s dialogism has political
imports for Brazil, because the denial of univocality means assertion of
the Brazilian polyphonic and pluricultural space and, ultimately,
liberation from mental colonialism.
Cannibalism is a metaphor actually drawn from the natives’ ritual
whereby feeding from someone or drinking someone’s blood, as they
did to their totemic ‘tapir’, was a means of absorbing the other’s strength,
a pointer to the very project of the Anthropophagy group: not to deny
foreign influences or nourishment, but to absorb and transform them
by the addition of autochthonous input. Initially using the metaphor
as an irreverent verbal weapon, the Manifesto Antropófago stresses
the repressive nature of colonialism; Brazil had been traumatized by
colonial repression and conditioning, the paradigm of which is the
suppression of the original anthropophagical ritual by the Jesuits, so
‘the cure is to use that which was originally repressed – cannibalism –
as a weapon against historically repressive society’ (Nunes in Johnson
1987: 51).
The awareness of Europe’s debt to the New World pervades the
Antropofagia in Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto. In the overt attempt
at freeing Brazilian culture from mental colonialism, the Manifesto
redirects the flow of Eurocentric historiography. The New World, by
means of the permanent ‘Caraíba’ revolution, becomes the source of
revolutions and changes; the Old World is pronounced indebted to the
New World because without it ‘Europe would not even have its poor