by Eva Hoffman
Tzvetan Todorov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and is a historian, essayist and Directeur de Recherche Honoraire at the CNRS in Paris. He has taught as Visiting Professor at various American universities and is the author of, among other titles, The Conquest of America, On Human Diversity, Facing the Extreme and Hope and Memory.
2
Brazil
Nicolau Sevcenko
Claude Levi-Strauss was 26 when he arrived in Brazil, in 1935, as a member of a group of distinguished French scientists and intellectuals, the so-called Mission Française, coming straight from La Sorbonne, University of Paris, to be the founding fathers of its tropical branch at the University of São Paulo. He rented a nice house that he could share with his wife and his father, both as eager as he was to flee the European chaos, where the rise of Nazi-Fascism pointed to dark times, intolerance and war looming close on the horizon. That house was peculiar in many senses. It was a nice, spacious house, recently built by an Italian capomastro in a Roman geometric style, which was a regular occurrence in a city whose population was mostly comprised of European immigrants, the majority of them Italians.
The house also had a wide backyard, displaying an orchard full of tropical plants and trees. There were palm trees, ferns, mango and papaya trees, to which Levi-Strauss himself added many other tropical species, found, selected and planted by him, among them a magnificent group of banana trees. In time, he would populate that backyard with a multitude of birds and animals that he would bring from his escapades to the rural outskirts of the city: macaws, parrots, parakeets, monkeys.
Even more interesting than that was the location of the house. The city of São Paulo is crossed by a ridge, dividing the urban area into two wide slopes, one to the southwest the other to the northeast. The dividing line at the very top of the hill was paved, becoming the most scenographic urban feature, Avenida Paulista, with rows of stately houses on both sides. The southwest slope comprised the posh area, planned by an English company engaged in selling overseas picturesque commercial versions of the original Garden City project of Ebenezer Howard. The houses were exotic models of colonial English bungalows mixed up with Spanish-Californian estancias architecture. Directly opposed to it, the northeast slope comprised the poor side of town, the so-called Liberdade District, reminiscent of the colonial area where slaves and cattle were kept, where the prisons, the pillory, the gallows, the humble chapels and the cemetery exclusive to Black people as well as the stables and the slaughterhouses were concentrated. The most fascinating thing about the house chosen by Levi-Strauss was that its façade was facing Avenida Paulista while the backyard was turned to Liberdade. Needless to say which side was Levi-Strauss’s favourite.
Levi-Strauss’s father was trained in the visual arts and was a professional photographer, keen on being supplied with excellent photographic equipment, which he shared with his son, whom he had instructed in his métier. Levi-Strauss therefore soon became a brilliant and accomplished photographer. Whenever his duties at the University of São Paulo permitted, he would venture with his cameras to the streets, always attracted towards the northeast slope, walking his way towards the historic centre of the city, with his interest concentrated particularly in the Liberdade District and the black communities. That’s how he registered scenes of Carnival, street dances, funerary ceremonies and rituals of spirit possession being performed in the public areas of Liberdade. During holidays he would travel away from the city limits, looking for ancestral ceremonies of Mestiço populations (Caipiras, people with mixed White and Native blood) in old colonial towns in the backlands of the State of São Paulo. After two years of teaching, he decided to take his greatest gamble: the expeditions to meet Native communities in the most remote lands of central Brazil, in the unknown, unmapped areas known as o sertão (uncharted backlands). Once he set off with his little expedition, anthropology in particular and the human sciences in general would never be the same again.
The incompatibility between Levi-Strauss and his Brazilian academic and intellectual colleagues couldn’t have been greater. Brazilian intelligentsia, especially those involved with the creation of the University of São Paulo, were mesmerised by the lure of modernisation. The main ambition of São Paulo’s elite was to become the Chicago of South America, the capital of industry, market, finance, science, new technologies and industrial arts. After the First World War, their cultural reference was still Europe, particularly France (not for too long though), but their business ideal was the USA. Within the very small ruling elite of the State of São Paulo, there was a tacit pride at having extinguished the last Native communities almost to oblivion in the State, as well as having alienated completely the former Black slaves and their descendents from the process of economic growth, giving preference to new masses of European and Asian immigrants. The richest state of the Brazilian Federation, the most powerful, the one with enough voting power to choose the next president on its own, the most advanced in terms of technologies, finance, education and culture, wanted to be seen as virtually Native-free, Black-free and Caipira-free.
It wouldn’t be a surprise then, how shocked and outraged this Paulista elite felt when, after the Second World War, in 1955, Levi-Strauss (who had left Brazil in 1939) published his seminal book, Tristes Tropiques. It soon became one of the key books of the twentieth century. It was entirely based on the experiences lived in São Paulo and the expeditions led by Levi-Strauss in the backlands of central Brazil. It changed not just the way anthropology was written and thought about, but more than anything else redefined the way Western society and culture were conceived. In his classic Race and History (1952), part of his works commissioned by the United Nations to denounce the legacy of racism and eugenics, he had already stated his beliefs in cultural diversity, stressing the riches, the wisdom and the beauty of many non-Western traditions. But it was in Tristes Tropiques that he dived deep into mythological thinking, ritual and rhythmic performances, and symbolic figurations as sources of alternative thinking and intuition, articulated in a kind of bricolage process, which deserved as much respect and appreciation as Western science and philosophy.
Coincidentally, by that same time in the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of Brazilian artists and intellectuals came to the fore, who were decidedly suspicious of modernity and modernisation, denouncing its deleterious effect upon popular traditions, especially those preserved by the Native, the Black and the Caipira communities. Brazilian history was marked from its very origins by a sort of strong insularity. The Portuguese, always terrified by the danger of strong foreign powers threatening to invade and steal their richest colony, were resolutely averse to any form of contact with foreigners of any kind, who were forbidden to enter into the colony’s territory. Both the Portuguese Crown and the Church were also afraid of the ‘dangerous ideas’, be they those of the Reformation or later on those of the Enlightenment and liberalism, infiltrating Brazilian minds, so the authorities did whatever was possible to prevent the spread of literacy within the colony. As a consequence, free from foreign influences as well as from literary sources, different levels of cultural configurations took shape, some based on Native mythologies and rituals, some on Sub-Saharan African religion and rhythms, some on Caipira conflations of the many sides of mestiçagem. Adding to that, the kind of poor Portuguese peasants who came to be settlers in Brazil, mostly coming from the poorest areas of Trás-os-Montes in the north of Portugal, were adepts and survivors of the heresy of the Holy Spirit (the same group as the Alumbrados in Spain, the Albingensis in Provence and the Fraticelli in northern Italy, decimated by the Crusaders under the orders of the Papacy). The basic element in common between these different groups (Natives, Africans, Caipiras, Trasmontinos) was the fact that they believed in rituals by which they could incorporate and be possessed by Divine entities in their multiple manifestations, dispensing absolutely with the tutelage of the Catholic Church or any kind of permission from the Crown authorities.
That new generation of intellectuals and artis
ts of the 1950s and 1960s just mentioned above was living and acting in the aftermath of the Second World War, under a wave of new technologies that invaded the daily life of the urban populations, defining new routines – mechanised, automatised, standardised – and moved by the dynamics of publicity and consumerism. However, they rejected the pressures to conform to this new planned and robotic world, looking forward to an alternative future. What then became the object of their deeper desires was that legacy of free-floating imaginaries, spontaneous, independent, rebellious, oriented towards the flows of the cycles of nature on the one hand and to the instinctual demands of the pulsating body on the other. That turned out to them to be the real treasure of Brazilian culture, a precious and fleeting heritage to be redeemed, to be cherished as much as to be translated and updated according to the demands of an alternative culture in the growing metropolis. That was the living raw material which could give symbolic as much as corporeal, sensorial and communitarian substance to social and cultural projects oriented towards a more balanced, equalitarian, caring, playful and pleasurable post-affluent society.
The main target of the cultural criticism articulated by these new artists and intellectuals was the new rationality applied to urban planning models, based on the American concept of the sprawling suburbs, grid-like functional zoning, and the mainstream architectural trend of high towers and huge car parks called the International Style. Many of the most important Brazilian capital cities were reconfigured according to these new paradigms: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte. But its most iconic manifestation was the brand new capital of the federation, prodigiously built up entirely within five years, from 1956 to 1960 in the middle of the sertão, at the heart of uncharted central Brazil, the city of Brasília. That futuristic city, dubbed ‘the capital of hope’ and ‘the most modern city in the world’ by the proud authorities who built it, was actually the nemesis of those artists and intellectuals who got in tune with the popular imaginaries representing the liberating legacies of the pensée sauvage.
Brasília was therefore presented, not only to Brazilians but to the entire world, as the colossal display window of post-Second World War advanced capitalism, putting a definitive end to the last terra ignota and its respective barbarian populations and cultures. The new capital was connected to a plethora of express highways and airports penetrating deep in all directions of the territory as well as establishing international communications. Nothing else was supposed to escape the overpowering spread of the new rationality of planning, economic exploitation of all available natural resources and the submission of all peoples, mostly the younger ones, to massive campaigns for the eradication of illiteracy and mandatory education according to a standardised national curriculum devised by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Brasília.
Since then there had been strong resistance from many rather isolated groups to this federal imperative to reduce many popular imaginaries to one single national culture. But historical change as it took its course, especially from the middle of the 1970s onwards, unleashed a dynamic that rendered this process virtually irreversible. A new wave of technological innovations evicted huge multitudes from the sertão and the rural areas, forcing them to internal migrations, which would inevitably end up by their settling into sub-human slums in the outskirts of the main capital cities. In fact Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques saw it coming, the whole book sounding as a kind of bittersweet swan song. Communities dissolved, families broke up and were separated, social bonds disappeared, cultural traditions were lost. People alienated from their native backgrounds and deprived of their emotional ties turned to the new ascending media personalities, trusting their best hopes to populist politicians. When Levi-Strauss returned to Brazil for a very brief visit in the company of President Mitterand, in 1985, he couldn’t even visit his beloved Liberdade, because the cab got stuck in a gigantic traffic jam. By leaving the country for the last time he declared, ‘the Brazil that I knew doesn’t exist anymore’.
The advantage of trying to figure out these complex historical changes from the perspective of the new generation of artists and intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s is particularly interesting because they not only could understand quite well what was going on, but they were also in a privileged position to consider what other historical alternatives were still available, conceivable or desirable. According to their view, the main source of the processes of cultural impoverishment was the institutionalisation of the Nation-State, with its ensuing pressure for educational reform and cultural homogenisation. In a sense, Europe underwent a similar process during the Renaissance, when the national languages were formalised according to fixed grammatical rules. This set the stage for the canonical ordering of cultural values from which national cultures were composed. Therefore, European Baroque was accordingly a period of centrifugal absorption of cultural production under the tutelage of Church and Crown.
In Brazil, however, moving in the opposite direction during a rather extended Baroque period that lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the presence of the Portuguese Catholic Church and the Crown authorities was so limited and concentrated in a few port cities, that all over the territory a centripetal effect occurred, a multiplicity of local cultural formations sprung up all over the territory and even across the borders, feeding themselves on Baroque symbols, images and motifs, but in fact switching them into something totally other. There was, for instance, a Guarany rebellious proto-republic to the south; a large Tupinambá community to the southeast; a Sertanejo-Caipira (by the way, the only variation of the Portuguese language that Levi-Strauss learned in Brazil) culture by the central plateau; a vast Congo-Kimbundo nation spreading from Rio de Janeiro to the adjoining areas; a Yorubá-Nagô-Hussuá nation on the northeast coast; a Tapuia-influenced culture in the pastoral backlands of the northeast; a huge Nheengatú federation in the Amazonian area, to mention but a few.
To no one’s surprise, as soon as Brazilian independence was declared in 1822, one of the first measures taken by the brand new Nation-State was to make it illegal for anyone to speak any languages other than official Portuguese or other recognised European languages, under the penalty for transgressors of being brutally flogged and imprisoned. As a follow-up in the same direction a national Instituto Histórico e Geográfico was created, designed to rearrange all facts related to the social and cultural experiences lived in the former colony in direct connection to the new Nation-State. Whatever by any means concurred or was interpreted as concurring with the achievement of the independent Nation-State was deemed relevant, the rest inconsequential; whatever concurred with the unified Brazilian national culture was significant, the rest discarded as meaningless. In parallel a new Academia de Belas Artes (obviously based on the Academie des Beaux Arts of France) was inaugurated, declaring all versions of popular Baroque or Native arts as barbarian, despicable and shameful to the cultivated nation.
The artistic generation of the 1950s and 1960s on the other hand was the first to abandon the centrality of the Nation-State and Western civilisation as historical or cultural parameters according to which everything would have to be weighed and measured. Their aim was to dive deep into whatever remained of the legacies of the many popular imaginaries which thrived in colonial times. For them, therefore, there was no such thing as Brazil or to put it another way, there were many Brazils, within and without the actual Brazilian territory. These artists were keen on learning to think in mythological terms, to speak with gesture and body movement, to express feelings and emotions through colours, flavours and smells, to establish social and affective bonds through rhythm and sound, to put play, pleasure and happiness at the centre of the social experience of daily life and to live in harmony with nature, natural cycles and all creatures.
There were many artists that could be mentioned as comprising this new 1950s and 1960s generation, representing different forms of artistic expression, from music to architecture, from sculpture to dance. For rea
sons of brevity in this paper, however, I will limit my references to four, certainly the four more prominent of them all: writers Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector, as well as visual artists Hélio Oiticica and Arthur Bispo do Rosário. To be sure, there were very few things in common between these artists, each one of them living a life totally separated from the others. What they shared then, making them utterly relevant to the culture of the second half of the twentieth century, was an acute awareness of the intrinsically anti-human, anti-social and anti-environmental values which became the dominant credo of post-war culture. The prevalent obsession with consumerism, entertainment, geometric precision, planning, automation, fast cars and planes, domestic cleanliness and efficacy, and above all the idea that the American way of life was superior and therefore the only model destined to shape the future of the entire humanity and of the planet, was to them senseless and offensive.
Guimarães Rosa’s fictional works are completely immersed into the oral narratives of the illiterate people of the sertão of north-central Brazil. His refined and very sophisticated prose tries to recreate oral traditions composed of mythic-poetic material coming from medieval and ancient Europe and Asia, as well as from Indigenous and African traditional sources. His stories refer to the Arthurian and Charlemagne legends, as well as to German, Slavic, Mongol, Indian and Trans-Himalayan mythologies. Certain mythological themes, for instance that of the ‘magic peacock’ (pavão misterioso) or the ‘enchanted bull’ (boi encantado), exist today only in Siberia and in the sertão of Brazil. On the other hand, we have mythic-poetic elements coming from Congo and Yorubá sources, mixed with Tupi-Guaraní, Tamoio, Tapuia and Gê cultural legacies. All of these Guimarães Rosa would elaborate in a richly complex experimental prose that tries to conglomerate into writing the subtle and multifarious memories and linguistic layers of millenarian oral traditions.
Clarice Lispector, on the other hand, mixes these elements of Brazilian popular oral tradition with the legacy of linguistic wonder of the Hassidic and Kabala culture she brought from her inheritance of the Russian and Ukrainian shtetls. So fond of allegories and parables, like her spiritual brother Franz Kafka, she nonetheless transcends the basic Hassidic fundament of her fascination with the powers of the spoken and body language by the way that she engages the syncretic and ritualistic elements of Brazilian popular culture. Her treatment, for instance, of the quintessential theme of the relationship between the woman and the sea, that is to say the relationship between women and the source of life, refers as much to the Hebrew myth of Lilith, as to the Semitic representation of Ashtarté, as well as to the classical figure of Aphrodite and, of course, to the all-powerful Afro-Brazilian godly figure of Yemanjá. Her compassion for the rural population that was being crushed into massive eviction, followed by a life lived under sub-human conditions in urban slums, was represented by images of insects and wild animals being systematically exterminated by a social policy of prophylactic paranoia. It was hygiene turned into ethics, in the same sense as in the 1930s and 1940s eugenics was enforced as State policy.
Arthur Bispo do Rosário was a very poor Black and barely literate man, born in the backlands of the northeast area. Being detached from his family since his childhood, he would live mostly as a beggar until he was the age to enrol in the Brazilian navy. But he would soon be discharged from the navy on account of what was considered his mental instability. He tried for a while to have a career as a boxing fighter, but with very little success. So eventually he returned to begging in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, until at the age of 30 he was sent to a mental institution, where he would remain until the end of his life in 1989. There, solitary in his cell, he would start unpicking the old uniforms of other inmates, in order to make a series of astounding pieces of embroidery. He would translate into works of textile and embroidery all the wondrous mythic-poetic imaginary of the popular woodcuts prevalent all over the backlands of the northeast, as a visual support to its oral culture. It came all of a sudden from inside Bispo do Rosário, as a volcanic overflow of prodigious artistic expression that became incessant and ever surprising to his very last days. Bewildered by his talents, the medics of the institution would permit him, from time to time, to roam the streets of Rio collecting pieces of garbage, discarded objects, industrial waste, junk and rags, which he would meticulously elaborate into deeply symbolic objects, discriminating panels (which significantly he would call ‘display windows’ or ‘archives’), banners, streamers, drapes, garments, cloaks, mantles and the most subtle and delicate compositions of textiles: colours, shapes, textures, knots, cords, fringes, studs, pendants and embroideries. Bispo do Rosário combined the uniforms of the mad and the garbage of the streets of Rio into one of the most sublime artistic treasures Brazil has ever had.
Although Hélio Oiticica was born into a middle-class family, he never had any kind of formal schooling or training in his entire life. That was because his family belonged to a long tradition of committed anarchists. He was therefore educated by members of his own family. But what a family that was! His mother was an accomplished musician, singer and piano player. His many aunts were choreographers, dancers, musicians and actresses. His older brother was an architect, his grandfather was a poet and playwright and his father was internationally acclaimed as both a biologist and an artistic photographer. Hélio Oiticica was therefore a man of many talents, so that when he decided to dedicate himself to the visual arts, he started by working with the abstractionist/concretist group of artists who counted as the avant-garde in Rio de Janeiro. The big surprise though came quite soon, when he decided to shape his art in accordance with the daily life and oral culture of the poorest layers of the population of Rio, living in the favela slums and in the dire settlements spread across the outskirts of the city.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as you may remember, the city was being modernised in line with the new standards of American urban planning and International Style architecture. For the same reasons, huge multitudes of people from the rural areas were being evicted from their native regions, having no alternative but to look for jobs in metropolitan areas. To face this massive invasion, the authorities of Rio were relying on the police and repressive forces to keep these undesirable people from spoiling their beautifully refashioned scenario. Hélio Oiticica knew exactly what he was doing. By living and getting integrated with people in the favelas, to the point of becoming one of the most acclaimed samba dancers of Rio, as a member of the legendary Mangueira School of Samba, he started shaping a brand new situational art. His aim was to learn and express the ingenious manners by which these segregated people were re-inventing, every day and in every way, a relentless praxis of resilience, capable of circumventing the repressive apparatus of the authorities, at the same time that they would be celebrating their own cultural values of vitality, sensuality and spirituality. That was the source of the parangolés of Hélio: a kind of elaborate fancy dress, each person could make their own, full of different textiles, plastics, meshes, nets, embroideries, stamps and written messages, destined at the same time for the public and collective dance of samba and for the display of messages of protest against the authorities, as well as pleas for civil rights and for the enfranchisement of people. Thus art would entail a ludic interplay between daily life, politics and popular festival. When Hélio tried to show the parangolé at the Museum of Modern Art, he was confronted and expelled by the Director along with his samba dancing friends. Nonchalantly, Hélio took his entire group to the external gardens of the Museum, at the very heart of the newly beautified Flamengo Park and danced the parangolé all night long under the lights of torches brought by his friends. That was one of the most legendary and unforgettable parties that Rio has ever had. After that, Hélio had to flee, living a political exile that would last almost to his death in 1980.
So Levi-Strauss’s basic aim in Tristes Tropiques – to affirm the originality, richness and rather generous character of the diverse Brazilian indigenous and po
pular culture – was taken to a sublime dimension, as well as to a very articulated expression, by the artists of the 1950s and 1960s generation. Apart from the disjointed heyday of the baroque period, since the inception of the Nation-State, never before had indigenous and popular culture played such a seminal role in the highest artistic output in the country. Although these artists were generally reviewed in Brazil in cold or lukewarm terms by critics trained according to American academic criticism, they were becoming highly praised by some of the most decisive critical voices in North and Latin America, as well as in Europe. The stream of critical debate seemed at long last to be turning to their favour. Paradoxically, therefore, they couldn’t predict it, but from the last decades of the twentieth century onwards, history took a surprising turn, undermining the role and powers of Nation-States at the same time that global and local interactions were reinforced. Perhaps then, their best hopes and dreams are not lost at all. Perhaps now, more than ever, we could learn with them that the moment has come when we shall say good-bye Brazil, hello Brazils.