It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books

a talk by

Denilson Baniwa

I could speak in my native tongue, I could speak in English, but I chose to speak Portuguese because I am an Indigenous Person, and I am what I consider to be, within my work, a ruin of the territorial colonization called Brazil. I am an indigenous person of the Baniwa people from the Brazilian Amazon. I am an artist and part of a Brazilian native art movement that includes many indigenous persons from the many peoples that exist in Brazil. In the region where I was born there are 23 indigenous peoples and there are over 300 indigenous peoples in Brazil overall, each with their different languages, cultures, traditions, rituals, and societies. A large part of those societies has been appropriated by many artistic movements in Brazil, modernism being only one of them. Since the arrival of the first European in Brazilian lands, indigenous culture has been extractively become the base of construction not only of Brazilian art but of Brazilian culture. Recently, due to the commemorations of the centennial of the Week of Modern Art and Brazilian modern art, we, indigenous artists, have been making an effort to think about what does the presence of the traditional peoples of this territory within the national discourse mean, whereas our bodies never fitted in it. The talk I bring to you today is called it is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books. It is based on a work I did, a Manifesto, a calling, so that indigenous artists in Brazil reclaim their seats and places within the so-called Brazilian Art. Not only of Modern Art, but of Contemporary Art as well.

It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books, that is a fact. As far as indigenous understanding goes, as my people understand it, it is impossible to learn how to do anything just in theory. A practice is required and an existence within the complex universe of doing, thinking, and acting. Action only happens when one leaves theory aside and goes on to practice. In 2017, in this place I am speaking from right now, the Goethe Institut in São Paulo, I and 10 other indigenous artists of Brazil have met some of the greatest collectors, gallerists, curators and Museum directors in Brazil to discuss what kind of indigenous presence was necessary in the Brazilian scene then. And what we, indigenous artists, heard from those people, from those great connoisseurs of Brazilian art, was that traditional peoples did not make art. They only made crafts. They made collective art, primitive art, or anything that fits that vocabulary, these synonyms, but never art that could be considered art by these academic means of production. So, I and an indigenous relative[1] from the Macuxi people – which is where the story of Macunaíma, written by Mário de Andrade, was stolen from – thought that we should confront those Brazilian Art academics and show them what Contemporary Indigenous Art looked like. As a Baniwa, I don’t have the place of speech, as they say, to talk about Macunaíma, even less to talk about what does Macunaíma mean to the Macuxi people, from whom Mário de Andrade’s story was stolen. But, as a native of the Amazon, I have the place of speech (of the place) where the ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grunberg – a German ethnologist that was in the Amazon region collecting myths, stories, objects and in one of his diaries he collected the myth Macunaíma which, by chance of the time, ended up falling in Mário de Andrade’s hands, and which gave him the chance to write the acclaimed book Macunaíma, a hero with no character, where he mixed indigenous mythology, African mythologies and the mythologies of the Brazilian nation.

At the time, Jaider and I had thought about how to present ourselves to the artistic academic society showing two faces. On one hand, the death of the fake Macunaíma written by Mário de Andrade and, on the other hand, the rebirth of the real Macunaíma which was the mythical hero of the Macuxi people. Jaider would performatically rebirth the original Macunaíma and would reclaim the space Macunaíma demands within society, and I would metaphorically assassinate the fake Macunaíma, the one stolen by Mário de Andrade. The painting I’m showing here is that work, which now belongs to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. That painting shows the decapitated head of Mário de Andrade merged, mixed, with the head of the actor who interpreted Macunaíma in the film. It is a metaphor that kidnaps both Brazilian Macunaímas, the literary and the cinematic. It is an offering to all indigenous artists in Brazil, where the seasonings used in the anthropophagic cooking are the traditional seasonings of indigenous cuisine. The traditional corn, the cassava, the pepper and the annatto (urucum). Beside the head, the first version of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma book, and, right below, a note, which is the note I leave to all indigenous artists in Brazil. Here is where the thing about the impossibility of plowing the land by reading books comes into play. In the note, one can read in Portuguese: “here lies the simulacrum Macunaíma along with the idea of the Brazilian people and anthropophagy seasoned with Bordeaux and pax mongolica. May from this long digestion Makunaima and the original anthropophagy, which are ours, indigenous people, be reborn.”

Within the indigenous understanding of anthropophagy, it is impossible that any Brazilian modernist raised in Europe, speaking French and descending from slavers or the Brazilian elite, it is impossible that they understand the complexity of indigenous culture and the complexity of what anthropophagy means to indigenous cultures.

The Macuxi people, where Macunaíma came to life, are a traditionally anthropophagous people, even though they have abandoned that practice a long time ago. The Baniwa people, which I belong to, have an ethos, a war ethics, called coada which is nothing less than the kidnapping of the enemy and their anthropophagic consumption. But these codes of anthropophagy in the indigenous world don’t mean the extermination of the other, nor the assimilation of their powers. Anthropophagy, for the Baniwa as well as for the Macuxi, is the annulment of alterity, the annulment of the different other, the annulment of the differences between devourer and devouree, in which all become one. So, how could some modernist artist, raised in French schools or imitating European movements, arrive in Brazil and be able to translate such a complex ethos as that of indigenous anthropophagy?

So, as we are in the commemorations of Brazil, all museums here are celebrating the Modern Art Week of 1922. We indigenous artists do not claim any response to modernism nor any response to the Week of 22. Because these answers, critical or celebratory, only make sense to an academia that copies European academia. What we, indigenous artists, are trying to do is to bring anthropophagous practice to an artistic sense, that of the contemporaneous, to teach, maybe, to white people in the arts or in academia, how one plants a cassava. One can’t plant cassava, one can’t plant any plant, one can’t grow or sow with state-of-the-art theory. One needs to live the being indigenous. One needs to live in the indigenous community in order not only to understand what anthropophagy means, but a different way to occupy the Brazilian territory, and to be in another retaking of the Brazilian territory, be it through art or through demarcation. And to reclaim Brazilian land we don’t have to claim any criticism or commentary on Brazilian modernism, seen that we, Brazilian indigenous people, make up 0.3% of the Brazilian society and, when the Europeans arrived, we were 100% of that society. It doesn’t fall on us to reclaim any kind of European imitation. What we must do is reclaim our presence. That is what I am doing here, through arguments, even it means to retake kidnapped narratives. 

Q&A

Adriana Johnson:

I found your presentation very moving, and I would like to know more about the idea of anthropophagy. You presented the anthropophagic idea as an idea of annulment of alterity. Not to assimilate, but to annul. So, my question is, considering the ruin that is Brazil, still, and your talk, that remains there as a ghost, and thinking about the relation with other indigenous peoples not in Brazil, isn’t there a way to annul Brazil, maybe in imagination? To annul it as existing in a certain context? I wanted to know more about that. Isn’t there a kind of imagination where Brazil doesn’t exist, where Brazil can’t be devoured, but annulled, perhaps? I also liked the word “stolen”. That story was “stolen”. I was interested in the relation between stealing and anthropophagy. It’s a very different concept precisely because it preserves the idea of the original: what one steals, what one copies is a simulacrum, it doesn’t carry all the phantasy that is present in the use of anthropophagy as assimilation, of doing something that isn’t one’s own. With the idea of stealing, it becomes apparent that there’s no assimilation, there’s the production of something very different, a second thing that’s not original. So, I’m interested in the usage of this word.

Denilson Baniwa:

How to annul Brazil, I don’t know. Maybe with the Delorean, the car that travels back in time and to go to 1500 and sink the first caravels that landed here, but no (laughter). There are, within all Brazilian indigenous society, many forms that are nullifying Brazil. Facing all the violence that colonial Brazil built on that territory, indigenous presence-resistance is still a way to annul that history, as history itself, including art, is colonial. However, that, as it happened in 1922, is ignored by Brazilian society because it happens in the margins of what gets to the big cities, whether Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. Black and indigenous voices were ignored in 1922 as they are today. Even today, indigenous, and black people’s actions have a minimal impact on Brazilian society. Indigenous people annul Brazil all the time in their own way. That annulment is what allows their living presence, with living indigenous languages still very present in Brazil, where laws were once created that banned them. Maybe, what indigenous artists are doing today is to amplify these indigenous voices anyway they can.

[Regarding the difference between stealing and anthropophagy, in indigenous anthropophagy, as I know it, in the Baniwa people, anthropophagy involves an agreement. Both parts know what is happening and take part in the process. There is a common conscience about anthropophagy, an understanding about what it does, and an agreement between the two. That’s why I say Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma was stolen because it was a unilateral movement. There was no agreement or reciprocity. It was stolen from the Macuxi and taken to São Paulo. Of course, there are other views about it, when jaider says that Makunaima wanted to go to Mário’s book cover, for example. That’s why I began talking about these two views about Macunaíma that we shared, about these two ways to talk about it.]

[1] Indigenous people in Brazil frequently use the word “parente”, relative, to refer to other indigenous persons, even if they belong to other groups otherwise generally unrelated.