Remora

A Ramble

"The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls."

Exquisite Corpse does civilization and its discontents a favor, and publishes a translation of Oswaldo de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.

"I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him."

Oswaldo's works and days were spent on poetry, the libido, and communism. Or at least until, like all Latin American intellectual poobahs, he settled down into the utter fatuousness of old age, wallowing in his own lipids and lying memories. We do like his definitive refutation of the liberal principle, by the simple expedient of eating the liberal. St. Paul advises us to prove all things and hold fast that which is good.
Oswaldo simply supplements that dictum: do it with your mouth and teeth and tongue. We also like the fact that the the golden age proclaimed by America was, indeed, all about all the girls. For Oswaldo, the younger the better. This is easier to do when you have the time for it. Luckily, Oswaldo came from a wealthy family. He was not only a creator of modernism, but a creation of one of modernism's monsters: the newspapers. He became a personality in Brazilian newspapers in the twenties, traveled to Europe and discovered the Futurists, Dadaists, and pullulating other ists, and returned with the mission to create some Brazilian equivalent of what he'd seen. In some ways, the typical modernist in the Picabia mode:


"In his behavior and other features like the mania of meeting people and the insistence on seeing those that he knew, the speed with which he got sick of those whom, the previous day, he had put up in the clouds, the ingenuous search for contact with foreigners who were passing through; the experience of living in so many different environments; the familiarity with Midases and politicians, all these demonstrating an obvious quality of the nouveau riche; but also with chauffeurs and black Indians, who amused him intensely and whom he would collect. To crown all of this, the love for novelty of whatever form: ideas, books, meetings, new people, crimes. An overwhelming use of everything to reach knowledge, a notion, at least an increase in information, like someone who wished to swallow the world." CANDIDO, Antonio. "Digress�o sentimental sobre Oswald de Andrade" ("Sentimental Digression on Oswald de Andrade"). V�rios escritos (Various writings). S�o Paulo: Duas Cidades. 1970.

Limited Inc would like to put its seal of approval on cannibal poetics -- it surely is more fun than the disembodied, Jack Kerouacian Gooey Gupta school out there in Colorado. Or whatever it is called. However, being a politically minded we, we are aware that the image of the Indian, in a space that has been intentionally depopulated of same, can exert all the fascination it wants to: this is still all about the criminal's heirs pickpocketing the corpse for his one last thing thing of value -- his fame. And even getting that wrong. There is, after all, something in Nietzsche's complaint about poets: they do lie too much: or as Zarathustra, who classes himself with the poets, says, "we know too little and are bad pupils: so we are forced to lie."

Limited Inc has been reading Scott Malcomson's book on race in America, One Drop of Blood. Business Week published a nice review of the book when it came out. However, we think the reviewer, Marilyn Harris, misses at least one of Malcomson's points:

In one of the most persuasive and unnerving revelations, the writer shows that before Europeans arrived on American shores, there was no consciousness of Indian-ness among the many, highly distinct tribes; instead, identity was tribe-based. It took a while for white colonists to think of the natives as a group, as ''the other.'' It also took time for Indians to perceive that they were being defined as such. By degrees, ''colonial law and practice turned native tribal citizens into Indians,'' Malcomson notes, and into ''the still more mystifying category of people of color--a group that, in a further move, was associated by colonists with permanent slavery.''

The Native Americans' future would hold paradoxes and ironies as well as manifold miseries, and Malcomson deftly teases them from the historical record. The parallels between their story and that of both blacks and whites shackle the three groups together in an uncomfortable journey through the centuries. Some Indians were enslaved, but others held black slaves. Some Indians in the early 19th century constructed a ''theology of separation''--much as certain blacks did later on. This amounted to a fundamentalist creed that rejected white influences and culture. Those who mixed with whites and converted to Christianity entered a cultural purdah and were rejected by both sides. Still, there was intense government pressure to assimilate. Malcomson shows how the national census reflected a dwindling Indian population up until the 1950s. After that, it began increasing sharply--as racial pride grew and Indians, rather than census takers, were allowed to state their own affiliation."

Harris misses the context of Malcomson's irony. It is true that the population of Indians has been growing sharply, but there's a circular logic in thinking that it is because Indians have been allowed to state their own affiliation, if in fact the question is: who is an Indian? Rather, if we are reading Malcomson rightly, he is trying to say something about the slipperiness of racial categories. The whole racial notion of Indians went from being a unity enforced by the original, European colonialist understanding of the New World to being a category that justified, firstly, the depossession of the members of the category, and then their assimilation into the property laws and morals of white society (a category that was constructed in relationship to its others -- as any good deconstructionist would expect), and finally into being a category in which to take "pride." Why the continual evocation of pride? Because these racial categories operate on the limit of their definitional usefulness against the most puzzling of them: white. That "white blood" flows in the veins of the suddenly franchised lost nation of the Indians -- that a lost nation recovered by a change in census methodology -- shows... well, it shows what? It shows that the Indian is defined by the problem of being an Indian, rather than by some certain knowledge that makes for declaring an "affiliation." It shows that, by inference, the same is true for that not so universal solvent, white -- which can absorb Jew, Italian, and even Indian, but can never seemingly absorb black.

Perhaps we can emerge from the whiteness by way of the cannibal. But Limited Inc has his doubts about that optimistic program. At one time it looked like Rimbaud would make us free. But now we need a bulldozer.