The publishing of the Pau-Brasil Poetry Manifesto, in 1924, enhanced what could have been a “vegetable turning point” in the first activities of Brazilian modernism. The greens of the Favela. The political domination of wild jungles. The malicious vines of wisdom. The summarized caged forests. The forest and the school. The vegetation. Vegetable richness. Brazilwood. All of that among pajé shamans nostalgia and military airfields. And of course: we cannot fail to mention currency issues, exports, Brazil profiteur. After all, everyone knows that, for the Modernist Week of 1922 to happen, money from the coffee magnates paid the rent of the São Paulo Municipal Theater. Or, according to another version of our modernist origin myth, these same coffee magnates (or people from their families or trusts) got the Municipal Theater for free.
Even the name chosen for the Manifesto was justified by concerns about international trade. Oswald de Andrade, who was well acquainted with the “locked-in” price fluctuations – in pounds sterling or Brazilian contos de réis – of agribusiness bags (that agro was not pop yet), made his point about “national borders”: “It was about rallying against imported poetry, so I resourced to the vegetal totem of brazilwood, our first-ever exported product”. Avant-garde tribute to a country “discovered” by the European need to consume spices and which continued its economic history dependent on other plants: sugarcane, coffee and, today, transgenic soy.
Oswald certainly thought too, the Pau-Brasil totem on his side, about the author of a “taboo book”: “Canaã, which no one had read and everyone admired”. Too bad they didn’t read it. The reading would probably conjure complexity into someone who only knew Graça Aranha (the “Graceless Spider” trolled in Revista de Antropofagia) for the famous 1924 scandal of a non-ecological speech intended to defend modernism at the Brazilian Academy of Letters: “We are lyrics of sadness, because we haven’t yet mastered nature”.
Canaã had already shown – two decades before 1922 – a very different view of the relationship between human beings and nature, with many of the most innovative “vegetable turning point”, philosophy and botany theses that are successful today: where Darwin – simplifying a lot – only spotted competition, new studies on forests and gardens reveal various types of collaboration, communication, alliances. Graça Aranha’s “taboo book” is built from long dialogues between Milkau and Lentz, two German immigrants with opposite views of the world who roam the forests of the state of Espírito Santo with wonder and amazement.
It is hard to select among so many very eloquent excerpts to exemplify the two positions. I take the risk. Here, Lentz, also a lawyer, speaks of the disappearance of the “inferior races”:
This forest we are crossing is the fruit of the struggle, the victory of the strong. Each of these trees fought a hundred battles to reach such splendid flowering; its history is the defeat of many species, the beauty of each one is paid with the death of many things that, since the first contact with the mighty seed, have been destroyed […] The ipê is a glory of light; the sun burns its leaves and it is the mirror of the sun. To reach that splendor of color, of light, of carnal expansion, much has the beautiful ipê killed… Beauty is murderous and that is why men adore it more…
Milkau replies with conviction, presenting his belief in “universal love” as the engine of history:
The whole nature, beings, things and men, the multiple and infinite forms of matter in the cosmos, I see everything as one, immense whole, supported in their intimate molecules by a cohesion of forces, a reciprocal and incessant exchange, in an eternal alloy compensation system, which forms the plot and the organic world’s vital principle. And everything leads to everything. Sun, stars, earth, insect, plant, fish, beast, bird, man, form the cooperation of life on the planet.
Canaan’s narration does not conceal its sympathy for Milkau’s ideas. Here I summarize a huge paragraph:
The rainforest is the splendor of strength in disorder. Trees of all sizes and all features. Trees, some of them thick, tracing a ray of shadow to home a squadron, those with stubby trunks that could not fit in a five men’s arms stretch, those so light and slender rising to peer up at the sky. There is sap for everything, strength for each tree’s greatest beauty expansion. All that vast flora reflects antiquity and life. In it there is no sign of a sacrifice that would be the triumph and reward of death. Inside, the parasites curl around the old trunks, with the grace of an adornment and a caress. Everything rises, and everything expands over the earth, composing a brutal, enormous ensemble, above the dense hair of the trees and below the network of strong and indomitable roots; all of it intertwines into a great organic and living solidarity…
Translated into today’s aging modernity concepts, images and examples, Milkau’s previous words and Canaã’s narration could result in Stefano Mancuso’s statements in the book Revolution of Plants, one of the main current “vegetable turning point” guides:
[Plants] are the living representation of combined solidity and flexibility. Their modular composition is the quintessence of modernity: a cooperative, distributed architecture without command centers […] Thus, in order to use environmental resources, plants make use, among other things, of a refined network of roots […] It is not by chance that the internet, the very symbol of modernity, is built in the form of a network of roots.
That said, reading Graça Aranha’s book could have given Oswald de Andrade’s squad a post-cybernetic and ecological taste avant la lettre, including the necessary distrust of the preaching that confused the human freedom conquest with the fight against the limits that would have been imposed on us by nature, or a progress conception gone viral by futurisms devoted to the acceleration made possible by machines and by everything that could admirably be considered artificial. Blaise Cendrars, for example, to whom the book of poetry Pau-Brasil is dedicated (“on the occasion of the discovery of Brazil”), perhaps using a common shock tactic at that avant-garde moment, wrote a dense eulogy of monoculture dealing with coffee as “metaphysical entity”:
In less than fifty years, monoculture has transformed the planet’s looks, driving its exploration with astonishing skill. […] Without any concern for the nature of each region, it adapts a certain culture, prescribes a certain plant, upsets a certain secular economy. […] It only cultivates, in comparison with nature’s vegetal superabundance, a very small number of carefully selected species. […] And this artificial monotony that they [human beings] strive to create, and this monotony that increasingly takes over the world, this monotony that some deplore, this monotony is the most apparent sign of our greatness. […] What desire has triggered this? What is the intelligence that drives this expansion movement? Who invented methods of culture so strict, so severe? What sensitive eye lines up the rows and distributes the masses of vegetation with such a perfect sense of beauty? […] Is it the work of a single man, or, more certainly, a slow conquest of the human spirit that surrounds itself with order and harmony in its struggle against nature? […] revolutionizing topography, fauna and flora, monoculture also revolutionized the human heart.
These words by Blaise Cendrars, written in 1927, find a strange and heavy echo in Oswald de Andrade’s conference in the city of Bauru, in 1948, even with criticism against “the cattle”, against “the delirium of reckless devastation”, against “the disregard for worked soil and by the working man”:
The truth is that the transformation of the São Paulo forest into coffee plantations in the last century was the biggest agricultural venture in the world. […] Shortly before 1930, I accompanied President Júlio Prestes as a journalist on an excursion that took me to [the state of] Mato Grosso. That’s when I first visited Bauru and traveled Northwest. I remember then the fascination that took us witnessing the felling that usually coincided with nascent cities. The houses, the church, the court of peace rose above the forest’s blackened stumps.
“Will I be contradictory?” This was a central question in the life of Gilberto Freyre, author of Casa-grande e senzala, a book that Oswald de Andrade, in that same Bauru conference, calls “totemic”, in contrast to the “taboo” of Canaã, as it “supports and protects nationality”. Oswaldian contradictions are also evident, and a powerful part of his work’s interest. Even taking this into account, the dazzled quote above may denounce that the totemism of his relationship with Casa-grande e senzala may have hindered the reading, especially by skipping the very evident preaching against monoculture. However, we already know that this first book by Gilberto Freyre may be turning into a taboo – as the currently neither admired nor read Canaã.
Let’s see… Which results in more quotations in this text already occupied by them… Gilberto Freyre wrote: “Nothing disturbs more Nature’s balance than monoculture, especially when the plant that dominates the region comes from outside”. For the author, monoculture does away with Nature’s “spontaneity” and “freshness”. No tropical paradise here: “a land of uncertain nutrition and difficult life: that was three century-long colonial Brazil. The shadow of monoculture sterilizing everything”.
This criticism would become even more systematic in later books, such as Nordeste. In Sobrados e mucambos, Gilberto Freyre delights in describing his ideal type of human-plant interaction, far removed from the “artificial monotony” – with lined up, perfect beauty – celebrated by Blaise Cendrars, walking into a kind of wuwei that captivates more anarchist urbanisms today:
The garden of the Brazilian home, preserving the Portuguese tradition, has always been a garden without the rigidity of the French or Italians; with a human, useful sense, overcoming the aesthetic. Irregular, varied, full of unexpected events. (This variety seems to have been learned from the Chinese: it is known that the Portuguese introduced Chinese gardens in Europe).
All mixed: food, pharmacy, perfumery, beauty: “Plants cultivated without any decorative reason: just for the prophylaxis of the house against the evil eye: rosemary and rue, for example”; plants “grown mainly for the good smell; the ‘hygienic aroma’”; plants “to make homemade medicine, tea, sweating, purgatives, refreshments, sweets” and “only for the always cheerful color of its flowers – the poppy, for example (which also served to give shine to the black boots of the bourgeoisie)”.
We are, in these Freyrean gardens, back to Graça Aranha’s Canaã “splendor of disorder strength” of the tropical forest’s “everything leads to everything”. Back to the complex and exuberantly contradictory lianas of eclectic Brazilian modernist group’s proposals and their international connections. If we radicalize Gilberto Freyre’s proposals, in a well-turned “vegetable turning point” (under the vibration of MD Magno’s Revirão), we can reach the “cosmic miscegenation” that Emanuele Coccia states in his book A vida das plantas (which not coincidentally has a chapter entitled “Everything is in everything”):
Finally, the flower-reason does not direct the multiple of experience back to a single self, it does not reduce the difference of opinion to the uniqueness of a self; it multiplies and differentiates beings, makes experiences incomparable and irreconcilable. Reason is no longer the reality of the identical, the immutable, the same; it is the force and structure that compels all things to mix with their fellows by means of the dissimilar.
Many more dissimilar things to mix, to seed (and I didn’t even mention, for example, the lily pad that appears splendid in Mário de Andrade’s O turista aprendiz – and more importantly: I didn’t include it, as they would take this garden essay to other fertile paths, quotes from the exuberant, sophisticated and very diversified thinking of indigenous peoples, for centuries in a constant “vegetable turning point”, which our pioneer modernism apparently only knew through the “white” mediation of Couto de Magalhães, Koch-Grünberg and their peers). So that they can live together for a while, germinate. Grafting on each other, hybridizing with new thoughts we don’t know what will be yet. Cosmic miscegenation. Infinite. Possible exit: follow another Gilberto Freyre lesson: better not to conclude. This article’s (folkloric?) mission: just leave these parts here, like seeds in a poorly ordered garden…
A century after the Week, from the mechanical futurisms of the Week (even with the flowering plant on Di Cavalcanti’s program cover), we distrust the future, the beliefs in progress that enticed those who lived that beginning of a machine and mass production civilization. Our vegetable gaze perceives, or has forcibly learned to perceive, things that no one there could have noticed or foreseen.
It takes some compassion… For this reason, I already regret not having made clearer the contradictions of Oswald de Andrade and Blaise Cendrars. So I end with two more sections, right from the plants’ “point of vivid” (as Emanuele Coccia prefers).
From Manifesto Antropófago:
If God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of vegetables.
And finally, to open it all up, Blaise Cendrars poem “Aberturas” [Openings]:
Openings to the sea
Waterfalls
Mossy hairy trees
Shiny varnished heavy leaves
A sun varnish
A well-rubbed heat
Splendor
I don’t even hear my friends in cheerful conversation anymore, they who share the
news I brought from Paris
On both sides of the train very close or on the far end of the valley
The forest is here and spies on me and it disturbs me and attracts me like the mask of a
mummy
Eye
Not a sight of an eye
Hermano Vianna holds a master’s degree and doctorate in the Postgraduate Program of Social Anthropology at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He published the books O mundo funk carioca and O mistério do samba (translated into English, Italian, Japanese and French). He has curated several festivals such as Carlton Artes, Tim Festival, Percpan. He created the television programs African Pop, Além-Mar, Brasil Legal, Central da Periferia, the website Overmundo (which won the Golden Nica prize at the Ars Electronica festival), the play Recital da Onça (starring Regina Casé) and the multimedia project Música do Brasil. He hosted the show Navegador, on Globo News. He had a weekly column on newspaper O Globo for five years and currently signs a monthly column in the Ilustríssima section of Folha de S. Paulo. He is a knight of the Order of Cultural Merit. He won, among others, the Multicultural Estadão and Trip Transformadores awards.
Notes
1 Oswald de Andrade. Sexagenário, não, mas sex-appeal-genário. In: Estética e política. Rio de Janeiro: Globo, 1992.
2 Oswald de Andrade. O Modernismo. In: Estética e política, op. cit., p. 191.
3 Graça Aranha. Espírito moderno. São Paulo: Cia. Graphico, Editora Monteiro Lobato, 1925, p. 35.
4 Graça Aranha. Canaã. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, p. 32.
5 Id., p. 32.
6 Id., p. 23.
7 Stefano Mancuso. Revolução das plantas. São Paulo: Ubu, 2019, p. 10-11.
8 Blaise Cendrars. ETC…, ETC…(UM LIVRO 100% BRASILEIRO). São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1976, p. 70-75.
9 Oswald de Andrade. O sentido do interior. In: Estética e política, op. cit., p. 315-16.
10 Id., p. 324.
11 Gilberto Freyre. Casa-grande e senzala. 21. ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, p. 34.
12 Id., p. 38.
13 Gilberto Freyre. Sobrados e mucambos. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1936, p. 221.
14 Id., p. 221-22.
15 Emanuele Coccia. A vida das plantas. Florianópolis: Cultura e Barbárie, Desterro, 2018, p. 105-06.
16 Blaise Cendrars. ETC…, ETC… (UM LIVRO 100% BRASILEIRO), op. cit., p. 56.