“Be tupi”: anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima’s poetry

by

Suene Honorato

Ellen Lima’s debut book, Ixé ygara returning to ‘y’kûa (I’m a canoe returning to the river’s inlet), published in 2021 by Urutau, brings together 36 poems in which the Tupi and Portuguese languages coexist since the title. On the page following the summary, black background painted with genipap, we read: “Tupi! Be tupi! There’s no questions”. The phrase is in italics, without quotation marks, and has no signature. Epigraph, although not a quote, as usual. Self-epigraph, in fact, that insists on returning throughout the reading of the poems. Ellen, between exclamations, says: “Tupi! Be tupi! There’s no questions”. Suggestion? Advice? Request? Ellen, author of the book and the epigraph, tells anyone that it is necessary to be Tupi. Anyone who opens her book is invited – summoned? – to become Tupi. But what does that mean?

In the poem “Ybytu” (wind), the poetic voice asks “what would it be like” if we exchanged Portuguese words for Tupi words. The poem collects examples of this exchange and ends like this: “If we call what is beautiful porang, / maybe one day, one morning, / everyone who slept peró, / woke up abá. / And the village becomes Pindorama” (54-55). Abá, in ancient Tupi, can mean person, people, when related to animals, for example; it can also mean man in relation to woman, kunhã; can mean indigenous in relation to the Portuguese, which is peró. The term in ancient Tupi to name the invader takes us back to 1500, when, among others, a certain “Peró” Vaz de Caminha wrote his letter. In the poem, peró is not exactly a “being”, but a way of seeing the world that naturalizes colonization; a past and present mode. If language can transform this way of seeing the world, it can also dream of transforming the world itself: when the taba is Pindorama, no longer Brazil, the name of a commodity, we will be Tupi abás and kunhãs. The invitation, then, is a utopia, a future dreamed of in the present. How would it be? How will it be?

Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph erases the famous aphorism from the “Cannibalist Manifesto”, where one can also read a utopia. In “The (Indigenous) Question of the Anthropophagous Manifesto” [A questão (indígena) do Manifesto Antropófago”], Alexandre Nodari and Maria Carolina Amaral (2018) map the reference frame of the aphorism, from Hamlet to the Tupi x Tapuias question in the formation of São Paulo’s identity and the indigenous struggles of that moment. They emphasize, in the reading of the “Manifesto...”, the opposition to the metaphysics of being and the refusal to affirm an essentialized identity, addressed to the romantic paradigm of representation of the indigenous. For Nodari and Amaral, the “Manifesto...” did not launch an identity issue, “but another kind of question, which points to an identity of another kind, which does not concern what we are (or will be) immutably (in a future always postponed), but to what we can and want to transform ourselves into (now)” (2499).

Ixé yagara… is not only the first book of poems by Ellen Lima. It is the book in which she affirms her belonging to the Wassu[1] and her commitment to her relatives and contemporary indigenous struggles. The verse that gives the book its name suggests that the affirmation of indigenous identity is a process in motion: ixé ygara (I am canoe) returning to ‘y’kûa (inlet of the river). Among expressions in the Tupi language – terms of departure and arrival –, the verb in Portuguese marks the permanence of the movement, in the gerund always avoided by the imposed language. ‘Y’kûa (river inlet), land, territory. Safe haven, since colonizers and neocolonizers hijacked and hijack the affirmation of indigenous identity because it demarcates not the “ownership” of land, but a way of dealing with it. A mode that needs to be interdicted so that progress cements the bones of those who insist on seeing the river as a relative, not as a resource, as states Ailton Krenak (40).

 Diaspora is the word that Ellen uses to describe this movement back to the territory and affirmation of the Wassu identity when telling her story in the afterword: “[...] in the middle of the way, there was a diaspora”[2] (59). A significant part of the indigenous writers and artists working in Brazil today had to deal with the separation of their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents from the territory of origin. Often this is a story of murder in territorial conflicts (genocide) or a story of cultural silencing of their identities (ethnocide). Kaka Werá Jecupé and Eliane Potiguara, for example, were born in large cities after their families were expelled from their territory. Mestra Mayá (Andrade, 2021), in A escola da reconquista (the school of reconquest), talks about the struggle of the Tupinambá in southern Bahia against violence and the seizure of their lands since the beginning of the 20th century. Auritha Tabajara (2018), in Coração na aldeia, pés no mundo (Heart in the village, feet in the world), narrates her search for better living conditions in cities and the prejudice suffered by being a woman, from the northeast, indigenous, and homosexual. It does not seem to me that the “identity issue”, in the books and in the lives of these writers, is related to fixed and immutable essences. The danger of identitarianism – so many voices have already warned us[3] – has to do with fascist ways of imagining the self, based on a fiction of origin and purity, constantly threatened by the existence of the “other” who, therefore, must be eliminated. Nothing could be further from the claim to indigenous identity in Ellen Lima’s book, as explained in the poem “Portrerritoriality” (“Retraterritorialidade”) (20):

Retraterritorialidade

Há dias em que me retrato, e nada.
Há dias em que o retrato
retrata tudo que as lentes não sabem ler.
as dores, os amores, as saudades.
Às vezes até minhas outras três vidas.
Tem dias que o retrato mostra a moça Wassu.
E tem dias que o retrato é coberto por ilusões ocidentais.
Tem dias que sou, e nada mais.
Tem dias que… é só um rosto, vazio e mais nada.

Portrerritoriality 

There are days when I portray myself, and nothing.
There are days when the portrait
portrays everything that the lens cannot read.
the pains, the loves, the longings.
Sometimes even my other three lives.
There are days when the portrait shows the Wassu girl.
And there are days when the portrait is covered by Western illusions.
Some days I am, and nothing else.
There are days when… it’s just a face, empty and nothing else.

By merging the words portray and territoriality, the poetic voice juxtaposes the collective and personal dimensions: the self-portrait is part of the symbolic demarcation of belonging to the Wassu people. But this self-portrait made of language refuses to reveal anything fixed. In it, what we read is nothingness, the feelings that the lens does not capture, the lives of the same life. Being “and nothing else”, therefore, without adjectives that allow identification, alternate with emptiness. The “western illusions”, which sometimes cover the self-portrait, suggest ways of being indigenous in the contemporary world that are not very predictable in the dynamics of essential discourses. Although Western values are perceived as illusory, they are still present in the way the poetic voice portrays itself.

According to Nodari and Amaral, the (indigenous) question of the “Manifesto...” refuses identity essentialisms. The diasporic identity evoked by Ellen Lima and other indigenous writers seems to me to be consistent with this perspective. But while the term Tupi is deliberately avoided by the Anthropophobic movement, “due to the Indianist and nationalist hypostasis through which the word had passed” (Nodari and Amaral, 2480), Ellen Lima not only insists on the term and the language, but also invites - summons? – everyone who reads Ixé yagara… to become Tupi. Perhaps because the frame of reference is different. Ellen is opposed to the Romantics, but also to the Modernists. To think about this opposition to the modernists, I first want to expose conceptions about the Tupi language from the 20th century onwards, before and after the gestation of the “Manifesto...”, and then return to Ellen Lima’s auto-epigraph. 

Tupinology in Brazil (c. XX and XXI)

In 1928, when Oswald de Andrade published the “Cannibalist Manifesto”, what was this Tupi language?[4] Let’s remember the novel Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma, in which the main character is ridiculed for demanding the officialization of a “truly” national language. The narrator (Barreto, 51, 58) uses three different terms to refer to this language: Tupi, Tupi-Guarani, and Tupinambá. This quarrel over names - which had barely been stabilized in the 19th century - with the generalization of the term “Tupi” for the language spoken by the indigenous of the coast in 1500 - reaches the XXI century.

In 1933, Plínio Ayrosa founded the first chair of “Tupi-Guarani Linguistics” at the University of São Paulo (USP). Frederico Edelweiss, in a text published in 1969, accused the initiative of being hasty because the Tupi language was not yet systematized at that time. Edelweiss proposes the following chronology: the original or ancient Tupi (Brazilian language) is the legitimate indigenous Tupi that was systematized by the Jesuits for catechesis. From the contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people, the general language or Brasiliano emerged from the Tupi; then, with the intensification of contact, the nheengatu, lingua franca, for commerce. Aryon Rodrigues, in an article published in 2010, continued to defend the differentiation between the Tupi languages (spoken in the 16th century between Rio de Janeiro and Pará) and Tupinambá (spoken in the 16th century in São Vicente). The general Amazonian language would have originated from Tupi; from tupinambá, the general language in São Paulo. Eduardo Navarro, in the introduction of the Modern Method of Old Tupi [Método moderno de tupi antigo], contests this difference.

The question of names is not the only “point of discussion” in the field of Tupinology. When I started to study ancient Tupi using the Navarro Method…, I was struck by the insistence on the verb iûká, to kill[5]. For example, to illustrate the uses of the suffix -(s)aba, this sequence of sentences – which I quote in Portuguese – is no less than absurd: “I pass by the place where the Indian is killed”; “The day in which the Indian is killed has not arrived”; “The arrow with which the Indian is killed is long”; “Caiobi, with whom Pedro kills the Indian, is handsome”; “The woman, for whom the Indian is killed, loves him”; “The purpose of killing the Indian is to avenge you”; “I don’t know how to kill the Indian” (Navarro, 279).

Reading the Tupinologists who came before Navarro, I have the impression that the hierarchical attitude (which, in the limit, leads to naturalization of genocide) is the rule. For example: Plínio Ayrosa, to justify the comparison that some Jesuits had made between Tupi and Greek, suggests the following: “The language they spoke on the coast was not their creation [...]; it came, like the Indians, from a primitive radiating focus, where the intellectual culture of its inhabitants should be indisputably superior” (24). It seems that this thesis was not carried much further by tupinologists, with the exception perhaps of Luiz Caldas Tibiriçá who, in a book published in 2003 by the Brazilian Creationist Society, defended the Asian origin of the Tupi. To prove it, it offers comparative vocabulary lists. And concludes: “It is not acceptable that, after the publication of this work, some Tupinologists continue to discuss the etymology of an autochthonous Tupi, when its etymology is more than demonstrated to be Asian” (93).

Edelweiss also assumes a hierarchical stance when he says that the indigenous people had “uneducated languages” (31), that they had no inclination for effort and lived rudimentarily (35). Finally, after commenting on the deterioration of the indigenous language by “Tapuias and mestiços”, who would have “bastardized” Tupi, transformed into Nheengatu (33) – a name he considers a “euphemism” (9) –, he states that: “In a few years, the last dialect will have disappeared with the last Indian, but not without leaving deep and eloquent traces of its precedence imprinted in the language of his successors” (36). And he takes on racist slurs when he says that it is inconceivable, “in a country that maintains exotic and expensive Afro-Brazilian Institutes”, that the leaders stop investing in the studies of a language that is “ours” (66). In relation to the indigenous, Edelweiss is strongly attached to the assimilation paradigm. He praises the “civilizing” strategies of the Jesuits and naturalizes the end of the indigenous people.

A parenthesis: in 1962 Lévi-Strauss published The Savage Mind, in which this hierarchical assumption is radically questioned. The book is based on several ethnographic studies of different indigenous peoples. Seeking to understand the classifications created by these peoples and how they influence the social structures they live and develop, Lévi-Strauss (31) argues that there are “different modes of scientific thinking”, not stages or phases. In many moments, he criticizes the presumption of superiority of Western science, as, for example, when he says: “Never and nowhere was the ‘savage’ this being just out of the animal condition, given over to the dominion of his needs and instincts that he often liked to imagine, nor was this consciousness dominated by affectivity and plunged into confusion and participation” (57, 59).

ANTHROPOPHAGIC CONTRASTS

 This quick sketch on Brazilian Tupinology highlights the power of Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph for a reading of the book Ixé ygara… Among the many ways to read it in this context, I highlight three. First: “be tupi” can mark anthropophagy as a possibility of resistance to ethnocide. In the poem “Another Portuguese error” (“Outro erro de português”), the poetic voice fictionalizes the erasure of indigenous languages, establishing an opposition to Oswald’s anthropophagy:

Outro erro de português

Peró chegou e mandou que parasse o
nhen, nhen, nhen.
A-nhe'eng abé
Oro-nhe'eng também,
nhen, nhen, nhen,
nhen, nhen, nhen,
nhen, nhen, nhen.

De castigo, cortaram nossa língua
no tempo e no espaço.
Suspenderam os cafunés e abraços
da voz dessa mãe daqui.

Mas um dia,
ainda cortamos a tua língua
e oro-karu com abati

(21-22)

Another Portuguese Mistake

Peró arrived and ordered to stop the
nhen, nhen, nhen.
A-nhe’eng abé
Oro-nhe’eng too,
nhen, nhen, nhen,
nhen, nhen, nhen,
nhen, nhen, nhen.

 As a punishment, they cut our tongue
in time and space.
The cuddles and hugs were suspended
from this mother’s voice.  

But one day
we’ll still cut your tongue
and oro-karu com abati

In “Portuguese mistake” (“erro de português”), Oswald de Andrade, the poetic voice laments that the Portuguese have dressed the indigenous, instead of the indigenous having undressed the Portuguese (177). This lament opens the possibility of imagining what would have happened if indigenous culture had prevailed over European culture. This “other” error mentioned in Ellen Lima’s poem is not a possibility: it points to the day when “Peró’s” language will be devoured. The repetition of “nhen, nhen, nhen” replaces the association of the expression with the native language, abá nheenga, and endows it with a positive meaning, opposite to the mimimi (complaining) that it evokes in everyday language. The anthropophagic attitude, of eating peró’s tongue with abati (corn), is a possibility for the indigenous people, while in the “Manifesto...” it is only possible for non-indigenous people.

Many peoples have been seeking to strengthen or reconstitute their mother tongues; others have adopted languages considered native. Especially in the case of indigenous people in the Northeast, ethnocide took place with such intensity that only the Fulni-ô remained speaking their mother tongue. And the genocide forced many communities to disidentify themselves as indigenous. In Ceará, students of the Kuaba Indigenous Degree are taking Nheengatu classes with an indigenous teacher from São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas), a city in which this language is among the four official languages (Nheengatu, Tucano, Baniwa, and Portuguese). In the municipality of Monsenhor Tabosa, in Ceará, the Tupi-nhengatu language was co-official (Law n. 13, dated May 3, 2021). The Potiguara in Paraíba two decades ago established Tupi (ancient) as the language taught in indigenous schools. Among the Wassu, although there is no institutionalized project for learning Tupi, there is a desire to study it, a process in which Ellen Lima was engaged in and motivated her to write the book. The last poem reads: “From taking so many Tupi words to dance, / from so much dating. / Xe Kûatiara was born” (Lima, 58).

The break with the assimilationist paradigm, formalized in the Federal Constitution of 1988, is an achievement of indigenous movements. Territories, languages, rituals, recognition of indigenous identities. In the “Yntroduction” to the theatrical monologue Tybyra, Juão Nyn, Potiguara artist, asks: “Is it possyble to demarcate physycal terrytoryes without demarcatyng the ymagynary ones?” (10)[6]. Literature and the revitalization of native or ancestral languages are territories that indigenous people began to occupy in recent decades to demarcate this symbolic space. In Brazil, it is not possible to discuss indigenous identities without thinking about the territorial issue that was established in the 16th century.

Second: “be tupi” is opposed to the image of the indigenous fixed to the past, object of discourse. The opposition to this image has to do with the affirmation of indigenous identities in the contemporary world, an identity that is diasporic, non-essentialized. Tupi and Portuguese are mixed in the book, and the records of learning, such as the use of a hyphen, remain as marks of a process. This realization was not possible in 1928. “Tupi or not Tupi” harked back to the past if we consider the dispute over the Tupi or Tapuia affiliation of the Paulistas. And if this quarrel had to do with the contemporary struggle of the Kaingang, in the reading of Nodari and Amaral (2018), the contemporary indigenous presence was still stigmatized in the “Cannibalist Manifesto”. Modernists inherit anthropophagy; it devours the very possibility of affirming indigenous identities. Between romanticism and modernism, the indigenous person remains in the past, represented as dead, an object absent from contemporary life, as Carola Saavedra (106) states. Tupi, a dead language, quite dead, even though “Tupi” meant so many things.

But I don’t believe that “Be tupi!” indicates the possibility of being Tupi or indigenous, simply by decision. The sentence that “In Brazil everyone is indigenous, except those who are not”, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2006), is complemented with: “only those who guarantee themselves are indigenous”. Ellen Lima, in my reading, is not inviting her readers to assume an indigenous identity, regardless of “guaranteeing” herself. Only those who guarantee themselves are invited to “indianize” themselves; and, for Viveiros, this guarantee has to do with a non-identity, as it is a collective, relational attribute. But there is something accessible to all: a way of looking at the world, opposed to the ideas of “civilization” and “progress”, which our modern modernists have not refused. And this is the third opposition to which “be tupi” reminds me in the context of Ixé ygara…: the opposition to the idea of modernity.

In “A Crisis of Messianic Philosophy”, Oswald de Andrade points to a utopian horizon in which we would all be the “technicized barbarian” of the “Manifesto...”: “And today, when, through technology and social and political progress, we have reached the era in which, in the words of Aristotle, ‘spindles work alone’, man leaves his condition of slave and enters once again the threshold of the Age of Idleness. It is another matriarchy that announces itself” (145). But today we know that savage capitalism profits from the catastrophe of thousands of people without work, without labor rights, pushed towards “uberization”. Spindles working “alone” today have made human and non-human lives expendable. The Age of Idleness has only arrived for half a dozen billionaires. And the Patriarchy was revamped.

In Ixé ygara…, the only poem with words in English comments on the destruction of the world by progress, even imagining the possibility of “turning another planet into a product. / And inventing merchandise on Mars” (27). The destruction of the planet is a spectacle that we will record because “now we have the best smartphones / to post the selfies of the end of the world” (28). Shakespeare’s language remains the one that best reflects the globalization of consumption that began with the “discoveries” of the 16th century.

In the online magazine Cemana de 22, Ellen Lima (2022) published “I don’t manifest the modern” erasing Oswald’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” almost line by line. As the title indicates, the opposition to the modernists is explicitly made there. For example: Oswald wrote, “What got in the way of the truth was clothing, the waterproof between the inner world and the outer world. The reaction against the clothed man. American cinema will inform”; Ellen writes, “What tramples on the truth is modernity. Western time fiction. The reaction against modern man. The Free Land Camp will inform”; Oswald wrote “Against Goethe, the mother of the Graccos, and the Court of D. João VI”; Ellen writes “Against the moderns, modernism and modernities in which we were not included” (Lima).

Still in this “non-manifest”, another formulation for the “tupi or not tupi”: “Tupi or not tupi there is no question. Oré abaeté” (Lima, 2022). In Tupi, “we” can be denoted by îandé, which includes speakers and listeners, or oré, which designates only speakers. In this new formulation, “be Tupi” is no longer accessible to everyone as a way of being, a verb that does not exist in the Tupi language. Îandé, us-everybody, is opposed to oré, real people, abaeté. It is only Tupi those who guarantee themselves, which does not exclude the fact that there are many ways of “being” and guaranteeing oneself. Many indigenous languages. Many indigenous identities.

NOTES:

[1] Indigenous people who inhabit the State of Alagoas, Brazil.

[2] In” (Diaspora in four elements) (Honorato, 2022), I analyze in more detail the configuration of this diasporic identity in the poetic project of the book Ixé ygara…, organized around the four elements of nature.

[3] I have in mind books such as Orientalismo (Said, 2007), A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade (Hall, 2006), Entre campos (Gilroy, 2007) and Armadilha da identidade (Haider, 2019), among others.

[4] In the first year of Revista de Antropofagia, where the “Cannibalist Manifesto” was published, Plínio Salgado wrote two articles proposing that the study of the Tupi language should be done with “human sense” (5), no longer with catechetical purposes, as the Jesuits had done. He says he doesn’t know Tupi well, but he ventures the hypothesis that this language would have originated from onomatopoeia. One of the examples he offers to prove his hypothesis is the following: showing that words with “t” have to do with hard things (itá, stone), he says that cuntã means virgin woman, with cunhã for woman and -atã for “hard, tense thing (the breasts, naturally)” (6). In Eduardo Navarro’s Dictionary of Old Tupi, the etymology of “kunhataĩ” refers to “woman with firm skin” (242). If the adjective “firm” has to do with “atã”, confirming Salgado’s intuition, the reference to the indigenous women’s breasts does not fail to remind of a certain “peró”. Be that as it may, I have never seen Salgado’s articles mentioned in the bibliographies of contemporary tupinologists. But attitudes like his, of inventing etymologies, are heavily criticized as unscientific. Even Navarro himself is accused by Tuffani (2012) of having followed dubious etymologies.

[5] Lemos Barbosa (1941) questioned the tradition of using “îuká” as a Tupi conjugation paradigm, as it is an irregular verb, but did not comment on the semantic implications of this choice. Érica Zíngano, in the poem “i-juca piranha”, speaks of her surprise in relation to the insistence on the verb îuká in Tupi grammars and relates it to methods used to teach American soldiers “more efficiently and effectively / the language of those / they would kill” (15).

[6] The use of y in the writing of i is a strategy of symbolic demarcation with which Juão Nyn seeks to re-signify his indigenous identity and evoke a sacred vowel erased by the Portuguese language.

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