Denilson’s 2019 painting, Re-Antropofagia, shows Andrade’s head being served on a platter as an offering to Indigenous artists. The painting is now hung in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, adjacent to Tarsila do Amaral’s seminal modernist painting, Antropofagia, from 1929.
Dodson met Esbell and Denilson in 2019, and the three spent hours discussing her translation. Esbell, Dodson and Denilson both said, didn’t have a problem with Andrade’s novel itself, but rather with the misconception that the modernists had “discovered” long-running Indigenous cultural practices.
In an essay, Esbell described asking Makunaima why he had allowed Andrade to “steal” his story. “My son,” Makunaima responds in the essay, “I glued myself to that book’s cover. They say I was kidnapped, robbed, betrayed, duped. They say I’m an idiot. No! It was my idea to be on the cover. I wanted to go with those men. I wanted to make our history. I saw our chance to find our eternity.”
Esbell died in late 2021, and Dodson requested that New Directions use one of his paintings as the cover art of her translation of “Macunaíma.”
Nearly a century after its publication, many of the novel’s Brazilian admirers are unsure of how it will be received in the United States. “Macunaíma is always on the verge of being canceled,” said Meira Monteiro, the Princeton professor.
Yet Dodson, for one, thinks that the book will resonate with a new American audience attuned to a history haunted by slavery and Indigenous dispossession, marked by the interplay of immigration and xenophobia — and underlain by a long-running strain of “utopian multiculturalism.”
“I think Americans will understand feeling the absurdity of this great variety of people from all over united under one flag,” said Dodson.
