Glaucio Aranha
Here I present my reading of the short story “O enforcado” (The hanged man), by Alberto Mussa, published in the book “Elegbara” (Record), in which the author recreates, in imaginary terms, the invention of feijoada. In the text, Alberto Mussa recreates the imaginary around one of the most genuinely Brazilian dishes: feijoada. The story is set in the land grant of Campos dos Goitacazes in 1627. Two characters stand out, the “Bugre” and the “cook”.
The “Bugre” is presented as a stranger to the place where the action unfolds (“emigrated from the forests of São Vicente”). Symbolically, we can take him as a metaphor for the coloniser, the one who comes from distant lands and speaks a different language, language being the unifying element of culture (“he only spoke the general language of the coast”). He is responsible for enforcing the Law, but he is also its arbiter, imposing an order shaped by cruelty and psychopathy. That order is carried out solely by the bush captain’s personal desire, regardless of cause or proportionality, just like the colonising advance that seized lands and massacred individuals and cultures, nations, and the histories and stories of colonised peoples. At the same time, his position was legitimised by the other settlers, since he represented their interests and the colonial, slave-owning ideology.
On the other side stands the “cook”. She is a flat character, described only as a runaway slave, but fundamental in her transforming role. She is presented not through description but through her performance (“she began to cook the feet, the ears…”; “she mashed the first mouthful of that mixture…”).
The meeting of cultures, when the Bugre tastes the dish he had found disgusting and unassailable, is a moment of “spell”, of enchantment, in the sense of an instant in which reality folds over itself and becomes something unimagined. Magic as the process of turning one reality into another. This transformation shows in the Bugre’s changes of conduct: he lets an Indigenous man escape, takes an interest in pork leftovers (“a strange habit, contrary to his tastes”), raises suspicions that he belongs to a band that no longer defends foreign interests (“the news that the Bugre was part of the band”) and, finally, shelters a runaway slave, “the last straw”, since from that moment on he is no longer the legitimate representative of colonial culture.
The author then sets out the alchemical process of the enslaved woman’s cooking, “the transmutation of waste into delight”. Here a zone of cultural translation is formed, in the sense used by Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics, that is, a space of transformative symbolic conflict.
Gastronomic alchemy turns the solid foreigner, defender of the hegemonic culture, into another subject, equally solid, but one who no longer belongs to the dichotomy of white and black; someone who could be called Brazilian, a subject who even in death no longer fits the previous polarities, turning even the sea brown (“the sea immediately took on the muddy colour of the river”). Even his loss of identity as a subject (the corpse), culturally transformed, shows his transformation into the dialectical synthesis of a new culture: “And perhaps that would become the future hue of the whole Ocean sea”.
The potential transformation of the sea into brown can be read here as the symbolic transformation of what separated the colonising nation (overseas) from the colony. The new culture, symbolised by the newborn feijoada, represents the legitimation of a trait unique to the colony, emerging as a legitimate and autonomous culture capable of turning the nation into something else, beyond the universe of colonial expectations.
Source: MUSSA, Alberto. O enforcado. In: Elegbara. Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo: Record, 2005.
Feijoada recipe
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