Maps and the hell of the same
In late April 1500, a large maritime expedition from Portugal to India veered off course far enough that it struck land at what is now Porto Seguro, Brazil. The captain of the expedition, Pedro Álvares Cabral, decided to take advantage of the accident and go ashore with a landing party to investigate what they had found. A member of the crew named Pêro Vaz de Caminha would accompany him and subsequently write a letter to Portuguese king Manuel I to describe what he had seen. Vaz da Caminha’s letter is the earliest European account of Brazil, and it is popularly referred to as Brazil’s “birth certificate.” What does Vaz de Caminha see at Porto Seguro? Perhaps more importantly, what does he hear? At first, practically nothing:
Acodirã pela praya homee[n]s quando dous quando tres de maneira que quando o batel chegou aa boca do rrio heram aly xbiij ou xx homee[n]s pardos todos nuus sem nhuu[m]a cousa que lhes cobrisse suas vergonhas. Traziam arcos nas maãs e suas seetas. Vijnham todos rrijos pera o batel e nicolaao coelho lhes fez sinal que posesem os arcos. E eles os poseram. Aly nom pode deles auer fala ne[m] ente[n] dimento que aproueitasse polo mar quebrar na costa.[1]
[Men came to the beach two or three at a time so that when our boat reached the mouth of the river, there were 18 or 20 of them, all dark-skinned and naked—with nothing whatsoever to cover their privates. They carried bows and arrows. They approached our boat with their weapons at the ready, and Nicolão Coelho signaled them to put down their bows, which they did. We were unable to speak with them or come to any useful understanding due to the sound of the sea breaking on the coast.]
What Vaz de Caminha sees at Porto Seguro are roughly two dozen Tupinambá men with bows and arrows. He also sees that they are naked (he will spend even more time lingering over the nudity of Tupinambá women), a distinction that for sixteenth-century Portuguese readers would point at once to savagery and prelapsarian innocence. What he hears, however, is only the sound of waves hitting the shore, a kind of natural white noise that precludes communication.
Later in his letter to Manuel I, Vaz de Caminha recounts a scene of dancing and music on the far shore of the Buranhém River:
Alem do rrio amdauã mujtos deles dançando e folgando huu[n]s ante outros sem se tomarem pelas maãos e faziãno bem. Pasouse emtam aalem do rrio diego dijz alxe que foy de sacauem que he home[m] gracioso e de prazer e levou comsigo huu[m] gayteiro noso cõ sua gaita e meteose cõ eles a dançar tomandoos pelas maãos e eles folgauam e rriam e amdauam cõ ele muy bem ao soõ da gaita. Despois de dançarem fezlhe aly amdando no chaão mujtas voltas ligeiras e salto rreal deque se eles espantauam e rriam e folgauã mujto. E com quanto os cõ aquilo muito segurou e afaagou. Tomauam logo huu[m]a esqujueza coma monteses e foranse pera cjma.[2]
[Beyond the river there were many of them, and some were dancing and playing in front of the others without holding hands and doing it well. Diogo Dias, a tax official from Sacavem and a fun-loving man, went across the river and brought one of our pipers with him along with his instrument. He then joined them dancing and took them by the hand, and they danced and laughed and followed him very well to the sound of the pipe. After dancing, Dias showed them several quick turns on the ground and a somersault, which surprised them and made them laugh. With all this, he held their attention and pleased them; however, they soon took fright (as mountain creatures do) and went away inland.]
Here again, there is no sound—at least from the Tupinambá. They dance, but Vaz de Caminha does not mention their music or singing, as if the whole performance were a silent pantomime. The only music here—the only sound, really—comes from a Portuguese piper. Dias takes the Tupinambá by the hand and leads them in a dance, but it bears asking to what extent there is any real contact between them. What hands does Dias touch and hold? Are they the hands of an Other capable of interrupting or even placing in doubt his enjoyment of the scene? Of course they are, but concepts quickly intervene to mitigate the risk of contact and contagion. For Dias, these are native hands, strange hands, naked hands—and they remain distant to him by means of the conceptual map he has already constructed of them.[3] There is no Other, and so there is only the simulacrum of proximity, a map.
In the end, the Portuguese would keep their distance just well enough to carve out a Brazil-sized piece of South America and claim dominion over it. They secured the Tupinambá and other indigenous groups to the land (as extensions of nature itself), brought in millions of enslaved African laborers to extract resources, and eventually built a vast commercial empire out of sugar and gold. Through generations of miscegenation and co-existence, the Portuguese would adopt closeness as their imperial brand; but it is important to study the limits of that closeness, the risks the Portuguese—like Odysseus—will not take. In the end, the Portuguese Empire is an empire of maps, not earth and sea.
What is the effect that maps have on our world? At what point does our need for conceptualization—and more broadly, to understand—preclude any possibility of closeness or ethics? Franco Farinelli speaks at (book) length of the order that emerges from our reduction of the earth—a labyrinth of interconnected peoples, stories, fantasies, nature, and much else—to flat, conceptualized space. Building on ideas articulated by early nineteenth-century geographer Carl Ritter, Farinelli criticizes the “cartographic dictatorship” that emerges from classical Greece, a conceptual order that reduces the three-dimensional, rhizomatic chaos (and alterity) of the world to a neat grid of measured-out lines.[4] For Farinelli, Christopher Columbus does not prove the world is a sphere so much as he reduces that sphere to a flat, plottable map:
Neither space nor time exists, things endure, in the world of Columbus, dominated instead by the spatio-temporal abstraction. […] Things are exactly the opposite of what is often still believed today: the impact of Columbus was not by any means that of making the image of the Earth spherical when it was previously believed to be flat, but of transforming the whole Earth, from the sphere that it had been believed to be, into a gigantic table.[5]
A master of dead reckoning (and perhaps little else), Columbus is for Farinelli an heir to Odysseus. He sails along, past, and through the Atlantic world, reducing what he sees and hears to points on a grid—a map. As when Odysseus and his men defeat Polyphemus through subtle trickery (telling the one-eyed giant that Odysseus is “nobody” so that others won’t come to his aid), Columbus attempts to take power over the world he has encountered by mapping it. For Farinelli, our maps do not represent the earth so much as the earth has come to take the form of our maps. The result of all this mapping is incredible power for the map-makers (see, for example, the 1835-36 Toledo War), but it also has the effect of smoothing over all meaningful alterity and reducing the world to what Byung-Chul Han has referred to as the “Hell of the same.”[6]
References
[1] Vaz de Caminha, Pêro. Carta de achamento do Brasil, 1500, Gaveta 15, Maço 8, no. 2, f. 1v, Arquivo Nacional, Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
[2] Vaz de Caminha, Carta de achamento do Brasil, f. 7v.
[3] For more on such Brazilian encounters and their Biblical connections, see Luca Bacchini, Nudi come Adamo: l’immaginario biblico nelle cronache dal Nuovo Mondo, Mimesis, 2018.
[4] Farinelli, Franco. Blinding Polyphemus: Geography and the Models of the World. Translated by Christina Chalmers, Seagull, 2018, p. 27. My thanks to Emanuele Lugli for directing me to Farinelli’s work.
[5] Farinelli, Blinding Polyphemus, pp. 20-21.
[6] Han, Byung-Chul. The Expulsion of the Other. Translated by Wieland Hoban, Polity, 2018.
