Zuzu Angel - Mother Courage of the Fashion World

The text below was writen by Mario Osava

Angel Jones, better known as Zuzu, was a Brazilian fashion designer who became famous in the 1950s and 1960s with haute couture designs that relied on colourful Brazilian floral patterns. She became well-known in certain circles in the United States, and her fans included Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Kim Novak and Liza Minnelli.

But in the 1970s, her vibrant designs were replaced by harsh black stripes, crosses, red splashes, tanks, and children peering out of cages on New York runways, as she used her unique vantage point in the world of fashion to protest the murder of her son and the torture and killings committed by the dictatorship.

Zuzu's life and her struggle to recover the body of her son, one of the roughly 150 political prisoners who fell victim to forced disappearance in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, are the focus of this film directed by Sergio Rezende, who specialises in historical events and personalities.

Zuzu's son, Stuart Angel, a student activist and member of a guerrilla group, was arrested by the military in May 1971.

Tortured in an air force barracks in Rio de Janeiro, Stuart died a few days later, after he was dragged back and forth on the ground by a jeep and forced to directly inhale vehicle exhaust fumes, political prisoners who were held in cells near Stuart's told Zuzu later.

It is believed that his body, which never appeared, was dumped into the sea.

After her son's disappearance, Zuzu Angel became a sort of forerunner to the "crazy ladies of the Plaza de Mayo", as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina became known in Brazil.

During Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the Mothers met once a week in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the seat of government, wearing white headscarves and walking slowly in a circle, in a silent form of protest to demand information on the fate of their sons and daughters, who were among the 30,000 people forcibly disappeared by the de facto regime in Argentina.

Zuzu did everything she could to draw attention to the disappearance of her son. She sent letters to the United Nations, the U.S. Senate, and to then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She faced Brazilian military tribunals, and became a high-profile enemy of the dictatorship.

"It is the sacred right of a mother to find and bury the body of her son," she responded to the authorities when they attempted to silence her outspoken protests.

"I am not brave; it was my son who was brave. But I have right on my side," she also said when people commented on her courage in confronting the military regime.

She received telephone death threats, and one of her stores was burnt down in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, in April 1976, five years after her son was killed, she died in a suspicious crash when her car was cut off by another vehicle as she was driving through a tunnel at night.

The tunnel now bears her name.

Her death has since been acknowledged as a murder, for which no one has ever been brought to justice.

Her glamour and her already cinematographic story made the decision to direct a movie on her life an easy one, says Rezende, whose films include "Lamarca", about a captain who deserted from the Brazilian army to join a guerrilla organisation that fought the dictatorship, and "The Battle of Canudos", about a late 19th century armed peasant and religious uprising that was brutally quashed by the army.

The star-studded cast of "Zuzu Angel" includes popular actress Patricia Pillar as the designer herself. Daniel Oliveira, who plays Zuzu's son, is a young actor who was acclaimed for an earlier performance as rock star Cazuza, who died of AIDS in 1990.

Chico Buarque not only has a close relationship with the film. Shortly before her death, Zuzu Angel gave him a letter to publish if anything were to happen to her, which read in part: "If I die, by accident or otherwise, it was the work of the murderers of my beloved son."

The songwriter distributed copies of the letter to the local newspapers, but it was not published by any one of them. In homage to his late friend, Buarque wrote the song "Angélica", which now forms part of the soundtrack to the film, in a slower version sung by Buarque himself.

"Who is this woman who always sings that refrain/I only wanted to rock to sleep my son/Who lives in the darkness of the sea/" says one verse of the song.

The Anthropophagite Manifesto

anthropophagite manifesto
by oswald de andrade
may 1928

Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The world's only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Tupy, or not tupy that is the question.1

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi.

The only things that interest me are those that are not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagite.

We are tired of all the suspicious catholic husbands put in drama. Freud put an end to the woman enigma and to other frights of printed psychology.

What hindered truth was clothing, the impermeable element between the interior world and the exterior world. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform.

Sons of the sun, mother of the living. Found and loved ferociously, with all the hypocrisy of nostalgia, by the immigrants, by the slaves and by the touristes. In the country of the big snake.

It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, boundary and continental. Lazy men on the world map of Brazil. A participating consciousness, a religious rhythm.

Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levi Bruhl to study.

We want the Carahiba revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all efficacious rebellions in the direction of man. Without us Europe would not even have its poor declaration of the rights of man. The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.2

Descent. The contact with Carahiban Brazil. Oú Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the surrealist Revolution and Keyserling's technicized barbarian. We walk.

We were never catechized. We live through a somnambular law. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.But we never admitted the birth of logic among us. Against Father Vieira. Author of our first loan, to gain his commission. The illiterate king had told him: put this in paper but don't be too wordy. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was recorded. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us wordiness.

The spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. The need for an anthropophagical vaccine. For the equilibrium against the religions of the meridian. And foreign inquisitions.

We can only attend to the oracular world.

We had justice codification of vengeance. And science codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectivized ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought which is dynamic. The individual victim of the system. The source of classical injustices. Of the romantic injustices. And the forgetting of interior conquests.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.

The Carahiban instinct.

Life and death of hypotheses. From the equation I part of the Kosmos to the axiom Kosmos part of I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy.

Against plant elites. In communication with the soil.

We were never catechized. What we really did was Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or featuring in Alencar's operas full of good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had the surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notiá
Notiá Imara
Ipejú.

Magic and life. We had the relation and the distribution of physical goods, of moral goods, and the goods of dignity. And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the aid of some grammatical forms. I asked a man what Law was. He replied it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Matias. I ate him.

Determinism is only absent where there is mystery. But what do we have to do with this?

Against the stories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterra. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress through catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And the blood transfusors.

Against the antagonical sublimations. Brought in caravels.

Against the truth of missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagite, the Viscount of Cairu:-It is the often repeated lie.

But they who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vengeful as a Jabuti.

If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of plants.

We did not have speculation. But we had the power of guessing. We had Politics which is the science of distribution. And a planetary-social system.

The migrations. The escape from tedious states. Against urban sclerosis. Against Conservatories, and tedious speculation.

From William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of Taboo in totem. Anthropophagy.

The pater families and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + sentiment of authority before the pro-curious (sic).

It is necessary to depart from a profound atheism to arrive at the idea of God. But the Carahiba did not need. Because he had Guaraci.

The created objective reacts as the Fallen Angels. After Moses wanders. What have we got to do with this?

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.

Against the Indian with the torch. The Indian son of Mary, godson of Catherine de Médici and son-in-law of Don Antônio de Mariz.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

In the matriarchy of Pindorama.

Against the Memory source of custom. Personal experience renewed.

We are concretists. Ideas take hold, react, burn people in public squares. Let us suppress ideas and other paralyses. Through the routes. To believe in signs, to believe in the instruments and the stars.

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of Don João VI.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

The struggle between what one would call the Uncreated and the Creature illustrated by the permanent contradiction between man and his Taboo. The quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem. The human adventure. The mundane finality. However, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal anthropophagy, which brings the highest sense of life, and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechist evils. What happens is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers itself. We reach vilification. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of catechism-envy, usury, calumny, assassination. Plague of the so-called cultured and christianized peoples, it is against it that we are acting. Anthropophagi.

Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins of the sky, in the land of Iracema- the patriarch João Ramalho founder of São Paulo.

Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. Typical phrase of Don João VI:-My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does! We expelled the dynasty. It is necessary to expel the spirit of Bragança, the law and the snuff of Maria da Fonte.

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, registered by Freud-reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without the prisons of the matriarchy of Pindorama.


Oswald de Andrade

In Piratininga
Year 374 of the swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha.


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1 Original in English [T.N.].
2 Girls: Original in English [T.N.].

Originally published in Revista de Antropofagia, n.1, year 1, May 1928, São Paulo. Translated from the Portuguese by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro.

A Semana da Arte Moderna de 1922 (The Week of Modern Art of 1922)

The week of Modern Art of 1922 was performed between 11th and 18th of February of 1922 in São Paulo at the City Theater(Teatro Municipal de São Paulo) and expected the presence of writers, intellectuals, painters, sculptors, architects and musicians. The main interest of this happening was to renew the artistic environment in Brazil. A production of a brazilian art more tuned to the european avant-gardes without lose its nationalistic character! After 100 years of Brazil's Independence, the young modernists wanted to "rediscover" the country and frees it from the foreign patterns. They used the "academicism" in the arts, influenced by the aesthetics and the movements as the Cubism, Expressionism and several other ramifications from the Post-Impressionists as the Divisionism (see Neo-Impressionism) as their guide. They planned to use those european models consciously for a renovation of the national art, concerned to make an art totally brazilian, without the inferiority complexes in relation to the art made in Europe. The artists involved in that Week are: Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Zina Aita, Társila do Amaral, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Ferrignac (Inácio da Costa Ferreira), Yan de almeida Prado, John Graz, Alberto Martins Ribeiro and Oswaldo Goeldi with paintings and drawings; Victor Brecheret, Hildegardo Leão Velloso and Wilhelm Haarberg with sculptures; Antônio Garcia Moya and Georg Przyrembel with architectonic projects; Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Menotti del Picchia, Sérgio Milliet, Plínio Salgado, Ronald de Carvalho, Álvaro Moreira, Renato de Almeida, Ribeiro Couto e Guilherme de Almeida a writers and musicians as Villa-Lobos, Guiomar Novais, Ernâni Braga e Frutuoso Viana.

The Week of Modern Art was just a consequence of the conflicts between the modernists and conservators. When Anita Malfatti came from Europe with her paintings and ideas from the new tendencies, she was criticized by the great writer Monteiro Lobato accusing her of not being faithful in describing the brazilian man and his nature, the comments were so heavy that insinuated that Malfatti was crazy. Oswald de Andrade, the writer and playwriter, also came from europe with new ideas and wrote two great manifestos but those were consequences of The Art Modern Week: First was called "Manifesto Pau-Brasil" 1924 which he says a "brazilian portuguese without archaism, without erudition. A great contribution for all the mistakes. How we speak. How we are." And a second one published in 1928, which was to oppose the conservator stream that was totally xenophobic and nationalistic, this manifesto was called The Manifesto Antrophagite. He criticizes the brazlian intellectuals and also the culture in the sense as we live in a third world country, we just assimilate ideas from the dominant countries instead of create them. Thus, what he proposes is not to deny any ideas from those countries but take the best and highest ideas and incorporate into our culture and uses it to create our own ideas.

The ideas of the week of Modern Art will be retaken later in the 60's to inluence again the students, politicians, young artists and mainly musicians, in special the Tropicalists.

A Brazilian Song!

Baby
(Caetano Veloso/English Lyrics: Mutantes)

You know, you must take a look at the new land
The swimming pool and
The teeth of your friend
The dirty in my hand
You know, you must take a look at me

Baby, baby
I know that's the way

You know, you must try the new ice-cream flavor
Do me a favor, look at me closer
Join us and go far
And hear the new sound of my Bossa Nova

Baby, baby
It's been a long time

You know, it's time now to learn Portuguese
It's time now to learn what I know
And what I don't know
And waht I don't know
I know with me everything is fine
It's time now to make up your mind
We live in the biggest city of South America
Of South America, of South America
Look here, read what I wrote on my shirt

Baby, baby
I love you
Baby, baby
I love you
Baby, baby
I love you
Baby, baby
I love you
Baby, baby
I love you
You do