Antonin Artaud: a surrealist character and the Tarahumara Peoples









Over the years, the indigenous peoples of Mexico have attracted the attention of countless intellectuals, anthropologists, and writers, who have visited the country with the purpose of experiencing coexistence with “non-Western” worlds. In Mexico, one of the foreign intellectuals who lived in the Sierra Tarahumara and wrote about the Rarámuri peoples was the Frenchman Antonin Artaud. It was 1981 when I discussed with my dear friend José Lameiras the proposal made by the National Indigenous Institute (INI) to write a text that would be attached to an edition of photos and text by Carl Lumholtz, the Norwegian naturalist who traveled through Mexico in the 1890s, with the permission, of course, of Porfirio Díaz in full power. Since my high school days at the Institute of Sciences and Arts of Chiapas (ICACH) I knew Lumholtz’s book because my teacher, Fernando Castañón Gamboa gave me an edition published by Ediciones Herrerías in 1945 (year of my birth) with the title of The unknown Mexico. The text and photographs of Lumholtz to which I referred were edited by the INI with the title The Northwest Indians (1982) including my text titled, “Carl Lumholtz the Unknown. Images of Man” (pp. 78-82) which was discussed with my colleague José Lameiras. While the conversation with José Lameiras was going on, he mentioned Antonin Artaud to me, adding something like “you cannot write about the Tarahumaras without first reading Artaud”. In 1981, Lameiras and I were working in the Anthropology Department of the UAM-Iztapalapa, which we had just founded in 1975 together with Juan Vicente Palerm and Roberto “El Flaco” Varela in Mexico City. The text that I had to write, as proposed to me by Juan Carlos Colín, then Head of the INI Audiovisual Archive, would have the purpose of commenting on Lumholtz’s photographs of his various expeditions to Mexico between 1890 and 1898, and in particular, of those that the expeditionary Norwegian took between Tarahumaras, Pimas, Tepehuanos and Huicholes, as it was written and published. But I did not ignore Pepe Lameiras’s suggestion to read Antonin Artaud, which was a discovery for me. While rummaging through the shelves of my library recently, I found the aforementioned INI publication and a note on reading the text by Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, known in Mexico as Antonín Artaud, The Tarahumara, written in 1944. In 2018, the Fondo de Cultura Económica published a text very similar to the previous one with the title the tarahumara and before that, the same publishing house made available to readers the text by Antonín Artaud entitled Mexico and trip to the country of the Tarahumaras (1987). Artaud was a playwright and poet. He wrote essay. He left a very extensive work that Ediciones Gallimard de Paris published in 28 volumes in 2004. He arrived in Mexico in 1936, right at the height of the Cardenista era. The country was still under the impulses and enthusiasms unleashed by the Mexican Revolution and the defeat of Porfirio Díaz. These were just times when the fate of the Indian peoples was being discussed at the continental level in Latin America in the context of the forging of National States. Acculturation theories were used to try to assimilate the original cultures in order to consolidate and strengthen a national culture, which meant erasing the cultural variety characteristic of the country. It was the Mexico of the deepest agrarian reform that has been carried out, with distribution of the land to a peasantry that came from the battles of the Revolution led by legendary figures such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa. He was the Mexico of the oil expropriation, of the reception of the Spanish republican combatants against the fascist axis in Europe; it was the country of “socialist education” and of the great artistic movements. It is the country that received Leon Troksky whom Stalin finally succeeded in assassinating. But also a Mexico that saw indigenous peoples as strange contingents living in a “primitivism” that meant an obstacle to achieving a modern nation. A character like Antonín Artaud, who according to his biographers lived tormented and in constant search to find a “total art”, a surrealist character who had written a collection of poems with the title of The navel of the limbs In addition to proposing the so-called “Cruelty Theater”, such a character found in the original cultures of today’s Mexico a different environment, a medium in which hallucinogens that alter consciousness are effective auxiliaries in the search for that “art total”. The art sought by Antonín Artaud combines theatre, acting, dramaturgy, poetry, essays, and literature in all its expressions. This “total art” is also absolute and finds its origins in cultures such as those of the Rarámuri, who have the ability to express the world in multiple ways. Antonín Artaud affirmed that the word is not the best of languages ​​and sought in the symbolic world of the indigenous people of the Northwest of Mexico a closer answer to his search. An art without the support of a world like that of the Tarahumara is a trap, according to Artaud, because it becomes a kind of hiding place for human misery. Precisely in his text on the Tarahumara, Antonín Artaud accuses psychiatry of complicity in the misery that overwhelms humans. The Tarahumara embody “primitivism” yes, but they are bearers of that “total art” that haunts the mountains, runs in the streams and murmurs in the wind. It is the white man who brings rot to a world like that of the Northwest Indians and this is expressed by Artaud in his play entitled precisely The conquest of Mexico, which is nothing more than the story of how oppression operates in a colonial system. Almost screaming, Antonía Artaud proclaims that it is imperative to return to the sacred-understood as spirituality-in the world of capitalism. For this reason, Artaud experiments with drugs, the peyote of the Huicholes, the hallucinogens of the Tarahumaras, which mix in a strange way with his psychiatric experiences. He defined himself as a stranger in his land, as a deportee in Rodez, France, in whose asylum he finished writing his book in 1946. On March 4, 1948, Antonín Artaud died, the creator of the Theater of Cruelty, vindicator of original cultures such as that of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and a fighter against modernity. His writing reveals a nervous character, impatient to change the world, restless. Some of his biographers claim that he was a devout Catholic and that he oscillated between atheism and devotion. The truth is that in his text he reveals himself to someone who is convinced that faith is another sign of human misfortune. He was a companion of Andrés Breton, the master of surrealism, and in a field marked by dramaturgy, Antonín Artaud created the “Theater of Cruelty”. Seeking to put himself before words, a basic conviction of the Theater of Cruelty, Antonín Aratud finds among the Tarahumaras a “people of the Sun” (as Alfonso Caso used to say) that finds its way in the ingestion of the Jikuri. He was attracted to the Tarahumaras, and he expresses it in his text, that they lived in an anachronistic world, challenging modernity. It is this anachronism that allows the Tarahumara to live a full life.

Antonín Artaud lived in Mexico with characters sympathetic to surrealism such as Federico Cantú and Inés Amor. Even in the gallery owned by Inés Amor, Antonín Artaud met María Izquierdo and Luis Cardoza y Aragón. I suggest consulting Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Anthology, Mexico, CONACULTA, 1987; Tomas Fernandez and Elena Tamaro, “Biography of Antonin Artaud in Biographies and Lives, Barcelona, ​​Spain, 2004. Available online. Likewise, let us remember that for a long period of time, Mexico was the destination of innumerable characters who sought the answer to their questions in hallucinogens. It is famous, for example, the life of María Sabina, the Zapotec wise woman who became overwhelmed by the number of people who visited her to have the experience of trying one of the mushrooms that she handled. See: Álvaro Estrada, Life of María Sabina, the Wise of the Mushrooms, Mexico, XXI Century, 1989.

Ajijic. Shore of Lake Chapala. As of May 16, 2022.






Antonin Artaud: a surrealist character and the Tarahumara Peoples