"Antropófaga" by Ananda Lima in One Sentence
How to develop a fantastical premise using self-similar echoes
I recently purchased a pair of hand-crafted working guillotine earrings that had me thinking: “If only my apartment were crawling with two-inch tall aristocratic tyrants, I would be prepared to deal with them now.” Then I wondered, “would this make a good short story?” After all, who doesn’t love dark stories about miniature people, written for adults?
The odds that I will pursue this particular story idea are quite low, but it did prompt me to revisit another excellent contemporary “miniature people” tale for grown-ups: “Antropófaga,” which appears both in Ananda Lima’s wonderful 2024 debut collection Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and in Kenyon Review Online, where you can read an earlier version of it for free.
“She devoured tiny Americans that slid out of a vending machine,” the story begins, in a premise that is immediately both fantastical and fun.
But it’s one thing to come up with a playful premise and much, much harder to turn that premise into a fully rounded and richly nuanced short story.
Lima has done both brilliantly. How does she pull it off?
By developing other important elements of her story in ways that echo and add layers of meaning to the unique premise she started with. Here at Lit in One Sentence, we’re always looking for ways that parts of a story resemble the emotional superstructure of the whole, and one look at the cover of Lima’s collection should tell you how important this type of recursion is in her writing as well:
Let’s see how she uses echoes of her fantastical premise to develop layers of meaning throughout the rest of this story.
The discussion below contains spoilers, but if you read it first, you’ll get to read the story with that “second time feeling” and an eye already trained on its boldest craft moves.
The Emotional Superstructure of “Antropófaga”
Mourning a miscarriage, a woman from Brazil must manage her addiction to devouring miniature Americans she can buy from the vending machine at her workplace.
How to Develop a Fantastical Premise Using Self-Similar Echoes
Antropófaga literarally means “human-eating” or “cannibal.” In 1920’s Brazil, antropófagia was also a metaphor for culturally devouring European influences, digesting and remixing them to create something uniquely Brazilian, ideas that were laid out in Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, or “Cannibalist Manifesto.”
Lima was certainly aware of this while writing her story:
They had the idea of cannibalizing whatever you wanted from European culture, and processing it into your Brazilian identity. It was this idea of the colonized eating the colonizers, but in practical terms, it was a lot of absorption and digestion of culture and making it our own. Which I think is very true for an immigrant person in a different context.
I didn’t have that idea in mind when I came up with the story. I just came up with the first sentence, and then suddenly I realized, I have a cannibalist story, and it was such a delight when I realized I was referencing this history. In the story, you don’t need to know any of the background, but I really like that connection.
One of the most brilliant things Lima does to make this story work is pairing the why of her main character’s addiction with the what.
What her main character Béia is addicted to is eating tiny Americans that she can purchase from the vending machine at the hospital where she mops floors.
We know right from the start that she turns to the questionable source of nutritive value because she is going through some difficult things. At first we learn that this involves a fight with her ex-boyfriend, who has recently moved out, and the “child, dog, house without a fence, and wedding that went down the drain in a counterclockwise swirl before ever happening.”
Lima could have left the why at this, but she didn’t. Farther in, we learn that the child was more than just theoretical. On a trip back to Brazil to visit their families, Béia conceived: “The baby had been a little Brazilian gift they’d brought back with them without knowing.” Then she miscarried. Her boyfriend offered that they could try again, but the “suggestion of replacing it with something calculated in the New Jersey winter had struck her as repugnant.”
She’s addicted to eating tiny Americans because she used to have one inside her and now she doesn’t, her cravings for this new snack even echoing the cravings of pregnancy. Lima has taken an absurd premise and given her character an emotionally realistic and poignant reason for engaging with it.
Lima’s choice also allows her to weave political depth into the story by choosing simple yet resonant background details that echo the themes.
Would Béia’s baby have been an American? Is she?
“Anchor babies,” say the angry blond women on Fox News, which the patients watch on the emergency room TV. “It’s their fault for bringing them here,” they say, while behind them play images of a warehouse where “a chain-link fence surrounded children who slept like potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil.”
The tiny Americans also come packaged in metallic plastic. They come in all sorts of flavors, from obnoxious tourist with a selfie stick to cowboy to body builder in an American-flag Speedo, but also a curly-haired brown woman consulting what seemed to be a book, then typing on her laptop and an elderly McDonald’s worker whose melancholy eyes Béia has to avoid while eating her. There is the woman in the pink pussy hat and also the screaming man in the MAGA hat, whose bones Béia can’t possibly crunch hard enough.
They aren’t particularly nourishing, these ingestible Americans, but neither is the hospital cafeteria food Béia chooses them over. Her kindly supervisor first calls all the vending machine fare (she does not seem to know about the more unusual items on offer between the Ruffles and the Doritos) tasteless junk, before relaxing and encouraging Béia to enjoy her treats without worrying too much what they are made of.
It’s because her stomach has become Americanized that Béia vomits up her birth control on the trip to Brazil and conceives in the first place. But ultimately, it’s homemade Brazilian food—still steaming rice, beans, fried yucca flour, tomatoes, and beef with onions—brought by another friendly coworker to the hospital that has the power to revive her, that is the only genuinely nourishing thing she manages to eat throughout the story. “The food tasted so good, fresh and warm and full and dense. None of that light artificial crispiness of packaged food.”
The miniature Americans, eventually, include Béia herself, with her hospital uniform and mop. This, she manages to swallow.
The only American she can’t swallow is a tiny echo of the daughter she lost, emerging from the metallic packaging in the end. “It was a small child, a girl, around two years old. Béia’s skin color. Same hair. The little face, a mix: her ex-boyfriend’s nose, Béia’s eyes.” Her hands shake and she drops the package and miniature baby and runs off, feeling very ill.
Endings are always tricky, but Lima nails hers by using a recursive echo worthy of the the cover of her collection.
Béia’s palms have begun itching and scarring, presumably an unpleasant side effect of all the vending machine food she’s been eating. As she hides herself in a closet, plastic packaging shoots out of them, Wolverine-like, and envelops her like a womb, her palms still attached “like an umbilical cord.” She is able to rock herself to sleep, thinking of the future she might have had with her baby, but when she wakes up, still in the packaging, she is in a giant vending machine. She can hear someone putting in coins, she can feel the wire coils turning to release her, and she ends—echoing the miniature baby she could only drop—in free fall.
From the starting point of “she devoured tiny Americans that slid out of a vending machine,” many important things we need to know—from why Béia is doing this, to how it makes her feel, to how it all ends—echo the elements of eating and craving and Americanness and tininess and nutritive value and metallic packaging and vending machines and more, in deeply nuanced ways.
Rather than adding new elements, Lima built out the story by adding layers and layers of meaning to what was already inherent in the fantastical premise she began with. The result is a very satisfying and emotionally nutrient-dense meal of a story.
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