Eng. brutality garden

Tropicália playlist (via Joybox)

The Portuguese term brutalidade jardim is used in a line of Gilberto Gil's song "Geléia Geral," with lyrics by the Brazilian poet Torquato Neto, from the album Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis, the founding album of the Tropicália movement.

The term brutalidade jardin itself originates in Oswald de Andrade's 1924 novel Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar. As Christopher Dunn explains,

Oswald's phrase is particularly striking because it does not follow Portuguese syntax (i.e. "jardim da brutalidade") in which the garden would necessarily be the site of brutality. Instead, the phrase constitutes a cubist montage in which the two halves contaminate each other but never cohere. The garden and brutality coexist in contradictory juxtaposition. Oswald's phrase captures the ambivalent stance of the tropicalists, who were fascinated with the Edenic national mythology yet also cognizant of its ideological premises and insidious uses. The military regime sought to represent Brazil as a peaceful 'garden' even as it brutality suppressed its opposition. Oswald's paradoxical phrase, alluding to violence within a tropical arcadia, telegraphically encapsulates the drama of Brazil in the late 1960s as seen through the tropicalist lens.'

-- Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001): 97-98