AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE AND THE DISCOURSE OF

THE BLACK ATLANTIC

 

Elizabeth A. Marchant – UCLA

 

 

 

The past several decades have seen a transformation in the relationship between state and society in Brazil as new social movements have worked to broaden the definition of citizenship. Black movements are among those that have pressed for change, and their efforts have had important implications for Brazilian race relations. The present study is part of a project to reconsider, through analysis of various Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions, what has become known in cultural studies as the “black Atlantic”. Unfortunately, Brazil is generally left out of these discussions. This omission reasserts the longstanding divide between Anglo-American and Latin American Studies.

Paul Gilroy’s conception of the black Atlantic, as outlined in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), is rich in its suggestiveness, useful to anyone interested in the relationship between race and modernity. It is also, however, startling for its complete lack of consideration of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking populations who comprise a majority of the inhabitants of the Americas. The people of Brazil represent one obvious exclusion from Gilroy’s notion of a black Atlantic. With thousands of miles of Atlantic coastline and the largest black population outside of Africa,[1] Brazil would seem to be an important site to consider in the formulation of ideas about the African diaspora. Nonetheless, discussions of that diaspora, like Gilroy’s writings on the black Atlantic, predominantly center on the English-speaking world, the Atlantic portion of the former British Empire, and therefore ignore Brazilian studies of race and the large body of work that compares race relations in Brazil and the United States.

Early in his book, Gilroy mentions Pedro Niño, a black man who served as Christopher Columbus’s pilot (16). He makes this reference to remind us that blacks have been involved in transatlantic endeavors from the moment of the first European contact with the Americas, but his observation does not lead him to any further examination of Spanish Portuguese-speaking diaspora communities.

Often theorizing about the black Atlantic rests on the binaristic understandings of racial difference that have emerged in the English-speaking world. How do ideas about modernity and double consciousness play themselves out in a post-slavery society less concerned with questions of racial origin and with its own distinct patterns of racial discrimination? How might these considerations modify over-arching theorizations of the African diasporic cultures in the Americas? From another perspective – something like the one suggested by an “upside-down” map of Americas[2] - the United States and Canada might be seen as exceptions for their understandings of racial difference. The binaristic thinking emblematized by the “one-drop rule”, an understanding of race based on genotype, does not hold for all of the Americas and does not define race relations in Brazil.

In turning very briefly to some specific strategies employed in the making of contemporary Afro-Brazilian culture, we can better understand the ways in which this production uses Brazilian history, in this case the history of Zumbi and Palmares. My hope is that a study of the manner by which contemporary cultural expressions address Brazilian history will allow for a productive discussion of Brazil’s place within formulations of a greater black Atlantic.

Contesting the view that Brazil is a racial democracy, some Brazilians (particularly those involved with the Black Movement and black cultural organizations) have asserted a racialized and resistant history as a means of affirming a distinct racial and political identity. This identity challenges the national myth of racial equality. Yet, as will be discussed below, the cultural manifestations of this resistant identity tend away from exclusionary understandings of African traditions or what anthropologist R. L. Segato refers to as an “African codex” (143).

As is the case with other black Atlantic communities, Afro-Brazilians have forged cultural expressions from a profound synthesis, combining their national history and experiences of slavery with other elements and influences. South African political struggle, reggae music, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and  hip hop are some of the many recent expressions of self-identification born of the African diaspora. These and other forms have come into play as Afro-Brazilians articulate a cultural and racial identity that affirms their distinct sense of self and community.

A key element of this mobilization involves the contemporary recuperation of diasporic figures in a growing Afro-Brazilian pantheon of cultural and religious icons including Anastácia, Henrique Dias, Dandara, and Luiza Mahin among others (Burdick 101). One very powerful example of this process resides in Zumbi, the last king of Palmares. Especially during the 1988 centennial celebrations of the abolition of slavery, Zumbi became a cultural icon implicated in the democratization process as well as the growing black consciousness movement at work in Brazil. His figure appears in a number of contemporary films, songs and literary works celebrating the African heritage of resistance in the Americas.

Zumbi is associated with the quilombo of Palmares, the community founded by runaway slaves that resisted Portuguese and Dutch colonial control for much of the seventeenth century. Yet the resistant qualities of Zumbi’s history are often erased as he is written into official history. As such, Zumbi serves to reveal the dynamics of racial and national identity. Racial distinction is sacrificed in the name of national unity. At the same time, his position in contemporary Brazilian culture raises important, potentially liberatory possibilities in terms of racial consciousness.

The signification of Zumbi and Palmares has not been exhausted by their incorporation into official history. For example, the hailing of Zumbi during the centennial celebrations of the abolition of slavery in 1988 is not a mere empty reference to a distant historical figure. There are complex tensions at work in this revisioning that offers a reading of Zumbi as both resistant and conformist given the context of his incorporation into Brazilian history. An analysis of Zumbi as cultural icon reveals two distinct strains. One is a hegemonic tendency to “folklorize” Afro-Brazilian culture. The other is a counter-hegemonic desire to read him as a symbol of continued resistance to racialized discrimination. Sustained interest in his image is evident in an ever-growing volume of projects in Brazil that include such varied manifestations as literatura de cordel written in Zumbi’s praise, a Zumbi miniseries directed by Walter Avancini that aired on Brazilian television in 1996, and the Servidor Web Zumbi, sponsored by the NGOs of Bahia.[3]

Tracing the figure of Zumbi as he emerges from the history of Palmares offers an opportunity to examine both issues surrounding race and culture in Brazil and the methods we employ to construct knowledge of the black Atlantic. Ironically, Zumbi has been incorporated into the official history of a social structure he actively rejected, his figure divorced from the alterity that Palmares understood itself to represent. The example of Zumbi as hero is now quite different from the example made of him when he was killed in 1695. Then, his head was chopped off, impaled on a spike, and placed on public view in Recife to intimidate those who might follow his example and to disprove claims of Zumbi’s immortality. That bloody image has been replaced by one of celebration and acceptance, a type of folklorization that has attempted to make Zumbi safe. National history has neatly dispensed with the problem of the political separation proposed and embodied by the quilombos.

Where the nationally-inflected history of Zumbi and Palmares ends, Afro-Brazilian resistance to erasure has not. The traditional history of Palmares might suggest this form of alternate social organization died with Zumbi three hundred years ago. Yet there is evidence to the contrary. Though they have been obscured by the fame of Palmares, there were many other quilombos[4]. And even Palmares did not die with Zumbi since survivors of Domingos Jorge Velho’s 1695 attack founded other quilombos. The history of these communities continues to be written and their impact continues to be felt. In fact, land titles were ceded to five-hundred thousand present-day descendents of the quilombos as a result of the inclusion of the “quilombo” clause in the 1988 Brazilian constitution.

Nonetheless, the quilombos and the varied uses of the image of Zumbi reveal the ways in which racial ideology informs government actions. While denial of racial prejudice still characterizes the most popular description of Brazilian social relations, the past two decades have seen a shift in official discourse on race. Continuing to claim that Brazil is a racial democracy, the state has been forced to respond to pressure from new Afro-Brazilian social movements and to re-articulate its relationship to Afro-Brazilians[5]. Government attempts to increase cultural tourism, for example, and to designate Afro-Brazilian culture as folklore require a certain valorization and distinction of that culture. The recognition of difference is central to folklorization. These actions contradict the ideology of racial mixture on which Brazilian national identity rests. Yet the folklorization of candomblé, capoeira, and other African-derived expressions both ignores the cultural exchanges out of which these expressions grow and relegates them to a static, atemporal position.

Against such attemps at folklorization, there is yet discernible a counter-vailing desire to read Zumbi and other Afro-Brazilian cultural icons as symbols of continued resistance to racialized discrimination. Examination of the lyrics to the samba de enredo “Kizomba, Festa da Raça”, for example, reveals complex strategies of  historical recuperation and re-evaluation[6]. The samba was written by Martinho da Vila and performed in Rio in 1988 by the escola de samba Vila Isabel.

In the first verse, we hear a historical affirmation of Palmares and a connection is made to abolition through freedom: “Valeu, Zumbi/O grito forte dos Palmares/Que correu terras, céus, e mares/Influenciando abolição.”[7] The construction of historical memory begins as the power after of Palmares crosses time to influence abolition, nearly two hundred years after thequilombo’s physical destruction. In the second verse, Palmares is linked across time to the present through the transformation of Vila Isabel: “Hoje a Vila é Kizomba/É batuque, canto, e dança/Jongo e maracatu”[8]. Two female icons then appear together, the invented resistind slave, Anastácia, and Clementina, the famous twentieth´century samba performer, followed by an initial reference to contemporary politics, “O pagode é o partido popular”[9]. The fourth verse calls all people to this ritual event and makes further reference to contemporary politics and the rewriting in 1988 of the Brazilian constitution. “Esta Kizomba”, it says, “é nossa constituição”[10]. The song claims a link to an African cultural form as its own new constitution. Afro-Brazilian gods are invoked and explicitly tied to culture, art, and bravery in the fifth verse. The six and final verse stretches to contemporary politics abroad: “Vem a lua de Luanda/Para iluminar a rua/ Nossa sede é nossa sede/de que apartheid se destrua”[11]. The moment of the performance is tied to resistant decolonizing political movements in Africa – the independence of Angola from Portugal and the call for the abolition of apartheid in South Africa.

The performative aspects of the story samba may also be considered here since the costumes and floats used by Vila Isabel in the procession reinforce the evocation of the quilombo and its community. And the bodies of the performers are linked through colonial history to bodies in struggle in South Africa and  Angola. The way in which this particular song has traveled since 1988 reveals the routes of the black music diaspora. No longer only performed by Vila Isabel, it has been recorded by Banda Reflexu’s. Not tied to Brazilian carnival, the song now circulates as part of a world music compilation of Afro-Brazilian music in a new samba-reggae arrangement.

The consciousness of identity-based politics has manifested itself in other pervasive forms of cultural expression. A prime example is Carlos Diegues’s 1984 film Quilombo. Drawing on carnival and its reformulation through Afro-Brazilian influence, this film seeks to connect the history of blacks with contemporary Afro-Brazilian culture. Through various manifestations of popular culture – most notably music, carnival, and candomblé, - Quilombo enacts a double representation of resistance against racial oppression, condemning both slavery in the seventeenth century and racial discrimination in the twentieth century. We see, as in the “Kizomba, Fresta da Raça” lyric, the linkage of previous historical moments with current cultural expressions. More centrally, these cultural forms become a reclamation of Afro-Brazilian culture as a distinct and critically informing construct.

On a semiotic level, the film presents a double narrative. It relies on and represents a revisionnary history, thus displacing the privilege of Europeans in European historical accounts. On this level, Quilombo asserts the centrality of marginalized histories. On a second level, the film inserts traditionally invisible, racially-marked faces and bodies in the form of black performers, reversing the tendency in the popular mass media to marginalize blacks. These actors engage in a highly stylized performance that foregrounds theatricality, musicality, and aesthetic play. On this second level, the film presents not just a revisonary history, but an interrogation of history itself. The use of dance and music – Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian – creates a celebratory mood that is akin to carnival. The plot of the film, organized around a series of episodes, evokes the samba de enredo as it is structured in a way “analogous to the colection of songs, dances, costumes, and lyrics that form part of that popular narrative form” (Stam “Samba” 69). Moreover, the dramatic lighting, artificial staging, stylized movement and decorated bodies evoke the very look of carnival. By drawing aurally and visually on the carnivalesque, the film establishes a reading that relies less on historical anecdote and accuracy than on the highly ritualized forms through which Afro-Brazilians have narrated their history.

In addition to relying upon the familiar samba form, Diegues employs well-known artists in the film including the dancers from the afoxé Filhos de Gandhi, the Imperio samba school, and the capoeira group Feitiço de Caxias. The internationally reknowned pop star Gilberto Gil composed the score for the movie. By drawing on readily recognizable cultural performers and by incorporating their dance, musical, and religious performances in the film, Diegues makes overt the connection between a historical moment os Afro-Brazilian resistance and contemporary cultural practices.

On a thematic level, Diegues’s film underscores the importance of collective action rather individual effort. Zuzana Pick notes, for example, that the mise-en-scène “favors the spaces where decisions are made and religious rituals are enacted. The Palmares sequences highlight performance aspects of collective interaction and downplay individual exchanges” (147). The emphasis upon group rather than personal identity indicates a relocation of agency and subjectivity. The evocation of communal life posits a form of social engagement distinct from that offered by European-derived epistemologies.

In contemporary literary representations, too, we find Zumbi and Plamares associated with liberation from repressive social structures both past and present. A self-conscious approach to history, and an understanding of history and race as social constructs characterize these recent writings. Many events currently relevant to a transglobal black consciousness are explicitly tied to evocations of the historical past. The outlook of the Afro-Brazilian literary group, Quilombhoje, founded in São Paulo in 1980, exemplifies this approach. Cuti (Luiz Silva), who invented the group’s name, expressed this idea succinctly in a 1995 interview when he said, “Quilombhoje is a neologism that encompasses the present state of the quilomboI [and] the notion of our historic retaking of it” (729). This retaking is premised on a racial self-identification that makes reference to daily struggles for dignity and justice in a racist society.

As an example of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literary expression that treats these themes, I turn to the work of Afro-Brazilian poet Marcos Dias and his volume País índig(o blue)nação: poemas no tricentenário da morte de Zumbi dos Palmares, the second book in his poetic trilogy titled Negritude, brasilidade e universalidade. In poems like “Caderno da civilização brasileira” Dias explores and exposes the notion of Brazilianness:

 

O emaranhado da desmemória

tece uma coroa de f/atos

capciosamente esquecidos

 

Na contracorrente

Gangas/Zumbis soçobram

Sem quase nunca chegar

 

Posta em questão a literatura

:

dobre monumento onde

nossos ancestrais esplendem

todo o palor

 

O

crivo de minhas releituras atesta

que a história oficial mente

Até nas e n t r e l i n h a s (11)

 

In this poem, Dias posits a collective identity that relegates Afro-Brazilians to invisibility. History here is understood as desmemória, as absence. The current of official history is so strong that Gangas/Zumbis stand little chance of making it to shore. Afro-Brazilians are left to shine in the pallor of their invisibility.

In the poem titled “Revista literária”, Dias makes further reference to history when he writes “De bordão verdamarel/ iam caçar passarin/em tropicalíricas florestas/ Mas os rios, os interiores,/  arapucas sutilíssimas// Tais ufanismos a cair/  como luvas/ Nos dedos de quem/ nunca abdicou da condição de mando// De algures houve quem lesse poemas e descobrisse na terra a democracia das raças” (13). While satirizing the literary tradition that touts the grandezas do Brasil in all of its overblown rhetoric, the poet links the colonial past with the present. Racial democracy is yet another “discovery” made by those who still have not relinquished their roles as masters.

Dias’s closing reference in “Revista literária” reminds us of one way in which study of Brazil forces a re-evaluation of the Black Atlantic theories drawn only from evidence in the Anglo-phone world. His work, and that of other contemporary Afro-Brazilian writers, exposes how the myth of racial democracy continues to affect Brazilian cultural production. Dias’s poems are not retellings of the Zumbi story; rather they address the unfulfilled promise of his experience. With this book, the poet suggests that on the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Zumbi, we have not fully reflected upon the legacy of the multicultural and participatory society of the quilombos.

All of these cultural sites reveal two predominant features significant to considerations of a black Atlantic more broadly conceived. The first is a creation and recuperation linking previous historical moments of cultural expression with current expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture. Even within re-formulations of the slave past, the focus remains a liberated future. This tendency is especially apparent in re-visions of Zumbi and the quilombos. The second related feature, an inclusive construction of community, is also found in these re-creations. As in the lyric of the carnival “Kizomba”, these expressions incline toward an inclusion of people of all races in their calls for unity and liberation. Their challenge is to insist upon this inclusiveness without falling back upon the myth of “racial democracy”. Both these features resonate with analyses of the black Atlantic offered by Gilroy and others. At the same time, the visions of liberation and inclusion suggested by Afro-Brazilian culture make of the black Atlantic a geography at once more encompassing and finely detailed.

 

 

Works Cited:

 

BURDICK, John. Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge, 1998.

CUTI (Luiz Silva). “Interview”. Callalloo 18.4 (1995): 729-732.

DIAS, Marcos. País índig(o blue)nação: poemas no tricentenário da morte de Zumbi dos Palmares. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 1995.

GILROY, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

NASCIMENTO, Abdias do. O quilombismo: Documentos de uma militância pan-africanista. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1980.

PICK, Zuzana M. The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

SEGATO, R. L. “The Color-Blind Subject of Myth; Or, Where to Find Africa in the Nation”. Annual Review of Anthropology. 27 (1998): 129-51.

STAM, Robert. “Samba, Candomblé, Quilombo: Black Performance and Brazilian Cinema”. Journal of Ethnic Studies 13.3. (1985): 54-84.

___. Tropical Multiculturalism: a Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1997.

TOLEDO, Roberto Pompeu de. O presidente segundo o sociólogo: Entrevista de Fernando Henrique Cardoso a Roberto Pompeu de Toledo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998.

SERVIDOR WEB ZUMBI. N.d. Non-Governmental Organizations of Bahia. 12 Oct. 1999 http://www.peacelink.it/zumbi/home.htmil.

VILA, Martinho da. “Kizomba, Festa da Raça”. Perf. Banda Reflexu’s. Yelé Brazil. EMI Records, 1994.

VILARON, André. “O quilombo Kalunga”. Revista do patrimônio histórico e artístico nacionnal 25 (1997): 246-59.