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Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil) ■
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Maracatu de Nação, A Tradition Reinvigorated The main carnival of Pernambuco, Brazil, which takes place in the large coastal city of Recife and the nearby town of Olinda, has received little attention from non-Brazilian scholars — either as an annual event or as a locus of cultural activity year-round.1 One of Pernambucan carnival’s most impressive features is the maracatu de nação groups, which are processions of predominately Afro-Brazilian percussionists and dancers dressed in resplendent colonial-era Portuguese attire. The focal point of each procession is its “king” and “queen,” a man and woman — usually the spiritual leaders and directors of the group, regally dressed and crowned — who, according to oral tradition, represent the king of Kongo and his queen parading with their court. This practice, unique in its musical detail to the urban area of Recife-Olinda, is related to a host of other widespread Afro-Brazilian traditional festivals evoking the king of Kongo. These were all held in conjunction with ostensibly Catholic celebrations of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, São Benedito, or Rei Baltazar (the “dark king” who, with two other wise men, visited the newborn Jesus).2 Prevalent in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Recife, maracatu de nação went into decline after around 1960. In 1967, only three groups remained. A 1969 newspaper states, “the authentic maracatus of pure African origin are disappearing with the deaths of their monarchs” ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1969). By 1988, one prominent observer of Pernambucan popular culture declared that the tradition appeared to be headed for extinction; another countered that, with nine groups then dedicated to performing maracatu de nação (many of them initiated recently by dissident members of older groups), there had 3 been a “miraculous” rejuvenation of the form. When I visited Olinda and Recife for carnival in 2004 – 5, I found a cultural practice showing clear signs of revitalization. Dozens of groups were present; Santos and Resende (2005, 29) suggests that while thirty-one maracatus de nação are currently registered with Pernambuco’s Carnival Federation, some sixty-five groups are active. There were many young people in their ranks, and the various races of participants in many new groups were striking. Almost all the groups were arrayed in the characteristic Latin American Music Review, Volume 29, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2008 © 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
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choreographic formations César Guerra-Peixe observed in 1949 – 1952, and described in his valuable Maracatus do Recife (1980). There are several social forces behind the resurgence of maracatu de nação:
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The work of middle-class, lighter-skinned activists to “rescue” the tradition by adapting its sonic and visual aspects into stylized, nonracialized forms (the first and most influential of such groups is Maracatu Nação Pernambuco, founded by Bernardino José in 1989); The globalized reimagining of maracatu de nação in the mangue movement (spearheaded in the early 1990s by Chico Science, now deceased, and the band Nação Zumbi); A state concern to articulate and project a unique identity, since exceptional cultural forms attract national status and tourism revenue; and A heightened Afro-Brazilian consciousness, inspired by the internationally renowned afoxés and blocos afro that transformed Bahian carnival in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Attitudes in Recife vis-à-vis Bahian influence are divergent. Culture officials have watched in alarm (but tourism boosters in envy) as Salvador’s re-Africanized carnival, with its miscegenated soundtrack axé music, has elicited unprecedented controversy, prestige, and international interest. If the “invasion” of Rio de Janeiro – style samba schools in Recife’s carnival 4 was the bane of Pernambucan purists a generation ago, the specter of a Bahian stranglehold on local creativity produced indignant debates and led some to call for a prohibition on Bahian trio elétricos in the 1980s and 1990s (Diário de Pernambuco [Recife] 1989; Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1993). For segments of Recife’s black population, however, the impact of Bahia’s electrified frevos on local carnival bands was irrelevant. They hailed the racialized political discourse and neo-African aesthetic of Bahian afoxés and bloco afros. Internalizing the imperative to rethink history, they drew inspiration from the idea that the quilombo Palmares, and its leader Zumbi, reigned in the captaincy of Pernambuco. According to the Jornal do Commercio, between 1982 and 1991, at least twelve different afoxés were founded in Recife and Olinda, and all twelve participated in 1991’s carnival. Roberto Santos, founder of the Pernmabucan afoxé Afro Axé, declared that the goals of the movement were to “disseminate African culture and dance more and more, while continuing to 5 point out the farce of the Golden Law of 1888.” The journalist explains that afoxés do this “using atabaques, agogôs, and other instruments that characterize the expression of African culture” ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1993).
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The statement that atabaques and agogôs — the drums and double iron bells associated with Brazilian candomblé, and also featured in the parades of afoxés such as Filhos de Gandhi — are expressing “African culture” in Recife’s carnival is suggestive. During recent carnivals, I noticed an occasional departure from what oral tradition maintains is the distinctive symbolic repertoire of the maracatu de nação. Specifically, the large single iron bell, called gonguê, was replaced here and there by the smaller, double agogô. And some groups had augmented their percussive battery with additional instruments: the timbau, a conical, djembe-like hand drum, and the abê, or large gourd rattle, common in afoxé. But the calunga, a small, ornately dressed wooden doll that serves as a sort of fetish, protector, and portable xangô alter for traditional groups, was sometimes missing from the newer groups; occasionally it was replaced by a female, black plastic child’s doll wearing a homemade African-style outfit. Both of the traditional objects that I saw being replaced — the gonguê and the calunga — hint at links to a Central African cultural base in maracatu de nação that has not been adequately explored by scholars. For many years, the “African contribution” to carnival in Recife was seen to be the function of the maracatus de nação. In 1908, Pereira da Costa praised its “typical African features and customs” (1908). Decades later, Afro-Pernambucan journalist Paulo Viana declared that “The negro rhythm brought from Africa with the slaves is present in Recife’s carnival, represented by the maracatus” (1974). But the social context surrounding maracatu has changed; the symbolic field that gives orientation and depth to state, national, and racial identity is not the same in twenty-first-century Brazil as it was in nineteenth- or twentieth-century Brazil. Maracatu de nação is transforming in several ways at once in a push and pull between differing symbols of African-ness or Afro-Brazilian-ness within the population of black Pernambucanos that still constitute its highest base of participation. Differing notions of tradition, resistance, and “authenticity,” particularly in their modern political and global connotations, are very much at play. This essay offers brief examination of two objects in maracatu de nação, the gonguê and calunga (largely ignored by the literature on both Brazil and Africa), that seem able to offer a renewed sense of African-ness to modern participants. This is followed by a discussion of competing symbols and values arriving in the politicized Bahian model of a “re-Africanized” identity, and how the traditional maracatu de nação groups are positioned with respect to Afro-Brazilian versus Pernambucan identity. I follow Zairian ethnomusicologist Kazadi wa Mukuna’s emphasis on “Conceptual and Contextual Analysis” to understand so-called “Africanisms” in Latin America (1999).12 Although it is important to try to identify the African origin of cultural manifestations in the New World, an equal priority is placed in
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understanding how those African elements are transformed in their new local cultural contexts. In other words, the nature of change, recombination, and reconfiguring of contemporary meaning in African-diasporic traditional culture becomes a subject of inquiry in itself. Origins: From the King of Kongo to the Maracatu de Nação Maracatu de nação is doubly syncretic. It embodies African and Portuguese influences, but within the African heritage, aspects of both Central and West African traits can be discerned. Nearly all the groups with a substantial history in Recife are affiliated with the West African–derived xangô religion, although some (such as Maracatu Nação Cambinda Estrela) profess ties with jurema, sometimes called catimbó, a hybrid of xangô with indigenous beliefs. The maintenance of ethnic “nations” as organizing units in maracatu perhaps speaks to the significance accorded to the king of Kongo ritual among local blacks during the colonial period. The practice may have been inspired by the visit of the king of Kongo’s ambassador to Dutch Recife in 1642; it was already occurring in Portugal among Central African blacks (Kiddy 2002, 159; Dantas Silva 1991a, xxxii). The first record of a coronation in Brazil of black ethnic “royalty” — in this case, a king and queen of Angola, not Kongo — comes from Recife, at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Blacks, in 1666 (by which time the Portuguese had retaken the area). Historian Elizabeth W. Kiddy argues that, because of the early predominance of Central African slaves in Pernambuco, and the legendary reputation of the king of Kongo among both slaves and Europeans, kings from all the various African ethnic groups came to be called “kings of Congo … the King of Congo became the term of the leader of African descent who represented and received the loyalty of blacks of many nations and people of mixed descent” (Kiddy 2002, 172, 181, 182). A controversial aspect of the maracatu is this historical relationship with white power structures. The election of black “kings” was carried out under the supervision of state and religious officials, in the context of Christian celebrations; the kings, mediators between white and black society, were charged with keeping order among their “subjects” and could even be called upon by white authorities to punish them. Against the interpretation that this was a ritualized exercise in the conciliation, division, and control of black populations, some scholars counter that the Kongo kings represented powerful, mythic hero figures, “affirming an African identity to the community that elected them and opening new spaces for black agency in a society based on slavery” (Souza 2002, 331). Still, the Kongo king ritual was linked inextricably with slavery, and in Recife, it was perhaps part of the institution itself. Leonardo Dantas Silva concludes that, “with abolition, on the 13th of May, 1888, the coronation of Kongo Kings lost its sanction
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and reason for being, because there was no longer the necessity for that type of ‘authority’ to maintain order and subordination among the black subjects” (1988, 1991b). Memories of the ritual were kept alive, particularly in the Xangô terreiros and the Catholic brotherhoods. Something like the contemporary procession of maracatu de nação had perhaps been enacted for the old Kongo kings. Henceforth, the dance-music-theater of maracatu de nação, lacking the political and symbolic depth it once had, would be performed for Catholic festivals for the Santos Reis and Nossa Senhora do Rosário, and during carnival and other secular celebrations. Jan Vansina, anthropologist and historian of Central Africa, suggests the continued importance of the idea of a Kongo kingdom in Central Africa after the Kongo state itself collapsed in 1665: “The façade of the kingdom was eventually restored … Kings were sacralized rather more than in earlier days; in the 18th century this turned them into mere figureheads, almost figments of the collective imagination. Besides the ideal of kingship, some of its emblems and rituals survived” (Vansina 1990, 221). In contemporary Pernambuco, there was very likely a search among diverse Central African peoples for new cultural common denominators, and objects with strong symbolic significance might have been valued and locally reconfigured. Kongo Concept: The Gonguê The gonguê is a single, clapperless iron bell, one to three feet long, considered fundamental to the performance of traditional maracatu music. In the historical record of Brazil, reference to the bell seems to appear only in Pernambuco. Larry Crook, an ethnomusicologist specializing in AfroBrazilian music, opined that the term gonguê “is possibly related to the Ewe term gakogui (iron bell)” (2002, 244), which would imply a derivation from West Africa, specifically in the region of Ghana. Crook offers no evidence for this idea. A more promising observation came from Guerra-Peixe, some fifty years previous, who identified the term gonguê as a “corruption of the Bantu ngonge for iron gong” (1980, 58). Granted, Bantu is a complex family of languages which contains many different words referring to bells: kengede, mulangu, kengelengele, njinjo, bembo, nyengede. But there is a vein of words based on the root – gong, referring to bells, including gonga (“time,” “bell”) and gunga (“bell”). Ngongi is described as an iron bell or gong “producing two different sounds, used in the past by headmen to assemble people for public works or war” (Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary 2006). Portuguese anthropologist José Redinha, in a study of Angolan musical instruments (1988),6 noted that the large (often, but not always, double) bell was widespread in the northern half or two-thirds of the region, encompassing the majority of people in Angola, and called by a variety of names: gongo, ngongue, ngongu, xigongo,
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FIGURE 1. Clockwise from left: gonguê from Recife, Brazil; single bell and double bells from the Democratic Republic of Congo; double bell from Uganda. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.
chingongo, longa. It was associated with aristocracy, kingship, and political functions, notably with the Jaga people. Traditions related to the Cabinda area suggest that the bells were once made of copper. Redinha unearthed documents showing that such bells were played by native royal functionaries to mark the arrival of the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias Novais at the island of Luanda in 1575. Combining linguistics and archeology, Jan Vansina produced a suggestive study of the histories, uses, and distribution of Central African bells (1969). Evidence exists that they were used for bridewealth and as “money” across the Ubangi River, possibly linking them with the river trade in general. However, Vansina described how large single or double iron bells were emblems of authority and power across the Kongo kingdom (1990, 158 – 65). He writes that the single bells were sometimes used as purely “musical” instruments, for diversion and entertainment. But in times of war, they were used “in the old Kingdom of Kongo to signal from one army unit to another, and to lead the soldiers in battle.” Among some peoples, single bells were deemed public property; among others, such as the Mbuun, such bells were regarded as emblems of high state honor and could be owned only by soldiers who had shown extraordinary bravery (Vansina 1969, 190). In general, double bells were property of the chief and played only at events in which he took part. Wherever he went, runners with bells went ahead to announce his arrival, playing his praise name. In societies where double bells were absent, “the single bell was an insignium of political leadership, whether of chieftainship or of the leadership provided by the eldest of a
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lineage or of the village associations … In some cases, where important chiefs had double bells, minor headmen or chiefs had single ones.” Among the Kuba, the single bell, rather than the double, was the preferred emblem of kingship. The association of large single or double bells with royalty in Central Africa followed kings to their graves: the playing of such bells in the funeral rituals of kings was common historically across the re7 gion (Vansina 1969, 190). Unlike the double bells of Sudanese West Africa (including the Ewe gakogui), which place the smaller bell above the larger bell, Central African instruments characteristically place the two bells side by side; they are often larger and heavier than West African bells. The pitch interval between their two notes is generally smaller than that of West African bells. A double bell from West Africa, called akokô (“iron” or “time”) in Yoruba, agogô in Brazil, is central to many Afro-Brazilian musical-cultural practices, most famously the samba as well as capoeira and the secularized public performance of candomblé music called afoxé. Guerra-Peixe (1980, 58) noted that in the public performance of xangô in Recife, a single bell similar to the gonguê was played; but it was always, without exception, called an agogô. (Today, the small single bell often used in both xangô and Bahian candomblé tends to be called adjá.) He also observed that the gonguê was always played with a wooden stick, whereas the agogô in candomblé or xangô was struck with a metal rod: the sound of iron on iron is supposed to be pleasing to certain orixás. In sum, if the “charter myth” of Kongo identity by the early eighteenth century drew from imagined connections with the fallen Kongo kingdom, it is plausible that one of the pervasive symbols of Kongo kingship — the iron bell — would continue to be associated with ritualized activity involving political power and authority. Similarly, given the fairly widespread metalworking knowledge throughout the Kongo region, one could imagine that people of Kongo origin might have carried to Brazil both the technological knowledge of how to produce these bells, and a cultural meaning for those bells related to the rituals of kingship. Certainly, more research remains to be done into the gonguê, its possible Central African antecedents, and its history and meanings in Pernambucan maracatu performance. It is unlikely that a specific “ethnic” or “tribal” origin of the gonguê could be discovered, even through aligning slave-trade demographics with the sort of work Vansina advanced. And even limiting the search for roots in historical Central Africa to societies who associated single bells of the gonguê type, instead of double bells, with kings (an indefensible limitation, since this form in Pernambuco could have resulted from a negotiation of cultural values, influenced by the greater costs of a double bell), Vansina’s research shows the distribution of single bells as a broad swath along southern coastal Gabon deep into the Kongo. Still, the maintenance in
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FIGURE 2. Above: a small akokô bell from Nigeria, West Africa. Below, left and right: agogô bells from Brazil. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.
Pernambucan maracatu de nação of this Bantu-derived word and its royal Kongo associations is unique in Afro-Brazilian culture. Kongo Concept: The Calunga Guerra-Peixe summarized the principal themes of maracatu songs, called toadas, that he heard in Recife in the early 1950s: The most common was each group’s referencing of its own name and importance. Other prominent references were to Luanda, kings, the imperial or royal court, xangô, the gonguê, the seashore, and the calunga. The calunga is a doll, typically carved of dark wood or painted black, considered by traditional maracatu participants to be essential to satisfactory performance and to maintaining the identity of the particular nação. Indeed, the calunga is believed to be a sacred protector of maracatu, holding the memories of all the ancestors of a given maracatu nation. An informant in Nação Elefante told Guerra-Peixe that the calungas are from a remote epoch, dating back to the foundation of the group, in this case 1800 (Guerra-Peixe 1980, 37 – 39). Its particular powers or ritualistic functions in the xangô terreiros are tenaciously guarded. The director of each maracatu nação, who should ideally be one of a familial lineage of directors, is personally responsible for looking after the calungas during the year. Each calunga is given a name, and several exemplars can exist at one time of a certain name. Thus, Katarina Real observed among three maracatus three different dolls called Dona Joventina: one made in 1835, currently in the historical museum of Igarassu; one made in 1905, currently in Recife’s Museu do Homem do Nordeste; and the third presently in use by the Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife]
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2000). Other names of traditional female calungas are Dona Leopoldina, Dona Clara, Dona Emília, Dona Bela, and Dona Isabel. The doll is almost always female, although at least two male calungas, named Dom Luís and Dom Henrique, have been observed. The male dolls are said to be named for kings of Kongo; Dona Isabel refers to Princess Isabel, who signed the Golden Law of abolition in 1888. When a new maracatu de nação was formed in 1967, partly through the guidance and patronage of anthropologist Real, the group’s leader named one calunga Dona Júlia — this was the given first name of of Dona Santa, the matriarch of Nação Elefante and a major figure in Pernambucan xangô. The second calunga was called Dona Inês de Castro. Real “admired the intelligence and imagination” of Eudes for choosing the name of a medieval Portuguese queen, but never asked him why he chose it (2001, 45, 105). Mário de Andrade studied the calunga in the early 1930s and presented remarks on its various meanings for the first Congresso Afro-Brasileiro in 1934 (Andrade 1967, 301 – 8). He suggested that, in Bantu-speaking Central Africa, the word was used as a greeting or nickname for people of high status (senhor, chefe, grande) or as a synonym for “ocean.” He cites the idea (of an unknown Englishman) that calunga came to refer to God in Angola: “Not their god, Zambi, well known and familiarly represented in sculpture, but the unknowable god of the missionaries that was impossible to comprehend — whose latitude cannot be measured” (Andrade 1967, 302). Through the writings of a Portuguese soldier stationed in Luanda, Andrade was aware that leaders of small villages in the interior of that region used “crowns of vine” and a staff “with a doll at the end” to symbolize their power (Andrade 1967, 303). But, he maintained that the application of the word calunga to a doll, as in the world of maracatu, was a Brazilian innovation — even perhaps a simple mispronunciation. For him, it was derived from calumba, which had various meanings in colloquial nineteenthcentury Portuguese: little girl, and a doll; as well as sugar cane syrup (and the trough it is kept in), a flowering shrub (Schneider 1991). That is, African people and their descendants in Brazil came to call the calumba doll by a similar name that was more familiar to them, calunga. He does record that the dolls were believed by some Afro-Brazilians to have magical powers to move and communicate; he found evidence that the dolls were occasionally part of the ritual objects of xangô leaders. The dolls were also sometimes called catita, or catitinha, in the maracatu nations Andrade explored. Kalunga, the Bantu word, refers to the sea or a large body of water that is the threshold dividing the living and the dead, this world and the spirit world. Andrade suggests this meaning with this excerpt from an old song: “Êh, cadê Dona Catitinha/Que no mundo não aparece?/Ela está debaixo d’água/Que não assobe nem desce.” Similarly, Edison Carneiro (1981) collected candomblé songs from Angola-Kongo
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rituals that mention the calunga. One states, “O calunga é um poço muito fundo.” Another piece includes the lines “Ora vamos ver/Duas conchinhas/ Do Calunguinha/Na beira do rio/Uma subia/E a outra descia.” Carneiro describes the syncretic relation between Bantu and Yoruba beliefs regarding water as “Iemanjá [Yoruba orixá of the waters] lives in the depths of the Calunga” (1981, 158). How should this statement be read? Carneiro would appear to grant a prior, foundational existence to calunga, and by extension the whole Kongo-derived belief system, over the West African candomblé, in Afro-Brazilian religious practice; or he just might be nodding to the earlier arrival of Bantu-speaking slaves in Brazil. Schneider’s dictionary of African words in Brazilian Portuguese lists fourteen definitions for calunga, including a Bantu divinity; the fetish doll of this divinity; anything of a very small size, possibly including dolls, children, or adults; a kind of fish. Calunga-grande is defined as the sea, calungapequeno as death, a cemetery, or the little realm of the dead. The calunga in these maracatu texts does imply a connection with the spirit world. More precisely, here it carries a double connection, one spiritual and one geographic. The calunga or “sea,” metaphoric in one case (the Bantu concept) and literal in the other (the Atlantic Ocean), is what mediates between the Kongo descendants in Brazil and their African ancestors. Guerra-Peixe collected these lines from Nação Elefante (“Dona Diamante” was one of their calungas): “Princesa Dona Diamante/Pra onde vai?/Vou passear/Eu vou para Luanda/ Eu vou, eu vou.” The names of individual calungas are often evoked in maracatu songs as a sort of geographic and cultural reconciliation. An old song from Elefante says: “A bandeira é brasileira/Nosso rei veio de Luanda/Oi, viva Dona Emília/Princesa Pernambucana.” A possible link between the maracatu/xangô calunga and public performance of candomblé religious practice is made in Raul Giovanni’s Lody’s 1979 study of the Bahian afoxés. He records that it was common to see a young initiate from each organization in Salvador carrying a babalotim, or small wooden doll, painted black, wearing satin clothes. The dolls were hollow, and charms or objects sacred to each particular candomblé house were placed inside. Animal sacrifices were occasionally made to the babalotim, which constituted a sort of mobile altar specific to each group and the orixás with which they were connected; the doll was believed to repel evil and emanate good. For the afoxés, a young boy was charged with carrying the babalotim, while the maracatus de nação traditionally choose a woman to carry the calunga. This raises a question about historical similarities between maracatu and the afoxés. In the early 1960s, Katarina Real’s centenarian informant
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told her that the original name of maracatu was nação, or, he elaborated, “Afoxé da África.” Each practice, maracatu de nação and afoxé, has a foundation in West African–derived religion; in public, each performs a sort of profane representation of their religious beliefs and activities, mixed with other Afro-Brazilian elements. The similarity may be a consequence of the general need to mask African beliefs in more acceptable outward appearances in Brazilian history. More specifically, it could also be related to the period of repression suffered by Afro-Brazilian culture in general in the decades following abolition. Many cultural practices (including capoeira) went underground, their followers often taking refuge in the terreiros of candomblé or xangô that could be relocated far from the city’s persecutions. A rich mixing of identities, ideas, and strategies would have occurred in these terreiros. If maracatu and Bahian afoxés once enjoyed a sort of easy, familial relationship, that has become an irony for Pernambuco that will be explored in the next section. For now, it is enough to note that the history and meanings of the calunga in maracatu de nação are far from well understood. Ethnomusicologist Philip Galinsky, in his insightful book on Recife’s modern music scene, refers to the maracatu calunga as a “voodoo doll” (Galinsky 2002, 108). Casual English translations do not give the calunga its due. Certainly its Central African links need to be explored, both as a word and spiritual concept, and also as a material form (based perhaps on dolls as insignia of power, or on the small portable altars common to villages after the collapse of the Kongo kingdom).8 Today in Recife, artists known for their work sculpting and restoring sacred religious art are commissioned to carve new calungas for maracatu; how were the dolls made in the past? Capoeira, the dance-fight game with an oral tradition linking it to Angola, has been analyzed as a ritualized “crossing of the kalunga” rooted completely in Kongo history, culture, and cosmology (Obi 2002). The calunga needs to be reconsidered in the context of maracatus. The babalotim has all but disappeared from Salvador’s afoxés; the calunga appears to exist nowhere outside Pernambuco, where it retains great importance to the few traditional maracatus. As with the gonguê, the persistence among traditional maracatus de nação of a complex set of Central African perceptions pertaining to the word-object “calunga” is striking. Afro-Brazilian Context: A Wider Symbolic Field of “Tradition” and “Resistance” Maracatu Leão Coroado was founded in 1863. Although younger than Elefante (founded in 1800), it is Recife’s oldest continuously active maracatu de nação, and is aware of its status and role as such. The liner notes to the group’s CD in commemoration of 140 years of existence describe its current
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Gonguê player, Maracatu Estrela Brilhante, Carnival 2004, Recife. Note the leg brace to help support the instrument. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.
FIGURE 3.
leader, Afonso Aguiar Filho, as “guardião do segredo do Leão Coroado … Sua missão é manter e transmitir procedimentos técnicos e seus instrumentos, associá-los a sistemas simbólicos, mitos, mistérios e ritualizações” (Noqueira 2003). The visual layout of the booklet depicts Afonso, on the right, looking stolidly at a separate picture on the left of Leão Coroado’s previous director, Luiz da França, who appears to be offering a handful of seashells outwards and to the right towards the younger Afonso. The message is clear: the torch has been passed to a worthy successor. Afonso, a babalorixá like Luiz de França, has stated: “Tradition has to be maintained. I am against the changes and stylizations that they’re doing today in maracatu … For this I say to everyone that the evolution of Leão Coroado will be to arrive at its roots” (“Documento Nordeste” 2002). The changes he criticizes are arriving from principally two sources. First, there are many new maracatu groups started by people outside the Afro-Pernambucan and xangô community. Some, notably Maracatu Nação Pernambuco and Maracatudo Camaleão, present ornate, highly produced performances mixing maracatu with other traditional styles; they will also introduce African percussion and electronic instruments, as well as horns, to their stage shows. Because of their greater networking skills and more open cultural discourse, these groups attain a level of success and international exposure that eludes the traditional groups. They typically express their goal as “resgatando” (restoring, recuperating) the maracatu de nação tradition; but ironically, many of their members are white, and no particular 9 connection with Afro-Brazilian belief systems is necessary to participate.
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Their critics often refer to them as maracatus de universitário. Because of their different positioning with respect to the meanings and accessibility of these traditions, they release recordings containing original compositions about the beauty of maracatu de nação, its African roots, the unique glory of Pernambucan culture, and so forth. The creator of Nação Pernambuco said in 2005 that he wants to “reveal the connections between maracatu 4 music and other kinds of music around the world” (José 2005). 2 (Nação Pernambuco is credited with recording the first full-length maracatu album, but the record also contains elements of samba and other regional styles.) Conversely, Leão Coroado, Estrela Brilhante (founded in 1910) and other groups that maintain a “traditional” posture generally limit their repertoire to material based on, or thematically and musically aligned with, maracatu toadas in the oral tradition and public dominion. Because these “stylized” groups perform shows onstage throughout the year, and because they have no Afro-Brazilian religious requirements to satisfy, they may be seen with no calunga (or with a simple cloth doll to visually represent a link with traditional groups); they do tend to express a strong commitment to the gonguê as a fundamental component of maracatu. But another aspect of change in maracatu de nação that Mestre Afonso may be referencing comes from a very different source, although it also centers on conflicting notions of “tradition.” In a process starting in the mid-1970s, Bahian carnival was “reAfricanized” (Risério 1981): old connections with African culture were explored; many new ones were imagined, along with links to the African diaspora in general; and a new sense of negritude, based on a globalized identity that reconciled traditional symbols of Afro-Brazilian culture with modern cosmopolitan style, emerged in Salvador. Candomblé, capoeira, afoxés, batuques in general — many such cultural forms came increasingly to be understood by both practitioners and the public as symbols of racial strength and resistance. The success of this movement, in terms of commercial returns, international prestige, and racial emboldening (that is, both personal self-esteem and general social advances for Afro-Bahians) did not go unnoticed by young black Pernambucans. The image of a politically militant, globally savvy Afro-Brazilian identity has inspired the growth of afoxés and blocos afro in Pernambuco. Both types of groups occasionally face charges of importing a copy of Bahian culture into Pernambuco, but an unlikely defender of the afoxés was anthropologist Katarina Real: “For me the entrance of Bahian afoxés in the carnival of Recife represents another example of the incredible powers of integration of Recife’s carnival” (Real 1990, 200–201). Of course, for some of the black movement’s most militant members, the powerful traditions of “integration” in Brazilian society were part of the problem they were trying to confront. It is a curious coincidence that,
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around the time of the “boom” in Pernambucan afoxés, black activists associated with Pernambuco’s small MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado) organization tried to help save Maracatu Nação Leão Coroado from disappearing, providing both financial support and the contribution of manpower to fill out its ranks of drummers. This is a chapter of the history of maracatu de nação that needs to be studied further. How long did this affiliation last? How did the nature of the relationship between the MNU and black cultural organizations in Pernambuco change over time? It seems that only Maracatu Nação Cambinda Estrela (founded in 1935 as another type of carnival group) publicly expresses admiration for the MNU: in their CD liner notes, they thank the MNU “for denouncing racism in our country.” Yoshihiro Arai observed Recife’s carnival in 1988 to assess public representations of candomblé (1994). In terms of performance, the public “spectacular” of diverse ritualistic behavior in afoxé, including clothes, dances, and musical invocations of specific orixás, is all presented with a detailed openness and directness that counters the maracatus’ secrecy and oblique representations of xangô culture. Arai speculates that this could be related to the different histories of the two traditions: the practice of candomblé in Bahia was long restricted to private spaces, whereas maracatu, through its history in the Kongo king rituals, inherits a tradition of ludic public performance in an ostensibly white, Christian sphere. By this analysis, the merging of maracatu with xangô resulted in the construction of a protective public façade, an impenetrable envelope, around xangô’s sacred elements. The strategy of such a façade to protect Afro-Brazilian culture was undoubtedly one part of the Kongo king processions on Catholic holidays throughout the colonial period. But the cultural discourse and reception of the contemporary afoxé owes much to historical factors in Brazil, and specifically in Bahia. It is well known that the afoxé Filhos de Gandhi was headed towards extinction when Gilberto Gil, a black Bahian musician of international prominence, intervened to support them (Gil was followed quickly by the Bahian government and the state office of culture and tourism). This was during the early phase of Bahian carnival’s re-Africanization. The group subsequently has become regarded, by both locals and foreigners, as a sort of living monument to resistance and racial and social awareness. Many later analyses draw from the characterization by Anamaria Morales, published in 1988, stating that the group originated “certainly as a form of ethnic affirmation … The participation of pais-de-santo in the afoxé Filhos de Gandhy leaves no doubts that this was an organization dedicated to cultural resistance” (264 – 74). A different image of the afoxé group emerges from a lively 1971 interview with their procurador, Seu Honério. He recollects that in February 1949, he and a gang of friends saw a movie called Filhos de Gandhi at
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Salvador’s Cine Jandaia. “We were all impressed with him [Gandhi], and Vavá Madeira suggested that we create a group with this name [of the movie]. The syndicate said no, because Gandhi was a statesman’s name and the Police wouldn’t allow it. But we worked everything out and founded the group under a mango tree.” For an undisclosed period, the group sang marchas carnavalescas, until one of their members bought an atabaque (drum used in candomblé ) “from a boy on the Rua do Passo … we stopped to sing in the house of Nonô, who was a filho-do-santo, and from then on we only sang candomblé songs” ( Jornal da Bahia [Salvador] 1971). This puts a somewhat different slant on the group’s origins, and reminds us of the context of the 1970s and 1980s in constructing an enhanced aura of Afro-Brazilian meaning and identity around candomblé and groups such as Filhos de Gandhi. As the black consciousness movement expanded in Brazil, articulating unprecedented challenges to Brazil’s racial paradigm, scholars were rethinking the nature of hegemony and agency, and cultural politics as a subaltern strategy. The particular social history of Brazil had facilitated a complex racial system in which, as Darién Davis argued, blacks were “assimilated into the Brazilian mainstream throughout history”: physically through miscegenation, and psychologically through the myth of racial democracy, with the mulatto escape hatch to allow well-behaved, successful, lighter-skinned blacks to advance into a special, more acceptable racial space (Davis 1999, 230). Given this, Larry Crook and Randal Johnson could declare in 1999 that any Afro-Brazilian behavior (recognized as such) is inherently political: “Cultural expressions involving questions of identity are inseparable from broader political processes, even when the connections are not rendered explicit” (Crook and Johnson 1999, 1, 5, 7). It has become almost an orthodox view among scholars, practitioners, and large segments of the public that such Afro-Brazilian culture and symbols represent resistance, as opposed to the mere (communal, festive, nonpolitical) carryover of traditional, “exotic” practices into the present. Yet some practices and symbols have been especially influential in communicating this attitude in Brazil, and beyond; they all also tend to derive from the black cultural-politics movement that emerged in Bahian carnival. As blacks were generally shut out of the normal routes to political power, carnival provided a space — albeit a complex one, due to the ambiguous relationship between carnivalesque expression and quotidian reality — to mount a cultural challenge to the status quo. Now the focus of international attention, the movement was initially ignored or dismissed in Salvador until a critical mass of popular interest solidified its base. If the blocos afro and afoxés of Salvador’s re-Africanized carnival have defined the parameters of this new, politicized Afro-Brazilian identity, the first bloco, 1974’s Ilê Aiyê, was both the vanguard of the movement and the
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standard against which later blocos are still (however implicitly) assessed. The other highly influential bloco afro, Olodum, is familiar to thousands of foreign visitors to their public rehearsals in Salvador’s Centro Histôrico or Pelourinho, recently transformed to a tourism site. The musical style of Ilê Aiyê is conveyed through what they call batuque or samba duro, a transposition of highly syncopated (and often minutely researched) African rhythmic sensibilities to a sort of escola de samba rhythm section, whereas Olodum revels in a globalized, African-diasporic sound focused on the Caribbean (samba-reggae being its most famous hybrid). Olodum, it should be noted, began as a recreational carnival club in 1979, but was reorganized as a black-consciousness organization by dissidents from Ilê Aiyê in 1983. These and other blocos repeatedly declare as their goals the restoration of cultura negra in Brazil, the strengthening of black pride and self-esteem, and the fight against racism. There were diverse reasons for the growth of this new Afro-Bahian identity. Many of its early leaders were not performers themselves, but educated workers in Salvador’s expanding industrial economy, frustrated by their own lack of socioeconomic mobility and the alarming rise of the black underclass. African liberation movements (particularly against Portugal’s lingering authority) were influential, as were the images and sounds of black pride from the United States. Locally, there also developed an impulse among activists in candomblé and capoeira to reject the state’s construction of these practices as touristic folklore. Textually, candomblé references and a foundation of West African, specifically Yoruban, symbols are as integral to the blocos’ repertoire as to that of the afoxés. This is perhaps most the case for Ilê Aiyê, since the mother of their director, Antônio Carlos dos Santos (Vovô), is a mãe de santo, or priestess of candomblé. She oversees the group’s initial procession at the outset of each year’s carnival, with a ritualistic deployment of white doves, fireworks, and chants, and offerings to the orixás. Their name, a Yoruban phrase, is said to have emerged from a consultation of the buzios (seashells) during a candomblé ceremony. Olodum is more eclectic, combining references to the orixás, Jamaica, Egypt, Cuba, South Africa, and Brazil’s parched northeastern sertão with constant evocations of Pelourinho (as a stage of both somber black protest and beery bonhomie). Other blocos also use a range of local and global symbols of black culture to create particular niches in Bahia’s crowded carnival market.10 The local press has come to endorse this re-Africanization — which, in 1993, helped Bahian carnival “beat” Rio’s for overall novelty and cachet—noting that it is “irrestível para os turistas … Não há Estado brasileiro tão representativo da herança africana como a Bahia … nem parece haver um oceano separando os baianos da África” (Veja 1993; A Tarde [Salvador] 2003). The establishment strategy of praising the movement’s cultural efflorescence while downplaying its political potential replaces earlier, more
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confrontational approaches to defuse it. Ilê Aiyê took the brunt of the attacks, not only because of its pioneer status (debuting during the middle of Brazil’s recent decades-long military dictatorship) but because of its policy, still maintained, of restricting membership to phenotypically black people. The bloco has long stated that it will change this policy when Brazil no longer presents systematic, structural racism against blacks in everything from education, employment, political representation, and wage equity to the mass media and popular culture. In 1988, the group’s rhetoric and notoriety provided a sharp counterpoint to official celebrations of the 100-year anniversary of abolition: in response, a vitriolic critique of Ilê Aiyê in the news magazine Veja bore the blunt title “They’re the Racists” (Belchior de Sá 1988, 134). Indeed all the blocos afro have been targets of the charge that, by questioning Brazil’s racial democracy, they are hypocritically introducing “race thinking” themselves — and even worse, it is often alleged, they are doing this by importing foreign perspectives and symbols of race consciousness (such as the American black power movement) that are alien to Brazilian society and national identity. But the power of the symbolic return to Africa pursued by the blocos afro and afoxés has been to highlight a part of Brazilian social history that most Brazilians have been content to leave unmentioned — the overarching distaste for anything remotely “African,” a prejudice that predated and outlived the freeing of slaves in 1888. Because the images, sounds, and tangible elements of black identity in Bahia have been newly valorized, they are also scrutinized and selected carefully by participants in the Afro-Bahian scene. A 1987 article in Olodum’s newsletter chastised all the blocos for their shabby, improvised aspect in the previous carnival. It acknowledged a lack of financial support, but argued: “[T]emos que perceber que quem produz essa viagem à África é a juventude negra baiana … precisamos estar atualizados, atentos ao que é novo, para criarmos uma nova estética dentro da cultura Africana contemporânea” (Nelson Mendes, “Akomabu,” Jornal do Olodum 1987; in Rodrigues 1996, 48 – 49). There is a feedback process, that is, between producers and consumers of the symbols of Afro-Bahian identity. Beyond dance and candomblé references, musical instruments themselves have taken on a new eloquence in this period of heightened consciousness of symbols. When Ilê Aiyê uses typical instruments of the Brazilian bateria such as agogôs, surdos, and repiques to play a fusion of batucada with Senegalese sabar rhythms; or when Olodum’s former percussion director Neguinho do Samba used Cuban timbales to signal the percussionists instead of a traditional apito or samba whistle (which he rejected as a coisa de guarda de trânsito [Rodrigues 1996, 29]), their symbolic decisions are being guided by a critical view of Brazilian society as well as a creative impulse to recast the texture of local experience in the wider African-Diaspora context.
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Consider, too, the berimbau, an Afro-Brazilian musical bow. As a compelling musical instrument and material object, the berimbau’s image has come to connote the strength and cunning of slave resistance; the personal liberation metaphors of capoeira practice; and capoeira’s own struggles to survive repression in the years after abolition (the instrument itself was periodically outlawed). With its primitive, rustic appearance, the berimbau asserts the relevance of traditional African-derived culture in the high-tech present. It gained more visibility through the participation of capoeira leaders in the recent campaign to create a “day of black consciousness” countering the abolition anniversary; the date chosen, November 20, corresponds to the siege of the quilombo Palmares in 1694, during which Zumbi fought to his death rather than surrender to Portuguese forces. It is often the only Brazilian musical instrument familiar to foreigners, many learning of it through capoeira academies or demonstrations in their home countries. Ironically, the berimbau appears not to have been part of capoeira before the mid-nineteenth century, or later; still, international tourists’ avid interest in the berimbau’s (and capoeira’s) contemporary overtones of Afro-Brazilian resistance and authenticity adds to the cosmopolitan prestige of the berimbau as a visual-musical symbol. The timbau, a Brazilian conical hand drum, emerged relatively late in Bahia’s re-Africanized milieu but has had remarkable impact. It was the principal instrument in Carlinhos Brown’s Timbalada, a large percussive carnival group founded in 1992 as a tribute to the blocos afro and their extinct ancestor, the blocos de índio. With his many students and disciples, Brown, a Grammy-award winning percussionist and composer, elevated this anonymous drum from a casual beach-party instrument to an icon of Afro-Brazilian musical power and technique. Associated with this transformation is Brown’s philanthropic investment to improve living conditions in his poor neighborhood of Candeal, a commitment to community uplift that the blocos afro formally share but do not equal. With the commercial and aesthetic success of Timbalada, every bloco afro has added a timbau player to their ranks — even if one might expect Cuban congas or West African djembes in those contexts. But here, too, candomblé has informed the instrument’s identity. Ari Lima argues that Timbalada conceived of the timbau, rhythmically and symbolically, as “a representation or profane synthesis of the candomblé atabaques,” the sacred hand drums used in ritual 55 practice (Lima 1988). Musically, Timbalada draws from many sources, but has often declared its allegiance to candomblé; combined with its ultramodern studio sound and RayBan-wearing chic, this allows it to occupy a realm between local Afro-Brazilian culture and the international music scene — a realm Brown calls Bahian afro-pop.11 In Pernambuco, meanwhile, attempts by local versions of Bahia’s blocos afro to participate in carnival have met with both formal and informal
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discouragement. Whatever the reasons, any mainstream discomfort with the blocos’ Afro-Brazilian religious undertones can have little to do with it. Candomblé provides the spiritual and aesthetic foundation of the afoxés, and it is the very aesthetic model of the afoxé Filhos de Gandhi, their costumes, dances, textual style, and instrumentation, that has dominated the afoxés in Recife since their inception. The first Pernambucan afoxé, Povo do Odé, paraded in homage both to Filhos de Gandhi and to Africa during the carnival of 1991. They invited leaders of the Bahian afoxé to Pernambuco for the event, and to chair an afoxé strategy session; the objective was to “concretize the interchange between representatives of cultura negra” ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1991). The maracatus de nação were not part of this conference. And the liner notes of a recent CD showcasing three Pernambucan afoxés drive home the idea that Recife’s modern, politicized “africanidade,” at a national level of significance, is the purview of these afoxés.12 The conceptual association between afoxé, candomblé, the blocos, resistance, and the politicized Afro-Brazilian identity represented in Bahian carnival may help throw the “African legitimacy” of maracatu de nação into question for some Pernambucans. The agogô double bell is central to afoxé performance, a staple of the blocos afro, and is also considered integral to the musical dimension of capoeira. These are symbolic contexts charged with racial and cultural resistance. As an instrument linked with candomblé, the agogô also is capable of opening a direct channel to African ancestors and the orixás. Antonio Risério describes the group Filhos de Gandhi as “beleza pura no toque do agogô … evoluíndo em coreografias 3 ancestrais, entre cânticos litúrgicos do repertório jeje-nagô.” 1 In many of their songs, Filhos de Gandhi reference the centrality of the agogô bells to Afro-Brazilian tradition; one, which Gilberto Gil has famously recorded, is “O Gandhi” by Antônio Caixão: “Ê o Gandhi saiu a rua/Abafou/O Gandhi saiu a rua/Tocando seu agogô/O quem falou assim/Foi nagô.” The afoxés of Recife also sing about the “African power” of their bells. All this puts a sort of pressure on the gonguê, which, as an instrument unique to Pernambuco and the maracatu de nação, does not carry the broad racial and cultural meanings that the agogô conveys across Afro-Brazil, from São Luís to Rio de Janeiro. Might there be a more straightforward explanation for selecting an agogô over a gonguê — a musical advantage, since the agogô is a double bell? In fact, although the gonguê offers only one playing surface, the instrument produces two distinct pitches (at an interval of anywhere from a third to a fifth) by striking it varyingly on its narrow neck or wide mouth. In this it is reminiscent of the handheld cencerro, or “bongo bell,” of Afro-Cuban music, although the gonguê has a long handle and is held mouth outward; the cencerro typically has no handle and is held along its side edges, mouth
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down and inward toward the player. The two most common gonguê rhythms in maracatu de nação are reproduced below (pitches indefinite). EXAMPLE 1.
For the sake of comparison, here is the standard agogô pattern of the afoxés, a rhythm called ijexá. Structurally, the rhythmic line resembles the slow maracatu pattern (beat 2 is displaced one-sixteenth note), although the two phrases are pitched differently. EXAMPLE 2.
Guerra-Peixe refrained from in-depth comparisons of the foundation rhythms of maracatu and xangô. Still, in a paper he presented in 1982 on African influences in Brazilian music, he mentioned a rhythm called “Congo” he heard in Pai João d’Angola’s xangô house in Belo Horizonte. Unfortunately, the paper’s appended notation does not reflect the pitch differences Guerra-Peixe suggested were there in performance. EXAMPLE 3.
This single-bell “agogô” (today called adjá ) timeline is similar both to the slower gonguê rhythm of maracatu and the afoxé ijexá. If a “borrowing” was involved here, who was the lender? For his part, Guerra-Peixe declared of the “Congo” rhythm: “Não tenho dúvidas sobre sua procedência angolana ou conguense, porque já o ouvi em gravações procedentes dessas areas de idioma banto” (1982). Only further studies will be able to shine light on the possible musical connections between xangô, afoxé, and maracatu. But behind the surface tension of agogôs cropping up in maracatu, it may be that the position of the traditional maracatus de nação as relevant bearers of African or Afro-Brazilian identity is similarly uncertain. Do the
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maracatus not connote racial resistance? After all, they suffered public censure and repression in the nineteenth century. Impassioned newspaper editorials often requested police intervention: “The maracatu is an infamous, stupid and sad thing! … Is a society that tolerates the maracatu civilized? Of course not! It’s as though we live in Abyssinia” (A Província [Recife], February 16, 1877). But both oral tradition and historical evidence imply that, as the king of Kongo ritual disappeared, its processional aspect was unproblematically absorbed into carnival; maracatu has been “representing Africa” in carnival since the early decades of the twentieth century, as Pereira da Costa and Mário de Andrade wrote. That is, perhaps “Africa,” by way of the maracatus, didn’t have to fight its way back into carnival and public awareness in Recife, as the story of Filhos de Gandhi and the blocos afro stresses that it did in Salvador. Such ambiguity is echoed in lingering doubts about the Kongo king institution’s link with Catholic brotherhoods: did kings who were crowned by priests and sheriffs have genuine political power and agency, or were they merely pawns in an elaborate ritual of social control? This debate is far from resolved among Recife’s maracatu community, or in the academy. In the carnival of 1964, Leão Coroado paraded with a float depicting two kneeling slaves, with a banner reading “Nunca Mais.” One of the two slaves was white, and Master Luiz de França told Katarina Real “A senhora sabe que também havia muito escravo branco!” (Real 2001, 26). More research needs to be done on the question of how maracatu entered the carnival celebration after abolition, with attention to how the practice may have changed throughout the decades in response to local and national political developments, and to the evolving conceptions of race and race relations in Brazil. Afro-Brazilian religious practice founded on the orixás — i.e., xangô or candomblé — has long represented in Brazilian society (for better or worse in different historical periods) the most authentic living legacy of African culture. By contrast, the outward musical, processional aspects of maracatu — in distinction from its traditional, internal xangô dimension — are generally considered by local practitioners and observers to be fully Pernambucan, dating from the late colonial or early imperial era. One Pernambucan researcher has written with pride, “In Africa there doesn’t exist anything like our maracatu.” (Claudia Lima Web site). This recalls a similar controversy over the roots of capoeira, with competing camps arguing 4 since the 1930s for an African or a Brazilian, specifically Bahian, origin.1 (Both sides have approximated each other somewhat over the years, partaking in the best of what each vision of capoeira offers in terms of teaching strategies and cultural capital.) The critical point here, though, is suggested by Lewis’s observation (1992, 66) that once the state endorsed a capoeira that would be taught through standard methodology, and practiced only in fitness academies targeting the middle and upper classes, “the importance
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and prestige of street games steadily declined in the eyes of most players.” Moving capoeira inside was “a crucial step in the domestication of the sport” because, according to Roberto da Matta’s framework of the casa and rua in Brazilian culture (in which the house is organized, controlled, and private; the street risky, unpredictable, and deceiving), “the academy becomes a kind of surrogate casa within which activities are supervised, safe, and healthy, as opposed to the dangerous and unruly street games.” Perhaps the opposite has occurred with maracatu de nação — perhaps the practice has become de facto “domesticated” to the extent that it has become a year-round public spectacle, a festive street parade or staged performance, with its already obscure connections to the (secretive, dangerous, mysterious, deceptive) Afro-Brazilian xangô practice rendered invisible in the harsh illumination of camera-flash or electric spotlight. The liner notes to a CD from Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante (founded in 1910) boast that “The group’s instruments are still made the way they were in the era of slavery.” This way of contextualizing the practice, merely as a holdover from slavery, may have less cultural cachet for some young blacks than the bold reinvention of African tradition occurring in Bahian carnival among the afoxés and blocos afro. For Antonio Risério, the best way to understand “re-Africanization” was to examine how Gilberto Gil’s song “Axé Babá” combined past, present, and future: “It’s an afoxé for Oxalá, but recorded in a sophisticated 24-channel studio — with handclaps, agogôs, and atabaques combined with the sound of a Rhodes keyboard,” electric guitar, and synthesizer (Risério 1981, 13). The impulse to rethink maracatu’s place in contemporary culture may explain why some maracatus are incorporating the timbau, the industrially manufactured Brazilian hand drum associated directly with Timbalada and blocos afro such as Ilê Aiyê, Olodum, and Malê Debalê. In 2004 and 2005, the young maracatu groups Nação Gueto and Daruê Malungo were both led by musicians who, walking on stilts, played musical signals and fiery solos on the timbau. Agogô bells were also observed in the ranks of these two maracatus. Gueto did not parade with any sort of calunga, but Daruê Malungo carried a black plastic doll. Another musical symbol of African cultural heritage has been absorbed, not only by newer groups, but by the venerable Nação Estrela Brilhante (founded in 1910): the abê, or large gourd rattle. Traditional maracatu groups have tended for years to use ganzá, a metal tube shaker common to samba as well as regional styles, but Mestre Walter of Estrela Brilhante decided that the abê was more traditional than the ganzá — because older maracatus had probably used this African instrument instead of the industrially manufactured Brazilian samba shaker. In the opinion of Pernambucan percussionist Eder “O” Rocha, a member of the band Mestre Ambrósio and a fixture in Recife’s music scene, “The abê was introduced into Estrela Brilhante through the direct influence of candomblé-de-rua [afoxé ].” He
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notes that groups deriving from the “cultos de candomblé de Recife” use a trio of differently sized gourds — large, medium, and small — to play syncopated patterns, and that this practice also appears in Estrela Brilhante (Rocha 2001). Maracatu Nação Porto Rico — founded in 1967 from a preexisting group, and so accorded traditional status — recently adopted the use of hand drums: from atabaques to timbaus to other African-inspired drums of simpler (carved-shell, rope-tuned) make. In their study of maracatu, Santos and Resende note that “the introduction of the abês and atabaques is much criticized by other [maracatu] masters and by folk experts.” But according to Porto Rico’s oral tradition, the group traces its heritage all the way back to the quilombo of Palmares. Jailson Chacon Viana, their director, justifies the introduction of hand drums by pointing to historical documents, suggesting that “funneled and single-membraned” drums were played in Palmares (Santos and Resende 2005, 45 – 46). There are obviously differing perceptions among Recife’s leaders about the meanings and boundaries of maracatu, and the groups monitor each other: Seu Toinho, director of Maracatu Encanto da Alegria, states flatly that “I’ll die first, but I won’t allow the abê in, nor will I let women play in this maracatu” (“Maracatu Nação Encanto da Alegria” liner notes). One school of traditional thought holds that women should not touch the instruments. However, most groups now allow women to participate as musicians, not just as dancers. Another newer group, Maracatu Nação Badia, is named for a famous mãe-de-santo in Recife who, the tale is told, led Recife’s first maracatu group — one that was itself, according to some popular versions of the tale, made up only of women. In the name of tradition, older maracatu groups may not sing or record new compositions; Porto Rico has composed a few new songs, but in general, the older groups stay rooted in traditional themes and structures. The result is ironic: Middle-class, whiter-skinned groups such as Nação Pernambuco, Maracatudo or Maracatu Várzea do Capibaribe release CDs full of inventive songs about Africa and African culture, and even write whole songs in Bantu or Yoruba, thereby keeping themselves in contemporary “Afro” style; this, while Leão Coroado is still singing about Princess Isabel, who freed the slaves in 1888. The newer groups, which often start as social projects for Afro-Pernambucan (or otherwise underprivileged) young people, rarely get the chance to record. One exception has been Nação Erê, who attracted some international support through collaboration with the famed Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira. Many songs with a socially critical perspective were composed for their debut album, with titles such as “Mãe Preta” (“Tantos meninos na rua/Sem teto, carinho e pão/Aguenta muita rojão/Quem fica na contra-mão”) and “Treze de Maio Não é Dia de Negro” (“Irmão, irmão/Assuma sua raça, assuma sua cor … Vem pra Nação Erê …/
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Pra denunciar racismo/E contra o apartheid brasileiro”). Coincidentally or not, this group advertises its use of the agogô rather than the gonguê, and they parade at carnival without a calunga. Conclusions This paper has attempted to show that the apparently unremarkable shift from one bell to another in some maracatus de nação may tell us something about the symbolic power of the different objects involved. These small changes may be an indication of a larger dispute over the symbols of African or Afro-Brazilian identity and “authenticity” in Pernambuco, particularly as these symbols are contextualized in the twenty-first century. Kim Butler has suggested that the Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1937, which focused on Bahian candomblé, “promoted an emphasis on ‘authenticity’ as a means of legitimation among the houses … Another side effect was a subsequent bias toward Nagô traditions in the academic literature” (Butler 1998, 207). But this event, influential as it was, probably was not the genesis of the often-invoked “Nagô bias” in Afro-Brazilian scholarship. A distinct preference for Islamist West African, as opposed to Central African, origins of (Afro-)Brazilian culture was a guiding preoccupation of Gilberto Freyre, organizer of the first Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934; and in this, as Anadelia Romo argues, Freyre was contributing to an earlier debate among Brazilian intellectuals about the relative cultural and intellectual 5 virtues of slaves from different regions in Africa (Romo 2007).1 At the level of popular discourse in Pernambuco, discord over “authenticity” and “traditional validity” appears to have divided the maracatu de nação for decades, although the conflicts are rarely cast in ethnic or “tribal” terms. A Pernambucan origin of the practice is regularly cited, although Mestre Walter and his gourd rattle are stretching the bounds of “tradition” back to Africa. Similarly, other elements of the traditional maracatu de nação may have an African heritage. The elucidation of specific Kongo elements, should they be verified, would be heralded by some maracatu leaders and researchers.16 It might be welcome news to Mestre Moraes, leader of the Grupo Capoeira Angola Pelourinho, a renowned capoeira angola academy in Salvador, Bahia, which asserts a cultural link with the origins of capoeira in Angola. Moraes, decrying an alleged “Yoruba hegemony” pervading the whole of contemporary Afro-Brazilian thought, has declared his goal to “restore the history of Bantu people in Brazil, and publicize the values of this immense cultural legacy” (Revista Exu 1989). Such a focus on African ethnic identity is not widespread among Brazil’s public, yet it reveals the passion these topics can evoke among Afro-Brazilian culture activists. The calunga’s traditional limitation to a narrow cultural phenomenon in one specific region means that young people are not seeing it in other
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Afro-Brazilian carnival processions, or through the media (e.g., MTV Brasil). A brief survey of state tourism literature suggests that the calunga has become part of the palette of official, patriotic Pernambucan identity that some black youths may wish to militate against — even as they choose to participate in maracatu, which, along with capoeira, is still the most traditional local Afro-Brazilian expression available to them. In historical practice, though, calungas are deeply associated with xangô, while the structure and function of newer groups do not rely on spiritual rituals or lineages. Some of these newer groups, such as Badia, do include a follower of xangô among their directorate to satisfy a certain vague sense that the religion brings validity to maracatu de nação. But there is no requirement to be a devotee of xangô to participate, which ironically makes the new “black” groups similar in their secular attitude to the “whiter,” stylized groups. Finally, the calunga is suffused with highly specific uses and historical significations that simply might not fit the sensibilities of some modern young Afro-Brazilians. To parade with a store-bought, black plastic “Barbie”type doll, as some groups do, may be less the smothering of tradition by stylization than the interjection into maracatu de nação of a new perspective on black culture and identity. Such toys, typically of the “Susi Olodum” 7 brand family, are of recent vintage.1 After all, before the success of the Bahian blocos afro, and the wide social, cultural, and economic changes engendered by that success, it would have been difficult to imagine such an “ethnic” commodity manufactured for and advertised to young black consumers — or their parents. The product demonstrates in a very modern, public sense that the black demographic market exists — even if census results regarding race in Brazil remain ambiguous. In a study exploring the relations between new aesthetics of beauty and consumption patterns among urban Afro-Brazilian women, Jocélio Teles dos Santos suggests that middle-class black mothers were often involved in the drive to create such dolls (2001). He notes that AfroDay, a business started by renowned Rio de Janeiro politician Benedita da Silva, has invested in the manufacture and marketing of black dolls. Silva told the Jornal de Brasília in 1992 that these dolls “valorize the black form, in a way that the child can recognize herself in the toy — identifying herself fully, without rejecting her own traits and characteristics.” In a remark that is particularly revealing, Silva adds: “My daughters didn’t like [black] cloth dolls, because there exists wide prejudice against them.” Not only do cloth dolls connote poverty in their simple, homemade composition, but they are also seen as fetish objects, “peças de rituais umbandistas.” By contrast, the plastic, mass-produced, store-bought doll of a black female figure apparently carries no worrisome undertones of African or Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice.
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According to Livio Sansone, in Brazil today, “‘Africa’ has come to signify civilization and tradition within black culture, somewhat in opposition to ‘Afro,’ which has come to mean a lifestyle — adding an African tinge to the experience of modernity” (1999, 39). For Gerhard Kubik, ethnicity “as a cultural consciousness movement is by definition non-ethnic,” but it is an attempt at a large-scale grouping beyond the “relatively narrow variation margin of what in ethnology is defined as an ethnic group” (1994). Maracatu de nação presents, in the context of modern flows of symbols and commodities that could represent black identity, a quite narrow variation margin. This is not because of any “ethnic” boundaries (West African, Kongo, or otherwise) that repel nonmembers, but because of its relative isolation and insularity as a cultural practice — including its longstanding aversion to publicize its connections with xangô. There are probably black youths in contemporary Recife (as in any city in the diaspora) whose interests are more “Afro” than “African”: for whom the search for roots and identity might involve shopping malls, Jamaican reggae, Lakers t-shirts, the Malcolm X movie, Salvador’s Ilê Aiyê, and American hip-hop as much as local maracatu de nação. For them, perhaps, the agogô, timbau, berimbau, and other emblems of a cosmopolitan, globalized Brazilian negritude offer more symbolic currency than the gonguê and the calunga — with or without a recuperated, specific Central African heritage for these two (now highly local) Afro-Brazilian cultural objects. Of course, one must acknowledge the importance of maracatu de nação — long associated with African cultural identity — in bringing prestige and new vitality to Recife’s carnival and popular music scene generally since the late 1980s (see Galinsky 2002). But this is not to say there is consensus on the symbolic or traditional nature of maracatu practice: recall that, as early as 1988, two prominent scholars of Recife’s popular culture drew opposite conclusions about the viability of maracatu as an expression of authentic local tradition, even as the number of participant groups was growing. The explosion of new maracatu groups with diverse identities and emphases, the appearance of the stage as a year-round performance venue outside carnival, the new black consciousness movements in Brazil, the trendy aerobics-style classes in “maracatu e dança afro” offered in Recife’s wealthy beachfront neighborhoods — all these have put new strains on maracatu’s claims to traditional legitimacy. As arguably the most traditional objects in maracatu (along with the alfaia bass drums), the gonguê and calunga are clearly capable of offering an affirmation of regional-ethnic pride to many Afro-Pernambucans. But to others, selecting the agogô may present a distinct option for framing local culture in larger symbolic processes. And if some groups also eschew the calunga, perhaps they see it as an example of the limited (discreet, ambiguous, non-confrontational)
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symbolic capital of xangô in maracatu, in contrast to how the candomblé universe has informed a bold Bahian negritude.18 Sansone has analyzed the hierarchies operant in the exchange of commodities related to modern black identity across the Black Atlantic (Sansone 9 2003).1 He observes that commodification implies a selection among black objects, bestowing status and promoting those that are selected. Successful new black objects are often costly (i.e., hair care products, glossy “ethnic” magazines, or hip-hop fashions); imported objects generally have higher status than local ones. The agogô is a conveniently inexpensive instrument that, if we apply to it Sansone’s framework for categorizing Bahian exports to the Black Atlantic, is simultaneously a “traditional” black object (drawn from venerable Afro-Bahian candomblé culture) and a so-called “new traditional” one (derived from modern Bahian carnival, itself globalized and re-Africanized). Of course, the agogô is not a “Bahian” instrument per se, although its new sheen of Afro-Brazilian resistance owes more to the Bahian afoxés, capoeira and blocos afro than to Rio’s older samba schools. But when some young Afro-Pernambucans “import” the agogô into their local cultural milieu of maracatu, they may be pursuing two related goals: First, the articulation of a separate space in which to transcend, if not resist, the conflicting claims to African-versus-local authenticity that hang over the symbolic expression of contemporary maracatu performance; and second, the creation of a linkage between Afro-Pernambuco, re-Africanized Bahia, and the Black Atlantic generally, where modern identity construction involves the selective, dynamic, even contradictory use of various local traditions, global trends, and African pasts. Notes The author would like to thank Julio Conde, Luis Orlando da Silva, Tom Farrell, Elizabeth Kuznesof, Barbara Weinstein, Saverio Giovacchini, and LAMR’s reviewers. 1. Relevant works in English include Pinto (1996); “The Pernambuco Carnival and Its Formal Organizations” (1994); Galinsky (2002); and Crook (2002, 2005). 2. See Benjamin (n.d.); Fernandes (1977); Lucas (2002); and Reily (2001). 3. See Dantas Silva (1988, 1991b) and Real (1990). 4. Katarina Real, who sat on Recife’s Comissão Organizadora do Carnaval from 1965 – 1967, criticized the “samba schools, an import from Rio de Janeiro, every year more exaggerated, threatening to smother the carnival groups of Pernambucan origin” (Real 2001, 19). 5. The Golden Law of May 13, 1888, signed by Princess Isabel, put an official end to slavery in Brazil. 6. I thank Professor Carlos Sandroni, Federal University of Pernambuco, for bringing this work to my attention.
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7. Recent video footage available in the JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance (Middle East and Africa III, distributed by Rounder Records, Cambridge, MA) shows a memorial ceremony for a king among the Tikar people of Cameroon; mourners are playing very large double bells. 8. James H. Sweet (2003) describes the significance of kitekes, “wooden statues that served as representations of the ancestors among the Kongolese.” 9. According to one news article, “There is no way to deny that all the current interest in maracatu is due to Nação Pernambuco … it was at their rehearsals that the middle class learned to dance and play” the traditional instruments (Lima 2001). 10. Goli Guerreiro (1999) has explored how the blocos afro base their aesthetic orientation on candomblé, as seen in their names and lyrical references as well as their dance and costume styles; she also creatively analyzed the types of Africa constructed in the discourses of many leading blocos afro. 11. “Toque de Timbaleiro” by Nem Cardoso, on their 1993 release Timbalada, declares “Toque de timbaleiro/Sacudindo o mundo inteiro/Foi criada na Bahia/ Saúda os orixás/Com a força ijexá/Candomblé, reggae, magia/… Vem com tranças negras lindas/Toque o timbau ê ô …” 12. Liner notes to the CD Afoxés de Pernambuco state, “The Afro-Pernambucan scene is one of the strongest in Brazil. In this context the afoxés fit in as powerful cultural and religious entities, preserving a tradition of the Afro-Brazilian culture … The afoxés contribute generously to raise the self-confidence of the black people of Brazil. The afoxés are also working politically and socially by informing people about their rights and fighting against discrimination.” 13. Liner notes to the CD “Afoxé Filhos de Gandhi,” a restoration of their 1981 long-play record. 14. The brand of capoeira that the state formally recognized in 1937 is associated with Manoel dos Reis Machado (Mestre Bimba), who argued that capoeira was born in Bahia. Bimba proposed to take his so-called capoeira regional or luta regional baiana inside a physical-fitness academy, register students with the state, charge fees, and prohibit students from practicing capoeira publicly; he would teach it through clear methods, structures, and exercises (derived in part from boxing and karate); and he would stress its virtues as a means of fitness and self-defense. To a government eager for healthful symbols of Brazilian national identity, this was appealing. But other capoeiristas in Salvador, led by Vicente Ferreira Pastinha (Mestre Pastinha), disagreed with Bimba’s methods and outlook. They claimed capoeira was African, and asserted its mystical, naturalistic, and individual nuances against Bimba’s rigorous standardized approach. 15. Elite concern with the Yoruba’s literacy and strong religious-ethnic identity was catalyzed by the 1835 Malê Rebellion in Bahia (Reis 1993). 16. For elucidations of Central African influence on Brazilian musical culture, see Mukuna (1979) and Kubik (1979). 17. The “Susi Olodum” doll, released in February 2000, boasted a period of initial sales ten times higher than its manufacturer anticipated (Wall Street Journal 2000). 18. Recife’s press tends to refer to maracatu de nação as a folkloric manifestation. Elefante and other longstanding maracatus have also been called “patrimônios do folclore pernambucano,” a characterization that would seem to condemn change.
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And whatever the maracatus’ historic value for representing African culture in Pernambuco, a newsletter from the state Secretariat of Tourism, Culture and Sport stresses their innate racial democracy and power to unite “negros, pardos, brancos e todas as demais combinações étnicas que pudermos arrolar” (Newsletter of FUNDARPE 1984). 19. While focused on exchanges between nation-states, Sansone also notes that much of the symbolic exchange and commodification of “Africana” across the Black Atlantic has occurred “within, rather than across, different language areas, and colonial and ethnic traditions” (2003, 91) — suggesting, therefore, regional exchange.
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