QUEENS AND BATUQUEIRAS:

RACE, GENDER, AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS

OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN MARACATU NAÇÃO

AN ABSTRACT

SUBMITTED ON THE NINETEENTH DAY OF APRIL 2021

TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS

OF TULANE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE DEGREE

OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

______Amy Katherine Medvick

APPROVED:______Dr. Daniel B. Sharp, Ph.D., Director

______Dr. Christopher J. Dunn, Ph.D.

______Dr. Felipe Fernandes Cruz, Ph.D.

This study examines maracatu nação, a working-class, Afro-Brazilian carnival pageant from the city of Recife in Pernambuco state, and its relationship to the transnational circuits of knowledge production created by elite artists and intellectuals interested in the practice. Maracatu nação features the procession of an African royal court dressed in elaborate and ostentatious European Baroque garb, with thunderous drumming, call-and- response songs of competitive bravado, and dance. Linked to the coronation festivities of

Black Catholic Brotherhoods and the rites of Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religion, and associated with black, working-class neighbourhoods in Recife, in recent decades maracatu nação has commanded increased attention from academics and artists, gaining popularity among the local lighter-skinned middle-classes, within other regions of Brazil, and in the Brazilian diaspora. However, though this attention has exploded since the 1990s, this dissertation demonstrates that the relational patterns that characterize this interest extend well into the early twentieth century.

Combining archival, ethnographic, and close reading methodologies, this study uncovers the how the field activities, creative and intellectual output, interventions, and field relationships of local and foreign artist-folklorists established enduring representations of maracatu nação as well as the intellectual paradigms through which the practice is understood today. Engaging with transnational and relational theories of identity and culture, this study also examines how performers of maracatu nação navigate the landscape shaped by former generations of researchers, and how they situate their practice

and themselves within historical narratives of local blackness. Performers of maracatu nação continue to grapple with two legacies left by former visitors: one, the practice of stylization of maracatu nação by elite artists, which contributed to the term maracatu estilizado (“stylized maracatu”) becoming a pejorative term used to place limits on innovation; and two, the threat of “going to the museum”—the cessation of a group’s activities and donation of their instruments and costumes to a local archive—perceived as a kind of death. These two intertwined discourses produce a tension between notions of tradition and innovation that are central to how performers of maracatu nação conceive of the conditions necessary for the practice’s survival.

QUEENS AND BATUQUEIRAS:

RACE, GENDER, AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS

OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN MARACATU NAÇÃO

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED ON THE NINETEENTH DAY OF APRIL 2021

TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS

OF TULANE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE DEGREE

OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

______Amy Katherine Medvick

APPROVED:______Dr. Daniel B. Sharp, Ph.D. Director

______Dr. Christopher J. Dunn, Ph.D.

______Dr. Felipe Fernandes Cruz, Ph.D.

©Copyright by Amy Katherine Medvick, 2021.

All Rights Reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is a product of the shared insights and support of so many who have helped me along the way. I would first and foremost like to thank all the remarkable and thoughtful people who agreed to let me into their world and share their knowledge of maracatu nação with me: Fábio Sotero, Danilo Santos, Eliene da Silva, Mestre Walter,

Toinho and Teté Silva, Mestre Arlindo, Karen Aguiar, Hugo de Oliveira, Fabio Aquino,

Leandro Santana, Marcionilo Oliveira, Carine Sousa, Cristina Barbosa, Renato Lins,

Helder Aragão de Melo, Bernardinho José da Silva Neto, Rubens Antunes, Raimundo

Lázaro da Cruz, and José Amaro Santos da Silva. I hope I am able to do justice to your teachings. I would also like to thank Rodrigo Calabria, José Fernando Souza e Silva, and

Angeles, for their assistance in connecting me to the right people at the right time, and your own insights into the world of maracatu nação. An extra special thanks to Carlos Sandroni for helping orient me in Recife and inviting me to share my research in your classroom.

I would also very much like to thank Isabella at the Libraries of the Fundação

Joaquim Nabuco, Angelina Lima at the Laboratório da Historia Oral e Imagem at the

Federal University of Pernambuco, and Suzianne França and Marília Bivar at the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, for their vital assistance in navigating those archives. The sources that I found with your help have enriched my research incalculably.

ii I would like to thank the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts Graduate Summer Merit program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada for the generous support and funding that made my research and graduate career possible. I would especially like to thank Jimmy Huck for all the guidance offered and innumerable questions answered.

I would also like to thank my dissertation committee—Felipe Fernandes Cruz,

Christopher J. Dunn, and Daniel B. Sharp—for their ongoing support and teaching through this process. A special thank you goes to Daniel Sharp for so many important conversations over my years at Tulane. Your endless encouragement, thoughtful criticisms, and enthusiasm for my project has sustained me through the inevitable monotony of research and writing.

My gratitude also goes out to my fellow graduate students and other colleagues that have gone through this journey alongside me. An extra thanks goes to Jessica Glass—my dissertation is better for all the time we spent processing Brazil and our relationship to it together.

I would like to thank Barbara Cavalcanti and Ivson Oliveira for your friendship and support during my time in Recife. Ivson, I am proud to say that some of my last days of pre-pandemic life were spent roaming the streets of Olinda and Recife with you. I would also like to thank Tallita for insisting that I come with you to Nazaré. That is still the farthest away I have ever been from home. Thank you to Goreth for your hospitality, and for saving me from the scorpion. I would also like to thank Aline Morales and the Brazilian music scene of Toronto, Canada, who first introduced me to maracatu nação and its incredible history. A debt of gratitude goes to Injimbere Baranyanka, Bemnet

iii Tekleyohannes, Mirra Kardonne, and Tova Kardonne, for being my first teachers in thinking about race, gender, and social justice, and for the friendship and conversation that sparked the questions I am still trying to answer today. A huge thank you to my family and especially my parents, Sally McKay and Peter Medvick, for engendering a love of music and a sense of curiosity in me—the two most important ingredients. Finally, thank you to

Ben Gieseler for getting me through this year. I could not have done this work without you.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii

1.0 INTRODUCTION: NATIONALISM, REGIONALISM, MODERNISM,

MARACATU...... 1

1.1 Historical and Contemporary Overview of Maracatu Nação...... 3

1.2 Outline and Research Questions...... 17

1.3 Methodology...... 22

1.4 Theoretical Framework...... 26

1.5 Historiography and Scholarly Contributions...... 38

1.6 Modernism, Nationalism, Regionalism, Maracatu...... 43

2.0 KINGS OF CONGO TO NAGÔ QUEENS: RACE, GENDER, AND

RELIGIOSIDADE IN THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF MARACATU

NAÇÃO ...... 58

2.1 Kings of Congo...... 60

2.2 Nagô Queens...... 96

2.3 The Rise of the Maracatu Queen...... 114

2.4 Religiosidade and Maracatu Nação: A Theater of the Colonial...... 122

3.0 FOLKLORE’S ORCHESTRATIONS: AESTHETICS OF TRAGEDY IN THE

FAILED “TRANSPOSITION” OF MARACATU NAÇÃO ...... 131

3.1 The (Failed) Movement to Make Maracatu the “New Samba”: Maracatu-

canção and the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana...... 140

v 3.2 Banzo Songs: Maracatu and an Aesthetics of Tragedy in the Work of

Ascenso Ferreira and Capiba...... 155

3.3 “The Transposition of the Popular”: Ariano Suassuna as Bridge Between

Maracatu Estilizado and the Movimento Armorial...... 184

3.4 Conclusion...... 194

4.0 RACE, RHYTHM, AND MARACATU NAÇÃO: THE ERUDITE

COMPOSITIONS OF CÉSAR GUERRA-PEIXE AND ZÉ AMARO SANTOS

DA SILVA ...... 197

4.1 César Guerra-Peixe: From Recovered Dodecaphonist to Proto-

Ethnomusicologist...... 198

4.2 Towards Blackness/Africanness in Brazilian Música Erudita: The Stylized

Maracatus of Zé Amaro Santos da Silva...... 224

4.3 Conclusion...... 234

5.0 ROYALS AND AMBASSADORS: TRANSNATIONALISM, MEDIATION,

AND THE AGENCY OF OBJECTS IN THE ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCHANGES

OF KATARINA REAL ...... 236

5.1 Dona Katarina as Transnational Actor...... 237

5.2 Pesquisa-Ação and the “Folkloric Left” of 1960s Pernambuco...... 242

5.3 Gifts and Appropriations: Real’s “Uneven” Exchanges...... 248

5.4 The Anthropologist as Midwife and Undertaker: Real at the Birth and

Death of Nations...... 259

5.5 Real and Resgate: “The anthropologist Katarina Real requires the return

of Porto Rico do Oriente!” ...... 266

vi 5.6 Reals’ Possession, or, Dona Joventina as Transnational Actor? ...... 276

5.7 Conclusion...... 292

6.0 CAUGHT BETWEEN ESTILIZADO AND THE MUSEU:

TRADITION, INNOVATION, AND SURVIVAL IN PERNAMBUCO’S 2020

CARNAVAL...... 294

6.1 Introduction: My Maracatu Weighs a Ton...... 294

6.2 The Shared Ideology of Tradition and Modernity in Pernambuco:

Armorial, Manguebeat, and Maracatu Nação...... 305

6.3 Groups and Nations: Maracatu Nação Pernambuco or Maracatu Nação

Pernambuco? ...... 319

6.4 The First Batuqueiras? A Confused Chronology...... 329

6.5 The Dirty Word Estilizado: Innovation and Survival...... 339

6.6 The Big and the Small, the Old and the New: Prestige and Maracatu

Nação...... 350

6.7 The Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco (AMANPE)...... 354

6.8 The First National Congress of Maracatu Nação...... 360

6.9 Racial Politics and Spectacle at Tumaraca...... 367

6.10 The Association of Maracatus of Olinda (AMO)...... 373

6.11 “No Museum Will Ever Get Us” ...... 379

6.12 Conclusion: The Weight of Maracatu...... 387

7.0 CONCLUSION ...... 390

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 404

vii 1

1.0 INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM, NATIONALISM, REGIONALISM, MARACATU

‘Adam’, speaking to me about Maracatu, told me that for many years, during the time of his grandfather, negros of all the nations that lived in Recife, used to come together in dance. They would say: ‘Maracatucá’, which is to say, ‘let’s disband.’ The students very much liked to watch these dances and, always hearing this word, engendered with those same negros a similar dance, calling it Maracatú, which seemed to them to be its name (Ovídio da Cunha 1948).

This project examines maracatu nação, a working-class, Afro-Brazilian carnaval pageant from the city of Recife and surrounding areas in Pernambuco state, and its relationship to the transnational circuits of knowledge production created by elite artists and intellectuals interested in the practice. In so doing, it produces not only a cultural history and ethnography of maracatu nação but a study of the interrelationship between history and anthropology as disciplines, and between knowledge production and cultural practice. Interest in and awareness of maracatu nação has grown considerably since the late1980s in Brazil and globally (P. Galinsky 2002). The pageant features the procession and dance of an African royal court dressed in elaborate and ostentatious European

Baroque-style garb, to the sound of thunderous drumming and call-and-response songs of competitive bravado. Historically, the coronation and procession of African Kings and

Queens—especially the Kings of Congo—were widespread practices in colonial Brazil, performed by members of the lay Black Catholic Brotherhoods, organizations comprised of enslaved and free Africans and their descendants. At the end of the nineteenth century, the coronations and processions of the African royal courts in Recife would come to be associated with the Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religion known in Pernambuco as

2

Xangô, constituting the first performances referred to as maracatu.1 Long associated with black, working-class neighborhoods in a marginalized region of Brazil, the music of maracatu nação has in recent decades commanded the attention of a broader array of participants, gaining popularity among the lighter-skinned middle-classes of Recife (P.

Galinsky 2002), within other regions of Brazil (Mira 2014), and in the Brazilian diaspora

(Mercier 2008; Pravaz 2010). In its journeys, maracatu nação and its meanings and practice have undergone processes of change—often shedding the royal court and focusing on music and dance—as performers adopt and adapt the practice to new contexts. The cultural politics of race and gender that surround maracatu nação are particularly resonant.

While the specificities vary with context, the practice is consistently caught between nationalist discourses emphasizing cultural mixture, traditionalist discourses emphasizing

“African purity,” and debates about cultural appropriation and maracatu nação’s place in social justice struggles.2

Combining archival, ethnographic, and close reading methodologies, this study uncovers the how the field activities, creative and intellectual output, and relationships established by local and foreign artist-folklorists established enduring representations of maracatu nação as well as the intellectual paradigms through which the practice is

1 The qualifier “nação,” meaning “nation” but also incorporating many other meanings to be discussed in later chapters, is used to distinguish this practice from another known as maracatu rural, which bears both considerable similarities and differences to maracatu nação. This convention in terminology would not become common until the mid-twentieth century, and the earliest sources on the practice simply refer to it as maracatu, leading to some ambiguity about which practice was being indicated. Legitimate concerns about anachronistic terminology notwithstanding, for the purposes of clarity, I will use the term maracatu nação when referring to the practice regardless of the time-period. However, when citing primary sources, I will leave the original language intact. See Lima (2008) for an extended discussion of the problems with this terminology and the nuances of the relationship between the two maracatus. 2 On these questions with reference to maracatu nação, see Ivaldo Marciano de França Lima (2008, 2009). See John F. Collins (2015), J. Lorand Matory (2005), and Beatriz Góis Dantas (2009) for Afro-Brazilian culture and religion’s relation to the state and discourses of “African purity.”

3 understood today. Engaging with transnational and relational theories of identity and culture, this study also examines how performers of maracatu nação navigate the landscape shaped by former generations of researchers, and how they situate their practice and themselves within historical narratives of local blackness. Performers of maracatu nação continue to grapple with two legacies left by former visitors: one, the practice of stylization of maracatu nação by elite artists, which contributed to the label maracatu estilizado (“stylized maracatu”) becoming a pejorative term used to place limits on innovation; and two, the threat of “going to the museum”—the cessation of a group’s activities and donation of their instruments and costumes to a local archive—perceived as a kind of death. These two intertwined discourses produce a tension between notions of tradition and innovation that are central to how performers of maracatu nação conceive of the conditions necessary for the practice’s survival.

1.1 Historical and Contemporary Overview of Maracatu Nação

To make sense of the complex of music, dance, and theatrical pageantry that comprises maracatu nação, it is necessarily to first outline the various broad social categories through which music is understood in Brazil and how they might translate to

North American categories. Maracatu nação is understood in Brazil as a form of cultura popular— “popular culture”—and its music as música popular— “popular music.” These terms do not translate exactly to the Anglo-North American categories of “pop culture” and “pop music” in the sense of mass-mediated, youth-oriented forms of music and culture.

Rather, the Brazilian terms encompass these meanings but also include nearly all forms of

“non-elite” music—culture arising from the “popular classes,” meaning the peasants, the

4 poor and working-classes, and lower-middle classes—even when these practices are now consumed or even created by relatively elite members of Brazilian society. When I use the

Brazilian terms cultura or música popular, or their direct English translations (popular culture and popular music), I am using the terms in the Brazilian sense. The term música popular should not be confused with the term música popular brasileira, which refers to a specific eclectic set of urban popular music practices that arose in the 1960s associated with the rise of bossa nova (an urbane jazz-influenced genre based on samba), the protest song movement, the experimentalist Tropicália movement, and the Brazilian counterculture. This latter set of practices will always be referred to by its full name, música popular brasileira, or by its more common acronym, MPB.

Cultura and música popular may refer to a broad range of practices, including urban and rural practices as well as those that are incorporated into the culture industry and those that are not. Therefore, when clarity is necessary, I will use the terms “rural” and

“urban” (rural and urbano in Portuguese) when making the distinction, and the qualifier

“mass-mediated” to draw attention to the ways in which a practice is inextricably intertwined with the culture industry. In Brazil, the term that might most readily translate as “country music” is música caipira; like in North America, this category is a specific practice and not the only one associated with rural populations.

I also occasionally use the terms “folk,” “folklore,” the Brazilian translation folclore, “folkloric,” and “folklorist.” I treat these terms as deeply problematic for the ways in which they have served to hierarchize and stereotype differing sets of cultural practices.

For example, while both maracatu nação and bossa nova are considered to be cultura popular, because maracatu nação is a practice historically associated with marginalized,

5 working-class black communities in the Northeastern region of Brazil, it has historically been categorized and studied as folclore. This term has been used to characterize the practice as “backwards,” “anonymous,” “illiterate,” “simple,” “raw,” “collective” and unchanging over time—projections which feed the romanticized idealization of maracatu nação as “authentic”, but which also obscure the skill, intelligence, individuality, and agency of the people who perform it. On the other hand, since bossa nova was primarily associated with middle-class, educated, white performers in the culturally hegemonic

Southeastern region of Brazil, it tends to be celebrated for its poetry, musical sophistication, and the individual genius of its creators, and would never be considered to be “folklore.” For these reasons, I try to always use the word “folklore” and related terms with quotation marks, except in instances where they function as self-identified markers, such as a folklore journal or a folklorist who understood themselves as such.

Finally, all of these terms stand in distinction to música erudita or música erudita brasileira. These fairly interchangeable terms refer to a set of musical practices analogous with what is in North America most often referred to as “classical music.” “Classical music” itself is somewhat of a misnomer, in actuality referring only to a specific era within the musical tradition of Western European elites (that has likewise been taken up in North

American and elsewhere as a “universal” music tradition), but it is often used to refer to nearly a thousand years of musical tradition. Other names used include “art music,” which

I reject due to its implication that other forms of music are not “art”—this is a debate which

I will return to in later chapters. Another term, “elite music,” I find more accurate, yet it is still problematic due to its lack of historical and cultural specificity. Where I intend to refer in this text to the Western European tradition and practice most commonly known as

6

“classical music,” I always use the qualifiers “Western European” and use the terms

“classical,” “art,” and “elite” interchangeably, since all three terms can help to remind of some of the critiques I bring to how that music practice is often framed. The term música erudita is used in Brazil to refer to this same tradition, as well as its local manifestation and continuation in Brazil. When the adjective brasileira is added, it specifies música erudita composed in Brazil or by Brazilians, and usually with a concern for developing a music reflective of Brazilian “national identity.” Likewise, I also use the term and its

English translation, “erudite music,” in these ways, with or without the qualifier brasileira.

Importantly, in both the Brazilian context and outside of it, Western European “art” music and música erudita practices place a higher value on the act of composition—pre- determining all or nearly all of the musical elements to be performed before instructing and directing an ensemble of musicians on their execution—and reveres the composer as the ultimate author of a musical performance and owner of the intellectual property it constitutes, and the “individual genius” that animates the composer’s work. The functioning of the composer rests on the ability to read and write Western European musical notation, normally referred to as musical “literacy.” This mode of operation stands in contrast with most musical practices of the world, which usually involve some level of improvisation in their performance (together with pre-determined composition), but which do so “by ear,” that is, through listening and experimenting musically in real time rather than through reading music. Many popular music practices also perform compositions the author of which is unknown, often understood as “anonymous.” Of course, the separation between these two modes of operation is usually over-articulated—all music creation requires some level of composition and some level of improvisation—just as many

7 musicians have developed their own means of notation other than the Western European standard, which they may use in combination with memorization and improvisation.

However, these distinctions are important to understand for the ways in which they are employed to assert social distinctions between different musical practices.

Therefore, maracatu nação is usually understood as a form of urban cultura popular (for it encompasses more than music) that has often been problematically characterized and studied as folclore. It is a set of practices that is learned and passed on orally, though maracatu nação drummers have devised ways of notating the pattern in which they alternate the use of each hand-held stick, what is sometimes called a “sticking pattern” in English. They might also write down, or nowadays use cell-phone recorders, to remember the words and melody of a song. It is also commonly assumed that the practice remained outside of the broader culture industry—particularly the mass-mediated industries involving sheet music, radio, television, sound and video recordings—until only recently. However, part of the aim of this dissertation is to show that maracatu nação has been enveloped in this industry just as it has been in that of academic knowledge production, since at least the decade of the 1930s. As I will demonstrate, many actors operating within the realms of mass-mediated urban popular music, MPB, and Brazilian música erudita have sought to bring the musical elements of maracatu nação into their fields of operation for nearly one hundred years.

The practice of maracatu nação, in its fullest form, involves the procession of an

African royal court—known as a cortejo—who parade and dance to drumming and song.

The entire group of artists who create the performances, usually based in a religious community affiliated with an Afro-Brazilian religious temple, are referred to as a nação

8

(pl. nações) and thought of as something like an African “nation” living in Brazil (the precise meaning of the term will be elaborated in the following chapter). Performers of the practice will also sometimes refer to a nação as a maracatu to denote the group that performs maracatu nação. For the sake of clarity, unless I am citing another text or interview directly, I will only use nação to refer to the organizations that perform maracatu nação.

While the format and ordering of a procession may vary, parades may open with one or two caboclos de pena, performers dressed in a stylized and stereotypical “Indian” costume (loin cloth, with a bra for women, and a feather headdress), and dance and leap while taking aim with a wooden prop bow and arrow. They are followed by a standard- bearer (porta-estandarte), who is dressed in European Baroque dress with breeches, stockings, buckled shoes, a tailed jacket, and powdered wig, and who carries the estandarte—the flag of the nação. After this, there may be a variety of figures, including lanceiros (a “military guard” usually in Roman dress), groups of “slaves” or “vassals” with prop tools for cutting sugarcane, various damas (“ladies”) carrying bouquets or chalices, baianas (women dressed in traditional Afro-Brazilian clothing, with long flowing white lace shirts and blouses, turbans, and a pano da costa, a special cloth from Africa draped over the shoulder), and the damas do paço (“ladies of the palace,” or “ladies in waiting,” dressed in the same level of finery as the royal court). Some of these latter, the damas do paço, are charged with the very important role of carrying and dancing with the calungas, the sacred dolls of the nação. With each nação possessing between one and three on average, the calunga, also sometimes called a boneca (literally meaning “doll”) is thought to house the spirit of an important ancestor. Most but not all are feminine in gender and are

9 given the title of Dona and Dom and are sometimes named after known historical figures.

They are made of wood painted black or dark brown, making the figure racially “black” even when it is named after a white historical figure, such as the Princess Isabel who signed the abolition of slavery in Brazil into law in 1888. They are dressed in Baroque finery as well, and sometimes their outfits match exactly those of the King or Queen. At the end of the parade are the nobles of the court, which depending on the size of the nação may include dukes and duchesses, barons and baronesses, counts and countesses, princes and princesses, and of course, the King and Queen. These last two are always present and may carry a royal scepter and/or sword. Behind the royal couple walks one or two pajes, “pages” who carry the train of the Queen’s gown and the King’s mantle, and a figure known as a vassal or slave, who carries a large umbrella canopy over the King and Queen, called a pálio.

Usually situated somewhere in the center of the parade is the batuque, the contingent of drummers known as batuqueiros (masc. pl.) or batuqueiras (fem. pl.), who are led by a male Mestre, or less commonly, a female Mestra. The batuque may range anywhere from between 20 to upwards of 60 percussionists and drummers (C. de O. Santos

2017, 64). The batuque comprises at least one to three percussionists who play a large iron bell usually known as a gonguê and sometimes also called agogô (distinct from the small iron bell usually denoted by that name), which is struck with a heavy wooden stick. The ensemble also includes at least a handful of drummers who play the caixa de guerra or tarol, both metal drums with snares similar to the military snare drum and played with standard wooden drumsticks. This is the most common instrument to be played by the

Mestre, if they chose to play one, though it is certainly not the only one. Ensembles also

10 include some form of shaker—historically, the long metal cylindrical shaker known as the mineiro or the ganzá, but more recently also including newer additions, most commonly the beaded gourd known as the abê, which has been adopted by the majority of nações.

The bulk of the drummers—usually at least 15 or more—play an instrument that has come to be known as the alfaia, but which was historically termed the bombo, afaya, or the zabumba (C. de O. Santos 2017, 76). These large, deep-toned drums are constructed of wood with two goat skins on either side, tightened with rope. They are played with either two large wooden sticks called baquetas or maçanetas, or with one of these and a slender wooden “switch”-like stick known as a bacalhau. The alfaias are further divided based on size, with musical roles of differing rhythmic complexity based on the size of the drum.

The Mestre leads the ensemble using a whistle known as an apito, using different rhythms to cue a variety of commands to the drummers and percussionists. Together, these instruments weave a tight web of rhythms that could be described as “syncopated,” but might more properly be understood as “polyrhythmic” or “co-metric,” as will be discussed further in later chapters. Either way, the rhythmic structure these instruments produce is complex, intricate, and often disorienting for the unfamiliar listener, yet also grounded and danceable once the ear is oriented to their pattern. The groove—the set of short repeated rhythmic patterns that give a piece of “groove-based” music its rhythmic flavor (what a drummer on a drum-set or a programmer of electronic drums might also call a “beat”)— that the batuque performs is called a baque, and there are several different ones, though three predominate and some nacões (plural of nação) insist on performing only one. These baques are also occasionally interrupted by virados, rhythmic “turnarounds” that propel the ensemble into the next section, leading to one of the alternate names for the musical

11 part of the practice, maracatu de baque virado, or “maracatu of the turned-around beat”.

Needless to say, these ensembles are also incredibly loud in volume, adding to the force and power of the experience of watching and listening to them.

A “song” in the performance of maracatu nação is usually called a toada, though it might also be referred to by the more general Brazilian term for song, música. The Mestre is usually the person in charge of choosing which toada to perform and takes the role of puxador, the person who leads in the call-and-response structure, though they may share this responsibility with other performers. The coro, or chorus, is comprised of most of the rest of the nação, batuque and royal court alike, and responds in unison (without harmonies) to the lines of the puxador. Most performances begin with the puxador singing the first line of the toada alone, without any percussion accompaniment, and the coro replying with their “response,” back and forth until a full verse or round of the song has been completed. At this point, the percussion enters, usually beginning with the gonguê alone, occasionally with another instrument, before the entire ensemble enters thunderously for the remaining passes through the structure of the toada. Sometimes this structure is quite simple, consisting of four or even two lines, and sometimes the toadas are longer and more elaborate, with distinct sections using different melodies. Many toadas have been performed for generations, with variations used in many nações. Others are more recently composed by members of the batuque and would be unlikely to be performed outside of that nação. Vocal tones tend to be deep and throaty (with a great deal of “grain” in the voice) and performed at the upper edge of the vocalist’s volume capacity. Once the drums enter, it is very difficult to hear the singing unless there are many singers or microphones are being used, but the performers continue to sing either way. The lyrics of

12 the toadas, often enigmatic, announce the arrival and coronations of kings and queens as well as other members of the court, especially the ambassadors. They also speak of a return to Africa, (especially the port city of Luanda in Angola), tell of Afro-Brazilian or maracatu nação history, or boast of the splendor of the nação, its royals, and its calunga.

I paint this image of maracatu nação so that the reader has an idea of what it looks like, but I do so in broad strokes, since it is not my intention to suggest one version of the practice as a “standard,” or more or less “traditional” than any other. Indeed, that goal cuts to the core of the arguments presented in this dissertation. Many of the elements I mention have entered the practice only recently and are still the subject of intense debate. At the same time, it is difficult to know how “traditional” other elements might be when the historical record is inevitably patchy. We can only assume that the practice of maracatu nação has not only changed over time, but that it was always varied and diverse among the different nacões that practiced it. And far be it from me to place boundaries on what the practice may become, though it is the prerogative of its practitioners to do so if they choose.

Most historical references to African royal courts like those seen in a maracatu nação took place as a celebration to mark the coronation of the King and/or Queen; however, maracatu nação has long been associated with Pernambucan carnaval—the yearly pre-Lenten festival—which since at least the 1930s, with the founding of the

Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana, has contests in which the carnaval practices in various categories (there are many more other than maracatu nação) parade and compete for cash prizes. While these tend to be the most elaborate performances and the focal point of the nação’s yearly activities, other recurrent events have emerged in which they perform.

One of these is the “Noite dos Tambores Silenciosos do Recife” (the “Night of the Silent

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Drums of Recife”), which takes place on the Monday night before carnaval Tuesday. Many nações gather in a downtown square, each giving a short, scaled-down parade followed by a stage performance, and then together perform a ritual in honor of their enslaved ancestors at midnight, at which point the drummers observe a moment of silence. A similar event, the “Noite para os Tambores Silenciosos de Olinda,” is held in the nearby town of Olinda on the previous Monday, featuring a slightly different set of nações, and has a similar intent

(more on the distinction between Recife and Olinda in the final chapter). There is also

Tumaraca, a massive, televised spectacle featuring the drummers of eleven or more nações performing together at Recife’s largest carnaval stage, also featuring many other special guests. Many nações also perform on the street or on stages during carnaval and in the off- season, and they also sometimes hold open rehearsals, especially in the weeks preceding carnaval. In addition to these public events, the practice of maracatu nação also includes private religious rituals that are usually only for members of the nação and/or their extended religious family.

The procession of the African royal court associated with maracatu nação is a performance practice found in a variety of incarnations throughout Brazil since the early colonial period (Kiddy 2005; M. de M. e Souza 2002). These performances have been historically diverse, associated with a variety of African “nations”3 and commemorating various historical and mythological events. The most numerous were the coronations and processions of the King and Queen of Congo, affiliated with the lay Black Catholic

Brotherhoods of the Rosary. These coronations and processions often commemorated the conversion of Kongolese King Nzinga a Nkuwu to Catholicism in 1491 (Kiddy 2005; M.

3 Ethnic groupings often formed as such in the colonial context—see Soares (2011).

14 de M. e Souza 2002). The chosen individuals were elected to their royal office from amongst the enslaved and free black population, and they often held real responsibility and social power within their communities in their capacity as king or queen. As such, the practice of coronations and the organization of African nações and brotherhoods have been characterized variously as strategies for the planter-class to maintain the colonial social hierarchy, as sites in which Africans could form communities and maintain certain elements of African culture and religion, and as crucibles of religious syncretism between an already Africanized Catholicism and other African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices (Kiddy 2005; Reis 2003, 2015; Santana 2012; Soares 2011; M. de M. e Souza

2002; L. de M. e Souza 2003; Sweet 2003; Thornton 1998).

While these coronation festivities were practiced throughout Brazil, and indeed in many other places in the African diaspora, maracatu nação itself, as distinct from the crowning celebrations that have influenced it, is only associated with working-class, black communities in Recife and other nearby urban centers along the coast of Pernambuco, especially Olinda, Igarassu, and more recently, Jaboatão. In the case of Olinda, the municipality—the first to be founded there, several decades before Recife—has long functioned almost as an extended suburb (without the connotation of a characterless,

“suburban wasteland” so often associate with the term in North America), and has more recently been incorporated into the greater metropolitan region known as Grande Recife.

Other practices referred to as maracatu have developed in other areas—most notably, the practice known as maracatu rural, among many other names, from the cane-cutting regions of rural interior Pernambuco—and the historical relationship of these practices to urban maracatu nação before the twentieth century is poorly documented. What is known is that

15 around the same time that the narrative of ethnographic encounter presented here begins, in the 1930s, a massive influx of rural-to-urban migration would have led to significantly increased numbers of formerly rural residents, including performers of maracatu rural, to come into contact with maracatu nação in Recife. The debates about the relationship between the two maracatus from that point on are complex, and beyond the scope of this study (see Lima 2008 for an extended discussion of this relationship).

The musical conventions of maracatu nação are understood to have developed out of music and dance practices associated with Xangô, and both Xangô and maracatu nação have been idealized as forms of resistance to white/European cultural and religious hegemony—an idea which has been re-emphasized since the rise of black movements in

Brazil in the 1970s (Crook 2001; Metz 2008). However, this emphasis on African identity and anti-racist politics in maracatu nação has coincided with its growth in popularity outside of the working-class black neighborhoods in which it developed. This reveals the city of Recife to be a complex space in which maracatu nação has been circulated among and mediated by a variety of actors, who each attach and detach distinct political meanings to and from the practice. This process of circulation has led to a contemporary scene in which Recife is home both to nações—which make claims to maracatu nação authority based on their lineage and ties to Xangô temples and black brotherhoods—and recently- formed grupos percussivos (“percussive groups”), which are often viewed, whether positively or negatively, as outside of the tradition. Many grupos percussivos, from the

1980s to the present, have been formed outside of the black working-class neighborhoods historically associated with maracatu nação, but they may nonetheless consist of a mixed- class, multiracial membership and are designed as spaces that both teach and perform

16 maracatu nação. They have also been the most likely to allow the participation of female drummers, to experiment with the musical conventions of maracatu nação, to eliminate its dance and procession elements, and to perform in contexts outside of the yearly carnaval celebrations—though these aspects of the distinction are rapidly dissolving. Other performers and groups—some of whom may also be members of a grupo percussivo or even a nação—have also incorporated influences from maracatu nação into rock, rap, and other pop-based formats (P. Galinsky 2002). In a different vein, many grupos percussivos have been founded either as community-outreach projects in marginalized neighborhoods, as women-only groups, or have been founded with significant links to one of the more venerated nações. In the context of Pernambuco’s state-sponsored music scene, each of these types of groups involved in maracatu nação must leverage multiple and often conflicting notions of legitimacy and authenticity to secure government support and funding (Enriquez 2012).

An important thread of this rupture is the challenge to the tradition that prohibits women from being batuqueiras, a shift in practice which has spanned across socio- economic classes and racial groups but is nonetheless consistently associated with white, middle-class values as opposed to the historically gendered division of musical roles in

Afro-Brazilian religious practice (P. Galinsky 2002). The prohibition on women playing drums can be juxtaposed against the importance given the figure of the Queen in maracatu nação performance. The Queen of the maracatu nação is usually accorded higher status than the King and this symbolically powerful role is filled by a woman who holds considerable social power and influence within Afro-Brazilian communities, usually in the role of a religious leader. It is also stipulated that the elected Queen (but not the King) must

17 be not only of African descent but quite dark-skinned (Santana 2012, 65). The role of women as Afro-Brazilian religious leaders is one that has been hotly debated in Afro-

Brazilian Studies since the 1930s, with critics arguing that the notion of “black matriarchy” in Brazil was the romanticized invention of US anthropologist Ruth Landes (Landes 1994; for the critique see Matory 2005). However, at present, female religious leadership has become a common if contested practice. The tensions generated by these two views of gender in maracatu nação—one which opposes the restriction against women playing drums and the other which celebrates the power of the maracatu Queen—continue to make themselves felt in the present-day racialized gender politics of maracatu nação in Recife.

This juxtaposition in particular will form a central thread of the first and final chapters.

1.2 Outline and Research Questions

This study combines ethnographic, historical, and cultural studies methods throughout, with the first four chapters dealing with historical questions and the final chapter with recent and ongoing issues in the transnational trajectory of maracatu nação.

The first chapter of this project examines the construction of religious identity, race, and gender in the performance practices associated with Black Catholic coronation festivities and Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religions, both of which directly contributed to the formation of maracatu nação. Drawing on chronicles, travel accounts, and early folklore studies and ethnography, this chapter establishes the racialized and gendered music, dance, and performance roles that would later meet with the formation of maracatu nação around the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter examines how the slavery-era coronations and processions of African royal courts reproduced in microcosm African, European, and

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New World political structures, and re-enacted events in African and Brazilian history.

These performances were tied, as were the political structures they reproduced, to religious structures and cosmologies that were in processes of flux in response to European contact with West and Central Africa and the commencement of the transatlantic slave trade.

Though often conceived of as distinct, African and Afro-Brazilian forms of Catholicism and other Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé, or Xangô in Pernambuco, have long been engaged in mutual influence with one another in ways that have been either obscured or novelized at certain historical moments.4 This section examines how the performance of political structures and African history, together with the performance practices of Xangô, have influenced maracatu nação. It demonstrates how political structures and cosmologies from both (and not limited to) Africa and Europe have participated in mapping gender and race onto specific performance activities, especially singing, dancing, and drumming, and in particular how these factors led to the rise of the Queen as the central focus of the procession and the highest authority figure in the social structure maracatu nação.

The next three chapters of my doctoral thesis examine the output of twentieth-century ethnographers of maracatu nação. It analyzes not only the archival traces of the social and cultural politics of early maracatu nação captured in their ethnographic representations, but also investigates how the ethnographers themselves participated in these politics and in turn shaped the future trajectory of maracatu nação practice. The second chapter examines a movement spearheaded by a small group of artists and intellectuals active in the 1930s and 40s, who engaged in ethnographic-style field research in order to produce stylized works of art based on maracatu nação. These artists and intellectuals sought to

4 See Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2006) on what she terms “epistemologies of purification” and “epistemologies of transculturation.”

19 establish a new genre of mass urban popular music—intended for performance by a small band with a vocalist, to be performed in salons or disseminated through the radio and record industries—that would supersede Brazil’s “national music,” samba, in national and international success and fame. While they ultimately failed in that goal, my research has revealed that their works in this genre—and even more so, the ideas they established through it, such as linking maracatu nação with notions of mortal nostalgia and tragedy known as banzo—had considerable reach and created a legacy whose impacts are still felt to this day, even if most of their compositions are rather forgotten.

The third chapter looks at the shifts enacted by the revered Brazilian composer and

“proto-ethnomusicologist” César Guerra-Peixe. With connections to the above-mentioned earlier generation of artist-folklorists, Guerra-Peixe took the project of the ethnographic research of popular culture—especially maracatu nação—into the world of Brazilian música erudita. An ex-avant-gardist turned nationalist composer, Guerra-Peixe’s research into maracatu nação from 1949-1952 not only culminated in symphonic, chamber, and solo works based on the practice, but also lead to the publication of his book Maracatus do

Recife, the first full-length monograph on maracatu nação, in 1955. Through both these domains of activity, Guerra-Peixe established an imperative towards a rigorously high standard of ethnographic accuracy in the stylization of popular culture—previously not a high priority—as well as furthering the notion, especially through his compositions and his discourse about them, that the “essence” and value of maracatu nação lay in its rhythms, to the exclusion of all other musical elements. This chapter also looks at the work and perspectives of the black Xangô priest and composer of African-inspired música erudita,

Zé Amaro Santos da Silva—a former student of Guerra-Peixe whom I had the opportunity

20 to interview during the course of my research. Silva’s comments not only shine a further light on the process of composition via “folklore” research and stylization, but also offer the perspective of a black Brazilian working within Brazilian música erudita who engaged in the composition of stylized maracatus.

The fourth chapter deals with the interventions of US anthropologist Katherine Royal

Cate (more commonly known by the Brazilianized version of her name, Katarina Real), who lived in Recife and conducted research there during the 1950s and 60s. In particular, this chapter examines her activities at the “births” and “deaths” of nações—assisting in the

“revival” of defunct nações or shepherding their material collections into museums or her personal archive. With these activities, and the relationships she formed through them,

Real—steeped in notions of pesquisa-ação, or “action research”—exerted significant influence on how certain nações would be remembered and how continuity between various instantiations of nações (which frequently disbanded due to lack of resources only to be started up again, sometimes by completely unrelated individuals) is understood.

Taken together, these three chapters will lay the groundwork for understanding the socio- cultural landscape of possibilities, constraints, concerns, and priorities through which present-day performers of maracatu nação must navigate.

The contemporary portion of my research engages the ways in which maracatu nação has undergone rapid processes of change in practice, meaning, and context along with its translocal and transnational circulation over the last four decades, and continues to investigate the cultural politics of race and gender and the role of academic knowledge production in the contemporary maracatu nação scene. Drawing primarily on my own ethnographic fieldwork, supplemented with archival research, critiques of ethnographic

21 texts, and the work of local public intellectuals, this section will examine how present-day performers of maracatu nação grapple with the legacy of the activities, discourses, representations, and interventions described in the previous chapters. It also considers the ways in which phenomena such as state investment in local popular culture, the rise of the

Movimento Negro, the “reAfricanization” of Pernambucan carnaval,5 the flourishing of the Manguebeat movement, and local feminist politics have shaped the socio-culturo- political field in which maracatu nação is now situated. In particular, during my fieldwork

I found that the realm of possibilities in the maracatu nação community was deeply structured by two discourses: one, the critique of maracatu estilizado, a pejorative term that acted to place boundaries upon innovation within maracatu nação; and two, the threat of indo pro museu (“going to the museum”), meaning the cessation of activities and donation of materials to a local archive, perceived as a kind of death. In this final chapter,

I argue that these two discourses are the direct legacy of the activities of the artists and folklorists examined in the previous chapters, and that together they produce a tension between notions of tradition and innovation that render the aesthetic choices of performers of maracatu nação politically charged. This chapter continues the emphasis not only on the trans-class, trans-local, and trans-national history of the practices and meanings of maracatu nação, but it will also investigate the role of both formal academic ethnographers and individuals influenced by ethnographic literature and methods in propelling maracatu nação through its various journeys, and how performers of the practice continue to engage with and make use of academic knowledge production towards their own ends.

5 See Larry Crook (2001) and Jerry D. Metz (2008) on the borrowing of this term from a similar phenomenon in Bahia (Dunn 1992).

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1.3 Methodology

My methodologies are designed to investigate the historical and ongoing translocal development and circulation of maracatu nação, the role of racial and gendered struggle and subaltern agency in its development and circulation, the relationship between academic knowledge production and cultural change and continuity in maracatu nação, and the ways in which present-day performers of the practice respond to this history while also making use of the methods and logics of academic knowledge production for their own ends. As such, I have employed five primary techniques to investigate these questions: close readings of ethnographic texts, archival research, participant-observation, formal interviews, and analysis of performances.

This research draws heavily on close readings of ethnographic texts, especially in but not limited to the historical portions of my dissertation. These texts include chronicles, histories, travel accounts and “proto”-ethnographies from the 1490s through to the abolition of slavery and the establishment of the First Republic in 1888 and 1889 respectively; late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth-century ethnographic scholarship and folklore collections; and the published work of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century public intellectuals, music critics, and academic and non-academic ethnographers and other researchers. These texts have been analyzed to establish the repertoire of representations and intellectual paradigms related to maracatu nação that have been put into broad circulation not only in Brazil but globally. They are also read “against the grain” when possible, to attempt to understand the concerns, motivations, beliefs, and meanings that animated the subaltern actors inscribed in these texts. However, in the majority of

23 cases, these texts inform most reliably about the preoccupations of their elite creators, and the focus of my analysis is on unpacking and critiquing their discourse.

The readings of the above-mentioned published texts are supplemented and supported by archival research in the extensive archives at the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and the archives of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste. These sources include newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, local folklore publications, as well as pamphlets, speech drafts and transcriptions, and other materials associated with the creation and inauguration of museum displays and collections. I read them for their descriptions of past performances and practices, the activities of maracatu nação’s performers and ethnographers, as well as the discourses established and reproduced through these texts, likewise read “against the grain” where possible.

I also employed participant-observation fieldwork in Recife and surrounding municipalities to understand continuing processes of change and circulation and how various participants in maracatu nação and other maracatu nação-derived practices engage with its history to inform and orient their contemporary practice. My ethnographic immersion in maracatu nação and other forms of Brazilian music and culture in fact began many years prior, as an undergraduate student and later a professional musician in

Toronto’s music scene in the mid-2000s, where I encountered and joined percussion ensembles that performed the music of maracatu nação and were led and populated by

Brazilian percussionists and Canadians who had spent considerable time studying with the nações of Recife. In this space, the trope of ethnographic encounter was a reigning paradigm in how we understood culture. It was in this crucible that I first came to many of the research questions of this dissertation. In this way, I have also been a participant in

24 some of the dynamics I am critiquing—and have certainly not escaped that condition through my migration to the academic world. Rather, this research represents a conscious effort to direct the inevitable mediations and interventions embedded in my own academic knowledge production towards ends that align with the concerns I saw expressed by the maracatu nação community during the course of my fieldwork.

The participant-observation research I conducted over the past year in Recife included attending rehearsals, workshops, public performances (especially those of the

2020 carnaval celebrations), and an academic-style conference organized by members of the maracatu nação community, where I could observe how individuals engaged with ideas and discourses of race, gender, cultural politics, and history in day-to-day, informal settings together with more formal performance settings. I also observed many public performances, analyzing them for nuances in music, dance, costumery, props, and lyrics, as well as for the broader framing within which the performances were presented and the discourse embedded in commentary and banter, which often made recourse to both history and contemporary socio-political concerns.

In addition to the more informal conversation that makes up a part of participant- observation fieldwork, I also conducted formalized interviews with individuals who perform maracatu nação and maracatu nação-derived musical practices. The majority of my interlocutors were the male Mestres of the nações, responsible for leading the contingent of drummers and usually a figure of considerable authority within the social structure of the nação. The predominance of Mestres among my interviewees was not by design; indeed, given my interest in the role of feminist politics in developments in maracatu nação in recent years, I had originally planned to prioritize interviewing the

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Queens, other women of the court, and female drummers of the various nações. However, in the midst of the slow process of gaining entrance into an aggrieved community, I very suddenly and very fortuitously made the acquaintance of someone who was able to connect me with a few Mestres, who connected me with yet others, in a whirlwind week of interviews that took place just days prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, after which the possibility of significant further research was foreclosed. The Mestres, however, proved to be invaluable and insightful interlocutors, able to speak to my musical interest in the practice as well as the broader social issues that I was researching, in ways that informed how my project was also changing from a focus on gender to the incorporation of gender issues into a broader picture of the changes that maracatu nação has undergone in recent decades. These interviews involved open-ended questions to allow interviewees to address those issues they deemed most important; the questions concerned the ongoing race and gender politics of maracatu nação’s “opening” to white and female drummers, the reverence commonly given to the maracatu nação Queen, maracatu nação’s relationship to new practice, movements, and contexts such as the Manguebeat movement and non-traditional recreational percussion ensembles, the nature and politics of maracatu nação’s presence in Brazilian diasporas abroad, its relationship to social justice struggles, how its history is understood by practitioners, and how that history relates to the contemporary issues listed above.

I occasionally participated in a performance capacity, most notably at a workshop associated with the conference; however, for the most part, I limited my activities to those of an audience member or observer. Likewise, I did not seek out one-on-one instruction as part of my research activities. There were several reasons for this choice, primary among

26 them a sensitivity to the local dynamics of the maracatu nação scene. While academic and non-academic researchers of the practice are ubiquitous (and their presence is at the center of my research questions), I wanted to remain outside the normalized modes and conventions of this research in order to hopefully “see past it.” I also hoped that by avoiding these typical research activities—which are often viewed as a form of appropriation—I could better gain the trust of my interlocutors in order to speak more freely about these very issues. Furthermore, given the intense rivalry that characterizes the maracatu nação scene, and the fact that I wanted my study to provide a wider “bird’s eye view” of the scene rather than a meticulous ethnography of a single group, I avoided participating in performance and direct instruction in order to not privilege or be perceived as privileging one group over another. Inevitably, my dissertation cannot possibly engage all the interlocutors I worked with in equal measure, so it may be that nonetheless, if they do read this text, I may be interpreted as emphasizing the importance of one group over another. I hope my sincere desire not to do so is nevertheless clear.

1.4 Theoretical Framework

This study concerns ideas of racial and gender identity as well as the social relationships these identities are embedded in. I use the term “race” to refer to the culturally and socially constructed set of traits and identities that have been projected onto human phenotypical difference, a process which is both historically and culturally specific to certain places and times and has been used to justify human hierarchy and inequality— especially in the context of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. Therefore, I employ racial terms not to use them in their literal sense, but to analyze the ways in which they are used

27 to articulate identity and social difference. It is important to note that while Brazil is home to a set of racial ideologies that has much in common with those of Anglo-American culture, they do not translate exactly. Specifically, Brazilian notions of race tend to be much more fluid, emphasizing a history of “racial” and cultural “mixture” and naming many

“shades” of this mixture between branco (“white”) and preto (“black”)—such as the term mulato, which in Brazil is not considered pejorative but indicates someone who is of visible mixed African and European ancestry; or moreno, a person with a complexion too dark to be considered “white” but who does not appear to necessarily be of African descent.

Importantly, the question of what kind of phenotypically presenting bodies are read through which kinds of racial identities is contextually specific, differing not only from the more simplistic “one-drop” understanding of racial identity in North America, but from region to region within Brazil and differently throughout time as well. While the convention was once to refer to Brazilians of African descent as Afro-Brazilians instead of preto, which was considered pejorative, increasingly many younger generations of black Brazilians are opting to use the identification negro. Therefore, unlike in English, negro is the preferred term of anti-racist social justice activists, used to include anyone of visible African descent regardless of how dark or light their skin might be (among other features that factor into

Brazilian notions of race, such as hard color and texture). It is important to note, too, that

Brazil is a diverse and multi-racial and ethnic country, and there are many more racial identities than the ones listed here; these are, however, those most relevant to the topic of this study. In this dissertation, I will use Brazilian racial terms, untranslated and in italics, to emphasize their socially and historically contextual meanings. Sometimes, for the purposes of clarity or flow of language, I will also use the English word “black” to mean

28 something equivalent to the Brazilian term negro, and “white” as a translation of branco.

The term Afro-Brazilian is used only when contextually appropriate, especially to specify

African descent and African-influence culture as separate from racial identity or phenotypical presentation, or when that is how a person or practice is self-identified.

I understand and use gender terminology in similar ways, where gender identity is understood as both a projection of socially and culturally constructed identities and traits onto a physically sexed body, and as a fluid form of self-identification that may not fit socially constructed binaries or may change throughout an individual’s life. Within Afro-

Brazilian religion, there are religious roles that allow for fluid or “trans”-like gender identities and a relatively high tolerance for homosexual or bisexual lifestyles, compared to the mainstream. Nonetheless, even within this fluidity, gender itself is understood as relatively binaried, with individuals living as either men or women. This is changing as younger generations have adopted the discourse of North American queer activism as well as developing their own, but it is the case that my interlocutors understood and described their social worlds in fairly heteronormative, cis-gendered terms. For this reason, despite their problems, I use the terms “women” and “men” to denote their heteronormative, cis- gendered meanings (reliably translatable between Portuguese and English), with the understanding that these terms refer to broadly social categories and roles but not necessarily the self-understanding of the individuals who lived and live within them.

In my analysis, I foreground a transnational and relational approach to understanding the history and practice of culture and identity formation. In a context in which Brazilian nationalism stresses processes of cultural mixture between European, African, and indigenous influences as central to Brazilian identity, and both racist and anti-racist

29 ideologies also invest in notions of bounded and autonomous “cultures,” this study seeks to adopt the approach outlined by Micol Seigel (2009), who argues that transnational encounters have been key sites for the production of national and racial identities.

Following Seigel, I understand the transnational to be phenomenon that are not bounded by national frames because they are either smaller than or exceed them. These transnational encounters, always occurring across inequalities of power and thus “uneven,” are moments in which mutual influence can be exchanged but which also provoke comparative discourses that work both to construct racialized and gendered national difference and erase the presence of the transnational in the national. Much as Stuart Hall (1981, 1993b) has argued that popular culture or black culture should not be understood as entirely autonomous from the sphere of activity and influence of economic and racial elites, Seigel argues that those nations which frequently become the center of comparative tropes—such as the United States and Brazil whose racial ideologies are often compared—in fact bear a transnational relationship that has helped to produce the very difference under comparison, but which has been erased from popular memory.

In keeping with this understanding of transnationalism, this study of maracatu nação seeks to reveal its transnational past and present, demonstrating that the practice and its precursors have been shaped by uneven translocal—transracial, transclass, transregional, and transnational—encounters, some even occurring outside of Brazilian geo-political territory, since before the “discovery” of the New World itself up to the present day.

Though not seeking to debunk maracatu-nação’s status as a “black”, “African,” or “Afro-

Brazilian” practice—a disingenuous claim given the racial and ethnic identifications of its primary practitioners both historically and in the present—this study nonetheless aims to

30 demonstrate, following Hall (1981, 1993a, 1993b) and Seigel (2009), that maracatu nação has always been a product of uneven racial encounters and has been shaped by actors not only African and Portuguese but Dutch, British, and Anglo-North American, among others.

This orientation seeks to complicate both Brazilian nationalist narratives of mestiçagem and narratives of “African purity” by accounting for the workings of power embedded in processes of cultural change and exchange—processes that are both inevitable products of cross-cultural contact and uneven products of social inequality.

As such, this study understands both academic and non-academic knowledge production to be a central site of encounter, especially work based in historical and ethnographic paradigms. Increasingly, anthropologists and ethnographers such as Stephan

Palmié (2013), J. Lorand Matory (2005), Heidi Carolyn Feldman (2006), Mattijs van de

Port (2011) and Hermano Vianna (1999) have embraced a historical scope to understand the role of anthropologists, folklorists, and other ethnographically-minded scholars in shaping Afro-diasporic religion and music—according to Palmié, contributing to the social and discursive construction of their very objects of study. Palmié problematizes the historical construction of the very categories upon which an ethnographic object such as

“Afro-Cuban religion” are predicated, questioning bounded assumptions about racial/ethnic/national identifiers such as “Afro” and “Cuban,” and categories of thought and practice such as “religion,” or even the notion of bounded “culture(s)” itself. As such, he draws attention to the ways in which scholars, especially anthropologists, categorically construct the very objects they study through that study, and in so doing also become agents of change in the lives, thoughts, and actions of those people that are the objects of ethnographic attention. In this way, ethnographers become historical actors, just as they are

31 in turn acted upon by the phenomena they study. This then makes possible that fields of study such as “Afro-Cuban religion” become dominated, across intellectual generations, by questions that have more to do with the concerns of the ethnographers than those of their informants; or conversely, that ethnographers may also be “manipulated” by informants in the service of their own ideological projects—or, indeed, for their very survival (Collins 2015). Ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014) similarly turns to the work of Colombia’s nineteenth-century folklorists, naturalists, and other intellectuals, to demonstrate how their ideas about music, sound, and the voice shaped broader notions of the relationship between race, humanity, animality, and the nation.

Ochoa Gautier demonstrates that the cultural “work” undertaken by folklorists and ethnographers is not limited in its effects to ethnographic objects and national identities but can shape notions as far-reaching as the very definition of what it means to be human.

While much of the power of ethnographic representations and the ethnographers who produce them resides in the realm of the ideological, the above-mentioned studies also demonstrate the ways in which ethnographers have made intentional and unintentional interventions in the realm of practice itself. It is now well documented that anthropologists, folklorists, and other ethnographically-minded researchers have mediated and encouraged

(Vianna 1999); revived and recreated (Feldman 2006); discouraged, altered, and edited

(Port 2011); and outright invented (Matory 2005; Palmié 2013) some of the “nuts-and- bolts” details of the practices they write about. In so doing, they both further certain ideological agendas and insert their interventions into the traditions they study.

Importantly, the interventions of ethnographers did not take place solely in the realm of intellectual production and academic scholarship; many were and are also artists

32 whose work is informed by their research and whose ethnographic interests have been informed by their art. This has been especially true among artists involved in artistic innovation, experimentation, or the avant-garde in various epochs since the nineteenth century. Both James Clifford (Clifford 1981) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) have demonstrated the congruencies and tensions between ethnography and the avant- garde art world. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett outlines, both domains of activity work with what she terms “confusing pleasures”; they search out the strange, foreign, and incomprehensible. Yet while the ethnographic impulse values confusion as part of the process of gaining ethnographic insight (at which point confusion is replaced by comprehension), the avant-garde resists contextualizing, explaining, and interpreting in order to exploit the pleasure of confusion for its own sake. Though they espouse different end-goals, the ethnographic and the avant-garde should be understood as fundamentally related gestures; just as the discipline of anthropology and the European avant-garde’s fascination with orientalist and exoticist tropes grew up alongside one another during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too have many important avant-gardists also worked as ethnographers—such as, for example, Béla Bartók, whose compositional innovations found inspiration in the Magyar folk songs collected through his work as an ethnomusicologist (Nelson 2012);6 or, as elaborated by Heidi Carolyn Feldman (2006), the active and influential role played in the “World Music” scene by new-wave/art-pop musician David Byrne. If both gestures can be fundamental to the life’s work of single individuals, then the relationship between the ethnographic and the avant-garde should be

6 Not coincidentally, Bartók’s compositions and published writings also adopted a deeply nationalist bent, in an effort to militate against the influence of Romani music “contaminating” the national(ist) music of Hungary—see Piotrowska (2013).

33 understood as collaborative rather than opposing. This kind of “collaboration” becomes a highly productive way of understanding the work of the artists-folklorists dedicated to composing stylized maracatus.

Of course, it needs to be clarified that the way in which I am using the word

“ethnography” here is not exactly equivalent to today’s conception of the methodology as embraced by academic departments of anthropology. As James Clifford stipulates regarding the “ethnographic” tendencies of the early twentieth-century French surrealists, ethnography in this sense refers to “a more general cultural predisposition which cuts through modern anthropological science and which it shares with modern art and writing.

The ethnographic label suggests here a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality...” (Clifford 1981, 542). Clifford elaborates:

Indeed, it requires an effort of imagination to recapture the sense, or senses, of the word ethnography as it was used in the surrealist twenties. A defined social science, with a discernible method, a set of classic texts, and university chairs was not yet fully formed. Examining the word’s uses in a publication like Documents, we see how ethnographic evidence and an ethnographic attitude could function in the service of a subversive cultural criticism [...] It denotes a radical questioning of norms and an appeal to the exotic, the paradoxical, the insolite (unusual, odd). It implied, too, a levelling and a reclassification of familiar categories (Clifford 1981, 548).

This early, “extra-academic” ethnography, or what might be termed “para-ethnography,” centered around what Clifford termed “ironic participant-observation” (Clifford 1981,

549)—an apt phrase to capture the dynamic through which members of the local and transnational middle-class have approached maracatu nação and other Pernambucan popular culture since the early twentieth century to this day. Importantly, and in alignment with trends in Brazil at the time, the French surrealists that Clifford describes were particularly interested in “black culture”—both African and African American—as the

34 object of their “ironic” ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, the two phenomena were linked, not the least in the influence and impact of French-Swiss modernist poet Blaise Cendrars,7 whose interest in Afro-diasporic cultures led him to visit Brazil where he was received by the leading figures of Brazilian modernism at the time. And, just as would occur later in the mid-twentieth century with the interventions of composer and musicologist César

Guerra-Peixe, this ironic sensibility, which resisted contextualization and notions of authenticity, also became a driving factor behind a push towards greater “scientific” rigor among some participants in the movement examined by Clifford (1981, 545).

For many of the foundational figures of the ethnographic disciplines, ethnographic research and representations were deeply linked not only to modernism but to the rise of nationalism as not only a political but a cultural organizing trope. Geo-political units justified their organization as such on the basis of a shared national culture, which was believed necessary and sufficient for maintaining loyalty (and submission) to the state.

Ethnographers and folklorists saw their collections of “folk” stories, songs, handicrafts, etc., as the basis for the formation of a national culture. At the same time, it was seen as paramount to rework these “folk cultures” in service of the nation: to edit out the anomalous and discrepant, to distill the collected “folklore” down to its imagined “essence,” to

“refine” it, working it into forms consistent with bourgeois sensibilities and erudite

European art forms.

This was as true of Latin American nationalisms as it was of European ones, though with differing inflections. As newly independent nations emerging out of colonial societies composed of widely disparate ethnic groups spanning four continents (by the early

7 Cendrars also published around this time a collection of African “folklore” entitled Anthologie Nègre (Cendrars 1921).

35 twentieth century, Latin America was home to significant East Asian, South East Asian, and Middle Eastern diasporas as well as the more frequently acknowledged European,

African, and indigenous groups), Latin American nationalisms were confronted much more with the question of cultural hybridity than were European ones, which could more neatly sweep their own heterogeneity under the rug. The responses of nationalist movements to hybridity in Latin America encompassed both efforts to homogenize or “purify” their populations (both eugenically and culturally) and efforts to celebrate, valorize, and encourage hybridity. Ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gaultier (2006) argues that rather than understanding Latin American forms as divided into traditional “pure” and

“hybrid” forms, Latin Americanist postcolonial (or to use the Latin American term, decolonial) scholarship should begin with the assumption that all of culture is in some sense hybrid and that “purity” should be replaced by the concept of epistemologies of purification (the discursive and practical construction of purity) and “hybridity” by epistemologies of transculturation (the emphasis and novelization of hybridization). Ochoa

Gautier argues that treatment of traditional and popular musics in Latin America cannot be understood as falling under one single disciplinary or ideological approach but are united in that they all simultaneously participate in the purification (folklorization, provincialization) of local musics and their popularization (globalization, hybridization)— for to declare one practice, artifact, or piece of lore as either “pure” or “hybrid” is to situate it relationally against its supposed opposite. In this way too, then, are ethnography and the avant-garde linked, which in their mutual approach of the strange (whether foreign or domestic) mutually constitute and build from one another. What the ethnographer collects as representative of the national-folk, the avant-gardist reworks into representative of the

36 national-elite. Both projects serve the nation-state, and as shall be demonstrated below, both act to turn the cogs of cultural change.

This study also works from the idea put forth by historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot

(1995) that all historical understanding is most relevant to the period in which it is produced—that it could and should not be otherwise, since the construction of meaningful historical narratives can only take place via the connection of events and information after the fact, and must constantly be revised as new information comes to light and new ideas and questions rise in importance. Trouillot argues against positivist claims that historical meaning is transparent, and constructivist claims that all histories are equally valid/invalid, to instead point to the ways in which inequalities in power and access to resources shape not only the unfolding of history, but the way in which sources are created, archived, synthesized, and published into historical narratives. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) similarly argues that the meaning of “ethnographic display,” whether in museums, ethnographic texts, World’s Fairs, or heritage festivals, lies in the destination, not the source. Meaning is produced in the engagement of the viewer with the display via the mediation of the ethnographer/curator and should not be mistaken for the meaning of the

“ethnographic object” in its original context. Incorporating the insights of Trouillot (1995) and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) with those of Matory (2005) and Palmié (2013), this study seeks to uncover the ways in which the activities of ethnographers have propelled the history of maracatu nação and its politics of race and gender, activities which are always already entangled with the contemporary forms of power and the political concerns that shape the published academic record.

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Rather than presenting a totalizing narrative of either the absolute representational power of academic scholars or the agency of subaltern performers of maracatu nação, this study seeks to view both sets of actors in uneven and often mutually misunderstood dialogue. Historian James Sweet (2003) has argued that though the material and expressive culture of Africans in Brazil were inevitably impacted by slavery, deeper cultural meanings, logics, and cosmologies were much slower to change. Sweet argues that this is because differently enculturated individuals, such as those born in Europe or Africa, would interpret a single “mixed” practice through their own cosmological lenses, thus ensuring the continuation of multiple and simultaneous cultural meanings and logics despite the superficial merging of forms. Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014) has demonstrated that highly ethnocentric nineteenth-century travel writing produced by cultural and intellectual elites nonetheless bears readable traces of subaltern perspectives. My own doctoral research will be based in an understanding of transnational encounter as a process of interaction not only between objects, symbols, and practices, but the interaction between simultaneous and co-existing interpretations of outward forms.

These interactions may include both top-down and bottom-up appropriations, which in turn are subject to multiple, parallel interpretations, in a process which may produce convergence, divergence, or further parallelism. Just as academic researchers have shaped the history of the objects they study, subaltern human “objects” of study have shaped the academic record in ways beyond the open and apparent. For example, John F. Collins

(2015) has demonstrated how the marginalized Afro-Brazilian residents of the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia, have both manipulated and appropriated the ethnographic practices the Bahian state uses to manage them, in order to navigate their way

38 through forced housing removals. In the process, they wind up consciously manipulating and inscribing themselves into state archives. However, this study is attentive to the likelihood that this phenomenon—what Palmié calls the “breakdown of the ethnographic interface” (2013, 149–221)—is a much more long-standing process than commonly assumed, and perhaps an inherent part of the ethnographic interface itself.

1.5 Historiography and Scholarly Contributions

This study, in emphasizing issues of transnationalism, gender politics, the interplay between knowledge production and practice, and the relationship between ethnography and history, also contributes to furthering discussions about continuity and change in Afro- diasporic culture. Since the inception of Afro-Brazilian studies in the late-nineteenth century, discussions have been dominated by debates about the degree to which Africans and their descendants retained or reproduced African culture in the Americas. Early scholars, many invested in either a whitened or mestiço Brazil, worked upon the premise that while most Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious practices demonstrated a certain degree of “outside” influence, nonetheless some variants of those practices exhibited more

“African purity” than others in their retention of supposedly more “unadulterated” African

“traits.” 8 Many scholars have been able to show that traits assumed to be “African” and

“non-African” are in fact dubiously so, and much “non-African” influence has also been erased from popular memory (Matory 2005; Palmié 2013).

8 For examples of this early scholarship, see the work of Brazilian scholars Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (Nina Rodrigues 1935 [1896]) and Edison Carneiro (1936, 1937), and U.S. anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1966b).

39

The terms of debate are often traced back to the rivalry between white US anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African American sociologist E. Franklin

Frazier. Early in his career, Herskovits sought to trace “African retentions” in the New

World and developed his theory of acculturation, and though he would later move to an approach which emphasized the syncretism or creolization of Afro-diasporic culture, he nonetheless was still invested in the idea of a direct relationship between Afro-diasporic and African cultural practices (Herskovits 1966b). Frazier, on the other hand, argued that the experience of slavery produced a complete rupture from African culture, and that the culture of African Americans was a response to the conditions of slavery and the subsequent oppression under which they lived after abolition (Frazier 1939). Frazier felt that this was particularly true in the United States, while places like Brazil did in fact exhibit a greater retention of African culture (Frazier 1942). Herskovits’ view of the fundamental continuity (even through change) of Afro-diasporic culture would become the broadly accepted one for many decades.

In the 1970s, Mintz and Price forcefully argued against any kind of meaningful continuity between African and African American cultural forms, emphasizing instead the process of creolization and adaptation to new and changing circumstances as central to the formation of African American culture (Mintz and Price 1992). Particularly, Mintz and

Price called for the abandonment of methods that sought to draw correlations between New

World material and expressive culture and supposed African cognates, such as that pioneered by Herskovits. The debate around notions of continuity and change as reflecting

“mixture” and “purity” continue to animate both academic and popular debates as anti- racist activists in Brazil have sought to “de-syncretize” Afro-Brazilian religion and culture

40 in opposition to widely embraced Brazilian nationalist ideologies celebrating culture mixture.

It is important to note that such debates have been largely taking place within the discipline of anthropology; historians, on the other hand, have been more preoccupied with questions of the availability and bias of sources and the question of agency. Since the

1990s, historians of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-diasporic, and Atlantic world cultural and intellectual history—often referred to as “new revisionists”—have sought to pay more attention to Africans and their descendants as historical actors. Scholars such as John

Thornton (1998), Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), João José Reis (1993, 2015), James

Sweet (2003, 2011), and Mariza de Carvalho Soares (2011) have sought in diverse ways to emphasize the agency Africans and their descendants in shaping New World history and guiding the continuity and change exhibited in New World cultural practices.

Anthropologist Stephan Palmié has critiqued the new revisionist school as reductively and often erroneously homogenizing virtually all New World culture as “African” (2013, 233–

234). As Mintz and Price acknowledged but ultimately dismissed as beside the point (Mintz and Price 1992, 7–22), the attempt to draw connections between New World and African cultural practices is often misleading because it over emphasizes material culture, practice, and outward symbolism, instead of the broader and more subconscious sensibilities, logics, and cosmologies that govern their use; Mintz and Price nonetheless conclude that Africans had no viable institutions for maintaining the continuity of these deeper forms of culture.

Working from contemporary primary sources rather than conjecture based on contemporary practice, new revisionists have been able to demonstrate that Africans and their descendants in fact had ample such institutions, not the least of which were the Black

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Catholic brotherhoods, Candomblé and other religions, carnaval organizations, and the organizations known as “nations” that each bear a relationship to the development of maracatu nação. Palmié’s critique of the new revisionist school assumes an understanding of culture limited to its material, practical, and outwardly expressed forms, and is centered on questions of identity and cultural ownership. However, the new revisionist school has in fact been less concerned with establishing, for example, whether to term religions such as Santería, Candomblé, and Vodoun as African or Afro-diasporic, and more concerned with writing the agency of black African people and their descendants back into the history of those religions. As James Sweet (2003) argues, the degree to which Africans exerted their agency over both the maintenance of continuity and the adaptation of their culture to its new context in the Americas can only be fully grasped if approached precisely through the underlying cosmologies and cultural logics that governed their choices.

This study seeks to build on and further complicate both the new revisionist approach and that advocated by Palmié (2013). I seek to demonstrate that the performance practices that contributed to the development of maracatu nação, whether seemingly “mixed” or

“pure,” were deeply shaped by the diplomatic agency of African royals and ambassadors, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants in Brazil, and the diverse yet broadly cohering West and West Central African cosmologies that guided their magico-religious and cultural practices. I also seek to demonstrate that the recent changes in maracatu nação and its global circulation have also resulted from the choices of Afro-Brazilian actors responding to the social concerns of the present. At the same time, I seek to highlight the roles of a wide variety of transnational actors that recognizes the development of maracatu nação as inherently dialogic yet does not reduce this dialogue to the interaction of the “tri-

42 ethnic mix” (European, African, and indigenous) so central to Brazilian mestiço nationalism. Rather, I seek to demonstrate that the development of maracatu nação took place as a result of the agency of Africans and their descendants in negotiating relationships with Portuguese explorers, traders, and missionaries to Brazil and Africa; Portuguese,

Dutch, British, and Brazilian-born slave-owners and colonial-era travelers; foreign and

Brazilian scholars and other researchers; the state, policy makers, funding organizations, national and international tourists and the tourism industry; and other non-black and non-

Brazilian participants in Afro-Brazilian musical and religious practices. These actors, depending on the context, have likewise exerted influence over the development of maracatu nação.

I also seek to contribute to this discussion by considering the ways in which gender and gender politics have shaped processes of cultural continuity and change. Some anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural historians have sought to examine the ways in which gender intersects with race and socio-economic status in the complexly racialized and hierarchized “color” spectrums of Latin America and other colonial and post-colonial societies.9 Fewer have made central the question of how gender politics and gendered struggle have been productive of both Afro-diasporic cultural change and broadly held conceptions of racial identity, such as in the work of J. Lorand Matory (2005) on the rise of matriarchy in Candomblé. This study seeks to build from Matory’s insights by remaining attentive to gendered struggle as productive of both cultural change and continuity—not only in response to the influx of US anthropologists to Brazil in the 1930s

9 See Laura A. Lewis (2003) and Anne McClintock (1995) on colonial Mexico and South Africa respectively; see Micol Seigel (2009), Carla Sacon Brunet (2012), and Natasha Pravaz (2008a, 2012) on twentieth-century Brazil.

43 with which he is primarily concerned, but as an always-present element of social relationships in any place and time. This study will examine the rise of notions of matriarchy and matriarch-like figures in the history of Afro-Brazilian culture and especially in maracatu nação as both a broader and older phenomenon than suggested by Matory, one resulting from material, cultural, and strategic factors guiding a variety of historical agents engaging with notions of gender.

1.6 Modernism, Nationalism, Regionalism, Maracatu

The beat of maracatu is entirely different from that which we are familiar with in terms of rhythm. It is strange, it has a special flavor of Africa. In a folkloric festival in Salvador, Bahia, the folklorist Evandro Rabelo, on a mission from Empetur, brought the group Maracatu Indiano to perform. The performance stage wound up being on a steep hill, lined by old city mansions. At the top of the hill, when the maracatu emerged and began the rhythm of baque virado, it seemed like those mansions would fall and that everyone watching immediately turned their gaze to the hilltop. The sound of the zabumbas, the caixas da guerra, the tarois and gonguês, dominated the environment. It was the maracatu that spoke most loudly. And it was the sole folklore presentation that made the writer Luiz da Camara Cascudo and Rosinha de Valença descend from the official podium, to the stage, in unrestrained enthusiasm (Stélio Gonçalves 1976).

Intellectual and artistic preoccupations with Brazilian national identity have been at the forefront of Brazilian cultural production since independence in 1822, though these questions took on a special urgency in the 1920s and 1930s. The rise of Brazilian nationalism was linked to the Brazilian modernist movement, though these two intellectual projects should be understood as distinct but overlapping, with a wide variety of approaches contained within and between them. Brazilian modernism in the early twentieth century encompassed both avant-garde/experimentalist and traditionalist emphases and was likewise connected to the rise in regionalist thought during this same period. This was a regionalism that both contested and worked together with a broader nationalist orientation. One point of consensus between all of these modernist, nationalist, and

44 regionalist strains is the key role of music and performance culture in the formation of

Brazilian national identity. As authors such as Santuza Cambraia Naves have argued (2015,

37–47), the major intellectual figures associated with this period set the terms of discussion for later movements, particularly musical movements, for the rest of the twentieth century up to the present, establishing a variety of intellectual projects and the various points of convergence and tension between them. These intellectual movements have deeply inflected the course of cultural politics in Pernambuco, not only in how artists and intellectuals navigate between local cultural practice and national identity, but also how they relate to other regional constructions—especially the nearby state of Bahia and attendant notions of blackness and Afro-Brazilianness—as well as between ideas of tradition and innovation.

As Amilcar Almeida Bezerra (2009) and Naves (2015) argue, the various identity projects witnessed in the broad field of Brazilian popular music are heirs to the intellectual legacy of two towering figures of the early twentieth-century modernist movement: Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. The two were friends, but despite their shared surname, were not blood related. While Mário was open to a certain degree of formal experimentation (as exemplified in his 1928 “rhapsodic” novel, Macunaíma) he primarily emphasized popular and folkloric traditions as the basis of a new Brazilian national identity and rejected anything deemed to be “foreign” influence. He was involved in the formation of state organizations for the collection and “safeguarding” of Brazilian “folklore,” and personally travelled the country (which he never left during his lifetime) to record the practices specific to Brazil’s many diverse regions. Mário’s distinction between “foreign” and “national” practices hung upon the fusion of elements of Portuguese, indigenous,

45 and/or African culture, while the cultural influence brought by Brazilians of other backgrounds (given the presence, for example, of large Italian, German, Arab, and

Japanese populations in Brazil by this time) were not considered to be adequately

“national.”

Mário’s contemporary Oswald de Andrade, on the other hand, developed in the

1920s the idea of antropofagia (O. de Andrade 1972)—“cultural cannibalism”—to argue that Brazilian artists and intellectuals should critically consume international influences to aggressively appropriate the best they had to offer and rework them into a “uniquely

Brazilian” result. Arguing for a “technologized primitivism,” Oswald embraced ironic and irreverent metaphors based on the (contested) claim that indigenous Brazilians practiced cannibalism. Deeply influenced by socialist internationalism, Oswald sought to create a vision of Brazil as a nation which could at once embrace its locally developed practices, reject the repression of bourgeois and European elitism, and yet not close itself off from international influence through the embrace of xenophobic and reductive attitudes. While the two Andrades were friends, colleagues, and together made up part of the broader modernist movement, their two distinct approaches to the formation of national identity would establish two distinct legacies within Brazilian culture—Mário, the legacy of movements which emphasized local “folkloric” popular culture as the basis of national identity, and Oswald, the legacy of experimentation, openness to international influence, and the embrace of new technologies and the culture industry.

Alongside the “two Andrades,” the Pernambucan anthropologist Gilberto Freyre articulated ideas about Brazilian identity that would be deeply influential in the formation of both national and northeastern regional identities. Freyre (see Bezerra 2009; and Falcão

46 and Araújo 2001) argued that the distinctive character of Brazilian culture was formed in the social relations between masters and slaves in the sugar plantations of northeastern

Brazil. Though not in fact the inventor of the idea of “racial democracy” (Vianna 2001),

Freyre did argue for the positive valuation of mestiçagem (the racial and cultural mixture of Portuguese and African, and to a lesser extent indigenous, people and culture) as the cornerstone of Brazilian identity. While Freyre considered the sugarcane producing regions of the Northeast to best exemplify this process, contributing massively to the development of regional distinctions and identities in Brazil, he considered mestiçagem to be characteristic of all Brazil, integrating his regionalist perspective into a broader nationalist project. Together with Mário and Oswald de Andrade’s influence on the development of

Brazilian culture, Freyre’s nationalist regionalism also helped to set the terms of how the

Andrades’ projects would be taken up in Freyre’s home state of Pernambuco. All three would be major influences on the artist-folklorists who first began studying and stylizing maracatu nação in the 1930s.

The regionalism that animates representations of the Brazilian Northeast is not limited to any one particular state in the area, though places like Pernambuco and Bahia have wielded a massive influence on the shape of these representations and discourses and hold a major stake in their outcomes. This regionalism places local Northeastern cultural practices and identities in opposition to the nationalized hegemony of Southeastern culture and thought emanating from the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. As Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. (2014) argues, the cultural differences both perceived and existing between Brazil’s various regions are the product of processes of discursive construction taking place throughout the course of its history and are as much the result of Northeastern

47 as they are of Southeastern thought. However, these regionalized differences would undergo a profound reformulation after the transition from an independent monarchy to a democratic republic in 1889. During this time, previous conceptions of a Brazil divided into “North” and “South” would further split on an east-west axis, with the “Southeast” and the “Northeast” (the most populous and urbanized) emerging as the most discussed and theorized of the many regions. The Southeast, centered around the city of São Paulo

(and to a lesser and differently inflected extent, Rio de Janeiro), was constructed as politically dominant, economically prosperous and powerful, technologically superior, and socially and culturally modern. The Northeast, on the other hand, was constructed as politically subordinate, impoverished both by outdated economic and social structures and frequent natural calamities, technologically and socially “backwards,” and culturally traditional(ist) and “folkloric.” The degree to which these differences can be reduced to discursive constructs (for example, rather than the product of unequal regionalized relations of power, or differing historical trajectories connected to sugar versus coffee production) is debatable—but the discursive strategies of regionalism as an ideology without a doubt contribute to glossing over the complexities of the Northeastern region, such as the vast disparity between the rich and poor, the rural and the urban, and between the various local identities encompassed within the broader umbrella identity of nordestino.

As Albuquerque Jr. likewise points out, it also obscures the ways in which Northeastern intellectuals have been deeply invested in the construction of negative or at least ambiguous stereotypes about the Northeast in service of their own political projects.

The states of Bahia and Pernambuco, and their respective capital cities of Salvador and Recife, are often seen as competitors for a hegemonic position within the Northeastern

48 region itself. Both places possess their own distinct relationship to Brazilian regionalism, nationalism, and the Southeast, that sustains that competition. While Pernambuco is characterized by an elaborate system of state support for cultural production that emphasizes conservative, “traditional” constructions of Northeastern cultural identity,

Bahia’s cultural scene, though less rigid and state-managed and bearing a much more ambiguous relationship to both the Northeast and the Southeast, is on the receiving end of much more attention than is that of Pernambuco.

In choosing the social world of the sugar plantation, Freyre privileged a social formation that was as characteristic of Bahia as it was of Pernambuco. While both states bear a social geography that is split between the interior desert “backlands” associated with the rural caboclo (an individual of mixed indigenous and European, and sometimes

African, descent), against the coastal sugar-producing zones featuring major urban centers with large marginalized African-descended majorities and small European-descended elite minorities. However, in terms of cultural identity Pernambuco tends to emphasize its

“caboclo culture” far more than Bahia, which distances itself from indigenous influences and emphasizes its African heritage (see Patricia de Santana Pinho 2010). In the discourses of Brazilian regionalism, Bahia’s status as nordestino is more ambiguous than is

Pernambuco’s, since it was Bahian migrants and their musical practices that are considered to have given birth to Brazil’s “national music” samba, in the Southeastern city of Rio de

Janeiro at the turn of the twentieth century (Sandroni 2001).

Importantly, samba underwent multiple processes of migration: from impoverished

Bahia to affluent Rio de Janeiro with the migration of recently liberated Africans; then from the working-class black communities of the hill-side shantytowns of Rio to middle-

49 class performers and the urbane genres of samba-canção, choro and later, bossa nova.

Though Sandroni (2001) has shown that the movement of samba in the early twentieth century was far more cyclical and circulatory than commonly imagined, the over-arching trend has been that what was once a practice associated with impoverished black Brazilians in rural Bahia (a practice now called samba de roda) has come to be nationalized and associated with the glamour of Rio de Janeiro, along the way splitting into countless subgenres (samba de enredo, pagode, samba canção, samba de exaltação, and offshoots like pagode baiano, bossa nova, and choro)—each with their own class, racial, and regional associations. Critical views of this trajectory are not uncommon in popular discourse in Brazil, and the “samba paradigm” informs a great deal of the fears and concerns expressed by members of the nações about the future of maracatu nação.

Because of the samba paradigm and its close links with Rio de Janeiro, Bahia is viewed as more ambiguously Northeastern in its regional identity. It is also on the receiving end of much more attention than many other states, as the mythical homeland of Brazil’s most iconic cultural expression. Since the 1930s, Brazilian intellectuals and artists across the nation have focused intense attention on Bahia and particularly its African-influenced culture (P. de S. Pinho 2010). In the 1930s and 40s, as the modernist project shifted into a quest for national identity, Bahia, as the homeland of the creators of samba, was the subject of academic research, national literature, and popular song. Brazilian, US, and French scholars such as Nina Rodrigues, Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Melville Herskovits, E.

Franklin Frazier, Ruth Landes, Donald Pierson, and later Roger Bastide and Pierre Verger, would conduct ethnographic research on the lore, music, dance, cuisine, and religious practices of Bahia’s black population. In their artistic works, composers such as Dorival

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Caymmi and authors such as Jorge Amado transformed the state into an idyllic paradise in which European and African cultures lived side by side and intermingled harmoniously, epitomized by the figure of the baiana, a black Bahian woman who in her various incarnations could be a sexually alluring woman of racially mixed descent or the comforting, nurturing “black mammy” working away in the kitchen. Osmundo Pinho

(1998) critiques this vision of Bahia, known as “baianidade,” for its role in creating the perceived dissolution of the contradictions of Bahia as celebrated heartland of Afro-

Brazilian culture and Bahia as site of racial violence and inequality, allowing for a political consensus that becomes the basis of racial domination.

Bahia’s hegemonic position contributes to a somewhat cautious view of the state’s influence in the rest of the Northeast, and arguably Pernambuco’s entrenched “localist” traditionalism has been as much a reaction to Bahian influence as it has been to

Southeastern and international influence. Part of this localism has involved an emphasis on the above-mentioned caboclo culture from the interior desert backlands, rather than

African and black culture, despite the two states having similar racial and cultural geography. The highly conservative Movimento Armorial (see Marques 2012; Teles 2000), founded to defend “Pernambucan tradition” against the experimentalism and mass culture proclivities of the Tropicália movement, was in large part responsible for this difference in emphasis in Pernambuco. Since its founding in 1970, key figures of the movement, especially Ariano Suassuna, have been highly involved in the state government institutions, which through the financial and institutional support of certain cultural practices over others, have policed the boundaries of what is and is not “Pernambucan” culture. Indeed, though not obvious, it should be noted that from the outset this conservatism was reacting

51 to a movement—Tropicália—that though centered in São Paulo, was spearheaded by a group of youths from Bahia, from whom the Pernambucan variant of the movement drew much inspiration.

The Movimento Armorial was spearheaded by author and composer Ariano

Suassuna in the early 1970s. Suassuna argued for the rejection of international and

“modern” influence in the Brazilian arts and advocated for the creation of a Brazilian erudite culture based on local “folkloric” traditions. His vision of local folklore emphasized

“medieval” Iberian influences and the culture of the Northeastern sertão (desert

“backlands”), where indigenous influence is more prominent than African, unlike the coastal urban popular culture so associated with black and “Afro” music and dance.

Suassuna established the Movimento Armorial as an explicit defense of these practices against the “corruption” of international and commercialized influence, and also as a regionalist defense of Northeastern culture against Southeastern influence. As such,

Suassuna’s intellectual and artistic project can be seen as the inheritor Mário de Andrade’s emphasis on a musical nationalism based in “folklore” and tradition, though influenced by

Gilberto Freyre’s insistence on regional identity within a broader nationalist identity project. As journalist José Teles (2000) recounts, Suassuna’s critics have denounced him and the Movimento Armorial as xenophobic, reductive, and ultimately stultifying to the free development of culture in the Northeast, contributing to an almost fascist conservatism within the institutionalized networks of Northeastern cultural production.

Often juxtaposed against Armorial, the Movimento Manguebeat—which grew out of Recife’s rock and rap scenes of the late 1980s—became by the 1990s a national and international phenomenon. Journalist José Teles (2000) traces the long trajectory of

52 popular music in Recife throughout the twentieth century that led to the Manguebeat movement, which combined elements of local rural and urban popular music practices with

North American rap, rock, funk, and new technologies. Manguebeat bands such as Chico

Science & Nação Zumbi (CSNZ) and Mundo Livre S. A. created fusions that mediated between local and global, and likewise between traditional and modern. Rather than embracing a distinct sound, musically the Mangue movement was diverse, but embraced a common vision. They have often been compared to the Tropicália movement (Teles 2000; see also Favaretto 1996; and Dunn 2001), and though they shared a certain “cannibalist” ethos inherited from Oswald de Andrade, they differed in their conception of their relationship to local tradition. While the Pernambucan manifestation of the Tropicália movement (see Teles 2000; Britto and Lemos 1979) rejected all “folklorization” of local culture, the discourse of the Manguebeat movement, especially that of Chico Science, demonstrates a deep engagement with notions of authenticity and “salvaguardismo” associated with early-to-mid twentieth-century folklore studies, anthropology, and the nationalist strains of the Brazilian modernist movement. Rather than rejecting the logic of

“folklore,” Science envisioned the Manguebeat movement as a means of “updating” it in order to keep it as a living practice. In this way, Manguebeat mediates between the

Oswaldian and the Freyrean.

After its emergence on the Recife scene, Suassuna became Manguebeat’s primary critic, though in a complex way—encouraging, for example, Chico Science’s embrace of local tradition but lamenting his incorporation of US pop influences and modern technology. Indeed, Teles reports that despite the public debates the two sometimes engaged in, after Science’s premature death in a car accident in 1997, Suassuna appeared

53 in tears at his funeral. Such a poignant moment revealingly demonstrates that the two shared points of convergence as well as points of tension. Indeed, the Movimento Armorial was as invested in the creation of musical fusions as was the Movimento Manguebeat, for the majority of their artistic output involved the creation of works in visual art, literature, theater, music, and dance, that employed the forms of European erudite art but drew on local practice for its content. Though it espoused an ideology rejecting international influence, the Movimento Armorial held certain elements of European culture to be universal, allowing them to slip past its nationalist and regionalist boundaries. It could be argued that in a similar fashion, Manguebeat emerged at a moment when US popular music influences had already passed from being considered “foreign” in the 1960s to settling into a “universal” status by the 1980s—at least for someone of Chico Science’s generation— so that the musical fusions of Armorial and Manguebeat are not as different as they at first seem, for both are deeply invested in the reworking of local tradition into international influences the construction of Northeastern or Pernambucan identity.

Ethnomusicologist Philip Galinsky’s (2002) treatment of so-called “traditional” practices in his study of postmodernism in the Manguebeat Movement is a case in point.

Galinsky’s study emphasizes the apparent spatial and temporal hybridity of the pop music movement. Yet his discussion of the local “traditional” elements that make up part of the postmodern “hybrid” of Manguebeat depicts them as relatively stable and bounded practices. Taking the practices of maracatu nação, generally described as being the most

“African” of Pernambuco’s performance practices, Galinsky discusses changes such as the formation of recreational ensembles and folkloric troupes that play maracatu nação outside of its traditional context, the incorporation of influence from other Afro-Brazilian and

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Afro-diasporic practices, and the entrance of women as drummers. However, these changes are depicted as a part of the broader changes that also gave rise to Manguebeat—which in a sense, they are. However, in Galinsky’s ethnography, prior to 1970 maracatu nação appears almost to be a “pageant without a history.”

Other scholars have examined the contemporary practice of maracatu nação and read it vis-à-vis notions of black resistance to white cultural hegemony, variously emphasizing influence from the “reAfricanization” of carnaval in the neighboring state of

Bahia (Crook 2001) or maracatu nação’s contestations of the spatial mapping of inequality across urban space (Santana 2012). Though with different goals in mind and different approaches at hand, Galinsky, Crook, and Santana’s work all echo the notion that maracatu nação bears a relatively transparent and straightforward relationship to black or African identity in Recife. These ideas are forcefully contested by Brazilian historian Ivaldo

Marciano de França Lima (2008, 2009). Lima examines the role of early twentieth-century folklorists in the discursive construction of virtually everything that is thought to be known about maracatu nação, challenging its “African roots,” its historical relationship to the colonial-era coronations of the Kings of Congo and the Black Catholic Brotherhoods of the Rosary, and the distinction often made between maracatu nação and another local practice known variously as maracatu rural, maracatu-de-orquestra, maracatu de baque solto, or samba de matuto, which bears some striking similarities and differences to maracatu nação (Lima 2008). In particular, Lima argues that historically there was no distinction made between the two practices, and that the difference between them was constructed parallel with the simultaneous valorization of Afro-Brazilian religions thought to be “pure” (such as Candomblé and Xangô) and the repression of certain other religions

55 thought to be “tainted” by religious syncretism with Catholicism, Kardecist spiritism, and indigenous influence (such as Umbanda and Jurema). Amidst this emerging dichotomy, according to Lima, performers of maracatu nação and scholars who studied it were able to construct its legitimacy by associating it strictly with Pernambucan Xangô, while stigmatizing maracatu rural through associating it with Jurema. This distinction in turn policed the aesthetics embraced within each practice, producing the marked difference between the two observed today. In a similar vein, Lima has also argued that the new recreational percussive groups founded mostly by the white middle-classes that perform music based on maracatu nação should not be understood as illegitimate simply because their performers are not poor and black (Lima 2009).

Lima’s historical intervention brings much needed attention to the role of folklorists in shaping the development of practices such as maracatu nação, yet the way he frames his arguments does not succeed in breaking down the essentialism he is critiquing. In justification of his arguments, Lima notes that, “I am only affirming that if Gilberto Freyre was correct in the idea that we are all Brazilians, and once we constitute the country of mestiçagem and confer on ourselves an indistinct Brazilianness, there is no sense in accepting the use of differentiating concepts” (Lima 2009, 18–19). Lima’s postmodernism collapses into mestiço nationalism, clear in his insistence that maracatu nação is not

“African” but “Brazilian”. His reference to Gilberto Freyre puts what might have been a productive intervention in service of the erasure of difference via the nationalist hybrid ideology of mestiçagem, rather than its critical deconstruction. For indeed, much in the way that Stephan Palmié (2013) has characterized the influence of Cuban anthropologist

Fernando Ortiz, Gilberto Freyre was one of the key actors who conjured up the specter of

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African culture in Brazil, with “specter” referring both to the presence of “African culture” in Brazilian culture and its “death” by mestiçagem.

At base, Lima’s arguments center around debates about what does and does not count as “maracatu.” And, just like similar arguments about samba, it does not actually bridge any kind of gap between maracatu baque solto and maracatu baque virado, but rather it loads the term “maracatu” ideologically with notions of racial, regional, and national identity. Indeed, why then insist that maracatu baque solto be understood as an equally valid form of maracatu, rather than, for example, use another of its names—samba de matuto—and make a claim for it as a form of samba? The notion that the two should be considered as one makes a regionalist claim about the meaning of “maracatu” as a category of performance practice. Along similar lines, when Lima affirms that maracatu is not

African but Brazilian, he negates Afro-centric essentialisms but reinforces nationalist ones.

Such claims run counter to Lima’s stated anti-essentialist intentions, only serving to intensify the word maracatu’s semiotic power to represent Pernambuco or Brazil, while conversely reinforcing the logic that also allows it to represent blackness or Africanness, or whatever suits the particular agenda of the entity engaging with the practice. This line of argumentation, therefore, does not actually deconstruct the discourses built up around maracatu nação, only shifts them into another register.

Rather, following the ideas of Stuart Hall discussed above, even as I emphasize the role of actors of many identities and positionalities in maracatu nação’s history, I do not attempt to negate its place as an important piece of black Pernambucan identity or African descended tradition. To do so would be disingenuous given the reality of its history and the lived realities of the people who comprise the nações. Rather, my goal is to reveal

57 something of the complexity of “identity” itself, or rather, the sedimentation in the self of a multitude of racializing (and gendering, classing, regionalizing, etc.) experiences resulting from a myriad of social relationships. In this sense, maracatu nação is both very black and very African and very Brazilian and Pernambucan, because these social positionalities would be meaningless without the years of personal and collective history that gave them form and meaning. While contemporary practice cannot not be subsumed under the frameworks established by one or another reconstructed and therefore inevitably inaccurate historical narrative, nor can we deny the role of our pasts in the shaping of our present and future selves. This is as much true on a broadly social level as it is on a personal one, where research has firmly established that individuals can spend their entire lives reacting to events that they have repressed in their memories or that happened when they were too young to recall, or even to inherited traumas that afflicted past generations. While the individual and social historical narratives that we consciously construct (and constantly revise) are without a doubt important social forces, so are the events that we may only remember as feelings, for they permeate and shape everything we do. This is why debates that oppose a historical past against an anthropological present—those that explain all through the lens of inherited tradition versus those that do so through that of contemporary invention—are perpetually unresolved and can often feel reductive. The two domains of experience and creation—the past and the present, the historical and the anthropological, tradition and innovation— are not opposed but deeply intertwined, co-constitutive and inseparable.

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2.0 KINGS OF CONGO TO NAGÔ QUEENS: RACE, GENDER, AND RELIGIOSIDADE IN THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF MARACATU NAÇÃO

The Maracatú is not only music—more than music, it is theater. Primitive music, it unfolds with strange sounds and with the cadence of its words. One has the impression that the Maracatú comes up from the depths of history and that it represents a phase from before the articulated word. Each sound seems to want to speak. Each sound is a grunting or howling of primitive man; each sound exposes the anguish of an anterior drama that exhibits the Innocence of a beginning of things; each sound comes up out of the purity of genetic things; the Maracatú is a cyclops, and its dissonances belong to the world of pre-mythological melody. For me, it was more than a musical exhibition, –it was theatrical. I saw in the succession of sounds a spectacle of Creation, a portrait of the wounds and the desires of man. The sounds for me transmute themselves into the movement of dances, grand, wide, mismatched, and powerful gestures, dissonant gestures, great geometric lines that were never parallel and would never meet; it could be the First Geometry. It is a music evidently without repression. The Maracatú represents the remnants of an ancient religious cult; the faithful who possess a king and a queen when they execute their strange song, they carry aloft a doll of cloth and often execute the song in front of the door of a church. (Flavio de Carvalho, Brazilian avant-garde artist and modernist, 1948).

Of all the maracatus arising in Pernambuco, Elefante remained since 1800 – the presumed date of its foundation, or 1888, as some authors prefer –, as an example and highlight of the carnavais of Recife. It is important to clarify that, only recently, the maracatus have ceased to perform at the door of the Church of the Rosary, as was the custom, losing with this the stamp of religiosidade, transforming themselves from Nação into a carnaval club. (Maria Regina M. Baptista e Silva, Pernambucan museologist 1976).

During many years spent informally and formally studying the history and practice of maracatu nação, I have heard countless references to the significance of its religiosidade—a Portuguese word meaning “religiosity” referring to the practice’s significant linkages with religious beliefs and practices. Scholarship as well has been focused on this aspect of the practice, as evinced by the passages above. If on the one hand the notion of religiosidade has been wrapped up in exoticizing and primitivizing narratives about maracatu nação or used to express anxious narratives about its decline or commercialization, as in the epigraphs above, it has also been used to underscore the severity of outsider appropriations of the practice, whether by local or transnational

59 intellectuals, academics, or artists. The chapter explores the histories embedded in these ubiquitous references to maracatu nação’s religiosidade—a word I leave it italics to emphasize the locally significant meanings enveloped within the idea in connection with the working-class Afro-Brazilian carnaval pageant. In particular, the religiosidade of maracatu nação stems from two antecedent practices: Black Catholicism in Africa and

Brazil and its associated coronation festivities, most famously the Kings of Congo, and

Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religions, especially those practiced in Pernambuco such as Xangô and Jurema. This chapter first gives an overview of the imagery and roles performed in the widespread coronation festivities celebrated by Africans and their descendants in Brazil throughout most of its history, as well as the gendered and racialized performance roles practiced in Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religion. Drawing on extensive secondary sources as well as published primary sources penned by scholars or travelers in a “proto-ethnographic” style, the chapter delineates the interplay of African and European cosmologies and spiritual practices with elite discourses that commented on them, to outline the repertoire of icons, roles, and references that are central to contemporary maracatu nação performance. In particular, I examine how these two practices and the discourses attached to them combined to contribute to the rise of the figure of the maracatu nação Queen as the central focus of the pageant. I also outline, in the final section, my framework for understanding the relationship between present-day maracatu nação and its historical religiosidade. Rather than privileging one or another relationship as primary, I argue that maracatu nação has been and continues to be a space in which performers of the pageant make sense of the conflicting cultural and religious imperatives central to the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Brazil for Afro-Brazilians—a space I

60 refer to as a “theater of the colonial.” While never negating the significance of religious tradition and ritual in maracatu nação, I argue that the relationship between the practice and the various religious traditions that have shaped it is one that is constantly renegotiated based on the needs of the present.

2.1 Kings of Congo

There is a Brazilian tale about an African king named Francisco, known as Chico-

Rei, who was captured along with his tribe and sold into slavery in Brazil. As recounted by early twentieth-century Brazilian scholar Arthur Ramos (1950), Chico-Rei believed he had the right to continue as a king “though he was exiled from his land” (1950, 102). He eventually amassed the funds to buy his own and his son’s freedom, and once free, together

Chico-Rei and the heir to his throne continued to purchase the freedom of their tribe, and then other tribes, eventually freeing many enslaved Africans working in the mines in Vila

Rica, in the state of Minas Gerais. Naturally, Chico-Rei ruled as king over this “veritable colony” (102) of freed slaves. He even purchased some of the mines and used the income they generated to free ever more enslaved Africans and eventually to construct a church, dedicated to Santa Ifigênia, and found a brotherhood there. While Chico-Rei’s status as true historical figure or mythical hero is disputed, the story serves as a clear example of how African Kings and the founders of Black Brotherhoods have been idealized as liberators and unifiers of enslaved Africans. Though figures such as Chico-Rei may well have existed, the archival record suggests a much more ambiguous relationship between

African royals, the Brazilian Reis do Congo, and the institution of slavery, where the

61 structure of the royal courts that partook in these celebrations mirrored the contemporary bases of political and social power in Brazil and the world at large.1

It seems likely that the coronations, processions, and other dramatizations of

African royalty in Brazil served as a means of preserving and passing on the memory

African political alliances and conflicts as a form of performed oral history and would have taken on differing valences based on the ethnic group, political ties, and personal history of the performers and audiences involved. The performance of African political structures and histories likewise served ends in the colonial Brazilian present, helping to establish, maintain, and legitimize various African-descended ethnic groups in Brazil and thus allow free, freed, and enslaved participants to jostle for position in colonial Brazil’s complex social hierarchy.

The election, coronation, and procession of black Kings and Queens has been one of the most widespread and enduring popular festivals in Brazil. These celebrations have been known by a variety of names—Reis do Congo, Congos, Congadas, Moçambiques,

Maracatus, Taieiras, and Ticumbis—in their diverse regional and historical variations

(Santana 2012, 102). Some of the most famous present-day manifestations of such practices are the parades of the black Kings and Queens of maracatu nação, in which a royal court complete with a black Queen, King, Princesses and Princes, Duchesses and

Dukes, Ladies-in-Waiting, Ambassadors, Standard-Bearers, and a Royal Militia, all decked out in European Baroque finery, perform deeply African-influenced music and dance. In all instances, the coronations and processions of Afro-Brazilian Kings and Queens are

1 To add further layers of ambiguity, the coronations, as a form of popular theater, were also appropriated by the white abolitionist movement in Recife to be incorporated into the abolitionist theater repertoire— presumably involving white abolitionists performing as African royalty (Castilho 2013).

62 symbolically potent performances in a country characterized by extreme racialized social and economic inequality after centuries of the forced labor of Africans and their descendants.

While in the present day maracatu nação is firmly associated with African descended religions such as Xangô and Jurema, the processions of the royal court possess a longer and broader history tied to lay Black Catholic Brotherhoods, especially the

Brotherhoods of the Rosary. These Brotherhoods are the product of a history of African and European exchange that in fact predates Old World knowledge of the continents that came to be known as the Americas. While much of maracatu nação practice is influenced by West African descended religion, it is also embedded with icons, aesthetics, and practices that stem from Central African and Afro-Brazilian Catholicism, forming a kind of spiritual palimpsest. This chapter will examine some of the earliest representations of

Africans, African royalty, and African royal ambassadors to colonial Brazil, to understand the ways in which the legacy and memories of African royalty and Afro-Brazilian coronation practices continues in present-day maracatu nação, and to understand how they have shifted in meaning for both performers of maracatu nação and those witnessing it. In particular, I will argue for the influential role of the Kingdom of Kongo and enslaved

Africans from this region, African royal ambassadors, and European proto-ethnographers in establishing enduring representations of African royalty that have been remembered through Afro-Brazilian coronation practices. These representations link African ambassadorial and royal figures to African Catholicism, transatlantic trade, and slavery, while also placing African monarchs in an intermediary position within the symbology of an emerging transatlantic imperial hierarchy.

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To understand the many possible meanings of African royalty in practices such as maracatu nação, it is necessary to untangle the meanings of royalty generally in and between Africa, Portugal, and Brazil. The Portuguese word for king, rei, and queen, rainha, are loaded with connotations developed over centuries in Europe and never divorced from the history of European overseas expansion. Indeed, the resumption of Iberian autonomy after the final expulsion of Moorish rule occurred in 1492, seamlessly coinciding with the

“discovery” and early colonization of the Americas—two moments that were ideologically linked in emerging notions of Portuguese and Spanish nationhood. For the Portuguese, whose Reconquista was completed earlier than that of the Spanish, expansion into coastal

North Africa began as early as 1415 (Kiddy 2005, 27).

Regarding the meanings attached to kingship in West and Central Africa, it is important to bear in mind the ways in which the early efforts to translate between European and African languages involved decision-making about exactly what practices, objects, social roles, and ideas were equivalent. Political leaders in West and Central Africa before the period of first contact with the Portuguese were named and understood not in

Portuguese but in a diversity of African languages with their own sets of meanings and associations, which would only partially overlap with Portuguese conceptions of royal rule.

To translate African political structures into the vocabulary of the Portuguese royal court can be understood as an originary moment of hybridity or syncretism, grafting one culturally specific set of ideas about social organization and leadership onto another and thus forever mutually transforming one another. Such a so-called “hybrid” culture would only further develop as the Portuguese established trade settlements in coastal Africa, settled several unpopulated African islands, married local women and produced Afro-

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Portuguese offspring in these places, and eventually gave rise to their own distinct ethnic group in West and Central Africa (Newitt 2010, 8, 19).

In the case of the initial encounters between Portuguese traders (representatives of the Portuguese Crown) and West and Central African dignitaries, the use of the word rei used to describe African rulers possessed a nested quality,2 in which the Portuguese recognized the authority of African rulers but saw it as “below” that of the Portuguese King hierarchically. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning notes that the right to use European royal and noble titles was thought of as a “privilege” bestowed on African chieftains in exchange for agreeing to Catholic baptism, citing the writings of Dutch naval officer S.P.

L’Honoré Naber. According to Naber, the first occurrence of this exchange involved the

Count of Sonho (part of the broader Kingdom of Kongo,3 stretching from present day

Gabon to northern Angola and encompassing most of both the Republic and the

Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1490 (Berckel-Ebeling Koning 2011, 533 n3). Naber’s comment highlights the complex dynamics of the exchange—African dignitaries received a new title and prestige amongst competing chiefdoms based on their overseas connections and special access to a new deity, while at the same time being incorporated into a hierarchy of nobility in which the Portuguese Crown appointed itself as supreme.

It is important to note that, while this is the understanding that the Portuguese had of the arrangement, often African dignitaries did not perceive their overseas European

2 Milica Bakić-Hayden (1995) theorizes the idea of “nesting Orientalisms” to describe the relationships of Western Europe to Eastern Europe, and Eastern Europe to locations yet further “East.” Likewise, it may be useful to consider the idea of “nesting imperialisms” and “nesting colonialisms” when thinking about global power hierarchies mapped onto widely dispersed geographical space. 3 I use the word Congo, spelled with a “C,” to refer to the social formations designated as such in Brazil. This is understood here to be separate from the actual African kingdom of Kongo, which I will refer to using this spelling (with a “K”) for clarity. In direct citations of historical documents, I will maintain the spelling used in that document.

65 connections as hierarchical in the early stages of Portuguese expansion (Fromont 2014,

31). John Thornton (1998) and many others have shown that European imperialism in

Africa was not an instantaneous process of domination—most African kingdoms were able to resist European incursions well into the nineteenth century, with the important exception of Portuguese Angola (Newitt 2010, 21). Rather, European colonial expansion into Africa occurred over centuries by slowly tipping the balance of economic, social, cultural, and religious power and eventually weakening pre-existing forms of rule. As historian Cécile

Fromont argues (2014), the Portuguese and the Kingdom of Kongo in particular were allies and “amicable” trade partners for the first few hundred years of their relationship. For this reason, as Fromont and others have argued (Iyanaga 2015; Fromont and Iyanaga 2019), the enthusiastic adoption of elements of Portuguese culture, attire, and religion in the Kingdom of Kongo from the late 1400s to the late 1600s was not the forced assimilation of colonialism but a voluntary one undertaken due to internal motives—what Fromont and ethnomusicologist Michael Iyanaga have described as the “worldly, ostentatiously Catholic culture of the Kingdom of Kongo” (2019, 2).

Nevertheless, Europeans set out to Africa and the Americas with imperialism on the agenda, and this nested, hierarchical structure as envisioned by the Portuguese would gradually become a reality, further reinforced as European colonial officials and even metropolitan monarchs were called upon to intervene in political disputes between African states. Baerle recounts that when “controversy had arisen” between the King of Kongo and the Count of Sonho, they both appealed to Count Johan Maurits, then governing Dutch

Brazil, sending emissaries, letters, and gifts of enslaved Africans and material goods.

Bearle writes that three emissaries from the Count of Sonho arrived in Brazil,

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one of whom left for the United Provinces to consult His Highness the Prince of Orange, while the other two came to ask Count Johan Maurits not to lend his support to the king of Congo. The Count did not refuse this request, but in letters to the directors in Angola he tried to settle the disagreement between these princes rather than aggravating it, because both parties had treaties with the Dutch (Baerle 2011, 237–238).

In this case, Maurits appears to have been keenly aware of his power in the situation and the necessity for diplomatic restraint. Nonetheless, despite Maurits’ diplomacy in the example mentioned above, the very nature of these colonial relationships meant that his choices exerted power over the course of African history as well as the terms by which it is understood. The very choice of whether to grant a term such as “Count” rather than

“King” would have contributed to reifying or even producing African political hierarchies.

Baerle’s own proto-ethnographic attempts to describe the African world would also establish such structures for his European readers. When Baerle wrote that the “kingdom of Congo is vast and very powerful,” with “several islands” that are “governed by viceroys under the king of Congo’s rule”; that “[t]here are six provinces in the kingdom: Bamba,

Songo, Sondi, Pungo, Bata, and Bembe” and that the “Congo, which gets its name from the city, is the most important of the provinces,” he himself contributed to the legitimization of these structures, a nested hierarchy that could be placed within a larger imperial hierarchy (Baerle 2011, 237–239).

If conferring the symbolic European crown onto African dignitaries can be understood as a colonial gesture that privileged African leaders in relation to one another but placed them in a subordinate position within the larger imperial world, the crown, as symbol, was also employed to legitimize and affirm European ownership of enslaved

Africans. Art historian Rebecca Parker Brienen, in her analysis of the work of Dutch painter Albert Eckhout, mentions a telling anecdote regarding the use of the crown for

67 branding enslaved Africans. However, the story’s import requires first a description of two of Albert Eckhout’s portraits of Africans painted during his time in Dutch Brazil— African

Woman and Child (1641) and African Man (1641). Brienen describes them as

“ethnographic portraits,” composed in such a way that they suggest the individuals are

“typical” representatives of their racial and/or ethnic group, but also argues that the

“ethnographic” impulse of these works should not be assumed to be strictly tied to notions of “ethnographic authenticity” associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology. Rather, Eckhout’s paintings reveal how the ethnographic gaze is one that creates its own iconographies of ethnic difference.

Eckhout’s two ethnographic portraits of Africans are singular in that they depict the individuals with a high degree of physiognomic realism, unlike most other colonial representations which tended to exaggerate phenotypical differences to the point of demeaning caricature. This realism is consistent with representations of black people by

Dutch painters of that era, whose racism did not attempt to equate blackness with

“ugliness” to the degree that painters elsewhere in Europe or in later epochs did (Strings

2019, 15–41). Eckhout’s portraits look like real people, and they are depicted with a dignity likewise rare in colonial representations of Africans and their descendants in the Americas.

This feature of their representation has led to speculation as to whether they are meant to depict enslaved Africans in Brazil, African commoners in Africa, or African nobles

(Brienen 2006, 131–170). Both individuals are presented outdoors, wearing what is meant to be understood as “traditional” African clothing, though it may not be: for the woman, a short skirt and bare upper body, and for the man, a loin cloth. The woman sports an elaborately constructed hat made of dried, woven grasses, and strings of pearl and coral

68 necklaces around her neck. She holds aloft a bowl, decorated with “African” designs, filled with fruit, and has a clay pipe tucked into her sash. Her nude son stands next to her, holding in one hand a tropical bird and the other a cob of corn that points to his mother’s pubic area. In the background, palm trees give way to a view of the ocean and a beach where dark-skinned fishermen are hard at work. In African Man, the man is shown holding a spear and a sword of elaborate construction. At his feet are many fragments of shells and an elephant tusk. The background also features palm trees and a view of the ocean, but no other human figures.

Brienen points out that the images in fact possess a very staged quality: Eckhout likely used enslaved Africans as models and added the other elements of the composition separately. She also argues that the other elements of the composition play a symbolic role and may not be meant to represent any specific African ethnicity. Rather, elements such as the shell fragments and ivory tusk at the foot of the man represent important items of trade between the Dutch and African kingdoms, while the fruit and corn cob in the portrait of mother and child make reference to the material products of the Brazilian colony. Likewise, the man’s clothing, which most closely matches that worn by African merchants, does not align with his sword, whose elaborate construction suggests a more elite status. The type of palm tree depicted is one that grows in Africa but not Brazil. The woman likewise wears fine pearl and coral necklaces and elaborate headgear, but more modest clothing, and bears fruit which suggests a connection to slavery. She also possesses a type of clay pipe that originated in Europe but became popular amongst Africans in Brazil. The palm trees depicted are varieties that grow in Brazil but not Africa, and the fisherman in the background appear to be indigenous or of mixed African and European descent. Brienen

69 takes these details to suggest that the two portraits are composites of elements meant to present an almost allegorical narrative, with the man depicted as being free, either a merchant or dignitary of Africa, while the woman is intended to be understood as enslaved in Brazil with iconographic elements that allude to the products of the slavery system there

(Brienen 2006, 131–170). Though Eckhout’s paintings likely don’t depict “actual” African royalty, the fact that they have been often interpreted as such, and that they do incorporate elements of elite African dress and accoutrements, suggests that their appearances were not incompatible with commonly held imaginaries of African royalty.

This is further suggested by the fact that in the copies of Eckhout’s paintings made by Zacharias Wagener, employee of the Dutch West India Company, Wagener added a brand in the form of a crowned “M,” the personal insignia of Count Maurits, above the

African woman’s left breast (Brienen 2006, 134–135). Brienen notes that this addition was likely to allay any doubts about her status. The fact that Wagener thought this clarification to be necessary only underscores that the African woman’s appearance in Eckhout’s original painting was at the very least ambiguous in terms of her status.

Henry Koster, writing in the early nineteenth century, likewise mentions the symbolic use of the crown, noting that “the sign of the Royal Crown” was branded upon enslaved Angolans, a symbol which they “carry on their chests” to indicate that they had been baptized before departure (Koster 1942, 498). The Crown, as symbol and brand, operated as a cluster of references including European royal and colonial power, conversion to Christianity, enslaved status, and European domination of the transatlantic slave trade. For the enslaved Africans who went to great lengths to recreate and perform

African royal power, the European-style crown, at times branded on their chests, would

70 have been a potent but complicated icon. The European-style crown has likewise been a potent symbol in maracatu nação practice, where it is worn by the King and Queen and is the subject of many toadas.

As Thornton demonstrates, African royalty (alongside merchants and other powerful figures) were actively involved in the slave trade, which was well-established since before the Portuguese began their explorations down the Atlantic coast of Africa. The structure of West and Central African society during the initial period of the transatlantic slave trade was one characterized by rival and warring states who wielded power over one another and other local, less powerful tribal and agricultural communities. One of the primary means of enslavement was capture in war. For this reason, the distinction between slaves and conquered subjects was weak (Law 1987; M. de M. e Souza 2002, 45–49), and while the enslaved in Africa often (though certainly not always) enjoyed more personal liberties and greater freedom from coercive violence and punishing labor than slaves in the

European colonies, the hegemony of slavery as a form of social organization was widespread and firmly established by the start of the European-dominated transatlantic slave trade. African royals did not only engage in slavery as a source of wealth and political power; they were also active agents in establishing trade in enslaved Africans with the

Portuguese. Exchange of the enslaved for material goods, as well as the exchange of ambassadors, was an integral part of maintaining amicable Portuguese-African relations

(M. de M. e Souza 2002, 45–49). Some African rulers, such as the Kongo King Afonso in the early sixteenth century, were critical of the trade (Newitt 2010, 22), though Cécile

Fromont (2014, 9–10) is careful to point out that Afonso did not oppose the institution of slavery itself nor even the existence of a trade, but rather the European domination of the

71 trade and its effects on local politics and his kingdom’s economy. Over the centuries, the sale of enslaved Africans to European traders became such an integral part of the West and

Central African economy that the trade’s eventual decline in the mid-nineteenth century provoked an economic and political crisis in pre-colonial West African states (Law 1997).

While the notion of voluntary African elite participation in the transatlantic slave trade is rarely present in histories of slavery told from a “New World” perspective, it is important to remember that enslaved Africans in Brazil would have been well aware of the political and economic structure of their homelands and the support of the trade by West and Central

African nobility, and it can be presumed that their Brazilian-born descendants would have had some awareness of this reality as well (Thornton 1998, 72–125). Therefore, African royal participation in the transatlantic slave trade should also be understood as part of the repertoire of associations attached to the symbolic use of the European-style crown for branding enslaved Central Africans.

For enslaved Africans enacting the coronations of the Reis do Congo, most of whom would not have been nobles, the ways in which they chose to represent African royal power would have been responses not only to their own memories of African kingship and their continued exposure to European royal iconography, but to ambassadors and emissaries of African nobles on their visits to Brazil.4 According to Cécile Fromont (2014,

8), the Kingdom of Kongo pursued a particularly ambitious and active diplomatic agenda, via both correspondence and ambassadors to Iberia, Rome, Brazil, and Dutch territories,

4 Another important means of exposure to African royalty after the initial rupture of enslavement and the Middle Passage, and one that is beyond the scope of this work, was the involvement of many African- descended (as well as indigenous) Brazilians as soldiers in the Portuguese campaign to win back some of their African territories from the Dutch in the 1660s. One such soldier, Manuel Soares, came from the regiment of Henrique Dias, the famed Afro-Brazilian hero of the war against the Dutch in Pernambuco, to lead his own troops of Pernambucan soldiers in the African campaign (Newitt 2010, 192–199).

72 which allowed them to seek protection from the papacy, broaden their host of European allies, and ensure the trade in luxury European goods highly valued there at the time.

Indeed, in maracatu nação, the “Embaixador” has and continues to have an important place in processions and accompanying song. The primary function of African emissaries was to maintain diplomatic relations between African kingdoms and European powers so as to maintain the mutually lucrative trade in goods and humans. As such, their diplomatic missions usually entailed lavish gift-giving and entertaining in both directions. In his narration of the dispute between the King of Kongo and the Count of Sonho, Bearle writes that when the King of Kongo’s letter was delivered to Count Johan Maurits in Dutch Brazil, it came “together with a large number of Negro[sic]5 slaves as a gift to the company. The gifts presented to Count Johan Maurits consisted of two hundred Negroes[sic], a gold chain, and a gold platter” (Baerle 2011, 237). Maurits in return sent to the King of Kongo

“a long cloak made entirely of silk, decorated with glittering gold and silver borders, a silk tunic, a hat of beaver fur, and a coverlet woven with gold and silver thread intertwined. To this, Count Johan Maurits added a saber decorated with silver, together with its belt, as his own gift” (Baerle 2011, 238). On the other hand, the King’s rival the Count of Sonho “was given a chair covered with red silk decorated with gold and silver thread, a long mantle made of many-colored silk, a velvet toga, and also a hat of beaver skin” (Baerle 2011, 237–

239).

5 Historical English-language terms now considered to be racial slurs occurring in historical documents will be maintained in direct citations but marked with [sic] to indicate their problematic nature and inappropriateness for the present-day context. Historical and present-day terms originating in languages other than English that are considered to be slurs or to be problematic in some contexts will be used untranslated and in italics (such as the Brazilian term índio to refer to indigenous Brazilians) to indicate the cluster of often untranslatable meanings attached to these terms in their originating context. Therefore, the Portuguese term negro will remain decapitalized, untranslated and in italics, to denote the differing historical and contemporary context in which the word is used and is often imbued with a positive valence by young Afro- Brazilians, unlike the equivalent English word in the North American context.

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Such exchanges served to dramatize the material benefits of peaceful relations between European and African nobility. In three paintings of emissaries of the King of

Kongo by either Eckhout or Jasper Beckx, thought to depict the Kongolese ambassador

Don Miguel de Castro and his servants and painted circa 1641-1643 (Buvelot 2004, 59–

61), the King’s representatives sport items of European sartorial finery that would likely have been gifts from the Dutch, conspicuously worn on their visit to Count Maurits in

Dutch Brazil. Indeed, Kongo elites were known for having enthusiastically embraced elements of Portuguese culture, including the Catholic religion, Portuguese names and

European-style dress (Newitt 2010, 13). Like Eckhout’s portraits of the African man and woman, these emissaries are represented in a realist style that imbues them with a sense of dignity and subjectivity. The Ambassador wears what may well be a beaver skin hat with a large red plume; his two servants, each featured in separate portraits, hold a gold-plated ivory tusk and an elaborately decorated box with unknown contents, at which the servant gestures (Herkenhoff 1999, 143–145).

Baerle’s descriptions of the Ambassadors of the King of Kongo, and their representation in painted portraits, make for an interesting comparison with an account of the arrival of Dahomeyan Ambassadors in the Captaincy of Bahia in 1795. In Edison

Carneiro’s 1950 anthology of writings on Afro-Brazilian culture, he reproduces a letter from Dom Fernando José de Portugal, Governor and Captain General of Bahia, to Senhor

Luiz Pinto de Souza, Portuguese Secretary of State, written on October 21st, 1795. The

Governor of Bahia describes the visit of two ambassadors from the kingdom of Dahomey

(in present-day Benin), come to deliver a letter from the King negotiating continued trade in enslaved Africans. Dom Fernando expresses considerable uncertainty over how best

74 they should be received and treated, given that “similar Ambassadors are hardly frequent in this country” (Portugal 1950), Bahia not having received any since 1750. Dom Fernando recounts that he “ordered to be made some long garments of silk, for me to give to them, for they came covered only in a Pano da Costa [a large woven cloth of West African construction], without any other clothes, and without anyone to serve them, except a slave who speaks their own language” (Portugal 1950). Dom Fernando comments that,

Since between the potentates and rulers of the African Coast there reigns still much barbarity and rudeness, and since they do not practice those formalities which civility and politics have introduced among the European princes in order to mutually conduct their negotiations, it is hardly admirable that these so-called Ambassadors have presented themselves with neither pomp nor ostentation, and that I have only recognized them as such that deserve some attention and contemplation at the sight of the letter they presented me from the king of Dahomey (Portugal 1950).

Clearly, Dom Fernando found it highly offensive that the Dahomeyan ambassadors arrived dressed in African clothing and without “pomp and ostentation,” interpreted as a grave diplomatic error. His account serves to underscore the political significance of the

Kongolese Ambassadors’ European finery and the portraits created of them displaying the riches available through trade with Africa. And though infrequent, the arrival of such

African royal Ambassadors could not have but made a considerable impression on and incited mixed emotions among any enslaved Africans that crossed paths with them during their visits. While it is difficult to prove, it seems likely that the visit of these Kongolese

Ambassadors to Dutch Brazil wielded considerable influence over how Africans and their descendants in Brazil imagined and performed African royalty in the coronations and processions of the Black Catholic Brotherhoods of Recife.

In his description of the Kongolese emissaries, whom he claims to have witnessed first-hand in the Dutch court of the Prince of Orange, Baerle describes performances given by the two ambassadors. In the first, he mentions dances that are at the same time displays

75 of military prowess: “These envoys had strong, vigorous bodies, and black faces; they were very nimble in their movements and oiled their limbs to facilitate this. I saw with my own eyes as I watched their dances which were marvelous to see, the way they leapt, the fearful flourishing of their swords, their eyes flashing as they pretended an attack on their enemy.”

He goes on to relate the emissaries’ performance of an African king, “a scene of the king sitting on this throne, maintaining an absolute silence as testimony of his majesty.” Yet the emissaries in turn demonstrated their customs for honoring foreign monarchs: “they showed us their fawning behavior and pretended honor, which they re-enacted to our great hilarity after bouts of drinking” (Baerle 2011, 238). Baerle’s reference to the emissaries’

“pretended honor” suggests multiple levels of irreverence, not only in the attitudes of the

Dutch court towards these Kongolese emissaries, but in the performances of the emissaries themselves. The scene described by Baerle offers an intriguing, though patchy, outline of the dynamics of power between African envoys, African kings, European monarchs, and colonial officials.

It is interesting to juxtapose the scene described by Baerle to a coronation ceremony described by Koster in early nineteenth-century Recife. Koster recounts that because of the death of the previous king, a new king was elected to rule alongside the queen, who retained her post despite the death of her symbolic co-ruler. Koster states that “[t]hese sovereigns exercise a species of mock jurisdiction over their subjects which is much laughed at by the whites; but their chief power and superiority over their countrymen is shown on the day of the festival” (Koster 1816, 273). Koster notes that “[t]he negroes[sic] of their nation, however, pay much respect to them” (1816, 273–274). As part of the ceremony, the newly elected monarch went to pay his respects to the local Vicar, of unspecified race but likely

76 white, who is reported as saying, in a “jovial” tone: “Well, sir, so to-day I am to wait upon you, and to be your chaplain” (1816, 274). Koster describes the arrival of the royal court, dressed in colorful European clothing and sporting paper crowns:

There appeared a number of male and female negroes[sic], habited in cotton dresses of colours and of white, with flags flying and drums beating; and as they approached we discovered among them the king and queen, and the secretary of state. Each of the former wore upon their heads a crown, which was partly covered with gilt paper, and painted of various colours. The king was dressed in an old fashioned suit of divers tints, green, red, and yellow; coat, waistcoat, and breeches; his sceptre was in his hand, which was of wood, and finely gilt. The queen was in a blue silk gown, also of ancient make; and the wretched secretary had to boast of as many colours as his master, but his dress had evident appearances of each portion having been borrowed from a different quarter, for some parts were too tight and others too wide for him (1816, 274).

While the King and Queen are described as wearing elaborate but old-fashioned European- style garb “of ancient make,” the “wretched” Secretary of State is described as possessed only of mismatched pieces, some of which are too big or too small for him. The clothes are also described as loud, boasting of too many colors. Koster notes that for the enslaved, funds were lacking to pay for truly fine attire.

Koster goes on to recount that everything went “slowly, much too slowly for the appetite of the vicar, who had not breakfasted, though it was now nearly mid-day, for he and his assistant priests were to chaunt[sic] high Mass” (1816, 274). The Vicar’s hunger propelled him to provoke an altercation over payment (the details of which are left rather fuzzy), and Koster mentions that he “was much amused to see him surrounded by the blacks, and abusing them for their want of punctuality in their contributions” (1816, 274–

275). Finally, the conflict seemingly resolved, the participants proceeded with the coronation Mass. Koster writes that with the Mass finished, “the new king was to be installed; but as the vicar was hungry, he dispatched the matter without much ceremony; he asked for the crown, then went to the church-door,--the new sovereign presented

77 himself, and was requested or rather desired to kneel down; the insignia were given to him, and the vicar then said, ‘Now, sir king, go about thy business’” (1816, 275).

Koster’s narrative suggests multiple layers of irreverence: whites laughing at the

“pretensions” of Brazilian Congo Kings, the Vicar’s brusque officiation of the crowning due to want of lunch, Koster’s own amusement at the Secretary of State’s second-hand clothing and the conflict between the Vicar and Their Majesties. Laura de Mello e Souza’s study of witchcraft and popular religion in Brazil demonstrates that irreverence towards symbols of religious and political authority coexisted with expressions of devotion, respect, and fear of the representatives of that authority, with all of these expressions sometimes articulated by single individuals (L. de M. e Souza 2003, 45–87). Irreverence, devotion, respect, and fear should be understood as a variety of co-existing responses to the social hierarchy of colonial Brazil. For those enacting this performance of African royalty and for

Baerle’s Kongolese Ambassadors, irreverence—for their Masters, the Vicar, whites generally, and African sovereigns— may not have been absent nor in conflict with sincere investment in the idea of royal power.

Understanding the shape of royal power in West and Central African kingdoms during this time is indivisible from the goal of understanding African religious cosmology, including the relationship of nations such as the Kingdom of Kongo to Catholicism as introduced by the Portuguese. Spiritual belief and practice were a fundamental part of how

West and Central Africans understood their place in the political universe as well as the relationship between their nation or ethnic group and others. Scholars of religious

“syncretism” in the African diaspora have emphasized that African Catholicism should not be interpreted as in opposition to autochthonous African religious practices. Indeed, the

78 notion that Africans engaging with Christian cosmology had either “converted” and were rejecting their prior religion or doing so as a façade is only salient under a European

Christian monotheistic logic that emphasizes the existence of “one true God” and considers any differing theology or religious practice as “heresy.” In contrast, African cosmologies during the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade operated on a significantly different polytheistic paradigm. John Thornton (1998) argues that European and African cosmologies shared enough similarities to allow them to fuse, and that overlapping but differing understandings of “revelations,” moments in which religious truths were revealed, enabled Africans to spiritually invest in Christianity while at the same time changing it and producing an “African Christianity”. Building from the insights of

Thornton, James H. Sweet (2003) argues that “African Christianity” was often only nominally Christian—while African elites may have had some opportunity to learn the particularities of Catholic theology, most commoners (the majority of the enslaved) would have had only a superficial familiarity with the symbology of the Christian religion. Rather, in an African cosmology that recognized the existence of multiple deities who each ruled over distinct ethnic groups or kingdoms and who may cooperate or come into conflict, the widespread acknowledgement of the existence and power of the Christian God by Africans did not entail conversion or worship, only an expansion of their cosmological universe

(Sweet 2003, 103–117). Sweet stresses that enslaved Central Africans who were baptized en masse before departure for the Americas had received no religious instruction and often viewed their baptism as an act of malicious magic by slave traders, perhaps the very magic that had enabled their enslavement in the first place (Sweet 2003, 191–215). Whether they chose to align themselves with or oppose that magic, it was seen as real and something that

79 had to be reckoned with.6 Although Sweet differs from Thornton in emphasizing that the apparent conversion of Africans to Christianity was superficial, he also stresses that within their polytheistic cosmology, enslaved Africans did not see Christianity as false or untrue but rather as a set of supernatural forces with which they could be opposed or aligned and which were deeply tied to power in the New World social order. One way or another,

Africans who embraced Christianity, such as those of the Kingdom of Kongo, practiced it in a way consonant with their own cosmological world views, creating what art historian

Cécile Fromont terms “Kongo Christianity” (2014, 14), but which could be broadened to

“African Christianity” or “African Catholicism” to include those, admittedly fewer, non-

Kongo Africans who also engaged with the religion, whether in Africa or in diaspora.

Laura de Mello e Souza (2003), writing on popular religion, religious syncretism, and witchcraft trials in colonial Brazil, likewise argues that Europeans brought with them not only elite, dogmatic, official Catholicism but popular forms of spiritual belief that incorporated aspects of pre-Christian European paganism with continually evolving forms of folk magic intertwined with Christian symbolism. In colonial Brazil, these practices had much more in common with African cosmology and would combine with African and indigenous religious and magical practices in a type of popular religious syncretism that crossed racial and class lines. Mariza de Carvalho Soares likewise finds evidence in the records of the Mahi Congregation of eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro that members, though identifying as Christian, were also wary of the possibility of witchcraft being

6 In many ways, this logic was not so different from that which governed European Christian cosmologies, if not perhaps in their official discourse, then at least in their practice. Afterall, for many centuries Europeans believed in the power inherent in the witchcraft of non-Christians or non-conforming Christians, taking it seriously enough to systematically hunt it out and suppress it. The key difference is that Europeans insisted on interpreting non-Christian religious practices as acts of Devil worship, subsuming these beliefs and practices under a Christian interpretive paradigm rather than taking the claims made by worshippers of non- Christian deities at face value.

80 directed towards them (Soares 2011, 188–200)—“witchcraft” in this case most likely implying some form of African-derived magico-spiritual practices. For enslaved and free

Africans in Brazil, under a cosmological world view that allows for the existence of multiple and at times opposing spiritual forces, the range of autochthonous African and

European spiritual beliefs and practices made up parts of a single cosmological whole.

Nonetheless, religious practice and religious difference were not divorced from social difference and hierarchy but were rather mapped onto them, so that social relations also formed a part of the religious and spiritual iconography of both European and African royal authority.

For many Africans and their descendants in Brazil, the development of their relationship with Christianity took place in the form of Black Catholic Brotherhoods. The lay Black Catholic Brotherhoods stemmed from the Portuguese Catholic brotherhood tradition, in place since at least the thirteenth-century (Reis 2003, 39). These Portuguese brotherhoods were devoted to charitable works for their own and non-members alike and were each devoted to a particular saint. They had a formalized administration and usually strict guidelines restricting membership based on race and economic class. Many also tended to be comprised of individuals of a particular profession, so that they often came to reflect the various social groups in their broader community. When the Portuguese began to establish trade settlements in West and Central Africa in the fifteenth century, they also established brotherhoods there, eventually including some of the earliest Black

Brotherhoods as well, long before the “discovery” of the Americas. One Portuguese Bishop in São Tomé, Frei Martinho de Ulhoa, even noted, writing in 1595, that the current king of the Kingdom of, Álvaro II:

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himself has had his name inscribed [as a member of] the most pious confraternities, and each year he is elected president of one of them. He personally carries out certain acts of piety as if he were an ordinary person. There are six confraternities, namely the Holy Sacrament, Misericórdia, the Immaculate Conception, the Rosary, the Holy Spirit and Saint Anthony of Padua (Newitt 2010, 224).

Not only were Black Catholic Brotherhoods well established one hundred years after first contact between the Kongo and Portugal, but participation in these confraternities was seen as a privilege worthy of a king. While this is purely speculative, it is possible that an association between elite and royal status and participation in Black Catholic Brotherhoods in the Kingdom of Kongo even fed into the association that developed in Brazil between brotherhoods and the election and crowning of Afro-Brazilian royals.

The Black Catholic Brotherhoods were conceived of as communities organized around Catholic devotion to a specific patron Saint, but they informally functioned as mutual aid societies, primarily providing funds for two of the most expensive undertakings in the life of an African or black Brazilian: manumission and funerary services (Soares

2011, 113–145). They would also organize festivities in honor of their patron saint and to celebrate the election and coronation of new Kings and Queens. There has been much debate as to how to understand the functioning of lay Black Catholic Brotherhoods in slave- holding Brazil. Some have seen acquiescence to the pressures of conversion, “slavocracy,” and the loss of African culture (Scarano 1976; M. de M. e Souza 2002), emphasizing the role of the brotherhoods in integrating people of color into colonial society—thus, despite whatever benefits they may have offered their members, functioning ultimately as a mechanism of white domination. Others have argued that Black Catholic Brotherhoods were important strategies of survival and that, because they were condoned and even encouraged by the Portuguese administration, provided relatively safe spaces for community; these scholars have emphasized the benefits that Black Catholic Brotherhoods

82 offered their members and the ways in which they allowed for the continuation of certain elements of African culture, albeit in a restricted fashion (Mulvey 1980, 1982; Kiddy

2005).

Both Mulvey and Soares argue that the Black Catholic Brotherhoods bore a complex relationship to African cultural and religious practices. Brotherhoods held strict policies on behavior for their members, requiring them to be upstanding individuals who refrained from any connections with African magic and cults; this did not prevent local elites from suspecting the brotherhoods of in fact harboring “heathen” practices. She notes that the practices of the brotherhoods do indeed betray some evidence of religious syncretism, especially in the use of “fetishes” in processions.7 Mulvey (1982) also argues that this religious syncretism was present in the style in which black brothers and sisters would conduct public celebrations using African music and dance. The most notable of these public celebrations was the annual election and crowning of African Kings and

Queens, especially the King and Queen of Congo, which would be celebrated on the feast day of the patron saint of the Brotherhood—usually, Our Lady of the Rosary. Soares (2011) likewise demonstrates that members of the Mina Brotherhood in eighteenth-century Rio de

Janeiro saw their Christianity as a status symbol and sought to distance themselves from the Bantu majority which they viewed as “heathen”; this embrace of Christianity did not preclude many male members, however, of suspecting the female members of the brotherhood of “witchcraft,” by which they likely meant African magical and religious

7 The English word “fetish”—originating from the Portuguese feitiço meaning spell, charm, magic, or witchcraft—was historically used to describe items thought to be imbued with spiritual power or to house deities, and was usually only applied to non-Christian religion, especially those originating out of Africa. See Harding (2000, 19–37) for a theoretical discussion of the notion of the “fetish” and its problems in studies of Afro-Brazilian religion.

83 practices. Both João José Reis (2003, 51) and Laura de Mello e Souza (2003) go further, arguing that the white and Black Catholic Brotherhoods alike were in fact the primary vehicle for the transmission of popular or “folk” Catholicism in colonial Brazil.

Patricia Mulvey’s (1980) early work on the brotherhoods argued that since

Brazilian Black Catholic Brotherhoods contained members from all segments of Brazilian society, including African-born free and enslaved individuals from all ethnic groups, Black

Brazilian Creoles and mulatos, and even a few whites, and also included male and female members, they should be considered the most inclusive organizations in colonial Brazil.

However, the brotherhoods were restricted based on identification with one of many

African “nations”—something like an Afro-Brazilian ethnic group—as well as by gender, with only a few mixed-gender brotherhoods and even fewer sisterhoods. The concept of

African “nations” in this context is a complex one to untangle. In her study of African

Catholicism in mid eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, historian Mariza de Carvalho Soares convincingly demonstrates that the formation of present-day conceptions of African ethnic groups and nations was a colonial process inherently tied to Portuguese exploration of coastal Africa and eventual colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade. Many present-day African ethnonyms were in fact European inventions which played a part in reformatting African political organization. Many of these terms originally designated groupings based not on our present-day understanding of ethnicity but rather geographical areas (independent of the mapping of various ethnic groups), religious distinctions between

Christian, Muslim, and “other” autochthonous African religions, and degree of proximity and contact with the areas of Portuguese exploration and control. In Brazil, Soares argues that the use of African ethnonyms should be understood primarily in relation to the

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Brazilian social context: these ethnonyms should not be assumed to be equivalent and parallel terms for ethnic groups in Africa, nor is their use consistent in various locations in

Brazil or throughout various time periods. Rather, the use of African ethnonyms in Brazil should be understood as designating alliances formed between Africans in Brazil in response to their contemporary and local contexts (Soares 2011, 19–100). These “nations,” as they came to be called, eventually took on a reified quality, becoming something like their own distinct ethnic groups founded upon linkages to a (partially imagined) African past, using terms and amalgamations of traits that were never linked as such in Africa or which in certain instances may never have existed. It is important to point out here that this process of ethnic identity formation is not unique to the history of African colonialism and transatlantic slavery but rather one that is present it all ethnic identity formation, which always emerges in part through political relationships and other social formations; it therefore should not be understood to undermine the “validity” of these “nations” or ethnic identities, since they are no more constructed than European ones. In the case of these new

Afro-Brazilian ethnic groups, as they perhaps should be understood, the notion of African ethnic lineages has taken on immense importance for those who identify with them and have been useful in strategies of survival for marginalized black Brazilians in the twentieth century. Historian Kim D. Butler demonstrates how in the post-abolition era (in Brazil, the decades after 1888) in the Northeastern state of Bahia, black organizing centered around ethnic and cultural difference between Afro-Brazilians, predicated upon the idea of separate and distinct “nations” or nações (Butler 2000).

Mariza de Carvalho Soares demonstrates the link between lay Black Catholic

Brotherhoods, the development of the coronation ceremonies, and the crystallization of

85 various Afro-Brazilian ethnonyms. In her study of the eighteenth-century Mahi

Congregation, a subsection of the larger lay black Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa

Efigênia that was predicated upon Mina “ethnicity,” Soares (2011, 183–221) recounts how the practice of electing Kings and Queens helped mitigate tensions due emerging identities of yet further ethnic particularity within the larger Mina group by “redistributing participation and prestige” (2011, 186) among representatives of these new “nations.”

While the election of royal courts within lay brotherhoods was a practice that dated back to medieval Europe, in Brazil the lay black brotherhoods came to place a special emphasis on this practice and link it to the developing nações (2011, 138). Coronations involved public processions and festivities, with the organization, habiliment, and other accoutrements of the royal courts figured on a European model, and the music and dance aligning with African practices. Such celebrations were not limited to a specific region in

Brazil but were common anywhere that saw significant populations of enslaved and free

Africans.

The coronations likewise were not limited to any single nação, though the most common were those that referred to themselves as Congo. Indeed, for most of the country’s long history with slavery, most enslaved Africans brought to Brazil were of Central African origin and thus more closely linked to the prominent Kingdom of Kongo, which covered the area between present-day Gabon in the north to Angola in the south. The Kongo’s ruler at the time of first contact with the Portuguese, Nzinga a Nkuwu, was famously converted to Christianity in 1491 during the establishment of “friendly” trade relations between the two states beginning 1485. Nkuwu, with his conversion and coronation by representatives of the Portuguese Crown, there after changed his name to King João I. Elizabeth W. Kiddy

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(2005) reminds that Nkuwu’s conversion appears to have been spiritually superficial, given that he abandoned the faith after only three years. Rather, Kiddy argues that the adoption of the new religion of the Portuguese would have acted as a status symbol for Kongolese elites and an effective diplomatic measure. Despite Nkuwu’s eventual retreat from the

Christian faith, the religion would be embraced by his son, Afonso, who upon inheriting the throne from his father also worked to establish Christianity as the Kongo state religion.

This meant primarily the religion of the elites, integrated into pre-existing cosmologies.

However, the general populace (which made up most of those enslaved) would also have had some basic familiarity with the symbolism, if not the full extent of the beliefs and practices, of Christianity, filtered through their own cosmological interpretations (Kiddy

2005, 50–51). In most Brazilian black coronation ceremonies, the court has been that of the King of Kongo, and some of the ceremonies explicitly re-enacted Nzinga a Nkuwu’s conversion.

The coronation festivities practiced throughout Brazilian history may have had roots in political performances in the Kingdom of Kongo. Cécile Fromont discusses the

Kongolese practice of sangamentos, or staged performances of military pomp and prowess enacted at the declaration of war as well as at other public events, including saint’s days, feast days, and public ceremonies, and she makes connections between the sangamentos and coronation festivities in colonial Brazil (2014, 21–63; Fromont and Iyanaga 2019, 3–

4). While the Brazilian coronations do not appear to be a one-to-one direct descendant of the Kongolese sangamentos (the Brazilian festivities were not limited to organizations of the Congo “nation”), there are many points in common, and no doubt many elements of the sangamentos did in fact feed into the Brazilian coronations. Indeed, after the conversion

87 and ascension to the throne of the Kongo King Afonso, who publicly framed his rule as the second founding of the Kongo, the sangamentos involved two parts—one that enacted the first founding using traditional Kongo dress and iconography, and a second that celebrated the second founding of the Christian Kongo incorporating European dress and iconography, including the European style crown.

Items made of iron were highly associated with royal power not only in the Kingdom of Kongo but in many other nearby kingdoms as well. Particularly emphasized was the single or sometimes double bell found in so many African and Afro-diasporic musics, central to the rhythmic logic of maracatu nação in the form of the gonguê. Indeed, while many historical documents describe instruments resembling the double-belled agogô used in many other parts of Brazil, the 1591 text of Filippo Pigafetta, recounting the preparation for battle in the Kingdom of Kongo, describes an instrument remarkably similar to the single-belled gonguê:

The movement of their troops in battle is controlled by various sounds and noises, directed by the captain-general [...] By these sounds, the orders of the general are distinctly understood [...] They use three principal sounds in battle. One is given by large kettledrums [...] Another sound is made by an instrument in the shape of an inverted pyramid, which is pointed at the bottom and at the top is wide like the base of a triangle in such a manner that there is an angle at the base but at the top it is flat. These instruments are made of thin plates of iron and inside they are concave and hollow like a bell turned upside down. They are struck with wooden sticks, and they are usually cracked to produce a sound that is raucous, horrible and warlike [...] Not only are these sounds in general use, but they are also used in combat, for during the skirmishes, brave men went in front of the soldiers, striking the bells with wooden sticks, leaping and urging them on, and also warning them of the dangers of the weapons that were being hurled at them (Pigafetta cited in Newitt 2010, 138). 8

This “inverted pyramid,” a large iron bell held open-end-up and struck with a wooden stick, perfectly describes the shape and technique of the gonguê, which is likewise a large,

8 From Filippo Pigafetta, Relatione del Reame di Congo et delli circonvicine contrade tratta dalli scritti and ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez Portoghese, Rome, 1591, reproduced in Newitt (2010, 138).

88 triangular iron bell held open-side-up, supported by a long iron bar, and struck with a heavy stick. While the gonguê likely had diverse antecedents, this instrument of war described by

Pigafetta seems likely to have been one, and its use as a tool of communication as well as a means of “urging” soldiers on is interesting to compare to its present-day role, where the loud, sharp tone of the bell (strong enough for one to be heard above dozens of drummers) is used to anchor the overlapping rhythms of the ensemble together, allowing them to play as a cohesive unit. The one or two performers on gonguê in a maracatu nação parade often move throughout the ranks of drummers, rather than remaining in a fixed position like the others, and tend to dance and jump more often, giving the distinct impression that they are trying to “urge on” the drummers, the bell therefore still fulfilling a similar role.

Fromont also discusses at length the symbolic importance of the iron sword, still symbolically brandished today by the Kings and Queens of maracatu nação as well.

Though the focus of Brazilian coronations was on the conferral and display of royal power along with music and dance, many cortejos have included a small, symbolic militia, including those of maracatu nação who are usually dressed as Roman warriors. Because of these similarities—the festive performance of military prowess, the use of European dress and the European style crown, and the inclusion of important iron implements such as the bell and the sword as symbols of royal power—it seems likely that the Kongolese sangamentos fed into the development of the Brazilian coronations.

Scholars have debated whether crowning ceremonies that celebrated the religious conversion of the King of Kongo reflect black and African acquiescence and accommodation to European domination or should be understood as spaces of resistance to that domination. However, as discussed above, for Africans with backgrounds in

89 polytheistic cosmologies, developing these practices would have been understood as additive—adding the Christian God to their already established pantheon, and interpreting the Christian faith through the logics of their own cosmologies. Furthermore, the continued performance of this conversion in pre-abolition Brazil would likely have been a multivalenced practice open to many readings by those participating and witnessing it— and perhaps intentionally so. In a fascinating parallel, Carolyn Dean (1999) examines the reconfiguration of Inkan royal heraldry by elite Andeans during Corpus Christi celebrations in colonial Peru. Dean finds that performances of pre-Colombian Inka rulers spoke distinct messages to distinct audiences—assuring white officials of their acquiescence to Spanish authority, while also declaring their own authority over Andean commoners. The manipulation of icons of Inkan royalty by Andean elites therefore represents a kind of quintessential colonial exchange, in which subordinated elites maintain certain privileges in exchange for cooperation with the colonial administration. Mariza de Carvalho Soares

(2011) likewise finds that the black brotherhoods and elections of African Kings and

Queens in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro were both sites in which members, most of whom were Africans who had achieved or would soon achieve manumission, jostled for an intermediary position in the hierarchy between enslaved black and free white. I understand the coronation of black Queens and Kings in colonial Brazil to be imbricated in a similar dynamic of that described by Dean and Soares, with an important difference being that the “privileges” enjoyed by freed and enslaved Africans able to participate in coronations offered fewer advantages than those permitted to Andean elites.

Memories of slavery, social structure, and conceptions of royal power in West and

Central African societies, together with reminders embodied in the visits of African

90 ambassadors, no doubt would have played an important role in the creation of crowning ceremonies in colonial, slave-holding Brazil, as suggested by the ethnographic record. In his 1901 folklore collection, Festas e Tradições Populares do Brasil, in a chapter entitled

“A Coroação de um Rei Negro em 1748,” Bahian folklorist and historian Mello Morais

Filho describes the contents of documents discovered in the Nossa Senhora da Lampadosa chapel, founded in 1742 in Rio de Janeiro. Morais Filho reproduces a petition on the part of the associated brotherhood to the “Desembargador Ouvidor Geral do Crime” (the

General Ombudsman of Crime) for permission to hold a crowning ceremony (Morais Filho

1946, 381–382). The author then goes on to describe the procession and ceremony that would have followed, drawn from the chapel’s archives and local oral histories, with an emphasis on the various members of the royal court and the “African” names9 used to describe them in place of Portuguese words: “Behind the musicians there walked majestically the Neuvangue (king), the Nembanda (queen), the Manafundos (princes), the

Endoque (magician), the Uantuafunos (slaves and vassals of the king), a bright and vigorous group of those genuinely African traditional festivities, celebrated in Rio de

Janeiro in the past century” (Morais Filho 1946, 384, emphasis added). Clearly, the notion that an African king would possess slaves and vassals was neither alien nor antithetical to those organizing the coronation. Indeed, possession of such slave-subjects would have constituted an important basis of royal and political power for anyone familiar with West and Central African royal traditions.

9 These names appear to be heavily “Lusified” in their spelling, and quite possibly may not be words in any actual African lexicon but rather Brazilian-invented terms using a combination of Portuguese and African phonology.

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Other popular dramas in Brazil featuring African royalty involved the reception of foreign ambassadors, with successful and unsuccessful attempts to avoid armed conflict, often ending with reconciliation between the two kingdoms. Embaixadores and

Embaixadas (Ambassadors and Embassies/Diplomatic Missions) assume a heightened importance in coronation ceremonies, processions, and dramas featuring African royal courts, as well as in the songs and poetry associated with these festivities. As Paola Verri de Santana notes, the Brotherhood of the Rosary in Lisbon was in fact a mediator in the relations between the Portuguese court and the African kingdoms with which it traded in slaves (2012, 98); this may well could have contributed to the heightened importance of ambassadors in performances of African royalty associated with the same brotherhood, since such mediators would have been working in a similar function.

Interestingly, in certain performances, the ambassadors initially fail in their mission and war between rival kings ensues. In his monograph on a crowning practice from the state of Paraná, the Congadas Paranaenses, folklorist José Loureiro Fernandes (1977) describes the drama enacted between the King of Congo and the ambassador of the Queen

Ginga, derived from documents describing the festival in Lapa, Paraná, in 1951. After engaging in battle, prisoners of war from the kingdom of Queen Ginga, including her ambassador, are brought before the victorious Rei do Congo to hear his decision regarding their fate:

SCENE 8 – THE ARRIVAL OF THE PRISONERS OF THE COURT OF CONGO

Upon returning to his throne, the King of Congo determines that the prisoners should be brought forth. The Ambassador does then enter, this time imprisoned between the Fidalgos of the Congo King, who bring him forward between crossed swords. The conguinhos, who follow them, continue in their wailing invocations, this time in the condition of captives, invoking royal pardon.

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Once arrived at the foot of the throne, all kneel before the King and await his decision.

SCENE 9—ROYAL PARDON

The King, sitting on his throne, with a large and fraternal gesture, extending his scepter over the head of the Ambassador, proclaiming his pardon: ‘Warriors and prisoners under lock and key, by the praises of the great Saint Benedict, all are pardoned’ (J. L. Fernandes 1977, 12, from documents housed in the Paranaguá Museum of Archeology and Popular Arts describing the Congada da Lapa of 1951).

Rather than dramas which directly challenged white European power in Brazil, the focus of the conflict is between two rival African kingdoms. Such conflicts were commonplace in pre-colonial Africa; though the real historical conflicts referenced here would rarely have resulted in the royal pardoning of prisoners of war, but rather in selling them as slaves

(Thornton 1998, 98–125). Such performances in Brazil would have not only served to preserve memory of African history for Afro-Brazilians, but also as a space in which to process the complex mediations—ambassadorial and otherwise—between African and

European religious identities.

In a practice known as Baile de Congo in the town of São Mateus, Espírito Santo state, in 1945, Guilherme Santos Neves (1976) describes a similar meeting of rival kingdoms, followed by war, only with the resolution of this armed conflict resulting in conversion to Christianity rather than a royal pardon:

Baptism

Congo King: Kneel, Bamba kings, Since I want to baptize you. You are pagan kings That have arrived in this place (Neves 1976, no page numbers).

As Marina de Mello e Souza argues (2002, 52–95), the coronations of the Rei Congo make reference to the actual historical conversion to Catholicism of the Kongolese court by

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Portuguese clergy in 1491. Souza notes that the Kongolese nobility restricted access to the new religion since religious privileges were a well-established basis of royal legitimacy.

Along with the adoption of Catholicism, the Kongolese court adopted Portuguese names, titles (such as rei, duque, conde, marquês—king, duke, count, and marquis—and the custom of referring to the king as Majestade, or “Your Majesty”), and other trappings of power such as the European-style crown. Thus, the crowning ceremony, in pre-colonial

Kongo, was a ceremony of conversion, rather than the conference of royal power, given that the court already held power—though the role of that conversion in solidifying the

Kongolese King’s power should not be discounted. Suffice it to say that although the political valences of conversion to Catholicism would have had clear links to European domination in the context of colonial and post-colonial Brazil, religious conversion in the context of West and Central African political history could also be understood as an act which conferred power—thus making the denouement of this drama of conversion an optimistic if perhaps unrealistic “happy ending,” much like the above-mentioned royal pardon.

The coronation of the Rei Congo has been variously interpreted on the one hand as a show of resistance to European domination and site for the maintenance of ties to African culture and history, while on the other hand as a means of social control used by slave- owners and colonial clergy and a practice that was influential in the establishment of

Catholic religious hegemony. While both claims may hold elements of truth, the historical record suggests that the crowning ceremonies in fact have reflected hegemonic conceptions of royal and political power. Before the abolition of the slave trade, enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil would have been aware of the well-established practice of

94 slavery as a basis for African political power, and the active and voluntary involvement of

African royals in the transatlantic trade with Europeans—both through the parts of their lives spent in Africa before sale to European traders, and through the visits of diplomats and ambassadors from African kingdoms to the colonial administration in Brazil. This awareness is reflected in eighteenth and nineteenth-century records of coronations, in which the King and Queen’s royal court included slaves and vassals. This social structure was not entirely symbolic, since it appears that the individuals elected to the Brazilian

“throne” wielded power and influence within their communities, limited of course by the legal and social restrictions placed upon the enslaved and free people of color. Yet despite the presence of “slaves” in Afro-Brazilian royal courts, some performances also occlude the connection between African royalty, political conflict, and enslavement, resolving dramas through pardons or religious conversion rather than the far more typical end of forced labor. Nonetheless, the coronation ceremonies and other forms of popular theater involving African royalty mirrored the structure of African and Brazilian society, whether based on a legitimization of power through the ownership of slaves and vassals or the power to press for religious conversion, though with the important distinction of placing free and enslaved Africans and their descendants at the helm, if only within the context of the celebration.

Beginning after Brazilian Independence in 1822 and especially in the decades following the abolition of slavery in 1888, many of the Black Catholic Brotherhoods and their coronation festivals would go into decline, remaining as living cultural practices only in a few areas by the mid-twentieth century (Kiddy 2005, 4). In Pernambuco, in a process which is poorly documented, processions of African royal courts developed that were

95 known as maracatu10 and would become associated with Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religion. This process occurred at some point in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century: the first known recognizable description of maracatu nação appears in the book Folk-lore Pernambucano, published by Brazilian folklorist Francisco Augusto

Pereira da Costa (commonly known simply as Pereira da Costa) in 1908. The word maracatu, however, appears in Brazilian historian Silvio Romero’s ethnographic framework for his 1888 history of Brazilian literature, as an example of a word of African origin, though he does not define it nor tie it to descriptions of African royal courts and brotherhood processions elsewhere in the book (Romero 1943, 120). These references are, however, scant, making it difficult to understand the precise relationship between maracatu nação and the many other coronation festivities historically practiced by black Brazilians.

The following section will examine another important component of the notion of religiosidade—the Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religions that are more commonly understood to be at the core of this idea than are Afro-Brazilian coronation festivities and

Black Catholicism. After giving an overview of the many religious traditions encompassed under this umbrella, with a basic sketch of their practices, cosmologies, and general history, this chapter will examine more closely the gender roles associated with this religion, as well as the ways in which elite intellectuals contributed to their development, to explain their profound influence over the gender roles of contemporary maracatu nação practice.

10 The designation nação would not be added until the twentieth century when massive rural-to-urban migration led to increased contact with another practice also sometimes known as maracatu, what is now usually called maracatu rural. See Lima (2008) for an extensive discussion of the relationship between the two.

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2.2 Nagô Queens

Alongside African Catholicism, enslaved Africans brought with them to Brazil a plethora of religious, spiritual, and magical beliefs, practices, and religions that were indigenous to Africa itself. Those beliefs and practices would enter into mutual influence with one another, and the many other religious practices present in colonial Brazil, changing over time to develop into what are now referred to as “Afro-Brazilian religions” or “African-descended religions.” These religions, the most famous of which is Candomblé from the state of Bahia, just to the south of Pernambuco, are plural, varying from region to region and within regions, displaying a remarkable diversity. However, these religions cannot be understood as part of broader streams existing along a spectrum between those displaying greater “syncretism” with Catholicism, European spiritism, and actual and symbolic indigenous influences, and those considered to be “pure” in their adherence to

African tradition. I place these terms in quotation marks to denote that none of these religions (nor indeed any religion) is devoid of those religious cross-pollinations often historically theorized as “syncretic”; in addition, many of those elements assumed to be

“outside influences” have been revealed to be entirely coherent with the originating African cosmologies that shaped these religions. However, as will be discussed below, the frequent interpellation of Afro-Brazilian religions as “pure” or “syncretic” exists as a highly important social fact, critical to understanding the cultural politics that play out around these religions. In addition to varying in these ways, Afro-Brazilian religions are also often distinguished by “nation” (nação), much as maracatu nação is. These various “nations” of

Afro-Brazilian religion have been shown to have once been much more diverse than in the present, where decades of what is sometimes referred to as “Yorubá hegemony” have

97 tended to homogenize (or standardized, depending on one’s perspective) the many diverse practices gathered together under the umbrella of “Afro-Brazilian religion” (Dantas 2009;

Harding 2000; Birman 1995; Butler 2000; Matory 2005; Parés 2013).

While these diverse religions vary widely, most play upon a core format in practice.

These religions tend to share a broad cosmology with the indigenous religious practices of

West and Central Africa, wherein the supreme being (that which in the Judeo-Christian tradition would be understood as “God”) is viewed as distant from human affairs, while a wide pantheon of less powerful but still mighty deities and spirits take interest in human affairs and act as intermediaries between humans and the supreme being. Ritual is based around communication with these deities, whether through forms of divination, through ritual possession often induced through African-descended forms of drumming, singing, and dance, through the giving of offerings and sacrifices, or through the working of other kinds of magic. In many traditions, practice also requires an elaborate series of initiations, though many members of the broader community may seek out the spiritual aid of the initiated or attend certain group rituals. Importantly, historically the practice of these religions has not been dogmatic but varies from temple to temple and even from initiate to initiate; nor has participation in one religious tradition necessarily precluded one from practicing another, including Christianity and other religious traditions originating from outside of Africa—even when those traditions may not permit the same fluidity in the other direction.

While Afro-Brazilian religions have been primarily associated with the African- descended working class, historians have shown that since the colonial era there has been a consistent presence of white participants (as initiates or more commonly as clients and/or

98 patrons of the initiated), both lower and upper class whites (Reis 2015; L. de M. e Souza

2003; Sweet 2003). This has been the case while most Afro-Brazilian religions have also been much maligned in public discourse, and often repressed by the authorities, whether colonial administrators, agents of the Portuguese Inquisition, or by the police and other representatives of the state in the twentieth century. Over the decades, Afro-Brazilian religions—especially those constructed as “pure” in their adherence to “African tradition”—have shifted from being perceived as causing political alienation among the oppressed black majority, to being associated not only with Afro-Brazilian identity but black identity politics and notions of resistance to European cultural and religious hegemony (Harding 2000; Butler 2000). This politicization of Afro-Brazilian religion, and especially Candomblé (or the variant known as Xangô in Pernambuco), has fueled the movement to “de-syncretize” the religion, whereby practitioners eliminate elements of

European origins, such as the names and iconography of Catholic saints, in favor of

African-derived ones that may or may not have already been in usage.11 It has also made white participation in the religion a contentious issue for many. In addition, the cultural politics surrounding Afro-Brazilian religions, especially where they have intersected with the interests of the local and foreign intellectual elites who made the first studies of the religious complex in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries,12 have created a situation in which those Afro-Brazilian religions that construct themselves as adhering to

Nagô (the term for Yorubá in Brazil) tradition are seen as the most “authentic” expression

11 On the de-syncretization movement, see Martins and Lody (1999) in Bahia and Costa (1977) in Pernambuco; for critiques, see Dantas (2009) and Matory (2005). See Palmié for a critique of similar issues in Cuba (2013). 12 On Bahian Candomblé, see Nina Rodrigues (1935), Arthur Ramos (1935), Edison Carneiro (1936), Ruth Landes (1994), Melville J. Herskovits (1966b), E. Franklin Frazier (1942), Roger Bastide (1978), and Pierre Verger (1999). On Xangô in Pernambuco, see Gonçalves Fernandes (1937) and René Ribeiro (1952).

99 of black identity and resistance—such as Candomblé and Xangô—while other variants that emphasize influences from Catholicism and European spiritism (Umbanda in Rio de

Janeiro, Candomblé de Caboclo in Bahia, or Jurema in Pernambuco) are seen as alienated from these concerns. Likewise, while many Central African/Bantu trait, together with West

African traits from sources other than Yorubaland, are present in Afro-Brazilian religious practice, these elements often go unrecognized as being of African origin, or if they are, remain undervalued in comparison to that constructed as Nagô.

These issues become significant with respect to the study of maracatu nação, since the practice, though deeply influenced by Central African cultural and religious practices and bearing strong links to African Catholicism, has nonetheless now come to be associated with Afro-Brazilian religions—namely Xangô, and equally significant but less emphasized, Jurema. Debates continue not only between scholars but among performers of maracatu nação as to the religious history and contemporary identity of the practice, where most members of the maracatu nação community will site religiosidade

(“religiosity”) as the primary criteria of determining insider/outsider status, before that of race, social class, or neighborhood.

Historians of colonial Brazil have shown that the earliest manifestations of a specifically Afro-Brazilian religious practice emerged in the form of calundus, largely

Central African inspired rituals centered around healing and divination (Harding 2000;

Parés 2013; L. de M. e Souza 2003; Sweet 2003, 2011). The calundus, performed to music and dance, were not based around a “congregation” or a fixed temple in the way that contemporary Afro-Brazilian religions usually are; rather, diviners and healers conducted the rituals as needed in whatever place was safe and suitable. Thus, as a religious practice,

100 it did not have the broader structure that is seen in the terreiros of Nagô practice, which usually feature a consistent hierarchy of initiates and a regular schedule of rituals. As

Harding explains, for most of Brazilian colonial history, the Brazilian population was mostly rural; however, as the port cities on the coast, especially Rio de Janeiro and

Salvador, rose in size and political power, they also provided the urban enslaved and freed population a degree of mobility and autonomy not possible in rural contexts, and these populations were integral in the formation of Candomblé—the best documented and most studied form of Afro-Brazilian religion. Harding demonstrates that Candomblé’s biggest innovation in comparison with its various African influences was the worship of a variety of deities within one temple. Certain deities also rose or dropped in importance in the New

World context, such as the decline of deities of agriculture alongside the rise of deities dedicated to war, justice, and chaos. New deities appeared as well, either as indigenous caboclos or “ancestral” spirits that represented an archetypal “aged” enslaved African.

Historians Harding (2000, 19–38) and Nicolau Luis Parés (2013) have shown that while the calundus were primarily though not exclusively associated with Central Africans, the shift from the calundus to the first documented Candomblé terreiros was a process led by individuals of the Jeje ethnicity, a West African group from the kingdom of Dahomey in present day Benin—rather than the more famous Nagô, or Yoruba ethnic group, with which the religion is now associated. However, Parés (2013) maintains that these religious practices, which have continued in diverse and relatively un-standardized forms to this day, were not exclusive to one ethnic group, and that although “Jeje structures” came to predominate, many other elements of practice stemming from Bantu religions, Islam, the famous contributions of the Yorubá, as well as influences from Catholicism and European

101 spiritism, have been integrated into the many diverse manifestations of Afro-Brazilian religion. He insists that none of these ethnic groups, nor their religious practices, should be taken as “primordial” to Candomblé, nor become a base line by which to judge their

“purity.” Indeed, it is well documented that there used to exist a greater diversity of terreiros in terms of their ethnic affiliations (Matory 2005), including terreiros that trace a

Central African lineage, usually described as congo or angola. And as James Sweet has argued (2003), even those instances of the incorporation of European Christian images, symbols, words, saints, and practices should not be viewed as such a radical departure from their African past, since in many West and Central African cosmologies it was common to adopt religious influence from other “cults,” ethnic groups, and traditions.

Gender roles in Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religions have been the subject of considerable debate, though rarely with consideration from the perspective of music, dance, and performance studies. Both men and women can be initiated as priests or priestesses, who act as conduits into which the spirits descend to communicate with or simply exist among the congregants. However, the relative balance between men and women in this role—and especially among the elders and heads of religious temples—has been a topic inspiring speculation, debate, and idealization. Mostly famously, the US anthropologist Ruth Landes, who conducted fieldwork on race and gender relations in the

Candomblé temples of Bahia in the late 1930s, is commonly seen as being the first proponent of the idea that Candomblé specifically—in contradistinction with the many other Afro-Brazilian religions practiced in Brazil—constituted a matriarchy in which female elders held a superior religious rank and social power over men (1940, 1994). Her writings on the topic emphasized the ways in which Candomblé priestesses lived

102 independently from men, often living separately from their husbands when married, sometimes describing this structure as a “matriarchy” or “cult matriarchate.” Landes was also the first scholar to make mention of the common perception that many if not all male initiates were what were called in the parlance of the times “passive homosexuals”—a designation that in 1930s Brazil referred to men who performed the “receptive” and therefore “feminine” role in anal sexual relations with other men, and significantly, the only member of the party who would be subject to the social stigma we would now call homophobia. Landes also furthered the widespread belief that the participation of male initiates in any measure, and especially as heads of religious temples, was a new development and therefore a break with the supposedly more traditional matriarchal structure.

Landes’ claims and suggestions have been forcefully contested by both her contemporaries—especially the famous anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1948)—and more recent scholars as well, most prominently by the anthropologist J. Lorand Matory

(2005). These scholars have denied the claims that women held any special status as the proper heads of Candomblé temples, though they both acknowledge that women have outnumbered men overall among the initiates in Bahian Candomblé13 (Herskovits 1944,

479–480) and its West African Yorubá parallels (Matory 2005, 18, 210). Matory in particular has stressed the social consequences of Landes’ writing, arguing that her texts allowed women to make the social ascendency she described into a reality, to the detriment of men in the Candomblé community.

13 This remainder of this section considers primarily sources on Bahian Candomblé, since there are a great deal more than on its sister religion Pernambucan Xangô—especially texts that shed light on gender. While I do not mean to suggest through this that one could stand in for the other, the two religious traditions bear a close relationship that make the Bahian literature useful in the dearth of more robust Pernambucan sources.

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Yet the nuances that Landes pointed out—particularly in the ways that the religion provided a support network that allowed female initiates to live autonomously from men, as heads of households, another way of understanding “matriarchy” made use of by some of Landes’ contemporaries14—still resonate with other historical research on the place of

African and African-descended women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bahian society. Enslaved women in Brazil were more likely to work as domestic servants and form intimate relationships with their masters, or to be permitted to work outside their master’s household for personal profit, therefore making it far more common for them to achieve manumission from slavery than enslaved males (Higgins 1997; Reis 2015, 193). This greater likelihood of freedom, gainful employment, and proximity to and intimacy with landholding elites also gave them increased economic and social power, and some Afro-

Brazilian women were able to leverage such power enough to be able to achieve wealth and status as the (unmarried) partners of wealthy white men, such as the famous Chica da

Silva (Furtado 2009). Other scholars of the formation of Candomblé in the nineteenth century have noted the rising number of female participants relative to male ones (Reis

2015, 122, 142), including as heads of Candomblé temples (Harding 2000, 72), during that time. While it does not appear to have been “tradition” for all initiates or heads of

14 See the work of African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier on households headed by African American women in the US, a phenomenon he referred to as “matriarchy” (Frazier 1939). Though Frazier’s study tended pathologize such families and contributed to establishing them as a stereotype for African American communities, his central observation that the poverty, discrimination, and instability suffered by the black working-class tended to result in a higher relative number of women-led households than among white and/or middle-class black families holds some validity. Given the timing of the publication of this research (based on his already published dissertation), the fact that both Frazier and Landes came under the harsh criticisms of Herskovits for similar claims, and the ways in which some of Landes’ later sociological explanations for a matriarchal structure in Candomblé align with Frazier’s ideas (Landes 1953)—Frazier indeed defended her views (Frazier 1943)—all together suggest that Landes’ use of the word “matriarchy” may have referred more to a sociological, Frazierian sense of the word than the more “mythological” notion of ancient, pre-modern matriarchal societies also in vogue at the time and often projected onto her work.

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Candomblé temples to be women, it does appear that due to social factors, female participants as leaders in the Candomblé community had been on the rise for decades.

In an article on the social consequences of Landes’ ideas, Sarah Hautzinger, an ethnographer of black women’s political organizing in Bahia, proposes an important qualification on the apparent power and autonomy of working-class Afro-Brazilian women observed by Landes, herself, and others: it is a “relative power, notable in subcultural pockets of women” (Hautzinger 2018, 211) that does not negate the overall context of poverty, white supremacy, and patriarchy in which these women live, nor does it include all women living in that context. Hautzinger points out that to idealize instances or even the prevalence of autonomous living from men and critical socio-political mobilization among Afro-Brazilian women risks erasing or obscuring the oppression that they face.

Hautzinger’s framing provides a way of understanding the import of the gendered social structure that Landes describes, while avoiding both the traps of idealizing that structure or of dismissing or denying it in an attempt to avoid or refute that idealization. It seems likely that black women living in the social space of Candomblé have exerted their agency to navigate the gender roles and expectations of the religion and broader Brazilian society, leveraging them to their advantage—not only after Landes published her work but for many decades beforehand, leading to the gendered dynamics that Landes observed.

Earlier ethnographic sources on the religion bear this out, containing various references and suggestions that women constituted such a majority among Candomblé initiates that their gender was presumed to be the default for the role. The influential

Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, nineteenth-century Brazilian psychologist and the founding father of the ethnographic study of Afro-Brazilian religion, discussed at length his theories

105 on the nature of their spirit possession rituals, consistently using almost only feminine pronouns in his examples and discussion. Yet Nina Rodrigues also diminished the agency of these women and even questioned their sanity, arguing for a psychological basis for the phenomenon and exploring the possibility that it was some subset of hysteria, perhaps

“somnambulism” (Nina Rodrigues 1935, 99–140). Of course, the notion of “hysteria”— the psychological malady of the “wandering womb”—was inherently and profoundly gendered feminine. That Nina Rodrigues turned to theories of hysteria to explain spirit possession in Candomblé suggests that by the time of his writing at the turn of the twentieth century, the role of Candomblé initiate was already firmly associated with women. In connecting these two ideas, Nina Rodrigues also made a link between black music and dance and mental illness, imagined in this case to be peculiarly contagious.

However, to do this Nina Rodrigues had to dismantle certain notions about race and hysteria and in the process, establishing critical discourses in the field of study regarding race, gender, possession, and dance. In particular, to make his argument, Nina Rodrigues had to refute the notion held by his contemporaries that black women did not suffer from hysteria: “contested as the existence of hysteria in the black race has been, this conclusion must be at least dubious. And the necessity of demonstrating the lack of reason of those who deny its existence obliges us to examine the assumption more closely” (Nina

Rodrigues 1935, 127). After critiquing the claims of other scholars regarding the non- existence of hysteria among black women in Africa and the United States, Nina Rodrigues disputed similar claims made by a Brazilian colleague, Lacerda: “I cannot speak to what

Sr. Dr. Lacerda has observed, but if Sr. Dr. Lacerda desired to observe hysteria among black women in all of its forms, he needs do no more than to come to Bahia,” later

106 commenting: “This is to say nothing of the mestiças of the black race, in which hysteria does not only exist, but is of great frequency” (Nina Rodrigues 1935, 130). According to

Nina Rodrigues, black women and especially women of mixed ancestry in Bahia were in fact quite prone to suffering from hysteria.

However, Nina Rodrigues stipulated that the form of hysteria among the women he observed (the discussion does not consider its possibility among men) was of a special kind, which in circular logic he also offered as further proof of its existence:

if any doubt still manages to persist in this respect, the extremely salient and preponderant role that the black race represented in the great endo-epidemic of abasia- choreiforme that since 1882 reigned in this state in an epidemic form for almost three years, for more than ten under the endemic form and still today exists in a sporadic form, is more than sufficient to undo it among both doctors and the general public. The considerable number of negros attacked by abasia-choreiforme that daily would perambulate the streets of this city, was the most irrefragable proof that the race has no immunity for hysteria (Nina Rodrigues 1935, 134).

The term abasia-choreiforme, or “choreic abasia” in English, refers to an inability to walk due to “abnormal” movement of the legs, specifically when this inability is thought to be psychological in origin. The word “choreic” compares these “abnormal movements” to dance, though it always pathologizes them as “unruly” because they lack the grace and fluidity of movement of elite, Western European-influenced dance aesthetics. In the collective, large groups of people moving in this manner were described as instances of choreomania, a mania of unruly movement, and a word which Nina Rodrigues uses liberally throughout his argument.

The performance studies scholar Kélina Gotman (2018) describes choreomania as the nineteenth century pathologization of “disordered” movement (uncontrolled, unintentional, lacking fluidity, collective, and without purpose) as mental disease. These ideas were developed by European psychologists and philosophers who liberally

107 interpreted reports of “epidemics” of “dance mania” in the ancient world and Medieval

Europe, theorizing the disorder as linked to a sort of Dionysian spirit of bacchanal (2018,

66–69)—casting as disease what were in actuality moments of social rebellion or jubilation among dissenting religious sects. Nineteenth-century psychologists such as Jean-Martin

Charcot linked the disorder with the unruly movements observed among female hysteria patients, thereby gendering the imagined epidemic movement disease as well. The many terms that made up a part of the choreomania lexicon are, of course, outdated and rarely used in contemporary psychiatric diagnoses. Instead, behaviours and conditions that may once have been lumped together under the pathologizing discourse of choreomania— epileptic and non-epileptic seizures, dance understood as such by its performers,

“convulsions” and other “unruly” movements associated with religious practices or social unrest, and uncontrolled movement in moments of psychological distress—are now separated out from one another, with only some understood to be “disorders” and others seen as forms of self-expression.

Nonetheless, the largely armchair study of choreomania (similar to Said’s

Orientalism) helped establish ideas about movement, aesthetics, and disorder that endure to the present in notions such as “dance crazes” and “infectious rhythms” (Browning 1998).

These ideas would spread from Europe, where they were discourses focused on the irrationalities of an imagined primitive past and the frailties and deceits of the feminine sex, to the colonies where they expanded in definition to a disease of the non-white, colonial or enslaved—and especially African—Other (Gotman 2018, 171–223). As an example, Gotman discusses Nina Rodrigues’ application of the idea to the messianic community of peasants alienated that coalesced around the preacher Antônio Conselheiro

108 in the late nineteenth-century, as a way to depoliticize the dissenting colony by casting its movement practices as mental or physical maladies. However, Nina Rodrigues had already treated the subject before this time, in his book on Afro-Brazilian religion as well as a separate article on the purported movement disorder. In both, Nina Rodrigues alludes to religion, especially African spirit-possession religions, as fomenting the disease. As Nina

Rodrigues explains:

A curious point of this epidemic is the relationship that persisted between its local exacerbations and the popular festivities in which the sambas, candomblés, and other black dances always prevail. This was due in large part to the influence of these parties and dances upon the development of the epidemic form of the disease, both in the report of the commission that, at the invitation of the city, studied the epidemic at the beginning and with great intent connected it with a very benign form of choreomania, that is to say, in the important report in which my colleague Dr. Alfred Britto connected the manifestations of the endo-epidemic form in the diagnosis of astasia-abasia that had been made in the first place by Dr. Souza Leite, abasia-choreiforme being the predominant clinical type. I, who also consecrated to this epidemic a small work, am familiar with the explosions of the choreiform epidemic, when it had only just been generalized, in diverse candomblés and sambas (Nina Rodrigues 1935, 134–135).

For Nina Rodrigues, the music, dance, and religious practices of Bahia’s black working- class not only caused the development of psychologically based movement disorders but caused them in an epidemic form—a sort of madness which was contagious and dissolved the identity of the dancer in the mania of the irrational, anonymous collective.

In an article on the same theme, Nina Rodrigues describes the nature of these movements in a separate epidemic of choreomania in the city of São Luís de Maranhão:

“the streets were daily traversed by a great number of women, principally, supported by two people and with a rhythmic gait interrupted every step with repeated leaps, genuflections and disordered movements” (Nina Rodrigues 2003, 146). The Brazilian psychologist stresses the predominantly female participants and the “genuflection”-like

109 movements they make. He also cites a colleague, Dr. Afonso Saulnier, who makes similar claims:

Some drag their feet and progress as if they were suffering from partial paralysis of the inferior limbs; others fling their legs, unable to coordinate the movement of their muscles, as happens to those who suffer from progressive muscular ataxia; others, finally, present an uncertain march, irregular and jumpy, as if they were true choreics; all, however, make at each step great genuflections because they lack the strength necessary to sustain the weight of their bodies. These choreic movements only manifest in the upper limbs, on rare occasion extend to the torso, and I have never found them in the muscles of the neck or face. These movements of the lower limbs cease when those afflicted are lying down or sleeping. Nearly all of those afflicted are women. I have never observed this illness amongst the aged. The race of color is without doubt much more attacked with it than the white one. (Dr. Afonso Saulnier cited in Nina Rodrigues 2003, 147).

Like many descriptions of “choreomania” by elite, medicalizing observers, it is incredibly difficult to read against the grain to try to make sense of what those movements meant for those who performed them. Many descriptions of the so-called dancing disease have been based on many layers of second-hand accounts as well as unreliable first-hand ones. In the case described above, these may have been individuals being affected by truly involuntary movements of a psychological or neuro-kinetic origin, perhaps in procession to a holy site to petition for healing from a Saint. It might also have been a manifestation of social unrest, expressed through collective “disorderly” movement practices or simply construed as such by its observers. In this case, it seems less likely than in others that these movements were understood as dance by those who performed them, though it is not outside the realm of possibility.

However, as I will discuss at greater length below, the significance for my argument is in the discussion itself, which by describing a disease as dance-like, but fundamentally not dance by virtue of being disease, and associating these movements with certain groups of people, the discourse of choreomania served to stigmatize all forms of movement associated with those people—in this case, women, people of color, and the ecstatically

110 religious. Both Saulnier and Nina Rodrigues stress that the majority of those who suffered from the epidemic attacks were women, and most of them women of color. They also both describe the characteristic feature of the disease, disordered movement, as a jerky, irregular gait while walking, and as a weakness in the legs leading to “genuflections”—linking the disease with notions of religious fervor, although in this case using movements drawn from

Catholic practice. In this way, the two Brazilian scholars pathologize the movements described—in terms of their aesthetics, in terms of their linkages with the irrationalities of religious fervor, and their preponderance among women and especially women of color.

Gotman argues that certain types of movement—those that are involuntary and lack fluidity and torque—have been pathologized as a kind of anti-dance which is fundamentally non-aesthetic (2012). Gotman discusses the attempt by epileptic dancer Rita

Marcalo to safely self-induce seizure in front of an audience in an effort to raise awareness about and reduce the shame surrounding her disease, and shows how the anxious responses of the public and especially the medical community reveal this pathologization, since the risks involved for Marcalo were relatively low and are undertaken by the medical community regularly for teaching demonstrations (a practice that began with famous

French psychologist Jean-Martin Charcot, founding father of the study of hysteria in the nineteenth century who was famous for his live demonstrations with afflicted patients).

Rather than being about safety, the anxiety was primarily a result of deep discomfort with the display of disorderly movement as art. While it is difficult to know whether the movements described by Nina Rodrigues in late nineteenth-century Brazil were intended to be dance or were involuntary, it is clear that though Nina Rodrigues and his contemporaries compared the movements of choreomania to dance, they also viewed them

111 as anti-dance and fundamentally non-aesthetic. Whether these movements were intended to be dance by their performers or not, in either case by linking them to samba and Afro-

Brazilian religion Nina Rodrigues pathologizes black dance and religious movement, casting it as anti-dance. Furthermore, in characterizing the dance of spirit-possession as linked to choreomania, a form of hysteria predominantly associated with women, and by furthering stressing the association of choreomania itself with women, Nina Rodrigues genders feminine the act of dancing and receiving the orixás in a Candomblé ritual. In doing so, Nina Rodrigues linked forms of music and dance associated with black Brazilians and Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religion with ideas of bacchanalian unruliness, insanity, and mental illness, positing this mental illness as collective and therefore potentially contagious. In this way, he laid the foundation for later discourses to emerge linking another puportedly Afro-Brazilian mental disorder—known as banzo, a slavery-era term for trauma among the enslaved described as a kind of excessive nostalgia—with maracatu nação.

The tendency to interpret spirit-possession in Afro-Brazilian religion in psychological terms was not a quirk of Nina Rodrigues but remained the scholarly norm for decades. In the mid-twentieth century, Brazilian scholar Waldemar Valente described possession as a psychological state triggered by dance and the sound of the drums playing specific rhythms:

What seems beyond doubt is that the music, and especially the music of the atabaque, alone, is capable of provoking the ‘descent of the saint’, even without the influence of the dance, the suggestive action of the environment, above all if religious emotion is excited by the reaction of a schizophrenic or hysterical state. Due to the ritual importance attributed to the striking of the atabaque, it has come to be counted as a genuine stimulus, capable in and of itself of setting off possession, that itself becomes, most likely, a type of conditioned reflex. And as proof that they are, the religious drums, stimuli that are powerfully utilized in the provocation of fetishist possession,

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there is the fact that they function as true foci of attraction for the ‘manifested’ ‘filhos de santo’ (Valente 1952, 85).

For Valente, it is first and foremost the music of the atabaque that induces trance, capable of doing so without the accompanying dance. This is significant, since it is customarily held that these drums can only be played by men, usually men who fulfill a separate role in the temple than that of the initiates who become physical hosts to the spirits. Elsewhere,

Valente makes this dichotomy clear: “Opposite the players of the atabaques are those

‘possessed of the saints’, dancing violently, in explosions of contortions, shaking the legs and the arms, agitating the head back and forth, but always obeying the rhythm, already dizzying, of the batuque” (Valente 1964). Pathologizing this form of dance in the same way as did Nina Rodrigues, Valente also highlights the opposition between drummer and dancer in a spirit-possession ritual, where drummers are (almost always) men and dancers include both men and women but skew towards higher numbers of women. In this way, the gendering of the two roles—an association that exists independently of the individual genders of the people who perform these roles—is made clear.

A structure emerges then, in which dance—which opened the dancer to possession— was linked with madness and associated with the predominantly female initiates, while the drumming that called the deities to descend was the purview of men. This suggests that drumming was viewed as a source—if not the highest source—of power over the outcome of a spirit-possession ritual. A comment made by US anthropologist in an article on drumming in Afro-Brazilian religion in Bahia suggests this is the case:

As in all African and African-derived cultures, drumming is for men. The taboo against the playing of drums by women, however, is not as strong in Bahia as elsewhere; in the interior of Dutch Guiana, for example, a woman is inhibited from even simulating drum-rhythms by the belief that, if she breaks the rule, her breasts will lengthen until they drag on the ground. One Bahia woman, [p. 489] at least, is a very good drummer; but she is a distinct exception and would never presume to play

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at a rite unless in an emergency when no male drummer was available. It is significant, moreover, that the god of this women is a male deity (Herskovits 1944, 488–489).

As Herskovits described, the right to the drums was guarded as the sole privilege of men in both Bahia and in places such as Dutch Guiana; yet in Brazil, at least, there were notable exceptions to this rule. The fact that a woman could be permitted to learn the ritual drums, and perhaps play only in an emergency, but was otherwise excluded from this realm of activity, suggests that her prohibition was not so much a matter of a belief that there would be a divine form of retaliation or other spiritual consequences, but rather an effort to guard male control over the course of a Candomblé ritual. If some sort of psychological triggering at the sound of certain drums or rhythms is indeed at play in the process of possession, as suggested by Valente above, the notion that the men were able to control the progression of rituals through drumming gains even more validity.

Either way, these roles—men as drummers, women and some men as dancers, and all engaged in singing—also provide the template for gendered performance roles in present-day maracatu nação. This template also includes the jealous guarding of access to drums and drumming as the sole domain of men, though like in Herskovits’ description of

1930s and 40s Bahia, some interlocutors and other sources suggest that there were a few women proficient on the drums of maracatu nação before the loosening of the restriction against them in many nações in the 1990s (to be discussed further in the final chapter). The final pages of this section will consider how the gendered dynamics of maracatu nação have led to the privileging of the Queen as a central figure and leader, in a parallel history to the contentious one first addressed by Landes in the early twentieth century.

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2.3 The Rise of the Maracatu Queen

In Brazil as in the Brazilian diaspora community in Canada where I first encountered maracatu nação, there is a diffuse notion that maracatu nação royal courts privilege their Queens rather than their Kings. Odd academic citations on the practice have noted the same (Guerra-Peixe 1980, 14; Benjamin and Silva 2017, 31; Thalwitzer 2013, 28 n.34), though none have taken it as their object of study. How this came to be in the context of a patriarchal, racist society was one of the first questions that animated my research on maracatu nação. At the same time that this is perception of mine is shared by others, when

I asked members of the nações in Pernambuco about it, some denied that the Queen had any particularly special status—and it is indeed true that in some courts, this is the case.

Fábio Sotero, head of the Associação dos Maracatus Nação de Pernambuco and president of nação Aurora Africana explained that some Queens have attained a relative rise in status since the famous Queen of Maracatu Elefante, Maria Julia do Nascimento, usually known as Dona Santa: “This leadership, since Dona Santa, became a role of not being only a

Queen. The question of not being only a Queen” (Sotero 2019). When I asked Sotero what this expanded role involved, he responded: “literally, mothers, literally mothers... it comes from maracatu, in the community, this leadership, right?... of charity, everything. So, it is from this” (Sotero 2019). Sotero explained that once Dona Santa became more than simply a performer playing a yearly role as a Queen, but rather a mother to the spiritual community of the nação—and gained remarkable notoriety doing so—other Queens desired to follow suit: “I think that sometimes the competition of... we fight, right? And say things like, ‘Ah!

How can I look better than her?’ But sometimes it has that sense, you know, of one wanting to do more than the other, and so to stand out more” (Sotero 2019). In this way, Sotero

115 suggested, as Queens both emulated and competed first with Dona Santa and later with each other, having a Queen of elevated social importance who was highly active with the maracatu nação community became a point of distinction for many nações, causing them to gain a greater share of the limelight in the city’s cultural circuits. Sotero’s argument tracks with the sources on Dona Santa from the early twentieth century; the Queen was and indeed still is revered as an iconic figure and no doubt fuelled the kind of competition he describes. Yet other sources suggests that a transition was already underway much earlier, before Dona Santa became Queen of Maracatu Elefante.

The first known extended discussion of maracatu nação in print is in the collection

Folk-lore Pernambucano by Pereira da Costa (1908), with conflicting dates of publication somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century. Pereira da Costa’s discussion is brief, neutral in tone (he neither mocks nor mystifies the royal court) and does not privilege either the Queen or King. There is a frustrating gap of several decades in the documentation after

Pereira da Costa, with an explosion of writing around the end of the 1930s (a period of intellectual engagement with maracatu nação to be examined in the following chapter).

There are a few references, however, in the early 1920s that seem to echo the tone of Henry

Koster describing the Kings of Congo one hundred years prior. In a 1922 article for the periodical Illustração Brasileira entitled “Reis de Maracatú” (“Kings of Maracatu”), one

Lucilo Varejão describes a procession:

One type, however, in each of these groups stands out from the others, due to the bizarreness of his figure and above all due to his strange and gaudy apparel: the king. Black, ordinarily black and old, with short breeches, buckled shoes and a velvet cloak—a gold-plaited tin crown on his head, he realizes, to the monotonous beat of the batuque, the most complicated and hilarious steps and grimaces. Following him is the queen, also black, and old, and crowned. And after come the nobles of the court, wearing the most exotic and hilarious clothing. They are velveteen suits of the loudest colors, the wigs of Louis the XV, General’s uniforms, among tufted dresses and short ballerina skirts (Varejão 1922).

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Varejão seems to find considerable humor in the sight of working-class Afro-Brazilians performing as royalty, mocking the poverty and ill fit of their costumes in much the way that Koster did. However, Varejão saves the bulk of his derision for the Queens: “there appear monstruous queens, disfigured like the ogres of legend, without their teeth and still shredded by the merciless whips of their former masters” (Varejão 1922). Varejão later elaborates:

the queen has a dress of light blue sateen, embroidered with a golden braid, white pumps, and black stockings. And, furthermore, the wicked one who decorated it spiked it in such a form and performed the cruelty of dropping so much rice powder on it, that the macabre group had still not begun to march and already the poor queen, with the heat, had a lamentable face (Varejão 1922).

It is clear that in the first few decades of the twentieth century, the African royal courts of maracatu nação were objects of scorn for some, seen as laughable for their regal pretensions. While the King seems to have enjoyed a status higher than that of the Queen— consistent with hegemonic notions of noble hierarchy—neither potentate in this maracatu court seems to have commanded much respect outside of the nações, at least in the eyes of

Varejão.

Sources on the practice are frustratingly scarce during this period, but it would not be surprising if there were more that espoused a discourse consistent with Varejão’s. At the same time, some sources from the time take a different tone. In Gustavo Barroso’s 1921 collection of northeastern “folklore,” Ao Som da Viola, describes maracatu nação thusly:

The African brings from his savage camps of Nigricia, where the ambassadors of the Oriental sultans of Zanzibar or Somal come, before the shackles of slavery brought by the European, to launch bloody raiding wars, the tradition which lead to the King of the Congos, the Cucumbys with their king and the Maracatus with their queen (Barroso 1921, 41–42).

In naming a broad variety of Afro-Brazilian coronation festivities, Barroso names maracatu nação specifically as possessing a Queen but not a King. Furthermore, while on

117 the one hand describing African communities as “savage camps,” he also links the coronation traditions with the royal powers of Arab sultanates, evoking the grandeur of these ancient empires rather than mocking the distance between the performers in Afro-

Brazilian royal courts and the political powers they were performing.

A second document reveals a similar discourse, this time in an anthropologically framed article in the 1938 Anuário do Carnaval Pernambuco of the Federação

Carnavalesca Pernambucana—an organization founded in the 1930s to manage carnaval in Recife and the surrounding areas, and a central focus of the next chapter. In this article, titled “Impressões ligeiras do carnaval pernambucano como fenômeno de antropologia cultural” (“Light impressions of the Pernambucan carnaval as a phenomenon of cultural anthropology”), Ovídio da Cunha discusses Afro-Brazilian practices associated with carnaval and the region generally, such as frevo,15 maracatu nação, and Xangô, and draws a similar connection between maracatu nação, Arab or Islamic cultural and religious ties, and queenly matriarchs:

The Maracatú of Pernambuco is one of the rare survivals, in Brazil, of this Afro- Islamic spirit, which develops in the Sudanese region. There could be, maybe, a rush to affirm in maracatú the persistence of a mentality quite remote from that which presided over the formation of our nationality; however, the sociologist must investigate all the facts, for within them, he will arrive at the conclusions. In this way, the existence of the canopy and the predominance of the queen, as being the most important figure, and, principally, the sense of social order that is expressed in this phenomenon so ubiquitous in our carnaval, it is very much the remnant of the political sentiment of the people who knew powerful monarchs, such as the celebrated emperor of Ghana (O. da Cunha 1938).

Cunha considers maracatu nação to be linked to Islamic influences in the religious practices of many enslaved Africans in Brazil and associates such influences with the

“predominance of the queen, as being the most important figure.” While Islamic influences

15 Frevo involves acrobatic dancing with miniature umbrellas to the energetic music of a mid-size brass and drum ensemble.

118 are indeed present in many aspects of Afro-Brazilian spirituality and culture, “matriarchy” has not been counted among them by contemporary scholars.16 Cunha later elaborates:

How to explain the feeling of respect and absolute belief in the orixás, the observance of a genuine liturgy, where the idea of social classification is evident, which resides in the form of totemism with its initial fact in this same classification, such as the initiated and non-initiated individuals in the religious dances, and principally, the respect for the Mother of the terreiro? In all these facts of our folklore, of a purely African origin, such as the Maracatú and the Xangô, there is, incontestably, the profound influence of the matriarchy, and of European culture, through the medium of Christianity, which did not manage to create a perfect symbiosis, but which varnished, superficially, an ethno-religious structure which remains intact (O. da Cunha 1938).

Cunha extends the influence and centrality of Afro-Brazilian matriarchs past the realm of maracatu nação to encompass the Xangô temples with which they were linked.

Significantly, Cunha’s writing was published when Ruth Landes had only just set foot in

Brazil and before Dona Santa became the revered queen of Maracatu Elefante in 1940

(Vasconcelos and Castro 2016, 198). And while the comments of Barroso and Cunha do not tell us much directly of the gendered social structure of maracatu nação or Xangô, they do suggest that something about the roles played by black, female elders had caught the attention of elite observers of the practices, and that their activities as leaders within the nações of maracatu specifically were of note.

It does appear, however, that if the notion of the pre-eminence of the Queens of maracatu nação was a circulating though not reified discourse in the 1920s and 30s, a decade into Dona Santa’s reign in Maracatu Elefante, her remarkable stature within her community helped to solidify the notion that the Queens of maracatu nação were more important than the Kings. In particular, a 1948 issue of the local journal Contraponto— with illustrations by visual artist Lula Cardoso Ayres, a collaborator with figures such as

16 See João José Reis (1993) and James Sweet (2003) on Islamic influences brought to Brazil by enslaved Africans.

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Ascenso Ferreira and Capiba who are the major focus of the next chapter—was dedicated to the maracatu Queen and was replete with comments on her relative status above her young King. Historian of maracatu nação Isabel Guillen credits the publication—and especially the involvement of Ayres—with helping to elevate and solidify Dona Santa’s status (Guillen 2006). One caption under Dona Santa’s photo on the table of contents page reads:

It is the most beloved maracatu queen of all of Recife. At her side, a young king, with long hair, but who appears as if a consort prince, because it is she that, with the same grandeur as always, though she is already weak with age, her hands trembling and her voice difficult to hear above the deafening background [English and italics in the original] of the zabumbas and gonguês, -- really commands the old ‘Maracatu Elefante’, founded in 1800, before the old Boa-Vista riverbanks... (Contraponto 1948).

While the collective love and reverence for Dona Santa is emphasized, the King of

Maracatu Elefante is demoted to a “consort prince,” a notion that was reproduced consistently throughout the issue and in other sources as well. In one article of the

Contraponto issue, the above-mentioned Ovídio da Cunha describes Elefante’s court: “The queen of the Maracatú has at her side her king, who is a secondary figure, and her court.

The Maracatus carry the most richly decorated standards, and always a portable canopy to cover the queen” (O. da Cunha 1948). In another, the caption for a photo of Elefante’s King

(incidentally, a young Eudes Chagas, who will be discussed at greater length in a later chapter as the founder and King of Maracatu Porto Rico) introduces him as: “The King of the Maracatú who is, moreover, a decorative figure in the procession” (F. de Carvalho

1948). In the main text of the article, the author Flavio de Carvalho elaborates:

At the right side of the Queen, below the canopy topped with a crescent, walks the King of the maracatú. In this strange court of blacks, he is, of all the great characters, perhaps, the least interesting – at least in Maracatú Elefante which seems to be the most respected of the Pernambucan carnaval. His role can be compared to that of a consort-prince who remains, always, under the shadow of his empress, without meddling in the matters of the Court. The Queen advances, in small steps, five or six

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meters and retreats, but the King remains always a bit aloof, without daring to insert himself into the foreground. What is the reason behind this discreet attitude? Is it the result of the very spirit that animates the Nation, a hierarchical requirement of the ceremony, or can it be noted only in those groups in which the Queen asserts herself on the basis of the prestige of her age or by her natural ascendence among her subjects? There lies the question to be answered by the scholars. We lean, simply, towards the second hypothesis. In a Maracatú directed by Dona Santa the opposite could not be comprehended: only she reigns and governs (F. de Carvalho 1948).

Carvalho makes subtle reference to the notion that maracatu nação had roots in African

Islam by highlighting the canopy decorated with a crescent. Interestingly, however, while the author opens the question posed by Ovídio da Cunha ten years prior about a matriarchal history for the practice, he ultimately dismisses Cunha’s theory in favor of the notion that this matriarchal structure was unique to Dona Santa and Maracatu Elefante. This interpretation, however, does not align with the comments by Barroso and Cunha from before Dona Santa rose to the stature that she did.

Either way, it seems that the discourses established by this edition of Contraponto would eventually be expanded to at times characterize maracatu nação as a whole. In a

1964 publication organized by the company Moinho Recife (Recife Mills) to commemorate its fifty-year anniversary, in an article surveying the various performance practices of Pernambucan carnaval, the folklorist and composer Valdemar de Oliveira

(who will likewise be discussed further in the following chapter) described the royal court of a maracatu nação parade: “Under the colored canopy of a massive parasol, that spins without ceasing, comes the Queen, the great power of the cortejo, with her scepter in one hand and her sword in the other, the King, in his inferior condition, a species of consort- prince” (V. de Oliveira 1964). The notion that the Queen was the ultimate authority figure in a nação while the King was of a lower status more akin to a prince had become detached from discussions of Maracatu Elefante to encompass maracatu nação generally.

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In addition to this notion, it seems that the phenotypical appearance of the Queen became of great importance at some point during the middle of the twentieth century. The

US anthropologist Katherine Royal Cate (more commonly known as Katerina Real), noted that, “There is a preference for people with the darkest shades of black skin – and if all the figures cannot be of this color, it is essential that at the very least the ‘Queen’ is black. The

‘King’ can be fairer-skinned, and generally is” (Real 1967, 75). Guerra-Peixe made a similar comment in his 1955 book Maracatus do Recife, noting an instance in which a white woman performed as King (1980, 20) This notion—that if nothing else, at the very least the Queen of a nação must be dark-skinned and appear to be of unambiguous black

African descent—is one that I have heard repeated by performers of maracatu nação-based drumming in the Brazilian diaspora community of Toronto, as well as noted by other contemporary scholars (Santana 2012, 65). Anne McClintock (1995) and Laura A. Lewis

(2003) have emphasized the processes by which gendered identities were racialized and race gendered in colonial contexts, to created intricate colonial hierarchies that depend for their logic on these interlocking identities. In particular, Lewis argues that witchcraft trials in colonial New Spain were a site in which indigenous peoples of either gender were feminized through their association with the Devil. Witchcraft, a domain in which women and racialized, non-white Others were powerful and feared, if also despised, inverted the logic of white male colonial power while ultimately serving to support that power by acting as its foil—what Lewis refers to as the “sanctioned domain” of white male power and the

“unsanctioned domain” of indigenous and female power (Lewis 2003, 5–6). It could be that in the context of Afro-Brazilian maracatu nação, firmly associated by the mid- twentieth century with Afro-Brazilian magic and spirituality (often understood as

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“witchcraft”), similar logics inverted the broader social hierarchy so that within its sphere of action, black women seemed the natural figures to hold “unsanctioned” forms of social, cultural, and spiritual power. Either way, it seems clear that the ascendance of the maracatu nação Queen—more than simply the result of more recent competition among the Queens in the wake of Dona Santa’s fame and influence, or notions of “black matriarchy” in Afro-

Brazilian religion promulgated by Ruth Landes—was already underway since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.

2.4 Religiosidade and Maracatu Nação: A Theater of the Colonial

The relationship between maracatu nação and the two religious traditions described earlier in this chapter—or any religious practice for that matter—has become the subject of divisive debate. In particular, the discussion is clustered around a few key questions: the nature of maracatu nação’s relationship to the Kings and Queens of Congo and Brazil’s Black Catholic Brotherhoods; how, if maracatu nação began as a Catholic- oriented practice, it became connected with Xangô; acknowledging the practice’s equally intimate relationship with other religious practices such as Jurema, which though not always considered to be “Black” or “African” religions (a reductive concept in the first place), are certainly deeply African influenced; and questions regarding the practice’s relationship to differing African ethnic provenience groups, primarily that known as Nagô in Brazil (more widely known as Yorubá) and Central African Bantu groups such as those from the kingdoms of Kongo and Angola. At the core of these debates, taking place somewhat separately among members of the nações and a handful of academics, are questions regarding racial identity—and specifically black racial identity—in a context in

123 which Brazil’s history of racial and cultural mixture is so discursively emphasized. This is a mixture not only of the African with the European, as is most often referenced, but also the African with the indigenous, and mixture between differing African ethnic groups. As

James Sweet (2003) makes clear, this last was by far the most frequent, widespread, and significant mixture to take place in the American colonies.

During the course of my fieldwork, and especially at the First National Congress of

Maracatu Nação (an event that featured primarily members of the nações along with a few local academics and public functionaries working in arts and culture), I witnessed a great deal of discussion about maracatu nação’s relationship to various religious practices, including Xangô, Jurema, Candomblé de Angola or Congo, Catholicism and the Black

Brotherhoods of the Rosary, and even Christian Evangelism—all to be discussed further in the final chapter. These discussions seemed to always pivot around maracatu nação’s relationship to Xangô versus its relationship to some other practice, a dichotomization likely due to the ways in which Nagô religion has become so deeply politicized and idealized as a nucleus of black identity and resistance to Eurocentric/white cultural hegemony in Brazil and abroad. As the anti-syncretism movement has grown over the course of the twentieth century, any element of religious or cultural practice that reads as

“mixed”, while hyper-valorized by mainstream Brazilian nationalist discourse, can come under scrutiny as evidence of capitulation to European cultural dominance. And while I do not take issue with the fundamental logic of the movement—I agree we need to be wary of forms of cultural hegemony that help to support social inequality, including

Eurocentrism—in this chapter I have attempted to show that what constitutes “culture” is not only the forms of language, practice, and material culture, but also the deeper and more

124 pervasive cosmologies and ways of engaging with the world that govern them. Therefore, for example, it can be entirely “African” and “traditional”—insofar as such qualities really exist, itself an open question—to incorporate elements of another’s culture and religion into one’s own, or to worship the ancestral spirits of the land one occupies, even if it means those spirits are Tupí rather than Nagô. In some ways, as Sweet (2003) has argued, moulding our understanding of cultural and religious politics along the lines of believer/infidel or notions of “conversion” is itself a capitulation to European cultural hegemony and Eurocentrism.

The Brazilian historian of maracatu nação, Ivaldo Lima (2008), comes close to many of these ideas in his historical revision yet without questioning the underlying logic governing both his own and the arguments that he critiques. Lima has made it the cornerstone of his work to forcefully argue for rethinking maracatu nação’s relationship to both the coronations of the Brotherhoods of the Rosary and to Xangô. Firstly, he questions the established discourse among twentieth-century scholars of maracatu nação that the practice historically developed from the coronations of the Kings and Queens of

Congo. He traces the development of this discourse among scholars of maracatu nação since the late nineteenth century and argues that there were many practices throughout

Brazil that featured Black Kings and Queens that could have given rise to maracatu nação.

In particular, he emphasizes that maracatu nação could not have developed from these processions, citing documentary evidence that the two coexisted during the nineteenth century. While Lima’s arguments against the strictly linear development of the Kings of

Congo into maracatu nação and his insistence on a more plural view of maracatu nação’s

“roots” is well taken—indeed, was a logical intervention in the purist discourses that

125 abound in Brazilian cultural politics—he does not provide proof that scholars in fact

“invented” the discourse linking maracatu nação and the Kings of Congo, only that they

“developed it”; he does not provide evidence of a deep link with any other historically documented crowning practice that maracatu nação could have developed from (indeed, he argues that it is “impossible to know”); and, his evidence of the coexistence of maracatu nação with the Kings of Congo in the nineteenth century does not in fact “disprove” a relationship between the two, any more so than the continued performance of ragtime or blues disproves that these practices were antecedents of jazz and many other forms of North

American popular music. Indeed, given that Africans of Bantu provenience (from in and around the Kingdom of Kongo) constituted the majority of enslaved Africans in

Pernambuco; that the Brotherhoods of the Rosary and the Kings of Congo were the most widespread African Catholic institutions in Brazil; and that by many linguistic and musical indicators maracatu nação likewise shows a strong Bantu provenience; it seems folly to suggest that the two traditions do not bear an important relationship.

At stake in Lima’s argument is the question of maracatu nação’s “true” relationship to the religion of the slave-owning class in Brazil; delinking maracatu nação from a strongly Catholic practice such as the Kings of Congo makes it easier to project onto the practice ideas of both African purity and black resistance to European religious hegemony.

Yet in so doing, the deeply West-Central African cosmology of African Catholicism and the fascinating history of the ways that the Kingdom of Congo appropriated Christianity to maintain their autonomy becomes supressed, and Afro-Brazilian religion is redrawn along the reductive logic of converted/heathen that drove European catechization missions in the first place.

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Yet Lima also pushes to broaden our understanding of maracatu nação’s religious affiliations to include a close relationship with other religions, particularly Jurema, that while clearly African influenced are not so clearly African or black identified. This argument is better supported both by oral histories given by maracatu nação elders and by archival or published sources describing some of the religious practices associated with specific nações. As Lima argues, the “official” narrative of early folklorists and other researchers of the practice claims that maracatu nação became linked with Xangô in the

1930s and 40s, when an intense period of police repression of Afro-Brazilian religious practices lead many communities to disguise their rituals as maracatu nação rehearsals.

This narrative argues that this lead maracatu nação to become deeply intertwined with the

Nagô tradition. On the other hand, the musical practice known as maracatu de baque solto—which is a music and procession practice performed at carnaval associated with the cane-cutting regions of the rural interior, and shares both some similarities with maracatu nação as well as some significant differences—was and had always been linked with the

“more syncretic” religion of Jurema. However, as Lima demonstrates and has been established by others in the nearby state of Bahia (Matory 2005), repression against these supposedly “more syncretic” religions was even more intense than that against

Candomblé/Xangô. The latter had the defense of many local scholars and intellectuals who argued that it was a “pure tradition” and therefore a legitimate religion that should be protected, rather than repressed, by the government. The former—the more syncretic religious practices, such as Jurema in Pernambuco, which incorporated more obvious influences from folk Catholicism, indigenous imagery and influences, and elements of

European spiritism—were cast as “charlatanism” and “superstition”, the decadent (in the

127 antiquated sense) deformation of the purer tradition of Xangô. Therefore, according to

Lima and his interlocutors, in addition to there being a much more fluid boundary between these worlds than often imagined, religious houses working in the modalities of Jurema were suffering greater repression and therefore encountered greater need to disguise themselves as maracatus nação. Lima in turn argues that the representations and texts created by early folklorists and scholars of maracatu nação sought to construct and police the boundaries between the two maracatus and their associated Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, which had previously been fluid or even non-existent.

Lima’s arguments for adopting a more plural understanding of the history and origins of maracatu nação—and that of maracatu de baque solto too—are well taken; this fluid relationship is born out in other early texts on the practices despite the discursive emphasis on creating distinct boundaries between them. However, once again, his arguments fail to grapple with the ways in which changes in both practice and discourse are linked with the broader ideological shifts taking place within their historical place and time. While Lima argues against the notion that it impossible to know maracatu nação’s

“true roots,” both because of the paucity of sources and the impossibility of thoroughly accounting for the kind of widespread change that gives rise to new traditions, he also attempts to reveal a “truer history,” arguing for acknowledgement of the practice’s link with a marginalized religion. In the process, it becomes clear that Lima is seeking to intervene in the contemporary cultural politics of the maracatu nação scene and that he is on some level disapproving of the ways in which the more recent cultural politics of race and religion have fuelled anti-syncretic ideas in politicized Afro-Brazilian scenes, implying that he sees the increased emphasis on maracatu nação, Nagô identity, and Xangô as a

128 problematic divergence from an idealized more plural past. In this way, Lima does not escape problematic notions of “authenticity,” he simply rebrands it as plural, fluid, and inclusive. Perhaps most problematically, Lima uses this argument to push back against the notion that maracatu nação is “African”—in itself not so problematic an argument, similar to Patricia de Santana Pinho’s critiques of Afro-centrism in Bahia (2010)—only to argue that it “should” be thought of as Brazilian. His arguments, then, use the notions of pluralism, diversity, and inclusivity to push against the discourses of black/Afro-Brazilian activists in the name of Brazilian mestiço nationalism disguised as “social justice.” As the racial upheaval of 2020 has demonstrated, appeals to an “All Lives Matter” politics of diversity and inclusion are not sufficient in a context of such stark racial inequality and violence, as much the case in Brazil as it is in the US and elsewhere.

More challenging is to hold space for two ideas. One idea is that, given that absorbing and incorporating elements of “outside” culture and religion was historically at the core of many African cosmologies brought to Brazil, notions of what constitutes

African tradition and African culture in the context of Brazilian anti-/syncretism politics need to be rethought with this fact in mind. The second is that, rather than debating maracatu nação’s “true roots”—a futile task, as Lima rightly argues—we can try to divest from the romanticized notion of unbroken, “pure” tradition as of highest value, and embrace seeing the practice as passing through eras where its forms and meanings are shaped by the cultures and religions of its milieu and the ways in which these cultures are valued socially. These “eras” (I do not mean to suggest the development of a strict periodization) include moving from an early orientation towards a Catholicism redrawn along the lines of West-Central African cosmologies, through a shift towards Afro-centric

129 manifestations of those cosmologies in Brazil— maracatu nação’s links with Xangô and

Jurema—and oscillating between the two Afro-Brazilian religious practices as Brazilian cultural politics move through a complex and changing relationship vis-a-vis notions of syncretism; and more recently, in the ways in which the practice engages with the atheistic or “non-religious” cultural rituals and iconography associated with “modernity.” Both these notions—one that remains invested in but revises how tradition is understood, another that de-invests in the valorization of tradition in the first place—lead us to what might prove a more useful way of understanding maracatu nação: as a space for the processing of newly encountered cultural and religious ideas, practices, and symbols, or as I phrased it in the title of this subsection, a theater of the colonial.

Furthermore, while much of my broader argument centers around the idea that researchers of various kinds have shaped the objects of their study through their interaction with and representation of practices such as maracatu nação, I do not believe that they simply “make up” their ideas about these practices and that their representations bear no relationship to reality. Rather, it is important to keep in mind notions such as Donna

Haraway’s “situated knowledges” (1988), where conflicting knowledges can be seen as true but incomplete, both describing different aspects of reality, rather than one true and the other false. Therefore, it is interesting to ask—rather than to reject the topic of maracatu nação’s relationship to Catholicism, Jurema, Xangô, or any other religion—how that relationship may have changed over the decades with its changing context. Of course, this question is inextricable from the problem of the biases by which all sources are shaped, and which are difficult to account for with deceased, historical voices that cannot be further questioned. Here too the dialectical approach remains useful, thinking through the dialogue

130 between maracatu nação and the broader “cultures” with which it has been in contact and that between its performers—the members of the nações—and the intellectuals and artists who have sought to know, understand, and represent them. It is in this dynamic sense of relationship from which the most interesting ideas emerge, and where I believe lies the fuel that drives cultural change. I prefer the idea of relationship over that of somewhat whitewashed terms such as “exchange,” because it highlights the ways in which relationships can be healthy, happy, easy, intimate, toxic, troubled, abusive—and, more often than not, and in complex ways, many of these things at once. It is precisely notions of relationship that are at the core of the following chapters.

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3.0 FOLKLORE’S ORCHESTRATIONS: AESTHETICS OF TRAGEDY IN THE FAILED “TRANSPOSITION” OF MARACATU NAÇÃO

Three years after its founding in 1935, the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana

(the Pernambucan Carnival Federation, or FCP) published the 1938 edition of the Anuário do Carnaval Pernambucano (1938), a yearly volume with articles, illustrations, and musical notation of songs pertaining to Pernambuco’s carnaval celebrations. Consistent with their overall mission, the FCP’s Anuário states that its purpose was to “mold carnaval into the sense of historical and educational traditionalism, reviving our customs, key characters from our history, and facts that educate us” in order to “color our carnaval with

Pernambucan colors” (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938). This goal was reflected in many of the suggested costumes, which include some based on historical figures (mostly but not solely Europeans) in Pernambuco’s colonial history. Yet alongside this vision of a studied and educational carnaval steeped in local history and “tradition,” the FCP also promoted a modernized carnaval that presents Pernambucan agricultural industry as critical to helping Brazil take a powerful position on the world stage. In addition, the FCP sought to develop and promote tourism to the region, “propagandize”

(their terminology) about carnaval to the rest of the state, region, and nation, and to disseminate Pernambucan music to the rest of the world via film and broadcasting technologies (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938).

The Anuário opens with a guide for hopeful participants in the organization’s various official contests. The contests include, alongside those for the best agremiação in various

132 categories (including maracatus nação), contests sponsored by local companies. These include the “Concurso ‘Produtos Pernambucanos,’”, in which participants must appear in a costume based on a local agricultural product, and the “Concurso ‘Peixe,’” wherein the costumes must specifically feature the tomato. The expectations for the contests are laid out in the opening article:

The Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana, with the intention of developing interest in the products of Pernambucan soil, giving them, as much as possible, a regionalist stamp, has come to institute the contest “Pernambucan Products,” with prizes valued at 3:000$000. To this end it is enough that the clubes, blocos, and troças1 affiliated with [the Federação] and which are interested in the above contest, make all of their costumes for the next carnaval inspired in our [local agricultural] products. To this end, the suggestion guide has published in this edition of the ANUARIO DO CARNAVAL PERNAMBUCANO costumes dreamt up and designed by Manoel Bandeira—the great Pernambucan artist (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938, bold text in original).

Later on, the Anuário states that:

publishing in this book designs of suits extracted from stylizations of pineapple, sugar cane, mango, tomato, jackfruit, passionfruit, avocado, cashew fruit, breadfruit, etc., has the double end goal of sanitizing the carnaval festivities of exotic traces, of clothing strange to our environment and to our people, and also to exalt Pernambucan products through the intermediary of its most typical wares, contributing to create a new spirit around these possibilities and from our resources which, duly made use of, will elevate Pernambuco and cause it to stand out in the concert of united Brazilian states (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938).

Throughout the rest of the Anuário, the articles are punctuated with full page illustrations of suggested costumes rendered in an ultra-modern, minimalist style. While most of the suggested costumes for men feature local historical figures—predominantly European ones though not only so—the costumes for women, while featuring a few historical subjects, primarily feature the local products of agricultural industry, ranging from exotic fruit to local seafood delicacies to staples of the Brazilian diet such as cassava root, a decidedly

1 Clubes, blocos, and troças are all types of organizations dedicated to particular carnaval performance practices.

133 un-glamourous but essential starchy tuber. The costumes designed by Manoel Bandeira (a

Pernambucan regionalist painter who shared a name with the even more famous

Pernambucan poet, Manuel Bandeira)2 produce a startling union of values. While

Bandeira’s feminine costume designs celebrate both the mundane and “exotic” products of local industry (though perhaps not so “exotic” to those for whom they are everyday fare), they also embrace a Jazz-Age vision of modern femininity in which a stylized simplicity is the foremost aesthetic—as the opening article declares, “no one will be able to deny the beauty and simplicity” of the “Tomato” costume meant to grace the figures marching or dancing “at the front of our clubes, blocos, and troças” (Federação Carnavalêsca

Pernambucana 1938).

The “Tomato” costume features a fitted, knee-length dress with what appears to be a hoop skirt. The model’s body is stylized, as are all those in Bandeira’s illustrations for the Anuário—exaggeratedly slender and elastic looking, rendered in a limited palette of black, red, and green, with an economy of lines to mark the contours of the face, arms, hands, and legs, and no outlines whatsoever in the depiction of the costume itself. She is implicitly white, but ambiguously so—her loosely sketched facial features and hair being slightly to the European side of racially indeterminate, and her skin tone constituted by the unmarked surface of the white page. Empty white spaces between the large blocks of color on her dress bleed into the white background, which features only the figure’s shadow, rendered in a few watercolour brushstrokes in black. The female figure is depicted balanced on one pointed toe, with one arm extended forward and the other carrying a bowl of

2 In order to distinguish himself from the celebrated Pernambucan poet Manuel Bandeira, the Pernambucan visual artist Manoel Bandeira spelled his name with an “o” or signed with an initial (Vainsencher 2009). Here the use of the “u” in “Manuel” appears to be a typographical error, since the article refers to the artist, not the poet.

134 tomatoes. The dress features over-sized, jagged green tomato leaves in a fan from the waist down through the top half of the skirt. The bottom half features large red tomatoes surrounded by a halo of leaves. The short, puffed sleeves and a jaunty cap are also drawn in the image of a round, squat tomato with a spray of leaves at the stems, and smaller tomatoes adorn the figure’s shoes. Her hair is worked into flapper pin-curls and she wears bright red lipstick in the same colour as the tomatoes that adorn her costume and fill her bowl. The illustration is accompanied by the following caption:

TOMATO

American fruit, today world-renowned. Highly recommended in the diet, by virtue of possessing vitamins in regular numbers, not only in its natural state, raw, but also when industrialized, in the form of paste. The Pernambucan production of tomatoes, through the intermediary of the PEIXE factories, avoids the importation of the tomato from the south or from overseas, as it also initiated and developed the Pernambucan exportation of this product to the rest of the country and the world. (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938; translation my own).

Together the image and the caption present the “Tomato” as both a critical mainstay of the

Pernambucan agricultural economy and as easily integrated into a vision of an elegantly modern femininity—or, perhaps, an elegantly feminized modernity. At the same time, the tomato is characterized not only as an American product gone global, and therefore universal—a valid enough claim—but as a robustly Pernambucan product that is not only able to counter the necessity for southern and foreign imports but is exportable as well.

This vision of Brazil and Pernambuco’s place in the world economy, not to mention the world’s cultural stage, is well in keeping with notions in vogue among Brazilian modernists at the time, such as Oswald de Andrade’s ideas of “poetry for export” and “cultural cannibalism” (—indeed, what is more cannibalistic than casting these women as a series of foodstuffs?). At the same time, the guide brings a regionalist inflection to these goals,

135 urging the importance of promoting not only Brazil vis-a-vis more developed nations, but

Pernambuco and the northeastern region vis-a-vis the rest of Brazil and the world.

Bandeira’s costume designs also include an outfit based on sugarcane which neatly exemplifies the ways in which the gesture of stylization, so central to mid-twentieth- century Brazilian modernism, served to hide in plain sight the more gruesome aspects of

Brazil’s history and its contemporary legacy. The Cana costume features a female model, poised on the tips of her toes, with one hand on her waist and the other slightly raised in a delicate posture beside her. Her dress, with a fitted bodice, full midi-length skirt, and short, square sleeves, is rendered in a limited palette of black, sea-foam green, and chartreuse.

The skirt features stylized sugarcane stalks against a black background, reaching up from the hem to the waistline. The collar of her dress is overlaid with one half of a gear, interlocked with another smaller, full gear on the chest. The gears are a gesture towards the mechanics of the sugar mill, the historical cite of much forced labor by enslaved Africans and many gruesome deaths for those that fell into its teeth. Upon the figure’s head sits an elaborate cap modeled after a sugar refinery, complete with a smokestack, and thick black fumes. Her hair is rendered in sea-foam green, as are her shoes. The process of sugar- production—and its history—progresses from the ground up, starting with the fruit of the soil, reaching up to the slavery-era technology of the mill, and finishing, on top of the model’s head, with the contemporary industrial sugar refinery.

The caption that accompanies the picture once again emphasizes the centrality of sugar in the local economy:

SUGARCANE

If it is not as aboriginal as it seems, other than the variety known as Creole-sugarcane, sugar has been rooted in Pernambuco since before the founding of the captaincy. In 1527 Pernambuco already exported sugar. It is thanks to sugar that we entered

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History as the richest of the captaincies of Brazil. Still today it is the principal crop of the State, which numbers 72 mills. It is also possible to make alcohol from sugarcane which, in addition to its industrial applications, is a vegetable-based fuel, destined to substitute gasoline, once we comprehend the necessity of not channeling abroad the gold of our wealth, with products of which we have national substitutes. (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938).

The caption, of course, makes no mention of the brutalities of slavery when it refers to the

400-year history of sugarcane production in Pernambuco. It also rather disingenuously refers to sugarcane alcohol as a “vegetable-based fuel” with “industrial applications” and makes no mention of the sugarcane spirits so broadly consumed at the very festival to which the publication is dedicated. The caption and the “Cana” costume reveal the gesture of stylization at its truest, most effective, and most problematic. The agricultural product and mainstay of the Pernambucan economy for most of its history is recast as modern by stripping it of the ludic, the inefficient, the ugly, and the shameful—these are eschewed in favour of a clean, rationalized presentation of sugarcane. While such a process of erasure is present in all the products featured in the Anuário—little reference is made to the human labor involved in their production other than the occasional inclusion of tools such as fishing nets and the massive gears of the mill—the gesture is underscored when applied to sugarcane, so emblematic of Brazil’s not-so-distant slave-holding past. The Cana costume, alluding to the process of production more than the others but not the human labor involved, is simple and elegant enough to fit within the bounds of late 1930s Brazilian bourgeois femininity— “light” enough in emotional tone that the figure can remain perpetually afloat, poised effortlessly on the very tips of her toes.

Taken as a whole, the costume suggestions designed by Manoel Bandeira and promoted by the Federação and its industrial sponsors make clear that the agenda of the

Anuário—and the organization that published it—is not solely about rigidly traditionalist

137 conceptions of local cultural identity as expressed through carnaval performance and sartorial practices. Indeed, the historically inspired costumes appear far less frequently than those based on contemporary agro-industrial products, and none of the costumes emphasize the “traditional” popular culture of the time. Rather, the FCP’s goal with the Anuário was in fact to manage carnaval’s entrance into modernity—minimizing its “excesses” and making it palatable for the middle classes of Recife. And though less startlingly apparent, the Federação and its Anuário enacts a similar gesture of stylization—as a means of modernization—toward iconically local, Pernambucan music and performance practices.

This chapter will demonstrate that, congruent with the orientation of the FCP (and in collaboration with them), early twentieth-century Brazilian folklorists and ethnographers were not in fact opposed to change, modernity, or European and US influence; rather they wanted to control and delimit the ways in which these changes took place. Maracatu nação’s early chroniclers, though opposed to certain developments in the practice of maracatu nação, actively sought to foster those changes, influences, mixtures, and modernizations that they deemed beneficial to the progress of the region and the nation.

Though some of the more grandiose of their efforts ultimately failed according to the terms in which they envisioned them (such as that of creating an international sensation out of stylized maracatus), the intellectuals involved in these efforts laid the groundwork for the two most influential late twentieth-century Pernambucan cultural movements—the

Movimento Armorial and Manguebeat—which though seemingly opposed to one another, in fact shared common roots and worked upon similar premises, with important consequences for the trajectory of maracatu nação in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries.

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Folklore collection and ethnographic modes of research, display, and performance have been much critiqued for furthering nationalism and European colonialism, and various scholars have addressed their roles in furthering political and social agendas

(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Matory 2005; Palmié 2013; Collins 2015). Following this line of inquiry, this article examines the role of early twentieth-century artists and intellectuals in Recife, capital of the state of Pernambuco in the marginalized northeastern region of Brazil, in establishing discourses that have shaped the trajectory of the Afro-

Brazilian carnaval pageant maracatu nação. These actors, working as both artists and folklorists, created some of the earliest representations of maracatu nação, through work published as folklore research, and through stylized creative work inspired by maracatu nação. In particular, this group of artist-folklorists sought to create a new genre of urban popular music based on maracatu nação, known variously as maracatu estilizado, maracatu canção, or maracatu de salão (here referred to collectively as maracatu estilizado or “stylized maracatu”), that they hoped would supersede the hegemonic samba in national and international fame. In doing so, they imagined a process of distilling maracatu nação down to its perceived “essence,” presumed to be an emotional register of sadness, sometimes articulated using the slavery-era term for trauma in the enslaved, banzo—producing what I call an “aesthetics of tragedy.” Though they failed in their broader goal of making stylized maracatu a long-lived international success, these artist- folklorists established paradigms that would shape how maracatu nação was understood and represented for decades and played an under-recognized role in the trajectory of

Pernambucan cultural politics.

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At the core of the paradigm these artist-intellectuals established was the practice of stylization—a creative process that, as demonstrated above, served to dislocate objects, practices, words, and images from their originating contexts and meanings and often erased the more troublesome elements of their pasts and presents (Moore 1997). They also engaged in ethnography-like research practices, which many have argued to enact a similar dislocation and erasure (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998), in order to informed these stylizations. Through these two intertwined practices, these artist-folklorists—who were all middle or upper class, and lighter-skinned or white—set the terms by which maracatu nação would be received, understood, discussed, and studied by the broader public and future generations of artists and intellectuals, in Brazil and abroad. Specifically, their representations of maracatu nação—both artistic and intellectual—furthered two critical notions: that the musical value of maracatu nação and its contribution to local popular music lay solely in its rhythms, and that its primary emotional register was one of melancholic nostalgia for Africa, articulated using the slavery-era term banzo. These reductive discourses, both specifically tied to maracatu nação but often generalized to

Afro-Brazilian culture as a whole, have continued to shape the engagement of artists and intellectuals with maracatu nação through the twentieth century and well into the twenty- first. In particular, notions of banzo articulated through an aesthetics of tragedy in stylized maracatu was central to the often-ignored early theorizing of Ariano Suassuna, who when working alongside this older generation of artist-folklorists as a young man, developed ideas that were foundational to the Movimento Armorial in the latter half of the century.

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3.1 The (Failed) Movement to Make Maracatu the “New Samba”: Maracatu-canção and the Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana

The stylization of Pernambucan popular culture in service of regionalist and nationalist ends was not limited to the suggested carnaval costumes featured in the Anuário of the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana. Rather, stylization represented a broadly applied strategy for developing and promoting a distinctly Pernambucan carnaval.

Historian Isabel Guillen (2007, 243, 2003), journalist José Teles (2015, 137–160), and ethnomusicologists Climério de Oliveira and Marcos Ferreira Mendes (2019), have described the movement spearheaded by individuals linked with the newly founded

Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana to create a new genre of urban popular music based on maracatu nação in the 1930s, intended for radio and recorded performances by a vocalist backed by a small band. Stylized maracatus were already part of the popular repertoire, if somewhat unusual; some of the earliest are attributed to the work of vocalist and instrumentalist Stefana de Macedo in the 1920s, a performer of stylized northeastern

Brazilian popular music given to melancholic ballads (Teles 2015, 149). By the 1930s, the practice of stylizing maracatu nação into a small band format became more common, backed by the FCP, and known variously as maracatu canção, maracatu de salão, and maracatu estilizado. The FCP, whose broader mission was to “clean up” carnaval by reducing violence and closely managing the various performance practices occurring during the festival, incentivized this new genre by organizing and funding shows, radio broadcasts, and audio and film recordings, creating a category for stylized maracatus in its yearly carnaval contests, and then further funding the winning compositions (Teles 2015,

147). On a more subtle level, the gesture of the FCP and its affiliates enacted a process of containment with maracatu nação by reducing the massive and multi-faceted complex of

141 pageantry, theatre, costumery, poetry, dance, drumming and singing to solely a musical practice. After the carnaval of 1936, for example, the FCP sent the sheet music of the winning stylized maracatus to Rio, by air, along with that year’s winning frevos, to be recorded by a major national record company (Teles 2015, 151). Within this broader effort, certain members of the FCP agitated for diverse ends: while the American J.P. Fisch sought to promote Pernambucan music, including stylized maracatus, both nationally and abroad,

Brazilian member Mário Mello pushed to feed these stylized maracatus, penned by middle- class composers, back into the repertoire of the working-class nações.

While both ultimately failed in their broader goals, their efforts established the first generation of artist-folklorists who studied, published on, and created works inspired by maracatu nação, producing some of the earliest representations of the practice.

Importantly, these were representations that slipped between the scientific and the artistic, leading to a blurring of the line between folklore collection and stylized creative work. This lack of boundaries between the artistic and the scientific was a preoccupation for some at the time, but not for the FCP; for example, in their 1938 Anuário, the FCP lauded the local

Rádio Clube de Pernambuco for amassing:

A precious archive for studies and research about frevo and maracatu [...] the prestigious local broadcaster has become the depository of an immense musical documentary collection in the genre[s]. Their archives, from where the editors of ‘Horas de Saudade’ are abundantly supplied, are the rich repositories of excellent specimens of Pernambucan carnaval music. In no other place in Pernambuco, neither in its museums nor its libraries, nor in any other institution of a social or cultural character, can the scholar of Pernambucan folklore find such a rich collection for his study and research. The director(s) of P.R.A.-8 did not do it intentionally. It was enough to hold on to, year after year, the compositions that appeared in their carnaval programs, in order to be able to present, at the end, a collection of immense importance to those who want to research the origins and the characteristics of the dances that make Recife’s carnaval so singular. Knowing how to separate, conveniently, the chaff from the wheat, the sociologists and musicologists have no way to measure their appreciation of the intrinsic value of the popular musicalia of carnaval (“Radio Clube de Pernambuco” 1947).

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Here, the idea that a radio station’s archive of compositions performed on the show could become a source for scholarly inquiry into the origins of Recife’s carnaval practices is celebrated. Distinction isn’t made between these compositions—likely penned by mostly middle-class composers, performed by vocalist-led small groups, and intended primarily for broadcast and record distribution—and the “popular musicalia of carnaval,” which encompasses a diverse array of practices dominated by working-class agremiações that would have appeared on the radio much less often, if at all. Rather, the passage enacts a slippage between the emerging genres of maracatu canção and frevo canção and the working-class practices of maracatu nação and frevo de rua (“street frevo”) that puts the elite stylizations forward as representatives of the whole, working out of but also eliding the hierarchical, racialized logic underpinning the development of these urban popular music genres.

The directors of the FCP and the composers engaged in the stylization of maracatu nação were working through a cultural agenda that was both deeply nationalist and regionalist, hoping to produce a new genre that could represent Brazil abroad and represent

Pernambuco and the Brazilian Northeast both nationally and internationally. Contrary to common paradigms that understand Brazilian Northeastern regionalism as focused on the local to the exclusion of the foreign, examination of the sources on early twentieth-century stylized maracatu makes clear that the emphasis on local identity—whether conceived of as Pernambucan state identity or a broader Northeastern regional identity—both constituted and was constituted by contact with the foreign, whether samba from the

Southeastern Brazilian cultural hub of Rio de Janeiro, or culture and individuals from outside of Brazil, especially the US and Europe. During the 1930s, tourism—primarily

143 national tourism—was an emerging industry in Recife, and the FCP actively sought to further promote tourism to the state through its management of Pernambucan carnaval.

Part of this effort, for some, meant seeking to curb the growth in Recife of the samba schools, carnaval organizations originating from Rio de Janeiro, by limiting the funding the schools received from the FCP and incentivizing other local genres. While often framed as a question of protecting local identity, the imperative was closely linked with the logic of the tourism industry—as popular composer of frevos, tangos, and fox-trots Nelson

Ferreira put it: “The tourists that visit us want to see what we have that is different: frevo, maracatu, caboclinho,3 for this reason we cannot permit that there is given [to samba] what there is to frevo” (Nelson Ferreira in Teles 2015, 135). In this way, questions of incentivizing, promoting, and protecting local practices were not only a reactionary response to the presence of both cultural practices and tourists from other parts of Brazil, but central to attracting those tourists in the first place.

The preoccupation with local identity on the part of both the FCP and local popular music composers was not only a product of internal national dynamics in Brazil, nor solely the preoccupation of Brazilians. José Teles (2015, 142) comments that it is strange that while Mário Mello and the FCP were hostile to influence from the Southeast of Brazil, the influence of J.P. Fisch—the US-born superintendent for a British-owned train and electricity company in Pernambuco—was accepted in the FCP without question, where

Fisch was elected as FCP president and often celebrated in local press. Yet the centrality of J.P. Fisch makes sense as part of the FCP’s regionalist mission, since their goal was to not only improve the standing of Pernambucan cultural production vis-a-vis output from

3 A Pernambucan carnaval practice involving costuming as a stylized indigenous Brazilian.

144 other parts of Brazil within Brazil, but also to do so abroad; in this respect, the presence, interest, and patronage of a foreigner was both a matter of distinction and an important gateway to international exposure.4

Fisch, for his part, not only became a constant presence in Recife’s cultural circuits

(Teles 2015, 137–148), but indeed through his own discourse, his Pernambucan regionalism, and through the very act of establishing that presence, he too embodied the ethos of the local cultural and intellectual elites. In the 1938 Anuário, the FCP lauds its president, celebrating the fact that “[o]ften one can see the manager of Tramways in the poor neighbourhoods, personally driving his car full of barefoot little children, happy at the opportunity for a ride in a car” (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938). Fisch conducted himself in the same way as did local folklorists, engaging in activities that resembled fieldwork by visiting working-class neighbourhoods and witnessing their cultural practices. He was also adept at the kind of informal diplomacy required for a US national in his position, ardently embracing the discourses of Pernambucan exceptionalism and Northeastern regionalism yet also knowing how to play his foreignness to his advantage. In a 1937 interview, when asked if he had learned to dance to frevo, Fisch is reported to have commented: “A foreigner can never catch perfectly the rhythm of a regionalist music. I have sought to practice, but either my legs refuse to help me, or my ears are not in line with my legs” (J.P. Fisch, 1937, in Teles 2015, 140). While central to the movement to construct and disseminate representations of Pernambucan identity in the

1930s, Fisch had to downplay his role as mediator by emphasizing Pernambucan popular culture as beyond the capacity of a foreigner to fully understand.

4 This dynamic would resurface during the Manguebeat era in the 1990s, in the discourses through which the movement’s foremost groups’ international success was interpreted—see Prysthon and Rosário (2005).

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J.P. Fisch had grand designs for Pernambucan music, including stylized maracatu.

In the same 1937 interview, Fisch commented that:

It is my desire as well – and I have already taken the first steps towards this—to send these discs to the powerful radio stations of North America, with the end of giving a night dedicated to Pernambuco. In this way the entire world will know Pernambuco through its music and have a good opinion of this people, because it is a joyful music, bouncy, of a strange and inviting rhythm. As you know, sadly, Pernambuco is little known abroad, where even the name is distorted. This is a way of making it known. And it is as well the first step towards tourism, which we intend to incentivize. We have also entered into an agreement for a sound recording of our Carnaval with the goal of presenting it to the entire world. Would that not be a good and opportune propaganda for Pernambuco? (J.P. Fisch, 1937, in Teles 2015, 141).

Fisch’s goal was to make the state of Pernambuco known in the US—for him, synonymous with the rest of the world—not only to promote a positive image of the state, but in order to attract foreign tourists to the Brazilian Northeast. Fisch had some limited success in this effort, producing two radio programs on WZXAF of Schenectady, New York state, that featured frevo canção, frevo de rua, and maracatu-canção, though the programs do not appear to have established the international repute of Pernambuco in the way he had hoped

(Teles 2015, 146). However, in much the same way as Micol Seigel argues regarding the early twentieth-century popularity of Brazilian maxixe—now long forgotten amongst all but the most studied of Brazilophiles (Seigel 2009)—the wide reach of stylized maracatu, though not long lasting, could not but have played a role in the emerging US imaginary of

Brazil.

J.P. Fisch was not alone in the aspiration that stylized maracatu might become popular abroad. Brazilian writer, actor, and composer Valdemar de Oliveira (b.1900- d.1977) likewise believed that maracatu could become an international sensation in its stylized form. Oliveira was central to the development of stylized maracatu; in the 1938

Anuário of the FCP, Oliveira was described as a “[d]ecided friend of the work of the

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Federação Carnavalesca, [...] the spiritual father of maracatu de salão. The idea to take advantage of the rhythm of maracatu and give it melody came from him” (Federação

Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938). This description of the “father” of maracatu estilizado establishes a common trope among the artist-folklorists, to be discussed further below: that what popular culture—Afro-Brazilian culture—had to offer of value was its rhythms and its rhythms only, it being left to the stylizer/composer to “embellish” the work with melody and harmony. This logic, foundational to the movement in question and present in much discourse regarding Brazilian cultural identity and race, establishes a racializing and colonialist relationship towards maracatu nação on the part of these middle-class, white composers. The complex, African-influenced polyrhythms of maracatu nação were celebrated as central to an emerging Brazilian musicality—and critical to the practice’s ability to compete with Afro-Brazilian samba from the Southeast or African American genres such as jazz—yet at the same time denigrated as “primitive.” In a 1935 article,

Oliveira commented:

There are, however, the maracatus. There is nothing equal to them in Brazil. We are the senhores of an inexhaustible deposit of rhythms and melodies of incalculable richness. The last maracatus that I heard, just a few days ago, at the Military Brigade Barracks, executed by a jazz orchestra and a quite numerous baque. They convinced that this will be the most characteristic music of our Carnaval and in the best condition to win all of Brazil and spill out throughout the world with a greater probability of victory than the Charleston, the Black Bottom and others, whose roots are founded, just as those of the maracatu, in the black skin of the African. The suggestive force of these savage rhythms is notable, marked by its gonguês, by its porcas and by its large drums. The most important thing is nothing other than, proportionally as time goes by, the increase of our arterial pulsations so that we will eventually surrender insensibly to the tough dynamic of those rhythms that deafen us and excite our entire nervous system. They are a barbarous music and dance, whose stylization in the sphere of salon dances would mark a rapid and complete victory without compare in any epoch (Valdemar de Oliveira, 1935, in Teles 2015, 154).

At once “incalculably rich” and “savagely barbaric,” Oliveira sees the rhythms of maracatu nação as capable of altering the Brazilian citizen’s very nervous system, a fact which he

147 celebrates. He emphasizes the practice’s origins in Afro-Brazilian communities, which he presents as integral to its ability to compete with the Charleston and the Black Bottom from the US. At the same time, this “victory” is not only of stylized maracatu—and thus Brazil and Pernambuco—over US genres, but of Recife’s middle-classes (its “senhores”) over maracatu nação itself, conquering in the “sphere of salon dance” a victory without rival in

“any epoch.” The relationship established between middle-class, white artist-folklorists and the working-class Afro-Brazilian performers of maracatu nação was embedded with and in hierarchies that rendered its own logic inherently contradictory.

Others viewed the stylization of maracatu nação in a similar manner, sometimes using tropes of sanitation and purity to frame the relationship between maracatu nação, stylized maracatu, Recife’s black working-classes, and its mostly white middle and upper classes. In one 1936 radio broadcast discussed by Teles (2015, 157), organized by and performed in the residence of one senhor José Gonçalves, a repertoire of songs including those of maracatu nação and some stylized maracatu compositions such as “Eu sou do

Forte” and “Coroa Imperial” were performed with a group of batuqueiros from Cruzeiro do Forte. Cruzeiro do Forte, in fact, are a group that performs maracatu de baque solto— generally considered to be a distinct through related practice from maracatu nação, and most certainly with a distinct repertoire—and it is not specified whether these drummers were joined by middle-class instrumentalists or vocalists in the performance of the stylized pieces, or whether they were adapted to the conventions of either maracatu nação or maracatu de baque solto. The broadcast program notes that: “These 17 compositions [...] promise to enact a genuine revolution among our radio listeners. Whoever has a radio, turn it on and dance to a pure maracatu from a clean and single source” (Note on broadcast

148 program, 1936, cited in Teles 2015, 157). Though this performance was in fact drawing together elements of maracatu nação, maracatu de baque solto, and the stylized maracatus of the local cultural elites, it was advertised as danceable yet “clean”. Often tropes of

“cleanliness” and “dirtiness” were used as euphemisms that simultaneously described sexuality and race, rooted in the racialized discourse that labelled African-descended musics as indecently sexualized. However, they also often referred to the imagined “purity” of the “folkloric” source, supposedly “untainted” by the influence or interference of elite, urban culture. In this reference to “maracatu from a clean and single source,” both discourses are seemingly evoked, suggesting that the performance is both pure because it is not “contaminated” by multiple sources, but also implicitly suggesting that it is cleansed of “immoral” subjects and sentiments, due to the positive influence of the stylized maracatus.

Co-founder of the FCP Mário Mello also comments on the trajectory of maracatu, via its stylization, in racialized terms. In a 1937 article, Mello opined:

It once was forbidden for the maracatu, the caboclinho, to parade through the principal arteries of the city. Today both are appreciated. The white girls break their bodies to the sound of the gongá[sic] and the maracatu is the darling dance in the salons of the upper classes, thanks to the Federação. The frevo lives on, relegated to an inferior position (Mário Mello, 1937, cited in Teles 2015, 158).

Mello celebrated the triumph of maracatu nação, once denigrated by the middle and upper classes, and now “appreciated” by white girls and the attendees of upper-class salons. Yet

Mello framed this triumph as one that could only be made possible by the practice’s stylization—ultimately thanks to the efforts of the FCP—since it would have been these stylized maracatus that were being performed as salon dances (sometimes referred to as maracatu de salão, or “salon maracatu”). The assumption that underlies this claim is that if white girls—assumed to be delicate, pure, and traditionally feminine—are dancing to

149 maracatu, then the practice has been elevated. Yet these white girls are also “breaking their bodies”—a reference to African-influenced dances in Brazil, which are generally much more athletic, acrobatic, or require a nuanced understanding of musical rhythm than most salon dances. Mello draws on the violent metaphor of “breaking the body” to describe

African-influenced dance performed by white girls; yet given the upper-class salon context he evokes it is unlikely that the dances performed to stylized maracatu were particularly acrobatic or nuanced with African-inspired polyrhythms. Rather, the phraseology allows

Mello to evoke blackness and African dance but do so within the “safe” bounds of the upper-class salon. Once again, Mello’s racialized description toes the line between exoticizing discourses that reference the blackness of maracatu nação, and discourses of

“purity” that elide race, class, gender, and sexuality to suggest that the stylized maracatus danced in the upper-class salons have elevated maracatu nação above its lowly origins, allowing it to triumph from its early, maligned status. Despite his optimism however, if his claim that frevo had been “relegated to an inferior position" contained any grain of truth, the tides have long since turned regarding the two genres’ relative popularity.

Though all those invested in the stylization of maracatu nação operated within discourses that were inherently ambiguous and sometimes outright contradictory with regards to notions of race and cultural value, within this group of artistic and intellectual elites there emerged an ideological split in the debates between Valdemar de Oliveira and

Mário Mello. At the core of the conflict was Mello’s agenda to feed stylized maracatu compositions back into the repertoire of the nações. Teles cites Mello’s assertation that:

Regarding the maracatus, attending to the fact that these same are found to be divided into two well defined types. One type encompasses the slow maracatus, similar to the US Blues, such as ‘É de tororó,’ ‘No yo-yo mango,’ and ‘Eh u’a calunga.’ And the maracatus of the type of ‘Coroa Imperial’ and ‘Eu sou do forte.’ The Federação resolved to distribute them among the respected classes of affiliated maracatus. The

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slow ones will be distributed among the maracatus Elefante, Leão Coroado, the songs by Sebastião Lopes, Capiba (Mário Mello, c. 1935, in Teles 2015, 155).

Mello’s intention to distribute middle-class composed stylizations among the nações was controversial even at the time, though for different reasons than they might be today. While many ethnographers of today would balk at the ethics of this patronizing course of action, resistance in the early twentieth century to Mello’s plan was largely centered around notions of cultural “purity” and “contamination.” However, it is tantalizing to speculate— though hard to know without more robust documentation—what kind of logic prevailed in the decision of which type of stylized maracatu to distribute to which nações. Mello’s reference to “slow” maracatus—distinct from the other, presumably “fast” ones—touched on a prominent element of both the aesthetics of and discourse surrounding the stylized maracatu movements, to be discussed further below: an aesthetic and discursive orientation that emphasizes sadness, melancholy, nostalgia, and tragedy as the core sentiments of maracatu nação. Embedded in Mello’s comment about “slow” maracatus— and especially in the fact that he does not give equal weight to the other type, which go undescribed—is this same aesthetics of tragedy, since on the most basic level, slow tempos are often read as expressing “sadness” within the Western European musical traditions

(though certainly not exclusively!). He proposed to distribute these compositions to two of the most revered and “traditional” nações, Elefante and Leão Coroado. Mello’s intended plan suggests that the slow tempos of one set of compositions (and their aesthetics of tragedy) are the proper domain of traditional nações, begging the question as to where he meant to distribute the other maracatus, such as “Eu sou do forte” and “Coroa Imperial”— perhaps to the maracatus de baque solto, known for their frenetic, driving tempos and simple but trance-like rhythms? Interestingly, this last composition—“Coroa Imperial”—

151 was the only one mentioned by Mello here to be successfully fed back into the repertoire of the nações, where according to Teles (2015, 156), it is sometimes still performed today without awareness of its elite origins.

The winning compositions of the FCP’s 1938 competitions seem to support the idea that “slow” maracatus are not only performed at slow tempos but also evoked a “sad” emotional tone, while the “fast” ones evoke a happy tone. Out of seven prizes awarded among the categories of frevo, frevo-canção, and maracatu, the first and second prizes respectively for maracatus were awarded to “Pae do Congo” with lyrics by Luiz Luna and music by Manoel Tenório, and “Maracatucá,” with lyrics by Silvino Lopes and music by

João Valença (Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938). Lead-sheets (simplified sheet music) for the compositions were included in the Anuário and allow for musical analysis. “Pae do Congo” is marked as moderato—a moderate pace—and features an insistent, driving rhythm in a major key (incidentally, employing some of the modal scales of the music of the sertão backlands, particularly the flattened 7th, a device not associated with maracatu nação). The lyrics describe and celebrate the royal court of maracatu nação and claim it as distinctly Pernambucan. On the other hand, the second prize winner

“Maracatucá,” is marked as lento, a slow tempo, features slightly less rhythmic density, and is performed in a minor key. The lyrics feature a great deal of inscrutable vernacular— likely inscrutable to the very working-class people it was meant to imitate—and finish with the following stanza:

When the black man cries for love, He is praying to Our Lord To be more black, lelê [To not be more black, lelê?] Who is worth something

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(Silvino Lopes, reproduced in Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938)5

It is unclear whether the unusual construction of the phrase “para sê mais nêgo”— “para ser mais negro” or “to be more black”—is perhaps not actually intended to be a vernacular distortion of “para não sê mais nêgo”— “to no longer be black”, in order to become someone “que tem valô” or who “is of value.” This would fall in line with the common discourse expressed in stylized maracatu that blackness is suffering. However, even if the lyric is meant to be read literally (an odd but still comprehensible construction), where the subject is praying to become more black because that is who has value—perhaps trying to convey an early message of racial empowerment? —the stanza still opens with the image of the black subject crying for love and praying desperately to God for change. Paired with the mournful melody and slow tempo of the piece, the former interpretation seems more likely, but either supports the idea that “slow” maracatus referred to those that expressed sadness through multiple musical and lyrical devices, not only through tempo.

Valdemar de Oliveira— “spiritual father” of maracatu de salão (Federação

Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938)— pushed back forcefully against Mario Mello’s plan.

In a 1936 newspaper article, Oliveira mocked Mello’s aspirations for stylized maracatu:

... Now, my God, how will the people from Leão Coroado learn ‘Eh u’a calunga’ by Capiba, with its tidy harmonies, it’s foreignized modulations, and its little lyrics put by force into the melody? It is necessary to avoid the pollution of this very pure source by the germs of the inspiration of our popular composers (Valdemar de Oliveira, 1936, in Teles 2015, 155).

Oliveira finds the idea of members of Leão Coroado learning the Capiba composition “Eh u’a calunga”6 laughable, though it is ambiguous as to why: while he seems to mock the

5 “Nêgo quando chora de amó,/ É pedindo a Nosso Sinhô/ Para sê mais nêgo lelê/ Qui é que tem valô” (Silvino Lopes, reproduced in Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana 1938) 6 The song title is referenced in texts with several different spellings.

153 elite pretensions of the stylized maracatus with references to their “tidy” harmonies, “little” lyrics, and “foreignized” harmonic modulations, he is also suggesting the black, working- class members of the nações would be incapable of learning these elements of European musical erudition. In addition to drawing on images of “pollution,” “purity,” and even infectious “germs” to decry the idea of teaching stylized maracatus to the nações, Oliveira also sees the aesthetics of the two practices as mutually incompatible, a deeply contradictory position given that he was foundational to the movement to base one genre on the other. In another article published a month later, Oliveira reinforces this idea:

Because no one can say that they have created a new rhythm for dancing so deeply popular, so profoundly racial as the maracatu. I doubt that our negros dance in their terreiros to ‘É de tororó,’ or to ‘Eh u’a calunga’. They don’t dance to them because the gait [andamento] is different. Things like this rob from their [stylized] maracatus the primitive flavor of the legitimate Pernambucan maracatus (Valdemar de Oliveira, 1936, in Teles 2015, 156).

Here, Oliveira extols the traditional maracatus nação and casts doubt on the idea the nações are interested in performing stylized maracatus such as Capiba’s “É de tororó” and

“Eh! Ua! Calunga!”—an argument he upholds with the assertion that the “gaits”

(“andamento”) of the two genres are incompatible. By this term, Oliveira seems to have been referring to something similar to the present-day African American idea of “groove” or the more Afro-diasporic notion of the “time-line”. Both terms refer to the ways in which a short, repeated rhythm that undergirds a piece (even a very simple one, such as the four quarter notes of traditional jazz) are inflected and articulated to produce a distinct rhythmic feeling in a performance that in turn shapes how dancers move their bodies to the music.

In his suggestion that maracatu nação and most stylized maracatus possess a different

“gait,” or “groove,” Oliveira is not incorrect—this difference is one of the first things that struck me when listening to recordings of stylized maracatus, especially since rhythm was

154 so emphasized by the genre’s advocates as a key “essence” of maracatu nação. However,

Oliveira roots this difference in racialized language, both celebrating the maracatu of the nações for being “deeply popular” and “profoundly racial”—somehow more “racial” than other practices performed by black Brazilians—but also characterizes them as primitive, seeking to police the “contamination” of this source material by the stylizations of local cultural elites, a cultural practice which he helped establish.

This group of actors—the US citizen J.P. Fisch and the local cultural elites Mário

Mello and Valdemar de Oliveira—not only sought to firmly establish the practice of stylizing maracatu as central to carnaval and Pernambucan identity building, but they were able to widely disseminate the fruits of this practice, if only for a brief period. They also established a key debate—what kind of legitimacy does stylized work based on maracatu nação have, and what is the proper relationship between these middle-class stylizer- composers and members of the nações? This debate continues to animate discourse about maracatu nação both within the nações and in the city of Recife at large. At the core of these debates were notions of race, cultural “purity”, popular and erudite culture, and hierarchized ideas about musical evolution. While these debates played out among figures closely tied with the FCP and its agenda of cultural management and the “sanitization” of carnaval, other artists, incentivized but not directly mandated by the FCP, were also invested in the development of stylized maracatu as a new urban popular music genre. The next section will focus on the work of poet Ascenso Ferreira and his collaborator Capiba, looking at the ways in which their stylization project shaped discourses attached to maracatu nação to this day.

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3.2 Banzo Songs: Maracatu Nação and an Aesthetics of Tragedy in the Work of Ascenso Ferreira and Capiba

The sound came still to one’s ears, in an almost extinct muffle, as if it were a murmur of lamentations: It’s from Tororó...... from Tororó... And then, to follow, the delicious speech of our land, enveloping the indolence of a strange song, but which played with the senses, and left the clássicos with their mouths open: ‘Monkeys lick me... Monkeys lick me... This is the maracatú that Ascenso Ferreira stylized and which was disseminated through the tender voice of Lêda Baltar, during the magnificent tour of Jazz Acadêmica in the epoch of its greatest brilliance and greatest action. Later came the scholars, researching the origin of popular songs, their ethnological interpretations and, often too, those that use and abuse folklore to explain only their merely personal points of view... (Cleophas de Oliveira 1943, on the poet and folklorist Ascenso Ferreira).

The above passage refers to a poem by the Pernambucan poet and folklorist Ascenso

Ferreira entitled “É de Tororó,” which was set to music by the famous Pernambucan composer Capiba in 1933, won second prize at Recife’s carnaval in 1935, and whose title was borrowed for a later book published in 1951 on maracatu nação. The publication brought together essays by Ferreira and future founder of the Movimento Armorial, Ariano

Suassuna, with musical transcriptions of ten “stylized maracatus” by Capiba, including the title composition. The passage captures neatly the often contradictory discourses that animated the movement at the center of which Ferreira was located: the search for

“folkloric authenticity” collides with jazz-age pop modernity; the celebration of a local intellectual and pioneer in the historical and ethnographic study of maracatu nação is followed in quick turn by the disparagement of the “ethnological interpretations” of academic types; and all with respect to a poem (misquoted in the above passage, in fact) and composition whose wildly exoticist references to being licked by monkeys have little to do with maracatu nação’s own poetics. Indeed, the poem is not even a poem; in the

156 phraseology of this author, it is as if the “maracatu” already existed, waiting to be

“stylized” into existence by Ferreira and then disseminated by the local popular music industry, in this case by the appropriately named band, Jazz Acadêmica. Though jarring, these contradictions were necessary in order to make the logic of the movement work: the proponents of maracatu estilizado needed to disavow the intellectualism of the clássicos7

(in which they were steeped), in order to make the process of stylization appear natural.

Though the ultimate goal was to render maracatu nação—or what was imagined to be maracatu nação’s “essence”—into forms deemed more fit for elite or mass popular consumption, the logic of this process needed to be obscured so that these stylized maracatus could be claimed to be “authentic” and therefore appropriate to represent

Pernambuco both nationally and internationally.

The maracatu estilizado movement extended beyond the initial efforts of the FCP to include artist-folklorists working in several disciplines, such as poet Ascenso Ferreira, composer Capiba, and visual artist Lula Cardoso Ayres. In particular, Ferreira would combine the gesture of stylization in his poetry with ethnographic writing published as folklore research, in which maracatu nação was central. Composer Capiba, who often collaborated with Ferreira, produced several stylized maracatu compositions that became hits and were briefly part of the local popular music songbook. This section focuses on the work of Ferreira and Capiba, as well as a film performance of Capiba’s stylized maracatu

“Êh! Uá! Calunga!” by little-known Northeastern vocalist Mara in 1937. All three of these artists contributed significantly to the development of stylized maracatu and its association

7 Roughly translating as the “scholars,” “intellectuals,” “academics,” or perhaps “traditionalists” in the sense of those who adhered to more conservative, European cultural traditions.

157 with an aesthetics of tragedy—and in the case of Ferreira, would validate this association through use of the slavery-era term banzo.

The poet Ascenso Ferreira was born in 1895 in the town of Palmares, in the interior of Pernambuco. After the death of his father when he was seven years old, Ferreira was raised by his mother, local abolitionist and professor Maria Luísa Gonsalves (Bandeira

1963, 8). He began publishing his poetry in local journals and newspapers as a young man, and published his first book of poetry, Catimbó, in the late 1920s. This book included various poems set to music alongside poetic stylizations and odes to various forms of local performance practices, including maracatu nação—a project which he would continue to elaborate in the coming decades. During this time Ferreira also became involved in the local manifestations of the Brazilian modernist movement, rubbing elbows with locally and nationally influential figures such as Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Gilberto Freyre, Mário de Andrade, and Manuel Bandeira. The influence of Mário de Andrade’s ideas about developing a Brazilian canon based on popular culture in music and the other art forms must have been particularly influential (M. de Andrade 1962). In Recife, Ferreira was at the center of a small group of Pernambucan artists and intellectuals who were all deeply invested in elaborating a local regional identity concurrent with the overall goals of

Brazilian nationalist modernism, which involved both the “scientific” collection and documentation of local folklore and the development of new, uniquely Brazilian expressive forms across all artistic disciplines. From his initial work consisting of “rhapsodic” poetic takes on local performance practices, Ferreira would go on to conduct field research, publishing a few articles in folklore journals—including an oft-cited article on maracatu

158 nação published in 1942, which would be republished in local journals and edited collections several times over the following decades (Ferreira 1963, xi–xviii).

Ferreira was often lauded by Pernambucan, Brazilian, and international Brazilianist intellectual elites for his poetic works, and especially for the way in which he navigated the line between artist and intellectual and between the popular and the erudite. Ferreira is described by his contemporaries as “in reality, [...] a poet not a sociologist, much less a researcher” (Sérgio Milliet, cited in Bandeira 1963, 7)—“not a mere stylizer. Not a simple collector of data” (Souza Barros 1944). Ferreira, though familiar with the literary circles of Recife, “did not sophisticate himself [sofisticou-se] with the attitudes and gestures of an intellectual, nor did he convert into one of those eruditos who imitate and cite Valery,

Rimbaud or Mallarmé with regard to everything” (Bruno 1945). This same author went on to claim that the impressions of the Northeast that Ferreira translated into poetry "were not collected in an intentional manner in the form of a documentation to use later. They were incorporated into his spirit by an organic process,” thereby becoming the “natural expression” that manifested in his poetry (Bruno 1945). French sociologist Roger Bastide, known for his work on Bahian Candomblé, wrote that Ferreira “allied intuition with science” to produce “popular poetry”—a task for which Bastide claimed he was uniquely suited, arguing that popular poetry could not come directly from the people but had to be penned by an intermediary who “was in direct contact with them [...] but who, at the same time, because of his culture, isolated himself enough from the popular classes to extract from the folk this poetry of which he is the carrier without being conscious of it” (Bastide

1963, 32–33). Bastide perhaps best articulates the near-impossible task proposed by

Brazilian modernism—to produce an art both “authentically of the people” and yet which

159 appealed to the sensibilities of local elites and could win the approval of the European vanguard—and like local intellectuals and artists, Bastide insists that Ferreira was a rare expert at this task. In order to do so, Ferreira must be characterized as educated and refined, yet still able to produce his art “unconsciously,” supposedly just like the “folk” from which he drew inspiration. It hardly mattered, it seems, that Ferreira had been contributing non- fiction articles based on his research to local folklore journals since the early 1940s, or that he was in fact one of the primary exponents of what was termed, without pejorative connotations, maracatu estilizado—he remained firmly “of the people,” “unscientific” and

“natural” in the remembrances of these commenters. Or as it was put in a profile on Ferreira published in the Boletim da Cidade e do Porto do Recife in 1944, in his poetry Ferreira created “‘Lore of the folk’ and not ‘lore about the folk’” (Souza Barros 1944; underscore in original). The author wrote these phrases in English just to emphasize the critical distinction.

One of the reasons given for Ferreira’s success at balancing the opposing twin goals of Brazilian modernism was the musicality of his work. As Mário de Andrade wrote,

Ferreira “elevates to the maximum possible the rhapsodic tendency of Brazilian poetry,” with his poem “Maracatu” cited as the most representative in this regard, since it was

“entirely sung” (M. de Andrade 1963, 20). Among his rhapsodic works, “the choreographic rhythms of côcos, maracatus, [and] sambas de matutos [... are] transposed admirably into poetry” (M. de Andrade 1963, 20). Roger Bastide likewise affirmed that in order to create

“popular poetry” successfully, “it is necessary to possess, in the highest degree, like

Ascenso Ferreira, a sense of rhythm”—by which he meant not only musical rhythm but the

160 rhythm of the sounds of everyday life among the rural and urban working classes and peasantry (Bastide 1963, 32–33).

But perhaps the greatest authentication of Ferreira’s work came from the claim that some of his poetry had in fact made its way into popular usage within local folk practices.

As Brazilian artist, intellectual, and sociologist Sérgio Milliet claimed, some of Ferreira’s poems had already “become anonymous, had already turned into folklore. The people hear it, they like it, they feel it and they don’t bother to ask whose it is, because they hear [these poems] as natural expressions of a characteristic culture” (Milliet 1963, 13)—a claim that would also be made about the stylized maracatus of Capiba, as discussed below. While it is difficult to verify this claim, it is not impossible—the folklorist and composer César

Guerra-Peixe, considered to be the founding father of the academic study of maracatu nação, recounted in much more detail a similar anecdote about Beethoven’s Für Elise being transformed into a loa for a Xangô ritual (Guillen 2007, 250). There is no reason why performers of popular culture cannot be influenced by the works and practices of the intellectual and artistic elites with which they come into contact.

Nonetheless, the direction of flow between popular cultural practice and Ferreira’s own poetry is less than clear. While certain of his “musicalized poems” may indeed have become part of the local “folkloric” vernacular, some of the themes earlier published by

Ferreira as poetry were later republished as collected lore. It is highly likely, though certainly not clear, that these melodies and themes were already a part of popular practice, and that Ferreira drew upon them in creating his poetry, only to later republish them as folklore and perhaps have his versions enter back into popular usage—underscoring the truly multi-directional and circulatory nature of cultural change. In his first book of poetry

161 published in the 1920s, Catimbó, Ferreira includes an appendix with transcriptions of the melodies of those poems meant to be sung. Among these is the poem “Maracatu”—that which Mário de Andrade cited as the ultimate example of Ferreira’s musicalization technique:

Zabumba bass drums The pop of bombs Ingono8 beats Banzo songs The staccato of the ganzá shakers

--Loanda, Loanda, where are you? --Loanda, Loanda, where are you?

The crescent moons of gleaming mirrors, necklaces and combs, jawbones and teeth of the maracajá...

--Loanda, Loanda, where are you? --Loanda, Loanda, where are you? (Ferreira 1963, 52)9

The poem places percussion and rhythm first, using references to the sounds and especially the drums in the first verse to poetically invoke maracatu nação. Zabumba, a common name for a bass drum in northeast Brazil that is sometimes applied to the large alfaias of maracatu nação, is paired with bombo (another word for the alfaia) and bomba (meaning

“bomb”), playing on the similarity in sound between the three words and emphasizing the thunderous quality of those drums. Similarly, ingono is a variant on the word “cangoma,” which refers to a large drum used in the Bantu Candomblés (those of Angola or Congo) as

8 Variant on cangoma/ingoma, a large cylindrical drum with one drumhead, made from a hollow log, of Bantu origin and used in the Congo/Angola Candomblés (E. U. de Barros 2007, 240). 9 “Zabumbas de bombos/Estouros de bombas/Batuques de ingonos/Cantigas de banzo/Rangir de ganzás.../ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estás?/ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estás?/ As luas crescentes/de espelhos luzentes/colors e pentes/queixares e dentes/de maracajás.../ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estás?/ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estás?/ A balsa no rio/cai no corrupio/faz passo macio/mas to a desvio/que nunca sonhou.../ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estou?/ – Loanda, Loanda, aonde estou?" (Ferreira 1963, 52).

162 well as in many dances. These many references to large bass drums are juxtaposed against the sharp, rapid, and higher pitched staccato of the large metal shakers known as ganzás.

Ferreira’s “Maracatu” not only emphasizes the role of the drums discursively; the poem’s “musicalization” also privileges certain rhythms as characteristic of maracatu nação. Most of Ferreira’s musicalized poems employ a rhythmic cell that undergirds all the rhythms of both the voices and the drums in maracatu nação. This rhythmic cell places an emphasis on the first, second, and forth of four evenly-spaced notes in a beat (usually transcribed as sixteenth notes), especially the second one, which could be visualized as

“xX.x” and which I will call a “1-2-1” since it involves a sequence of notes lasting a duration of one, then two, then one. This kind of rhythmic undergirding is typical of Afro- diasporic musical practices with origins in coastal West and Central Africa—in its more complex variations, it is often referred to as a “time-line” (with the most famous timeline being the Cuban clave, though there are many others). As Brazilian ethnomusicologist

Carlos Sandroni argues (2001, 19–38), it is a common trope to describe the defining characteristic of samba and many other Afro-Brazilian musical practices as being rhythmic

“syncopation,” a discourse equally embraced by academics, musicians, and lay people.

However, the notion of syncopation is Eurocentric, since it describes “unexpected rhythms” that do not align with an “expected norm” that is only “expected” within the conventions of European erudite music. Scholars of African music have shown that what they call “contrametricity”—the simultaneous execution of non-aligning rhythms—are considered the norm in those practices. Nonetheless, the ways in which African rhythmic sensibilities have historically been reworked into European-derived metricity in Brazil might legitimately be referred to as syncopation, as long as this use is properly clarified as

163 such. As Sandroni elaborates, the early assimilation of African-derived rhythmic sensibilities into European-descended popular music practices in Brazil involved first the progressive simplification of contrametric rhythms in order to fit into a basic 4/4 time signature (a rhythmic organization of four equal-length beats that feels “even”, typical of

Western European erudite music), while still retaining something of their original contrametric feel. From there, musicians performing what came to be known as samba (and many other musics) were able to then increase the complexity of the music through the manipulation of countless variations of these small “syncopated” rhythmic cells. One of the most employed of these cells is a rhythmic pattern of 1-2-1 within the space of a single beat. For example, the continuous repetition of this pattern, with few variations, forms the rhythmic basis of the practice known as choro and is also often employed in bossa nova, both urbane offshoots of samba, as well as underlying many variations within samba itself.

Though following their own separate historical trajectories (and historical musicological studies in this regard are lacking), many forms of Northeastern popular music employ the same 1-2-1 rhythmic cell, including maracatu nação. However, maracatu nação is one of the most pronounced instances where the way in which rhythms are organized and performed across instruments (their orchestration) creates far greater complexity than suggested by such a simple rhythmic cell. In particular, the large iron bell known as the gonguê tends to omit the first 1 of the cell in the first beat, leaving a space and coming in heavy on the 2 instead. Likewise, the alfaias perform the first 1 with the generally weaker left hand, using a backhanded stroke that makes the resulting note rather muted, while hitting the following 2-1 with a heavy stroke made by the right hand, resulting in what can sometimes sound like a silent note on the initial beat. Both of these rhythms

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(those played by the gonguê and the alfaia) are “held together” by the rhythmic scaffolding provided by the caixa snare drums and the shakers, whether ganzá or abê, which both play rhythms that are syncopated, but emphasize that syncopation much less dramatically. This extreme form of “syncopation” is relatively unusual even among Afro-Brazilian and other

Afro-diasporic musical practices—while the rhythm of maracatu nação is clearly identifiable for most listeners as being in some variation of 4/4 time, the displacement of the beat can disorient a listener unfamiliar with the practice (especially one who is mostly familiar with European-derived rhythms), causing one to perceive the beat as being a fraction later than it really is.

In Ferreira’s musicalizations (and in Capiba’s stylized maracatus, as will be discussed further below), the 1-2-1 rhythmic cell is used more consistently in his poem

“Maracatu” than in any other. This suggests that much of what Ferreira and his contemporaries perceived as the “essence” of maracatu nação—that which they aimed to capture through the process of stylization—was its rhythmic complexity. This is further underscored by the fact that Ferreira’s “Maracatu” (and his other poems musicalized by

Capiba) bear little to no relationship with maracatu nação melodically and incorporate harmonization not usually present in a maracatu nação ensemble comprised of unison voices and drums. However, the move used by Ferreira and other of shifting the rhythms of maracatu nação percussion and its 1-2-1 rhythmic cell into the melodic register flattens the complexity of the original rhythm, removing the heavy emphasis on the 2 created by the gonguê and the distinctive technique used to play the alfaia, as well as the interlocking character of the entire batuque.

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In addition to placing a great emphasis on rhythm and percussion, Ferreira’s

“Maracatu” characterizes the toadas of maracatu nação as “banzo songs.” Banzo was a colonial-era term referring to a type of mental illness that primarily afflicted enslaved

Africans. The list of symptoms included what would now be described as depression, anxiety, insomnia, loss of appetite, unexplained weight loss, weakness and fatigue, gastrointestinal changes, heart palpitations and even fever, and in extreme cases episodes of dissociation, addictive behaviors, suicide and suicide attempts, or unexplained death

(Oda 2008, 741). Such symptoms would in the present day be understood as indicators of unresolved post-traumatic stress from the cruelties of slavery; indeed the term banzo, specific to the Brazilian context, was likely understood by local doctors and scholars to be equivalent to the more broadly used diagnosis of “nostalgia” (a mental illness primarily affecting soldiers forced into service in wars and occupations far from their homes) by the

European medical establishment (Oda 2007, 358). While banzo seems to have referred to what we would now call PTSD, for most of the colonial period, banzo was explained primarily as a kind of “mortal nostalgia” (Oda 2008, 736) on the part of enslaved Africans for their homeland, and only secondarily as a reaction to their loss of liberty and the cruelties inflicted upon them under enslavement (Oda 2007, 348). Therefore, while in a certain sense banzo was very much a reality—the behavioural manifestation of the many traumas inflicted upon enslaved Africans—in the discourse of Brazil’s medical establishment its interpretation was skewed to privilege the serious effects of being forcibly removed from one’s home, family, and culture of origin, over the even more serious effects of captivity, grueling forced labor, humiliation, and daily abuse. Such a privileging had the

166 result of downplaying the horrors of slavery and reinforcing deterministic ideas about race, culture, and climate that developed throughout its practice.

The 1930s and 40s saw a revived interest in banzo amongst scholars of Afro-

Brazilian culture and religion (Oda 2008, 737), who often theorized the term to be of

African etymology though it most certainly actually stems from Portuguese (Oda 2008).

Ferreira’s use of the word banzo is consistent with this trend, giving “scientific” legitimacy to his representation of maracatu nação as a serious, nostalgic, and even tragic art form.

Ferreira is not “incorrect” in ascribing a feeling of nostalgia to maracatu nação: many songs make references to a return to Luanda, Angola, or Africa generally. However, at least in the present, these references tend not to be delivered with the emotional melodrama implied by the antiquated term banzo. Given the problematic nature of historical documents on maracatu nação, usually created through an elite lens, it is difficult to know whether this disconnect in emotional register extends back into Ferreira’s time or before, though it is likely that it did. In associating maracatu nação with banzo, Ferreira reformulated idea’s previously articulated by Nina Rodrigues about black dance and choreomania—now instead of fetishizing forms of black dance and spirit-possession ritual as a disorder of collective unruly movement, Ferreira fetishizes maracatu nação and banzo as forms of collective unruly emotion.

Ascenso Ferreira’s most cited work of non-fiction prose on maracatu nação likewise perpetuates notions of banzo, though in an understated way. First published in the local journal Arquivos in 1942 (Ferreira 1942) as well as in the 1951 collection É de

Tororó: Maracatu (Borba Filho 1951), the article, titled simply “O Maracatú,” would be

167 republished in local journals and collections for decades.10 The article is impressionistic and anecdotal—a far cry from what would be described as “scientific” ethnography today, even after the reflexive turn—but nonetheless positions itself as scholarship, discussing the origins and history of the practice using cited sources and including musical transcriptions for brief analysis. Much of Ferreira’s article is devoted to parsing out the boundaries between maracatu nação and the more rurally-situated maracatu de baque solto, as has been much discussed by Brazilian historian of maracatu nação Ivaldo Lima (2008).

However, the article also produces a distinct impression of maracatu nação and its emotional tone that marks a transition from earlier discourses that mocked the perceived

“airs” of the black royal court, to one that attempts to portray a stoic dignity in the face of exile, oppression, and poverty. After opening the article by linking maracatu nação with the fraternities dedicated to Rei Baltazar (the black member of the three kings who visited the infant Jesus at his birth)—an odd choice to emphasize over the Brotherhoods of the

Rosary and the Congo King celebrations—Ferreira introduced a friend, one Valfrido-Pé- de-Cabra, a local owner of a sugar mill and plantation. Ferreira argued throughout the article that while many of the older land-owning elites are still “repulsed” (Ferreira 1951,

14) by Afro-Brazilian cultural practices such as maracatu nação, the younger generation of senhores which grew up in the decades after the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil (of which generation Valfrido was a member), were quite interested in popular culture and made a habit of witnessing working-class and peasant performances during carnaval. In

10 While the text of the article remains the same, variations exist between the various publications in how (and if) illustrations and musical transcriptions are integrated into the text. For the sake of consistency with the other materials considered here, I am working from the 1951 version published in É de Tororó: Maracatu (Borba Filho 1951), which has original artworks based on maracatu nação by local artist Lula Cardoso Ayres integrated throughout the book, and the musical transcriptions of Ferreira’s article integrated in the main text, rather than included as an appendix. In this way, the reader is confronted with the musicality of the practice, invited to hum the many tunes themselves and make comparisons between them.

168 this way, Ferreira both represented maracatu nação as embattled, narrating the struggles with local police who frequently (and still to this day) shut down their rehearsals and performances, but also painted a portrait of a newly emerging Pernambucan intelligentsia who cultivated field relationships with performers of popular culture so as to become knowledgeable about local “folk” practices. Ferreira noted that “[e]ven I was raised in an environment of horror at the Maracatus” (Ferreira 1951, 14), making of himself an example of the transition from older attitudes now considered archaic by his peers to the forward-thinking interest in “folklore” espoused by the local intellectual elite and artistic avant-garde.

Ferreira depicted the banzo of maracatu nação in subtle ways, first emphasizing its embattled social position, as demonstrated above, and then depicting the practice as rooted in—but distanced from—former glories. As Ferreira described the royal courts of a maracatu nação parade, he commented somewhat enigmatically that “[i]n the ancient

Maracatus, the King and the Queen used to march full of dignity, covered by a parasol that is always moving, perhaps to signify that the Earth turns...” (Ferreira 1951, 16). Ferreira set up the idea that the court marched with dignity at one time, in the performances of the

“ancient” nações—also one of the terms used at the time to differentiate maracatu nação from baque solto—but did not further discuss the ways in which this aspect of their performance had changed. Rather, the statement trailed off, evoking the idea that the royal courts of the nações have lost this former dignity, perhaps meaning that their costumes and other accoutrements were no longer so convincingly royal due to lack of resources and the strain of police repression. Ferreira went on to describe the royal courts and their performances, finally concluding that: “[t]he songs support even more the assertion that

169 we are in the face of an exiled nation, as I have demonstrated” (Ferreira 1951, 17). Ferreira emphasized the state of exile of the maracatu “nations”—certainly, a discourse that is present in the toadas of maracatu nação, though not the sole discourse—taking them as if they were direct transplants of the courts of Kongo or Dahomey, rather than performances of those courts by the descendants of their enslaved former subjects. In the language of

Ferreira, maracatu nação not only deals with themes of exile; its royal courts are exiled courts, and maracatu nação is the banzo that animates the longing for return from that exile, the “mortal nostalgia” for a now-lost African royal power.

. In Ferreira’s opening anecdote, Valfrido asks him the question that becomes the central concern of the article: “Oh Ascenso, you who are the poet, tell me why is it that the

Maracatus have the obligation to dance first at the doors of the Churches before entering into Carnaval?” (Ferreira 1951, 13, italics added). By Valfrido/Ferreira’s logic, a poet is uniquely qualified to answer questions regarding popular practice. As will be discussed further in the section on Ariano Suassuna below, poetry was viewed by Ferreira’s contemporaries as linked to the “tragic spirit” of maracatu nação, since both stemmed from an inner orientation towards aesthetic “romanticism”—an inclination imagined to be particularly present among Afro-Brazilian “folk artists”. Ferreira’s own role as both poet and folklorist is not presented as conflictual here, capable of eroding his credibility as an authority on maracatu nação—as he assured his readers, “[o]f course it is in the transcription of these songs that I limit myself to record the words exactly as I heard them from the singers” (Ferreira 1951, 24). Among these transcriptions, it should be noted, the melody for one song, “Baiana Bonita” (Ferreira 1951, 21) bears a remarkable similarity to the suggested musicalization for his poem “Maracatu,” which is notated in his 1927

170 collection of poetry Catimbó (Ferreira 1963, 72). While the harmonic key, and a few rhythm and melodic embellishments have been altered, the core contours of the melody remain the same. Importantly, Ferreira’s poem “Maracatu” was published 15 years earlier than the transcription of the song in his 1942 article, raising the difficult-to-answer question of how his later transcription of “Baiana Bonita” may have been affected by the tune already having been published as part of his original work.

Near the end of the article, Ferreira also discussed the Federação’s efforts to incentivize the stylization of maracatu nação. He writes with an odd distance from the movement, given that he was the primary lyricist for its most successful composer, Capiba.

He comments that the Federação “has very much sought to stimulate the Maracatus, going as far as instituting prizes for the composers. However, until now, it has not taken care to support the selection of virtuosos, in an effort towards the re-establishment of traditions”

(Ferreira 1951, 28). The word “virtuoso” is most often used in Brazil to denote the honest, moral, or virtuous. Yet in connection with the discussion of music, it can also carry a similar meaning to that in English, where the word “virtuoso” is used to describe someone of exceptional talent. For this reason, it is not entirely clear what—or rather who—Ferreira understands as a “virtuoso” in this context; he may be referring to the best of the composers engaged with stylized maracatu (perhaps with himself and his collaborator, Capiba, in mind), or he may be referring to members of the nações themselves—those whose knowledge of the practice is most “honest.” Indeed, at the end of the article, Ferreira takes up this question again, stating that:

there could still be time for us to save the Maracatu. It is enough for the Federação to promote a selection of virtuosos, helping them to re-establish the tradition, because throughout this Pernambuco and beyond, there still exist many a black child of the terreiro who knows how to sing: ‘Ô rei qui vem da China,/ Rainha qui coroou...’ [‘O king that comes from China,/ Queen that is crowned...’]” (Ferreira 1951, 31–32).

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Ferreira depicts the “rescue” of maracatu nação—an early instance of the discourse and practice of resgate (“cultural rescue”) that would become more prominent among later generations of folklorists, especially in the 1960s—as hinging on the fact that there are still black members of the Afro-Brazilian religious communities who know the toadas of maracatu nação. Yet, it is not clear if he is suggesting that the “virtuosos” selected by the

Federação should be from among this population, or if he intends this to mean those most talented from among the local set of artists-folklorists should go out to research maracatu nação in greater depth, perhaps among “black children.”

Maracatu estilizado, Ferreira insists, is a compositional practice that produced works “destined for the Conservatories and not Carnaval,” arguing that “[t]he Maracatus estilizados applied to the dance of the royal courts will only produce the complete descaracterização of the primitive festivity” (Ferreira 1951, 28). Ferreira is most surely referring to the initiative by Mário Mello to distribute FCP prize-winning stylized maracatus among the nações. Like Valdemar de Oliveira, Ferreira finds this idea repugnant. The word descaracterização, or “decharacterization,” suggests the idea that maracatu nação will lose its identity if it becomes enmeshed with the stylized compositions based on its rhythms and themes. Ferreira goes on to lambast the “tremendous confusion made by some composers regarding this matter, some of them going as far as a clear mixing of Portuguese music with black themes” (Ferreira 1951, 28), and quipping after a musical transcription that “I am not well studied in musical matters, but, to my ears, I can affirm that this song is the twin sister of the song ‘Caninha Verde,’ [from] a Portuguese clube very much in vogue in Pernambuco at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one”

(Ferreira 1951, 28). In the heartland of mestiçagem no less, Ferreira decries the mixture of

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Portuguese and African musical traditions. Though he seems, at times, to be critiquing stylized maracatu as inauthentic—such as when he states that it is destined for the conservatory rather than carnaval —he was also personally involved in the stylization of maracatu nação and seems to be more concerned about the separation between maracatu nação and maracatu estilizado. At stake here is not only the possibility of maracatu nação losing its “authenticity” through the integration of maracatu estilizado into the repertoires of the nações, but the fundamental distinction between the two practices that allows the stylized maracatus to become “works of art”—with all of the moral and material gains that designation implies—rather than “anonymous” popular culture, practiced without recompense or recognition often at the personal expense of the nações and their members.

This fundamental distinction and its links with notions of art and artistry would be elaborated on by a young Ariano Suassuana in this same volume, to be discussed further in a later section, where its reliance on notions of banzo is made clear.

In his association of maracatu nação with notions of banzo, Ferreira was not alone.

Ferreira’s collaborator, Lourenço da Fonseca Barbosa—the Pernambucan composer popularly known as Capiba—became perhaps the region’s most prolific and most frequently recorded and performed composer of popular music from roughly the 1930s to the 1950s (Teles 2000, 53–60). Born in the interior of Pernambuco in 1904 to a large musical family, Capiba began playing and composing as a child and continued until his death in 1997 (Teles 2004, 6–8). More commonly known as a composer of frevo—an Afro-

Brazilian urban popular music genre played by small brass and drum orchestras that perform a fast-paced rhythm to which are executed acrobatic solo dances—Capiba also composed several stylized maracatus, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries. Ten

173 of these maracatus were collected and published as part of the multi-contributor volume,

É de Tororó: Maracatu in 1951 and were analyzed in an essay by Ariano Suassuna in the same publication, to be discussed further below. Like Ferreira, Capiba seems to have embraced certain aspects of ethnographic methodology—in fact acting as the transcriber for Ferreira’s 1942 article, discussed above (Ferreira 1951, 32)—but unlike his colleague,

Capiba did not publish any work as a folklorist as far as I am aware, working primarily as a composer. However, of all the composers working with stylized maracatus, Capiba was the most successful; indeed, a 1952 feature in the magazine Manchete described Capiba’s

“É de Tororó” as the “maracatu that gave him fame” (A. Cunha 1952, 37) in contradistinction to the frevos from which he earned his primary living, and later described him as “an author capable of representing the genre” (A. Cunha 1952, 37) of stylized maracatu. Capiba’s stylized maracatus, like the poem by Ascenso Ferreira above, emphasized notions of banzo by employing musical devices that read as sad and at times tragic. This is no coincidence, since Capiba worked closely with Ferreira, who penned the lyrics of many of his maracatus. Capiba’s stylized maracatus comprise a significant moment in the early representation of maracatu nação, being by far the most numerous, well known, and most broadly circulated of this rather obscure popular music genre.

Despite being little remembered by members of Recife’s music scene at the time of this writing (most inquiries made about stylized maracatus during interviews elicited only puzzled glances), a few of Capiba’s maracatus became part of the local popular music songbook, at least for a time.

The best example of the reach of Capiba’s stylized maracatus is the song “Êh! Uá!

Calunga!” According to journalist José Teles, the song was a hit at the time, though now

174 largely forgotten. Teles recounts that when the white stage performer Eros Volúsia visited the Northeast, she researched Afro-Brazilian dances to adapt to stage performance, including maracatu nação. The FCP’s 1938 Anuário includes a small feature on Volúsia and quotes her speaking on the importance of “conserving” and “stimulating”

Pernambuco’s carnaval by “defending” its artistic patrimony. The article also features three photos, two of Volúsia visiting a Xangô terreiro in the neighbourhood of Pina and the sede (“headquarters”) of Maracatú Cruzeiro do Forte, and a third which features

Volúsia in full costume for stage. The Brazilian ballerina is shown wearing a top, skirt, anklets, and headdress made of feathers, with her belly and her legs bare and her long, straight hair hanging down around her face. The costume evokes the auto-exoticist sensibilities of nineteenth century Brazilian indianismo, as does her pose, in which she is perched on the tips of her toes, knees bent, leaning forward with her arms thrown back as if about to spring from the ground or dash away from the empty, unmarked space of the studio. In 1938 in Rio, she would go on to include the song “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” in a spectacle at the Teatro Municipal to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil (Teles 2015, 151–152). The tune was also recorded by Northeastern popular music vocalist Mara Henrique Ferraz in 1935 and performed again by her in the film A Samba da Vida, directed by Adhemar Gonzaga, in 1937 (Hortencio 2014; Armazém

Memória 2020).

The recording of “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” by vocalist Mara Henrique Ferraz (commonly known simply as Mara), was one of the last recordings she made in her short career before giving up her life as a performer for marriage (Hortencio 2014). Aesthetically, it is a prime example of the stylized maracatu trend of 1930s and 40s Recife. The arrangement used for

175 her 1937 film appearance is much the same in character as the original recording, employing the same devices, themes, and general instrumentation, but swapping the male vocalist’s counterpoint part for a male chorus, expanding the horn section to include woodwinds and strings but scaling back their presence while Mara sings, and repeating a few sections from the original to extend the performance by a full two minutes. The effect is to make the performance feel more grandiose, while still sounding like the same arrangement of the song. The tempo of the film version clocks in at around 55bpm, slower than the tempo notated on the sheet music published in 1951 and is performed in the original key of D minor. Due to their similarity, here I will focus on analyzing the film performance of the song.

The film Samba da Vida (“Samba of Life”), in which Mara appears performing

“Êh! Uá! Calunga!” was made in Rio de Janeiro by Adhemar Gonzaga and released in

1937. A light musical comedy about a family of con-artists that occupies the home of a well-to-do family and attempts to steal their identities, resolving itself neatly in marriages between the children of the two families, the film has little to do with Pernambuco, maracatu nação, or the Northeast of Brazil. Mara’s performance is unrelated to the plot, occurring only because one of the con-artist’s daughters is in show business and takes a trip to a studio where she witnesses Mara being filmed. Beyond this performance, neither

Mara, the song, nor its themes make any further appearance in the film. These conventions were typical of films—especially comedies and musicals—being made both in Brazil and the United States at the time, with perhaps the most significant point of reference being the film performances of Brazilian vocalist Carmen Miranda. Miranda shot to fame in Brazil as a stage performer and recording artist of urbane sambas, and became an international

176 star known for her distinctive stylized dancing featuring a coquettish economy of movement, and her stylized costumes based on the traditional clothing of Afro-Brazilian street vending women from Bahia. As Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez (2016) demonstrates,

Carmen Miranda’s signature stylized “Afro-Bahian” look—long flowing skirt, bared midriff, flouncy and frilly tops, bright colours and daring prints, high platformed heels, abundant chunky beaded necklaces and bracelets, and of course her famous fruit headdresses—formed a stereotype of Latin American femininity that became world- famous and endures to this day. As Bishop-Sanchez argues, Miranda's stylized baiana (a

Bahian, and usually Afro-Bahian, woman) did not develop into its final form until she moved to Hollywood to make films in the US. While still in Rio, her stylizations were much less pronounced, and more focused on creating a “glamourous” rather than “exotic” image. Once in the United States, however, where her appeal hinged exactly on the

“exoticness” of her Brazilian identity, her stage costumes became increasingly bold, midriff bearing, and at times even intentionally comic—Miranda was indeed as respected for her comedic talents as for her singing and dancing—and of course the headdresses yet larger and more outrageous. This point of reference is important for understanding the context in which Mara’s performance of stylized maracatu and banzo took place. While

Miranda’s effervescent, flirtatious, and “fiery” persona, a light-hearted stereotype of Latin

American femininity created for consumption in the United States, is a far cry from the melodrama of Mara’s rendition of “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” certain elements of the costume design certainly nod to the Miranda aesthetic, as will be elaborated below. Yet other aspects stand in stark contrast to Miranda’s iconic stylizations, though Mara’s performance

177 remains equally stylized and exoticist in its heightened emotionality, sombre ritualesque movements, and its aesthetics of tragedy.

The scene opens on Mara, wearing a bikini and draped with beads, large feathers on her head. The percussion begins with a low, resonant drum playing a habanera rhythm

(a short rhythmic pattern incorporating the 1-2-1 cell described above), and a higher pitched woodblock. Low-brass outline the harmony, and a string-section enters with long- held notes. Mara sings the minor-key refrain, gazing into the distance, her arms outstretched like the Catholic Virgin Mary:

From São Paulo de Luanda They brought me here Eh! Eh! Eh! Calunga, calunga! They brought me here.

Black people suffer so, calunga! This is the whole of my weeping lament, calunga! Maracatu, maracatu! Eh! Uá calunga!

My mother cried, Calunga! And I sang low, Calunga! Maracatu, maracatu! Eh! Uá, calunga!

Mara is joined by a “consort,” a muscular shirtless man in harem pants similar to the

“slave” character of a maracatu nação parade, wearing a cloth draped over his shoulder and a Napoleonic hat like those of the infamous Northeastern Brazilian bandits. He is racially ambiguous, perhaps of some African descent. He paces around Mara, shooting her sultry glances and bending down on one knee. The couple are enveloped by an ensemble of white women dressed in hoop-skirted gowns, reminiscent of the “ladies-in-waiting” of a maracatu nação royal court, and fair-skinned dancers in bikinis and feathers who pace out slow circles around the couple while a chorus of voices chant the song’s refrain. The dancers take two steps forward, pause, and raise their arms slightly as if in salutation, over and over. They are criss-crossed by a procession of men in harem pants walking up and

178 down the steps to a large Church. Near the end of the performance, the woodwinds take up the melody while Mara is led forward by her consort in small yet dramatic steps. He releases her hand as she comes to a full stop, raising her arms and her gaze to the sky. Then the couple, with arms stretched high above their heads, turn and pace robotically forward as if possessed. As Mara takes up the last line of the melody, she stands once again with her arms outstretched in a pose resembling the Catholic Virgin, while her consort stands at her side with bent knee, gazing at her lovingly. She stares mournfully into the distance as she intones the final, wordless notes.

In many ways, Mara’s performance of Capiba’s composition could be understood as an early example of exotica. Phil Ford characterizes exotica as any creative representation of Otherness that employs the tropes of ethnographic realism without the intention of being understood as truly ethnographic. Exotica “advertises a real connection to a world that may not actually exist. Exotica makes extravagant and dubious claims for ethnographic representation with a straight face, and so throws down the gauntlet to interpretation” (Ford 2008, 122), meanwhile trading on “the simultaneity of the ultramodern moment and the half-forgotten past” (Ford 2008, 111). As such, exotica music

“aggravates the chronic anxiety that haunts all discussions of ‘world music’—that there may be no way to define a stable distinction between good engagement with the ethnic

Other and a bad exoticism” (Ford 2008, 128). Ford’s exotica had its heyday in post-WWII

North America and Europe and was primarily music produced by white artists for white, middle-class listeners eager to be transported to far-off locales, yet exotica’s musical tropes can be traced earlier, present in much of the works associated with the Harlem Renaissance and its transnational Afro-diasporic parallels, such as the performances of Josephine Baker.

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Some of these musical devices—such as the use of ostinatos, low tom-toms, and minor keys—are present in Mara’s performance of “Êh! Uá Calunga!” just as they are in Duke

Ellington’s “jungle jazz,” raising the question of whether such works were a significant influence on Capiba and the arrangers and performers involved in the production of his pop maracatu.

As Kimberley Hannon Teal (2012) argues, depending on the context, the musical devices and effects used by Duke Ellington to evoke Africa in his “jungle music” compositions have been read variously as exoticist “tricks,” testaments to his composerly genius according to the rubric of European classical musical values, proof of his status as an artist producing “authentic” representations of a unique and creative new African

American culture, a proud evocation of African heritage, or as relatively transparent musical devices that are capable of representing African back to Africans at performances in Senegal in the 1960s. The musical devices themselves—the use of growls, mutes, and screeches on the horns, low harmonic density, the use of pentatonic scales, open and parallel fourths and fifths, ostinatos and drones, and an emphasis on percussion, especially low-pitched drums—are ambiguous, already pre-existing in the vocabulary of African

American jazz, and later used to evoke an invented, imagined Africa in a context in which it was assumed that the “true” African musical heritage of African Americans was unknowable, lost to time. However, in the broader context of Mara’s performance of “Êh!

Uá Calunga!” in late 1930s Brazil, African musical heritage was assumed to be not only knowable but ever-present—and despite its inevitably invented aspects, arguably it was more present and knowable, given Brazil’s high degree of contact with Africa and the late cessation of slavery there. If, as Pim Higginson argues (2011), the image of the black body

180 dancing to the sound of drums has been viewed in many parts of the African diaspora as a problematic signifier associated with exoticist conceptions of so-called African

“primitivism,” in Brazil, as in much of Latin America, drumming and dancing, while not divorced from the exotic, are also every-day creative expressions that are not limited to the semiotic evocation of Africa or use by black bodies. Indeed, most musical performances in

Samba da Vida feature samba, by now considered to be Brazil’s “national music” and no longer understood as the sole purview of black performers. And, in this context in which samba—understood as both Afro-Brazilian and national, ubiquitous—reigns supreme, maracatu nação would have been an example par excellance of specifically “African” musical heritage in Brazil.

This exoticist representation of maracatu nação—and through it, African religiosity and slavery’s tragic past—becomes all the more significant given its dramatic departure from the actual sounds of maracatu nação. The performance of banzo-infused, stylized maracatu enacts an appropriation not only of a practice but of a feeling, of African and black grief at to the many traumas of enslavement, forced labor, daily abuse, and the ongoing post-abolition legacy of racism, poverty, and violence. As discussed above, while notions of banzo are inevitably tainted by the racist lens of post-abolition Brazilian socio- economic and racial elites, I do not wish to negate the reality of the actual suffering the word attempts to describe, or to deny the possibility that maracatu nação may have been at times a vehicle for the expression of such feelings. However, it is necessary to make a distinction between white performances of banzo and the feeling and state-of-being described as banzo. Mara’s performance makes banzo and maracatu nação into a sort of muted melodrama, in which the figures resign themselves to the tragedy of their existence

181 and their inescapable longing for a lost homeland and lost freedom. The words “maracatu” and “calunga”—the name for the sacred dolls carried and danced with by the damas de paço in a maracatu nação procession—appear as singularized exclamations with no connection to their actual semantic meanings, cried out as if they now mean only “tragedy.”

At the same time, we are presented with a central figure who we are left to assume is a royal but is not dressed in the European Baroque-style clothing typical of a maracatu nação royal court, but instead appears semi-nude, reproducing primitivist stereotypes.

Furthermore, the drama that plays out between Mara and her male consort sexualize the tragedy being performed, a tragedy that we are left to assume is born as much of the stiffly ritualized relationships enacted here through dance as it is of the unbearable rupture with

São Paulo de Luanda, capital city of colonial Angola. Though the details are left vague, the performance seems to suggest that the suffering that plagues Afro-Brazilians, the suffering from which they might gain limited relief through the performance of maracatu nação, results as much from their insistence on clinging to the memory of a tragic past through the strange rituals and religiosity enacted here, as it does from that traumatic past itself. In some senses, the song and especially this performance can be taken to enact a subtle form of victim blaming.

The emphasis on banzo—whether named as such or not—connected with performances of “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” was not limited to the performance by Mara.

According to journalist José Teles (2015), when Eros Volúsia performed the number in a spectacle in Rio de Janeiro, the program included the following description of maracatu nação: “A dance of a religious character. The reminiscence of ancient black ambassadors.

The movements of fatigued bodies... the expressions of suspicious souls of men turned

182 towards heaven. The tragi-comic parade of miserable kings and queens” (performance program, c. 1938, cited in Teles 2015, 151–152). The program describes bodies exhausted by labor and souls turned suspicious by abuse and discrimination, turned in prayer towards the heavens during the nostalgic remembrance of now-lost African political power. In this instance, the procession is described as both tragic and comic—tragic because the performers were poor and oppressed, nostalgically remembering the grandeur of African royalty in costumes that were usually worse for the wear, and comic because of the incongruity in the eyes of white elites between the pretensions of a royal court and the humble state of its performers—a characterization also seen in many older descriptions of maracatu nação and other Afro-Brazilian royal court performances. The description evokes multiple layers of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo described as “imperialist nostalgia” (1989): fair-skinned elites mourn the decline of a practice by Afro-Brazilian performers that they were complicit in marginalizing and impoverishing, while they also project nostalgia for lost African empires as a motivation for the performance onto the

Afro-Brazilian performers themselves. While during this period representations of maracatu nação de-emphasized this perceived “tragi-comic” quality in favor of emphasizing only tragedy, Volúsia’s performance of the song “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” reinforced the association of maracatu nação with banzo, as well as reproducing the condescension of older descriptions of Afro-Brazilian royal courts.

Later recordings would both attenuate and elaborate on the sense of banzo and the aesthetics of tragedy produced in Mara’s performance of Capiba’s composition. The version of “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” released in 1960 by black Pernambucan crooner José Tobias speeds up the tempo, producing a jaunty groove that retains the prominent role of the

183 woodblock and punctuates it with staccato horn shots on the upbeat. Suave 1960s string glissandos, a mixed gender chorus, and a horn section that harkens back to Mara’s version give a sense of mod glamour to the performance, though the minor key and lyrics nonetheless establish a sombre mood.

The live performance by renowned Portuguese fado singer Amália Rodrigues, recorded in the same year but only released in 2001 and which she introduces simply as

“Calunga,” moves yet further away from any resemblance to maracatu nação while of course amplifying the aesthetics of tragedy and nostalgia, which are central to fado’s affect as well (Gray 2013). Plucked Portuguese-style guitars and a low, subtle drum marking a simple 4/4 beat accompany Rodrigues’ intense, mournful vibrato. The arrangement and the melody are altered significantly, though not unrecognizably, in order to adapt the song to the conventions of fado, a transformation which is surprisingly convincing. Rodrigues also omits the verse which states that “Black people suffer so, Calunga!” (“Negro sofre tanto,

Calunga!”), removing the only direct reference to race and suffering yet without diminishing its expression. The result is a song that sounds as if it could be part of the fado canon, but for its strange references to colonial Angola and use of unknown, African sounding terms such as “maracatu” and “calunga.”

A version recorded by Pernambucan samba singer Karynna Spinelli for the 2014

Capiba tribute album Capiba, Elas, e Outras Canções plays more off Rodrigues’ version than either maracatu nação or Spinelli’s samba, featuring a double bass articulating a simple 4/4 beat and plucked string instrument used in a similar fashion as in Portuguese fado. While Spinelli does not omit the verse that Rodrigues does, she does borrow some of

Rodrigues’ terse fado phrasing. In this way, the song “Êh! Uá! Calunga!” drifts further and

184 further from any connection to maracatu nação even as it circulates on a global scale and then returns to its place of birth, becoming simply another entry in the local popular music songbook. Ironically, even if it took decades, and never occurred quite on the scale hoped for, in this one composition some of the original intentions of the actors that first launched the stylized maracatu project would eventually come to be met.

3.3 “The Transposition of the Popular”: Ariano Suassuna as Bridge Between Maracatu Estilizado and the Movimento Armorial

The same volume discussed above, É de Tororó: Maracatu (Borba Filho 1951)— which included Ferreira’s essay “Maracatu,” transcriptions of Capiba’s stylized maracatus, and reproductions of the artwork of Lula Cardoso Ayres—also includes an early article by local idealogue and playwright Ariano Suassuna, titled “Notes on the Music of Capiba.”

Only twenty-four years old at the date of publication, Suassuna would go on to greater fame later in his career, especially as the founder of the Movimento Armorial in the 1970s

(to be discussed in greater detail in the final chapter). Significantly, though Suassuna’s later work was focussed on the culture of the sertão, the interior desert back-lands of the

Northeast that are not particularly associated with African and black cultural practices, in this early essay on the stylized maracatus of Capiba Suassuna can be seen working out many of the ideas that would later become fundamental to the Movimento Armorial, especially those regarding the relationship of the erudite artist to local popular culture. In many ways echoing ideas first articulated by Mário de Andrade about the relationship between what he called “artistic music” and “popular music” in the formation of a Brazilian national musical canon (M. de Andrade 1962), Suassuna regionalizes these ideas as well

185 as placing notions of banzo in the stylization of maracatu nação central to his understanding of these relationships and the process of transformation he hoped they would enable. Though the stylized maracatus of Recife’s early twentieth-century artist-folklorists are only inconsistently remembered, I argue that Ariano Suassuna forms a bridge between the past movement and the present cultural landscape, developing his most influential ideas while a young man working alongside Ferreira, Capiba, and Ayres and disseminating them later on in his career.

Suassuna opens the article by arguing that all artistic works can be understood to privilege either form or content—elements which, though always present together and impossible to completely pry apart, are “two opposing positions, determined by two different states of spirit” (1951, 37) that are “present in the artist before [the creation] of his own work and before that of other [artists]” and from those two states “flow two different styles, to which all others can be reduced” (1951, 37). Borrowing the terminology of Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Suassuna states that “classical” works of art are those that privilege form over content, while “romantic” works are those than favour content over form. He stipulates that the terms “classical” and “romantic” as used here should not be confused with the historical artistic periods of the same names, though they borrow their names and logic from these movements. Suassuna argues that the style of a work depends on the vision the artist has of the world and his relationship with it—“the metaphysical position of the artist” (1951, 38). “Classicism” stems, in his view, from a vision of an ordered world and “romanticism” from an understanding of the world as fundamentally lacking order or universal values. In this way, an artist and their works can be either classicist or romanticist regardless of the era in which they lived and worked. In

186 this way, Suassuna establishes a dichotomy that became the basis for other differentiations between rural and urban, interior and coastal, black and indigenous, that were central to his developing theories.

After this, Suassuna goes on to argue that though culture moves through eras in which one of these aesthetic orientations predominates, the individual artist—especially the “romanticist”—is not subject to their era but creates it, both by creating new forms and recreating old ones. According to Suassuna, cultural change is moved forward by individuals of a certain kind of “extraordinary spirit” that can be found within any branch of art. Those artists of “Dionysian tastes and temperament,” Suassuna claims, tend to create a sort of “summary” of past tendencies, while also ripping them from their fundamental basis, therefore creating aesthetic revolution and carving new paths forward.

According to Suassuna, however, this “extraordinary spirit” is only possessed by composers and other artists creating “erudite art,” and particularly only “the most profound and important, the result of lucid positions assumed by the great spirits in the face of human values and whose patrimony has accumulated with the greatest vigor since the beginning of time” (1951, 41). Suassuna claims that the “essential difference” between erudite and popular art is that it is linked to an epoch and a tradition but does not bear the mark of those same great individual creative spirits. When it does, “the music, popular at the outset, outgrows its own limits and becomes marginal, because superior to the environment from which it originated” (1951, 41). In this way erudite art is the “sedimented fruit of the superações of popular music” (1951, 41). The word superação (used above in its plural form, superações) is a noun usually translated as “overcoming,” and it becomes a key term in Suassuna’s theorizing later in the article, used to refer to when an artist is able to make

187 a “low” art form overcome its popular origins through the originality of the artist’s genius.

Suassuna argues that all erudite art begins as popular tradition but goes through a process of differentiation through the contributions of the individuality of such “geniuses.” It is this process that Suassuna would propose local artists begin to take control of through the

Movimento Armorial in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Moving to the issue of regional identity and music, Suassuna claims that in the populous coastal cities it is difficult to find truly “primitive music,” which is important since “this primitive music will be the future starting point for an erudite northeastern music” (1951, 42). Toggling between epistemologies of purification and epistemologies of transculturation (Ochoa Gautier 2006), Suassuna erases hybridity and change in the sertão and fetishizes it in the coastal urban centers. In the desert back-lands of the interior sertão, argues Suassuna, tradition is much more “severely” preserved and “primitive music” therefore easier to find. Suassuna describes the music of the sertão as stemming from a fusion of Iberian music with indigenous melodies, whose descendants form the majority population of this area. These influences join with elements of Gregorian chant introduced by the colonial missionaries. Due to these three influences, the music of the sertão is predisposed towards classicism, since “the man of the sertão is [...] internalized and severe”

(1951, 42).

On the other hand, according to Suassuna the urban centers of the coast and their surrounding areas are characterized by “everyday popular music” (1951, 42) that has been profoundly shaped by post-colonial influences. In this “softer, lusher climate,” Suassuna argues, one finds the “Black-Dionysian elements which came with the African race”

(1951, 42) which predisposes the music of the coast towards romanticism. In addition to

188 these, Suassuna claims, the music bears many other influences given its coastal urban and therefore more cosmopolitan location, and these influences have eroded any classical tendencies it may have once possessed. Suassuna underscores the importance of the religious life of black communities in this regard. While in Suassuna’s view it has little influence upon the culture of the sertão, Afro-Brazilian religion and its music forms a strong presence in the zona da mata and the coastal cities. The “black music” of the Xangôs and the maracatus nação—“profoundly rhythmic and evocative” (1951, 42)—is essential to understanding the Northeastern musical landscape, where it has created a species of

“northeastern impressionism.” According to Suassuna, these qualities link the music of the coast, and especially that of Afro-Brazilians, with the spirit of romanticism. The

Northeastern musical forms that he finds most indicative of this spirit of romanticism— and most “interesting and appropriate to the region”—are the frevo and its derivative, frevo-canção, and what Suassuna terms “the maracatu negro.”

With respect to such practices, Suassuna saw three paths for the popular composer.

The first was to compose squarely within the popular tradition. The second, to enact the superação of the popular by creating “exceptional works” within that tradition. If the artist was of truly extraordinary talent, Suassuna further argued, they will by doing this pass through a phase of “transposition” (transposição) to finally arrive at the “re-creation”

(recriação) of this tradition, “it’s highest form” (1951, 45). Mere imitation, writes

Suassuna, is the domain of the popular composer, while “re-creation” is that of the erudite composer, with “transposition” as a kind of intermediary stage critical to the generation of a “national music.” It is this individual genius, Suassuna argues, that allows the artist to create art that is at once both “national” and “universal,” art that is based in local popular

189 traditions but able to incorporate “universal influences” without sacrificing its “national character.” The role of the “genius” of the composer is, on the one hand, to avoid the trap of national music that is reduced to a “patriotic-descriptive ‘impressionism’,” (1951, 45) and on the other, the trap of a universal erudite art that is disconnected from the people,

“ungrounded and over-intellectualized, such as can be found in modern art, whose roots extend to the Renaissance” (1951, 45).

It is here, after this lengthy exposition, that Suassuna comes to the matter at hand— the works of local popular music composer Capiba, and especially his maracatus. Suassuna argues that Capiba was the first and one of the only composers to attempt the

“transposition” of the popular, in a region whose “música suprapopular” (1951, 45) is otherwise quite lacking. Suassuna organizes his compositions into two groups, the “purely popular” and the “transposed popular,” which he argues should be valued differently. Of

Capiba’s “purely popular” compositions—those that in Suassuna’s estimation fall squarely within popular tradition—he says, “Here there is no artifice. He is a popular composer, at ease among the people, composing in this sense and realizing, in those old forms maintained by tradition, his work, at once collective and personal” (1951, 48). While not

“original” in the way that Suassuna views erudite music, Capiba’s “purely popular” compositions are still possessed of “intuition and good taste, on the part of Capiba” in contrast with those “recent composers who make habit of presenting as their own, foreign musics with the rhythms changed. This path is quite unsound, principally when we have in view the fact that our music possesses a perfectly characterized spirit” (1951, 48).

It is the second group, the “transposed popular” compositions of Capiba, that

Suassuna finds most praise-worthy, however. These include “Stravinsky no frevo,”

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(“Stravinsky in the Frevo”), a “frevo of a more elevated character [...] an extremely interesting endeavor [...] the result of Capiba’s contact with the music of Stravinsky, which has in common with frevo the preference for brass and wind instruments” (1951, 54).

Alongside Capiba’s Stravinskyesque frevo, Suassuna opines that of Capiba’s choros,

his best creation in this genre is, in our view, the third movement of the sonata por violoncello. One could call this excerpt a ‘Brazilian Mozartiana,’ in the same way that Vila-Lobos called some of his compositions ‘Brazilian Bachianas.’ It consists of a choro, written for violoncello, under the influence of Mozart, whose rococo, paradoxically pure and ingenuous, adjusts itself marvellously to the Brazilian rhythm (1951, 59).

In both examples, Suassuna does not seem to perceive the contradiction with his earlier condemnation of composers who borrow foreign compositions and “Brazilianize” their rhythms—it seems that according to Suassuna, this gesture is acceptable as long as the

Brazilian composer borrows only influence and not thematic elements themselves.

Suassuna saves discussion of Capiba’s maracatus for the end of the essay, a discussion that is surprisingly brief given that maracatu is the theme of the entire publication. Suassuna quickly discusses the ten maracatus reproduced at the end of the book—two of which Suassuna claims are “purely popular” and the remaining eight which are “transposed popular”—including short transcriptions as he did for the compositions discussed earlier. For all compositions, Suassuna emphasizes their “almost religious sadness,” demonstrating “another aspect of the black soul—joyous and tragic at the same time—a dualism responsible for the greater part of the Black-Dionysian to which we have already referred” (1951, 63). Suassuna highlights the composition, “É de Tororó”—the

“musicalization” of the poem by Ascenso Ferreira—which he claims represents “a reversion to the tragic religious spirit of the Afro-Brazilian, mixed with the anguish that slow and dolorous music takes on” (1951, 63), and argues that it was only due to the

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Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana’s “lack of comprehension” that the tune came in second place at the yearly carnaval competition to a “popular maracatu without great qualities, already completely forgotten” (1951, 63). Suassuna concludes by claiming that

“the musical value of these maracatus is intrinsic and alive as such, but its original links with poetry are inevitable [...] This literary-musical link almost always directs itself to the tragedy of the black race,” citing the composition “Êh, uá, Calunga” as a prime example, in which “the collective tragedy of the black Brazilian is evoked, not only by the music, of a rare purity of melody, but by its very words” (1951, 64). In the same way as did Ferreira’ poetry, Capiba’s compositions, and Mara’s performance of his composition in Samba da

Vida, Suassuna reinforces the association between maracatu nação and notions of banzo.

Suassuna’s language makes clear the ways in which his theorizing is embedded with hierarchy, arguing the erudite should be valued above the “transposed,” and the

“transposed” above the “merely popular.” In other words, the cultural production of the urban, majority-black working classes of Recife was mere fodder, while the stylizations of the middle and upper classes were the true works of art. His use of the term “transposition” as a metaphor for this process is particularly revealing of the ways in which the discourses surrounding stylization as a cultural practice both created and maintained socio-cultural hierarchies and obscured them. The musical term transposition in English (transposição in

Portuguese), literally to “move positions”, is used in both languages to describe the act of taking a melody or an entire song in one tonal center and shifting the pitch up or down to another tonal center, keeping all the relationships between the pitches in the composition the same so that the melody remains recognizable though, depending on how far it is moved, noticeably higher or lower. This movement is most often used in order to render

192 the piece of music playable by a new instrument or voice with a different tonal range and a different mode of play, fitting the melody within the particular constraints put in place by that instrument or vocal range. It is also sometimes used within a piece of music in order to create interest while maintaining some level of cohesiveness with the original melody.

Crucially, the possible tonal centers under the Western European music theory repeat in a series of twelve (running through the letters A to G along with six intermediate tones) and are conceived of through spatial language (so that tones with a slower rate of vibration are described as “low” and those with a faster rate as “high”), so that a piano keyboard, for example, from left to right runs through pitches from low to high with note names repeatedly cycling through from A to G#/Ab (an intermediate tone between G and A) and starting over at A again. Therefore, while transposing a piece of music from the key of C to the key of F, for example, does not in and of itself imply a direction of movement—it could be lower or higher—in practice, musicians speak of transposing “up” or “down.” In a similar way, Suassuna’s use of “transposition” as a metaphor to describe the act of stylization avoids making explicit its hierarchical logic (though he makes that logic abundantly clear in his essay), at the same time that it is intuitively understood that any act of transposition will necessitate a movement understood as either “up” or “down.” In this way, Suassuna’s theorizing, like much of the discourse of stylization at the time, celebrates local popular culture but places it below the erudite in a developmental hierarchy in which

“transposition” was assumed to be an “elevating” process.

As can be seen in this essay, Suassuna rejected the Afro-Brazilian cultural practices of the coastal urban centers as a proper basis for the development of a northeastern erudite tradition, in favor of the indigenous and Iberian influenced culture of the interior sertão

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“backlands”—a stance that would become yet more pronounced when he founded the

Movimento Armorial in the 1970s. However, the reasoning behind this rejection, developed here in this early essay, is that he views the cultural production of black

Brazilians, and especially their music, as “less primitive” than the culture of the sertão, though it is heavily implied that his imagined reason for that is greater contact with elite

European and white Brazilian culture. However, at the same time that Suassuna rejects practices such as Xangô, frevo, and maracatu nação, they are crucial to his theorizing of the process of cultural transposition. In particular, the problematic notion of banzo, which was in intellectual vogue at the time, was central to this theorizing, characterized as a feeling that doomed the subject to suffering in “mortal nostalgia” but also ensured the kind of aesthetic innovation that would ultimately lead to the development of a Northeastern erudite tradition. This is of course in many ways another twist on the trope of the tortured artist, yet here early twentieth-century notions of blackness—specifically, those in vogue amongst fair-skinned middle-class Pernambucan intellectuals—were critical to the formation of this trope. Interestingly, given that the majority of the artists involved in stylizing maracatu nação and other practices were not black, Suassuna’s fantastical reasoning implies that this banzo—part of what he terms the “Black Dionysian,” equally given to effusive expressions of joy—was something not only detached from the black subjects that gave life to maracatu nação, but capable of animating local white artists as well. Banzo, in other words, was contagious.

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3.4 Conclusion

The group of artist-folklorists engaged in the stylization of maracatu nação ultimately failed in their goal of creating a new genre of urban popular music that would supersede samba in fame and popularity. Despite the proliferation of writing about the movement, the incentives of the FCP, and the national and international reach of some of the burgeoning repertoire, the artists involved in creating maracatu estilizado had never limited themselves to that practice alone and would focus their efforts on better established genres, such as Capiba did with frevo. Stylized maracatus fell out of circulation in the urban popular music circuit and were certainly not taken up by the nações in any significant amount. Songs that did remain in the local popular music songbook, such as “Êh! Uá!

Calunga!” were likely seen as oddities or outliers if they were understood as maracatus at all.

However, the movement nonetheless left a legacy. Its practices, aesthetics, and discourses—especially those surrounding notions of banzo—became attached to maracatu nação for decades. Through their engagement with the idea of banzo, these artist-folklorists reworked earlier ideas about black music, dance, and religiosity as a form of collective disease of “unruly” movement, understood as a kind of mental disorder, and transformed them into a discourse that characterized maracatu nação as an expression of “unruly” emotion, attaching the practice to a sense of immeasurable loss. Through this gesture, the traumas resulting from slavery and oppression and any suffering that may have indeed been expressed by maracatu nação performance were appropriated and de-politicized.

Notions of banzo in maracatu nação and its stylization would also help to foment ideas in a young Ariano Suassuna that became foundational to the Movimento Armorial in

195 the late twentieth century and which shape the Pernambucan cultural field to this day. At the same time, the goal they set out—of establishing maracatu nação as an emblem of

Pernambucan identity and making it the basis of an urban popular music genre that would take the world by storm—were later fulfilled by the Manguebeat movement in the 1990s and early 2000s. While it is not my intention to suggest that artists such as Chico Science

& Nação Zumbi were directly responding to the stated intentions of figures such as J.P.

Fisch, Valdemar de Oliveira, Mário Mello, Ascenso Ferreira, Capiba, Mara, and Suassuna, these cultural actors were critical figures in creating the cultural world that Manguebeat artists were born into, establishing paradigms, discourses, and representations that would be inherited by this younger generation of musicians, performers, and artists. Indeed, in a

Recife music scene so dominated by the trope of the “middle-class intellectual finding inspiration in the culture of the masses”—a phenomenon that continues to be the locus of considerable anxiety for members of the nações, who have been complaining of exploitation by artists and intellectuals for decades—it would be remiss to see the explosion of this pattern of relational behavior as disconnected from earlier generations who likewise operated through the paradigm of the ethnographic-avantgarde. Importantly, since these artist-folklorists were among the first to create representations of maracatu nação, we are left with the question of how they may have shaped the practice in ways not documented by the archival record—or indeed, whether there ever really was such a time “before” these kinds of flows between unequal but interconnected worlds.

While the project of developing stylized maracatu as a genre of urban popular music would fade, some composers continued the practice in the realm of Brazilian música erudita. The most famous of these, the composer and musicologist César Guerra-Peixe, not

196 only became an early success story for the practice of folklore stylization as an erudite compositional practice; he also enacted a profound shift in the Brazilian intellectual world, especially with respect to the study of maracatu nação, from the collection of local popular culture as primarily a practice to support composition, into the study of maracatu nação as an intellectually rigorous practice, of value in and of itself and better able to serve the act of stylization when performed with “scientific” accuracy. In this way, though still motivated by personal artistic goals, Guerra-Peixe helped to shift the paradigm around the research of maracatu nação into a kind of proto-ethnomusicology.

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4.0 RACE, RHYTHM, AND MARACATU NAÇÃO: THE ERUDITE COMPOSITIONS OF CÉSAR GUERRA-PEIXE AND ZÉ AMARO SANTOS DA SILVA

While the project of developing stylized maracatu as a distinct genre of urban popular music would fade after the 1930s, some composers continued the practice in the realm of música erudita—the Brazilian term for the national manifestation of what is more broadly understood as European “classical” music. The most famous of these actors, the composer and musicologist César Guerra-Peixe, was not only a pioneer of the practice of the stylization of popular culture as an erudite compositional method in Brazil; he also enacted a profound shift in the Brazilian intellectual world, especially with respect to the study of maracatu nação. Though starting from the notion of “folklore collection” and fieldwork as primarily a practice to support the creation of original creative works, Guerra-

Peixe increasingly moved towards the rigorous study of the music of popular cultura

(especially maracatu nação) as both intellectually valuable in and of itself, and as a better means of supporting the process of stylization. In this way, though still motivated by personal artistic goals, Guerra-Peixe helped to shift the paradigm around the research of maracatu nação into a kind of proto-ethnomusicology.

In addition to the interventions of Guerra-Peixe, this chapter examines the work of

Zé Amaro Santos da Silva, a black Pernambucan composer who studied the method of

“folklore” stylization with Guerra-Peixe in the 1960s and who has also experimented with the stylization of maracatu nação in the context of música erudita—and who I had the privilege of interviewing during the course of my fieldwork. Though Silva has not had

198 quite the towering influence of a figure such as Guerra-Peixe (who had the good luck to be a white man in the mid-twentieth century when the intellectual and musical worlds of

Brazil were not quite so saturated as they are now), his maracatus are particularly interesting in that they intervene in the common representation of maracatu nação and

Afro-Brazilian subjectivity as steeped in banzo, as discussed in the previous chapter. As the only Afro-Brazilian composer of stylized erudite maracatus that I am aware of—and the only composer of stylized maracatus connected with this early-to-mid-twentieth century group of artist-folklorists that I had the opportunity to speak to—Silva was able to provide valuable information and perspectives on the process of stylization itself, as well as his personal interventions in the racialized cultural politics of the maracatu estilizado movement.

4.1 César Guerra-Peixe: From Recovered Dodecaphonist to Proto-Ethnomusicologist

The Brazilian composer and musicologist César Guerra-Peixe (1914-1993) is often credited as the godfather of the academic study of maracatu nação and the country’s leading expert on the practice of using “folklore” as the basis of stylized música erudita compositions. Born in the city of Petrópolis in Rio de Janeiro state, Guerra-Peixe was the son of Portuguese immigrants (Nepomuceno 2001, 18). He began studying music as a child and was already performing by the age of twelve (Lacerda 2011, 138). In Rio de Janeiro in the late 1930s and early 40s, Guerra-Peixe worked as a performing musician, composer, arranger and conductor for studio and radio orchestras, where he enjoyed creating unexpected juxtapositions of classical and international pop repertoire with elements of

Brazilian popular music (Lacerda 2011, 140). Later, during his stay in Recife starting in

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1949 and through the early 50s, Guerra-Peixe likewise composed and arranged for the orchestra of Rádio Journal do Comércio de Recife, for which he composed some of his early stylizations of maracatu nação (Lacerda 2011, 142). It was during this time that he began conducting fieldwork among the nações, Xangô temples, and other sites of popular culture in Recife, and he would go onto to publish the first full-length book on maracatu nação, called Maracatus do Recife, in 1955 (Guerra-Peixe 1980), becoming a music scholar who is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of Brazilian ethnomusicology (L. O. C. Barros 2007, 116). Some scholars have also framed Guerra-

Peixe as both an early influence on and participant in the Movimento Armorial (D. B. da

Silva 2014), and it is very likely that the composer came into contact with, influenced and was influenced by mid-century exponents of Northeastern regionalism, especially Ariano

Suassuna. He would continue as one of Brazil’s foremost music scholars and composers of música erudita until his death in 1993.

Because of the varied nature of his musical activities, Guerra-Peixe was also viewed differently by different groups of actors. In a posthumous collection of memorial essays

(in fact first petitioned by Guerra-Peixe himself, which should give the reader a sense of the proportions and agentive force of his ego1), contributor Randolf Miguel recounts that while many other composers of música erudita and music scholars considered him to be a

“popular” composer because of his commitment to nationalism and work as an arranger of popular music, the professional musicians who worked with him on radio broadcasts and recording sessions of popular music did not know this side of his work (Miguel 2007, 15).

1 The volume, published 14 years after his death, includes in the opening pages a facsimile of the handwritten list of contributors, together with suggestions for the aspects of his work that they cover, that Guerra-Peixe originally proposed. The editors of the volume recount that they were able to largely remain faithful to the composer’s original list of contributors (Faria, Barros, and Serrão 2007).

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At the same time, as will be discussed further below, adherents to the ideologies of

Brazilian nationalism, regionalism, and those involved in “folklore” collection and study first viewed Guerra-Peixe as Europeanized, creating “ugly,” overly experimental work— that is until he purportedly abandoned European avant-garde ideas and techniques to pursue composing “national” music. As will be discussed further below, it seems likely that many of the forceful opinions and judgements—of himself and others—regularly expressed by

Guerra-Peixe were, at least in part, an attempt to navigate these deeply conflicting perceptions of his positionality in the Brazilian cultural field.

In articles about him, and even the introduction and preface of his own book,

Guerra-Peixe is often presented as a former dodecaphonista who later experienced a change of heart and dedicated himself to the composition and research of “national” music.

“Dodecaphonism,” more commonly known as the “twelve-tone technique,” was a method of composition developed by European composers in the early twentieth century. Most closely associated with the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, the twelve-tone technique used mathematical grids to determine the sequence of pitches and rhythms, called “series” or “twelve-tone rows,” that allowed the sequence to be permutated continually without privileging any pitch or note length over any other—in stark contrast with the typical conventions of traditional Western European music theory and compositional practice. The result was music that was randomized—but in an even, consistent, and mathematical way—yet could still contain recognizable themes. As Ethan

Haimo argues (2006), while many Western European music historians have framed the intention of the movement as a complete rupture with the conventions of European “art music” in order to liberate compositional practice from any arbitrary aesthetic constraints,

201 in fact Schoenberg’s “atonal” work can be seen to possess a continuity with his early compositions that were more in keeping with Western European “art music” conventions at the time.2 Nonetheless, “atonal” music and twelve-tone composition techniques have been adopted and understood by many to be an attempt to enact just such a rupture from the Western European aesthetic past. Dodecaphonism was brought to Brazil by the German immigrant Hans Joachim Koellreuter. Guerra-Peixe studied with the German composer and was a member of Koellreuter’s avant-gardist group Música Viva during the 1940s

(Faria 2000, 169; F. Barros 2017, 219; Hartmann 2017, 14), before he left the group to pursue the composition of “national music” near the end of the 1940s.

Most references to Guerra-Peixe’s early interest in twelve-tone composition frame his shift into nationalist music as a complete rupture from dodecaphonism and avant- gardism generally, and one that incorporated a more “politically engaged” emphasis on

Brazilian identity rather than “slavishly” imitating European trends. Guerra-Peixe himself

(apparently writing using the “royal we”) wrote that, “we were decided apologists of dodecaphonismo—curious species of music that we attempted to deform to our mode, supposing to therefore produce a work of national culture... —when, in the middle of 1949, we changed our aesthetic attitude vis-a-vis Brazilian music and human sentiments”

(Guerra-Peixe 1980, 10). With no less than human sentiments on the line, Guerra-Peixe did indeed enact a significant shift in approach in moving towards the composition of so- called “national music.” However, as other scholars have suggested—and I would like to argue more forcefully—Guerra-Peixe the dodecaphonist and Guerra-Peixe the nationalist

2 This continuity is in addition to the basic conventions of European art music, such as its instruments, ensemble structures, the break-down of pitched sound into twelve equal and distinct tones, its rhythmic sensibilities, and its social contexts, which form yet another type of continuity not discussed by Haimo.

202 composer and folklorist were in fact two mutually coherent and interdependent positionalities.

As discussed earlier in the introduction to this dissertation, interest in the ethnographic “other” and European avant-gardism have a long and intertwined history, often motivated by a quest for the new, strange, and different. In turn, notions of artistic innovation were also often framed in nationalist terms in Western Europe, and the music of “the folk” became a widely accepted source for the themes that would animate European national “art music” cannons throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Indeed, though the project of elaborating a Brazilian “national” erudite music was imagined to be predicated upon the rejection of European mores in favor of “New World” ones, the very endeavour itself was built solidly upon cultural logics—namely, notions of national identity based in local “folk” practice—then reigning in Europe.

Brazilian musicologist Antonio Guerreiro de Faria has pointed out that even in his twelve-tone phase, Guerra-Peixe was attempting to “nationalize” the technique, though with lukewarm reception. Faria notes that in his experiments with twelve-tone series,

Guerra-Peixe would use “melodies of a vague national character”(Faria 2000, 170) as well as syncopated rhythms associated with Brazilian rural and urban popular music practices.

Trying to combine twelve-tone rhythmic series with “vaguely” national melodies, or twelve-tone pitch “rows” with “syncopated” Afro-Brazilian rhythms3 was an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic innovations of the European avant-garde with the socio-political imperative of elaborating a national identity through music—one which, ironically, satisfied neither the cultural nationalists nor the Brazilian or European avant-garde. Faria

3 See previous chapter for discussion of Carlos Sandroni’s arguments regarding the problems with the term “syncopation” as used to describe Afro-diasporic rhythmic paradigms (Sandroni 2001).

203 emphasizes that Guerra-Peixe considered the usage of “syncopated” rhythms, especially, to be essential in meeting his hybrid goal (Faria 2000, 170).

If Guerra-Peixe’s interest in dodecaphonismo was not divorced from the desire to compose “national” music, nor was his rejection of twelve-tone techniques and his refashioning as a nationalist composer and folklorist entirely divorced from European philosophies and models of artistry. This is brought home forcefully by the fact that

Schoenberg, the major pioneer of dodecaphonism himself, argued for the necessity of innovation in the use of popular culture as source material, rather than engaging in mere

“literal citations,” in an article entitled “Style and Idea”—that appears to have influenced the famous Brazilian nationalist and modernist Mário de Andrade, who was a major influence in the turn towards nationalist composition in the fledgling Guerra-Peixe (Faria

2000, 172–173). Schoenberg argued that the challenge of writing music based on

“folkloric” themes was the discrepancy between the “simplicity” of the source material and the imagined greater “complexity” of the erudite format; he also stressed that a truly creative composer with something to say that has not already been said (a major preoccupation also driving the development of the twelve-tone technique), needed to move beyond merely re-presenting popular themes in order to still create a great work of art

(Faria 2000, 172–173). Mário de Andrade in turn, like others such as Ariano Suassuna discussed above, argued for the need to apply such ideas to the development of a Brazilian erudite music, a tradition envisioned as possessing clear inspiration in local popular practices “elevated” by the “individual genius” of the composer in adapting the themes to erudite forms and “developing” them. In this way, while Koellreuter acted as a mediator of Schoenberg to Brazil via the twelve-tone technique, Andrade acted as a mediator of

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Schoenberg via ideas about folklore, stylization, nationalist composition, and artistic originality. Both mediations deal in different strains of European avant-gardism, which provided a bridge rather than an impasse for composers such as Guerra-Peixe seeking to elaborate a Brazilian “national erudite music.” For Guerra-Peixe, this meant turning to the stylization of the melodies and rhythms of popular music practices, but with the goal of creating música erudita rather than mass urban popular music as in the case of Oliveira,

Capiba and Ferreira.

Perhaps because of his academic bent, the composer was given to elaborate theorization about the process of composition via stylization. Faria cites a description of the composer’s “Three Phases of Stylization,” regarding his compositional process during this era of his career, which Guerra-Peixe would publish in his memoirs later in life:

1—The material—This can be understood as those elements such as melodic conventions, harmonies (if they exist or are implied), eventual polyphony, rhythms, etc.—everything at last under a determined general characteristic. For example: music based in that of the Caboclinhos of Recife will necessarily have to be made with its own elements; that based in the Jongo Paulista, will have to be, then, something different but equally coherent.

2.—The selection—This can be understood to be the selection of the material vis-a- vis its aspects to be put into relief, according to how the composer sees this or that popular manifestation in a determined work. For example: the simple beat of a gongué[sic] (a musical instrument) can furnish the principle for a musical piece, much as the baião-de-viola (a rhythmic pedal played on the strings of the instrument); or even, in another style of music, a detail such as a stupendously prolonged chord of the popular choirs of São Paulo, such as is heard at the Folia de Reis, in the Congada, Moçambique, etc. On the other hand, there remains the form of the music. If the original source does not offer adequate suggestions to the work in question, it falls to the composer to invent something in keeping with the original. It is necessary that everything works together towards the most complete realization of the work.

3o—The elaboration—This comes down to the formal balance, elevated to the terms of artistic values. A high level of stylization, but in such a way as to permit (or make the listener sense) that there figure in the work, demarcated, the characteristics of that which is being stylized. If, as Mário de Andrade says, this phase is still social, it rests to the composer to know how to employ his talent in an elaboration which is dignified, but direct (Guerra-Peixe cited in Faria 2000, 173–174, “social” and titles italicized in original).

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Guerra-Peixe describes a process in which the composer is tasked with filling in the gaps— either gaps left by pulling a single element from its context, such as the rhythm of the gonguê of maracatu nação, “gaps” in the original source material (such as in musics that do not articulate harmony, leaving the composer to seek the “suggested” harmony), or (as was likely often the case) gaps in the knowledge of the composer concerning the popular tradition he was attempting to stylize.

In Guerra-Peixe’s view, though, these lacunae seem less like gaps and more like spaces for the individual expression of the composer. In this way, Guerra-Peixe entered into the same kind of hierarchical logic articulated by Ariano Suassuna, in which the erudite composer’s stylizations of “folklore” occupy a “higher” artistic level than that of the

“folklore” itself. This is revealed in comments by Guerra-Peixe, who claimed in a 1973 newspaper interview that “My music artistically photographs folklore, this is not to say to take a 3x4 portrait for an ID document” (Guerra-Peixe cited in Faria 2000, 187). Guerra-

Peixe, in his memoirs, elaborated further:

It is worthwhile to call attention to the fact that this does not mean a photograph in the sense of making a little portrait—destined for an ID card, but an artistic photograph in the sense in which the sonorous source material (that is, that which is being featured) will be in terms of art sufficiently recognizable or sensed by the lay listener in such problems. And this is different than “copying folklore” as sometimes they say happens around here (Guerra-Peixe cited in Faria 2000, 187, italics in the original).

Guerra-Peixe saw his stylizations as works of art, elevated not only above the original

“source material” but also above other composers who did not do enough to “develop” the elements of their source inspiration into an original erudite composition. Though he does not state as much here, it is likely that he was referring to Capiba and other composers who were interested in stylizing popular musical practices but into a more middle-class urban popular music format rather than the trappings of Brazilian música erudita. However, even

206 in this statement, one can see the tension between notions of artistic originality and ethnographic authenticity that would impel his shift towards a more ethnomusicological paradigm. When attempting to clarify his distinction between the photograph-as-portrait and the artistic photograph, Guerra-Peixe comes back to the importance of the “folkloric” source being recognizable to even the lay listener, yet without making clear in detail what makes his “artistic photographs” different from “copying folklore.” As will be discussed below, Guerra-Peixe became increasingly preoccupied with the question of ethnographic knowledge and authenticity in his compositional process, causing him to place a greater emphasis on his research activities and thus helping to enact an important shift in the landscape of Brazilian ethnographic knowledge production about maracatu nação and popular culture generally.

Brazilian historian of maracatu nação Isabel Guillen has argued that Guerra-Peixe helped change the public view of maracatu nação to a more positive one (Guillen 2007), though many of her examples seem instead to support the idea that Guerra Peixe helped disseminate a more accurate public perception of maracatu nação—related but not identical shifts. Guillen also recognizes the role of Capiba, Ascenso Ferreira, and the visual artist Lula Cardoso Ayres in this regard (Guillen 2007, 243, 2003); however, Guerra Peixe was the one who took this project further than any other, especially in inspiring others to employ ethnographic methods to gain a more in-depth knowledge than previous generations. In his book Maracatus do Recife, Guerra-Peixe recounts his first experience seeing maracatu nação performed after already attempting to create a stylized composition based in the practice:

In June of 1949 I visited Recife for the first time. Influenced by reading the works published about Maracatu (the cortejo), I took the opportunity to, in that City, compose a maracatu (music), with the goal of integrating it into a ‘Suite’ for a string

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quartet or orchestra. Days later I had the opportunity to witness, more or less as a tourist, a special exhibition of Maracatu Elefante, and the persisting disillusionment is absolutely indescribable... Although the above-mentioned work had garnered the applause of people who are well-intentioned in the aesthetic problems of música erudita Brasileira, we cannot fail to denounce, now, the distance that separated the musical piece from its source. Later having studied the grupos populares of Recife, I included a maracatu in the ‘Suite Sinfônica n. 2,’ in which the principal characteristics of this modality of popular music are integrated in a more direct manner. This is my current point of view, regarding the use of folklore in the creation of works that enunciate the sources that originate them (Guerra-Peixe 1980, 49n.4, bolding added).

According to his own narrative, Guerra-Peixe’s drive to study maracatu nação ethnographically was born of a sense of embarrassment at the difference between his stylized composition and what he terms the “source material”—contradictorily so, since the end-goal of the stylization process could only be to transform that which is being stylized. Recognizing that he was witnessing Maracatu Elefante “more or less as a tourist,”

Guerra-Peixe identified the problem as lying in the superficiality of his engagement with popular culture up to that point. In this way, Guerra-Peixe moved the project of stylization from one which embraced the idea of transforming maracatu nação—especially, for example, the aspiration of Mário Mello to integrate stylized maracatus into the repertoires of the nações—into one that wrestled with the idea of transformation, hoping to resolve its tensions through the “objective” collection of ethnographic data.

Though willing to be self-critical in a footnote, Guerra-Peixe was even more severe in his judgment of the stylized compositions of others. Indeed, Guerra Peixe himself found the works of the composers and lyricists of the 1930s maracatu estilizado movement to be lacking, writing of the maracatus of Capiba in a 1952 letter to Vasco Mariz:

I know them all. As songs they are quite pretty and inspired. Capiba arranged a rhythm for each of them. But of maracatu they have nothing. Indeed, the authentic maracatu, that which comes from the black Bantos—from Angola or Congo— is something completely different. Whoever goes to judge whether these maracatus of Capiba have something to do with the dance [of maracatu], will verify the great deceit (Guerra- Peixe cited in Guillen 2007, 247, italics in the original).

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Guerra-Peixe, willing to concede the aesthetic virtues of Capiba’s compositions4—which he elsewhere described as “semi-eruditos” (1980, 49)—nonetheless asserts that they have failed to adequately represent maracatu nação. Guerra-Peixe goes on to elaborate on the project of bringing stylized maracatus to the salons and orchestras of Recife:

The authentic maracatu (with the authentic rhythm, that is) was never danced in the dance salons nor did the orchestras play its true rhythm. Now, despite no longer being played at dances, it is the case that the orchestras are beginning to play it a bit, ever since I managed to write it for the radio. They say that the rhythm is very difficult, and that the orchestra would not play it. I, however, did away with this myth and the few that I wrote were executed with extraordinary success. [...] I will add: Capiba himself seems to have recognized his error. So much so that since the radio orchestras have begun to play maracatu in its authentic rhythm, he, Capiba, never again wrote another maracatu. And I took some months until I managed to write down the rhythm of the zabumbas, that is, without any exaggeration, that which I wrote in the article that I sent you: O zabumba no maracatu (Guerra-Peixe cited in Guillen 2007, 247 italics in the original).

Guerra-Peixe, while bolstering his own success in the endeavor of stylizing maracatus for erudite formats and emphasizing Capiba’s lack of ethnographic authenticity once again, also contributes to establishing a key discourse: the idea (already present in the works of

Ferreira, Capiba, and Suassuna) that the essence of maracatu nação, the core of its authenticity, lies in its rhythms first and foremost, rather than in any of the many other elements that comprise maracatu nação performance, such as song, poetry, dance, popular theater, pageantry, and costumery.

While I am hesitant to take Guerra Peixe’s own word at face value regarding the accuracy of his ethnographic knowledge, the “superiority” of his stylizations over those of

Capiba, or his influence in changing public attitudes regarding maracatu nação, it is true that he was the among the first to argue forcefully for the importance of rigorous scholarly

4 It should be noted that many authors frame Guerra-Peixe as one of Capiba’s teachers—despite being ten years younger than the Pernambucan composer—and apparently the two did maintain contact by letter, with Capiba sending his work to Guerra-Peixe for “evaluation and corrections” (L. O. C. Barros 2007, 112).

209 research as the foundation of nationalist composition, and indeed the first to publish on maracatu nação in a scholarly format. His book Maracatus do Recife, originally published in 1955, breaks down the subject into discrete chapters that tackle the historical origins of maracatu nação, the etymology of the term, the melodies and rhythms of the practice, its instrumentation, with chapters looking more closely at the individual nações and their repertoires—and of course, a conclusion. All is supported with extensive musical transcriptions and anecdotal evidence from his time in the field. While the article published by Ascenso Ferreira (1942), for example, employed some of these elements, the overall tone was more speculative and impressionistic. Beyond that article, most early published work that discusses maracatu nação does not do so exclusively, but rather brings up the topic in the context of a broader discussion of carnaval and popular culture. Much of it is also speculative, impressionistic, and semi-fictional. Even in the work of the much referenced Pereira da Costa, writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maracatu nação is merely one of the many cultural practices studied by the prolific folklorist, taking up a handful of pages in his weighty tome, Folk-lore Pernambucano

(Pereira Da Costa 1908). Mário de Andrade dedicates a chapter to the “Congos” within which category he included maracatu nação (M. de Andrade 1959), but he does not appear to have extensive firsthand knowledge of the practice, as Guerra-Peixe did not hesitate to point out in his own book (Guerra-Peixe 1980). Though certainly not the first to research maracatu nação ethnographically, Guerra-Peixe was indeed the first to do so extensively and publish the results in a book-length work that discusses the practice systematically.

And as Isabel Guillen has documented, this shift in focus contributed to a more accurate

(and generally positive) public perception of maracatu nação (2007)—and, I would add, a

210 larger paradigm shift away from ethnographic research as the basis of composition and towards ethnographic research for the sake of knowledge itself, though the composer remained invested in both projects.

However, Guerra-Peixe’s twin goals as a composer—that of accurate ethnographic representation and that of artistic originality—were often in conflict, and the tension between them was a driving force behind the composer’s quest for deeper and more accurate ethnographic understanding. On the one hand, Guerra-Peixe considered many other nationalist composers to “merely” use folclore as a “citation,” copying popular tunes and themes directly without adding any original contribution or transformation. Brazilian musicologist Clayton Vetromilla cites Guerra-Peixe as asserting that:

And neither do I find it necessary to use the themes of folclore as a citation: in all my production, I have only used four melodies folclóricas to this day. It is the ambience, the essence of folclore which must interest the composer – even in the music of the vanguard – otherwise the folclore could become diluted, imperceptible to the public (Guerra-Peixe cited in Vetromilla 2014, 306).

Guerra-Peixe prides himself on only directly “borrowing” popular melodies four times, while simultaneously on a quest to evoke the “essence” of folclore in his compositions.

While his comment that the “folclore could become diluted” if composers engage in excessive “citation” resembles earlier debates about whether or not to introduce stylized maracatus back into the repertoire of the nações, the phrase “imperceptible to the public” suggest that his preoccupation here is something else—namely, that the public will not be able to perceive the folclore in his compositions. How overuse of “citation” would lead to this end is unclear, yet other statements by Guerra-Peixe bear out this interpretation and demonstrate the way in which his conflicting goals produced a tension that helped shift the paradigm more towards the anthropological or ethnomusicological. In a 1950 letter to Curt

Lange, Guerra-Peixe wrote of his research with a local priest of Xangô in Pernambuco:

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I am doing great work with a Babalorixá that comes to my house. He sings me all the melodies that he knows, with their different interpretations, with the rhythm that accompanies them and all this in the order in which they are sung in Xangô. That is, first the melodies for a certain saint, next those for another, following the rigorous hierarchical order of the beats of the percussion instruments. How can I exemplify this in an orchestra??? How can I write in a way in which someone who has never heard a Xangô has either the exact or an approximate impression????

Another aspect: I had the Babalorixá hear me at the piano, playing some of the rhythms of Xangô. Naturally I had to arrange a core harmony in order to realize this, as well as certain sung notes to substitute for the non-fundamental beats of the percussion of Xangô. Some of these rhythms the Babalorixá recognized then and there, others no, until I got it right. Now I ask you: will the opinion of one of these men of Xangô be sufficient and advisable? They know nothing, but they are very familiar with their music and are guided by a sonorous sensation closer to their own music, don’t you think??? I think that when a man of Xangô recognizes his music or his rhythm in some composition, it is because this composition has realized it well, don’t you think??? I think so, because in this case, in my view, the opinion of the greatest musicians is worthless, if they don’t have sufficient familiarity with the matter at hand (Guerra-Peixe c.1950 cited in F. Barros 2017, 232–233).

At the same time as he sought to avoid being “derivative” by avoiding “citation,” Guerra-

Peixe wanted to create stylizations of folclore that would convey the “essence” of the practice to a listener unfamiliar with that folclore; barring simply “citing” actual melodies drawn from one or another practice, Guerra-Peixe sought to achieve this by checking his stylizations against the ears of a “man of Xangô” while rejecting the evaluations of a “great musician”—meaning here a performer or composer trained in the Western European and emerging Brazilian música erudita traditions. Critically, this process revolved around borrowing not melodies but rhythms that were fleshed out with new pitches—melodies and harmonies—on the piano. As will be discussed further below, this process reinforced the broader paradigm of a focus on rhythm as the valued contribution of Afro-Brazilian popular music to Brazilian música erudita and popular. In Guerra-Peixe’s logic, even the melodies of folclore can be “cited”—meaning that they carry some sense of authorship, of being the intellectual property of the “folk”—but the essence of folclore, those properties which

212 cannot be owned and therefore can be borrowed without compromising the originality of the stylizer’s work, lies in its rhythms.5

The effects of this paradigm shift were not limited to academic or composerly pursuits; Guerra-Peixe also claimed to have helped establish the expectation of a scholarly level of familiarity with popular music practices as part of the required general knowledge of a performing musician. In a 1979 newspaper article, the composer commented that:

I took 40 days to understand the characteristic rhythms of the traditional maracatus. No professional musician in Recife knew these rhythms. Only after I went there is it that it has become a question of honor for drummers to know how to play the rhythms of the maracatus. Before that, no one cared (Guerra-Peixe cited in Guillen 2007, 246 italics added).

The notion that knowing how to play the rhythms of maracatu nação on the drum-set or other percussion instruments had become a matter of honor is no exaggeration; this is an excellent way of capturing the general attitude towards popular and non-Western European music that I have observed throughout twenty years of immersion in the North American world of jazz education as well as those of many of the Brazilian working musicians I have known. One should be able to play in a wide variety of styles: though the ultimate imperative is flexibility in an unpredictable and precarious line of work (Packman 2009), the notion that a working musician should be “well-rounded” and familiar with a broad array of styles, including those often excluded from the Western European music canon, is also often framed in terms of a moral-ethical responsibility, a kind of musical multiculturalism as well as a commitment to self-improvement, self-expansion, and education. However, it is important to note that this shift towards a more accurate,

5 The grand irony, of course, is that as Guillen has documented (2007, 250), a Xangô priest with which Guerra-Peixe worked—perhaps the same—later admitted to changing many elements of the songs he shared in order to protect the secrecy of the religion. In this way, Guerra-Peixe’s quest for ethnographic “authenticity” was doomed from the start.

213 ethnographically grounded understanding of maracatu nação did not necessarily “liberate” the practice from the hierarchical dynamics of the first generations of artist-folklorists.

Guerra-Peixe’s research was still ultimately in the service of “transposing” maracatu nação and other popular performance practices into the trappings of Western European- descended erudite “art” music; as discussed above, this endeavor was conceptualized in discriminatory and hierarchical terms.

An important facet of this ongoing, embedded hierarchy are the ways in which

Guerra-Peixe, like Ferreira, Capiba, and Suassuna before him, framed maracatu nação’s value primarily in terms of its rhythmic contributions. As would become standard practice in mid-century ethnomusicology and folklore studies, for Guerra-Peixe the process of field research was one of “collection”: he “collected” Afro-Brazilian melodic modes (a term for certain kinds of musical scales) and rhythms, and well as fuller-fledged songs. One colleague has noted that Guerra-Peixe collected and identified “beyond the 14

[Northeastern modes] already cited, 49 black modes found in the Xangôs and a further 10

European modes, making a total of 59 modes in this region” (L. O. C. Barros 2007, 116), while the composer himself once wrote that in the Xangôs of Recife, “I collected a great number of rhythms. Just in the first three that I visited I noted around 70 rhythms. This together with the rhythms of maracatu nação, caboclinho and other things gets to a total of one hundred (100) rhythms...” (Letter from Guerra-Peixe to Heitor Alimonda, c.1949, cited in Alimonda 2007, 108). In Guerra-Peixe’s conceptualization, true ethnographic understanding of Brazilian popular culture can come about from the analytic deconstruction of performance practices into modes and rhythms that can be isolated, quantified, and compared. While in the realm of science he may have valued the modes

214 and rhythms equally, in terms of their utility for stylization rhythms were more highly valued. In the preface to his 1955 book, Maracatus do Recife, Guerra-Peixe writes:

Diverse factors came to allow me to reside in Recife, which happened from 1949 to 1952. In principle, watching the Pernambucan folguedos6 I had no intention but to observe the popular music and pick out one or two tunes that seemed interesting to develop in future works. Since the rhythm of the accompanying instruments seemed to me—as it still does—the element in music of a nationalist character the least attended to, I dedicated special attention to its details (Guerra-Peixe 1980, 10, bold text in original).

Even as early as 1949, the notion that rhythm was underarticulated in Brazilian nationalist music is hard to sustain (unless perhaps one limits one’s scope to Brazilian música erudita, as Guerra-Peixe likely was). Nonetheless, Guerra-Peixe’s emphasis on drawing rhythmic inspiration from popular, Afro-Brazilian musical practices to the exclusion of melodic or harmonic ones is not a matter of simply redressing a balance. Rather, it is predicated upon the Eurocentric assumption, quite common in Brazil as elsewhere, that African and

African-descended musical practices had little to offer in terms of melody and harmony— that these were aspects of African-derived musical practices that were underdeveloped or simplistic.

As early as the 1970s, ethnomusicologist John Blacking argued against these ideas, highlighting the subtle melodic complexities of African musics. He used as his case study his research on the Venda, a Bantu people from South Africa, emphasizing that Africans often had greater facility learning the nuances of European melody than Europeans those of African melody (1976). Twenty-five years later, music theorist Martin Scherzinger

(2001) likewise argued against the ethnomusicological rejection of formal analysis of non-

Western European and especially African musics, arguing that the privileging of social

6 “Revelries,” usually in the context of carnaval.

215 context obscures the ways in which African music may be understood theoretically within that very context—and indeed obscures the true complexity of the music itself, thus rendering it perpetually “Othered” in comparison to a thoroughly theorized Western

European “art” music canon. Scherzinger follows this argument by demonstrating the complexities of Shona mbira music, wherein the melodic and harmonic complexities of the piece “Nyamaropa” not only equal but mirror its rhythmic complexities in mathematical ways, elaborating the same patterns in a different musical register. And, I would add, while these rhythmic complexities might be more easily felt in comparison with Western

European “elastic” notions of time in simple metric formations, the melodic and harmonic complexities of “Nyamaropa” are not as readily apparent to an ear primarily trained in

Western European notions that consider melodic complexity to lie in teleological thematic development, and harmonic complexity to lie in the sequential manipulation of consonance and dissonance, producing sensations of tension and resolution. The harmonic and melodic complexities of “Nyamaropa”, on the other hand, lie in the many variations embedded simultaneously within a short, repeated sequence. The initial perception of melodic and harmonic “simplicity,” then, is a result of an error in listening stemming from a Western

European “way of listening,” not an African melodic and harmonic poverty.

More recently, black music theorist Philip A. Ewell has critiqued the white racial frame of music theory as an academic discipline (Ewell 2020). Ewell argues that what we call “music theory,” nearly exclusively based on the music compositions of eighteenth- century, upper-class, male, white and mostly Western European composers, in erasing this context and framing itself simply as “music theory” seeks to universalize the musical aesthetics of this very small group of human beings. Ewell demonstrates that the origins of

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“music theory” lay in an explicit project of demonstrating white superiority by “revealing”

(rather than developing) the theory that explains the supposedly “natural, mathematic genius” of the music created by these composers. The continuation of this frame in the study of “music theory” excludes not only music theorists of color from the discipline, but more problematically, it dismisses the vast majority of the world’s musical production from consideration for study, implicitly placing this music low on a racialized scale of musical value, at the same time re-affirming the racialization of white people as intellectually superior to all other people—the very stuff of antiquated, nineteenth-century scientific racism.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that relatively few musical studies of African music, and even fewer of Brazilian music, enter into any kind of theoretical analysis of melody and harmony, limiting themselves to study of its rhythm. It becomes difficult, then, to document the ways in which African melodic and harmonic aesthetics have shaped Afro-

Brazilian musics such as maracatu nação, a much-needed study which is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, for the purposes of my argument here, suffice it to say that the assumption that African music was melodically and harmonically “poor” and only contributed rhythmic interest to Brazilian musical practices pervades musicological thought in Brazil to this day, as is clear in this passage from a tract by Guerra-Peixe on composition:

From Fr. José Maurício to Henrique Oswald, there was plenty of ability in the sense of there being written pieces in allegro, presto, vivacissimo, etc. But in the so-called “nationalism,” composers encounter problems that are far from being solved. Normally they structure a rhythmic schema in the percussion, of a batuqueiro character and they add to this a harmonized melody; and if they do not write the batuque they seem to ignore how to solve the question of the proper character of living tempos... Maybe the path would be to melodize the percussion, an experience which has had satisfactory results in the works by the author of these lines. Or it may be, to transform the rhythmic material of the percussion, into sonorous values in terms of

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melody and/or rhythmic-melodic passages whenever possible. The most elementary batuque, rebarbative or even mediocre, could be transformed into an artistic piece, once it is forgotten that a musical composition is not limited to the use of the sonorous material such as one encounters in its popular origins. In other words, to give aesthetic meaning to raw material [matéria bruta] (Guerra-Peixe cited in Faria 2000, 185–186, italics added).

Guerra-Peixe’s characterization of general compositional process in Brazil is one in which rhythmic themes are drawn from popular culture and then elaborated with European- derived melody and harmony. He suggests that Brazilian música erudita suffers in the lack of attention to how to work these in metronomic rhythms—those based on a steady beat, seen as lacking nuanced complexity in Western European “art music” but enabling the possibility of complexity through layered polyrhythms in many African musical practices.

While desiring to make use of these metronomic rhythms, Guerra-Peixe also insists that musical compositions of aesthetic value must possesses a “living tempo”—the notion in

Western European “art music” that truly nuanced musical time should be elastic and

“breathe” rather than strictly metronomic and steady. To solve this problem, Guerra Peixe suggests “melodizing the percussion”—perhaps using pitched percussion instruments to either articulate melodies, or to use percussion with a wide range of undefined but widely disparate pitches and make those pitches more explicit. He also suggests “transforming the rhythmic material of the percussion [...] into sonorous values in terms of melody,” likely meaning to have melodic instruments perform the complex rhythms drawn from popular musical practices. Significant here is that Guerra-Peixe refers to these complex (usually

Afro-Brazilian) rhythms as rhythms of a “batuqueiro character”—a batuqueiro being a term for a drummer fairly specific to the terminology of maracatu nação—strongly suggesting that his experience with researching and stylizing maracatu nação played a significant role in his theorizations of compositional process. Even more significant,

218 however, are the hierarchical terms in which he casts this rhythmic source material, referring to these rhythms as “rebarbative” (unpleasant, unattractive, crude or even gross) and “mediocre”—elsewhere describing them as “executed with plenty of violence” (1980,

24)—but capable of being transformed into “art” by the skillful integration of European- derived melody and harmony by the white composer. In the last phrase, Guerra-Peixe refers to these rhythms as “matéria bruta”— “raw material,” or the very thing which early twentieth-century Brazilian modernists strove to not become for European artists in search of inspiration.7 The use of the word bruta, suggesting notions of “primitive brutishness,” further underscores the racialized reasoning of Guerra-Peixe’s compositional theory. The project of elaborating Afro-Brazilian rhythms, such as those of maracatu nação, into erudite pieces using European-derived melody and harmony, was one that was inherently racializing and hierarchical, down to its foundational logic.

Another interesting and problematic facet of Guerra-Peixe’s preoccupation with rhythm is the ways in which it genders maracatu nação by privileging some of its gendered roles over others. Indeed, by framing maracatu nação’s musical value in terms of solely its rhythms—meaning those executed by its percussionists, a virtually all-male group of performers—Guerra-Peixe also de-emphasizes the contributions of female members who normally perform as vocalists and dancers. In particular, it can be argued that the rejection of the melodic content of maracatu nação as a basis for stylization serves to both fetishize and exoticize black male musical performance and to silence black women’s voices in a practice in which their roles and contributions have historically been so valued and vital.

7 See the works of Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), the most famous Brazilian modernist to argue against the one-sided use of Brazilian—usually rhythmic— "inspiration" by Western European artists and composers in the 1920s and 30s (O. de Andrade 1972).

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Guerra-Peixe’s música erudita compositions based on the stylization of maracatu nação bear out the composer’s discourse—in particular, the movement “O Maracatu” from the Suíte Pernambucana (1955), composed around the same time as the publication of his book. The composition opens with woodblocks playing a version of the gonguê rhythm; soon, the orchestra joins with repeated chords. The ever-escalating harmonies suggest the grandeur and excitement of a bustling urban environment in a growing nation. It quickly cuts to a soft, slightly mournful section without percussion or heavy, quickly articulated rhythms. It then shifts back to repeat the opening section. The string melody played over the percussion is suave and sophisticated, elegant. Hints of harmonic dissonance and melodic chromaticism evoke European modernism and integrate elements of the so-called

“Northeastern modes” he collected (significantly, modes that are not associated with the music of maracatu nação). Suddenly, a transitional section abruptly moves the piece back into the previously stated mournful section, now with a suggestion of film-soundtrack foreboding in the low-brass. The “maracatu nação rhythms” fade in and out while all three moods inter-combine. Finally, the full orchestra enters with heavily articulated marcação

(the primary groove of maracatu nação) for a frenzied finale that builds to a fever pitch of wide, loud major chords in the brass. At the same time that it straddles a line between musical “folklore”-infused regionalism and nationalist modernism (one of Guerra-Peixe’s overarching concerns), “O Maracatu” demonstrates that the composer was successful in at least another of his stated goals—that of integrating the rhythms of popular practices such as maracatu nação into an original composition in such a way that it would be recognizable as such to someone with even a passing familiarity with the music of the carnaval pageant.

At the same time, the melodic and harmonic content of the piece, which are highly

220 elaborated and borrow from other Northeastern practices, but which are distanced from the melodic-harmonic conventions of maracatu nação, help to perpetuate and further the notion that the “essence”—and the value—of the Afro-Brazilian practice lie in its rhythms, not its melodies or harmonies.

Guerra-Peixe’s work as an arranger and composer in the world of urban popular music is much more difficult to pin down; apparently, the composer did not keep a consistent record of his work in this domain (Faria 2007, 29; Miguel 2007, 17), perhaps to minimize the significance of this less revered realm of musical activity in his career.

Recordings crediting Guerra-Peixe as an arranger or composer can be found online on websites like YouTube.com, but verifying this information using other sources is much more challenging. An interesting example that can be verified is the composer’s participation in a recording of the tune “Maracatu Elegante,” composed by José Prates and recorded by vocalist, instrumentalist, and folklorist Inezita Barroso. Furthermore, the song offers an interesting opportunity for comparison, since it was recorded twice in the 1950s by Barroso and Prates, and again by Barroso in 1966 for the album Vamos Falar de Brasil,

Novamente, with arrangements and orchestra direction by Guerra-Peixe. The composer’s involvement in the 1966 recording is corroborated by Brazilian musicologist Clayton

Vetromilla (2014, 304) and is similarly credited in the online Brazilian music database

IMMuB.org. Barroso herself, born 1925 in São Paulo (UOL Entretenimento 2015), is also an interesting figure—though primarily a folklorist, she enjoyed an extensive performance career singing and playing both the popular music practices she studied and stylized pop works based on them.

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In contrast to his symphonic work based on maracatu nação and other popular music practices, in his arrangement of “Maracatu Elegante” Guerra-Peixe did not overly pre-occupy himself with notions of authenticity. His 1966 version of the tune opens with sharp brass hits and a high woodblock punctuating dreamy bossa nova-style guitar playing jazzy harmonies, accompanied by smooth string pads and a tinkling piano. The harmonic changes, deeply jazz influenced, employ the iconic bossa nova technique of alternating between complex stacked chords with altered fifths, sevenths, and ninths that make subtle shifts between harmonic modes, evoking an impressionistic stasis, and then quickly moving through a series of cadences in the bridge, constantly modulating until the songs arrive once again at its harmonic starting point. The lyrics reference the instruments of the maracatu nação batuque and the figures of the royal court. A chorus singing “bate o bombo e o agogô” in counterpoint to Barroso’s irrepressibly joyous lead vocals, progressively shorten their refrain to simply the syllable “boom”—the Brazilian pronunciation of the first half of the word “bombo.” The short tune careens towards its finish and lands on a final

“boom” that echoes with reverb. The entire arrangement, though containing a few nods to maracatu nação in the lyrics and percussion, is ultimately consistent with the aesthetics of

1960s MPB.

It is tempting to speculate, though difficult to know, what factors shaped Guerra-

Peixe’s arrangement of “Maracatu Elegante,” especially given that with Barroso, he was collaborating with an artist equally invested in the collection and study of “folklore” and the creation and performance of works based on it, and that by this time Guerra-Peixe had established himself as the country’s leading expert on maracatu nação. His choices are especially intriguing since many of other tracks on the album emphasize Barroso’s

222 ethnographic knowledge and performance expertise, where “Maracatu Elegante” stands out in its “pop” sensibility and its distance from the performance of ethnographic

“authenticity.” Given that the composer seemed to try and de-emphasize the importance of his popular music endeavours in his career, one wonders also if this could have motivated him to avoid “spending” his most prized ethnographic knowledge—of the rhythms of maracatu nação—in this context. Unfortunately, the research necessary to fully understand this facet of the composer’s career is beyond the scope of the current project.

This chapter and the previous have examined the activities of early-to-mid twentieth-century artist-folklorists and their engagement with the working-class, Afro-

Brazilian carnaval pageant maracatu nação. As discussed in the previous chapter, the earliest generation of ethnographers dedicated to this effort—including figures associated with the Federação Carnavalêsca Pernambucana such as J.P. Fisch, Mário Mello, and

Valdemar de Oliveira, as well as important actors in the worlds of Northeastern modernism, regionalism, and popular culture such as Ascenso Ferreira, Capiba, and Ariano Suassuna— were primarily concerned with the production of Northeastern and/or Pernambucan culture, in both its mass popular and erudite forms, which included creating a new genre of urban popular music based on maracatu nação in the 1930s.

The composer and ethnomusicologist César Guerra-Peixe, whose most significant contributions began about fifteen years later at the end of the 1940s, would have had contact with many of these figures during his time in Recife from 1949-1952—and crucially, was instrumental in shifting the emphasis of the paradigm established by this earlier generation.

While Guerra-Peixe’s research into local popular culture— focussing primarily on maracatu nação and Xangô and culminating in his 1955 book Maracatus do Recife—

223 began as an effort to support a similar stylization project taking place within the world of nationalist erudite composition. However, Guerra-Peixe’s drive to distinguish himself from his contemporaries, together with his preoccupation with resolving the tensions between the conflicting imperatives of nationalist creative production and avant-garde erudite originality, would lead him to place a greater emphasis on conducting field research of high scholarly rigor, worthy as a pursuit in its own right. While this effort seemingly separated the interest of the scientist from the interest of the artist—interests that were openly and unabashedly blurry among his artist-folklorist antecedents—it in fact simply obscured this connection, allowing for Guerra-Peixe’s creative and intellectual production to be authenticated on both fronts and establishing him as both a leading ethnographic authority and as a composer who deftly navigating the vicissitudes of the regional, the national, and the universal. At the same time, his intellectual and creative activities and especially their now-obscured interdependence supported ideas like those elaborated by Ariano Suassuna in the previous chapter, who postulated the need for composers of “individual genius” to

“elevate” popular culture by “transposing” it into erudite traditions. It is clear from Guerra-

Peixe’s discourse—and the discourse of many who write about him—that as much as he insisted on the value of popular culture and prized the opinion of his working-class interlocutors above those of more “learned men,” he also believed his creative production to be of a higher order than that of popular musicians, composers, and performers.

In particular, he also substantially furthered the already developing notion that the primary value of African-descended music lay in its rhythms, discarding the melodic and harmonic elements and often even the very percussion instruments that articulated those rhythms. Rather, Guerra-Peixe saw the role of the erudite nationalist composer as the

224 creative individual who brought (Western European-style) melody and harmony to

“embellish” African rhythms. This logic furthered hierarchies of cultural value that already viewed melody and harmony as of higher cultural worth. By setting out the work of the

(white, middle-to-upper class) erudite composer in these terms, Guerra-Peixe developed a theory that affirmed received assumptions about the higher cultural value of Western

European-influenced music over that of Africa.

4.2 Towards Blackness/Africanness in Brazilian Música Erudita: The Stylized Maracatus of Zé Amaro Santos da Silva

During the beginning of my research in Recife in 2019, just as I was discovering archival materials illustrating the significance of stylized maracatu in Recife’s early twentieth-century cultural politics, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Zé Amaro

Santos da Silva, an Afro-Brazilian composer and pai-de-santo of Xangô then in his eightieth year. I was introduced to Zé Amaro through José Fernando Souza e Silva from the Commissão Pernambucana de Folclore, an institution to be discussed in the next chapter to which the US anthropologist Katerina Real had strong ties. José Fernando, of a similar age to his friend Zé Amaro, came from the intellectual lineage of Recife’s most prominent folklorists and introduced me to Zé Amaro on the insistence that in order to know Pernambuco and maracatu nação, I had to make contact with Candomblé—and secondly because Zé Amaro had had brief contact with Guerra-Peixe in the late 1960s. As

I sat down and spoke with Zé Amaro, it became clear that this conversation would be important to my research for another reason—he was a composer of música erudita and had composed several maracatus. Not only was this a rare opportunity to ask about the logic and process of composing a maracatu firsthand, but Zé Amaro was unique among

225 such composers of stylized maracatu as a black man and of a later generation, one that came of age in the 1960s.

Zé Amaro Santos da Silva was born in 1939, and as a young man studied music formally, playing trombone in popular orchestras. At a certain point in his musical development, Zé Amaro says he “discovered the value of national culture” (Z. A. S. da

Silva 2019) and began visiting the agremiações of carnaval and Afro-Brazilian religious terreiros in order to understand these manifestações, where he would make transcriptions of the musical performances. He pursued extensive music education, earning an MA in music at the Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro, where he wrote his dissertation looking at

European artists who came to Recife to perform at the historic Santa Isabel theater and later stayed in the city and founded music schools. He later held a position as a professor of music history, choral music, and folklore at the Federal University of Pernambuco, and had published many books on music, popular culture, and Afro-Brazilian religion, including his MA thesis. At a certain point he was also initiated into Xangô, and now heads his own terreiro. Afro-Brazilian religion attracted him “for obvious reasons,” giving him an opportunity to connect more deeply with his African cultural and religious inheritance. He spoke at length about the irony that there are many fair-skinned, white-identifying people in the world of Candomblé and many black Brazilians who have no interest in the religion, and he critiqued the Eurocentricity of the Brazilian education system that taught very little about Brazil’s African-descended culture. Much of his musical and scholarly work was aimed at redressing this lacuna, providing both information about and art celebrating the religion of the orixás.

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In particular, Zé Amaro highlighted his 2009 album Suíte Afro-Recifense, recorded with the ensemble Korin Orishá, his chamber group comprised of violin, viola, cello, flute, bassoon, and clarinet whose name means roughly “song of the orixás” in Yorubá. Playing alongside the chamber group, the album also featured a group of percussionists playing

Candomblé drums, and a guest vocalist. All performers were of the Candomblé community, and therefore familiar with the toques, or the characteristic rhythms associated with the various orixás. The compositions were his own fusion of European chamber music conventions with thematic material drawn from the music of the terreiro and performed with lyrics in Yorubá. The album was recorded with the support of the Serviço Social do

Comércio Nacional (the SESC Nacional, a federally support organization that funds and supports projects in arts and culture, among many other things), and since its release the group has toured across Brazil. On the back cover of the album, there is a short blurb by

Zé Amaro, declaring that,

Here we have the first attempt at preserving texts and music of this African inheritance in a classical format, with the intention of safeguarding this cultural patrimony [...] In this way, we hope to guard and disseminate this patrimony so that the economic storms do not come to wipe it out of the Afro-Brazilian cultural-religious milieu (Korin Orishá 2009, excerpt on back cover).

Like his stylized maracatus, to be discussed further below, Zé Amaro’s Suíte Afro-

Recifense makes an intervention in the world of Brazilian música erudita, infusing the methods and forms of the Movimento Armorial (usually focussed on Iberian and some indigenous influences) with inspiration from Afro-Brazilian cultural practices. It is unusual in this respect, since it is far more common for artists to articulate an oppositional politics based in Afro-Brazilian identity through urban popular music or rural folk practices reformulated for an urban audience.

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I was introduced to Zé Amaro in part because of his contact with Guerra-Peixe.

Though Zé did not have a close friendship or working relationship with Guerra-Peixe, he had followed his work closely and in the late 1960s had the opportunity to meet and study with him. During his time in Rio de Janeiro, Zé Amaro took some formal lessons with him on how to conduct “folklore” research for use in composition, and through this study created a work based in a Northeastern form known as ciranda. After that, Zé also had several opportunities to talk with Guerra-Peixe more informally, conversations which primarily centered around Guerra-Peixe’s thoughts on issues of composition and instrumentation, a topic which apparently Guerra-Peixe was particularly enthusiastic about. It seems, then, that though their contact was limited, Guerra-Peixe was an important influence in Zé Amaro’s interest in and approach to composing works based on local popular practices, including maracatu nação, and that therefore Zé can be considered to be part of the same musical lineage.

Zé Amaro enthusiastically brought out the sheet music for several of his compositions, both his stylized maracatus and a few frevos canção as well. I took the opportunity to ask him about his compositional process for the maracatus:

A: What... what are the characteristics [...] of maracatu that you think are important to bring and make into a choral maracatu?

Z: See, one of the characteristics, one of the important characteristics that I ... emphasize is the question of the rhythm. Because here there is the rhythm of maracatu [gestures at the sheet music], right? They are all here, look here, here they are...

A: “Gun-guh-guh-gun...” [singing]

Z: And, got it? Here the, here the part on top is the... the song, right? The song here uses components that all—the rhythm, this does the most diverse rhythms. Because maracatu does not have only one rhythm. It has that principal rhythm of, of, of... of the bombo chefe. Right? Of the bombo chefe, that here is “boooooooom, boom-boom- booooooooom,” this here, it has the rhythm of the meião. “Boooooom, buh-boom- boom buh-boom-boom buh-boom-buh booooom, buh-buh-boom-boom.” Right? And the rhythm of the caixa as well, the caixa de guerra. “Ca-ca-tah, ca-ra-ca-tah, ca-ca-

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ra-ca-tah, ca-ca-ra-ca-tah...” which Guerra-Peixe emphasized very well, this here in his book, there in the rhythm, right? And.... yes. And the agogô. “Bip-boop bip-boop buh-buh-buh bip-boop.” That part there, right? Well, it is all there, it is... how can I put it? Alongside this, I tell the story of Dona Santa, who was a famous queen, a maracatu queen, right? (Z. A. S. da Silva 2019).

Like other composers of stylized maracatu before him, Zé Amaro emphasized rhythm as the primary element used to evoke maracatu nação in an erudite composition. While it seems that this focus on rhythm has become part of the received logic of such a style of composition, Zé Amaro goes farther than Ferreira, Capiba, Suassuna, or Guerra-Peixe in emphasizing the diversity of rhythms played in maracatu nação and especially the rhythmic signatures of the various instruments and the way they are stratified to produce a larger, interlocking, polyrhythmic whole.

The composition at hand was a piece called “Dona Santa” (composed for four voices), a tribute to the famous early twentieth-century maracatu nação Queen. I asked Zé

Amaro about how he arrived at the melody, and if there were any characteristics of maracatu nação in the melody itself. At first, he replied in the affirmative, but when I asked him to elaborate, he replied that it was not a melody drawn from any toada, but simply one he had invented himself to melodize the poem about Dona Santa, his original starting point.

I followed up by asking about how he would go about harmonizing a piece like this, since maracatu nação is typically performed in unison, without any explicitly articulated harmony:

Z: See, see, the harmony, it comes like this as a consequence of the... if there is a piece for four mixed voices, we—it doesn’t do to do a choral piece in unison... Which is what happens with the maracatus normally. They don’t have harmony. So, since there are four voices, a distribution of four voices, well then, we put the harmony exactly in the middle of this, which is to be able to give it a better embellishment/beautification [embelezamento]. The construction of the, of the composition.

A: Mmhmm... is there a certain, certain... I don’t know, rules, or guidelines that you have to choose for the harmony—

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Z: No, no.

A: —in order to evoke maracatu?

Z: Huh?

A: In order to write this harmony, of course it is not in maracatu normally, but do you write a harmony that evokes maracatu? Is there a specific quality? Are there certain things that would not...?

Z: Do, that would not do?

A: Yeah.

Z: Well, see, when we... do you compose?

A: Uh-huh... yes. Z: A little, right? So, when you compose something, you think about the construction, so you are the architect of the piece. Isn’t it so? And what is it that you compose, of what is it that you compose? From a poem? Right? That now will be embellished by a, a melody? Right? And, since it refers to a thing called maracatu, well this maracatu has its own rhythm. It has its own rhythm in the principal bombo, in the meião, the caixa, of course, in the agogô... well then, we take advantage now of the four voices to distribute this rhythm. While one voice, one or another voice, it goes along doing exactly those melodic designs with the, with the poetry, right? Well, then, this... now there isn’t a specific rule.

A: A yes, just the general line...

Z: Yes

A: ...that you follow?

Z: Yes. Well, exactly that, you follow this, this general line, you have the melody, and you construct with the rhythm and the vocal ensemble the harmonies for the vocal ensemble. The harmony, we follow in the most traditional manner for how to write, for how to harmonize a particular melody (Z. A. S. da Silva 2019).

Zé Amaro seemed a bit confused by my questions, as if surprised at the idea that I had considered the possibility of influence from maracatu nação in the melody and harmony of a stylized piece. As he tried to explain his process for creating a simple harmonization for the melody using the conventions of Western European music theory, he brought the discussion of this compositional process back to the question of rhythm. As elaborated above, Zé Amaro articulated his compositional process as beginning with a poem, which

230 he then gave a melody, which he then in turn harmonized, before distributing this harmony among the voices and assigning them rhythmic roles that used the rhythms of maracatu nação to evoke the carnaval practice. I got the impression that, short of drawing on the actual melody of a toada, the notion that the melodies of maracatu nação (and their implied harmonies) could be abstracted into general principles worth using to shape a composition was somewhat unthinkable.

While Zé Amaro seemed to share similar logics with Guerra-Peixe and other composers of stylized maracatu with respect to compositional process and the elements of music, he differed greatly in the way in which he understood the narratives and emotional tone of these pieces, explicitly pushing back against the preoccupation of other white composers with notions of banzo in maracatu nação. The nuance with which he approached this idea became clear as he explained to me the back story behind his maracatu for piano entitled “Teresa Rainha”:8

Z: This here is a maracatu that I wrote. I wrote it in 1980. This here is the following, it deals with a story of a, a true story of an African woman named Teresa, that according to what the history says, she had to marry a soba. A king of those Africans [...] And since this soba had many wives, and being that Teresa was a beautiful woman, and such—she felt the need for a male companion, so she found a lover. So, you already see it, right? When a woman who is considered a queen lies with another man, since the soba wasn’t like these northeastern troglodytes, this is their work, what do they do? They find the woman and kill her, homicide, right? Understand? But him [the soba], no, he decided on revenge and sold her to a slaver. He sold her and she came to port here in Recife. In the slave market, where she had been posted, the owner of a sugar plantation, you know? From the city of Ipojuca here in the interior of Pernambuco. How can I put it... He, he went up to her and he bought her. Since she had all the bearing of a queen, of a woman—she still smelled of frankincense, those golden bracelets, on her body, well, he gave her special treatment. As if she were a concubine. Well. One day, there was a problem in the plantation. There weren’t enough workers to work the mill. And the women of the plantation, "Damn it, who is this concubine? Why doesn’t she do anything...?” so then, she began, “Why doesn’t

8 Pereira da Costa recounts some of Teresa’s story in his 1908 Folk-lore Pernambucano: “...Tollenare found in the slave quarters of the Sibiró sugar mill, in Ipojuca, a queen of Cabinda, imperious, refusing to work, and knowing how to makes the slaves obey and fear her. Theresa Rainha, as this black sovereign was called, who fell from the throne into the slave hut of a Brazilian senhor, when arrived still wore on her arms and legs, as a symbol of her lost royal station, some large rings of golden copper” (Pereira Da Costa 1908, 212).

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this girl, this nêga work [at the mill]? Why doesn’t she work?” Because she worked with her charm, right? [...] arranging things in the house, so on. “Why doesn’t she work in, in”—she had never done labor there. So then, he put her to work, but her not knowing how to work with the machine, the mill, so she put the cane into the mill. She put the cane in the mill and the cane went like this and pulled her arm in. She went to free her arm with her other arm, and that arm got pulled in too. And so, she was left without both her hands. This Teresa was left without both her hands (Z. A. S. da Silva 2019).

Zé did not hesitate to recount the tragic history upon which this maracatu was based, mentioning the historical sources in which he had found references to the story.

Importantly, this tragedy was of the brutality of slave labor rather than a romanticized longing for a lost homeland. He continued by singing the piece for me:

Z: “Queen Teresa, a pretty maiden, with ribbons, she dressed in joyous colors, with regal airs, she enchanted her partners who sighed with love. Ginguim and seductive mulata, sweet-scented woman, she made even the crudest senhor tremble. Far from her Angola, where she reigned. She reigned in Ipojuca with colored threads, never losing her regal airs.” You know? “Never losing her regal airs. As an African here with her subjects, she was a great and beautiful queen,” and it repeats. Well, this is that maracatu that I wrote (Z. A. S. da Silva 2019).

His tribute to Teresa avoids mention of her tragic fate, instead celebrating her social power as a woman possessing the regal bearing of a queen even when enslaved in Brazil. This way of recounting the story of Teresa caught me by surprise, but Zé Amaro explained his motivation for this choice as our conversation continued. Later, when I asked about how he saw himself in relation to other composers who wrote stylized maracatus, he explained his broader vision for his own compositions:

Z: There are various ways of conceiving of maracatu. Yeah, Capiba had a maracatu, no, it was... yeah, “É de Tororó.”

A: Yeah

Z: “É de Tororó,” a maracatu, yeah. It is a very plaintive thing. As if black people lived lamenting, suffering all the time, because we were enslaved, because we were caught, because whatever—well. My conception, in my conception since I always lived among dancers, the dancer, joyous men, with big laughs, that big smile, that— well, I always disagreed with this manner of these white composers of conceiving of black people as suffering, captive, at the sugar mill, in the slave hut, I don’t know what. My tendency was another. My maracatus, all of them, they have a story that is

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always a highlight of the figure of the black man. Understand? For example, this story of Teresa, despite the tragic side of her life, I did not want the maracatu to have this tragic side. Rather, that it was, there appears this woman, pretty, beautiful, with roses, ginguim, perfumed, right? That made the crudest senhor tremble.

Well then, it is this. My tendency was always to choose a maracatu of, say, another vision. Of this “Rei de Angola,” for example, I won a prize with that one. You know? It is... how do I say it... It is a fiction, it is a fiction, this one, the story and such [...] “Hail the King of this maracatu that comes to greet, to greet his people, ba ba ba ba.” Well, always inside this perspective of being a happy person. Right? A happy person, not a sufferer. Such as those other composers thought, understand? Principally Capiba, the maracatus of Capiba are entirely um chororó danado [“damned weepy”]. Understand? (Z. A. S. da Silva 2019).

Zé Amaro rejected the fetishization of suffering that characterizes the stylized maracatus of Capiba and the writings of his contemporaries. Rather, though he does not shy away from discussing the injustices and cruelties in the source material for some of his works,

Zé insisted on creating representations of enslaved Africans, black Brazilians, and maracatu itself as empowered, proud, and dignified, usually through depiction of regal subjects.

Zé Amaro generously shared with me the sheet music for three of his stylized maracatus— “Dona Santa,” “Tereza – Rainha,” and “Rei de Angola”—analysis of which bear out his claims about his motivations and approach with the genre. All three compositions make their aesthetic link to maracatu understood through rhythm rather than melody or harmony. This is most often articulated through the 1-2-1 rhythmic cell discussed in the previous chapter, though the composer also integrates common rhythms played by the gonguê as well as the primary rhythm played by the alfaias, known as marcação. On the other hand, the compositions to not appear to derive any influence from the melodic conventions of the songs of maracatu nação, or indeed any harmonies that might be implied by those melodies. Rather, the harmonic and melodic conventions are

233 those of the Western European “art” music tradition, though influences of jazz and

Brazilian popular music are also present.

The composition “Dona Santa” is explicitly articulated in its lyrics as a “song of melancholic nostalgia” for the deceased Queen and her legendary nação, Maracatu

Elefante, and indeed, the is the sole of his three compositions to evoke a melancholy emotional tone. However, the composition is not limited to this register, as it also evokes, alongside the three others, a sense of grandeur using expansive piano chords or choral orchestrations and employing many open fifths and octaves in the lower register. In “Dona

Santa,” the effect is one of both mourning and wonder at the maracatu nação Queen’s majesty and charisma. In “Tereza – Rainha”—as discussed above, a composition that Zé

Amaro told me was inspired by a very tragic story—the composer does not focus on this aspect of her biography, but instead celebrates the historical figure’s beauty and social power despite her enslaved status. This composition, more than any of the others, cultivates a sense of majesty through the devices mentioned above – large, expansive, open chords with powerful sounding fifths and octaves in the bass register. “Rei de Angola,” which similarly celebrates a fictional African potentate, incorporates into this sensibility experimental influences from jazz and the European avant-garde, including close, dense harmonies with many extensions and alterations, or moments of dissonance or atonality.

The emotional tone of these pieces varies, with moments that could be described as joyous and others as mournful, but without the sense of banzo that Zé Amaro critiqued in Capiba’s works. The predominant emotional tone is a sense of grandeur and wonder that does indeed celebrate the variously royal figures the composer is paying tribute too.

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4.3 Conclusion

At the core of Guerra-Peixe’s compositional theory and ethnographic endeavours reside the same hierarchical notions of cultural value articulated by Ariano Suassuna and internalized by his predecessors and contemporaries discussed in the previous chapter.

These ideas are predicated upon the very notions of “art” and “artistry,” ideas that developed in a Western European context which for centuries has been intertwined with imperial and colonial projects and eventually the development of “scientific” racism. As

Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014) demonstrates, European and white Latin American discourse about the music of colonial racial Others—and especially about whether the expressive sound made by these Others was truly “music” (and thus truly “art”)—was at its core about whether these others were truly human. Some inkling of this past, of course, has been the great motivator of many ethnomusicologists and other ethnographers of non-

Western European, non-elite musics, who since the mid-twentieth century have insisted on the artistic value of these practices as not only worthy of study but simply as human creative expressions in and of themselves. However, it is important to be careful with the impulse to broaden our notion of “art” to encompass formerly excluded practices; not because they are not “worthy” of the designation, but rather because this gesture fails to interrogate the very notion of “art” itself, which is embedded with racialized social hierarchies that need to be dismantled. It is crucial to question the logic and histories that inform the impulse to

“elevate,” “update,” or “hybridize.”

At the same time, the perspectives of a composer such as Zé Amaro Santos da Silva provides another important reminder. As a black composer working primarily within the emerging Brazilian música erudita tradition—a tradition that while perhaps drawing

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“source material” from local popular culture is also firmly predicated upon forms, conventions, and logics originating amongst the Western European cultural elite—and a direct heir to Guerra-Peixe’s legacy, Zé Amaro has been invested in the development of that tradition at the same time that he has sought to challenge it and make space for Afro-

Brazilian culture and black subjectivity within it. Zé Amaro provides a rare reminder that even fields of cultural activity that may primarily be occupied by elites also contain more marginalized voices who may see the problems with the tradition they have dedicated themselves too and still believe in its value. Zé Amaro’s maracatu nação-inspired compositions are not free of the broader logics that govern notions of race and cultural value in Brazil, yet they also make conscious interventions in some of the problematic aspects more particular to previous attempts to stylize maracatu nação—especially the fetishization of banzo through the aesthetics of tragedy, as seen in the stylized maracatus of Capiba. Zé Amaro’s work and his perspectives on the stylization of popular culture and maracatu nação remind that while it is important to question and dismantle the logics that create and uphold racialized cultural hierarchies—including the very terms of the debate over the nature of “art” and the relationship between the “popular” and the “erudite”—at the same time, for the foreseeable future, this is the world we live in. It is important not to leave formerly closed off worlds of elite cultural production to their own devices, but rather insist on a place for the creativity of marginalized people in their canon. It may be possible that the two endeavors can take place side by side.

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5.0 ROYALS AND AMBASSADORS: TRANSNATIONALISM, MEDIATION, AND THE AGENCY OF IN THE ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCHANGES OF KATARINA REAL

This chapter examines the mediations and interventions of US anthropologist

Katarina Real, 1 who conducted ethnographic field research in Recife during the 1950s and

1960s, published a book on Pernambucan carnaval, and became heavily involved in the local world of “folklore” research, “action research,” and popular culture. The chapter examines her relationship to the world of maracatu nação and the ways in which she acted to both “revive” defunct nações and usher others into museum and university collections.

An enthusiastic collector of local material culture herself (Kubrusly 2007), Real’s interventions wielded significant influence over the trajectory of maracatu nação in the late twentieth century—influencing how defunct nações such as Maracatu Elefante would be remembered in museums, and how new ones would be styled, such as in her collaboration with local performer and Xangô priest Eudes Chagas to found/revive the nação Porto Rico do Oriente. The chapter concludes by examining the legacy of Real’s acquisition of the sacred calunga doll—known as Dona Joventina—of the nação Estrela

Brilhante do Campo Grande, Real’s thirty-year possession of the doll in the United States, and her eventual donation of Dona Joventina to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, an anthropology museum in Recife. I examine Real’s performative attempts to make the

1 Katherine Royal Cate would publish primarily in Brazil, where her name was “Brazilianized” to “Katarina Real”—real being the Portuguese word for “royal” (as well as meaning the same as the English “real”). Since this modified name is the primary one by which she is known in Brazil and abroad, I shall refer to her as Real in my own text, though her name appears with many variations in my sources.

237 calunga “speak” in her defense in light of the controversies over cultural patrimony and anthropological responsibility that were sparked by the donation. Through her research, writing, interventions—and especially in the nuances and tension of her field relationships—Real made a major impact on the trajectory of maracatu nação socially and aesthetically, as well as broadening a local sense of ownership of the practice.

5.1 Dona Katarina as Transnational Actor

The US anthropologist known in Brazil as Katarina Real was born Katherine

(sometimes spelled Catherine) Royal on December 7th, 1927, in Annapolis, Maryland. Her father, Admiral Forrest Betton Royal, spent some of his career working as a Naval Advisor in Brazil’s naval school, stationed in Rio de Janeiro from 1939-1941, and he also travelled throughout Brazil with young Katherine in tow. For this reason, Real claimed to feel a special connection to the country when she returned later in her life. She would undergo this return both due to the work of her husband, Robert Cate—a soil analyst who worked in various parts of Brazil—as well as her own research. After receiving a BA in Luso-

Brazilian Studies at Stanford University in 1949 and an MA at the University of North

Carolina in 1961, Real returned to Brazil under a grant from the Organization of American

States to conduct field research on the “folklore” of the Northeast. She would later publish this research in the book O Folclore no Carnaval do Recife in 1967, before eventually returning to the United States and completing her doctorate in Anthropology at North

Carolina in 1970. Deeply influenced by the work of Gilberto Freyre and his ideas of mestiçagem and racial democracy, Real was an avid participant in Brazil’s folklore movement. In addition to her academic research, she also helped to organize many museum

238 exhibitions both in Brazil and the United States. She would come to work with the

Commissão Pernambucana de Folclore (Pernambucan Folklore Commission – “CPF”) from 1964 to 1968, acting as president of the Commissão Organizador do Carnaval do

Recife (The Organizing Commission of the Carnival of Recife) from 1966 to 1968 and assuming the post of Secretary General of the CPF in 1967. In recompense for her life’s work in the field of the study, collection, protection, and incentivization of “folklore” in

Pernambuco, she was declared an honorary “Citizen of Recife” by the municipal government in 1967 (see Kubrusly 2007, 29–32).

Real struggled unsuccessfully to get her doctoral thesis published in the United

States, though she found more success in Brazil, where she published two academic articles as well as her 1967 book on Recife’s carnaval. She also published a later work, also in

Brazil, in 2001, entitled Eudes, o Rei do Maracatu (“Eudes, the King of Maracatu”), that was on her friendship and collaboration with Eudes Chagas, founder of the nação Porto

Rico do Oriente. In addition to close readings of these two texts, I have also consulted several smaller published works—pamphlets designed for museum exhibitions penned by

Real, transcriptions of some of her speeches, and documents housed in the archives of the

Museu do Homem do Nordeste (Muhne) in Recife. This museum retains, in its private archives, materials concerning Real, her donation of the calunga Dona Joventina to the museum in 1996, and the bequeathing of the entire collection of costumes, instruments, and other items related to Maracatu Elefante to the museum after the death of its famous

Queen, Dona Santa, in the early 1960s.

Real was a prime example of a transnational actor—not only in the sense that she was an American anthropologist working in Brazil, but in that she was both formed by

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Brazil (spending significant portions of her childhood and adulthood there, long before engaging in her research) and helped to form it in its present context through her many mediations in the world of popular culture—not the least of which was to consistently publish her work in Brazil in the Portuguese language. In the words of Real herself, “along the route of this research, I became a bit ‘of the land’ – a bit Portuguese, a bit Afro, and bit

Amerindian-Brazilian!” (Real 1967, 14). Though the sentiment is expressed a bit flippantly by the standards of contemporary anti-racist discourse grounded in critiques of the appropriation of identity, it would not have been seen as such in Brazil until quite recently—indeed I have heard many Brazilians express similar ideas about race, culture, and identity. It is difficult to argue that Real (or any ethnographer for that matter) would not be significantly shaped in their subjectivity by such extended contact. And as shall be demonstrated below, Real made a significant impact on the history of maracatu nação— an impact which is remembered in both celebratory and critical ways.

The flip side of Real’s transnational subject position and field of action, of course, are the ways in which she represented and was used to represent Brazil to a North American audience. The sources for this work are few. Real struggled to have her academic writing published in English, but frequently engaged in activities such as hosting radio programs on the music of Brazil and other Latin American nations, and curating museum exhibitions—arguably, activities with a broader reach than scholarly writing. Most tantalizing is a reproduction of a feature—though it reads more like a commercial advertisement—from a US magazine, promoting Real as an expert on Brazil, though it is not clear to what end. The page is reproduced in a commemorative booklet on Real created

240 by the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco 2007). I have reproduced its text below:

LEADING AUTHORITY IN THE U.S.A. on Brazilian Folk Dances

KATARINA REAL has recently returned from Brazil, the land of her childhood. Association with leading Brazilian artists and years of research in the field of Brazilian arts have equipped her to interpret Brazilian culture, and particularly Brazilian dancing, as no one else on the American Platform today. Born in the United States, she went to Rio de Janeiro for the first time at the age of nine and has returned several times since. In her travels there, she made an intensive study of Brazilian manners and customs - - Folklore and dancing especially. Speaking perfect Portuguese and having learned native dialects, she has lectured (in Portuguese) to the Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos. Also, her lectures over the Radio Ministério de Educação, sponsored by the Instituto, were enthusiastically received. MISS REAL is superbly qualified to introduce to the American audience the exciting and colorful world of Brazil’s folk music and dance. In her lectures, she also displays curious musical instruments and demonstrates the most fascinating traditional dances, including the captivating FRÊVO and mysterious MARACATÚ.

LECTURES ‘Around Brazil on the Musical Folkways’ - - - The Mighty Amazon - - - Jungles of Pará and Mato Grosso - - - - Exotic Dances. ‘The Candomblé Rituals of Bahia’ - - - Strange Afro-Brazilian Cultures. ‘The Children of Brazil’ (Special Children’s Program)

TYPICAL COMMENTS - - Enthusiastic Audience - - certainly among the best exhibitions we have ever seen here. Elsbeth Fox Palo Alto Community Center

Miss Real’s lecture covered everything from voodoo to Brazilian politics - - - a real authority on folklore and a true friend of Brazil. Bulletin of the Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos

After having seen interpretive dancing all over the world, I would be happy to recommend Miss Real to any audience in the country. Newton H. Bell Noted Traveler and Lecturer.2

If the text itself leaves Real’s background somewhat ambiguous, using her Brazilianized name, referring to Brazil as “the land of her childhood,” and only noting that she was born

2 Courtesy of the Biblioteca da Fundação Joaquim Nabuco.

241 in the US but not explaining the reasons she travelled to Brazil at a young age—is she an

American born to Brazilian parents, or simply the daughter of worldly travelers? —the photos of Real do little to clarify the matter. The accompanying images, one thumbnail sized and the other taking up half of the copy, show Real with Brazilian percussion instruments—brandishing a beaded gourd in the smaller, and standing next to a large hand drum (possibly an atabaque) in the larger image (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco 2007). In both photos, she is adorned with chunky beaded jewelry while in the larger, she is also wearing the traditional garb associated with the Afro-Bahian street vendor-women—white lace blouse and skirt, pano da costa and a white turban tied around her head. She is posed leaning backwards with her arms raised, her hands inflected in a gesture that suggests she is dancing. The clothing, jewelry, delicately flexed hands, together with the stark contrast between her pale skin and dark (presumably red) lipstick evoke the stylized baiana of

Carmen Miranda—though Real’s costume is much truer to its source, making this performatively exotic representation of Real even more powerful for its ability to suggest to the viewer that Real is in some sense “a native.” The deception—perhaps Real’s initiative, but likely the producers’ as well—is significant in that it paints a convincing picture of Real’s authenticity as both an authority on and interpreter of Brazilian performing arts, and therefore gives her interpretations and interventions weight in the eyes of the US public. The feature also underscores Real’s transnational subject position and field of agency, conducting research and engaging in other activities in the field of folklore studies as a Brazilianized American mediating between both countries.

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5.2 Pesquisa-Ação and the “Folkloric Left” of 1960s Pernambuco

Brazil during the 1960s can hardly be understood without acknowledgement of the repressive military dictatorship which took power in 1964 and retained power until 1985.

Real’s narratives in both her main texts take place during this difficult phase in Brazilian history, though she scarcely mentions it. However, the mark of the dictatorship is felt in her work indirectly, through her commitment to what she terms Brazil’s “folklore movement.” Up to and during the dictatorship, Brazilian cultural production would come to be dominated by the left, and particularly by a certain brand of Marxist-influenced nationalism that placed a high emphasis on popular culture as an invaluable national resource that should serve as the basis for “engaged” cultural production—and was at times viewed as in need of “protection”. The most famous manifestation of this movement was in the politically engaged protest music of the Southeast, which grew out of the bossa nova scene but came to incorporate diverse influences from urban working class and peasant culture into a bossa-esque format (Treece 2013). The impoverished and marginalized—yet also often romanticized and idealized—Northeastern region played a prominent role in the discourse of the protest music scene, which incorporated many Northeastern elements into the emerging popular protest song palette as it cast the region as the heartland of the true

“Brazilian people” victimized by the brutal new regime. However, in many ways the

Southeastern protest song movement maintained and re-elaborated pre-existing power dynamics between the Southeast and Northeast, with the Northeast in the role of

“authentic” but archaic and primitive “folk” who were in need of the interventions— whether to protect them, preserve their “way of life,” or modernize them—proffered by the artists, intellectuals, and activists of the “modern” Southeast (see Dunn 2001, 45–55).

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Recife itself was home to a Northeastern take on the protest song movement, though here the emphasis was yet more on the “folklore” itself, as well as its collection, documentation, and preservation (see Teles 2000). Just as the protest song movement of the Southeast came to be known as the “festive left” (due to the central role of competitive song festivals in the development of the scene), the Northeastern cultural left could be nicknamed the “folkloric left.” In Recife, the “folkloric left” engaged with local popular culture as a basis for an oppositional and regional identity, distinguishing themselves both from the oppressive new regime and Southeastern hegemony. Be that as it may, a similar dynamic existed between this elite movement and the actual members of the classes populares as did between the protest song movement of the Southeast and their marginalized/idealized Northeastern “muses.” Therefore, to refer to oneself as committed to the Brazilian folklore movement, at this moment, especially in Recife, was to be engaged in a mode of discourse which idealized “the folk” as a privileged site of authenticity and the natural opposite to the heartless repression of the dictatorship. As such, “the folk” were both a source of inspiration and a vulnerable, oppressed population in need of the interventions of the intellectual and cultural elite. Needless to say, such ideas often performed more cultural work for the middle-class leftists who espoused them than for the benefit of “the folk” themselves, though as will be demonstrated below, it did at times supply members of the working classes with elite and well-connected, if often problematic and patronizing, advocates and mediators.

The way that Real is remembered in Pernambuco varies greatly: academics, especially older ones, tend to view her interventions as important and necessary and marvel at the commitment and depth of knowledge of a foreigner with regards to local popular

244 culture, while many individuals within the maracatu nação scene who have studied this phase of the practice’s history might interpret her actions much less generously. Renowned

Pernambucan folklorist Roberto Benjamin, in a booklet accompanying an exhibit on Real by the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, writes that Real was a:

...precursor, among us, of pesquisa-ação (‘action-research’): she became a member of the Commissão Pernambucana de Folclore, of which she was the director and accepted the thorny mission of presiding over the Organizing Commission of the Carnaval of Recife. In these activities, she resgatou (“rescued”) diverse carnaval societies and promoted the acceptance of the maracatus-rurais previously rejected and harassed in Recife and brought to the capital’s downtown the ursos and the bois-de-carnaval, which previously did not leave the suburbs. (Benjamin 2007).

In another part of the commemorative booklet, in a section of unattributed authorship, it is argued that Real was able to leave behind the academic imperative to remain emotionally and politically “disengaged,” proposing many “innovations and changes in both practices and traditional terminologies” (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco 2007), such as changing the names of certain practices to ones she considered more accurate, more dignified, and less discriminatory, and—significantly for our story—bringing back the crowning ceremonies of the Kings and Queens of maracatu nação.

Real’s speech at the ceremony in which she was made Secretary General of the

CPF—which was later published in the form of a small booklet by the Fundação Joaquim

Nabuco—perhaps best outlined her vision of the role of “folklore” study with the Brazilian folklore movement. In the speech Real described her goals and guiding principles for the

CPF. She began by insisting that their vision of folklore would be “highly anthropological,” considering all cultural practices of the “folk” legitimate objects of study (Real Cate 1967,

9). She prioritized maintaining an understanding of culture that was dynamic, allowing for change, punning that “the idea that ‘folklore is dying out’ is itself a type of ‘folclore’!”

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(Real Cate 1967, 9).3 She also called out paternalistic attitudes towards “folklore” that characterized it as peculiar, quaint, adorable, or uncivilized, pointedly avoiding the term

“primitive” in her speeches and writings (Real Cate 1967, 9).

It is also here that she most clearly outlined her understanding of folclore de ação—

“action folklore”—giving the term ação a meaning rather different from that suggest by

Roberto Benjamin decades later. According to Real, folclore de ação involved the study of

“folkloric traditions in which the people made, realized, presented, or represented something—a ‘folk’ drama, carnaval practices, dances, games, songs, toys, costume and dress, cuisine, handicrafts, basket-weaving, embroidery, lace-making—and also mutual aid societies and both secular and religious festivals” (Real Cate 1967, 10). In contrast, Real rejected the emphasis on the collection of “magical formulas, rhymes, beliefs and superstitions” (Real Cate 1967, 10) which she associated with the folklore studies discipline of the United States. She saw this type of “folklore” collection as not only infantilizing but socially destructive when it included the collection and dissemination of rhymes, sayings, and tales replete with racial slurs and discriminatory caricatures (Real

Cate 1967, 10). The “tragic result” of such folklore collection, she emphatically argued, was “beatings, fights and riots on the streets, looted shops, and entire cities in flame!” (Real

Cate 1967, 11).4 Real went on to assure her Pernambucan audience that Brazil was home to less of this kind of “folklore” (a dubious claim), and that that which exists is mostly in

3 The term folclore is a common way of suggesting that an idea is false yet commonly believed, much like an urban legend, superstition, or everyday “myth”—Real was also, contradictorily, very involved in preproducing this same folclore of the imminent demise of local popular culture with respect to Recife’s nações de maracatu. 4 Real was referring to racial struggle in the United States at the time. As I write these words in the wake of the racial awakening of the summer of 2020, I am struck by the incoherence between Real’s professed commitment to anti-racist anthropology and her activities, interventions, and appropriations in the field, and indeed, by how little has changed between the 1960s and today.

246 the South and appeared to be in decline, thanking her colleagues for deprioritizing the collection of such material.

Real’s speech went on to present her goals for the CPF: to disabuse the authorities and the public of the idea that the ubiquitous presence of cultural practices and material culture understood as “folklore” was linked with economic underdevelopment; to collaborate with local youth, incentivizing them to study and preserve their “riquissima folkloric heritage”; and collaborating with the tourism industry so that, “when the day came that Recife has high luxury hotels and well organized tourism programs... for there to still be dances, folk dramas, carnaval performances” along with “good studies of the same” in order to be presented to both tourists and scholars visiting the area (Real Cate 1967, 14–

15). Real also assured the audience that the CPF “eyed with caution—and why not—a certain distrust” at the use of performers of popular culture at philanthropic events in which the monies earned went to various charities but the performers themselves received no compensation, a trend which she considered a great injustice.

Real’s own published work is also interesting for the ways in which it both conforms to and diverges from anthropological convention. Real’s first book, O Folclore no Carnaval do Recife (published in 1967), dedicates a chapter to each kind of carnaval practice, creating a broad typology that depicts these practices as bounded and distinct. Yet she insists on a remarkable sense of historical dynamism in her writing, reminding the reader that only “from 1961 to 1965, the period of my research” was it possible to say that

“during this period, the clubes carnavalescos had such and such characteristics, knowing very well that a carnaval such as that of Recife—in the full force of cultural evolution, even cultural explosion—five years from now could have modified itself dramatically”

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(Real 1967, 21). And though she has been critiqued by Lima as devaluing the maracatus rurais as “impure” in comparison with the nações africanas (and indeed some of her writing does suggest this attitude), in other places she celebrates them, arguing that the maracatus rurais, “face strong barriers of resistance, even a lack of comprehension in the city – because no one knows ‘what they are.’ They are, in fact, the true dynamic of folklore,” the “fission and fusion of elements, folkloric and cultural traits and styles.

Indeed, in some cases, what appears to be a ‘de-characterization’ is in reality evidence of the very force of a tradition, in the throes of evolution and growth” (Real 1967, 152).

Perhaps most intriguing is her choice to end her first book with a chapter titled “Self-

Criticism and Appeal” (Autocrítica e Apêlo) (Real 1967, 154–156) in which she recognizes all the various analytical fields and lenses her book lacks, such as the broader social, political, and religious context of these practices, and the names of her informants. For all the ways in which Real’s initial 1967 ethnography of Recife’s carnaval associations is typical of an antiquated style of anthropology, she was also at times startlingly transparent, so that a contemporary reading of her work can take in to account the complexities, contradictions, and nuances of her research activities and perspectives, even if these complexities are not offered in the main text of her foremost publication.

Her second book, Eudes, Rei do Maracatu (published in 2001), is a first-person narrative about her friendships and activities with several important figures in the maracatu nação community, particularly with Eudes Chagas, and her collaboration with Chagas to found a new nação and resuscitate the crowning ceremonies of the Black Catholic

Brotherhoods of colonial-era Brazil. As Real describes it in the introduction, “This will also be the history of the relationship between Eudes Chagas and an anthropologist called

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Katarina Real, not for vanity on my part, but to reveal how two beings from quite different cultures arrived at a profound mutual comprehension and a friendship based in admiration, respect and affection for one to the other” (Real 2001, 15). Though the book does not appear to be written with the express intention of being reflexive—ex., of consciously and openly partaking in the academic exercise of acknowledging the presence and actions of the researcher as factors impacting ethnographic data collection, interpretation, and indeed future events in the field—Real’s 2001 text expands the transparency present in her 1967 book and clearly bears the mark of the sweeping changes to anthropological theory and practice in the intervening decades. This makes the book an ideal source for reading

“reflexively”—or the related historian’s method of reading “against the grain” of the source’s bias—by present-day scholars to better understand Real’s role in the history of this field.

5.3 Gifts and Appropriations: Real’s “Uneven” Exchanges

Brazilian anthropologist José Jorge de Carvalho (2016) critiques the changes in attitude of academic researchers of popular culture with regards to notions of responsibility towards the marginalized people who perform the practices they study. Carvalho traces a shift over the twentieth century from complete “scientific” detachment from the political and social concerns of culture bearers in the early twentieth century, to a mid-twentieth- century sense of responsibility to act as a mediator between culture bearers and the state, and finally into a contemporary scene in which researchers often both become performers of the practices they study and/or act as mediators between performers and the culture industry. However, while it has become commonplace for researchers to argue for popular

249 culture as a form of resistance and celebrate the ability of culture bearers to negotiate with and advocate for themselves against the state and the culture industries, very often the practical mediations of these researchers fail to follow suit but instead further the process of commodification within ongoingly unequal socio-economic relations. It is in this context that Carvalho refers to the kinds of modernist syntheses that are so often the result of academic research on popular culture in Brazil as “cultural borrowings that over time turned into cultural theft” (2016, 412) when those same researchers shirked reciprocations in the form of advocacy or gained personal profit from their use of information and knowledge gained through research for personal creative output, claimed as “original”.

In many ways, this dynamic echoes that outlined by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in her classic ethnography of poverty in the interior of Pernambuco, where local elites exploit the culture of reciprocity and the exchange of “favors” in their employ of the poor as laborers or domestic staff (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 98–127), promising them assistance in addition to their paltry wages but delivering the bare minimum. While their elite “patrons” make claims to values of reciprocity but then fail to deliver, the poor of the impoverished rural community that Scheper-Hughes studies formed a genuine if informal mutual aid and support network in which resources were distributed by communities based on need, and assistance with childcare provided by neighbors during difficult times. While it is an out- dated trope of early anthropology to insist that gift-giving is the primary mode of exchange in so-called “primitive” societies in opposition to commodity exchange in more

“advanced” ones (see Mauss 1966; for critiques, see Appadurai 1986; and Thomas 1991), it might be more accurate to say that the social transactions that underlie this understanding of gift exchange are important components of social life in all societies. This dynamic—

250 that of elites gaining access to and knowledge of popular culture based on notions of reciprocity that are then defaulted upon—is also present in the artist-folklorists discussed in the previous two chapters, though arguably the potential for and frequency of personal profit (without reciprocity) from use of popular culture by cultural elites has grown considerably since that time. Indeed, during the course of my research in Recife during the carnaval season of 2019-2020, I heard not a few members of nações complain that foreign collaborators had stolen items belong to the nações, such as costumes and instruments— as well as concerns that despite my neatly typed consent forms outlining my strictly academic usage of the information I was collecting, in five years I would “start a band.”

Interviewees often seemed relieved to discover that my questions were primarily social in nature, rather than focused on maracatu nação rhythms, songs, and dances or detailed questions about maracatu nação’s spiritual cosmologies.

In 1960s Recife, Real’s research ethos in the above sense was complex—in many places she espouses a strong sense of social responsibility towards the working-class and

Afro-Brazilian performers of the practices she studied, especially vis-a-vis the state, though as Carvalho makes clear, the interventions of this era were themselves deeply inflected by power dynamics and Real’s no less so. Likewise, though there is evidence that Real occasionally performed Afro-Brazilian music and dances in the United States (and indeed was marketed in such a way as to underscore her “near native” status), it is not clear what the extent or the nuances of these performances were, or what Real’s understanding of them was. Nonetheless, it seems that Real operated in the field with a sense of commitment to the well-being of her interlocutors, though imperfectly realized. As demonstrated below,

Real’s reciprocal give-giving, loans, and exchanges are an ever-present theme in her

251 second book about Eudes Chagas and the founding of Porto Rico. Yet these exchanges are

“uneven”—in the phraseology of Micol Seigel (2009)—taking place across vast and hierarchical differences in social and economic power between working-class Afro-

Brazilian culture bearers and an middle-class, white US anthropologist. Carvalho’s idea— that cultural loans made in the name of reciprocity eventually become “theft” when that reciprocity is defaulted upon—can help illuminate how some “gifts” received by Real during her fieldwork (most famously that of the calunga of Estrela Brilhante do Campo

Grande, Dona Joventina) could become acts of appropriation in the eyes of subsequent generations. This chapter works towards an understanding of the field relationships between Real and her interlocutors as both amicable and strained due to tensions arising from prevailing social disparities (of which Real seems to have worked to supress her own and others’ awareness). Likewise, it attempts to understand how Real’s interventions can be both activism and interference, and how her receipt of invaluable items, such as the calunga Dona Joventina, can be all at once “gifts,” strategic acts on the part of subaltern actors, and appropriations by Real herself.

The maracatu nação world of 1960s Recife was one in which the presence of anthropologists and other intellectual elites was ubiquitous. This is indeed the case today, where both local and foreign students and scholars make maracatu nação the object of their study, some developing positive and mutually beneficial long-term relationships with the nações and others less so—enough so that this was a major subject of discussion within the scene, as will be examined in the following chapter. In the 1960s, it was no less so. In

Eudes (2001), Real describes Chagas at a performance as “surrounded by admirers, men and boys of the middle class” (2001, 115)—suggesting that even before maracatu nação’s

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“boom” in the 1990s, certain maracatuzeiros could become something of a local celebrity and the recipients of a great deal of attention from members of the middle-classes. In

Folclore (1967), Real refers to going to a party hosted by Maracatu Indiano, which she described as a “beautiful, joyous party, with lots of beer and sugar-cane liquor for everyone, and even some ‘uisques’ [whisky] for ‘the doutôs’” (Real 1967, 82)—doutô, or ‘doctor’

(doutor) in the regional vernacular, referring not only to medical practitioners or those with doctorates, but any upper class person of “distinction”. Just as at least some nações found it beneficial to be prepared to receive elite patrons and offer them an expensive and chic imported liquor, Real seems to have understood that there needed to be some level of reciprocity in the exchanges between anthropologist and interlocutor. In the introduction to Folclore, Real expressed the wish that not only did she hope she would not be perceived as an “intrusion in this vast field of national folklore” in Brazil, but lauded the “warm generosity of the Brazilian in sharing those things most ‘his’ with those that come from afar” (Real 1967, 14)—convinced this was proof of Brazil’s “acculturative power.”

Acts of gift giving and exchange are ever-present in Real’s narratives in Eudes, and

Real recounts that she entered the field with the intention of giving gifts as a means of gaining access to the spaces and people she wanted to research (Real 2001, 80). Real recounts that as a “novice anthropologist, having received the degree of Master a month before,” and knowing she was about to embark on her first research trip to Brazil, she purchased “four decorative rings with stones in various colors” at Woolworths, “probably imported from Czechoslovakia.” Real notes that she “thought that such rings would help me to make friends with some of the directors of the carnaval associations I intended to study.” She gave the first to Dona Santa of Maracatu Elefante upon first meeting her, who

253 chose a yellow ring since it was the color of her orixá. Real gave the second ring to Perrê, the director and King of the carnaval association Tupi-Guarani. Perrê subsequently returned to Real’s apartment requesting a second ring, since he had given the first to his girlfriend who had been pressing him for it incessantly. Real writes that she was offended, exclaiming, “I gave that ring to you, Perrê, as King of the Tribe Tupi-Guarani. It was never meant to be presented to a girlfriend!”(Real 2001, 82–83). The last ring she gave to Eudes

Chagas at the inauguration of his new nação, along with a necklace with a garnet and pearl pendant, that had previously been given to Real as a gift from her sister, for the group’s new calunga Dona Inês de Castro (Real 2001, 80).

Real was also on the receiving end of gifts and special loans from her interlocutors.

For example, Luiz de França, renowned Mestre of Maracatu Leão Coroado, one day brought Real a tattered notebook titled “The Book of the Sect,” containing all the information necessary to interpret the jogo de búzio’s that was his specialty as a diviner within local Afro-Pernambucan religious practice, with the intention of lending it to the anthropologist. Real claims that she “tried to refuse accepting the book, recognizing that it was the man’s livelihood, but he insisted” (Real 2001, 60–61). Instead, Real returned the book “with relief” the next time she saw him.

Perhaps Real’s most dramatic tales of gift exchange involved those offered between her and Eudes Chagas. Real recounts one instance, during the first carnaval by Chagas’ new nação, Porto Rico (Real 2001, 90–94). That year, Real decided to create a prize to be awarded by the Commissão Pernambucana de Folclore to the agremiação “most responsible for the preservation or restauration of a tradition in danger of disappearing”

(90). Naturally, Real had chosen Chagas as the first recipient of the prize, which she

254 planned to award to him personally at the new nação’s first official carnaval parade. She had chosen a decorative sword that she had earlier purchased at the Mercado Modelo in the city of Salvador, Bahia state—for which she had made a special velvet satchel—as the gift that would symbolize the honor bestowed by the CPF. However, due to some mix up with the time of the parade, Real was relaxing in her home with her husband, drinking wine and watching the earlier parades on television, when the announcer advised the audience that

Porto Rico were beginning their procession. Real writes that she looked out her balcony, and “there on the other side of the Duarte Coelho Bridge, I saw Porto Rico initiating their choreographed evolutions at 8:15pm – and I was on the fourteenth floor of a building on the other side of the bridge” (92).

Apparently Real snatched up the “Sword of Gold” and ran down two flights of stairs to the elevator that would take her the rest of the way to the front entrance, where she

“jumped like a ray of light to cross the Bridge, running frenetically” (92). Once across the bridge, Real had to make her way through ten rows of people to get to the podium “in an inelegant manner, giving pushes and elbow shoves” (92), jumping over the barricade to arrive, breathless, at the announcer’s podium just as he announced that Porto Rico had finished their presentation and were saying farewell to the public. Real called out to the announcer to order the nação to return, “for the love of God! [...] I have an importantíssimo present to give them!” (93). Apparently, the announcer, surprised but ultimately unphased, announced over the microphone, “the anthropologist Katarina Real requires the return of

Porto Rico do Oriente!” (93).

According to Real, the nação returned and performed their parade once more, which Real describes as the most exciting [empolgante] that she had yet seen. After the re-

255 hash of the parade, Real says that she had trouble containing her emotion as she took the microphone and asked the nação to stop in front of the podium so she could present the award, offering Chagas the sword on bent knee. The moment was captured by an anonymous photographer, and the photo is preserved among the collections of the

Fundação Joaquim Nabuco as well as being reproduced in her book. Once presented,

Chagas, “radiant, took the satchel and removed the sword, raising it up for the public to admire” (94). Real would later discover that Porto Rico were that year’s champions in the carnaval competitions, a remarkable feat for a newly founded nação.

Such a dramatic, ritualized, and public act of gift-giving did not go without its repercussions. The Mestre of Leão Coroado, Luiz de França, was incensed that a new nação was awarded First Prize, when this was expressly against the rules of the Federação

Carnavalesca (Real 2001, 94–96), complaining in an interview published in the local press and threatening to withdraw his nação from the contests forever. Real invited França over to her apartment to talk over the matter, though França remained unconvinced by her appeals. Real made one final attempt to smooth things over, showing França a second sword she had bought together with the one she had awarded Chagas. She told França that the CPF intended to award the prize to him the following year. Real went to find the sword to show França, noting “it seemed to be that he liked it, since a weak smile appeared on his wrinkled face. Promising me that he would not make any more complaints in the press about the victory of Porto Rico, he rose to leave and we said goodbye amicably with a strong handshake” (Real 2001, 96).

Eudes Chagas would reciprocate Real’s regal and symbolically rich gift with one of his own, with two gestures to honor Real that though likely amicably intentioned,

256 nonetheless betray an ambivalent undertone that goes apparently undetected by Real in her narrative. Real recounts (Real 2001, 49–52) that Chagas, upon mentioning that he had decided the symbol of the nation would be a ship—a caravela5—and that he wanted Real’s husband Bob to baptize it as its “padrinho” [godfather], Real told Chagas about the ship she had baptized, the USS Forrest Royal, which was named in homage to her father after his death in combat. Real writes that, “Eudes demonstrated so much interest at this news that I went to my library and took out the album of photographs of the launch of Forrest

Royal.” During and after Real told Chagas the story of her father’s death and the christening of the ship, “Eudes remained looking awhile longer at that photograph in silence.

Afterwards, thanking me for telling him the story of the ship, he rose and said goodbye with a mysterious smile” (Real 2001, 49). When Real and her husband arrived at the ceremony to baptize the caravela, Real was greeted by a miniature craft that Eudes had had built, which included many of the features of the US Navy ship she had shown him.

(Real 2001, 50). Not only that, but the model ship, named “Santa Maria,” was part of a trio of caravelas and there was a model “Pinta” and “Niña” as well.

These ships would re-enter Real’s narrative at a later point, during a performance by Porto Rico at a public square in Recife known as Pátio de São Pedro (Real 2001, 115–

121). Real attended the performance and describes watching the dancers holding the model ship above their heads, making it appear to bob and rock as if resting on undulating waves.

After the performance was finished, Chagas brought the batuqueiros to Real’s table and had them play in her honor. One drummer was using a tarol that had been painted with her name in homage to the anthropologist (Real 2001, 90). The drum had apparently been one

5 The ships used by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores of the Americas.

257 of many named after either Afro-Brazilian spiritual entities, important individuals within

Recife’s maracatu nação community, or some of maracatu nação’s elite patrons, including

Real. After performing the toque, Chagas’ announced that the “Pinta” would be given to

Real as a gift (Real 2001, 116).

The next day, as Real recounts, Chagas arrived at her apartment with the model ship, where she was able to examine it more closely. Real notice what she described as

“curious little planks” and asked their significance. Chagas responded that “they open to the compartments where the black slaves, chained, travelled to Brazil. The sailboat represents a slave ship [navio negreiro]” (Real 2001, 118–119). This prompted Real to ask

Chagas “what the significance of the “Pinta” was to his maracatu?” Chagas replied that,

“It represents the ship that will take all the black people of Brazil back to Africa, Dona

Katarina.” Real relates that she felt “perturbed” by Chagas’s response, wondering whether all of Brazil’s African descendants would really want to return to their ancestral continent, but she refrained from commenting, feeling that it would be socially inappropriate and instead changing the subject.

The story of these two homages—the naming of a drum after Real (which included painting her name on it) and the gifting of the “Pinta” to her—are inflected with an ambiguous emotional tone indicative of Real’s anthropological relationships. On the one hand, they are outwardly conspicuous demonstrations of that infamous Brazilian cordiality, and in this sense, sincere in their attempt to honor the US anthropologist; indeed, I do not mean to negate that possibility or suggest that Chagas or any others’ intentions were duplicitous in any sense. Yet they both contain uncomfortable associations. The image of a drum painted with the name “Catarina” being struck by a heavy stick cannot lends itself

258 to an interpretation as a (perhaps facetious and joking) act of symbolic violence. However, such a reading on its own would be lacking, since these drums, some of which are considered sacred, were also named after orixás, divine entities of considerable but oftentimes capricious power with whom it was considered necessary to negotiate to improve the outcomes of one’s endeavors. While I would stop far short from suggesting that Real and other elite patrons honored with these drums could have been regarded with the reverence of a divinity, it remains an interesting possibility that Chagas and other performers of maracatu nação may have understood Real and other intellectual elites to be in possession of a capricious power that could just as easily thwart as it could benefit them, much like the elite rural “patrons” described by Scheper-Hughes (Scheper-Hughes 1992,

98–127).

Similarly, the gifting of a caravela/US Navy ship/slave ship/vehicle of black emancipation is equally multivalenced. The slippage between a ship used to colonize indigenous territories and a ship used to transport enslaved Africans and a ship used to further US neo-imperialism speaks to the long historical continuity, inter-relationship and overlapping of these globalized relations of deep inequality and domination. Giving such a gift, which symbolized layered histories of domination, to a foreign and very involved anthropologist is already replete with suggestion. At the same time, the ship bears a fourth identity as the ship that would emancipate Brazil’s black population by returning them to their ancestral homeland. The combination of these four identities for the ship suggests that perhaps Real was seen as both an agent and beneficiary of exploitative structures of social, economic, and intellectual power and as someone whose presence could be re-purposed in the service of the nação’s interests. And while Real was indeed committed to the social

259 and economic well-being of the people whose practices she studied, her understanding of what kinds of interventions would have been of benefit, and what constituted a fair exchange, both of which were compromised by her elite subject position—together with the benefits that she accrued from her research activities—ultimately tipped the balance of reciprocity in her favor, making what were once presented as “gifts” to now be understood by many as “thefts.”

5.4 The Anthropologist as Midwife and Undertaker: Real at the Birth and Death of Nations

In October of 1962, the maracatu nação community and the city of Recife at large witnessed the death of Maria Júlia do Nascimento (b. 1877)—more commonly known as

Dona Santa, renowned and widely respected Queen of Maracatu Elefante, founded in

1800—and with her death, the death of their oldest nação as well. At the same time,

Recife’s museological world acquired one of its greatest prizes, consisting of the entire collection of instruments, costumes, and other items belonging to the defunct nação. It appears that Dona Santa had entered into an agreement with the local municipal government years earlier; having decided she did not want to appoint or allow to be chosen a successor as president of Elefante, Dona Santa declared that she wanted the nação to cease operations after her death and for its entire collection to be donated to the soon-to- be-built Museum of Recife. The materials that comprise the collection have changed hands several times since the death of Dona Santa while remaining with the museological world; they are currently a part of the permanent exhibit of the Museum do Homem do Nordeste

(the Museum of Northeast Man—Muhne) and have been since its opening in 1979. The story of Maracatu Elefante “going to the museum” is remembered to this day within the

260 maracatu nação scene, where it is seen as both a kind of theft and a kind of death, and therefore as a cautionary tale (Kubrusly 2007, 20; Vasconcelos and Castro 2016). This so much so that, apparently, the late Mestre of Leão Coroado, Luiz de França, was determined to set fire to all the drums and costumes of his nação if he was unable to find a suitable successor, rather than have his nação go to the museum as well (Kubrusly 2007, 55).

The notion of museum displays representing a kind of “death” is not without precedent, nor is the notion that such displays, in a different sense, possess a kind of life.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) argues that part of the agency of ethnographic display lies in its capacity to usher—or even transform—sites of everyday life into museums. She elaborates on the ways in which museums and tourism have a shared history that goes beyond their mutual economic entanglement. While museums allow people to travel across space and time without ever leaving their city and present, tourism offers to bring tourists to “the world’s best open-air museum.” Both museums and tourism deal in virtuality, though their discourse emphasizes actuality. In so doing, they not only give “dead, dying, or obsolete” ways of life a second life as “heritage,” but are often active forces in the assumed “death” or “obsolescence” of those ways of life. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2015) further argues that UNESCO World Heritage and other similar initiatives participate in this process, designating certain sites as “heritage” (rendering them into displays) or certain practices as ‘intangible heritage” (rendering the people who engage in the practice into museums which exhibit displays/heritage).

Anthropologist John F. Collins (2015) brings home the “real-life” destructive consequences of the notion of intangible heritage as wielded by UNESCO for impoverished Afro-Brazilian residents of the newly “restored” historic Pelourinho

261 neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, capital of Bahia state in Brazil. As Collins recounts, with the granting of World Heritage status by UNESCO and the inauguration of the state’s multi-million dollar “restoration” project, impoverished residents of the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador—once the capital of colonial Brazil, and since the modernist movement of the 1920s, lauded as the cradle of Brazilian mestiçagem and thus Brazilian national identity—found themselves becoming “monuments” of the African contribution to Brazilian racial democracy, at the same time as the majority of this impoverished population were forcibly or coercively relocated to peripheral urban slums. Though not quite “death” (necessarily, usually), these forced relocations demonstrate the way that the safeguarding of "heritage” (ie., local popular culture, historical sites, and buildings) impedes and even demolishes the freely and fully lived lives of culture bearers, and ushers them into a kind of social death. However, like the Pelourinho residents in Collins’ ethnography, performers of maracatu nação are well aware and critical of the dynamics between academic researchers, the local anthropological museums, and popular culture; furthermore, a variety of actors in Recife, including members of the nações, both make use of at the same time as they push back against the “museumizing” gesture in a variety of ways.

Historical research on Dona Santa suggests that though triply marginalized (as a working-class Afro-Brazilian woman), she wielded her agency expertly to the benefit of her own local stature and that of her nação. In particular, Dona Santa was a skilled mediator between the maracatu nação community and Recife’s intellectual and bureaucratic elites

(Vasconcelos and Castro 2016). Some sources cited by historians Henrique de Vasconcelos and Eduardo Castro indicate that Dona Santa had promised the collection to the mayoral

262 government in exchange for the deed to a home in which she could live out the final years of her life. Apparently, she had an attorney who, on her behalf, created a four-person commission to ensure that Elefante’s collection of instruments and costumes ended up where she intended after her death. It is interesting to note that the original “museum” which housed Elefante’s collections was in fact the headquarters of the Movimento de

Cultura Popular (the Popular Culture Movement, or MCP—a leftist organization working within the field of culture), since the Museu Municipal was still under construction

(Vasconcelos and Castro 2016). After the military coup of 1964, the MCP was declared subversive, its buildings raided by military police, its employees fired, imprisoned, or exiled, and its books burned. During the months that followed, the far-right military government created new institutions for managing cultural life which took over the remaining collections of the MCP. Elefante’s collections had remained intact through this upheaval, and thus came under the administrations of the Instituto Joaquim Nabuco de

Pesquisas Sociais (IJNPS, now the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, and who oversee Muhne).

IJNPS promptly completed the collection by requesting the donation of the nação’s calungas by Dona Santa’s daughter, who reportedly wept at the ceremony of their donation

(Vasconcelos and Castro 2016). Therefore, while Dona Santa’s original decision to donate

Elefante’s collection was made in an era when state-directed cultural management was significantly left-leaning, and in which such a donation may have been understood as toward the greater social good, after her death the collection quickly came into the possession of a museological body that ultimately answered to the new far-right, repressive military regime, rendering it an agent of that regime regardless of the individual intentions and inclinations of its employees.

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Aside from these possible factors, Dona Santa may have also been concerned with preserving her own legacy (Kubrusly 2007, 17), challenging the tendency (quite common, especially in mid-twentieth-century Recife) to romanticize popular culture for its supposed collectivist, communal nature. In contrast, many performers of maracatu nação take individual pride in their accomplishments and want their names to be remembered.

Certainly, Dona Santa’s decision has had the net result of enshrining her near-hallowed place within maracatu nação history—Muhne’s permanent exhibit features an elaborate display of Elefante’s materials as part of that exhibit’s section on Afro-Brazilian culture.

No other Afro-Brazilian cultural practice is as well represented in the museum except for the religion Xangô, and the two exhibits flow into one another to underscore the relationship between the two practices. Muhne presents maracatu nação and Elefante in a near one-to-one equation, with only one—albeit significant—item from another nação, the calunga Dona Joventina of Estrela Brilhante (to be discussed further below). Within the display, which creates an approximation of a real-life cortejo by arranging the items in open air, but with a mannequin wearing one of Dona Santa’s gowns placed at the front of the ensemble, arms raised with sword in hand as if leading her drummers into battle, rather than in the rear of the parade where the royal court is normally located. The resulting effect places a huge emphasis on the figure of Dona Santa, and together with the numerous print features and tributes published on the Queen during her lifetime and after her death, help memorialize her and her nação as central icons of maracatu nação history. Individual and social motivations aside, it is still difficult to say why the matriarch would choose to cease the activities of such a prestigious nação in the first place. However, it seems clear that the

264 decision was deliberate and well-considered, typical of the way in which Dona Santa leveraged the complex cross-class social relations of mid-twentieth century Recife.

Dona Santa’s powerful agency notwithstanding, the enduring significance of

Elefante’s final resting place in the museum—for older and younger generations of maracatuzeiros alike— has been understood as both a theft and a death. Nações are often but not always passed down within bloodlines, are not definitionally attached to a physical location such as a neighbourhood, and performers transit between them with frequency

(Sandroni 2007). For these reasons, establishing continuity between generations of performers working under the name of the same nação —especially when there are significant temporal pauses between instantiations—must be accomplished via discourse and practice if the nação wants to lay claim to the prestige of that name and its distant date of foundation. Such continuity is complicated if the possessions of a previous generation of a nação were ushered into the care of a museum or university archive who then refuse to return them—as occurred in the 1980s when one of Dona Santa’s former acolytes, Dona

Madalena, briefly resuscitated the Elefante name (Kubrusly 2007, 73–74). The “restored” nação, unable to make use of materials now under the ownership of IJNPS, had to remake their own instruments, costumes, and calungas—and some of these newly-made materials, such as the queen’s crown and sword, also ended up in the possession of the museum when the second Maracatu Elefante likewise ceased activities (Leal 2002). The same struggle occurred when the present-day instantiation of Porto Rico sought materials donated to the

Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco after the death of Eudes Chagas, as will be discussed further below (Kubrusly 2007, 118). For this reason, the seizure of objects of material culture by official representatives of Recife’s elite intellectual institutions are

265 often seen not only as a death but as a kind of theft, wherein the possession of a nação’s patrimony by an elite institution robs future generations of the full ability to lay claim to and continue that nação’s legacy.

I recount the story of Elefante’s final resting place in the museum to underscore the challenges that make the genealogical continuity of the nações so difficult to maintain and therefore such a meaningful and important point of prestige. Members and leaders of nações make use of the intellectual infrastructure in which they are embedded to manage this genealogy, often enjoining the assistance of key mediators from among the local intellectual elite, and in so doing, acting as mediators themselves. Katarina Real acted as just such a mediator, present and involved (though not always central), at not only the

“deaths” of nações such as Elefante and Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande, but at their

“births” as well, as described below regarding Real’s involvement in the resuscitating of

Porto Rico by Eudes Chagas. In the two examples to follow (that of Porto Rico and Estrela

Brilhante), just as in the many examples given above (it should be noted that Real assisted in the transfer of Elefante’s collections to the MCP and in the design of their original display as well, though I was not able to locate more information on this), Real’s imprint can be felt in decisions made by maracatu nação leaders, and her choices and actions in her field of research can be seen to shape subsequent events. Furthermore, once Real herself came into possession of the calunga of the then-defunct Estrela Brilhante, she became central to its history, caring for the sacred doll for decades in her home in the United States, and eventually making the decision to repatriate the calunga by donating it to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste in 1996.

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5.5 Real and Resgate: “The anthropologist Katarina Real requires the return of Porto Rico do Oriente!”

The notion of resgate—meaning in this context something like “cultural rescue”— became a driving force in Brazilian cultural politics during the 1960s. The social upheaval, repression, and conflict caused by the military dictatorship caused many to believe—

Katarina Real included—that many cultural practices of the popular classes, such as maracatu nação, were under threat of disappearing. Though certainly somewhat sensationalized (perhaps to justify the work of the folklorist), in the 1960s the notion that maracatu nação might “go extinct” was not difficult to argue. Of the few nações remaining, both Elefante and Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande had ceased to parade at carnaval and had officially shut down activities. Nonetheless, while Real’s preoccupation over the fate of maracatu nação might have had some considerable justification, what I find more interesting—and, at times problematic—from a historical perspective is the interventions that she made in this process. While her efforts to help Eudes Chagas found a new nação contributed to an important turning point in the future prospects of the practice, she was also in a position to wield considerable influence over the course that future would take.

As quoted above, the Brazilian folklorist Roberto Benjamin—a contemporary of

Real— lauded the US anthropologist because she “resgatou (“rescued”) diverse carnaval societies” (Benjamin 2007) among other things. The Portuguese verb resgatar is often employed to refer to this kind of cultural preservation and revival work. The term has roots in the early stages of the Portuguese slave trade, when resgatar was used to refer to the obtaining of slaves who were captives from “just” and “holy” wars, and were thought to be “rescued” from “barbarity,” “heathenism,” and the imagined hardships of life in Africa

267 through enslavement, disturbingly distorted into an act of benevolence (Newitt 2010, 23).

The word thus has carried with it at various points a logic in which gestures of oppression are framed as gestures of aid. Though I do not mean to suggest that the contemporary usage of the word carries exactly the same connotation or that this understanding was present in the minds of the twentieth-century folklorists who first adopted it—indeed, this history of the word is one of which most people nowadays are unaware—the roots of the word resgate underscore some of the problematic dynamics at play in cultural preservation and restoration projects.

In the 1960s, notions of “resgate” marked a new phase in the dynamics of engagement of the intellectual elite with popular culture. Whereas the artist-folklorists discussed in the previous chapter framed their work as an act of stylization, without pretensions to be reproducing an “authentic” manifestation of maracatu nação (though many pretensions to be “elevating” it), the intention behind resgate places much more emphasis on maintaining the “life” of the practice in question. Daniel Sharp (2014, xii– xiii, 128–129) discusses the problematically patronizing and ultimately stultifying dynamics of resgate in Recife’s New Music scene of the 1990s and early 2000s, and chronicles the ways in which popular discourse grew increasingly critical of the idea at the same time as many continued invested in the notion. During the time that Chagas and Real were engaged in the founding of the present instantiation of Porto Rico, such critiques were much less common—though not completely absent—with folklorists’ interventions being generally viewed in a much more positive light. However, though troublesome, many of the interventions undertaken by Real would later provide fuel for an emerging discourse that aims to place greater agency in the hands of the maracatuzeiros and create more

268 equitable relationships between performers of popular culture and local and foreign intellectual elites.

As can be seen in Real’s speech discussed earlier in this chapter, she consciously rejected assuming a patronizing attitude towards the cultural practices she studied, though her understanding of patronization was narrowly defined as explicitly characterizing popular culture as “cute” or “primitive,” and did not include her own propensity for making interventions in local popular culture. Real was likewise cognizant of the ways in which her actions in the field would generate a series of actions and reactions—such as when she attempted to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Mestre of Leão Coroado, Luiz de França, by telling him she intended to present him with an award as well—but did not question the underlying assumption that Recife’s nações required such interventions. Perhaps for this reason, Real is able to claim that Eudes Chagas “never needed an upper class patron or sought the patronage of a politician” (Real 2001, 132), seemingly oblivious to her own role as just such an elite patron. With respect to her attempt to help Chagas found a new nação,

Real claims to have taken her cue from Bahian intellectual Edison Carneiro, who argued that the insertion of elite intellectuals into the field of popular culture could provoke the

“rapid liquidation” of its cultural riches, and that for that reason the folklorist had to exercise caution (Real 2001, 43). Likewise, Real cites Carneiro’s warning that when folklorists intervene to restore a dying practice, they “should never forget that this practice belongs to the people and must be maintained, from then on, through their own initiative”

(Real 2001, 43), with the folklorist’s role being one of service rather than leadership. By

Real’s account, her actions in the field were guided by certain principles meant to equalize or at least shift the power dynamics at play.

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Despite her caveats, the tone of Real’s second book, Eudes, Rei do Maracatu

(2001), is so insistently cheerful that it seems to suggest that she was denying (or in denial of) social tensions present in her field relationships and contradictions in her own thinking and movements. This is not to say that her field relationships were not amicable, nor that the types of interventions she engaged in might not have been seen as beneficial by performers of maracatu nação—indeed, the resgate of Porto Rico was first and foremost

Eudes’ Chagas’ initiative—but to rather point out that amicable relationships and welcomed interventions are never free of social tensions and power differentials. It is the ambiguity of these field relationships that interests me in reviewing Real’s research output and activities.

In her book, Real characterized her relationship towards Chagas as one of great affection, expressed in emotionally superlative terms. After losing touch during a stay of several years in the United States with no visits to Recife, Real described feeling

“felicíssima” (very happy, even ecstatic—a superlative she employed with frequency) to learn that he was still alive and well via a magazine article she read on a flight from Belem to Recife (Real 2001, 125). She often adopted an attitude of deferential reverence, perhaps intended as a counter balance to their extreme class disparity, referring to Chagas as “meu

Rei Eudes” (my King Eudes) (Real 2001, 125) and herself as his “goddaughter.” Real describes being impressed by Chagas’s “capacity to live in two different worlds [...] the mystical world of his African sect and the modern world of the 20th century,” where he

“lived in complete harmony with the urban environment of the city, always curious about the novelties of modern life and scientific technology” (Real 2001, 132–133). Real’s praise for Chagas' ability to negotiate disparate social fields is predicated, of course, on the

270 primitivizing assumption that this trait was unusual (it is in fact ubiquitous among marginalized people), and that the world of Afro-Brazilian religion existed outside of

“modernity.” At the opening of her book, Real describes the first time she saw Chagas perform at carnaval, with the club known as Clube das Pás:

...a giant black man entered the scene, naked from the waist upwards, with red satin pants and flaunting a golden crown on his head. He wore an enormous cloak with a black velvet train of some five meters in length onto which were embroidered, in silver sequins, the words ‘King of Xangô’. Four boys dressed as pages appeared carrying a carpet, of red velvet, who began to unroll it on the platform in front of the ‘King.’ He advanced masterfully to the end of the carpet, rotated and began to return, when there emerged a white palanquin encrusted with jewels and carried by four ‘slaves.’ The lid of the palanquin opened up and a radiant odalisque descended to the platform, a beautiful young woman, the color of milk, wearing a white bikini covered in glitter on her ivory-white, svelte body, and a diadem of gems atop her head of long black hair. Barefoot, the young girl advanced with a sensual gait along the length of the carpet until she arrived in front of the ‘King.’ This same ‘King’ smoothly took her hand, and both, the Black King and the lily-white odalisque, walked slowly back to the palanquin and she entered it again, aided by one of the ‘slaves.' During the entirety of this magical, moving scene, characterized by a certain eroticism, there was a quasi-total silence on the part of the public, as if they were hypnotized, but, when the hatch of the palanquin closed and the glorious parade of Clube das Pás continued its march down the avenue, there was a crash of applause that made the very grandstands tremble. It was a night of dreams! (Real 2001, 27).

Real seems to be taken by a certain exoticist fascination with Chagas, his role as King (a role he assumed in other carnaval organizations before the founding of Porto Rico), and his eroticized performance with the young, white, bikini-clad ‘odalisque.’ Given her own tendency to refer to Chagas as “my King,” it seems safe to suggest that Real harbored a special preoccupation with the dynamics of the kind of cross-racial and cross-gender field relationship that she would develop with Chagas.

Real became involved in the founding of Porto Rico via a friend named João

Santiago dos Reis, a public functionary working for the Secretary of Education with the municipal government (2001, 15–29). According to Real’s narrative, Santiago telephoned

Real to invite her to collaborate with Eudes Chagas, who was planning to transform his

271 carnaval troupe Rei dos Ciganos, often described as a “covert maracatu” founded during the era of police repression of the nações in the 1930s, into a maracatu nação. Real agreed to assist, and over the coming weeks Chagas came to visit Real frequently to discuss the process of founding the new nação (2001, 43–52). Referencing her inspiration in the writings of Edison Carneiro mentioned above, Real offered two ball gowns that she no longer wanted to the fledgling nação, which they sold to purchase new fabric to make matching costumes. Real also showed Chagas a published collection of paintings by Carlos

Julião entitled Riscos Illuminados, from which he got the idea to create a flag rather than the traditional standard for his nação, explaining that “we are a ‘nation,’ the Nation Porto

Rico do Oriente” (Real 2001, 46, italics in original). In this example as in the one mentioned above, in which Chagas based the model ship “Santa Maria” on photos of the

USS Forrest Royal that Real had shown him, Real’s passive role as a kind of “consultant” in the process of founding Porto Rico was still one from which she wielded considerable influence over the shape of the new nação’s aesthetics and practice, even if these decisions were ultimately under the control of Chagas himself.

Real’s involvement in this project of resgate also had social repercussions in the maracatu nação scene at large. It seems that Real was well aware of this and took pre- emptive action in order to curb possible negative outcomes of her proximity to the new nação. Real recounts that, feeling concerned that her position in the Pernambucan Folklore

Commission would cause jealousy, rivalry, or tension between the new Porto Rico and the other nações, she invited leaders from the maracatu nação community—Seu Veludinho, an almost one-hundred-year-old batuqueiro who had participated in several nações over the year; Luiz de França, the Mestre of Leão Coroado; and Eudes Chagas himself—to

272 meet in order to convince them to cooperate with one another (Real 2001, 53–64). At the meeting in her downtown apartment, when she explained her intentions for gathering the group together, she recalls that they expressed surprise that she thought such a discussion necessary. Chagas explained that they were all “brothers of the sect” and that it was

“impossible” that they could compete with one another, that indeed, Seu Veludinho had already made efforts to assist Chagas in the founding of the new nação by helping train the batuqueiros and offering guidance in the construction of their calunga. Luiz de França, reportedly a bit more hesitant, also offered to help train the drummers, give a class on the construction and maintenance of the drums, and donate a few of their old instruments to the nascent nação. Despite Real’s intervention in her own intervention, however, rivalry did ensue, for example as described above when Luiz de França withdrew Leão Coroado from the concursos when Porto Rico were given first prize in their debut year.

Real’s most active intervention connected to the founding of Porto Rico was her effort to re-institute the crowning ceremonies that were once conducted by Catholic priests for newly elected black Kings and Queens of the nações. These ceremonies had reportedly disappeared over the decades since the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil. Real claims to have been inspired by reading about the predecessors of such ceremonies in Henry Koster’s

1816 Travels in Brazil, and asked herself, “... is it not true that the aims of the Pernambucan

Folklore Commission include more than the mere preservation and documentation of popular traditions, but, also, the restoration of the same in cases where it would be possible?” (2001, 67, italics in original).

As the carnaval of 1968 approached, Real resolved to make this dream a reality, speaking with the priest of the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosario, the Archbishop (who

273 was quite favorable towards the idea), and even attempting to speak with members of the council that oversaw the Bishop—though at each turn she was ultimately told that the

Catholic Church could not support such a ceremony (Real 2001, 65–76). Finally accepting that she would likely be unable to gain permission for a Church crowning and recognizing that such a thing may even compromise the Archbishop’s or Chagas’ relationship with their respective constituents, Real at last desisted in her efforts. Growing depressed over the failure of her project, Real went to finally tell Chagas of her plans for the first time. Real recalls meeting Chagas at his terreiro, where she sat and explained her failed attempts to find a priest who would be willing to crown the new nação’s King, growing emotional and embarrassed, even shedding a few “hot tears” over the issue. Apparently, in response,

Chagas began singing a hymn for Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, “smiling radiantly.” Pausing, Real wrote that Chagas’ then told her, “Do not cry, Dona Katarina.

You did everything that you could, and the issue did not work out. Sometimes, things don’t go the way we want. I did not need a coronation like this, but I believe that there has to be an acceptable solution one way or another” (2001, 75).

The phrase “I did not need a coronation like this” is such a strange one that despite the narrative being written from Real’s memory, and thus subject to distortions, it seems highly likely that Chagas did indeed say something along these lines. Real does not comment further, but this and other elements of her narrative suggest that Chagas’s feelings towards the crowning were ambivalent. Though there were many compelling reasons to ultimately embrace Real’s unsolicited attempt to resurrect the crowning ceremonies—such a newsworthy public ceremony would bring considerable prestige to a new nação—he also seems, by Real’s own account, to have maintained a boundary between a Catholic

274 coronation in the name of tradition, and the practice’s present-day grounding in Afro-

Brazilian religion. 6

Though Real failed to convince the mainstream Catholic Church to perform a crowning ceremony for Chagas, her vision nonetheless wound up coming to fruition through the assistance of her friend João Santiago, the local public functionary who had originally introduced her to Chagas (2001, 77–88). Santiago had found a Bishop in the

Brazilian Catholic Church (a national variant of liberal Catholicism founded by Roman

Catholic dissidents) who was willing to perform the ceremony and had organized the entire crowning event for the coming week.

Real arrived at the Pátio do Terço for the ceremony, expecting something small and simple. Instead, she found a large crowd that filled the square, including many of the various types of carnaval agremiações of Recife, there to celebrate the occasion, including the nações Leão Coroado and Indiano in full costume. There was also a reporter and a photographer from the Jornal do Commércio, a local newspaper, there to document the event. The priests arrived and went to change into their ritual vestments, and while they did so the King and Queen of Leão Coroado arrived as well, hoping to also be crowned together with Eudes Chagas and Mera of Porto Rico (2001, 84). Soon thereafter the ceremony began:

Don Isaac, with his miter and the various other vestments of a Bishop, and Father Ciciliano appeared, and we all grouped around the table. Inside the hall there was an air of reverence, of profound religiosidade, almost a mysticism, while the Bishop said the ‘Our Father.’ Afterwards, he raised a small bowl of Holy Water from the table and asked that the Kings and Queens kneel. When he began to sprinkle droplets of Holy Water on the crowns of the Kings of Leão Coroado and Dona Mera, I noticed that Eudes was still standing. The Bishop approached him, and I remained speechless to

6 At the First National Congress of Maracatu Nação, held in Recife in November of 2019, I attended discussions in which some of the more politicized members of the maracatu nação scene expressed a similar sentiment to that of Chagas above, saying of the more recent cessation of the coronations, “We don’t need that anymore.”

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observe that Eudes was shaking his head ‘no.’ He looked at me with a wise smile and said to me in a low voice, ‘I was already baptized!’. At that moment, I remembered the words Eudes spoke at our first meeting, when he told me about the ritual of the amassi at the headquarters of Maracatu Elefante, with Dona Santa informing him, ‘It is a baptism.’ It seemed extraordinary to me that his Afro-Brazilian religion, Nagô, offered him the confidence to turn down the benediction of the Catholic Church, but I accepted and understood his perspective, fascinated (Real 2001, 84–85).

It appears that not only Chagas and Mera but the King and Queen of Leão Coroado all desired to participate in the crowning ceremony. Furthermore, not only the members of

Porto Rico, Leão Coroado, and Maracatu Indiano showed up to celebrate the event, but indeed many from Recife’s other carnaval organizations, engaging in myriad street festivities and parades after the coronation to commemorate the occasion. Nonetheless, it appears that Chagas placed boundaries around the “(re)Catholicization” of African royal courts in Brazil, refusing a Catholic baptism on the grounds that he had already been

‘baptized’ by Dona Santa. The revival of the coronation ceremony was the result of the initiative and agency of Real and her friend João Santiago, and Chagas’ ambivalence suggests the restoration of the practice was not something he or other members of the maracatu nação community were likely to seek out on their own. In this much less passive fashion, Real exerted a significant influence over the course of maracatu nação history, reviving a ritual that would subsequently last for several decades.

More importantly, this intervention was not to restore some tangential point of historical anthropological purism but cut to the core of cultural tensions regarding Brazilian racial identity and religion. While Real appears to grasp the significance of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Xangô and Jurema for black performers of maracatu nação, she also went to considerable lengths to restore some of its Catholic heritage—a move that many in Brazil would be inclined to read as an act of religious and cultural imperialism. And while Real’s

276 revival of the coronations did not endure into the present day,7 the restoration of the ritual produced and/or reinforced certain publicly held notions of maracatu nação’s religious identity and history as fundamentally syncretic. While it is not untrue to assert that maracatu nação is the product of the meeting of diverse cultural practices and cosmologies on a global scale (as has been demonstrated), the discursive emphasis on the notion of

“syncretism”—what Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier terms an “epistemology of transculturation,” in which the hybridity of one practice is sensationalized over and above the inevitable hybridity of all others (Ochoa Gautier 2006)—can only work in support of the status quo of prevailing notions of mestiçagem and racial democracy. This is an especially marked move given that most other scholars of maracatu nação, both before and after, have tended to work under an “epistemology of purification,” emphasizing the practice’s “African purity,” sometimes claiming it even as the “purest” example of African culture in Brazil.

5.6 Real’s Possession, or Dona Joventina as Transnational Actor?

DONA JOVENTINA Wood, fabric, natural hair, 1910 Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante, Recife, Pernambuco

The calunga Dona Joventina is a spiritual entity, worshipped by the members of the Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante of Recife, founded in 1906, by Cosme Damião Tavares, born in Igarassu, in the second half of the XIX century. In 1966, the Maracatu disbanded and, according to the North American anthropologist Katarina Real, the queen of the Maracatu told her that, during a religious ceremony, a spiritual entity ordered her to deliver Dona Joventina into her care. In 1996, Katarina Real donated Dona Joventina to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, as an act of restitution of the cultural patrimony of the city of Recife. (Placard next to the

7 The president of the Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco (AMANPE) and of the Maracatu Nação Aurora Africana, Fábio Sotero, informed me that one nação, called Xangô Alafin, had recently succeeded in conducting a coronation with the collaboration of the Catholic Church. Previous to that, the last African royal to be crowned was Queen Elda of Porto Rico (Sotero 2019) in 1980 (website of Nação do Maracatu Porto Rico, https://nacaoportorico.maracatu.org.br/a-corte-real/).

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display case of the calunga Dona Joventina, in the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Recife).

If Katarina Real assisted at the birth—or rebirth—of nações, she was also present at their deaths and involved in the passing of their material patrimony over to its institutionalized inheritors, a sort of “folkloric” undertaker, such as with the passage of the collection of Maracatu Elefante to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste recounted above.

More famously vis-a-vis Real’s involvement, the US anthropologist acted as the guardian of a nação’s most prized possession—the calunga Dona Joventina—for thirty years, after the nação Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande ceased operations in the mid-1960s.

According to Real, the Queen and president of Estrela Brilhante, Dona Assunção, was visited by a spirit in a Jurema ritual, who informed her that she “no longer needed to put the nação out on the street; that she could sell all the belongings of the Nação”—except for Dona Joventina, which should “be given as a present to Katarina” (Real 1996a). When

Real returned to the United States in 1968, she brought the sacred doll with her, and Dona

Joventina remained in Real’s home in Santa Fé until Real returned her to Recife and donated her to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste in 1996. Fantastically, during the donation ceremony—which included local politicians, intellectual elites, and members of the nações—Real chose to give her speech not as herself but as Dona Joventina, in whose voice she narrated the calunga’s life story in minute detail, including her time in the United

States. Real’s version of events and the museum’s claim to the doll were and are both highly contested—partly because there are two nações in two different cities with the name of Estrela Brilhante that both claim ownership of the calunga, but also due to misgivings about the appropriateness of Afro-Pernambucan sacred objects being given over to the care of foreign white US anthropologists and state institutions. The remainder of this chapter

278 will explore the conflicting narratives of Dona Joventina’s travels, examining how what once may have been a gift can become an appropriation, and the ways in which the agency of objects—in this case both museum displays as theorized by Barbara Kirshenblatt-

Gimblett (1998) and that of the sacred calunga doll—have been employed to manage the ways in which the transnational travels of Dona Joventina are remembered and understood.

A calunga is a sacred doll, usually made of wood, that is carried and danced with by a dama de paço in a maracatu nação retinue. While most calungas are gendered female, there are a few male calungas, and all are referred to with the honorific Dona or Dom followed by their name. A calunga is particular to a nação, which may have more than one, but never many, and is central to a maracatu nação procession, on par with the importance of the royal couple. Afonso Aguiar, the late Mestre of the nação Maracatu Leão

Coroado, describes the guidelines outlined to him by his predecessor Luiz da França for the construction of a calunga: “A calunga of Maracatu has to be of wood. And it has to be whole, a complete figure” (Afonso Aguiar cited in Câmara 2017, 56–57), referring to the fact that calungas are made to be anatomically accurate humans underneath their clothing.

With dark-painted skin but “Caucasian”-appearing facial features and European dress, the calungas of maracatu nação resemble in many ways local Catholic statuary of black saints, many of which are carried in Catholic procession in a similar way. However, members of the nações hold the calunga and its dance to be an African tradition—the word is indeed of Bantu origin—and the sacred dolls (or bonecas, as they are often also referred to in

Portuguese) are believed to house the patron ancestral spirits of the nação. As such, a calunga is not only an object but understood as a being, and of high spiritual value and

279 importance. The mere fact alone of Dona Joventina having been in the possession of

Katarina Real is enough to generate considerable controversy and resentment.

Real’s narrative of the event frames her acquisition of Dona Joventina as a gift, and one of critical importance given the precarious condition of popular culture and the country during the late 1960s. Mostly due to the onset of the repressive right-wing military dictatorship in 1964, Real saw popular culture as under threat of disappearance (Kubrusly

2007, 87, 96), both because of its performers’ status as working-class Afro-Brazilians and because the valorization of and investment in popular culture was seen as a subversively

Marxist project. It is true, too, that at the time, several of Recife’s few nações were closing operations, mostly famously Maracatu Elefante a few years prior. And, following the example of the famous nação of Dona Santa, when it became no longer viable for Estrela

Brilhante do Campo Grande to conduct their carnaval parades, Dona Assunção likewise sought to deliver the nação’s most precious item—the calunga Dona Joventina—into the care of a representative of the intellectual elite. At least, this is the narrative according to

Real, though as will be addressed below, it is a contested one.

Brazilian anthropologist Clarisse Quintanilha Kubrusly (2007, 10) has claimed that those carnaval organizations, including the nações, that accept funding and aid from the municipal government, are obligated to participate in the official parades of the Federação

Carnavalesca Pernambucana under penalty of having their materials seized and donated to an “organ of historical preservation” should they fail to parade for three years consecutively—noting later in her text that this is “at least what is heard in the maracatus de baque solto and virado” (Kubrusly 2007, 79), explaining that she was unable to confirm the rumor. Indeed, it seems rather that the donation of the Elefante collection, at least, was

280 done voluntarily and likely with an eye to the preservation of a great nação’s legacy. Either way, the museum has come to be seen as a kind of maracatu nação graveyard, and the story of the transfer of the Elefante collection from the care of a left-leaning organization to one ultimately governed by the right-wing regime, and all the struggles in gaining access to previously donated patrimony faced by those attempting to bring back old nações, are enough to make the future prospects of a nação’s collection a matter of some concern.

Perhaps this is why Dona Assunção—or rather, her spiritual guide, the Mestre

Cangarussu—chose to give the calunga to Real. Unlike a museum or a university, which might refuse, with institutional backing, to return the calunga should the nação ever managed to reorganize, it may have been wagered that Real, as an individual rather than an institution (and one with a vested interest in the restoration of carnaval traditions) might be more easily persuaded to give the doll back to a future instantiation of the nação.

Similarly, as a private, individual recipient of this great gift, Real might have been thought to be more likely to perform some of the ritual acts—such as “feeding” the calunga with offerings—that maintain the doll’s sacred status, duties Real reportedly did in fact perform, if imperfectly. Speculation aside, the voluntary (if not exactly chosen) donation of a nação’s collections and calungas to the intellectual elite and its institutions was a common practice, occurring not only with the original Elefante and Estrela Brilhante, but with the future Porto Rico after the death of Eudes Chagas and the second 1980s reincarnation of

Maracatu Elefante as well (Kubrusly 2007).

According to Real, “[t]he majority of the people of the ‘nações’ know” (Real 2001,

63) that when Dona Assunção came to give her the calunga, Assunção specified that

Mestre Cangarussu had said the doll would have to be ‘given to Dona Katarina’ and that

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Dona Assunção could not ask for any payment for the beautiful gift” (Real 2001, 63).

Reportedly, Real hesitated to accept such a priceless item (Sandroni 2007, 1), but in the end accepted provided that Dona Assunção allowed Real to pay for the high school education of Lenira, the dama do paço that normally danced with the calunga (Kubrusly

2007, 94). For a few years the calunga resided in Real’s apartment in Recife, known as the

“Torre do Frevo” and considered a sort of “museum” of popular culture due to the vast collection of material culture Real had assembled during the course of her fieldwork

(Kubrusly 2007, 48–59). During these years, Real brought Dona Joventina out into public two times: once at her acceptance of the title of “Citizen of Recife” in 1967, where the dama do paço Lenira danced with her calunga once again; and again in 1968, at the launch of Real’s first book at the Teatro Popular do Nordeste (Real 1996a). In 1968, citing the hardening of the military dictatorship at this time, Real left for the United States, taking

Dona Joventina with her where she would remain for thirty years. During most of her time in the United States, Dona Joventina remained in Real’s home in Santa Fé, New Mexico, with one departure for exhibition at a Museum in San Diego, California. In the 1990s, with the reopening of Brazil, Real returned to Recife again and found that popular culture and maracatu nação were thriving. It was this discovery that impelled Real to return the calunga to Recife, by donating Dona Joventina to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste.

Kubrusly (2007) notes that the “official” narrative offered by Real is contested by members of both Estrela Brilhante do Recife and Estrela Brilhante do Igarassu (from the nearby town of Igarassu). Estrela Brilhante do Recife was founded as a “resumption” of

Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande; as we have seen, the revival of formerly defunct nações is a common practice in the world of maracatu nação, and usually such claims to

282 continuity are honored even when the participants, neighborhood, and other factors are different from the original group (Sandroni 2007). According to Kubrusly, the Queen of

Estrela Brilhante do Recife, Dona Marivalda, feels that her nação is the direct continuation of Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande and that for this reason Real should have returned the calunga to her. On the other hand, Kubrusly reports that the matriarch of Estrela

Brilhante do Igarassu, Dona Olga, believes that Dona Joventina was either stolen from her nação by members of the Campo Grande group, or that there was never a Campo Grande nação and that the entire story was fabricated by Real who in fact stole the calunga from

Igarassu. For her part, when Real sought to return Dona Joventina to her natal territory, the

US anthropologist did not recognize in either of the present-day Estrela Brilhantes the

Campo Grande group she had researched and chose to donate the calunga to the Museu do

Homem do Nordeste instead.

The shaky ethics of Real’s appropriation of Dona Joventina, and the removal of the calunga to the United States, are not the focus of my analysis here, as interesting a topic for debate as they may be. Rather, I am concerned with the ways in which Real once again intervened in maracatu nação’s history in ways that have had a lasting impact within the scene beyond the individual grievances of the members of the two Estrela Brilhantes.

Indeed, Real did not attempt to escape controversy by making her donation of the calunga a quiet affair. Rather, in a momentous ceremony, Real chose to deliver a speech that allowed her to control the narrative of her acquisition of the calunga (Kubrusly 2007, 95–

96), offering a pre-emptive defense of her motives and authenticating her possession of the calunga by making the speech in the voice of Dona Joventina. It is the question of the performatics of Real’s possession of the doll—inserting her own subjectivity into a body

283 that would normally hold the subjectivity of an ancestral spirit akin to a minor deity and causing her to “speak” through a semi-metaphorical act of ventriloquism—that is the topic for analysis of this final section.

On March 5th,1996, at the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, after greeting “the authorities” (Real 1996a), the leaders of local carnaval groups, representatives of the

Federação Caravalêsca Pernambucana, the Queens and damas de paço of Estrela Brilhante,

Elefante, Porto Rico, and Encanto do Pina and Mestre Luiz de França of Maracatu Leão

Coroado, the batuqueiros, and indeed the calungas there present, Real announced that in order to “combat any nervousness” on her part, she was going to invite Dona Joventina to speak since the calunga was “very accustomed to facing the great public” without fear.

With that, Real conducted the rest of her speech as Dona Joventina, telling the audience that “I was ‘born’, or if you prefer, was carved out of fine wood” by an unknown craftsman some time shortly before 1910. Joventina-Real continued:

I have articulated arms, and I can put them in any position—I am a complete woman with very pretty breasts and a few other little things...!! For many years, Katarina thought that I was pregnant because I have a slight belly, but when Dona Regina, here at the Museum, examined me naked, without my gala clothing, recently she though not – she guessed that my little tummy was typical of an African woman, strong and well nourished.

Joventina-Real continued to describe the way she was mounted on her stand, what it was made of, and the style, materials, and state of her clothing. Making links to the material culture of the black vendor-women associated with the Black Catholic Brotherhoods of

Our Lady of the Rosary, Joventina-Real also described the way that she danced “in the hands” of many damas de paço during carnaval.

Joventina-Real then turned to the circumstances in which she “met” the US academic, saying, “it was only in 1961 that I came to know the anthropologist Katarina

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Real when she appeared at the headquarters of the Nação Estrela Brilhante, located at that time in the neighborhood of Campo Grande, in order to interview Dona Assunção,” then president of the nação. Joventina-Real also described the girl who would wind up being the final dama de paço to dance with her—and who incidentally was present for the speech—Lenira, “an extraordinary dama de paço, marvelous!” adding that “I was always very happy dancing and spinning with her.” Joventina-Real goes on to describe Katarina

Real at greater length:

Whenever Katarina came to the headquarters to converse with Dona Assunção, she asked Lenira to take me out of the room where I normally resided hidden in the depths of the house and that Katarina never came to know. Katarina would then ask Lenira to dance with me because she found me very beautiful and mysterious, and I began to like this stranger with such a strange accent.

Sure to emphasize that Dona Joventina felt warmly towards the US anthropologist, the speech also emphasized the playful, positive relationship between Real, Lenira, and the calunga.

Joventina-Real moved on to speak of the difficulties—social and economic—that were faced by Estrela Brilhante and maracatu nação generally in the 1960s, sure to note that though she “no longer saw Katarina,” she nonetheless “knew that she fought hard to prevent Estrela Brilhante from shutting down.” Nonetheless, the calunga recounted that the nação paraded for the last time in the carnaval of 1964. Joventina-Real then explains that one day in 1966, “Dona Assunção rolled me in a towel and brought me to Katarina’s apartment.” The calunga outlines the same story told by Real in her book, saying that

“during a Spiritist session, in her house, a Mestre descended to advise that Dona Assunção no longer needed to put the maracatu on the street; that she could sell all the instruments, costumes, and other property of the Nação with the exception of me – the Calunga Dona

Joventina – and that I had to be given as a present to Katarina” (underline in the original).

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Joventina-Real, like Real cited above, stated that “everyone already knows” the rest. Real accepted the calunga, which she kept in her home in Recife, and in lieu of payment, she and her husband paid the costs for Lenira, the teenaged dama de paço, to attend a quality high school.

Joventina-Real recounted that when the calunga was in the US anthropologist’s possession, Real “wanted me to be very elegant, in a kind of ‘luxury’ that I well deserved.”

Joventina-Real describes how Real took apart one of her own dresses to make the gown the calunga currently was wearing, as well as having a velvet and ermine cape made for her. Real remade Dona Joventina’s tattered wig and gave her “toledo earrings from Spain” and other jewelry. Joventina-Real also noted that Real had made the crown she was wearing out of a hairpin brought from the US— “which is admirable because she is not very skilled with her hands.” The US anthropologist also commissioned a carpenter to make Dona

Joventina a scepter of wood with a small animal carved in ivory. Joventina-Real told the audience of the few times she had appeared in public since her transfer into Real’s possession: at two local events in 1967 and 68, and a third “in the exposition of the Katarina

Real Collection of Northeastern Popular Art at a museum of great renown in San Diego of

California, where I was placed in the entrance of the exposition with open arms offering a welcome to the visitors from various countries of the world.” Between her US hairpin crown, Spanish earrings, and residence in a prestigious California museum, Dona Joventina had acquired a worldliness beyond many of the others in attendance, through the interventions of Real.

Joventina-Real then returned to the subject of the difficult situation of maracatu nação in the late 1960s. With the death of Dona Santa and the closing of both Maracatu

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Elefante and Estrela Brilhante do Recife in the years prior, the few nações still in operation were in what Joventina-Real described as a “precarious condition, threatened with disappearance.” Joventina-Real explains that Real, “profoundly preoccupied with the situation,” collaborated with João Santiago and Eudes Chagas to found/revive Porto Rico.

As great a boon as this new nação would prove to be for the local maracatu nação scene in Recife, with the intensification of the military dictatorship, the FCP found itself “in the hands of the ‘top-hats’ who took little interest in the problems of the carnivalesque people,” declaring that there was an “alarming lack of interest in Pernambucan folklore and in the preservation of our regional traditions,” leading to the near total dismantling of the

Movimento de Cultura Popular and “so many good Brazilian friends imprisoned, raided and even exiled.” Joventina-Real stressed that “with a heavy heart, Katarina and I left

Brazil at the end of ’68,” and that Dona Joventina went to live in “that country called the

United States, where no one knows what a maracatu is.” Here, Joventina-Real reports,

“Katarina and I decided that I would stay there waiting for the situation to improve for the popular traditions and for the carnivalesque people.” Joventina-Real told how it was only when Real could visit Brazil again after the return to democracy in 1989, that the US anthropologist was able to ascertain that popular culture and Pernambucan carnaval, including maracatu nação, were now thriving. To be exact, it was “last year, in the carnaval of ’95, that Katarina was so excited by the resurgence, restoration and renovation of the many Pernambucan folkloric traditions” that she told Dona Joventina that it was time for her to return “to her Pernambucan people in order to pay homage and thank all those people who are parading in the dozens of maracatus nação, old and new” as well as countless other carnaval practices. “To finish,” concluded Joventina-Real, “I need to tell

287 you, because Katarina does not want to, that it is with great sacrifice that she separates from me.” Assuring the audience that the US anthropologist knows she will be well cared for at the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Joventina-Real also reminds them that “I will have the calungas, Dona Emília, Dona Leopoldina e Dom Luíz of the friend of Katarina,

Dona Santa, to keep me company. Katarina promises me that she will return from the

United States once and awhile to visit me during the Festival of Momo—and I will remain awaiting always with great joy the visits of all the northeastern carnivalesque people here at the Museum!” Thanking the audience on behalf of the calunga and the anthropologist,

Real and Joventina finally bid one another adieu.

Real’s performance as the calunga Dona Joventina, in which she inhabits the subjectivity of a sacred doll accustomed to housing spirits, invites an analysis into questions of the agency of objects and other non-human actors and notions of human-object ventriloquism. Latour (2005) argues for the necessity of accounting for the agency of non- human actors in analysis of social relationships and their outcomes. With this, Latour does not mean to suggest that objects possess an agency commensurate with human agency; rather, he points out that objects nonetheless play a role in events normally construed as

“human” and therefore “social,” and that they do so in particular ways unique to that object.

Building on the ideas of Latour, François Cooren (2010) elaborates on a theory of ventriloquism, in which human agents make non-human things (which he calls êtres, or

“beings”) “speak” in order to further their own agendas. Cooren argues that this theory allows “not only for one to identify the beings that interlocutors animate during their conversations, but also to show that, in doing so, these same interlocutors position themselves as animated by the beings that they are animating” (Cooren 2010, 40–41).

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Cooren’s theory of ventriloquism is highly metaphorical, where his notion of non-human

“beings” includes ideas, principles, beliefs, etc. Yet the metaphor becomes particularly salient for understanding the agency of Dona Joventina, and especially the agency that

Katarina Real wields through the calunga. Real, in making Dona Joventina speak, is not only able to present her own narrative of the calunga’s history that frames her acquisition of the doll as a gift—she is also able to assert, from “Dona Joventina’s” point of view, that the calunga enjoyed her years in Santa Fé and was well treated, even friends, with the US anthropologist.

Maria Erofeeva (2019) argues that theories that employ metaphors of ventriloquism to understand object agency and human-object interactions are too human centered; they do not truly unravel the kinds of agency exerted by objects, but rather the ways in which humans exert their agency through objects. Erofeeva points to the notion of “affordances” to help understand the ways in which particular objects may suggest specific usages to the humans that interact with them, thus recuperating the notion of the agency of the object as something separate from human intent. Erofeeva distinguishes between the agencies inscribed in the object by its creator, and other agencies it may afford in later interactions.

However, Erofeeva argues that in reality this is not possible; rather, there is a an ever- oscillating relationship between the agencies inscribed into objects, through the actions that they afford, and the capabilities, interests, and attachments to those objects of the humans that encounter them.

Erofeeva’s critique becomes complicated—but all the more necessary—when considering a non-human object made in a human form, meant to house a spirit conceived of in a human image. The precise agency of objects made in human form—whether a

289 ventriloquist’s dummy or a sacred doll—is that we can “throw” our voices onto them. In the case of a calunga, it is an ancestral spirit that normally inhabits the sacred doll, though customarily the calunga speaks only through its hallowed silence. The agency inscribed in the calunga (that of being able to house a human-like spirit by physically resembling a human-like being) affords the possibility of Real appropriating that agency to inhabit the doll, causing it to speak with Real’s own voice while making it appear to be the voice of

Dona Joventina.

However, Real’s conceit does not really attempt to convince the audience that it is anyone other than Real who is speaking; in documentary footage of the speech, Real’s unwieldly, halting, American-accented Portuguese—not to mention the fact that she is not actually throwing her voice as a ventriloquist would—ensure that the performance would not ever be understood this way. Rather, in addition to using the act of ventriloquism to obscure her own agency by having Dona Joventina claim she “enjoyed” her time in the

United States, Real asserts to the listener through this unconvincing act of ventriloquism that Dona Joventina is, after all, in fact nothing more than an object. Unlike the sacred presence of a silent ancestor in the body of Dona Joventina, Real’s noisy possession of the calunga demystifies it. This is further reinforced as Joventina-Real describes the naked, wooden body of the sacred doll and the conditions of her construction, alongside many other details that remind of the calunga’s object status. How often does one hear an ancestral spirit refer to being “wrapped into a towel” to be brought to an anthropologist’s high-rise apartment? Real-as-Joventina object-ifies the calunga—an object that normally is invested with the formidable agency of a minor deity—in the truest sense. This move serves to deflate the spiritual urgency and moral authority of the competing claims for Dona

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Joventina. By this, I do not mean to suggest that Dona Joventina is in fact “only” a doll, but that perhaps Real meant to, and that even if she did not, her act of unconvincing ventriloquism produced that effect. It is perhaps also for this reason that members of the two Estrela Brilhantes now think of Dona Joventina as “dead,” as Kubrusly notes in her ethnography (2007, 88)—not only due to the years of improperly observed ritual obligations and her imprisonment in a glass display case, but through Real’s intrusion into

Dona Joventina’s subjectivity and the resulting object-ification of the calunga.

The notion that Real was invested in her speech as a means of controlling the narrative around Dona Joventina and Real’s thirty-year possession of her is borne out by

Real’s hope to have the speech published and available to visitors of the museum. Later that year, Real anxiously wrote to the museologist in charge: “Regina, will you be able to publish the pamphlet of my ‘goodbye lecture’ to Dona Joventina? Remember that Dr.

Fernando promised the publication of the pamphlet. I think it is important to put the pamphlet beside the bell jar of the Calunga so that the visitors can know a bit more about the history of this centenary figure and about her donor. Please advise” (Real 1996b). Later in the letter (despite an attempt to turn the focus of attention over to news of the museum),

Real returns to the subject of the calunga and those attached to her: “Now I would like to hear more of your news. Is Dona Joventina being visited very much? Has the enchanting

Lenira, the dama de paço of Nação Estrela Brilhante in the 60s, returned to speak with her

‘dear friend’? And the project of reforming and augmenting the Museum, how is that going?” (Real 1996b). While the pamphlet does indeed seem to have been published—I located a printed copy of it—it does not, at least at this time, appear alongside the one- hundred-year-old calunga at the entrance of the Museum.

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The Museum do Homem do Nordeste—formed in 1979 from the amalgamation of the collections of the local Museum of Anthropology, the Museum of Popular Art, and the

Museum of Sugar—and concerned with “the role of a public museum in contributing to the access of the general population to the right to memory,” operates under a professed,

“commitment to, by way of our actions, be[ing] more inclusive and equanimous in the representation of the diverse modes of being and creating of the populations of the

Northeast” (Museu do Homem do Nordeste 2019). The original conception for the museum sought a break from traditional modes of ethnographic display (A. Oliveira and Chagas

1983):

The principal characteristic of this 1979 exposition was the absence of glass showcases. Aécio de Oliveira was inspired by the popular [open-air] markets of the Northeast in order to conceive of a museography similar in form to those that present objects in the fairs, seeking to approximate the cultural repertoire of the public that she sought to reach. He wanted Muhne to be “a ‘moreno’ museum, very Brazilian, free of the glass showcases imported from the European museums.” Other characteristics of the inaugural exposition were the exposition of the entire museal collections of the originating institutions, dispensing with the existence of a technical reserve to guard the collections and the suppression of the individual labels of the objects, in order to avoid the saturation of the visitor.

In the photographs we can see the innovations in the exhibit modes of Muhne. Within them, we highlight the fair stand for the sale of herbs, the manner in which the costumes and objects related to Candomblé and the objects of Maracatu Elefante were exhibited, arranged in a way so as to reproduce the spatiality of a cortejo (Museu do Homem do Nordeste 2019).

Most of the collection—including donated instruments, uniforms and costumes, and the large papier machê elephant on wheels belonging to the defunct nação Maracatu

Elefante—do indeed remain in open air today, free of glass cases. Like in the Smithsonian’s re-creation of an Indian mela fair discussed by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, 66–69), objects from various eras and local subcultures, whether gifts, purchases, or inheritance from past museums, are on display in the “open air market” as commodities that are nonetheless not for sale. The Maracatu Elefante collection is indeed arranged somewhat

292 like a cortejo of maracatu nação, though the drums are resting on the ground with the red and white caps of the Elefante batuqueiros laid upon their skins as if the drummers had walked away—the effect is haunting. The gown of Dona Santa, along with her calungas

Dona Emilia, Dona Leopoldina, and Dom Luíz are somewhat removed from the cortejo, with two of the calungas and several crowns contained in a glass case. For her part, Dona

Joventina of Estrela Brilhante do Campo Grande stands in a glass case, opposite a statue of a white Catholic saint and quite apart from her companions the calungas of Maracatu

Elefante, at the entrance of the museum where she indeed welcomes “visitors from various countries of the world” in addition to the “carnivalesque people” of Pernambuco.

5.7 Conclusion

Even if the sad day arrives in which there disappears from Recife the last old ‘Nação’, for a considerable majority of Pernambucans of all social classes, Maracatu will continue to be an emotion, a feeling, a subject of vibration. The intellectuals, the journalists, the middle class, and the people in general—all feel the Maracatu to be peculiarly theirs. To be Pernambucan is to feel the Maracatu (Real 1967, 82).

Real wrote the above lines in the conclusion of the chapter on maracatu nação in her 1967 ethnography of Pernambucan carnaval. Though purportedly describing the relationship of local elites to maracatu nação, the passage cannot help but convey something of the US anthropologist’s own feeling towards the working-class, Afro-Brazilian carnaval pageant.

Motivated by the exigencies of pesquisa ação and resgate during a period of right-wing military repression in the 1960s, the American academic claimed a central place in local intellectual circles and assumed responsibility for the “protection” of local popular culture in Recife. Through these activities, her field relationships—especially that with Eudes

Chagas—were characterized by notions of gifting, exchange, and often unrealized reciprocity. Yet through her roles in the “death” and “birth” of nações, Real was also able

293 to assert a personal vision, whether directly or through her influence on her collaborators.

In particular, as the guardian of the calunga Dona Joventina for over thirty years, Real was able to not only inscribe herself on the sacred doll (through commissioning or making clothing and accessories for her), but through her decision to donate the calunga to the

Museu do Homem do Nordeste—and to engage in an act of unconvincing performative ventriloquism in the donation ceremony—Real profoundly shaped the sacred doll’s history and how it is understood and remembered.

The broader effect of Real’s interventions was to help engender a widely-shared sense of responsibility for—and therefore a sense of ownership of—local popular culture on the part of both local and international intellectual elites. Completing a process begun by figures associated with the research and stylization of maracatu nação in the early-to- mid-twentieth century, both through her activities and her very identity as an American anthropologist engaging in them, Real expanded and normalized the notion that local elites had a stake in maracatu nação and its fate—a dynamic that continues to characterize the relationship between members of the nações and local, national, and international artists and researchers interested practice to this day. Indeed, the statement can be understood as performative, for it was in her acts of intervention, research, and writing, that Real ensured that “all feel the Maracatu to be peculiarly theirs” (Real 1967, 82).

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6.0 CAUGHT BETWEEN ESTILIZADO AND THE MUSEU: TRADITION, INNOVATION, AND SURVIVAL IN PERNAMBUCO’S 2020 CARNAVAL.

6.1 Introduction: My Maracatu Weighs a Ton

Saturday, February 22nd, 2020

I got up at 6am to go meet some friends for the Bloco da Lama in the Sítio Histórico of

Olinda. The bloco is a Manguebeat tribute in which all the participants cover themselves in lama de argila, a thick yellow-white clay. The bloco also features the grupo percussivo

Batucada Atômica, which plays the drums and rhythms of maracatu nação to back

Manguebeat refrains. Their t-shirts featured the slogan “modernizar o passado é uma evolução cultural” (“to modernize the past is cultural evolution”); the phrase came from lyrics to the song “Monólogo ao Pé de Ouvido” by the Manguebeat pioneers Chico Science

& Nação Zumbi, a tribute to various Latin American bandits and revolutionaries which opens with this line calling into question the cultural conservatism that is deeply embedded in Pernambuco’s artistic and intellectual establishment.

Even at that early hour, Olinda was already busy and full of people. The entire bloco was meeting at a large square outside a still-functioning monastery. There were big tubs of mud that people were busy covering themselves with, and some were also throwing it at one another playfully. A friend and I went and covered our exposed skin with mud. Some people used tons and with others it was more of a gesture. With some it had dripped artfully down their arms and back. Others put it on their faces, clothes, and hair. Most of the

295 participants seemed young, in their 20s and 30s, certainly too young to have been active participants in the Manguebeat scene while it was in its heyday.

Eventually the batucada assembled and people began congregating around them.

Someone came carrying a traditional-style estandarte (standard) labelled “Bloco

Mangue”—founded in 1995. Eventually the group of about 20 percussionists began to warm up, beating out their mixture of traditional maracatu de baque virado rhythms with variations that suggested the rock and rap influences of Manguebeat and moments of carioca samba from Rio de Janeiro and Bahian-style samba-reggae, which worked very well on the deep, resonant alfaia bass-drums. It seemed like the “toadas”—the term for the short call-and-response songs that have historically formed maracatu nação’s repertoire— were mostly refrains from popular Manguebeat songs, and many people were singing along.

Suddenly my friends and others directly beside the band linked arms together, forming a barrier around the drummers. Soon the parade began to move, and quickly things became very intense. As the large group of revelers pressed out of the square into the winding streets of Olinda, we passed a bottleneck created by a parked car right where the narrow street connected to the square. Bodies were pushed in all directions as the circle of linked arms struggled to maintain itself as a barrier for the band. Though the pressure eased after the initial bottleneck, the bloco remained tightly packed as we inched our way along the route through the historic district of Olinda. The crowd did not abate or stop pushing, yet somehow there was room for spectators to line the streets in addition to those looking on from inside the houses. Sometimes, impossibly, other blocos would

296 squeeze past us in the opposite direction, neither group letting up, creating a disorienting palimpsest of musical sounds and an even tighter press of bodies.

Despite the discomfort, I found myself moving forward in small dancing steps. Once we moved onto a wider street and had a bit more space, the young woman leading the group started to periodically direct the band to crouch low and play very quietly, and the crowd would do the same. Then the group would bring the volume back up after a virado and everyone would jump up and down and dance with renewed energy. Eventually we turned out onto Avenida Liberdade, where we could spread out a little more, and paraded under the cover of thousands of little plastic flags rustling in the breeze. We stopped here for quite a while, as we had done maybe once or twice before. By this time, I had become part of the cordão, the group of friends separating the band from the crowd, where I had a privileged and unobstructed view of the drummers. Across from me I noticed a girl with an elaborate glittered headband that read “Meu maracatu pesa uma T” (“My maracatu weighs a T[on]”) with a picture of an alfaia—another reference to Chico Science lyrics.

Once we began moving again, we paraded out to Avenida Sigismund Gonçalves where we gained even more space and the human cordão could finally let go. Unexpectedly, I found myself parading beside a couple I knew from the maracatu de baque virado scene in my hometown of Toronto, Canada—an experience not at all unusual for me in Olinda’s historical center—and we caught up after my absence of several years. From there, we wound our way onto Rua Manuel Borba and finished the parade where the street opens to a park and a beach. People dispersed, and my friends and I congregated under the shade of a tree, deciding what to do next while we rested. We were exhausted, though some wanted to continue on to other blocos.

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Sunday, February 23rd, 2020

I arrived at the official carnaval concursos (contests) in downtown Recife at around

8pm—much too early—having been warned that it would be hard to find a good seat. There had been parades of various kinds all day, after all, but at this hour I found that while the bleachers contained a healthy-sized audience, there was still room for me to find a front row seat to see the official maracatu nação parades. These parades would be graded by a panel of judges and the winners would receive a cash prize—I had come to see the nações in the first division, made up of consistently top-ranking groups. I purchased some snacks and beverages and settled into my spot on the bleachers to wait for the nações.

When I arrived, the spectators consisted mostly of families with multiple generations present—grandparents and young children, many in costume. Near me in the bleachers there was a young girl of maybe 8 years. Though likely mostly of African descent, she had a vague phenotypical resemblance to indigenous Brazilians, and it was likely for this reason that she was dressed up in a rainbow feathered “Indian” costume. At a certain point she asked me a favor, but I couldn’t fully understand what she was saying—a fact she found confusing since I could speak back to her clearly in Portuguese. I explained that

I was from Canada, where there is snow, and for that reason I don’t always understand things. She looked perplexed, but soon began to ask me a bunch of questions: did I have a son or daughter? Does it snow where I am from every day? (I said no, only for half the year). Was I going back? Today? Was I Japanese? (I said no—though this is a not- infrequent interpellation for my Eastern-European-descended self in Brazil; a Brazilian airline attendant would ask me the same question a few weeks later).

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Later on, another child arrived with his family in the same area, costumed in a military police uniform. The young boy was small, maybe 5 years old, dressed in the dark blue and black camo uniform with boots and red felt beret that I had seen many more times on much more intimidating adults, and a plastic weapon—I can’t remember if it was a gun or a taser. Likewise of primarily African descent, the boy had a large mop of ringlets, smooth and shiny, spilling out under his beret, and took his role very seriously. I don’t know if his family previously knew the family of the girl dressed as an indigenous Brazilian, but the grown-ups were chatting and laughing together, positioning the “military officer” and the “Indian” together for a photo. The girl posed with popped hip, much taller than her counterpart.

As the event ran late, my anticipation mounted—this would be my first time seeing the official parades of the nações in person, a very different experience from the off-season street parties, festivals, and open rehearsals of Recife and Olinda—or Toronto or New

Orleans for that matter, where I had also watched grupos percussivos play the music of maracatu nação. Finally, the sounds of the leader’s whistle, the snare drum calls, and the voice of the announcer over the PA signaled that the first group was beginning to parade.

Few people sitting on the front row of the bleachers remained seated, instead standing right up against the railing to get a good view—so I did the same. I was soon bombarded with a barrage of colorful sights and sounds. Little of the popular or the academic discourse on maracatu nação conveys the degree of spectacle involved—though a few members of the nações complain about it. Elaborate, creative, humorous, and whimsical costumes adorned dancers executing a group choreography that wove them in and out of the different sections of the parade. Though by no means as elaborate or lavish as the

299 famous Samba Schools of Rio’s carnaval, these performances were a sizeable departure from the solemn coronation processions I had read about, even in the more recent academic literature on the subject. Several nações opened with fireworks, some continuing throughout, while another popular nação incorporated a smoke machine.

The parades opened with 2 or 3 caboclos de pena (“feather ‘Indians’”)—individual dancers dressed as “Indians” (and perhaps based as much on a North American imaginary of indigenous dress as a South American one), whose agile movements incorporated the acrobatics of capoeira and passo de frevo1 to evoke the imagined sneaking, running, crouching, leaping, and bowmanship of an indigenous hunter. The caboclos would leap out in front of the parade, crouch dramatically while aiming their prop bow and arrows, and release them before leaping up and dashing back into the parade’s ranks. Usually following the caboclos was a small float or banner announcing the name of the nação. The floats, called carrinhos, are pushed or pulled by hand rather than engine-driven, and feature the name of the nação along with lights, lots of glitter and other shimmery materials, and often a 3-dimensional figure in papier-mâché related to the name and iconography of the nação. Behind the carrinho began the wings of dancers—the “alas de personagens,” or “wings of personalities”—and of course, the batuqueiros—the drummers. Each group of dancers worked with a different theme, costume, and choreography—groups of older women dressed as Candomblé priestesses; dancers dressed as orixás, the deities of Candomblé; groups of young women in creative, elaborate costumes featuring fruit, flowers, and other props; men costumes based on either Ancient

Roman soldiers or an imagined “African” warrior, and groups of laborers carrying prop

1 Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian performance practice that blends martial arts with dance. Passo de frevo is the name for the dance component of the genre known as frevo.

300 machetes or hoes and miming the act of harvesting sugar cane. In contrast to the fantastical make-believe of these dancers, the batuqueiros wore uniforms instead of costumes, usually featuring matching white linen pants and t-shirts printed with the name, logo, and slogan of the nação. The nowadays numerous female drummers would wear the same uniforms as the men—with a few exceptions, especially among the women and occasional man playing abê, who adopted long matching skirts instead of pants while the rare male player wore pants with added frills to add movement to their costume. Overall, the difference in their dress—the sense of being a uniform rather than a costume—set the batuqueiros apart, almost marking them as the true militia of the parade, rather than the more carnivalesque- appearing Roman soldiers. However, in the most popular groups, the batuqueiros brought an intensity of energy and movement unrivalled by the other wings, jumping up and down on cue, spinning, and drumming in circles around one another. In contrast to the solemn ostinato of parades past, these contemporary nações played at bouncier tempos, bringing in a hint of funk sensibility to make the rhythms infectiously danceable.

After the drummers and the many alas of dancers, the royal court appeared beginning with the many damas de paço—dozens of ladies in waiting wearing European baroque- style gowns with large hoop skirts in fanciful colors. They would dance with raised arms, spinning their impossibly wide hoop skirts to dramatic effect. Their gowns were sequined, glittered, embroidered, and edged in lace; while employing a design meant to evoke the

European elite garb of the late Baroque period, the fabrics included not only synthetic laces, satins, and velvets, but wild neon colors as well as animal prints, synthetic furs, and natural materials such as raffia, feathers, and coconut shells meant to evoke Africa. A privileged few of these damas, situated at the beginning of the group, were bestowed the

301 great privilege of carrying the calungas. Each nação possessed one or two—or sometimes more—of these small, usually wooden or cloth dolls, dressed in clothes to match their human escorts. These sacred dolls, believed to be vessels for ancestral spirits, were usually

“female” and painted to have dark skin, though there were exceptions. The damas who carried a calunga would dance and spin with them, raising them up for all to see. Many of the younger damas, those who would not be chosen to carry a calunga, were performed by men. While many of these men were young, slight, and made up so as to be indistinguishable from their female-bodied counterparts, many nações also possessed a very special dama, the baiana rica—a wealthy, black Bahian woman—also performed by a man. With this particular character, the performer was a large, very masculine man who played up the comedic drag aspects of his exaggeratedly masculine form within an exaggeratedly feminine, frilly gown. The damas were then followed by a series of noble couples—princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, etc.—parading in pairs wearing matching Baroque finery. The final couple, of course, were always the King and Queen, with the Queen serving as the centerpiece and finale of the spectacle. The Queen was followed by several “slaves” and “pages” who carried her large parasol and the long train of her gown or fanned her with large leaves and feathers.

As the night wore on, many of the families with young children went home, though not all, and more and more teens showed up—it seemed like many had a personal connection to one of the nações, many sporting the t-shirts of one or another group. There seemed to be a significant queer male presence among these teens, there with their female/femme friends. There were also many older people, mostly Afro-Brazilian, who seemed to be there alone and very intent on the nações. Every now and then vendors (many

302 of them children) would come up on the bleachers to sell water, soda, and beer, and very occasionally, food. The teenage members of the audience were very animated, cheering loudly for their favorite groups, performers, and personal friends. Encanto da Pina received an extra loud cheer and applause, and Estrela Brilhante do Recife even more so.

They had a massive group of drummers who put on the most animated show out of all the nações so far, and there were girls screaming throughout their parade as if they were the

Beatles.

The above two vignettes illustrate two vivid moments in the 2020 carnaval of the

Grande Recife Metropolitan Area. The first, taking place in the chaotic street party of the municipality of Olinda’s sítio histórico, illustrates the special place that maracatu nação occupies in the musical and festive imaginations of young people who see themselves as inheritors of the Manguebeat counterculture. The event, typical for Olinda’s more youth- oriented carnaval structured around drinking, dancing, costuming, and street parties, was permeated with the cultural values of Manguebeat (“to modernize the past is cultural evolution”) as well as both references to and the very rhythms of maracatu nação played on the drums of a batuque with the addition of a few extra percussion instruments often found in the recreational ensembles known as grupos percussivos. Just like the visual, sonic, and physical bricolage of Olinda’s carnaval, the Manguebeat tribute mashed up maracatu nação drums and rhythms with the rhythms and tunes of not only Manguebeat but Bahian samba-reggae, rock, and hip hop.

The second vignette describing the official adjudicated parades of Recife’s carnaval contests presents what is frequently referred to as the focal point in the year of a

303 nação’s activities, the high point towards which each nação spends the year working.

However, this event is equally structured by its own “mash up”—not only the meeting of

“European,” “African,” and “Indigenous” influences (cast in broad and sometimes rather superficial strokes) that are so often cited as the origin story of maracatu nação, but the influence of twenty-first-century Afro-diasporic youth culture, the conventions of the famous samba schools from Brazil’s affluent Southeast, and the “pop carnivalesque” of contemporary costuming and street party practices, not to mention the incorporation of new technologies and ongoing innovations in the performance of maracatu nação that cannot be reduced to a group-specific “influence”. While the latter might at times be held up as

“tradition” in contrast to the “modernity” of the ways in which Manguebeat culture has engaged and been engaged by maracatu nação, one doesn’t have to search hard to find critiques of the concursos and the ways in which the official maracatu nação parades have changed in recent decades—by members of both nações that participate in the contests and those that refrain from doing so. By juxtaposing these two carnaval moments here, my goal is not to disparage a contemporary maracatu nação scene that has “sold out” in the name of glittery “espetacularização,” though such critiques are not without their important points. Rather, it is to present what counts as maracatu nação “tradition”—or indeed as the practice’s “modernity”—as a shifting horizon, and one that is deeply contested at that.

This chapter examines notions of tradition and innovation in the contemporary maracatu nação scene, examining how the legacies of visiting artists and intellectuals discussed in the previous chapters have shaped the concerns of performers of maracatu nação in the present day. Based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in

August, September, and November of 2019 and the month around carnaval (mid-February

304 to mid-March) of 2020, the chapter examines the ways that the discourses of maracatu estilizado and “going to the museum” (indo pro museu) shape the fears and concerns of members of the nações, serving to police not only the boundaries of inclusion in the tradition but the space for individual agency and innovation within the nações as well. I show that when the troublesome past century of ethnographic research, stylized appropriations, and museumization is remembered, and when it is not, performers of maracatu nação continue to navigate through the structures it created. In particular, regardless of their orientation towards an ethos of tradition or one of innovation, the nações and other performers of maracatu nação must grapple with the twin specters of estilizado and the museu; or rather, what is lost through the embrace of change, and what is risked through its rejection.

In particular, this chapter draws on a whirlwind series of interviews conducted primarily with the Mestres of various nações in the few weeks between the end of carnaval and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down public life and required that

I immediately return home.2 Unfortunately, the scope of this project is such that I cannot meaningfully elaborate on the impact that the pandemic has had on the maracatu nação community, other than to say it has been devastating—and largely due to preventable failings in government. Rather, this ethnography also represents some of my last memories of normal—and vibrant and exuberant—social life before a year of isolation in the similarly suppressed carnival city of New Orleans. It is my sincere hope that this ethnography can speak to the concerns of the nações while also offering a sense of their enduring vitality and creativity in this year without carnaval.

2 Some interviews, in fact, were conducted by video chat after my return to the United States.

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6.2 The Shared Ideology of Tradition and Modernity in Pernambuco: Armorial, Manguebeat, and Maracatu Nação.

Since the 1980s, postmodern thought (in both its intellectual-academic and its artistic-cultural currents) has critiqued the stability of identity and categories developed under the intellectual tradition of Western European modernism. Within cultural criticism and the academic study of culture it has become common to celebrate instances of

“hybridity” in popular culture, arguing that hybridity is better fit to celebrate difference and challenge totalizing discourses, especially those of nationalism and modernism that historically have supported state power, socioeconomic inequality, neocolonial power structures, and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, among other things. This argument is frequently applied to Latin American and Caribbean musical practices, including the music of the Manguebeat movement (P. Galinsky 2002; Vargas 2007), with many scholars asserting that these practices represent resistance to those nationalist discourses that suppress internal diversity and defame external, international influences.

Complicating this argument is the fact that the majority of “New World” nationalisms have long been grounded in concepts of hybridity; in the case of Brazil, in the famous ideologies of mestiçagem and so-called “racial democracy.” However, the fact that

Brazilian culture is informed by diverse influences originating in many far-flung corners of the earth is not singular; it would be a rarity to find a society without such diverse influences given the long global history of ancient and contemporary migrations and circulations of people and ideas, millennia of imperialism, European colonialism in the modern era, the transatlantic slave trade, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century labor migration in the Americas—not to mention the growing digital circulation of culture. Nor is it singular that this mixture is so emphasized in a nationalism also highly associated with

306 xenophobia and fear of the so-called “un-Brazilian”—indeed, such apparent contradictions have been common throughout the Americas as well, whether in the form of Brazilian mestiçagem, Spanish American mestizajé, French Caribbean creolité, the US “melting- pot” or Canadian multiculturalism.

What appears to be contradiction in these xenophobic yet pluralist nationalisms, however, is not so. Anthropologist Peter Wade (2000, 1–19) has argued that the heterogenous, hybridizing gesture generates same-ness (after a long period of mixture), just as the homogenizing gesture generates new differences (between the homogenized group and all the rest). Similarly, Shalini Puri (2004, 1–79) has shown that often discourses of hybridity celebrate their own freedom from totalizing identities but do not question the basis for the categories that make up the “ingredients” of said hybridities, in a manner that reveals a continuation of intellectual investment in these categories rather than their dismantling. This is similar to ethnomusicologist Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s (2006) articulation of “epistemologies of purification” and “epistemologies of transculturation,” as discussed in the introduction to this dissertation. Though such discourses position themselves against one another, they both describe partial realities, cannot exist in isolation from one another, and share a common ideological foundation—or what George Yúdice terms a shared “social fantasy” (2003)—that is held by diverse and often clashing social formations.

Ochoa’s argument offers a way of conceptualizing the famous notion of

“intertextual gaps” outlined by Bauman and Briggs (1992) that also responds to the particularities of nationalist discourse in many Latin American nations. However, the notion of intertextuality and genre becomes salient to the understanding the contemporary

307 maracatu nação scene in many ways. According to Bauman and Briggs, much can be understood about the exercise of social power through attention to the ways in which actors attempt to minimize or emphasize the “gaps” between texts (understood both as the words or other particularities of performance as well as the discourses that surround them). As will be demonstrated below, much energy is expended in the maracatu nação scene to minimize the “gaps” between the differing approaches of the various nações as well as within the history of any single nação—and indeed, the collective nature and call-and- response structure of the practice seem designed to minimize such gaps in performance practice—though there are likewise those that advocate for allowing more room for these

“gaps.” Intertextual gaps similarly become the subject of preoccupation with respect to the historical and genealogical narratives constructed by nações and their members. The effort to minimize gaps can be understood as multivalenced, where it can at once be seen functioning as a top-down primitivizing gesture that limits the practice to the status of

“folklore,” and at the same time as a strategy for presenting a united front and a distinct, clear racial and cultural identity used by communities that have been historically oppressed, exploited, marginalized, and discriminated against.

Martin Stokes (2004) has outlined the debates that developed from the 1980s onward regarding the growth of the “World Music” trend (the commercial label for non-

Western musics marketed as “field recordings” of “untouched” “traditional” practices— working off an epistemology of purification, in Ochoa’s terms) and later the related trend known as “World Beat” (non-Western musics marketed as fusions of either multiple practices or traditional practices with new technologies, working from an epistemology of transculturation). Stokes characterized the debates as largely centered around two

308 positions: the Marxist-influenced critical discourse which stressed unequal power relations in the production and consumption of World Music and World Beat, and a celebratory liberal discourse that sees the global circulation of sounds and the resulting hybridities as a form of resistance or even evidence of the dissolution of reductive nationalisms and other totalizing discourses. Stokes rightly points out that both discourses tend to over-generalize and miss the dynamics of specific instances of hybridization or appropriation at work; he likewise reminds that both the anxious and celebratory narratives on musical cross- fertilization have been central to public discourse in Latin America for decades, where both have possessed the capacity to function as means of maintaining top-down cultural hegemony and social inequality. Steven Feld (Feld 1996) and Wayne Marshall (Marshall

2007) (among others), in two distinct historical moments, have both addressed the ways in which blackness is imagined and figured through “World Music” practices: both feeding the development of new, uniquely diasporic Afro-diasporic practices between the United

States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and West African nations, while also opening up a global playground for the twenty-first-century reincarnation of Norman Mailer’s

“primitivist hipsterism.”

David Novak (2011) has argued that more recent practices of “World Music” connoisseurship associated with the online circulation of obscure “non-Western” pop and rock recordings (often dubbed from radio broadcasts onto tape cassettes before being digitalized) represent a break from previous modes of academic and commercial circulation of “non-Western” sounds. However, his arguments are harder to sustain in light of the dynamic developments in public social justice discourse in the late 2010s, wherein critiques of cultural appropriation have become more mainstream. Though the Western

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European or white Anglo-North American “re-mediators” of foreign sounds he describes may differ from their academic or record-company-exec predecessors in opting for a distorted, lo-fi aesthetic, their tendency to read such sounds as markers of “authenticity” only perpetuate the deeply embedded association of “authenticity” with “primitive technology,” now “transvalued” (in the parlance of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) for its apparent distance from the slickness of modernity (but no less Othered for that). In the dynamic music scene of Recife, the ways in which maracatu nação engages and is engaged with by the Pernambucan middle-classes, Brazilians from outside of Pernambuco, and foreigners evidences all these complexities, making it important to tease out the nuances of these relationships.

It is for these same reasons that interdisciplinary historian Micol Seigel speaks of

“uneven” transnational encounter when speaking of the ways in which conceptions of race and national identity in Brazil and the US were co-created by Brazilian, US, and other transnational actors through mutual talk by one about the other (Seigel 2009). Seigel’s formulation of transnationalism is not the celebratory pluralism of either Brazilian mestiço nationalism and racial democracy or contemporary postmodernist hybridity theory. Rather, she argues that the inequalities in power and differences in context between transnational actors engaged in various forms of exchange are not only important to reckon with for a full understanding of the dynamics of transnational exchange, but in fact are fundamental to the very process of construction—and differentiation—of racialized national identities themselves. It is precisely through those moments of transnational—or in some cases, simply translocal—encounter and exchange that identity comes in to being, and in Seigel’s work, music and performance are key sites of such exchange.

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If the broad contours of the notion “modern versus traditional” map the relation between “Western” and “local” musics in the global imagination of “World Music,” a similar relationship can be mapped in the dynamic of a music scene to its “home” nation, region, state, or city. In Recife, for example, various artists and entire movements understand themselves through their relationship to “tradition,” whether this relationship is perceived as strictly conservative or experimental, valorizing or rejecting. But what counts as “tradition” is likewise a social construction, and plays a role in supporting inequalities of power between various sectors of society, as Hobsbawm has famously argued (2012). As Sharp (2014) has shown regarding the relationship between the band

Cordel do Fogo Encantado and local performers of samba de coco in Recife, while the former is construed as experimental, hybrid, and modern, the latter are thought of as tradition, pure, and at times, archaic—all are in fact part of and participate in “modernity,” including making use of its technologies, employing its logics and discourses, negotiating its challenges, and innovating within their chosen practices. Both are not-quite-willing co- producers of the ways in which notions of “tradition vs. modernity” and “hybrid vs. pure” are mapped onto them, inflecting how they are interpreted, valued, and at times, hierarchized.

In Pernambuco, a more conservatively oriented anxiety over the destiny of popular culture would be formalized in the 1970s with the founding of the Movimento Armorial

(Vargas 2007, 35–57). Spearheaded by Ariano Suassuna, the Movimento Armorial emphasized popular culture as the basis for identity, be it national or regional. Within the logic of Armorial, “true” popular culture was associated with the culture of the sertão—the desiccated Brazilian backlands characterized by medieval Iberian and indigenous

311 influences—while the culture of the coastal cities was seen as “suffering” from

“deleterious” foreign influences (Vargas 2007, 42) and, incidentally, those of the Afro- diasporic world. In his book on hybridity in the music of Chico Science & Nação Zumbi,

Herom Vargas argues that the Movimento Armorial embraced hybridity as a foundational process in Brazilian culture but did not support the elaboration of new hybrid cultural practices in the present (2007, 47–52). However, it seems that the Armorial gesture was more complicated than this: the movement sought to develop projects based in the forms of European “high” culture, including the foundation of the Armorial Chamber Orchestra and the Armorial Ballet (M. G. R. de Oliveira 1993, 123–143; Vargas 2007, 37–41).

According to Suassuna,

...by my understanding, in Brazil what is national is only what is from the popular [working or rural peasant classes] or at least linked to the popular. Like the work of Cervantes which was not popular but linked to the popular, like the work of Rabelais in France, the work of Shakespeare in England. That is to say, like these great writers and artists that linked themselves with that which was popular in their land, in their culture [...] So, the Armorial Movement intends to valorize cultura popular or the cultura of the artists and writers that in Brazil seek to link with the popular. Now the question of whether one links well or poorly, this will depend on each one, you know? (Ariano Suassuna in M. G. R. de Oliveira 1993, 127).

In this statement by Suassuna, those artists who were properly “linked” with popular culture were valued just as much as those who were considered the original bearers of popular culture; or, in other words, the elites could authenticate their work by linking themselves to the poor. As demonstrated earlier in this dissertation, however, Suassuna and others like him had explicitly argued that such work was in fact superior to cultura popular, which was only really valued for its suitability for erudite artists to “link” with. But what does it mean here “to link”? In the Movimento Armorial, it meant to create new syntheses using elements of and themes from popular culture but working within the forms of erudite

European art such as the chamber orchestra and the ballet. It is ironic that neither the

312 participants in Armorial, nor their academic critic Vargas, perceive the hybridity of this project: these Western European forms are not those of the Iberian peasantry or urban working classes—the cultura popular of Western Europe—but rather those of the transnational Western European elite, within which circles Western European countries such as France, England, Germany, Italy, and Austria (not Portugal or Spain) were considered the epitome of this erudite culture. This already hybrid elite Western European art is then fused with Northeastern Brazilian popular culture. The lack of recognition in the discourse surrounding Armorial of their mixtures as a form of hybridity reveal the ways in which Western European erudite culture is still considered “universal” in Brazil, and for this reason does not present a threat to popular culture in the thinking of Suassuna and his colleagues. The relationship of the Movimento Armorial to technology was similar—

Suassuna declared that “the notion of ‘progress’ is valuable for technology but not for Art and Literature” (Suassuna M. G. R. de Oliveira 1993, 109–134), though they would still make use of new technologies in order to record albums and put on shows.

In the time between the Movimento Armorial in the 1970s and the Manguebeat movement in the 1990s, there were happenings of historic importance in Brazil’s political, social, and cultural life. Since the end of the 1960s, Recife had experienced its own local manifestation of Tropicália, the cultural and artistic movement that would permanently open the Brazilian culture industry to foreign influences and vanguard experimentations, and it managed to do so without sacrificing a politicized stance against the dictatorship then in place (Teles 2000, 109–134). According to the journalist José Teles, the conservatism of the Movimento Armorial was a reactionary response to Northeastern

Tropicália (Teles 2000, 128). Teles recounts that Pernambucan Tropicália would in the

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1970s pass through a “hippy drop-out” phase that was less radical in its position than the

1960s Tropicalist scene, but which was a site for the flourishing of Pernambucan folk-rock influenced by local sounds (Teles 2000, 145–178).

The military dictatorship would begin to relax its repressive policies beginning in

1979, and in 1985 the generals ceded control of the country back to a civilian government, followed a few years later by the resumption of free elections. At the same time, Brazil was enveloped in the global expansion of neoliberal economic values, emphasizing the deregulation of economies, the free market, and globalization. Many Latin American economies, including that of Brazil, would see the growth of economic inequality and foreign debt. Most of the literature about the beginning of the Manguebeat Movement affirm that Recife during this time was in an economic crisis and a period of cultural stagnation. Regarding the latter claim, José Teles would write that only “in a superficial analysis can the 1980s be considered ‘the lost years’ for Pernambucan music. In truth, it was a long transitional phase, not as sterile as it can seem” (2000, 225). In fact, Teles’ book remains the only I know of that deals with the history of Pernambucan popular music in the twentieth century as a constant current of activity and dynamism, without periods dismissed as “not worth the effort” of studying. During the 1980s, the Brazilian rock scene, frequently referred to as BRock, flourished and became popular throughout the country.

Alongside this, linked but distinct from it, the Brazilian punk and heavy metal scenes also took off, with a much heavier sound than that of BRock, and both scenes had their local manifestations in Recife. There were also growing soul and funk scenes from the 1970s on, with their center in Rio de Janeiro (Dunn 2016, 146–174), that would lead to the development of Brazilian hip hop and the related practice known as funk carioca, with both

314 represented in Recife as well (Teles 2000, 225–262). Local manifestations of all these scenes and practices would develop in Recife as well.

At the end of the 1980s, musicians in Recife playing varieties of rock and rap began to take interest in those practices understood as local “tradition,” such as maracatu nação, maracatu de baque solto, forró, cantoria de viola, samba de coco, embolada, cavalo marinho, and banda de pífano. Sometimes this music scene has been referred to as

“Recife’s New Music scene,” because not all these artists identified themselves with

Manguebeat even though they had much in common with the movement. The bands most associated with Manguebeat—Chico Science & Nação Zumbi (CSNZ), that played a mixture of maracatu nação, maracatu baque solto, and other local practices with rap and heavy metal, and Mundo Livre S/A, which combined samba with funk, soul, punk, and new wave—published a manifesto, written by Fred Zero Quatro (leader of Mundo Livre

S/A) and Chico Science, published first in the Brazilian press in 1991, and later with a few alterations in the liner notes of the first album by CSNZ, Da Lama Ao Caos, released in

1995. The mangueboys3, as they were sometimes known, positioned themselves against the traditionalism of conservative artists such as those linked with the Movimento

Armorial, but the discourse of their manifesto developed a new way to articulate a familiar idea:

...the first signs of economic sclerosis manifested themselves at the beginning of the 1960s. In the last 30 years the syndrome of stagnation, along with the permanence of the myth of the ‘metropole,’ has only led to the accelerated aggravation of the picture of misery and urban chaos. [...] Emergency! A rapid shock, or Recife will die of a heart attack! It is not necessary to be a doctor to know that the easiest way to stop a subject’s heart is to obstruct its veins. Likewise, the fastest way to clog and empty out the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries. What to do to not sink into the chronic depression that paralyses our citizens? How to bring back the spirit, de-

3 Participants in the Manguebeat scene, fans or creators of music and other art of the Manguebeat movement.

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lobotomize and recharge the batteries of the city? Simple! It’s enough to inject a bit of the energy of the mud and stimulate what still remains of fertility in the veins of Recife. (Quatro cited in Vargas 2007, 65–66).

Like the artists of Armorial and early to mid-twentieth-century folklorists, the mangueboys likewise assigned themselves the role of rescuing local music. Their manifesto repeatedly puts forward the notion that the city’s culture was at risk of dying out—by their interpretation, for its lack of innovation and relevance to younger generations—which echoes the related notion put forward by the folklorists and artists of Armorial that many local cultural practices were on the verge of death. This suggestion placed the mangueboys in the position of “doctor” poised to save the life of Pernambucan culture by administering an injection of “energy.” Contemporary academics writing on Manguebeat likewise reproduced this discourse, which positioned the mangueboys as heroes. They frequently note the state of “stagnation” of Recife’s music scene without specifying what this means, beyond the broader economic crisis (which has improved, though the region remains poor compared to the economically dominant Southeast). Herom Vargas writes that Manguebeat

“recovered the musical traditions of Pernambuco” (Vargas 2007, 17), while Philip

Galinsky affirms that the participants in the new scene enacted a “rediscovery and revalorization of Pernambucan culture in the 1990s” (P. Galinsky 2002, 73). These discourses construe “traditional” practice as passively awaiting rescue in a state of paralysis, hidden away in some corner, to be discovered and revived by the mangueboys.

Absent is the history of continuity and change in these traditional practices (as well as pop)—for example, the dynamic “(re-)Africanization” of the nações and the flourishing

Recife rap and rock scenes.

The veiled alignment between traditionalism and modernization reveals itself in a conversation between the most famous representatives of Manguebeat and Armorial—

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Chico Science and Ariano Suassuna, respectively. According to Suassuna, in a discussion between the two, Science declared, “But prof, look, I am trying to valorize maracatu rural,” to which Suassuna responded, “Well then, how can you valorize maracatu rural, which is something good, by introducing rock, which is crap? How is that possible? A bad thing cannot valorize a good thing, no way!” (Ariano Suassuna in Vargas 2007, 63). The two not only both accepted without question the idea that local practices required

(re)valorization, but also that this could be achieved through a hybridization with another music. Where they disagreed was in which influences should be added in—those of North

American rock (or rap, or whatever other style of US popular music) or those of erudite

Western European “art” music.

It would be easy to explain the difference in opinion has a generational difference in tastes, but as Vargas notes, certain Pernambucan Tropicalists, such as Jomard Muniz de

Britto (with an age difference of around 10 years from Suassuna, who was the elder), criticized the “salvationism” of both movements (Vargas 2007, 84–85). At the same time, there were young participants in Recife’s New Music Scene that took up a more traditionalist emphasis, most famously the revered band Mestre Ambrósio (Murphy 2001).

The band distinguished itself from the Manguebeat movement by maintaining that its objective was to begin from a position “within” foreign musics and follow a process of what they alternately referred to as the “cleaning” of these influences or “self-discovery,” in order to reveal the local tradition that already lived within them. The members of the band, together with the mangueboys, discursively embraced change, but envisioned their movement as one that moved from the foreign to the local, or the modern to the traditional.

(Murphy 2001, 251). More problematic, however, are the metaphors employed by the band

317 to describe this movement: the notion of “self-discovery” implies that these “traditions” maintain their continuity within the very bodies of Pernambucans (of any class position!) but can only be revealed through a process of cleaning the “dirt” of foreign influence. These ideas demonstrate certain ideological links with the Movimento Armorial, though on an aesthetic level the music of Mestre Ambrósio possesses a rather more “Mangue sound.”4

It is not surprising, then, that during and after this period, efforts to “safeguard” traditional local practices would become institutionalized in Brazil and globally, in the form of federal and state government agencies. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has described special statuses such as “Immaterial National Patrimony” or UNESCO’s

“Intangible World Heritage” as arbitrary with respect to their distinction from so called

“tangible” or “material” heritage, a distinction which tends to erase the human actors and their agency in either case (Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett 2015). She argues that the explicit and implicit criteria for eligibility of such statuses tend to map, and thus hierarchize, the various practices and “monuments” in question according to nationality, region, race, and class.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett further argues that initiatives like those of UNESCO have done little more than draft lists of “masterpieces,” yet these lists accelerate practices and material culture into museums, greatly contributing to their “death” as “living masterpieces” despite the stated preservationist agenda.

4 Some participants in this scene moved through an evolving awareness of the contradictions of this dynamic. Ethnomusicologist Daniel B. Sharp recounts how the group Cordel do Fogo Encantado, another band aligned with the Manguebeat movement in its style of playing, its sonic intensity, and it’s lyrics, but which avoided electric/electronic instruments, began as a research project on local “folklore” stemming from the desire to “rescue” local practices (2014). Though the band would eventually distance themselves from this position (and instead further emphasize the fusion of diverse elements in their music), there persisted an unequal discursive relationship—much to Cordel’s frustration—between them and other “traditional” artists from the same small town in the interior, who likewise recorded CDs, went on tours, and had to negotiate their relationship to the modern world, but which played styles of music positioned as “traditional.”

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Both US ethnomusicologist Jeff Packman and Brazilian ethnomusicologist Carlos

Sandroni have written on the effects of UNESCO recognition and “safeguarding projects” on Bahian samba de roda. These scholars describe how these efforts offer more resources, opportunities, and visibility for “traditional” practices, but also participate in their objectification and “folklorization,” privilege some practitioners over others and so generate conflicts and “unfriendly” competition, and act to draw these practices into the local and global music industry and all the compromises that go with it (Sandroni 2010;

Packman 2012). In studies such as those of Packman, Sandroni, and in Sharp’s work on samba de coco (2014), it becomes clear that salvaguardismo and the commercialization of practices, as much as these forces seem to be in opposition, both participate in the

“folklorization” of popular culture. One facet of this broader phenomenon is the move of many practices to the stage context (Pereira and Leão 2016, 273–276), something which many “traditional” performers view with displeasure but recognize as a necessity of survival (whether economic or cultural). There is also growing critique of cultural appropriation in Brazil, which is also linked by critics to the objectification and reification of practices, such as occurred with the rhythms of maracatu nação’s (E. I. de Carvalho

2007).

It is not my intention to denounce the hybridity of Armorial or Manguebeat. Rather, my goal is to critique the way in which practices such as maracatu nação, the fusions of

Manguebeat, Armorial experiments, Recife rap and rock, and the relationships between them, are described, differentiated, and subtly but powerfully hierarchized. Counter to so many claims, hybridizations of the “local with the global” and “tradition with modernity” do not negate these categories and identities which are so fundamental to the ideologies of

319 modernism and nationalism, but in fact are invested in them. It can be demonstrated that the gestures made by “hybrid” and “traditional” artists, together with those that position themselves somewhere in between, are not so different as they superficially seem once they engage with local popular culture. All accept the stability of what is mutually understood to be “traditional,” see tradition as a mark of “authenticity,” agree on the necessity of

“approaching” these practices from an imagined “outside,” and enact a fusion of elements of these practices with others, construed as foreign or modern, to develop their own musical style. All likewise see themselves as performing some kind of “rescue” of these practices and the musical life of Recife in general. Meanwhile, those practitioners of “tradition” likewise have a history of change and continuity, and engage in debates about tradition and innovation, exercising their own agency within their ever-evolving social context.

6.3 Groups and Nations: Maracatu Nação Pernambuco or Maracatu Nação

Pernambuco?

It is common for individuals to qualify any comment regarding the group Maracatu

Nação Pernambuco with the phrase, “you know, but they aren’t really a nação.” It is equally common for comments to include, on the other hand, a recognition of the important role they played in bolstering interest in maracatu nação outside of the communities which performed it and a few interested academics. This interest included Recife’s middle classes and people from other parts of Brazil and the world—along with the complications and opportunities for appropriation such interest brings—but it also included many people from bairros populares that had no nação and who subsequently founded one. This was certainly the way Nação Pernambuco was characterized by ethnomusicologist Philip Galinsky over

320 twenty years ago (1999, 121–129)—the reason I was familiar with the dynamic between this group and the maracatu nação scene upon entering the field. Variously described during my encounters with maracatuzeiros as a grupo percussivo, a maracatu pára- folclórico, and as a maracatu estilizado, the most frequently repeated discourse tended to acknowledge the double-sided nature of Maracatu Nação Pernambuco’s role in maracatu nação history, recognizing both the pros and the cons of the visibility they created for the practice. However much this discourse recognized the ambiguity of the situation, I soon discovered that their position was even more ambiguous than it originally appeared: the group, unlike the grupos percussivos among which they are often counted, played a prominent and equal role in the First National Congress of Maracatu Nação in November of 2019, and its leaders consider it to be a nação, not a grupo percussivo. While I had come to Recife with the assumption that Maracatu Nação Pernambuco’s differentiation from the traditional nações was a stable and uncontested notion, the ambiguity of how they were defined by others—together with their own self-identification as a nação—lead me to frequently ask my interlocutors how they understood the distinction between a nação and the grupos percussivos that played the drums and rhythms of maracatu nação.

Grupos percussivos in Pernambuco began in the 1980s, when some members of the black community of Recife—inspired by the highly politicized “(re)-Africanization” of the famous carnaval of Salvador in the neighboring state of Bahia—began to found percussive groups based on the model of the Bahian afoxés and blocos afro, integrating Bahian influences into the percussive and rhythmic framework of maracatu nação (Crook 2001;

Metz 2008). Since this time, the grupos percussivos have exploded, far outnumbering the nações. References to tensions between the two types of group were frequent, though as

321 my field work would reveal, the relationship between them—including both how ambiguous cases were distinguished and the relationships existing between individual nações and grupos—was far more complicated to delineate. When I met with Fábio Sotero, the president of the Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco (Associação de

Maracatus Nação de Pernambuco, or AMANPE), he outlined his typology for classifying the various groups based in maracatu nação, part of how he determined which were legitimately nações and therefore could gain membership in AMANPE. Firstly, there were the “traditional” nações, with a full royal court and batuque (contingent of drummers); there were the maracatus estilizados or maracatus pára-folclóricos (“para-folkloric” maracatu—he gave the example of Maracatu Nação Pernambuco), who have a royal court and batuque but depart considerably from traditional practice and aesthetics in costumes, instrumentation, music, figures of the royal court, etc.; and finally the grupos percussivos, who have only the batuque and who mix any and all musical influences into a percussive framework based on the music of maracatu nação (Sotero 2019). While Sotero’s intermediate designation, maracatu pára-folclórico, was useful for understanding the variety of practices I witnessed, I did not encounter anyone else using that term. Rather, there simply existed a wide variance in where my various interlocutors would draw the line between a nação and a grupo percussivo. Furthermore, it seemed that the most important characteristic to determine nação status for most people was the question of religiosidade—meaning first and foremost a strong connection to the Afro-Brazilian religions of Xangô and Jurema. This was a connection that needed to be present among the leadership, but not all members of a nação necessarily need to be initiates or practitioners of Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religions, as long as they demonstrated respect for the

322 religious aspect of the practice and were willing to participate in the rituals connected with it. However, the distinction between a nação and a grupo percussivo based religiosidade did not fully resolve the ambiguity. As Fábio noted to me:

So sometimes they [the grupos percussivos] play afoxé, samba-reggae, o mangue, so... any instrument they like [...] in the way that they like, so... this is what is called a grupo percussivo. It doesn’t have those other characteristics. The grupo percussivo has grown in Brazil and abroad a great deal. You know? Now there are appearing some with a royal court as well. Actually, so—well, at the feet of the songs of our courts. And so, there is the discussion: is it maracatu nação as well? [...] Because they also sometimes have religiosidade! (Sotero 2019).

Fábio’s openness to the idea that such groups could be nações was, on the whole, unusual.

For most members of the nações of Recife and its surrounding municipalities, groups performing maracatu nação outside of Pernambuco, even if they had a royal court and a religious connection to a temple of Xangô or Jurema founded in the Brazilian diaspora, could never truly be nações.

On the other hand, as will be discussed further below, the other term he used for this intermediate designation—maracatu estilizado—was used frequently but almost always pejoratively towards another nação otherwise considered to be “legitimate” but thought to be straying too far from tradition in some way. Given the history of this term that I was simultaneously uncovering in the archives, I paid special attention to parsing out how my interlocutors understood this designation vis-a-vis the other various terms for performances practices based on the maracatu nação tradition.

One reason for the tension reported between the nações and the grupos percussivos was the wide difference between investment and return for the two types of group. José

Jorge de Carvalho (2016) argues that when urban and rural working-class Afro-Brazilian performance practices are commodified for the entertainment of the middle-classes and international tourists, they are often paid more to perform a vastly modified form of what

323 is often originally a sacred practice, in a dramatically truncated amount of time—what

Carvalho terms a “stillborn simulacrum” of Afro-Brazilian expressive culture. Within this dynamic, the middle-classes and tourists usually pay Afro-Brazilian performers more money for less time spent performing than the artists would require to feel they had fully realized their artistic goals—effectively paying them to both entertain and then be silent.

Although Carvalho primarily centers his critique around time—for example, folk dramas and rituals that would normally take many hours being condensed into twenty-minute presentations—the dynamic rings true within the maracatu nação scene despite the fact that performance time is not the primary dimension in which maracatu nação is reduced for commodification. Instead, many critiques of the grupos percussivos focus on the absence of religious responsibilities for these fully secular groups, which represents a reduction of time investments for performers rather than for audiences. In this way, some grupos percussivos become a means by which middle-class Brazilians and foreign visitors can have the experience of performing on alfaias, caixas, gonguês and abês without the temporal, emotional, and financial investment required to put an entire royal court on the street for carnaval or complete the ritual spiritual obligations of a nação—their religiosidade. However, as Karen Aguiar (the granddaughter of the late Mestre Afonso of

Maracatu Nação Leão Coroado, who has taken up the mantle of leading the nação’s batuque since his death) put it, “sometimes the grupos percussivos win much more backing than a nação of maracatu” (K. A. A. de Souza 2020), meaning backing from the state as well as local private financial support that often goes to other carnivalesque groups. This inequality in investment and return between the two types of group seems to be the seed of the tension that lingers between them.

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The flip side of this disparity of investment and return were issues of ownership, authorship, and stewardship, wherein the nações felt they went unacknowledged as the creators and guardians of maracatu nação in a Recife scene where the grupos percussivos were usually able to garner much more attention. Mestre Hugo of Nação do Maracatu Leão de Campina described his view of the relationship between the nações and the grupos percussivos in this way:

So, it’s like this. I don’t think it is a problem. I think that there is in truth a lack of information. I think that each one must have their place. Or—a grupo percussivo, that is something different, it is a grupo percussivo. Right? For a nação of maracatu, say— I am saying, a nação of maracatu of tradition, history, you know? That worships and sings for the ancestors. So, a Mestre of a grupo percussivo, he does this too, but he does not have the same obrigação [ritual obligations] that a nação has. For a nação to be able to parade on the streets, it needs to make the obrigação for its calungas, a religious obligation for its instruments, asking permission from the spirits to be able to come to the street. It is not only a question of showing up there in street and beginning the party. So there is all of this hierarchical religious question of protection and religiosidade [...] Whereas the grupo percussivo, it does not have this, this responsibility (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020).

Mestre Hugo saw no harm in the grupos percussivos using the music of maracatu nação as such, but rather saw it in the “lack of information” that could lead a tourist or other community outsider to mistake one for the other. This difference, of course, hinged on the religious obligations (obrigações) that a nação had to perform but which were absent from the practice of virtually all grupos percussivos. Mestre Hugo went on to ask me:

Hugo: Would you disrespect your father? Would you disrespect your mother? No. So, who is it that brings this tradition of baque virado to today? I am asking you, you: who is it that brings this tradition of baque virado to today?

Amy: Ah, it is the nações, right?

Hugo: Yeah. So if the nações did not exist, there wouldn’t exist baque virado, exist this history (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020).

Mestre Hugo brought much more intensity to these last comments, suggesting that this aspect of the relationship was what he found most troublesome: a lack of

325 acknowledgement, either from the grupos percussivos or the public at large, of the origins of maracatu de baque virado in the nações and their role as it’s guardians, those that had brought that practice into the present day.

Some grupos percussivos understood the importance of respect and reverence for the members of the nações and worked to cultivate positive relationships with a nação that would afford them the opportunity to learn, give them insight into what respectful use of maracatu de baque virado might look like, and potentially give both types of groups access to shared resources and opportunities. Karen of Leão Coroado described their relationship with the grupo percussivo Batadoni:

We are doing really awesome work with a grupo percussive called Batadoni, they are from over in the historical center of Olinda, they approached us, and we acted like their godfathers [apadrinhou eles], right? And so, some of the participants of the grupo percussivo participated in and joined our nação, but they also continue with their own work in the grupo percussivo. Exactly because of this, because of the responsibility, the foundation and everything. It is much less heavy, to carry a grupo percussivo rather than a nação of maracatu to play, a nação of maracatu, you need to prepare, you have certain protections, it is, you have a certain tradition, you know? Of which a grupo percussivo has none. So, for someone who wants to play maracatu without worrying, without this foundation, the grupo percussivo is there, and there isn’t only one there is a mountain of them. You know? And so, we try to create this point of contact with the grupos percussivos because I think it is awesome, you know? It is... to make music, uh, to use—yeah—to do something different there with the music of maracatu—its, outside of tradition, right? Take this here in order to transform it into something else and at the same time respect the source from which it comes. I think it is really awesome this work that the grupos percussivos are doing here in the city (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

Karen expressed sincere appreciation for the musical innovations that could take place within the grupos percussivos, which also created a space for people who wanted to play the music of maracatu nação to do so with less responsibility than that required by a nação.

It seemed that she found that use of maracatu nação to be quite positive for all involved when the grupo percussivo had a close relationship with a nação that could help teach them both the practice and its deeper spiritual meaning.

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It should be noted, as well, that there are many groups who occupy a position that is ambiguous both in terms of how they are defined (as a nação or a grupo) and how they enact notions responsibility and investment. Therefore, there are “legitimate” nações who are members of AMANPE or AMO (the Association of Maracatus of Olinda) or both, who perform the ritual obligations yet contain many middle-class members or engage in a great deal of aesthetic innovation and thus are at times interpellated as maracatu estilizado, maracatu para-folclórico, or even as a grupo percussivo. On the other hand, some groups and nações that operate in this ambiguous territory also frame the notion of responsibility as primarily social, de-emphasizing the centrality of religious obligations but making their headquarters and organization into a kind of community center for working-class young people with the goals of offering psychological empowerment, the teaching of teamwork and leadership skills, and the offering of modest but critical forms of mutual aid (such as providing meals and access to showers)—and may for this reason also be viewed by others as a grupo percussivo rather than a nação. Thus, while the broad contours of the dynamic that Carvalho critiques certainly do shape the relationship between the nações and other commodified ways of performing the percussive traditions of maracatu de baque virado, this dynamic maps only loosely onto the categories ranging between nação and grupo percussivo.

Maracatu Nação Pernambuco was founded by Bernardinho José da Silva Neto, who recounted the story to me at their sede in the historical center of Olinda one August evening after a rehearsal (Silva Neto 2019; see also P. A. Galinsky 1999, 121–129). Bernardinho grew up in the Recife neighborhood of Pina in a family with strong religious ties to the brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks, the most numerous of the Black

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Catholic Brotherhoods that proliferated throughout Brazil during slavery. Bernardinho had witnessed other practices linked to the Black Catholic Brotherhoods while travelling in

Brazil, such as the congado, and was inspired to found a group that performed maracatu nação informed by this side of its history. Already a working musician, Bernardinho stated that he wanted to base the group in popular culture but also “rethink maracatu, not only as a carnaval manifestation, but also as a popular opera” (Silva Neto 2019). For this reason, as well as thinking of Maracatu Nação Pernambuco as a nação of maracatu, Bernardinho also asserted that: “We are a congado, because when we were founded, we had as a reference point, we always had as a reference point the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks of Recife, and later that of Olinda” (Silva Neto 2019). Bernardinho and another group leader, Rubens Antunes, explained that their group and its performances had a religious component, but they did not want to restrict what religion that might be.

Bernardinho elaborated:

It is because in this case, our spiritual approach, it is collective [...] For me spirituality, it is about studying. Because religion is an option. There are people who are born, and they have a, they have a very particular spirit, very singular. You know? And in Brazil there is a lot of this, right? So that suddenly someone goes to Umbanda because it migrated to her and she follows it, others go to Jurema, right? Others for the culto of the orixás, others for the Rosários Pretos, here in Catholicism, others will be Evangelicals. Some even go as far as maracatu de Cristo [maracatu of Christ]. Here in our particular case, for me, it is very much a question of the Rosário, of my family. You know? I very much cherish the spiritual life, the interior life—look at me, I am getting emotional with this, it is so alive still, right? The tears are the source of it, you know? […] I pray a lot, I protect myself with a lot of prayer, with the… with prayer books…(Silva Neto 2019).

While telling me about this side of his life and his interest in maracatu nação, Bernardinho pulled a small Catholic prayer-book from his pocket and handed it to me to examine.

Bernardinho’s own investment in black Catholicism, as well as its historical ties with maracatu nação, seemed to be heartfelt and sincere. At the same time, he pointed out that their King was a babalorixá of Candomblé, just like many Kings and Queens of other

328 nações. He told me that as far as the Association of Maracatus of Olinda was concerned

(of which they are a member), they were a nação—a position consistent with that organization’s more expanded understanding of what constitutes maracatu nação, to be discussed further later in the chapter. Bernardinho likewise held an expansive understanding of the world of maracatu nação, saying to me: “For example, you are of the

Pernambuco-Americas Embassy, because you are from Canada [...] because [maracatu nação] already goes from the south to the north, right? The Pernambuco-Europe Embassy.

The Pernambuco-Americas Embassy. We are at home [together], right?” (Silva Neto

2019). Drawing on notions of Pan-American identity and the imagery of the “Ambassador” so prevalent in maracatu nação symbolism, Bernardinho made a case for including all those with links to maracatu nação, regardless of their religious identification or social background.

When I spoke to others in the maracatu nação and Recife music scene generally, there seemed to be a degree of recognition and appreciation for the significance of the group in bringing attention and opportunities to the world of maracatu nação, as well as the validity of the religious aspect of Maracatu Nação Pernambuco. Making clear he did not consider them to be the same as a nação, Mestre Hugo of Leão de Campina told me:

Nação Pernambuco, for me they are a group... that had the courage and created a really beautiful show and brought it to the world. Right? […] Which is work for the stage. And it is beautiful, it has—they also have a religious question, right? They have a religious question, but my understanding is that they are a stage show group. So, I don’t know. They are not, I didn’t know, I never thought that they were a nação. They must be a stage group, that is, that does beautiful work, spectacular […] there are more groups with Nação Pernambuco bringing this culture to the world (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020).

Mestre Hugo appreciated their performances and the role they played in recent maracatu nação history, without considering them to be a nação. I found this to be the case with

329 most people I spoke to—within the nações or otherwise—who did not see Maracatu Nação

Pernambuco as the same as the “traditional” nações. One of the key distinctions that Mestre

Hugo articulates is that they are a “grupo de palco” (a “stage show group”) who performed on stages as part of a show rather than parading at carnaval. This distinction is a bit more difficult to maintain nowadays, as many “traditional” nações now also perform on stages and in many other diverse contexts beyond the carnaval parades, and as Maracatu Nação

Pernambuco also parade with a cortejo during carnaval, albeit not in the context of the concursos. However, at the time of the founding of the group, their tendency to perform on stages would have set them apart from the nações who did so only rarely. It seems that some of this original context, as much as it has changed over the intervening decades, still remains in how members of the maracatu nação community understand the difference between a nação and an ambiguous group such as Maracatu Nação Pernambuco. As Karen of Leão Coroado explained it, “So, Nação Pernambuco was a stage show. Then it became a grupo percussivo. The name ‘Nação Pernambuco,’ it isn’t the ‘Nação’ of ‘Nação of

Maracatu. It is a figurative name. As if it were ‘Leão Coroado,’ they are ‘Nação

Pernambuco.’ It is not ‘Maracatu Nação Pernambuco,’ understand? (K. A. A. de Souza

2020).

6.4 The First Batuqueiras? A Confused Chronology

Alongside the development of an entirely new breed of groups performing maracatu de baque virado rhythms on maracatu de baque virado drums, the nações likewise began to undergo significant social changes. The two most discussed of these changes are the entrance of batuqueiros from “outside of the community” (“afora da

330 comunidade”)—meaning variously from the (implied white/light-skinned) middle-classes, other parts of Brazil or the world, or sometimes people from working-class neighborhoods but not linked to Xangô or Jurema—and the growing presence of female drummers among the ranks of batuqueiros. This last change in demographics was considered especially controversial: those who opposed it claimed that it was against tradition for women to play drums, especially tambor de pele—drums with “skins,” in this case, the alfaias—since it was also prohibited for women to do so in Xangô and Candomblé. However, while the notion that the prohibition on women drumming is tradition is widely accepted (and is certainly widespread within analogous Afro-diasporic practices), others were not convinced. As Fábio Sotero—president of AMANPE as well as of the nação Aurora

Africana—argued, “what they call tradition… etcetera. I think that they only, they only discovered tradition when they didn’t want to allow people to move forward” (Sotero

2019). There is a certain amount of historical evidence to this effect. As the US anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, noted in nearby Bahia state:

As in all African and African-derived cultures, drumming is for men. The taboo against the playing of drums by women, however, is not as strong in Bahia as elsewhere […] One Bahian woman, at least, is a very good drummer; but she is a distinct exception and would never presume to play at a rite unless in an emergency when no male drummer was available (Herskovits 1966a, 193).

While Herskovits’s reliability is of course colored by the biases he brought to his research as a white, male, US scholar, it seems safe to assume that there may have been a few singular women who played drums within the context of Bahian Candomblé. One of my interlocutors, Cristina Barbosa—an ethnomusicologist who was also among the first women to regularly perform as a drummer with Estrela Brilhante do Recife—also confirmed seeing photos in local archives of women playing drums in Candomblé in the

1940s. At the same time, given the high prevalence of this prohibition in the present-day

331 in many Afro-diasporic practices,5 it seems reasonable to imagine that there has long been some degree of restriction placed upon women playing drums, at least in practice if not in official “tradition” in the most dogmatic sense. In that case, Herskovits’ comment is interesting; his mention of a woman who knew how to play but would never do so in a ritual except in the case of an “emergency” suggests there was flexibility in the convention.

A woman might be capable of playing the drums for the deities but may not necessarily be the most desirable candidate for the role. With reference to the discussion of gender roles in Candomblé performance earlier in this dissertation, the condition of flexibility within a broader convention of drumming as a male-dominated activity serves to suggest that what is really at stake are notions of power and control. If the act of drumming is understood to be the highest seat of human control over the outcome of a ritual, then it makes sense that this role would be reserved for those who sat at the top of the social hierarchy of the religious community.

However, perhaps since very few women sought to challenge this arrangement until the 1990s, or perhaps for the reason that Fábio Sotero mentioned above, there are very few references in historical documents or published studies to the existence of a formal prohibition. Either way, in contemporary discourse in the maracatu nação scene, it is held that the rhythms, drumming conventions, and performance roles of the practice come directly from Afro-diasporic religious music; thus, for many it follows that if women are prohibited from playing the drums in Xangô, then they must also be in maracatu nação.

One nação, Estrela Brilhante do Igarassu (from the nearby municipality of Igarassu) still insists on maintaining the role of drumming as an exclusively male domain, along with

5 For a discussion of gender roles and prohibitions in Afro-Cuban Santería, for example, see Katherine Hagedorn (2001).

332 several other elements of their practice that are unique to that group and which they claim are more traditional than what is done by the nações of Recife, Olinda, and Jaboatão.

Nonetheless, today most nações permit women to play drums—in particular, the alfaias that are the subject of the prohibition—and perform on them at carnaval. For those nações that are most committed to notions of tradition, allowing women to play the drums requires a skillful navigation of Afro-Brazilian “theology.” While some use ritual divination methods to request permission from the deities (a common practice in Afro-Brazilian religion when undertaking any major decision), others avoid the issue of prohibition by using different drums. As Mestre Toinho of Almirante do Forte explained it to me, normally in Xangô and maracatu nação drums would be “blessed” and “fed” with various ritual obligations—it is these sacred drums that women are prohibited from playing.

However, if some or all of the drums used in maracatu nação—which despite its religious connections is also a practice that straddles the profane world of public performance and carnaval—are not made sacred in this way, then there is no harm in women playing them.6

Yet others explained that the rules of Xangô need not apply to maracatu nação, and that changing the practice in the latter need not require changing the practice of or affecting in any way the former. As Marcionilo Oliveira—spokesperson for the Associação dos

Maracatus de Olinda (AMO) and president of Maracatu Nação Maracambuco—put it, women can play, “As long as they do not corrupt the essence of maracatu, if she has a strong sense of rhythm, she is a good batuqueira—but she is not an ogan.7 Is it not so?”

(M. Oliveira 2020). Women were, in fact, ubiquitous as drummers among the nações I

6 See Hagedorn (2001) for a discussion of a similar work-around for gender prohibitions in Afro-Cuban Santería. 7 The title for the male drummers in Xangô or Candomblé ritual.

333 witnessed at the carnaval celebrations of 2020, even if their presence is still considered to be controversial.

The story of how this began varies depending on who tells it. The most common narrative is that the first women to perform on drums with a nação at carnaval were three women from Federal University of Pernambuco, Neide Alves, Virginia Barbosa and

Cristina Barbosa, the latter two being sisters (P. A. Galinsky 1999, 153), who began performing with Estrela Brilhante do Recife in the 1990s. They are usually framed as fair- skinned, middle-class outsiders to the maracatu nação community, such as in the discussion by ethnomusicologist Philip Galinsky (1999, 152–155), who focuses on the controversy their presence engendered. However, when I spoke with Cristina Barbosa about how gender factored into her experiences playing maracatu nação in the 1990s, she noted that there were already women in those communities who knew how to play the drums, though they would never do so in public performances. Barbosa was careful to specify, therefore, that the distinction held by her and her sister was that of the first women to perform on the street, meaning in public, at carnaval.

The narrative is yet further complicated, however: in a book of photographs in the library of the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, I found I photo of a young black woman performing on the alfaia at carnaval with Maracatu Leão Coroado—the caption reads:

“‘Batuqueiros’: highlighted, a female presence” (Araújo 1989, 101, 109). The caption suggests that women performing in this way was by no means common; however, the publication date of the book—1989—places this performance several years earlier than the involvement of Alves and the Barbosa sisters with Estrela Brilhante do Recife.8 In my

8 Mestre Walter of Maracatu Nação Raízes da África, formerly of Estrela Brilhante do Recife, also corroborated this fact in an interview with Philip Galinsky (1999, 153).

334 interview with them, Maracatu Nação Pernambuco also made a claim to the distinction of being the first nação to have female drummers since their founding, also in 1989 (Antunes

2019; Silva Neto 2019). This is a claim that is seconded by those that recognize the group’s self-identification as a nação, such as Marcionilo, the spokesperson for AMO (M. Oliveira

2020), but would not be recognized by those who do not recognize the group as a nação.

The coincidence of these two claims to being the first nação to welcome female drummers in the year 1989 underscores how the issue operates in the world of maracatu nação.

Maracatu Nação Pernambuco—a group that highly values notions of innovation and expansive inclusiveness—clearly consider the idea of being the first nação with women drummers to be a point of pride. On the other hand, the possibility of nação Leão Coroado, deeply identified with and invested in notions of tradition, being the first to include women as drummers—a status that documentation suggests they may hold—was never once mentioned to me during my research nor commented on in any text I encountered.

I met with Cristina Barbosa, one of the two sisters who were part of Estrela

Brilhante do Recife in the 1990s, at her office at the local SESC (a state-sponsored series of recreation and community centers that support local popular culture through funding, education, space and resources, and the organization events) where she worked as a producer. She recounted to me that when she was completing an undergraduate degree in music at the Federal University of Pernambuco, where she studied percussion, music education, and ethnomusicology, she and her sister Virginia—studying in a similar capacity—opted to together research and write a history and ethnography of Estrela

Brilhante for their honors thesis, each covering different eras of the nação’s history to create a larger narrative of the group (see M. C. Barbosa 2001; and V. Barbosa 2001).

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Barbosa’s research originally brought her to the revived version of Maracatu Elefante that was active in the 1980s into the early 90s, and she recalled that in this nação, there was a young woman that knew how to play all the drums and percussion instruments and who even led rehearsals, but never played at their public performances, performing as a dancer instead (M. C. Barbosa 2019). She told me that her own entrance into Estrela Brilhante do

Recife—and her role as a drummer—occurred at the behest of Mestre Walter, when he and

Dona Marivalda were reconstituting the group based on the nação Estrela Brilhante do

Campo Grande that had ceased activity in the 1960s. As will be discussed further below,

Mestre Walter has built a reputation as one of the great innovators of maracatu nação—a controversial distinction in a community that is deeply invested in ideas of tradition—and counts his inclusion of women in Estrela Brilhante as among those innovations (França

2020). As Mestre Walter recounted in an interview with Galinsky, the addition of the women gave the nação a special distinction and attracted media attention (P. A. Galinsky

1999, 153), unusual for a nação of maracatu at that time. More than a media stunt, however, Barbosa would remain a member of the nação for eleven years (M. C. Barbosa

2019).

I asked Barbosa about the landscape of the controversy surrounding her and her sister’s presence in Estrela Brilhante as batuqueiras. Barbosa explained that the controversy was due to the combined tension caused by their gender, their age, and their

“outsider” status, especially as representatives of the local intellectual establishment: “So, for this—now see—there are going to be criticisms, we heard criticisms from men from other maracatus, of our age as well, this issue of our age, they criticized us directly, to our faces [...] a critical view of researchers as well. Researchers, folklorists from other places

336 too” (M. C. Barbosa 2019). These three factors combined—their gender, age, and outsider status—contributed to resistance by some members of the community to their presence and activities in the nação. Barbosa elaborated:

There was the point of view of people who were, say, more traditional from the world of maracatu that were saying that a woman could not play. Right? And... the fact of us being people, women and people who were from outside of the community [...] Because women also did not play, right? The young women of the community did not play, they would dance. Or they would sing. When the young women of the community saw us doing this, they were like, ‘I can too.’ (M. C. Barbosa 2019).

Barbosa intimated that the fear was not only concerning their presence in and of itself, but how their presence might alter the expectations of women and girls from within the maracatu nação community, possibly encouraging them to pursue the role of drummer as well. Barbosa told me that within Estrela Brilhante, there was much less resistance to their presence as drummers, though they would sometimes encounter the belief that they were talented but could never play the way men play (M. C. Barbosa 2019)—a common discourse facing women in male-dominated musical spaces generally. She told me, however, that with time even this milder form of resistance eased, and eventually they were accepted and respected as batuqueiras.

I asked Barbosa about the common perception that “outsider” participants and visitors to the nações were simply riding a trend or engaging in cultural tourism, inserting themselves into this space and later forgetting about it. Without denying that this dynamic does often occur with visitors to the nações, Barbosa asserted plainly: “No, we—it was our life” (M. C. Barbosa 2019). Barbosa elaborated: “For me, it is a part of my history. My musical formation, my practice even, is Estrela Brilhante. Where I literally learned music,

I went to music school, right? But I actually learned music in Estrela Brilhante” (M. C.

Barbosa 2019).

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The roles that women presently and historically occupied in maracatu nação are usually framed with notions of “prohibition,” and the discussion has most frequently revolved around their capacity to play the alfaia. However, other instruments have also historically been cut off for women (particularly the iron bell known as the gonguê, also called the agogô in Leão Coroado), as well as for men, such as the beaded gourd shaker known as the abê, an instrument only added to the maracatu nação line-up during the

1980s (and still considered to be controversial by some more traditionalist groups). This last, in particular, is normally considered to be a strictly “feminine” instrument. Some

Mestres I interviewed framed this delineation as a question of aesthetics, drawing on heteronormative notions of gender to argue that the sensuous dance-like movement of the body involved in playing the instrument looked better performed by a woman. Most nações have the female performers on the abê accentuate this aspect of their performance by wearing a different uniform than the other percussionists, with long, flowing, and often flower-printed skirts and blouses that flutter with their movements. I had long assumed that the role of abê was not so much prohibited to men as it was perhaps seen as undesirable to most cis-identifying men. However, after witnessing the frequency of male-to-female cross-dressing in maracatu nação performance (including by straight, cis-identified men)—something rarely discussed in any academic literature on the subject—I suspect the gender roles surrounding music and dance might yet be more complicated, contingent both on context and other axes of the performer’s identity. When as I asked Mestre Hugo of

Leão de Campina about the issue of gender and drumming, he elaborated on the issue, tying together many of the threads that complicate this still controversial issue:

So. Let’s go! So, this—there is a tradition, but it is a tradition of the terreiro. Right? In the, in the...there are not women that play, right? The atabaque, in order to invoke the orixá, she has other roles. The thing is being that it is today, in the world which is

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totally modern, we cannot demand this of many people. There is a nação in which only men play. Well, no problem, it is the tradition of the nação. They have the right to maintain the tradition of women not playing the bombo. Of not playing in the batuque. Though in my nação I don’t want any problems, a woman can occupy any place that a man can, though men, here in my nação, men did not used to play abê. The abê, which is an instrument that only arrived a short time ago in maracatu. So, but for religious reasons men did not play abê, and today, in this year of 2020, we opened the doors for men to play abê. [...] Women in Leão de Campina, did not used to play the gonguê. Now, they do. Women can also play gonguê. So, it was permitted, as long as you have respect, take care, protect the religious question of that instrument. That is, or the entity. Or the nkisi.9 He understands that you are a person of respect and valor (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020).

While maintaining the validity of the choice of a nação to continue to reserve the role of drumming only for men, Mestre Hugo embraces an inclusive approach to his own nação, emphasizing to me that men, women, and queer members could participate in whatever capacity they chose. And consistent with many of the changes that have taken place in feminist discourse and practice over the preceding decades—moving towards more plural and nuanced understandings of gender identity and their intersection with the physically sexed body and sexual orientation, not to mention other facets of identity such as race, class, etc., when forming an intersectional feminist political analysis—Mestre Hugo, with the permission of the notoriously gender-bending deities of Xangô, sought to open space for men to perform in a role historically gendered feminine. In this way, while individuals on both sides of the debate may still see the issue of gender and performance roles in fairly binaried terms (men vs. women, prohibition vs. permission, tradition vs. progress), others are finding ways to open a more plural and inclusive space for individuals of any gender that still align with their understanding of tradition—and, with the will of the gods.

9 Mestre Hugo and the nação Leão de Campina are aligned with a minority lineage of Xangô based in Angolan and Bantu culture and identity (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020). The religious tradition uses Bantu words in their practice rather than Yorubá ones, such as the word nkisi for the deities they interact with, rather than the more common orixá. During our conversation, Mestre Hugo would switch between Bantu and the more common Yorubá terminologies to explain his concepts, as he did in the excerpt cited above.

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6.5 The Dirty Word Estilizado: Innovation and Survival

Sat., Nov. 16th, 2019

I'm at the percussion workshop of the First National Congress of Maracatu Nação, playing alfaia for the first time in ages. It’s a meeting of a few nações and other interested parties, such as myself, in the sede of one nação—in this case, it’s the celebrated yet controversial

Maracatu Nação Pernambuco. The nações and their Mestres are young, excellent teachers, and they seem to be enjoying this unusual opportunity to jam and share rhythms with members of other, often rival, nações. Yet, alongside their youthful energy and creativity,

I detect a slight defensive tone when these Mestres teach their versions of various key maracatu nação rhythms—ostensibly the entire purpose of the “meeting of nações” format of the workshop. The young 20-something Mestre of one nação said, “We stylize a lot of our baques. Because if we don’t stylize, we remain behind. If you don’t innovate, you will be left behind. [Porque se a gente não estilize, vai ficar atrás. Se não inova, vai ficar atrás].”

Another asserted, "People call it estilizado, but it isn’t. It’s just that each nação needs to have its own identity, it needs to distinguish itself. [Maracatu nação] is not only something for the carnaval competitions... [Não é só coisa pro concurso...]”. It seems like “estilizado” is a bit of a dirty word, at the same time that the act of stylization is ubiquitous in the maracatu nação scene. It appears to refer to almost anything—none of what I heard sounds stylized, and certainly not in comparison with “maracatu for solo guitar” or “maracatu for four voices.” Does it just refer to any kind of change or innovation?

The younger nações trace their lineage back to older/more prestigious ones. And they all borrow each other’s rhythms, add to them, and change them. The different sotaques can be distinguished by the most minute of details, at the same time as there is an

340 improvisational approach that means that the rhythms can also come out slightly different each time.10 How then to understand the critique embedded in the term “maracatu estilizado” in a scene where flawless adherence to tradition is so highly valorized, yet improvisation and innovation are both commonplace and considered necessary to be successful?

The many changes to the practice and social context of maracatu nação since the late

1980s has led to the use of the term maracatu estilizado to critique ways of performing the practice that are viewed by the speaker to be inauthentic or so removed from tradition as to be considered irresponsible. As discussed above, Fábio Sotero used the term, analogous with the term maracatu pára-folclórico, to describe a group that possessed both a batuque and a royal court, but departed considerably from traditional maracatu nação aesthetics and practice, did not possess a genuine religiosidade, and were therefore not a true nação

(Sotero 2019). However, the way I heard it used in practice was more often as a criticism of the choices of other nações otherwise seen as “legitimate”—at least officially so by their inclusion in one of the maracatu nação associations, AMANPE and AMO. While it might be tempting to see the critique as one used by older individuals to criticize younger ones, the term has been used by contemporaries of various generations to critique both each other and cross-generationally in both directions. Therefore, perspectives on the nature of maracatu estilizado, both on how to define it by concrete examples and how it is

(de)valued, have much more to do with an individual and their nação’s particular leaning towards either a modernist/innovative or traditionalist/preservationist emphasis, than it

10 See Climério de Oliveira Santos (2017, 88) for discussion of improvisation and rhythmic variation in maracatu nação percussion.

341 does with generational affiliations. However, in general there is nonetheless a bias towards viewing younger Mestres, batuqueiros, and nações as more likely to engage in the kind of innovation that leads to maracatu estilizado, even if this does not perfectly match the reality of the situation.

Interestingly, the few times I asked, no one linked this term with the early twentieth- century artist-folklorists who used it to describe their compositional innovations—so much so that I eventually stopped asking—though some were vaguely aware that such things had occurred. Rather, the term estilizado has been broadly used in Pernambucan culture in recent decades to refer to various local “traditional” practices transformed by new technologies and innovations in musical aesthetic into something considered by the speaker to be “tainted” or “adulterated” by modernity. Nonetheless, I strongly suspect that estilizado became one of the most common terms to express such a critique precisely because of the kinds of experiments described in this dissertation. As shown in previous chapters, the small group of artist-folklorists interested in maracatu nação established an intellectual genealogy that endured well into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Furthermore, though the compositions from the early twentieth century described as maracatu estilizado are not widely remembered or at least remarked upon by present day maracatuzeiros, the artist-folklorists who produced them are so frequently cited by practitioners of maracatu nação that their artistic and intellectual production, taken as a whole, cannot but have influenced the shape that the cultural politics of maracatu nação would take in later decades, in both their traditionalist and experimentalist strains.

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In one of my first field interviews, with Fábio Sotero, president of AMANPE and the nação Aurora Africana—together with the nação’s Mestre, Danilo Santos—Fábio and

Danilo explained in detail what they meant by the term maracatu estilizado:

Fábio: [Maracatu estilizado] is when they study and create a spectacle, with clothing that is very different from the format in which we work.

Danilo: More compact, right?

Fábio: More compact, without much appliqué, without much embroidery, without much luxury.

Danilo: More colorful.

Fábio: Right? And... without the hoop skirts... The characters very... hardly any. No, they only put a King and a Queen and the...

Danilo: The dama do paço...

Fábio: [...] Right? And the dama do paço. The dama do paço, and some twenty baianas, all the same, and the King and the Queen. That is maracatu estilizado. And the batuque really predominates, sometimes they come out with different outfits, more, more, you know, it’s...more costumed in an “Afro” style, etcetera... and sometimes even the instruments with characteristics that don’t go with ours.

Danilo: Or wind instruments... Nação Pernambuco, right? (D. M. dos Santos 2019; Sotero 2019).

For Sotero and Mestre Danilo, maracatu estilizado was a clear category, with a very specific set of aesthetics and practices that included simple, colorful costumes and the addition of wind instruments, that existed outside of the world of the nações—epitomized by the group Maracatu Nação Pernambuco. Yet elsewhere I asked Sotero about negative attitudes in the scene towards innovation and change; he spoke in favor of a more relaxed attitude towards innovation citing Maracatu Porto Rico, a nação that is viewed as both

“old,” prestigious, and “authentic,” and innovative: “in the 80s, Maracatu Porto Rico began to innovate. And they didn’t cease to be tradition. And no one complained. And today everyone does what they do” (Sotero 2019). Of course, according to some people that I

343 spoke to, people did complain about the changes Porto Rico made in the 1980s, referring to them then as maracatu estilizado, and I have heard other similarly tradition-oriented individuals make a similar critique of the group during the course of my fieldwork.

However, Sotero’s larger point still stands—together with the prestige and legitimacy that comes from their high profile and consistent success at the carnaval contests, many do see

Porto Rico as emblematic of maracatu nação authenticity. Younger nações and those with fewer resources may struggle more to walk that line, but it is possible for at least some nações to both engage in innovation while maintaining “legitimacy” in the eyes of the broader maracatu nação community and the public at large.

While Sotero maintained a distinction between maracatu estilizado and innovation within the nações, other members of the nações saw the two categories as overlapping. I asked Karen Aguiar of Leão Coroado (a nação revered as highly traditional) how she understood the term maracatu estilizado:

Maracatu estilizado. It’s... I don’t have much of an argument to bring to this, because as I told you I am only 20 years old, so...it doesn’t make any sense for me to speak about sixty years ago […] It’s... I imagine that all the maracatus were born in the same form. That they were born in one form or another, all together. And whoever didn’t found a maracatu in that epoch, founded another maracatu based on the maracatu that already existed. There are, then—there were the three oldest, right? Elefante, Estrela of Igarassu, and Leão Coroado. And from there, of those three, I believe that there arose the other nações. And I believe that a maracatu estilizado comes from innovation, right? Of the incorporation of new instruments and traditions from that which already happened. Leão Coroado has maintained the same instrumental formation and royal court since its founding. We always play with caixa de guerra, tarol, mineiro, agogô and tambor. Always [...] I think that this is what creates stylization […] I had never been to the Avenue to see the contests. And when I [finally] went I was like, “Look, it seems like a samba school!” There are alas [wings of dancers], separate, which in a traditional royal court there is not. So, I think that maracatu stylizes itself and applies it, right? Incorporating traditions from other cultures of other cultural manifestations, into maracatu. Patangome, the timbau, the djembe, an atabaque, an ala from a samba school, choreography, so... These things do not make up a part of the tradition of maracatu and nowadays they are being implemented [...] Musically speaking, I think it is incredible [...] But... in terms of the tradition of maracatu, I think that we are losing the essence [...] You know? Musically speaking,

344

it’s awesome, it’s incredible [...] But the essence of maracatu is getting lost. You know? I think that we have to be careful [...] That’s what it is. We have to see up to what point we can innovate (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

For Karen, maracatu estilizado centered precisely around innovation taking place within the nações. For Karen—as for many with a more traditionalist perspective—only a few nações (including her own, Leão Coroado) were considered traditional enough in their aesthetics and practice to avoid the term estilizado; most other nações, even those whose innovations had become standard practice, might be considered stylized. Without discounting the aesthetic value of these innovations, Karen saw the blurring of the line between maracatu nação and cultural practices from other places as threatening to the

“essence” of maracatu nação.

Others I spoke to saw the issue of change or deliberate innovation in maracatu nação tradition as somewhat inevitable, and not necessarily bad. Mestre Hugo of Leão de

Campina explained his understanding of the term to me:

So, because maracatu is not new, so therefore to the older people we have come to occupy maracatu only a little while ago, right? And maracatu is studying, you always have to study in order to bring another nação into today. But you are right, the older nações, they follow what the others who are even older did before. Understand? And we want the most traditional, in the case of the newer nações, we bring what we see from… the 1980s up to now. So, we bring a, a baque from the 80s. And this already has a lot of change. Those from the past, they wove many different baques, many baques that today no longer exist. You have to study in order to bring it here, in order to bring it to today (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020).

As an oral performance practice with only recent and still limited access to various forms of recording technology, in Mestre Hugo’s view newer nações can must base themselves upon the older ones—a historical memory that can only extend back a few decades. Mestre

Hugo notes the idea that in fact in the past the nações played a greater variety of rhythms that have now been forgotten. As a proponent of a lineage of Xangô and maracatu nação aligned with Angolan and Bantu culture and religion, a minority strain that has few

345 practitioners and even less historical documentation than the Nagô (or Yorubá) lineage,

Mestre Hugo’s nação is deeply invested in attempts to recuperate some of the elements of

Bantu culture that may have been lost. Mestre Hugo described to me the process by which his nação would reconstruct some of these lost rhythms by looking to other Bantu-based practices,11 also consulting the deities for confirmation on whether they were on the right track (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020). Mestre Hugo also saw the discourse of maracatu estilizado as one that discriminated against the more recently founded nações, saying: “So it’s like this, maracatu estilizado, for them, I like to say that they call estilizado we who are the new maracatus of only a young age, but I like to say the following, maracatu that— maracatu that is stylized, the maracatu that is renewed today, that is the traditional of another era” (H. L. C. de Oliveira 2020). Mestre Hugo viewed change and innovation as an inevitable and necessary part of maintaining maracatu nação tradition through the formation of new nações and the recuperation of lost practices.

Though my requests for definitions of maracatu estilizado very rarely received a consistent answer with respect to neither aesthetic nor social distinctions, one constant variable was that none of the members of the nações seemed to ever consider their own practice to be estilizado, though they might recognize that others viewed them as such. It also became clear that the term referred to something broader than simply designating

“outsider” or middle-class groups formed to give stage performances or that did not possess religiosidade. Rather, though few agreed on the specifics of what estilizado looked like and who engaged in it, all agreed that the term referred to excessive innovation taking place within nações that they otherwise considered to be legitimate, whether based on their

11 See Feldman (2006) for discussion of a similar approach in the Afro-Peruvian music scene.

346 community ties, genealogy, religiosidade, and or membership in either AMANPE or

AMO. Most also viewed the kinds of “inauthentic” innovation implied by the term maracatu estilizado as something undesirable, though some such as Mestre Hugo also felt the term was often misapplied to legitimate kinds of change. However, yet other practitioners I spoke to took pride in their innovations, even as they recognized the critique made by the term to be justified in other contexts.

Perhaps the most renowned innovator in maracatu nação’s recent history is Mestre

Walter, the leader of Maracatu Nação Raízes de África and former Mestre of the batuque of Estrela Brilhante do Recife—responsible for inviting the Barbosa sisters to participate in that group in the 1990s, among many other things. When I sat down to talk with Mestre

Walter in his tiny home in Águas Frias, before he permitted me to ask questions or begin recording, he looked at me with a side-long glance and asked, “Do you want to know about maracatu, or do you want to know about Mestre Walter?” I hedged my bets and replied that I would like to learn about both (which was the truth). Mestre Walter was more than familiar with dealing with academic researchers and had armed himself with many questions I needed to answer before we could proceed. He asked me how I had heard of him, and I responded that I knew of him through friends in Toronto who had studied with

Estrela Brilhante for several years, but that I had also read about him— “You are famous!”

I told him. I was struck with the strangeness of the gulf between the poverty in which he and most members of the nações lived and the world-wide renown that some of them had achieved, Mestre Walter being foremost among those. I was not being disingenuous or overly flattering when I called him famous—I had indeed read about him in academic

347 analyses as well as hearing many stories from my friends in Toronto, who made clear the great reverence and respect they had for the man.

Once we began talking, having made clear that he did not want to speak of his past projects, Mestre Walter told me in detail of the new nação he was leading. Based in a children’s group he had started around a decade earlier and more recently converted in to a nação, Raízes da África had won first place in the “Access Group” category that year, which would allow them to pass into the more prestigious category of “Special Group” next year. Despite his advanced years, Mestre Walter lead the small group of young drummers with an explosive energy, distinguishing them from the rest by including an instrument from the Southern region—the patangome—as a shaker. I asked Mestre Walter how he defined maracatu estilizado:

Look, what you asked, no one knows how to respond! Only Mestre Walter! Only Mestre Walter! Are you recording? Well then you are going to learn now. Because maracatu is divided in two. In everything, maracatu is divided into maracatu de baque virado and maracatu de baque solto [...] Maracatu has divided in two [...] There exists profane maracatu and religious maracatu. Right? Within maracatu there exist two types of drums: drums of maracatu and drums for maracatu [...] What is a drum of maracatu? A drum of maracatu is that which is prepared, made for maracatu. What is a drum for maracatu? It is that which is made in a factory to play around at carnaval. Anarchic maracatu. What is anarchic maracatu? It is that in which they go around playing and having fun without any interests whatsoever. They grab a, a... an estandarte [the flag, or “standard” of a nação] and dance as if they were in the ballet, they dance like this [demonstrates] [...] and they sing the toadas of maracatu! They sing them! (França 2020).

Mestre Walter’s distinction between maracatu nação and maracatu estilizado seemed to rest on the distinction between drums “of” and “for” maracatu—in other words, drums made by members of the nações with traditional materials and techniques and “fed” with the traditional ritual obligations, and those made in a factory and purchased for use at carnaval. Yet the reasoning of this distinction was not fully clear to me. Mestre Walter continued, describing how performers engaged with the drums for maracatu:

348

Mestre Walter: […] the guy gets a bottle of cachaça [sugarcane liquor] and makes of the little drum [...] and he smokes on top of, of, of the drums. Is that right? But he can do that because it is not a drum of maracatu, it is that it was made for maracatu. That group [grupo] that sings and plays the music of maracatu.

Amy: A grupo percussivo, is that right? It is this, no? So maracatu estilizado is a grupo percussivo?

Mestre Walter: […grupo] percussivo that plays the music of maracatu. So, you asked, is it prohibited? No. You can’t prohibit something that is of the world, of the people. As long as you have respect. Maracatu of the people made for the people. But you have respect. Right? (França 2020).

I had not in fact asked Mestre Walter if such use of the music of maracatu nação was

“prohibited,” though it was logical enough that he assumed I meant to, since most people used the term maracatu estilizado in a pejorative sense and he was used to being on the receiving end of that critique. Yet despite this assumption, Mestre Walter defended the profane use of drums for maracatu to play the music of maracatu, something that he nevertheless considered to be maracatu estilizado and outside of the purview of the nações.

Mestre Walter was credited with bringing many new elements into maracatu nação practice, including not only opening membership in his nação to include people from

“outside” of the community, such as the fair-skinned middle-classes, international tourists and ex-pats, and female drummers; Mestre Walter was also among the first to introduce the abê from Bahian afoxê as well as various musical devices from the repertoire of carnaval samba, such as dramatic rhythmic breaks between sections. Mestre Walter described his reasons for incorporating these changes:

every nação of maracatu, when it passed by, it was playing the same thing. If one passed by singing a toada, that one there, what he did, until the end, there in that moment, all would do the festival with… the public domain, yeah, that being, that toada that no one knows who owns it. And…the baque, literally, there existed three, in truth […] Of instruments, there only existed three (França 2020).

Mestre Walter’s reference to the public domain is telling; continuing to perform exclusively material that had been passed down through generations also forfeited the

349 possibility of not only the “economic” benefit of performing original material (these would still be few), but also relinquished what is called in copyright the “moral” right to be recognized as the author of something, regardless of who is benefitting economically. Of course, this way of conceiving of copyright, deeply informed by the development Western

European eighteenth-century capitalism, has been used throughout history by elite composers to exploit the work of popular, peasant, and working-class artists economically, as well as to erase the collective, relational aspects of creative production and establish notions of “individual genius” that help support (racialized, classed, colonial, etc.) hierarchies of cultural value. Instead, Mestre Walter sought to claim some of this sense of being an “owner” of what he was performing:

But when I assumed the same shirt,12 when I wore the shirt of maracatu, then I did there continue my vision. Of growing another baque in the lineage of the baques, right? And I composed a toada for maracatu and I created the little breaks [as paradinhas] within the maracatu. And from there we were growing, I was innovating. But this without leaving and without overtaking and without wounding […] Right? And what I changed, we can say it like this, it is here, the following: if no one had done what Mestre Walter had done, they would still be there two hundred kilometers distant still (França 2020).

For Mestre Walter, his innovations did not only help create an individual vision within the

“lineage” of maracatu nação—in his estimation, without departing from that tradition— but they also helped revitalize and sustain the practice as a whole. It is indeed true that many of Mestre Walter’s previous innovations have since become standard practice within the maracatu nação scene, lending credence to his interpretation.

As our conversation progressed, Mestre Walter invited me to take photos of various items around his home that spoke to his accomplishments. There was one shot in particular

12 A euphemism for entering the tradition of maracatu nação.

350 that he insisted I take, of him holding a certificate issued to him the previous year by the

Legislative Assembly of the State of Pernambuco. The certificate read:

The Legislative Assembly of the State of Pernambuco and the Deputy Wanderson Florêncio, Author of the motion 001801/2019, in homage To the Pernambucan Carnaval, awards this distinction to

Maestro Walter Ferreira de França

Mestre Walter held the certificate with pride as I snapped several photographs. As I finished, he asked me:

Mestre Walter: Do you know what—do you know what, can you imagine what this here is? You know, right? You don’t know? [indicating the word “Maestro”]

Amy: It is different than “Mestre,” right?

Mestre Walter: Because “Maestro” is that person that reads and writes in musical notation. The brothers [os hermaneque] around here, they don’t know how to do this. Are you understanding? (França 2020).

It wasn’t clear from our conversation whether the term “Maestro” was intentional on the part of the Legislative Assembly and Deputy Florêncio or a misspelling/misunderstanding of “Mestre”; either way, Mestre Walter clearly enjoyed the special distinction the term conferred. Throughout our conversation, Mestre Walter made it clear how important it was to him that his individual accomplishments be recognized, whether by ethnographers such as I, the state, or other members of the maracatu nação community. As he reiterated during the end of our visit, this was why he always asked, “Do you want to know about maracatu or Mestre Walter? Because they are different” (França 2020).

6.6 The Big and the Small, the Old and the New: Prestige and Maracatu Nação

Because of the tensions between differing interpretations of the meaning of notions such as religiosidade and maracatu estilizado, and the divergent understandings and

351 valuations of tradition and innovation, it is difficult to untangle the value system that accords more prestige to some nações over others. With some twenty-nine nações represented by AMANPE and ten by AMO (with some nações being members of both and others members of neither), many members of the maracatu nação scene describe the hierarchy of nações as problematic, pushing back against the tendency to refer to “big”

(grandes) and “small” (pequenas) nações by asserting that there is no such thing as a “small nação” (Sotero 2019). Others replace the language of size, a measure of a group’s stature as well as the size of their membership, with the terms “old” (antigas) and “young” (jovens) nações, where the “young” nações are generally assumed to have the lower status of a

“small nação.” Yet few that I spoke to seemed to be entirely disengaged with the value system that makes sometimes subtle distinctions about the status of a nação, its members, and their practices. Rather, though the hierarchy that emerges might be unfair, there was a significant difference in the status of a nação, with prestige playing a major role in visibility, access to resources, and opportunities available to a given nação.

The age of a nação is certainly one of the primary markers of status, and for this reason, many nações emphasize genealogical continuity and minimize the pauses and significant changes in leadership and membership over the years—the “intertextual gaps”

(Briggs and Bauman 1992) in their genealogies—in order to be able to claim a more ancient date of foundation and the legacy of a revered nação. This is not to say that such nações are “duping” the public; such strategizing is understandable given there is no special stipulation that a nação must remain under the direction of a single blood lineage to retain the same name (Sandroni 2007). Inevitably, disagreements over the right to “inherit” a

352 particularly prestigious nação occur. Older nações, regardless of their position on a spectrum between tradition and innovation, tend to possess a high status.

The size of the group, as implied by the terms “big” nações and “small” nações, also plays an important role. Groups with larger membership can put on more elaborate parades and have more resources for in-house labor, promotion, connections, and financial support. Those groups that put on more impressive parades tend to win the carnaval concursos more often, which not only adds to their prestige and visibility but comes with a cash reward that can further be invested in the next years’ performance.

Interestingly, it seems as if the nações that most frequently win the concursos are also those that are more open to innovating and “modernizing” their parades. Thus, in many ways, innovation in maracatu nação can be a great boon to the status of a nação, at least from the perspective of the concurso judges and the general public. On the other hand, so far the only two nações to have received special, individual patrimonial statuses—

Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante de Igarassu being given the status of “Living Patrimony of Pernambuco” in 2009 and Maracatu Nação Leão Coroado the same in 2006 as well as that of “National Immaterial Patrimony” in 2014 (“Salvaguarda Do Maracatu Leão

Coroado - Home” 2020)—also happen to be considered two of the oldest and most traditional. These statuses likewise come with greater visibility, prestige, opportunities, and state support and funding—factors which in certain respects drag these nações into

“modernity”. It is interesting to note that these two nações also refrain from participating in the concursos, where aesthetic innovation is valued more than within the maracatu nação community itself, and which are viewed by many to cheapen the practice, reducing it to competition and gearing performances towards pleasing judges. It could be said, then,

353 that in addition to age and size, existing at either extreme between tradition and innovation will give a nação a high status, especially if they are old, and to a lesser extent, have a large membership. While innovative nações tend to win the carnaval celebrations and their prizes more often, garnering a great deal of media attention, the most traditional nações, if they are of an old and “unbroken” lineage, are also most likely to win state support through special heritage designations.

Understanding the workings of prestige in the maracatu nação scene is important because the intense hierarchy and resulting competition between the nações is part of what gives critiques of estilizado their force; a performer of maracatu nação or an entire nação can quickly be cut down to size by the implication that it has in some way “sold out” or lost touch. However, I strongly suspect that a significant part of this reaction against innovation and perceived stylization also stems from a long legacy of the kinds of elite appropriations of maracatu nação described in previous chapters, perhaps even more so than from the recent innovations of a few individual Mestres. By using maracatu nação as the basis of their innovations, elite stylizers have made innovation a politically charged act, producing divisive reactions towards either end of the tradition-innovation spectrum among members of the nações. Once cultural and intellectual elites have used the transformation of maracatu nação as a means of maintaining cultural hegemony, it is hard to conceive of resistance to that hegemony without recourse to notions of tradition. Notions of resistance are a significant part of why my interlocutors valued the maintenance of tradition, seeing that continuity as taking place against the forces of oppression in which maracatu nação is undoubtedly embedded. However, as many pointed out to me, change may be inevitable—and innovation perhaps desirable—in a performance tradition that

354 must continue to appeal to new generations growing up in new cultural contexts in order to survive. The workings of prestige and their intersections with notions of tradition, which limits the human individuality of its adherents, and innovation, which is perceived as threatening to cultural solidarity and resistance to elite hegemony, have a significant impact on the prospects of newer nações, and through them the viability of maracatu nação as a practice. The dynamic outlined above was a significant reason for the formation of an association, AMANPE, to unite the nações of various sizes, advocate for them in interactions with Pernambuco’s state organizations for the funding, support, and management of local culture, while also supporting them in their individuality—their sotaque, or “accent”—to be described in greater detail in the following section.

6.7 The Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco (AMANPE)

Monday, February 24th, 2020

I went to see a presentation at Patio de São Pedro by Estrela Brilhante de Igarassu.

They were scheduled for a 30-minute slot, separate from all the Recife nações and not part of any competition. This lone nação from another nearby town had an ambiguous relationship to the others, adhering to an idiosyncratic style that was thought to be older and more traditional than that of all the rest, supposedly unchanged during their nearly two-century history. Also, more controversially, they were one of the few nações that refused to permit women to play drums. Not belonging to either AMANPE or AMO, participating in some events in Recife but not all (given the limitations of distance between their town, Igarassu, and Recife), they occupy a place both revered and excluded. Given my interest in the impact of so-called modernity on maracatu nação and especially the

355 gender issues it sparked, this nação was fascinating to me but not one I initially imagined

I would be spending much of my time around. Ironically, one of my initial contacts in the maracatu nação scene—a white Pernambucan friend who had spent several years living in

Toronto, where we had performed in various groups together—was now playing regularly with Estrela do Igarassu and often invited me to their events and rehearsals.

When I walked into the square, city workers were cleaning the square with soapy water. Most of the restaurants were still closed, but there were a few with their patio tables set up. I saw the drummers in their shirts of floral chitas, a traditional Northeastern fabric, hanging around by these tables. Before long, they were called to assemble—the drummers lined up in the area directly in front of the stage, and the court and dancers occupied most of the open space of the square. Besides the drummers, the group featured a King, Queen, the “slave” carrying the large parasol, the standard bearer, the damas dancing with the bonecas, and many, many, other damas do paço dancing on their own. They wore full skirts but without the hoops popular in the other nações. The costumes were not coordinated to a theme but there were a few that had the same design. The court of dancers were positioned randomly but equidistantly from one another and danced in place. Only the standard bearer danced in and around the damas, twirling the standard. The dancers did not coordinate their movements but danced the classic steps freely and independently. They played through five toadas to the diminutive afternoon audience and then finished.

After the presentation, I went to the nearby Pátio do Terço for the Noite dos

Tambores Silenciosos do Recife. I noticed the same friend and some others had taken a table in the restaurant, and I went and joined them, trying to keep up as I listened to a heated discussion about state support for culture—that was that it was inadequate, both in

356 terms of financial support and the inclusion of nações in events, such as the main stages of carnaval. Eventually the Mestre of Estrela do Igarassu joined, and my friend asked if he remembered me from my visit a few months earlier. He said he didn’t—too many people coming through the sede. Before long, the first nação—Sol Brilhante, from Olinda—began playing, opening the night. The stage was set up at the end of a long street, and the various nações were assembling up and down the street in order of their performance, so that the next in line, when it was their turn, would parade into the barricaded area, with the vocalists perhaps on the stage itself—it was hard to see as it eventually became quite crowded. The MC introduced the nações as they paraded in, and they would play for a while before parading out and down a side street. Sometimes the groups waiting would play too, and depending on where you stood, the competing baques would overlap. The nações were there with a full batuque and a reduced court, sometimes with caboclos de pena, always with King, Queen, “slave”, standard-bearer, and damas. As Sol Brilhante finished their presentation and paraded past me out of the barricaded area, one of the older damas stopped and came over to where I was standing, trying to get my attention.

She said, “Deus vai com você” (“God be with you/God is with you”) and then either “Você tem muito axé” or “Que você tem muito axé” (either stating that I possessed much axé, an

Afro-Brazilian spiritual term for positive life force, or wishing me much axé—much meaning hinges on that little easy to drop and easier to mishear “que”). She then kissed my hand, hugged me, drew a heart in the air, and continued on.

From there I went back out to find a good spot to watch the nações, and almost immediately ran into other friends from Toronto. I stopped to talk with them, and they invited me to come with them as they walked around visiting the different nações. I

357 continued to wander around, trying to make my way closer to the barricaded area where it had grown so crowded it was hard to see and almost impossible to move around. Later

I met up with some new friends I had made, mostly British tourists who were travelling in

Brazil extensively or visited Recife regularly and were very involved in maracatu nação.

When I was talking with one of them and I mentioned I was from Toronto, we discovered we knew a few people in common through the world of maracatu nação. He told me that their Brazilian academic friend’s research was on the “gentrification of maracatu nação”.

Later I saw him getting set up to play with one of the nações along with another of their friends. Slowly, I also realized I had seen some of them perform with a nação in Olinda a week prior.

The nações continued to present until just before midnight. By this time, I could see nothing of what was happening with the nações because it was incredibly crowded. At the stroke of midnight, the streetlights were shut off and fireworks set off. The thunderous drumming of maracatu nação, which had filled our sonic space for hours, dramatically fell silent. After the fireworks were over, I could hear what sounded like Afro-Brazilian religious music, with voice and atabaque, playing very relaxed, plaintive songs. After the ceremony had ended, the next nação in line started up to continue the presentations. I made my way out of the crowd and down the street where the next nações were waiting. I saw a few young damas lying on the ground within the circle of their large hoop skirts, exhausted while still waiting to perform. I passed the Mestre of Estrela Brilhante do Igarassu, who spontaneously gave me a big hug. I paused to watch Aurora Africana play a bit, with a few ganzeiros from Estrela Brilhante do Igarassu joining in. I continued on down the street, passing nação after nação, moving towards the main thoroughfare where I could eventually

358 catch a ride home. The waiting nações stretched down the street and down around the corner. It was clear the presentations would go on until the early morning.

AMANPE—the Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco—was founded in

2009 with the intention of organizing and giving representation to the nações, to be able to advocate for the nações collectively and individually with respect to the control exerted over carnaval by the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana and other state-funded organizations supporting local popular culture. Its first long-standing president was none other than Brazilian historian of maracatu nação, Ivaldo Marciano de França Lima— though it is now directed by Fábio Sotero, who is also the president of the nação Aurora

Africana (Sotero 2019). In line with Lima’s intellectual orientation, the organization embraces a discourse of inclusivity, attempting to foster greater tolerance for the many differing approaches to maracatu nação embraced by its members, and especially to advocate for and increase the visibility of those nações that are lesser-known or have fewer resources than the most famous (the “small” or “young” nações). However, as an advocate for the maracatu nação scene, the association is also at the helm of safeguarding projects

(such as the one workshopped during AMANPE’s inaugural national conference on maracatu nação in November of 2019) as well as the nuts and bolts task of determining which groups qualify for membership as “legitimate” nações (by no means uncomplicated!) in an effort to prevent potential co-optation of both the practice and the association by groups perhaps more appropriately understood as grupos percussivos.

Advocating for around twenty-nine nações at the time when I spoke with him, Sotero joked about the stresses of leading AMANPE:

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we held an election in 2014 which was when I took up leadership of the association [...] I have already done two elections, there were two elections, and... look! I am almost bald already! [...] But... it is a situation that is sometimes easy to deal with because, since we have a certain access to bureaucracy, to information, right? And at the same time it is complicated since there still exist many maracatus that do not have their administration updated (Sotero 2019).

In addition to advocacy and safe-guarding, AMANPE provides resources to the poorest nações, who often lack access to computers and other technology that would allow them to apply for state support. In so doing, AMANPE are able to support those “small” or

“young” nações who do not have individual statuses granted by the government or do not regularly win the carnaval contests, fostering the diversity and vitality those newer groups bring to the maracatu nação community.

Sotero described the process by which the association determined membership:

In the statute of... of AMANPE, it says that each agremiaç—each associate nação needs to solicit the office, affiliation, right? And then it gets passed by an assembly, a general meeting for the majority to decide yes or no. Although, this does not give a, a... a kind of freedom for whatever person or whatever agremiação or group to affiliate (Sotero 2019).

The acceptance of an applicant was ultimately decided by a vote among the associated nações of AMANPE, after reviewing their eligibility for membership. When I asked him to elaborate on this eligibility, Sotero replied that AMANPE was in fact in the process of determining exactly what criteria they would use to determine whether an applicant was in fact a nação:

There are many groups that say they are maracatu that are not maracatu. So, we are creating this, it is waiting only to be approved at the general meeting. From here I believe it will be a month, in the coming month. And so, these, these criteria are—the religious question must be fundamental in all of them. Right? That they are always in the tradition of... ah, if a maracatu arrives that has religiosidade, it is a maracatu nação (Sotero 2019).

Sotero did not list any further criteria, though I suspect there might be more that pertain to performance practice and community. However, consistent with the discourse of others I

360 spoke to, the possession of religiosidade was foremost in determining whether or not a group was a nação.

In this way, AMANPE was positioned to act as a powerful regulating force in the social relationships between those groups deemed to be nações and the rest of the city, including visiting international researchers such as myself. Perhaps the most significant testament to this capacity was an event organized by AMANPE which I attended in

November of 2019, the First National Congress of Maracatu Nação—a two-week long conference primarily attended by members of the nações (along with a few interested state functionaries and academics), the focus of which was to create a plan for the “safe- guarding” of maracatu nação since the practice received the special status of “Immaterial

Cultural Patrimony of Brazil” in 2014. This conference and the safe-guarding project will be the subject of the section that follows.

6.8 The First National Congress of Maracatu Nação

Anthropologist John Collins has described the ways in which residents of the infamous Pelourinho neighborhood in the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia

(Pernambuco’s major competitor in the Brazilian Northeast) appropriate the academic methods of ethnographic research, interrogation, and record keeping used by the state researchers sent to study them (Collins 2015). Collins’ interlocutors have manipulated both paper texts and spoken discourses to affect their personal fate in the face of indemnifications for the government “restoration” of Salvador’s historical red-light district, with some managing to either avoid eviction or secure greater compensation by strategically placing themselves within and manipulating the historical and ethnographic

361 narratives collected by said researchers, inscribing themselves into the archive in the process. Likewise, some Pelourinho residents strategically prefigure themselves as ethnographic Others in order to discomfit and therefore challenge public health educators sent to “correct” their habits and improve their self-esteem. Collins describes a contemporary ethnographic field in which the distinction between researcher and interlocutor—and their respective power to shape the official archive—are not only significantly blurred but now irrevocably intertwined.

Collins’ ethnographic insights—and similar ones put forth by Stephan Palmié regarding the discourses surrounding Lucumí and Yorubá Traditional Religion in Cuba and the United States (Palmié 2013)—shed light on the significance of Brazil’s First National

Conference of Maracatu Nação held in downtown Recife. Spearheaded by AMANPE with the support and participation of state organizations, the conference—formally titled the “1st

National Congresso of Maracatu Nação: The Challenges to and Perspectives on

Safeguarding”—brought together performers of maracatu nação, public functionaries and

NGOs working in culture, academics, and others interested in the practice to hold a series of discussion panels and other events open to the public and free of charge. The focus was not academic but rather practical, with the congresso designed to provide an opportunity for the workshopping of a detailed plan that would form the basis of an ongoing salvaguarda project (the Plano de Salvaguarda de Maracatu). The plan, and the conference meant to workshop it, were part of the ongoing developments put into action when maracatu nação was officially designated “Immaterial Cultural Patrimony of Brazil” in 2014 by the Consultative Council of Cultural Patrimony, part of the Institute of National

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Historical and Artistic Patrimony (IPHAN), itself a branch of the federal government linked with the Ministry of Tourism (Aquino 2014; IPHAN 2021).

The congresso was furthermore intended as an opportunity for interested parties to discuss the needs of the nações—especially the need for more opportunities to perform outside of the carnaval season and more options for financial support, whether through state funding or through further commercialization—while also working to acknowledge and foster tolerance for the diversity and differences between the various nações. While the panels primarily featured the leaders of nações—Mestres, Queens, and Presidents— together with public functionaries and the occasional academic researcher, the audience was comprised of primarily batuqueiros and other performers, many of them quite young.

The week included several discussion panels, the presentation of a documentary, a ceremony in honor of the Queens and the ancestors, and a series of workshops in which members of 3 or 4 nações (and a smattering of unaffiliated participants, myself included) met to teach one another the variations and arrangements that contributed to the sotaque

(accent) of their particular nação. Therefore, while open to and welcoming of the general public, the congress was primarily intended for the nações, with events designed either to foster more tolerance and less competition between them or provide an opportunity for communication between the nações and the institutions from which they draw or hope to draw state support.

One panel opened with a pre-composed list of demands, displayed to the panel and audience on a projector screen, forming the starting point for the following discussions wherein the panel and a few audience members debated the finer points of the demands:

Safeguarding Demands of Maracatu Nação § Training workshop for researchers in the Maracatus to record the memory and traditions of groups and organize collections and support their research

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§ Project Development Workshop for fundraising § Creative Economy Workshop/Mapping of production chains § Policies to support and encourage performances and presentations by Maracatu groups § Fostering the recording of CDs and DVDs of the groups § Creation of a Maracatu Nação Cultural Reference Center § Interventions with regards to situations of disrespect and intolerance § A specific statute/public notice for Maracatu Nação

Many of the demands addressed issues of financial support, access to opportunities and resources, documentation, and the education of the public. The nações were preoccupied with their economic survival, many citing the struggle for impoverished communities to amass the necessary resources to parade at carnaval —including the fashioning of elaborate costumes, props, and floats, the maintenance of instruments, and securing of rehearsal spaces—with inadequate financial support from the state’s various cultural organizations and few opportunities to earn money through performing or the investment in and sale of recordings and merchandise outside of the carnaval season.

However, the focus of the discussion that followed was the concern that maracatu nação could be co-opted, appropriated, or become overly commercialized and therefore lose what was referred to as its “essence”—usually with the implication that either maracatu nação might change so much aesthetically that it would become unrecognizable, or instead that it might lose its sacred quality. Comparisons with the history of samba were not infrequent, with one panel member declaring that he “didn’t want to see maracatu sold the way samba was, with bundas e mulatas.”13 These two concerns set up a central tension,

13 “With butts and mulattas.” The forms of samba associated with carnaval in Rio de Janeiro are infamous for their sexualized dance performances. In particular, this form of samba is associated with the mixed African and European mulata (the feminine form of the Brazilian term for “mulatto,” which is part of common parlance in Brazil and is not considered particularly pejorative or politically incorrect). The mulata has been a central Brazilian nationalist archetype since the late nineteenth century, functioning as an embodied representation of the ideology of mestiçagem, or racial mixing. The stereotype of the mulata is that of a young, sexually desirable mixed-race woman, often originating from the state of Bahia, who is particularly skilled at dancing samba. This stereotype has been much critiqued for the ways in which it objectifies women of color in Brazil and obscures histories of racialized sexual violence. Nonetheless, it is

364 since all opportunities to increase the economic resources of the nações opened up the opportunity for co-optation by the state (as occurred with samba under the Vargas regime in the 1930s) or the specter of “dilution” and potential offensive appropriations. While these issues were nothing new for maracatu nação, recent developments such as the granting of official national “Immaterial Cultural Patrimony” status and the creation of

National Maracatu Day (August 1) earlier that year brought new urgency to these fears.

Less marked was discussion of the possible negative impacts of salvaguarda itself—both the capacity for such a plan to contribute to the visibility and thus commercialization of maracatu nação, and the ways in which it would also open up the possibility for the co- optation of a regulating structure limiting the organic diversity and evolution of the practice from one generation to the next. This tension made it possible for the commonly used phrase ir pro museu (“to go to the museum”) to be used to denote the “death” of a nação and its relegation to a museum display, while at the same time a concerned performer of maracatu nação in the audience could in all sincerity underscore the inestimable value of the practice as a form of “living history” by stating that, “every maracatu is a museum, every maracatu is a social museum” (“todo maracatu é um museu, cada maracatu é um museu social”). While few present that day would likely have denied the necessity of some degree of innovation in maracatu nação practice to keep in step with a changing context, it also appeared broadly agreed upon that there was a limit to how much the practice could change, that there was a core “essence” to maracatu nação and that the immutability of this essence was an inherent good.

still active in shaping both the Brazilian cultural imagination and the bodily practices of Rio’s samba dancers, regardless of their individual phenotype (see the work of Pravaz 2000, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2012).

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The notion that maracatu nação possesses a core that needs protecting requires, of course, that boundaries be drawn around the practice and its performers, delineating what is and isn’t maracatu nação. This issue was perhaps once clearer in the early twentieth century when there were not yet grupos percussivos and the nações were delimited by the working-class, black, Xangô- and Jurema-practicing communities in which they were headquartered. However, gender, class, race, and even nationality, regional identity, or

“genealogy,” are no longer viable ways of delimiting the boundaries of what is and is not a legitimate nação, both due to the impracticability of doing so when the contemporary membership of many nações is now so diverse, and also because of the importance placed upon notions of “inclusivity” among the twenty-first-century liberal-leaning individuals who support the practice both in Brazil and elsewhere. My suspicion is that as other markers of identity that once delimited the boundaries of maracatu nação become unusable, religion—or what is often termed religiosidade, or “religiosity”—is increasingly drawn upon to be the defining characteristic of maracatu nação authenticity.

This was clear in the public conversations I witnessed at the congresso, where religiosidade (almost always referring to Xangô and Jurema) was cited as the force that

“keeps maracatu alive,” but where the religious nature of maracatu nação was also seen as under threat. Some expressed their concern over outsider appropriations through references to this religiosidade, saying, “it is necessary that the world recognizes the religious responsibility of maracatu”—seeing the world’s lack of awareness as leading to the conflation of the grupos percussivos with the nações, opening the door to possible further co-optation. Indeed, some saw the religiosidade of maracatu nação as already adulterated by European instruments—the primary logic, for example, of the much-

366 criticized adoption of the atabaque drum (central to the practice of Candomblé and Xangô) by Porto Rico (Metz 2008). Yet others insisted that “the black universe is very large,” encompassing many religious traditions, and stressed the necessity for more religious tolerance within the maracatu nação scene itself. Indeed, the religiosidade of maracatu nação does not refer solely to one religious tradition, but rather a family of Afro-Brazilian practices including several distinct lineages of Xangô and Jurema. The association of maracatu nação with Jurema, however, was not always acknowledged by some members of the maracatu nação community or academic researchers; a large part of the work of historian of maracatu nação Ivaldo Lima was to argue for an expanded understanding of the religious foundation of maracatu nação to include the practice (Lima 2008). By a similar logic, there is also a serious argument to be made for Africanized forms of

Catholicism (and, it seems, at least a tacit if not emphasized acceptance of it). The discussants at the congress seemed unified, however, in their rejection of a few rumored evangelical appropriations of maracatu nação.

The participants also exhibited an ambivalent relationship to the ubiquitous presence of academic researchers in the maracatu nação scene. While some welcomed the opportunity for cultural exchange and greater visibility, many felt they were treated unfairly. Yet most comments argued for the necessity of more contact with individual researchers, feeling they needed to spend more sustained time in the communities of the nações, observing their living conditions and day-to-day lives, to truly understand the context of maracatu nação. Speakers similarly spoke of past researchers—including

Ascenso Ferreira, Cesár Guerra-Peixe, and Katarina Real—in ambivalent terms, both critiquing the ways in which their texts were often considered more authoritative than the

367 knowledge and historical narratives of the practitioners themselves, but also frequently referring to those same texts to back up their own arguments regarding maracatu nação’s past. Perhaps most emblematically, the MC for the event opened the first day by reading an excerpt of a poem about maracatu nação by Ascenso Ferreira. As Stephan Palmié

(2013) has likewise described, the intellectual and popular fields—and the discourses they employ—cannot any longer be considered to exist in isolation from one another (if they ever really were). Rather, individuals and discourses pass between and cross-pollinate these fields of activity, so that members of working-class communities may appropriate academic discourses and texts (Collins 2015) in order to contest official academic narratives.

While the conference organized by AMANPE was focused primarily on the pragmatic concerns of salvaguarda and survival, AMANPE have also been able to make interventions in maracatu nação’s prospects through advocating for the nações vis-à-vis the state within specific performance contexts. The following section will examine the event that has come to be known as Tumaraca, the existence of which has been made possible through the advocacy of AMANPE.

6.9 Racial Politics and Spectacle at Tumaraca

Thursday, February 20th, 2020

I arrived in Recife Antigo at about 6:30pm, and there was already a large street party, with many nações lined up one after another. Most of them were just waiting, but every once and awhile one would strike up and play for a few minutes. I wandered around for a while, trying to understand how the groups were laid out on the streets. I walked up and

368 down the rows and rows of drummers, taking stock of which groups were present and snapping a few photos. As the night went on and I took stock of the nações present, it became clear that this was an event made up primarily of members of AMANPE. Slowly more and more of the groups began to play at the same time—a sonically disorienting but pleasurable experience. After maybe 30 minutes, the nações began to parade. I noticed while I was waiting, and during the parade itself, that this event framed maracatu nação as a musical practice rather than a broader carnaval practice. Sometimes a King or Queen were present, but without an extended court, and they tended towards “Afro”-style clothing and the ceremonial wear of Xangô rather than the European Baroque costumes worn at a full parade.

I followed the nações as they paraded towards Marco Zero, eventually turning a corner to reveal the main stage erected for carnaval. As we approached, I began to realize the scope of what was happening. The parade had begun with trumpet fanfare in the

European/US military tradition, played by five trumpeters standing on the street in front of one of the nações. As I moved with the parade out into the open space of Marco Zero, I could see that there were about seven trumpeters lined up on the massive stage, once again playing marches, some of which I recognized as hallmarks of the Western European canon.

With total ceremonial pomp, an MC (the same that made the opening remarks at the

Congresso) announced the nações as they arrived. The stage and the area in front of it where the nações were gathering were being filmed and broadcast to three giant monitors behind and to the sides of the stage. The drummers were entering a large, barricaded area just for them, guarded by intimidating looking police in riot gear, with the Mestres on a platform in front of the stage. Both the MC and Mestre Chacon of Porto Rico, who was

369 dressed in a red and green robe and feathered crown/headdress, said a few words, hyping up the audience. The MC celebrated the size of the group—thirteen nações and a large crowd—saying, “Muita gente aqui para bater tambor, muita gente aqui para mostrar que

Recife também é preto! (Lots of people here to beat the drum, lots of people here to show that Recife too is black!)”

The Afro-Brazilian choral group Voz Nagô sang a ceremonial opening, and then there were extended drum rolls while fireworks were set off. It felt like a stadium show. The crowd looked massive, though in reality I think there were more drummers than audience members. The nearby streets were still busy the whole time, with frevo and samba groups audible. Finally, the show began, featuring various Afro-Pernambucan acts. Though

“folklore”-focused, the aesthetic was open to pop influences if there was an Afro-Brazilian or local tie-in. I heard “Xangô” (Baden Powell’s “Afro-bossa-nova”), and Chico Science lyrics intoned by Voz Nagô: “Meu maracatu pesa uma tonelada! (My maracatu weighs a ton!).” The guests performed on stage while the many hundreds of drummers played the marcação rhythm and sometimes even some simple arrangements. This was often difficult to pull off with several Mestres leading together, but still powerful. The MC would punctuate the performance with statements about the intent of the event and the nature of maracatu nação:

“Para enegrecer o Marco Zero!” (“To blacken Marco Zero!”);

“O melodia do branco e o batuque do zulu...” (“The melody of the whites and the rhythms of the Zulu”);

“Pro Recife, e prá Angola também!” (“For Recife, and for Angola as well!”);

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“Somos todos o pele do mesmo tambor!” (“We are all the skin of the same drum!”)– stated once referring to the nações, but then re-stated in reference to the multi-racial audience as well. With the show over, the MC dismissed the groups one by one back into the street, where they went their separate ways, some continuing to play as they did so.

The above event, known as Tumaraca, left me bewildered but excited by the possibilities of reading such a large, public spectacle centered around maracatu nação. I was left thinking that if the opening of maracatu nação to a broader community has made possible tons of uncomfortable and at times cringe-worthy white, middle-class, and foreign appropriations, it has also made space for this—the large-scale cooperation of not only the

Metropolitan Area’s nações, but collaborations with other Afro-Pernambucan artists and the state to produce a powerful spectacle that pushes for black recognition in Recife. Yet the meaning of this event is double-sided, ambivalent—at once so exuberantly and unabashedly black, Afro-centric, and positioned politically against the establishment, yet producing a glittering spectacle to rival any other performed and consumed on Recife’s largest state-sponsored carnaval stage, that same establishment’s primary performative space during carnaval.

Reading the event became yet more complicated when I looked into its history.

Tumaraca only began under that name in 2018. Previously, the encontro de batuqueiros

(“meeting of maracatu nação drummers”) took place on the last Friday before Lent, the official opening of Recife’s carnava —an event created by internationally acclaimed black

Pernambucan percussionist Naná Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos had been personally directing the drummers at the opening of carnaval since 2002 until his death in 2016, and in so doing

371 was considered to be an important advocate for the nações and black culture to the broader public of Recife (Brasileiro 2018b). After his passing, the maracatu nação scene feared that the gains he had helped make—and especially the great televised spectacle on the

Friday night of carnaval weekend—would not fare well moving forward (Brasileiro 2016).

While the opening proceeded as usual at carnaval 2017, with Vasconcelos’ role being shared by the various Mestres, in 2018 their concerns proved justified when Pernambuco’s

Secretary of Culture, Leda Alves, announced that since the one-hundred-year anniversary of Pernambuco’s most iconic carnaval practice, frevo, would fall on the Friday of carnaval, the encounter would be moved to the Thursday before, claiming that “there was no need for discussion” of the matter (Brasileiro 2018c). Significantly, while frevo also has African and Afro-Brazilian roots, it does not read as “Afro-Brazilian” or “black” in the way that maracatu nação does in the social context of Recife—perhaps because it has been more subject to the same processes that were undergone by samba by which it moved from being a practice created by working-class black Brazilians to being broadened into Brazil’s

“national music.” In a similar fashion, frevo is often thought of as Pernambuco’s “most representative” genre, though admittedly not with quite the same degree of hegemony as samba. Either way, while the nações and AMANPE made their anger and disappointment over the change clear (Brasileiro 2018a), they came to negotiate a new arrangement with the state rather than re-instate the older event.

An article published by the local news outlet Diario de Pernambuco in January of

2018 features a statement by AMANPE, entitled “Fábio Sotero: A quinta é dos maracatus”

(“Fábio Sotero: Thursday belongs to the maracatus”) (AMANPE 2018). In the statement,

Sotero—on behalf of AMANPE—states that the association of nações “would like to make

372 clear some of the questions related to the change in the date of the presentation of the maracatus de baque virado in the Carnaval of Recife” (AMANPE 2018). They assert that the decision “was made collectively. Through a great deal of struggle, mobilization, and the union of the nações, African based traditions have guaranteed their autonomy”

(AMANPE 2018). In reference to their displacement by an event paying tribute to frevo, the statement asserts that “frevo, whose origins also stem from, among other influences, the movements of capoeira [an Afro-Brazilian mixture of martial arts and dance], a cultural manifestation representative of Pernambucan culture and of the force of black people and their ancestors, will be paid tribute to” (AMANPE 2018). Emphasizing the black and

African ancestry of frevo, the statement by AMANPE forecloses the attempt to evade the black-identified quality of Pernambucan popular culture perceived by many in the displacement of maracatu nação by an event focused on frevo. The statement concludes saying, “the brother rhythms, frevo and maracatu, will set off the revelry in a party in which neither cultural manifestation is more important than the other. Because the carnaval of

Recife is diverse, it is plural, it is joy and Union” (AMANPE 2018). The statement, delivered with both the militant firmness of social justice activist discourse and a reassuring message of ultimate unity, equality, and shared joy in the city’s carnaval, allowed the nações a means of shaping the narrative of the change in the event to one that acknowledged both the adversity faced by the practice and the agency that they exerted over the outcome. Since 2018, the “meeting of batuqueiros” has continued on the Thursday before carnaval under the name Tumaraca. Though now officially dubbed the official

“closing” of the pre-carnaval season, many members of the nações still defiantly refer to it as the “abertura” (“opening”) of the pre-Lenten festival (Brasileiro 2019, 2020).

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An event such as Tumaraca—and the advocacy provided by AMANPE that allowed it to happen—underscore the complicated social position of maracatu nação. Though still being met with police repression, discrimination, and lack of resources on the part of its practitioners, maracatu nação is also clearly intertwined with the state and embedded in the structure of “official” carnaval, beyond simply the under-attended concursos.

However, the back-story of Tumaraca demonstrates the degree to which this relationship with the state is strained and precarious. Though many nações could be criticized as

“selling out” for collaborating with Recife’s official state-managed carnaval, the benefits that they draw from this collaboration cannot be counted upon to last without a powerful advocate, such as someone with the stature and international acclaim of Naná Vasconcelos, or an organization such as AMANPE. This strained relationship with the state also underscores why some nações have preferred to unite under an alternative organization— the Association of Maracatus of Olinda, or “AMO”—that operates entirely apart from state agencies, to be discussed in greater detail in the following section.

6.10 The Association of Maracatus of Olinda (AMO)

As I spent more time observing and talking to people in the maracatu nação scene,

I became increasingly curious about the split I was perceiving between the nações of Recife and Olinda. When I met with the spokesperson for AMO (the Association of Maracatus of

Olinda)—Marcionilo Oliveira, also the president of Maracatu Nação Maracambuco—to investigate their reasons for maintaining a separate association dedicated to their own municipality, I began to understand how the scene there differed from that of Recife and the nações of AMANPE. To be sure, there was some overlap between the two

374 organizations—a few nações were members of both—but on the whole, they were comprised of a different set of members with a different mode of operation. I met

Marcionilo and Carine Sousa (producer for Maracatu Nação Maracambuco), who enthusiastically explained the organization’s mandate and functioning to me.

Marcionilo explained that despite the official name of “Association,” the organization was in fact a collective, without a president, in which all member groups— ten in total—were equal in contributions, responsibilities, leadership, and authority over decision making (the full name “Associação dos Maracatus de Olinda” has the advantage of the acronym “AMO,” which beside being easy to remember, also means “I love” in

Portuguese). Like the NGOs in Rio de Janeiro described by George Yúdice in Expediency of Culture (2003), who use the often-discriminated-against genre of carioca funk to work for social justice for residents of the impoverished favela communities, AMO viewed culture primarily as a means for social transformation, or what Marcionilo described as a projeto social (“social project”) (M. Oliveira 2020). In the collective’s biography—among the print materials they generously shared with me—AMO is described as being founded,

“with the mission of preserving, divulging, creating bridges and strengthening the work being developed by each maracatu participating in the group” (Associação dos Maracatus de Olinda (AMO) 2019). The biography continues: “In AMO we try to the maximum to gather the collective, as much in the execution of our activities as in the bureaucratic part in order that all walk together side by side for the sake of the culture of maracatu and of our state” (Associação dos Maracatus de Olinda (AMO) 2019). In this way, AMO’s work tends to emphasize the role of many nações (members of AMO or otherwise) as community centers and spaces for mutual aid in impoverished communities.

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Perhaps because of the collective’s primary emphasis on social justice through and for maracatu nação and its performers, it seems that AMO places far less emphasis on notions of tradition—especially the idea of religiosidade—than does AMANPE.

Alongside several nações that may be considered traditional—including the very traditional Maracatu Leão Coroado—AMO also represents groups that might be considered by others to be grupos percussivos or maracatus pára-folclóricos, but which self-identify as a nação, such as Maracatu Nação Pernambuco. In their biography, AMO lists short bios for each nação as well. Alongside the more conventional descriptions, others are framed in the language of social justice: “Maracatu Nação Badia, founded on

October 4th, 1995, a not-for-profit entity that is dedicated to the socio-educational, cultural, and recreational professionalization of youths and adults” (Associação dos Maracatus de

Olinda (AMO) 2019, bolded text in the original). Or take for example Marcionilo’s own nação: “Maracatu Nação Maracambuco, founded on June 9th, 1993. With the mission of divulging, preserving, and promoting Pernambucan culture, especially Maracatu de baque virado, using culture as a tool of social transformation and touristic activity” (Associação dos Maracatus de Olinda (AMO) 2019, bolded text in the original). Conceived of first as not-for-profits and tools of social transformation rather than nações in the most traditionalist sense, these groups existed in AMO alongside a highly venerated nação such as Maracatu Leão Coroado.

Unsurprisingly, then, when I asked about the term maracatu estilizado, Marcionilo espoused a very liberal understanding of what constituted maracatu nação tradition:

Marcionilo: I will start with the oldest nações. There are tourists in Porto Rico, right? There are.

Amy: Yes, I imagine so.

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Marcionilo: They have many! So, it is no longer traditional. Let’s say, estilizado. Don’t they have timbau? Don’t they have abê? That is no longer traditional. Traditional is gonguê, ganzá—ganzá, caixa. And the tambores [drums]. That’s it. None of the tambores are made of macaiba wood anymore because it was prohibited [...] Estilizado. Were the performers wearing costumes made with gold thread or silver thread? Today who has the money to get gold thread that costs three thousand reais14? Really, gold thread! So yeah, there is maracatu with reggae, with flashy lights [...] We have a calunga that is named Isabel de Rua Oliveira, she is here. And she was made in the traditional way. Am I estilizado or traditional? I am both (M. Oliveira 2020).

For Marcionilo, what others called estilizado were simply adaptions to the current social and economic realities in which maracatu nação exists. For him, all maracatu nação practice constituted both tradition and innovation/stylization.

Marcionilo and Maracambuco’s producer, Carine, explained that what was at the core of the discourse of estilizado was the belief among the older nações that any perceived estrangement from traditional understandings of religiosidade constituted a loss of authenticity. Carine felt, however, that their own spiritual obligation lay in the work of social transformation rather than traditional conceptions of religiosidade:

The difference is only this. Let’s say that some of the young maracatus, they have a, let’s say, they have a broader terreiro [Afro-Brazilian religious temple], because we cover a community that is religion […] So, our territory is larger, it is expanded because we work with the community. We are not obliged to be with a house, a terreiro, understand? (Sousa 2020).

For Carine, this sense of social justice as a kind of “broader terreiro” was a sentiment shared by many other nações of the same “generation” as theirs—nações that had been founded after the rise and influence of many twentieth-century social justice movements in Brazil. Marcionilo also felt, at the end of the day, that the innovation and vitality brought by younger members and more recently founded nações was critical to the survival of the practice as a whole: “the old ones need the new ones […] if you are too old […] you will go to the museum…” (M. Oliveira 2020).

14 The plural form of Brazil’s unit of monetary currency, the real.

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AMO avoided the state-managed events of carnaval organized by the municipal government of Recife and the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana, preferring to seek funding and support independently to organize events on their own terms. In particular,

AMO—consistent with the approach to carnaval in Olinda generally as distinct from that of Recife—avoided any involvement in the concursos of Recife, the annual competitions in which the nações paraded and vied for champion in one of several categories, and they did not try to replicate or reproduce them in any of their own events. For Marcionilo, this decision was about reducing the ethos of competition, rivalry, and reward which he felt fueled hierarchy and resentment among the nações involved. Many members of the nações that I spoke to—regardless of their location in Recife and Olinda, membership in

AMANPE or AMO, and involvement or lack thereof in the concursos—expressed a similar sentiment. Interestingly, the late Mestre of Maracatu Leão Coroado (a member of AMO),

Afonso Aguiar, expressed a different reason for avoiding the contests, beyond the ambivalence towards them often exhibited by his predecessor Luiz da França and AMO’s outright rejection:

After I took over Leão Coroado, in accordance with what I had discussed with Luiz [de França], in order to maintain it in the way that he left it, I came to verify that, if I was in the competitions (the official parade of the agremiações, on Guararapes Avenue), as he had participated, I would, automatically, me estilizar.15 I did not think I had the right to change, as the people were pleading to, because it would distort, it would finish with the tradition. In the epoch of Luiz, there weren’t these changes, but, when I arrived, they began to ask to add abês and other things. And, in order to avoid a trampling, I though it better to desist. I consulted the orixás and I received the endorsement to leave. I participate in the stage shows, like in Alto José do Pinho, in Casa Amarela, it’s only that I do not participate in the official parade, which is a competition (Afonso Aguiar cited in Câmara 2017, 56, square brackets in original citation, bolding added).

15 Ie., “stylize myself.”

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While those who embraced a less traditionalist approach to maracatu nação such as

Marcionilo opposed the hierarchy and resentment that contests engendered, Afonso Aguiar resisted them in the name of tradition, suggesting that the competitions—which come with cash rewards that are important factors in maintaining a nação’s viability—were a primary driver of “stylization.” The rejection of the concursos and the (admittedly insufficient) financial support they offer, of course, is made much easier with the special status as

“Immaterial Patrimony” enjoyed by Leão Coroado, which comes with a monthly government stipend. However, it is also made possible by the broader support of an inclusive organization such as AMO, which provides support and opportunities for the nações without having to submit to the regulating influence of the FCP or their contests which may drive stylization/innovation.

Marcionilo’s comment above about nações that are too old “going to the museum” is also telling. While many are sensitive to the criticism of being too innovative, there was also a commonly expressed fear of a nação “going to the museum,” meaning that it would cease functions and have to donate its instruments, costumes, props, and floats to a museum or university archive, perceived as a kind of death. This phrase was a direct and conscious reference to the “death” of Maracatu Elefante after the literal death of its Queen and president Dona Santa in the 1960s (Kubrusly 2007; Vasconcelos and Castro 2016), as well as several others in the decades since. Though this fate was understood to sometimes be caused by a lack of resources—a nação being too financially destitute to afford to continue its activities—it could equally be due to a lack of an appropriate successor for an aging or departed leader, a problem stemming ultimately from a dearth in new blood coming into the nações. It is therefore commonly assumed that in order to avoid “going to the museum,”

379 a nação needs to have a distinctive and compelling enough identity to attract funding— whether from state organs, independent financiers, the yearly concursos, or independent economic ventures such as ticket and CD sales—as well as to attract sufficient new membership to ensure the likelihood of an appropriate successor. While this is more of a concern for younger nações (older ones have the option of their identity lying precisely in the “purity” of their tradition) as they struggle to cultivate their own unique sotaque without being criticized as estilizado, older nações still face the threat of the possibility of “going to the museum.” The following section examines the work of the young batuqueira Karen

Aguiar, granddaughter of Afonso Aguiar, the late Mestre of the batuque of Leão Coroado, as she navigates notions of tradition and modernization while sharing the leadership of the nação with her mother in the absence of male successor.

6.11 “No Museum Will Ever Get Us”

Mon, Feb. 17th, 2020

Back in Olinda—I arrived in Recife from New Orleans yesterday—and I’m in the sítio histórico tonight for the Noite para os Tambores Silenciosos de Olinda. I watched as one of the oldest and most famous nações, Leão Coroado, opened the event. They had a small court—3 couples, including the King and Queen, the “slave” carrying the parasol, a standard bearer, and several damas de paço, the oldest carrying a calunga. (I would later meet some of the “lesser” noble couples of the court, who as it turns out were visiting from

Bristol and had a few friends closely linked with the maracatu nação scene—they had stepped in at the last minute to fill out positions in the royal court, a common occurrence since many nações are lacking in these performers). The court was in full costume,

380 accompanied by maybe 30 drummers. The event was taking place at the Quatro Cantos, a small intersection of two cobbled-stoned streets in the picturesque historical district of

Olinda. They had a small PA set up on the street for the puxadores—the vocalists who lead the call and response songs in a maracatu nação performance. There was a small crowd there, and some way through officials began to set up barricades to separate the crowd from the performers. The membership of Leão Coroado, in all roles, was multi-racial.

There were many children, including some drumming. There were also many women drumming, and the person in the role of Mestre was a young black woman with sleek braids dyed bright red, the color of the nação. The group paraded in slowly and then shifted to create two parallel lines—one of drummers, the others of members of the court—and danced or played in place, facing one another.

The young woman positioned herself in front of the microphone, leading the drummers both through song and the caixa slung from her waist. She sang out the first lines: “Este maracatu foi fundado em 1863” (“This maracatu was founded in 1863”) and the entire nação, drummers and court alike, sang the same line back. The young woman and her nação continued with the rest of the toada:

Known as Leão Coroado, with a past full of glories never undone It is the oldest maracatu, but no museum will ever get a hold of it We are a Nação Germã16, an African seed, given to us by father Xangô17

16 “Germã” is a common ethnonym in the maracatu nação lexical universe. Thought to literally mean “German” (though not resembling the primary Portuguese word for German, alemão), it is speculated to refer to many things, including perhaps an African ethnic group originating from a German-colonized area of Africa whose original ethnonym was replaced or forgotten (K. A. A. de Souza 2020). Non-African ethnonyms are not uncommon in the maracatu lyrical lexicon, with occasional references to Chinese, Portuguese, and Pernambucan royalty. 17 Fundação: Esse maracatu foi fundado em 1863/ Codinome (Com o nome) Leão Coroado, passado de glorias nunca se desfez/ É o maracatu mais antigo, pois nenhum museu nunca lhe acolheu/ Somos uma nação germã, a semente africana, pai Xangô nos deu.

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Right here is the crux of the problem I am trying to break down—so much prestige attached to being old, being traditional, but at the same time, no one wants to “go to the museum.”

How are the nações, both the “young” and the “old,” negotiating these tensions?

A week or two later I had the pleasure of interviewing the young woman I saw leading the batuqueiros of Leão Coroado that night. Karen Aguiar, the twenty-year-old granddaughter of the nação’s recently deceased Mestre Afonso, had participated in Leão since a child, first as a member of the court, and later as a percussionist, where she had learned to play all the instruments by a young age. Afonso Aguiar had been chosen as successor by the revered President and Mestre of Leão Coroado, Luiz de França, before his death in 1997 (Benjamin 2017; Câmara 2017), despite having no previous experience with maracatu nação. This decision was not a light one; reputedly, França had struggled to find an appropriate successor, but Aguiar was chosen because of his responsibility and integrity in addition to being a Xangô priest and talented musician. According to Isabelle

Câmara, França spent considerable time passing on his knowledge of maracatu nação and his wishes for how Aguiar was to lead Leão Coroado (Câmara 2017, 54). For this reason, though there had been no prior relationship between Aguiar and maracatu nação, the lineage of Leão Coroado was considered to be unbroken—a major point of pride for the over 150-year-old nação.

However, upon the death of Afonso Aguiar in 2018, no similar transfer of leadership had been made, and the task fell to Aguiar’s family, specifically his daughter in the role of president and his grand-daughter Karen leading the drummers of the batuque.

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Karen spoke to me about her experience over the last year or so leading the nação (along with her mother) after the death of her grandfather:

Amy: So, nowadays... you are acting as Mestre?

Karen: Yeah. Well, I do the work of the Mestre, right? What a Mestre must do, but I don’t title myself “Mestra.”

Amy: No.

Karen: I am only the regent [regente] of Leão while there is no Mestre.

Amy: Why don’t you want the title?

Karen: I think that to be Mestre, you need to have much more experience than I have, and also Leão Coroado doesn’t... the religiosidade, the tradition of Leão Coroado does not permit that a woman takes up the whistle18, only men (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

Referring to herself with the title of “regent,” borrowed straight out of European monarchic vocabulary (suggesting the implicit “royal” status and power of the Mestres, even if not technically part of the “royal court”), Karen had not opted to title herself as “Mestra,” explaining that because of her young age and gender to do so would be an affront to the tradition.

I had heard a similar sentiment expressed by other members of the nações— especially older Mestres—who felt that the young (predominantly) men leading some nações should not call themselves “Mestres.” “Young” in their estimation often included men over forty years old. In fact, Karen’s grandfather had expressed a similar sentiment about himself. Isabelle Câmara cites Afonso Aguiar as saying:

I never was from the culture of Carnaval, I am not a carnavalesco. My Carnaval is maracatu. They put me in this entanglement. I tell everyone: I was born into [Candomblé], I lived my entire life, and I never left my father’s side for one day, I had obligations, but I never left. He died, and I, by the determination of the orixás, was taking care of the house, but I don’t know the half of what he knew. So, today, I see people much younger than me, with less life experience, calling themselves ‘babalorixá’, ‘mestre’. I do not like to talk this way, because this title of mestre is

18 A euphemism for filling the role of Mestre.

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rather heavy. Luiz de França was a Mestre, who, until 1997, taught maracatu to all the groups that came up around here; a mestre is that person that goes to university to get a master’s degree to try and defend that thesis, right? I always say: ‘I am here with a little more experience than you, so, we are going to play, you are going to learn with me and I am going to learn with you” (Afonso Aguiar cited in Câmara 2017, 55, square brackets in original citation).

Afonso Aguiar’s humility with respect to his title and his relationship to the performers he led is striking and may be partly due to the circumstances through which he came to the practice form outside of the world of maracatu nação, as well as the general feeling among many than being the mestre do batuque (leader of the drummers) did not make one a

Mestre. In this context, with a grandfather who himself avoided taking up the title, it was natural that Karen felt uncomfortable doing so herself.

However, I found myself wondering how much of her hesitation concerned the possibility of backlash from more conservative members of the scene because of her gender. Karen did not appear to be seeking out a leadership position nor fueled by a desire for accomplishment and recognition so much as she seemed driven by a sense of duty and responsibility as well as a deep commitment to her nação:

Mestre Afonso passed away in April of 2018. And after him, we were without options—to choose a Mestre, you know? The whistle was offered to the men of the nação, but none of them wanted to take on the responsibility. And so as not to leave the maracatu to go to the museum I took up the whistle. I got the confirmation of the orixás, a jogo dos búzios in order to know, everything, and it was permitted that I put this maracatu on the street. In order to not go to the museum (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

As reluctant as she was to defy Leão Coroado’s more conservative adherence to tradition,

Karen did not hesitate to speak on the frustrations faced as a young woman in the maracatu nação scene:

It is very difficult! It... the men feel threatened, obviously, and so they try to attack us all the time, right? When they aren’t turning us into a joke in the baque, they are saying we are incapable. Either that I am not capable of playing, or that I play like nenhuma doida [roughly, “like a nutcase”], you know? (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

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Karen told me that these difficulties were only heightened by her new leadership role, to the point where some more conservative members of the nação had left rather than continue under the leadership of a woman. The situation undoubtedly was exacerbated by her young age—however, I had witnessed several other nações with very young male

Mestres, and while I am certain that they too suffered some resistance by older batuqueiros on account of their age, I got the feeling that this issue was particularly tricky for Karen.

The issue further piqued my curiosity about the toada I had witnessed a few weeks before which cited the date of foundation of the nação, staked a claim as the oldest, and defiantly asserted that Leão would never “go to the museum.” It seemed as if this was a moment when the issue of tradition was caught in a particularly fraught tension with the group’s future prospects. I asked Karen about the song, and she wrote out the lyrics for me from memory, later consulting the liner notes of the nação’s 2015 album liner notes for the composer credit and recording date. However, my questions were cut short as Karen discovered a discrepancy between the lyrics in the liner notes and the ones she was used to singing:

Karen: Mom, I just discovered that we have an incorrect toada!

Mother: What is it?

Karen: We are singing a toada wrong!

Mother: Which toada?

Karen: “Fundação!”

Mother: How so?

Karen: In the liner notes it is saying “Com o nome de Leão Coroado.”

Mother: It’s “codinome [codename],” no?

Karen: No, here it says “Com o nome”

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Amy: “Com o nome”...

Karen: So, I don’t know which is wrong, you always sang “codinome,” right?

Mother: Yep!

Karen: Yeah. There is a lot of this in maracatu, you know? Nowadays he isn’t alive anymore to say which is correct and which is wrong. So we get wrapped up a lot in these little things (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

An issue that for others might seem less consequential seemed to take on a special urgency—since Karen and her mother’s legitimacy as leaders was so under attack, it was all the more necessary that they be meticulous with respect to matters of tradition.

However, without the authority of their late Mestre, the accuracy of “com o nome” versus

“codinome”—a word that smacks of modernity both as an English borrowing and due to its suggestion of spy thriller intrigue—remained unresolved.

As I had made a habit of doing at all my recent interviews, I asked Karen her views on what was meant by the term maracatu estilizado and how she, personally, understood the issue of innovation in maracatu nação: “You know, musically speaking, it is massa

[awesome], incredible!” she said, giving examples of innovations made by Mestres many decades older than her. “It is incredible. But the essence of maracatu is getting lost. You know? I think we need to be careful. It’s like this. We need to see up to what point we can innovate” (K. A. A. de Souza 2020). Karen’s comments made it clear that attitudes towards stylization/innovation in maracatu nação were not simply generational. Karen elaborated on her perspectives on how she hoped maracatu nação would be able to navigate the changes lumped together under the umbrella “modernity”:

Like, the way it happens in Leão Coroado, you know? We maintain our essence, our tradition. Nowadays it is new management. My mother and I direct Leão Coroado in a different way than my grandfather directed it. We are doing a much more modern kind of management. You know? But the essence of Leão Coroado, the tradition of Leão Coroado, we maintain. I won’t tell you that we are going to continue to store a paper archive because it was done like this fifty years ago. If I can store a digital

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archive, I have the security to store a digital archive, I have the digital storage space, the memory, why wouldn’t I do this? Why wouldn’t I digitalize the material archive, the collection of Leão Coroado? Because Leão Coroado is 156 years old so we have to do things the way they did a hundred years ago? No, it’s not like this. I think that our methods need to be modernized. But the essence of maracatu, the tradition, has to stay safe (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

For Karen, modernizing meant taking advantage of new technologies but remaining faithful to the instruments, rhythms, lyrics, and roles maintained by her grandfather and previous generations. Yet I got the sense that her age—or rather, the way in which she was differently shaped by the social context of her life thus far as opposed to older generations—did leave her with some ambivalence about her stated position. She seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the musical innovation taking place in the maracatu nação scene and (not-so)-privately frustrated that some of the benefits of modernity—such as the push for gender equality—were not fully realized in her nação. I asked her to explain what she meant by the “essence” of maracatu nação:

Well, I think that the essence of Leão Coroado is to do maracatu, the nação, the community, it is the family of Leão Coroado in the way it was always done, right? I think the tradition is in getting everyone together to embroider a standard, it’s to gather everyone for a rehearsal, it is, the tradition is to make Leão’s clothing in the same way it was always made, it is to build the drums in the same way the Mestres always do it, it is to maintain the baque, you know? It is to maintain, truthfully, the traditions, maintain the toadas, maintain the cadence, it is to do Leão Coroado as it was done 150 years ago. This is not to ever say that I need to be 156 years old, or that I have to run the administrative procedures the way it was done 156 years ago. I think that the—the essence of maracatu is not—it is much more in bringing everyone together to play the drums than it is to organize the documentation (K. A. A. de Souza 2020).

For Karen, maracatu nação’s tradition and its “essence” were about maintaining the specific outward forms of their practice, yes, but they were also about fostering human connection between people in the nação community. With all this in mind, Karen’s choice to open the Noite para os Tambores Silenciosos de Olinda with “Fundação” might serve as a tacit reminder to more conservative maracatuzeiros of the imperative to keep the nação

387 together, performing on the street, and free of the museum, even if it requires an unconventional break with tradition.

6.12 Conclusion: The Weight of Maracatu

This chapter examines the ways in which the social legacy of the artists and intellectuals described in the preceding chapters remains present as a force shaping the world that performers of maracatu nação live in, their priorities, their concerns, and the ways they choose to navigate through them. In a context in which the borrowing of maracatu nação is ubiquitous and the presence of community “outsiders” in the nações commonplace, many members of the nações feel it necessary to defend the boundaries of their practice against intrusion, appropriation, and co-optation. To do so, in many cases they have borrowed the trappings of the intellectual world and cultural management, such as forming associations, organizing conferences, and maintaining their own archives. At the same time, however, the exigencies of avoiding “the museum” together with the imperative to avoid being viewed as maracatu estilizado meant that the nações have had to innovate to avoid death but resist innovation in order to avoid the loss of their

“essence”—another kind of loss of life, or loss of soul. Rather than arguing for the privileging of either end of the spectrum between tradition and innovation, in this chapter

I present a diversity of orientations to the two concepts, where all nações must engage in both to some degree in order to survive. Rather than seeing adherence to ideas of tradition as restrictive or the embrace of innovation as abetting in the broader co-optation of maracatu nação by the state and the culture industry (both arguments have a grain of truth), rather I argue that the tensions created by the legacy of elite intellectuals and artists to

388 represent, stylize, and archive the practice create a narrow space of viable action in which the nações can operate. While the privileging of tradition often suppresses the individual creativity and agency of performers of maracatu nação, rendering them into faceless

“culture bearers,” the privileging of innovation risks estrangement, commercialization, co- optation, and a perceived lack of solidarity with the rest of the maracatu nação community.

Both courses of action become politically charged, making the relationships between individual nações as well as between the nações and the city at large politically fraught.

The tension produced by this dynamic was palpable every time I entered into maracatu nação’s domain to conduct my research, and this despite the fact that everyone I interacted with was gracious, open, and welcoming. In the opening pages of this chapter, I cited the

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi lyric “my maracatu weights a ton!” (meu maracatu pesa uma tonelada!), a celebration of maracatu nação’s “heaviness” in the sense in which that word is understood by fans of rock and hip hop—an expression of the sonic capacity of loud, rhythmic, and deep bass tones to express power and oftentimes dissent and resistance to an oppressive society. However, as much as maracatu nação is heavy in this celebratory sense, and despite the joy and vibrancy exhibited in the performances I witnessed, at the same time maracatu nação was heavy, in many senses, with the weight of its history.

I do not mean for this to be a solely pessimistic narrative, however; rather, a sober evaluation of the current situation. Despite all, the nações are finding ways to advocate for their needs and promote tolerance among their community for the different approaches adopted towards notions of tradition and innovation; and at least some of the visitors who engage with the nações are hearing them. For now, the nações are finding ways to stay

389 grounded in their history yet cultivate their individual sotaque, all while steering clear of the museum.

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7.0 CONCLUSION: MARACATUS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

In the second season of the Brazilian television series 3%, produced by Netflix and running from 2016-2020, the impoverished majority population of a post-apocalyptic

Brazil stage a small carnaval celebration. Every year, the residents of the wasted inland society, known as the Continente, who have reached the age of twenty compete in a series of contests called the Processo, and the top three percent gain admittance to the elite offshore eco-bubble community known as the Maralto (the “High Sea”). The night before the Processo, the residents of the Continente gather to sing, dance, and drink in the streets, in a procissão (religious procession) kicked off by a local preacher of the futuristic descendant of Christian Evangelism. The costumes and props of the revelers take the

“stylized squalor” aesthetic of the show to an extreme: make-shift costumes, puppets, umbrellas, and hula hoops made from thick wire and scraps of garishly colored cloth and twine, with homemade fireworks exploding in the crumbling streets of a ruined mega-city.

The centerpiece of the procession is a percussion and dance troupe with a Queen.

The troupe is performed by the real-life São Paulo group Ilú Obá de Min; they are described as a carnaval bloco that “has as its basis work with African-matrix,1 Afro-Brazilian, and women’s cultures” with the objective of “maintaining and propagating black culture in

Brazil and the fortification of black women” (Ilú Obá De Min 2021). They are loosely structured in the form of an afoxê, a sort of Bahian analogue of maracatu nação featuring

1 “Matriz Africana”—a common expression in Brazil meaning African-based, African-descended, or African-influenced.

391 the rhythms of Bahian Candomblé performed on atabaque, agogô, and the beaded gourd called the afoxé in this tradition, but known as the abê in Pernambuco—indeed, the abê that was incorporated into some nações of maracatu after the growth of Bahian-style afoxês in Recife in the 1980s. Ilú Obá de Min, however, are not exactly an afoxê; though the rhythms they perform here are those of that practice, they are also shown playing the alfaias of maracatu nação. Significantly, all the drummers are women, many of them quite fair- skinned, who play intricate rhythmic patterns similar to the paradinhas and breques that were first pioneered in maracatu nação by Mestre Walter in the 1990s. The group also features dancers colorfully dressed as the orixás of Candomblé/Xangô—one of the few subtle cues in this series that the post-apocalyptic world we are witnessing is in fact the ruins of Brazil.

The Queen is played by the funk-and-soul-infused MPB artist Liniker, a black transwoman from São Paulo state. She is dressed in colorful tatters hung on a wire frame in a shape that evokes the Baroque gowns of the maracatu nação Queens, with a long, tiered lace shirt that she ruffles to show off her legs like Carmen Miranda. The Queen sings

“Preciso Me Encontrar,” a samba by the composer Cartola (1908-1980) that is an ode to individual independence and self-discovery:

Let me go I need to walk I am going off to search To laugh so as not to cry

Let me go I need to walk I am going off to search To smile so as not to cry

I want to watch the sun rise I want to see the waters of the rivers run To hear the birds sing I want to be born

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I want to live2

One of the main characters of the series, a white girl named Glória, eventually joins in on the rabeca, a fiddle descended from a Baroque era violin that is central to many rural popular music practices in Northeastern Brazil, and something that would rarely be performed with the Afro-Brazilian percussion practices featured in the procession.

Together, in the eclectic mix of a myriad of musical and carnaval traditions, the young people of the dilapidated city parade in celebration of the chance, however small, of leaving the poverty of the Continente for a better life on the Maralto, a privilege only a tiny minority of them will be granted.

The dystopian future depicted by 3% offers a scathing critique of Brazilian class inequality and the false promises of a corrupt meritocracy and follows a small group of rebels as they seek to bring down the Maralto and liberate their resources for the benefit of the majority. Yet in many ways, the series reproduces many discourses against which

Brazilian activists have long been militating; most especially, that Brazil does not suffer from racial prejudice and its only real social problem is socio-economic inequality. This explanation of Brazilian society has long been the apology of even those who do not fundamentally contest that inequality, and as black activists in Brazil have been pointing out for years, not only are the majority of the poor also the majority of people of visible

African descent, but middle-class black Brazilians also suffer their own forms of racial discrimination. 3% participates in this color-blind narrative: it presents a world that is supposedly both post-racial and post-gender yet more class divided than ever. The council

2 Deixe-me ir/ Preciso andar/ Vou por aí a procurar/ Rir pra não chorar/ Deixe-me ir/ Preciso andar/ Vou por aí a procurar/ Sorrir pra não chorar/ Quero assistir ao sol nascer/ Ver as águas dos rios correr/ Ouvir os pássaros cantar/ Eu quero nascer/ Quero viver (Angenor “Cartola” de Oliveira, 1908-1980).

393 that runs the Maralto is balanced in both race and gender, and with one member in particular embodying the figure of the mythic black matriarch of Brazilian nationalist myth; the head of the military is a white woman, as is the eventual hero of the series. One character, a white transwoman who passes the Processo, is as free to live her gender identity in the Maralto as she is in the Continente. Yet there are subtle hints that at least the legacy of race lives on in this post-apocalyptic world: while the most “well-to-do” family of the

Continente (who “always” pass their Processos) is white, their domestic servant—a rare privilege in the Continente but not-so-uncommon in Brazil—is black, as is the most underdog of characters, the wounded but rebellious young black woman, Joana. The social world of the series reveals anxieties about Brazil’s future—a world in which social justice and affirmative action have rendered race and gender inequality obsolete while the excesses of a corrupt class hierarchy have been allowed to run rampant and destroy the country for everyone.

The procession depicted in the episode also depicts the fears and anxieties of the nações for the prospects of their carnaval practice, though this is likely unintentional on the part of the show’s creators. In this distorted carnaval set in the distant future, myriad performance practices have melded together, alfaias lost in a Bahian afoxê performing urbane samba from Rio de Janeiro in a percussion troupe populated only by women, with a rural rabeca wandering in and out of the scene. Even more concerning, dancers dressed as orixás and a maracatu nação Queen parade in the name of the evangelical religion that worships a dyad known as the “Founding Couple” of the Maralto, bolstering the young people of the impoverished and marginalized Continente to pour their energy into the slim chance at a comfortable life that requires they abandon their homes and families. The

394 musical flavor and religiosidade of maracatu nação have been lost, and what remains has been put in service of the continued exploitation of the oppressed majority. This seems a fitting way to end this discussion of maracatu nação’s history, for after all, interest in history can never be divorced from concern for not only the present, but the future as well.

The future was implicit in all my conversations with my interlocutors from the nações, even if we mostly talked of the past and present.

This dissertation has sought to understand this past and how it animates the present.

Since the earliest traces in the historical record of practices that would find their way into maracatu nação, there has been a concern for making sense of the meeting of disparate cultures. From the Kongo sangamentos to the Afro-Brazilian coronation festivities, black forms of Catholicism have sought to envelop Christian ritual and iconography into African cosmologies, producing performances of African royalty in Brazil that were—and still are—both political and spiritual, a form of popular theater that also constitutes a means of preserving Afro-Brazilian historical memory. At the same time, Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religions have processed these relationships in a different way, forming a diverse set of spiritual practices that have become central to notions of Afro-Brazilian identity and resistance to European cultural and religious hegemony. The aesthetics and rituals of these two broad Afro-Brazilian spiritual lineages have contributed to the present day carnaval pageant maracatu nação, imbuing it with an intensity of significance referred to by its practitioners as religiosidade.

I have sought here to delineate the development of one particular translocal relationship—that between the nações of maracatu and the elite artists and intellectuals who visit them. Beginning with the Federação Carnavalesca Pernambucana and the artist-

395 folklorists affiliated with or incentivized by them, I examine the ways in which this small group of actors set out to create a new genre of mass-mediated urban popular music created through the stylization of maracatu nação, a genre that they hoped would supersede samba in national and international fame and popularity. Disseminating the genre through sheet music, radio, audio recordings, and film—reaching both the dance salons of Recife and the radio stations of the United States—figures such as Mário Mello and Waldemar de Oliveira debated the wisdom of introducing the stylized maracatus back into the repertoire of the working-class nações, though none of these projects would not turn out to be long-term successes.

The poet Ascenso Ferreira and the composer Capiba produced more stylized maracatus than perhaps any others, with songs such as “Eh! Uá! Calunga!” entering into the local popular music songbook. At the same time, they established enduring representations of maracatu nação that established some of the discursive paradigms through which the practice is understood today: firstly, that the primary value of maracatu nação lay in its rhythms, to the exclusion of all other elements; and secondly, that the practice’s primary emotional register is one of tragic melancholy and longing for the

African homeland, often articulated using the slavery-era term for trauma among the enslaved, banzo. In turn, this “aesthetics of tragedy” would become critical to the intellectual development of a young Ariano Suassuna, who as a young man working alongside Ferreira and Capiba for the 1951 publication Maracatu: É de Tororó, would begin to formulate many of the ideas that were central to the Movimento Armorial, playing a gargantuan role in the trajectory of Pernambucan cultural politics to this day. In particular, Suassuna would use the idea of banzo in the stylized maracatus of Capiba to

396 argue that the spirit of romanticism, an inherent quality of the “black Dionysian” expressed in the form of deep sadness, would propel the innovation necessary for the formation of regional or national culture—but only once this banzo, implicitly contagious, was embraced by local white, middle-class composers. Together, through writing and making art about and inspired by maracatu nação, this group of artists and intellectuals established the stylization of popular culture as a central mode of artistic production in Pernambuco.

Later researchers, still artists or performers in their own right, would act to shift the emphasis of these relationships, away from stylization towards ethnographic representation for its own sake, such as with the Brazilian composer and folklorist César Guerra-Peixe, and later towards the pesquisa-ação and ethnographic interventions of the US anthropologist Katarina Real. Guerra-Peixe, like figures such as Ferreira and Capiba before him, continued to conduct ethnographic research on popular culture, especially maracatu nação, to form the basis of música erudita compositions. From the Southeast and thus a non-Pernambucan, Guerra-Peixe’s compositions based on stylized popular culture, including maracatu nação, sought to “nationalize” what were otherwise considered to be regional practices. Guerra-Peixe’s discourse about his compositional process furthered the already established notion that the value of maracatu nação and other working-class Afro-

Brazilian musical practices lay in their rhythms, and that it was the job of the composer to

“elevate” the “raw material” by adding melody and harmony—operating under a clearly hierarchical logic. At the same time, Guerra-Peixe’s discourse also placed high emphasis on conducting research of a scholarly level of rigor, procuring a depth and breadth of ethnographic understanding that would allow him to produce stylized compositions that, while original, would also be “recognizable” by his interlocutors as representative of their

397 practice. Disparaging the stylized maracatus of Capiba, in his efforts to distinguish himself through his ethnographic expertise on maracatu nação Guerra-Peixe would establish ethnographic knowledge of popular culture as an imperative for local artists. His own text, the 1955 Maracatus do Recife, would be the first “scientific” monograph written about maracatu nação, a book that is still consulted by scholars and members of the nações alike to understand the practice. Through his academic and artistic activities regarding maracatu nação, Guerra-Peixe helped to establish an ethnographic-style relationship to popular culture as fundamental for Brazilian artists.

The US anthropologist Katarina Real, active in Recife in the 1950s and 60s, became a major figure in what was known as pesquisa-ação—a generation of activist-researchers who set themselves the task of protecting, preserving, and reviving popular culture viewed as perpetually under threat. During her time in Recife, Real acted as a kind of “undertaker,” helping to usher the materials of struggling nações into local museums to preserve their legacy, an intervention that foreclosed their ability to resume activity once they lost access to their instruments, costumes, and calungas. Likewise, in collaboration with the Xangô priest Eudes Chagas, Real helped to “revive” a defunct nação, wielding considerable influence over the aesthetic and spiritual choices that Chagas made while founding the nação Porto Rico do Oriente. During this time, she also came into possession of the calunga Dona Joventina of the nação Estrela Brilhante do Recife, when its president, Dona

Assunção, gave the sacred doll to Real in place of a local museum when the nação was forced to cease activities. Keeping the calunga with her in Santa Fe for nearly thirty years, when in 1996 she chose to repatriate Dona Joventina, Real set off a controversy between two nações that lay claim to the doll, in a debate that cut to the heart of notions of cultural

398 continuity, patrimony, and the ethics of ethnographic exchange. Real’s performative attempts to make the calunga “speak” at the donation ceremony underscores the ways in which Real’s self-insertion into maracatu nação history sought to control the history not only of her involvement in the practice but that very history itself. To this day, members of the nações of maracatu still remember the events surrounding Real, expressed in their anxieties over the worst imagined fate that could befall a nação— “going to the museum,” perceived as a kind of spiritual death.

The final chapter of this dissertation looks at how performers of maracatu nação grapple with the legacy of these events in the present day. In a context in which secular grupos percussivos that perform maracatu nação percussion outnumber the nações themselves, and white, female, and/or middle-class drummers now populate their own batuques, concerns over the demarcating of cultural boundaries are high. For most members of the nações and many others, the religious character of a group—its religiosidade—is the most important defining trait. However, perceived adherence to traditional aesthetics also plays a significant role in how individuals understand the gray areas between a grupo and a nação, placing significant boundaries around the amount of aesthetic innovation that a newer nação or younger Mestre can engage in. These boundaries are most often policed through the critique of maracatu estilizado, a kind of aesthetic

“selling-out” that can potentially encompass any kind of change to practice, no matter how small, but always seems to characterize someone else’s nação. The factors of age—or the capacity to establish continuity with former groups sharing the same name—together with either rigorous adherence to tradition or innovation dazzling enough that it can win over the maracatu nação community and the judges of the carnaval concursos—shape the

399 landscape of prestige among the nações, and therefore access to resources, putting some at risk of “going to the museum” despite the recent flourishing of the practice since the 1990s.

It is in this context that the maracatu nação community have appropriated some of the structures of academic knowledge production and professionalization to advocate for themselves against the state, the culture industry, and visiting researchers. Through associations such as AMANPE (The Association of Maracatus Nação of Pernambuco) and

AMO (The Associação of Maracatus of Olinda), the nações can advocate for themselves in situations of conflict with these other powerful cultural actors, as well as facilitate cooperation in a competitive scene and garner resources and opportunities to support

“smaller” nações and help prevent them from “going to the museum.” These activities have included organizing the first national conference on maracatu nação, where panels of maracatuzeiros debated with public functionaries and local academics over the future

“safeguarding” of the practice. Other nações, such as Leão Coroado, have maintained their emphasis on aesthetic traditionalism even as Karen, the young leader of the batuque who fell into the role after the death of her grandfather, works to create a digital archive for the group and establish her legitimacy as a musical leader. In a variety of ways, the nações have worked to reassert their own terms for the popular consumption and academic study of the practice. Like the heroes in the television series I discussed at the opening of this conclusion, who used what little resources they had to pull water out of the air and make food grow in a desert, the nações have marshalled their resources to become a powerful presence on Recife’s main carnaval stage even as they continue to live on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, parading as black Kings and Queens of a “nation in exile,” to the overwhelming sound of powerful, polyrhythmic drumming.

400

At the core of the argument of this dissertation is the desire to hold space for seemingly conflicting truths and make sense of their relationship: to see tradition as encompassing change, and innovation as resting upon tradition; to see maracatu nação as

African, Brazilian, and transnational; as black yet never divorced from the involvement of white actors; of seeing the long history of women’s transgression into male spaces, and their celebration as Queens, without losing sight of their continued exclusion; to recognize performers of maracatu nação as individuals who are nonetheless also members of aggrieved collectives; to recognize their agency without losing sight of the force of the inequalities that they live within; and to see human relationship as complicated, comprised of neither totalizing domination nor rosy conviviality. These are debates that have animated the disciplines of anthropology and history alike for decades, but in a sense, they are false debates, for they do not account for the ways in which these extremes work together to produce our reality, for better or worse. These poles, precisely in their oscillation between conflict and collaboration, have been a driving factor in the historical trajectory of the Afro-

Brazilian carnaval pageant known as maracatu nação.

Terça-Feira Gorda

Yesterday was terça-feira gorda—Fat Tuesday—the final day of carnaval, and there were still a few more maracatu nação presentations left to see. I went to the Praça do

Arsenal in Recife Antigo in the late afternoon to catch the cortejo of Maracatu Nação

Pernambuco. When I arrived, they were already assembled and playing, with a mid-sized crowd collected around them. They had a large group of batuqueiros and a small court.

Before long they began to parade through the streets of Recife Antigo, and I went with the

401 small group of spectators dancing along behind them. Eventually it began to rain, a sun- shower, but the nação and their fans continued on, as did I. The rain was refreshing after the intense and unusually sunny and dry carnaval season. I got out my umbrella and bounced it up and down like the pálios that shelter the King and Queen. We made a large loop through the Antigo as the lowering sun shone through the intermittent rain.

Occasionally we would pass other maracatu de baque virado groups—lesser-known groups that I did not recognize, certainly not numbering among the “legitimized” nações of

AMANPE and AMO, even if they paraded with a modest court and adhered to other tenets of the tradition. Most of the groups would stop playing and break ranks to let us pass. At one point, Nação Pernambuco opened to let another group pass by but continued playing the whole time. The cortejo continued until it ended once again at the Praça do Arsenal.

The members parted ways, posing for photos, and talking with family and friends.

From there, I made my way to see Estrela Brilhante do Recife perform at Marco Zero in the early evening. When I arrived at the walkway leading to central square, I found myself coming up behind a cortejo that I recognized from their costumes. Dona Marivalda and her King were in their ornate red finery, and the tall man holding the blue and white pálio was dressed like an Arab “mamluk” with white harem pants, turban, sash, and bare feet. The batuqueiros were playing out in front and between them and the Queen were several damas de paço and a standard bearer. I followed along behind Dona Marivalda, pausing every once and awhile on the way to the main stage while people took her photo.

She received this attention with a quiet grace, hardly changing her calm facial expression.

By this time, the sun had set, and it was fully dark. I grew emotional walking along there behind her, thinking about how much she is talked about in the maracatu nação scene in

402

Toronto, and the long and personal musical and intellectual journey that had culminated in this research, in this moment right now. If what was happening in Toronto could be considered part of a maracatu nação genealogy in any way, this was the matriarch of our line, and I enjoyed her calm, stately, graceful energy. Unlike her damas, and unlike many other Queens, she did not dance. Perhaps this was due to her age, but it made her seem all the more queenly.

The “fans” did not stop coming to take her picture or pose for one next to her. I took a few photos of people taking photos. When we reached Marco Zero, another group was still performing—an afoxé—and Estrela lined up on the street ready to take the stage once they were done. I continued to watch the court as they waited. A member of the event staff came to consult with Marivalda, as did the man who performed the baiana rica. I noticed that the drag baiana had many playing cards attached to the red and black frills of her skirt, a detail that had escaped me during Estrela’s official concurso parade a few nights earlier.

Finally, Estrela took the stage, and I found a spot to sit on some steps directly opposite on the other side of the square. They played for 20 minutes before the MC announced that the municipal government would pay homage to Dona Marivalda for her important role in local culture. It sounded like she was presented with an award or certificate, though I could not see what with the large crowd that separated me from the tiny figures on the massive stage. Soon the presentation finished and the nação descended the stage on the side of the waterfront, playing their way back to the central walkway. Once they left the stage area, I got up to watch and follow beside them. As the drummers passed me, I noticed for the first time that the t-shirts of the women had been modified to indicate

403 their gender. Shirts that had been made with the title “BATUQUEIRO” in big block letters on the back, had an extra line added by hand so that they now read “BATUQUEIRa.” It struck me as significant, and weirdly poignant, that after some 30 years of female drummers performing with this group, new t-shirts had not been made. Yet clearly, they had found a way around it, adapting the masculine uniforms to reflect the gender of its feminine-identified drummers.

I continued to follow the nação down the walkway, though at times, the sound of samba from the stage dominated my sonic field. At this point, most revelers seemed no longer interested in taking the Queen’s photo, some pushing roughly past her wide hoop skirts. The band continued to play for a while, but then ended without ceremony. Drummers and damas dispersed, and my own attention began to wander to the other carnivalesque sights and sounds that filled Recife’s downtown.

404

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BIOGRAPHY

Amy Katherine Medvick, originally from Toronto, ON, Canada, earned a BA with Honors in Jazz Studies from Toronto’s Humber College in partnership with Thompson Rivers

University in 2010, majoring in flute. She performed for many years as a flautist and vocalist in Toronto’s jazz, indie, and Brazilian music scene, including as the founder and lead vocalist of the Brazilian Tropicália tribute band Os Tropies, who released the Toronto

Arts Council funded album The Soil in 2016. Amy completed an MA in Ethnomusicology in 2015 from the University of Toronto, where she conducted research on grupos femininos in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada and Mitacs Inc. Her doctoral research in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, has been funded by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane, Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts Summer Merit program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship program. Amy has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences and was the recipient of the 2016 Stephen P. Jacobs

Paper Prize for Best Graduate Paper presented at Tulane’s Latin American Graduate

Organization Conference. During her time at Tulane, Amy has served as a teaching assistant for the Department of History and the Department of Music, and as a course instructor at the Stone Center, where she was honored with the 2018 William J. Griffith

Award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant in Latin American Studies. In addition to her research, Amy has performed regularly on flute and voice during her time in New Orleans.