AKC 8 Lecture Series: Spring Semester 2012 `Samba and beyond

AKC 8 T&RS Spring Term 2012 – La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues 15/03/2012
AKC 8 Lecture Series: Spring Semester 2012
‘Samba and beyond: Song, resistance and Afro-Brazilian Identities in the 20th Century’
David Treece
Whether in music, dance, festival or religion, the African and Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage is widely invoked as the
‘heart and soul’ of Brazil’s national-popular identity, both in official and non-official circles. Perhaps this ought to be
expected in a country where the population of African descent is second only to that of Nigeria. But while it is happy
to celebrate the genealogical ‘roots’ of its self-image in this way through an abstract, ahistorical ‘remembrance’ of
the African origins of the nation, Brazilian nationalism is far from comfortable with outright expressions of
autonomous black identity that might be suggestive of difference, dissent or discrimination. For a mainstream
culture and ideology whose cornerstone is the idea of the mestiço, the mixed-race personification of a successful
ethnic and social integration, the memory of slavery (abolished only in 1888 and thus still a relatively recent
memory) always threatens to act as a disturbing reminder of an unfinished history of racialised oppression and
struggle.
Black cultural memory therefore remains a contested territory, in which the symbols of black identity are the object
of competing forms of interpretation and representation: the heroic slave rebel, the sensual, seductive mulatta or
the wily, playful trickster; cultural tradition perceived as the property of the nation or as an expression of resistance;
Africa and the Diaspora: a distant, mythical past of ancestral origins or a living, fluid network of cultural affiliations
and identifications — a Black Atlantic — that overflow the boundaries of the nation and offer Afro-Brazilians multiple
ways of living and responding to the experience of modernity.
1. Roda, Batuque: the ring as resistance
How did the urban popular song-form called samba at the turn of the twentieth century bear the marks and
memories of the experience of slavery (abolished only in 1888) and of slave resistance? As cultural event, sacredsecular celebration, as ring-dance, rhythm and carnival music, samba sustained but also reinvented in a new urban
setting the structures of ritual and self-identification that enabled blacks to forge a space for themselves in the postAbolition era.
Escravidão (batuque by Grupo de Umbigada)
Slavery
Ave a Princesa Isabel
Ai que beleza
Negro comia no cocho
Agora come na mesa
Já acabou a escravidão
Ai que beleza
Negro comia no cocho
Agora come na mesa
Hail Princess Isabel
Oh how beautiful
Black man ate from the trough
Now he eats at the table
Slavery is no more
Oh how beautiful
Black man ate from the trough
Now he eats at the table
Trabalhar, eu não eu não
No trabalho, não tenho nada
Só tenho calo na mão
O meu patrão ficou rico
[E eu fiquei sem tostão]
E nós ficamos na mão
Work? not me, not me
At work, there’s nothing that’s mine
All I’ve got is a callous on my hand
My boss got rich
[And I was left without a penny]
And we were cheated
AKC 8 T&RS Spring Term 2012 – La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues 15/03/2012
Caruru
Callalou
(samba, João Tomaz/Ernesto dos Santos/ Oito Batutas, 1923)
O que me faz soluçá - minha nêga
é o caruru com quiabo - minha nêga
É o vatapá apimentado - minha nêga
É o mungunzá abaianado - minha nêga
Desce, mulata! Rebola danada!
What makes me sob - my black woman
is callalou with okra - my black woman
Is peppered vatapá stew - my black woman
Is cornmeal pudding à la Bahia - my
[black woman
Get on down, mulatta! Swing those hips!
Quando você der outra festa
não me convide mais não
porque da outra o que me resta
é uma dor no coração
Estou todo dolorido
Que falta me faz uma mulata aqui, homem!
Ai, minha vida!
When you have another party
don’t invite me any more
‘cause from the last one all that’s left me
is a pain in my heart
I’m hurting all over
I could really do with a mulatta, man!
Oh, this life of mine!
2. Hustling v Heritage
Under the populist regime of Getúlio Vargas (1930-45), samba was raised to the official status of the nationalpopular music. As an expression of mestiço nationalism, embodied in the figure of the mulatto woman, black
tradition was incorporated into the idea of an Afro-Brazilian culture, celebrated folklorically as the national heritage
in the thematic samba-enredos of Carnival and in the spectacular, panegyric samba-exaltação of Ary Barroso and
Carmen Miranda. At the same time, though, individual samba composers contested the official values of the regime
– the family, hard work and a complacent nationalism – by chronicling life as lived in Rio’s poorer neighbourhoods,
and by celebrating the figure of the malandro or hustler. The ambivalent ethos of the malandro drew upon a deep
current of African religious philosophy, the memory of the trickster Exu, as a response to the contradictory position
that blacks found themselves in, in a modern, urbanised but still racist society.
Lenço no pescoço (Wilson Batista, 1933)
A scarf around my neck
Meu chapéu do lado
Tamanco arrastando
Lenço no pescoço
Navalha no bolso
Eu passo gingando
Provoco e desafio
Eu tenho orgulho
De ser tão vadio
With my hat askew
Dragging my clogs
A scarf around my neck
A razor in my pocket
I saunter along
I provoke and challenge
I’m proud
I’m such a loafer
Sei que eles falam
deste meu proceder
Eu vejo quem trabalha
andar no miserê
eu sou vadio
porque tive inclinação
eu me lembro, era criança
tirava samba-canção
Comigo não
Eu quero ver quem tem razão
I know they’re always talking
about this way that I go on
I see people working
and living in misery
I’m a loafer
because that’s what I felt like being
I remember when I was a kid
I used to make up samba songs
Don’t mess with me
I wanna see who’s right or wrong
Meu chapéu do lado . . .
With my hat askew . . .
AKC 8 T&RS Spring Term 2012 – La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues 15/03/2012
E eles tocam
e você canta
eu não dou
And they play
and you sing
and I don’t care
3. Beyond samba: black identities and resistance since the 1960s
In the second half of the century popular songwriting reinvented black identity against the background of the samba
tradition, both by a conscious identification with the historical memory of black resistance inside Brazil, and with
black cultural traditions elsewhere in the Diaspora:
(a) In the early 1960s, in the context of a left-wing cultural movement of protest, samba and bossa nova became
politicised and re-africanised, by black and white musicians, giving rise to the afro-samba and protest songs of Baden
Powell, Edu Lobo and Zé Kéti.
(b) From the 1970s, Brazil’s northeastern ‘black capital’, Salvador da Bahia, rediscovered the religious and secular
traditions of carnival-going from early in the century; at the same time it developed a new form of black cultural
consciousness by identifying closely with the traditions of the black Caribbean, to produce the phenomena of axé
music and samba-reggae.
(c) Centred in the black suburbs of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but spreading to other cities, the soul movement
known as funk spawned its own homegrown version of rap. Although it took its lead from the US, the linguistic and
musical inventiveness of Brazilian rap has tapped into a local and longstanding seam of black musical creativity,
rooting the present-day experience of prison inmates and shanty-town youths in a startling different interpretation
of their history.
“Opinião” (Zé Kéti, 1964)
“Opinion”
Podem me prender, podem me bater
Podem até deixar-me sem comer
Que eu não mudo de opinião
Daqui do morro eu não saio não
Daqui do morro eu não saio não
Se não tem água, eu furo no poço
Se não tem carne, eu compro osso
E ponho na sopa, e deixo andar
Deixo andar, deixo andar
Fale de mim quem quiser falar
Aqui eu não pago aluguel
Se eu morrer amanhã, seu doutor
Estou pertinho do céu
They can imprison me, and beat me
They can even leave me to starve
For I won’t change my mind
I won’t leave the morro
I won’t leave the morro
If there’s no water, I’ll drill the well
If there’s no meat, I’ll buy bones
Put them in the soup, and let it go
Let it go, let it go
Whoever wants to talk about me can talk
Here I don’t pay no rent
If I die tomorrow, mister
I’ll be right next to heaven
Isso aqui também é nosso / All this here is ours too, by P.MC & Dj Deco Murphy (1997)
I’m gonna tell another part of the story
I don’t know if it’ll make you laugh or weep
But I know that the account that follows
Could only be told by someone who’s felt on her skin
The deep pain, the pain it’s impossible to escape
Put there in a way that’s strategically prepared
Cautiously calculated, coldly executed
That’s why we kept there for a long time
Silent and imprisoned by the limits of our thoughts
If it were down to some all this would never change
For them it makes no odds, but
We’re the ones who know what we’re about
We’ve gotta make them hear our voice
You don’t earn respect you win it
The time is now you’d better believe it
It was a hard road to get here
Being black and poor is really hard in Brazil
Whoever’s black and poor in Brazil suffers twice over
In the hands of those guys he’s always beaten down
Black for them means to take what’s coming
Be called a monkey, be treated like a slave
The bossman’s always around
Dreadlocks or cropped hair is no good to him
Because the black who’s proud is threatening too
You’re only nice if you’re ashamed of your colour
And so I ask you what’s gonna happen now?
AKC 8 T&RS Spring Term 2012 – La Lucha Continua/The Struggle Continues 15/03/2012
If we don’t change, don’t fight, if we knuckle down
The solution’s inside of us
Don’t feel inferior next to any playboy
Everything I’ve a right to I want to have and can
All this here is ours too