Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia Brazil

Michael  Iyanaga

I could barely contain the thrill and excitement, but also a niggling apprehension, as I waited for the bus that would take me to my first bloco afro rehearsal, this time not as a spectator as I had been previously, but as an actual participant! My dear friend and gifted dancer Sel Guanaes was already inside the bus waving smilingly at me through the window as it halted making its usual hissing sound. We had agreed to catch the same buzu (the Bahian slang for buses) since Sel lived in Brotas and thus several stops before Luis Anselmo, where I would hop on and join her. It was about 6 p.m. on a January weekday and the streets were packed with people making their way home from work as the day's heat gave way to the evening breeze. Enjoying our break from college, we could indulge in making that summer of our lives revolve around the preparation for carnaval. We had "jumped carnaval" many times before in our home city of Salvador, always as "foliãs pipocas, " the "popcorn revelers" that hop freely from trio to trio and from bloco to bloco, no strings attached, no rehearsals needed. The year of 1992 would be different, though, as we were given the opportunity to participate as dancers in none other than the bloco afro Muzenza, attending the rehearsals led by none greater than the revered choreographer Augusto de Omolú! Located in the neighborhood of Liberdade, Muzenza is one of the several blocos afro that emerged in Salvador in the 1970s with the goal of carving out spaces for the recognition and acceptance of blackness in the racist and classist sphere of Bahian carnaval. Muzenza itself was founded in 1981, strongly inspired by the philosophy and aesthetics of Rastafarianism, and contributing, in turn, to reinventing Bahia's blackness by exploring diasporic routes while revisiting African roots. This resignification of blackness as positive and beautiful, which promoted, among other processes, the blackening of the body through movement and aesthetics, relied on Afro-Bahian dance as one of its central pillars. Dance and music have powerfully produced pleasure, pride, dignity, and the sense of belongingness to something bigger. During those rehearsal evenings, as our sweaty bodies swayed in unison responding to the call of the drums, my initial unease as to whether I would be able to follow the dance movements that I so deeply appreciated morphed into a collective exhilaration that set in motion all the senses of our bodies and souls. Yet, Afro-Bahian dance makes itself present way beyond the time period or designated spaces of carnaval. And although in some locations of Salvador it might be more markedly

Dance in Brazil: in-between cultures How is the dance from Brazil? This conversation starts with this phrase, as if it were a challenge, one that opens a debate on the topologies of an art that is invented and consolidated “in-between cultures”: corporal, dance, and choreographic cultures. How is the dance from Brazil? — Why am I choosing to put it this way? To avoid another question — “What is the dance from Brazil?”, a question that I would not have an answer for, since it points to a whole field, the whole of the dance made in a specific territory: Brazil. Then, why this specific phrase? How is the dance from Brazil? To provoque questions about dance from its traces of origin, not only those of its structure — body, time, space, movement —, but also those that put dance in relation to its context and culture. For a conversation, reflexion and debate on art and the time and space where it is built, as a topology that affects a society, and by which it is affected

In this article, we argue that before they are recognized as intangible cultural heritage of humanity dances such as the Samba de Roda undergo various processes of popularization, heritagization, and spectacularization that conceptually transforms them from social dances into a category that we define as dance heritage. Before they were inscribed on UNESCO’s lists, many dance examples were labeled as folk, traditional, and popular. The ambiguity of what a folk dance, traditional dance, and what heritage means to different people have become increasingly problematic as all of these terms are contested and changing. While folklore was mainly accessible through the means of documenting and writing, dance was transmitted as bodily knowledge and later reconstructed as a choreographic practice. Regardless of its alignment with different heritagization processes and its status as intangible cultural heritage, we do not consider Samba solely as “folk” or “traditional” dance as these terms objectify the dance practice as non-modern and limit the public perception of the dance as anything other than tradition. Rather, we argue that dance as intangible cultural heritage, as discussed in the following pages, is directly influenced by local and national cultural politics that dictate its process of safeguarding and its public appreciation. Dance heritage, as seen in the following pages, is made, and not found, while it is also commodified for consumption in order to establish continuity with the history and the past of the nation-state in which it is located. Moreover, we are trying to expose some of the obstacles in the process of conceptualizing dance as heritage, while at the same time we regard the safeguarding process and the UNESCO inscription as further standardization.

University of Illinois Press Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia, Brazil Author(s): Michael Iyanaga Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 119-147 Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacmusiresej.35.1.0119 Accessed: 22-10-2015 14:54 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Illinois Press and Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Black Music Research Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia, Brazil Michael Iyanaga In the sociohistorically important Recôncavo region of Bahia, in Brazil’s northeast, the local majority African descendent population regularly celebrates its patron saints not only with masses and processions but also with samba song and dance. As such, samba is found at Catholic pilgrimages, ritual cleansings (lavagens), and, most prominently, saints’ feasts. The last of these is perhaps most famously exempliied in the large three-day Festival of Our Lady of Good Death, held annually in the city of Cachoeira, which culminates in hours of celebratory samba dancing (see A. Castro 2006; Marques 2008). Less publicly, samba caps off rollicking patron saint house parties known as rezas, each moment of which is marked by ritual music. Standing in front of the home altar, attendees irst intone a series of Catholic hymns before gathering in a ring to dance and responsorially sing their saint-saluting sambas (Fig. 1). On occasion, this samba can even prompt Catholic saints (and other entities) to possess the host and other guests for a divine dancing and singing distinct from the types of possession rituals characteristic of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda (Iyanaga 2013, 313–359). People typically see this samba for Catholic saints as an expression of their Catholic faith. In fact, with its church-inspired contexts and choreographies (e.g., the Sign of the Cross, bowing before the altar, etc.), saint-extolling texts, and capacity to instigate possession by Christian martyrs, this type of samba might best be described (in analytical, etic terms) as a “Catholic samba.” But why is samba—by which I mean a local Afro-Brazilian dance, song, and rhythm—a fundamental facet of both public and private Catholic patron michael iyanaga has a PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA. In addition to conducting research, Iyanaga has taught at universities in the United States (UCLA, College of William and Mary) and Brazil (Federal University of Paraíba and Federal University of Pernambuco). Black Music Research Journal Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2015 © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 120 bmr journal Figure 1: Samba during a reza for St. Anthony in São Félix, Bahia, on June 13, 2011. Notice the ring formed by the attendees, who are also rhythmically clapping their hands for the dancer in the middle of the ring. (Photo by Michael Iyanaga) saint celebrations in Bahia? After many years of ieldwork in the Bahian Recôncavo (2008–2014), I can offer a fairly straightforward, ethnographic answer: People believe their saints adore samba. In the enthusiastic words of one Bahian woman I met in 2011, “What Saint Anthony likes is parties . . . He likes samba!”1 And Saint Anthony is no oddball. In fact, Saint Roch, Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saints Crispin and Crispinian, Saint Barbara, and Our Lady of the Conception—all of whom can be counted among the region’s most popular saints—are believed to share Saint Anthony’s predilection for the Afro-Brazilian art form. Yet this local, “native” perspective only provides a partial response to the question; an investigation of macrohistorical processes reveals another explanation for why saints love samba. In the present article, I insist on asking why, in a diachronic sense, people perform samba for their saints. By interpreting more than three centuries of devotional black musical practices in Bahia, this article posits that saints enjoy samba because Africans and their descendants effectively reinvented and transformed their Catholic 1. I have translated this citation into English, as well as all subsequent Portuguese-language citations. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 121 saints, “converting,” so to speak, the Christian martyrs into samba-loving gods. And while my argument that samba is historically linked to Catholicism revises the secular frame through which scholars have traditionally studied samba, my focus here is less on samba itself than on saints and Catholicism in this Afro-diasporic Brazilian context. Indeed, my overarching goal is to reframe Catholic practices as integral to the African diaspora in Bahia as well as, by implication, in the Americas more generally. After all, scholars interested in African-American religious practices have, over the past century or so, turned primarily to religions in which (West) African gods igure prominently (such as Candomblé, Regla-de-Ocha, Vodou, etc.), while relegating Afro-Catholic practices to the margins, either by treating them as a form of passive assimilation (e.g., Karasch 1987, 254) or by dismissing them as a creative sham that allowed Africans to resist colonization by veiling their beliefs and rituals in Catholicism (e.g., Bastide 1971, 183; Pollak-Eltz 1977, 243). In the present essay, I offer a case study that contests these models. Indeed, the evidence I review here suggests that samba dancing (or its antecedent forms) has been integral to Catholic contexts since the colonial period (roughly 1500–1822). What’s more, the data suggests that this was by choice. As such, far from a failed effort to assimilate Catholicism or a veiled attempt to worship African gods, the Afro-Brazilian dancing that has been a major part of Bahian Catholic celebrations since (at least) the eighteenth century was a fundamental aspect of its practitioners’ shared worldview. Hardly just a dance, then, devotional samba indexes a New World black understanding of Catholicism and of Catholic saints. In this way, this Catholic samba represents neither passive assimilation nor unbridled resistance—it its somewhere in-between. And, I think, it is in fact this “in-between-ness” that most accurately depicts the history of the black experience in the New World. After all, interested in both salvaging their own humanity and constructing the best possible lives within an oppressive system of slavery and racial discrimination, the enslaved and marginalized in Bahia constructed and cultivated new, localized cultural institutions— “African-American institutions” (Mintz and Price 1992, 23)—by employing fragments of their and their oppressors’ pasts. If in fact Catholic samba developed and lourished partially as a means by which Africans and their descendants could empower themselves within the slavocratic structures of colonial Bahia, the naturalness with which present-day residents (of diverse ethnicities) of the Recôncavo samba dance for their saints is a palpable sign that the musico-devotional practice eventually spread beyond black social spheres to become a foundational element of the region’s Catholic culture more generally. European and Euro-Brazilian Catholic saints (and by extension Catholicism) were “Africanized”—or more accurately, perhaps, “creolized” (or “Afro-Brazilianized”)—and could This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions bmr journal 122 thus be embraced not as the gods of the oppressors but as personal protectors of the enslaved and oppressed black population. And it was this version of the saints that helped construct Afro-Bahian culture (and later Bahian culture). For my argument, I review evidence ranging from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. My sources are varied: archival documents, historical newspapers and periodicals, travelers’ accounts, and secondary sources. In addition, I occasionally pull from ethnographic material (including oral history) to reinforce my interpretations. Given the scant historical record and the evasiveness of my object of study, this article aggregates bits and pieces of evidence to trace distorted historical continuities, reinterpret previously uncovered data, and present new information. In the end, I hope to suggest a new way of imagining how samba relates to Catholicism and how both relate to the black experience in Bahia. Samba in Bahia In academic literature, Bahian samba is routinely called samba de roda. Locally, however, people generally refer to it simply as samba (this is, moreover, the term most commonly found in historical documents). Following this nomenclature, I, too, call it samba. Bahian samba looks and sounds characteristically different from other styles of Brazilian samba (see Sandroni and Sant’Anna 2007). The dance includes a ring formed by the participants, who sing and clap the basic ostinato rhythm (see Ex. 1), while a solo dancer (or sometimes a pair of dancers) occupies the middle of the ring and executes the miudinho (itty-bitty), a dance step whereby the dancer shufles her or his feet back and forth while the upper half of the body remains nearly motionless. When inished, the dancer chooses a successor by way of a movement known as the umbigada (belly bounce), though this motion sometimes uses body parts other than the belly. Generally speaking, these dance movements are traceable to Bantu-speaking Central Africa. In fact, a cross-examination of choreography, rhythm, and etymology reveals that Bahian samba is primarily of Central African provenance (Carneiro 1961, 10–11, 36; Döring 2004, 82–84; Iyanaga 2013, 250–254; Kubik 1979, 15–22; 2013, 30–33; Pinto 1991; Silva and Oliveira Filho 1983, 43–44). While this information is invaluable for identifying samba’s antecedents in Brazil, it does not eliminate all of the methodological hurdles. Example 1. Basic samba rhythm as clapped by participants. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 123 The term samba is, and appears to have always been, wildly polysemic (Sandroni 2012, 86; Waddey 1980, 196). Therefore, although the word samba appears in print for the irst time in 1838 (Sandroni 2012, 88), we cannot assume it meant the same things then as it does today. As an added complication, the terms samba, batucajé, and batuque were, for much of the nineteenth century, vague synonyms that referred to any African-derived musical practice (particularly when it included drumming). By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the samba described in the written record increasingly appears to resemble the activity designated today as samba (Sandroni and Sant’Anna 2007, 30; Santos 1997, 27). The other problem is inding sambalike dances when they are not referred to as such. Thus, locating samba (and its antecedent forms) in historical documents is sometimes only possible by inferring from descriptions of characteristic dance movements, singing styles, and musical instruments. My search for samba therefore includes not only terminology but also dances and other clues, such as context. Scholars have traditionally interpreted sambas or batuques in the historical record as references to either secular amusement or early Candomblé. Here I rely on a third alternative: samba as Catholicism. Central African Dancing in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Brazil I begin in the 1600s, with a vague reference to the aforementioned belly bounce, the Central African-derived umbigada. As musicologist Rogério Budasz (2007) has shown, popular baroque dances are referenced in the work of seventeenth-century poet Gregório de Mattos. Budasz explains: “At the feast of the brotherhood of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Mattos saw the mulata Luísa Sapata dance the ‘cãozinho’ (little dog): . . . ‘[s]he took so many umbigadas [belly blows] / She ended up transforming / Wine into pure vomit’ . . . The umbigada . . . was a basic feature of many dances imported to Brazil and Portugal from the Congo-Angola region” (2007, 7–8).2 It seems the cãozinho constituted one of many types of pieces frequently performed on the guitar-like viola (6), which is signiicant given that the viola (in its ten-string version) is today strongly indexical of Bahian samba (Nobre 2009). While it is unclear why or under what circumstances Luísa’s dance took place, this nevertheless implies that as early as the seventeenth century, a Brazilian brotherhood feast included a Central African choreographic movement. And indeed it appears that Central African dancing was 2. It seems that Mattos originally wrote this using the term embigada rather than umbigada (Budasz 2001, 151). This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions bmr journal 124 salient in the public patron saint feasts organized by black brotherhoods in colonial Brazil. Brotherhoods Lay Catholic brotherhoods played an integral role in the socioreligious milieu of colonial Brazil. These confraternities, designed around the veneration of a patron saint, served as mutual aid societies, vehicles for social ascension, and philanthropic organizations. By the beginning of the 1700s, there were at least thirty-one brotherhoods in Bahia dedicated to the Virgin Mary alone (Cardozo 1947, 22), and the socioreligious institution became increasingly popular over the course of the century. While membership in brotherhoods could sometimes be restricted according to class or ethnicity, this was actually quite rare (Parés 2007, 82; Silveira 2006). Instead, exclusions were based chiely on “color” (cor), thus separating black confraternities from those that were mulatto (pardo) or white (Mulvey 1980, 254–255; Parés 2007, 82; Russell-Wood 1974, 579). Importantly, though, not all ethnic groups possessed equal amounts of power within the sodalities. Angolans, in particular, exercised what historian Lucilene Reginaldo calls a “singular importance” in Bahian brotherhoods, as they were often founders of the confraternities and frequently occupied monopolistic positions of power (2011, 239–240). The yearly patron saint feast was the main event on every brotherhood’s calendar of activities. As Elizabeth Kiddy explains, “Each lay religious brotherhood put on an annual feast day celebration, and the communities competed to see which would have the most extravagant festival. The festivals included religious observances as well as lavish processions in which all the brotherhoods in town would participate” (2005, 97). The extravagance and lavishness was expressed through ostentation: “Brothers and sisters set out from their confraternity in their inest raiment, with capes, torches, banners, crosses, insignias, and statues of saints borne on platforms in pomp-illed processions, followed by dances and food and drink” (Reis 2003, 54). Historical documents offer some hints regarding these dances. Take, for example, a 1786 letter in which black devotees of the Glorious Lady of the Rosary of the City of Bahia wrote to Queen Maria I requesting that they be permitted “masks, dances in the idiom of Angola with their related instruments, Canticles, and praises” (quoted in Reginaldo 2011, 204). Here is an example of black agents, probably an ethnically heterogeneous group, characterizing their own dances as Angolan. While it is dificult to know exactly what dance movements these individuals hoped to execute, they may have wanted to dance something not entirely unlike today’s samba. After all, the seventeenth-century accounts of Italian Ca- This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 125 puchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo suggest Angolan dances included spinning, leaping, loud call-and-response singing, and handclaps. An Imbangala (Jaga) funeral dance, for instance, included dancers who “spin around on a single foot like tops” (Cavazzi 1965, 128), while grandees of Queen Njinga, seventeenth-century ruler of the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba (in present-day Angola), are said to have “turned round the ire making various gestures and motions with their bodies and limbs, accompanied by clapping their hands and shouting, while others round the ire did other dances of the same kind and sang their songs, one leading and the others answering.”3 The late nineteenth-century travelogue of Portuguese traveler Alfredo de Sarmento offers another—if somewhat anachronistic—hint: “In Luanda (Angola) and in various presidios and districts . . . the batuque consists also of a circle formed by the dancers, going to the center a black man or woman who, after executing various dance steps, gives an embigada [belly bounce], which they call semba, at the person they choose, who will then go to the middle of the circle, to substitute him” (Sarmento 1880, 127; emphasis in original). As Carneiro (1961) famously noted, this Angolan batuque, with the ring of participants, solo dancer, and belly bounce, is strikingly reminiscent of Bahian samba. For clues regarding the character of the “related instruments” mentioned in the Bahian letter, iconography is helpful. Two of Cavazzi’s seventeenthcentury paintings are particularly illustrative. Depicted in “Queen Nzinga and a Drummer, Kingdom of Kongo, 1670s” (Fig. 2), for instance, are a pluriarc and a long membrane drum, while in “Musicians, Kingdom of Kongo, 1670s” (Fig. 3), Queen Njinga’s court musicians are shown playing a jug, resonator xylophone, and two-string bow harp. It should be noted, however, that as early as 1622, “The music of Angola was made not only with African musical instruments but also European instruments” (Thornton and Heywood 2007, 213). This suggests that the Angolan instruments referenced in the late eighteenth-century Brazilian brotherhood letter may have referred not only to local Central African instruments but even possibly to European instruments such as the organ, viola, or European trumpet (Thornton and Heywood 2007, 213–214). Indeed, the aforementioned Bahian confraternity for the Glorious Lady of the Rosary may very well have wanted to accompany its Angolan dances with a blend of African and European instrument types. After all, it is precisely this seamless overlaying of Central African and 3. From John Thornton’s unpublished translation of Antonio Cavazzi’s Missione Evangelica al regno del Congo, Book 2, Chapter 12, accessed June 2, 2015, http://www.bu.edu/afam/ faculty/john-thornton/cavazzi-missione-evangelica-2/book-2-chapter-12. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 126 bmr journal Figure 2: “Queen Nzinga and a Drummer, Kingdom of Kongo, 1670s” by Antonio Cavazzi. Image Reference Bassani-10, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library (Accessed June 6, 2013). Figure 3: “Musicians, Kingdom of Kongo, 1670s” by Antonio Cavazzi. Image Reference Bassani-19, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library (Accessed September 25, 2012). This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 127 Figure 4: “Coronation of a Black Queen on the Day of Kings” (Coroação da Rainha negra na festa de Reis) by Carlos Julião (c. 1770). Courtesy of the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. European instruments that we see in Carlos Julião’s eighteenth-century paintings of black Day of Kings festivals in Rio de Janeiro. Depicted in his “Coronation of a Black Queen on the Day of Kings” from the 1770s (Fig. 4), for instance, are a xylophone, a European-style membrane drum, and a type of long scraped idiophone seen in at least one of Cavazzi’s paintings from Angola (Fig. 5; see also Fromont 2014, 41–44, 60–62; Fryer 2000, 83–85). In Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, Prussian traveler G. H. von Langsdorff describes a slave crowning ceremony he witnessed in 1804 in Santa Catarina (southern Brazil). Despite the racist language, the account’s intricate details regarding dance, song, costumes, and musical instruments make it worth citing at length: Commonly the slaves rush into the street with great noise and impetuosity . . . A monotonous cry, a wild, noisy, yet measured kind of drumming, a sound like that of hammering copper, a clapping of hands, distinguished the place of assembly. . . . The king, or leader of the dance, . . . stood like a hero in the midst of his followers, who were all collected in a circle round him. Instead of the helmet of steel, his head was ornamented with gold paper and feathers. . . . In his left This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 128 bmr journal Figure 5; “Dance Scene with Local Instruments” from Descrição Histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola (Cavazzi 1965, 162). hand he held a reed about two feet long, in which were a great many notches pretty close to each other. On this he scraped continually with a little stick which he held in his right-hand. The rest of the dancers had either like sticks, rattles, or little bells, any thing, in short, that would make a clattering and noise. Instead of musicians, some of the negroes sat in a corner of the room upon the ground, and struck with their hands upon an ox-hide, which was stretched over the hollow trunk of a tree, serving as a drum. The whole company were ornamented with feathers and ribbands, and wore diadems of gold paper. Both negroes and negresses having formed a circle round the king, afterwards began, irst one, then another, according to the degree of agility they possessed, to come forwards in the circle as solo-dancers, when they made the strangest gestures that can well be conceived. The rest sung, or screamed some incomprehensible African songs. They drew the hip and anklebone with incredible celerity into a circle horizontally, while the upper part of the body remained almost motionless, seeming as it were, to balance themselves upon the lower part. The neck, the shoulders, and the back, were equally shaken with such celerity, that they seemed to have every joint and muscle about them perfectly at command. The greatest dexterity was shewn by a half-naked negress, who united with the most rapid movement of the hips a very exactly measured and equally rapid motion of the feet. The distortions of the countenance, the This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 129 swelling out of the cheeks, and other hideous gestures, seemed to constitute, according to the ideas of these people, the perfection of the performances. (1817, 55–57) With the gold crowns, feathers, and celebratory dancing, this scene appears to be a version of the Day of Kings festivals practiced by brotherhoods throughout colonial Brazil (M. Souza 2001) and depicted in Julião’s painting (Fig. 4). Additionally, “The occasion for the Brazilian festivals, the election of a king, further echoes the celebration of mythical and real kings of the sangamentos” (Fromont 2013, 194; emphasis in original). Sangamentos were Central African rituals that, already by the sixteenth century, took place on feast days and other important occasions using a mix of European and indigenous African elements. Sangamentos included a dance in which “the sitting king or ranking ruler, members of the elite, and common soldiers each took the stage in order of precedence. With spectacular simulated assaults, feints, and dodges, each man showcased his dexterity with weapons and his physical agility” (Fromont 2014, 22). And indeed the individualized, rank-ordered dancing noted in Langsdorff’s account further suggests that what he observed in Santa Catarina was a New World adaptation of a Central African sangamento. In addition, the dance moves themselves recall the aforementioned nineteenth-century Angolan scene described by Sarmento. This data from southern Brazil, together with the letter from Bahia and Julião’s paintings from Rio de Janeiro, suggest that brotherhood dances all over colonial Brazil displayed a strongly Central African aesthetic. Why? It is important to understand that until the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans in Brazil were nearly all of Central African provenance (Reginaldo 2011, 289–290; Sweet 2003, 18; Verger 1987, 9). This means that Central Africans could have easily established in Brazil “the core of a new language and a new religion” (Mintz and Price 1992, 50), and this new religion which may have looked like the innovative mix of Central African and European practices already described. After all, the Catholic Church reached the various kingdoms of Central Africa by the late ifteenth century and lourished, especially in the Kingdom of Kongo (Thornton and Heywood 2007). As such, the development of public dances for saints may have begun well before enslavement, in Catholic Central Africa. Indeed, by the seventeenth century, black brotherhoods for the Rosary were established in São Salvador (Kongo) and Luanda (Angola) (Heywood 1999, 14; Kiddy 2005, 32–33; Reginaldo 2011, 60–62), and these, like the sangamento, may very well have included a unique blend of indigenous African and European symbols and practices. Still, it would be wrong to assume that Central African aesthetics were simply uprooted intact and forced upon other African groups or Afro- This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions bmr journal 130 Brazilians in the New World. In a 1780 letter describing public black celebrations in the captaincy of Pernambuco, just north of Bahia, the former governor of the captaincy and count of Povolide José da Cunha Grã Ataíde e Mello conirms that “blacks divided into nations and each of them with their own instruments, dance and spin like harlequins, and others dance with diverse body movements” (quoted in M. Souza 2001, 232). Although it is signiicant that the spinning described in this letter seems reminiscent of Cavazzi’s description of the Imbangala funeral dance, it is more important to note the public negotiations that appear to take place. Blacks dance together, but separately. As such, Africans and their descendants in Bahia may have used brotherhoods to make “space for the continuation of ethnic identities” while “simultaneously asserting their unity as blacks and making room for a collective memory that linked the heirs to the tradition with an African homeland” (Kiddy 2005, 136). This process, however, surely constructed common aesthetic and/or devotional links. In fact, if the origins of Catholic samba are partially to be found in brotherhoods, it is precisely because these institutions afforded a space for a type of interethnic negotiation that could lead to the development of a coherent Brazilian art form that was indeed distinct from, but still rooted in, Central African aesthetics. In other words, with a mixed population of African ethnicities and Brazilian-born crioulos dancing and celebrating together, even if following a roughly Central African aesthetic template for saint devotion, the involved members were in fact creating something new, something Brazilian. In the end, the Catholicism brought to Brazil by Central Africans—which had already been, as Thornton puts it, “highly mixed with African religions” (1988, 266)—would no doubt have been creolized, that is, Afro-Brazilianized, through New World collaboration. Calundús Central African dancing in the eighteenth century was not limited to public festivities associated with the Catholic calendar. In fact, one of the irst descriptions of a samba-like Brazilian dance comes not from a patron saint day festival, but rather from a calundú, a ritual practice that may also have served as a source for the development of Catholic samba. “Brazilian calundú ceremonies,” explains historian James Sweet, “were scripted in much the same manner as possession rituals in Central Africa” (2003, 145). And music was an integral part of this ritual. In the 1680s, a calundú was documented in the Bahian municipality of Rio Real. There a slave named Caterina cured with calundús, during which she “sang and danced to the playing of the canzás [shakers]. In the language of her homeland (Angola), she spoke in the voices of her deceased relatives” (151). Other percussion instruments This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 131 were also commonly used in calundús. In 1728, for example, traveling priest Nuno Marques Pereira described a terrible night of sleep due to the tabaques (conical membranophones), tambourines, canzás, jugs, and castanets played by the “blacks” as they performed “their Calundús” (Pereira 1939, 123). With the exception of the jugs and castanets, the percussion instruments listed in Pereira’s description are common in twenty-irst-century Bahian samba. Calundús, during which an individual danced (usually while possessed by an ancestor) in the middle of a ring formed by the participants, were practiced all over colonial Brazil. And while calundús were clearly not church events, one eighteenth-century example from Minas Gerais reveals the complex relationship calundús may have had with Catholicism. In 1739, Luzia Pinta was accused of “conjuring diabolical apparitions” through her calundús. Souza describes the ritual: With a wide lace wrapped around her head with the ends toward the back, dressed as an angel, and two black women singing, also Angolans, and a black man playing atabaque, which is a small drum, and they say that the black women and the black man are slaves of the abovementioned, and playing and singing they are in that place from one to two hours, she would go crazy, saying things that no one understood, and they directed to the ground those people who were going to be cured, passing over them various times, and on these occasions is when she would speak of the winds for divining. (1987, 267) The cures were not, however, realized solely by divine winds. Luzia Pinta’s calundú even called on Catholic saints and the Catholic Church: When the Angolan illness comes to them, which they call calunduz, with which they go out of their heads and begin speaking remedies that are to be applied to the sick, that on the occasions in which they conduct said cures, they always request of the sick two-eighths of gold, with which they go say split Masses, half for Saint Anthony and the other half for Saint Gonçalo, and it is with the intervention of these saints that they conduct said cures. (Mott 1996, 131) The implications of Luzia Pinta’s calundú are signiicant: By the early 1700s, Angolans involved in singing and dancing the calundú—what Sweet emphatically describes as a non-syncretic Central African healing ritual (2003, 145)— also turned to Catholic saints for help. It is unclear whether their dancing also somehow involved saints or if their ritual followed some form of church-inspired liturgy, but Luzia Pinta’s calundú nevertheless demonstrates that even in private settings Central African dancing, singing, and spirit possession comfortably integrated practices (mass) and symbols (saints) derived from the Catholic Church’s “universe.” Though the calundú (as an institution) appears to have been heterogeneous, they shared some similarities. In cases where the ethnicities of the This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 132 bmr journal African diviners and participants are identiied, they are nearly always Angolan. The possession appears to have been by ancestral spirits—rather than gods (as is generally the case for West African-derived rituals)—for the purpose of divining and curing, thus suggesting Central African derivation (see Janzen 1992; Parés 2007). Taken together, these facts show that calundús consisted essentially (and perhaps entirely) of Central African elements. Might calundús have been taken to Brazil already with Central African Catholic elements? Furthermore, might calundús have included Catholic saints and prayers beyond saying masses in saints’ names? One mid-eighteenth-century example provides some insight. The summary I offer here is of an acotundá (or a Tundá dance) in Minas Gerais, which, unlike the Central African-derived calundú, mainly involved West Africans. In late September 1747, authorities raided Josefa Maria’s home. According to detainee testimony, “Josefa Maria . . . entered into the Dance uttering some words that ind our Holy Catholic Faith and others that she did not understand. . . . and after this dance a woman left named Quitéria and there she climbed on top of the house and began to preach in her language, saying she was God and daughter of Our Lady of the Rosary and of Saint Anthony” (quoted in Mott 1988, 90). Unlike the mainly Angolan-run calundús, only two of the participants at this acotundá were Central Africans. All others, save one crioulo, were West Africans (100). Although Parés (2007, 116) has argued that this acotundá might typify a proto-Candomblé ritual, it also serves as a testament to the creative ways in which Africans and Afro-Brazilians used and appropriated mainstream Catholic symbols of the period. This information even points to Catholic saints as possible points of convergence between the public (lay brotherhood festivities) and the private (calundús). It seems hardly coincidental, after all, that Saint Anthony, one of the era’s most popular saints, is mentioned in both the acotundá and Luzia Pinta’s calundú. Might the participants of these African-derived ceremonies also have been members of confraternities for Saint Anthony or, for that matter, for Our Lady of the Rosary or Saint Gonçalo? Devotions to Catholic saints may also have been important for they surely allowed Africans of all ethnicities (including descendants of Africans) to relate to one another while simultaneously helping them partake actively (and collectively) in the hegemonic socioreligious system of colonial Brazil. I am thus suggesting that speciic cosmologies and aesthetics (which were largely rooted in Central African forms for the reasons already mentioned) were cultivated, disseminated, and developed through interethnic, intergenerational, and interclass institutions such as lay brotherhoods and calundús. If so, perhaps samba developed as something of a musico-choreographic (even religious) lingua franca by which the black population in Brazilian could begin to create a local, shared history. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 133 Proof of such innovation may be in the samba itself. As Rath illustrates in his study of seventeenth-century African music in Jamaica, when distinct African ethnic groups performed together they negotiated in interesting ways, what he identiies as “pidginization in action” (1993, 724). In a similar way, West Africans and Central Africans (broadly considered) may have collaborated to create their own colonial Brazilian music. Kubik (1979) has convincingly argued that West African rhythms tend toward twelve-pulse cycles while Central African rhythmic cycles favor sixteen pulses. The superposition of one cycle over the other within the same temporal space would consequently create a polyrhythm based on a greatest common divisor of four. That is, the twelve-pulse West African cycle works with the sixteenpulse Central African cycle if the former is organized into four groups of three beats and the latter into four groups of four beats. When performed together in the duple meter characteristic of both samba and (perhaps not coincidentally) processional marches, the groups produce triplets over sixteenth notes. Might not the relative frequency of triplet variations in today’s samba resound as evidence of New World collaboration? Angolan dances for Catholic celebration and the integration of saints into calundús are signs that Catholic saints were being resigniied and rearticulated. This is a suggestive sign of agency. Calundús (as well as the acotundá) were private events, usually held far from the reproachful eyes of the authorities. Thus, the ceremonial veneration of (even possession by) Catholic saints suggests that Africans and crioulos chose quite freely to incorporate Catholic symbols into their African-derived rituals. Similarly, brotherhoods were overtly choosing to dance in speciic ways to exalt the patron saints with whom they identiied. This was not a laughable attempt at assimilation. And the confraternity’s letter requesting Angolan dances was no aberration. In fact, the historical record is ripe with arguments between brotherhoods and the ecclesiastical authorities who tried to regulate how Africans could celebrate (Reginaldo 2011, 227–241; M. Souza 2001, 228–248). Brotherhoods did not insist on speciic dances by accident; these were purposeful decisions. After all, racialized modes of celebration clearly created solidarity among the black population while naturally excluding white and certain mixed-race Brazilians. Cosmology, however, may have been even more crucial in guiding devotees’ aesthetic choices. If, as Lucilene Reginaldo observes, brotherhoods sometimes refashioned their patron saints as relatives (2011, 139–140), then the decision to dance in certain African idioms may in fact have come from the rather “logical” assumption that their ancestor-saints would prefer those dances over any others. And if Saint Anthony or Our Lady of the Rosary favored African dances, even if the saints did not look physically different, these martyrs were no longer the same ones venerated by the colonists. Africans and their descendants This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 134 bmr journal would thus have effectively—and rather subversively—resigniied their oppressors’ saints. But the resigniication of Catholic saints may not have been entirely a New World innovation. Central and West African Precedents of Resigniication In August 1704 a Kongolese aristocrat, Kimpa Vita (baptized Dona Beatriz), rose from the dead, claiming to have become Saint Anthony. In the months that followed, Dona Beatriz, serving as a vessel for Saint Anthony, traveled to various Kongolese cities, spreading a “radical reinterpretation” (Thornton 1998, 113) of the message that had hitherto been preached by the European priests (see also Reginaldo 2011; Vainfas and Souza 2006). Dona Beatriz revised the role of Kongolese (and Africans generally) in the history of the church, asserting, for instance, that Jesus, Mary, and Saint Francis were all Kongolese (Thornton 1998, 113–114). Dona Beatriz’s mission was short lived, however. After she was put to death in 1706, her thousands of followers (so-called “Antonians”) were sold into slavery, and many were taken to Bahia (206), presumably taking this radical reinterpretative approach with them. Dona Beatriz’s reinterpretive strategy revised the meaning of the symbol (i.e., the Catholic Church and the important igures) without necessarily rejecting its outward form. Indeed, this mode of radical revision, which transformed the church and saints from the inside out, gave Dona Beatriz and the Antonians counterhegemonic tools to personalize and localize symbols that had not originated among the Kongolese. But this Kongo-style reinterpretation did not necessarily originate with Dona Beatriz. In fact, the sixteenth-century foundation myth of Christian Kongo, in which Afonso I ascended to power with the help of Saint James, was another case of radical reinterpretation. As Fromont argues, “Afonso crafted [in his narrative] a space of correlation in which he merged and redeployed central African myth and Christian lore. . . . What a European would consider a pagan people enters into Christendom ushered by the miraculous intercession of God’s mighty crusader Saint James” (2014, 38). In Afonso I’s reconiguration of local mythology, then, Saint James—like Saint Francis, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary would later be in Dona Beatriz’s reading—is reinterpreted as a protector of the Kongolese people. This is, once again, an example of a type of inside-out resigniication. Although the early demographic importance of Central Africans makes their experience with Catholicism and radical reinterpretation especially signiicant for this study, West Africans may have had a similar revisionist approach to Catholic saints. Convincingly, Apter (1992, 2004) has argued that the Yoruba arrived in the Americas with a long tradition of cultural This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 135 revisionism. Regarding West African-inspired “syncretism” in the Americas, Apter argues that Catholicism “was not an ecumenical screen. . . . It was the religion of the masters, revised, transformed, and appropriated by slaves to harness its power within their universes of discourse. In this way the slaves took possession of Catholicism and thereby repossessed themselves as active spiritual subjects” (2004, 178). Despite their general and internal differences, Central and West Africans possibly shared subtle pan-African modes of radical reinterpretation and revision, which no doubt would have facilitated the development of such practical logics in Bahia. As such, the speciically racialized, black practical logics that guided the African (and Afro-Brazilian) appropriation and resigniication of Catholic saints in the New World may have been a part of both West and Central African social life long before these groups arrived to Brazil. I would like to return briely to my central argument. I have looked speciically at public brotherhood celebrations and private calundús in Bahia. And though both were rooted in Central African cosmology and aesthetics, neither was ever bound exclusively to this population. Consequently, I have thus far suggest that a Catholic samba formed over the course of the eighteenth century as a form of radical reinterpretation in which saints were celebrated publicly and privately by way of dances that were structured primarily according to Central African modes of expression. Additionally, I have argued that this was a cosmologically guided process of revision, which remade saints as divine beings sympathetic to the emergent New World Afro-Brazilian culture of the eighteenth century. If indeed this fed into the creation of what was to become Afro-Bahian religious culture—that is, a unique set of local black practical logics according to which people interpreted and understood Catholic saints—then certainly it would have extended to the larger society outside of private calundús and Catholic brotherhoods. And in fact, over the course of the nineteenth century, this is precisely what happened. Samba Dancing for Saints in the Nineteenth Century4 In 1805, English traveler Thomas Lindley published his revealing description of a Bahian scene: The chief amusements of the citizens are the feasts of the different saints, professions of nuns, sumptuous funerals, the holy or passion-week, etc. . . . On 4. The following abbreviations are used in this essay: APEBa (Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia) and FPV (Fundação Pierre Verger). I conducted research with the newspaper O Alabama at the Instituto Geográico e Histórico da Bahia and used the Biblioteca Pública do Estado da Bahia regarding the newspaper A Tarde and the magazines A Coisa, Bahia Illustrada, and Papão. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions bmr journal 136 grand occasions of this kind, after coming from church, they visit each other, and have a more plentiful dinner than common under the term banquet; during and after which they drink unusual quantities of wine; and, when elevated to an extraordinary pitch, the guitar or violin is introduced, and singing commences: but the song soon gives way to the enticing negro dance. . . . It consists of an individual of each sex dancing to an insipid thrumming of the instrument, always to one measure, with scarcely any action of the legs, but with every licentious motion of the body, joining in contact during the dance in a manner strangely immodest. The spectators, aiding the music with an extemporary chorus, and clapping of the hands, enjoy the scene with an undescribable [sic] zest. (Lindley 1805, 275–277; emphasis in original) Interpreting Lindley’s description of handclaps, call-and-response singing, and a dance step resembling the miudinho, José Ramos Tinhorão (2008, 66–67) has argued that this “negro dance” is an early nineteenth-century samba. Also, although this scene bears semblance to the southern Brazilian crowning celebration described by Langsdorff, nowhere in Lindley’s description is there reference to any brotherhoods or royal regalia. It appears, then, that the Englishman observed a more generalized, noninstitutional practice. I turn now to Santo Amaro, in the Recôncavo, to review excerpts from an 1808 letter written by the Captain of Militias, José Gomes: “On those said Holy days of Christmas, many slaves of every nation descended from the Plantations . . . and uniting themselves in three corporations with many, of this Vila, according to each one’s nation, they . . . played, or danced, in their customary way . . . and the Nagô and Hausa . . . half-way dressed, with a large atabaque . . . continued with their dances not only during the day but also during a large portion of the night, banqueting in a home near said situation . . . and there was much to drink” (quoted in Harding 1997, 286). These semipublic Christmas celebrations were surely not brotherhood feasts. And though the groups were divided by “nation,” as are Candomblé houses, the presence of (what appear to be) libations, coupled with the lack of any ixed sacred space, suggests little relation to what would later be Candomblé. Perhaps this Afro-Christian scene, like that described by Lindley, was a type of sacred play so characteristic of today’s patron saint samba. In August 1854, the deputy of Santanna, José Eleuterio, wrote to the justice department, requesting reinforcements for the Festa de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Festival of Our Lady of Good Death), which would take place in Salvador later that month. The extra policemen were needed to “avoid groups of batuques, which ordinarily appear after the Novena [nine days of prayer]” (Santos 1997, 29; Verger 1999, 95).5 Batuque here is essentially 5. APEBa, Colonial e Provincial, Polícia, Maço 6230. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 137 synonymous with samba, as the terms were used interchangeably for much of the nineteenth century to refer to African-derived drumming and dancing. And just as samba always closes the activities of the Festival of Our Lady of Good Death today, these batuques appear to have played a similar role in the mid-nineteenth century. The linking of sambas to novenas appears not to be limited to Our Lady of Good Death, however. In December 1864, the Bahian newspaper O Alabama reported on an incident during which “two soldiers . . . brutally beat a man” in the city of Maragogipe (in the Recôncavo), when they went to samba dance at a church’s front steps, “Where there were novenas.”6 It is clear that the newsworthy information was the ight, not the samba on the church steps. Samba was also a major part of saint’s day processions. In Salvador, for instance, citywide festivities for Catholic saints were regularly accompanied by what, in 1898, the satirical publication A Coisa described as “beautiful chulas [verses] in the arrogance of the sensual samba.”7 And according to the magazine Papão in 1904, people regularly samba danced at the annual Festival of Nosso Senhor do Bonim, or Our Lord of the Good End (Iyanaga 2010, 137n46).8 These data suggest that dance styles typical of brotherhoods in eighteenth-century Catholic contexts gradually moved to the mainstream during the nineteenth century, probably coinciding with the diminishing number of brotherhoods. At the same time, however, one could reasonably argue that these public sambas on saint days demonstrate nothing more than the fact that Africans and Afro-Brazilians took advantage of holidays to practice their secular activities. After all, during the nineteenth century, batuques were often observed on any given weekend.9 But the existence of private, residential sambas for saints seems to suggest this was indeed a fairly systematic devotional practice. In July 1838, for example, the newspaper Correio Mercantil published the following: “On the night of the 29th past, a noisy batuque near the area of Engenho da Conceição e Fiaes [on Salvador’s outskirts]. . . . This ‘lawful’ merrymaking, lasted until after two o’clock in the morning of the 30th” (quoted in Reis 2002, 121). Reis deduces that “the party probably was in relation to the night of St. Peter” (121). Given the general popularity of samba dancing at Catholic events by the nineteenth century, perhaps this “noisy batuque” was indeed nothing more than a residential party for Saint Peter. 6. O Alabama, December 24, 1864, 3. 7. A Coisa, no. 24, February 7, 1898, p. 1; see also Couto (2010). 8. Papão, February 6, 1904. 9. APEBa, Colonial e Provincial, Polícia, Maço 6230. A document from the chief of police, in 1851, reports on the problem that during the “nights from Saturday to Sunday, and Saint days of Guard, many suspect individuals” gather “to do batuques all night, and day.” This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 138 bmr journal Yet sambas and batuques were bothersome to people all over the city, and the next example comes from Salvador’s important Sé Parish. By the mid-nineteenth century, Sé Parish, once home to the city’s elite, had become an increasingly working-class neighborhood whose racially diverse nonslave residents included merchants, scriveners, public servants, and day laborers. On May 3, 1864, the newspaper O Alabama complained that one Sé Parish resident, a woman named Josefa Boi, was known to gather, “at home, mainly at night, dissolute women, lost men, police soldiers and tout le mond [sic] for sambas, uproars and debauchery, from which results continued disorder” (emphasis in original). The newspaper report further explained that on the 29th (presumably of April), one such disorder occurred between two sailors who had gone to Josefa’s house “on the occasion of a party for the saints Cosmas and Damian.”10 While not explicitly stated, it seems reasonable to infer that the “party” for Saints Cosmas and Damian at Josefa’s house would also have included samba, a fact that raises important implications. According to a census predating this affair by only nine years, Sé Parish’s free female population was predominantly white (31.83% of all women) and parda (29.19% of all women; Nascimento 2007, 119), leading me to suspect that Josefa Boi, who appears to have had the socioeconomic conditions to possess a home (being neither an “aggregate” nor a “slave”), was probably white or parda. If this was indeed the case, it indicates that Catholic samba reached beyond a solely black segment of society by the mid-1800s. On the other hand, if I am mistaken regarding Josefa Boi’s racial identiication, the presence (even if only a perceived presence) of “tout le mond” at these parties for Catholic saints surely suggests a social practice that had become fairly common across racial lines by the mid-nineteenth century. A inal example further emphasizes the point. On September 25, 1869, the newspaper O Alabama complained that at that time of year, every street corner has a “philandering black woman” (creoula requebrada) or an “insipid pious woman” (beata de lambida) who, with two small images of saints, would regularly beg for alms in the name of Saints Cosmas and Damian. The article goes on to explain that the devotion includes “batucajê” (drumming), “caruru” (okra stew), and palm oil-stewed chicken.11 All three of these are central to festivities for Cosmas and Damian in Bahia today (see Iyanaga 2010). The evidence reviewed here suggests that a dance, which would eventually be denominated as samba, became increasingly common for saint celebrations (and at Catholic events in general) over the course of the nineteenth century. As Lindley’s narrative implies, Catholic samba dancing 10. O Alabama, May 3, 1864, 1. Many thanks to Nicolau Parés for this reference. 11. O Alabama, September 25, 1869, 1. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 139 appears to have been limited to the black population at the beginning of the century but was no longer isolated to brotherhoods. Successively, in light of this increased public exposure to Afro-Brazilian celebration, the practice seems to have spread—if only timidly—to the Bahian population more generally by the mid-nineteenth century. By the turn of the century, then, samba dancing and singing seems to have become a social norm for commemorating Catholic saints in Bahia, whether in public or private. Samba Dancing for Saints in the Twentieth Century For the twentieth century, I offer only a few illustrative examples that demonstrate the importance of samba at saints’ feasts. In 1918, the magazine Bahia Illustrada lauded the ubiquity in Bahia of trezenas (or thirteen days of prayer) for Saint Anthony. The article notes the presence of circles for dancing (rodas), guitars, plates that “chop” (repicar), and violas.12 Though indirect, the mention of instruments historically related to Bahian samba, especially the plate and viola (see Nobre 2009; Waddey 1980), suggest that samba was performed for Saint Anthony. A decade later, the prominent Bahian newspaper A Tarde documented an accident involving a plowman, Pedro Sant’Anna de Jesus. During a party for Saints Cosmas and Damian, while “the harmonica attacked a rollicking samba and the partygoers, moving wildly, danced tightly in the shy room, . . . [a] irecracker . . . exploded in [Pedro’s] hand.”13 In a September 27, 1933, editorial for A Tarde, someone signing as “F” described what Saints Cosmas and Damian’s day would be like: Today is the day of “dous-dous”14 [two-two] . . . At night will be the party. One of those batucadas [drumming] . . . The samba will in fact be black and blue, my lord! . . . And the pretas [black women] with their showy skirts and their doubled petticoats, all straightened up, done up in hoops and bows and bracelets and rattling jewelry [barangandans] and amulets from the Congo, Ethiopia, Abyssinia and from this whole great savage world that the foreigner civilized . . . the black women with their torsos . . . are going to swing their hips fantastically in the Samba, in the Samba, in the crazy Samba, that doesn’t ever end . . . 15 I will not address the pejorative racial overtones in this passage, which embody a dominant 1930s stereotype regarding the Bahian preta, or black 12. Bahia Illustrada, June 1918. 13. A Tarde, October 15, 1928, 2. 14. The term dois-dois (here as dous-dous) was often used—and continues to be employed today—to refer to twins. According to Jorge Amado (1961, 159), the term was originally coined by Candomblé priestesses. 15. A Tarde, September 27, 1933, 2. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 140 bmr journal woman, as viviied in works by sociologist Gilberto Freyre and novelist Monteiro Lobato. Instead, I want simply to call attention to the repeated (capitalized) word “Samba,” which effectively emphasizes the prominence of the dance form in this normative description of what a “party” in 1933 was like for Saints Cosmas and Damian. Next, a nearly ethnographic account from A Tarde in 1936 offers a vivid snapshot of a trezena for Saint Anthony in Salvador. The narrative explains that “For thirteen days . . . He [Saint Anthony] lives in every heart, dominates the whole city. He sits at the top of every altar, decorated in every home. . . . After the prayer, the farra [party] heats up. The dances are animated. Pairs gather at the windows. Dona Chica’s husband has his eye on a guy from the city, who is dancing in a scandalous way.”16 It is unclear whether this farra was samba, but oral tradition (and the above citation from Bahia Illustrada) suggests it very well could have been (Iyanaga 2010, 139–141). Finally, Odorico Tavares, in a 1950 essay originally published in the variety magazine O Cruzeiro,17 detailed a celebration for Saints Cosmas and Damian: “And now the kids are eating . . . and the adults, around them, sing songs [toadas]. They go wild, raise the tub and sing . . . Earlier, other songs are intoned, with great enthusiasm of those present, kids or adults” (Tavares 1964, 149–150). Included among the toadas were samba songs that are still today common all over the Recôncavo (see a brief discussion of the repertoire in Iyanaga 2010, 142–144). Samba was a regular presence at domestic saint celebrations in the twentieth century. This is not to say there were not other styles of music; one might have heard polkas, modinhas, orchestral music, jazz ensembles, and probably a number of other types of music.18 But samba, as an integral part of the celebrations, appears to have been the most widespread. Certainly there must have been distinctions by social class and ethnic identity, as the racialized 1933 characterization of the Saints Cosmas and Damian celebration suggests. The Euro-Brazilian elite might have been more likely to contract orchestras, while Afro-Brazilians (or less wealthy Euro-Brazilians) may have been more inclined to sing and dance samba. And perhaps saints were believed to have a range of tastes. Therefore, while Saint Anthony may not always have been celebrated with samba, the twin saints Cosmas and Damian, whose cult in Bahia demonstrates many attributes that appear to derive from pan-African (esp. Yoruba) modes of twin veneration (see Iyanaga 2013, 438–439; Lima 2005; Omari 1979), may have been celebrated with samba regardless of class or ethnicity. 16. A Tarde, June 13, 1936, 2. 17. FPV, O Cruzeiro, November 18, 1950, 35–38, 40, and 44. 18. See Bahia Illustrada, June 1918, regarding a celebration for St. Anthony and various types of dance; A Tarde, September 18, 1936, 2, for jazz played at a celebration for Saints Cosmas and Damian. This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 141 In summary, what I am calling Catholic samba—a Bahian musico-religious expression rooted in Central African aesthetics and performed for Catholic saints—was irst articulated in the context of two popular colonial institutions, brotherhoods and calundús. In this process, a practical logic began to develop in which Catholic saint celebrations acquired a speciic, local repertoire of sounds, choreographies, and ideas. By the early nineteenth century, African-derived dancing for saints appears to have spread beyond the institutional boundaries of brotherhoods. Catholic samba then breached African and Afro-Brazilian social circles by the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps due in part to the era’s growing black elite (Parés 2007, 169–211), but also surely as a result of the continuing interactions among Bahia’s various racial and social groups (Reis 2001, 132; Sweet 2003, 154). Consequently, it seems that by the twentieth century, Catholic samba had become part of the culture of patron saint celebration in Bahia. Resistance, Assimilation, or Empowerment? I have argued that Catholic samba is the result of a process by which black agents actively revised their Catholic saints. As such, the proliferation of the practice in Bahian culture is—whether explicitly or not—part of a legacy of African resistance to colonial domination. But isn’t the “reproduction” of the age-old European tradition of saints’ feasts, even if modiied with Central African-derived dance, just assimilation? Is it possible for samba to be both resistance and assimilation? Parés poses the problem as thus: “This conceptual polarity, assimilation and resistance . . . is normally conceived of as mutually exclusive, which is to say, blacks, or the associations they constituted, assumed positions of assimilation or of resistance. . . . [I]t is worth considering that the same individual could, as one can today, adopt successively at various points of his/her life, or even simultaneously, positions of assimilation or resistance” (2007, 93; emphasis in original). Parés’s key observation is to suggest the possibility of simultaneous resistance and assimilation, a view that is all the more sensible when considering the circumstances of real life, when cultural agents are often simply “making do” (de Certeau 1984), rather than embracing any explicit positions of “resistance” or “assimilation.” The contradiction, it seems to me, is in the combination of Catholicism and samba. After all, samba can easily be understood as resistance, particularly prior to abolition. Slavery was psychologically disastrous, but it was irst and foremost a physical technology of control that, like all forms of discipline, “dissociates power from the body” (Foucault 1979, 138). And since samba implies movement (in handclaps, dancing, gathering in a circle, singing, etc.), the mere execution of samba under conditions of slavery This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 142 bmr journal suggests the empowering of a disciplined body in an explicit form of physical resistance to domination. It should therefore come as no surprise that authorities in the nineteenth century tried repeatedly to pass legislation prohibiting samba and batuques (Reis 2002; Santos 1997). At the same time, however, Africans and Afro-Brazilians were generally sincere Catholics. Dancing samba to Catholic saints thus suggests the assimilation of the oppressor’s religion even it the saints are resigniied as samba-loving martyrs. If Catholic samba embodies a history of both resistance and assimilation, it suggests that individuals can challenge hegemony while simultaneously reproducing it. Apter eloquently articulates this irony regarding syncretism in the New World: “If hegemony is unmade through syncretic ritual, it is also remade, and it would be wrong to equate its religious impulse with proto-revolutionary struggle pure and simple. . . . The ritual revision of dominant discourses also reproduces their grammar and syntax” (2004, 179). Meditating on the question of what constitutes “resistance” in a colonial context, Jean and John Comaroff point out that: Early on in the colonizing process, wherever it occurs, the assault on local societies and cultures is the subject of neither “consciousness” nor “unconsciousness” on the part of the victim, but of recognition. . . . Out of that recognition, and the creative tensions to which it may lead, there typically arise forms of experimental practice that are at once techniques of empowerment and the signs of collective representation. (1991, 31, emphasis in original) The advantage of this conceptualization—recognition and empowerment in place of assimilation and resistance—is that it directs attention to internal states of existence. In other words, it is not the act of resistance or assimilation that best expresses the experience of the colonized victim. Rather, the experience is reigured in ontological terms. For Africans and Afro-Brazilians making a life for themselves in Bahia, samba dancing for saints was an “experimental practice” that empowered individuals by inserting them into colonial society and also became a musico-religious lingua franca around which a New World collective black identity could be constructed. Indeed, samba empowered—and continues to empower—because it solidiied a new reality, one in which European saints identify with the plight of the oppressed Africans and African descendents in Brazil. Samba was just one among a multiplicity of possible eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of black empowerment. In other words, there has never existed only one “approach” to dealing with circumstances involving multiple actors situated in variable positions of power. Empowerment is best attained not by relying on any single “experimental practice” but rather by interacting with a web of such practices. Africans and their descendants made sense of their world and their positions in it by appealing to a plu- This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Iyanaga • Why Saints Love Samba 143 rality of experimental practices and New World institutions, ranging from sorcery to Catholic mass, without mutual exclusivity. To take a hypothetical (but plausible) example, an African slave could participate in the Latin liturgy of the local Catholic mass in the morning, samba dance in front of the Church afterward, seek out a Yoruba-speaking African diviner before dinner, and say the rosary in Portuguese just before bed. These should be regarded as discrete institutionalized practices that complemented—not opposed—one another, and that, over time, precisely because of this movement between institutions, ended up in fact transforming and innovating the institutions and practices themselves. Furthermore, no institution (i.e., brotherhoods, Candomblé, family units) was necessarily internally homogeneous. Thus a given social institution may have offered its “members” different modes of empowerment depending on both the particularities of its establishment and each member’s position of power. The reconiguration of Catholic saints as samba-loving partiers—along with the samba dancing used to please the saint—should be construed as an empowering experimental practice that developed into an Afro-Bahian institution. Concluding Thoughts Today, samba is performed for Catholic saints largely because people in Bahia believe their patron saints prefer the Afro-Brazilian art form. But how did saints come to love samba in the irst place? Simply put, Africans and their descendants effectively revised Old World saints. By appropriating and reinventing the most important saints in Bahian society, Africans and Afro-Brazilians were able to create meaningful spaces for themselves while at the same time inserting themselves into the mainstream. This process was possible and indeed desirable because the oppressed were never simply passive objects in the colonizing mission; they never just “assimilated” their oppressors’ saints. To the contrary, by being molded into samba-loving gods, the Catholic saints were the objects of conversion. The saints—and by extension Catholicism more generally—were effectively imbued with new sensibilities and characteristics. While my goal has been to show that samba dancing for Catholic saints developed as a speciically Afro-Bahian institution, I have also argued that this practice became part of Bahian culture more generally. This means that samba has become a shared way by which all Catholic practitioners (whether Euro- or Afro-Brazilian) can venerate their saints; Catholicism in Bahia has been reshaped according to African-derived cosmological sensibilities. The point is that Africans and their descendants were fundamental to the creation of Bahian—and Brazilian—society in myriad ways that reach This content downloaded from 128.239.133.6 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:54:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions bmr journal 144 far beyond those aspects usually recognized in hyphenated form as “AfroBrazilian.” In the end, I hope this case study compels scholars to look at other European institutions that have supposedly been “assimilated” by colonized New World populations in order to question whether these might not instead have been other instances of reinterpretation and rearticulation. Acknowledgements Parts of this essay were presented at the third biennial Congresso Baiano de Pesquisadores Negros (October 15, 2011) and at the ifty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology (November 3, 2012). 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Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia Brazil

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