Moving and Sounding Towards Freedom: Capoeira Angola As a Practice of Afro-Brazilian Racial Consciousness by Esther Viola Kurtz Department of Music May 2018 Ó Copyright 2018 by Esther Viola Kurtz This dissertation by Esther Viola Kurtz is accepted in its present form by the Department of music as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________ _________________________________________ Joshua Tucker, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date____________ _________________________________________ Kiri Miller, Reader Date____________ _________________________________________ Marc Perlman, Reader Date____________ _________________________________________ Anani Dzidzienyo, Reader Date____________ _________________________________________ Jasmine Johnson, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________ _________________________________________ Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE ESTHER VIOLA KURTZ EDUCATION PhD Brown University, Ethnomusicology, 2018 Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies, 2018 MA Brown University, Ethnomusicology, 2014 MM Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands, Oboe Performance cum laude, 2003 BM Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands, Oboe Performance, 2001 BM Eastman School of Music, Oboe Performance with distinction, 1998 PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS 2018-2019 Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Music, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Music Mansion, Providence, RI 2016-2017 Mellon Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop: "Performing Dissent: Bodies, Body Politic and Practices of Protest," Coordinator, Brown University 2014 & 2017 Professor James N. Green Grant for research in Brazil 2012-2017 Brown University Scholarships, Graduate School and Music Department, Brown University 2016 Brown University's Office of Global Engagement: Global Mobility Program: Graduate Research Fellowship 2015 Mellon Summer Seminar in Dance Studies, Northwestern University 2015 Decolonizing the Racialized Female Subject: Black and Indigenous Self- making under Empire Workshop, Brown University 2010 Cambridge Arts Council Grant for curating the Vortex Series for New and Improvised Music. 2009 Scholarship for Women Improvisers – School for Improvisational Music, Winter Intensive Workshop, NY, NY 2007 Dutch Fund for the Performing Arts for studying choro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2003-2005 The Suite Music Week (De Suite Muziekweek), support for performing new works, Amsterdam, NL. 2000-2001 Fulbright Full Grant / Netherland-America Foundation, Utrecht, NL. iv INVITED TALKS 2016 "Práticas Negras: movimentos músico-corporais como instrumentos da conscientização." [Black Practices: musical-corporeal movements as instruments of consciousness-raising.] At A Cor da Bahia [Center for research on race], Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. May. CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION 2018 “Capoeira Angola and Rural Samba of Bahia as Practices of Freedom as Marronage.” Collegium for African Diaspora Dance third conference, Duke University, Durham, NC. February. 2017 “‘I also want to enter!’: Sounds, bodies and queering the Rural Samba of Bahia.” Panel co-convener. Dance Studies Association annual conference, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. October. “Ancestralidade e Liberdade: Embodying slave resistance and freedom in contemporary Capoeira Angola of Bahia’s interior.” Panel co-convener. Afro- Latin American Graduate Student Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. April. “‘I also want to enter!’: Sounds, bodies and commitment in Rural Samba of Bahia.” Approaching Dance graduate conference, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY. May. 2016 "Guerreiras in a Man’s World: Woman-warriors claiming space in capoeira Angola." Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and George Washington University, Washington, D.C. November. "Guerreiras in a Man's World: Woman-warriors embodying contradiction in capoeira Angola of Bahia's interior." Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance, joint annual conference, Pomona College, Claremont, CA. November. 2015 “Back to the streets of Bahia: Making space for the embodied knowledge of capoeira Angola.” Accepted for Society for Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance joint annual conference, Athens, Greece. June. 2014 “Playing in the streets: The embodied pedagogy of urban capoeira Angola in Bahia.” New England Chapter of the Society of Ethnomusicology, Brown University, Providence, RI. April. “‘Voltar Pra Rua!’: Capoeira Angola Choreographing a Return to the Streets of Bahia.” Brazilian Studies Association, 12th International Congress, King’s College, London, UK. August. v TEACHING EXPERIENCE Brown University, Providence, RI World Music Ensemble, Teaching Assistant, 2017-2018 Music, Civil Society, and Public Service, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2016 Brazilian Choro Ensemble, Instructor, Fall 2015 Dancing the African Diaspora, Teaching Assistant Spring 2015 Introduction to Ethnomusicology, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2014 Introduction to Music Theory, Instructor, Spring 2014 Capoeira Angola at Nelson Fitness Center, Instructor, 2012-2013 RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Dissertation Fieldwork in Bahia and São Paulo, Brazil, 2 months, 2017. Dissertation Fieldwork in Bahia, Pernambuco, and São Paulo, Brazil, 4 months, 2016. Dissertation Fieldwork in Bahia and São Paulo, Brazil, 2 months, 2015. Master's Paper Fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil, 2 weeks, 2014. Preliminary research in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2 months, 2013. SERVICE TO PROFESSION 2017 Member of the Climate Survey Committee for Diversity and Inclusion, Music 2016-2017 Coordinator Mellon Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop, Brown University 2016 Member of the Departmental Diversity and Inclusion Plan committee, Music Department, Brown University 2013-2014 Organizer, Ethnomusicology Colloquium Series, Music Department, Brown University MUSIC AND DANCE EXPERIENCE Curation and Production 2018 Co-curator of the First Fridays Concert Series at the Music Mansion in Providence, RI. Bringing innovative artists who engage social issues through performance. 2012-2014 Co-producer and curator of the Junk Kitchen Concert Series in Cambridge, MA. Mixed-genre shows addressed conceptual and social issues. 2010-2011 Co-producer of the Vortex Series for New and Improvised Music in Cambridge, MA. vi Performance 2016-present Member (saxophone, vocals, arranger) of the World Music Ensemble (Afro-beat/funk/reggae), Brown University. 2012-present Member (oboe, saxophone, flute, vocals) of the Choro Ensemble, Brown University. 2016 Touring member (saxophone, flute and backup vocals) Miss Fairchild Showband (R&B/funk), in St. John U.S. Virgin Islands and Rhode Island. 2009-2013 Oboist with various artists and groups including Garrison Fewell, Eric Hofbauer, Todd Brunel and the Vortex Other Dimension Ensemble, Choro Democrático and the Boston New Music Initiative. 2009-2012 Brazilian percussion with samba reggae group of Mestre Deraldo, Cambridge, MA. 2008-2009 Member (oboe) of Brokken Fabriek, monthly improvisation series in Amsterdam, headed by Corrie van Binsbergen. 2008 Studied choro at the Escola Portátil and Hermeto Pascoal's "Universal Music" approach to musical creation and improvisation with Itiberê Zwarg at the Pro Arte Music School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 2003-2007 Oboist (freelance) with Holland Symfonia and the Nationaal Symfonisch Kamerorkest, in Amsterdam, NL, KunstKlank in Noordwijk, NL. 2003-2005 Founding member (oboe, actor) of Duo Hibiki, worked with composers, commissioned and performed new works, with support from Suite Music Week (De Suite Muziekweek) in Amsterdam. Directed and coached by Adelheid Roosen and Ernst Reijseger to create theatrical, cross- disciplinary and multi-media presentations of new music. 2000-2002 Member (oboe) of the Ricciotti Ensemble, touring street orchestra in the Netherlands. Capoeira (Afro-Brazilian fight-dance-game) & Dance Training 2013-present Visiting student with capoeira Angola group of Mestre Cláudio, Angoleiros do Sertão, Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil. 2009-present Member of the Mestre Deraldo Academy of Capoeira Angola Joao Pequeno de Pastinha, Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola (CECA), Cambridge, MA. 2006-2017 Participant in capoeira events and workshops in Den Haag, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, NL; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Marseille, France; Helsinki, Finland; New York, NY; Feira de Santana, Salvador, and São Paulo, Brazil; Cambridge, MA. 2009-2010 Brazilian popular dance styles forró and samba de gafieira at Moves & Vibes in Cambridge, MA. 2006-2008 Forró and samba de gafieira with Juliana Braga in Amsterdam, NL. 2008-2009 Capoeira Regional with Mestre Vladimir in Den Haag, NL, and capoeira Angola with Mestre Marrom in Rio de Janeiro. 2001-2003 Contemporary dance and contact improvisation in Amsterdam, NL. vii MEMBERSHIPS Society for Ethnomusicology Dance Studies Association (previously Congress on Research in Dance) LANGUAGES Brazilian Portuguese—fluent speaking, reading and writing Dutch—fluent speaking, reading and writing French—intermediate speaking, reading, and writing viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation weaves together many facets of my musical and intellectual life, and as such many people have influenced, inspired and supported me along the way. I may never have chosen this particular path if my high school oboe teacher at the New England Conservatory preparatory program, Lynn Jacquin, hadn’t suggested I participate in the Festival of the Arts in Itu, São Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 1994. That experience sparked my enthusiasm for Brazilian music and culture. Thirteen years later, I returned to Brazil, this time to study choro music and capoeira in Rio de Janeiro. There I began training capoeira Angola at Mestre Marrom’s academy in Copa Leme. I will never the forget the day that Mestre Marrom saw me adjusting my headband at the mirror before training and commented to someone standing with him, “This one’s only Angola now!” He had noticed that after his annual event, I had started coming to class every day, giving up training at another local capoeira academy of a different style. I am grateful for his instruction in my first months training capoeira Angola, as I struggled to understand the movements with my body, and for all the members of his school with whom I trained, including Tatiana, Yuri, Ferra Dura, Fabio, Japa, Juliana, Rodrigo, and others, many of whom are now contra-mestres or mestres. My sojourn there was brief, but Mestre Marrom’s academy was my first capoeira Angola home, and I could not have had a better welcome into the art. When I returned to the Netherlands, Mestre Samara in Amsterdam generously welcomed me into his group even though he could see my heart was in capoeira Angola. After returning to the United States, I joined Mestre Deraldo’s CECA (Centro Esportivo ix de Capoeira Angola) in Boston, MA. It is by training with Mestre Deraldo, Mestre Manhoso and my capoeira brothers Contra-Mestres Toca and Calango that I gained basic proficiency in capoeira Angola, which allowed me to arrive in Bahia already speaking its corporeal language, though of course I still have plenty to learn. I first learned about Mestre Cláudio from Contra-Mestres Xandão and Tico, when I met them during Mestre Marrom’s event in Rio, in 2008. CM Tico contacted Mestre Cláudio in advance of my first visit to Bahia, in 2013, and helped arrange for my stay there. Since 2013, Mestre Cláudio has welcomed me in Feira de Santana on my regular visits, allowed me to train with him and his students, and tolerated my persistent questioning and hanging around. Obrigada Mestre, thank you for sharing your vision of capoeira Angola with me. As I listen back to interviews with group members of the Angoleiros do Sertão and think about all of our discussions and experiences together, I am continually humbled by everyone’s generosity and wisdom. In addition to Mestre Cláudio’s, their ideas and movements form the core of this work. Thank you Solange, Thomaz, Ranran, Pernalonga, Hulluca, Pirata, Papagaio, Igor, Orikere, Bolinha, Nayara, Binho, Flavinha, Maiana and everyone else in Feira and Salvador. Members of other satellite groups in São Paulo state also welcomed me into their homes and shared their time and thoughts with me, especially Treinel Natureza and Pedro, Coragem, Tico and Natália, Abusada, Tatu, Caixixi, Ana Simpatia, Afonso, Rafa, Felipe, Contra-Mestre Xandão and Flor do Oriente, Cara de Pandeiro, Treinel Molejo, Treinel Blanca and many others. Seth in Salvador, thank you for opening your home to me and sharing your perspectives and friendship with me. x Rita Eloá Gonçalves touches the lives and hearts of everyone who comes into contact with the Angoleiros do Sertão, and I am no exception. Rita is a master of solutions, of finding ways when there appear to be none, of making the impossible possible. Her warmth is matched only by her wit, and she continues to inspire me and all who know her. I cannot imagine having done this work without her help and that of Dona Nalva and Gabriela. I only hope I can one day repay their hospitality and support. Dona Ivannide and Iaiá also deserve more gratitude than I know how to express, for their generosity, laughter and stimulating conversations. I trust that there are many more of these to come. At Brown, I have been initiated into the realm of the academy through working with many brilliant faculty. My advisor, Joshua Tucker, guided every step of my way, from navigating the uncertainties of fieldwork to processing data and eventually building a dissertation piece by piece. I have had his total support and also felt at liberty to shape my own inquiry. Each member of my dissertation committee has likewise provided sound advice and critique, each in different ways. I thank Marc Perlman for his questions and modes of reasoning, Kiri Miller for her strategies and overview, and Jasmine Johnson for her generosity and insights. From my first day at Brown, Anani Dzidzienyo has profoundly influenced my priorities and commitments to Afro-Brazilian politics, and I have so thoroughly enjoyed and benefitted from our hours of conversation, as many generations of Brown students have before me. My multiple research trips were made possible by funding from the James N. Green Grant for research in Brazil, the Global Mobility Program Graduate Research Fellowship from Brown University’s Office of Global Development, the International xi Travel Fund and Music Department funds at Brown. Writing of the dissertation was supported in part by a Mellon Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop. In Brown’s Department of Music, I also thank Dana Gooely, Matt McGarrell, Mary Rego, Jen Vieira, Lauren Bitsoli, Drew Moser, Kathleen Nelson and Ashley Lundh, and all of my wonderful graduate student colleagues, especially Dave Fossum. My thinking has also been shaped by the grounding I received from course work in the Department of Africana Studies. In addition to Anani Dzidienyo, I thank Tricia Rose, Paget Henry and Keisha-Khan Perry, and Africana graduate students and staff. I am also grateful for feedback I received from fellow graduate students in our Mellon Dissertation Workshop. Thanks to Traude Kastner for administrative support, Stefanie Miller for co- convening the workshop with me and sharing her brilliance, all workshop participants for their comments and work, and George Lipsitz and Barbara Tomlinson for their feedback on my chapter draft. I am grateful to Nicosia Shakes and Mario LaMothe for their extra comments as well, and to Dan Sharp for generous feedback early on. I also thank the fellows of the Mellon Summer Seminar in Dance Studies at Northwestern in 2015 for their collegiality and critique. I was fortunate to take a class with Ingrid Monson at Harvard and benefited from her questions, advice and feedback. At the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, I wish to thank Professora and Contra-Mestra Paulinha Barreto for serving as an institutional contact, writing letters, and inviting me to give a talk and offering her feedback. I also thank Angela Lühning and Jeferson Bacelar, and in Feira de Santana, Josivaldo (Bel) Pires de Oliveira, for our exchanges of ideas. Thanks also to Tedson Souza. I have surely left out some names of people who deserve to be mentioned here, please forgive my lapse. xii My family, the Kurtzes, Coffins and Dickes, and numerous friends have patiently weathered the graduate school journey at my side, celebrating each successful achievement in turn. I know all of my grandparents would have been thrilled to be here now. Finally, Ben has been my anchor and my joy, encouraging me to wapacha all the way. xiii TABLE OF CONTENTS CURRICULUM VITAE iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix LIST OF FIGURES xv INTRODUCTION Capoeira Angola: Practicing Racial Consciousness in Bahia’s Interior 1 Note on racial terms 99 CHAPTER ONE Practices of the African Matrixes: Axé and the Aural-Kinesthetic 103 CHAPTER TWO An Angoleiro Ethics: Mestre Cláudio’s Teachings as Africana Philosophy 184 CHAPTER THREE Guerreira Tactics in a Man’s World: Women Conquering Space in Capoeira Angola 237 CHAPTER FOUR Capoeira Angola as Black Movement: The Racial Politics of Angoleiro Practice 300 EPILOGUE The Angoleiros do Sertão as a Quilombola Practice of Freedom 373 GLOSSARY 393 BIBLIOGRAPHY 396 APPENDIX I: LIST OF INTERVIEWS 431 xiv LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1.1. Basic rhythms (toques) of the capoeira Angola bateria 134 Fig. 1.2. The basic samba de roda rhythms as played by Mestre Cláudio 140 Fig. 2.1 – 2.12 Screenshots of Mestre Cláudio and Mestre Jogo de Dentro’s game 235-236 xv INTRODUCTION: Capoeira Angola: A Practice of Racial Consciousness in Bahia’s Interior Se eu contar meu nascimento If I tell you the story of my birth vocês pode ate chorar you might even cry. Mesmo antes de nascer Even before I was born o meu pai me abandonou my father abandoned me iê! Minha mãe criou três filhos iê! My mother raised three children comeu pão que o diabo amassou she ate bread the devil kneaded [she suffered a lot] iê! Eu nasci na roça iê! I was born on the roça [countryside] e não andava de carro and I didn’t travel by car era cavalo ou a pé it was by horse or on foot Hoje eu ando de avião Today I go by plane eu vou pra onde eu quiser and I go wherever I want As vezes, eu digo que não vou Sometimes, I say I won’t go e vocês pode levar fé and you better believe it iê! Capoeira cresceu tanto iê! Capoeira has grown so much capoeira conquistou valor capoeira has proven its value capoeira me deu tudo capoeira has given me everything capoeira me educou capoeira educated/raised me Sempre acreditei na capoeira I always believed in capoeira é pobre de quem não acreditou Poor is he who didn’t believe Viva Bahia! Long live Bahia! This dissertation in many ways is a tribute to Mestre Cláudio, who has dedicated his life to capoeira Angola and to his group, the Angoleiros do Sertão (capoeira Angola practitioners of the Backlands), based in a buzzing market hub of Bahia’s interior, Feira de Santana.1 As much as I am pushing back against mestre-centered narratives of 1 All translations of Portuguese, from texts, lyrics or interviews, are my own unless otherwise noted. I will provide translations in context the first time a Portuguese word appears in the text. Refer to the Glossary for an overview of the main Portuguese terms used throughout the dissertation. There are only three formal levels of capoeira practitioner in the Angoleiros do Sertão: Treinel is the first formal level after “student.” Contra-mestre is the level before mestre, and mestre/mestra = mestres (men) or 1 capoeira by featuring the voices, thoughts and movements of his students, the group is his life’s work. Any engagement with the Angoleiros do Sertão is an engagement with Mestre Cláudio, his life and his philosophy of capoeira Angola. I begin therefore with his story. Mestre Cláudio Costa was born in 1966 in a neighborhood in the poor, dirt-road outskirts of Feira de Santana. As he recounts in his ladainha, the litany-song that begins a capoeira roda, Cláudio’s father left shortly before his birth, an act Cláudio has never forgiven. His mother, Dona Antonia, raised Cláudio and his two siblings on her own. To support her family, she made and sold acarajé, the bean fritter snack traditionally prepared by members of the Candomblé religion. When she was working as a domestic in the homes of wealthy families, she would cut off just a bit of the meat she was preparing for their dinner to take home to feed her children. But on other days, despite her hard work, Dona Antonia was unable to provide food for her children. So Cláudio and his siblings learned about hunger from an early age, how it felt in a growing body to have nothing to eat. Rita, Cláudio’s wife, recounted to me how Cláudio and his friends would rummage through trash bins to find discarded scraps to eat. One of his friends was nicknamed Yoghurt, because he loved it so much! Whenever they found a bit of yoghurt still clinging to a container, they would give it to him. Rita and Cláudio had recently run into Yoghurt. He was in a wheelchair, having survived being shot eight times, but apparently left paralyzed. The rest of Cláudio’s childhood friends are all dead. I imagine from Rita’s telling that they have died of violence, drugs, or poor health. The only reason mestras (women) are considered master-teacher-players of capoeira Angola. They usually have had many decades of experience playing and teaching capoeira. They are valued as living resources, containing knowledge of capoeira’s history, philosophy and secrets. A ngoleiros / angoleiro/as: I use “Angoleiros” (with a capital A) to refer specifically to members of the Angoleiros do Sertão and “angoleiros” (with a lower case a) to refer to practitioners of capoeira Angola generally, regardless of group affiliation. 2 Cláudio is alive today is because of capoeira. Capoeira has given him everything, and this is why he gives everything he has to capoeira. Cláudio began capoeira as a young boy on the streets of Feira de Santana. At the time, there were no capoeira mestres in Feira and he began playing with another boy, without any formal instruction. Then, in order to pursue more lucrative work, his mother moved to Salvador, the coastal capital of Bahia, and eventually sent for him to join her. He also went to work as a handyman and gardener in the house of a wealthy woman. He started school there, but as he put it, “I went to school, only I didn’t go.” One day he was on his way to get his identity card. The mistress of the house had scolded him, saying, “Cláudio, here [in the city] you cannot walk around without identification. Here it is not the same as in the interior. You must have your documents.” So he went to get his identity card, and near the police station was the capoeira academy of Mestre Dimola. “Passing by there, I heard it, I liked it, and I enrolled [in the capoeira academy]. But before I enrolled, every day I went to school, only I didn’t go to school. I went to watch the capoeira, until I stopped going to school. I went to capoeira, every day I went to capoeira class.” Capoeira was his education. When he returned to Feira de Santana, several years later, he began to teach capoeira in different peripheral neighborhoods. He played capoeira on the street and in the rodas at the Mercado de Arte Popular (the Popular or People’s Arts Market building outside of which he holds his street roda today). Everywhere, he said, had capoeira on the street. He trained for a year or two with a mestre in Feira called Nego de Jorgina [Jorgina’s Black Man]. Jorgina, his mother, was a mãe de santo, a Candomblé priestess. Cláudio stopped teaching capoeira for a while in 3 order to devote himself to learning more. His apprenticeship was on the street. They called it “street capoeira” because it didn’t come out of a capoeira school or academy. And so he went on learning street capoeira. Then one day there was a roda during the Micareta festival of Feira, a kind of local carnival that takes place outside of the carnival season, in April. An old homeless man arrived at the roda, and he asked Cláudio if he could play. Cláudio told him to ask the mestre who was leading the roda, Nego de Jorgina, who responded, “No! Crazy people don’t play here, no way!” However, Mestre Cláudio could see the man wasn’t crazy. He was an old capoeirista (capoeira player), only he slept on the street. This was why he was dirty and unkempt. The man stayed low to the ground, watching the games. Cláudio recounted, “Man, just when you didn’t expect it, he threw himself into the roda, but he threw himself low to the ground. Man, what capoeira! I thought to myself, this is the capoeira that I want! I began to do this kind of capoeira, avulso. Avulso, it’s when you don’t have a specific place to learn.” He began training this kind of capoeira, low to the ground, all on his own. Later he would learn that this kind of capoeira was also known as capoeira Angola. It was the capoeira that many older mestres still played, and that was undergoing a kind of revival at the time, in the 1980s. When he was twenty-two years old, in 1988, he went to São Paulo to teach a capoeira course, and people, including older mestres, started calling him “mestre.” As he had no official mestre and belonged to no capoeira academy, he could not be officially “formed” or graduated as a mestre. Yet he became a mestre in the way the older mestres had, by general consensus of the community. He explained, “In the past, the capoeira mestre was recognized as a mestre by his capoeira community. He 4 was someone who had students, who taught classes. This was a mestre.” What is also implied here is that all of these people, students and other mestres, who started calling him “mestre,” also recognized his exceptional capoeira ability: his swift movements, his clever game, and his distinctive style. Mestre Cláudio has given everything in his life to capoeira, and capoeira has given him everything in return: the financial means to support his family, to purchase land and build a compound of living quarters and capoeira training spaces, including a swimming pool with bar, where he welcomes hundreds of capoeira players at his annual event. Capoeira has provided him with international renown and teaching opportunities and friends, lovers, and devoted students all across Brazil and Europe. Various researchers, too, have come and gone, “drinking from the source,” as he often puts it, in order to produce documentaries or written work, and have their lives permanently altered in exchange. I am one of these. * I began training capoeira Angola in earnest at Mestre Marrom’s academy in Rio de Janeiro in 2008, during my six-month sojourn in the city. In February of that year, Mestre Marrom held his annual event, Vadiando entre Amigos [Playing Capoeira with Friends], and two contra-mestres from the Angoleiros do Sertão, Tico and Xandão, traveled there to give workshops and play in the rodas. The students were divided into groups based on ability, so as a beginner I was placed in the class taught by the two Angoleiros. I remember duck-walking around the large space, a decrepit gym hall, in a deep, low squat, 5 every muscle of my legs burning after only moments in the position. But I also remember watching wide-eyed at how both Tico and Xandão moved, with such fluidity and style, Tico with his compact form and Xandão with his extended limbs. Looking back, I realized I hardly knew anything about capoeira at the time, having trained only for about a year and a half, and I knew even less about capoeira Angola, but I remember thinking— knowing — “This is the capoeira I want!” I learned from Tico and Xandão that their mestre was Mestre Cláudio, based in Feira de Santana. Part of what distinguished Cláudio from other capoeira mestres was that he had chosen to stay in the interior of the country, resisting the pull of the prosperous coastal cities (the litoral), and the even more lucrative possibilities of establishing schools in Europe or the United States. Instead, Mestre Cláudio stayed in Feira, the only mestre of capoeira Angola in the city, in order to preserve and foster the popular culture, the culture of the people of his region, the Sertão of Bahia. When I first arrived in Feira de Santana in 2013, therefore, I was fulfilling a desire that had bloomed in Rio de Janeiro 2008. Yet unforeseeably to me in 2008, I arrived with burgeoning questions that would eventually shape and become this dissertation. Starting where I am Before I contextualize my scholarly engagements, I heed Soyini Madison’s call to "start where you are" (2012:21). While performing fieldwork in Bahia, I felt my positionality in concrete ways and gleaned insight from reflecting upon my position and what it meant to my interlocutors. Indeed, throughout my visits I had many frank conversations with community members about my role in the group as a white North 6 American researcher and woman, or gringa. I was acutely aware of my whiteness, gender, and class, and the ways my body signaled my national and geographical place in the world. I came to the field sensitized to my position of power, but I also faced situations of powerlessness and vulnerability in ways I had not anticipated.2 Within this politicized group, several people put me in my place in a variety of ways, confronting and testing me, as an outsider who came to "absorb" their knowledge for my own benefit. These confrontations took many forms: Some were subtle snubs or threats, attacks or manipulations meant to make me feel scared, distrustful, alone, out of place, or in the wrong. The gist was that, as a white woman, I was in perpetual danger because I was too naive, stupid and weak to defend myself. I should submit to male authority for my own good. One group member never failed to acknowledge me as a gringa, making half-jokes about my "dirty gringa money." However, many more of these moments where interlocutors openly discussed my position took a highly constructive form. I consider these conversations some of the most precious, generous gifts of my fieldwork. In these dialogues, community members confronted me, signaled to me they were watching me, and warned me not to take advantage of my access to the community. Yet my interlocutors also reminded me, and I acknowledged, that it took a certain level of mutual trust and honesty to have these conversations in the first place. By discussing issues of power and inequality with me, interlocutors risked having unpleasant conversations, a risk they took voluntarily. This is why I felt that they spoke to me about these issues from a position of friendship and 2 For example, I felt prepared to defend against any unwanted sexual overtures, and very few situations of this nature arose. However, I was less prepared for other ways that certain people tried to exert power over me, such as depriving food, making physical threats, or pressuring me to give money. 7 generosity. Doing so, they recognized that I was genuinely concerned about the ethics of my research practices. In return, I confirmed that I wanted to hear their critiques and to incorporate them into my methods and analyses. While I built trust and developed friendships with group members, I am not claiming that I have earned a special "insider" status among the Angoleiros do Sertão. Indeed, my point is that the building of trust and friendship is an ongoing project, not a status one can arrive at, and at the same time no amount of trust and friendship can ever grant me a truly “inside” position. The group as a whole is open and welcoming, accustomed to hosting foreign visitors, in my time there usually from Europe, Israel, or Japan. As I have returned several years in a row and stayed for extended periods, ranging from two to four months, group members have told me that I have earned an honorary place in their family, or they tease me, asking why I don't just stay in Bahia and join the group. Yet none of this erases our mutual awareness that I do not belong there. I do not belong to the Sertão and nothing there belongs to me. Unlike in Rio, where I often passed for Carioca (native to Rio), in Feira my white skin is whiter even than the “Bahian whites” and always signals that I am a guest, that I come from far away, and I come with wealth. I use “wealth” literally, because even on a graduate student stipend, my economic power—to move around the world, to purchase nourishing food, medical care, protective clothing, sunscreens, and insect repellents (in climates where mosquitos transmit serious illnesses), as well as computers, cell phones and recording equipment, and comfortable housing—stood in stark contrast to many community members I encountered in Brazil. I may have been struck by the visceral way my gender marked me as inferior to the men 8 around me, but this was a temporary inconvenience. At the end of the trip I knew I was going home to a place where I would be treated as a capable adult. Instead of seeking to prove how much trust and insider knowledge I gained, therefore, I show how frank discussions about the implications, ethics and politics of my perpetual outsider status have shaped my methodological and theoretical engagements as well as informed which questions I have asked and how I have reached my conclusions. By revealing here how some interlocutors navigated the politics and ethics of fieldwork with me, I show how “positionality” emerged not only as an academic concept, but as a concern of vital importance to community members. * Viola [as I am called in Brazil]: I want to write about how our values and ideas about machismo and racism, how the way we live always has contradictions. How it’s not possible to find a group of people who think the same about everything, have same experience. Every person that I’m going to ask about these things in the Angoleiros do Sertão, about racism, machismo, will have a different response. It's important to express this, that not everyone thinks the same. Iaiá: It’s complicated, it involves lots of things. It seems simple! It seems like everything's cool! For the mestre, everything’s cool (massa), it's always cool! V: I have to find a way to write about the mestre, too, my strong feelings [about our conflicts] without making it only about me. But it is part of it all! I: Yes, it’s a part of it principally because you are coming from another culture. There are moments where you are seen as a person who is there sucking/absorbing (sugando), wanting to know what? Wanting to know too much—and, no, it’s not like that—and so this thing of the research, too, is also very conflicted. [You're] researching in a space that is not yours, trying to convince the people that this is doing good. Remember to deliver something back to these people! Because the people expect some [kind of] return. And what, where is it? What did you write? You’re staying here watching us, what are you going to do? We [will] want to know what you did. You need to have this mind, to come back, to show the people 9 you are interviewing. […] I’m not talking about a presentation, but talk with the people. V: I get the feeling from the mestre that he isn’t interested in what I’m doing. I: He might not be interested, but he is worried about the people, like, if you interview the people in Mantiba [his community], he'll be happy if you come back and talk with the people you talked with and tell them what you did. This is an ethical posture, and he’ll be happy. It might not involve him, but [it involves] the people he feels responsible for. This excerpt comes from one of many conversations I had with Iaiá about my privileged position and the ethical responsibilities that come with it. Iaiá is closely allied with the capoeira group, and trained with them when she was younger. Her mother is Dona Ivannide, the close friend of Mestre Cláudio and ally of the capoeira group who has founded and led the local Movimento Negro (Black Movement) group in Feira de Santana.3 Dona Ivannide is militant and outspoken on issues of racism and sexism, and she is one of the few people who publicly and forcefully criticizes Mestre Cláudio for his treatment of women. Iaiá is also an active Black Movement militant who speaks her mind about race and gender. Both women serve as models for many group members, especially for women. Iaiá is also in a committed relationship with an advanced group member who teaches his own nucleus, or off-shoot group, in Salvador. Both Dona Ivannide and Iaiá have spoken with me at length about capoeira, Candomblé and racial and gender politics in Brazil. I consider them among my closest friends in Feira, whose insights and presence during my fieldwork have profoundly shaped my work. The conversations I had about my privilege were not always easy or comfortable. Sometimes I did get defensive or frustrated, not because I disagreed with what they said, 3 There are many “black movements” in Brazil, smaller and larger groups that organize in autonomy from one another or in collaboration with the national movement, the Movimento Negro Unificado. However, many activists informally refer to these groups as “the Movimento Negro.” 10 but because we never seemed to arrive at concrete answers. In another conversation with Iaiá and Rita, Mestre Cláudio's wife, we spoke frankly about my position and duties, and I brought up the issue of gain. I felt a constant pressure to contribute financially to Mestre Cláudio, in exchange for what I was gaining by being there. Yet I knew that no amount of money could ever compensate fairly for how I benefitted from my research, for example, by building a career. Iaiá said that it wasn't only about money, though she felt the Mestre was justified in trying to gain from me as I was gaining from him. I understood this was what he was doing, even when I disagreed with his tactics. However, I said, if we agree that money is not enough, or that money is not the only issue, then where does that leave us? How can I possibly compensate Mestre Cláudio and others for contributing to my dissertation, which (I hope) eventually helps me further my academic career? Rita's anecdotes provided a possible answer. She told me how she had seen dozens of people like me come to the roça, Mestre Cláudio's compound, and do their research, make promises and then leave never to return again. In one case, a European researcher filmed Mestre Cláudio and the group, and produced a DVD, promising to send it to him, but never did. He only found out about it years later when he was teaching in Europe and someone else showed it to him. He was furious. I understand, therefore, that as a white, foreign researcher I embody potential betrayal. Yet, I wondered, was it enough to return and share my work? Was this all they were asking of me? Sometimes it seemed that way, as if the worst betrayal would be for me to leave and forget about them. Yet I sensed there was more. Iaiá also told me about a "conflict" between several women group members were having with a black movement group at their university, in São Paulo state. I learned later that the black student group took issue with the fact that 11 the capoeira group had only white practitioners (see Chapter 4). I believe Iaiá was gesturing to my position of racial privilege, urging me to contemplate what it meant for me to be a white practitioner/researcher learning and benefitting from this black practice. It was not her (or anyone else's) responsibility to give me answers. Every time, after one of these conversations, I would return to my apartment and write field notes furiously, usually arriving at only one conclusion: I must keep these issues at the forefront of my concerns. I must commit to the ongoing work of ethical practice. Still, I was frustrated by how little I could do to "give back" or "help" without it taking collaborative form. I had ideas about how I could contribute to the group--for example, helping the Mestre digitize his archive of capoeira Angola materials, including photographs, video tapes and newspaper clippings, many already decaying in the humidity. But first he would have to want me to help him in this way. This kind of collaboration would also require some degree of trust, and I am still not sure the Mestre trusts me in this way. Furthermore, neither the Mestre nor other group members have ever expressed that they want or need my “help,” though they often expressed the need for more money. This is a daily preoccupation in the lives of almost everyone that I worked with in Bahia. They know I have much more money than they do. It is unequal and unfair. I give them money when they ask for it or need it or charge for it. I understand that when the Mestre wants money from me, this is the most direct way to ensure that I contribute, because when I go away, there is no guarantee that I will ever return again. But I know, as I am sure he does too, I can never give him or anyone else enough money to balance out systemic inequalities. 12 I present these ethical considerations in an unfinished state. I do not have noble answers or radical new models for ways to reciprocate the generosity of my interlocutors, or to resolve the ethical problems that come with being a white scholar from the global North examining black culture and extricating black knowledge from the global South. Doing so I bring with me and reproduce, to some extent, colonialist and imperialist stances and attitudes. I believe that Iaiá and others meant to confront me with this question: What are you going to do about it? Their concern is not only with what I am going to say in the texts and papers I produce. They want to know, what am I, a white researcher, going to do with the knowledge I have extracted from this black practice and its community of practitioners? What is the work I want my work to do (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013)? My preliminary response has been to assume a political position regarding racial inequality in my research. In contrast to some social sciences approaches, yet still building upon and alongside the studies they produce, my aim is not only to describe and faithfully represent a social situation and context, but to contribute to changing it. To do this I engage the activist stances at the foundation of Black and Africana Studies, Black Feminism and Critical Race Theory (Valdes, Harris, and Culp 2014; Delgado, Stefancic, and Harris 2017; Combahee River Collective [1978] 2014; Kolenz et al. 2017; Collins 2000). I center the lived experiences of Afro-Brazilian practitioners of capoeira Angola and their white and non-black colleagues, and at the same time I position myself in this context and write from the ground of my own experience. In this way I strive to practice scholarship as “accompaniment,” engaging in compassionate analysis “in a way that combines critique and affirmation, that blends generative ideas with generosity, that uses 13 ego, energy, and ambition not primarily for personal gain but to help and serve others” (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013:16). This also means that my aim is not “speaking for aggrieved groups” but rather “speaking from their experiences and struggles” (19); not writing about race, racism and people’s suffering, but writing in attempts to alter the conditions that create them. Granted, an intention to change or influence does not mean I will succeed, but at the very least I am open with my interlocutors and readers about my political commitments to dismantling structural racism in Brazil and the United States. As I will elaborate upon further below, where I address my methodologies, I hope that this enables a critical posture that is not a mode of attack (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013:20), but rather one of dialogue and co-construction. Dissertation overview At its broadest, my research asks how African diasporic music and movement practices influence the ways that practitioners think about race, gender, belonging and politics. As practitioners move, listen and create sounds, how are they also producing knowledge and theorizing the political? With these questions I seek to address how disciplinary approaches still tend to separate the sensing body from the thinking mind, thereby obscuring the intellectual and political work that takes place in African diasporic embodied practices. In order to better understand how bodies think and act, I bridge ethnomusicology, sound and dance studies and Africana thought. I argue that sound and movement practices of the African diaspora are sites not only for celebration and critique, spirituality and creativity, but also for theorizing racialized power relations. 14 This dissertation examines these questions in the context of Mestre Cláudio’s capoeira group, the Angoleiros do Sertão (capoeira Angola practitioners of the Backlands), which is based in Feira de Santana, Bahia, in the northeast interior of Brazil, but also has satellite groups in São Paulo state, as well as other locations in Brazil and Europe. With this study I ask how practitioners of capoeira Angola, an Afro-Brazilian music-movement form, cultivate sensory knowledge as a mode of developing racial and political consciousness. A centuries-old practice that merges stylized fighting, bodily play, music, percussion and song, capoeira Angola passes on the wisdom developed and deployed by enslaved Africans and their descendants to achieve freedom. Citing this history, practitioners claim their practice as a form of social activism that helps sustain resistance to white, patriarchal, colonial oppression in Brazil. Through musical and bodily training, students embody the ancestral lessons with the aim of transforming their physical abilities and their consciousness (ways of perceiving and being). Centering practitioners’ sensory experience of the practice, I describe how they shift their understandings of self, race and community as a result of their training. I explore how practitioners who inhabit diverse positionalities (from poor, black youth in the Northeast to middle-class, white educators in the Southeast of Brazil) interpret the teachings of enslaved ancestors and bring them to bear in their contemporary lives. Indeed, while capoeira Angola valorizes black Brazilian identity in defiance of systemic racism, capoeira communities still perpetuate to varying degrees the sexist and racist ideologies of dominant Brazilian society. I ask, therefore, how and for whom capoeira can be understood as a practice of freedom, and whether the practice is differently liberatory for men and women, or for blacks and whites. 15 While I argue that capoeira Angola produces knowledge as an alternative to Euro- centric regimes of knowledge-power, I also use critical ethnographic methods to examine the limits and possibilities for this cultural movement to contribute to broader projects of black freedom. I do this by including voices of practitioners and community members largely absent in existing capoeira scholarship, and asking how they challenge but also maintain racialized and gendered power relations. In this way, I complicate interpretations of capoeira as fully realized liberation by revealing how the practice embodies freedom as an ongoing struggle. I identify capoeira Angola’s political potential in its mobilization of the Afro-Brazilian past through sounding, moving bodies in the present, in order to construct an alternative, Afrocentric future. Ultimately, with the dissertation I make several interrelated contributions: Drawing on methods from music, sound, dance and performance studies, I have developed approaches for analyzing simultaneous sound and movement. Recognizing sensory ways of knowing as central in practices of the African diaspora, I also contribute to expanded conceptions of political theory and Africana thought that include the thinking produced in capoeira Angola’s sonic and bodily expressions. Brazilian history and capoeira The history of capoeira, as a practice developed by enslaved Africans in Brazil, must be told in tandem with the history of Brazil as a colonial power that derived its might from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The colonization of Brazil began in 1500 when commander Pedro Álvares Cabral landed his Portuguese fleet on the South American continent (Skidmore 1999:5). Soon thereafter the Portuguese established trading posts 16 and missionaries began arriving in order to “convert the heathen” populations, which numbered at least several million at the time (Skidmore 1999:6-8). The subjugation of the indigenous populations therefore took a religious form alongside their subjugation under slavery, but it nonetheless resulted in their decimation by epidemic diseases and genocide (Skidmore 1999:15; Crook 2009:17; Metcalf 2005: 111-2). As throughout the Americas, as indigenous populations decreased, the Portuguese turned to Africa for a source of enslaved labor, where they had been practicing chattel slavery since the fifteenth century (Skidmore 1999:17). Brazil brought more enslaved Africans to its shores than any other single nation or colony in the New World, with estimates numbering from four or five million upwards to sixteen million (Skidmore 1999:17; Crook 2009:17; Nascimento and Nascimento 1992:89). Roughly 40% of enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil (Bergad 2007:96), reaching the peak of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. Brazil was the last country to abolish both the slave trade in 1850 and slavery in 1888 (Bergad 2007:10). In 1549 Salvador was established as the colony’s capital, which it remained for over two hundred years (Skidmore 1999:10). As such, Salvador was one of the principle ports for the colony’s slave trade. It soon became known for its majority black population, comprising enslaved and free Africans and Afro-Brazilians (Reis 1993:5; Farias et al. 2006) eventually earning the moniker “Black Rome” (Landes 1947:17; Dunn 2007). Contrary to the myths the Brazilian elite have told themselves, slavery in Brazil was brutal and slave mortality was high, whether due to malnutrition and neglect, or the tropical climate in which diseases festered. In contrast to North America, where the enslaved population grew primarily through reproduction, Brazilian slave populations 17 were steadily replenished through the trade with Africa. This meant that during the years of the slave trade, through 1850, there were large African-born populations in Brazil who carried with them their traditions, languages, and cultural practices. Brazilian authorities in turn reacted ambiguously to African cultural expressions, at times repressing them and at times encouraging them, as a means of letting the enslaved population “blow off steam” (Avelar and Dunn 2011:8). This combination of factors has contributed to the sense that Afro-Brazilians have retained many of their African practices, most famously through the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, which shares many characteristics with other African diasporic religions such as Cuban Yoruba religion, or Santeria, and Haitian Vodou. Traditions of making instruments have also been passed down through the generations in Afro- Brazilian communities, with percussion instruments in Brazil still made with the same techniques as those used on the African continent. For example, the berimbau, the bowed gourd-resonator used in capoeira, seems to have evolved very little from its African counterparts. Furthermore, as Matory (2005) has shown, many of these “retentions” are actually the result of active and continual communication and exchanges maintained between Africans in Brazil and on the continent, evidence of intentional efforts to maintain African identity and characteristics of their practices. Throughout the nearly four hundred years of slavery in Brazil, enslaved Africans “never stopped fighting for their freedom” (Nascimento and Nascimento 1992:89). The Nascimentos were not referring to everyday forms of resistance, such as “foot dragging” and “false compliance” (Scott 1987:xvi).4 Rather, they referenced the founding of a vast 4 I elaborate further on Scott’s theories of resistance in Chapter 4. 18 number of maroon communities, or quilombos, and organized rebellions and uprisings, the most famous of which took place in Salvador in 1835 (Reis 1993). The uprising of 1835 came after a slew of other slave revolts which had gained momentum as Brazil transitioned to independence from Portugal, as Afro-Brazilians, enslaved and free, dared to dream that independence could also bring racial equality and freedom from slavery (Costa 2000:10). However, this was not to be the case as the uprisings instead triggered harsh punishments and a tightening of control over the black populations by the authorities (Reis 1993). Independence from Portugal was gained in a manner unique in the New World. The king of Portugal, João VI, driven from Lisbon by the Napoleonic wars, had moved his court to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1808—the only European regent ever to establish their kingdom outside of Europe. However, after João left his son Pedro as regent in 1921, Pedro declared independence in 1822, establishing the Brazilian Empire that would last until 1889 (Costa 2000). In this way, though the formal structures of power shifted, Brazil continued to be governed by a small class of white elite, a pattern that has persisted until to today, though in different forms. The dominant narrative of Brazil’s independence focuses on Pedro’s defiance of the Portuguese Court and portrays Brazil’s transition to independence as peaceful, without armed conflict. However, that narrative only holds for the southern provinces of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The war of independence waged in Bahia is absent or given only passing mention in English-language texts of Brazilian history (Andrews 1991; Reis 1993; Kraay 1998; Skidmore 1999; Costa 2000), but it looms large in popular 19 memory in Bahia to this day.5 Indeed, 2 de julho, the 2nd of July (1823), is celebrated as Independence Day in Bahia over the national holiday of September 7th (1822). This reflects how divided and decentralized the country was throughout colonial rule, and in many ways how it remains until today. It also reveals an academic tendency to privilege studies and events focusing on the Southeast of Brazil, especially its largest cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, reflecting in turn broader educational and economic disparities between Brazil’s poorer northern and wealthy southern regions. In any case, the people of Bahia continue to celebrate the 2nd of July as a struggle of the people against power, thereby inserting Afro-Brazilians as heroes into the national narrative. The popular reading does not always emphasize race explicitly, and of course it oversimplifies the history, but black Brazilian fighters played an indispensable role in the conflict and they were consciously fighting for their freedom on many levels (Reis and Silva 1989). In other words, they fought not only for Brazilian independence from Portugal, but for freedom from the racial oppression imposed by the colonial power. While only the former of these freedoms would be achieved, the significance of the struggle in Bahian memory retains this racial resonance (Kraay 1998). This is especially true among capoeira practitioners and scholars, who argue that capoeira practitioners were undoubtedly among the ranks of the valiant fighters from the underclasses (Abreu 2005), as they also were in the War of Paraguay several decades later. The first mention of capoeira by name in historical records appears in a police document of Rio de Janeiro dating from 1789, and the first visual representation of 5 Kraay (1998) writes about black militia officers in Salvador in the period 1790-1840, and though he does not focus on the war of independence, he reveals the complexity of the situation where patriotic black militia fought against Portuguese forces but were also mobilized against black rebel groups. 20 capoeira occurs in a painting by Rugendas dated 1835. However, travelers and observers had written in earlier documents about combat games and other ritual practices that were likely precursors to capoeira (Assunção 2005:31-69). All in all, capoeira and assorted similar practices are assumed to have existed long prior to the 1789 document, though we have no way of knowing the details of how they were played. While some oral tradition claims capoeira’s origins in rural plantations, imagining it was practiced in the quilombos, there is no way to either confirm or refute these ideas. We do know from police documents and newspaper notices that capoeiras (as capoeira practitioners were known) were persecuted in cities with increasing intensity as the nineteenth century progressed, paralleling the rising tensions between enslaved and free African and Afro- Brazilian populations and the smaller class of white powerholders. Indeed, as the institution of slavery faltered and fell throughout the Americas, abolitionists reminded elite Brazilians that their clinging to slavery made “Brazil a shameful anachronism in the modern world” (Skidmore 1998: 18).6 Again, enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians acted on their understandings of this historical shift away from slavery. After suppression made organized revolts no longer feasible in Bahia after 1835, enslaved actors increasingly appealed to the legal system to secure their freedom. By the 1870s they felt “emboldened” to start organizing rebellions again, and by the 1880s slaves were leaving the plantations of São Paulo “en masse.” The combination of 6 In comparison, the slave trade to the United States ended in 1808 with abolition of slavery in 1865, compared to Brazil’s ending of the slave trade in 1850 and abolition in 1888 (Bargad 2007:30-32). 21 these actions and other factors brought about abolition in 1888, for which Princess Isabel would receive the credit as she signed it into law (Andrews 1991:35-41).7 Just as the institution of slavery declined until it was no longer tenable, the institution of the empire had also declined in the eyes of elites as well as the people. In 1889, a bloodless Republican military coup removed Pedro II from power, marking the start of Brazilian Republican rule by a faction of military elite (Skidmore 1999:74-76). Several urgent problems faced the elite of the new republic. With freed Afro-Brazilians leaving rural areas for the cities, planters faced a labor crisis. At the same time, they faced their own racist fears that the newly freed black population would seek violent vengeance or otherwise pollute the Brazilian national image. Indeed, European scientific racism dominated Brazilian thought, placing “great emphasis on defense of the purity of the ‘civilized’ portions of the national race against the polluting, degenerating influences of primitive or corrupt portions of society” (Borges 1995:60). In this climate, Afro- Brazilian cultural expressions were deemed even more threatening than in previous eras. While capoeira practitioners had previously been persecuted on grounds of vagrancy or disrupting the peace, with the new Penal Code of 1890, capoeira was officially criminalized (Oliveira and Leal 2009:32). The solution to the two-fold “problem,” in the eyes of the elites, of labor shortage and an unwanted black population came in the form of embracing the ideology and public policy of “whitening.” In the form of ideas, this translated to the theory that the superiority of the white “race” would eventually dilute and extinguish the black one, 7 The latter half of the nineteenth century, with the end of the formal slave trade, saw increased internal trade where enslaved workers were sold to plantation owners in the south of the country, where coffee production overtook sugar production of the north (Costa 2000:144-6). 22 whitening and elevating the entire population in the process. Notably, this countered theories that racial mixture resulted in degeneracy (which still held sway elsewhere in the Americas). Instead, it posited miscegenation as a positive process that would eventually solve white Brazil’s racial “problem” (Skidmore 1998:64-5). Though whitening ideology had emerged earlier, it took full force in the form of policy through state-sponsored European immigration. Voilà! The two-for-one solution to the labor crisis and the blackness of the Brazilian population. By 1914, 2,700,000 Europeans had immigrated to Brazil, many settling in the south and working on coffee plantations (Skidmore 1998:136-144). However, Brazilian white elites were still confronted on a daily basis with the presence of African descendants in their midst. By 1920, the elites had begun to sense they could no longer attribute all the country’s ills to the presence of Afro-descendants. The Brazilian population was actually becoming progressively lighter—the millions of white immigrants helped—and yet the country continued to struggle economically. Throughout the World War I years, Brazilian intellectuals and artists embraced the primitivist aesthetic movement so popular abroad, which enabled them to “reverse their valuation of the Indian and African heritage, thus breaking down boundaries between the ‘pure’ and the ‘polluted’ segments of the nation” (Borges 1995:69-70). More than any other intellectual of the time, Gilberto Freyre’s ideas ushered in a new ideology of Brazilian racial formation. Educated at Columbia University, Freyre brought back to Brazil North American anthropological ideas about the necessity of valuing and preserving “primitive” cultures (Butler 1998a:42). In Casa Grande e Senzala (1933), translated as The Masters and the Slaves (1986), Freyre painted a new idyllic 23 picture of Brazilian history and society, one in which masters and slaves lived in relative harmony; where intimate relations between white Portuguese men and black enslaved women symbolized the mixture of cultures. By valuing African, Afro-Brazilian and to a lesser extent indigenous Indian contributions to white European culture in Brazil, Freyre argued that Brazil’s unique national character was defined by mixture, or mestiçagem. Most importantly, Freyre held up this union of cultures as explanation and proof of the (near) lack of racial prejudice in Brazil. Moreover, this idea allowed Brazilians to feel that, once slavery was abolished, the “evil consequences of miscegenation” were abolished along with it (Skidmore 1998:191-2). In other words, once rid of slavery, white Brazilians felt they had rid themselves of any wrongdoing towards the black population. Freyre’s achievement was to inspire this dramatic ideological shift that paved the way for the concept of “racial democracy,” which still holds sway today in the Brazilian racial imaginary, despite having been thoroughly debunked by generations of scholars (Andrews 1991:7; Costa 2000:234-46). Freyre was one leader in a broader academic movement of searching for Brazilian national identity in its expressions of Afro-Brazilian “folklore” (Vianna 1999:8-9). Anthropologists, sociologists and musicologists across Brazil produced studies of the African culture in Brazil, evaluating their authenticity and arguing for the value of their contributions.8 However, this celebration of African and Afro-Brazilian practices and influences did not translate to the valorization of the Afro-Brazilian people themselves. Indeed, Freyre’s project effectively “served to reinforce the whitening ideal” by always 8 See for example: Almeida 1942, 1961; Andrade 1972, 1997, 1995; Carneiro 1978, 1967, 1937; Cascudo 1939,1967,1971; Nina Rodrigues 1935a, 1935b; Ramos 1956, 1939, 1935. 24 showing how the white elite benefitted from African influences, not the other way around (Skidmore 1998:192). In the 1930s, Getúlio Vargas took power establishing his dictatorship with the Estado Novo [the New State], and he began a project of renovating and modernizing Brazil. Freyre’s ideas worked hand in hand with the need to establish Brazil’s modernity and its national identity. As an example of this cultural work in application, the 1930s and 40s saw samba, an Afro-Brazilian music form, elevated to the national music through the Rádio Nacional broadcast out of Rio de Janeiro (McCann 2004:36-37). The practice of capoeira also gained ground and shed some of its stigmatization in this period. Since the criminalization of capoeira in 1890, capoeira practitioners had experienced repression, though this took different forms in the two main cities where capoeira was practiced, Rio and Salvador. In both cities, capoeiras were closely associated with street violence. In Rio, where capoeira was synonymous with violence, police repression seems to have effectively ended street capoeira and sent the practice underground. In contrast, Bahian capoeiras seem to have maintained more violent and more ludic forms of capoeira alongside one another, with some famous capoeiras lacking any association with violence and “disorder” (Assunção 2005: 105-123). It is in this context that two principle figures emerged in the 1930s in Salvador to lay the foundations for contemporary capoeira practice. Mestre Bimba was a visionary capoeira practitioner who set out to modernize capoeira in order to transform it into the most effective martial art, which he renamed the Bahian Regional Fight. The capoeira that has subsequently taken the world by storm descended from Bimba’s style of capoeira, which is why angoleiros informally refer to all 25 non-Angola contemporary styles as “Regional.” Bimba established a sports school in order to teach his Regional fight, and he innovated the form by adding kicks from other martial arts, and introducing uniforms and levels of graduation. In 1937, due to Bimba’s efforts, capoeira was legalized if practiced indoors, within the confines of “academies” or sports schools, and in 1953 Vargas allegedly declared that capoeira was “the only truly national sport” (Assunção 2004:141). In response to Bimba’s innovations, a cohort of capoeira mestres began to call their unadulterated style of capoeira “Angola.” They petitioned Mestre Pastinha to organize a school of capoeira Angola, which he did in the 1940s under the name of Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola (known as CECA, Sports Center of Capoeira Angola) (Assunção 2004:155). Pastinha’s Angola style was recognized by intellectuals as Carneiro as the more authentic, African style, and Pastinha was eventually sent with other capoeiristas from his group, as well as Candomblé priests and samba musicians, to represent Brazil at the First World Festival of Black Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 (Assunção 2004:151-166). Due to the efforts of these two founding fathers, capoeira was disassociated from the street, criminality, disorder and violence, and elevated to a practice suitable for “everyone,” as a famous ladainha puts it, though in practice, “everyone” has meant increasing numbers of whites and elites. The Vargas regime eventually transitioned to a short-lived democracy, and in 1964 a military coup plunged Brazil into another twenty years of dictatorship. Democracy was restored in 1985 and the new Brazilian constitution went into effect in 1988. Throughout these changes of power, however, the influence of the Vargas years on conceptions of national Brazilian culture have remained strong. Under the various 26 dictatorships, any expression of difference was characterized as a threat to national unity, as the outlawing of political parties in 1937 exemplified. Tellingly, this ban ended the first black political party in Brazil, the Frente Negra [Black Front], established in São Paulo in the early 1930s (Andrews 1991:154), in the same year that Vargas legalized capoeira. Today, despite the efforts of academics and activists, many Brazilians still hold fast to these ideas about difference: invocations of difference, whether in the form of speaking out against racism or as a celebration of black beauty, are still ironically considered racist by many and thereby a threat to national unity (Nascimento 2007). While conducting fieldwork in Brazil, I also sensed the tangible effects of a population having emerged from a century dominated by dictatorships, with only pockets of democracy. Many of the people I talked with expressed extreme distrust of the political system. Disillusionment has only grown in recent years with the fall of the Worker’s Party. After twelve years of Worker’s Party rule, under which new social welfare policies lifted many Brazilians out of abject poverty, a hard right wing government has seized power (those on the left call it a coup, as do I) and jailed the former president and folk hero Lula. Black activists call attention to legislative progress that has been made, most notably in recent laws mandating racial quotas in public universities and the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian history in schools. However, at the same time, they recognize how much remains to be done. Having established this broader historical context, I now turn to the more particular aspects of this study. Capoeira Angola and the Angoleiros do Sertão 27 Capoeira Angola: A brief gesture towards the undefinable When a capoeira practitioner tries to define capoeira, often the more deeply involved they are in the practice, the more cryptic their answer, as illustrated by Mestre Pastinha’s famous line: “Capoeira is everything the mouth eats!” By eluding definition, capoeira embodies its own skills of evasion and the value it places on cunning and slipperiness. So out of respect for capoeira’s wily ways, her refusal to be pinned down or caged in, I do not attempt to contribute a comprehensive answer. However, capoeira scholars have aptly dubbed it a “blurred genre” (Lewis 1992:1; Downey 2002:490). It combines stylized, aesthetic movement-to-music with fighting and above all, play. I often tell people capoeira Angola is like a combination of poker, chess and boxing: like poker, it requires bluffing and keen psychological insight, the ability to read one's opponent's personality and condition. Like chess, it requires strategy and what I think of as "seeing into the future”: a great capoeirista knows at any given moment all of their partner's possible moves and the new (future) possibilities they all create in the game. Like chess and poker, at least, capoeira is also a game. Like boxing, capoeira requires movement and art, sweat and confrontation with fear and pain. And it happens in a "ring." As this dissertation shows, capoeira Angola is also much more, including ancestrality, spirituality, community and political struggle. However, for now, imagine two people, or players, surrounded by a ring of bodies, some sitting on the ground and singing the chorus, and eight of them standing and playing various percussion instruments and also singing. The space pounds with sound, from the thud of the lowest drum to the shimmer of the metal discs on the pandeiro hand drum. The chorus of voices rises and falls in response to a lead singer whose hoarse voice strains above the noise. 28 The two players in the middle fold and bend, kick and crouch, nearly always facing each other. They may play close, compacting their bodies in space, or they may take more distance and float their legs up into a languorous handstand. Their movements may seem harmlessly slow or murderously quick. Sometimes they laugh out loud, gesture theatrically, or scowl. Beyond the ring of players, if this is the Saturday roda of the Angoleiros do Sertão, a city street bustles. Passersby stop to watch intently. The sun burns down, but is obstructed by a grand old wide-leafed tree which provides the shade for the roda. Everyone present feels the energy pulse through their bodies, and when they walk away they feel better than they have all week. Capoeira Angola and other contemporary styles The historical polarization between Angola and Regional styles that emerged from Pastinha’s and Bimba’s schools has persisted. Though there are no standardized definitions or criteria for determining proper style names and characteristics, Regional, or “contemporary capoeira” as the styles that evolved out of it are also known, remains distinct from capoeira Angola in many ways.9 Regional can be easily recognized as the style of shirtless, barefooted men wearing white pants and doing flips in the air on the beach. It is the most widely disseminated form, recognized and practiced, as well as represented in various media, from films to commercials. Contemporary capoeira groups have also been commodified and commercialized to a much greater extent than most capoeira Angola groups, with large international capoeira organizations counting 9 Even though "Regional" technically refers to the style originated by Mestre Bimba, and not widely practiced anymore, it is often used as shorthand to refer to all contemporary styles which evolved from Mestre Bimba's style. I use it in this general way. 29 thousands of members. What most differentiates the two general styles, however, is not only the way the game itself is played, but the meanings evoked in practice. Where Regional tends to foreground showy acrobatics and athleticism, with superficial references to its origins in slavery, capoeira Angola is a ritual intended to evoke in practitioners an embodied contact with African ancestrality. Capoeira Angola's international reach is also growing. The movement style of Angola is said to be slower and lower to the ground, though many groups and players disrupt this generalization. It is said to be more "traditional," closer to the way capoeira was played before there were separate styles, though many Regional players dispute this. While many practitioners and scholars claim that “Capoeira é uma só,” [There is only one capoeira], those that say this are usually not angoleiros. Much has been made of the rivalry between practitioners of the two styles—seeking to determine which is better to fight with, which is more authentic, etc.—but I have witnessed more mutual respect than rivalry. Many present day Angola and Regional players appreciate each other’s differences, perhaps having agreed to disagree, and even look forward to playing against each other in the rodas. In the 1980s, capoeira Angola seemed threatened with extinction, as the flashier Regional and Senzala (a group based in Rio) styles won over crowds and audiences. Yet as Afro-Brazilian culture went through a phase of “re-Africanization” in Bahia in the 1970s and 1980s, mestres of capoeira Angola — the few old angoleiros who clung to their practice — recognized and re-claimed capoeira Angola as the more African, thus more authentic, version of capoeira. As black militancy saw a resurgence during the “opening” period towards the end of the dictatorship, capoeira Angola became even more 30 directly associated with black power — or black power through black culture (Araújo 2004; 2015). This work was primarily undertaken by black mestres and mestras who were also academics, securely in place in the universities. Thus the revival of capoeira Angola accompanied a broader resurgence of black militancy that as part of its project linked black power to (and through) black culture. Leaders in this work tended to be simultaneously (and continue to be) activists, practitioners and in many cases, also academics. As black (or Afro-descendent) and militant, they view their positions as advocating from their own position for their communities. Assessing the current situation (in 2018) reveals the fruits of their labors, which are still ongoing. Capoeira Angola has enjoyed several decades of increased valorization and participation, around the globe and, in part due to its global spread, in Brazil. Yet with these successes, angoleiro/as in Bahia today confront new issues. The capoeira-activists of the 1980s and 90s remain embedded in academic spaces. In their struggle to valorize capoeira Angola, one of their strategies seems to have been raising its worth as object of study in the eyes of academics. Capoeira Angola was not only worthy of serious academic study, they argued, but serious academics could be practitioners and scholars. In a sense, these angoleiro-professors continued Mestre Pastinha’s (and Mestre Bimba’s) projects of lifting capoeira off the streets, engaging in a kind of respectability politics. The mestres of the 1980s-90s picked up the work of the mestres of the 1930s through 60s in showing that capoeira was not a street fight of vagabonds and criminals, but an art or sport suited for people from all levels of society. As more professors and graduate students began to train capoeira, capoeira also earned a reputation as an esteemed activity worthy of academic study. Since Mestre Pastinha's efforts at uplift in the 1960s, but 31 especially as it has entered even more elite spaces from the 1980s onwards, capoeira Angola has seen a steady increase in white participation, many entering through exposure to classes at their university. Today, capoeira Angola is beloved by white, middle class, university folks. I am one prototypical North American example. Likewise, within the Angoleiros do Sertão, many Brazilian practitioners encountered capoeira Angola at their universities, and the group counts a majority of white practitioners. For this reason, I ask what does predominance of white participation means to a practice of black liberation. The Angoleiros do Sertão Community The Angoleiros do Sertão form a heterogeneous community whose binding force and positive energy (or axé) radiates outwards yet circulates centripetally, drawing in practitioners from across Brazil and the world. The community is a complex organism, with members playing diverse roles of varying intensity. I have defined the community of the Angoleiros do Sertão broadly, including practitioners that range from beginners to mestres, as well as the non-practitioners who are drawn to the group by its binding force. I spoke to as diverse a group as possible in terms of racial identification, gender, socio- economic background and geographical location in Brazil. I consider the actively practicing Angoleiros in Feira de Santana the core actors, contributing their energies to the day-to-day maintenance of the group: showing up to trainings, sweating, helping the mestre make and maintain the instruments, playing samba at the Saturday roda, and working tirelessly on preparations in the months leading up to the annual event in January, among other activities. Then there are the teachers (contra- mestres and treinels) and students of the satellite groups, many of which are based in the 32 interior of São Paulo state, with one in Recife, Pernambuco, but which also include groups in Helsinki, Finland; Berlin, Germany; and Split, Croatia. As most of the international members only come to Brazil once a year or not at all, I have not included them formally in this study, though I intend to include them at a future date. Other ethnographic accounts of specific capoeira groups have limited their scope to the mestre and practitioners, drawing firm boundaries between those who practice and those who do not. In this particular group, as I am concerned with questions of how capoeira practice intersects with practices of racial politics, I soon decided this way of delimiting the group of actors would be arbitrary and artificial. Beyond the actively training students in Feira, therefore, I have included some former students and others who have never trained capoeira. Most of these non-practicing community members either used to train capoeira, or have family members who train/ed or are in relationships with current members (or all of the above). Many of them are active militants in local groups of the Movimento Negro. Some of them love to participate in the samba de roda every Saturday. The most prominent of these non-practicing members is Dona Ivannide, a close friend of Mestre Cláudio's for over three decades and leader of a local chapter of the Movimento Negro in Feira de Santana. Dona Ivannide and Mestre Cláudio each refer to the other as one of their most significant "references." Uma referência, a reference, means a role model and teacher, someone who has imparted life-altering knowledge to others, who has guided and instructed one's own development. The mutual respect shared between these two figures, each references to many others, can be matched only by the vehemence of their frequent disagreements. Yet, both passionate and militant in their views, they have also both 33 shown the willingness and ability to change their views and positions. Perhaps this characteristic more than all others illustrates their wisdom and their value as leaders. They have trodden different paths, Ivannide becoming politically active through the union movements, and Mestre Cláudio focusing all of his energies in capoeira Angola. Yet each acknowledge their shared commitment to bettering the lives of the black people and their indebtedness to each other for expanding their understandings of how to achieve this. Dona Ivannide has changed Mestre Cláudio, confronting him with his own machismo, while Mestre Cláudio in turn has encouraged Dona Ivannide to soften her views towards whites, whom she used to believe had no place practicing capoeira Angola. The Sertão of Bahia The sertão (Backlands) of Bahia refers to a semi-arid region comprising the majority of the state, westwards of the coastal Zona da Mata (rainforest). Feira de Santana, located at the beginning of this region, is known as the “gateway to the Sertão,” or more romantically, the “Princess of the Sertão” (Senna 2014:77). Feira’s history and development are deeply entwined with the livestock farming that has made up the base of economic activity in the broader area since early in the seventeenth century, and which depended upon the unpaid labor of enslaved populations (Freire 2011). Indeed, all agricultural and economic production depended on slave labor. Aside from raising cattle, these laborers also made possible the farming of tobacco, various foodstuffs such as beans, corn and cassava, as well as cotton, sugar and coffee (Freire 2011). The city of Feira itself developed out of a farm, founded in the eighteenth century, which served as a 34 stopping point for cattle drivers on the road from the interior of the state to sell their livestock in Cachoeira and Santo Amaro, of the bordering Recôncavo region, and in the port of Salvador on the coast (“Feira de Santana” 2018). Feira de Santana, which translates to the Market of Saint Ana, grew over the course of the nineteenth century into a major market and trade hub, as it continues today, where farmers, cowboys, and artisans gather to exchange goods and services. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen unprecedented growth in population, with roughly 500,000 inhabitants in 2002 (Senna 2014:77) and informal estimates of nearly a million residents as of my last visit in 2017. This growth has been visually apparent as rolling stretches of brush land, in the city’s peripheral areas, have been converted to condominium complexes, with endless rows of identical boxed housing from one year to the next. In one neighborhood, between the city’s edge and Mestre Cláudio’s neighborhood of Mantiba, a dirt field where children used to play football has been bought by Korean merchants and enclosed by walls towering several stories high, to guard warehouses (according to local sources). Mestre Cláudio and others fear that his rural existence on the “roça,” the countryside, may be short-lived. He lives now on a parcel of land surrounded by undeveloped brush and farmland, which bursts with green and echoes with the sighs of croaking frogs when there is rainfall, and tinges brown in the dry season, with lone cacti punctuating the horizon. The region seems to suffer from interminable drought, broken on occasion by some periods of rain. Yet from Mestre Cláudio’s compound, the sertão’s romantic mix of suffering and beauty is palpable: in its famous moonlight, (as eternalized in the popular song “Luar do Sertão”), or in the air free of city smog; in the dirt roads nearly impassible when rain digs the ruts too deep; or 35 in the brightly lit neighborhood bars consisting of just a few plastic chairs and plentiful chilled beer. The sertão in Brazil, more than a geographical region, has been molded in the social imaginary as a place of hardship and beauty, known for its devastating droughts, where life requires resilience and often ends in violence; “a wild and uncivilized land where cangaceiros (bandits), coronéis (political strongmen), and fanatical religious leaders fought one another for physical and spiritual control of the backlands and their population” (Crook 2009:15). The sertão symbolizes the negative side of a “dialectic opposition” between “progress and backwardness, the modern and the archaic.” In contrast, the coastal cities, especially of the Southeast of Brazil, are “modern, progressive, representative of new values, where political activity is practiced with democracy, through the use of argument and reason” (Neves 2011a:55). With this opposition, much of which can be traced to southern media representations (Crook 2009:15), also comes an idealization. The sertão represents a simpler, more genuine life now lost in to the past.10 Racially, the sertão has been constructed as home to degenerate mixed-race peasants, or caboclos, famously portrayed in Euclides da Cunha’s novel of 1902, Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands). Cook describes how musical traditions of the sertão have likewise been thought to fuse “Iberian music with the primitive melodies of the Indians,” thereby symbolizing “archaic elements of Brazilian culture preserved in their pristine state” and providing “a cultural counterpoint to the strong sense of African and European mixture based in the coastal Northeast” (2009:16). Even though Feira de 10 Dent also writes about these qualities of the sertão and how they take audible form in música serteneja, (music of the sertão). While this specific musical culture is in Brazil’s Central-South, he acknowledges that along with sharing terms, the ideas about the sertão of the Central-South share similarities with those about the sertão of the Northeast, which proliferated earlier (2009:125-133). 36 Santana is a city, it retains a strong sertão, country identity: cars must regularly share the road with horse drawn carts; beyond the city center most roads remain unpaved; rodeos are regular events; the vast market halls still function in much the same way as they have since the city’s beginning, selling not only food goods in bulk, but agricultural supplies and leather work from saddles to sandals. When Mestre Cláudio chose to found his capoeira school in the interior, he intentionally evoked this history and context, radically departing from dominant understandings of the sertão as racially and culturally mixed, but predominantly Indian and European. Despite the fact that the largest and most famous quilombo, Palmares, was located in the sertão (in the seventeenth century), and even though African or Afro- Brazilian cultural elements still persist in the sertão, they are rarely acknowledged as such (French 2009:20-21). Mestre Cláudio is also unique for asserting a sertão claim and origin of the Afro-Brazilian practice of capoeira Angola. Far more than merely naming the group the Angoleiros do Sertão, Cláudio chose brown pants for the group’s uniform, styling it off of the cowboys and rural farm workers of the region. In his singing style, he emulates the projecting nasality of the aboio, the style of song cowboys (boiadeiros) sing to their cattle to herd them. He avidly collects songs from local aboiadors, singers of the style, as well as from sambadores (samba singers), committing them to memory on the spot. He possesses an unrelenting passion for the cultura popular, popular culture, of these backlands of Bahia, which he also fiercely defends as black culture. He has devoted his life to keeping alive and relevant the black popular culture of the Bahian sertão. By including capoeira Angola in this constellation of cultural activity and life of the sertão, he also argues against dominant narratives that locate capoeira’s birth in the cities 37 of Salvador, and even Rio de Janeiro. In his view, more rural, remote areas also contributed to capoeira’s development, aligning more with capoeira origin narratives that envision capoeira’s birth on plantations. Nearly all of the famous mestres of Bahia, he explains, came from the interior of the state, not the cities. From Bahia, mestres then proliferated capoeira through the rest of Brazil. He also points to the evidence of capoeira songs, old enough that their origins are unknown, with lyrics referring to cattle, bulls, and other rural themes. This proves that capoeira has existed in rural areas for a long time. In this way, Mestre Cláudio advocates for recognition of the interior’s and the sertão’s contributions to capoeira history, in answer to dominant scholarly attention to capoeira primarily in Salvador, Bahia (Pires 2004; Abreu 2005; Oliveira 2005; Abib 2009) and Rio de Janeiro (Soares 1994; 2001) or both (Assunção 2005). This means that in contrast to dominant conceptions of sertão culture, Mestre Cláudio understands his regional culture as thoroughly Afro-Brazilian. As we drove from his house to the downtown once, he gestured to all the undeveloped land, saying that it used to be owned by various members of his extended family. He told how they were all named “Costa,” because enslaved Africans taken from the West Coast of Africa were given this name, which means “coast.” It was unclear whether he meant they had purchased the land, or settled it after slavery was abolished or whether they escaped slavery to this area, but as one student told me, many of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Feira de Santana have their origins in communities of fugitive or free Afro- Brazilians. They do not all call themselves quilombos, but the student believed that Mantiba, where Mestre Cláudio grew up and now resides, likely was some form of quilombo in practice if not in name. Aware of this history, and of his own origins as a 38 descendant from enslaved people, Mestre Cláudio proudly identifies his regional popular culture as black popular culture, cultura popular negra, his people, o povo, the black people. Black Bahia The city of Salvador, Bahia, previously known as São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Saint Salvador of Bahia of All Saints) or simply Bahia, has been known as the “Black Rome,” the center for the Afro-Brazilian religious practice of Candomblé, at least as early as the 1930s (Dunn 2007:849) and as the “gateway to West Africa” for Brazilians (Landes 1947:17, also cited in Dunn). It continues in the present as a “mecca” for Afro- Brazilian culture (Afolabi 2009:152). As such, the city attracts visitors and tourists, from all over Brazil and the rest of the world, seeking to experience Bahian blackness (Pinho 2010; Williams 2013), whether as a representation of Africanness, African diaspora, Afro- Brazilianness or quintessential Brazilian culture. While Brazil as a whole has a majority Afro-Brazilian population of around 50.7%, when adding together the census categories of “black” (preto) and “brown” (pardo) according to the 2010 census (Lamarca and Vettore 2012). Bahia state has an Afro-Brazilian population of 79.1% as of 2006, by the same measures, (“Demografia da Bahia” 2017), while the city of Salvador has 79.5% (“Salvador, Bahia” 2018). In the context of Bahia’s renowned blackness, Mestre Cláudio’s identification of his regional popular culture as Afro-Brazilian would not seem surprising. However, as I have shown, black Brazilian culture has historically been understood as centered in the coastal city of Salvador and its surrounding Recôncavo region. The ethnicity and racial 39 identification of traditional countryside and sertão culture, in contrast, are understood as a mixture of primarily Portuguese and Indian or a “creolized” mix (Dawson 2014:118)—a figure with dark skin yet is “not considered black” (Nascimento 2007:63). By claiming both African descent and sertão identity, Mestre Cláudio counters the erasure of the African from the rural, interior culture, indirectly evoking not only the “movement of escaped, freed and former slaves into the backlands,” (Dawson 2014:121), the legacy of rural quilombos, but also the centuries long, enduring presence of large populations of Africans and their descendants in the interior. Scholarship on race in Brazil Agier (1995) provides a summary of four “cumulative historical moments” in the development of racism in Brazil, each governed by different prevailing ideologies: slavery, European racialism (or scientific racism), policies of “whitening,” and racial democracy (1995:248-251). It is now widely accepted that characterizations of racial slavery as “benign,” in any geographical or historical location in the Americas, are in no way accurate. Though practices varied from place to place, in Brazil enslaved subjects suffered dehumanization and subjection comparable to that of enslaved subjects throughout the Americas (Reis 1993; Nascimento and Nascimento 1991; Karasch 1987). After abolition, the period of scientific racism theorized African descendants as biologically inferior (Agier 1995:249). The next phase saw the institutionalization of “whitening” policies, built on the ideology that black inferiority could be overcome through miscegenation (Skidmore 1998; Dávila 2003). 40 With his theory of “Luso-Tropicalism,” Gilberto Freyre lay the foundations for Brazil’s prevailing ideology of racial democracy, which re-valorized racial mixture as evidence of harmonious and benign race relations (Nascimento and Nascimento 1991:109-110; Nascimento 2007:55). Here Agier’s observation of the “cumulative” nature of racist ideologies in Brazil is important, for though scholars have broadly refuted the “myth of racial democracy” (Costa 2000), the popular belief that miscegenation precludes racism in Brazil remains unshakable among many Brazilians, leading Elisa Nascimento to refer to this phenomenon as “the sorcery of color” (Nascimento, E. 2007). In the edited volume Race, Class and Power in Brazil, Fontaine picks up where Agier’s summary leaves off, and outlines several stages of scholarly work on race and racism in Brazil in the twentieth century, starting with three observed by Hasenbalg and adding one of his own. He began with Freyre, whose intervention, though flawed, was nonetheless intended to counter previous “blatantly racist” theories (1985:1). Then came the Pierson school, which subsumed race under class prejudice, followed by Fernandes’ theory that racial discrimination could be explained as an “anachronistic” hold-over from slavery. These theories have subsequently been disproven, but Fontaine added another more recent stage, in which political scientists began to develop more heterogeneous approaches to the subject (3). The volume attends to this political turn, pioneered by Anani Dzidzienyo (1971) among others. Since Fontaine’s 1985 volume, scholarly and activist work on race and racism in Brazil has continued to proliferate. Political scientists, race theorists and historians have critiqued the cultural politics of the Black Movement in Brazil (Hanchard, ed. 1999); shown how racism manifests as inequalities in access to education, labor opportunities, 41 criminal justice, and women’s health care (Reichmann 1999); argued for bringing an analysis of the racial dimensions of a wider range of “racially salient socio-political and cultural dynamics” in Brazil (Winant 1992); and shown how Afro-Brazilians have continually developed diverse approaches to contesting racism and white supremacy, from the time of slavery to the present (Kraay 1998; Butler 1998). No one has devoted more life-energy to the multiple projects of revealing histories, and analyzing, founding and leading organizations of black struggle, than Abdias do Nascimento (1980; 1989;1995; Nascimento and Nascimento 1992), who made it his life’s work to combat racism and the genocide of black people in Brazil, and to document and analyze a continuous tradition of Afro-Brazilian resistance and struggle. He traced this history back to the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese began their colonization of Brazil and brought the first enslaved Africans to its shores, to the quilombos, communities of fugitives from slavery, to slave rebellions (Reis 1993) and through the twentieth century. Along this vein, in his history of black political organizing in São Paulo, Andrews (1991) showed how enslaved Afro-Brazilians brought about abolition when they walked away from plantations in large numbers. He also describes the founding of the Frente Negra (Black Front), the first black political organization in Brazil, active from 1931-1938, the precursor to the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement), founded in 1978 in the waning days of the dictatorship. These works, by revealing hidden or forgotten histories, draw attention to the long continuous history of black political organizing in Brazil. Prior to this scholarly activity, many of these movements had been obscured, in part due to the way the various authoritarian regimes that dominated the Brazilian political landscape of the twentieth century forbade discussion of race. To this 42 day, many still believe that speaking about racism conjures racism into existence (Nascimento 2007:1). Anthropologists have also contributed accounts of the ways black Brazilians experience racism and define their identities. Several scholars have focused on black women’s experiences (Burdick 1998; Caldwell 2007), for example showing how black women’s bodies in Salvador are racialized as they move through urban spaces along the class spectrum (McCallum 2005). Twine ([1998]2001), seeking to understand how Afro- Brazilians reconciled their experiences of racism with the maintenance of racial democracy, found that they do not classify as racist subtler, everyday forms of racial discrimination, while Sheriff (2001) explored how Afro-Brazilians used a range of terms to describe skin color, while nonetheless preserving understandings of a black-white divide, in contradiction to what many previous texts claimed. In more recent studies, anthropologists are expanding definitions and sites of Afro- Brazilian political action in the city of Salvador. Perry (2013; 2016) has argued forcefully for recognizing how Afro-Brazilian women’s grassroots organizing around concrete, specific issues, such as land retention, represents an overlooked form of black Brazilian political mobilization. In another case, Williams (2013) examined the “ambiguous” nature of transnational relationships in the sex tourism industry in Bahia, where women organize to protect their rights and their safety in this line of work. Smith’s (2016) ethnographic study of black Bahian street theater protesting anti-black police brutality reveals the links between the state’s performance of violence against black bodies and its construction of Bahia as an “Afro-paradise.” Smith argues that in contemporary Brazilian racial politics, the ideology of racial democracy has been displaced by “Afro- 43 nationalism,” a national project that “permits” blackness in the “national fabric” while at the same time continuing “a routine politics of gendered, racialized terror toward the majority-black working class that manifests in the systematic killing of black people by the police throughout the country” (Smith 2016:6). As I write this, Afro-Brazilian communities and their allies across Brazil and the world reel from the assassination of Marielle Franco, a lesbian Afro-Brazilian woman activist known for her outspoken critique of police violence in Rio de Janeiro (Phillips 2018). Afro-Brazilian cultural politics What emerges from this scholarship are the ways that is that Afro-Brazilians, over the course of centuries, have continued to consolidate their communities of struggle around their cultural practices. Under oppressive circumstances, whether slavery, post- abolition or dictatorship that limited all political organizing (Jones-de Oliviera 2003), Afro-Brazilians have used their cultural spaces not only to construct identity but also to develop communal means to combat racism. The means took many forms, often combining the psychological, spiritual and political. Indeed, as Amilcar Cabral found in the struggles for national liberation in Africa, culture is “an inexhaustible source of courage, of material and moral support, of physical and psychic energy” (1973:53). The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, particularly in Bahia, provided such a source of culture, creating what Harding (2000) referred to as “alternative spaces of blackness.” From within these spaces, Africans and their descendants defined and reinforced their humanity and world views. In the absence of the words of enslaved and free black Brazilians in the historical record, Harding looked to their acts, as often only 44 recorded in police reports.11 In this way she revealed how the construction of alternative spaces empowered Africans to define “alternative meanings of blackness” (152). Butler (1998) also has shown how Candomblé formed a powerful institution where Afro- Brazilians cohered community around their shared African descent, overcoming ethnic differences. In these same communities, samba also functioned as "ritual for the restoration of psychological and spiritual balance” (Butler 1998: 87). In this dissertation I show how capoeira Angola contributes to the formation of contemporary alternative spaces of blackness alongside samba de roda and Candomblé. Throughout the scholarship on race in Brazil, therefore, a dominant theme has focused on the political power of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices and institutions. Recent historical studies of the slavery era and post-abolition in Brazil show how Africans and Afro-Brazilians have maintained and innovated their cultural forms and challenged systems of oppression through creative social, economic and political action (Reis 1993; Bacelar 1999; Farias et al. 2006; Harding 2000). In their volume Black Brazil: Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization (1999), Crook and Johnson bring together articles by academics, activists and practitioners to address how Afro-Brazilian practices have forwarded political projects benefitting the black people, but also to what degree they have been co-opted by the state. Outlining the tensions addressed in the debates and arguments made in the volume, they recognize how "[l]ong standing Afro- Brazilian religious (e.g. Candomblé, Xangô, Tambor de Mina) and secular traditions (e.g. capoeira, Bumba-meu-Boi, maracatu, afoxé) provide important loci for the perpetuation 11 Police reports have provided the foundation of many historical studies in Brazil, for example, on samba’s development (Hertzman 2013), capoeira (Assunção 2000; Pires 2004), and slave rebellions (Reis 1993). 45 and reproduction of African-derived social practices. At the same time, they have also been used as 'binding elements of a social homeostasis that benefits elites' in the construction of a national 'consensus culture'" (Crook and Johnson 1999:7, citing Yúdice). Elite appropriations of black Brazilian culture have "folklorized" the practices as "relics of tribal Africa," freezing them in time and distancing them from the “contemporary realities” of black people. In these ways culture can also be “a source of obstacles and difficulties, of erroneous conceptions about reality” (Cabral 1973:53). However, Crook and Johnson conclude that black Brazilian cultural practices nonetheless serve as "mechanisms of resistance and as resources for black to construct their own identities" and to build "relationships both with Africa and with the contemporary Afro- Brazilian community" (7), and as such they are "absolutely essential in order to mobilize the mass population of Afro-Brazilians with divergent social, economic, and ideological backgrounds" (9). Crook and Johnson and their contributing authors ultimately argue for the crucial role that Afro-Brazilian cultural practices and communities of practitioners play in forwarding anti-racist projects in Brazil. Theirs is a dominant position in scholarship on Afro-Brazilian culture and politics, one that celebrates the potential for cultural practices to influence political views and actions. Dunn’s (1992) article on the protest voiced in black Bahian carnival groups also exemplifies this finding, as does Afolabi’s (2009) study of the ways Afro-Brazilian writers and poets voice their critique and subjectivity, and Pardue’s (2008) analysis of hip hop as a marginal discourse that challenges the dominant order. Yúdice (2004) has provided a nuanced analysis of the ways people mobilize cultural practices for social justice projects, managing culture as a resource, 46 while at the same time attending to the limits they contend with as they negotiate with state actors. Yet a common thread runs through these works: at the very least a tentative optimism that cultural practices can be sites for some kind of political mobilization, no matter how nascent. In stark contrast, Michael Hanchard in Orpheus and Power (1994), argued not only that culturally based political movements were ineffective, but that they were actually harming the Movimento Negro’s (Black Movement) ability to mobilize Brazil’s black population and bring about political change. His critique hit a nerve among activists and scholars of race and cultural practices in Brazil, many of whom cannot imagine a black politics without black cultural practices at its core. As his text has generated so much response and thought, and because it continues to challenge me to re-examine my own arguments and commitments, I address his work at some length. * Hanchard set out to determine why the Movimento Negro in Brazil had failed to cohere a mass-mobilization of Afro-Brazilians at the national level. He deemed mass- mobilization a necessary prerequisite in order to create a racially just society, and he identified two coinciding causes of the Black Movement’s failure: 1) “racial hegemony” in Brazil, under which the black movement has failed to deconstruct the myth of racial democracy, and 2) the “culturalism” of the MN, under which black movement activists mobilize "the symbols of the African diaspora" in the same ways as the white elites: treating them as mere symbols, thereby “draining [them of] historical content and […] 47 concrete political significance" (Bairros 1996:175). Hanchard defined culturalism as “the preoccupation with genealogical inquiries and artifacts of Afro-Brazilian expressive culture,” which “has led the movement away from strategies of contemporary political change and more toward symbolic protest and a fetishization of Afro-Brazilian culture” (1994:99). In other words, Within culturalist politics, cultural practices operate as ends in themselves rather than as a means to more comprehensive, heterogeneous set [sic] of ethico-political activities […] Culturalism freezes or hypostatizes cultural practices, divorcing them from their histories and the attendant modes of consciousness that brought them into being. (21) To remedy this, Hanchard proposed that the black movement abandon culturalist politics. He argued that, since "racial consciousness does not automatically lead to collective action or thinking," consciousness-raising projects must be linked "with practical political activity" (160). Hanchard received considerable counter-critique from within the black movement in Brazil and beyond. Luiza Bairros (1996), a prominent scholar on racial issues in Brazil and leading member of the Movimento Negro, took issue with multiple aspects of his study. Not only did he fail to address the heterogeneity of the MN, but Bairros found that he seemed to overlook the possibility that the MN had developed its own theory and practice, its own critical self-analysis. Bairros also pointed out how his study used a comparative lens despite the fact that he claimed it was not a comparative study. Indeed, Hanchard's framing question poses a comparison: "Why has there been no sustained Afro-Brazilian social movement in Brazil comparable to the civil rights movement in the United States or nationalist insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa…" (Hanchard 1994:5)? 48 Yet he did not pursue any further comparison of the differences in historical context in each of the three places. By declining to do so, Hanchard closed the possibilities for his analysis to reveal what moments of rupture would be in the Brazilian case, or to situate what political victories and failures would signify in a society where the negation of citizenship is the norm and racial oppression does not result from a classic process of colonization - the case of Africa - nor the existence of a legal apparatus depriving blacks of fundamental rights - the case of the United States. (Bairros 1996:180). Substantial critique of Hanchard’s work has centered on accusations and denials of his supposed imperialism, imposing North American racial understandings on South American populations and politics (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Venn 2000; Venn 2003). Yet these accusations have been largely proven unfounded as scholars of race and racism in various national contexts have recognized both “commonalities and distinctions” in the ways that racism functions across borders (Perry 2013:xiv). Indeed, transnational dialogues between black activists has been ongoing for centuries, though these exchanges deserve more scholarly attention (Andrews 1991; Matory 2005). Furthermore, even though racial formation varies from place to place, activists from different countries work in solidarity with one another (Hanchard 2003; Vargas 2008, also cited in Perry 2013:xiv) and anti-racism activists and intellectuals have long recognized the fruitfulness of such exchanges. As Nascimento and Nascimento noted, referring to Anani Dzidzienyo’s pioneering work on race and racism in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s, “it took an African perspective to penetrate the subtle subterfuges of racism in Brazil and identify its active role in the determination of Afro-Brazilian living conditions” (1992:172) In many ways this continues to hold today, as non-Brazilian scholars contribute valuable perspectives, based on their lived experience and in collaboration with Brazilian colleagues (Reiter and Oslender 2014; Mitchell and Hordge-Freeman 49 2016). Finally, in recent years, as discussions and acknowledgement of racism have become more mainstream in Brazil, and the U.S. has moved more towards “color-blind” ideologies, under which anti-racist activists are accused of creating racism, the political and social understandings of race and racism in both countries are only becoming more similar (Bonilla-Silva 2006).12 Yet I do not read a simple accusation of imperialism in Bairros’ response to Hanchard, though he did (1996). Rather, I hear in Bairros’ critique of Hanchard and defense of the Movimento Negro an insider speaking to an outsider who has not sufficiently engaged with the totality of thought and lived experience of “insiders.” Bairros speaks from the position of intimate knowledge of the MN and other social movements in Brazil, and she felt that Hanchard failed to perceive certain truths about the MN and perhaps about Brazilian blackness more generally. Bairros was critical of the kinds of questions Hanchard asked the MN members he interviewed, from which he then concluded that the movement’s intellectuals “lacked analytical rigor” (Hanchard 1996:230). He did not find evidence of analytical rigor because he asked interviewees “more to recount facts than to reflect on how… the movement influenced and was influenced by the ideology of racial democracy” (Bairros 1996:177). Nor did he appear to have discussed his culturalism thesis with interviewees, or other questions which could have revealed the diversity of ideas within the movement (177). True, this failure could be characterized as “imperialist” or “colonialist,” but what it reveals to me more importantly is a lack of ethnographic engagement. 12 See the current demonization in right wing media of the Black Lives Matter movement as “racist.” 50 I treat this exchange at such length not in order to enter into the fray, but because I find Hanchard’s criticisms and Bairros’ counter-critique raise two generative issues concerning my study of the Angoleiros do Sertão. The first is Hanchard’s assumption that a mass-mobilized national anti-racism movement is necessary for achieving a racially just society and that it is possible in Brazil. Especially given the current political situation in 2018, where the worker’s party has lost power to the right, and the state seems to be increasing its militarization, which disproportionally targets black lives, it is important to ask if mass-mobilization is the only way, and whether it is even possible. Though Hanchard wrote about the 1990s, perhaps an era of more optimism, he may have underestimated the deep distrust that many black Brazilians hold for organized political systems. I believe it worthwhile to ask what other ways may be available to anti-racism activists in Brazil. Indeed, Bairros (1996) and others have pointed out that grassroots, neighborhood-based activist groups, often led by black women, are already doing the “political work” that Hanchard called for (Perry 2013:23; Williams 2013; Smith 2016). Also relevant for my own work, the work of identity construction and political consciousness-raising can also take place outside of spaces that identify explicitly as politically activist (Burdick 1998). Yet with the exception of Smith’s (2016), which examined street theater with an explicit anti-racism message directed against police violence, the projects studied by these scholars are not organized around cultural expressions. The case of the Angoleiros do Sertão, and many other capoeira Angola groups, differs from activist groups in that the capoeira practitioners organize first and foremost around the practice of capoeira, as opposed to an expressly political agenda such as 51 changing policies, protecting land rights or protesting police violence. In other words, at first it would seem as if the Angoleiros were precisely one of the worst kind of perpetrators of the culturalism of Hanchard’s critique, perhaps even falling outside of it: the group is allied but not officially affiliated with the local Movimento Negro group, and their anti-racism agenda remains largely disconnected from any political groups or structures. In fact, Mestre Cláudio refuses to engage in any way with organized politics in Feira de Santana because he has seen the lack of continuity of support for cultural projects from one administration to another. He recognizes that politicians operate for their individual gain, and he will not play their game in order to curry favor for fleeting, paltry financial sponsorship. However, I also put this study in dialogue with studies of activist groups because the Angoleiros do Sertão frame their practice and actions as a form of anti-racist activism. By taking this claim seriously, I ask in what ways a group of capoeira Angola can contribute to building racial and anti-racism consciousness. To what extent does their work transcend the limitations Hanchard found in culturalist projects? This leads to the second issue Hanchard’s assessment raises for me. Hanchard criticized culturalism by characterizing it as an incessant “looking back” to African-roots culture in order to define black identity in Brazil. Drawing his analogy from the film Orfeu Negro, Hanchard likened the Movimento Negro to the Orpheus of the film, who sought to retrieve his lost Euridice through a ceremony of Candomblé. Yet at the sound of her voice, as in the original myth, Orfeu could not resist looking back to catch a glimpse of Euridice: “With that backward glance, Orpheus loses Euridice forever” (Hanchard 1994:164). In this way, Hanchard critiques Afro-Brazilians that “look back” to Africa in order to define and understand their cultural practices. He finds these projects idealistic 52 and uncritical. He likens this conception of the African past to Euridice, something “timeless, unchanging, unwavering in her beauty and devotion” (165). However, this characterization does not do justice to Afro-Brazilians’ diverse approaches to their culture, to their capacities for self-critique, nor to their consciousness of the invented nature of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983): even within the capoeira Angola community, with its rigorous self-imposed standards of “tradition,” many mestres acknowledge the diversity of opinions on what is “traditional,” how the practice has evolved over the decades and the roles they have played in these changes, innovating or adjusting certain aspects of the practice. Above all, Hanchard’s misrepresentation fails to see how Afro-Brazilian cultural practitioners mobilize their history in order to transform the present and future (Costa 2009). This concept of turning to the past in order to define and construct a better future is also expressed in the West African principle of Sankofa. Elisa Larkin Nascimento named her four-volume collection of writings after this concept, for these very reasons. As she defined Sankofa: It means that it is never too late to go back and collect what was left behind. A conscious return to origins guides this work from beginning to end, and its text valorizing the experience of returning as an essential condition for development of the future. (2008, back cover) Likewise, Abdias do Nascimento's Quilombismo concept looked to the history of quilombos in Brazil in order to imagine and propose a new and future form of social organization. Hanchard wrongly equated the "backward glance" of Afro-Brazilian cultural politics as attempts to "retreat to 'the way things were'" (1994:165) and "to capture, hold and ultimately know the past, which is, as most scholars recognize, an impossibility" (166). Here Hanchard denies Afro-Brazilian intellectuals, activists and 53 peripheral community members alike any capacity not only for critique, but also for creativity and imagination. Knowing the past is only an "impossibility" to those unwilling to imagine and experiment with radical new ways of accessing the silences or gaps in the historical record (Hartman 2008; Fuentes 2016; Campt 2017). In another sense, Hanchard's argument is not only a critique of culturalism, it is a critique of cultural practices themselves, a refusal to take seriously any potential power to be gleaned from practicing music and dance, sound and movement. He does not seem to recognize that cultural practices and expressions are sites for fostering creativity, for exercising imagination; for cultivating powers of resilience and alternative world views, without which African descendants in the Americas never could have survived let alone thrive and invent radical ways of fighting racism and constructing more just societies (Kelley 2002; Lipsitz 2011). As this dissertation argues, Afro-Brazilians continue to find in Candomblé a host of fundamental originary concepts that reverberate through all of their cultural practices. It serves not only to construct black definitions and valuations of self, community and humanity, but of ways of knowing and being in the world that serve as resources for physical, spiritual, psychological and political empowerment. To suggest that black organizing, in its many forms, do away with the cultural component, or even de-center it, is like suggesting unplugging a lamp from its source of electricity and then demanding it glow more brightly. In other words, though Hanchard raises valuable critiques, he declined to explore how black Brazilians cultivate their creative and political powers. These kinds of insights, I argue, are what political scientific methods may overlook and what ethnographic methods can contribute. 54 Methodologies, positionality and ethics I have chosen my methodologies and the kinds of questions I asked my interlocutors in part in an attempt to fill in what I found missing in Hanchard's study. Yet, more than a response to Hanchard, I see my work as aligning with Hanchard's and other scholars' overarching commitments to contribute to critical analyses of, and struggles against, gendered racial injustice. In this broader sense, therefore, I position my work within the traditions of Black and Africana studies, where scholars seek not only to critique social and political relations of power, but also to contribute to effecting change that benefits “aggrieved racialized” populations (Lipsitz 2018). To do this, I have assembled methods and theories from diverse disciplines, sometimes feeling as if I were trying to re-invent the wheel only to stumble upon another school of thought or scholarly community that had already paved so many ways. This is one of the ways I think that scholarship is more like creative practice than often acknowledged: it is a process that is never finished, that reveals itself in the doing (and the going back and forth), and therefore that cannot be fully plotted out and charted from the onset. For instance, I wish I had known about D. Soyini Madison's Critical Ethnography (2012) before even applying to graduate school! However, even though I came to her work after I had completed my fieldwork, I found that critical ethnography encompasses much of what I have been striving to achieve in my research. Critical ethnography, as I understand it, addresses some of the tensions between critical theory and ethnographic approaches. Many critical theorists engage objects as texts, "reading" cultural products, analyzing relations of power as they are revealed 55 through literature, film, music, dance, performance, etc. They usually do not include in their methods extended interaction and involvement with the makers of the cultural products, declining to develop personal relations with the artists or community members. Yet cultivating such relations can provide information that is otherwise inaccessible. Ethnographers recognize this and therefore often prioritize the thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, feelings and positions of their interlocutors, to such an extent that voicing critiques (of their thoughts, hopes, fears, etc.) may be seen as a betrayal, an unfair assertion from the dominant power position of researcher. These are, of course, oversimplified generalizations, yet many scholarly disciplines tend to seem more at home closer to one end of the spectrum or the other. Critical ethnography, in contrast, provides a middle ground. According to Madison's outline, critical ethnography brings together Foucauldian critique, considerations of positionality, "open and ongoing" dialogue with others, and an acute attention to the ways theory and method inform one another: where "[c]ritical ethnography becomes the 'doing' or the 'performance' of critical theory" (2012:16). In my research with the Angoleiros do Sertão, I have found that engaging in dialogue with group members and openly discussing my positionality have enabled my critical analysis. Throughout the fieldwork process I have made my political commitments explicit in my conversations and questions. Although it was not always comfortable, sometimes I expressed respectful disagreement with interlocutors. I wanted to show them that I came to the field with certain questions and even preconceptions, but that when I challenged their thinking in conversation it was because I was also willing to be challenged. Furthermore, not only was I open about my agenda, sharing with interlocutors my aims, 56 critiques and doubts, I also strove to avoid reproducing an elitist stance. So I also discussed literature and theory I was engaging with, when relevant. I considered group members as intellectual colleagues, my equals and superiors, regardless of the level of their formal education. This also meant that I openly contested many commonly held assumptions about capoeira Angola's power as a tool of resistance and freedom. Yet I did so while building relationships with group members, and showing them that I shared their love for capoeira Angola and the desire to learn more. And I listened intently to what they had to say, whether I agreed or not. In this way, I hope that any critique I raise in this dissertation will not surprise any group members who read the dissertation. They should recognize in this text the same person who trained alongside them and pestered them with questions about their physical sensations while playing and their understandings of racial politics in Brazil. At the same time, by describing capoeira games and recording conversations throughout this text, I hope to gesture toward the processual nature of this work. Capoeira games, like fieldwork conversations, are forms and sources of "dialogical performance" that bring people together in order to "question, debate, and challenge one another" (Conquergood 1985:9). As these debates concern "big" questions about race, racialized relations of power, and meanings of freedom, we accept that we will not necessarily arrive at answers. Thus Conquergood's model of dialogical performance applies to the dialogues of fieldwork as well as the work produced by the researcher: [Dialogical performance] is a kind of performance that resists conclusions, it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing. Dialogical understanding does not end with empathy. There is always enough appreciation for difference so that the text can interrogate, rather than dissolve into, the performer. […] More than a definite position, the dialogical stance is situated in the space between competing ideologies. It brings self and 57 other together even while it holds them apart. It is more like a hyphen than a period. (9) In these ways, I have centered the concerns and priorities of interlocutors while at the same time making space for critique. To do this I adopted a "grounded theory" approach, which requires "bracket[ing] preconceptions about what is important in order to attend to people’s indigenous ways of ordering and interpreting their worlds" (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011:167). This means attending not only to the "terms, phrasings, classifications, and theories" of capoeira Angola practitioners, but also to the contexts in which they apply the terms (167-8). Such an approach also resembles the method Mestre Cláudio prescribes for learning capoeira: ask fewer questions, observe more, think and reflect. In other words, learn by doing and being together. To apply this in practice, I have noted not only which subjects group members prioritized in conversation, but I have also observed how they behaved in a range of social contexts and allowed this to shape the direction of this study. One viewpoint in particular emerged from my experience of training, hanging out and talking with members of the Angoleiros do Sertão, in informal conversations and interviews, and it has guided this grounded approach. Mestre Cláudio and his students consistently expressed to me a critique of speech and talking as opposed to action and doing. "Talking," "discourse" and "talking well" were considered modes of elites, academics and politicians (what one interlocutor called “o reino do falar,” [the realm of speech]), whereas "practice" and "doing" were modes of the black people (o povo) and black popular culture (“o reino do fazer,” [the realm of doing]).13 Though I have translated fazer as “to do,” in Portuguese it also means “to make.” These meanings are 13 Thanks to Afonso Mesquita for his poetic naming of the two realms. 58 significant because they signal the realm as a place of doing and making, a space of creative action. Moreover, group and community members understood this realm of doing, which houses the various facets and practices of black popular culture, as emerging from the same African "matrixes" (matrizes africanas). The image of "Africa" therefore looms large in the group members' imaginations, as a source of culture, identity and strength.14 This conception of capoeira Angola as a realm of black/African doing and creating has profoundly shaped my choice of methods and interpretations. The realm of speaking and the realm of doing When Mestre Cláudio and his students expressed their valorization of doing over talking, they were not signaling a simple binary opposition or valuation, in which "action" was good and "speech" was bad. Rather, they were making nuanced distinctions between different forms of speech, as well as ways of being, and the racialized values assigned to them. Mestre Cláudio incorporates speaking and discussion into his teaching in fundamental ways: after capoeira classes Mestre Cláudio will often open up the roda to discussion, answering students' questions, and during informal drinking sessions he often opens up about his observations and analyses of capoeira games. It is in these moments of hanging out that the mestre puts his philosophy into words. Most importantly, the mestre often uses these moments—after or before rodas or hanging out and drinking beer—for telling his stories. He illustrates his vision of capoeira and life through these stories, 14 While this "idea of Africa" may seem to have little to do with contemporary lives and peoples on the African continent, it does translate into an awareness and curiosity about actual African cultures, peoples and practices, historically and in the present. Access to such information may be limited, but group members, to varying degrees, do actively seek to increase their knowledge about contemporary Africa and African history. 59 repeating them day to day and year to year, and the people around him remember and re- tell them. Iaiá, a close friend of the group who is pursuing graduate work in Literature, believes the Mestre’s story telling is central to his role as a leader in his community. She described how he tells stories during the group's yearly event in January, to students, visitors and community members that gather around to hear him: [The moment of the event] is the Mestre as a griot. When the Mestre starts to talk — nothing is happening — and he sits down, and naturally the people get closer and closer to him, gathering together, coalescing. It’s how he works the language. He uses his own language to tell what happened. He invents stories, he tells truths together with lies. He adds new points. Every time he tells a story, it's different, one more thing happened. This is very much a thing of the older folks. Finally, the story becomes a thing that's not a lie, but that’s told in many different ways. Iaiá is not alone in referring to Mestre Cláudio as a “griot,” and doing so connects his way of storytelling to the community’s African past. Community members listen to the Mestre in rapt attention, and remember the tellings and repeat them, also adding their own stories. In this way the Angoleiros do Sertão weave their sense of community out of a collective past and into their present and future. Throughout the dissertation, I have included the stories and narratives interlocutors recounted in our interviews and conversations, in order to gesture toward this way of communicating. Members' critiques of "speech," therefore, did not target all forms of speaking and talking. Rather, they differentiated the Mestre’s way of speaking from the more formal and normative modes of speech valued and spoken by academics and intellectuals. One story in Mestre Cláudio's life illustrates the difference between Mestre Cláudio's way of speaking, using the vernacular of the Bahian periphery, from the academic ways of "speaking well." 60 One night, Mestre Cláudio and I had decided to run home from the capoeira training he had taught in the city center. But when we had run about half way home, he stopped running and started talking to me about the challenges of being both father and capoeira mestre to his sons. This launched him into a whole series of anecdotes about students he had felt compelled to kick out of the group, for various reasons, severing relations and friendships with them. But one story stood out. It was a tale of utmost betrayal.15 The student in this case had started training with Cláudio at a young age, early on in the history of the Angoleiros do Sertão. He showed tremendous promise as an angoleiro soon became Cláudio's best student. Mestre Cláudio came to think of him as a son. He encouraged him to go to school and paid for his school fees and uniforms. The student came from a poor Afro-Brazilian family on the periphery of Feira de Santana, just like the mestre. Cláudio was determined that he should have all the advantages Cláudio had not had in his own life. So when the student excelled at the university, Cláudio supported him in continuing on to a get a master's and eventually a doctoral degree in history, for which he wrote his dissertation about capoeira Angola in Bahia. At one point, the student organized a panel about capoeira and invited Mestre Cláudio to attend. During the question and answer session that followed, someone asked a question about the old mestre of Bahia, and the student did not know how to answer. From the back of the room, Mestre Cláudio offered to answer the question, but the student brushed him aside, and would not let him speak. Later, Mestre Cláudio found out that the student had explained to a mutual friend that he had not wanted Cláudio to speak during the session because Cláudio "didn't know how to speak." Other incidents occurred until Mestre Cláudio 15 As I retell the story here, I draw on multiple tellings, by Mestre Cláudio and other community members, each of whom filled in different details and aspects of the story. 61 concluded, and others around him agreed, that the student was leveraging his relationship with Cláudio for his own career advancement. In other words, while Cláudio had thought of him as a son, the student, once he gained prestige as a professor, distanced himself from Cláudio and no longer acknowledged all Cláudio had taught him and done for him. Instead, he was ashamed to be associated with someone who "could not speak." This and other anecdotes revealed to me the deep class and racial associations with forms of speech in Bahia and throughout Brazil. Mestre Cláudio speaks the (black) language of the roça, laced with the rural slang of Bahia's interior. As Iaiá and his students have attested, his performative speech has a captivating cadence and beauty. Yet "to speak well" (falar bem) means to speak with formal pronunciation, sentence structure and vocabulary. By speaking this language of the white elite, academics and intellectuals exclude non-academics, the uneducated, from participation in dialogue. They guard their dominance over the realm of speech and devalue what the people have to say and what they do. As Mestre Cláudio put it, "It's easy to become enchanted with the discourse, but you must become enchanted with the practice." He was talking about a cohort of capoeira mestres and mestras in Salvador known for being outspoken about racial politics in Brazil. Each of them has also pursued academic degrees, some are completing their PhDs while others are already professors. From hearing them speak, I have gathered that part of their militancy has been to insert capoeira Angola into the university. By occupying positions of both professor and mestre/mestra, they have collectively claimed space for Afro-Brazilians in the university and proven capoeira's worth, not only as an object of study but as cultural institution in Brazil. These professor-mestre/as are strongly allied 62 with the struggle against racism, and they believe capoeira Angola can play a crucial role of building self-esteem and racial pride. However, from Mestre Cláudio's perspective, they may "speak well" about the Movimento Negro and racial politics, but they have no relationship with the povo, with the peripheral Afro-Brazilian people and their popular movements. He finds these mestres disrespectful towards other black capoeiristas who hail from these marginalized communities, criticizing them for "not knowing how to talk." In his experience, they dismiss not just the speech but the work of these capoeiristas, some of whom have devoted their lives to teaching capoeira in the periphery, instead of the university. This attitude also reproduces the values of racial democracy, valorizing the cultural object (capoeira Angola) while dismissing and ignoring the cultural subjects, the Afro-Brazilian people who have created and sustained the practices. Along with public institutions like universities, the “realm of speech” also intersects with the world of organized party politics. In his decades of teaching capoeira and running the street roda in Feira de Santana, Mestre Cláudio has had to navigate his relationship with the city and city officials. Yet he has refused to petitions them for public funding, as he does not want to enter into a relationship of dependency on the whims of public office holders. In instances when he has offered his own contributions to the city, they have repaid him with exclusion. For example, he relates how for years he would continue the samba de roda inside the Mercado de Artes market hall, bringing the party from the street to the market. This inevitably drew a crowd, animating the hall and bringing business to the many bars and restaurants of the market. When the city closed the hall for renovations, Cláudio suggested they include a stage to facilitate public 63 musical performances. Yet after reopening Cláudio was told there was no room on the performance agenda for his group. He had contributed for years by bringing popular culture to this popular market, but now that it had achieved some status, Cláudio’s contributions were no longer welcome. He has other stories of subtle and less subtle snubs on the part of public entities, and he believes the authorities are threatened by his group because it keeps growing. His annual events are larger every year, attracting participants from all over the world. And he has achieved all of this without asking for help, in violation of the standard patronage relationships that have dominated Brazilian political relations for centuries. Only adding to Cláudio’s distrust of party politics is the recent downfall of the Worker’s Party. Even though he appreciated how the Worker’s Party’s social policies benefitted millions of poor Brazilians across the country, he was extremely disillusioned when Lula, the ex-president, was convicted on corruption charges. To Cláudio, this proved that all politicians are the same, regardless of party, and none can be believed to be putting the best interests of the people first. He prefers to remain aloof. In another example, for over a decade, Mestre Cláudio has been teaching three weekly classes at the state university’s cultural center, the Centro Universitário de Cultura e Arte (CUCA) of the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana (UEFS). Yet in 2016, during the university’s summer break in January, officials at the CUCA kept delaying confirmation that the group could continue to train there when classes resumed. They cited as reasons that their priority was to offer classes of ballet, yoga and karate… After much negotiation and anxiety, Mestre Cláudio was eventually allowed to resume teaching at the CUCA, though several months were lost. However, this anecdote reveals 64 the precarity of the group’s situation in relationship to the public institution. The leadership at the CUCA had recently changed over at that time, and Mestre Cláudio had to renegotiate his use of the space. Though Mestre Cláudio has achieved world renown as a capoeira Angola mestre, and he remains the only mestre of capoeira Angola in Feira de Santana, the organization of CUCA did not seem to value his contributions either to the cultural life of the city or to their center. At any moment, at their discretion, CUCA officials could decide to oust Mestre Cláudio from the space. This is just one illustration of the reasons why Mestre Cláudio prefers to avoid dealings with public institutions, with the realm of speech. In this context, the realm of speech cannot be trusted, for its effects do not always align with what has been spoken. And while the realm of doing includes the informal and vernacular ways of speaking I described above, it emphasizes the actions of doing and making over speaking. Thus, when Mestre Cláudio talks about the "practice," he means engaging the people, teaching capoeira in poor black neighborhoods, putting into the practice the ideas expressed in the discourse. Furthermore, he is not opposed to political discourse on racial politics, but as he put it, "Discurso sem prática não gosto,"[Discourse without practice, I don't like it.] The discourse is meaningless without the practice, which, for Mestre Cláudio and his students, is teaching capoeira in Feira de Santana, in peripheral neighborhoods, and bringing samba de roda to the street every Saturday for the people to participate. Furthermore, as I listened to Mestre Cláudio decry the elitism and hypocrisy of academics studying capoeira, I understood I was implicated in this critique. I have learned over the years to recognize how he tells stories in order to teach lessons or send 65 messages. I knew, therefore, that while he was revealing his insights into the politics of the capoeira world, he was also letting me know that he knew where I came from, and that he had good reason not to trust people like me. For this reason, too, I have attended to the tension between the realm of speaking and the realm of doing and allowed it to inform my choices of methods and theories. Contributions to the literature Capoeira scholarship and race Capoeira Angola is commonly considered the more “traditional” style of capoeira, meaning it has retained more ritualistic, Africanist elements. Its African-ness, or Africaneity, is also closely associated with capoeira Angola as a site of resistance and liberation. Capoeira was developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil, the reasoning goes, who used it to escape slavery and for self-protection, and so capoeira today brings with it this spirit of resistance and the struggle for liberation (Lewis 1992; Browning 1995; Fryer 2000; Assunção 2005). Recent Brazilian scholarship on capoeira continues to examine capoeira history (Soares 2001; Pires 2004; Oliveira 2005; Abreu 2005; Talmon-Chvaicer 2008; Abib 2009; Höfling 2012; Magalhães 2012); capoeira as popular culture and wisdom (Abib 2004); analysis of song lyrics (Barbosa 2008; Yahn 2012). Two extensive new collections reveal that capoeira scholars continue to be concerned with capoeira history and pedagogy, particularly how it can be used in multicultural educational settings to teach children liberal values; and scholars have also started to address globalization, mediation, gender and identity (Freitas, ed. 2015; Pires et al. 2016). (On gender see also Barbosa 2005a; Oliveira and Leal 2009). Ethnographies 66 by scholar-practitioners continue to proliferate, exploring how practitioners use capoeira to maneuver social inequalities (Wesolowski 2007), how foreign practitioners undertake apprenticeship relationships in order to gain insider status in Brazilian capoeira (Griffith 2016) and how capoeira communities develop in international contexts, or diaspora (Delamont 2017). However, throughout these studies and even among practitioners themselves, resistance and liberation remain undertheorized and self-evident concepts, and distinctions between individual and collective freedoms are blurred. While some capoeira scholarship aligns resistance in capoeira with the way it educates about "diversity" through valorizing black identity (Abreu and Araújo 2016) or examines meaning in capoeira's African(ist) movement aesthetics (Rosa 2012), the literature does not center racial politics and therefore fails to examine how capoeira contributes both to contesting and supporting dominant racial ideologies in Brazil, and to what extent it functions as resistance or a practice of freedom at the broader levels of community or polity. The decentering of race and racism in capoeira scholarship seems to reflect the tenacious national ideology of racial democracy, as if scholars, both Brazilian and foreign, are cautious of disturbing the status quo of “cordial” race relations in Brazil. While the supposed cordiality of race relations in Brazil can be traced to Freyre’s theory that miscegenation signaled and precluded racial discrimination, scholars have since noted that racism in Brazil often takes “cordial,” or subtle and coded forms (Turra, Venturi, and Datafolha 1995; Twine [1998]2001: 75-6; Nascimento 2007:43). Nevertheless, there remains strong social pressure not to rock the boat by speaking or writing too critically about racism, for it is still commonly held that “a racist is someone 67 who speaks of racism” (Nascimento 2007:1). I believe this may explain why, for example, one of the most politicized mestra-professors, Rosângela Costa Araújo (Mestra Janja), speaks out on racial politics in talks and classes, but does not voice her politics as forcefully in her scholarship. Perhaps this also reflects another separation of realms, where mestre/a-professors feel that political activism and scholarship do not mix. In any case, as an outsider (non-Brazilian), I do not feel restricted by pressures to conform to racial cordiality or to separate my politics from my scholarship. My position allows me to leverage critique in ways scholars at Brazilian institutions might not wish to risk, a fact also recognized by several of my interlocutors. Critique is not always considered “cordial,” and it therefore goes against prevailing social norms in Brazil. Militant Brazilian scholars do write critically about race relations and inequality in Brazil, but they tend not to write about capoeira at the same time. Indeed, I sensed a hesitance to think critically about capoeira as a political tool or practice. This makes sense considering how capoeira is celebrated (along with Candomblé, and practices of the African matrixes in general) as contributing to resistance and protest. Criticism might be seen as potentially weakening capoeira's resistance. From an outside position I can raise critiques, with the intent of strengthening understandings of the practice’s limits and potentials, but if my conclusions are found too threatening, they may also be dismissed with little collateral damage to the practices themselves or community members. Furthermore, as a white, North American researcher in Brazil who is attentive to race relations, I have experienced the ways white people discuss race amongst themselves, when no Afro-Brazilians are present. Some white people in Brazil assume I share their views on race, which allows me to observe how white Brazilians negotiate their 68 whiteness within the spaces of black Brazilian practices, in a country where studies of white reflexivity are still burgeoning (Dávila 2003; Nascimento 2007; Silva 2014; Carone and Bento [2002]2017). In these ways, with less personally at stake, if my conclusions help strengthen members’ political arguments or understandings, then I hope the anti- racism movement within capoeira only has something to gain. Many practitioners were unimpressed when I told them about my central concerns. They couldn’t imagine how I could fill a whole dissertation about the obvious truism of capoeira as resistance/freedom. Yet making claims about capoeira’s transformative and liberatory potentials proves easier than explaining how and to what extent capoeira transforms. It is also easier to celebrate its potentials than articulate its shortcomings. It is my aim, therefore, to take seriously practitioners' convictions about capoeira's political potential and explore how contemporary capoeira Angola practice can contribute to countering structural racism and to building collective black freedom. At the same time, I take seriously my and their commitments to these political projects. I believe that critique can aid in strengthening the practice’s potential. With these aims in mind, I understand “freedom” as a radical concept that gestures toward what may seem an impossible future, where structural racism has been dismantled at its core; and a concept powerful enough to sustain this struggle even in the midst of despair. Yet implicit in this broad and lofty definition is an acknowledgement of all the work necessary to get there—in fact, there is a recognition that there may not be a “there” but only work. And this freedom work takes myriad forms, from writing poetry to waging revolution, all of it is necessary. Thus while I know I am taking on a lot by talking about freedom, I know I can only say a little. Yet again, I find it imperative to keep this more 69 expansive and deeply political sense of freedom in mind as I question what angoleiros are doing with their practice and what it is doing with them. In this way I aim to take account of the range of understandings of freedom practitioners bring with them to the roda— from the ways they experience moments of capoeira play as liberatory, freeing their body-minds-spirits, to the ways they imagine racial, gendered and socio-economic justice—and how practitioners then bring these experiences and ideas with them as they move and resonate through their lives, communities and beyond. * In many ways, this dissertation picks up where Greg Downey's Learning Capoeira (2005) left off. Downey arrived to conduct research in Brazil with questions similar to my own. He wondered how "debates about capoeira styles" (for example, concerning the "whiteness" versus "Africaneity" of different styles) "were related to larger social conflicts" (such as racism) in Brazil (16). He chose as his field site, the Grupo de Capoeira Angola Pelourinho (GCAP, Capoeira Angola Group of Pelourinho) in Salvador, led by one of the most militant black movement activists among capoeira mestres, Mestre Moraes. Downey characterized the group and his choices this way: GCAP vigorously argued that capoeira was, in fact, an important part of the political movement against racism […] Yet this antiracist political agenda, however crucial to GCAP members and to Brazil’s future, seemed to leave out important elements of the art I was learning. The large-scale social impact of capoeira practice might be to diminish prejudice, but the everyday influence of the art on practitioners was much more subtle, complex, and multifaceted. (2005:15) Downey seems to have thought of anti-racist action as taking place only on a large social scale. For this reason, perhaps, he did not look for the everyday acts and practices that 70 contributed to anti-racist agendas also in "subtle, complex and multifaceted" ways. He explains how he chose to forgo pursuing interpretations of anthropological "meaning, if meaning is understood to be references, symbolic significance, or discursive sense," (19) instead privileging practitioners' "phenomenological, physiological, or even neurological" experiences of training and learning capoeira (20). He argued that attention to anthropological concepts such as “identity, symbol, representation, structure, discourse, imaginary, cultural logic, context, economy, politics, resistance, and even culture […] can lead ethnographers far away from everyday life and their own perceptions" (16, emphasis in original): The terms have a momentum of their own, and they are liable to lead a reader away from the roda, halting the analysis of capoeira practice and its effects at the individual level. These terms try to explain what is immediate by referring to social, political, historical, or symbolic realms that are far more difficult, if not impossible, to observe directly. The story about African influences and race relations in Brazil, for example, although it may be intellectually compelling, remains largely invisible in everyday life. Writing this discussion required layers of academic texts. One need not know this history, however, to feel palpably the weight of race and the traces of African influences in Salvador. Although the history helps us to understand the source of traditions, it may not illuminate very well how they are lived. Although we may learn that racism originated in slavery, for example, we do not know better how racism feels, how people get classified, or how people are affected by encounters with prejudice. (16) From Downey's viewpoint, racism, anti-racist politics, and history are intellectual stories that remain imperceptible in "everyday life" and somehow cordoned off from "how racism feels." But for whom are these solely intellectual subjects? To whom are "African influences and race relations in Brazil" invisible? He relegates concerns for identity, discourse, politics, history and symbolic meaning to the academic world (the realm of speech), as if the people he trained with (some of whom were surely academics themselves, as Mestre Moraes is) did not think about these concepts, and use them to 71 process their everyday lived experience—as if these concepts did not also take embodied form and enter the roda. Downey chose to pursue “a phenomenology of the bodily transformations brought about by capoeira" (17), as if these bodily transformations were somehow separable from phenomenologies of history, Africaneity, racism and politics. Furthermore, though it may be true that one need not "know this history… to feel palpably the weight of race" in Bahia, Downey does not further pursue with his interlocutors questions of how racism feels. He never returns to considering the palpable weight of race or, indeed, of racism and racial histories. For practitioners I spoke with who experience racism in their day-to-day lives, learning about the history of Africans and Afro-Brazilians in Brazil, of slavery and its repercussions today, and sensing them through affective registers, are vital projects necessary for constructing understandings of self and arguments to dismantle racism in Brazil today. In other words, they do not learn about slavery in order to understand how racism feels; they know how racism feels and therefore they want to learn about slavery. Perhaps Downey was concerned that thinking about anthropological theory would lead him far away from his own everyday life and perceptions as an ethnographer, but did not question how these concepts may also have been lived and felt by practitioners, in their capoeira training and everyday lives. In sum, what is missing from Downey's study, and what I hope to contribute, is a study of capoeira Angola grounded in the theories and methods of Africana studies and Black Feminism, where lived and bodily experiences are always already understood as personal, political and productive of meaning. My aim with this dissertation, therefore, has been to bridge conceptual with phenomenological approaches. In other words, it is a phenomenology of blackness (as 72 experienced by black and non-black subjects), Africaneity and racial-political consciousness in capoeira practice; a phenomenology of practitioners' imaginaries of African history and ancestry in the roda and how these inform their lived experience beyond the roda. Where Downey contributed an invaluable analysis of bodily experience and transformations through capoeira practice, I have sought to reveal how bodily experience and change relate to social and political processes and understandings. Much of what Downey wrote about capoeira Angola training resonates with my own experiences and those of my interlocutors. I have sought to build on his findings and to push through the difficulties he encountered in order to discern the social, political and historical--the meaningful--within the immediate experience of participating in a moving, sounding practice. As Downey describes it, he chose to shift his focus because the political issues were not what seemed to concern practitioners on the individual and everyday-experiential level. Yet perhaps he overlooked the ways that his own position may have influenced what practitioners wished to discuss with him. Brazilians are generally known to avoid talking about race and racism because they are not considered polite or pleasant (cordial) topics of conversation. But who are these general "Brazilians" and in what situations do they avoid these topics? Are they white Brazilians speaking to black Brazilians, or Afro- Brazilians talking to white researchers? Or are they Afro-Brazilians talking to African American researchers? In other words, as a white, foreign researcher arriving in Brazil, I could not assume that practitioners' reluctance to talk about race with me meant that they did not usually talk about race with each other. Indeed, on my first fieldwork trip I feared I had encountered a situation where people were reluctant to talk about issues of racism 73 and politics. I came to the field having heard about Mestre Cláudio as an outspoken advocate of black resistance, who understood capoeira Angola as part of the anti-racism movement. Yet as I spent time with him (only several weeks on the first trip), I did not observe this kind of behavior. I felt daunted. I wondered, would I ever be able to engage him on these topics on more than a superficial level? However, over the years, I returned again and again and continued to ask the same kinds of questions, though with increased sophistication as I also studied more. I talked about my own political commitments, and I believe that Mestre Cláudio began to recognize the sincerity of my concerns. Eventually, I observed more instances of Mestre Cláudio speaking about capoeira's role in anti-racist politics. Attending to the political thinking and activities of members of the Angoleiros do Sertão meant that I also befriended and interviewed black movement activists who were closely associated with the group. They participated in many of the group's social activities, such as samba and hanging out after the capoeira roda, but they did not necessarily train capoeira. By expanding the scope to include non-practitioners in my definition of community members, I have revealed how capoeira Angola practitioners are part of a larger, collaborative anti-racist project. With this approach, I encountered a community of practitioners, activists and enthusiasts fiercely committed to grassroots, creative efforts to improve black lives in the peripheries. Their collective actions may not fit neatly into categories of "activism" or "politics," but they are activist (seeking change) and political (aimed at influencing power relations) nonetheless. Ethnomusicology and Dance Studies 74 At its foundation, this dissertation asks: How are cultural practices political? In what ways do music and dance practitioners effect social and political change through their practices? In this way, the study builds on literature that has addressed these questions from various perspectives. Within Brazilianist music scholarship, the intersection of politics with musical practices and texts has received much attention. Avelar and Dunn’s (2011) volume examines popular music as a practice of citizenship, through which musical agents navigate belonging and exclusion, and in his monograph Dunn (2001) focuses on the musical aspects of the Tropicália movement that emerged as a counterculture during the dictatorship, challenging Brazil’s dominant national narratives. One of the ways Trópicalia musicians did this was to revise the Brazilian modernist concept of antropofagia, or cannibalism, by figuratively “eating” foreign musical influences. This flew in the face of the dictatorship’s ideas of what Brazil should sound like. The theme of foreign musical influence in Brazil continues to occupy scholars, and looking at a younger generation of musical producers Magaldi (1999) found that they enthusiastically embraced North American music forms in order to be modern, not necessarily to define their Brazilianness. unrestrained by the discourses and anxieties of previous generations. In another study of contemporary, post-dictatorship musical practices, Moehn (2007) finds that musicians construct “audiotopias,” imagined spaces of an “alternative Brazil,” where sound practices level out class inequalities. Música sertaneja of the Southeast, one of Brazil’s most widely popular music forms today, has also been examined for the ways migrants, from rural areas to cities, use their music to navigate urban modernity, shedding stigmas yet retaining traditional values (Reily 1992). In another study on the genre, Dent (2009) shows how musicians define their modernity 75 through a rural social identity expressed in their music. Packman identifies ways that musical styles signal activism and claim space in street festival in Salvador (2012) and the ways professional musicians in the city leverage “flexibility” by signifying on the Brazilian popular music canon in order to attract and keep audiences (2009). While scholarship on Brazilian indigenous music has focused on indigenous cosmologies and how they relate to sound and musical practice (Bastos [1978] 1999; Basso 1985; Seeger [1987]2004), more recent work addresses the shifting meanings of musical practices when indigenous actors perform their music for white audiences in order to intervene in struggles for land, health and survival (Seeger 2013). Many studies have focused more specifically on the meanings of Afro-Brazilian musical practices for Afro-Brazilian communities. With the transition from dictatorship to democracy from the 1970s onwards, the Black Movement in Brazil was rejuvenated after many decades of stagnation, spurring increased attention to Afro-Brazilian cultural forms and political activism. In this context, scholars have explored the political potential and achievements of cultural groups and practitioners such as the blocos afros in Salvador (Dunn 1992; Crook 1993), break dancers (Raposo 2012), funkeiros in Rio de Janeiro (Yúdice 2004b) and other popular black music forms such as axé music (Perrone 1992; Henry 2008) and afoxé in São Paulo (Costa 2010). Since the 1980s, Brazilian hip hop, or "conscious rap," has become another site of black political expression (Bollig 2002; Pardue 2004, 2008; Pinho and Rocha 2011). The non-governmental organization AfroReggae, founded by favela dwellers and focused on bettering relations with police, has also received critical attention (Yúdice 2001; Ramos 2006). Others have explored these issues in less obvious sites. Burdick has examined black identity and political 76 consciousness in the context of Brazilian gospel and evangelical music (Burdick 2010; 2013). Much of this literature asks what practitioners actually gain politically, socially, economically or in terms of education through their cultural production, and to what extent their practices are co-opted by larger state-run structures such as the tourism industry (Raphael 1980, 1990; Crook 1993). Of course the "power of black music" (Floyd 1995) has captivated scholars beyond Brazil. Scholars have examined the social and political meanings of black music and movement practices across the Caribbean, in Cuban rumba (Daniel 1991), Afro- Cuban Santeria (Hagedorn 2001; Beliso-De Jesús 2014) timba (Vaughan 2012), and in projects of Cuban nation-building (Moore 1997) in Trinidad carnival (Guilbault 2007; Jones 2016), and in Peru (Feldman 2006). On the African continent, researchers have considered West African juju (Waterman 1990), the ways artists have commented on and grappled with HIV/AIDS (Barz and Cohen 2011), the social functions of Zulu choral music (Erlmann 1996), and how African American musical influences in Africa fostered transnational connection (Jaji 2014). In North America, scholarship of black music and culture has proliferated since the consciousness-raising era of the 1960s (Baraka 1963; Levine 1977), though black thinkers have grappled with issues of representation, authenticity and agency in struggles against racism for much longer (Hughes 1926; Du Bois 1926; Ellison [1945]1999; Baldwin [1949]2012). Indeed, scholars of black music, as one recent volume shows, address themes ranging from musical interpretation, music's mass mediation, gender, and musical agency and resistance (Maultsby and Burnim 2016). Historical work has also been done, attending to the ways black women defined themselves in performance (Davis 77 1999; Brown 2008), the dynamics of white consumption of black popular culture (Lott 1993; Monson 1995), the political meanings jazz took on for musicians in the Civil Rights era (Monson 2010), jazz as a radical black aesthetic (Moten 2003), and funk in the post-Civil Rights era (Brown 1994; Morant 2011). Since the 1990s, hip hop scholarship has debated the tensions between the form's revolutionary beginnings and its contemporary place as the preeminent American popular culture (Rose 1994, 2008; Neal 1999; Dimitriadis 2001). Scholars of black dance forms have also addressed the politics of black bodily expression from popular social dances (Stuckey 1987, 2002; Daniel 1991; Hazzard- Gordon 1992; Albright 1997; Gottschild 1998, 2005; DeFrantz 2004, 2016; Thompson 2014) to modern dance (Manning 2006; DeFrantz 2002, 2005) to the everyday "games black girls play" (Gaunt 2006). Thus my work engages broader considerations in the field of dance studies with embodied and performative forms of politics (Phelan 1993; Savigliano 1995; Reed 1998; Martin 1998; Fischer-Hornung 2001; Lewis 2004; Lepecki 2005, 2013; Franko 2006; Parviainen 2010). Scholars of music, dance, embodiment and the body, across many disciplines, have long critiqued the Cartesian mind-body duality that still pervades many academic disciplines as well as common understandings (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Jackson 1983; Csordas 1994; Reed 1998; Farnell 1999; Thomas 2003). Yet like the Angoleiros' critique of speech-worlds, these scholars do not argue for silencing speech or turning away from text. Rather, they grapple with the many ways that moving, sounding bodies create and communicate meaning (Hanna 1979; Farnell 1999). A primary concern of these scholars has been how to translate music/movement-knowledge and experience into text, without 78 reproducing or reinforcing linguocentric models. It is a conundrum or paradox that we who continue to speak/write about music and dance accept nonetheless. After all, as Charles Seeger (1977), speaking or writing about music (or movement) requires a "speech-music analogy, allowing [however] for indeterminate amounts of homology and heterology" (1997:16). In other words, translating musical meaning into text means accepting the limits of translation. Dance and performance scholars have, therefore, sought to counter the supposed ineffability of movement and ephemerality of performance (Taylor 2003; Foster 2003; Lepecki 2004). As Thomas argued, "Although there may be difficulties in translating dance into words, it does not necessarily follow that dance lies outside of language and is therefore 'ineffable'" 2003:174). Foster sought to challenge the ephemerality of performance by calling for "a more meat-and-bones approach to the body based on an analysis of discourses or practices that instruct it" (Foster 1997:235), while sound studies scholars have proposed soundscapes as a means to materialize sound (Samuels et al. 2010). Since bodies, movement and music produce meaning, dance scholars argue that people can use "their bodies to produce a text—not to illustrate a text but to actually textualize the space […] with known signifiers" (Alker et al. 2010:86). In similar ways, musical exchanges can also communicate and "say something" (Monson 1997). Thomas DeFrantz uses analogies of movement to speech when he recognizes that "black social dances are constructed like verbal games of rhetoric such as toasting and signifying which simultaneously celebrate and criticize" (2004:65). In fact, it is from this "dynamic amalgamation of pleasure and critique" that black social dance forms derive their "power," which attracts and moves practitioners and audiences alike (66). A 79 simultaneity of celebration and protest also takes place in the serious game of the capoeira roda, where players ridicule and attempt to humiliate each other, while at the same time valorizing the power of black Brazilian culture and cohering their bonds of community. Capoeira Angola is a fight with a smile.16 In another analogy, DeFrantz identifies the capacities to speak and incite action through movement, which he terms "corporeal orature": I define black performativity here to be gestures of black expressive culture, including music and dance, that perform actionable assertions. In terms of black social dance, these performative assertions do not "describe" dancing, rather, they are the physical building blocks of a system of communication we may term corporeal orature. Corporeal orature aligns movement with speech to describe the ability of black social dance to incite action. (2004: 66-67) DeFrantz troubles any clear-cut distinctions between public and private readings of black movement. While to a certain degree the orature in capoeira Angola is only legible from inside the practice, the power of its protest can still be perceived by non-practitioners. As with text, one must possess some kind of literacy in the language in order to converse with it. As I elaborate in Chapter 1, the bodily and musical exchanges that take place in the roda are often called a "conversation" or "dialogue" by adepts. Some level of fluency is necessary in order to participate in a meaningful exchange of movements. However, as the crowds gathered around Mestre Cláudio's Saturday roda attest, such fluency is not necessary to understand the more general gist of what the Angoleiros are "saying." My task here, therefore, is to translate some of this orature or saying into the text of this dissertation. What are capoeira practitioners saying with their moving and sounding? Furthermore, as group members claim their doing trumps their saying, I have focused on 16 Mestre Deraldo, of Boston, MA, is a master of playing a serious, dangerous game with a smile on his face. 80 their experiences of doing (training and playing movements and music) in order to ask what their doing is doing (Daniel 2005:5, crediting Foucault).17 What are the effects of their doing, their moving and sounding practice, on practitioners individually and on the community more broadly? In her article "Choreographies of Protest" (2003), Susan Foster reads the bodily events of protest not as dance, yet she asks "the kinds of questions that a dance scholar might ask" (397). I cite some of them here, for they have also informed my "readings" and interpretations of the doings of the Angoleiros do Sertão: what are these bodies doing?; what and how do their motions signify?; […] what kind of significance and impact does the collection of bodies make in the midst of its social surround?; […] how have these bodies been trained, and how has that training mastered, cultivated, or facilitated their impulses?; what do they share that allows them to move with one another?; what kind of relationship do they establish with those who are watching their actions?; what kinds of connections can be traced between their daily routines and the special moments of their protest?; how is it possible to reconstruct and translate into words these bodies' vanished actions?; how is the body of the researcher/writer implicated in the investigation? (397) With this project, I explore the ways in which social and political action may take sonic and embodied form. What is the social or political impact of a “collection of bodies” enacting their spontaneous choreographies on the street of Feira de Santana? Do Afro- diasporic bodily practices offer resistive potentials that differentiate them from more text- based cultural forms, such as literature or song lyrics? By now it should be clear that heeding Mestre Cláudio and his students' insistent call to attend to their actions and doings does not mean an outright rejection of academics and speech. Group members also recognize the strategic utility of mastering the language of the realm of speaking and conquering space within the worlds of the academy and 17 Dreyfus and Rabinow cite a personal communication with Foucault, in which he sums up the problem of analyzing “intentionality without a subject”: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (Dreyfus, Rabinow, and Foucault 1983:187). 81 politics. I recognize that their discourse, discussions and speech extend from their "doing," just as I expand their "saying" to include their actions. In their doing I include everything from their moving and sounding in the microcosm of the roda to the broader choices and actions they make in their lives. I include musical practice as an embodied practice and focus on the extra-textual musical elements, such as how the sounds of the instruments signify the African past, and how practitioners physically and aurally experience learning and playing the instruments in the roda. This means I have attended to their music-making, the sounds they produce with instruments and voices, as well as how they move while listening in the roda. I have asked them to describe their sensations and experience during all of these acts. In order attend both to sound and movement, without privileging either one, I have bridged methods and approaches from ethnomusicology and dance studies. By placing moving, sounding bodies at the center of the project, therefore, I am expanding approaches to analyzing simultaneous movement and music/sound. The Aural-Kinesthetic Music and movement are inseparable elements in diverse expressive practices across Africa and the diaspora: these “dance/music” practices (Daniel 2005) require both music and movement to be complete (Chernoff 1981; Stolzoff 2000; Floyd 2002; White 2008; Schloss 2009), often applying the same term to the music as the dance form, for example, as with zouk (Guilbault 1993), salsa (Garcia 2013) and rumba (Daniel 1991). Likewise, a formal capoeira ritual (roda) cannot happen without the participation of everyone present, taking turns playing instruments, singing calls or responses, and joining 82 in the “games,” (matches between two partners). Yet studies that address both music and movement remain rare (Kisliuk 1998; Downey 2002; Hahn 2007; Miller 2017), with dance and music scholars often citing an expertise limited to one field. While scholars have long recognized the embodied nature of musical production (Blacking 1977; Baily 1995), more recent studies of bodies and sounds tend to fall short of examining how bodies and sounds act upon one another (Malnig 2009; Henriques 2011; Cook and Dodds 2013; Glieca and Wyers 2013; Sunardi 2015), or they take a systematic, cognitive approach that forgoes ethnography and subjective experience (Godøy and Leman 2009). In order to address this lacuna, I draw on my decades of musical, dance and capoeira training and respond to Imani Kai Johnson’s call to attend to “the simultaneity of music and movement” by creating new approaches for “writing the aural-kinesthetic” (Johnson, I.K. 2012). I find especially productive Johnson’s “focus on a visceral, embodied, kinesthetic response” to music, one that considers “the feel of the song as a whole.” In other words, Johnson seeks to bring our attention to bodily experiences of moving to music and sound, in social settings where the music is produced and played specifically for the purpose of making bodies move. It is this relationship I explore in the context of the capoeira roda, the experience of moving to the sounds of the berimbaus and other instruments, as well as the physicality needed to create those sounds. Doing so, I join a growing cohort of scholars seeking to break down conceptual divisions between movement and sound, recognizing how our language and analytical training may lead us to separate aspects that really are parts of a totality of experience (García, D. 2009; Fogarty 2010; Garcia, L-M. 2011; Bragin 2014). 83 I have developed approaches to writing the aural-kinesthetic by conceiving of sound as also material (Samuels et al. 2010; Kapchan 2015, 2017) and corporeal (Downey 2002), and by perceiving sound as movement. This aligns with how capoeira practitioners experience sound as calling and urging bodies to move, defining and claiming spaces, and transmitting and distributing energies. I expand upon studies of listening bodies by proposing listening not only as a learned skill (Downey 2002; Meneses 2016), but also as an engagement with sound as an affective force, potentially imbued with agency. To do this, I have attended to interlocutors’ understandings gained through multiple modes, senses and aural-kinesthetic sensibilities: through discourse and discussion, formal and informal education, and knowledge transmitted through music, sound and movement. Ultimately, I consider writing the aural-kinesthetic as contributing to the broader political aims of this dissertation project. I argue that moving, sounding bodies immersed in Afro-Brazilian practices produce knowledge and theory often overlooked by academic methods that prioritize knowledge communicated verbally and in text. When the Angoleiros valorize action over speech, they put forward a critique of both racism and logocentricism—the racist logocentricism—of elite white worlds of the university and party politics, within which they continue to be marginalized. In other words, Mestre Cláudio and group members understand the realm of doing as black political practice, while the realm of speech upholds racial democracy by speaking about the value of black culture but doing little to protect black life. Yet, to be clear, some Afro-Brazilians also participate in the realm of elite speech just as some white people defend the realm of black doing. These are among the tensions and complexities I address throughout the 84 dissertation, as I consider how practitioners from diverse subject positions (from poor, black youth in the Northeast to upper-middle class, white university professors in the Southeast of Brazil) interpret and participate in Afro-Brazilian practices. Africaneity: Debates on Aesthetics and Hybridity In this dissertation I refer to capoeira Angola interchangeably as a black and Afro- Brazilian practice, which also reflects the parlance of the Angoleiros do Sertão. I understand black and Afro-Brazilian also as signifying belonging to the African diaspora. However, while my reasons may appear obvious to many, this view is far from universally accepted among angoleiros, capoeiristas and scholars. Assunção (2005) has treated the controversies at length, outlining dominant “master narratives” and myths about capoeira’s origins, which can be divided into general camps claiming either Brazilian-nationalist or African “essence” (2). He takes a rather orthodox historian’s approach, denigrating myths as “simplistic” because they fail to account for the true “complexity” of capoeira’s “contradictory and ambiguous” history (5-9). He also treats the narratives all as historical, not distinguishing between those that have ceased to compel contemporary actors and those that continue to be meaningful for practitioners today. Assunção has contributed one of the most thorough and detailed histories of capoeira to date, and for this capoeira practitioners and scholars everywhere are surely appreciative, as I am. However, by dismissing myths as simplistic, he does not leave room for recognizing the complex, contradictory and ambiguous ways that practitioners use and assign meaning to the myths. Perhaps this task is better taken up by ethnographers, and this is the approach I take in this dissertation. 85 Assunção contributed a lengthy critique of the “Afrocentric narrative,” citing cases where scholars had fabricated details to prove the “African” nature of diasporic practices. As he contends, “unsubstantiated” claims only contribute to “discrediting the Afrocentric approach” (26-27). Yet by focusing his ire (and some condescension) on the most “fundamentalist” examples—scholar-practitioners who seek to establish capoeira’s purely African origin and nature—he not only overlooks the political work that these claims perform in the context of racialized relations of power, but he also neglects to represent a much more prevalent view of capoeira’s origins, that nonetheless still maintains a (more moderate) Afrocentric perspective: As Mestre Cláudio and many other capoeira mestres have put it, “Capoeira was developed by Africans in Brazil.” This view preserves recognition of the “African” in capoeira, by appreciating how Africans and their descendants in Brazil drew on their collective cultural knowledge, of diverse music- movement practices, and eventually developed capoeira over several centuries. Assunção’s rigorous scholarship confirms the validity of this view, and he gestures towards it when he posits attention to hybridity as a more fruitful approach, but he does not acknowledge this as one of the ideological narratives. I believe that this perspective on capoeira’s origins makes the most sense. Like all traditions and practices, capoeira has developed and evolved. We have no way of knowing how much capoeira has changed over the centuries, but it is likely it has changed a great deal and coalesced from many other practices. As Assunção and other historians have shown, capoeira has transformed greatly even over the course of the twentieth century. Assunção was also recently involved in a documentary project with Mestre Cobra Mansa, a capoeira Angola mestre who is also pursuing his PhD, and who 86 was one of the most adamant proponents of the capoeira-is-African thesis (Assunção 2013). In the film, they travel to Angola to search for capoeira’s origins. While they found diverse bodily games, many of which shared one or another similarity with capoeira, they found none that could reasonably be interpreted either as capoeira’s predecessor or what it may have evolved into. Thus the film essentially disproves the thesis of capoeira as a purely African practice, though it does not comment further on wider debates of capoeira’s origins. Christine Dettmann (2013), an ethnomusicologist also involved in the film project, offers a nuanced outline of the debates and how they intersect with the broader context of scholarship on African survivals, continuity and creolization. She also recognizes how "creolization" may more accurately describe the processes of cultural development, yet she questions its usefulness due to how often it has been misinterpreted and misused to ideological ends other than those intended by Mintz and Price (1992), who proposed creolization as a frame or “approach” for interpreting African American culture and history (Price 2001:43). She argues, as I also do, for an ethnographic approach that reveals the “personal meaning” of Afrocentric ideas for practitioners (Dettman 2013:82). Addressing more closely the specific ways in which creolization and hybridity have been used to stake out opposing sides of the debates helps explain why emotions run so high and why an ethnographic approach, especially one grounded in the activist, anti-racist tradition of Africana studies, is so important. Even when stating that creolization does “not mean a loss of ‘African-ness,’” as Assunção states (Dettmann 2013:76), scholars’ uses of “hybridity” and “creolization” tend to have the effect of downplaying or erasing Africanness or blackness. This often 87 takes subtle forms, where scholars referencing hybridity/creolization/mixture make implicit assumptions that a form (or a people, racial category, cultural practice, etc.) cannot be both hybrid and black (Sansone 2003; Capone 2010; Pinho 2010; Palmié 2013). This tactic has also been common among white male North American jazz scholars and critics (DeVeaux 1991, 1996; Sudhalter 1999). In fact, when mixture diverts from blackness it does similar work to ideologies of mestiçagem/mestizaje in Latin America, which can either include black people but deny their unique subjectivities, such as when Brazilians claim “we all are African,” or exclude them entirely through acts of explicit racism (Wade 2010:90-96). Both inclusion and exclusion in these cases function to exclude the complete humanity and experience of black people. Citing together these authors who defend hybridity does not do justice to the sophistication and variety of their contributions and arguments, nor to their political intentions. Many of these scholars are motivated by a commitment to combat racism, which they conflate to various degrees with essentialism, by exposing the social construction of categories such as “blackness” and “race.” However, I disagree with their tactics, which generally reject or de-privilege categories rather than processes or structures. Attacks on the concepts of “race” (Sansone “abhor[s]” it (2003:5)) or “Africanness” often fail to consider how these concepts fundamentally shape the lived realities of the people they write about—the ways black people experience their race, their blackness or the Africanness of their practices. Terms such as “black” must be understood not as “natural, biological and genetic” signifiers, but rather as “historical, cultural and political” (Hall 1993:111). As Omi and Winant argue: [D]espite its uncertainties and contradictions, the concept of race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world. The task for 88 theory is to capture this situation and avoid both the utopian framework that sees race as an illusion we can somehow ‘get beyond,’ as well as the essentialist formulation that sees race as something objective and fixed, a biological given. We should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion. (2014:112) Approaches that question a practice’s blackness also ignore black geography: how black practices have evolved over many years within majority black communities, who were segregated either de jure (as in the U.S.) or de facto (as in Brazil). Neither minority white participation in the practices nor black artists' appropriations of European or white American elements (common examples given include the use of Portuguese in capoeira, or the use of European instruments in jazz) erase the fact that black practitioners were the principle creators, innovators and sustainers of these forms over many generations. In sum, focusing on race too easily diverts attention from racism: from the ways in which the concept of race continues to support structural racism and violence that target black lives. Deconstructing race proves the absurdity of racism, but does not weaken its hold. Finally, it is worth asking what hybridity and related concepts can contribute to combatting racism. Hybridity is characteristic of all cultural development in contexts where multiple cultures interact. “African” cultures on the continent are and have always been hybrid already, not to mention heterogeneous (Apter 1991). And Africans in the Americas have always shown ingenuity at adapting, innovating and modifying cultural practices, absorbing, adopting and incorporating diverse non-African elements into their practices. Hall describes how black culture is always “impure” and “to some degree hybridized”: Selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulation of European ideologies, cultures, and institutions, alongside an African heritage […] led to linguistic innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien social 89 space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing, and talking, and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and community. (1993:109-10) I recognize, therefore, as Dettmann does, that creolization/hybridity concepts are useful for analyzing processes of cultural development. Yet I go further than Dettmann, both in my critique of creolization (it has not only been misunderstood but also misused, as I have shown), and in my view on its potential uses. Specifically, in the cases of Africans and their descendants in the Americas, I argue that attention to processes of creolization or hybridity reveal the ingenuity, creativity, innovation and resilience of these people in their cultural and political struggles to survive and thrive. This ingenuity, sometimes expressed as the ability to make "something out of nothing" (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 2013:49; Moten 2017:152-7), itself is a black cultural aesthetic and process passed down from Africans to their descendants and elaborated upon in unforseeable ways. Or, as Apter has identified them, "refiguration" and "revision" are the "discursive strategies" through which "New World blacks empowered their bodies and souls to remake their place within Caribbean [and American] societies" (1991:155-6). Attention to hybridity also emphasizes the heterogeneity of black experience, subject positions, and forms of political consciousness. Categories of "blackness" and "race" should thus be understood as already complex, hybrid and changing, but attention to complexity, hybridity and change should not be allowed to divert from attending to blackness, race and racism. Understanding capoeira as a practice that evolved among predominantly African and Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil centers the people who practiced and developed the form. From this view, it is not necessary to claim or identify pure "survivals" or "retentions" of African culture, because it is understood that cultural 90 practices are "dynamic, living, [and] creative" (Levine 1978:4) and that "new ideas were recycled through age-old concepts to produce new music [or expressive] styles" (Maultsby 2005). However, recognizing certain common aesthetic resonances and world views among African and diasporic practices does not essentialize black culture. Rather, it means recognizing the (historical and contemporary) agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants to orient toward the places and cultures from which they were forcibly removed; recognizing that they have always made “strategic and situational choices about the long-distance and territorial communities in terms of which they imagined themselves" (Matory 2005:36). The self-identified "Africaneity" of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices should not be understood as claims to a fixed and frozen, timeless and homogenous African-ness, but rather as assertions of connections between the "sociopolitical realities of contemporary Africa and Latin America” (Dzidzienyo 1985:139). In other words, when Brazilians identify themselves and their practices as African-descended, or black, or even African, aesthetics cannot be separated from politics. Practicing capoeira Angola in Bahia, in many groups, means immersion within a deeply Afrocentric practice and in trans-temporal Afro-Bahian imaginaries of quotidian black life. Song lyrics, in colloquial Bahian Portuguese and with remnants of African dialects, evoke an imagined past of the daily struggle under slavery, referencing moments of subversion and play, allegory, celebration, remembering and wisdom. Students sweat in efforts to embody the agile strength, flexibility and expression of old mestres and capoeiras of the past, stevedores, plantation laborers, and sailors. This immersion involves practitioners of every racial background and skin hue. For students in groups 91 with such an Afrocentric focus, it means they experience the world from a position where “Africa” is centered, as an idea (Mudimbe 1994), surely, even as a myth (Pinho 2010), but a powerful one that defines the meaning of the form. For the Angoleiros do Sertão, the powerful idea of “Africa” enables them to reclaim or revise their identities, and valorize their African features and heritage, or those of their friends, in opposition to dominant Brazilian discourses that still equate blackness and Africanness with slavery, inferiority and ugliness.18 Celebrating black beauty through appropriating an “African” aesthetic, on the other hand, has a profound impact on how children and adults re-imagine their own image and subsequently their sense of strength and self-worth. Many black movement activists feel that this sense of self-esteem is a prerequisite for subject becoming political actors. As such, the group joins a longer and larger project that extends into a past long before the more recent rejuvenation of the Movimento Negro and black identity politics of the 1970s (Nascimento and Nascimento 1992; Matory 2005). While this turn to Africa sometimes evokes essentialist claims, where black appearance signifies cultural belonging and aptitude (Pinho 2010), it is also more than this. It is a pro-active, political project; a "demotic discursive practice" that reinterprets and renegotiates history and memory (Baumann 2002:193). In other words, it is misplaced to blame Afro-Brazilians for essentializing their own identities, as many scholars do (Pinho 2010). As long as Brazilians see “bad hair” when they see an Afro-Brazilian wearing their hair in a “natural” style, they will hear the devil in the drums of Candomblé; and as long as police continue their genocide against black 18 One interlocutor described how in text books when she was growing up the only time a black person appeared was as a slave. In this and other ways, black Brazilians are daily reminded that their only place is one of slavery and servitude. (See also Dettman (2013:86) where Mestre Cobra Mansa relates having this experience, too.) 92 and brown bodies, activists and scholars must attend to the experiences of blackness and brownness—the shared African descent—of those whose lives are most precarious. Only when racist ideas of negative essences no longer exist, perhaps, will there no longer be any need to counter them with expressions of blackness-as-Africaneity as signaling something cohesive, positive, generative, creative and real.19 On the other hand, perhaps this sense will persist. What scholars who focus on dismantling identity politics fail to understand is that racial identity projects are not ends in themselves for black movement activists. Black identity is a tool used to draw attention to lived black experience. While many scholars marvel at the complexity of racial identity questions in Brazil, residents of the periphery already know the answers: “Want to know who’s black in Brazil? Ask the police.”20 Practicing capoeira Angola, therefore, thrusts every student into the history of racialized oppression and its permutations in the contemporary world, whether they reflect on it or not. For these reasons, I have examined whether and how practicing capoeira Angola — learning to embody wisdom passed down from enslaved Afro- Brazilians and incorporating it into their daily lives — informs and alters practitioners’ conceptualizations of race and racism and their experience of racial and political differences and ideologies. 19 I see this positioning as doing something different from Gilroy’s “anti-anti-essentialism,” in that the need to construct ideas of racial belonging come not only out of shared practices (as Gilroy notes) but also out of shared lived experience of blackness (1993:102). In other words, without denying the agency of Afro- Brazilians to construct their senses of self, community and belonging, I also point to the structures of racism within which they must navigate. Racism, a white invention, perhaps does more to fix or essentialize black identity than any other idea or factor. 20 I have heard this repeated by young, black men in the capoeira group and in activist circles (see also Smith 2016:11). 93 Africana Political Philosophy and Quilombismo Practitioners of capoeira Angola, and other black Brazilian cultural practices such as Candomblé, claim the practices as sources of both individual and collective consciousness, strength and self-esteem, nourished through/in community. These are the qualities practitioners most often referenced when I asked them about the ways in which they understood capoeira Angola as “resistance” or as “freedom.” In order to “thicken” these understandings of resistance, I attend to the “cultural richness” of the group’s practices (Ortner 1995: 183), exploring their philosophy and spiritual affinity with Candomblé, and I also address how power struggles of gender and race manifest in the group (Ortner 1995:177). Yet, as I outlined above, I feel that freedom as a concept also deserves more thorough theorization in capoeira studies and in studies of the political power of black cultural practices more broadly. Shifting the focus from resistance towards freedom also facilitates an attention to more generative and active aspects of the practice. The frame of resistance requires thinking in terms of opposition (to racism, to oppression, etc.) whereas the frames of freedom and creativity open up possibilities for thinking about the black practice as "a place to build, not just a place to tear down" (Lipsitz and Rose 2014). I frame my questions, therefore, as an examination of capoeira Angola’s limits and potentials to contribute to black freedom. For whom does capoeira function as a practice of freedom and how? In what ways is the practice differently liberatory for men and women, or for black and white participants? For while capoeira Angola valorizes black Brazilian identity, capoeira communities still perpetuate to varying degrees the sexist and racist ideologies of dominant Brazilian society. In this way, I complicate 94 interpretations of capoeira as fully realized liberation, in order to contribute a more nuanced understanding of the ways cultural practices can be political projects. More specifically, I integrate the theory of “freedom as marronage,” developed by African American political theorist Neil Roberts (2015), Quilombismo, proposed by Afro-Brazilian political philosopher Abdias do Nascimento (1980), in order to formulate a quilombola theory of cultural politics and freedom as practice. Marronage, or flight from slavery, has served as a crucial site of black self-determination throughout the Americas (Price 1996; James 2013). Roberts argues that various forms of marronage constitute overlooked sites where enslaved and freed Africans and their descendants have theorized freedom out of their experiences of enslavement and oppression. In Brazil, maroon communities known as quilombos exist to this day. "Quilombismo" refers specifically to Nascimento’s political philosophy, which he modeled after an idealized reconstruction of quilombo society, and by which he proposes a still-to-be established Brazilian sociopolitical system that builds on ancestral, Afrocentric values system (Nascimento A. 1980; Nascimento E. 2004; Afolabi 2012). By examining capoeira Angola as a maroon space, or quilombo, I place it within a broader contemporary context of political and cultural organizing within claimed and created “alternative spaces of blackness” (Harding 2000). I argue that practitioners “escape” into capoeira not in the Bakhtinian sense of releasing tension to avoid confrontation, but as a pro-active assertion of their autonomy and humanity. In capoeira spaces, they create spaces of refuge in which they can imagine and construct their own version of a better society that is neither perfect nor static or finished. Embodied actions of flight, running and fugitivity are central to marronage and quilombismo, and so I draw 95 out this inherent necessity for movement as I consider capoeira as quilombola action. Focusing on process rather than result also reveals how freedom struggles remain unfinished and in motion. In this way I argue that capoeira Angola embodies freedom as practice (Foucault 1998; Goldman 2010) and as ongoing struggle (Davis 2012; 2016). Chapter overview In Chapter 1, “Practices of the African Matrixes: Axé and the Aural-Kinesthetic,” I show how the three practices of capoeira Angola, Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion, and samba de roda, a singing-dancing-drumming form, all share an African diasporic aural-kinesthetic orientation through which they foster community. This means that practitioners train their bodies to produce and respond to sound in similar ways in the three practices, leveraging African ancestral knowledge, with the goal of cultivating positive energy, or axé. This in turn coalesces community and reinforces practitioners’ senses of belonging and commitment. Drawing together dance and music studies and Africana thought, I have developed methods for analyzing simultaneous movement and sound, urging dance and music scholars to do the same, thereby contributing to decolonizing knowledge practices. Chapter 2, “An Angoleiro Ethics: Mestre Cláudio’s Teachings as Africana Philosophy,” provides an ethnographic description of Mestre Cláudio’s philosophy of capoeira Angola as Africana philosophy. Throughout his teaching, the Mestre frames capoeira Angola’s overarching value as one of commitment and obligation. Capoeira transmits wisdom to its students and in return they must give back to capoeira and to the community. I argue that this lesson has implications for conducting critical ethnography, 96 as it transcends other models of reciprocity or responsibility by requiring a life-long commitment. By writing this chapter, I enact my own commitment to the group, as I have aimed to produce a document that is primarily legible, useful and meaningful to group members. In Chapter 3, “Guerreira Tactics in a Man’s World: Women Conquering Space in Capoeira Angola,” I draw on interviews with women practitioners, observations and my own experience training with the group, in order to examine how women capoeira practitioners negotiate positions of race, gender and class. The women critique the mainstream feminist movement in Brazil for being too centered on speech expression, confrontation with men, and white women’s experience. In contrast, they contest sexism and define their femininity through the embodied action of claiming space. I argue that in these ways they enact their own mode of gender politics that aligns with, yet functions autonomously from, black and transnational feminist thought. Chapter 4, “Capoeira Angola as Black Movement: The Racial Politics of Angoleiro Practice,” is an in-depth analysis of how group members understand capoeira Angola as an anti-racist practice in Brazil. While capoeira Angola, like Candomblé and samba, developed in black communities, today capoeira Angola counts more white practitioners than black. From extensive interviews with black and white group members and black movement activists, I conclude that all practitioners experience similar personal transformations through their practice, gaining spiritual, psychological and physical strength. However, when it comes to seeking ways to extend these strengths to the aggrieved black community, white practitioners hold back while black practitioners press forward, limiting claims of capoeira’s transformative potential in society. 97 In the Epilogue, “The Angoleiros do Sertão as a Quilombola Practice of Freedom,” I explore the forms of freedom practitioners achieve through their capoeira practice, from bodily freedom of movement to the liberty to embrace black identity. I argue that capoeira Angola offers a space of refuge away from dominant racialized power relations, in which practitioners can define autonomous value systems and ethical ways of being. However, I also critically examine how the capoeira community reproduces inequalities found throughout Brazilian society, limiting practitioners’ freedom efforts. Above all, I argue for recognizing the essential role being-in-motion plays in freedom projects: just as mastery of capoeira Angola remains an ongoing process, moving towards freedom requires life-long commitment and practice. 98 Note on racial terms Racial terms Throughout the dissertation I use “black” to signify African descent, synonymous with Afro-Brazilian. I also use the term when people identified in Portuguese as either negro or preto. Negro is the older generation’s term for “black” political identity; preto, while it may retain some pejorative connotations for some, is rising in usage among politicized black youth, a reclaiming of negative term that more directly evokes black color as something good. Preto is also the word used to describe something black in color, while negro always refers to a black person. However, negro is still used today, and does not sound as antiquated or offensive as Negro does in the United States, though it still can also be used pejoratively, depending on the context. I used “white” to refer to people who identified as branco. I also use “non-black” to refer to people who declined to identify as either white or black. I choose “non-black” instead of “non-white” because, as will become clearer, blackness is the category from which most of these people seemed to seek the most distance. Racial demographics of the Angoleiros do Sertão I have tried to quantify racial demographics in the group, but settling on absolute numbers is difficult, not only because group participation fluctuates, but because it is difficult to know where and when to draw the line between black and other non-white categories. Many members of the group are what I would see, through a North American racial lens, as light-skinned or lighter-skinned black people (for example, with clear Afro- descendent features in their hair and noses, but lighter brown skin hues). However, 99 signaling a higher prevalence of racial consciousness in the group than in much of Brazil, many of them identify as negro/a (black). In the United States, these people would usually be considered black, but in Brazil they may identify as pardo (the census category “brown”) or use other terms such as moreno (also meaning brown). I have found it useful to consider racial demographics from two general perspectives. First, I always ask in interviews how people identify themselves. In the Angoleiros do Sertão, compared with the general Brazilian population, there is less avoidance of black identity among those who have the option to avoid it under Brazilian racial understandings, i.e. those with all but the darkest skin tones. In such a group that actually values blackness above other racial identities, group members rarely used euphemisms for blackness, such as moreno/a or pardo/a, often used by lighter-skinned people with Afro-descendent features who do not identify as black. Asking people to self- identify in this group yielded a much smaller range of identities than other social scientists have found among the broader Brazilian population. Generally, group members identified as black or white, with a few declining to identify as anything. I recognized, however, that merely adopting how people self-identified and leaving it at that would mask over the complexity of racial dynamics in the group. Thus, while always remembering self-ascribed identities, I also have paid close attention to people’s phenotypical characteristics and considered how they might be ascribed an identity in the United States. Considering phenotype, I have made the following observations about this group: • Dark-skinned people have less choice of identity, and they usually assumed a black identity, though sometimes grudgingly. 100 • Lighter-skinned people with Afro-descendent features in this group most often identified as black. • People who would be white in the US identified as white. • However, many people belonged to a range of categories we would consider non- white in the US: § People who looked Latino/a (light skinned, but dark wavy hair, sometimes thicker lips, etc.), tended to identify as white. § Light-skinned or (sometimes ambiguously) white people who assumed racial markers, such as locks, and in the US could even “pass” for black, tended to identify as white or decline to identify. § Some members (like many Brazilians in general) have brown skin but less pronounced Afro-descendent features. In this group, these people felt they could identify as black only if they knew they had a black ancestor or relative. § Some acknowledged indigenous features and ancestry, yet no one claimed an indigenous identity. In some cases, I sensed people struggled when they knew they could not claim or pass as white, but also felt they could not or did not want to assume a black identity. Perhaps some people declined to identify because they did not feel they had options available to them. On the one hand, there is the oft-noted and absurd number of terms available to describe skin color. But on the other, there seems to be a paucity of available terms for heritage, or perhaps ethnicity, that does not fit into the most widely used categories. 101 In sum, from talking with members of the Angoleiros do Sertão, I got the sense that they value the African descended heritage above all others. (One interlocutor even stated this explicitly to me.) Many seemed wistful, as if they wished they could claim black identity but knew they couldn’t. If they didn’t feel they could claim it, they most often identified as “white,” unless they felt their skin was too brown or “yellow” (as one put it), rendering the white category unavailable. 102 CHAPTER ONE Practices of the African Matrixes: Axé and the Aural-Kinesthetic In order to understand capoeira Angola, sometimes you have to go to Candomblé. Then you’ll understand why we do certain things. (Orikere) When I asked practitioners of the Angoleiros do Sertão to describe their experience of playing capoeira, they often turned to Candomblé or samba de roda to explain the power of their sensations as they listened and moved.21 In accounts verging on mystical, they expressed the difficulty of putting their experience into words. What emerged, however, was that the sound of the berimbau in the full bateria (the eight-piece ensemble of percussion instruments used during rodas) moved them in many ways. It stirred emotions, triggered memories of this life and lives past, summoned ancestors, evoked their spirituality and moved their bodies. In the conversation cited above, Orikere, one of Mestre Cláudio’s most advanced students, and I were talking about the role of the bateria and the music in a capoeira game. As many other practitioners did, he suggested that learning more about Candomblé would help me understand the function and power of music in capoeira Angola. As I listened to Orikere and other interlocutors, and played 21 With my use of the term Candomblé I follow colloquial usage in Bahia to refer to a host of related Afro- Brazilian religious practices and their various traditions and subgroups or nações. Remarkably, in the communities I worked with, I observed little to no concern with establishing hierarchies or claims to authenticity in competition with other nações, or even among various traditions within them, in contrast with how much attention these debates have received in scholarship (Matory 2005; Opipari 2010; Parés 2013), in belated response to the anthropological works that established Nagô supremacy in Candomblé (Nina Rodrigues O animismo fetichista dos negros da Bahia (1900) e Os africanos no Brasil (1932); Landes 1947; Bastide 1960). All Candomblé and Umbanda practitioners I spoke with seemed confident of the authentic Africaneity of their practices, independent of which nação they belonged to. Furthermore, practitioners referred to the whole range of practices as “Candomblé,” as a generic name, even though they may be known by other names in other contexts. For this reason, I do not find it necessary, for my purposes here, to distinguish between them. 103 music and capoeira with them in rodas, it became clearer to me why they consistently talked about Candomblé to explain capoeira and samba. What resonated through all three practices were the ways that music conducted energy and oriented bodies to sound: how bodies cultivated energy through music and movement, how the energy acted on bodies, and how community members understood this as an Afro-Brazilian, ancestral energy called axé (pronounced ash-EH). In this chapter, I explore how capoeira Angola practitioners understand axé as a constellation of concepts emerging from three “alternative spaces of blackness” (Harding 2000), the practices of capoeira Angola, Candomblé and samba de roda. In her history of Candomblé, Harding described the religious practice as a space—“physical, socio- political, cultural, psychic, and ritual-religious”—that aided enslaved and free Africans and Afro-Brazilians to develop “alternative meanings of human community and black identity within the matrix of slavery” (2000:xvi-xvii). Though slavery has been abolished in name, Afro-Brazilians in Bahia and the rest of Brazil continue to live under subjugation and struggle against structural racism. For these reasons, “alternative spaces of blackness” continue to play an essential role for Afro-Brazilians, from within which they can define their own senses of self, humanity and self-worth, as I show in Chapter 4. The spaces of Candomblé, capoeira and samba de roda have always overlapped with one another, with practitioners in the past providing support and aid for one another, across the boundaries of cultural practices, and they continue to do so in the present. While the three practices have different ritual details and specific purposes, they all share the overarching goal of cultivating axé, and in each of them axé as an energy and concept helps orient the bodies of practitioners toward sound. 104 Often described as energy, axé is an element or force that summons ancestors (bridging past, present and future), binds together practitioners into community, and generally makes people feel really good. Axé, as transmitted through movement and sound, participates in a call-and-response exchange of energies that far exceeds the singing of lead verses and responding choruses. As a “dynamic principle” (Sodré 1983:129), axé is always in motion: it can be accumulated, but cannot be stored away untended to. It must be cultivated through ongoing commitment. In Afro-Brazilian communities, axé is cultivated through diverse bodily practices, but here I focus on the way cultivating axé requires developing “aural-kinesthetic” sensibilities (Johnson, I.K. 2012); how axé as a concept links ancestral energies with movement and sound; indeed, how axé as a term and concept aids in translating the aural-kinesthetic orientation into words. Understanding axé in this way reveals how its cultivation is a way of generating Afro-Brazilian knowledge, leveraging ancestral wisdom in the present moment in order to ultimately transform the world for the future. * In this chapter, I first consider briefly how literatures on flow, trance, and affect can inform analysis of the particular experience of moving to “music meant to make you move” (Johnson, I.K. 2012). I address the usefulness of the various terms and concepts, while maintaining my commitment to privilege practitioners’ own terms, theories and understandings. I then provide the socio-cultural context in which practitioners understand their practices as emerging from the same matrizes Africanas (African 105 matrixes or origins), and I provide a brief overview of the practices shared histories. Next I address the sharing of musical repertoires between capoeira, Candomblé and samba. Yet as my intention is to reveal how the practices also share similar musical orientations and ontologies, transcending the sharing or exchanging repertoires, this leads to a deeper exploration of the ways in which the axé concept reveals how sound is experiences as an ancestral “call.” The axé transmitted through sound calls and acts on bodies, and practitioners experience this in turn as a call to responsibility, which resonates through the entirety of practitioners’ lives. Responding to the calls of these practices, practitioners have often made radical life changes when they chose to dedicate themselves, when they recognized their compromisso with their practice. I then consider, therefore, how bodies are called to become “responsible,” committed to sustaining the cultivation of axé through the group’s capoeira Angola and samba practices. Though I refer to samba throughout the chapter, samba receives less attention throughout the chapter because it is understood to have emerged directly out of Candomblé (specifically Candomble de Caboclo ceremonies). As the connections between samba and Candomblé are therefore considered more evident among practitioners, more discussion focused on how capoeira also derived, though less directly, many of its sensibilities and concepts from Candomblé. Furthermore, samba as played on the street (not within the Candomblé house, or terreiro), requires less specialized knowledge than either capoeira or Candomblé. In that sense, it could be considered “simpler,” and more about letting go and having fun. As such it generates less verbal analysis among group members. However, samba nonetheless serves as an essential site 106 for the cultivation of the group’s axé, and for the development of aural-kinesthetic sensibilities. In short, it deserves more attention than I have given it here. The aural-kinesthetic and altered states of consciousness The aural-kinesthetic and affect In “Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic,” Imani Kai Johnson (2012) issues a call “to consider the possibilities of shifting the focus of analysis in such a way that it allows for the simultaneity of music and movement.”22 She terms this way of being and knowing, through orienting the body to sound, the “aural- kinesthetic.” In her article, she suggests we “shift our orientation to music and rhythm by drawing on our kinesthetic responses to it,” in order to counter the centering of the visual in academic studies of dance and artistic practices. Aural-kinesthetics, she explains, “recognize that social dance practices are kinesthetic forms within the all-encompassing aurality of an environment” (2012). While she writes about black social dance, the centrality of “kinesthetic forms” (movement) within an environment of “all- encompassing aurality” (sound), extends beyond categories of “music” and “dance,” as it resonates throughout African diasporic practices, such as capoeira, Candomblé, and samba. These three practices, to paraphrase Johnson, all revolve around sounds meant to make bodies move and movement that must be done to sound. Taking up Johnson’s task in this context, I have found that the aural-kinesthetic of these Afro-Brazilian practices is intimately bound with practitioners’ concepts of axé. To understand how practitioners 22 I am grateful to Naomi Bragin for pointing me toward Johnson’s article after I heard Bragin reference the “aural-kinesthetic” in a conference presentation at the Congress on Research in Dance meeting in Claremont, CA, 2016. 107 relate their experiences to axé as a force that moves (through) bodies and sound thus necessitates a deeper engagement with the aural-kinesthetic. As a practitioner of capoeira Angola and samba de roda, I have trained and developed my aural-kinesthetic senses for many years. Yet Johnson’s call to “write the aural-kinesthetic” has helped me define methodological tools for expressing the aural- kinesthetic in writing. In part, this also means attempting to “write sound,” which involves “the writer listening to and translating sound through embodied experience, the body translating the encounter between word and sound, sound translating and transforming both word and author” (Kapchan 2017:12). Elsewhere, Kapchan (2015) draws attention to the “sound body,” which is “a material body that resonates (with) its environment, creating and conducting affect” (41, emphasis in original). Though both Kapchan and I still center human bodies, her framing allows the inclusion of bodies both “sentient and non-“ in the category of sound body (40). From this perspective, the drums and berimbaus are also sound bodies. The overall aurality of the capoeira or samba roda, furthermore, could be considered a body of sound. Thinking with these scholars, I have sought to expand my sensory attention, focusing on the bodily effort of producing sound, or bodies as instruments (Kapchan 2015:41, citing Sun Ra); and on sound as movement and material. Kapchan noted the materiality of sound, as well, when she observed that, “even when inaudible, [sound] is indelibly material. As vibration, it permeates everything, unloosening thereby the knotted dualisms of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, body/mind” (Kapchan 2015:42). Tomie Hahn likewise observed how sound can be felt: “The entire body ‘feels’ sound waves. Sound informs us of an 108 energetic vibration being produced in a location, and we orient ourselves depending on our associations with the sound” (2007:115). In his dissertation on intimacy and affect at electronic dance music events, Garcia also addresses the “tactility” of sound (2010:89), how it can “impact the whole body” (96), such as with the “visceral sense of impact” from deep “’sub-bass’ resonances” (90). EDM events, like the capoeira, Candomblé and samba events, merge the sonic with the multi-sensory in environments of “sonic immersion” and “a combination of heat and humidity that might make the air feel dense and almost solid” (96). Garcia argues that “these are scenes of social, sonic, and affective attunement—that is, of coming into (or falling out of) sync with the ‘vibe’ of others or of an atmosphere” (2010: 180-181). Hofman observes how music scholars also have recognized “sound as affective vibrational force,” thereby attending to “sonic materiality” and “sonic affect as the ‘nonrepresentational ontology of vibrational force’” (2015:45). Notably, Garcia, Kapchan and Hofman all consider these bodies-resonating-with- sound as conductors or transmitters of affect. Garcia notes that one interviewee described vibration as transmissible across matter, whether sentient flesh or inanimate objects, thus characterizing sound (and music) as being impersonal in a sense similar to the way other interviewees described musical affect as impersonal and transpersonal: it may emanate from a body or impacts [sic] upon a particular body, but once put into motion, sound fills a space and hits all objects as its waves propagate. (179, my emphasis) Garcia and other scholars in the Spinoza/Deleuze and Guattari tradition leverage affect theory in order to attend to pre-subjective forces or “intensities.” Massumi, whose work also builds on this tradition, defines affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from an experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Deleuze and Guattari 109 1987:xvi, also referenced in Hofman (2015)). In other words, by understanding affect in this way, Massumi wants “to show us a non-docile body,” a body that is “more than dumb matter available for discipline and cultural inscription” (Mazzarella 2010:293); a body that can be acted upon and that can act. Citing Mazzarella, therefore, I ask, “What is [affect] good for” in the context of capoeira, samba and Candomblé? Could it help reveal how sound as a transmitter of affect not only affects bodies and is affected by them, but also even potentially increases or decreases practitioners’ capacities to act? Perhaps. Yet when angoleiros and Candomblé adepts describe their embodied experience with sound, the concept of axé performs strikingly similar work to that of affect. For example, in the following passage, simply substituting “axé” for “affect” would provide a description of axé nearly identical to many found in literature on Candomblé (as I will review below): [A]ffect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds […] Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension... (Gregg and Seigworth 2010:1, my emphases) Gregg and Seigworth even note that affect (like axé) “accumulates” (2, emphasis in original). In this chapter, therefore, I follow my interlocutors in using the term “axé” to refer to the “visceral” and “vital forces” that “drive us toward movement.” Like affect, axé is a kind of intensity that resonates in and through bodies, that accumulates, and that is also “impersonal and transmissible” (Garcia 2011:174) or “transpersonal” (179).23 Yet 23 The “elusive” Japanese concept of ki also performs remarkably similar work to that of axé: it “circulates within the interior of the body, while at the same time intermingling with the ki-energy pervasively present in the environment including that of other persons;” and, “Awareness and control of ki through the body fosters the flow of movement, enabling dancers to move with a spirited energy that radiates from the body 110 unlike affect, the concept of axé, as I will discuss below, also illuminates how practitioners experience their deeply held ontologies of sound and the ways it affects bodies, as inextricable from the African ancestrality of their practices. Altered States of Consciousness: Flow, Trance and Possession My choice to pursue practitioners’ understandings and uses of axé, therefore, reflects my intention to engage “practices and their practitioners on their own terms” (Jankowsky 2010:23). This approach becomes particularly salient when attending to practitioners’ experience of simultaneous listening, sounding and moving, and the meanings they assigned to this experience. The fact that words often evaded them suggests that they were experiencing some kind of altered state of consciousness, similar to that experienced by jazz musicians while improvising (Hytönen-Ng 2013:149). Playing capoeira was highly pleasurable. Some called it a form of trance, others rejected the label. Many described the sensation simply as “feeling the axé,” and being in “sintonia” (syntony), or in sync. A vast literature has been devoted to seeking explanations and understandings of the ways the music and sound bring people into such altered states. However, like Jankowsky in his study of spirit possession in stambeli, I do not approach this altered state as “a problem that needs to be solved” (24). As he put it, “I am less interested in explaining trance than in understanding how the conditions for trance are produced and the kinds of meaning it is capable of generating in the specific context of Tunisian stambeli” (24). Furthermore, I argue as Jankowsky does that “ritual through dance” (Hahn 2007:60). Mestre Manhoso, an experienced practitioner both of capoeira Angola and other Asian martial arts, and a mestre of my group based in the Boston area, has also made this comparison between axé and ki/chi. 111 [like capoeira, samba and Candomblé] possesses its own theoretical possibilities, and that it is from within that its meanings resonate beyond it” (26). While I do not wish to choose an “etic” term to describe practitioners’ experience, the widely cited concept of “flow” warranted brief consideration of its usefulness and limitations. Turino offers a concise overview of the “flow” concept, as developed by Csikszentmihalyi and taken up by many others, listing four conditions necessary for reaching a state of flow: 1) There must be a balance between the challenge of the activity and the practitioner’s skill level, such that they experience pleasure rather than boredom (too easy) or frustration (too difficult); 2) Related to this, the activity must have “a continually expanding ceiling for potential challenges,” so it can never be fully mastered; 3) “Immediate feedback” during the activity “keeps the mind focused”; and 4) the activity is “bounded by time and place,” enabling participants to “tune out ‘the everyday’” (Turino 2008:4-5). Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi list these conditions, but also include others: practitioners experience a sense of control over their actions, an altered experience of time, and perhaps most importantly, they experience “the activity as intrinsically awarding;” the reward is in the doing (process) rather than the getting done (end result) (2009:196). Beyond the repeated pleasure it provides to participants, scholars have noted how repeated experiencing of flow also brings other benefits. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi cited studies showing that students experiencing more flow increased their commitment and persistence, which they eventually applied to building skills and facing challenges (2009:199-200). Csikszentmihalyi ([1990]2008) has long advocated that workers experiencing more flow would be not only happier but more productive—in short, better, 112 more useful laborers (see also Mazzola 2009:102-3). Turino’s vision is a bit more idealistic. He observed that people experiencing flow when making music together developed a bond with each other and entered into a kind of communitas. In this state, he found that “personal distinctions are stripped away allowing people to temporarily merge through their basic humanity” (2008:18). Though temporary, Turino does suggest that at least the potential exists for such experiences to lead to “new lived realities” (18). Capoeira practitioners experience all of the conditions listed above while training and playing capoeira, though not all of the time. Perhaps more accurately, practitioners go in and out of flow states during training and playing. Yet the universality and broad applicability of flow theory means that it is too general to sufficiently describe everything that happens with capoeira, samba and Candomblé participants. Consider how most angoleiros find a roda extremely pleasurable even when they are not in a state of flow. Sitting in the roda can make it difficult to achieve a flow state: sitting on the floor, with knees bent in front of the body (body getting stiffer), waiting for hours on end for a turn to play, listening in order to sing the correct responses, all while trying to focus on watching the games taking place; this experience is often physically painful, an exhausting test of endurance. Rather than being absorbed in the task at hand, I sometimes find it difficult to concentrate as time seems to drag (rather than fly). And yet, even under these conditions participating in a roda can feel like an extended peak moment of another sort. What makes the roda feel so good even when I am not experiencing flow? Is this simply another, more uncomfortable kind of flow? Or is there something deeply satisfying about knowing you are contributing to the flow experience of the two players in the ring? At the very least, room must be made for variations in the flow state: some 113 where a sense of control is heightened, others where one feels as if being controlled; some deeper or more rewarding than others; some perhaps even partial or fleeting. Another concern I have with flow theory is Csikszentmihalyi’s emphasis on disorder versus order. He frames states of “disorder in consciousness” or “psychic entropy” as counterposed to states of “order in consciousness” or flow (2008:39-40). Yet especially in the context of Brazil’s past and present, the valorization of “order” evokes authoritarian control. (See the nation’s flag, whose motto declares “Order and Progress.”) Throughout Brazilian history, Afro-Brazilians and capoeiras in particular have been stigmatized as vadios (lazy bums) and desordeiros (literally, “disorderlies” or hooligans). To align capoeira Angola play with a state of “order in consciousness,” therefore, seems to conflict with the angoleiro ethics of re-claiming negative terms and subject positions in order to create value out of disorder and “doing nothing” (vadiagem). Perhaps a more accurate understanding of flow in capoeira Angola is to see the range of activities that make up capoeira practice, training and play not necessarily as being in flow, but playing with it. Playing with flow means trying to maintain flow while simultaneously trying to knock one’s partner out of it. This requires developing skills for creating and embodying “disorder” while maintaining one’s own “order”; making the unproductive pleasurable; even making the disorderly seem orderly, or vice versa; and above all turning disorder into beauty. When comparing capoeira, samba and Candomblé, another consideration is to what extent capoeira and samba participants experience a kind of trance or possession comparable to what initiates experience in Candomblé. While I will elaborate more below on practitioners’ range of understandings of their altered states during play, one 114 study has addressed at length the subject of music and trance in capoeira. Flávia Diniz (2010), an ethnomusicologist and scholar-practitioner based in Salvador, concluded that trance took place in both capoeira and Candomblé. Recognizing that the trance in capoeira is not exactly the same as that of Candomblé, she distinguishes between the “possession trance” of Candomblé as and the “ritual trance” in capoeira. Yet the various trance-states share certain characteristics: Trance—as much in Capoeira, as in Candomblé and in the Caboclo Cult [the Candomblé ritual that plays samba de roda]—makes the subject dissolve him/herself in the collective and still transcend their apparent personal limitations, getting closer to the supernatural possibilities of the divinities, entities and legendary heroes, when they are represented or incorporated in the rituals. The subject, in the trance of Candomblé, repeats choreographies that represent the myths of the divinities—the acts—learned in a normal state or in trance. In Capoeira, the subject uses a vocabulary, a grammar of movements, an aesthetic and an ethics to improvise, learned during trainings and rodas.” (156) In all the forms Diniz considers (Candomblé, capoeira and the Caboclo Cult, which she distinguishes from non-caboclo Candomblé ceremonies), music “unleashes” the state of trance (157). However, while they were unanimous as to the importance and power of music, the angoleiros of Mestre Cláudio’s group did not all agree that they experienced “trance.” For example, some felt the presence of the ancestors close by, but without “incorporating” or taking them into their bodies. Many reported—at certain moments— transcending their usual abilities, playing better than they normally did in class. Yet this increased ability did not necessarily signify a trance or possession state. Some practitioners were very adamant at distinguishing between the possession of Candomblé and the unnamed altered state of playing capoeira. It is also possible for participants to experience a sense of collectivity (or communitas) without any kind of trance or flow state. 115 The issue of control also complicates evaluations of trance in capoeira. While a flow state may be experienced as having heightened control or an effortlessness, trance as possession “implies not a lack of control, but a (volitional or nonvolitional) transfer of control to another entity” (Kapchan 2007:60). In Candomblé, this voluntary giving up of one’s body to be inhabited or “mounted” by an orixá, often results in the initiate having no memory of what transpired while mounted. In contrast, capoeira practitioners cautioned that a loss of control in capoeira was not ideal as it could lead to dangerous situations. Yet other experienced scholar/practitioners maintain that trance does occur in capoeira. Diniz cites Decânio Filho, who thought of consciousness and unconsciousness on a “continuum,” where the capoeira trance has a “smaller degree of unconsciousness” than the trance of Candomblé. He seems to find in the “involuntary, unconscious, reflexive, automatic” movements of capoeira a form of trance, a lack or relinquishing of control on the part of the capoeira player (Diniz 2010:161-2, citing Decânio). However, many of these movements can also be understood as trained muscle memory, the same as any other martial arts practitioner or footballer experiences. In sum, I believe that the way initiates receive the spirits of the orixás in Candomblé happens in a much more regimented, controlled, and uniform context than that of capoeira roda. The success of the Candomblé rituals depends upon the proper incorporation of the orixás by the initiates, so much more is at stake. Furthermore, as Meneses (2016) has shown, Candomblé initiation trains dancers to perceive and move to music (to “listen with the body”) in specific ways and only within specific contexts. These kinds of responses to music do not come automatically, or outside of the mover’s control. Outside of the terreiro context a dancer may remember the sensations of trance 116 without falling into it (Meneses 2016). The roda of capoeira Angola, in contrast to the Candomblé ritual, allows for a much broader range of individual experiences and personal interpretations. I do not find it necessary, therefore, to define what happens during a capoeira game as “trance,” though comparisons with trance states can be illuminating and many practitioners use that word to describe their experience. Regardless of precise definitions, many practitioners related the concepts of trance, or trance-like states, to Afro-Brazilian spirituality and ancestrality. Diniz defined the “incorporation” that took place in capoeira Angola rodas one of “Afro-Brazilian ancestrality, in which subjects can really lose objective and individualized control of themselves, as they are ‘taken’ by the concepts, behavior and ritual expressions of their ancestors” (2010:177). Some practitioners would surely relate to this description of their experience. Yet others did not so much experience a loss of control, but more a heightening of abilities. Others experienced an ancestral presence, without equating it with incorporation or possession. In other words, by keeping terms and definitions open, I am striving to allow for the diversity of ways members of the Angoleiros do Sertão described and understood their experiences. Finally, keeping to my intention to engage capoeira, samba and Candomblé practitioners on their own terms, one word came up quite frequently as practitioners verbalized their experience. They often referred to the overall, euphoric feeling of the roda as one of sintonia. More common in Portuguese than in English (syntony), sintonia refers to matching frequencies of sound (as used in electronics), or more colloquially, it is similar to how we talk about “being on the same wavelength,” or “being in sync” in English. Only in this case, sintonia refers to what happens when the practitioner is 117 immersed in the music, in the “all-encompassing aurality” of the roda, whether sitting at the roda’s edge or while playing. A matching of vibrations, a sympathetic resonance, occurs. Merriam-Webster’s definition also seems particularly apt: “the state of being normally responsive to and in harmony with the environment; resonance” (Syntony 2018). Being in sintonia while hearing the bateria means that one’s body responds to the sound and resonates together at the same frequency. This also evokes Kapchan’s sound body, which experiences a “realignment of bodily rhythms with sonic and spiritual ones” and “transforms according to the vibrations of its environment, and correspondingly transforms that environment” (2015:35, 38). The role of music in conjuring sintonia and invoking an embodiment or affective perception of Afro-Brazilian ancestrality brings us back to axé. While Diniz found that “music is the unleashing factor of the trance state” in capoeira and Candomblé (2010:157), she later explained that “[w]hat unleashes this ‘incorporation’ is the ‘energy’ or the ‘axé of the roda,’ that is, its fluency, which depends extraordinarily on its musical aspect” (163). Though she does not further elaborate upon the relationship, Diniz at least implicitly linked music with axé. In capoeira literature I found only one other reference to this connection: In the ritual of capoeira, the roda turns into a place of transmission of axé— the vital, spiritual and emotional energy, or the dynamic principle—that circulates and flows through the instruments, the songs, the clapping hands and the movements of the bodies. The players relate how, at the apex of the ludic tension, due to their high degree of concentration, they feel in a kind of almost religious trance and that the state of ecstasy that exists in capoeira rodas is derived from the interaction of the participants. (Barbosa 2005b:94) Here Barbosa observed that the songs and movements in the roda transmit axé. However rather than connect practitioners’ experiences of trance and ecstasy to axé, she explains 118 how they result from players’ concentration and interaction. I argue, in contrast, that axé plays a direct role in participants’ experiences of altered states, heightened concentration, “ecstasy,” and flowing corporeal communication. It is this web of relationships—axé to sound to movement to experience of flow/ancestrality/Africaneity—that remains unexplored in capoeira literature and that I address in this chapter: how axé is channeled, created and transmitted through music and sound; how axé-as-sound-and-movement brings practitioners into altered states of body and mind, into sintonia with the music and with one another; and how it also brings them into contact with Afro-Brazilian ancestors and ancestral energy, or ancestralidade. Before addressing in more depth how practitioners experience this axé-induced sintonia, I now turn to explore how angoleiros understood the three practices as bound together by their shared African “matrixes” or origins, and their shared ancestralidade, or ancestrality. Matrizes Africanas and Ancestralidade Contra Mestre Zara, an ogã in a house of Candomblé (he plays drums for the ceremonies or festas), delivered a lecture on Candomblé at a capoeira Angola event I attended in the interior of São Paulo, in 2016. As the angoleiros gathered around, he urged us as to learn more about Candomblé. He explained, You, as capoeiristas, do not need to be of Candomblé. But independent of the world vision you have, you must know Candomblé. Why? In order to avoid having a warped vision of it, of that which also sustains our Africaneity within capoeira. Zara’s message was twofold: on one hand, he was defending Candomblé against the increasing demonization of Afro-Brazilian religions and cultural practices invigorated by 119 the upsurge of evangelical churches in Brazil. On the other hand, he wanted us to value Candomblé for the ways it has contributed to capoeira Angola’s survival. His message to us was not one of conversion, but one of seeking knowledge: People believe what they think is best for them. This cannot turn into an absolute truth. Nothing in life can turn into an absolute truth. There are other sides that we need to be able to assemble, to include and to find conflict with in order to form our opinion […] Go to a terreiro [house of Candomblé], sit down, listen and observe […] go vivenciar [live and experience it] […] That moment will bring you consciousness, of being and living with the people […] There is no learner’s manual. The booklet is vivência [living and experiencing]. Just as with capoeira there’s no learner’s manual. The manual for capoeira is vivência, training, and all of the matrizes Africanas carry this same characteristic. For Zara, Candomblé held knowledge, essential to our understanding of capoeira Angola, that we could only gain by going to a terreiro, listening, observing, living and experiencing Candomblé—and then forming our own opinion. He was also indicating the limits of his ability to convey this wisdom to us through words, in a lecture. Opipari (2010) observed that this wisdom itself was a form of axé she called “axé as ritual knowledge.” When she asked her interlocutors how they acquired it, “[t]he responses [were] always nearly unanimous: in practice, watching, observing and executing [doing]” (89). She described how learning about the “foundations” (fundamentos) of Candomblé took place in both “formal” and “informal” spaces (89-91), during rituals and celebrations but also hanging out, participating in day to day life. The path to knowledge in both capoeira and Candomblé are through this kind of vivência—often also called convivência (living and experiencing with others)—that Zara spoke of. Zara also connected the shared concept of (con)vivência with capoeira and Candomblé’s shared Africaneity, their belonging to the matrizes Africanas, or African- descended practices. I heard this answer more frequently than any other when I asked 120 what bound together capoeira, Candomblé and samba. One former capoeira student, Iaiá, called capoeira, Candomblé and samba “coisas nossas,” “our things,” belonging to the black Bahian community. She explained they were brought here—of course they were elaborated upon—but they are things that continue to have a connection to the place from which they were taken [Africa]. So the religiosity, the way that we connect with Africa, capoeira, everything was there inside our space, in the slave hut. Samba was our party. Capoeira was our party, too, but also our form of defense… So I believe it’s a way for us to connect ourselves, to recover our ancestrality. Iaiá’s categories are useful, like different sides of a multi-faceted object: samba as a party, capoeira as a form of (playful) defense, and Candomblé as a religiosity that pervades all of the “alternative spaces of blackness” (Harding 2000), and which maintains their ancestral connections to Africa. Orikere, a capoeira practitioner, stated matter-of-factly that capoeira, Candomblé and samba are three conjuntos [they form an ensemble] that cannot be separated. Even though you might not be ‘of axé’ [a practitioner of Candomblé], the axé is in you [if you play capoeira]. You’re in the axé, the force, that current, that energy. You start to speak of the ancestors, you start messing with things that have died. You give life to it and you manage to incorporate it into your body. Orikere’s understanding provides a complement to Zara’s. Where Zara urged capoeiristas to seek knowledge of Candomblé in order to understand capoeira, according to Orikere we have already involved ourselves in the same energy, the same axé, by practicing capoeira. We are already incorporating the ancestral energy into our bodies, and though he does not mention it explicitly, this also means we have entered into an ethical relationship of compromisso. As Orikere said in the quote that began this chapter, if we wish to understand more—not only why we do certain things, but perhaps why we feel 121 and experience certain things—we must go to Candomblé. Understandings difficult to convey in words can be experienced in practice. The concept of ancestralidade, which binds the practices to each other and to their common African past, is also central to the political project of recuperating histories and identities that structures of white supremacy and anti-black genocide in Brazil have denied and sought to erase (Nascimento 1989). The common understanding that Candomblé “historically represent[s] a form of cultural resistance and social cohesion” (Barros and Teixeira 2008: 201) also extends to capoeira and samba. Practicing any one form provides access to the same ancestrality, the same source of knowledge, wisdom, history and tools for resistance. Pedro Abib (2009), a scholar-practitioner of capoeira, located the historical resistive power of Afro-Brazilian practices in their ancestrality, using terms similar to the way many practitioners and scholars talk about it: [In the] daily life of Salvador in the first decades of the last century ... capoeira, samba, candomblé and other manifestations demonstrated the resistance of a culture that many wanted to extinguish, fortunately without success, because the ancestrality present in the traditions of a people is not a thing to be scorned! (34) Abib draws an explicit connection between the (African) ancestrality of the practices and their ability to resist annihilation. I would shift the emphasis and say that it was the Afro- Brazilian practitioners and community members who “demonstrated” this resistance and resilience through their practices, drawing strength and power from the ancestral forces, or axé, they cultivated within them. Afolabi makes even more explicit how axé has sustained Afro-Brazilian cultural resistance and, by extension, Afro-Brazilian spiritual survival: “In this vital force, which among Afro-Brazilians is generally referred to as axé, resides that muse of cultural resistance and production without which their spiritual survival is not only impossible but practically illusory” (2009:1). Considering the healing 122 properties of axé in Candomblé ritual, its force and power has also been and remains directly related to sustaining Afro-Brazilian lives (Harding 2000:77-103).24 Iaiá, who does not practice Candomblé, has nevertheless frequented many festas with her mother, Dona Ivannide, who was a member of a terreiro for many years. Both Dona Ivannide and Iaiá are self-proclaimed “militants” of the Movimento Negro, the Brazilian Black Movement. They focus their energies on direct political action while defending capoeira Angola, samba and Candomblé as necessary aspects of the political movement for black rights and freedoms in Brazil. Iaiá told me, I’m not of Candomblé… But usually if you’re in the Movimento Negro, you know Candomblé. It is a reference for us, for the idea of returning to Africa, to the ancestors, to cultivate a culture we know is ours… In my point of view, what capoeira has to do with Candomblé—aside from the structure, such as how the Mestre is like a pãe de santo, and the practice of storytelling, like the griots—I perceive the roda of capoeira like a thing of axé, of Candomblé. There are days when you can tell that the capoeira doesn’t have a single bit of axé… it doesn’t work, the energy doesn’t flow. This spiritual aspect is very strong. The ancestrality is thus closely linked to, perhaps even contained within, the axé that the practices cultivate and circulate. Dona Ivannide’s description of the nascence of Candomblé and capoeira evokes her sense of the shared historical origins and ancestrality. She described it as if recalling a memory: I think that capoeira rose up in Brazil in a period when the slave-system was ongoing, and in that period Candomblé was one of the elements that united the enslaved people, one instrument that African people and their descendants had to join forces to organize their fights… Capoeira was this, too… And just as Candomblé has the drums as one of its pillars, the prayers in Candomblé are musical, capoeira is also a musical fight. It does not function without its musicality… So I close my eyes and as a person who lived in Candomblé for some time, I think about the moments in Brazil’s history when the terreiros of Candomblé, after the big festas, I see capoeiristas there in the terreiros, on the day of rest, playing capoeira in the terreiros. This is what I see in my memory — not 24 I explore the relationship between ancestrality, axé and political struggle in Chapter 4. 123 my memory, my imaginary… Because capoeiristas were nothing more than sons and nephews of the mães de santo, brothers of the community. Because communities during the time of slavery were communities of santos [Candomblé practitioners]. Generally, the communities began as a roça de santo [rural area where they built the house of worship], and they organized themselves afterwards into quilombos [maroon communities]. And I think it was out of that place that capoeira came and capoeiristas came. Dona Ivannide draws on her years of lived experience within Candomblé to access an imaginary of practitioners’ experience in the past. While Ivannide corrected herself, changing her wording from “memory” to “imaginary,” it was clear she experienced the imaginings as if they were memories. In this sense, the spaces of Candomblé, samba and capoeira festas and rodas become “lieux de mémoire,” (memory places), sites that are experienced as “richly evocative points of contact with prior generations” (Leite 2005:284, using Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire). Leite found that intense sensory experiences of remembering are common in “diasporic tourism,” whether with Jews “returning” to Portugal, or African Americans “returning” to Ghana. Participants in a diverse range of such “homecoming” voyages described strikingly similar experiences: “the bodily sensations of ‘being there’ … ‘remembering’ ancestral experience, often somatically as well as intellectually,” and sometimes “an experiential merging of past and present” (Leite 2005:276). I believe that festas and rodas create such “memory places” as well, in which the sensory, full-body experience—hearing and creating sounds and movements—combined with knowledge of the past—knowing that one’s ancestors performed similar dances and movements—form powerful memories and imaginaries (285). In the context of Afro-Brazilian practices, these experiences reveal the “body’s capacity to embody the African diaspora,” or dance and movement “as embodied cultural 124 heritage” (Johnson, J.E. 2012:2). And while these reconstructions of the past are informed by oral histories and circulated academic knowledge, they are solidly grounded in immersive practices of embodied knowledge. In other words, the sounding, bodily traditions serve as “repositories” of embodied historical and cultural knowledge handed down from mestre or mãe de santo to disciple, over many generations (Daniel 2005). Like Dona Ivannide, several members of the Angoleiros do Sertão also described their experiences of ancestrality as if they were memories. While white practitioners also talked about and felt ancestrality, the people who described the sensations as visceral memories tended to be, like Dona Ivannide, militant black activists with experience in Candomblé (or Umbanda).25 Abusada, an Afro-Brazilian capoeira student in one of the groups in São Paulo state, described feeling the presence of her ancestors upon entering the roda to play capoeira: When I kneel down at the foot of the berimbau to play capoeira, I first ask license/permission from my ancestors, because it was they who began this movement of capoeira Angola, and I am certain that they are with me in that moment… When I start playing, it’s the same thing in capoeira as in Umbanda, it’s as if I’d already played this some day before… I’m remembering what I’ve already done… It is my ancestrality, really. I feel the presence of my ancestors very strongly in the roda. I feel that they are with me. I feel that I am never alone! Because they are there with me, playing, they’re orienting me. Bolinha, an Afro-Brazilian student who trains with the mestre in Feira de Santana, also described an acute awareness of ancestral presence and something akin to receiving a vision of the past. Referring to the time of slavery, he described: Imagine that against all of this suffering, you have your body as an instrument of liberation. It is as much a defense against the whip of the overseer, a defense of mandinga, so you can escape the oppression that the slave master wants to impose 25 As I indicated in a note earlier, I include Umbanda in the general constellation of Afro-Brazilian religious practices, despite detractors’ claims that Umbanda is “whitened.” Umbanda is clearly “black enough” for Abusada, with her black militancy, racial consciousness and concerns about white appropriation of black culture. 125 on you, as it is a ritual, to say, “No, our ancestrality must be kept alive!” Capoeira Angola must fulfill this role! […] Today, to do capoeira Angola for me is to keep all of this suffering alive, and all of the courage of a people, all their dignity and [self-]respect that they’ve had in order to still be alive today. So when I go to a roda of capoeira, when I see the toque [rhythm] of the berimbau, when I see all the energy involved in capoeira, I observe it all as happening back then, during slavery… Many times I see this, in my mind, when I close my eyes, I envision the sugarcane field, and I see black folks playing capoeira.26 These embodied memories or imaginaries of the past lives of enslaved Afro-Brazilians form part of practitioners’ day to day lived experience. The concept of ancestrality, therefore, brings the past into the present, providing the power to shape the future. Whether in the form of orixás, the “saints” or deities of Candomblé, descending to join the festa, or enslaved ancestors joining the roda of capoeira, or a more dispersed form of energy or axé, the ancestrality carries with it knowledge and experience of a distant past into the present moment. The ancestors are present to teach, guide and orient those in the ring. * Historical records of Candomblé and capoeira practice are limited, but they suggest the ongoing inter-relatedness of communities of practitioners. Drummers for Candomblé also drummed for samba and capoeira. Candomblé initiates practiced capoeira, and everyone danced and sang samba, whether in the terreiro or at neighborhood parties and celebrations. Many capoeira mestres were also members of Candomblé houses (Pires 2004:122-129; Abreu 2005:120; Assunção 2005:116-119, 138; Abib 2009; Santos 2010). 26 Many practitioners seemed to use the verb “see” in a more general way, as in “perceive.” When Bolinha says he “sees” the toque of the berimbau and the energy, therefore, I understand him to mean he generally perceives them, not necessarily limiting his perception to the sense of sight. 126 This is the connection that Contra-mestre Zara emphasized in his lecture to the angoleiros when he said, “I think that capoeira Angola has a very direct connection [to Candomblé]. Not a connection of spirituality, of possession, but of historical context.” Zara was careful in his lecture to respect the potential religious differences of the capoeira students he addressed, and therefore emphasized the close historical proximity of the practices rather than the more subjective connections of spirituality or possession. He stressed how the practices have come from the same origins and contain similar features, such as the counter-clockwise motion around the circle and the dancing or moving within a circle. Practitioners of capoeira and Candomblé were also persecuted by authorities over the course of centuries. Indeed, many of the historians cited above drew their material from police records referring to capoeira or Candomblé as criminals (see also Landes (1947) and Harding (2000)). Zara explained, Candomblé and capoeira had a very close relationship for a long time. We couldn’t train and play capoeira on the street because it was deemed “vadiagem” [prohibited as vagrancy, subject to persecution]. So it was the terreiros of Candomblé who sheltered us, who let us use the space of the terreiro in order to practice capoeira. And in turn the capoeiristas protected the houses of Candomblé from police repression, and in many cases they became ogãs of the houses.27 Historian of Candomblé, Rachel Harding (2000) points to the “silence” about Afro- Brazilian religious practices in testimonies left by Afro-Brazilians, even those known to have played leading roles in the practices. They maintained silence and secrecy surrounding their practices likely for their own protection and that of their communities, to avoid persecution (Harding 2000:105-106, building on Oliveira), and these silences 27 Ogã is a general term referring to male members of Candomblé who do not incorporate orixás, but who have care-taking responsibilities in the terreiro. The term can therefore refer to the drummers, one of the roles assigned to ogãs. I find it interesting the frequency with which male capoeiristas are ogãs/drummers, as opposed to fulfilling other roles in the houses. Perhaps this suggests even more strongly the musical ties between the practices. 127 persist today.28 Yet reading through this silence, Harding and other historians have shown that Candomblé, through its spaces, leaders, belief systems and ways of living, provided a social netting that held together the Afro-Brazilian community in many ways, as Dona Ivannide and Zara also described. As Zara explained, capoeiristas guarded Candomblé communities against police violence, while mães and pães de santo (the priestesses/priests, or leaders of Candomblé houses) provided shelter and protection for capoeiristas by “closing” their bodies to harmful forces, through the uses of patuás, amulets and fetishes ritually imbued with spiritual powers. These relationships of varying degrees of proximity and affinity persist today. Dona Ivannide recognized how the history of repression has likely influenced how contemporary capoeira organizations view or distance themselves from Candomblé: Dona Ivannide: Now, today are there organizations of capoeira who do not have any connection with Candomblé? Probably they exist! The majority of them do not say, officially, that they have a connection… But I think that the people of capoeira, principally of Angola, have some relationship with the energy of Candomblé. Viola: Do you think it's possible for them to have this connection even if they are not conscious of it? DI: Yes, I think they do. I think that the toque of the berimbau, in the head of the capoeiristas, transmits an ancestral memory also carried in the toque of Candomblé. Even without them knowing it. For example, if a capoeirista sees a tambor playing, it reminds him of the berimbau. I think it's something so close, one with the other, that even if the capoeirista isn't of Candomblé, if he leaves class, or leaves the roda one day and passes in front of a terreiro of Candomblé, the tambor will call him. The toque calls him.29 28 Karine in her interview recalled: “Everyone has an uncle, a grandfather, who was of Candomblé, or still is… Feira de Santana has a lot of terreiros that no one knows, they’re hidden. The people are oppressed. They don’t show themselves. At school, I remember that over the course of my entire school career, I don’t remember a single fellow student who was of Candomblé!” She said they feared discrimination and so kept silent about their ties to Candomblé. 29 Toque refers to a rhythmic pattern, but the word also translates to “touch,” and as used by capoeiristas and Candomblé adepts, “toque” takes on an almost mystical quality and includes the sense of the toque as sound and call 128 According to Dona Ivannide, Orikere and others, a conscious awareness of Candomblé is not even necessary in order for practitioners to be affected by the toque, the sound, and therefore the energy, the axé, of Candomblé. Or put another way, the energy of Candomblé, axé, circulates throughout the Afro-Brazilian practices, transmitted through their musical sounds. Musical ties and transits: “Your eyes hear! Your ears see!” If you really love capoeira, you won’t content yourself with saying, “Oh, over there they have a rum, rumpi and lê” [the drums in Candomblé]. If you’re really interested, you’ll go there to the Candomblé! (Rita) Dona Ivannide’s description of the connection between Candomblé and capoeira shows how discussions of the practices’ shared relationship to a collective African/Afro- Brazilian past and ancestrality soon leads to a discussion of music and sound. And Rita’s quote above echoes Orikere’s quote at the start of the chapter. They are all saying that learning about Candomblé, and specifically its orientation to music, will help us learn about music in capoeira and how it affects us. Yet despite widespread acknowledgement in scholarly studies and popular knowledge of the historical and enduring connections between capoeira, Candomblé and samba, few scholars have explored the orientations to sound and movement shared among the practices. Scholars who have addressed the practices together have often drawn on their own experiences, where initial involvement with one practice led to involvement with one or more of the others (Browning 1995; Merrel 2005; Diniz 2010). (While Pinto (1991) also describes the musical elements of the three practices alongside one another, the extent to which the musical practices are deeply interrelated remains implicit.) Many 129 angoleiros described a similar flow of involvement, entering Candomblé after joining capoeira, or vice versa, suggesting a continuity into the present of the historical affiliations. Barbara Browning (1995) encountered and participated in samba, Candomblé and capoeira while living in Bahia. One of few authors to divide her attention more or less equally between the three practices and consider how they relate to one another, she approaches her analysis through movement and dance. She describes how she learned with her body in all of the spaces, and indeed how this bodily way of knowing pervades these and other Afro-Brazilian forms. She opens her account with an overview of samba, “the dance of the body articulate,” a body that speaks through dancing (Browning 1995:1), and soon tells how in the Candomblé de caboclo tradition of Candomblé, caboclo spirits dance samba (26). She goes on to explain that in the period during which both Candomblé and capoeira face severe police suppression, “both candomblé dance and capoeira were sustained in the roda de samba, through gestural and rhythmic reference” (30-31). While she does not provide much more detail as to what this may have looked and felt like, my own experience in Feira de Santana fills in some of the blanks. Mestre Cláudio’s style of samba draws many of its characteristics from the samba played in Candomblé caboclo ceremonies, and many group members with knowledge of all three practices felt that people experience the call so strongly in the group’s samba because of its direct relation to the samba de caboclo.30 However, the samba that Mestre Cláudio brings to the street every Saturday morning is not a religious ceremony. While caboclo spirits do occasionally descend and “mount” participants in the samba, this is not 30 In fact, several people told me that not only is samba played in caboclo ceremonies, but that the various sambas that have proliferated throughout Brazil trace their origins to the samba de caboclo. From this viewpoint, Candomblé birthed samba in its secular form. 130 the intention of Mestre Cláudio’s sambas. When this happens the spirit is quickly sent away. Like the dancer Meneses (2016) interviewed, most samba participants know how to “listen with their bodies” differently, depending on whether they are in a samba on the street or in a terreiro. Rita, Mestre Cláudio’s wife and long time student, related how Mestre Cláudio, like many capoeira mestres before him, was raised in a family and community of tocadores, players who drummed for Candomblé, played samba at parties outside the terreiro, and made instruments for all of these occasions. The connection of Cláudio’s samba to Candomblé was further strengthened, she said, by the fact that, because he makes drums for Candomblé, local tocadores of Candomblé come by the Saturday roda to order new instruments from him. They inevitably stick around and play for the samba, lending it their axé. She described this power of samba to bring people together: The samba is similar to Candomblé, so naturally if a tocador is passing by the samba [she sings the rhythm - pa-tum, pa-tum pa-tum-pa-pa-tum] It’s a call! It practically drags you there! Even if you don’t want to, you hear it, and you’re like, “But where is it? I need to see! It calls my attention!” To clarify, I asked her if she meant the person felt drawn not only to see, but also to hear. Rita responded as if my question were redundant, “Your eyes hear! Your ears see!” The forces that bind together the practices, therefore, are clearly musical in nature. In the most thorough examination on the subject that I have encountered, Diniz addressed the musical “transits,” or flows of musical material, between capoeira Angola, samba de roda and Candomblé, in her dissertation (2010) and in a co-authored article (Diniz et al. 2015). She identified two different ways in which capoeira music draws on Candomblé repertoires: in the first, capoeira songs make reference to various elements of Candomblé in the song texts, borrowing words or expressions from the religion or even 131 referring to orixás or other spirits. In the second process, songs from Candomblé are sung in the capoeira roda, though often with modified lyrics (Diniz 2010:129). She chose for her study Grupo Nzinga, a unique group where the Mestras and Mestre of the group actively import songs from Candomblé into the capoeira Angola roda in order to fortify the group’s Afro-Brazilian identity by emphasizing its connection to Africa. Many of these Candomblé songs are not known or sung in other capoeira circles. Yet despite the singularity of this phenomenon, Diniz also identified and transcribed songs more widely sung in capoeira that have known origins in Candomblé or samba. I now provide an overview of the ways that playing instruments have parallels in the three practices, as well as a discussion of the varying degrees of participation required of each practice. “Nossa luta” [Our fight]: The capoeira Angola bateria The berimbau comes from family of bowed, resonator-gourd instruments brought to Brazil from Africa by enslaved Africans. The bow consists of a hard, straight biriba wood stick (vara) strung with a tough wire harvested from within car tires (arame). A hollow gourd (cabaça) with a hole carved out of one end serves as a resonator, mounted with string, gourd touching the vara. A coin or brass disc (dobrão) is secured in the left hand, whose pinky also balances and supports the entire weight of the instrument, and the dobrão closes the wire to create a pitch approximately a whole step above that of the open wire. A stick made of bamboo wood or ticum wood is secured in the right hand and used to strike against the wire to produce sound. A reed rattle filled with seeds (caixixi) is also secured in the right hand and used to produce accented rattles or left to passively 132 sound as the instrument is played. If it sounds complicated, it is. Be not deceived by the apparent “simplicity” of a single-stringed chordophone. It produces a range of tones and sounds, and by moving the cabaça away or towards the body, the player can change volume and create a “wa-wa” effect.31 At some point in the latter half of the twentieth century, the capoeira Angola bateria became standardized to include three berimbaus, two pandeiros (tambourine-like hand drum, with a goat skin head and metal shaking discs inlaid in the rim), and one each of reco-reco (gourd scraper), agogô (double cowbell made of the round outershell of Brazil nuts), and atabaque (the large, deep-sounded hand drum of Candomblé) (Assunção 2005:110). The three berimbaus are made in three sizes and pitches, one each of which is used in the roda, from the lowest (berra-boi, called gunga in some groups), the middle gunga (called médio in some groups), and the highest viola. In the Angoleiros do Sertão, the berra-boi plays the Angola toque and marks the leading rhythm, the gunga plays the toque of São Bento Pequeno and the viola plays São Bento Grande. In Fig. 1.1 I have transcribed only the basic rhythms for each instrument of the bateria, without variations. The transcription should be taken as approximate, not adequately capturing the sense of groove or swing of the bateria. 31 For an in-depth study of the berimbau and its meaning and applications in Brazilian culture more broadly, see Galm (2010). 133 Fig. 1.1. Basic rhythms (toques) of the capoeira Angola bateria. The mestre or whoever is leading the roda plays the berra-boi and initiates the singing, beginning the roda with a ladainha or litany-esque solo song (no chorus responses), which often conveys some of the mestre’s personal history or wisdom he wishes to communicate to those present. He determines the pace or tempo with his Angola toque on the berra-boi, and may improvise or play around (virar or dobrar) with the toque while remaining true to its basic rhythmic pattern. Similarly, the gunga “secures” the São Bento Pequeno toque, with some variation. The viola has free reign to vary as much as desired. So while the two lower berimbaus secure the pulse and rhythm, the viola (while still staying true to the accents of the toque São Bento Grande) has the liberty to improvise more complex and virtuosic variations, often responding to or “commenting on” what the 134 capoeira players are doing in the roda. For example, the viola player may play faster, repeated tones to celebrate a particularly well-executed move, or more generally they may play more excitedly in order to add more energy to the game, to get the players to play more. While other groups may encourage more variation on the other instruments, Mestre Cláudio prefers to keep the beats of the supporting instruments unadorned. The pandeiros play a basic three note pattern over the two bars, with little to no variation, and with a shake to jingle the metal discs in between. The reco-reco and agogô play the same basic three note pattern, lining up with the pandeiro and also reinforced on the atabaque, which adds a sixteenth-note upbeat. The atabaque, while marking a simple beat, provides a deep bass sound, often likened to the heartbeat of the roda. The pandeiros add some shimmer in the upper registers with their metal shaking discs, and Mestre Cláudio instructs his students to accent the “slap” (on the last eighth-note of the bar), which lines up with the atabaque’s duller sound (marked with an x, and played by hitting the center of the drum with a flat palm, sometimes barely making a sound beyond a “thud.”) The reco- reco contributes a dry, wooden scraping sound and the double nut-shell agogô produces high-low-high pitched clucks. Mestre Cláudio calls these last two “instruments of effect,” meaning that they contribute to the sonority, supporting but not directing the basic beat. However, whether playing leading or supporting roles, every instrument matters. Rita complained to me once after a roda at which she was playing atabaque, which plays on the far left (from the perspective of the instrumentalists), with the agogô and then reco- reco players sitting to her right. While she was playing and listening, she struggled to hear her two neighbors: 135 I felt their absence right away when they entered [too quietly] after the ladainha… My mestre is very demanding, and naturally I hear every Saturday that these ‘instruments of effect’ make a difference. So when I didn’t hear them, I felt, ‘Please! Play, because I’m not hearing them!’ I missed them immediately. And the pandeiro, too! It wasn’t >SLAP!< [she slaps her hands forcefully]. She went on to explain that the instruments of effect are played for a reason, they make a difference in the sound of the bateria. Alone, she acknowledged, they may not seem to contribute much, but in the context of the whole bateria they produce a significant effect. She explained the hierarchy of instruments, with the berimbaus as the “principle” instruments, followed by the atabaque and pandeiros. “But the others can’t just be there, playing weakly, not corresponding to the energy of the berimbaus!” As I will elaborate upon below, the primary function of the bateria is to produce energy, and everyone present, but especially those playing instruments, must do their part. “Nossa religiosidade” [Our religiosity]: Parallels in Candomblé I have already noted how Candomblé houses also use three atabaques. There is much variation from nation to nation and thus what I outline here should be taken as only the most precursory overview of how instruments are played in Candomblé ceremonies. However, I have found interlocutors quite consistent in how they describe the basic functions and roles of the instruments in Candomblé, regardless of which nation they belong to. The most universally used names for the three drums are, from low to high, the rum, rumpi and lê. Depending on the nation and/or the toque and orixá, the drums are played with hands or with hands and a stick (aguidavi). Just as the berra-boi in capoeira, the rum player commands the ritual, determining the beat or toque which in turn 136 corresponds to the orixá that is being celebrated and invited to descend to the festa. However, here the parallels begin to diverge. The rum is also the only drum that elaborates or improvises, and may only be played by men trained in that leadership role. The rum player also follows the steps of the dancing orixá very closely, playing to help the orixá dance and responding to the orixá's movements. Thus the rum plays a similar role, in some aspects, to the berimbau viola. However, in my understanding, the rum's following of the orixá's dance is much closer and more crucially linked than the viola player's responding to the capoeira game. Unlike the other berimbaus, who include variation even when “marking” the toque, I learned in Contra-Mestre Zara’ lecture, and was told by others, that the rumpi and lê do not diverge from it and are played by ogãs essentially lower in the hierarchy than those that play the rum. So in capoeira the highest- pitched viola varies the most, but that role lies with the lowest-pitched rum in Candomblé. In a capoeira roda anyone may play the berimbaus, though the hierarchy loosely applies: The mestre usually starts on the berra-boi, with more advanced players or other mestres present on the other berimbaus, and then the mestre determines who plays next later in the roda. Similar concepts thus remain constant across practices: that of "securing" the toque (segurar) and varying, as well as the way hierarchy is reflected in who plays which instruments. However, there are differences in the details and the rigidity of their application. One way of summarizing these comparisons to note that the same concepts govern both practices, but that the roles and "rules" structuring Candomblé are far more elaborate and strict. Another significant way that the complexity of Candomblé contrasts with capoeira is the variation and importance of the toques. While capoeira mestres and adepts 137 have claimed to know upwards of thirty different toques in capoeira, in practice only three are commonly used in most groups of capoeira Angola, and they are played simultaneously. The toques in Candomblé play a much more central role in the ceremony because they serve to summon the orixás. Each toque determines how all of the other instruments are played and it contains its own meaning, corresponding to an orixá or multiple orixás, or to specific elements or moments of the ritual. A toque played incorrectly—even if played rhythmically correctly but without the correct energy or axé—could mean that the orixá fails to appear. The consequences of errors, and therefore the responsibility of the musicians, is much greater. Many practitioners noted that Candomblé, therefore, was much more "serious," even though they felt that capoeira was also a "serious game." The agogô in Candomblé marks or reinforces the toque, similar to how it functions in capoeira, but because of the relative complexity of the toques in Candomblé there is more room for error and thus relatively more responsibility involved. “Nossa festa” [Our party]: Parallels in samba de roda If Candomblé is a serious rite, and capoeira a serious game, then samba de roda is a serious party. While Mestre Cláudio brings his high musical standard to his samba de roda, he is quick to point that he is not a sambador, a master samba musician, he is just a capoeira mestre who loves to play samba. (By extension, he says the Angoleiros do Sertão is not a samba group, but a group of capoeira Angola that loves samba. When they perform samba in public, they wear their capoeira uniforms, too.) Thus the transition from the roda of capoeira to the samba every Saturday marks a collective release of 138 breath, the moment to truly unwind, relax and have fun. For example, rarely if ever have I seen Mestre Cláudio or his group members drink beer during a capoeira roda, but if it is available or offered, the libations will flow during the samba. Nonetheless, parallels exist in how instruments are played and their functions in the ritual. Samba de roda also uses hand drums (tambor is the generic name for drum, and timbal is the type the mestre uses in samba), though they differ in shape from the atabaque. A lead drummer plays on one of the timbals, and if a second drum is present the player will follow the lead, but both will embellish the basic rhythm to their abilities. Mestre Cláudio also added a bass drum, bombo, to fill out the lower register of the samba, lacking due to the higher pitch of the timbals compared to the atabaque. He uses pandeiros, playing a traditional samba de roda rhythm, and held in the way the old folks played, hanging the instrument vertically on the fingers of the left hand, and hitting down with the right thumb for the low note, slapping up for the high notes. (The tempo goes so fast that the right hand must move rapidly up and down, up and down.) The mestre has also recently added two heavy metal shakers that he dubbed "cherem-cherem" after the deafening sound they produce. They mirror (and completely drown out) the rhythm played on the double caixixi shakers (two caixixi held together in one hand). Finally, he uses wood blocks that reinforce the participants' clapping hands (palmas), with a sharp high-pitched sound. Everyone in the roda who is not playing an instrument is expected to clap, and everyone must also sing. I have transcribed the basic rhythms in Figure 1.2. It should be noted that these are also only approximate in that I have not attempted to capture the swung nature of the beat. The third note of the wood block / hand claps, for 139 example, comes earlier in actuality. The caixixi is also heavily swung. Nor have I notated the constant shimmer of the pandeiros’ jingles. Fig. 1.2. The basic samba de roda rhythms as played by Mestre Cláudio. The toque stays the same throughout the roda, though virtuosic drummers will add their axé through seemingly endless variations. Mestre Cláudio's version of samba de roda, which he also calls samba rural, borrows the samba de caboclo toque, played in festas that pay homage to the caboclos in several different nations of Candomblé. Caboclos are a category of entity or spirit celebrated in certain Candomblé nations and Umbanda. Unlike the orixás, they originated not in Africa but in Brazil, and therefore speak Portuguese instead of African languages. However, they behave similarly to (some) orixás in some ways, in that they love to come the parties held by their devotees. Like the 140 orixás, the cabolcos arrive at their festas and mount initiates, demanding and expecting that all the details of the music, food, clothing and props conform to their preferences. Of the many caboclos, the boiadeiros (cowboys) are especially relevant to the Angoleiros do Sertão, as I was told they (like the Angoleiros) love to samba. Mestre Cláudio told me that he modeled his capoeira school’s uniform, with its brown pants, after the brown pants worn by rural workers of the Bahian sertão, but the caboclos and boiadieros also wear brown leather pants as they are entities representing these rural workers. Diniz also mentioned that many bodily gestures used in capoeira can trace their origin to the gestures and comportment of the caboclo spirits (Diniz 2010: 129, 153; Diniz et al. 215:196), a subject that deserves further inquiry. Thus Mestre Cláudio's "rural samba" differs significantly from the well-known samba de roda of the Recôncavo, which was recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. His is samba rougher and faster than other samba de roda groups in the era, many of whom have adopted the customs of the Recôncavo. His samba is also much louder, which negates any use for the traditional violas (the ten- string guitars typically used in the sambas of the Recôncavo) thought he notes that the viola was not necessarily used in the samba of the Sertão, the interior backlands of Bahia. He believes the current widespread use of the viola in the sambas of the interior has much to do with the samba of the Recôncavo gaining hegemony as it has received more media attention. These groups also usually adopt the folklore-style of matching flowered skirts (for women) and shirts (for men). The media attention has undoubtedly increased due to the official and scholarly emphasis placed on the samba of the Recôncavo as the most authentic and traditional samba de roda during and after its being named intangible 141 heritage (Sandroni and Sant’Anna 2006). I think that the extensive official and public recognition of the samba of the Recôncavo has likely fueled Mestre Cláudio’s dedication to preserving and sustaining the unique samba of his region. Above all, Mestre Cláudio wants the sound of the samba to dominate the space and move participants, and this is why he makes it so loud. He has sought to rival the deafening sound he adores of the carros de som and the paredes de som or paredão — sound walls, evocative of Jamaican dancehall sound systems — which blast arrocha, reggae, and other popular musics from car trunks and in bars. In addition to being a mark of virility and masculinity (as when one man drives up in his car with a louder sound system, driving away the man and his car who had previously occupied the spot), volume is simply what Mestre Cláudio believes the younger generation wants: younger people want their music loud, and loud music makes them move their bodies more. So Mestre Cláudio makes his samba loud but keeps it "traditional" through his use of acoustic, hand-made instruments of wood, leather and metal (though he recently started using synthetic heads for the timbals because they last longer and they are louder). In contrast to Mestre Cláudio’s acoustic “wall of sound,” all the other samba groups I have heard, even the “traditional” ones of the Recôncavo, use amplification. The one instrument that simply cannot compete with all the sound the group produces is Mestre Cláudio's voice leading the song. When available, Mestre Cláudio will use a microphone, but there are usually no microphones available. The result is that Mestre Cláudio has likely inflicted lasting damage on his voice. Each year when I return he seems to struggle more and more to project and sing loudly enough, and his voice breaks more often and sounds more strained. For added support he has the people playing 142 the drums, usually the men of the capoeira group, join him in the call, the verse of the song, and everyone else responds with the chorus. It appears to me that Mestre Cláudio has felt more necessity as well as liberty to innovate in samba than he has in capoeira. This also points to the lighter, less rigid and rule-bound nature of the samba de roda. He may be using religious toques and songs in his samba, but the samba is nonetheless more irreverent than holy, and perhaps therefore more free. Degrees of participation Another aspect that links the practices but also distinguishes between them is the degree to which people can participate in them. Capoeira, Candomblé and samba de roda are all highly participatory, yet they welcome involvement of spectators to varying degrees. A Candomblé ceremonial party (festa) takes place in the “house” (casa or terreiro) of the directing mãe or pãe de santo. Many festas are open to the public, welcoming anyone to enter and watch the ceremony. In festas I have witnessed, the audience may include tourists, either alone or with an organized tour, and community members, which include members of the house itself, Candomblé practitioners from other houses and non-practitioners. I cannot always tell how other audience members are affiliated with the hosts, but sometimes they sing along with the songs and sometimes they do not. Rita explained to me that those that sing along are likely from another house, therefore they are not participating in this house’s party, but they are familiar with the songs and movements and would participate in a similar party at their own house. At breaks in the ceremony food and refreshments are handed out to everyone in the audience, needed reinforcement for parties that can last eight or more hours (all day or all 143 night, depending upon when they started). In festas I have been to, there is a clear division between audience and practitioners. Practitioners wear ceremonial dress, either white flowing dresses (what has become the typical “Baiana” costume), or other outfits of brown cloth, leather, fringe (as I saw in Candomblé de caboclo ceremonies), and they sit or stand in the back half of the space. Audience members wear casual regular clothes, t- shirts, shorts and jeans. They sit on white plastic chairs (as found throughout Brazil on sidewalk bars) or benches, facing the front of the room. The drummers are usually against the back wall or to the side. A ceremonial throne might be found in the middle of the wall, from which the mãe de santo commands the ceremony, leading songs. In every ceremony I have attended, I was struck by the hospitality of the house members, welcoming strangers, freely serving delicious snacks (salgados), rice, beans, meat, and plenty of beverages (beer or soda, depending on the house and the spirit being celebrated). While Candomblé houses may be compensated by state tourist bureaus for opening their doors to tourists, the practice of welcoming outsiders to the party seems to extend beyond attracting tourists and tourist money. The members of Candomblé houses I spoke with largely belonged to terreiros in remote locations, removed from the tourist circuit, but they nevertheless described (certain) festas as open and welcoming community members and anyone who wanted to join. (Some festas are closed, performed only for members of the house.) However, attending a festa is different from actively participating in it. Audience members may sing along if they know the words, but they do not spontaneously join the dances or any other aspects of the ceremony. In the case that an outside attendee “falls” to an orixá, as does happen on occasion, they are quickly attended to, usually removed to another space where the orixá is sent away. The 144 ceremony is a carefully choreographed event that must follow specific norms and protocols, deviation from which is quickly resolved. Capoeira Angola and samba de roda are progressively more participatory than Candomblé. Whereas only initiated members of a house participate in Candomblé festas, a capoeira roda on the street is potentially open to anyone who plays capoeira. The mestre, or whoever is directing the roda, ultimately determines who may play, quickly screening the newcomers or unknown characters who always turn up. As a general rule, anyone is allowed into the roda, unless they approach the space inappropriately (for example, barging in without acknowledging the mestre, or stumbling from inebriation.) If they demonstrate that they cannot play well, the mestre will usually end their game quickly and remove them from the roda. Thus the space is conditionally open to anyone who plays capoeira and demonstrates their knowledge of the ritual protocol when given an opportunity. Mestres differ as to how much control they exert about who gets to play, but all the rodas I have witnessed have been inclusive. However, no one is guaranteed a game, especially in rodas attended by large numbers of participants. Samba de roda is the most participatory of the three practices, because no prior knowledge or training is required for dancers. In Mestre Cláudio's roda de samba on Saturdays, guest drummers always come by and play, though they are usually known already by the mestre, many of them local drummers from Candomblé houses or professional samba groups. In less formal situations (i.e. at private parties or during a street festival) the mestre is also less strict about who can play which instrument. Anyone who wants to enter the circle, however, may dance. While many dancers are skilled in the subtle hip and foot movements of the samba de roda, being a good dancer or even 145 knowing how to dance samba (sambar) is not required. Yet with all eyes on your backside, your body, your clothes, your feet, it takes courage to get in the ring, and while some people relish being the center of attention, others seem joyfully torn between wishing to be a part of the energy and festivity, but feeling too shy to dance in the roda. According to Mestre Cláudio, however, everyone present is obligated to contribute, or participate, in some way. On one occasion Mestre Cláudio made explicit how seriously he expected everyone present to contribute to the samba. Shortly after it had started one Saturday morning, he gestured to stop the music and stepped into the middle of the ring of bodies. In a hoarse voice he yelled above the street noise, chastising the spectators for not contributing. He shouted, "You're all here watching like this [and he made a dumb blank expression with his face, folded his hands in front of his body and slouched his shoulders] as if it's some kind of spectacle! But this is cultura popular, you must also contribute something!” He started clapping his hands vigorously, demonstrating that they contribute by clapping if they didn’t want to dance. He was clearly frustrated that his own povo, the people from whom the practice originated, did not seem to know how to join in their own cultura popular. They had to be coached, goaded, to contribute their energy to the roda. The moment also revealed how seriously Mestre Cláudio takes his own role in sustaining and nourishing popular culture. He is not there merely to entertain a crowd with samba de roda every Saturday. He is there to teach the people, if necessary, that the samba they adore requires their reciprocity of energy and participation in order for it to survive and thrive. In this way, he provided yet another teaching moment about the compromisso 146 demanded of the practices. If the people present are enjoying, soaking in the axé, then they must contribute to creating that axé. While there is much more to discuss about the “musical transits” between the three practices, here I am more concerned with how the practices also share bodily orientations to sound and how practitioners experience these orientations in their practice. To understand how music-as-ancestral-energy-as-axé circulates through the spaces of practice and exerts forces on practitioners’ bodies, it is first necessary to look more closely at the range of meanings attributed to axé – in literature and according to members of the Angoleiros do Sertão. The Multiplicities of Axé Considering its central significance to Candomblé, axé tends to receive little in- depth analysis in many texts about Afro-Brazilian religions (c.f. Santos 1976; Opipari 2010), and discussions of axé are nearly absent in literature about capoeira and samba. Axé is often defined in general terms and treated as a given concept that needs no further explication, or exceeds explanation. Indeed, axé has on the one hand a “vast field of meanings and uses,” which often raises comparisons in anthropological literature with the “problematic” term mana (Opipari 2010:81). On the other hand, despite this vastness, axé also lends itself to succinct definitions: Sodré defines axé as “the power of realization and transformation” (1988:xviii; see also 1983:143). Sodré’s interpretation clearly echoes definitions of the term as they appear in studies by scholars of Yoruba culture. Robert Farris Thompson (1984) defines àshe as “the power-to-make-things-happen, morally neutral power, power to give, and to take away, to kill and to give life,” where the range 147 of powers varies “according to the purpose and the nature of its bearer” (5-6).32 Drewal (1992) defines ase as “Performative power; the power of accomplishment; the power to get things done; the power to make things happen” (201). She articulates an explicit relationship between ase and agency: “The agency of performers is implicit in the Yoruba concept of power known as ase” and cites other scholars’ definitions of the term as “a coming to pass,” “effect; imprecation” and “power, authority, command” (27). Furthermore, this power is neither good nor bad. Rather, it is a generative force or potential present in all things […] and in utterances—prayers, songs, curses, and even everyday speech. Ase is the power of transformation. Humans possess this generative force and through education, initiation, and experience learn to manipulate it to enhance their own lives and the lives of those around them […] This is the real ‘work’ of a ritual performer. (Drewal 1992:27) Scholars and practitioners in efforts to deepen their understanding of Afro- Brazilian culture by looking to African religions and practices tend to assume or claim equivalence between the Yoruba ase and the Brazilian axé, a move critiqued by scholars who seek to deconstruct what they perceive as essentialist identifications of Afro- Brazilian culture with African culture, or as efforts to “superimpose” Africa onto Brazil (Opipari 2010: 81; see also Capone 2010). My position is somewhat between the two extremes, though I tend to relate more to the arguments of scholars like Sodré and Thompson because, at least in some aspects, their definitions resonate so strongly with the ways that practitioners understand and define their practices themselves. Angoleiros and Candomblé adepts generally define axé in simple terms (as in the majority of works I consulted on Candomblé), and they almost always assign it a positive valuation. For 32 Axé appears also as ase, àshe (Yoruba), and ache (Cuban) among spellings. Some scholars of Candomblé use Yoruba spellings, but I use the Brazilian spelling (axé) as I am principally concerned with the ways Brazilians understand the term’s range of meanings. 148 them, axé is generally good, though some would acknowledge that the power could be used to ill effect, as well. Yet I have found that more elaborate descriptions of axé in the literature also resonate with the ways practitioners reference axé to describe their experiences in rodas and festas. In short, as Drewal (1992) found with Yoruba ritual performers, I believe that cultivating axé, and by extension, making things happen, getting things done—in short, transformation—is likewise the “work” of capoeiristas, Candomblé members and even samba singer-dancer-drummers. I argue, therefore, not for the one-to-one equivalence between axé and related terms throughout the African diaspora, nor even for the complexity of the term—succinct definitions can still be accurate. Rather, I wish to emphasize, like Opipari, the broad range of meanings that practitioners assign to axé, without seeking to avoid “all contradiction or ambiguity that could exist” in their experience (84). However, apparently unlike Opipari, practitioners I encountered felt and expressed a strong association between axé as a concept and the African roots of their practices. In other words, I include Africanist readings of axé’s related concepts not in order to authenticate practices, but because these sources are also meaningful to many practitioners. This last point aside, Opipari’s overview of the broad range of definitions adepts assigned to the term sounds very familiar to me (84-88). Like her interlocutors, practitioners I spoke with often defined axé as “força,” which includes force, energy, power, strength. Next, people noted that “axé” was a common expression of well- wishing. Such exclamations among the Angoleiros do Sertão and common throughout Bahia, in speech or text via Whatsapp, include “Axé pra você!”; “Axé pra 6 [i.e. vocês]” (Axé to you/you all!); “Axé pra nois!” (Axé for us!); or “Axé pra quem é de Axé!” (Axé 149 for whoever is of Axé/of Candomblé).33 Opipari’s respondents explained, “axé is what you wish for someone,” “peace, joy, prosperity […] It is everything that is good” (84). Specifically within Candomblé, axé is also used as “emphatic expression of realization of rituals” (similar to “Amen”), and it can also signify the offerings of food to the orixás or spirits, or even the specific animal parts they use to make the meals. The term is further used to refer to the terreiro itself (as in, “In my axé, we do things like this…”), as well as the ritual practices themselves (85). And these definitions are by no means exhaustive. Seligman (2014), another North American scholar of Candomblé, noted that the fundamental purpose of the range of Candomblé practices and rituals, including “divination, blood sacrifice, song, dance, and possession,” was to “increase human access to axé” and to accumulate axé. She observed that, “like matter, axé can neither be created nor destroyed. Instead it is transmitted—among objects, people, and orixás” (33), and this transmission happens through bodies: Accumulation and depletion of axé are understood to be fundamentally embodied processes. Hence, material, bodily practices like sacrifices, consumption of sacred food and feasting, rituals of cleansing, ritualized movements and physical acts of devotion (e.g. prostration), dancing, and trance and possession, all serve to increase levels of axé. (35) Wafer (1991) provided a useful framework for understanding the multivalence of the term, explaining that axé can refer both to “container” and “content” (18). This explains why, for example, the food offered to the orixás is called axé and is simultaneously known to contain axé. Wafer further notes that axé has “mobility”: while it can be accumulated, it cannot be kept indefinitely. It must be regularly renewed, hence the necessary repetition of rituals (19), such as the ritual anointing of the atabaque drums 33 I have left the spellings as they appear in texts (SMS) and informal speech. I do not consider these incorrect, merely colloquial. 150 with food offerings, herbs and blood, in order to replenish and restore the axé of the drums (Béhague 1977). In The Taste of Blood, Wafer notes the “close link between axé and blood, for which reason the term is sometimes translated as ‘vital force’” (19). While I also heard axé often referred to as “vital force,” its association to blood remains confined to Candomblé. However, I find axé in/as blood provocative because blood not only sustains life (contributing to human and animal abilities to make things happen), but it also circulates and pulses. Axé also circulates, through humans, spirits, animals, materials and sounds, and in its sonic form it pulses, which Mestre Cláudio acknowledges when he calls the bateria (the group of instruments in the capoeira roda), the “heartbeat” of the roda. This brings me back to my primary concern, that of the ways that axé relates to sound and effects how sound and matter relate to one another. Analysis of this relation is scant in the literature, often mentioned only in passing. For example, Opipari cites Santos as noting: “Not only the sound of the word is a conductor of axé, but also that [the sound] of the musical instruments, [which are] ‘formidable invokers of the supernatural entities…” (2010:83). However, I encountered one extended quote on a blog post about Candomblé titled “The toques of Candomblé” (Manuela 2008) that I subsequently found proliferate across countless blogs and websites devoted to Candomblé and Umbanda, without citations. I eventually found the passage, verbatim, in two books, though I cannot determine if either author is the originator of the text (Reis 2010:113; Grandinni 2016:236). Regardless of the original source, the popularity of the quote suggests to me that it expresses a fundamental truth about sound and axé. My translation follows: “Sound is the first relation with the world, from within the maternal womb. It opens channels of communication that facilitate treatment. In addition to 151 reaching[?] the most primitive movements, music acts as an ordering element, which organizes the person internally” [this first section often appears in quotes] Sound is the conductor of the Axé of the Orixá, it is the sound of hide [leather of drum heads] and vibrating wood that bring [sic] the Orixás, that are [sic] African symphonies without scores. The Atabaques, are the main musical instruments of Candomblé, whose playing is the responsibility of the Ogãs. They are of African origin, used in almost all rituals, typical of Candomblé. In traditional use in ritual and religious music, they are used to summon the Orixás. [...] The atabaques in Candomblé are sacred objects and annually renew this Axé. They are used only in the dependencies of the terreiro, they do not go out to the street like the ones that are used in Afoxés, these are prepared exclusively for that purpose. Despite the centrality of sound and music to Candomblé ritual practice, scholars outside of ethnomusicology tend to pay little attention to music, movement and sound. (To my dismay, Gerard Béhague, the great scholar of Afro-Brazilian religious music- making, is absent from many current bibliographies.) However, the proliferation of the above quote on websites devoted to Candomblé suggests to me that practitioners of Candomblé themselves are deeply interested in the importance of music to their religion. Following Wafer’s logic of container and content, I argue that sound might even be axé, in sonic form. At least, it becomes difficult to separate the container from its content when dealing with sound. The atabaque drums are infused with axé and their vibrations transmit axé and call the orixás to the ceremony. Considering the materiality of sound, when bodies resonate with sounds that transmit axé, the axé could be understood to enter participants’ bodies. When capoeira practitioners repeatedly reference Candomblé and axé when I ask them to describe their sensations of playing capoeira, I believe it is this 152 phenomenon that they are attempting to put into words: the embodiment of axé effected through sound. Axé is a force that is known through the senses, and attending to the senses can illuminate “specific sensibilities” (Guerts 2003: 199). Practitioners may have difficulty describing axé and aural-kinesthetic sensibilities in verbal language, but they sense and know through their bodies. By paying particular attention to the fundamental roles of both sound and movement in the channeling, creation and transmission of axé, I make an intervention in the literature on African and Afro-Brazilian religions and culture that tends to focus on texts (e.g. Gates Jr. [1988]2014) and material objects (e.g. Thompson 1984) as transmitters or containers of axé. My interest in sound and movement is not meant to detract from the significance, as emphasized in Candomblé literature, of the ways that axé pervades and connects human and non-human beings, from spirits to animal parts and blood, to herbs and other matter (Santos 1976; Wafer 1991; Shirey 2012). Rather, I mean to expand attention to the ways that sound, as yet another (non-human) vehicle or element, cultivates and transmits the energy. In short, my aim is not to arrive at a “true” or complete definition of axé, but to explore how practitioners experience axé—and how axé defines their experience. Doing so reveals how this orientation to sound, as a means of creating and sending axé, transcends religious practice and resonates as a foundational way of being in Afro-Brazilian life. Axé for the Angoleiros: Sounding moving (aural-kinesthetic) energy The same vital force that sustains the religion of Candomblé sustains capoeira. (Dona Ivannide) What is this axé? Vital energy, the thing that nourishes us, gives us life. 153 (Contra-mestre Zara) As addressed above, “axé” is a common concept and expression used in daily life in Bahia and its definitions range from the vital force cultivated in Candomblé to Axé Music (a style of Bahia pop music) to casual greetings. Given the breadth of ways people speak about and understand axé, I asked the angoleiros and other community members to define or explain their use of the term in order to understand its significance to them in capoeira, Candomblé and samba. Was the axé they experienced in capoeira and samba the same as the axé cultivated in Candomblé? Does axé function similarly across all three practices? Some conflicting understandings emerged, yet everyone was united in understanding axé as a form of positive energy, whether they viewed it as something that spanned the practices or that signified something markedly different in Candomblé. While everyone I spoke with uses the word, few felt confident in providing an ultimate definition. I had hoped that practitioners of Candomblé might be better equipped to explain it, but their responses also ranged in confidence and specificity. Like Opipari, I therefore decline to offer a formal or universal definition of axé. Nor do I prioritize a person’s definition of axé based on their proximity to Candomblé. As Orikere said, cited above: “Even though you might not be ‘of axé’ [a practitioner of Candomblé], the axé is in you [if you play capoeira].” For example, Pernalonga, who does not practice Candomblé or concern himself with it much, recognized how the axé contributed to his ability to perform movements he is normally not capable of. Thus by listening to how practitioners use the term and talk about it, as well as how they experience it in the roda and drawing from my own experience, I gesture toward the breadth of what axé can mean 154 and do, and how it is intimately present and transmitted through the sounds and music of the capoeira, Candomblé and samba de roda. Dona Ivannide spoke a lot about “energy,” and when I asked her if by “energy” she meant “axé,” she immediately confirmed, “It’s axé, it’s axé!” I asked if she could define axé. She said, “I call it light, energy. When I say to you, ‘Axé, Viola!’ I am wishing you light, peace, positivity. All of this is axé.” It has the same meaning in capoeira, she said. When she says, “Axé!” she is wishing that I have a good night, a peaceful day, a life of success. “It is a spiritual sentiment of good, of well wishing.” It also follows, therefore, that when she said, “the same vital force that sustains the religion of Candomblé sustains capoeira,” this vital force is axé. In Dona Ivannide’s view, axé is the vital energy that sustains both practices: In my own way of understanding, it’s more than just material. Because I believe in energy, and in my opinion it’s an ancestral energy that spans capoeira and Candomblé. For me, the same vital force that sustains the religion of Candomblé sustains capoeira. I believe in this, but I don't think that everyone is obligated to believe in this. For Dona Ivannide, the energy we experience in capoeira is one and the same as the orixás, whether we who are practicing capoeira realize it or not. She explained, This energy you spoke about in capoeira, for the black people, for the people who began capoeira back then, this energy is orixá! It is sacred. This is cosmic energy, that is mine and that is yours, for us of Candomblé it is orixá. For us, the toque in the roda pays reverence to the orixá. I cannot guarantee this, that a mestre of capoeira thinks like this. This is my vision. I don’t know how the mestre thinks. But I know that when a cord of a berimbau breaks, and then a second cord breaks in the roda, many times the mestre already considers stopping the roda because he knows that that day is not a good day. There’s negative energy there. Or many times he will sing a song that may not appear to, but that pays reverence to an orixá that he calls to strengthen the energy of the roda. Dona Ivannide’s view and her anecdote raise several important points. For her, the energy of capoeira and Candomblé are one and the same, but she does not wish to impose 155 her view on anyone else. In this way she reveals how understandings and perceptions of axé are highly subjective. As someone “of axé” she feels the same energy in the roda as in the terreiro, but she recognizes that other people may experience this differently, and they would not be wrong. Contra-mestre Zara has been in Candomblé and practiced capoeira for many years, and he also defined axé simply as “vital energy.” Orikere qualified it as “force, current, energy.” Binho was more hesitant to define it. When I asked him, he said it depended on how one used the word. He distinguished between the axé of colloquial speech, that can also refer to the rhythm of Axé Music, from the ase of Candomblé, with its Yoruba spelling. He explained, “When you say ase, it is a very strong word. ‘I’m going to my ase,’ means there’s going to be a festa at my ile axé, [literally: house of axé], my terreiro.” When I asked him to define what it meant, he said he did not know how to explain it. So I used the example of the samba, asking, “When the mestre says the samba has lots of axé, is it the same thing?” He replied, “It’s axé, good energy… everyone felt the same thing, the sintonia, like, man that was so good!” But when I asked if that was the same thing as in Candomblé he said, “No. In Candomblé it’s everything that is there at the [space of the terreiro]. When we use the word axé [outside of the terreiro context, as in the samba], it puts in something good, it’s energy… When we say, ‘Let’s give it axé!’ it means we have to exert ourselves a bit more, put in more energy, make something happen — sing more, play more. You see how the samba sometimes falls [the energy dips]? When it rises up again, the axé is there!” Binho located the axé in samba in the singing and playing. Similarly, Dona Ivannide had explained how the toque pays reverence to the orixá, and the mestre seeks 156 to change the energy of the roda through his choice of song. However, Binho distinguishes between the religious “ase” of the axé cultivated in samba and capoeira, while other people with experience in Candomblé or Umbanda did not draw this distinction. Like Dona Ivannide, Abusada spoke about the concept of axé in Umbanda as well wishing: “It is good energy, that everything will work out, wishing good for everyone. It is not possible to confirm, really, but I think it comes from the matrizes Africanas before entering into capoeira. For me everything began together and only later separated.” I asked if she thought the axé in capoeira was the same thing, and here she drew another kind of distinction: I think there are a lot of people who say ‘axé’ insincerely. When I say, ‘Axé para você!’ it is something strong for me, I don’t say it all the time. I’m wishing everything good for you. It’s connected to my spirituality, too. I see lots of people in capoeira Angola, including in this group, who don’t know about this relationship [with matrizes Africanas, with spirituality]. They don’t want to know. They’re not interested in researching it. Abusada’s experience suggests that practitioners may adopt the same term, but use it without knowing or considering its powerful meaning for others. They may think they know what they are saying, but to someone who has researched and lived more closely with Afro-Brazilian religion and culture, their understandings may seem superficial. Perhaps Contra-mestre Zara sought to counter this tendency, as well, when he urged capoeira practitioners to seek out a deeper knowledge of Candomblé, to avoid using terms and performing motions that they did not understand. Despite the range in interpretations, however, a general understanding prevails of axé as good energy. Early on, during my first fieldwork trip, I kept writing in my notes about the “euphoria” I and the people around me were experiencing. It was an extreme 157 good feeling, almost like a natural high, that we experienced after trainings, but especially during and after the rodas. It was much more than a “runner’s high” that comes from physical exertion, which we also experienced together. It felt impossible not to love the people who co-created this sensation, who shared in it alongside me. Clearly what I called euphoria was part of the glue that formed and bonded the community. Then one day Mestre Cláudio mentioned the good feeling, in a brief conversation that only took up several lines in my field notes: Cláudio was talking about how when you feel that feeling in capoeira, the energy: He said, You know how sometimes you feel better doing capoeira than anything else? That's the energy, the axé. As I thought about it, I realized that axé is exactly what I had experienced the first time I attended an event of capoeira Angola, in Rio de Janeiro in 2008. I had only been training capoeira for a little over a year when I went to Rio, and I had not yet encountered capoeira Angola. I decided to try it out while in Rio, and trained capoeira Angola at Mestre Marrom’s academy for several months before the event, but I felt lukewarm about it. Capoeira Angola felt like a language I couldn’t understand. I felt left out of the secret, unsure why everyone loved it so much. Then Marrom held an event, and angoleiros from all over Brazil came and participated. I remember the energy of the first roda, the sound of the full bateria with carefully tuned berimbaus, their resonance filling the space and my body. Something inside of me shifted and from that moment onward I dedicated myself solely to capoeira Angola. It was like falling in love.34 That first encounter with axé was what eventually led me to pursue a PhD in ethnomusicology to write a dissertation about capoeira Angola. It had profoundly altered the course of my life. 34 Berliner (1994:393) and Hytönen-Ng (2013:29-40) also found that jazz musicians often reported feeling and expressing love in relation to their experiences of playing music. 158 Pernalonga described how axé had also changed his life. After attending one of Mestre Cláudio’s annual events in January, he decided to leave behind his life in the northern state of Rio Grande do Norte and move to Feira de Santana in order to train capoeira Angola with the group. I asked what it was about Mestre Cláudio’s style that he liked so much, and he responded, There's no explanation I don't think, you feel it and you want to feel it for always, this axé that the Angoleiros do Sertão have, that Mestre Cláudio has… It’s a sentiment that comes and stays in you, and when there's a Saturday that you don't go to the roda, you already miss it. You always want to be in the middle of this movement. Pernalonga has not frequented Candomblé, so his understanding of axé is based on his experiences with capoeira Angola and samba. Yet his description of axé was consistent with the understanding of axé as “a very positive energy,” and it was the same in samba as in capoeira. I asked what made the axé happen? “If you have various people, energies, with the same intention, it will become that axé. If people are there who don’t want to be there, it breaks the axé. They must be in the same sintonia.” Furthermore, he understood axé as occurring in “manifestations that came from the black people in the era of slavery.” Orikere, who frequents various Candomblé houses, also felt that the axé in capoeira and Candomblé were one and the same, but recognized the range of ways people used the word. He said, Axé just means energy [força: energy, strength, power]. Energy, like so you can walk. It’s [also] a way of talking, like saying, ‘Good afternoon!’ Now, there are things that we say are really axé, when you sweat — it’s different. Força, with axé, not strength for you to be strong. It’s spiritual, when you say, ‘Axé para você!” I am wishing something spiritual for you. It’s the same in capoeira, also 159 ancestral. Axé is when you give your body, you sweat for it, you really throw yourself into it, “break” everything.35 Orikere makes a distinction similar to Abusada’s, recognizing colloquial uses of the word that differ from its use as a spiritual well-wishing, akin to a blessing. Across the range of uses, however, axé always signifies something good and positive. Orikere also illustrated how producing axé can require extreme physical exertion. As he spoke I pictured how he played capoeira, his shirt always sopping with sweat, and the way he throws his body with seeming abandon but split-second control. He plays the tambor in the samba with the same total-body commitment. With these images in mind, I asked, “So, it’s a physical thing?” He corrected me, “It’s spiritual!” I pressed, “But it has a physical side?” With slight frustration he declared, “It’s everything! Yes, body, spirit, mind! It has to have it all. You have to channel the energy, sacrifice yourself and feel it — it’s something else, it’s a fucking trip [onda da porra]!” Again, words failed to express the power of axé. I suspect that one of the reasons it is so hard to explain axé in verbal language is because it is at once so simple, so obvious to the people feeling it, and also something transmitted and known through the body. As Orikere said, “It’s just energy!” But even as “just energy,” it is a special kind of energy cultivated in capoeira, samba and Candomblé, through varying means, which can impact people’s lives in profound ways. I now turn to explore the ways that axé-as-sound engages in an aural-kinesthetic call-and-response, where sound “calls” bodies into the practices and bodies respond by 35 “Break” (quebrar) here is a colloquial expression akin to “destroy,” as how a musician might say after a show, “We destroyed it tonight!” to mean, “We played really well with a lot of energy, etc.” 160 “entering” and moving. Then I address how musicians cultivate axé through the bodily labor of playing instruments. Calling: sound calling bodies This is not an illusion, it’s not in my head. When you play berimbau, when you play samba, it’s as if the force is internalized as part of you. As if an ancestral energy, something from your past becomes internal, and calls me. (Bolinha) All angoleiros feel the “call” of the berimbau Bolinha described, and a great many of the Angoleiros do Sertão, whether black or white, of Candomblé or not, describe the sensation of hearing the call as “ancestral.” Capoeira scholar Greg Downey describes capoeira practitioners’ “apprenticeship” of learning how to listen to and hear the berimbau, and as students train and gain playing experience they inevitably hone their listening skills and internalize ways of moving in accordance with the rhythms, sounds and tempos of the music (Downey 2005). He argues that practitioners perceive music “not merely through a layer of cognitive categories and symbolic associations, but with a trained and responsive body, through habits copied from others and socially reinforced, and by means of their own musical skills, arduously acquired and actively engaged in listening” (Downey 2002: 490). While the acquisition of listening-knowledge Downey describes forms an essential part of capoeira training, the call of the berimbau can also be experienced prior to responses copied and learned through practice. In other words, the apprenticeship and social reinforcement cannot account for the immediate physical and emotional impact the first contact with the berimbau often has on future angoleiros. All of the mestres (and some practitioners) with whom I have worked most closely describe their first contact with capoeira not as visual — seeing the movements and being 161 impressed or inspired — but as aural, upon hearing the berimbau. In remarkably similar narratives, they describe first hearing the sound of the berimbau, being gripped by it, drawn to it, and feeling compelled to follow it to its source. There they encountered a capoeira class or an informal roda. Discovering capoeira as the source of the sound, they began to train and never looked back. These encounters happened before any apprenticeship took place, and while their bodies had yet to undergo physical training, they still responded to the sound by moving to its source. Thus, while the apprenticeship Downey describes does take place, many practitioners experience the berimbau-as-call before undertaking any training, and they continue to experience it — perhaps with increasing intensity — as they develop their capoeira. While Downey focuses on the bodily responses to the music conditioned through listening during training, I am interested in the affective impact of the sound of the berimbau. When practitioners hear the bateria, in other words, they are moved in a number of ways. They experience a call that moves their bodies to enter the space as well as join a community.36 As Abusada described, “The moment I entered the [capoeira] class I knew this was what I wanted to do! Only later did I realize why it was such a strong experience for me, the first time I saw capoeira Angola. Today I understand that it is directly connected to ancestrality. When I’m in the roda, it’s as if I’ve already been part of it for a long time.” Bolinha also noted the connection between the music’s call and ancestrality. He explained that Candomblé and capoeira could not exist without music and that the songs 36 One could argue that Brazilians had been culturally conditioned, perhaps subconsciously, to have certain associations with the sound of the berimbau, which is pervasive throughout Brazilian popular culture (Galm 2010). However, this still does not explain how many non-Brazilians have similar “first-time arrival” experiences, such as many experience with EDM (Garcia 2011:167). 162 in capoeira must be sung in Portuguese in a certain way in order to preserve their “ancestral meaning and feeling.” He used a song from samba de roda to illustrate: I see these songs as a chamado [call]. [singing samba tune] Não venha não, não venha não, esse samba de preto venha não / Eu vou sim, eu vou sim, esse samba de preto da pra mim! [Don’t come, don’t come, [to] this black-man’s samba, don’t come / Yes I’m going, yes I’m going, this black-man’s samba is good enough for me!] When I say this, I’m telling stories that my mother told me, that my uncle who used to be a sambador told me. Stories that my grandmother told my mother, things that happened in the interior [rural, inland Bahia], where she lived, of sambas that existed. Sometimes the people didn’t have a direct relationship with Candomblé, but at one point in time the lady used to have samba in her house, she lit a candle for a certain orixá, or she held the samba for such and such caboclo. So the way the drums function, this rhythm, it is also a chamado… If it happens this way with me, and I believe in this ancestral force, it happens in the same way with all the other people that suffered the marks of slavery. The berimbau also is a chamado, the sound of the drum is a chamado, when it plays in the roda of samba, it’s a chamado. For Bolinha, the songs and sounds of instruments of samba, Candomblé and capoeira carry an “ancestral force” that calls to those descended from enslaved people in Brazil. Bolinha frequents Candomblé and, while long associated with the capoeira group, has only recently begun training in earnest. He began by talking about the musical calls in capoeira and Candomblé, but made his point about the ancestrality of the call by singing a samba and talking about Candomblé and the religious samba of the caboclo (from certain Candomblé ceremonies). The call of the samba on the street, calling people to participate, is different from the call in the Candomblé festa, which summons orixás, caboclos or other entities. However, they share the characteristic of a sounding call that brings bodies (human or non) into the space, and by evoking the terreiro space through sound in his samba, Mestre Cláudio brings an ancestral force to the street that can be felt by those present. 163 Practitioners that I interviewed had varying understandings of the degrees to which similar elements in all three practices were the same or different. Personal understandings may also shift as practitioners deepen their knowledge of the practices. For example, whereas Zara wished to emphasize the historical connections between capoeira and Candomblé, saying that “spirituality” and “possession” were not where the practices aligned, Abusada and others felt the spirituality very much in both practices. For her, the question of the call itself was spiritual. In both Umbanda (which she practices) and capoeira, she feels in the toque of the drum “something very spiritual, as if I’ve already lived it, as if I’ve already heard that drum a long time ago. It seems like I’ve already danced that samba. The drum is calling me. It is something really very spiritual.” Because she had switched to speaking about samba, I asked her to clarify, “Is it the same thing in capoeira and in Umbanda?” She responded, “It’s the same thing, the same thing. This is what connects me.” I asked if this meant that she “incorporated” (received a spirit in her body) during capoeira. She was very clear: No, incorporation has nothing to do with it. When I’m in capoeira Angola I don’t see the entities [orixás, caboclos] there. But I feel the connection with the people who have already been there, the black people, an enslaved black woman, for example, who constructed capoeira [i.e. ancestors]. It’s not that a spirit or entity is there in the moment, but rather the sensation of knowing that they have been there, and knowing that I am in a space where I already was. It has nothing to do with incorporation. Here Abusada aligns with Zara’s interpretation, yet other practitioners had different interpretations of whether incorporation happened in capoeira or not. Another angoleiro and Candomblé practitioner, Binho, speaking about how he entered Candomblé, described how one day, after visiting a terreiro for some time, the orixá Oxum took him by the arm and chose him to play the drum. He told me how he was 164 not seeking further involvement with Candomblé, nor did he want to play the drums there, but he said, “She called me and chose me to play the atabaque.” In talking to other practitioners of Candomblé these moments of being called to the religion were common. Many people started attending Candomblés because many festas are open to the public, the houses welcome outsiders, and the rituals involve beautiful costumes and music and often serve delicious food. As Flávia explained to me, in her town of Cachoeira (considered the birthplace of Candomblé) there is very little else to do at night, so people go to the festas to have a good time. In some cases, an orixá will call the person to participate, as in Binho’s case, or the person may end up seeking more guidance from the mãe de santo, as in Flávia’s case. As she put it, “Learning about Candomblé was not my objective, as it is for many people who come to Bahia. I came for capoeira! Candomblé began entering my life, not necessarily because I was seeking it.” The “decision” to join a community of Candomblé, therefore, often feels less like a decision and more like an invitation. The guest may turn it down, but often they willingly accept. When I asked Binho about the musicality in capoeira, he immediately turned to talking about Candomblé, its trance, the call and the ancestrality. He said, [The musicality in capoeira] is total. It’s the trance, too. It calls, in the same way that the atabaque in Candomblé has power to play and the ancestor or the orixá comes. Playing the berimbaus is the same kind of thing, it carries something of the suffering of our ancestors. It’s expression! Only someone who has it really knows. This is why when you’re playing berimbau and the sonority beats inside of you, you get goosebumps... I can only be grateful, to be part of the Angoleiros do Sertão and to have a little of this sintonia. For Binho the berimbau and music in capoeira calling to the body of the capoeirista is the same as the drum in Candomblé calling to the orixá. The sounds and music themselves carry an ancestral memory and awareness of past suffering. While he sees the call as the 165 same in both Candomblé and capoeira, he did not refer to incorporation, but instead talked about “trance.” Binho’s answer draws an equivalence between the call to capoeiristas in capoeira and the call to orixás in Candomblé. I find this a significant point: the call in capoeira calls the practitioner while the call in Candomblé calls the orixá to mount the practitioner. Therefore, the (human) practitioner in both situations experiences the call of the music from different vantage points.37 The general, initial call to enter the practice, however, acts upon practitioners in similar ways in both cases. Responding: responsive bodies and “trance” In capoeira, samba and Candomblé, the songs always involve a call and response between lead singer and responding chorus. Here, however, I address the non-vocal, bodily responses to the musical (verbal and sonic) call of the bateria. Practitioners experience a range of corporeal responses that defy generalization. While many players reported experiencing “trance,” verging on a kind of incorporation in some cases, they also stressed the importance of self-possession and control. Here the differences between incorporation in Candomblé and playing capoeira become clearer. In Candomblé, as stated above, the orixá or other entity is called to mount the initiate. At that moment, practitioners explain that the initiate is no longer present in their body. After the orixá leaves and they are awakened, they often have no recollection or consciousness of what their body did while under direction of the orixá. Capoeira practitioners, in contrast, did not report such a complete bodily taking-over by an external entity. The players must 37 It would be theoretically fascinating to interview an orixá about their experience of feeling the call of the music, and dancing to music, in a Candomblé ritual, in order to compare it to a capoerista’s experience of the capoeira roda, but I doubt I will ever have the opportunity to do so. 166 remain conscious enough not only listen and hear the music, but also to regulate the energies in the roda. Similar to jazz musicians, they must listen and play (either instruments or capoeira) at the same time, entering into a state of heightened awareness or concentration (in order to divide yet focus attention) that facilitates flow (Hytönen-Ng 2013:41-48); sometimes they even feel a loss of control, though without losing all consciousness, in which they “followed the music rather than the music following” them (Berliner 1994:389-393). They must be responsive bodies, able to receive and regulate energy, but without letting it take over. They must find a balance between staying conscious and in control (to some degree) and letting the music move them. In literature on capoeira, much has been made of the different toques of the berimbau, and how each one dictates a different kind of game (Downey 2005:93). However, contemporary mestres of capoeira Angola tend to use the same three toques in rodas, adding variety and expression through their elaborations of the toques (viradando or dobrando, improvising embellishments while still retaining the basic toque) or by changing tempo. Players most commonly describe the influence of the berimbau on their bodily movement in terms of pace or playing speeds. Rita’s provides a typical explanation: The instruments are the ones who dictate the rhythm of the game, just as they dictate the rhythm of the entities [in Candomblé]. You will dance what is played, and capoeira Angola is no different. The game will flow in conformity to what the berimbau establishes should be done, what the berra [the lowest berimbau] is dictating at that moment. There will always be the same toques, but different tempos, different rhythms. Sometimes slower, other times quicker. And your body has to have this understanding, you have to have this understanding, that this is a moment that’s slower. The body will be totally connected with the music. As Rita stated, if the berimbau plays slowly, the corresponding game should be slower, and likewise if the berimbau picks up tempo the game should accelerate. Lyrics also 167 contribute to directing the players, and though this is not my focus here, it has been addressed elsewhere (Lewis 1992; Capoeira 2003; Downey 2005:74-86; Yahn 2012). Good players understand and perceive through their bodies how the berimbau is directing them, and they adjust their games accordingly. (Though it should be noted that the determination of tempo does not happen in only one direction: two players speeding up their game, or playing more excitedly, can also cause the lead berimbau player (on the berra-boi) to increase tempo.) Placing the understanding in the bodies transcends the ears as the site of listening, instead distributing it throughout the whole body and accessing sound through the body’s range of senses (Meneses 2016; Kapchan 2017). Responsive bodies, therefore, are already listening bodies. Some mestres and scholars lament the limited number of toques used in contemporary games as a simplification of capoeira Angola, through which it has lost some of its richness. However, these laments may also reflect more general frustrations of mestres with younger capoeiristas’ inability to really hear and play with the berimbau, even when the toques do not change. Perhaps when mestres talk about “listening” to or playing “in accord” with the berimbau, they are also referring to something more than perceiving toques or tempos. Perhaps they are also concerned about younger players’ inabilities to “hear” or sense the ancestrality and spiritual energy communicated through the sounds. In other words, the call of the berimbau functions far beyond an elaborated metronome beating out the tempo. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, many different kinds of games exist beyond “fast” and “slow,” even within one toque. Perhaps when practitioners discuss toques and tempos, it is to aid verbalization of a 168 subject difficult to put into words: all of the ways their bodies respond to sound in the roda. For even when playing capoeira according to the berimbau’s tempo, this does not mean coordinating movements to beats, as happens in a vast diversity of music and dance forms. In capoeira play, unlike in Candomblé or samba de roda, foot placements or bodily accents rarely align with rhythms, beats or musical accents happening in the bateria. There is no entrainment, no coordinating of movements to a musical, rhythmical groove. Yet another kind of alignment, a sintonia, nevertheless takes place to a deeply groove-based music, and it involves multiple levels of (sub)consciousness. In other words, practitioners are allowing the music to influence their movements, but it is difficult to explain exactly how this happens. In fact, practitioners talked more about the total effect of the sound of the bateria than they did about “rhythm.” In order to encourage practitioners to describe their bodily responses, I asked for them to try to recall a range of sensations. I would ask what they heard, which instruments they listened to or if they listened more to song lyrics, and I asked for them to try to describe the sensations and feelings they had while they played. “Thickly” descriptive responses eluded everyone, perhaps due to the flow-like state of playing. Perhaps ironically, some practitioners even described the deeply embodied act of playing more as an out-of-body experience, as some jazz musicians also did (Berliner 1994:393). When I asked Solange, who has trained with Mestre Cláudio in Feira de Santana for the last ten years, to describe what she feels when she plays, she responded, When I enter into the roda, when the bateria is really grooving [bem amarrada], I am transformed. I can't see anyone else. For me it's just me and the other person playing there, the music that's singing, and I try not to think about the movements, I don't think, I do the movements that come, I get carried away! It's as if another 169 person enters into me at that moment. Different from the training. In the training I have some difficulty [with certain movements]. In the roda, no. I feel more at ease to do it. I don't know what it is. Maybe this has a lot to do with this question of ancestrality… that when the instruments play you feel the ancestrality arrive. I believe that it might be this, too… Same thing in the samba roda. When I pick up an instrument, or enter into the roda of samba to sambar [dance samba], I don't want to know who's there! I want to know what I'm feeling! And it's really good! Very positive! So the game flows naturally. I don't think about the movement, [as in] ‘Ah! I'm first going to do this, then that.’ I can't do that. I let it flow. All my readings in dance studies texts of detailed, self-reflexive descriptions of actual physical sensations led me to think I needed to elicit them out of my interlocutors. So I asked Solange to elaborate upon what sensations she felt in the roda. She responded that it was very difficult to describe, but that “freedom” came closest. “I feel free, I don’t think about work, don’t think about problems or about good things, I think about nothing. I just feel free.” I pressed her more, asking what she specifically felt physically. She said it was the same with thinking as with physical sensation: “I don’t feel anything in my body. Because sometimes you’re like, oh I’m feeling pain here or there. But when I’m moving in the roda I don’t feel it. Until the energy passes. Then when the energy passes you already feel tired!” And she laughed as I nodded in agreement. It was so true. I had experienced this many times as well, the temporary suspension while playing not only of pain and fatigue, but also fear. Rather than heightening physical awareness, the roda seems to dissolve aches, pains and fatigue (which constantly plague people who train capoeira intensively), which then return when the game is over. In Solange’s experience, it was again the music, the bateria, that “carried” her away and brought the positive energy, the feeling of freedom. Rather than physical sensations of muscles or pain, she focuses on the feeling of freedom, on a general sense of well- 170 being. She avoids thinking, and the music and energy of the roda facilitate this not- thinking and not-feeling. Though I resisted distinguishing between “thinking” and “feeling,” I am nonetheless bound by this language. So I asked practitioners questions using both words in order to encourage them to think about their total experience, rather than try to isolate certain aspects of it. When I talked with Treinel Natureza, the most advanced woman player in the group, about her experience playing, I asked if she felt she was thinking or not thinking, feeling or not feeling. She said that she usually feels more than she thinks, but that there are games when thinking in necessary. She gave the example: When you are playing with a dear friend and you haven’t seen her in a while, I think when you’re playing with her you have to let go and play with emotion, with a smile on your face, with agility. You let yourself be carried away by your soul. Now when you’re in a situation where you don’t know the person and you feel they have bad intentions, you need to play with intelligence. Then reason enters. So we need to know the moments, when it is better to think more than — ah! — feel, and when you really have to be happy and let the body be led by the soul. Natureza recognized that different kinds of games require different levels or modes of attention and control. She could relax and let go more with a friend she trusted, while playing with someone who seemed intent on taking her down required more vigilance. She also distinguished between different songs and how they affected her. Having grown up with a father who was a capoeirista and took her to many rodas as a young child, she described how certain songs moved her much more than others. When she hears them they make her want to play, to be in the roda. I asked if she thought music could move her body, and she acknowledged that it could, but she talked more about music evoking emotions, making her cry or making her feel happy. She cautioned, “Inside the roda of capoeira, we can’t let ourselves get involved too much with the music, 171 because it would turn into something dangerous. If you give yourself over to the music [too much] you will end up hurting yourself.” And she made a sound of a body hitting the floor. She also acknowledged that the music could help you in the roda, providing strength in addition to emotions. It could also serve to warn you of potential danger, such as with a song like Lasso o boi vaqueiro, [Lasso the bull cowboy]. Upon hearing this song, a player should know that the singer is calling for the players to “lasso” one another. The singer wants to see someone fall, so players should be extra alert. Natureza’s relationship with music in the roda provides a valuable perspective of someone with many years of experience. She is aware of the power of music to carry her away, but is careful to remain in control while playing in the roda. Her caution reveals how players must negotiate the energies in the roda. Perhaps this kind of knowledge and ability to negotiate energies is similar to how initiates of Candomblé learn the appropriate moments and ways to “fall” to the orixá. In other words, the music has power, but ultimately the practitioner must learn how to regulate the power of the music in their body. Another student in Feira de Santana, Pernalonga, describes other emotions when he enters the roda. He feels the same call of the berimbau to play, the music moving him, but he also described feeling as if every time were the first time. “It always seems like a new thing, you never get used to it! And different things always happen, especially in the street roda. It always has a different energy than an inside roda. When the Mestre starts to play, it already moves you. Only if you aren’t really an angoleiro, you don’t see it. Whoever is [an angoleiro], feels it.” I asked which sensations he felt, and he answered, “Anxiety, happiness—various sensations mixed together. You want the mestre to call you 172 to play, but at the same time you don’t want to! There’s always that anxiety, that knot in the stomach!” While not as many people mentioned feeling this anxiety, I certainly related to it! I suspect that feeling anxiety and fear are probably more common, but not the first emotions players wish to acknowledge. Though once the game begins, usually all feelings of fear fade. Describing the moment of playing in the roda and the sound of the instruments, Pernalonga continued, I believe that in capoeira Angola there is a trance. When you are really there in body and soul, the instruments move you. You do things that afterwards you say, How did I do that? That only happens when the roda is formed. It has a ritual, right? This is obvious for anyone who practices [capoeira]. And at the moment, you do things that you don't even know how you did them. You only know you did them because the instruments carried you, led you to do them. Things have happened [in the roda] that I'm not able to do when I’m like this, normal, outside of the roda. Some entrances, some rasteiras, you can only do when the axé is really high. Binho also compared the state of playing to trance and, like Solange, described a narrowing of his focus: “In that moment, when I’m playing, I only see my partner and the bateria. It’s like a trance, a trance happens, completely. I don’t see anything else.” I asked what he heard while he was playing capoeira and he said he listened to “all the instruments together,” describing how the music helps him play. “The sintonia carries your body. Even if you are stuck, [with] the sintonia of the berimbau, the other instruments, the harmony, the body sways. The music does all of this.” When I asked if other kinds of music did this he immediately answered, “Yes, Candomblé.” Flávia found the sensation of playing capoeira verging on “possession.” She said that the moment of the roda, differently from just playing capoeira informally outside of a roda context, for her approaches something like possession, really, a bit inexplicable. Because it’s an improvisation of things, but it makes me feel like I’m not alone. I know that… at times I think 173 about doing things [with my body] that I don’t [normally] do. Sometimes I do things that I didn’t plan on, so for me it’s like a mixture between the pleasure of being myself and of not being myself. Like Abusada, Flávia reports feeling as if she’s not alone in the roda. For Flávia, like Pernalonga and Solange, this means sometimes moving in new ways, performing movements the body has not previously done. However, while Flávia felt this was “something like possession” in Candomblé, I hear her comparison as analogy rather than an equivalence. To my knowledge, no one I spoke with had experienced incorporating an orixá. This means that they accessed the experience of trance or possession in Candomblé through their imagination of it, not through personal practice. Even though they may be practitioners of Candomblé, attending ceremonies, sometime drumming for them, they could not compare the bodily sensations or state of consciousness of playing capoeira with that of incorporating orixás. Yet this does not matter, as I am not seeking to determine a precise equivalence between trance/possession in Candomblé and that in capoeira. Practitioners’ close proximity to Candomblé allows them to speak from the perspective of intimate observers, of deep vivência, and so they draw on this knowledge to illustrate what they experience in capoeira. Orikere also evoked Candomblé to describe how the music calls him to enter the roda and play, and how it encourages or directs or nourishes the movement throughout the game and the roda: It’s almost as if you were someone of axé [of Candomblé], who cannot fail. It’s the same thing. For those of us who surrender ourselves to capoeira, it’s the same thing. When the berimbau plays, you respond. Even if you’re drunk, no matter what, you find a way. It’s a mystical thing. 174 Orikere also confirmed that this sensation of feeling compelled to respond to the berimbau was the same thing he felt the very first time he heard the berimbau, only then he did not yet know what it was. I asked him what he heard or listened for while he was playing, and again he referred to Candomblé to aid his explanation. He said, “I hear everything. I know when the music changes, I know if someone makes a mistake. Anything that happens, I know. It’s you channeling yourself, directing yourself with that music. It’s like Candomblé. If you don’t play the right toque, you will be playing all night long and no one [no orixá] will come, nothing will happen. When you put in the axé — karai! [damn!]” Trying to describe what happens when you “put in the axé” he fell back on expressions of emphasis and expletives. Words may fail, but the body knows what to do. Regardless of how closely they knew Candomblé, capoeira practitioners readily compared the experience of playing capoeira to the moment when the orixá arrives and dances in a Candomblé ceremony. In both cases, bodies respond to a musical call. However, practitioners differed as to whether the “trance” of capoeira were the same as the state of incorporation in Candomblé. Practitioners distinguish between ancestors, who are with them in the roda of capoeira, and orixás, whose proper place of arrival is the terreiro. Capoeiristas who are not “of axé” may or may not evoke Candomblé to explain the aural kinesthetics of the roda. Some have sought and gleaned information about Candomblé without joining a terreiro community, and others expressed very little specific knowledge of Candomblé, but this did not prevent them from experiencing the state of capoeira play as something akin to trance or recognizing the energy they feel in the roda as axé. 175 I now turn to explore how practitioners’ compromisso to capoeira manifests as the obligation and commitment to put energy back into capoeira in the moment of capoeira play, through cultivating and transmitting axé by playing music in the roda. Bota axé! [Put in the axé!]: Playing instruments, being responsible bodies In that early conversation with Mestre Cláudio about energy and axé, which I referenced earlier, he also explained how the energy could impact people’s lives in profound ways. For Mestre Cláudio, experiencing axé in capoeira, how good it makes him feel, endows him with a certain obligation. Receiving axé is not unidirectional. You must pass it on to others through teaching and supporting the capoeira group. Benefitting from the good energy cultivated in the group, members assume part of the responsibility to ensure that the axé continues strong. Showing up to the roda to play capoeira, but not helping set up the instruments, not playing the instruments, and not going out for beers with the group afterwards—this kind of behavior violates the sense of community and the understanding of axé as something that everyone receives, but must also contribute to cultivating and transmitting. Rita told me that the mestre put it this way, “When you are on the instrument, give yourself! You have to give the best of yourself, play the best you can possibly play! Because whoever is playing [capoeira] depends on you. They depend on your best!” Playing in the bateria, whether on berimbau, atabaque or the simpler instruments of “effect,” reco-reco and agogô, comes with a responsibility. As Rita explained, the players in the roda depend on the music in order to play their best game. I have even seen Mestre Cláudio critique students for slouching or standing too casually while playing. Their body 176 posture reflects their attitude and therefore also projects a certain energy. When he tells his students they must always play “with attitude,” this means they must play with serious commitment and focused attention, alert bodies and a proud stance. Rita described the consequences of a lack of attitude or attention in the bateria: If the game is governed by what’s being played, and if you’re playing with little energy, with bad music, naturally the game will be bad, with little energy. It will be difficult for things to flow well, for the game of question-and-response to occur. In this moment, the body needs the incentive of the music in order to respond. The music determines the axé of the game, which in turn influences the ability of the players in the ring to enter into a flowing game of question and response, the conversational communication sought in good games. When the energy “breaks,” the game comes to a halt, as Rita describes: You know how when someone incorporates the entity in Candomblé, and she plays what is sung? At the moment when the tambor stops, the entity leaves, and the person who received her falls to the ground. Why is this? Because she is moved by what is being played. In capoeira it is similar. At the moment the berimbau calls, you are involved with the music. You are centered, focused, because the music tells you what kind of game you are going to play. She sang a capoeira corrido: “Ô quebra gereba, quebra; Ô quebra gereba” [Oh break it, break it!] The music is warning that someone is going to try to “quebrar,” literally break, or heat things up, play a harder game. She sang another, similar example, “Balançou, Quero ver cair! Ô lá o lá-e!” [You/he balanced, [now] I want to see you/him fall!] So the music dictates the rhythm of the game. The berimbau dictates the rhythm of the game. So when the berimbau is lowered for you to exit the game [the mestre plays continuous triplets on the berra and lowers the stick toward the center of the roda], it’s as if you broke the energy. And naturally your hearing will feel that things are not the same as they just were, that tuning of the three berimbaus is interrupted. It’s as if the energy is broken. 177 Rita’s use of “rhythm” suggests that she means much more than the strict definition of the term as a beat or rhythmical pattern. Being connected with the rhythm of the game means being aligned with the groove and flow of the music, as well as the texture of the whole bateria. Another kind of break interrupts the energy, though unintentionally, when an inexperienced player takes over playing a berimbau or atabaque and fails to match the groove or volume of the previous player. Then the energy dips, and it can be very disconcerting for whoever is playing capoeira in the roda. Rita also drew attention to the role the song lyrics play. Songs with words such as “quebra [break]” or “cair [fall]” act to instigate a more aggressive game, and the tempo of the music will also usually pick up when these songs are sung. As Rita pointed out, these songs also serve as warnings to the players. If everyone is singing “break it!” or “I want to see you fall!” it is in a player’s best interest to stay extra alert, on the look out for quick sweeps (rasteiras) or full-impact head-butts (cabeçadas). In contrast, other songs containing lyrics such as “I want to see a beautiful game” or “Slow, slow” can be used to calm down and slow down the game. Thus all the elements of the music work together to direct the bodies and minds of the players in the ring. Playing the instruments thus means assuming a great responsibility. Binho stated this most explicitly, drawing on his experience with playing drums in Candomblé, as well. He was describing how he felt playing in the roda on Saturday. He first described entering into a kind of trance, but then he went on: You know you are doing good for yourself, and at the same time you are passing on some of the culture, which few people truly value. And you have the responsibility, you know there are people depending on you to show up and contribute to it. This Saturday roda, for us here in Feira, it's a total responsibility. We have to do that roda because the people are expecting it, waiting for it, every Saturday. It's a complete responsibility. 178 When playing the atabaque in Candomblé he said he also felt the sense of responsibility, but to an even greater extent. He said, “The responsibility is more because you are involved with something ancestral. Not that capoeira can’t be ancestral, but in Candomblé it is more centered. You know the orixá is there, you know the orixá only comes if you play well. The orixá only dances if you play.” The practices are comparable, but the stakes are different. If the musicians in the bateria do not play way in a capoeira roda, the players may not play good games, or they might even get hurt. (Though of course they can get hurt at any time.) The responsibility is different, for Binho, when the orixás are involved. Disappointing an orixá, or letting down a congregation of Candomblé practitioners eagerly awaiting the orixá’s arrival, he feels is a weightier responsibility. However, the relationship between musical sound, energy, and dancing/playing is the same. A capoeirista and Candomblé practitioner at Contra-mestre Zara’s lecture also commented on this semblance: Zara, it’s cool you’re talking about the dancing [in Candomblé], because it’s like the berimbau. Just how Mestre João Grande changes the rhythm for you to dance in front of the berimbau, in samba it is the same thing, in Candomblé it’s the same thing when the orixá appears in front of the atabaque: You play so the saint will dance for you. It’s the same in capoeira, you don’t play fast when the rhythm is slow. You play very much with the rhythm, with the instrument. You don’t play alone. The ogãs in Candomblé have the responsibility of playing the drums in order to call the orixás or other entities to the ceremony. In the Afro-Brazilian religions (unlike in their Cuban counterparts), ogãs do not incorporate or receive spirits. They play the music, cultivate and feel the axé, but they stay present and conscious and never give over their bodies to the spirits. However, they have the intimate knowledge of how to play “so the saint will dance,” and they take this way of playing, this attitude, with them whenever 179 they play instruments for other practices. Mestre Cláudio, who also played drums in Candomblé ceremonies for many years, often counsels his students on how to play in the capoeira bateria and the samba. He instructs them to play with straight body posture, not slouching or casually standing with one hip jutting out. The correct attitude also involves the right way of looking, or olhar. I wrote in a field note how he had described it to me: When you're playing drums in samba, you can't look down. Someone did this in the roda and he got pissed. He said, ‘You can't play [like this—and he mimicked the person, tucking his chin into his chest, head down, eyes closed]. You have to watch them, follow them.’ He said it was the same thing as when we talk with each other, we look at one another. We give our attention. He said this wasn’t a rule, but he thinks it is a more correct way of playing, also when playing berimbau, to watch the people who are playing [capoeira]. Another time, talking about playing drums in samba, he said that you must “look into the eyes of the horse,” the “horse” being the person who incorporates the orixá. He sang a samba, “Eu vou mandar de lado lá pra cá / eu vou mandar de lado lá pra cá” [I’m going to send it from that side to this side] to illustrate the exchange of energy moving back and forth. Again, he said you can’t play drums with your head down. You must look at the person in the roda. As he talked and sang to me, he stared into my eyes with an almost angry intensity, to illustrate. I had seen this look in his eyes many times while he was drumming during the samba de roda. He explained that when he did this, he was directing and sending the energy to the dancer and receiving it back. The same exchange happens with the call-and-response from the chorus singing. Constantly throughout the rodas that Mestre Cláudio conducts, whether capoeira or samba, he will turn to those gathered in the circle and gesture vigorously with his palms up, making a quick lifting motion with his arms. He is literally trying to raise the axé. When he does this, often with a scowl on his face, it means he is displeased with the 180 current level of energy and participation. It means, “Sing louder, clap harder, play louder!” The crowd responds to his command with a surge of sound and smiles and the energy palpably increases. Dancing in the ring when this happens, I have felt the wave of energy enter and pass through me and my legs feel lighter, my movements swifter. Receiving the energy helps me give more in return. Thus the musicians must summon their energy and focus in order to contribute to the call and response, the exchange and flow of axé in the rodas of capoeira and samba. As Rita expressed it, “You have to give the best of yourself, play the best you can possibly play!” Recall how Orikere, who also plays drums in houses of Candomblé, put it this way, “Axé is when you give your body, you sweat for it, you really throw yourself into it, break everything.” It takes energy to create and send energy, and this is the responsibility, the compromisso, people take on when they join the Angoleiros do Sertão. Conclusion As practitioners and community members narrated their experiences of capoeira Angola, Candomblé and samba de roda they slipped between practices, illustrating what happened in one space by comparing it to what happened in another. They also slipped between terms. When they talked about axé, it became clear that they were also talking about music and sounds and African ancestrality. When they talked about feeling the presence of someone or something else with them in the roda, many interpreted this as a feeling of spirituality. In these ways, the meanings of sound, music, energy, axé, spirituality, ancestrality and Africaneity all mingled. Sensing all of these at once resulted in an altered state of consciousness many called sintonia. 181 I have presented practitioners’ descriptions at length in order to show how their own terms and meanings provide a richness of “theoretical possibilities” that originate within their rituals and practices and “resonate beyond” them (Jankowsky 2010:26). Axé may function in many ways like an impersonal, pre-subjective force, but it also does so much more. Angoleiros’ concepts of axé reveal how aural-kinesthetic sensibilities play a fundamental role in Afro-Brazilian expressive practices. Making sound and listening, and moving while listening and making sound, are all essential activities for cultivating and transmitting axé, which in turn must be understood as a form of African ancestral knowledge. This particular form of knowledge, this way of knowing, does not use words as its primary conductor—it uses bodies resonating with sound, or sound bodies. This knowledge is known through multiple senses, but this does not mean it is pre-cognitive or unconscious. In fact, practitioners seemed highly conscious of their experiences (of axé, forces, ancestrality, etc.) even if verbal descriptions were difficult to come by. The Afro-Brazilian aural-kinesthetic way of knowing and being enables community members to cultivate axé, which in turn brings community members into sintonia. The axé calls together and coheres community around shared projects of accessing and recuperating an African past. In this chapter I have shown how members of Angoleiros do Sertão experience this sintonia and long to experience it again and again, cultivating and accumulating axé for themselves and their communities. Yet if axé is indeed the power of realization, the power to make things happen, what kinds of things do these practitioners seek to make happen? Niyi Afolabi recognizes this power of axé. He defines axé as “vital force: that ancestral strength and energy with which Afro-Brazilians cope and regenerate themselves 182 through creative and cultural strategies that have their political implications even when they are not forcefully or apparently articulated” (2009:1). In the next chapters, I will explore what the cultivation and harnessing of axé enables practitioners to do, or, what they do with the axé they cultivate with such dedication. Yet before I turn to exploring what actions result from their access to its energy-force-power, I address Mestre Cláudio’s philosophy of capoeira Angola. 183 CHAPTER TWO An Angoleiro Ethics: Mestre Cláudio’s Teachings as Africana Philosophy They are many, the tricks of Exu. Exu can act against. Exu can act in favor. Exu does what he does, it is what it is. (Prandi 2000:70) Exu is not exactly an orixá. Exu is a principle of communication that links humans with the divinities as much as man with other men, men with themselves and people with the environment. Exu is the dynamic principle of the African universe […] Exu is thus omnipresent and absolutely individualized […] Exu is, in himself, multiple. He does not have rules, but mystery—which detonates the rule […] Exu is many, which is why he can invent new rules and preserve others. He can, as the real [as reality], be creative, devastating, imperative, comprehensive and even violent. He does not exactly answer to ethics, but, what may appear paradoxical, he is the condition for the black-African ethics. Exu is the bearer of axé. (Oliveira 2003:108-9) Exu is as much a principle of individualized existence as a dynamic principle of communication, a vehicle of axé (energy, active field, necessary to mobilize the entities in the orum and the aié).38 (Sodré 1983:122-3) I begin this chapter by evoking Exu as he appears through the eyes of Brazilian scholar-practitioners of Candomblé. As my interlocutors in the Angoleiros do Sertão ground their understanding of capoeira in the ways of knowing of Afro-Brazilian practices, I have also found myself turning to Candomblé to understand capoeira Angola, and Exu keeps calling my attention. As messenger and trickster, Exu embodies the 38 Orum/orun is Yoruba for the spiritual world, domain of the orixás, where aié/aiyé is the physical world or domain of humans. 184 angoleiro skills of communication and deception. As noted by capoeira scholar Maria Barbosa, due to his “intermediary and unstable position” Exu can be “invoked as much for good as for bad,” and like the capoeira player he “emblematizes ambiguity, malandragem, mandinga, and the unexpected” and values “diversion, creativity, duplicity, ambivalence and seduction" (2005b:93).39 Put another way, Exu does not stand for right or wrong, but for the negotiation between various forces and ethical positions. He is the spirit of decisions, of way-making and way-choosing. He does not provide answers, but he opens the paths to finding them. Indeed, he is the “master of the freedom- ways of [his] people” (Nascimento 1995:18). In these ways, the ambiguous nature of Exu manifests in the roda of capoeira Angola, revealing the roda as a space for negotiating ethical positions, where each angoleiro who enters the circle brings their own subjective understandings of what constitutes right or wrong behavior. With this understanding, I frame capoeira Angola as an exercise of moral philosophy; a practice for training the mind in ethical thought. As players move together in the roda, they bring their ethical positions into play, striving to embody their ideal ethical behavior and postures. However, as Exu reminds us, there will be no ultimate resolution of right and wrong. The aim is not to determine a winner or a loser, but to move together towards greater understanding. While Mestre Cláudio’s lessons inevitably made bodies sweat and muscles ache, I argue that his ultimate aim was not to change his student’s bodies so much as to change their minds. More specifically, his concern was to convey a system of ethics through sonic and bodily practice. 39 Barbosa noted that Waldeloir Rego (1968) also compared capoeira players with Exu in his foundational study on capoeira Angola (Barbosa 2005:96). 185 Though Mestre Cláudio does not necessarily refer to his work as explicitly as philosophizing, other capoeira mestres and practitioners commonly understand capoeira as a philosophy (Almeida 1986; Capoeira 2006, 2016; Diniz et al. 2015). As Brazilian philosopher Eduardo Oliveira reasons, “[c]apoeira is a game of liberty, and as such, it is an ethics, constituting a quintessential multidisciplinary and multi-referential field” (Oliveira 2015:253, emphases in original). Yet, Oliveira laments, throughout its centuries of existence, academic philosophers have paid little heed to the “philosophy of capoeira,” which he characterizes as a “philosophy of life and a singular philosophy of the art of free and enslaved Africans, that reveals itself as a game of the body, in the inside and outside rodas of capoeira Angola” (253). Here perhaps Oliveira touches upon one of the reasons why philosophers have not engaged capoeira as philosophy: it is expressed through the body and movement, as well as through sounds, music and lyrics. As such it does not resemble the texts of the Philosophy canon. As someone who has apprenticed in both the bodily language of capoeira and the language of the academy, I aim to address the lacuna identified by Oliveira by putting the languages in dialogue with one another in this chapter. To do this, I place Mestre Cláudio’s angoleiro philosophy, as I have learned it, within a broader corpus of Africana philosophy. As Chapter 1 has shown, the Angoleiros do Sertão understand capoeira Angola as a knowledge system, a way of knowing and being in the world, that is rooted in practices developed by Africans and their descendants in Brazil. Capoeira Angola comprises a tradition of analysis and reflection on this knowledge, and as such I argue that it contributes to Afro-Brazilian philosophy, 186 and therefore belongs to the Africana philosophical tradition.40 I consider Mestre Cláudio, as someone who has reflected deeply on the practice of capoeira Angola, an angoleiro philosopher: a thinker whose philosophizing is based in the practice of and reflection upon capoeira Angola. These may seem grand or pretentious claims, but they are not. I am merely arguing for recognizing the aural-kinesthetic work of capoeira Angola practitioners—their moving, sounding and thinking—as a form of philosophy. As Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye (1987) has argued about the philosophical tradition in Africa, historical lack of philosophical writings does not equate with a lack of philosophical thought. Afro-Brazilians, as peoples everywhere, philosophize, “that is, pose fundamental questions, and reflect on fundamental aspects, of human life, conduct, and experience” (Gyekye 1987:9). Like African philosophy, Afro- Brazilian philosophy can also be discerned through analyzing and interpreting “traditional thought,” which in turn can be found embedded in cultural expressions and practices, such as “proverbs, linguistic expressions, myths and folktales, religious beliefs and rituals, customs” and in people’s “sociopolitical institutions” (Gyekye 1987:ix). African and Africana philosophers are divided on whether to include these practices as expressions of philosophical thought, and some will surely reject my inclusion of non- verbal practices as a form of thought. However, I build on Gyekye’s proposition that traditional thought can be found in ritual practices and argue that this holds for the 40 To my knowledge, what I call “Afro-Brazilian philosophy” has yet to be characterized as systematically and thoroughly as, for example, Paget Henry (2002) has done with Afro-Caribbean philosophy. However, an oft-cited source is Cosmovisão africana no Brasil: elementos para uma filosofia afrodescendente [African Cosmovision in Brazil: elements for an Afro-descendant philosophy] (Oliveira 2003). I consider my work here as contributing to Oliveira’s project. Furthermore, Henry, Gyekye and others have also noted, scholars of Africana philosophy often include ideas or thought that were not originally designated as “philosophy” by the thinkers themselves (Outlaw 2016:86). 187 practices of the Afro-Brazilian matrixes. As such I consider capoeira Angola a source of philosophical knowledge. * Below I first discuss some of the ways that ethics come into play in capoeira Angola games and practice, before moving on to an overview of the ways that Mestre Cláudio’s Angoleiro philosophy aligns with certain aspects of Africana philosophy, such as the concepts of moral character and obligations to community and humanity. Then I examine three ways in which the Angoleiros do Sertão put their ethics into action. First, I describe how Mestre Cláudio conceives of an ideal capoeira game. Striving to achieve an ideal game, or jogo bonito, shows how angoleiros work on cultivating their individual habits and behavior, which correspond to the level of character.41 I then provide a close reading of a significant capoeira game between Mestre Cláudio and another renowned mestre. This game, which generates heated discussion to this day, illustrates how Mestre Cláudio puts his ethics into practice—into movement and play. I show how, notwithstanding the richness and importance of verbal analysis, Cláudio “says” even 41 Brazilian soccer is also known as “o jogo bonito,” the beautiful game. While Brazilian capoeiristas are surely aware of this, I have not heard them discuss a beautiful capoeira game in relation to soccer. Soccer is the beautiful game (where “game” means sport), whereas a game in capoeira refers to the unit of play. The emphasis on movement aesthetics in both contexts does, however, point to a broader concern with body aesthetics and movement across Brazilian culture, not only in capoeira and soccer, and perhaps to an even broader cultural obsession with beauty. DaMatta has also noted the importance and uniqueness of malandragem in Brazilian football, which he links to bodily techniques of improvisation and jogo de cintura [play of the waist], referring to an ability to deceive and escape using bodily movement (DaMatta 1982:28-9). Another specific aesthetic connection drawn between capoeira and other forms of movement in Brazil references the ginga, the swaying swinging movement (Rosa 2015). The concept of jogo bonito in capoeira, referenced in many songs and discussions, deserves a dissertation of its own. But very briefly, it describes an ideal capoeira game, in which attack and defense, cunning, trickery and humor all occur with bodily expression, creativity, and flow. 188 more with his game. Finally, I describe the group’s Saturday morning roda, which they hold up as the embodied action of their compromisso to community. Capoeira Angola as Ethical Play Scholars and practitioners alike recognize capoeira as a form of play. Lewis draws primarily on Gadamer to define the experience of play in capoeira as a “paradox of losing oneself and simultaneously finding one’s self,” or, experiencing a sense of “freedom” (Lewis 1992:3). And as Lewis also acknowledges, other scholars of play touch upon this common theme of liberty through play. Indeed, Huizinga’s definition of play easily applies to capoeira: it is entered into voluntarily, it occurs in a specific time and place, it is “liberating, even when it is structured;” it may include aesthetics; and it is intrinsically rewarding (Masters 2008:857-8). Masters also compares Huizinga’s theory of play to that of Caillois and Czikszentmihalyi’s flow concept in order to show how they all recognize the centrality of pleasure in the play experience, albeit with a certain “tension between freedom and structure” (858-60). However, I do not agree with these scholars’ understanding of freedom and structure as in opposition to one another. From the perspective of capoeira as improvisation, like jazz or any other improvised music or dance form, the structures are what make the play possible and pleasurable. Furthermore, as Danielle Goldman argues in her study of improvised dance as a practice of freedom, to “ignore the constraints that improvisers inevitably encounter is […] to deny improvisation’s most significant power as a full-bodied critical engagement with the world, characterized by both flexibility and perpetual readiness” (2010:5). Likewise, 189 capoeira practitioners engaged in improvised play experience freedom and pleasure not by eradicating the constraints or rules of the game, but by playing with and against them. Returning to Exu, the playful trickster of the streets and crossroads has aided many scholars in their understandings of capoeira and other African diasporic practices and expressions (Levine [1977]2007; Thompson 1984; Wafer 1991; Drewal 1992; Oliveira 2003; Barbosa 2005b; Capone 2010). Henry Louis Gates Jr., in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988, 2014) paired Esu- Elegbara (as Exu appears in Yoruba tradition) with another trickster figure, the Signifying Monkey of African American lore, to show how “the black tradition… theorize[s] about itself in the vernacular,” reflecting on, repeating and formally revising itself (1988:xxi). Margaret Drewel in her study of play in Yoruba also recognized Esu/Exu’s trickster “play” as fundamental to Yoruba ritual (1992:12-16). It is with the sense of play Drewal describes—“overlapping and interpenetrating” with “ritual,” “spectacle” and “improvisation”—that I see capoeira Angola as play. Furthermore, in Brazil as in Yoruba culture, playing takes place in ritual and day-to-day life, and it is “not… unserious, frivolous, and impotent” (15). Rather, play as the mode of everyday praxis is by definition serious and efficacious, shaping what reality is and how it is experienced. The unpredictable trickster stationed at the crossroads, whether in Nigeria or in Brazil, is a symbol of the efficacy of play, and narratives that focus on him are models of and for its practice. (17) Capoeira Angola is a space in which to cultivate such play, in order that practitioners may then draw on their training to “play” in everyday situations. Like Exu, angoleiros do not play by “the rules.” While Lewis defined some of capoeira’s rules in his book (1992:92), he also acknowledged that the category might 190 overlap with performance aesthetics (198). Indeed, what he called rules could also be placed in a range of overlapping categories, such as strategy and aesthetics (“Keep moving”), wisdom or just not being foolish (“Don’t turn your back on an opponent”), and morality (“Don’t try to injure opponent physically”). I avoid the term “rules” because practitioners rarely use the term the context of capoeira Angola, but this does not mean angoleiros play without constraints. As I will address below, when Mestre Cláudio talks about the kind of game he wants his students to play, he uses terms such as anti-ético [anti-ethical], desnecessário [unnecessary] and feio [ugly] for moves he doesn’t like, and terms such as com expressão [with expression] and intelligente [intelligent] for moves he likes. Whereas rules seem to imply fixed, objective and indeed constraining categories, Mestre Cláudio’s terms gesture towards the values, aesthetics and ethics that both inspire and are expressed through the movements. Furthermore, rather than strictly adhering to rules, the Angoleiros do Sertão embrace an ethos of autonomy and self-determination, and as such they relish playing with the so-called rules, pushing and tugging at them, sometimes breaking them. As Drewel observed of Yoruba ritual, “[i]mprovisors [improvising players] risk transgressing the boundaries of appropriateness. These boundaries are not hard and fixed, however, so that negotiating appropriateness is itself another dimension of improvisation” or play (1992:7). I argue that capoeira Angola players are also playing improvisers involved in a negotiation of “appropriateness,” during and beyond their moments of play. Beyond the capoeira roda, angoleiros reflect deeply on the norms of play and at play. I approach Mestre Cláudio’s capoeira Angola, therefore, as a form of play whose aim is to educate about norms or ethical values. This means I am exploring capoeira as a 191 system of ethics, or more accurately, a practice in which practitioners hone their ethical judgment. In other words, as players play with each other and analyze their own games and those of others, they are most often fundamentally concerned with the moral choices made. Indeed, certain games continue to generate discussion for years after the event, as is the case with the games I discuss here. After all, while group members share “normative beliefs”—ideas about what constitutes ideal behavior—this does not mean they will always behave in conformity with these norms (Bicchieri and Muldoon 2014) or even agree about what form that behavior takes. They often agree in the abstract (beliefs and expectations) while disagreeing about the concrete (behavior). Similar to Javanese musicians who agree upon the existence of an “unplayed” or implicit melody, but cannot agree upon what that melody is, angoleiros rarely reach consensus on how ethical norms should be enacted in practice (Perlman 2004:1-3). Yet while I initially saw these disagreements as contradictions, I now see them as “discrepancies between normative expectations and behavior” (Bicchieri and Muldoon 2014). The purpose of discussion and analysis, therefore, is “to explain, clarify, refine, sharpen, or enlarge the understanding of the concepts and issues” related to these norms (Gyekye 2011), in order to more fully understand the values that form the foundation of a group’s ethical thinking. If capoeira Angola is a kind of micro-society, with its own set of guiding principles, then capoeira practitioners are its moral philosophers, and capoeira games provide the raw materials of the Angoleiro ethical practice. The games are events in which actors must make numerous moral decisions and actions, which are then analyzed in discussion, and later re-embodied in trainings and future games. So in this sense capoeira is not only an ethical game, but it is also a way of playing with ethics. 192 I contribute in this way to recent literature that seeks to define more precisely the philosophy (or philosophies) of capoeira (Abib 2004; Conceição 2015; Nogueira 2015; Oliveira 2015; Araújo 2015a). Much scholarship, especially by non-Brazilians, has emphasized deception and mistrust as forming the foundation of capoeira Angola’s philosophy (Willson 2001; Downey 2005; Fuggle 2008; Varela 2013). While deception and cunning do comprise essential elements of capoeira Angola’s world view, I argue that interpreting deception as an ends rather than a means risks misrepresenting the ethical work accomplished in the practice. Rather than viewing these tactics of deception only as “weapons of the weak,” aimed at subverting and resisting oppressive forces (Scott, J.C. 1987), I find that the teaching of deception and defenses against it as a means to building trust and community (Oliveira 2015; Araujo 2015a). The fundamental concepts of malícia and malandragem, while glossed as cunning and capacities for deception, also signify profound ways of knowing and “wisdom,” as Nestor Capoeira explains: We could ask what ‘wisdom’ has to do with ‘deceiving the other’: it is that to deceive the other, it is necessary to know how the other is, and how he is going to act; and, on the other hand, to know our [own] potentialities for action and weakness. (Capoeira 2016: 271) Malícia is ultimately about self-knowledge and “knowledge of the true nature of human beings, to see behind people’s social facades” (272). Yet Nestor Capoeira also names a second essential component of malícia: a “joy of living” (272). The joy is essential for coping with the weight of knowing people’s worst characteristics, no matter how well they mask them. The joy is an antidote to the disillusionment that comes from unmasking and encountering the “ugliness” of everyday life. The essence of malícia in the capoeira game, therefore, is play—playfulness and creativity. In this view, capoeira as a practice 193 of philosophy trains its adepts to play with concepts of “good” and “bad,” emulating Exu, and cultivating wisdom in the process. In this context, it is important to note that for many angoleiros capoeira Angola’s ethics do not judge violence as always already “bad” or evil. Values of violence, deception, community, beauty and trust do not necessarily conflict with each other. Mestre Pastinha expressed this sentiment as follows: “Capoeira is a fight, and a violent one. It can kill; it already has killed. Beautiful! In the beauty is contained the violence” (Downey 2005:113 citing Freire). Downey clarifies that Pastinha is not remarking that capoeira is beautiful “in spite of violence,” but that even when violence is “restrained, capoeira remains beautiful to the mestre. The art derives part of its aesthetic appeal from its mortal gravity” (113). It is this “mortal gravity,” the danger and violence inherent in capoeira Angola, that contributes to its ability to function as a practice of ethics. As with Goffman’s (1970) “framework of strategic interaction,” a key component is that participants “are locked in what they perceive as mutual fatefulness” (137). In other words, if the stakes of the game are too low (as in “fun-only” games (144)), the strategy involved ceases to be compelling. In the case of capoeira Angola, without its fundamental violence, it loses not only its beauty but its moral relevance as well. In other words, part of the power of capoeira Angola to function as a practice of ethics comes from the way its foundation contains these seemingly conflicting values at the same time. My argument then is that capoeira Angola practice, in the Angoleiros do Sertão, is essentially philosophical in nature. As an expression of the African matrixes in Brazil, it is also Africana philosophy, in music and motion. At the same time, I approach this chapter as an opportunity to act upon my own ethical relationship to the group. As Mestre 194 Cláudio’s student, visiting his group on fieldwork trips from 2013 through 2017, training with the Angoleiros do Sertão has changed not only my body, but also my understandings of capoeira Angola and how what I have learned can inform my actions in life. When I claim that Cláudio’s project is fundamentally ethical, therefore, I do not ignore the implications this has on my own position as researcher in his group, and on the work I produce as a result of my research. Of the ethical concepts I outline below, the most fundamental in Cláudio’s teaching is that of compromisso, the ongoing commitment required of capoeira Angola practice, and the resulting obligations to the capoeira itself and the broader community. For these reasons, as an experimental response to the moral call I have heard in Cláudio’s teaching, his behavior towards me, and also voiced more explicitly to me by community members, I have attempted to write this chapter with Cláudio’s and his students’ interests foremost in my mind, thereby enacting my own compromisso to Mestre Cláudio and the larger community of angoleiros in Bahia. This means that I have sought to prioritize their questions and concerns, producing a document that I hope will be of value to them, at the very least as a record of Mestre Cláudio’s vision of capoeira Angola, as filtered through my necessarily limited understanding. Capoeira Angola as Africana Philosophy With “Africana philosophy” I refer to a vast body of work concerning African, African American, Black and Afro-Caribbean as well as Afro-Latin American philosophy. Yet while it may seem too broad a category, its philosophers justify the grouping together of such diverse traditions of thought because they recognize core concerns that run through it all. The editors of I Am Because We Are: Readings in 195 Africana Philosophy consider Africana philosophy a tradition extending over five thousand years and including a “rich diversity of texts” (Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016:9). They briefly define the tradition in this way: These texts and the others included [in the volume]—despite their remarkable diversity of origin, style, and of method—constitute a tradition, we suggest, because in them it is made more or less explicit that the fundamental philosophical or intellectual concern is that of the meaning of individual life in community. (9) They recognize, as many Africana philosophers have before and since, the many objections that have been raised to the use of terms such as “black,” “tradition,” “African” and “philosophy.” In response, much ink has been spilled in defense of the very existence of philosophy in Africa and the diaspora (Gyekye 1987; Eze 1997; Coetzee and Roux 2003; Wiredu 2004; Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016). Indeed, perhaps the single most prominent overarching theme throughout all Africana philosophy and discourses is this refutation of the “devaluation and rejection of their truth claims” (Henry 2002: 44; see also Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016). I take up these aspects of Mestre Cláudio’s teaching as a decolonial, anti-racist project in Chapter 4. For now, as I have addressed my own use of the terms black African(a) in the introduction, I depart from the assumption that Africana philosophy exists and its expression takes many forms, one of which is Mestre Cláudio’s teachings in the Angoleiros do Sertão. Mestre Cláudio’s Teaching and Africana Ethics Several core “generative themes” (Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016:15) of African and diasporic moral philosophy emerge in Mestre Cláudio’s teachings. They are “generative” because, rather than claim an essentialist universality, they show how 196 common themes can generate a vast diversity of applications and manifest in different ways. It is with this sense that I have found particularly generative several of the concepts Kwame Gyekye identified as central to African ethical thought in his article “African Ethics” (2011) and as elaborated in An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (1987), and which also recur throughout other writings on Africana philosophy. The four themes that most resonate with Mestre Cláudio’s teachings are character, humanism, communalism and the ethics of duty. First, the concept of character, a person’s morals, is dynamic and rooted in a person’s behavior and actions. Second, African ethics are humanistic: “what is morally good is generally that which promotes social welfare, solidarity, and harmony in human relationships” (Gyekye 1987:132). Third, this extends to communalism, which does not conflict with individualism, but rather understands that the good of each individual depends on the good of the community. Finally, this results in an “ethics of duty” (Gyekye 2011: para 0.3), in which individuals recognize and assume responsibility to each other and to the group, for their own and common good. By bringing Mestre Cláudio’s philosophy in dialogue with African ethics, I show how his thought resonates as Africana moral philosophy. * “The concept of character, suban, is so crucial and is given such a central place in Akan moral language and thought that it may be considered as summing up the whole of morality” (Gyekye 1987: 147). A person’s moral worth, the extent to which they are 197 “good,” can be discerned in their character. Yet it is important to note that “character” can be synonymous with “morals,” and therefore takes on a positive connotation. If someone “has no character,” it means they have no morals, or as we might say in North America, they are a “bad person.” However, the concept of character is also dynamic: “character is acquired. A person is therefore responsible for the state of his or her character, for character results from the habitual actions of a person” (Gyekye 1987:150, my emphasis). Put another way, personhood itself must be achieved, and can therefore be failed at, where becoming a “true person” means becoming “a moral being or bearer of norms” (Menkiti 2004:326). “Character is, thus, a behavior pattern formed as a result of past persistent actions… Consequently, what a person does or does not do is most crucial to the formation and development of his or her character, and, thus, to becoming moral or immoral” (Gyekye 2011: para 3.5). In this way, moral character is directly linked to action and or doing. It is this aspect that the Angoleiros do Sertão emphasize most forcefully in their moral thinking: their contributions come through their habits, behavior and actions in the realm of doing, which Mestre Cláudio and his students contrast with the realm of speech. As Mestre Cláudio said to me, speaking of two university-educated capoeira mestres, they both “speak well.” They know how to speak about the Movimento Negro (the black movement) and politics, but they have no relations to the people and popular movements. For Mestre Cláudio, they are hypocrites because they criticize other capoeira mestres for not knowing how to “speak well,” yet fail to value how these mestres contribute to bettering lives in poor communities. Mestre Cláudio summed up his counter-critique: “It’s easy to become enchanted with the discourse. But you need be enchanted by the 198 practice.” Academics talk all day about fighting racism and helping the poor black population, but what are they doing? An Akan proverb sums it up: “Speech (talk) is one thing, wisdom another.” Gyekye explains, “Words do not constitute wisdom; the good speaker is not necessarily wise. To be wise, that is, a philosopher, requires a certain type of intellectual effort, activity, and approach” (1987:63). As I elaborate throughout the dissertation, the Angoleiros identify the “good” that they do in their “doing,” their activity of practicing and playing capoeira. This attitude is also reflected in Mestre Cláudio’s common pronouncement: “You don’t train capoeira to learn [to play] capoeira Angola; you train in order to become an angoleiro.” Capoeira Angola is not just a skill to learn, not something merely “does” but something one “is”—a lived pattern of habit and behavior. Training capoeira changes people, and they will not learn capoeira Angola unless they are willing to change. Geurts (2003) observed a similar link between bodily movement and morality in Anlo society. She described a direct relationship between kinesthesia (sensing of body movement), bodily comportment and character, or “moral sensibilities” (73-77). Certain ways of moving signified specific moral dispositions: there was a “clear connection, or association, between bodily sensations and who you are or who you become: your character, your moral fortitude is embodied in the way you move, and the way you move embodies an essence of your nature” (76). When Mestre Cláudio urges his students to recognize that they cannot simply learn how to play capoeira Angola, but that to play capoeira Angola they must become angoleiros, he reveals a similar understanding of how bodily training ultimately changes and shapes ethical ways of being. As in African thought, the Angoleiros concept of morality is also “humanistic” or 199 “anthropocentric,” “centring [sic] on the contemporary concerns of human beings, including ancestors (who are always with their kin), rather than on otherworldly considerations” (Appiah 1998: para 2.9). They consider “good” that which promotes “human welfare” and “social well-being” (Gyekye 2011: para 5.7). The humanistic focus of morality as opposed to a religious one (the aim of good action being to better human life, not to please God) is a point of contention among Africana philosophers. Yet authors who argue that Africans are fundamentally religious “fail to understand what makes religion important in African life, namely, the welfare of the individual and that of society” (Bewaji 2004:397). While Brazilian moral concepts are also deeply influenced by various religions, from the African-derived religions, Catholicism, Spiritism and increasingly Evangelical Protestantism, morality within the Angoleiros do Sertão is also human-focused. Candomblé provides a foundational orientation in capoeira Angola, but this should not be understood necessarily as a religious base. In other words, the ethical system of Candomblé, like the African religions Gyekye refers to, also “originates from considerations of human welfare and interests, not from divine pronouncements” (2011: para 5.7). Thus, both capoeira and Candomblé are forms of “moral practice” (para 5.15), emphasizing the importance of ethical action and doing. In sum, “what is good is constituted by the deeds, habits, and behavior patterns considered by the society as worthwhile because of their consequences for human welfare” (para 5.7). “Communalism” is the most broadly recurring theme in Africana philosophy, as reflected in the title of a prominent volume on Africana philosophy I Am Because We Are. The editors of this volume call this concept a “relational conception of reality” that binds individuals to community, but also extends to relations between humans and spirits 200 (Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016:16). Hord et al. chose the title to illustrate the foundational place of the principle in black philosophy, borrowing the phrase from Mbiti’s foundational text on African philosophy. Mbiti identifies it as central to the African world view: “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: ‘I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am’” (Mbiti 1990:106). Menkiti calls this “notion of an extended self” a “beingness-with-others” (2004:324), and Bewaji explains that “community is founded on notions of an intrinsic and enduring relationship among its members” (2004:397). This concept circulates widely among Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil, too, often referenced by the Zulu word ubuntu, which has also received broad scholarly attention and application (Mnyaka 2005; Metz 2011; Sarra and Berman 2017). The power of the concept lies in that it does not oppose individuality and individualism, but connects what is good for an individual with what is good for the community, thus forming the “basis of the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the group” (Gyekye 1987:156). The communalistic concept is particularly well suited for understanding capoeira Angola, and other African diasporic practices, where individual virtuosity and unique expression are understood as essential contributions to participatory practice. In other words, just as in the community there need be “no conceptual tension or opposition between the common good and the good of the individual member” (Gyekye 2011: para 7.2), there need be no tension between individual and group expression, in which practitioners contribute to maintaining the tradition, each with their own unique flair. 201 Lastly, following from a relational, communitarian perspective is an “ethics of duty,” which includes the “ethical values of compassion, solidarity, reciprocity, cooperation, interdependence, and social well-being,” and under which “people fulfill— and ought to fulfill—duties to others not because of the rights of these others, but because of their needs and welfare” (Gyekye 2011: para 9.4). Appiah points out an important difference between Western and African notions of reciprocity. Whereas in the West reciprocity implies giving and receiving back (or receiving and giving back), in African thought this “range of obligations” is “rooted in unchosen relationships to people from whom one has received nothing” (Appiah 1998: para 2.3). In other words, an initial incurrence of debt is not a necessary condition for this form of responsibility. Community members are bound by this code by nature of their membership in the community. Mestre Cláudio explicitly summons a similar ethic through the concept of a compromisso with capoeira. In Portuguese, meanings of compromisso include obligation, promise and commitment. The related verb comprometer(-se) likewise means to commit or engage oneself. Cláudio often expresses this sense by saying, “Capoeira dá, mas ela cobra [Capoeira gives, but she charges],” meaning that with all the benefits practitioners receive from capoeira comes a deeper obligation. So while Cláudio frames compromisso in terms of getting and giving back, it nevertheless transcends a model of debt incurred, paid and cancelled. Where a debt lasts as long as it remains unpaid, one’s compromisso, is ongoing. It shares with the African “ethics of duty” a state of permanence. The concept of compromisso is common in Afro-Brazilian culture, and is often used in Candomblé to express the serious commitment made by initiates and other practitioners. Yet another interesting aspect of compromisso is to whom or what 202 practitioners are obligated. Individuals in leadership positions, such as capoeira mestres and the heads of Candomblé “houses” or places of worship, all make demands of loyalty and service. However, when Mestre Cláudio reminds his students that “capoeira gives but she charges,” he is framing the commitment to capoeira itself. Indeed, I have translated the Portuguese pronoun “ela” as “she” rather than “it” precisely because Cláudio seems to evoke capoeira as an “entity,” a being in herself, with the agency to make demands. While capoeira is not an orixá, a common topic of discussion at Angoleiros do Sertão events is whether capoeira is indeed some kind of “entity” (entidade), a term used to describe orixás and other non-human spirit beings. While I do not believe Cláudio considers capoeira an entity, some of his students do. However, his commitment to capoeira still resembles a Candomblé initiate’s devotion to her protecting orixá, as one story illustrates. Once Cláudio was visiting with a mãe de santo. His mother had been deeply involved in Candomblé and Cláudio had even lived with her for several years in a terreiro, a Candomblé house. He also grew up drumming in Candomblé ceremonies, so he had likely consulted with a mãe de santo before. This time she charged him with some kind of task, probably to make an offering to his protecting orixá. But Cláudio defiantly refused. He told her that he has only one compromisso in his life, and it is with capoeira. Consequences can be dire for those who fail to fulfill their commitments in Candomblé. However, by refusing to take on the responsibility, Cláudio was not so much avoiding an obligation as he was reaffirming his unending and all-encompassing commitment to capoeira Angola. 203 As has perhaps become apparent, the four themes I identified are deeply interrelated. Moral character or personhood is connected to doing good for other humans and for the community. Acting upon these obligations to community in turn is what defines one’s individual character. It is within this frame that I understand the Angoleiros do Sertão as a project of Afro-Brazilian philosophy that resonates with other philosophies of the African diaspora. I now turn to examine how Mestre Cláudio and the Angoleiros do Sertão practice their ethics through their actions and behavior in the capoeira roda, through capoeira play, and how they reflect upon and analyze their practice in philosophical terms. Angoleiro Ethics in Action Jogo Bonito: Ethics and Aesthetics of an Ideal Game The debate over right and wrong is the ethical system of capoeira. Let’s say there’s a “closed” [tight, close proximity] game going on, a contra-mestre and a good [advanced] student, who can handle the game, and—BOOM!—the contra-mestre gives the first blow, the student responds—TOOM!—this is one case. Then there’s the inversion: there’s a hard game, and the student gives the first blow—TOOM! There’s the right way and the wrong way. So we’re always discussing what happened. This is the ethical discussion in capoeira. (Afonso, interview) Afonso, a member of the Angoleiros do Sertão from the interior of São Paulo, was talking about the capoeira community as “an ethical organization,” a view commonly held by capoeira practitioners (Barbosa 2005b; Fuggle 2008). In his hypothetical example, he gave two simplified scenarios: In the first, the player with the most authority and training gives the first blow, and the student answers in kind, in response to the attack. In the second case, the student initiates the more aggressive play by first hitting the player with more experience and authority. Was the student wrong to hit the contra- 204 mestre, because it disrespected the contra-mestre’s authority? Or was the contra-mestre wrong to hit the student, knowing that she did not possess the skill to defend herself against it? Was the student’s blow in response sanctioned because the contra-mestre had initiated the harder play? When considering such situations, players’ individual personalities, playing styles and histories also factor in. There are no simple answers. Afonso went on to explain, “Mestre [Cláudio] always says, if you want to play hard, search for someone who has your condition [equal ability]. Don't play this way with someone who doesn't have the condition. So this is an ethical value. You can do a hard game, but do it with someone else who can too.” According to Afonso, Mestre Cláudio would likely say the contra-mestre should not have hit the student in the first place. As a hypothetical situation, there are too many unknowns to determine who, if anyone, would be at fault, but it reveals how games—both real and hypothetical—provide the fodder for ethical analysis. Games are the moments when angoleiros put into action everything they have trained and learned, and they are therefore the subject of scrutiny. When angoleiros discuss and analyze games, judging the actions and responses of the players given the specifics of each situation, they engage in “ethical discussion,” or moral philosophizing. Through their analyses, they seek to “explain, clarify, refine, sharpen, or enlarge the understanding” of what constitutes the ideal way of playing and the ideal game. Yet, while most angoleiros agree on general principles, such as upholding the tradition and valuing cunning over brute force, they tend to diverge greatly when seeking to clarify what these principles look like in practice. Here I present several key components of Mestre Cláudio’s understanding of an ideal game, a jogo bonito (beautiful game). Appiah identified another salient feature of African ethics: “there is often no clear 205 distinction between moral vocabulary and aesthetic or technical commendations” (1998: para 2.7). Bewaji also noted how in Yoruba thought what is ethical is also deemed beautiful (2004:398), and Nzegwu also found that true beauty is not superficial, but rather functions as “a vital glue for social cohesion,” where in other words “the socially approved notion of beauty has a moral basis” (2004:419). In capoeira Angola, too, the uses of the term “beautiful” to describe an ethical game and “ugly” (feio) to describe unethical movements or games, reflect a similar alignment of moral with aesthetic values.42 In Mestre Cláudio’s teaching, aesthetic values (referring to physical movement quality) often remain tacit, while ethical values are stated in more explicit terms, but I will show how they intersect and feed into one another. Also important to note is that Mestre Cláudio’s insistence on achieving beautiful capoeira is directly related to his project of defending capoeira Angola against its continued stigmatization in Brazil, as an activity for criminals or vagabonds. (While the social status of middle and upper class white practitioners protects them from the stigma, it can be intensified for poor and working class black practitioners.) One main purpose of Mestre Cláudio’s public roda every Saturday, therefore, is to demonstrate to the world capoeira Angola’s value and beauty as black popular culture. Beautiful or good capoeira, therefore, requires both physical skill and ethical judgment. For example, after one Saturday roda Mestre Cláudio was talking about one of his most advanced students. From a movement-quality perspective, this student moves exceptionally beautifully. He moves with grace and control, performing virtuosic movements with strength and fluidity. In a handstand position he can lift and lower his 42 This language is also used more broadly in Brazil, where the word “ugly” is often describes a serious lapse of manners. For example, leaving a party without saying goodbye to the hosts could be called “ugly.” 206 body, balancing his torso on one elbow and pushing up onto his hands, seemingly without effort. The student is also extremely powerful, meaning that his attacks have a deadly force. Mestre Cláudio was upset after this particular roda because he felt the student had not held back enough in one of his games. He was concerned that the student might seriously injure someone. He said there was “no reason, no necessity” for such a game, when the student knew he was playing people with a lower level, who did not have the skill to avoid such a rapid attack, if it were misplaced. (In the game he referred to, the advanced student had thrown explosive circular kicks within a hair of the other player’s face. This is a common occurrence in the group, and I had not noticed anything unusual about this game.) Mestre Cláudio said, “When you’re playing with someone you know is far below your level, it’s just ugly, it’s unnecessary!” He went on, imagining a situation in which you were playing with a stranger: as soon as you saw that they played at a lower level, you should adjust your play to their ability. You would not continue to attack them once you saw they could not defend themselves. However, in this case, the student knew his playing partner very well and knew the person had a lower ability. There was no excuse to play so aggressively. Recalling the game, I remarked to Cláudio that the lower- level student had seemed to enjoy himself. He had seemed challenged, but had laughed and smiled throughout the game. Mestre Cláudio responded with irritation in his voice that this was because the less-experienced student had no idea the danger he had been in. Neither had I. What had appeared to me as a friendly game, which had elements of flow if also some more heated moments, was ugly in the mestre’s eyes because it had violated the ethic of protecting one’s partner from harm. In this instance, the student’s play was ugly not because of its movement 207 quality—he did not lose control of his movements, or move without grace and flow—but because it contained unethical, “unnecessary” violence or aggression. This raises two questions. What makes a game beautiful/ethical? And when would such aggression be “necessary” or at least sanctioned, not unnecessary? As to the first question, to play capoeira Angola beautifully, according to Mestre Cláudio, players must “prioritize the game.” In essence, this means prioritizing the cooperation and coordination of the players, over the desires or motives of individual players. The most common way practitioners express this ideal game, often called a jogo bonito, is to describe capoeira as a kind of conversation (Barbosa 2005; Miranda 2012). Like jazz improvisers, capoeira players talk about their musical exchanges as “dialogue,” listening to (and watching) and responding to one another (Monson 1997:77- 80), and this communication forms the essence of what happens during a game. When it goes well, there is “interaction, partnership and dialogue” (Barbosa 2005b:84). In The Little Capoeira Book ([1981]2003), Nestor Capoeira describes capoeira as a “corporal dialogue” in terms similar to the way I have heard countless mestres speak: “It is a dialogue made up not of words but rather of movements—exploratory movements, attack movements, defense movements, deceitful movements—questions and answers in the mysterious language of capoeira” (27). What are the specific elements that comprise this conversation? Individual movements are “learned, in-body formulas” (Drewal 1992:7) that can be likened to vocabulary or words that are combined to form phrases or sentences (Almeida 1986:153). Basic pairings usually consist of attack (question), usually a kick, and defense (answer), an evasive movement. A classic training sequence illustrates this question and response: 208 player A gives a rabo de arraia (low circular kick with hands on the ground) and player B responds with negativa, an “escape” where the player descends sideways to the floor, supporting their body with hands and feet only; player B then gives rabo de arraia and player A responds with negativa, and so on. In the context of a game, the questions and responses become more complicated, as player B not only responds but simultaneously prepares another contrasting question. Ideally, a player performs every move as a preparation for the next one, which requires thinking and eventually seeing ahead. Just as in chess, where master-players make moves anticipating their opponent’s counter-plays many moves into the future, a seasoned angoleiro moves while seeing into the future, akin to Mestre Acordeon’s “playing with the crystal ball” (Almeida 1986:148)). When instructing his students about movement quality, Mestre Cláudio often emphasizes this cognitive aspect of play, using terms strikingly similar to those used in rhetoric and to the ways Goffman (1970) described “strategic interaction”: students must use “intelligent” movements that “make sense” (fazer sentido) and “convince” (convencer) the other player. Similar to jazz musicians’ ideal of “saying something” (Monson 1997), every “question” must make sense so that the other player can formulate an appropriate response. As players get more advanced, a question might be a mere gesture rather than a complete movement. If the gesture is convincing, the receiving player will understand the implied move, believe it might come, and respond accordingly. This happens when Mestre João Grande, one of the oldest and most venerated living mestres of capoeira Angola, plays with less experienced players. While he has lost much of his agility and range of motion due to his advanced age, I have seen him cause opponents to fall suddenly to the ground in response to a simple jerk of his hip. They 209 believed so surely his kick was coming that they threw themselves down to avoid a kick that he probably had no intention of throwing, let alone the physical capacity of completing. In games between two mestres playing at this level, something different happens. These games often have extended moments, sometimes the entire game, where it seems as if the mestres are doing very little. They gesture toward movements, rarely completing them, because the other responds so rapidly with an equally convincing move. This almost hidden bodily dialogue happens with such speed and subtlety that there is no need to finish sentences or phrases. The meaning of their gestures is so clear that it renders completion unnecessary, they have already moved on. Clearly, as in conversation and jazz improvisation, such exchanges may result in interruption and conflict rather than beautiful playing (Monson 1997:80). There is a difference between efficient communication (finishing one another’s sentences or reading one another’s minds), and cutting each other off. As in conversation, “this talking of the body transforms itself into a monologue when the capoeira roda is used only to demonstrate one’s bodily agility and the domination of one player over the other” (Barbosa 2005b:84). When players focus too much on “getting” each other, reaching for leg sweeps (rasteiras) they cannot achieve or kicking more directly at the other’s face, this provokes overly defensive or closed playing, blocking or avoiding attacks rather than engaging and responding to them. This kind of play sacrifices the malícia, the subtle cunning, and the “sense of the game” (sentido do jogo)—and the game turns ugly. When Mestre Cláudio does refer directly to movement quality, he says that movements must have “expression” and “spirit” (espírito). As these terms could be interpreted in a variety of ways, it was not immediately clear to me what he meant. 210 However, Cláudio expects his students to learn through observation, not through asking questions for verbal clarification. (He often expressed frustration, complaining that students seem to expect him to “open up their heads and put capoeira inside,” and he made a slicing motion with his hand as if he were chopping open a coconut with a machete. He reminded us how he learned capoeira without a mestre. How did he do it? “You have to seek it out! you have to observe!”) During a class warm-up exercise, he provided an opportunity for observing what kind of movement quality he wants. He had us skipping sideways around the classroom in a big circle. When he gave a verbal signal, yelling out, “Switch!” we had to switch sides while still moving in the same direction, turning our bodies but continuing the circular progression. He stopped us to chastise us. Imitating us, he showed how we switched with halting, jerking motions, stopping then re- starting. No! He wanted us to “move like angoleiros,” and he demonstrated a smooth, anticipated switch. This was key to the art of the angoleiro: you must be able to move in instant reaction to a movement as if you knew it were coming. An angoleiro may be taken by surprise, but they will never betray the surprise in their body. Instead they transition smoothly and rapidly, switching movements often mid-move, as if they had planned it that way all along. This moment demonstrated how controlled and fluid movement qualities formed part of the fundamental angoleiro aesthetic, and how they also were intimately connected to the intelligence and sense of the movements. Returning to my second question above, when aggression might be “necessary” or not unnecessary, I propose two general answers. Mestre Cláudio actually prefers the harder kind of game (pegado), as long as it does not lose “the art of capoeira,” its sense and beauty—as long as it remains ethical. Harder play does not preclude beauty. 211 However, the force of the attack must remain fair. An advanced player can play aggressively with a younger player, perhaps to challenge them, but should not put them at risk of serious injury. In a different situation, a hard or even violent blow may be deemed necessary, if in response to equally hard blows or provocation, or in self-defense. One story in group lore tells about a time years ago when a capoeira Angola group was visiting Feira de Santana from Rio de Janeiro. Mestre Cláudio had warned his students to be on their best behavior and play with respect. However, when it became clear that the Rio group was there to test to abilities of the Angoleiros do Sertão, Mestre Cláudio signaled to his most violent students that they no longer needed to hold back. Group members that were present can still recount the ensuing fights blow by blow, recalling a full cabeçada (head-butt) that sent someone flying out of the ring. Yet even in this case, though the games were “hard,” they were still good (though perhaps not bonito) because they kept the play going and still maintained an ethical orientation. In another situation, if defending against excessive violence would result in the game degenerating into an all- out brawl, this would cease to be capoeira Angola and it would end the roda. In such a case, a good angoleiro ends the game by moving back to the foot of the berimbau, extending their hand and leaving the roda. In sum, resorting to “ugly” play means relinquishing the constellation of ethical and aesthetic values contained in the concept of “beauty”: movements that “make sense” and enable a flowing, “intelligent” conversation, where players challenge each other without putting each other at excessive risk of harm. Put another way, the ideal game facilitates a playful corporeal communication and the joy and elation it brings, which in turn serve to join and cohere community. Malícia and malandragem form part of this aesthetic, 212 because without the risk of being outsmarted or swept to the ground (the “payoff” or “mutual fatefulness” of Goffman (1970:137)), there would be no game and not wisdom gained, no “serious and efficacious” play (Drewal 1992:1), and no serious fun. Rather than mistrust, the game requires a fundamental openness and trust, without which there could be no game—only a contest or fight.43 In his lecture on Candomblé, at a yearly event of the Angoleiros do Sertão in São Paulo state, Contra-Mestre Zara lamented that some people think of Exu as a “very bad figure,” when in fact he is the one who connects our world with the spiritual world. While he can hinder communications, he can also facilitate them. Understanding this, he urged us not to think of Exu as either “bad” or “good.” In Candomblé, Zara explained, the question of “good” and “bad” is like a two-way street: The point is, good and bad don’t exist. You’re all of this! You can choose to do good, you can choose to do bad! What Candomblé will give you is balance. It will say to you, you have these possibilities, these various paths. This one is a great path, if you want to follow it. It’s difficult!... All religions give paths, but this one leaves me more conscious that there doesn’t exist one unique vision of the world. There are various ways of thinking, and they should be brought together. Like Candomblé, capoeira Angola provides tools for achieving balance and making choices. Some practitioners like to play hard games, following through with attacks, head-butting opponents out of the ring. I’ve received black eyes from these kinds of players.44 Yet others strive to make their partner laugh in a game, aiming for maximum fun. I have learned much from playing both kinds of games. The embodied ethical play of 43 I thank Mestre René for clarifying this for me in a workshop. 44 In Salvador I found capoeira Angola schools with a vast range of ethics. In some schools any kind of aggression is strictly forbidden and grounds for halting a game or throwing a player out of the roda. In others, students regularly receive broken ribs and bruises as part of training, because they want to be able to use capoeira as a fight if necessary. However, in all of these schools, the mestres and students declare that they value a beautiful, conversational game full of malícia and malandragem. However, these games look very different in each place. 213 capoeira Angola, therefore, does not so much teach practitioners what is right and what is wrong, as it provides them with the consciousness for choosing and creating their own “vision of the world” and the awareness of other people’s visions and choices. One historic game, perhaps more than any other in the lore of the Angoleiros do Sertão, shows how Mestre Cláudio put his Angoleiro ethics into play in a game with Mestre Jogo de Dentro at the 2012 Capoeirando meeting. This game continues to provoke discussion in capoeira Angola communities to the present day. Jogo de Mestres: The ethics of rasteira Capoeirando is an enormous capoeira event that gathers hundreds of capoeiristas of all abilities and styles, from all over the world, in the beachside town of Ilheus in southern Bahia. Founded by two of the most influential mestres of capoeira Regional Mestres Suassuna and Gato, in 1994, it has grown into an international festival (“Capoeirando Ilhéus”). While the event centers capoeira Regional (or “contemporary” capoeira), like many similar events it also invites mestres of capoeira Angola to give workshops and participate. According to a YouTube post, this “Capoeira Angola roda formed spontaneously with the arrival of several great mestres” (Capoeira Inspiration 2014). At least a hundred people were gathered around the edge of the roda, eager to witness great games between the mestres. While such games often remain polite and uneventful, they can also involve subtle or not-so-subtle testing of each other’s skill and even temper. They inevitably involve a play of egos, where mestres may feel they must defend their titles or compete to demonstrate capoeira at its best. While I was not present at the roda, I learned of the 214 game from hearing Mestre Cláudio and his students refer to and discuss it on numerous occasions. I have written a performative description of the game based on watching YouTube videos filmed from two different angles (Capoeira Senzala Toulouse Familia 2014; Capoeira Inspiration 2014; Miyamura 2012). (Watching, re-watching, and pausing the videos facilitates a kind of close viewing that enables me to provide this description. However, being present at the game would have provided access to other kinds of information, perhaps less precise in detail, but more accurate in sensing the energy in the space.) One video contained several games leading up to the game between Mestre Cláudio and Mestre Jogo de Dentro. At the far edge of the roda, across from the camera, I could see Mestre Cláudio standing, fully focused on the game before him, watching and waiting his turn, occasionally rubbing his hands and swaying with the movements and music. Mestre Cláudio has been playing with Mestre Cobrinha when Mestre Jogo de Dentro enters the roda, signaling he wishes to “buy” the game. Cláudio and Cobrinha embrace, and Jogo and Cláudio meet at the foot of the berimbau. The game starts easy and smooth, but soon some tension enters the ring. Jogo steps between Cláudio’s extended legs and gives him a cabeçada, and Cláudio swipes at Jogo’s neck or face in defense (the view blocked by the camera angle). The crowd responds, “Ohhh!” and Jogo spins away in defense. They each seem to be reaching their kicks closer to each other’s faces, but keeping arms up in protection and jumping away in time. About a minute into the game, Jogo de Dentro calls the first chamada of the game, turning his back to Cláudio and extending his arms out to the side. 215 Chamada is a corporeal “call” that comprises a series of semi-choreographed gestures and responses. One player interrupts play to “call” the opponent, usually by reaching one or both arms outstretched. The called player responds by approaching the caller, and meeting hand to hand, or hand to shoulder, depending on the form of chamada. Bodies touching in this way, they then walk several steps back, several steps forward, until the caller gestures to resume regular play. Cláudio takes his time, but finally enters the chamada to Jogo’s left side, raising his arms to meet Jogo’s and standing behind him (Fig. 2.1), and they walk in parallel. As the caller of the chamada, Jogo leads the walk, and Cláudio matches his steps. Both step back with their left feet, then with their right (Fig. 2.2). As they start to transition forward, Cláudio switches his feet to mirror Jogo: so now, as Jogo’s left foot goes forward, Cláudio steps with his right (Fig. 2.3). On the next step, Cláudio hops on his right foot once (Fig. 2.4-2.5), and steps forward with his left earlier than Jogo (Fig. 2.6- 2.7). As Jogo steps forward with his left foot, Cláudio’s right foot sweeps under Jogo’s left foot before he can set it down, stealing his balance (Fig. 2.8-2.11). Jogo falls backward (Fig. 2.12), catching his fall with one hand, and Cláudio moves aside to let him fall, hands out in protection — the crowd cheers! Delivering a perfect rasteira, or leg sweep, must be one of the most gratifying experiences in capoeira, which can only be augmented when delivering it against a renowned mestre. Witnessing it also provides a high dose of adrenaline and pleasure, even in a video. Audience members present must have experienced a range of emotions, from triumph to surprise to enjoyment to indignation. But without a doubt, all present felt a surge of energy through their bodies as Mestre Jogo stumbled backwards. One mestre 216 bringing another mestre (nearly) to the ground is an event. Afterwards would come the discussions, analysis, and arguing about ethics and technique. For the moment, all eyes focused on the game. Jogo de Dentro gets back on his feet in an instant and almost immediately calls another chamada, as if to say, “Fool me once…!” Cláudio wags his finger and enters the chamada again, over-cautiously blocking the back of Jogo’s knee, seeming to protect himself against a revenge-rasteira from Jogo. Play resumes after the uneventful chamada ends. Soon Jogo flicks a kick at Cláudio’s face. I cannot see if the kick made contact with his face, and even with a clear view it is always hard to judge, but Cláudio jerks his head away quickly and touches his cheek, a gesture that usually means one was hit or that it came very close. Jogo raises his shoulders as if to say, “That’s what you get…!” And touches his foot with his hand. They walk around the roda and resume play. The play seems more cautious. Upsetting Jogo’s physical balance, Cláudio has also disturbed his emotional balance, nicking his pride. In return, Cláudio received a quick kick in the face. The stakes have risen. Among mestres and more advanced players, often when tensions rise the game slows down. The mestres remain in control, seeming to heighten their caution and awareness, ready for the next attack. In a way the game has gotten more serious, but the heightened tension also makes it more fun to watch. Jogo gives Cláudio a cabeçada (head-butt), as if shoving him away, perhaps irritated by his close, crowding play. Cláudio calls another chamada, also back-facing. Jogo enters and Cláudio steps back to start the walk. They step back in sync, at a slow, methodical pace. Then Cláudio quickly and lightly adjusts his position and steps forward, 217 but at a faster pace than Jogo. They step: one — two — and on three Cláudio sweeps Jogo’s foot as he steps forward before it can touch the ground. Jogo falls again! Backwards, catching himself with his hands, he quickly pivots to standing. Another swell of cries from the crowd and I think I can hear some rumbling, commenting. Another perfectly executed rasteira! Play resumes again, and Cláudio calls another chamada. This time facing front, right arm raised. Jogo enters and within seconds Cláudio has brought him to the ground again, a third time! Jogo de Dentro must be experiencing emotions in the range of annoyance, embarrassment, perhaps even anger or shame. But his outward appearance remains cool, as one would hope from a mestre. Cláudio gives him a fourth rasteira, during regular play, as he is transitioning in a move, sweeping both legs and just moving them aside. Jogo lands on the floor again, his rear end hitting the floor, and he gets up shaking his head. He does not approve. Finally, Jogo finds an opening for one forceful cabeçada that sends Cláudio jumping back to the edge of the roda. The crowd cries out again. Perhaps this cabeçada communicated something in the vein of, “I could do more of this and worse if I were as undisciplined (maleducado) as you are!” Shortly afterward, they embrace and end the game. Analyzing a game of capoeira Angola is like interpreting an overheard conversation: the better you know the context and the people involved, the more you will understand. But you can never know for certain what they are thinking. As one YouTube commenter put it, “Only whoever knows what went down before this can judge” (Generoso 2017). Not knowing whether the mestres had any previous conflicts makes it harder to evaluate their behavior. Was Mestre Cláudio settling an older dispute? In my 218 reading, I draw on my experiences with Mestre Cláudio and with capoeira Angola, and his comments about the game. I offer my ethical analysis, which will overlap with and diverge from the interpretations of others. I do not know Mestre Jogo de Dentro well, but during a class I took with him at a workshop, he explained that the fundamental movements he was passing to us were meant to build “resistência, equilíbrio e controle” (resistance as physical strength, balance and control). He had us train aús (cartwheels) and banaeiras (handstands) descending into headstand; balancing on one leg, giving a chapa (flat-footed kick) to the front and back repeatedly, pushing through the burn in the standing foot. At the end of the class, as mestres often do, he gathered us and spoke about the importance of playing a “jogo educado,” a polite game with good manners. He talked about how the game should start slow and smooth, as you warm up your body and allow each other to play, and as you evaluate your opponent. Only further into the game you might choose to increase speed or play harder, try to get your opponent, but always with educação, refinement. He said that virtuosic or acrobatic movements were fine, if you wanted to use them, but they were not necessary. I felt he was describing a mature way of playing that emphasized elegance and simplicity. I believe this is the game he demonstrated at Capoeirando. In light of this glimpse of Jogo de Dentro’s philosophy, perhaps what did not happen in his game with Mestre Cláudio says just as much as what did happen. Jogo’s control and relative cool models a masterful maturity. As Mestre Cláudio repeatedly brought Mestre Jogo de Dentro to the floor, he could have chosen to retaliate, to escalate the fight and attack back. I have seen games turn into violent confrontations over much smaller offenses than the rasteiras Cláudio gave Jogo de Dentro. He stuck to his ideals, 219 and he would not be nudged to let go of them. Was he upset? Humiliated? Angry? Vengeful? It is very hard to say just from watching the video. As Cláudio seemed intent on provoking a reaction, perhaps even a fight, a few of Jogo’s kicks and expressions betrayed a sense of disapproval or irritation, but overall he remained calm. The emotional and physical control this takes should not be underestimated. One YouTube viewer posted, “You can see in mestre jogo de dentro’s game that he wanted to develop the game.. he didn’t return the rasteiras because he didn’t want to.. […] this is being a mestre, having humility [sic]” (Lima 2017). Mestre Cláudio’s game also displayed his philosophy and mastery. He attacked, but without rancor, and he remained equally cool, though much more playful. When Cláudio has discussed the game, he explained that his rasteiras were a valid response to Jogo de Dentro’s initiating aggression by kicking his face. (Responding with rasteiras could even be seen as a moral high road, because rasteiras require more malícia than direct kicks, and when completed well, rasteiras cause less physical pain.) If Jogo had not first kicked him, Mestre Cláudio would not have completed the rasteiras, but would only have demonstrated them. Completing a rasteira without provocation is ugly, “unnecessary” (desnecessário)—unethical. Furthermore, Cláudio emphasized, rasteiras and other forms of attack should only be used against players who you know can defend themselves. Mestre Cláudio also demonstrated his technical and aesthetic mastery with his artful rasteiras. What Cláudio made seem effortless and natural is extremely difficult and truly virtuosic. He also performed rasteiras from three different positions in the chamada. So this was not a lack of imagination, performing the same move three times. Rather, it was a brilliant demonstration of “repetition with a difference” (Gates Jr. 1988:xxii), an 220 ingenious improvised signifying on the rasteira-in-a-chamada. Performing this close reading of the game only increases my appreciation of Mestre Cláudio’s perfect timing of a technique that uses principles of physics to bring down an opponent, using leverage rather than force. Cláudio’s success begs the question, how did Jogo de Dentro allow them to happen? The first one may have taken him by surprise, but after that Jogo had been warned. How is it possible he was not more on his guard? This is the biggest mystery of the game. Had Cláudio really found a true Achilles heel? Cláudio teaches that chamada as a “trap,” but one that you knowingly walk into. Why wasn’t Jogo on full alert the subsequent times he entered the chamada, especially after the first rasteira? When practicing rasteiras, I have experienced how knowing a rasteira is coming makes it much harder to execute. Sometimes we even train with our eyes closed to fake the state of not knowing. But after the first one, how did Jogo de Dentro not know it was coming? Did he not believe Cláudio would try it again? When Mestre Cláudio refers to the game, it is often in the context of discussing “tradition” in capoeira Angola, refuting certain mestres’ claims of holding the most authentic version of the tradition. Mestre Jogo de Dentro, Cláudio says, tells everyone that Mestre João Pequeno (Jogo’s mestre) taught the rule: whoever enters (answers) the chamada, cannot give a rasteira. This would mean that only the one who initiates the chamada is allowed to give a rasteira. But, Mestre Cláudio argues, if that is true, why did Mestre João Pequeno also teach us to take a step back, widening our legs, when we turn our back to call a chamada? (Jogo de Dentro illustrates this wide-legged stance in Fig. 2.1). The reason we widen our stance is to defend against a possible rasteira from the 221 approaching player. Why do I need to position myself defensively if the person entering the chamada “cannot” give me a rasteira? Debates about “tradition” in capoeira Angola are almost always about more than the tradition itself. In this case, Mestre Jogo de Dentro is a mestre from the lineage of Mestre Pastinha, because Jogo de Dentro learned capoeira with one of Pastinha’s two principle students, Mestre João Pequeno. Pastinha’s lineage has become hegemonic in the capoeira world, and in recent years mestres who learned from other teachers have begun to speak out against its hegemony as it threatens to erase the diverse contributions of other mestres (Magalhães 2012:156-178). Mestre Cláudio is one of these voices, arguing for recognition as a mestre from the interior who learned capoeira “on the streets.” As he tells it, he learned from studying, watching and training with various mestres, even citing João Pequeno as one of his most important teachers. However, he was not “formed” as a mestre by another mestre. He became a mestre the same way that mestres in the past earned their status, by unanimous opinion of community members, including figures like João Pequeno, who called him “Mestre” Cláudio out of recognition for his mastery of capoeira Angola and his distinctive style. This means that the game between Jogo de Dentro and Cláudio was also a game between representatives not only of two different lineages, but two contrasting understandings of “tradition” in capoeira Angola—and two contrasting philosophies. Mestre Cláudio was “saying” quite a lot, therefore, with his rasteiras. He knew the event of Capoeirando was a highly public platform, he used it to assert not only his definition of tradition, but his mastery of its techniques, aesthetics and ethics. The game also serves as a forceful illustration of how the chamada distills the 222 essence of capoeira play. Greg Downey (2005) examines chamada in depth in a chapter of his book also for this reason. He quotes Mestre Cúrio describing the fundamental quality of the chamada: “The chamada is the philosophy of the angoleiro; it is the malícia (cunning) of the angoleiro…. Because the violence of the angoleiro is not in giving a leg sweep, or in a kick, or in a punch—the cunning of the angoleiro is really in the chamadas” (107, citing Vieira). As a moment of suspension of the question and answer form, the chamada “increases the drama and tension of the game” (Downey 2005:105, 110) due to the close proximity and bodily contact between players (see also Lewis 1992:120-126). The calling player increases their openness and vulnerability (Downey 2005:110) because they usually stand fully upright, with open arms, leaving their head and torso, the most important areas of the body, exposed. In certain chamadas they even turn their back to their opponent. For these reasons, the chamada serves as a distillation of the capoeira game, “a concentrated forum to play out the tension between contradictory elements, like conflict and cooperation, that animate the art” (Downey 2005:111). Downey, who studied with Mestre Moraes, a student of Mestre João Grande (João Pequeno’s contemporary and counterpart, the two famous students of Pastinha), learned that during a chamada, “At any time, either player may suddenly break the sequence with a surprise attack” (105), in contrast to Jogo de Dentro’s supposed “rule” that the called player cannot attack. Downey further notes: For the chamada to be executed well, a player need not follow a predetermined script. In fact, a chamada is made to be broken…. either with a sudden surprise attack or with a breach in conventional patterns (107) … The chamada then really has no ‘rules’; to suggest this fundamentally misses the point that the players who most faithfully follow the basic model are invariably the least experienced ones. (108) 223 As Mestre Jogo de Dentro by no means falls into the category of inexperienced player, there must be other explanations for why he fell repeatedly into Mestre Cláudio’s artful traps. Perhaps the game demonstrates Mestre Cláudio’s mandinga: did he exert some kind of magical force over Jogo de Dentro? Yet I have not heard anyone discuss the game in these terms. Perhaps more at issue here is a conflict and contrast between value systems (under the guise of “tradition”). Jogo de Dentro did not necessarily display naïveté by falling in the chamadas, but he revealed his ethical principles, as if to say: “I come from a tradition of well-mannered capoeira, in which we behave like this. I trust you will not disrespect me again.” To which Mestre Cláudio responded, “With all due respect to your tradition, why do you continue to prize it so highly if it does not provide you with ways to defend yourself in the moments you most urgently need them?” YouTube comments reflect a range of reactions, from admiration to indignation. Many viewers expressed gratitude, joy and respect, praising both mestres as “great,” noting Cláudio’s skill with the rasteiras and Jogo’s cool, as well as his justified cabeçada of retaliation. Several comments expressed strong disapproval of Mestre Cláudio’s game, claiming that it lacked basic skill and respect for the other mestre, especially because he had not called the first chamada. Much discussion focused on the fact that Cláudio gave rasteiras during a chamada, and the responses reveal the complexity of the issue. Several commenters expressed the relative nature of “rules,” noting that the game show the necessity of preparing for moves even when they are not done, or considered unethical, in one’s home group. To these viewers, Cláudio’s game did not violate tradition or disrespect the other mestre. To the contrary, it was an example of mandinga and malandragem, and therefore bonito. 224 Mestre Cláudio and members of his group continue to discuss this game, though it happened more than five years ago, I believe because it touches upon broad ethical debates in the capoeira Angola community. The game has significance not only for Mestre Cláudio’s individual reputation as a mestre, but also as it plays out a meeting of divergent embodied philosophies. In this game, each mestre argues forcefully for—and “says something” about—his ethics of capoeira Angola, which he in turn uses as teaching material in future discussions and analyses. Saturdays: Community and the povo negro Africana philosophers have argued that contemporary philosophy ought to play a direct role in contributing to bettering human life and society (Gyekye 1987, 2011), recognizing the Africana “tradition of doing philosophy that engages the world in order to change it” (Hord, Okpara, and Lee 2016:17). Mestre Cláudio’s Angoleiro ethics likewise take an engaged and activist approach. Included in Cláudio’s and his students’ compromisso to capoeira, is a commitment to advocating for the valorization of Afro- Brazilian culture and lives. The group’s most important embodiment of this commitment—its moment of action—is their weekly Saturday morning roda of capoeira Angola followed by samba de roda, participatory drumming, singing and dancing. Capoeira and samba are cultura popular, the culture of the povo negro, the Afro-Brazilian people—Mestre Cláudio’s culture. He has devoted his life to celebrating and sustaining it, with his efforts culminating in the Saturday morning roda on the streets of Feira de Santana. The roda is his offering to his povo, the people of his rural Afro-Brazilian community. 225 To understand the significance of this roda first requires understanding what the Angoleiros are “saying” on the street every Saturday through their sonic “corporeal orature,” the language of their moving, sounding bodies (DeFrantz 2004). This language is a vernacular of the region, audible and legible to roda spectators as well as passers-by. Karine explained, Everyone who sees a roda of capoeira sees it as a black thing [coisa de negro]. A black thing [coisa de preto]. It is a black space, black territory. And so it brings [with it] the black culture of resistance […] If you go to Feira de Santana on Saturday, and see them playing there, you know it is a black thing, even though there are more white people playing than black! Everyone knows it’s a black thing. The Evangelicals, the Christians, the Catholics that walk by, they cross themselves, they cross to the other side of the street, because it reminds them of Candomblé.45 The drum beats remind them of Candomblé. They reject it. Capoeira today has changed a lot, but there still exists a huge prejudice against capoeira practitioners, especially capoeira Angola […] So this is what people perceive, even if they are not able to translate it into words, the people know that there exists a very strong relationship with Candomblé. When Karine spoke of “everyone” she was referring to Brazilians, especially Bahians. For them, the sounds of drums evoke Candomblé and mark the space as black, regardless of the presence of white bodies. The sounds supersede the racial identification of the practitioners. She explained how, at least in Bahia, “everyone has an uncle or a grandfather who was in Candomblé.” Yet often people avoid openly declaring their proximity or knowledge of Candomblé because it remains so stigmatized, but “everyone knows the signs, the people know the sounds.” As I discussed in Chapter 1, the three practices of capoeira, Candomblé and samba are linked in the everyday experience of the Bahia people. The sound of the atabaque in the roda of capoeira evokes the atabaques of 45 Many a Saturday I witnessed Evangelical groups stationed by the roda with placards warning against those who choose a path other than “the Lord’s.” I believe their choice of time and place was intentional, and that they likely saw their work as countering the diabolical presence the Angoleiros. 226 Candomblé, and Mestre Cláudio’s samba de roda draws directly from the toques of the Candomblé samba. Unequivocally legible as a black space, the roda is therefore also a politically resistive space, according to Karine. Capoeira remains marginalized in Brazilian society, she explained, so it is both political and cultural, a “political-cultural movement” that continues the historically resistive work of Candomblé. She explained that Candomblé contributed greatly to the survival of the black community. It guarded secrets, hid and protected people from the police and other persecution. Continuing these practices together, in community, continues this resistance work. As she put it, “If you consider the sound, the movements in the samba, in the [capoeira] game, these all recall the whole experience of the work of the slave, the fight against slavery.” Mestre Cláudio has therefore made a very deliberate choice to hold his roda of capoeira Angola, followed by samba de roda, in the middle of one of the busiest streets, on the busiest market day of the week, in broad daylight. He has maintained the roda for over twenty-five years, outside on the street for at least fifteen years and previously inside the neighboring Arts Market hall. It is a political act of defiance against all the forces that would try to suppress or extinguish these black practices. Mestre Cláudio speaks out not with words or speeches, but in the sonic and corporeal vernacular of the Bahian people. Cláudio’s students start to gather as early as nine or ten o’clock in the morning under the generous branches of a grand tree on the median strip of the Avenida Getúlio Vargas, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The students arrive dressed in the school uniform: dark brown pants reference the outfits of rural workers of the region, the Bahian 227 sertão or backlands. The white tee-shirts show the school insignia, two illustrated figures playing capoeira, one extended into a backbend, the other on his hands in bananeira (hand stand) with one leg stretched out. Several students are tasked with retrieving the instruments from storage in the basement of a nearby university arts building (CUCA), where the group also trains Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. Saturday morning the Angoleiros can be spotted in a small procession balancing the larger drums on their heads — the atabaque for capoeira and the timbals and bombo for the samba — carrying other instruments in large bags or by hand, from the CUCA to the roda site. This weekly commitment, without fail, is one of the ways Cláudio’s students fulfill their compromisso with the group and with capoeira Angola. They gather under the tree, sweep the ground clean, and start stringing up the berimbaus, tightening the wire string, matching each cabaça gourd with its proper vara, or wooden pole, then tuning them as well as they can so that the berimbaus resonate loudly enough to be heard over the din of traffic. Usually the Mestre shows up later, so the students start by playing samba informally. Less experienced players try their hands at the timbal or the bombo (bass drum), instruments that require the most stamina and technique to play. When the mestre shows up, he checks the berimbaus to make sure they have been tuned properly, and soon thereafter he begins the capoeira roda. Those playing in the roda start by standing in a circle, completing the semi-circle formed by the eight members of the bateria. He has his students stand to complete the ring at first because it attracts passersby: when they see a circle of people standing and watching the center of the circle, it makes them want to come close to see what everyone is looking at. Only when a sizable crowd of onlookers has gathered, usually several games into the roda, does the mestre have the capoeira 228 players sit on the ground, as is usual with Angola rodas. By that point the crowd has packed several persons thick, and all eyes focus on the action in the ring. The people that gather week after week to watch the roda come from the surrounding region, some from hours away. Saturday is a big market day in Feira de Santana, so many people come to run errands and do their weekly shopping in the sprawling market halls filled with mounds of tropical fruits, stringed bundles of fresh herbs, dry goods like manioc flour and corn meal for animal feed, as well as butcheries with entire cow and pig carcasses hung for cutting. The faces of the people are brown and black, creased from the relentless sertão sun, some glistening with sweat, often with brows furrowed in concentration as they watch the Angoleiros play. They clutch plastic shopping bags and purses as they stand in the circle. Mothers and fathers bring shy children clinging to their legs, eyes glued on the players in the ring. One young man (he was a boy in 2013, now he is a teenager) shows up every Saturday to play the drum, beside the drummers of Candomblé houses who also invariably attend. Watching their faces during the capoeira roda, I see the serious, attentive interest with which they follow the players' movements. They laugh along in moments of humor, or cheer when a player successfully topples their opponent to the floor. And they occasionally throw crumpled bills into the ring to instigate the money game. Some of the crowd are night shift workers stopping by on the way home, still in uniforms of security guards or cleaners, or street workers in fluorescent orange suits. Some are cowboys, dressed in hats and boots, bowlegged from horse riding. The roda also attracts devoted Black Movement activists, who show up to dance samba as an affirmation of the power of black culture. Many are dressed in their finest, women in bright colors or leopard prints, gold and silver, in body- 229 hugging and body-revealing tops and shorts or skirts. Older ladies dress in longer, flowery, flowing dresses. Some of the men also wear loud colors like red or green, with gold chains and meticulously sculpted hair do’s, faux hawks or patterns buzzed into the sides of their heads. Mirrored sunglasses, lipstick, cologne abound. The roda is an event! By the end of the capoeira roda, the crowd has usually reached a critical mass. They have attended respectfully to the capoeira. But immediately after the mestre signals the end of the capoeira roda with an abrupt “iê!”, he starts singing a samba tune, without the drums. The crowd animates and presses closer, for the samba is the real reason they have all come. This is no coincidence or spontaneous occurrence, but a sequence carefully choreographed and conducted by Mestre Cláudio, developed and refined over the course of the decades. By playing the samba after the capoeira without fail, Mestre Cláudio draws a crowd of people who do not play capoeira, but who nonetheless have come to understand much of the game and participate in ways available to them. It is as if capoeira Angola were the medicine he masks with the sugar of the samba. While Cláudio has built an international career teaching capoeira, Cláudio distinguishes himself from other mestres by refusing to leave his home town in the interior of Brazil for the more lucrative city centers on the coast or abroad. For decades he has been the only mestre of capoeira Angola in Feira, and he sees his role as preserving and growing his regional brand of cultura popular, so often overlooked by capoeira mestres and scholars in the capital cities of Salvador, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, or in the university centers of São Paulo. Thus Cláudio’s resistance has multiple fronts. His actions critique the centralized, urban (and coastal versus interior/rural) production of knowledge about capoeira Angola. When he sings both capoeira and samba songs about 230 cows and cowboys, bulls, and rural farm life, he argues that capoeira also has roots in the interior of Bahia. Cláudio also has decades-long ties with the local Movimento Negro groups, and this association has informed how he positions his work as a movement of resistance against racism and white supremacy in Brazil. He views his Saturday morning roda as a direct contribution on this front, a direct critique of the systematic devaluation of Afro-Brazilians still rampant throughout the Brazilian political and social systems. Above all, the roda is a confirmation and celebration of the Afro-Brazilian people’s black beauty, worth and humanity. It is Cláudio’s way of acting on his compromisso to the Afro-Brazilian people and their regional culture. Conclusions: Response and Responsibility Mestre Cláudio and his students were drinking beer in a street side bar, as they do every Saturday after the roda, talking about a game that had happened a couple months earlier during the yearly event in January. Mestre Claudinho had given a forceful chapa to the visiting Contra-Mestra Tatiana’s chest, knocking the wind out of her. She could not continue play, and left the roda to lie on the ground and recover. Like Cláudio’s game with Jogo de Dentro, group members discuss this moment to this day, and I take it up again in Chapter 3. Was Claudinho out of line, or was Tatiana unprepared? Mestre Cláudio told us that when something bad happens to him in his life, instead of looking to the future in panic and asking, “Now what?!” he looks to the past and asks, “What did I do that caused this bad thing to happen to me?” Rather than providing straightforward answers to ethical questions, Cláudio demonstrates his own process of reflection. Cláudio did not tell us whether or not he 231 thought Claudinho was right or wrong to hit Tatiana with such a violent attack. Instead, Cláudio suggested that in a similar situation, he would take it as an opportunity examine his past behavior in order to understand what he had done that led to this moment. He did not specify from which position he imagined himself, Claudinho’s or Tatiana’s, leaving it open to imagine either one. The implication was that, by modifying his actions going forward, he could prevent future “bad things” from happening to him. Cláudio often expresses this cause and effect understanding as the importance of knowing the consequences (consequências) of one’s actions. As every movement calls for a response, the caller must always be aware of a call’s numerous potential responses, and at the same time, be prepared to answer them. In this way Cláudio draws attention to the responsibility inherent in emitting a call, revealing the ethical implications of call and response. He shows how each individual is empowered to learn from their past in order to influence the future, a view that reflects multiple aspects of an Africana ethical world view: it recognizes the individual’s obligation to critically evaluate their behavior, take responsibility for their actions and character (or character-as-action), while at the same time recognizing the individual’s capacity to change their ethical behavior (character). Above all, this reflects an embodied sense of morality, in which bodily actions, habits and behavior come directly to bear on an individual’s ability to think and act morally. The concept of jogo bonito, Mestre Cláudio’s game with Jogo de Dentro, and the Angoleiros do Sertão’s Saturday morning roda all provide instances of the Angoleiro ethics in action. The jogo bonito reveals the ethical stance required of any practice that is committed to dialogue. Similar to the dialogic nature of capoeira games, Dwight Conquergood proposed “dialogical performance” as an ethical stance for ethnographers: 232 The aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another. It is a kind of performance that resists conclusion, it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing. (1985:9) The open-endedness of dialogical performance also resembles the capoeira Angola game and makes up part of its ethics. Two players who meet in the roda must prioritize the conversation, to keep it “open and ongoing,” rather than seeking to arrive at definitive conclusions, a winner and loser, or determination of being right or wrong. At the same time, as I have argued, the “beauty” of such a game does not deny or diminish violence, but leverages it as a necessary component that makes the ethical stakes of the game worth fighting for. In other words, the real-life consequences of wrong or ugly action in the capoeira game render the games a form of serious play. They are not symbolic interactions, but the actual playing-out of real ethical situations, as Mestre Cláudio’s game with Mestre Jogo de Dentro illustrated. On the wider level of community, Mestre Cláudio and his students embody their compromisso to capoeira Angola and the black community of Bahia’s interior through their weekly roda. On the streets of Feira de Santana, in Exu’s own domain, they simultaneously play, perform and enact their ethical responsibility to black Bahian popular culture. Capoeira Angola and the rural samba de roda affirm the value and individual worth of rural, black lives. When the people show up to the roda, they see themselves reflected in the ring, they understand its corporal language and they feel called to participate in the ways available to them. The fact that the roda takes place in public, in broad daylight on the busiest market day, affirms that their culture is worthy of public expression. In the context of increased attacks and demonizing of black culture by the growing evangelical movement, the significance of this message only increases every 233 week. This project is the ongoing practice, the action and doing, of the Angoleiros do Sertão’s profound compromisso with Afro-Brazilian culture and the community that has nourished them. Finally, reflecting upon this chapter as part of my own compromisso with the Angoleiros do Sertão and capoeira Angola, I am left with several questions. By attempting to prioritize the Angoleiros’ concerns, have I kept the theoretical frame too narrow? In other words, does this approach necessitate a kind of compromise? Until I have translated the dissertation and made it available to group members, I will not know if they find it at all valuable. Over the years, I have tried to engage Mestre Cláudio in conversations about reciprocity, seeking to determine if and how I could use my position of privilege and access to benefit Cláudio and his group, but he never expressed interest in those conversations. Yet this was not because he felt I do not owe the group anything. I believe, rather, that he did not intend to spell out for me what I should instead observe. I must sharpen my perception and draw my own conclusions about what I can contribute to the group. Part of the nature of such a compromisso is that it is never finished, an ongoing practice and process rather than a conclusion or result. For this reason, I consider this chapter only an initial response to calls and questions that I will continue to contemplate. 234 Fig. 2.1. Mestre Cláudio approaches Fig. 2.2. Walking back in parallel. chamada. Fig. 2.3. Walking forward in mirror. Fig. 2.4. Cláudio hops on right foot. Fig. 2.5. Cláudio on right foot, prepares step. Fig. 2.6. Cláudio early step with left. Fig. 2.7. Jogo prepares step forward with Fig. 2.8. Cláudio approaches rasteira with left. right. 235 Fig. 2.9. Cláudio rasteiras Jogo’s left leg. Fig. 2.10. Rasteira. Fig. 2. 11. Rasteira complete. Fig. 2.12. Cláudio lets Jogo fall. Entire duration of sequence from Fig. 2.1. to 2.12. is five seconds. 236 CHAPTER THREE Guerreira Tactics in a Man’s World: Women Conquering Space in Capoeira Angola The Mestre’s voice strains to sound through the smog and heat, and the chorus rallies in response, raising all the vocal energy they can muster. The women are few, but they make themselves heard by singing out above the thick choir of men’s voices, matching the men’s volume instead of their pitch. The resulting dissonance adds a richness to the chorus, a multiplicity to its texture, along with the buzz of the berimbau’s coin-against-wire and the rattles of seeds and metal shakers. To join in I must also choose: Do I sing with the men, using a lower register of my voice where I cannot sing as loudly? This is my way of blending in, contributing by conforming, hiding in the sound. But when the Mestre gestures desperately with his arms, as if trying to scoop up the air with his palms, clutching his throat — demanding we give more, sing louder! — how can I sing low? I try to sing up an octave, matching the men’s intonation, but it is too high. So instead I join the other women, opening my full voice where I can sing the loudest without too much strain. None of us women are singing the exact same notes, but I feel free to sing as loudly as I can and to concentrate on giving all of myself to the sound we are producing together. In much traditional Brazilian música popular, music of the people, women sing the choruses an octave above the call of the lead singer, usually a man. This can be heard throughout Bahia, in choruses of samba de roda, capoeira and Candomblé, as well as on commercial recordings of samba and other styles. In many capoeira and samba groups, 237 the chorus sings a third above the main line. However, in the Angoleiros do Sertão, Mestre Cláudio maintains what he calls a “rural” style, keeping the responses “simple,” in unison without added harmonies. As a result, the men sing in unison at a lower pitch and the women either match them there or sing out at higher pitches, yet without conforming to the convention of singing thirds or octaves. The complex dissonances created when the women choose their own pitches are anything but “simple,” so I wondered what the Mestre thought about the women’s singing, for he rarely provided instruction on how to sing other than to demand everyone sing louder. One evening, Mestre Cláudio had arranged to record some of his favorite sambas in a friend’s small makeshift studio. He asked me to join with several other capoeira students, including one other woman. As I sang the response choruses, I chose to sing with the men and match their lower pitch because of the exposed context. The other woman, however, sang boldly above them at uneven intervals that ranged from tritones (diminished fifth above) to upwards of a sixth. Later, when I listened back to the recording with the Mestre, he commented that the chorus was not good because we were not singing the right melodies. When I asked him what he meant, he explained that the one woman “had difficulty” with singing the correct melody, but he preferred not to correct her because he did not want to discourage her. In fact, he only acknowledged her part in making the chorus “not good” because I had pressed him on the issue. While he considered the intonation divergence less than ideal, it was not significant enough to point out, for when the mestre is truly bothered he will angrily halt all music-making and berate his students to do better. Never have I heard him or anyone else critique the 238 women’s way of singing. Unrestrained, the women’s voices pierce through the choruses, high and fierce. * I open with this anecdote to show one way in which women in the Angoleiros do Sertão claim their space in a practice still dominated by men. I call these ways “guerreira tactics,” the tactics of women-warriors who use their voices and bodies to claim space in capoeira and in their lives. Here it is a sonic space, in which they contribute to the collective dynamic of the chorus, yet raise their pitch and volume in order to make their voices heard. As I address in this chapter, this distinctive way of singing-together-yet- apart, or “distuning,” intentionally singing out of tune, resonates throughout other guerreira tactics. It describes the way the guerreiras of the group leverage the lessons they learn in their capoeira Angola practice, negotiating compromise and conflict, maintaining their dedication to community and tradition, while at the same time choosing when “to enter,” whether entering to attack, to contest or just to play.46 Central to guerreira tactics, therefore, is a shared commitment to co-creating community alongside men while claiming space within it. Attending to the women’s experience of training and playing capoeira Angola, I consider how players’ gendered, racialized, economic and geographical positions literally come into play, and how the women bring their guerreira tactics into the roda. 46 Entering in capoeira play refers to stepping in closer to an opponent in order to prepare an attack. Knowing when, where and how to enter, therefore, is an important capoeira skill. It can also refer to entering the space of the roda, in capoeira or in samba. 239 Gizêlda Melo Nascimento (2008) argues that Afro-Brazilian women have always offered a sonic and bodily “subterraneous counter-discourse” to the ways their bodies have historically been subordinated: as instruments of labor, as wombs to create more enslaved laborers, and post-abolition, as whitened and sexualized “mulatas for export.” She describes how Afro-Brazilian women have woven their voices and bodies into the “counter-history of deviations” in a series of moments: the moment in which her body leaves the imposed petrification and gains movement; the moment in which the voice thaws itself and opens itself to alternative passage ways to carry her word, distuning from the command of the master; the moment in which the body, no long reified, opens itself for creation, recuperating its identity and its entirety. (Nascimento. G.M. 2008:51, my emphasis) Nascimento’s imagery merges sound and movement to show how Afro-Brazilian women’s counter-discourse happens in their bodies and voices, gaining movement, opening their bodies to creation, and distuning, or singing intentionally out of tune. I heard the women’s singing in the Angoleiros do Sertão as their own kind of distuning, a guerreira means of claiming sonic space in the samba and capoeira rodas. By distuning with the men’s voices, the women seek out a register where they can make audible their contributions to the community. It is a subtle divergence from the “command of the master,” the demands made on their bodies and selves to conform to dominant, masculinist norms, both within capoeira and in their lives beyond it. When women in the group talked about confronting machismo47 within capoeira, they often expressed their struggle in terms of claiming, achieving and conquering their 47 “Machismo” is also a Portuguese word, and can be translated as “sexism,” but I generally opt for using the Portuguese because it more directly references the male, the “macho,” element of sexism, that is, the male dominance over and oppression of women. I also use machista to mean “sexist,” as it preserves this continuity and the reflects common usage in Bahia. 240 space; in other words, actively taking possession of their space.48 Their spatial concept merges symbolic social space with physical spaces, demonstrating the spatial nature of gendered, racialized social issues, that “[b]lack [women’s] matters are spatial matters” (McKittrick 2006:xii; see also Lipsitz 2011; Hunter and Robinson 2018). Attending to the spatial dimensions of intersecting oppressions reveals how social norms still confine Afro-Brazilian women to certain spaces, as domestic laborers in kitchens or laundry rooms of white, upper class households; and they are still largely denied access to other spaces, such as university classrooms and white collar professions, though quota systems are opening the university space to more Afro-Brazilians (McCallum 2007). When women consider the spatial aspects of capoeira Angola, therefore, they recognize the practice both as a space-making enterprise and a terrain for contesting space. For Afro- Brazilians, capoeira Angola is “our space,” a black space that community members create in order to define themselves and their experience (Harding 2000). Yet as capoeira remains a male space, where masculinist and machista norms still prevail, women struggle to gain and keep their ground within the practice and in the roda. When Afro- Brazilian women feel excluded, whether by men or white women, they can experience a deep sense of injustice at being made to feel out of place where they sought belonging.49 When women enter the roda, therefore, they enter their bodies and voices into this contest, occupying space with their bodies, and seek to demonstrate their right to it through the quality of their games. When they insist on playing instruments, they also 48 Verbs they used included conseguir (achieve), conquistar (conquer but also achieve, accomplish), tomar (take), encarar (confront), ocupar (occupy), abrir (open) the espaço (space). 49 Abusada has posted at length on Facebook about her experiences of conflict with white women in her group who made her question her own place in capoeira Angola. But ultimately these conflicts only strengthened her resolve to persevere in capoeira Angola, which as a black space she identified as “my space.” 241 claim their physical and sonic space in the bateria. By expressing their struggle in spatial terms, the women discussed gendered issues without putting them in terms of direct conflict with men. Many women made clear that they experienced harsher racial and gendered oppressions beyond the capoeira Angola community, and that they found in the capoeira community and practice a source of strength. When women talked about claiming space, they emphasized their own agency in overcoming disadvantages without directly placing blame on the men of the group. In this way, they took matters into their own hands, bodies and voices without threatening the bonds of community by aggravating gendered conflict. They also demonstrated angoleiro cunning: within the capoeira world, men are still the “stronger” party, not only physically but in terms of occupying positions of power. The women knew that directly opposing men, entering into adversarial conflict, would most likely result in the women losing ground and ceding space. Knowing when to raise one’s voice or use force, and when instead to smile and play a beautiful game, are all facets of guerreira tactics and wisdom. In this chapter I place the women’s guerreira tactics in the broader context of black women’s movements in Brazil and black feminist thought across Brazil, the U.S. and Africa. However, women in the group were highly critical of mainstream feminist discourses in Brazil, finding they aligned too closely with the white elite “realm of speaking.” For many women in the group, “feminism” itself is a divisive concept, centered on speaking rather than doing, focused on confrontation with men, and ultimately only concerned with white women’s experience. Many understand feminism as a threat to their femininity and womanhood, arguing for the negation of feminine 242 characteristics in order to make men and women “equal” meaning “the same.” Respecting the group’s general aversion to the term, therefore, I do not label the guerreiras feminists. Rather, I ask how attending to their embodied actions of claiming space, along with the ways they voiced their thoughts on gendered relationships and positions, reveals how they contest machismo and define their femininity through their own guerreira tactics. To do this, I narrate conversations and capoeira games played by guerreiras of the group, in which they mobilized their voices and bodies to negotiate the frictions of intersecting positions of gender, race, class, and nationality. As such I contribute to a small but growing body of capoeira scholarship that focuses on contemporary gender relations and the experiences of female capoeiristas (Araújo 2015; Wesolowski 2007; Barbosa 2005a, 2008). As a whole, capoeira scholarship reflects a bias that, intentionally or not, privileges men’s perspectives as more authentically representative of capoeira practitioners, thereby normalizing the male experience. Capoeira histories focus almost exclusively on the viewpoints of mestres (Assunção 2005), and while male capoeiristas historically outnumbered females, even contemporary studies that include practitioners’ perspectives have featured almost exclusively male voices (Downey 2005). By centering women’s experience, I seek to counter this tendency and explore how women mobilize their capoeira practice as a means to transgressing gendered norms and asserting their own self-definitions and ways of being. Describing the women as guerreiras also facilitates a dialogue with other literature that explores how women define alternatives ways of being female through embodied practices. Yet in contrast to sporting communities of women skateboarders (Bäckström 243 2013), bullfighters (Pink 1997), or boxers (Lafferty and McKay 2004), women capoeiristas participate directly in a “man’s world,” training and playing with men as opponents in rodas. Black social dance and music practices provide other spaces where women contest and complicate their hyper-sexualization (Cooper 2004; Jones 2016), or where they can take on a “badass femininity,” eschewing respectability and ladylike behavior “in favor of confrontation, aggressive, and even outright offensive, crass, or explicit expressions of a woman’s strength” (Johnson 2014:20). Like the b-girls Johnson discusses, female angoleiras, also risk stigmatization by participating in a practice associated with poor, Black, street-hustling men, and this can be especially prejudicial for working class Black Brazilian women who, like b-girls, may be judged masculine, undesirable or sexually available because they practice capoeira (Johnson 2014:18). However, many angoleiras still embrace a more traditional femininity while engaging in the subtler, contained forms of aggression and confrontation taught in capoeira Angola. The guerreira aesthetic, like the angoleiro ethics it builds on, melds the “badass” with the bonito or beautiful. Black Women’s Thought and Experience Black feminism in a transnational context Though Black Feminist Thought by that name has developed in the US context, Patricia Hill Collins and other black feminists recognize that “common concerns link women of African descent transnationally,” as they face intersecting oppressions everywhere (Collins 2000: 234). Collins recognizes that “(t)he task now lies in fleshing out dialogues and coalitions with Black women who live elsewhere in the Black diaspora, 244 keeping in mind that intersecting oppressions have left a path of common challenges that are differently organized and resisted” (235). By focusing on the experiences of women in the Angoleiros do Sertão, many of whom are of African descent and non-white, I center their actions in the broader context of black and brown women’s struggles in order to contribute to transnational dialogue and translation of diverse discourses on black women’s experience and activism (Alvarez, Caldwell, and Lao-Montes 2016; Smith 2016). Doing so, I build on work attending to how women in smaller communities, marginalized from the academic and urban centers of thought that publish about black feminism and women’s struggles, can also contribute strategies for overcoming the challenges they face (Perry 2013). In Brazil as in the US, black women have often developed a feminist consciousness “within the context of antiracist social justice projects,” meaning that simply searching for women who “self-identify as ‘Black feminists’ misses the complexity of how Black feminist practice actually operates” (Collins 2000:30-31). Collins cites Nigerian scholar Obioma Nnaemeka stating that the “majority of African women are not hung up on ‘articulating their feminism’; they just do it” (31; my emphasis). In practice, this means that many black women do work that looks like black feminist work, though they may not identify with the label “feminist.” This resonates profoundly with how the women of the Angoleiros do Sertão talked about their experiences with racism and machismo and their understandings of feminism. Just as group members stressed that their anti-racism actions took place in the realm of doing, the women emphasized how they fought machismo and sexism through their actions, by living the fight, rather than through verbal arguments or other forms of mere talk. They 245 understood the concept of feminism as largely confined to the realm of speech. I hear their insistence, therefore, as a call to attend to their lived actions and to observe and value “what they do and how they do it” (31, citing Nnaemeka), attending not to their talking but to “their self-definitions that foster action” (113). In the context of capoeira Angola practice, I prioritize attending to how women train in class and play in the roda, how they make music, and how they align their lives with their practice. I listen not only to what they say in conversations and interviews, but what they do and say with their bodies and through sound and movement. In this way, I argue that in order to truly value, see and hear Afro-Latin American women’s “intellectual contributions” (Smith 2016), we must expand our attention to include the ways they produce knowledge in sonic, embodied and performative forms, in addition to seeking out and disseminating their written work, as Smith advocates. This also means attending to the “unofficial, private, and seemingly invisible spheres of social life and organization” (Collins 2000:202), listening to women who do not necessarily identify as intellectuals, feminists or activists. By arguing for attending to women capoeira practitioners’ knowledge and ways of knowing, I seek to augment the crucial work of scholars such as Christen Smith, Kia Lilly Caldwell, Sandra Azerêdo, Sueli Carnerio and Keisha-Khan Perry who are drawing attention to the contributions of black Brazilian activists and intellectuals. US black feminist thought has not been widely translated into Portuguese and disseminated in Brazil, though this changes as North American and Brazilian scholars have started to collaborate in overcoming this divide (Alvarez and Caldwell 2016). Yet as these scholars show, black Brazilian feminists have developed their own nuanced analyses of the ways race, gender and class intersect to structure black women’s experience. Since the 1970s, 246 black feminists in Brazil have fought to “blacken” Brazilian feminism, critiquing mainstream Brazilian feminism for marginalizing the experiences of women of color and failing to address racism (Caldwell 2001; Carneiro 2003). The refusal to center racial issues in the Brazilian feminist movement has led many Afro-Brazilian women activists to forgo feminism altogether (Figueiredo and Godinho Gomes 2016:913). When women in the capoeira community expressed their aversion to feminism, I believe it was this mainstream, white, color-blind Brazilian feminism that they had in mind. Furthermore, in Brazil as in the US, black feminist thinkers continue to claim their space among intellectuals and academic elites. Recognizing the importance of “lift[ing] as we climb,” black feminists acknowledge that poor and working class black women have not always been included in middle-class black feminist activism; for while higher education has been sought as a tool for “uplift,” it may also be viewed critically as an “agency of socialization into a White middle-class worldview” (Collins 2000: 201- 225). Members of the Angoleiros do Sertão, especially those from Bahia, remain deeply distrustful of the world of academic and activist elites, even though many group members (in both Bahia and São Paulo) hold degrees of higher education. Among those who reject it, feminism is viewed as an elite project that has little to do with their lived experiences. Perhaps contributing to this pejorative understanding of “feminism” is a more general project in Brazil to refute and discredit feminism in print media: In Brazil, the term “feminism” has been subjected to systematic depreciation and delegitimation within lettered realms for quite some time. As a rule, the use of the term is bound to certain meanings of feminism associated with the 1960s women's movement that have been underscored and universalized in [order]… to sustain a determined,… deliberate, discursive, cultural and political representation... [leading] to a representation of feminism as an extremist movement of Women's Liberation, buttressed by a homophobic, monolithic, authoritarian ideology that is fossilized in past history and… engaged in transforming woman, removing her 247 feminine characteristics! (Schmidt 2007: 765) Here Schmidt describes how even within the realm of speech, the “sphere of lettered culture,” strong antifeminist projects have persisted. These negative conceptions seem to have also become mainstream, for many capoeira community members in Bahia expressed them as well, such as the idea that feminism means hating men, or defeminizing women. Yet above all, I found that community members’ distrust of feminism reflected their distrust of elite, academic institutions and forms of organizing that have historically excluded the black poorer classes in Brazil. Guerreiras and the black Brazilian women’s movement For many black women in Brazil, their dedication to black culture and thought is inseparable from their lived experience of Afro-Brazilian ancestrality and spirituality. I consider this melding of the political, cultural and spiritual as part of the guerreira ethic, though each guerreira may interpret it differently. Mãe Beata de Yemonjá, a mãe de santo (Candomblé priestess), described the symbiotic relationship between spiritual, cultural and intellectual survival: “To be a woman of candomblé and to maintain my religious tradition alive and preserved, I consider myself a guerreira from the quilombo, and Candomblé was and is the one responsible for the maintenance of various aspects of Black culture, religiosity and Black collective thought” (Yemonjá 2008:21). Yemonjá’s expression of indebtedness to Candomblé resonates with the ways practitioners of capoeira Angola also experience the religion as deeply informing their capoeira practice, whether or not they have undergone initiation. Regarding gender roles and relations, Candomblé also provides an alternative model. Carneiro and Cury recount how "the equilibrium of forces between the sexes is always present in the myths" of 248 Candomblé, yet when male orixás feel they must control the female orixás it is not due to the females’ inferiority, but rather because their power has the potential to overwhelm the males (2008:120). The feminine orixás, therefore, model diverse, heterogeneous ways of being female and human. For example, Ogum seduces and uses her intelligence to deceive; willful, capricious Iansã, of fire and lightening, loves a challenge; Obá is a true warrior (guerreira) with shield and sword; Oxunmaré is the goddess of still waters; Iemanjá is of the sea, and like the sea, can be violent or calm (Carneiro and Cury 2008: 126-130). Furthermore, even though Brazilian women often identify more with female orixás, these models transcend gender to some degree because anyone is open to the influence of any orixá, masculine or feminine. In this way, Candomblé provides "a perception of the infinite human potentialities" (130), which are also present in capoeira. In capoeira Angola, every angoleiro/a plays with a unique style according to their personality. Guerreiras, like the feminine orixás, possess flexible and multiple ways of being female. Being a guerreira also means knowing how to choose one’s battles. In the capoeira Angola group, the women’s reluctance to enter into direct confrontation with men reveals their understanding of how they can most productively conquer their space. It is not by making enemies out of their male community members, but rather by fostering their allyship. This stance also aligns with feminisms developed among Africans and Indigenous women (Nnaemeka 1998; Rousseau and Hudon 2017). In her introduction to Sisterhood, Feminisms and Power (1998), Obioma Nnaemeka shows that while there are many feminisms practiced on the African continent and in the diaspora, she has found that they share values of “[p]ower-sharing, complementarity, accommodation, 249 compromise, negotiation, and inclusiveness” (12). African feminists welcome men as “partners in problem solving,” which is a “manifestation of the cross-gender partnership that is a prominent and time-tested feature of African cultures—a partnership that is reinforced by colonialist and imperialist threats” (8-9). In Brazil as well, while Afro- Brazilian women activists continue to challenge sexism within the Movimento Negro, they nonetheless maintain solidarity with the movement and with black men (Caldwell 2007: 154-7). The guerreiras of the Angoleiros do Sertão move, sound, fight and act in this broader context. Drawing on the ancestral energy cultivated in their Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, they claim their space as women in the man’s world of capoeira, training, sweating and playing alongside their male comrades. I now describe the nature of this “man’s world” in order to contextualize the women’s efforts, struggles and strategies. A Man’s World: Gender in Bahia Machismo in Bahia and capoeira Our society is machista, racist, homophobic. Capoeira Angola, which is part of our society, isn’t any different! So here, too, you’ll find machismo. And even though it’s Afro-Brazilian culture, no matter where you are, it will have racism and it will have homophobia. (Abusada) While the women and men of the Angoleiros do Sertão all acknowledge the machismo that pervades Brazilian society and the capoeira community, many women emphasized that the gendered oppression they faced outside of the capoeira group was much worse than anything they experienced within the group. Solange, for example, said, “In the group I am treated much better than in any other place. I am respected as a 250 woman, but I’m not treated as something fragile, that can’t do anything. On the contrary: the group has helped me perceive the strength I have.” In order to avoid a reductive branding of the capoeira community as sexist, I address how machismo manifests in capoeira practice as well as the ways in which it is contested. Abusada was speaking generally of Brazilian society when she spoke of “our society,” but Mestre Cláudio’s geographical context of the Northeast maintains its own particularly violent, misogynistic brand of machismo and idealized masculinity. Sound practices and common themes of popular music heard around Feira de Santana provide a window into certain aspects of the Northeastern macho ideal. As in most of Bahia, arrocha music blares out of speakers stacked in bars or the sound systems crammed into car trunks. Similar to country music, or música sertaneja, in the Southeast, arrocha is the “culturally intimate” music of Bahia (Dent 2009). In sweetly pure and nasal tones, male singers profess the purity of their love and lament their broken hearts, more often than not, caused by their ex-girlfriend’s betrayal — or, in local parlance, her putting “horns” on him. Being made cuckold, or corno (horned), essentially negates a man’s masculinity, rendering him a non-man (Hautzinger 2004:51). Indeed, jokes about cuckolds also abound (see Fonseca 2001 for another regional variation). One capoeira practitioner explained to me how there were basically two kinds of jokes: jokes about “fags” (viados) and jokes about cornos, but corno jokes, he assured me, win out for popularity and variation. Any reference to bulls provides an opportunity to evoke one or both insults, and in the cowboy culture of the sertão bulls themselves abound, providing plenty of fodder for humor. For example, the capoeira student told me, if you say that someone “licks salt,” you are calling him “gay” because that’s what bulls do. As this joke 251 illustrates, accusations of homosexuality and being cuckolded can be interchanged, perhaps because they both equate to being non-man in the dominant view. The jokes, therefore, by emphasizing the complete negation of masculinity, point to its opposite, the hegemonic ideal of the masculine. Dent briefly addressed what he found country songs revealed about Brazilian men’s masculinity, concluding that songs expressing male “powerlessness” through emotional display in the face of lost love represented a culturally intimate (embarrassing but true) longing for modernity. He saw men crying from heartbreak in song as expressing a hidden desire of manly Brazilian men to allow themselves to express their own emotions, as the cosmopolitan modern man supposedly does (Dent 2009:225-227). Perhaps the men in the Southeast of Brazil differ radically from those in the Northeast, but in my experience many Bahian men have no problem expressing emotions and crying in public — especially when they are drunk. In other words, they do not need arrocha or country music to allow them to express their pain and emotions. However, I agree with Dent that the music allows men to feel (and cry about) their sense of powerlessness, specifically their disempowerment at the hands of women. (As Dent explained the theme of many songs, also common in arrocha, the man loved her so much he was powerless to control his feelings, then when she left or betrayed him he was again at her mercy and the mercy of his emotions.) Yet rather than seeing these expressions of mourning disempowerment as reflecting the desire to be modern or cosmopolitan, I see them as absolving men of responsibility. The message of the music, therefore, reinforces male power roles and aligns with other forms of “victim-blaming” symptomatic of machismo. The woman is to blame that the man has lost his power and self-composure. Similarly, in the Northeast, 252 when a man reacts to his woman’s infidelity by losing self-control, flying into a rage, attacking or even killing her, his violence is deemed justified, even inevitable, and it remains the woman’s fault. Inverting these culturally intimate portrayals of emasculated men at their weakest reveals their opposite: ideally masculine men, empowered and strong. Male protagonists of arrocha songs do not react to betrayal with violence, but authentically masculine (macho) men do.50 In Bahia, people listen to arrocha because they think it is funny, a woman told me. They joke about infidelity and cornos in order to distance themselves from these disempowered forms of masculinity and thereby assert their power. When a man’s masculinity is threatened by infidelity in his own life, however, it ceases to be a joking matter and he may feel compelled to turn to violence to reclaim his true manhood. In many respects, Mestre Cláudio embodies the ideals of Bahian masculinity. He is a self-built patriarch, having lifted himself and his family out of poverty through his success in capoeira. As a mestre, he organizes and commands all around him, taking space with his powerful physical presence and through sound, not only with the deafening drums of his samba on the city streets. He has also filled the entire back seat and hatchback of his car with speakers so powerful that they require an airplane battery to operate. When he arrives at a bar and plays his “sound” (som, sound system), as is the common practice in Bahia, it drowns out all competition. In this way he claims and occupies the entire space. He also proudly recounts how he has fathered more than seven children, all with different mothers, all of whom he provides with varying degrees of material support. He also brags about his philandering and virility, preferring to live 50 Macho in Portuguese can carry a negative connotation as “macho” does in English, but it is also used neutrally to mean “male” or “manly.” 253 separately from his wife and their daughter, he explains, in order to preserve their relationship. In short, Mestre Cláudio’s most pronounced expressions of masculinity come through his dominance and sexuality. He openly professes his love of sex and sexual freedom, and jokes about sex all day long, though sexual innuendo and joking are generally off-limits in capoeira training spaces and rodas. As if in perfect symmetry, Mestre Cláudio’s wife Rita embodies many of the aspects of quiet, ideal femininity. She labors tirelessly to financially support not only her daughter, but her sister and mother, while also managing Mestre Cláudio’s entire administration, rarely uttering a word of complaint. She endures his betrayals not without pain and struggle, but has never retaliated in kind, and always takes him back after he repents. Perhaps her contributions to the annual event best exemplify how she defines her roles: she has taken charge of all of the non-capoeira or samba-related aspects. In contrast to the way things went in earlier years of the event, Rita makes sure that three abundant, nourishing meals are served on time every day, she organizes teams of volunteers to manage cleaning and other tasks, and she oversees the guest mestres’ accommodations. The most recent year I attended she barely slept two hours a night, yet she arrived fresh, made-up and dressed exquisitely in new dresses at every party. Under Mestre Cláudio’s leadership, to what extent does machismo enter the space of capoeira Angola? In the Mestre’s view, capoeira was created by men, so it is only natural that men (still) dominate it. In short, capoeira is a Man’s World. Yet in many ways capoeira Angola subverts normative ideals of masculinity. The spaces of capoeira training and playing set sexuality, and even in some respects, gender aside. Men and women (and children, if present) of all levels train the same movements, and participate in the same 254 classes and rodas alongside one another. They wear the same school uniform, brown pants and a white t-shirt with an Angoleiros do Sertão logo.51 The movements themselves also defy stereotypes of masculinity. While capoeira Angola demands significant upper- arm strength (which men are assumed to have more of), it also requires bodies to bend and flex, such as in the back-bending “bridge” (which many men struggle with, while women often achieve it more easily). Thus capoeira Angola provides an opening, if ever so slight, for both men and women to subvert gender norms. How, then does machismo manifest (or not) in the Angoleiros do Sertão, and what tools does capoeira provide for women to negotiate their gendered positions? To approach these questions, I turn to anecdotal and subjective experiences of group members and the ways they talk about their experience of training, playing and “living with” (as in convivência) the group. I also draw on my own observations and experiences, having watched carefully for actions, that may either explicitly or implicitly harm, target or empower women, whether during capoeira training, at rodas, or in other interactions beyond these events. Machismo in capoeira Angola, as everywhere, can manifest in subtle and not-so- subtle ways. In my own experience, even overt acts of sexual harassment and violence sometimes feel first only like a slap in the face—a numbing shock—with the full weight and meaning of the moment only sinking in hours, sometimes days later. In a social situation where directly protesting machismo is stigmatized, it takes considerable 51 I have always thought that while Angola uniforms could be said to favor a male physique (i.e. men may look better in t-shirts and pants than women), the uniform seems more unisex to me, having a leveling affect. This contrasts with capoeira Regional, where men often train or play shirtless and women sometimes even train in only a sports bra or bikini top. Revealing more skin, in other words, increases the gendering and sexualization of the players’ bodies. 255 awareness and courage to identify behavior explicitly as machista. Especially in the capoeira community, where autonomy is a key tenet, individuals present various interpretations of the same situation, with some identifying machismo where others claim gender played no role. All of these factors make discussing and analyzing machismo in capoeira difficult, but I believe that presenting the complexity and nuance of these situations will help deepen our understandings of how gender and sexism, like racism, work in sometimes slippery, subtle ways. Within the Angoleiros do Sertão in Feira de Santana, women remain in the minority. Afro-Brazilian women are severely underrepresented, with rarely more than one present at any given roda or class. While offshoots of the group in São Paulo have more female members, there has been only one woman who consistently trained with the group in Feira in the years I visited. In this group, the roda-leader, often a mestre, contra-mestre or advanced student, chooses who gets to play and how long, starting and ending the games. Even when more women are present, they are generally not given as much opportunity to play as men, and when they play their games are noticeably shorter.52 Certain roda-leaders only allow women to play with other women. The reasoning usually offered for these actions is that players with a higher level, who play better, will be given more opportunities to play and their games will go on longer because they are more entertaining to watch (using Monson’s analogy, they have more to “say”). If the women present happen not to have a high level, they will play less, not because they are women but because they do not play well enough. With few exceptions, men occupy the highest levels of player in the group. 52 In rodas led by other groups where participants are left to enter the roda of their own volition, women usually play even less, as a group of assertive, advanced male players most often dominates the roda. 256 The training site is also a space in which social norms are manifested, imposed and contested, and some women reported experiencing differential treatment during class. A typical class includes a portion where the students train in pairs. The mestre or instructor will devise a simple choreography of several moves and responses that work together in a flowing sequence, to emulate a flowing game. Women have noted that when the class breaks into pairs, men often seek out other men, avoiding being paired with a woman, tacitly signaling that only men make good training partners. With a woman some men seem to feel they have to “hold back” their movements, play slower or more carefully, out of heightened concern about hurting her. Perhaps they doubt her ability to perform the sequence correctly or deliver certain movements with enough speed or force. Women are also rarely called upon to demonstrate movement to the class. In these and other subtle ways, women are generally made to feel like perpetual beginners, never quite good enough. Men and boys at beginner levels, in contrast, are enthusiastically embraced and encouraged, and they also tend to make quick progress. Women also reported experiencing more overt forms of machismo during class. Abusada, who trains in São Paulo state, is a black movement activist who speaks out on issues of racism and machismo. She explained how training particular movements revealed more clearly how male colleagues thought about training with women. She recalled a class in which the professor was teaching a sequence using chapa, a flat-footed direct kick, in which they were practicing aiming the chapa at the opponent’s side, hitting their rib cage under the armpit. Abusada recounted, “The professor was teaching chapa, and I was training with my partner, a man, and at one point he gave me a chapa to my chest, to my breast, which is a very sensitive place for a woman!” In the class, she reacted 257 from the pain, and scolded her partner, admonishing him to be more careful. But he responded, “Ha, so you’re not woman enough to take a chapa!” Abusada replied, “No, wait a minute, everyone here knows that if we’re working with chapa, we can’t hit the ‘lower part’ of the man, because we know it’s sensitive. This is a consciousness everyone has about men. Why can’t we have this consciousness about women, that the breast is more sensitive? It’s a place that you can’t give a chapa to! If we’re going to train chapa, is it going to be like this? That if you hit my breast, I can hit your lower-part?” Abusada spoke out to her partner, making this valid argument, but he refused to acknowledge her comparison, saying the two cases were entirely unrelated. He accused her of being unfair, called her “stupid” and proceeded to ignore her. In this situation, the male student believed that a woman not being able to “take” a chapa to the breast merely confirmed her weakness, while her protest confirmed her “stupidity.” Abusada fumed as she retold her story, and I also felt my blood quicken with anger at her training partner’s insolence. I have also experienced this kind of outright refusal to consider my feedback during trainings. In one class with the group in Feira, we were training rasteira, a leg sweep. My partner kept attempting the move, a sweep at the ankle of my standing leg to cause me to fall, but he could not manage to dislodge my foot and bring me down to the floor. I knew that what was missing was the proper sense of timing, but instead of adjusting his timing he delivered the move with more impact each time, to no effect. Finally, my ankle smarting from the pain, I told him, “You don’t need to use so much force!” He just gave me a blank stare, and continued to pound my ankle. While the posture of helping one another learn a movement is common, my partner refused to acknowledge my feedback. Later, when talking with Rita about the class, I told 258 her that I sensed that group members did not appreciate being corrected by someone who was not a regular member of the group, and a foreigner—a gringa. Immediately she rejoined, “By a woman, a woman! They don’t accept being told by a woman!” Because I had had the same experience in that class with another woman student, as well, I asked, “Even other women don’t accept it?” She just raised her eyebrows above her wide eyes as if to say, Do I have to spell it out for you? Didn’t I tell you it’s messed up?! I was struck by Rita’s conviction that being a woman was what mattered above all. During trainings women are expected to assume the role of novice, silent receivers of instruction. When we attempt to actively participate in our learning, our input is rejected. Furthermore, while I sensed that my outsider status made my feedback even less acceptable, it is also possible that my whiteness shielded me from more direct insult, such as Abusada experienced. Where my feedback was met with icy silence by group members in Bahia, in the whiter group of São Paulo state Abusada was disrespected, insulted and dismissed. Equal (igual) or the same (igual)? For several years, Solange has been the only woman training in Feira de Santana with Mestre Cláudio. She has been with the group since 2006, but had trained intensively for about six years, and would still be considered relatively “young” in capoeira. Mestre Cláudio often recounts Solange’s story with pride, as an example of a true guerreira. She is from a very poor Afro-Brazilian family but has fought hard to become the first in her family not only to earn a college degree but also a master’s. Describing when she first encountered capoeira Angola she said, I saw myself as an ugly person, without grace, a person who was only suited for doing domestic work. When I saw this capoeira for the first time, I thought, it’s so beautiful! The melody was very beautiful, the lyrics of the songs made so much 259 sense. And the respect people had for each other — this enchanted me. This was the place where I could learn about my origins as a black woman. With the Mestre and group members’ encouragement and moral support, she got into a competitive public university and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Solange was still searching for work in her field of geography, and so she was working at a call center of a mobile phone service provider. Nevertheless, she had scraped together funds to purchase a plot of land and was building her own house, across the road from the house she built for her mother several years ago, on the periphery of Feira de Santana. When I asked Solange about her experience of being a woman training capoeira, usually the only woman in the room, she first commented on the physical differences between men and women: It's undeniable the differences between men and women in capoeira, no, in everything. I don't have this idea that, ‘All the rights that women have, men also have, and all the rights men have, women also have,’ because they're physically different. Whether we want it or not, we're physically different. In order to do the things men do in capoeira, we would need to triple our training. So if the man needs to train one or two times, we'd have to train five or ten times do to the same movement. Because we don't have a life [that requires] this physical condition! We do things that women do, our work is lighter, not just in the house, but in life. We work in offices, we don't carry heavy weights, and this physical [aspect] ends up directing us. For Solange, the physical differences between men and women were not necessarily based in biology, but came from social and cultural roles. In her view, the physicality of capoeira privileged men’s socially conditioned bodies. They performed more heavy labor in their lives and therefore adapted more easily to the heavy training of capoeira. But then she continued, So, it's really more difficult, because the woman has other activities that prevent her from giving so much priority to capoeira. For example, if he could the man would do capoeira the whole day long. The woman can do capoeira all day long too, but at the same time she has to make food, she has to wash the dishes, she has 260 to wash the clothes, she has to work, and so it ends up that when she comes to train she's worn out. The man, no, he can leave the house as it is because someone will clean it up for him! Thus it was not only the lighter type of work women performed, but the demands made on their time that prevented women from dedicating themselves the extra hours it would require for them to reach the level of their male colleagues. Though Solange has started by emphasizing physical differences, seemingly leading in a biologically-based argument, she had ended up identifying social expectations that disadvantaged women in their training. Solange stated this in an interview I conducted jointly with her and her boyfriend, Pernalonga, another member of the group, so while she may have been talking to some extent to appease him (by stating she did not believe men and women had the same rights) this last statement could be heard as a critique of him, too. In an earlier interview, she stated this situation even more explicitly, describing how men and boys are encouraged to get out of the house and be physically active. They are told, “‘Go play football, go to capoeira, go do whatever!’ But the woman? No! The woman must stay inside the house, which is her place! Submissive, in the kitchen! There is no space for capoeira in the life of a woman!” Abusada also brought up physical differences in our interview, but soon connected them to social conditioning: Then there’s the thing of the physical body itself, because the physical body of the woman is different from that of the man. This is proven scientifically; you already see the difference when he’s born! But then, from his childhood on, the man has to be machão [super-macho], he has to train hard. I see little kids here in [my town] who have been training [capoeira] since they were really little! […] But as a girl, no, you have to be delicate! And when a man and a woman grow up in these contexts, it’s logical that the man will be stronger than the woman! Much stronger – he’s been training since he was a child! The girl, no, she’s always 261 being told to be more sensitive. And she arrives at capoeira Angola, and it’s pretty much like, “Ok, you don’t have the physical strength of a man, why do you want to be the same (igual) as a man?” But it’s not about being the same as the man! The question is if I can do this [movement] if I train it! Because my life story is different from yours! And I’m not talking about socio-economic differences! It’s really about gender, this thing of being a woman or a man. Abusada acknowledges certain bodily differences between men and women, but she immediately moves on to discuss how boys and girls are raised differently from the outset. Boys are taught to be tough and physical, encouraged to use their bodies and build strength, while girls are expected to be delicate and sensitive. Thus while both women acknowledged having difficulties with particular moves that may seem to come more easily to men, such as those requiring more upper body strength, they were more emphatic over the role social expectations played in molding boys to be strong and girls to be “delicate,” which can also be read as a euphemism for “weak.” There are also plenty of movements that seem better suited to women’s bodies, such as ponte (bridge or backbend), which boys and men often struggle with due to lack of flexibility in their shoulders and upper backs, and which many women perform comfortably. The argument that women’s bodies are less suited to perform capoeira movements thus does not hold water. Rather, these women emphasized that gendered demands shaped expectations and impacted physical development. This discussion also reveals a semantic issue with the term “igual.” “Igual” in Portuguese is a cognate with “equal” in English. However, in colloquial Portuguese igual is most commonly used to mean “the same.” For example, someone might say, “There are parts of Southern Brazil that are igual (just like/the same as) Europe! The streets are immaculate, public transportation runs on time, etc.” Or someone might say, “You are igual (just like) your mother!” In this usage, “igual” expresses likeness and sameness. 262 In social justice contexts, however, “igual” derives from “igualdade,” equality, which does not refer to likeness but equality of value or worth. Anti-racist activists argue that black people are equally human, equally deserving of healthcare, education, and opportunity as white people. Feminists argue that women deserve equal pay to men, and equal protection from violence. In the contexts of rights-based discourses, seeking “equal” rights does mean seeking “the same” rights. However, these movements do not base their claims to rights on claims to sameness. Indeed, the notion of equality is actually dependent on the notion of difference, not sameness, though the negotiation of equality and difference poses a certain “dilemma,” as Joan Scott has recognized: “It has been impossible to demand equality without somehow recognizing difference, but too much insistence on difference […] undercuts claims for equality” (Scott, J.W. 1987:112; 2018). Among the Angoleiros do Sertão, “feminism” is understood as going too far in the opposite direction, by insisting on sameness and arguing for the abolition of difference between women and men. It appears that the anti-feminist movement in Brazil has succeeded in propagating the idea that feminism stands for the de-feminization of women (Schmidt 2007), for forcing women to be just like (igual) men. Rita expressed this view one night during a car ride on our way to capoeira class. We were talking about these issues and she said, “I am against feminism.” When I pressed her to explain why, she said, “Because I believe women need to occupy their own space.” She went on, saying how women cannot always be as physically strong as men, but they can be even stronger in other areas, while some women are even physically stronger than men, too! I was confused and said, “But this is exactly what feminists say, too! Why are you against feminism?” 263 “Well, that’s not what I thought they said. I think feminists talk about how men and women have to be completely igual (the same). And men and women can’t be the same, we can’t be just like men. And we don’t want to be just like men.” Whatever the source of this interpretation, I found that women asserting themselves in capoeira were often met with resistance in the form of arguments that they cannot be “exactly the same” as men and therefore should not try. Rita’s aversion to “feminism” suggests that she sees it as somehow opposing the notion of women “occupying their own space.” She understands feminism as women making demands to men to this effect: “We are the same as you, so give us our space!” By feeling that women instead must occupy their own space, conquer it for themselves, Rita renders herself as an active subject, not a passive recipient making demands. Space is something women must claim through their actions, not their speech. Listening to members of the Angoleiros do Sertão talk and argue about gender and machismo further reveals how language serves to obscure and confuse, rather than clarify and resolve, disputes. Recognizing the messiness of language helps explain why community members distrust “talk” and embrace embodied action in its place, as a primary way of communicating ideas and contesting space. Feminismo versus Machismo: Feminism is a dirty word While group members generally acknowledged machismo and were invested in countering it, they described “feminism” as divisive rhetoric, a words-based fight used to separate women from men. In a group that prizes community cohesion and loyalty, this kind of division was unacceptable. Even the heated discussions that arose from time to 264 time around these issues remained deeply distasteful to some members, who declined to participate. One such discussion erupted on a Saturday night in Feira de Santana. That Saturday, as usual, Mestre Cláudio and a crowd of his students had started drinking beer after the roda ended in the early afternoon. After moving from the sidewalk bar to the spot in the Centro de Abastecimento (Provisions Center), the buzzing market hall where we ordered inexpensive lunch, we ended up at Solange’s house on the periphery of Feira de Santana, where she lived with her boyfriend. Beer was procured, and the drinking continued, as she deep-fried chicken on her stovetop. The Mestre was already showing signs of intoxication, as was Iaiá, who often joins the Mestre for the post-roda drinking sessions. I was not drinking at all this time, and neither Rita nor Solange drink alcohol. Mestre and Iaiá entered a heated discussion about machismo and feminismo, which happens more often when Iaiá is present as she carries her mother’s militant mantle of speaking out against racism and machismo. As the discussion unfolded, it appeared that the Mestre wanted us to concede that he wasn’t machista. He held certain views about women, he said, vaguely alluding to what all present understood to mean his appetite for sex, his penchant to tell explicit jokes, and perhaps even his openly-acknowledged philandering. But this didn’t necessarily make him machista, he claimed. The discussion started to get heated when the Mestre defended himself by using capoeira as an example. He said that capoeira was a “masculine practice,” because it had been developed by men: they created it in their own image, so to speak, thus it made sense that they continued to dominate it. This was simply a fact, not machismo. 265 Rita agreed with the Mestre, adding how men had originated so many other professions that women now take part in due to women’s exerting themselves and conquering these professional spaces. She said this proved that women would “naturally” do the same in capoeira. As they have already entered capoeira in greater numbers, it would only be a matter of time before they naturally rose in the ranks and prominence in the capoeira world. Iaiá objected: This wasn’t natural at all! Seeing how emotions were running high, I hesitated to join the discussion, but finally I also joined in to argue that men in positions of power also had to change their minds in order to recognize women’s achievements. However, Cláudio did not respond to me. He was willing to hear these arguments from Iaiá, but not me. He continued as if he hadn’t heard me, threatening that he could call Rita’s views “feminist.” He clarified, “I’m not saying her views are feminist, but someone could consider them feminist!” As he spoke, it became clear that he understood “feminista” to be the equivalent of “machista.” If machismo meant men dominating women, then feminismo meant women dominating men. Hence his disgust with feminismo. Drawing such an equivalence was a subtle parry in this fight. On the one hand, he was trying to defend himself, absolve himself of machismo, but on the other, by suggesting that Rita might be representing feminismo, he implicated her in his guilt. He was saying, in effect, I am not machista, but even if I was, Rita is a little feminista, too, so we’re equally at fault, if at all. In other words, Rita’s potential feminismo justified his machismo, and he was not to blame. Recognizing the tricky game he was playing, I blurted out, “But machismo and feminismo are not the opposite!” Again I was wholly ignored by the 266 Mestre. Iaiá heard me and agreed, but sighed wearily saying, “Here we go again with the whole discussion about what machismo is…” Solange watched the chaos unfold, silently turning the chicken in the oil and refilling beer cups. The smoke of fried oil filled the kitchen as there was no exhaust or windows to provide ventilation. I felt stifled breathing in the thick oil fumes. I thought of joining the others out in the fresh air of the covered anteroom to the house, but I wanted to hear the argument, so I stayed. I could tell Solange was not pleased, and I was also upset as I realized the layers of misunderstanding, which seemed willful to me. The mestre refused to understand feminism as “anti-machismo” or anti-sexism. It was as if being machista made up too much of his understanding of self, as if being “man” required being machista. Taking away his machismo amounted to taking away his manhood. Rita, as his wife, was not as free to oppose him as Iaiá was. Threatening Rita that her views might be considered “feminist,” he was warning her, Watch out! Don’t go too far! As I continued to try to join the discussion, the Mestre finally turned to me to shut me down. Impatience in his voice, he said it was different for him discussing this with Iaiá, because he considered her his equal. I felt stung. His message was clear: I was not his equal and not worthy of contributing to the discussion. In the same moment, I realized I could not argue back that I was his equal, because he was the Mestre. He had the authority, and as his capoeira student I should show him respect. I fumed to myself, thinking, but I am still his equal as a human being, no less worthy of respect than anyone else! Yet according to the structure of authority in the capoeira world, I was in no position to argue with the Mestre. I sat for the rest of the conversation in stunned silence. In contrast, as Iaiá has 267 often acknowledged, he was willing to hear critique from her because she is no longer his student, and therefore is no longer bound by the group hierarchy.53 Several days later, I interviewed Solange and her boyfriend Pernalonga. With questions about our discussion still fresh in my mind, and remembering that Pernalonga had stayed in another room far from the smoke and heat of the argument, I asked Pernalonga, “I wanted to know, for you, what is feminismo? And what is machismo?” For several moments we sat in silence as Pernalonga did not respond. Finally, he exclaimed with annoyance, “I think it's ridiculous, in the 21st century!” “I’m just asking what it means—“ “I don’t know, no! I think feminism—I don’t know, I don’t understand, no! Because it’s outdated (ultrapassado), it’s not possible to understand anymore. Capoeira has children, old people, women, men—I don’t understand. I think people who talk about it are backwards.” Soon afterwards he left the room. I turned to Solange and asked her, “What do you think?” She responded, I never studied about this either, so I don't have a lot of understanding. But from what I’ve heard it’s as if [feminism is] the woman seeking rights that were always 53 Of course my position includes more than being his student. As a white North American academic woman, I am treated differently by Mestre Cláudio, compared to how he treats his students, in a number of ways. The Mestre talks about “gringos” with (teasing) disdain, sometimes bordering on disgust, and he clearly includes me in that category. At the same time, he often professes his love for individuals he spends time with. As he does with most of the people around him, he claims he “loves” me, too, and demands I return the sentiment (“Say you love me!”). His treatment of me, however, has ranged from the celebratory (saying I am special and he considers me a friend, treating me as an exceptional gringa) to the abusive (punishment, mostly psychological, for being a gringa), and also includes a complicated relationship with money (on one hand charging me the same monthly class fees as his students, but on the other trying to manipulate me for more funds in direct and less-direct ways). In sum, the Mestre decides which category he places me in at any given time, choosing the category and treatment that best suits his needs. In the scene described above, relegating me to the position of (female) student gave him sufficient grounds to justify dismissing my contribution to the conversation. The presence of other people, and who they are, also without a doubt plays a role in how the Mestre determines how he will treat me. 268 denied her. And machismo, I think we can understand it because it always happens a lot here in Brazil: [it’s] that the man always thought that the woman's place was in the home […] If you go looking for a job, always the best jobs went to men. Now women are managing to conquer these spaces. Lots of people fight over this. But, personally, I think it's just a fight. And I don't have time for this fight! I don't have time to wear myself out with this fight! My life has always been really very tough. So, I prefer to seek my space, to run after it, instead of fighting and arguing, like that discussion that happened here the other night. Everyone was arguing, arguing, and in my view it didn't go anywhere. For Solange, fighting is a distraction. She acknowledged the machismo she and other women faced in Brazil, and she understood feminism generally as the efforts of women seeking rights that had been denied them. Yet she preferred to spend her energy on claiming her own space—studying, working, building a better life for herself and her family—rather than arguing about “feminismo” and “machismo,” fighting about words. As Rita expressed earlier, Solange combatted machismo not through fighting with men, but by conquering her space through her actions and behavior. Treinel Natureza is the most advanced woman player in the group, and she leads her own satellite group in São Paulo state. She expressed a similar sentiment about feminism, with some hesitation: “I—I’m not a militant feminist, but I do consider myself a feminist in the sense of seeking equality, in my daily life. Not in writing or posting texts, no. But in my actions, my day-to-day behavior and conduct, I do consider myself [feminist].” Collectively, the guerreiras of the Angoleiros do Sertão recognized how machismo entered into their lives and their capoeira practice. Yet they did not find in “feminismo” an effective or appropriate response. Instead, they insisted that they combatted machismo and inequality through their actions and behavior. The space of the capoeira roda makes up one of the most important spaces in their lives. It is a space that 269 privileges movement and sound, bodily communication over talking, a “beautiful game” over “beautiful speech.” When the women claim space in their lives, they draw on the lessons they have learned in their capoeira practice. I now turn to the games these women play, the embodied tactics they use in order to contest, occupy and conquer their space in the roda. Guerreira Spatial Tactics Ceding space: Kicked out of the roda The annual January encounter of the Angoleiros do Sertão officially culminates in the public roda on the streets of Feira de Santana, on Saturday morning. While the Angoleiros hold a public roda every Saturday of the year, the four-day January event is the peak moment of the year, with the roda at its apex. Accordingly, the roda attracts a much larger crowd than a regular Saturday, with capoeiristas traveling from all over Brazil and the world to join in. Visiting mestres are honored by being given the berimbau to lead several songs, and they play numerous games with the capoeira players present. Bodies pack in thick, the Angoleiros wearing their cleanest, newest school shirt and pants, and Mestre Cláudio directs the roda, making sure that visitors from farthest away get a chance to play, carefully matching abilities of players to ensure that games are balanced. A roda such as this is marked with heightened ritual and formality, and Mestre Cláudio expects his students to play their best, their jogo bonito, demonstrating to the public capoeira Angola’s beauty and intelligence. For the Angoleiros do Sertão this might mean reigning in a bit of aggression, but it does not mean playing without force or speed. 270 Players are expected to be on their best behavior: they can take down their opponent, but they should do so only with reason, and then with intelligence, grace and humor. However, every roda of the Angoleiros do Sertão ends with Adeus Adeus, the faster-paced “Good-bye” game in which players may “buy” games, jumping in to play without waiting for the Mestre’s command. The Adeus Adeus, marking the end of the roda, therefore also marks an ambiguous loosening of norms and expectations. Players brave enough to enter joyfully test their speed, freeing up their movements, perhaps taking more risks. To start the Adeus Adeus, Mestre Cláudio gestures for the players in the circle to stand up, move in closer together, squeezing their bodies together and making the roda smaller, “closing” the space in which the faster game takes place. This increases the intensity of the moment: as games get more aggressive, with fast and hard kicks, the players have less space in which maneuver and avoid them. These games epitomize “jogo de dentro” [inside game], a hard, dangerous game played close or “inside.” At the end of the roda closing the 2016 encounter, the Adeus Adeus was hot and fast, and only the most fearless jumped in to play. So many bodies were packed in to watch, sing, and play that I was unable even to see much of what was going on in the middle. I held my phone above my head to video the action, so I could at least look back at it later, but even then it was difficult to get the players in view. Only several days later did I hear the mestre discussing the game between Mestre Claudinho (one of his oldest students, and the first that Mestre Cláudio graduated to mestre) and Contra-mestra Tatiana, of Mestre Marrom’s group in Rio de Janeiro. Tatiana is considered by many to be one of the greatest angoleiros now playing, and therefore certainly one of the best 271 women players. She is widely respected, especially adored by women players who look up to her as an example of a woman playing as competitively as men. I first met her in 2008 when I was living in Rio and began training at Marrom’s academy. Playing with Tatiana always felt dangerous, and Marrom never let beginners or less-experienced people play with her in the roda. Even training with her, I learned the hard way how careful I had to be with her, as she never held back her kicks or sweeps. It is not only her strength and her tough play that distinguishes her game, but also her incredible flexibility, control and creativity, performing movements with her unique style. Not only can she land on her hands in seemingly any position, but she lowers her head or feet to the ground with precision at just the right moment, easily blocking or twisting away from an oncoming attack. Mestre Claudinho is fearless in his own way. In fact, Mestre Cláudio often speaks disparagingly about Claudinho saying how he’s given up on trying to convince him to play well, a jogo bonito. Every time Claudinho enters the roda the play turns towards a fight. He might profess he is “just playing,” but whether he cannot hold back or simply chooses not to, he always plays rough (I received a “friendly” black eye from him on my last visit). In the moment Mestre Cláudio was discussing after the event, Claudinho was playing with Tatiana during the Adeus Adeus. They played hard for a few moments, and she held her ground. At one point, he gestured that they walk around in a circle, a move used to re-set the game or to enter into a chamada. Claudinho initiated the chamada by stopping and holding one hand up in the air, “calling” her to approach him and touch her hand to his. While the chamada may appear to be a kind of “truce” in which play stops and players may relax, this is far from the case (cf. Lewis 1992:197). The chamada is 272 always a moment of heightened danger, whether the players realize this or not, because it calls the other player to enter into close proximity, often with an open torso (standing upright), rendering both players more vulnerable. When approaching a chamada, students are advised to be extremely alert, and to stay protected at all times. During the particular chamada Claudinho gave to Tatiana, the conventional way of entering was for her to approach Claudinho with one hand up, to join his raised calling hand, and her other arm bent in front to protect her torso from a potential chapa. Indeed, Tatiana did approach in this way, but with lighting speed Claudinho gave her a chapa so quickly that she had no time to block it with her arm or dodge out of the way. His delivered his chapa with such force that it knocked the wind out of her and, unable to breathe, she left the roda and lay on the ground to recover. In reviewing this moment later, Mestre Cláudio and others discussed whether Claudinho had been out of line. Some people felt that Claudinho shouldn’t have hit her so hard because she was a woman. It was okay to play rough like this with a man, but not a woman. Seeming to sidestep the gender question, Mestre Cláudio expressed that he found this aggressive way of playing generally “unnecessary” (desnecessário). I took this to mean that he felt it served no purpose; it was violence without provocation, reason or meaning. However, he also conceded that sometimes certain (more aggressive) movements were “necessary” because they helped you learn. Surely Tatiana was reflecting on this moment, too, and analyzing when and where she had let down her guard and opened herself up to the attack. Others added that if a man had been kicked this hard he wouldn’t have left the roda, but would have continued the game. They were critical of the fact that Tatiana had left the roda to recover, and also expressed her 273 disapproval. She seemed also to think that Claudinho had hit her with unnecessary force. For the male students discussing the incident, her reaction merely revealed that women were weaker than men. Tatiana was too weak to take a hard kick. Listening to the discussion, I recalled Orikere, another exceptional student, telling me earlier how he had initially been drawn to capoeira Angola because he was told it was the place where “the weak could beat the strong.” Having learned a bit about his life story, I knew he came from an underprivileged background, with his parents in and out of prison. I understood that he identified with “the weak,” not only in the physical sense, but with the underdog, the marginalized Afro-Brazilian people. Capoeira Angola had offered him a source of strength on many levels. Hearing Mestre Cláudio repeat the interpretation that Tatiana demonstrated her weakness at not being able to take Claudinho’s chapa, I asked him, “Isn’t capoeira Angola the place where the weak can beat the strong? Couldn’t the ‘weak’ also include women?” Cláudio responded simply, “Yes, but this doesn’t mean that the strong still can’t beat the weak.” I found the Mestre’s response evasive. I couldn’t help but wonder how one of the students would have reacted to having the wind knocked out of him! But would Claudinho even do that to one of the Angoleiros? Even though Claudinho had apparently expressed remorse after the incident, I still wondered if he had hit Tatiana so hard because she was such a strong player, because he thought she could handle it, or as if to say, You think you’re so strong? Take this! Perhaps he meant to test her or put her in her place. Claudinho’s violent chapa illustrated what Mestre Cláudio said: the strong can still beat the weak. 274 At the same time, group members debated whether Claudinho was at fault, whether he should have held back his kick. This raised the implicit question of whether he was capable of toning down the force of his kicks. If not, this was a lack of technique and skill on his part—a weakness. As for Tatiana’s role in the incident, no one questioned her technique or skill. No one asked whether she should have entered the chamada differently or been able to escape it. It seemed a given that Claudinho’s chapa came too quickly to avoid. In the end, the only critique leveraged against Tatiana was the weakness she displayed by being forced from the roda to catch her breath. While minor pains and bruises are par for the course in capoeira training and play, I had never heard Mestre Cláudio emphasize being able to tolerate violent kicks as a necessary skill.54 I marveled at the men’s ingenuity. It was as if they were evoking a new standard in order to place the blame with Tatiana. The discussion revealed that male angoleiros may celebrate capoeira Angola as a weapon of the weak when they identify with “the weak” (marginalized, poor, black Brazilian men). However, when women are perceived as demonstrating weakness, it disqualifies them from the competition. Their weakness, in other words, is not the kind that can be overcome by alternative weapons and strategies. A double standard is operative here: when women are beaten, it is due to their gender, but when men are beaten, it shows what they have left to learn. Yet whether men acknowledge it or not, the fact remains that most angoleiro/as interpret getting “beaten” as an opportunity to learn. Whether or not men include women 54 I know of one group, at least, that does train with this kind of violence. One student of the group explained to me that he wanted to be able to use capoeira as a fight, so it was necessary to spar and use full force in training. He regularly broke ribs and got black eyes from his teacher. However, Mestre Cláudio and his students have always voiced strong disapproval to this group’s violent style and ethic of play. 275 among “the weak” who benefit from capoeira Angola, female players understand that the techniques and strategies of capoeira Angola emphasize intelligence and flexibility over brute force. Larger, stronger bodies might be able to hit harder or bring someone to the ground more easily, but smaller compact bodies, of men and women alike, can move quickly under and around larger bodies.55 Small bodies use intelligence and technique (knowledge of timing and physics) to bring down larger bodies. The fundaments of capoeira Angola prize wisdom and aesthetics over aggression. All of this points to the possibility of women becoming great players, as Tatiana and several other exceptional women players have already confirmed. As I once heard Mestra Janja propose in a discussion during a capoeira workshop, capoeira Angola already contains the seeds of its own transformation. We need only look more deeply to see that the ethics, tools and strategies taught in capoeira Angola can be put to use by anyone who needs them. The revolutionary ethos is embedded in the practice itself, whether those currently in power wish to acknowledge it or not. Contesting space: When foreign bodies enter the roda As I trained with the Angoleiros do Sertão on my extended stays in Feira, often Solange and I were the only women present in the trainings. We have trained together during classes and we have often been paired up in rodas, so we have played together multiple times. Solange’s game is quick and fierce, taking on the group's characteristic 55 Indeed, the diversity of bodies and abilities present in capoeira Angola warrants its own study. Though normatively abled bodies make up the vast majority, in general capoeira Angola groups practice the inclusion that they preach. I have witnessed playing in the roda toddlers and the elderly, people with various physical handicaps, missing limbs, obesity, mental and developmental disabilities, even vision impairment. 276 speed and playfulness that verges on provocation. She favors an aggressive game, aiming for more direct attacks, trying to "get" her partner (catch them off guard, or take them down with leg sweeps), which leaves less room for constructing a beautiful game of bodily call and response. Solange being the only woman training in the group much of the time heightened my awareness of my own presence in the space. Drawing on my experiences hanging out as the only woman among men, in my case usually among jazz musicians, I wondered if she also had a sense of occupying a special position, a woman accessing a male space and (almost) becoming one of the guys. As one sole woman boxer in a gym with men expressed how she would react to another woman training at the gym: “I’d probably beat a bitch up real bad if she came in here, just so that she’d think twice about coming back. If I beat her up bad enough maybe she wouldn’t come back” (Lennox 2012: 125). Did Solange experience my presence in the group in a similar way, as a threat to her space? The fact that I was not only another woman, but white and foreign, meant that I was more likely to be seen as an intruder and competitor than an ally. When we were paired to play together, did Solange feel an added pressure to defend her territory and put me in my place? One occasion several years ago gave me an opportunity to observe Solange play with some “gringas” even more foreign than myself.56 A group of Japanese capoeira- tourists was visiting the Mestre for several days. In the roda I could feel a mild tension, a 56 As I elaborate in another note below, “gringo/a” is used in Bahia to refer to all foreigners. It has not retained its specific reference to North Americans. It also appears that among this group, as I also address below, one can become less gringo/a by acculturating to the group and Bahian norms and shedding certain negative characteristics of gringo-ness. In my case, I felt “less foreign” because I had spent months with the group and in Bahia as opposed to days. However, in my particular case, I will always be seen as a gringa to some extent. 277 sense of outsiders on "our" turf, which also made the roda feel a bit more like a performance. After all, the Japanese group had come to learn from the Angoleiros. As I watched the games, I was struck by the contrast between the Japanese players and the Angoleiros. The Japanese players seemed to move with heavy, sticky bodies, as if moving through jelly, alongside the smooth swift flow of the Angoleiros. Solange played with two of the visiting women, and both times it was exciting but tense to watch, because she threw herself into the game regardless of whether her partners could keep up. Mestre Cláudio teaches that when you notice the other person lacks the condition (condição, playing ability) to play how you want to play, you should adjust and meet them at their level in order to prioritize the game. Solange, however, seemed to disregard this principle, and the Japanese women became increasingly flustered and nervous as they sensed that Solange might actually hit them. I thought it seemed as if she were trying to prove something to them. After the roda I joked with her, "Wow, you really wanted to beat them up, didn't you!" She laughed back, saying, "No! I was just trying to inspire them to train! Now they'll want to train more!" That same thought had occurred to me while I watched the games: surely they will return to Japan feeling they need to train much harder. Solange and I have developed a joking rapport over the years that on occasion gives way to expose some tension. She teases that I'm "brutal" or "violent" and that she's going to get me in our next game. I respond that I'm actually really sweet and innocent, and I fear for my life playing with her. Our humor only thinly covers some truths. I do not back off from playing a harder game, if I can keep up, and there have been times when I have exerted myself with Solange. On her part, when Solange jokes about “getting” me, I 278 don’t sense she is merely joking. She often takes verbal jabs at me for being a gringa, commenting about how I must have a lot of money. But then she’ll claim with a look of disgust that she wouldn't want it because it's gringo money. Yet further adding to the complexity of our relationship, in interviews Solange has spoken openly about her experiences and views. She has seriously considered my questions and generously offered her time and thoughts to answer them. I am aware that, as one of the only women training in Feira and one of the very few Afro-Brazilian women in the group, much of this study builds on her testimony. All in all, our relationship approaches a form of camaraderie with some hostility beneath the surface, with occasional moments of warmth that never quite seem to arrive at friendship. Our relationship also reveals the difficulty of parsing out the ways that intersecting, structural forces of subjugation surface in interactions between individuals and on personal levels. Is there any way to disentangle our personalities from our positions on two sides of many divides? I am a white woman who arrives to spend several months a year in Bahia, with enough funds that I need not work a regular job while I am there, while Solange has fought her way through several university degrees only to work long hours training customer service representatives in a calling center, far from her desired profession. In our first interview, she told me how she had started to research capoeira as an "instrument of social transformation" in rural areas, but could not continue because none of her professors would agree to advise her and support her work on the topic. In a way I am doing the research she wanted to do, on top of all the other glaring inequalities. However, my many privileges do little to protect against a well-aimed kick. Seth, a white American man from Louisiana living in Salvador, provided the perspective of 279 another white North American in Bahia, but one who has lived there for over six years. He described how it had taken him several years to recognize that his fellow group members played extra tough with him because he was a gringo. As the fact dawned on him, he told me, he also grew more aware of his privilege as a white foreign man in Bahia. He realized he had grown up expecting people not to hurt him, and so it had taken him several years to see that the black eyes and cuts he got from training were reserved for him, while his fellow group members remained unscathed. He gave an example of such a training: Like when you’re training and you're with a guy, a black guy, a local guy, and he trains hard with you, he trains rougher with you. I mean there’s been times straight up where we're training — a spin and then a kick — and in the middle of the spin, he grabs my hat, and when I finish the spin he throws the hat in my face, and then he launches a kick while I’m blinded… He kicked me in the face! He cut my eye open! Seth’s training partner used a well-worn trick by throwing something in his face to blind and distract him. Yet while this kind of trick usually ends in a feigned attack and laughter, serving as a warning, in this case Seth’s opponent actually followed through and drew blood. Seth recounted how his friend told him how he used to go to the rodas in the touristic Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador expressly in order to "bater no gringo"(kick some gringo ass). Now his friend includes him in this tough talk, even chastising Seth after he plays too nicely with another gringo, "Man, I told you! Jogue duro com ele! (Play hard with him!) They come here thinking it's gonna be all easy for them?! You gotta show them!" I pointed out to him that it felt different for me as a white foreign woman. I sensed, in contrast, that the men would not train hard enough with me, treating me as if I 280 were fragile. Because of this I often feel deprived of a good training, though the "hard" training I desire does not include getting my eye cut open. I added how I also felt that in Feira de Santana the group had accepted me as a liminal, partial member. Seth just laughed and called me out for being too trusting. He thought I was overestimating my insider status. Laughing, I asked, "You mean I'm too naive?" He laughed back, "Yeah! Of course!" On reflection, I understood Seth’s point. The Angoleiros may make me feel included, but I will never fully belong to the group. Yet my experience as a woman still differed from Seth’s. Men may not train or play hard with me, but women do. Inheriting the legacy of racialized gender relations established during slavery, black and white men still relate differently to white women than they do to black women. Throughout the Americas, white women have historically been deemed gentle, virtuous and weak, ideal specimens of womanhood, in contrast to black womens’ asexuality or hyper- sexualization, and their ability to endure pain and hard labor (hooks 1981:47-49; Collins 2004). As a white woman, I must be protected not attacked. However, reflecting enduring hostilities between white and black women (hooks 1981: 154-55), Bahian women feel no such obligation to protect my white body from harm.57 Just days after my conversation with Seth, I played in a roda led by Treinel Pernalonga. Pernalonga has started his own sub-group in his neighborhood in the periphery of Feira de Santana where he teaches capoeira Angola to a growing group of neighborhood children. Solange, his girlfriend, aids him with his teaching though she has 57 While bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins write about the United States, slavery affected gender and race relations in the US and Brazil in similar ways. Abusada, another member of the Angoleiros, has also talked at length, in the same terms, about white women’s perceived fragility and the differential treatment afforded to white and black women. 281 no official title or status as teacher. Thursday nights they hold their weekly roda. When I was last there, the students had only been training for a little over a year and many did not yet have the ability to play a full game. However, other members of the Angoleiros regularly made the trek to the roda, eager for another chance to play during the week and to contribute their energy to the roda and Pernalonga's project. On that night, the roda had attracted a particularly large turnout. A local woman has opened her home and offered the cleared-out front room of her house as the training and roda space. The floor is made of large smooth white ceramic tiles, typical in many homes. The space that night was packed with bodies, participants sitting in a circle with their backs against the walls, and the musicians of the bateria seated in chairs along one wall completing the circle. The tiled floor and empty walls amplified the berimbaus, pandeiros, atabaque and other percussion, and all of the voices. Arriving after the roda had started, I felt the jolt of the pounding sound of a roda in full force as I entered the space after a quiet car ride. The air was hot and damp with sweat. I arrived with several other people, and we squeezed ourselves between other seated bodies in the ring. Watching the games, I noticed that Solange was playing with particularly high energy, attempting lots of leg sweeps, giving many kicks to the face. Eventually Pernalonga gestured for me and Solange to play together. I felt stiff, wishing I had had a chance to stretch my body. Everyone present seemed heated up, sweating, moving fast, and in contrast I felt slow and tired after a day of traveling. But I was excited to play! The energy of the roda called me and made me eager to join in. As I knelt down and joined hands with Solange to start our game, I resolved not to get swept up in her game. I wanted to play on my own terms, not feel forced to match her speed or 282 aggression. That's not my style, I thought. I wanted to try to encourage her to play with me. We started playing, and I concentrated on keeping a cool head, keeping my movements flowing and expressive and trying to engage her in play. But she was on fire. She didn’t find any good opportunities to knock me down with a leg sweep, but instead seemed to concentrate on more direct kicks. Every time I moved in one direction, she met my face with a kick, swift and just held back so as not to hit me. We never locked into any kind of groove. I had the feeling she was jumping around, running circles around me, and I was just watching, trying to find a way into the game. She also started tapping my face with her hand whenever I was exposed. We eventually met again at the berimbaus and, half-joking, I smiled and said, “Calma, calma!” (Calm down!), lowering with my outstretched palms toward the ground, but she just grinned and went at me again. Finally, after a short time, Thomaz who was directing the roda that moment, ended our game. It was not a good game and was probably just as painful to watch as it was to play. I returned to sit in the roda deeply unsatisfied. I was annoyed with myself for not managing to create a game and not having avoided her jabs and taps. Yet I was also irritated that she had focused her efforts on trying to get me at whatever cost, with what I considered cheap shots. It is much easier to get direct hits than to artfully trick someone into a moment of imbalance, and then with a perfectly-timed nudge send them to the floor. It’s easier to kick their feet, hoping they’ll fall, or hit their faces when they are exposed. I should have protected myself more, but only in rare circumstances do I touch an opponent’s face when it is unprotected, which is often. The move feigns a slap in the face, and doing it incessantly in a game aggravates the opponent more than serving any other 283 function. Solange wanted to irritate me, not play with me. She wanted to show she was faster than me — and she is — rather than find a tempo we could both play at. After our game, she played with another woman who was visiting the Mestre for a few days. The woman was half Belgian and half Congolese, so while she was technically also a gringa, she was black, lighter skinned but with long locks. 58 As I watched Solange play with her, I saw they had a game. Solange was still quick, but she refrained from the quick jabs and cheap shots. Games always involve two, with no one player completely in charge. The visiting woman succeeded in playing with Solange as I had not. However, I also sensed that Solange especially wanted to get me, to kick my white-gringa ass. As she did not yet have the skill to get me with the cunning and grace of a jogo bonito, she reverted to getting under my skin. While she didn’t cut my eyebrow, I did feel cut down. Solange could not prevent me from showing up to the roda, from entering the space, but by rendering a good game impossible she had cut me out of sharing in the good energy. I found it hard to enjoy the rest of the roda after that game, and was given no other opportunity to play. After the roda, I talked to someone else about our game, and they agreed that Solange had prevented any real game from happening. I commented on the energy of the roda, saying I found it too worked up, a bit chaotic. I also said I was disappointed I only played once, and so terribly. They responded that it made sense I felt that way, because I 58 Although the derogatory term gringo/a originally applied only to North Americans, Brazilians use it to refer to all non-Brazilians. However, the term still connotes whiteness. White Brazilians are often said to “look like a gringo” while Black foreigners are often told they don’t look like gringos, they look Brazilian or Bahian. In the case of a “gringo/a” hailing from continental Africa, their genuine Africannes might trump any gringo/a status. Notably, I have also heard Mestre Cláudio tell a white European group member that he doesn’t consider him a gringo: Aside from wearing his (dirty blond) hair in locks, the member is physically imposing, very large and strong, has been a soldier (and has probably killed people in that capacity) and openly voices explicitly macho and derogatory views of women. In this case, it seems that machista-masculinity can also trump gringo status. 284 had had a bad game, but they had found the energy good. They suggested that the number of people who had showed up had perhaps overwhelmed Pernalonga a bit, rendering it difficult to conduct the roda in an ideal way, for example by ensuring everyone got equal playing time. Most other adults present had played multiple times. So I was left wondering if they had intentionally prevented me from playing again, reinforcing my still-outsider status, or if it had just worked out that way on that particular night. These thoughts remain speculative, because even when I discuss these issues with group members I have no way of knowing if they are revealing the way they really think. However, that night at Pernalonga's roda I felt excluded from the space, physically present but prevented from sharing the group’s axé. Notably, the roda took place without the presence of Mestre Cláudio, who generally strives to make visitors feel welcome. Out from under the gaze of the Mestre, the Angoleiros confirmed Seth's suspicion that the code of bater no gringo extends beyond the tourist capital of Salvador. As a woman, I would be considered too easy a target for the men. As the only woman training with the group in Feira, therefore, the responsibility of kicking the gringa’s ass rested solely with Solange. As a rule, after my continued visits to their group, members treat me with respect and our relations range from familiar to friendly. With Solange, however, I always feel more on edge, aware of the many ways I still pose a threat to her space. Conquering space: Guerreira tactics in the roda It’s the opening night of an annual event held in a university town in the interior of São Paulo state. 59 A man and a woman meet at the foot of the berimbau, the place in the 59 The video of the game I describe here can be seen on YouTube (Yahn 2016). 285 roda where the players enter into the ritual play.60 She is compact with light brown skin, her silky brown hair in a ponytail tucked into a small brown rasta cap, or tam, and he is taller and black, with his locks tied up and stuffed into a larger grey knit tam. The singer leads the song “Pai é pai, mãe é mãe, sou xodó de papa, sou xodó de mamãe” [Dad is dad, mom is mom, I’m dad's darling, I’m mom's darling], a sweet song encouraging a friendly game, and the crowd sings the chorus with gusto. Both players lower their heads to the ground in negativa, facing the berimbaus. They start with deliberate movements, fluid but controlled, low to ground. Natureza, the woman, lowers her torso onto one elbow, and Pingo, the man, gives a steady round rabo de arraia kick and halfway through raises both legs into a handstand. The players lift their legs over their partners’ backs in a relaxed and flowing corporeal dialogue. As the game progresses, attacks come more frequently, in the form of quicker kicks coming closer to bodies, though they remain largely “shown”: they are held-back gestures of potential kicks, rather than full attacks that make contact. Spectators in the roda — the other angoleiro/as completing the ring and singing the chorus of the song — yell and shout in response to the quickened movements, cheering the players on. The game enters its third minute, and Natureza and Pingo return to the foot of the berimbau, signaling a restart of the game. They revert to slower, flowing movements. Then the song-leader switches to, “Bota fogo no mato, chama ele, ele vem,” [Set fire to the forest, call him, he comes], calling for more “fire” in the game. Play continues at a seemingly relaxed pace, but as Pingo lowers his head to the ground, Natureza steps behind it, blocking his movement, and to escape it he changes directions by whipping his 60 The “foot of the berimbau” refers to the position crouched at the feet of the berimbau players, who may be seated in chairs or on a bench (as in this roda) or standing. 286 legs up and outward, springing to his feet in a showy flip, landing in a squat and springing back immediately with a flat-footed chapa kick. The game accelerates. The previous moment of apparent peace possibly masked less-peaceful intentions. Now that the game has picked up, no slowing down or graceful movements can be trusted. (Though they never really should be.) After another restart at the foot of the berimbau, the pace picks up even more, and kicks whip around passing just with a hair of each other’s backs. Then as the players once again return to the foot of the berimbau, another singer takes over and starts singing: Maria subiu no coqueiro Maria climbed the coconut tree Para pegar o coco de mão To grab a coconut by hand Mais o coqueiro era alto But the coconut tree was high E Maria caiu no chão And Maria fell to the ground Maria Maria [coro] Caiu no chão [chorus] Fell to the ground The final line serves as the hook or punch line of the verse, and when he sings “Maria caiu no chão” Natureza cries out (as if in mock indignation), raises her hands to the sky and then crosses herself in protection. As the other roda members respond gleefully to the chorus, “She fell to the ground!” Natureza turns to face them and waves her finger, as if to say, “No she didn’t! No she won’t!” The game resumes, Pingo now challenged to make Natureza fall, Natureza on her guard, and everyone present singing out in full voice, eager to witness the action to come. Natureza is the only woman in the Angoleiros do Sertão who has earned the title treinel, and she now leads her own satellite-group in São José dos Campos, São Paulo. She grew up in a neighborhood on the periphery of São Paulo city, and she entered the group while attending university when she started training with one of Mestre Cláudio’s 287 most advanced disciples, who oversees multiple off-shoots of the school throughout the interior of the state of São Paulo. Treinel Natureza and Contra-Mestre Pingo’s game is representative of a good- natured game between friends. The roda took place at the opening night of a yearly event, so friends were gathering and reconnecting; spirits were high in anticipation of all the good games and axé to come in following days. The game also reveals the subtle kinds of play on gender common in capoeira games. To mark that a woman enters the roda, the leader often chooses songs with lyrics about "Maria" or "Catarina.” Men entering the roda, in contrast, with their unmarked gender, are met with songs drawn from the vast capoeira repertoire, some containing gendered words (for example, nego, black guy), but often chosen to send a message about what kind of game the singer wants to see.61 In this case, the song did both: it marked Natureza’s gender and told Pingo how to play with her. When the leader sang "Maria fell to the ground," everyone understood that Pingo should now try to make Natureza fall. While songs about falling are common in capoeira, songs specifying a woman falling are rare. The choice of song raises questions: Was Natureza being singled-out for attack because she was a woman? Or was this provocation simply in line with any other song calling for a more aggressive game? Was this subtle machismo or inclusive camaraderie? Could it be both simultaneously? Days later I asked Natureza about the moment the song switched to “Maria caiu no chão.” She said, “Everyone was there wanting to see me fall on the ground!” Laughing she added, “Thank God I didn’t fall!” I asked her if she thought it was machista 61 Nego and nega, black man and black woman, are common terms of endearment in Bahia, used as “man” is used in English, to refer to anyone regardless of their race or phenotype. They always mark gender, though depending on the circumstances they may or may not mark race. 288 that they specifically called for Maria, a woman, to fall and she immediately answered, “No, it’s not machista, it’s capoeirista.” She explained how a woman could also sing to a man about falling, or to a woman, or they could sing a song where no gender was specified. These songs are used to entertain the roda, she said. They are a musical signifying calling for corporeal signifying, poking fun and stirring up the fight-game with coded lyrics understood by all, challenging players to trick each other with stylish, subtle moves (Gates: 2014: 59). Even if the singer was calling out Natureza as a woman, it still fell within the norm of signifying in capoeira Angola. Natureza agreed with my suggestion that it could even be seen as a show of confidence in her as a player, a sign of respect, engaging her on these multiple levels of meaning and play. The singer wanted to see a good game, and he knew she could handle the provocation and defend herself. And she did! As Pingo hopped and swept, trying to make her fall, she kept grounded, maintaining her expression and flow: The game resumes with Pingo charged to cause Natureza to fall. They continue to move gracefully, with smooth steady movements. Pingo lifts into a bananeira (handstand) and Natureza responds by opening scissor-legs toward his hands on the ground. They perform circular kicks in close proximity; Natureza escapes by lowering herself into a head balance. At one moment as Pingo completes a circular kick Natureza goes in for a head butt, but he encircles her neck with his arm, bringing her into a headlock; her cap comes loose, he places it back on her head (feigning care) but covering her eyes, blinding her, and then kicks toward her face, but she instinctively jerks herself away, knowing the trick, and the cap falls to the ground again, his kick missing her face. But as she remains turned away, leaning down to pick up her hat, he comes at full speed, sweeping at both 289 her legs, aiming to take her down to the ground! He takes the soles of both her feet off the floor, but she saw it coming, stayed close to the ground and caught her fall by shooting both arms down to the ground. It was close, and the crowd yelled out, but in the end she kept herself from hitting the ground. As she rights herself, Pingo comes back at her again, with a spinning back kick, his foot aimed at her face but he holds back short of making contact. Smiling, unfazed by his rapid attacks, she gestures at Pingo to walk in a circle around the edge of the roda, another way of re-setting the game. Natureza now keeps the pressure on Pingo by aiming kicks more directly at his face, and he continues searching for the right sweep to bring her down. He tries one while she is standing up, but she holds her ground and his foot only rides up her calf, lifting her pant leg, but failing to budge her foot. Instead she shifts her leg backwards, taking his leg with it, giving him a sweep in return, but he quickly disengages before she can send him to the ground. They continue with inverted movements on their heads and hands, kicks circling close to faces and backs. The tempo stays up, and they play with bounce and flow. Finally, the berimbau calls the end of the game, and they embrace and leave the roda. At a later event, I told Pingo I was writing about his game with Natureza, about how he failed to make her fall. He shot back, laughing, “Ah! I didn’t make her fall only because I chose not to!” Pingo covered himself, refusing to concede failure. However, his answer reveals some truths as well. As a contra-mestre with a hard, fast game, Pingo probably could have made Natureza fall if that were his sole objective. However, he was not trying to make her fall at any cost, to send her to the ground in a violent or ugly manner. Within the parameters of an amicable game, retaining the playful grace of the 290 game, therefore, he failed to make her fall because Natureza had protected herself. True success for Pingo – achieving the fall – would only have come if he had done it with style. In the end, as there are no winners or losers, it matters less whether or not Pingo was able to respond to the specific call of the song. Both players managed to heat up the game, risk more, play harder, and still maintain the flow of a jogo bonito. Everyone had a good time. Through this game Natureza conquered her space in the roda in a number of ways. For one, she held her ground by not letting Pingo take her down. This view frames Natureza’s achievement in the negative, however, as merely “not falling.” She also did more. Staying on her feet she contributed to sustaining a good game for nearly ten minutes. This feat can be compared to playing a long jazz solo, but keeping it interesting the whole time. A good game, like a good solo, goes somewhere and says something. The players soak up the axé from the music and the singers, and they feed it back through their movements, through the wit and joy of their bodily dialogue, lifting the spirits of everyone watching the game. Climactic moments, such as a beautiful sweep or a spectacular fall, are not necessary. Two players developing a good game together can demonstrate their ability in many ways even more than a dramatic take-down. By sustaining the tension, keeping the audience riveted for the whole game, Natureza occupied both physical and temporal space. Yet she did even more. When the singer called for Maria to fall to ground, he raised the stakes. He not only called attention to Natureza's gender, but he called for her downfall. In contrast to most songs that call for falling or attacks, where each player is called to attack the other, this one created a one-way challenge: Pingo, with more 291 experience and a higher-level, had to bring Natureza down. The "strong" was told to beat the "weak," which of course is unfair! The sauciness of this move on the singer's part created a heightened energy. But by calling for Natureza to fall as a woman, the choice of song seemed to imply that if she were to fail and fall, it would also be because she was a woman. The singer was calling for Natureza not only to defend her own status and reputation, but also that of all women angoleiras. Though Natureza might not agree with my gendered reading, I think I understand why she took the joke as "capoeirista," downplaying how it signified on her gender. If she had accepted it as machista, she would have fallen into another trap: playing as a woman, for all women. This shows the ambiguous, subtle kinds of added pressure women face in the roda all the time. By staying on her feet, Natureza claimed her space as a capoeirista; but if she had fallen to the ground, she would have fallen as Maria. Conclusions The problem with conquering space The prevailing opinion in the Angoleiros do Sertão holds that the capoeira space is open to women, they are welcome to join and train. Just like the men, they must dedicate themselves, train hard, practice the instruments, and learn to sing the songs. In other words, everyone must earn their inclusion. However, as arguments for affirmative action also claim, a merit-based system assumes a level playing field, that women and men have the same opportunities and advantages in their training and lives. As we heard from Solange, this is simply not the case. Women enter the capoeira space already at a disadvantage, having been raised according to Brazilian gender standards. 292 Here lies the problem with the concept of conquering space: women must first demonstrate their ability, then they will be accepted into the space. Yet they need opportunities to play in order to improve their ability. Before they have earned the right to complain about being excluded from the space, they must show that they have earned their inclusion. Men and boys in the Angoleiros group invariably progress more rapidly than women. Young men with less time in the group soon play more often and longer games than women who have been with the group for many years. This increases the pressure women experience every time they play. As they have fewer opportunities in the roda to demonstrate their ability, each time they play they must prove they are worthy of occupying roda space. Each game has the potential to increase or decrease their future opportunities. This is the critique also raised by Dona Ivannide: The capoeira folks don't want capoeira to be a feminine space. They won't accept it. They only accept it when it is already a given, a fact, when suddenly a woman appears before them who enters into real confrontation. They kick her down, and she picks herself up and rises above it. The process is already a given. Only when no one manages to send her away, only once it is a consummated fact, only then do they accept her there. Dona Ivannide, with her decades of convivência alongside Mestre Cláudio and the Angoleiros do Sertão, has seen that women are only accepted in the capoeira space when they are already able. The entire burden of proof lies with them. The men leading the group stand in passive judgement, the gatekeepers to the art. Women are not allowed to enter the space and try and fail. If a woman plays well, space is ceded to her. If she makes mistakes, her games are cut short or she may not play at all. This troubles to some extent women’s narrative of actively claiming space. 293 Abusada explained that this makes it difficult for women to avoid confrontation, necessitating that we women “confront our space head on.” Even when not seeking conflict, women asserting themselves is interpreted as confrontational: When we’re in a space where the majority are men, and you confront a man and say, “Now I want to try to do this movement. I want to try to play this instrument!” If you’re a man talking to the professor he’ll say, “Cool, go ahead, you can try!” But when it’s us [women], it’s taken as a confrontation with the professor. Simply because we’re women! We have to have courage to ask for what is considered natural for a man. And so this is the confrontation we always face, in society as much as in capoeira, for us to achieve our space. We always have to conquer our space in the roda. In this way men and women’s displays of ambition are also viewed differently. Men are encouraged to “go ahead and try,” while women face the added risk of being branded confrontational, perhaps even “feminist.” When a woman enters the roda, therefore, she carries the extra burden of having to prove that she deserves to occupy that space. Especially when involving younger, less experienced players, this surely contributes to certain games with women escalating from playing around (brincando) to more heated, aggressive play. I can imagine how important it might be to Solange that I not outplay her. If I played better than Solange, she and group members might experience that as my taking space that was rightfully hers. So she does her best to prevent that from happening. Natureza’s game with Pingo also exemplifies the added pressure placed on women in the roda. She told me in an interview that she had worked very hard to achieve her title. As the only female treinel in the group, observers expect her to prove that she deserves her title every time she plays. When I asked how she managed to achieve her level in capoeira, she said, “I think it came from my strength, from my searching… due to my dedication.” She felt that other women in the group had the capacity to become 294 treinels, but that they needed to make more effort, to dedicate more of their time to capoeira as she had. She declined to comment with any specificity on how being a woman might have made her struggle harder. However, Natureza’s story with capoeira stands apart from that of other Brazilian women in another way. Her father was a capoeirista and took her with him to rodas when she was still a child. From a very young age Natureza watched capoeira and trained with her father. While her father trained the Regional style, not Angola, she recognized that her foundation had helped a lot when she began to train capoeira Angola. She was able to draw on years of developing her ginga movement, upper arm strength, flexibility, and being able to hold and play the berimbau. The encouragement Natureza received from her father contrasts with the way many parents in Brazil discourage their daughters form participating in capoeira. Rita described how her father strictly forbade her from training capoeira. She would sneak off to watch the rodas throughout her teenage years. Solange related how at work and in her family she still faces constant ridicule and criticism. Colleagues deride her for prioritizing capoeira and family members say she should have children by now instead of still preoccupying herself with capoeira. Working class women in Bahia, and still in many parts of Brazil, are expected to do everything in the house, and the workload is strenuous and time consuming. Especially in Bahia, houses must be cleaned thoroughly every day because open houses in hot climates accumulate dust, mold and pests if not kept meticulously clean. Clothes are washed, scrubbed, rinsed and wrung out by hand. Meals always include several dishes, and must be cooked fresh, usually for large groups of 295 people. Women may be welcome to train capoeira, but they still often face discouragement and other obstacles to their training. This raises the question of whether hard training and dedication are all that women need to claim their space. Placing the responsibility fully on women’s shoulders shifts the focus away from men’s behavior and calls on women to assert themselves. The women in the Angoleiros do Sertão for the most part have embraced this attitude, finding empowerment in the posture of actively conquering their space. While it serves to maintain cooperative relations with men, it also diverts any attention from men’s responsibility to address and change their own behavior. It renders machismo a women’s problem, just as racism in Brazil is considered a problem only for Afro-Brazilians. In recent years, Mestre Cláudio has become more vocal in underscoring his support of women fighting for their space. However, he has strong opinions as to approaches and strategies. For example, he criticizes mestras who speak out against machismo yet have let their capoeira game wane. Strong words cannot substitute for a strong game. I share this view to some extent. While I probably appreciate the speaking more, I do find it disappointing to see a mestra play an underwhelming game. Like many women, I want to see strong women players serving as examples and role models. Cláudio also disapproves of women practitioners who organize events only for women and hold rodas where men are not allowed to participate. One student interpreted the Mestre’s position as arguing for a “right way and a wrong way” to fight every battle, demonstrating a principle lesson of capoeira Angola: If you are a weaker party and you choose to fight with brute force, you will lose. But if you carefully select your strategies, if you use your intelligence and flexibility, you can beat someone much stronger than 296 you. If more radical feminist practitioners seek to remedy machismo in capoeira by excluding men from the spaces, the Mestre feels this will alienate men, and these women will lose the men as allies. The guerreiras of the Angoleiros do Sertão generally do not support these kinds of extreme and divisive measures. They insist on claiming their space alongside, not against, the men in the group. Spaces Conquered Mestre Cláudio acknowledges his own machismo, if unapologetically or sheepishly, but he has also shown his ability to change, if with gradual steps. Even since my first visit in 2013, I have noticed that he talks more frequently about “women in capoeira,” acknowledging the necessity of having more discussions among community members. Abusada has noticed this change, too. While she criticized the members of her own group for refusing to discuss issues of gender, she cited the Mestre as an example: “I hear the Mestre talking about the gender issue, and if he talks about it, why can’t others?” I have also noted that when the Mestre travels to give workshops with other groups, he always makes sure to play with the women during the rodas. Playing with a mestre is considered an honor and always a great learning opportunity. By singling out the women, even if their levels are not very high, he shows they are worthy of occupying that space in the roda, even as students with much to learn. His games with these women still remain shorter than those he plays with men. However, if a woman plays well, he will play with her longer. In this way, the Mestre has started to open the space just a bit, allowing some women to play whether they are at a high level or not. However, back in Feira at his own 297 weekly roda, there are still rodas where he does not call Solange to play even once. Progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go. While I have limited my analysis to the Angoleiros do Sertão, it forms part of a broader capoeira Angola community that extends to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, and throughout Brazil and the world. In contrast to thirty years ago when capoeira Angola was still struggling for survival and revival, there are now several prominent female mestras. Their presence as women who have achieved mastery in capoeira Angola already refutes beliefs that women can never rival men in capoeira. As they speak out about women’s position in capoeira, their ideas and statements reverberate throughout the community as capoeiristas hear them at events and repeat them back home. Conversations about machismo and gender are now occurring with more urgency and frequency throughout the entire Bahian capoeira community. The evolving discussion and the rise of more accomplished female players increase the sense that women are conquering more space in capoeira. When women in the Angoleiros do Sertão emphasize their struggles in terms of claiming space, they are framing their empowerment in terms of sounding, embodied action. They sing, play and move their bodies as a mode of doing. Despite the problems with the concept of conquering space, the women in the Angoleiros group remain adamant. As Natália, another female student, put it, “Feminism in capoeira Angola is about making things happen! Playing a good game! Capoeira is not about talking, it’s about doing/making. And feminism seems like it’s all about talking, but come on, are you trying? Are you training on your own, if you need to?” Through dedication and persistence women practitioners make strides. Change may seem to come gradually, and 298 spaces once conquered can still be lost. The very concept of claiming space is dynamic, not static. Dedication to conquering space is above all a dedication to ongoing movement. The multiple ways of ceding, contesting and conquering space explored in this chapter comprise guerreira tactics. They encompass commitment to community and allow for incompletion, maintaining loyalty to capoeira as a practice alongside men, even if they have not yet conquered their own machismo. Drawing on lessons from their practice, guerreiras know the “weak” can beat the “strong,” sometimes by avoiding direct and open conflict, instead ducking down and twisting their bodies, maneuvering into a better position. They raise their distuning voices, growing the volume of the collective chorus with their own distinctive tones. But other times they enter the roda kicking, fearless of the blows they may receive in response. The space of the roda reveals a diversity of approaches and responses. It serves as a training ground for tactics to confront all manners of difficulties, challenges and oppressions. As they conquer their space in the roda, guerreiras train their bodies and their minds in order to bring this wisdom to their lives beyond the roda as well. Above all, they embrace dynamism and doing, which places emphasis on their agency and their abilities to act, move and change their own lives. The guerreiras show how conquering space is an ongoing battle for which their training is never complete. 299 CHAPTER FOUR Capoeira Angola as Black Movement: The Racial Politics of Angoleiro Practice Karine is a militant activist in local black movement groups in Feira de Santana, known for her speaking ability: she is regularly given the mic at rallies and marches because she improvises powerful and poetic speeches, giving voice to the struggle of the Afro-Brazilian people. She is currently working towards a PhD in History, writing and publishing about black women’s activism in Feira de Santana (Damasceno 2017). In these many ways Karine is a storyteller. She used to train capoeira with the Angoleiros do Sertão, and still feels a strong affinity for the group and its anti-racism project. She makes regular appearances at the rodas, events and celebrations and loves to participate in the samba de roda. When I asked her how she had become so close to the group, she began to tell about one Saturday when she had gone to the roda on the street. She had been there before and was watching the capoeira and samba as usual. But this time, when the samba began, some of the guys of the capoeira group called to her to enter the roda and sambar (dance samba). She interrupted herself: But there’s another story: I was always very timid. This idea of dancing at a party, it didn’t exist for me! I never danced! — I usually say that the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) saved my head. Because I started to think of myself as a beautiful woman. And even though I already had the dream of going to the university, I then decided to do a master’s degree, too, and then a doctorate. I began to dream about more. 300 And she launched into the back story of who she was at that moment when the Angoleiros do Sertão called her to enter the samba roda. Karine told how in her youth, her extreme shyness had forced her to confront her fears head on, and as a result she had developed into a formidable public speaker. Once at university, she emerged as a leader in the Black Student Movement. However, she sooon found that activism involved much more than talking, thinking and debating about politics in meetings. “Our way of doing politics also takes place at the bar, at parties and hanging out and talking.” In these informal spaces she was still confronted by her physical shyness, “this thing of the body.” Her body, she told me, was “locked,” closed and stuck. “I still hadn’t managed to liberate my body.” At parties with her black militant friends, when the women pulled her to dance with them she refused, “It was impossible!” She returned to that particular Saturday: So I’m there watching the samba and suddenly the guys start calling me to dance, and I was shy! I didn’t do samba! They’re calling me, and I’m like, Oh my god, what am I going to do? I’m not going in, I can’t! Only when the guys started calling me, Mestre Cláudio stopped the roda and also called me to samba. So I went. Because the Mestre had told me to! But also, already when the boys were calling me, it had triggered something very strong in me, related to my political relationship with the group. She knew the samba was the moment of interaction between the group and the community. She explained that some community members present that day at the roda were academics like herself, but many more were not. As every Saturday, the crowd that gathered to watch capoeira and revel in samba consisted primarily of people from poor, peripheral areas. Karine described how part of her work as a black militant inside the university involved calling to these people and encouraging them to leave their “rural reality” and claim space in the world of the university. She recognized how Mestre 301 Cláudio had ventured beyond his community to teach at the university, a space that remains uncomfortable for him because it continues to marginalize him. But he went anyway to support the growing group of young black students that called to him to join their fight to denounce racism from within the academy. “How, then,” Karine asked, “could I refuse to leave my comfort zone, and just stand there and watch?” And so I felt called to remember that this was also a way to contribute to the movement happening there on the street! I did not feel I had the right to say no only because I was embarrassed to samba on the street with everyone watching me. For me, at that moment, my own embarrassment was of little importance compared to the importance of contributing to the movement on the street. And I was so embarrassed, so stiff! I wasn’t able to enjoy it at all. That day it was much more about my political compromisso than it was about pleasure or anything else. So I samba’ed! From that day on, Karine continued to return to the Saturday roda and enter the samba. As she grew accustomed to overcoming her embarrassment, the experience of dancing samba grew beyond its initial political importance. The political significance remained undiminished, but alongside it grew another level of meaning. I kept samba-ing because I was also liberating my body! I believe that the Angoleiros do Sertão, especially the samba, helped me experience a liberation from the racism that still locked my body. The Angoleiros do Sertão helped me in my fight of liberating myself from the chains of racism that so often limit our heads and in my case still limited my body, still oppressed my body. So I began to experience moving my body through my involvement with the Angoleiros do Sertão, seeing people samba and samba-ing with them, in my own way […] It liberated my body, my way of moving, and this has contributed so much to who I am today. I am a woman who contributes through my way of moving in the world, more than before. And if I contribute in any way, as everyone there samba- ing contributes, I think that just as they did this in my life, they also do it in the lives of other people. Karine’s story embodies how the Angoleiros do Sertão envision their activism, bringing their black doing to the street, to the people. In Karine’s case, the Movimento Negro had already saved her head, her way of thinking about and valuing herself as a 302 black woman, but the Angoleiros saved her body, her way of moving in the world. It connected her with the informal realm of black doing, the social organizing and community building of moving, sounding bodies that takes place beyond the meetings and protests. * I return to the Saturday morning roda in this final chapter to pick up the broader question that has shaped my inquiry. Paraphrasing Daniel (2005:5) I ask, what does the doing of capoeira Angola do? I have centered this question in part due to the Angoleiros’ insistence that I attend to their doing—their sounding, moving action of playing capoeira—and this has led me to seek or create other methodologies for understanding (and sensing) the politics of their cultural practice. I have done this by way of integrating methodologies and theoretical frames from across the (already-interdisciplinary) disciplines of Africana studies, ethnomusicology, dance and performance studies, in attempts to situate practitioners’ subjectivities and lived experience in their historical, cultural and political contexts. In this chapter I turn to consider practitioners’ understandings of capoeira Angola as a partner movement to the Black Movement in Brazil. I draw on the ethnographic “thickness” of the preceding chapters, which together contextualize my interpretation of Angoleiro politics in the following ways. In Chapter 1, I explored the Angoleiros’ interpretations of axé, and how they leverage sound and movement to create and transmit axé-energy. Understanding axé as a form of sonic and bodily power, I integrated music 303 and dance studies methodologies in order to attend to the aural-kinesthetic: the sensing of simultaneous sound and movement. This meant attending to the Angoleiros’ work on the micro-level, on the level of sound waves vibrating in bodies, creating sintonia among instruments, sounds, and participants. Resonating outward, axé also links living human bodies with the past through its summoning or evoking of African and Afro-Brazilian ancestors and spirits. In this way, axé coheres community around Afro-Brazilian ways of knowing and being, through participatory aural-kinesthetic practices. As a power of realization, axé provides a source of energy and strength for community members to draw on in their continuing commitment to their moving, sounding “doing” of capoeira Angola. In Chapter 2, I showed how Mestre Cláudio’s pedagogy is an exercise in Africana moral philosophy, in which students are encouraged to learn to think for themselves when judging the beauty or ugliness and the right or wrong behavior in capoeira games. Students also learn to apply these ethics to their lives, within and beyond the roda, most forcefully through their compromisso with capoeira Angola. This commitment manifests in capoeira and samba playing every Saturday, when the group brings their action to the street and includes the broader Afro-Brazilian community in their cultivation and circulation of axé. In Chapter 3, I examined what the doing of capoeira Angola can look like in action, as a tool for skillfully navigating oppressions and challenges, whether subtle or direct. I showed how women in the group apply their “guerreira tactics” to claim their space in the capoeira roda. Drawing on their own definitions of female strength, they struggle against gendered constraints in the roda and their lives, all without forfeiting their solidarity with 304 the men in the group and their lives. The chapter also revealed the unfinished nature of the group’s project of opening the capoeira space to women, a fact that Mestre Cláudio also acknowledges. However, capoeira Angola nonetheless contains the seeds of its own change, and the women in the group use the wisdom they have gained through capoeira to transform and occupy its spaces. These three chapters reveal the practice of capoeira Angola in the Angoleiros do Sertão as a social and ethical project rooted in a home-grown Pan-Africanist orientation and Afro-Brazilian ways of knowing and being. This final chapter addresses more directly how Mestre Cláudio and group members understand capoeira Angola’s potential to develop and transform practitioners’ consciousness of racial politics. As discussed in Chapter 1, in practices with shared African origins, practitioners draw a direct connection between African ancestrality and resistance. They experience Africaneity as a form of political power that has directly contributed to black survival and resilience. Furthermore, the power of ancestrality and Africaneity takes tangible (sonic and bodily) form in axé. Thus, even though practitioners did not necessarily express it in these terms, I understand the energy-power of axé as a form of political power. I believe this is what Niyi Afolabi meant when he defined axé as “ancestral strength and energy with which Afro-Brazilians cope and regenerate themselves through creative and cultural strategies that have their political implications even when they are not forcefully or apparently articulated” (2009:1, my emphasis). Axé is a source of power that Afro-Brazilians cultivate in their practices and draw on in order to realize their political actions. The question remains, what do capoeira Angola practitioners do with this power? I found that there are as many answers to this question as there are angoleiros. Capoeira 305 Angola again refuses to be pinned down. Despite being centered around the authority of the Mestre, capoeira Angola remains a “decentered” practice because it draws its power from the ground and “insists on the presence of difference in our midst, that can’t be reassimilated to rules, regulation, rationalization”; a decolonizing practice that resists enclosure and mass commodification (Alker et al. 2010: 78-9). Yet before I reproduce the same kind of celebratory rhetoric that I write against, let me again emphasize that I find in capoeira Angola’s resistance to containment and organization both possibilities and limits for its use as a tool for political transformation. These are some of the tensions or contradictions within capoeira Angola’s philosophical framework. Even as it fosters an ethics of community and compromisso, capoeira Angola prizes individual autonomy. Fierce rivalries between mestres, and even among members of the same group, are testament both to capoeira’s fostering of independent thought and how this can stand in the way of consensus and cooperation. In this chapter I first revisit the dominant trope of “capoeira as resistance” in order to explore the work that a frame of resistance does and does not accomplish. I suggest that considering capoeira Angola as a practice of freedom might serve to fill in some of what the resistance frame leaves lacking. As I elaborate further in the Epilogue, conceiving of capoeira Angola as a marron or quilombo space, enables an understanding of how practitioners create and claim the space of capoeira outside of the dominant social sphere. Instead of a resistive response, theirs is an active practice of freedom taking place in spaces beyond the realm of speech, outside the surveillance of dominant groups (Scott 1990: 108-135; Harding 2000). Shifting the frame of analysis from resistance to freedom, I argue that practitioners are involved in an ongoing project of creating their own spaces 306 in which they define and embody their humanity, their self-worth and their values. By committing to continual movement and change, capoeira Angola practitioners commit to long-term projects of honing their thought and developing their consciousness. Through their practice, they understand the incomplete nature of political work. In the testimonies that follow, the Angoleiros reveal the ways that their practice has shaped their lives and their consciousness in profound ways. For black, white and non- black practitioners alike, practicing capoeira Angola brings intense joy and a sense of belonging. The euphoria experienced through capoeira Angola can be so intense sometimes that it blocks out any pain and suffering, physical and psychological, faced in everyday life. In this way, the practice can serve as a refuge, even an escape. Yet at the same time, group members also consider how their lives and practice are embedded within larger ordering structures governed by opposing values. For this reason, I always return to questioning how they understand capoeira Angola’s contribution to combatting or dismantling structural racism and patriarchal oppression. Ultimately, I argue that capoeira Angola as practiced by the Angoleiros do Sertão operates in a realm of doing, an alternative space of blackness, rich with wisdom about Afro-Brazilian ways of knowing and being; theory and analysis of the community’s experience of marginality and racism; and strategies for living, acting and doing according to self-definitions of Afro-Brazilian humanity. The paradox or conundrum comes when trying to determine to what extent the Angoleiros’ actions can change existing power structures. Talk of change does take place in their discourse. However, they believe that change will come principally from the doing of their practice, rather than engagement with formal political parties or structures. I argue that this doing is 307 already doing something, but its bodily language—its corporeal orature—is not necessarily legible in the elite realm of speech. The lessons and wisdom communicated in capoeira Angola are not meant to be understood by outsiders, but instead are directed inward, speaking to community members in their own language. Here precisely, also, lies both the practice’s strength and weakness, its potentials and its limits. Capoeira Angola practitioners, like Mestre Cláudio, who disengage with the dominant, organized political arena do so because they feel they have little chance at effecting change in that realm. But instead of accepting disempowerment, members of the Angoleiros do Sertão adopt an active posture to the effect of, “We may not be able to change the world, but we can change our own lives.” As I mentioned in the Introduction, in the current political context in Brazil, total disillusionment and seeking distance from party politics does not seem an unreasonable position. As the narratives of group members reveal, capoeira Angola offers numerous potentials, some realized and others yet to be actualized. For many black angoleiros, the African ancestrality they experience in the practice fuels their political militancy. However, the potential for African ancestrality to function as a mobilizing force for more collective political action is diluted to some extent by white participation. White practitioners claim that they feel the ancestrality, yet they tend not to connect their commitment to capoeira with any potential activism on behalf of the Afro-Brazilian community. This reflects a broader dilemma in Brazilian racial politics, and anti-racism projects across the Americas: how to convince white people to become active anti-racist actors and address the racism in their own (white) communities? In the conclusion of the chapter, drawing on interlocutors’ analyses, I propose that for capoeira Angola to become 308 a more potent tool for political change, it must reach the hands of those who need it most, residents of Brazil’s black peripheries. At the same time, its project of black valorization and anti-racism must be brought to the fore and made explicit. White practitioners must also confront their own complicity in upholding dominant racial projects. These are necessary steps if the practice is to more directly serve to dismantle color-blind ideologies of racial democracy. In these ways, I reveal how capoeira Angola, as an African diasporic musical, bodily practice, enacts its own racialized and gendered politics, and how it makes up part of a larger movement of black political consciousness and activism in Brazil. Resistance and its limits Resistance, with a host of meanings, remains at the core of community members’ definitions of capoeira Angola and of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices more broadly (Lopes 2004). I therefore find it imperative to consider the meaning of resistance in capoeira Angola, which also means engaging a topic that has occupied thinkers, philosophers, political theorists and scholars across the disciplines and centuries. As the assemblage of texts in Duncombe’s Cultural Resistance Reader (2002) shows, thinking on resistance has drawn from Marxism, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, James Scott’s attention to everyday practices of resistance and the cultural studies of the Birmingham School, where Stuart Hall defined popular culture as the culture of the oppressed, and thus the site of both “consent and resistance”—the site of struggle (Hall 1998:453). Duncombe also traces thought on resistance through the work of anti-colonial theorists, feminists, and cultural activists. In Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post- 309 Critique (2004), Hoy addresses resistance as it has been theorized by so-called poststructuralist thinkers Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida and others. He counters critics of poststructuralism who find that recognizing the pervasive distribution of power only leads to despair and pessimism, essentially rendering irrelevant any discussion of resistance. Instead, he defends poststructuralist theories by showing that they can be used to determine how resistance can be “critical,” which is necessary in order “to distinguish emancipatory resistance from resistance that has been co-opted by the oppressive forces” (2). Throughout all of this thought on resistance, the central concern is with understanding how people come together and contest the domination or oppression they experience; or, in more Foucauldian terms, how they act within the relations of power in which they find themselves. So much has been written on these topics, using these terms, that some surely feel there is nothing left to be said. But if we nonetheless persist in writing about resistance, we have been cautioned to avoid romanticizing it (Abu-Lughod 1990), advised to “thicken” its ethnographies (Ortner 1995) and eventually asked if we can or should move “beyond” it (Fletcher 2007). I recognize along with Fletcher that while some scholars may find the concept of resistance over-used or worn out, the questions that have driven such work remain relevant and central wherever we still hope to analyze relations of power in order to contribute to bringing about a more just society (2007:ix). Furthermore, concern about the academic marketability of “resistance” is a distinctly First World problem. For those who think of themselves as Third World citizens excluded from life in the First World, as many Bahians do, resistance retains urgent significance. 310 The wisdom communicated through capoeira Angola in many ways epitomizes James Scott’s (1987) “weapons of the weak,” in which resistance takes indirect forms such as dissimulation and the slowing down of work. The song Eu vou dizer ao meu senhor, for example, tells a narrative in the first person: “I’m going to tell my master that the butter spilled. The butter isn’t mine, the butter belongs to ioió” [a generic name for the master’s son]. The singer (a slave), we understand, spilled the butter on purpose but will act as if it was accident. After all, it’s not as if the slave had anything to lose. The butter was surely not for his or her consumption, but for the children or family of the slave owner. Similarly, the Saturday roda as a public declaration of the value of black life and culture is an example of Scott’s (1990) “third realm” that takes place between hidden and public transcripts. Where public transcripts conform to dominant understandings, and the hidden transcripts are how the oppressed express their discontent and critique in private, this third realm lies strategically between the first two. This is a politics of disguise and anonymity that takes place in public view but is designed to have a double meaning or to shield the identity of the actors. Rumor, gossip, folktales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms—a good part of the folk culture of subordinate groups—fit this description. (19) It may appear that the Angoleiros are “just playing capoeira” on the streets, but with their corporeal orature they are actually declaring not only their presence, but the value and beauty of their culture, their refusal to succumb to misery, and their undying commitment to joy. These examples also reveal how Scott’s theories may so easily be used to romanticize resistance, while at the same time failing to take a necessary further step, by showing how these resistive practices bring about social or political change (Gutmann 311 1993). Nevertheless, Scott’s championing of the study of “everyday” forms of resistance expanded the frame beyond explicit, direct acts such as rebellions and revolutions, and scholars continue to engage with his ideas (Heredia 2017). Scott also argued that marginalized peoples not only resisted domination through a multitude of smaller-scale acts, but that they were aware both of their own domination and their conscious choice of tactics or “weapons.” In this way Scott also advocated for recognizing folk wisdom, contesting elitist views of “peasants” as uneducated and therefore ignorant, unable to develop astute analyses of their social and political situation and power relations. The value of these contributions endures despite the validity of critiques raised against them. I do not take issue so much with the fact that capoeira continues to be celebrated as resistance and liberation, as it has been throughout previous literature (Lewis 1992; Browning 1995; Fryer 2000), but that this celebration has been accompanied by so little specificity and critical analysis. To remedy this, it is necessary to first acknowledge the wide range of meanings that resistance takes on for practitioners. When community members talk about resistance, they refer to the physical, bodily strength and endurance required to train and play capoeira Angola. They also evoke the historical resistance that has enabled Afro-Brazilian practices to persist over time: resistance to annihilation despite violent suppression and persecution. These understandings of resistance are rather straightforward. However, they are always accompanied by a political sense of resistance, and this is the aspect I wish to examine more critically. I want to understand what this resistance is doing. What are its effects in community members and within the broader communities of the peripheries of Feira? What specific ideologies, forces or structures does capoeira resist and how? Following Abu-Lughod (1990), what does examining 312 capoeirista modes of resistance reveal about power relations in Brazilian society and how they manifest within the group? How does a closer examination of resistance reveal its “rich and sometimes contradictory details” (42)? Early on in my fieldwork, Mestre Cláudio revealed one of the contradictions that comes with understanding capoeira as black resistance. He explained, Capoeira is resistance of the Afro-Brazilian people and it still is today. Only today everyone does capoeira. White, Indian, brown, black, everyone, mulatto, everyone does capoeira. But capoeira is a product of the black people. It is popular culture. No one owns it. It is the culture of the people, and whoever likes capoeira, does capoeira. Independently of which part of the world people come from, they can do capoeira. With this caveat, Mestre Cláudio indicated a contradiction that this chapter examines at length. For the Afro-Brazilian people, Capoeira Angola was and remains a form of resistance. But what does it mean that now “everyone” can practice it? I pressed him to speak more directly to the significance of capoeira for the Afro-Brazilian community: Viola: So do you think—this is a difficult question, but—do you think that capoeira can be used to fight for the rights of Afro-Brazilians? Cláudio: Yes. V: How? C: Hmmm. [pauses while thinking] Man, to fight for the rights of the Afro- Brazilian people, it has to be the people themselves that do this. And capoeira has this very strong capacity to join people together. Out of capoeira you can unite, gather, discuss possibilities. […] There are other movements here on the roça [countryside], like football, but none manages to gather so many people, not one! Capoeira has this [clap! clap! clap! clap!], understand? It’s much more, with this power of capoeira. For Mestre Cláudio, the power of capoeira as a tool (ferramento) or weapon (arma) of Afro-Brazilian resistance lay in its ability to gather people together, to foster community. In light of critiques that the Black Movement in Brazil has failed to mobilize the poor, 313 black Brazilian majority, this potential for capoeira to gather and unite people could be significant. Could capoeira inspire marginalized black Brazilians to overcome their quiescence, their political apathy (Gaventa 1982)? Yet the fact that capoeira also includes white, middle and upper-class people, as well as foreigners, may undermine its significance as black Brazilian resistance. I wondered, did Mestre Cláudio imagine that capoeira could raise white people’s racial consciousness, forming a multi-racial anti- racist coalition? Or was his vision more in conformity to ideals of Brazilian racial democracy, seeing capoeira as a space where all races were equal? It became clear that probing capoeira as resistance, and its transformative political potential, would require attending to the ways that the capoeira community has also internalized some of the values it purports to resist and the conflicts it seeks to resolve (Ortner 1995:177). How resistive can a practice be when both “oppressor” and “oppressed” play side by side? These questions also reveal the limits of resistance as a frame. Thinking in terms of resistance inevitably invokes its opposite, domination or oppression. In this way, resistance may seem to be “strictly reactive, [lacking] a positive vision of what is to be achieved by social change” (Hoy 2004:6). Locked in resistive struggle, actors may gain and lose ground, but the relations of power remain undisturbed. Of course this fairly accurately describes the lived experience of many Afro-Brazilians: basic infrastructure is lacking in peripheral neighborhoods, public education is an aberration and public healthcare remains difficult to access. The people have little faith in their ability to influence any of these conditions. Scott’s (1990) characterization of “hidden transcripts” as expressing anger and frustration at such inequalities and injustices seems applicable here. 314 However, listening to capoeira Angola practitioners talk about their experience and participating alongside them I am convinced that something much more takes place in the space of practice. Far beyond the expression of mere (reactive) anger, community members come together to cultivate the life-affirming and euphoric energy of axé, to revel in black joy: [B]lack joy allows us the space to stretch our imaginations beyond what we previously thought possible and allows us to theorize a world in which white supremacy does not dictate our everyday lives. House parties, backyard cookouts, and other spaces where black bodies gather in celebration produce rich and profound moments in which black love and laughter “lifts everyone slightly above the present” and allows to feel [sic], to know in our bones, what black utopia might be like. (Johnson 2015, citing Moten) Such moments are key to understanding the “miracle of survival of black people” across the Americas (Lipsitz and Rose 2014), and I argue, key to understanding what happens in the roda of capoeira Angola. The space is generative. To be sure, the game involves trickery, malícia and malandragem, but these are not end points but rather means to the greater ends of strengthening bonds of friendship and love and building an alternative vision of the world. In other words, the tools and actions of capoeira Angola are fundamentally constructive, positive and creative, not reactive and negative. The project of the Angoleiros places them not only in opposition to dominant ideas, but outside of the dominant spaces. For these reasons I find that thinking about capoeira Angola practice as freedom opens up a fruitful mode of inquiry. Moving towards freedom An old wooden plaque hanging in Mestre Cláudio’s capoeira space reads “Capoeira é Liberdade,” capoeira is liberty, capoeira is freedom. This phrase also echoes 315 on the lips of his students and angoleiros everywhere. Yet this idea also receives little elaboration or theorization in the literature on capoeira. Instead, it is commonly assumed to mean capoeira's historical use by enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians to liberate themselves from slavery (Lewis 1992; Assunção 2004). Could a more thorough theorization of capoeira as a practice of freedom facilitate analyzing capoeira’s political potentials? If thinking in terms of resistance narrows the frame to one of static opposition, does thinking about freedom open up the possibility to imagine a situation where resistance is no longer necessary? Does freedom gesture toward a space where subjects can move beyond relations of power and resistance (Fletcher 2007:156)? The theorization of freedom has of course concerned philosophers since antiquity. Yet, as Niel Roberts argues in Freedom as Marronage (2015), while the theorists from antiquity to modern times have used slavery as a metaphor, this has resulted in a “disavowal” of slavery as lived experience and “the actions of the enslaved, obscuring the importance of a slave’s capacity for revolutionary action” (28).62 In the context of racialized slavery of the Atlantic world and its continuing legacy, this disavowal amounts to an “acknowledgement of the traumatic event” while simultaneously “reject[ing] its relevance” (29). It seems as if theorists sensed that considering the perspective of the enslaved while taking on the question of freedom would disrupt the very moral, religious, philosophical and political grounds upon which the theorists made claim to their own 62 Considering that prominent philosophers of antiquity were slaves themselves, it could be argued that they did indeed theorize from the lived experience of slavery. However, Roberts’ argument focuses on the way Western theorists have taken up freedom in the context of nearly four hundred years of racialized slavery, which differed substantially from slavery of the Greek and Roman antiquity. 316 liberty. Indeed it would, as African and African American political theorists have argued at least since the eighteenth century.63 Barnor Hesse voices a similar critique when he notes how freedom and “its contested meanings are routinely theorized within the terms of liberalism, democracy and republicanism, and their constitutive entanglements in Western colonialism and race governance are occulted as part of their representative formulation” (2014:289). In other words, theories of freedom rooted in Western liberalism have “foreclosed” the ways that enslaved people and fugitives themselves have theorized freedom. Hesse considers the “black fugitive thought” of Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, and David Walker as “escapology,” escaping this “colonial-racial foreclosure.” In turn, Roberts analyzes the thought of Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis and Édouard Glissant among others. Citing Douglass he argues, “Victims of subjection have the capacity to alter their world. The unfree, Douglass suggests, are perceptive teachers of freedom's meaning” (73). In sum, thinking about freedom as marronage means considering how enslaved and fugitive agents have contributed unique theorizations of freedom “from the underside,” drawing on their lived experiences of subjugation, fugitivity and moving towards freedom (Roberts 2015:12). Roberts intended his theory of “freedom as marronage” to find applications beyond its literal meaning of flight from slavery and beyond its historical and geographic locations in the Caribbean. Extending it in these ways, I consider capoeira as a practice of freedom as marronage, and I also connect it to Brazil’s own significant legacy of 63 For example, see Cugoano ([1787]1999) on his own experience and refutation of slavery, Lemuel Haynes’ “Liberty further Extended” (1776), and Saillant (2003) on the thought and writings of Lemuel Haynes. 317 marronage, quilombismo (which Roberts acknowledged but did not incorporate).64 Considering capoeira as a maroon or quilombola space and practice, I argue that capoeira passes on the theories of freedom developed by the enslaved subjects who practiced the form. Only in this case, the theories are communicated in music, sound and movement as well as in song lyrics. Capoeira Angola is one of many embodied “repositories,” like Candomblé and other African diasporic religions and music-movement practices (Daniel 2005:64), in which quilombola practices of freedom have been developed and transmitted across generations. While the sources highlighted by Roberts and Hesse took written form, I expand their argument to include the thinking that takes place in sonic and bodily practices. Several of Roberts’ arguments inform how I consider capoeira as a form of freedom as marronage. First, I heed his, Hesse’s and other black political theorists’ calls to consider what can be learned by considering slave agency and the ways that “micro-acts of flight have macro-consequences for freedom” (Roberts 2015:49).65 While I also recognize the limits of agency as a rubric when applied to the lives of enslaved people (Hartman 1997; Fuentes 2016), I still find provocative Roberts’ argument, especially as applied to contemporary subjects who are technically no longer enslaved.66 I see capoeira 64 Quilombos are maroon communities established by fugitives from slavery, throughout Brazil, and many still exist today as semi-autonomous communities. Quilombismo can refer generally to the practice of forming quilombos, or to Abdias do Nascimento’s political philosophy, as I address below. Quilombola is the adjective form of quilombo. From now on, I will use “marronage” and “quilombismo” interchangeably. 65 See also Joy James (2013) on “Afrarealism” and “maroon philosophy.” 66 Roberts, with his theory of marronage, also rejects the notion of slavery as a condition of “social death” for the enslaved (a concept developed by Orlando Patterson and widely taken up by other scholars of slavery, including Hartman and Fuentes): “The idea of social death denies the significance of psychology to freedom, rendering it unable to explain how slaves are able to become free physically outside the actions and intentions of enslaving agents” (Roberts 2015:117). In its place, he leverages Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” which “harbors the prospect of revolution among the unfree who ascertain dissatisfaction with existing life options” (119). 318 Angola as a product of enslaved people’s agency, creativity, resiliency and longings for freedom, and I therefore ask what its lessons mean to contemporary agents descended from both slaves and their captors. If capoeira as a practice, or even individual games of capoeira, can be considered “micro-acts [or perhaps nano-acts] of flight,” what consequences do they have for freedom? Second, for Roberts, marronage reveals that freedom is not static, and struggles for freedom are ongoing, "perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight that are moments evanescent, durable, overlapping" (181). The concept of movement, he argues, was key in Frederick Douglass’s understanding of progress and reform. He cites Douglass’s lecture: “Happily for us the world does move, and better still, its movement is an upward movement... mankind as a whole must ever move onward, and increase in the perfection of character and in the grandeur of achievement” (194). While the movement in Douglass’ speech may be more metaphorical than physical, one of the characteristics of fugitivity is the way it merges physical and metaphorical flight and movement, as Douglass’ own life illustrates. Likewise, the movement-as-flight that takes place in the capoeira roda is not limited to the physical dimension, but also applies to movement of thought. This is evident in Mestre Cláudio’s insistence on observing and reflecting in order to change one’s perception and thinking, to alter one’s ways of knowing and being in the world. In other words, the most important movement in capoeira practice takes place as a change in consciousness and being, which can only be realized through, but is in no way coterminous in, bodily movement. Finally, Roberts outlines a “typology” of marronage. “Petit marronage” has been defined as temporary flight by individuals or small groups, and “grand marronage” as 319 mass flight to autonomous free communities (98-103), most famously in Brazil as Zumbi’s Palmares, founded in the interior of the country and maintained for a century. Roberts adds “sovereign marronage,” “a philosophy of freedom referring to non-fleeting mass flight from slavery on a scale much larger than grand marronage,” but he finds this type lacking ultimately because it reproduces authoritarian power structures (103-111). Building on these types, he argues for “sociogenic marronage” as a framework for countering the “long-standing false binary” in studies of politics and slavery between “flight” and “structural reordering.” In these previous studies, acts of flight are separated from inquiry into revolutionary politics and the corresponding transformations indicative of the shifts between the previous order and the ensuing sociopolitical system. Sociogenic marronage allows us finally to understand how revolutions are themselves moments of flight that usher in new orders and refashion society’s foundations. (115-6) Roberts envisions sociogenic marronage as a bottom-up project, which requires attending to the “actions, beliefs, and ideals of slave masses, good and bad” (115), to “peasants’ longings and actions,” and it means recognizing how “[o]ur imaginaries of freedom for self and mass have integral effects” (116). Building on Fanon, he argues for the necessity of considering the psychology and lived experience of blackness and of freedom.67 Though the community of the Angoleiros do Sertão operates on a modest scale, I consider group members’ lived experiences and imaginaries of freedom significant for the ways in which they gesture toward potential greater effects. Expanding Roberts’ framework, I ask if Roberts’ proposal might not also be reversed to suggest that moments of flight contain something of the revolutionary, the “reordering of the state or society” (116). In other words, I turn his argument on its head in order to interrogate the practice 67 He derives the “sociogenic” from Fanon’s “sociogeny,” where “[s]ociogenesis is the idea that lived experiences fashion our social world and structure our civil and political orders” (Roberts 2015:119). 320 of capoeira Angola as a kind of fertile maroon territory, where seeds of thought are planted and nourished which may grow into broader projects that shift society’s foundations—seedlings, perhaps, of sociogenic marronage. Roberts does not engage Brazilian thinkers on the subject, instead basing his theory on the ways marronage developed in the Caribbean. However, many decades prior to Roberts’ theorizing, Abdias do Nascimento proposed Quilombismo, a theory and plan of action that embodies certain key elements of sociogenic marronage through its choice of language, its vision of freedom and its plan for reordering Brazilian society. Nascimento summarized the main thesis of Quilombismo: Africans in Brazil must develop their own liberation ideology, based on their own historical experience, not in order to separate themselves from the rest of Brazil, but to prepare to lead the nation, as its majority population, in a democratic context. (Nascimento and Nascimento 1992:65) Nascimento’s Quilombismo is an imaginary of freedom, a “proposal for the future” that was and remains “ahead of its time” (67). It takes as its foundation Afro-Brazilian “history and values,” political thought and social organization, concluding that “racism is not a dilemma of the black community alone but of society as a whole in a multiracial state, and of humanity as a whole in the world context” (105). The psychology and lived experience of enslaved Afro-Brazilians and their descendants forms its base. Borrowing Roberts’ terms, Quilombismo is founded on “slave agency” and experience. Like marronage, Quilombismo is a “dynamic process,” one involved in “a constant process of revitalization and remodernization” (Nascimento 1980:153). Nascimento’s theory leaves ample room for including capoeira as a quilombo space. Alongside the “illegal” quilombos, “independent communities in the depths of forests,” Nascimento recognized also “legalized” quilombos throughout Brazilian history 321 and into the present (Nascimento 1980:151). Pertaining to this latter category are many kinds of “associations” and “brotherhoods,” including “terreiros… afochés, samba schools, gafieiras, gremios…” many of which refer to social and cultural groups organized around Afro-Brazilian music and dance practices. Capoeira schools and groups also belong here. Taken together, he argued, all of these spaces, illegal and legal, form a unity, a unique human, ethnic and cultural affirmation, at once integrating a practice of liberation and assuming command of their own history. This entire complex of African social phenomena, of Afro-Brazilian praxis, I denominate Quilombismo. (1980:152) Nascimento lays out his manifesto in “Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative” (1980), in which he calls for a radical, future-oriented break from existing Brazilian institutions of white supremacy, colonialism and paternalism. He rejects abstract theorizing and “Euro-centric” scientific models because these fail to create the kind of scientific knowledge black people need: that which allows “them to formulate theoretically—in systematic and consistent form—their experience of almost five centuries of oppression, resistance and creative struggle” (159). Black Brazilians must draw on their “critical and inventive knowledge of [their] own social and economic institutions, battered as they have been by colonialism and racism. In sum, to reconstruct in the present a society directed toward the future, but taking into account what is still useful and positive in the stores of [their] past” (160). He takes the quilombo as one such quintessential repository of Afro-Brazilian knowledge and creativity, where he finds a social-political model of “solidarity, living together, existential communion” and “economic egalitarianism,” where “work is first a form of human liberation” (161). He envisions a “collective life” whose “concepts, definitions and principles must express 322 Black collective experience, in culture and in praxis” (160-1). Lest his theory be confused with socialism, Nascimento clarifies: The differences between Quilombismo and Euoprean-derived socialism are evident. The latter makes no attempt to address the question of plurality of cultures or harmonious social relations among distinct ethnic, religious, or other groups. Much less does it discuss the need to recover and reconstruct the cultural identity, human dignity, and protagonism of peoples subjected to the holocaust of European colonialism. (1992:66) The majority of new leaders in the Quilombist state will be black and women. Prenatal, maternity and child care as well as education will be provided for all free of charge, with African history and the arts central in educational curricula in order to foster a “creative society” (169). Nascimento’s proposal is revolutionary, calling for a new anti-racist, anti- colonial state, a “radical transformation of existing socioeconomic and political structures,” without which the “total and definitive emancipation” of the Afro-Brazilian people, and by extension all Brazilians, cannot happen (1992:160). By placing the project of the Angoleiros do Sertão within the quilombola tradition, I mean to bring attention to the ways their work refuses and escapes dominant norms in order to construct spaces for practicing freedom. I am identifying capoeira as a practice of creative black fugitivity. Just as angoleiros re-signify vadiagem (loitering), refusing its negative connotation and claiming it as a generative activity of play that generates community, I find that theirs is a productive escape: not a shirking of political engagement but an active building of spaces in which to imagine and practice new, liberatory alternatives. However, I must make clear the stakes and scope of my claim. I see the practice, or “doing,” of the Angoleiros as a micro-politics that generates movement toward 323 possibilities, many of which as yet remain unrealized. In thinking through these possibilities in this chapter, I show what they are doing now (the lived effects and affects of practicing capoeira Angola for community members), while in the Epilogue I gesture toward what they might someday do (potential future effects and affects; what movement and change might look like). To do this, I attend to personal, individual as well as community and society-wide implications and impacts of the practice. This means that I read the Angoleiros’ project both for its (micro)realizations of freedom as practice—akin to Goldman’s (2010) analysis of improvised dance taking place in the “tight places” of mambo, between dancers and jazz musicians, in contact improvisation or during nonviolent protest—and for its broader significance in fostering “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002). This situates the practice capoeira Angola in what Best and Hartman call “the interval between the no longer and the not yet,” a productive space of tension between “the complaint that is audible” to legal, political systems and “the extralinguistic mode of black noise,” a time-space that lies “between the destruction of the old world and the awaited hour of deliverance” (2005:3). Best and Hartman explain that their “black noise” is synonymous with Kelley’s “freedom dreams” (14), exposing how the non-verbal, sonic and bodily dimensions of this freedom work are often dismissed as meaningless noise.68 By claiming black noise as a positive mode of freedom dreaming, they open up space for the inclusion of the sounding and moving of capoeira Angola into the body of black political thought, even though it is thinking not expressed 68 The equivalence of “freedom dreams” with “black noise” also makes sense in the context of Nascimento’s Quilombismo, too. First, it is surely his “freedom dream.” At the same time, Nascimento’s radical ideas have received little attention until recently in Brazil, and he has been imprisoned as an enemy of the state, similar to other radical black thinkers throughout the Americas. These attempts to silence him reveal how his persistent, loud dreaming has been perceived as so much “black noise.” 324 exclusively in words. It is with these understandings that I consider the Angoleiros do Sertão’s sound/noise/movement—their project and organization, as well as their sounding, bodily aesthetics and choreographies—as moving and sounding towards freedom. At the same time, in order to break away from the image of freedom as a place to be arrived at, I explore how freedom must be practiced. In a 1984 interview, Foucault explained his understanding of “practices of freedom” in distinction from “processes of liberation.” Practices of liberation may come first, but then practices of freedom are necessary “if this people, this society, and these individuals are to be able to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society” (Foucault 1998: 282-3).69 Drawing his analysis from ancient Greek philosophy, Foucault reasons that practices of freedom are therefore inherently ethical: “The Greeks problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense in which the Greeks understood it: ethos was a way of being and of behavior” (286). This ethos, its ways of being and behaving, found expression in the care of the self. Indeed, Foucault believes that among the Greeks and Romans—especially the Greeks—concern with the self and care of the self were required for right conduct and the proper practice of freedom, in order to know oneself […] as well as to form oneself, to surpass oneself, to master the appetites that threaten to overwhelm one. Individual freedom was very important for the Greeks […] Not to be a slave (of another city, of the people around you, of those governing you, of your own passions) was an absolutely fundamental theme. The concern with freedom was an essential and permanent problem for eight full centuries of ancient culture. What we have here is an entire ethics revolving around the care of the self […] I am not saying that ethics is synonymous with the care of the self, but that, in antiquity, ethics as the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative: “Take care of yourself.” (285) 69 Roberts (2015), drawing on Arendt similarly distinguishes liberation from the “foundation of freedom”: liberation comes first as a necessary prerequisite for the founding of freedom that must follow to complete the project (32). 325 Foucault acknowledges that this view of freedom “is quite a different definition of freedom from our own” as the Greeks understood freedom in opposition to slavery. In this understanding, he explains, “a slave has no ethics” (286). Where does this leave us when trying to imagine practices of freedom “from the underside”? What might be the slave’s perspective on care of the self and ethical ways of being? In other words, is it possible to expand the definition of a practice of freedom to include the practices of enslaved people, who carved out spaces in everyday life in order to practice and move towards freedom? I believe it is. Moreover, I argue that if we do not pursue these questions, we risk reproducing the disavowal and foreclosure admonished by Roberts and Hesse. I mean, therefore, to “steal” the concept of “practices of freedom” from its potential entanglements with Western political theory’s colonial-racial foreclosure (Hesse 2014:301). Surely Candomblé, as a practice intimately concerned with healing and behavior, could also be considered self-care, an ethos and a practice of freedom—even when practiced by enslaved subjects. Furthermore, the Greeks understood care of the individual self as extending to care of others: “The care of the self is ethically prior [to caring for others] in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior” (Foucault 1998:287). What would care of self look like when linked to fostering collective power (axé) with others, not only in order to care for one another, but ultimately to restructure society? As I have shown, the Angoleiros do Sertão are deeply concerned with defining their own ethos, which they also believe manifests primarily in ways of being and behavior—in doing. And like improvised dance (Goldman 2010:145) capoeira Angola is also a practice of self-care. Capoeira practice confronts individuals with themselves, 326 requires that they face their weaknesses and their lack of knowledge, in order to overcome them. Yet in the Angoleiros group, as in other quilombola spaces, the focus on individual self-care—at least ideally—gains greater meaning as it extends to care of the group. Considering capoeira Angola as a practice of freedom based in an ethical care of community and self, my question is then how to move beyond the “tight spaces” of the capoeira and samba rodas out into the broader community. How do capoeira practitioners bring their practices of freedom with them into the world? * To explore these questions, I turn to the conversations I had with practitioners in which they told their stories, as I pressed them to elaborate more on what they believe their doing does. As revealed in previous chapters, I watched, listened and attended to their sonic and bodily actions. I strained my senses of perception in order to understand beyond what was said and explained, and I found a wealth of bodily and sonically transmitted knowledge and values. Yet I still urged my friends and interlocutors to talk about the political power of the practice, and what capoeira Angola had to offer the marginalized black populations of Brazil. If Mestre Cláudio and his students understand their commitment (compromisso) to capoeira Angola as an obligation to preserve and defend African-rooted practices, how do they understand these obligations as extending to the broader black community? 327 I approached this by asking first how capoeira Angola has influenced them, as it entered and permeated their lives, acting on their bodies, minds and spirits. More pointedly I then asked whether and how capoeira Angola functioned in the lives of practitioners as a practice of liberation, resistance and freedom. What did they do with this powerful tool in their hands, bodies and minds? Did they conceive of their involvement in capoeira Angola as contributing to the larger project of black freedom? If so, how? At the core of these understandings lie practitioners’ racial imaginaries: how they understand and experience racial identification and belonging in Brazil, and how they define their own place, role and sense of self in a racialized society. In contrast to much mainstream Brazilian racial thinking, Mestre Cláudio and his students openly acknowledged that racism exists in Brazil. Many practitioners, black and white, had become aware of racism, that “something wasn’t right” in Brazilian society, from an early age and have gone on to deepen their analyses through university studies and participation in social movements and activism. Their capoeira Angola practice often served to strengthen commitments to seeking more nuanced understandings of Brazil’s racial history and contemporary politics, and in some cases practitioners felt that their practice had caused an “awakening” of sorts to these issues and how they related to their own identities. However, I noticed subtle variations between interpretations of Angoleiros who identified as black (negro/a, preto/a) and those who identified as white (branco/a) or neither. Black practitioners who strongly identified with capoeira Angola as a practice of political activism tended to seek involvement in black movement activism beyond 328 capoeira, whereas white practitioners distanced themselves from direct involvement in anti-racist activism, even when they recognized capoeira’s racially political potential. White and non-black (identifying as neither white nor black) practitioners also came closer to reproducing the ideology of mestiçagem, which posits racial mixture as the essence of Brazilian identity, and by dropping the “black” and “Afro” from Brazilian culture, “annihilates” black and Afro-Brazilian identity (Munanga 2004). This view celebrates black culture as universal Brazilian culture, while simultaneously denying the systemic racism that continues to devastate black people and communities. The range of racial imaginaries within the group, therefore, already complicates claims about the practice as resistance and freedom. Recalling Mestre Cláudio’s caveat, capoeira Angola remains resistance for the Afro-Brazilian people, only now everyone practices it. What does this mean for capoeira’s potential to catalyze change in racial consciousness and contribute to black freedom? I have divided the testimonies below along color lines, a move that runs directly counter to Mestre Cláudio’s ethos that “capoeira is for everyone,” in order to reveal the sometimes subtle differences in interpretations between black and white/non-black angoleiros. Beginning with black angoleiros and black movement activists, I show how they often experience their African ancestrality as a form of militancy, and how the practice counters negative valuations of blackness. Black angoleiros, more than white, acknowledged potential problems of white participation. Turning to the testimonies of white and non-black angoleiros, I show how they also experience ancestrality, yet it works on a more individual level. They experience an embodied connection to Afro- Brazilian blackness, yet when it comes to extending this to a sense of responsibility to 329 Afro-Brazilian communities, they feel it is not their place. White practitioners choose arenas other than explicitly anti-racist movements in which to practice their activism. I conclude by discussing the suggestions practitioners had for addressing the current limitations of capoeira Angola, in their group, as a movement for socio-political change benefitting the black community. Black angoleiro/as: ancestrality and militancy Black youth of the periphery and self-esteem When we met for our interview, Bolinha wanted to show me the neighborhood where he grew up and lives, Rua Nova, located downhill from the central bus terminal in Feira de Santana. He described it as a historically black neighborhood, and told me the history of its founding by a black woman called Dona Pomba (Lady Dove) who owned a farm in the area, before the city expanded. She is remembered and celebrated for having given away much of her land to other black families, leading to the foundation of the neighborhood. Residents retain pride in their independent black origins, and though the neighborhood is stigmatized as crime ridden and poor, it is known throughout the black community for its thriving social, cultural and political movements.70 Bolinha explained that Rua Nova continued as an important site of black organizing and activism in the city. The place carries its past into the present, and residents maintain its significance in popular memory, countering public discourses. 70 On the Brazilian Wikipedia page on Feira de Santa, Rua Nova is only mentioned under the headings “Poverty and inequality,” “Security and criminality,” and “poor neighborhoods,” as one of the poorest and most violent areas of the city (“Feira de Santana” 2018). 330 When Bolinha was growing up in Rua Nova, Dona Ivannide de Santa Barbara also lived there with her family. Bolinha spoke about her influence on him and many other young black people in the neighborhood whom she "put on the path of the fight, the resistance," by helping raise their consciousness of their roots and identity. Bolinha said, "If I believe that the black population can have another way of living, it comes, in addition to my ancestrality, through meeting Ivannide de Santa Barbara." Bolinha became active in the Movimento Negro at around sixteen years of age. He first learned about capoeira Angola through Dona Ivannide's son, who was training capoeira with Mestre Cláudio at the time. However, Bolinha would only start training many years later. At the time he saw capoeira simply as physical activity, and he preferred to devote himself to his work and his studies. Eventually, however, he began to understand capoeira Angola as contributing to the resistance of the Movimento Negro, Brazil’s political black movement. He started defending capoeira, arguing that it belonged in the periphery and on the street every Saturday morning. He began training, first with friends, then with another local teacher who used to belong to the group. When I interviewed him, he had only been training with the Mestre for four months, though he had known the group since he was a child. When I asked him how he felt capoeira Angola could contribute to the Movimento Negro, his response echoed Karine’s interpretation of the Saturday roda. Bolinha said, “For me today capoeira is my greatest instrument of militancy, because the roda on Saturdays is saying that this resistance still exists.” Growing up in the periphery, Bolinha explained, meant growing up amidst violence and criminality. As he considers every resident of his black community family, a part of him, he feels an acute loss whenever a 331 young person dies as a victim of violence. Every time he thinks, "Man, if he had been in capoeira maybe he wouldn't have suffered this violence. Maybe he would have sought another path in his life." This sentiment was also expressed by Pirata, another member of the capoeira group who had grown up in a poor, black periphery of Feira de Santana. He claimed that capoeira had helped him greatly in life: Because lots of my childhood friends have died or they’re in prison, others are addicted to drugs. Capoeira liberated me of all of this. Capoeira liberated me from fights, it liberated me from everything bad. I could be robbing, I could be killing, dealing [drugs], I could be dead, but no. While other people were doing this, robbing, killing, I was in capoeira and capoeira was educating me that they were the ones on the wrong path. Orikere, an advanced student of the group, came from a family life embroiled in the violent world of drug trafficking. He feels his life has literally been saved through his involvement with Mestre Cláudio and capoeira Angola. He was clearly speaking from his own experience when he told me, “I believe the majority of capoeira professors [did capoeira] because they didn't have any other choice in life. It was the only solution. So they embraced capoeira and got out [of dangerous situations].” Like Pirata, Bolinha also framed capoeira’s potential in terms of liberation. Yet for capoeira to realize its liberating potential it must reach the peripheries, the areas that need it most, placing the tool in the hands of the people so they can then liberate themselves: My sadness is to know that this liberation, which has arrived for me, has not yet arrived for many others. I hope that one day capoeira will arrive in all the peripheries of the world, everywhere where there are black people who have suffered the process of slavery. Because I believe in capoeira as an element of liberation, of consciousness, a way to believe that tomorrow life can be better. He has experienced this form of liberation through capoeira Angola in his own life, but it pains him to see how many more people could benefit who do not yet have access 332 to it. I asked him to define more precisely the kind of liberation he felt that capoeira could bring. He replied, “Liberation for me is consciousness. Consciousness of being black, of suffering racism. Sometimes you see a black woman or man being violated racially, but they do not understand it as racial violence… Liberation is consciousness.” Solange, the sole woman training with the group in Feira, also grew up in the periphery of Feira. She also connected capoeira’s potential to its ability to raise consciousness and expressed a similar understanding of its limits as well: In my vision, capoeira itself cannot take a person out of the periphery… What it does is bring consciousness to that person, so they then leave, they then want to change… There are some people in the capoeira who were very close to drugs, lived on the street, and after capoeira they saw other options… In my view, capoeira acts on the person, opens their eyes. They begin to see differently. There are also people who [don’t train in the group] but are always close by who start to feel more human, like people, more important… through knowing capoeira and the people who train it. Capoeira is consciousness of sociality, class, ethnicity, race — it’s also family, culture, ancestrality… You can’t define it with one word. Solange has observed that capoeira Angola helps bring consciousness not only of racism, but also of black people’s humanity. She described how this influence spread even to people who do not actively train capoeira, but she also spoke from her own experience. Solange described how before entering capoeira Angola she saw herself as “an ugly person, without grace,” a person only suited for domestic work, dominant society’s expected “place” for Afro-Brazilian women. Not only did Solange pursue graduate studies, but over the years she has also started to embrace black aesthetics in her physical appearance. When she decided to start wearing her hair in natural styles, a mutual friend of ours excitedly sent me photos via text message of Solange’s hair in braids for the first time. This work of consciousness-raising is what Bolinha and black militants in Brazil feel cultural movements can contribute: an open valorization and celebration of Afro- 333 descendent identity, belonging and aesthetics coupled with an awareness of the racism pervasive in everyday life. These are necessary steps on the way to achieving freedom and self-determination. Dona Ivannide, Bolinha’s mentor, sees this raising of self-valorization, or self- esteem, as capoeira’s greatest contribution to contemporary black practitioners. She is a dear close friend of Mestre Cláudio, and the primary militant “reference” (referência, or role-model) for members of the Angoleiros do Sertão. Her influence on the political thinking and consciousness of group members, including the Mestre, has been profound. She has long been a fierce defender of capoeira Angola as a component of the Movimento Negro. The high numbers of white people entering capoeira today did not interest her, she said: “In its origins, capoeira was a fight of rebellious blacks.” She addressed me frankly: For you non-blacks, non-Brazilians, those not descended from the enslaved, it is difficult to understand. But for us, here, whoever starts doing capoeira here in Brazil, we are not people from the academy, from the university. [The black Brazilians who do capoeira] are from the periphery! They're blacks, called "malandros", "vagabundos", "vadios" [derogatory terms signifying criminals, lazy vagabonds or bums]. And so, it seems to me that that space gives them a sense of belonging. "I am part of some thing.” This does something! This sense of belonging makes it possible that [a capoeira student] can think of leaving that place in order to build something because he already is somebody, because on the inside he already feels like somebody. If I am some body, I can do some thing! For me, or for others! And so I think bringing self-esteem is the biggest contribution that capoeira gives to the black people, to encounter themselves as individuals, as people, as citizens of the country! It is the valorization of their humanity, [it allows them to] feel like people, to feel human. Two young black men in the Angoleiros do Sertão, Papagaio and Igor, echoed this sentiment, describing how capoeira had helped build their self-esteem. I spoke with them together, and both men also described the connection in capoeira Angola between freedom, resistance and their black ancestrality. Papagaio felt the freedom in his body, 334 saying, “When you start to practice, you feel a liberation, your bodily movements go naturally… It’s as if you’d already practiced it before.” Igor added, “And not only the body, but the connection between body, mind and spirit… They work together, with the music, too… The music conducts the movements of your body, and you’re in sintonia with the music and with your partner…” Papagaio continued, That exchange of axé, of positive energy, it’s always good. When we’re in the roda and we let the music enter our thoughts, we let ourselves be carried away, with the movements of capoeira Angola, and the music carries us to do the movements, to make new friends — this is capoeira, bodily and mental liberation. When I asked them to elaborate on capoeira Angola as a tool of resistance, Papagaio responded: Everyone knows capoeira was created by the blacks, by the Africans. It comes from long ago and it always reinforces the idea of resistance… The more we train capoeira, live with capoeira, the more we manage to understand that we don’t have to be ashamed of who we are. Capoeira gives us this strength, gives us this support, [as if to say], “Ah, you’re a person!” I’m a capoeira, I’m an Angoleiro do Sertão, I’m an angoleiro! So you have self-esteem, capoeira lifts you up! Igor: And we always bring capoeira to the streets every Saturday, we’ve been doing this for a long time. So it’s also a way of showing society that we are here, and that we do make up part of society, and we’re enjoying [ourselves] and we’re fighting and empowering ourselves! We are embodying this fight. This is the fundamental contribution of capoeira that Dona Ivannide described. Capoeira Angola counters the derogatory identities imposed upon black people and confirms their personhood and humanity. Claiming capoeira and angoleiro identity, these young black practitioners claim, in Dona Ivannide’s words, “I am somebody, therefore I can do some thing.” Igor summed it up: Capoeira is for the street, it’s periphery. There’s no point having a cultural space of capoeira Angola [indoors]. I think it has to have visibility. And we don’t depend, either, on the government. No support whatsoever. There are people of all types in capoeira Angola. It embraces this. In the group we have people from the 335 university, people who are students, who are professors, who are bricklayers. So capoeira Angola shows society that we exist. Papagaio: That we exist and we are there! Igor: And that even still repression exists. Repression still exists, we still have racism! It’s necessary to clarify this. Papagaio and Igor experience capoeira Angola as a public, visible embodiment of struggle against racism. This is the instrument for black liberation in the periphery that Bolinha described. As a white person, I do not know how it feels to have my humanity questioned or denied. Yet listening to my interlocutors, and observing white supremacy in action in the world around me, I hear them recount the real violent effects of this denial. The dehumanization of the black population manifests in the murder and genocide of black people in Brazil (Nascimento 1989; Smith 2016). But even when spared the sensational acts of direct violence on their bodies, those who live under this dehumanization suffer the violence of having their humanity denied, and with it their worth, intelligence, beauty, and all their diverse ways of being. Capoeira Angola counters these forms of violence. Young black practitioners from the periphery experience the practice as validating their black existence and raising their self-esteem. For them the Saturday roda is a public declaration of their humanity and their defiance against racism and dehumanization. Limits to blackness, limits to resistance By affirming black humanity and worth, Capoeira Angola is a “counterstrike to racism,” as Afonso, a white practitioner put it. Yet, as Bolinha recognized, in order for capoeira to realize its potential it must reach “all the peripheries of the world.” And even 336 in the hypothetical situation that capoeira reached every resident of every periphery, could it contribute to catalyzing broad social and political change? The practitioners I spoke with demonstrated how capoeira Angola worked on them as people, changing their bodies, minds and souls. A recurrent theme was how capoeira Angola allowed them to leave, to get out of the periphery. But what about the spaces and people left behind? To what extent does capoeira Angola function as escape—not in the sense of radical flight, that involves constructing a new world, but in the sense of channeling away resistive violence, or taking the colonizer’s place (Fanon 2004:19-23)? I raised these questions with Dona Ivannide and she quickly said, “Look: Capoeira as resistance, in the most voracious, most radical sense of the word, as in confrontation in the class struggle, I don't believe in it.” She believed that long ago capoeira fulfilled a role in the “confrontation for liberation,” but it no longer did. Today the class struggle, the workers’ struggle, has become tied to political parties. Gains and losses are limited to the rise or wane of one political party or another. Capoeira no longer has a role to play in this struggle. Moreover, capoeira’s (now lost) resistive power is connected to its blackness. When capoeira began, Dona Ivannide explained, it was exclusively black: the majority of those who did capoeira were blacks or mulattos, they came from this vadiagem [vagrancy]; this people that were disoriented, drifting, without any occupation.71 I think in that moment capoeira was a space of black resistance. But to the extent that capoeira turned into a ludic game, and became something that was studied by academics; that due to its being a ludic game has the possibility of gathering people participating in the same group, Europeans, mixing the colonized with the colonizer — I don't know anymore, what is my place there?! It's as if it's turned into mere child’s play… I know that the capoeirista can kill someone, I know all about this, but what I want to say is that today capoeira is at most a personal fight of self-defense. It is no longer a fight of resistance. At the very most it is a fight to defend the group! If someone from the Angoleiros do 71 Vadiagem is also re-appropriated and re-valorized in capoeira terms to mean playing capoeira. “Vamos vadiar!” literally means, let’s hang around and do nothing (like bums), but in capoeira it means, “Let’s play capoeira!” [Also see discussion below] 337 Sertão were attacked, the students would resolve the problem. But from the point of view of national politics, the people, I think this connotation has been lost. In Dona Ivannide’s vision, therefore, capoeira’s original blackness was tied to its functioning as a form of collective resistance, for the black community. Now, with its inclusion of white practitioners and becoming an object of study for (white) academics, it has become “mere child’s play.” It is as if the price capoeira has paid for acceptance and respectability by white society has been a loss of its resistive power. It is important to understand that Dona Ivannide speaks as a non-practitioner of capoeira, but as a black movement militant activist who has decades of experience in both grass roots and organized party politics. And she notes correlation, though not necessarily causation, between white participation and capoeira’s loss of resistive power. However, her view does raise the question of whether the mixing of the colonized with the colonizer has weakened capoeira’s potential as a weapon for black resistance. In its contemporary context of white and non-black participation, therefore, has capoeira retained any of its potential to mobilize for black resistance and freedom? The problems of white participation: playing with the colonizer Dona Ivannide also acknowledged certain advantages gained from capoeira’s ability to attract diverse practitioners. Reiterating her positive assessment of capoeira she added: Now in relation to self-esteem, it’s the opposite. This is why I said that you had to do various readings… I think that the convivência of this people, originally black and mestiço, with other people, Europeans… this helps bring self-esteem to this people. So capoeira continues to fulfill a very strong role as resistance in the psychological sense. Strengthening the identity. From the civic point of view, official, institutionalized, it doesn’t. There's no longer a role [for it to play] from my point of view. 338 White and foreign participation and support of stigmatized black cultural forms can serve to raise their esteem in the eyes of prejudiced Brazilians. In this way, Capoeira embodies a multiculturalist ideal of diversity-and-inclusion agendas: diverse actors transcending their differences and uniting in community. Does this suggest one way capoeira can contribute to combatting racism? This project within capoeira has a history. In the early twentieth century Mestres Pastinha and Bimba strove to elevate capoeira and secure its decriminalization by moving the practice into “academies” and attracting white academics and elite members of society as students (Assunção 2005). It has parallel histories in Candomblé, as well, which survived and thrived in the twentieth century in large part due to elite white patronage. Dona Ivannide believes that black working class practitioners have something to gain by their association with whites and foreigners, those whose opinions Brazilian elites have traditionally prioritized (Skidmore 1998). These relations of association play out in the Angoleiros do Sertão in Feira de Santana. Unlike Salvador, Feira lies beyond the tourist track. Poor, black youth growing up in Feira have little opportunity to interact with tourists (whether foreigners or Brazilians from other regions), and thus lack access to the potential advantages that come with such interactions. People I have spoken with framed the opportunities as generally broadening their horizons in life: exposure to people with other experiences, professions, and knowledge of other parts of the world; chances to practice and incentive to learn English or other foreign languages; even the possibility of meeting a foreigner, falling in love, and moving abroad (Williams 2013). 339 However, as capoeira spreads across the globe it gathers increasing numbers of white practitioners. Even in Bahia, with its eighty percent black population, capoeira Angola groups tend to have more white practitioners than black. While the group in Feira may have more black members than white, adding in the large majority of white group members in São Paulo, and the white European members who attend the annual group event, and the result is unambiguous: The group as a whole has a majority white membership. The question remains, to what extent do large numbers of white angoleiros diminish capoeira Angola’s power as a weapon against racism? While no group members suggested capoeira Angola should be practiced only by Afro-descendants, it is worth asking whether projects that do so, like the carnival group and community school Ilê Aiyé, more effectively foster racial consciousness (Dunn 1992; Tosta 2010). Bolinha expressed similar reservations to Dona Ivannide. He was concerned that white people practicing capoeira would see capoeira as a sport, something “ludic” practiced only for fun. For the black practitioner, Bolinha believed, capoeira involved “spiritual memory,” the chamado (call) of the berimbau retrieving an ancestral past. A white practitioner could develop a certain “sentiment,” and the desire to be present and play the instruments, but other things such as mandinga, or how to ginga (sway) with the body, were only accessible to black practitioners. He imagined that white participation could play an important role if white people learned more about racism through their practice and committed to working towards its end, but this would not necessarily solve the problem of reaching more black people: It saddens me not to see more black people doing capoeira. There is always a majority of white people doing Angola. It shouldn’t be this way. I’m not saying they can’t do it! I’m only saying that it belongs to an African people. [In this] process of modernizing capoeira, I don’t want white people to see capoeira 340 Angola only as a martial art, only as something ludic. This is the danger. We need to fight against this. Abusada is one of the few Afro-Brazilian women practicing in the group, and she trains with a satellite of the group in the interior of São Paulo, a region with a significantly smaller black population than Bahia. She recalled how it also saddened her, when she first started training capoeira, to enter a group without any black women as references. While she considers Mestre Cláudio a truly great reference for her, he remains a “masculine” reference. She longs for contemporary examples of black women excelling in capoeira, as she sure they also did back in the time of capoeira’s origins. Furthermore, she noted how many capoeira Angola groups have no black practitioners at all: This hurts me a lot… Because it isn’t a problem for me to have whites in capoeira! The problem is their domination, without a single black person! Because you see that black people distance themselves a lot from Afro-Brazilian culture. Why do the black people distance themselves so much, and the white people want to get so close? … You see the same thing, this cultural appropriation, in the terreiros. There are terreiros that don’t have a single black person! This upsets me a lot because… this is how racism works. The black people deny their origins. They straighten their hair, they never talk about the Black Question because it makes them uncomfortable. It’s this thing of distancing yourself! “Wait, capoeira Angola is a black thing? I don’t want to affirm myself as black, so I won’t take part in capoeira Angola. I’ll seek means by which I can whiten myself, to be accepted in society.” Abusada explained how these concerns had motivated her to study cultural appropriation at the university, and she intended to write her college thesis about appropriation in capoeira. She also answered in part her own question. Black people distanced themselves from black practices in order to avoid compounding their stigmatization. A black person affirming their blackness “darkens” themselves in the eyes of a system of white supremacy, running counter to the ideology of “whitening” that still permeates public discourse in Brazil. The ideology, with its long history in Brazil, preaches that color lies 341 on a spectrum where whiteness is the ideal, and in order to better themselves everyone should strive to approximate it (Skidmore 1998; Dávila 2003). To this end, many black and brown Brazilians seek to “whiten” or lighten themselves through altering their appearance (straightening hair, wearing conservative clothing) and their behavior and practices (Burdick 1998; Caldwell 2007). This is another form of violence against the black body, which shifts the blame for racism to those who suffer from it, holding black people responsible for diminishing their blackness if they wish to avoid discrimination. The falseness of the ideology, the infamous “mulatto escape hatch,” lies in its implicit promise of the possibility of escaping racial discrimination.72 Karine emphasized how, in contrast to black practitioners, white practitioners could not as easily be “darkened” by Afro-Brazilian practices. She warned me, “I’m being very frank with you here, I say this with a lot of respect, with this white woman who does capoeira.” I assured her I wanted to hear what she had to say. She described a scene, people watching a capoeira roda and seeing a white person taking part in the ritual: You [the white person] are there, sometimes with dreadlocks, with your capoeira clothes, with your berimbau. You play and the people see you there and say, “Look! She doesn’t have any problem being there in the middle of a group of blacks!” This is their perception looking [at you]. It’s no problem for you, being a white person that associates with blacks. Only the black person isn’t seen in the same way! He is seen as a vadio, a druggie. A black woman is seen as a woman who doesn’t deserve respect, as a lesbian. In other words, the blackness of the space does not injure white practitioners in any way. They might even gain some kind of cultural capital, impressing other whites with their fluency in the Afro-Brazilian cultural rituals, or their tolerance. They can enter a black space, participate in the practices, and even dreadlock their hair, as many white and non- 72 See Degler (1971) for the “mulatto escape hatch” theory and Silva (1985) for a widely cited refutation. 342 black angoleiros do: But if you leave this universe of capoeira, you remove your dreads, you take off your clothes, [leave behind] any image of prejudice that you could suffer from doing capoeira, if you leave that black universe – no matter how much you might have been seen as “black” because you were in that universe, or seen as a white who doesn’t have any prejudice – When you leave that roda, you are no longer marked. This was the fundamental difference between blacks and whites practicing capoeira. For black people, Karine said, “Everywhere we go, wearing capoeira clothing, not wearing capoeira clothing, we live our lives having to deal with this experience of racism.” For some black women and men, she imagined, seeking out black spaces like capoeira simply felt like taking on too much. Life was difficult enough confronting racism daily, why add insult to injury by openly embracing stigmatized black cultural practices? Structural, societal and quotidian forms of racism create a context in which white and black practitioners will have different visceral experiences of capoeira Angola “in the skin.”73 Karine noted, for example, how white people did not come to capoeira with racially-based self-esteem issues. “They might have other conflicts that I don’t know about! But they don’t have this internal fight, these conflicts of self-esteem, that we have very strongly.” However, up until now, I have explored the experiences and views of black practitioners and community members. How do white practitioners describe their experiences and interpretations? Do they see capoeira as a mere sport or ludic pastime as some black activists fear? Can practicing capoeira raise white people’s consciousness about racism and catalyze contributions to the struggle for black freedom? Or is their attraction to capoeira another form of wanting “everything but the burden” (Tate 2003); 73 This is a direct translation of the expression na pele, which Brazilians often use when discussing the lived and felt experience of racism. For example, “Eu nunca senti racismo na pele” [I’ve never felt racism in the skin] means, “I’ve never experienced racism directly.” 343 of romantic “white desire” that ignores structural difference (Lipsitz 2006:118-123); of white people’s “love and theft” of black culture (Lott 1993)? Their testimonies reveal a range of interpretations and raise issues that may reinforce the concerns of black practitioners. White and non-black angoleiro/as Every Angoleiro/a of the Angoleiros do Sertão, no matter their racial identity, felt that capoeira Angola had altered their lives in profound ways. Many have found in the Angoleiros do Sertão an extended family, and they devote themselves to the group as they would to their own brothers and sisters, parents and relatives. A significant number of group members, black and white, hold radical or militant political views and regularly participate in social movements. Yet even within this tight community, I found that views of racial issues often diverged along racial lines. Some of these views were more predictable than others. For example, as Karine predicted, white people did not experience the practice as a validation of their humanity because their humanity was never in question. However, other testimony revealed nuances in how white practitioners positioned themselves in relation to broader national projects of racial democracy and racial mixture as the foundation of Brazilianness. Subtler forms of “cordial” racism proved difficult to disturb (Turra, Venturi, and Datafolha 1995), even among white people sharing an embodied practice so deeply rooted in black community and its ancestrality. Ancestrality: “I’m not black, but I feel it, too!” 344 Many practitioners who identified as white or non-black described how their Brazilianness enabled them to feel the “ancestrality” of capoeira, even though they lacked African descent. Yet whereas many black practitioners experienced ancestrality as linked to black resistance, white practitioners viewed them as distinct. Tatu was an undergraduate at a prestigious public university in the interior of São Paulo at the time of our interview. When I asked her how she thought capoeira Angola could contribute to the Movimento Negro, she answered at first, “I think it's a complicated question, because I'm not even black!” But she went on to offer her understanding of capoeira Angola as an important space for Afro-Brazilians to connect and recognize their African descent. She went on: There are lots of people in capoeira who are searching for this connection, this ancestrality. I search for it too, but from another perspective. I’m white, but I think we feel this, too, in capoeira. But concerning the Movimento Negro, I don't feel I have the right to talk about it. For Tatu, practicing capoeira provided her with access to (black) ancestrality, but it did not authorize her to speak of the black resistance movement. Where black practitioners often experienced ancestrality as, or alongside, an awakening to a more activist, militant posture, it did not seem to have this effect for white practitioners. When Pedro, a university educated practitioner from São Paulo state, first started training capoeira, he described how he had only felt its physical benefits. But then he had a kind of awakening: I began training without a lot of axé, more as just physical exercise. I felt the stretching, felt how my shoulder got stronger, because I worked a lot at the computer… And then I went to Bahia, and I began to associate this with the ancestrality, which isn’t mine, but as every Brazilian has their blackness [negritude], their relationship with all the indigenous, the Afro [Afro-Brazilian, or African descended], I began to feel the impulse of this ancestrality, too. So Bahia awakened me to this. 345 I asked him to elaborate about how he had developed this connection with ancestrality and negritude. He explained how he was descended from Europeans, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German: I don’t have any link through blood with this ancestrality. But this is the thing: to be Brazilian brings with it this relationship. In truth, my relationship with Afro ancestrality, and even Indigenous, is this relation with this thing of difference, of what we really are. I think the Afro question awakens in me, on the one hand a curiosity, and on the other hand it’s something that I am, but I never was, because I’m Brazilian and I’ve had relationships with this big stew [mixture]. Pedro’s feeling of having a relationship to blackness and indigeneity through his Brazilianness reflects the ideology and logic of miscegenation, most famously put forward in 1933 by Freyre (1986) in The Masters and the Slaves. The tri-partite origin myth of “harmonious” race relations still captivates the mainstream collective Brazilian psyche: all Brazilians have inherited some aspects, whether through blood or culture, of Europeans, Indians and Africans. This myth not only occludes “racial rape” as harmonious relations (James 2013). It also denies that access to mixture only works in one direction, from white to black, and is therefore only available to whites and non- blacks. No dark-skinned black person in Brazil would get very far, or garner much benefit from claiming white European ancestors. In essence, then, miscegenation and mestiçagem function as mechanisms of anti-blackness. They exclude blackness and black people from the national project, and reinforce the expectation that they aspire to whiteness (Munanga 2004; Wade 2010). Meanwhile, white people continue to claim having “one foot in the kitchen,” as one ex-president of Brazil has done (“Quem quer ser uma pessoa negra?” 2017), a claim of distant African ancestry even if it does not appear phenotypically in their skin or bodies. This claim grants them access to and even possession of black culture, as epitomized by Brazilian pop singer Daniela Mercury’s 346 blackface in a recent carnival show: she darkened the skin of her entire body with bronzer and donned an Afro wig, provoking the ire of black activists (Anjos n.d.; Terto 2017).74 Yet the fact that Mercury took the stage beside the president of Ilê Aiyé, the carnival group known for its anti-racism and black power militancy, belies how accepted it is for white Brazilians to claim access to blackness and black ancestrality. Pedro went on to describe how his visits to Bahia contributed to his relationship with, and understanding of, ancestrality: [Bahia] is a mirror. Going to Bahia, as a Paulista [resident of São Paulo state] brings me the ability to see the difference, the other. It brings this question of the toughness of the body. We Paulistas are more rational, we say that we’re more developed, in the sense of access to schools and literacy, compared to the Northeast, which has more regional inequality. This is not prejudice! It informs a lot of reparative policies in Brazil today. So there is this inequality, but because the Northeast doesn’t have the “tradition” of education… they develop oral culture. They develop bodily expression. For me this is a richness that I want! I want to develop this in myself. I want to! I want to develop my rational part, but I also search for the opposite, to have bodily expression, to have cultural expression, oral expression, which I didn’t have access to at the university. So the ancestrality comes from this question of orality and bodily expression. Pedro assured me his generalizations about the “toughness of the body” in the Northeast and the rationality of the Southeast were not a form of prejudice. In his understanding, the inequality, the lack in the Northeast of “rationality,” schools and literacy, have been turned into something positive: the development of oral culture and bodily expression. He was aware this characterization could be interpreted as prejudiced, but held to his conviction, confirmed by his experience in both places, that the Northeast was the land of the black expressive body, and the Southeast the land of the white rational mind. 74 One of Daniela Mercury’s biggest hits “O Canto da Cidade” [Song of the City], in fact, begins with the lyrics “A cor dessa cidade sou eu” [I am the color of this city]. Singing about Salvador, one of the most famously black cities in the world, Mercury is literally claiming her blackness. However, while she might be perceived as Latina in the U.S., Mercury is phenotypically white. 347 Furthermore, he seemed to understand the “development” of bodily and oral culture in the Northeast as a response, as if to compensate for its lack of schools and “rationality,” as if Northeasterners developed their bodies because they could not develop their minds. Finally, recognizing the positive advantages of both kinds of development, Pedro declares how much he wants to develop his own bodily expression. This is what Bahia brings to him. The black ancestrality he accesses in Bahia enriches him, complementing his already-strong mind with a strong and expressive body. Pedro’s wife, Natureza, was one of the few Angoleiros who declined to identify herself racially or ethnically. When I asked her how she identified, she responded: This thing of color, of race, I don't like it. I think we are humans. Brazil is very difficult, because we have a huge mixture, of Indian [Indigenous] with white with black. In the history of my family, I had an Indian great-grandmother, my grandfather was Portuguese, so it's a mixture... I tried to find out with my parents [if I had any black ancestry], but it seems I don't have any black genealogy, as far as I know. But I feel the ancestrality, independently of everything, just as other people also can feel the black ancestrality. Natureza has brown skin and shiny, wavy brown hair. I did not expect her to identify as black, but as she had avoided answering, I still wanted to know how she would identify. I asked her, “So on the census you wouldn’t declare yourself as negra?” I wouldn't, because I would be lying. Also because in Brazil there are these quota policies, it would be ugly [unethical], people would think I was trying to take advantage of the benefits. Viola: Would you declare yourself white? Natureza: Ah, not white either! Because I don't feel white! When I was born I was registered as white. My mother and father are white. I was born morena [brown]!!75 [laughs] I consider myself morena because the mother of my father 75 Morena is one of the most common terms used in Brazil to describe people who are not white. It translates to “brown,” but can be applied to a vast array of skin tones, often being used as euphemism for “black.” For example, if someone says, “I am black.” Another person might rejoin, “No you’re not, you’re morena!” This exchange resembles how in the U.S. a woman might say, “I’m fat,” and her friends would say, “You’re not fat, you’re just curvy!” (See Burdick 1998:16-19) 348 was more morena. I think because her mother [Natureza’s great-grandmother] had Indian descent. So I don't like to declare myself anything. I'm really just a human. Like white practitioners, Natureza felt the ancestrality despite her lack of African descent. She also used the known mixture of her own family tree to invoke her Brazilianness. I found it significant that she had actually sought to determine whether she had any black ancestry. Perhaps her involvement with capoeira Angola had inspired this? Or perhaps she and her parents sought to solve the mystery of how two “white” parents produced a “brown” child. In any case, as with white and non-black Brazilians more generally, proof of African ancestry is not necessary to feel the black ancestrality. One might ask if something productive could come out of white people accessing black ancestrality. Could it contribute to learning and teaching about African and Afro- Brazilian culture and history, furthering the agenda of the Movimento Negro and their advocacy for the Law 10.639 passed in 2003, which legally mandated teaching African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in schools (“L10639”). The passage of this law represented a significant victory for the Movimento Negro in Brazil. However, as my conversations with white angoleiros begins to show, learning about African and Afro- Brazilian culture does not automatically result in anti-racist consciousness. White practitioners justifying their place in black practices by evoking mestiçagem ideology can become harmful when non-black people claim possession of black culture to the exclusion of black people. Black people are made unnecessary, they are “erased,” when everyone can own and practice their culture, and this in turn can “depoliticize” black culture (Kelley 2003:61). Black people become, like black lives in Brazil and the United States, disposable, and black resistance is eclipsed. I ask with some urgency, therefore, 349 what white and non-black practitioners do with their access to the power and resistance of black ancestrality and the range of affects it inspires. Individual change and self-defense When I asked Afonso, “What does capoeira Angola bring to your life?” he answered, “It’s very personal.” He first explained how capoeira brought him in “connection with the people” and taught him how to speak a “language that makes sense for the people.” He valued capoeira’s power to remove people from dangerous life situations, from a path toward criminality, and “give opportunity for people who don’t have other opportunities in their lives.” Yet in this last case, he was not speaking about his own life. Afonso comes from the interior of São Paulo. He is white and blonde-haired, and has a master’s degree from a good public university. He cares about capoeira’s power to help people, he explained, because he is a teacher. He appreciates capoeira’s power to educate. Regarding his own experience he said, This is very personal. I was never much into confronting people. I always avoided conflicts. But this raises lots of problems, because people always impose themselves on you. In a male-dominated society, boys impose themselves on other boys through force, intimidation, and I always had a lot of difficulty with relationships with other boys. Capoeira gave me tools to defend myself. Even though he started training at twenty-three years of age, and was therefore no longer a “boy,” capoeira gave him the opportunity to re-write his story. As a timid boy he was a target for bullies, but as a young man he found courage. He recounted one incident at a college party, where a drunk man became verbally aggressive with a woman. Afonso’s friend tried to intervene, but the bully started beating him up. Afonso went up to him, and the guy said, “Do you also want to get punched?” Afonso recounted, 350 I stayed silent and just stared at him in the eyes, getting closer, closer, closer. My face was like this [inches away from the other man’s face]. If this guy moves, [I thought], I’m going to give him a cabeçada [head butt] to his nose. I was ready for this. But it wasn’t necessary, because the moment that he saw I was serious, concentrated and ready to fight for real, he pulled back and we told him to leave the party. This never would have happened if I hadn’t done capoeira. Many practitioners, black and white, credited capoeira with helping them overcome shyness. Like Karine who felt the samba of the Angoleiros do Sertão liberated her body, many people came to capoeira lacking physical and psychological confidence. Boys and men in Brazil might find in capoeira Angola an alternative to dominant norms of masculinity that dictate the ideal male appearance of bulging biceps, pectorals and broad shoulders. Capoeira Angola, in contrast, values not how a body looks but what it can do. Its movements and aesthetics privilege a wiry, agile physique that can compact itself, elongate, stretch, flex and bend, and move quickly, but successful angoleiros come in all shapes and sizes, each with their own advantages. Several of the men I spoke with in the group described how capoeira drew them out of the shyness of their youth. Orikere described how capoeira Angola attracted him because he always felt weaker than everyone, and in capoeira Angola “the weak could beat the strong.” Thus capoeira Angola practice built personal and physical self-confidence in white practitioners as well as black. However, black practitioners recognized that racist devaluations of their appearance and humanity were faced by black people as a group. They understood their individual sense of self-worth, therefore, as connected to the black community. For white practitioners, their sense of personal change tended to remain individualized. Thomaz’s story exemplifies how capoeira Angola can profoundly alter the course of an individual’s life. Like Afonso, Thomaz also grew up in the interior of São Paulo, but he moved to Bahia ten years ago in order to be closer to Mestre Cláudio and continue 351 training capoeira Angola. He is an engineer, one of the professions cited in colloquial Brazilian conversation to signify the highest social standing. Friends often remark how, as an engineer, he could find work anywhere and earn much more money, but instead he has chosen to live in Bahia, limiting his career options and earning potential. When I asked him how capoeira had changed him, he replied: It has changed me a lot. Capoeira educates [you] a lot. First, physically, with the body, [it teaches] consciousness of having to take care of yourself… But any physical activity can do this. The difference with capoeira is this connection with popular culture [cultura popular]. This really ends up making the person fall in love, with the customs, the ways of being… Capoeira’s way of educating is not a book education, it’s more an education of behavior. Popular culture, especially when it’s from the interior, is very simple, very, very, very simple. And you learn it through observing the behavior of the people, and seeing how they act in a very simple way, but very intelligent, very cunning [street-smart]. Thomaz’s recognition of capoeira as a practice of self-care echoes Foucault’s understanding of care of the self as a practice of freedom. However, Thomaz gestures to something capoeira Angola can offer beyond this: it can teach white practitioners how to relate to (black) popular culture, how to speak a “language that makes sense for the [black] people,” as Afonso had put it. Here again, “popular culture” and “the people” in Brazil refer to black popular culture and the black people, as Mestre Cláudio often reminds his students and audiences. White practitioners, therefore, are describing how capoeira has taught them, as middle or upper class white people, to communicate with poorer, darker-skinned, working class people. Another white practitioner also described capoeira’s profound personal impact on him as changing how he communicates. Ranran is from the interior of Bahia and lives and trains in Feira de Santana. He said, Capoeira completely changed my life: my way of arriving somewhere, my way of defending myself in the world, my way of relating to people. Because I don’t 352 think of capoeira only as a game, [as movements] negativa, rabo de arraia, aú — Capoeira gives you another universe of thinking, another way to dialogue with your own body and people. It gives [you] malandragem, vadiagem… This way of relating to people. The values of this “universe of thinking”—a black universe—and black embodied ways of dialoguing are embedded in the words Ranran used. Often translated as “street- smarts,” malandragem also means the malandro’s way of acting and being, the prototypical Brazilian street trickster. Elite white Brazilian society, who dictates mainstream norms, scorns malandros as criminal, marginal outcasts who prefer cheating and stealing to honest work. Yet capoeira flips the meaning and turns malandragem into a prized way of being in the world, a kind of intelligence that can be gained only through sweat and literally getting one’s hands dirty (anyone who plays capoeira in the street knows dirt and grime firsthand). Malandragem means beating one’s opponent through cunning and creativity. It includes the over-emphasized “deception” in capoeira, but encompasses so much more: expression, beauty, intelligence, efficiency, being convincing. Similarly, vadiagem means vagrancy, the loitering of vagabonds. Highly pejorative in Portuguese, both terms are racially coded to refer to black or dark-skinned poor men, or vadios (bums). Yet in capoeira language, vadiagem refers specifically to the art of capoeira and the game itself. Songs calling, “Vamos vadiar!” (“Let’s loaf around!”) mean, “Let’s play capoeira!” Again, the negative connotation has been flipped, and vadiagem to an angoleiro is the most beloved activity. Embedded in this flipping of the term is also some malandragem: the white man (the professor, the engineer) passing by a capoeira roda in the street today still sees a group of scruffy, dirty loafers, loitering, doing “nothing” of any use to society. Why don’t they get jobs? he might mutter to himself. He 353 refuses to consider, or cannot comprehend, the education and power being transmitted and communicated through this vadiagem. Yet the embodied lessons of capoeira Angola were not intended to be legible to the elite whites. Perhaps this explains in part why so many white people, especially the men in the capoeira group, valued having gained access to this knowledge. They realized they had learned to “read,” understand and speak a secret language originally intended to confound them and undermine their power. Like Afonso, Ranran felt capoeira had given him knowledge of other ways of defending himself that drew from capoeira’s “way of relating to the people”: I think it’s a vision from the periphery, too, of class, of identification of the oppressed with the oppressor. For example, perhaps [capoeira has] given me a better way of interacting with the police, the enemy of classes. Because the police is our enemy, for the working class… so this game of falseness with the police, with the oppressor, too, it’s a lot easier when you learn from capoeira. While Ranran is white, as a member of the working class with rural family roots he told me, “I don’t recognize myself as white, but I know that I am.” (When I first met him several years ago he wore his hair in locks, though he has since cut them, he said because his employer at the school where he works demanded he do so). Ranran identifies more with the oppressed than the oppressor, so he values having learned the “falseness” of malandragem: We learn that you always have to smile, in the roda, even if something is really irritating you, you have to always smile, pretend. This is the theater that capoeira brings to us. As the Mestre said, it’s a game of falseness. What other art praises falseness? But not falseness in the sense of wanting to hurt or destroy people, but a form of falseness in the sense that you defend yourself, too. When you aren’t able to hit head on, don’t hit head on! The point of the “falseness” of malandragem is not to hurt one another, but to defend oneself. After all, as Ranran also expressed, there are no victors in the capoeira Angola 354 roda: “I don’t believe in this,” he said, “Both have to leave victorious. Both have to make a marvelous game.” The defense comes from knowing how to move and act even against a stronger opponent, against someone who seemingly overpowers you. As it is unwise to use direct force against someone whose force is greater, so one must turn to indirect means instead. Yet the question remains: What happens when the oppressor learns the tools and tactics of the oppressed? Can the struggle against the colonizer be waged alongside the colonizer? Clearly these questions oversimplify the situation. As these narratives show, many white practitioners are conscious of the politics of race relations in Brazil and support the anti-racism project. So to put it another way, what do white practitioners do with the lessons they learn in capoeira? How can they effectively put their knowledge to use in the struggle for black freedom? White angoleiro/as and the black movement: A “difficult” alliance? Rita grew up far into the interior of Bahia. As Mestre Cláudio’s wife, she has closely observed his teaching and thinking for well over a decade. She also cites Dona Ivannide as having played a formative role in the development of her thinking on race and racism. During our interview, Rita spoke passionately about the “fight against inequality” and how the Movimento Negro and capoeira Angola have strengthened each other in Feira de Santana, largely due to the friendship and collaboration between their respective leaders, Dona Ivannide and Mestre Cláudio. Rita explained how the Mestre had raised her consciousness about racism, urging her to see the structural nature of disproportionate racial representation in jobs and careers. She said he told her, for example, “if you go to a hospital with ten doctors, very 355 rarely will you find even one black doctor! But if you go to the street cleaners’ company, you’ll see fifty black folks and very rarely will there be a single white person!” She also learned from observing Dona Ivannide tell young black people around her that their hair was beautiful, that they were just as capable as anyone else to attend university. She said Dona Ivannide recharged people’s energies that had been lost over time because of racism […] She made us believe that we could do it! […] She believes more in me than I believe in myself! How important she’s been in my development, my consciousness! How much I have changed since I started capoeira Angola and met her — especially her! I noticed that Rita spoke in the first person when speaking from the position of black people. Perhaps she was echoing Mestre Cláudio and Dona Ivannide who spoke from the position of “we, as black people.” Yet I was unsure if Rita identified as black, as she would not necessarily be considered white in the United States, with shiny, curly dark brown hair, full lips and nose, but light skin. So I asked her how she identified. She was silent at first, then spoke in a lower voice: It’s difficult. And I can’t be hypocritical. Because I never will have the history, nor will I have experienced half of what a black person has experienced “in his skin” [na pele]. [She slaps her arm several times.] Because I am white. This I learned with Ivannide. I can be a militant, conscious, but I will never be capable of explaining the pain of prejudice. As much as I know about it, I’ve heard it spoken of, I have never been a victim. I have never experienced it in the skin. I can say I’m a militant of the Movimento Negro from the moment that I am at the roda every Saturday, [I can say] that we make it stronger, in the samba. Rita’s difficulty seemed to come from her identification, as a white person, with the black culture of capoeira Angola and samba, and her understanding of the practices as a form of militancy that contributed to Movimento. She was concerned that assuming the struggle for black liberation as a white person might appear “hypocritical,” as if her white skin disqualified her from contributing to the collective fight. Yet she resolved this, 356 drawing on what she has learned from Dona Ivannide, through her dedication to capoeira Angola and maintaining the Saturday roda. The Saturday roda was a site and action of black militancy she felt she could contribute to. Many white and non-black practitioners expressed a similar difficulty with finding their place within a movement of black resistance and militancy. Where did this difficulty come from? In Brazil, in contrast to the United States, there is little precedent for white participation in black movements. Furthermore, anti-black sentiment (often unconscious) prevents many people from assuming a black or even non-white identity, an issue which remains a primary concern of the Movimento Negro. Did anti-black sentiment also contribute to white and non-black practitioners’ hesitance to seek other ways to contribute to the black movement? I asked other members of Feira’s local Movimento Negro what they thought of white people’s feeling that they could not join or participate in the Movimento Negro. Iaiá asked simply, “Have they tried?” Concerning the question of whether light-skinned black people would be accepted into the Movimento Negro, Bolinha proclaimed, “Yes, yes! The people who think they cannot join the movement have never tried to! But this is [due to] how much violence they’ve suffered in society. They can’t imagine themselves as black or as white.” Coragem lives and teaches capoeira Angola in São Paulo city. With long dark dreadlocks, a wide nose and easily-tanned skin, he can appear as a light-skinned black man. In Bahia, when his skin darkens from the sun, people joke that he looks like Mestre Cláudio. However, he told me he has no “connection” with blackness in his family. His father is “whiter” and his mother is Indian, and he grew up in a good middle class neighborhood. While he spoke at length of capoeira as a practice of freedom, I tried to 357 steer the conversation to the question of how capoeira Angola could contribute more specifically to collective, black freedom. He responded, It’s very hard for me to talk about this because I’m a boy of the middle class. I have friends from the periphery, and I work in the periphery, but then I go away again. You should ask someone from the periphery. But as I see it from the outside, I wonder if people [in the periphery] really search for freedom? Is that what’s important to them? Because what’s most important to the people in the periphery is survival… Liberty for them [in the periphery] is very different than for us. Liberation for them is to survive, to live well. They aren’t interested in social issues… They achieve things in a different way from how we do. They don’t like talking about politics. While I recognized the political apathy Coragem referenced, my conversations with Bolinha, Dona Ivannide and many others showed that not everyone on the periphery is averse to talking politics, thinking about social issues and seeking freedom. I also see reflected in Coragem’s understanding of freedom Hesse’s (2014) colonial-racial foreclosure: white liberal theories of freedom that conceptualize liberty within “what might be described as its Western possessive individualism, the racial liberties of elite white European and white American [and Latin American] citizens. This is extremely close to saying without saying that liberty is a racial value, invariably at the dispensation of a white Western birth right” (298). In other words, the very concept of freedom has been tethered to whiteness, “enunciated from the colonial site of the citizen, an always already free white European or white American male” (299). From this perspective, freedom is a concern only for the free, and only white men are free—in which case, Coragem’s question makes sense. At the same time, while Coragem wore his hair in black locks and has devoted his life to black culture (he teaches capoeira Angola as his only profession now), he felt unqualified to discuss racial politics. He knew people in the 358 Movimento Negro, but did not take part in it because he felt it was not his place, because he was not black. Perhaps white people feel the black movement is not their place because they are unaccustomed to positions of non-leadership. White people in Brazil are so conditioned to play the role of protagonist that they have proven incapable of subordinating themselves within movements led by black militants. As a result, black militants have preferred to organize in black-only spaces and white people sympathetic to the anti- racism cause assume they do not belong in black political spaces, so they avoid them.76 Yet such segregation is strikingly absent when the black spaces are cultural, not political. Perhaps the real problem lies in the fact that white people continue to think of the “race problem as a Negro Question rather than a White question” (Kelley 2003:66). One incident illustrates an impasse not only between black activists and potential white allies, but also between black political and cultural practices. A satellite group of the Angoleiros do Sertão, in the interior of São Paulo, had encountered some criticism from a black student organization at the university where the group is based. In our interview, I asked Tatu, a member of the satellite group, what had happened. Tatu first reminded me that she knew very little about these debates and issues, but she recounted how a “coletivo negro,” a black student collective, was holding a discussion for other black students. After the meeting they had planned a film screening, which was open to the public. The film was about Zumbi, the rebel leader of the Quilombo of Palmares, and Tatu and other members of the capoeira group wanted to attend. They arrived at the time the film was supposed to start, but the members of the 76 In a personal communication with me Tedson Souza, an anthropologist getting his PhD at UFBA, sketched this common sentiment of black-white relations in spaces of racial politics in Brazil. 359 black collective were still in discussion. They invited the capoeira group to join them, and the discussion turned to a critique of the capoeira group. Tatu recounted: The critique was that there are only white people in our capoeira group. This is really significant. We talk about it all the time. For some people [in the group] it’s not a problem, but for me it’s weighed heavily [...] At the meeting, one guy said, “It's very difficult to hear our songs being sung by whites.” It must be awful. I can’t imagine what it must feel like. I can’t judge him. And yet, how should we act? Because stopping capoeira—! [she gestured to say it was not an option] I think it's complicated. When we hear these critiques, we think, goodness, but what is at the bottom of this? I think the person [who made the critique] didn't know the culture, really. I don’t judge them. I understand their critiques, but these are critiques coming from people who are outside of the culture. Viola: [I was confused] Outside of — the culture of capoeira Angola? Tatu: Outside of these spaces where we exchange this tradition that we are learning. Viola: But maybe they think that they are inside of it, because it’s black culture? Tatu: Yeah, because it's black culture! And I don't dispute this at all! I don't question it. The capoeira group indeed occupies a peculiar position. Under tutelage of Mestre Cláudio they learn capoeira Angola as black culture and resistance. They see themselves as taking on the role of helping preserve this culture. As I have shown, learning capoeira Angola requires a lifetime of dedication. Practitioners often alter their life course, rearranging careers and relationships, in order to devote themselves to capoeira Angola. The black activists in the room that day have not done this work or made this kind of commitment to capoeira Angola, and thus Tatu saw them as “outside” the culture of capoeira Angola. But as black militants they have made a compromisso with the black movement, and they see capoeira Angola as black culture and therefore their own, just as the black militants in Feira recognize capoeira Angola as a black space without practicing it. 360 Tatu told me she was actively conversing with friends who were in the black collective at her college. These conversations were ongoing, and her thinking was still developing. She was also taking courses on Oral Memory and History and the Study of Afro-Brazilian and African Populations. She admitted she never would have studied these subjects if she had not entered in capoeira Angola. We talked about the concept of ally- ship, where people who do not share the same identity can still support the struggle, and she responded swiftly, “I also believe in this! Only white people can’t take a role of protagonist.” Tatu was actively trying to work through the question she had posed, how white people participating in black culture should act. But she had yet to arrive at answers. How should white people act? White actions and activism Perhaps equating anti-racist political action with participation in the Movimento Negro is too narrow. Are there other ways to take on the struggle against racism? Several non-black practitioners described how they took such action in their daily lives. Through interpersonal relations they encouraged black friends and colleagues to expand their ambitions, or as teachers they educated children about the racism embedded in “jokes” and teasing. Rita brings her understanding of how racism functions in Brazilian society to her workplace, by talking with colleagues. She told the story of a colleague at the gas station where she works as a financial administrator. She described him as a "big black man" who worked as a garbage collector there. One day she asked if had never wanted to do something else with his life. He was surprised, for what else could he do? Aside from his 361 job picking up the garbage at the gas station (sweeping the pavement, picking up litter), he had only washed cars. She asked him about his education, and he told her he had studied until he was ten years old. He knew the basics of spelling, but to read he had to sound out each letter of every word. She asked why he had stopped studying? To help his parents, because they were very poor. Rita fumed with indignation as she told me, “The failure isn’t just that the school was bad, he couldn’t even go to school! They needed food! The entire process is wrong!” She encouraged him to think of aspiring to work another (better) job at the station. But the only way to move to another position was to be the best garbage collector. Rita had learned from Dona Ivannide to recognize that the man had never even thought about aspiring to a better job at the gas station, much less becoming an engineer or doctor. “Racism takes away all perspectives and expectations in life!” She asked him, “Have you never thought about trying to do this, to be the best, so you could get a better job?” He asked her in disbelief, “You think they’d even notice?” Rita said, “If they don’t, I will point it out to them.” But she didn’t have to. Some days later the station had never looked cleaner. A man drove up to the station, stepped out of his car dressed in a fine suit and dropped some trash on the ground. A worker said to him, “Senhor, please don’t litter here! Don’t you see how clean it is?” It turned out the man was the owner of the station. He agreed it was spotless, and he asked, “Who does the cleaning here?” The other workers indicated the man Rita had encouraged, and soon he was promoted. Other Angoleiros I spoke with also bring their understanding of racial politics in Brazil to their daily lives. Many of Mestre Cláudio's students, throughout Brazil, are school teachers at elementary or high school levels. Teaching positions at public schools 362 are coveted in Brazil. To attain a public job in Brazil, any job for a state-run institution, one must pass highly competitive exams, but once earned, the position is for life and offers excellent benefits. Some Angoleiros have found that working with children and teenagers offers an opportunity to educate them about racism, to counter the effects of mainstream media and thinking that normalizes negative images of black people while disseminating the idea that racism does not exist in Brazil. Natureza, for example, declared that she brings to the classroom, "Every day, on a daily basis!" the question of “valorizing blacks, and the importance of their cultural, economic, social and historical roles in Brazil”: For example, one student calls another macumbeira [derogatory, racially charged word for witch or magician, black magic practitioner] I ask the student, why did you say that? Do you know what macumba [black religion or fetishistic ritual] is? Where this word comes from? One student calls another "monkey." Why? And in this way I go discussing various questions with my students. From anecdotal evidence and my own experience as a white person traveling throughout São Paulo state, casual racist jokes and remarks remain very common there. White people I met in São Paulo regularly expressed dismissive views of Bahia, as if in confidence of one white to another, assuming I would agree. They would say things like, "Why would you do research in Bahia? There's nothing interesting up there!" or, "Bahia is just full of lazy people who can't accomplish anything." Other practitioners described growing up hearing racist jokes in the schoolyard that were always excused as "just jokes." Only later did they begin to understand the harm embedded in such comments. By directly confronting this behavior among children, teachers can contribute to countering this pervasive form of racism. At least, they can try to raise awareness in students at a young age of the layers of prejudice embedded in words like macumba and monkey. 363 * Many white practitioners also participated in political activism beyond their capoeira practice, but the movements tended not to address racism. Most practitioners, black and white, felt that their most significant contribution to the anti-racism struggle came through their capoeira practice, especially by holding rodas on the street. Afonso, for example, recognized capoeira Angola as an anti-racist movement, but with a particular form of fighting: Some capoeira groups take direct political action, but they’re in the minority. For the majority of groups, I think that the political doing of capoeira is doing capoeira. I see it like this: old black men and old black women are valorized [in the capoeira community] […] The majority of old black people, outside of capoeira, are treated like indigents. They die in poverty; they die on the street. Here in capoeira they are applauded. This counters racism… But there are different forms of fighting. The fights of unions and politics is a European tradition, from the workers of Europe. For black people in Brazil, the fight is to survive. They fight to stay alive. Afonso’s division between white/European and black/Afro-Brazilian forms of struggle echoed Coragem’s: black people’s preoccupation with survival precluded their ability to fight for freedom, or fight through unions and politics. Again, Dona Ivannide’s example, as a black woman from the periphery who worked as a union organizer, disproves this. However, while many grassroots movements in Brazil are led by black women, they tend to organize around specific issues, for example, related to domestic or sex workers’ rights or land claims (Williams 2013; Perry 2013). In other words, they do not always articulate their politics as first and foremost anti-racist, though this is implicit by their organizing and acting on behalf of poor black communities. 364 Still, this was not quite the argument Afonso was making, so I pressed him to explain how he imagined capoeira contributed to fighting racism in Brazilian society. Was capoeira’s fight restricted to an individual level or could it have a more collective effect? I brought up Mestre Cláudio’s example and leveraged a direct critique. I asked: Viola: For example, Mestre Cláudio talks about his survival, his achieving all of his money, his swimming pool, traveling the world. But he talks about all of this as his conquering racism. I see this and think, but what did you do against racism? What have you done for the lives of other black people? Afonso: [takes a deep breath] I agree with you that the benefits of all of this need to go to all. But what I imagine the Mestre thinks is this: the people are going to benefit from this through capoeira, so we have to disseminate capoeira. This is his way of fighting. I have an active political miltancy in my life, too. So I’m trying to do both fights. I’m a member of a political party, I organize social movements and protests, I write for a newspaper and keep in contact with other militants. Afonso’s view aligned in some ways with Bolinha’s: capoeira Angola contributed to the anti-racism struggle through its valorization of black people, and for it to have a broader effect, it must reach more peripheral, black communities. However, Afonso and other politically active white angoleiros limited their anti-racism activism to their participation in capoeira Angola. Bolinha and other black practitioners, in contrast, experienced a continuity between their capoeira practice and their black political militancy. This suggests that the limits of capoeira Angola’s applicability to broader struggles with racial politics lies not in the practice itself, but in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Coragem put it: Capoeira is a tool. You are the one who picks up the tool. Capoeira shows you freedom, but it will be different for everyone. Capoeira shows the way, but you are the one who has to walk the path. With this tool you can do whatever you want: you can try to search for freedom for lots of people or you can use it for personal pride. You can think about your own individual freedom, but you can also talk about it, teach it to others. Capoeira is a powerful instrument, but it matters what you do with it. 365 Conclusion: Power to the Periphery For capoeira Angola to be mobilized as an effective instrument of black liberation and a practice of freedom, several criteria must be met. First, capoeira Angola’s geography is crucial, its spaces and places of practice matter. To empower black Brazilians fighting structural racism, capoeira Angola must reach the periphery. Ranran recognized how spatial limitations of capoeira limited its political potential: Ranran: Sincerely, capoeira Angola the way it is today, it belongs to the middle class […] But we think about capoeira Angola differently here [in Feira] [...] We want empowerment here. And I think that here in Feira we have to begin to do this again, as the mestre has already done.77 We need to go to the periphery to train, to teach capoeira. We need to empower our people! We can’t keep doing capoeira only for people who come from abroad, only for reasons of ego. Mestre René said this, too: if we don’t give classes in the periphery, one day we’ll only have gringos in capoeira! We’ll only have Paulistas! With all due respect to the Paulistas! There will be very few people of Bahia training, few people with the desire to carry our culture onward. Because it seems like everyone gets really good [at capoeira] training in Bahia, and when they get good they leave Bahia. I asked Ranran for examples of capoeira Angola functioning to empower people of the periphery, and he spoke of Solange, who grew up on the poor outskirts of Feira and became the first in her family to go to university, eventually earning a Masters degree in geography at a public university. He also talked about Pirata, who had arrived at the training looking like a street ruffian, “the kind that the police always stops to question,” who are profiled as criminal. Ranran said: Capoeira opened a space for him. You see him today and you can dialogue with him, you see happiness, you see the dream. Maybe empowerment also has to be personal, not only political, in the sense of a revolution, which I also think is important. 77 Ranran was referring to a project Mestre Cláudio ran for several years in his home community, on the periphery of Feira. He offered free capoeira classes to all community members, children through adult. But Mestre Cláudio taught every class himself and funded the project out of his own pocket, and eventually it proved unsustainable. 366 He also noted how Pernalonga had recently begun a project training with neighborhood children in a periphery of Feira de Santana. The goal of that project was not to earn money (he taught for free), but to bring capoeira to the community: The boys that train in Lagoa, they’ll have contact with Pernalonga and Solange [who helps him teach]. Maybe they’ll enter into another family, and this family will instrumentalize them. Our family is pretty welcoming in this sense. At the school where I teach, there are lots of little girls that want to train, twelve, thirteen years old! Which I think is awesome! I’m very happy about this. From the moment that these girls understand themselves as black women, and recognize their culture, from that point on they don’t accept being sexual objects, [as they are portrayed] in the music sold on the radio. For me this already makes up part of a process of social change. So my dream is that the roda one day returns to having this axé of the periphery. The “axé of the periphery” is the power and energy of the people, their sense of self- worth and their resistive strength. Ranran’s dream echoed Bolinha’s hope that “one day capoeira will arrive in all the peripheries of the world, everywhere where there are black people who have suffered the process of slavery.” They, like Dona Ivannide and others, recognize that for capoeira to fulfill its role in contributing to black empowerment, consciousness and liberation, it must first reach the black people who need it most. The second crucial component that must accompany this dissemination of capoeira Angola to the periphery lies in the way the “tool” is used. Ranran cautioned that empowerment does not happen automatically. Alongside his teachings about expression, intelligence and compromisso with capoeira, Mestre Cláudio also preaches the power of education. He urges his students to pursue university degrees and to seek more in their lives than they previously thought possible. As capoeira challenges them to push their bodies and overcome psychological weaknesses and fears, they learn that they can draw on these tools and strategies to overcome difficulties in their lives beyond capoeira. 367 The same is true regarding racial consciousness or consientização, in Paulo Freire’s terms (2001). Ranran suggested that capoeira Angola might prove more effective than other movements at black political organizing in the periphery. Many Movimento Negro groups are centered in elite spaces such as universities, especially those in the wealthier Southeast of Brazil. Ranran recognized that residents of the periphery feel excluded by the academic language they use. He suggested how capoeira Angola, by teaching “the people’s language,” might offer a solution: Maybe in Bahia we have this idea of [valuing] black culture and all, but this is a lot more in discourse than in actual empowerment. The movimentos negros are a lot more discourse than real empowerment of the periphery, of the black people. Maybe at some point it once was [more empowering], but I can’t affirm that because I didn’t live through that time. But I think that the way that they talk in the Movimento Negro sucks, because one part of it is on the side of the government, subservient to the PT, [the Worker’s Party], and the other part is still independent, but it has a discourse that can’t dialogue with the periphery! It has a discourse that’s really radicalized, that’s really interesting ideologically, but this ideological point of view can’t be shouted out because no one will listen to shouting! It has to be in a didactic form. You have to show the significance of things so that the people who are listening want to hear you. I know this because I teach in the periphery, too. For lots of [kinds of] students, even in the rural zone. In my classes I try to talk — and capoeira gives this a lot to me — to talk in a way that [makes] the students want to listen to me. Maybe I’ve even reduced my vocabulary because of capoeira. But I don’t think this is a bad thing. Because the amount of words that we learn in the academy distances us from the people. Though we did not discuss Freire’s ideas explicitly in this conversation, Ranran leveraged a Freirean critique against the Movimento Negro’s way of doing politics. Though Freire’s seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2001) lacks a racial analysis, the poor, rural people he worked with in Pernambuco state, just north of Bahia, were black and brown, occupying a common position as their counterparts in Bahia. Ranran’s recognition that these people will not accept being shouted at echoes Freire’s argument that a liberatory education cannot reproduce structures of oppression: the oppressor 368 “depositing” the knowledge he chooses into the people’s heads, as if they were empty vessels without thoughts and theories of their own. They must be empowered to educate themselves, to steer the direction of their education and liberation. One component of this is to speak and value their language, not try to force them to speak like the colonizer. Ranran learned this from capoeira Angola, how to speak in a way that the people of the peripheries recognize as their own. Yet for capoeira Angola to function as black conscious-raising, a final criterion must be met: racial politics must be made explicit in its teaching. Capoeira Angola must be taught with the explicit aim of black liberation and freedom. Abusada, the young, militant black woman training in the interior of São Paulo, stated definitively: I think that capoeira Angola itself can’t raise consciousness. Who does this are the people who are inside it. You see groups of capoeira Angola that don’t even want to know about it as Afro-Brazilian culture. They just want to see it as a sport. And for me, this is disrespectful to the people who created capoeira Angola! […] It depends on the group you’re in and the people who are in it — if they have a minimum of consciousness or not — and I’m not talking just about academic consciousness, not just picking up a book and studying. I see this in Mestre Cláudio. He has a structure of speaking that I find unbelievable[amazing], the way he speaks, the way he plays music, the simplicity he has, the way he tells his story, he manages to raise consciousness [in the people around him]. As an example, she recounted her experience of hearing him tell his story for the first time: One time I heard the Mestre talking, in a workshop, about how he started capoeira. It was the first time I heard him tell his story, and I cried [so much that I had] to control my sobbing at that moment, because it was something I had been needing to hear from him: how he began there in his region, his mother selling acarajé, how his mother lent money to him so he could go to the capoeira roda, and how strong Afro-Brazilian culture is for him, in capoeira Angola.78 This was really important for me and made me even more conscious of what I believed. 78 In Bahia, black women devotees of Candomblé selling acarajé (a fried bean cake with fillings, a ritual offering to the orixás) on the street has become a cultural symbol and meme of quintessential black Bahian culture. In practice, it is grueling work, but one of the few available ways poor black women can make a subsistence living. Mestre Cláudio’s mother supported her three children, as a single mother, by selling acarajé. This anecdote also imbues Mestre Cláudio with authentic black Bahian-ness. 369 And that’s how you succeed [in raising consciousness]. If you take someone from a group that doesn’t consider capoeira Angola to be Afro-Brazilian culture, you won’t have any consciousness-raising at all. Because capoeira Angola doesn’t do this on its own. In Abusada’s group far removed from the Mestre’s influence, in the interior of São Paulo, a much wealthier and whiter space than backlands Bahia, this kind of consciousness- raising does not take place. She generally sees the Mestre only once or twice a year at events. In her group, she said, “There are very few people who talk about this, and when they do, it’s not a subject they give priority to. And I think it ought to be.” * Examining the experiences and views of black and white practitioners alongside one another reveals some of the limits and potentials of capoeira Angola as a practice of black freedom. With white practitioners making up the majority in most capoeira Angola groups, it means that predominantly white people are in the position to benefit from capoeira practice. For capoeira to function as an instrument of resistance and liberation, it must reach more black people in the peripheries. Yet even in the periphery, practicing capoeira merely as a sport or physical exercise is not enough. As Abusada noted, capoeira Angola does not raise consciousness on its own. It must be taught as Afro-Brazilian culture and history. Yet even when this is the case, white practitioners still refrain from seeking active participation in political black consciousness movements. The picture emerges of white people taking up space. They are not necessarily displacing poorer, black participants intentionally, but their presence in such large numbers brings into question the blackness of the space. For black practitioners, who experience a visceral 370 and affective link between capoeira Angola’s blackness, its Africaneity, its axé and its resistive power, what does white participation mean and do? At the annual capoeira events the group holds every January, on Mestre Cláudio’s compound on the periphery of Feira de Santana, a hundred or more visitors arrive from all over Brazil and the world. Many of them speak about their sojourn in Bahia as a kind of pilgrimage. Visiting angoleiros, from other parts of Brazil (mostly the Southeastern states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) talk about “soaking up the axé” and “recharging the batteries” in Bahia. There was a subtle economy of extraction taking place: arriving, paying, “drinking from the source,” and returning home revitalized and renewed. I take part in this neocolonial economy as well, collecting field notes, interviews, sound recordings and observations, only to go home to process all of these raw materials and turn them into conference papers and a dissertation. Yet given the group ethic of compromisso, I wondered how other white and non-black, non-Bahians thought about how to contribute in return. Did other white practitioners feel that their responsibility in capoeira extended beyond the community of practitioners, to contribute towards the struggle against racism in Brazil? I found that they did, but only up until a point. They saw their main contribution as coming through their commitment to capoeira Angola: training, teaching and playing on the streets. When it came to taking action in black political movements beyond the roda, they found it was not their place. Instead, they preferred either to mobilize along other issues or commit to a practice of speaking out against racist ideas in their daily lives. However, white participation has not extinguished the potential for capoeira Angola to provide a counter-narrative to devaluations of blackness and black lives. 371 Individual Afro-Brazilian practitioners have found a source of strength, and confirmations of their humanity and lived experience, in the capoeira Angola community. Building on growing self-esteem, they aspire to make more out of their lives than they previously thought possible, whether by pursuing advanced degrees or going to trade schools. Above all, capoeira Angola offers an “alternative space of blackness” (Harding 2000) from within which Afro-Brazilians can access and reconstruct their past in order to imagine and build new futures. In the Epilogue, I take up this theme in order to explore capoeira Angola as a quilombola space, of flight, refuge and multiple forms of escape. It can function as a retreat, like the “mobile,” “suburban quilombos” that surrounded Salvador in the nineteenth century, providing temporary respite from daily subjection in an African inflected environment (Reis 1993:40-2). Sometimes capoeira must also act as a “safety valve” (Spencer 1986:3-8), a “way of relaxing … during which the most brutal aggressiveness and impulsive violence are channeled, transformed, and spirited away” (Fanon 2004:19). In these moments, capoeira is carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, acts of fleeting freedom that soon fade as established power relations prevail. Yet what traces are left of these freedoms? What must be made from their enduring repetition, capoeira’s (and Candomblé’s and samba’s) endurance and persistence as cultural practices over the course of centuries? What more could contemporary capoeira Angola practitioners do to cultivate and fortify their practice as a quilombola practice of freedom? 372 EPILOGUE The Angoleiros do Sertão as a Quilombola Practice of Freedom One Saturday several weeks before I left Brazil on my last fieldwork trip in 2017, I joined the cluster of friends and admirers that always gathered around the Mestre after the roda. We were taking part in the weekly celebration that follows the roda, what has become a near essential part of every Saturday. After the capoeira roda, and after the samba that follows it, everyone is buzzing. Collectively we have reached a high and want to sustain it, staying close to the mestre and each other. We had all been drinking for hours, and the afternoon was winding down, but the conversation turned serious in the way it so often and suddenly does with the Mestre. When the mestre is in a celebratory mood, there is no knowing which direction the conversation will go. He’ll just as easily talk putaria (tell dirty jokes) as he will analyze the details of specific capoeira games and players, or espouse his views on racial and gender politics. On that day, Iaiá asked the Mestre a question about how capoeira Angola could be more present in the Movimento Negro, and as he responded and I listened on, I had the distinct feeling he was offering me a parting gift, answering some of the most pressing questions I had been pursuing over the years. He started talking about how the Movimento Negro above all focused on bringing about liberation, and that people who practiced capoeira should understand this. He felt that the capoeira Angola group was in need of a “new generation” of angoleiros who were also active in the Movimento Negro. He lamented that even though there were 373 several young black men in the group, they lacked a racialized political consciousness. As the previous chapter has shown, some of the men in the group do possess a racial consciousness and understanding of the politics, but the Mestre wished they were more directly involved with the Black Movement. Iaiá observed that the moments when she learns the most from the mestre, when he talks about about capoeira’s role in the Movimento Negro and black politics, his students aren’t there. It makes her think they are less interested in these issues. She agreed that a new generation of conscious capoeira players was needed. The mestre said that capoeira needed more people like Iaiá, directly involved in the movement, but also involved with capoeira. While the Mestre’s focus on the black men in the group may seem to reflect his machismo, in this community, as the previous chapters have shown, Afro-Brazilian women are the predominant organizers of local Black Movement action. In fact, Iaiá and Karine, two central figures in the local movement, both trained capoeira previously but chose to focus their energies and make their compromisso with direct political action instead of capoeira. I heard his focus on the men of the group, therefore, as a call for the black men to join the work the black women were already doing, follow their example. He also acknowledged that perhaps he should be the one to lead by example, to be more active in the movement, but after all these years he was exhausted. The work would just be too much. As he spoke, I heard the fatigue in his voice, his vocal cords worn from the years of singing on the street, summoning the group to match his energy. I know he has already invested all of his living energy in capoeira Angola and samba, to keep them thriving and alive. I have seen him breathing his own life into black popular culture, 374 spending every ounce he had, even to the detriment of other facets of life that people usually put first, such as relationships and family. He was tired, he said. I listened for a long time. I had heard Mestre Cláudio talk about the Movimento Negro before, and he often refers to racism and racial injustice, but this was the first time I had heard him so explicitly discuss his view of how capoeira Angola and the black movement related to one another. For four years I had visited him on his plot of land on the periphery of Feira de Santana, asking questions about the political organizing potential of capoeira Angola, but this is the first time he had talked so openly about it in my presence. Though he looked at others who were present while he spoke, namely Iaiá, directing his speech at them, I know he was aware I was there (I was sitting beside him) and I felt he also wanted me to hear what he had to say. I had interviewed him twice in 2013, during my first visit, but since then he had always declined to be interviewed again, preferring to communicate informally. (He would say, “Isn’t it better this way?”) That afternoon he revealed that the same questions that have guided my research burned in his mind, too, and he was upset. He spoke bitterly of young men, not only in capoeira, wearing their hair in Afros, natural styles and rastas (locks), but without participation in any movement, in many cases not even capoeira. He also acknowledged that practicing capoeira alone was not enough, but he felt it was too much to ask of him to be both a mestre leading an international group of capoeira Angola and a political organizer. He had already taken on similar roles at various times throughout his life, and now he felt it was time for younger people to take on the burden. He knew the emotional and psychological toll that activist work demands, and it pained him to recognize how much work was still needed and not to know who would take it on. In his speech there was a 375 sense of having carried something so far, yet not knowing who he could trust to take it further. He spoke about himself and Dona Ivannide, aging leaders of two intersecting branches of the Movimento Negro, who had fought side by side for many years. For many years Mestre Cláudio had invited Dona Ivannide to give informal lectures at his capoeira events, speaking on issues of race and gender in capoeira and society. Many times Mestre Cláudio had rallied members of his group to join Dona Ivannide and her fellow black activists on the streets during protest marches, often with Mestre Cláudio bringing along drums and berimbaus to contribute to the singing and chanting. But now a new generation was needed. Who would take up the work when they were no longer here? Iaiá objected, “No, before you are dead! We cannot wait until then!” Cláudio seemed frustrated by students who throw themselves into capoeira, heeding the call of its total compromisso, devoting their lives to capoeira, but seeming not to realize that capoeira itself was about so much more than just capoeira. For these students he noted, however, doing capoeira was enough. They also discussed how part of the problem lay with the large number of white people practicing capoeira Angola. Iaiá recalled how for two years in a row, she had heard black capoeiristas say while passing by the public roda during the festival of 2 February in Salvador, that they did not want to enter because it was just “full of white people.” Iaiá asked how a traditional black practice can expect to attract and retain black practitioners when the majority of practitioners are now white. Mestre Cláudio admitted he has struggled with this problem for years, but he always comes back to his belief that capoeira is “democratic,” that he cannot turn away white people simply because they are 376 white. I have gathered from his use of the term that by “democratic” Mestre Cláudio refers not to the organization of power within capoeira groups, but to its inclusivity. Anyone and everyone can practice capoeira, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, black and white. Though he rarely put it in these terms, white participation in capoeira has also sustained the practice itself, in this group and others. Wealthy white students have contributed financially, evoking relationships of patronage from throughout Brazil’s history, enabling the Mestre to build or renovate structures on his property and increase his equity in other ways. As white students make up the majority in the group, they also sustain it through their dues-paying membership. These relationships are also reminiscent of relationships cultivated between practitioners of black culture with white intellectuals and artists in Bahia (Assunção 2005:150). As white, educated elites also became students of capoeira Angola, studying and associating with Mestre Pastinha from the 1930s onward, they contributed their cultural and racial capital to the practice. Though capoeira scholars and players do not discuss it in these terms, this era essentially initiated a project of uplift and respectability politics, lifting capoeira Angola off of the streets, away from vagrants, criminals and “rude boys” that gave capoeira a “bad image” (Assunção 2005:156). As the racialized stigmatization of capoeira persists doggedly to this day, the possibility for white practitioners to lend their protection and respectability through their mere presence also continues to be relevant. The fact that capoeira (in its various forms) has become so popular abroad, in predominantly white countries and communities, has also added to capoeira’s prestige at home through the same mechanisms. 377 * In one conversation, Mestre Cláudio and Iaiá touched upon many of the central themes I have taken up in this dissertation: the political relevance of capoeira Angola, the racial consciousness of angoleiros, their sense of political responsibility and commitment, and the significance of majority white participation; the divergence of gender roles, with the underrepresentation Afro-Brazilian women reflecting their choices, as well as their responses to pressures, to devote themselves to activism and/or domestic duties, over participation in capoeira. Yet discussions of these issues build on understandings of capoeira Angola as a source of a very special kind of black power: a form of axé that is particular, perhaps, to capoeira Angola yet also continuous with axé in its various manifestations that resonates throughout all Afro-Brazilian practices. Even more broadly, axé resembles the energies and powers cultivated in all manner of African diasporic practices: forces summoned through bodies and sounds, movements and music, that cohere, sustain and fortify communities, and that empower people to transform their lives. As I have shown in Chapter 1, attention to axé as it circulates through sounds, bodies and movements is necessary in order to recognize how it flows through, connects and binds practitioners in a broader community—not a community defined only by practitioners, but one bound by the “shared yet diverse” nature of Brazilian blackness (Hunter and Robinson 2018). Axé as a binding force also functions to enable doing, to increase the potential for action, which in turn corresponds to the community’s ethics, as discussed in Chapter 2. In other words, creating and cultivating, giving and receiving axé also involves practitioners in 378 ethical relationships. They take on the compromisso of enduring dedication to the practices, to the cultivation of axé, to each other, and in many cases extend this commitment to the marginalized Afro-Brazilian community. Returning to the framing questions of this dissertation, I weave together these findings and perspectives in order to understand how capoeira Angola practitioners interpret the power and compromisso they cultivate together as a form of racial and political consciousness. Given the deep affective Africaneity of capoeira Angola and its direct references to resistance and freedom, how does capoeira Angola function today as a practice of freedom? In the conversation I described above, I believe Mestre Cláudio’s consternation stems from a deep ambivalence he has faced throughout his career and life. On the one hand, Mestre Cláudio recognizes that to bring about political change requires direct action and engagement with political projects and structures. He has seen in the local example of Dona Ivannide an activist who has also joined a political party and worked as a party leader in order to effect change from within the political system. Dona Ivannide’s move from popular movement organizer to political party member parallels a broader shift that has taken place over the past several decades of Movimento Negro organizers entering into party politics, on local and national levels. On the other hand, capoeira Angola has emerged from the “underside,” out of the experience of enslavement (Roberts 2005:21-23), in spaces that enslaved subjects created as necessarily “alternative” (Harding 2000) or separate from the spaces controlled by the dominant white elite. Mestre Cláudio has always understood this, too, and has fought to preserve his group’s and his own autonomy and independence. He has refused to petition politicians for 379 support of his cultural projects, preferring to fund them himself or solicit sponsorship from local businesses. When he has had to interact with city or state institutions, he has often been sorely disappointed, as I addressed in the Introduction. This ambivalence can also be found embedded within the practice and philosophy of capoeira Angola, and it results from a tension between integrationist and separatist political approaches, where the aim of integration is “to become part of society using the mechanisms of access sanctioned by the dominant sector,” while that of separatism is to “retreat to enclaves of alternative or parallel societies” (Butler 1998:63-64). Capoeira Angola, therefore, can be understood as encompassing both integrationist and separatist tendencies, which receive varying emphases depending on how the practice is interpreted. Emphasizing capoeira as a “democratic” practice that includes “everyone,” rich and poor, black and white, etc., represents its integrationist qualities: capoeira as a space that realizes the Brazilian dreams of “equality and racial democracy” (Sheriff 2001; Assunção 2005:214). As discussed in Chapter 4, practitioners recognize that white participation can elevate capoeira’s status. However, in practice this approach risks reproducing color-blindness, where “everyone” can participate and own Afro-Brazilian culture, but focus on the supposed victory of racial harmony diverts attention from the fact that fewer Afro-Brazilians are accessing and practicing the form. Interpreting capoeira Angola as an alternative black space, in contrast, aligns with separatist strategies. Retreating from the dominant sphere, in this case, is a refusal and reversal of dominant norms and values, an act of self-determination and self-definition. This is the strategy of quilombos and maroon societies: flight from white-ruled spaces in order to create alternative societies. 380 Yet as Butler also points out, such extreme or pure instances of complete separation are difficult to sustain and therefore also quite rare (Butler 1998:62). The famed Quilombo of Palmares stands as the quintessential example, in which fugitives from slavery in Brazil maintained an autonomous society spanning a century and with an estimated population of 11,000 (French 2009:77, citing Schwartz) to upwards of 30,000, notably including “Brazilian Native Americans and anticolonialist whites” (Nascimento and Nascimento 1992:123). Yet Palmares was also the exception. Most quilombos were much smaller and more temporary in nature (Reis 1993:40-2). These quilombos align more closely with what Butler calls a “semiautonomous model, in which participants live in both mainstream and alternative societies” (1998:62). I understand the capoeira Angola of the Angoleiros do Sertão as a kind of semiautonomous micro-society within the macro-mainstream, with quilombola actions and practices taking place in a number of scales. In a spatially small or “tight” space (Goldman 2010), rodas themselves can be experienced as quilombos, spaces at once enduring and fleeting, claimed and created through the sound and movement of angoleiros’ bodies. Mestre Cláudio’s Saturday roda, for example, is enduring in the sense that he has maintained a roda in the same space in Feira for over thirty years (first inside the Mercado das Artes marketplace building, and for roughly twenty years on the median strip just outside of it). Yet it is fleeting because it lasts only several hours every week. Furthermore, Mestre Cláudio has never asked the city for permission or permits to hold his roda there, though officials are aware of his regular presence there. His roda is considered a cultural institution, perhaps the city’s most prominent one, for it attracts visitors not only from the peripheries of the city but from all over Brazil and the world; 381 yet at any moment public officials could choose to shut the roda down. Over the course of my fieldwork period, the city has planned to cut down the majestic, centuries-old trees of the median strip of Getúlio Vargas Avenue in order to build a rapid transit line.79 Though the tree under which the roda takes place still stands, some construction has already begun. Removing the trees would displace hundreds of artisans and workers who conduct their businesses under the shade they provide, and Mestre Cláudio would be forced to find another space for the roda. In other words, his claiming and occupation of space never achieves permanence or ownership. In this sense, Mestre Cláudio’s capoeira Angola roda resembles a de facto, mobile quilombo that has yet to win, or perhaps will never seek, legal status—it exists and persists without any official protections.80 As this dissertation has shown, within the tight space of the quilombola roda, angoleiros co-create and move through ethical scenarios. The corporeal dialogue of their games provides the material through which they work out their aesthetic values and ethics. Privileging the active doing of capoeira Angola, their movements and sounds “speak” their truths, to each other, to affiliated community members and to anyone else invested in learning and understanding their embodied language. The games themselves, therefore, form the “texts” upon and with which practitioners signify, again and again, 79 “Feira de Santana: Previsão de Término Do Túnel Da Avenida João Durval É Confirmada Para Março de 2018 | | Jornal Grande Bahia (JGB)” 2018, “BRT: iniciada construção de estações de passageiros na Getúlio Vargas | Jornal Grande Bahia (JGB)” 2016, “Financiamento Do BRT É Suspenso Pela Justiça Federal” 2016, “Obra de construção do BRT em Feira de Santana é autorizada; investimento é de R$ 87 milhões” 2015. 80 The 1988 Constitution of Brazil, drafted when the country transitioned to democracy from military dictatorship, includes a “quilombo clause,” which gives rights to land claims to contemporary residents of quilombos, descendants from fugitives from slavery (French 2009:xi, 77). However, though these communities throughout Brazil are numerous, the process of seeking and acquiring official quilombo status is complicated. Many communities may not qualify as potential petitioners or they may lack access to the necessary experts, or they may have other reasons for not seeking official quilombo status. 382 repeating and revising them in order to theorize “their own status” (Gates Jr. 1988:xxv), separate yet embedded within dominant Brazilian society. It is this simultaneity of separateness and embeddedness, resembling a position of “outsider within” (Collins 1986), or an occupation of the undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013), which constitutes the roda as a space of struggle, as a training ground for the confrontations and evasions that take place in social spheres beyond the roda. Yet the spatial contests and ethical battles waged in the roda are not merely symbolic of the struggles practitioners face in their lives “outside” the roda (cf. Lewis 1992). As one interlocutor exclaimed to me in exasperation, “There is no ‘outside’ of capoeira!” In other words, practitioners of the quilombola movement of capoeira Angola do not escape their context—or, rather, they do escape, but not in the sense of running to a space where they can leave the battles behind (Harney and Moten 2013:30). Another way of putting this is to imagine a continuum, not separate or even intersecting spheres. The contests of the roda may occupy a smaller space, they may seem to take place on a smaller scale, but they are the same contests as take place “outside” the roda. When capoeira mestres say, therefore, that the roda is the world, or the game in the roda is the game of life, they are not speaking metaphorically. They mean that who we are in the roda is who we are and the spaces conquered in the roda are real. Claiming space in the roda is claiming space in one’s life. In Chapter 3, I showed how women negotiated gendered and racialized relations of power. Capoeira Angola provides strategies and a wide range of resources, or ways of being and moving through the world, such as modes of observation, reflection, intelligence, flexibility and humor. These are all tools that that empower the “weak to 383 beat the strong,” as Orikere put it. At the same time, the shifting, in-process nature of an ethical project in motion means that not every player adheres to common understandings of what is right and wrong: as a result, sometimes the “strong” use their brute force to put the weak back in their place, or to remove them from the space of play altogether, in seeming contradiction to angoleiro ethics. When women warrior-players, guerreiras, talk of claiming and conquering space, therefore, they mean this both literally and symbolically. Just as they must use their combined physical, mental, psychological and even spiritual strength in the roda to claim and occupy space over time, by playing games that “say something” (Monson 1997) and that “make sense” (Mestre Cláudio’s fazer sentido), the women cultivate this knowledge and these sensibilities in their lives. I focused on women’s experience not to claim their experience as exceptional, but to show how every player brings their own subjectivities and positions to the roda, and brings their capoeira Angola ways of being into the world. (There is no outside!) As Mestre Cláudio always says, “You don’t train capoeira Angola in order to be able to play capoeira Angola. You train in order to become an angoleiro.” In different ways, every player draws on angoleiro strategies. At the same time, we must wrestle with the contradictions embedded within the practice; the problems that necessarily come from remaining within. One of the most significant of these contradictions (or ambivalences), I have argued, is the one I highlight above and what I call in Chapter 4 “the problem of white participation.” White participation is only a problem when it replicates the ideal of racial democracy, where white practitioners share, taste and absorb black practices yet turn a color-blind eye to lived black experience. In other words, it is only a problem when white 384 people seek “everything but the burden” of blackness (Tate 2003), the celebration and joy of black culture without the critique of whiteness. Yet this problem does not undermine my understanding of capoeira Angola as a black quilombola space. Even in the Quilombo of Palmares, the fugitives maintained to some extent the institution of slavery (Lara 2006:362 Risério 2007:406). Rather than undermining or negating the claims that quilombola spaces foster freedom practices, these seeming contradictions reveal the freedom projects as unfinished. Though I have not emphasized them excessively throughout the dissertation, the community of the Angoleiros do Sertão, led by the charismatic Mestre Cláudio, embodies numerous significant contradictions. I have addressed some of the ways that Brazilian and Bahian gender roles are replicated in the capoeira group and serve to constrain women’s participation. Yet there are other ways that sexism and machismo pervade the group’s social practices. For example, beyond the Mestre’s weakness for dirty jokes that objectify women, which he knows many women in the group find intolerable, sexual harassment and double standards regarding fidelity are also the norm in the group. Not every man participates in these more extreme forms of machismo, but there is little resistance to them, from men or women. The women who spoke with me about their experiences of harassment did so only on condition of anonymity (when citing them on that subject) and such conversations were rare. In general, most group members did not feel comfortable voicing any direct critique of the Mestre, though many, he himself included (though always jokingly), acknowledged his flaws. I chose not to focus on these aspects in the dissertation because, when writing about such a small, intimate community, I have not yet found a way I could do the experiences justice, revealing their value and 385 complexity without having them appear as mere character attacks, and while preserving interlocutors’ anonymity. Writing about these “uglier” aspects of the group could be seen as a betrayal of their trust, painting the group in a negative light. In answer to that potential critique, I wish to make clear a point interlocutors made again and again: whatever the gender dynamics of the group, they are not worse than those found at large in Bahia. In other words, the group is by no means exceptional in its treatment of women and I probably would have experienced similar situations in many other capoeira groups. However, this does show that the group clearly falls short of creating a space that significantly counters dominant machista norms. Notwithstanding this fact, women in the group were unanimous in expressing that they felt the benefits they gained from practicing capoeira and belonging to the community outweighed the disadvantages or abuses they experienced. In similar ways, the group leaves the problem of white participation unresolved. However, as I have argued, the “problem” is not simply that white people participate in capoeira Angola, but that their practice does not sufficiently mobilize them to expressly anti-racist actions. Perhaps this is asking too much of capoeira Angola, but I will remind readers that I did not originate this demand. I am taking seriously practitioners’ claims that capoeira Angola is an anti-racist, freedom project and identifying where I find it falls short. Drawing on interlocutors’ analyses and my own observations, I suggest several ways the practice could be developed if capoeira Angola is to realize its potentials. As Mestre Cláudio touched upon in the conversation above, and several interlocutors expressed in their interviews, capoeira Angola as a tool for black freedom must reach the people who need it most. This means more black men and women must 386 not only participate in capoeira Angola, but understand the knowledge that they cultivate in the practice as liberatory, as providing tools for political consciousness and mobilization. Many practitioners experience how the lessons learned in capoeira Angola can be applied to life situations beyond the roda on an individual level. What is often lacking is an understanding of how to make the leap from individual to collective application. While capoeira Angola contributes as a practice that affirms the value and beauty of black lives, this is not enough. In Brazil as in the United States, black and white people alike can misinterpret white appreciation and participation in black culture as striking a blow against racism. This logic makes sense only if racism is defined very narrowly, limited to extreme incidents where violence or harm is inflicted for explicitly racial reasons (as in the Jim Crow South). Under this logic, any brotherly and sisterly cooperation between blacks and whites proves racism’s abolition. However, this fails to take account of what Collins (2004) and Bonilla-Silva (2014) call the “new racism,” or color-blind racism, in the U.S., which appears strikingly similar to Brazil’s racismo cordial, or cordial racism, the forms that racism takes in a supposed racial democracy, which bases its claims to racial equality precisely on a supposed fluidity of race and color strikingly similar to color-blindness. No one should be fooled, therefore, into believing that white participation in black practices or culture signifies a loosening of racism’s hold. Nor, as I have shown, does it necessarily result in white ally-ship in anti-racism struggles. On the contrary, white and black participants alike can cooperate in upholding color-blind, racial democratic ideologies that divert attention from racism and lived black experience. 387 No one I encountered in Brazil called explicitly for more white involvement in the black struggle, and these are spaces where whites have historically been largely absent and unwanted. However, I believe that white passivity around racial issues is ineffective at best. In other words, racism is a white problem and white people must find ways to confront it, in themselves, in their communities and in the social structures they help to maintain. This leads me to wonder what would happen if whites attempted joining black movement groups in Brazil. Could they find ways to participate without assuming command? Does capoeira Angola provide a space in which white practitioners could develop such ways? In contrast to other forms of white consumption of black culture, capoeira Angola provides an opportunity for white practitioners to confront their received ideas and ideologies about blackness and black culture. Singing songs about slavery and slave cunning, learning the bodily movements, vocal timbres and swung rhythms of capoeira Angola means embodying slave wisdom and agency, lessons of black fugitivity and flight. If white practitioners truly “reflect,” as Mestre Cláudio so often urges his students to do, they will surely ask themselves what they are doing in this space. Taking to heart Mestre Cláudio’s emphasis on compromisso, on long-term dedication and obligation to the practice and community, white practitioners could also extend this thinking to consider their potential contributions to black freedom. Indeed, some group members have had these thoughts and asked these questions. Recognizing the limits of their existing knowledge, some have sought to learn more about African and Afro-Brazilian history and cultures. Others seek to speak out against racist epithets or in support of black colleagues. Yet again, these instances remain incidental. What is needed is more 388 collective engagement with direct critique, such as Dona Ivannide used to bring to her group discussions: ask white practitioners to contend with their own “ancestors,” settler colonial enslavers. The conversations will be uncomfortable, but what better space to engage in these difficult subjects than a community already bound with such strong ties of loyalty and camaraderie? Ask white practitioners to take on some of the burden. In essence, I ask that practitioners collectively devise means to more directly and actively realize capoeira Angola as a practice of black freedom. I recall one conversation I had with a young Afro-Brazilian woman who had recently left her group due to the machismo of her mestre. We were gathered at an annual “women’s event” held by the angoleira Brisa do Mar on the island of Itaparica, across the bay from Salvador. As the young woman told her story, she kept saying, “Capoeira é liberdade!” [capoeira is freedom]. I asked her, but how can it be freedom when you experienced so much oppression from your mestre? She seemed a bit frustrated, repeating, “Capoeira is only freedom!” Finally, she used her story again to illustrate: her mestre had created oppressive conditions for her and other women in their group, so the women had chosen to leave. This was freedom: choosing to leave and continuing to train capoeira Angola, but without a mestre. “Capoeira,” she said, “is inside of me.” In this way, she made a distinction between capoeira as practice and philosophy and capoeira as defined by mestres and groups. This reminded me of something I had been thinking about since the previous year, when I had heard Mestra Janja talk during a capoeira event I had attended. I asked her and the other woman present, “Is this what you’re saying, that capoeira might already contain the seeds for its own liberation?” They agreed animatedly, yes, and the other woman said, “And this is why the mestres are always imposing their power on us, 389 keeping others down!” They do this in order to secure their position, because they know that their teachings contain the tools for revolt, for claiming liberation and creating the conditions of freedom. When the young woman says that capoeira is inside of her, therefore, I believe she means this liberatory essence of capoeira. Mestres may abuse their power and their students, but they cannot prevent them from absorbing capoeira’s lessons of liberty. This is the kind of vision Abdias do Nascimento provided with his Quilombismo. He has been critiqued for idealizing Palmares, but I doubt he would have taken offense at that. The act of imagining a better future is by definition idealistic. He was practicing Sankofa, turning to the past and taking what was good in order to build a different future. Capoeira Angola practice is also a practice of Sankofa, remembering the past, summoning ancestors, embodying their lessons and bringing them all into the present. As a practice of critical reflection, capoeira Angola also demands constant revision—even if it is done in the name of tradition. From this perspective—cultivating embodied knowledge of the ancestral past in the present in order to construct a better future— tradition is not incompatible with innovation and change. When Mestre Cláudio urges his students to observe and reflect in order to learn, he is urging them to think for themselves, to learn how to teach themselves. Some advanced students have so thoroughly embodied this wisdom that they threaten Mestre Cláudio’s authority by developing their own contrasting interpretations of the capoeira Angola tradition. In some cases they leave the group, in other cases tensions may simmer for years. Yet surely Mestre Cláudio recognizes the source of these conflicts, and the paradoxical position he occupies as mestre. Similar to being a parent, a mestre’s ultimate goal with educating his students 390 should be to make himself redundant. Yet as mestres are only human beings, they also often struggle with letting go of the reins. Like Nascimento’s Quilombismo, the Angoleiros do Sertão’s quilombola practice of freedom remains unfinished and unrealized. Yet by making their compromisso to the practice, they commit to keeping the seeds alive and keeping the wisdom growing. They commit to the ongoing practice of freedom, to the constant struggle. Activism seems to require tireless dedication; yet in reality, everyone gets tired. Mestre Cláudio’s fatigue is testament to the way a life of fighting can wear one down. Recent attention in activist circles to the importance of self-care also speaks to this reality (González 2015). Capoeira Angola, as a practice that strengthens mind, body and soul, can provide a source of resilience and healing necessary when confronting the overwhelming tenacity of white supremacy and structural racism. As Audre Lorde recognized, care of self is “self- preservation” and “an act of political warfare” (2017:130). When the self in question is deemed less than human by dominant society, and is worn down by struggling against those dehumanizing forces, then caring for that self is an act of revolution. So perhaps capoeira Angola can be understood as a rich amalgam of practices and strategies vibrating with liberatory axé. It provides tools, tactics and strategies; wisdom and ways of knowing, living and being grounded in ancestral, African-descended tradition. Yet as Coragem said, as with any tool, how it is used depends upon who is holding it. Tricia Rose expressed this in similar terms in a conversation on the power and potential of improvisation as a practice: “[S]ometimes even the most generative categories can be pressed into the most non-generative service. Right? So improvisation 391 isn’t the way out. Improvisation in the right hands is a tool to imagine a way that hopefully is a way out, based on what we put into it” (Lipsitz and Rose 2014). As I hope to encourage scholars to consider the overlooked political potential of musical movement practices, I also hope to encourage capoeira Angola practitioners to recognize the powerful tool they hold in their hands. As they commit to their training, I urge them to also commit to fighting for the freedoms that still elude people of African descent across the Americas. Such fighting requires a commitment to movement; confrontation with pain and fear; a valuing of process over perfection, of signification over the signified; a dedication to doing, making and creating; all of which can be learned in the capoeira Angola of the Angoleiros do Sertão. Axé Bahia! 392 GLOSSARY agogô percussion instrument with two resonators; can be made of metal, as a double cow bell, but in the Angoleiros do Sertão the agogô the resonators are made with two spherical Brazil nut shells screwed to a wooden stick; African origins Angoleiro/ angoleiro I capitalize the term to refer to members of the Angoleiros do Sertão; uncapitalized, it refers to any practitioners of capoeira Angola regardless of group affiliation atabaque traditional drum of Candomblé, also used in capoeira; head usually made of cow hide, base of drum tapers conically and is placed in a stand to keep it upright while playing; African origins axé positive energy, force, power of realization; a concept central to Candomblé that also circulates more widely throughout Bahia and Brazil carrying positive connotation bateria refers to the complete ensemble of the capoeira roda, consisting of three berimbaus, two pandeiros, and one each atabaque, agogô and reco-reco berimbau iconic principle instrument of capoeira; bowed instrument, made with wire and wooden pole, with a gourd resonator; played by balancing the instrument on the pinky finger (usually left hand), striking the wire with a stick (held in right hand) and opening or closing the wire using a metal disc or large coin grasped between index finger and thumb (left hand); always played while clutching a caixixi (right hand); African origins cabeçada head butt caixixi rattle percussion instrument made of woven cane and a coconut shell base, filled with seeds; African origin Candomblé Afro-Brazilian religion capoeira can refer to the practice of capoeira or, especially in previous centuries, to a player/practitioner; 393 capoeirista contemporary parlance for a capoeira player or practitioner of any style chamada literally means call (or called), refers to capoeira movement and ritual where one player “calls” the other by extending their hand or hands, usually upwards or sideward, inviting them to “enter” and join hands; then the caller leads a walk, forward several steps and back several step; it is a moment of heightened tension in the game as the caller may be trying to set a trap for the called player; there are many different kinds of chamada chapa a direct flat-footed kick, executed by extending a bent leg straight towards the target compromisso commitment, obligation contra-mestre/a the second to highest rank of capoeira player ginga swaying basic movement of capoeira; sways both side to side and back to front, accompanied by protecting arm movements: for example, step right with right foot, back with left, forward with left, back with right, forward with right gringo / gringa a flexible term that has lost its original connotation of referring only to U.S. nationals, it can refer to any non-Brazilian foreigner in Brazil; associated especially with whiteness guerreira a woman warrior jogo game, from verb jogar, to play malandragem the art of the malandro, or street-wise trickster, ability to distract, deceive and control an opponent in the capoeira game malícia similar to malandragem, may have connotation of malice, intent to harm, but not always; cunning, slyness Mestre/a / mestre/a one who has achieved mastery of capoeira Angola; capitalized I use it as a title (Mestre Cláudio); throughout the dissertation, “the Mestre” refers to Mestre Cláudio; in lower case refers to any mestre (male) or mestra (female) of capoeira; used more broadly in Brazil to refer to those who have mastered other expressive practices militante a militiant activist; it is common for members of the Movimento Negro in Brazil to call themselves militants; it signals strong 394 political commitment to the movement and to action negativa evasive capoeira Angola movement, where the player descends to the ground sideways from a crouching position, appearing to lie prone on the ground, supporting body weight only with hands and feet; knees, torso, head, etc., hovering just above the floor pandeiro hand percussion resembling a North American tambourine, with a leather head (usually goat skin) suspended on circular wooden frame, into which are inserted metals discs to create shimmering sound; African and Middle Eastern origins quilombo maroon community established by fugitives from slavery; many quilombos remain today throughout Brazil, whose inhabitants are descended from those who escaped from slavery rabo de arraia circular, backward-facing kick, executed by stepping forward, pivoting so back is facing opponent and simultaneously bending at the waist to peer between legs, with or without hands on the ground, lifting back leg up and forward to the opponent rasteira leg sweep, can be executed from a number of positions, but generally involves sweeping and lifting an opponent’s foot or feet off of the ground causing them to fall reco-reco scraper instrument; in the Angoleiros do Sertão, preference is for it to be made from a oblong, hollow gourd with notches carved on the surface, played by scraping a stick back and forth over the notches; African origins roda the capoeira or samba event; literally meaning wheel or ring, it refers both to the event and the actual ring of bodies formed during the event treinel the first formal level after “student.” The title is often only awarded after many years of dedicated training and many students never reach the level. 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Abusada, Paraguaçu Paulista, SP 2016 13. Pedro Ivo, São José dos Campos, SP 2016 14. Camomila, São José dos Campos, SP 2016 15. Treinel Natureza, São José dos Campos, SP 2016 16. Flor, São José dos Campos, SP 2016 17. Binho, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 18. Ranran, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 19. Rafael, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 20. Tales, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 21. Igor & Papagaio, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 22. Silvinho, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 23. Natália, Marília, SP 2016 24. Tatu, Marília, SP 2016 25. Nayara, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 26. Pirata, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 27. Luciene, Recife, PE 2016 28. Karine, Salvador, BA 2016 29. Dona Ivannide, Feira de Santana, BA 2016 30. Caixixi, Mantiba, Feira de Santana, BA 2017 31. Flavinha, Mantiba, Feira de Santana, BA 2017 32. Contra-mestre Tico, Mantiba, Feira de Santana, BA 2017 33. Afonso, Mantiba, Feira de Santana, BA 2017 34. Ana Simpatia, Salvador, BA 2017 35. Bolinha, Rua Nova, Feira de Santana, BA 2017 36. Rafa, São José dos Campos, SP 2017 37. Felipe (e César), São Paulo, SP 2017 431 38. Coragem, São Paulo, SP 2017 39. Seth, Salvador, BA 2017 40. Thomaz, Salvador, BA 2017 41. Maiana, Salvador, BA 2017 42. Flor, by Skype, Paraguaçu Paulista, SP / Providence, RI 2017 432