From there, from here

Lorraine Mendes | From there since here, 2024

In the hills and avenues, communities and neighborhoods, it is through rhythm that worldviews are taught and learned. Such ways of living challenge traditions that forcibly attempt to impose themselves as a unified idea of Brazilian culture and civility. From the All Saints Bay (Baía de Todos os Santos)—a territory where I have never set foot—I hear rhythms that resonate with movements of refusal toward social structures and that, incessantly, create and recreate ingenious and sophisticated modes of collective organization.

In Cosmopoetics of Refuge, Dénètem Touam Bona, a French thinker of multiple origins, weaves together the recognition that life itself is an artist; that in the habits and festivities lived in collectivity, we find ancient exits for problems that still walk among us, Black people of this vast land we have come to call Brazil. Through Bona, we can understand that since the Vissungos, the chants and collective ceremonies of our peoples have functioned as remembrance, insubordination, and memory.

Vissungos are responsorial songs practiced by enslaved Black and African people in the fields and mines of the state of Minas Gerais. But these chants were also intoned for the dawn, for desire, and other daily and ceremonial activities, such as burials. The sung language, beyond Pretoguês, was primarily a mixture of Kimbundu and Umbundu—languages that to this day mark our way of speaking.

Muriquinho piquinino, Ô parente, Muriquinho piquinino De quissamba na cacunda. Purungunta aonde vai, Ô parente. Purungunta aonde vai Pru quilombo do Dumbá.

This excerpt from the transcription of Vissungo 62 is old music to my ears, having grown up in Minas Gerais within a Black family in the rural area of a small town. As old as the memory it evokes, as resilient as the time it witnesses, the music drummed with fingertips that I learned from my father as a child continues to reconnect me with an unrepresentable Blackness—one that escapes, with beauty and festivity, through rites and enactments, from the conception of the "Negro" invented by the colonial trap.

To affirm ourselves as unrepresentable is an aesthetic-political gesture of refusal. A refusal that stems from a Black poetics contemporary to the modes and models of representing Blackness in White-Brazilian art history and the system it employs—which, in the molds of coloniality, follows the logic of exploitation and appropriation of our bodies, histories, lives, and futures. The way out toward a present-future is a "stone sung" (pedra cantada) in the past-present: the "sweep" (rasteira) is given by the collectivity, its gestures, feasts, and inventive ways of teaching, celebrating, and learning.

In "Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture," Lélia Gonzalez (2018) identifies the contempt for the pluriracial and pluricultural formation of our society as a Brazilian cultural neurosis: denegation (denial). Such a problem, according to the author, violates and disrespects alterities, promoting erasures, repression, and the "re-pressing" (recalcamento) of subalternized cultures. One of the processes of repression the author refers to is the notion that there is a "Brazilian culture" that merely "allowed" the influence of certain Indigenous and Black-African cultural elements. Such an understanding stems from a hierarchy that distances and once again marks the difference between "culture" as a European element (thus superior) and the "savage" and "grotesque" place of otherness. This hierarchy contributes directly to the discourse that defines non-white religiosities, habits, languages, social organizations, and ways of life as primitive and without history. With this discourse as a guide, we have a second pair of coexisting opposites: consciousness and memory.

History and the hegemonic discourse are found in consciousness, which, in the condition of otherness, defines us through infantilization and stereotyping. Meanwhile, memory operates in the place that restores the history that was never written.

Memory is the rasteira (the deceptive sweep). It is through memory that one tells what history does not: borrowing from literature, we are also interested here in escrevivência—a concept originally present in the work of Conceição Evaristo—as an exercise of telling, through one's own collective-body and language, that which history chose to repress. It is to fill the gaps with the fiction we want to project into the future, allowing the affects and actions of our people to be seen and known, thus creating a future memory on our own terms.

"It is in malungagem, in the restitution of bonds of a common Afro-diasporic experience in origin and in the recognition of trauma, that we will restore community organizations in this society, and that these may reverberate in the field of visual arts." (FELINTO, 2021).

Renata Felinto reminds us of Malungagem, of the restitution of bonds and community organizations. When I observe Guilherme Almeida's production, rhythms I have never heard reach me, yet they commune with the vissungos I learned from my father—strategies of life, memory, and restoration through belonging.

To grow up listening, playing, and reverberating is to grow in the permanence of bonds and feasts that ensure our continuity. The body that celebrates is the same one that fights. The body that learns is the same one that teaches. Cycles of Black lives continue to commune with principles and values passed from hand to hand, from rhythm to rhythm, toward a Black future that already exists.

BONA, Denetem Touam. Cosmopoéticas do Refúgio. Florianópolis, SC. Cultura e Barbárie, 2020.

FELINTO, R. O feminicídio epistemológico. Jacarandá: Arte & Poder,[s. l.],2021. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/3CThUMm. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2021.

GONZALEZ, L. Primavera para as rosas negras:Lélia Gonzalez em primeira pessoa. São Paulo: Diáspora Africana, 2018.