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By Bruna Silva
Unlike the opulent title 'Musica Popular Brasileira' (Brazilian Popular Music), the MPB (which praises a whitish mixture of the country's diverse musicalities), we will talk about the kind of music that is written in minuscule and in the plural: those that are in day-to-day of the diverse people of this territory, in their way to party or get together, in bars, the streets, or in the privacy of their homes, their backyards; composing the soundscape of the cities streets and neighborhoods. Popular Brazilian musicalities that shape the daily lives, identities, and sensibilities of people living in their territories. Also, to the same extent, the musicalities are structured by these elements in a permanent dialogue (although in their expression there is immense multiplicity and mutability, linked to the orixá Exu, one of the principles).
Music is not something we just do, but something that makes us, in a circular movement. Having as a parameter the national language we speak, which shapes the way we see and communicate the inner and outer world around us, music as a language can be seen in the same way. Musicality would then not be just a product of a culture, but something structuring in the way we feel, experience and create bridges between the internal and external world, precisely because it is a common base, like the national language, that allows us to communicate.
In this perspective, the enslaved Africans who came to these lands and the blacks who were born here were able, also through this language, to create a common place - even in the midst of all violence - in which they were not slaves, property of someone, but people, with knowledge, ethics and sensibilities communicated and experienced through the musical experience. This radical imagination - given the conditions of dehumanization -has a common root, from what I see, with the freedom that was materialized and territorialized in the quilombos.
Considering these places where black people make free and independent communities (not subjected to the material and onto-epistemological structure of colonialism) without exhausting them in their material expression, the quilombo can then be understood as a guiding principle of emancipation, following the thread woven by Abdias do Nascimento . Seen in this way, the quilombos were and continue to be created by us in many formats and proportions, some of them so inserted in a "normality" that they hide in plain sight: black musicality and everything that it brings in its universe would be precisely one of these quilombos. No wonder, those who wanted to avoid the survival of the black element in Brazilian society, during most of the first half of the 20th century, criminalized samba and religions of African origin. And we “nos aquilombamos” (used quilombo as a verb): in the backyards of famous aunts, like Ciata, Afro-Brazilian musicality and spirituality flourished; samba, Candomblé and Umbanda (and ultimately the carnival parade and the samba associations - escolas de samba- are expressions of this effort.
This ability to negotiate with the environment, deceive, "confuse in order to explain" (as Tom Zé sings) is attributed to the orixá Exu. With his cult (which resisted and was reframed in the various black diasporas in America), we learned the technology of multiplying joy through music, dance and parties, cultivating axé from it. This force (the axé) is responsible to take us forward, innovating, improvising and creating life through a commitment with Joy: life experienced in its most powerful and creative way. Pursuing the journey not in straight, martial steps, but as dancing steps. Sometimes spinning, sometimes moving forward, sometimes swinging... fighting with the oppressive enemy, just like in capoeira: gingando (swinging), deceiving the opponent at the same time clearing the way for the unexpected and accurate blow. We can compare this image to the way in which we, blacks in diaspora, feed an identity of resistance to the white hegemonic structure. Gingando, deceiving our opponent, we're continuously sharing treasures (forms of BEING in which we are subjects and not objects) in plain sight, since for that same hegemony, these jewels were nothing more than trinkets.
Bruna Silva is a Social scientist, currently a master's student in Social Anthropology (National Museum/UFRJ) and her research topic is pagode and backyard parties in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
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