Happy Black History Month! Welcome to a durational and commemorative celebration of Black lineages and narratives and futures. Although we now observe the holiday for an entire month, it once lasted a mere week: In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, who is regarded as one of the first scholars to study the African Diaspora, proclaimed that the second week of February would henceforth be known as “Negro History Week,” which he chose because it aligned with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
Woodson believed that “if a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Here, he recognizes integral links between the production of “history” (that is, the preservation of documents, images and artifacts, which can then be used to re-tell or re-member our “past”), the continuation of one’s “tradition” (that is, the re-telling and re-invocation of the past through preserved materials) and therefore the continued existence of a particular cultural group (that is, the passing of customs, rituals and collective memory down ancestral lines).
Additionally, while Black History Month was originally conceived to celebrate African-American heritage specifically, it has since proliferated and taken form beyond our borders. In honor of this Diasporic solidarity, I will take a moment each week of February to reflect on the cultural production of several Afro-Diasporic communities. Inspired by Woodson’s evocations above, I will consider a specific art work in the context of the nexus between epistemology (i.e. the production and acquisition of knowledge) and the legacies of slavery and neo-colonialism (i.e continued existential infringements on Diasporic epistemological legacies).
We begin today with a consideration of Afro-Brazilian women’s efforts to reconnect with their ancestry even as public discourse continues to relentlessly efface their existence by way of mestiçagem: an ideology which asserts that the presence Afro-Brazilian heritage is a stain on national identity and thus, seeks to erase it through miscegenation. This ideology, ultimately grounded in anti-blackness, has also led to a concerted effort in erasing the material evidence of Brazil’s booming slave trade, which of course is the root of Afro-Brazilian presence in the country. The sum of these efforts has led to the attempted expunction of Afro-Brazilian heritage more broadly.
As is the case with most Diasporic communities, ‘traditional’ Brazilian archives hold little other than what scholar Saidiya Hartman names “the traces of our vanishing.” That is, ‘traditional’ archives are inherently geared towards preserving and reifying historical narratives that are inextricably linked to anti-blackness, such as mestiçagem. How then, are Afro-Brazilian women meant to recount their stories?
Across time, women of the African Diaspora have turned to our bodies as well as the soil our ancestors graced as as a means of excavating our respective lineages. This act stands in defiance to legitimated notions of epistemology, which posit that “valid” knowledge can only be acquired by means of “hard facts,” “proof” or “evidence,” which often comes by way of archival documents. But, again, what to do if those documents do not exist or have been suppressed by the state?
In order to unpack these dense histories, we will consider Elekô: a short film released in 2015 by Mulheres de Pedra. The women in Elekô posit affect, corporeality and spirit as powerful means of acquiring knowledge, communing with their ancestors and both acknowledging and paying homage to their Afro-Diasporic roots, thereby standing in direct opposition to the forces that wish to obliterate them. Before reading, I suggest you watch the film (duration: 6min 30sec), taking particular note of the connections established between the women and the land.
The iconography of mestiçagem asserts that Afro-Brazilian blood must be diluted for the sake of the nation’s progression. This ideology depends on notions of black-blood as primordially soiled. In a North American context, this manifested by way of the “one drop rule,” which relegated all those with a hint of black-blood to a state of abjection. Ultimately, what sits at the foundation of this thinking is the notion that there is something fundamentally deviant or dangerous about women of African descent, and that this deviance can only be repaired through miscegenation, or “whitening.” Consequently, this ideology disrupts Afro-Brazilian women’s connection to their lineage and therefore to themselves. In Eleko (2:40-3:30), we see a bold deviation from mestiçagem: the Afro-Brazilian female subjects depict an embodied re-connection to their ancestry through the visual and auditory elements of the film.
At 2:40, the subjects begin to re-awaken their heritage. They are shown standing on a patch of soil at the Port of Little Africa, which was a burial ground for a myriad number of Afro-Brazilian’s. When a body is put into the ground it decomposes and becomes organic matter, like soil. With this in mind, the earth that the subjects are standing on likely contains the physical remains of their ancestor’s bodies. The port, which is symbolic of colonialism, draws attention to the African lineage that mestiçagem works to dissolve. Although it was previously used to dispose of Afro-Brazilian bodies, the subjects reconfigure it by using it as a site to recall those who came before them, those who mestiçagem attempts to erase.
The body persists as a site of ancestral re-collection when the subjects physically merge the ancestral soil with their living flesh. At 3:02, they are shown holding handfuls of the soil, and slowly begin to sprinkle it around themselves and rub it on their breasts and chests. The subject’s intentional hand movements and focus renders the scene ritualistic; as if the women are partaking in a sacred, corporal re-connection with their African heritage. By fusing their physical bodies with the remains of those who came before them, the subjects stand in direct opposition to mestiçagem. To reiterate, not only are they standing at the Port of Little Africa, but they are invoking the spirits of the very people mestiçagem attempts to erase: Afro-Brazilian women.
Mestiçagem continues to crumble as we see the subjects affirm the legitimacy of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, like Candomble: an ancient Afro-Diasporic spiritual tradition. Although Candomble practitioners have been severely persecuted by the Brazilian government, at 2:40, the subjects invoke drums, which are characteristic of this practice. The drums are heard but they are never seen, thereby serving as a reminder of both this persecution as well as the perseverance of the tradition in the face of forces that wished, for centuries, to extinguish it. This element opposes the whitening regime of mestiçagem by furthering the spiritual connection between the subjects and their Afro-Brazilian roots. By re-connecting to the ancient practice of Candomble, they allow their ancestors to live on, through them.
All in all, the subjects in Elekô re-imagine the Black female form into history by using their own bodies as a site to awaken their heritage. That is, although mestiçagem has worked to estrange Afro-Brazilian women from their ancestry and therefore from themselves, Elekô asserts that for Black women, connections to the body and the land serve as a means of world-building and creating new possibilities, which stretch beyond the strictures of a vehemently violent anti-blackness and therefore also disrupt the conditions that enable the continuation of said violence today… For the moment we begin to feel where we have been, we may being to shape our own futures.
This post was adapted from an assignment I created for a class taught by Flavia Araujo De Santos, who opened my eyes to mestiçagem as well as the many connections and divergences between experiences of Black women across the diaspora.
© 2020 Camille Bacon, No part of the writing that appears here or anywhere else on this substack may be reprinted or published elsewhere without explicit written permission from the author.