Staying locked at home reading the news is bad for the head. Since I can’t take Mr. Polzonoff out of his house and take him for a walk in a nice place, because he lives so far away, perhaps I should tell you about the festivities I saw this Sunday, on the eve of the attack by black racialists on the Church of Nossa do Rosário in Curitiba. His text about this was very depressing.
Dumb with PhD
We see this kind of news and we have to learn to be stupid to understand it . It is necessary to forget, for example, that the Church has black saints since before the discovery of Brazil. That Saint Iphigenia, princess of Ethiopia, is represented with the Church in her hand, given her importance in the beginnings of Christianity. Again, this country of Catholic formation is very used to bowing to a black woman before a mana with pink hair and an ox ring in her nose comes to give us orders. If they allege that Santa Ifigênia is not one of the most popular saints, I say that this is not the case of São Benedito, a black man born in Sicily at the time of the discovery of Brazil. His devotion left Europe, crossed the Atlantic and found here the Africans who made the same crossing.
But black Catholics did not always organize themselves taking into account the color of the saint. The preferred patroness was Nossa Senhora do Rosário. In Salvador, Cachoeira, Rio de Janeiro and Olinda there are homonymous churches called Igreja Nossa do Rosário dos Pretos. In São Paulo and Recife, there are the eponymous Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Pretos.
As the well-born of colonial society did not want to mix with descendants of slaves and ex-slaves, color was a barrier to entry into third (lay) orders and privileged burials. So instead of crying and asking for quota, these successful blacks created such churches and brotherhoods. Precisely under the patron saint Nossa Senhora do Rosário, attacked by the red shirts.
It takes a deliberate, studied stupidity, falsifying reality, to say that Catholicism is for white people. Just walk into a church and look who’s inside. If the demographics of the place are not atypical (such as an area of Ukrainian settlement, for example), the church will be full of pardos. One has to divide the world between things in black and things in white, which is a hell of a job. Interestingly, however, none of these racialists considers that the University came from Europe, so it could only be white.
And indeed, if you want to repeat racist atrocities, it is easier to garner support from a Ford Foundation (in this regard, read “Uma Dropa de Sangue”, by Demétrio Magnoli), which will finance its studies in one of those gringo departments of Black Studies, than the little brown lady who is attending mass, or seeing the people from the terreiro to deliver offerings.
In the wrong place, according to the calculations
And here we come to the need to take a little walk. Looking at it from a calculating perspective, I could say I’m in the worst place in the world. Black racism is advancing, and I am a white girl alone in one of the blackest places in Brazil. To make matters worse, the racialists put a university here during the PT. The new university attracted none other than Kabengele Munanga to live in the city (I had the information, but I never saw him in person). To make matters worse, I live in a state ruled by the PT, which reserves an area of the administration to be a playground for racialists. The Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Seppir) was created by Lula in 2003 and ceased to exist at the federal level. In Bahia, we have a Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Sepromi), a state Seppir (and I know that the expression “racial equality” was used in opposition to anti-racism because a historical activist told me this: he wanted to sell the government a campaign against racism and Seppir was willing to deal with you, as long as you didn’t use the word “racism” and exchanged it for “racial equality.” As he was a serious man and a legitimate anti-racist, he refused to give up the word racism).
My position, in theory, should be impossible. If I were to conduct my life based on the above information, I would be desperate, thinking I need a very well policed and mostly white place to live. But my position serves, rather, to show that these people don’t have as much power as they think.
The street outside
I’m in my house , reading under the window, when I hear my name called. It’s the wall painter, a deep black man who was all dressed up in Ethiopian colors – right down to the mask. Let them know that they’ll come do the work after finishing painting a garage and catch up. I ask for the owner of the bar, who has been missing since eye surgery. He speculates that today the old man will show up, because of the Oshun festival that would take place between one, one and a half, when the river was full. I take the opportunity to find out why there was nothing on the 2nd of February, saying that I thought it was strange not having anything for Iemanjá. He responds very emphatically that February 2 is in Salvador, because it is Iemanjá and Iemanjá is salt water. As it is fresh water here, it is Oxum.
This is a basic knowledge that I already had. That’s why I found it strange, since, since the construction of the dam, the water in the river at this point is brackish. I left it to find out in loco .
I calculated that, if he said it was going to be one, one and a half, it must be two onwards. It was not difficult to find the point of the party: there were palm branches decorating the descent to the pier and, further on, in the square, a covered structure protecting baskets full of flowers. It was the offerings. I ask some acquaintances who the party was for. The answer has already varied: Oxum and Iemanjá. I saw the busy ogan passing by and went to ask him. The answer was: Oxum, Iemanjá and Nanã.
An ogã is in charge of staying sober in the rituals, taking care of order. This one, in particular, prefers to call himself caretaker, which, if we are to believe him, is the Yoruba translation. And I must also say that this is a Sepromi employee. However, his conduct does not point to any evidence of racism or racialism. He was always kind and cordial to me.
I have no doubt that there would be no shortage of black atheists and college students to take his place in the position. But, as election is something that still matters, some authority must have preferred to make an average with terreiros instead of putting a boring academic who made everyone angry. I have no doubt that Sepromi’s original project was to promote racial separatism. But the result is a religious civil servant who takes care of community life and knows all the people. Mutatis mutandis, is the Patronage.
My first exit was just to collect information. I caught sight of atabaques, which, given the place they were, I would hear from home when it started. The bows tied to the trees were yellow, a sign that the party should traditionally be for Oxum until the dam (the wall painter is old and took this temp). The tribute to Iemanjá must be a novelty post-dam and Nanã, looking on Google, you can find out that it is from the swamps. There is a swamp in the river.
Hearing the drums hours later, I leave the house again. I saw Candomblé celebrations in the square that I had only seen in watercolors by Carybé. I believe that in Salvador these parties do not take place on the street, but only inside terreiros. Women in full skirts and turbans danced in a circle with men in bonnets, while a small orchestra of atabaques drummed and a man sang religious songs in Yoruba. At a given moment, the dancers take the baskets and take them to a sloop – it has to be a sloop, an archaic vessel, which sails without an engine.
The audience was similar to that of a Catholic church, until because it’s the same. There are a lot of old ladies, including my neighbor, who it took me a while to get to know because of the mask with a baroque saint printed on it. By the way, around here there are many masks and shirts with photos of sculptures of Baroque saints. I suppose they are distributed throughout the parish, and the public used them.
At one point, the square was emptied because of another procession (or procession, as they call it) that came to bring offerings. The public kept comparing the two festivities and soon chose a point from which they could see both. There were those who were concerned about the number of chants per orixá, which could end up only in the ebb and prevent the delivery of offerings. I also heard that the praised sloops came from Coqueiros and Nagé. And I even heard young people talking about ConectSUS, saying that the best vaccine was the coronavac.
Appreciation of reality
The buzz and the comments show that there are normal people on the street, even when they practice a religion so different from that of most readers of this newspaper. The chants in Yoruba show the strength of cultural spontaneity: isn’t it beautiful that a language has been preserved in such adverse conditions?
Today I could write a rather grumpy text using the coverage that Folha gave to the invasion of church. But we already know that Folha’s journalists live in a bubble. The question is whether we want to live. If we accept it, we are lost. We won’t even have the strength to demand the punishment of the criminals who disrespected the cult in Curitiba.
Fear prevents the appreciation of reality. Reality is on our side; not the red shirts who think Catholicism is for white people. Go for a walk, sit in a square, and I doubt there isn’t something beautiful to see. You can’t stay at home just reading the news.
PS: After writing the first few paragraphs, I watched yesterday’s video by Alexandre Garcia. In it, I discovered that the invaded Church is Nossa Senhora do Rosário of the Black Men . I could have corrected it, but Polzonoff likes PS.
