From Candomblé to Carnaval: Secularizing Africa and Visualizing Blackness

Abstract

Like the rituals found in Candomblé, carnival is known for its transformative effect on the body and the psyche. Individuals play, create transgressive identities, and reposition themselves in hierarchical social arrangements. Dichotomies such as self and Other cease to represent binary opposites, given that they often coexist during rites of spirit possession, masking, or the simple act of dressing up or down. In this complex play of identities, the following must be asked: At what point do these dynamics cease being play and become transformative political discourse? Thus I turn to the epigraphs above to conceive and construct the diversity of experience and formulation found in carnival. For Da Matta, who studies carnival in Rio, its luxuriousness hides the poverty and social misery that mars the Brazilian sociopolitical body. For Aldrick, the synecdochical body that only becomes animated through his role as the Dragon Masker during carnival in Trinidad, it is the time when the dispossessed can be seen and, by extension, heard. While in Da Matta’s formulation carnival hides sociopolitical realities, for Aldrick, carnival reveals them. Political engagement, we can infer, appears in the interplay between what is hidden and what is seen. This chapter examines carnaval ¹ as a rhizomatic location in the Afro-Brazilian insertion of their Africannness and blackness.

What explains the style of Brazilian Carnaval is the necessity of inventing a celebration where things that need to be forgotten can be forgotten if the celebration is to be experienced as a social utopia. Just as a wild dream makes reality even more vehement, Carnaval can only be understood when we take into account what it needs to hide in order to be a celebration ofpleasure, sexuality, and laughter.

Da Matta, Carnival, Rogues and Heroes

He wanted everybody to see him. When they saw him, they had to be blind not to see.

Aldrick in The Dragon Can’t Dance