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Revolt of the Saints
Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy
By John F. Collins Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9570-6
CHAPTER 1
"The Eighteenth Battalion of Love"
Failure and the Dissemination of Misinterpretation
The very involuntariness of love, even where it has not found itself a practical accommodation beforehand, contributes to the whole as soon as it is established as a principle.
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
In June 2009, during a break in the winter rains that sent chunks of masonry crashing onto homes built along the interior walls of collapsed buildings, I joined a friend at the corner of João de Deus and Gregório de Mattos Streets. This crossroads served for most of the twentieth century as the symbolic heart of the Maciel, as the western side of today's Pelourinho Historical Center was called prior to 1992, when IPAC initiated its most recent round of urban reforms. My companion, whom I will call Malaquias, had been one of the neighborhood's many infamous malandros, or old-school hard men who refused to tolerate affronts to their honor even as, like the Mago introduced in the preface above, he often "took no position at all" while making do at the edges of the so-called formal economy. By the mid-1990s Malaquias had parlayed this renown as a bender of rules, and thus as a fixture in the Maciel/Pelourinho, into a career as a reggae musician. And as we traversed streets where the smells of wet lime, garbage, and rotting hardwoods had been replaced by stale beer and fresh paint, my friend compared his life to the increasingly depopulated Historical Center.
Malaquias' autobiography, which I have heard in many iterations, usually involves escape from his overbearing cowhand father in Bahia's dry backlands (the sertão); childhood struggles to survive alone in the once lively streets of the Maciel/Pelourinho; confrontations with, and crafty confoundings of, infamous detectives; stints in the penitentiary under aliases that spared him a record and thus permitted him to travel to Europe; re-acquaintance with his mother, a domestic servant who had been forced to send him to live with his father so she could care for others' children in Salvador; conversion to Pentecostal Protestantism; and, finally, consecration as a Rastafarian leader, or a holy man celebrated due in part to widely perceived links to the Afro-Brazilian tradition packaged and disseminated in the Pelourinho's reconstruction. Malaquias, then, has become well known, and a person (gente) rather than a street child or convict, on the basis of travails and a struggle for truth that he argues has led him to an appreciation of Afro-Brazilian identity and rather Christian notions of restoration and self-examination.
As Malaquias and I left the Maciel, we stopped by the Praça das Artes, Cultura, e Memória (Plaza of Arts, Culture, and Memory), an interior courtyard restored by IPAC in 1999. There a sculpture called "Redemption" gurgled hopefully. Encrusted with semiprecious stones whose safeguarding requires that the artwork be enclosed by an iron fence, the fountain announces that:
water washes away evil as compassionate tears sacralize this contemporary ritual. In the end, then, the place's negative energies are inverted.
The Pelourinho's destructive aspects evaporate, and from this we extract its regenerative power.
Out of condemned material we extract magical power, the mana of the condemned, whose magic is that of knowing how to reinvent life in a ritualized form again and again, again and again.
But Malaquias and I did not even glance at words that suggested that we were crossing a landscape whose regeneration, we had learned through bitter experience, rested on the ritual sacrifice and careful presentation of data — the "mana of the condemned" — about its inhabitants. All too familiar with this state-directed monumentalization of the Pelourinho's populace over the last two decades, we pointed out the corner in which Bira "the Ox" and Fat Carlos used to tether their fighting cocks. And we spat, nearly in unison, below a tiled sign that announced our arrival at the Praça das Artes, Cultura, e Memória. Not by chance, then, its first vertical column was louvered at a thirty degree angle so as to guide the viewer's eye toward "A-C-M," the initials and well-known nickname of Bahia's "Governor" Antonio Carlos Magalhães.
Unnerved by the spectral power of the iron-fisted patron of "Arts, Culture and Memory" whose architects, neighborhood residents agreed, rarely missed a chance at nervous obeisance, we followed Rua João de Deus. We walked silently past the military police post established in 1992 as part of the state's initial attempts to control the Maciel and paused at the handicrafts market that had replaced a brothel formerly known as the Buraco Doce (Sweet Hole). After Malaquias collected a small sum owed to him, we crossed onto the bustling Terreiro de Jesus Square. There, bookended by Salvador's Cathedral and the gold leaf of the Baroque Igreja de São Francisco (São Francisco Church), baianas do acarajé slathered black-eyed-pea fritters (acarajé) with fish paste and okra while capoeira fighters drummed up an audience in the drizzle. At the Square's opposite edge we turned toward the still-stigmatized 28th of September Street. Descending pitted hillsides (ladeiras), we sought to recall the names of sealed buildings' former occupants. At times we stuttered and stumbled, disoriented on slippery cobblestones that had once reassured in their uneven familiarity.
Now, nearly two decades after they had shuttered the first of the Maciel's buildings, workers were transforming colonial sobrados, built for planter and merchant elites but occupied across the twentieth century by impoverished quasi-citizens, into quarters for the philanthropies and state institutions that would help cement the Pelourinho as a cultural destination. Due to hiccups in IDB funding supported by arguments that planners had neglected the population, they were also converting a number into apartments for the police and the bureaucrats reviled, and envied, by Malaquias and his former neighbors: In response to pressure to enliven a now-depopulated architectural jewel, IPAC and its institutional sibling, state-level urban planning body CONDER, had joined federal credit institutions to structure mortgages for public servants. But this meant that working-class Afro-Bahians without formal labor documents (carteira assinada) or the marks of bourgeois propriety demanded by lending officers had little hope of returning to Brazil's soon-to- be-reconstructed African heart.
As Malaquias and I reached the corner of the 28th of September and Saldanha da Gama Streets, we paused before the doorway of the charred shell of number 18, a building that still bore the coat of arms of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the Americas' oldest philanthropic organization. In 1998 one IPAC official had described to me the edifice — dubbed the "Gueto" (Ghetto) by its vocal group of mainly Pentecostal and Rastafarian occupants so as to emphasize their kinship with residents of poor areas of Kingston, Jamaica — as "a vile nest of dangerous snakes, the absolute worst there is in the Pelourinho!" But in 2009 we approached it as Malaquias' former home, a space he had filled with friends from the Bahian sertão he fled before arriving in Salvador as what observers usually call a "street child."
Military police regarded us warily as we kicked at construction scraps and ran our hands along graffitied walls. Some stared, seeking to understand what the gap-toothed Rastafarian wearing an expensive watch might be passing surreptitiously to the large gringo. Savvier civil police detectives shouted ostensibly welcoming, yet decidedly menacing, greetings. These gatekeepers skilled at torturing supposed miscreants recognized us as one of the neighborhood's many odd pairs: While still subject to the threat of summary abuse, Malaquias and I had gained a measure of safety due to an association with the heritage landscape and the social science so essential to its reconstruction. This is not to equate our experiences or the risks borne by a white, U.S. citizen and a working-class, Afro-Bahian, but rather to emphasize their interrelatedness in a UNESCO World Heritage site that served as a hub for communication across and between transnational networks and Salvador's working-class neighborhoods.
The felt identification that residents referred to in the wake of their expulsion as da antiguidade (again, being or arising from antiquity), authorized Malaquias and me as performers within and interpreters of a Pelourinho-based quotidian. At the time, IPAC had worked assiduously to separate out, and then mobilize, this everyday life as an economic resource and index of supposedly shared beginnings. Indeed, the foreign anthropologist who had become a doutor on the basis of his knowledge of an antique land's social relations, and this former convict and self-described flagelado (sufferer, beaten one) who had become a reggae phenomenon as a result of his representations of his struggles in those same streets, fit quite nicely into, and even helped animate and give form to, the historical center as a sensuous, at-times enjoyable, and much-discussed reconstruction of Brazil's colonial origins. In part as a result, it is difficult to find a visitor to Salvador who fails to exclaim something like, "Wow, Bahia's really beautiful. The art, the music, the Afro- Brazilian culture. It's really the heart of Brazil!" Or, in a slightly different but related version, one may hear, "I despise the Pelourinho. It's so touristy and false, so filled with hustlers and street children, so commercial, and so brutal!" This book does not evaluate either claim. Instead, it burrows into a novel Bahia that comes into being in direct dialogue with the national and diasporic pasts produced in Salvador's downtown heritage machine. The Pelourinho as a quite literally re-membered formation, so real and so illusory in its reconstruction of what never existed until now, is simultaneously commercial, beautiful, traditional, novel, and, yes, still so brutal.
This first chapter is both an argument and a panorama. Designed to stand in for anthropology's classic "Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village" introduction to a field site, while still offering the reader a shared path into a panorama rife with description and dislocation, it revolves around a failed event in a neighborhood seemingly anchored in feints, dodges, and unauthorized appropriations. This approach to narrative origins is intended to carve out and describe an inchoate and provisional, yet formative, perch from which the rest of this book flows. And the sentimental space that emerges from the enveloping, bittersweet love out of which I conceptualize and introduce the group of Pelourinho residents who would become the neighborhood social movement "S.O.S. Filhos do Centro Histórico" (also "Children of the Historical Center" or "S.O.S."), and with whom I traversed Bahia's streets and bureaucracies in developing the standpoints I seek to share across the present ethnography of the making of a historical center, is not the neatly encompassing, idealized love of inclusion.
A focus on setbacks, ruses, missed opportunities, petty insults, misinterpretations, potent threats, and, of course, the love that shrouds and shreds us all does more than reflect the many literary traditions that present this love as an involuntary feeling that is strongest or most clearly apparent when denied or unrequited: It also mimics the often conflictual yet powerful forms of association relied on by a group of close friends, most of them former "street children," in their everyday dealings with their state and with one another. Such contradictory, at times even violent, love seems most appropriate for drawing you, my reader, into the intimacy of the encounter between a state and its people in Salvador's Historical Center over the course of its state-directed "improvement." This is true in part because, I venture to argue cross-culturally and relatively ahistorically, the declaration of love, even if made cynically or never fulfilled, alters the reception, and shape, of those phenomena associated with the pre-carity of the promise, its enunciator, and all those connected by the utopian possibility of pure communion with an Other.
As we walked, and in an example of productive negation and the Pelourinho's place in suturing disparate phenomena, moments, and people, Malaquias and I recalled a misty night five years earlier. Compadre Washington, the producer of Brazil's then-most famous band, the pagode music supergroup "É o Tchan," had screeched to a halt to leap from his black Mercedes and join us at an impromptu bar made up of aluminum chairs set on the 28. And thus while Malaquias and I traversed a neighborhood now nearly devoid of inhabitants, we chuckled about how we had pointed out to Compadre Washington that as he was appearing on television and enjoying the good life, his former friends from the Maciel/Pelourinho had remained in crumbling, squatted buildings to face intensifying violence from the feared Choque (Shock) military police units sent to root out the last of the neighborhood's long-term residents.
Due to the Choque's boots, fists, and nightsticks, people nicknamed its patrols the timbalada in honor of the powerful beats of another Bahian institution, the Timbalada music group led by the well-known percussionist Carlinhos ("Charlie") Brown. And as Brown and his musicians traveled abroad and gained fame, they built in his home neighborhood, the Candeal de Brotas, a concert space modeled after the Pelourinho's colonial architecture. This venue came to attract large numbers of the city's elite to its Sunday performances even as the state-sanctioned and malignant version of Brown's Timbalada would storm into the Gueto to search for lawbreakers, collect debts from criminals they controlled, and support IPAC attempts to dislodge residents. By 2001 these enforcers had been largely replaced in the Pelourinho by a specially trained force modeled on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's New York City–based community policing initiative.
While it would be incorrect to suggest that Bahia's military police are now pacific monitors in a Pelourinho their state has sought to assemble as an idealized community of Afro-Brazilians and objectified popular practices, the transition from brutal Choque to white-gloved tourist police is emblematic of an entwined violence and state-directed care basic to millennial Brazil and the production of Bahian heritage as a form of communal property. In Salvador this involves race, history, and hygienic surveillance of public and private spaces by the police, as well as by "softer" institutions like IPAC and putatively beneficent NGOS.
During the more than two decades I have watched them interact with Pelourinho residents, IPAC's social services administrators have often counter-posed themselves to the state's more repressive forces even as they rely on them for tasks they usually wish to deny. This often bewildering interplay of repression and concern for a citizenry configured as requiring improvement was evident as Malaquias and I climbed the hill from the Gueto and, leaving the 28, moved toward colonial Salvador's main square, the Praça da Sé.
As we rounded a corner where the words "Isso Não e Verdade" (that's not true), splashed across a wall in the 1990s, had been painted over and that now provided a vantage point for a policewoman watching over camera-toting tourists and researchers like myself, we passed a flock of fresh-faced IPAC interns drawn from Salvador's expanding university system. Clipboards in hand, they were updating censuses intended to detail remaining inhabitants' practices. This data, which IPAC would soon sequester and then redeploy selectively to justify a variety of initiatives and provide the authorizing content of histories of a Brazil supposedly born in the Pelourinho, provoked Malaquias to remark slyly, "Hey, John, remember when I became a human sandwich? You know, the day I became a living notebook?" We chuckled and recalled how Malaquias had left the Gueto to begin the public protest that would launch S.O.S. Children of the Historical Center. But we laughed hardest, and felt most forcefully the bittersweet nostalgia in which we wrapped our past lives and interpreted the present unfolding before us, when we remembered how Malaquias had returned home to the Gueto some ten years earlier.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolt of the Saints by John F. Collins. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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