“SEEN FROM ABOVE, IT LOOKS MORE LIKE A SKY ON THE GROUND. I DON’T KNOW, IN MANGO TREE POETRY AS THE SEA HAS SPREAD, AND THE BEAUTY OF THE PLACE, TO UNDERSTAND THIS, ONE HAS TO FIND THAT LIFE IS NOT ONLY WHAT YOU SEE, IT’S A LITTLE MORE.”
This text was started to be written on May 27th (a date defined by federal decree of September 21, 1999, as Atlantic Forest Day). The day when we lost another one of the Griôs in the Brazilian popular culture: the Mangueira native Nelson Sergeant, a Covid-19 victim at age of 96.
In Nelson Sargento’s voice I heard for the first time this samba song verses (Sei lá Mangueira, lyrics by Hermínio Belo de Carvalho and music by Paulinho da Viola), one of the most beautiful tributes to this carioca (Rio de Janeiro) hill.
Although in the forest of symbols that make up the identity Brazilian samba is a kind of standout, few Brazilians recognize the real depth of its roots, where they truly touch:
“The first samba schools were founded in farms, in the backyards… I don’t call it a religion, I call it Ancestry, it had already come from Africa.”
Ancestry, ancestral wisdom, solidarity, citizenship and resistance that make the African inheritance bases, it has this power to gather, to give strength and that’s why samba was born there”, teaches samba’s bastion Rubem Confete, in an interview with Zé Luiz do Império Serrano to this author.
“With what the purpose were the first samba schools created? They were created to dispute a space within the city of Rio de Janeiro that was denied to black people”, complements the samba composer and writer Nei Lopes, one of the greatest Brazilian scholars in history of the African continent.
Performance Ocre (2019), de Anita Ekman com Sandra Nanayna, realizada no Parque Nacional da Serra da Capivara; e Ocre Sambaqui (2005), de Anita Ekman, em fotografias de Maria Clara Diniz
Even before the grounding of “Recreational Guild Samba School Mangueira First Season” (Grêmio Recreativo Escola de Samba Estação Primeira de Mangueira), in 1928, by Carlos Cachaça, Cartola and other samba performers, from 1910 on, the people who lived on the hills would come down to parade on Boulevard XI (Praça XI) with two carnival cordons: the Mountain Warriors and the Mangueira Jokers, which came out with a front commission of Indians who presented an “indigenous choreography”, having an almost 2 feet tall wood stick as its standard.
What could Mountain Warriors teach us about our forests’ fictions?
As the established relationships among indigenous peoples, Africans and their descendants have constituted a true “trump card” that formed crucial dynamics of resistance against the advance of colonial borders towards our forests (as an example, it is worth mentioning the emblematic case of Quilombo dos Palmares in Alagoas, where Dr. Scott Joseph Allen’s archeological surveys concluded: “We know now that the site is in fact an indigenous settlement, full of evidence of indigenous constructions and burial in urns”), the Afro-indigenous relations have been little debated in the context of the Atlantic World.
Indigenous people and their different resistance strategies to prevent the devastation of our forests (that ultimately built and altered the Atlantic World history and, consequently, the global capitalism history) remain as Brazilian people’s big blind spot.
FOR A HISTORY OF THE FORESTS
This is the reason why this challenge is rightly placed for the contemporary Brazilian art to not only build another imaginary of our forests, but to expand the Atlantic World horizon so within it the historical main character of indigenous peoples could be fitted, as well as women (indigenous, black, mestizo, cis or trans). It brings us hope to think that the works produced by the curators-healers-indigenous artists would drive a possible opening from which new lines of investigation in the fields of Art History and Environmental History could arise. And that in a near future (we are free to dream), the History of Forests could be consolidated itself as a field of knowledge production and exchanges that could actually bring together different epistemologies, possibly resizing the concept of the Atlantic World, expanding it in a way to encompass another foundational time frame: the Time of the Origin.
According to Denilson Baniwa, in “Everything is People” (Tudo É Gente – 2020):
“My grandparents used to say that, in the past,
Before me, or you or any other homo sapiens had dominated the planet
Everything was people: forest, humans and non-humans were people.
There were jaguar people, parrot people, tree people, stone people; and the people-people
We all spoke the same language even.
We all understood each other.
Time was different too, there were no watches or alarm clocks
Work wasn’t an accumulative function, but a collectivity function
But this was from time when neither my grandparents nor us have lived
It’s from a time before time
Today we don’t know the language of birds or plants
Or rocks, or creeks or mountains or even remember anymore
We don’t even get along with our neighbors or residents of the same planet
I know we can’t retrieve that time
But we can, today, learn that lost communication
When we realize that there is an environment beyond us humans
Today as long as there is no time machine that
May throw us back to the times of the ancestral world
We can remember that we are part of the planet and don’t dominate it
Art, indigenous or not, can serve as a metaphysic translation mechanism
Translating the voices from the forest, stones, water and all living beings
Indigenous art can be an ally to understand the worlds,
Because it travels between the ancestral and the plasticity of the modern world
Indigenous artists can be art-shamans who share
Knowledge brought back from all voices
Including those which existence, we don’t even remember anymore
Art is what unites us
It is the connection between the ancestral world and the world that we aim from now on.”
Let’s go back to Mangueira Mountain Range (Morro da Mangueira.)”
Natureza-Morta (2016-2019), de Denilson BaniwaFirstly, introduced by Portuguese settlers on the Atlantic coast of the African continent, the mango trees have only taken root in our soil in the 16th century. In previous centuries, in Mangueira Mountain Range (Morro da Mangueira), as with the entire coastline from Rio Grande do Norte to the South, what prevailed in that landscape was a dense rainy forest tropical, which was characterized by immense quantities of flowers, with an abundance of epiphytes, such as orchids and bromeliads, coloring the exuberant scenery, so often extolled by the Mangueira ‘s Old Guard Anthem: Mangueira your scenery is beauty created by nature.
THE FOREST AS A MONUMENT
The forest and its peoples have been a recurrent theme in verses of many patriotic samba songs, such as the famous samba lyrics by Silas de Oliveira for Serrano Empire (Império Serrano, a samba school), in 1965: “Our green forests, Waterfalls and cascades of subtle coloring, And this beautiful indigo blue sky, as a frame, as a watercolor of my Brazil.” But what probably the samba masters didn’t know, just as today the vast majority of Brazilians, who when looking at the forest think it as “virgin forest”, is that the natural landscape is also a cultural landscape, created by indigenous peoples:
“Sometimes Brazilians think that their indigenous peoples don’t have monuments, they don’t have cultural creations as impressive as those in Mexico, Peru or other countries in Latin America, but this view is mistake. If you read the Amazonian archeology and anthropology, what is very interesting to notice is that the same forest that still exists to this day is one of the greatest creations of the Brazilian indigenous peoples. It was modified by men and women who have been living there until today and that have been adding to the biological diversity, improving the land and the conditions for agriculture, for gathering and hunting. From this perspective, you can think that the forest itself is a great cultural realization and is the greatest monument by the Brazilian indigenous people. A cultural monument that is at the same an environmental monument”, writes the historian Mexican Dr. Federico Navarrete Linares (Unam) in the catalog of the exhibition For You America – Pre-Art-Colombian (Por Ti América − Pre-Art-Colombian, 2005-2006).
Brazil is the country that has the greatest botanical wealth in the world (46,097 species, 43% endemic, according to research by FAPESP). This immense biodiversity is located mainly in the forests that are located in the Brazilian territory and that are the result of the environmental protective management by the indigenous peoples. Recent studies suggest that 60% of the Amazon is anthropogenic, which means that the largest rainforest on the planet was planted, cultivated and intensively managed by indigenous hands and minds.
The people who inhabited the Amazon between 9,100 and 8,000 years Before the Present were already collecting an impressive number of plants. In accordance with the researcher Francisco Javier Aceituno Bocanegra, at the archaeological site of Peña Roja (Colombia) near 26,708 seed remains were found, 68% of which were palm trees and 32% wild fruits.
In the book Anthropogenic, Amazon, edited by the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Marco Pereira Magalhães demonstrates that in the Brazilian Amazon, in the Monte Alegre region (Pará), where the oldest evidence of human presence in the forest was discovered (11,200 years BP), it was proven that at least 9,000 years ago the plant management (in which palm trees have a prominence) was already present in the inhabitants’ way of life of in that region.
But it was around 8,000 to 6,000 years before the Present that botanical systematic cultivation began to spread in the immense territory of the Amazon. Passion fruit, ingá, pequi and several other palm trees fruits, as well as roots, such as cassava, were already part of the food culture of the ancestors of those who Christopher Columbus in 1492 decided to call Indians (because he thought he had arrived in the mango trees land).
SAMBAQUIS
SAMBAQUIS
Therefore, those first nomadic human groups in the Amazon are the ones responsible for creating the Tropical Cultivation as well as making the profound changes in the landscape on this side of the Atlantic. Those were people who, in addition to modify the landscape through forests species management, also built monuments made of shells called sambaquis in Tupi (tamba means shells, and ki: heaped).
In a period over at least 7,000 years, different peoples built numerous sambaquis at the mouth and estuaries of the great rivers and along the Atlantic coast (which reached more than 30 meters in height). Inside these sambaquis are often found human burials whose bones were painted with ocher.
In the Amazonian sambaquis, next to seeds which prove the intense management of indigenous peoples in those areas, fragments of ceramics were discovered which are considered to be the oldest ones found up to the present in the Americas (7,600 years old Before the Present). A thousand years later, at Sambaqui in Bacanga, São Luís do Maranhão, we find evidence of body painting stamps made of ceramics. I used this technique and created my own stamps to carry out the Ocher Project, collaborative ritualistic performances at the Park’s archeological sites in Serra da Capivara National Park, located in Piauí (where the oldest evidence of human presence on the continent was found, 48 thousand years BP). In the region of the Serra da Capivara National Park, the Caatinga (in Tupi: white forest) is located, the only genuinely Brazilian forest, essentially formed by species of fauna and flora that do not exist anywhere else in the world.
The ritualistic performances in the Ocher Project, carried out with the participation of indigenous actress Sandra Nanayna Tariano, discuss the protagonism of women in art and history of our continent through the relationship between body and cave paintings. And also, the close relationship that exists for indigenous people between earthly body and women’s body (cis).
I have established a deep dialogue on this topic with Sandra Benites (Guarani Nhandeva, anthropologist PhD student at the National Museum and the first indigenous curator at Masp), producing art works dedicated to discuss women’s history in the Atlantic World: such as Tupi Valongo – New Blacks and Old Indians Cemetery, Atlantic Forest Bellies and Tupi Valongo – Kunhangue rekó, recently presented at Live C-MAP Entangled Terrains at MoMA.
“Body painting is an art form deeply connected to women’s domain, as well as pottery, where the body-earth bond is clearly present”, he says in an excerpt from the text “Tupi or Not Tupi. That is the Question? Beyond the Mr. Agassi’s Photographic Saloon: The Rainforest and The Role of Indigenous and Mestiza Women”, that we wrote together for the Peabody Museum, Harvard, on the occasion of the live Race, Representation, and Agassiz’s Brazilian Fantasy.
“Actually, body painting is a way of informing, connecting with and transcending using the body to those other dimensions of what in Guarani is called Ore ypyrã (Time of Origin), but also transports us to the true origin of human beings as a whole.
This idea of looking at the body and through it see the body of land (and vice versa) is an important question to be opened for non-indigenous people. In a certain way, what is painted on the body or on the earth-body holds a deep and ritualistic bond. The very idea of the existence of this body-earth relationship through painting is clearly present among different groups of indigenous people, but not limited to them. Because the use of ocher to paint on the body and cave walls is a human practice dated to over 70 thousand years, which was performed in all the continents, except for Antarctica.
Sandra Nanayna, an indigenous actress (Tukano-Tariano) from Rio Negro, in Amazonas, who participated in the Ocre Project, said: “To be like the rock-people is the big dream”.
To stay on Earth through what art is capable of transcending and also to integrate in relation to the sacred and beautiful Earth’s body, this should be at least one possible way of reimagining another possibility to leave our marks on Earth, on the body of Nhandecy eté.
One of the biggest wounds in Brazil’s history is slavery: indigenous and African. To fully understand the history of our forests, it is necessary to understand as well as the role of Brazil in the history of the African diaspora, tied to the recognition of the indigenous slavery. The Australian Researcher from the University of Melbourne, Freg J. Stokes, with whom I have collaborated, along with other Guarani researchers, for the construction of an atlas of the History of Atlantic Forest and Guarani resistance, concluded that, from 1520 to 1680, between 90,000 and 170,000 Guarani people were enslaved by the Portuguese, but it was the resistance built by the Guarani that hindered European trade routes, such as the inland silver in the continent, slowing deforestation in the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest.
Within that same forest, in the womb of Ka’aguy Porã (in Guarani, literally, the beautiful and sacred forest) that covers a large part of the Brazilian Atlantic Coast for millennia inhabited by natives of the linguistic branch Tupi (including the Guarani), where most of the 12 million of enslaved Africans that were brought to the Americas were disembarked. A total of 4.8 million people, more than the total sum of enslaved Africans who arrived in the US and the Caribbean together. The Valongo pier in Rio de Janeiro was the largest port of Planet Earth receiving slaves, where approximately 2 million human beings arrived. The enslaved Africans who didn´t resist the crossing or who died in the Valongo Market were thrown to ground nearby, at the New Blacks Cemetery (Cemitério dos Pretos Novos). This place was a sambaqui before being turned into the biggest black cemetery outside the African continent.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. And it was just after the abolition, in the vicinity of Valongo, that the samba that was brought from the Recôncavo Baiano by black women, as Tia Ciata de Oxum, flourished in the city of Rio de Janeiro… And this region, for millennia occupied by the indigenous people Tupinambás…. came to be known as “Little Africa”…. birthplace of candomblé and samba in Rio de Janeiro.
“Art is free and open
In the image of creator being
Samba is the people’s truth
Nobody will misrepresent its value
I sing again
I sing grounded on the floor
With passion, sing my people”
Candeia (New School)
“We need to follow, to sing and to paint ourselves with the commandá (beans) graphics. The commandá is in the graphics (zigzag pattern design) of ceramics and the body, it opens the way, it is the way of the truth. It’s a connection that doesn’t fail, it’s a species that goes away as it grows, grows. The graphics bring healing, and they are the paths we take. The graphics that are of commandá, it is the way while it is the intensity of our resistance, because the way is long, but if you can walk it, you will reach a deeper level of spirituality and wisdom”, the shaman Awaete Timei Assurini says, in the project Agenda Awaete − Exchange of Assurini Knowledge and Practices of Xingu. May all seeds of resistance bear fruit.
Aguyjevete.
