blackness capoeira

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Blackness in movement: identifyingwith capoeira Angola in and out ofBrazilScott Head a & Heloisa Gravina ba Department of Anthropology , Federal University of SantaCatarina , Florianópolis , Brazilb Department of Anthropology , Federal University of Rio Grandedo Sul , Porto Alegre , BrazilPublished online: 10 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Scott Head & Heloisa Gravina (2012) Blackness in movement: identifying withcapoeira Angola in and out of Brazil, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 5:2,194-210, DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2012.695221

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Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in andout of Brazil

Scott Heada and Heloisa Gravinab*

aDepartment of Anthropology, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil;bDepartment of Anthropology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

This article addresses the contemporary practice of the danced fighting-form andritualized game known as capoeira Angola, in and beyond Brazil. Located interms of the Black Atlantic, the practice of this art places the meaning of‘blackness’ doubly in movement: in the embodied experience of the game, no lessthan across the varied cultural and historical contexts to which practitionersassociate such experiences. Attentive to both the shifting dynamic of the game �alternately playful, serious or one disguised as the other � and to the mobileinterpretations practitioners give to the game and to its history of racializedconflict, our analysis likewise privileges the uncertainties of movement over thedesire for fixity. Adopting a multi-sited approach juxtaposing four differentethnographic perspectives � on the game, and that of particular practitioners � inBrazil and in France, we treat capoeira as a diasporic constellation of identity-in-difference spurring varied and novel forms of identification.

Keywords: capoeira; performance; Black Atlantic; blackness; Brazil; France

The very name of the cultural practice at issue in this paper would at least appear to

affirm its African Diasporic origins: capoeira Angola. Similarly, the more local

origins of the danced fighting-form known as capoeira among ‘blacks’ in Brazil,

during slavery or in its aftermath, are rarely directly denied (Soares 2001).

Nonetheless, the newfound popularity of this ‘traditional’ style of capoeira, both

in and beyond Brazil, draws attention to the complexities involved in refiguring such

African, black, and/or Brazilian ‘roots’ in terms of trans-Atlantic ‘routes’ of cultural,

historical, and political identification. Here, the sudden surge in popularity of

capoeira Angola, following its longstanding marginalization with respect to the more

‘modernized’ style of capoeira, places the art form at a crossroads wherein the well-

known path of cultural commodification meets the far trickier path involved in

commemorating this culturally and historically ‘black’ art form across variously

drawn lines of cultural, social, gendered, and ‘racial’ difference.

Conceptualizing capoeira Angola in terms of the Black Atlantic entails treating

this singularly danced fighting-form as a performative embodiment of the disjunctive

temporality at the heart of African Diasporic cultural expression. As elaborated by

Gilroy (1993) in particular, cultural figurations of that disjunctive temporality recall

the violent social and existential upheaval entailed by the middle passage, slavery,

and its (ongoing) aftermath � a deep historical juncture that separates the ‘black’

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal

Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2012, 194�210

ISSN 1752-8631 print/ISSN 1752-864X online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

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Atlantic from its place of origin even as it effectively connects otherwise distinct

social and cultural contexts. As such, cultural expressions figured along these lines

interrupt the linear, continuous model of time to which both nationalist and

Afrocentric accounts of cultural ‘origins’ appeal, even as they traverse the cultural

boundaries imputed by homogenizing accounts of cultural difference. Here, then, in

approaching capoeira Angola from this conceptual angle, we do not treat the art

form as ‘Brazilian’ or ‘African’, or as a neatly hyphenated conjunction of allegedlydistinct origins � ‘African�Brazilian’. Rather, we approach the contemporary

practice of this danced fight and ritualized game as a diasporic constellation of

identity-in-difference, wherein the differences at issue interrupt fixed conceptions of

identity even as they spur varied and novel forms of identification.

With this overall conception in mind, this article entails a multi-cited,

‘constellational’ approach in turn, whereby we juxtapose four markedly different

ethnographic perspectives on the art form and of its practitioners, alternating

between Brazil and France in particular. Part of our motivation in turning to France

is to provoke a certain de-centering of the strong tendency to address the cultural

politics of ‘race’ in Brazil in terms of comparisons to the USA. While such

comparisons have stimulated rich debates � and may continue to do so � they also

risk being reified into strongly contrasting terms, even as they assume highly

polarized views regarding the contrasts thus posed. Notably, views from France are

hardly exempt from such polarizing tendencies, as when two French sociologists

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999) levied the accusation against dualism-oriented(‘black’ and ‘white’) analyses of race in Brazil as being but one more product of

US-based imperialism.1

The strategy we have adopted here, in the interest of side-stepping such polarizing

tendencies rather than merely extending them with respect to France, is to seek to

interrupt � or at least complicate � comparative readings of the respective situations

of capoeira Angola in Brazil and France, and of the respective politics of racial

identification on the part of practitioners in these locations. Toward that end, even as

we alternate between ethnographic encounters2 in France and Brazil, we also

alternate between taking the art form itself, or a given practitioner thereof, as the

principle subjects of those respective encounters. While changes in perspective and

scale constitute a routine feature of social-scientific knowledge (Strathern 2004,

pp. xiii�xxv), the overt manner in which we juxtapose such perspectives and call

attention to the partiality of the perspectives thus drawn is intended to frustrate

comparative typifications of ‘racial’ and cultural identities. Through this approach to

racial and cultural identifications, we thus seek to privilege the uncertainties of

movement over the desire for fixity. Similarly, as researchers also immersed in thepractice of capoeira, we overtly insert our presence in the ethnographic scenes

described, so as to highlight the positions from which we write, which � not unlike

the game itself � involve a mobile process of negotiation with the subjects of our

ethnography (Abu-Lughod 1991).

In this regard, Jackson (2005) offers a suggestive mode of elaborating Gilroy’s

(1993, pp. 96�99) critique of ‘racial authenticity’ in an ethnographically sophisticated

manner. Following Jackson, authenticity-based approaches tend to operate in terms

of a relationship between ‘an independent, thinking subject and a dependent,

unthinking thing’ (p. 14) � they effectively ‘objectify’ that which they address and

over which they render judgments. Whereas, an approach operating in terms of

African and Black Diaspora 195

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Jackson’s conceptually twinned term, ‘racial sincerity’, figures the relation thus

elaborated more along the lines of a ‘liaison between subjects’ (p. 15). Jackson is

careful not to idealize relations based on ‘sincerity’, however, calling attention to

sincerity’s highly performative nature, which renders relations based on sincerity just

as ripe for betrayal as for leading to a heightened mutual understanding. His

principle point of elaborating this notion of racial sincerity is to begin to account for

the messier, inter-subjective, lived, and embodied dimensions of ‘racial’ identificationand difference that fall outside not only the clearly defined ‘racial scripts’ privileged

in authenticity-based accounts but also in standard modes of social-scientific

analysis (p. 17�18). While Jackson focuses his densely ethnographic analysis on

the USA, we find his views to be particularly relevant to matters of ‘race’ as lived in

Brazil and France alike.

Similarly, in our case, we approach not only practitioners of capoeira Angola but

also the art form itself more along the lines of getting to know a ‘subject’ � wherein

the partiality of such knowledge remains foregrounded � than that of observing and/

or dissecting an ‘object’ � in which case, the desire for comprehensive treatment tends

to hold sway. Thus, with respect to the art form itself, we do not directly address the

longstanding debate in the literature on capoeira as to the art form’s origins in Brazil

or in Africa � a debate generally guided more by interests in staking or analytically

taking apart authenticity-based claims than in exploring such origin-tales for the

modes of identification entailed thereby.3 Likewise, in turning to the political views

and sensate modes of embodying the art form as articulated by particularpractitioners, we do not treat them as ‘representative’ of more widespread views,

as analytical ‘typifications’ of distinct, collectively inhabited subject-positions or

identities.

Rather, in our introduction to the dynamics of the game itself in the first section,

and our expansion upon it from the perspective of a voiced personification of history

in the third, we seek to evoke (Tyler 1986) subjectively rich and aesthetically

elaborated dimensions involved in performances of capoeira Angola that lend

themselves to be identified with in particular � yet open-ended � ways. We draw these

two vignettes regarding the art form from different perspectives: the first from that of

a member of the audience of a performance taking place on the street; the subsequent

one from that voiced by a particularly poignant song sung at the beginning of a

game. Taken together, these vignettes turn to the game of capoeira as a privileged

arena in which mobile signs of blackness take on sensate form and substance through

the lyrics of the songs and rhythms of the music, no less than in the bodily

movements and spatial organization of the game. More than the cultural expression

of an identity politics, this performative space consists in an enigmatic mode ofembodied play akin to what Gilroy (1993, pp. 37�38), following Seyla Benhabib,

terms a ‘politics of transfiguration’ � a politics existing on ‘a lower frequency where it

is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about’ which struggles to

‘repeat the unrepeatable’. Here, then, while these vignettes are loosely located in

Brazil, they also point to formal features of the art form that may traverse the

Atlantic more or less unchanged � or better, along the lines of Gilroy’s (1993)

conception of diasporic tradition as a ‘changing same’.

Whereas, in turning to France in the second section, and again in the fourth, we

also turn to address the ways in which particular practitioners describe themselves as

identifying with the art form. In the first of these sections, we present the trajectory

196 S. Head and H. Gravina

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of a young Brazilian man already turned contramestre � a senior teacher of capoeira

Angola just below the position of mestre � in the process of establishing himself in

the periphery of Paris; and then, when we turn back to France in our last

ethnographic vignette, we follow the trajectory of another experienced practitioner,

only this case that of a Franco-African woman living in Marseille, France. Far from

individual examples of collective ‘routes’, both such personalized trajectories add

ethnographic flesh and body to the displacements that comprise the African

Diaspora, highlighting the partiality of perspective and foregrounding the role of

contingency in social and cultural processes. In both cases, in reflecting and

refracting aspects of one-another and that of the other sections, these singularly

lived embodiments of ‘blackness’ in and through capoeira Angola constitute

reflexive modes of subject-constitution, wherein the forms of cultural and racial

identification acted out in the game reverberate with those taken up by these

practitioners in everyday life.

Taken as a whole, then, our paper aims to flesh out how the contemporary trans-

national practice of capoeira Angola places the meaning of ‘blackness’ doubly in

movement: in the embodied experience of the game, no less than across the varied

cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts with which such narrated experiences

dialogically interact. With that overall goal in mind, let us know turn to introduce

the reader to the feelingful form of movement in the game as it might be happened

upon for the first time.

A partial perspective

You, the audience � whether you are doing some evening sightseeing in a foreign

country or coming home after a day’s work at your job as a janitor for a local travel

agency; making the first of your night-shift’s rounds in your gray uniform and tall

black boots, or burning some time in your short red dress before taking on a different

kind of night-shift; shining shoes on the streets to survive, or sniffing glue to escape

the pressures of survival � have likely seen (or at least heard of) capoeira before. You

have yet to see it played in the open air of a downtown square here in the city of Rio

de Janeiro not long after sunset, however, as you encounter it now. Many of those out

on the street around you pass by with little more than a passing glance, whether

through an unshaken adherence to routine or ineptness in the art of tarrying. But

you were looking for a diversion, perhaps without realizing it, and something

peculiar about this particular performance caught your eye and ear.

You may have seen capoeira at the gymnasium of your children’s school, in a

night-club (just prior to the mulata dancers performing a samba routine), on

television or film or while surfing the Internet, in a brochure given to you only that

morning at your beach-side hotel, or in the pictures of one of the many magazines

devoted to Capoeira bought (or pilfered) from the local newsstand. You may also

have heard stories of capoeira as having once been played by urban ruffians known

as capoeiras, only to be subsequently transformed into a ‘national’ martial art, sport,

and/or dance in Brazil. While you have yet to see any of the gravity-defying acrobatic

leaps and kicks with you have thereby come to associate with capoeira, the game

before you exudes a combination of playfulness and controlled intensity that is

uncommon enough to interrupt the habitual rhythms of your feet and thoughts. You


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stop to watch, letting the feelingful tones of these sonic and visual cadences slip

momentarily into your corporeal consciousness.

You see a number of those involved in the performance playing musical

instruments, three of which are berimbaus, accompanied by three or four percussion

instruments of varied kinds. The players of the instruments stand in a line or shallow

arc, comprising the flattened side of an otherwise open circular space some four orfive meters in diameter, known as the roda. The boundary of the roda is made up of

the mostly sitting and mostly uniformed bodies of other practitioners waiting their

turn to play; behind them, you and the rest of the audience stand, collectively

enclosing the performers within a wall of bodies of varying permeability. Even as you

take in such details of the overall scene, the lyrics of the call-and-response singing

that accompanies the game also filters into your awareness: Oi, sim, sim, sim/Oi, nao,

nao, nao/Hoje tem, amanha nao (‘Oh, yes, yes, yes/Oh, no, no, no/Today there is,

tomorrow no more’); the other players, along with scattered members of the

audience, respond in unison to the musician voicing these words with a first-rising-

then-falling pitch and tone that echoes and accentuates the lead singer’s first line: Oi,

sim, sim, sim/Oi, nao, nao, nao.

Because of the density of the crowd and the constantly shifting positions of the

players relative to your line of vision, you only catch glimpses of the interchange of

movements between those presently playing: in this case, two men of roughly the

same age, one with long hair and clearly ‘white’, the other with a shaved head andjust as clearly ‘black’, even allowing for more ‘flexible’ Brazilian categories of ‘racial’

perception. Your constantly interrupted vision accentuates the difficulty of getting a

clear view of the game, even as the constantly shifting positions of the players

themselves � as their bodies twist and turn around, beneath, and over each other at

varying degrees of proximity to one another and to your own position � further

complicates your view.

Indeed, the enigmatic nature of the movements themselves further accentuates

the overall effect of perceptual disorientation produced by this prolonged play of

revelation and concealment. One moment, the game appears to be a slow-paced,

ritualized exchange of intricately interconnected slow-motion kicks that are ducked

underneath with back-bending twists of the body executed close to the ground, only

to transition without a definite ‘break’ into a quicker paced, upright game involving

a continual dancing in and out of the rhythm interspersed with feigned attacks and

back-and-forth dodges of the upper torso. But no sooner than it begins to make

sense, to become a ‘patterned’ perception, the style of play shifts once again � this

time, into somewhat slowed down, apparently more ‘strategic’ game. It nowresembles a chess game played with bodies more than a choreographed dance or

ritualized combat.

Finding your view once again blocked, you nudge up nearer to the game, only to

find one of the players pressed back up against the edge of the roda right in front of

you, apparently cornered by the other, and evidently disconcerted by his inability to

maneuver his way out. As other members of the audience crowd in behind you to

view the rapidly ‘heated-up’ action, you get caught in something of a tight spot

yourself. The intensity of the moment is palpable, as a uniformed practitioner with

shoulder-length dreadlocks presently standing with you in the audience exclaims

repeatedly, E isso que e a realidade! (‘This is what reality is!’). Meanwhile, with your

mobility constrained and your attention momentarily distracted, you fail to avoid the


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impact of the player trapped in front of you as he comes careening backwards,

having just been kicked square in the chest while stretching one of his arms upwards

in what seemed to be some sort of failed gesture of ‘truce’.

As you recover from your fall, the musician still leading the same call-and-response song calls out: Olha a pisada de Lampiao/Hoje tem, amanha nao (‘Look at

Lampiao’s footprint, today it’s here, tomorrow, no more’); and the audience

responds, Sim, sim, sim, nao, nao, nao. From the scattered laughter coming from

the crowd around, you surmise something else is up besides the reference to the

legendary bandit-turned-popular-hero from the Northeast of Brazil, and following

the line of sight of those laughing, you notice a foot-size smudge on the shirt of the

player who collided with you, who has just stood up, pride clearly hurt but body

intact. If for a moment, your eyes meet his, we cannot say, for Scott is not quite surewho it was that he tumbled into that evening, upon being forcefully kicked out of the

roda; his so-called ‘partner’ in that game, known as Urubu in capoeira circles, would

eventually become Scott’s senior capoeira teacher, or mestre.

Blackness across the Atlantic

Now, imagine that you have crossed the Atlantic on a Rio de Janeiro/Paris

connection. You arrive at the spacious community gymnasium on the periphery of

Paris, and see around 50 people, women and men, dressed in t-shirts similar to thoseused by many of the players at the roda in downtown Rio. Observing more closely,

you read the names of some of the various groups of capoeira Angola, and those of

the cities in which those groups are located, principally from Europe and Brazil.

From amidst that crowd of t-shirts, the figure of mestre Rene stands out: a tall and

slender black man with an immense turban on the top of his head suggestive of the

long dreadlocks contained within.

It is the first event organized by the Oke Aro Association, only recently founded

by the mestre’s son, ‘contramestre’ Reny, in Paris. Upon arriving at this event, whatalso stands out for Heloisa as she enters this improvised ‘conference’ space is the

sheer number of ‘blacks’ present: at least half of those present, whereas that number

rarely surpassed one-fifth of those present at other events of a similar nature that at

which she had been present. Conversing informally with Reny at a later moment, he

would explain to her that this was a result of the participation of members of the

Kolors Association, a group lead by the Martinican, Jocelyn, a particularly

politicized group treating capoeira as an instrument of anti-racist struggle.

This commitment reverberates in the opening words of mestre Rene, whoemphasizes that ‘capoeira is open to anyone, so long as you don’t forget that it’s a

black thing [‘‘coisa dos negros’’], part of African-descendant culture’. Indeed, his

group in Salvador, ACANNE, is comprised roughly equally of blacks and whites �provided they show themselves to be committed to ‘black culture’.

Upon taking up residence in France, Reny finds it necessary to initiate a ‘process of

translation’ (Bhabha 1994) of the capoeira views learned from his father, mestre Rene,

to the local context, however. In an interview conducted by Heloisa some months later,

at Reny’s apartment where he lives with his French spouse, Selma, he explains:

For mestre Rene, the black man [‘‘negao’’] is a black man and that’s it. [. . .] But if I tookup all of mestre Rene’s tradition just as he passed it on to me, I wouldn’t have any


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students. Mestre Rene is the Malcom X of capoeira Angola. So if I taught it like he does,all rigid, tough, I wouldn’t have a single student here. So what do I do? I take some of his[teachings], mix it with the situation here, in 2009, living in Paris . . .

Through his ‘translation’, or recontextualization, of capoeira as a ‘black thing’

practiced in Salvador � a city with a predominantly black population, known as the

‘storehouse’ of this art form, to capoeira as practiced in the republican,

cosmopolitan context of Paris, Reny begins to trace other contours for capoeira as

a fight for liberation:

Black for me is not the color, it’s the situation in life. [. . .] Just as there is many a blackman that raised himself in life through stepping on others or fighting, there also havebeen whites that were robbed and lost everything. So black for me is not race; it’s asituation in life. For this very reason, when I’m teaching class and I say allez, that’s ablack-man thing! Everyone’s black, we’ve got the same problems, we live in the samequartie . . . c’est fou.

Before taking Reny to be promoting an erasure of race as a political category, it is

necessary to contextualize what he says in terms of his presence as a black

contramestre of capoeira Angola, both Brazilian and baiano (from the Northeast

state of Bahia), in Paris. Having begun playing capoeira at five years of age, since

then he has been learning from and conversing with various other mestres, mostly

black, listening to his father’s politicized discourse and that of members of the ‘Black

Movement’ close to the art form, participating in other ethnopolitical (Agier 1992)

expressive practices such as the Carnaval and percussion band, Ile Aye, and

frequenting Afro-Brazilian religious houses.

Thus, all of these cultural practices are lived as self-evidently ‘black’ for Reny.

And in the case of capoeira, the songs that produce the ambient soundscape

of this practice � histories of struggle and black resistance in varied historical

moments � constitute an essential part of his life growing up, as an embodied

imaginary.

The relation to Afro-Brazilian religion is pertinent insofar as it permeates the

universe of capoeira at different levels (Gravina 2010). It is present in the songs that

speak of the orixas � African deities, and even in the very name of Reny’s group �Oke Aro, the ritual salutation to his orixa, Oxossi. What is relevant here in this

relation is how it affects a particular mode of experiencing and understanding the

body. Mestre Rene himself refers to that connection in the first roda of the event:

not long after the roda begins, he interrupts the roda with an abrupt ‘Ie!’ � a

radically abbreviated version of the cry with which a ladainha (and thence the roda)

begins. He then requests the substitution of the players of the pandeiros

[tambourines], saying: ‘If these pandeiros don’t speak truly, then my capoeirista

[capoeira player] won’t come’. This ‘his capoeirista’ is a sort of double that

overtakes his body, coming from a mythic time of ancestral capoeira. But this does

not mean that he ceases to be mestre Rene in that moment, fully present at each

roda. This ‘his capoeirista’ acquaints us with a body capable of inhabiting a time-in-

between that is neither quite the visible present nor the immemorial past but the

ancestral-past-turned-present in the very bodily movement, the bodily presence of

his ancestral capoeirista in his present body. Here, mestre Rene’s singular mode of


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relating to alterity helps us to comprehend his son Reny’s performative embodi-

ment of racial sincerity � recalling our discussion of Jackson’s (2005) term � that

both sustains and complicates his critical displacement of ‘blackness’ as a racially

exclusive ‘script’.When thus contextualized, Reny’s disjoining of blackness from race � the body as

inscribed with a particular racial identity � and his linking it to one’s ‘situation in

life’, in fact extends mestre Rene’s claim that doing capoeira is a ‘black thing’. For

here, if the body thus modeled is capable of being co-inhabited by other forces,

as involving an ‘encounter of the other in me’ (Albright 2001), then doing a ‘black

thing’ involves, for that moment, a ‘becoming-black’ � without losing one’s

other race-bound bodily identity (whether ‘black’ or ‘white’). For dos Anjos,

Afro-Brazilian religions, insofar as they involve the incorporation of divinities,articulate through their practices a philosophy according to which:

. . . bodies do not have races, races are perspectives that circulate amidst a multiplicity ofbodies . . .. Race or nation is, in this political philosophy, conceived as the place fromwhich perspectives emanate, or better, the spirits. Spirits are points of view thatincarnate bodies. (Anjos 2006, p. 119)

Upon arriving in France and effecting a cultural translation of mestre Rene’s

‘black man’s capoeira’ with respect to this new context, what Reny proposes is a

peculiar form for the politics of blackness in capoeira, as he personally embodies a

black cosmology mobilized in the performance of capoeira.

If you see Reny singing or playing an instrument at a roda, or playing in theroda himself (Figure 1), it is possible to glimpse an ancestral-capoeirista-turned-

present akin to that referred to by mestre Rene. His mode of inhabiting that space

like his second (or first?) nature, speaks to the black figure as a model of excellence

in that context, an ideal to which to aspire. Likewise, the familiarity with which he

interacts with other mestres, clearly demonstrating that he is at home in their rodas

no less than his own, alludes to the transmission of an ancestral knowledge

traversing time and space alike. Thus, it is through the contextualization produced

by his own practice of capoeira that his affirmation that, ‘independent of color,everyone is black’, acquires the power to collapse racial categories inherited from

colonialism.

Walking about the world . . .

Having first introduced the stylized movement of capoeira Angola as an largely

uninformed pedestrian might witness a public performance thereof, we then jumped

across the Atlantic to introduce a particular practitioner of this art form giving voice to

his situational conception of ‘blackness’, in dialog with other such views. In the present

section, we seek to flesh out how a disjunctive figuration of diasporic temporality takes

on form and substance through following the lyrical unfolding of one of many possibleladainhas, or ‘songs of lament’, sung at the beginning of a roda of capoeira Angola.

Prior to presenting the ladainha that follows, it is important to note that,

particularly when resituated in a trans-national context beyond Brazil, much of the

meaning attributed to the lyrics of the songs accompanying the game may well be


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lost to many of those present. Yet the relation between meaning and movement

extends beyond the game itself and the immediate surrounding in which it takes

place. The songs and movement alike become meaningful through the memories of

those listening, just as the sensate and kinesthetic memories of practitioners extend

their meaning well beyond the bounds of the roda. Gaps in understanding �linguistic, cultural, and experiential � may thus be filled, even as the substance

with which they are filled transforms their significance (Stewart 1996, pp. 3�5) � not

unlike the very act of translating this song. We thus read the form and content of this

ladainha with such informal dimensions of memory in mind, continually making

connections beyond the words themselves, not so as to imitate the connections other

practitioners might make so much as to supplement such potential links with our

own contingent connections:

Figure 1. Reny in Montpellier, 2008. Photograph: Heloisa Gravina.


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Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Tava andando pelo mundo I was walking about the world

Tava andando pelo mundo I was walking about the world,

Oh meu Deus Oh Lord

A procura de amor In search of love

Mas a vida foi cruel But life was cruel

So me mostrou tristeza e dor Only showing me sadness and pain

Cada canto que eu passava Each place through which I passed

Via muito sofredor I saw many sufferers

Vi o meu irmao morrendo I saw my ‘brother’ dying

Cheio de fome o lambedor Filled with hunger licking

Roubando, matando os outros Robbing, killing others

Em nome do desamor In the name of the love they lack

So nao e de meu espanto It only does not surprise me

Que esse irmao seja de cor That this brother is ‘black’

Cada vez que eu caıa Each time that I would fall

Dessa luta eu recordava This fighting form I would recall

Capoeira e arma forte Capoeira is a powerful weapon

Quando a vida nao diz mais nada When life says no more

Mas apesar de tanta dor But despite all the pain

Esse povo tem amor This people’s love abides

Salve o pai Ogum Hail father Ogum,

Santo Antonio e protetor In Saint Anthony we confide

Camarada . . . My friend . . .

Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee! . . .With this forcefully extended cry, a mestre or experienced

practitioner initiates not only the singing of this ladainha4 but also the ritualized

unfolding of the roda as a whole. Moreover, while this voiced sound initiates the

sequence of words that follow in its wake, its own nonsignifying nature indexes thatpoliticized poetic � or poeticized politics � to which Gilroy (1993) refers as existing

on a ‘lower frequency’ than that of verbal discourse, a potential intimation of the

‘power of the slave sublime’ (p. 37). For, once the space of the roda is formed, but

prior to its becoming occupied by the interchange of fighting and dancing to take

place within it, the roda must first be ritually transformed such that the interplay of

rhythm, song, dance, fight, and play that follows becomes capable of bodying forth

marginalized moments from the displaced past(s) of peoples of African descent in

and beyond Brazil, and of thence calling into question the social, cultural, and

political contours of the ongoing past-turned-present. Placed as it is at the beginning

of a capoeira roda, sung invocations such as this flood the space of the game with

historical memory, even as they flood the realm of ‘history’ with affect. Indeed, far

from closing the game off from its surroundings, the inwardly turned moment in

which the ladainha is sung literally and metaphorically opens a way not only into the

roda but also out into the world beyond its porous bounds.

. . . I was walking about the world/Oh lord/In search of love . . .How better to invoke

the diasporic trajectory of this art form than through this image of ‘walking about

the world’? Here, the phrase announces a world that extends beyond the realm of

fixed locations and straightforward destinations alike. It thus evokes a mode of

engaging the world in movement not so different from that given voice to in the blues,

which, like ‘signification itself ’, is ‘always nomadically wandering . . .. Ever on the


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move, ceaselessly summing novel experience’ (Baker 1984, p. 8). More pointedly, this

line resonates with the opening lines of a song by Ma Rainey, ‘Lost Wandering

Blues’, written in 1924, whose first lines run: ‘I’m leaving this morning with my

clothes in my hand/Lord, I’m leavin’ this mornin’ with my clothes in my hand/I won’t

stop movin’ ‘til I find my man’ ( Davis 1998, p. 77). Here, we find the same motif

coupling wandering movement with the search for love, and even the same repetition

of the first line with the added reference to ‘God’; perhaps what most readilydifferentiates their opening lines is that the blues song speaks specifically to the

wandering trajectory of a black woman.5

. . .But life was cruel/Only showing me sadness and pain . . .Even as such singing

liberates those listening, if only momentarily, from the pressing demands of

immediate reality, the words of this and other ladainhas � let alone blues songs �imbue these vagrant wanderings of mind, body, and spirit with a heightened sense of

reality on a different register. Houston Baker’s (1984) commentary on the dynamic

juxtaposition of hope and despair in the lyrics of blues songs and the musical

rhythms that accompany them might as well have been made with respect to this

ladainha: ‘Even as they speak of paralyzing absence and ineradicable desire, their

instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and

unending possibility’ (p. 8). Only, in the case of ladainha, that heightened tension

between mobility and fixity is played out in the game itself, as players-to-be await the

end of the solo song before initiating their bodily dialog, even as the ladainha imbues

the subsequent game with images of personal and collective (hi)stories of suffering,struggle, and hope.

. . .Each place through which I passed, I saw many sufferers/I saw my’brother(s)’

dying/Filled with hunger licking/Robbing, killing others/In the name of the love they

lack/It only does not surprise me/That this brother is ‘black’ . . .. The ladainha thus

paints a human landscape that is thoroughly at odds with the mythical portrayal of

Brazil as a land of relative social and racial harmony, even as it calls forth images

that run uncomfortably close to widespread representations of urban violence run

rampant, whose (not so) subtly racialized dimension continues to haunt the present,

both in and beyond Brazil. At the same time, it speaks to capoeira’s own historical

association to urban gangs and ruffians (Head 2004, Assuncao 2005) � referred to

precisely as capoeiras, even as it presents a perspective subtly at odds with the

predominantly ‘white’ elites, government officials, and European travelers writing

about them � the documents from which capoeira’s written history draws. Visiting

Botanist, Charles Dent thus wrote in his memoirs, published in 1886 and cited a

century later by a historian of capoeira (Holloway 1993, p. 268): ‘Numerous

mulattos, called Capoeiros [sic], dance about and run ‘‘amok’’ with open razorsstrapped to their hands, with which they rip people up in a playful manner’. If, on the

one hand, the ladainha offers what might well seem the ‘same’ historical image

linking ‘blacks’ (or ‘mulattos’) with violence, on the other hand, the manner in which

the oral tradition gives voice to that image evokes a markedly different angle of

identification with the violence thus portrayed.

. . .Each time that I would fall/This fighting form I would recall/Capoeira is a

powerful weapon/When life says no more/But despite all the pain/This people’s love

abides/Hail father Ogum/In Saint Anthony, we confide/My friend . . .. The ending lines

of this ladainha thus invert the prior image of violence and despair associated with

‘this people with the affirmation of their abiding ability to love. Further bolstered by


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the blessing provided by the African/Yoruban Orixa known as Ogum in Brazil, and

the Catholic saint that is frequently associated with him, something of the unfulfilled

potential for social compassion and unobstructed freedom encoded in the word

‘‘love’’’ might yet come to be realized � provided, that is, one keeps in mind thatOgum presides not only over the peaceful activities of agriculture and healing, but

also war.

Recalling that Ogum is also known to be an accomplished blacksmith, we might

read the ladainha as a whole as forging a forceful and affect-laden chain between

wandering, despair, struggle, and love. Still, it is crucial to remember that briefly after

the singing of the ladainha � following a short transition towards the call-and-

response mode of singing that accompanies the game � players will begin entering

the roda to engage in fluid intercorporeal dialogs. Such ‘conversations’, as they arenot infrequently referred to, involve dancing, play, and improvisation, even while

they are infused with a far more serious agonistic side and interspersed with

the occasional act of forceful physical contact. As such, when situated in terms of the

roda at which it is sung, this ladainha asks to be read as a ‘dialectical image’

(Benjamin 1978) � a powerful mode of charging the movement that follows with

historical depth and political significance, even as the bodies of the players are held

literally at a standstill while the ladainha is sung, soaking up its simultaneously social

and aesthetic reverberations (Figure 2).

The art of fighting in dance

Poca, whose mother is French and father is Burkinabe, encountered capoeira Angola

only after leaving Africa to ‘walk about the world’ at the age of 17 years. Up until

Figure 2. Mestre Manoel and Sonia Maria in Rio de Janeiro, 1998. Photograph: Scott Head.


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then, she had grown up in Burkina-Faso, in a largely Francophone environment,

wherein local traditions and cultural practices were held in low esteem.

As with many youths of a certain social standing � fruits of the post-colonial

‘cooperation’ between France and many of its (ex)colonies � Poca then leaves for

France to pursue university studies in Paris and establishes herself thereafter in

Marseille. In the movement back and forth between France and Africa, she feels

uprooted, and thus similarly alternates between moments of disparaging and over-

valuing ‘African’ culture. It is not easy. During an interview with Heloisa at her

apartment in Marseille, Poca recounts:

I’ve always had a ‘complex’ with African dance . . .. I felt an idiot for having to learnAfrican dance here, you know, I should have learned it there, naturally, at my father’sparties. I would go, but just stay watching . . .. So capoeira, well, I think it touched sostrongly because it touched my African side. Capoeira allowed me to discover an entireuniverse where, at last, the history of blacks was talked about, and we used [musical]instruments that clearly came from Africa . . ..

At the same time . . . you know, I didn’t feel very comfortable with the percussion,African dance, and capoeira allowed me to feel at ease with the instruments and with mybody . . . it used to be a little different. I think that [capoeira] was the outlet for metissageand as I myself am metisse [mestizo] . . .. It just made a lot of sense. Everything spoke tome. This art of fighting in dance, this felt easy to me. In any case, it gave me the desire tolearn, to really get to know this.

Thus, Poca reconnects to her past in Africa through the present-day practice of

capoeira Angola in France. In the context of this art form � as fleshed out in other

respects in the previous section � more than a linear history, we find histories sung

and told that evoke the voices and sounds of a black/African past ritually incarnated

in the present through the roda. Likewise, the movement that soaks up these voiced

histories inflects fluidity with unforeseen ruptures � as witnessed in regard to the

street roda in the first section.

This disruptive element surfaces not only in the songs and movement but also in

the process of ‘translating’ this Afro-Brazilian practice to the context of France. It is

precisely through this interstitial space that new sensate signs and meaningfulsensations can be inscribed on the ‘history of blacks’.

Here, it is important to take into account that Poca’s path to learning capoeira

occurs through movements on another level as well: that of traveling back and forth

between Brazil and France. Besides strengthening her own contact to the art form,

such repeated visits also eventually lead her to take a Brazilian mestre back across

the Atlantic with her to start a group in Marseille. At the same time, an ambience of

what is felt to be the racially and culturally ‘mixed’ popular culture of Brazil

permeates the practice of capoeira in France. This takes place through the creation of

‘Brazilian’ spaces beyond the roda itself: in parties, informal gatherings, music shows,

and the consumption of ‘typical’ Brazilian food and drink, such as the famous

‘caipirinha bresilienne’. At the same time, these festive activities constitute the

informal social medium through which stories and histories of capoeira are

effectively translated to the French context.

When Poca speaks of capoeira as a ‘metisse’ practice, that image returns us to the

Black Atlantic � a space marked not only by the sign of violence, but also by

reinvention, as a mode of creatively contesting dominant narratives of identity and


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difference. It is in this space of forceful asymmetries that capoeira emerges � not as a

purely black-African practice but as the result of the multifaceted relations between

Brazil and Africa. It is therefore a practice that is born under the sign of conflictive

cultural interpretations and contingent alliances readily betrayed.In a certain sense, the crossing of the frontiers between Europe and Africa was

constitutive of Poca’s life from birth � through the transnational union of her

parents. At the same time, tensions arising from the asymmetrical relations between

France and one of its (ex)colonies shook up her sense of self. How to conjoin in

oneself these two places of belonging, connected as they are by the sign of violence,

by a historical caesura? It is through Brazil that she finds another way to go from

France to Africa. That way is not inscribed by a direct opposition but rather through

indirect routes. Not denying conflict but accepting it as immanent to life, Poca facesconflict in the midst of the songs and movements of capoeira.

Concluding image: ‘It’s black, . . .Calunga’

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate,deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with asound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament� all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their enforced exile, theirDiaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to theeast. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself uponeach of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in anangry froth . . .. (Paule Marshall, 1969, p. 106)

Sitting, cramped and confined in the cabin of a transatlantic flight, the blackness of

the Atlantic below, as evoked by Paule Marshall’s pen, the deep, darkly moving

resonances of the violent history that brought the African Diaspora into being and

the flowing yet dangerously unpredictable currents of the that vast expanse, itsexplosive force and sounds of its impacts on terrestrial shores, seems all-too-far

removed and whited out by the reflecting light off the clouds between. From that

height, the perspective would remain much the same, whether the flight were between

Brazil and France in either direction (as for Heloisa or Reny), or between the USA or

England and Brazil (for Scott), or even from Burkina-Faso to Paris or Marseille (as

for Poca), if pushed westward by a storm.

Marshall’s passage thus reminds us of the need to return to the question as to

what the contemporary transnational trajectories of capoeira Angola have to do withthat impossibly fluid past that continues to haunt and perturb the present. Even if

mestres and other practitioners in general traverse the Atlantic in such antiseptic

plane cabins, quiet echoes of the ‘ineffable terrors of slavery’ (Gilroy 1993) lie

hibernating within them � as in mestre Rene’s enigmatic ‘other capoeirista’ � to be

awoken by the songs, rhythms, and movements of the capoeira rodas awaiting them

at their destination. At the same time, once out walking about the periphery of Paris

or the downtown square of Rio de Janeiro, or the upside streets of the hills all

around, one is more than likely to encounter far less resonant, hardened echoes ofthe ongoing impact of that violent past: dark echoes only indirectly filtering into this

essay, as in the middle lines of the ladainha, Tava andando pelo mundo � one of many

such songs that incorporate such dissonant images of violence and suffering into the

vibrantly syncopated flow of the game.


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I was walking about the world . . .The comings and goings of Poca over the

Atlantic find their motivation, if not ‘in search of love’, then at least in the

re-assembling of a culturally sundered self. In this sense, her successive displacements

between concrete and existential spaces in France, Brazil, and Africa suggest other

meanings and movements associated with this fluid conceptual crossroads.

E preto, e preto, e preto, Calunga! � ‘It’s Black, it’s Black, it’s Black, Calunga!’ The

chorus of one of any number of call-and-response songs that poetically incorporate

references to the ocean and waves of the sea into the game, or, alternately, refer to

one or other scene of slavery, this song stands out in evoking � or invoking � that

aqueous expanse as Calunga, ‘the ocean of the dead’, even as it thrice punctuates its

color like waves crashing in quick succession. Calunga (or Kalunga, elsewhere6) thus

conjoins two realms that may well have come in contact with one another in

Angolan/Congolese or ‘Bantu’ cosmology in response to European colonialism:

Death became associated with the ocean because it was the ocean that brought theagents of that slow death that is slavery, and because it was in the ocean that the slavesdeparting for Brazil or the Caribbean would disappear forever. (Lienhard 1998, p. 119)

In the changing calls sung by an individual that elicit the unchanging response, any

number of references might be incorporated into this song, to both the living and the

dead: the name of a revered capoeira mestre (‘Mestre ______ e preto!’); ‘capoeira’

itself; Zumbi; Malcom X (‘Xiz’); Queen Njinga (the Angolan queen known for

combating the Portuguese colonizers for much of her life); or Lampiao, among

others. Or, one might call any one of the musical instruments being played ‘black’; or,

once again, any of those playing those instruments or playing in the game � even if

they are phenotypically ‘white’, although in this case that inclusion is likely to be

marked: ‘Even Scott is black!’ Here, then, all those thus named are equally immersed

in the rhythmically breaking waves of the ocean of the dead. And in so doing, the

song resonates strongly with Reny’s conception of blackness as a fluid category

modeled in terms of capoeira’s own mode of bodily figuration. And as such, such a

fluid model certainly does not preclude signs or acts of rupture to punctuate its flow

� as when a suddenly well-placed kick sends a neophyte player flying into the

audience of a game out on the street at night.

To what extent, then, can this sensate poetics of fluidity and rupture � or of the

potentially disruptive force submerged within fluidity � be extended to the

contemporary transnational trajectories of capoeira Angola, refiguring them as

disruptive inscriptions within a dominant modernity? Our approach to this question,

pursued on a number of levels throughout this essay, has been to treat it as less a

matter of evaluation than of inscriptive acts, on the part of practitioners and

researchers alike, fleshed out through ethnographic means. Here, then, our approach

resonates with that of Homi Bhabha, even as he broadens the horizons of this

question beyond our more narrowly circumscribed concerns:

The challenge to modernity comes in redefining the signifying relation to a disjunctive‘present’: staging the past as symbol, myth, memory, history, the ancestral � but a pastwhose iterative value as sign reinscribes the ‘lessons of the past’ into the very textualityof the present that determines both the identification with, and the interrogation of,modernity: what is the we that defines the prerogative of my present? (Bhabha 1994,p. 247)


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Let us conclude, then, by refiguring the art form in response to Bhabha’s questioning

comment and Marshall’s poetic image above:

Capoeira Angola embodies the memory-in-movement of struggles initiated long

ago and not yet over, displaced from an incomplete past onto the social and

metaphorical margins of an uncertain present, flowing into yet other struggles to be

fleshed out elsewhere � in other places, other voices, other writings only hinted at

here. The art form does not proceed from beginning to end as in a neatly

choreographed sequence, but flows inwards and around, spilling into a vortex

without an apex, a spiral of centripetal force without a fixed center. Its movement

flows, but not continuously or smoothly, as water runs down a drain. Rather, such

movement ebbs and flows as the waves crash upon a shore of uneven rocks, tossing

back, and forth between the steady downbeat and improvisational accents of the

music, the unpredictable intent of one’s adversary, the ever-changing tides of socio-

historical circumstance, and the varied interpretive stances of those watching,

listening to, and reading about this art form on-the-move.

Notes

1. See Dorst (2000), Hanchard (2003) and Pinho (2004) for responses to this accusation.2. As anthropologist Johannes Fabian (2007), p. 146) writes of such ethnographic

‘encounters’: ‘It has been said that ‘having been there’ is what gives authority to theethnographer. But this is perhaps not enough. The phrase should be extended � ‘havingbeen there and then’ � to emphasize the event-character of ethnography, its temporal andtherefore historical nature that, as far as anthropology is concerned, is enacted not just bybeing in places but by participating in events in the presence of others’.

3. This debate on origins, about which much ink has been spilled (see Vieira and Assuncao1998, Assuncao 2005), might be productively refigured from the angle of racial sincerity asopposed to authenticity, but the intricacies involved would entail a paper in its own right.

4. Scott associates this ladainha foremost with Mestre Valmir, by whom he first heard it sungand to whom he has informally heard the composition of the song attributed. Nonetheless,as with ladainhas (and other capoeira songs) in general, these songs circulate amongmestres and practitioners without attributing authorship to one particular mestre.

5. As Angela Davis says in her commentary on blues songs composed and sung by women onthe theme of travel: ‘The traveling blues man is a familiar image. But the traveling blueswoman is not familiar. Although travel was generally a distinctly male prerogative, there weresome women who, because their lives were not primarily defined by their domestic duties,were as mobile as men’ (Davis 1998, p. 71). Although, in the case of capoeira songs, anovertly female perspective is infrequently voiced, this ladainha at least does not exclude itsbeing sung in such terms. Indeed, Scott’s reading of this song is no doubt influenced by thefact that his only recorded version of this ladainha is sung by a woman � mestre Janja, in the‘CD’ produced by her capoeira Angola group based in Sao Paulo, Grupo Nzinga, in 2003.

6. See Ochoa (2007) for a much more extensive discussion of Kalunga in the context of Cuba,whose strong resonances to our own discussion lends further substance to the BlackAtlantic conception.

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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Strathern, M., 2004. Partial connections. Oxford: Altamira Press.Tyler, S., 1986. Post-moderns ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document.

In: J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds. Writing culture: the politics and poetics of ethnography.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 122�140.

Vieira, R. and Assuncao, M.R., 1998. Mitos, controversias e fatos: construindo a historia dacapoeira. Estudos Afro-Asiaticos, 34, 81�120.


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