Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [9]
In Canberra, I sat in my clean office, listening to the kookaburras, going out for lattes with new friends, and wondering why Salvador so intrigued me, why I found myself outlining possible research options that would take me back. I marveled at the strength of Salvador’s African culture, transformed through the mixing of other societies and peoples. The culture was a multilayered one, created by African slaves who had obtained their freedom, returned to Africa, influenced society there, and then returned to Salvador. Now the city was at least 80 percent nonwhite, almost all of mixed African ancestry. It had become the center of African culture in Brazil, considered by many sources the largest African city outside Africa. In Salvador, one found samba, the afro-blocos of Carnival, and the African-Brazilian spiritist religion of Candomblé.
I had published earlier on topics related to race, class, and gender, so, after much deliberation, I decided to turn my academic interests to these issues in Bahia. I rang Alexandra for advice.
“Why don’t you research capoeira angola?” she asked. “It’s an African-Brazilian martial art form and dance, a symbol of male virility, but some women play. It was brought by the slaves, so it has lots to do with race and class—plus, I used to train with a group there. You can join my group.”
I took Alexandra’s advice. I studied Portuguese and dove into whatever materials on capoeira I could find. It had come to Brazil with the slaves in the sixteenth century and became a dance and form of defense for the slaves on the sugarcane plantations. In the nineteenth century, capoeira gangs protected their various territories in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, wearing specific colors to denote gang alliances. At the time, the capoeiristas were noted for the small, delicate shoes they wore. They flummoxed the police because although they did attack and kill people, they never stole from anyone.
Throughout the mid-1800s, more slaves were arrested for practicing capoeira than for any other activity, except escape attempts; yet capoeira was only made officially illegal in 1890. Punishment for practicing capoeira was brutal—four hundred lashes and imprisonment if you survived. But still men continued to train and to create social disorder through its practice.
Based upon the information I found, as well as my earlier anthropological work, I wrote a grant to do research for a year in Bahia. Then I waited with bated breath for the seven months until I heard back.
When I was awarded the grant, I could hardly believe it. It was, I knew even then, one of those occurrences that changes a person’s life forever. I rang Alexandra in Amsterdam and told her to let her family know when to expect me.
When I arrived in Salvador, Alexandra’s family greeted me as though I’d never left. I felt almost the same as they did. Two days after I arrived, on a Monday evening, I took the bus with Andrea to my first capoeira class.
The group trained at a neighborhood at the city’s center, a neighborhood called Pelourinho. The name Pelourinho, Andrea told me, means “whipping post” and was named after the whipping post that once stood in its central plaza. Andrea smiled. “They don’t talk about that now,” she said.
We walked through cobbled streets dusted by late afternoon sun. Colonial Portuguese buildings with casement windows and gracious verandahs overlooked tree-lined plazas. Nearly all of these beautiful buildings were in various states of decay. But the decay of beauty creates its own beauty. These crumbling buildings shone gray-rose and umber in the hot afternoon sun. Strong Amazonian hardwood still held them together, but the