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African and Black Diaspora: An

International Journal
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Blackness in movement: identifying

with capoeira Angola in and out of
Brazil
a

Scott Head & Heloisa Gravina

Department of Anthropology , Federal University of Santa

Catarina , Florianpolis , Brazil
b

Department of Anthropology , Federal University of Rio Grande

do Sul , Porto Alegre , Brazil
Published online: 10 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Scott Head & Heloisa Gravina (2012) Blackness in movement: identifying with
capoeira Angola in and out of Brazil, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 5:2,
194-210, DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2012.695221
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2012.695221

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African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal

Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2012, 194
210

Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in and

out of Brazil

Downloaded by [Faculdade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas] at 12:41 15 April 2015

Scott Heada and Heloisa Gravinab*

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

This article addresses the contemporary practice of the danced fighting-form and
ritualized game known as capoeira Angola, in and beyond Brazil. Located in
terms 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 less
than across the varied cultural and historical contexts to which practitioners
associate such experiences. Attentive to both the shifting dynamic of the game

alternately playful, serious or one disguised as the other
and to the mobile
interpretations practitioners give to the game and to its history of racialized
conflict, our analysis likewise privileges the uncertainties of movement over the
desire for fixity. Adopting a multi-sited approach juxtaposing four different
ethnographic perspectives
on the game, and that of particular practitioners
in
Brazil and in France, we treat capoeira as a diasporic constellation of identity-indifference 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 wellknown 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: helogravina@gmail.com; head.sc@gmail.com
ISSN 1752-8631 print/ISSN 1752-864X online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2012.695221
http://www.tandfonline.com

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African and Black Diaspora

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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 allegedly
distinct 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 the
practice 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 Gilroys
(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

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S. Head and H. Gravina

Jacksons 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
sinceritys 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 identification
and 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 forms 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 particular
practitioners, 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 of
embodied 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 Gilroys (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

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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 transnational 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 days work at your job as a janitor for a local travel
agency; making the first of your night-shifts 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 childrens 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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S. Head and H. Gravina

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 or
five 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, na o,
na o, na o/Hoje tem, amanha na o (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-risingthen-falling pitch and tone that echoes and accentuates the lead singers first line: Oi,
sim, sim, sim/Oi, na o, na o, na o.
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 and
just 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 now
resembles 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
isso que e a realidade! (This is what reality is!). Meanwhile, with your
repeatedly, E
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-andresponse song calls out: Olha a pisada de Lampia o/Hoje tem, amanha na o (Look at
Lampia os footprint, today its here, tomorrow, no more); and the audience
responds, Sim, sim, sim, na o, na o, na o. 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 sure
who 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 Scotts 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 those
used 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 mestres son, contramestre Reny, in Paris. Upon arriving at this event, what
also 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, who
emphasizes that capoeira is open to anyone, so long as you dont forget that its 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 Renys apartment where he lives with his French spouse, Selma, he explains:
For mestre Rene, the black man [nega o] is a black man and thats it. [. . .] But if I took
up all of mestre Rene s tradition just as he passed it on to me, I wouldnt have any

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S. Head and H. Gravina

students. Mestre Rene is the Malcom X of capoeira Angola. So if I taught it like he does,
all rigid, tough, I wouldnt 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 . . .

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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, its the situation in life. [. . .] Just as there is many a black
man that raised himself in life through stepping on others or fighting, there also have
been whites that were robbed and lost everything. So black for me is not race; its a
situation in life. For this very reason, when Im teaching class and I say allez, thats a
black-man thing! Everyones black, weve got the same problems, we live in the same
quartie . . . cest 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 fathers 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 orixa s
African deities, and even in the very name of Renys group

Oke Aro, the ritual salutation to his orixa , Oxo ssi. 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 dont speak truly, then my capoeirista
[capoeira player] wont 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-inbetween 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 Renys performative embodiment of racial sincerity
recalling our discussion of Jacksons (2005) term
that
both sustains and complicates his critical displacement of blackness as a racially
exclusive script.
When thus contextualized, Renys disjoining of blackness from race
the body as
inscribed with a particular racial identity
and his linking it to ones 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 ones
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 of
bodies . . .. Race or nation is, in this political philosophy, conceived as the place from
which perspectives emanate, or better, the spirits. Spirits are points of view that
incarnate bodies. (Anjos 2006, p. 119)

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

black mans 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 the
roda himself (Figure 1), it is possible to glimpse an ancestral-capoeirista-turnedpresent 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 possible
ladainhas, 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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S. Head and H. Gravina

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

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:

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African and Black Diaspora

Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee !
Tava andando pelo mundo
Tava andando pelo mundo
Oh meu Deus
A procura de amor
Mas a vida foi cruel
So me mostrou tristeza e dor
Cada canto que eu passava
Via muito sofredor
Vi o meu irma o morrendo
Cheio de fome o lambedor
Roubando, matando os outros
Em nome do desamor
So na o e de meu espanto
Que esse irma o seja de cor
Cada vez que eu caa
Dessa luta eu recordava
Capoeira e arma forte
Quando a vida nao diz mais nada
Mas apesar de tanta dor
Esse povo tem amor
Salve o pai Ogum
Santo Antonio e protetor
Camarada . . .

203

Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee !
I was walking about the world
I was walking about the world,
Oh Lord
In search of love
But life was cruel
Only showing me sadness and pain
Each place through which I passed
I saw many sufferers
I saw my brother 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
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 peoples love abides
Hail father Ogum,
In Saint Anthony we confide
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 that
politicized 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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S. Head and H. Gravina

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: Im leaving this morning with my
clothes in my hand/Lord, Im leavin this mornin with my clothes in my hand/I wont
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 readily
differentiates 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 Bakers (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 mybrother(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 capoeiras own historical
association to urban gangs and ruffians (Head 2004, Assunc a o 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 capoeiras 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 razors
strapped 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 peoples 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 that
Ogum 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-andresponse mode of singing that accompanies the game
players will begin entering
the roda to engage in fluid intercorporeal dialogs. Such conversations, as they are
not 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 So nia Maria in Rio de Janeiro, 1998. Photograph: Scott Head.

206

S. Head and H. Gravina

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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 overvaluing African culture. It is not easy. During an interview with Heloisa at her
apartment in Marseille, Poca recounts:
Ive always had a complex with African dance . . .. I felt an idiot for having to learn
African dance here, you know, I should have learned it there, naturally, at my fathers
parties. I would go, but just stay watching . . .. So capoeira, well, I think it touched so
strongly because it touched my African side. Capoeira allowed me to discover an entire
universe 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 didnt feel very comfortable with the percussion,
African dance, and capoeira allowed me to feel at ease with the instruments and with my
body . . . it used to be a little different. I think that [capoeira] was the outlet for me tissage
and as I myself am me tisse [mestizo] . . .. It just made a lot of sense. Everything spoke to
me. This art of fighting in dance, this felt easy to me. In any case, it gave me the desire to
learn, 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 meaningful
sensations can be inscribed on the history of blacks.
Here, it is important to take into account that Pocas 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 bre silienne. 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 me tisse 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 Pocas 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 faces
conflict in the midst of the songs and movements of capoeira.
Concluding image: Its 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 a
sound 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, their
Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the
east. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself upon
each of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in an
angry 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 Marshalls 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, its
explosive 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.
Marshalls 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 with
that 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 of
the 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.
preto, e preto, e preto, Calunga!
Its Black, its Black, its Black, Calunga! The
E
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 the
agents of that slow death that is slavery, and because it was in the ocean that the slaves
departing 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 Lampia o, 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 Renys conception of blackness as a fluid category
modeled in terms of capoeiras 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 past
whose iterative value as sign reinscribes the lessons of the past into the very textuality
of 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 Bhabhas questioning
comment and Marshalls 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 ones adversary, the ever-changing tides of sociohistorical 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 the
ethnographer. But this is perhaps not enough. The phrase should be extended
having
been there and then
to emphasize the event-character of ethnography, its temporal and
therefore historical nature that, as far as anthropology is concerned, is enacted not just by
being 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 Assunc a o
1998, Assunc a o 2005), might be productively refigured from the angle of racial sincerity as
opposed 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 sung
and 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 among
mestres 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 on
the theme of travel: The traveling blues man is a familiar image. But the traveling blues
woman is not familiar. Although travel was generally a distinctly male prerogative, there were
some 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, an
overtly female perspective is infrequently voiced, this ladainha at least does not exclude its
being sung in such terms. Indeed, Scotts reading of this song is no doubt influenced by the
fact 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 Black
Atlantic conception.

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