Meeting at the Afro Museum in Rio brings strength of macumbas in MPB

The heritage of Afro-Brazilian culture will be celebrated with great celebration, this Friday (7), at the end of the Malungagem cycle – The influence of macumbas on contemporary Brazilian music, at the Museum of History and Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUHCAB), in Gamboa, the port region. Meeting at the Afro Museum in Rio brings strength of macumbas in MPB

This will be the third stage of the project’s journey, which began in September at the Jeje traditional terreiro, Ilê Omo Iya Ade Omin, in Higienópolis, north of the city. The second meeting was in October, at the Centro de Cultura Única – União Umbandista Luz Caridade e Amor, in Pedra do Sal, in the well-known Pequena África, also in the port region.

Singer and composer Alê, creator of the project, said that the initial idea was to bring religious philosophies into Brazilian music as a way of creating a bridge to present his original work, but with the execution the malungagem has revealed itself to be more than that. It became a proposal for valorization and symbolic reparation by bringing society closer to terreiros through art and the recognition of their cultural strength.

“It’s giving a voice to people who live this culture and often don’t even understand, as a culture, coexistence in a terreiro space, with ancestral healing technologies and with communication with the invisible. As an artist passionate about music, I see musicality as a dome that involves the religious practice itself. The idea of malungagem comes from there”, added the Yawô of Ilê Omo Iya Ade Omin and heir to the Banto/Yorubá traditions, in an interview with Brazil Agency.

The word malungo, of Bantu origin, means traveling companion and, according to Alê, the term malungagem emerged from a feeling arising from his process of racial literacy. “Malungagem, by definition, is the reunion through encounter, of those who descend from African ancestors who arrived in Brazil in tumbeiros [navios que trouxeram de África as pessoas escravizadas para o Brasil]. It is a meeting to celebrate genuinely Brazilian Afro-indigenous ancestry”, he described, informing that he is already thinking about transforming the project into a doctoral thesis.

“The malungo were the companions of people who traveled in tumbeiros, Africans violently removed from their lives, their cultures, their countries and often from ethnicities that did not communicate with each other, who maintained historical cultural rivalries, but had the emotional intelligence to overcome this at the moment they found themselves experiencing that terror when they were placed in a ship’s hold and turned into merchandise”, he added.

The project’s creator also highlighted that although religious intolerance and aspects of black culture still exist, even in the way people from the interior and rural areas communicate, the influence of the Africans who came to Brazil can be seen.

“I live in a rural area, that Caipirês is nothing more than the way in which the first generation of Africans managed to reproduce the Portuguese of Portugal, so the racist speaks the black language, he speaks Pretuguese, which the wonderful Lélia Gonzalez coined very well”, he commented.

Alè said that at the first meeting that took place in September, the topic of the debate table was the influence of Candomblé on contemporary Brazilian musicality, with opinions from yalorixás and babalorixás from the three main lines of Candomblé found in Rio de Janeiro: Jeje Angola and Ketu to find out how they felt about references to orixás in Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), which according to research, as mentioned, also includes traditional country music.

“The diversity of work that goes from traditional country music to rap citing cosmology. I’m in the middle of this with my work, the album Igbá”, he explained.

“Igbá means gourd, it is the vase, container where we worship the orixá, usually with stones [sagradas] called otá” he informed, adding that in the pronunciation of the word of Yoruba origin, the letter g is silent.

Each meeting began with the playing of the Ngoma, a drum that passes through time, followed by a conversation between terreiro leaders, artists and researchers, culminating with Alè’s ritualistic and poetic music.

At this stage the conversation will be with prominent names in contemporary Afro-Brazilian culture. The founder and Popular Master of Quilombo Aquilah, researcher of Afro-Brazilian traditions and former director of the José Bonifácio Cultural Center (today MUHCAB), Hosania Nascimento; the samba singer, teacher and activist for the valorization of black women and terreiro culture, creator of the roda Samba belongs to Massa, Criss Massa; and the museologist, dancer and researcher of popular cultures, member of Grupo Zanzar and co-founder of Brincantes da Pedra Branca, Itana Gomes.

“We preferably invite women who work with popular culture, festivities and musicality, whose origins are macumbas, to learn about the influence of axé, on the Portuguese language, on cuisine, on the way we dress in the imagination of Rio de Janeiro and fundamentally on music, which is always the main star”, pointed out Alè.

Itana Gomes will bring to the debate the influence of terreiros culture not only due to religious origin, but those who have the concept of belonging to remember their ancestry. The researcher said that despite the still presence of manifestations of intolerance, she has noticed a growth in interest and public participation in cultural presentations. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t intolerance, but we have managed to gain a bigger space nowadays”, he stated, remembering that an example is the round of popular dances that Grupo Zanzar does in front of Circo Voador, in the center of Rio, every last Thursday of the month together with Jongo da Lapa.

“These circles take place in a territory where there was slavery, where there was a difficult process for the black population and where we transform the place we are in joy, even if it is at that specific moment to celebrate life”, he said.

Singer Criss Massa, who already has a career that values the presence of religious songs in popular music, said that samba would not exist without axé.

“The samba batucada comes from the batucadas inside the terreiros, in the houses, with the barrels”, he revealed, adding that he will also show at the debate table the interference in other beats from musical sectors such as funk and rap.

“Other beats that became known in relation to the axé beat for samba, samba-enredo, samba de terreiro, samba pop and then it fell into the funk beat among other things”, he commented highlighting that sometimes the lyrics of the song don’t even refer to a specific orixá, but the ancestry is present.

“We use ijexá a lot within samba. Jorge Aragão’s song Identidade is ijexá and doesn’t talk about orixá at all. It talks about prejudice, racism, but it doesn’t talk about orixá”, he exemplified.

Criss also noticed a change in prejudice towards black culture.

“You can show yourself better, you can come out of the closet and show what you really are. In the past, you wouldn’t hear people say they were a spiritist, Umbanda, Candomblecista. They said they were Catholic. Not today, people make a point of saying what they are. That was the freedom and you can see it through various samba circles, movements, people who do dance and theater. You can already see this on the streets, there is greater freedom of expression”, he reported.

Hosania Nascimento will present in the debate the project of Quilombo Aquilah, in the town of Tanque, in Jacarepaguá, southwest of Rio, teaching Afro diasporic songs in schools, such as Jongo nas Escolas and Baianas de Acarajé nas Escolas.

“It’s important from a very early age to make children aware of Yoruba songs, Umbanda songs, Maracatu tunes. All these songs used by people of African origin must be demystified and seen without demonization, I don’t like using that word, but it’s important, because that’s what happens”, he pointed out.

“I think it’s important to take Umbanda points as comfort to children. My entire life as a child, until I was 10 years old, the songs I used to sleep with were Umbanda points. My grandmother was indigenous, Umbanda, I’m a black woman, but mixed because my grandfather was Portuguese, my grandmother was indigenous and my mother was black. I carry with me all this plurality of DNAs. I was comforted with these points that have nothing demonic, on the contrary”, he defended.

Regarding acarajé, Hosania stated that in addition to being an offering intended for Iansã, it is a delicacy of Bahian and black ethnic cuisine.

“You don’t need to look at acarajé just as a religious point, as an offering, but rather as a delicacy of Brazilian cuisine.”

Regarding samba, Hosania highlighted that although there are those considered divas such as Dona Ivone Lara and Leci Brandão, there are other important women who have been made invisible, such as the well-known pastors, who are of great importance in the samba plots of schools and who are present in Quilombo Aquilah’s research projects.

“We have been doing research work for many years, me as a popular master, on Afro-Brazilian musicality, we go through samba, we are considered intangible heritage of Rio de Janeiro, our musical group Pastoras do Aquilalh in honor of our first ladies of samba. Today we have recognized divas Mrs. Ivone, Jovelina, Clementina, but the women who were behind the men’s songs like those that Ataulfo [Alves] that he baptized them as shepherdesses, they were the first female samba dancers and they were the ones who chose the sambas that the schools would parade”, he revealed.

The third stage will also feature artistic participation by the dancer, choreographer and creator of the IntuiDanse project, Maria Liberta, and Tairini Cristine, known as Poeta Tairini, MC, DJ and slammer from São Paulo based in Ubatuba.

The meeting will end with a concert by Alè. The meeting is produced by Ubuntu Cultura e Arte in partnership with Neggra Sim and is the result of winning the Fluxos Fluminenses notice from the State Secretariat for Culture and Creative Economy of Rio de Janeiro.

Free tickets can be obtained at the address https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/malungagem/3180847?share_id=copiarlink