45. The African Diaspora and Its Margins: ancestry, culture and religiosity in Brazil

When dealing with religious traditions of African origin, it makes no sense to resort to generalization. This would presuppose the existence of a single Africa. You can’t consider just one African man, the common denominator of all the continent’s ethnic groups and “applicable” to all regions. Similar traits can be observed in Africa, such as the perception of the sacred in everything; the permanent relational tension between the visible and invisible worlds; between the world of the living and the dead; the communal sense of existence; religious respect for ancestors, which goes all the way back to the parents; the cultivation of the meaning of dreams associated with the various practices of oracles and divination. However, there are also numerous differences: a system of deities and their corresponding mythologies; sacred iconographies; religious prohibitions and the social regulations (including food and sex) that result from them. These aspects can vary from one region to another, from one ethnic group to another, from village to village. In Brazil, these elements of African tradition have served as a matrix in the composition of Afro-Brazilian religions, forming a broad and richly nuanced mythical repertoire and producing a considerable ethnic-cultural-religious diversity. In the case of Candomblé, these specificities correspond to regional variants, the presence of deities related to the African region of origin, the cult of ancestors, divinatory practices, ritual elements, trance, etc., components of ethnic identities and the basis of differentiation between Candomblé nations. The term nation, used as a demarcator of borders between groups, should not be thought of in isolation from other sectors of social life (ethnic, religious, territorial, linguistic and political), since religiosity is permanently related to everyday life. That said, it is necessary to realize the mobility of this term in the face of the various meanings attributed to it since the 17th century. Parés (2006) approaches the process of the formation of Candomblé nations in Brazil from a perspective centered on relational ethnicity. He begins his analysis of the use of the term from its operational character, expressed in the form used by slave traders, missionaries and administrative officials of sovereign European states, at a time when the term nation acquired the same meaning as country or kingdom, when they referred to the various indigenous groups they encountered. With regard to sovereign states, the author observes that in Africa there was a projection of the European context of the time, which privileged a sense of collective identity based on kinship affiliation to certain chiefdoms usually organized around monarchical institutions. However, regardless of this projection, in Africa the identity of the group stemmed from the kinship ties of the family guilds that recognized a common ancestry. Ethnic or community identity was therefore guaranteed through the cult of certain ancestors or other spiritual entities. The integration of the various fields of sociability (religion, art, politics) into the events of community life took place through a vast symbolic repertoire, such as body painting and skin incisions (especially on the face, but also on the arm or other parts of the body) that recalled the tribal marks of ancestral Africa. The body can be considered an element and a form of belonging – and at the same time of differentiation, acquiring this meaning as a function of what is seen through the process of interaction with the religious, in which there are precepts for purifying and preparing the body, prohibitions regarding food and sexual activity, even its own movement, rhythm and dance. The ritual construction of the body and space will become a cultural element of differentiation and identification between the various Candomblé nations. At the same time, the city – or home territory – and the language were also considered important factors in the designation of group identities. Furthermore, in the African diaspora, the historical-cultural linearity that has long inhabited the imaginary of concepts such as belonging, identity and geography is perhaps an intriguing aspect. If we think about how exhausted explanations of the relationship between place, position and consciousness have become, they fail to account for the break with territory, a determining aspect of identity until then. Gilroy (2001, p.13) observes that the cultures of the black Atlantic […] created vehicles of consolation through the mediation of suffering. They specify aesthetic and counter-aesthetic forms and a distinct dramaturgy of remembrance that characteristically separates genealogy from geography, and the act of dealing from that of belonging. The diaspora suggested different ways of being, providing other understandings of solidarity, similarity and kinship relations. Forms of micro-political agency that cut across cultures, resistance and transformation movements, among other visible processes, on a more general scale. The plurality produced in Brazil overcomes the condition of social lamentation that underlies forced separation, brutality and loss: the consequences of exile. For Gilroy “[…] native alienation and cultural estrangement are capable of conferring creativity and generating pleasure, as well as ending anxiety about the coherence of race or nation and the stability of an imagined ethnic base” (2001, p. 20). In this sense, there are many aspects to the diaspora. In Brazil, the actions of the European colonizers towards indigenous cultures explain why cults such as Iara, and so many other indigenous rituals, have not found expression in wider society, and the same cannot be said of African cults. Slavery forged the memory of the motherland, significantly feeding the religious legacy that still circulates today in the terreiros and spreads throughout society: the belief that life is the supreme good. This way of conceiving life, totally different from the Christian tradition, is present in Brazil through the rites, which are forged according to pre-existing mythical themes. The status of the entity Iemanjá in Brazil is a fine example of diasporic forging, since Iemanjá is considered the mother of salty waters by the faithful and followers of African religions; in Africa, she is sovereign in the Egba region and worshipped on the Yemoja River. The wars between the Yoruba nations led to the exodus of the Egbos towards the west, precisely Abeokutá, at the beginning of the 19th century). In Brazil, Iemanjá has the archetypal image of the great mother with full breasts, whose images are represented in myths. According to Jung (2008), the archetype is an abstract, energetic matrix, forged from universal values by humans in their earthly existence. This explains the constant image of the Great Mother in different cultures and times. The presence of this Great Mother in Brazil came about through multiple archetypal images represented by indigenous, African and European cultural nuances. This aspect contributed to the forging of a plural cult that did not necessarily correspond to the archetypal African image. The most diverse peoples have always constructed archetypal images of the great mother. She is the ancestral, spiritual mother. In Brazil, two images coexist: Our Lady, of the Catholics, and Iemanjá, of the Afro-Brazilian cults. Part of the population worships only Our Lady; part worships Iemanjá and another part worships both images that merge into one. This is because social archetypology is in the popular unconscious, even though archetypal images are elaborated from the imaginations of the ethnic groups in contact (Póvoas, 2007). The cult of Xangô occupies a central place in Oyó; Oxum is striking in Ijexá; Oxossi in Ketu; Ogum in Ifé, a recurring aspect with the other divinities of the African pantheon. In other words, the position occupied by the deities is deeply related to the history of the city where they appear as protectors. Having said that, another notion emerges: that African religion is directly linked to the notion of family. A large family whose origin is traced back to the same ancestor, involving the living and the dead. In principle, the deities would be a divinized ancestor, who in life “[…] had established links that guaranteed him control over certain forces of nature, such as thunder, wind, fresh or salt water, or else ensured that he was able to carry out certain activities such as hunting, working with metals.” (Verger, 1996, 18). Laplantine and Nouss (2002) emphasize the importance of considering everyday practices, rituals, artistic manifestations and individual experiences in understanding mestizaje as a continuous process of cultural interaction that creates an amalgam between identities. Mestizaje is the fruit of encounters, of journeys, where it is no longer possible to separate the elements that have intermingled.