Ilê Aiyê in Brazil and the Reinvention of Africa

Wlamyra Albuquerque, Professor, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil 'Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Re-invention of Africa' is a book that chooses IleAiye, an important and active cultural and political group in Bahia, as its research subject. It is a contribution to the analysis about African Heritage, racism, and anti-racism in Brazil. The bibliography used (both Brazilian and non-Brazilian) is quite selective and relates to topics such as carnival, Afro-Brazilian culture and identity. Although other authors are mentioned, only are of them are discussed throughout the book. Perhaps a broader interaction with Brazilian bibliography would have avoided what appears to be naivety - in the choices of literature fragments about carnival from the first half of the 20th century, for instance. Quotes, such as the following one about Olavo Bilac is worth mentioning to illustrate, 'In his attempt to typologize the reveler, Bilac creates a dialectical structure between the authentic reveler in general and those who become victims of Carnival through death.' Both academic and political work by Olavo Bilac have been studied by many authors, helping all remember how scholars from the beginning of the 20th century disputed projects of national identity that focused on the representation of Afro-Brazilian in the public realm1. In one of his most well-known texts, Olavo Bilac states that 'the real, the legitimate, the authentic, the only true Carnival is that from Rio de Janeiro2.' Therefore, he did not take into account the Carnival from Bahia. In addition, the reader is not adequately presented to some important authors, such as Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, Ruy Castro e Antonio Riserio, nor are they acquainted with the contexts in which these writers 'works were produced. 1See, amongothers, Pereira, Leonardo Affonso de Miranda.' O Carnaval de Letras.'Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro; Rio de Janeiro, 1993. 22 Olavo Bilac, ' Carnavalesco' apud Cunha, Maria Clementina Pereira. Ecos da folia - uma historia social do carnaval carioca, Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2001, p. 254. In Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Re-Invention of Africa, one can perceive a vivid interest in the analysis of overlaps of Carnival, culture, and the exclusion of the Afro-Brazilians as announced by the author in the first chapter, 'This chapter interrogates the relationship between the rituals of Carnival, the interfacial myths of celebration and renewal, and the complex dynamics of inclusive exclusion that the event represents for Afro-Brazilian marginalized populations.' The author also discusses the diversity of Carnival in countries with great population of Afro-descendents, such as Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba, as well as important places in the US like New Orleans, Brooklyn, Miami, Harlem, and San Francisco. In addition, the author considers the relationship between Carnival and the Yoruba celebrations with its masks and egungun, without losing sight of the fact that, 'Afro-Bahian Carnival means different things to different people.' In midst of all diversity brought in Ile Aiye and the Re-Invention of Africa, issues that remain in discussion among experts are presented as resolved. One example can be found in chapter 1, when the author argues that, 'Struggling to express their own voices, many blocos afros or Afoxe such as Ile Aiye and Filhos de Gandhy associate with Candomble, the Afro-Brazilian religion in Bahia, as well as capoeira, the martial art/dance brought from Angola, West Africa.' There are several studies about the origins and cultural and historical dynamics that link 2 Angolan dances and martial art rituals with capoeira and Bahian Afoxe3. By ignoring this fact, the author loses some good opportunities that he had built to explain how Carnival is immersed in historical and symbolic paths which are quite complex and also include other cultural practices. Series Editor Review, Toyin Falola Endorsement 'Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Reinvention of Africa in Bahia' Toyin Falola Bullet Points/Executive Summary * Political Impact: Ile Aiye has successfully created an 'African Rome' within Brazil with transnational resonances with the African diaspora * History: Ile Aiye emerged in 1974 as an Afro-Carnival group in Bahia-Brazil and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2014 * Primary Goal: Anti-racist cultural politics as a Civil Rights strategy * Mission: ensure racial equality and the broadening of political participation for Afro-Brazilians through the promotion of African heritage * Main Activity: Carnival is the major annual activity of the organization * Other Activities: Ebony Goddess Pageantry; Black Music Festival; Elementary School; Vocational School; Junior Music Band; Senior Music Band; Special appearances in social events such as Yemoja's Day, Black Mother's Day, Good End's Church Purification, seasonal shows in the Curuzu headquarters, and invited international shows all over the world * Main Ideals: Self-esteem, dignity, equality, and respect for elders. * Accomplishments: Acceptance of blackness and Africanness in Brazil, especially in Bahia; acceptance Afro-Brazilian model of beauty; recognition of African contribution to Brazil * Challenges: (i) Managing a local enterprise with Pan African resonances in a country that celebrates miscegenation and racelessness; (ii) Inevitable negotiation and potential 'cooptation' with the State due to dependence on tourism-induced patronage * Prognosis: Despite the reluctance to commercialize its products (music, costumes, paraphernalia, emblems, etc), market forces and limited funding are forcing Ile Aiye to rethink and remedy its racialized ideology * Transnational Significance: As the first Afro-Carnival group to adopt an anti-racist posture in Brazil, its larger Pan African and transnational impacts have been noted by a number of American Civil Rights activists, iconic beauty models and scholars who have passed through its headquarters (Jesse Jackson, Naomi Campbell, and Henry Louis Gates). * World Cities Frequently Performed In: New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta (USA); Paris, Frankfort, London, Brussels (Europe); Abidjan, Porto Novo, Dakar, Accra, Malabo (Africa); Tokyo-Japan (Asia); Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Salvador (Brazil) A number of discursive agencies can be teased out of the case study of 'Ile Aiye' as a political organization. First, the chaotic action of Carnival is the appropriate ambience to exercise freedom, mask its politics, and at the same time reveal it to the unsuspecting authority figure whose privileged social position is temporarily displaced or inverted. Second, the activities that precede the actual Carnival performance are as important as the week long bacchanal in the sense that the 'Noite da Beleza Negra' event for example, in which the Ebony Queen for the next Carnival is selected, serves as an inversion of the white beauty ideal by replacing it with Afro-Brazilian ideal of beauty and femaleness. Third, the 'Mae Hilda School, the 'Banda Ere,' the Banda Ile,' and the 'Escola Profissionalizante' are all microcosms of empowerment as each level graduates into another in order to produce an integrated being who is able to celebrate self-esteem and be gainfully employed by passing through Ile Aiye's organizational rites of passage. Fourth, in proving to the State that it can organize itself and lead its own organization, Ile Aiye challenges the racist stereotypes that Afro-Brazilians could not organize themselves and need the help of white Brazilians in order to do so. Finally, the seeming cooptation by the State through tourism-induced patronage is a double-edged sword in the sense that Ile Aiye must confront its entrepreneurial stature well beyond combating racial ideology and needs not apologize for marketing a consumable product-be it cultural, social, spiritual, or political. When the history of Brazil is re-written to include the once-marginalized Afro-Brazilian population, Ile Aiye's place will be indelibly registered in the annals of Brazilian cultural politics as one of the social movements that intersects culture, ideology, and politics of visibility and empowerment. On the basis of its painstaking ethnographic methodology, its archival recuperation of Africanized Carnival costumes, its critical analysis of the role of education in the advancement of a marginalized people, the celebration of black beauty through taking pride in Afro-Brazilian female body, its discursive agency through music, and the celebration of its organizational iconic memory through its leadership, Niyi Afolabi's 'Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Reinvention of Africa in Bahia,' has given us a compelling story of survival and triumph of the human spirit from the very mouths and symbolic actions of African descendants in Brazil who have heroically refused to be swept away by the torrents and waves of the black Atlantic even in a reconfigured ideological context where they are no longer considered invisible, and no longer perceived as insignificant. It is a story that simply must be told. Africa lives on in the vibrating souls of millions of Afro-Brazilians who celebrate age-long festivities that their ancestors termed egungun, the ancestral masquerade. Through this Ile Aiye narrative, the local truly meshes with the global. From a global historical perspective, a wishful 'Durban Declaration' by the delegates who were present there has yet to erase what seems to be an anomaly that is hidden in plain sight when it comes to Brazilian racial relations and the claim of a racial paradise. Fifteen years after the 'World Conference Against Racism' in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, during which Brazil officially recognized that racism is prevalent in Brazil and must be addressed structurally in order to integrate masses of Afro-Brazilians who are conditioned by the legacies of slavery and its aftermath, one keeps wondering if the denial before now is endemic to the maintenance of the status quo in white power structure or the fear of having to share that power if Afro-Brazilians are considered equal partners in the somewhat disproportionate political process and participation since Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese. A theory has been deployed in what is associated with a world renowned historian, anthropologist, sociologist, and cultural intellect, Gilberto Freyre, who in The Big House and Slave Quarters (Casa Grande e Senzala [1933]) argues for the uniqueness of Brazil as an experiment in racial harmony through race-mixture that included the Amerindians, the enslaved Africans, and the European colonizers. Despite this racial miracle, social inequalities abound in the treatment of Afro-Brazilians who are often blamed for their own plight in terms of poverty and are thus encouraged to mix with the European race in order to rid themselves of the stigma of Africanness or blackness. Yet, there is ample historical evidence that despite this enchanting race-mixture, social mobility for the racially mixed is not guaranteed and still depends on social class, education, and opportunities that are not often readily available. It is indeed against this background that the contribution of Niyi Afolabi's 'Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Reinvention of Africa in Bahia' must be embraced, understood, contextualized, and welcome. For the three to four hundred years that slavery lasted, even a hundred and thirty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians continue to long for Africa that is no longer reachable, to which they can no longer return, but can only process as an 'utopian' return as well as through the cultural politics of using such a spectacular celebration as Carnival to agitate for social transformation and equality in Brazil. Carnival has always been a moment to 'escape' the frustrations of daily living but the narratives in 'Africa in Brazil' tell us more about the story of the economically oppressed, the spiritually lost, the politically disenfranchised, and the socially marginalized. They tell us about the struggles to reinvent Africa within their local space (Bahia); they tell us about reconnecting with Africa that is now a 'living memory' as they appropriate a marginalizing space in order to popularize the sacred during Carnival performances; adorn themselves with the colorful and symbolic African carnival costumes; empower Afro-Brazilian women; educate their children; educate the community about Africa; and above all, systematically seek inclusion in a society that seems to have kept them invisible for many generations. In this whole process of telling their own stories, the cultural organization, Ile Aiye, must also negotiate with the very governmental structures that it accuses of racism since it depends on such patronage in order to successfully enact its social agenda. This push-pull dynamic of needing to collaborate with the same organizations it challenges creates a potential for cooptation. The cost of inaction or ideological rigidity as opposed to flexibility is however not thinkable-hence the need for example to meet the State half way as Ile Aiye lays out its annual theme and social agenda while the government collaborates financially with the understanding that cultural tourism is promoted and global market is equally fostered. 'Africa in Brazil' has thus succeeded in historicizing social oppression while at the same time sharing with the reader the strategies Ile Aiye deploys in negotiating with the State while socially, economically, and politically empowering Afro-Brazilians. This work is a major narrative testament to how local cultural forces creatively navigate the arduous terrain of politics, mindful of the exigencies of market and global forces, attending to the inevitability of negotiation, and resolutely advancing their social agenda without being completely locked into a stifling ideological terrain of struggle. Africa is no longer limited to the confines of the continent. In the era of global flows of people, ideas, and goods, the legacies of slavery and colonialism have complicated the notion of unidimensional dynamics of dispersal, assimilation, adaptation, renewals, and reinventions. 'Africa in Brazil: Ile Aiye and the Reinvention of Africa in Bahia' rekindles age-old connections between Africa and the Americas; dramatizes the communal spirit with which rituals and ceremonies are politicized for the dual purpose of renewal and negotiation of power; reenacts social, political, and economic hierarchies in a unique annual cultural performance that allows it to neutralize those hierarchies even temporarily; reconstructs the image of Africa and its significance to include spiritual forces that can only be symbolically venerated in a profane terrain; while unifying racialized bodies and celebrating and preserving Afro-Brazilian identity that has been bastardiz...