Afro-Paradise
Christen A. Smith
Published by University of Illinois Press
Smith, Christen A.
Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil.
University of Illinois Press, 2016.
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Interlude I
Culture Shock
I knew that I had a
ived when the public bus I was riding slowed
to a crawl because of the people parading in the streets. Some
were dressed as clowns and some as giant-sized puppets. Many
people just walked along with the parade, following the beat of
a small band of teenage boys drumming. When I got off the bus
to catch up with the members of Culture Shock, I soon found
one of them laughing and joking around, holding the daughter
of another actor. They were wearing their faded black-and-white
insignia T-shirts with their motto emblazoned on the back: “Nós
somos a voz da favela que faz parte dela” (We are the voice of the
favela that comes from the favela). It was dusk, not quite dark
yet, and everyone was enjoying the night summer air and the
lighthearted atmosphere of the parade. People were laughing
and joking as they walked through the streets. I walked along
with the parade through Fazenda Grande do Retiro past store-
fronts, houses, and tiny squares. This part of the city exemplifies
the demography and topography of Salvador’s periphery—the
low-income, mostly black literal and figurative margins of the
metropolis (Espinheira XXXXXXXXXXAt the time of the performance,
the neighborhood had one of the higher indices of violence in
Salvador (Paim et al XXXXXXXXXXAs we walked, we joked around, sang,
and chanted slogans. By the time we circled the central hub of the
neighborhood, we a
ived back at the bus stop. The streetlights
were on now and the paradegoers gathered around the concrete
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32 interlude i: culture shock
plaza to wait for the show to start. It was the kick-off event for
the Tenth Meeting of the Cynics of Scenic Arts (X Encontro de
Cínicos de Artes Cênicas), a theater festival that
ought together
amateur dramatists from across the state. The concrete plaza that
would serve as the initial stage was the depot at the end of the bus
line. It sits tucked away in the middle of the commercial district
of the neighborhood, just next to the community school where
the next two days of the theater festival would be held.
The sandy-colored concrete of the plaza’s awnings and benches
are a sharp, sterile contrast to the loud, buzzing energy of the
children, teenagers, adults, and elderly people who are chatting
and playing while waiting for the opening performances to begin
outside. About half of the crowd consists of children still hyper
and smiling from the parade. The gatherers are a mix of
own
faces. The monotonic concrete is the perfect stage—a contrast
that emphasizes the theater’s role as a symbolic inte
uption of
everyday routine. As people come to watch under the streetlamps,
they form a circle in the middle of the plaza, creating an em-
odied stage for which the audience members are the human
markers. A group of about a dozen young boys, all around ten
or twelve years old, climb on top of one of the concrete awnings
covering a bench to get a better view—a makeshift balcony.
When the acting begins, more people gather from the com-
munity, drawn by curiosity, word of mouth, or a bit of both. There
seem to be as many people from the neighborhood observing as
there are dramatists and actors. Everyone appears comfortable
and it is hard to tell who is a theater participant and who is not.
Some who stop to look veer from their paths to the grocery store
or the lottery to see what is going on. Many of them stick around,
and others stay for a bit and then pick up and move on. Through-
out the evening, people come and go as they please. Although
the presentations are a clear disruption of the normal space of
the bus stop, it is not an uneasy one.1 As the actors perform, the
crowd laughs and jokes loudly, creating a constant hum of voices
over which the actors project their lines.
Several theater groups present that opening night of the Cíni-
cos festival. The first play is by a group from the Bahian coun-
tryside. This is a more traditional moralistic play about poverty
and caring for others. The second play is Stop to Think by Culture
Shock.
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interlude i: culture shock 33
In 2003, seven years before the death of Joel da Conceição
Castro, black street-theater troupe Culture Shock performed its
signature play Pare Para Pensar (Stop to Think) across the city of
Salvador. When I met them, there were five principal actors—four
men and one woman—and three to five actors that participated
off and on. Everyone was under thirty-five. The play explores
the overlapping injustices of classism and gendered racism that
disproportionately affect black working-class residents in Salva-
dor’s peripheries, focusing principally on racial violence. It is a
sharp and edgy form of theater that inte
ogates local, national,
and global power structures and challenges those who live in
Bahia to “stop to think” about how being “black” in Brazil means
something more than just ca
ying certain phenotypical traits or
the unifying force of historical experience. Stop to Think discusses
everything from “sell-out” soccer players to the absence of black
faces on national children’s television programs. However, the
primary focus of the collection of short vignettes is the state te
or
that defines the lived experience of working-class soteropolitanos
and its social and political significance.
On May 1, 1994, Giovane So
evivente and Jorge Arte founded
Culture Shock in the peripheral neighborhood of San Martins on
the lip of the Subú
io Fe
oviário region of Salvador. Motivated
y the constant “shock and siege” of police raids, racial profiling,
poverty, and inequality in the region, the two wanted to create
a community-based organization that would provide a positive
form of recreation for neighborhood youth, while allowing them
to speak out against the injustices they experience every day.
They attributed these injustices to racism, and their goal was
to use the theater to
ing attention to what they perceived to
e this structural link. Inspired by the politics of long-standing
lack Brazilian political organizations such as the Movimento
Negro Unificado (MNU) and the Afro-carnival group Ilê Aiyê,
the founders positioned themselves as an antiracist, problack
organization (Covin 2006; Dunn XXXXXXXXXXThe result was a sharp
and edgy form of theater that inte
ogates everything from Bra-
zil’s infamous racial cordiality to the transnational and translocal
interconnections between the United States’ wars on Iraq and
Afghanistan to police invasions of the peripheral neighborhoods
of Bahia. However, their performances are much more than just a
eflection on the dehumanizing effects of racism. Culture Shock
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34 interlude i: culture shock
also reveals how antiblackness and state violence are part of the
very fa
ic of black life in Bahia, and define the space of the city
itself. The theater in this case decodes the layers of secrecy and
silence that define Bahia as an Afro-paradise.
Stop to Think’s interventions are as much content as they are
structure. The fifteen-minute play is a series of allegorical vi-
gnettes that metaphorically and literally denounce the racism,
white supremacy, and antiblackness that frame the politics of
ace, class, gender, and sexuality in Brazil. It is not only a play, but
also an ethnographic na
ative itself, one that in some ways
ings
ethnography into conversation with magic realism by refusing to
privilege tropes of truth telling over parody, satire, poetry, and
dance as media for remembering, telling, and producing com-
munity.
For Culture Shock, community is the periphery. The periph-
ery region that they called home during my time working with
them was the Subú
io Fe
oviário (Railway Subu
s), and the
peripheral region north of the city, particularly the neighborhood
of Sussuarana. These zones played a key role in their identity
formation. The Railway Subu
s are situated on the western half
of the city and expanding along the coast of the Baia de Todos
os Santos (Bay of All Saints). It extends from the neighborhood
of Calçada just north of Cidade Baixa (the lower city) to the
neighborhood of Paripe situated at the far north of the city and
it is home to an estimated 500,000 people (Espinheira XXXXXXXXXXThe
name literally refers to the train that runs from Calçada to Paripe.
After some of Culture Shock’s performances in the region, we
would catch the train back toward downtown instead of taking
the bus. Along the trip, we would watch the house lights come
on in the neighborhoods in the hills that line the track. The lights
would beautifully illuminate the sky at dusk like stars, and the
cool
eeze from the ocean would set in.
Historically, the subu
s were fishing communities. Yet de-
mographic changes over the past thirty years have increased the
population considerably, attracting “squatters” and low-income
esidents looking to settle somewhere more affordable in the met-
opolitan region of Salvador. The influx of low-income residents,
the majority of whom are of African descent, has caused main-
stream society to stigmatize the region. Sociologists describe the
Subú
io Fe
oviário as one of the most violent areas of the city
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interlude i: culture shock 35
(Espinheira XXXXXXXXXXGovernment officials describe the subu
s as
a set of “disorderly settlements . . . without any planning, with
precarious and inhumane living conditions” that were set up by
an influx of “impoverished residents” who rushed to the region
to squat (Viana 2004, 9; my translation). The news media’s de-
scription of the region is similar (Fonsêca XXXXXXXXXXHowever, this
perspective is acutely dismissive of the state’s role in failing to
provide