ACARÁ: insurgent delicacy
beauties are lighted things from within*

Acará – from the Quicongo: kala, burning coal, ember** – gives its name to the rite in which a lump of cotton, soaked in palm oil, is lit on fire to be swallowed by people in a trance. The purpose of the ritual is to identify the inquic deities. In terreiros, the word also refers to preparations made with black-eyed peas, including acarajé (‘eating a ball of fire’), the technique of which is an integral part of a knowledge passed down by black mothers, based on bonds of community and affection, in which the deities are part of the food circuit by offering their favourite foods.

At the same time, Acará, from the Tupi-Guarani language, names various species of fish – acará-bandeira, acará joia, acará do Congo, acará-açu, acará-cascudo – and is sometimes used in the popular dialect to mean ‘fish that bites’, a probable reference to some aggressive subspecies. Fish are part of the main practices, exchange relationships and diets of various indigenous peoples. From it, we can take note of aspects of vigour and care, specific to the acts of fishing, cooking and preparation.

A theme already discussed by Lélia Gonzalez,¹ it is not possible to explain a language by itself, nor is it reasonable to disregard the intimate relationship between the contemporary lexicon and speech structure of the vocabularies incorporated by Afro-diasporic or native populations: hence we speak pretuguese. Along the same path, Clóvis Moura² tells us that, in Brazil, the coloniser avoided as much as possible black Africans from the same nations staying together, aware that the language barrier – we now know that around 2,500 languages are spoken on the continent – would hinder the enslaved’s chances of organisation. In order to deal with the separation of bodies, these people together with the indigenous masses were faced with the need to create a new code among their peers, which Yeda Pessoa de Castro³ called the senzalas dialect.

Starting with the linguistic question, the organic-inorganic matter instilled in Acará has to do with a world of things in communion. This interconnected world subverts an idealised separation between nature and culture that is commonly considered by Western perspectives of knowledge to be the only fruitful one. Like newspaper reports that daily mix political and natural issues,⁴ what we have learnt from both black African and indigenous traditions has a sensitive clarity that has been tried to be ignored: human and non-human practices are interdependent.

Fire
divine
Fish.
Trance. Bite.
Affection-Bean
A C A R Á:
is for circularity and coexistence between aspects of strength and sensitivity. 

On the other hand, white-centred national historiography and its institutional archives have strategically rejected these two aspects of non-white groups, representing them as either conciliatory or violent. This type of approach is ironically criticised by the paradoxical question ‘black: good slave, bad citizen?’.⁵ 

With regard to its conciliatory nature, the abolitionist process was deprived of the recognition of the disputes and struggles waged, and was historically constructed as a white movement. Much of the iconography built about Brazil perpetuates the image of the peacefulness of the enslaved. In the same vein, there was a deliberate erasure of the insurrectionary mobilisations and their Afro-indigenous leaders during the struggles for independence, a fact that became a pulsating theme in the ‘commemorations’ of the bicentenary. This has led to efforts to reconstruct the acts and features of these rebels, where new monuments, posthumous portraits and their stories are the object of reflection and fabulation in both art and social movements, reclaiming the non-white person as an active political subject.

Gestures of beauty, on the other hand, were systematically attempted to be taken away from Afro-diasporic communities, in order to reinforce the stereotypically brutish characteristics that are still assumed about these populations today. This was made possible by economic restrictions that have persisted since post-abolition and the Republic – since the relations of power-production and economic infrastructure have remained the same, moving from the slave base to the super-exploitation of the labour force. But also because of direct attempts to ban the use of material objects that are also part of the devotional circuit, such as jewellery, balangandans, fine fabrics and prints. Restricting this materiality reveals a form of symbolic violence that is just as perverse, if not more so.

This stereotypical view has had an impact on the way we treat our bodies, with one of its possible parallels in contemporary times being the censorship – veiled or not – of braided, curly or turbaned hair, from school to work environments. Contrary to what people have been led to believe, our hair requires sensitivity when untangling it, and the delicacy of the touch needs to be redoubled when inserting the fingers ajar to feel its roots. This gesture is accompanied by a subtle tremor in the person receiving the cafuné – a term coined from the Quimbundo kifune** – who shivers because they are often unaccustomed to the other person’s affection in these parts (a word for an entity’s place of origin in Umbanda**). At the same time, the use of curly hair adorned with a turban or lifted by fork combs challenges the idea imposed by the racist dialect of keeping ‘hair behaved’, i.e. disciplined, i.e. contained. Awareness of one’s own body involves reflecting on its beauty. Therefore, taking sides with their aesthetic uses is also a political stance. 

These discussions come together in the works and artists in the group exhibition ACARÁ: delicadeza insurgente. 

Paulo Nazareth, side by side with a black man, confronts us by asking the colour of his own skin in a B&W photograph. When his raciality is questioned in the light of the myth of racial democracy, reality reveals itself, as he himself described in an interview, oozing out of his frizzy hair. In an opposite but complementary way, Ayrson Heráclito brings the viewer a mirror. Considering the transitional stage of narcissistic identification, this reveals, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, a ‘form of narcissism in which blacks seek the illusion of mirrors that offer a white reflection’.⁷ The artist’s research into the dendê palm again addresses the impossibility of the peaceful mixture suggested in theories of miscegenation and, by using the expression ‘barrueco’ (anomalous pearl), refers to a type of beauty that he describes as non-classical. 

Still on the subject of self-inscription, Eustáquio Neves offers a portrait outside of the keys of exoticisation of the rites of different religious matrices put into practice by black people. Lita Cerqueira and Shai Andrade propose the photographic record in the way a new monument is erected, in other words, in fine dialogue with the territory it occupies, in this case: the street at a party. In this delicate gathering of works with a monumental character, Emanoel Araújo, who mixes abstract enterprise with research into Afro-Brazilian cults, presents us with his totemic geometric relief of the projected colour of Oxalá, while Ana Beatriz Almeida materialises the divine – her paternal ancestors – in a piece of clothing, showing in the overlap between clothing and photography that things do not represent people, but constitute them.⁶

Nádia Taquary, by naming the tree-joia-iroko, an object of beauty and devotion, highlights the communion between the divine, time and nature, based on the centenary trees, as lush as the sky in Jaider Esbell. From the pictorial elaboration of everyday practices established directly with the soil or in the yard, Maria Auxiliadora, with the subtlety of her small characters, also shares this great knowledge about the circularity between land, people and ritual, knowledge which Moisés Patrício reflects on the burdens and responsibilities imbued. In Maria Lira Marques we have an expressive language and a highly sensitive technical procedure that, at the same time, vigorously opposes the extractive logics of capital, capable of devastating entire bodies and territories, such as the Jequitinhonha Valley, where she comes from. This capitalist logic perpetuates the exploitation and suffering of bodies in a way that is contiguous to the slavery period, painfully illustrated by Sidney Amaral through the image of the night-mark on her back. Let’s not forget the current system in which we live and its implications for the different social strata.

Inaugurated in dialogue with Carlos Martiel’s solo show, Posesión (with a critical text by Ayrson and Beto Heráclito), the exhibition ACARÁ: insurgent delicacy, promoted by the Verve gallery, highlights the dual engagement of the artists who have come together to create political proposals that are as rebellious as they are charged with strong aesthetic rigour and delicacy. The show is an invitation to reflection and critical awareness of the socio-cultural impacts of class-race violence, without ever giving up a propositional perspective of freedom and incendiary dazzlement of the world. 

References

* Excerpt from the song Lágrimas negras. Composed by Jorge Mautner and Nelson Jacobina. In: Árvore da vida (1988).

** LOPES, Nei. Novo Dicionário Banto do Brasil. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2012.

(1) GONZALEZ, Lélia. Racism and sexism in Brazilian culture, 1984. In: GONZALEZ, Lélia. For an Afro-Latin American feminism: essays, interventions and dialogues, 2020. RIOS, Flávia; LIMA, Márcia (eds.). Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2020: 75-93.

(2) MOURA, Clóvis. Radical Dialectics of Black Brazil . 2nd ed. São Paulo: Maurício Grabois Foundation co-edited with Anita Garibaldi, 2014.

(3) CASTRO, Yeda Pessoa de. From African languages to Brazilian Portuguese. Afro-Ásia, Salvador, n. 14, 1983: 96.

(4) LATOUR, Bruno. The Pasteurisation of France. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.

(5) MOURA, Clóvis. Negro, good slave, bad citizen? Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Conquista, 1977.

(6) MILLER, Daniel. Stuff, junk and things. Anthropological studies on material culture. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Zahar, 2013: 37.

(7) FANON, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Bahia, Edufba, 2008: 15.