Book, Afrographies of Memory: the Reign of the Rosary in Jatobá[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Seminal and pioneering, Afroografias da Memória records the religious and cultural coexistence that so strongly marks Brazilian identity, memory and popular culture, revealing the richness of traditions brought by Africans and the social and cultural history of resistance and survival of black populations, during and after slavery, by incorporating their voice, colors and form of sociability into the dominant culture, creating their own rituals and their own forms of belonging and community acceptance. Ancestry and community, the Jatobá terreiro explodes with charm in this oral classic, which returns to the shelves reaffirming the immanent and fundamental role of black people in Brazilian culture. FOURTH COVER Afrografias da Memória is one of the greatest works of oral literature among us. Telling the story of the Reign of Nossa Senhora do Rosário do Jatobá, in Minas Gerais, Leda Maria Martins, doctor in Comparative Literature and queen of Nossa Senhora das Mercês, links the written word with the voices, colors and melodies of the Reign, a manifestation Bantu culture that, through ritual performances, transcreates African styles, symbolism, metaphysics, choreography, countless knowledge, values ​​and worldview. Inscribing the memory of black diasporas through the rite, the tradition weaves itself through the spirals of time, confronts oppression and becomes an intangible heritage of the Brazilian people. Celebrating 25 years of its launch, this second edition, revised and updated by the author, testifies to the vitality of Reinado, memory, the book and the party, in the poetic contour of the words that enchant its pages and in the evocation of the black body that sings and dance and, in this way, perform and re-signify their own history. ORELHA [by J. Guinsburg] The ways in which black people were imprinting their ethos on Brazilian cultural life are, without a doubt, in their main and perhaps most significant part, those that crossed the social spaces where the great events of the Luso-Western culture and in which the hierarchical values ​​of its high code were enshrined. Neither the official portraits, nor the cultural academies, nor the rhapsodes on duty, nor the calligraphic scribes kept records of the routes through which this gold of expression and experience of the Afro people, mined in slavery and alienation, passed from the mines, for example , to the mines. Discriminated, marginalized, he was obliterated in the anonymity of slave quarters, quilombos and the reigns of Rosário. And it is precisely there that Leda Martins sought him out to bring to light, in Afroografias da Memória, his trans-seminant and dazzling legacy that, undeniable, continues to pulsate in the most intrinsic forms of the making of this Brazil of so many Brazils. Reprojecting and reconfiguring Afro-Brazilian oral textuality in the book's textual universe, focused on the Black Kingdoms and the congadas of Minas Gerais, the writer recovers the spellings of oralitura in transcreations of the unwritten inscriptions preserved by the congadeiros, in their rites and celebrations. For this rewriting, which is a reading of surrender and vigil, if, on the one hand, in a first step, you allow yourself to be possessed by the voices of spell and soul exaltation, on the other, and with complete deliberation, you distance yourself from enchantment, assuming the epistemological place of his authorial condition that wisely records, in the traces of characters, the echoes reverberated by the striations of memory in the transcript of remembrance. LEDA MARIA MARTINS Queen of Our Lady of Mercy of the Reign of Our Lady of the Rosary of Jatobá, in Belo Horizonte. Poet, essayist, playwright and teacher. PhD in Letters and Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG and Master of Arts from Indiana University, in the United States, with a post-doctorate in Performances Studies from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, and in Performance and Rites from Fluminense Federal University – UFF. She was a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the Federal University of Ouro Preto – Ufop and a visiting professor at Tisch, as well as director of Cultural Action at UFMG (from March 2014 to March 2018). He works in the areas of performing arts, comparative literature, performances and cultural studies. He published several books, book chapters and essays in Brazil and abroad, with emphasis on Cantiga de Amares (independent edition, 1983); The Modern Theater of Qorpo-Santo (Editora UFMG/Ufop, 1991); The Scene in Shadows (Perspective, 1995); co-editor of Callalloo (v. 18, n. 4, Johns Hopkins, 1995, Special Issue: African Brazilian Literature); Afrographies of Memory (Perspectiva/Mazza, 1997 and 2021); The Anonymous Days (Sette Letras, 1999); Performances of Spiral Time, Poetics of the Body-Screen (Cobogó, 2021). In 2017, the Leda Maria Martins Award for Black Performing Arts in Belo Horizonte was created, sponsored by the Development Bank of Minas Gerais – BDMG. COLLECTION The Perspectives collection brings together important texts, in extensive research on the scope of the subject. It includes biographies, history, art, anthropology and literature. FROM THE COVER Cover image: Masts with banners in procession. Photo by Vera Godoy, 2017. The rites and processions of the Reinado do Rosário in Jatobá explode with colors and joy. These festivals are symbols of the power, resistance and creation of Afro-Brazilian culture. EXTRACTS On Hallelujah Saturday, when the Rosaries are generally opened, until the end of October, when the kingdoms withdraw and close themselves, the drums sing in Minas and guide through the alleys and asphalts, through the chapels and churches of the Rosary, through the backyards, the nations of the congado, who, with their kings and queens, their captains and sailors, transform Africa into the lands of the Americas. Like stilettos autographing the abyssal borders and symbolic-geographic boundaries of these general mountains, congos, mozambiques, sailors, catupés, candombes, villains, caboclos, in their rhythmic, chromatic and choreographic variety, perform songs, gestures, rhythms and speeches, as aedos and griôs that overlap history and memory, postfacing Brazilian cultural discourse with African prefaces. The oral word, thus, is realized as language, knowledge and enjoyment because it combines, in its diction and veridiction, music, gesture, dance, singing, and because it requires property and adequacy in its execution, because for “that the word acquires its dynamic function, it must be said in a specific way and in specific contexts”. Thus, in congados, each situation and ritual moment requires language, expressed in songs: there are road songs, songs to pull flags, songs to raise flagpoles, songs to greet, greet, invoke, songs to cross doors and crossroads, and many others. The crossroads, a tangential locus, is highlighted here as a symbolic and metonymic instance, from which different paths of discursive elaborations are processed, motivated by the discourses that cohabit it. From the sphere of rite and, therefore, performance, it is a radial place of centering and decentering, intersections and deviations, text and translations, confluences and alterations, influences and divergences, fusions and ruptures, multiplicity and convergence, unity and plurality, origin and dissemination . [...]. In this movement, the very notion of center disseminates, as it moves, or rather, is displaced by rhythmic and melodic improvisation. Says Elisson: “because jazz finds its vital point in endless improvisation on traditional materials, the jazz player must lose his identity, even when he finds it.” Just as the jazz musician, a metonym for black cultures in the Americas, retraces ancient rhythms, transcreating them dialectically in a dynamic and prospective relationship, this culture, in its varied modes of assertion, is founded dialogically, in relation to the archives of African traditions, European and indigenous, in the intertextual and intercultural language games that he performs.