CHAPTER 6

Brazil: More African Than Africans

Brazilians’ . . . personal experience made it impossible to accept such a dehumanizing and absolutist system especially of racial segregation when it came to the mulatto.

—THOMAS E. SKIDMORE,
The Idea of Race in Latin America

Having spent considerable time in Brazil, north and south, I can assure you that being what they see as a prieto, “black-black,” like asphalt, or being branca. almost “lily white,” both have salient drawbacks. The south of Brazil, industrialized and modern and mythologically white, has been populated by millions of Brazilians who, although they may not be exactly prieto, are definitely not white. To see the “Africans,” I was always directed to the north, to Bahia. This was quite confusing to me, because anywhere I walked in Brazil, I saw folks who looked colored to me. Nevertheless, I sadly came to understand what my southern Brazilian acquaintances meant, when I finally did go to Bahia, just to go, but not to see the Africans, which I could do by myself in my hotel with a mirror.

Nearly twenty years ago, I asked a class of mine at university in Bahia to bring in the beginning of a performance piece or a one-act play based on their lives and world as they understood it. Every single presentation was based on a myth, albeit a real African myth, but a myth nonetheless with Ogun, Yemaya, and Babaluye raising Cain in downtown Salvador, or some unnamed mountain pass. This was alarming. My students were validating themselves as the “other” where they were not the other. I contained my frustrations as long as I could until finally I asked them to just stop for one minute. I asked, calmly as I knew how, “What would happen to all of us in Salvador if a nuclear weapon exploded? Can a nuclear weapon affect the daily life of the gods in the same way it affected the people of Hiroshima or Chernobyl?”

There was a terrible silence in our room. It’s easier to hide inside a myth, as Paul Laurence Dunbar said in “We Who Wear the Mask,” even at the risk of being Maya Angelou’s singing caged bird. I have no recollection of the gods Xango or Oxossi’s presence at the last meeting of the Organization of American States. Their absence, unlike Fidel’s, was not even noted. We are not folklore. As the recent elections of African-Brazilians to the Brazilian Senate attests. The epitome and apex of Brazilian life may be the continually multiplying mulatta, but we must all eat whatever our hue, or the hue and cry over who we are.

Naturally we begin with the crux of our main dishes, which is rice. The same Guinea and Angola population so fawned over by Carolinians for their skills in rice cultivation also captured the imagination and entrepreneurial needs of Brazilian planters. They ate rice, so we have instead of Carolinian rice, Brazilian rice, which differs in a number of ways, as we shall see.

Brazilian Rice

Using long grain rice, wash and carefully pick out dark spots, Brazilian dead insects, et cetera. Heat oil in a skillet. Use vegetable, canola, peanut, olive oil, margarine even, not butter. Fry about 2 cups of the rice with 1 finely sliced onion; doing this, stir gently with a wood spoon until the mixture has a whirring sound like a woman’s many skirts. Let yourself take at least ten minutes, cooking mixture over a low flame. Dryness is essential to rice passing itself off as Brazilian. Then add 1 peeled, finely chopped tomato and 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce. Add about 2 cups of boiling water. Continue to stir, but remove your pan from the flame. Watch for popping now. When it’s off the flame, stir conservatively, once or twice, no more. Take your pan back to the fire and bring to a boil. When boiling, cover, lower heat. Cook nearly half an hour. Don’t go stirring this now. When the rice is done, take it off the stove, uncover, and let whatever water left float off in the air. You can dress your rice however you please, even making shapes out of it in molds and such. The primary point, however, is once again that each grain can stand separately, that is, on its own.

What are we going to put on this rice we’ve made so perfectly? How about a dish I discovered while searching the islands of Itaparica and Itapúa for Dona Flor and at least one of her husbands? Assuming we know to look for dende oil, which is so frequently used in Bahia, a rich dense oil from the palm Elasesis guineensis, an African import along with the rest of us, let us begin with cuisine.

Shrimp Carúrú

After we clean—you do, hopefully, know how to shell and clean shrimp—place 1 pound in melted butter, about 1 tablespoon, with chopped onion, parsley, green pepper, and tomato to taste. Grind, by hand or machine, ⅓ cup of dried shrimp and mix in a little bit more than 1 tablespoon of manioc meal. Grate some coconut meat and save the heavy milk. To what’s left of the coconut water add 1 cup of real boiling water and set aside this thinned milk for later. Put your shrimp and a bit more than a cup of sliced okra in with the sauteing shrimp mixture. Keep over a simmer until your okra is soft but retains its shape. One second or two before you serve, add your coconut milk, that’s right, the thick one, with some dende oil and serve over your rice. If you’ve done this right, whatever color African-American you are, you can surely get by as a real Bahiano do norde, believe me. I’ve done it, waiting patiently for one of Dona Flor’s house or Gabriela’s lovers to smell the aromas eking out of my small, wooden house on the winding stone-paved streets of Itaparica. But I was not too disturbed by the appearance of a very friendly Guadalupe man, who I hoped was looking for his incarnation of Dona Flor. Enough with fantasy, let’s go back to our kitchens.

Although Brazilians are great meat eaters, usually chicken and fish are available to more people. While I was with the cast of For Colored Girls . . . —although we couldn’t call it that or the public would think we only talkin’ ’bout the blacks, at least this is what I was told—I had the opportunity to indulge in a typical northeastern, that is, Afro-Brazilian dish of vatápà, which can also be made from shrimp alone, or shrimp and fish in combination. To this day, I can still use what actors call sense memory, and we call daydreams, to re-create and savor.

Chicken Vtápà

Sauté 1 sliced onion, a handful of parsley, and peppers of your choice, at least 2, with 4 peeled and chopped tomatoes in dende oil, preferably but not necessarily. Simmer the chicken in this mixture, adding water as needed. Our chicken is cleaned and separated at the joints and we’ll let it simmer until the meat falls off the bone just as if we were preparing a Carolinian fricassee. Then we take the chicken out and cleanly, like a gangster in Detroit, take it all off the bones. Now we’ve got 2 grated coconuts set aside with the thick milk. Add 6 cups of water to the coconut milk and cook softly until the coconut meat is soft. We take our ½ pound of ground dried shrimp, along with the ½ pound of ground roasted peanuts—you know you don’t have to do all this by hand—and put it in the coconut milk mix. Cook for a while, add your chicken gravy. Season as you please with regular salt and pepper, then strain. If needed, thicken your brew with 1–2 tablespoons moistened rice flour. Put in the chicken and the thick coconut milk and heat very, very slowly. Your dish should have the texture of a heavy white sauce. Remove from the heat. Serve over rice or the equivalent of sweet spoon bread.

The song that made Carmen Miranda famous was “Watercolor of Brazil,” which would have to include the national dish of Brazil, feijoada. There are a number of feijoadas, which is traditionally served with collard greens, farina, and orange peels, but I picked a feijoada I hankered after months after leaving Bahia.

Zaki’s Favorite Feijoada

First we soak about 1 pound of jerked beef in cold water overnight. (We already learned how to do this.) Soak 4 cups of black beans overnight, too. Next day, drain your beef, cover with cold water, bring it to a brisk boil, and keep it there 5 minutes or so. Drain this again and let it cool down a bit. Add all your other meats, 1 pound each of smoked sausage, smoked pork, smoked tongue, some bacon, and 3 pig’s feet. Bring all this to a boil slowly and simmer till the meats are tender to the prick of a fork. In your other pot, set your drained beans, cover up with cold water, and without any kind of seasoning let them boil, too, till almost tender. Drain the beans.

Put the mixtures from both pots together in one big pot; keep over a low flame until meats are very, very tender and the beans are soft enough to burst out of their skins. While this is going on, hum your favorite tune and fry 1 chopped shallot, 1 onion, chopped up too, with some spicy link sausage torn into little pieces, until everything is brown. Put in 1 cup of the cooked beans, mash it all up, then stir in a bit of bean juices and let this simmer 5 to 10 minutes.

Pull your meats out of the beans and prepare a nice presentation of them in an orderly and proportionate manner on a large platter. Traditionally the tongue is placed in the middle with the other meats’ round it. Use the bean juice as gravy over the meats. Put the beans in a large bowl with a nice rice, some orange slices, pepper and lemon sauce, or cooked farina. You may drink what you like, but cachaca is the Brazilian equivalent of tequila. So, when in Brazil, et cetera.

Brazilian Hominy (Mungunza or Cha de Burro)

(These are posoles.) Add 2 cups cooked, drained hominy to about 4 cups of scalded milk with 1 cup of thickened coconut milk together with 3 whole cloves, 1 cinnamon stick, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 cup sugar, and simmer for near 45 minutes. Then put in your 1 tablespoon of butter, ½ cup of crushed peanuts, 1 teaspoon of rose flower water, if you can find it, and add rice flour as needed to thicken and get a creamy texture. Serve cold with cinnamon sprinkled on top.

Now, if this doesn’t bring to mind Amado’s Gabriela, Cinnamon, and Clove, I don’t know what will. In Bahia, where the Amado family has a restaurant named after another one of Jorge’s novels, Tent of Miracles, this dish is eaten with a spoon. A heavier, more solid type of mungunza, called mungunza para corbar (hominy to cut) is spooned into a dish lined with banana fronds and allowed to cool, cut in squares, and served cold. The highest concentration of folks of African descent outside the continent of Africa live and eat in Brazil. We eat what they eat, just differently. These recipes have stayed with us for centuries, being improvised here and there, where we found that somethin’ we were accustomed to in, say, Guinea was not available at the mouth of the Amazon.

The same process nurtured Brazilian music, dance, and vernacular poetry, which I imagine went on not far from the campfires, fireplaces, kitchens of hungry people in festive moods. Dancing the chorro, the Brazilian equivalent of a Cuban Sazon, a mezcla (mixture) of European waltzes and polkas with African rhythms punctuating the melody, or bouts of repentismo during which poets of varied powers improvise lyrics one after the other: how we play the dozens.

If this is not sufficient to build up your appetite, we can invite you to a few playful rounds of capoeira, which is deadly if done with seriousness. Capoeira, a dance similar to martial arts, like some of the foods we’ve been discussing, is a direct import, like we were, from the coast of Angola. If basketball is likened to an athlete’s ballet, then capoeira is a kick boxer’s jitterbug. Barefoot, flying through the air like the Savoy dancers of the 1930s, capoeira masters are pushed by the irrepressible syncopation of the berimbau (a stringed instrument on an arc of wood that can be plucked or bowed), the stabaque (a percussion instrument), and the quirky cuica (a drum that varies in range and intensity with the pull of a string and the drummer’s imagination). Capoeira is taken lightly, or as lifesaver by police assigned to the huge favelas (shanty towns) that ring Brazilian cities. Here the law can be in anybody’s hands.

When my father wandered up into Rosinha in Rio, a policeman asked me where he’d gone. I pointed up to the hills. He shook his head sadly. “Why, we don’t even go up there.” But Daddy’s inimitable street smarts and good looks apparently worked well for him. I thought maybe these are urban quilimbos (urban maroon settlements), where we are a law, a culture unto ourselves, but such is not the case. As Lygia Fagundes Telles reminds us in the stirring novel The Girl in the Photograph, Brazil endured terrible political upheavals in the mid-twentieth century, just as we in North America struggled with. The difference being that Brazil at that time was a police state.

There they interrogated me [Bernado] for twenty-five hours, as they shouted, “Traitor to your country, traitor.” Nothing was given me to eat or drink during this time. Afterwards, they carried me to the so-called chapel: the torture chamber. Then a ceremony was initiated. It was frequently repeated and took from three to six hours each session. First, they asked me if I belonged to any political group. I denied it. So they wrapped wires around my fingers, beginning the electric torture: they administered shocks to me weak at first and then becoming stronger and stronger. Next, they obliged me to strip off my clothes. I was nude and unprotected.¹

Arbitrary violence or premeditated violence conducted by the state was integral to our first experiences in the New World. The idea that “all that’s over with” is not only naive but dangerous, because we then deny the very connective tissue of our historical realities. Just consider the ravaging of the Amazon rain forest, the Crips and Bloods or beggars and huffers in Sao Paulo. But we have managed to survive, to live.

Africans and African-Americans who visit Brazil come away with an almost mystical attachment, which is summed up beautifully in another passage from Fagundes Telles.

I used to think about my people, I knew I wouldn’t go back but I kept on thinking about them so much. Like when you take a dress out of a trunk, a dress you’re not going to wear, just to look at it. To see what it was like. Afterwards one folds it up again and puts it away but one never considers throwing it away or giving it to anyone. I think that’s what missing things is.²

We are blessed, since we can find our ovens and stoves and make up for some of what we long for.