Brazilian carnivals, just like Brazil, shouldn’t be talked about in the singular, but in the plural. Therefore, when talking about the event, it’s correct to think about the events, and all their potential pluralities in their influences, social dynamics, and in the execution of the festivity itself.
For this reason, and to illustrate this idea, nothing better than to address three of the main manifestations of Brazilian carnivals: the festivity in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, in Bahia, and in the state of Pernambuco, represented mainly by the cities of Olinda and Recife.
In a first historical analysis, these three locales on the Brazilian coast held, in different periods, national leadership in political, economic and social terms. Salvador was the first colonial capital, Pernambuco was a large captaincy, renowned for its sugar production and marked by the invasion of the Dutch led by Mauricio de Nassau, and Rio de Janeiro, founding modern, urban Brazil, with cosmopolitan aspirations.
What lies behind these statements is the fact that, in each of these locales, the productive power was moved by Negro slaves and Brazilian Amerindians. At the same time, the dominating control was exercised by western, European culture. What we have, then, and within the regional contingencies that influence and are influenced by cultures, is this genuinely Brazilian syncretism, a collision of driving forces that invents something new.
And where is the carnival amidst all of this? might be the question that comes to the mind of the attentive reader. Indeed, the carnival is amidst all of this. The festivity holds an undeniably theatrical root of procession that is present in western cultures, Greco-Roman, in Candomblé, of African origin, where the celebration itself is an act of staging, and in the indigenous culture, both in religion as well as in its diverse mythology and the powerful influence of the Umbanda rites.
Rhythm is, perhaps, the central point of this analysis, a vector that is intertwined in the history of the festivities of these three cultures. On the one hand, we notice that the predominant instruments of the festivities in Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco are, homogeneously, a mixture of the influences brought by the peoples that mainly colonized Brazil. From the Europeans, the influence of the Iberean guitars and the tambourine, come from the north of Africa. From the Negro slaves, comes all the drumming of African origin that forms the candomblé as an ancestral and religious representation. And, finally, from the native Indians, rattles and other drums that intermix with the African instrumentation.
At this point, diverse cultural expressions are born, such as samba, afoxé (or axé), maracatu, and frevo, for example. It is obvious that there are other situational and historical points that form these genres, just as they are mixed in certain places, such as the samba de coco in the northeast, the samba in the Reconcavo Baiano and other examples. However, it’s impossible to disassociate them from their formative genesis.
Let’s take as an example the samba, the great standard of Brazilian culture. Its execution by the Portela drums, one of Rio’s the most traditional samba schools, is deeply connected to the percussion of a candomblé ritual honoring the divinity of hunting and forests. When the samba school is performing in the carnival parade, this rhythm is always played. In Bahia, the afoxé, the origin of axé music, makes use of this same beat as its rhythmic base.
The processions are also, in themselves, a profound mark of the Brazilian colonizing cultures. Indeed, societies have an inherent tendency to create stagings as a way of maintaining traditions alive, of creating a feeling of ancestry, and of forming a complete cultural vocabulary. It could be no different with Western, African or Amerindian cultures. All of them have important theatrical canons, and are the vector of the idea of the procession as a way of representing themselves and creating their own identity, that, in the case of Brazilians, was ripped out by force, for we are children of exile, of slavery, and of the colonizing adventure.
The carnival is, in a panoramic way, one of the great allegories of Brazil, mainly in its multiplicity, plurality, and even in the contradiction inherent to its history. Whether in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, or Pernambuco, in February one sees what this country is: what it was based on, what it represents, and its chaotic and complex aspirations.
This complex, diffused and syncretic feature of Brazilian culture is not limited to the carnival ambience. Indeed, this is an ethnic vector that influences all the Brazilian ambiences: cities, coexistence, social dynamics, streets. Our daily life holds ancestral marks that can be found in any street corner of the country.
Just like the carnival, FINK celebrates every day our union, diversity, creativity, joy and passion. All of this is present in our corporate culture, in our thoughts and also in our acts. Brazil is present in the mundane, in the carnival and also in our lives.
