By ANTONIO SEVERIANO*
The lamps are not symbolic equivalents of the colonizing violence materialized in the representation of the bandeirante Borba Gato
In times of hegemony of the unilateral liberal vision, any universalist perspective within the field of struggle of peoples around the world is undermined. It was this conception that cemented the construction of socialist and communist policies during the last centuries, from the organization around labor in Europe and the Americas to the struggles for colonial liberation in Asia, the East and the African continent.
This solidarity was of the utmost importance for the victories that occurred in their organizations and popular outbursts. We are well aware of the history of the international scenario of the liberation wars of former colonies that erupted into popular uprisings with the help of militants, intellectuals and mass organizations on other continents. This is without mentioning the active participation of foreign militants in conflict-ridden territory.
The directions taken by social movements in recent decades follow paradigms different from those mentioned. We see their theoretical emergence and their practical equivalents taken from culturalist currents in their liberal expressions, especially in the field of self-centered cultural criticism around regressive identities, which we take here as ahistorical and, at times, mystified enthusiastic conductors and expressions regarding the conception of culture.
Roughly speaking, we can demonstrate this reality in the field of liberal black militancy through cultural products such as the recent Afropunk,[I] which had African royalty as its theme (the social context, historical temporality, the despotic role of these monarchies are of no importance to them) and a generalist reference to African mythologies.
It is important to note that renowned artists and intellectuals in the field of the black movement are enthusiastic about such initiatives, taking them as policies of resistance to what they understand as black ancestry. It would be worth discussing the fetishistic, mystifying and ideological nature of such individual and group positions, much closer to a liberal politics and economy through the reification of these traits as commodities.
Thus, there are political and cultural differences between Africans and Afro-Brazilians who claim to be direct descendants of the former without applying to this original voluntarism the necessary mediations that express any connection of this kind. In the midst of all this discussion, what is fundamentally important is to observe whether these practices dialogue with and reflect the needs of the peripheral people (from a relational point of view and without disregarding differences of all kinds and the specificity of racism) in a dialectical perspective between blacks and whites. We believe that these political and cultural practices do not reflect the mentality of this population.
The people don't give a damn about voluntary symbolic historical reparations that are disconnected from their heterogeneous reality. The outskirts are the ones who know best that racism is a problem not only for black people, but also for their neighbors in the community, their brothers in the church, their foster brothers, from the perspective of the mixed-race "mixture" cast upon their family and which reflects their entire surroundings; in a word, it is a problem of brotherhood.
Something different from the individualistic position with a narcissistic background in search of prominence and demands for belonging through mistaken readings of the meaning of acculturation and even colonization in political and aesthetic terms – let us remember that aesthetics are not always political.
During Black Awareness Month, an action carried out by the city of São Paulo through the provocation of demands from sectors of the black movement sparked a public discussion fundamentally around the practice of historical reparation of the memory of black people in the Liberdade neighborhood. There, the removal of the famous Japanese lamps scattered throughout the central streets of the neighborhood on Rua dos Aflitos was demanded, due to the existence of the Capela dos Aflitos and the remains of the cemetery established there in the mid-17th century, intended for the burial of enslaved and marginalized people.
Before proceeding with a brief analysis of what happened, it is worth presenting the “other side” involved in the issue. Japanese immigration to Brazil in the early 20th century was less due to voluntarism on the part of these immigrants than to the need for a desperate escape for survival. Unfortunately for those first immigrants, here they found poverty and exploitation organized by the practices of slavery by the “quatrocentena” elite of São Paulo.
In fact, it is always worth remembering that those sectors of the social classes of Asian origin who have risen economically here, sharing to some extent a status with more traditional sectors of the São Paulo elite, have a social origin that comes from a poverty-stricken Japan and a Brazil that welcomed them based on the violent legacy of colonial practices, including in the racial dimension (it is necessary to look closely at the reasons for the phenomenon of whitening proposed by the country's elites and its equally racist results towards the Asian people). It would be tangential to the text, although pertinent, to address the problem of ethnic discrimination that affects the Chinese population in Brazil.
Posts and totems
The movement for historical reparations would gain a lot by expressing solidarity when, in the concrete example, it could unite its symbols much less in the name of Japanese memory than as a political lesson of moral greatness on the part of the black people represented. - let it be said – by such institutionalized sectors. It would be, without a shadow of a doubt, an example of pride and political demarcation in the larger dimension of unity around a common memory. Imagine metaphorically that beautiful Yoruba totems illuminated by such Japanese lamps would be an expression of unity, which is also a feeling to be shared among peoples.
To say that we, black people, should not do something like this because our culture would be erased once again is a resentful position; overcoming this could happen exactly in the terms above. A proposal like this would certainly revolt the movement forged under post-structuralist and culturalist theories along the lines already mentioned. Acculturation, erasure, and memory would be some of the concepts that mobilize opposing discourses, which would certainly point to the colonizing dimension through a semiotics present in the image of the symbiosis between those symbols.
There would undoubtedly be statements highlighting the immense difference between the history of suffering and the current reality of black people compared to other peoples living here, real differences that must be unequivocally considered. However, we are not talking about degrees of exploitation and violence, but about principles of solidarity and the construction of bonds of union and belonging that are alternatives to the abstract law of the ideology of National Unity.[ii]
We are not concerned with posts, aesthetics and their representations, but with the policy that guides such actions of reparation and memory. Without real dialogue with the population, without sensitivity and renunciation of pre-established conceptions, sometimes contradictorily colonizing, we are a huge distance from the construction of a universalist policy of unity among the exploited people and victims of all types of discrimination in our history.
Without a doubt, these lamps are not symbolic equivalents of the colonizing violence materialized in the representation of the bandeirante Borba Gato.[iii] Here is a key point: we only remove the symbols of our enemies. All this to say that the path to building political solidarity among peoples in the diaspora also involves the problem of representation, ultimately institutionalized through their representations in attitudes that reinforce the same logic of disintegration forged by the capitalist system.
Antonio Severiano it's bacharel in law and public servant in the state of Pernambuco.
Notes
[I] https://www.uol.com.br/toca/noticias/2024/10/21/palcos-do-afropunk-bahia-terao-realezas-africanas-como-tema.htm
[ii] Roughly speaking, an ideology forged in the construction of our republicanism and which served to reinforce the relations of power and superiority between the elites and the people.
[iii] View at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2021-07-24/estatua-do-borba-gato-simbolo-da-escravidao-em-sao-paulo-e-incendiada-por-ativistas.html
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