Sexy Catholic: The Extravagance of Deprivation in Rio’s Carnival
Gigantic golden crowns topped with feathered women, floating seas dripping into pirates mouths, slave ships, a black pope, a child being born, the powerful, the suffering, the stories of black leaders, and indigenous tribes, these are just a hint of the floats that were on display last Sunday night when we attended the 2019 carnival parade at the gigantic Sambódromo in Rio de Janeiro.
Over the past week Rio has been engulfed in carnival sparkle, and the pungent underbelly of that. I am beginning to bear witness to the next level of extremes in Brazil, and it has left me speechless. Literally, I got off the internet for a week following. So yes, you are getting this post a week after the festivities have ended but with an urgency to both share with you the epic scale of extravagance that goes into the iconic Sambódromo parades that happen over 5 days at the massive stadium, and what people do outside the stadium during carnival. What we ended up doing. This post is a doozey so I have divided into two parts to give some historical context to what samba and carnival culture is. For me, history is what actually stole my breath.
PART ONE:
To begin, we start with the word that jumps out most this week of festivities: Deprivation.
How and why, in an entire week filled with an overabundance of drinking beer literally 24/7, glitter all over the bodies of men and women alike, travel getaways with family, and EXCESS in every sense, does the word deprivation come up?
I will let the story of samba and the history of carnival itself answer that. After all, it is a holiday based on the Catholic calendar to commemorate Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Carnival is the purge before the saint-like period of consensual deprivation. But the reality of Brazil’s carnival is that deprivation is both the beginning and the end, acting as bookends to an exclamation punctuated by 6 days of excess but born out of, and returning to, saddening states of non-consensual and socially enforced deprivation. From the housing to the food sources, education, and political representation, Rio’s black communities are starving.
Beginning with excess,
Last Sunday night, two days deep into Carnival, I was like a kid preparing for Christmas morning. I paced around the apartment of Rafael’s dad’s, checking off boxes to make sure we had everything we would need to both endure, and relish in 12 hours of continuous stadium-style samba watching. The epic mile-long Sambódromo is where we were heading, amidst sideways rain and thrashing thunder, yes nothing was going to stop this experience. The only other time I had the fortune of buying tickets to the trademark carnival event (which to get them at cost you have to go to Centro Rio, or else you will be paying double to quadruple from an outside vendor) was two years ago. I went with my then boyfriend and we left at midnight because he found it less than appealing. He also was finding me less than appealing at the time, so that goes to show you his unfortunate taste.
Rafael and I had made a commitment to each other that we would stay the entirety of the full event, rain, or sparkle, until the sun rose over the stadium, cheering with almost a hundred thousand other fans. So, even in the sideways rain, with no rain ponchos or jackets, we headed out. Driving anywhere in Rio during the 7 days of Carnival is hazardous. Alongside the mega-parade at the Sambódromo, there are over 20 blocos or street parties at any given time happening in various neighborhoods. If you open up Google maps you may get a warning but other times you will be stuck in unmoving traffic surrounded by partygoers, so pro tip, don’t drive. The level of drunkenness and reckless behavior tends to increase as days go on, and by the sixth day the streets barf glitter and vomit bile, and broken relationships. People are wrecked, and joy-filled, and grateful, and SLEEP DEPRIVED.
Tonight though we would not deal with the traffic. We would get a cab that would take way too long, it would then leave us far away from the metro stop we desired because of flooding, we would walk through knee-deep water, and ride in the jam-packed and costume filled metro car, 15 stops, soaking wet; all for the love of samba.
Arriving at the Sambódromo is like arriving at a game day of any major professional sporting event. People flooded out of the subway and into the crowded streets, weaving between vendors selling ponchos, and popcorn, and wearing their samba school’s colors, singing, rushing, and laughing. I like to compare it to drinking beer with my dad at 10 am in Seattle’s Century Link parking lot waiting for the Seahawk’s game to kick-off. Day drinking during the NFL finals is for the good of the team. Day drinking, late night, early morning, and sleep deprived continuous drinking in Rio, is for the good of the team. But good news if you DON’T DRINK, you will survive! I am in recovery and this is my second Rio carnival without the booze. It is doable, and fun, and for me, only possible when I keep at least one other person around me who is also not drinking. Pro-tip: If you're heading to watch the samba parade BRING YOUR OWN SNACKS. It is totally allowed and cheap, and you are going to be there for 12 hours so enjoy it with the food and drinks you like! Like Redbull, lots of Redbull.
Getting into the giant stadium was a breeze with no lines or waiting (ummm did I mention it was still raining at this point). Our friends saved us a third-row seat on the benches in Sector 10 right above the judges station so we were about to watch 7 of Rio’s elite Samba Schools, million dollar budgets perform in front of us extravagantly for HOURS.
But samba wasn’t always like this though, this, commercial.
I was shocked to learn, and shocked at myself for being this shocked, that samba itself, what I associated with Bebel Gilberto, lounge music in boutique hotels, and crystal studded feathery bikinis, and I guess white people, was outlawed in its early years because it was created by slaves, and former slaves. Black people. Yes, in this discovery my inherent racism was glaring. Stereotypes tethered together as a package of Chiquita banana women wrapped up in white linens and placed on my expensive hotel glass bar for me to consume with leisure.
That is how white and “Afro-Latino” without the ican, samba was in my mind.
Black people? I said to myself in question.
I am writing this after completing Layla Saad’s 28-day Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Every white person, or privilege holding person should read it, cannot recommend it enough. It has helped me to become the observer of myself in situations in which racism goes on autopilot in my brain, so seeded, and deep, if left unearthed it might forever live as an undercurrent of my perceived reality. Her workbook is the beginning. And living in Brazil is graduate level work; daily work, to hear and call out my white supremacy. As in the whitewashed, sterile and “safe” (as in nothing to do with a horrific past including my ancestors enslaving other human beings “safe”) version of what I thought Samba was. And that it, like many other, rich, extravagant, beautiful, multi-faceted things, born in Brazil, is built on the backs of the kings and queens, musicians, teachers, healers, mothers, families, babies, of Africans ripped from their homes and shackled, raped and abused here on the country named after a tree that was also forsaken. Samba itself is black, and proud, and loud, and radiant. Not bossa-nova, we are talking about Samba here.
After abolition (Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery) blacks were further persecuted by not being able to find jobs. The population of Brazil was 60% black after abolition and the government actually saw this as a threat and began to raise the incentives to European immigrants to relocate to Brazil and work in the coffee plantations to essentially white out Brazil. Many former slaves migrated from farms in northern Bahia to Rio to find work in the capital city, only to be told they could not sing or dance any of their traditional songs in public. That it was criminal. Including what was then developing as Samba. They were deprived of their right to partake in their culture. That is until their culture became profitable. It is now a 3 billion dollar industry for the City of Rio. And it came from the depravity of basic human rights.
A woman by the name of Tia Ciata, was among those to migrate from Bahia and with her she brought the sacred African tradition of Candomblé. Tia Ciata settled in the port area of Rio in 1876, what is now called little Africa but in the early 1800’s it was the area where slave ships came in, and slaves were marketed off; a history Rio has only recently fully publicly unearthed in its construction of the Port neighborhood in preparation for the Olympics. Tia, using her Candomblé medicinal practices, healed the then President’s leg and was granted his good fortune. The President upon her request appointed her husband as a police officer in the city of Rio. When citizens of the city would call in to report the dancing and singing happening at, and in front of Tia Ciata’s house, those complaints were dropped, and what we call samba today, was born. Samba parties began to grow in the neighborhood surrounding Tia’s house and the first blocos or street parties involving a car playing music and people following it dancing began. This traditional has exploded exponentially but has its roots in the black community.
In 1933 O Globo, Brazil’s largest media outlet purchased the rights to organize and broadcast the samba parade after a few years of it organically growing in neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods. Villa Isabel, Mangueira, Portela, Império Serrano, these legendary “schools” are organized more like guilds. The name “Samba School” arose out of them originally practicing in schoolyards. Samba Schools also provide a place to learn, celebrate and recognize Afro-Brazilian culture and history, something largely ignored in the traditional Brazilian school system. In today’s samba school performances, you will see demonstrations of the horrific injustices committed against black people in Brazil, still.
As demonstrated by the first school of that Sunday night, Império Serrano. They were ushered in by a series of radiant green fireworks representative of their emerald green flag. Império Serrano is a Samba school initiated in the neighborhood of Madueira, in the North Zone of Rio. Nothing really prepares you for the scale of the Samba Parade. It took a total of 25 minutes for the first dancers to reach where we could see them. The entirety of the stadium built just for samba is over one mile. Each school is judged on very specific criteria. The first judging is on the performance that the twelve dancers do, initiating the theme of the samba school. These are generally the school’s best dancers setting the stage of an epic story to unfold. Império Serrano’s dancers were dressed in dirty, ragged clothes that dangled from their bodies and accentuated each movement trailing in ethereal filth. The dancers ranged in age and represented the people living in the streets, alone, as families, as children. As their dancers neared our judging station, with them came a gigantic platform that began to rise upwards as the dancers streamed onto it from the ground. The raised stage created a story box for them to show the life cycle of a homeless person, culminating in the birth of a baby on the stage and then wrapped naked into the flag of the samba school. The video still gives me chills. It wasn’t until the platform began to roll away that I noticed the body on the ground in front of it; a sole person, barefoot and wrapped in an emergency blanket.
Deprivation: ‘the damaging lack of material benefits considered to be basic necessities in a society.’
- Merriam Webster
The gigantic float to follow the band of homeless people was a three-tiered electric green heart that opened up to reveal more dancers. The sides of the float were complex foam systems of atoms and neurons transmitting light signals topped with the iconic women in crystal-drenched outfits and feather headdresses. The sheer scale of excess of Carnival in Brazil could be an equal measure of gauge on the sheer scale of deprivation. According to the 2010 census, 27 percent of the population of Brazil lives in favelas or shanty towns, a number that rose 18 percent from the last census. Each samba school entry has between 2,500 and 7,000 dancers performing over the course of the 1 hour and 15 minute time period. The city of Rio has 3 million people living in favelas. Over 1 million people come from outside of Brazil to enjoy in Rio’s carnival. “There are more people living in favelas in Brazil, 11.4 million individuals, than people living in Portugal, home to 10.6 million.” (Forbes) It is like playing statistical tug-of war with the lives of the black communities of Rio.
What led to the creation of favelas? And what is happening now inside of them? To see what samba school came next after Império Serrano, (and ended up taking second place over ALL of the Samba Schools) AND to hear from favela residents about their views on the parade and carnival traditions …. Stay tuned for PART TWO.
