The sacred and the profane in African and African-derived Carnivals

[Jacuma]

Daniel J Crowley,

In keeping with the announced subject of this session, I have modified my paper to consider how the Sacred might impact on that most Profane of festivals, the utterly secular Carnival of the Christian liturgical calendar which celebrates earthly vitality and defiance of restraint just before the long penitential period of Lent. Carnival has deep roots in the European Middle Ages and even in the Classical Mediterranean, but has now spread to all the continents except Antarctica, and even there may be celebrated by individual researchers. The Christian minority of Goa in India has preserved its Portuguese-derived Carnival, and Goan migrants in Melbourne are said to continue the festival there in their homes and clubs. Whether the populous communities of Spaniards, Italians, or other Europeans have also kept Carnival going in Australia is not yet known, but Mumbwa is a local Carnival-like fete.

In Africa, Carnivals exist in ex-Portuguese Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands, in the Spanish-administered Canary Islands, and evidently in Cotonou, Republic of Benin; Maputo, Mozambique; the island of Sao Tome; and Ziguinchor in the Senegalese Casamance. In keeping with the subject of this Symposium, I am limiting my investigation to African and African-derived Carnivals, which include those of Brazil, the Caribbean, Louisiana, and other New World areas where Blacks play a significant role in the festival.

CARNIVAL AS PROFANATION

Because it precedes Lent, Carnival long ago was conceived as the last chance for 40 days to eat meat, to make love to your wife (and/or others), and to live joyously, all forbidden activities during the season when one is supposed to do penance in preparation for a spiritual resurrection at Easter. Of course this also included giving up partying, dancing, drinking, and every type of carousing which, while not specifically sinful, are considered "occasions of sin" because they provide temptations or at least opportunities to break the Ten Commandments and other rules of the Church. Thus it was not too hard to see how the Carnival period, from one or two days to several weeks, came to be the specific time when one purposely set out to break the mold, to determine to do all the things normally impossible or forbidden in everyday life, and perhaps even to fulfill oneself by trying out one or more alternative roles or lifestyles, to be for a short time what one could never be in ordinary life. This is the reversal phenomenon so often noted in Carnivals everywhere, wherein regular behavior is reversed, and people choose to do the very opposite of their normal behavior.

In the dictionary, "profane," from Latin pro, "before," and fan=4 "temple," means not only "secular," but also "unsanctified," and even "irreverent," while "profanation" means "desecration," or even "sacrilege," in the sense of "a loss of sacred character, possibly by irreverence or contempt as shown by vulgar intrusion or vandalism," or "a loss of sacred character as through defilement or reduction to secular use" (Webster 1970: 679 ). Certainly then, Carnival is truly profane since it seeks specifically NOT to be sacred, and indeed to do violence to propriety and respectability by irreverence and even contempt, often made all the more effective through the use of indirection, humor, and irony.

Such profanation is the specialty of European Carnivals, elements of which are specifically designed to be sacrilegious, as shocking as possible to the conservative and the religious. But in the New World Carnivals, such specific sacrilege is rather rare, and where it occurs, the specialty of the upper classes who are usually relatively lighter-skinned than their lower-class countrymen. An example might be Trinidadian "ol' mas"' bands, with their "pregnant" male transvestites, shabby hand-me-down clothes, and double entendre placards ("Chitty Council") satirizing politics and politicians. Another is the Banda do Lim or Garbage Band of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, which plays garbage men carrying political placards; or the Mudanca or Moving Day bands riding in ancient donkey carts overloaded with the pathetic possessions of the poor migrants from the Northeastern secas or droughts-a savage commentary on local conditions all the more effective because it is played for humor. It thus ridicules both the poor and those who have caused their poverty, or who ignore it or profit by it.

Of course even the huge Samba Schools of Rio de Janeiro sometimes choose political or social commentary and criticism, as for instance the "Mama, I Want Manaus" enredo ("theme") of the 1984 Carnival which satirized the greed of Brazilians who go to the Amazonian city of Manaus to buy duty-free goods such as imported electronics and designer clothing.

Brazilian magazines and newspapers make a great fuss over folioes or "merrymakers," always portrayed as semi-nude women being nuzzled by obviously drunken or drugged men wearing bits of costumes, usually late at night in Canecao or other smart nightclubs. These represent the demi-monde plus some fast-but-still-respectable male hangers-on, sometimes wealthy, sometimes aristocratic. For the press at least, they represent the wild and crazy side of Carnival, those who commit public "folly" in their devotion to the unrestrained freedom of Carnival time. What they do NOT represent is the mainstream carnavalescos, who are much too serious about their costumes and the quality of their dancing to waste their time on such public displays of passion, which in any case they consider to be jejeune, "kid-stuff." It is not for nothing that the slum-born Escolas da Samba are called "schools," since they do indeed teach their participants how to dance properly.

THE SACRED IN CARNIVAL

Perhaps this is the place to proclaim "Crowley's Law": The lower the class (and darker the skin), the more serious the carnavalesco. Bahians and African-nationalist Cariocas (natives of Rio) often compare their increasingly race-conscious Afoxe and Bloco Afro parading organizations with Catholic religious street processions at Corpus Christi and other holy days. "This is our chance to display our culture and religious beliefs, just like the (white) Catholics do during their festivals." They sometimes add, "That's why they are so down on Carnival, always trying to stop it or change it or limit it." For people of this orientation, coming out in Carnival is a political act as well as a cultural one, as is apparent from the Bloco floats representing tanks painted in camouflage, the alas ("wings") of green bereted soldiers, and the widespread use of red-yellow-and-green "African" flags with black stars, to say nothing of the dancers doing traditional Gelede dancing in suitable Yoruba-derived attire.

More and more, Afro-Brazilian mythology derived from Yoruba sources is featured as the subject of Carnival. For instance, Iemanja (Yemoja in Yorubaland), the Goddess of the Sea syncretized with the Virgin Mary, was the chosen subject of the Bahian Carnival of 1984, with an immense picture made of multicolor strands of lightbulbs suspended across the line of march in the Praca Castro Alves, and the sacred symbols of the other gods and goddesses of the pantheon in giant lighted form displayed on lampposts throughout town and around the harbor. Although few critical comments were heard at the time, since then some African nationalists have pointed out that this usage is a travesty of their religion, and that they will resist future exploitation of their mythology. This however may be difficult to implement, since the Afoxe parading groups, traditionally recruited in Afro-Brazilian terreiros or cult headquarters, have always used a slow religious drum rhythm, and sang in the street parades the same religious songs otherwise used in their most sacred ceremonies. Some Bahian Blocos actually hold short religious ceremonies in mid-street during the parade, especially in front of the (minimal) bandstands to maximize public attention. Here there is no hint of objection to the alleged secular nature of Carnival. Rather, it is seen as an opportunity to display sacred rituals, costumes, symbols, songs, dances, and drumming, and to tell the truth, I don't believe anyone either in the Afoxe or in the audience found the presentation in the least offensive, parodic, or irreligious in any way. So here is the Sacred element in Carnival.

In the Carnival of Recife in northeastern Brazil, the traditional Maracatus represent Royal Courts of Africa played entirely straight-faced in Louis XV court dress complete with panier hips, white wigs, and lace handkerchiefs, as well as a few African umbrellas thrown in for local color; not sacred, but a dead-serious cultural presentation in the midst of the festival. The Caboclinhos or "Little Halfbreeds" in plumed skirts and headdresses are often accompanied by a Paje or sorcerer who performs ritual dances believed to derive from the Tupinamba and other aboriginal Brazilian peoples, even though his horns and gourd amulets derive from Africa.

Perhaps it should be added that in other Carnivals, serious religious subjects are specifically banned. An example would be the prohibition on any representation of the Hindu gods in Trinidad Carnival, and the brouhaha when a group came out as Baptists wearing long translucent pale green tunics. Such mimicking of serious (dark-skinned lower-class) religionists who preach on streetcorners was much criticized by middle-class writers of letters-to-the-editor in the newspapers, especially when it was discovered that the maskers were wearing red bikinis under their tunics. The only thing more shocking and indeed profane was the further discovery that quite a few of these pseudo-Baptists were NOT wearing red bikinis under their tunics.

Interestingly enough, the African Carnivals show considerably less concern with either the sacred or the profane. Besides the usual clowns and transvestites, the Tenerife Carnival parodies a Catholic funeral procession on Ash Wednesday night with the "Burial of the Sardine" wherein couples dress as `widows" and lament their loss using graphic hand gestures suggesting genital size. In Guinea-Bissau, traditional village groups are invited by the government to parade and dance in the streets, which they do with great elan but no suggestion of humor or criticism. In Cape Verde, as in St. Lucia in the Caribbean, a Carnival street skit showing death by swordplay and resuscitation by magical ritual is parodic, the characters being soot-smeared "Africans" or "Madinkas." Here we are back to the profane, with maskers of mixed ancestry and somewhat Westernized culture making fun of their traditional rural African cousins.

In Luanda, the present Marxist military government, dominated by old Black Creole families, has changed the date of "the Carnival of Victory" to March 27, ostensibly to honor a 1976 defeat of the South Africans, but actually to minimize the power and presence of the Catholic Church. Similarly, the local Ntokoist Protestant sect is now considered subversive because it resists the government's "civil religion." Contemporary Carnival groups are led by a King, Queen, and Count, and include among many other roles charm-carriers who magically protect the drums from damage by rivals. And as elsewhere, profane ridicule of the mighty is a major theme, with "provocatively prepared songs which revealed to all their moral weaknesses, their private foibles and their social lapses. Incest and witchcraft were particularly fine grist to the song mills of the Luanda bards" (Birmingham 1988: 99), all of which sounds very much like Trinidad Calypso.

CONCLUSION

Always new, always changing, always multivalent, Carnival contains a surprising amount of sacred ritual and cosmology presented with dead seriousness and even attempts at proselytization. For some devout Carnival maskers, the street parade is both an act of worship and a statement of racial (and political) identity and pride, utterly distinct from the "merry making" of maskers of other classes and/or ancestries who reverse their everyday life to glory momentarily in all that is profane. Indeed, both the Sacred and the Profane forms of expression sometimes take place side by side in the same street at the same time, perhaps even between brothers. Both are truly complementary, and suggest the strength of Carnival's hold on its devotees, and perhaps why the French scholar Gaignebet chose to consider Carnival a religion.2

Notes

I. Read at the Triennial Symposium of African Art, Arts Council of the African Studies Association, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, June 15-17, 1989.

2. I take this opportunity to thank Jean Colvin, Director of the University Research Expeditions Program, University of California, Berkeley, and the indefatigable participants who have supported my several Carnival research projects. I also thank Dr. Pablo Eyzaguirre for bringing the Birmingham article to my attention.

Works Cited

Birmingham, David. 1988. Carnival at Luanda. Journal of African History 29: 93103.

Gaignebet, Claude and Marie-Claude Florentin. 1979. Le Carnaval, essais de mythologie populaire. Paris: Payot.

Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. 1970. London: G. Bell.

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