For the first time in my life I got to know a quilombo.
As soon as I arrived in Cafundó, in the interior of São Paulo, I talked to Alex, Cíntia and Regina.
Instead of calling them “interviewees”, I might recognize them as “cousins”. They are quilombolas and part of the 32 families that live there. We have distant blood ties. Their ancestors and mine came from Angola.
I, like almost any other Afro-descendant in Brazil, could only discover the past by doing a genetic test. For the quilombolas, it is enough to look away or listen to grandma’s stories. Quilombo is the discovery of a new world.
Until then, I recognized that three experiences were fundamental for me to understand my blackness.
The first was in childhood, at home and with my parents’ teachings about what I was, my potential and my place. The second experience, in adolescence, happened when I got to know the musical work of Jorge Ben Jor and the weight of his guitar and black lyrics with joy, pride and African origins. The third mixes the pain of racism and understanding what it has caused (and still causes) with research, study and racial literacy.
On August 19, 2022, I was surprised by the fourth experience. For the first time, I met blacks who knew the history of five or six generations back. What’s more, all blacks were freed even when the Brazilian state insisted on treating them as objects of possession.
During the visit and between conversations, the conversation was with a feeling of complicity. The result could not be different: knowing my identity. I wish all black people in Brazil could do the same.
The quilombo was, for me, a new RG, it was the rhythm of the African drum that has echoed in Brazil for centuries and presented itself as the fruit of the family tree. The quilombo is past and present in a harmonious seam in the fabric of time.
While in the white experience racial identity is marked by nostalgia and by the possibility of manifestation of origin in culture and, generally, from a positive perspective, for blacks racial identity is revealed, at first, in discrimination. We grew up without identity, we live with the worst social indices, our rights are denied daily. In other words, we are taught that being black is dealing with diversity all the time.
The basis of the slave machine created by Portuguese and Brazilians is in the disorganization that begins with the kidnapping of enslaved people, separating families, ending the bond of the land, transforming demonstrations into crime, violating women and amputating everything, from limbs to humanity.
Under this weight, the quilombo is born and, thus, it resists being unbearably organized. The quilombo is the antithesis and, therefore, it is not recognized by the state and society. The quilombola organization is the answer to slave crime. The slave master fears the order.
In 1791, enslaved insurgents overthrew the government of Santo Domingo and abolished slavery in present-day Haiti. The renegades changed society. It was in the quilombo that I understood. In their own way, the quilombolas promote part of the effects of the Haitian Revolution in Brazil. They resist everything and everyone. They are black owners of their own history. Long live the quilombo of Cafundó that, so far away, is close and will never leave me.
Source: CNN Brasil
