Stanzas and Sticks: Poetic and Physical Challenges in the Afro-Brazilian Culture of the Paraíba Valley, Rio de Janeiro

My father was a tenant farmer And a great sharecropper He sang calango all night through And never lost at rhyming

Martinho da Vila¹

Benedito Gonçalves, after a challenge game with one of those present, left with Salvador for the road, and on this occasion he, the witness, saw Benedito assault Salvador with a number of blows.²

Guaratinguetá, 1890

Approaching Male Challenges

In her seminal work on free men in a slave society, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco emphasized the pervasiveness of violence among free poor men in the Paraíba valley during the nineteenth-century Brazilian Empire. Physical aggression happened frequently between men who were neighbours, coworkers, friends, or even related to each other, she wrote, and these ‘violent altercations were not sporadic’, but part of ‘the flux of everyday life’. For Franco, that violence ‘permeates the entire social organism, emerging in the less regulated sectors of life, such as leisure relations, and projects itself on to the codification of fundamental cultural values’. On the basis of nineteenth-century criminal records in the municipality of Guaratinguetá, she notes that while fights originated in various contexts, they always derived from verbal challenges. It is these ‘poetic disputes’, and their relationship with physical challenges between males, that I examine in this article.

Although Franco perceived the importance of the desafio (challenge) in the popular culture of the region, she greatly underestimated, in my view, its creative potential and the variety of its social functions. Perhaps her reliance upon criminal records, combined with a curious neglect of other types of source, conditioned her somewhat negative assessment of popular culture in

Fig. 1.

Calango singing at Quilombo São José, 2007, with João Batista Azedias (left) and Manuel Seabra (second left).

Fig. 2.

Manuel Seabra (left) and Jorge Fernandes playing sticks at Quilombo São José, 2007.

the Brazilian ‘valley of slavery’.³ I argue, in contrast, that the various types of verbal and physical challenge were crucial to the development of original cultural forms in the Paraíba valley. Verbal challenges were at the heart of three cultural practices which crystallized after emancipation, in 1888, and which represent the most widespread and important forms of rural folk culture in that region. They are the jongo, the calango, and the folia de reis.

Jongo refers to a rhythm, a type of lyric and a dance whose origins are located in West Central Africa.⁴ Calango stands for a sung duel accompanied by music and a couples dance. Folia de reis (Kings’ Folly’) is a theatrical performance, or ‘folly’, inspired by medieval Iberian mystery plays about the three wise men or ‘kings’ who visited the newborn Jesus.⁵ Physical challenges were present in all three, but were also at the core of jogo do pau (stick play) and the fighting that erupted at social gatherings.

Limited communication between historians and anthropologists/folklorists in the decades after the Second World War may explain why Franco showed no interest in further exploring the role of challenge in the caipira, or rural culture, of the Paraíba valley.⁶ Thirty-five years before the publication of her work, however, the European or African origins of the desafio or challenge had already been the subject of academic debate between outstanding sociologists and folklorists such as Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Roger Bastide and Maŕio de Andrade. Cascudo explored the Iberian origins of the desafio in his classic Vaqueiros e cantadores (1938), and categorically asserted that: ‘The improvised challenge (desafio), accompanied by musical instruments, does not exist in African lands’.⁷ Roger Bastide, while praising Cascudo’s book and acknowledging the Iberian origins of the desafio of North-eastern Brazil, indicated that poetic challenges existed in many societies.⁸ By transforming apparent hostility into play, they contributed to social cohesion and to ‘smoothing out of customs’.⁹ Furthermore, he wondered: ‘Is it not curious that these duels...