A Legacy to Brazil and the World: Remembering Abdias do Nascimento

Abdias do Nascimento

Chester Higgins © 1996

March 14, 1914—May 23, 2011 [End Page 676]

The life and career of Abdias do Nascimento may be seen as comprising four major parts: his early years up to the end of the Second World War; the years immediately following the war to the mid-1960s; the end of the 1960s to the early 1990s; and finally the mid-1990s to May 2011, the time of his crossing over.

The first segment, coincidentally framed by wars, begins with the birth of Abdias into a working-class family in Franca do Imperador in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1914. Memories of slavery, ended a mere generation before, were no distant reality for those residents of Franca who were themselves formerly enslaved or for their descendants born into freedom. For young Abdias those memories would be seminal, sparking a growing awareness of the intersections of the past and the present.

He expressed a pride in his African origins and early on recognized the need to confront racial injustice when and where it reared its head. In his early twenties he would make his first foray into political activism when he joined with fellow black youth in the Afro-Campineiro Congress to protest racial discrimination in Campinas, São Paulo. He would subsequently participate in the Frente Negra Brasileira (Black Brazilian Front), which had been launched in 1931 and went on to become the first political party of black Brazil. The party would enjoy a brief life: in 1937, the Estado Novo (New State) imposed under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas ordered ordered the party banned.

Between this time and the start of the Second World War, Abdias had served in the army, been imprisoned twice for political offenses, organized a theater group among his fellow inmates in São Paulo, relocated to Rio de Janeiro, and traveled throughout South America in the company of young poets from the region. Properly speaking, then, Abdias had already traveled farther than many of his generation. At this stage in his life, his contemplations on the condition of blacks in Brazil were multidimensional, for he was ever aware of the local, the national, and the international condition. Africa had a fixed place in his thoughts; he, along with his fellow attendees of the Afro-Campineiro Congress, had pledged to make a pilgrimage to the continent at the earliest opportunity.

In 1944, a year before the end of the war and the fall of the Estado Novo, he founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater), or TEN, whose mission was to educate and train blacks who would not normally be represented in theater. TEN would begin with a bang. In an act decidedly counterintuitive in the overall context of Brazilian life and society at the time, this group of amateur black actors and actresses launched the company with a production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, the nation’s capital, in May 1945. Abdias had taken the initiative to write to the playwright requesting permission to stage the play, and O’Neill generously waived the standard royalty, a fee the fledgling TEN could ill afford.

Performing The Emperor Jones for the first time ever in Portuguese, with a troupe of untested actors—maids, lower-echelon workers—was an act of courage on the director’s part. Some of the actors were only recently literate, having been beneficiaries of TEN’s educational program. Apart from questions of competence, there was the ticklish issue of the play’s provenance. Did there exist no Brazilian plays that treated black themes with anything other than trivializing stereotypes, plays that portrayed black characters as complex human beings? That he found none would, it seems, speak for itself. That he risked being charged with negating Brazilian culture and evincing a disposition toward imitating the North American model of race relations, with all its attendant violence and negativity, was not something he would dwell on. The show...