Between Left and Right, I Remain Black: Interview with Sueli Carneiro

Sueli Carneiro, founder of the NGO Géledes—Instituto da Mulher Negra, is one of the most influential Brazilian black feminist thinkers who has combined her own original conceptual frameworks with feminist and antiracist activism practices. Born on June 24, 1950, in the city of São Paulo, this daughter of Ogun, the orisha (or African deity) symbolizing struggle and achievement, does not run from Brazil's many conflicts, so many of them stemming from the country's stark inequalities. In addition to talking about her successful trajectory, we seek to articulate the political context in Brazil as well as her activism and intellectual production while foregrounding the analyses of two phenomena that, while antithetical, are political realities in Brazilian public life. We are referring to, on the one hand, the beating heart of the intellectual and political production of black women in Brazil and, on the other hand, the regressions in Brazilian society that have come with the rise of the current President.

1. We would like to start by discussing the relationship between spirituality and politics. During the course of your political life, you have written about your encounters with several religions of the African diaspora, especially Candomblé. Considering that you were born into a family of practicing Catholics, to what extent have the values and practices of Candomblé influenced your political and intellectual thinking and actions?

I came relatively late to Candomblé and was initially moved by an intellectual interest, which was, to a great extent, determined by an existential crisis. It was the mid 70's and, at that time, I was an undergraduate studying Philosophy. I was married to a white Jewish man, who introduced me to the cultural horizons and modus vivant of the middle-class city of São Paulo. Those circumstances gradually caused me to move away from my proletariat origins. But it was the university, with its limited cultural repertoire, that was especially stifling. There was no place for original thinking or for learning new ways of thinking other than those originating from the Western tradition. That environment and my feeling of being uprooted led me to look to Candomblé as another way of thinking about the world—to a human experience of the African diaspora that could provide me with support to confront, intellectually, the civilizing malaise that had been tormenting me daily.

Then, I started my relationship with Candomblé from a researcher's perspective with the research project "O poder feminino no culto aos orixás" ("Female power in orisha worship"). An article of the same name resulted from it, which inspired the creation of both Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra and other black feminist organizations that discovered new ideas about women in traditions of the African diaspora and established such concepts as grounds for the contemporary political practice of black women.

Conversely, this familiarity with Candomblé has also enhanced my belief in the need for rescuing the African cultural heritage that was scorned and demeaned by colonization. I tried to update it according to the current challenges faced by black resistance.

2. It is interesting how your experience of the University sparked a desire to find black epistemologies, such as Candomblé. To loop back to your time as an undergraduate, could you tell us how your inclusion in the Universidade de São Paulo (USP/University of São Paulo) occurred in the midst of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which took place from 1964–1985?

In the early 70's, it was a hard experience to enter the University while being black—although complaints by contemporary black students are basically the same. The essential difference is that there were only a few of us on the whole campus: one black student in Philosophy, one in Sociology, another in Economics, and that was it. As for black professors, there were none, until the appearance of Kabengele Munanga, the Congolese-Brazilian anthropologist that concentrates on Afro-Brazilian studies and racial relationships. That was not until the 80's. It was, therefore, a very lonely...