[Page 2: The Samba of the Crazy Black Man: Possessing the Mulata through a Choreography of Disidentity
by Carla Melo]

So what happens when a "pitch-black" male, wearing boots that clearly signify queer identity, takes his place on stage, presenting a kind of possession of the "split-possessed" mulata? To attempt answering that, one needs to consider that heteronormativity is one of the foundations of the myth of racial democracy and thus implicit to the construction of the mulata as an icon for "Brasilidade." When Luiz de Abreu showed his body in profile (still only visible as a dark silhouette), the samba he performed was a markedly feminine move of squatting down towards a bottle placed under one's legs while shaking one's hips, a 1990s dance phenomenon literally known as "the bottle dance," which, in turn, was created by a bleach-blonde pop singer performing "mulata-ness." Abreu's mimicry of the arguably unconscious mimesis of the mulata—a mimesis characteristic of 1990s "Axé music" that vulgarized her classier sensuality—exposed the construction of both, as well as the exclusion of queer subjects from representation.

On top of this layering, the rough voice of black diva Elza Soarez soared over the electronic tribal drumming, announcing,  "the black meat is the cheapest meat in the market."  Then, Abreu stopped dancing, dropped character, and casually crossed downstage center, placing himself under a bright spot. For the first time, we were confronted with the body three-dimensionally. This extreme contrast between the body as a contour (as in a shadow play) to the embodied confrontation caused by frontal male nudity under stark lighting was heightened by the emphasis of the lyrics on the body as meat. He then stood there for a moment, staring straight out into the audience. His staring at the fourth wall marked the absent presence of one who knowingly exposes oneself to the gaze. Then, conjuring analogies to a 19th-century traveling exhibit of an exotic Other, he started to move his abdomen up and down and from side to side, with such a degree of muscular mastery, that soon the shock value of male frontal nudity was replaced by awe at his skills. Such a display betrays our expectations for the sensuous virtuosity of samba and almost replaces it with a exhibit of what Bakhtin called the "grotesque body"—a body that disturbs norms of beauty, propriety and control and that constitutes a hybrid, open-ended entity, in which the lower body and orifices are celebrated as sites of pleasure (Bakhtin 1936:303-341). Yet, unlike the grotesque body, the excess and hybridity of Abreu's body was choreographed with minute control in a series of contortions that eventually led him back to performing the classical samba moves of the mulata. 

This second possession of the mulata was performed as a direct address to the audience, in the same center-stage position. Through his straight spine, elevated chin, excessive yet empty and frozen smile, and his fast footwork (in complete sync with the swaying arms), he performed a perfect samba, turning himself into a kind of "hyper-mulata." This clearly exposes her hyper-objectification and leads us to question whether an icon of nationality can be anything but a site of split-possessions or cross-identifications and whether these do not cancel each other out generating nothing but absence. This absence is made visible not because Abreu is being possessed by her, which would signify a lack of agency on his part, but rather, because he inhabits her phantasmic body with a great level of control. Yet the degree of disjunction between his fake smile and the vitality of the samba moves conjured the image of someone who is only allowed to exist through the ghostly presence of the imagined mulata.

In attempting to unpack this dance of signifiers present in Abreu's performance, I also found José Muñoz's theory of disidentification extremely useful. He defines it as a way of dealing with hegemony:

Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), [disidentification] is a strategy that tries to transform the cultural logic from within (…). (Muñoz 1999:11)

Abreu's possession of the mulata seems to counteridentify with her, since he does not demonstrate any enjoyment in doing so until the very end, yet the piece as a whole performs disidentifications that destabilize icons of nation which cross and interpenetrate other systems of identity. Since Muñoz's theory was specifically developed for dealing with the work of queer artists of color in the U.S., disidentification (both as a mode of performance and as a way of reading), must undergo adaptations in order to be applicable to the Brazilian context. For instance, when examining the work of performance artist Marga Gomez, Muñoz describes what seems to be the opposite of the process created by Abreu's Samba:

The phobic object, through a campy over-the-top performance, is reconfigured as sexy and glamorous, and not as the pathetic and abject spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture. (Muñoz 1999:3)

In Abreu's Samba, it is the exoticized, glamorous body—like a phantasmic image in the minds of the audience—that is replaced by male frontal nudity as a phobic object (certainly not always so, but true in this context). This male performing femininity, thus retaining a certain glamour, still makes queerness look pathetic and abject. When he drops the mulata character and starts to perform the internal contortionism, the "abjectification" is intensified. Given the assimilationist character of race relations in Brazil in contrast to U.S. race relations, and the relative invisibility of queerness, though this body will eventually transform itself into a glamorous subject and find pleasure in disidentification, at first it seems that it needs to counteridentify with a series of identifications set up by the mulata as the essence of "Brazilianness." Thus, it seems that within this specific context, Muñoz's theory has to be choreographed as a movement from counter- to disidentification in order to be effective.

            Before moving into the second phrase of his choreography, I want to further explore the bold image of the body as meat as inhabiting a space between counter and disidentity. In an interview, Abreu reiterated the objectification of the black body:

The idea is to discuss this body that was transformed into a thing through history. In other words, we were separated from our subjectivity, our families, our gods, our culinary, and from our words. And what was left was this body-thing. This body has been our disgrace and our resistance. (Abreu 2004:1)

Yet the body as meat needs to be understood as more than objectification, and his performance does more than just denounce it. From the abdomen, Abreu's visceral contortions move into the pectoral muscles, then to his shoulder blades and, finally, to the buttocks. If my "finally" reads like an exhale, it is due to the known Brazilian obsession with the buttocks, which could be compared to the American obsession with breasts. Men and women are taught to desire/identify (respectively) with the idealized round, firm and smooth "mulata booty" and, of course, a whole industry cashes in on this desire. Abreu's performing buttocks, though round and smooth, dance against each other as he is able to isolate each "butt-cheek," counteridentifying with and disturbing the desire for the unified and perfect ideal. This is achieved in conjunction with the lyrics that racialize the object of desire and emphasize its commoditization. They also turn it into an "abject object," in the sense that "meat" creates an analogy to that of a dead animal—which we are only able to consume when we no longer think of it as once alive. The abject object is in between life and death, between seduction and repulsion, and it is this in-between-ness that lends complexity to what would be an otherwise quite obvious message-laden performance. Though these isolationist contortions desexualize his body, the image of the body as meat connects it with food and death, making it grotesque and thereby re-eroticizing it at a deeper level. In this sense, the lyrics perform the transition from counter to disidentification in that they lend it a grotesque ambiguity. This results in an equation between seduction and repulsion that is characteristically enacted by the exotic object, who, as Marta Savigliano suggests, is led to perform an auto-exoticism in order in gain visibility (1995). Also, in shifting the attention from skin to internal organs—the lyrics speak of black meat, not black skin—the fragmentation and contortions of Abreu's body, juxtaposed with the lyrics, displace the main marker of race while becoming a signifier for the epistemic violence inflicted upon embodied black subjectivity.

            This body as meat is not only raced but also gendered. When Abreu drops the parodic performance of the mulata to fragment his body in a series of internal contortions, he also re-signifies the construction of black masculinity. Actually, this re-signification starts from the very moment we identified him as male through the dancing shadow of his penis. From the very beginning, the penis has been thrown around as a piece of meat with no power. This is intensified in the contortion segment when he manipulates it with his hands, stretching and knotting it, as if it were an appendage disconnected from the rest of his body. Through this manipulation, he clearly counteridentifies with the trope of sexual virility attributed to the black Brazilian male, which is one of the central heteronormative characters in the theater of erotic interracial exchanges constituting the myth of racial democracy.

The question of epistemic violence hidden by the myth is foregrounded by the juxtaposition of the black body with the strongest icon of the nation-state. The Brazilian flag is at once, set, costume and prop. As the patterned backdrop, not only does the flag loses its "aura," as Walter Benjamin would phrase it, but it also loses its message: Hundreds of mini flags form the pattern of a grid printed on a semi transparent fabric, in which the positivist motto of "Order and Progress" that sits in the middle of the flag is no longer legible. As a costume, he plays with it as an extension of his body, in reference to both the work of a famous visual artist and to carnival parades. Although some consider his performance a violation of the flag, generally speaking, Brazilians are not as patriotic as mainstream Americans—for instance, in Brazil you never see a Brazilian flag hanging outside of a house or mounted on a car; in fact, you rarely see it at all, unless it is Independence Day or during the world soccer championship. In the latter instance, fans actually wear the national icons as capes, not so unlike the manner in which Abreu first uses it. In a sense, Abreu's manipulations of the Brazilian flag may be read as a revenge on the epistemic violence inflicted upon those who have been Others since even before Brazil became a nation: as a disidentifying practice that sets the subaltern subject further apart and at the same time intimately close to national identity. Through the violation, the black subject rejects assimilation, but does not entirely reject the notion of belonging to the nation.

For this reason, this is the moment in which his choreography makes a sharper turn from counter- to disidentification. After performing a spectacular yet deadpan samba with huge plastic red lips on, he once again drops character, goes off stage and comes back with a large piece of fabric, similar to the backdrop, though now the flags in it look larger. The fabric has a slit in the center that coincides with the edge of one of the flags. Through this slit he puts one of his legs, one of his arms and his head, one at a time, as if trying to find the perfect fit. This playfulness with the flag, for an educated audience, instantly reads as a reference to the Tropicalist Movement9 of the late 1960s, which revolutionized Brazilian cultural production with its irreverence and its hybrid aesthetics. More specifically, his use of the flag as a kind of clothing recalls the work of a visual artist whose work coined the term "Tropicalism." Through installations and wearable art, Helio Oiticica sought to shift the focus from product to process and from sight to other senses. His most famous pieces called "parangolés" were capes inspired by his involvement with Samba Schools and with the everyday life of the slums. They were functional and conceptual pieces, meant to adorn the dancing body. Using elements from the architecture of the slums, the parangolés suggested an equation between the body and the house, celebrating the creativity of its inhabitants. Instead of simply co-opting the aesthetics of poverty, Oiticica was interested in capturing the tactics and epistemologies of those who live outside the boundaries of citizenship, and raised related issues that created a dialogue between high and popular art—in some ways similar to pop art in Britain and the U.S., but in a more abstract manner. Oiticica called these capes "sensuality tests," which points to a desire to reappropriate samba sensuality from the commercialization of its image. In addition to carrying these references loaded with festivity and play, the last section of the piece presents for the first time a subject that seems to enjoy dancing, transforming the parodic attack, or what I have called the possession of the imagined mulata, into an act of being possessed—into an act of celebration in which the passive verb merges with the active. Through this act, the lived experience of doing the samba coexists with an enjoyment of the fiction of national identity. The awareness of this fiction is brought by his reference to the famous parangolés—think Warhol's Campbell soups—which identify with the disidentificatory practice of the Tropicalists, who were constantly redefining what it meant to be Brazilian.

According to Felipe Chiarello Souza Pinto, Abreu's every use of the flag transgresses the Law of National Symbols, which prohibits its use as clothing, towel or curtain, as well as its reproduction in products, packing, etc. (Pinto 2004:1). Although Abreu's transgressive deployment of the flag has not been legally punished, it certainly caused more shock than his frontal male nudity, especially at the end of the piece, when he literally "stuck it up his ass" and glamorously paraded across the stage, as if he were standing on a Carnival float. The act of anal insertion has several layers of signification. Obviously, the gesture visibilizes his position as a queer subject as it refers to anal sex and transforms the epistemic violence into pleasure—more specifically, into male homosexual pleasure. It also literalizes a level of identification in which the flag becomes an extension of his body, which is also reflected in his declaration about it as "that which clothes me. It's my country." Since the act conjures the expression "to stick it up one's ass," which is similar in Portuguese, it carries a certain violence with it and a certain degree of violation, but here he takes on the power position by doing it to himself—thus implying that his body is no longer simply inscribed upon, it also does the inscription. Thirdly, as a reference to a carnival costume, or to a "carnivalesque allegory" as Brazilians ironically call it, he carnivalizes or inverts the essentialism that permeates national identity. It is with a great sense of carnival laughter that he locates the feminized/queer lower body as the source of the symbol of the fatherland, thus honoring the buttocks as the real national icon. Given his identification with Oiticica, it is no surprise that this gesture also references the theory of anthropophagia,10 which is the foundation for the Tropicalist movement. Mocking the primitivist trope, Tropicalists sought to eat up all cultural influences to create a hybrid art. Unlike the myth of racial democracy, they exposed the violence and the exclusion inherent in the hybridization of Brazilian races and cultures. Through the symbolic transformation of the flag into excrement, into that which comes out of digesting divergent discourses, the agency to recreate the fiction of national identity is relocated in the black subject. This polysemic gesture, by which the flag is at the same time a signifier for violence, carnival, homosexual desire and hybridity, amounts to a disidentificatory practice that delights in wearing a multilayered set of identities as a fiction.

        The very title of the piece, O Samba do Crioulo Doido, adds a great deal of ambiguity to the negotiations of identity taking place in Abreu's performance. The titular samba, which is never actually played in the piece, was created as a parody for the samba songs that serve as yearly anthems for each samba school.11  These "samba plots" are often narrative and reflect the theme of each samba school's carnival parade. Perhaps best translated as "The Samba of the Cuckoo Black Guy," this samba was such a success in the late '60s that it soon became a national proverb. At the literal level, it pokes fun at black people's lack of knowledge of national history and even at the samba schools' tendency to tackle historical themes. At the proverbial level—the one used in the media and in everyday talk—it stereotypically connotes in a self-deprecating humor Brazilians' supposedly "innate" ability to create chaos, as well as their incapacity towards historical coherence, perhaps pointing to the popular belief that Brazilian history "doesn't make much sense," and is especially used to attack politicians' idiocies. Clearly, the substitution of "crioulo" with "Brazilians" is another sign of the pervasive power of the myth of racial democracy, through which negative qualities are identified as black and then attributed to all Brazilians. It goes without saying that only by being an exception to the rule one can properly perform whiteness. Another Brazilian proverb announces, "This is the country where everything turns into samba," so it also means the ability, implicitly brought in by the black, to have fun with the chaos.