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[page 303]
Philip Zwerling
The Political Agenda for Theatricalizing
Religion in
Shango de Ima and Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns
Amilcar
Cabral, the African revolutionary, wrote: "A people who free themselves
from foreign domination will not be free...unless they return to the upward
paths of their own culture....We see, therefore, that if imperialist domination
has the virtual need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation
is necessarily an act of culture."(1) What Cabral perhaps did not
envision is that expressions of culture can be politically defined and
that national liberation may cede primacy to contemporary cultural realities.
I wish to examine two plays that, in preferring Yoruba religion over Christianity,
may be seen as theatrical manifestations of national liberation that are
determined and, in one case undermined, by contemporary national necessities.
These
two plays are Shango de Ima, attributed to the Cuban Pepe Carril
and Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns by the Brazilian Abdias do Nascimento.
I choose them because the same Yoruba religion is central to their themes
and stagecraft, because accessing that religion is a statement of cultural
identity for these Afro-Latin authors, and because both have been translated
and anthologised in English. Shango de Ima has been produced in
New York. Since both plays are accessible to an English speaking audience,
they have had an impact far beyond their national borders.
At
first glance, Cuba and Brazil might appear more dissimilar than similar:
one a small island of 14 million, the other a giant land mass on the South
American continent with 160 million inhabitants; one Spanish speaking,
the other Portuguese, with all of the European historical and cultural
connections those different languages imply. But in some significant ways,
both countries share much in common. Both were long-time European colonies,
their indigenous populations decimated by invaders and repopulated through
many centuries of a [page 304] slave
trade that brought captured black people from the West coast of Africa,
and, more specifically, from the Yoruba lands now identified with the
modern country of Nigeria. Slavery in Cuba lasted until 1873 and in Brazil
until 1888. Both countries followed slavery with a strict policy of apartheid
and racism while attempting, unsuccessfully, to wipe out African languages,
religion, history, and art.
This
attempted destruction of a culture was undertaken beneath the twin banners
of modernity and civilisation and served effectively to streamline and
rationalise economic exploitation which occurred along racial lines. In
self-defence, the Africans clung tenaciously to the culture and religion
that identified them. For example, Africans would sing in the Cuban fields,
"While my body in Cuba wilts, my soul in Ife [the Yoruba holy city]
blooms".(2) This cultural suppression was ultimately unsuccessful
in both countries where Yoruba religion survived, often under a veneer
of Catholicism, to flower again publicly as Santeria in Cuba and as Candomble
and Macumba in Brazil.
One
of the greatest differences between the two countries, of course, has
been their modern political development. In Cuba, Fidel Castro and the
Communist Party, (once, but no longer officially atheist), have reigned
since 1959, while over that same period of time Brazil has seen a succession
of right wing military dictatorships. The left-wing Brazilian Workers
Party captured the presidency with the election of Lula da Silva in 2003
and ushered in a fledgling democracy.
Santeria,
Macumba, and Candomble survive as religions of the Yoruba people in the
Diaspora. There are other Latin American versions of African religions;
for example Abakua and 'palo monte', also found in Cuba, are of the Bantu
people enslaved from the Congo. Between 750,000 and one million black
people were brought from Yorubaland to Cuba in chains, numbers so great
that at times Africans constituted a majority of the island's population.
Interestingly, anthropologists found Yoruba-speaking Cubans as late as
1951.(3)
[page
305] Santeria centers around the 'orishas' or saints and is
called 'La Regla de las Orishas" (The Law of the Saints). While these
faiths had been described as syncretic hybrids of Christianity and Yoruba's
indigenous religion in years past, many contemporary authors argue that,
though influenced by Catholicism, Santeria, Candomble, and Macumba represent
the survival of indigenous spirituality hidden by their practitioners
beneath Catholic forms.
It
is clear that in colonial Cuba, the Yoruba religion was denigrated as
little more than black magic, and Afro Cuban culture was mocked as a part
of the stereotypically primitive and uneducated 'negrito'. For example,
prior to our own Civil War, white American acting companies from the Untied
States performed minstrel shows in black face for segregated white audiences
in Havana's Gran Teatro Tacon. This theatre had been built in 1838 by
slave labor and Blacks were then excluded from attending.(4) As late as
1912, an Afro Cuban revolt, joined by many santeros, was viciously suppressed
by a Cuban government allied with the United States.
Segregation
was so complete that black protagonists did not appear on the Cuban stage
until the play "Canaveral" in 1950, though Yoruba religion appeared
on stage in "Agallu-Sola ondoco" in 1941.(5) Such progressive
approaches appeared simultaneously with the 'costumbristas' and 'negritas'
[white actors in blackface] theatre pieces which used Yoruba religion
as a colorful adjunct to the usual racist melange of machismo, alcohol,
sex, and the 'exotic' religious rituals and music of Afro Cubans that
portray the Black Cuban. Even today, a majority of the Cuban population
consider the Black Cuban as an oddity, an outsider, and 'the other'.
Though
labelled, dismissively, by the Spanish colonialists and Catholic Church
as pagan pantheism, Santeria offers a sophisticated metaphysics and ethics
that collapses the division between the natural world and the human world
of feelings and desires. Santeria believes that [page
306] the universe and all its objects are alive with a life
force called axe'. In Santeria there is a creator god named Olofi
who is no longer active in world affairs, and the orishas who are his
children. The chief among the orishas is Obatala, who is both male and
female. Shango is the orisha of fire, lightening and thunder. There are
many creation stories and tales of orishas intervening in human affairs.
In religious services, the orishas impact human beings through the santeros,
or priests, who access the orishas with ceremonies and sacrifices. The
future is divined through the reading of shells and bones cast by the
santero.
The
Cuban play Shango de Ima which opened at El Teatro Guinol in 1969
presents a series of separate stories strung together and presented as
a dramatic whole about the orisha Shango. The play uses Santeria music,
dancing, and ritual on stage but it's thematic thrust includes more than
a simple celebration of that religion.
Its
mere appearance on stage is significant in the context of Cuban history.
The revolutionary government has been on rocky terms with the Catholic
establishment for the four decades of its existence. Catholic priests
fought, died, and were captured with the invaders at Playa Giron (the
Bay of Pigs). I saw on each of my visits to the island that the Church
chafed under legal limitations that confined its activities within church
walls. Street processions, proselytising, and church schools were banned
and the government excluded believers from Party membership.
On
the other hand, Afro Cubans had gained the most from the revolution which
had ended de facto segregation and espoused racial equality. As
a result, the Asantehene of Ghana, the King of the Ashanti, and the Ooni
of Ife, the Nigerian city sacred to Santeria, had officially visited Cuba
as guests of the government 15 years prior to the visit of Pope John Paul
II (who refused to meet with a delegation of Santeros on his own
visit to the island). However, as late as 1990 the official Cuba guidebook
could state, after a brief reprise of the history of Santeria: "the
primitive and pagan practices have faded into the past, Christianity is
an accepted part of Cuba's heritage".(6)
[page
307] In 1991 the Cuban Communist Party opened membership to
religious believers, whether they be Santerian or Catholic, and officially
opened a museum of African religions in Guanabacoa, outside Havana, and
made it, along with holy sites and Santeria ceremonies, available for
foreign tourists. Some speculated that beyond attracting hard currency
from visitors, Castro hoped to create an official Santeria religious and
political counterweight to Catholic power. Historically Santeria meetings
had functioned in colonial times as covet gathering places [quilombos]
to plan slave uprisings and anti-Spanish rebellions. The religion was
still sufficiently feared by whites that as late as 1959 the dark-skinned
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, in an effort to increase his power and
frighten opponents, let it be whispered that he practiced Santeria in
the Presidential palace.
Official
government sanction for Santeria served other goals as well. As George
Brandon wrote: "The Castro government gave the Afro Cuban religious
public recognition as an element of the national cultural heritage".(7)
In 1991 the government allowed the formation of the Yoruba Cultural Association.
By November 2000, Washington Post reporter Eugene Robinson could report:
" The Afro Cuban religion...is an everyday fact of life in Cuba,
a constant presence....Nowadays everywhere you turn in Havana you see
someone wearing a beaded bracelet or necklace or some other sign of the
Yoruba faith...on university campuses and in office buildings".(8)
The
staging of Shango de Ima must be seen within this context of a
changing political/social scene. For here was theatre celebrating Santeria
mythology both as art and, equally importantly, as a formative piece of
the national Cuban patrimony.
As
a cultural symbol Shango performs the Cuban iconography of publicly recognised
and acceptable black personal and communal power. In the words of Cuban
poet Rogelio Martinez Fure':
[page 308] Today
through the streets, in the bars, Shango brags about his gold medals,
his watches, his rings, burns his tobacco with obvious pleasure, scatters
his seed in all directions, flaunts his sex, boastful of his potency
and moving through the world as if he means to grab it all.(9)
Shango
de Ima begins with a song to Elegua, orisha of the crossroads, performed
onstage. Shango, child of Obatala wants to know his absent father and
his real name. Obatala answers him significantly : "You can call
yourself 'man', or 'the question' or you can take the name 'Black' which
is like our condition and our blood." And indeed Shango is all of
these things. He is a man, a black man, seeking his identity and his way
in life.
In
the course of the play Shango seeks out his real father, marries Obba,
sleeps with his adopted-mother Yemaya and makes love to the sisters Oya
and Oshun. Shango is quick to anger and reckless in his desires. (For
example, when poor Obba serves him her own ears for dinner when she can
find no meat, he rejects her as mutilated and earless.) Shango then rashly
battles Ogun.
When
all whom Shango has offended take their complaints against him to Obatala,
she decides his fate: Shango's punishment will be found in his own condition,
condemned to an eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth and battles without
end. "All paths of the road", says Obatala, "turn toward
their inevitable end in the quiet of the cemeteries."
Shango
has become a sort of Everyman, given life, power and love by the gods,
but out of the rebelliousness of his own nature he is unable to value
or keep his gifts. By placing the story in the distant past, among deities
and devoid of humans, the drama does not necessarily connect to or comment
on contemporary society or political events, although it certainly elevates
Santeria to both the level of art and to the level of universal spiritual
importance. Shango's miscues and his punishment are all too human and,
like Prometheus of Olympian [page 309] religion,
his rebelliousness, courage, and searching nature invite us as human beings,
whether white or black, to weigh the dualities of our own natures.
The
Brazilian play, Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns, has a much more immediate
socio-political goal. It's author, Abdias do Nascimento, is an Afro Brazilian
in a continuing color-conscious society. He served in the national legislature
and founded the Negro Experimental Theatre in Rio in 1944. His play, Sortilege
I, was the first play written by an Afro Brazilian having an Afro
Brazilian theme. Written in 1951 it was banned by the police for 6 years.
Abdias do Nascimento rewrote Sortilege I as Sortilege II: Zumbi
Returns after spending a year (1975-76) studying in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
Sortilege II seems to share some elements with Eugene O'Neill's
Emperor Jones. However, for Nascimento, the flight into the jungle
and the casting aside of Western dress is a positive return to honorable
roots rather than Jones' devolution into savagery.
The
Zumbi of the play's title was the elected king of the black Republic of
Palmares that welcomed escaping slaves and defended freedom against Portuguese
slavers for 100 years (1595-1696). In this play's celebration of Candomble
and Macumba (the Yoruba religions of Afro Brazilians), Zumbi is Egun.
That is, Zumbi is simultaneously political and religious, King and orisha.
Palmares (the place of the palms), represents axe' the life
force of the orisha religion, which is renewed by belief, worship and
sacrifice.
Brazil
was the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery, though they never
legalised segregation or criminalized miscegenation. In the 20th Century
Brazil embarked on a stated policy of embranquecimento (literally
'whitening') believing that intermarriage would create a people of a single
race. Questions of race were removed from census forms after 1950. However,
little thought was given to what would be lost if the population of white,
brown, and black were melted down into a single shared color or why blacks
needed whitening. In the end the process failed and 44% of Brazilians
remain identifiably black and brown,(10) though, economically and politically,
Blacks "...remain powerless in Brazil".(11)
[page
310] It was illegal for racial discord to be examined on stage
(the official reason for censoring Sortilege I back in the 1950's)
for fear it would spread beyond the theatres. Simultaneously Black culture
was appropriated and whitened in a search for a single common denominator
of culture. Nascimento writes bitterly of new high rise residential buildings
in Brazil named for Yoruba orishas, buildings so expensive and restricted
that, in his words, "black people cannot even live [there]".(12)
As one 1977 newspaper ad put it:
Osala is the greatest orisa. The Osaguian Building
is one of the highest on 7th Avenue. Osaguian is dressed in white and
marble is his symbol. The Osaguian Building is made of marble. By virtue
of his color and his symbol Osaguian is the Afro Brazilian god of peace
and love. The Osaguian Building features calm and luxury.(13)
Not only are blacks economically excluded from this
residence but the ads also tell them that white is the color of peace
and love, leaving one to wonder of what representation the color black
might be.
In
his political activities (he was elected to the National Assembly as a
Black Power exponent) and is his dramatic writing, Nascimento highlights
racial oppression and Black pride. In Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns,
the Afro Brazilian lawyer turned murderer, Dr. Emanuel Esquire, is fleeing
the police. Crashing through the forest, he stumbles onto a Temple of
Ogun. Pausing to catch his breath, this confirmed Catholic and earner
of a Ph.D. excoriates Macumba with words any white Brazilian might share:
"This is why these niggers don't get anywhere. All these centuries
in the middle of civilisation and what good has it done? Still believe
in witchcraft, [page 311] practice
Macumba. Animistic cults, evoking savage Gods. Gods!...Science has already
analysed that phenomenon. It's nothing more than collective hysteria....What
ignorance!.(14)
But
at the altar, Emanuel (a significantly Biblical name) is visited by the
resident orishas and by the people he has mistreated in the past: Ifigenia,
the Afro Brazilian he loved and abandoned as he sought success in the
white world and his white wife Margarida whom he strangled when, out of
racial animosity, she aborted their mixed race baby. As the police close
in, Emanuel sees the error of his racial self-hatred, sheds his western
clothes piece by piece, and reappears in formal African dress wearing
the crown of Ogun. In an emotional and spell-binding climax, as drums
beat in the background (again recalling The Emperor Jones) and
as the tension rises, Emanuel says: "Now I've gotten free. Forever.
I'm a true African". He kneels as a supplicant and an orisha brings
a sword down upon his neck. In the sacrifice, Emanuel's axe' is freed
and the life force replenished.
In
his 1973 essay "The Fourth Stage" Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka,
describes Yoruba tragic drama as unique, different from Greek tragedy
and from Nietzche's depiction of the Apollonian and Dionysian. To Soyinka,
Yoruba drama has its African roots in the re-enactment of a cosmic conflict
in which revelation and morality are equally at play. Yoruba tragedy,
he writes:
Plunges straight into the 'chthonic realm', the
seething cauldron of the dark world of will and psyche, the transitional
yet inchoate matrix of death and becoming. Into this universal womb
once plunged and emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within
the abyss.(15)
In the Yoruba reality, where past/present/and future
simultaneously coexist, life contains "the ancestral, the living,
and the unborn". But the abyss looms between gods (the orishas) and
men, [page 312] "a final severance",(16)
an abyss that can only be temporarily bridged by sacrifice, rituals and
ceremonies that appease the cosmic powers.
This
gulf has its historical plane as well. A once harmonious Yoruba world
(like a Garden of Eden, envisioned by Jews, Christians, and Muslims) has
been destroyed by the slave trade that ushered in an African Diaspora
that cut off adherents from their roots in the sacred Yorubaland city
of Ile Ife and cast them thousands of miles away to suffer in places like
Cuba and Brazil. Ironically, the importation of Christianity and Islam
into the modern state of Nigeria has seen both religions working to suppress
the indigenous religion of the orishas even as they battle each other.
Tragic
theatre both commemorates this great separation and acts to bridge the
chasm as it re-enacts simultaneously the timeless cosmic conflict and
the modern tragedy of slavery, racism, and oppression. "Ogun",
writes Soyinka, "is the embodiment of will and the will is the paradoxical
truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man".(17) For
oppressed Yoruba people in Cuba and Brazil, the daily humiliations of
slavery and transportation across the Atlantic were themselves psychic
re-enactments of this cosmic disruption of Yoruba cosmology. For them
immersion in the rules of the orisha is a reconnection with a cultural
past, a geographical reality, a religious mythos, and, sometimes, a political
agenda.
A
play may be a representation or use of religion for fiduciary, dramatic,
political, and/or religious purposes. Each of these two plays has been
written for a distinct national/political audience. With that audience
and political goals in mind the dramatists selected whose stories to tell,
how to tell them, and how to treat contemporary events within a common
history. Black identity, Black history, and Black religion are at the
heart of these two plays.
[page
313] Enslavement was a cataclysmic disruption to Yorubaland.
The disruption occurred on the level of family; those left behind were
bereft of fathers and husbands. On the level of country, the state lost
able-bodied warriors, leaders in commerce, and statesmen. Families left
behind faced economic deprivation while the country was left undefended.
For
those who were enslaved and transported to the Americas the event meant
a near complete separation from their society, culture, and religious
beliefs. For them it meant a loss of a sense of self. For all Yorubas,
slavery could be seen as the cosmic disruption, the disharmony and ruin
of Yoruba identity whose cyclic view of history and sense of racial continuity
was shattered. Undoubtedly then, 17th and 18th century Yorubas could relate
in immediate emotional ways to the origin stories of their orishas which
grew out of cosmic battles, rebellion, and defeat, so similar to their
own. Where Yorubas had lived in three simultaneous stages of existence
(1 past, present, future, 2 ancestor, living, and 3
unborn) they now entered a fourth stage, what Soyinka has called "the
dark continuum of transition...."(18) These plays are attempts to
both represent that dark transition and to navigate it into a new light
and a refreshment of axe', the Yoruba life force.
In
the plays, for example, the orisha Ogun appears in each play, although
how he is treated varies from play to play. Ogun, worshipped with palm
wine, is the God of war, revolution, and restorative justice.(19) Shango,
who of course is the main character of Shango de Ima, is the orisha
of fire, thunder, and lightening, of anger and retributive justice. Throughout
Carril's play, Shango is at war with his own emotions and the other orishas.
His struggle is a struggle to understand and control himself. On two occasions
Ogun and Shango fight and Ogun ultimately triumphs. When the other orishas
bring their complaints against Shango to Obatala he passes a judgment
upon this play's protagonist: "The joy which makes suffering possible,
the birth which leads to death will be your punishment and the punishment
of all men....all the [page 314] paths
of the road turn toward their inevitable end in the quiet of the cemeteries..."(20)
and these last words of dialogue are followed by the chant to Elegua that
opened the play.
Shango's
revolt has been defeated and in his defeat is a lesson for all mankind:
life, struggle, and striving only end in death. Here the catharsis of
Shango's defeat (a defeat based upon personal failings similar to those
of Oedipus or Willy Loman) returns the audience of this tragedy to a sense
of stasis and acceptance of their fate. It is a tragedy in a Western mode
based upon the fall of an individual with whom all in the audience, regardless
of race, can identify and learn better how to control their own appetites
to avoid a similar fate.
How
could it be otherwise in Cuba in 1970? Surely no play calling for continual
revolution or extolling victories to be won could be tolerated within
a revolutionary Cuban society that had already triumphed. Shango becomes
here the tamed mascot of a black race that has been integrated into and
benefited from the political revolution of 1959. In fact Shango's temper,
selfishness (the rejection of Obba and the seduction of Oya), boastfulness
(his battle with Ogun), and eventual defeat make him a sort of Everyman
who must be purged of his rebelliousness and reintegrated as a safe member
of the larger society who does not seduce women, cheat on his wife, or
battle his superiors. If Shango has not been 'whitened', he has been Cubanized.
When
Shango de Ima toured beyond Cuba and was produced in New York City
it was easy for non-Cubans and whites to embrace the drama and relate
to Shango's trials and tribulations. Though there could be no doubt that
these were black gods, with African hair and African features who wear
African clothing, their frailties and fears were universally recognizable.
Certainly
their representation on stage was a statement of Afro Cuban pride and
acceptance. As Antonio Castenada, President of the Yoruba Cultural Association
of Cuba said: "The orishas are not just gods, they are black gods.
We feel that nobody who truly is ready to [page
315] accept black gods can be racist".(21) The Cuban staging
of Shango de Ima was a public affirmation of the country's African
heritage and a political statement in a revolutionary society where a
black majority is still governed by an overwhelming white Communist Party
elite. Its performance is a show, a demonstration, and a lesson. As a
proclaimed Marxist-Leninist society Cuba cannot, by definition, be racist.
While it may recognize the historic struggle against racial oppression,
that past struggle must always be seen as secondary to the economic exploitation
of the proletariat, regardless of race. Producing and embracing Shango
de Ima demonstrates the end of racial oppression and the celebration
of Black culture cleansed of contemporary social commentary. Here Yoruba
religion becomes significant as anthropology, history, and colorful folklore.
Here Santeria adherents, white as well as black, make a personal religious
choice as do Cubans who choose Catholicism. And so their choice makes
no political statement.
In
contemporary capitalist Brazilian society, past racial oppression may
sometimes be admitted even as current discrimination must be denied. For
Nascimento and other Black power advocates, Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns
is a weapon, not a relic, icon, or symbol of the past. Nascimento as playwright
chooses to emphasize the humans, Emanuel, Ifigenia, and Margarida, rather
than the orishas. The human, Emanuel, enters the terreiro, (the
sacred and hidden ground where the altar to Ogun has been erected), rather
than having the gods come to him.
Emanuel's
nature, self-serving, reckless, impetuous, and violent is not unlike that
of the orisha Shango. He is, at first, an Everyman, whose ambitions have
brought ruin to others and ultimately led to his own downfall. But there
is a difference. Emanuel failed because he tried to escape his Blackness.
By forsaking a black lover for a white wife, earning a higher educational
degree, converting to Christianity, and dressing as a European, Emanuel
has cut himself off from his black identity.
His
murder of Margarida, though cruel and repellent, was inspired by her own
participation in an ongoing genocide: the murder of a black baby solely
because of its color. By [page 316] entering
the terreiro Emanuel attracts the orishas and begins his symbolic
return to his black roots. By laying aside his title, his degree, his
European dress, his religious prejudices, his very 'whiteness' that he
has become and under the tutelage of the orishas, he is an African again.
His death at the hands of the orishas is a sacrifice of the present to
the future of the race. Emanuel's last words are "I killed Margarida.
I am a free black man!".(22) A storm breaks over the terreiro
as he speaks (Shango's thunderbolts and lightening break on stage) and
the chorus chants "Axe'" and "Axe' Xango",
and then "Axe' Zumbi" conflating the life force with
the orisha Shango and then the historical black resistance hero Zumbi
as Emanuel becomes a part of them all. Emanuel falls, slain, onto the
altar of Ogun. The Chorus chants "Rest black man, slavery is over,
freedom's here" and their final chant as the curtain slowly falls
is "Axe! Axe! Axe! Axe! Axe!" And the continuing life
force is invoked for the audience, to empower them to action.
Sortilege
II: Zumbi Returns is an angry, defiant play, enlisting historical
memory and religious and cultural values in a battle for national liberation,
as described by Cabral in the quotation that begins this essay. The play
might well be censored or suppressed in Cuba today for challenging Communist
assumptions of racial harmony. But religions remain most vital while they
remain in opposition to the national status quo .
Endnotes
- qtd. in Soyinka, Wole.
Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture.
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1994) ix.
- Canizares, Raul. Walking
With the Night: The Afro Cuban World of Santeria. (Rochester, Vermont:
Destiny Books, 1993) 3.
- Carril, Pepe. Shango
de Ima: A Yoruba Mystery Play. (New York: Doubleday and Company,
Inc., 1970) 26.
- Martin, Randy. Socialist
Ensembles: Theatre and State in Cuba and Nicaragua. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 144.
- Joseph Pereira: "The
Black Presence in Cuban Theatre" in Afro-Hispanic Review,
January 1983) 15.
- Gravette, Gerald A. Cuba
Official Guide. (Havana: National Institute of Tourism, 1993) 27.
- Brandon, George. Santeria
from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993) 47.
- Robinson, Eugene. "An
Island of Faith" in The Washington Post. November 20, 2000.
- qtd. in Shango de
Ima 27.
- Fiola, Jan. Race Relations
in Brazil: A Reassessment of the "Racial Democracy" Thesis.
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990) 102.
- Fontaine, Pierre-Michel.
Race, Class, and Power in Brazil. (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1985) 56.
- Nascimento, Abdias do.
Brazil: Mixture or Massacre: Essays in the Genocide of a Black People.
(Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1979) 147.
- qtd. in Nascimento. Mixture
or Massacre 148.
- Nascimento, Abdias do.
Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns. in Crosswinds: An Anthology of
Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. ed. William B. Branch (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993). 207.
- Soyinka, Wole. Art,
Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1994) 28.
- Soyinka. Art 29.
- Soyinka. Art 30.
- Soyinka Myth 26.
- Soyinka Myth 54.
- Carril, Shango 89.
- Robinson, "An Island
of Faith".
- Nascimento, Sortilege
II 243.
- Nascimento, Sortilege
II 245.
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