Miracles of the People
By John Ryle The Times Literary Supplement, London July 31, 1998,
expanded
How a French ethnologist became a magician in Brazil
In late December 1997 I received an irresistible summons from Rio de
Janeiro. A samba school, União da Ilha do Governador, one of fourteen
in the Grupo Especial, the first division of carnival, was taking as its
theme for carnival the coming February the life of Pierre Verger, a
French photographer and ethnologist who lived in Brazil, in the
north-eastern city of Salvador da Bahia, from the late 1940s, off and
on, until his death in 1996. As a friend and sometime acolyte of Verger,
I was requested to join the ala de amigos, the "friends' wing"
of the school, one of the teams that would constitute the
thousand-strong assembly of dancers accompanying Ilha's floats in their
floodlit progress through the Sambódromo, a half-mile long defile in
downtown Rio where the carnival parade reaches its culmination
My initial reaction to the invitation was shock, then hilarity. What on
earth would Verger have thought ? The spirit of Rio carnival - profane,
lubricious, transcendentally kitsch - is fundamentally at odds with the
tranquility and profundity found in Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian
religion of which he was an adept and chronicler. Though carnival and
Candomblé both spring from the African strain in Brazilian culture,
they are quite distinct from one another, as different as rap and gospel
music. And Verger, although he took a certain pleasure in the iconic
status he acquired in Brazil towards the end of his life, would
undoubtedly have professed horror at the idea of joining the gallery of
popular heroes, musicians, rogues, and mythic figures that are
customarily portrayed on the carnival floats -- the carros alegóricos -
colossal pleasure-vessels that move in a sea of glitter and feathers,
surmounted by minor celebrities and near-naked dancers shimmying and
shaking their booty for the TV cameras.
Rio carnival has become a highly orchestrated piece of television
entertainment. Although it remains an authentic popular event, with
hundreds of thousands of Cariocas (as the inhabitants of the city are
known) joining in as spectators or participants, the high point of
carnival is pure showbiz: an elaborate, formalized and highly
competitive contest between samba schools, which vie with each other in
the extravagance of their displays and the brilliance of their dancing
and musicianship. A typical samba school (the term refers not to any
educational function, but to its communal character, as in a school of
whales) is identified with one of the morros, the hill-top shanty-towns
that dot the landscape of the city, and is financed by the local
drug-barons and organizers of the jogo de bicho, the illegal numbers
racket. The core membership of a school is drawn from the inhabitants of
the morro - poor, black or mulato, people at the bottom of Brazil's
pyramid of race and wealth. Carnival in Rio is a holiday from reality, a
dream of opulence, where all partake, for a moment, of the glamour
marketed by the telenovelas and miniséries, the soaps shown daily on
Globo and Manchete, Brazil's leading TV channels. During carnival, for
two or three days of practically non-stop live broadcasts, the people
themselves become the show; the society of the spectacle feasts on
itself. As Joãzinho Trinta, most august of the carnavalescos (the
professional metteurs-en-scène of the samba schools) is wont to say,
"it is only intellectuals who are interested in poverty; what the
people like is luxury."
Pierre Fatumbi Verger did not like to be called an intellectual. And his
life in Brazil was far removed from the glitz and mammon-worship of
carnival. But it was not distant from the life of the people.
Candomblé, in a more fundamental sense than carnival, creates a world
where, as Verger put it, those at the bottom of the social scale are
lifted up, a world in which the capacity to enter trance and incorporate
the spirits of West African divinities, the òrìsà (or orixás as the
word is transliterated in Portuguese) gives a measure of dignity to the
poor and downtrodden. In nineteenth-century Salvador, in the terreiros
of Candomblé - the temples and sacred groves that today outnumber the
city's churches - slaves and descendants of slaves reinvented the
culture of the Yoruba and other African peoples, creating an urban,
new-world form of African ritual and cosmology, an act of faith that may
be compared to the reinvention of Christianity in North America by
Mormons. It is not only that Candomblé is the creation of black
Brazilians, it is also a world where social relations within the world
of the urban poor as a whole are transfigured, where, notably,
homosexual men and women may become figures of influence, where the
doubly discriminated against can attain high status.
It was this Candomblé community of Salvador, that Verger, an exile from
bourgeois existence in pre-World War II France, took as his own.
Although he rejected the label "intellectual", habitually
referring to scholars as "imposters" and "colourless
parrots", he became its leading chronicler. His historical work on
the slave trade and his documentation, in writing and photographs, of
religious practice in the linked cultures of West Africa and
North-Eastern Brazil, locate him in the world of learning. But for
Verger these activities were all ways of drawing closer to the black
Brazilians who were the objects of his admiration and affection. As he
put it in an interview with Emmanuel Garrigues (quoted in a recent essay
by Stéphane Malysse):
Soyons francs, l´ethnographie ne m'interesse que modérément. Je
n'aime pas étudier les gens... ce que j'aime, c'est de vivre avec les
gens et de les voir vivre d´une façon différente de la mienne. . .
To be frank, ethnography does not interest me that much. I don't like
studying people… what I like is to live with people and see how their
lives are different from mine.
For the last decades of his life Verger lived a life of extreme
simplicity in a low-income bairro of Salvador called Vila América, part
of the larger neighbourhood called Vasco da Gama. He had no telephone,
not even a radio. For some months in the late 1980s I was his guest
there, staying in a half-abandoned house at the back of his property, a
house that, since his death, has become the Fundação Verger, an
institute dedicated to research in the field he pioneered. The day I
moved into my new quarters Verger enquired if I was superstitious.
"No, not really", I replied. "That is good," said
Verger. Then he informed me, with a characteristically subliminal
chuckle, that the building had been the site of a recent tragedy. Its
previous inhabitants, he said, had come to an untimely end: "Ils se
suicident ici - toute la famille."
It was at that time, in the main house, with the help of his research
assistant, a medical student named Fábio Araújo, that Verger was
slowly and laboriously assembling the information on Yoruba traditional
medicine that now appears in Ewé (the title of the book is the Yoruba
word for leaf.) To say that Verger lived ascetically would be an
understatement. He survived on toast and black coffee, with the
occasional boiled egg - though he would sometimes also offer me, using
the exaggerated French accent with which he amused himself when speaking
English, "a little cup of thé". When I brewed coffee in his
kitchen I would be reminded to seal the unused coffee filters in a tin;
the cockroaches, he explained, were partial to the glue in the seams.
Cooking was done on a blackened two-ring gas burner. Once I found a
mouse asleep in the oven. The long-suffering Fábio, now a medical
doctor in São Paulo, said to me on one occasion "You know, I do
draw the line at reheated tea."
Verger was serious and a trifle possessive about his research. The
sheets of paper that contained the data on Yoruba herbal medicine that
he had collected twenty or thirty years earlier in Nigeria and Benin, he
habitually referred to, in a pun true to the Yoruba taste for deep word
play, as his "leaves". These leaves drifted from room to room
of the house - formulae, invocations and lists of ingredients, fragments
of an old world scheme of knowledge, most of which - although it has
been partially reconstructed in the new world religion of the orixás -
exists only in West Africa; and some of it now not even there. There
were no copies.
From a cupboard in the kitchen, meanwhile, the negatives of five decades
of Verger's photographic work, the visual analogue of his scholarly
explorations in African cosmology, some still unprinted, most
unpublished, spilled carelessly out onto the floor. Full of books and
papers, the house was a tinderbox. But it enjoyed the protection of
African deities, being dedicated to Xangô, the Yoruba Sòngó, god of
fire, and painted a deep red in his honour. It was the same stock of red
paint, Verger would point out with amused satisfaction, as had been used
to decorate the fire station in downtown Salvador. (He was acquainted
with the dangers of fire, having earlier lived on the top floor of a
spectacularly burned-out building in Pelhourinho, Salvador's
then-ruinous historical centre.)
The red façade of Verger's house stood out from the deep green of the
trees on the steep slopes of Vila América - you could see it from half
a mile away. In addition to this colour symbolism, Verger had placed
inside the front door a local ironworker's representation of Exú, the
trickster messenger of the orixás, dweller at crossroads and guardian
of thresholds. It was no doubt the high level of supernatural protection
afforded by these divinities that kept the leaves and photographic
negatives safe from theft or accidental destruction during those years.
Slowly, during the 1970s and 1980s collections of Verger's photographs
were published, or republished, under the Corrupio imprint, by Arlete
Soares, a São Paulo publisher and friend of Verger. Now, in The
Go-Between, a selection is finally available in an international
edition. In Ewé, meanwhile, the results of Verger's long and
painstaking investigation of the Yoruba art of medicine also see the
light, completing the last phase of his scholarly work, an enterprise
which began with his monumental study of the slave trade, Flux et reflux
de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os
Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (a book invoked by Bruce Chatwin, in
his rather shorter work, The Viceroy of Ouidah, principally, one
suspects, for the magnificent gravity of its title)
Ewé is not a work of analysis. It's more like a cookbook - a book of
recipes, of medicinal herbs and materia magica. Should you wish to cast
a spell - to cure worms, say, or get rich, or make rain fall, or make
someone fall down a well, or render them sexually impotent (or find a
cure for impotence) or - a rarer requirement nowadays - make a peasant
dance in front of a king, then this book will inform you, or remind you
if you are already an adept, of the ingredients and forms of words
required. Verger writes from within the Yoruba tradition, as a babalâo,
or father of secrets, a devotee of Ifá, the spirit of divination, a
role into which he was initiated in 1952 in Dahomey, where he was also
given the name Fatumbi (signifying symbolic rebirth under Ifá's aegis).
It was a name that he used with pride. Ewé is, accordingly, a book that
takes little or no account of developments in the academic fields of
ethnobotany and ethnomedicine. What it provides - as Theodore Monod, one
of Verger's academic patrons, said, a trifle bluntly, of Flux et Reflux
- is a rubble of information ("cet énorme volume de moellons")
building material for some future architect.
Nor does Ewé broach the question of the survival of Yoruba medical
techniques in Brazil, though Verger was himself an occasional consultant
to practitioners of this art in Bahia. Fortunately, however,
Afro-Brazilian herbal medicine is the subject of a useful new book by
Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé. Here, Voeks describes how,
while their white masters were introducing temperate agrosystems to the
tropical environment of North-Eastern Brazil, Brazilian slaves were busy
discovering analogues to the flora they had left behind in West Africa.
Geomorphological happenstance - which links North-Eastern Brazil to the
Bight of Benin as part of the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana -
has produced an environment in Bahia that is not so far removed from
that of West Africa. Thus some of the key ingredients of traditional
Yoruba and Fon medicine (and cuisine), such as dendê palm oil, the
viscous reddish oil familiar to lovers of Bahian street food, were
easily introduced and cultivated in the new world. For others, such as
the iroko tree, the tree at the heart of the Yoruba sacred grove,
Afro-Brazilians were able to find botanically related local substitutes.
The species lists in Ewé and in Sacred Leaves are important
contributions to ethnobiology. They also act as a metonym, a key example
of the process of cultural translation and substitution that brought the
wider Afro-Brazilian cultural world into being, the world that Verger
documented so copiously and with such loving empathy.
The Go-Between is a selection of the photographs that once mouldered in
Verger's kitchen cupboard. It's an apt title: Verger moved back and
forth between Africa and Bahia, reintroducing one to the other, both in
his scholarly research and his work as a photographer. Unlike the
pictures in his most remarkable photographic work, Dieux d'Afrique
(1954), which paired images of West African religious rituals with their
Brazilian equivalents, those in The Go-Between are not arranged
ethnographically, but chronologically and topographically. They reveal a
further aspect of Verger's work: the global range of his working life in
the years after he left France, before he settled in Brazil.
Verger was a true world-wanderer, determinedly expatriate. He was born
in 1902 to a prosperous family of Belgian immigrants in Paris, where his
father owned a printing works, and in old age his good manners still
bespoke the discipline and charm of the French grands bourgeois. But he
spoke with loathing of his upbringing, professing, like Jean-Paul
Sartre, to hate everything about his childhood. This antipathy to the
culture of his birth did not drive him to activism or moral philosophy,
as it did Sartre; it found its outlet in another form of escape, a
centrifugal trajectory that drew him to the tropics, to the allure of
otherness embodied in non-European peoples. As his fellow photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson put it succinctly, "He came from a grand
family, but his first pictures were of prostitutes in Mexico."
The photographs Verger took during his Wanderjahre, in the nineteen
thirties, forties and fifties, are a tour d'horizon of the Western world
on the brink of decolonization. They were published in Life magazine, in
the London Daily Mirror and in a number of collections - now rare -
produced by French publishers. These are pictures of people in their own
element, largely on their own terms - in Tahiti and Algeria, in Harlem
and Haiti, in Cuba, Surinam and Ecuador, in Mauretania, Rwanda and
Niger. The photographs are all - or nearly all - of people rather than
landscapes or artefacts. Some are of notables: Trotsky and Diego Riveira
in Mexico, Hemingway in Cuba, Chiang Kai-Chek in Nanking, Yoruba and Fon
religious dignitaries in Nigeria and Dahomey. Most, however, are of
good-looking young men - dockers and colporteurs, ferrymen and
musicians. Verger's eye plays over limbs and faces, taking in the light
on the smoke of an exhaled cigarette, the glance between two friends,
the half-closed eyes of a man in trance. Or it comes to rest on a youth
with whom, it seems clear, he is himself exchanging a flirtatious stare
- a kind of photographic counter-transference. Verger's sensibility was,
as these pictures bear witness, manifestly homoerotic. But they are
pictures from an age of innocence, when the contract between
photographer and subject could remain unexamined.
Huge enlargements of these pictures adorned the carros alegóricos that
were assembled outside the Sambódromo in Rio at midnight on Shrove
Tuesday, 1998, when I arrived to join the throng of União da Ilha's
carnival supporters. Standing out from the crowd was Milton Cunha,
Ilha's extravagantly-attired carnavalesco, the architect of this homage
to Verger. He was dressed in skin-tight black leather in the
eighty-degree heat. On his head he wore a helmet with pair of bright red
horns - a reference to the colours and accoutrements of Exú, trickster
intermediary of the orixás (a figure who acquires a lurid, demonic
aspect in the half-Christianized appropriations of African religious
systems that are practised in Rio). Milton Cunha was doing a last-minute
inspection of the floats he had created. Among them was a Mount
Rushmore-sized sculpture of Verger, carved from Styrofoam, and a giant
model of a single-lens reflex camera, recognisable as Verger's 6 x 6 cm
Rolleiflex, magnified to the power of a hundred, with a group of dancers
pirouetting atop the viewfinder. Two youths lay stretched out on
projecting spars like jaguars, their limbs dangling above the
groundlings. In the midst of all this kitsch Milton had succeeded in
retaining vivid glimpses of the Vergerian aesthetic; the lounging youths
formed exactly the kind of tableau that, in life, would have caught the
photographer's eye.
The amigos de Verger were in the rearguard of the parade, where any
amateurishness on our part would be inconspicuous and less subject to
scrutiny by the judges. We were kitted out in our carnival costumes,
white, with an ethereal screen-printed portrait of Verger on the front,
and on the back an image of the shaved, painted and befeathered head of
a Candomblé initiate. As the clock moved towards the hour of judgement
in the Sambodrome a good few of us were still struggling to master the
lyrical and rhythmic complexities of the song we would be singing in the
parade. This samba-enredo (story-samba), composed each year by the most
talented lyricists and musicians of each samba school, is the text of
carnival, the thread that unites the costumes, the floats, the dances
and the rhythm of the drums. União da Ilha's samba was called "Fatumbi,
A Ilha de Todos Os Santos" - the Island of All Saints - a title
that combined a reference to Verger's Yoruba name with a fusion of the
name of the school, Ilha, and the city where Verger lived, which enjoys
the name of Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (known variously in
Brazil as "Salvador" or "Bahia").
The composers of the samba were three stalwarts of the school, Marco
André, Almir da Ilha and Mauricio 100; the singing was led by a
Pavarotti-sized baritone named Rixa. The task of keeping a
thousand-strong chorus in synchrony as the parade turned the corner into
the sambadrome was down to pairs of compositores assigned to each wing.
Dancing backwards into the light, they whipped us into a frenzy of
repetition. Vem ver, vem ver, began our song, a bateria arrepiar:
Come - the drums will make you tremble... Shine down on us, divine gift
! A child of destiny, born in thrall to Ifá Crosses the sea with our
Island. The vessel is a slave ship With the orixás on board... Giving
himself to them completely, He is consecrated a diviner. The white man
becomes a magician.
Verger, this child of destiny, our song explained, had crossed over,
from the Old World to the New, and, before that, from the culture of his
birth to that of Africa, the domain epitomized by Ifá, Yoruba spirit of
divination. And there he had become a magician, homem feitiçeiro.
Negro chora, negro ri, ran the chorus of the samba
Black people lament and laugh Love, love Black is the race and black the
cry Black people are so handsome And Fatumbi was their photographer.
This voyage that Verger made, we sang, changed the course of his life -
muda sua trajetoria. After this he settled in Bahia and became an adept
of Candomblé:
He changes course and comes away, Making Bahia his home. And becomes a
son-of-saint of Mãe Senhora . . .
This name, the name of Mãe Senhora, is one to conjure with in Salvador,
especially in the world of Candomblé. Among the Cariocas, though, in
the flag-waving, dancing crowd that lined the terraces of Rio's
Sambadrome, only a few would have fully understood this reference to the
redoubtable woman who was Verger's mentor and protector. A high
dignitary of Bahian Candomblé, until her death in the 1970s, Mãe
Senhora was the presiding priestess at the most celebrated terreiro in
the city, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, the House of the Power of the Sign of
Xangô. It was she who put Verger's house in Vila América under the
protection of Xangô (a god who is the patron not only of fire, but also
thunder, forked lightning, justice, money, and a few other things
besides).
Verger, who lost his own mother when he was in his twenties, spoke of
Mãe Senhora with a wry reverence. Strictly-speaking - pace Marco André
and the co-authors of our samba - he was not actually her filho-de-santo
(that is, her initiate or "son-of-saint"), since it was in
Benin, not Brazil, that he went through the full-scale initiation into
the religion of the Yoruba. But soon after he settled in Bahia, Verger
became a frequenter of Mãe Senhora's terreiro, along with a number of
Bahian artists and intellectuals, and she appointed him to one of the
posts in the elaborately Yorubafied hierarchy that she reserved for
patrons of the temple: in Verger's case the role of Oju Obá, the Eye of
the King ("King" being, here, an honorofic term for Xangô).
The portrait that Verger took of Mãe Senhora, swathed in bounteous
starched crinolines and flowing brocades, is an arresting study in
matriarchal hauteur. It is an act of homage unlike any of the other
pictures that he took, either of celebrities or lounging youths. And he
always spoke of her, unlike many of those he knew, with respect and
affection. He was not, however, completely under her sway. Once, when I
was driving across town with him, he pointed out to me the site of
another Candomblé temple near Afonjá. "I used to go there to make
Mãe Senhora jealous," he said. "It was the only way I could
get her to tell me her secrets."
He also resisted his mentor in another respect. Although Mãe Senhora
dedicated him, as well as his house, to Xangô, the patron of her
terreiro, Verger came, finally, to serve another orixá, Oxalá, the
father of the gods (the Yoruba Òrìsàálá or Obàtálá). Oxalá
eclipsed Xangô as his principal orixá (in the Candomblé phrase, the
"possessor of his head"). Although his house remained painted
red for Xangô, Verger's habitual dress, by the time I knew him, was a
flowing tie-dyed white shirt with blue patterning, conforming to the
sartorial convention of Candomblé iconography, where the figure of
Oxalá is always dressed in white, and to the customs of Salvador,
where, on Fridays, many of the inhabitants of the city don white in
Oxalá's honour, imparting an ethereal glimmer to the streets at dusk.
Thus the final float in Ilha's Carnival homage to Verger, which
portrayed him in cadaverous old age, had him swathed in white and
silver, his thirty-foot high head surrounded by a canopy of light that
turned out, on examination, to be a representation of a giant flash
bulb. Fatumbi Illuminado, read the inscription, Encontra Oxalá. "Fatumbi,
Radiant, Comes Face-to-Face with Oxalá". In this last tableau
Milton Cunha, the carnavalesco, had excelled himself. It was a vision of
blinding whiteness: the photographer, the magician of light, the Eye of
Xangô, caught at the point of death, passing through the lens into the
brightness of eternity.
At a certain point in Ilha's samba-enredo, there was a cunning
modulation in the drumming of the bateria that conjured up the rhythm of
Oxalá - that is to say, the percussive signature, specific to a
specific orixá, that is employed in Candomblé to invoke spirit
possession among adepts. At this point, it seemed to me, the rhythm
modulated from that of Oxalá into that of Xangô, Verger's other orixá.
Maybe I was mistaken: it was some years since I had been in a terreiro;
my memory of the drums had been blurred by time. But there in the
fantastic light and noise of the sambadrome, with a hundred drummers
surrounding us, I felt myself instantly transported back to Salvador, to
the Saturday night drumming rituals in which candomblézeiros would
become possessed by these dancing African gods. And as we paraded
through the canyon of spectators I saw in my mind's eye - and felt in my
limbs - the transe-en-danse that had intrigued and detained me there, as
it had intrigued and detained Verger so many decades earlier when he
first visited Brazil.
Candomblé beguiles the unbeliever. It is partly because no one ever
asks the question "Do you believe ?". Like most African
religions, it is system not of creeds but of observances. At its heart
is a dance, a visible leap of faith, a wordless submission to possession
by a deity, a religious experience so spectacular and all-absorbing that
the question of belief may be considered otiose. The Brazilian singer
and composer Caetano Veloso, himself from Bahia, suggests this in a song
called "Milagres do Povo" - miracles of the people - a
description of the middle passage and of the reinvention of tradition by
slaves in the new world. He pays characteristically elegant tribute, in
this song, to Verger's role as Ojuobá, the eyes of Xangô, the observer
and chronicler of the cultural endurance of Afro-Brazilians.
Quem é ateu, Caetano begins, in his limpid tenor, e viu milagres como
eu. . .
Atheists who've seen miracles, as I have done Know that where God is
not, the gods Don't disappear; they multiply. The gods don't give up;
for the sovereign heart, Cannot be confined by slavery, Cannot be
confined by "No". So much "Yes" can never be
confined: The dancing Yes The Yes of sex The glorious Yes That arches
across our history Ojuobá came here - and he saw this
Verger's vision of black Brazil was imbued in this way with love and
with learning. It was, both in its beginning and its end, a vision of an
ideal. For him Salvador was the place where black people had contrived
to redeem the history of slavery, wresting dignity and power out of the
cruelty and humiliation of the slave trade. A recent Brazilian
television documentary about Verger includes an interview (given on what
turned out to be the penultimate day of his life) in which he mentions a
long-time friend and former protégé of his, the pai-de-santo Balbino
Daniel de Paula. He explains that Balbino, although he was an illiterate
okra seller in the market in Salvador when they first met, had no sense
of social inferiority, "because," Verger tells the
interviewer, "he knew he was a son of Xangô".
For Verger the miracle of the people thus held out the promise of
redemption, of reconciliation between blacks and whites, between the
peoples of the African diaspora and the descendants of their former
masters, including exiles like himself, who were also indirect
beneficiaries of their labour. The inversion of social relations in the
terreiros of Salvador da Bahia extended, in his vision of things, to the
entire city.
At this point a reservation needs to be made. Verger's understanding of
Afro-Brazilian culture was deep and sincere, but it was partial. Race
relations in Salvador, as the Bahian historian João José Reis pointed
out in an obituary of Verger in the Folha de S. Paulo, cannot accurately
be portrayed the way Verger was wont to do, as a meeting of calm waters,
as the redemptive coexistence of different cultures. Despite the
ubiquitous African flavour of Bahian culture, political and economic
power there remains, as it does in the rest of Brazil, with os brancos.
Verger was by no means sentimental about human nature - he applauded,
for example, what he described as the moral realism of Candomblé, with
its acknowledgement of the universality of malice - yet his own
asceticism and a tendency to what may be termed nostalgie de la
bidonville could blind him, on occasion, to the economic reality of the
lives of the poor black inhabitants of his adopted city.
Verger, then, lived the life of Candomblé and performed its rituals; he
officiated at hundreds of Candomblé ceremonies. His life's work was to
record and celebrate the religion of the orixás. But did he in any
sense believe in it ? It had been a question in the mind of his first
academic patron, Théodore Monod, then Director of the Institut
Français d'Afrique Noire, who is quoted in The Go-Between. "Ce
n'est pas tout de même pas," wrote Monod, "pour que Pierre
Verger se convertisse au paganisme que j'ai obtenu des bourses d'étude
pour lui" (I didn't get scholarships for Pierre Verger so he could
convert himself to Paganism).
For adherents of Candomblé the question of formal belief may be beside
the point, but in the western tradition, in the tradition Verger sprang
from, it cannot be avoided. Had it really been as we sang in the
carnival samba ? "Se entrega por inteiro…"
Giving himself completely He is consecrated a diviner. The white man
becomes a magician.
While I was staying with Verger in Bahia I was curious, naturally, to
know to what extent, living in that red house dedicated to Xangô, with
its metal Exús guarding the door, he had come to reside spiritually as
well as physically in the universe of the orixás, in the world of
diviners and magicians. The question was given additional weight for me
by the problem I was having defining my own relation to Candomblé. As
an itinerant researcher and lapsed anthropologist, in Bahia I found
myself a spectator at the ceremony, seduced yet sceptical, in a terrain
vague between ravishment and unbelief.
Years earlier, as a student of anthropology at Oxford preparing for
fieldwork in South Sudan, I recollected, I had listened in on a
conversation in which E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the doyen of British
anthropologists, the author, inter alia, of the classic ethnographic
monograph Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, discussed this
question of belief. E-P, as he was known, then in his final days,
maintained that while he was engaged in field work in Sudan, immersed in
the Zande spiritual world, he found himself acting to all intents and
purposes as though he himself believed, as Zande did, in the reality of
witchcraft and divination. But this state of mind, he said, lasted only
until he left the field. Back in his own culture he became a child of
the Enlightenment again.
Verger, unlike E-P, did not frequent the academy. He never left the
field. The field was where he spent his life. When I was with him in
Bahia, sometimes accompanying him to Candomblé ceremonies where he
performed a ritual function that was certainly more than ornamental, I
wondered whether it was possible, living as he had for so long on terms
of intimacy with the Candomblézeiros, that he had gone so far as to
take on their view of the world as his primary mental reality. Or
alternatively, whether Candomblé had somehow delivered him from the
demands of belief - into a world where religion was defined solely by
observances and performances.
I knew he did not consider himself a Catholic (unlike E-P, who became a
Catholic convert). Verger's intellectual temper was much too sceptical
for revealed religion. He had rejected Christianity as part of the
baggage of Western bourgeois culture and spoke of it with a certain
bitterness. Once, for instance, while I was staying with him, a
supplicant came to his door to try and borrow money. The man pleaded
with Verger to help him pelo amor de Deus; Verger told him he should not
be foolish, that there was no God and, if there was, no evidence that he
loved men.
Clearly, for Verger, the god of his fathers was not part of his
cosmology. What was less clear, however, was his epistemological
relation to the religion that he had served half his lifetime. There was
no doubt that his interest in Candomblé was much more than
ethnological; he was concerned that it be recognised as a religious
system on a par with religions of the book, such as Christianity.
According to his protégée, the ethnomusicologist Angela Lühning (now
Project Director at the Fundação Verger in Salvador) he saw, in the
system of consecration to a particular orixá, a recognition and
exaltation of the individual personality, of deep aspects of character
otherwise obscured by the process of socialization and education. (As
Caetano Veloso put it, "…os deuses sem deus /Não cessam de
brotar" - where there is no God, the gods multiply.) This hidden
personality, Verger held, is what manifests itself in the possession
trance - or, as he preferred to call it, the expression-trance.
One day in Salvador I gathered the courage to ask him a crucial question
- a question all researchers into trance-based religions would like to
put to the authorities in their field. Had he himself, I asked, ever
gone into trance ?
"Alas," he said, "I am far too French for that. Far too
rational."
Then he added, with uncharacteristic vehemence, "Reason. It kills
everything. All chance for pleasure, for relaxation, for real
sentiment."
Embarrassed by this unwonted strength of feeling, but not enough to be
deterred, I persevered with my line of enquiry. Although he, Verger,
might not be an adept, I pointed out, he certainly knew, as I did,
plenty of people who habitually went into trances. And he talked of
these friends of his quite naturally in terms of the orixás they were
held to embody when they were in the trance-state. Had he not, just the
other day, I reminded him, together with his friend, the pai-de-santo
Balbino Daniel de Paula, been casting the cowrie shells and deciphering
their patterns in order to discover what Ifá, the Yoruba spirit of
divination, had to say about their fortunes in the coming year ? Clearly
in his own life, I suggested, he had embraced the descriptive language
of Candomblé, its deep metaphor. Wasn't there consequently a sense in
which he did, in fact, believe in the orixás, in their day-to-day
reality ?
I was to see Verger several times in the years after I left Salvador, in
Rio de Janeiro and in London, but this was the only occasion that I
ventured to raise the subject of his personal beliefs. I sensed his
exasperation at my pertinacity, or my literal-mindedness. He turned
towards me and repeated the question. "You want to know if I
believe in them?" he asked. Then, turning away again, with an air
of regret and finality, speaking first French, then English, he said.
"Je vis comme si. I live as if ."
John Ryle is Anthropology and Ecology Editor of the Times Literary
Supplement
Post Script
Caetano Veloso, composer of the song, "Milagres do Povo", had
this to say on Verger's vision of race relations in Salvador and Jõao
Reis' critique of it: "Both are right and wrong," he wrote in
an e-mail, "Truth should be searched [for] in the tension between
the two poles."
Books reviewed
Pierre Verger Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society 744 pp.
Odebrecht / Companhia das Letras, São Paulo. n.p. (French edition:
Maisonneauve & Larose. Fr 198) 8 57164 514 0
Pierre Verger The Go-Between / Le Messager: Photographs 1932-1962 237
pp. 215 photographs. Ed. Revue Noir, Paris / D.A.P., New York $65 2
909571 24 6 hardback, 2 909571 25 4 paperback
Robert A. Voeks Sacred Leaves of Candomble: African magic, medicine and
religion in Brazil 236 pp. U. Texas, Austin. $17.95 paperback $37.50
hardback 0 292 78731 6 paperback
Video / Film / Interview
Pierre Fatumbi Verger Conspiraçao Filmes, 1998
Pierre Verger "Entretien avec E. Garrigues" L'Ethnographie
109, 1991
Recent studies of Verger
Angela Lühning "Pierre Fatumbi Verger e sua obra"
Salvador da Bahia, Brazil: Afro-Ásia 21-22, 1998-1999
J. Souty "Comme un seul homme, Pierre Fátumbi Verger" Paris:
Revue l'Homme 147, 1998
Stéphane Malysse "Les Inconsciences de l'oeil" Ms., n.d.
© John Ryle 1998 All Rights Reserved E-mail: john@ryle.net
