De-Whitening the City
The “De-whitening the City” Podcast is a place born of the desire of five black women, residents of Salvador, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, to overcome geographical distances so as to promote and celebrate the act of gathering. Emmily Leandro, Gabriela Gaia, Luciana Mayrink, Malu de Barros and Natalia Alves are the Terra Preta Collective, which shapes and gives voice to this exercise of creating a shared virtual territory — both a political and an aesthetical venture — now made public for the first time.
In the upcoming episodes, we will assemble our distinct pathways, accumulations and baggage as they intersect with our experiences, stories, memories, affections, and professional and activist performances. We will think and talk about cities, the lives within them and also their overflows. We are interested in dialogue as a creative gesture, capable of weaving Afro-diasporic feminist cartographies, which articulate “root and errantry” (in reference to Edmilson de Almeida Pereira) and leak into words the smell-strength of earth and sea, as the writer Cristiane Sobral combines so well in her poem “Águas” [Waters].
Because to ‘de-whiten the city’ means to re-populate it with so many things that have been seized from it as if they were not dignified, relevant, proper or real.
The city is discursively and politically constructed by specific sectors, agents and subjects as a small, poor and incomplete fiction, as such separating, minimizing, undermining and demonizing all that which otherwise permits and maintains its life. We will neither let go of revering, acknowledging, and carrying on the teachings of our elders, nor will we shy away from envisioning and daring greater futures.
In finding ourselves in women like Beatriz Nascimento, we recognize our oceanic and infinite nature. We carry a map-body of faraway countries and remake ourselves on each piece of land we have seen reborn in such unlikely ways in so many corners.
We can claim nothing less than the city as a territory of ancestral rights, which we will read from perspectives, policies and cosmologies that make sense to us, not from those violently naturalized or imposed upon us over time. This will help us all to gain something. In this first post, we present three questions that bring us to a configuration of the intersection that constitutes this territory and that are pushing us forward.
The first concerns the shared writing that comes before the audio performance. We take the collective exercise of writing as a way of producing space, shortening distances and creating connections, which only makes sense as a collective pursuit. Gloria Anzaldua, an American writer of Mexican origin, wrote that in the company of other women “the loneliness of writing and the sense of powerlessness dissipate”; that this collective movement of women, even if they were to write individually, would make their writing jump to a place beyond time and space.
“Where I forget about myself and feel like one with the universe. This is power”, wrote Gloria.
When we reaffirm this act of writing as a collective act, we tell the world that we are not alone. We write with many hands. We seek inspiration from the amazing women who have crossed our paths one way or another. The women in our families, friends, warriors and militants, scholars, writers, musicians, artists in general, healers, and as many as it makes sense to interact with to create our territories. We regard the text as a shelter and as a meeting place — in the same way we see the city. And this range of presence, relationship, and coexistence is part of it.
The second element of this intersection — and there is no hierarchy to this ordering — is the conviction that the contents we wish to talk about urge for new ways of communicating. How to express the knowledge which has brought us here, passed down by word of mouth by our ancestors? How to construct a text as disobedient as the practices of back women in daily life? These questions run through us as we weave words to discuss possible cities.
Expressing our voice on paper as a way of feeding explanations and representations that affirm our humanity is an exercise. The text has long been a tool that enabled oppression. As bell hooks writes,
“Black diaspora women have not started to write naturally, for there is always someone ready to silence the natural impulse of creation, as soon as it manifests in us. So, in order to write, we must always resist. We must always remember that our ancestors sacrificed themselves so that we could have the ability to read — in order that we could also be able to write.”
To write, therefore, is to make sense of our existence, to own our history, as the American Patricia Bell Scott affirms.
In claiming writing, the rise of a universe becomes possible, where language can be reinvented, resignified and freed — even if only momentarily.
In this sense, Grada Kilomba, a Portuguese woman of Angolan and São Tomé and Príncipe origin, points to writing and art as places where we meet again, where we can “describe rather than be described”, where we can speak rather than be spoken about, “where I will be the author and the authority of my own story” says the interdisciplinary artist.
Minas Gerais writer Carolina Maria de Jesus knew very well the power inherent in the act of writing her own story: “Our writing is a weapon,” she used to say. “I will put your name on my book”, she would tell those who insulted her. What do we learn from Carolina Maria de Jesus’ disobedient and courageous writing?
It is about weaving new urban plots. What are black women doing in the city? How do black women build cities? We are aware that text and city do not coincide, do not get in each other’s way. But what comes to surface in the “verb residues” — a beautiful and powerful idea we have borrowed from the Minas Gerais poet Leda Maria Martins — when we take as common thread the narratives of these women and their Afro diasporic writings?
The third question is how we will bring to the center of our space, questions that are so dear to us — though all too often neglected — without becoming worn out at the end of each episode? In fact, this may be the greatest motivation for us to exist in this virtual space, co-inhabiting these words multiple times. Because this body still surrenders to the exhaustion of personal and professional lives, moving around this minefield city. Because this body also tears and is torn apart when it vocalizes and consolidates that which occurs between thoughts and words. Explaining the things we have experienced during this time helps us understand much of what we feel about the transformation of silence into language and action that Audre Lorde, an American writer from The Caribbean, speaks of. Whom does our silence serve?
The silence and absence of memory regarding the intellectual contribution and practices of black women and men in the city were sustained for centuries in learning spaces. Nonetheless, we never stopped talking or producing knowledge. We must consider that the permission required for certain groups to do so using their own voice were, and continue to be, asymmetric. So, finding a way to go back to what is not visible about our own people is urgent. When we look at the paths we have consolidated and the spaces we are occupying in universities, offices, galleries, we delve into ourselves and into the memories built in this endless field. We recognize one another when we weave and recompose our ancestry, with which we forge new-old knowledge that can and should enhance our ways forward. This knowledge in action escapes the exhausting zone of pain promoted by colonial trauma.
This is not a task for one woman only, and so here we are uncovering the healing processes that lead us above and beyond exhaustion. As proposed by Castiel Vitorino, an artist and psychologist from Espírito Santo, Brazil, it was necessary to create a set of mandingas to ease the pain of bodies violated by racism, silencing, erasure, hijacking, loss and genocide. It was also necessary, to create a lot of music, rhythm, dancing and partying to temporarily suspend this state of a world that was impossible to live in, without totally disconnecting from it. Many ways of being and surviving together had to be invented.
To connect all these layers of living to urban studies, we propose an attempt to restore knowledge and tear down western prophecies. The bond with the art universe as a possible path gains momentum and shape in the installation “Quarto de Cura” [The Healing Room] in late 2018, by Castiel in Fonte Grande. “Quarto de Cura” is up the hill, at the home of Congo master Renato, Castiel’s grandmother’s neighbor, where the artist returns once a week as a promise to her grandfather. This is how the city gradually takes shape in these episodes. This is how the city slowly becomes the actions of black women of different generations, so that it welcomes us, cares for our bodies and is a resting place. This is how the ground is laid so that the pathways, real or invented by us, may create connections that keep us moving and going forward.
And now that we have been properly introduced, we would like to present Sofia Costa, who transits between the arts and the undergraduate degree in architecture and urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia and is the creator of the art and visual identity that make up this episode. The multilocality of the women of Terra Preta was an inspiration for her creative process and for the search for references, such as photographer Lázaro Roberto from Bahia and Olivia Francisco, an artist from Rio. Collage as a language has been Sofia’s way of communicating and carrying out her work in the city and in academic projects. For her, collages maximize the possibility of accumulation and articulation of narratives and reports about the city and its experiences, as well as the recognition of what is being communicated. She uses photography as her central piece, around which other elements aggregate, resulting in compositions that tell possible and comprehensible stories, open to various interpretations from a single image. Sofia understands the image as a bridge between moments and generations when it goes out to the street or to social networks.
The image created by Sofia brings to the center of the landscape two women photographed in the 1970s in Salvador by Lázaro Roberto: one is braiding while the other is having her hair braided. The nagô braid was and still is an important means of identification and communication between both black men and women of the diaspora. Legend has it that the designs of the plots that formed on the heads through the braids carried cartographic orientations for the scapes, wisely transferred by the braider in the act of braiding.
By bringing this gesture to the podcast’s visual identity, we bring the expertise of those who have the city at their fingertips and who walk through it and want it in their own body, seeking freedom. With the city behind them, Sofia’s women are crowned and majestically announce that the pathways are open.
Although we replenish ourselves daily, it is from this shared territory that we set out to advance in all these actions and narratives fertilized by the diaspora. And that is definitely not a task for one woman only.
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Translation: Maria Bernadete Morosini
Technical revision: Mariana Leandro Pereira
Revision: Ana Naomi de Sousa e Junia Zaidan
TO LISTEN THE PODCAST (portuguese)
HOW TO QUOTE THIS TEXT
PEREIRA, G. et al. Coletiva Terra Preta. De-whitening the city. 2019. Disponível em: <https://medium.com/@terrapreta/de-whitening-the-city-21bee439fd07>.
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