Shouts in Caruaru: Art Against A White Revolution
Lira’s “Quantos Calos,” a banner created in 2018, asks viewers, “How many calluses of your black hand hold together a white revolution?” when translated into English. Photos courtesy of Ana Lira unless otherwise stated.
Editor’s Note: The interview this story is based on was conducted in Brazilian Portuguese. All quotes are the author’s translations of Lira’s words.
A black canvas hangs from a wall in a busy Brazilian metropolis — perhaps São Paulo, Recife, Manaus or Curitiba. It interrupts the routine of pedestrians, commuters and demonstrators with a troubling reflection in white letters: “Quantos calos da tua mão negra sustentam uma branca revolução?” (“How many calluses of your black hand hold together a white revolution?”)
Through the use of the verb “sustentar,” the piece’s creator, Afro-Brazilian visual artist Ana Lira, places the metaphor back in the hands of Black Brazilians exploited since colonial compositions. In Brazilian Portuguese, the verb’s first connotation is to support and sustain like pillars in a building, while its second is to feed, raise, maintain and provide shelter. In playing with this double meaning, Lira accuses whiteness of imposing the burden of emancipatory projects upon Black workers. Through the artwork, she reminds white progressives that despite Black people making the rebel dream possible, they have been the silenced characters of Brazilian history.
Lira’s provocation comes in defiance of the 2018 social media campaign #NinguémSoltaAMãoDeNinguém (#WeWillNotLetGoOfEachOthersHand), which arose from progressive Brazilians’ hopelessness in the wake of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s election that same year and the far-right leader’s bigoted statements and actions against historically vulnerable groups.
“The problem is that well-meaning progressives considered Bolsonaro’s election the only hecatomb in Brazil,” Lira told me in a November interview. “While whiteness pretends to spearhead political campaigns, my work reminds us how Afro-Brazilians have structured their revolutionary slogans.”
Não-Dito/Unsaid documented a public program in Belem. Top left: Coletivo Pitiú presenting their work in our weekly meeting. Top right: a meeting focused on hearing women who work in the traditional street market, Ver-O-Peso, in Belem (PA) about the government intervention in the area. Bottom left: receiving artist Arthur Leandro/Tatá Kinamboji to discuss impacts of the violence that affects Afrobrazilian territories in Amazonia. Bottom right: an experience to dance the word “collective” conducted by Nego Rai, from Centro Cultural Coisas de Negro, during a visit to Icoaraci district, a traditional Afrobrazilian region in Belem. Caption courtesy of the artist.
Historians and political theorists are yet to decide if the last years of Brazilian politics have been worse than the two decades of dictatorial rule in the mid-to-late 1900s. Despite the impasse, it is clear that Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 dredged up a collectivizing sense among progressive forces, leading to an urgent need for mutual-aid calls to action against his ghastly tropical fascism. Cross-class, -race and -gender alliance seemed to be the only path toward reconstruction. Yet Lira’s artwork harped a cautious melody even as Bolsonaro rose to office.
Amidst an already divided political climate, viewers of Lira’s banner wonder why she would provoke division between progressives seeking solidarity against fear. Why pose a question with the potential to create internal tensions and oppose a Leftist campaign against Bolsonarism? Is she against collective solidarity in times of authoritarianism? Does she fail to understand that internal tensions among progressive forces would be precisely what Bolsonarism wished to deploy, a divide-and-conquer method against oppressed groups?
Perhaps, her canvas is a haunting reminder that a real revolution must reckon with racial dynamics, or it will not be a revolution but a face-lift of a system that fails to defy white supremacy.
Revolution in the Salon
Stylized portrait of Ana Lira, 2020.
Unlike most, Lira talks about revolutionary practice as a domestic form because relevant chapters of Brazilian socialist and communist parties took place in her living room. Born in Caruaru, a city just outside Recife, the capital of the state Pernambuco, in the 1970s, Lira grew up in Jaboatão de Guararapes, a remote Recife district under intense military control and embroiled in political dispute.
In 1964, 13 years before Lira’s birth, conservative armed forces conducted a coup d’état that ousted the democratically-elected, left-leaning president, Jõao Goulart, and gained authoritarian control of Brazil’s government. As the civic-military-entrepreneurial dictatorship, headed by Gen. Castelo Branco, unfolded, middle-class Brazilian communists found refuge and work abroad. For Black working-class communists, however, low-profile positions across the country became the only alternative.
On December 13, 1968, the dictatorship initiated its most tyrannical phase. The Fifth Institutional Act suspended the Constitution, dissolved Congress and legitimized censorship and political persecution. As a result, political opponents, including Lira’s father, had their rights revoked for associations with communism.
Her father’s return to the Brazilian Northeast from São Paulo was far from accidental. It was an act of survival against state terrorism, giving him the only chance he had to survive the threats of torture and political execution at the height of authoritarianism.
“My father came to Recife when persecution became epistemic post-1968,” Lira said. “While he was still organized in the [Communist] Party, he planned forms to create better conditions for people in his impoverished district. When I was born in 1977, my household was practically a community cultural center.”
Considered one of the hubs of national, political and cultural thought, Northeast Brazil has the largest population of Afro-Brazilians across the country’s five regions, and only Nigeria has a Black population larger than Brazil’s. Accordingly, the Northeast has a lively arsenal of Afro-diasporic culture — including a plethora of musical instruments, Candomblé, Frevo and Axé — as a symbol of its history.
Despite its significance, the region has faced tremendous state absenteeism. As such, its states are constantly listed at the bottom of national human development indexes, revealing how racism seeps into public policies.
If Brazil is located within the periphery of global capitalism, growing up in Jaboatão meant residing on the periphery of the periphery of capitalism. As a materialization of adverse statistics, Lira grew up in a neighborhood under intense military control and dispute, resulting in a curfew that lasted ten years. From her teens to her first college years, Lira’s work schedule ran around the time of the dictatorial curfews, even after the official end of military rule in 1985.
In “nãoobrigado” (“nothanks” or “notforced”), Lira pulls from the political turmoil that characterized her adolescence and lays evidence on the filthy papers of Brazilian politics by presenting elections as a marketplace where candidates choose their voter-clients. She recomposes the pamphlet Brazilians use to record their chosen candidates’ numbers for input in the voting machine during national elections, covering these incomplete tags with powder, mud and shadows.
Lira’s recomposed Brazilian voting pamphlets for “nãoobrigado,” also known as “nothanks” or “notforced.”
Here, she plays with meaning again, evoking that of the term for electoral stronghold, curral eleitoral — literally interpreted as an electoral barn or sheepfold in Brazilian Portuguese — and “obrigado” (thank you), which connotes a paid due rather than free-of-charge gratitude.¹ As such, “nãoobrigado” refuses any obligation to Brazil’s political theater, rejects co-participation and presents the lack of agency in a democracy reduced to the ballot, relating voters to cattle moving toward the slaughterhouse and the traces of their voting ritual to an unexamined crime scene.
The Lillies Amongst the Rocks
Lira’s work possesses an intimacy and universality that perhaps originates from her simultaneous connection with her own domesticity and the public arena. Her mother’s singing and hums have been the grounds for her sonic experiments with art, such as her 2019 research into the musicality of the African diaspora turned multi-part program, Project CHAMA.
The joyous carnival celebrations of her upbringing also played a part, setting the stage for her participatory exhibition “Nos traquejos do tempo [vibração um]” (In the ways of time [vibration one]) in 2022. In partnership with Instituto do Tambor, the show celebrated freedom, community and knowledge production in Black and Indigenous music through specially-made hand drums from her state, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.
“Art was a communal activity,” she said of her early years. “Our house became a shelter for art in a region lacking governmental assistance. We shared our local knowledge — weaving, singing, dancing and painting — as a form of collective care through culture.”
As the community prepared for the public festivities, Lira played with her creative potential through music, dance and artistic production. Potentially, this is one of the major differences in her artwork: her process tends to start when she is mingled amongst the masses.
She started her professional life studying Civil Engineering but later pursued a second degree in Journalism. Though she was never officially registered as a journalist, Lira worked as a radio hostess on local stations, promoting political debates and raising awareness on issues that affected those on the fringes.
Promotional image for Project Chama, Ana Lira, 2020.
Despite establishing a successful career, Lira found herself wanting to follow her dreams and achieve professional independence through art. She made her official debut as an artist at 32 (but only told her family of the change when she was 40) and has weaved radio programs into her exhibitions since.
Far from romanticizing a path where she has found more rocks than lilies, Lira’s talent has allowed her to transit through privileged positions, and her artwork has achieved worldwide recognition. She has exhibited her work in France, Netherlands and Mexico and at the Mercosur Biennale, and been nominated for one of Brazil’s most prestigious art awards, the PIPA Prize.
As she enters the 14th year of her artist career, her visuals speak. Rather than being solely fixed portraits, her paintings, photographs and stencils are simultaneously soundscapes. Even the visual metaphors she produces take on a movement that blurs the expected stability of images.
Lira adheres to the notions of redaction and annotation that Christina Sharpe wrote of in her 2016 book “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being”: “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see;” her work enlarges our perceptions as they advocate for self-reflexive social movements.
In her piece, “Parte da Família” (Part of the Family), she erases the images of white children exploiting Black women’s bodies for their entertainment, allowing the viewer to see a visual dysgraphia that contradicts the narratives of white supremacy and its forms of historicization.
Parte da Familia focused on the contemporary strategies of slavery that persists in Brazil. The group created a series of posters to be fixed in the streets. Caption adapted from the artist’s.
Employing the wordplay found across her artwork, “family” gains complexities in these collages due to the slave trade. Enslaved Black women, forced to labor in these casas grandes, became the families’ cooks, house cleaners, wet nurses and nannies while access to their own children was contingent on the enslaver’s approval. All the while, Portuguese colonizers in Brazil frequently committed acts of sexual violence against enslaved Black women. As such, the “familia” in Lira’s work evokes racial and gendered violence, rebelling against white framings of any emancipatory project that sidelines Afro-Brazilians.
In Opposition to the Promised Land
In considering the provocations she introduced during Bolsonaro’s years, Lira’s work is not divisive. Rather, it troubles ersatz alliances and strengthens solidarity among those fighting for radical racial equality. Her experience with liberal and progressive politics throughout her life has made her wary of strategies that flatten out — or even efface — race from the political rationale under the premise that we will solve other social problems when progressives gain power.
“Quantos Calos” rejects any future promise of left-wing reparation to structural racism only after Bolsonaro’s political decline. Lira’s wager is that racism should be reckoned with in the present — as a politics of everyday — as opposed to in the elusive promised land.
Her position reminds white liberals that while campaigning to keep their hands together in downtown São Paulo, police massacred Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in favelas and rural districts. While the middle-class performative activism masquerading as a revolution flourished with glitzy slogans, the gunfire from military forces’ staged unfortunate spectacles against marginalized groups — every week and everywhere.
Avalição Grátis/Free Evaluation (2015- ) is work conceived from researching commercial street signs, started by Josivan Rodrigues with sign painted Odon’s help in Recife in 2015. In Recife, it was exhibited as sign where the following sentence is read: “Compro e Vendo Voto. Avalição Grátis” (I purchase and sell votes. Free quotation), painted by the Carioca sign painter. Placed in front of the gallery, the sign provoked the most divisive reactions, from indignation with the fact that someone was advertising the purchase and sell of votes to people entering the gallery to negotiate their votes for the coming elections. Caption adapted from the artist’s.
Lira’s life narrative proves that art can flourish despite political persecution and discrimination. The lessons of her father’s radicalism and mother’s songs allowed her to fall in love with feelings and affections that cannot be fully spelled out with theory. Her art became an avenue for projects with unstable answers.
In a milieu where color and delight seem incoherent, Lira’s work chooses precisely vibrant tonalities because her work moves, dances and sings back at the viewer. It is not only the object that speaks to you. Her voice becomes an incessant yet intimate call to converse privately with yourself and your rebel imaginations.
footnotes
¹ In Brazilian Portuguese “obrigado” stems from the expression "sou obrigado a agradecer a Vossa Mercê," which translates to “I am obliged/forced to thank thee."
