Artur Bispo do Rosario: Imaginary, cultural expropriation and anti-black racism in modern Brazil

by

Salloma Salomão Jovino da Silva

Here is the narrative of what was done at the 1904 site. The police blindly and excessively rounded up people they found on the street. They took them to the police stations, then gathered them in the Central Police. There, violently, humiliatingly, they snatched the waistbands of their trousers and shoved them into a large courtyard. When there were a few dozen, they sent them to the Cobras island, where they were mercilessly beaten. This is what Alves' terror was; Floriano's was red; Prudente’s, white, and Alves’, colorless, or rather, trunk and cod.
- Lima Barreto, Diário íntimo.

The main thing in this work of mine from Casa Verde is to study madness in depth, its different degrees, classify its cases, finally discover the cause of the phenomenon and the universal remedy. This is the mystery of my heart. I believe that with this I do a good service to humanity. (...) From all the neighboring towns and villages, crazy people flocked to Casa Verde. They were furious, they were meek, they were monomaniacs, it was the whole family of the disinherited of the spirit. After four months, Casa Verde was a village. The first cubicles were not enough; a gallery of thirty-seven more was ordered to be annexed. Father Lopes confessed that he had not imagined the existence of so many crazy people in the world, and even less the inexplicable of some cases.
- Machado de Assis, O alienista.

The second time I was in the asylum from December 25, 1919 until February 2, 1920. They treated me well, but the crazy ones, my companions, were dangerous. Also, I meddled a lot with them, which didn't happen that time I was left out.
- Lima Barreto, Diário íntimo.

Anti-Black racism in Brazil has repeatedly generated sinister, contradictory, and ongoing stories of real and symbolic violence. These are so assimilated and commonplace that, at times, it becomes difficult for a black intellectual or researcher to choose this or that theme, fact, or event to develop valid public understanding. There is, however, an intriguing fact that is generally known, which suggests to me an effectively revealing unknown, if critically understood, about the modernization of the Brazilian society. It is about the life, work, and post-death prestige of a man of African descent known as Artur Bispo do Rosário.

At the global economic level, Brazil went from being an agrarian-monoculture and underdeveloped country in the first half of the 20th century to one of the largest world economies at the beginning of the 21st century. This would not have been possible without a radical technological and productive change. Productive modernity was not accompanied by a reform in collective rights and in the fight against inequalities. The traditional violence applied against black populations and native peoples only modulated and intensified, while racism constituted itself as public policies. This apparently contradictory process can be called reactionary modernity.

In Brazil, the deracialization of black historical characters has become part of the dominant culture. Machado de Assis, seen as the father of modern national literature, until very recently was visually interpreted as a white person. This is what some already aged photographs of him at the beginning of the 20th century indicated. However, when images of his youth were located, it was found that some kind of artifice had been applied throughout the 20th century so that he would appear less black than he actually was. [1]

There are numerous other examples in this regard. Strategies adopted by cultural elites as a way of erasing the marks of anti-black racism itself, transforming the everyday experience of racism into a neurosis of black people. In this case, a kind of popular social psychology has been disseminated, which acts with the a priori culpability of black people for their supposed repression, that is, a primal envy of whiteness. In this argument that wants to impose itself against everyday experience, “there is no racism”, but repression of black people.

In the case of Bispo do Rosário, however, I remember his image in an Afro diary from the 1990s. A printed booklet, with spaces for personal notes, with images and indications of people, dates and historical events relevant to the black population, which brought some data about the black artist and printed the photographic reproduction of his objects. Since the 1990s, I have come across his creations spread across many articles of black-anti-racist activism and in catalogs of museums and art exhibitions with some ethnic-racial-black connotation. Artur Bispo do Rosário is, since then, projected and seen as a brilliant black man.

Recently, in May 2022, Instituto Itaú Cultural produced an exhibition of the artist at its headquarters on the noble Avenida Paulista, in the city of São Paulo, in which there were sculptures, paintings, embroidery, models, miniatures of vessels, clothes and banners and pavilions. Rosário's works refer us to scenic objects or installations that seem to me like those of the Samba Schools, Maracatus Groups, Congadas and other “processions”, pândegos, “embassies” and black “folkloric” processions of “the olden days”.

A work by Arthur Bispo do Rosário caught my attention: a set of industrial shoes made of white plastic and blue denim –the “Conga”. I had already noticed it in photographic materials available on the internet, but I could distinguish this montage in the exhibition. The footwear was probably one of the first industrialized forms of a pattern of shoes made of cloth and petroleum-derived material in the country. Alpargatas was the generic name of the textile and footwear industry effectively titled: Sociedade Anonyma Fábrica Brazileira de Alpargatas e Calçados, founded in 1907.

This is a story about modernity and modernism in Brazil from the 20th to the 21st century. These shoes were called Conga and I wore them for most of my youth. They were inexpensive, versatile, easy to clean, and relatively durable shoes. Conga is a Central African name, related to the ancient Congo Empire, on the banks of the Kwango River. In Brazil, and perhaps in the diaspora, Congo has become a broad ethnical identity. Since my childhood, I heard this name and its derivatives among the elders. Vovó Maria Conga [Grandma Maria Conga] was always present in Umbanda, a Central African religion in Brazil. Conga and Congado are names of traditional popular festivities in the country. In short, there are still many Congos scattered and subsumed in this Black Brazil. In Bispo do Rosário's work, we can observe this journey from African roots to popular culture, to mass industry and the return to the roots by the artist.

The central character of this weird story of cultural and economic modernization of a slave-owning tropical society is this black man, born in a small town in the state of Sergipe, Northeast region. Other than that, almost nothing else is said about him. If he had a family, if he had children, if he loved someone. Nothing? However, in all the published materials about Artur Bispo do Rosário a particular adjective is used: crazy. Why? Bispo do Rosário, now deceased, cannot contest this characterization made of his person.

For the review of the plot, it is important to say that Senhor Rosário, about whom little has been researched, was born in the state of Sergipe in the first decade of the 20th century.  In the 1920s, still a teenager, he already resided in the capital of the Republic, the city of Rio de Janeiro. He would have been a boxer and competed in official boxing matches, when he was injured after being run over by an urban tram in an accident. Received, as if by charity, at the residence of a white lawyer of Italian origin in the same city, he worked as a domestic worker in the mansion of that upper-middle class family. That same lawyer handled his indemnification process with the Canadian company, a public transport service provider.

According to the narrative of an official website about his life and work[2], he suffered a psychotic outbreak and drifted through the city, when he was taken to the traditional Benedictine monastery. From there he was then taken to the Mental Asylum or “psychiatric hospital”, where he was incarcerated until close to death in 1989.

There is a cloudy, opaque and suggestively criminal background to the narratives about Rosario's imprisonment that lead me to believe that perhaps he was victimized by usurping godparents. In Brazil, recently, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has frequently acted in favor of the freedom of domestic workers kept in a work regime analogous to slavery.  Their “protectors”, as a rule, continue to claim that there is no crime for such an affective tradition of removing people from poverty and incorporating them into the domestic environment, “as if they were part of the family”.[3]  Usually with no salary and no benefits provided for in labor laws, which, in turn, have recently suffered with deregulation to increase corporate profitability at the expense of poor and racialized populations. 

Also, according to a text extracted from the same website, we learned that in 1982 his work was shown to the art consuming public. This audience saw its fifteen banners for the first time in the exhibition called ‘Margem da Vida’, at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. After the success of his participation, Bispo do Rosário received several invitations to new exhibitions. If there was a pay, someone must have taken the money.

I believe that a certain indisputable characterization of Arthur Bispo do Rosário as black and crazy may have been motivated initially because he publicly demonstrated a habit, until then, very common in Brazilian culture of African origin, of talking to spirits and the dead. I also assume that his admission to the psychiatric hospital was managed by his tutors so that they were free to appropriate his retirement in the Navy and the compensation received for the accident suffered in his youth, which weakened him physically and psychologically, perhaps irreversibly, when he had worked as a civil servant of the company responsible for tram transportation in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s. Finally, I believe that such characterization may have seemed important in the construction of his character as a marginalized plastic artist. In this case, the beneficiaries would be the permanent guardians of his work, curators and directors of the museum that bears his name, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Some studies point to the fact that the imprisonment of socially stigmatized people in asylums has been used by the State and by elite sectors of Brazilian society, in various circumstances, since the mid-19th century.[4]

The black-mestizo writer Lima Barreto wrote two diaries from his youth until his death. One of them about the impressions that his environment made on him and the other, a long, concise and dramatic account of his admissions in the Mental Asylum. Lima Barreto died at the age of 41, on November 1, 1922 – eight months after the São Paulo Modern Art Week, organized and held, as is well known, at the Municipal Theater of the City of São Paulo.

Machado de Assis, considered the father of modern Brazilian literature, distrusted the power of psychiatric medical knowledge and wrote a long story, in which the main character has a firearm surname, Bacamarte [blunderbuss]. In “The Alienist”, Simão Bacamarte, guided by science, enters an imaginary world built by Machado. But psychiatric science intended itself to penetrate the fantasy world of the individual in order to extract him from there and reinsert him in the real world. This turnaround is an absolute inversion of the foundations of the science born with modernity.

It seems unlikely that Michel Foucault knew the work of Machado de Assis when writing his History of Madness; however, we are led to think about the work of the French philosopher, who was so interested in the subject and offered us escape routes to reflect on the most varied forms of presentation and exercise of biopower. Following the work of Foucault, the issue of anti-black racism as practice and ideology of biopower has been addressed by Achille Mbembe. Mbembe also took advantage of, and extended, Foucault's writings published in Society must be defended. Especially in the pages where he proposes questions about the application of colonial learning and about the conceptual development of the hierarchy of races in an European context, leading to the formulation of the concept of “nechropolitics”.

Would it not be possible or probable that the custodian family of Bispo do Rosário, at the time of his admission to the asylum, proceeded in the same manner as those families who adopt impoverished black people and enslaved them, a practice that was even more common in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century? Did they incarcerate him in order to snatch his compensation and retirement from the tram company, where he had worked for many years, before having an accident and being taken in? Precisely the good family of the lawyer who represented him in the damages suit? Perhaps we will never know the real stories behind these narratives that cover up the two protective instances, that of the rich carioca family and the asylum institution.

In raising such questions, I ask myself whether I myself cannot be accused of being insane, interdicted and locked up in some asylum. I say this not as a literary effect, but aware that the current mental health policy, in 2022, is regressing to methods prior to the anti-asylum struggle, which, from the 1980s onwards, began to demand humanized treatment for patients in psychiatric institutions in Brazil. And they made great strides until the new “anti-drug” policy managed to pass amendments to national legislation and set precedents for compulsory admissions of people indicated as drug users, even against their will. We are witnessing a new wave of industrialization of madness. A highly profitable activity for churches and clinics.

The second idea that underlies this text is that precisely the emergence of a certain black imaginary arising from specifically African ways of thinking were applied to artistic-creative expressions conceived from the mid-20th century onwards. While, on the one hand, “normal” urban socially subaltern black people consciously sought to escape the stigmas imposed by anti-black racism, on the other hand, “abnormal” black people were free to deal in an artistic-creative way with attitudes, values, and visions of an “archaic” world that the modernity of the Brazilian elite wanted to erase, forget or supplant. “The cause of our backwardness” as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues wrote at the end of the 19th century.[5] Psychiatrists have become black people’s most efficient and modern analysts, anthropologists and reformers, occupying important places in intellectual and political leadership.

In the unique case of Artur Bispo do Rosário, it would be possible to establish links between his oral and visual discourse as deeply connected to Central African worldviews and cosmogonies, disseminated in religious and creative contents in urban Brazil, something that we can define as black popular cultures.

When dealing with African aesthetic continuities in Brazil, Kabenguele Munanga, a Brazilian anthropologist born in Central Africa, noticed and highlighted the following:

It is known, for example, that during slavery the coronation ceremonies of the kings of Congo were tolerated and even institutionalized (Rodrigues, 32), but this singularity granted to the Bantu settlers of Congo was only possible within the space of the religious confraternities to which they belonged, such as the Venerable Third Order of the Rosary of Nossa Senhora das Portas do Carmo, São Benedito, etc. However, they could not, within the current colonial and slave holding context, reinvent referred objects, traditionally used in African political institutions of the time. However, there was a very resistant cultural field, in which one can clearly observe the phenomenon of continuity of African cultural elements in Brazil. (Munanga, Arte afro-brasileira, 225)

For a long time, Western pictorial art assumed two-dimensionality as the main convention or as a priority form. “Classical” sculptural work generally referred to Greece and Rome, rarely to Egypt or Ethiopia. When the findings of Leo Frobenius and Franz Boas began to be disseminated in the West, there was a kind of seismic shock in visual narratives and some of the old certainties of the visuality and representational systems of the West collapsed. The so-called avant-garde European artists didn’t take long to feel the tremors on the surface. Munanga emphasizes:

This field, much studied by social specialists from various disciplines, is that of religiosity. One should recall that the conversion of black Africans was among the reasons evoked in the 16th century to legitimize and justify slavery. On board the slave ships, there were already chapels where the captives were baptized even before the crossing. When they arrived at their destination in Brazil, they were forbidden to practice their religions. All measures, including police repression, were taken to ensure their conversion to Catholicism. Otherwise, the Catholic religion was considered the only true religion, and those of the enslaved were relegated to the position of mysterious cults or simple superstitions. (Munanga, Arte afro-brasileira, 225)

Paradoxically, since the 1980s, the academic environment has been relatively aware of the participation of African descendants in the production of objects of undeniable aesthetic values in the formation of Brazilian society, often linked to their religious practices. Racism, which previously denied the full humanity of black people, has undergone this internal reform, admitting, not without dispute, since the middle of the century, that Africans and their descendants, contrary to predictions, elaborate logical thinking and develop aesthetic feeling.

Despite the visible Eurocentrism of the events of the commemoration, the artistic-cultural exhibitions related to the celebrations of 500 years of Iberian expansionism were followed by a vigorous and tense debate on African and Afro-Brazilian arts. Emanuel Araújo, a notorious scholar on this subject, published in 1988 “A Mão negra na Arte Brasileira” which established a kind of milestone for a series of research and reflections on Afro-Brazilian visual arts, previously only treated in a generic manner as “folklore”.

However, it was only recently that private and public visual art institutions began to conceive of the physical presence of artists and audiences made up of black people among their exhibitors and visitors. Before that, however, a group of young visual artists from the city of São Paulo, including Rosana Paulino, Renata Felinto and Moises Patrício, started a performance movement, which consisted of demarcating the (strange and exogenous) presence of black people in racially hygienist or white-centric spaces.

Artists of all languages generally spend a relatively large time of their lives trying to understand and use in their favor the channels of visibility and legitimation paths for their creativity. Visibility that can eventually be translated into monetary value and status. The laws of the art object market obey the rules of mercantile capitalism, but there is a wide field of subjectivities in the definition of accepted or proscribed aesthetic configurations. Modernity, in a way, allowed a flexibilization of conventions around originally European/Eurocentric precepts.

Artur Bispo probably attended primary school, that is, the first four years of school literacy, where he probably learned the rudiments of reading and writing that he used in his panels, paintings and industrial fabric embroidery. In these same supports, there are ideograms already identified in the practices of Umbanda in Brazil and Vodou in Haiti. Robert Thompson Farris[6], traces important links between such graphic signs from Africa to Brazil.  One can go a little further and find resonances in the tradition of “rhythmic fabrics” researched by Thompson in the textile prints made by Artur Bispo dos Rosário.

My hypothesis is that the imagination of Artur Bispo do Rosário, his maritime imagination, expressed by the predominance of the color blue and the boats seen here as objects of escape from the fixed territory indicate a very specific source in the narratives that emerged in the Christian geography of the ancient Kingdom of Congo.

This would also be the origin of his delusional Christianity. Would it be possible to say that, instead of an outbreak, Bispo had entered a trance state from which he extracted these “revelations”? Could this be the state that was perceived by the wider society as a deviation from normal behavior not culturally permitted?

Dreams, even in Judeo-Christian traditions, play an important role in the dual perception of the world. The physical world co-inhabited by intangible beings called spirits. Could it be that the introduction of the ban on black religious practices, where both the dream and the premonitions have a different meaning, had marked Artur Bispo as someone to be imprisoned?

It is the premonitions or revelations that come through dreams that need to be interpreted in the light of Bantu philosophies, I now think.

It is important to have a framework on the issues of access to schooling and the systems of reading and writing in the first decades of the 20th century, and the barriers raised by anti-black racism, such as, for example, the subsidized importation of white foreign labor, with privileges as land access and titles and regular jobs. George Reid Andrews, contradicting Florestan Fernandes' thesis on the supposed larval or organic incapacity, or on the inadequacy of black working people to the free labor market, showed how the elite of the São Paulo industrial system built additional barriers to keep black workers out of the factory work, just when it had started to become a primordial part of the social integration system.

Although in later times controversies arose over the validity of the scientificity of such inferences based on eugenics, until that time these were irrefutable. Imperial or internal colonialism were Siamese brothers of 19th and early 20th century raciology (scientific racism).

In practice, what was at issue were the “racial conflicts”, or fears about the end of white hegemony in different parts of the world and the very survival of the colonialist system, which, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, had reached its peak, especially involving European countries and their colonies on the African and Asian continents. (Souza and Santos, 748)

Between 1900 and 1950 there was a real boom in public mental asylum institutions in Brazil. Lima Barreto and Artur Bispo do Rosário were black mestizo men, later recognized as geniuses, who were victims of belonging to “degenerate races” and incarcerated in these institutions.

It is possible to think that the sociopolitical changes of the “democratic opening” planned by the Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) have created an environment favorable to the viewing of the work of Bispo Rosário. “However, the collective exhibition was the only one he participated in during his lifetime. Bispo did not accept to be separated from his work and did not consider himself an artist. For him, everything was the result of a mission that would one day be revealed on the day of judgment.”[7]

Artur Bispo do Rosário. I effectively consider this name to be an enigma involving mass incarceration, psychiatric medical knowledge, public health policies, concepts of art, formation of the consumer market for art objects and cultural circuits. All this is bundled together by the structuring centrality of anti-black racism in Brazil during the 20th century and at that time of the second decade of the third millennium of the Christian era.

Anti-Black racism in all geographic quadrants of the colonial world and in post-colonial societies has been exercised with ordinary violence and extraordinary sophistication in the increasingly radical use of technical-scientific knowledge. Based on information on anti-drug policies in Brazil today, it seems possible to support the idea that the biopower of death, contraction, collective humiliation, and massive racial incarceration, exercised by psychiatric medical knowledge throughout the 20th century, is once again being summoned to provide justifications for a new asylum policy, since it had cooled down in the post-democratic opening period, in the 1990s.

If psychiatric medical knowledge has been used in Brazil to legitimize the exclusion of the black-mestizo and indigenous population from the modernization process, as shown by the proportional numbers of hospitalizations of racialized people or documents such as Lima Barreto's diaries, should we not question how they work in the expropriation and exploitation of symbolic, material and cultural goods created by Afro-indigenous people who, due to the stigma of mentally disabled, become vulnerable to free exploitation by their “protectors”? These misappropriations configured a discontinuous permanence of a cultural system created during the transatlantic traffic and the globalization of slavery as a productive practice. If then it was possible to expropriate someone's life and body within the current morality, that mora has been supplanted, but now it is possible to deprive them of their wisdom.

NOTES

[1] See Eduardo de Assis Duarte, Machado de Assis: Afrodescendente, Rio de Janeiro, Malê, 2020.

[2] Available at http://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/ Access on July 22, 2022.

[3] See, for example, https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/gerais/2022/07/14/interna_gerais,1380220/mulher-e-resgatada-apos-32-anos-de-trabalho-analogo-a-escravidao-em-minas.shtml (Access on July 22, 2022) and https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/05/13/idosa-e-resgatada-no-rio-apos-72-anos-em-situacao-analoga-a-escravidao.ghtml Access on July 22, 2022.

[4] See Aguiar, Marcela Peralva. A causalidade biológica da doença mental: uma análise dos discursos eugênicos e higienistas da liga brasileira de higiene mental nos anos de 1920-1930. Revista Mnemosine, Rio de Janeiro, v. 8, n. 1, p. 2-27, 2012. Available at:

 https://www.epublicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/mnemosine/article/view/41572/pdf_224. Accessed on: Jul 18, 2020.

[5] See Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina. Os africanos no Brasil. 3 edição. São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1957.

[6] See Thompson, Robert Farris. Face of Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americans. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993; Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: Afro and Afro-American art and phylosophy. New York, Vintage Books, 1954.

[7] https://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/

WORKS CITED

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Andrews, George Reid. Negros e Brancos em São Paulo (1888-1988). São Paulo: Edusc, 1998.

Araujo, Emanuel (org.). A Mão Afro-Brasileira. Significado da Contribuição Artística e Histórica. São Paulo: Tenenge, 1988.

Duarte, Eduardo de Assis. Machado de Assis: Afrodescendente, Rio de Janeiro, Malê, 2020.

Barreto, Lima. O Cemitério dos Vivos. Rio de Janeiro: Planeta, 2004.

Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes. São Paulo: Globo, v. 1 e v. 2, 2008 [1965].

Foucault, Michel. História da Loucura. Tradução de José Teixeira Coelho Neto. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991.

Foucault, Michel. Em defesa da sociedade. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2005.

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Munanga, Kabengele. Arte afro-brasileira: o que é, afinal? In: Catálogo Mostra do Redescobrimento – Brasil 500 é mais. São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Virtuais, 2000.

Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo. Os Africanos no Brasil. 5. ed. São Paulo, Companhia Editoria Nacional, 1977.

Souza, Vanderlei Sebastião de; Santos, Ricardo Ventura. O Congresso Universal de Raças, Londres, 1911: contextos, temas e debates. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, v. 7, n. 3, p. 745-760, Sep.-Dec. 2012.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Face of Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americans. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: Afro and Afro-American art and philosophy. New York, Vintage Books, 1954.

Museu Bispo do Rosário: https://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/