Do outro lado by Fraga, César, and Maurício Barros de Castro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Do outro lado by Fraga, César, and Maurício Barros de Castro John Maddox (bio) Fraga, César, and Maurício Barros de Castro. Do outro lado. Intr. Ana Maria Gonçalves and Abdulai Sila. São Paulo: Editora Olhares, 2014 I have never before seen a cemetery so full of life. In 2013, Brazilian photographer César Fraga and historian Maurício Barros de Castro traveled Africa, visiting "places of memory" that commemorate the history of slavery, the tombstones of the trans-Atlantic trade that created Brazil, and the New World, as we know them. This is Fraga's eighth book of photos, following Empurrando água (2014) on Brazil's ports and Gigante vermelho (in press) on marine research in the southern tip of South America. In Do outro lado, his photos are full of movement and color, even as they depict the chains that purportedly bound captives to one another, or the patio where women were kept like livestock until a governor picked one for his proclivities. There are images of children playing, women singing in harmony or working in the sub-Saharan heat, priests that slit the throats of sacrifices right in front of the viewer, majestic colonial forts at one point adorned with a statue of Stalin, and "Brazilian" masques made by returned slaves, all equally in Venetian decay and enlivened by the sun, surf, and human energy surrounding them. Fraga and Castro's journey spans the island of Cabo Verde, the former Slave Coast dominated by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and eventually Germans (Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria), as well as the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Fraga captures light, shadow, movement, and drama in a way that makes photography rival any visual art form, and the large format of a coffee-table book highlights the care and talent Fraga's photography displays. Funerals, weddings, religious rites, and workdays are made portraits, landscapes, still lives, and street photography. But what keeps the animal skulls, voodoo fetishes, and bloody machetes from being a catalogue of exotic images for a mildly scandalized bourgeois Brazilian audience? Castro's historical narrative gives meaning and sobriety to the harnessed energy of Fraga's photographs in Portuguese and English. It relates them to modern-day Brazil. He begins with a brief panorama of the Portuguese colonies and slave trade, then heads to Cape Verde, the birthplace of the African, and in many ways, American, Conquest by Europe. He then proceeds through the sea routes that connected the Portuguese with their enemies, allies, and human cargo. The reader feels the suffocating darkness of the prison of Gorée off the coast of Senegal, and s/he repeatedly passes through the "gate of no return" in this and many other African nations, where chained men, women, and children were led to ships where they would die or never see their home again. Castro and Fraga's Africa has many pockets of "Brazilians," those who returned to the continent, principally after the 1835 Revolt of the Malês. These were predominantly Muslim African slaves and free people of color who were shipped back by way of the Portuguese fort of Ajuda, where they were dubbed "Agudás," "Tabons," "Retornados," or simply "Brasileiros." They spoke [End Page 217] Portuguese and built Catholic-inspired structures to live and worship for decades. African words like "Sankofa," the need to return to where something was lost in order to find it and start again, create a new vocabulary for remembering slavery and understanding this vast, diverse continent. Well-known Brazilian places like "Porto Seguro" and "Pelourinho" take on a new meaning in an African context. Queen Jinga of Angola's name is the origin of the swerving step of capoeira used to manage attacking forces, much like the way she manipulated Portuguese invaders by converting to Catholicism or allying with their enemies to remain in power. Brazil's centrality to the slave trade is captured in the figure of the Chachá, or African prime minister and head slave trader, of Brazilian origin, and research findings that Brazil was, in some times and places, directly controlling the slave trade, bypassing its...