Seated at a small round table at George & Harry’s café in New Haven in the winter of 1969, I was reading and drinking hot tea with lemon when a picturesque couple entered. The woman, tall and slender, wrapped in scarves and sweaters, was complaining about the cold. My first impression of the man was that he was a personage of historical consequence, like Haile Selassie. But it was the language they spoke, succulent, musical Brazilian, that propelled me out of my seat. They were standing at the counter waiting to order when I introduced myself:
—Sou Pedro. Bemvindos à Cidade dos Olmos. (I’m Peter. Welcome to the Elm City.)
—Você é brasileiro? (Are you Brazilian?)
—Por dentro, com certeza! (On the inside, absolutely!)
—Mas você é uma dádiva de deus! (But you’re a godsend!) Meu nome é Abdias. Essa é Isabel, minha parceira. (My name is Abdias. This is Isabel, my partner.) Falo pouco inglês. (I speak little English.) Amanhã converso com alunos de teatro sobre Brasil. (Tomorrow I speak with theater students about Brazil.) Pode interpretar para mim? (Can you interpret for mim?)
—Com prazer. (With pleasure.)
—Oxalá seja louvado! (May Oxalá be praised!)
We sat for half an hour at a larger table. Abdias spoke about his voluntary exile. He was in New York on business when Brazil’s second “military steward,” Army Marshal Artur Costa e Silva, shut down Congress and imposed martial law. I told him that the people I lived and worked with in the “Mosquito Island” favela of Olinda were sure I was a spy for “the company” [CIA] who’d lost his way. But they were so poor they had absolutely nothing to hide. His laughter was my benediction. Without realizing it, I had auditioned and been cast as the sorcerer’s apprentice.
The following afternoon, we stood side by side on the proscenium stage of the Yale University Drama School. Professor Nascimento spoke about the history of Black Brazilian Theatre, of which he was a founder. He was a spellbinding storyteller with no need for a script or slides. If I wanted him to slow down I had only to raise my hand and he would pause and give me time to catch up. There had been no time to discuss the details of his talk. I was afloat in a world of which I knew nothing. His confidence was my life buoy. He watched and listened with rapt attention as I turned his words to English. If I missed a detail––a name, a place, the title of a play, he repeated it. I adopted his gestures, modulated my voice as he did. We were a unit. I never experienced anything like it before or since. Now I avoid interpreting because I know how many pitfalls can arise especially without preparation or a script and before a live audience.
In hindsight, my first experience went without a hitch. After almost an hour of bilingual narrative, we had fifteen minutes to field questions. I remember how exhausted I was by then. I stumbled more than once translating audience questions into Portuguese and Professor Nascimento’s replies into English. Thankfully, several audience members bailed me out by translating both their questions and his answers for the Drama School cohort. Dean Robert Brustein joined us onstage, took both our hands and led us to the footlights to respond to audience applause with a bow. It was the highlight of my stage career which started in first grade and has continued into my eightieth year.
Abdias’s founding of TEN, Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theatre) occurred in Rio de Janeiro the year I was born, 1944. He described it so vividly that afternoon, I felt I was part of it––the long lines of chauffeurs, doormen and housemaids waiting to audition for a place in the company the day after Abdias ran a small announcement in the Jornal do Brasil. He spoke of the audition process, the singers, dancers and actors rehearsing together for lack of space, daily literacy classes made joyful by a brilliant colleague, Ironides Rodrigues, who went on to be an activist, author and social critic.
Abdias had tapped into a wellspring of talent and knew just what to do with it. He wrote Eugene O’Neill a letter, after seeing a production of his play The Emperor Jones in Lima, Peru, with a white actor in blackface playing the lead. He asked for permission to translate and perform the play in Portuguese, explaining that the only Black people who had ever set foot in Rio’s Municipal Theater were janitors who began to clean the house when the curtain came down and the audience exited. O’Neill granted TEN the rights to all his plays, eschewing royalties. Getúlio Vargas, Brazil’s perennial autocrat, after meeting Abdias, ordered that TEN’s premier production have a single performance at the Municipal on May 8th, 1945—which happened to be Victory in Europe Day. In front of the curtain, before the play began, Aguinaldo Camargo (who played the lead), Abdias, Ilena Teixeira and Ruth de Souza recited “three fighting poems” in English, Brazilian Portuguese and Cuban Spanish: “Always the Same” by Harlem’s Langston Hughes, “Menina de Favela” (Slum Girl) by Aladir Custódio, and “Negro, Hermano Negro” (Black, My Black Brother) by Regino Pedroso.
Almost half a century later, Abdias wrote, “TEN’s premier public presentation had a radically leftist tone, unmistakably supportive of progressive world politics. However, white Brazilian ‘progressives’ did not reciprocate that support. They accused us of racism and fascism. They did their best to destroy and discredit us.”
Another revelation to me was that Abdias, Léa Garcia, and seven other members of TEN were cast in Vinícius de Moraes’s verse play Orfeu da Conceição with music composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim with a stage set by Oscar Niemeyer, principal architect of the nation’s created-from-the ground-up capital, Brasília. The production, which Vinícius financed himself taking time off from his diplomatic post in Paris, had a limited run at the Municipal Theater from September 25th to 30th, 1956, and is best known as the inspiration for Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), a French production shot in Rio de Janeiro that won both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1959. Vinícius’s play was ill-fated, however: After the truncated run at the Municipal, the truck carrying Niemeyer’s set from Rio to São Paulo had an accident and the set was destroyed.
My generation was galvanized by Black Orpheus. Its soundtrack was pivotal in launching “jazz samba,” more popularly known as bossa nova. Carlos (Tom) Jobim and Luis Bonfá composed the unforgettable melodies Felicidade, O nosso amor and Samba de Orfeu (Jobim) and Manhã de Carnaval (Bonfá). Vinícius and Jobim had collaborated on music for the play, but Sacha Gordine, the movie’s producer, asked them to create new songs so that he and Marcel Camus, the director/writer, could have a share of the profit.
In the film, the key role of Serafina, Eurydice’s cousin, was created by Léa Garcia, who played Mira, Orpheus’s jilted lover in the play. In the film, Marcel Camus cast Lourdes de Oliveira as the filmic Mira and was married to her and to Marpessa Dawn at different times. He was a “one hit wonder” but not a bigamist.
Camus and his script-writer Jacques Viot divested Vinícius’s play of a lot of excess mythological baggage in favor of the winning combination of a marvelous soundtrack, astounding Eastmancolor cinematography by Jean Bourgoin, and palpable sexual vibrato between Marpessa as Eurydice and Breno Mello as Orpheus.
I met Marpessa by chance one night in 1977 in Manhattan at a Soho loft party. “Eurydice is here,” my wife said. I approached her with the same lack of trepidation as I had Abdias and Isabel, believing she was Brazilian.
—Oi Marpessa! Sou Peter….
—Is that Portuguese? she answered.
Marpessa told me she had learned Eurydice’s lines “phonetically,” although she was fluent in French and that helped. She had been married twice, once briefly to Marcel Camus and then, happily, to Belgian actor Georges-Eric Vander-Elst with whom she had five children. She preferred to be called “Gypsy.” We were both looking for work as actors and decided to do a Lanford Wilson two-character one-act as a showcase production. There was no flirtation or intrigue between us. I introduced her to my wife and that was that. Was Abdias a Brazilian priest —a pai de santo—who had brought us together and, if so, for what purpose? He was teaching at SUNY Buffalo at the time and painting the orixás, the Afro-Brazilian gods and goddesses, in oil on canvas, exercising his artistic genius in yet another medium.
Gypsy’s unique combination of egoless beauty, sweetness and grace cast a spell as powerful as the goddess Iemanjá or Iansã baixando (the goddess descending) via the body of a trance-induced worshipper. I felt blessed by her presence. We never performed Wilson’s play This is the Rill Speaking in public, but we got together to rehearse and talk three or four times. I remember asking her whether she had ever met Abdias and of course she had. He had remained friends with Vinícius de Moraes who knew his wife Léa had a leading role in the film and was keen for tidbits of gossip about on-set activities in the Babilônia favela where cast and crew spent weeks. His daughter Susana said he didn’t want to attend the film’s debut at Cannes because he was furious with what Camus and Sacha Gordine had done to his play, but she persuaded him to accompany her, and when the audience gave him a standing ovation at the end of the screening his attitude changed.
I first saw Black Orpheus in a wintry New England boarding school when I was 18. I saw it several times more before I departed for Brazil four years later. I spent three months training for the Peace Corps in Chicago and tried to stay on in Rio and carry on the work of a returned volunteer I met there but was told this was impossible. Peace Corps was withdrawing its volunteers from São Paulo and Rio favelas because they were hotbeds of anti-American sentiment—which was not mentioned until we got to Brazil, where it was front-page news.
My fellow volunteers and I took a nonstop eight-hour Pan Am flight in September 1966, from Idlewild to Galeão two airports named for national heroes now, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Like the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Peace Corps’ mission in Brazil was troubled from the start. The CIA had infiltrated the trade unions and universities in Rio and São Paulo and lent clandestine support to the 1964 coup d’état which toppled President João Goulart’s “populist” government, replacing it with five military “stewards” who successfully fended off democracy for the next 21 years (1964-85). Goulart had confabbed with Fidel Castro in Havana. The U.S. State Department feared that the burgeoning syndicalism of sugarcane cutters in the fertile Northeast zona da mata would create a socialist stronghold Fidel’s charismatic foreign minister, Che Guevara, could use as a steppingstone to South America. Paulo Freire’s “literacy in 40 days” program was about to be rolled out nationally so that millions of peasants, construction workers and self-employed fishermen would become functionally literate and vote for Goulart.
The Paulo Freire Method was developed as part of the People’s Culture Movement in his hometown, Recife, capital of Pernambuco, a historically rebellious state. Goulart’s populist regime was overthrown in a largely non-violent golpe on April 1, 1964. A year earlier, on April 2, 1963, Marshal Humberto Castello Branco, the first “steward” of the impending dictatorship, attended a ceremony marking the Freire Method’s first graduation ceremony, supervised by Paulo Freire himself and sponsored by the government of Rio Grande do Norte for more than 300 newly literate adults. The first of Brazil’s military stewards, Field Marshal Humberto Castello Branco, in full uniform, sat onstage just behind and to the left of President João Goulart. Before he returned to his garrison in Recife, Castello Branco remarked to Calazans Fernandes, “I see you’re fattening rattlesnakes here!” A year later, the rattlesnakes had become dragons and Castello Branco, the first of five preservers of the status quo, had assumed the unlikely role of St. George.
Freire was imprisoned within days of the coup. The new military government objected to Peace Corps volunteers’ advocating birth control, claiming that they were the vanguard of “Tio Sam’s” desire to make the vast green jungles of the Brazilian Amazon theirs. There were only 70 million Brazilians then. The generals felt the nation was underpopulated. Sixty years later there are over 200 million.
In 1969, I interpreted for Abdias on various occasions. One I missed was his meeting with Black Panther Party representatives in New Haven, a year before the trial of the “New Haven Nine,” including Panther leader Bobby Seale, for murdering a Black spy in their midst.
While he was at Yale as “a visiting scholar,” Abdias asked me to translate Sortilégio, a play he had written for the Black Experimental Theater that was published in English ten years later as Sortilege (Black Mystery) by the Third World Press. Since then, it has been staged by university theaters and become part of a Black Theater anthology. Out of the blue, at a time when we had not met or corresponded in many years, he informed me that he wanted to share the royalties of my translation of the play with me.
When we were all in New York following my graduation from Yale College in 1969, I arranged a brunch for Abdias and Isabel with my father, who was born the day before Abdias in 1914, in Düsseldorf, Germany. Abdias was born in Franca, in São Paulo state. My father, inspired by Abdias’s presence, spoke to him in French. Abdias had been Albert Camus’s guide in Rio de Janeiro when the Algerian author visited Brazil in 1949, so I was not surprised that their dialogue was possible. My father would have taken umbrage if I had had to translate for him. We enjoyed mimosas, Darjeeling tea, belly lox, cream cheese and bagels. It was the first time that Abdias had eaten lox and bagels. His widow and co-author Elisa Larkin Nascimento told me years later that he developed a taste for these delicacies and found a delicatessen in Rio where they were available.
I remember sending Abdias a poem I’d written on the birth of Iemanjá, Abdias and Isabel’s daughter, who was born in Buffalo during what was called “a mutiny” at the Attica, New York, state penitentiary, which ended with the needless death of many prisoners, most of them Black. Abdias was corresponding with some of the “political prisoners,” and was deeply shaken by the occurrence a mere 35 miles from SUNY Buffalo, where he taught Brazilian history from an African perspective.
Shortly after I came to Los Angeles in 1982, I met and became friends with his and Léa Garcia’s second son, Henrique Cristóvão. Henrique gave me his father’s address in Rio, and our friendship was renewed. When he became a Federal senator after the death of his illustrious predecessor, anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, Abdias sent me a beautiful poster of an exhibition of his paintings in Brasília as well as a bimonthly edition of his journal, THOTH, replete with biographies of Afro-Brazilian artists, poets and thinkers accompanied by his discursive explanations of their exemplary importance, speeches full of the same passion and persistence to the cause as those I translated in 1969.
I am one of the founders of the Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA. My 2006 doctoral dissertation, “In the Shadow of Freire: Popular Educators and Literacy in Northeast Brazil,” considers a number of educators and researchers who “reinvented Freire” in the decade following his death. In THOTH #2, Senator Abdias Nascimento’s “May 8th, 1997 posthumous homage to the educator Paulo Freire and the actor Anselmo Duarte” was inspiring. Abdias recalls observing Paulo Freire at work in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, now a West African republic.
“Coherent and faithful to his principles,” Abdias wrote, “he also taught in Guinea-Bissau, where, several times, I witnessed his figure leaning over students studying under the trees on the streets of the city, recently freed from Portuguese colonialism. The country still did not possess an educational system. Paulo Freire was working on the organization of this instruction, expanding the consciousness that only education liberates. I register this with pride and emotion, rendering homage to a Brazilian of singular pedagogical competence and of incomparable feeling for human solidarity. (THOTH #2, p. 49).
Abdias returned from exile and turned the floor of the Brazilian Senate into a classroom where he elucidated the glories of Afro-Brazilian culture “sob a proteção de Olorum”—under the protection of the god Olorum. He died on May 23, 2011, at the age of 97. We had reunited in 2009 when my wife and I visited Abdias and Elisa at their apartment in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Glória. I end this essay two weeks after 95-year-old Noam Chomsky was mistakenly reported to have died. He had the good sense to marry a Brazilian woman who brought him back to their home and a well-equipped hospital in São Paulo after he suffered a massive heart attack in the U.S.
Dr. Chomsky is the patron saint of twentieth century linguistics, and Dr. Nascimento a federal senator, an actor, a poet, playwright, painter and theatrical producer who fully involved himself in the plight of his people for more than seven decades while staying abreast of history and world politics, writing, speaking and inspiring generations of Brazilian afrodescendentes. They spanned the first and second millennia like twin colossi and will remain in the hearts and minds of millions of people whom they encouraged to sunder the bondage of oppression, whether social, racial, sexual or spiritual, leading by example and leaving a visible path behind.
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