Quilombo Country: Afrobrazilian Villages in the 21st Century (DVD, 2006, 73 minutes), directed by Leonard Abrams, Quilombo Films (www.quilombofilm.com)
Although Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery (1888), resistance to the institution over the years continued unabated, with fugitive slaves joining one another to form settlements throughout the country. These communities, known in Brazil as quilombos, united recently arrived Africans with Afro-Brazilians in complex, dynamic societies. Most of the large formal settlements were destroyed within two years of their founding (with the exception of Palmares, which endured for almost a century as an independent kingdom), but descendants of their inhabitants continue to carve out a living in villages scattered throughout the northern Amazon region.
Quilombo Country: Afrobrazilian Villages in the 21st Century, a documentary by Leonard Abrams, presents a panorama of daily life in three of these contemporary quilombos. Their locations mark the historic movement of Africans across Brazil, beginning in the northeastern state of Maranhão and moving west to the delta island of Marajo and finally to Trombetas, farther into the Amazon basin. The film is a sweeping ethnography, touching upon a range of issues, from food cultivation and preparation to religious practices to land rights and racism. Although this approach makes for a largely unfocused film, Abrams captures compelling images and testimonies that convey some sense of the tensions within quilombos.
The film opens with the forceful voiceover of the narrator, hip-hop legend and former Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, who briefly explains the history of quilombos. The filmmaker launches into an overview of the quilombos’ basic characteristics through a visit to Santa Joana and Santa Maria, where residents demonstrate how they cultivate, harvest, and prepare their food—digging up manioc roots and grinding them into flour; harvesting and hulling rice; and extracting oil from the seeds of babassu palms. Their agriculture is remarkably low-tech, as is the construction of their homes: The residents, or quilombolas, erect houses with wood frames, clay walls, and roofs made of palm leaves. They point to the installation of electricity and running water as recent improvements, and we see power tools at work in the surrounding jungle.
Quilombolas seem to spend considerable time engaged in the tasks of subsistence living, tied perhaps to the communities’ recent reclaiming of their land. Official quilombo land rights were first recognized under the 1988 post-dictatorship federal constitution. Prior to this, residents recount, sharecropping and wage labor were common, as was conflict with outsiders over land. Throughout the film, collective land ownership resurfaces as a fundamental issue for the quilombo. “We can’t leave,” explains Patricia Da Sousa, “because if we do, we could lose our land. So we have to stay in our place. If we leave to work, we lose the land because farmers from outside will come in and take it.” Irineiu da Souza of the Association of Remaining Quilombos of the Municipality of Oriximina discusses nascent efforts to form agricultural cooperatives to leverage higher prices for cash crops like brazil nuts.
The apparent balance that quilombos have achieved between subsistence living and integration into a cash-crop economy speaks to their complex relationship with and within Brazilian society. But despite evidence of this complexity, the film portrays the quilombos as cut off: Scenes of long boat rides through densely forested areas and machetes hacking through the underbrush give way to serene views of the quilombos, patches of cultivated land in the jungle. This footage is juxtaposed with interviews of former quilombo residents now living in cities and towns, constructing a clear dichotomy.
Despite the long history of outsiders threatening quilombos—in modern times, they have survived the military regime’s eviction plans, the threat of major business interests, and encroachment by wealthy landowners—many quilombo residents say they want to benefit from key aspects of modern Brazilian society. This is especially the case with formal education, which is what leads many young residents to move to urban centers, since most quilombos offer only primary education. Cristiane de Oliveira in Varre Vento, a young woman clearly dedicated to her teaching job at a primary school, says her choice to teach in the quilombo is partially determined by her qualifications: Having completed only a grade school education, she would be unable to work in a larger or less remote community.
In addition to these concerns, Abrams spends considerable time considering the religious practices of quilombos. The religious syncretism practiced by many Brazilians has long been the subject of scholarly discussion, to which Abrams contributes little depth. But his footage of ceremonies and festivals inspires awe. Residents participate in religious life with energy and passion, and their zeal is evident in varied public and private manifestations. During a healing session, in which religious leaders call upon spirits to cure sick villagers and provide advice in a dark, smoky room, a woman consults a spiritual intermediary to learn why she and her husband have separated, and if he will return. In a larger ceremony, twirling believers collapse into the arms of their neighbors as spirits possess them.
“We dance till [the spirits] will come and we go into a trance,” says a priestess, explaining the body-wracking convulsions and fainting during the ceremonies. While these scenes are powerful, they also impart a feeling of voyeurism, as though the camera should not intrude into such intense, sacred moments.
The film also documents saints’ days and public celebrations. In the quilombo of Santa Maria da Pretos, we witness the feast of Santa Filomena, in which residents cut an enormous mast from a tree and carry it from the forest, entering homes and receiving gifts of food, money, and alcohol in exchange for a blessing. The mast is then raised in the town amid drinking and singing. Abrams also shows footage of pageants performed throughout the region, in both rural and urban settings. One particular narrative dance relates the tale of a slave who, to satisfy his pregnant wife’s craving for bull’s tongue, kills the master’s bull and must flee a band of hunters, only to be saved when a healer brings the dead animal back to life. These festivals and their narratives combine a plurality of religious and secular elements, yet their rich iconographies and histories go unexplored, leaving viewers to wonder at their beauty.
Concern over the perceived loss of this vibrant culture in the face of modernity is addressed at various points in the film. The Catholic priest of Obidos applauds efforts to revitalize an African culture lost through years of wage labor and oppression, while ex–quilombo resident Seu Mimi Viana comments on the erosion of community values in the urban setting. Yet community activist Ivo Fonseca Silva, from the Association of Rural Quilombo Communities of Maranhão, denies the possibility of such a loss, citing the intimate relationship between culture and identity. Quilombola Libanio Pires offers his assessment. “Our situation is still very hard,” he says. “We haven’t found other people that value us. Yes, we have value.
But much of our culture has lost importance. We gather up the children to learn the drums, and so some leave and others enter. The older ones die but the children grow up knowing.” Clearly, the meanings and expressions of
quilombo culture are a source of debate.
All of the issues touched upon in Quilombo Country—land rights, conceptions of community, racism, cultural expressions, religious beliefs—are compelling in themselves. Any one of them could have served as a single critical lens through which to examine contemporary quilombos, but the film, lacking a meaningful guiding question, attempts to cover them all. Abrams chooses breadth over depth, and while he has amassed a wealth of material, he fails to present it in a way that encourages critical consideration. The authoritative voiceover is almost incompatible with the documentary’s style, which gives precedence to thoughtful testimonial accounts and respects the opinions of numerous quilombo residents.
One issue left largely alone in the film is that of race and racism. Imagery and memories of slavery permeate the documentary, yet apart from several brief moments, race in the present is seldom addressed explicitly. This omission may owe to the filmmaker’s failure to consider the quilombo within the larger context of contemporary Brazilian society.
Nonetheless, Quilombo Country offers rich testimonial material and intimate footage. Abrams’s filmmaking style appears open and honest: Community members welcome the camera into their homes and offer personal stories as well as historical and political commentary. If the film is sweeping and overambitious, the opinions, explanations, and concerns expressed by residents focus our attention on the plurality of forces that shape today’s quilombos.
Corinna Zeltsman is a writer and printer living in New York. She is a former NACLA staff assistant.
