Overcoming the Politics of Heritage

Being from South Carolina, I commonly associate the term heritage with the debates over flying the Confederate flag on Statehouse grounds. For those who support its continued flight, the argument usually sounds something like this:

"I just want to support my southern heritage; it's not about slavery."

But no matter the argument, slavery is a part of the Confederate heritage. That flag cannot be seperated from its association with a system that was supported by enslaving other human beings later deemed inferior due to the color of their skin.

So what's this got to do with candombe? Since arriving in Uruguay, the term I've heard cited most frequently regarding candombe rhythms is patrimonio. Patrimonio = heritage.

There's a hierarchy of patrimonial tradition and representation in candombe culture, that seems to change based on the occasion. These three recur with the most frequency:

1. Uruguayan: it was created here, and belongs to all Uruguayans regardless of race, class, or region.
2. Afro-Uruguayan: created by and cultivated by enslaved Africans and their descendants, primarily associated with the neighborhoods Barrio Sur and Palermo.
3. conventillo: rhythmic styles cultivated and developed in housing projects known as Mediomundo (Sur), Ansina (Palermo), and Gaboto (Cordón). Often these are associated with Afro-Uruguayan history and culture.

With each sub-identifier comes exclusion, quite often built on the fear of outside appropriation/influence.

Just one week removed from the National Day of Candombe, Afro-Uruguayan Culture, and Racial Equality, it's easy to see why candombe is employed for nationalistic purposes. Attend any parade of the Llamadas, and on the surface the appearance is exactly "racial harmony through candombe, an African-based cultural form developed in Uruguay." But there are arguments that beyond the limits of Montevideo, candombe is more of a national novelty. In his book Musicas populares del Uruguay (2007), Coriún Aharonián proclaims that "the tamboril is almost exclusively Montevidean," acknowledging that it exists in other locations, but sufficient evidence doesn't exist to call it an Uruguayan phenomenon (90). My only experience with candombe outside of Montevideo was in Rivera, where I was told they play and have their own style, but it's different. The performance I heard there was led by Mundo Afro drummers from Montevideo, so it's difficult to comment more here at this time.

The Afro-Uruguayan label manifests in several ways. Most obvious is the prefix acknowledges the African roots of candombe, which is a fact without argument. Beyond that, it gets complicated. At the conference I attended in early October, ethnomusicologist Olga Picún proposed dropping the prefix, which generally was not met with enthusiasm by the largely Uruguayan audience. Gustavo Goldman, a musician and ethnomusicologist from Montevideo, responded that he liked the label, that it "assigns ownership." But it's difficult to paint a black and white picture of candombe (pardon the pun). The following are examples "assigning ownership" which appear in print; not necessarily negative, but demonstrate complications:

"It is not necessary to be a physically black Montevidean, only culturally black. The fundamental logic of the llamada is incompatible with an individual formed in the Western European white culture." (Aharonián, Músicas populares, 106). 

"The interpretive action of expert drummers conveys an ethnicized and racialized meaning to the whole performance: they are Black Old men who play, independently of the racialized social identity of the drummers, white, brown, or black in everyday life." (Ferreira, 2007).

Aharonián cites drummer Fernando "Lobo" Nuñez, from an interview conducted by Uruguayan popular musician Jaime Roos ("Le sacaron la fiesta," Jaque, Montevideo, 8-III-1985):

"...the white 'can come to play with the sabor of a black, but I don't know if they can have the same joy, and communicate that joy as can a black." (Músicas populares, 106).

Further complications arise as conventillo culture is added to the mix. The forced removal of families from these buildings was "experienced by Afro-Uruguayans as a direct assault on their families, culture, history, and traditions" (Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation, 143). Yet not all of the residents sharing in the Afro-Uruguayan culture, history, and traditions of these buildings were Afro-Uruguayan. Mediomundo translates to "half the world," so named because it was home to a highly integrated immigrant population. And there are several references to the Ansina area being called "Particular," due to the large number of Italian immigrants living there (Ferreira, Los tambores del candombe, 1997: 77). Martha Gularte references this paradox in her poem "Cuareim y Ansina:"

"Fueron manos malvados que derrumbaron mi alero, olvidaron que en

 Cuareim, blancos y negros crecieron."

"They were evil hands that tore down my roof, they forgot that in

Cuareim, whites and blacks grew up." (Marvin Lewis, Afro-Uruguayan Literature, 2003: 20-21).

In the previous post I mentioned displacement and community. These are principles of candombe. Displaced Africans created candombe, creating a sense of community in the most adverse conditions. They overcame their differences through the reconstruction of African musical forms. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, European immigrants living in conventillos found that "one way to be, or to become, Uruguayan was to take part...in an African based cultural form." (Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation, 62). This was/is the beauty of candombe...it wants to unite. It's the politics of carnival, the fear of change, that perhaps keep it from doing so.

My imagination tells me that the old candombe, those llamadas, transcended spoken language; perhaps even facilitated understanding.

If anyone thinks I'm being negative, let me say that I can't wait to come back to Montevideo, and experience candombe without a paper to write. To try and connect all of this to the flag issue that I opened with...well, I know people that I love, who support that flag and would like to see it continue flying above the South Carolina statehouse. Even though I don't agree with them, I know they would do anything for me. They're not bad people, only a product of a culture; a culture I rebelled against with the help of music. I feel the same way about some of the people I've met here who might say that whites can't play or understand candombe. I'm optimistic that discrimination is not the objective, it's just human.

That brings me to a video of Maya Angelou. I have to give credit here to a Danielle Brown, a fellow Fulbrighter, whose blog is amazing. She posted a video of Maya Angelou talking about the power of words, and of course, with YouTube, once you watch one thing, you're going to watch something else. For me it was more Maya Angelou, and it really resonates (ignore the audio delay, it's worth listening):