A Creative-Theoretical Immersion into Black Radical Intellectual Thought, Part 2

This post is part of our roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea.

Beatriz Nascimento thus provides some significant pretexts for current discussions. Her essays on race expand our thinking about racial frameworks across the Americas. A classic that should be added to readings of race in the Americas is her “For a History of Black People”, which is both a critique of “History” with a capital H even as she uses it deliberately to insert a “History of Black People”—also capitalized. There are several questions to be raised, but an assertion even then that counteracted the given narrative about Brazil in a definitive, declarative sentence: “Perhaps Brazilian racial democracy exists, but in relation to black people it does not”.¹  Thus, she calls for a History of the Black Race to be written and a History of Black people in Brazil as well as part of that history, a history they make themselves. Thus, another correlate:  “I no longer accept any form of paternalism”.²  This reads well with the “Black People and Racism” essay that follows.

This is the boldness that we also observe as Beatriz Nascimento fights for the articulation of a Black woman’s resisting perspective on herself and her larger culture minus the overarching “favelada/ghetto” representation, the “neguinha-de-morro” through which Black women are seen, sometimes by their own communities. In an essay titled “Towards Racial Consciousness,” we have an actual physical fight in which she entered and won over that pejorative Black girl representation, even as she reproduced it. It is interesting that this is a gendered/racial consciousness that came as she witnessed and experienced the destruction of a childhood classmate, Jurema. This was a girl she stood up to and fought and won during school days, even as she was fighting against the stereotypical Black representations that were being enforced culturally. In the end, it was Jurema who was now technically defeated by the larger structure who tells her: “Keep studying. Don’t let them do this to you”.³  The “this” is the systemic framework of racism and sexism which can lock poor Black women into a cycle of dependency on men with little resources themselves, and therefore of poverty evident in dirty threadbare dresses and multiple unplanned pregnancies without a possibility of escape. Jurema’s “Don’t let them do this to you” becomes “Don’t let them do this to us!”.

Beatriz Nascimento’s discussion of “The Black Woman” is certainly needed to complete our full understanding of any study of the Black Woman in global perspective.  Her essays, in this vein, need to become classics in the Black feminist library. “The Black Woman in the Labor Market” can be read in conjunction with essays by Claudia Jones on the “super-exploitation of the Black woman” who in her words is “the element of the population [which] finds itself in the lowest position in the hierarchy.”  For her, sexual exploitation is linked with labor exploitation. This pairs well with her “The Black Woman and Love,” which reminds one of the work of bell hooks on this subject. For her, “either she remains alone, or she connects herself to alternatives in which the relations of domination can be loosened”.

What is lovely about this collection is that it gives us another creative-theoretical methodology. Clearly, Beatriz Nascimento was a poet as well, and her poems can perhaps be published separately in their own space. But here, we are fortunate to have poems interspersed with the more analytical essays. In a way reminiscent of Audre Lorde, the poems at times best articulate some ideological positions she wanted to make as with “Antiracismo/Antiracism” or the “Portugal” creative reflection that combines both forms. She talks deliberately about the tension between the academic and forgetting and that she was worried about not being able to create her book. In a way, the editors of this collection do precisely this for her, “Creating her Book” with love, care, dedication, careful selection, and introductory contextual analyses because Beatriz Nascimento produced in several genres: poetry, theory, film, and the reflective essay. The film Ori (1989), which she co-produced, begins with the dialectic is in the sea and images of the waves of the sea, which always imagistically represent Yemaya’s skirts.

Perhaps comparable North American counterparts could be the creative methodologies of Zora Neale Hurston, or theoretical assertions of bell hooks. What we can claim definitively is that in The Dialectic Is in the Sea, we are presented with a work of innovation/collaboration/translation. The editors, her daughter Bethânia N.F. Gomes, Archie Davies, and Christen Smith, have produced an innovative work in the developing genre of Black feminist biography, in a form similar to the collection edited by Alissa Trotz, The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writing of Andaiye (2020). These works give us material for comparative discussion and the study of Black women’s intellectual praxis as they pave the way for other similar projects of reclamation. The appearance of these works opens us to the continued recovery of scholarship in the Black radical intellectual tradition as we re-insert Black women who did Black feminist collaborative work simultaneously.

A fascinating closure to this discussion and the meaning of the Dialectic Is in Sea is her discussion of reading stories from books and magazines in her grandmother’s special trunk as a child and then learning upon her grandmother’s passing that the family had put the chest in the sea. Images of flowers, perfumes, and presents are placed in the water as an homage to Yemaya in Salvador-Bahia and other locations in Brazil, creating an engagement with Africa via the “archive in the sea.” Across the Americas, engagement with the oral and written history of quilhombismo (creating maroon spaces) is constructed in this childhood experience as a dream sequence of resistance that became a vision she carried clearly through her life. But upon Grandma’s passing, the archival chest, with its intellectual knowledge, meets the archive of the sea in a ritual of return. These imagistic references carry forward that symbolic and actual return to Africa but also becomes, in the end, a ritual of un/forgetting or perhaps “rememory” out of which she creates her own actual creative-theoretical “transatlanticidade” for in her words: “It had to be into the sea, the living being that makes things perennial”.⁴