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Vânia Cardoso
Mãe Beata has been living in Miguel Couto for the past 18 years. One among the many working class neighborhoods just outside Rio de Janeiro, Miguel Couto is part of the Baixada Fluminense, a large urban area in the outskirts of the metropolis. The media portrays Miguel Couto and the Baixada Fluminense as places of high crime rates, innumerable homicides, and incredible poverty; these names thus immediately trigger images of misery and violence in the minds of most residents living in Rio de Janeiro. Mãe Beata vehemently rejects such images, pointing out the children playing in the streets and the women gathered at the street corner as signs of a dimension of life in that neighborhood that escapes the dim image through which her neighborhood is typically portrayed.
It is not only these experiences that are mostly absent from representations of the Baixada. Forgotten also are the innumerous Candomblé houses that can be found in the area, like the one that Mãe Beata opened here in 1985. A respected religious leader, Mãe Beata is a priestess of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion that has a strong following amongst the Baixada residents, in addition to the many practitioners that come from other areas of town. A religion whose history dates back to the centuries of slave trade between Africa and Brazil, Candomblé is built upon the religious practices and beliefs that enslaved West Africans brought with them to the New World. Despite the fractioning of ancestral religious structures due to the social reality of slavery and continual racial oppression, slaves and their descendants combined these diverse and fragmented practices and beliefs in new ways and lent them new significance. Some religious communities were able to survive even during the height of repression to the Afro-Brazilian religions, and from the turn of the century on many more houses were opened throughout Brazil.
Practitioners constructed Candomblé houses in areas very much like Miguel Couto, in the periphery of large urban centers where the land was cheap and far away from the close scrutiny of the repressive police forces. These were areas that were also forgotten by the Catholic Church, which in the past sought to prohibit what was deemed as 'devil worshipping' by 'primitive people.' By the time Mãe Beata started her own community, fourteen years ago, Candomblé was legally accepted as a religious practice, and despite its large following, continued to suffer the stigma of being a marginalized religion, practiced mostly by Black women and men from the lower social classes. Mãe Beata's own position as one of the most well known Candomblé priestesses, not only within the Candomblé community, but also among politicians, intellectuals and social activists, has nevertheless failed to alter her socio-economic position. A retired seamstress, she lives in a rented house and shares with her neighbors the common experience of continually trying to make ends meet.
Even though it was only in the past decade that Mãe Beata became a known priestess and social activist, she has practiced Candomblé almost her entire life. She was initiated in the religion at the age of twenty five, by Ialorixá Olga, the matriarch of Alaketu, a Candomblé community began in the XVII century in the northeast of Brazil. It was as a young child, however, that she started participating in the social world of Candomblé and learning its traditions. Born on January 20th, 1931, at a sugar cane plantation in Bahia, she grew up in the surroundings of the city of Cachoeira do Paraguassu. A region marked by the presence of old men and women who survived the years of slavery and of their descendants, her childhood years were filled by the stories told by these people. These stories weaved the sacred myths of the Candomblé gods, ancestral stories about Africa, and the very histories of the people among whom the young Beata lived her early years.
Mãe Beata's very birth becomes one more story to be told as part of this ongoing history. She was born midway to her home, in a crossroads in the plantation, where an old African mid-wife, Tia Afalá, helped her mother, who had began to give birth as she was fishing in a nearby river. The old woman told Mãe Beata's parents that their newly born child was the daughter of Iemonjá, the goddess linked to motherhood and nurturing, and Exu, the powerful trickster god who rules the crossroads and mediates all the relations between humans and the sacred -- a deity mistakenly identified by Catholics as the devil. Mãe Beata often refers back to this story, explaining that she has always lived her life at crossroads, traveling through many different paths during her sixty eight years, always guided by the nurturing force of Iemonjá and under the protection of Exu.
Her travels began early, when, following the path well traced by many families before her own, Mãe Beata moved with her parents to the capital of the state. It was there that she married a childhood friend and met the woman who would soon become her Mãe de Santo -- her spiritual mother. In 1967 she finally gave up an unhappy marriage and soon joined the waves of migrants from the Northeast who moved to Rio de Janeiro in search of a better life. She brought her two sons and two daughters to live with her, working at various jobs as a seamstress, hairdresser, manicure and housekeeper. They moved often through the different neighborhoods of Rio, settling at last in Miguel Couto, thirteen years after leaving their native state.
Mãe Beata now lives surrounded by her grown children and her grandchildren. Like most Candomblé priestesses, she has never remarried, as her religious leadership duties and the continuous requests for her religious guidance and advice leave her little privacy or time to share with a companion. On the other hand, it also gives her a degree of personal freedom much higher than that of most women in Brazilian society. It is in part this freedom that has allowed her to take an active part in the women's movement, in the Black movement and in interfaith debates, as well as to develop an ongoing socio-cultural program geared to the needs of the community of Miguel Couto.
Mãe Beata's experience as a priestess of Candomblé has always had a deeply political dimension. For her, to practice Candomblé has meant to continuously defend and publicly proclaim its legitimacy as a religion. It has also allowed her to gain a public status that would otherwise be extremely difficult to achieve. Even though the membership of the Candomblé communities is by no means gender or racially exclusive, the vast majority of its members are Black women, and so are most of its leaders. The fact that Black women stand in the forefront of the religion upsets typical secular and religious hierarchies in Brazil, opening up an unprecedented social space for these Candomblé priestesses. Among the women who have reached the position of priestess in Candomblé, some of the older ones have become well known public figures, their life histories bespeaking the history of the religion and the very history of Afro-Brazilians.
In the beginning of the 1990s, a group of Candomblé leaders in Rio de Janeiro decided to form a public forum where this history, as well as the religion itself, could be discussed. By then Mãe Beata's personal charisma and religious knowledge had already allowed her to gain the respect of the religious community in Rio de Janeiro, and her Candomblé house was chosen as one of the places where these forums would be held. It was at one of these public discussions that she was introduced to several women involved in the women's movement, who invited her to attend one of their statewide meetings. That meeting, in Moqueta, was a landmark in her life, as it allowed her to meet people who shared many of her concerns and desires, as well as opened up the doors for her involvement in social and political organizations that reflected the politics she practiced in her everyday life.
When the United Nations Summit of 1992 began in Rio, Mãe Beata joined the crowd of social activists who descended upon the city for ECO-92, the non-governmental organizations' alternative meeting, which took place at the same time. After that meeting she became one of the counsels for the State Council in Defense of Women's Interests, and was invited to join several women's organizations in the state. She also joined the Inter-Religious Fund, an interfaith social organization which would eventually finance the first months of a program in her Candomblé community that offered professional training classes to young men and women from the neighborhood. That was the first of many of her initiatives to open up the Candomblé space to the community surrounding it, and to turn it into a cultural center where people from the neighborhood could attend classes and participate in cultural and political forums. The hardest challenge to keep such projects going has been the difficult task of securing funds.
Since the 1992 meeting Mãe Beata has traveled widely to attend conferences and give talks in several cities in Brazil. She has also visited Germany and the United States, having been invited to both places to talk about her life experiences and to share her vast knowledge about Candomblé. Despite the travels to places that she could never have dreamt of as she listened to stories as a child, one can always find her back in her modest home. It is in Miguel Couto that all the paths she has traveled come together. It is in this particular crossroads that her experiences are re-collected in the many stories she has to tell about her life and the life of the people who have accompanied her in this long journey. It is here where you will come to when you need the help of the gods and it is here that Mãe Beata will give you your much needed counsel.
Vânia Cardoso is an anthropologist doing research on women and Afro-Brazilian religion. She has compiled and edited a book of short stories by Mãe Beata, Caroço de Dendê.