The region has been represented in popular music, literature, and film not only as a nostalgic space, but also as a space of rebellion and millenarianism, where violent bandits are celebrated for their vigilantism and maverick Catholic mystics preach the apocalypse.
Brazilians use the word saudade to express the multiple registers of nostalgia: individual and collective, universal and uniquely Brazilian. Saudade is not simply a straightforward translation of the word “nostalgia,” but rather an expression of a deep longing or sense of loss that has come to be conceived as a generalized affect of Brazilian-ness. The bittersweet yearning of saudade, described by Joaquim Nabuco as “remembrance, love, grief and longing” all at once, is often understood to be ever present in Brazilian life. The anthropologist Roberto da Matta evocatively describes saudade as “an enchanted temporality that contaminates” (1993, 34).
Cultural Rescue in Arcoverde, Pernambuco
After the screening of the video of Dona Senhorinha, researchers gave a presentation on musicians in Arcoverde, Pernambuco, a small commercial city on the edge of the desertlike sertão interior of the state. The poet, historian, and literary scholar Micheliny Verunschk and the ethnomusicologist Cristina Barbosa described how new notions of citizenship, heritage, and tourism were scraping against older notions of folklore.
Micheliny explained that when she grew up in Arcoverde in the 1980s, it was widely considered “a place without history, without memory, and without culture,” a sentiment shared throughout Brazil during the fits and starts of redemocratization during the transition out of decades of military dictatorship. She expressed a desire to discover an Arcoverde where she would want to raise her own children someday. In what she described as an “active reconquest of identity,” Micheliny learned about the history of samba de coco from Lula Calixto, a singer and street vendor widely known as a town eccentric. Micheliny described Lula as a link to an older generation of samba de coco musicians. He sold coconut candy on the streets of Arcoverde and offered to teach samba de coco to anyone who would stop and listen. He tirelessly sought out sympathetic teachers, who allowed him to teach in elementary schools. Lula considered this his calling.
Coco is a style of music and dance principally associated with poor Afro-Brazilians from the coastal Northeast, not the dry interior where Arcoverde is located.1 It is mainly found in the state of Pernambuco and adjacent coastal states. Coco consists of layers of percussion with an asymmetrical 3 + 3 + 2 pulse tresillo timeline (counted ONE and two AND three and FOUR and). Backing vocals respond with short refrains, and songs alternate between verses and rapid-fire improvised, declamatory sections called emboladas, or tongue twisters. There are myriad variations on coco. One of the most prevalent styles in Pernambuco is coco de embolada, in which two dueling tambourine players trade insults, play word games, and provide social commentary on street corners and beaches.
The recognition of coco as music that harbored the essence of Brazilianness can be traced back to Mário de Andrade, who gushed about a coco singer named Chico Antonio whom the Mission recorded in 1929, claiming that Antonio’s voice “managed to distill the quintessence of this way of ours of singing. It is a subtle nasal quality, good and sweet but with a strong bite to it, not unlike the bittersweet taste of the cashew fruit” (Andrade 1959, 378). Andrade’s writings about Chico Antonio cemented coco as part of the key musical vocabulary used in modernist explorations of Brazilian-ness. The melodies and recordings that Andrade brought back to São Paulo provided composers with the ingredients to “rediscover” Brazil musically.
Samba de coco, the specific variety of coco played in Arcoverde, is one of many Afro-Brazilian round dances commonly understood to have preceded samba, such as samba de roda in the state of Bahia, jongo from the state of Rio de Janeiro, and tambor de crioula from the state of Maranhão. The genre indexes both the more Afro-Brazilian coastal Northeast and the white and mestiço arid sertão backlands. Its repertoire overlaps with the accordion-driven forró dance music emblematic of the northeastern interior. In contrast to coastal coco, samba de coco in interior Pernambuco also varies in terms of instrumentation: the triangle and a small surdo bass drum are included, and large bombo drums are not, yet the ganzá shaker and pandeiro are present in both styles.
In her speech at the meeting Micheliny revealed that the street musician Lula Calixto had died in 1999 of Chagas disease, shortly after she finished her research with him on samba de coco. There is a direct connection between Chagas disease and poverty: the beetle that transmits the disease lives in thatched houses made of mud, but not in the sturdier and higher-cost, tile-roofed brick or cinder block houses. It is an ironic and tragic twist that a quaint, folkloric mud hut replica later served as a museum in his honor.
Micheliny noted that only after Lula’s death and the media attention surrounding it did the city formally recognize samba de coco. It has since become the “sonic postcard” of Arcoverde that promotes the city to tourists. As one of the attractions drawing tourists to visit, Lula Calixto’s family built a bar in the front part of their house and a small museum across the street. In the bar family members receive visitors and hold impromptu “rehearsals” at which the family group sings songs and encourages everyone present to dance coco. In the museum visitors are invited to learn the story of the group through an exhibition of photographs and Lula’s personal effects.
The next day, three members of Lula Calixto’s family, Assis, Iuma and Iram, stood on the auditorium stage and answered questions about the group that Lula founded: Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde (Samba de Coco Roots of Arcoverde), or simply Coco Raízes. Assis, a stout, soft-spoken carpenter around sixty years old with a striking mixture of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian features, fielded questions in a clipped sertão accent. He had never written a song before his brother Lula passed away four years earlier. But after Lula was gone, Assis felt compelled to carry on his brother’s dream of sustaining a samba de coco group and began to write lyrics and invent melodies. Assis’s slender, beautiful niece Iuma demonstrated the two steps of samba de coco—the quick trupé and the slower parcela—as Assis clapped a tresillo rhythm and tentatively sang one of his compositions in this formal setting. As Assis sang lead, Iram and Iuma responded with insistent refrains in ringing vocal harmony.
Coco Raízes was not the only band in Arcoverde that had achieved popular and commercial success. When Micheliny Verunschk conducted her research on the history of popular music and culture in the city, she was helped by her friend José Paes de Lira Filho, known as Lirinha. As Micheliny recorded interviews, Lirinha learned songs and pandeiro tambourine techniques. After they finished their research, Micheliny wrote a report, and Lirinha started a band called Cordel do Fogo Encantado, playing music inspired by the styles he had learned. Lirinha wrote and sang about the Alto do Cruzeiro neighborhood where the much of the Calixto family lived, several blocks uphill from Lirinha’s family home. A large, white, cement cross stands there at the top of the hill; it is a scenic point removed from and overlooking the town’s center. Walking up the hill to the Alto do Cruzeiro became pivotal to Lirinha’s artistic development. It was where he heard the source of his inspiration and where his musical apprenticeship took place.
Before the weeklong meeting I had only heard of Arcoverde at a concert by Cordel, as the group calls itself.2 The iconoclastic pop band was influenced as much by radical, experimental theater as by local folklore. It was led by Lirinha, who sought through its performances to reappraise past cinematic and literary representations of the region as a territory of poverty, violence, and drought. Cordel’s performances were a stormy, apocalyptic experience that evoked the cinematic, mythical northeastern sertão of violent bandits and millenarian maverick Catholic preachers. The band combined the incantatory tone of fire and brimstone prophecy with hypnotic, percussion-heavy Afro-Brazilian sacred music. Cordel feverishly bent music marked as regional and traditional, such as samba de coco and reisado, so that its performances would stand up to the strident intensity and volume of a heavy metal or punk rock show. At nearly every performance the group claimed samba de coco as one of its main musical influences.
From a very young age Lirinha