Indigenous and Anticapitalist Sounds: Musical Practices to Pollinate the Brazilian Caatinga

Fig. 1. The Praiá Dancer, who represents a spiritual entity important to the traditional musical ritual system. The entity is also important to community decision making (and is a repository of great environmental knowledge).

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From the sound landscape of the Alagoas Caatinga, in northeastern Brazil, several types of sounds emerge. Some, such as the roaring of cattle, are a feature of rural areas while others are typically urban, such as the gathering of children returning from school, the combination pointing to the complexity of the place, urban life intertwined with a rural environment. Likewise, the area is characterized by the expansion of agricultural activities on small and medium farms, and by the small and middle-sized cities that have developed over the last decades, the result of an unbalanced urbanization process, guided by the mechanisms of coloniality.

In this landscape of sound, it is important to mention the profusion of sounds from the birds and creatures that populate and pollinate the biome beautifully, besides generating life. There is a close relationship between these sounds and the different species of flowers that color the environment, and the fruits that promote well-being and health, such as the umbu fruit. The combination of these sounds and relationships forms a soundscape, as Schafer (2001 [1977]), who understands this as a sound environment, explains.

The Caatinga and all its profusion of sounds, relationships, knowledge and species is one of the most threatened regions on the planet. It has suffered an intense process of desertification, which substantially affects the lives of the people, their knowledge, and the species that live there. In addition, this process affects not only the possibilities, but also the life-giving potential of the region. Several indigenous peoples still make their living space within this biome, which is, therefore, a place of pluri-epistemologies and diverse ontologies, rather than a place intended only for the production of goods.

In the soundscape of this region, especially in the indigenous territories, the unique sound of indigenous music stands out, the vibrating and powerful sound of the Toré a true epistemological and ontological matrix for “good living (bem viver)”, a balanced and healthy indigenous way of being-in-the-world typical of South American indigenous peoples.

The musical ritual of Toré was often harshly repressed by local elites, as part of a constant epistemic violence. Although once seen as merely a cultural performance, diacritically marking out the indigenous identity, Toré is much more than that!

A polysemic musical ritual with political and epistemic anti-capitalist values, Toré has the potential to decolonize the caatinga. The practice of Toré is outlined as the way in which indigenous peoples reflect, maintain and produce new ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. The practice is furthermore based on other categories and notions of allowing other life possibilities. Our mother tongue resides in our music; it is a document that keeps us alive in the territory. It keeps us going. It is maintenance! It makes us stronger! It is a cure. We feel it on our skin.

The relationship betweenbirds, flowers and plants leads to a lively and diverse Caatinga. In the process another soundscape based on a variety of other sounds, human and non-human, emerges as the “enchanted” ones, vital entities of indigenous spirituality. This takes place in relation to nature, perceived from an indigenous point of view, rather than through the Cartesian dichotomy, based on Western ontology, that separates nature from culture.

Accordingly, in Toré the Caatinga is musicalized and pollinated, and remains alive. Our aim is to present part of the cosmopolitical aspect in the sound of the Toré songs, based on an idea of the “living Caatinga”that opposes the current desertification process of the biome. The “living Caatinga” is the driving force behind the decolonization of space and for the practice of anti-capitalist resistance, and calls attention to new relationships and possibilities.

The idea of interconnectedness is vital to the living Caatinga. Therefore, we look forward to presenting the Toré as the assumption of another caatinga, not degraded, not turned into a desert, but full of life, and pollinated!

Fig. 2. Spiritual leader guiding Praiá dancers in a musical ritual called the Praiá Ritual, which is part of the musical ritual system for which Toré is the basis.

Territory

The Kalankó, an indigenous population, consists of about 400 people who live in the interior of northeastern Brazil, in the high hinterlands of Alagoas, specifically in the municipality of Água Branca. Even today, the community still does not have a demarcated indigenous land. This process has been dragging on for years at the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the state institution responsible for indigenous issues. The demarcation would guarantee not only the physical and cultural maintenance of the group, but also the conservation of the Caatinga.

The Kalankó territory, fragmented into small landholdings, and small and medium-sized properties belonging to indigenous and non-indigenous people, is increasingly affected by non-indigenous production activities and land expropriation. Some predatory activities practiced by the non-Indigenous are easily identified in this territory, including fruit production; the grazing of a small herd of cattle and goats; a transporter company; ostrich production; wood for charcoal and stakes, among other activities. In addition, there is the advance of the non-indigenous landowners who end up appropriating more land year by year, pressuring the indigenous population into ever-smaller portions of land, with fewer necessities for survival.

This process of territorial expropriation and ecological degradation is responsible for the scarcity of the resources that are vital for the life of the indigenous population. Jardilina Kalankó says that “we plant watermelon, but when summer comes, everything dries up”. For the Kalankó shaman Tonho Preto “the cotton crop has been reduced by more than half, the cotton is extinct. It doesn’t rain in the summer anymore”. Likewise, “the caroá is being lost. It is part of religion. One vestment needs 150 dozen kilos of caroá, which is scarce. Today there are 12 Praiá vestments, made with great difficulty, besides being scarce, we are supplying other people, too”.

The caroá is a type of bromeliad typical of the Caatinga. From the fiber of its leaves, important objects are made by the indigenous population of the region, such as the Praiá garment for dancers. The Praiá dancer (fig. 1) represents the enchanted entities that are the basis of the indigenous spiritual world. Such a situation underlines the relationality that is fundamental to the Kalankó epistemology: without territory, there is no caroá, greatly affecting the spiritual practice of the collective.

The Kalankó live in degraded parts of the Brazilian Caatinga, one of the regions in Brazil that is most threatened and transformed by anthropic action (Souza, 2004, pp. 4-8). The Caatinga houses a typical Brazilian biome, with low rainfall and high average temperatures throughout the year. It has high biodiversity and covers about 700 thousand km² of the nation’s territory. Currently, about 80% of its area is affected by anthropic changes. This is typical of Brazilian predatory capitalism, threatening a dramatic scenario for the nation’s future sustainability. The Caatinga is dying. It is inarguable that Brazilian governments have always collaborated with the degradation of the biome. Only 5% of the Caatinga is a preservation area and less than 1% is indigenous land. Notably, the deforestation rate in the country is increasingly high, at a time when there is a far-right government ruling the country.

We want the land in order to preserve natural resources, traditional medicine, forests, streams. The hinterlands need to be cultivated. Besides, the land sustains natural resources, medicine, springs, forests, streams, music and life. The land needs to be cultivated and planted with corn, cassava, cotton and watermelon. The spirituality of the indigenous people is to guard the land to preserve its natural resources, and to use the soil to cultivate and produce food, to guarantee well-being.

The Toré

The Toré is part of a musical-ritual system that also includes the Praiá and the Service de Chão. This musical genre extends across a large part of the interior of Alagoas and beyond. In each Toré ritual, at least three songs must always be sung, producing an enchanted energy that comes from the presence and action of the enchanted entities in the ritual arena – the “terreiro”. According to Culezinha Kalankó, the “terreiro” “is meant to receive this energy that is responsible for health, safety, and joy”.

Fig. 3. A great Toré circle. A good example of a Toré practice in the middle of Caatinga in Kalankó territory.

Listen:
Audio 2. Toré Music: Feathered Caboclo

Zé Kalankó states that he “was born in the Toré,” and will die in it. To Tonho Kalankó, “Toré is the music that has always been sung”, since their ancestors. As for Maria Kalankó, “one cannot live without Toré.” Often, it seems as if Toré is the basis for the formation of subjectivities. To be born in the Toré means discovering oneself as a subject alongside authorizing, recognizing and appropriating to oneself a way of existing in this world.

Furthermore, it is in the domain of the Toré that one catches sight of a series of practices, notions, ideas, and feelings that can be appreciated in relation to life, where one connects the body to a way of being. To illustrate this point, in the Toré one always seeks to dance in pairs; this brings about the logic of association, in the case of bodies, entities that should not isolate themselves. The dance is based on the “core-periphery” structure, in which the singers stand in the center of the circle and the other participants on the margins. The dance is always performed counterclockwise, and the moves consist of twirls and turns.

The singing is based on a “question-answer” structure, in which the singer sings two verses, and the participants answer with two more, as well as some variations of this basis. All Kalankó musical pieces are reiterative in the sense that they take on a new meaning and resume a path already demonstrated by the group. The more the dynamic is repeated, the more enchanted energy is produced in the moment. Toré is reiterative also because it happens through the repetition of certainsound figures – melodic cells, similar rhythms, relations and elements proper to the epistemology in focus. The music also reiterates certain terms, which can be characters, objects, or actions proper to the environment.

Kalankó musicality is about the Caatinga. There are many melodic procedures, demonstrating that the Toré is based on creativity and freedom. The melodic phrase is composed of two parts, evenly shared, always ending at the bottom. Also notable aresome procedures within the melodic composition, such as the profusion of arpeggios, ornamentation, rhythmic moves between singer and chorus, and also between men and women, interpolation and stacking.

Fig. 4. Toré Musical Transcription which points to musical and epistemological elements based on Caatinga indigenous perception.

Even though the Toré is called a “promessa” or “brincadeira”, “it is about respect,” as Mr. Edmilson, a great Toré master says, due to its importance in producing social relations and lifestyles, and its connection to territory. The rite can be performed in several spaces, from inside an individual’s home, to outside a village’s bounds. Toré is usually performed in the farmyard, a rectangular space located in the center of a village. When such rites also assume an external political significance, they demonstrate a diacritical sign of ethnic identification.

Urubu de Serra Negra

Urubu de Serra Negra

de velho caiu as penas (Cantador)

de come mangaba verde

na baixa da jurema. (Cantador)

Ole le coã (Coro)

na baixa de jurema

olele coã

na baixa da jurema ole le coã

Serra Negra Vulture

Serra Negra Vulture

so old its legs fell off (Singer)

from eating green mangaba

in the lowlands of the jurema. (Singer)

Ole le coã (Audience response)

in the low jurema

ole le coã

in low jurema ole le coã

Fig. 5: Aunt Maria Kalankó, who represents one of the first generations to inhabit this part of the Brazilian Caatinga following the violent forced movement suffered by indigenous Pankararu in Pernambuco state.

Listen:
Audio 3. Toré Music: Serra Negra Vulture

Associations and relations: Flowers, birds, fruit and territory

Each song in the Kalankó village belongs to an enchanted entity, the musical ‘owner’ of the work. In this case, the owner of the Toré “Serra Negra Vulture”, above, is from Andorinha master, which points to a bird from the region. Analysis makes it clear that the main relationship in the song is between sky and earth. In it, the vulture, another bird, represents the higher ground, since it is a bird that flies high.

The vulture that comes from above has eaten green mangaba, a regional fruit. The act of eating here implies a transformation, which results in the feathers falling out, diminishing the power of the animal. The jurema, a vegetable, is located in a region classified as lowland. The term jurema, in geography, identifies something similar to a low altitude valley. The jurema is placed in opposition to the mangaba, a much-appreciated fruit, that seems to be in an intermediate realm, neither low on the ground nor set on high. The sensitive code that becomes evident is taste. Such relations are often present in the songs.

More than that, the Kalankó people have an amazing knowledge of the plant and animal species of the Caatinga. This knowledge is put into use in healing procedures, cooking, territorial management, and in ritual musical moments. Part of this knowledge refers to the understanding and classification of a number of birds, such as Gavião Caburé (barred forest falcon), Viuvinha (barn swallow), Andorinha (swallow), Acoã (laughing falcon), Urubu (vulture) and others. When they appear in the Toré, the birds of the Caatinga usually represent the enchanted entities that, while still alive, have transcended into the spiritual world and protect the community.

In relation to what has been said, the Kalankó, while referring to themselves – subjects – identify themselves as standing on the lower ground, therefore distant from the birds that occupy the higher level. Accordingly, they elaborate a series of correlations with the plant order, that is to say, the vegetal world. Flowers,in Toré music , for example, are taken as subjects of the group. The narrative itself is created to locate the group in the indigenous universe of the region, based, for example, on metaphors of a phylogenetic kind, which involves, on one side, the “Old Trunks”, that represent the ancestors, and, on the other side, the “Rama Tips”, the “new” communities.

It can be said that the Kalankó (a farming population)’s cosmovision, has two base layers, the high and the low, represented by the sky and the earth. In this scenario, the indigenous person must work towards the conjunction of both in order to promote contact with the enchanted world, which can give access to the vital energy – the enchanted one – that manifests abundantly in non-degraded places. This conjunction has to do with the action of singing. To make it happen, sound is used as an agent of the conjunction. Kalankó musicality establishes a complex network of relations between species that articulates the sky with the earth, the birds with the flowers, and the Toré with the territory.

Territorial Songs

The Toré songs are territorial, as Julio Kamer Apinajé states, speaking of Panhi musicality. For Kamer Apinajé (author), it is necessary to sing the traditional songs to ensure the sustainability of both the population and the world. Territory, therefore, is not only a space of intensified commodity production. On the contrary, territory is intrinsically connected with other areas of life, such as social organization, ritual, access to natural resources, health, musicality, and, finally, indigenous existence itself (Kamer and Herbetta, 2018).

According to Floriberto Diaz Gomes, a Mixe intellectual:

It is not madness or superstition that our fathers and mothers taught us that we should talk to the earth to cultivate it, or that trees, birds, and rivers are our brothers, and that we should do rituals and life ceremonies at least once a year, to look at ourselves and realize that our life is the smallest point in the cosmos, but perhaps one of the most important in creation (Hernandez and Jimenez, 2014, p. 49).

Toré, then, proposes a living Caatinga effectively based on relations and principles, with an axis of other classifications and distinct relations between species and territory, for instance, among territory, bromeliads, birds, plants, other animals, healing, the body, and the spiritual world. To take into consideration this other way of perceiving and producing the Caatinga is to decolonize its current management. Singing the Toré is a proposal of transformation.

In opposition, the destruction of part of the territory to generate capital for a few individuals is evident. This implies destroying not only the territory, but all of the spiritual and ancestral knowledge that is learned from/with nature, and disrupting a series of ancestrally established relationships.

Listen:
Audio 4. Toré Music: Aldeia tem caboclo

Pollination as a deep connection

The text presented here is the result of a long and intense dialogue between a great Toré master, Chief Paulo Kalankó, and researcher Alexandre Herbetta. We have tried to present, from our own memories and knowledge, remarkable features and affective elements of the musical tradition, based on our distinct points of view. At some points the pronoun “we” is used, indicating the possibility of an intercultural collective, something that is vital to the contemporary world. In others, individual songs, sounds and memories are the gateway to good and proper communication.

We have tried to highlight how the practice of musical ritual is the concrete epistemic and ontological proposition of another way of being and, consequently, of another handling of the world. The concept of Kalankó music, for example, is distinct from that of music in the Eurocentric Western world. The concept of development is the same. According to Oyeronké Oyewumi, “societies that have experienced colonization have suffered many negative effects, some psychological, some linguistic, and some intellectual. However, perhaps none has been less studied than how colonization subjugates knowledge and marginalizes local epistemes” (2016, p. 1).

Sousa Santos (2007, p. 14) asserts that “the understanding of the world far exceeds the Western understanding of the world”. In brief, the musical structure evidenced in Kalankó music reveals a world in which the enchanted spiritual entity (and its energy) is seen in and relates to birds, whether the hawk, the acauã, the parrot or another bird species, while the Indigenous people that interacts with these birds, relates to the plant world, often refering to types of flower. The intermediate world is constituted of elements located in the middle of the other two layers, such as fruits—mangaba, murici and umbu—and are affected by taste, which leads to transformation.

The Toré musical tradition, therefore, establishes connections and effects the varied relationships between the elements mentioned above, as well as others that did not appear in the Toré discussed here, in the process demonstrating a grammar of decoloniality (Mignolo, 2010). Associations between species creates life in the Caatinga, as does access to an enchanted energy that is responsible for the health and happiness of the people.

This process is somewhat similar to pollination. The relationship between birds and flowers generates the abundance and multiplicity of species—the living caatinga!

Such a proposition reaffirms what Shawn Wilson, an intellectual of Cree Indigenous roots postulates about indigenous way of thinking. For Wilson, the relationality of the indigenous peoples is central to their distinct organizations and behaviors. It is notable that, from an indigenous perspective, the universe is not understood in a fragmented manner, based on Western dichotomies of nature and culture, body and mind, reason and emotion.

For Arturo Escobar, it is possible to think of this dynamic – as well as similar dynamics – from the perspective of relational ontology. According to the author (Escobar, 2016, p. 113), […] relational ontologies are realized in cultivation practices similar to traditional peasant husbandry (polyculture with production for subsistence and for the market, a diversified landscape with links to communities and gods, etc.). In the same vein, Mignolo and Tlostanova (2012, p. 232) suggest that the most appropriate term for this type of situation is “vincularidad,” reflecting a deep inter-connectivity that deals with the relationships among the various elements, as well as the constant correlations between them. The relationship can feed back into the system, giving a more complex aspect to the various networks of association so established.

Moreover, the elements identified in analysing the Toré songs are multiple and interrelated, expressing arrangements that connect the Caatinga, the animal and floral species, the humans, the songs, and the spiritual entities. This indicates a specific notion of territory, i.e., that the enchanted ones, the birds, other animals, fruits, movements, objects, and people exist only to the extent that they are associated.

Humans and non-humans, different species, can therefore coexist in a respectful and balanced way that breaks with western dichotomies. Important elements, but fragmented and isolated from the complexity of life when it is reduced to the notion of predatory exploitation, such as development, backwardness, income generation, employment, and market economics, all typical of a westernized matrix of knowledge, should not play a central role in the management of the territory in question.

While the Caatinga of Alagoas – and Brazil in general – continues to be exploited in a destructive way that isbased on a developmental and predatory capitalism, undergoing an intense process of desertification, as we have seen, the Kalankó continue to have the biome as a space for survival, a place for the production of a universe of life and well-being – not only for the production of commodities.

Broadly speaking, the end of the Caatinga is the end of the enchanted birds and indigenous flowers, and of the relationships between the species. The Toré is then more than a diacritical marker that points to an indigenous belonging. The Toré is the proposition of another Caatinga—not degraded, not turned into a desert, but full of life. A musical territory and a pollinated one.

To this extent, Immanuel Wallerstein notes the importance of the present moment in the unfolding of the contemporary world. He claims that the modern world system is currently facing a fundamental bifurcation; “it is going through a systemic crisis that also affects the structures of knowledge. We have before us not one, but two great social uncertainties: what will the nature of the new historical system we are building be, and what will the epistemology of our new structures and knowledge be” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 48).

We fight for a music-filled, alive, pollinated Caatinga. For an interconnected Caatinga, too. We plead the importance of the assumption of pluri-epistemologies. We believe that interculturality can be fundamental to the elaboration of public policies that effectively seek sustainability. Similarly, we fight for the Toré. Our fight is to demarcate the Kalankó land. Once our own land is secured, our lives will get better. It is our right. We are both indigenous and citizens.

I will never forget a Toré that took place on the final night of the “Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples of the Northeastern Hinterlands”, in 2007. Throughout the day, joy was evident in the Toré circles, where the laughter and joy were visible on everyface. At the same time, suffering was an ever-present theme in the speeches of the leadership, focusing on the struggle of the indigenous peoples to have their rights respected within the country, asking for respect from the Federal Government.

It was very cold in the Caatinga that night and it started to rain, preventing the anticipated Praiá Rite from taking place. I heardresigned comments saying that this is just how an Indigenous life is – difficult. The constantly-lit bonfire was almost extinguished by of the rain as it began to fall heavily, also threatening the final Toré. This Toré would gather all the participants of the meeting, as an expression of group association.

The non-Indigenous – myself, members of the Alagoas rural union and members of movements against the transposition of the São Francisco River – hurried back to our tents, set up under the central hut of the indigenous territory in the Caatinga – protected from the weather. At the same time and inversely, the Indigenous peoples of diverse groups ran to the “terreiro” in front of our tents and began to sing and dance the Toré. The fire bravely resisted the abundance of rainwater.

We, the non-Indigenous, remained comfortably inside the hut, talking about the issues raised throughout the meeting. The conversation lasted a long time— we hoped that the rite would end soon. We lacked the courage both to participate and to admit our lack.

The circle did not end! The Indigenous danced in the rain, covered in mud, all night long.

I did not see the end of the rite.

I slept thinking about the images of those mingling bodies, smiling in the light of the fire. Thinking about that other Caatinga.

All of them, the Indigenous, the Caatinga, ideas, mud, joy, birds, fire, laughter, flowers, sounds, water, laughter… associated, interconnected, forming a special, musical and exciting landscape. Neither past suffering nor the mysterious future existed anymore. Nor did desertification. There was life!

Life in the Caatinga was that moment a life of joy and jubilation. Always.