Women of Axé, Justice and An-other Thing

by

ana laura silva vilela*

(Portuguese version available here) 

Introduction

Women from different Afro-Brazilian sacred communities articulate and claim a multiplicity represented by the women of axé (“mulheres de axé”). Their corporeality and community narratives express an Afro-diasporic ancestry and confront colonial violence against their very existence, whether in the form of religious intolerance or religious racism. Scrutinized through an analysis of raciality in the early days of Brazilian anthropology and criminology, the women of axé live with the paradox of being incorporated into the national imagination — as exemplified by the figures of the “baiana” and the “mãe preta” (“black mother”) — while simultaneously being the target of aggression by a colonial state: the invasion and destruction of temples, the neo-Pentecostal takeover of media and public institutions, and ongoing attempts by the state to control their practices.

This essay conjures scenes and sections from a doctoral thesis entitled Mulheres de Axé: Justiça Epistêmica nas experiências das ialodês (“Women of Axé: Epistemic Justice in the experiences of the ialodês”), in which I brought my field of training, Law, into dialogue with the lives of two terreiro women of Candomblé, an ialorixá and an ebome from Salvador, Bahia.1 To this end, I drew on various theoretical conversations between visual arts, anthropological literature, Black Brazilian feminisms, and the contribution of a group of authors who write predominantly in the United States academia that has become known as feminists of refusal.

Embracing Black feminism’s formulation that the lives of Black women offer projects of justice does not mean embracing any type of justice. This embrace depends on an-other thing. The lives of terreiro women reposition different knowledges in/through their bodies, attire, and practices, lengthening the boundaries of time, public/private, and sacred/political. And while these women make demands on and struggle over lexicons from the state, they do not exhaust themselves in the latter. Rather, they elaborate on “an-other thing.” Insubmissive and unpronounceable, this essay works with this “an-other thing”.

Thus, the essay mobilizes four sections. In the first part I explore the limits of the justice that can be enunciated when the women of axé stand before it. Next, I comment on the ancestrality that informs the lives of these women. Finally, justice dialogues with the experiences of two women of axé: the refusal of Fausta before her encounter with the scientific racism of Nina Rodrigues and Lívia Natália, a baiana ialorixá whose poetry is soaked in the episteme of Oxum. 

1. Justice and An-other Thing

The undoing of the plot begins with her drifting from the course, with an errant path, with getting lost to the world. The undoing begins with an escape to the woods, with perilous freedom, with petit maroonage, with wading in the water. It does not begin with proclamations or constitutions or decrees or appeals or a seat at the table or a stake in the game. Saidiya Hartman, “The plot of her undoing”.

One owes to Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay “Critique of Violence” an immediate assertion of Law as violence, whether of an institutional manner or of maintenance of its own order. There essay carries something within itself that instigated important thinkers throughout the twentieth century to work with it and that is the starting point for the main contributions on justice that I draw upon in this text: from Jacques Derrida and Denise Ferreira da Silva.

The trust in the Benjaminian assertion, so many decades later, is not due to the prophetic character of the essay. Derrida, for instance, recovers the articulation of violence as the founding moment of Law — whether in the forms of the state, the police, and in the repetition of violence as authority — offered by Benjamin in order to “always keep alive the question on the origin, the foundations and the limits of our conceptual, theoretical or normative apparatus around justice” (37-8). If on the one hand Derrida walks with Benjamin regarding the articulation of the violence that imposes Law, he differentiates it from the idea of force. Force would have to do with justice, which exists as difference from Law:

How to distinguish between this force of law, this “force of law” as one says both in French and in English, I believe, and on the other hand the violence that we always judge unjust? What difference is there between on the one hand the force that can be just, in any case judged legitimate (not only the instrument in the service of law but the very realization, the essence of law), and on the other hand the violence that we judge unjust? What is a just force or a non-violent force? (9)

From this exploration into the meanings of Law, force, and justice based on Benjamin’s text, one can already note the central distinction of Derrida’s argument: Law and Justice are not the same thing. Here, I propose that we deal with this difference not through the most common questions that the “telepathic constriction” (Mombaça and Matiuzzi, 15) of modern juridical theories deems fitting to ask — for example, questions concerning the origin of Law in Justice or as a regulating ideal of justice (De Ville), among others.3 When Derrida states that “law is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, it is just that law should exist, but justice is incalculable, it demands that one calculate the incalculable” (30), a possibility opens up for other speculations around the concept of justice.

But let us dwell a little longer on the articulation of justice as incalculable and an “impossible experience” (Derrida 29-30). On one side there would be a “justice (infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rules, foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous, and heterotopic)” and on another side would rest “the exercise of justice as law, legitimacy or legality, a device which creates stability, is statutory and calculable, a system of regulated and codified prescriptions” (41). However, this distinction is not meant to function as an excuse not to seek justice. On the contrary, “it is a hyperbolic increase in the demand for justice, the sensitivity to a kind of essential lack of proportion that must inscribe, within it, excess and inadequacy” (37-8).

In the conception of justice outlined by Derrida, there is yet another dimension that I need to emphasize. It concerns the location of law and justice in the central undertaking of Derridian philosophy — deconstruction:

In the structure I describe, law is essentially deconstructible either because it is founded, that is, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual layers (and this is the history of law, the possible and necessary transformation, sometimes the improvement of law), or because its ultimate foundation, by definition, is not founded. The fact that law is deconstructible is not a misfortune. One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress. But the paradox I would like to submit to discussion is this: it is this deconstructible structure of law, or if you prefer, of justice as law, that also ensures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if something like that exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. Just as deconstruction itself, if something like that exists. Deconstruction is justice (26-7).

What interests me here is to follow Derrida’s argument that “deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice and the deconstructibility of law” (27). Concerning the interval, that is, about justice being the path between what can be deconstructed and what cannot, it becomes difficult not to be seized by the images of an itan that Verger describes about the iamis, the owners of the bird and of feminine power at the origin of the world:

In story VI of the odù ogbè ògả, when the iyàmi – ęlęye arrive in the world, they go and perch on seven species of trees successively, as it happens in the preceding story. On each of these trees they conduct activities of a different character. On three of them, they work for Good; on three others, they work for evil; on the seventh, they work for good and for evil. This tends to show us that for the Yoruba, power – àse (axé) – in itself is neither good nor bad, neither moral nor perverse; only the manner through which axé is employed matters (Verger 18).

First, one must recall the epistemic violence that positioned the bird-mothers and several categories of Yoruba presence in the world in a Manichaean way. The images of the iamis moving among the trees offer a fitting allegory to the interval occupied by justice between the moments of Derridian deconstruction. Moreover, they evoke what Thiago Hoshino elaborated as “turning” the law through santo4 — and why not turn justice as well? Instead of remaining stuck in the reduction of “good and evil,” this “turning” summons us to watch closely what justice turns into as it lets itself be crossed by forces, by santo, by the low and powerful flight of the eleyés, and to think about the destructive and procreative power attributed to them. What if we think of the destructive as a “generative performance of an abolitionist reading for the world” (Mombaça and Matiuzzi 17)? They keep flying, then, between the destructive and the creative, between the calculated justice of law and the unpronounceable justice. Between death and (posthumous) life, between making death and making life, even in death itself. Justice consists of this flight, it is within the to-come, “possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not present, not yet or even never, there is justice” (Derrida 27).

I find a path to follow the speculations of Denise Ferreira da Silva (“Speculations”) in her complex articulation concerning the impossibility of justice. Ferreira da Silva also shares the notion of law as a signifier of violence/blackness concerning the inseparability between the transparent subject and racial violence.5 However, the Derridian formulation is grasped from the outset in the title of her main text on the theme: “To Be Announced: A Radical Praxis or Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice.” The author’s contribution unveils the juridical architectures of modernity created from the sexual body of the enslaved native and what is incomprehensible and unrepresentable in her. The characteristics of this epistemological tool also serve to expose that justice, when understood as law, is always resolved as violence. On the other hand, if justice is understood by its impossible, as proposed by Derrida, the sexual body of the enslaved native announces that it is only possible to know the limits of justice and to know at its limits, when, by revealing the total violence of the modern ethical-juridical architectures, that unrepresentable can also wander and lead to other imaginations about justice (Ferreira da Silva A Dívida Impagável, 2019).

Before the scene of modern knowledge in which she was not accounted for,6 in which she was reduced to nothing, the sexual body of the enslaved native is not interested in merely exposing the insufficiency of modern categories, especially that of the subject. Ferreira da Silva’s project articulates what is between value, that is, “the formal equality that orients juridical determinations (of law and the State) and the formalization of the violence operated by scientific (racial) knowledge” (“Speculations”). Her body, upon entering the scene of knowledge, demands other questions and gestures:

The question, then, is if the existing mechanisms of justice, namely the administrative and the executive — both of which have prevailed throughout the life of the liberal architectures that sustain capital in their latest iterations — have been oblivious to racial violence, what would become of justice if raciality entered into its formulation? Would it produce a program for the realization of justice — a plan to force it to deal with the violations, the injustices, that proliferate throughout global existence — that was not based on obscuring how the total value expropriated from slave labor and native lands exists? Figured now as global capital? (“Speculations”).

The intricate handling of categories and phenomena is intended to think justice at its limits — in the limits and in the entanglements of ethical-juridical architectures, of onto-epistemological categories, and of matter. The sexual body of the enslaved native shows, therefore, everything that justice cannot accomplish. But within its intractability by the modern text, at the limits of justice, “the captive body in the scene of subjugation” (Ferreira da Silva A Dívida Impagável, 2024) unsettles thought and allows itself to wander. If on the one hand Derrida located justice in the movement between what can and what cannot and will never be deconstructed, when the captive body in the scene of subjugation enters the lexicons of justice, she carries a task and re-elaborates the notion of justice no longer as deconstruction. It is an-other thing. It has to do with Fanon’s injunction in The Wretched of the Earth7, according to which there is no new thing when one thinks in the old way, through the forms of the (old) world as we know it:

With \X, I illustrate what becomes possible when blackness speculates and wanders in the world, heeding the ethical mandate to challenge our thinking, to free our imagination and to welcome the end of the world as we know it, that is, decolonization, which is the only adequate name for justice (Ferreira da Silva “Hackeando” 198).

“\X,” “the Thing,” “Excess,” “sexual body of the enslaved native in the scene of subjugation,” “the captive body in the scene of subjugation”; these are many of the names by which the presence of raciality and of what is not represented in the modern text are written in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s text. By centralizing raciality as a privileged category for analyzing the modern text, Ferreira da Silva’s speculations (“Speculation”) around the notion of justice explain how the latter is epistemological, yet nonetheless material, and that one can only know it in the face of its non-realization (Ferreira da Silva, A Dívida Impagável 2019). And if justice can be understood as deconstruction when race is not centered, seen through the “Thing” it can only mean decolonization, a process of knowledge and of a praxis. Thus, the sexual body of the enslaved native in the scene of subjugation is an epistemological tool because it not only exposes but also perverts that very scene through a Black feminist poetics.

2. Ancestrality and Matter

In the talk “Iyá Tundé: the Mother who returned,” delivered at the II Seminário Mulher, Mito e Riso in 2020, Ebome Vanda Machado joins Afro-diasporic ancestrality and the lives of women with a very particular notion of time in an unrepeatable manner. She revisits (her) initiation (in barco)8 as the great legacy that terreiro women offered to her people.

Today I’m going to tell a story and the title of my talk is “Iyá Tundé, Iyá Tundé”. In Yoruba, Iyá Tundé means the mother who returns. This means that in order for me to be, for me to be able to be here today, many women went to the ancestral realm so that others could return (…) I’m going to talk about the initiation. And to do that, I decided to talk about my own initiation, about how I was initiated (…) First of all, the day of the initiation is unforgettable. I still see myself as if in that moment — with all my senses extremely sharp, watching the elders become anxious, circumspect, and very active. The sounds and the smells came from the kitchen and filled the house. Everything signifying something that was about to happen, which I did not grasp — even the air I breathed mobilized the secret I did not know. The cackling of the animals, the banging of pot lids, the grinder at work, the bustle of the kitchen, the opening and closing of doors and suitcases. The waters running from the taps, being poured into the pots, the ebós, the smudge burners, everything, everything moved me in that moment. Everything moved me. It was late afternoon and the sun had already set and the first birds were already settling in. It was late afternoon and the magical smell of the alchemy of leaves and the sound of the pestle was inebriating, making me repeatedly ask: and now? And now? How to know “and now”? Initiation has sacred secrets, so the “and now” must really remain for a later moment. The pounding of the pestle was impressive. I don’t know if you have ever seen the pounding of a pestle. It beats like the heart. It goes tam-tam, tam-tam, tam-tam, just as a heartbeat — always one beat stronger and one weaker; one stronger and one weaker, it truly seems like the symmetry of heartbeats, and some beats fed and held my own heart that was leaping. It was the day of my initiation. The hour had come and everything in that moment was silence. A silence. An absolute silence. On the day of initiation, we feel a silence. But we also feel a certain apprehension of all realities. Everything gives a sense, a sense that is great, a sense that seems greater than what we are feeling, somehow a sense of a certain disordering. I am making an effort to order the disordering of that day. The lightness of silence also brings an enormous concentration of energies. And the immanence of what had always been potentially within me surfaces and allows me to perceive myself and to perceive everything as acts and scenes of life. But they are acts only present in my most remote memory. There was a doubt: “Am I seeing?”; “Am I hearing?”; “Am I doing?”; “What memory is this?” Or “what reality is this?” Everything became fully present. Many gestures became present, but through chants, meaningful gestures, prayers and silences. Silences and care from all the elder women of the house (…) And for days and days I was experiencing the warmth of the earth, the earth that sustains and feeds us and one day will receive us without life. The earth began to have another meaning for me. Every now and then I touched the earth. The earth. And I felt a pleasure, a love, an… another relationship. The earth. “Death germinates.” “To plant somewhere.” I was planted. I was planted. Planted in the earth. The night of the twenty-sixth of July was long, long, long. It was very long. Time strolled unhurriedly and I was completely surrendered and oblivious to any kind of pressure. What I was experiencing now was a time without measure, but it had… it was my time. It was my time. It was something so particular that I would have no way of speaking about this time of mine (…) We were eight women, eight women. The barco was of eight women. But we ended up becoming nine because a boy was born. My sister Rita’s boy, so we became nine. He was already born feito.9 He was feito in my sister’s womb. The barco… And I thought a lot, I always thought about the barco… Why barco? Barco de iaô, barco…? What does barco mean? Why barco? The image of the barco came and went all the time (…) Iyá Tundé is the mother who returns, it is the return of the female elder who dies and is celebrated on her arrival as the first girl of the family, a girl of the family. Which female elder would have gone to the Orun, so that I could return, in that way, on that day, with that joy? Truly, death happens for the African people as a celebration of life. “Death is a festival,” just as our master João Reis wrote. Death is a festival, and every time I think of that moment I still think ‘may the first Black women always be exalted, they who were uprooted from the African continent, enslaved, and many already reborn, who left as the greatest legacy for us Black people, the greatest ritual that makes the chaining together of all the senses, the chaining of the many subjectivities we hold and that make the path to transmutation. To the human dignity that we have because of this initiation and which, luckily for us, was not lost in the holds of the slave ships.’ Everything was back in my being. Because they, the Black women from Africa, brought more than their strong arms for labor. They brought secrets, sacred secrets, protected between skin and flesh. The barco de iaô is like that. And my barco, iaô, to this day, keeps unspooling the thread of time in the opposite direction of the ships that brought our ancestral mothers. The days went by, the days seemed vast. Over the course of the days and the rituals, and very ancient scenes, which I cannot express here. Forgive me. But everything took place as real expressions of my being and my existence, replete with a poetic, yet unveiling, ontology. I began to think, who am I? A Black woman of Oxum who had gone through everything other women go through. But that is another story (“Iyá Tundé”).

An attentive reading of this narrative summons the many senses through which the lives of the women of axé articulate their projects for justice. The justice that announces itself here, this “an-other thing,” is fundamentally tied to the notion of ancestrality, which demands a complex understanding of time.

Imposed upon this research, ancestrality is also a jargon that is often repeated, yet little elaborated directly due to the delicate manner with which it must be delineated. How to conceive ancestrality, when so many different groups claim their ancestralities — even through hegemonic appropriation? First, it is necessary to understand that Ebome Vanda and the cosmovivências of the povo de santo speak from and are grounded in an Afro-diasporic ancestrality. That means both putting into practice African communitarian principles that conceive the group as a system composed of everything that exists and has existed — the ancestors hold a place of prominence (Leite) and constitute an organizing and preserving principle of the group (Sodré) — and re-elaborating an event of common dispossession (Brand).

Any concept of justice that is born from these experiences bears responsibility toward those who have already existed and those who are yet to come (Derrida Specters). In this way, the Derridian notion of justice with and by the specters gains new breath when reflected upon the experiences of terreiro women. After locating justice at the limits of the impossible, Derrida complexifies it by understanding it as an unending exercise of memory and of debt toward the specters.

Indeed, when Derrida wrote about specters, he had in mind Hamlet’s burden, William Shakespeare’s character who is “the most celebrated case of collective autobiography or the longest-lasting session of analysis in the West” (Beber 5). He was also thinking about the ghost of Marx in social thought, himself killed so many times, and in the reality after the fall of the wall, declaring him dead even further. However, calling specters into the conversation, especially into the conversation of justice, has the potential to show that what no longer exists and what has not yet existed (this particular realm of justice) also take part in what happens now.

Rafael Haddock-Lobo brings the Derridian specters into conversation with the episteme of Afro-Brazilian religions to argue that spectral apparition is always political and irremediably brings with itself a task. Moreover, specters are multiplicities — never a single thing — whose apparition brings with them a “spatio-temporal disjunction” (56). The interruption of the presumed temporal linearity unleashed by the specter comes close to the cleaved and spiral-like temporality that Leda Maria Martins attributes to ancestrality. In elaborating on Black epistemes, Martins conceives them always in movement and as a concept of time itself, a time that spins, spiral-like, in which difference always returns.10 These are Africannesses (africania) and repertoires that repeat, that improvise, putting into practice the driving force that is ancestrality. Ebome Vanda’s articulation of the initiation as the Mother who returns, therefore, is no accident.

The experience of initiation narrated by Ebome Vanda puts into perspective the disjunction of time and the embodiment of ancestrality. Initiation is a term imported or contaminated from anthropological jargon, Ebome Vanda explains, preferring the term feitura (making) in her book Pele da Cor da Noite (Skin the Color of Night). Feitura is a more fluent term, steeped in the lived experiences of candomblé, and one that better describes what happens in the multiple stages in which one “faz o santo.”11 In narrating her feitura, Ebome Vanda articulates another time she experienced and affirms that this complex process is one of the greatest legacies transmitted by the ancestresses who planted their forces here (Brazil), their energies, their axé. It is impossible to read the account above and not think of Cidinha da Silva’s notion of ancestral technologies of production of infinities.12 In the voices of her characters we find these ways of living, of making, of surviving, and enchanting that were “inherited from those who came before us and brought us here” (14-5).

There is a risk of conceiving specters as transcendental presences, distant from materiality. However, specters consist of a “kind of virtual that does not dissociate itself from materiality” (Pinto Neto 124). Thus, when Ebome Vanda narrates the landscape and the multitude of women who were singing or who were there because they were the ones who taught the living to sing, when she feels herself to be (the) earth, one witnesses the material dimension of ancestrality. Different, however, from a notion of genealogical ancestrality that seeks an origin in the known (Brand), in the modern-scientific answer of genes and logos, in a modern resignification of the most unshakable specter of the West: the patriarchal family. Africa in the very definition of the ancestor — not in the past for it exists not in transcendence but rather is matter:

My grandfather left me in this expectation and curiosity, therefore. For the name he could not remember was the name of a place we could not remember. Africa. It was the place we do not remember, even though it took its place in all the conversations about who we were. It was a visible secret (Brand 31).

The same occurs with the spectral presence of the barco in Ebome Vanda’s narrative. The simplest solution would be to think that the barco is simply an inspiration for the initiation, a metaphor, a remembrance of what was. But that is not the case. The barco is not a metaphor, it is substance itself. When they are made, they become barco, they are the barco. A barco of eight women and a boy born among them. The barco is matter. Understanding that ancestrality is materiality consists in the demand for responsibility that justice demands.

3. Lívia Natália and an episteme of Oxum

Lívia Natália is a poet from Bahia, ialorixá, and university professor. She is of Oxum, and that is the ontology of her art. She understands her creation as an adoxada literature, of enchantment, and not as fantastic literature (magical realism). Adoxu is one of the foundations we bring to ourselves during the feitura,13 that is, “the consecration of the Ori so that it becomes the faithful channel of communication between the initiate and his or her orixá” (Souza 198). By explaining the quality of Oxum to whom she belongs, the poet explains how belonging to the orixá is what makes her writing possible:

When I was consecrated to this Orixá, I carried the common knowledge about Osun as the goddess of beauty, love, gold, and delicacy. But, to my astonishment, my Mother is an old Osun, a powerful sorceress who is accompanied by the Ègúns, disembodied beings, whom she taught to dance. And, moreover, among the sixteen qualities which are worked with in the Ketu of Bahia, she is so unique, exceptional, and respected that one cannot pronounce the name of this Lady (Souza 196).

Here, Oxum figures explicitly as an epistemological foundation. And not just any one. Being of Oxum “who is accompanied by the Èguns” is to confront the colonial limitation to the image of the orixá. Furthermore, Lívia Natália offers a writing “under the sign of singing Èguns” when her poetry also becomes enchanted through the denunciation of racial violence, as in the example of poems in which she rises up against police violence:

Quadrilha

Maria did not love João,
She merely idolized his dark feet.
When João died,
Murdered by the police,
Maria put away all his shoes (Souza 137)

The poem was written under the impact of the Chacina do Cabula, a mass killing that occurred in Salvador in 2015 when 12 youths were murdered by the Military Police of the State of Bahia (Souza 137). The event functions as one of the best examples of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s philosophical denunciation regarding the peaceful coexistence between racial violence and the Rule of Law since it did not receive any comments containing moral repudiation from the State.

Oxum’s epistemological presence can be seen multiple times throughout Lívia Natália’s work. Most of her publications devote themselves to water, as immediately displayed in their titles: “Água Negra” (“Black Water”); “Água Negra e outras Águas” (“Black Water and Other Waters”); “Correntezas e outros estudos marinhos” (“Currents and Other Marine Studies”); “Sobejos do Mar” (“Remains of the Sea”); “Dia bonito para chover” (“A Beautiful Day for Rain”). It is with this spirit that Lívia Natália teaches about the notion of poetry that informs the present thesis this essay articulates, that is, poetry as epistemic justice:

Faced with this, one must ask: what can a poem do? What can literature do in the face of such a violent disrespect for human rights? A poem can recover subjects from oblivion, a poem can wash and dress the deemed unimportant dead, a poem can cry for them and tell them of the importance of their lives more than of their deaths, a poem can return to us the humanity denied, a poem can be an act of affection for the cold face and for the survivor, a poem can be episteme, can be a form of inscription, repressing white silences. A poem can set the Eguns to dance, a poem can be a way of saying even contrite silences [...] (Souza 203).

Poetry is a form of knowledge but not just any knowledge. One that makes thought take a turn, capable of producing other imaginaries.

4. Fausta/Obatalá

I propose that we write an erasure, that we make an annotation (Sharpe), in the following chapter of Nina Rodrigues’s Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Baianos (Fetishist Animism of the Bahian Blacks): “Feitiço, Vaticínio; Estado de Possessão, Oráculos Fetichistas” (“Sorcery, Vaticination; State of Possession, Fetishist Oracles”). Written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, in this part of the book we meet Fausta, a Black woman who practices candomblé and who had not yet been initiated, whom the Maranhão-born physician pays to carry out tests about possession during candomblé sessions. Among other questions, his aim was to know whether it was possible to consider such state as a manifestation of hysteria.14

Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) was an intellectual based in Bahia and considered a precursor of racial studies, legal medicine, and criminology in Brazil. He took part in debates and implementation of public health reforms and of the new Criminal Code at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. He and a few of his texts circulated through Europe. He lived in France, was read by names of the stature of Marcel Mauss, and was considered a worthy tropical representative of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (Romo 38).

It is with great caution that one attempts to tackle the complexity of Nina Rodrigues’s work. He certainly partook of biological determinism and worked to spread scientific racism. On the other hand, his debates about race also gave emphasis to environment and culture and rejected solutions pointed out by his contemporaries to the racial problem, such as the recruitment of European immigrants (Romo). Among scholars of his work, some recall that he was a defender of empiricism, a tireless ethnographer of the religious practices he investigated who also took the word of his interlocutors seriously (Maggie and Fry 10-11). He used the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to criticize the police persecution of candomblés. He was raised as an ogã in the Gantois, the type of ogãs whose destination in the terreiro is dealing with the politics beyond the terreiro’s space, using his prestige for the defense of the community (Braga 48).

The intention here is not to exhaust the analysis of an author whose greater than life-like status the studies of Afro-Brazilian religions arguably have never managed to free themselves from. Whether because of the racial ranking he inaugurated among African cultures from the more to the less “degenerate” that contaminates the internal field of Afro-Brazilian religions and their studies to this day, whether because of his pioneering records or because of the claiming of his work to christen a Bahian school of racial studies in the 1930s (Corrêa), Nina Rodrigues is a specter that haunts texts. The present thesis would not be able to discuss deeply and critically the contribution of the physician from Maranhão. In this sense, there are detailed analyses about the repercussion of his work and the establishing of the Nina Rodrigues School (Corrêa) and the activation of race and gender in his positivist criminology (Franklin “Raça, gênero e criminologia” – “Race, Gender and Criminology”).

In the midst of researching the skull of Antônio Conselheiro and other famous criminalized persons, Nina Rodrigues walked within candomblés. There, in his relationship with the terreiro women, one notices the space he reserved for the intersection between gender and race in his analyses. According to Naila Franklin, they were portrayed either as “sorceresses,” thus criminals who harmed the lives of other people, or as “unwary ones” who lacked rationality or discernment (Franklin “Entre a incauta”; “Raça, gênero e criminologia”).

But it is Fausta whom we need to meet. In the chapter I mentioned above and under analysis, the first appearance of Fausta/Obatalá takes place when the santo manifests “bruto” (raw/brute manifestation), or, following a Black feminist poetic analysis, in a raw state (estado bruto) (Ferreira da Silva The Unpayable Debt):

The observation that follows, curious and conclusive, constitutes, it seems to me, an experimental demonstration that, as I have been maintaining, the estado de santo is no more than a simple instigated state of somnambulism. One day, not many months ago, I was attending a candomblé session near the door that peered into the room where a girl was dancing in estado de santo. I noticed that a Black woman, still young, who was at my side, followed the dance with the greatest attention. I asked her if she also had a santo and which one it was. She answered that she had one but because she did not have enough money had not yet been able to go through initiation. However, she was preparing herself and she asked me to assist her with a donation. Moments later, she suddenly throws herself into the room and begins to dance with an expression that took any doubt from me: she was no longer in a normal state. I questioned the mãe de terreiro about this. And she explained to me that it is not uncommon that, even before initiation, the santo already reveals itself, as it was the case of that girl. This is what is called a santo bruto (“raw saint”), not yet feito (“made”/feitura). In these cases, the manifestations are seen as a punishment, a demand by the santo for the person to go through the initiation right away (Rodrigues 77).

If we only stick to the words written by the physician, here in the position of researcher, we observe his inquisitive curiosity (Ginzburg) and the emic explanation given by the mãe de santo about the raw ontology of an uninitiated “santo.” What would a santo bruto be? A performance that interrupts any scene? The scene of research? The ritual progression of a public candomblé activity?

The observation of Fausta’s santo bruto, followed by permission granted to Rodrigues to accompany the interruption of the raw trance by other terreiro women who followed the situation, awaken an opportunity for a research contract:

After an extremely long and fatiguing dance, the girl fell into lethargy and, led by her companions, was laid on a mat in the shrine (santuário), where I was then accompanying the mãe de terreiro. I asked the latter how long the girl would sleep in that state; she answered that she could sleep many hours or be soon awakened, and she consented to the latter so that I might witness it. To do so, she filled her mouth with santo water that was taken from a pot that was next to the altar, and threw it on the girl’s face, who was sleeping covered in very copious sweat. The girl startled awake and got up dazed, surprised to be drenched in that manner. I let her distance herself from the mãe de terreiro and from the other companions, and both on that day when I went to find her, and on various subsequent occasions, whenever I questioned her with the greatest care, I found a gap in her memory that went almost from the moment she had thrown herself into the dance up to the one in which she awoke drenched in water. When I told her that I had been a witness to everything, that I had seen the mãe de terreiro wake her by throwing water on her face, she always said to me, in a tone of the liveliest sincerity, that she absolutely still remembered nothing. And, held as she was by the promise that I would assist her with her initiation costs, I would have obtained the confession of the truth, just as I obtained from her other important clarifications that removed all doubt as to her good faith. I saw her, afterwards, fall into the estado de santo more than once, and with indisputable displays of complete transformation (Rodrigues 77-8).

Fausta’s santo em estado bruto does not refer only to the orixá who hasn’t yet been settled after initiation sessions. It positions Fausta in front of the scientific text, within the strategy of scientific intervention, locating her in exteriority, in affectability (Ferreira da Silva Toward). Fausta is constructed as a research object because she is affectable, different from the consciousness of the transparent subject (for example, a man who can intervene in a Black female body) whose essence is self-determination (Ferreira da Silva Toward). Further on, Nina Rodrigues details his research/intervention strategies:

A good while later, I met her one day in this city. And in spite of the reluctance she had always shown, I managed to convince her to be hypnotized. At the clinic, she showed extreme sensitivity to the first hypnosis session. The complete somnambulistic state was easily instigated by suggestive directions. Alone in the clinic room, I was afraid to try to conduct any experiment concerning the state of santo possession that day. I asked her to come back the following day when I counted on the presence and assistance of other colleagues. My distinguished colleague and friend Dr. Alfredo Britto, professor at the university, kindly agreed to see the woman. And in his presence, having previously hypnotized her, I suggested to her that she was in the terreiro where I had seen her with the santo. She began at once to see the house, the objects, and the people who were present on that occasion. Knowing as I did the order in which the sacred songs and chants in that candomblé session took place, and knowing that the chant of her santo Oubatalá was the fourth one, I then tried to instigate a hallucination through mentioning the songs, beginning with that of Esú. She would advise me about the order of the various chants and when that of Oubatalá was due to follow, I confirmed to her forcefully that she was going to enter the estado de santo. Suddenly she began to make her torso sway slowly and to emit a prolonged pschio... I called her by name, Fausta, and asked her what was the matter. She answered me that she was not Fausta but Oubatalá, that Fausta was merely the horse of Oubatalá. The state she was in, the way of speaking, were all a faithful copy of the estado de santo of mãe de terreiro from when I had met her. I wished, however, to compel her to dance, to which she objected, now alleging that she was not using proper clothing, that the music of Oubatalá had already ceased and that of another santo had began, and finally that we were in the time of Lent and during this time santos should no longer dance. I insisted, trying to suggest to her that she actually was wearingthe robes of Oubatalá; I tried to instigate the hallucination of the this santo’s song again, but she who up to that point had shown herself passively obedient to my suggestions, refused to accept them. Always insisting on being allowed to leave, Oubatalá gave me further explanations about Yoruba mythology, his relations with the Catholic cult, all in accordance with the limited ideas of Fausta, which I already knew well. At last, I asked what needed to be done for him to leave. He answered: give a little water to his horse. As soon as she drank a glass of water, Fausta awoke in the state of bewilderment and confusion in which I had already seen her many times when coming out of estado de santo. This state of bewilderment is more or less lasting. Many hours later, Fausta was still so dazed that she lost the money I had given her for her initiation feast (Rodrigues 78-80).

We are facing a scientific and sonic intervention. Racialization also produced the affectability of Black bodies through music, noise, sounds (Robbins). The resonances (batucagés, chants, incomprehensible sounds, etc.) originating from spaces marked by Africanness studied by Nina Rodrigues are structuring dimensions of racialization in his work (Robbins 73). In the interaction described above, stimulating Fausta through the sonic is one more of the Rodrigues’ efforts to construct “a typology of minds, affectable consciousnesses, radically distinct from the subject of (self – and internal) regulation, which the notion of ‘free will’ presupposes” (“Speculation” 226). Some contemporary defender of the supposed ethnographic acuity of Nina Rodrigues might, still, point out that he was “mulato.” But his place in the scene of scientific regulation, as a physician and researcher-owner who has financial resources, concretizes the final transaction of racialization. Nina Rodrigues can enter into the condition of transparent subject. Fausta cannot.

What Fausta performed, a black performance of raw trance, was a textuality that originated from another episteme because it evoked a philosophical knowledge and a cosmovision in her body, her gestures, movements, and sounds. Leda Maria Martins identifies in Black performances what she called oralitura (oraliture), the complex interweaving of embodied knowledges in which memory and the designs of the cosmovisions that inhabit bodies move, thus erasing the distinction between orality and writing. Bodily performances such as Fausta’s trance become an Afro-embodied episteme:

The breadth of oraliture does not only encompass rituals but also an immense variety of formulations and conventions which install, fix, revise, and disseminate themselves through innumerable means of cognition of a performative nature. Thus, it engraves through the body magnetized by complex sounds, voices, gestures, choreographies, adornments, designs and graphite, traces and colors, knowledges and flavors, values of different orders and magnitude, Afro-inspired logos and gnoses, as well as many possibilities of erasing the discretionary protocols of exclusion and their systems (...) In the context of thought that brings together (“trança”) the diverse and different African cultures and the cultures of the diaspora, simultaneous movements of retroaction and advancement can only be measured and tackled within the very scope of a worldview, of a conception of living time and its temporalities, founded by a matrix of thought: that of ancestrality, the mother-principle that interrelates everything that exists in the cosmos, transmitter of the vital energy that guarantees the existence at once common and differentiated of all beings and of everything in the cosmos, the extension of curvilinear temporalities, the ruler of cultural practices and their manifestation, inhabited by a time that is not split and measured by the Western model of linear and progressive evolution (Martins 41-2).

In the chapter under analysis, it is striking that the Rodrigues compares Fausta’s state of possession with a case of a young white woman stricken with hysteria. To deal with the white woman’s case, a “Malê sorcerer” was called as a specialist. Only at a later moment, a physician — Rodrigues himself — intervened and achieved the desired result, that is, the white woman’s return to the gender normality of domestic life (Rodrigues 83). Fausta, however, did not have the same outcome because she refused to meet again with the anthropologist-inquisitor-physician, just as other initiates also actively refused to take part in the doctor’s researches. Regarding the comparison of the cases and the refusal of the candomblé practitioners, I cite:

Thus, while here simple verbal suggestion was sufficient to immediately put an end to a state of possession, during Fausta’s second phase of somnambulism my suggestions achieved nothing and it was necessary to resort to a specific action – drinking water – to terminate the state, just as a specific action had been needed to instigate it, that is, hallucinating the sacred music. For the time being I have not been allowed to carry my studies further. Fausta herself has not yet returned to this city as she had committed to in order to complete her examination from the point of view of hysterical symptoms. I have tried to submit other initiates to a similar experiment but in general they formally refuse any attempt at examination when it comes to possession, or estado de santo. Thus, I cannot state if these manifestations are limited to what I have observed or if, on the contrary, they still harbor more complex phenomena of greater relevance of the nature of Indian fakirism or of certain spiritist phenomena which, however, I never had the occasion to observe. To this day what I have been able to see is what has been faithfully set forth here (Rodrigues 83).

I suggest we stay with Fausta’s insubmissiveness (Evaristo). No, it is not possible to know Fausta and reduce her existence to this experience of violence. Let us imagine what Fausta and the other terreiro women, who refused to take part in the researches on trance, anticipated for us. In the novel Beloved, the Black American writer Toni Morrison reimagined the life of Margaret Garner, a freed Black woman who fought against re-enslavement in the nineteenth century and preferred to kill her children rather than allow them to know slavery. It is worth recalling the reasons that lead Sethe, the character inspired by Garner, to flee the farm where she was with her family. Sethe watches the “Professor,” the new owner, measure the skulls of enslaved people. In addition to this, the obscene violence of Sethe’s maternity is also portrayed in the novel, which I will not reproduce here. But Toni Morrison wrote how violent it was for Black people to have their bodies invaded, measured, stimulated in scientific intervention by the analytics of raciality (Ferreira da Silva Toward). Fausta’s refusal must be read as an enunciation of epistemic justice.

At another moment in this text, I wrote that epistemic (in)justice does not refer only to the existence of subjugated knowledges that cannot be witnessed or believed, or to the struggle historically waged by the women of axé and povos de terreiro so that the nation-state might understand and incorporate their lexicons. Although this is not a small or simple task, it is not limited to its terms. Justice is also found in the unfathomable, the unpronounceable, in the insubmissive, in what is yet to be announced (Ferreira da Silva A Dívida Impagável). Nina Rodrigues was not able to subjugate or comprehend the sacred in Fausta’s body. Through that, we face a radical example of epistemic disobedience. Nina Rodrigues did not have axé to generate trance and invoke Obatalá.

Just like Sethe, Fausta refused to be an object (Moten). The depiction of the cries of pain of Aunt Hester during a whipping, narrated in the biography of the freed Frederick Douglass, sparked debates about justice, images of violence, and refusal of objectification that can be useful here. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman begins with an explanation of why she would not reproduce the scenes of violence inflicted on Aunt Hester as narrated by her nephew Frederick Douglass. For Hartman, repeating these words in today’s texts does not fulfill the role of denouncing violence, but rather it risks occupying the ambiguous position of repeating, spectacularizing, and naturalizing the scenes of subjection.15

Fred Moten, in In the Break, engages with the importance of Hartman’s critique of the voyeuristic reproduction of scenes of subjection but insists that there is another writing that Aunt Hester’s cries produce, the performance of vocality of her resistance: “the emergence of the radical materiality and syntax that animate Black performances, out of political, economic, and sexual objection, indicates a drive for freedom that is expressed, always everywhere, through its graphic (re)production” (Moten 33). Moten reflects on how the cries in the scene of subjection or even in Black music deceive the linguistic project of the Enlightenment, producing a critique of the notions of value and matter. Forms of resistance that are not limited to phonemes and words. Fred Moten writes “Resistance of the object: Aunt Hester’s scream.” We can annotate: “Resistance of the object: Fausta’s refusal.”

The scene narrated positions Fausta in the scene of recognition and allows us to “explore the female body as a referent of desires that cannot be regulated and are not representable” (Ferreira da Silva A Dívida Impagável 62). At the moment of transparency, the body of the enslaved native is an Excess, and it is from this realization that one enters the limits of Justice as something still to be announced, a referent of force and violence (A Dívida Impagável).

Still following the scientific text of Nina Rodrigues, the presence and naming of Fausta raise other questions. The manner through which Nina Rodrigues dealt with terreiro women did not share in the same conception of humanity. From this it follows that we will never know if Fausta truly was the name of the daughter of Obatalá. The same nineteenth century produced the long poem Faust by the German writer Goethe. The work became known for the myth surrounding the main character, Doctor Faust, who, seeking to know all things, makes a pact with the devil, the latter represented as Mephistopheles. Containing thousands of verses, the long poem is more complex than its most well-known plot point, but Faust became notorious for such a deal, the “Faustian pact” (Heize).

After a century of political struggles and confrontations with the racism present in Afro-Brazilian studies, the supposed naming of Fausta by Nina Rodrigues offers an irony as to who would be Mephistopheles with whom she would have made a pact. It certainly was not Obatalá. He, insubmissive. Indomitable.

*In an attempt to maintain consistency with the original both in terms of intention and direct reference, the quotes Dr. Vilela uses were translated from the versions offered by the essay instead of searching for the same passages in their original sources.

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QUOTE AS:
Ana Laura Silva Vilela. Mulheres de Axé, Justiça e Outra Coisa. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.3, September 2025. p. 20-45