VOICES OF GOD

Blackness and Gender in a Brazilian Black Gospel Music Scene

JOHN BURDICK

VOICES OF GOD

Blackness and Gender in a Brazilian Black Gospel Music Scene

JOHN BURDICK

The struggle to alter dominant views about race in Brazil is a long, tortuous, uphill battle. Despite more than thirty years of sustained Black movement activism (Bailey 2009; Rodrigues and Prado 2013), views about race in Brazil today continue to be dominated by a cluster of deeply troubling ideas, such as that racial discrimination is not really a serious problem in Brazil; that slavery in Brazil was less oppressive than it was in the United States; and that political activism about race is both unnecessary and at odds with Brazil's mixed-race national identity (Alves 2012; Cicalo 2012; Reiter 2008; Reiter and Mitchell 2009; Soares 2012). Brazilian Pentecostals — still, the fastest-growing religion in Brazil — tend to embrace these ideas (Burdick 1998, 2013). They regard the secular realm as irredeemably corrupt, reject Afro-Brazilian spirituality as the devil's playground, believe converted Christians already enjoy full equality before God, and see the individual soul as fundamentally more important than any this-worldly collective identity (Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001; Freston 1998; Novaes 1985; Pedde 2002; Pierucci 2006; Prandi 2004; Selka 2005).

Given the pervasiveness of such views among Brazil's Pentecostals, it is worthy of note that in the past two decades a growing number of Brazilian Pentecostal musicians have begun to play, deliberately and self-consciously, what they call música negra (Black music), of which the most prominent subgenres are música Black gospel, rap gospel, and samba gospel (Pinheiro 1998, 2003, 2004, 2009). São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, is the epicenter of this trend and now includes more than twenty major Black gospel choirs, two hundred amateur and professional Christian rap groups, and dozens of samba gospel groups. Thus, on almost any evening, in any neighborhood of São Paulo, one can hear a Black gospel choir, gospel rapper, or gospel sambista crooning the message of Christian salvation. During nine months of fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, I sought to understand how, and how much, these musicians might be pushing back against their religion's rejection of Black identity politics by configuring that identity in new ways. The relationship between Christian music and Black identity, though thoroughly explored in North American scholarship (see, e.g., Monson 2007; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Ramsey 2004; Reagon 2001), has not been much investigated in Brazil. In striving to grasp this relationship, I have paid special attention to the role of gender (cf. Selka 2007, 2009, 2010). This chapter details my finding that, while male and female Black Christian singers both articulate a positive Black identity, they do so in subtly different ways.

A note about methodology: on the Black gospel scene, I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty female and twenty male singers age eighteen to forty-five. I interviewed only people who identified themselves as negro. Use of this term self-referentially in Brazil tends to affirm a sense of belonging to a group that historically has been stigmatized; in contrast, self-referential use of the terms moreno (brown) and mestiço (mixed) is less group-affirming, drawing attention only to the individual's skin color or mixed ancestry (see Silva and Reis 2011). In São Paulo, however, everyday use of the term "negro" has become so common that it is no longer markedly group-affirming. Its very commonness pushed me to dig deeper, to see the different underlying meanings it possessed. Working with this group of forty interviewees, I asked: To what extent and in what ways did female Afro-Brazilian singers of Black gospel understand what they were doing in ethnoracial terms? How did these understandings differ from those of male Afro- Brazilian singers? In what ways did these understandings lead female and male Black gospel singers to push back against their churches' and Brazil's hegemonic stances toward racial politics?

My most striking finding was that almost all of the Black gospel singers I interviewed, male and female, thought of their music in intricately racial terms. In contrast to gospel rappers and gospel sambistas, Black gospel singers spoke spontaneously and extensively about the rootedness of their genre in the North American Black church (a igreja negra), its connection to the Black civil rights struggle in the United States, and the idea that their African descent conferred on them a predisposition to excel in this art form. But they went further and supported controversial (for Brazil) political projects, such as creating forums to discuss racism in church and teaching about the role of Africa in the Bible. I discuss these projects in more detail later; the point I wish to underline here is that, along with their strong consensus that ser negro (being Black) was directly linked to their art, male and female Black gospel singers conceptualized the linkage in different ways, which revealed gendered ideas about God, history, theology, and suffering. In this chapter, I draw attention to three of these differences. First, I suggest that the male and female Black gospel singers I got to know experienced and thought in different ways about the role of their voices in spiritual battles with the devil; second, they thought in different ways about the role of their voices, as Black voices, in God's plan for humanity; and third, they had in mind distinctive Black political projects.

WOMEN, MEN, AND THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE

I begin with Priscilla, a self-identified negra in her late twenties who was a soloist in her neighborhood's Pentecostal Church of God in Christ (COGIC). For her, singing was a constant inner spiritual battle. "The devil," she would say, "knows the power of gospel music to...