Enchanted Tactics and the Multiplication of Politics

Subtly spinning the fibers of oral sources, Lior Zisman Zalis tells us about “Terecô”, in the region of Codó, Brazil: beyond being a religion or “cultural phenomenon”, it is another way of conceiving the agency and intransigence of beings, challenging in turn the scope of westernized instrumental reason.

The absence of records, of official documentation, and the lack of attention of historians to the Codó Terecô makes it difficult to access a fragmented and scattered memory through the orality of the elders. With the elders as interlocutors, their weakened voice produces a hoarse sonority of words in a whisper. The weariness of the voice scatters what they narrate, unconcerned by the certainty of their apprehension.

Something from nature emerges from the murmur, that thing made of sound and muscle that sometimes sings, sometimes narrates, sometimes gets lost and then finds its way to continue echoing.

I will try here to outline some of the memories that can build a structure of reflection and suspicion. As told to me and to other friends, they are memories that do not fit, that confront, challenge, and point out limits to a certain sense of political action. Aspiring to tactical operatives, they announce that the plurality of being produces a plurality of acting. They draw horizons for and suspicions about projects of secularization. They narrate an enchanted politics.

Terecô is a religion of African origin with significant Indigenous influence, whose birthplace is the Cocais region, specifically the municipality of Codó, in the interior of the state of Maranhão in Brazil. Also identified as Encantaria and Macumba—and in many cases as Umbanda—we find Terecô practitioners in tents from Ceará to Pará, each with a distinct Terecô. This diversity makes any attempt to define Terecô or Encantaria insufficient. Not only because of the complexity and variety of practices of each house, each with its own doctrine, but also because of the secrecy and mystery that accompany it. In Terecô, obedience, care, obligations, and attention are given to the enchanted ones, entities that descend into or possess the body of the brincantes (as the practitioners are called) in different contexts of social life, not necessarily restricted to the moment of playing the drums. This systemic presence turns these entities into beings that actively participate in the daily life of the brincantes, intermingling human and non-human life.

As one of the cities with the highest concentration of terreiros per square meter in Brazil, Codó is pejoratively called “land of Macumba,” “capital of sorcery” and “mecca of witchcraft,” a stigma produced by racism and religious intolerance to religions of African origin in Brazil. At the same time, the fame of Codó is also due to a great demand of people from all over Brazil to the holy fathers and mothers who work in the city, solving problems of different natures, from love to politics. Although widespread and very present in the city’s daily life, the prejudice towards Terecô and brincantes is explicit, especially by evangelical and neo-pentecostal churches who associate them with “things of the devil.” Encantaria, however, responds in its own way.

It was on August 16 when the brincantes, enchanted supporters of the Tenda Espírita de Umbanda Rainha Iemanjá, whose holy mother is Mãe Janaína, daughter of the late Bita do Barão, a famous holy father of the city, took to the streets. In this passeata—an event that takes place in many tendas where the enchanted and brincantes take to the streets and walk for hours—the brincantes walked through the center of Codó guided by a sound system more than three meters high that amplifies the drums to the rhythm of the Mata. Right at the beginning of the parade, there was an evangelical group that sang evangelical songs and songs praising Jesus Christ, shouting curses at the brincantes. Suddenly, in the middle of this group, a boy who could not have been more than fifteen years old received the Pomba Gira entity, opening a circle around him with irreverent movements. His choreography is soon identified by the brincantes who, with humor, realize what is happening there. The entity dances in the midst of the believers, defying their prayers and exorcisms. Some try to restrain him, without success. After the passage of the procession, Pomba Gira leaves, carrying the body of the child to the ground.

As a result of the structural and religious racism of the state and of Brazilian colonial society, Terecô and Black religious communities, like many of the religions of African origin in Brazil, are marked by historical persecution and repression, more linked to the state than to other religious communities. The ancients, “old trunks” as they call them here, tell some stories about that time, especially about a few tactics to keep the drums beating so that the practice survive until today. The stories, though many, are seldom passed on to the younger ones and are constantly subject to disappearance and oblivion. That is why I ask the brincantes and the enchanted permission to share them here.

The irreverence of the enchanted in relation to those who challenge them appears in different works on Terecô. Anthropologist Mundicarmo Ferretti recorded that Légua Boji Buá de Trindade, the Old Man, ancient entity and chief of the Encantaria da Mata Codoense, was associated with the defense of the enslaved against the masters. His defiant attitude was marked by stories of transgressive apparitions. It is said that he used to enter the city mounted on a donkey, holding the tail of the animal as a rein, spitting on the houses of the whites. Whoever approached him and tried to talk to him would be immediately punished by seizing them and wrestling with them on the ground, or making them climb tall trees full of thorns. Then he would leave with his bottle of cachaça and disappear.^[1] Seu Raimundinho Pombo Roxo, a ninety-four-year-old pai de santo, tells the story of the day the Old Man was arrested at the police station after a police raid, a recurrent event at the time when Terecô was prohibited and persecuted by the police. In the story, first recorded by anthropologist Martina Ahlert,^[2] the Old Man,  , arrived at the police station under arrest, but soon asked for cachaça and danced to the sound of the cabaça played by Seu Raimundinho. Defying lieutenant Vitorino—a figure that appears in different memories of the Terecô persecution—and the policemen by dancing around and dense and constant draws, he was released, never to return.

I heard the story of another of Old Légua’s arrests from Tereza, a mother of the Tenda Espírita de Umbanda Santa Bárbara, currently directed by Mãe de Santo Maria dos Santos. During a police raid aiming to finish off Terecô, while everyone was fleeing, Légua Boji, a man, stood in the middle of the room, extended his hands and said to the policeman: “Arrest me.” They did so and took him to the police station. When he got there, he opened the cell and ordered the policemen to enter. Confused by the request, Légua was quick to explain, “I have done nothing wrong for them to arrest me, it was you who did it, so get in there,” and the policemen complied. Old Légua just left. Every time I hear stories about how the enchanted defied the state by attacking the police, I think of the radical politics of this memory. In this politics of defiance, the rationality of the state is played with. Its repressive strength is challenged by the enchanted and the brincantes, not only by putting fear into its agents, but also by playing, joking, and dancing with its authority.

The playful, the political, and the defiant intersect in the configuration of a political action of their own.

I was also told stories of policemen who entered the tendas to prohibit the Terecô, but ended up “falling for it.” Pai de Santo Zé Baixada told me that he himself made some policemen who wanted to stop him join his party and play cabaça: “They played until morning. They didn’t know how to play, but in time they learned.” Tereza tells a similar story. When that Lieutenant Vitorino tried to put an end to the Terecô in Doña Naza’s tenda, as soon as he arrived, he threw his truncheon and pistol on the floor, took off his shoes, and danced the Terecô all night long: “He didn’t know why, but he went to prohibit the Terecô and ended up falling into it.” The sense of “falling” also alludes to a politics of overthrow; both body and authority fall, succumb to a rhythm, and are dragged into an atmosphere. To submit to the rhythm of the Terecô, called the rhythm or drum of the jungle, is to transform the performative authority of the state. By enchanting the bodies of the police, a different politics appears. Since I started listening to these stories I have not stopped thinking about how these unusual tactics of confrontation with state power seriously disrupt any guerrilla political program or counter-colonial tactical repertoire.

This systematic persecution and the stigma of witchcraft caused many of the holy fathers and mothers to play the drums in secret places, such as at the backs of the houses or in spaces farther away from the city, in the babassu forests or near rivers and lakes. They played in silence, often without a drum, using bamboo, palms, and other instruments. Anthropologist Martina Ahlert, in her work on the Codó Terecô, tells us about a conversation she had with Seu Bigobar, in which the latter says that the enchanted ones consider themselves the owners of the forest and, therefore, restricted access to these spaces to whoever they wanted: “Only those who the enchanted ones wanted entered the forest.”^[3] It was said, Ahlert writes, “that the policemen heard the sound of their drums marking the beginning of the rituals, but when they headed towards them, they ended up getting lost. By the time they realized it, they were already elsewhere in the municipality.”^[4]  The policemen heard the drumming in one place but were led to another, and so on. In other cases, the roads never led to the destination. They walked but were constantly getting lost. I learned from Dona Mazé, wife of Raimundinho Pombo Roxo, that in the vicinity where the drumming took place, the roads were closed with prayers so that the police would not find them. Mãe de Santo Vicença told me, interlacing her fingers, that the forest itself closed the paths with roots full of thorns: “They searched all night and could not find the Terecô.” As a sort of policy of deception, the enchanted altered perceptions, paths, and directions in order to disguise themselves.

Other memories reveal the active participation of the enchanted in this resistance, such as the one told by Roberto, a cab driver in the city, who recalls the anecdotes of his uncle, who had a small altar in his house and did his work there: “We lived in this section here, on the other side of the bridge, in Praça da Bandeira. He was doing his thing there, when the municipal guards, the police, would pass by whistling and then he would send  . . . his enchanted ones to take these people to bathe in the river, in the Itapecurú, until it was over . . . He would conjure and bathe. When he finished, then he would let them go.” These stories are common and were also identified by Martina Ahlert. It was “common . . . to hear that when the policemen found the place of the drums they would ‘fall’ (that is, they were enchanted), dancing until the morning of the next day.”^[5] Cícero Centriny also tells of the day when the nefarious Llieutenant Vitorino is taken by an enchanted one when he arrives at a Terecô in Quilombo Santo Antônio dos Pretos, the mythical cradle of the religion.^[6] The elders and the enchanted ones themselves tell different stories in different regions of the city, from Miragaia to Santo Antônio dos Pretos. The fact is that the enchanted possessed the policemen and involved their bodies in the Terecô.

In this sense, in addition to the performative irreverence, to the deception, we can identify in these stories an ontological affront to the very concept of Western politics.

I found in these narratives, especially in those of the enchanted ones that possess policemen, the confirmation of a suspicion. If I am asked about the truth, about the evidence, about the possibility that all this is a great fantasy, I keep thinking about the fabrication that is politics itself, speculation upon speculation, myth upon myth. From the social contract to justice, we are drowning in fable. What is mobilized here is another sociability and, therefore, another politics. It is not a “belief” or a “cultural phenomenon,” but another way of conceiving the agency and intransigence of beings. In challenging the state, the enchanted and the brincantes also challenge Western history, the history of revolutions, the history of uprisings, insurgencies, and upheavals built on a secular rationalism that seeks to eliminate the relevance of spirituality and religiosity, as well as other beings, in the political mobilization of many societies.

This suspicion is echoed in contemporary debates on what have been called ontological struggles, in which non-humans actively participate in processes of social and political mobilization. According to Arturo Escobar, if the concept of community ceases to focus on the human and begins to include non-human presences, consequently “the terrain of politics opens up to non-humans,” ^[7] New tactics and movements emerge as their own forms of struggle. The different ontological expressions lead to other forms of coexistence and ascendancy, as well as to other forms of political participation in the society in which they are inserted.

We can think of the presence of tactics in conflicts and wars that imply different forms of protection and closure of the body, the role of religious entities and leaders in political movements, the capacity of certain subjects to transform themselves into animals or other beings. All these and many others develop multiple political ontologies. Marisol de la Cadena and Arturo Escobar have worked on the pluralization of politics,^[8] questioning the impact on the modern conception of politics when it is not restricted to humans through the emergence of social actors hitherto in the shadow of politics, such as religious leaders, entities, gods, and other beings.

If we go back to the cases of the Terecô and their history of struggles, we identify a specific mode of encounter and confrontation between worlds, translated into different enchanted tactics. When beings multiply, the possibilities of action multiply. The enchanted not only confront the state, but take possession of its agents, incarnating themselves in its bodies to make them their own. More than opening politics to other ontologies, multiplying its possibilities of action, disruption, and invention, it is important to recognize the multiplicity of tactics that guide the struggles. The case of the participation of the enchanted in actions against police raids aimed at repressing Terecô is only one case within a broader map of different processes of insurgency, uprising, and resistance in which entities, forces, and technologies are present.

The different social groups suffering colonial violence react by dragging their cosmologies along with specific modes of political action,^[9] mobilizing what Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino called “spiritualities of battle”:^[10] the tactical use of religiosity in counter-colonial confrontations. In this map of insurgent spiritualities, woven on the backdrop of a secular sense of politics, orienting systems are drawn, compass points for other horizons, facts, actions, beings, and thoughts that, by multiplying politics, together multiply the ways of disputing it.