Questions for Shaw "Samba and Brasilidade: Nations of National Identity in the Lyrics of Noel Rosa"
1) Explain Noel Rosa's use of the samba genre and discuss its relationship to brasilidade. What are Rosa's views on nationhood in Brazil?
2) In the 1930s the ideas surrounding race in Brazil shifted. What was Rosa's opinion on race and how did it influence his sambas?
2) In the 1930s the ideas surrounding race in Brazil shifted. What was Rosa's opinion on race and how did it influence his sambas?
posted by Lindsey at
11:04 PM
2 Comments:
1) Positioning the samba genre as “an expression of the Brazilian soul” (82), Noel Rosa utilized his music to explore Brazilian identity in the 1930s. His picture of the brasilidade captured the less flattering components of Rio existence, focusing on vice, womanizing and poverty. However, Rosa glorifies rather than condemns these antics. In “Sao coisas nossas”, he writes:
“The girl courting
On the street corner and in a doorway
A married man with ten children and no money
If her father finds out he’ll use his fists
Our things, very much ours”
“Sao coisas nossas” acknowledges the hardships of carioca life, addressing prostitution, gambling and the malandro. By embracing the tribulations of lower class Brazilians, Rosa integrates these aspects into his personal construction of true Brazilian identity. On the other hand, Shaw claims that Rosa’s music, which often incorporated humor and surreal imagery, transported the listener “far from the banal realities of life” (83). Why would Rosa strive to create an escape from Rio when his lyrics appear to embrace it? While the samba “has the power the transform everyday existence” and acts as an “antidote to poverty” (85), the genre is intended to instill pride in the condition of the national spirit, not deteriorate it. Overall, Rosa’s music is a painful love song for the troubles of early-20th century living. According to Rosa, true Brazilian nationhood is rooted in the Sambatists and their music, a source of patriotic pride and the essence of brasilidade.
2) With the influx of immigrants to Brazil in the 1930s, Rosa sensed Brazilian identity to be under threat by foreign forces. He detested imported icons such as the talking cinema, “bottle-blond hair” and the foxtrot. These cultural invasions soon materialized in Rosa’s samba lyrics, where they were ridiculed and condemned. In “Nao tem traducao”, meaning “There’s no Translation”, Rosa articulates the impending extinction of Brazilianness:
“The slang that our shantytowns created
Quickly the city accepted and used
Later the malandro stopped dancing samba
Playing his guitar
And only wanted to dance the foxtrot”
While Rosa feared a change in Brazil’s cultural landscape, he also comments on the shift in the country’s social and racial composition. As part of the process of branqueamento, or “whitening”, Brazil encouraged the settling of white European immigrants and restricted the number of incoming Asians and blacks. Furthermore, immigrants who had come to Brazil before 1930 were no longer “acceptably white” (90). As race consumed the issue of identity in Brazil, Rosa asserted his own image of the true Brazilian, the mixed race resident of the Rio slums, and of the prototype of Brazilian beauty, the mulata. The mulata paradigm is the subject of “Leite com café”, in which Rosa clearly expresses his opinion on race:
“The dark girl from up there on the hill
Full of beauty and charm
Symbolizes our great race
She’s the colour of milk with coffee
And the blonde girl from the city
Was never my type
When I’m near her I catch a cold
Because she’s so icy”
Here, Rosa contests the sensuality of the white woman and uplifts the status of the mulata from the favellas, embedding her with the essence of national beauty. These lyrics and thoughts function as modes of preservation for both Brazilian identity and female beauty.
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