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Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic

2018; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 51; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00430

1937-2108

Matthew Francis Rarey,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

An archival abscess subtly warps the pages of a manuscript held at the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon, Portugal (Fig. 1). In 1704, agents of the Portuguese Inquisition sewed this object into the binding of the trial papers of Jacques Viegas, an enslaved "natural of Ouidah" about twenty years old.1 Jacques had entered the Holy Office in June of that year, desperate to confess the sins that burdened him. Reaching into the cuff of his pant leg, he removed this small green fabric pouch and held it up for inquisitors to see.2 It was because of this object, he stated, that demons attacked him, grabbing his limbs as he slept. Over the next four months, inquisitors interrogated Jacques about the object's origins, construction, and use. Jacques explained that he acquired it from Manoel, another black man in Lisbon, who manufactured pouches that could protect their wearers from knife wounds, gunshots, and malevolent forces. Through an opened seam in the side, one can still glimpse the pouch's contents: black hairs, seeds, cotton, and a folded piece of paper (Fig. 2). Manoel always filled his pouches with such empowered substances, later activating their potential through ritual incantations. The secrecy of their manufacture, however, contrasted to the spectacular public performances that confirmed their efficacy. In one case, Manoel put on one of his pouches and plunged a sword into his chest "with great force; but it did not hurt him, only bending the sword."3 This proved to Jacques that it was no ordinary object: It was mandinga. To inquisitors, this term confirmed Jacques's pact with the Devil. And so they sentenced him to an auto-da-fé, a public flogging, and three years of exile to southern Portugal.4 But while Jacques would never return to Lisbon, this object remains there, preserved inside the decaying pages used to imprison it and its owner.Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, apotropaic objects called mandingas circulated in places like Madeira, Cape Verde, Brazil, Angola, and Portugal. These diverse regions were bound together by the governance of the Portuguese Empire and the movements of African ideas generated through the transatlantic slave trade, a system of transcultural destructions, flows, and reinventions scholars have come to call the black Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Matory 2005). Almost all information about these objects, including the only extant mandingas from this period, survives in the trial records of the Portuguese Inquisition.5 While these documents emerge from Inquisitorial efforts to both suppress and demonize the practice, Inquisitorial records also position mandingas as rich, and heretofore largely unexamined, archives of Africans' experiences in the early modern black Atlantic.For art historians, mandingas' forms and uses present a series of definitional problems. Strictly speaking, mandinga described not an object's form, but its function. While mandingas commonly protected their owners from violence, some could intervene in sexual and romantic relationships, or even allow enslaved persons to escape the oversight of their masters.6 And while their forms could vary widely, a mandinga was most often a fabric pouch (bolsa) into which empowering substances were placed. Used across all racial and social classes, these bolsas de mandinga were primarily produced and disseminated by enslaved Africans whose biographies crossed central and western Africa, Brazil, and often Portugal; Africans who—like the objects they made and disseminated along the way—spent their lives navigating, fighting, and reinterpreting a range of conflicting, even contradictory, visual and ritual practices.To date, mandinga pouches have largely eluded scholarly scrutiny. Historians, who have often considered mandingas as symptomatic of colonial power relations (Sansi 2011; Souza 2003; Sweet 2003) or African resistance to slavery (Harding 2003), tend to characterize their contents as difficult-to-interpret transculturations or as efforts to mask or dialogue indigenous African beliefs with foreign influences (Lahon 2004; Calainho 2008; Santos 2008). Meanwhile, Amy J. Buono notes that art historians "have largely ignored the mandinga pouches, in which the more 'artistic' elements are hidden from view inside the pouch itself" (2015: 25–26). Both of these perspectives parallel mandingas' reception in Portuguese Inquisition records, where declarations of insignificance, indecipherability, and diabolism accompany descriptions of the pouches' contents. That parallel makes dedicated art historical studies of mandinga pouches all the more pressing.In this essay, I argue that mandingas' seeming indecipherability and visual banality are not just matters of current scholarly debate, but were their core aesthetic strategies. Principles of visual indeterminacy, occlusion, and assemblage governed the mandinga pouches' production as a strategic innovation in response to systemic violence and ever-shifting cultural boundaries. By hiding their internal contents, mandinga-makers (mandingueiros) experimented with an ever-changing assemblage of carefully chosen activating substances. Paralleling their makers' experience of dislocation and recontextualization, bolsas de mandinga contained an array of contents that interrogate cultural boundaries, religious orthodoxies, and artistic hierarchies. Their form, too, was strategic: small pouches blended in with preexisting amulets across central and western Africa as well as Christian Europe. Their small size and light weight also facilitated transfer from person to person. In this way, mandinga pouches embody a mobile version of what Cécile Fromont has termed a "space of correlation," where their makers explored cultural transformation and sociopolitical efficacy away from the oversight of masters, inquisitors, and other elites (Fromont 2014: 70). In what follows, I analyze the classification, construction, and use of select mandinga pouches in order to investigate the contributions they make to the study of African diasporic visual cultures. In so doing, I take as a conceptual thread the term "survival." While this term alludes to Melville Herskovits's (1958) foundational and often-critiqued searches for essentialized African cultural "survivals" in the Americas, here I intend the term to trace mandingas' multiple, even contradictory, lines of cultural influence as representative of their makers' search for safety and protection in a violent world.By the mid-eighteenth century, people across the African-Portuguese world used mandinga—the Portuguese rendering of Mandinka or Mande—to characterize any object that could help protect its wearer from knife wounds, bullets, and malevolent forces. It is not clear exactly how or why this African ethnonym came to refer to apotropaic objects not sanctioned by the Catholic Church. However, a series of early seventeenth century Portuguese-language descriptions of the Upper Guinea Coast associated Mandinka Muslims with the use of leather amulets filled with orations written in Arabic (Monod, Mauny, and de Mota 1951: 9). While often chalked up to superstition and idolatry (Guerreiro 1930: 403), particularly concerning for the chroniclers was the pouches' role in religious conversion between Islam and local practices. A 1606 account by Jesuit priest Balthazar Barreira describes how Mandinka Muslims in present-day Guinea-Bissau placed Qur'anic papers into leather pouches, then disseminated the amulets to spread Islam.7 And in 1625, the Cape Verdean traveler André Donelha reported how Mandinka Muslim priests (bixirins) spread "the cursed sect of Mohammed" in Guinean seaports by selling "fetishes in the form of ram's horns and amulets and sheets of paper with writing on them" (Mota and Hair 1977: 161). Although, two centuries after Donelha, a similar confluence of these pouch-amulets, horns, and local talismans plays out the bodies of subjects depicted in Amédée Tardieu's 1847Peoples of Senegambia (Fig. 3). Here, the pouches' capacity for cross-cultural translation cuts both ways, spreading Islam in ways that transformed it in new locales, here incorporating ram's horns from established local spiritual practice in the process.This integration of previously foreign practices baffled Portuguese authors, particularly when what they defined as Christian symbols were brought into the mixture. Donelha reported that he was "distressed" to see his acquaintance, the Mandinka youth Gaspar Vaz, "dressed in a Mandinga smock, with amulets of his fetishes (nóminas dos seus feitiços) around his neck." But Gaspar explained that his Islamic dress was simply a strategy to win favor with his Muslim uncle, whose goods Gaspar was set to inherit. Lifting his smock, Donelha saw Gaspar wearing "a doublet and shirt in our fashion (ao nosso modo) and from around his neck drew out a rosary of Our Lady" (Mota and Hair 1977: 149). While Gaspar's explanation satisfied Donelha, his sartorial practice can also be understood as an adept manipulation of religious symbols in order to appeal to different religious sensibilities. Responding to this problem around 1615, Manual Álvares decried the selective appropriation of Christianity in Senegambia, saying "All of them practiced, and had always practiced, a form of Christianity which concealed pagan ceremonies, for they only showed themselves Christian when in the sight of the padre, while in the Lord's sight they were worse than heathen" (Hair 1990: 1). In this realm, pouch-form amulets, filled with Arabic writings and displayed on the body alongside local and Catholic symbols, were already agents of cross-cultural (mis)translation and conversion.By the turn of the eighteenth century, Inquisition records indicate that mandinga was gradually being decoupled from its ethnic referent and morphing into a synonym for feitiço, from which derives the English term "fetish." Feitiço, also spelled fetisso, referred to a range of invisible malevolent forces, as well as the material objects that controlled, manipulated, or counteracted them. This term, as William Pietz traced in a foundational series of articles (1985, 1987, 1988), emerged in the conflict between radically distinct, yet newly intertwined, social and cultural systems on the West African coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, certain material objects came to embody the impossibilities of cross-cultural translation. While Pietz does not explicitly mention mandinga pouches, they were nevertheless an early and exemplary "fetish," so termed as it embodied the "problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogenerous social systems" (Pietz 1985: 7). In defining these objects as feitiços, Inquisitors and users alike spoke to their power as originating from "the fixation or inscription of a unique originating event that has brought together previously heterogeneous elements into a novel identity" (1985: 7). Pietz thus raises a series of points relevant to consideration of mandinga pouches moving forward: First, that the constituent material elements of feitiços, and by proxy mandinga pouches, derive from (and implicitly accentuate) their heterogeneous, foreign origins. Second, that fetishes materialize debates about the constructedness of social values, i.e., that particular aesthetic and material forms are valorized or ignored by different people for different reasons. And third, that fetishes were not simply a European mischaracterization of African religiosities, but rather a theory of material relations that evolved and expanded as the Atlantic world matured.Mid-seventeenth century Inquisition records increasingly mention enslaved Africans in Brazil and Portugal making and selling apotropaic pouches meant to protect from knife wounds. The first recorded case of an enslaved African using such objects in Portugal is from 1672, when a man named Manuel was accused of using a pouch tied around his wrist to protect himself from knife slashes, a theory he proved by daring a local cleric to stab him with a sword in a public square in Portugal.8 In his trial, Manuel's pouches are referred to not as "mandinga," but as "leather" (coura) and "pouch" (bolsa). Inquisitorial denunciations of mandinga-users increase in the decades after 1700, which likely reflects their increasing usage across the Atlantic world, as well as Inquisitorial suspicion over their use.Such inquisitorial efforts to define and suppress mandingas and their users coalesce in the term feitiçaria, the accusation most often leveled against mandingueiros. Feitiçaria broadly defined the invocation and manipulation of feitiços (both material and immaterial), as well as other saintly and demonic forces, for particular ends. While often translated into English as "sorcery," in Inquisition records the term is often analogized to, or even substituted for, bruxaria (witchcraft), sacrilégio (sacrilege), or magia (magic). Yet to many, feitiçaria often carried particular connotations of a special knowledge of unseen or hidden things, a kind of esoteric expertise which remained both elusive and feared.9 As such, feitiçaria was ambiguously defined as that which it was not, and throughout the first half of the eighteenth century it was usually deployed as an accusation as opposed to a self-description. As new practices came under the Portuguese Inquisition's purview in the decades after 1700, then, the Portuguese Inquisition's equation of mandinga with feitiçaria reflected an intellectual investment not only in the idea of a definable, and distinct, African religiosity, but also its inherent opposition to sanctioned Catholic practice. The first Portuguese-language dictionary, published by Raphael Bluteau, makes clear the initially dual definition of mandinga as both ethnic group and feitiçaria:While here Bluteau laments the influx of mandingas into the imperial metropole, he also seems to confirm their efficacy. In his writing, mandingas really do work to protect their wearer from harm, an opinion that speaks to their broad popularity across African-Portuguese societies.Ironically, the Portuguese themselves facilitated mandinga pouches' spread across the Atlantic. Between 1694 and 1698, the annual arrivals of enslaved Africans into Brazil nearly quadrupled (Voyages Database 2017); and while mandingueiros during this period came from all racial backgrounds, mandinga clients seemed to prefer pouches from enslaved Africans who had spent at least some time in Brazil. However, no extant Inquisition record that discusses mandingas lists a defendant of Mandinka ethnicity.10 In other words, by 1720, "mandinga" was not only decoupled from an identifiable ethnic origin, but was applied to objects and people whose biographies crossed Africa, Brazil, and Europe (Sansi 2011: 23; Souza 2003: 134). The 1789 edition of Bluteau's dictionary makes this explicit: The definition reads simply "Mandinga: African. Feitiçaria" (Bluteau 1789: 51).The early 1600s debates over Mandinkas' religious affiliations and the term's gradual redefinition as a fetish object of unclassifiable or syncretic confusion, however, stands in contrast to the efforts to define Mandinga as an ethnonym on contemporary maps. William Berry's 1680 map, Africa: divided according to the extent of its principall parts, labels both the lower-case ethnonym and upper-case "Kingdom" of Mandinga (Figs. 4–5). A small castle visually reinforces the "kingdom" designation, while a dotted line delimits its geographic boundaries. In this way, the map makes visible distinct African ethnonyms that can be classified by viewers. Even its title actively "divide[s] [Africa] into parts" "distinguished from one another," while that classifying action is underscored by the colored dotted lines that delimit an array of "empires, monarchies, kingdoms, states, and peoples." The map's wide framing, though, also makes visible the eastern coast of Brazil. A view that was meant to appeal to merchants and slave traders by showing the geographic proximity between the two regions, it also incorporates areas that, as mandinga-makers would acknowledge and inquisitors knew, were instrumental to the construction of mandingas' seeming Africanness: Portugal and its Brazilian colony.By 1700, mandinga pouches had emerged as one of the most sought-after and effective talismans in the Atlantic world. But mandingas often functioned in conversation with a wide range of other protective amulets. Africans in Brazil utilized a mélange of tattoos, scarifications, jewelry, beads, amulets, and medals that Tania Andrade Lima, Marcos André Torres de Souza, and Glaucia Malerba Sene refer to as a protective and aesthetic "second skin" (2014: 104) in order to "seal the body" (fechar o corpo). A late-eighteenth century watercolor by Italian-born Portuguese colonel and artist Carlos Julião visualizes mandinga pouches' role in this practice (Fig. 6).11 The untitled image depicts a black street vendor in northeastern Brazil.12 Framed against a sparse landscape, she balances a tray of fruit on her head while carrying a child on her back. In his rendering, Julião turns both her left hip and chest out from the image, which calls attention to the assorted amulets and talismans displayed on her body. Around her neck hangs a devotional scapular, rendered as a black square on a red string, which in practice would have been marked with images or prayers to a Catholic saint. Other objects hanging from her waist also speak to Catholic affiliations (Fig. 7). The yellow and red circles represent common brass and bronze medallions with images of saints and Christ. One is identifiable: A silver heart-shaped medal, at the far right, reproduces the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which by the early eighteenth century was well established as a popular Catholic devotional symbol (Kilroy-Ewbank 2014). In slavery-era Brazil, both scapulars and medals like these were popular among "new Christians" (cristãos novos), principally Jews and Africans who had recently been baptized by choice or force. "New Christians" were those most often denounced to the Inquisition on charges of sorcery. Such denunciations were occasionally the result of what Julião displays here: the close intermingling of orthodox objects like scapulars and medals along with other, sacrilegious amulets and apotropaic symbols on their bodies. A tattoo or drawing of a pentagram—a common occult and talismanic symbol—marks the back of the woman's left hand, while two pouches hang from strings attached to the white cloth encircling her waist.The pouches stand out in this diverse range of talismanic media for their seeming visual banality and ambiguity, key factors to mandingas' subtle power. As the term mandinga described the function of an amulet, not its form, the display of amulets and apotropaic symbols on one's body immediately posed questions about their potential powers. Teeth and cotton cords, for example, are among the objects described as mandinga in inquisition records, while pouches could serve other talismanic or even practical functions distinct from mandingas.13 As such, and perhaps most nefariously for inquisitors, the scapular rendered by Julião could also be mandinga and may only be distinguished from the pouches around his subject's waist by an unseen ritual efficacy manifested through contents that remain invisible even as these objects are proudly displayed. In this way, mandinga pouches both hid and flaunted the esoteric knowledge of their makers, while also inviting speculation on the existence and form of its contents. This strategic occlusion parallels Mary Nooter's argument about certain African arts, as mandinga pouches' powers partly derived from "the deliberate obstruction, obscuring, or withholding" of their contents (Nooter 1993: 56). Strikingly, this point parallels the performative discourse of feitiçaria, or sorcery, posing questions about the relationship between the esoteric aesthetics of certain African societies and the emergent discourse of sorcery in the early modern black Atlantic. Roger Sansi, for example, notes how sorcery more or less depends on a strategic withholding of a fully revealed truth, which "can be revealed only in part, precisely because it is occultation which makes sorcery powerful" (Sansi 2011: 21). The pouch plays a game with the viewer, constantly flaunting a potential hidden truth, but never fully granting its revelation.Inquisition records seem to also play this game, revealing quick glimpses or descriptions of mandinga pouches' contents, but almost never the logics behind them. Yet it seems that as mandinga pouches gained an increasingly diverse clientele in the decades after 1700, their makers also began to incorporate new kinds of contents into mandingas' aesthetic arsenal, ones radically distinct from the Qur'anic papers on the Guinea coast. Three records from the first decades of the eighteenth century give a sense of the types of inclusions. In Pernambuco in 1719, Luis de Lima purchased a mandinga pouch containing three Catholic prayers, a piece of altar stone (pedra d'ara), and the bone of a deceased person.14 In Portugal in 1729 Pedro José owned a red cloth mandinga containing a "bone and some hairs,"15 while three years later Antônio de Sousa received a mandinga filled with horn, white paper, and some "red feathers from a Brazilian bird."16 And in Angola in 1715, Vicente de Morais received a mandinga pouch that contained "some Latin orations" and "a green thing that he did not recognize."17As they faced inquisitors' questions, Luis, Pedro José, Antônio, and Vicente gave little information as to what they thought about the contents of their bolsas. But the collective contents they described provide a tantalizing cross-section of the logics behind mandingas' production: a material assemblage which privileged unassuming, transformative, liminal, and foreign inclusions. Elements related to processes of conversion, whether religious or material, abound inside the pouches. Only through interaction with pieces of altar stone, for example, could the unconsecrated Catholic host transform into the physical body and blood of Jesus. Altar stones' ability to transform sterile wafers into divine flesh and blood exemplified mandingas' ability to sanctify seemingly quotidian objects, and thus would have been invaluable inside a pouch with similar goals. Meanwhile bones, another common inclusion, similarly cross the lines between life and death—just as mandingas must do in their effective work—while also mirroring the empowering inclusions in Catholic reliquaries. That such bones were often collected from cemeteries at midnight reinforces that their power derives from these liminal times.Inside mandinga pouches, writing often played a key role. Papers covered in designs, orations, and prayers served, perhaps, to ensnare language's ephemerality by transforming it into ink and paper. For example, an apotropaic paper used by Silvestre de Pinho, a sixteen-year-old free preto (black man) in far southern Brazil in 1765, transforms medals, crosses, and tattoos into ink (Fig. 8).18 Creased from being folded, here it has been opened to reveal the symbols that transformed the paper into an empowered object. A pentagram like that on the hand of the woman in Julião's image appears once more, inked into paper just as it had been inked into skin—here again paired with a series of crosses. Each symbol intermingles with short orations and signatures, while small crosses, placed at seeming feverish random across the paper, seem as a kind of apotropaic punctuation mark.As receptacles for the foreign and the unknown, I also read mandingas as one way their makers tried to map, or archive, their personal experiences in a black Atlantic world predicated on cultural transformation and the destruction wrought by enslavement. The unassuming, liminal, and/or seemingly unclassifiable contents of some mandingas seem to be their makers' extended meditations on Michael Taussig's definition of witchcraft as a "gathering point for Otherness" (1991: 465). Coins, writing systems, religious symbols, and exotica from across the Atlantic world abound inside mandinga pouches. In this light, Brazilian bird feathers take on new potential meanings. Allowing freedom of movement through the sky and marking an origin point across the ocean, they counter-reference the forced migrations of enslaved Africans' lives in the Portuguese Empire. This underscores how demonstrations of foreign origins emerged as constitutive elements of sorcerous power: Indeed, even the term mandinga alluded to a generalized foreign Africanity, and thus the particularly effective powers derived from foreign objects and places.Building from an emphasis on the liminal, transformative, and the foreign, it seems mandinga makers often sought out objects that defied classification. Hairs, bones, and horns, all common inclusions in mandingas, resist clear definitions of use and aesthetic interest.19 By including these substances, mandinga makers continued to emphasize the secrecy of the knowledge they possessed: knowledge to carefully identify and harness the powers of quotidian objects and symbols through dynamic recontextualization. This point coalesces in Vicente de Morais's quick description of the "green thing he did not recognize," an object that was likely chosen not in spite of its visual illegibility, but because of it and the supernatural effects it visually conveyed. Illegibility thus worked as both a strategy of secrecy and of efficacy, an embodiment of sorcery discourse and perhaps, for the enslaved, a moment of escape from organized supervision and control.As instruments of material and religious conversion, methods of capturing a fleeting and precarious life, and examinations of the power of the unknown, mandinga pouches both intervened in and encapsulated an increasingly diverse and interconnected Atlantic world premised on ebbs, flows, and instabilities. The mandinga, too, circulated through these realms, incorporating materials it picked up along the way. In this sense, mandingas map both personal experience of their makers and the entirety of the Atlantic world as experienced by the enslaved. But for the Portuguese Inquisition, the polymorphic spiritual practices displayed inside mandinga pouches exemplified a nefarious religious intermixture that undermined the stability of Catholic doctrine. Such confusion often resulted in the arrest and trial of mandinga makers, during which inquisitors dramatically opened mandingas in order to define and classify the internal contents that gave them such sorcerous power. Faced with this litany of transformative and liminal materials, however, Portuguese inquisitors often voiced either confusion or disinterest over the meaning of these substances. The conflict between visual occlusion, the ambiguities of heterodox Catholicisms, and the potential efficacy of the pouches' contents plays out most clearly in the practice of José Francisco Pereira.José Francisco Pereira, a natural of Ouidah, was arrested in Lisbon on charges of feitiçaria in 1730.20 Born in Africa, enslaved in Brazil, and finally taken to Portugal, Pereira emerged as one of the most sought-after mandingueiros in Lisbon. His trial record contains the most extensive and detailed record of mandinga production in eighteenth century Lisbon. The trial record of his accomplice, José Francisco Pedroso, contains a series of seven drawings that Pereira had placed inside the mandinga pouches that emerged as evidence at his trial.21 From these, as well as the pair's descriptions, we can trace how Pereira's practice not only confounded an emergent distinction between feitiços-as-African and Catholic iconography, but also served as a space to forge the dynamic reinvention of his own ritual and religious experiences as potential challenges to the daily realities of enslavement.At first glance, José Francisco's designs collectively display what inquisitors could identify as permissible Catholic iconography. In one of the three nearly identical images he produced (Fig. 9), José Francisco renders at center a cross, accented with the spear and staff topped with a sponge. At top, a heart symbol is pierced by two arrows, an image likely derived from the Sacred Heart of Jesus symbols discussed earlier. Meanwhile, the circular symbol at center derives from the wide range of devotional medals and coins-turned-amulets that circulated on the bodies of people across the African-Portuguese world.22 The two lines crossing on top of it represent the spear and sponge used during Christ's crucifixion, but here they are converted to feathered lines that evoke the feathered quill pens José Francisco would have used to create the designs: a moment of self-reflexivity, where mandingas' contents reflect on their own production.In another image, drawn in black ink and red blood, he depicts the Arma Christi, a collection of objects and references to events related to Christ's crucifixion (Fig. 10). This grouping of symbols was used across Iberia and southern Europe as early as the ninth century (Berliner 1955; Gayk 2014). A cross, topped with the letters INRI, is flanked, at left, with Christ's flagellation pillar topped with the rooster that crowed upon Peter's third denial of Jesus. A ladder, at right, was used for the deposition of Christ's body from the cross, while the presence of a skull and crossbones below the cross was usually interpreted as the grave of Adam. Today, a chromolithograph of the Arma Christi is commonly used to represent the creator-being Olofi on candles honoring a group of seven orichas in the Afro-Cuban-identified religion Regla Ocha, or Santería (Fig. 11). While I am not arguing for a direct lineage between José Francisco's Lisb