Saudades in Brazil

Departure Harbors in the South Atlantic

L’Océan nous unissant plus qu’il nous sépare.

Léopold Senghor, Salvador, 1964.

Culture and civilization were two broad ideas under severe criticism by Afro-Diasporic intellectuals and global political movements in the 1960s. Many of these advocated for a revolutionary rupture with colonial powers, whether the old European Empires or the ones based in the Cold War. However, less known are the details of several radical options at stake in the period. These are views that have previously been buried under a criticism with major blind spots for the diverse alternatives created by Afro-Diasporic and indigenous thinkers. Léopold Senghor is undoubtedly one such thinker, claimed by critics such as Wole Soyinka and Frantz Fanon as a supporter of outdated or mystifying ideas of black identities.¹ However, recent scholarly work emphasizes Senghor’s radicalism then and now, arguing, for example, that “it is time to break down the ideological barriers that limit the Senegalese philosopher’s rich intellectual production to a reaction to colonization, and to show the complexity of his philosophy” (Cheikh 2014, 6). As we will see in Senghor’s poetry and speeches, this complex philosophy also opens new perspectives on other African descents in the Diaspora.

Thus, distinct from tracing Senghor’s philosophy, my call in this article is to evidence Senghor’s aesthetic and political commitment to worlds outside the North Atlantic area, especially regarding south-to-south connections between Afro-Atlantic regions.² I argue that Senghor articulates poetics and politics to build up an integral world by constantly merging Africa and the Americas into a nonviolent reconciliation of times and peoples. This poetic and political approach was a legitimate afro-diasporic alternative to the defense of rupture and violence against colonization as sustained, for example, by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre (1961). The most visible political consequences of Senghor’s approach were to gain Brazil’s support for the decolonization of Portuguese territories in Africa and the creation of a transatlantic community based on cultural ties. The less obvious outcome is the confluence of poetic sensibilities building up freedom, solidarities, and alliances in the South Atlantic. This article is organized in sections pointing out Senghor’s trajectory and his role in the Négritude movement, then an analysis of his poetry, and, finally, an examination of the discourses and records of Senghor’s travel to Brazil in 1964. My approach considers an intrinsic relationship between aesthetic creation in poetry and political intervention through speeches in public spaces. Considering the connections between politics and poetry, my argument proceeds as a ship moving between two margins, from a poem to the travel records and back again to another poem or discourse and so on. By proceeding this way, I emphasize Senghor’s poetic and political movement toward a Luso-Afro-Atlantic Negritude as a machine in slow and continuous motion, sailing through undercurrents of poetic traditions of the South Atlantic.

Solidarities on the High Seas

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born in Joal Fadiouth, Senegal, to a merchant family of Serer origin. He first received formal education from the religious missions working under the French Colonial Empire and then in Paris in one of the most prestigious universities of the empire. As Vaillant summarizes about Senghor’s educational trajectory, he took part in a very small group education to become “the elite of the colony” while developing emotional and cultural ties to France: “They came to love the French language and culture, but they also suffered from living in the two separate worlds” (22).

Together with Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and other students from French colonies living in 1930s Paris, Senghor forged the Négritude movement, a distinctive way to face racial and colonial conflicts and to sustain “translocal solidarities” between Afro-Diasporic communities. Those are Paul Gilroy’s words for the constitutive forms of diasporic dispersion and strangeness that have marked many individuals, families, and groups for centuries, as opposed to the modes of belonging delimited by territorial sovereignty and rooted relationships (1993, 8). Négritude as a cultural movement took over places such as Martinique, Haiti, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Madagascar, and several other territories of the French Colonial Empire to mobilize its epistemologies, folk narratives, and traditions as poetic material for a black critique and cultural production in tandem with European avant-gardes and anti-colonial politics.³ Irene Dobbs Jackson defined the movement as “hydra headed” and “characterized both by its realistic adaptability to the historic moment and its paradoxical, mystic nature” (quoted in M’Baye 2009, 30). In the following years, a “black internationalism” grew from multiple fronts, such as the creation of the magazine Présence Africaine by Alioune Diop in 1948 and the organization of two black artists’ and writers’ congresses in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). Léopold Senghor was a leading figure, publishing poems and organizing the powerful edition Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948) with a preface by the prestigious philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre. Moreover, since 1937, Senghor also played relevant political roles in France and Senegal, ranging from the representation of the colony in the French Assembly to the creation of the most important mass political parties in Senegal that led the independence process in 1960. Senghor’s multiple commitments to politics and literature, as well as his strong ties to France and belonging to Senegal are evidenced by the literature about his poetry and life.⁴ Nonetheless, such abundant studies are centered mostly on Senghor’s connections with Paris and Harlem and dismiss relevant south-to-south connections, particularly the global reverberations of decolonization and the 1955 Bandung Conference on the Third World.⁵

But there is more to the story of Afro-Diasporic intellectuals like Senghor, who promoted dialogues with Lusophone regions such as Portugal, Brazil, and Guinea-Bissau. In this sense, my argument converges with Patricia Pinho’s approach, which defines diaspora as a “multicentralized configuration” (2005, 40), which in her case places the city of Salvador as one of the black “Meccas.” The work of Goli Guerreiro on the cultural repertoires of Atlantic cities is also an inspiration for the following reflection, particularly her stages for understanding the cosmopolitanism of African and Afro-Diasporic communities and her sensitive periodization of the material and symbolic circulation in Africa and the Americas. Thus, cosmopolitanism and decentralized configurations are two key ideas for understanding Senghor’s poetry and politics, as we will see.

Approaching Senghor’s Poetry

A few years before visiting Brazil as head of state, Léopold Sédar Senghor published the poem “Élégie des saudades,”⁶ in which he weaves a melancholy song about the consciousness of himself and the conditions of his colonial descent. Nocturnes was developed over fifteen years and marks a maturity in which a particular poetic style and emphasis on Négritude is expressed as a redeeming humanism. The form chosen by the author is expressive of the set of reflections on transformative events in his life, as well as a lyricism that connects mourning, drama, sensuality, and hope. The long tradition of elegy in Western poetics can be understood as a song “suggested either by the death of an actual person or by the poet’s contemplation of the tragic aspects of life. In either case, the emotion, originally expressed as a lament, finds consolation in the contemplation of some permanent principle” (Greene and Cushman 2016, 62). Throughout the centuries, the aesthetic principles of elegy have been modified on several occasions, giving rise to new possibilities for lyrical exploration.⁷ It would be no different in the case of French-speaking Négritude poets, such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. According to one of the terms immortalized by the latter, both poets were successful in using the word as “miraculous weapons” for the radicalization of African and Afro-diasporic aesthetics in French expression.

I explore Senghor’s poem based on his affiliation with the tradition of Western elegies, but also on the thematic, linguistic, and rhythmic re-elaborations that redefine the elegy in dialogue with oral traditions. Among such reinventions is that “the ontological view is expressed through a ‘comprehension,’ a ‘com-passion’ for the world, expressed by the use of shortcuts, by the force of semantic shocks, by rhapsodic repetitions, for the effect of injunctive enchantment, [and] for the intuitive syntax of juxtaposition”⁸ (Sabourin 2007, 41). Hence, I adopt critical principles of “close reading” in a consideration of the poem as a whole with its own structural logic without losing the analogical relationship of poetry with its social environment, particularly between the poet and his potential readers. I identify three major principles in the poem, each one defining articulations between Senghor’s poetics and the politics of a Luso-Afro-Atlantic Negritude. Such principles are similar to the “The Kingdom of Childhood” trope in Senghor’s poetry noticed by Thiam Cheikh. In other words, the principles I identify are place markers “to chart a journey that cannot really be cited/understood as beginning in a particular place but which must have some beginning that is always evoked when talk turns to journeys” (2014, 39). In the poem I explore in the next section, Senghor defines three place markers to define a journey through a Luso-Afro-Atlantic world.

In the Sea of Negritude

I start my analysis of “Élégie des saudades” by highlighting the pulse of life and death within the word “saudade,” one of the poet’s favorite words in the universe of the Portuguese language. Senghor’s choice presents an interesting shift from the original language of the vocable.

Up from the depths inside me I hear shadowy

Voices singing of saudades

Is it the ancient voice, the drop of Portuguese blood

In me rising from the deeps of time

My name rising up-river to its source?⁹

The poem begins and ends with the poet’s attention to an inner cry that asks about the voice in the shadow of feeling. At the beginning a song, and at the end a complaint, the voice appears as a lost point of the origins, even before the existence of the singer. The initial pulse of nostalgia asks about the origin of the poet’s own name, which bears the “Senghor” as a derivation of the Portuguese “Senhor”: “Drop of blood or Senhor the name a captain once gave to his faithful laptot.”¹⁰ The question of origins thus goes back to a colonial antiquity that delineates the Portuguese presence in West Africa before the French presence and that leaves elements of the poet’s own name as traces. The hesitation between the biological or cultural origin is part of the poetic question, leaving open the subject of the poet’s descent, as well as his colonial condition—the first element of his poetics to highlight.

A second important point in Senghor’s poetics is the way he sings his belonging to Africa. In the poem, Senghor’s Serer ethnic origin is not delineated. On the contrary, he establishes his connection with the vast African territory, with palm drinks, lakes, rivers, forests, and a vigorous alert: “I understood the signs of the Tribe.”¹¹ Then, Senghor invokes the presence of different colonizations with their violence and, instead of a tragic closure, he accentuates a superior capacity for understanding achieved by those enslaved and colonized: “Ah! Drink up all the rivers, Niger, Congo, and Zambezi, Amazon and Ganges.”¹² In this excerpt we can perceive resonances of the African American poet Langston Hughes in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a meditation on the timelessness, wisdom, and resilience of black people.¹³ In Senghor’s poem, the circulation of populations derived from colonial violence, therefore, can be understood as a conscious inebriation: “Drink up all the seas in a single negro draught, without pause but not without accent.”¹⁴ It is important to remark that under the poetic form adopted, the poet turns to a constant remembrance, in which the temporality itself ends up overlapping: “Ah! I confuse, confound/Confound present and past.”¹⁵

At this point of the poem, the slave trade is remembered, highlighting the tones of the different languages of the colonizers who share the same legacy of European violence on the African populations. However, the poem’s stress is Portuguese, as is slavery, and the voice under the shadow of “saudade” is remembered by the poet as part of his visit to Portugal. Therefore, we identify a third important principle for Senghor: learning through travel experiences and its relationship to reading and knowledge: “I rediscovered my blood uncovered my name last year at Coimbra under the scrub of books.”¹⁶ Senghor’s rediscovering of his blood and name through geographic circulation and readings at the University of Coimbra feed the poet’s dream of searching for origins, not as a starting point, but as a passage that connects him to other worlds and, moreover, catalyzes the African knowledge he possesses. Within a myriad of colonial and slavery experiences, Africans became more conscious about the world, despite suffering a violent diaspora for centuries: “And all the dreams, drink all the books and all the gold, all Coimbra’s prodigies.”¹⁷ At the end, the image of the university returns as a space for lyricism and knowledge inebriety.

The second part of the poem emphasizes the missions of the poet’s lyrical voice, addressing a pacification of the worlds violently brought together by colonization. The language is marked by a Christian tone, shaped by pastoral expressions in African territories, with emphasis on the nature and the signs of the “Tribe,” with capital letters. Perhaps the verses underline the role that Senghor would play as head of state, leaving the republic of dreams for a real creation in Senegal, in a way to “subdue the desert to the God of fruitfulness.”¹⁸ By the end of the poem, the voice in the shadow of “saudade” becomes a complaint. At the closure of the poem, the contours of the Portuguese presence in Senghor’s existence are defined: an existence that remains as a claim to “saudade,” as an imagination of origins, and that even blood, the most striking element of the Portuguese trail in the body of the colonized, loses strength and relevance due to a preponderant principle: “My Portuguese blood is lost in the sea of my Negritude.”¹⁹ The poet emerges from the conflict of times, bloods, and colonial empires as a peacemaker of deceased worlds.

In the elegy’s poetic tradition, Negritude can be seen as a principle of permanence that consoles existence in the face of various dispossessions. Although Portuguese blood remains as “memory” and as “saudades,” Negritude as a sea encompasses differences that support connections with the four parts of the world: “A single sea stretching into four distances.”²⁰ I highlight the strength with which Negritude as a foundation reiterates a “poetics of forgiveness” in which the past of colonial violence can be converted into matter to achieve universal harmony. (Wilder 2015, 59) In this way, I converge with Gary Wilder’s analysis of Léopold Senghor, which stresses a progressive consolidation of such poetics in the immediate post-war period (50). As pointed out, the “poetics of forgiveness” does not imply a renunciation of the memory of colonial violence, but the conversion of the potential resentment into a commitment that combines the deterritorialization of the past with future fertility.²¹

In the next section, we will continue the investigation of Senghor’s poetics during his travels through Brazil and in his readings about Brazilian racial exceptionalism, which was popularized at that time by the expression “Racial Democracy.”²² Senghor’s interventions will be observed in light of the poetic principles revealed in “Élégie des saudades,” such as the colonial condition, belonging to Africa, and experience of travel. Furthermore, we will point out how such principles and Senghor’s “poetics of forgiveness” underlie his ideal of Negritude.

Poetry as Method: Gilberto Freyre’s Work in Paris

In the 1950s, we encounter the first traces of Senghor’s contact with the idea of Brazilian racial exceptionalism based on Gilberto Freyre’s studies on miscegenation. For Freyre, this was a moment of increasing prestige of his work among French intellectual circles. “Could poetry be a method of knowledge in sociology?”, asked Roger Bastide in a meeting dedicated to the work of Freyre in 1956, which included Léopold Senghor (Leenhardt 2006, 37). Lucien Febvre, a central figure from the École des Annales, delivered remarks emphasizing Freyre’s essayistic features and the lyrical character of his prose. A relevant question was raised by Febvre and touched on the burning question of colonialism. Based on the Jesuits’ failed experience of converting rebelled indigenous people, the historian asks: “Is a single civilization where all men can find their homeland possible?” The question that was gaining strength at the time in France was already posed in West Africa and would become dramatic in the following year with the outbreak of the Algerian War and the Loi-Cadre, which expanded the autonomy of the French territories in Africa. Senghor was one of the French Secretaries of State who drafted the new law, and yet he defended a decolonization that would keep the new African states in a federation led by France. Under such logic, a federation would fulfill the demands for political self-determination and economic support, contributing to the consolidation of a Franco-African civilization based on miscegenation. As Senghor used to say, miscegenation was the bind between federalism and civilization, since all great civilizations were formed by cultural and biological miscegenation (Wilder 159). Moreover, Léopold Senghor conceived of race itself as mixed, laying “the groundwork for a non-essentialist essentialism,” in which Negro cultures “develop, change, and mix with other cultures, while they remain fundamentally African” (Cheikh 2014, 6).

In addition to this longstanding concern with the phenomenon of miscegenation,²³ Léopold Senghor demonstrated a growing concern with the subject when interacting with Lusophone regions in the 1960s. The initial point of this concern is expressed in the poem “Élégie de saudades” and, after that, in Senghor’s speeches in Brazil.

Léopold Senghor’s Travels to Brazil

Although planned years before, Senghor’s official mission to Brazil took place in September 1964, only six months after a military and civil coup d’état against president João Goulart. The coup d’état was the first step of a dictatorship that would last 21 years, but at the time, the coup had massive support from conservative segments of Brazilian society as well as from political representatives, business leaders, Catholic groups, military forces, and the United States. Following the coup and the persecution of members of the Brazilian congress, the legislature elected General Castello Branco to run the government until the end of former president João Goulart’s term (Schwarcz and Starling 2015, 448), which included the period of Senghor’s official visit.

An intensive agenda led Senghor to visit several cities, where he received titles, visited industries and state facilities, and signed agreements.²⁴ He met several official authorities and businessmen, but the visit was particularly relevant for the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais (CEAO) in Salvador, Bahia, and the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos (CEAA) in Rio de Janeiro. Both organizations were leading initiatives to strengthen ties between Brazil and Africa, the first furthering research networks and student exchanges (Santos 2005, 28) and the second emphasizing Brazilian foreign diplomacy to the Third World (Dávila 2010, 22). In Salvador, Senghor underlined the importance of the scholarly exchange between the University of Bahia and the University of Dakar and commended Pedro Moacir Maia, a professor recommended by CEAO to teach Brazilian Civilization in Senegal. In Rio de Janeiro, the CEAA invited Senghor to lecture about Africa and Senegal at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos).

During his travels, the Senegalese president gave at least four speeches, two longer ones in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia and two shorter ones in Brasília. During his visit, Senghor barely mentioned Brazil’s political situation under the new military regime, although he defended democracy as one of the three pillars of Senegal in a speech at the Brazilian Congress.²⁵ Additionally, during a meeting with General Castello Branco, Senghor pointed out the general’s positive “democratic attachment” in relation to his power to define a new efficient order for the country.²⁶ I choose to analyze the longer discourses at the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Federal University of Bahia because of their complexity and connections to the poem analyzed in the previous section. Although it was his first visit to Brazil, Senghor revealed a unique knowledge of the country and its literary tradition, properly mentioning a lexicon of references that touched on the sensitive country’s self-image as a “Racial Democracy.” In addition, his words stressed features of Senghor’s poetics as well as his agenda of political commitment to Brazil and the decolonization of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique.

In my reading of Senghor’s speeches, I consider Edward Said’s reflection on strategies that could be used to “widen, expand and deepen our awareness of the way the past and present of the imperial encounter interact with each other” (1994, 39). Said acknowledged that while novels were “the aesthetic object par excellence” to investigate the clashes in the era of Empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was poetry, in fact, that occupied a more important place in the case of post-colonial Senegal and many territories colonized by Portugal in Africa. Such an understanding is confirmed by Pires Laranjeira, who defends the existence of an African Portuguese-speaking Negritude, whose poetic elaborations represented “uma das pontes culturais de passagem para os movimentos de libertação, que actuaram decisivamente a partir dos anos 60” (2000, xii–xiii).

In the African context, Senghor’s case is the most iconic instance of a poet who is also president. For that reason, we find continuities between the development of poems such as “Élégie des saudades” and of political discourses, both using poetic digressions and a vibrant prose of metaphors, paradoxes, euphemisms, and analogies. I also consider discontinuities in reading Senghor’s speeches, such as those suggested by Jocélio dos Santos. Santos noted, in regard to the poet’s passage through Bahia, the importance of “analogias e as aproximações africanas e brasileiras internas ao seu próprio discurso” (2005, 47)—beyond the common excitement of a diplomatic visit.

“No city in Brazil could be better chosen than Bahia and no monument in Bahia than this University to celebrate, with our fraternity, the marriage of Latinity and Negritude.”²⁷ These opening words at the Federal University of Bahia were the culmination of Léopold Senghor’s visit to Brazil, where he celebrated a cultural agreement between Brazil and Senegal. The agreement was signed to link both countries, and it was transformed by Senghor’s words into something symbolically bigger. The speech in Bahia gave continuity to what he had stated in a shorter but no less solemn way at the Brazilian Academy of Letters when he addressed the “Brésil dans l’Amérique Latine”: “In fact, you gathered in this vast country, whose whole is proportional to the continent, the three races that make up Latin America. But what I admire, in your case, is less the biological crossing than the cultural symbiosis that you have achieved.”²⁸ Let’s attend to how the titles and the beginning of Senghor’s speeches place Brazil in Latin America or within a “Latinity.” In his topographic lexicon, it is remarkable how he defines Brazil’s place in a broader context, continental on the one hand (America) and linguistic-cultural on the other (Latinity). The statesman’s speech was in French, often held as the most prestigious among Romance languages and widely used by most of the Brazilian intellectuals whom he encountered during his travels. He would repeat the gesture in 1975, when he was honored at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, invoking French in convergence with “Lusitanidade” as a definition of Portuguese culture. The reference to languages also occurred in other situations, such as when Senghor suggested to the anti-colonial leaders of African territories under the control of the Portuguese who wished to adopt French as an official language: “Make it the first foreign language,” Senghor would say, “it will be enough. Remember that you are not culturally alone: there is Brazil.”²⁹

A Rhetoric of Deviation

The notions of “culture” and “civilization” were central to Léopold Senghor’s interventions in denoting countries like Brazil and Portugal or indigenous and African collectivities. Senghor greatly admired the result of “cultural symbiosis” in Brazil.³⁰ He favored this over “biological miscegenation,” a difference that has consequences for his understanding of Brazil as a “Racial Democracy.” The description of Brazil as a cultural symbiosis, as exemplified by the literary elaborations of writers such as Machado de Assis, Gonçalves Dias, and Cruz e Souza, would be for Senghor “like the refined fruits of a transplant, the complementary virtues of the three ethnic groups: of the three civilizations that make up Brazilian culture.”³¹ The ethnicities or civilizations basically refer to Europeans, Indians, and Africans, spelled with capital letters when the poet declares: “What I discovered in this Brazilian genius was a triple desire for fidelity to Latinity, Africanity—more precisely: Negritude—Indianity, which results in a triple effort of lucidity in analysis, of integrality in the grip of life, of permanence in memory.”³² For Senghor, cultures are expressions of civilizations that can be opposed to each other and also interpreted in their complementarity. Thus, Brazil is a civilization composed of three other civilizations, synthesized by the features of each of them. These features can be either perceived in symbiotic literary outcomes or due to a particular origin.

The poet’s understanding of culture and civilization helps to explain his differences from Gilberto Freyre. First, Senghor’s contrasts between cultures as civilizations and the successive shift between one term and another defines a “rhetoric of deviation.” Among Senghor’s first deviations there is the elevation of Amerindian and African collectivities to the status of civilization, as opposed to Europeans, characterized as “Latinos.” This operation allows the second and more important deviation: to equate “Africanity” to “Negritude” and, in this way, to discuss Africa as a philosophical conception and as a project of a new humanism. For Gilberto Freyre, however, the term “civilization” has a Eurocentric meaning, being used more often to designate Christian Europe and the Islamic world.³³ Freyre will mobilize the term in a recurring manner to speak of Brazil as a “Lusotropical Civilization,” a term later applied to other territories colonized by Portugal. Thus, Freyre does not delineate Amerindians as a civilization, except the Aztec and Inca empires, which he defines as “semi-civilized” (2003, 157). For Gilberto Freyre, when the Portuguese colonizers landed in America they met a “bando de crianças grandes; uma cultura verde e incipiente; ainda na primeira dentição; sem os ossos nem o desenvolvimento nem a resistência das grandes semicivilizações americanas”(158). In the case of Africans, Freyre says that it is not enough to exclude “Egito, com a sua opulência inconfundível de civilização, para falar-se então à vontade da cultura africana, chata e uma só. Esta se apresenta com notáveis diferenças de relevo, variando seus valores na quantidade e na elaboração” (369).

The wavering way in which Léopold Senghor approached miscegenation during his time in Brazil is also clear based on his cultural emphasis rather than a biological one. If, for Gilberto Freyre, miscegenation necessarily passes through violent sexual intercourse, generally of Portuguese and European men with Indigenous and African women, then for Senghor, by contrast, the most relevant are the cultural expressions. For the poet, such phenomena would be captured by language, but they would also be evident in architecture and in the production of artifacts. The importance of language to Senghor can be seen in the first reference to Freyre’s work when, in Rio de Janeiro, he praises the author, who “refuses to speak ex cathedra as he progresses, in addition to statistics, for the experience and ‘the infallible language of the people’ that he brought to life, to feel the Brazilian realities in the world.”³⁴ The language also appeared at the opening of the speech in Bahia, as an explanation of the ties during the early post-Senegalese independence phase between the Universities of Dakar and Bahia. Senghor mentioned the interest then to extend “Francophony to Latinophony, introducing Portuguese in high school and higher education, along with Spanish and Italian,” and concluded, “My concern was to give Portuguese a very special place.”³⁵

When facing the audiences who watched his speeches in Brazil, Léopold Senghor demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of the theses about Brazilian racial exceptionalism based on the idea of miscegenation and seasoned his prose in the two speeches with several mentions of Gilberto Freyre. A close look at those references reveals that Senghor referred mostly to Casa-grande & senzala and did not include any interlocution with later works, especially those associated with “Lusotropicalism,”³⁶ the colonial knowledge directed to the territories of Africa and Asia (Castelo and Cardão 2015; Thomaz 2002). While avoiding such references, Senghor also made no mention of the critique of Angolan critic and anti-colonial activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, published in Présence Africaine in 1955. Senghor had not yet cited this important anti-colonial text by the time of the Portuguese African independence when he visited Lisbon. In Brazil, although Senghor addressed explicit statements in support of African decolonization from the Portuguese Empire, the president’s rhetoric in dialogue with Freyre’s ideas deliberately avoided a direct confrontation with the latter’s contemporary theses in defense of Portuguese colonization in Africa.

Anti-Lusotropicalism

Although Senghor did not directly address Freyre’s ideas as an ideologue of the Portuguese imperial state, he eventually discussed the legacy of Freyre’s ideas, then used as colonial knowledge about Portuguese-speaking Africa. In emphasizing Gilberto Freyre’s main work, Senghor seems to extract from him a kind of antidote to the perverse effects of “Lusotropicalism” that guided Portuguese colonial policy in Africa. In other words, Senghor’s performance in Brazil elaborated a counterargument for the uses of miscegenation as a colonial technology by the Portuguese Empire. Let’s dig into this perspective.

Léopold Senghor maintains a decisive link between miscegenation and the emergence of great civilizations: “As in Egypt, as in Sumer, as in Greece,” the success is due to the “mixture of blood and exchange of civilizations.”³⁷ Paraphrasing Lucien Febvre’s preface to the French edition of Freyre’s book, Senghor describes the Brazilian of any color as a masterpiece of cultural complexities and triumph in the tropics. Based on Freyre’s postulate that culture is more determinant than race in Brazil’s patriarchal formation, he says that “the Brazilian in 1964,” practices “without complexes, a policy of integrating complementary values.” Equivalent once again to the African contribution to civilization, Senghor highlighted in his speech the “vitality of black Africans: in the symbolic forms and rhythms that crossed the Atlantic to acclimate here, and first in Bahia.”³⁸ Contrary to Gilberto Freyre who defined the formation of a civilization in the tropics associated with both an almost extra-European Portuguese exceptionalism and with Indigenous and African cultures, Léopold Senghor conceives of the formation of civilization in Brazil as a new chapter of other great civilizations in history. The virtue of miscegenation for the emergence of great civilizations is, therefore, evidence of a very long duration, observed in several other moments of human history, one that “constantly negates the ‘essentialism’ of Senghor’s understanding of the Negro” as well as of any other race (Cheikh 2014, 77–8).

With regard to miscegenation and civilization, it should also be noted that Senghor is interested in the Arab heritage of the Portuguese, distinguishing it as “Africans of Arab civilization.” In his speech in Bahia, he emphasized Egyptian civilization under “négro-Berber” miscegenation, echoing the theses of fellow countryman Cheikh Anta Diop on the black origins of the Nile peoples in the work Nations nègres et culture. It is worth remembering that, for Gilberto Freyre, the Arab peoples affected colonization in Brazil in several ways. For example, Arab culture was perceived as part of the Portuguese matrix, considering the primitive occupations of the Peninsula and the long Muslim domination.³⁹ Freyre, however, stresses the religious opposition between Christians and Muslims, either in Casa-grande & senzala or in later works. In the African Portuguese territories, Freyre’s concern was the diminution of Christian faith in the colonizing enterprise and the danger represented by the profound influence of Islam among Africans, which he had noticed, for example, when he was in Dakar (2001, 221). The land presided over by Senghor at that time had a large majority of the population devoted to the precepts of Muhammad and a powerful political, economic, and cultural force in the Islamic brotherhoods.

We can suppose that this situation was the reason for another rhetorical deviation operated by Senghor in his speeches. Although Senghor underlined the importance of the Arabs, he eliminated the religious question from his complex position as a Christian converted at a young age, presiding over a country with an overwhelming Muslim majority. Again, Senghor, a supporter of the “Universal Civilization” along the lines of Teilhard de Chardin, insisted on the “complementary virtues” of cultures, avoiding antagonistic poles. Maybe that explains why Senghor left out any reference in the speech at the Federal University of Bahia to the rebellion of enslaved Africans devoted to Muhammad in Salvador in 1835. As João José Reis has shown, the Malês Revolt was the greatest slave revolt of the colonial period in Brazil, and even Freyre reserved a special place for the event, placing it “entre as revoluções libertárias, de sentido religioso, social ou cultural” (382). Such an omission does not seem naive.

Saudade in the Margins of the Third World

In the same period that Frantz Fanon offered an open justification of violence by colonized peoples in The Wretched of the Earth, Léopold Senghor propounded an alternative that was averse to direct confrontation. Two examples of Senghor’s approach include his Anti-Lusotropicalism and his rhetoric of deviation as discussed above. An additional way of avoiding direct confrontation may also be found in Senghor’s lyrical conversing with miscegenation—one of the legacies of colonization in Brazil—based on a singular word of the Portuguese-speaking vocabulary that he greatly admired: saudade. The term was used by Senghor initially in “Élégie des saudades,” then again in the speech in Rio de Janeiro, and later at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. The evocations elaborated around the word “saudade” seem to define the president’s positive perspective on the meaning of Brazil’s experience:

As for saudade, I have never felt it so deeply as when reading [Brazilian] poems, listening to [Brazilian] music … It is, along with gentility, one of the most human expressions of Brazilian humanism. Because saudade is, at the same time, regret for the lost Paradise, the hope of a world of fullness and the acute feeling of yours, of our current situation, composed of alienations and contradictions. Your saudade, but it is the expression of our dream for us, men and women of the Third World; it is our poetry.⁴⁰

The three senses of saudade pointed out by Senghor are found in his “Élégie de saudades” and they are important as keys to the poet’s reading of Brazilian exceptionalism and the work of Gilberto Freyre. Although it does not directly address the violence of colonization and the trafficking of enslaved Africans, the memory of such events is reflected in Senghor’s words in evoking the “lost paradise,” that is, a time before the rupture caused by colonization, one that raises a state of nostalgia. Saudade has a long history as a motif in Brazilian songs. For example, a pioneering composition of the Bossa Nova musical movement, Chega de saudade, was released by João Gilberto a few years before Senghor’s visit to Brazil. Among the composers was Vinícius de Morais, one of Senghor’s favorite poets, as we will see. As noticed in “Élégie des saudades,” another reference to music is found in Portugal and pays tribute to the fado singer Amália Rodrigues, who sings in the last verses of the poem to end the journey of the poet’s old loves. Rodrigues, the great voice of Portuguese melancholy in the twentieth century, dedicated at least two songs in her repertoire to saudade. Thus, we can realize how, through song and poetry, saudade is a central theme explored in the Luso-Afro-Atlantic context.

The displacement of a past time seen as glorious and stable, followed by an alienating rupture, is the common condition that Senghor invokes to think of the similarity between the country of Gilberto Freyre and his African homeland. Senghor sets forth an experience of a lost time in the deep sea of the colonial condition. He stresses the emotional contours of this experience by emphasizing the alienation and the contradictions that promote a state of intense pain. Thus, saudade may be intrinsic to Brazil, but it is the expression of a dream that unifies colonized peoples. Similar to the images written by W.E.B. Du Bois sixty years earlier in North America about the “state of pain” and “double consciousness” experienced by African Americans in The Souls of Black Folk, the nostalgia invoked by Senghor also emphasizes the fragmenting doubleness of the colonial condition of black people. But in Bahia, Senghor links the saudade as “state of pain” to a diasporic situation of all peoples from the Third World—a category with a particular political value since the Bandung Conference in 1955. Senghor’s perspective on the colonial condition shared between Brazil, Africa, and other peoples of the Third World finds no ground in Gilberto Freyre’s Lusocentric reflection, which is why the poet emphasized the universe of language and cultural artifacts, in spite of other conditions such as economics, sexuality, geography, and nutrition.

Finally, let us probe the third meaning of the word saudade: “the hope of an integral world.” I reiterate that the poem “Élégie des saudades” is a melancholic and sad composition according to the convention in which the poet’s voice emerges as a question and ends as a lament. The images of the identity of the poet and his world in ruins are constructed in the first part with several references to the territory, to African nature, and to the rupture of historical times. The poet, amid the reminiscent pieces of a broken existence, rises to a certain height, in a pastoral stance,

My mission is to pasture the herds

Avenge injury, subdue the desert to the God of fruitfulness.⁴¹

This verse expresses the submission of the desert of a divided existence to a future fertility. Considering the ethical intertwining of this poem with Léopold Senghor’s philological explorations of the word saudade, I identify the construction of an “integral world” as the constant search to turn the two sides of the Atlantic into a nonviolent reconciliation.

Likewise, that is the same principle guiding Senghor’s intervention into the idea of Brazilian racial exceptionalism, a correlated target of his travel in Brazil. On the one hand, it was part of the diplomatic ethics that guided the cultural agreement to expand the circulation of university students and the production of knowledge between both countries. On the other hand, Senghor led the demand for Brazilian support against Portuguese colonialism in Africa and, consequently, for the creation of a Luso-Afro-Brazilian community.⁴² The result of the “wedding,” announced as a metaphor in Senghor’s speeches, would be the successful participation of Brazil in the First World Festival of Negro Arts. If Brazil was a projection for a future new civilization, the festival would be the ritual that would allow its participants to synchronize with the existential example of Africa’s peoples’ sacrifice. After all, as Senghor recalled, who resisted the greatest genocide of human history without losing their human character?

Conclusion

Although I have emphasized the distinctions between Senghor and Freyre, there are convergences that should not be ignored. For both of them, Brazil was a kind of exemplary future for humanity. On the one hand, Senghor emphasized Brazil’s exceptional capacity to build up a new humanity based on complementarity and fidelity to the values of the three civilizations that took part in a misceginated effort. On the other hand, Freyre argues that this new humanity would be a “balanced antagonism” between the Portuguese capacity to colonize and the African and indigenous power to colonize being colonized.⁴³ However, the Portuguese-tropical accent sets the tone for Freyre, affirming the initiative as the most “democratic” colonization practiced by a European people. But the Brazilian exceptional model of social relations achieved different values: for Freyre, the Brazilian colonial past and nation-building were the justification for the Portuguese to maintain control over the territories of Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and Cape Verde since they dealt with “pre-Brazils.” For Senghor, in his interpretation of the “Brazilian model,” the country was a future horizon for colonized regions that could only evolve with political autonomy in relation to Portugal.⁴⁴ Thus, if for Freyre the realization of Lusotropical exceptionalism could only occur with the maintenance of political submission to Portugal, for Senghor, this would only happen in a relationship of autonomy, as in Brazil’s independence in 1822, as well as Senegal’s since 1960.

Léopold Senghor’s preference for “conciliatory agreements,” mediated by the accent he gives to Freyre’s theses, was present during all of the poet’s stops in Brazil and in the careful selections of references that demonstrate the unity between the two shores of the ocean. In Salvador, his speech concluded with a discussion of gentility as another relevant trait of the Brazilian character that highlighted its origin in Negritude, brought by an Arab-Berber presence. Again, the president takes us through the seas of poetry. On the African side, a poem about the honest and honorable man:

You honored the king,

You honored the poor

You have honored your enemies.

If honor were a dog,

Seeing you, she would wag her tail.⁴⁵

From the other side of the Atlantic, quoted in Senghor’s speech, the counterpoint in Vinícius de Moraes’s “Elegia quase uma ode”:

Queria tornar-me mendigo, ser miserável

Para participar de tua beleza, meu irmão.

Queria, meus amigos … queria, meus inimigos …

Queria …

queria tão exaltadamente, minha amiga! (Moraes 1960, 72)

Senghor’s choice of this elegy by this Brazilian white poet should be underlined, as should the poem’s structure as call and response. We hear how the voice of the African Orpheus is answered by its equivalent on the Brazilian side, promoting a fusion of Western poetic traditions with the African traditions of griots and tribal meetings. Vinícius de Moraes was a renowned poet and diplomat whose closeness to Afro-Brazilian artists and cultures dates at least to “Orfeu da Conceição,” a play from 1956 adapted to the cinema by French director Marcel Camus. The excerpt selected by Senghor is part of a long poem in which the genres of elegy and ode mix and symbolize transition and maturity. The desire for transformation emphasized in Senghor’s speech is complemented by others in the poem, such as a search for lost truth (“Remember yourself, child poetry, you…”) and a question about identity (“What a dream! is my life?”). Both modes of expression are also realized in “Élégie des saudades” and also in the conclusion of Senghor’s speech, closing a semantic circuit of references that positions each poet on an Atlantic shore. The unity of styles is elaborated in the form of dialogue, a rhythmic call and response repeated in the meetings between Brazil and Africa: “Until death (murder or suicide) to restore the split, disintegrated dignity; even the spontaneous kindness of the little ones, you will find it all in Africa: in Nigritie.”⁴⁶ By placing ode and elegy in dialogue under the sign of “Nigritie,” Léopold Senghor nourished a particular Afro-Diasporic cosmopolitanism. Considering Almerinda Guerreiro’s ideas, this is a kind of “post-contemporary” cosmopolitanism, deeply engaged with how black cultures “vivem um processo de recriação cultural diverso e cosmopolita baseado na troca de informações entre repertórios artísticos, comportamentais e ideológicos moldados em combinações particulares nos variados portos do ‘mundo negro do Atlântico’” (2017, 113).

The last paragraphs of Senghor’s speech in Brazil are dedicated to reinforcing the importance of the country’s participation in the First World Festival of Negro Arts. Placed in the sequence of the scene of the two poets and cultural ambassadors who are in dialogue from margins, the invitation calls for the reciprocity of an expected response on the part of Brazil, both for the event and for leading the creation of a Luso-Afro-Brazilian community. This community, whose first mission would be to mediate the decolonization of Portuguese territories in Africa, was also seen as an example of collaboration that would promote “Racial Democracy” in a different direction from that supported by Gilberto Freyre’s “Lusotropical” colonial knowledge. Disputes about the meaning of Racial Democracy occurred at many points during the twentieth century in Brazil among both white and Afro-Brazilians. In the year Senghor visited Brazil, there was widespread celebratory conviction about the idea of Brazilian racial exceptionalism, which was considered almost common sense by writers, artists, and intellectuals. Even anti-racist movements contested how inclusive such ideology was, but not its principles.⁴⁷ Thus, Senghor’s poetry and speeches converged with such celebratory conviction from a transnational perspective, reaffirming a major assumption of Francophone Négritude “that cultures are neither fixed in a definite past nor definable in a limited geographical sphere” (Cheikh 2015, 80–90). In the case of Racial Democracy, Léopold Senghor’s approach evidences a “multicentralized configuration” similar to the one claimed by Patricia Pinho about Salvador, but in this case between Dakar, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador. His poem, and the considerations about “saudades” in Brasil that it incorporated, expressed a desire for a shared unity in Afro-Atlantic aesthetics and political commitments.