1.What are the stakes of claiming “I am Black” and why does the woman who registered her grandchild insist that people should stop saying so and so is “a little Moreno,” or “a little pardo”?
2.Use the words of these two speakers to explain the philosophy about the land that quilombolas have: “It’s a collective. They could offer us lots of money, but no, we can’t sell it. Because if we sell the land, he is buying the land that we plant on. How would we plant? If it weren’t for nature, what would we survive on? When we die, our children won’t have a place to live… If we sell our farms, it will be the same as eradicating our own kind.”
3.What does this man’s song help you understand about what it means to claim blackness in the Americas: “My grandparents were slaves and fugitives/ Fugitives who built families/ Because of this, I do not deny my negro blood, my heritage. I lived so lived so nature, enchanted by a beauty I carry with me and never forget/ Today I live in a world totally different I don’t see the origins of our life.”
4.What do you think the value of making such a documentary is? How does watching this video enable you understand the contemporary geography of the Black World in the Americas?
5.One of the interviewees in the documentary film, Quilombo Country: AfroBrazilian Villages in the 21st Century, explains that “The sacred and the profane are always together. There is nothing purely profane and there is nothing purely sacred.” Why would such a nuanced position be a critical epistemology for people who were targeted for black suffering in the Americas and disappeared by the emergence of the white settler nation state?
6.What does this mean and how would life change in our own society if this philosophy was widespread? “If there’s a chore that’s too big to do by yourself, you ask others to help, and then you get it over with quickly.”
7.Translate these words spoken by two people in the film into your own understanding
“Because we weren’t made by our own hands. When we were born, we were born like this. Because God gave it to us, we are committed to it….It’s God’s work; God left it for us”
8.What is significant about Damascena Gregoria being able to recite the history of slavery for himself? Here’s his oral history: Damascena Gregoria explains that “during slavery… [his] grandfather began his life in Maranhao…was sold in “Ver O Peso” market in Belem for a jug of cachaca and a crate of bananas…grew up with a mand called Legaive [who] brought up 13 different boys and these boys worked on the farm. They were beaten, enslaved, and made to do everything at an exact time. There was a certain time to eat. If you missed it, you wouldn’t eat at all. In the old days they would catch black people and kill them, nail them to sticks, hit them with bull’s horns, leave them there for some time. Some died like that, still tied to the stick. That’s how they treated blacks here in the island of Marajo. Many things of the blacks have remained. They would fight over the land of the island of Marajo.
9.Why do think quilombolas outside of Obidos and Santarem maintain that they reside on “borrowed land?”
10.What does it mean to say
“He just got the land, but he has nothing to do with us. Because here people have died for centuries, people from our community and didn’t respect that when he bought those lands he bought the farm but then he got part of the land that belonged to our community. That’s exactly what we are fighting for. We want our lands back” (Here’s a hint to help you: Will See, Take Tha House Back, https://vimeo.com/171211732)
11.What is the purpose of wearing a protective enchanted belt, acknowledging that one sees ghosts or talks with ghosts, calling the caruanos—the healers from the depths—without them we can’t work, warming up the ceremonial space, using smoke in ceremony, dancing, drinking cachaca, lighting candles, building an altar? Where do the people think healing comes from? Where does spiritual, psychic, physical, and emotional healing come from for them?
12.What does Damascena Gregoria mean when saying “I make music from this so we don’t forget”?