PREORDER: Tragedia – NICOLA LO CALZO

Description

Tragedia by Nicola Lo Calzo explores tragédia, a unique theatrical tradition from São Tomé and Príncipe. This street theater, shaped by Creole, African, and European influences, serves as a powerful tool of cultural and political resistance. Through performances such as tchiloli, danço congo, and auto de Floripes, tragédia recounts stories of colonialism, oppression, and the struggle for identity. The book examines its role in shaping collective memory, shedding light on the historical roots and postcolonial dynamics of the archipelago. A journey through ritual performances and social critique, where theatrical expression becomes an act of empowerment and liberation. Rich in historical insights and visual testimonies, this volume captures the complexity of a tradition that remains vibrant and essential to the São Toméan community today.

 

 

Nicola Lo Calzo, Tragédia

Damarice AMAO

Photographer but also historian, archivist and anthropologist, Nicola Lo Calzo does not hesitate to wear all the necessary hats to embrace the reality of the territories and individuals who are the subject of his investigations dedicated to little-known chapters in the history of slavery and colonization. For more than 10 years, he has been mapping the manifestations of cultural resistance deployed by certain Afro-descendant communities on both sides of the Atlantic, from Benin to Cuba, Guyana, Haiti and more recently the Mediterranean basin.

Lo Calzo questions, among other things, the complexity of memorial legacies and sheds light on the way in which the power structures of the past, based on the exploitation and racialization of social relations, continue to shape the present of these communities. A proponent of a global approach to history, Lo Calzo seeks to capture the flow of circulation of popular cultural practices and oral traditions born of this history, as illustrated by his most recent work dedicated to the figure of San Benedetto il Moro in Sicily. This son of a black enslaved person who became the patron saint of Palermo, embodies a form of cultural syncretism uniting communities that are sometimes very distant but culturally and intimately linked by the history of the slave trade.

Taking an engaged approach, Lo Calzo offers counter-stories that mix photographs, archives and collections of oral testimonies. The artist places himself unequivocally on the side of the “subalterns”, in particular the descendants of the enslaved or convicts from the colonial era, until then reduced to the status of simple anonymous extras, as many heirs to a past without imagination. In Lo Calzo’s work, photographic documentary investigation is intended, first and foremost, to be an instrument at the service of the “nameless” of history.

Haunted Landscapes

For Tragédia, Lo Calzo stops in São Tomé-et-Príncipe, a remote archipelago in the Gulf of Guinea that entered the great history of the slave trade and colonization following its occupation by the Portuguese in 1470. Located at the intersection of the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian, these “middle-of-the-world islands,” as they are commonly called, are today synonymous with Robinson Crusoe luxury. At least, that is how the contemporary tourism industry describes it, boasting of its exceptional natural setting, its cultural mixing, its historical heritage, its beaches and its geographical position far removed from the turbulence of the contemporary world. The argument thus draws on a hackneyed exotic imagination, born at the time of the “great discoveries” and still largely persistent in the colonial era.

In the 1950s, in an article on the famous Batepá massacre in São Tomé, the anti-colonial activist Mario Pinto de Andrade, under the pseudonym Buanga Fele, denounced the exploitation of this imagery by quoting a few lines from the tourist brochure “Lisbon World Travel”:

“In this territory, plantations stretch out; some climb mountains while others descend gently towards the sea. It is a grandiose spectacle, animated by the comings and goings of the melancholic and superstitious natives. They sing in chorus at nightfall, sad and melodious tunes or amuse themselves by dancing the “bilangua”, the “goma” or the “socopé”. These people, with their naivety, their respect for Christian symbols and festivals, remind us of the peasants of Beira and make us think of the celebrations of Minho, the fairs of the Algarve, and all the links in the same chain that is the immense Portuguese territory.” “Then come other absurdities of the same kind,” concludes Mario de Andrade before recalling the signs of a more sordid reality based on the exploitation of individuals and resources: “From June to September, a veil of haze hovering over a heavy and peaceful atmosphere, a halo of coffee and cocoa, this is the island of São Tomé, seen from the ocean. The men in the plantations are already beyond hope great, human loads that merge with the sacks for export.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, São Tomé-et-Príncipe was one of the jewels of the Portuguese colonial empire, making it the world’s leading producer of cocoa. This economic and “civilizational” success, to use the terms of the colonial propaganda of the time, was symbolized by the roças, its large plantations that have now disappeared, whose production organization is similar to that of slavery, which was abolished on the island in 1876. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the image of São Tomé-et-Príncipe disseminated worldwide by means of postcards, seemed to be summed up by its cocoa and coffee production, its gigantic roças and its black workers, anonymous and miserable figures posing in front of the fruits of their production or their modest homes. These postcards glorifying the economic success of the large producers gradually gave way to a more consensual iconography – beaches and preserved tropical nature almost devoid of human presence. To draw this complex landscape, Lo Calzo confronts these old postcards and photographs with his own images. The result of a long survey, the latter bear witness to a sensitive gaze guided by the search for traces of this violent and ambivalent history through places and monuments threatened by oblivion or perhaps more precisely inhabited by ghosts. For the photographer, it is a question of trying to capture on the surface of objects and bodies, the invisible scars of this past in the continuum of daily life in the society of São Tomé-et-Príncipe.

Defolklorizing folklore

 

Collected under the name Tragédia, Tchiloli, Auto do Floripes and Danço Congo are all examples of the richness and vitality of the cultural heritage of the black and mixed-race descendants of the archipelago. Marginal practices, with often nebulous origins, they have nonetheless become significant manifestations of the popular identity of the archipelago. Throughout the first part of the 20th century, this progressive legitimization is accompanied by a phenomenon of folklorization, at its peak on the eve of the island’s independence in 1975. Thus, the illustrated work of the ethnologist Fernando Reis, the first volume dedicated to the folklore of the archipelago Povo Floga. O povo brinca is both a tribute to and a euphemism for its expressive and potentially subversive scope. Reduced to the rank of entertainment and local curiosity characteristic of the genius of the Portuguese colonial empire in terms of cultural mixing, Tragédia is confronted, in the same way as the Caribbean carnival, with the risk of cultural reification that has underpinned the discourse of colonial ethnography since the 19th century.

Lo Calzo’s approach keeps its distance from ethnographic language in favor of a polyphonic and collaborative experience. His own gaze mixes with that of the archives as well as with the voices of the protagonists encountered during his investigation, mixing their personal stories with that of the process of transmission of practices of which they are the heirs. Here, the capturing exoticism, as it has long been common in the photography of elsewhere, is not his goal. Thus, the sometimes-excessive attention paid to appearance and costumes found in part of the so-called “masquerade” photography, both past and contemporary, is less important to Lo Calzo than the recording of gestures in situation, anchored in a very palpable present. Abandoning the strict framework of a documentary, Lo Calzo thus varies the points of view, whether he is drawn into the choreographic whirlwind of the dancers of the Danço Congo or whether he places himself on the imperceptible threshold that separates the audience and the actors in Tchiloli performances. Lo Calzo captures, above all, the in-between situations at the origin of a certain disturbance within the images, like the moments when daily life and the space of fiction intertwine, as in his portraits of actors taken from a respectful distance. At other times, it is the photos of objects of apparent obsolescence – Tchiloli masks, veils, headdresses or other costume details – that remind us through the precision of the framing of their power as intercessory objects.

Reinvigorated by the postcolonial theories that Lo Calzo himself draws on, research has gradually freed the various cultural manifestations of São Tomé-et-Príncipe from a simple folkloric frame of reference in favor of interpretations that highlight both their spiritual and social dimensions. Like other masquerade practices such as the New Orleans carnival, for example, Tragédia constitutes a framework for the expression of alternative visions of the world for communities on the margins of the legitimate cultural framework. “To claim to analyze the cultural aspects of peoples from a folklore perspective, as simple anthropological data, is to falsify reality from the point of view of the experience of the communities and to omit its participation in the productive process,” thus defends the poet and anticolonial figure Alda do Espirito. She campaigned throughout her political career in São Tomé-et-Príncipe for the full recognition of vernacular cultural experiences in the melting pot  of national identity. On the eve of the archipelago’s independence, the revival of Tchiloli or Auto do Floripes was thus concomitant with the cultural and intellectual effervescence of the decolonization movements that the African continent was experiencing at the time. In the same way as cinema and literature, dramaturgy questioned and affirmed the possibilities of a postcolonial black identity, outside of any ethnographic and folkloric framework. At the end of the 1960s, the director Sarah Maldoror, partner of the activist Mario de Andrade, performed in Paris, with a troupe of black actors – Le Griots – a play by Jean Genet entitled Les Nègres which, by a curious coincidence, has many points in common with Tchiloli.

Directed by Roger Blin, Les Nègres is also a play with a carnivalesque dimension, organized around a trial, where black people disguise themselves as white and gather around a bier where, in this case, a young white woman who was murdered lies. Questioned by Marguerite Duras, Maldoror explains: “We need you to learn to know us through an equality of relationships and to forget even what you were taught at school about Negroes. […] This play by Genet will help you to know us better.” Imbued with the spirit of Negritude, the play thus assumes an openly militant message by denouncing racial prejudices against Afro-descendant people and their desire for justice, similar to the one expressed in a roundabout and encrypted manner in Tchiloli, a practice haunted by the history of trafficking, racial inequalities and colonial violence:

“You are witnessing the performance of an exemplary trial that pays homage to the spirit of equity, which places justice for all as the most Important fundamental value. But we, the people of São Tomé, have been playing and repeating this morality for decades. We do not have the right to this justice. And this, less and less”, confides the president of one of the island’s troupes – the Caixao Grande – to the writer and ethnologist Jean-Yves Loude”.

A long and patient foray into the past and present of the archipelago, with Tragédia, Nicola Lo Calzo contributes, if not to justice, to the possibility of a narrative of these performative experiences, born from the need to exorcise the still-strong traumas of the colonial era.

 

Damarice AMAO