Bembé
do mercado
THE FEAST OF ÒJÚ OBÁ
The Bembé
The story is told that motivated by the signing of the Lei Áurea (the Law that decreed the end of slavery in Brazil), the fishermen and saint people of Santo Amaro da Purificação, in Bahia, under the leadership of João de Obá: African Malê son of Xangô Orisha, held candomblé (Bembé) in the public market for three days. On the last day, and as a culminating part of the festival, an offering of thanks was made to the Mother of Water (Orishás Oxum and Yemanjá); since then, 133 years ago, this is how May 13 has been lived in the city of Recôncavo of Bahia.
The centennial event, registered by IPAC and IPHAN, performs and updates the memory and the storytelling of May 13, 1889. It is a primordial celebration for the subjects that realize it, preponderantly non-white and adepts of religions of the Afro-American matrix, who, in intersectional analysis, in addition to the evils of racism and sexism, live in the peripheral neighborhoods in a situation of vulnerability, so that their participation in the celebration evidences a strategy of survival and autonomy in the search for the constitution and updating of their identity ties, of solidarity and denial of social exclusion in favor of referential citizenship.
Òjú Obá
Roque Boa Morte was born in the symbolic and enunciative context of the community from which the Bembé do Mercado emerges. He is an Afro-American man, cis, gay, also the son of Orisha Xangô, photographer, lawyer, professor, and heir to the ancestry of two traditional families in the Ketu and Santo Amaro Caboclo Candomblé cults.
Taken from a young age by his elders to the market in times of celebration for the abolition, he built the images and memories that today result in the visual work that is the basis of his master's degree research at Pós-afro UFBA, financed by FAPESB and partially presented here.
The legacy
The work in question falls within the field of visual anthropology, particularly autoethnography, and was produced from a field activity that took place over five years. Its peculiarity is to mobilize emerging knowledge of the festival in its imagetic dimension, from a look inside the community, as a methodological perspective of investigation of the celebration and of those who perform it; a people whose ancestry, preponderantly diasporic and struggling for survival, built a system of symbols and affinities that currently guides, identifies, and safeguards them.
