travellers’ tales Reggae city On Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the city of São Luís do Maranhão has a complicated colonial past, ample historic architecture, a tradition of avant-garde poets <strong>—</strong> and it’s also a hotbed of reggae music. David Katz heads there to learn more about an unlikely outpost of Jamaican music, and the new reggae museum that celebrates this cultural link Marco Paulo Bahia Diniz/shutterstock.com 62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
In an anonymous meeting hall on a São Luís backstreet, the sweat is dripping off the walls. Several generations of one family are partying together at the front of the dance floor, and the divisive demarcations of race and class that often dominate contemporary Brazil seem absent. Although English is not widely spoken, dancers mime the choruses of obscure roots classics by Eric Donaldson, the Maytones, and Larry Marshall, all Jamaican countryside singers of a bygone age <strong>—</strong> you could be forgiven for thinking that dancehall never happened, let alone soca, grime, or dubstep. A handwoven tapestry of the Maranhão State Vinyl Association hangs proudly from the ceiling, and when DJ Jorge Black drops the needle onto Tradition’s “Gambling Man”, a languid slice of British lovers rock from 1978, waltzing couples push to the fore, anxious to demonstrate their command of ritmo agarradinho, an intricate, ecstasy-inducing move for clinching close-dancers that roughly translates as the “rhythm grab.” It is the dance of choice for all discerning Maranhese, who shun prospective partners that cannot master it. São Luís do Maranhão is one of the most intriguing and atypical cities of Brazil’s far northeast. Located midway between the beach bum’s utopian expanse of Fortaleza and the ornate Amazonian metropolis of Belém, it was built on an island flanked by two broad rivers that feed an Atlantic bay, the picturesque yet dilapidated town centre attesting to its former opulence. São Luís’s complicated history and peculiar geographical location have rendered it one of the most ethnically diverse of all Brazilian cities, its relative isolation yielding a strikingly unique culture. The town’s long locus as a Waltzing couples push to the fore, anxious to demonstrate their command of ritmo agarradinho, an intricate, ecstasy-inducing move for clinching close-dancers Opposite page Festival time in São Luís Above Even the city’s traffic lights are decorated with azulejos ostill/shutterstock.com slave port and its proximity to the Amazon basin have resulted in substantial black and Amerindian communities, and many of European descent reached the city from the barren hinterlands known as the sertão, all of which is reflected in local cultural practices. For instance, the annual festival of Bumba-meu-Boi centres on the myth of a slaughtered bull resurrected by an Amerindian shaman with the help of St John the Baptist. The local variant of Candomblé, known as Tambor de Mine, mixes West African spiritual traditions with Amerindian elements, while the Tambor de Crioula and Cacuriá dance traditions have their roots in West Africa, augmented by European and Amerindian influences. São Luís also has deep associations with romantic and Parnassian poetry, and reggae, not samba, is the music of choice, being so deeply engrained in the local psyche that the state government has just established a Reggae Museum in the heart of the old colonial centre <strong>—</strong> the only such institution outside of reggae’s Jamaican homeland. It is another of the many unexpected aspects of this vibrant and colourful city, known variously as the “Brazilian Athens,” “Love Island,” and the “Brazilian Jamaica,” which forms a very rewarding destination for travellers who make the effort to reach here. “ São Luís is a distant place that’s not easy to get to, even by plane,” says Otávio Rodrigues, a journalist and broadcaster who presented the popular Bumba <strong>Beat</strong> radio show in São Luís during the 1990s. “The nearest metropolitan capitals are about 1,000 kilometres away, and historically the city was more connected to Europe than to the rest of the country, which resulted in a well-educated elite with a remarkable list of writers, poets, and journalists, but also a poor mass, mainly of African descent, or of mixed Amerindian, African, and European. Aside from the beautiful buildings of the historic centre and a kind of bucolic poetry in certain circles, the city has none of Europe’s glamour. Instead, popular traditions like Bumba-meu-Boi and Cacuriá stand as some of the best examples we can find of Brazil’s rich folkloric universe.” WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 63
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