History hidden in a children’s game (Part 3)

A few weeks before the Children's Boi in Caieira, I participated in a workshop where Silvana Mindua, a Guarani teacher, taught a group of children and teenagers how to make a blowgun.

You kids shouldn’t forget that all toys were once a work of art or were once made to use. This blowgun, a bow and arrow: when you play with them you act out a story that comes from a long time ago. What does this zarabatana mean? For us, it was once life, our survival.

In the old days, our ancestors made blowguns for practical use. But of course kids used it as a toy: that’s what kids do. They observe and learn. Older children made blowguns and then the little ones watched; they made play zarabatanas that were also real ones.

We no longer have open land where we can hunt, but we can still hold onto the meaning of these crafts and toys: basketry, the blowgun, bow and arrow. Our traditions have become indigenous art. Indigenous toys.

For those who prefer a more European theorist, Walter Benjamin wrote something similar a hundred years ago:

Frequently, so-called folk art is merely the residue of cultural goods that renew themselves when assimilated into a wider community … it is precisely through these rhythms [of play] that we first become masters of ourselves. ( Walter Benjamin, Reflections on the Child, Play, and Education. SP: Editora 34, 2002. pp 100-101 )

In a way, what I'm suggesting here is that the Boi de Mamão is a blowgun. Colonization robbed the Guarani of their hunting grounds, but the toy survives as a way to maintain their culture and memory. The church repressed Judaism and continued to persecute the New Christians, but they hid their culture in a game or ritual they would call the Boi de Mamão. Hegemonic western medicine stripped the witches, healers, and Afro-Brazilian curandeirosof their authority, but something of that past remains alive and hidden in the Boi.

During a performance of the Boi at the Pântano do Sul school, a woman told me how she and her friends played Boi when they were children. At that time, the men of the community still practices the Farra do Boi — a traditional bullfight that was later outlawed — and in June, the children would dig up the bull's skull, put it in an anthill to clean it, and use the skull as the head of the Boi de Mamão. This childhood practice transformed the " thing " — the frightening bull whose meat was essential for the community's survival — into a toy. The bull sacrificed in the Farra is resurrected in the toy for the Boi de Mamão, just as Mateus's bull is resurrected by the healer in the performance

Some interpreters say that the torture of the bull in the Farra represents the punishments of Judas — a representative of the Jews in many forms of Catholicism. Interviews from when the Farra was legal indicate that the men who carried out the Farra described their activity as "jewing" the bull — a common word in colloquial Portuguese, but powerful in this context.

In rabbinic tradition, the great ritual of sacrificing oxen takes place during the week of Sukkot: like Saint John 's Day in Brazil, Sukkot is the harvest festival. Before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the priests slaughtered 70 oxen on Sukkot, and their meat provided the food for the festival's barbecues.

“The Talmud observed that the number of bulls totaled 70, or the equivalent, in rabbinic language, to the number of Gentile nations on Earth. For the rabbis, henceforth, the profusion of bulls constituted a fervent prayer on behalf of the non- Jewish world… The bulls served to atone for the misconduct of the Gentiles… this ritual was elaborated not for the conversion of the Gentiles, but for their well-being. ” ( https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/the-seventy-bulls-of-sukkot/ )

The sacrifice of the 70 oxen is the ritual that guarantees the survival of the world. For the Guarani — traditional inhabitants of the coast where the Boi de Mamão is now practiced — prayer, dance, and song also guarantee the survival of the cosmos (or, in the elegant words of Airton Krenak, “postpone the end of the world ” ).

I don't want to insist that the Boi de Mamão is a syncretism between Judaism and Guarani spirituality — although I do want to present that possibility. What I want to claim in this playful text is that play in its many forms can be a way of remembering and reliving the past. In script of the the Boi de Mamão, the healer resurrects the ox. In the Boi de Mamão of Pântano do Sul, the children's play "resurrected " the skull of the ox killed in the Farra as a toy. The performance of the Boi de Mamão both gives a symbolic continuity to Sephardic Judaism and represents the great Guarani insight that play is a remnant of the past and the way to hold off the end of the world.

My unease with the Boi de Mamão when I first came to Santa Catarina, the feeling that it lacked coherence and narrative arc, only shows that I didn't understand what I was watching. I thought the Boi was a spectacle. The Boi is not a theatrical work, nor a dance, nor a musical show. It's a game — which means it's ritual, history, resurrection, and joy.