The Queen of Lady Merces, Leda Maria Martins, combines desire and research

A queen walks on the stones of Barati. Visitors may not have noticed that she is wearing civilian clothes, but Leda María Martins must be the only Brazilian intellectual to wear a crown. Poet, playwright, teacher and essayist, since 2005 she has been Queen of Nossa Senhora das Merces, during the reign of Nossa Senhora do Rosario do Jatoba, in Belo Horizonte, a throne she inherited from her mother.

“The ruling is not very well known in Brazil. It is a manifestation of the Bantu that Brazil ignores. The Bantu have a very rich culture and they are civilizing the country,” says, who on Saturday (24) participates in the Flip debate with Cristina Sharp. Researcher at York University, Canada.

The tradition of the rule is based on a legendary account of Our Lady of the Rosary. One day, the blacks saw the saint wandering in the sea, so the whites took the image and placed the Virgin in a church built by the blacks – and prevented them from entering. But every day the saint returned to the water.

Tired, the whites decided to let the blacks pray over the image. The Virgin accompanied the worshipers only when elderly black men, with bare feet and simple clothes, played three sacred drums. Since then, the Covenant has recreated this legend.

The presence of a researcher in the Covenant is not a hobby or something parallel, but on the contrary, it has everything to do with her intellectual career.

In works that have become references, one of the main ideas developed by Martínez is that blacks brought a series of philosophical concepts to Brazil. But this was not recorded in books and texts, but in songs, dances and performances – the body in performance, in short.

By studying the language of these performances, Martins develops – or translates – a series of concepts. This decades-long work has transformed her into one of the major black intellectuals active in the country.

It is a path that is still not common in Brazil for people with its story. Martins was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, into a family of limited means with a strong connection to music – and his mother, who already had a close relationship with the ruling Minas Gerais state, also enjoyed samba.

“My family was friends with great composers. My mother and my aunt were dancers in Salguero. After that, Paolo da Portela asked my mother to be a dancer there, and my aunt went to Manguera. I learned the history of this music with the family,” – says Lida Maria Martins.

She showed an extraordinary aptitude for study from an early age. She learned to read on her own at the age of four with her family in Minas Gerais. She lived with comic books, science fiction books and encyclopedias bought by her mother – at a young age, as part of the promise, she also became a princess in her reign.

At that time, she also developed a passion rare among those pursuing a career in the humanities—mathematics, which she refers to as a source of poetic magic. “Mathematics gives me tremendous pleasure, a poetic pleasure, when decoding equations. I work with rhythm in my poetry,” she says, and she plans to relaunch her out-of-print poetry books and a new book next year. “Rhythm is pure mathematics, it is the imagination of mathematics.”

He almost pursued a career in the area, but in the end, stopping at the literature course, he devoted himself to a training that connected two extremes – academic culture, books, oral traditions, music and royalty. She says: “Financial difficulties are one thing, but I did not face intellectual difficulties. The difficulties were another matter, such as being the only black student in the room.” “But I had complete confidence in myself intellectually.”

At the end of the seventies, he obtained a master’s scholarship in the United States, where he studied Corpo Santo Theater. He arrived there shortly after the end of official apartheid in the country. “I saw instances of racism similar to what happened in Brazil, but in a very transparent way. There was no way to camouflage it, as it always happened here,” he recalls. “But I had more black colleagues at university. Racism was discussed openly, and I was able to read a lot about it. There was solidarity among black people.”

There she was first introduced to the dramatic texts of Abdias Nascimento’s Teatro Experimental do Negro – and upon her return to Brazil, she decided to devote herself to a doctoral degree at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, with a period at the University of Berkeley, where he analyzed black theater in Brazil and the United States.

Soon after, she began a career as an educator that lasted decades, mostly at UFMG. His doctoral research resulted in the book “A Cena em Sombras” from 1995, which is still a reference today. Martins does mention Covenant there, one of the richest collections of black poetry in the country. He says: “I felt the lack of analyzes that added something about African matrices in reflections on black theater. Therefore, I propose the idea of ​​the crossroads as a theoretical key.”

The next book, “Afroografias da Memória”, by publishers Mazza Edições and Perpectiva, is one of the most famous. It was the result of a mission the teacher received from João Lopez, former head of the reign of Nossa Senhora do Rosario de Jatoba – when he was about to die, he asked her to record the history of the reign.

Another concept she has developed is that of spiral time, which is present in her latest book, Performances of Spiral Time, Poetics of Body Screen, and was the subject of an international symposium at Berkeley ten years ago. The work begins from the same foundation as others, which is an analysis of the cultural manifestations of African heritage and performance. Table at Flip this Saturday. (25) at 7 pm. (Mauricio Meirelles | Fullpress)

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