Build Your Own Archive: As Sete Portas da Bahia

      
Interested in creating an archive for your school, or perhaps one of your own? As Sete Portas da Bahia (The Seven Doorways of Bahia), with text and drawings by the famous artist Carybé, is an essential inclusion.

Carybé was born in Argentina, and began drawing when he was 10 years old. He studied fine arts in Rio de Janeiro, and at 27, he visited Bahia for the first time. When he was 49, he moved to Bahia and began to document the everyday lives of the people of Bahia through drawings and paintings.

In As Sete Portas da Bahia, Carybé presents different aspects of Bahian culture, including capoeira, the Largo do Pelourinho, the Festa de Yemenjá, candomblé, and more through his unique drawings and some very lyrical Portuguese prose. Here he talks about the fishermen and the songs they sing as they haul in a net heavy with fish:

The sand is white; they, dark. From the intense morning light rises a song.. .hundreds of voices respond.

Their feet are planted in the sand. When the suction increases the weight of the net, they cede a step and curve more their muscular backs:

A baleia me pediu
Aderecô Aninha
Pra fazê uma devoção
Aderecô Aninha
Vou pegá na jangadinha
Aderecô Aninha
Vou me embora velejá
Aderecô Aninha
O vento pegou de proa
Aderecô Aninha
Até da volta do má
Aderecô Aninha
Vou me embora que é noite
Aderecô Aninha
Eu não quero navegá
Aderecô Aninha
Fazê dos óio candeia
Aderecô Aninha
Até hora de vortá…

Recognize this lovely song? It’s one of the corridos that Mestre Moraes sings on the Grupo de Capoeira Angola Pelourinho CD “GCAP Tem Dende”.

For a capoeira practitioner, As Sete Portas da Bahia is a great book not only for its look into capoeira and Bahian culture, but also because of the wonderful connections one can discover in the book that tie the two together (like the one above).

This book is available for your perusal (in Portuguese) in the FICA-DC Archives.