Yemanja, goddess of the sea - Brazilian relationship to oceans
UNESCO Courier, August-Sept, 1991 by Mario de Aratanha

The musical tradition of the Brazilian littoral began with the arrival of the first Portuguese navigators and developed during the 300 years or more which saw the forced migration of slaves from Africa. This century it has achieved nationwide popularity and recognition through the talents of Dorival Caymmi, a mulatto of AfroItalian origin who drew inspiration from the songs of Portuguese sailors, mestizo fishermen and worshippers of the three black divinities of the sea.

THE AFRO TRADITION

The coastline of Brazil is almost 8,500 kilometres long-longer than that of almost any other country in the world. Along it the early sixteenth-century colonists first settled. Only later did colonization spread to the hinterland with the gold rush to Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century, the rubber boom which attracted settlers up the Amazon, and the development of coffee-growing inland from Sao Paulo. The inauguration of a new capital, Brasilia, in 1960 constituted an official challenge to the Brazilian's passion for the sea.

Maritime culture is important in the big northeastern cities such as Recife and Fortaleza, and throughout the region as a whole. But it is primarily in Bahia that the ripple of waves turns most easily to music. Portuguese influences such as that of the majurada ("Sailor, it's the fish in the sea/ that taught me to swim, that taught me to swim. . . . ") were followed by African Candomble' chants which established a tradition of sea songs, whose musical form and religious power attested doubly to their black origins. The people of Salvador de Bahia, the most African of Brazilian cities, sing for all the Orixas, the saints of their syncretic religion, but they keep their best offerings for Yemanja, the goddess of the deep sea more beloved than her fellow-divinities, Oxum god of the shore and Ayoka goddess of the deep.

"On the second day of February, festival day
at sea,
I want to be the first to celebrate Yemanja.
..."
Thus sang young Dorival Caymmi, who left
Bahia in 1938 to seek fame and fortune in Rio
de janeiro, where he was a fantastic success with
his big guitar and his serious way of singing about
gods, fish, fishermen, and the sea off Bahia.
"The raft set sail with Chico Ferreira and
Bento,
the raft returned alone..."
"How many have lost
husbands and sons in the waters of the sea."
While Caymmi sang of dramatic events from the lives of the fishermen of northeastern Brazil and their families-disconsolate widows, weeping fiancees waiting for their men to return, offerings begging Yemanja to provide fish-Admiral Paulo Moreiro da Silva, the architect of modern Brazil's fishing policy, said jokingly that "The hunger problem of the northeast would be solved if we turned the map of Brazil upside down and sent the great shoals of fish from the south to the north". In rich, cold, southern Brazil, where the economy is based largely on industry and agriculture and where the coast is sparsely populated, sardines are plentiful and fishing is practised on a large scale with modern vessels.

In the northeast, where fishing has always been a source of subsistence, the fish are bigger and finer, but they are caught individually on the line, from rudimentary craft such as the saveiros of Bahia or even from rafts. The recent industrialization of fishing in the region has largely brought profits to a handful of companies from the south.

POETIC INSPIRATION

Solitary adventures like that immortalized by Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea are common in the warm waters off Bahia, Ceara and Pernambuco. They have inspired many poems, including one written by Caymmi and his great friend Jorge Amado, which contains the words:

"It is sweet to die at seal in the green waves of the sea.... The siren has seduced the handsome sailor..."

Caymmi's influence on Brazilian popular music has been far-reaching. Many other composers inspired by folklore have followed his example, and have brought the music of distant regions to Rio, the cultural centre of the Brazilian sub-continent. As a composer and guitarist Caymmi has been a great innovator in the field of harmony. Already a veteran, he wrote four of the early songs of Joao Gilberto, the creator of the bossa nova. His musical heirs are countless.

Caymmi was still very popular when the bossa nova appeared on the scene. He shared its glory on the record in which he and Gilberto, accompanied by Cuarteto em Cy, sing a bossa nova classic, "The fishermen's suite":

"My raft is off out to sea ... / when I come home from the sea a fine fish I shall bring/ my friends will come back too/and we shall give thanks to God in heaven

Farewell, farewell fisherman, do not forget me/I am praying for fair weather/that the weather won't be foul. . . .

With weather like that we stay in port/He who goes to sea does not come back.