Stanzas and Sticks: Poetic and Physical Challenges in the Afro-Brazilian Culture of the Paraíba Valley, Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

My father was a tenant farmer And a great sharecropper He sang calango all night through And never lost at rhyming Martinho da Vila 1Benedito Gonc¸alves, after a challenge game with one of those present, left with Salvador for the road, and on this occasion he, the witness, saw Benedito assault Salvador with a number of blows. 2 Guaratingueta´, 1890 APPROACHING MALE CHALLENGES In her seminal work on free men in a slave society, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco emphasized the pervasiveness of violence among free poor men in the Paraı´ba valley during the nineteenth-century Brazilian Empire. Physical aggression happened frequently between men who were neighbours, coworkers, friends, or even related to each other, she wrote, and these 'violent altercations were not sporadic', but part of 'the flux of everyday life'. For Franco, that violence 'permeates the entire social organism, emerging in the less regulated sectors of life, such as leisure relations, and projects itself on to the codification of fundamental cultural values'. On the basis of nineteenthcentury criminal records in the municipality of Guaratingueta´, she notes that while fights originated in various contexts, they always derived from verbal challenges. It is these 'poetic disputes', and their relationship with physical challenges between males, that I examine in this article.Although Franco perceived the importance of the desafio (challenge) in the popular culture of the region, she greatly underestimated, in my view, its creative potential and the variety of its social functions. Perhaps her reliance upon criminal records, combined with a curious neglect of other types of source, conditioned her somewhat negative assessment of popular culture in