The São Paulo Municipal Theater is one of those places that were always out of reach for black citizens of Brazil, even though no segregationist law like those of the United States prohibited them from entering.
Emicida (Sao Paulo, 1985), one of the most relevant Brazilian rappers, gave a recital at the end of last year in that majestic building that stands in the center of the metropolis.
The room where Maria Callas or Duke Ellington performed welcomed an audience much blacker and younger than usual.
This virtuoso of rhymes, cartoonist and music producer has turned that concert into the common thread of the documentary
Amarelo, everything is for yesterday
, released on the 8th on Netflix.
It is a tribute to Afro-Brazilian personalities ignored by history and to the anti-racist movement born during the dictatorship on the steps of the theater.
Without them, that kid raised on the outskirts by a domestic employee mother would never even have dreamed of being Emicida, explains the artist in an interview conducted by videoconference before the premiere.
His mother is the only one who still calls him Leandro.
Question
.
The first time you entered the Municipal Theater, were you already famous and powerful?
A.
Yes, he was already Emicida, which says a lot about Brazil.
I wish they had explained to me his greatness since he was little.
Q.
To what extent were you, the artists who accompanied you and the public rewriting the history of Brazil?
R.
The Municipal Theater was a temple of high culture, of elitized culture, which is based on the questionable idea that the people do not understand art.
That alienated the poor, but who doesn't get moved by a painting, a song, a book or a poem?
I am not the first black artist, nor the first representative of a popular movement to take the stage.
But we manage to bring in an immense number of people who pass by every day, but they never wonder why we have never entered that theater?
Because we have never been invited to belong to him.
Forty years after the birth of the Unified Black Movement we had the opportunity to occupy that stage.
The most symbolic, magical thing was to find some of the people who were on those stairs fighting for a more just Brazil and place them in the middle of the theater.
Q. There
are three men and a woman who, in the middle of the concert, he asks to get up.
A.
Yes, yes.
The moment they get up is very strong because they fought for me to be on that stage.
So that I would dream, so that I would believe that I could be Emicida.
Q.
Your worked songs are admired in the suburbs, but also by middle-class Brazilians. Are you a bridge in this country where those worlds don't mix?
P.
I return to the importance of the Municipal.
Perhaps the event that gave him the most fame in Brazil was the Modern Art Week of 1922, led by Mario de Andrade, a great writer, critic, intellectual ... he was a kind of Swiss army knife, he did everything.
Close to that bourgeoisie from São Paulo, heir to coffee, he understood that popular culture was the best lens to understand the reality of Brazil.
Some may consider me a bridge because I have intellectually sophisticated material, but I don't think the people can't understand it.
My origin is much closer to that of the poor people of São Paulo, unlike the group that embraces Mario.
Our history books were records.
If you want to know the Rio de Janeiro of the sixties, you need to listen to the samba of then.
And there in the layers of poetry you find life in the favelas.
You will have another perspective.
I try to tell my time beyond the official story.
P.
The documentary is also an invitation to meet other artists that perhaps history forgot or ignored.
R.
I think the best term is invisible.
The film analyzes a part of the Brazilian history of the last hundred years that has been made invisible.
Many of us did not know those figures. I present them to my generation to tell them that, without the contribution of these men and women, there would not be that figure that they admire so much as Emicida.
Q.
Your work is, in your own words, a combination of entertainment and political instrument.
Has the weight of each of those ingredients changed throughout your career?
R.
I think not.
The text does not need to be a pamphlet to do justice to the right to exist of people who feel they do not have that right.
I think that this balance occurs because I research language a lot.
In recent years I want to understand how samba tells a story and from there I try to make rap.
In (the album) Amarelo I present that way of dialogue.
P. It
gives the impression that he read a lot from a very young age.
Where did you read?
A.
In many places.
My mother was a domestic worker.
He worked in some very chic houses, where they had comics.
Some (patrons) were nice.
They would see me draw and give me papers, markers and say to my mother, 'Jacira, that boy has talent and such'.
But some did not like it and my mother was forbidden to take me to work.
Since I had no one to leave with, I started to stay home alone.
My mother bought me old comics, which were very cheap.
Later I frequented libraries and I began to understand better that environment of exclusion and that problematic relationship that Brazil has with critical thinking, with the intelligentsia.
And because of my characteristics - a poor dark-skinned child is often understood in Brazil as a kid without a family, close to crime - there were not a few institutions in which I was persecuted by security officers because in their heads I represented some kind of destruction.
I couldn't stay long inside, but I frequent a lot of libraries, shit.
Lots of bookstore.
I ended up making friends with the owners of many old-fashioned bookstores.
They let me sit there reading when I couldn't buy.
Q.
When was the last time Emicida was discriminated against?
A.
It is a good question.
I do not remember.
Q.
That is good.
A.
I live in a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood.
I go out just to work.
I am not at the mercy of that structure that exists in Brazil with the same frequency of people who lead less comfortable lives.
That is why I do not feel that discrimination.
But now that you ask me, I remember an interesting occasion.
I have a house in a northern neighborhood, in a building with a gate.
And one day I went there, I had lost the key, I was in a hurry.
I was at the door of the building where I lived for about five years, a lady went to open the door and, by the time I went to tell her to leave open that she was going to enter, she knocked on the door, closed it and ran out desperate.
In his head someone of my characteristics could not want anything more than to commit a crime.
She left scared, running with her bag securely attached.
It was sad.
I left wanting to cry, but the truth is that I live a much more comfortable situation because I interact with fewer people and I am a public figure.