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“We are going to manage with joy,” Margareth Menezes, the current Brazilian Minister of Culture, told the table of collaborators shortly before taking office in January 2023. Popularly known for her career as a singer-songwriter and for having founded the
afro pop
movement
in her native Bahia, Margareth Menezes is much more.
In the eyes of black women, actresses, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and cultural managers, she is the Afro-Brazilian voice that has always worked for black cultural entrepreneurship and racial equity.
“For us, she sums up our place of power and has a role more of a militant than an artist,” says Roberta Ribeiro, a 37-year-old actress from a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.
Her music, crossed by a gender and race perspective, makes her a cultural activist.
In a memorable show in 2006, in Salvador de Bahía, Menezes broke down in tears when singing one of her best-known songs,
Faraó
,
which in the last stanzas says: "The black people ask for equality, putting separations aside."
With the percussion in the background, he stands up and speaks to the audience with his arm raised: “We don't want to speak from a place of survivors, we want to live and collaborate with this country because we can give much more.
We just need opportunities."
The scene is recreated in the musical show
Voces negras
by Ribeiro who, as a child and teenager, already admired her.
“She dreamed of singing, not so much for the music, but for earning a prominent place as a black woman,” she says.
So far in the first quarter of her tenure as minister, Menezes has surrounded herself with Afro-descendant professionals in the first echelon of the Culture portfolio: Joelma Gonzaga, a Bahian film producer in charge of the Audiovisual Secretariat;
Roberta Martins, in the Secretariat of the Culture Committees, and the northeastern actress Maria Marighella as president of the National Foundation for the Arts (Funarte).
“One of the first messages that the minister transmitted to us was to restore the protection of artists and recover support and promotion mechanisms,” says Marighella.
One of the most immediate steps Menezes took upon taking office was to unlock nearly 1 trillion Brazilian reais (more than $190 million) from the Rouanet Law, a cultural incentive tool.
And, in the middle of the carnival, while he paraded in Salvador, Recife and Rio de Janeiro, he relaunched some cultural sponsorships.
One of them was with Banco del Nordeste: the investment of about 10 million reais (almost 2 million dollars) for the culture of that part of the country.
“Culture needs money.
A song is not magically successful, there has to be investment in all places”, affirms the Bahian singer Mariene Castro, known for her Afro-Brazilian work and for being the voice that moved the closing event of the 2016 Olympic Games. .
During the '90s, Menezes suffered from the structures of a selective music market.
He had less national than international visibility, as reflected by his 21 world tours and multiple Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations.
“Despite her talent, Margareth didn't have the same kinds of support as other Brazilian singers.
That is imbued with a structural racism”, affirms the actress Verónica Bonfim.
“The important thing about her figure is that she inspires and empowers new generations of Afro artists,” she concludes.
Margareth Menezes with first lady Janja da Silva during her inauguration in Brasilia on January 2. MAURO PIMENTEL (AFP)
The brand new minister accumulates a history of cultural promoter that is not as well known as her artistic career.
Elle created in 2004, in Salvador de Bahía, the Cultural Factory where the so-called Iaô market operates, a pole of art, creative business and dialogue on black cultural entrepreneurship and promotion of producers and artists.
Young cultural managers work for this objective in other corners of the country.
Jaqueline Fernandes, 43, is the director of Festival Latinidades, a platform for the artistic and intellectual production of black Latin American, Caribbean and diaspora women that popularized the term "Afro-Latinas" in Brazil.
“Margareth is an inspiration and brings new vigour.
She represents our power.
Angela Davis, the American philosopher and activist, famously said: "When a black woman moves, the entire structure of society moves with her."
Michelle Mury, from the digital online
music distributor
AltaFonte, assures that this movement comes hand in hand with training in cultural administration.
“There is no other recipe than training and giving spaces and employment to all people to achieve equality for both technical, strategic and managerial tasks.
If we don't diversify and fill leadership positions, the wheel toward effective inclusion won't move forward,” she says.
The incentive to write and literature stand out as an antidote to face inequalities of access.
The Rio de Janeiro writer Eliana Alves Cruz, winner of the 2022 Jabuti Award, advocates incentives for people to write their own stories.
“It is interesting to bring the cultural sector closer to literature, to education so that our young people write and understand the importance of recording their lives”, she says.
It is inevitable to think of a thread of continuity between the management of the Ministry of Culture of Gilberto Gil, between 2003 and 2008, and the one that Margareth Menezes is starting now.
Gil activated a political action called Cultura Viva that set out to reach the widest cultural diversity in the country.
The program benefited nine million Brazilians and impacted 1,100 cities.
The accent on that diversity is clear in the first actions and words of Menezes.
During Lula's first government, affirmative action policies reached new generations of artists who are now in their 30s.
"I am the result of these policies and of the struggle of Margareth's generation and of the entire black movement and the Brazilian social field," says Sol Miranda,
If there is something that begins to be glimpsed in the first actions of the Menezes administration, they are affirmative actions that target women in culture.
On March 8, her ministry issued three measures along these lines: the Gender, Race and Diversity Committee to support the development of public policies from a transversal perspective;
the
Carolina María de Jesús Prize,
which grants close to 2 million Brazilian reais (more than 380,000 dollars), for fiction writers and finally, the
Ruth de Souza Audiovisual
call to subsidize Brazilian filmmakers in making feature films.
In all the accounts, there is a feeling of belonging to a black feminist collective and the conviction that Menezes is setting a pattern that is still uncomfortable in Brazil: moving structures.
“We are a continuity, one of the other.
And when we understand that and occupy spaces of power, we understand that we are not alone”, says actress Cinnara Leal.