Anthropological Quarterly: Review of Fado Resounding (Machaqueiro 2015)

BOOK REVIEW Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro, George Washington University

Lila Ellen Gray, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 328 pp. 

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hen reading Lila Ellen Gray’s Fado Resounding one can almost feel the silence settling in the dark, before being softly disrupted by a guitar’s first chords. The descriptions are so detailed and emotionally rich that it is hard to avoid feeling goosebumps when imagining Osório’s voice in À Meia Laranja. This is a beautifully written book, ethnographically rich and detailed, yet hard to classify: it is ethnomusicology, anthropology, linguistics, identity and gender politics. It is also poetry and music.    Based on ethnographic work conducted in Lisbon between 1999 and 2010, but focused on the period between 2001 and 2003, Fado Resounding explores the traditional Portuguese musical genre fado, not just as an ethnographic object per se, but as an agentive aesthetic that generates and crafts around itself a range of phenomena: foundational discourses, identities, bodily performance, ways of being, divas, and, of course, feelings. For Gray, the discourses on fado—not just about its origins, but also about what it is—inform the ways in which postcolonial Portugal reframes its history on the lost empire, and shapes its place in the margins of Europe. Constituting an important element of national identity, fado expresses several narratives of the history of the country, placing Portugal in a modernity rooted in a colonial past. Fado emerges here as an ontology, not just in the sense that, as for many fadistas, fado is fate (fado in Portuguese literally means “fate”), but also because, for the Portuguese, fado as a particular epistemology shapes one’s conception of the body, time, and space. Fado’s epistemology includes the academic discourses on fado (both on its technical and historical constitutions), political and ideological discourses on identity (in

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 1, p. 219–226, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2015 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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their various relations with fado from the Portuguese dictatorship, from 1933 to 1974 until the beginning of the 20th century), and the knowledge that circulates through fado (in its performativity and reflexivity).     Taking very seriously the concept of “participant” in participant-observation, Gray sings the fado herself. In the first chapter of her book, Gray describes this learning process which, in itself, contradicts the ethos of fado. Indeed, Gray is told, fado is not learned: one is born with that feeling, with the fate of dedicating one’s life to fado. As an American, therefore, Gray lacks the true soul of a fadista. Not only does she not sound like a fadista due to her accented pronunciation—she cannot “say the words well”—but also because her “Americanness” reinforces her alterity towards Portugal (and Europe) (56). Authenticity is thus not just a category at play in the evaluation and qualification of fadistas and their performances, but also a category that can either include or exclude a person from a collective feeling, from a way of being. Authenticity is also at play in the opposition between amateur and professional contexts. Professional performances are often considered “soulless” or too modern (31). In the amateur venues Gray observes, and in which she participates as a singer, the feedback other singers and audiences provide forms a major part of what is an unmarked teaching/learning process. This process also entails an unacknowledged set of rules about the role of generation, gender, status, and social networks in shaping definitions of authenticity. Other rules and preferences about performance are tacitly followed and help to shape “structures of listening”: the importance of silences, which create a “collective intimacy”; the importance of tears, which can be both symbolic (through the sound of the guitar) and literal; and the importance of constructing repertoires—a body of fado— that give fado an ontology, and fadistas a particular biography inflected through the lens of fado (41). These rules and preferences, in effect, form a pedagogical guide for how to listen, sing, feel, and talk about fado: after all, despite the fact that one is born with the feeling of fado, “one is not born knowing how to sing fado” (69).  In her second chapter, Gray delves into issues of Portuguese colonialism and national identity. The supposed exceptionalism of Portuguese colonialism is enshrined in the concept of “lusotropicalism” as defined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in 1933, and appropriated by the dictatorship during the 1950s and 1960s. According to this lusotropicalist ideology, Moorish influence in the Iberian Peninsula shaped the 220

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Portuguese as a benevolent colonizer, “miscegenating” with the colonized and “inventing” the mulatto (73). This exceptionalism not only served as a legitimizing ideology for late Portuguese colonialism, but also served as a distinguishing mark of national identity vis-à-vis other former colonizers, helping to mitigate the long-standing, inherent anxieties of being at the margins of the continent (80). This exceptionalism also forms the foundation for a modern multiculturalism that fosters “hidden” and “subtle” forms of racism (Vala et al. 1999), since this so called miscegenation is, in fact, a source of anxiety when it transcends the discursive realm. This subtle racism is equally visible in discourses on the origins and authenticity of fado as described by Gray throughout the book: ideas of “contamination” by Moorish, African, or Brazilian musical traditions are frequently rejected. One of the elements of this “colonialist ideology of race” is saudade, a supposedly untranslatable word that defines Portuguese (and Brazilian) national identity, describing feelings of longing for something that is lost. Many fado lyrics reinforce this combination of sadness and nostalgia as an “aesthetic ethos of saudade” by glorifying Portugal’s past and colonialism, promoting a sense of national uniqueness, and locating the essence of the Portuguese soul in fado (89).   However, as Gray demonstrates clearly, neither the appropriation of fado by the dictatorial regime, not its professionalization under censorship and associated erasure procedures, rendered fado into a hegemonic tool of the regime. On one hand, fado was domesticated, brought from the brothels and taverns to “luxurious venues,” and stripped of lyrics expressing social concerns or forms of protest (96). In this regard, fado became part of the “sociality among the ruling elites,” and also an instrument for “international diplomacy,” as international leaders visiting the country were often welcomed with fado shows (99). But on the other hand, fado continued to be performed in more or less clandestine sites, and its lyrics used to contest the regime (even if with limited circulation, or written with subtle double meanings incomprehensible to the censors). After the 1974 revolution, fado was, for a time, politically incorrect, especially among intellectuals and elites from the left, given its explicit connection to the regime. Yet, again, this trend did not become hegemonic, and fado rapidly acquired a new momentum, reaching its zenith in 2011—at least at the level of national discourses—when UNESCO classified fado as “intangible cultural heritage.” Chapter 2 thus demonstrates the “impossible contradictions” of fado: fado is, at the same time, both the song of the regime 221

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and the song of resistance (91); this political ambiguity—fado’s “elusiveness”—is what renders it so powerful and enduring (103). In Chapter 3, Gray explores the relationship between the agency of fado as genre, place, and the “poetics and politics of place making” (137). The “emplacement” of fado is enabled through lyrics, which often refer to specific neighborhoods in Lisbon, or to the city as a whole (106). During the dictatorship, these neighborhoods were fetishized— conceived in the regime’s ideology as little rural village-models of what Portugal ought to be—since urban spaces were seen as sinful and demeaning. Given their small size, the villages became metaphors for the country itself—less than one-fifth the size of its immediate neighbor, Spain—a representation of Portugal’s anxiety about being marginal to the rest of Europe. More recently, these neighborhoods have been refetishized to lay claims to the authenticity of fado, even if the ethos and aesthetics of that fetishization are similar to those that existed during the dictatorship. This similarity illustrates a paradox: while claiming to be cosmopolitan, Portugal nourishes a nostalgia for rurality, isolationism, and for the lost empire. Adding to this paradox, Gray notes that despite the increasing internationalization of fado through touristic circuits, UNESCO’s recognition, and the world music industry, the circulation of fado actually “reinforces core-periphery economic stereotypes of Europe’s North and South” (125). The politics of place are further complicated by fado’s reflexivity and exoticism. Gray argues that the Portuguese produce self-orientalizing discourses of affect, nostalgia, and place through fado: if the North looks at the South as the place of authenticity, excessive feelings, and emotions, the South positions itself through discourses of nostalgia, essence, and soulfulness. And while this self-orientalizing move reinforces the essentialization and fetishization once promoted by the dictatorship, the reflexivity of fado provides its own critiques of this move. Gray cites two fados which contain social critiques that would never have been authorized by the dictatorship, and that completely evade the common features of colonial nostalgia, saudade, or the familiar neighborhood. Constituting clear poetic, aesthetic, musical, and political ruptures (132), these fados are the counterpoint to the regime’s ideology, demonstrating the agency of fado as genre (137). This agency is expressed in the ways people “experience senses of place,” and in the shaping of those socially and geopolitically situated places. 222

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The fourth chapter poses some challenges for a non-musically trained audience, as it explores the technical aspects of fado performative styles and their relationship with musical transcriptions. Styling is, again, claimed to be unlearned; rather it is informed by one’s feelings, and “depends as much on the sensitive use and awareness of silence in performance as it does on the inventive use of sound” (139). In the end, Gray argues that just as singing, listening, feeling, and talking about fado have to be learned (despite the claims that one is born knowing how to do it), styling also relies “on deeply learned, internalized behavior and rules”; thus, different performances and styling reflect the accumulated corpus of previous performances and aesthetic trends (156).  Fado is also gendered: “female and male are cast in different cultural forms” and these gendered roles are reproduced by performers and their performances (159). In Chapter 5, Gray explains that in fado circles, men emerge in leadership roles, and as the legitimate sources of musical knowledge (160). They are also the theorists of fado, holding the power of meta-analysis (160). Men have the final word in discussions of styles and performances, despite the fact that women compose, write lyrics, and perform. Women acquire several different roles, running from the virginal and protective figure of the mother to the mistreated prostitute. On the contrary, representations of men vary between the bravo and the weepy, sometimes criminal, but always machista. These representations are inherently connected to the gender ethos disseminated during the dictatorship and strongly reinforced by the Catholic Church, in which female sexuality is ideally limited to reproduction, whereas manhood is proven through sexual performance. Following scholar Ana Ferreira’s notion of “luso-sex” (2002:108-110), Gray notes that this notion refers to a past ideology of moral reconfiguration of the place of woman in the family, “an ideology that upheld stringent moralizing discourses celebrating women’s role as ‘bearers’ of nation and of empire vis-à-vis their supposed centrality as wives and mothers, relegating them to the domestic sphere” (164). But even when fado refers to the woman as a prostitute, she is romanticized; as in the case of “Severa,” fado’s first diva, central thematic figure, and symbolic token, adding to the ambiguity of fado’s cosmology. In her exploration of gendered roles, Gray reflects on her own position as a participant in amateur fado venues. She says that she was initially perceived by others to be sexually available, since she stood alone at the bar and was mostly unknown to other customers. Later on, her recording 223

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equipment would be symbolically perceived as her male companion in these venues. In her last chapter, Gray explores Amália Rodrigues, the Portuguese fado diva who was appropriated by the regime as a symbol of the nation, and commodified in international circuits as the ambassadress of the dictatorship’s ideology. The figure of Amália continues to be appropriated for political ends, a process that is facilitated by her self-positioning as politically neutral—a role she eagerly tried to maintain throughout her life, even if her career as an international fado performer was only possible with the dictatorship’s sanction and support. Her cultivated political ambiguity and savviness have simultaneously enabled both discourses: one that accuses her of being a fascist, another that accuses her of being a clandestine supporter of communism. Apart from questioning the veracity of these discourses, what is relevant is their circulation and how they contribute to the myth around Amália’s biography. By reading between the lines of this biography, Gray unveils Amália’s fluid political and fado identity, and her reflexivity about her own aesthetic choices, vocal techniques, and performance style (193). Curiously enough, her “unique vocal style,” mimicked (sometimes in excess) by other performers seeking authenticity, is precisely what could be considered a fault among other singers: bad diction. Yet, given the diva status, faults became marks of uniqueness and soulfulness. Gray also explores the “communities of affection” (199) formed by Amália’s fans, who share discourses and feelings regarding the diva, her personality, and her style. Amália’s biography is entangled with the mythological biography of fado, one feeding the other, and vice versa: the tropes associated with her style—naturalness, soulfulness, heterogeneity, humble origins, and suffering—are, at the same time, the features that characterize fado as genre, and that enable its significance as an ontology. Two appendices give transcriptions of the fado described in Chapter 4 on styling and improvisation. In addition, several figures and plates enrich Gray’s ethnographic descriptions. Albeit categorized as “music/ anthropology,” this book speaks to wider audiences in cultural and gender studies, linguistics, and political theory. The only thing missing is an audio support, so that readers may close their eyes and feel the fado settle under their skins as they listen to the guitars and the voices. n

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References: Ferreira, Ana Paula. 2002. “‘Loving in the Lands of Portugal’ Sex in Women’s Fictions and the Nationalist Order.” In Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas, eds. Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, 107-129. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freyre, Gilberto. 1933. Casa Grande & Senzala. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil. Vala, Jorge, Rodrigo Brito, and Diniz Lopes. 1999. Expressões Dos Racismos Em Portugal. Lisboa: ICSInstituto de Ciências Sociais.

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