https://journals.scientia.international/SIJSocial

Scientia International Journal for

Social Sciences

Vol. 1, 1 (2026)

Type: [Research Article] | DOI: 10.56365/akbw8v69

This is an open access publication under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

Archive and Repertoire of Black Culture in Fiction: Jorge Amado's

Tenda dos Milagres

Antonia Cristina de Alencar Pires1, Gustavo Tanus 2*

1State Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5696-

7187

2Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5696-7187

* Corresponding author: crisp563@gmail.com.

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to examine the novel Tenda dos Milagres (1969) by Jorge Amado, considering it as an archive

of Afro-descendant culture. This study is based on reflections on the relationship between archive and fiction developed by authors

such as Keen (2003), Codebò (2010), and Gonzáles Echevarría (2011), as well as the concepts of repertoire and performance also

related to the archive, as theorized by Diana Taylor (2013). Thus, grounded in the thinking of these authors, we will observe issues

related to the forms of recording ancestral culture (re)presented in the novel and situations surrounding these records, such as the

clashes between the knowledge of the white, dominant elite and the traditional knowledge of the black and excluded people in the

city of Salvador, Bahia, during the first decades of the 20th century, as well as the appropriation of this same knowledge by the

same elite at the end of the century, transforming it into profitable products of mass culture/cultural industry, which was fully

developing at that time, driven by the business-military dictatorship. On our journey towards the free and vast territory of

Pelourinho, the setting of the narrative and the locus of enunciation of the protagonist Pedro Archanjo, other theorists will

accompany us, helping us to think through the plurality that constitutes the novel in focus.

Keywords: Jorge Amado; Tenda dos Milagres (The Tent of Miracles); Afro-Brazilian Culture; Archive; Repertoire.

Article details | Open Peer Review

Edited by:

Bruno César Alves Marcelino

Reviewed by:

Maria de Fátima Bento Ribeiro

Nayanne Lima Alves

Citation:

Alencar Pires, A. C., & Tanus, G. (2026). Archive and Repertoire of Black Culture

in Fiction: Jorge Amado's Tenda dos Milagres. Scientia International Journal for

Social Sciences, 1 (1), 12. https://doi.org/10.56365/akbw8v69

Article history

Received: 01/10/2025

Revised: 24/12/2025

Accepted: 06/02/2026

Available: 25/02/2026

Scientia International Journal for Social Sciences 2 of 15

A version circulates among the people of the terreiros, runs through the streets of the

city: it was the orixá himself who ordered Archanjo to see everything, know everything,

write everything. For this, he made him Ojuobá, the eyes of Xangô. (AMADO, 1969, p.

117).

1. A brief journey through Amada's fiction

Jorge Amado

is one of the most prominent Brazilian writers of the 20th century. Among his

contemporaries, he was the best-selling author both in Brazil and abroad; his works have been translated into

more than forty languages and widely adapted for television and film. Despite his publishing success and

having built up a huge readership, as well as leaving a rich legacy to Brazilian literature, Amado did not

always receive unanimous praise from critics, especially during the early reception of his work, and

particularly from those who were ideologically and politically opposed to the Bahian writer. Not infrequently,

this segment of critics labeled Amado's work as propagandistic and Manichean, populated by types (rather

than characters) lacking psychological depth and linked to exoticism and stereotyping. These were issues that

seemed to us t , as if the goal were to fabricate, at any cost, something that would disqualify Jorge Amado's

literature because it was accessible to the popular classes.

For most of his critics, the so-called "demerits" of his work stemmed from the ideological project to which

he was linked and which he believed to be a function of literature and the greatest commitment of a writer:

denouncing class struggle and the economic and social oppression to which the working class, the

dispossessed, are subjected. Because of this, his innovative work—if we take into account the period (first

half of the 20th century)—with narrative elements, especially the narrative focus, and procedures such as

mixing true facts, historical events, and inserting real people into the plot to achieve maximum verisimilitude

in the construction of a complex fictional universe, was often disregarded.

To corroborate these statements, we cite the case of Capitães da Areia (Captains of the Sands), an avant-

garde novel, both in form and content, as it is structured around dialogism (in the Bakhtinian sense of the

term). This dialogism is achieved through the strategy of presenting the protagonists in six pretexts, placed

before the first chapter, which emulate a police report and letters sent to the newspaper's editorial office

commenting on the article in question.

The use of many discursive genres as resources within the narrative is verifiable in his works, whether

newspaper clippings and official, legal, or police documents, popular songs, cordel literature, poetic ways of

spinning stories, or naming sections of novels. It is interesting to note that the importance of these circulating

or surrounding discursive genres in relation to the plot has not been studied extensively. In general, trying

not to generalize, they are mobilized to construct invalidations between truths, on the one hand, the official

and bureaucratic, on the other, popular experience and living. And the issue is not really a purely Manichean

Jorge Amado was born in Itabuna, Bahia, in 1912. In 1930, he moved to Rio de Janeiro to study law. His first novel, O País do

Carnaval (The Country of Carnival, 1931), was published when he was only 19 years old. In 1933, he published Cacau, a novel

that deals with the social reality of the population of rural Bahia who work in cocoa cultivation. This novel was censored and

copies were seized. In the following years, Amado published novels with urban themes: Suor (Sweat, 1934), Jubiabá (1935), Mar

Morto (Dead Sea, 1936), and Capitães da Areia (Captains of the Sands, 1937). Between 1936 and 1937, the author was arrested

twice for political reasons and had his books seized again. In 1941, he went into exile in Argentina, persecuted by the Estado Novo,

and wrote the biography of communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes entitled O Cavaleiro da Esperança (The Knight of Hope) (1942).

In 1945, he was elected federal deputy for the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) and participated in the Constituent Assembly, but

his mandate was revoked when the PCB was outlawed. Between 1948 and 1956, he traveled to several European countries, an

experience he recounted in the book O Mundo da Paz (The World of Peace) (1951). He returned to Brazil in 1956 and published

his most popular novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, in 1958. He was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961 and

returned to live in Bahia in 1963. Jorge Amado received several literary awards, among which the Camões Prize (1995) stands out,

for his entire body of work. In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne University. He died in Salvador, Bahia,

in 2001.

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clash, operating through static binaries (as read by more traditional critics), but rather in understanding the

many contradictions and transformations inherent in the phenomena, because hidden, it seems, among the

digressive meanderings of the uses of these genres, is a more systematic and devastating critique than one

would suppose from their ordinary use alone.

In the case of the novel Capitães de Areia, Amado's goal was to contrast the voices representing the wealthy

white elite (represented by the authorities and the media) with the voices of the subalternized (represented by

a poor seamstress and a priest without social prestige), thus enabling various perspectives on abandoned

minors and the opportunity to discuss a pressing issue at that time: the begging of the descendants of former

slaves or of parents who died during the smallpox epidemic that ravaged Bahia in the late 1910s. In contrast,

initial critics (and many who followed) preferred to point to the novel as a eulogy to juvenile delinquency,

which led to hundreds of copies of the novel being burned in public squares.

Although criticism such as this seems to be a thing of the past, the specter of Amado's political militancy

still seems to haunt his fiction, as several studies divide it into two phases, the second beginning after his

departure from the PCB in the late 1950s, considered at the time to be a "turning point" in Amado's writing,

which supposedly moved away from political and social issues. In our view, however, Jorge Amado's

departure from the Party did not mean his departure from his commitment to bring the subaltern classes and

their tireless struggle against economic and social inequalities, represented in his work, into the literary space.

We therefore understand Amado's work as a whole, without dividing it into phases, as we consider that

until his last texts, Jorge Amado continued to discuss social injustices, the repression of Afro-Brazilian

culture by so-called white culture; the valorization of traditional knowledge and popular religiosity; the

processes of constructing subaltern identities, of minorities inhabiting territories on the margins of the nation.

Proof of the unity of Amado's work is the relationship between novels from different periods, such as the

aforementioned Capitães da Areia (1937) and Os Pastores da Noite (1964), both of which feature

marginalized groups persecuted by the police and the media, who survive minimally thanks to the bonds of

solidarity that unite individuals in situations of extreme poverty.

We also point out the relationship between Jubiabá (1935) and Tenda dos milagres (1969), the main

subject of this article. It should be noted that both novels focus on a poor black protagonist who, faced with

an oppressive context, takes on the task of organizing and raising awareness in his communities and

territories. This awareness is based on the recognition of being an excluded minority and the understanding

that the rich culture inherited from their ancestors can be transformed into a powerful tool in the fight against

this exclusion. In this way, Antonio Balduíno and Pedro Archanjo are two sides of the same persona, even

though 34 years passed between the creation of one and the other. Thus, the characters reiterate the unity of

Amada's corpus and underscore the permanence of violence against the subalternized and the struggle against

the erasure of ancestral culture.

That said, in the following topics we will reflect on the relationship between

documentary/biographical/memorial proposed in Tenda dos milagres, which is presented in the text through

a kind of "archiving." To this end, we will develop a study with the intention of verifying the common points

with archiving procedures, in an attempt to perceive Amada's narrative as a kind of archival fiction. The

question is not to read it here strictly as an archive novel, or archive fiction, since for that to happen, the

archive, in its constitution and use, would have to be a kind of creative currency for literary production, for

example, through the exploration of its exteriority within the plot, which in fact does not happen. What we

intend, therefore, is to demonstrate that literature can function as an archive, in the Foucauldian sense, and,

in the case of the novel studied, perform ethical and poetic modes of functioning of the wisdom and memory

of Afro-descendant culture, and the clashes and debates surrounding the knowledge derived from it.

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2. Archival fictions, archival novels & Foucauldian archives

According to Roberto González Echevarría (2011) in his study on Latin American fiction, archive fictions

are narratives that seek a key to identity for culture, in a kind of rejection of established truths and institutional

explanations given as natural. In this sense, Echevarría observed that ethnography played a fundamental role

in what he called archive fiction by offering:

[...] a way of representing the originality of Latin American stories, customs, speech, and other cultural phenomena. The

result was the “novela de la tierra” (novel of the land), a highly critical and hybrid product whose rhetorical model was

provided by anthropology, from whose domain it can only escape by merging with its object of study, revealing the

essentially literary character of ethnography. (Echevarría, 2011, p. 243, our translation).

From the perspective of hybridism, Gonzáles Echevarría pointed to Euclides da Cunha as the only Brazilian

writer who, with Os sertões, produced a work that was “half reportage, half scientific analysis, and entirely

literature” (Echevarría, 2011, p. 184). The Cuban critic established the connection between literary narratives

and anthropology (especially ethnography), and the hybridism they present, in texts produced between the

late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, because these narratives attempt to characterize Latin

American beings and lands. Although he does not appear on the critic's list of writers, Jorge Amado could be

included, since novels such as Cacau (1933) and Mar morto (1936) have a strong anthropological emphasis,

as they (re)present the lives of cocoa farm workers and fishermen on the coast of Bahia, respectively, without

ceasing to be literary narratives. It is worth noting that it is not only Jorge Amado's novels written in the

1930s that have this hybrid characteristic, which could prompt other works to reflect on Amado's fictional

universe. We believe that this characteristic is another of the factors that led critics to consider Amado's work

as minor literature.

According to the same Cuban critic, in the second half of that century, the language mimicked by the

narratives would be the language of the archive, its function, and archiving procedures; that is, to store

memory, edit it, and update it. To corroborate these statements, we turn to two authors who also theorized

about archive fiction: Marco Codebò and Suzane Keen.

According to Codebò (2010, p. 16), "there is a field of boundaries in the archive novel, in which "it

sometimes overlaps with other genres, including historical, realistic, epistolary, and testimonial novels, as

well as historiography, memoirs, law, and journalism." For Keen, in a study on British literature (2003, p. 3),

archive novels are a genre that encompasses several subgenres of fiction that "feature the action, the plot of

'doing research' in documents. They designate a character or characters, at least temporarily, as archive

researchers [...]". Such fictions seek (professionally or otherwise) to interpret the past through its material

traces, stored in document-holding institutions (libraries, archives, and even museums), with the aim of

uncovering the truth about that past (2003, p. 60).

It is based on Keen's point about the traces of the past, the truth (or not) they contain, and the preservation

of memory surrounding archives that we call on Michel Foucault (2008) in our critical journey, since the

theoretical tools of this work aim at a critical reading of Tenda dos milagres. Observing the treatment of

records and the processes of archiving black culture in the novel, we see it as necessary to relax Foucault's

notion of the archive, which, within its archaeological phase, has an epistemological intention and is therefore

treated as a language system, a set of rules that, in a culture, determines the appearance and disappearance of

statements, their permanence and their erasure. Thus, according to the philosopher:

[...] we have in the density of discursive practices systems that establish statements as events (with their conditions and

domain of appearance) and things (comprising their possibility and field of use). It is all these systems of statements

(events on the one hand, things on the other) that I propose to call archives. (Foucault, 2008, p. 146).

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The question of permanence/erasure present in archives, to which Foucault draws our attention, goes back

to the very origin of archives as constructions of group memory, and therein lies a key question: to which

memory are archives linked? Jacques LeGoff's studies on memory matrices as instruments of collective

identification shed light on this question. According to Le Goff, archives have always been related to official

collective memory. The earliest known archives are those of the ancient Asian kingdoms and pre-Columbian

America, created with the intention of being an "official program of remembrance," in which the sovereigns

were the very center of remembrance (Le Goff, 1992). Now, if there is appearance/disappearance,

permanence/erasure of statements, if there is a separation of events and things, as Foucault emphasizes in his

definition of archives; and if archives are matrices of collective memory and, to a large extent, of official

memory, as Le Goff shows us, it must be inferred that archives can be understood as sources that foster

narratives, which arise precisely in the folds, in the interstices, in the voids between permanence and erasure,

between the gaps opened by the movement of selection of what, in the official eyes, deserves to be

remembered and what should be banished from official memory.

Based on these considerations, what we propose in this work, starting from the understanding of the li

terary work as a discursive unit that is established and formed through feasible statements, is an

approximation to the perception of the conservative character of the archive which, according to Marques

(2008, p. 107), thus reinforces the homogeneous time of the nation:

[...] however, the discarded elements, the memories of subalternized groups, of minorities, which were excluded from the

process of enunciating the nation's legitimizing narrative, tend to insinuate themselves through emptiness and

fragmentation, as unclassifiable residue, in the archive of the national community's official memories. (Marques, 2008, p.

107).

It is, therefore, the "unclassifiable residues" that shake the conservative character of official archives,

pointing to another memory and operating in the sense of brushing against the grain of history, as proposed

by Walter Benjamin. (Benjamin, 1994, p. 225), which will serve as raw material for the archival fictions that

emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Appropriating them, Latin American writers used them in their texts, from

an identity perspective that contrasted with the identity model proposed by 19th-century narratives, which

were based on the myths of the continent's origins.

3. Archiving in Tenda dos Milagres

Tenda dos milagres is, on the one hand, a "novel of resistance," like other contemporary narratives. From

this perspective, it draws attention to the authoritarianism of the period in which it was conceived and

published, in a context of suppression of rights, marked by the resurgence of the military regime after the

enactment of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in December 1968. Amada's narrative blends fiction and history,

literature and journalism, myth and allegory, encompassing the hybridism that Echevarría speaks of and the

form of the "mosaic of genres" as conceived by Codebò.

It is, therefore, the "unclassifiable residues" that shake the conservative character of official archives,

pointing to another memory and operating in the sense of brushing against the grain of history, as proposed

by Walter Benjamin. (Benjamin, 1994, p. 225), which will serve as raw material for the archival fictions that

emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Appropriating them, Latin American writers used them in their texts, from

an identity perspective that contrasted with the identity model proposed by 19th-century narratives, which

were based on the myths of the continent's origins.

On the other hand, still based on Echevarría, the novel in question brings together the characteristics of

archival fiction, since its central theme is the discussion of Bahian cultural identity, configured in the clash

between two territories: that of the white elite, represented above all by the Terreiro de Jesus Medical School

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(in addition to other spaces), and the territory of the subalternized, represented by Pelourinho, the "University

of the people." This clash calls into question the knowledge produced by both and the methods used by the

elite to supplant traditional knowledge. The figure of the archive as a place of records of the past mediates

the identity debate, whether in the form of Mestre Pedro Archanjo's notebooks (which would come to

constitute the memory of the culture inherited from black ancestors), or when police archives (or newspaper

archives, which carry the voice of the authorities and provide accurate records of the persecution of

subalternized groups, such as the peoples of the terreiros and practitioners of capoeira), consulted by

sociologist Fausto Penna to (re)construct the figure of Ojuobá de Xangô.

In a clear rejection of established truths and institutional explanations, as Echevarría writes about Latin

American archival fictions, the narrator of Tenda dos milagres begins the text by characterizing the

environment in which much of the plot will unfold, for it is in that environment that the main character of the

narrative — Pedro Archanjo, the Ojuobá of Xangô — and other characters of importance to the plot of the

novel:

In the vast territory of Pelourinho, men and women teach and study. A vast and varied university, it extends and branches

out into Tabuão, Portas do Carmo, and Santo Antônio Além-do-Carmo, Baixa dos Sapateiros, the markets, Maciel,

Lapinha, Largo da Sé, in Tororó, Barroquinha, Sete Portas, and Rio Vermelho, in all places where men and women work

with metals and wood, use herbs and roots, mix rhythms, steps, and blood; in this mixture, they have created a color and

a sound, a new and original image. (Amado, 1969, p. 11).

From the excerpt transcribed, we believe it is important to highlight the following aspects: the

characterization of Pelourinho as a "vast territory," which is also a "vast and varied university." Jorge

Amado's use of the term territory is conducive to the writer's intention. The term is a polysemic concept that

contains the notions of space and culture, intertwining material and immaterial traits endowed with countless

meanings, in permanent (de)construction throughout history, as explained by Anael Ribeiro Soares (2014).

The concept ranges from the notion of a place of shelter and protection against external dangers (as in ancient

and medieval times) to the more contemporary idea, presented by Soares himself, of territory as a place of

identity and memory for peoples and groups, or, in his words:

Territory originates and at the same time originates, generates, and, in turn, is generated in social relations, giving rise to

the relationship between man and his space, where identity bonds are formed, a semantic structure is created, giving rise

to culture. (Soares, 2014).

In fact, Amado points to Pelourinho as a place of refuge and identity for a particular social group. In the

case of Tenda dos Milagres, these are subalternized groups who, in that space, are grounded in ancestral

knowledge. Hence the use of the term "university," which refers to places of knowledge production. It should

be noted, however, that Pelourinho is an open university and the knowledge produced there is autonomous

and pluralistic. It is precisely its autonomy and plurality that give rise to its constant struggle against the local

elite, as we will discuss in this study. We also draw attention to the terms "steps" and "blood," which denote

that the passage of men and women in the territory of Pelourinho is a passage of struggle and, consequently,

of resistance to the dominance of the ruling elite. In every sense (racial, economic, social, and cultural).

Observing the similarity between Amada's narrative and ethnographic texts and, at the same time,

perceiving the relationship between ethnography and archiving present in Latin American archival fiction,

we seek dialogue with another theorist who proposes to reflect on the figure of the archive and the forms of

recording Latin American cultural memory. This is Diana Taylor (2013), who, in questioning the role of the

archive as the guardian of the official cultural memory of groups and peoples, points to another archive, based

not necessarily on written records, but on what she understands as "repertoire" and "performance."

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Broadly speaking, the repertoire would be a kind of code based on body communication, including

gestures, movements, dances, songs, and oral traditions, which result in performances (Taylor, 2013). For the

author, the term "performance" has a range of controversial meanings, but from the perspective of its

relationship with cultural memory, she defines performances as "acts of vital transfers, transmitting social

knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through repeated behaviors" (Taylor, 2013, p. 9).

Diana Taylor's considerations lead us to infer that repertoire is in the order of the recording of knowledge,

while performance is the form of transmission of this knowledge in oral cultures, with memory and the body

being the places where records are kept. It is the body in motion and the repetition of movements that,

according to Taylor, would ensure the transmission and permanence of knowledge. Archives and

documentary records in the strict sense, on the other hand, belong to the realm of writing and therefore have

the advantage of the fixity of the letter, but they depend on those who possess knowledge of written language

for their contents to be transmitted. Furthermore, they are not immune to exclusions and erasures of

statements, as Foucault (2008) warns us. Despite this, Taylor considers that archives and repertoires can

coexist in the same society, one does not exclude the existence of the other.

Thus, based on the theoretical assumptions presented so far, we will first look at the series of lists presented

by the narrator of Tenda dos milagres in the introduction to the novel. These lists appear to be records of the

ancestral culture rooted in the Pelourinho territory and can be thought of as notes on the repertoires and

performances of the knowledge contained in this culture (Taylor, 2013) or as notes that illuminate the power

of Afro-descendant heritage, bringing into discussion the clash between dominant culture and marginalized

culture, present in Latin American archival fiction from the 1960s and 1970s (Echevarría, 2011). In both

cases, the lists presented are undoubtedly a fictional strategy for archiving the cultural memory and identity

of the black people of Bahia.

As a discursive genre, lists are types of texts that relate things or people, with a criterion of sequencing,

whether alphabetical, temporal, or chronological (Costa, 2008); like a roll, an arrangement of a series of

names (of things; of people, living or deceased; of circumstances; of goods, amounts, etc.), arranged in an

order for formalization, registration, or remembrance. In the case of the novel, the narrator, a kind of double

of Pedro Archanjo (who wrote everything down in his notebooks and then transformed his notes into

documents, in this case books, with the aim of legitimizing what he observed and capturing the marginalized

collective memory through the printed word), introduces the reader to the narrative environment through the

"soundtrack" of the place, demonstrating the intense pulsation that exists there:

Here resound the atabaques, the berimbaus, the ganzás, the agogôs; the pandeiros, the adufes, the caxixis, the gourds: poor

instruments, so rich in rhythm and melody. Music and dance were born in this popular territory: Mr. Deodoro is an expert

in atabaques of all types and nations: Nagô and Jeje, Angola Congo, and Ilus from the Ijexá nation. He also makes agbês

and xerés, but the best agogôs are from Manu. (Amado, 1969, p. 11).

The instruments mentioned are closely linked to capoeira de Angola. This dance-fight is part of the

repertoire, act, and manifestation of resistance of Afro-descendants, inhabitants of Salvador, and especially

Pelourinho. The repertoire of moves, stored in the memory of the masters as "Budião, Querido de Deus,

Saveirista, Chico da Barra, Antônio Maré, Zacaria Grande, Piroca Peixoto, Sete Mortes, Bigode de Seda,

Pacífico do Rio Vermelho, Bom Cabelo, Vicente Pastinha, Doze Homens, Tiburcinho de Jaguaribe, Chico

Me Dá, Nô da Empresa, and Barroquinha" (Amado, 1969, p. 14), is transmitted through the performances of

their bodies to apprentices, in a spectacle of exuberant vitality:

the berimbaus command the varied and terrible blows: half-moon, rasteira, cabeçada, rabo de arraia, aú com rolê, aú de

cambaleão, açoite, bananeira, galopante, martelo, escorão, chibata armada, cutilada, boca de siri, boca de calça, chapa de

frente, chapa de costas and chapa de pé, são bento Grande, São Bento Pequeno, Santa Maria, Cavalaria, Amazonas,

Angola, Angola Dobrada, Angola Pequena, Apanhe a Laranja no Chão Tico-Tico, Iúna, Samongo and Cinco Salomão —

and there's more, oxente!, of course there is: here in this territory, capoeira angola was enriched and transformed: without

ceasing to be a fight, it became ballet. (Amado, 1969, p. 15-16).

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These masters, by repeatedly practicing their craft, (re)affirm their ancestral identity. But it is not only the

capoeira masters who have their place in Pelourinho. The narrator lists several of them: miracle writers,

typographers (in the figure of Lídio Corró, a faithful friend of Pedro Archanjo, the Ojuobá), writers of cordel

literature, sculptors, herbalists, visual artists, tambozeiros, santeiros, silversmiths, among others.

In this territory filled with sounds and colors, the health of residents is in the hands of the "herbalists," who

possess knowledge of herbal medicine. It should be noted that the healing practice of herbal medicine, derived

from popular knowledge, is combined with religiosity and, ironically, is practiced just meters away from the

Faculty of Medicine, where so-called scientific knowledge is professed, which classifies such practice as the

result of ignorance among popular groups:

In the leaf tents, the obis and orobôs, the magical ritual seeds, are added to the medicine. Dona Adelaide Tostes, spitting,

foul-mouthed, and heavy on the cachaça, knows every bead and every leaf, their ebó power and their quizila. She knows

about roots, tree bark, plants, and grasses and their healing qualities: alumã for the liver, lemon balm to calm the nerves,

tiririca-de-babado for hangovers, quebra-pedra for the kidneys, capim-santo for stomach pain, capim barba-de-bode to lift

spirits and boost energy. Dona Filomena is another expert: if asked and paid, she prays and protects the client's body

against the evil eye, and positively cures chronic catarrh and chest ailments with a certain mixture of mastruço, honey,

milk, lemon, and who knows what else. No cough, no matter how violent, can resist or endure. A doctor learned a recipe

from her for cleansing the blood, moved to São Paulo, and became rich curing syphilis. (Amado, 1969, p. 19).

In the same vein, that is, health care, in addition to spiritual care, a record is made of the mothers-of-saints

and the close relationship between them and Pedro Archanjo, "Aunt Maci, Mrs. Menininha, Mother Senhora,

from Opô Afonjá, the respectable matrons, not even they kept secrets from the old man, revealing everything

to him willingly – in fact, the orixás had ordered it that way, ‘for Ojuobá there are no closed doors’” (1969,

p. 45). It should be reiterated that, in addition to the mothers-of-saints and the herb ladies, other women and

their crafts are also described by the narrator, emphasizing the importance of the female figure in the popular

classes, in contrast to the elite groups, centered on a patriarchal conception.

The sculptor is given the craft of transforming hardwoods into pieces of devotion, as can be seen in the list

that enumerates the raw material and its corresponding object:

[...] rosewood, brazilwood, vinhático, peroba, putumuju, massaranduba [transformed] into devotional pieces, oxês of

Xangô, Oxuns, Yemanjás, figures of caboclos, Rompe-Mundo, Três Estrelas, Sete Espadas, the shining swords in their

powerful hands (Amado, 1969, p. 17).

In Pelourinho, the Afro-Brazilian artist Mestre Didi uses "beads, straw, horse tails, leather: he creates and

recreates ebiris, adês, eruexins and eruquerês, xaxarás de Omolu." (Amado, 1969, p. 14). The list of artists in

a community, a pantheon of artists and their sculptures, continues: "There is also the 'santeiro' Miguel [who]

makes and embodies angels, archangels, and saints. Catholic saints, church devotion, the Virgin of the

Conception and Saint Anthony of Lisbon, the archangel Gabriel and the Child God, and the silversmiths, who

molded noble metals, silver and copper, gold, the best known of whom was Lúcio Reis" (Amado, 1969, p.

19).

It is important to note the intertwining of folk medicine and art with religiosity in that marginalized area

of the capital of Bahia. Like capoeira, religiosity has the same performative character and resistance to the

domination of the elite and their attempts to erase ancestral memory. Consequently, the Afro-descendant

cultural identity. As Ildásio Tavares observes, "within a process of cultural crushing, religion is the most

important vehicle of resistance. It mobilizes, unites, and strengthens identity" (Tavares, 2009, p. 26 apud

Teixeira Sobrinho; Magalhães, 2010).

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In this sense, Candomblé plays a prominent role in the narrative. This is not without reason, since the main

character, Pedro Archanjo, was Ojuobá de Xangô

†

, a high position within the hierarchy of Candomblé

terreiros. This assertion can be seen, for example, in Pedro Archanjo's note about the mothers of saints:

"Queens in the streets of the city, with their trays of food and sweets, doubly queens in the terreiros, mothers

and daughters of saints" (Amado, 1969, p. 84), wrote Pedro Archanjo. Or in the description made by the

extra-diegetic narrator, when recounting Dr. Levenson's visit in 1968 to Olga's candomblé:

Daughter of Lôko [Time] and Yansan [Oyá], in Alaketu, [...] and, turning a deaf ear to the explanations of the girl's fiancé,

she greeted them with joy and friendship. Leaning on his shiny paxorô, Oxalá danced up to him and welcomed him into

his arms. "Your enchanted one, my father, is Oxolufan, old Oxalá," Olga told him, taking him to see the pejis. Olga was

a queen in her Bahian costumes and necklaces, with her entourage of feitas and iaôs. (Amado, 1969, p. 84).

In the transcribed excerpts, we see the archiving of the rites and deities of Afro-Brazilian religions, as well

as their priestesses.

The description of Afro-Brazilian religious rites runs through the entire narrative of Tenda dos milagres,

confirming its anthropological/ethnographic characteristic, as mentioned above. One of these rituals is the

"Axexé." This is a funeral ritual dedicated to a person initiated into Candomblé. It is a ritual of great beauty

and emotion, in which ancestral songs attempt to unite the world of the living with the world of the dead.

Below, we transcribe the narration of Pedro Archanjo's funeral, in which the Axexé is practiced:

The voice of the pai de santo Nezinho rises in the funeral song, in the Ioruba language: (sic)

Axexê, axexê

Omorodé.

The choir repeats, the voices growing louder in the farewell song: "Axexê, axexê."

The burial continues, climbing the hill: three steps forward, two

steps back, dance steps to the sound of the sacred chant, the coffin raised

at the height of the obás' shoulders: Iku lonan ta ewê xê

Iku lonan ta ewê xê

Iku lonan (Amado, 1969, p. 57-58).

As Antônio Carlos Teixeira Sobrinho and Carlos Alberto Magalhães observed in their essay “Jorge Amado

and identities on the margins,” the reference to Candomblé as a key element in the narrative contributes to

removing it “from the margins where it had been placed physically and symbolically. It is not only the people,

inhabitants of the margins, who are moved to the center, but also their gods, in an act of restoring the dignity

that had been taken from them.” (Teixeira Sobrinho; Magalhães, 2010). Regarding the representation of

Candomblé in the narrative, there is also a parallel between fiction and history, given the issues related to the

persecution of Candomblé terreiros in the 1920s, marked by police abuse of power, racial discrimination, and

religious intolerance.

†

Orixá, a deity in Yoruba culture, lord of thunder and responsible for the execution of justice.

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Many babalorixás and ialorixás took axé and saints away, expelled from the center and neighboring neighborhoods to

distant farms, places that were difficult to access. Others took the orixás, instruments, costumes, itás, songs and dances,

baticum, rhythms, and moved to Rio de Janeiro—this is how samba arrived in the then capital of the country, in the

caravans of fugitive Bahians. Some smaller terreiros could not resist so much persecution and disappeared for good.

Several reduced their calendar of celebrations to essential obligations, carried out in secret. (Amado, 1969, p. 303).

With this, Jorge Amado discusses the subordination/marginalization of the Afro-Bahian religion,

distancing himself from other literary texts or analytical studies. As Teixeira Sobrinho and Magalhães (2010)

state, representations of Candomblé are little studied, limited to observing it as a representation of popular

daily life, a mere composition of the cityscape, which amounts to a concealment of black culture, condemned

to the margins or to the reductionist limits of folklore.

By disassociating Candomblé from the folklorization that has been imposed on it and treating it as a

mechanism of collective identification for black-mestizo people and a place of resistance for these same

people, denouncing attempts by the ruling class to erase it, Jorge Amado establishes in his text a serious and

profound discussion about the exclusion of black people from the social/cultural/historical process. We

believe that the considerations of the scholars mentioned above are quite pertinent in this regard:

The oppression exercised against Candomblés was configured, metonymically, from a process of erasing black identity

itself, which, in these sacred spaces, was created, subsisted, and sought to resist. The persecution was therefore part of a

broad movement to exclude Black people, a proposal that originated in and was identified with the post-abolition

movement, which sought to protect and maintain racial hierarchies. These were places of power, on the one hand, and of

submission, on the other, in order to keep them intact, safe from the social advancement of the formerly enslaved people.

(Teixeira Sobrinho; Magalhães, 2010, p. 155).

It should be emphasized, however, that despite the cultural crushing suffered by Candomblé and its

relentless "pushing" to the margins through the use of symbolic and non-symbolic violence, Afro-Bahian

cults managed to survive, constituting a mechanism for the (re)cognition of the Afro-descendant population

of Salvador.

4. The archivist and the archive researcher: Pedro Archanjo and Fausto Pena

We have worked so far with the forms of (re)production of the records of Afro-descendant cultural

memory, linking them to the notions of repertoire and performance and to the question of identity

(re)presented by archival fictions. Next, we will address the figure of the "archive researcher," as described

by Keen (2003, p. 60). In Tenda dos milagres, this researcher is the sociologist and poet Fausto Pena, tasked

with “gathering data through which he could get a better idea of the personality of Archanjo, about whom

[an American researcher] was going to write a few pages, a kind of preface to the translation of his works.”

(Amado, 1969, p. 18).

The task entrusted to the sociologist points to the archiving processes carried out around written

documents, which are the collection of material, the selection and interpretation of this material, and the

construction of a text based on what has been interpreted. The dissemination of Archanjo's books by

researcher James D. Levenson triggered the launch of a campaign to celebrate the centenary of the birth of

Pedro Archanjo, born in 1868. This task is accomplished from two perspectives: Pena as an outside observer

and Pena in the first person, in the present tense, narrating the events that led to Archanjo's discovery by the

ruling class of the state of Bahia.

As in any (re)constitution based on traces, remnants, and oral accounts, Pena will encounter gaps in the

material that will give rise to the archive of the life and work of Pedro Archanjo Ojuobá, as the

sociologist/researcher himself recounts:

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Not only did details escape me about Archanjo's existence, but also important, perhaps vital facts. I often found myself

faced with a void, a gap in space and time, or inexplicable events, multiple versions, disparate interpretations, complete

disorder in the material collected, and contradictory information and informants. (Amado, 1969, p. 22).

James D. Levenson went to Bahia, "the land of Archanjo, the location and subject of his studies, his

research, the reason for his work" (1969, p. 35), to better understand Archanjo's work, consisting of four

books: Popular Life in Bahia (1907); African Influences on the Customs of Bahia (1918); Notes on

Miscegenation in Bahian Families (1928); Bahian Cuisine – Origins and Precepts (1930). These books are,

within the plot, descriptive studies of Afro-descendant culture, based on the city of Salvador: “how much he

had collected, noted in his notebooks, for his work, ‘a bag of treasures,’ the wisdom of the people” (Amado,

1969, p. 46).

As can be seen from the excerpt transcribed, Archanjo behaves like an archivist, collecting, classifying,

and organizing records of Afro-descendant culture. His dedication to this activity lasted until his death, as

the narrator reports, reiterating the importance of the work of Ojuobá de Xangô:

[...] they found him dead, lying in a gutter, late at night. In his pockets, only a notebook and a stub of a pencil, no identity

documents. Unnecessary, in fact, in that poor and filthy area of the old city, where everyone knew and loved him. (Amado,

1969, p. 37).

Pedro Archanjo's habit of writing everything down can be understood as "archival sickness," as Derrida

put it to describe the compulsion to archive, the desire to preserve the memory of things, the desire to return

to the origin, the struggle against forgetting (Derrida, 2001). Archanjo's compulsive archiving translates into

Ojuobá's understanding that it was necessary to preserve the memory of his ancestors' knowledge, preventing

its death, its disappearance.

It is important to note, once again, that Pedro Archanjo spent his life making written records in his

notebooks, as seen in the excerpt transcribed above, but, ironically, the written records about him were scarce,

limited to police reports, since the character was arrested several times because of his activism on behalf of

the oppressed. It should be noted that in these reports, he is characterized as a "criminal," even though

Archanjo never committed any crime. Until the celebrations of his centenary, the figure of Archanjo was part

of oral accounts, and even in these, he was already fading away.

As we stated earlier, considering Tenda dos milagres as a novel of resistance and a place for debate on the

issue of identity, we recall that these characteristics are represented in the confrontation between knowledge

linked to white culture (the dominant knowledge) and the knowledge of the people, related to Afro-

descendant culture (the knowledge repressed by the elites). For this reason, Pedro Archanjo's relations with

the intellectual elite are conflictual, from the moment Ojuobá enters the Faculty of Medicine as a janitor

‡

Within this renowned institution of knowledge, the University, he occupied a minor position. Let us recall

the words of the reactionary Professor Batista when he met his former student Fausto Pena in the "unknown

hole in the middle of nowhere," the Xixi dos Anjos bar, during Levenson's visit in 1968:

After all, what is he trying to foist on us as the pinnacle of science? Nonsense in bad Portuguese about the rabble, the

common people. Who was this Archanjo? Some prominent figure, a professor, a doctor, a luminary, a political leader, at

least a wealthy merchant? None of the above: a lowly janitor at the Faculty of Medicine, little more than a beggar,

practically a laborer. (Amado, 1969, p. 65).

‡

According to the Aurélio Electronic Dictionary: "1. Head of discipline in schools. [...] 2. Junior employee in the faculty office."

Scientia International Journal for Social Sciences 12 of 15

Several decades after the publication of Archanjo's books, the unease they caused still persisted among

members of the Bahian elite, as can be seen in the excerpt highlighted above, denoting the persistence of an

authoritarian and exclusionary mentality in the city of Salvador. The hatred of Pedro Archanjo was spread

by the most prominent professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, Professor Nilo Argolo: "professor of

Legal Medicine at the faculty and scientific mentor of the congregation, renowned as a sage and owner of an

enormous library, [...] he had written those terrible pages, those burning words, about the mestizos of Bahia."

(Amado, 1969, p. 119) The image of the professor contrasts with that of Ojuobá, a master of the popular

institution of the University of the People, legal representative of traditional knowledge, still employed in a

lower hierarchy within that institution. For Argolo, it is worth remembering that in this Faculty of Medicine,

a place where all scientific, official, and legitimized/legitimizing knowledge is produced, eugenic/Aryan

theories were produced outside the realm of fiction. From these intersections, we can relate the real and

fictional characters, in which a kind of revision of positivist/eugenicist thinking is carried out, given by the

clash between the professor and the janitor. In this sense, there is the appropriation of a clash between

historical figures: Nina Rodrigues, whose theses are considered racist, and Manuel Querino, an Afro-

Brazilian intellectual who became notable for his studies and anthropological and ethnographic books, two

of which resemble the themes of Pedro Archanjo, one dealing with Bahian cuisine and the other tracing a

kind of genealogy of the white elite of Salvador. Rodrigues and Querino were protagonists in an ethnic-racial

debate in the city of Salvador in the early 20th century.

Professor Nilo Argolo considered it unacceptable that a janitor, a mestizo and resident of Pelourinho, could

be capable of writing and publishing books, especially books that directly challenged eugenicist/Aryan

theories about the purity of the white race and the inferiority of blacks and mestizos. Pedro Archanjo's

"audacity," his rebellion and insubordination, cost him dearly, for in addition to losing his job at the college,

Ojuobá suffered persecution and a process of ostracism and oblivion that lasted until the (re)discovery of his

books by the American researcher.

In the present time of Amado's narrative—the year of the celebrations of Pedro Archanjo's centenary—

questions about knowledge and cultural production turn to other aspects that, at the end of the 1960s, were

already beginning to permeate the discussions of Brazilian intellectuals: the issue of cultural dependence,

which in Amado's novel is expressed in the figure of the American researcher Levenson, and the issue of the

cultural industry and mass culture, outlined in the strong presence of the media (newspapers and advertising

agencies) in the text. We recall here that it is because of Levenson's "discovery" of Archanjo, a respected

professor and foreign Nobel Prize winner, that Ojuobá is also "discovered" in his homeland, thus emphasizing

that it was necessary for foreign authority, especially American authority, to first endorse the importance of

Archanjo's studies on the diversity of local culture so that the mestizo from Taboão would later be recognized

by the elite of Salvador.

With regard to the media, it should be noted that it is the media, not the university, that is leading the

celebrations of Pedro Archanjo's centenary, transforming him into a consumer product, a commodity, an item

of mass culture, glamorized by the cultural industry. The figure of Ojuobá then undergoes several changes,

with traits being added or removed according to economic and political convenience. The university and

schools follow what is determined by journalists and advertisers, reiterating the power given to the media

during the period of corporate-military dictatorship, a power that would continue to this day. Although James

D. Levenson endorses the importance of Archanjo, for the population of Salvador he will remain in the realm

of the unreal, the legendary, the eccentric, due to the temporal distance, the "gaps and hiatuses" in the records

of his life, and the emptying and saturation of his image stamped on walls, both as a poster boy for Coca-

Coco, as well as Crocodilo cachaça. It should also be noted that popular culture and its knowledge remain

marginalized, considered minor, treated as something "exotic," understood at that time as "folklore." Thus,

the elite of Salvador once again points to Archanjo's marginality as his place, minimizing his knowledge, his

struggle on behalf of the oppressed and the organization of workers, diluting his relationship with Candomblé,

Scientia International Journal for Social Sciences 13 of 15

erasing his rebelliousness, by inscribing him as a folkloric figure, which lends itself to economic exploitation,

just as they did with the ancestors and do with the descendants of Ojuobá de Xangô.

5. Final considerations

To conclude this study, let us return to what Marco Codebò wrote, which we believe applies to Tenda dos

Milagres: "Archival novels perform the same type of meaning-making operations performed by the records,

archives, and inventories that characterize bureaucratic archival practices" (Codebò, 2010, p. 14), or what

Echevarría (2011, p. 8) says about the history of these types of novels being the history of the escape from

authority and that they are part of a subplot.

Let us also return to Taylor's thinking on the question of written texts and their permanence in societies,

linking it to the craft of typography, practiced by Lídio Corró, in Tenda dos milagres, located in Ladeira do

Tabuão (1969, p. 16). Typography is defined by Derrida as the art of printing, whose property is made by the

duration of the characters written on the surface of the paper. (Derrida, 2001, p. 41)

That said, it should be remembered that, in addition to being the "rector's office" of the open university of

Pelourinho, bringing together the "notables of poverty, a numerous and essential assembly" (Amado, 1969,

p. 104), Mestre Corró's workshop functioned (like other printing presses) as a meeting point for the

intellectual elite and disseminated the knowledge produced by this intellectuality through the product of their

work, printed texts:

[...] troubadours, guitarists, improvisers, authors of small brochures composed and printed in the printing house of Master

Lídio Corró and in other poor workshops, sell novels and poetry in the free territory for fifty réis and a penny. They are

poets, pamphleteers, chroniclers, moralists. They report and comment on city life, putting every event and invented story

into rhyme, both of which are astonishing [...]”. (Amado, 1969, p. 13).

Thus, she connects with popular knowledge, expressed in cordel leaflets, on the one hand, and formal

knowledge, on the other, when she takes on the responsibility of transforming Archanjo's notes into books,

as well as taking on the responsibility of sending them to formal institutions of knowledge, understanding the

value of Archanjo's texts and the need to disseminate and preserve them for posterity. In both cases, the issue

of the durability of printed texts must be considered.

Jorge Amado thus highlights the importance of typographers and popular printing houses, understanding

this art/craft as fundamental for the transmission of knowledge, preventing its loss, as happens with the oral

transmission of knowledge. The Tent of Miracles, the rectory of the popular university in the vast and free

territory of Pelourinho, is an instrument of collective identification for those who occupy that territory,

reiterating the question of identity present in the novel, as well as being a metaphor and metonymy for

Amado's text itself.

On the other hand, Mestre Lídio Corró's "Tenda dos milagres" (Tent of Miracles) can be thought of as an

ironic subversion of the Greek "arkheion," the residence of the archons, high magistrates, holders of power,

and place where official documents were kept. In short, a place where collective memory was kept, from

which archives as we know them today originated. From this perspective, Archanjo and Corró are a kind of

"archon," since they exercise a certain degree of control, as an epistemic authority, in the Pelourinho

neighborhood, and the workshop/studio is a place of memory for things and events related to subalternized

groups.

From this, it is worth highlighting the defining role of formal institutions of memory and knowledge, which

ultimately work from an archival perspective, in constructing the figure of Pedro Archanjo as an intellectual

and disseminating his work. If he had not sent copies of his books to these institutions, "national and foreign

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libraries, his books would not have been talked about again, as Levenson would not have discovered them"

(1969, p. 35).

In Salvador, only a few ethnologists and anthropologists knew about them [the books], most of them from hearsay.

Suddenly, not only journalists but also public authorities, the university, intellectuals, the institute, academia, the Faculty

of Medicine, poets, teachers, students, the theater community, the numerous phalanx of ethnology and anthropology, the

Center for Folkloric Studies, the tourism crowd, and other idlers all realized that we had a great man, an illustrious author,

and we did not know him, we did not even mention him in speeches, relegating him to complete anonymity, without any

promotion. Then the race around Archanjo and his work began. A lot of paper, ink, and newspaper space was spent,

starting with Levenson's interview, to salute, analyze, study, comment on, and praise the wronged writer. It was necessary

to make up for lost time, correct the mistake, and erase the silence of so many years. (Amado, 1969, p. 35).

Thus, we emphasize the importance of the novel, for its archiving procedures, for recording Afro-Brazilian

popular cultural and religious tradition, whose grandeur is not due to the exhaustion of terms, given that the

lists, as Maciel (2009) considered, are as subjective as fiction can be, are insufficient, being governed by an

arbitrary character of the classification systems that govern our lives and knowledge.

Of the other figures from the archives discussed in this article, the police report is a discursive genre

distinguished from another discursive genre, the epigraph of the novel: "Brown, commoner, and poor—a

know-it-all and a tough guy. (From a police report on Pedro Archanjo, in 1926)." Its protocol function, as an

external discourse highlighted at the beginning of a work, or in a section of that work, which “functions as a

border” (Genette, 2009, p. 131). And, as a border, it frames the reading that will follow as an act; it gives

clues; and it acts as a threshold that separates the exterior from what will be interior. Thus, before entering

the text itself, there is a clue from this other textual genre: the police report.

This discursive genre, used in police work, is a formal, functional document in which the police authority

reports, in an organized and selective manner, the procedures carried out, the information gathered, and the

preliminary conclusions about the existence of a criminal act and the evidence of its perpetrator, which will

be the basis for the indictment, which is not the conviction itself, but rather the formalization of the status of

the person under investigation, so that they can be brought to trial. As stated above, we see the use of terms

from popular vernacular, riddled with prejudice to describe the "subject," framing him not as the legitimate

intellectual or researcher that he is, but as a presumptuous and potentially problematic individual,

disqualifying his character and his work based on his origin and ethnicity. This "factual and social"

description was made by someone in a position of public trust, that is, someone who, as part of their job, has

credibility and a presumption of truthfulness in the eyes of society. They are an instrument of power

responsible for constructing an official version of events, based on selectively described facts and persuasive

interpretations that contrast with their supposed neutrality and objectivity.

The elements of this description touch on issues that run throughout the novel, which are our long-standing,

interrelated issues: racialization; authoritarianism; and the subordination of the poor, in a clear

disqualification of their knowledge, being seen as arrogant subjects, especially those who challenge the

dominant power, defended by forces that, despite their public security function, or in the name of that security,

do not shy away from a judicial function that they had before the republic, before the end of slavery in Brazil.

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http://www.ucs.br/etc/revistas/index.php/antares/article/view/576/433