O DESTINO TRÁGICO DA RAINHA PRETA: Pajelanças, realismo-mágico e missão civilizatória na cidade de São Luís-MA em fins do século XIX

Abstract

In São Luís do Maranhão, in the last decades of the 19th century, black women could be queens; live animals were extracted from human bodies; a witch or a sorcerer could be found on every street corner; plants could heal; water could be treated as mother goddesses; and even stones could live. Stories like these were common at the time, attracting the attention of a large audience – including the most skeptical – when they were published in newspapers. Among the similarities were the nickname pajelança, the black population involved, their relationships with a highly sought-after profession, the antagonism of the civilizing project in force, and a certain fascination that they already aroused. For what reasons would someone leave their home, cross the city to the printing presses and editorial offices of newspapers, to pay for a publication in which they invented and complained about these magical practices, fictitious or not? This is what this research investigates. In other words: the social dramas resulting from the pajelanças in that city at the end of the nineteenth century are examined, specifically those glimpsed by the press – linked to police documents, court records, current regulations, memoirs, literature and scientific productions. To investigate the aforementioned object, the basic problem questions the conflicts between the real and the intended São Luís caused by the persistent existence of pajés in its perimeter and surrounding areas. Parallel to what has already been written about the religious field of Maranhão created by the intersections between indigenous, african and european cultures, and its coercion in times of a supposed republic, here this magical phenomenon – but no less real for that – is perceived from the dynamics to which it belonged in that society at the end of the century; in the post-abolition of the slavery system. More than an amalgam of therapeutic and religious practices, which had against them a slave state in reformulation, pajelanças were communities, or solidarity networks, formed by individuals for whom reality was too hostile, unsustainable; whose belief system also integrated those who detracted from them, by removing them from obscurity, from private life, giving them relevance, socially recognizing their powers.