In a pedagogical interview in this Sheet on Sunday (15), historian Luiz Antonio Simas said: “The essence of street Carnival is its spontaneity, its transgressive character.” “Carnival has survived all attempts to organize it because it has a unique dimension of collective reconstruction of the meaning of life.”
You can imagine what this “collective reconstruction of the meaning of life” would be based on what you see during the days of the festival — and also what you don’t see in the preparation for it. In the first case, the joy of belonging to something, even if ephemeral, and the person who is by your side, your equal in sharing that joy, you have never seen fatter (or thinner) and perhaps you will never see again.
There is also, and this discussion is central in São Paulo, the occupation of the city, so oriented towards cars, increasingly elitist in the policy of concession of its assets —parks, for example—, and, subjected as never before to the capital that irrigates the real estate sector and excludes.
Thus, it seems almost a miracle that blocks like Quem Tem Boca Vaia Roma appear in the city, which parades anarchically in a few blocks of Siciliano, part of Vila Romana, and whose founders deliberately chose not to be “big”, remaining faithful to a spontaneity that the São Paulo Carnival is losing with its vitaminized electric trios and its parades redistributed to regions that have nothing to do with the blocks’ origins.
QTB didn’t come out this Monday. Formed by several musicians who lived in the same one-story house next to the square that served as a gathering place for the parade, it perhaps no longer has the umbilical connection with the neighborhood that it had such an impact on.
One of its founders, musician and poet Gustavo Galo, 40, now living in Mantiqueira, says that the block changed the neighbors’ view of those residents who rehearsed and played day in and day out, sometimes disturbing the supposed peace of the region.
“There was a general contagion. The block ended up protecting us from dirty looks, sometimes we had to deal with the police, which the neighbors called. With the block, they started to see us not as messy young people, but as neighborhood workers.”
From the first parade, a decade ago, this small utopia of an almost idyllic city began for QTB and Siciliano, in which different residents know and help each other, in which traders still have accounts for payment in thirty or forty days — such as the Natalina bakery, the biggest attraction in the neighborhood and a key stop in the QTB parade — and that the block, as happened with the sports clubs in the past, comes to be understood as a collective heritage, something that future generations will insist on preserving. maintain.
Perhaps it is too much to ask of such narrow-minded politicians to understand the scale of this, especially with the million-dollar competition for sponsors who are solving what once seemed to these politicians to be a problem.
Today, ironically, they use Carnival not only as a great generator of economic revenue, but they allow themselves to assume a certain paternity of what they already call the “biggest Carnival in Brazil”.
Even so, the utopia of a better city lives on. As Galo says: “Carnival undoes hierarchical rigor, teaches us to live collectively and horizontally, and brings out routines that we ordinarily repress.”
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
