It is a cold Sunday afternoon in Brazil. It is neither raining outside, nor an otherwise unpleasant day, but it is cold enough to warrant a blanket over my lap, as I write and work on some game ideas.
For a while now, I have been studying how to build games using ready-made engines in my spare time from the PhD which has consumed my life for the last five years and now reaches its conclusion. And I am finally settling down to a few ideas to work on from here on, and those ideas needed a place to exist.
A place for now will have to be just a name. Maybe it will grow into something else, something larger, even something which mixes game making with architecture and other forms of art, as forms of my expression, and maybe an umbrella large enough to bring others in. I dream of that, but for now, it is nothing but a promise, and a promise which starts with a name.
This name had to express who I am, and what I am, and several ideas in the past failed to reach that “just right” name which expresses who I am, what I believe in, where I am and where I come from. Fireworks explode outside, Brazil right now is walking into the gaming field in the football world cup, somewhere in the US of A. People cheer from their homes. Under my blanket I smile hoping this is some kind of good omen for what I am to start today. A good omen for this name.
Kizumba is a word that only exists in the place I was born, Rio de Janeiro. Even if I no longer live there, in that urban space between the fields of Campo Grande and the rivers of Rio da Prata, a typically Brazilian space of rivers and valleys and what used to be small farmland; I still carry its unique language and culture with me. It is a place in which when we want to ask for someone to hand us the hose to water our gardens, we ask for the “rubber” ( borracha ), and when it is raining, we reach to open our “hats” ( chapéus ) when everyone else is reaching for their umbrelas.
In this place where the rivers and mountains and farmland meet, families were formed from enslaved people and impoverished white immigrants, where religions mixed in peculiar ways, with a very standard catholic layer of relationships and practices for the sake of social norms and hierarchy, to adhere to daytime colonial white standards, while at night in the terreiros, small secluded places of worship for the African pantheon which came to Brazil with an important part of my bloodline, the prayers and practices of the sacred took place, often at night, often not to be spoken again the next day amongst fellow members of the well-to-do part of society. Still vestiges from times in which official marriages were not carried out by the powers of the government, but rather, by the Catholic Chuch, and your worship of your ancestral Orixás had to be carried in secret. The Japanese Catholic for a while had to hide their symbols of worship in mirrored devices and other strategies to escape prosecution. In Brazil the increasingly racially mixed population would adopt a few images of catholic devotion, strip them of their roman catholic meaning, and use them as avatars of their true Orixá, their actual deity of worship. In such an environment, it should come to no surprise that one religion was imbued with the façade of the socially adequate, while the other lived on as the place of the sacred, of the magic, of true power and miracles. Regardless of how visible the roots of our blood may be in the colour of our skin, as many families exercised to great extents, to marry whiter each generation to hide that fact.
In such a society, some words tended to carry within them, this duality of meaning, this duality of facades, a public and a private one, this quality of Janus. Words such as Terreiro, simply put, an ungardened crude soil area in your garden or backyard or in the community, where red or brown bare land exists, nothing grows for it is a place of movement, of walking, of hardened soil, a place for starting fires, making churrasco, parties, festivities, and religion. The religion which takes place within nature, within the community, under the rhythm of drums. Terreiro for some, is also a hidden place, a dark place, a negative connotation for the exact same reasons and the choice of where one falls under the social division, which face of Janus is the preferred one. Words such as Macumba, which can be either positive or negative, a word which represented party and dance and festivity, and carried on that same religions connotation, feared and shunned by white proper colonial society, but alive and well elsewhere.
Words such as Kizumba.
Kizumba most likely came from Kizomba, an Angolan dance, and so, something for a moment of happiness, celebration and freedom to be. In Rio, most likely Kizomba gained a local variation, and became Kizumba, to refer to those parties of the unwelcomed, unwhite, unicolonial in nature. For the white colonial coded society where I grew up, Kizumba meant Ruckus. Confusion. Somewhere many people gathered, to create confusion, to create disorder.
The freedom of some is the nightmare of others. I love such words that live in the knife’s edge of meaning, depending on the face of Janus you are facing at the moment. The party of the oppressed has always been the nightmare of the oppressor. The songs of freedom of some hit with the sound of revolutionary drums the ears of others with so much to fear. And the chaotic ways of collective creation of some, are dreadful to the eyes of the uncreative. The party and dance and jubilee of some, is the ruckus for those who like to do the othering.
Kizumba is a word which could only be born in the west side of Rio de Janeiro, in between the river, the hills and the farmland which would later become a suburban tapestry of mixed races and cultures. Kizumba so clearly talks to that place I come from, a trans woman, born of white and black bloods, who experienced the values, fears and privileges of that white colonial coded society, which also sought our blackness in magic and favors from our ancestral Gods and Goddesses in the Terreiros at night.
Kizumba é festa. Kizumba means party. Kizumba means Ruckus.
I hope I can do good by this name.
Because in the words of the Sage, RZA, it’s time to “Bring da motherfuckin' ruckus!”
Jessica Luchesi