The unsubmissive metaphor of sortilégio, by Abdias Nascimento

Abstract

The play Sortilégio was originally written by Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) in 1951, in the context of the Teatro Experimental do Negro, a company founded by the playwright, actor and director seven years earlier in Rio de Janeiro. The play was performed in 1957 and published for the first time in 1959. The author made changes to the text, republishing it two decades later. Sortilégio combines references to urban reality with a poetic atmosphere and violent images, adding to the Brazilian scene, in an unprecedented way, visual and sound elements inspired by Afro-Brazilian rites, as well as emancipatory messages. It features seven songs, called pontos, ritual chants that frame the dramatic actions. The text has become a classic, a source for Brazilian theater in recent decades due to the metaphorical, metaphysical and political suggestions it contains. We relate these suggestions to each other in order to grasp their joint meaning, simultaneously political and metaphysical, according to the terms of the play.