Samba: The Ancestral Heartbeat of Brazil — Part One

The Griô: Haroldo Costa and the Book of a Country That Reads Little

Haroldo Costa died in Rio de Janeiro this past December, at ninety-five. Actor, writer, the first Black actor to stand on the stage of the Theatro Municipal, author of fifteen books, judge of Carnivals, founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro — and, above all of it, one of the great keepers of samba's history. When I filmed him, he was the historian. Now he is the history. He would not have minded the demotion. He spent his life arguing for it.

What he gave me, on camera, was an idea I have not been able to put down since.

He said the samba school is the book of a country that reads little. That in Brazil, a place where the printed page never reached everyone, the school took over the work the book could not do — it told the people their own history, in song and in procession, year after year, so that nothing essential would be lost. The parade is not decoration. It is a chapter. The escola de samba, he argued, narrates "a história da nossa história" — the history of our history — to people who would otherwise never read it.

Haroldo Costa, screen shot from Samba on your Feet

And at the center of that idea stood a figure he named with great care: the griô.

The griot, in West Africa, is the one who remembers. He carries the genealogies, the wars, the harvests, the names of the dead, and he sings them back to the living so the village knows who it is. Costa saw the griot reborn on the avenida where the carnival paredes. The puxador — the singer who carries the school's song — is the griot. He stands before forty thousand people and sings the whole samba alone, first, before the drums, before the crowd answers him. He is, Costa said, the historian. He is the one through whom the story passes.

This is the thought that should change how you watch a Carnival. The thing tourists photograph as spectacle, Costa heard as testimony. Behind the feathers and the floats is an oral tradition doing exactly what oral traditions have always done — defending a people against forgetting.

But the part of his argument that has stayed with me most is the part about who actually carries it.

The Velha Guarda. The Old Guard. The elders of the school, who if they did not see it born were there near the beginning, and who hold in their bodies the whole life of the thing. Costa called them the greatest reference in samba — and then, in the same breath, said the truest and saddest thing in the film: that they are, unfortunately, forgotten. Esquecidos. Desconhecidos. Forgotten and unknown. The living archive, neglected by the very culture it sustains.

He believed we owed them reverence. That every sambista should, in his phrase, bow the head before them. Not nostalgia — reverence, the kind owed to a library you are about to lose.

I did not understand, when I was filming, that I was recording a man describing his own future.

Because Haroldo Costa has now joined them. The historian became the history; the man who named the griôs is now one of the names a griô must carry. When he died, another figure of the Carnival called him exactly that — a griot. The frame he spent his life building for others closed, gently, around him. There is no irony in it. There is only the thing he was always telling us: that this is how a culture survives, by passing the voice from the one who is leaving to the one who remains.

That is what a film is, when it works. Not a monument — Costa distrusted monuments. A workshop. A place the voice is kept and handed on.

He gave me his, and now I am handing it to you.

The samba school is the book of a country that reads little. The man who taught me that has gone to the Old Guard, where he always said the real history was kept. The least I can do — the least any of us can do — is refuse to let him be forgotten.

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This is the first of a three-part series. Part Two follows the life of Cartola, from the construction scaffolds to the sambista's ring he willed to a friend. Part Three returns to the street Carnival that the dictatorship and the decades took away.