The Clinking of Christ’s, Chico/Gil’s and Criolo’s Cups: The Issue of Ethics in a Dialogic Toast

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the aim is to demonstrate the ethical-semantic impact of great time in the reaccentuation of two reformulations of the expression “let this cup pass from me.” Theoretically, we describe great time as semantic sectors of existence which frame the possibilities of meaning actualized in speech genres and concrete utterances. Methodologically, the song Cálice by Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil and the RAP Cálice by Criolo are dialogically disposed in relation to their context of production, to one another and to the biblical narratives Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and The Last Supper, which simultaneously convey status of utterance to the expression of which cup configures a metonym and fix the expression as an item of a cultural memory that we can now name Roman Catholic memory.¹ The discussion shows that the transposition of this utterance from one semantic sector of existence to another alters the reflection and refraction processes of ideological signs through a game of memories.

KEYWORDS:
Semantic sector of existence; Memory; Concrete utterance; Ethical act; Ideological sign

RESUMO

Neste artigo, o objetivo é demonstrar o impacto ético-semântico do grande tempo na reacentuação de duas reformulações da expressão “Afasta de mim este cálice”. Teoricamente, descrevemos grande tempo como áreas semânticas da existência que emolduram as possibilidades de sentido realizadas em gêneros discursivos e enunciados concretos. Metodologicamente, a canção Cálice de Chico Buarque e Gilberto Gil e o RAP Cálice de Criolo são dialogicamente dispostos em relação ao seu contexto de produção, a um e ao outro e às narrativas bíblicas Jesus no Jardim do Getsêmani e A Última Ceia, que simultaneamente conferem status de enunciado à expressão da qual cálice configura uma metonímia e fixam a expressão como um item de uma memória cultural que podemos nomear Católica Romana¹. A discussão mostra que a transposição do enunciado de uma área semântica da existência para outra altera os processos de reflexão e refração de signos ideológicos por meio de um jogo de memórias.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Área semântica da existência; Memória; Enunciado concreto; Ato ético; Signo ideológico

Introduction

In contemporary Brazilian history, songs have been a relevant arena of values. During the decades of military dictatorship (1964-1985), for example, an aesthetic movement known as Brazilian Popular Music (henceforth, MPB, the consolidated acronym in Portuguese) cunningly performed the political task of resisting the oppressive regime. At that time, composers had the challenge of simultaneously participating in the subversive discursive chain and misleading censors. Using codenames to sign their work was a common strategy of famous composers (especially, lyricists) to avoid veto threat. Also, in the meticulous work with verbal language, cultural memory from non-political spheres was frequently evoked to accomplish the artists’ resistance through poetry. In that scenario, songs were symbolic weapons in the ongoing struggle for democracy (NAPOLITANO, 2004; SALLES et al., 2015; KOGAWA, 2018; SANTOS FILHO; BORGES, 2019).

Under some different circumstances other musical movements also gave voice to the marginalized in Brazil. From late 1970s onwards, funk and RAP (initials of Rhythm and Poetry) have spread as marginal artistic movements in which the voice of the lower-class suburbia could eventually be heard. Both funk and RAP have been instruments for social identity and for aesthetic and political struggle (VIANNA, 1990; CASTIBLANCO LEMUS, 2005; DUTRA, 2007; REIS, 2007; GIMENO, 2009; ARAÚJO, 2018).

In this paper, the aim is to demonstrate the ethical-semantic impact of great time (BAKHTIN, 1999c; 1999d) in the reaccentuation of two reformulations of the expression “let this cup pass from me” in two Brazilian songs: Cálice [free translation: Cup], composed by Chico Buarque de Holanda and Gilberto Gil and censured in 1973, and Cálice, composed by rapper Kleber Cavalcante Gomes, known as Criolo, in 2011. The original utterance - “let this cup pass from me” - integrates a narrative in the Biblical Gospel according to Mathew (ch. 26, vss. 36-46), Mark (ch. 14, vss. 32-42) and Luke (ch. 22, vss. 40-46), usually entitled “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.” It narrates the last moments of Jesus before being arrested, convicted and crucified, and it reveals a complex ideological clash.

On the one hand, Jews, especially the Pharisees, accused Jesus of blasphemy for having claimed to be the Son of God. That is the first clash. Guardians of the Jewish tradition expected the Messiah to accomplish a political independence from the Roman Empire, but Jesus seemed to have performed a religious, spiritual release. This clash distinguished, at first, Jews from Jewish-Christians. On the other hand, being under the political domain of the Roman Empire, Pharisees did not have the authority to arrest and convict Jesus. Therefore, they adjusted their accusation so that it could trigger a Roman response. They accused Jesus of self-declaring the King of the Jews and menacing the so-called “Pax Romana.” In this case, there was a religious and political clash.

The Catholic Church derives from the Jewish-Christian branch, and spreads the Biblical Gospel especially around the Western world within the period known as Great Navigations. This way, in the 15^th century, the Portuguese brought to Brazil not only their language, but many other cultural frames, including religion. Despite the ethnical miscegenation that occurred along the centuries afterwards, linguistic and religious colonization were deeply successful in Brazil. Thus, many of the Biblical narratives constituted its cultural repertory.

In short, this is the fountain from which both composers of the songs entitled Cálice drink to utter their ethical position of political resistance. However, as we have just highlighted, the tension between religion and politics has been an issue since the emergence of the original utterance. Because the metaphorical religious language of the songs does not inaugurate this articulation with politics, we hypothesize that the historical conditions of the great time are crucial to the ethical-semantic reaccentuation of this utterance in the Brazilian context.

1 The Verbal-Ideological World: Existence as a Dynamic Discursive Process

Despite all the philosophical speculation around the idea of existence, in this paper, we select from the etymology of the word the basic schemes on which we ground its dialogic conception. In Latin, sistō, sistere means “to cause to stand, set up, take a stand” (DE VAAN, 2008). The formative ex indicates a movement, a direction, and is usually translated as “out, out of.” Etymologically, the concept expressed by the compound existere implicates the movement of taking a position, of taking a stand. Dialogically, existence conceptualizes this dynamic process of “taking a stand” in relation to the cultural bonds which turn individuals into members of social groups. This dialogic understanding of existence has influenced the theoretical production of Bakhtin/Medvedev/Vološinov Circle (henceforth, BMV Circle) since the beginning.

In Bakhtin’s work, the concept of act - responsible act - conveys this idea of assuming a position towards the other, towards the thought, towards life-as-deed. It is conceived in the unfinished book probably written between 1919 and 1921 and originally published some years after his death (BAKHTIN, 1995). In this unfinished work, Bakhtin sustains that there is no way for one to escape from his/her responsibility of existing. Whatever meaningful act one performs, it is socially and culturally implicated, and, because of that, one’s position impacts the relations around him/her. The Russian author goes further and states that not even a thought, including a theoretical thought, is excused from this active participation in the ongoing event of being, i.e, existing.

Actual act-performing thinking is an emotional-volitional thinking, a thinking that intonates, and this intonation permeates in an essential manner all moments of a thought’s content. The emotional-volitional tone circumfuses the whole content/sense of a thought in the actually performed act and relates it to once-occurrent Being-as-event (BAKHTIN, 1995, p.34, emphasis added).

Therefore, Bakhtin understands that making sense results from the constitutive movement of positioning and taking part in the communicative chain which defines “Being-as-event.”

I, too, exist [et ego sum] [Disclaimer in the consulted edition: In all the emotional-volitional, performative [postupochnaia] fullness of this affirmation] actually - in the whole and assume the obligation to say this word. I, too, participate in Being in a once-occurrent and never-repeatable manner: I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else. In the given once-occurrent point where I am now located, no one else has ever been located in the once-occurrent time and once-occurrent space of once-occurrent Being. [...] That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else. The uniqueness or singularity of present-on-hand Being is compellently obligatory (BAKHTIN, 1995, p.40, emphasis added).

He summarizes this movement of existing as “my non-alibi in Being” (BAKHTIN, 1995, p.40). It is over this non-alibi in Being that Bakhtin builds a dialogic theory of language. According to him, existence unfolds into a discursive communicative chain - the actual unit of which is the utterance (BAKHTIN, 1999a, 2016a, 2016b). This way, we understand that uttering is the means of existing.

In his late notes made in 1970-71, Bakhtin (1999b) describes the way he conceives the semantic processing in the ongoing event of existing. For rhetoric sake, he identifies two interdependent meaningful planes: a stability and an instability plane. Because individuals do not live in social void, but in society, there is an aspect of meaning which is necessarily distributed, i.e., it is shared with the others with whom one forms a social unit. This distribution among the social group(s) constitutes the stability plane of meaning. Because utterances are singularly instantiated and can never be repeated, there is an aspect of meaning which is temporally and spatially situated. This is the instability plane. The utterance is the phenomenon that derives from the intersection of these two planes.

Each element of speech is perceived on two planes: on the plane of the repeatability of language and on the plane of the unrepeatability of the utterance. Through the utterance, language joins the historical unrepeatability and unfinalized totality of the logosphere (BAKHTIN, 1999b, p.134).

In the conceptual scope, those two planes provoke the distinction between meaning itself (or sense) and distributed meaning. Both integrate semantic processing, but sense profiles what derives from the situated character of the utterance, and distributed meaning profiles the references shared by the social group(s). The former is characterized by Bakhtin (1999b, p.145) as a response: “Meaning always responds to particular questions. Anything that does not respond to something seems meaningless to us; it is removed from dialogue”; the latter, as a shared repertory that is not directly linked to the constant dialogue: “Formal definition is removed from dialogue, but it is deliberately and conventionally abstracted from it. It contains potential meaning” (BAKHTIN, 1999b, p.145). They both derive from actual social interaction; their distinction is a matter of focus on different planes of semantic processing.

It allows us to say that, from the dialogic point of view, semantic processing involves the singular actualization of the repertory of the social group, and it necessarily involves evaluation.

Understanding repeatable elements and the unrepeatable whole. Recognizing and encountering the new and unfamiliar. Both of these aspects (recognition of the repeated and discovery of the new) should merge inseparably in the living act of understanding. After all, the unrepeatability of the whole is reflected in each repeatable element that participates in the whole (it is, as it were, repeatedly unrepeatable) (BAKHTIN, 1999b, p.142).

It means that semantic processing implies a complex perspectivation. Sense constitutes a social accomplishment that results from a situated work on language. Resulting from a situated work, it is necessarily framed by a concrete situational perspective. Distributed meaning constitutes a kind of shared reference which is the basis for that situated work. Because distributed meaning is abstracted from social dialogue, it functions as an index of common knowledge, which stabilizes a certain viewpoint. The viewpoint which frames an utterance necessarily implicates both an evaluation of the perspective stabilized in the distributed meaning and an evaluation of the situational perspective.

This complex perspectivation is actualized in the course of the ongoing existence, i.e., as the discursive communicative chain unfolds. Therefore, it takes place in social-cultural interaction, in which Bakhtin distinguishes two types of words: my word and the other’s word. These two types of words are qualitatively distinct in the sense that the other’s word roughly corresponds to what is available in the repertory of the social group, and my word corresponds to the singular and continuous effort of making sense out of this repertory. Bakhtin states:

I live in a world of others’ words. And my entire life is an orientation in this world, a reaction to others’ words (an infinitively diverse reaction), beginning with my assimilation of them (in the process of initial mastery of speech) and ending with assimilation of the wealth of human culture (expressed in the word or in other semiotic materials) (BAKHTIN, 1999b, p.143).

In a slightly different fashion, in a book first published in 1928, Medvedev conceives this “world of the other’s words” as an ideological world (MEDVEDEV, 1991). However, before going through Medvedev’s discussion on this matter, it is important to highlight two points. Firstly, the excerpts selected for consideration here were taken from a piece of work in which Medvedev is performing a particular task: to include literary scholarship in the Marxist agenda in the USSR of his time. His institutional position demanded this effort, and the arguments he presents in the book are crucial to the present discussion. However, details about his working conditions and the intellectual history of his thought within BMV Circle exceed the scope of this article.²

Secondly, the notion of “ideology” in Russia/the USSR in the 1920s was under dispute, and whatever concept we evoke from there/then may differ from its present reception, especially in the Western world. For this paper, we can say that “ideology” refers to the symbolic systems produced by society to organize human relations with each other and with the environment. That is the case of law, science, art, religion and any other system for regulating and categorizing social relations. In Vološinov’s words, “By ideology we have in mind the whole totality of the reflexions and refractions in the human brain of social and natural reality, as it is expressed and fixed by man in word, drawing, diagram or other form of sign” (VOLOŠINOV, 1983b, p.113, emphasis added). Thus, in this paper, whenever we refer to “ideology,” “field of ideological creativity” or when we characterize something as “ideological,” we speak of the cultural fields, like art, religion, law, science, and so on, that frame and organize human relations with one another and that mediate their relation with the environment.³

Having set that, we reiterate that Medvedev defines the “world of the other’s word” as an ideological world, and there is room for calling it a verbal-ideological world.

Social man is surrounded by ideological phenomena, by objects-signs [veshch’-znak] of various types and categories: by words in the multifarious forms of their realization (sounds, writing, and the others), by scientific statements, religious symbols and beliefs, works of art, and so on. All these things in their totality comprise the ideological environment, which forms a solid ring around man. And man’s consciousness lives and develops in this environment. Human consciousness does not come into contact with existence directly, but through the medium of the surrounding ideological world. The ideological environment is the realized, materialized, eternally expressed social consciousness of a given collective. It is determined by the collective’s economic existence and, in turn, determines the individual consciousness of each member of the collective. In fact, the individual consciousness can only become a consciousness by being realized in the forms of the ideological environment proper to it: in language, in conventionalized gesture, in artistic image, in myth, and so on (MEDVEDEV, 1991, p.14).

Medvedev argues that individuals contact the world through the frame of a social group. It is from and through the perspective of the group that one makes sense of whatever is around him/her. Thus, the process of making sense relies on what is distributed among the collective, and this distributed reference is the basis of semiosis. The Russian professor also mentions that every ideological product is an object of intercourse (MEDVEDEV, 1991). That is one of the various reasons why we can assume that there is a coherence between Medvedev’s and Bakhtin’s thought. Even if we see a kind of phenomenological bias in Bakhtin’s thought and a Marxist speculation in Medvedev’s, they both consider existence as the assumption of a perspective, and that the basis of such perspective is distributed among the social group and singularly actualized in social intercourse.

So far, we have stated that, from the dialogic point of view, existence occurs in sociocultural interaction, and it implies a historical approach to language instantiation. This means that history necessarily impacts the production of language and the circulation of discourses, but how does it happen? The historical condition of any utterance is assumed by the thinkers of BMV Circle in, at least, two theoretical ways of relating different levels of temporality in the production of utterances and circulation of discourses. Bakhtin (1999d, p.169), for instance, distinguishes “small time (the present day, the recent past, and the foreseeable [desired] future)” and “great time - infinite and unfinalized dialogue in which no meaning dies”; he completes: “There is neither a first or last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). [...] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time” (BAKHTIN, 1999d, p.170). The Russian thinker states that much of the complex cultural condition of humanity is only revealed on the level of great time, which seems to be the case we shall examine soon.

Vološinov (1973) also distinguishes two temporal levels, and he argues that both determine any discursive interaction: “the immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine - and determine from within, so to speak - the structure of the utterance” (VOLOŠINOV, 1973, p.86). The integration of these two temporal levels defines BMV Circle’s comprehension of history. For the Russian thinkers, history consists of dialogic relational dynamics that take place through the tension between the time span of singular interactional instantiations (Bakhtin’s small time) and the flow of superordinate transformations that make cultural reframing possible (MAGALHÃES; KOGAWA, 2019).

If this temporal differentiation and integration is conceptually relevant, its methodological approach is not necessarily clear. How can we tackle “the broader social milieu”? How do we deal with the dialogue that takes place among cultures, peoples, nations over centuries and millennia? How do we access the “boundless past and future”? Drawing frontiers seems to be the key to shed light on this challenge.

Vološinov (1973; 1983a) sees semiosis and social organization as interdependent. The way he understands this interdependence relies on the fact that any cultural product, i.e., whatever is assumed beyond its natural condition, is comprehended through the ties that constitute the social group in which that product emerges, and not simply through the physicochemical aspects of it. Consider, for example, a tree. As an element of nature, it equals itself. Once it is symbolized as an item of landscaping or an item of the rain forest, it exceeds its natural condition and means something, and its semiosis depends upon the validation of a cultural structure. As a concept, the tree has been interpreted through some social lenses - Ecology, Biology, and so on -; it has been (culturally) semiotized.

This means that the moment we symbolize we adjust to some social orientation and trigger the process of semiosis. The tree as a natural element remains a tree. It is the cultural organization that establishes the conditions to symbolize it as the source of some medicine, as an item of landscaping, as an item of the rain forest, and so on.

Because Vološinov (1973) understands that social history is implicated in semiosis, he describes semantic processing and change as culturally motivated phenomena and, therefore, historically and socially conditioned. His words are worth quoting at length:

The generative process of signification in language is always associated with the generation of the evaluative purview of a particular social group, and the generation of an evaluative purview - in the sense of the totality of all those things that have meaning and importance for the particular group - is entirely determined by expansion of the economic basis. As the economic basis expands, it promotes an actual expansion in the scope of existence which is accessible, comprehensible, and vital to man. The prehistoric herdsman was virtually interested in nothing, and virtually nothing had any bearing on him. Man at the end of the epoch of capitalism is directly concerned about everything, his interests reaching the remotest corners of the earth and even the most distant stars. This expansion of evaluative purview comes about dialectically. New aspects of existence, once they are drawn into the sphere of social interest, once they make contact with the human world and human emotion, do not coexist peacefully with other elements of existence previously drawn in, but engage them in a struggle, reevaluate them, and bring about a change in their position within the unity of the evaluative purview. This dialectical generative process is reflected in the generation of semantic properties in language. A new significance emanates from an old one, and does so with its help, but this happens so that the new significance can enter into contradiction with the old one and restructure it. The outcome is a constant struggle of accents in each semantic sector of existence. There is nothing in the structure of signification [the stability plane of meaning mentioned earlier in this paper] that could be said to transcend the generative process, to be independent of the dialectical expansion of social purview. Society in process of generation expands its perception of the generative process of existence. There is nothing in this that could be said to be absolutely fixed. And that is how it happens that meaning - an abstract, self-identical element - is subsumed under theme [the instability plane of meaning] and torn apart by theme’s living contradictions so as to return in the shape of a new meaning with a fixity and self-identity only for the while, just as it had before (VOLOŠINOV, 1973, p.106 - the highlights are ours).

As a theoretical construct that relates the production of meanings to social history, semantic sector of existence describes a superordinate condition to semiosis and enables us to sketch meaningful boundaries within great time span. In the scope of his discussion, Vološinov (1973) highlights the cultural potential of words. He affirms that “the word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence” (p.13) because, different from other kinds of semiotic material which are “specialized for some particular field of ideological creativity” (p.14), the word - or the linguistic sign - “can carry out ideological functions of any kind - scientific, aesthetic, ethical, religious” (p.14).

This is exactly the case under analysis in this paper. In the Biblical narrative “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,” the word cup functions as an index of the discourse built through a political-religious tension and establishes a basis for a Jewish-Christian cultural memory. The complex cultural conformation to some deity established the production conditions of the tension that is constitutive of such memory.

The political organization of the Roman Empire was founded, among other aspects, over religious tolerance. Nevertheless, the Empire assumed religion as a regulating reference, and there was no clear-cut distinction between Church/State, being the Emperor the maximum pontiff. This way, Judaism was tolerated by the Empire, but the strict monotheism of Jews provoked a political-religious tension. This tension led to a ferocious persecution to Christians in the first centuries A.D. It was only four centuries after the death of Jesus that Emperor Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and favoured Christians. Afterwards, the alignment of the Empire with Christianity culminated in the institutionalization of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church was the institutional device used by the Portuguese to establish the religious frame for the colony of Brazil in the 15^th century, and the institution remained a strong cultural memory vector until the constitution of the Republic in late 19^th century. Despite sociocultural changes along the centuries, it is still pervasive. The composition of a popular song in late 20^th century and in early 21^st century assimilating and reaccentuating key elements of this Catholic memory corroborates that. However, the transposition of indexes of this cultural memory to a different semantic sector of existence and to a different cultural field and discursive sphere - in Vološinov’s terms, to a different field of ideological creativity (VOLOŠINOV, 1973) - impacts the organization of speech genres (BAKHTIN, 1999a) and alters the ethical act performed through each utterance. This indicates how words are ideologically versatile.

Note that this versatility clearly distinguishes Vološinov’s notion of sign from Saussure’s. From the dialogic point of view, signs do not derive from intra-systemic relations but from the intersection of social history and cultural systems in symbolization. Thus, we can say that for Vološinov - as for the other thinkers of BMV Circle - linguistic signs matter once they reveal aspects of the ideological world. Taking into account the pervasive character of linguistic signs, we can rename it verbal-ideological world.

In dialogic terms, the semantic sectors of existence describe the historical conditions under which social groups frame and mediate the relation of the individual with the others and with the environment and the relation among social groups. Semantic sectors of existence constitute a superordinate constraint to the ways one can take a stand in the ongoing process of living in society, and language is an integral part of them, as we shall see in the next section.

2 Social Memory and the Ethical-Aesthetic Aspect of Uttering

Social interaction is actualized through concrete utterances and is constrained by a superordinate symbolic system, theoretically labelled semantic sectors of existence. However, utterances do not immediately integrate this superordinate constraint. There are other levels of symbolic arrangements which organize the ways of taking part in the verbal-ideological world.

The verbal-ideological conditions of the Roman Empire correspond to what we call a pre-modern world. In this semantic sector of existence, traditional societies were regulated by religious myth, so that there was no clear-cut distinction between religion and the State. In the modern world, the ideal of nation arose as a cultural organization in which religion and State were separate institutions (THIESSE, 1999). Dialogically, we can say that the pre-modern and modern world differ because of the semantic sectors of existence that regulate social functioning. This way, theocracy and democracy constitute not only two ways of government, but two different superordinate symbolic systems that constrain the ways social groups are organized and the ways they relate and interact.

Dufour (2003) highlights two characteristics that detach modern from pre-modern references. Firstly, he differentiates the transcendent asymmetry which separates deity and subjects in a traditional society from the anthropocentric references that regulate socio cultural relations in a modern society. Secondly, he draws attention to the fact that, in pre-modern society, there is one regulating value and validating device for cultural organization - deity/religion. In modern society, the regulating values and validating devices are plural - State, Reason, Science. This way, in a theocratic society, the cultural fields are subordinated to religion and its myths. Art, law, science somehow respond to the validating status of religious values. In a democratic society, the cultural fields respond to multiple axiological references - State, Reason, Science - and religion constitutes one of the cultural fields, like art and law.

These are the macro scenarios which encompass the utterances under analysis here. The Biblical Gospel was produced in a theocratic culture organized into an Empire which tolerated the religion of the social groups under its domain; the songs composed elsewhere about 20 centuries afterwards were produced in an anthropocentric society struggling for freedom of expression and social justice. However, there is no immediate link between those scenarios. Cultural memory is a condition to the establishment of a social legacy spread over the Western world. The issue pursued in this paper derives from the transposition of an element of a Roman Catholic memory fixed in Gospel narratives into a different semantic sector of existence and from its impact on the reaccentuation of values. In order to understand how this pervasive Christian memory has been transposed into popular Brazilian songs, we specify the ethical-aesthetic configuration implicated in the concept of memory from the dialogic perspective.

Bakhtin (1999b) makes it clear that memory is not a matter of individual recollection. He says that whatever can penetrate into an individual’s psyche has migrated from “the memories of languages, genres, and rituals” (BAKHTIN, 1999b, p.144). It means that he conceives memory as a social phenomenon manifested in cultural forms “(including forms of language and spoken speech), and in this sense they [cultural forms] are inter-subjective and inter-individual (and consequently social)” (BAKHTIN, 1981, p.249).

Amorim (2009) draws attention to the distinction that Bakhtin (1990) makes between the memory of the object from the memory of the subject. The former corresponds to the memory preserved in objective forms which constitute cultural legacy, just like already quoted. In short, we can say that it is a set of social voices that, by indicating a certain historical track as well as a certain ideological repertory, reverberates distributed meanings in cultural objects, like linguistic forms, rituals, and so on. The memory of the object is the attribute that guarantees place and relevance in the verbal-ideological world. The memory of the subject derives from the aesthetic position of the subjects implicated in the utterance. In the aesthetic position in which one receives the finalization of the other - the position of the character - the memory of the subject is oriented towards the horizon of meaning. Within the frame of the horizon, meaning potential is a process of becoming, and the memory that derives from this position can be categorized as a memory of the future (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.126). Because the horizon is ahead and constitutes a destination, a direction for the subject objectified as a character, Bakhtin (1990) highlights the moral and ethical aspect of it, and Magalhães (2019) relates this moral and ethical aspect to the pragmatic implication of the memory of the future. Differently, in the aesthetic position of the author, the subject is not oriented towards the horizon, but towards the finalization inherent to the act of creating. It means that this memory produces finalization, and in order to produce that the subject in author position must have an overview of the whole meaning so that the prospective horizon of the character constitutes an object finalized by the author. The memory that derives from this aesthetic position can be categorized as a memory of the past (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.126). Obviously, this is not free from ethical responsibility, but it is determined by its aesthetic function of finalizing, which produces meaning itself, and is not guided by the horizon of meaning potential.

In the Biblical context, “Let this cup pass from me” has two enunciative planes which distinguish between the citing and the cited context and mobilize different dialogic partners (BAKHTIN, 2016a; b). In the cited context, Jesus entreats the Father to deliver him from God’s wrath - the cup - and, in the citing context, the Evangelists write Jesus’s prayer of supplication. In the first context, the material and pragmatic production of the prayer is actualized through the interaction between Christ, the author of the prayer; Yahweh, God the Father, to whom the prayer is addressed; and the object of the prayer, the plea for deliverance. For a Jew at that time, the word cup integrated a cultural repertory with two excluding distributed meanings. In various Psalms, in the original language, the word כּוכּ [kōws] (CLINES, 1993-2001) is used as metaphor for God’s blessings and salvation towards his people. This is the case of Ps 16:5, 23:5, 116:13. However, it can also function as a metaphor for quite the opposite, God’s wrath especially towards the impious people, as in Ps11:6, 75:8. In prophetic books, this metaphor for God’s wrath is reiterated, as in Is 51:17, Jr 25:15, Hab 2:16. Considering Jesus’s mission as a sacrificial act of atonement for the sins of those who he gathered into God’s Spiritual Kingdom, the cup instantiated in his plea evokes from this literary Jewish repertory the metaphor for the punitive wrath of God. Within the Jewish scope, it is all at once a religious and a judicial appeal.

In the citing context, the prayer is not a pragmatic act, but it accomplishes the discursive task of integrating a literary repertory, which constitutes a cultural memory - or, according to Bakhtin (1981; 1999b), a memory objectified in cultural forms. Among the synoptic Gospels, the one according to Luke seems to emphasize Jesus’s humanity. The fact that he is the only Evangelist to register the phenomenon of hematidrosis in “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane” corroborates this emphasis. Being a physician, this physical phenomenon must have had special relevance for Luke. Also, Luke seems to care for the chronological order of the narratives, which reflects human temporal experience. Anyway, the aesthetic finalization promoted in the citing context highlights Jesus’s human nature. In short, in the cited context, Jesus experiences the excruciating agony oriented towards the horizon, guided by a memory of the future; in the citing context, due to the finalization made feasible by the memory of the past of the author of the narrative, Jesus’s plea is signified as the beginning of his vicarious sacrifice.

Luke explicitly addresses his text to Theophilus (Lk 1:3). Some scholars consider that there has never been an empirical person named Theophilus, and that the name would represent a group of disciples that followed Jesus’s teachings (BÍBLIA DE ESTUDO DE GENEBRA, 2009a). Anyway, there seems to be a consensus that Luke’s first addressee was from Greece, which conveys a transcultural status to the narrative (KOESTHER, 2005; STORNIOLO, 2011; MARGUERAT, 2012; CARNEIRO, 2016). From a Christian point of view, the addressee projected to and evident in these writings can be any Gentile. So, the transcultural target of the narrative was probably all at once ethnical, geographic and religious. Finally, the acute human agony of Christ constitutes the enunciative object of the narrative Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the Roman Catholic tradition established with the institutionalization of Christianity centuries later, Luke’s text constituted an important object of the cultural memory, especially regarding the lexical hint which links this narrative to the one known as The Last supper (Lk 22:7-23).

We find The Last Supper some verses before Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the former, Jesus metaphorizes his blood by proposing that the wine of that supper should be a memorial of his sacrifice for those who would follow him. Later, this metaphor would be the basis for the Christian ritual institutionalized as the Holy Eucharist. In the latter, due to the chronological presentation of events, the blood Jesus sweats can already stand as the beginning of his self-sacrifice. The word for blood in the original language, αιµατι [aimati] (NOVO TESTAMENTO INTERLINEAR, 2004) and του αίmατός [tou aimatós] (NOVO TESTAMENTO INTERLINEAR, 2004; RUSCONI, 2003), respectively, establishes a material link between the narratives. This way, both of them are vectors for the consolidation of the figurative bond between blood and wine within the domain of the vicarious sacrifice. This constitutes a benchmark for Christian memory, in general, and for the Roman Catholic tradition, in particular.

The two enunciative planes of both narratives provoke different discursive projections over the metaphoric processes in three key lexical items in the prayer and in the Gospel narrative: “cup,” “wine” and “father.” According to the Jewish tradition, the figurativization of Yahweh as a father tended to be restricted to his relationship with the Davidic descendent who was expected to “free” the Hebrew people or to liturgical practices (BÍBLIA DE ESTUDO DE GENEBRA, 2009b, cf. notes to Jn 8:41). The people was usually metaphorized as flock, wife or bride, among others. Pragmatically, in the Jewish domain, the identification of Jesus as Son of God could be either a heresy or the accomplishment of a prophecy. We know that the Jewish tradition was built over the first interpretation. However, for Christianity, in general, and for the Roman Catholicism, in particular, God is metaphorized as the father of both Jesus and the members of the Church. Therefore, the explicit addressment of the prayer in “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane” constitutes a point of discursive tension in the original religious sphere, and it is over this tension that the Jewish-Christian memory is found.

This discursive tension also interpellates the other key words. Cup, which encompasses a series of metaphorical processes, integrates the religious sphere. Firstly, it names a liturgical sacred utensil. Secondly, the metaphors consolidated in the literary and prophetic Jewish traditions are added to this liturgical symbolism. To conceptualize the transcendent relation with Yahweh, prophets and poets had recourse to anthropopathy, which puts the transcendental and intangible being in human scale, i.e., in the scope of human perspective and domain. This way, they project human moods and feelings onto the transcendent divinity and metaphorize God’s “wrath.” Thirdly, the “wrath” is once more metaphorized as the “cup [of God’s wrath].” As a metaphor for this “God’s feeling,” cup functions as an index of discourses and values proper to the Jewish-Christian sphere. Wine and blood, likewise, follow this discursive configuration.

The semantic game unfolds through the tension between the meanings validated by the performance of a heresy, so that father, cup and wine function as indexes of a desecration, and the meanings validated as the accomplishment of specific prophecies, so that the same words are reaccentuated as indexes of the redeeming sacrifice that founds the Christian era. In any case, they produce meaning inside the Jewish-Christian sphere, in which a specific speech genre, the prayer, is the means to take part in the transcendent dialogue with Yahweh/God/Father. Out of the symbolic boundaries of this sphere framed by the complex social organization of the Jewish community under the domain of the Roman Empire, the ideological status of these words alters completely.

For the present discussion, the integration of these discourses and values into the cultural memory consolidated by the Roman Catholic Church is of special relevance. After all, this is the institution through which Christianity also constituted the Brazilian memory. The composers of the songs entitled Cálice [Cup] under analysis in this paper ultimately dialogue with the Roman Catholic evaluative orientation, and their dialogue is built through the way they play with the memory of the past and of the future, integrating aesthetic finalization and ethical claims. If social memory is objectified in cultural forms, including genres and linguistic forms, the subject’s memory operates according to the ethical-aesthetic position assumed also in relation to these objectifications, and the production of meaning (itself) is a continuous game of memories (MAGALHÃES, 2015). As we shall see in the next section, this game of memories simultaneously unfolds in two directions. On the one hand, there is the way the author of the utterance finalizes episodes of the Catholic memory. On the other, there is his ethical positioning as a character in social history.

This refined conceptual work around the issue of memory illuminates the present discussion in the sense that it allows us to describe different ethical levels implicated in the aesthetic approach to the utterance. In the cited context, Jesus suffers the expectation of sacrifice and is guided by the memory of the future which conveys a moral and pragmatic status to his prayer. In the citing context, the author of the narrative finalizes Jesus’s plea as a manifestation of humanity in relation to the vicarious sacrifice. Furthermore, this game of memories objectifies the narrative as a canonical text, corroborating, in general terms, a Christian memory, and in narrow terms, a Roman Catholic memory.

Magalhães (2012, 2013) has already highlighted the importance of writing, and therefore literacy, for the Lusophony policy constitutive of Brazilian memory and identity. Because usage integrates social evaluation into the memory objectified in words, lexicon is also constitutive of cultural legacy (MAGALHÃES, 2016), and written documents in Brazil preserve different levels of Portuguese-Brazilian memory. In this paper, we consider religion another facet of this. Since the arrival of the Portuguese in America, in the 15^th century, the presence of the Roman Catholic Church has been a strong ideological device for the design of Brazilian memory and identity. Important facts make its cultural pervasiveness evident: the first mass was celebrated in Brazil in 1500 by Portuguese priest Henrique Coimbra; Society of Jesus had large influence during the colonial period; in 1824, the Political Constitution of the Empire of Brazil established Roman Catholicism as the religion of the Empire. In present days, the Catholic Church is detached from the State. However, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics reckons that nearly 65% of Brazilians are self-declared Catholic.⁴ Therefore, despite the transformation in the cultural and political status of the Church in Brazil, we can affirm that it has constituted an important pillar of Brazilian memory.

3 When the Cups Clink: The Issue of Ethics in the Aesthetic Game of Memories

Among the instances in which the songs Cálice by Chico Buarque de Holanda (henceforth Chico, as he is widely known in Brazil) and Gilberto Gil and Cálice by Criolo constituted concrete utterances, in this paper, we analyse, respectively, the document with the lyrics evaluated and vetoed by censors in 1973⁵ and a 2’47’’ video with Criolo and Chico available on Criolo’s YouTube channel.⁶ We focus on the dialogic relations that reaccentuate some key lexical items as indexes of discourses and references for sociocultural positioning.

Chico and Gil’s song became famous with Milton Nascimento’s interpretation in 1978, but here we consider the document evaluated by censors in 1973. Anyway, the song integrates a historical context in which various aesthetic movements assumed the ethical task of resisting the regime. Singers and composers of popular songs in late 1960s and in 1970s turned music festivals into symbolic devices for circulation of discourses and values silenced by the dictatorial system (NAPOLITANO, 2004). In this political environment, MPB flourished and stood as discursive podium on which voices and dialogues of different orders inside the musical sphere and among different discursive spheres were reorganized, reaccentuated, amplified (CARETTA, 2013; SALLES; FERNANDES; MALUF-SOUZA, 2015). Chico was a prominent opponent of the military dictatorship, and his poetry developed as a voice of resistance (SANTOS FILHO; BORGES, 2019), especially in the way he built the author-character relationship (KOGAWA, 2018). His song composed with Gilberto Gil was no different. From a dialogic point of view, the document with the lyrics for Cálice submitted to censors in 1973 constituted an act, a way of taking a stand in the communicative chain of political struggle and artistic production in Brazil. The discursive sphere is hybrid - aesthetic-political - as it is shown in the game of memories the written document actualizes.

Chico/Gil’s lyrics mobilize the format of a prayer of supplication, Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in particular, to accomplish a non-religious task. By assimilating the structure of Jesus’s plea - “Father, take this cup away from me⁷” - and by repeating it three times, just like Jesus did in the Gospel narrative, a formal hint of dialogic relations is given, and the concrete utterance unfolds through a double voice.

There is a voice which echoes the plea for deliverance. It addresses God, the Father, and takes part in a transcendent dialogue; a common practice in Christianity. The object of such plea - the cup - is a paraphrase of Jesus’s supplication. There is also a voice which claims for freedom of expression. Both voices are heard in the actual performance of the act, which results in a semantic ambivalence. Based on Bakhtin (1984), Magalhães (2019, p.98) defines semantic ambivalence as “gradient correlation of [distributed] meanings socio-culturally validated to the production of discourses.”⁸ In the present discussion, this correlation is established in a threefold discursive movement.

Firstly, Roman Catholic memory is assimilated. The formal resemblance to the plea in the Gospel narrative evokes a cultural tradition - in this case, the Roman Catholic canon. Secondly, this memory is reorganized. Evidently, it is not a transcription of the Biblical text, but an adaptation into something else to accomplish something else. The words cup, blood and wine are key indexes of the semantic bridge between the canonical memory and this lyrical enunciative instantiation. Thirdly, the memory is politically reaccentuated. It is uttered neither in the context of Jesus’s pragmatic plea, nor in the context of a Biblical narrative. Even so, both contexts are mobilized for the aesthetic finalization of the ethical act performed in a semantic area of existence totally different from that of the original plea. The production of the song-utterance does not respond to a complex theocratic and polytheistic society, and the religious appeal plays a totally different role. It is a song in the form of a prayer, and not the other way round. This semantic hierarchy is determined by the discursive sphere in which the utterance emerges: the artistic-musical sphere.

The lyrics evaluated by the censors integrated the artistic-musical sphere of a young Republic whose democracy was under menace by a military regime imposed nine years before. This way, the song-utterance is not framed by a social functioning regulated by religious narratives, even if those narratives play a relevant role in the cultural memory of the groups implicated in the enunciative project. The fight for democracy confirms the anthropocentric dimension of the communicative chain and sets the ethical scope.

The song-utterance follows these processes of figurativization: in a source domain, there is the form of a prayer of supplication - the aesthetic elaboration; in the target domain, there is a subversive claim - the ethical act. Because of this aesthetic elaboration, we hear echoes of Biblical voices. The song assimilates values consolidated in the Catholic memory established in the religious sphere and reaccentuates the prayer of supplication genre by transposing it into another sphere. The struggle for democracy as expression of the superordinate symbolic frame of the social order indicates that State and Religion have different cultural status. The author of the song, and not of the prayer, also echoes a non-religious voice, a political voice. The discursive impact of this interchange of discursive spheres in the aesthetic elaboration and the ideological implication of the chorus of the song make the ethical act evident.

Considering these voices we can hear, the title of the song points to two discursive directions simultaneously: towards the past, by evoking the Catholic memory (aesthetic shaping); towards the future, by performing a claim for freedom of expression (ethical act). Through this tension, the plea that constitutes the object of the song-utterance is not the manifestation of an atoning suffering, but the performance of a political denunciation.

This artistically elaborated political complaint for freedom of expression is addressed to those who can restore a democratic discursive condition, and not actually to God, and the enunciative frontiers materially actualized in the notes of the censor reveal the semantic ambivalence constitutive of the utterance. In the document, the visual contrast between the lyrics, which were typed, the handwritten notes of the censor(s) and the stamped veto differentiates the speech subjects (the authors) in action and explicitly draws the limits of each utterance. Among the censors’ handwritten notes, there is one juxtaposed to the key word in the plea matching cálice [typed lyrics] - cale-se [handwritten note].⁹ This note makes the semantic ambivalence that links the utterance to a political discourse explicit, and the veto confirms the historical and pragmatic condition of the plea. If there were freedom of expression, the political complaint would not make sense. The veto, all at once, responds to the aesthetic utterance and validates the ethical performance.

The second song-utterance entitled Cálice we consider here is a RAP selected from a short video which is constituted by a small discursive chain itself. It is available on the YouTube channel of Brazilian composer Kleber Cavalcante Gomes, known by his artistic name Criolo. He was born ten years before the end of the dictatorial regime, so he started his artistic career in a political context of restored democracy. Nevertheless, the escalating social problems in Brazil had caused a critical segmentation. Lower classes settled on the periphery of the cities or in slums; thus, economic distinction was also geographically manifested. Especially because of this economic-geographic distribution, in Brazil, suburbs have been associated with a series of social problems, like poverty, violence, among others. Criolo builds his social and artistic identity as a member of the suburbs, and his artistic production responds to those social problems. He has been nominated to and won several musical awards;¹⁰ according to his own words in the rap-utterance Cálice, “my name is Criolo and rap has been my cradle, but there are no frontiers for my poetry.”^11,12

His YouTube channel was opened in 2011, and the short video we discuss here was posted in 2012. The 2’47’’ video can be segmented in this sequence: A) 1’’ to 5’’ - photo of Chico and Criolo standing side by side; B) 6’’ to 1’30’’ - Criolo’s performance of the RAP Cálice, apparently, in a humble bakery; C) 1’31’’ to 2’34’’ - Chico’s performance of a RAP in a show, as an explicit response to Criolo’s; D) 2’35’’ to 2’41’’ - photo similar to the one in part A, but this time Criolo is laying his head on Chico’s left shoulder and one reads these subtitles in quotes: “Welcome to the club Chicão, welcome to the club..¹³”; E) 2’42’’ to the end - credits to @FCO_CrioloMc. Following this division, in the present discussion we focus on sequences B and C.

In sequence B, we identify a musical utterance. The author is pragmatically realized by Criolo. At 35’’, he explicitly echoes Chico’s Cálice: “There is prejudice against the Northeastern/ There is prejudice against the black man/ There is prejudice against the illiterate/ But there is no prejudice if one of the three is rich, Father.”¹⁴ Northeastern, black man and illiterate stand as a metonym for social Brazilian problems. The North and North-East of the country are considerably poorer than the South and South-East, so cultural aspects of the former - accent, typical physique, and so on - tend to be discredited; due to the enslavement of Africans in Brazil Colony, racial prejudice has been a serious issue since then; because Brazil “inherited” the Portuguese social organization, literacy has been a crucial device for cultural participation (MAGALHÃES, 2012; 2013), and, therefore, illiteracy has been an obstacle for plain existence as a citizen. Nevertheless, all these problems are subsumed by the economic asymmetry, as indicated in the last line quoted. Then, we can deduce that the enunciative object is social denunciation. The threefold metonym formally resembles the repetition of Christ’s plea. Besides, the mention of “father” echoes the format of a prayer. However, the lines that follow construe a different addressee.

Although we can hear an echo of the Catholic memory just like in Chico/Gil’s song, at 51’’ the author utters: “Dictatorship continues, my friend Milton/ Repression continues, my friend Chico/ My name is Criolo and RAP has been my cradle, but there are no frontiers for my poetry.”¹⁵ Dictatorship and repression settle a chronotope (BAKHTIN, 1981) that compresses: a) the time and the space of Chico and Gil’s composition of Cálice, 1973; b) the time and space of its first release with Milton Nascimento’s interpretation, 1978; c) the time and space of the present utterance. This compression does not make those times and spaces coincide, but places them in a symbolic contiguity. Historically, dictatorship and repression are not the same. There was the time of the composition and veto; there was the time of the release; now is the time of echoing the other times. Dialogically, both dictatorship and repression are simultaneously referential, because they point to (reflect) a time of an actual imposed regime, and metaphorical, because they also function as social reference to signify the time and space of the present artistic utterance (refraction). This is feasible due to the aesthetic finalization of Chico and Gil, who integrate the cultural memory. This means that they are addressees and characters shaped in and representative of a space, a time, a political struggle. In 2012, Chico and Gil stand for cultural icons for their artistic talent and for their history of political fight. In the time span of the referential dictatorship, they are guided by a memory of the future and perform ethical acts (composition, release etc.) in the fight for freedom of expression; at the time of the performance of this RAP Cálice, they are, on the one hand, finalized as icons of the victory of democracy, and, on the other, uttered as direct addressees in the artistic and political dialogue.

At 1’03’’, the chorus reaccentuates the double-voiced signs of Chico and Gil’s song, and cup is replaced by biqueira,¹⁶ biate¹⁷ and cocaine, so that each of three utterances of the “plea” points to social problems to which Criolo responds. In this new format of the plea, the vocative “father” encompasses various semantic possibilities cultural memory has made available. In the orchestration of a multi-voiced social denunciation, it echoes the voice cited in the Gospel, the voice of the canonical Gospel and the double-voiced ethical act of Chico/Gil and Milton. As a conductor of voices, Criolo finalizes different elements and layers of cultural memory to create his rap-utterance; as a social “whistle-blower,” he stands as another warrior guided by the moral memory of the future. He is taking a stand in the ongoing discursive chain (he actualizes his verbal-ideological existence); he pragmatically performs an ethical act, and the response to it is ahead, expected, in the process of becoming.

At 2’01’’, Chico’s performance of another RAP as an explicit answer to Criolo’s Cálice produces a completion and (temporarily) finalizes Criolo’s RAP confirming its ethical and aesthetic cultural relevance. It guarantees the chaining of discourses of different moments of political struggle. Eventually, Chico performs the chorus of his own Cálice, and once more cup, wine and blood are reaccentuated. This time, within the same semantic sector of existence that frames Chico/Gil’s and Criolo’s composition, the utterance does not alter its ethical aspect, but the “cup” and the “bloodstained wine”¹⁸ are shaped by a memory of the past which produces the aesthetic finalization of the victory of democracy over the dictatorial regime in mid 1980s. We can say that Chico’s performance produces a positive finalization for the video, and part D confirms that. If the subtitles suggest Criolo’s ascendancy over Chico - he is welcoming Chico to X -, the position of the photographic subjects - Criolo laying his head over Chico’s shoulder - construes their relation the other way round. Also, the form of the hypocoristic - Chicão [free translation: Great Chico] - indicates the recognition of Chico’s iconic status in the political-artistic sphere. In short, the 2’47’’ video on Criolo’s YouTube channel consists of an optimistic utterance in the ongoing political-artistic discursive chain, and it refracts ideological facets which reiterate the aesthetic-ethical implication of cultural existence. In the game of memories, cup, wine and blood function as indexes of a complex ideological web.

Conclusion

In this paper, the aim was to demonstrate the semantic impact of great time in the reaccentuation of two reformulations of the expression “let this cup pass from me.” In order to achieve this goal, based on Vološinov (1973), great time was categorized as semantic sectors of existence, which were defined as superordinate symbolic systems that constrain the ways social groups are organized and the ways they relate and interact. Although those superordinate systems do semantically impact utterances in concrete interaction, they depend upon other verbal-ideological devices to operate.

This way, based on different contributions of BMV Circle, we defined the cultural environment as a verbal-ideological world in which taking part into a continuous discursive process is the means for existence. This situates any meaningful material beyond its natural status producing a comprehension that semantics responds to communicative demands and, therefore, is historically biased. Because of that, we treated semiotic forms as indexes of socio-culturally validated concepts. We also sustained that this verbal-ideological existence is performed through an aesthetic work with ethical outcome. For the case discussed here, the game of cultural memory (Roman Catholic memory) and memory of the subject (both of the past and of the future) displayed the processes of reaccentuation of lexical items making them indexes of socio-cultural values.

At last, we demonstrated that the distinction of semantic sectors of existence is crucial to differentiate between the historical emergence of the original utterance “Let this cup pass from me” and its assimilation, reorganization and reaccentuation in musical utterances of two moments of recent Brazilian history. We show that Jesus’s plea in Gospel narratives ultimately constitutes a representative text of a Catholic canon and, therefore, a cultural form in which a religious memory is objectified. Because it emerged in a complex polytheistic society, this cultural memory encompasses both religious and political dimensions. Once it is transposed into another semantic sector of existence, the religious dimension pragmatically gives place to an aesthetic one, validating musical utterances as modes of participation in an ongoing social struggle of a young democracy. Because of that, words like cup, wine and blood function as multi-voiced signs which simultaneously echo: a) the assimilation of a prayer constitutive of an episode of Roman Catholic memory; b) the reorganization of such prayer and memory into songs in the shape of a prayer; c) the reaccentuation of a religious-political act as aesthetic-political acts.

To sum up, we can say that, from the dialogic point of view, all those “cups” clink on a discursive toast because they all present a subversive dimension. Even though the semantic sectors of existence differentiate the pragmatic aspect of what we can categorize as “subversive,” somehow they all accomplish some political resistance at their time. Due to the historical condition of any social and political struggle, the game of memories operates this symbolic chaining of ethical acts - and their cultural meaning - of different subjects from different places and times.

• 1
  In this paper, references are made to biblical excerpts as components of the repertoire of the cultural memory specially linked to the Roman Catholic Church, because of its value and function in the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, since de 16th century, which was decisive for the constitution of the sense of Brazility. However, specially from de 19th century, with the organization of Protestant institutions in Brazil, these excerpts started to echo other trends of Christianity as well, so that this cultural memory could be broadly labled as “biblical memory.” As the history of Christianity in Brazil exceeds the scope of this paper, this note is registered, even though the mention to a Roman Catholic memory is kept.
• 2
  For further information, see, for example, Medvedev and Medvedeva (2014) and Medvedev, Medvedeva and Shepherd (2016).
• 3
  For further details about the complex sources for and reception of BMV Circle’s concept of ideology, see Brandist (2002), Tihanov (2002), Costa (2016), Grillo (2017), among others.
• 4
  Available at: https://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/noticias-censo?id=3&idnoticia=2170&view=noticia. Access on 12 Apr. 2020.
• 5
  Available at: http://www.arquivonacional.gov.br/br/ultimas-noticias/902-memorias-reveladas-2 Access on: 26 Apr 2020.
• 6
  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utJENUg2NJ4 Access on: 26 Apr 2020.
• 7
  Text in the original: “Pai, afasta de mim este cálice.”
• 8
  Text in the original: “correlação gradiente de significados validados socioculturalmente para produção de discurso.”
• 9
  In Portuguese, the symbolic constructions for cup [lyrics] and shut up [handwritten notes] are homophones: cálice; cale-se = /’kalisi/.
• 10
  Available at: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criolo_(cantor) Access on 26 Apr 2020.
• 11
  Text in the original: “me chamo Criolo e meu berço é o rap, mas não há fronteira para a minha poesia.”
• 12
  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utJENUg2NJ4 Access on: 26 Apr 2020.
• 13
  Text in the original: “Bem vindo ao clube Chicão, bem vindo ao clube.”
• 14
  Text in the original: “Há preconceito com o nordestino/ Há preconceito com o homem negro/ Há preconceito com o analfabeto/ Mas não há preconceito se um dos três for rico, Pai.”
• 15
  Text in the original: “A ditadura segue, meu amigo Milton/ A repressão segue, meu amigo Chico/ Me chamo Criolo e meu berço é o rap, mas não há fronteira para minha poesia.”
• 16
  In Brazilian Portuguese, a slang word which refers to illegal drug dealing and its complex system, involving users, dealers, criminal organizations, corrupt police officers and so on.
• 17
  A Brazilian adaptation for the pejorative and derogatory bitch.
• 18
  Text in the original: “vinho tinto de sangue”

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 Dec 2020
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2020

History

• Received
  18 June 2020
• Accepted
  05 Sept 2020