While Afro-descendants in the Americas often produced larger-than-life symbols of resistance, cunning, or vengeance—in Brazil, leaders of runaway slave settlements, like Zumbi; orixás (Yoruba and Candomblé gods) like Ogum, Xangô, or Iansã; inquiries (nkisi, Kongo powers and their material figures) like Matamba or Nkosi; or folkloric tricksters like Zé Malandro, bohemian flâneurs who disdain work but nevertheless always “get by”—we also find instances of dehumanized victims, enslaved bodies-without-will, who became objects of ritual devotion.
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Their images and icons generate not only pity or repulsion, but also reverence and attraction. Some were actual historical characters like the 18th century woman Rosa Maria Egipcácia da Vera Cruz, who, after 25 years of slave-labor, abuse, and forced prostitution as a so-called profit slave (escrava-de-ganho), began to have mystical visions and to recount them in vivid detail (Mott 1993). Initially subjected to whippings and exorcisms as one accused of being possessed by demons, she was later celebrated as having genuine visionary power and sanctioned mystical visions. She came to be revered as a saint, and everyday people sought her for miraculous results.1
2Other saints were less specific “historical” persons than composites or types, born of the collective imagination rather than actual flesh-and-blood partum. One example of a composite slave acquiring a sublime, saintly status in Brazil in the 20th century is named Escrava Anastácia (Slave Anastácia). Popular but officially unrecognized Catholic saints like Rosa Egipcácia, Slave Anastácia, Saint Expedito, or others suggestive of multi-racial fusions, like Maria Lionza in Venezuela (Canals 2017), or, today, the Mayan rogue saint Maximón in Guatemala and Honduras, demonstrate the creative vitality of Afro- and indigenized Catholicisms.
3Among this wide range of figures, Afro-Brazilians’ preferred saints were, during much of their history, severely repressed. Agents of the Church were mostly hostile toward African and Afro-American practices through at least the middle of the 20th century and beyond. Still, given the sheer inventive possibilities opened by the wide category of “saint,” it was and is no easy task to regulate its fecund production. So, for example, Roger Sansi described an Italian family of image-makers resident in Salvador da Bahia in the process of releasing a new saint, Our Lady Unmaker of Knots—consisting of a Virgin disentangling a knot—who suddenly gained a following (Sansi 2007, p. 37). In the north of Brazil, even bandits and highway killers have become semi-saints, or “saints under construction,” after their executions (Freitas 2000, p. 198). Eliane Freitas suggests that such “precarious saints”—precarious by virtue of their ambivalent moral status and fleeting fame—may be considered especially effective, not only as a result of their extraordinary violence followed by equally dramatic, painful deaths, but also because of their marginal status. Stuck in a purgatorial limbo, they work overtime to gain credit through benevolent acts and progress toward heaven. This makes them highly motivated, energetic, and useful (ibid.).
4Like the Virgin of Knots or the holy highway bandit, precarious saints are often activated via unofficial and unlikely paths. Slave Anastácia first came into being as an incarnate force via a French 19th century traveler’s sketch. Much later, after 1971, she became a saint and mass media phenomenon. She has since appeared in myriad shrines and multiple guises, drawing a constant flow of pilgrims and internet clicks. She is carried on prayer cards, prayed to in shrines, visited on websites, watched on soap operas, and worn in bikinis. Paradoxically, given that her image is one of violent bondage and silencing, she circulates and “speaks” everywhere. Through the figure of Anastácia, I interpret the ritual attraction to the dehumanized victim-body as a way of fine-tuning the idea of saints as a source of power, will, or agency.
5The kind of agency activated through exchanges with saints is not simply present or absent, notwithstanding certain religious traditions’ “purification” efforts to clearly establish or undermine presence (Keane 2007, p. 54). Rather it is emergent, depending on the mode of saints’ material and social configurations, and the mood evoked by the saint’s manifestation. An example: Slave Anastácia signifies diversely, and with varying social effects, for different groups of ethno-racial users (Burdick 1998; Wood 2011). John Burdick’s work is especially incisive on this score. He points out that white, middle-class women engage Slave Anastácia by highlighting her dramatic difference from them, highlighting the saint's dark skin and benign good nature and solicitude, in a more or less patron-client (or master-slave) form of exchange (1998, p. 159). By contrast, Black or mixed-race women’s engagement with Anastácia, when it exists—since many Black activists reject