One Big Canoe

The last few months have been quite eventful in Brazil, and although I won’t attempt a political analysis here, I am often impressed how the micro reflects the macro, as the politics in the little Santo Daime church where I have been a member for the last nine years have also left me chanting #EleNão! It has all been food for thought as I am about to start a doctoral program in Latin American and Latino/a/x Studies at UCSC, eventually researching women and gender in relation to the Santo Daime doctrine, the corporeal centrality of the bailado or dancing works, and Umbandaime, the hybridization of which was initiated by women mediums from the South of Brazil, but which is now largely becoming dominated by male church leaders, even as other male church leaders reject its practice outright. I have loads of learning and coursework ahead before I can actually start my research, but I wanted to write one last blog entry before I hurl myself into this new chapter, which will surely lead to much more and better writing down the line. I got my acceptance notification back in February but just got back to Santa Cruz the other day as I wanted to stay in Brazil and round out this almost ten year cycle since I moved to Canoa Quebrada in 2009, finish up the festival season there, and attend EMFLORES, an annual women’s Daime gathering with which I’ve become involved the last few years.

I drank daime for the first time in Canoa Quebrada in 2004, but later was initiated or “got my star” in California with Luzia, whom I consider my “madrinha” or godmother within the lineage. Soon after, Fabio and I built our house in Canoa and went there to live, and I ended up focusing a great deal of energy on the local Daime church, Flor da Canoa, mostly because there were so few initiates on the women’s side to hold it down, and I wanted to keep drinking daime and doing my spiritual work, having left the life that I knew behind in California. Therefore, I was more than thrilled when within the last two years we finally started receiving an influx of women. In early 2017 we had received a family of four - a mother, daughter, and her two small children, who came to live at the house in front of the church property. These women lived for twenty five years in Mapiá, the heart center of our Santo Daime line located in the Amazon forest, and I helped get them established in Canoa, happy to finally have some more women with whom to join forces. Around that time, several local young women from Aracati, four of them only seventeen years old, also started attending works regularly.

I had been concerned about the lack of female leadership in the church, and that without more guidance, these young women might fall prey to the “machismo” culture in Canoa Quebrada, which is very strong. Around that same time I had become aware of several cases in which well known padrinhos were under the radar for having seduced or harassed multiple women in their currents, mostly members who were decades younger than them, and were in the middle of scandals rocking their respective communities. The #MeToo/#EuTambem movements had gained steam as more and more women were coming forward, telling their stories, seeking justice, and gaining power by joining forces after years of suffering from depression, threats, scandal and isolation. Despite my efforts to unite and motivate the women of Flor da Canoa through ciranda circles, hymn studies and a women’s only whatsapp group, three of the new, young fardadas ended up hooking up with men in the current soon after getting initiated, (and while I was away working on my grad school application, it might be worth mentioning,) two of them with men more than twice their age. This pattern of using the Santo Daime uniform as a seduction trap was all too obvious and upsetting to me, particularly because the behavior of these recent initiates dramatically changed as soon as they entered into these relationships. They seemed to give up their autonomy within the community and came to be known in relation to the men they were now dating, instantly gaining status within the ranks of our small church. I also lost influence with them as I, a madrinha and a foreigner, was no match for their new, fatherly mates.

This year’s EMFLORES gathering was scheduled for mid-August, and as I was in the organizer’s whatsapp group, I decided to give voice to some of my concerns there, suggesting that we use the gathering to shine light on the tendency towards abuse of power within Santo Daime circles. The EMFLORES gatherings over the last few years have brought together about a hundred women from all over Brazil. What better context to deal with this growing and upsetting tendency as the Santo Daime doctrine expands throughout the world? The madrinha hosting this year’s event suggested I write a manifesto to present at the meeting, which I set about doing, researching movements such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women almost thirty years later, bold, internationally collaborative actions on which to base our stance. I enlisted the help of some friends and tried to generate interest through various social media groups, found articles about the increasing rate of feminicidio in Brazil, (murders committed primarily due to the victim’s female sex and gender identity, usually by their own husbands or boyfriends,) and upsetting statistics about gender bias and how it manifests throughout Brazilian culture in terms of health, education, and economics which leave women with the short end of the stick, so to speak.

Meanwhile, things in my own, local current began going from bad to worse. Even though I had served as secretary for two years, and then vice president for two more, had dedicated myself to the church for years and always spent my afternoons cleaning and preparing the church on days when we have works, I had been transformed into an enemy in the eyes of the men who founded the church twenty years ago, the powers that be. My enthusiastic reception of the women from Mapiá, whom these men considered “outsiders,” along with my plans to leave, were viewed as treason. As these new women joined the Daime community and were added into the media groups, I found myself repeatedly defending them against blatant coercion and gender prejudice. Once I stood up for a woman with a toddler and no car who was holding “unauthorized” hymn studies in her home, which resulted in an exchange of hostility and insults directed towards me. Another time I defended a recent initiate who was respectfully asking permission to go to a work late as she had a job which extended into the evening who was told she would not be permitted, even though people have always arrived late, and especially certain men who regularly show up at least half way through the works. Finally, when I complained after two young women were kicked out of the church’s main whatsapp group for no good reason, I was then kicked out of the group as well, after being called crazy and referred to as an enemy for all to see.

So there I was, an ex-communicated, humiliated and cursed “sister” with the festival season about to start. Festa Junina, the popular Brazilian June festival, is also celebrated in the Santo Daime tradition, principally with works for Saint Anthony, Saint John, and Saint Peter. I was there in Brazil particularly to participate in the festival at my “home” church before embarking on this intensive academic path, and there I was hardly welcome anymore. But that wasn’t even the worst part of it. Several days after I had gotten back to Brazil earlier this year, the day of Carnaval, a dear sister there in the current tried to commit suicide, hanging herself with a bed sheet. Her boyfriend had found her and gotten her down, but she was in a coma, and it was unclear whether she would survive. She was the secretary of the church and I was still vice president at that point, though our president had left months before. She was one of my closest friends and allies there and we had spent lots of time together, writing a grant proposal the year before trying to get funding for the church, (which we ended up not getting,) always rehearsing together and performing the administrative duties that no one else wanted to take on. Her suicide attempt came as a total shock. When I started putting the pieces together I had to fight off feelings of guilt for my absence through the December/January festival season last year. I began hearing stories about the stress it caused her to be forced into more of a leadership position on the women’s side. It wasn’t until she lay unconscious in a coma that I realized the toll it must have taken on her. Her family blamed Daime for her actions and forbade us from visiting her. Although she survived, she is not the same, and probably never will be, as it took her months to learn to eat, talk and walk again. We lost a dear sister, and I can’t help but associate the abusive, misogynistic culture surrounding the church there with her demise, especially considering everything that happened afterwards.

The June festival is made up of official works which are popular dates of initiation for new members of the church, a ritual called “getting your star,” as I mentioned earlier. Several young people had recently come to me expressing their desire to join the ranks, and as one of the few older, active fardada women in the current, they had come to me. They were also aware of the troubles I had been having with the church founders, and the conflicts that had been occurring. One of the women who had come to me had been encouraged not to choose me as her madrinha, but I said I would talk to the new administration about it, as she was wanting me to be the one to initiate her. However, when I went to talk with them the next day, a bad situation got worse. The conversation soon got aggressive and emotional, and the man who is currently president became abusive, telling me that I “don’t know anything,” that I have acted as an enemy to the church as I have embraced “outsiders” by bringing the women from the Amazon to live there, and that I am crazy. Ultimately he not only didn’t give me his blessing to represent the women’s side of the church in initiating a new member, but he forbade it. I was disgusted and angry, not because of any personal ambitions or ego-centric illusions of being a madrinha, but because of the devastation of knowing that all of these young women who were just coming into the Doctrine had to watch their most senior female member humiliated, disrespected and negated after nine years of enduring service and sacrifice for a church which these men considered theirs all along. I no longer had a voice, a place at the table, an identity within the church community, and I have since watched these young women accept their roles as subservient, favored new members, not of a church, but of a harem.

The following month I went to EMFLORES, along with one other woman from Canoa Quebrada, the woman who had been holding rehearsals in her home months earlier, and who still doesn’t “have her star,” but loves Santo Daime. This year the gathering took place in Recife at a church I had only been to one other time five years before, Ceu do São Lourenço da Mata. Each year the event gets more organized and the enthusiasm for women daimista gatherings increases. There were about a hundred women present from all over Brazil. I had brought my manifesto and presented it to a few young women with whom we stayed the night before the event began, planning to present it at the group circle Saturday afternoon along with a friend with whom I had been drafting it. However, when I talked to the host madrinha after we arrived, she said she preferred we present it at the closing the following day, and I sensed she was getting cold feet. Granted, it’s a lofty topic and could occupy a whole, other gathering, but I felt it was important that we at least address it, as it’s not every day that we are in the presence of such a critical mass of Daime women. I let it go, feeling that I didn’t have the strength or support yet to try to insist, but after the madrinha gave her presentation about the sacred feminine and the role of women in community, I took advantage of the open forum to share some of my story, much of which I have described above, and then some other women also shared, one young woman speaking for the first time about abuse she had suffered having grown up in a Santo Daime family at the hands of a padrinho in her community.

After the discussion, I was comforted to find that as the women splintered off into their tent clusters around the property, a wave of conversations was cresting. I was very pleased that more talking was happening. A step was taken. Just last week a friend and madrinha who also swings between the US and Brazil forwarded me a letter from Bia Labate, a well known and respected ayahuasca researcher, giving her name and support to a group of fifteen Daime women coming together with accusations of abuse against a powerful padrinho, and concomitantly various disciples of another even more famous Daime guru are also going public with their claims against him. I cannot judge these men or defend the women and men making the accusations as I don’t know them, but the patterns are strikingly familiar. We need to be talking about it, studying how to talk about it, and more importantly, how to listen. By truly listening we can lift the veils of shame and violence that mute the voices of those most affected. I return to the word I chose for 2018, “inclusive,” as opposed to “exclusive,” which has been upheld in capitalist culture as something to strive towards, as in “elite” and “privileged.” As most of the statistics on humanity’s progress seem to be heading in the wrong directions, it’s clearly time to reverse these associations and seek inclusivity in all we do. There are a lot of us on the planet, broken up into all sorts of categories, and there is a lot that we don’t have much control over as individuals. The more we study ourselves and how we treat others, we can at least maintain some hope that all is not lost, as we’re all in the same canoe, after all.