Transcendental knowledges

Xambá and Portão do Gelo, from the Quilombo to the epistemic intertwining of black culture in Olinda, Pernambuco: an interview with Ivo de Xambá

Abstract

Adeildo Paraíso da Silva, an Honorary Doctor from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), is a babalorixá and quilombola leader. In this volume, he gives an interview to Auxiliadora Maria Martins da Silva, PhD in Educational Sciences from UFPE and Full Professor of the Department of Teaching Methods and Techniques. Ivo de Xambá, as he is known, says that his life is guided by African teachings, fundamental principles that permeated his professional history and communitarian experience. Not only that, he also reveals to us that the terreiro, as a decolonizing power, is capable of making us understand that there is another heritage guarded by the black culture in his city, Olinda, the cradle of frevo: a heritage which is  not far from the transcendental historically instituted African epistemological sites and that is characterized in the imaginary of Olinda’s black population by its opposition, organized through the Portão do Gelo, to the coloniality of power, to white privilege, and also to recreational racism. All the questions raised by Professor Auxiliadora Martins, in this direction, have an objective that circulates in the analysis of how the epistemic intertwining of this quilombo and its practice of a decolonial education takes place with São Benedito, the neighborhood where it is located, as well as how the anti-racist struggle is formulated from the perspective of Africanity and autobiography and how its memory, in this path, legitimizes the presence of the black body in society and all its deepest restlessness.