Intérieur de fortune moyenne au Brésil, J.-B. Debret, 1823 in Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, São Paulo, 1816-1831.
Português: “Tentei captar essa solidão habitual desenhando uma mãe de família, de pequenas posses, em seu lar onde a encontramos sentada, como de hábito, sobre sua marquesa (…) lugar que serve, de dia, como sofá fresco e cômodo em um país quente, para descansar o dia inteiro, sentada sobre as pernas, à maneira asiática. Imediatamente ao seu lado e bem ao seu alcance se encontra o gongá (paneiro) destinado a conter os trabalhos de costura; entreaberto, deixa à mostra, a extremidade do chicote enorme feito inteiramente de couro, instrumento de castigo com o qual os senhores ameaçam seus escravos a toda hora. Do mesmo lado, um pequeno mico-leão, preso por sua corrente a um dos encostos desse móvel, serve de inocente distração à sua dona (…). A criada de quarto, mulata, trabalha sentada no chão aos pés da madame – a senhora. É reconhecido o luxo e as prerrogativas dessa primeira escrava pelo comprimento de seus cabelos cardados, (…) penteado sem gosto e característico do escravo de uma casa pouco opulenta. A menina no centro, à direita, pouco letrada, embora já crescida, conserva a mesma atitude de sua mãe, mas sentada numa cadeira bem menos cômoda, e esforça-se por ler as primeiras letras do alfabeto traçadas sobre um pedaço de papel. À direita, outra escrava, cujos cabelos cortados muito rentes revelam seu nível inferior. Avança do mesmo lado um moleque com um enorme copo de água, bebida frequentemente solicitada durante o dia para acalmar a sede devido ao abuso de alimentos apimentados. Os dois negrinhos, apenas na idade de engatinhar, que gozam, no quarto da dona da casa, dos privilégios do mico-leão, experimentam suas forças na esteira da criada”. (DEBRET, 1971)[1] English: The larger compositions work when they manage to return to the silence and understatement of the sketches. This creates a far more complicated narrative space than the last painting. This is one of Debret’s great domestic interiors devoted to the anatomization of the power relations of slavery. The print operates tremendous tensions around stasis and movement, and its horizontal layering articulates a ruthless hierarchy. The slaves are the only people in contact with the ﬂoor, indeed they dominate the ground level. At the bottom are the naked and half-naked infants, frozen, like pets at play, in the middle foreground. The smallest one, like a miniature statue of the Buddha, is compositionally caught up in a music of the spheres, the round belly, with its round navel, and shaved head bounce off the orange clasped in the chubby hand. The other infant looks towards its slave mother and is about to crawl forward. The two adult slave women operate in the left and right margins of the middle ground, seated on mats; they stare intently over their lace making, sitting on hard bamboo mats with legs crossed. They mimic the intense concentration of the two white females. The far right margin is fractured by the entry of a serving boy, who is literally waiting on the women. Barefoot he enters, holding a tray with a large full glass container, and moves with trepidation towards the white woman and her daughter. His hair is cut in the distincrive half—crescent of a Mozambique black, while it is noticeable that the crawling infant also has its hair cut according to a tradition of Congo and Nigerian Africans. The patch of hair over the fontanel has been left to grow, while the rest of the head is shaved. It was and indeed is believed in many West Coast African communities that this soft open part of the infant skull could be a window for evil spirits to enter and so the hair was allowed to grow there as a protective shield or veil literally raised to a higher level, above the blacks, as dons raise themselves above all lower life forms at an Oxbridge high table, sit the white woman and her daughter, The amply breasted woman in an empire line frock and cashmere shawl cuts out paper, probably for a dress pattern, while her daughter reads out her ABC—diary to her. Both wear light silk slippers. Tire print is delicately inﬂected with ironic social comment, which teeters on the point of satire without ever spoiling the verisimilitude of the scene. The little girl, about six or seven, is mastering the art of reading and writing, proscribed to slaves, while the black boy, about ten and one presumes totally illiterate, gazes at the girl with fascinated trepidation. Nevertheless the scene could be taken to express idyllic calm, a good slave-holding house, where all is peaceful industry and calm, were it not for a single detail. On the far left margin a small golden—lion—monkey sits on the arm of the bench, and seems to be reaching towards a plant, which is leant against the wall and rises out form behind the large sewing basket. In fact this is a not just a plant, but a special type of whip, a whip that Debret had shown in action in one of his most violent prints dealing with slave torture. This type of cane, with its disrincrive plait and two leaves features, in the brutal watercol— our Feirom' afoirmm'o negro: rm. mm.” This is one of Debret’s great challenges to his audience in terms of a demand to carry out the violence. And yet the effect of the whip as a visual sign of violence is much more powerful in the domestic interior because it is unused. It sits there waiting, unnoticed for the time being. Suddenly the apparent calm of the scene is charged with terror: that whip can suddenly be used on any one of those pieces of black flesh by that heavy docile seemingly oblivious white woman. It probably has been, but even if it hasn’t, the horror lies in the fact that it can be, any time, any place, anywhere, as softly or as brutally, and for as long or as short a time as the white woman desires. Come to that, the white woman can command any of the black ﬁgures to use it on each other. Again it is left for us, the viewers, to join up the traumatic dots, to ﬁnish the picture of slave terror, but this time the whole thing has been organized with a knowing understatement that challenges our capacities to understand the sadism and the abuse of black women and children by white women and children.[2]