A black man, a Brazilian black man, a black man in search of his deepest being, reuniting himself 'with his soul and that o f his gods, his water his land with the sky that was its own, all - soul and gods, waterskyland - wrested once violentl y from his spirit by the tremendous force of the slavers'curse, a curse that gnawed and wounded him in every stride o f his existence, has a long path o f devotional spiritual exercise, o f cleansing, for the return to the primal event that ontologically identifies him.

Abdias do Nascitnento chose the path of return to recover his soul - the soul of all black people - estranged in an involving, seductive and hostile historical contingency. In social action and revolt, in theater and literature, in art and daily life, Abdias sought the signs of his spiritual reunion. And till is hostile to the black man - to Abdias - in the search for himself f, because the cultural situation that surrounds him deceives, distracts and deludes with its signs and tools of domination.

There was a social space and a spiritual time sheltering the black soul, space and time translucent in millennial myths and allegories, myths and allegories ordering all the sensory phenomena revealing the sphere of permanence and continuous presence. It was the slavers' rape that, in the name o f civilization or acculturation, purported first to conquer, then to .substitute, and ultimately to cut off' from the black soul its primordial essence. Abdias do Nascimento's path of spiritual cleansing had its beginning in a prolonged and tense rethinking of these words to discover in them, the words, their tremendous dominating compulsion.

EFRAIN TOMAS BO
Rio de Janeiro, July 1975.