(Singing) The cheapest meat on the market is the black meat.
The cheapest meat on the market is the black meat.
(Music: “Mulheres Negras”)
Whilst the leather of the lash cut the meat
the metabolized pain strengthened the character.
The colony produced more than captives,
it created heroines that, in order to not create more slaves,
killed their children.
We haven’t been beaten by the social invalidation,
we survive the absence in novels and advertisements.
The system might even turn me into a housemaid,
but it can’t make me think like a housemaid.
Whilst standard women fight against machismo,
black women struggle against machismo, prejudice and racism.
They fight to reverse the aniquilation process
that incarcerate afro-descendants into jail cubicles.
No, there is no Lei Maria da Penha that can protect us
from the violence that subordinates us to cleaning jobs,
from reading in the bathrooms of Nazi universities,
“Scholarship monkeys out!”
I don’t have the standard beauty for the whiten process
but I’m the impersonation of determination to the law of the righteous.
Slave ships and nicknames given by the slaver
failed the mission to give me a sense of inferiority.
I’m not the subordinate the lord thinks he built.
My place isn’t in the ordeals of Brazil.
If I’m one to join the favela’s drug dealing,
it’s because the Lei Áurea is nothing more than a dead text.
(Singing)
No, you don’t need to hide, officer,
I know you’re following me, by my features, by my braids.
I know that in your course to protect beach owners
they taught you that black women leave markets with products under their skirts.
I don’t want a butter pot or shampoo,
I want to break the machinery that gives me squeegee and uru.
I want to make my people understand that it’s inconceivable
to be happy with scholarships from a education that is terrible.
I’m tired of seeing my people in the statistics,
the single mothers, housekeepers, convicts.
The steel of the new chains doesn’t incarcerate my mind,
it doesn’t buy me and nor makes me show my teeth.
Black woman, don’t get used to pejorative terms.
It’s not better to have straight hair, thin nose.
Our facial qualities are like words of a document
that keeps alive the greatest crime of all times.
Stand on your feet for those thrown into the sea,
for the corpses that in the pillories they were peeled.
Don’t let them make you think that our role in our homeland
is winning gringos and tourists over by playing mulata.
They can pay less for the same tasks,
attack our religions, call them witchcraft
and underestimate our part in Brazilian culture,
but they can’t take out the pride of our black skin. No.
(Singing)
Black women are like Kevlar blankets.
Yzalú: Sing it with me.
(Singing) Prepared by life to resist
the machismo, the shots, the Eurocentrism.
They undermine but can’t turn our neurons into captives.
No.
Yzalú: It’s beautiful.
(Singing) Black women are like Kevlar blankets.
Prepared by life to resist
the machismo, the shots, the Eurocentrism.
They undermine but can’t turn our neurons into captives.
(Applause)
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