Samba and Saudade: The Rhythm of Brazil’s Longing

The first time he said it, we weren’t even apart. We were sitting next to each other, his hand resting lazily on my knee, the way it always does when words aren’t enough. “Saudade,” he murmured, half to me, half to himself, as if the feeling existed independently of time and place. I laughed, told him he was being dramatic. He just smiled, like he knew something I didn’t. 

Every weekend, I board a plane. Every weekend, he does too. We meet in some city that isn’t home for either of us — like Paris, Lisbon, maybe Miami if we’re feeling extravagant. Then Sunday night comes, and we part again. My boyfriend is half-Brazilian, and I think he feels this distance more deeply than I do. He has a word for it: saudade. He texts it to me when I’m out somewhere without him, says it over the phone before we hang up, murmurs it even when we’re together, as if already bracing for goodbye. 

At first, I thought it was just another word for missing someone, as I’m still learning Brazilian Portuguese I didn’t quite grasp the full concept of the word (which I’m making huge progress on the language currently, if you’re wondering). But saudade is heavier than that, softer and sharper at the same time. It is a longing that never quite resolves — a yearning not just for what is gone but for what was never fully yours to begin with. It is the echo of happiness as much as it is the ache of its absence. And in Brazil, it is not just a feeling; it is a rhythm.

Members of Portela samba school perform during the last night of carnival at the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaín in Rio de Janeiro, on 12 February, 2024 (Source: AFP/Getty Images)

Dancing Through Sorrow: The Emotional Landscape of Samba 

Samba is not simply a genre of music; it is an act of defiance, a body refusing to be weighed down by history. Born from the pain and resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities, samba carries with it the echoes of migration, colonialism, and survival. It is rhythm turned into resistance, longing turned into movement. In every beat, there is something deeply paradoxical — a song of sadness that forces you to dance, a melody that breaks your heart but asks you to celebrate anyway. 

In a world that demands forward motion, samba loops back. It does not rush to the next beat; it lingers, circles, lets the body breathe. Unlike the rigid precision of Western classical music or the linear progression of pop songs, samba thrives in its improvisation. It allows for error, for interruption, for the unexpected joy of a note played slightly too late or a step taken a fraction too early. Samba resists the tyranny of time; it does not march forward like a metronome — it sways. 

To understand samba is to understand the paradox of saudade: that joy and sorrow are not opposites, but partners in the same dance. This is a music born from resilience, from the fusion of African, Indigenous, and European influences in Brazil’s colonial past. It was shaped in the favelas, in the backyards and streets of Rio, by people who knew that life was as much about struggle as it was about celebration. The rhythm itself reflects this — playful yet melancholic, light on its feet yet heavy with history. 

A Rhythm that Remembers 

Samba does not exist in the polished spaces of concert halls; it lives in the streets, in crowded bars, in the sweaty, joyful chaos of Carnaval. It is a music of the people, a rhythm that remembers. Its origins lie in the samba de roda of Bahia, a form of music and dance with deep African roots, brought to Brazil through the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans carried their rhythms across an ocean, holding onto them when everything else was stripped away. 

Under colonial rule, enslaved Africans in Brazil were forbidden from playing their drums, but rhythm is not easily silenced. It found new homes — in claps, in feet tapping against the earth, in bodies moving even when stillness was imposed. Even in oppression, samba kept its pulse alive, hidden in the muscle memory of those who carried it. Even when colonial authorities banned drumming, fearing its power, rhythm found a way to survive — hidden in the syncopated claps, the tapping of feet, the coded messages woven into song. 

Beyond the cities, quilombos — communities of escaped enslaved people — served as vital sanctuaries where African rhythms and traditions could be preserved. These spaces of resistance nurtured the very spirit of samba, carrying it through generations as a symbol of defiance and survival. The music that began in these hidden places of refuge now reverberates through Brazil's heart, unchanged by time, unstoppable in its expression. 

To this day, samba is not a polished art form confined to concert halls; it is a living, breathing force that exists wherever there are people. During Carnaval, it erupts into the streets, an explosion of colour and movement, a moment where sorrow and celebration collapse into something bigger than either. But samba does not only exist in the spectacle of escolas de samba parading through Rio — it thrives in the quieter corners of everyday life.

A man playing his guitar on the sidewalk, a grandmother humming in the kitchen, a late-night gathering in someone’s backyard, where the sound of a cavaquinho drifts into the humid night air. Samba is everywhere because samba belongs to the people. 

This is what makes samba inherently subversive. To move, to celebrate, to keep playing — these were acts of defiance, a refusal to be erased. Even today, samba carries the weight of this history, its joyous energy always tinged with something deeper, something older. 

Saudade as Defiance 

At the heart of samba is saudade, a longing that is not merely sentimental but subversive. To long for something is to refuse to let it disappear entirely, to keep it alive through memory, music, movement. This is why samba has often been a space for resistance, a way for marginalised voices to assert their existence when the world tried to erase them. 

During Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), when censorship suffocated political discourse, samba became both an escape and a weapon. Musicians smuggled critiques of oppression into seemingly innocuous lyrics, crafting songs that could slip past the regime’s scrutiny while speaking directly to those who knew how to listen. 

Chico Buarque, a master of double meanings. His song Apesar de Você (“In Spite of You") appears, on the surface, to be about a toxic lover, but it is, in reality, a direct challenge to the dictatorship. The “you” in the song — the one who rules with an iron grip, who dictates how people live — will one day wake up to find the sun shining again, the people singing again, as if their control had never existed. The melody is deceptively light, even playful, but beneath it lies a quiet rebellion, a reminder that even in darkness, the spirit of resistance dances on. 

Samba’s history is filled with such moments — of artists using rhythm to disguise protest, of people using dance to reclaim power. It is no coincidence that samba schools in Rio emerged from the favelas, communities that have long been ignored and vilified by the state. To take up space, to celebrate despite hardship, is its own form of defiance. 

The Dance of Distance 

My boyfriend once told me that Brazilians don’t just feel saudade — they dance it. It lives in the sway of the hips, the stomp of a foot, the way a hand grazes the air like it’s reaching for something just out of grasp. Samba is the physical expression of what words cannot quite say. 

Maybe that’s why, whenever we part ways, he never just says saudade and leaves it at that. He’ll text me song lyrics, voice messages with a few bars of something he grew up hearing. Music is how he carries feeling. And maybe that is why samba has never been just music — it is how a nation processes its longing. 

Samba endures because it is more than music; it is memory, history, protest, survival. It carries saudade not as passive mourning but as an insistence that joy is still possible, that movement is still possible, even in the face of loss. 

I think of this whenever I watch my boyfriend dance. The way his movements seem to follow an invisible current, his hips shifting between past and present, his steps never quite fully landing before they are carried into the next. Brazilians don’t just feel saudade — they dance it. They live with the ache, let it move through them, and transform it into something beautiful. 

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson samba offers: that resistance does not always look like struggle. Sometimes, it looks like a body refusing to be still, like a song that carries on long after the musicians have gone home. The beauty of this music is that it does not deny sadness; it embraces it, moves with it, refuses to let it become stillness. This is the lesson of saudade, too — it is not a wound to be nursed in silence, but a rhythm to be felt, a song to be sung, a dance that never quite ends. 

Comparative Rhythms: Samba, Flamenco, and the Blues 

Samba does not exist in isolation; it belongs to a global tradition of music as both emotional outlet and political resistance. Across cultures, longing has found its expression in rhythm, melody, and movement. If saudade is samba’s guiding spirit, then one might argue that duende fuels flamenco and the blues carries the weight of sorrow in the American South. These musical forms, though shaped by different histories, share a common essence: they are the sounds of survival, of beauty wrested from hardship, of longing turned into art. 

Flamenco, like samba, is a genre steeped in paradox. Born from the suffering and resilience of marginalised Andalusian communities — particularly the Romani, Moors, and Jews — flamenco thrives on duende, a concept Federico García Lorca described as an almost mystical force that emerges from deep pain and emotional intensity. Much like saudade, duende is an ache that refuses to be silenced. In flamenco, longing is carried in the mournful wail of the cante jondo, the guttural depth of the voice mirroring the weight of loss. Where samba uses rhythm to soften sorrow, flamenco intensifies it, drawing it out in the raw, unrestrained laments of its singers. 

The blues, emerging from the African American experience of oppression and displacement, carries a similar tension between suffering and resilience. Like samba, it takes personal and collective pain and transforms it into something both deeply melancholic and strangely cathartic. The call-and-response pattern of blues music — mirrored in the interplay between samba’s instruments — creates a sense of communal expression, as if sorrow itself is being shared and lightened through sound. Samba, flamenco, and the blues all refuse to be entirely overcome by grief; they grieve, but they also persist, insisting on movement, on expression, on life. 

What distinguishes samba, however, is its embrace of joy as an act of defiance. Flamenco spirals deeper into pain, the blues lingers in its sorrow, but samba — though carrying the same weight of history — chooses to dance. It insists that saudade is not just an emotion but a movement, not just longing but the rhythm of resilience itself. 

Saudade in Songs

Listen to Cartola’s As Rosas Não Falam and tell me it isn’t saudade distilled into sound. His voice is soft, almost fragile, as he sings of roses that do not speak, of love that has gone but left behind its scent. Or Paulinho da Viola’s Coração Leviano, in which betrayal is dressed in the gentlest of melodies, the heartbreak softened by samba’s graceful sway. Even the great Noel Rosa, whose compositions could be wry and humorous, wove an underlying wistfulness into his work. 

There is a reason why saudade finds its purest expression in samba. Unlike the Western idea of nostalgia, which often idealises the past, saudade is not just about looking back — it is about feeling the presence of something absent, about longing for what is slipping through your fingers even as you hold onto it. Samba, with its looping rhythms and improvisational spirit, mirrors this feeling perfectly. The melody circles back on itself, the beat moves forward but never quite in a straight line. It dances around its own sadness. 

Theorising Saudade: Longing, Resistance, and the Unfinished Song 

Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, describes longing as a state of being suspended, as if caught in a moment that stretches endlessly, refusing resolution. Saudade operates in much the same way — it is the constant pull of something just out of reach, an ache that lingers rather than fades. Samba embodies this suspended state. Unlike Western musical forms that build towards resolution, samba resists closure. It loops, it returns, it lets feeling stretch into movement, refusing to be neatly contained. 

There is also something deeply Fanonian in samba’s relationship with resistance. Frantz Fanon, writing on colonialism, understood the way oppressed peoples turn to music and dance as forms of self-assertion, as a way of reclaiming stolen agency. For the Afro-Brazilian communities that birthed samba, rhythm was more than sound — it was survival, an embodied defiance against a world that sought to erase them. Saudade, in this context, is not just a private emotion but a collective one; it holds within it the memory of forced displacement, of histories lost, of a future that remains uncertain. Samba, then, is the articulation of saudade through movement — it keeps the past alive, not by freezing it in time, but by carrying it forward, step by step, beat by beat. 

Perhaps this is why samba remains so powerful. It does not try to resolve longing; it does not seek a neat conclusion. Instead, it dances through it, making room for joy within sorrow, motion within stillness. To feel saudade is to know that something has been lost — but to dance is to insist that not all is gone. 

The Echo of Absence 

The irony of saudade is that it is not just about missing something painful — it is often about missing something beautiful that you know you can never hold onto. It is the inevitable ache of fleeting happiness. And isn’t that the nature of music? A song exists only in the moment it is being played; as soon as it ends, all that’s left is its echo. 

In a world that demands forward motion, samba loops back. It does not rush to the next beat; it lingers, circles, lets the body breathe. Unlike the rigid precision of Western classical music or the linear progression of pop songs, samba thrives in its improvisation. It allows for error, for interruption, for the unexpected joy of a note played slightly too late or a step taken a fraction too early. 

Perhaps that is why, even when my boyfriend and I are together, saudade lingers in the background. Not just because he misses me, but because saying it is a way of holding on, of keeping the space between us from feeling empty. He carries his culture in the way he speaks, in the way he insists on finding a rhythm even in the sadness of departure. It is the knowledge that time is always moving, that nothing lasts forever, that even the happiest moments contain within them the seed of their own ending. But maybe that is not something to fear. Maybe it is something to dance to. 

The body moves, the beat goes on, and the music, however briefly, makes the distance disappear.  

And perhaps I am learning this, too. That missing someone does not have to be a quiet, mournful thing. It can be something you sway to, something you let into your body without letting it weigh you down.

Saudade is not a wound — it is a rhythm. And like samba, it keeps moving. 

S xoxo

Written in Monaco

8th February 2025