Samba and Saudade: The Rhythm of Brazil’s Longing
The first time he said it, we were not even apart. We sat side-by-side, his hand resting with a familiar weight on my knee, a gesture that often bridges the spaces where words feel insufficient. “Saudade," he murmured, the word suspended between us, spoken partly to me and partly to the air, as if the feeling itself existed independently of time and place. I laughed, dismissing his tone as theatrical. He responded with a quiet smile, one that suggested he possessed a knowledge I had yet to acquire.
Our lives now follow a recurring pattern. Each weekend, we board separate flights, converging in a city that belongs to neither of us — perhaps Paris, Lisbon, or Miami when we seek a more decadent atmosphere. Then, as Sunday night descends, we part once more. My boyfriend is half-Brazilian, and I have come to believe he feels this perpetual separation with a particular intensity. He has a word for the sensation: saudade. He texts it to me when I am at an event without him, whispers it over the phone before the line goes dead, and sometimes breathes it even when we are together, as though already rehearsing for the next farewell.
Initially, I mistook it for a simple synonym for missing someone. As I continue my journey learning Brazilian Portuguese, I am slowly grasping its deeper, more complex dimensions. Saudade carries a heavier, more intricate quality. It is a longing that refuses resolution — a yearning that encompasses both tangible absence and the ghost of people, memories, possibilities that never fully materialised. It is the haunting echo of a past happiness, inseparable from the acute ache of its present absence. In Brazil, this is more than a solitary emotion; it is a cultural rhythm, a melancholic melody woven into the very fabric of daily life.
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 transcends the category of a musical genre; it represents a physical act of defiance, a body's conscious refusal to be anchored by the weight of history. Its origins are deeply rooted in the pain and extraordinary resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities, carrying within its very structure the echoes of forced migration, colonial violence, and a determined will to survive. It is rhythm transformed into resistance, longing articulated through movement. Within each syncopated beat exists a compelling paradox — a lament that compels the body to dance, a melody that cradles heartbreak while simultaneously demanding celebration.
In a modern world that privileges relentless forward motion, samba offers a different temporal logic. It lingers in the space between beats, circling a central rhythm to grant the body its own tempo. This stands in stark contrast to the rigid architectures of Western classical music or the linear, predictable progression of a pop song. Samba finds its soul in improvisation. It embraces human error, welcomes spontaneous interruption, and discovers unexpected joy in a note played slightly behind the beat or a step taken a fraction too soon. This is a rhythm that actively resists the tyranny of the clock; it does not march with mechanical precision, it sways with organic, human grace.
To truly comprehend samba is to grasp the essential paradox of saudade: the understanding that joy and sorrow are intimate partners in the same eternal dance, rather than opposing forces. The music itself emerged from a crucible of resilience, a powerful fusion of African rhythms, Indigenous melodies, and European instruments within Brazil's complex colonial history. It was forged in the favelas and the communal backyards of Rio de Janeiro by communities for whom life was an inseparable blend of daily struggle and necessary celebration. The rhythm embodies this duality — its surface is playful and effervescent, yet its undertow carries a profound, inescapable melancholy. It is a sound that is light on its feet yet heavy with the memory of generations, a testament to the art of finding liberation within constraint and crafting beauty from the raw materials of sorrow.
A Rhythm that Remembers
Samba resists confinement within the polished acoustics of concert halls; its true home remains the streets, the crowded bars, and the sweaty, pulsating chaos of Carnaval. It is fundamentally a music of the people, a rhythm steeped in collective memory. Its origins trace back to the samba de roda of Bahia, a powerful form of music and dance with direct lineage to West African traditions, carried to Brazilian shores through the brutal passage of the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans transported their rhythms across an ocean, clutching this cultural cornerstone when all other possessions and freedoms were violently stripped away.
Under colonial rule, where drumming was explicitly forbidden for its perceived power to incite and communicate, rhythm demonstrated an extraordinary resilience. It could not be silenced. It migrated into the syncopated clap of hands, the percussive tap of feet against bare earth, the undulating motion of bodies that refused imposed stillness. Even within the strictures of oppression, samba maintained its vital pulse, preserved in the very muscle memory of those who carried its legacy. Coded messages and stories of resistance were woven into the fabric of its songs, ensuring their survival against systematic attempts at cultural erasure.
Beyond the urban centres, the quilombos — communities founded by escaped enslaved people — functioned as crucial sanctuaries. These autonomous spaces became living archives where African rhythms, languages, and spiritual traditions could be preserved and practised freely. They nurtured the embryonic spirit of samba, cultivating it across generations as a potent symbol of defiance and cultural survival. The music that first resonated within these hidden places of refuge now forms the enduring heartbeat of the nation, its core essence remaining untouched by time and unstoppable in its expressive power.
To this day, samba retains its character as a living, breathing force, flourishing wherever communities gather. During Carnaval, it erupts into a public spectacle of colour and movement, a temporary universe where sorrow and celebration fuse into an experience larger than either emotion alone. Yet samba's presence extends far beyond the grand parades of Rio's escolas de samba. It thrives in the intimate corners of daily existence: in the strum of a guitar on a sun-baked sidewalk, in the absent-minded hum of a grandmother in her kitchen, in the late-night backyard gatherings where the bright, melodic line of a cavaquinho drifts into the humid, tropical air. Samba permeates Brazilian life because its ownership rests unequivocally with the people.
This democratic nature underscores samba's inherently subversive soul. Historically, the very acts of moving, celebrating, and playing music constituted a profound defiance, a conscious refusal to be erased or silenced. The music carries this history within its very structure; its seemingly effortless, joyous energy is forever tinged with a deeper, older knowledge of struggle and the triumphant will to endure.
Saudade as Defiance
At the heart of samba is saudade, a form of longing that transcends mere sentimentality to become a subversive act. To yearn for something with such intensity is to actively refuse its complete disappearance, preserving it through the vessels of memory, music, and collective movement. This inherent quality established samba as a vital space for resistance, providing marginalised communities with a means to assert their existence in the face of systemic attempts to erase their presence and silence their voices.
During Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), when state censorship strangled formal political discourse, samba evolved into both a sanctuary and a strategic weapon. Composers and musicians became masters of allegory, weaving sharp critiques of oppression into lyrics that appeared, on the surface, to be apolitical. These songs could navigate past the regime's censors while delivering potent messages of solidarity and dissent to an audience trained to decipher their hidden meanings.
The work of Chico Buarque stands as a definitive example of this artistic resistance. His composition, Apesar de Você (“In Spite of You"), presents itself as a lament about a domineering romantic partner. For the discerning listener, however, the song reveals itself as a direct and courageous challenge to the authoritarian regime. The “you" addressed is the dictatorship itself — the entity that rules with an iron fist and dictates the contours of daily life. The song's triumphant climax prophesies a future where this control will evaporate, where the sun will shine and the people will sing once more as if their freedom had never been interrupted. The melody, deceptively light and almost playful, creates a stark, powerful contrast with its revolutionary message, embodying the very spirit of a resistance that persists and dances even under the weight of darkness.
This tradition of coded protest runs deep within samba's history. The art form is rich with examples of artists using rhythm as a disguise for dissent and communities using dance as a tool to reclaim their agency. It is a deliberate and significant historical fact that the great samba schools of Rio de Janeiro emerged from the favelas, communities that have been systematically neglected and stigmatised by official power structures. Within this context, the act of celebration itself, the decision to take up sonic and physical space in a world that seeks to render you invisible, constitutes a powerful and enduring form of defiance.
The Dance of Distance
My boyfriend once explained that Brazilians do not simply feel saudade; they embody it through dance. The emotion finds its expression in the deliberate sway of hips, the emphatic stomp of a foot, the way a hand might trace the air as if brushing against a memory just beyond tangible reach. Samba becomes the physical articulation of sentiments that words often fail to capture.
This understanding clarifies why, in our own relationship, he never allows the word saudade to stand alone. A text message will arrive carrying a fragment of song lyrics; a voice note will contain a few bars of a melody from his childhood. For him, music functions as the primary vessel for carrying emotion across distance. This personal habit reflects a broader cultural truth: samba has never been merely entertainment. It is the mechanism through which a nation collectively processes its layered and enduring longings.
Samba endures precisely because it transcends the definition of music. It operates as living memory, oral history, silent protest, and a testament to survival. It carries saudade as an active insistence, transforming passive mourning into a declaration that joy remains a possibility and movement a form of liberation, even when confronted with profound loss.
I am often reminded of this when I watch him dance. His movements seem guided by an invisible current, his hips navigating a space between past and present, his steps forever suspended, flowing seamlessly into the next motion. This is the Brazilian relationship with saudade made visible. They welcome the ache, letting it flow through their bodies to be alchemised into startling beauty.
Perhaps this represents samba's most vital lesson: that resistance does not always wear the face of overt struggle. Sometimes, it manifests as a body's refusal to be still, as a melody that persists long after the instruments have fallen silent. The genius of this music is its refusal to deny sadness. Instead, it embraces sorrow, moves in concert with it, and actively prevents it from solidifying into paralysis. This is the parallel wisdom of saudade. It transcends the isolation of a private injury, becoming instead a rhythm to be inhabited, a song to be shared, a dance with no final step.
Comparative Rhythms: Samba, Flamenco, and the Blues
Samba occupies a significant place within a global tapestry of music that functions as both emotional catharsis and political defiance. Across diverse cultures, the universal experience of longing has consistently found its voice through rhythm, melody, and physical expression. If saudade serves as the guiding spirit of samba, then duende provides the fiery soul of flamenco, while the blues carries the heavy sorrow born from the American South. Though shaped by distinct historical circumstances, these three forms share a foundational purpose: they are the sounds of survival, the creation of beauty from hardship, the artistic transformation of deep-seated yearning.
Flamenco, much like samba, is a genre built upon powerful contradictions. It emerged from the suffering and resilience of marginalised communities in Andalusia — particularly the Romani, Moors, and Jewish people. It draws its power from duende, a concept the poet Federico García Lorca described as a mysterious, earth-born force arising from profound pain and emotional authenticity. Similar to saudade, duende represents an ache that demands to be heard. In flamenco, this longing manifests in the raw, visceral intensity of the cante jondo (deep song), where the guttural depth of the voice gives tangible weight to loss. Where samba often uses rhythm to transmute sorrow into dance, flamenco confronts it directly, stretching and intensifying emotion in the unrestrained lament of its singers.
The blues, born from the African American experience of systemic oppression and displacement, navigates a similar tension between suffering and endurance. It shares with samba a remarkable ability to alchemise personal and collective grief into an expression that is simultaneously melancholic and cathartic. The call-and-response structure fundamental to the blues finds a rhythmic parallel in the conversational interplay between samba's percussion instruments. This technique fosters a powerful sense of communal expression, creating the feeling that sorrow, when shared through sound, becomes a lighter burden to carry. Samba, flamenco, and the blues all share this refusal to be defeated by grief; they acknowledge pain while persisting in their expression, insisting on movement, sound, and life itself.
The quality that distinguishes samba within this powerful triad is its conscious, deliberate embrace of joy as an act of defiance. Flamenco often descends into the depths of its own pain with a tragic beauty. The blues comfortably inhabits its sorrow, finding solace within the melancholy. Samba, while carrying an identical weight of historical trauma, makes a different choice. It chooses to dance. In this genre, saudade becomes a physical momentum, a state of longing channeled into the rhythm of resilience.
Saudade in Songs
To hear Cartola’s As Rosas Não Falam is to experience saudade distilled into its purest sonic form. His voice, soft and threaded with a gentle fragility, sings of roses that cannot speak and a love that has departed, leaving only the lingering trace of its memory. Paulinho da Viola’s Coração Leviano is another masterclass in this emotional landscape. Here, the sting of betrayal is cloaked in one of samba’s most graceful melodies, the heartbreak somehow softened and made bearable by the music’s insistent, swaying rhythm. Even the wry, observational wit of Noel Rosa, a cornerstone of the genre, is consistently underpinned by a subtle, pervasive wistfulness, a recognition of life’s fleeting beauty.
This seamless fusion of emotion and music reveals why saudade finds its most authentic expression within samba. The Western concept of nostalgia often involves an idealised, sentimental gaze towards the past. Saudade, in contrast, possesses a more complex and immediate quality. It is the visceral feeling of an absence made present, the act of longing for something even as it slips through one’s grasp. Samba, with its cyclical rhythms and spirit of improvisation, provides the perfect structural mirror for this sensation. The melody perpetually circles back on itself; the rhythm pushes forward yet refuses a linear path. It is a form that consciously, artfully, dances around its own inherent sadness.
Theorising Saudade: Longing, Resistance, and the Unfinished Song
In A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes characterises longing as a state of suspension, a moment stretched to its breaking point that refuses definitive resolution. Saudade operates within a similar emotional territory; it is the constant, gentle pull of something perpetually out of reach, an ache that lingers and deepens with time rather than dissipating. Samba provides the physical embodiment of this suspended state. Where many Western musical traditions build towards harmonic and narrative resolution, samba actively resists such closure. Its structure is cyclical, its rhythms returning and overlapping, allowing feeling to expand into movement and refusing to be confined by a conventional conclusion.
A Fanonian lens further illuminates samba's intrinsic connection to resistance. The philosopher Frantz Fanon, in his work on colonialism, detailed how oppressed peoples often turn to cultural expressions like music and dance as vital acts of self-assertion, a means of reclaiming agency in a world designed to deny it. For the Afro-Brazilian communities who forged samba, rhythm represented an instrument of survival, an embodied defiance against systematic attempts to erase their identity and history. Within this framework, saudade transcends the realm of private sentiment to become a collective, cultural memory. It holds within its essence the legacy of forced displacement, of fractured histories, and of a future that remains tantalisingly uncertain. Samba, therefore, becomes the kinetic articulation of this collective saudade. It keeps the past dynamically alive, not by preserving it as a static relic, but by carrying it forward with every step and every beat.
This theoretical grounding clarifies the enduring power of samba. The form makes no attempt to resolve the inherent tension of longing; it seeks no neat, emotional conclusion. Its genius rests in its willingness to dance directly through the heart of sorrow, consciously creating space for joy within grief and for motion within stillness. To feel saudade is to acknowledge a profound sense of loss. To dance the samba, however, is to issue a powerful, physical declaration that not everything is gone.
The Echo of Absence
The essential irony of saudade rests in its focus; it is not simply the act of missing something painful, but often the poignant longing for a beautiful experience one knows is inherently transient. It is the inevitable ache that accompanies fleeting happiness, the shadow cast by a brilliant, passing light. This very quality mirrors the nature of music itself — a song exists fully only in the moment of its performance, and once the final note fades, all that remains is its resonant echo in memory.
In a world that champions relentless forward motion, samba offers a different temporal logic. It resists the linear drive to a conclusion, choosing instead to linger, to circle its melodic themes, and to grant the body space to find its own breath. This stands in deliberate contrast to the rigid architectures of Western classical music or the predictable progressions of a pop song. Samba discovers its vitality in improvisation, welcoming human error, spontaneous interruption, and the unexpected delight of a syncopated note or an anticipatory step. It is a celebration of beautiful imperfection.
This understanding perhaps explains why, even during our time together, a sense of saudade often permeates the atmosphere. His expression of it transcends simple missing; it becomes a way of holding on, of ensuring the space between us never feels truly vacant. He carries his cultural heritage in his speech, in his persistent search for a rhythm that can encompass even the melancholy of departure. It reflects a deep-seated awareness that time is perpetually in motion, that no moment is permanent, and that even the most joyous experiences carry within them the quiet knowledge of their own conclusion. Yet this awareness need not be a source of fear. Perhaps it is something one can learn to move with, a tempo to which one can choose to dance.
The body finds its motion, the beat continues its pulse, and for a brief, transcendent interval, the music makes the geographical distance between us dissolve entirely.
I am slowly learning this lesson myself. Missing someone does not have to manifest as a quiet, mournful burden. It can become something you sway to, a feeling you allow into your body without permitting it to anchor you in stillness. Saudade is not an open wound to be protected; it is a rhythm to be inhabited. And like the samba from which it draws its spirit, its only imperative is to keep moving.
S xoxo
Written in Monaco
8th February 2025