“Aquele abraço”: the pain of prison became joy, forgiveness, and samba

The song “Aquele abraço” portrays the world that Gilberto Gil reencountered after regaining his freedom. He and Caetano were released at the same time from the barracks in the Military Village of Marechal Deodoro, in the north of Rio de Janeiro, on Ash Wednesday 1969.

Seeing the city again for the first time with the Carnaval decoration marked Gil so much that he used it as a “backdrop to the song,” as he says in his book Todas as Letras: “In my head, ‘Aquele abraço’ happens during Ash Wednesday: that's when the ‘movie’ of the song is mentally located for me.”

To tell a story in song, Gil took advantage of the fragmented yet continuous mechanism of the audiovisual narrative that has been one of his characteristics since the song “Domingo no parque.”

He re-signified all that he went through during his arrest, as a result of the hardening of the dictatorship in Brazil, in a mosaic of emotions and feelings expressed in the form of allegories.

Starting with the title of the song. The military men who guarded him in prison always greeted him sending “a hug.” The jargon of humorist Lilico, very popular at the time, was a reference to which the composer could not have access because he was in prison and incommunicado.

In prison, Gil thought the attitude was genuine, but such a behavior must have felt strange: it was contradictory to be treated with so much affection and deference for the torturers who kept him unjustly captive, under false accusations of subversion and attack on national symbols.

The military were aware of a reality hidden to Gil, because he was in prison; but when he came across it, brought by the same men who were his executioners, he used his sensitivity to rework it.

He transformed the fear, the feeling of fear and abandonment, the certainty of the injustice suffered, and the roughness of the world itself into art.

By using this greeting so effusively in the song, it is as if he emptied it of the sad memory of the months in prison to fill it with the Carnaval-like, free atmosphere that he found on the streets as he left prison.

It was like a slogan for the feeling of leaving prison and then Brazil. A hug sent to things that he saw again, but would be forced to leave due to the following “invitation” to exile. A hug on someone who is loose and wants to leave, transcend.

There is also the verse “alô, alô Realengo, aquele abraço!” [literally translated, “Hello, hello, Realengo—a hug!” This is not just the random name of a neighborhood in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Gil wanted to reference the area of the city where he was arrested, as he reveals in the commentary for the song in Todas as Letras:

“The idea in ‘Aquele abraço’ was to name some place in the North Zone of Rio (where we were incarcerated), one of those railroad edges …, and Realengo is one of them. An inexact association made by approximation; I didn’t even want to refer to the exact place where I had been stuck.”

Not by chance, the song closes the show Barra 69, a series of three concerts Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso did a week before leaving the country, ordered by the military.

The concert was intended to raise funds for the tropicalists’ trip, with no date of return, but ended up becoming a symphony of goodbye, with high political voltage.

“For a farewell concert, the end couldn’t have been more euphoric. With the crowd standing up, Gil closed the concert singing ‘Aquele Abraço,’ an irresistible samba that was performed in public for the first time in this concert,” says journalist and writer Carlos Calado.

The story is in the book Tropicália – A História de Uma Revolução Musical [Tropicália – The Story of a Musical Revolution] (1997).

“Much more vivid in my memory is the moment when Gil showed me ‘Aquele abraço,’ a song he would sing for the first time in public at that concert. We were in the living room of the house in Pituba and the samba made me cry. The brilliance and fluency of the phrases…

“… the evidence that it was a popular song of inevitable success, the feeling of love and forgiveness imposing itself over the sorrow and, above all, directly addressing Rio de Janeiro, a city that I feel is so intimately mine after staying there for year…

“… when I was 13 and 14—and so mine on another level, too, because it is, as João Gilberto says, ‘the city of Brazilians’—all this shook me strongly and I sobbed convulsively.”

Caetano Veloso, in his autobiography Tropical Truth (2003)

Caetano Veloso still remembered the impact the song had on all those who were at its performance, in the Barra 69 concert.

“The audience was also taken by the song, singing it with Gil as if they had known it for a long time...

“...The place where irony showed up in that song—which seemed to be a farewell to Brazil (represented by Rio, as is tradition) without a shadow of resentment—made us feel up to the troubled we were facing...

Within this revision of the past-that points-to-the-future is “Aquele abraço,” samba-praise with which Gil, with grace and joy, forgives his past, so that, in peace with the present, he may be able to free his future.