I’ve been dreading writing the Brazil story. Technically, the Brazil story was the whole reason I quit my job back in April. I’d been living with a (very generous) friend at his apartment in Moema and had gathered enough material and savings to take back control of my time. Freedom! There were a few different ways that I was going to frame my story of Brazil.
There’s the poetic framing. The mulato inzoneiro born of the Treaty of Tordesillas and 20th-century global migration. The poetry would come in its gradations. In Rio de Janeiro, favelas overlooking beach clubs and armed federal police officers marching down the shore. And São Paulo — the largest city, perhaps the most misunderstood. Replace the samba with deep house. Toucans and parakeets digitally reconstructed on app-interactive, augmented reality, start-up de novo, venture capital backed displays on the walls of shopping malls. The constant rain in São Paulo presents tropicalia in a new light. But maybe the poetry of Brazil is really in its deep convections to something else. The jeitinho do brasil. I’ve heard them say. Um jetinho muito forte. Jetinho means “way”. Form and function. The music, the pride. Schizoid politics. The rich-poor divide.
But I don’t know if that’s exactly what I want to say. What I need to say at least. It’s heavy handed.
Maybe what I really need is the historical framing. I’m American after all — all we have is history. And it’s a great story. It’s a story about Portuguese explorers coming to the New World in search of riches and God. Of how those explorers were almost entirely men. Of how those men had children with Native women and then imported slaves from the eastern shores of Africa. To work the sugar plantations. About the ferocity of those plantations. About how the Portuguese throne fled Lisbon during the Napoleonic wars and relocated to Rio de Janeiro. About the son of the king, Dom Pedro II, decided to stay and create the Empire of Brazil. About how slavery was abolished near the end of the 19th century.
About how the long tail of those mixed race people is the “pardo” people who constitute the racial majority of the country today, especially in the Northeast. About how racial purity has projected itself onto modernity, how anything but being mixed race was bred out of the people in favor of constructing a new ethnicity of the new world. How delicate that balance is. About how new migrants layered on top of this complex. About how the poor seem to always have a less-desirable mix. About how no one knows what to make of that. Is that historical?
About how the CIA helped install a modernizing, yet repressive military dictatorship in the mid-20th century. About how those modernizing efforts favored the big cities. About how migration in pursuit of their slice of the pie created the slums that have, in turn, produced the crime statistics in the country. About how the current president, Lula Ignacio da Silva, worked to alleviate these divides. Then went to jail. And then Bolsonaro was elected. And then Lula was released from jail. And then Lula won again. Bolsonaro and his supporters didn’t believe it. And it created a bunch of problems with the structure of Mad Libs Modernity, Trumpism, Bolsonaristas, Steve Bannon, stolen election. “SAVE US!”. Mad Libs Modernity.
Maybe history doesn’t mean that much.
Then it has to be the personal framing. The kid from a small town in Maryland who gained the gift of a Brazilian friend in college. Brazilian friends. He came to Brazil for the first time on the edge of his 21st birthday for Carnaval in Rio. I often wonder if it’s better to include names when I tell these stories. They know who they are. It’s my fifth time here, so there is a lot that can be said. 2019 feels like a different life now. In just the last year, I spent nearly five months in São Paulo. I lived in a semi-scam Airbnb in an active construction site, moved downtown into a very luxurious studio apartment, moved in with a (again, very generous) friend for almost three months, quit my job, left Brazil because of the death of my grandmother, came back to Brazil, stayed for two weeks (with another very generous friend) in the Dubai of Brazil. Balneario Camboriú. It’s a town of a couple hundred-thousand people that was built by a cabal of all-seeing real estate development companies that plaster their logo on all of the skyscrapers that line the beach cove on which the city is built. All of the streets are numbers. Every third car is a Range Rover.
Oh, there was this restaurant, Casa do Pasteis, which sold these delicious foods called pasteis (obviously), friend dough pockets stuffed with various fillings. My favorite one had pernil in the center, this seasoned pork with onions and capers. We’d get those super late at night, after coming back from these world-class clubs where the blue-eyed, blond-haired progeny of Germans immigrants to the state the city is in (Santa Catarina) would be dancing. There is a city a few hours from Balneario, Blumenau, that is famed for being functionally German. People still speak German there. A lot of people think the Germans in Brazil were all Nazis, but the biggest wave of German immigration to Brazil actually happened a half-century before the rise of the Third Reich. Though, the politics of Santa Catarina is really complicated, with strong ties to Bolsonaro. I wonder what they make of the insurrection. Is that what we’re calling it? It only happened yesterday…
Ok, the personal framing is going to be hard. A lot can happen in four years. Especially in a place like this. I’m glad to be back. Fifth time is the charm. I’m writing from Fortaleza right now. It’s a town in the Northeast of the country, a major port city famed for…the fort? The sun is shining. I’m convinced that it’s brighter in this part of the country. The tilt of the planet means that the angle of sunlight they get here is a bit more direct. I’m sitting in a coffee shop that makes you buy something every forty minutes if you want to stay connected to the wifi. Classic. I’m going to São Paulo on Wednesday. Maybe this time, I’ll finally figure out the metaphysical, high-stakes, explorer-intellectual, Alexis de Tocqueville perspective on Brazilian people and culture.
I’ll write about it, at least.
