This is a response to my piece The Brazil Story.
It’s very difficult for me to write about Brazil. I’ve been trying to do it for months now. Every time I start, I get caught in the first couple of lines and then give up trying. Every piece that I start to write about Brazil gets stuck somewhere between the big picture and the day-to-day experience of it. It’s a place where I’ve lived! I don’t know what else to say. I’ve told everyone I’ve ever met to come here at some point. There is no way of understanding or explaining Brazil outside of experiencing it.
There are truly extraordinary things about it here. Things that I’ve only ever seen here. There’s a way people behave. A perspective on life that is unique and all-consuming. It’s intoxicating. And there are challenging things. Big cities are big cities. Inequality is inequality. I’m American — extremely American. Beauty juxtaposed with complication is maybe the most central thing in our culture. I get it. My “worldliness” isn’t an escape from that. But my experience of Brazil has happened in isolation. My understanding of what any of those things mean, of how I should think about this country, has nothing to do with my life outside of it.
Brazil is similar to the United States, it politics often mirror it (especially lately, unfortunately), a lot of its population resemble Americans, it a major consumer of our culture. Even with that, I’ve only ever experienced Brazil in reference to itself. Most of my days here have been spent living as I would anywhere — working, walking around, meeting new people. Everything else, the intoxicating parts of the culture, the deep connectedness I feel when around groups of Brazilians, the tension I feel walking the streets at night, all exist on this backdrop of the everyday.
It would be like me trying to explain succinctly my understanding of New York City. I could describe what the city claims to be about. “I’m walking here!” Hot dogs and puffer jackets. Artists on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn. But to me that is just projection. My only understanding of New York was my hyper-specific, arguably singular experience of the time that I was visiting and living there. I could market Brazil to you or I could tell you what it’s actually been like. And with Brazil, the former runs the risk of misrepresentation and the latter runs the risk of being completely meaningless. Neither makes for good content.
Take for example what I’ll call the “Parece” conversation. As I’ve been learning Portuguese, I’ve developed this script of about 10 bottled conversations that I’d feel confident having with my non-English speaking Uber drivers. At first, these were all self-referential conversations about the level of Portuguese that I’m able to speak (”I’m learning…but I love the language and I love Brazil!”) Then it progressed into setups for semi-interesting reflections I can make on my time in Brazil. In Portuguese, ”Parece”, the second-person singular conjugation of the verb parecer, means to look (like).
And, in fairness, I really do think I look pretty Brazilian. It’s hard to say what exactly that is supposed to mean. Whenever I talk about it with Brazilians, that is the conclusion we always come to as well. “I really thought you were a Brazilian”. “Well, I really could have been”. Its commentary on the nature of large, multi-ethnic New World countries that developed their populations on the promise of a better life to immigrants. Or on forced labor. A combination of the two, usually. The United States and Brazil are extremely similar, perhaps uniquely similar in the world, in that regard. Their differences are exaggerated for that reason too.
The United States invented itself by imposing Manifest Destiny on the people who had something to gain from it and then marketing its most precious cultural productions — Coca Cola, blue jeans, representative democracy, nuclear weapons, ketchup, and car-centric cities — to the world. American culture exist through the international economy ensuring plausible deniability. Brazil marketed itself to its people. Brazilians know what it is to be a Brazilian. Perhaps, only Brazilians know this. The good and the bad. The leakages — funk music on TikTok and bossa nova being major ones — barely scratch the surface. I think this explains the fortitude of the culture here, the intensity. Brazil exist most strongly to the people who live here. It’s the opposite of Americans.
So what are we supposed to do with that information? It’s novel and interesting until you think about it, and this it isn’t. It means that Brazil can only be experienced. I could talk all day about the abnormal beauty of the Brazilian people. About the indescribable fun I have at parties here. About the complicated politics. About the strange dynamics of race and class here. About how great it is to sit on the beach with a couple of friends listening to Gilberto Gil, sipping caipirinhas as the sun sets. And it’s so cheap! I could market the hell out of this place until everyone that reads this is convinced that they must come to Brazil, just to check it out, as soon as humanly possible.
But, of course it is! The high-level realization is that people and places are different, that there is something powerful about experiencing new places. Americans especially will take away what they will from the deviations from the mean. Brazil is a parallel universe, where you can see what would have happened had the Puritans not made American culture one of petulance and paranoiac individualists. It’s a great place to go to for this reason. I’m excited to see what I’ll write about on this trip.
The question here is about truth. This is a good point of reflection on the craft of writing. Who am I to say the things that I say. What story is there to tell. Should I be varying my sentence structure more. Maybe less? Who cares, really? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain Brazil. I can scream until I’m hoarse about the paradox of the tan Brazilian or the long-term consequences of US intervention. But what would I be writing about? I’d barely see the forest, let alone the trees.
I'll probably not figure out the metaphysical, high-stakes, explorer-intellectual, Alexis de Tocqueville perspective on Brazilian people and culture for quite some time.
Maybe I don’t need to.
