Brazil Notes

A guest post by Edivaldo Soares

 

I’ve come to Rio de Janeiro for a wedding. The groom is my
wife’s cousin, but he isn’t a particularly close cousin, and family
loyalty accounts only for part of why I’m here. There must be another
reason, and the reason is what it always is these days when I get into
a plane: I travel to complicate my idea of what it means to be in this
world.

On the drive into Rio de Janeiro from the airport
earlier, I had noticed the bridges and highways. For them to have been
built, there must have been some kind of more or less efficient
interaction between the economy and the national and metropolitan
political structure. The same, or a similarly, more or less efficient
interaction is necessary to keep the roads and bridges in good repair.
Below the bridges, which are made of concrete, there is evidence of
dredging. Beyond them, rock has been blasted to create tunnels through
the mountains. In some neighborhoods, unpromising land was salvaged for
construction, some of it shoddy; as in most cities, what is rich and
what is poor can be seen in the landscape. That journey in is in early
morning light, and the favelas hang on the sides of the mountains. But
apparent, also, is the fact that this is a rich country.

Long
ago all we knew of other places were adventurers’ reports and the
material testimony of far-fetched goods. The other place was always
wondrous wonder or wondrous disorder, and Herodotus selected anecdotes
only for their strangeness. The distant shore is a place for our dreams
to rest, and foreign countries exist not for their own sake but for
ours. “Long ago all we knew,” and it remains so even now: India, Italy,
Morocco, Brazil: each is summarized to answer in a different way the
pre-set question of travel. At night the mountains of Rio look like
hills. Seen from the bridge bringing us back into the city, a dense
network of lights on each describes a dark shape. Each hill is like a
chocolate cake covered in confectioners’ sugar. This is the land of
football, carnival, and samba, a joyous place, given to simple
pleasures, unserious in all the best ways. Everybody fucks everybody,
the races mix without anxiety, and the country is blended into shades
of caramel, a preview in microcosm of what the world will look like
someday. That is the story; but these are not the things I think about
when I first enter the city. My thoughts are on first principles, that
a city is a built thing, a made thing. To start with the land is
“discovered,” won in a battle or in battles, and is tamed and ordered
through the efforts of centuries so that its ports and its hinterlands
are able to feed, serve, and entertain a large population. A city that
manages to do those things well, grows until it becomes a megalopolis.

As
cities go, Rio de Janeiro is not unusual. The first thing I note, as I
begin to mentally review the infrastructure, as I begin my haphazard
inquiry, is how similar the built environment is to that of every other
great city I know: the overpasses and underpasses, the street vendors,
the massive buildings in various states of newness or disrepair, the
patient commuters crowding the bus-stops, the evidence of things built
by politicians, things built by consensus and on the back of a complex
capitalist economy. Only later do I begin to note the dissimilarities:
this is another city, an unusual city, and it is another country. It
is, above all, in another continent and hemisphere, and there is a deep
strangeness to a place in which the land and its water are related to
each other by an almost familiar logic, where the geological processes
as well as the evolution of animals and plants have led to different
results. At night, I see Venus in an unexpected part of the night sky.
When I run water down the sink, I look for the Coriolis effect. Within
a few days, I have seen bays, inlets, birds, insects, leaves, and
fruits unlike any I knew before, with variations in color, smell,
cries, size, and scale. Only the humans are basically the same, the
behavior of the humans, their self-defence, their sentimentality, their
needless cruelties. Only the humans need no special interpretation—or
so I think—the humans and their dogs.

I see only one
black person on my flight to Rio, the dry-skinned and skeptical man who
peers at me from the mirror in the airplane toilet. Everyone else on
the flight is white, or just one or two Mediterranean shades south of
white. But on disembarkation, I see two other black men, one about the
color of the current American president, the other darker than me,
older, and wearing a “Jazz New Orleans” t-shirt. The darker man stands
with me and a handful of others in the passport line for non-citizens.
The Brazilian line is considerably longer and looks like the Brazil I
saw in Astoria. But several of the baggage handlers and groundstaff—I
begin to look around now, and get into a mood, and begin to count—are
black, some of them mulatto, some slave-dark. There is an aggravated
division, though I don’t want to come to such conclusions so early in
the journey. This is not the story the world tells itself about Brazil,
or that Brazil advertises to the world about itself.

There
are many more blacks on the streets. At a crossing, young black boys
swarm the cars, selling cell-phone chargers and newspapers. They look
like Nigerians, like the boys who descend on cars at intersections in
Lagos. But places are not transparent, and understanding why things in
a place are as they are does not come easily. I know that my
understanding of divisions between the races is formed by American
history and by my own experience in that country and can only take me
so far in here. Would I come closer to the truth if I read a study on
Brazilian race-relations? I would come closer to a truth, I am sure; but there’s a truth also in the immediacy of my own experience.

Later,
I visit two beaches, whites-only beaches (or so the casual visitor
would think) about two hours from Rio. One is for a richer clientele,
the other less so, but almost all the blacks I see at both are vendors
or workers. At the richer one, in Buzos, I enter a restaurant for
lunch. The maitre d’ ignores my greeting, pretending not to see me.
After a few awkward moments, I seat myself. Then I notice him
whispering instructions to a black waiter, and it is this waiter alone
who serves me and speaks to me while I am there. It is tempting to
think the incident explains itself, but what what one sees while
traveling is rarely self-explanatory. Each place has its own worries
and there’s a sense in which what is visible is the wake of a
particular history, fleeting, active, but answering to a large and
unseen thing. Each society deceives itself in particular ways. The
forms of oppression that were practiced here for so long lead to
specific pathologies in the society. In Rio there appears to be more
socializing across the races than in the US. But there also seems to be
an elaborate and finely-tuned colorism at work: among people who would
all be considered black in the US, there is a hierarchy of color. The
northern European whites and the Mediterranean whites are more likely
to socialize with fair-skinned blacks, and it isn’t unusual to see
groups of blacks in which everyone in the group is within a narrow
range of color: very dark, brownish, yellow, and so on. It isn’t the
one-drop rule. The number of drops matters.

The
guidebooks are full of warnings about the blacks, though of course the
warnings are not expressed so baldly. One must not visit favelas alone,
one must be careful in certain districts, and be alert on the metro,
and avoid walking at night. It appears to be sensible advice, but there
is a hysterical tone in the warnings. The warnings are intended for
white tourists. I am a young black man, and my mode of dress and bodily
attitude make me blend in easily with locals. I feel more welcome on
the streets than in fine restaurants, marked out by my inability to
speak Portuguese than by anything else. I hear the warnings from others
too, and they are the sorts of things that New Yorkers would say to
visitors to their own city: the talk of “bad” neighborhoods, the kinds
of people—whole classes of people—that one should avoid, the
experiences the visitor couldn’t possibly be interested in except from
the safety of a tour bus going around the human zoo. But whether to
Harlem on a Sunday morning or to the favelas in an organized tour, “bad
neighborhood” is a code term for other things, a rhetorical move that
separates some imagined “us,” rich enough to travel, white enough to
see ourselves reflected in television melodramas and in advertising,
from “them,” whose presence at our travel destination is an
inconvenience.

Rio is by some distance the most
geographically spectacular city I have ever visited. Riding the cable
car up to the Pão d’Açúcar adds something genuinely new to my
experience of the world. The sea and its numerous inlets at the moment
the sun is setting behind Corcovado, the streets and houses hundreds of
meters below with their evening lights just coming on, and those lights
seen all together nestled in the undulating land like so many fresh
rivulets of lava, the massive monoliths scattered in the bay, and all
of this viewed from the great height we crested in a nineteenth-century
contraption: it was an awesome rush of sensation, an unanticipated
seduction of the eye, fairy-tale stuff. The gneiss monoliths were
extruded in ancient times when the continent that is now South America
sheared itself away from Gondwanaland. How beautiful it all looks at
dusk from the mountain named for the shape of the tins at sugar
refineries. The shape of the coast created calm bays, calm bays are
ideal ports, ports build great cities, and Rio de Janeiro became the
entry and exit into one of the world’s great expanses of wealth: sugar,
mines for precious and semi-precious stones, and slaves.

In
the Lapa district of the city, I meet a man who is selling “African”
things at a street fair. He is Sengalese, short and with delicate
features. I ask him how much some woven Islamic caps cost and see, in
his bright eyes, a flicker of recognition: he responds in English, and
immediately becomes curious about me, where I’m from, what my name is.
His name is El-Hadj, and he tells me he has been in Rio for twelve
years. He speaks English well, with a considered tone. “It’s a very
difficult country,” he says, unprompted. “They are very hard on blacks
here. Things are difficult if you are black.” For Brazilian blacks, or
for Africans? “Both. But harder if you are Brazilian. I am an African.
I know my rights”—I am struck by this usage of rights, which sounds
rather American to me—“but these Brazilians, it is so sad, you know.
After five-hundred years…” He taps his head.

El Hadj
imports the goods from Dakar—trinkets, figurines, printed cloth, and
hand-woven material—for sale in Rio, but his real work, he says, is
that he is a journalist He is just trying to earn some money on the
side to do his master’s degree in Brazil. He has a calm and calming
presence, with none of the tense energy or obvious fatigue of some of
the brothers who do this street trade. He still writes, for French
language outlets, some of which are published in Senegal.

“The
slavery is not over, you see. The blacks here try to be close to
Africa. I think they are closer to Africa than those in America. In
some ways, they are more connected to African culture. Because that is
our problem as blacks, you see, we have surrendered our culture, the
good things in our culture. Not all of it is good, but we should not
give up the good things. This is our biggest problem. But Brazilian
blacks…” Again, he taps his head. “And the whites in this country,
forget it, they will give the blacks no chance.”

“What about you? Do you move around freely?”

“Yes,
sometimes, when I enter a nice mall, they really look at me strangely,
you know. What is this guy doing here?” I tell him I have experienced
the same. He said, “But it is a good country, a very good country. The
food, the culture. I like Brazil, even though it is difficult. The
women are beautiful.”

He has to attend to one customer,
then others come to join her, black Brazilians, dressed in white. Their
affect is like that of the Afrocentric blacks in Brooklyn. The women
begin to admire bales of El Hadj’s wax-print cloth, and I leave him.

The
place at which we arrive after crossing the world is a surprising
version of home. It is home not in the far-fetched and marvelous view
from the mountain, but in the street-level, the bankers, the maids, the
internet service, the electrical grid, the supermarkets, the unctuous
waiters, the video games, the question marks over the cab drivers, the
schools and churches, the clean bathrooms, the dirty politics, the
traffic jams, the little pockets of “authentic culture,” the noise from
kindergartens at midday, the translated American bestsellers, Celine
Dion on the radio, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on the television,
the bored police officers with their brooding firearms, the indifferent
water pressure from the showers, the sports pennants hanging from
windows, the adults dressed like toddlers on game-day, the beer, the
wine, the graffiti, the transvestites, the auto-repair shops, the
gas-stations, the cowboys, the cowhands, the hospitals, and the
cemeteries.

What has us setting off to distant
destinations in the first place? Perhaps “us” is wrong and travel
writing, and travel thought, ought to begin in the singular, in some
acknowledgement of the “I” that speaks. I am Yoruba, and in this
country, of all the places outside Nigeria, the Yoruba heritage is
visible. The orixas of the northeast of Brazil, are the orishas of the
southwest of Nigeria. Xango is Shango, Exu is Esu, Yemanja is Yemoja,
Ogu is Ogun, and Obatala is unchanged. The gods are all here, the
language itself survives in ritual, and Yoruba drumming has found its
way into the samba and, greatly decelerated, into bossa nova. Farofa is
garri, the sweet and sour flour of the cassava plant, a staple food of
Yorubas on both sides of the Atlantic. In the lifetime of my
great-grandparents, slaves were still arriving in Brazil from
Yorubaland. In the same generation and later, there were those who
returned after slavery in Brazil. Names like Pereira, da Silva, and da
Costa survive, and those families became important, particularly in
Lagos. The architectural innovations the Afro-Brazilians brought back
to Lagos, Abeokuta and surrounding towns, the stucco facades, the
two-story buildings, mark those places to this day. But none of this
means an easy delight for me, a Yoruba man visiting Brazil. It suggests
only that this country is the site of some trauma to which I am
related, a trauma the memory of which catches me at sudden moments.

I’m
writing these words Tijuca, a working-class neighborhood of Rio, on a
rainy afternoon, and there’s a white cloud sitting on a green mountain
in the distance. The cloud is so densely white that it appears to be
just as substantial as the forested mountain itself. I am reading
Machado de Assis’ masterpiece “Epitaph of a Small Winner,” which is
itself set in Tijuca, a wry book, a funny and humane examination of
cynicism in Rio’s upper classes, written by a black man when slavery
was still legal here. I remember—this an overstatement, but it feels
right—I remember the things suffered here by Africans. It is strange to
think I would have understood the pleas at the whipping post, that it
would have been in my own language, the language of my people—my people
sold off into slavery by my people. A blood knot ties each of us to
ancient acts of violence. I am unhappy and at home.

But
in writing all this, what I exclude is a proper sense of the pleasure
of travel, and the intense pleasure of traveling to this particular
place. I hate cheery travel writing, but I feel I have overcorrected in
the other direction.

Edivaldo Soares is a heteronym for Teju Cole. All photographs copyright 2010 by Teju Cole; these and others may be viewed at his Flickr portfolio.

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