Friday 7 March 2008

Over and out...

Aiiiii, where are we now? After three months I find myself suddenly heading home.

We’ve spent a lovely six days in Sao Paulo, catching up with the near and dear and, after so many fleeting encounters, reveling in the long-term friendships with solid foundations. Sao Paulo feels oddly like home now, and it bizarrely it seems like a luxury getting out of the tourist circuit and vegging out in Ju’s suburban place. We’ve been to the fabulously named O! Do Borogodo, twice – and it really as brilliant as the name promises – done a couple of good parties and a lot of merciless shopping for all the bits of Brazil that you can buy and take home. Our packed bags are, as a consequence, remorselessly heavy.

Our friends have asked us about our time here, what’s changed for us. Brazil for me now is spelt with an “S”, for a start. What else?

I’ve come to understand how your adrenalin levels can be re-set by shocking or traumatic experiences, had to concede the disparity between what my rational mind wants to believe and what my body chemicals are screaming at me.

I’ve fallen in love with Portuguese but missed my language – the power it gives me to control situations, and I’ve really come to appreciate how I use it to extricate myself from situations, to force my way through the world. Without language, your judgement skills are seriously impeded. You can’t understand the nuance and the connotations of what people say. All ideas, ideologies, cultural references are gone. A softer word, a harder word, an ironic touch, word play, diplomacy, tact, persuasiveness, finesse, eloquence, articulacy, slang – all the ways we own our language normally are gone.

You have to express your basic needs in basic ways, and this leads to me finding myself being overly polite and compliant. It’s either a yes or an impolite refusal, nothing in between, which means people can push the envelope until we put our heavy foot down. The boundaries of what is acceptable have to change in the absence of a way to negotiate them.

But we also gain from this. It forces us to watch, to live in the present, to gauge people’s thoughts and emotional states through all the other means, physical clues, where their eyes go, where their tension a and attention is held. Most people are for the most part pretty transparent, in terms of judging what they are trying to get out of a situation. And so that’s all you have to go on – people’s objectives. The subtleties of how they try to achieve them are lost in translation.

The Brasilians have a term – “jeitinho Brasileiro” – little brazilian way – which describes the skill of getting around obstacles. It’s a mindset which affirms that there’s always a way to get what you want, you just have to talk the other person around. Nothing is fixed, everything is negotiable, and rules are there to be bent. It’s why there is chaos and corruption. It’s the favela that springs up on the unoccupied land. It’s the capoerista ducking the flying foot. It’s the skill that procures a restaurant table that didn’t exist, or persuades a bar that it’s not time to shut. It’s the cause of the politicians having to have their credit cards withdrawn, like little naughty children, because they’ve all been passing off private luxuries as business expenses. But it’s also a playfulness and joyousness, an approach to life that, for an English person, defined by queues and forms and taught to tick the boxes and respect their place in the world, is liberating and thrilling.

Brazil is a place of porous boundaries. As a country, its miles and miles of borders are unpolicable – hence the flow of drugs from Bolivia and Columbia being trafficked through for European consumption. Boundaries in Brazil are insubstantial. It’s the rope in Carnaval that divides the pipoca from the bloco, and the street that separates the favela from the luxury apartments.

But then, in another sense, the divides are unsurpassable. Brazil is a country that has driven me to angry desperation at the shameful state it’s in. It’s royally fucked. Brazil has one foot in the first world and one in the third. It’s a country where the haves and have-nots are savagely divided, the former barricading themselves in, the latter undertaking desperate acts of violence to try to get a grip. As a result of the massive underinvestment in the education of its populace, Brazil suffers an incredible derth of intellectual capital, which, it seems to me, no-one is doing anything to rectify. I lost count of the people who told me of the woeful state of Brazil’s public schools. The average Brazilian has only 5 years of education. The only way to get into University (only 4% of the population obtain a degree) is to be privately educated. On my last night in Sao Paulo, we debated the tyranny of Fidel’s regime, the lack of freedom that the Cubans have endured. The Cubans have the best health care system in the world and excellent education – but as my Brazilian friend pointed out, they can’t do anything with it, because they have no freedom of speech. How free in comparison, we debated, are the millions of Brazilians without access to any of this? For many in Brazil, I felt, the only way to get their voice heard is through acts of violence.

The horror stories are unending. Everyone you meet will tell you a new one – from the middle classes: tales of the hold-ups in restaurants, at wedding receptions, in. The street mugger who’s so high on crack the gun is shaking in his hand. The bus hijacks. The car-hijacks. The kidnapping. The break-ins. The bag-snatchings. The pickpocketing.

From the favelas: the police brutality, the lost bullets that pass through thin walls and kill children. The corrupt NGO in the favela that had fallen under the control of the trafficantes The endless turf wars, the unbelievable death toll of young men (the hole in the population that’s comparable to a country at war), the ruthless capitalism of the cocaine economy, the savagery of the Tropa de Elite. The police troupe who desecrated the Morrinho, pulling guns on 14 year old boys because they believed that their creation was actually a model for a war-strategy.

And between the two, the police who will empty your bank account if you’re caught with a joint, who sell guns to the trafficantes, who, dressed in plain clothes, hold up busloads of Japanese tourists and relieve them of their cameras. Who moonlight as security guards and are paid off by the robbers they let through. Who’ll crack their baton into your back in Carnaval because you accidentally bumped into them. On and on and on.

And the media, who can’t expose the political corruption, who don’t contribute to rigourous intelligent debate about the solutions, but who ruthlessly monger the horror stories, day after day after day. The inanity of the telenovelas, which occupy everyone’s interest instead.

Oh, and the racism, which everyone denies exists but is palpable. It's still inescapably a country built on the back of slavery, and despite the mixing up that's gone on since, the implied status of skin colour still casts a long shadow. The Brazilians have a plethora of words to describe the colour of someone’s skin, their ethnicity. In popular parlance, dark-skinned girls have “skin the colour of sin”, because it’s permitted to lust over them. There are people alive in Brazil today whose grandparents were owned by other people’s grandparents, but slavery is the elephant in the room. In the Mercado Modelo, in Salvador, a building which used to be the holding port and trading place for slaves, stalls selling African-inspired art jostle for the tourist dollar, whilst walk downstairs, and you find the unmarked, unlabeled, pit of hell where thousands of men and women were kept like battery chickens, a huge windowless wet circular cavern, a one-time warehouse for humans – but without a single sign admitting the building’s past. It truly is unspeakable.

And being white, over there, everyone assumes that you have the same ingrained notions about race and social class (which, having grown up in multi-cultural London, we don’t). That’s hard to get round.

At the airport, on our way out, the black security attendant who was passing our luggage through the scanner asked us where we were from. When we told him, he asked us “but you don’t have black people in London, do you?” He was surprised when we assured him that we did. “But not like me?” he asked, “not as dark as me?” We were unable to convince him.

It's also somewhere where you feel your sex. Men and women aren't friends in Brazil (certainly not platonic ones), and sex permeates nearly every exchange. Being there has made me feel, as I never have before, the 'weakness' of my sex - the places that are off-limits to women - and, perhaps even more tangibly, it's made me realise the ease of my path through the world in London, where I can count on one hand the times I've been on the frustrating end of someone putting an obstacle in my path because of my gender. I'm really fucking grateful for it.

The shame that creeps onto the face of the educated, intelligent, liberal, social-minded middle-class Brazilian if you talk about the problems that the country faces. What keeps coming back to me is the sociologist who stated that Brazilians have to ignore the problems, that they rationalise and deny facts, because if they were to confront this dreadful reality then they’d be forced to put everything on hold until the problem is fixed. And whose social conscience goes that far?

If I lived there, I’ve asked myself, what would my social position be? Could I bear it?

And at times it can be desperately depressing. But at the same time, it’s ruthlessly invigorating. Everything that matters – the forces that propel us – death, sex, desire – are so close to the surface. London, in comparison, seems flat.

We've also been on the receiving end of so much open-hearted friendship and generosity. In stark contrast to London's hostile pretence that everybody else doesn't exist, we've had so much genuine interest in who we are, where we're going. Everybody has time for a chat, and as a result your world gets infinitely enriched by other people's stories. Every Brazilian who heard of our bad experiences felt it personally, and apologised for it, to the extent that we felt more comfortable not mentioning it. But I definitely feel that the few instances where people wished to take from us were proportionally miniscule in comparison to the myriad of tiny and not so tiny kindnesses that so many people bestowed on us, and which will stay on just as forcefully in my memory. Knowing full well I'm running headlong into full-blown sentimentality here, it's nonetheless true to say that we were looked after by just so many, and it's made me hope that one day I'm capable of bestowing the same generous hospitality.

Back home now, everything seems depressingly the same. I ask for news. There isn’t any. Everyone is doing the same stuff they were before we left, have been living the same lives, day in and day out. It’s a bizarre sensation of having gone through the looking glass, or through the wardrobe into a topsy-turvy world that throws everything you thought you know on its head, and returning to the familiarity of the bedroom to find that not a minute has passed.

My little Brazil story – one that was inextricably bound up in the 15-year-long friendship between A and I. We grew to a level of interdependence that was extreme – but never wearing. We slept in the same beds, ate the same food, had the same experiences, read the same books, spent the same money, met the same people and told the same stories for 93 days. We looked at the world, for the most part, through the same lens, and found pleasure in the process of rooting out how it affected us differently. But we got to the stage where we knew intimately the state of each other's bowels, could count the blemishes on each other's skin, knew the ongoing soap-opera of each other's dreams, had worn all of each other's clothes, removed the offending pieces from each other's food without being asked to, finished each others sentences, if we were talking to others, and didn’t need to finish them if we were addressing each other. “Look at the…Yeah.” “I might just – alright then”. Back in London, in our shared flat, we’re remembering what it’s like to live at least semi-independently, and to break the habit of consulting each other automatically on each and every of life’s inane tiny decisions. That said, we've made a pact to stave off the remainder of the British winter with Series 2-5 of The Wire...

“When you travel” mused Anatole, “I think you leave a little piece of yourself in the places you’ve been, and after a time, you don’t feel complete, anywhere, because a part of you is always somewhere else.” I concur.

Where next? People keep asking me. But the list of countries to tick off has been relegated to a back page in my mental notebook. Why flit from one unsubstantial encounter to the next, meeting countries like fleeting “friends” in a bar – seeing only the side they like to project to the world, and never getting to know their secrets, inadequacies, longings, intricacies? I want to go back to Brazil, and get to know it better.

Tuesday 4 March 2008

Cities of Gold

Last post from Brazil

Christ this has crept up on me….I’m miles behind in explaining our adventures, having left you last sitting around drinking beers with backpackers in Belo Horizonte…so an abbreviated catch up since then…

We went to Ouro Preto, one of the “cidades historicas” which was once the capital of Minas Gerais state when it was all about the mining. There is indeed a lot of history to be had in Ouro Preto; it’s been declared a World Heritage Site and seems very much like a living museum.

I hold the opinion that history is quite inaccessible unless you’re up close to it, which is why Ouro Preto is an amazing place to spend some time in terms of getting to grips with the forces that shaped the country over the last few centuries –– but also it’s very dull to have it described to you out of context, so I’ll stick to the abridged version.


Ouro Preto’s richness is a result of the ruthless exploitation of two commodotities – gold, and slaves. During the 1500s, gold was discovered in the region and of course everyone flooded in to try and get a piece of the action. Thousands of slaves were shipped in, and tons of gold sent back to Europe. There was quite a bit of warring between the Portuguese, who tried to control the flow of gold by taxing it at 20%, which wound up the settled Brazilians, who tried to get a revolution of the ground with the aim of getting Minas declared an independent state. This was quashed and the leader of the revolution, Tiradentes, (who actually was just the scapegoat fronting the campaign for the rich local gold-moguls) was killed in a rather nasty fashion and bits of his body spread all over the place.

We spent a day going on a long walk around the city, guided by Joao Baptiste, who we’d had the fortune to meet in a bar the previous night. He was an incredible auto-didact with a huge knowledge of architecture and history, who spoke not only perfect English but Spanish, French and German too despite never having finished school. He was born in Ouro Preto, and his family have been there for 8 generations.

The backbreaking work of getting the gold out of the ground was only possible due to the colonialist’s ability to treat humans as animals for their free labour, and the mines died off with abolition. Joao Baptiste was frank and forthright with his explanations of how his ancestors were bought, sold, selectively bred:

“You’ll notice that the black people here are short. Only the short ones were selected to come here and work the mines – the taller black folk were used to cut cotton and work the sugar fields. And then they were bred to be short – if a boy of 12 or 13 looked like he was growing too tall, he’d be castrated.”

In the Casa de Contas, basically for many years the main bank of Minas Gerais, the gold was held on the top floor and the slaves in the bottom – a basement room which is now filled with cases displaying instruments of human subjugation and torture. From my atheist perspective, the punitive Catholicism which gave rise to the glut of awe-inspiring Rococco and Baroque churches in the town was the mental instrument used for the same purpose.

From Ouro Preto, we went to Tiradentes, a small town in stunning countryside which nowadays, we discovered, is exploited for its prettiness (like, it seems, all the pretty towns in Brazil) by far too many antique shops and pousadas. “Some” warned the Lonely Planet, “may find the glut of antique shops cloying”. We were well and truly cloyed within about an hour and a half.Maybe we just weren’t in the mood for it, but I think when too many people are trying to make you pay attention to the history/prettiness of a place, it all just gets a bit irritating. And there’s always the strange phenomenon to be observed of everybody trying to ignore the modern, squinting to blot out the cars and adverts and telephone wires in order to see the “historical”, reframing their photos to crop out the bit that they don’t want to see, which is the reality of the here and now. I find the wilful refusal to accept the present - and the accompanying selective memory making - a little bit disturbing.

Tiradentes is odd to a city girl because of the number of unaccompanied animals wandering round the streets. Not only dogs (of which there are many) but horses and the occasional cow, having a snack outside the post office or ambling down the road. Quite often you’re walking somewhere and they follow you for a bit, which is slightly disconcerting. Sitting bored outside yet another cloying shop, I made the mistake of stroking a friendly dog. The owner of the shop came out and said something to me in Portuguese, which I took to be warning me off doing so, but I couldn’t really understand the explanation apart from something about “todo o mundo”.

Twenty minutes later, we did indeed have todo o mundo, as the dog I’d stroked was joined by another and another and another until we were apparently the leaders of a large pack of them. It’s hard to style out a thronging hoard of canines and we started to feel rather silly. It was however the most exciting thing that happened to us all day, bar an incident when A discovered to her utter horror that her icecream (she’d gone random with the flavours) had cheese in it. Really, it did. Cheese.

Tiradentes was the jumping point, however, for a really stunning day of horse-riding. A and I were taken off on great horses with their owner, Adriano, (followed, of course, by his two dogs) for 3 hours of cantering around the stunning local area. I had feared at one point that riding, which is one of my favourite things, was permanently written off by the slipped disc, so it was exhilarating to be back in the saddle.

And from Tiradentes, it was back to Sao Paulo, which felt strangely like coming home.