Introduction: ‘Brazil Is Just Nearby’
It’s good to know the joyful reaction in the city [Rio de Janeiro] to the abolition of slavery, in 1888, was felt all over the country. It could not have been otherwise, as in everyday life the injustice of its origins was felt by all. Where I went to school, a state-run institution in Rua do Rezende, the children were delighted. I recall that our teacher, D. Tereza Pimentel do Amaral, a highly intelligent woman, explained to us what it really meant; but with the simplicity of a child, all that I could think was: free! free! I thought we could all now do as we liked; that from then on there would be no limits to the progress we dreamt of. But how far we are from that! Still so trapped in the cobwebs of prejudice, the rules and the laws! […] These memories are good; they have a whiff of nostalgia and lend us a feeling of eternity. Inflexible time, the offspring and brother of Death, gradually kills aspirations, destroying our hopes, leaving us with only sorrow and our recollections of the past – often mere trifles, but which are always a consolation.
The author of this passage is Lima Barreto. Journalist, essayist and columnist of the city, he was one of the few Brazilian writers to define himself as black – both as a man and in his writing – and this despite living in a country where the censuses showed that the majority of inhabitants were black and mestizo. The passage does not appear to have been written for posterity. This emotional outburst was scribbled on the back of a piece of paper in the War Ministry, where the writer worked as a clerk; a government employee, relatively low in the hierarchy of civil servants.
His father, João Henriques de Lima Barreto, who had connections to the monarchy, was one of the first to lose his job under the new republican government; he found employment in a warehouse and was subsequently put in charge of an asylum. In 1902 he was diagnosed as ‘mentally insane’ and forced to retire from his government post. Insanity, which at the time was thought to be a result of a racial degeneration resulting from miscegenation, was to pursue his son throughout his life; Lima Barreto was interned in the National Hospital for the Insane on two occasions, in 1914 and 1919. The words ‘madness’, ‘despondency’ and ‘exclusion’ frequently appear in the writer’s work and to a large extent define his generation.
There seems to be nothing random or arbitrary about the passage. It reveals some of the persistent traits of Brazil’s short history; at least, the history that begins in 1500 with the country’s ‘discovery’, as it is referred to by some, though ‘invasion’ would be a more accurate term. Although these five centuries of the nation’s existence have been marked by a wide diversity of events, in differing political and cultural contexts, certain stubbornly insistent traits can be observed. Among these has been precisely the challenging and tortuous process of building citizenship. As this book will demonstrate, there have been occasions when the public has demonstrated civic-mindedness and enthusiasm, for example when slavery was abolished in 1888, as mentioned by Lima Barreto. When Princess Isabel announced the long-awaited decree from the balcony of the Paço Imperial, people crowded into the square below. Although eventually enacted by the government, the law, known as the Lei Áurea, was largely the result of the pressure of public opinion. As important as it was, the law nonetheless did very little to integrate those Brazilians who had enjoyed neither citizenship nor rights for so long. It illustrates a recurring pattern. Many such acts were followed by political and social setbacks: projects that failed to produce an inclusive society; a Republic devoid of republican values, as described by Lima Barreto.
This is the reason why comings and goings, advances and setbacks are so much a part of Brazilian history, a history that might be characterized as ‘mestizo’, in a sense, like the Brazilian people. It is a history providing multiple, and at times ambivalent answers, one that cannot be interpreted in terms of the traditionally celebrated dates and events; nor can it be traced through objective considerations alone, nor in terms of a clear-cut evolution. Brazil’s history is an amalgam generating different forms of ‘memory’. It is ‘mestizo’ not only because it is a ‘mixture’, but also, clearly, a ‘separation’. In a country characterized by the power of the landowners – many of whom own immense estates, each the size of a city – authoritarianism and personal interest have always been deeply rooted, undermining the free exercise of civic power, weakening public institutions and consequently the struggle for people’s rights. There is a popular Brazilian proverb, ‘if you steal a little you’re a thief, if you steal a lot you’re a chief’, as if to legitimize the notion – highly controversial and much discussed today – that the wealthy and powerful are exempt, citizens above suspicion.
There is a further trait which, as a social rather than a natural construction, is not endemic, but is nevertheless shockingly resistant to improvement and a constant presence in Brazilian history. The logic and language of violence are deeply embedded determinants of Brazilian culture. Violence has characterized Brazilian history since the earliest days of colonization, marked as they were by the institution of slavery. This history of violence has permeated Brazilian society as a whole, spreading throughout, virtually naturalized. Although slavery is no longer practised in Brazil, its legacy casts a long shadow. The experience of violence and pain is repeated, dispersed, and persists in modern Brazilian society, affecting so many aspects of people’s lives.
Brazil was the last Western country to abolish slavery and today it continues to be the champion of social inequality and racism, which, albeit veiled, is equally perverse. Although there is no legal form of discrimination, the poor, and above all black people, are the most harshly treated by the justice system, have the shortest life span, the least access to higher education and to highly qualified jobs. The indelible mark of slavery conditions Brazilian culture; the country defines itself on the basis of gradations of skin colour. Whereas those who achieve success become ‘whiter’, those who become impoverished become ‘darker’. But Brazilians’ self-identity does not end with this porous sense of ethnicity, for there is racial inclusion in many of the country’s best-known cultural activities: capoeira, candomblé, samba, football. Brazilian music and culture are ‘mestizo’ in both their origin and singularity. Nevertheless, the numerous processes of social exclusion cannot be ignored; they are reflected in the limited access to entertainment and leisure, to the employment market and to health services (affecting birth rate), and in the daily intimidation by the police, where racial profiling is the norm.
To a certain extent, this amalgam of colours and customs, the mixture of races, has formed the image of Brazil. On the one hand, this mixture was consolidated by violence, by the forced importation of peoples, cultures and experiences into the country. Far from any alleged attempt at social harmony, the different races were deliberately intermingled. This resulted from the purchase of Africans brought to Brazil by force in far larger numbers than to any other country. Brazil received more than 40 per cent of all slaves that were brought from Africa to work on the plantations in Portuguese America – a total of around 3.8 million individuals. Today, 60 per cent of the country’s population is made up of blacks and ‘browns’; it could thus be ranked as the most populated ‘African’ country, with the exception of Nigeria. Furthermore, despite the numerous controversies, it is estimated that in 1500 the native population was between 1 million and 8 million, of which between 25 per cent and 95 per cent were decimated after the ‘meeting’ with the Europeans.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that the same mixture of races, unequalled in any other country, generated a society that was defined by mixed marriages, rhythms, arts, sports, aromas, cuisine and literary expression. It could be said that the ‘Brazilian soul’ is multicoloured. The variety of Brazilian faces, features, ways of thinking and seeing the country are evidence of how deeply rooted the mixture of races is, and of how it has produced new cultures born from its hybrid nature and variety of experiences. Cultural diversity is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the country, deeply marked and conditioned by ‘separation’ but also by the ‘mixture’ resulting from the long process of mestiçagem.
Although the result of centuries-old discriminatory practices, Brazil’s mixed-race soul – born of the mixture of Amerindians, Africans and Europeans – provides for new perspectives. There is a multiplicity of meanings in the culture produced by a country that does not obey the established correlations between the dominator, on the one hand, and the dominated on the other – European and Amerindian, white and African. As Riobaldo Tatarana, one of Guimarães Rosa’s most important fictional characters, once said, ‘held captive inside its little earthy destiny, the tree opens so many arms’ – so too, with its hybrid soul, Brazil has many arms. Brazil cannot be categorized, by way of blurring the most obvious cultural practices; the country is both a part of and distinct from the rest of the world – but always Brazilian.
And the country has many characteristics. Lima Barreto concludes his text with a sarcastic outburst: ‘We keep on living stubbornly, hoping, hoping … For what? The unexpected, which may occur tomorrow or sometime in the future; who knows, a sudden stroke of luck? A hidden treasure in the garden?’ This is Brazil’s national obsession, which the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda wrote about in his 1936 seminal work Raízes do Brasil, a country on the lookout for the daily miracle, or some unexpected saviour. He called the trait ‘Bovarism’, using the concept in reference to ‘an invincible disenchantment with our own reality’. Since then, the idea has been adopted by the Carioca (inhabitant of Rio) literati to describe the Brazilian addiction to ‘foreignisms’, to ‘copying everything as if it were its own raw material’.
The term ‘bovarismo’ originates with Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and defines the altered sense of reality when a person thinks of himself or herself as someone else. This psychological state generates chronic dissatisfaction, produced by the contrast between illusions and aspirations, and, above all, by the continuous disparity between these illusions and reality. Now imagine this same phenomenon transferred from an individual to an entire community that conceives itself as something that it is not and is waiting for some unexpected event that will transform its dismal reality. According to Buarque de Holanda (and Lima Barreto), all Brazilians have an element of Madame Bovary.
At football matches, an iconic metaphor for Brazilian nationality, everyone waits for ‘something to happen’ that will save the game. People cross their fingers in the hope that some magical intervention will fall from the skies (alleviating malaise and solving all problems). Immediatism takes the place of planning substantive, long-term changes. The current fashion is for Brazilians to identify themselves as members of the BRICS, and to cling to the belief that the country has joined the ranks of Russia, India, China and South Africa because of the extraordinary economic growth of recent years, and with a greater degree of autonomy.1 If Brazil has truly achieved such remarkable economic growth – and is really the seventh largest economy in the world, not to mention the country’s enormous, and little exploited, natural resources – it should not be ignoring serious social problems in the areas of transport, health, education and housing which, although there has been considerable progress, are still woefully inadequate.
‘Bovarism’ is also implicit in a very Brazilian form of collective evasion, which allows Brazilians to reject the country as it really is and imagine a quite different one – since the real Brazil is unsatisfactory and, worse still, citizens feel impotent regarding their ability to make changes. In the void between what Brazilians are and how they perceive themselves, nearly all possible identities have been explored: white, black, mulatto, savage, North American, European, and now, BRICS. The tropical version of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ is ‘To be is not to be’. Or, in the words of film critic Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes, ‘the arduous construction of ourselves [that] develops in the rarefied dialectic between not being and being someone else’.
This concept also explains another local obsession: looking at ourselves in the mirror and always seeing something different. At times more French, at others more American; at times more backward, at others more advanced: but always different. In various phases of Brazilian history, this type of idealized construction of the country served to foment Brazilian nationalism.
At any rate, despite the ambiguities of the national discourse, colonial nations of the recent past, like Brazil, are obsessed with creating an identity that is comparable to an inflatable mattress. For these countries, national identity is always in question. We know, however, that identities are not essential phenomena and, far less, atemporal. On the contrary, they are dynamic, political and flexible representations, reactions to negotiations in given situations. This is perhaps the reason why Brazilians cling to the idea that this plasticity and spontaneity are an integral part of their national practices and ethos. From this viewpoint, Brazil becomes the land of improvisation where things always turn out well, and the popular proverb (with its ill-concealed certainty), ‘God is Brazilian’, can be understood. Whether by witchcraft, invoking the aid of the saints or through prayers and incantations, beliefs and religions intermingle for the desired miracle to materialize.
Brazilian Bovarism is implicit in another characteristic that defines nationality: ‘familyism’ – the deep-rooted custom of transforming public issues into private ones. A good politician becomes a ‘member of the family’ who is always referred to by his Christian name: Getúlio, Juscelino, Jango, Lula, Dilma. It seems no coincidence that during the dictatorship the generals were referred to by their surnames: Castello Branco, Costa e Silva, Geisel, Médici and Figueiredo. As Buarque de Holanda argued, Brazil has always been characterized by the precedence of affection and emotion over the rigorous impersonality of principles that organize society in so many other countries. ‘We will give the world a cordial man’, as Buarque de Holanda said, not in a celebratory tone, rather regretting and criticizing Brazil’s tortuous entry into modernity. The word ‘cordial’ derives from the Latin ‘cor, cordis’, semantically linked to the Brazilian word for ‘heart’ (coração) and to the supposition that, in Brazil, intimacy is the norm (even the names of saints are used in the diminutive), revealing an extraordinary lack of commitment to the idea of the public good and a clear aversion to those in power. Worse still, Buarque de Holanda’s argument has been rejected in most circles, and his notion of ‘cordial’ widely misinterpreted. It was seen as a parody of Brazil’s cordiality, a harmonious, receptive people who reject violence. It was not understood in the critical sense, as a reference to the difficulty in being proactive in establishing effective institutions. Another example of Bovarism is how lasting Brazil’s self-image has been: a peace-loving country, one that rejects radicalism, despite the innumerable rebellions, revolts and protests that have punctuated Brazilian history since the outset. Brazil is and is not: an ambiguity far more productive than a handful of stilted official images.
Sound ideologies, therefore, can be compared to tattoos or an idée fixe; they appear to have the power of imposing themselves on society and generating reality. Hearing them constantly, Brazilians end up believing in a country where hearsay is more important than reality. Brazilians have constructed a dreamt-up image of a different Brazil – based on their imagination, happiness and a particular way of confronting difficulties – and have ended up as its mirror image. All this is well and good. But the country continues to be the champion of social inequality and is still struggling to construct true republican values and true citizens.
Once this internal dialectic has been recognized, the next step is to understand that it is not in fact exclusively internal. The country has always been defined by those looking on from outside. Since the sixteenth century, before Brazil was Brazil, when it still constituted an unknown Portuguese America, it was observed with considerable curiosity. The territory, the ‘other’ of the West, was either represented through what it did not possess – neither laws, rules nor hierarchy – or else by what it demonstrated in excess – lust, sex, laziness and partying. Seen from this angle the country would merely be at the margins of the civilized world, a gauche culture filled with uncouth people, who are nevertheless peace-loving and happy. In advertising, and according to foreigners, Brazil is still seen as hospitable, with exotic values, and home to a type of ‘universal native’, since the country is apparently inhabited by an amalgam of ‘foreign peoples’ from around the world.
Although Brazil is undeniably blessed by a series of ‘miracles’ – a temperate climate (sixteenth-century travellers called it ‘the land of eternal spring’), an absence of natural catastrophes (hurricanes, tsunamis or earthquakes) and of institutionalized and official antagonism towards certain groups – it is certainly neither the promised land nor ‘the land of the future’. There are those who have attempted to cast Brazil as representing an alternative solution to the impasses and contradictions of the West. Inspired by the idea of cannibalism, as witnessed by the first visitors, later developed by Montaigne, and even later reinterpreted in the twentieth century by Oswald de Andrade in his ‘Manifesto antropófago’ (1928), Brazilians have an obsession with reinventing themselves, with transforming failings into virtues and omens. Cannibalizing customs, defying conventions and upsetting premises is still a local characteristic, a ritual of insubordination for nonconformists that perhaps sets Brazilians apart, or at least keeps the flame of utopia alive.
Ever since the arrival of Cabral and his fleet of caravels, Brazil has been a paradise for some, an endless hell for others, and for the rest, a kind of purgatory on earth. Despite these characteristics being identified with the past, they are still alive and well. Around 1630, Vicente do Salvador, a Franciscan friar, considered Brazil’s first historian, wrote in his short History of Brazil: ‘There is not a single man in this land who is republican, who cares for or administers the public wealth; instead, it is every man for himself.’
Since the very beginning of the country’s short history, of five hundred years or so, from the establishment of the first plantations in the territories that were later to constitute Brazil, the difficulty in sharing power and engendering a sense of common good was evident. However, despite Frei Vicente’s comment, republican values do exist in Brazil. Inventing an imaginary construction of public life is a typically Brazilian way of avoiding the impasse generated in the interior of a society that has been a success in some aspects while a failure in others.
Thus Brazil’s development was born of ambivalence and contrast. On the one hand, it is a country with a high degree of social inequality and high rates of illiteracy, whereas on the other its electoral system is one of the most sophisticated and reliable in the world. Brazil has rapidly modernized its industrial parks, and it has the second-highest number of Facebook users in the world. At the same time, vast geographical regions lie abandoned, particularly in the north, where the chief means of transport is by rudimentary sailboats. Brazil has an advanced constitution that forbids any kind of discrimination, yet in reality, silent and perverse forms of prejudice are deeply ingrained and pervade everyday life. In Brazil the traditional and the cosmopolitan, the urban and the rural, the exotic and the civilized, walk hand in hand. The archaic and the modern intermingle, the one questioning the other in a kind of ongoing interrogation.
No single book can relate the history of Brazil. In fact there is no country whose history can be related in linear form, as a sequence of events, or even in a single version. This book does not set out to tell the story of Brazil, but to make Brazil the story. In the words of Hannah Arendt, both the historian and her or his reader learn to ‘train the imagination to go out on a visit’. This book takes her notion of ‘a visit’ seriously. It does not intend to construct a ‘general history of the Brazilian people’, but rather opts for a biography as an alternative form of understanding Brazil in a historical perspective: to learn about the many events that have shaped the country, and to a certain extent remain on the national agenda.
A biography is the most basic example of the profound connection between the public and the private spheres: only when articulated do these spheres constitute the fabric of a life, rendering it forever real. To write about the life of this country implies questioning the episodes that have formed its trajectory over time and learning from them about public life, about the world and about contemporary Brazil – in order to understand the Brazilians of the past, and those that should or could have been.
The imagination and the diversity of sources are important prerequisites in the composition of a biography. A biography includes great figures, politicians, public servants and ‘celebrities’; it also includes people of little importance, who are virtually anonymous. But constructing a biography is never an easy task: it is very difficult to reconstitute the moment that inspired the gesture. One must ‘walk in the dead man’s shoes’, according to the historian Evaldo Cabral, to connect the public to the private, to penetrate a time which is not our own, open doors that do not belong to us, be aware of how people in history felt and attempt to understand the trajectory of the subjects of the biography – in this case the Brazilian people – during the time they lived: what they achieved in the public sphere, over the centuries, with the resources that were available to them; the fact that they lived according to the demands of their period, not of ours. And, at the same time, not to be indifferent to the pain and joy of everyday Brazilians, but to enter into their private world and listen to their voices. The historian has to find a way of dealing with the blurred line between retrieving experience, recognizing that this experience is fragile and inconclusive, and interpreting its meaning. Thus a biography is also a form of historiography.
For similar reasons this book does not go beyond the year that marked the final phase of democratization after the dictatorship, with the election of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1995. It is our view that the effects of the governments of Cardoso and his successor Lula are yet to be fully felt and that they mark the beginning of a new phase in the country’s history. The present has been influenced by both presidents, and perhaps it is the task of the journalist to register the effects of their governments.
It is evident, then, that this book does not attempt to cover the entire history of Brazil. Rather, bearing in mind the issues mentioned above, it narrates the adventure of the construction of a complicated ‘society in the tropics’. As the writer Mário de Andrade said, Brazil explodes every conception that we may have of it. Far from the image of a meek and pacific country, with its supposed racial democracy, this book describes the vicissitudes of a nation which, with its profound mestiçagem, has managed to reconcile a rigid hierarchy, conditioned by shared internal values, with its own particular social idiom. Seen from this angle, in the words of the songwriter and composer Tom Jobim, ‘Brazil is not for beginners.’ It needs a thorough translation.
Copyright © 2015 by Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling
English translation copyright © 2018 by Penguin Books Ltd.
