Archive for Brasília
While my guitar gently weeps (Part 7)
“Is this guitar yours?” asked me the flight attendant.
“Game over…” I thought to myself.
“Yes, it is,” I answered, with my poker face on.
“Is there any problem?”
“Can you play?”
“Yes, I can.”
“If I asked you to play something for me, would you be able to?”
For half a second I thought these questions were rather strange. But then I remembered that airport people can sometimes ask apparently innocent questions to get liars off guard.
(My friend tells me that every time she goes home to Minnesota they ask her: “Minnesota… MS, right?” A sleepy traveller can easily agree, and then a much longer list of questions follows…)
Without hesitating, I replied: “Yes, I would. Would you like me to?”
“Ah, I love to see a woman play the guitar… I wish I could play too. As we speak there´s a plane leaving for Dublin, full of musicians who are going to play at a festival. How I wish I were on that plane…”
At this moment, the captain´s voice spread throughout the speakers:
“Flight attendants, prepare for take-off.” Flirty flight attendant closes off the conversation with a wink, and proceeds to check overhead bins and seat belts at the speed of light. Only my hysterical laughter knew no restrains, nor could it be easily shut off.
* * * * *
“Dear passangers, here´s your captain speaking!”
I woke up with a start, startled by the loud speakers and the blinding lights all turned on at once.
“In a few minutes we will start our breakfast service.”
I look through the window. It is night. I look at my watch. 4:45am. A bit too early for breakfast, in my opinion. The captain hears my thoughts, and corrects me:
“It is now 5:45 am local time. We have started our descent. To our right, we can see the city of Brasília. We estimate another two hours until São Paulo, landing at aproximately 7:50am, arriving at the gate at 8:07.”
I look at my watch. Still a lot of time left. And after the gate there´s immigration. Then there´s baggage claim. Then check-in line, followed by another possibly traumatic check-in. Then wait for hours till boarding, plus two more hours of flying, so that, with luck, I can be home by dinner.
I look through the window. I can see my city below, still asleep, its little lights glimmering as if it were Christmas already. “Excuse me, sir, this is my stop! Can you let me off? Is there a button I can push, a string I can pull, so you´ll let me off right here?”
It was so strange that it rained…
In Brazil, to indicate surprise
we sometimes use the expression:
“Wow! I think it’s gonna rain!”
I don’t know why or how
this expression came to be.
The fact is that we use it
Even when it has nothing
to do with the weather
(something that really used to puzzle me
as a child
and still does).
Sometimes it’s an unexpected phone call.
Sometimes a long-promised visit.
Sometimes a spouse, sibling, child or the like
Who out of the blue
Decides to do the dishes.
Or make the bed.
On this first day of October
something extraordinary occurred.
It rained.
For the first time since May 29th.
Sunday had brought rumours
of brief scattered showers
here and there
just to make you want it more.
I myself didn’t see any
Nor did I believe anyone
Who said they’d seen.
The forecast was for the end of the month
Maybe mid-October
if we were lucky.
But as the evening fell on Monday
It was neither rumour nor scattered.
The whole sky came down
All at once
Including thunders and lightenings.
It was just like a quadrille
During the feast of St. Jean-Baptiste
One side of the street cried out:
“Look, it’s raining!”
And the other side replied:
“It cannot be!”
In no time, everyone was staring
out of the window,
Thinking the rain much more thrilling
than the evening news
Children bounced up and down
Adults cried for joy
There were even fireworks
Pretending to be lightening and thunder
It was just like we had won
The World Cup Final
And my father, who had always been hurt
whenever anyone referred to “rain”
as “bad” or “ugly” weather
admired, along with the rest of the city
the beauty of the storm,
the birthday present
he had desired the most.
The evening was more festive
than winning a Championship
More festive than a birthday party
Or the feast of St. Jean-Baptiste
It was the end of the winter
And the rain had conquered the drought
The feast was called “spring”
The party was called “rain”
The weather could not be more beautiful
It was a visit much waited for
A long needed shower
Cleasing and refreshing
Bodies, streets and souls.
It was Thanksgiving
and Thanksgetting
11% Humidity
I don´t get it…
So you´re saying that
there´s spring in Brazil?
I am.
Equinox, days getting longer,
dry trees getting covered
with colorful little flowers….
Isn´t that spring?
But wait a minute:
You don´t have a proper winter.
It doesn´t get even 10 degrees
colder than the usual.
Well, here´s the deal.
What characterizes winter here
isn´t temperature.
It´s humidity
(Or rather: lack thereof)
Take a closer look at the scenery above:
Got it?
This is Brasília
Friday, 21st September 2007:
Instead of snow, we have dry smog.
(It is dry smog.
It is not just a dirty lens.)
Humidity level: 11%
(Average in the Sahara desert: 13%)
Over 110 days without rain already.
Next rain expected mid-October.
See any clouds?
It’s a hellish winter:
30 degrees Celsius in the shade…
Even so,
the best thing is to run to the shade
whenever one can find one!
Spring in Brasília
As some of you know, I am spending this autumn in Brasília. Only it’s not autumn here, but spring. As the equinox is this weekend, it seems an appropriate time to write a report of my new daily routine.
I wake up in the morning, and look through my window:
After a hearty breakfast, I drive to the university library:
I park a block away. As I walk alone I wonder
what my day will bring me:
I work in the library all morning:
At lunchtime I drive back home:
Our parish’s little library is open every afternoon. That’s where I go after lunch:
Day and winter come to an end in the capital of Brazil.
The end.
Caring about Caring
When I was 16 a Native Brazilian was burned to death in Brasilia, my hometown and capital of Brazil.
The victim, Galdino Jesus dos Santos, was in town for the celebrations of the 19th of April, the Day of the Native. Having arrived at the hostel after doors were closed, he was sleeping in a bus shelter in one of the busiest avenues in the city.
The perpetrators were 5 teenagers, upper middle class, well-educated. On being asked why they killed the Native, one of them replied: “We didn´t know he was Native, we thought he was just a beggar.” As if that made it ok.
I remember thinking at the time “what a horrible idea!” But my feeling wasn´t really indignation – I was too stoic at the time to get indignant about anything. It was more like intellectual disdain for the murderers (“what a stupid idea”), mixed with a resigned “such things happen”, and with a prayer for the soul of the victim, and for the murderers to get a bit more sense into their heads.
And that was all. No point worrying about what´s passed. Disdain, resignation, tranquility, that was what I felt. A Stoic thing really.
“Such things happen.” Oh, God, where, when, how do things like this just “happen”? My lack of sensitivity at the time now shocks me almost as much as that of the assassins. When you grow up seeing your hometown in the evening news only for political corruption and upper-middle-class teenage crime, you may become a bit anesthesised.
These were people my age, same town, same social class. The “Indian Busstop” was on my way to school. It got decorated, full of posthumous honours. I used to go by there twice a day. And twice a day shake my head in disapproval, Harvey Siegel style, as if the problem had only been an intellectual mistake, something wrong with their education.
Of course there was something wrong with their education. But, my goodness, the guys were rich, went to the best schools, they had everything they wanted. Which goes to show: 1) that quality of education is not determined solely by which school one attends and 2) that even at school education shouldn’t be solely “intellectual”.
The goal of education inside and outside the classroom should be to make humans more fully human. It’s not a matter of simply learning how to think. We should learn how to think with our hearts and feel with our minds.
But the tendency in academia generally, starting with schools, is to detach thinking from acting, theory from practice, causes from consequences, the subjective side of the object, and the objective side of the subject. Problems are formulated and solved “considering ideal the conditions” and “ignoring any friction”.
My stoic reaction is a consequence of this, as is the murderous attitude of the young men. One ends up thinking of people as if they were objects in the equation. One forgets that they are also subjects: subject agents and agent subjects, who create and are created by the “objective reality” of everyday.
Last week I started reading “Pedagogy of Indignation”, a collection of Paulo Freire’s last writings. The last thing he wrote about was the story of this Native Brazilian, and of our youngsters:
“What a strange thing, to kill Natives, to kill people, just for fun. I’m here thinking, sunk in an abyss of profound perplexity, amazed at the unbearable perversity of these young people, de-humanising themselves, in a place where they grew down instead of growing up.” (Pedagogy of Indignation, p. 66)
Paulo Freire died some ten days after the Native was killed. I’m not sure he understood that Galdino was killed but not because he was a Native: the boys had thought he was “just a beggar”. It was a cruel act of violence, of elitism, but it wasn’t racism.
At same time, of course Galdino was killed for being a Native: for being in an unknown urban jungle, for not having a chauffeur, for being put up at a hostel with no stars, that had no 24-hour receptionist waiting for the dear guest, or a thoughtful chaperone worried about the welfare of visitor from far away. And this is the 5-star treatment that he got as the envoy sent to the capital to receive the honours of the Day of the Native.
It wasn’t only the boys then that committed violence against Galdino. It was Brazilian society as a whole. Of course it was racism, as well as elitism, on the part of an entire society. This does not all of a sudden makes the five young men less guilty: it only makes the rest of us more, all of us innocent people who do not see that we play a part in this injustice.
A friend of mine is always saying that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference. And as Brazilian musician Renato Russo would say, “where does this indifference, tempered with iron and fire, come from?” Galdino’s story seems come from Renato Russo’s songs, a mixture of Metrópole with Faroeste Caboclo, Índios and Baader-Meinhof Blues. “Violence is so fascinating, and our lives are so ordinary…”
One of the most important trends in Paulo Freire’s legacy is a commitment to shaking off the indifference that seizes the “ordinary citizen”. An attempt to make people less passive, less patient, so that they can also be impatient agents. And this starts at school, and much before school starts.
But, as Renato Russo would say in “Índios”, how I wish I could, at least once, explain what nobody can understand…
