Brasil!!!

I begin by saying I will not be able to report much about my country. Probably, because I don’t know it well enough. And this is being honest. Being Brazilian is a very personal aspect of life and it means a different Brazilian story for each and everyone of us.

Let’s briefly try my story: I am an “Oliveira de Carvalho” (Olive and Oak tree, respectively) hence my surname suggests I am from a “New Christian” background. There were reports of Jews escaping from a number of European countries to the Iberian Peninsula and ultimately to the American colonies.

But how accurate or, better saying, reliable is this assumption? How can it be helpful on determining my ethnic, cultural origins? This has a very limited if any relevance to most  Brazilians. I have friends by the name of “Saad”, cousins “Yamakoshi” and neighbors “Paticcie”. It’s just life!

Authors such as Gilberto Freyre and Darcy Ribeiro, despite their different approaches and emphases, have labored to identify traits of culture and people that are specifically Brazilian.

Their analyses have focused on processes, social practices, and symbols that are held to be pervasive throughout the large population and vast territory of the country (Probably you will not  notice that unless you have Peters projection map but Brazil is the fifth largest country in the Globe, slightly smaller than the States.)

Ribeiro would often refer to Brazil by using the metaphor of a “New Rome”. In no other country of the New World one could find such an extension of miscegenation, of different races living together and, in addition to that, a surprising and voluntary, perhaps uncommitted consensus of being united as one nation.

There is this strong African identity within. Something common perhaps to Cuba and Haiti.  This can be observed more intensely in some specific parts of the country such as the State of Bahia.  While the developed Southeast Region (Rio de Janeiro/Sao Paulo/Minas Gerais) appears as the industrial and intellectual and industrial engine of the country, Bahia comprises everything that is artistic, mystic, erotic.

To better describe this, I would share this excerpt of Jorge Amado’s masterpiece “Shepherds of the Night”. A superb novel where the night is described with mannerisms of a mulatto woman.

“She sat down with us in the gayest times taverns, a maid from the star-studded black. She danced the samba, whirling her golden skirt of starts, voluptuously swinging her black African hips, her breasts like heaving waves. She made merry in the circle of capoeira fighters, she knew the master moves and even invented new ones, with the cleverest devising, disregarding the established rules, that madcap of a night!”

Oh yeah, we have great Literature! And music and, plastic arts, and cinema!

To share something about my country I would have to rely on the experiences I have had in a fairly limited part of its continental domains.

I am from Minas Gerais (Portuguese for “General Mines”) Where the most remarkable Colonial Heritage from the Gold quest to the first Independence movements.

To be continued…