Brazzil

Whatever your prejudices or opinions regarding race, ethnicity, eugenics, and miscegenation, you don't know anything until you have experienced the population of Brazil. A half millennium of immigration and uninhibited intercourse has produced a thoroughly miscegenated people. Brazil is a teeming nursery of a single human race.
By Norman Weeks

I tried to find the little house I had lived in during my Peace Corps days. The rural road outside Penedo had changed so much during my twenty-five year absence that I hardly knew where I was. I had trouble recognizing my own house, because of the remodeling changes made by its current occupant. I became sure that I had found my old home only when I saw one constant in its furnishings, namely, the hammock on the varanda.

The hammock is a fitting symbol of tropical lassitude. The first time I climbed into one, at that moment, I began going native. The hammock is indeed native. The aboriginal Indians of Brazil used to sleep in hammocks. The invading Europeans brought their beds with them, but, when they discovered that the organic stuffing of the mattresses was susceptible to infestation by local vermin, the Europeans imitated the Indians and took to sleeping in hammocks.

The hammock is very space-efficient. For the poor of the Nordeste (the northeast region of Brazil), who live in one room, an immobile bed would take up too much of the interior living space. Lifting one end of the hammock from its hook and hanging it on the other hook on the back wall opens up the bedroom to use as parlor and dining room. Sleep may be put aside, making way for wakefulness.

We commonly associate death with sleep, the coffin with the bed. In the Nordeste, a deceased whose family is too destitute to buy a wood coffin is carried to his grave in the hammock he had slept away his life in.

So, the last use of the hammock; but there is a lifetime of good napping and sleeping to be enjoyed first. Lying comfortably in a hammock takes a little art, however. You have to lie on a diagonal, if you don't want to wake up from nap or sleep with a terrible backache.

My Peace Corps colleague Mark used to sleep in his hammock, but I myself could not get used to an entire night in one. I like to sleep on my stomach or on my side; the hammock was always bending me the wrong way. Before I took up residence in my house on my sítio (little country estate), I bought a bed. Aware of the problem of insect infestation, I had a piece of inert foam cut into mattress size; Helena, my sweetheart, sewed a cover for it. And so I slept away my nights according to European and American tradition.

I was native Brazilian during the daytime. Every day after lunch, I used to take a book and resort to my hammock on the varanda of my house. The book proved an alien intrusion of the intellectual into the sensual. Under the drowsy spell of the midday heat and the shushing of the rustling palm fronds, I would doze. My hand would go limp and the book fall to the floor of the varanda.

What happened to the book once happened to me. I almost became a casualty of the hammock. One of the hooks, the one attached to the window-frame, must not have been properly tempered steel, for, little by little, it was straightening out, without my noticing it. One day, as I dozed, the end of the hammock slipped over the hook and, unsupported at one end, my body plunged to the concrete floor of the varanda. My bones were rattled, I was shaken from my slumber. After taking a long walk around the sítio to determine that my skeletal and nervous systems were intact, I returned to the varanda, figured out what had happened, hammered down the hook, and climbed back into the hammock.

The worst injury done to me during my Peace Corps stay in Penedo was when, one night, a sneak thief crept into my sítio and stole my hammock from the varanda. I immediately went out and bought another one, which I kept inside at night, next to my bed, where I could guard it.

When I found myself taking to the hammock before lunch or even directly after breakfast, I had to admit to myself that I was succumbing to the inertia of the vida tropical (life in the tropics).

The Portuguese word for hammock is rede, which means net, like a fishnet. Some hammocks are a network of cordage, squares of open space being left between warp and woof. It would seem that such an open mesh would be cool, but I do not like or recommend that kind of hammock. The openings admit insects to the attack, and the cordage is rough on bare skin. Also, the transverse poles at each end turn the hammock into a tense pallet and prevent wrapping a comforting cocoon around the body.

The hammocks of Brazil are not cordage. They are cotton, dyed in bright colors and patterns, sometimes decorated with tassels along their fringes. The best are made in the state of Ceará, in the Nordeste, where the hammock tradition is so deep in the regional culture.

The motto sewn on one hammock I owned was Durma Bem, Viva Feliz, Sleep Well, Live Happy. You can live happy in a hammock without necessarily sleeping, for a hammock may be shared. Besides the single width (called solteiro, which means bachelor), there is a doublewide (casal, couple).

Sharing a hammock is a test of compatibility, as any Nordestino will tell you. I myself passed the test once, failed it once. There was a long and languid afternoon on the sítio, when I experienced intimate hammock compatibility. Helena and I, side by side but becoming one, pulled the edges of the hammock around us, wrapped ourselves in each other, and lapsed into bliss.

On another occasion, in Recife, with someone else, every little move I made displaced her, every adjustment she made discomforted me. And so on, a whole sleepless night, every attempt at accommodation futile. But then she too was an American, the two of us awkward strangers in a native Brazilian casal hammock. So, not every sharing of a hammock is enjoyable. But alone, anyway, suspended, in peace, you return to the security of floating in the amnion of the womb.

You might have been visualizing swinging in a hammock, but there should be very little motion, really. A hammock is not a playground swing or a trapeze. Twist your pelvis just slightly to set up a little motion, if you want that; or, if your hammock is near the floor (where it should be for safety, as I discovered to my hurt), push off from the floor with your hand. Some attach a cord to the wall, drape it over the hammock, and tug the cord gently if they want motion. But again, you want to be afloat, not tempest tossed.

When I returned to the United States from my Peace Corps service, I brought a new Ceará hammock with me. (It was a solteiro, not a casal. I must have anticipated a reversion to temperate-zone human relatedness.) I had some hooks too. Yet, I never unpacked the hammock and set it up. A hammock in Chicago? The Brazilian artifact was as out of place there as, after two years in the tropics, I was to find that I too had become.

You might think that every Latin American is named either José or Maria. In fact, the Brazilians have an astounding variety of first names. When I first arrived in the country in 1968, I was surprised to be introduced to Sócrates!

For a sample of Brazilian first names, we can browse in the telephone directory of Recife. Under Almeida, a very common surname, we find, in sequence starting at the beginning of A, the following variety of first names that yield the initials A. A.: Adriana, Adroaldo, Affonso, Agaci, Agamenon (a kinsman of Sócrates, I think), Agenor, Aguinaldo, Airton, Alaíde, Alba, Albanita, Albelena, Alberto, Alcides, Alcimar, Alda, Aldeci, Aldemir, Alexandre, Aliete, Alípio, Aluísio, Álvaro, Alzira, Amara, Amaro…

Moving ahead to C, we pick up at: Clea, Cleide, Cleonilda, Cleto, Cleildio, Clideno, Clodomir, Clóvis, Conceição, Corina, Cremilda, Crisanto, Cristênio...

Under D: Dalva, Danniela, Dantas, Darcilene, Débora, Delmira, Denílson, Diana, Diedja, Digenal, Dilermando, Dinara, and even (Socrates' grandfather) Diógenes.

In Brazil, it seems that every euphonious combination of letters has been tried out as a personal name. The Brazilian version of my own name, Normando, sounded strangeto me, but not to the Brazilians. I found another Normando in the Recife phone book.

As with us, the Brazilians derive many of their names from the Old and New Testaments, but they also dip into Greco-Roman history, the latter part of our own education, but, for some reason, not a well excavated mine for American first names. Well, I'd never name a daughter of mine Phryne! (Note to those who are not classical scholars: Phryne was a notorious Greek prostitute, the model for all those statues of the naked Venus.)

Reading the Recife phone book aloud is a musical entertainment. Besides the Bible and classical literature, I also find suggestions of the enchanting damsels of the Shakespeare comedies. Wouldn't you like to frolic in the forest green with Rosineide or Tatiane or Nicette or Olívia—(come to think of it, Will did have an Olívia)—or Evalise or Eulália?

Some strange derivative first names I found were: Wagner, Rossini, Dinamerico (sounds like the name of a bank), Djardiniere (named after a condiment?), Ebenezer (last name not Scrooge), Elesbão (not a lesbian, I hope), Erasmo (do Recife, not of Rotterdam), Expedito (a stamp on an express package?), Fausto (ready to make a deal with the devil), Waldênio (a fan of Thoreau?), Walkíria (Wagnerian, again), and Zoroastro.

Also: Aurora (our own Dawn), Franklin B[enjamin] and, the other way around, Benjamin F[ranklin]. How about naming your new baby girl Benvinda (Welcome!)? There is a Brazilian in Recife named Cheng Ping, an immigrant I would guess but not assume.

Can you identify the classical personages who are the sources of the following Brazilian names: Antenor, Augusto, César, Constantino, Creuza, Demócrito, Deocleziano, Djanira, Efigênia, Epaminondas, Euclides, the beautiful Eurídice (popularized by the heroine of Black Orpheus, Fábio, Pitágoras (in Brazil not a bean eater but a beans and rice eater), Solon, and on and on to Ulisses.

This is not to say that there aren't plenty of Josés and Marias. Those two names are at the core of Christian religion, after all, and Brazil has been a Christian country. (You might even meet a Maria José or a José Maria.)

I have a recording of an amusing Nordestino (northeastern regional) folksong, the title of which is "As Marias Que Eu Amei" (The Marias I've Loved). Most Marias have a compound first name or a middle name derived from the attributes of the Blessed Virgin. The singer inventories all the Marias he has loved and complains, in puns on their Marian attributes, how each Maria proved the unsatisfactory opposite of the beneficent promise of her name. Maria of Help was no help at all, Maria of the Appearance disappeared, Maria of the Pleasures brought him pain, Maria of Victory defeated him, and so on.

Shifting our attention from theology back to philosophy I wonder whether the Sócrates I met earned the dignity of his namesake. And did he find a Brazilian Xanthippe to marry? What's in a name? In a Brazilian name, letter music, history and culture, creativity, quirks and fancies.

Why not a different name for every single person who is born, unique as is the human individual? Then, at last, we'll have heard the last of José and Maria, Johnny and Mary.

***

As with Brazilian names, so with Brazilian faces. I wish I could get everyone's permission to photograph their faces. What a fascinating portrait gallery I could assemble! In Brazil, it is not only the country, but the people too who are the spectacle. Whatever your prejudices or opinions regarding race, ethnicity, eugenics, and miscegenation, you don't know anything until you have experienced the population of Brazil. A half millennium of immigration and uninhibited intercourse has produced a thoroughly miscegenated people. Brazil is a teeming nursery of a single human race.

In my own experience, I have found the Hawaiians, another interracial population, the most beautiful of all peoples. Perhaps Brazil has had too many ingredients in the mix, not all of them thoroughly stirred in yet, to satisfy aestheticism. Brazilian faces are not all beautiful, but they are all interesting.

You might say that, when a single stock interbreeds exclusively, it gradually evolves into a caricature of itself. There is no perfect type, because the idea of type itself is defective. The master race, as we have found out, is a monster.

Now, it's not accurate to say that the Brazilians are of no race, because, in fact, they are the long-term harvest of several races. Which races were the roots in any particular person is sometimes not easy to discern, even if you stare hard into the faces that pass before you. You see traits, but you cannot see genes.

Accustomed to categorizing by traits, however, you speculate about each Brazilian you meet. That one there, slight in build, fineboned, with Lusitanian features of face—the Portuguese rootstock. My taxi driver in Manaus, built square, solid on his feet, heavy boned, square bronze face—aboriginal Indian. In the Nordeste, where sugarcane agriculture demanded slaves, you see the faces of Africa, a sometimes lightened Africa, however, all around you. If you travel in the South of Brazil, you'll see quasi Germanic, Italianate, Japanian, and who knows what all else. By the time of the extinction of the human, Brazil will have produced every possible type of face.

The Brazilians like to describe themselves as the fifth race; they don't yet understand that they themselves have made race thinking obsolete. The Brazilians are not adding another race; they are ending race, and, ultimately and eventually, racism. Miscegenation eliminates race.

Brazilian miscegenation is linked with the myth of promiscuous sex. The famous Brazilian ethnosociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre perpetrated the now stereotype of blackies and whities having at each other all day and all night under the aphrodisiac spell of the tropics. Freyre was a scholarly Boccaccio; his books are the sexiest social studies texts you'll ever read.

… As if interracial sex were somehow sexier than same race sex, and the weather arouses the hormones! Well, there might be something to the notion of climate as conducive to, or inimical of, sexual interest and activities. In most of Brazil, everybody is half naked, and so more or less always on provocative display. And no one in Brazil wears himself out shoveling snow!

I don't know whether frequency of intercourse is higher in Brazil—(or Polynesia or the Caribbean)—than in Toronto, Oslo, or Tibet. We need some vagabond Kinsey to run around with a multilinguistic questionnaire to determine that.

Brazil is an erotically permissive society, certainly. Carnaval is, or has become, nothing less than participatory pornography. There are troubling aspects of Brazilian eroticism, but whether it is to the good or bad of individuals or the society has no glib answer. The eroticism of Brazil is familiar to me; it neither shocks nor mocks me. I title my book, Tropical Ecstasy out of experience.

Against the Freyrian stereotype myth and the raw reality of Brazilian eroticism, I must counterpose the warm physical affection between Brazilians—kisses, abraços (a familial hug, not an erotic embrace), loving touches between friends, family members and especially toward children.

I keep marveling that most of these faces I see every day on this trip did not exist when I lived here in Brazil twenty-five years ago. It's a new, different population. You can't step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus. With the population burgeoning, you can't visit the same Brazil twice.

The face of Brazil is unrecognizable, because it is an ever-changing face.

Norman Weeks served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Penedo, Alagoas, Brazil from 1968 to 1970. In 1995 he returned to Brazil and to Penedo to see how all had changed in twenty-five years. Tropical Ecstasy, his book on the trip, is being represented for publication by Debbie Fine, Southeast Literary Agency, P.O. Box 910, Sharpes, Florida 329590910. Norman Weeks may be reached at jmnf62577@aol.com 

The texts above were written for Tropical Ecstasy.

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