Dos Espíritos

(versão original em inglês do meu artigo, publicado em dezembro de 2010 pela Yod, revista italiana de cinema, comunicação e interdisciplinaridade)

Juliana de Albuquerque Katz

Philosophy Student at Tel Aviv University

juliana.albuquerque@gmail.com

A small account of Brazilian Carnival through the eyes of a Philosophy student trying to understand her own country and its culture. As a mix of narrative and Philosophical enquire, the article aims to cause a reflection about gender discrimination and its probable genesis in Brazil. From the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha to the poems of Ascenso Ferreira the author observes an increasing objectification of women which makes her ask herself about the Brazilian ethical behavior through History. Which, in fact, would explain the difficulty to analyze how Brazilian values are built in a context of social and moral permissibility. Would Brazil be more intelligible if dealt as an Ethical-Aesthetical project such as in some of Darcy Ribeiro’s reflections? If so, how can we think of using the notions of body and sexuality to reinterpret the concept of the Hegelian recognition in order to prove with Simone de Beauvoir that the first step towards acknowledging the other should be affectivity and not conflict? Thus, what does our current Aesthetic vices tell us about the constant objectification of women? Do women take part of an Ethical world or are they set aside as an absolute other? To the author this is the riddle Momus casts upon us all. Key-words: Carnival, Brazilian Culture, Recognition, Gender Discrimination.

I

It is Saturday morning and the streets of Recife’s commercial center are packed with people. They all dress very differently from their daily clothing. Instead of the seriousness of the socially accepted disguises it is time to come out of the closet and chose to be oneself beyond its limitations. Supermen, ballerinas, Indians and even Carlitos seem to invade the streets. Some men dress as women and some women dress in minimalistic clothes. They dance and sing nonstop.

Street vendors walk along with the crowd selling cold beer with buckets pilled on their heads. I can’t find any coins in my pocket and another person pays for my drink. We instantly become friends. It’s an everlasting Carnival friendship until the next corner of the street where we take different directions. I head to the main bridge in town where an enormous and colored rooster stands still although the crowd seems to make the entire city vibrate. I am inside the famous Galo da Madrugada, the world’s biggest carnival street party that involves at least three traditional commerce neighborhoods in the city of Recife. The party starts at Bairro de São José, continues at Bairro de Santo Antônio where it apparently achieves its zenith at Avenida Guararapes, although the crowd also invades the city center main avenue already in Bairro da Boa Vista. Overall, a crowd of at least 1.5 million people follow the party on its 9 Km route.

It is insane! The heat is unbearable and can only be overcome by the beer. Suddenly everybody seems to be drunk and irreverence takes place. Men grab women by the arm and kiss experiencing no trace of resistance but reciprocity. People watching the party from above the old buildings start to dance on the edge of their balconies. Everywhere there is the smell of sweat, urine, ether and marijuana.

For the next three days not only Recife but the entire country will slow down and get involved in an atmosphere of consented social misdemeanors. In Salvador, crowds will follow the famous trios elétricos, modified cars with ultra-potent sound-systems, on the top of which artists such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Daniela Mercury sing and dance to the rhythm of Axé Music. In Rio de Janeiro many people will watch samba schools perform on Sunday and Monday evenings. But street parties are also bound to happen in many of Rio’s neighborhoods. In fact, street parties are the main characteristic of Brazilian Carnival. Nevertheless, although they seem to acquire a different flavor in each one of the country’s regions due to Brazil’s diverse cultural and ethnical formation, their essence still the same: the struggle of the people in forming a Brazilian identity freed from the historical oppression of illegitimate political elites.

Thus the atmosphere of social misdemeanors; which is a more exuberant picture of the historical Brazilian people’s relaxed threshold of moral values: a consented and decadent people’s revolution.

Such characteristic of this population is well examined by the historical documentation in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s book História Geral da Civilização Brasileira. In this work, the author quotes Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha report to the King of Portugal «many more things ought to be dissimulated instead of punished in such a new land (…)» (Holanda, 1963:119) A quote that can be accidently linked to the 20^th century Chico Buarque’s Carnival tune that celebrates the inexistence of sin bellow the Equator.

II

This historical context of social and moral permissibility marks my difficulty to explain to my foreign colleagues how our values are built if the concepts of sin and, consequently, redemption do not seem to take effective part of our social structure.

One should try to understand Brazil as an Ethical-Aesthetic project. Something like Darcy Ribeiro’s idea of a “Brasil bonito” and, therefore, one should have the courage to face Brazilian reality. Only then, the country and its manifestation will acquire some intelligibility and let itself be spoken of.

I struggle to analyze the issue of Brazilian ethical behavior through the History of a Aesthetic clash between Civilization and Eros. Such clash in our national History has its roots well fixed 510 years ago, when the first Europeans arrived at the newly discovered Terra de Vera Cruz, and nowadays, is well portrayed by the annual Carnival season with the exploitation of female image.

In this case, the History of such exploitation dates back in the 16^th century when Pero Vaz de Caminha wrote a letter to the Portuguese king about the marvelous newly discovered land and its inhabitants – the native South American Indian tribes. And those natives (male and female) as portrayed by Caminha were of such beauty and innocence that they would walk around naked without a trace of shame on the presence of strangers.

Needless to say that in many quotes from the letter, Caminha attains himself to the elaborate description of female beauty and writes to the king about their round bodies and gracious genitalia. To which, he states, are of such a beauty that would cause envy to the European ladies of the court.

Nowadays, however, the European ladies of the court exchanged places with middle- class women who year after year sit in front of their television sets to watch the traditional advertisement of the carnival season broadcast by Rede Globo (the country’s largest television company).

My early Carnival memories go back to this traditional advertisement. Since 1991, its video take presents a mulata dancing frenetically to the rhythm of samba while being stripped out of colorful make-up in order to become a bit more naked in every annual season.

The envy felt by many women over the image of the beautiful mulata is indeed the result of a lack of confidence of average female to self-image and reliance to the body nurtured on the female while on the early stages of formation of her social character, a fact that has been examined since Simone de Beauvoir’s writing of Le Deuxième Sexe.

According to the French philosopher, not to have confidence in the body is not to have confidence in oneself which lead us to figure out that the body should be understood as the objective expression of the subject (Beauvoir, 1986: 93, vol. II). Such a theory was drawn by the Husserlian concept of Leib, and later adopted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work Phenomenology of Perception in the notion of corps vivant which Beauvoir was familiar with and evolved in her works, most notably Le Deuxiéme Sexe and Pour une morale de l’ambigüité.

I want the reader to focus on the sole idea of the body being the objective expression of the subject. Because, if it is so, what can be said about the situation of women in Brazil due to the fact that their body is only recognized as an object instead of being acknowledged as the expression of her self?

Ascenso Ferreira (1895-1963) is a well-known Brazilian poet. In his works he portraits regional themes from northeastern Brazil. In one of his verses about Carnival he says: «I saw the Genius of the Race!/ (I bet you think I will talk about Rui Barbosa)/ How!/ The Genius of the Race that I saw was that little chocolate mulata/ doing the siricongado step/ on Tuesday of carnival!»ⁱⁱ.

In the poem, a man envisions a woman’s perfection as being a mouth-watering chocolate colored mulata. The relation of a food in order to describe the woman’s main features should be rated as offensive wasn’t for Ferreira’s poetic efforts. As a matter of fact, such a comparison shows nothing that can be considered remarkable but for the fact that it consolidates a female image as man’s mere object of immediate satisfaction.

To this fact one can picture gender relations in Brazilian cultural expressions to be quite precarious. In fact, they are an emulation of medieval European content. And, therefore, they betray Darcy Ribeiro’s theoretical utopia of a new Tropical Civilization.

III

Now, to understand how such a Tropical Civilization would be possible, one must understand the Carnival phenomenon not as a mere transgression of traditional imposed values, but as a synthesis of values and as an adaptation of all the other civilizations taking part on a larger than life tropical attitude.

Thus, the simple emulation of medieval European content to the gender relations in the country already sounds as an imposed value due to suffer a modification. And such a change can be set in motion if we reinterpret the Hegelian concept of Recognition through the application of body and sexuality as its possible fundamental tools – which would bring us face to face to the fact that the living body is indeed part of our situation.

To the mulata in Ferreira’s poem or simply to any other Brazilian female, this should mean a chance to become free and to actually take part on the social and political process of the making of a country and of a new tropical civilization.

In this new tropical civilization, Carnival would play a true revolutionary role. It would remodel affective relations and our way to face the other, which would not be seen as menace, or as the unknown absolute different; but as one like me which I am able to love. Such feeling would extrapolate particular relations and occupy an ethical function in providing grounds for a universal recognition and the legitimacy of political institutions.

Let Carnival be an open invitation to acknowledge the other. In the previous paragraphs I quoted Pero Vaz de Caminha. One should attentively read his letter and examine the way in which the Indians received the Portuguese travelers. It might have been innocent but it was not naïve: it was a phenomenological approach. They were open and ready to witness the unveiling of their Portuguese counterparts. If only the Portuguese were bound to ascribe themselves in the same movement without attributing the new land and its inhabitants the weight of being «(…) the paranoid and salvationist extension of Portugal and Iberia (…)»ⁱⁱⁱ we might have had the courage to develop a tropical civilization from our very beginning.

Those were my thoughts as I left Galo da Madrugada already late in the afternoon but they soon deemed away as I, perplexed, entered the night and found myself new adventures to play.

——