Whale Time: Re: Avram

Re: Avram
Carnival

all stories and essays by Avram Klein

Its Own Country

Karen and I were able to make up pretty easily. We went out for coffee and a cigar, looked at some Brazilian Playboys and Trip Magazines and were set. We split up so she could relax on the beach, but unbeknownst to us, it was the first day of preparation for Salvador's Carnival.

There were about ten thousand people packed into the street between the famous Salvador elevator and the water. The crowd consisted of a few different kinds of partyers. There were people who had apparently paid money to support the celebration and were wearing official multicolored t-shirts. There were also a few people shaking their asses as if it were at a 1965 backyard soul music dance party.

Pretty much everybody else was rough housing. There were guys wrapping things around girls necks and shaking them. There were guys putting other guys in headlocks and tossing them around. There were kids dancing in the giant water fountain, filling plastic water bottles, and chucking the bottles into the crowd.

If a fight broke out, the cops would grab and push the participants to their doom, creating a vein of open space in the crowd. The open space would then be used as a parade of jumping and cheering. If there was no room for a parade of jumping, a crowd would just begin to jump, smashing into people and pushing them out of the way. The people being pushed would then explode into fierce anger, spraying the jumpers with beer. The anger would then turn quickly into joyous dancing and headlocks.

The main attraction was a set of giant trucks with a stage on top and a band performing Brazilian popular music. The dancers on top of these trucks had bodies of pure, toned muscle. Their booty shaking was no normal shaking—it was perfection. The final band rolled through and sang the Brazilian hit of the summer, "A Tane Namorad," by the Tribalistas.

I had accidentally put my entire money belt in my back pocket. Some guy who didn't look like a thief spotted it and started to feel on my pocket. I stepped back and maneuvered my way behind him. He then maneuvered his way behind me. So I took off through the crowd and another guy got pushed into me, causing me to look back to see that the thief was following me. When the thief and his girlfriend realized I was onto them, they took off.

Karen and I took off the next day for Praia do Forte. Before leaving Salvador, let me explain something which I learned while in Boipeba which has to do with racism in Brazil.

The first Brazilian to use the N-word in front of me was a guy I had made friends with on Ilha do Mel named Silvio. He had just brought me to see some giant caves on the beach. We had hiked straight up the side of a hill to look down at the ocean. I was hot and out of breath and there was no way of getting away from him because we were on top of a very steep hill with only one small path to hike down.

I decided not to be judgmental of Silvio because his financial and academic achievements far outweighed mine. He was a chemist for a medical company in Curitiba, and he was also really nice. He didn't show even the slightest hint of malice in his voice or gesture when he said it. I was a little weak in the stomach from the comment, but I stuck with him and went on to find a crippled kitten trapped on the beach and dying in the sun. We worked together to save the kitten's life, wrapping it in my shirt and feeding it water and wet bread. We put the kitten in a box, exchanged e-mails, and then I took off with the kitten and didn't see him again.

The second Brazilian to use the N-word was a girl I kissed on New Year's. We were watching the sunrise on Ipanema Beach on New Year's Day and she used the word. I didn't react harshly, as we had spent the whole night dancing against a wire fence in a night club, but still I was worried. As I got to know her, it turned out she practiced Capoeira and was a member of the Senzala Capoeira group. This made me think that she wasn't racist because Capoeira is an African art form and most of the members of her team were Afro-Brazilian. This left me a little confused.

The third Brazilian to use the word was Hoochie. She used it at the dinner table while I was on my way out of town after visiting her in Sao Paulo. Things were moving a little fast with our relationship, and when she said the N-word my eyes almost popped out onto my plate. It took me off guard.

The next day, I was on my way to Bahia which is the famed state that is home to a mostly Afro-Brazilian population, and I was planning on playing lots of soccer and Capoeira with the Bahianos, free of any guilt or uncomfortable hesitation. With Hoochie as my girlfriend, this was more difficult because I felt as though the word was hanging over my head, holding me back from really befriending the exotic Afro-Indian-Syrian-European people of Bahia. When Hoochie wrote me and said that she had gotten back together with her fiancé, the question of racism was one of the reasons why I was really relieved.

The fourth Brazilian who said the N-word to me was Karen. This is when I decided to put my foot down and determine whether the N-word is considered a racist term in Brazil. She insisted that it was not. I had been hesitant to hook up with her at first, partially because the last two chicks I had hooked up with had used the word. When we first met, we had visited a ship museum, located in a Salvador lighthouse where there was an authentic display of how the slaves were transported over the Atlantic. We both agreed that it was awful and discussed the movie Amistad among other things. With this, I had assumed that she was not racist. And she insisted that she was not. She claimed that in Brazil, words carry no weight and that people judge each other solely on their intentions. I wasn't completely convinced, but what drove this idea home was something that happened while I was on Boipeba.

Boipeba is a fishing community of about two thousand people located on an island which serves as something of an extension to the city of Valenca located to the south of Salvador. We were having dinner in a restaurant attached to a supermarket. There was a family running the two businesses—a mom running the restaurant and a dad running the market, accompanied by a small daughter and a dog. We asked what the dog's named was and it sounded like the little girl said, Legau, which means good.

Karen kept asking, what? And the girl finally exclaimed Negoo. Then Karen asked if the dog's name was Negoo and the father agreed that this was the dog's name. Karen explained to me that Negoo is a slang term for a black person and is the Brazilian equivalent to the N-word in the US.

This kind of put me off a little. I found it hard to believe that this incredibly gentle and friendly family in this small community would name their dog Negoo, especially with a little girl. I pondered it for a day or two and thought that maybe their naming of the dog possibly met with some disapproval from the rest of the community or that maybe the family was a little eccentric.

We went back to the market a night or two later and while buying some homemade mangaba popsicles, I had a moment of clarity in regards to racism in Brazil.

I was looking at the father and the daughter. The father had huge, solid muscles, but also had large, thick glasses, which is rare in Brazil. He was talking with his friend and just from his mannerism and incredibly tranquil way of expressing himself, I knew that there was nothing unusual about their dog being named Negoo.

I also realized beyond anything that although the ideas of the US bleed into South America through movies and pop music, Brazil is in no way the US for any of the people living anywhere in this country. It is a completely separate country with a completely separate way of understanding their history with a separate understanding of how to live.

Nonetheless, the word in question is an ugly awful term. I eventually complained and said, "Just say 'black people'." I'm thinking from here on out, dating chicks who say the N-word is not a possibility.

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