Brazil Political and Business Comment - Brazil - a State of Mind for Foreign Dreamers

Sometimes the dream idea of Brazil is based on the actual country but selectively, so that only those aspects of the country, which prop up the dream, are used. I can think of two artistic examples – Terry Gilliam`s film “Brazil” made in 1985 and John Updike’s novel “Brazil” published in 1994. Is it not interesting that two Americans, who have a vast country of their own to plunder for artistic purposes, should choose the Brazil of their imaginations?

Gilliam`s film, set in the future, is the weird account of a nobody who fantasizes about disappearing into the clouds to escape from the repressive society in which he lives. The advertising poster showed a crazed looking man whose head is literally exploding, along with the title “Brazil. It`s Only a State of Mind.” That film could easily have been set in an anarchic city like São Paulo yet it never entered the director`s mind to set it in the country after it was named.

Magpie Meets Magnet
In an interview Gilliam said his characters were “all trapped in a world of their own making”. It would be good to detect some irony here but I do not. He added: “I work in this strange sort of magpie approach. I just start collecting things, and having an idea, a central idea, works like a magnet. Things just start sticking to it. I might end up with basically all these ideas that I start shuffling around like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to make a story or some sense out of the thing.”

The magpie and the magnet: this odd combination of scattered ideas and thoughts being drawn to the Brazilian magnet is fascinating. However, why is the magnet Brazil and not Bulgaria or Belgium or Burkina Faso or Botswana? Maybe these places would have resulted in “a story or some sense” since the film had little. I could find no reference to the origin of the name of the film, showing how the idea of Brazil as a place of fantasy is taken for granted. Unfortunately for the director, the moneymen who backed him were appalled with the result, re-edited the film and showed it without his approval. Maybe we should be grateful to them because God knows what other nonsense we would have had to endure in the name of Brazil.

New Englander Updike Goes Native
At least Updike`s eponymous novel is actually set in Brazil with Brazilian characters. However, these characters bear as much resemblance to real Brazilians as a Jorge Amado character would bear to one of the Updike`s more common New Englanders. Updike takes a well-off white girl from Rio de Janeiro and pairs her off with – guess what – a poor black boy from a favela. The boy, called Tristão – no, the girl is not called Isolde but you get the point - gives her a stolen ring, they fall in love and set off on a trip around Brazil What follows is a trip around Updike`s mind – a middle-aged man`s version of Easy Rider set in the tropics. During the years of their wanderings the couple has all sorts of adventures during which she becomes a prostitute and, at one point, they even switch colors, thanks to the mandatory injection of the magic realism which makes the reading of so much Latin American literature a chore.

I accept that all writers have the right to wander around in their imagination but Updike uses Brazil in a way he could not have used any other country. Brazil gives him all the contrasting material he needs – wealth and poverty, black and white, tropical rain forests and the drought-ridden sertão. Like a tourist who behaves differently abroad than he would at home, Updike goes overboard in a way which would have led to him being burned with the witches at Salem had he written this book in the 17^th century.

Foreigners have been writing about Brazil for 500 years and have often got it wrong. Since the country was actually “discovered” when Cabral was going in the opposite direction from his destination, India, perhaps this jinx has remained. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that in the quarter of a century after the first Portuguese landings Brazil was virtually neglected and other Europeans started arriving to cut down brazilwood. ”Brazil became a sort of no man’s land over which the Portuguese crown wielded only a shadowy control.” Five hundred years later we can still say the country is a mental no man`s land beyond any control.

Sex Appeal
One of the reasons why Brazil appeals to the foreigner is the sexual element. For most foreigners Brazil is associated with the carnival and football. Every year people all over the world see pictures of thousands of almost naked girls of all colors dancing in the streets. Unlike the po-faced, waif-like superstar models who strut around on catwalks these Brazilian girls look happy and sexy. There is no political correctness about them or their society. Brazil may be the largest Roman Catholic country in the world but the church obviously rules with a light hand. Compare the Brazilian carnival with the Fassnacht celebrated in Germany and Switzerland. Compare the noise and heat of Rio de Janeiro, where people are dancing to the vibrancy of the drums in temperatures of 30 degree Celsius, to a carnival in Basle where brass bands wheeze out oompah music and everyone is red-nosed and wrapped up to keep out the cold. I have attended both kinds of carnival and can assure you the Brazilian version comes out well ahead in every way.

Knowing this, thousands of European and American men head for Brazil at carnival time in the hope of finding some sex and adventure. Brazil`s main sex magazine is called simply “Brazil”. Presumably the English word is to make local buyers feel sophisticated and attract foreign buyers through its very name which promises sexual delight.

Erotic Delights
There is nothing new about this sexual attraction. The first Portuguese sailors were astonished at the nudity and beauty of the Indian women they met. The Indian men did not seem to object to the visitors pawing their women, since the Indians themselves stole or traded women from other tribes. As for the women they seem to have gone along. As Joseph Page puts it in “The Brazilians”: “The sight of naked painted bodies in the midst of lush vegetation had a hypnotic effect on men who had just survived the rigors of a transatlantic crossing. The willingness with which Indian women gave themselves to the white strangers no doubt contributed heavily to the enthusiastic response of the Europeans to the native people.”

John Hemmimg in “Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians” writes: “Much of the appeal of the Brazilian natives was the fantasy of a naked handsome people governed only by natural instincts, an adolescent´s dream world where carefree single women had complete sexual liberty. The Italian Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan, described how naked Indian women climbed aboard the ships and surrendered to the white men with natural innocence.” Hemming also quotes Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to the New World, as writing: “When they (the Indian women) have relations with us Christians they show no trace of modesty...They have another extravagant custom which seems incredible. Being libidinous, the women make their husbands´ members swell so much that they look like animals; they do this by the artifice of the bite of certain poisonous insects. As a result many men lose them altogether and are left as eunuchs.”

Readers who saw the Brazilian film “Caramuru”, released last year, will recall a scene in which the young Indian girl describes this primitive aphrodisiac to the stranded young Portuguese traveler, Diogo Alvares Correa, who ends up having a cozy ménage à trios with her and her sister. It is interesting that even to this day if a man wants to buy sex with two prostitutes at the same time, the term used is “sexo ao indio”. To further the erotic element, in time these Indian women were joined by African women and, since there were not enough white women around, the men were encouraged to have Indian or black wives and mistresses to people this new land. With the mass immigration which began in the 19^th century the Brazilian fantasist was able to add women from all over western and eastern Europe, the Middle East, Armenia, Japan, China, Korea and other South American countries to his heated imagination.

Look Out – Brazilian Women on the Loose

This openness and freedom which Brazilian women show compared with European or American women is one of the reasons why foreign men are drawn to them. However, perhaps naïve foreigners should take care of Brazilian women. The jungle may be full of colour and excitement but it is also full of dangers. Remember the long-term effects of the Indian womens’ aphrodisiacs on their menfolk. Perhaps Brazilian women should come with the kind of health warning found on cigarette packets.

In a way it would be better if these foreigners were to remain in the Brazil of their dreams where they have total freedom to think as they please. Since the Brazilians do not seem to mind having their country used as a mental escape zone the dreamers should keep on dreaming. Otherwise, grim reality might enter, as happened with the English bank robber, Ronald Biggs, who spent over 20 years in Brazil living a life which would have made most middle-aged failures envious. However, a couple of years ago Biggs, by then a sick old man, left his mulattas and caipirinhas and opted to go back home to drizzly old England where he is now a guest in one of Her Majesty`s prisons.