Brazil: How to love a country whose leader has blood on his hands
Jair Bolsanaro became President of Brazil on 1 January 2019. Since then his policies have seen 100s of 1000s die of Covid, vast swathes of the Amazon destroyed, Indigenous Peoples’ rights trampled, increased intolerance of the LGBTQ+ community and more. Such political realities were at the forefront of my mind as I started this week’s armchair travel… But the more I read, the clearer it became that history is long and Brazil is enormous. He may be devastating lives and nature now, but he is a short-term fascist fool. He is just a blip, an anomaly, a painful mistake that will one day be an embarrassing historical footnote.
After all, Brazil hasn’t always been this way. It legalised gay marriage a year before the UK, and ratified the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — something Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA have yet to do. So instead of worrying about the present President, I instead focused on the sun-drenched music (this week’s playlist comes in at 4 and a half hours), food, drink and culture.
And where better to start than with breakfast…
Acai berries look like black currants and are full of antioxidants that benefit your brain, heart and overall health. They are also bloody expensive. It took a while to find a shop that sold them, but I was so excited by my new purchase that I got up early to prepare my children a pre-school acai bowl. Only one of them ate it… neither of them liked it!
As lockdown lessens and Birmingham opens, I get to head out and find the Birmingham shops that sell the niche produce I need. This week that meant heading to BrasilPortu, a shop, butchers, café and bar that sells all things Brazilian. We came back with biscuits, beer, cheese balls and vegan tamales. All were delicious and went well with our Gaucho barbecue…
A Brazilian Gaucho (or cowboy) barbecue is pretty much like any other barbecue, you cook a heck tonne of vegan meat and eat it with Brazilian potato salad. And of course a caipiroska, a caiprinha made with vodka instead of cachaca!
But, with a country as large as Brazil there are far too many dishes to fit into just one evening, such as this Feijoda, a black bean dish which we served with roasted vegetables. It was far more successful than Acai bowls and happily scoffed by three generations of Wainwrights. Though only one generation finished it by drinking cachaca, Brazilian rum…
The next night was an even bigger success — Tofu moqueca, I kind of coconut cream tofu stew with fried plantain. I would strongly recommend it. Seriously! Go make it now…
…and then go watch The Second Mother, a calmly acted story of a long-suffering house-keeper trying to reconnect with the daughter she’s supported, but never got to watch grow up. It is full of cliches, but that just made it feel all the more homely… which is more can be said for the City of God, which we watched nearly 20 years ago and I still rate as one of the greats.
So much so that I bought the DVD of the much gentler linked TV series City of Men, also about the Favellas in Rio de Janeiro. It’s an almost comic take on the dramas that kids growing up extreme poverty have to face and was a phenomenon in Brazil (watched by 35 million people). I don’t think I’ll ever get past episode four. I guess it’s the equivalent of a Brazilian watching Fawlty Towers to learn what England is like!
So that just leaves this week’s novel. I plumped for Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva an experimental poetic book that taught me nothing about Brazil! It is a free-flowing narrative, the story of a woman, or an idea, or the story itself being born, written from the view of a painter, trying to achieve with words what she achieves with paint. It felt like a grown-up Burroughs book, where literary convention was being destroyed with love rather than arrogance. You can open the book at any page and find a paragraph it is worth reading and trying to understand. As an example, if I flick through, the first one I find is:
“I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.”
But I have invented too much truth for one week, and so I must stop and prepare myself for my trip to Brunei!
