Brazilianness exists in the differences between us – 08/14/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

There is a field of tensions that we call Brazil and that is formed from the original peoples, who were already in the territory but were not Brazilians, because the country did not yet exist; of the first Europeans who arrived to dominate the inhabited earth; of Africans brought in by force; of the Europeans, Arabs and Asians who landed —and land— in multiple migratory waves.

In the relations of tension within this field, one must include the lust transformed into violence between the different bodies, as the anthropologist and great interlocutor of psychoanalysis Lélia Gonzalez reminds us.

To be Brazilian is to be just a part of this open system of ethnic-racial relations. Some of us hear: “You’re Brazilian? Don’t you look like it?!”. But, after all, what does a Brazilian look like?

The black, symbol of miscegenation, is considered “the face” of the country, but is, symptomatically, placed in the place of second-class citizens. The indigenous is the “exotic” and if it is not covered with feathers it is considered false. The white man, who controls the narratives about the formation of Brazil, dreams of being anything but Brazilian. Asian and Arab ancestry is used to disqualify Brazilianness.

For example, let us remember that Brazil has the largest number of Japanese descendants outside of Japan. They are young people who do not speak Japanese, rarely visited the country of their ancestors and fell into samba and feijoada over a century ago, but continue to be called “Japs” by the phenotype, no matter if they are grandchildren of Koreans, Chinese…

Is Brazilian black, is it Indian, is it yellow, is it white?

So far, we are the result of what happened between all these groups and also the result of the denial of the history and culture of the first two. In the case of indigenous and black people, ancestry needs to be rescued in every detail. For whites, it is important to recognize a common history that mischaracterizes their ancestry. It is not a question of denying it, but of rectifying it.

When I’m in Italy, the land of my grandparents —which I only got to know when I was an adult—, the echoes of my family’s history are heard, but I don’t recognize myself as Italian. It was in the Umbanda yard that I baptized my daughter, my music is MPB and I don’t think that pasta is the panacea of ​​cooking. I had the privilege of getting to know the footprints of those who preceded me, even to allow myself the luxury of understanding that I don’t identify with them.

It is not the same with blacks and indigenous people. The exhibition “Dos Brasis” is on display at Sesc Belenzinho, beautifully curated by Igor Simões, Lorraine Mendes and Marcelo Campos and exquisitely set up. It recovers a part of the black Brazilianness that we have not seen in the decades we spent confined to school benches and in which we were hammered with a historical version that was stripped of its foundations. The system of ethnic-racial relations that composes us has always been flattened by a pale and fallacious narrative.

We left the exhibition enraptured by the violence, but also by the grandeur. It is set up in such a way that children happily roam around the site without realizing all that is at stake. There we recover traces of a common nationality.

It is not possible to be Brazilian without having been traversed by the natural exuberance of this land that was invaded for extractive purposes and that only by accident became a country. The only merit we could receive for living in such a beautiful place would be for our ability to preserve it. It’s not the case.

Being Brazilian is a type of decentering, a type of vertigo. If we could afford it, we would be the country of the future, because there is nothing the world needs more than peoples who recognize their incompleteness and who are open to alterity.

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