In Brasil, English is alive, and well . . .
This thing that I want to talk about starting in this section is not something that should be put all in one place, because it ís an ongoing delighted discovery that I make daily of the fascination that Brasilians have for my language. I think, by the way, that it ís not really English that they love, it ís American (as opposed to British), a matter that maybe I should talk about first.
I have a feeling that despite the infinity of differences that would be easy to tick off, one by one, there is a greater similarity between the United States and Brasil than between the United States and any other country (at least any that I have been to). This might seem funny. How could one say, for instance, that our great neighbor to the north, Canada, is not the obvious candidate for the country with the greatest similarity to the States? Both speak English, both were New World colonies of England, heavy French influence, same approximate climate, same foods, etc., etc. And yet I feel that Canada is infinitely far from the States. To me, Canada feels purer, more innocent, than the States. This may in part be because of the thinness of its population, but I have another suggestion, which ties in with Brasil: Canada is different, deeply, because it is white. I don’t know what the history of slavery was in Canada, but I can’t believe that slavery was anything like as influential there as it was in the US. And I don’t know the statistics for the percentage of Canada’s population that is black, but I feel that Canada’s blacks are like, say, Germany’s. They are fairly recent immigrants, by and large. Blackness is not a deep part of the Canadian psyche.
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Nor, I believe, though I have never been there, is it a big part of the Mexican psyche. I just bet that there weren’t lots of Mexican slaves. I have no feeling for the countries of Central America, being just too ignorant of them, but I don’t think that they were filled with slavers. In North America, then, it was us, the Americans, who were the slavers. And one thing that links us to the Brasilians is just this — slavery. In South America, it was the Brasilians who were the slavers. By and large, the other countries of South America feel white to me, like Canada does. I do not believe that there is the same strength of an African presence in Ecuador, in Chile, in Panama, as there is in the Brasil and in the US.
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In Brasil, there were many slaves left over — understand, now that I am giving you some mix, I can’t tell you what percent of one and what of the other, of fact and impression. You are getting how I, as one white Yankee, the real New English kind, a linguist, see Brasil, on the basis of no formal study whatsoever, very little reading on the subject, how I am reacting so far to what I intuit from living as Brasilianly as possible, from loving the crazy life here. You may be pretty bad off, as far as having a solid basis for knowing about this country, but at least you’re no worse off than I am.
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Remember, by the way, that we are getting around to a beginning discussion of what begins to happen to such a Yankee as I am when he sees, like I did this past month, a fairly black Brasilian, in his twenties, say, walking by with a pretty ragged tee shirt on, I believe of a faded Kelly green, with one English word written on it:
POWDER
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OK, you may say, so what? That’s a bit weird, right, we wouldn’t find any shirts like that made in the States and available from Sears, say, but . . .
This is just the beginning. I am trying to tell you, simultaneously, of the love affair that Brasilians are having with you Americans, you all unawares, and with your language, with the only problem with that being the generally awful school system here, in particular the part that has to do with getting English down reasonably well. That part has a lot of what we might agree to call enthusiasm for English, but it is also capable of generating a sort of circular design on a nicely made, medium-priced sweatshirt and pants combination, about the right size for a two or three-year-old, and on the chest of this really nice sweat suit it says:
ETHICAL AND PRICING GUIDELINES
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So you are maybe beginning to feel my problem — me, the card-carrying linguist, most of whose professional research has been carried out on trying to find out what the structure of the English language (in particular, of the American language) is. And here all around me there is an English inside out, or in reverse, or about to hit warp speed, or something even more indescribable. I mean, how would you try to interpret a tee shirt on a nice girl at the cash register of your school’s lunch counter whose shirt reads:
BACKWARDS FROM
?
Could you just shrug it off and forget about it?
That ís my problem — I can’t. I hardly look Brasilians I meet on the street in the eyes anymore — I want to read their shirts first.
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OK, so where were we? Brasilians love Americans. They love American music, and it’s easy to find really good music stations which play about fifty-fifty marvelous Brasilian music and great American music — Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, John Lennon (OK, so they like more than just Americans), Carly Simon — Dave Brubeck I heard last week, I think. James Taylor. The Beatles, the Stones. Brasilian versions of Beatles’ songs — like last year, a big hit here was a Portuguese version of “Hey Jude.” Not only that, but that’s what I hear as the music that is played in shopping malls or supermarkets.
And Americans love Brasil too. I know of exactly one counter-example to the claim that every American who has ever come down here was crazy about Brasil. He’s a friend of mine, but he’s a complicated friend, and he definitely got off on the wrong foot and was out of the country before he hardly arrived. And he’s the only American I have met who is not attracted right off to this place.
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And how I see the African presence linking our two, my two, countries, is as follows: a huge number of black people came to both our countries, had some very rough treatment at the hands of the Portuguese/English colonists, and ended up being “liberated” — that is, not officially discriminated against any more.
And then what happened is that in both countries, black people started to be recognized as heroes, in absolutely central areas in each culture. For us in the States, I think the first place was in professional sports. Starting with the great Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the most mystical and religious of our sports, baseball. Shortstop for my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, not just a good player, who held up his end of the game, did a decent job. No. Jackie Robinson was legendary. Clutch plays as a fielder, a great arm, a dangerous base-runner, a bunter, squeeze plays at home plate. Like you knew he was going to make something happen when he came up to bat, when the ball went out towards Peewee Reese at second and you knew he would throw to Jackie for the light touch of the bag at second, before the high leap over the spikes of the incoming base runner’s slide, as he fired the ball to Gil Hodges at first for a beauty of a double play.
There was a lot of prejudice against him, and he was just too good to ignore, too good to beat. He was a hero for me, a white ten-year-old kid growing up in Poughkeepsie, ninety miles up the Hudson River from Brooklyn.
And someone who is better at sports than me, maybe they will say that who paved the way for Jackie were the great unbeatable black boxers, like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson. I don’t know, I’m just saying how as I grew up, I felt the States begin to have to admire the great black backs of pro football, Marion Mottley, Jimmy Brown, O. J. Simpson, or the great basketball players, Magic Johnson, Big O, Kareem.
What would professional baseball, football, basketball — the big three of American sports — be without black athletes? That can’t even be seriously entertained as a question.
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And then what next? Well, speaking personally, I would have to say, our music. Like who are the US popular music heroes of modern times? What ís your list? Mine, which comes absolutely devoid of all guarantees, would have at least these people in it: Scott Joplin, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Charlie Parker, Johnny Cash, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Thelonious, Miles, Coltrane, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, Lightning Hopkins, B. B. King, Billie Holiday, Brubeck and Desmond, Simon and Garfunkel, Leadbelly, Bruce Springsteen, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Christian, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle, Elvis, Elvis, Elvis, Oscar Peterson, Nina Simone, Art Blakey, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Glenn Miller, Wes Montgomery . . .
Of course I am forgetting lots of names, especially in those areas, like hard rock, Dixie, Country music, rhythm and blues, where my own tastes haven’t led me to buy and listen to a lot of the artists. But I can’t believe that that’s going to matter. Because the basic story of the rise of our popular music has got to be said to have been something like this, right?
Ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, bop, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, modern jazz, and then on to more and more fused forms.
And who are the turning points in this ascent? At least some like this, I would think just about any historian would want to say.
Satchmo. Basie. The Duke. Billie Holiday. Bird. Elvis. Dylan. Miles.
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It is easy to go on and show how black people are rising to more and more important positions in many areas of American life, from the entertainment world through government, through the professions, and into the business world.
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In Brasil, I don’t know the history at all, but I know that some of the greatest players that at least I have heard of in soccer, an activity that Brasilians take most seriously, were or are black.
And the same is true for music — for MPB, música popular brasileira.
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But I am saying this all wrong. It is just misleading to look at the percentage of blacks in various sectors of Brasilian society, and to find out that they are higher than in the corresponding percentages in the US, or possibly lower. Those would be true observations, but irrelevant ones, on a deeper level. The level of attitude.
It is hard to find a way into this area. Maybe this will do it. Racially, Brasil is made up of whites, from a lot of countries (Portugal, France, England, Germany), and of Orientals, especially the Japanese; of blacks, and of people from the many tribes of Indians whose land we live on.
And also: of any conceivable admixtures of any of the above. There is one word for mixes of black and white: mulatto. Another for mixes of Indian and black — mestizo. And yet a third for mixes of Indians and whites —
But more important than the actual biological facts as to what percentage of what races some Brasilian is is the way they will feel about it. And that, to a large extent, at least among the people who I have talked to, is: I may not know exactly where in my genealogy I have black ancestors, but they are probably there, all right. All of us here are black to one or another degree.
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And this last feeling — that we are all black — is, it seems to me, the only way out of a world full of prejudice and racial hatred. I don’t say that Brasil has solved all problems of prejudice, especially economically. But the deep-running feeling: we are all one — that is of incalculable worth. Imagine how much better the world would be if all of us could only learn to really feel that, about all races, and all creeds.
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Just one last linguistic thing about the way black and white interpenetrate here. There is no black dialect here. There is nothing that corresponds to Black English. Listening to someone talk on the telephone, you have no idea of the color of their face.
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I should say, too, that being here for this long has already made a big difference in my thinking and feeling about my own prejudice. I did not manage to grow up unprejudiced, and though I have tried to consciously rid myself of all such feelings, I am sure that there remain many subterranean ones, hiding, waiting to come out.
But I also feel myself almost not noticing any more what color Brasilian I happen to be with. More and more, it is coming to be just an irrelevance. And this wonderful gift from Brasil to me is a gentle one. There is no gritting of the teeth and trying fiercely to root out prejudice. Inside me, it just feels as if it is just sort of thinning out, turning to wisps, being blown free of my mind.
Graças a Deus —†thanks to God.
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Postscript: Tee shirts I’ve read
POWDER
BACKWARD FROM
I BELIEVE IN PACE
(I think that they were trying to say “peace”)
THIS CAR WILL RUN BETWEEN CHICAGO
ETHICAL AND PRICING GUIDELINES
(on a sweatsuit for a kid of about 2-3 years of age.)
THE FIRST TRY OF UNIVERSE CONQUEST
(under a picture of a mountain)
SWOOPING
and insurance
TIRE SLANDER
O. H. U.
(in big letters: — above them, extending vertically, the words —
OPEN HER UP
ITALIAN PEN
BE IN THE GRIP OF THE TECHNOLOGY
STICK TO ONE’S GUNS
GET THE UPPER HAND
VARIANT FOOT
EXPERIENCE RESISTANCE
HAVE A GOOD REPUTATION
SNOB LINE
Dropped
Third
STRIKE
(pragmatically weirdissimo, since this is a culture which doesn’t know what balls and strikes are, let alone that three strikes and you’re normally OUT, let alone that third strikes can be dropped, with different consequences.)
THE WINDS THAT BLAST US
HOTS COOP
FORTE POINTS
15
TEAM
SUPERBOWL
COMPETITION
SUNSTREET
CICLES WAY
—
AUTHENTIC SHOES
—
DROP
KNEE
RECEIPT
HAPPY
POSITIVE DISTRATION
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Your piece was well written, I enjoyed reading it.. thanks.
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Alan