HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRASILIA

Writing today's essay has been a strange experience: I set out to write a celebration of the capital of Brazil on its 51st birthday because I genuinely enjoy living here and yet the deeper I have looked into the history and current situation of the city, the darker the picture has become.

Near the town where I was born in Wales there is a cave with prehistoric remains.  The town itself has Roman and mediaeval features and the surrounding district seems to have been inhabited for several thousand years.  In total contrast, for the last 15 years I have lived in Brasilia a city which, on 21st April, celebrated the 51st anniversary of its inauguration.  Obviously, indigenous peoples lived in this area long before the Europeans arrived and on our occasional wet and rainy days I often wonder what life was like for them, building whatever protection they could from the bushes and trees in the local scrubland known as the cerrado.

But it is the modern city that dominates the landscape today - no one knows or cares what happened to the original inhabitants.  The abundant greenery of other parts of Brazil provided building materials for large-scale communal dwelling places and also the colourful feathers to create the headdresses of the indigenous groups that appear on picture postcards.  The relative inaccessibility of their lands also provided a certain inviolability, whereas the cerrado provides less game to hunt, less foliage suitable for building and less protection against human predators, so tribal societies in the Brazilian Midwest were always more sparse and precarious.

As far back as the 18th century there was talk of moving the capital of Brazil towards the centre of this huge country and in the mid-1950s President Juscelino Kubitschek finally committed his reputation and the country's finances to planning a functioning capital where there was nothing but miles of virgin scrub, a few farms and, in the words of one of the first pioneers: "More snakes than you could shake a stick at".  Even more striking is the fact that to all intents and purposes the place was up and running within three years after construction started.

Of course, there was a cost to all this.  The country ran up huge amounts of debt and safety regulations for the mainly unskilled labour force were rudimentary to say the least.  Two fascinating films: Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra, by Vladimir Carvalho and O Romance doVaqueiro Voador by Manfredo Caldas show the lives of the labourers brought in (mainly from the Northeast of Brazil) to build the city.  Translating the phrase Vaqueiro Voador - Flying Cowboy - is an example of Brazilian black humour referring to the northeasterners, many of whom had been cowboys before becoming unskilled construction workers, falling from the high-rise office blocks they were building.  Local folklore has it that the bodies were buried in the foundations of new buildings.

One particular incident stands out in both films: at the time of Carnival in 1959 men working for the Pacheco Fernandes Dantas construction company staged a protest against the quality of their food and also against the water being cut off in their living quarters, thus preventing them from washing after work and going to Carnival dances in nearby towns, as well as their pay being withheld for the same reason.  Carnival or not, work had to go on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  On 8th February a protest about bad food in the dining hall led to altercations with the catering staff and a general breaking of furniture, which led to the GEB (Special Brasilia Guard) being called.  This was a police force that had been put together because police chiefs in the then capital, Rio de Janeiro, did not want to lose their men by sending them to what was to be the new capital.

As the men of the GEB attempted to beat up the ringleaders of the protest, they were in turn set upon by others from the 1,300-strong workforce and had to beat a humiliating retreat.  That night, a stronger force of GEB, allegedly armed with machine guns, appeared in lorries and proceeded to shoot indiscriminately into the living quarters of the construction workers.  It is not known how many casualties resulted from this action: claims of numbers of deaths range from one to 120.  Incredibly, there was almost no news coverage of the event because at that time Brazilian newspapers closed down for two days during Carnival and in any case they were more interested in covering the visit to Rio of the American film star Jayne Mansfield.  One anti-Kubitschek newspaper from Minas Gerais did send a reporter and even tried to follow the story up a month later, when it discovered that the eyewitnesses had mysteriously disappeared.

We do have a statement from a socialist politician, Salvador Lossaco who, as well as being in favour of building the new capital, also supported those working there.  He denounced the violence of the GEB and with respect to this incident he claimed that 50 law-enforcement officials fired machine guns, resulting in the deaths of 14 workers and serious injury to 37 others.

For those who speak Portuguese, I recommend viewing on Youtube the following excerpts from the film Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra that show interviews with Lúcio Costa, the urban planner of Brasilia and Oscar Niemeyer, its main architect.  Costa claims that he knew nothing of the incident but goes on to say, in essence: "Even if I had known I would not have cared because it was the Wild West out there and we had a job to do".  Niemeyer at least has the decency to look uncomfortable (‘shifty’ might be a less charitable description) and tries to close down the interview when pressed.  The clips can be viewed at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA6M_C5vTcI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIjSCVwflU&feature=related

What I find interesting is that Niemeyer has always claimed to be a Communist and indeed shows his true Stalinist credentials in making no protest against the sacrifice of workers for the Greater Good.

And this brings us to the paradox that makes Brasilia such a perfect place to live in: despite initial cosmetic attempts to provide different levels of accommodation for different income groups, it soon became clear that the new capital was attracting inconveniently large numbers of people with little or no income and these migrants were accommodated in the satellite towns that are now known as the Entorno.  These settlements follow the classical American pattern of shabby, low-rise, low-cost houses served by dirt roads that are gradually paved over time.  Given the immense problems of unemployment and drug trafficking in Brazil, violence levels are at a level that countries like Iraq would consider unacceptable.

(Conversation some years ago between me and my then maid, who lives in one of the satellite towns:

Self: So Maria, you're from the Northeast, right?

Maria: Yes.

Self: So do you have your family here?

Maria: Well, my father was here but he was murdered 12 years ago.  I still see the bloke who did it walking around town but he was never brought to trial.)

The situation is reminiscent of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, in which the Eloi live a perfect life on the sunlit uplands until nightfall, when the Morlocks emerge from their subterranean factories to capture members of the Eloi to eat.  This situation is mirrored in Brasilia in recorded cases of armed thugs raiding domestic dinner parties in houses in the elite sector of town.

So, what started out as a pleasant reflection on a remarkable achievement in a developing country has unfortunately turned into a rather more critical observation.  If Lúcio Costa were still alive, he would probably put the problems down to ‘growing pains’, but given that the Federal District politicians were recently videotaped pocketing bundles of cash payoffs it is difficult to see the social and financial imbalances between the Plano Piloto and the satellite towns being reduced in the near future.  In fact, Costa's enlightened social views are reflected in this form of social apartheid. I would say that I am going to cultiver mon jardin except that the safety risks involved in living in a house with a garden force my wife and I to live in an apartment.

What Colour was Othello?

We are used to seeing Shakespeare's Othello portrayed on the stage either by black actors such as the magnificent Paul Robeson or blacked-up white actors like Laurence Olivier (giving one of his typically mannered and affected performances).  And yet there is a contradiction in the play: in Act I, Scene I we are immediately introduced to the image of Othello as being ‘the thicklips’ and ‘an old black ram’, both derogatory descriptions that would apply to a sub-Saharan African.  And yet the subtitle of the play is The Moor of Venice and in the original story that is held to be Shakespeare's main source, Cinzio’s Un Capitano Moro also refers to a Moor and the Moors are supra-Saharan people today classified as being of Berber/Arab stock, among whom thick lips and a black skin are not common traits.

So the question may be asked: what colour was Othello?  One of the problems is the general application of the word ‘Moor’ in Shakespeare's day, very often rendered as ‘Blackamoor’, a derogatory term applied to North Africans with dark skins.  Interestingly, among all the insulting comments made about Othello in the play, this word is not used although Othello does refer to himself as ‘black’.

We should perhaps look at the question of the Christian/Moorish confrontation in Europe which showed itself in the Arab occupation of Iberia from 711-1492, the Crusades from 1096-1270 and the Ottoman Wars in Europe (c.1300-c.1700), the part of the conflict in which this play is set.  The question is seemingly never asked: what is a Moorish officer doing fighting with Christian Venetians against the Islamic Ottoman Empire?  The first point to make is that religious allegiance at this time did not necessarily involve parallel military allegiance.  In 11th century Spain, the hero Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar is given the title El Cid (from the Arabic ‘Sidi’) and fights for both Christian and Moorish masters. Another question left unanswered here is that of Othello having married Desdemona, presumably in a Christian ceremony, so we have to ask, not only what colour he is, but what religion he follows.  Othello never mentions God in the whole play and ironically the character who refers most frequently to God is Iago.

If Othello is a North African Moor then the Ottoman Turks are as geographically and culturally distant from him as Norwegian Vikings would be, so Othello's Venetian employers would have no problem in offering him a contract to fight against the threat to their island of Cyprus (which was eventually occupied by the Ottomans in 1570).  This situation still leaves Othello as a Moor however, and not a sub-Saharan African.  Obviously a member of the latter group could have worked his way north and established himself as a successful mercenary soldier, but given the traditional relationship of supra- and sub-Saharan peoples (i.e., the tendency of the former to enslave the latter) this would be so unlikely as to merit a mention in the original story and the subsequent play.

Next we come to the question of the acceptability of Othello's marriage to Desdemona.  In Cinzio’s original story their marriage is public, even though her parents initially object.  In Shakespeare's play the couple have eloped and married secretly, causing Desdemona's father an understandable measure of discontent in the circumstances, but he finally blesses the union.  Given the literal demonisation of dark-skinned people in Europe at the time (they were considered by many to be agents of the Devil), it is unlikely that either Cinzio’s or Shakespeare's Brabantio would have given even reluctant agreement to a markedly interracial marriage.

But, to return to Act I, Scene I, how does Othello’s ‘Moorishness’ fit with ‘the thicklips’ and the ‘old black ram’ - terms that refer to the physical appearance of and the sexual calumnies directed against sub-Saharan black people, as opposed to Moors? The solution I suggest is that, while Shakespeare takes the Moorish figure from Cinzio, he actually envisages the figure of Othello in terms of one of the black slaves whom he would have seen in London since Sir John Hawkins brought the slave trade to England and its colonies 50 years before Othello was written.  Given the general use of the words ‘Moor’ and ‘Blackamoor’ to describe African people in general, this merging of two physical types may now be explained.

Still the objection may be raised: surely Shakespeare was far too sophisticated and intelligent to make such a generalisation.  This may well be true and it could be that Shakespeare has seized upon Cinzio’s original story but deliberately pushed Othello's origins further to the south in order to make a statement about contemporary attitudes towards sub-Saharan Africans.  This does not make Shakespeare an early Abolitionist but it does place Othello in the same theme-park as The Merchant of Venice which again is not a 20th century type of condemnation of racial prejudice but does nonetheless make the point that people should be treated in terms of their own qualities and not in terms of some perceived tribal difference.

We should always remember that we are looking back to Shakespeare through the prism of 200-300 years of slavery and the institutional racism that appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Given that decent and honourable men were powerless to overcome such abuses during hundreds of years, it is another indication of Shakespeare's status as a human being that he could go to the heart of those problems before Western ‘civilisation’ (not to mention its pupils Stalin, Mao and the Japanese military) had shown how far into the realms of obscenity scientific progress could develop them.

A Short Alcoholic Diversion from the Otherwise Serious Content of this Blog

It is far from the aim of these innocent communications to corrupt my gentle readers but the fact of you taking the trouble to read the idle ramblings of an idle fellow shows you to be a person of sufficient good sense and responsibility to be trusted with the following information. 

You will have gathered that I spend much of my time in Brazil and I feel it is only right to share with you news of one of Brazil's greatest contributions to global civilisation: the caipirinha, a drink made from the local white rum known here as cachaça (accept no substitutes such as the heretical caipirosca, made with vodka).

One of the advantages of this drink is that you can use the cheapest cachaça available.  There are purists who drink cachaça unmixed with any foreign substances but I have to confess that the upmarket (and expensive) cachaças leave me unmoved and since we are going to adulterate the drink anyway, there is no problem in using the cheapest variety.  Cachaça is now quite widely exported so you can make the caipirinha without having to come to Brazil.

Obviously, different people make the drink in different ways, but this is the one I have found to be most satisfying.

First, prepare your glass(es). Place the glass in your freezer for an hour or so and take it out when you are ready to serve the drink. 

Next, cut a lime into pieces and place them in a mortar.  Add two or even three dessert spoons of sugar (if you’re trying to lose weight and think you can get away with sweetener, forget it and find a good book).  Add half the amount of cachaça you wish to drink and crush the lime pieces, sugar and alcohol with the pestle.  Take the previously prepared glass from the freezer and put four or five ice cubes in now.  Add the mixture from the pestle, not all of which will flow out.  That’s why you now add the rest of the cachaça to the remaining sugar in the mortar to wash it out and add it to what is already in the glass.

In restaurants, the caipirinha is served with a straw so that you can suck the ice-cooled portion from the bottom.  If the ice is put in last, it sits on top of the crushed limes and cools the upper level of the liquid but when you drink it the ice then rests against your lip and freezes it.  It is, of course, possible to strain the mixture and not have any limes in the glass at all but what we are talking of here is a hand-crafted product, the slight imperfections of which are part of its charm.  Fragments of lime and undissolved sugar come up through the straw, giving the whole thing a combination of perfection and rough texture.

If you do want to drink without a straw, try the following technique.  Many years ago an American friend suggested a modification to serving this drink.  Take one of the lime sections and run it around the rim of a glass to dampen it with juice.  Up-end the glass and dip the rim into a saucer of castor sugar, so coating the rim with sugar, and then put it in the freezer.  In this case you will have to put the ice in last otherwise you will drink the uncooled part of the caipirinha first, and of course you have to put up with the frozen lip - but you pay your money and take your choice....

I have never been a great drinker of alcohol because of suffering from early-onset hangovers and one of the advantages of the caipirinha, at least in my case, is the lack of a hangover either at the time of drinking or the next morning.  So there we are: drink responsibly and non-violently, let someone else do the driving, and share your caipirinhas with friends to bring about a small increase in the sum of human happiness.

Shakespeare and the Reformation (or the Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Let us look at the background against which Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the reign of Elizabeth I, the second of Henry VIII’s children.  For much of Henry’s reign Britain was officially a Catholic country, until the king needed a divorce when it became necessary to repudiate the Church of Rome and incorporate the nation into the stream of Protestant Reformation sweeping through Europe.  Refusal to conform to this adjustment cost Henry’s chief minister Sir Thomas More, his head. Henry’s son, Edward VI, has been described as a “Protestant bigot” and his sister Mary who succeeded him could be described as a Catholic equivalent.  The middle child, Elizabeth, returned the country to the Protestant fold while adopting a relatively middle-of-the-road to religious difference.

What did this mean to value system of people who lived through this period of spiritual turbulence?  In today’s Protestant church it is almost a disadvantage for a priest to believe in traditional Christianity, and even respectable Catholic thinkers are saying contraception is acceptable and that the Church will eventually accept married priests.  In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a different case.  Men were burned alive for refusing to adapt their practices to the demands of one religion or the other.  What power was strong enough to cause them to do this?  It was the power of a belief in a heaven and hell in which one would spend eternity, a belief that the individual had a relationship with God interpreted through the teachings of a Church on earth.

This belief system is essentially a mediaeval one, but the Reformation and subsequent economic developments (Italian capitalism) and geographical discoveries (the Americas, the spice routes) demanded a more rational approach to spirituality and we can argue that the crisis caused by these two tectonic plates of human history rubbing together produced the earthquake of the Renaissance.  Two sets of religious beliefs were claiming the exclusive right of access to God - both could not be right.  Although Columbus’ letters are full of thanks to God, the success of his voyages was due as much to secular mathematics as to divine benevolence and the Church had denied the mathematics on which Galileo’s view of the universe was based.

So where did this leave the citizen of Elizabeth’s England, a 16th-century third world country whose economy depended on providing raw materials such as wool, leather and tin to the powerful and sophisticated states of Europe that were divided into Catholic and Protestant power blocs similar to those of the 20th century’s Cold War?  In addition to the normal risks of daily life (theatres regularly had to be closed in summer because of plague), we must remember the constant threat throughout most of Elizabeth’s reign, of the mightiest empire in the world, that of Spain.  King Philip of Spain, the most powerful man on earth, had married Elizabeth’s sister Queen Mary and wanted to regain his hold on the Protestant island that was encouraging the Dutch rebels in his Hapsburg Empire.  We recall the Spanish Armada, the failed invasion of 1588, but most people do not realise that this one of four attempts to conquer England, Ireland and Wales (Scotland was still independent at this time).

The citizen of Elizabeth’s England lived in a world which was insecure both physically and spiritually because important links with the past had been broken.  Mediaeval man had looked to the classical and biblical past for the authority that controlled his present, but Renaissance man looked to the future, based on the twin foundations of Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman cultures.  The Middle Ages sent crusader colonists to Jerusalem to reinforce the past.  The Renaissance sent colonists to the Americas to develop the future.  In this state of change and crisis, what I would call the Great National Nervous Breakdown, where did Renaissance man and woman look for guidance?  The first answer is still the church, where they would listen to two-hour sermons from preachers like John Donne, the Dean of St Paul’s (who had expeditiously converted from Catholicism to Protestantism to achieve social – and financial – progress).  They would also go to the theatres, where the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries presented them with lessons from Roman and British history as well as comedies and tragedies with storylines taken from the centre of western learning, Italy.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays analyse the chaotic and brutal politics of his times by looking at historical parallels but he also analyses human relationships, giving people a guide to living with each other during a period of history when many religious values had been overturned.  This section of his work - both tragedy and comedy - centres on love and of course love is the basis of Christianity (though we might not think so when we read the histories of 2,000 years of religious warfare).  The comedy 12th Night, in particular, contains a wonderful set of lessons in love that embrace eight different aspects of that emotion.

It is interesting, but not surprising, that Shakespeare should not make open references to religious questions in his plays: if he came down on one side or the other of the Catholic/Protestant divide he could find himself in trouble if and when the nation's religious wind swung around in the opposite direction.  Nevertheless, we do find the dilemmas that appear in religion being discussed in non-religious contexts.  For example, Macbeth shows us the conflict between free will and fate.  The Three Sisters tell Macbeth at the beginning of the play that he shall be king, which may either be a prophecy or the ramblings of three drunken Scottish bag ladies.  It is Macbeth who, obediently like any nagged husband ("Are you going to cut the grass/the King's throat or not?") does not wait for the King to die a natural death, but allows his free will to interfere with his fate by hurrying matters along and killing the King prematurely.

The conclusion that I suggest, therefore, is that the arrival of the Reformation in England and Wales (some would say it has not yet arrived in Ireland) caused every ordinary individual in the land to carry out a religious self-assessment.  Did you abandon a Church that said those who abandoned it would burn in hell, or did you remain true to that Church and burn on earth? It seems fairly obvious that those engaged in writing plays for general consumption would be living on a higher plane of awareness of the existential conflicts being acted out on the streets and would therefore portray them on stage in heightened forms of expression.  This is the advantage English literature gained from the Great National Nervous Breakdown.

There is, however, one huge siege gun aimed directly at this argument: the most religiously conservative country in Europe, Spain, was producing excellent dramatic literature in greater quantities than England and in Cervantes had not only an artistic rival to Shakespeare, but the man who invented the modern novel, the literary form that has overtaken theatre as a point of access most people have to literature.  Does this big gun nullify my previous arguments? I think not (but then, I would say that, wouldn't I?).  Spain and Portugal (kingdoms that were united for a while during this period) were in a better position than most societies to understand the intellectual and technological revolutions that were carrying their power to the Americas, India, the East Indies, the Philippines and Japan.  Indeed, we may even read Don Quixote in this light: the knight's illusions are noble and magnanimous, representing the mediaeval ideals of Christian chivalry, but Sancho Panza represents the modern world of the 17th-century that has to adapt to changes in the physical world and new approaches to the spiritual one.  So English writers faced Shakespeare's brave new world by abandoning an old religion and creating many new ones (as Voltaire said: "This is the country of sects. An Englishman, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever road he pleases") while the great Spanish dramatists, especially Calderón, looked for answers to the new questions in the old religion.

Interested in teaching English language using literature?  Have a look at http://litandlang.co.uk

AN AID TO LANGUAGE LEARNING

I first started developing the system shown below when studying Spanish at university and refined it during many years of teaching English to non-native speakers.  The idea is based on the theory that we learn better if we recognise our own mistakes rather than having them corrected for us by someone else.

The chart shown below applies to the English language but can easily be adapted to others.  Producing language involves a series of choices; when we first put together our attempts at expressing ourselves we take the static 'bricks' of the language - our vocabulary - and adapt it to 'the architect's plan' of the language - the grammar.  As our knowledge improves, we make this process more automatic until we can confidently handle groups of words which, to continue the building analogy, are the prefabricated sections of our structure.  In time, we do this without thinking; for example when we use the French phrase 's'il vous plaît' we do it automatically without translating it as 'if it pleases you'.

In making my analysis of language I have tried to categorise the different types of choices we make when manipulating grammar and vocabulary.  Along the top of the chart you will see those choices, while down the left-hand side of the table are the elements of language in which mistakes most commonly occur (at least, in English – other languages would have a ‘Subjunctive’ category for instance).  At the bottom of the chart is a 'catch-all' section for those phrases that don't fit into neat categories.

ERROR ANALYSIS CHART
Grammatical Item	CAUSE OF ERROR
	Selection			Word Order	Add/Omit	Collocation
	Form/spelling		Lexis
verb phrase
tense
auxiliary
irregular
infinitive
+ to, +-ing
noun phrase
count
plural
genitive
adv.   phrase
comparison
adj.  phrase
comparison
preposition
with verb
with noun
with other
pronoun
Determiner
Def.Art
Indef. Art.
conjunction
sentence
register
question
negation
relative
Other notes

The way I used the chart in practice was to ask learners to speak into a tape recorder or write letters and essays.  With the written work, I would return the material with mistakes highlighted in orange or red ink.  With the tapes, I transcribed only the errors, for reasons of time.  The orange signified errors of less importance while the red indicated errors that seriously interfered with an indication.  The learner was now expected to correct the errors and to indicate the type of error on the chart with either an asterisk or the more enthusiastic learners even used numbers referring to the error in the original.  The material would come back to me (in a process I called 'chewing the cud') to check that the correction and the classification on the chart were correct.

So the phrase *'I am going to classroom' would come in the column Add/Omit at the level of Definite Article.  In this case it would be indicated by a minus sign rather than an asterisk, to indicate omission.  You will see that some of the cells are 'greyed out'.  This is to help the classification process because it shows those types of error that are almost never made (i.e. the spelling of the indefinite article), although my more creative students did manage to invade these areas.

There are obvious areas of ambiguity in the chart.  For example, when we find the phrase *'he has come yesterday', is it the form of the general Verb Phrase, is it the form of the tense or is it the addition of a redundant auxiliary with the form of the past participle that is also wrong?  It doesn't really matter, as long as the same kind of mistake is always categorised in the same way.

The original version of the chart did not include a separate classification for spelling - everything was included under 'Form', in the sense that the way we spell a word implies our choice of the form we use to write it, as opposed to the grammatical form we choose to put it in.  However, as time went on it became clear that it was useful to distinguish simple spelling errors from grammatical ones, but they were marked with an 's' instead of an asterisk.

Another later addition was the 'Collocation' column to indicate to more advanced students how words in a language fit together in some ways, but not in others.  The analogy I used was that of the atoms of the molecule H₂O, which can only fit together in that way because of the way they are constructed.  So, if we imagine the lexical scope of the words 'rough' and 'coarse' as being two circles, we can say that they overlap and are interchangeable when they refer to ‘rough/coarse sandpaper’, but that they are not interchangeable in the phrase 'I have had a rough week'.  This is the kind of mistake learners make through mis-use of the dictionary but fortunately today it is possible to test such phrases by typing them into Google to see if they actually exist.  Try typing "rough week" and "coarse week" (between quotation marks) into Google and compare the results.

In pedagogical terms, this system has been criticised because it is in a sense 'negative' - concentrating on what learners have done wrong rather than encouraging them for doing things right.  My answer to this is that, first of all the active learner wants to know what he or she is doing wrong, secondly explanations of error can be done in such way as to show the positive points: "That's great!  You've picked up the phrase ‘going to class’, but unfortunately if you use ‘classroom’ you have to say ‘the’".

In the many years I used the system I found my students tended to be motivated by it and I applied it to my own written production when learning Portuguese.  This was useful in that it showed me the frequency of a kind of mistake I didn't even realise I was making: the use of prepositions.  It is this kind of self awareness that makes us better at producing language.

   Interested in teaching language through literature?  Take a look at: http://www.litandlang.co.uk