The popular talk-show star Regina Casé received me in her extravagant mansion, wearing a flowing caftan, at least five pounds of jewelry, and a cosmetics counter’s worth of makeup. “I’ve been to North America and to Europe,” she said. “You have a pine woods. You have a grove of oak trees. Have you been in our Atlantic rainforest? We have a hundred kinds of trees, everything is growing on top of everything else, it’s all competing for the sun and the water, and somehow it all survives, more lush than anywhere else in the world. That’s the social structure of Rio, too. Just as our Amazon is providing the oxygen for the world, we make social oxygen here. If you don’t learn to integrate your societies the way we’ve integrated ours, you’re going to fail. In America, you have a lot of problems, a lot of injustice, a lot of conflict. You try to solve the problems.” She threw up her hands in mock horror. “In Rio, we invite all the problems to a big party and we let them dance together. And we’re inviting the world to come here and dance, too.”
* * *
In August 2014, four years after I reported this story, I spent a few days in Rio. By then, UPPs were serving some 1.5 million people living in or near almost forty favelas, at staggering cost. Nine thousand police officers had received training to decriminalize and reinvigorate the favelas; in 2016, that number is expected to exceed twelve thousand. From 2009 to 2014, gang and police killings in the pacified favelas fell by half, and rates of other violent crimes dropped even more dramatically. The New York Times reported that students in the pacified favelas were performing twice as well as the average Rio student.
Despite this progress, the Institute of Social and Political Studies found that nearly half of Rio’s favelas remained under the control of vigilante militias; more than a third were in the hands of drug gangs; and fewer than one in five had a UPP presence. Between 2011 and 2013, the Police Ombudsman’s Office received nearly eight thousand complaints of police violence including assault, rape, torture, and murder—yet only eighteen officers were sanctioned as a result. A recent Amnesty International study found that on-duty police officers were responsible for 1,519 homicides in Rio over five years—nearly one out of every six of the total homicides registered in the city. In most instances, the UPP Social charged with providing medical, sports, and educational services simply failed to materialize.
The report Exclusion Games, issued at the end of 2015 and compiled primarily by NGOs, chronicled abuse of children’s rights and basic civil liberties in the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics. It noted an uptick in police violence as the pacification program wobbled, and charged that more than four thousand families had now lost their homes while another twenty-five hundred were under threat of similar displacement. Further, it reported the disappearance of several street children in episodes of so-called social cleansing. The Rio government has disputed some of these allegations.
Then there is the matter of Amarildo. On July 14, 2013, a construction worker with epilepsy named Amarildo de Souza, who lived in the Rocinha favela, was seen entering the local police station. He was never seen coming out. He was classed as “missing” for two months, until enormous demonstrations across Rio with thousands of people chanting “Where is Amarildo?” finally led to an investigation. Ten officers, including the head of Rocinha’s UPP, were accused of torture—including electric shocks and putting the man’s head in a plastic bag—and then concealing his corpse.
In April 2014, Douglas Rafael da Silva Pereira, a dancer, was beaten to death by the police. A resident of his favela later said, “This effort to pacify the favelas is a failure; the police violence is only replacing what the drug gangs carried out before.” In “pacified” Santa Marta, people complained of escalating tension. The Washington Post reported that at least ten gunfights had taken place at police bases in pacified favelas. After the period of relative peace, this mounting animosity between police and gangsters generated an increase in murders, arson, and revenge killings. A Rocinha resident, Cleber Araujo, said succinctly, “It feels like we’re in a war.” A Pew Research Trust study found that in 2014, Brazilians trusted the police less than they had four years earlier. When police battalions arrived to rout out the gangs that controlled the Maré favela, even law-abiding residents found their houses invaded and their possessions destroyed; police helicopters fired indiscriminately. In 2015, Atila Roque, the head of Amnesty International Brazil, said that the whole plan was “backfiring miserably and leaving behind a trail of suffering and devastation.” Many believe that the pacification program will be defunct as soon as the Olympics are over. Asked how long it would take for the gangs to resume their position, one favela resident said, “They will run into each other on the way out.”
I visited Vidigal, recently pacified at the time, with Márcio Januário, a playwright, actor, and dancer. Januário is black, heavily tattooed, openly gay, and widely beloved; to walk through Vidigal with him is to be greeted every ten steps. He works with children and adults in Vidigal to put on plays. When I saw him, he was fresh from a performance of Romeo and Juliet set in the favela and performed in what he calls Favelese—the psychological language of the slums—with his Free Minds theater company. Vidigal, which occupies a hill right above Ipanema beach and next to Barra da Tijuca, has the best views in Rio. Januário complained that the price of everything had skyrocketed with pacification. Many people had already sold the houses where they had lived for generations for what seemed to them a lot of money—but he said they would never find comparable houses because prices continued to escalate as middle-class purchasers bought into the favela adventure. Vidigal now has poor and rich areas, and these populations seldom interact. When I asked Januário whether he would ever consider relocating, he scoffed. “I have to be here,” he said as we sat in his spare, attractive studio apartment. “When it gets too expensive for me, I will leave Rio completely.”
Vidigal has terrible schools and few services. Januário, who volunteers in the schools, said that the kids aren’t interested in education because the teachers aren’t interested in teaching. He works with between thirty and forty students each year, many of whom go on to university. “When I began this project seven years ago, a teacher said to me, ‘You’re crazy! This school is for dummies. Poor black people don’t need theater.’ ” Januário contended that people capable of so much fun were capable of learning. “When they wake up,” he said, “they open their eyes and say, ‘Where are the lions? Let’s fight them.’ You just have to change which lions they are after.” I asked whether people were less afraid within the favelas, and he said, “It’s normal to us to live in fear; it’s not so hard as it would be for you. Violence is a culture, and there are a lot of people who like violence. Don’t assume we all want peaceful lives.” Like many favela residents, he was not only unimpressed by the whole idea of pacification, but also dubious of the problem it was intended to address.
GHANA
* * *
In Bed with the President of Ghana?
New York Times, February 9, 2013
My friend Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s wedding brought me to Ghana. The traditional ceremony began when a representative of the groom’s family said to a representative of the bride’s, “We have seen a beautiful flower growing in your garden, and we wish to pluck it.” In keeping with tradition, the two families threw challenges back and forth, which seemed to ritualize the complex ambivalence parents often feel at their children’s marriages. But they also kept breaking into song. It felt as though they were simultaneously battling and celebrating. The presentation of the dowry didn’t feel, as I’d anticipated, like a commodification of the bride. It felt respectful, less as if they’d bought my friend than as if they’d offered a tribute in acknowledgment of her worth.
* * *
When my husband-to-be and I met the Ghanaian politician John Dramani Mahama at a friend’s wedding near Accra eight years ago, I liked him immediately. I kept up with his fortunes mostly through mutual friends and was happy to learn in 2009 that he had bee
n elected his nation’s vice president. When I read a draft of his trenchant memoir, My First Coup d’État, in 2010, I volunteered to introduce him to some agents and editors in New York. Many people in the developed world expect African political leaders to be either terse and political or bloated and ideological. The surprise of John Mahama’s book is its tender humanism, and I thought it would go a long way toward breaking down prejudice in the United States. I blurbed the book when it was published last July; I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments; I hosted a party to celebrate its publication; and I conducted an onstage interview with John Mahama at the New York Public Library on July 10, 2012.
On July 24, the Ghanaian president, John Atta Mills, died, and John Mahama stepped into the presidency; in December, he was elected to another term. In late January 2013, the Ghanaian press suddenly exploded with references to Mr. Mahama’s relationship with me. “President John Dramani Mahama has been fingered to be in bed with one Mr. Andrew Solomon, a gay lobbyist,” blared one unfortunately worded report. Another announced, “Andrew Solomon reportedly gathered a few affluent people from the gay community to raise campaign funds for President Mahama with the understanding that when President Mahama won the elections, the president would push the gay rights agenda.” I was reported to have paid $20,000 for copies of the book.
The occasion of these revelations was Mahama’s appointment of a woman one newspaper called the “fiery human and gay rights advocate, Nana Oye Lithur” to head the newly established Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection. In confirmation hearings before a parliamentary committee, Lithur averred that “the rights of everybody, including homosexuals, should be protected,” thus provoking a firestorm. I was presumed to have pushed through her nomination, even though I had in fact never heard of her. The argument that Lithur was selected not for her formidable skills but because of a foreign devil dovetailed with the continuing position among some Africans that homosexuality is an import from the decadent West.
I have neither the ability nor the inclination to meddle in foreign elections, and I paid not one red cent for the book John Mahama inscribed to me. The only way I may have influenced him on gay rights was by welcoming him into the household of a joyful family with two dads. It is deeply unsettling to be implicated in a national scandal, to know that my attempts to be kind and helpful to someone would become his millstone.
On Friday, February 1, 2013, the president’s spokesman said that President Mahama didn’t know me. On Saturday, the president called me to apologize. On Sunday, the government issued a statement that Mahama and I know each other, that I have never made a campaign contribution or persuaded anyone else to do so, and that President Mahama “does not subscribe to homosexualism and will not take any step to promote homosexualism in Ghana.” I am not sure what is involved in promoting homosexualism, but I am pleased to know that a cordial friendship with me does not constitute such an act.
The situation of gay people in most of Africa is deplorable, and the double-talk from the Ghanaian administration has done little to assuage valid concerns. In the wake of this brouhaha, I have received hundreds of letters from Ghanaians via my website and Facebook. Half are from gay people about how dire their situation is. One said, “I am tired of this humiliation and embarrassment. I don’t know whether if I am a gay I am not a living being. I have tried to pretend to be what they wanted. I need your word of advice and help. Sorry to say I feel like committing suicide. My tears are dropping so badly that I have to end my email here.”
Some others come from angry people who make harsh threats about what will happen to me if I ever return to their country: many are cruel; a handful, frightening. I am unused to being so hated. But more are from straight allies, of whom there appear to be legions. One woman complained, “Men are deceiving me too much, so I want to join your LGBT please.” Another declared, “I wish God has blessed me like you. I am not a gay but I respect and love so so much. May you live to always help mankind.” A surprising number come from priests and other clerics who announce that they believe all people are equal in the eyes of God, thank me for my advocacy, and say they will tell their congregations to accept and love instead of judging and castigating.
By curious coincidence, this whole matter arose while I was in India promoting a book that deals in large part with how any condition may go from being perceived as an illness to being lived as an identity. It draws on my experience of such a transition for gay people in the United States. When I first visited India, some twenty years ago, the only obviously gay people were destitute and marginalized. On my second trip, in the late 1990s, I met a subculture of rather soigné gay men, but their faces flushed whenever the thing we had in common was acknowledged. At the Jaipur Literature Festival in February 2013, the “gay panel” in which I participated attracted more than a thousand people, many of whom complained of hideous prejudice in India—but who were emboldened to object publicly to the problem in a tone that anticipated its ultimate resolution. There were many, many straight allies there as well.
The articles that attacked President Mahama for knowing me referenced “the raging national debate on gay and lesbian rights” in Ghana. That there is such a debate—even if it’s a debate about whether to lynch us—is meaningful progress. That local propagandists can plausibly suggest that the president of a West African country is in the hands of gay lobbyists reflects an evolving world. I hope that President Mahama will seize this occasion to take a leadership role in the region on LGBT rights. That so many people from his country wrote to me when the scandal broke indicates that many are thinking through these issues. I hope the time is not far off when to know someone like me will be less of a liability and more of an asset.
* * *
The bizarre saga recounted in this article continues. My name appears in nearly every piece about gay rights published in Ghana and is invoked by homophobes from Accra to Zabzugu as an emblem of the evil that stalks their country. Meanwhile, heartbreaking letters continue to flood my inbox. In the summer of 2015, a rumor surfaced in the Ghanaian media suggesting that I had somehow figured in the death of former president John Mills, as part of a nefarious conspiracy to install my man John Mahama, “to pave way for the spread of lesbianism and homosexuality into the country”—this despite President Mahama’s continued unwillingness to show support for gay rights. Mahama has had little contact with me in the years since the original accusations were leveled.
Another recent story in the Ghanaian press described a Legon lawyer’s ecstatic vision that I would soon experience a profound religious conversion. One report held, “A Law Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ghana, Moses Foh-Amoaning, has prophesized that renowned gay activist, Andrew Solomon, who is an alleged friend of President John Dramani Mahama, will one day become a pastor. ‘Andrew Solomon will be called Pastor Andrew Solomon one day,’ he said. The Law Lecturer told Atinka AM Drive that the gay crusader will soon get closer to God.” Another article on the topic said of Foh-Amoaning, “According to him, the forces behind the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States of America [USA] is unfortunate—he also cited renowned gay advocate, Andrew Solomon, as chief propagator—but ‘God will meet him [Andrew Solomon] at a point and hit him to change.’ ” I haven’t been hit yet, but rather look forward to the encounter when it comes.
In January 2016, another Ghanaian story said, “Citing the president’s association with the acclaimed gay rights activist Andrew Solomon to buttress his point, the Ningo Prampram parliamentary aspirant said President Mahama will do anything for money. ‘If President Mahama can collect gay money to run his campaign, then he will soon mortgage Ghana to anti-Christ to win the 2016 elections,’ he fumed.”
I wonder whether I might collect interest on the mortgage when it is realized.
ROMANIA
* * *
Gay, Jewish, Mentally Ill, and a Sponsor of Gypsies in Romania
New Yorker, July 7, 2014
* * *
In my teens, I asked my great-aunt Rose where in Romania our family had come from. She claimed that she didn’t remember. I said, “Aunt Rose, you lived there until you were nineteen. What do you mean, you don’t remember?” She said, “It was a horrible place and we were lucky to get out of there. There’s no reason for anyone to go back.” I begged her to tell me at least the name of the place. She gave me an uncharacteristically steely glare and said decisively, “I don’t remember.” That was the end of that.
My paternal grandfather—Aunt Rose’s older brother, a farm laborer—had preceded her to the United States when he was sixteen, fleeing pogroms and generational poverty. He was processed at Ellis Island and settled in New York City, where he brought up his family under financial duress, only just able to feed his children. He nonetheless ensured that my father got a good education, and my family has lived in relative prosperity ever since. I’ve often wondered about the life my grandfather left behind. My forebears presumably had inquiring and capacious minds much like mine, my brother’s, and my father’s, and I have pondered what it would be like if we lived in a society that provided little scope for social mobility.
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 48