by Simon Schama
Oh, yes, I love Brazil, but Porto Alegre was different: less tropical; more, sigh, European. There is much talk about the Germans and the Italians who came there, and on to the plane came a pack of the former, drunk at noon; planting themselves wherever seats seemed to beckon, despising mere boarding-pass seat assignment; mighty shouts of ‘Markus’ and ‘Thomas’ roaring down the aisles for no particular reason anyone could make out except as an expression of Kameradschaft in the southern hemisphere. The plane skirted the Atlantic coast, breakers curling below while the flight attendants pretended to have run out of beer.
Porto Alegre is an instantly appealing place, foaming with blue jacaranda blossoms, merry with sidewalk cafés set between nineteenth-century Brazilian town houses, their gables as curly as a gaucho’s whiskers with snazzy touches of crimson or gold paint. It was Sunday, which meant, even in the Sheraton, that feijoada was on; a gamut of darkly stewed meats together with the manioc farofa I remember loving on that first trip and did again: it’s fluffy and gritty at the same time, which doesn’t sound enticing, but somehow is. In the park, a boy pulled out his guitar and sang samba to impress, while a circle of capoeira devotees went through their clambering motions to a dull drum beat.
A book fair was in swing; not the kind boasting marquee events with the usual suspects, but a pretty, shady plaza laid out with fifty or so stalls, each the size of a bouquiniste, displaying the wares of local publishers and booksellers. The organisers were proud of the egalitarian principle, and it was astonishing in the age when the death of print is prematurely announced to find a smallish Brazilian city where little presses seemed to be around every corner. Charles Kiefer, the handsome professor with whom we had lunch, walked us over to one of the stalls and showed us the thirty-odd volumes that collected the fiction of his students. Another year, another volume, and the professor couldn’t have been happier. If Brazilian fiction were ever in danger, it wouldn’t be his fault. Myself, I was reading The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, novellas by the Colombian author Alvaro Mutis so richly, spectacularly, sensually wondrous that you hate him for ever stopping. ‘Ah,’ said Kiefer, ‘so good’, as if he had filled his mouth with fine wine, and then, sighing a little, thought I might, in that case, enjoy a small exhibition over at the local bank devoted to Gilberto Freyre. Freyre! I hadn’t thought about him for forty-odd years: a poet among historians; a romancer of the Brazilian difference: slavery and the Casa Grande, somehow made less brutal by miscegenation; the cradle of a mixed-blood culture. Oh sure. Samba slavery. Doesn’t count. I had wised up to the fantasy a long time ago, but there was, nonetheless, something wickedly beautiful about Freyre’s dreamy writing, and the show beneath the stained-glass ceiling advertising ‘Prudence’, ‘Enterprise’ and such like unerringly harvested the spell. Displays of Freyre’s tropically coloured paintings were set above trays of sand; peeling cabinets with drawers were opened to reveal faded banquet menus, dog-eared photographs and diary entries. You entered the whole thing through the skirts of a giant carnival mannequin. Another Brazilian seduction; and I could feel my portion of northern scepticism draining away into the gentle afternoon.
The lecture was delivered: a generously receptive 800, most of whom seemed to want to ask questions, and most of them did. Eventually our hosts ushered us off to an upscale French restaurant where it would have been churlish to turn down the foie gras. It wasn’t until our last night in São Paulo that we were taken, by Marcello Dantas, the designer of many of Brazil’s most brilliant museums and exhibitions, to a place that boasted serious native cooking: Amazon fish (‘neither salt nor freshwater,’ said Dantas, beaming, ‘just packed with big river nutrients’); fresh hearts of palm, warm and silky on the tongue; stupendously subtle banana ice cream (a contradiction in terms, but go figure). The place is called Brasil a Gosto. It’s better than anywhere in London.
If you fly in to São Paulo from another Brazilian city, you’ll land (if you use the local airport) in a startling place: bristling with tower blocks set close and white like the model for Blade Runner; a city 120 kilometres across; piled up favela slums; stunning fashion by designers such as Rosa Cha and Gloria Coelho, who does things with sequins that I can’t begin to explain in the Financial Times. And yet, this wild, teeming antheap of a place has no billboards. The mayor, Gilberto Kassab, a Syrian-Paulista, decided they were ‘visual pollution’ and gave owners thirty days to get rid of them. The fine for failing to do so was 10,000 reals (about £2,500) a day. So the place throbs along beneath its pall of traffic fumes; just eleven million Paulistas trying to get to the end of the week. A place for heroes.
On the way back to New York, my nose in Alvaro Mutis’s journeyings of Maqroll the Lookout, I’d look out myself to the fading shoreline of the tropic forest and feel wistful. Brazil is one of the places where your nerve-endings work overtime and you never want them to stop their dancing little hum and buzz.
Back in the Hudson Valley, everything decelerated. The farmers’ market at the local train station was loaded with good stuff. People bustled autumnally, chirpy with the delight of a fine new president.
Comedy Meets Catastrophe:
On the Korean DMZ
Financial Times, 25 September 2009
On a late-summer afternoon, the last frontier of the Cold War, the Military Demarcation Line dividing the two Koreas, is picture-perfect: a romantic landscape painter’s dream, provided of course you block out the barbed-wire fence running along the summit of the high hills. Indifferent to history, the dragonflies that are everywhere in Korea bob and flutter around the gun nests. A hundred metres down the steep hillside, the Imjin River loops through idyllic country which, fifty-nine years ago, was cratered with mortar fire. On the south bank, woods tangled with wild grape grow to the river’s edge. The north bank, though, is deforested, and the South Korean soldiers at the observation post tell you this is not just for a clearer path of fire for their communist enemies, but to deter defections by their own men.
From time to time, soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army come to the river to catch fish for their supper, or hunt the wild boar roaming the few coppices left on their side. The pigs scavenge trash discarded by the South Korean outposts, so that indirectly, courtesy of the porkers, the south feeds the north. Without the self-provisioning, so the South Koreans humorously say of their enemy counterparts, it’s bark and grass soup for dinner. A North Korean invasion, they imply, is held at bay less by their barbed wire than by the fear that should the People’s Army ever make it to Seoul, it would head straight for Burger King and not come out for a week.
Smugness aside, it’s hard not to notice a telling contrast between the eroded, barren uplands to the north and the brilliant green rice and corn fields to the south. Local farmers here who found themselves trapped in the Demilitarised Zone are subsidised by the Joint Security Agency (United Nations and South Korea), and their land swept of the millions of mines left behind by the Chinese during their advances in the grim war of 1950–53. No pesticides are allowed on these crops, so ‘DMZ’ rice, the military will tell you, is the most fragrant in all of Korea.
Et in Arcadia ego. An island of gourmet organic rice surrounded by landmined woodlands sums up the bizarre adjacence between prosperity and paranoia that is the Korean front line. And as the Clinton mission which last month sprung two American women journalists from twelve years’ hard (not to mention the occasional nuclear underground test) reminds us, sixty years after the war that few outside the region remember, Korea still matters. It’s the zombie war that won’t lie down and it’s still ravenous for trouble. The Korean question is both relic and omen; an ideological conflict preserved in aspic and the hottest of hot sauces for a hard-pressed US president and his overstretched military. Kim Jong-Il, the self-styled Dear Leader, is fond of reminding the world that his missiles can reach California. This should be a joke, but it isn’t. Every time Pyongyang pounds its chest, Tokyo grins, but nervously.
Up at Observation Post
Typhoon, a monarch butterfly, bigger than a humming bird, alights on a hemp sack dumped at the foot of the barbed wire. The good-natured soldier escorting us while we shoot footage for a documentary about Obama’s foreign-policy challenges tells me the sacking contains a cluster bomb. Every two months or so, a lightning bolt from one of the big storms that roll through the mountains will set one off. ‘The first time that happened I thought the war had started . . .’
On this late August day the servicemen seem more battle-ready to fight swine flu than the million soldiers of the KPA stationed the other side of the Demilitarised Zone. We pass platoons of them, sitting in trucks, their faces covered in protective sky-blue masks. They ask politely if they might take our temperature, a procedure they themselves observe four times a day. A soldier slides a thermometer under my armpit and, five minutes later, announces that I am in the best of health.
Comedy rubbing shoulders with catastrophe is on even more theatrical display fifty kilometres to the west at Panmunjom, where the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission (UNCMAC) has had its base since the cessation of hostilities in 1953. Private First Class Anthony Hauch from Philadelphia reminds us – easy ballpark cheer coming from his film-star looks – that, notwithstanding its official demilitarisation, we are in an Active Combat Zone. ‘If you feel like getting off the bus and taking a leak at the side of the road, don’t.’ Those landmines, five million of them, are waiting for the unsuspecting. Do they, we ask, ever go off? ‘Oh sure, they’re Soviet old-style, pretty unstable. The deer land on them now and again.’
Those ancient minefields are not the only thing about the fifty-six-year armistice that’s unstable. Every few years there is an ‘incident’ that sobers up the absurdity. In 1976 a tree-trimming patrol, deemed by the North Koreans to have violated the armistice, was attacked by a military axe gang, two officers hacked to death. Though Private Hauch won’t say when the most recent ‘incident’ was, he hints that they are not infrequent. The Chinooks parked on the helipad look ready for action and the small troop of UN soldiers stay on high alert because of a not-unfounded sense that Kim Jong-Il can’t be relied on to play by the usual rules, especially if reports of his ill health are true and a power struggle for succession is about to ensue.
For Kim Jong-Il wears the uniform of a Maoist, but runs his office like a gangster. Drug trafficking and counterfeiting supply revenue for the nuclear game. In an infuriated response to the UN’s denunciation of this May’s underground test (approximately the same grade as that dropped on Hiroshima), the Dear Leader declared on 27 May that North Korea was no longer bound by the armistice – which means, technically, that the war between North Korea and the UN has now gone hot.
Still, it’s hard to go trembly two kilometres away on the actual Duck Soup character of the ritualised mutual nose-thumbing. It would need a combo of Joseph Heller, Voltaire and Jaroslav Hasek (the author of The Good Soldier Svejk) to do justice to its madness. Negotiations for the original armistice and any discussion of infringements are conducted in long low huts, painted respectively blue for the UN and aluminium silver for the North Koreans. Two large buildings face off in emblematic hostility. Ours, the South Korean, known as ‘Freedom House’, sports granite floors, polished chrome and glass doors. Theirs – optimistically named ‘Welcome House’ – is a number assembled from the Leonid Brezhnev Album of Architectural Style. When the Freedom House was seen to stand taller than its opposite number, the North Koreans lodged a protest and added a glass-walled storey to theirs. South Korean guards stand behind the blue huts, precisely half of their helmeted heads hidden by the walls, the other half exposed to the foe, fists clenched at their side, as if auditioning for a martial-arts movie. Their opposite numbers prowl the Welcome terrace, stopping to brandish a pair of aggressive binoculars in our direction. But, from the roof of Freedom House, you can peer through much bigger binoculars at them glaring right back at us. I must regretfully report that the enemy has a definite edge in tactical glowering.
All this is so fabulously loony, a living museum of Cold War craziness, that one has to remind oneself that behind the mutually assured scowling there is, in fact, something profoundly serious at stake, the moral significance of which is not depleted by its repetition in the mouths of blow-hard politicians, namely the price to be paid for the survival of freedom.
The sentry boxes beside the motorway that runs south along the Han River to Seoul might seem peripheral to the life or death of one of the most vibrant and complicated political societies in all of Asia, but they are not. No one believes the KPA is about to pour down Route 77 to the capital. But the point of North Korean military bluster is to remind the US – and probably Russia and China too – that as a mischief-maker, the last true communist dictatorship (not counting life-support Cuba), the country can create havoc, whether through covert relationships with terrorists, insurgent forces taking on the US in west Asia or outright anti-American governments like Iran.
Remote and esoteric though the Korean story may seem, it still represents a tutorial in the purposes and legitimacy of using military power to enable, protect and stabilise fragile democracies far from the West. As he ponders his narrowing options in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama could do worse than to ponder Korea’s modern history. In January 1950, Harry Truman’s usually canny Secretary of State Dean Acheson neglected to include Korea in a statement about the perimeter of indispensable defence in east Asia. This was the green light that allowed Kim Il-Sung and his patrons Stalin and Mao to believe North Korea could overrun the South without serious opposition. Truman’s decision to send troops and the UN commitment to resist aggression amounted to a belief that the credibility of the American shield for the democracies emerging after the Second World War, in Europe, Asia and above all in Japan, would not survive the fall of South Korea.
Was Truman wrong? The war that ground to a bitter stalemate in 1953 took 36,000 American lives, tens of thousands of other UN troops, and 353,000 Korean military on both sides, as well as 2.5 million Korean civilians. It was, as David Halberstam reminds us in The Coldest Winter (2007), a pitiless horror. And, after it was over, it was not at all clear that the Korea south of the thirty-eighth parallel that had survived was, in any sense worthy of Truman’s rhetoric, a truly free, rather than merely non-communist, state.
Cold War paranoia drove American policy to turn a blind eye to succeeding authoritarian governments in Seoul, and the persecution of any oppositional figures who could be stigmatised as leftist. Only belatedly did the American government come to the aid of champions of civil rights like the late South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung. It took the atrocity of the Kwangju massacre in 1980, and the recoil against the brutal suppression of the democracy movement, for South Koreans to reclaim the true fruits of their liberation. Whatever decisions are taken about the places where American power might be used to shield fledgling electoral democracies in the Middle East and Asia, similar torturous complications are bound to occur there too.
Which may not mean, however, that the effort might not be worth the sacrifice. The contrast between the wretched, cruel and self-eviscerating tyranny in North Korea and the dazzling economic and cultural energy of the South could not be more instructive. Despite the recession, the South Korean economy is a marvel of modern enterprise. Unlike most Western economies, it manufactures globally marketable cars, mobile phones and electronic goods. And if these achievements are bought through depressed labour costs, there’s precious little sign of that on a Saturday night in downtown Seoul. The streets are packed with a raucous crowd, mostly young, hitting the espresso bars. Street vendors do a roaring trade, but so do the retailers selling trainers and casual wear, much of it in the juvenile pastels that Koreans seem to enjoy.
The unimpeded right to consume may not exactly be up there with Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as a reason to commit arms to resist authoritarianism. But the consumption is not just of trainers and jeans: it’s the choice to buy or reject religion (
church spires are everywhere in South Korea); the right to free and fair elections and to read and speak as one wishes, usually (though not invariably) unthreatened by police. And the right to inject traditional culture with modern temerity.
On a dogstar night in front of the Seoul City Hall, I sat with a big crowd and listened to a thrilling ‘new-wave Korean’ band – Noreum Machi – deliver new power to traditional percussion. A robed man who beat on an immense hanging vertical drum and four girl drummers delivered a violent and ecstatic sound into the velvety darkness. There was something apt about this explosion of sound for border-line Korea. The drum is the voice of an army, but on that night in that place, it was the beat of jubilant liberty too.
Testing Democracy
9/11
Guardian, 14 September 2001
It came, literally, out of a clear blue sky, one of those eye-poppingly beautiful mornings when you forgive autumn for polishing off summer. All around New York the last rituals of American innocence were being enacted: huddles of mums and dads at the roadside reassuring their seven-year-olds that there was nothing frightening about the big old yellow school bus lumbering towards them. A grey heron was dabbling in the mill pond in our Hudson-valley suburb, oblivious, like the rest of us, to the fact that American history, in the shape of its most irrepressibly ebullient city, and American power, in the shape of its fortress Pentagon, was about to take the hit of its life.
Two nights before, millions had watched the Spielberg-Tom Hanks Second World War TV epic, Band of Brothers, based on Steven Ambrose’s history of a paratroop company in the Normandy invasion. Like Saving Private Ryan, its selling point was supposed to be the unsparing realism of its combat scenes; its willingness to concede pain and terror. Up to a point. The tobacco tint of the images told you this was history, inspirational, consoling. And a history in which everything worked out just fine. Some, at least, of the good guys would make it. And whole nations of bad guys would bite the dust.