The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  Naturally, the military government has laid waste to the freedom and distinction of the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Brasilia, places scarcely venerable in terms of age and yet the best the country had to offer. At a freer time, Lévi-Strauss left France in 1934 and went to teach in Sao Paulo and from there to travel into the interior of Brazil, to follow his anthropological studies of various Indian groups. A French mind, ambitious, abstract, learned and yet almost violently open, as one may speak of violence at the moment when a mind and spirit assault and engulf their subject—this mind met the obstinate, dazed fact of Brazil. And immediately Lévi-Strauss conveys to us that sense of things standing in an almost amorous stillness, so piercing and stirring is the way Brazil seduces the imagination. Standing still—or when moving somehow arduously turning in a circle that sets the foreign mind on edge, agitates thought of possibility, of meaning, of past and future.

  And always Brazil lies before you, even now, demanding to be named, to have its prophecy explicated, its dream and memory honored. Tristes Tropiques is literally a memory, written fifteen years after Lévi-Strauss left Brazil for the last time. It is a work of Brazilian anthropology, with its strangely and grandly speculative intensity about the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara. But it is anthropology that lives like a kernel in the shell of Brazil. The trembling search for metaphor and the pull, always downward, to despair, to a weight of doleful contradiction: these tell you exactly where you are.

  The body painting, leather and pottery designs of the Caduveo seem to Lévi-Strauss to represent a profound and striking sophistication. This elaboration is a part of his quest, his spectacular journey of self-definition:

  The dualism, to begin with, which recurs over and over again, like a hall of mirrors, men and women, painting and sculpture, abstraction and representation, angle and curve, border and centerpiece, figure and ground. But these antitheses are glimpsed after the creative process, and they have a static character.

  The Caduveo and their style of representation—hierarchical, still, symbolic in the manner of playing cards—will inevitably call forth in Lévi-Strauss’s mind a sense of “structural” kinship with things far away in time and place. But in the beautiful and bitter isolation of Brazil, the configurations are not only united by longing or innate design in man’s mind to the plains of Asia or North Dakota, they are united and standing in their setting. Here it is the town of Nalike, on the grassy plateau of the Mato Grosso. And we feel, so unlike a merely investigative work are these remarkable chapters, everywhere among the Indians an absorbed, special French investigator, creating in a hut next to a witch doctor his youth, his exemplary personal history and intellectual voyage.

  Great indeed is the fascination of this culture, whose dream-life was pictured on the faces and bodies of its queens, as if, in making themselves up, they figured a Golden Age they would never know in reality. And yet as they stand naked before us, it is as much the mysteries of that Golden Age as their own bodies that are unveiled.

  The mysteries of the Golden Age. When Lévi-Strauss traveled to Brazil in 1934 and later, fleeing the Nazi occupation in 1941, he found, one might say, in Brazil this great autobiographical moment, found it as if it were an object hidden there, perhaps a rock with its ornate inscriptions and elaborate declamations waiting to be translated into personal style. The book is a deciphering, one of many kinds. In one way it is a magical and profound answering of the descriptive and explicatory demand this odd country has at certain times made upon complex talents like Lévi-Strauss and da Cunha.

  What is created is a work of science, history, and a rational prose poetry, springing out of the multifariousness of the landscape, its mysterious adaption or maladaption to the human beings crowding along the coast or surviving in small clusters elsewhere. Lévi-Strauss was only twenty-six when he first went to Brazil. He is far from home but the conditions are brilliantly right. He is in the new world and it is ready to be his as Europe, Africa, or Asia could not be. This newness, freshness, the exhilaration of the blank pages are like the map of Brazil waiting to be filled—this brings with it an intense literary inspiration. He is deep, also, in his professional studies; everything is right, everything can be used. When the passage grates it is still material. The two French exiles in their decaying, sloppy fazienda on the edge of the Caduveo region, a glass of maté, the old European avenues of Rio, the town of Goiânia: he speculates, observes, places, re-creates with a sort of waterfall of beautiful images.

  It is the brilliance of his writing at this period that is Lévi-Strauss’s greatest, deepest preparation for his journey through the Amazon basin and the upland jungles. He is pursuing his studies, but he is also creating literature. The pause before the actual writing was begun, when he was forty-seven, is a puzzle; somehow he had to become forty-seven before the real need for the inspiration of his youth presented itself once more. It was all stored away, clear, shining, utterly immediate. Often he quotes from the notes he made on the first trip and always, seem to have brought back the mode, the mood also, and to have carried the parts written later along on the same pure, uncluttered flow.

  A luminous moment recorded by pocket-lamp as he sat near the fire with the dirty, diseased, miserable men and women of the Nambikwara tribe. He sees these people, lying naked on the bare earth, trying to still their hostility and fearfulness at the end of the day. They are a people “totally unprovided for” and a wave of sympathy flows through him as he sees them cling together in the only support they have against misery and against “their meditative melancholy.” The Nambikwara are suddenly transfigured by a pure, benign light:

  In one and all there may be glimpsed a great sweetness of nature, a profound nonchalance, an animal satisfaction as ingenuous as it is charming, and beneath all this, something that came to be recognized as one of the most moving and authentic manifestations of human tenderness.

  In one way Tristes Tropiques is a record, not a life. There is nothing of love, of family, of personal memory in it, and little of his roots in France. At the same time, the work is soaked in passionate remembrance and it does tell of a kind of love—the great projects of a great man’s youth. It is the classical journey, taken at the happy moment. Every step has its trembling drama; all has meaning, beauty, and the mornings and evenings, the passage from one place to another, are fixed in a shimmering, vibrating present.

  And it is no wonder that Tristes Tropiques begins: “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe …” and ends, “Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying!” The mood of the journey has been one of youth and yet, because it is Brazil, the composition is a nostalgic one. At the end there is a great sadness. The tropics are triste. “Why did he come to such a place? And to what end? What, in point of fact, is an anthropological investigation?” How poignant it is to remember that often in places “few had set eyes upon” and living among unknown people, how often he would feel his own past stab him with thoughts of the French countryside or of Chopin. This is the pain of the journey, the hurting knock of one place against another.

  Lévi-Strauss was in his youth, moving swiftly in his first great exploration, and yet what looms up out of the dark savannahs is the suffocating knowledge that so much has already been lost. Even among the unrecorded, the irrecoverable and the lost are numbing. The wilderness, the swamps, the little encampments on the borders, the overgrown roads that once led to a mining camp: even this, primitive still and quiet, gives off its air of decline, deterioration, displacement. The traveler never gets there soon enough. The New World is rotting at its birth. In the remotest part, there, too, a human bond with the past has been shattered. Tristes Tropiques tells of the anguish the breakage may bring to a single heart.

  Breakage—you think of it when the plane lets you down into the bitter fantasy called Brasilia. This is the saddest city in the world and the main interest of it lies in its being completely unnecessary. It testifies to the Brazilian wish to live without memory, to the
fatigue every citizen of Rio and Sao Paulo must feel at having always to carry with him those implacable Brazilian others: the unknowable, accusing kin of the northeast, the backlands, the favelas. If you send across, the miles and miles the stones and glass and steel, carry most of it by plane, and build a completely new place to stand naked, blind and blank for your country (Brasilia, diminutive of the whole place, sharing its designation), you are speaking of the unbearable burden of the past. Brazilians are always fleeing their past and those capitals that stand for the collective history; they move from Bahia to Rio and now to Brasilia. This new passage the crossing, is one of the starkest in history. It is a sloughing off, thinning out, abandoning, moving on like some restless settler in the veld seeking himself. At last, in Brasilia there is the void.

  It is colder, drearier in 1974 than in 1962. Building, building everywhere, so that one feels new structures are as simply produced as Kleenex, In every direction, on the horizon, in the sky, the buildings stand, high, neat, blank. Each great place leads to a highway. There are strictly speaking no streets and thus no village or corner life. Utter boredom, something like a resort which has no real season. A soulless place, a prison, a barracks. Rigidity, boredom, nothing. Try to take a walk around the main hotel. Even if there were a place you wanted for pleasure to get to, you must drive. There are no streets, you tell yourself again, as if perhaps it was something in Portuguese you misunderstood. Around you are roadways, wide, smooth, full of cars.

  The military likes Brasilia. It is their Brazil. Nothing to do with the sad tropics, with the heart of history. So here in the deadness, in the agitating quiet of this city without memory, you remind yourself that this is the dead center. Everything indeed comes from this clean, silent tomb. There is nothing without its consent: no killing, no deaths in the street of young people brought back from Chile, no maiming, no interrogation and torture in the nude of Catholic lay women, seized in their night classes for adult workers.

  There is no place to go. You came to see if it had changed and it had not, except downward. So back to the hotel room, on a red-dirt, desert plain. Relief comes in reading once more the great prose work, Rebellion in the Backlands, by da Cunha. It is a peculiar epic, military, mournful, seized with the old idea that there is a Brazil somewhere; it must be described. Its flowers, leaves, scrub, its thirsting cows and its drinking tapirs. And a tragic battle between 1896 and 1898, when an ill-prepared military expedition went out from the capital of Bahia to subdue a band of ragged religious fanatics.

  —June 27, 1974

  * My quotations are from the 1961 (Atheneum) translation of Tristes Tropiques done by John Russell. A new edition based on the 1969 revised French edition and translated by John and Doreen Weightman was published by Atheneum in February 1974.

  5

  Letter from South Africa

  Nadine Gordimer

  June 16 is now a public holiday in South Africa, known as Youth Day. That day in 1976 is when children, most of them from schools in Soweto, the sprawling black township of Johannesburg, gave their elders a lesson in courage.

  The moment oppressive regimes begin to show cracks is the moment when people stop being intimidated by the violence. That moment came in South Africa when the schoolkids of Soweto marched in protest against being forced to learn Afrikaans, “the language of the oppressor” in Bishop Tutu’s words.

  The cause was almost incidental, one out of many grievances worthy of protest. What mattered was that the protesters kept protesting even when the police, aided by helicopters and armored cars, killed the children with guns and attack dogs. They refused to be cowed. It was the government of Apartheid that showed its fear by shooting unarmed children. And that was the beginning of its end.

  —I.B.

  I FLEW OUT of Johannesburg on a visit abroad two and a half months after the first black school child was killed by a police bullet in Soweto. Since June 16, when the issue of protest against the use of the Afrikaans language as a teaching medium in black schools, long ignored by the white authorities, finally received from them this brutal answer, concern had been the prevailing emotion in South Africa.

  Concern is an overall bundle of like feelings in unlike people: horror, distress, anguish, anger—at its slackest manifestation, pity.

  There was no white so condemnatory of black aspirations, so sure of a communist plot as their sole source, that he or (more likely) she didn’t feel “sorry” children had died in the streets. Black children traditionally have been the object of white sentimentality; it is only after the girls grow breasts and the boys have to carry the passbook that chocolate suddenly turns black.

  There was no black so militant, or so weary of waiting to seize the day, that he or she did not feel anguish of regret at the sacrifice of children to the cause. Not even a mighty rage at the loathed police could block that out.

  I was away for the month of September. Henry Kissinger came to South Africa to discuss the Rhodesia settlement with Mr. Vorster; six children were killed while demonstrating against his presence. A day or two after I arrived home in October, a girl of fifteen was shot by police at the Cape. The six were already merely a unit of the (disputed) official figures of the dead (now 358), some adult but in the main overwhelmingly the young, in unrest that has spread from blacks to those of mixed blood, and all over the country by means of arson, homemade bomb attacks, boycotts, and strikes. The fifteen-year-old girl was added to the list of fatalities; no one, I found, was shocked afresh at the specific nature of this casualty: the killing of a child by a police bullet.

  Like the passing of a season, there was something no longer in the air. People had become accustomed, along with so much else unthinkable, to the death of children in revolt.

  I try to recognize and set out the reasons for this acclimation before daily life here, however bizarre, makes me part of it.

  When striking children met the police that Wednesday morning in June in the dirt streets of Soweto and threw stones that promptly drew bullets in return, who would have believed that the terrible lesson of white power would not be learned? The lesson for these children wasn’t free, any more than their school-books are (white children get theirs for nothing); they paid with the short lives of some of their number. No one could conceive they would ever present themselves again, adolescent girls bobbing in gym frocks, youths in jeans, little barefoot boys with shirts hanging out as in a wild game of cops and robbers—to police who had shown they would shoot real bullets. But the children did. Again and again. They had taken an entirely different lesson: they had learned fearlessness.

  Of course, white attitudes toward them began to change, even then. It was immediately assumed by the government and the majority of white people that since the issue of the Afrikaans language had been quickly conceded, and the children now demanded the abolition of the entire separate educational system for blacks, and then bluntly “everything whites get,” such intransigence must be the work of agitators. Among black people—among the outlawed liberation organizations inside and outside the country, and those perforce confined to balancing cultural liberation on a hair’s breadth of legality within it—all began to claim credit for the first popular uprising since the early Sixties. No one will know, for years perhaps, how to apportion the influence of the banned African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress—their leadership in prison and exile—in the development of schoolchildren’s defiance into the classic manifestations of a general uprising.

  Neither can one measure how much of the children’s determined strategy was planned by older students of the black university-based South African Students’ Organization. There surely were—there are—agitators; if agitators are individuals able and articulate enough to transform the sufferings and grievances of their people into tactics for their liberation. There surely was—there is, has never ceased to be—the spirit of the banned political movements in the conceptual political attitudes and sense of self, passing unnamed and without attribution to th
eir children from the tens of thousands who once belonged to the mass movements.

  What neither the accusations of the white government nor the claims of black adult leadership will ever explain is how those children learned, in a morning, to free themselves of the fear of death.

  Revolutionaries of all times, who know this is the freedom that brings with it the possibility of attaining all others, have despaired of finding a way of teaching it to more than a handful among their trained cadres. To ordinary people it is a state beyond understanding. We knew how to feel outrage or pity when we saw newspaper photographs of the first corpses of children caught by the horrible surprise of a death nobody believed, even in South Africa, would be meted out by the police. Blacks still burn with an anger whose depth has not yet been fathomed—it continues to show itself as it did at the Soweto funeral of Dumisani Mbatha, sixteen, who died in detention. Seven hundred mourners swelled to a crowd of 10,000 youths that burned 100,000 rands worth of the Johannesburg municipality’s vehicles and buildings. Yet—not without bewilderment, not without shame—black people have accepted that the weakest among them are the strongest, and thus by grim extension also accept the inconceivable: the death of children and adolescents has become a part of the struggle.

  We whites do not know how to deal with the fact of this death when children, in full knowledge of what can happen to them, continue to go out to meet it at the hands of the law for which we are solely responsible, whether we support white supremacy or, opposing, have failed to unseat it.1

  When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.…

  —Olaudah Equiano, eighteenth-century black writer