Misha
Klein, Anthropology
 |
Alma
Guillermoprieto after
her performance. |
In
the early evening of February 18th the
Graduate School of Journalism and the Center for Latin American
Studies co-sponsored a presentation by journalist Alma Guillermoprieto.
Introduced by visiting journalist Carlos Chamorro, Guillermoprieto
treated an audience of about 100 to a combined reading of selected
writings and a vibrant live performance based on her experiences
living, dancing, and ultimately parading with one of Rio's
samba schools.
Guillermoprieto, former South American
Bureau Chief for Newsweek, has written extensively on Brazil
and Latin America more broadly, and has published in the New Yorker and
the New York Review of Books, in addition to her books Samba (which
was nominated for the National Book Critic's Circle Award) and The
Heart That Bleeds. Those already familiar with Guillermoprieto's
writing recognized her rich use of language and heightened sensibility,
part of her project to lead readers and audiences in the US beyond
headlines and major events and closer to lived experience in Latin
America.
For those expecting the usual gushing enthusiasm
of converts to Brazilian samba, Guillermoprieto's austere opening declaration
that she hated Brazil came as a shock. This was the beginning of an
hour and a half long performance which was multi-sensory and dramatic,
enthralling as much for her choice of material as for her commanding
presence and theatricality. Working intensively as a correspondent
for a US weekly news magazine, her disdain was as much for the people
who appeared not to work as for the tremendous beauty of Rio de Janeiro. "In
the middle of all that splendor, all I could think of was decay and
death," she explained. Living in the more affluent southern zone
of the city, she also noted the absence of Black people, or rather
their presence in the "background" in service jobs, but who
nevertheless seemed to "enjoy themselves against the odds." She
resolved to pursue certain elements of Black culture, namely samba,
in an attempt to understand, and hopefully learn to like Brazil. Guillermoprieto
gradually waded deeper into the community life of the favela of
Mangueira and the famous samba school which lies at its feet and bears
its name. Eventually, she became so involved in this project, that
she quit her job, moved into this poor favela on the other side
of the tunnel which connects the two halves of Rio, and dedicated herself
full time to following and participating in the samba school's preparations
for the upcoming Carnaval parade.
By
intertwining the trajectory of her exploration of samba as a window
onto Brazilian culture with the history of the
popularization and integration of samba into Brazilian popular culture
- from its African origins through its illegal and disreputable existence
(including Carmen Miranda's surprising contributions) to its heyday
and ultimate establishment as a quintessentially Brazilian form of
music and popular expression, Guillermoprieto led the audience on an
odyssey of discovery. Her successive simple costume changes, as she
shed layer after surprising layer, paralleled the story she told as
she let her own expectations and resistance fall away, allowing her
to arrive at an embodied understanding of what it is that makes Brazilians
so apparently happy and so passionate about Brazil, in spite of seemingly
endless political and economic difficulties.
By daring to actually leave the expected,
and live in the favela, in an attempt to approximate herself
to the experience of poverty, albeit protected by the community that
made sure she stayed in a place with running water and a flushing toilet,
Guillermoprieto sought to understand what underlies both samba lyrics
and the collective spirit that makes it possible to bring 5000 individuals
together in the school's highly coordinated and luxurious annual parade.
She described the different types of samba, and the social themes picked
up in the lyrics of popular sambas at certain historical moments, whether
in the first recorded samba, "On the Telephone," or in later
songs laced with the codes of drug traffickers, and accompanied selected
recordings by reciting their translated quotidian poetry.
Her personal, lived experience of the favela and
the samba school's preparations were incorporated at every level of
sensory expression in her presentation, from the description of the
sights and smells, to the accompanying samba music (selections from
over 70 years of recordings), to her shedding of costumed layers, to
the gestures and movements which she incorporated throughout, making
it a multiplex performance. A trained dancer, Guillermoprieto concluded
her presentation by almost surreptitiously getting the audience to
follow her through the broken down, enormously slowed down movements
of what she describes in her book as "spatter[ing] a starstorm
of steps" or a "whirlpool frenzy", and once the audience
actually began to move she herself broke into samba, with a grin that
confirmed that she had finally learned to samba and, with it, embrace
Brazil.
