Kaleidoscope of Skin Colour

(written in 2006, while travelling in Brazil)

Even though I had been practising Portuguese for about a month before I left Sydney, it’s the first unassisted conversation one has in a foreign language that is the most exciting – kind of like solo flying or driving the car for the first time on your own without your dad’s hand hovering near the hand brake. It doesnt even need to be a complex dialogue, but for me just that feeling of “wow I did it” was enough to put a smile on my face. Ironically, for me it occurred in Buenos Airies (en route to Brazil), not in Brasil. In Portuguese, it went something like this: 

a woman approaches me:
Her: Do you speak Portuguese?
Me: Yes, a little…
Her: I need a strong man.
Me: I can help you.
<END> 

Given that she was about 60 and we were standing next to the baggage carousel at the airport it all made perfect sense. I promptly helped her with her large bags smiling that our brief form of communication had been successful. She repaid me by introducing me to some cute Brazilian woman standing nearby – I have no idea if they knew each other or if she just picked someone out of the crowd for me. Either way i didn’t really care.

 So my first encounter of Brazilians en masse was also in Buenos Airies. Aeronlineas Argentinas had kindly delayed the plane to Buenos Airies by many hours, so everybody with a connection had to be rescheduled. So they put all the people who were going on to Sao Paulo in the same bus and overnight hotel for a connecting flight the next morning. Well it seems that the bus was mostly full of Brazilians and one kiwi.

 And what a social bunch they were. Before long they were all talking to each other. I couldn’t really understand much but it was pretty clear that none of them knew each other. There were 16 year olds talking to 60 years olds and everything in between. It was very amusing to watch. None of the typical barriers to discourse seemed to exist. Age, tribe or clothing didn’t matter here – anyone could talk to anyone on this bus. Strange, I was brought up with the sensible advice of not talking to strangers on public transport, but it seemed to be working a treat here.

 I dont really know what they were talking about but since they were tired and had all just taken long flights (from Syd/Akl) and despite this they were still erupting in laughter, my guess is that they were taking cheap shots at Aerolinas Argentinas and the Argentinians in general for screwing up their flights. Most neighbouring countries around the world have some kind of friendly banter and rivalry between them (although this can periodically bubble over into a war). Having travelled in Brazil for a while now I haven’t heard too may terms of endearment brandished by Brazilians towards the Argentineans.

 But I couldn’t silently observe the bus people for long because soon I was also part of it, they were asking me questions and including me in their conversations. And amazingly they would sometimes en masse switch their conversations to English just for my benefit. I thought only Germans and Scandinavians were thoughtful enough to do that kind of thing…? I had learnt something and I hadn’t even arrived in Brasil yet!

 So straight away from an experience like this, even as simple as sitting on a bus you start to form an opinion of Brazilians. The problem is though that with about 184 million of them from a kaleidoscope of skin colours and ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds every opinion you form is never going to be able to be applied to much. That’s what’s so interesting about Brazil, it’s so hard to pigeon-hole anything, so hard to come away with an opinion, a generalisation or anything about the place or the people. You just have to observe what you observe and file it away as an ´experience´. The only non-contestable facts that seem accurate about Brazil are “its big and its diverse”.

 The ´bus people´ although coming from all over Brazil probably did represent a given socio-economic slice of the pie. They had all just come off the long-haul sector from Sydney/Auckland on their way home. Most of them were either studying English or holidaying in those countries. So they were fairly well educated presumably with some financial capability. Not typical of Brazilians but then not atypical, just a slice of the pie.

 It’s so hard to pick a typical Brazilian from looking at them. I met some people so white I was sure they were from Scotland or somewhere – no they were Brazilians. I met one woman in Brasil who had that delicious copper/coffee coloured skin – I was convinced she was Brazilian – no she was from Jordan in the middle East…Hmm very confusing. There are of course patterns to the look – you start to see certain people who fit a description or profile and for sure there is generally a pallette of light to medium brown skin colours that are what Westerners might envisage as typically Brazilian – or perhaps an expression that I had probably coined a few times in the past as that ´Sth American´ look. But my naive reference to a ‘Sth American’ look reminded me of when as a boy my mum would say we were having ‘Italian’ for dinner. It took me years to realise that Italian was not the name of a food dish (well I was quite young at the time). Spending any time in Brasil will make you realise there isnt even a Brazilian look let alone a Sth American look. There are looks, and many of them.

 So as you walk down a busy street in Sao Paulo, every shade of skin colour will walk past you in the space of 60 seconds – even Asian. (Sao Paulo has one of the largest population of Japanese people living outside of Japan). Brazil can only be described as a massive melting pot. If bio-diversity is achieved by means of a wide gene pool, then when the next Spanish flu pandemic or Ebola-like virus wipes out most of the western world, Brazil with its amazingly wide gene pool may be one of the few countries still standing.

 Since skin colour and appearance are not a clear identifier of the people its hard to ascertain what is. Obviously their cultural values and attitudes may have some uniformity but as a visitor you can’t see those things while walking down the street. As a visitor, the only obvious identifier is their language. At a glance its the single thing I could find that told me that the white skinned person over there was actually from the same place as the African skinned person in front of me – obviously different origins but both certainly Brazilian. In countries like China and Japan there are far more obvious cues that tell you that people are from the same place.

 And it’s not just Portuguese they speak, but Brazilian Portuguese. Grammatically rooted in European Portuguese it has deviated on a few points, but its pronunciation is a fair bit different. Brazilian Portuguese is actually much nicer to listen to than Euro Portuguese – more melodic and pleasant. But perhaps in an effort to shake their colonial past a little, one Capoeira teacher here said at the beginning of a class “I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Portuguese, I speak Brazilian” – a fair comment I thought.

 I wondered psychologically what it must be like for the Brazilian people to speak a language that isn’t effectively native to their own country. I only wondered it for about 10 seconds then I felt really stupid – of course it’s identical for me. I am from New Zealand but I speak English – a language obviously from England and I don’t necessarily feel particularly English. It seemed like an identical situation. I concluded there probably wasn’t much psychological effect and tried to move on to thinking about something more intelligent.

 The Brazilian melting pot gene pool made me chuckle at some other countries efforts to keep their genes intact. The sometimes xenophobic Japanese had laws so strict that children could become stateless in some circumstances (their citizenship laws are based on proven bloodlines, not the soil upon which you are born). This had the effect of keeping the Japanese gene pool very pure. In contrast Brazil seems to have a gene pool version of the “American Dream” in that anyone can be Brazilian – it doesnt matter where you come from. 

 Having travelled in Japan, the massively homogenous population of similar heights and jet black hair made a wonderful contrast to Brazil’s canvas of skin pigment. For in Brazil, as long as I could get the walk right and the subtle thumbs up sign and of course keep my mouth shut – even I could pass as kind of Brazilian. Try that in Japan…

(To be fair to the Japanese, they are wonderfully helpful and friendly people especially in the rural areas I have visited – they just have a fairly tight definition of whos Japanese and who isnt).