adventures

FESTIVALS OF JUNE - BUMBA MEU BOI

THE ADVENTURES OF DON-EDUARDO
& DONA SHARON, LA ARTISTA

ENTRY TWO BRAZIL JULY 2004

Foremost in the planning of our trip to Brazil was to synchronize our travels in the NE of the country with the “Festivals of June.” I hesitate to name them more specifically than that because it seems that every precinct, neighborhood, city and state seemed to choose a different name for the celebration.

In the more sophisticated, Euro-centric parts of Southern Brazil, people were envious of the those in the North because unlike Carnival, which shares many of the same attributes as these Festivals, they have not been commercialized, packaged and drained of their true “folkloric qualities.” We learned this from in-country tourists who had journeyed North to explore the wilds of their country and witness these festivities in person, having learned about them on the Brazilian Discovery Channel.

Dona Sharon in her research had come to believe that, “WE HAD TO BE IN SAO LUIZ,” by a certain date or else we would miss the “MAIN CELEBRATION” of something she called, “BUMBA MUMBA BOY!”

Well, she was close. In many places, the Festival is called, “BUMBA MEU BOI.” It is also called Sao Joao, Sao Pedro, and several other saintly names which apparently have little to do with what the Festival is about except for the desire of the Catholic Church to maintain the facade of control over the people’s lives.

“BUMBA MEU BOI” is a quintessential multi-cultural celebration. For it commemorates a “perhaps mythical" slave revolt, involving one slave, his wife or girlfriend, the master’s most favored bull, and the colonial baron who owned them all.

To offer a little background to remind those of you who once knew that legal slavery lasted for a quarter of a century after Lincoln ended the practice in the US. Although abolition came in 1888, it took till early in the 20th C. for the practice to disappear in the more rural areas of the Northeast. So there are still people alive whose parents were born slaves. It’s history, but not the distant history it is in this country.

“BUMBA MEU BOI,” is a peoples celebration. For weeks the streets are decorated with colorful banners, and numerous electrified images of the famous “BULL,” and the nights: filled with music & dancing, with extravagant “Las Vegas-style” costumes (that would meet or surpass anything you could find on “the Strip”) of hundreds upon hundreds of musical performance groups of all ages on ad-hoc stages created on street corners, public parks, massive public plazas across the Northeast. Some times the groups were only 20 or two dozen dancers, numbered were in the hundreds. And I mean every place in the Northeast, not just Sao Luiz for one night at the end of June.

The Dona got that part wrong. For, from the day we got off the plane in Salvador (our first stop) for the next three weeks, in every city and town we visited, every single night and all day long on Saturday and Sunday, “BUMBA MEU BOI,” or Sao “whoever” was being celebrated in musical performance all over town! With ad-hoc bars set up in the streets and food stalls and merchants selling folkloric trinkets (music and shopping was in the air and Dona Sharon, La Artista heard the call).

The music!?! The dances!?! The costumes!?! Incredible! Spectacular!
The Dona went crazy! She loved it , shooting many wonderful photographs capturing the visual flavor of it. If I remember correctly the Dona might have bought a trinket or two.

I loved it too. At least the first half dozen or so performances I watched outside in the plazas, in the suffocating heat of the Equatorial night…

(early on, we’d only just arrived in Brazil and I was still waiting for my internal cooling system to adjust to the heat and humidity – I was told it would kick in; however all that ever occurred was in my never-ending heat prostration and ever-present perspiration, the thought simmered that should I ever find myself back in NYC on a hot midsummer’s night; one of those killer nights when the air so heavy that the atheists cry out for, “God to make it rain!” I will remember , “BUMBA MEU BOI” on those nights and sigh, “This isn’t hot. This is delightful.”)

Despite the heat and sweat, monotony of the music and persistent humidity, witnessing “BUMBA MEU BOI” is great. It was authentic and the participants and audience’s enthusiasm genuine and ultimately a lot more fun than say, a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Dancers and musicians of all ages from little kids to very old women and men.

Happily after one or two dance numbers, even the most athletic dancers were sweating bullets. Everyone was, musicians, audience members, bartenders, merchants, - so if they didn’t mind, neither would I. (The Dona will testify that my close observation of the dancing soon enabled me to do a fair imitation of the steps, which I entertained other Brazilians with, from time to time).

Some nights we stood watching for 2 to 3 hours as multiple groups took the stage to perform their “version” of the story. Sometimes the story was: the slave and his girlfriend were getting married and the bull was killed to serve at their wedding feast; others the slave was married and his wife pregnant, lusting hungrily for some cow’s tongue to eat; so the slave cut it out and cow nearly died; or died and was brought back to life by one of the Voodoo or Vuduns medicine people.

I could try to enumerate all the various other permutations of the story: How in different areas, because the tribal peoples are more culturally influential they save the day; or in the formerly slave dominant areas, the African tribal telling of the story has them playing the heroic role; or even how in some telling of the story as bad as slavery was, there was a forgiving and empathetic slave-owner willing to save the life of the slave despite the fact that he had stolen the most favored “bull/cow/whatever.” I will simply record that Dona Sharon has all the information you might ever want to know about the these Festivals of June. As she attended far more of them than I, she has become well-versed in “BUMBA MEU BOI” lore and can answer all questions.
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I burned out after the third set of BUMBA MEU BOI performances in the third city we visited. In reality, La Dona eventually burned out too, on all the music and dancing. My complaints after a week or so were the observation that there were really only 6 or 7 pieces of music and perhaps only 3 or 4 different dance steps without few variations. So even though I might have only seen 10 or 12 groups in three cities the only difference was the costumes. And as spectacular as they were, they all shared sequins and feathers and skimpiness of Las Vegas costumes and after a while I don’t know if I was watching a show at the MGM Grand, The Bellagio, Luxor or Caesar’s Palace as all the costumes start to look the same - alternately beautiful and blinding.

But for the musicians and dancers, it was a marathon and their energy never flagged. Certainly, in the heat, the exhaustion gets to a dancer or two and they pass it, falling to the ground. But remember this is Brazil and they only fall on the beat of the music. As every group has its own ample number of handlers, and stage crew, the fallen dancers are whisked away before being trampled by the survivors.

To paraphrase a previous comment made when I was still only a Bobo, (the name change you may note for this trip comes after my continuing study of Latin American mores convinced me that calling myself a Bobo while traveling in these environs would never change its local meaning which at best is… a mentally retarded person…or a fool), without question, even based on the 2.3% of the country we visited, Brazil is someplace entirely different…

“Brazil is a party. A party that never ends, with a seat at the United Nations.”

In other words, we’re having a lot of fun!

don-eduardo
Barreirinhas, Maranhao, BRASIL 14 July 2004

BELEM

THE ADVENTURES OF DON-EDUARDO
& DONA SHARON, LA ARTISTA

ENTRY ONE BRAZIL JULY 2004

Louis Bougainville, Alexander von Humboldt, even Charles Darwin might have had the knack, but I find it difficult to tap into the mythos and romance of adventure travel at three forty five in the morning. The aforementioned explorers may have been able to function without even a short hit of coffee, but I cannot and for that reason rarely leave Santa Monica without my “two hit” espresso pot.

And so it was in the middle of a torrid night in early July, two inches of the caffeine enriched black liquid, enables me to get on the bus, which transports us to the boat, that carries us to an island in “The River.” The destination where we arrive at dawn to watch parrots as they wake up and fly off in cute pairs to begin their day’s activities. The fact remains it is an ungodly hour, even for parrots, whose first forays into flight don’t look particularly graceful or self-assured.

In that early morning half-light, it is nearly impossible to identify the flying objects as parrots or discern their bright green feathers. The only thing that was undeniable was the beginning of an extraordinary sunrise.

A sun - lighting a wide expanse of “The River” framed by that ever-present perfect look of primary growth jungle. A sun - growing brighter in a surprisingly wide swatch of deep blue sky. A sky - with a thousand clouds, each rippled to the same width and angle – the same size and shape. Clouds changing color from black to gray to pink to purple to white. The density of the colors changing in a thousand clouds all at the same time, as if Nature was being altered in real time with the same perfection, I’ve seen Dona Sharon accomplish with a push of a button in PhotoShop VII.

It was a spectacular sunrise and would have been had it been any river, but it was my first, observed sitting on a boat, floating down The Amazon!

We were downstream of the city of Belém, considered geographically and historically at the mouth of the great River. Belém, is a very old city for one in the Western Hemisphere, having been founded soon after Brazil was discovered, 500 years ago.

At various points during that long history, The Amazon has served to make Belém, the richest city in the world. Pick a century: 17th, 18th, 19th… pick a highly valued commodity: gold, silver, rubber… at some point it was being found up stream, somewhere in the endless riches of The Amazon Basin and had to come through Belém on its way to the rest of the world. As a result, the world’s riches flowed back into Belém.

The German film “Fitzcarraldo,” which brought fame to the Opera House in the upstream city of Manaus, because a boat was carried over the Andes to get to it, never indicated that the Amazon’s first Opera House was built in Belém a hundred years earlier around 1750. At a time when Manaus was little more than an upriver trading post, while Belém was one of the riches cities in the world. We were told that during the 18th century the people in Belém were so rich (and the infrastructure so lacking) that they sent their dirty laundry to be done in Lisbon. It took four months door to door. You have to believe they did a really great job at those Portuguese laundries. We looked and looked, and to this day, early in the 21st C., Belém still lacks a decent dry cleaning establishment or Chinese laundry.

Despite that fact, we enjoyed Belém a great deal. As the city sits within yards of the Equator, the simplest landscaping is lush and tropical. The Jungle seems to come right up to the next corner and must be cut back on an ever-continuing basis. There are no suburbs, you either live in the city or in the middle of the Jungle. Being Brazil, even though remote (it’s 2000 miles south to Rio), Belém has a skyline of hi-rise dwellings, the residence of choice for Brazilians.

Despite being the 5th largest country in the world, and there are millions upon millions upon millions of acres of uninhabited land, Brazilians (who possess anything) value SECURITY more than anything else, and choose to live in vertical dwellings like New Yorkers, because they provide a false sense of security. As a result, even in the wide open spaces at the mouth of the Amazon, they choose to live in high rises buildings.

Now of course, the security provided is ultimately an illusion. Because the security guards are almost universally members of the “have-nots class” of Brazilians. Should resentment get the better of them, as it often happens due to the arrogance and insensitivity Brazilians of the upper classes often manifest, collusion with thieves occurs. Then, even an apartment on the thirty second floor becomes vulnerable.

We came to the conclusion that Brazilians like to live in high-rise buildings because they need a sense of security even if it is a false one. The pattern of high rise construction clearly indicates that it isn’t the unobstructed views they are after. But ten or fifteen miles upriver on the Amazon, the skyline of Belém looks incongruous sticking out of the primary growth jungle.

Belém felt relatively safe to us, although it’s location, history and population give it an, “edge of civilization” feel to it. Even with its cosmopolitan mix of indigenous peoples, mulattos, and European descendents amidst its decaying equatorial 19th C. architecture, you always feel in the middle of the jungle.

But all the various craft floating, sailing or motoring along The River always remind you that heading upstream is the depths of the Amazon which these days, like the preceding 500 years, remains a dangerous place for a wide variety of reasons. One need not be a “pain-in-the-ass environmentalist” to get killed these days up the Amazon, we were told, so we choose instead to visit Belem’s highly-touted zoo.

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One of Belém’s top attractions is a zoo/botanical garden/museum that is second to none. It’s lush vegetation in the middle of the city feels like it has always been there and that the paved streets, street stalls, storefronts and high rises which surround it, supplanted the jungle which once stood around it. That in fact might have been the case, but I doubt the hundreds of animals, birds and fish collected there, (some in cages, some not) were simply around when the fences were put up. Amidst the unimaginable dense flora are immense blue parrots, panthers, dozens of different kinds of turtles and in the aquarium some of the most amazing fish species I’d ever seen. Those kinds of species only found on the Amazon. We visited the gardens on our first Sunday in the country along with all classes of Brazilian families which made the day’s excursion a total delight.

But what made Belém such a special place for us… was meeting and getting to know “RIC”.

Ric Corday. Corday is a French name. Ric’s father was French. His mother from somewhere in the Northwest, Seattle I think. Although raised in Paris in the 50’s, Ric grew feeling and thinking he was a lot more than 50% American.

Technically one might call Ric an ex-pat. Although with his heavily-French accented and rusty English, American would not be the first identity you would pin on him. And as Leon Trotsky probably spent more time in residence in the USA than Ric has, it is only his attitude and outlook that identifies him as an American.

Ric felt so deeply that he was an American that in his innocence, he felt the need in the mid-60’s to join the armed forces. Fortunately, he got over the French guilt of losing Viet Nam before he got sent there and got himself killed. Joining the US forces also radicalized him and he emerged from his time in the service like a real American of the 60’s, angry at authority, long-haired and sympathetic to left-wing politics.

By this time, his father had moved to South America, and Ric gravitated there. His father’s establishment credentials (he had already become the head of the Chamber of Commerce) helped Ric decide to stay outdoors and he became a hunting and fishing guide in Southern Brazil and Argentina.

Eventually he migrated into filmmaking, becoming a DP in commercials, in Sao Paulo. These days he owns a restaurant and bar in the newly gentrified Warehouse and Dock area of Belém.

We found Ric because it was meant to be. We were hungry and it was the wrong time of day to find an open restaurant (as usual). A waiter walked by carrying a plate of steaming rice from Ric’s kitchen when Dona Sharon spotted him, hunched over his Apple I-book at one of his table, a thick DSL cable trailing off toward the wall.

A plate of rice. An intense man hunched over an Apple computer with a fast Internet connection on the banks of the Amazon. Dona Sharon was looking to download her photos onto a disc, having not yet seen an Internet Café anywhere in NE Brazil, I wouldn’t have minded checking my e-mail. Who better to start up a l conversation than Dona Sharon.

A casual conversation begins. Apple this, Mac that. Who knew where it would lead? Four hours later we were still talking. Sharon had forgotten about downloading her pictures, I’d forgotten about e-mail. With a disarming suddenness, a conversation with a stranger felt like one with an old friend. Ric felt the same way and showed it, surprising himself. People who live on the edge of civilization, so close to the forbidding and wild aren’t open, emotionally accessible and generous of themselves. We had lot of questions about Brazil, about Belém, about him. Ric was open, responsive and had a lot to say about – everything!

When four hours of conversation seem like 10 minutes, we knew he was one of those 500 people. Long ago I came up with a theory that postulates, “there are really only 500 connected people in the world, only we have not yet met them all. That day in Belém we finally met Ric.

As it turned out there was nothing casual about meeting Ric. It was simply rediscovering someone we had always been destined to know. Despite the external differences in where life had led us, we shared too many of the same ideas, had too many common experiences, similar perspectives and outlook on the world.

Too quickly an uncommon familiarity, awareness and knowledge of how different things looked, felt, seemed today, 20 years ago, all our lives. It was one of those – connections – only made these days when on the road – an openness to new people – which allows the experience of coming to quickly know you want to have this person in your life because –its so comfortable and familiar – we must know them already or should have met before…

We spent only a few days in Belém, but we spent a part of each day hanging out with Ric. He wanted some of his friends in Belém to meet us. They unsurprisingly turned out to be great people, of course, Brazilians who were smart, progressive and made it plausible to live in a place like Belém.

The lack of a shared language was not a barrier, only a gap and delay in the conversation. One night Ric gave one of the most masterful displays of simultaneous translation, I’d ever seen as he translated both ends of a conversation I had with his friend, a shrink named Jose Paulo. Ric was so good at it, it blew his mind. He claimed he’d never done anything like it before.

Even before we left Belém, I started thinking about how fortunate I’ve been in my traveling life. I’ve met some of my best friends while I’ve been out on the road. People, who despite their far and distant locations, enable me to establish a bond, despite differing perspectives and points of view. Perhaps it is HOW we think about the world, rather than WHAT we think about it. Like me they are people who live their lives, do their things, but spend a part of each day in their heads…thinking… about ideas, history, politics, people, relationships, weapons of mass destruction, small handguns, design elements, sometimes sports, sometimes the Jews, always about how the world could be a different place if only…

While I sit part of most days in my perch in Santa Monica, looking at the Pacific to ponder these questions, I know my friend Guerrando is just outside of Firenze wandering in his backyard, pacing along the banks of the Arno doing the same; and my friend “Hob, ” too, as he saunters down to the Rio Grande where it runs through Albuquerque, and my friend, “Hic” ruminating on why his “neo-con” friends keep making mistakes, while traversing alleys and bad neighborhoods around Denver; and my friend Osvaldo, worrying about the Jews on the banks the Rio Plata, taking a coffee after a bike ride, reading the local Buenos Aires newspapers; and of course, my friend “Dags,” the only professional philosopher in my crew, recently relocated to Brisbane on Oz’s Pacific Coast whose thought and consideration to even my most simple questions are sometimes twenty years journeys into the mind and heart… and now Ric, sitting at one of his tables at the “Docks” in Belém looking up from his computer and staring off across the Amazon, wondering if Kerry and Edwards will find a way to defeat the forces of evil.

I see spectacular things in my travels, but the people I meet is what really makes it for me… makes it worth waking up at ungodly hours of the morning on the chance that the next connection to the 500 people will be out there. Less than a week into this trip, NE Brazil revealed another gem.

Somewhere in Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman”, Willie Loman’s successful brother Ben, has a speech that expresses an idea I particularly like. And I’ll paraphrase it here, “I went into the Jungle, with nothing. Some thought me a pauper, with little of value, barely a penny to my name. But when I came out I had found what I needed to be a rich man. It wasn’t the gold I now carried in my pockets, it was good friends I had made!”

don-eduardo
Sete Cuidades, Piaui, BRASIL 12 July 2004

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