It might not be a good sign when you find that one of the things the author of the book you just bought is most known for is making a fool of himself in a debate with Hugo Chávez supporters. But good books about Brazil in English are few and far between. For the most part, they are severely handicapped by the need to explain very basic things to the public, meaning that anyone that wants to read more than one book about Brazil will be forced to read and re-read endlessly the same information about how Brazilians like the beach and samba music (notably, two things that I have almost never seen or heard in the last couple of years in the interior of Bahia).
Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed Larry Rohter’s Brazil on the Rise. Written as an introduction to Brazil, it still assumes a reasonably sophisticated reader, and by looking for interesting takes on familiar subjects it not only held my interest helped to give me a clue to just how little I know about the country. Symbolic of this is the section on soccer, which I considered skipping entirely under the assumption that it could not avoid being utterly boring. But happily, after getting the inevitable comparisons to sex out of the way, it dives into enough ugly things – corrupt refs, basically enslaved players, and outrageously arrogant star players – that provided real insight into Brazilian society.
Though clearly passionate about Brazil, Rohter is frank in his appraisals of various aspects of the country, and the book reads as much as a criticism of Brazil as an explanation of its recent rise. The most satisfying parts for me were those that showed that the author, a former New York Times Bureau Chief in Rio, is just as befuddled by certain aspects of Brazilian culture as I am. Chief among these are:
His take on the tendency of Brazilians to agree to make insincere commitments, whether in political promises or for social events – “It is as if the declaration of an intention to perform an act is the same thing as actually doing it…”. In a similar vein, I’ve long considered that there seems to be a greater than normal confusion between image and content in Brazil. This is on display at events like opening and graduation ceremonies in schools, where promises to improve the world with education and, above all, love, will frequently be made with no interest in the many practical issues at hand (“How exactly is one person’s personal sense of love going to change the world?” and “shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that most people in this room are graduating but still can’t write a paragraph in their native lanuage?”). Also interesting is that Rohter’s quote above is part of a discussion of the Brazilian constitution. In the United States, the Constitution is a fairly literal and succinct description of rights and the structure of government, in which almost every word (and comma placement) is of crucial importance. Brazil’s sprawling monstrosity of a constitution, on the other hand, is an exercise in national fantasy in which Brazil confuses itself for Sweden. The result is that it doesn’t matter much if a law is unconstitutional, because Brazil is incapable of guaranteeing all the rights it proclaims. A good example is the minimum wage, which, as a friend pointed out to me (since I would not be crazy enough to try to read it on my own) is currently unconstitutional – the Constitution claims that the minimum wage must be enough to house, clothe, feed and educate a family, requiring a minimum wage of around R$2,000 per month according to some measures, while the current minimum wage is currently R$545.
The hypersensitivity of Brazilians to foreigners’ designs (or what Brazilians think are foreigners’ designs) of their country – Rohter spends a fair amount of time on this subject and it makes for good reading. Apparently it got it’s start in the 1960s when France’s de Gaull apocryphally claimed that Brazil was “not a serious country”, and ever since it has been difficult to convince Brazilians that other countries are not conspiring to steal their wealth and territory. I was especially happy to see that a preposterous scam that was sent to me by e-mail a few years ago got a mention. A friend of mine wanted to know whether a certain rumor was true, and e-mailed me an attachment that purports to be part of an American geography textbook about the Amazon, which includes such text as “The value of this area is unable to calcule, but the planet can be cert that The United States won’t let these Latin American countries explorate and destroy this real ownership of all humanity”. The gist, of course, is that the US is the real owner of the Amazon is the US, not Brazil. I don’t remember what I responded, but it probably included a great deal of disbelief that anyone would believe such a clearly fraudulent document, and assurances that the English in the text is clearly written by a Brazilian and could not possibly appear in any American classroom. Rohter helpfully traces this type of garbage back to a military industrial complex that sees the need to pose imagined outside threats as a justification for its own existence on the one hand, and to cast logging, mining and other activities that threaten the Amazon as patriotic duties on the other. And the Brazilian public, long suspicious of any foreign activity in Brazil, has eaten it up with all the chowderheadedness of an American “Drill, baby drill” campaign. Another thing I might have mentioned to my friend was that Americans largely don’t care enough about Brazil to spend so much time scheming to weaken their sovereignty. But as Rohter explains, this is equally problematic, playing into an inferiority complex that he expands on in detail.
And in the case of inferiority complexes, the book also performed well during Rohter’s analysis of the development of Brazilian foreign policy in recent years. Though Brazil has claimed much success in foreign policy in recent years, with “south-south” partnerships to create a multi-polar world, Rohter paints foreign policy as Lula’s big giveaway to the leftists he disappointed by maintaining Brazil’s market economy upon taking power – a safe trade, since only intellectuals care much about foreign policy anyway. Rohter argues that, despite having a first-rate diplomatic service, the political craving to be taken seriously as a great power has led to overreach and poorly thought-out maneuvers on Brazil’s part, especially its naivety in believing that it could so easily produce better results than developed countries in Haiti and Iran. Even more entertaining is the boondoggle of Brazil’s attempt to win a seat on the UN Security Council, in which Brazil worked to help China gain entry into the WTO (thereby ensuring a flood of cheap products to put São Paulo industry out of business) only to see China immediately veto the big for the Security Council on account of Brazil’s alliances with India and Japan. It’s heartening to see that the US isn’t the only country that commits such strategic catastrophes, though at least Brazil’s don’t cripple its economy…
Along the way, Rohter also makes a strong and convincing case that Brazil has a racism problem. This is not as easy as it sounds given the propensity in believing otherwise among many Brazilians, including the elite – and characteristically, reviews of the book by Brazilians on sites like Amazon tend to criticize this chapter as the result of Rohter being American.
In discussions of the economy, Rohter becomes less critical. He notes Brazil’s extraordinary achievements such as balancing its international trade and diversifying its energy sources, especially through sugarcane ethanol, as well as the pioneering success of companies like EMBRAER and EMBRAPA, both of which are too important to cover briefly here. Especially interesting is the discussion of the recent sub-salt oil discoveries, which promise to greatly advance Brazil’s development. Rohter appears to believe that Brazil has the institutional structure to handle the influx of oil wealth without becoming a basket case like most other oil-dependent countries, and is generally optimistic about the prospects for Brazil to continue the fast rise of recent years, despite some challenges to overcome along the way.
For me, the book perhaps falters the most in discussions of culture. The section on Brazilian authors was especially uninteresting, since it consisted basically of a partial list of cannonical Brazilian authors with basic information that could be easily obtained through a Google search. If anything, the defining feature of Brazilian literature is that there is so little of it. In Brazil, the average citizen reads one non-school book per year and functional illiteracy rates flourish. On top of this, I found myself a bit irritated on the Rio-centricity of things. This book (along with most others about Brazil) would let you believe that everyone in Brazil listens to Bossa Nova, which is emphatically not the case in Bahia, and in fact I have never heard it outside of the occasional telenovela soundtrack. I would rather explore the reasons why so much of Brazil’s artistic output remains of such low quality (Paulo Coelho, almost everything on TV, arrocha music) rather than beat the same dead horse about the cannon of respected authors from the past. And in any case, the discussion seems peripheral to the theme of "Brazil on the Rise" since the history of Brazilian authors provides no argument either for or against the country's advances.
In the end, the book illuminated countless things for me despite my intermediate knowledge of the country, and was entertaining from start to finish. There is another recently released book on Brazil out, called “the new Brazil”. I hope to take a look and see which one is better soon enough.
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