The evil eye

With the exception of a brief flirtation with a superstition about the number 16 as a teenage soccer player, I've never really had much time for magical thinking.  I'm a pretty hard nosed materialist.  So as one might guess, I've always quietly scoffed at the idea of the evil eye, in spite of its pervasiveness here in Brazil.  None the less, two weeks with Helena Iara in Recife forced me to do some re-thinking on the issue.

Though there are many forms of the evil eye, the most common one in Brazil often isn't intentionally malicious; in fact, the danger comes from admiration.  If someone compliments my clothes or appearance or anything else, it shows the possibility of envy, and that envy has consequences; in fact, in Portuguese, the word "evil" doesn't enter into the dynamic.  People fear the "olho gordo" or fat eye, the desire of the other for what I have.  It makes sense in a culture that has long been poor, and where social equality (within an economic class, though not from one to another) is an important virtue.



The problem comes when the object of envy is a baby.  If someone else admires Helena Iara, or envies Rita and me because she is our daughter, that envy can make her sick.  An entire social group of "benzedeiras" or blessers (sort of like good witches) exist in order to help kids get over the illnesses caused by the evil eye.  This struck me as sort of silly... until Helena became the victim of the olho gordo, as she did last week, with fever, confusion, and inability to sleep.

Lest you think I'm getting soft in the head, let me explain what I think happened.  In Recife, blond children are uncommon, and because they are almost always the children of the rich, they seldom turn up in the favelas and areas of urban decay where we spent most of our time.  For that reason, Helena attracted a lot of attention.  A lot.  She literally stopped traffic from time to time, and people surrounded her as if she were a rock or soap opera star, each one of them with more extravagant compliments.  In a city of almost 3 million people, one of the dirtiest and hottest and noisiest places I know, it was just too much.  Helena became over-stimulated and got sick.

A benzedeira blessed Helena, and I doubt that it did any harm -- in fact, the kind and soothing words of the woman, and the sweet-smelling fond she swung around Helena probably helped.  But what really worked was rest: getting her away from the chaos of the city, from the intense and desiring eyes of thousands of people.  She still had to deal with the heat, but she soon was as happy and healty as she had ever been.  And I came to have a little more respect for folk beliefs that I used to think were all confused with magic...

On the street

Sunday night, Rita, Helena, and I were walking through Recife Antigo, the old city built by Dutch colonists in the 16th and 17th centuries, and now a contrast of old beauty and urban decay.  The sound of drums echoed through the narrow streets, as maracatus practiced their rhythms, but few people were around, and few streetlights illuminated our way.  Crossing an abandoned street, we saw a girl of thirteen or fourteen years -- the kind of girl we might have named a "street kid" before understanding how life on the street really works -- who was kicking a light rubber ball and watching it float slowly to the ground.  Helena Iara was fascinated, and pointed to the girl and her game.

Attracted by the finger and Helena's shouts of interest, the girl approached: not with the timidity one might expect of a street girl, nor the begging tones of a poor urchin, but with an excited voice.  "Do you want to play?" she asked Helena, and then turned to us, as if asking permission.

Rita set Helena on the cobblestones, and she grabbed the string of the balloon-ball and began to kick it across the ground, limited only by Rita's hand from running and falling.  She laughed, screamed, kicked to ball to Thaisa (as the girl introduced herself) and then waited for it to come back.  Rita and I joined the laughter, which lifted the sinister air that had filled the streets.

I don't think we played any more than five minutes before we picked up Helena and headed to the bus stop, but I think that those minutes probably taught Helena more philosophy -- the encounter with difference, treating others as equal, as ends instead of means, of the chance to learn and play and not fear -- than any number of talks that she and I might have.  A beautiful night of practical philosophy and ethics.

Salvador and Recife

Helena Iara has had a hard time with the heat, here near the Equator.  Sleeping is hard, she rejects putting on clothes with even more vehemence than she does at home, and she even came down with a cold that seems to be associated with going in and out of air conditioning (100 degrees on the street, less than seventy in a bank... it isn't easy even for an adult).

The great thing about Brazil's northeast, however, is its culture, with more dance forms and musical genres and styles of painting and decoration than anyone could imagine.  And since Rita and I are making a movie with kids who rap, break-dance, and dance capoeira, she's gotten a lot of exposure to a new world.

Most people who have seen either capoeira or break-dance see them as spectacles, as amazing feats of acrobatics, but for the kids who do them here in Recife, the activity is much more profound.  Both serve as ways to transform conflict and to ritualize violence.  As one kid told us, breakdancing appeared when gangs were fighting on the streets, and some young artists proposed to turn the battles into an artistic competition, instead of a conflict ending in death.  The language of the break-battle remains the same as for war, but you can't touch the other, and victory is decided by competence, not blood.  Rita's doctoral dissertation followed this process of transforming violence into art.

The same is true of capoeira, maracatu, and many other artistic forms here in the northeast.  And for Helena, a little girl who loves drama and movement and acrobatics, it's been fun.

Photos from Salvador da Bahia

 
Rita and I are still in Brazil's northeast, without very a lot of time to write blogs, but I wanted to post some photos of our brief stop in Salvador da Bahia.

The semiotics of a Baby Bjorn

For the last several days, any time that Rita or I pass by the coat tree as we carry Helena Iara, she reaches out, laughs, pleads, and stares.  Her Baby Bjorn infant carrier hangs there, sometimes clearly visible, other times almost hidden behind coats and coats.  But with even a glimpse of the black straps, Helena explodes into a cacophony of sounds of desire.

Not an amazing story: babies learn what they want, and the learn to show it.  But what's interesting here is that Helena doesn't want the baby carrier.  She wants to go for a walk.  The Baby Bjorn has become a symbol of her real desire, which is to go out in the street to see dogs, pick flowers, and meet people.  It's a complicated sort of symbolism, but a process of signification none the less.  Something stands in for something else.

In fact, Helena is less involved in metaphor and more in metonymy, where the symbol participates in the signified, in some small way.  If Helena were to associate a frying pan with her afternoon walks, that would be a metaphor, but because we use the baby carrier as a part of the walk, it's metaphor or synecdoche.

It might seem that this distinction matters only to linguists and rhetors -- and that's probably what Helena thoughs as I tried to explain it to her on a walk yesterday -- but it does say something important about the way that humans learn language.  Augustine's famous description of learning words involves adults pointing at things and then saying their names, but I think that idea doesn't work for Helena yet.  Instead, she learns symbolization in a series of small steps, taking a part of the walk and making it stand in for the whole experience.  The next step, I think, will be to see that the symbol need not have anything to do with what it symbolizes.  That -- according to child neurologists, at least -- will be years in coming.

Acabou?

Rita and I have becomes used to hearing "Mama" and "Dada" from Helena, but there's a new word in her vocabulary, one that I had not expected.  Linguists who study infants suggest that babies first acquire nouns and proper names, only moving on to verbs much later, but Helena has begun to say the word "acabou," and to use it in a context that makes sense, often repeating it after we say it, but sometimes even producing it on her own.

"Acabou" means "it's over" or "it's all gone" in Portuguese.  Strange words for a baby, who is beginning almost everything, to say.  Yet it's a relatively common word in Brazil, at least when we speak with babies: Rita mashes cooked banana onto a plate, and Helena eats it eagerly.  When she's eaten it all, "Acabou!"  We pile pillows up into a mountain, and Helena tears them down one by one, and when she throws the last one from the couch to the floor, Rita will say, "Acabou," to which Helena replies "'cabou", with exactly the same tone of voice.

There's an easy explanation for Helena's use of the word, something we get from Freud.  He saw his grandson playing with a spool of thread on the floor, throwing the spool under a table where he could not see it and saying “fort” (gone). Then the child pulled the spool back to him and said “da!” (here). The game could go on for hours and hours.

Freud only came to understand what the boy was doing when the child called the spool “mother.” The mother, Freud’s daughter, had been spending many hours away from home, an event which seemed to traumatize her son. By throwing his mother under the table and “hiding” her (sending her away), and then bringing her back, the boy came to feel that he was controlling the trauma. It hurt him, but he chose it. According to Freud, one could see the same impulse in soldiers who suffered from shell-shock, who re-created the trauma again and again in their minds until they felt as if it wad their choice, and therefore under their control.

Is Helena using words to cover up the trauma of the end?  Honestly, I doubt it (and in fact, I think the whole edifice of Freudian theory constructs trauma as much as it describes it, but that's a polemic for another day).  Honestly, I think it's more about understanding the way that words work.  Ends can be clear things -- we put "the end" at the end of movies and books -- and she has come to understand that there is a sound that connects to these ends (as someday she'll understand that "once upon a time" marks a beginning.).  Helena is learning narrative.

Out of control (almost)

Last week, Rita and I hung a swing for Helena in the backyard.  Thanks to the height of the flamboyant tree (that's really its name, give because of the vibrant red flowers), she gets a long pendulum back and forth, and the higher she gets, the louder her shrieks of joy.  Not only is it great to watch, but it gives Rita's and my backs a break from carrying an increasingly heavy little girl, or bending down to help her to walk.

Helena's other favorite new activity is running downhill.  It can be down the ramp at a restaurant or store, down a trail, or even (with lots of help) down the stairs (we're trying to break her of this last game).  Almost like a skier after the lifts have closed, she will point her feet up the hill, demand that I help her walk up, and then turn downhill for the run.

What's the point of these games?  Why are they so much fun?  In fact, I might ask the same of some of my favorite sports -- skiing, rock climbing, now kitesurfing -- which just expand the sense of speed and movement that Helena enjoys.  Looking at her (and thinking of myself), I think the joy comes from just barely being in control, being just on the verge of too much.  Swinging isn't a passive activity for a little girl: Helena is actually using her balance to hold herself upright, and not to fall side to side.  If her weight shifts, she could go crashing into the orchids that embrace the tree.  And she loves the challenge of reaching for clothes on the laundry line, just beyond the reach of the longest swing.  Running down hill is even clearer as game between control and chaos, when a little trip could mean a fall (or would, if she didn't have her hands in mine).

Kayaking and kitesurfing are similar: you don't control the water or the waves or the wind.  They are a movement that you can understand and use, but not influence.  The joy of the sport comes from using these dangerous and unstable (though not unpredictable) elements as toys, exercising what little control I can to make a game.

There's an important metaphor about freedom here, if I can get my mind around it.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Over the last several days, Helena Iara has been making lots of new sounds.  Some of them sound like they'll someday become words, while others are more raw, sounds of desire and anger and hurt.  Yesterday, as we had lunch, she began to make one of those angry sounds, and Rita and I began to lecture her on table manners... until we realized that she was imitating a lion.  It was the same sound she used when she plays with her two stuffed lions, or with her feline finger puppets.  Grrrrr....

Watching Helena play with her stuffed animals has been fascinating, because she looks like an infantile version of an Amazonian shaman (at least as they are described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the great Brazilian anthropologist), whose power lies in the ability to see through the eyes of other animals.  Knowledge, for the shaman, is not to have an objective view of the jaguar, but instead to see the world as the jaguar sees it.  For Amazonian people, this kind of perspective shift is both epistemology and ethics -- how we know the world and how we act right -- because we not only learn how the jaguar sees the world, but also how to treat it with dignity, even when we need to hunt it.

This way of seeing the world might seem strange to a European adult, but to children, it makes sense.  What is play, make-believe, or just acting out a scene between Barbie and a Teddy Bear?  It is an attempt to step into the shoes of that toy, to see the world as that animal or doll might see it.  They use their toys as a shaman uses Ayahuasca: to get behind the eyes of the other.  Perhaps more significantly, I think that babies play for similar ethical and epistemological reasons: they want to see other perspectives on the world, and they want to get closer to the other.

Why does Helena roar?  She wants to see how she feels with that sound in her mouth, if she feels powerful like a lion, big and brave.  She wants to see how her parents react.  It's a way to learn, a way to try out different personalities that she might like, and a way to get closer to other people.  We can condemn commercial toys for lots of reasons, but (as I think the Toy Story trilogy argues well) when a child can play with many of them, they offer the chance of many changes in perspective, a developed point of view that the child can inhabit for a moment.

And in fact, what is this blog, but an intellectualized version of the same kind of game?  Helena can't tell me what she really feels or things, no more than a jaguar can explain its perspective to the shaman.  So, like a child with a toy, I try to project myself into Helena's perspective, imagine what she is thinking, learning, seeing.  I'm wrong most of the time, of course, but the effort changes the way that I see the world.  And that's both ethics and epistemology.