Hip-Hop baby

For the last three weeks, we've been hosting three young filmmakers from Recife at our house: we've worked with them on numerous projects for the last six or seven years, and now they are starting their own news channel, where they report news from the favela from the perspective of the favela.  (The site launches tomorrow, at www.favelanews.org, if you're interested).  All three of the young artists love rap, and one of them is one of the best breakdancers in Brazil, so Helena found herself in the middle of a crash course in the philosophy, ethics, and æsthetics of hip-hop.

American hip-hop is most famous for its misogyny and violence, but Brazilian hip-hop has stayed more true to the movement's roots: in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s, rap and breakdance served as a way to transform gang conflict into artistic conflict.  Instead of fighting with knives and guns, hip-hop artists fight with dance moved and rhyme.  Over the next dozen years, before rap got co-opted by the music industry, rappers, dancers, and graffiti artists developed a comprehensive philosophy of black self-help, valuing the beauty of the slum, and calling for social justice.

How does this make sense to a little girl?  Not through words like "social justice" or "combatting discrimination."  She liked the dancing and and music, things that fit into her world of fun and beauty.  Quite a few times, Okado, Dita, and Adriano took advantage of a break in their classes to teach her the basic moves of breakdancing, turning our kitchen into an improvised dance floor.  And by the end of the three weeks, Helena had memorized the chorus and several of the verses of Okado's most famous rap, "Morar na Favela não é fácil" ("It ain't easy to live in the 'hood"), which has become a kind of anthem for kids in the favelas of Recife (we filmed this music video of it last year).

There is a lesson to philosophers -- and others who want kids to think and learn -- here.  We put a lot of effort into words: words in books, words in lectures, words memorized and repeated.  But the attraction of hip-hop -- and its secret to inspiring frequently illiterate kids from the urban periphery to learn, to write, to make art -- is that it is fun.  It uses the body in dance.  The ear in music.  Like most great philosophical movements in antiquity (the ones that actually made a broad impact on the world, unlike today's phenomenology or analytic philosophy of language), hip-hop is an integrated way of thinking that includes the body, culture, sound, and being-together.  The Stoics included spiritual practices with their thinking; the Epicurians food and physical exercise.  Buddhism and Christianity, now understood as religions, also started as philosophical-cultural movements.  In all of those cases, philosophy was a way of life, not a way of thought.

And thanks to Okado, Adriano, and Dita, Helena was initiated into one of the more interesting of those movements over the last couple of weeks.

Everything transforms

A couple of weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to visit one of Rita's childhood friends, a family that Helena loves to visit, because the son always brings out his toys.  This visit, she became obsessed with little games that would have been called "Transformers" when I was a kid: these were not exactly the brand name Transformers (cars or other machines that turned into robots when you moved the parts around), but something a little more organic, like rocks that turned into dinosaurs and leaves that became crocodiles.

Helena also loves other stories of transformation: books and songs about caterpillars that become butterflies, stories of peasant girls who become princesses (though, since I'm not always happy about the politics of such stories, I also tell stories of princesses that become peasants).  She also loves doll clothes and the changes that they imply.  All in all, we can say that Helena, like many kids, loves change.

There is something human in this process: children may think that adults are so different from them that in order to "grow up", they will need to pass through a metamorphosis similar to that of a caterpillar.  I wonder, though, if something even deeper isn't going on here: last week Rita was preparing a paper for an anthropology conference in São Paulo in which she compared the role-playing of little kids to the idea of clothing in Amazonian tribes.  In the West, we have the idea that play-acting is like being on the stage: an actor pretends to be something for a time, but then returns to his same being when he doffs the costume and the persona.  Yet in the Amazon, a change in clothes means a change in essence: when I put on the mask of a jaguar, I begin to see the world like a jaguar sees it.  Others treat me as a jaguar.  The clothes of a jaguar make me a jaguar.

Kids seem to see the world in the same way.  They aren't invested in their own personality or identity, in the way that an adult (or especially an adolescent) will say "I'm not the kind of person who..." They are much more willing to transform, to try on other "clothes".  Through many philosophers who write about play (Benjamin, Freud, and Agamben come to mind) talk about the repetition that play involves, I think that this kind of personal experimentation is even more important.  And, quite frankly, much more fun.

Pictures from the patio on a rainy day