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.

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.