Aqui, não.

The title of this post is something that Bete says to us a lot in class whenever we talk about differences between Brazil and the States. "Aqui, não. Not here." An example: "In the United States, there's hot water in the entire house because the water's warmed with gas. Aqui, não. There's usually only hot water in the bathroom, and when it's heated, it's all electric." I've had a lot of aqui, não moments since arriving in Brazil. Some are pretty mundane--jarring at first, definitely, but not hugely important in the broader scheme of things: Brazilian "mustard" and "ketchup" taste nothing like any condiment I've ever eaten; electric showers tend to be kind of spastic; toilet paper, despite the name, doesn't go in the toilet, and, as a result, bidets are a dime a dozen; driers are almost non-existent outside of the laundromat; everything is sweeter--everything.

It's these tiny things, though, that are the persistent, daily reminders that I'm out of my element, my comfort zone. The small things whose presence I take for granted are gone. Traveling makes you see that the minutiae that structures our daily lives, the seemingly trivial stuff we assume is a given--a can of Diet Coke will taste like this, a hamburger will look like that--none of it's as stable as we'd like to think. And that's so exciting. So much of what I'm interested in--academically, intellectually, politically--involves upsetting what we assume to be immutable laws of the universe, upending people's preconceptions and, hopefully, making space for new ways of looking at the world. And if a packet of Brazilian ketchup can do that, just imagine the possibilities.

Then there's the big stuff, the aqui, não's that have really made me think about this country and my own. Favelas, primarily black slums perched precariously on the granite mountains that jut up from Rio's sprawl, testify to the insanely unequal distribution of wealth that plagues Brazil. I might be off here, but the favela seems to be treated as a sort of government-sanctioned jurisdiction of poverty and violence. I definitely wasn't expecting to see, for example, bus lines running to "Favela Cidade de Deus." I don't know of anything I can really compare it to in the U.S. Place names in Southern California, let's say, can be just as loaded (Compton, Inglewood, South Central) as the names of Brazilian favelas (Cidade de Deus, Rocinha, Rio das Pedras), but I don't think I'd ever see city maps labelled "South Central Slums," or "Lennox Ghetto." In fact, there's a move to sanitize the cultural connotations of these city names--South Central is now "South Los Angeles," for example.

A couple days ago, we were lucky enough to hear a talk by Brazilian cultural expert Roberto da Matta. It was all about soccer and the incredibly important role that the sport plays in the lives of Brazilians. A big part of his argument was that soccer is the promise of equality, of competition waged on a (literal) level playing field in a country that's so stratified along socio-economic and racial lines. Brazilian culture, he said, "requires a king," someone who's on top, a defined hierarchy of people. While I usually get kind of uncomfortable with sweeping cultural analyses (Brazilian society is like this, American society is like that--despite the fact that both countries are comprised of hundreds of millions of people), I can't help but wonder if the favelas, for all the talk of reform and aid and leadership training for youth there, are a welcomed part of society. If Brazilians really do have some cultural need to see who's farther down on the ladder, they need only to look up to the terraces teetering on the hillsides throughout the city.

American society, undoubtedly just as stratified as its Brazilian counterpart (if not along the same lines) operates quite differently. Americans don't want to see the ladder at all--it's far easier to pretend that we've done away with it entirely. In fact, our cultural compulsion (and national delusion) is to believe that we don't have to re-enact the level playing field in the world of sports because we're actually living it. For Americans, it's easy to look at Rio's glaring poverty, inequality, and social injustice--literally thrust into the public eye by the topography of the earth itself--and think, "Aqui, não. Not here."