Desde Liberdade

[desdeliberdade]

Our films met before we met physically. In 1998 at the Berlin Film Festival Jia had his first film Xiao Wu ... I had a film there called Central Station at the same time. And when I saw Xiao Wu and the second film that Jia did, Platform, I was completely mesmerized, not only by the very singular and unique point of view of a filmmaker I didn’t know at that point, but also I was very much impacted by the fact that characters that live so far away from Brazil could feel so close to me. And this triggered the desire to see every single documentary and feature film Jia did from that moment on. In 2006 I saw the film that I would probably be able to describe scene by scene called Still Life, which I find an absolute masterpiece. By then I realized that Jia Zhangke was probably the filmmaker who better offered us a reflection of our own time, and not only in China. Thus the desire to do a documentary on Jia.

Walter Salles, in conversation with Jia Zhangke at the British Film Institute

[desdeliberdade]

椰子樹 Yashi Ju.  O Coqueiro. The Coconut Tree.

Photos taken at the Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros (CENB). 

A community literary magazine founded in 1938 by and for the Japanese in Brazil, Yashi Ju’s wide range of essays and haiku and tanka poetry speaks of life in Brazil for the Japanese community. The magazine published its eleventh issue in 1941, and after a six year hiatus that, according to the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonese (Bunkyo) 1 was due more to disinterest within the Japanese community rather than pressure from Brazilian authorities, resumed publication of its twelfth issue in 1947 (550). 

The magazine still circulates today, but its readership has gotten older, as the number of Japanese-Brazilians who can read Japanese (and who are interested in the literary world of their grandparents) continues to decrease. Nowadays, explains Kenji Matsuzaka, who works at the Center, pieces about family, getting sick, and getting older are becoming more commonplace in the fabric of the magazine.

I’m curious about those six years in which nothing was written. Bunkyo actually writes that there was a “falta de vontade de seus participantes,” which I may have interpreted too liberally as “disinterest” (550). Was it because of economic reasons, or organizational reasons -- or something else altogether -- that there is no record of those six years? I’m curious because from what I’ve gathered so far, the Chinese in Brazil basically have written very little, and I’m intrigued by everything this absence in literature stands for -- a political voice (or lack thereof) different from that of Chinese Americans in the United States, a self-history that is more difficult to piece together, and what, if not In the Year of the Boar and Jacky Robinson, do Chinese-Brazilian children read? 

"Bunkyo" is the abbreviated name in Japanese of the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonesa. ↩︎

[desdeliberdade]

Brazil is also similar to other countries in the Americas where immigrants entered within a context of slavery, although abolition in Brazil came only in 1888. Yet immigrants were not slaves, even if they were often treated poorly. Many immigrants separated themselves, often aggressively, from slaves or free people of African descent. This separation was ongoing and dynamic: while some immigrants "became white" by distancing themselves from blacks and indigenous people, others moved in the opposite direction, either by marrying a person of color or not fulfilling certain cultural, social, and occupational expectations. Those who did not conform to the whiteness mandate through self-segregation often lost the advantages of being an "immigrant." The new ethnic identities that emerged among the descendants of immigrants in the Americas must thus be understood in relation to broader attitudes about creating racial, social, and political separation from those of African descent. (7) 

- Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present

[desdeliberdade]

Challenging Latin American Demographic Stereotypes

Between about 1870 and 1930, roughly four million immigrants settled in Argentina, two to three million in Brazil, perhaps one million in Cuba, and 400,000 in Uruguay. In North America, Canada received more than 1.3 million newcomers, while the United States settled more than twenty million. Although most immigrants to the Americas came from Europe, significant numbers arrived from the Middle East and Asia. These numbers challenge contemporary academic and popular stereotypes of Latin America as populated almost exclusively by indigenous people, those of African descent, and people of mixed backgrounds. The multiple origins remind us that newcomers from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe (and more recently in Brazil, from places like Bolivia, Argentina, Portuguese-speaking Africa, and Nigeria) played crucial roles in national identity formation (5).

- Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present

[desdeliberdade]

A walk down any main street in Brazil, whether in a huge metropolis or small town, emphasizes the importance of immigration to national identity. A common Brazilian bar food is kibe (a torpedo-shaped fried croquette made of bulgur and chopped meat), even though most consumers are not descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the 1960s, many young middle class Brazilians have been obsessed with manga (a type of Japanese cartoon magazine), while older Brazilians eat sushi and practice … (3-4)

Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethinicity, & National Identity in Brazil