DISCLAIMER: This is not meant to offend anyone, this is only my complex and conflicting journey to connect myself to my culture.
Why am I ashamed?
What am I ashamed of?
Growing up my parents ultimate goal was to move to the USA, they told me "the green card makes your life easier". All they wanted was to make more money so they could afford a better education for me.
I went to private schools for as long as they could pay it for me and they still couldn't put Brazilian private schools on the same level of USA public schools.
They had me having English lessons for years. "English is the most spoken language in the world" my father said "you have to know English to be successful". And I was an impressionable child with corporate dreams to pursue, so I committed to the bit.
Soon enough I started writing in English.
Then, one of our acquaintances made it to the USA. He made the dream real, solid, reachable. We had hopes for a better life.
In one of our Skype calls he told me the weirdest - and most wonderful - part was the "dreaming in English", as he put it, when after a long day speaking the language you couldn't help but dream on it too.
In my mind, then, it clicked: the more English I consume the more native I become.
A though.
Everything always starts with a thought.
One damn thought.
It was what it took to put me on the road to self-hatred and to make me detach myself from my culture. All it took for me to segregate all the culture available to me- to categorize and "villainize" my culture as a whole. Music, poetry, movies, soap operas, everything was inferior if compared to the big nation.
My cellphone settings were changed to English and I proudly carried around the fact I spoke the language as a badge. I was over the moon when I first read USA texts and could understand them.
For long - too long in my opinion - I was the "English girl" I knew about stuff kids from my country around my age didn't because I would spend a lot of time on forums and alike consuming media like I was about to move to there any moment. I molded my personality to fit their standards so I wouldn't be a fish out of water once I got there.
I found friends who spoke English and taught the ones who didn't so we would speak it in school. A way to talk bad about someone in front of them. A way to mock teachers at the same time they would compliment us for being - god help me, this one will always haunt me - "way ahead of the other children our age". If I could go back and make they take it back...
American high school was the dream to be achieved.
So long being superior, knowing more, quoting Edgar Alan Poe.
"The higher you step, the bigger is the fall".
I didn't go to the USA.
Never even traveled by plane 'till this day.
And in no time, the lack of knowledge of my culture started to catch up with me.
High school took a tool on me. Of all the problems I had probably the frustration of being in Brazil was the biggest of them. Classes weren't interesting because they weren't in English. I didn't have to change classrooms every period and I wouldn't get my driver's license by sixteen. I didn't have a locker. There are no lockers on Brazilian high school.
I was devastated and fought furiously with my - this guy is a saint, I swear, watch it - Portuguese teacher. Professor, actually, he had a doctorate if I remember correctly. Me, a fifteen years or something old fighting a doctor on how Joaquim Machado de Assis is not "good literature". In my head, back then, it wasn't even literature worthy.
God, if I knew back then.
I wasn't "the prodigy" anymore. I was just rebellious. At everything. Closed in the trap I designed to myself and unable to connect with other teenager.
It wasn't until lockdown that I started to feel a certain need to be a proud Brazilian citizen. Not for politics, economy or raising poverty rates. Those are always present and I was never aware to them. There wasn't time to pay attention to my country's situation if my dream was a white picket fence house instead of a big terrain with a gate or bars and electronic security system.
With TikTok came the trends, and even in my self spite I couldn't help but keep my social medias American.
Call it irony if you will but it was an USA trend with a Russian song that brought me back to my roots. Or at least helped me question my actions towards my country.
"I'm just a simple Russian girl, I've got vodka in my veins, so I dance with brown bears and my soul is torn apart."
I stopped and then thought "after everything I have done and I am still not American enough. I will never be a USA citizen" and then "but I am American" and I was in shock. Because I always have been American. Not USA but Brazilian. Sharing the same America with them. Living on the same America they do.
Such a line of thought, however controversial, made me think that if I were to make an edit to this trend what could I use to refer to Brazil?
Making me follow all the way to the question I dreaded the most: "what do I love about Brazil? what is it that even makes me Brazilian after so long hiding from my nationality?"
To be completely honest I was stupefied by how quick the culture flowed in my blood and I realized:
I don't need Little Red Riding Hood. I have the Saci.
We don't have the big white house but we have a fucking palace in our capital.
I want to play games with Narizinho, Pedrinho and Emília at the Yellow Woodpecker farm.
I want to draw in any sheet a yellow sun burning bright.
I can read Capitães de Areia instead of Lord of Flies.
And I should study more about the anti-asylum movement and read about Barbacena's tragedy documented by Daniela Arbex in her GENIUS book Brazilian Holocaust instead of hearing more and more about the USA "gun problem" or "cameras on police officers' clothes".
I don't mean it as disrespectful or unimportant but I had spent so many time trying to reach the outside, the exterior, that I never once looked around to see the wonderful culture surrounding me.
The soccer, the music, the dance- God, I want to try capoeira before I die, I want to travel to see the Cataratas do Iguaçu and I want to truly understand my ancestors and the explosion of ethnics and cultures my country has to share.
And as the thoughts came and went I realized that I love being Brazilian.
"Festa de Ipanema, meu amor" - Movie: Rio, 2011.
Carnival, axé, samba, pagode, I want to dance.
Mônica, Cebolinha, Cascão, Magali, Chico Bento, I want to live at Limoeiro street.
O Auto da Compadecida (A Dog's Will), - and even Minha mãe é uma peça - it's a comedy I can laugh to with no effort, I can understand the accent and from which region of my country it comes from and I can relate to the joke.
Carolina Maria de Jesus is my Anne Frank.
Coconut, avocado, passion fruit, lime, mango, melon, cashew are not "exotic" foods, those are natural fruits I find with "seu" João at the small vending at the end of the block.
My fruits, my music, my tragedies, my country.
I still accepting this reality. But I don't want to be ashamed to put, even if under a username, in my bio, description or whatever that I am Brazilian.
