Letters from Portugal: Sabores do racismo

Writing in The Guardian some time ago, and dealing with the issue of racism in Portugal, Joana Gorjão Henriques, a Portuguese journalist wrote that ‘Even though Portugal has racial profiling, race crime and the daily subordination of black people by whites, most Portuguese would deny that their country has significant "racial problems" – that's what they have in America, France or the UK. Such attitudes are a hangover from the dictatorship years and the “luso-tropicalism” ideology created by the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre in the 1950s, which spread the idea that the Portuguese were better colonisers – and that ongoing British or French soul-searching over race was a result of “bad colonizing”.

This is the curious feature of Portugal, in that as much as they aver that things have changed since the bad days of the Estado Novo, and things have changed, some things still remain; perhaps not the same but they linger. But this is another matter, and perhaps we should stick to discussing racism.

The problem perhaps lies in the fact that when we (or ‘the Portuguese’) think about racism, we think of dramatic occurrences, ‘significant racial problems’. In doing so, we seem to excuse the small, hidden acts of racism that we effect on a daily basis, that lay the basis for the more significant acts to emerge. If we acknowledged these small acts, we would realize that racism inheres not in the dramatic acts, but in these small quotidian actions. Take for example the simple act in which we brush away the ‘coloured’ peddler of wares, or jump back, even if ever so imperceptibly, when a person of colour approaches us.

Bairro Alto, one of Lisbon’s more popular night-spots has a number of street-vendors who seem to have racially divided their occupations. If ‘the Africans’ sell you beads and trinkets, the South Asians sell you roses and toys that flash with light, and the Portuguese-Gypsies politely offer you ‘drugs’ of various sorts.

It is with this background that the reader should imagine me setting off, rather dandily, on one of my first evenings in Lisbon to a dinner party. Being ever so well-brought up, I had in hand a designer bouquet for the hostess. Stopping enroute, at the Jardim Principe Real, not too far from Bairro Alto, I approached (what I presumed to be) a lady to ask for directions. The response left me bewildered for what I received was a rather rude brush-off as she rushed away saying ‘No, no, no’. Scratching my head in bewilderment, it too me some time to realize that the bouquet in my head (and probably the colour of my face) gave the good lady cause to assume I was trying to sell her my bouquet! Or take the example when another lady, seemed somewhat nervous – she actually jumped back - when I approached her (admittedly in the less secure Intendente neighbourhood) for directions to my destination.

Two swallows admittedly do not make a summer, and this is not to argue therefore that ‘the Portuguese’ are racist. It merely illustrates some of the possible flavours of racism. Indeed, one should inquire into my own South-Asian racism, when my response to such racism is to point indignantly to my class location, given that our class locations allow us so often to operate as white. One could also inquire, whether like most South Asians from a certain background, I am also not reading race whenever my ego is bruised by someone whose respect I merely take for granted. And yet, each of these inquiries should not prevent the partner in these encounters to inquire if they too sniff the odour of racism in their actions.

To repeat a point and elaborate somewhat, racism should be understood as inhering not merely in the dramatic and violent acts that attract our attention, but also in the quotidian acts that draw from gut instinct, preconceptions, and unconscious reactions. It would be impossible to deny that any of us is not racist, given that the contemporary world order is still recovering from its colonial past, a past that was actively based on racial stereotypes. If we can recognize that in this game of racism, it is not just about aggressors and the violated, but also about all of us participating in a market where we use racist ideas as capital to build on in whatever form, then perhaps we can get away from these ridiculous suggestions that we are not racist and begin to examine what exactly are the ingredients that contribute to the peculiar flavour of our individual racism.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo 16 Oct 2011)

No Carnaval in Paradise: The impossibilities of Carnaval in a post-Christian world

There is a certain familiarity that Lisbon brings to the Goan visitor. The place is full of familiar names, figures and remembrances. In this context, a friend suggested that rather than think that it was Portuguese names that Goans bore, it was in fact Goan names that the Portuguese carried with them. Goa, in other words, is where Portugal originated.

Now this suggestion seems facile, ridiculous even. We would do well to remember though, that history is always an artifice, a construction of ideas, emphasizing some aspects rather than others, the direction of some flows, rather than others. Much writing and thinking, especially within Portugal, begins from the assertion of Portugal’s gift of culture to the world. Where there is talk of counterflows, the influence of the colonized is seen as only ornamental, superficial. The colonized has not really impacted on the famed continental Portuguese soul.

I am led to these ruminations by my thoughts this last Carnaval. Through the entire festival, I was possessed by a strange irritation; an irritation I just could not figure out. I was sure it had to do with my conviction that Carnaval is a tropical feast, and my being out of Goa and missing the passion with which Carnaval is celebrated in Goa. I argued in my last column that the Goan Carnval is now a brief and gaudy lament for a lost citizenship which is why we Goans are still so passionately celebrate it. It was after seeing my thoughts on paper, that it all came together, and I could place a finger on an alternate source of my irritation.

‘These silly Portuguese are not doing it right’ I kept thinking, holding Goan practice to be the model-type. And indeed why not, since as I will go on to argue, the Goan Carnaval continues to approximate the ideal of what Carnaval is supposed to be. The Portuguese Carnaval simply has ‘to suck’ as a Lisboeta friend put it, because it has largely lost any context that a Carnaval ought to have.

The hierarchy of the Goan Catholic Church may disapprove of it; and our last gasp of fun, before Lent may not quite be the spirit in which we ought to approach Lent. However, we must recognize that the fact that Lent is still taken fairly seriously provides a significant context for the Goan Carnaval. Even if we do not abstain during Lent, the Goan Catholic enters into a social context, not different from that experienced by the errant Muslim during Ramzaan. In not abstaining we recognize deep down, that it is we, the non-abstainers, who are the aberration. In the post-Christian society that Portugal has become, the absence of the tension of restraint that Lent provides to the periods of moral laxity and consumptive excess through the rest of the year, results in a Carnaval without an edge.

The Catholic faith in Portugal has been largely replaced by a more secular faith, that of the ceaseless worship of Mammon, through constant consumption and sensorial gratification. Ghalib perhaps captured it best in his couplet; ‘Hazaron qwahishein aisi ki har qwahish pe dum niklen; bahuth nikle merey armaan, phir bhi kum niklen’ (Thousands of desires, each worth dying for...many of them I have realized...yet I yearn for more...). My perspective is to be sure partial and biased. I am but a few months a Lisboeta, and live in close proximity to Bairro Alto, the veritable temple courtyard of Mammon in Lisbon. In this location, and to quote the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan in his poem Madhushala, ‘Every day is Holi, and every night Diwali’.

Carnaval is necessarily a period of abandon, when we create a fleeting material paradise of plenty, to contrast with the daily deprivations we may suffer. As such, it is also a festival with stresses our relationship to the corporeal. When in this consumeristic world, every day is a Carnaval, and want is almost unknown, what sense in having a half week of Carnaval just once a year?

Portugal may be poor, its standards of living lower than in the rest of Europe, and yet, this is not the poverty of its not-so-distant past. It has, despite its grumbling, and it has to be said that the Portuguese lo-ove to grumble, settled comfortably into the Pax Europeana. This Pax is what Foucault has would have called governmentality. A situation where by and large our every material need is taken care off, or at least entertainment and distractions provided if it is not. Portugal’s needs may not be taken care of, but it definitely lives within a bureaucratic and consumeristic net where the edge of frustrated desires are blunted. The Goan Carnaval, as I laboured to indicate last week, is powered by the desire to incarnate a radically different citizenship from the one we currently inhere in. At Carnaval, we dance on the edge of that desire.

Goa, and indeed much of the world, lives outside of such a Pax. We may all be made of the same flesh and blood, but thanks to this Pax, this net of distraction, we realize our bodies (our corpus) in radically different ways from those in the European continent. It is perhaps a realization of this radical difference in corporeality, and the ensuing impossibility of Carnaval in Lisbon, that was at the basis of my irritation through Carnaval this year.

The time of Carnaval, and its relationship to the world, is an ideal. Once we are admitted into this reality, there is no new or old, authentic or pretender. When Portugal (or the colonizer) falls away from this ideal, it is indeed, Goa (or the colony) that becomes the model. The colony then, is where the metropole, can now originate from.

(A version of this column was first published in the Gomantak Times, 24 Feb 2010)

Credits

Image No.1 - Campo das Cebolas - Lisbon
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo1087357.htm

Image No. 2 - Carnaval in Lisbon - 1907
http://xafarica.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/158121.html

Image No. 3 - The Fight Between Carnival and Lent - artwork by Pieter Bruegel
http://apor.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/%C2%ABdominica-ad-carne-levandas%C2%BB/

Image No.4 - Roman Triumph
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-roman-empire.html