Hijacked by Realism
In an ordinary afternoon, numerous mourners attend the funeral of a well-known upper-middle-class man. The funeral takes place in the cemetery São João Baptista, located in the old neighborhood of Botafogo, in Rio de Janeiro. The deceased man is to be buried in the oldest part of the cemetery, in one of the plots shaded by trees where decaying majestic or pretentious tombs are adorned by marbled sculptures. As the grave diggers prepare to lower the casket, amid the muffled weeping distant popping sounds are heard. In the seconds that follow, the sounds grow explosive, and the grave diggers calmly tell the mourners to fling themselves to the ground, since the noises come from gunshots exchanged between contending drug dealers located in a nearby favela perched on a hill facing the back of the cemetery. As bullets whiz by, most of the mourners stumble against tombs and trample the funerary flowers in their frantic flight toward the cemetery’s gates. The closest relatives of the dead man, a faithful few, dodge the flying pellets. Some throw themselves to the ground, some hide below dramatic funerary statues whose arms gesture toward the sky, and some seek refuge behind marble angels whose unfurled wings the stray bullets threaten to reduce to rubble.
As part of his daily ritual, a famous rock musician living in a grandiose mansion in the decaying old bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, takes his early-morning swim. As he does every morning, at the end of his exercise he scans the blue depths of the pool for stray bullets. He does not find them every day. But when he does, he adds them to the stray bullet collection on his shelf.
At the end of another commonplace day, a working mother boards the collective van toward a favela of Rio de Janeiro. As the van climbs the hill, the gore-splattered ground and the bodies of the dead warn her even before she gets home that she may soon see the bloodied body of her adolescent son, shot by the police.
Bypassing class barriers, violence in the metropolitan centers of Brazil extracts its daily harvest of wounded and dead. The above-mentioned episodes were told to me by people who had experienced them or had heard about them from acquaintances. Whether exaggerated or factual, these narratives could have been extracted from newspapers or viewed on television. Accounts of rapes, murders, kidnappings, and assaults gain widespread circulation through the media, but the perception of urban violence is also fueled by interpersonal rumors that shroud the cartographies of the city as dreaded zones of danger.
Unlike cities that have been subjected to terrorist attack, ethnic strife, or civil war, the major metropolitan areas of Brazil witness violence usually attributed to social inequity, poor governance, and conflict wrought by the drug trade. Since the 1980s increases in social violence produced by the globalized drug trade and in the flow of media images, consumer goods, and new cultural identities have caused a crisis of representation of the city, of the favelas, and of the “national imagined community.” Conversely, the democratization of Brazilian society has brought to the forefront formerly silenced and invisible protagonists. As never before, the urban poor, the favela communities, and the victims of social discrimination are voicing their rights to consumption and representation. Despite fluctuating polls, the popularity of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva remains relatively secure and indeed has risen incrementally because of the welfare policy of the “bolsa família,” which provides basic subsidies to needy Brazilian families in the poorer regions of the country. Furthermore, recent discoveries of oil reserves have given the government of Lula, as da Silva is known, a boost in regard to the prospects of increasing wealth and augmenting Brazilian autonomy in the future. Nonetheless, while new democratic agendas are in the making, the disrepute of governmental institutions by successive corruption scandals, the neglect of public health care, the disrepair of airline and road transportation, the appalling conditions of Brazilian prisons and the strength of criminal factions — as evidenced by the shutdown of São Paulo in 2006 — and the daily reportage of urban social violence transmitted by the media have created an atmosphere of radical uncertainty.
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Notes
I thank Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar for suggesting the title of this essay.