Prose by Elizabeth Bishop

Author:Elizabeth Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466889446
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Chapter 10

The United States and Brazil have many things in common besides both being in the Western Hemisphere and sharing the name of Amerigo Vespucci. It is time we got to know and appreciate each other better; time that the United States gave more to Brazil than loans and those less attractive features of our culture that are thought to be “Americanizing” the world. The United States and Brazil have more in common than coffee and Coca-Cola, although we now have a great deal of both of those.

We are both big countries and very much aware of our size. Perhaps number, gigantism, the “biggest” this or that, mean too much to us. Culturally, too, although we have such different traditions, there are similarities. Both the U.S. and Brazil remained rather cautiously imitative for two hundred years or more, and both have suffered from (let us face it) inferiority-feelings at different periods in our histories. But we laugh at the same jokes, enjoy the same movies, and have almost the same legends of the “frontier,” Indian chiefs, gold-rushes, pioneers, hunters, and savage beasts. Americans and Brazilians are equally quick to sympathy, on the side of the under-dog, hospitable, and kind; both have a sense of national destiny, of great things ahead, and the word “democracy” can still move us deeply.

By a combination of good luck and good mangagement, the U.S. has solved many of the administrative and economic problems of capitalistic democracy earlier than Brazil has. But we should not let that blind us to the many valuable things in the Brazilian “way of life.” Brazil is coping with her Indian problem at least as well as, if not better than, we are ours. And certainly the social and racial problems left over from the days of slavery are being solved more gracefully, and with less suffering, in Brazil than in any other part of the world today. We may never be able to solve our race problem in the Brazilian way, but at least we should be able to think about it calmly.

In personal relations, their less guilt-ridden moral code and their franker attitude towards sex and marriage seem more adult than ours, and preventive of the miseries of prolonged adolescence and over-romanticism. The Brazilian lack of aggressiveness, willingness to compromise, live and let live, love and let love, and their acute sense of the ridiculous in public and private pretentiousness, are all qualities that we could use more of. Their enjoyment of life has not yet been spoiled by the craze for making money; they have not yet added up the hard sum of so much money, so much pay. Although this may come as the inevitable price of further industrialization, perhaps the Brazilians will somehow be able to make it less harsh and driving than we have done.

There are no earthquakes in Brazil, and no hurricanes. There is plenty of space. There is no death penalty. Brazil has no real enemies, has had no real war for almost a hundred years, and never has had a war of conquest.

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