One of the places I visted was the headquarters of Cearah Periferia in Fortaleza. This organization runs courses in Urban Planning for people from poor communities in Fortaleza who want to improve their local area. Oxfam gives some funding for these courses. Cearah Periferia gave me a book written in poetry about the history of one community. It's an example of "cordel" literature, which is a tradition of Northeastern Brazil. Here are two verses about the fruits that grow there.
De Agricultura têm
Coqueiros e graviola,
Goiabeira, abacateiro,
Mamoeiro e castanhola,
Sirigiela, jambeiro
Cajarana e castanholaTangerina, tamarindo
Ateira, jaca e mangoeira
Maracujá, sapotí
Limoero e laranjeira
Para completar se têm
Cajueiro e pitombeira.For agriculture there are coconut and graviola trees,
guava, avocado pear, papaya and chestnut trees,
siriguela , jambo, cajá, tangerine, tamarind,
ateira, jackfruit, mango, passion fruit, sapotí, lime
and orange trees, and to finish cashew and pitomba trees.
As you can see, Northeast Brazil has wonderful fruit.
I wrote about coconut, guava, tangerine, mango, passion fruit, lime
and orange in a postcard from
Rio, when I
visited some parts of Brazil that rich Brazilians and English
tourists see. In this postcard I'll try to describe what the
fruits in the slums and the backland are like.
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Olinda, the name of the Northeastern city where we were briefed about Brazil's economy, means "Oh, beautiful". Oh, it is. Brazil is the tenth largest economy in the world, with a GDP of around a trillion dollars, and has immense vegetable, mineral and human resources. Outside the briefing room the elegant pale leaves of a graviola tree waved against blueandwhite tiles. Graviola juice is creamy, refreshing, exquisite.
Despite this, 12 per cent of Brazilians live in favelas, or slum areas, where there is 80 per cent unemployment. The infant mortality rate is 38 per 1000 live births. Brazil is 67th on the UN World Development Index. The richest 10 per cent get nearly half the total income of the country. Graviola fruits look like scarily-deformed green hedgehogs with black spines. The swimming pool shone blue and cool between the trees and tropical flowers. A bossanova glided out from the bar.
The Northeast is the poorest area of Brazil. Infant mortality in Northeast Brazil is 52 per 1000. Average income is half that of Brazil as a whole, and the inequality of income distribution is just as severe. We finished the briefing and walked past the palmshaded baroque palaces of the centre of Olinda. Tropical birds sang. The restaurants played love songs. We could hear the distant shouts of football players on the beach as their ball bounced out into the turquoise sea.
O Brasil não é um país pobre, é um país injusto
Brazil is not a poor country, it is an unfair country
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil
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"My father is an avocado" is something I eventually learned not to say. The correct word for lawyer is advogado. Oxfam paid for an advogado to help the 30,000 residents of São Cristóvão, a poor area of Fortaleza. Many of them were evicted from their homes because they couldn't pay the rent: some of the evictions were overturned in court. One of the evicted residents was Matilha.
Matilha is a grandmother. She has a smile that makes you feel that everything in the world will be fine. "What is your greatest dream, Matilha?" asked one of the Oxfam staff. "I've already achieved my greatest dream, which was to get my house back", she replied. She gave us the blessing of that smile.
Matilha's house is not bad compared to some of the houses we saw in Fortaleza. It has running water, electricity, brick walls, no holes in the roof. But in that area there are no secondary schools her grandchildren can go to, no police, a lot of problems. Even her greatest dream is poor.
I feel honoured to have met this gentle woman. We returned from her house in silence, too full of emotion to speak.
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Jackfruit is a dull yellow spiny fruit. The one I saw was enormous, as long as the distance from my fist to my elbow. It had a thick rottensweet stink, like a melon that had been left on a compost heap on a hot day. "I think jackfruit smells of sewage", says Rachel, who works for Oxfam in Brazil.
We drove up in a airconditioned minibus to a piece of land about the size of a football pitch, filled with shacks made from of old pieces of corrugated iron. A stream covered with green scum ran by the side of the field. The people who live here have no sewage facilities, so they use plastic bags which they dump in the stream. Children were playing on the banks. Most favelas in Fortaleza flood in the rainy season. We took photos, climbed back into the minibus, and drove on.
One of the people in the minibus was a Brazilian from Fortaleza. He'd never been to this part of town - there's no reason for him to go here. He was shocked by what he saw.
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Sapotí, oí meu gozo..sings Gal Costa, the great singer from Northeast Brazil. A sapotí is a tasty fruit, or a tender term of affection.
Chegue aqui
Lua nos coquerais
Mas você é bem mais
bonito
- Soundtrack to "Tieta", Caetano Veloso
Sapotí, hey my lovely, come here - the moon's in the coconut palms but you're much more goodlooking
At a housing project in Fortaleza run by Cearah Perifiería, people who had previously lived in shacks on the river banks were building houses for themselves. There was music from all directions - the houses contained few possessions, but all had a ghettoblaster. A mother was tenderly teaching bricklaying to her two young daughters. They were finding it great fun.
How many people sleep here? we asked, in one finished house. When they told us, I didn't believe it: there wasn't enough space for that many people to lie down on the floor. They pointed above our heads to two hammocks strung from corner to corner.
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It's a chestnutcoloured singlet, with a fashionable design and a Palma Fashion logo. It's for sale in the swankiest shops in Fortaleza, but I bought mine in Palmeira, a slum area of that city.
The Palma Fashion label was started by several residents of Palmeira who make clothes and who started up their small businesses with the help of small loans from Banco Palmas, a microcredit organization supported by Cearah Periferia and Oxfam. No normal banks will lend to these people, they're too poor. But the default rate on the loans is much lower than the default rate on loans to the customers of normal banks.
Ilsa de Souza Carneiro makes clothes for Palma Fashion. She told us how she'd used her loan to buy the first supply of cloth, and built up her business from there. I didn't catch the exact figures because I was distracted by her acidgreen dress with gold spots, so striking against her brown skin. She certainly has an eye for colour.
Banco Palmas began in 1998. When it started, its total capital for loans was 2000 Reais (around $2000). In two years, it has helped to create 90 direct and 450 indirect jobs in the Palmeira slum area.
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It's the break during the presentation at the Banco Palmas, and they're serving us cajá juice. There's a line of people sitting on a comfortable bench in the shade. There are green leaves in the sunlight behind them. The man at the head of the line talks to Celso, a volunteer from a government agency, who consults a jobs database on his computer. Gentle music is playing. They don't have job centres as pleasant as this in England.
Cajá juice is light orange in colour, and at first watery, but then the taste expands, as though you're drinking a space of mountain air.
Banco Palmas give business loans to 4 out of 5 of the residents who apply. What about those you can't lend to? we ask. They show us another room where women are moving gently to music. It's part of a course to help highrisk women to gain self esteem and some control over their lives. There's a graph on the wall that they've created of the good and bad events in their lives. One of the few good events is the birth of a son to one when she was fifteen. The atmosphere in the room is intimate and soothing.
The residents of Palmeira run a theatre group. It's called Flores do Lixo: flowers from the rubbish dump.
The women running the Banco Palmas are downright jolly,
despite the conditions they're struggling against. They
have a great sense of fun. It rubs off on us. We laugh a
lot, the day we visit them.
I swear this is true - the day I spent in the Palmeiras slum area,
I enjoyed myself more than even the day I spent in luxury
in beautiful Olinda.
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I've never tasted fresh tamarind. Dried tamarind, however, is an ingredient of Branston Pickle, that highlight of English cuisine.
As you drive down the highway from Fortaleza into the
interior of Northeast Brazil, the landscape that at first
is lush and palmfilled becomes drier and drier. Huge
cactuses appear by the roadside, branched like menorahs.
All green disappears apart from a large plant with flat
leaves the size of a hand, and green grooved fruit. The
fruit is filled with caustic powder. It's good for
nothing, this plant, not even the goats will eat it. It's
called ciume, jealousy.
A bit further on and not even jealousy grows.
The climate of the Sertão, a vast dry area making up most of the interior of Northeast Brazil, is the same as the Mojave desert. When the rain does come it comes all at once, unpredictably, and the poorquality soil cannot absorb it; it evaporates away. People farm in the Sertão, nevertheless. If you own a very large tract of land, then you can be a cattle farmer, because the cattle will find enough to graze on. If you only have a small farm, you can try to grow beans and fruit using rainwater stored in cisterns. In Altamira they have not had enough rain for a good harvest for eleven years. Oxfam paid for silos in Altamira to store seeds between harvests.
The sun in Altamira hits us like a slamming door. The forecast for that day was 44 degrees centigrade. "We can feel your despair," says Jackie Jones from Oxfam to the woman who is showing us the silos. "What is it that keeps you going?" "Somos resistentes," she replies, with a weary shrug. "We are stubborn, we have endurance," says the translator. The silos are empty.
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The artists of Northeast Brazil make vivid woodcut engravings to illustrate cordel poetry. One engraving depicts women picking cashew nuts, with hummingbirds flying around them. The nut grows on top of the bright red or bright yellow fruit, looking like an odd stalk or handle. Another engraving shows a family on foot carrying all their possessions, the mother tearful and pregnant; the title is "Because of hunger and thirst I left my Northeast". A third is of a strange creature with the body of a graceful deer, and the face of a terrifying sun with sharp teeth and eyes. It's the Monster of the Sertão.
Sou uma peca bonita, feita do creadorWhat I find impressive about this woodcut is that the artist, J.Borges, has succeeded in showing the monster's beauty.
Sou a sol quente que eclarece o mundo
Mas no Sertão sou terror
Porque acabo a trabalha do pobre acricultor
I am a beautiful creature, made by the creator
I am the warm sun that brightens the world
But in the Sertão I am terror
Because I destroy the work of the poor farmer.
Before I saw the Sertão I'd wondered why migrants who left their farms in periods of prolonged drought wanted to return when the rains came. I'm so glad I don't live in the town of Tauá. But when I walked around Tauá with a camera at 6 in the morning when it was already too hot to walk fast, I wanted to photo every house, every shop, every lorry. They all had surprising colour and delicate ornamentation. People wished me good morning as I walked down the street. Back in England the photoshop assistant said, "where is that? It's so beautiful. I'd love to go there".
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As well as papaya the families of Joaquim and Amorim grow banana, potato, carrot, beetroot and lettuce on their small organic farm in the Sertão. The lettuce doesn't wilt, despite the climate. How do they do it? Amorim tells me about careful soil preparation, about adopting some of the techniques used by the Israelis to make the desert bloom, of storing water collected from a river that only flows once a year before it evaporates. They use the natural enemies of pests rather than pesticides. Oxfam gives funds to ESPLAR, which does research into these agricultural techniques for smallscale family farms in the Sertão. Oxfam also gives support to the local rural workers' union that is spreading this knowledge. The techniques won't work everywhere in the Sertão - for example the land has to be flat - but where they do, they could make all the difference to a family with a small farm.
The families of Joaquim and Amorim sell carrot fudge in packets labelled "Delices do Sertão": delicious things from the dry lands.
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The families of Joaquim and Amorim make jam from their fruit, but also from carrots and beetroots. Their banana peel jam is tasty and spicy. They waste nothing. ESPLAR's pest control uses a bent paperclip and a used disposable plastic coffee cup.
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Siriguelas are small and delicate, like very tender grapes.
BANDA SIRIGUELA, says the poster for a forró group. It's stuck
on the wall of a roadside bar next to a cage of loud
blackandyellow birds who are competing with the forró coming
out of the radio. Forró is a dance from the Sertão with
lively accordian music. To dance the forró you take your
partner in a close hold (it only works if you and your partner
stay very close) and rush together backwards and forwards
across the dance floor, trying to avoid the other couples
doing the same. It's a hoot. Eduardo, who is organizing our
trip, tells me that there is a whole series of forró bands
with fruit names.
The people who move to the big cities of Brazil to flee poverty and thirst in the Sertão bring their music with them. In a dive in Rio I heard people from the Northeast sing "Asa Branca", the song of a farmer whose farm is destroyed by drought.
Inte mesmo a asa branca
Bateu asas do Sertão
Entonces eu disse adeus Rosinha
Guarda contigo meu coraçãoHoje longe muitas leguas
numa triste solidão
Espero a chuva cair de novo
Pra mim voltar pro meu sertão
- "Asa Branca", Luiz Gonzaga + Humberto TeixeiraEven the whitewinged dove flew away from the Sertão
So I said, farewell Rosy, keep my heart with you
Today a long way away, sad and lonely, I wait for rain
to fall again so I can go back to my land.
After this song, everyone danced the forró to "Festa do Interior", a joyous celebration of enduring love.
Ardia aquela fogueira
Que me esquentava a vida inteira
Eterna noite - sempre a primeira
Festa do interior
- "Festa do Interior", Moraes Moreira + Abel SilvaThat bonfire was burning keeping me warm my whole life long, eternal night, forever the first backland party.
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"That's where I'm going to stay for the carnival next February", says Eduardo, "that bar in front of the pitomba tree." A pitomba is a small round fruit with very tough skin. Recifolía, where we were going to go that evening, is not a real carnival, Eduardo explains, it's a poor imitation put on outofseason to make some money for the companies that sponsor it.
At Recifolía the whole length of Recife's beachfront road was packed. Jampacked. In the centre, trucks carrying raucous singers and bands amplified by VERY LOUD sound systems. Behind the trucks, thousands of dancing brazilians in bright Tshirts matching the band they were following. To the side, thousands more, leaping in the air on the beat. Huge groups doing frevó and forró and axé and other dances I couldn't identify with great skill and blatant delight. Pickpockets being arrested. Couples snogging. Sellers of beer and guaraná yelling their wares. PiTOMMBa piTOMMBa beats coming from the sound systems. Gaudy transvestites. A group of girls standing on a bench and cheering. Music that scooped us up like a bulldozer and made it impossible not to grin wide as a fruit tree, and dance.
"How do you do this dance?" I asked a Brazilian. "You enjoy yourself", he answered.
I certainly enjoyed myself on this trip. The fact that I did is a tribute to the people I met. They're creating flowers from the rubbish dumps, and delicious fruit from an unfair land.
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