Life and Jiu-Jitsu in Both Brazils
Revised February 2009
By Roberto Pedreira
I was wary when a light
skinned guy hanging around my table at the beachside caf・on Av. Atlantica
said "good morning"
to me, in English. I had a Krugans kimono and a
Machado kimono and didn't need to buy anything else, especially nothing
that could be found in a shop catering to gringo tourists. But as long as
he was there, I decided to find out what I could. Brazilians tend to be
pretty laid back about it even if you don't want what they are
offering, rather unlike Thais and Koreans in that regard. They are also very
aware of Brazil's problems and do not see the logic in denying the obvious
to foreign visitors. The good and bad points of Brazil are right there for
everyone to see.
I asked
Alexandre what was his name and if he had heard of the Gracie family. "But of
course, man・ he said.
Brazil
don't have so many winners; you win in Japan, we gonna know about it right
away." In fact, he said, the
guy he works with in his store practiced jiu-jitsu, has a black belt, and
knows Rickson Gracie personally. Ordinarily, I'd be doubtful. In Rio, it's
very possible.
Zoca
He was Zoca.
He had gone to the Anglo-American High School in Botafogo with Rickson.
Zoca
did know Rickson. Why not?
He knew everyone. Rio
is a small city and the jiu-jitsu community is a tight, dense one.
Everyone knows everyone else, even if they don't always know their
real names. Zoca's
real name
for example is Mario, but Rickson doesn't know that.
Like Rickson,
Zoca learned judo from George
Mehdi in Ipanema during the early 80's. They all wanted to learn judo so
they could compete in judo tournaments, Zoca said. The jiu-jitsu guys
wanted something more stimulating to do than drilling defenses for attacks
that probably would never happen. Rolling was always a feature of jiu-jitsu training, as far back as
anyone I talked with could remember (although I didn't
specifically ask
Alvaro Barreto, who has been in the art for 40 years, or Mehdi either, who
had trained at Helio and Carlos・academy on Rio
Branco for three years from 1949). In any case, organized jiu-jitsu
sport was still a long way off in the future. He agreed with everyone else
I talked to that Mehdi was a very tough guy--everyone was afraid of him, I
was told several times but also that he was virtually a human encyclopedia
of submission techniques (Mehdi told me he had learned the techniques in
Japan during the early 50's). Was it possible that many, possibly even most
of the jiu-jitsu techniques used by the Gracies and their students were
introduced by guys who learned them from Mehdi, I asked Zoca. "Very
possible" he said.
Zoca agreed with many others who don't
teach jiu-jitsu professionally that the boom has been a mixed blessing.
Some tough guy learns a few techniques, suddenly thinks he's
the king of
the beach, starts teaching kids out in the suburbs, they start getting
into fights on the street. That's not good "Sure, everyone wants to test
himself, see if he can do the techniques he knows, but you should do it in
the dojo with an opponent who is prepared and willing to do the same.
Attacking some naive guy in the street doesn't
prove nothing, man."
He didn't
exactly blame anyone, but the names of Carlson's fighters came up time and
again. Sure, Fernando Pinduka was a heroi of the ringue but
he has an evil character・ Why? "
He likes to spank people"
(Espancar is the Portuguese word
for beat up on・ the Brazilians usually translate it as spank. The
successes of jiu-jitsu fighters in vale tudos made jiu-jitsu popular, but
it isn't good for young kids to try to emulate guys like this.
Brazil got
enough problems already" he said.
Zoca earned
an MBA in New York and worked for Merrill-Lynch in the City before
returning to Rio. He spoke
English fluently and had a lot to say about Brazil's economic and related
social problems.
Poor People
The
principle problem is that there are too many poor people. They are poor
because of when and where they were born, and it doesn't help that
politicians and other rich corrupt people try to grab what little they do
have or can get. When money is allocated for something like an irrigation
project up in the [impoverished] northeast, the poor people don't
benefit,
because the rich landowners siphon off the funds, figuratively, and
sometimes the water too, literally. What's to stop them? If you have money
in Brazil, you can get away with anything, including murder. Your lawyer
will keep the case tied up in court forever, until anyone who cares about
it gives up, or forgets--or disappears. Or you can pay off the police in the
first place. In fact, you can hire them to do the hit for you. "It sounds cynical" he said, "But
it's true・
Sometimes the
police proact rather than react to criminal trends. They simply kill
people, usually street kids, who they think might someday be a problem. Of
course, they are right. These kids probably will be a problem. How else
will they live? [Tobias
Hecht argues that the police are no longer busy killing street kids.
Street kids do get killed in extraordinarily high numbers, but they are
usually killed by other street kids, sometimes with a little indirect help
from the police]. The police also periodically sweep through the
favelas in search of drug lords. Invariably, the newspapers the
next day run photos of sheet covered corpses laid out in the street. The
drug dealers generally are lucky enough, smart enough, or well connected
enough not be among them. The
police don't mind that. Whoever got killed probably committed some crime,
some time in the past, and if they didn't yet, they would in the future,
given half a chance. It all evens out.
According to people who have been there, most favelas are actually fairly safe places to be, except when the police show up.
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Favela, seen from window of Corpo Quatro |
The poor
people may not have much, but they don't
seem miserable, I said. The
average favela dweller in Rio's
South Zone has a quality of life
better than the average middle-class person in Tokyo, in many regards, it
seemed to me. I see more
miserable looking people in one day in Japan than I saw in 32 weeks in
Brazil.
"Maybe in the South Zone, but not in most of the rest of Brasil"
he
said. The poor folks live crowded in flimsy shacks crammed together in
favelas because it doesn't
cost much to live in a favela.
They can't
afford better because they don't
have money because
they can't
get good paying jobs because they don't
have enough education and
they can't
get enough education because their schools are
"shit."
Zoca and
Alexandre, who had joined the discussion, estimated that public school
teachers earn between 300-500 reais per month, while private school
teachers, like the ones who taught Zoca and Rickson at the Anglo-American
school, make 1,800-2,000 reais. "You think a good teacher is going
to teach in a favela school if she can teach in a private
school?" Zoca asked rhetorically.
He drew a diagram and commented, "Brazil is two countries. One is
small and rich and white and the other is large and poor and dark." Zoca wasn't
the first person to
make this observation. He certainly won't
be the last. Brazil's
impoverished majority will
cease to be poor, according to some analysts, when Brazil's
rich people
voluntarily give up their monopoly on the nation's
wealth. That wouldn't
be easy to do, even
if they wanted to do it.
According to others, if this improbable event ever did occur, it
would simply make every Brazilian poor, and the poor
people, paradoxically, even poorer than they are now, and probably unhappier
too.
Bleak Outlook
Like most other Brazilians, Zoca almost seemed to enjoy painting a bleak picture of Brazil's socioeconomic landscape. He seemed credible enough, but can a rich person really know what a poor person's life is like? Maybe, if he was once poor too, but as Zoca admitted, getting rich is a fantasy more than a possibility. Young guys think they can make it as a futebol hero, without realizing that even for the few who can boot a ball well enough to earn a spot on one of the teams, the average futebol player makes less than 1,000 reais per month. That isn't bad, but it isn't a lot either, and the career of most futebol players is brief. The best jobs available to most young black males are stealing cars, selling drugs, and "sequestering" (kidnapping) rich people. "It takes real organizational ability to pull off a successful sequestrão," Zoca said. Some of these guys could do well in the legitimate business world, given a chance. But then, who needs competition?
Brazil is a
racial democracy, it is often said. And like many other things that are
often said in Brazil, no one takes it very seriously. About the only
thing you can say about Brazil's race problems are that they are different
from America's, but primarily because Brazil and its history are different
from America and its history. Brazilians tend to view race (raça) as
a matter of color, and subtle variations in shades of color, rather than
ethnicity or genetic inheritance. (They also pay attention to the
curliness of hair and thickness of lips). In theory it makes a difference.
In practice, the difference is small. In America, "blacks" as a group have
less than "whites." In Brazil, darker people as a group have less than
lighter people.
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Homeless people, discussed below |
A Familia sem Teto
A "family" of homeless Brazilians, recently arrived from Bahia, had decided to camp out beneath my second floor window at No. 23 Rua Raul Pompeia They were there every night for two weeks. I gave them a few reais when I went in for the night, some spare shirts on cooler nights, and some bread or fruit or water when I had extra. I had brought four inexpensive diatonic harmonicas from Japan to give away. The American blues man Junior Wells reportedly avoided the statistically typical life of a young male in America's inner cities by the accident of having been given a harmonica by a sympathetic judge (Junior had been nabbed trying to steal enough to buy one.) I envisioned my homeless neighbors down below forming a band and earning an honest income playing samba melodies on a beach or street corner. They were fascinated by the sound of the harmonica when I played some Little Walter riffs from Juke and Off the Wall. I gave them the four harmonicas. They squabbled over them and then spent about ten minutes blowing into them and then lost interest (like most people everywhere who try to learn to play any musical instrument).
Eventually
they began to feel too much at home, staying up late partying and
bickering over one thing or another. Other homeless people would wander
over to visit, some with bottles of cachaça, and once in a while one
or two of the better-off local neighborhood kids too, who seemed to prefer
rags soaked in paint thinner. One night, someone poured a bucket of water
on them from one of the apartments above mine. The next day they relocated
a few blocks toward Ipanema, in front of the Zona Sul supermarket
Residents
don't
want to be too inconvenienced, but they are not unsympathetic and
sometimes offer boxes full of clothes or food to people who look homeless.
(They usually drive over to a different neighborhood to do it, undoubtedly
to avoid providing incentives for the established homeless to stay, and
new homeless to come, to their own neighborhoods.) Maybe they are
disposing of things they don't want or need anymore, but still, it helps.
And no one who stands on the sidewalk long enough with a hand extended
will fail to collect enough money to buy enough food to sustain life.
"Bananas are cheap", as someone explained. Brazilians are realistic. They
don't believe anyone can accomplish anything they want to if only they set
their minds to it. Some things are not under human control. Poor people
are poor because of the accident of who their parents were, which was
determined by Deus, not by anything they themselves did or didn't
do, could have done, or can do. It's
just the way it is. Poor people aren't
poor because of character flaws (such as laziness or inability to delay
gratification) or because they did something wrong in a previous life.
They don't deserve to be poor. They simply are.
The Answer
Zoca thought
he had the answer: "More education." Of course, that requires better facilities and teachers, which
costs money. Where will the money come from? The poor people don't
have it,
obviously. The answer
was also obvious. Since the poor people can't pay, the rich people have
to. Since the problem and the
solution were both obvious, why hasn't the solution been implemented, and
the problem thereby solved? Because, he explained, although the rich
Brazilians pay heavy taxes, the money goes to other rich Brazilians, or
back into their own pockets in the form of subsidies and rents. Very
little of it helps the 87-90 percent of Brazil's 164 million people who
need the help. I couldn't doubt that tax cheating and political
corruption don稚 do a lot to help Brazil's
poor people. But I wondered if
spending a lot of money on education would accomplish much more than
producing larger numbers of well-educated unemployed people, who maybe
wouldn't be satisfied with the beach, carnival, samba, nice weather and
beautiful views of the city.
Zoca still
trained, but no longer competed. "Competing is good, but it isn7t
everything. Everybody don't need to do it." Typically, he invited me to
train. We were not anywhere near an academy at the time, but it reflected
a certain point of view.
Jiu-Jitsu guys assume that if you are interested in jiu-jitsu, you
want to roll. To them, jiu-jitsu without rolling isn't jiu-jitsu. And that's precisely why, as
someone once said, jiu-jitsu still reigns.
Recommended Reading: At Home in the Streets (1998), by Tobias Hecht, published by Cambridge University Press. About homeless street kids in Recife (in the Northeast), rather than Rio, but the story is basically about the same.
A Arte Suave index
GTR index
(c) 2000-2009, R. A. Pedreira. All rights reserved.
Revised February 2009