"Honey, I’m Home!"

An Essay About Time and Space

Dorothy would say that there’s no place like home.

How could she know? How is that sort of knowledge even possible? Rational beings like you and me would say she’d have to visit just about everywhere to be certain that there isn’t, at least yet, a place like home. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly a representative sample of all places — and we reach a dead end, since how much is enough for a sample to be representative says more about your standards than hers (I’m surprised there isn’t any Oscar Wilde’s quote that I could cite here. Was I supposed to come up with good epigrams too?). But there’s another way she could have learned how unique and extraordinary her “chez soi” was: travelling.

Travelling is motion. It is, at its core, the getting out of place. And it doesn’t take walking a mile on Dorothy’s glimmering red shoes to know that. Having moved to Brazil as a child, long before I knew the sense of belonging, I’ve realised that immigrants know there’s no place like home because they are, currently and constantly, in displacement. The moment you’re conscious that you’re going somewhere, that’s when you feel like being nowhere at all. And, eventually, that very nowhere attaches to us, just like a weird stain on that old backpack, waiting to be used again.

Settling down…

The thing about migrating is that, eventually, one establishes a new home. It may take what feels like an eternity and an immeasurable amount of suffering, just to find out it won’t ever be exactly like what you knew of home, but it will still be home. But I imagine that even those who never left their place under their mother’s wing (or skirt, in Brazilian idiom) expect this phenomenon.

Going back, for those who ever get this opportunity, truly feels like a punch in the stomach. This time, home won’t feel like home either — precisely because time has passed while you were gone. Oh, and all the things you missed while you were too busy to miss anything or anyone from back home. The tree in your old backyard grew so much, and you feel like a pruned branch. How could it be that we feel quite at home around people with whom we don’t even share maternal language, but also feel a little alien when in the land that bore us? Maybe the capacity of being sick from home and homesick at the same time isn’t a human exclusive trait. This was perfectly stressed by Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a transsexual immigrant from the distant planet of Transylvania, when claiming to go home: “Everywhere it’s been the same, feeling / Like I’m outside in the rain, wheeling / Free, to try and find a game, dealing / Cards for sorrow, cards for pain”.

And then you go back home. Not home, just home. You know, that place where you’ve been living long enough to finally get a considerable fraction of the jokes. Where you know someone, who knows someone who went to that wedding (in my case, that wedding where everybody got COVID-19 because they all took drugs from the same Ziplock). Where you have some young but ever-growing roots — probably limited by the small vase you bought because it was all you could fit in the room. In any case, you come back expecting a warm welcome.

But it doesn’t take much time to be reminded that you’ll never ever get that awkward verb conjugation completely right or that you will never ever understand the widespread nostalgia about local tv shows that went on air decades ago. Home fits you just like stockings, embraces you perfectly but is terribly itchy too — and it is a truth universally acknowledged how quickly stockings become worn out. Unless, of course, you outgrow them first.

…in Brazil.

“Nowhere else is worth my home” reads in a wooden board, hanging on Lucia’s door. Lucia has lived and aged in Morro do Vidigal, one of Rio de Janeiro’s most famous slums– due both its mesmerising view of the beach and its fascinating history. She has been pictured in a documentary in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the institutional recognition of her favela, as they’re informally called in Brazil.

The state of Rio de Janeiro alone has 2 million people living in favelas, two thirds of which became so attached to them that they wouldn’t move out even if their income doubled. But these subnormal agglomerations weren’t always pictured as home, in fact they often begin as temporary housing for newcomers. Since the 16th century, events such as the Portuguese colonisation, the absorption of a large fraction of the Atlantic slave trade and the population whitening migratory policies have made this country home for so many outsiders. But favela residents are most often moving — or being dragged– across Brazil.

Throughout the last century, as Brazil was transformed by industrialisation and demographic transition. Rural impoverished people were attracted by the opportunities of the urban areas, mainly in factories and in the construction sector. Having nowhere to live and being too poor to pay rent, they’ve built their own rudimentary houses in abandoned lots. Then, as time passed and the family grew, they’d simply build another floor right above the ceiling.

The ceiling is also what Criolo (probably Brazilian greatest living rapper, born in a slum in São Paulo) recalls when asked about his greatest childhood home memories. Not made of glass, but of truck load cover, bed frame and parts of a cooker, his fragile and opaque roof was limiting his growth. By the time he became a star, favelas had also expanded — and in 2017, they were home to 11.4 million people in Brazil.

Apart from the low living conditions in the houses, these people also suffer from lack of public goods. For instance, since illegal houses aren’t on the official maps, not even the correspondence gets to be delivered to their doors. Due to independent initiatives, such as “On the Map”, they are gradually gaining access to something as essential as a name: an address.

But housing regularisation isn’t an exclusive issue of the urban areas. Quilombolas, many of which live far away from the big cities, also seek a legally acknowledged and protected home. Their story dates back from the Brazilian Empire period, when of fugitive or freed slaves got together in communities called Quilombos. Some of them were born in colonised African countries and sold to European landowners in Brazil. Others were already second generation offshore, conceived by enslaved and raped women in Brazilian soil. Their descendants are up to today vindicating the land where they first established after escaping the senzalas (slave houses) or buying their own liberation.

However, among these disadvantaged people, there are some that get a more palpable idea of all they could have had, had they been born from a privileged family. It’s them who, according to Brazilian sociologist Roberto Da Matta, are the exception for the before-home-office no-work-at-home cultural rule: housemaids.

In 2019, about 6 million women left their homes early in the morning to take care of somebody else’s home. They are the ones who know where everything and anything goes in the house and are also often expected to contribute to the employee’s kids’ education. Some don’t leave until the weekend arrives, being considered almost as a family member, or more to be accurate, almost as a part of the house. Yes, almost. Every year, a tragic story reminds them to “feel at home, but remember you aren’t”.

I’d summarise by saying that Brazilians behave as if they were always at home. For instance, it’s common to use first names, nicknames or diminutives to refer to people outside of a close circle of friends and relatives — and this applies to everyone from waiters to professors.

But I hope I don’t give the impression of an egalitarian society, because it’s quite the contrary. If both the waiters and the professors mentioned were arrested for committing a crime, they probably wouldn’t be imprisoned together because here, university degree holders not only earn more than high school degree holders, they are also allowed to go to a special prison cell until they are effectively condemned. It’s a weird and complex society. As Da Matta would put it, Brazil is dual, and Brazilians choose to go right through the middle. And speaking of paths…

Unsettled Matters

When did Brazil go wrong? And most importantly, was it avoidable?

I’m not turning to Daron Acemoglu for answers because he already got our fate wrong once. Instead, I’ll recall a poem by Oswald de Andrade about what would have been different if the odds were in favor of the native indigenous people. Would they have undressed the newcomers, instead of having been worn up, down, off and out by them?

We can never know for sure — just like we can never know for sure what would have happened if we’d lost that bus, train or plane when migrating. Of course, such deviations from an intended path can have more than just temporary consequences. How long you carry forward a past stumble depends on how related your step steps from their predecessors. If they’re completely correlated, you’re actually just taking a random walk: every step is exactly like the one before and equally susceptible to be further disturbed. Allowing such obstacles to sum up indefinitely makes it quite impossible to ever overcome them and return to the initial route. Whether that’s bad news or not, depends on you: are you going somewhere or just going?

If you’re going somewhere, I’ll ask you to picture yourself next to Dorothy, standing right before a golden road to… anywhere, really. What if there were multiple roads, instead of just one? Which one would you take? Well, maybe they converge a few miles ahead — and, if we only care about the ends, the means are of no importance. In real life, even if we do care about the means too, we might be unable to accurately discern which path is which when making decisions — be it because we’re a bit short sighted, or simply because there are too many options.

If you’re just going, the problem would be opposite. What if there were ramifications just a few steps ahead? What if those multiple branches diverged even further? In diverging paths, one wrong choice stops you from ever arriving at the intended destination.

Either way, seems like an awful amount of choosing and even the homme economicus isn’t expected to think that much. But it is important to create artificial “what if” situations, even if just to make that you’ve chosen optimally. The metaphor was already taken, but the road was not: considering a counterfactual is crucial for making a rational decision.

With a little help from technology and creativity, this might be a feasible task. Do something as simple as looking out from somebody else’s porch on Window Swap so to picture yourself in a different life. Wander around an unknown place with Google Street View as if it was your neighbourhood. Get informed on the local news from a distant reality — which you also can by tuning in Streema, drive to your imaginary work in the early morning — a possible experience due to Drive & Listen — or just go over to a strangers’ house for a study session — by taking part in a Study With Me Live on YouTube. Let your imagination flow beyond this place you’ve got used to call home.

A tale as old as time

And so, Dorothy was right. This place is nothing like home. I’m not home right now and I’m not home when I go back to check on my relatives. Twenty years have passed since the last time I was home and time only seems to grow one way. No matter how much we humans know (and keep learning more) about the spatial and temporal dimension, it always feels like the first time when we realise, time and space really aren’t the same thing. Maybe there’s no place like home — and no real possibility of ever going back — because home was an event in time that won’t happen again no matter the physical space we occupy. It won’t ever happen again even if time, as a famous homeless doctor once proposed, was indeed a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

If you’re still in the nest, please don’t start thinking of ending things. You’re right in the eye of the hurricane and, lucky for you, a hurricane is made of motion. There might be speed, but there’s no hurry. You have all the time of the world, and I highly recommend beginning by doing some research on the past and the future. The probability of a precise situation happening once was already close to zero, so I don’t intend to reinforce the old “History repeats itself” cliché. But to inform ourselves about past times is to travel in our minds, and it might be what it takes to better understand the present.

History was mostly written by people who did exactly that. It was learning and writing about ancient Rome, that Pierre Corneille, a French author, stated “Rome is no longer in Rome, …” — which seems to describe greatness of the Empire, so large and powerful that one could feel its capital within all conquered territories. But the sentence goes on with “…, it is here where I am”. The way it has been translated, simply pronouncing the “R” as an “H”, as foreign speakers frequently do, would be elucidating enough.

A translator would know this better than anyone else. To be a translator is to be an immigrant too, it is to shift between worlds in the unconceivable speed of the blink of an eye. It is to have deep understanding and an admirable grasp of both the original and the translational idiom of the text. Ironically, I learned this reading an English version of Albert Camus’ “L’Étranger” — a short novel that has been published in English by the titles “The Outsider”, “The Stranger” and “The Foreigner”. I like imagining that each translator chose the title that fitted them best — their homeland is their language after all.

It is usual nowadays to finish essays with a “take home message”. But I would advise against going home after reading mine. I’m certain you can also find yourself a home wherever you go. Don’t forget to put a toothbrush in that old stained backpack!

The probability of obtaining a specific outcome out of a continuous distribution of possibilities is virtually zero. So, out of the continuum of time and space, or even better: out of the continuum of time and space of my existence — South America, 1999 until, at least, the very moment I type this, the odds of being here and now are practically non-existent. Therefore, I couldn’t but accept such an extraordinary opportunity to write. Thank you.

References

ANPED. Paraíso Tropical Vidigal. 2017. Available at: https://anped.org.br/video/paraiso-tropical-vidigal . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

MELLO, K. Com 2 milhões de moradores, favelas do Rio seriam 7ª maior cidade do país. 2014. Available at: http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2014/09/com-2-milhoes-de-moradores-favelas-do-rio-seriam-7-maior-cidade-do-pais.html . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

SCHWARCZ, F. d. S. G. L. M. DICIONÁRIO DA ESCRAVIDÃO E LIBERDADE. [S.l.]: Companhia das Letras, 2018.

HAAG, C. Lilia Schwarcz: Quase pretos, quase brancos. 2007. Available at: https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/quase-pretos-quase-brancos/ . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

IF NOT US THEN WHO? Quilombo land title struggle in Brazil. 2016. Available at: https://ifnotusthenwho.me/films/quilombo-land-title-struggle-brazil/. Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

AMORIM, D. Número de empregados domésticos no País bate recorde. 2020. Available at: https://economia.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,numero-de-empregados-domesticos-no-pais-bate-recorde,70003178662 Date of access: 20 sept. 2020

SGANZERIA, C. Criolo fala sobre as marcas do segregacionismo no Brasil: “Vivemos um apartheid escancarado”. 2018. Available at: https://revistamarieclaire.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2018/12/criolo-fala-sobre-marcas-do-segregacionismo-no-brasil-vivemos-um-apartheid-escancarado.html. Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

BELLO, L. Dia Nacional da Habitação: Brasil tem 11,4 milhões de pessoas vivendo em favelas. 2017. Available at: https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-noticias/2012-agencia-de-noticias/noticias/15700-dados-do-censo-2010-mostram-11-4-milhoes-de-pessoas-vivendo-em-favelas . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

AFROREGGAE. Tá no Mapa. 2016. Available at: https://www.afroreggae.org/on-the-map/ . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

RIBEIRO, D. Caso do menino Miguel Otávio é a síntese das relações desse país. 2020. Available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/djamila-ribeiro/2020/07/caso-do-menino-miguel-otavio-e-a-sintese-das-relacoes-desse-pais.shtml . Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.

EL PAíS — BRASIL. Presos com diploma, a elite carcerária do Brasil. 2017. Available at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/02/02/politica/1486060660_586514.html. Date of access: 20 sept. 2020.