Feeling the carnival heat

One of the unique-est things about Brazil is that they have a huge home-grown music industry that’s virtually unknown elsewhere. Most regions have their own distinctive music; Rio has samba, obviously, the north has forró, Recife has frevo and Salvador has axê and the second biggest carnival after Rio. Carnaval in Rio has its famous samba schools, while Carnaval in Salvador has the ‘trios elétricos’ – several megawatts of volume on wheels, with the band perched on top and accompanied word-perfect by tens of thousands of people.

Because that’s the effect of having an all-Brazilian hit parade; it means that Carnaval here is the equivalent of Madonna, Robbie Williams, and dozens of stars with talent doing a free five-day concert of all the tunes the country’s been humming for weeks. The middle-class teenagers sing along to the radio in their air-conditioned cars; the favela kids bang out the rhythms on the sides of the buses, and the street vendors blast them out from carts all day every day, mostly right outside my flat. So far I’ve only managed to distinguish one word of this year’s big tune, which is repeating itself over and over in my head as I type, making me want to punch myself in the brain.

Anyway. On Sunday, Ivete Sangalo, one of the biggest names, came to Recife along with a few other trios elétricos, with the result that the entire population of the city turned out along the 10km or so of beachfront avenue. Any excuse for carnival-type shenanigans, these Brazilians.
I was a spectator for this one, not having my partner in crime M2 to brave the streets with me, and we piled beer into cooler boxes and made for the raised terrace of Meire’s rich parents’ seafront apartment. There are advantages to being slightly above the crowds and able to see what’s happening, although I’d still rather get down and stuck in among the sweating hordes. When the whole seething mass of street suddenly starts heaving and bouncing simultaneously as the best tunes come on, your heart skips a beat just watching. Down among them, you can’t help but catch the frenzy of shirts whirling round heads and friends spinning round each other, and it’s one of the best feelings I know.

This not being Carnaval proper, there was loads of time in between the floats to people-watch and chat and try and explain to curious Brazilians what I’m talking about above; namely, the cultural (and weather-based) differences why we don’t have anything in England that unites the country like Carnaval. This is one of the reasons why the crowds fascinate me so much; the way whole families are there from baby to grandma, who tells pastel two-pieces to toma no culo and lets everything hang out instead.

This means that for every colt-legged chica wearing a hanky's worth of Lycra, there’s what Aline describes as a ‘horrorosa’, which doesn’t need translating and makes me laugh. And everyone dances, badly or well; as with the clothes, the less naturally blessed are a source of solidarity, and the talented and beautiful are a joy to watch.

All of a sudden, there's a rush to the balcony to watch as people surge through the crowd below like ripples on a pond, running outwards from the epicentre of a fight. Two seconds later a single file of police, brutal but effective, shoulders everyone out the way to get through to the trouble. The speed at which they take the offenders into custody gives a new meaning to the term summary justice. It seems pointless calling them ‘suspects’; judging by the cheers and whistles from the crowd as the officers punch and slap their prey into the vans, it appears that the case is done and dusted-up already.

A couple of niggling thoughts; how can they be so sure they’ve got the right men, and if they’re so happy elbowing each other out of the way to kick and beat them in front of the crowd, what the hell will happen to the poor buggers when they get them to the station? As always, I’m torn between the diffidence of imperialist guilt*, and the conviction that respect for human rights is the only thing that differentiates the civilised from the barbarism they claim to be fighting. Predictably, the only solution that currently offers itself to this conundrum is to have another beer.




* Although, yet another thing to love about South America is that it wasn’t we gringos who murderously colonised and viciously exploited this particular perfectly-OK-before-we-came-along paradise. The Littlewoods-sized catalogue of atrocities that occurred here were entirely perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese. In your face, Iberians.