Portugal Rio Douro

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We woke up at 6 am so as not to run the risk of being too typically Brazilian (meaning: always late). We were to meet Jorge, the owner of the restaurant that has delighted us in the last few days. He invited us for a day-off up the River Douro to visit the vineyard country, the real home of Porto wine (among other very fine wines, of course).

We arrived before 9 at the station, amazed with our own punctuality. I wonder how Swiss Edu has become, and how British I have. I guess that in my case it comes from my Grandma who is always ahead of time; nothing annoys her more than letting people wait for her.

Jorge came punctually, too, and laid down his plans for the day. He was not able to arrange something with a specific Quinta (a little farm) whose wine he usually buys for his restaurant. But we should take the train all the way to Pinhão anyway, and see what we could manage from there.

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So we set off, with no plans at all. We didn’t mind, we had already spent an evening with Jorge, he had told us that he was just back from 8 months traveling in India and Thailand; that he is married to a Brazilian and had visited Brazil several times. As Edu put it, after a certain time traveling the world we no longer travel places but rather people. Friends set the routes, people to reencounter define the way. That’s why we didn’t mind whatever we would do in the day, the real gift was knowing more about Jorge, telling him about us, striking a friendship, a bond, for new travels in the future.

It was anyway a beautiful train journey following the Rio Douro. We talked about life, economics (the Portuguese government is at the verge of total collapse), the situation of Brazil and Portugal, in some ways so similar. We share a very dumb political culture and a whole set of wrong models.  Jorge: “Brazil is trying to change things, to educate the people with laws, top-down, but this is no evolution, no education, it’s simply imposition.”

In Brazil there are also many jokes with the Portuguese in the uncomfortable role of the dumb ass. Much like the Belgians for the French, Austrians for Germans etc. We talked about that, too, wondering if there was some kind of mutual perception that led us to it, apart from simple prejudice or an atavic anticolonial feeling. I thought at first that maybe  people here were way more literal when in a conversation, i.e., not developing much beyond what was asked. In a brief research in my mind I realised this seemed to be the case everywhere. In every single place I have been, there are always some people who anticipate problems and offer different answers, while some other people are just plain literal. Anyway I just felt ashamed by the thousands of jokes I have heard in Brazil.

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And then we reached Pinhão, and we walked under a blasting sun until Jorge made some magic and arranged a private journey for the 3 of us. We ended up taking a boat down river Douro. Valdemar, the sailor, a man in his 50s who had never been to school, tells me that he feels very sad for his 13-year-old son when he sees him spending his whole time in front of a computer. He’s missing the world, he says. He puts himself in a compartment where all he chooses is similarity. Valdemar then told me about the fossils and cave paintings that were found in the region and that had put many historical theories in check. And then he told me how he loved the river, and most of all meeting people. I asked him who where the people that most intrigues him, he said it is the Israelis.

Holy Jesus, I thought… no, not here…! Could it possibly be that even in a boat in north Portugal I would have another round of Palestine/Israel discussions with a boat man who had not been too much in school? But I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask why.

“They are very friendly, you know, but there is a sadness that they all seem to carry. I don’t know where it comes from. I noticed this sadness once in a family I first met, it was present in every member. I first thought the family had some kind of terrible story in their life, but then I met other Israelis and the same sadness was there. It is not explicit, in the open… it’s just some kind of saddness mixed with fear in their heart.”

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The talk didn’t go further, though. Before I could ask more, Jorge called me to see the wine terraces and the topography of the area. Green terraces, old manor houses, it seems people here are self suficient and they plant and grow all they eat.

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We eventually reached our destination about an hour later. A friendly Portuguese lady took us to Quinta Nova, a vineyard owned by one of the richest families in Portugal (Amorim) that also has a restaurant and hotel. We had the most amazing food; a special fig dish started the feast, which was flooded by wonderful wine and ended with an orange pudding and, of course, Porto wine.

If that had not been enough, we were still offered to enjoy the swimming pool. It lays on the same level as the vine terraces in a fake horizon, and the sun was inclement. We swam, laughed and talked while contemplating the vineyards and the Rio Douro all the way down.

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I was so thankful to Jorge that I could not even explain. He told that it was not common to invite strangers like this to go out and spend the day together on their free day. “The Portuguese are reserved people, and I was afraid I scared you off, but then, we had connected so much.”

what we saw from the pool…

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It is true. O Caçula, Jorge’s restaurant, is a jewel we found by total chance. I had never imagined we would make a friend in Porto in such a short visit.

And now, as Edu is packing his bags to go to Switzerland and I make my way to Lisbon I feel my heart tighten. But it is ok. I have felt that before, it is that painful feeling that anticipates Saudade.

And it is also the feeling you often get when you are in the right track. When you know in every cell of your bone that your departure affects you and the others you are leaving, and that you will always think back at that time with joy and happiness; the pain comes from  our inablity to accept that we must keep walking just a few more steps till you re-encounter those you once left.

Love,

Jules

The Fado, Saudade and Joy, in Porto, Portugal

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Cidao 1

Porto is slowly becoming my favorite place in Europe. I just feel so happy now, so in place, the days have been so sunny with breezes, the skies soo blue and next to me is Edu, someone who fully understands me and my whole journey. Someday I will tell you more about Edu… some of you have met him now, but he entered my life after all that had to collapse had collapsed, after I got rid of all the loose ends I had to close. He saved me from my most violent epilectic fit in Brazil. And he entered my life in my own house, meeting right on the first day my dearest friends, and then my closest family. He met my grandmother. And then he edited my book as much as he could. So if you are astonished why some of my emails reach you without mispeelings and other mistakes, it is always an indication that he is with me. And let’s hope this will be forever 🙂

 

Ok, I was not supposed to to write that much but my life has been like that… of being so exposed and explicit. and while my previous emails were called Around the World, this now is called Being in the World. I am tired of being slightly off worlds. Because my old desire to see people and cultures has not died in the hospital, what has died is my fear to be in the world and face it. I am here. And I am happy to be.

AAAAA

I received so many lovely messages that moved me enormously, also from people I had not heard of in ages. One in particular was from a friend I met in India in 2008 and we never talked again. She wrote to say she had always read me. It is a very deep and personal email that flooded me with joy and a desire to share my joy.

 

Here in Porto the people are wonderful. And now that I feel more in place I am able to hear people properly. And since Edu is like me and loves to listen to people, and is just as interested in others as I am, we do very little and yet it feels like we know this place since forever. From within.

 

We made a friend, Jorge, who owns a very special restaurant that saved us from starvation when the internet suggestions failed. We were searching for a specific restaurant that we couldn’t find and Zé Pedro, the waiter at Jorge’s restaurant, got out of his way to show us the other place, which was closed. We decided to walk all the way back because his friendliness deserved to be rewarded. We hadn’t even seen the menu, but ok.

 

It was the best decision we could have taken. Not only the food was superbe, but Jorge, who we did not yet knew was the owner, told us about his love for Porto, that he had been recently to Brazil, and he gave us an address of a place where we could listen to some fado. “It is not a concert hall, it is apparently a place where the locals sing”, he said.

 

So the day after we decided to see the place. We took another friendly cab driver who at first just murmured hello but as he got closer he began to shout to people on the street and I made a comment of how popular he seemed to be there. “Of course”, he said, “I AM from this neighbouhood!”

 

And then we arrived at the place. As I saw it in front of me I thought this is the BAR DO CIDAO in Porto!!!

Cidao porto

 

It was completely packed with old people, but not just. Listening to an old man singing fado, I was taken aback: the whole little cafe stood in silence while the man sang, some heads swang to the rhythm, some mouths followed the lyrics. There was no place to sit, and nothing really proper to eat. I imediatelly started to cry (of joy, even though I was hungry as a dog).

Fado here:

 

And then suddenly the owner, a lady with the strongest and most authoritarian voice in the precinct, would scream in between songs like a school teacher demanding total silence.

 

But the noise came from outside. Inside everybody stood sill listening and drinking wine, and beer and eating all kinds of fried food.

Velhinho e eu

During the breaks I could talk to the old men, all fado experts. One of them told me that if I wanted to listen to professional fado I should go somewehere else. When I asked about where I could find genuine hearty fado, he told me I could not find a better place than there, the Adega do Douro. He gave us a chair (a real treat in a place packed like that) and told me that the fado is played in only a few keys. A singer would come to the “stage” and give only the key to the guitar players and tell them what kind of Fado they wanted to sing (fado, fado canção, fado humoristico etc).

Edu Porto

 

But the main idea is that people write their verses (“quadras” or “sextrilhos”) at home and then come and sing. As I sat there, I kept imagining how much of this tradition was actually mixed to Brazilian choro. Choro is a kind of Brazilian jazz mixed with African rhythms like lundu. I thought, as i heard one song after the other, of how Portuguese Brazil is in its emotion, in its fundamental connection to the feeling of “saudade”.

 

The best explanation I ever read of the word “saudade” is a nostalgic feeling of the past in the hope to relive it in the future. I believe people all over the world feel saudade in one way or another (Brazilians say there is no translation, but Edu tells me the Germans have a word for it, Sehnsucht… and in English it is something very close to “longing”… ), but hearing the Fado yesterday I knew that so much of our Choro (which means “weeping”) comes from this longing. This romatinc longing for experience, for something actually lived, and not for ideas or ideals.

 

I sat in this lillte cafe feeling i was the luckiest person on earth not only because once again I had found the way to the heart of a particular culture, but also because I was not alone. For the first time in my life, I had next to me someone who could see that as well.

 

And so I made these videos to share with you what the real fado feels like.

 

Eventually we left the Fado to go back to Jorge’s restaurant (O Caçula) and then we spent the whole night talking to him, and in the end he offered to take us tomorrow to see where the real Porto wine, and his family, come from.

 

So, Fado is sad, is funny, is longing. Above all it is social interaction, it happens when people come together to tell each other what is happening in their lives and their deepest hearts.

 

If I wrote a fado today, it would long for all the people I met on the road, I feel saudade for all of you who are in this list. But my fado would also carry the joy and hope to see you again somewhere IN the world.

 

And as Fado can also be funny here it is the Fado Humoristico

My First Interview- Mosaic the Path In Between

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Dear friends as I keep getting questions about people who cant get my book. And I def want that all of you who want to are able to read it.. Here it goes:

1. It is only available online now…
2. You can buy it in any amazon in any country you are!!!!.
The link i put was the one local to the UK but you can find it in any amazon inthe world 🙂
3. You do not need to have a kindle to read it.
You can download the application of kindle for ipads, smart phones, computers for free
Here for downloading kindke app
The book is called
Mosaic the Path in Between
You can get it in any amazon!
This is the link to the UK one,
 if uou are not in the UK go to the site of amazon in your country and search for the book with the title
Mosaic, the path in betweev
If you have any problem let me kbow!  🙂 and if you are reading .. Please let ne know about it!!
Love Jules in Rome in ny way back to Asia 🙂

INTERVIEW – JULIETA FALAVINA, AUTHOR “MOSAIC, THE PATH IN BETWEEN”

by Eduardo Simantob, (Journalist, Zurich – Switzerland)

1. You have been to a few hotspots in the world (Kashmir, Palestine). How is it to travel in places like this, being a woman?

JF – People ask me this quite often, but I had to pass by a certain psychological “preparation”. I used to fear going to a place as charged as Palestine, but there was a situation I lived once in Paris, in a very dodgy neighborhood, where I was faced with a very hostile encounter with a young Algerian in the street at night. But eventually we had a very interesting exchange, and the estrangement and hostility turned into empathy and understanding. Suddenly I felt I was ready. That night I felt I could go anywhere. Palestine, Kashmir, slums in Brazil, any conflict zone.

In all of these places I was welcomed. Not because I was parading as a savior, simply because I was just plain human. People know it, they can feel it. When you try to be respectful people act accordingly. More often than not my Palestinian and Kashmiri friends were intrigued by what they called “my goodness”. They usually took me in, and often told me I had to be very careful in the next village. Once I left them I should pay more attention, not all people are as nice as they were, they would say. I guess this deep fear of the unknown is a common thing everywhere. And though I know most of my friends shiver just to think of me talking openly to strangers…. I can’t avoid it. I find the risk of dying or being hurt really less scary than the reality of not knowing the other.

2. How does the fact of being a Brazilian woman affect the access to the people, and to the stories you tell?

JF – Being a woman makes it harder and easier at the same time, though I don’t know how it is to be a man. But being a woman makes it possible to be anywhere in a more gentle way. All people I met had mothers; some had sisters, and daughters. Whenever people were aggressive I usually asked about their family. I never felt scared for being a woman anywhere. Fortunately it has been so long that I do not feel harassed that I barely know how I react to this. I usually talk back to people. And they get puzzled, and eventually start telling me their stories. Or else, when they could not talk to me, they would offer sweets in a bus, or a smile… I really cannot think of a time when I felt really scared.

Being Brazilian also makes a huge difference. I did not notice it immediately… but soon enough I realized that by the fact that Brazil is mainly known for football and carnival, it made people relate to me very differently. Not having a history of being a colonial power, or an imperial power (although in Latin America this perception is a bit different) often allowed me to ask whatever I wanted. Having been born in Brazil also prepared me to the idea of syncretism and to accept difference, in spite of all economic problems arising from the enormous inequality that exists there. We usually boast how we are used to difference, but it took me a long time to feel at home in Brazil again. And if there is one thing I do admire from where I come from is the usual acceptance people have towards difference. And of course, the proverbial optimism and joy. Being Brazilian allowed me to always laugh and to be emotional at things. Seeing difference was the norm in my life rather than the exception. So people often ask me about football players or Carnival, which are happy events. It makes my journeys significantly easier.

3. You avoided taking sides when describing the conflict zones you travel through, and keep the politics in the back. But how could you describe yourself, politically?

JF – My book came out of a series of emails I sent to people to explain the place I was in. I was, and still am, more interested in people than in the political reality of a place. I studied international politics and social sciences, so I was not unaware of the political facts on the ground. But I felt misinformed by it. I find it very important to know the history of a place, yet what always moves me are personal stories. And the more I wrote about them the more I realized how similar we are in the world.

As an anthropologist I always defended the plurality of the world. I wanted to cherish the languages, the cultural manifestations, and as a student of psychology I also always felt we were exactly the same everywhere. It did not matter even whether I spoke the language of the place, soon enough I could grasp what was going on.

The reason I never write that much about politics in my e- mails is because politics permeate the world where we live, but if we focus too much on it we are taken by ideas and lose touch with the human aspect.

I don’t even classify myself politically anymore. I am interested in people, but without ever losing the notion that we are the same in diversity. It is tricky when you think of borders, that on one hand they should  preserve differences, and yet, on the other we should  not allow them to fully separate us  from the other.

4. And spiritually?

JF – Brazil is a very syncretic country. I was born in a Catholic family who is not practicing and that doesn’t attend church. As a child I believed in nothing, and had no affiliation to any specific religion. As soon as I could define myself as something, I would say I was an agnostic. Later, following the trends of the time I became a fundamentalist atheist. Until I met a friend who is deeply involved into religious studies, and asked him whether he was a “believer”.

He said, “I guess I am a believer trapped in the body of an atheist”. To what I replied, “I guess I am an atheist in the body of a believer.” We became very good friends ever since. I believe both of us relieved our atheist parts somewhere along the path. I have always felt both.  Sometimes a believer trapped in an atheist body, sometimes an atheist trapped in a believer body. Never were the two in the same place at the same time. Till the day I stopped trying to be that coherent. Nowadays I am very interested in religious beliefs, but my biggest religious practice has to do with compassion. A value I learned to understand better with Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”, and that I see in almost all religious manifestations in the world.

5. What is the meaning of the “path in between”?

JF – I wanted to call my book ‘In-betweeners’ because I always felt we were trapped in between worlds, ideas etc. But something that happened in Brazil made me realize that we do not have to choose all the time. We do not have to be perfect. We have to make a Mosaic. Mosaic is a celebration of art. It is a celebration of what is made by hand, the art of the possible. Taking things that were broken and making something better with them. Something beautiful. And celebrating what is most human: living the symbolic.

Art is for me the best manifestation of humanity. And a mosaic is a form of art that leaves the idea of perfection (in disruption) aside. A mosaic is beautiful because it is made of pieces. We are all made of pieces.

What matters is the journey, not where we come from or where we end. This movement to go back is a search for belonging and we belong both to the All and to a specific thing. We must go back to realize that we are inheritors of all the joy and pain that exists.

The middle path is a Taoist idea, a Chinese concept. But it is something beyond that I wanted to bring, because it has nothing to do with being in the middle as being “right”, “correct”, but of being really in between things, conflicts, ideas. It contains the idea of the middle from Buddhism. But not a perfect middle.Just in between, in what humans are; in this human experience we can make a mosaic.

But this is just one narrative. There are others and they should all be heard. Because it is only in hearing the other that we find our own voice. And I have finally found mine.

6. What was your plan when you started to write your blog, and how did it change in the course of your travels?

JF – My book is in fact a series of emails I started to write to my friends when I first went to volunteer in Asia.

As soon as I started asking people whether what I wrote about them was ok, they told me they wanted to be part of my list to know about the other people I met. Soon many of the people I had met were reading my stories somewhere else. This has fundamentally changed the way I wrote because all that I saw I wanted to share with people I had left on the journey. So my emails were always an attempt to share with others what I saw.

Once I started going back to places, my writing changed again. I remember a class I attended at the LSE where Professor Fuller explained how his experience with the people he researched made him much more accurate.

“When you write about people in Tuvalu and they do not read you, you can say anything. Now when you talk about Indian Brahmins and they will read you and be in your audience, you have to be more careful”.

I often thought of those words when I wrote about Palestinians and Israelis. I always knew they would read it. I needed to be as accurate as I could. That is why, when I published my book and I asked people whether I could write about them, they said yes. Not only they knew me, but they had read me. They knew what I wrote was what they had told me.

7. Did you change much of your writings when transcribing your blog to the book? Is the voice you found in the book the same as the one in the blog?

JF – Most of my writing is exactly as it was. The only corrections were made by my editors for most of these emails were typed from my I-Phone or I-Pad, and I simply never edit anything. I don’t know how to, and was always on the go.

8. Do you think that your experience as an anthropologist is more an advantage or a hindrance to your sensibility?

JF – I actually am not sure. I believe I was born an anthropologist because of my interest in the other. In the beginning I used social theories, political theory, cognitive theory to attempt to understand life. Then this was all thrashed. I guess I took from anthropology the admiration for a plural world, and from cognition an interest in the things that connect people. From my Professors Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch I learned that what people say and what people think can be fundamentally different. Maybe from my whole time in academic life this is the most important lesson I have learned. What people say usually has to do with society, now what people feel and think…. that is way harder to tap into scientifically.

9. You studied music and have composed quite a few songs. Is your music some kind of link to Brazil, or do you feel it more in tune with your international experience?

JF – Well, I started to compose when I was a child. I used to feel that Brazilian music touched my soul while other music travelled to other places in my body. Nowadays I do not feel that anymore. I remember hearing Klezmer in Brazil and feeling I was a nomad. Music connects me to my body, and that is where home is to me.

10. Do you still feel like writing songs?

JF – I am not sure. Since it is quite hard for me to sing now, because of a health issue, it is difficult to say. I love playing with a French musician called GaspardDeloison, a very talented boy I met in Asia. Gaspard has the ability to transform what he hears in something more beautiful. He is so humble that he can’t see it. If I ever were to record a cd it would have to be with him. Yet I prefer nowadays to just play the piano (which I can’t actually play).

“Mosaic, The Path in Between” can be purchased for kindle. You do not need to have a Kindle to read it.  If you do not have kindle you may download a kindle app for free on your phone, Ipads, or computers.

For Kindle here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CSAJHP4/ref=r_soa_w_d

MOSAIC, THE PATH IN BETWEEN

SYNOPSIS

“Mosaic” is the journey of a woman who always

felt lost, but who never feared the Other, and went after It. It is the journey of a woman coming of age while trying to understand boundaries as well as her roots

in search of a sense of home. It is a human journey through her body and with a soul open to

record the so many voices that helped her finally find her own. The voices of Thais, Palestinians, Israelis, Tibetans, Europeans

and so many others, calling for a gentler world, a world in which all of us feel less alone.

The book does not follow a strict chronological order. Instead, it delves on an inner path. Mosaic starts with an old self of the author, still naïve but at the same time quite skeptical of faiths, dogmas and deep-rooted beliefs, leaving a precocious and short- lived marriage to do voluntary work in a school in Thailand. It is a seemingly harmless world, and her travels then also follow no plan or any specific curiosity, until she decides to focus her PhD in a research about how Israelis and Palestinians perceive and act upon the very idea of peace. Suddenly the individual stories and the humanity of the people she meets become much more interesting than any academic work. The PhD will eventually be dropped, but the trip will rage on up to the limits of physical endurance, as she is faced with odd health issues, the proximity of death and a reassessment of spirituality. She starts to realize that “home” transcends geography; it is made by people, by love, by managing to conciliate her roots with the antennae that connect her to the wider world.

The book also includes original illustrations done by artists Thomaz Bondioli (São Paulo/Amsterdam),Valérie Ciriadès (São Paulo/Belgium), Sandra Naxara(São Paulo) and Mounia Dadi (Marrakesh). Original graphic design made by Gustavo Soares (Rio de Janeiro).

“Mosaic, The Path in Between” can be purchased for kindle. You do not need to have a Kindle to read it.  If you do not have kindle you may download a kindle app for free on your phone, Ipads, or computers.

For Kindle here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CSAJHP4/ref=r_soa_w_d

Mosaic, The Path in Between

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julieta Falavina (1981) was born in São Paulo, Brazil, but attended French schools in order to follow a constant curriculum while following her parents’ errands. At the age of 19 she won a Fulbright scholarship and graduated in Music and Anthropology at Hofstra University (New York), later continuing her studies at University of Amsterdam (Social Sciences & Conflict Resolution) and finally settling at the London School of Economics, where she completed her Masters in Cognitive Anthropology

and started the PhD program. She was also teaching assistant at Birkbeck College and University of East London in Political Approaches to Social Conflict (2011).

Julieta’s nomadic life started at a tender age, having lived in Buenos Aires and in South Australia still in her teens. While pursuing her academic career in Europe, she traveled extensively in South America, Southeast Asia, India, North Africa and the Middle East. In 2009, while volunteering in Thailand, she began to narrate her stories via e-mail to about 20 friends. The characters in her stories started to become readers, too, firstly to know what was being told about them, but then to also follow the world through the eyes of someone they knew so well. Soon the mailing list had more than 500 names, many of them replicating the stories to their own friends. In parallel, Julieta kept two blogs, one in English and another in Portuguese (with different contents), where newcomers could read what she had written before. As a prolific songwriter, Julieta has also dozens of songs composed in several languages, and many of them can be seen in her own YouTube channel. She is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian and French.

Links:

http://www.translatingthoughts.wordpress.com (blog English)http://descolonizandoamente.wordpress.com/ (blog Portuguese)http://www.youtube.com/user/julietafalavina/videos?view=0 (YouTube Channel)

“Mosaic, The Path in Between” can be purchased for kindle. You do not need to have a Kindle to read it.  If you do not have kindle you may download a kindle app for free on your phone, Ipads, or computers.

For Kindle here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CSAJHP4/ref=r_soa_w_d

Mosaic, The Path in Between

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Posted on May 4, 2013

Image

Dear friends as I keep getting questions about people who cant get my book. And I def want that all of you who want to are able to read it.. Here it goes:

1. It is only available online now…
2. You can buy it in any amazon in any country you are!!!!.
The link i put was the one local to the UK but you can find it in any amazon inthe world 🙂
3. You do not need to have a kindle to read it.
You can download the application of kindle for ipads, smart phones, computers for free
Here for downloading kindke app
The book is called
Mosaic the Path in Between
You can get it in any amazon!
This is the link to the UK one,
 if uou are not in the UK go to the site of amazon in your country and search for the book with the title
Mosaic, the path in betweev
If you have any problem let me kbow!  🙂 and if you are reading .. Please let ne know about it!!
Love Jules in Rome in ny way back to Asia 🙂

“ It is not because I do not know my way. It is because I love you. And when we part we should know that. we should make it as a ritual. So that I know that  a piece of me is going. And i kneed to know that.”

 

Dear friends,

 

I know I owe an email to you. I started this email on the plane. And I will finish today as I am about to fly tomorrow to London.

Bear with me, I still make the same mistakes as usual.

 

So it starts…

Here I am again, on a plane. The first 4 hours I slept non stop. I was exhausted. For those of you who do not know I am flying to Switzerland to show my book in a sort of literary Salon.

 

Yes, that’s the news… I finally published a book!

Last year I started to write for a Magazine called Varal do Brasil, and while I was in Colombia they sent me an email inviting to join them in this literature salon in Geneva (May 1st-5th 2013)

 

I thought it was cool although I did not have any book to show. Once I came home I told my father and he said it was preposterous… especially because it was already the end of January, there was simply no time to write, edit and publish anything. “Think about next year”, he said.

 

My friend Claudia Alcantara, however, took the initiative and enrolled me in the Salon.

 

Claudia used to have a very normal job, and she disliked the curls in her hair, which is something very common in Brazil, some old traces of racism hard to die. She also disliked the way hairdressers worked the issue. So she decided to find out how the process was done. She ended up writing a manual to straighten hair and it started selling all over Brazil.

 

Hairdressers were impressed and started to ask her whether she also had some related products to sell? She didn’t. After a few emails with the same request, she decided to say yes.

 

She went around, studied some chemistry and invented a product based in the stuff that already existed, and she mixed chocolate into it.

 

Nowadays Claudia is the owner of a cosmetics brand called Cadiveu, and she sells her products for over 50 countries. Cadiveu has a brilliant website and you can read more about it here http://cadiveu.com/.

 

Claudia is someone who always believed in good ideas. She sold a product before it existed because she believed it could exist. She enrolled me in a literary salon to show a book in Geneva before I had a book.

 

And now I am in a plane with two suitcases filled with books.

 

It is called “Mosaic, the Path in Between”.

 

Mosaic, is the art of what is possible. Nowadays I even think of it as the art of the impossible.

 

This book is a call for a more human world. It contains many of the emails I wrote throughout these last years…. It contains 4 mains ideas… Al Naqbah ( the great disaster when Palestinians lost their homes, but here I expand it to the huge disaster that most of us do not know where wer come from), borders ( what are they for?), Inbetweeners ( the feeling of always being trapped between worlds), and a search for home.

 

It contains the voices that many that I encountered Thais, Moroccans,  Israelis, Palestinians, Tibetans, Colombians, Braizlians and soo many others… to eventually reach the voices of my own family.

 

It is a treaty of love,…. that could not have been made in 2 months if people all over the world had not helped it take shape/

 

I owe special thanks to Andrey my Russian friend in Sweden for reading it, commenting it, and even helping edit it when we were all running out of time. Haiko Ballieux, my ex husband, my great friend from Holland who edited from the UK and the US,  Eduardo Simantob who is Arabic and Jewish and Brazilian and who edited from Switzerland in all of his spare time, Andrew Tope, who is British who edited on a plane between the US and UK. Then I have to thank the people of the Design Gustavo Soares, who I know since my Uni time, who designed this book in Rio while we still edited. He did the design in his spare time, while worki full time  and taking care of his 1 year old daughter,  Thomaz Bondioli  who is Brazlian/Portuguese and lives in Holland for making all maps and Illustrations. And Victor Mendes  in Sao Paulo for making the files online so that we could be doing this all over the world.

 

The Maps are hand made. They represent my experience.  Middle East map was particularly difficult for us to make. But once I was approved by a Palestinian and an Israeli I cried.

 

Then I must say that, the time was running so short that we had to ask  other people from other fields to help us.  Sabrina Rabelllo, brilliant  composer, and  who did  Phd in physics  at Kings College and Post Doc in Harward!, Henrique Sa Earp who did PhD mathematics in Imperial College and now is teacher at the univrersity of Campinas in Brasil. Marcello Sorrentino who did his Phd  in anthropology at the LSE where I left mine :)   Marcelo Fortaleza Flores who is an anthropologist and filmaker who lived in the AMazon for 6 years and had studied with Krishna Murti, taught me in the US, then at the Sorboonne. And Elizabeth Ings who is British  and is a writer and whom I met meditating in Vipassana. Finally Marisa Silveira who is in the US, and is from RIo and did her Phd in Linguistics at UCL also edited parts of this book.

 

Then came the art…. Thomaz decided to make some amazing illustration to represent the tougher chapter. He asked me to tell him. I sent him a song I had composed  and he made the illustrations of the chapter called Amit.Image

Then came Sandra….

 

Ok, Sandra came before. Sandra makes amazing Mosaic. And I asked her why she made Mosaic. And she told me she did them because she like doing art but was clumsy. She broke things. So she made a Mosaic. I told her that day, in the beach… that is beautiful. Mosaic is the art of what is possible. A celebration of that has been shattered but we make something beautiful with. That is how may book went from being in Betweeners to Mosaic…… Because it was a celebration of these in between things… the art of what is possible.

 

And so  I asked Sandra whether she could send me a picture of a Mosaic. She did. We had one day. The resolution was wrong. And she told me she collected the pieces to that mosaic by the thames… pieces she imagined that had floated…. had a journey. We managed to get the resolution by Sunday ok. We had to delivered by Monday morning.

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Actually I managed to convince Jacqueline the lady responsible for Varal to Brazil and for me being there now to allow me to bring the books with me so that we could get 2 extra days. Now we needed till monday morning.

 

Then my childhood friend whom I had not seen in decades came to visit and now as the very famous fashion designer Valerie Ciriades came for a visit. I asked her. Can you do me one drawing. She told me she no longer drew. She only did clothes. For when Jules? Tomorrow… And so I told her. Seat when you have time and read the part of the book mosaic of voices…about my family… which she knows well…. and if it comes you send it to me. It came… and to me it is how she sees me. It makes me happy because it is how I like to see myself today.. feminine, delicate and like music.

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And  then Monday we were all ready to send… and Gustavo had a doctors appointment….. and  then Mounia wrote me to Congratulate me….Mounia Dadi in Morocco. The brilliant painter, and my dear friend

 

It was in her house that I first had my  first ever epileptic attack. It was after seeing her art. Her whole following collection she  later told me was inspired on what had happened to me. So as I was about to print the book on monday… It felt now.. it is ready it has  to have Mounia’s painting

 

I asked her and she immediately said yes. and sent what she felt it represented me searching others. I sent an sms to Gustavo… Gu Don’t kill me… we need to put one more image. Can we please….??

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Resolutions wrong, electricity down… all working magically for her painting finishing my book.

 

I knew it was then right!

 

It was over.

 

We sent at 4 monday to Fabio my Grpahic Producer, and also a great friend of my father…. and he told me He was uncertain we could have them before monday.. when I flew.

I suddenly wanted Sunday because I wanted to release my book, our book in Brasil… and it was all ready at 9 am saturday.

We released at the casa do Nucleo with Benjamim Taubking palying piano ( though he had to travel soon), and me telling the story ot the book.  I won’t tell the story now. I am tired, I think I have said it all now.

I am on plane. I fly to finally deliver the book to Geneva. Just like Claudia believed one day it would happen.

 

The release was beautiful we made a mosaic…. a mosaic that features pieces put by my 88 year old grandmother and my 5 year old cousins of second degree. My dear dear dear friends were there. And now I fly. They all hugged me very strongly telling me staying 6 months away was too much.

 

It is true…. as I fly here..  I agree… I ll miss them too much. That is thought when you have finally made home inside. Then you can realise all the homes you had all over. All the love you have to all and you feel this uncontrollable desire to go there… and give one more hug, an now, our book…. which all of them feature,

 

So that I wrote on the plane. Here I met Edu my main editor. Who told me, we need to edit proper now, and then we would release online on amazon. I cried. I felt my book was not good. I still went to the fair. edu explain to me over and over the book was good. But it had to be edited by one person thoroughly. He read my my whole book. And we are doing that.

He drove to fair. And I met amazing people. There was so much. So many people I felt so tired. ALl the tlack of sleep suddenly appeared. And I made a new friend. Nairubia and indigenous gril from a tribe called Iny in the island of Bananal. She put her hands in my lip. Closed them. She touched my face. She was there as the artist of the illustrations of the book. She was so special that I walk out.

 

She look into my eyes. Adns she said. He knew of your pain, dont ever let the light go away. Darkeness is just absence of light. She touched my face. Caressed my temples. She sang. And she said

 

“ I have nothing to teach you. You know. but one thing. dont get out of the litght anymore”

 

And then she gave me a profound gift. She told me people like me make her want to live. It imediatelly came to me the conversation I had with an anthropologist who told me the indigenous were different. I looked into her eyes. And I knew what I preached in my whole book was truly real. That day I felt… I don’t know indigenous people. As Nairubia touched my faced. Released the tension from my eyes. I knew compassion exactly the same anywhere is always [present. I cried.

 

I asked her whether she wanted me to take her back to the place where authors were and she said yes.

 

“ It is not because I do not know my way. It because I love you. And when we part we should know that. we should make it as a ritual. as if a piece of me is going. And i kneed to know that.”

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I knew fully what she meant. I walked with her. we toasted with juice. We hugged. and I felt in place.

 

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Then I cam home. The house of the travelling family you will read about. I met them on the road. Seing them again was like a part of me was being made put back. They cooked for me, they hugged me. We remembered all that once was. I am happy.Image

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Edu took care of me for all the time he could. They take care of me now, and tomorrow I fly to London.

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It is all good in this side of the world. And it will always be good wherever I am because I am in place.

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Love,

from Switzerland

This World

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My dear friends,

I have not written in a while… that is because I am almost done with my book. Mosaic, the Path in Between…..
But there is a last episode I owe you… and I want to share before my book should be print by the end of the month… when I plan to be in Switzerland to show it….
but this is my last news… of my last hospital trip…. it is important so please read…

Dr. Getulio

 

“This is truly unbelievable! Just completely unbelievable. Just like you can refuse a doctor I can refuse a patient. I want to say something very serious to you. If you do not take your medicine I will not be your doctor anymore. I can’t take this anymore Julieta!  You are beautiful, intelligent, brilliant! Why did you not take your pills Ju! Why?”

 

Dr. Getulio entered my life as the neurologist who was to explain me why was it that my brain was destructing itself. It has been now almost 6 years that he entered my life. I was terrified at first because what I could possibly have was multiple sclerosis. For the past  I never really knew much about Multiple Sclerosis, but it terrified me.  For  the last  6 years I know Dr. Getulio I have been on epilepsy medicine. Since I was first admitted to Hospital six years ago I have embarked on a journey to attempt to try to understand what had happened to me.

 

Multiple Sclerosis became eventually a long faded possibility. You all have now read my last episode. I woke up paralyzed one morning and  that  is not why Dr. Getulio is furious with me. He is furious because of “now”. This week, just as I am about to print this book which has been put together in a very short time, with the help of all of my friends I just decided to stop my epilepsy pills because I visited a doctor that said that that was a possibility.

 

I did not follow the advice of that doctor fully either. He was a homeopath and he told me I could stop. I should have waited and should have been more cautious, I should have done it properly, I should have reduced it cautiously. But being me, always so willing to ditch allopathy I just stopped the medicine all together on my own way.

 

I was playing piano to a friend, Eduardo Simanthob, a brilliant poet and writer (and who is now one of the editors of this book) when suddenly I had too much energy in me. I do not remember anything anymore. I seized. I hurt my whole body in that fit. I was once more admitted to hospital and it is because of that that Dr, Getulio, my family and my friends are now  furious.  For once in my lifetime, I  was actually not scared of the seizure. I felt protected.

 

“ I have no idea what caused all the rest that happened to you Julieta. I don’t know why you lost myelin in your brain. I do not know why your tongue one day was paralyzed. All exams show  absolutely nothing.  But  there is one thing I am certain of, and that is that you are epileptic. I am not sure what caused the loss of myelin in your brain 6 years ago but that has left a focus of epilepsy. You do not not need to do anything but take one pill a day to control this! Why can’t you do it?”

 

Dr. Getulio is a brilliant doctor. He is trusted by all. I trust him. And I have just decided to add him here as my last super character. He is not here because he is a brilliant doctor,  I chose to put him here  because he changed something structural on the way I think this week.

 

I decided to write this book so that we all could live better, so that we would not have to quit the world. I always knew I should write a book, but I have never fully known what it should be about. In a conversation with my friend Paula Gabriel, we concluded we both, who are nice people had been quite suicidal. We wondered what was happening, that so many people were so unhappy? Paula pondered that we had been born seeing cartoons of the future, and that now we were all terrified with the collapse of the world. Suddenly, we all wanted to be present. Paula and I always talked about how this form of being present, just to satisfy egoic chemical releases left us in the end completely lost, alone, and disconnected.

 

When my book eventually came about, I knew I wanted to write a book so that we,  people, who cared for others, we most of us genrous people, , could find a way to sstop wanting to quit the worldt. My answer, or the beginning of it seemed to be in gentleness, in more care of those around.

 

This week when I seized, and could deal so well with the pain of the attack that must have been something wrong. I realised my feeling ok with the attack was almost as a total lack of care for life just like my previous wanting to die phase.  As I was about to print this book, a book where I call for a more caring world,  my body reminded me one more time that we live in a physical world. I realised that when I attempt to negate allopathy altogether to have cures that come solely from ideas, or beliefs I once again quit the world and the human experience. I forget the absolute importance of those around me.  When I do not take my medicine, I realise, I do not value the work of so many people I deeply respect, I do not value my own life, when I do not take the medicine I quit the world.

 

I have a body that is having unnecessary pain now because of an ideological choice I made. I can deal with the pain well now. Those around me do not deserve to go through this pain. So I add Dr Getulio here as a way to apologize to all. In an act to understand that my life is precious and worth to be lived in its best way.  As an act of realization that in not taking simple measures to prevent harm to myself I hurt myself and others.

 

DR. Getulio embodies to me an abandonment of my total idealism.

 

“ I speak as a friend nor as a doctor Julieta. I will one day write a book. Though I am a neurologist.  I confess I believe most diseases are psychosomatic. One day I will write a book about that.”

 

I am sure he will. I am sure it will be a brilliant book. And I hope I can be part of this book. Dr. Getulio is a friend.  Someone I did not meet before these six years but someone who has been always a friend. Someone who  has called me daily on my cel phone to know how I was, when I begged to leave Hospital.

 

Thank you Dr. Getulio, Thank you.  I promised I will take the medicine everyday for as long as you believe it is fundamental. And I do understand that might be forever.

 

I add this part here because Dr. Getulio reminded me that I want to live well, that I want to stay in this world treating life as sacred.  I add this part here in order to thank all  of my dear friends who kept me grounded and whose work I believe is fundamental to the well being of so many in the world. I thank you Getulio Dare Rabello, Francesco Lombardi,  Laura Moriyama Silveira, Aquiles Paiva, Ivana Mendes, Camilla Amaral, Sara Al Saraf, Bruno Bueno, Cris Formiga,  Cristiano Sanna, Ilda Bondioli

Re-Encounters – Around the World in Sao Paulo

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I don’t know how it happened but one day re-encounters have become way more important to  me  than encounters. Don’t get me wrong I still love encountering people, But now, I love reencountering them more.

About two years ago I met Chi. He had been travelling at that time for 1  year. He had left his native Taiwan to travel for 2 years the world. We met though couch surfing.  I organized a dinner celebration for Chinese new year for him 3 years ago. We hosted at the time.

When he arrived in our place he had crossed China overland, then Mongolia, Russia, entered Europe through Estonia went all the way down to Greece, traveled overland Eastern Europe to Western Europe and I had met him when he had reached England.

 

At the time I was doing my Phd at the LSE. He met my friends. He heard about about my research in the middle east.  My housemates. My ex-husband and I liked him so much that we convinced him to just stay with us all of his stay. He had such an interesting view on travelling. He who was from Taiwan and had traveled overland sleeping in a mattress thought the biggest difference in people was city versus villages.

 

Now, twp  years  later, he is still on the road… He has left home 3 years ago, after having worked 2,5 years to  save up. He used to feel he could only travel for two years. Now he feels he could still go on for 8 years on that money.

I wake up very early to meet him. He is tanner, has long hair now and had just been to Rio in Carnival. He is in Brasil he tells me for 3 things: carnival me, and the Amazon.

 

I love Chi. He is so unique. And so I take him to do the stuff I need. First of all… I take him to Kamal. I want to give my Coffee from Colombia. Kamal for those of you who read me is the guy from Siria.

We walked  from my house till we reach Avenida Paulista.  We talk about life. Where has he been. We no longer really care about how many countries, or borders. We care about people. So though I ask where he has been the following  years. I am most interested to know how was going to South Sudan to Sudan and then Egypt,  and then Israel, and then Turkey and then my most desired destinations ( together with  Burma), to Iran!!!

“The people in the middle east are too good. It is sad to see them be oppressed as they are.  Though I think the Arab spring was real chaos…. It is only spring for the news….South Sudan was the best introduction to Islam. People took their time for people. They visited each other every Friday. They are strong not because of the economy or the army. The people are strong because they care about each other. You know what it is funny… in every country they are afraid of the next. They are always afraid that something would happened once I crossed the border”

 

I know. What he talks about. So we get to Kamal. In the mall where there are so many Chinese immigrants. And when I bring my coffee Kamal is happy, he is moved. I tell him Chi is my friend. He has been travelling with a back pack for 3 years. Kamal is amazed. Kamal who came to Brasil  when he was 17. Kamal explains to people around Chi travels with backpack sleeps on a mattress,  has a pot to cook.  People are amazed. Chi asks me to ask him how was Brasil.

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I tell Kamal to tell the truth. I don’t care. I want to know this.

“ I love this place. Brasil opens its arms,  hugs  and welcomes you.  I have been back to Siria 4 times. You know. My brother stayed. And I go there and I know he is a good person but I don’t know him. He has been now here for 3 months. But he has a stuck mentality. If you don’t agree with him, he stops talking. I look everything from above and  is ok to disagree. In the middle east it is different.”

I am impressed learning what he thinks. I tell Kamal that I brought him the coffee from the cooperative. I explain the whole story and he gets it.  Very soon there is coffee in front of  me. He is curious about Chi.  We all talk in mix languages. I tell him, I have to go, and he tells me I need to come more often. I promise to do so. I learn so much about Kamal today. I learn so much about Brasil.

And then I take the tube/metro to go to Liberadade, a Japanese neighbouhood. There is something I want to get there. We enter a shop and we are helped by an old looking like Japanese man. He is from Shanghai.  I introduced him to Chi, they speak Mandarin. The old man had lived in Brasil for 45 years. The lady who works with him is Brasilian but she tells me her children are fluent in Mandarin.

I am shocked. How come? Was she married to a Chinese man? Not the case. She explains to me the school around the corner teaches Chinese to children. Her children are 12  and they had learned since they were 2. The school receives Chinese children, mix children, but  Brazilian like her children as well.

“ I cant understand what they write.” And she smiles

She is happy.  Chi and I walk around talking about life, people, films, lao tse. It is just so good to reencounter someone you know. I find out some of the people  I met in Asia or in Palestine have hosted him. People from different continents that now know each other. It is so good to discover a bit more my own city with a foreigner. None of us care too much about the touristic things. I want to show him, what matters to me.

I want to take him to my little home as I am creating it. As we walk out of the Tube  I hear my name.  I look and I see Bruno who plays in CIdao every Monday. Bruno who last time I wrote played my favourite songs in my little carnival. Turns out he is almost my neighbor.

 

I feel happy. I have reencountered a dear friend who like me cares about people. And I can finally show him what my home is. Which means very soon I will take him to the  Casa do Nucleo, the project  of the Pianist Benjamin Taubkin… and tomorrow I will take him to see Cidao. Then I ll take him to climb.

He insists I must not get tired.  He is just here to see me.

He does  not need to see anything. And I explain I am so happy he is here. I am so happy I can show someone I deeply respect a bit of where I come from. Finally I can, and soon we will go with my godfather back to the  Centrakl Market.

I know where I come from, Benjamin was right it is where the new is possible, Kamal is right it is a place that welcomes you with whatever it is that you come with.

 

Sao Paulo and Rio, Carnival- Resistence or Separation?

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I am trying to reconcile myself with where I am from.  Brasil, the land of syncretism, of inequality, of multitude of narratives, of joy, laughter. Sexuality that swets out of peoples bodies. The land of Carnival. And it is carnival, and I who never could see what was soo Brazilian of me, decided I would celebrate it in silence.

Then, I decided, I should go to Rio to discover carnival. So, I called Lu, a childhood friend and she agreed to it immediately . On the same night we were in a bus to Rio. Elisa, who hosted us, is from Rio but does not really like carnival, nor the beach. We are friends since we lived in NY. So Lu, who went with me, and I went to the streets to celebrate while Elisa went to visit her parents.

We got out, with the intention to reach a Bloco de Carnival.  Carnival is celebrated  all over in Brasil. Usually in the streets. Blocos are basically a block of music… There is a concentration of people in the streets dancing and parading. Blocos have different themes. Different music.  Different people listening , drinking, dancing in the streets. It is open and free to all.

Rio, is overtaken by blocos during the whole day all over the city during the carnival week. I had searched for my friend Paula on one last year on a broken foot. At the time I looked for Paula Gabriel, my friend I met during my Master at the LSE.  There was too many people last year and I had a broken foot and.  I just could not reach her.

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This time,  we had phones, plans, and still it took a long time for me to find her. And when I did I felt relieved and happy. It felt like ” It took a year but I am here now”. Paula and I are writing a book together. I hugged her. And now I could be really in the bloco.

Brasil is a mix place. Yet like in Colombia there are 3 main groups the indigenous, the African descendents, and the outsiders… from Europe, from the middle east, asia etc. In Brasil, it seems to me that we are way more mixed than in Colombia.

In the blocos you see them all. So I was there enjoying the music.. when I saw a man in his 50s started a conversation with a blond Brazilian girl next to me. She refused him, he attacked her Brazilianess, she was obviously not Brazilian to him. I hated that man then. Yet I just observed him. And watched him grab a Mulata ( a mix of white and black woman) and pull her saying to his friend,, this one is a whore let’s take her.

I wanted to shout at him. This blond girl, this mulata, you  are all the same. Cant you see it?? We are all inheritors of this huge massacre that took place here, and still does. I did not.  Then seconds later I saw a drunk guy coming to the blond girl. She ignored him as well, than she was rude. And I being me, I went to talk to him. He eventually left furious.

“ This girl believes she is better than me because she is blond!? How can you be her friend? You are a good person I can tell”

He was drunk. He left. I suggested to him he should drink water. He should take care of himself. One part of me rememembered when I was in Colombia and started to cry when a boy left me dancing alone. It was not him, but the loneliness in the middle of the salsa that was unbearable to take. So I knew this boy, drunk as hell, felt so abandoned there in the middle of so much joy…. That it ached me.

Minutes later I saw a 5 years old black child lost. I asked him whether he needed help. He hesitated. Huge part of me knew he was poor, probably used to all of this. Yet a 5 year old lost in a crowd of beer and music and people desperate to send sadness away can  nor should ever be used to it? Should we? So I walked with him. Till we found his “cousins’ I still knew he would get lost again.. Someone else would help him agaom for 3 minutes. But I stayed with him for a while, explained his cousins he was too little, I stayed with him till he told me I could go.

“ Juliano, take care of yourself. I know you can do it alone. But we must take care of ourselves and others around”

He shook my hand. There was sooo much grief in his eyes… that after that…..I stood a bit more but I had to leave eventually. Grief in a 5 years old… it is too much.

I was exhausted.

I once wrote that I thought Joy was the last form of resistence. And this carnival I understood it… how much resistence even while laughing it is just still separation.

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It truly was. It was this last attempt to not to let anything go in. NO matter what happens, it is to stay and laugh, and kiss, and attempt bold gestures with people who do not matter.

Yet, in the craziness of carnival, even the rejection of a blond unknown girl can hurt too much. It hurted me. Watching the joy of all singing songs of people who had pain. Who sent pain away.

There is some enormous beauty to carnival.  Yet it coexists with shallowness. Nothing can ever be too profound. Maybe it is because nothing can go really in. And then love, and joy, feels almost stolen from its proper correlations to sadness. In most people, and most places, but not in all..

I came home, and I bid farewell to my friend. I just had to listen to my body it was too much. I needed a rest. And so I took a bus back to Sao Paulo and I went for dinner, with my dear friend the brilliant pianist Benjamin Taubkin. We had Japanese food.

We talked about carnival. About life.  About music. I felt my carnival was finally taking place. I drove to the bar of Cidao to see my friends play. I did not even have to ask my favorite songs. They started playing the Choro “Desprezado” by Pixinguinha, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9XJs_iIzB8

and then Migalhas de Amor  by Jacob do Bandolim, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9XJs_iIzB8

when they saw me.  The know I love it.

There was this older lady there. I saw her listening to  the music. She was beautiful. She heard the Choro.  Choro is a kind of music that is a mixture of African rhythms and European ones…  the name choro means  “ cry,” or chorinho  “a little cry). And  I could almost see the music in her body travelling. I wrote her a message.  In a napkin something along the lines

“  You hear music in silence. It is so beautiful. Thank you for making my carnival more beautiful”

I folded it and took it to her. Then I went back to my seat and stayed there till the musicians had stopped playing. I felt such a joy. She came to me, and told me she was from the northeast. That she would keep my message. She thanked me. We hugged. In celebration of joy, of music, of recognizing music goes inside when we allow that we smile while feeling pain without costumes. We eventually let the music, and the people around unweave the sadness, in a celebration.

So in Sao Paulo, a place not known for carnival, I reconciled myself.  I heard music that unweaved me.

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Love is Subversive- Written for Varal do Brasil

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“ Love is subversive”

 

It was what I thought  when I finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez “Love in the Time of Cholera”. Florentino lived stories where he was never present, waiting his whole life for a childhood love. In Colombia of the book, it was only possible when the flag separates them from it all, the flag of the Cholera. Because Cholera is contagious, and love could only exist in this way contained in a boat in a river because in society it corrupts everything. It corrupts all the visions.

This thought came to my mind a thousand times. Every single time that I have been to violent places. Every single time when I have been to very developed places. Why is it that love is so difficult?

In my whole life I have searched to give love to so many people in so many places. There was however always a point that I left. It was because the love that I searched to rescue me from myself, could not do it. Love made me vulnerable. It was because love was missing inside of me.

Love collapses something from which we are not prepared for Ideas versus the body. We feel love or some form of it in our body and we think about it in some other way.

I feel that love is compassion. Compassion is to understand what Asians philosophers; religious men, sociologists and many others have touched the idea that we are all of the time individuals in a plural world. Love collapses separation from the other. Love is human.

And as has Victtorio Arrigoni, the Italian activist killed in Gaza, said, we must stay human.

When I crossed the wall of separation in Israel, to get to the West Bank, (against the will of my friends) I, for the first time, met Palestinians. At the time I already used to write the stories of the people I met around the world. From Palestine I wrote about my daily life.

One day an Israeli philosopher with whom I was supposed to meet and kept postponing because I kept staying everyday one more day in the West Bank, sent me a text message saying he wished he could see what I was seeing.

I offered to send him the emails I had sent to my friends and within hours he sent me a text message saying,

“I cannot see you anymore”.

I asked him whether it was because of what I had written in my emails and he agreed. I was intrigued since I had not written anything about the occupation or the politics. I called him and he explained to me he did not know why it was so difficult. I insisted, after all he was a philosopher that was his job to make something familiar, strange.

“It is too human”.

It was difficult for him to say this. I was thankful. He followed by saying: “had you written about the occupation or the politics, I would have understood. I could have agreed or disagreed, I am prepared for that. But when you write about yoga or love or how they take care of you like we do here, it is too human”.

That day I went to Jerusalem to talk to him. I have never seen him again. But that has remained in my mind forever. When I write about the Human, I collapsed all separations, all of them.

And there is nothing more human than love, collapsing the mind versus the body dichotomy. It is very difficult to deal with all the confusion that comes from the enormous vulnerability of love, of being human of not being separate from the other, the others.

In Colombia, not along ago, I met a man from Gaza. He has a bar/restaurant in Taganga, (a fishermen village by the Tayrona Park). It was his way for fighting for Palestine: serving food.

In front of his cafe/restaurant, there were drawing of Handalas and “revolucion” written on the wall.

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Handalas is a cartoon. He is the most famous character by the Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al Ali. Handala is depicted as a ten year-old boy, the figure has turned his back to the viewer, and has clasped hands behind his back.

He has always his back turned to the viewer and hands clasped because Naji Al Ali was critical of both Israeli and Arab leaderships. He rejected all peace solutions that came from outside.

It is different in Colombia. When I arrived in Taganga, I first saw the Palestinian flag, and then the Revolucion written in the wall and then the Handalas. I introduced myself to Yassert, the owner of the cafe/restaurant as someone who loves the Middle-East and who has friends in both sides of the wall.

I went back to Yassert’s cafe every single day. I went back to hear his story, to drink his coffee, and to see his son, he had become a friend.

Right on the first day I had been there, I went back to my hostel and decided to research more about the character Handala. I read why he had clasped hands. He refused help of the outside world.

I immediately remembered that there in Colombia the Handalas painted in the restaurant of a man who had fought in the Intifada, who had been released by the Red Cross, held hands in a massive hug. I remembered that one carried a key, the other a weapon; one had a sling shot downwards. All carried by their shoulders.

I disliked seeing a weapon. I however, when I read that Naji al Ali had made them in clasped hands and separated, with their back to the viewer, felt relief. There in Colombia they held each other. There is one who carries a weapon in his shoulder, but his arms and hands supports the other. The neighbour.

I looked back on my mind, to remember that the WORD Revolucion was written differently as well. There was the word LOVE in the middle backwards. It was in bright red letters. There where love was so subversive that was kept in a boat, a man who had fought in an Intifada, serves food. He fights for his cause with his restaurant, feeding people, bringing those who are willing to talk to talk.

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And in his wall Handalas hug and the biggest word is LOVE.

Love, is subversive, but has not been contained by the boat of Florentino. Love is human. With all it perfect imperfection. And Vittorio Arrigoni, italian activist who was killed in Gaza, knew that.

I have been sometimes disturbed by activists who seem to all fight their own ghosts in other places. The same thing I have done myself in so many places in the world.

That day, someone I love, showed me for the first time Vittorio’s blog. His main message was “Stay Human!”

To love is to remain human. With the weapons, the cameras, and the fears. Love is subversive because it forces us to stay. It collapses all divisions.

So from Colombia, from Taganga, I thanked the universe, humans, god…. that cholera had been contained, but not love. Love exists in every part we allow it to be. That might be the path: to allow it to be in its full humanity, in all its perfect imperfection.

Brazil, waiting in Sao Paulo, Coffee and writing

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Life is what is happening now, while you are waiting.”

 

I heard these words from my speech therapist. I have heard them before. But now they freaked me.

 

I am back in Brasil. And I am home. I feel home. And these days I started a new tradition: going to the Central Market of Sao Paulo ( Mercado Municipal)  with Toninho, my godfather.

So, the central market in Sao Paulo is a fascinating place. I had been there before. This time I am with Toninho, and he grew up there. So he tells me the fascinating stories about all that came through rivers to Sao Paulo, how it was at first something like a stock exchange of food. I am fascinated by this. Even more fascinated I am by the people around. Tourists, and the now very pricey stalls, with what is best there is of fruits, and nuts, and meats. The owners are old. They have been there for too long. Toninho knows these people. His own great grandfather “is” somehow there. His grandfather took rides with a donkey who could drive him home everyday while he slept. Everyday he got drunk there.

Oh yes there are bars as well, and a Lebanese place to eat. I choose immediately the Lebanese place. We seat to eat watching the market there. I hear stories of these people who are not here. But they still are. All these old men selling fruits, and nuts, and different kinds of food… I can see them too. And their grandchildren, and the grandchildren of their first clients. They are all there. I eat what I know from the middle east.

how much I crave for the middle east usually. Not today. Today I am with Toninho in the Mercado Municipal.

 

I tell him I am writing a book. I take out my new fiction short story. I never write fiction. Too difficult. I just don’t feel it could be called fiction, because I notice as I type it gives me a strange feeling of ownership. And nothing in this world is really just mine. It is all social. We are social and individuals at the same time.

 

As I daydream of the implications of this… I abandon the market in my imagination. The market that exists, the market that now exists even more profoundly because I know the stories of the people. People I have never met but that Toninho has. My mind flows back to my broken phone.

 

Some of you might remember when I went to fix my phone with a Lebanese man in a mall where mainly Chinese illegal immigrants worked. It has been almost a year now. I take a cab there. Hearing from the cab driver the prejudices he has towards illegal immigrants. The cab driver who himself is discriminated by the people in Sao Paulo because he comes from the northeast. I try to explain to him the irony of it. Why is it that some people are oppressed and then become the oppressor and cant see it?

 

I walk by the Chinese mall, and i know how to get to Marwan, the Lebanese man who has fixed my phone before. I go down. He is working. I look the stand next to him. Kamal from Syria (pro Bashar) is not there. I wonder what has happened to him. But as my mind flies around I hear him from inside the stand of Marwane. ” How are you?” I reply ” Salem Aleykum. His stand now has become a coffee place. And from what I get Kamal now works with Marwan”

 

” Are you ok. You have been sick? you look so skinny”

 

I say jokingly ” Kahua, Ana Bdi  Kahua” Something like “ Coffee, I want coffee.. “in what I remember of Arabic. I tell him this thinking of Yassert in Colombia. I tell him I have been sick and I am amazed he remembers me so long ago. The man next to him, is Lebanese. Ibrahim. He has just come out of Hospital. I ask Marwan how many days without phone will I be. ” For you 50 minutes. Is that ok?” I am impressed. It usually takes days. He is a very busy man. but I know he is being kind to me. 50 minutes is Nothing

 

So I spend the following minutes talking to Kamal and Ibrahim about coffee. The coffee that appears mysteriously for me. That coffee place belongs to Kamal now. You must eat too! So I ask for Cheese Bread ( Pao de QUeijo) and we talk. And talk, and Kamal teaches me how to make coffee with Cardamom. He loves coffee. He is a chef. We talk of life. I show them the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron. Of course..only because my phone is ready before I am…and I can show pictures on it..I show Yassert in Taganga. Time flies…. .

Kamal does not let me pay for the coffee. I know it will be pointless to argue on that. I know because I know Yassert and I know Palestinians. I just know. He knows I know but he knows I am Brazilian.  So I insist. He disagrees. I tell him he has a coffee place. He cant not charge for coffee. Ibrahim says he will pay my coffee. I tell Ibrahim I have just met him, Kamal is an old friend. I know I cant pay.

 

And I remember my friend Paula Gabriel, who has once written about Mauss The Gift and Branding ( but i ll digress too much now… my free flowing mind). In short lines, Mauss, argues that a gift is a relationship. When you give one you are establishing one. I know if I pay i am declining that. I do not decline a relationship. I accept. And then comes to my mind more coffee. Jose Carlos in Colombia.

 

The day I go down the mountain I visit  Jose Carlos finca, a coffee farm. According to all in Minca,  it is the best organic coffee from Sierra Nevada. Jose Carlos had brought his last batch of coffee to me when I was falling apart sick in Minca. Nacho had told him to sell it to me. It was real treasure… I realised as people kept showing up to talk to him later. I promised to visit him in his FInca once I came down the mountian… it was up in the hills… and I went ( as you might remember to see the snowed capped mountains), I stop.

 

Very few things disturbed me in Colombia as much going to this Finca did. The FInca is brilliant. it is in the mountain. It is all organic. The coffee is great. Jose Carlos tells me it all. He tells me his life. He came from a family of fighters, in very rich family of Colombia. They were Marxists, and then they lost the civil war, and moved to the US. Jose Carlos became a business man. Now, he had quit it all. and he lived in a shack in this mountain alone to find happiness. He went to the city once a month. I feel he is journeying the same fight now on his own. I feel he is unhappy. I feel unhappy. I see Peter admires this lifestyle. They have this notion they are too fucked up, they need to be perfect before they can be with someone in this world.

 

I walk out. I ran away inside of me. I cant take anymore abandonment because people feel they are not good enough. I hear Jose Carlos.. but I want to save him. I want to save myself. I bring his coffee and I am afraid to drink it. But I do it. And I buy more coffee from a cooperative. It might be not so special as JC coffee is but I feel at ease drinking this coffee that comes from people who understand they need others.

 

I have 4 bags of this cooperative  coffee from Sierra Nevada here. And I think it is sacred this coffee. Jose Carlos coffee is perfect but it lacks what i most crave. Imperfection. I love his coffee.. but there is only two people I can give it to. To my parents. I do no longer feel that abandonment I used to feel. So I can give them the best quality coffee I have, and yet my most difficult coffee to give. And I drink it with them.

 

So the few packages  I have of the coffee of cooperative.. I keep to give the right people. And the right people must really love coffee… and already have a real social relationship with me.

 

I give one to Toninho, my godfather,  with whom I went to the market, I tell him all the story in Mercado Municipal of Kamal. The other I give to my dear friend Victor. The third I decided that day, I would give to Kamal. He loves coffee.. and yes I accepted that coffee..without paying. I accepted the social contract of a relationship. A friendship.

 

I still have one left which I will wait for the right person to come and drink it with me.

My speech therapist is right, life is what happens while you are waiting. But when you have something very worth to wait for. You live it all that is around more profoundly making what you had never done before. Waiting.

 

And so I wait. But while I do it life becomes more and more interesting. And I write a book with all that belongs to all. All of us. And I am capable to send to my family to read. And they read and tell me what they think. And I take what they can give. I change what I have written acording to their thoughts. their combined thoughts. My thoughts.

 

Someone once told me in Colombia. And this has been blocked to an extent in my mind that i cant know who it was.  Whether it was in real life, or in the internet… where it was… someone told me I was a writer. I answered what I usually do. I was a story teller….That to be a writer it is like to be a musician, a poet. It is sacred. And this person who now almost feels like a character in my imagination replied. ” You struggled so much to live a life of meaning, a sacred life”  Why cant you see it in you?

 

So, yes, I wait, I write, I am a writer. I struggle to be one. And I am finally, home.

Colombia, The Payment and the Mountains

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As I last wrote I discovered more about the place I stayed in Minca because of Nacho, and because of Nacho I know more of all the alternative narratives there are in Colombia. When I first arrived in Colombia I heard the Costeños ( the people of the Coast) who were mainly descendent of Europeans, then I met the campesinos ( the people from the fields), then I tried to see the Kogi ( an indigenous population) and yet as I walked the Sierra Nevada for 3 days I understood I could not meet the Kogi like that. They were living in other place, the real Kogis, might not even be or look like Kogi after all. It did not make me sad, I respected what was more to respect: the Mountains. And then I met Nacho.

Nacho was from the Andes, though not indigenous he was married to Erika who was indigenous descendent. He never cared much about that till one day he started going deaf. His mother in law told him to go to see a Shaman.  He did it out of respect  for the mother in law and the shaman healed him. Years later when he decided to join the army to fight the guerrilla he was shot by the Farc he almost died. He was in a coma for a long time and one day he woke up but he was not well and had lost a leg. Once he was awake he remembered the Shaman.

Nacho came from the Andes region. His father is a professor of Sculpture. And when this accident happened he decided to follow the Shaman to Minca the village I was in which is in the Sierra Nevada.

The hotel I was staying had been called  was called by Nacho the casa grande ( the big house). He explained to me that it was indigenous ground. The paths still preserved were indigenous. And after no longer being for a while a convent it had become a big house where indigenous peoples from different places came to talk to and to live. Nacho had lived there for 10 years to recover. During these 10 years he had learned the ways of different tribes . He had healed. He was particularly close to his Shaman. But he learned to respect nature and the mountain. He told me, he still had a leg prosthesis to walk and yet this journey had healed his soul. I understood Nacho very well.

We talked in a car journey to Santa Marta because I wanted to buy a Kogi bag, and I had learned from someone there was an indigenous house where I could buy from the Indigenous people so that the money would go fully to them. Nacho was taking some tourists to go Santa Marta, Peter and I took a ride with him.

In this ride I learned something important: that according to Indigenous ways I should not help the entire world. People have their own journeys. I debated this with Nacho. I explained to him I was soo helped always and though I could not get the help, I at least months later could understand what was said to me earlier. So I thought we must help. He agreed. But then you have to let it go when people just keep refusing help. I understood it, and I am understanding it now, that sometimes I help the unknown,  I hear stories to safeguard myself. To not be too vulnerable. There are many stories which are fundamental for me to hear. But not all. And when I don’t make this distinction I abandon those who are so close and are the most important to me.

I abandoned Peter many times trying to listen to all these narratives. And I understood watching him that my own departure hurts the most important people around me. Yet, there are stories I needed to hear. I am still learning this complicated balance.

Nachos story had to be heard.  So I heard. And I was told by Nacho I should go see the snowed capped mountains. It was the most sacred place there was. And that I should visit the Cumbre, the mother of all waters. And Nacho explained me I should make a payment to the mountain.

A payment, he said,  could be anything, it had to be something of value. He often gave tobacco. Words. What it was there to be given.  I told him I d like to go. It involved us getting to 2800 meters. I asked him to find the right people to take Peter and I. He did. Eqlias and Jose. Two brothers who were one of the 150 real people from Minca.

I was excited.  He told us to prepare ourselves for cold. And told us to go at 4 am. I came home and started to think what I could give to the mountains. I knew I could give my words. But what should I give of mine. Some part of me thought I should give my bracelet but immediately realized I was not prepared for that. So I remembered Thailand.

Some of your who read me for a long time, might remember that last year as I decided to ride a  bike for 57 km in unknown part of Isaan. I was then with my very close friends to this day Andre and Sandra, and Fred from Norway.  In that ride, we ate, and searched for coffee, and  I had found a little bag in the one shop we saw in this remote area. The shop where I bought iced coffee.

I wanted to buy the bag to put coins, and the old Thai lady rushed towards me, and removed the things from the inside of the bag. I realized right then that the bag belonged to her and so I apologized. She touched her hearth and made a gesture to give it to me. I refused it; she pointed to the sky and repeated the gesture. It was a gift. I had tears in my eyes. I could not speak Thai or her English. So I looked inside my bag and could not find anything special. So I took the scarf in my neck. The scarf I had bought in the Middle East, and had travelled the world with. And I gave it to her. She refused it like I had and I also pointed to the sky. It made me happy. I carried that bag ever since as a little treasure.

That was it: I would  give the bag to the mountain.

Eqlias picked us up and we took more than 2 hours to get  up the mountain in a motorbike. I wore all that I had to be able to go from 30 celsius to 5. I froze. I spoke sometimes but most of the time I looked the forest.  We stopped sometimes because it was too hard to go by bike.  Peter and I walked. We stopped when we met the military that was there to prevent the guerrilla. I who do not even like the military took pictures with them. I heard them too.

And then we got to a very high place. The mountain was covered and we could not see  the snow capped mountains. I thanked the sun for warming me up. A man, Leonardo, who worked in a cel phone tower there brought us coffee.  I dislike the cell phone tower there. But I liked the coffee and Leonardo. Peter and I did yoga, stayed in the sun, took pictures, till it was time to go to the Cumbre.

We had to go under some barbed wires with the help of the army to reach this place. It was a different place. It did not look like the mother of all waters. It reminded me of Harry Potter enchanted lake. I walked there. Took the bag and opened it. Peter said he would put the tobacco. He explained to me it was just returning tobacco to nature where it came from.  I put some as well, and I understood my bag could not be returned there.  I opened my bag where I had put the tobacco and we started putting it in the water.  I made thought after thought of payment ; most of it was love, and thankfulness. Then I knew , Peter without telling me, had shown me the bag did not belong to that place. But as I opened the bag I saw a little sculpture.

In Thailand when I broke my foot and all people came to say farewell, a Dutch man who lives in Nong Khai brought me once his work.: Buddhas …he told me it was a gift but I should choose one. I choose one that did not really look like a Buddha. It looked like a monkey. He had his eyes covered.  I always joked I did not know it was a monk or a monkey.

When I saw it this time,  I decided the monk, the monkey, the gift belonged there. So, I followed Peter s advice put the monk overlooking the Cumbre. I watered it, remembering Raphael, the 3 years old boy of the travelling family I once wrote about.  When he came to Nong Khai he asked to water the Buddhas like in temples. So I watered the monk/monkey with the freezing water and I thought if he is a monkey he was back in nature, if he was a Buddha he was in place taking care of it all. I stood up and I walked towards the mountain.

I sat and I asked Eqlias whether the mountain was sacred to him. He told me he was half Palenqueiro ( free slave descendent), and choco ( black community of Colombia). Yes the mountain was sacred tp him. I told him I had made a payment. He told me the mountain was sacred because Nacho had taught him about it.  We talked about the mountain he had the real respect for it just like Nacho had it though they were not indigenous.

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I asked him about his family, he told me his father had abandoned him when he was 3, his mother had disappeared on the mountain when he was 15. I had tears in my eyes covered by my sunglasses. I asked him what he wanted to have happened to his mother.

He told me he wished she had abandoned them. That this way she is not dead. As he told me this the clouds went down and down. I could see the mountains, the trees, the palm trees and the snowcapped peaks at 5700 meters in front of me. What a sacred place I thought. I had seen how close to each other were Eqlias and his brother Jose were. Now we spoke of their lives.

I told him I thought that if she was dead maybe she is in a better place, if she lost her memory maybe she is happier somewhere else in a different life.. but I doubted that someone who has abandoned a family could be happy. He smiled.  I told him that like him I wished her happiness.

I told him I had made a payment to the mountain and he understood what I meant. And there I knew that the sacredness of the world, the stories, and love belonged to all of us who inhabit this universe. I took my little bag and I told him the story of it and I told him the bag did not belong to the mountain, but it was sacred to me, so it belonged to him now, someone who took me to a solemn place. I gave it to him

“ Eqlias, do to it whatever you want. Keep it, maybe berry it, give it to your daughter, or keep when you hear from your mother. I give to you because I was going to give it to the Cumbre. It does not belong there, but at the same time it does. You brought me here to the most sacred  place there is. I give it to you because you told me your story. I give it to you because I am thankful.”

He understood. Jose understood I gave them. Not only Eqlias. Jose had been only 7 when his mother disappeared.  And we watched the mountains for a long time.

When I bid farewell to Minca I was taken to Santa Marta by Nacho and Erika his wife. I had met his whole family the day before. I had brought icecream to his 3 daughters and his son. I had met the dog and the turtle.  This time Erika came to say goodbye. We drove to Santa Marta. We went to buy our indigenous bags the ones we would recognize.  Peter recognized his immediately.  It was from the mountains. I recognized mine only  with Nachos help 🙂 He took me to buy the best coffee ( which is another story), and then he took me to get the best bus. He took me to go. Erika told me I had to come back to her house, In the Andes.

I was taken away from Minca by newly made friends who would stay with me like my dear friends Andre and Sandra have stayed ever since that bike ride. I was taken away by people who gave me what they had of most sacred. I left having learned so much.  I learned one more time, in my skin, that all this world belongs to all of us who are part of it. That I am part of the massacres that happened and happen daily in the world. That in my daily choices I impact the world. That I cannot help all, but some. And  the most important lesson I have learned might have been that sometimes I make wrong choices. And my friends, ( Nacho,  Andre), I depend on you, to remind me of the right choices, so that I do not loose what is the most precious. The voices that have not been heard.  Specially mine, and of those I love the most who are so close to me, and yet sometimes listening to others I let them feel I am not there.

Love,

me

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