There’s a smell I know when I walk out of the airport in São Paolo; earthy and intermingled with car fumes. When the air is heavy with moisture and heat cloaks every step. It’s what humidity smells like. To this day, whenever I catch it, I am transported back to childhood moments of breathing in the smell of home. Or more accurately, my home away from home.
In London, where I was born; the air is far crisper, the smell too mundane. My parents have lived here for 30 years now, each leaving behind different countries and cultures, to build something foreign. Unfamiliarity is the cultural currency of being the child of Brazilian-Montenegrin parents living in Britain. My internal world is constantly unaligned with the outside and there will always be moments that grate on the skin. I’ve grown up in halves – half missing, half uncertain.
As a result, a country that is a 13 hour plane ride away can feel like home just as much as the country of my birth does. It is also probably why I invest so much emotional energy into the politics and body of a country I haven’t returned to in so long. It feels like the UK is falling apart in slow motion. I am grasping onto a place where I can remain safe, and find a nationality to feel proud of.
Brazil was where we went to feel good – so how could there ever be anything unsettling there?
In my 14 years of life preceding the 2008 financial crisis, going ‘home’ for Christmas was an annual privilege. We would spend three glorious weeks in Uberlandia, my mother’s home city. I hoard memories of connecting with every cousin and old friend who knew we were coming. In this idyll, I had no problems and I knew no despair. This was the place we came to in order to feel secure.
Poverty existed at the fringes at all times – everyone talked about it but I rarely saw it. It was as if these imperfections were swept under the rug simply because we were visiting. This is how I could both know and pretend not to know Brazil’s difficult reality and political tension seething under its surface.
It is, of course, easy to be apolitical when you’re ten. Yet, it was more than that for me. Brazil was where we went to feel good – so how could there ever be anything unsettling there?
Brazil feels like a childhood friend, whose new address I never learnt. I miss her terribly.
In my mother’s home, there used to be a single, brown fabric armchair in the middle of a white tiled floor. It stood opposite the TV, where my granddad would sit with one of us in his lap. We would share our time watching Brazilian-dubbed cartoons and local TV shows, eating our way through plates of the sweetest pineapple until our tongues were salty and raw. My granddad was a fruit vendor, and he always brought home the ripest and juiciest bags of fruit for us – knowing we could never get the same thing in London.
Now 25 years old, I have not returned since I was 14. Brazil feels like a childhood friend, whose new address I never learnt. I miss her terribly. I speak about her with the kind of pride I could never feel for the United Kingdom. The special rose-tinted love reserved for a place whose problems never had to affect me, because I never stayed. Just like handing a baby back to a parent, the moment your arms feel too heavy.
Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, rode a wave of right-wing hatred right up to the Presidency. The Amazon burned. COVID-19 arrived with terrible might. It’s hard to live in the diaspora with contentment these days. Unless you are my mother, who has known Brazil’s cyclical turmoil intimately and sees this moment as yet another storm for her home to weather.
“I grew up with most of the problems you think are new,” she said, “Brazil has been in debt, in poverty, in trouble – since I was born.”
Recently, I had a conversation with her about what we missed and what we didn’t. I told her about my heartbreak over what Brazil had become. I talked of my fears for its future. My mother responded by telling me about how, for the last decade, the local free clinic in Uberlandia had constantly run out of bandages and needles. She told me about how the state never stepped in to keep her mother’s family out of poverty. She reminded me of how her father’s business of selling fruit collapsed; that she had got herself a job at 14 to keep the family going.
“I grew up with most of the problems you think are new,” she said, “Brazil has been in debt, in poverty, in trouble – since I was born.”
We kept talking, tossing pieces of information back and forth between us. She spoke about the Fifth Brazilian Republic, a brutal, US-supported military dictatorship, that came to power when she was two. My mother recalled how she used to drink a mixture of coke and coffee to keep her awake – after taking university classes in the morning, working in the afternoon, and studying at night. Money had always been scarce for her.
I am familiar with that truth because, to my immense gratitude, I’ve always been reminded of the poverty my parents left behind.
Hearing my mother’s assertion that for those without money, nothing has changed, was jarring. It contradicted my stubborn assertion that things had once been better. She explained that for all its dynamism, Brazil has never been able to help those who desperately need it. She insisted on this even when I spoke about increased poverty, inflation and human rights abuses under Bolsonaro – telling me I was missing the point.
“Brazil always struggles.” I learned. Then she added, Brazil always overcomes.”
“All of the memories I had built up of Brazil as triumphant, were for her, moments that had pushed her country closer to the mess it lies in now.”
We turned to the left of the political spectrum, and she spoke about the once beloved socialist leader; Lula Inácio Lula da Silva. My mother, like many Brazilians, had relied on Lula to pull Brazil out of its cyclical poverty; to plant hope in its roots. For a while, his policies were hailed around the world as the future of poverty reduction. This was the Brazil I had known as a child, the one of progress and lingering optimism – a lost golden age.
My mother looks back and sees Lula’s power as a festering thorn in Brazil’s side. Yet another leader who had left the country in breakdown, ushering a right-wing resurgence. All of the memories I had built up of Brazil as triumphant, were for her, moments that had pushed her country closer to the mess it lies in now. I saw her country’s decline as a blow to my Brazilian heritage; she saw it as another reinforcement of the view she had always taken. Brazil always struggles. Brazil always overcomes.
We never came to an agreement about the present state of Brazil, one of the worst faring countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. My mother has always looked at her home without the intermittent idealism I have. Her pride and love come from her people and culture. I often feel like an imposter in the spaces she can move so easily in, and so I view Brazil differently to how she does. They are two different countries.
I fear for the future of Brazil, because I recognise this descent into normalised right-wing authoritarianism. I know it academically, analytically, professionally. But my mother does not share this fear because she knows Brazil’s resilience. So I have to stack my personal hopes and fondness of richness on Brazil’s potential to incite joy. Joy, in the feeling of being somewhere equally wondrous and familiar. In that beloved smell of the air when I step out of the airport.
Artwork by Monika Radojevic
Monika is a Brazilian-Montenegrin poet, writer and multi-disciplinary artist based in London. She is a staff writer at Aurelia. In 2019, Monika was the inaugural winner of Stormzy’s Merky Books New Writer’s Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Teeth in the Back of my Neck, will be released with Merky (a Penguin Random House imprint) in May 2021.
