Read on Twitter
Ok, this will be in English because this post of @laurampohl ressonates A LOT to me when she talks about writing from a Latinx perspective as a Brazilian (go read this post! Go watch Bacurau! You'll love it, I promise!) https://twitter.com/tordotcom/status/1295735640118755331
When I had the opportunity to publish WWGFH for the American audience, one of the first things that @tassitassi (my roommate and agent for internacional business) and I talked about was that now, as a translated writer, people would perceive me as part of the Latinx community
I really never thought about that. Just like @laurampohl, I live in Brazil, I'm perceive as white in my country and have a middle class background i.e. a LOT of privilege. Identity is not something that I'd put much thought on
And this has a lot to do with being Brazilian. Our country was build and erased constantly. Our national heroes were, for the most part, fabricated in a Hero Narrative that has nothing to do with reality. We are perceive as "the friendly neighbour", with our bodies and our samba
But our past was violent. Our country was build with enslaved force and rape, and our veins still carries a lot of racism today. We are like that Family Guy meme when it comes to treat people: if your white or white passing, we worship you; if you're not, that's another story
And we put EVERYTHING under the rug. "No, I'm not racist, of course not! I have a Black friend!" or "No, I don't have prejudices with the poor! I even do charity once or twice a year!"
And then we have the influences coming from everywhere. My generation grew up watching Friends and My Wife and Kids and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And our soap operas. And a specific Mexican TV show called El Chavo. I mean, we consumed a lot of foreign culture.
Some of us see ourselves as inferior as Americans (we even have a name for that -- "straydog feeling"), because we don't have the same lifestyle portrait on TV, so there's a lot of copycat what we see as 'the best' (and, in their process, kind of erase our local culture)
When American people ask me about Brazilian identity (with their American lenses pointed at me), I never have a quick answer. We are the biggest country in Latin America and we share a lot of family dynamics with our overprotective Latina mothers, but our language is different
But we share differences of perspective. Because we grew up with American influences, sometimes we see ourselves closer to American People than Latin American people (for exemple, I can speak English, but I can't speak Spanish not even if my life depends on it)
Identity will never be an easy subject to me. Because I'm a mix of White, Black and Indigenous in a country that have their population growth directly related to rape and murder, and these roots are painful and people do prefer to erased them
My parents are from the Northeast, but I grew up in the Southeast, and that is also a very complicated relation because, on top of all the Outsider Lenses, I still have to deal with the inside ones (equally full of prejudices)
Yeah, I don't have a conclusion for this thread, as I don't have one about my Identity. But the beginning of @laurampohl's post captures pretty much all I always wanted to say about this
Maybe I write a book about it someday (for American audience only. It will be very strange talk about this with Brazilian readers) (maybe we should stop put everything under the rug, after all).
