Dance Lest We All Fall Down

Breaking Cycles of Poverty in Brazil and Beyond

Margaret Willson

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295801681
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

An unexpected detour can change the course of our lives forever, and, for white American anthropologist Margaret Willson, a stopover in Brazil led to immersion in a kaleidoscopic world of street urchins, capoeiristas, drug dealers, and wise teachers. She and African Brazilian activist Rita Conceicao joined forces to break the cycles of poverty and violence around them by pledging local residents they would create a top-quality educational program for girls. From 1991 to the graduation of Bahia Street's first college-bound graduate in 2005, Willson and Conceicao 's adventure took them to the shantytowns of Brazil's Northeast, high-society London, and urban Seattle. In a narrative brimming with honesty and grace, Dance Lest We All Fall Down unfolds the story of this remarkable alliance, showing how friendship, when combined with courage, insight, and passion, can transform dreams of a better world into reality. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVXj44o3rVE

part one

learning to dance

one

seduction

I had just boarded a Varig Brazilian Airlines flight from Brussels to Salvador. The year was 1991. I knew I had left European space and entered Brazilian almost as soon as I entered the plane. I walked to my assigned seat and found a nun sitting there. “Excuse me,” I said. “You’re in the wrong seat.”

“No,” she said. “This is my seat.”

“May I see your ticket?” I said. The people in the adjoining seats were all listening; a child stared over the back of the next row. Who would harass a nun?

She handed me her ticket. It was for three rows back, a center seat. The plane was packed.

“See,” I said. “Your seat is different.” The annoyance around me thickened to hostility.

The nun looked at me, said nothing.

“Do you understand?” I asked.

“This is my seat,” she said. “I’m sitting here.” The man beside her placed a protective hand on her arm.

A man behind me took my hand luggage. “Let me help you with your bag,” he said in Brazilian-accented English. He strode toward what was indisputably my new seat and placed my bag in the overhead.

Brazil-1, Margaret-0.

I was now squashed into my new seat between a fat man who was already snoring and a man whose foul breath rushed at me when he smiled. As I settled in, I contemplated the politics of the World Cup. If a game like that could invert power relations between G8 countries and countries struggling to pay off international debts, then what unbalancing experiences could I expect in Brazil?

I was only on this plane because of Alexandra. It was her fault. I was an anthropologist working in Amsterdam and had been awarded a year’s fellowship position in Australia. Alexandra had somehow convinced me that from Amsterdam, Brazil was on the way to Australia, and, that being the case – particularly since she would be visiting herself – I simply had to visit her family in Salvador, a major city in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Somehow I had conceded to this dubious plan.

“You’ll love it,” Alexandra had said to me only a few weeks before. We were sitting in her section of an illegal squat in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. She loaded more wood into the old, rusted barrel that served as her heating source. The building was in a state of disuse and disrepair, virtually abandoned by its owners, and it had been taken over by squatters. About twenty other people lived in this squat, but Alexandra had sectioned off this large room for herself, secured by a heavy wooden door, a bolt, and large lock.

Alexandra’s room overlooked a canal. Its floors were wide sixteenth-century oak, the ceilings high and dark from centuries of life and grime. In one corner, Alexandra had built herself a bed of planks. Near the ancient glass-paned double door that lead to nothing but a view above the canal, she had placed two lumpy but serviceable sofas she had found in the street somewhere nearby. Across from the bed, fairly near the stove, she had set up a gas burner on a rough counter and connected it to a propane tank. Beside the burner stood a battered sink and a bucket to catch the water beneath. Everything was as tidy and spotless as cleaning could make it.

“You will love my family, my sisters,” Alexandra said, handing me a steaming cup of tea she had poured from the pot that stood warm on a homemade shelf above the stove. “How long will you be able to stay?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My position in Canberra doesn’t start for two months, so I suppose I could stay as long as six weeks.”

We settled into the sofas. Late afternoon sun shone across the dark planks, catching their soft, deep color, making them luminous. Alexandra opened the doors, and we heard the bells of bicycles and the conversations of people as they passed below.

We sat in silence for a moment, savoring the peace.

“When you get to Salvador,” Alexandra said, “you will understand why I so love this place.”

“I love this place too,” I said.

“No, it’s different for me. You’ll see.” She laughed. “You know, I wouldn’t give this invitation to visit my family to just anybody. It’s exactly because you see the beauty here, of this squat, this place most people wouldn’t even want to set a foot in. This is why I know you’ll rest fine with my family.” Alexandra sighed. “A half an hour before my Dutch class. You know, it’s funny. I’m learning to read and write English and Dutch, and I never really learned to read and write Portuguese.” She laughed. “After I learn these other languages, maybe then I’ll be able to learn the language I was born with.”

“Você pode dormir comigo!” Andrea said. Andrea was Alexandra’s thirteen-year-old sister. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and surveyed the narrow, low bed in front of me. From everyone’s gestures, I gathered that she and I were supposed to share it. Alexandra had just escorted me from the airport by bus. The flight, on four different airplanes, had taken over twenty hours. In Salvador, it was now sometime in the evening after dark. I was in the bedroom of Alexandra’s family home. Alexandra’s family lived in a very poor part of Penambuas, a neighborhood at the periphery of Salvador. Inside their bedroom, a dim lightbulb hung above our heads. The single bed in front of me was about five inches from my shin, a bunk bed about five inches behind me. The only ventilation came from the door to the living room and a six-by-six-inch grated hole in the wall above our heads. I could hardly breathe. Alexandra watched me carefully for my reaction.

I laughed. I was an anthropologist. I had lived for months in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, subsisting on sago grubs. I could handle this.

“Thank you,” I said to Andrea. “Tonight I could sleep on anything. But I’m a lot bigger than you. I will push you onto the floor!”

Alexandra translated and Andrea shook her head dismissively. “Would you like to take a shower?” Alexandra asked.

I nodded and she led me from the bedroom to a bare concrete box of a room. It contained only a toilet with no seat and a shower head with a drain near the center of the floor.

“The toilet doesn’t work,” Alexandra said. She gestured toward a bright red plastic bucket. “Just fill that with water from the shower, dump it into the toilet when you are done, and the water will just flush stuff down the drain.” I nodded. “This towel is clean,” she said handing me a towel that hung from a nail on the wooden door.

I thanked her, shut the door, and turned on the shower. The water came out surprisingly cold. Strange, I thought, I’m so hot, yet my skin still tenses at the anticipation of a cold shower. I stepped in, and, after a few seconds, my body adjusted and it felt fine. Then, as I was shampooing my hair, I saw a dark shadow on the wall. My eyesight has always been bad, and the only light in the room came filtered from above the short wall that separated the bathroom from the kitchen. I leaned closer for a better look, then jumped back.

It was a cockroach, at least three inches long. Once I’d seen the first one, I began to notice them everywhere: two in the corner, one by the ceiling.

I rinsed my hair, turned off the shower and, watching carefully where I stepped in my bare feet, quickly dried off and put on a sleeping shirt.

Alexandra’s three younger sisters smiled at me as I reentered the bedroom–I now realized that all five of us were to be sleeping in here. Alexandra gave me a fierce glance. I toweled my hair and said, “I feel much better.”

Andrea shoved my bag to the foot of the bed, the only space available for it, and shut the door. The temperature in the room immediately rose ten degrees. She lay down on the bed and I perched beside her. Alexandra, eighteen-year-old Ana, and sixteen-year-old Soraia took the two bunk beds.

The “mattress,” I discovered as I lay down, was a flimsy plywood box with no padding whatsoever. It was covered only by a thin sheet. I raised myself onto my elbow and felt the wood begin to crack. This entire thing is going to collapse, I thought. I lay perfectly still.

After some time, Ana spoke. “Está muito calor aqui,” she said. “Vou subir.” She crawled from the top bunk bed, pointed toward the ceiling, and with a motion of her hand, invited me to join her. Andrea grabbed our sheets and bounded out behind us. We unbolted the back door, climbed a ladder made of wooden slats nailed into the crumbling concrete wall, and climbed onto the roof.

A warm night wind touched my face, and I breathed a grateful sigh. I curled up in the sheet and lay down upon the concrete roof. The night was not quiet; I counted at least five radios blaring competing music stations at full and tinny volume. A mosquito bit my elbow, so I covered my arms with the sheet. Another mosquito landed near my eye. I pulled the sheet over my head. Then from below, something bit me. I jumped.

Andrea said something I didn’t understand. Then she made a crawling motion with her hand. “Ant,” I said copying the motion. She nodded. Another bite. How many hours before dawn?

I’m an anthropologist, I kept thinking. I can handle this. But I don’t have to like it.

The next morning I discovered that what I had thought the night before to be an urban stream running past the front of their house was actually an open sewer. This sewer emptied into an even larger sewage canal at the bottom of the hill. Alexandra told me that their house now had a completed cement and tile roof and a partially-plumbed indoor toilet because of money she and her brothers had sent from Amsterdam. Despite the daily scrubbing that Ana and Soraia gave to their house, rats still lurked beneath the back washing trough. The girls washed the dishes immediately after we ate and placed them in tightly shut cupboards, yet, when I pulled out a coffee cup for morning coffee, I found a cockroach nestled cozily inside.

Their neighbor’s home consisted of rubble piled into unstable walls, topped by a roof of broken boards. At the bottom of the hill, next to the larger sewer, young children, who seemed to have no parents, lived in a makeshift tent of torn blue plastic sheeting. These children came daily to beg at the door for food.

Everyone I saw in the area was part African descent, various shades of brown and black, often clearly mixed with indigenous or European ancestry. At five feet ten inches, I stood taller than anyone around me, except Andrea and Ana, who were both close to six feet tall with long, graceful limbs. Wherever I went, I was an object of curiosity.

Andrea, Ana, and Alexandra’s father sold sugarcane juice, which he squeezed in a motorized cane-crusher, at the edge of the highway. Their mother, Tatiana, looked about sixty-five, but told me she was forty. She had given birth to fifteen children. Nine still lived. Tatiana sold sonhos, sweet, sugar-covered buns filled with guava paste, from the window of the house. Because the cement used to construct the house had been mixed with a great deal of sand, the sill crumbled beneath our elbows and fingertips. I learned to lean carefully against both sills and walls.

Tatiana awoke at four each morning to make the sonhos. Sonho, they told me, means dream in Portuguese. So each day, I stood beside Tatiana as she sold dreams from the crumbling front window sill.

Of Tatiana’s nine surviving children, five still lived at home–two boys and the three sisters. The brothers only came home late at night, and the father, when I saw him, was usually drunk. Alexandra only shrugged. “He beats us,” she said.

After about three weeks, Alexandra returned to Amsterdam, leaving me in her sisters’ charge. Andrea became my primary teacher of Portuguese and the ways of the streets. I nicknamed her Ursinha or “Little Bear” because of her bright eyes and fierce temper.

Over the following weeks, Andrea, Soraia, and Ana insisted I change my wardrobe; they replaced my one-piece swimsuit with a tiny bikini, refusing to appear on the beach with me otherwise. They tightened my clothes, shredded the hems of my shorts to create a fringe, and in various ways changed every piece of clothing I had into what they considered more beautiful.

These “remodeled” clothes, which were often revealing and explicitly sexy, I considered “cheap” or overly suggestive, going by the standards of the Northern, middle-class society in which I was raised. I tried to explain to the girls that in the United States and Europe, a woman who wore explicitly sexy clothing was perceived as being sexually available or “loose.” I told them that in rape trials in the United States the way a woman was dressed at the time was often used as proof that she was “asking” for sexual violence.

Andrea and Ana told me that in Bahia, except in church or other places where one needed to show respect, this was not the case. A woman who wore sexy clothing was simply considered attractive. It was a woman’s behavior, they told me, as well as her class in society, that determined whether she was considered “loose.” During our evening chats, as we sat on the roof to catch the wind, Andrea and Ana instructed me that a woman was supposed to be sensual at all times and was expected by society at large to use her sensuality as a means to control men. But, they said, presenting a sensual image and actually being sexually available were morally and socially separate. Indeed, part of the derogatory image of the gringa or Northern female was that she was available, but not sensual. And such insults they certainly did not want said about their guest. I was, after all, their responsibility.

A few weeks after my arrival, the sisters set out to show me what they considered beautiful and important in their city. They took me to see a mall. In an instant we walked out of some of the worst poverty I had ever seen and into a designer shopping center. Light and clean hallways were flanked by inviting shops, sporting top-brand fashion and housewares. Music played from a high-tech sound system while escalators silently moved people from one well-lit floor to the next. In architecture and goods sold, this shopping center was equal to the best of its kind in the world. The majority of the people in this mall looked well-fed and well-dressed. And, like myself—and unlike my friends—they were all white.

The girls and I paused before shops that sold goods they could never buy and they smiled as if proud, showing off these stores to me and apparently wanting me to be as delighted as they were. Constantly they urged me to buy, something. I refused and grew increasingly uncomfortable, acutely aware that my ability to buy these goods underscored and reinforced the economic, class, and racial differences between them and me.

The longer we wandered the mall, the more my confusion and discomfort grew. I was no stranger to inequality and racism—I was, after all, from the United States. What I couldn’t understand, though, was the girls’ reaction to the mall. Why were they so eager to show me this hub of materialism that seemed to me a blatant symbol of their oppression? Why was their inclination not one of anger, to smash the colorful displays? And where was their anger at these light-skinned, well-dressed people who clearly had advantages so explicitly denied them?

Where was their anger at me?

A few days before I was supposed to leave Bahia, Ana and Andrea told me about a festival that coming weekend in Arembepe, a small fishing village about an hour north of Salvador.

“Is it beautiful?” I asked.

Andrea looked at the dust between her feet. “We’ve never been there,” she mumbled.

“Really?”

“It costs extra on the bus,” Ana explained, her eyes proud and defiant to belie the shame of this admission.

When I asked the price of the trip, she told me about 30 U.S. cents. I decided I wanted to visit the village as a goodbye to my time with them.

“How about you be my guides,” I asked. “I’ll pay our expenses. That’d be fair. I certainly wouldn’t be able to go there alone.”

Andrea and Ana looked at each other, then at me. “Really?” Andrea asked. “We can go?” She pranced in a circle around me, telling me everything she had heard about this town. She ran inside to ask Tatiana’s permission. We left that evening.

Arembepe, Ana told me, had been made famous in the 1960s when it became a hippie haven for the likes of Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin. Some “hippies” still remained in a small community on the northern edge of the town. They lived in grass shacks and made a living selling jewelry and marijuana. A factory had also been built somewhere nearby. Because of the factory and the hippie influence, middle-class Brazilians avoided the place, going instead to Praia de Forte and other communities further north.

“So, that’s why there’re no big hotels there?” I asked.

“Yeah, there are some small pousadas where you can stay,” Ana smiled, “but we can sleep on the beach or somewhere. The pousadas are too expensive.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure of the best thing to do: offer to pay for a stay in a hotel or let them tell me how they would spend the weekend if I hadn’t been there. I finally chose the latter because that seemed to sit the best with them. Although I was the foreigner, I was also just a part of their big adventure. I g...