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May 24, 2012. São Paulo.

How to begin to encompass the experience of two days spent in a cosmopolitan city of 20 million? The Airbus, riveted angel of conveyance, drifts over the misty cerrado. When we descend, the city is there repeating itself for mile after mile of blocky white spires, gaseous air, stately European grace and accreted Lego-land geometry. The city’s intensity is cut with thick green parks. The city’s velocity is slowed by a transit workers’ strike, which is fine by me. It’s difficult enough to get my head around this density of human energy. As writers, we are students of patience anyway, and our state department motor pool driver is a dignified professional whose face never strays from calm focus.

We are arts ambassadors, as Alan has dubbed us. After speaking/reading/performing to over a thousand Brazilians in over twenty events in three cities during the past ten days, we feel deeply the diplomacy inherent in art. Art educates empathy.

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May 22, 2012. Brasilia.

At a visit to the Universidade Católica, a professor told me that Brasilia is considered a mystical city. Not far from here is a city of 20,000 people, Vale do Amanhecer, which was founded by a woman truck driver who had a vision in the 1960s to start a city and a new religion, which she did. People come from all over the world to live there. They’re all “veteran spirits of the Earth with nineteen or more incarnations.” They help people, drawing them in during “times of confusion and insecurity.”

Brasilia is something else entirely. A designed, futuristic national capital of the nation spurred by President Juscelino Kubitschek. All the development in Brazil was happening along the Atlantic Coast, including the capital of Rio. JK moved the capital to the nation’s center, which made many citizens happy–except those in Rio who saw their city decline and face more poverty and violence following the move in 1960. Brasilia was designed by Lucia Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in 7 to 8 months, built in three years by 60,000 migrant workers laboring day and night. The nineteen ministerial buildings, the presidential and vice presidential palaces, the metropolitan cathedral, the plaza of the three powers, the national congress, national library, museum, theater, the museum of the indigenous people, etc. Sectors of the city designated for education and churches, hospitals, hotels arranged in superquadra, with commercial streets separating them.

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May 20, 2012

The future has arrived at Praia do Futuro. Here is what I had the chance to buy while sitting with my companions under the shade of a thatch umbrella: caipirinhas, bikinis, boiled shrimp, fruit salad, football caps, giant conch shells, sarongs, CDs of forró music, lace table cloths, massage, facial, lymphatic drainage, sunglasses, tattoos, a pair of polished magnets for stress relief, hammocks, screen prints, necklaces, spontaneous song by repentista, crab paws. Yes, crab paws. They were delicious. But the most wonderful were the bikinis. Armloads of all colors carried table to table. I saw a woman try one on while sitting at a table with a group of friends and family. No giggles or embarrassment. Finesse in the way the new bra was slipped over the old and the old slipped out from underneath. It made me think of the trauma it is for women in the U.S. to buy a new bathing suit, an experience we joke about because we dread it so much. We hate our bodies and feel shame not at the hating but at the imperfections. Here, whatever a woman has is on display and not a cringe in sight. One of our traveling companions is Maria Jose Barbosa, a Brazilian scholar and translator who teaches at the University of Iowa. When I asked her what is the situation of women in Brazil, she said that everything in Brazil is a negotiation of contracts. A man kills a woman thinking she’s having an affair and he gets acquitted. A woman is president. But the idea of femininity, she said, is not to be embarrassed by your body — to take ownership of it. The saintliness of motherhood is emphasized, but contraception is available and subsidized for the poor.

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May 16, 2012

After Michaux (Ecuador: A Travel Journal): What is this name of this tree lining the beach, waxy open fists of leaves and briquets of green fruit.  What is the name of that boat? Single sail, boxy hull, huge wooden rudder where the stern man navigates in the calm space separating the sand beach from the marine thoroughfare where the queue of behemoth cargo ships and tankers head for the loading booms and siphons in the city’s port, lined up like milk cows waiting to come into the barn.  The small boat — not a panga, dhou, pirogue. I’m looking for what Michaux called “the faithful gong of the word,”  one of the simple hungers of travel that accompany me.

Today we met with students and teachers at Universidade Federal do Ceará, this northeastern state in Brazil which was described to us as the poorest region in the nation. Federal and state public universities here are free. It’s not easy to get in. But it can be a ticket out of a neighborhood so dangerous a college student will not go outside after dark. They stayed in the auditorium for over two hours, asking questions about writing and racism and violence and The Hunger Games. They were eager for the conversation about contemporary literature and so were we, feeling that joy, as one young man described to me, that although we came for such differing circumstances we could feel alike for certain things in the world. He’d lost a friend, an old woman who had loved butterflies. He missed her but had found in one of my poems that connection, sweet and sad, come close into memory. They asked about influences and I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop and her many years of living in Brazil. The professors said she was in the Brazilian canon, which was thrilling to hear.

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