An Introspective Look at the Houses in Brazil

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

The houses in Brazil have irregular clay brick roofs. They are shaped like that, you know, because they used to be shaped individually, on the thighs of workers, often enslaved women. Given that each thigh has different dimensions, each little cinder block took on a different shape. Yet the roofs worked all the same, with a leak or two, as happens even in the sturdiest of homes. 

 The houses in Brazil lose power frequently, especially those near the beach or mountains—or more so those not in a city.

 The houses in Brazil always, delightfully, smell like coffee in the morning. 

 The houses in Brazil have colorful doors and beautiful buzzing beija-flores, hummingbirds, that softly kiss tropical flora.

 The houses in Brazil have hard, uncomfortable beds, and thin pillows that hurt your neck if you don’t stack them in the right way.

 The houses in Brazil can be stacked, each on the next like precarious building blocks or blocked off and lonesome, separated by high and pointed iron fences with ivies threading themselves between each metal palisade. 

 The houses in Brazil have loudly patterned window shades, pillow shams, bedspreads, and couch covers. They’re ugly, yet they bring together brick-walled, tile-floored homes in a mysteriously warm way. 

The houses in Brazil all have hammocks, or at least they have hooks for them—each set a suggestion of, or for, leisure. In the afternoons, the soft and sweet stray cats come up and entwine themselves in your fingers if you leave your hand hanging during your siesta. 

 The apartments in Brazil are not like the houses. The buildings are constructed in threes and cut off from the streets by tall stone walls that rise and rise like urban fortresses. They do, however, tend to have hooks for hammocks and uncomfortable beds and the smell of coffee wafting from them in the mornings. 

 I write these observations after two weeks of traveling through the state of Rio. Over my many visits back to this country––my country, as it were––in the past twenty-three years, I’ve seen houses in six of the twenty-six states: São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Ceará, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Espírito Santo. It’s not so many, yet I feel as if I’ve seen a lot. As a result, I feel that I can say affirmatively what Brazilian houses look like.

On second thought, however, I don’t know what the houses in the forested state of Amazonas look like or those atop the bluffs of Mato Grosso or along the wide rivers of Sergipe or those lying dustily in arid caatingas of Paiuí, where my mother’s mother is from. The entitlement I feel to speak about Brazil—a place so big, so culturally and geographically variegated—is thus perhaps misplaced. 

Nonetheless, I feel a prerogative to write this for a newsletter about autobiography because writing about Brazil feels like writing about myself. I am from here, after all. That is, if I’m to qualify being as being from a place by way of history. Because generations of my families were born here, grew up here, lived here, fell in love (or at least got married) here, had children of their own here, and stayed here. My father’s mother recently told me that the first time she left Brazil she was 39 years-old. She’s been to over thirty countries since, and yet she always chooses to come back here. 

My brother and I, by way of my mother’s decision to immigrate to the United States, broke my families’ pattern. Although I was born in Brazil, the majority of my growing up time did not happen in Brazilian landscapes. My brother was already 16 when we moved to the U.S. But since he’s 34 years-old now, the majority of his personality development also happened on American soils. Both my partner and my brother’s partner are American. Our children will only be half Brazilian. I don’t know whether my brother feels American or Brazilian; we don’t really talk about these things. 

In a way, my familial generation and its plights most closely resemble those of my great-great-grandparents, who immigrated to Brazil from Italy and Portugal. So, writing about Brazil feels both close and far, true and not. Saying I’m Brazilian feels the same. 

Heidegger writes about being as being-in-the-world, where the worldliness of the world is defined by its familiarity to the one who lives. According to him, as I move about, the world readily makes itself manifest to me, and, in turn, I understand my being. But, if I am to define my biography by this history of mine, basing my self on these people who I only know through my grandmother’s stories and her scattered, orange-tinted photographs of unfamiliar places and times before mine, then perhaps I need to look to another philosopher. For, in terms of origin, I sometimes wonder where the self ends and where the other begins: after all, isn’t this thing that I am really a genetic soup of person after person that I don’t know? Isn’t this thing that I know (or merely think) myself to be only that because it is defined by what others are, too? 

If so, is autobiography inherently about anything and everything but me? That I am merely the node through which all things pass and merely have the inclination to use written language to convey it? 

Is it enough, then, to write about the houses in Brazil to tell you, reader, about me? 

Nietzsche says that the autobiographer inevitably selects, omits, and interprets, creating a story that may be more about the present self’s needs than about historical accuracy. To his point, I don’t even live in a house in Brazil, yet, writing about these houses feels more like me than anything else at this moment. And further yet, more than anywhere in the physical world, I feel as if I can live in these words. 

‘Textuality’ has always meant more to me than ‘reality.’ In my undergraduate philosophy thesis, I argued that the self is best understood by way of narratives because, like the houses in Brazil—and everywhere else for that matter—the meaning of what the self is, is a (re)constructed series of stories that retrospectively build a continuous plot through which one defines the nature of one’s self. Beyond that construction, those irregular cinder block roofs lying on red brick foundations, there is only natural landscape—untamed dust waiting for a meaningful shape to arise from the writer’s, the being’s, mind. 

My words are my bricks. I slowly create my self as I textualize it. In writing, I work against the forces of entropy that pop the screws in the walls and peel its paintjobs. And although I may not live in a house in Brazil ever again, the sense of existence these words provide me are enough, for now. 

Though, I may need to repaint soon.