Family and Community in Aracaju, NE Brazil

''My grandmother started walking 5 miles a day when she was sixty.  She´s ninety-seven now and we don´t know where she is.''  Ellen Degeneres

Sorry, I was browsing some quotes about family in search of something apposite....but saw this one from Ellen and had to use it, even though it hardly points the way to the subject of this post; it was concealed in a long run of quotes of the sort that would grace a mother´s day card or father´s day card and it quite caught me by surprise!

If you´re still with me, I am going to jot down just a few thoughts about family and the sense of community here in Aracaju, NE Brazil and note contrasts with what I have experienced elsewhere.

Being a Welshman, I come from a nation wherein the family is important and it certainly was, and is, in my case.  That said, I know from long chats with my parents that the concept and role of the family that we enjoyed, loving and caring though it was, was not the same as had enfolded them when they were growing up.  It does seem that in places and times when life is hard, when we are experiencing or can at least remember circumstances that caused us to need the extended family´s help to get by, the bonds are strong but, as we become more affluent and more otherwise independent so the breadth of what we know as family and the role it has in our lives changes.

In Brazil, at least up here in the traditionally conservative, rural NE, family is still at the core of life.  One of the first contrasts from what I have experienced in Europe and the US is that families may actually be much larger.  My husband is one of 7 kids and his mother was one 24.  One of my uncles in Wales had 7 kids, but no-one even came close to 24.  In years gone by in the poorer homes in this region of Brazil, it was the norm that when a couple had reached the number of children they could reasonably support they would give additional kids to family or fiends who they knew wanted more.  The child who was handed over in this way, would usually know his birth parents and would essentially grow up with two sets of mums and dads.

The dynamic within a family of my parents in law's era sounded to me not unlike that in Wales of that era.  While the father was the head of the household, '....I´ll tell your father, when he comes home....', it is the mother who shoulders the task of home making.  Indeed, when I applied for my CPF, akin to a US social security number, I was required to furnish my mother´s maiden name, not my father´s surname.  The father was, and still is in most households that I know here, the one who goes out to work and his homecoming reminds one of, '....home is the hunter, home from the hills....'.  The father of a friend of Josue´s, a really lovely, welcoming man with a cheeky sparkle in his eye, has never washed up a plate in his life, never cooked a meal or assisted in housekeeping in any way.  Meals are on the table at the right time, or he will take his seat at the table and breath heavily until food is put before him.  The brother of another friend, who has his own family now, requires the same level of care and food must be on the table as he walks in from work and it must be of the necessary quality and sufficient quantity; or his wife will hear about it.  We may all know families where the dynamic is such, but here it is the norm; at least in my experience.

Family here is also bigger outside the nuclear.  At our recent Sao Joao party, one entire table of ten people was introduced to me as all being cousins of my husband.  When we walk around the City, I am constantly told that this or that person is a cousin.  While the relationship is known, whereas it might not be in some areas of countries like the USA or UK, we may already be seeing a change occurring in that familial breadth in the fact that I will be told he/she is a cousin, but the detail of whether they are 2nd, 3rd, once or twice removed etc is no longer known or remembered and they will, increasingly, be little more than passing acquaintances.

The close knit family, anywhere, can deliver riches beyond anything other than the love of the one you choose to live your life with....but it may also deliver heart ache.  If a child falls foul of the rules of the home, retribution may be severe.  In terms of disciplining the kids, I think of the true tale told to me here of a mother coming home to find one of her young daughters holding the cat up by the tail.  Daughter drops cat and prepares for the fall of her mother´s heavy hand....but no, nothing other than Mum asking the girl to help unload the shopping then, as this task is almost complete, the mother suddenly grabs a handful of the young girl´s hair and lifts her off the ground.  She holds her there and holds her there, despite the girl´s screaming and wriggling, then puts her down.  The mother calms her daughter and gently asks, '....did that hurt...?', yes replies the girl and the mother then closes the engagement with, '....well, it hurts the cat, too....'.  Disciplining tends to be more basic, here, with the punishment often chosen 'to fit the crime'!

For more serious infringements, however, people we know of my husband´s generation have been told to leave home when young; thrown out.  I know well, from our friends here, that that may result from something like a child coming out to its parents or a female child seen kissing a boy in public all etc.  There is a sense, however, that such family dynamics are starting to change, at least in the major City of Aracaju if not in the towns and villages elsewhere in the rural and relatively poor Sergipe State.

With the extended family still being real family, here, visits from the same are much more frequent than would usually be the case in others areas I have lived in.  Such visits will not, in our experience, be preceded by a call to see if you are at home or whether it is convenient to call.  It simply can never be inconvenient for family to call in.  If family arrive while you are entertaining friends, they will normally pull up chairs and join in.  Such visits, even when accompanied by overnight bags, are usually of unspecified duration.  Indeed, I have at times asked how long a relative (or very close friend - afforded similar status) is staying, how many nights, and been told that we simply don´t know.  You can never be too busy for family to visit and the visit will last....as long as it does.

Well, that really only scratched the surface of the issue of family and how it is different here from what I have been used to elsewhere. In the second post of either tomorrow or Thursday I shall explore my experience of identity and community in NE Brazil.....and it would be great to think that you might join me for that as well.

Thanks a million for dropping in.  I really appreciate it.  My very best to each of you and your families.

Stay safe.

Dave