1.) How many of the children (percentage) of the pickers come back and support their families in the Picker Operations? I recall that the one guy at the beginning (I forget his name) wanted his future child to be a lawyer to help protect their rights.
2.) In the art produced by Vic Muniz, how did it improve the morale of the Pickers at the landfill? It didn’t really touch on it a whole lot in my opinion.
What role did race play in Wasteland?
Although race was not really mentioned in Wasteland, the majority of the pickers had darker skin. I think that the issue of race should have been addressed in Wasteland since it most likely played a role in the poor conditions the pickers were living and working in.
Is art the best way to help people in poverty?
I think that art is helpful for people in poverty as an outlet and to recognize other aspects of life. However, I do think it would have been helpful if Vik gave the pickers advice or education on how to get a new job and overcome obstacles that exist in everyday society.
In waste land how did the art of Vic Muniz raise the happiness and confidence of the pickers at the Jardim Gramacho landfill?
IN the painting that Vic Muniz made and sold for the pickers of the Jardim Gramacho Gramacho landfill, how do you think this money benefited the community?
In class on Thursday, April 12th, Jack presented to the class his research on Brazilian prisons. He explained how citizens residing in favella’s are unfairly targeted and imprisoned for minor crimes, overcrowding the Brazilian prision system. It reflected the current issue of Lula’s imprisonment and how he’s being kept away from such conditions, and provided an introductions into the day’s major discussions about race in Brazil.
Nasua introduced her book Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil by Alexander Edmonds. She covered how Edmonds’ research focuses specifically on how beauty functions as its own factor in society, leaving widespread impacts on how Brazilian women identify themselves. There was an ideal body type, one that had black and white features, though predominantly European in the face. One’s body going through plastic surgery (plástica) was a form of therapy, as some surgeons such as Ivo Pitanguy describe. However, Nasua pointed out the dangerous implications of these practices, including how they directly contradict they ideal of a “racial democracy”. There is an idea that only portions of black bodies are truly acceptable, and for darker skinned women to be more socially accepted as “beautiful”, they must alleviate their “errors” of looking poor, and instead using surgery. This is crucial in understanding Brazilian society and the delusion of assuming that all races are equal when they are clearly divided.
Jackson was able to dive deeper into Brazilian perceptions on race in his presentation of Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America by Edward Telles. The book was more of a scientific report, explain how Brazilian’s identified themselves racially and how others perceived them. It included a history of how race has changed over time, altering how Brazilians have identified their race. Though the book had some discrepancies, such as a small sample size, it still provides a personal look into the world of racial identify.
All these topics tie into the major theme of the reading; how has beauty standards and the growth of plástica emerged as a source of identification for Brazilians? Alexander Edmonds returns in today’s coverage of Brazilian bodies in this article ‘The Poor Have The Right to Be Beautiful’: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil. He explains how plastic surgery has been reinterpreted as a therapeutic practice and serves as a way to “normalize” citizens, especially the poor. Because of the free healthcare that allows anyone to get plastic surgery, it’s prominence has grown dramatically. It’s established a mindset of bodies serving as a representation of one’s entire identity, and can be seen as a way to alleviate citizens from poverty. This has serious historical implications for how Brazilians identify who they are, how people can use science to change their identities, and how Brazilians have begun to categorize themselves beyond race and class, and into bodies.
Some key terms to remember from this seminar are:
To learn more about these topics, feel free to explore the following sources
Questions to Consider:
Attempted Prison Break Leaves 21 Dead in Brazil’s Amazon Region
This article, published in the Rio Times, discusses a recent incident in which the Santa Izabel Prison Complex, a Brazilian prison, was assaulted from the outside. The attackers, described only as “a heavily armed group,” used an explosive device to blast through a wall and “facilitate the escape of inmates” (Alves 2018). In a subsequent investigation by the Para state Department of Security and Social Defense, an indeterminate number of the prisoners themselves were found to have been in possession of weapons at the time of the offensive. A total of twenty-one people ultimately lost their lives over the course of this event, including a prison guard, five inmates attempting to escape, and fifteen individuals working to free the prisoners (Ibid.).
Santa Izabel is located near Belem, Para, a state capital in the Amazon river basin. In February, the National Council of Justice had warned both state and prison officials of the high probability that there would be a large-scale escape effort in the near future. Moreover, the agency had recommended the construction of an additional wall and an enhanced security presence around the particular compound which would be breached two months later. This facility, the Center for Recovery of Penitentiary Para III, was found by the Superintendence of the Penitentiary System to be capable of housing no more than 432 prisoners. However, at the time of the jailbreak its cells were well over capacity, holding “a total of 605 inmates” (Ibid.).
Upon observing the broader Brazilian prison system, one finds that this instance of violence, overcrowding, and apparent negligence by public servants is not unique to the complex in Para. Writing for the American University International Law Review, Layla Medina finds that the country regularly fails to enforce its own laws on the treatment of inmates, in addition to passively condoning actions which violate the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Through her research, the author also determines one of the key factors behind all of these problems to be the criminal justice system’s pervasive failure “to grant detainees a prompt custody hearing,” which in turn leads to overcrowding and leaves prisoners vulnerable to abuse by guards and other inmates (Medina 2016, 627). These problems are further exacerbated by significant political pressure to impose harsher punishments for relatively minor offenses, which disproportionately impacts poor communities and ensures that prison populations expand faster than the facilities accommodating them (Ibid., 612-27). It can then be stated that the problems highlighted in these articles are deeply connected to the social and economic divisions that have plagued Brazil since its independence, and will likely persist until such inequalities are recognized and properly addressed.
Works Cited:
Alves, Lise. “Attempted Prison Break Leaves 21 Dead in Brazilian Amazon Region.” Rio Times, April 11, 2018. http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/attempted-prison-break-leaves-21-dead-in-brazils-amazon-region/.
Medina, Layla. “Indefinite Detention, Deadly Conditions: How Brazil’s Notorious Criminal Justice System Violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” American University International Law Review 31, No. 4 (July 2016): 593-627. http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/auilr/vol31/iss4/3.
On March 20th, Brazil’s government announced that it planned to vaccinate the entire country against another outbreak of yellow fever by April 2019. For those who may not know, yellow fever is a nasty disease. It’s caused by a virus that is spread through mosquito bites. The first time I learned about it was in the seventh grade when my class was studying Colonial American history in Philadelphia. The worst epidemic occurred during the summer of 1793. At the time it started around 100 people died, but at the end, the death toll reached 5,000. While modern medicine has come a long way since 1793, yellow fever is not to be taken lightly, further evidenced by the fact that in this year alone 300 people (including tourists) in Brazil have already died from the virus. “This virus has hit the outlying areas of the country’s largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, particularly hard, threatening to become (Brazil’s) first-blown urban epidemic since 1942.” (
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Despite the disease’s normal location in Amazon River basin, it broke out of its usual pattern in early 2016 and started to move toward the country’s largest cities, which prompted the declaration of a public health emergency in 2017. Perhaps what is more troubling than the outbreak of the disease, is the number of domestic people who still need vaccinations. At a news conference, Health Minister Ricardo Barros said, “We are going to act preventively instead of reacting with emergency measures as we have done.” Referring to the fact that health officials would need to vaccinate an additional 77.5 million people to reach the country’s entire population by April of next year.
Ironically, critics say health officials are the ones who failed to act aggressively, due to the fact that they determined yellow fever had limited reach and was therefore not worth the risk of vaccinating the entire population. These actions or lack thereof subsequently left them scrambling when the virus appeared near São Paulo in the most recent outbreak. Additionally, increasing efforts to vaccinate 23 million people this year have been hampered by “false rumors” about the vaccine.
Historically, it is hard to conceptualize the recent events going on in Brazil. While we have talked about shifty politics and dictatorship in class, I’m not sure this current epidemic falls directly under those categories. I think that if one wanted to, they could make the argument that the governments’ ineptitude in handling the yellow fever outbreak could possibly fall under state-sanctioned violence. I myself am not making that argument because I feel like I would need to do more research, but judging from the tone of this article, I feel like it could be made. I also feel like this argument might hold credence due to the fact that Brazil just came off from dealing with the massive Zika virus outbreak that spread from 2015-16.
Health workers visited the Pirituba neighborhood of São Paulo this month to vaccinate residents. Credit Dado Galdieri for The New York Times
How is poverty portrayed?
Poverty is a huge theme for Macabéa in Hour of the Star, not only poverty as in socioeconomic status but poverty in her spirit and her life experiences. Poverty is a major issue in most countries in the world. Having Macabéa and Rodrigo be complete opposites shows how poverty and wealth in Brazil, and any other country, have such an unequal wealth distribution. The narration of the novel coming from Rodrigo shows the audience that many people believe and understand that with wealth comes education and happiness. People always say money does not buy happiness, but it does bring financial stability, sustainability, and education. This can be seen in how Macabéa is described as only surviving on hot dogs, soda, and coffee, but Rodrigo is not surviving, but thriving.
Something I found very intriguing about The Hour of the Star was its style of narration. Perhaps its the part of me that loves poetry, but the style of the narration came across as prose. Very early on, the narrator poses very large questions about life, consciousness, and what it means to simply exist. Based on these early themes my question is: How do we make sense of Macabéa’s death at the end of the story? Does her death lead to an interesting commentary on the core meaning of life and existence in the world?
At the end of the book, our narrator comes to the realization that everyone dies, even him. Perhaps this scene was a bit jarring after Macabéa’s drawn-out death, which spanned multiple paragraphs. Particularly the narrator’s departure when he says “Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.” (77) However, I think the abruptness helps strengthen Lispector’s central message of the book. No matter what type of life you lead, whether it’s seemingly as miserable and mundane as Macabéas, or as lavish as your favorite celebrity, nobody truly lives their life as if they are mortal. That is to say, no one wakes up thinking that this is the day that they’ll hit by a car. It’s an impossible expectation for people to have. Yet, even though it might seem cliche, death’s like Macabéas happen all the time. Perhaps not in the same way, but they certainly happen.
A sad example of this was the passing of Clayton Geib during the Fall semester, whose cause of death still isn’t fully known. His death was particularly hard for one of my friends on the football team. In our conversations following Clayton’s death, my friend told me that it was hard for him to really accept Clayton was gone, and that he was soon trapped in a cycle of telling himself, “I just played with him (Clayton) yesterday” and other similar comments for almost weeks on end. I believe Lispector tried to get at this concept with having Macabéa die so suddenly at the end. Not only is contemplating our own mortality something everyone struggles with, but it’s not something we like to do, as evidenced by the narrator saying, “don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.”
Personally, I thought the last quote reflected a sentiment reflected in one of my favorite Kanye West lyrics: “If you admire somebody you should go on ‘head tell ’em,
people never get the flowers while they can still smell ’em “
“What was the author’s purpose of having Macabea’s death be so sudden, and so insignificant?”
The ending of the book has Macabea die from a Mercedes. Throughout the book, the author keeps demonstrating how insignificant Macabea is, how ugly she is, poor she is, in poor health, mentally slow and ignorant etc. Most of the time, deaths in literature that are emphasized are usually significant, but hers was so sudden and she was marked as insignificant. Why have her die at all? The symbolism, reason, and descriptions around her death are interesting and difficult to decipher.
Question: What is the purpose of “(explosion)” in the novel?
Throughout the novella, the narrator interjects his own commentary to explain what he means or to add that he does not like writing, Macabéa, any of the other characters, and various other opinions. He does this by either incorporating some paragraphs in first person to show that it is his mind or by adding remarks in parentheses at the end of a paragraph or in the middle of a sentence. However, there are many times that the narrator interjects “(explosion)” in the middle of a sentence and offers no explanation for it. This may be because the author himself does not know what he means, which is entirely plausible as he says many times that the writing is “above and beyond [me]. [He’s] not responsible for what [he’s] now writing” (63). Nevertheless, whether the narrator understands it or not, the word was included and therefore means something in the grander scheme of the novel. I argue that the interjection symbolizes moments of change or realization in Macabéa’s life.
This realization came first on page 33 of the novella, when Macabéa exclaims: “Ah month of May, never leave me again! (Explosion)”. This occurs after Macabéa stays home from work for the first time and learns about her own body. Her body and its features are things that she had ignored her entire life, so here, she is becoming more of a person, something that the narrator alludes that she is not. Later in her life, Macabéa decides to go to the doctor after eating too much chocolate and being in pain. Here again, there is an explosion (57). Not wanting to be a burden or presumptuous, she had never gone to the doctor before. Although she does not grow much here as it is told to us that she does not get her prescription, she is still taking steps to become someone larger than an obedient pure girl whose convictions even she does not understand. Finally, arguably the most important explosion, is when: “Macabéa’s eyes were opened wide as if by a sudden voracity for the future” (67). This is one of the largest points that the narrator attempts to make. Before, he was adamant that she had no future because poor, sad girls with no realization of who they are did not have futures nor did they think of futures. This, then, is the biggest change and realization that Macabéa has: her acknowledgement and hope that she has a future.
The explosions, then, are an explicit manner of telling the reader that something is changing, both in the repetitious actions and in Macabéa’s personality. Rather than readers assuming and debating points of change in Macabéa, the author lays it out neatly.