Looking for Life

Having a new baby on hand makes work a little more difficult, but I have been able to take some time to subtitle the three most recent episodes of Looking for Life, the telenovela made by indigenous children in Bolivia.

Episode 13

Episode 14

Episode 15

Our Daughter was born last night

What matters most with a baby is to talk, of course.  The content isn't anywhere near as important as the tone, the eye contact, the attention.  None the less, I'm very glad to say that Helena Iara was very attentive as I tried to explain to her the development of pre-socratic philosophy and autarchic, decentralized government as a root of the thinking of Thales and Anaximander.  Whether these hypotheses are true or whether she will even be interested in philosophy matters very little.  What was great was her constant, curious eye contact.

Today I'm interrupting the Shine a Light blog to celebrate an entirely personal event, one that has little to do with street kids or child soldiers or indigenous kids making telenovelas (though the name Iara is Guaraní...).  Rita and my daughter was born last night, weighing in at a little over seven pounds, and since then has shown herself to be strong, healthy, and curious.  Her eyes are in constant movement until they find an interesting object or person, at which point they maintain an intense attention.  Pediatric neurologists say that babies can't focus their eyes yet at this age, and certainly the concept of an "object" hasn't yet entered her eager brain, but she certainly pays attention to color, form, and movement.

For the Pre-socratics, the world was made of up of four elements: water, fire, earth, and air.  For Helena Iara, the elements are probably movement, color, smell, and sound... but they still come together to form a world.

I'll be continuing these reflections on another blog, so as not to confuse it with Shine a Light.  helenaiara.blogspot.com

Some thoughts on modern fairy tales

The history of fairy tales helps understand the sometimes disturbing elements in several of the films made by children in Rio de Janeiro.  We might be tempted to see it as a result of the violence around them (and in some cases, it clearly is: Kevin's story that the Barata Yazmin lives in a dark place full of bullets), but when we look at the way that fairy tales developed at the end of the middle ages, we see that the brutality and yuckiness we see in many of these films only expresses a post-modern version of a much older tradition.

Robert Darnton, for instance, traces the history of the redaction of Little Red Riding Hood, which in the earliest written forms we have (from the folklorist Perrault in the 17th century) was a deeply disturbing and nihilist tragedy.  When the girl (no red riding hood is mentioned) arrives at her grandmother's house, the wolf demands that she take off all of her clothes, burn them in the fire, and then climb naked into be with him before he devours her.  Darnton criticizes Bettleheim's famous interpretation that the story contains hidden symbols of sexuality, insisting that people of the late middle ages had no hang ups to force them to express lessons about sex in code.  They could do it in plain language.  Nor is there a woodsman to cut her from the wolf's belly at the end of the story; that was an addition made by the Brother's Grimm much later, adding an unrelated German fairy tale.

When Beatriz tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood in The Incredible Story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf, she hews closely to the orthodox version until the end, when she cuts the added-on story of the woodsman.  In fact, her "erroneous" reading of the text is more honest to the original than the pablum added by the Brother's Grimm to make a disturbing story more palatable to the nascent bourgeoisie.  One of Liberation Theology's most interesting insights about hermeneutics was that the poor, more similar to the original writers and readers of the Bible, had a certain epistemological privilege in reading and interpreting the Bible.  One might ask if the same is not true of kids from the favela reading old fairy tales.  Their lives are much closer to the abject poverty and stateless violence that characterized the late middle ages than is the life of any middle class intellectual.

It's worth while looking carefully at the way Beatriz concludes the story, the joy with which she presents the tragedy.  Her faked scream and quick exit from the camera may show more about medieval and favela subjectivity than hundreds of anthropological essays:


I'll add to these reflections soon, thinking through the other movies made by the pre-school kids in Rio de Janeiro.

Amarelo/Yellow

Quase sempre, os adultos lêem as histórias para crianças como se fossem inocentes, "infantis." Porém, se lemos os contos dos irmãos 

Grimm ou outros contos de fadas na sua forma original, vemos que podem ser, realmente, histórias estranhas, violentas, confusas... Em 

Amarelo, Allan, um menino de 3 anos de idade da comunidade de Salguiero, Estado de Rio de Janeiro, faz uma leitura da história 

disneyficada de Peter Pan, embora sem ler as palavras do livro. Lendo as imagens a través das suas próprias experiências, mostra uma 

verdade da história que a maioria de adultos não seriam capazes de ver: a sua violência, aleatoridade, e surrealismo. Não é necessáriamente uma melhor ou pior leitura que a ortodoxa, mas é interessante, um tipo de hermeneútica de suspeita (pra usar uma idéia de Paul Ricouer) 

infantil.

We almost always read chilldren's literature in an infantilized way, as if it were merely cute. In fact, however, if we look at the stories of theBrothers Grimm or any other original folk tales, we quickly see violence, strange and confusing stories. With Yellow, Allan, a three year old living in the favela of Salguiero (Rio de Janeiro state) offers his own reading of the story of Peter Pan, using only the images and his own experiences as a touchstone. The result is a little disturbing, but I think it simply points to the surreal and aleatory aspects of the story itself,which we adults often lose in our wish to see only the cute in children. I see this reading as a sort of hermeneutics of suspicion, to apply an idea from Paul Riceour to the world of children's thinking.

En Busca de la Vida/Looking for Life

Episode 12

Episode 11

I just posted several new episodes of Looking for Life, the soap opera we are making with Aymara Indian kids in Bolivia, 

on YouTube. Several weeks ago, I cross-posted the first two episodes on this blog, but I wanted to put these more recent 

ones up now as a point of comparison. One of the proposals of making a soap opera, with serial episodes posted every 

week, was to show how kids learn to film, act, and tell stories. I think it is obvious, comparing these different episodes, 

what an amazing improvement they have made in every aspect of filmmaking.

New Article/ Nuevo Ensayo

Hace algunos meses, escribí un artículo para el Harvard Divinity Bulletin, donde usé las ideas del filósofo francés Emmanuel Levinas para pensar la manera que adolescentes que eran niños soldado en la guerra cvil Colombiana denuncian a la violencia y nos llaman a la consciencia.  Aida Ramos, una traductora epañola que trabaja con nosotros como voluntaria, acaba de traducir el texto en español, y está disponsible aquí.

Several months ago, I published an essay in the Harvard Divinity Review, using the ideas of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to think through the way that children who had once been soldiers in the Colombian Civil War denounce violence and injustice and call others to conscience. I have just published the essay on the Shine a Light website, under the title The Prophet at War.

Morar na Favela não é Fácil/Livin' in the Hood ain't easy

One of our most successful projects over the last several years has been City of Rhyme, a group of young rappers from the most violent favelas of Recife, in Brazil's poor northeast.  MC Okado's "Livin' in the Hood Ain't Easy", composed when he was 14 years old, became an anthem in the city: I remember that several days after the concert that launched the group, where 5000 people from every social class saw the kids perform downtown, I was in an entirely different part of Recife and heard two kids beat-boxing and rapping the song.  It really captures the challenge of living in the favela... and then pride kids have that they are able to survive and even thrive in aplace that would kill almost anyone else.

The lyrics, translated into English:

Living in the slum ain’t no easy task.

Those who live in Arruda must be alert. I say,

Living in the slum ain’t no easy task.

Those who live in Santo Amaro must also be alert.

Many brothers are gone, but I’m still around

I’m a B-boy, a capoeirista, a graffiti writer, an MC.

C’mon over, bro’

I’m M.C. Okado, from the edge of the canal.

And I’m telling you:

When I’m on stage, I don’t envy anyone,

In this material world, you’re worth what you own.

“We’re from the slum, so we face discrimination when applying for work”

“And then, when we get work, they say we’re sell-outs”

The slums are full of junkies,

Bullets fly everywhere,

Kids can’t play outside without risking their lives.

With so much violence around me, I don’t even know what to do.

But God is with me, and I’ll never get involved.

Living in the slum -- what a nightmare!

Most killings take place in Cardinô.

He’s responsible for the ruin of Pernambuco

Is proud of having eliminated so many of our brothers.

He feeds on gunshots and corpses.

He has no talent, no ideas, no common sense, and nothing to talk about.