War came to Angola in 1961.
My father would have been 11 when it started. Too young to comprehend, too young to feel the silent, invisible shockwaves that travel through the minds of men and women. Knowledge jumps like a cricket from one to another, but it leaves the young on Islands alone.
Older brothers were old enough. Old enough to be conscripted, to be sent to war.
This was not going to happen. They swore it amongst themselves. They would not die in the jungles. They would not die for a nation they had never seen. This was a family of the sea, not a family of the empire. Fishermen and sailors - not warriors, not colonialists that wanted to make a small nation bigger, a river of blood spreading with tributaries of land.
They would leave. Evacuate. Disappear into the world. They were used to the ocean and the infinite distance it held. People suffer time on the ocean, it ticks on the horizon. They were used to the ocean because this family never had anything more than its distance, time and horizon. Its boundlessness gave them their limits.
They would go to Brazil. They would see how far time and place could stretch.
It stretched exactly ten days. By ship this is how far the Atlantic extends itself. We always imagine this ocean drawing a line between New York and London, blue on blue being teased apart by supersonic jets and floating cities of luxury. It also gives passage from one continent of poverty to another, from one place of teaming life to another.
Some people go from the third world to the first. From places that breath life because they inhale death, to places that find homeostasis in a cool vat of money and relative safety.
Brazil used to be another Portuguese colony. The empire sucked the gold out of it. They bled Africa to mine this gold, to plant and harvest the crops, to bear their illegitimate children, children who became the forbearers of a new race, a culture that rescinded its own domination and subservience. How can you do either when you are half slave and half master?
They landed in Rio de Janeiro. A city named after a river that does not exist and once called the New Eden, a new paradise with a second fall implied.
They did not find wealth, but they found life. A city that does not distinguish, that does not split apart. The drinking continued while gunshots rang out in the hills. A bacchanalian amphitheatre, ringing out with the music of something terrible, something beautiful.
There was the time that a massacre of seven children occurred at the door step of a church. A little monument for little corpses. They had been trying to find shelter. The Statue of Christ looks out over everyone but protects nothing. He remains an ideal and, as always, something you look up to – he just never looks back down.
There have been many times when people tried to find a foothold on the mountainsides that look out onto the bay, and almost always the men with guns and bulldozers come, demolishing with bullets and steel the dreams of a people built out of cardboard and tin.
The drug runners use assault rifles that can punch a hole through 2 consecutive walls and then find enough energy to shatter bone and ligament, but like wasps the government finds victory in numbers and the ability to sting again and again without having to die.
My father looks back to this January River and he smiles.
In the Brazilian spirit all death is the percussive rhythm of life. The beats of the Samba mimic the gunshots and the small, drum like explosions. You wonder through it all bare footed, clothed in shorts and skin. A crazy grin makes you belong in such a place. Joy in the midst of this thing that is both city and graveyard, pearl of grit and ocean, concrete poetry and modernist anguish. A beer in your hand and the women swinging their hips, a man crying into a microphone, singing of suffering with a smile on his face.