Living for the most part of my life in a country other than my own has in essence deconstructed my primary childhood characteristics and habitual traits. Coming into contact with a variety of nationalities, cultures and belief systems has personally led me to become someone who no longer fits within the societal parameters I was originally brought up in. The ten years I have resided in Britain do not in any way make me British, nor do they make me less Brazilian. Yet I often found myself facing many difficulties in relating to both cultures. This raised conflicting feelings of inner
negotiation, comprising together a duality of feeling foreign in a place I once called home and being foreign in a place I had consciously chosen as home.
This unsettling sense of being in-between created a restlessness and deep underlying feeling of belonging neither here nor there. According to Homi Bhabha in his work The Location of Culture (1994), this particular sensation creates room for individuals and communities to exist in a floating space that originates from the merging of different cultures one has been exposed to. Bhabha refers to this as ‘the third space’, something I can wholeheartedly identify with. Based on my own personal experiences I would describe my own third space as a place in which you are home, but not at home and, it will never be a home. Therefore cultural hybridity is not static, but rather an ongoing process, in constant mutation. Both Hubert Herman and Bhabha suggest an
examination of what is at the border of cultural practices and identities in order to create and resignify cultural meanings. He goes on to say that: “This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that
entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” (Bhabha, 1994, p.4)
The culture into which I was born is characteristically hybrid by nature. Often described as a melting pot of ethnicity, Brazil’s multitude of indigenous tribes and colonisation by a range of nationalities created a vibrant diversity that can be witnessed throughout the country’s mix of race, dialect and rituals. Brazilian sociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre described the influence of European and African culture in shaping Brazilian identity in his work Masters and the Slaves (1933).
This miscegenation in the country varies from state to state. This can be seen in movements such as the influx of Eastern European Jewish settlers in southern Brazil during the late 1920s as well as in the arrival of enslaved people forcibly taken to north-east Brazil up until the mid-19th century. This diverse cultural miscegenation was an influence on the way I portrayed my own heritage and roots within the documentary. I felt the need to place my family members and myself as people who were exposed and shaped predominantly by the culture of north-east Brazil. Exploring the ‘Nordestino’ (north-east) element meant that I could better contextualise these aspects of self and family when constructing the documentary’s narrative. This process
was not only for the audience but also for my own self-identification and cultural purposes. It enabled me to reflect key elements more accurately within the story.
Recife, one of the largest capitals in north-east Brazil, has been a place that has struggled with socioeconomic disparity for many years. Throughout history the north-east of Brazil has been overlooked by the government and as a result is severely underdeveloped compared to other areas of the country. My own family roots and origins are heavily tied to Recife. My grandmother and great-aunties were born on the outskirts of the city in small villages that existed on the brink of poverty. The hardship of growing up in these poor peripheral communities during this period was coupled with outdated hierarchal social systems where women had few or no rights. This posed a somewhat suppressed and pressurised environment for many women, who were often under the strong hold of the male figures in their lives. Husbands, fathers and brothers were often seen as the family dictators. The matriarchs of my family had their upbringing influenced by a societal set of values that placed them in a position of domesticity, invisibility and placidness. Their experiences as young women living through a military dictatorship compounded and even reinforced the way their opinions and behaviours were shaped.
Establishing this as the backdrop in which their lives unfolded made it possible for me to highlight some of the factors that shaped their ideologies, identities and point of views. In many ways these elements came to impact the development of my own idea of self profoundly. As a young woman leaving my country with the principles taught to me by my mother, the differences in cultural upbringing quickly became apparent when observing women in western culture.
The principles underpinning my family’s style of upbringing had been passed on cyclically throughout generations, particularly amongst the women in my family. My grandmother raised my mother according to the same ethos and ideas that she had been raised with, and my mother applied these to me in turn. In order to construct my personal narrative within the film, it was necessary for me to recognise that my
identity and my storytelling processes were also heavily determined by the element of gender.
Originally, I did not set out to produce a film that focused on female interviewees and their personal political stances and perceptions. However, in interviewing my family and friends I was able to see that there was an underlining common denominator that connected our political experiences (or possible lack thereof). Gender overdetermined all of our individual narratives and subsequently shaped our subjective experiences (Kehily, 1995, p.30). There were commonalities within all of our storylines that were fundamentally present due to our gender. This can be seen in the segment of the film where we discuss our fears and doubts about participating and attending large-scale protests in Brazil. We all felt unsafe and fundamentally scared about attending these protests. We were all aware of how violent these demonstrations had become due to the police brutality and government retaliation towards the protesters. This
consequently influenced our decisions either to stop attending, or not to attend these demonstrations to begin with.
This feeling of insecurity was not foreign to me. My mother, grandmother and great aunties taught me morals and values that instilled in me a particular character of obedience and placidity. The influence of these ideals on my own upbringing instilled me with a subdued, linear political perception. The deconstruction of these initial ideas and beliefs engrained within me depicted and shaped the direction of the
project, bringing into effect a ‘cinema of we’ (Lebow, 2012). As a result, the creation of the ‘I’ illustrated throughout the film could not have been done without the
participation of my family and childhood friends who, in their own way, rekindled light on who I once was and who I had now become.