Teach me vowels as airy and lengthy as flute concertos, I asked
my Brazilian Portuguese teacher. School me grammar and spelling
electric and inviting like a conga line. Spurn politics. Shun religion.
Sing a stereotype fragrant with passionfruit, stinking with romance.
Brazil shrank, in my stressed haste, from its true symphonic power
to one triangle played by a tuneless fool. I learned so little. At first.
“Reach high,” she said. “The top shelf of your strong imagination.”
I did. That’s where I found Brazil. I met the intellectuals exiled
by the military dictatorship. The musicians who returned home
to a resurgent democracy trilling with parrots, tourists, and traders,
only to teach resistance and learn trauma again under Brazil’s new
dalliance with fascism. I met poets who once found noble metaphors
for hope in the laundry, now strangers to rhyme. Politicians upgrading
their deficient minds with artificial intelligence. Students protesting,
willing to paddle the eternity of the Amazon to Brazil’s bright future.
Gone, my personal kaleidoscope of kitsch. Gone, the Carnival feathers
without context. The banana republic, banished to myth. The medicine
in an exuberant, sung word of Brazilian Portuguese—that I will keep.