Our "Mutt Complex"

Rio de Janeiro - When World Cup time rolls around, the same old clichés come back : "Europe bowed before Brazil,” "no one can match a Brazilian,” etc. Triumphal slogans, which try to revoke, with the stroke of pen, our inferiority complex with respect to Europe and North America. (For some Freudian reason, no Brazilian feels inferior to Africans or Asians). From 1958 on we have made soccer our principal way of convincing ourselves that we are not a lesser race, we are not mutts, we are not third world (for someone who thinks this way, the three terms are synonymous).

But, after all, who is it that feels inferior to Europeans and Americans? Interestingly enough, not the masses. The Brazilian masses manage to admire and be amazed by the economic and social achievements of those nations, but that doesn't mean that they’ve given up on their own way of life. Ask someone from the sertão in the Northeast, someone who lives in the slums of the big cities, someone in the rural parts of the Southeast or Central West, a fisherman on the coast, or a shopkeeper in a little town in the interior: "Do you think that the Brazilian people is inferior to the American people?" The most that he will say is "Not inferior! Brazilians are poorer, life is messier, but we get by very well.” With the exception of those suffering the profound depths of wretchedness (and there are millions of them), the average José may feel that he is suffering from unfairness, that he is forgotten, exploited, irresponsible, the whole list. But inferior, never.

The inferiority complex, the mutt complex to which Nelson Rodrigues referred so often, is cultivated by our elites, those who get the fattest slices of the Gross National Product, the best opportunities for work and education, those whose job it is to converse with other countries - our politicians, diplomats, industrialists, bankers, artists, intellectuals...These, who live in contact with the "outside world” blush with shame every time that they are identified as Brazilians and are treated like second-class citizens. These folks - in principle the only ones exempt from the stain of the original sin of poverty - feel the most anguish when they perceive that this does not guarantee them an automatic pass to enter the Paradise of the First World.

"It's something from the First World!" The members of our mongrel elite say this with such pleasure, such envy, such tantalizing torture every time they see something clean, nice, organized, decent, fair, well-made, something that is as it should be. And with such despair they see that they are civilized enough to know what is "good,” but not civilized enough to share fully in it - because they bear in their genes a DNA which is mulato, mestizo, third-world.

Perhaps this explains the death wish which possesses this elite, an elite which is ready to sink Brazil even if it has to drown together.

* Translated from the original Portuguese by Tom Moore. Tom is a classical musician and translator who lives in Rio de Janeiro. His most recent CD of trio sonatas by Boismortier is available from A Casa Estúdio.

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