DAVID BYRNE, NA BAHIA, COM CAETANO
E GILBERTO GIL, TAGARELANDO SOBRE
URBANISMO, RACISMO E SCHOPENHAUER



"At Caetano’s house C flips through a book of Pierre Verger’s photos of Bahia and Salvador from mid 20th century, and I am taken by a shot of this commercial district taken from Cidade Alta (the upper city). In this shot one can see the same grid of commercial buildings, but when the picture was taken they were all of moderate height, and all beautiful colonial edifices. “What a shame what has happened here”, I say. Caetano agrees, and says that this legacy of incredible architecture — which existed in numerous places all over Latin America — should have been treated “like a European City”. I think he means that many European cities — London, Milano, Torino, Brussels, Lyon — also have what were once commercial centers that emerged during a historical era, but no one would have dreamt of razing those centers and replacing them with steel, glass and concrete office towers. But in the Americas, North and South, that’s what mostly happened — except in a few isolated spots.

(...)



At Paulinha’s party and at Gilberto Gil's the next day the full rainbow of folks were present — dancing, drinking and chatting. C mentioned that she would make eye contact and say "hi" and "welcome" to guests of every hue and they smiled and responded in kind. Sad to say, this is not the usual situation in the States. Here everyone is just a little more relaxed around everyone else, whereas in the States when races meet there is always a slight tension, some fear, suspicion; and, from the Afro-American side, anger, envy, and resentment that colors everything. I’m generalizing, of course. We musicians don’t behave that way — at least in my dreams we don’t. The separation of worlds and the ghetto-ization of peoples — distinct music, food and culture — that exists up North and that poisons everything, is to a large extent much less prevalent here — but the racism still can’t be denied.

(...)



In the evening a small group heads over to Gilberto Gil’s house where his daughter is having a birthday party. Gil and Caetano and I are talking and Caetano goes off on one of his riffs — this one about how the German philosopher Schopenhauer made some surprising statements about the tropics and race. According to Cae, the philosopher claimed that humanity was originally black — as we emerged from the tropics in Africa. This is hard to dispute. Of course we were. Schopes continued to follow this line of reasoning, saying that black is therefore our default skin color, the “true” color of humanity, and that other colors or non-colors are therefore marginal — notably, and especially, white. He claimed that from a global perspective whites, especially blonde blue-eyed ones, are a fringe group that somehow managed to survive in the chilly and forbidding Northern climate. This didn’t go down all that well at the time with his countrymen". (vale a pena ler a totalidade do post e dos anteriores)

(2009)