I've neglected to blog entirely since moving to South America, but did feel the urge to sit down and write this evening, so apologies for the poor service, and I hope this is the beginning of a return to form.
It's Carnival here in Uruguay, a place that clearly decided that if they couldn't beat Brazil in sequins and spectacular, they would instead trump them by having the world's longest Carnival, seven weeks of it, stretching out to the middle of March with no regard whatsoever for Lenten frugality. The setpiece though is a parade that sees teams of dancers snake their way through the city to a throbbingly heavy drumbeat pounded out until the drummers' hands bleed - a shockingly African drumbeat. I say shockingly because one could easily live here for years under the impression you were in a small town in Spain or italy several decades ago, certainly before the arrival of mass immigration; quaint restaurants selling home-made gnocchi, blustery beaches, bars that play the Beatles unironically - in short, a less exotic feeling place 6000 miles from Europe it is hard to imagine.
In the 17th century, though, Montevideo was the main entry port for African slaves trafficked to South America to till Brazilian sugar plantations or toil in Bolivian silver mines, and inevitably some stayed. About 8% of the population is considered of African descent now. Their faces are virtually absent from the city centre and swish beachside suburbs, being mostly tucked away in parts of the city you're advised not to go to alone, only allowed to stake a claim to public spaces at odd events like the carnival parade, or the festival pictured here, where believers throw fruit and flowers into the Atlantic for the African sea goddess Iemanjà.
Those faces have also made newspaper headlines here lately for less picturesque reasons - a racially motivated attack by two white girls on a black anti-racism activist outside a nightclub has caused a national bout of soul-searching about whether Uruguay is much more racist than people would like to think. Campaigners have also been grabbing column inches with a petition to get the expression "trabajar como un negro" - to work like a black man - removed from the official Spanish dictionary. If you're a native English speaker, of course, you just involuntarily gasped on reading that expression, and I feel slightly morally compromised for having even written it, but the role of dictionaries is to describe language as it is used, not prescribe - or proscribe - it.
There is a debate worth having here, though, about language, racism and political correctness. The conservative press here, while admitting the black population has suffered systemic discrimination, rails against copying the Anglophone example of policing language, socially banning certain terms and replacing them with more consensual alternatives, and many in the Anglophone press would agree. Even if reports that, say, Luton Council once banned Christmas decorations because they might offend non-Christian residents (this was repeated in an Uruguayan paper today, but I'm virtually certain it was a British tabloid invention) have been somewhat exaggerated, we all sometimes feel that in English we are treading in a linguistic minefield. Spanish is far less socially policed in this sense; does that mean, as someone argued to me last night, that Uruguay's most famous son Luis Suarez shouldn't have been suspended, whatever he said to Patrice Evra, because for him the words don't pack the same cultural punch? There is a shred of a case here - most people swear much more liberally in foreign languages because you lose the learnt sense of taboo - but I don't believe that Suarez, who has claimed the regular excoriation he gets from the British press is racially motivated, doesn't understand the taboo, even if he doesn't know much about the cultural baggage around race in Britain or Evra's native France. Does the blunt language still used about race in Spanish, then, really mean its speakers are generally more racist than Anglophones? Most people who consider themselves cosmopolitan and multilingual would say it's just a question of cultural difference, and most translators, if confronted with "trabajar como un negro" would render it into something inoffensive in English.
And yet. And yet, in Uruguay the unemployment rate for young black women is nearly double that for white ones. A scholarship scheme to help send Afro-Uruguayans to university can't find enough qualified applicants. In Mexico, one of my home countries, the indigenous population suffers systematic discrimination, to the point where people of indigenous origin living in cities do everything they can to hide that fact. They rewrite their histories and pretend they can't speak indigenous languages to fear of being classed an "indio", a word that's still almost universally used, and makes me shudder every time I hear it. Language is not just a toolkit manipulated to describe the world around us - it manipulates us, it sets the parameters within which we can express ourselves. We think we can go in any direction we choose, but in fact we have a set range of passages to choose from within the architecture built by syntax, grammar, and the vocabulary available to us. Deleting an expression from a dictionary in itself cannot help close one of those passages, but its existence is the signifier that points towards a deeper cultural problem. It will take time for mainstream Spanish usage to absorb the difference between, say, disabled people and people with disabilities, but the quicker it goes down that route, the better.
And if you clicked on this hoping for a fun story about Carnival, here's one I made earlier - about Uruguay's 79 year old drag queen.
