Up until now, most of my posts in this blog have been about movies... but Helena loves books even more, so I'm going to start writing about children's literature as well. Here, the first part of an extended "think piece" I've been working on about Dr. Seuss and social change. As anyone might guess, Helena loves Green Eggs and Ham, and it turns out to be a pretty useful book to think about violence in the favela.
Marília
was twelve or thirteen when she joined the funk gang. She danced well, she sang even better, and she loved the
camaraderie of the group, the sense that someone always had her back, even in
the most violent alleys of the favela where she lived. Her ability to compose songs and her
fearlessness quickly made her one of the gang's leaders, and she used her new
authority to challenge gangs from around the city to more and more violent brawls. Beautiful, tall, and with a newly dyed
shock of blond hair, she became one of the most feared people in Recife,
Brazil.
Gangsta
Funk is a kind of ritualized violence, based on repeated challenges using
music, almost an esthetic duel of insults and affronts, as if the Jets and the
Sharks from West Side Story
had come to life, dancing and singing and fighting to a funk beat. The most respected members of the
brigades are creative composers, who invent lyrics to laud their friends and
denigrate their enemies. Marília
knew how to rhyme taunts into unforgettable challenges, but she also found she
was gifted as a field marshall, organizing battles so well that her gang, once
the laughing stock of the city, never lost.
Marília
concentrated her power in the funk gang by taking as her boyfriend the boss of
the gang that controlled drug trafficking in the favela. The two gangs had always cooperated in
defending the community, so it was a political as well as romantic match. When her sister started to date the
leader of the gang on the other side of the canal, it looked almost like one of
those arranged marriages to cement Hapsburg and Bourbon alliances in early
modern Europe. Everyone thought that the two banks of the Canal de Arruda would
come to dominate both trafficking and funk in the city.
Two
years ago, a gang from third favela tried to take over both sides of the canal,
and suddenly the alliance became fragile.
A raiding party from Marília's neighborhood killed a couple of boys on
the other side. The funk insults
began to rain down. Finally, in a
pitched battle, Marília's boyfriend murdered her sister's boyfriend.
Were
Hollywood to make a movie of Marília's life, that murder would open the
climatic act of the film: either the chaos and anarchy of revenge (if Tarantino
were directing) or the passage into redemption (Clint Eastwood as director,
maybe). Whether we look at Paul on
the road to Damascus, the call of the Hebrew prophets, or the evangelical trope
of being born again, in the West we like our conversion to come like lightning
from heaven, or at least with the drums and gunshots of a movie soundtrack.
As
Marília talks about who she has become, though, the story sounds less like the
voice that came to St. Augustine in Milan, and more like a book we don't
generally think of theologically: Green Eggs and Ham.
Green
Eggs and Ham gives
intellectuals an excuse to let their hair down. Jesse Jackson famously read the verses in the cadence of
Martin Luther King on Saturday Night Live, and everyone from computer
scientists to mathematicians to Mormon theologians[1]
has used the book to theorize playfully about their favorite subjects. Here, though, I'd like to suggest that
when we read Marília's story together with Dr. Seuss, we learn something about
how people really change.
Almost
every American who has had a child or been a child since 1960 knows the basic
plot of the book: thirty-five years passed between my childhood and when I
began to read it to my daughter, and I still remembered most of the rhymes by
heart. As the book opens, a tall,
nameless character with a hang-dog look tries to sit quietly and read his
newspaper, but Sam-I-Am won't leave him alone. First, the rascally Sam-I-Am rides by on a dog, then on a
tiger, and then sets the story in action by forcing a plate of food under his nose
and asking, “Do you like green eggs and ham?” After a first refusal, Sam-I-Am offers the green eggs and
ham a total of eleven times in more and more ridiculous and dangerous places
before his interlocutor, exhausted, finally accepts.
And
here, the conversion: the food he had rejected again and again becomes the food
he loves the most, and a beatific smile descends on his face. My 22 month old daughter is so thrilled
by that smile that she starts reciting the book's last words – “Thank you,
thank you, Sam-I-Am” – well before the final page.
Here,
conversion is nothing like the blinding light that shines down on St. Paul in
Caravaggio's painting, nor like the 3000 people transformed by Peter's
preaching in the Book of Acts. The
conversion in Green Eggs and Ham
isn't about charisma or drama or power; it happens only through the perverse
persistence of Sam-I-Am, who finally exhausts every “no” that the other
character can offer.
[1] See, among others, Lachlan
Forrow, "The Green Eggs and Ham Phenomena", The Hastings Center
Report.
Vol. 24, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1994), pp. S29-S32, which looks at the difference
between what hospital patients say they want and what it turns out they wan;
Randy Haupt, "Green Eggs and Ham." IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 51, No.3, June 2009;
M.J. Kaiser , S.H. Cheraghi, "Green eggs and ham" Mathematical and
Computer Modelling. Volume 28, Issue 1, July 1998, Pages
91–99; and Robert Patterson's quirky and quite funny "Hebraicisms,
Chiasmus, and Other internal evidence for ancient authorship in Green Eggs and
Ham." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Volume 33, no. 4, winter
2000, pages 163-168.
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