Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (58 page)

Their deaf son, Suarayasa, who had been signing while doing his martial arts moves the day before, told us that he had deaf and hearing friends, but that he really liked getting drunk with deaf friends. “Deaf people my age don’t go to school,” he said, “so they have time to work, so they’ve got money and buy the drink.” Alcohol abuse is more frequent in the deaf community in Bengkala, and a number of deaf young men showed me with pride the scars from their drunken fights. Suarayasa’s deaf grandmother said he had to get his drinking under control and shook her head when he said he was going to marry a hearing girl. I asked him why, and he said, “All the deaf girls already turned me down. They don’t like my drinking, even though I never vomit.”

An older couple, Sandi and Kebyar, lived with their two deaf sons,
Ngarda and Sudarma. Ngarda’s hearing wife, Molsami, came from another village, and when she realized she was pregnant by Ngarda, she thought she’d better learn to sign. “I worry about the difference between a hardworking husband and a lazy one,” she said. “Hearing or deaf doesn’t make very much difference.” Ngarda was glad to have four hearing children. “We already have many deaf people here,” he said emphatically. “If all of us are deaf, it’s not good.”

Sudarma took the exact opposite position. He is married to a deaf wife, Nym Pindu, and said he would never have married a hearing woman. More than anyone else I met in Bali, he seemed to take the positions associated with Deaf politics in the West. “Deaf people should stick together,” he said. “Hearing to hearing is good, and deaf to deaf is good. I wanted deaf children and I want to live among deaf people.” All three of his children are deaf. Sudarma is a big drinker, with scars to show for his brawling.

We were supposed to have started the day by visiting Getar, the deaf chief of the village, and his sister, Kesyar, but Getar had been called out in the morning to fix some pipes, so we talked to them the next day. At seventy-five, Getar is not only still fixing pipes but also, when he has some money, making regular visits to the brothel in the neighboring town, about which he told us in some considerable detail; on his last visit, he had had three “girls” for thirty thousand rupiah (just over $3). The number of deaf in Bengkala fluctuates; Getar said that when he was born, the village had only six deaf people—though he subsequently explained that by
people
he meant “adult men,” and that if he included women, he could remember eleven deaf villagers. He communicated frequently with hearing people, and his signing was iconic; it lacked the elegance of Cening Sukesti’s or the punch of Sudarma’s.

Getar married once only. His wife bore him five children, then died from eating too much jackfruit. His children were all deaf; four of the five survived infancy. His primary responsibility as chief was to order jobs for members of the deaf alliance. “There are pipes to be fixed. There is a security job,” he explained. “The big boss comes to me, and I decide who will do the jobs. If there’s a death, the
family will come to me, and I will decide who will dig the grave. For each job, the person who does it gets most of the money, but some money is also kept to go into the collective deaf-alliance fund, and every six months we slaughter a pig—or some pigs if we can afford it—and the meat is divided equally among the deaf people.” Getar told me that choosing who gets which job is political, since everyone wants the jobs that pay well. “I keep a record of who has done each job so I can show that the decisions are fair,” he said. “If someone is hungry and needs the work, then I’ll give it to him. If someone hasn’t had a job for a long time, I give them a chance.” When the other deaf people sign to Getar, they use more polite, formal signs; he, in turn, uses those forms of address with hearing people. Getar had not been the object of prejudice, but he spoke with longing about the freedoms of younger deaf people. There were more of them, he thought, and their lives were easier. Now they were even going to school.

After our long days of interviews, Cening Sukesti invited us to come out to their farm. It was raining, but Santia shimmied up a tree and brought us fresh coconuts, and we had mealy corn and heavy cassava. There were a lot of jokes with innuendo; Cening Sukesti chuckled as she explained that she had refused sexual favors to Santia until he had finished building their new hut. The deaf alliance had an attractive ease to it, a ready and embracing intimacy. When I asked about prejudice against the deaf, they all agreed that there was none in the village. They all had hearing and deaf friends and could mingle at will.

In Bengkala, people talked about deafness and hearing much as people in more familiar societies might talk about height or race—as personal characteristics with advantages and disadvantages. They did not discount the significance of deafness nor underplay its role in their lives; they did not forget whether they were deaf or hearing and did not expect others to forget it, either. But they considered it within the realm of ordinary variations rather than an aberrance and a severe disability. The deaf alliance in Bengkala is extremely free in every sense except geography; their freedom is predicated on a linguistic fluency shared only in their village. I had gone there
to investigate the social constructionist model of disability and found that where deafness does not impair communication, it is not much of a handicap.

Kata Kolok appears to be unique among sign languages for the deaf in that it is used by more hearing people than deaf people. But it is threatened as deaf teenagers from Bengkala are increasingly sent to boarding school, where they learn Indonesian Sign Language (ISL). Many marry deaf people from other parts of Bali and use ISL instead of Kata Kolok; in recent years, eight deaf individuals from Bengkala have moved to other parts of Bali or Australia. Even if non-Bengkala spouses are deaf, the marriages are unlikely to produce deaf children, since individuals from outside Bengkala do not possess the recessive gene that causes deafness there. Since 2005, no deaf children have been born to parents who use Kata Kolok, so no new transmission of the language from deaf parents to deaf children has occurred. As the number of deaf people in Bengkala dwindles, so, too, will the communicative utility of Kata Kolok.

Travel + Leisure
, October 2011

I went to Rio de Janeiro in 2010 for
Travel + Leisure
to report on how the city was changing in the lead-up to the World Cup and the Olympics. The central question was the shifting dynamic between the privileged and the impoverished. I addressed the subject in the published article, but conducted a deeper investigation that finds voice in this expanded version.

A
t a time when much of the world is in some form of decline, Rio de Janeiro is the view looking forward; it can feel like the capital of hope. The wave of change owes something to the booming Brazilian economy, something to the discovery of offshore oil, something to the energy brought to the city when it was chosen for the 2014 World Cup finals and the 2016 Olympics, and most of all to the dramatic reduction in crime. All of these changes are elaborately intertwined. Rio has not achieved the placidity of Zürich or Reykjavík, but just as every small joy feels like rapture after a depression, the improvement in Rio has an aura of fiesta that those tranquil towns will never know.

A great many cities sit beside the sea, but no other integrates the ocean as Rio does. You can imagine San Francisco located inland, or Boston minus its harbor, but to imagine Rio without the waterfront is like imagining New York without skyscrapers, Paris without cafés, L.A.
without celebrities. The landscape has an almost Venetian urgency. “If you don’t go to the beach, you don’t know anything that’s happening,” said the artist Vik Muniz. “No matter if you have Twitter or a cell phone, you have to go to the beach every day from four o’clock until sundown.” Beaches are inherently democratic; when you socialize in public wearing only a bathing suit, money loses its copyright on glamour. Though the beaches in Rio remain considerably segregated by class, because the color of your skin and the brand of your bathing suit and sunglasses mark your status, much of what you show at the beach is your body, your skill at volleyball, your aura of cool. The social implications are significant. It takes effort to be a snob in Rio.

The topography has dictated another social anomaly. People of privilege live in the flat seaside areas, which are not prone to landslides, in the Zona Sul (the Southern District), which encompasses the famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Those neighborhoods are punctuated by abrupt hills, which have been settled by the poor over the past century or so. Although home to nearly a quarter of Rio’s population, these steep districts, known as
favelas
, do not appear in detail on most maps of the city and historically have lacked utilities, garbage collection, closed sewers, and police protection. Even in the exclusive Zona Sul, you are never more than five minutes from a favela. Muniz said, “You’re sitting in Saint-Tropez surrounded by Mogadishu.”

Building inside the favelas is unregulated, and when the rains come, houses collapse. Walled off from the city proper, these gang-dominated enclaves have been the setting of endless violence. Most cities have slums, but in many—including many others in Brazil—these are on the outskirts of town or in a single, contained enclave. Rio’s favelas are dotted all through the city like the chocolate chips in a cookie. The city’s peculiar geography is such that shantytown gunfire is audible even in the most affluent neighborhoods. The social distances in Rio outmeasure the geographic ones.

Much of Brazilian culture originated in Rio’s favelas. Samba evolved there, and the new funk music, too. Many soccer stars hail from the favelas, and some of Brazil’s famous models. Carnival in Rio—the biggest pre-Lenten festival in the world, with 2 million
people a day partying in the streets—depends largely on the “samba schools” of the favelas, which compete to put on the most glittering displays. French aristocrats never say that France would be nothing without the slums of Paris, and most upper-class Italians are embarrassed by the Mafia; hip-hop culture notwithstanding, most Americans opt for the suburbs. But in Rio de Janeiro, those who have privilege admire those who don’t. José Maria Zacchi, one of the architects of change in Rio, told me that in nineteenth-century Brazil, little distance separated the manor house and the slave quarters, and not much has changed in that regard. “The educated upper middle class loves to mingle with the people, loves it,” the poet and critic Italo Moriconi said. “It’s part of the Carioca culture.” (The word
Carioca
refers to people or things from or of Rio.) Yet Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world—a place, as the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz said, of “cultural inclusion and social exclusion.”

Carioca pride began its slip in 1960, when the capital was moved to remote Brasília and the government functionaries skipped town. Previously a federal district on the order of Washington, DC, or Mexico City, Rio was folded into the surrounding, undeveloped state for administrative purposes. Business shifted increasingly to São Paulo; Rio was deindustrialized. Violence from the favelas threatened rich and poor. Wealthy people employed private security forces, drove bulletproof cars, and stopped wearing jewelry. Drug gangs fought one another and an incredibly corrupt police force. The gangs sometimes put their enemies into towers of tires and set them on fire—a method of execution known as the microwave oven, similar to the South African atrocity called necklacing.

Some policemen moonlighted in private militias, protection organizations within favelas and slums that were hard to distinguish from the gangs they theoretically controlled; Moriconi referred to the “promiscuous relationship between police and crime.” In 2008, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said, “A remarkable number of police lead double lives. While on duty, they fight the drug gangs, but on their days off, they work as foot soldiers of organized crime.”
In 2008, 1 in every 23 people arrested by Rio de Janeiro’s police force was killed by police or by others in custody before making it to trial—a striking statistic considering that the ratio for the United States is 1 in 37,000.

Luiz Eduardo Soares served briefly as national secretary of public security under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, who ruled from 2003 to 2010. Soares instituted a program to enter poor areas with respect. “We were there offering a public service, not invading,” he told me. But policing is a local issue, and it was hard to change problematic procedures and attitudes with a national policy. “When you give a policeman discretionary authority to kill, you’re also giving him authority to sell life,” Soares said. “He can say to the suspect, ‘I can kill you. That won’t cost me anything. But I can also not kill you. How much would you give me?’ ” It does not take long for such behavior to become organized. Favela residents armed themselves heavily. Innocent people were injured and killed in the cross fire, and life expectancy was short. In the Zona Sul, street crime became ubiquitous. Upward of a thousand people a year were killed by police in Rio and São Paulo alone, a significantly higher number than that for the whole United States. The chief of special operations of the Rio police was indicted for corruption. “If you were poor, you were scared of the police; if you were rich, you were skeptical of them,” said Roberto Feith, Rio’s leading publisher.

Given the centrality of sports to the Brazilian psyche, it’s no surprise that the World Cup and the Olympics should have inspired Rio’s leadership to attempt a change. After decades of internecine quarreling among their administrations, the mayor of Rio, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and the federal government of Brazil began to work in sync. In 2008, Rio’s secretary of security, José Mariano Beltrame, introduced the UPP (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or Pacifying Police Unit), a new force of younger, ostensibly uncorrupted officers under the aegis of the military police rather than of local bosses. “We need fresh, strong minds, not a Rambo,” said UPP commander Colonel José Carvalho at its start.