Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (18 page)

What holds utopia in place is not just a vision of a perfect place but the experience of living in a bad one. Ironically, the bad places were often former ideal places, their failure provoking people to seek out better alternatives. However, Bountiful also shows that the pursuit of utopia can quickly become a workable project: as ideological purism cedes ground to ordinary needs, it can offer both tangible benefits to individuals and concrete examples of social change. Today the “no-place” of utopia has thousands of outposts. Some are remnants of past hopes while others are newly founded, but all illustrate humanity’s powerful and paradoxical hunger for escape and homecoming.

40° 09′ 32″ N, 24° 19′ 42″ E

The Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, is a fifty-kilometer-long peninsula that kicks out into the Aegean Sea. Along its coast are twenty Greek Orthodox monasteries, steeply walled and turreted. Most of them were founded over a thousand years ago, their thick defenses and lofty towers bolstered over the centuries as protection from pirates. Athos also contains the medieval town of Kayres, the village of Daphne, and many chapels and ancient ruins. It is a wild and rugged landscape, accessible only by boat, spined with mountains that rise to two thousand meters or more at the southern end.

It’s not off the map for me, but it might be for you. Athos is an extreme example of a place defined by exclusion. Women are banned; even curious female sightseers are supposed to stay at least five hundred meters offshore. If they reach land, they are subject to a period of imprisonment ranging from two months to a year. Not only are women banned but so too are all female animals. One of the few exceptions is female cats, which, according to the monks, were “provided” to them by the divine providence of the Virgin in order to control vermin. But cats aside, permission to visit is restricted to adult men and “young males accompanied by their fathers.”

The desire for men-only religious places may appear anachronistic, yet the story of Athos shows that it is remarkably resilient. According to legend, Athos was given by God as a holy garden to the Virgin Mary. On her way to visit Lazarus in Cyprus, storms swept Mary and her companion, John the Evangelist, onto the peninsula’s east coast. They landed at a spot near a pagan temple dedicated to Apollo. Today it is the site of the monastery of Iviron. It is said the “pagan idols” cried out to the local people to come down and greet Mary, which they did, abandoning their old ways and converting to the new faith. Struck by the beauty of the area, Mary prayed to God to have it given to her. God spoke to her: “Let this place be your lot, your garden and your paradise, as well as a salvation, a haven for those who seek salvation.”

Mount Athos is dedicated to the Virgin, and the bulk of its many icons are images of her, but it remains a male sanctum. When the legality of the ban on women is questioned, it is argued that its 335 square kilometers must be understood as one big monastery. “If one views each of the 20 monasteries of Mount Athos as a single entity,” explained one of the Holy Mountain’s secular champions, Austrian politician Walter Schwimmer, at a recent international conference dedicated to Mount Athos, “the ban of women from a male monastery is nothing extraordinary but a rule that is commonly accepted.” Schwimmer’s argument relies on and thereby highlights the fact that spatial exclusion remains a widely accepted facet of religious life. Occasionally its biggest impact is on nonbelievers. Two of the most visited places in the world, Mecca and the center of Medina, are also two of the most inaccessible: non-Muslims are forbidden. Mormon and many Hindu temples are also off-limits to nonbelievers, but such attention to faith is the exception rather than the rule. Usually it’s not faith that matters when getting into religious places but gender. With the exception of some reformed Christian and Jewish denominations, the world’s religions exhibit a deep sense of anxiety about the presence of women. Until recently women were forbidden to enter the sanctuary in a Catholic church, and the Muslim and Hindu tradition of purdah keeps millions of women trapped in their houses or peeping out at the world from behind the “protection” of a veil. In some of the remoter Hindu villages of Nepal the practice of
chaupadi
survives. This tradition dictates that women must not enter their own homes for up to seven nights during menstruation. Instead, they must live and sleep outside, in huts, in caves, or in the open.

From a traditional religious perspective men and women living side by side in towns and villages is a source of endless problems. These can be solved only by choreographing rituals of separation. Mount Athos is free from such headaches. It is a utopian space in which the celibate holy man’s wish—to live without distraction and temptation—is finally realized. It’s the best that earth has to offer until the day of resurrection, when men can finally shed their mortal bodies.

From its famed “six thousand beards” the number of monks on Athos has dwindled to about two thousand. They constitute a self-governing community whose political autonomy is enshrined in Greek law: the Greek constitution recognizes Athos as “a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact.” The only bishop with authority over Athos is the “Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople–New Rome” (which the rest of the world calls Istanbul), where in 1046 Emperor Constantine Monomachos sanctified the exclusion of women from Athos.

This prohibition of women has its own legal name, the Avaton. As a piece of legislation it must be judged, on its own terms, a success. Despite its long history and vaunted beauty, the number of women who are known to have entered Athos is very small. There was Helena of Bulgaria, who came here to escape the plague in the fourteenth century. But she may not count, as her feet never touched the ground. In deference to local mores she was lofted around in a hand-held carriage during her entire stay. Athos met a firmer pair of feet when Maryse Choisy, a French psychoanalyst and onetime patient of Freud, decided to pay a visit. She put on a large false mustache and dressed as a male servant. She also claimed to have undergone a bilateral radical mastectomy, what she called her “Amazonian.” Her commitment paid off and she spent a month on Athos. In her book
Un Mois Chez les Hommes
(1929), Choisy records the following interesting clarification from a monk at Vatopedi monastery on the prohibition of hens, which are banned as part of the general prohibition of female animals: “We must draw the line somewhere,” he explained. “The day we possessed a hen, some brothers would argue that we should also accept a she-cat, a ewe (a useful animal) or even a she-ass. And there is but a step from a she-ass to a woman.” The monk’s list of banned animals suggests that the admission of female cats to Athos is a relatively recent concession. Enraged by the misogyny she encountered, Choisy delighted in exposing the Holy Mountain, depicting the monks as lazy, slow-witted, and racked by homoerotic desire. Her account is mocking and salacious, and its sexual content has been dismissed by some as vindictive fakery. Single-sex communities are ready fodder for titillation. But it’s a leering curiosity that points to a real paradox: sex may be repudiated in such places, but it is also their organizing principle and, hence, their obsession.

Athos will probably always be plagued by occasional female incursions. Yet far from making the monks doubt their territorial gender claim, invasion and ridicule only seem to strengthen their view that they are the defenders of a sacred heritage. The Avaton is just one of many ways in which Athos is proudly out of step with the modern world. It permits foreign visitors on sufferance. The monks issue just ten visitor permits a day to the non-Orthodox, but up to one hundred for “Greeks and Orthodox.” When they land at Athos, visitors have to go back in time, literally. The Greek Orthodox Church adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1924 but not on Athos. Here the monks still use the ancient Julian calendar (a practice also maintained by small Old Calendarist sects in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and the United States). As a result, Athos is thirteen days behind the rest of the world.

The stubborn archaisms of Athos and the beauty of its landscape make many feel protective toward it, including Prince Charles, who is a regular visitor. Yet there is something deeply unattractive about the sophistry that sustains the Avaton. Today its defenders resort to the language of respect for cultural difference. Walter Schwimmer argues, “Somebody who demands the end of the ban of women on Mount Athos simply lacks respect for the way of life the monks of Mount Athos have chosen.” Schwimmer throws us an apparently rhetorical question: “Can such lack of respect for the others, violating their human dignity, be the basis of a ‘human right’?” It’s a slippery argument and makes it hard to warm to Athos. Such a defense could be used to deny any and all human rights merely on the basis that they impinge on someone else’s choices. The “respect my choice to discriminate” defense also reminds us that, when considered alongside the world’s manifold examples of religiously sanctioned female-free places, the Holy Mountain looks like an extreme case of a general trend rather than a charming exception.

23° 00′ 59″ S, 46° 51′ 31″ W

Ranch of Sprouts is one of the old names for Brotas Quilombo, an Afro-Brazilian township. Quilombo is the generic name given to the free territories that were established by runaway slaves in Brazil. The settlements came in all shapes and sizes, but the most famous was Palmares. Established in 1600 on the northeast coast of Brazil, Palmares was a republic of ex-slaves and is said to have been about the size of Portugal. It held out for eighty-nine years, far longer than most quilombos. Today there may be two thousand suburbs and villages that have quilombo roots. The Palmares Foundation, which is attached to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, recognizes 1,408, spread out across all but three of Brazil’s twenty-seven states.

The quilombos were forgotten for most of the past century. Unmarked and unrecognized, they hung on as scruffy enclaves, absorbed and surrounded by modern municipalities that expropriated their land or did their best to ignore them. But the Brazilian constitution of 1988 changed all that when it recognized the legitimacy of quilombo land. It was a momentous shift, for the constitution declared: “The definitive property rights of remnants of quilombos that have been occupying the same lands are hereby recognized, and the state shall grant them title to such lands.” In 1995 a year of national celebration was announced to commemorate the death of Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares, who was officially titled a “hero of the Brazilian nation.” In this atmosphere of acceptance, many communities have outed themselves as quilombos in “festivals of self-definition,” usually held on November 20, Brazil’s annual “day of black consciousness.”

The quilombos have become the centerpieces of a new confidence and pride among Afro-Brazilians. Their acknowledgment has also opened up interesting questions about the centrality of “free places” in the struggle against slavery and for black identity. Escape is not just about running away; it’s about having somewhere to go, about setting down roots in a different kind of place. If free places cannot be sustained, then escape becomes impossible and resistance slowly dies. The story of the quilombos drives home these simple truths, but it also throws up more complicated issues. After all, if quilombos are communities of escape, what is the point of them after the abolition of slavery and in a world in which Afro-Brazilians are just another ethnic group in a multiracial society? By referring to the quilombos as “remnants,” the constitution was making a point: it was recognizing their history but also dispatching them to the past. When does a place stop being a quilombo? When does it stop being defined by its past? The answer has emerged over the past couple of decades, as the quilombo movement has evolved, and for the time being at least, it appears to be “never.”

Brotas Quilombo is being tested by all these questions. It is home to about thirty families and lies on the edge of Itatiba, a small town seventy-six kilometers from the booming mega-city of São Paulo. The houses are built with concrete blocks and asbestos tiles and are spread over an overgrown suburb of dirt streets and tropical woodland. This modest place was once just part of a much larger escape zone that drew in runaways from far and wide. However, like many other quilombos, a small plot of land was eventually bought up by two ex–farm slaves, Emília Gomes de Lima and Isaac de Lima, the original novice or seedling ranchers, hence the name “ranching sprouts.” Oral history testimony cites Isaac de Lima as hoping that “everyone that has my blood will have a place to live.” Many of the villagers root their ancestry in this first tenured couple, and they are the great-grandparents of its oldest inhabitant and local matriarch, Ana Teresa Barbosa da Costa, whom most people in Brotas Quilombo call Aunty.

The ownership of Brotas Quilombo has been in jeopardy many times over the past hundred years. Unaffordable property taxes, lack of official recognition, and plans to turn the whole site into a hospital waste dump nearly destroyed it several times. Until recently it was off the beaten track and at the wrong end of town. Few people visited apart from those going to worship at the quilombo’s popular Umbanda religious or cult house. Interviews with the people who live in Brotas Quilombo have consistently showed a powerful desire not to let the past slip through their fingers. “Today, eight generations later, most of the residents of the quilombo are of mixed race,” a local resident, Paulo Sergio Marciano, told a BBC reporter. “But our priority is the recovery of our traditions, of the connection between Brazil and Africa.” Today this nostalgic passion is finally reaping rewards, and Brotas Quilombo has been recognized by the state of São Paulo as an urban quilombo, an achievement that has brought with it a cluster of official and academic reports on its past and future.

Coming out of the shadows has also brought concrete challenges, some of which concern property law. Like most quilombos, the ownership deeds for Brotas Quilombo were far from complete. Entitlement to the land has had to be proven through many different sources, including oral histories and, literally, dug-up artifacts. Chains and iron balls have been uncovered and passed on to the authorities as well as a stone figure of a woman from an African tribe. These items matter, for they are used as evidence of authenticity and ownership. This was especially important in the early 2000s when residents were faced with a construction company that had started to build condominiums on their land. In 2003 a government official claimed that the state was “not in a position to say whether or not there has been an invasion of this property, because there are no obvious borders.” Since then much has changed. The borders have been confirmed and new investment has brought street lighting and a heritage center to Brotas Quilombo. Indeed, there has been something of a revolution of attitudes. From a marginalized backwater it has become a fashionable place to visit, especially for a more socially conscious generation. It now hosts interracial festivals and history events that attract people from all over the district.