Women's Review of Books Volume 24, Issue 2 March/April 2007
Kathleen de Azevedo  - Samba Dreamers


The Brazil of the Imagination
Reviewed by Marguerite Itamar Harrison

      Despite its wistful title, Samba Dreamers is a dark tale of endurance and survival, at times raw and unsettling. Kathleen de Azevedo's debut novel is both a realistic portrayal of the difficulties immigrants have in adapting to a new country and a Hollywood fantasy about the American dream.
      Beneath a fun, humorous surface, Azevedo delves into the complexities of truth and fantasy, love and loss, and reality and myth, which she articulates using the spatial duality of homeland and exile. Lending scholarly seriousness to what might otherwise be light fiction are Azevedo's Brazil-specific references to Amazon mythology, rainforest expeditions, Carmen Miranda, military dictatorship-and cannibalism, which she uses  knowledgeably, in a manner consistent with Brazilian cultural history. Azevedo is  particularly good at employing her thematic agenda as a catalyst in her narrative, making cannibalism, for instance, do double duty:

 She had devoured her heart in the quest for love, and now there was a big hole. When she wept with desire, she didn't have a pretty dainty cry, a lace-hanky cry. She had an ugly cry, a hacky howl, the cry of anguish described in Amazon legends.

       These sorts of references create a sophisticated subtext of cultural difference and establish the correlations between modern-day experiences and those of the past. A short glossary of Portuguese terms, a brief preface, and acknowledgments detail Azevedo's sources of inspiration.
Excerpts from accounts by seventeenth-century European travelers to Brazil set the tone for each chapter. The excerpts that introduce the early chapters are dispassionate descriptions of the travelers' encounters in the New World; as the encounters gradually evolve into fierce clashes of beliefs and behaviors, the excerpts gain force.
       The novel begins over international airspace, as Jose Francisco Verguerio Silva, a Brazilian passenger bound for Los Angeles, transforms himself into Joe Silva, shedding a past marked by personal loss and political persecution. He is "trembling, clutching a cigarette with his broken but healed fingers, and bargaining with the devil to give him peace." Except for the novel's epilogue and intermittent flashbacks, the story takes place on US soil. Brazil hovers just out of reach as a symbolic, mythical place that is not quite paradise. The narrative registers with sensitive accuracy the plight, peril, and persistent impermanence experienced by immigrants in this country, who confront prejudice and stereotypes at every turn. Compounding their hardships are homeland demons, oddly coupled with sensually sweet nostalgia. They invoke the samba both to remember and to forget:

 The samba started from inside the hips, fueled by the fire of fear in their hearts, and demanded a Brazilianness, a Brazil that was at the core of all their troubles. This dance, more important than the national anthem, was a dance too beautiful to destroy, as the samba dreamers in their hope rubbed against each other just enough, not for sex, but to feel each other alive in the belly of Brazil, where the flame of the samba and its gentler brother the bossa nova was fueled by a desperate passion to survive.

      Joe ends up in Hollywood, a backdrop that adds a surreal element to his daily life. After briefly working as a dishwasher, he gets a job as a tour-bus driver and guide to celebrity homes in Beverly Hills. The tour company dresses Joe in a ridiculous outfit that both highlights and, ironically, homogenizes his Latin persona to the point of obscuring his Brazilian identity. His boss announces; "You will be Ricky Ricardo," and dresses him in "a sequined babaloo coat....open neck with no tie, slicked back hair. Gold chain." Joe spends his days recounting (and fabricating) Hollywood tales. In his off-hours, he tries too hard to create a normal family life with his toddler twins and white-bread American wife Sherri, who neither understands nor loves him. He suppresses his passions, fed by the multifaceted Brazil of his imagination:

 Brazil was fading, just black holes of information in a letter. Yet he cherished the gentle bate-papa, chit-chat, the sweet carinhoso of news of the family that fluttered like birds over the dark sea of his pain.

      In addition to Joe, the reader encounters Rosea, the prickly, troubled daughter of legendary Brazilian movie star Carmen Socorro (based Carmen Miranda). Samba Dreamers began as a story centered on Rosea, and she is Azevedo' s most alluring and disturbing character, especially as Azevedo forces her to contemplate her contradictory role as Hollywood's Brazilian bombshell:

  Only years later, when Carmen died after appearing on the Jimmy Durante Show, did she return to Brazil, her turban turning into a whirlwind, and blowing across the seas. Rosea found her mother crashed on the floor and cradled in the puff of her yellow-and green satin skirt and starched petticoat. The  studio took her body away and didn't Rosea the funeral was in Rio because there; was nothing left to bury but a dream.

     Rosea is strange and a little scary: "[S]he a1ways: reminded people what they were most afraid of, the part of the past that haunts them. She reminded people of what happens when others forget you exist." When the novel begins, she has just been, released from prison. She had set fire to her own home with the aim of eradicating her anthropologist husband's possessions, including his pet monkey. As one of the many targets of Rosea's destructive personality, the monkey foreshadows other bizarre encounters. A handful of secondary characters– among them a wildly freakish bird-boy and an aging produce merchant--add color to the narrative. Azevedo brings them into contact with each other and with her protagonists, while refraining from weaving their lives into a seamless pattern.
     As the plot escalates into scenes of passion murder, undercurrents from the past give substance: Joe's memories of political torture; tragic tidbits that surface from Carmen Socorro's tutti- frutti, tinsel-town life; meetings on the faraway banks of the Amazon between haughty male scholars on anthropological quests and  mythological women warriors. (These nicely echo Rosea's turn as a combative, urban Amazon).
     Azevedo occasionally relies too heavily metaphor, creating melodrama rather than drama, and especially in the opening chapters, her style" can seem forced: "The distant hills rested together like fat thighs"; "The sun scorched the sky with blue Ajax." Moreover, minor spelling errors Portuguese intermittently distract from the narrative flow. What worries me more, however, is that Azevedo contributes at least somewhat to a stereotypical North-South divide by contrasting the sensuality of her two protagonists with the coldness of their North American counterparts. In contrast to Joe and Rosea, Joe's wife Sherri and the anthropologist Jeremy come across as self-absorbed and unfeeling. These imbalances may betray the author's own dreamlike idealization of Brazil; a place that clearly inspires her imagination.
     The University of Arizona Press's Camino del Sol series, dedicated to literary work by Latina and Latino writers, deserves praise for recognizing that a Brazilian-born author falls within its scope. Trifling criticisms aside, Azevedo's portrayal of life in exile and her representation of a broad spectrum of immigrant issues are sophisticated and convincing.


Marguerite Itamar Harrison is an assistant professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College.