Continuation of Sweetness and Light: Football as Popular Narrative

A couple of months ago, while covering Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) in my section of a Latin American Literature in Translation course at Duke University, I encouraged my students to grow uncomfortable with the way we view Latin America on the popular level.  We had just given Disney’s Good Neighbor Policy era Los tres caballeros (1945)  a much more critical viewing than, certainly, anyone in Post-WWII America ever imagined it would receive, and I wanted to draft off of our momentum.  Lispector’s work, like that of so many writers steeped in a hard ‘70s post-structuralism, predominantly revolves around the task of representation.  Our narrator, a comfortable middle class writer, spends the majority of the novel trying to capture an impoverished young girl, Macabea, always claiming that he is not sure if he is capable of getting her right.

The questions arise: Why is he so fascinated by her in the first place?  Does she exist as such, or is she simply a product of his fantasy?  Does he envy her in some way?

No doubt, Macabea seduces the narrator, though not erotically as much as pathetically.  Her dire situation is met with a brave face that the narrator cannot stomach, and he imagines countless people taking advantage of her, ranging from caddish men to state-paid doctors.  More interestingly, though, the uncomfortable read forces a confrontation with one of Brazil’s foundational myths: alegria, or “happiness/joy,” a refraction of Latin America’s ever-present Nobel Savage discourse coupled with an “ignorance is bliss” motif.

In class, Lispector’s probe led to a popular analysis of how the Brazilian national narrative continues to play out in contemporary global culture, where we analyzed videos from Nike’s Joga Bonito campaign from the 2006 World Cup.  The Nike sponsored adds played heavily off of the “ignorance is bliss” theme, depicting the Brazilian National Team in perma-smiles and constantly juggling the ball with carefully affected skill.  To an extent, in their highly produced videos, Nike was brave enough to do Rousseau one better.  For Nike, ignorance was artistry.

As we prepare for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where, undoubtedly, we will be presented with the typical angle of Brazil as happier and therefore more technically skilled and therefore happier (repeating) narrative, these clips are worth another look.  As one add reminds us, Ronaldinho’s personalized shoe, one that according to Nike is imbued with childhood nostalgia for the old days of playing in the dirt, is even stamped with the word, “alegria.”

The myth of Brazilian artistry does not stand up to even the lightest of scrutiny, at least not to the mythical extent that Nike projects it.  And media frenzy and sportscaster bent aside, the Brazilian team does not do anything more impressive than Argentina, Spain, or dare we even say Holland.  But it is hard to imagine a successful shoe campaign with Holland international Robin van Persie set against Samba and sunshine; and “geluk” does not quite roll of the tongue like “alegria.”  But if the former French star, Eric Cantona, returns to the airwaves to facilitate our armchair anthropology this year, let’s be very wary of the narrative of the artistic savage, and even if they were as good as Nike would lead us to believe, in 2006 they looked sluggish most of the tournament and didn’t make it past the quarterfinals. Ole!

Joga Bonito

Joga Bonito 2

One week last February, potential members of the English national football team took us through a highly maudlin, yet entertaining, narrative arc. John Terry – England’s then captain – tacitly admitted to cheating on his wife with, feasible World Cup teammate, Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend. Bridge, in turn very publicly denied Terry a handshake at the beginning of a match between their two club teams, Man City and Chelsea, presumably communicating a message of “thanks but no thanks” to a position alongside Terry on the World Cup squad to English trainer Fabio Capello. And Ryan Shawcross of Sunderland cried on the pitch after breaking the leg of young Arsenal hopeful, Aaron Ramsey, the day before he, himself, was to be named as Bridge’s replacement on the national team. All the while, a slight, well-dressed, Portuguese man was preparing to go to London, where he would beat up on a team that he admitted to being his own and then, post-match, would make vague claims about being “the chosen one”.

Few could argue that things in football’s home country have not gotten weird. Even fewer could argue  with the fact that we are finding ways to entertain, and communicate with, ourselves through this medium that span well beyond the importance of the final score of a match or the current standings in league tables.

While the common perception of popular narrative’s evolution is that it shifted from oral culture to the written word with the invention of the Gutenberg Press and the later massification of literacy, and from the written word to new media with the popularization of the Internet and digital mediums, this column will create a forum for articles that point to football as a simultaneous medium of all of the above, as we preserve, and entertain ourselves with, classic, massive, and ludic tropes and themes through the global game.

As the world prepares for what may be considered the most cosmopolitan World Cup in the tournament’s 80-year history, to be hosted by South Africa from mid-June to mid-July, no shortage of praise has been heaped upon the international game as a bellwether for better times.

The game’s political supporters are not without their strong points, and the fact that Africa will host its first ever tournament as a hopeful sign of the continent’s development may have some validity.  Many of the Premiership’s stars from the league’s strongest teams, themselves powerful international brands, are African.  With the Premiership providing a tight race atop the tables in the midseason, everyone is scratching their heads, wondering what will happen to the league’s most successful teams as they attempt to make do without stars such as Didier Drogba, Kolo Toure, Salomon Kalou, Emmanuel Adebayor and Alex Song as they return to Africa to represent their countries in the African Cup of Nations.  Fans wait with bated breath to see if Chelsea will maintain its narrow lead in the tables without Drogba, arguably the league’s most virtuosic scorer, and how Arsenal will cope without its key African players on the back line.  Indeed, with the departure of African players from the Premiership in the middle of the season, there is a departure, in part, of the Premiership itself.

Bono was quick to pick up on Africa’s growing influence in both the game and the global psyche in a recent NY Times op-ed piece, where he noted that the tournament would usher in a decade of Africa, in a symbolic gesture that, in a similar way in which with the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the United States passed the torch of history to China, the opening of the Cup in Cape Town would cover over hundreds of years of colonial wounds as we all stare bravely into the global future.

And yet, these arguments overwrite the real political problems that surround the global game.  Football is, no doubt, positive as a referent that allows cultures around the world to dialogue but not if it gives way to the misrepresentation of the reality of global politics.

Friday morning, 8 January, 2010, Togo’s national team was ambushed by the separatist group, Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, while traveling by bus through Angola, the Cup of Nations host country.  Two team officials and the team’s bus driver were killed in the attack.

Pessimists will argue that the incident preemptively mars Africa’s first World Cup.  Optimists will note that Angola and South Africa do not even share a border and have very different political infrastructures.  Realists, however, will surmise that the game, even if it is the world’s best symbolic hope, does not provide enough substance to overwrite the geopolitical trauma experienced in many post-colonial spaces.  While football may cause ebbs in national and regional histories, moments of unprecedented tans-cultural camaraderie and  ebullience amongst its followers, it does not lead to political stability in itself.

Some argue that the investment that hosting the tournament brings is a success story before the tournament even begins.  Yet, R.W. Johnson, in a piece on the politics surrounding the developmental side of the World Cup in South Africa published in the London Review of Books last month, points to the underbelly of investment: “The city had also wanted originally to locate the stadium in a black or Coloured area, both in order to encourage investment and jobs and to make it easier for the poor to attend matches. This immediately went out the window when the Fifa inspection team, headed by Franz Beckenbauer, visited Cape Town. One of the criteria they laid down was that the stadium should have ‘fine mountain views’. The team toured the poor areas, assumed the city had to be joking about choosing anywhere so obviously ugly and unsafe, and plumped for Green Point, an affluent white area with fine sea and mountain views and many good restaurants.”

Arguments can be made that in plucking a handful of players from the soccer farms in African and Latin American countries, just as Fifa plucks idyllic spaces to frame the game in its host countries, football is ascribing to a politics of underdevelopment.  And apologists such as Bono grease the wheels of the symbolic machine.

I am looking forward to both the African Cup of Nations and the World Cup as much as anyone and also believe that an international game, especially one with the intricate poetics and beauty of football, is still great for the world.  But let’s approach it with sobriety.  Cosmopolitan entertainment should not be confused with global panacea.  And theorists should be critical of arguments that say otherwise.

As Togo’s national team traveled through Angola this weekend, they took with them the borders of the global game.  In no way can the interaction at that border be interpreted as an embracing inclusivity.