Happy thanksgiving, tigrinho

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“But you’re not going home for Thanksgiving?”

I shook my head a little confusedly. Thanksgiving is an important family event, sure, but it won’t be the end of the world if I miss out on a stressful turkey-gorging session with my loved ones. (Last year found me hacking through what turned out to be the wrong side of a turkey with a pair of gardening shears in a desperate attempt to butterfly it, so I think I’ll take a pass on repeating that.) Suddenly I was being beheld as though I’d announced my intention to disown my baby sisters. How, my interrogators demanded, was I going to miss the most important American holiday of them all?

Now it was my turn to narrow my eyes.  As it turns out, I can lay the blame for this one squarely on the shoulders of Ross, Rachel, and I’ve never seen an entire episode of Friends so I’m going to skip trying to guess all the rest of the names. (What’s Lisa Kudrow’s character’s name again?)

Well, it’s not entirely Friends‘ fault. Go ahead, just put “Thanksgiving episode” into Google Image Search, and you’ll get festive turkey-laden tableaux from a dizzying variety of shows ranging from Dexter to the O.C. and even Degrassi. Naturally, the terms ”Christmas episode” and “Halloween episode” each get about 20x more hits. But every November, just as Brazilians are gearing up for another scorching summer, they are treated to the annual spectacle of Americans commemorating a romanticized-if-not-fictitious Indian-on-Pilgrim culinary lovefest. That’s got to make an impression.

Not to mention the movies. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles immediately sprang to mind:  Steve Martin practically gets an aneurysm and suffers through 92 minutes of John Candy in order not to miss Thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, you would be forgiven for thinking, Thanksgiving is pretty much the biggest deal for Americans since the Constitution.

I’m not saying that Thanksgiving isn’t important, but a) it’s, uh, just a dinner, and b) my Brazilian friends seemed to be convinced that it put Christmas and the Fourth of July to shame. Before turkey-lovers pile on top of me, I’ll stop trashing the holiday and briefly reflect on the whole host of possible misapprehensions that come from observing a culture from afar and through the lens of Very Special Sitcom Episodes. I’ve been putting off writing about the Festival do Rio, and so Caetano Veloso beat me to the punch with a wonderful column in the Globo about Brazil through an Almodovarian eye. I won’t try to step on his toes by rehashing the same themes, but I’ll say this much.

Early on in La piel que habito, Almodóvar’s latest, it’s revealed that one of the characters grew up in Brazil. Almost immediately the camera cuts to a moreno boy skipping down the slope in a favela (and, if I’m not imagining it, to a samba beat in the soundtrack). “He had been running drugs since he was 7,” the narrator intoned. A rueful, embarrassed chuckle rose from the audience, and I was jogged out of my film-watching reverie. It occurred to me that if I’d seen the film a few years earlier, I probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. That is the visual shorthand for Brazil, after all. It took sitting in a theatre in Copacabana, cariocas to my right and left, to fully realize how bizarre that must be for Brazilians. My nationality has about as much to do with the Friends Thanksgiving episode as my experience in Rio has to do with Zeca the cartoonish child drug-runner: each tableau has a truth to it, but they paint a very limited picture. Of course, without direct experience to the contrary, we end up taking ludicrously reductive clichés at their word.

The difference, of course, is that America is fully responsible for its Thanksgiving episodes, and hence for the way it presents itself to the world. Brazil doesn’t get as much of a say: too often, Almodóvar and the Simpsons get the last word.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo