A Special Kind of Rage
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By Marshall Shord
There is a chapter in Machado De Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in which Cubas describes killing a black butterfly that has found its way into his room. In William L. Grossman’s English translation (which he titled Epitaph of a Small Winner), the insect moves its wings “in a derisive manner, as if mocking me, and I took offense.” Cubas whips the butterfly with a towel and flicks its corpse from his windowsill, blaming it for not having been born blue.
“The fear that the rich whites and upper-middle-class whites feel when a black man is captured on the cameras we’ve installed knocking at the doors of their houses is indescribable, Even if it’s midday, even if the black man is well dressed, It makes no difference, They go into a panic.” These words are spoken late in Paulo Scott’s Phenotypes by a retired cop-turned-security system installer and the father of the novel’s narrator, Federico. Almost a century-and-a-half has passed, yet what’s different in Brazil (and America, for that matter)? To be Black in a place where Blackness is not wanted, expected, or invited is to be subject to constant and degrading violence, of varying degrees, from birth to death.
Federico, a counselor for Black youth and something of a social justice celebrity in Brazil, is surprised his father is talking so frankly about race after decades of insisting he be judged as “a man who is neither better nor worse than other men.” But no one is exempt from seeing things as they are, and Federico’s father has his own experience as a Black man who succeeded within a profession designed to oppress people like him and his family. As a result, he carries inside himself a special kind of rage, along with an “intention not to make mistakes, never to make a single mistake,” because, as another character observes, “Black people can’t make mistakes.”
Phenotypes first presents itself as a satire of the hubris of technocratic groupthink before changing tack and transitioning to a more personal novel about the preservation of Black identity in a world hostile to Black life. The book opens with Federico being introduced to the other members of a government commission tasked with sorting out a standardized system of measuring racial identity for university admissions. Federico immediately feels a “canine distrust” of the other members; they are bureaucrats for the most part, in attendance because they have to be. He notes that his seat is too far away from them, his dress too casual. He is apart, in both look and outlook. Haunted by “ghosts that had also been those times when I felt uncomfortable being who I was,” Federico’s unease triggers a series of flashbacks to his childhood in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.
It is here, over the course of eight harrowing, bravura pages, that Phenotypes sets its true course, revealing the commission as nothing more than a framing device, one which will ultimately be discarded later in the novel. (Throughout Phenotypes translator Daniel Hahn admirably renders into English Scott’s lucid, ambulatory prose, but this section deserves particular praise.) As Federico follows his memories from one moment to another, cataloging the racialized violence and humiliation he, his family, and his friends experience on a daily basis, he traces how they all have shaped themselves against the obtrusive contours of a racist society. We see Federico himself—who is so light-skinned as to pass for white—returning violence with violence, always defiant in the face of injustice. His darker-skinned younger brother, Lourenço, is sanguine, an outlook Federico envies and wishes he could maintain. Their father, dark-skinned like Lourenço, refuses to acknowledge race as a determining factor in his life. Their white mother wants them all to see themselves as a Black family, but not to make too much of it. Activism would put the safety of her family, especially her husband and Lourenço, at risk.
Federico’s whirlpool of memories drains to a single day—August 10, 1984—wherein appears in embryonic form the shape the rest of his life will take. On that day, at seventeen years old, Federico “witnessed and experienced as I’d never witnessed and experienced before all the cowardice of the hierarchization of skin colors practiced in Brazil, all the cowardice of a psychological massacre, of a psychic disturbance of broad social reach.”
Scott lays out the events of that day from end to beginning, in chapters alternating with the novel’s present. Recency bias—and the sensational nature of what ensues, which feels like it could have come from a gritty cop drama with a social conscience—gives primacy to that evening, making what comes before it appear peripheral, less fateful. But this is a structural illusion: the narrative equivalent of confessing a shameful secret under cover of a fireworks display.
On the night of August 10, 1984, Federico, Lourenço, and Lourenço’s friends get into a brawl with a group of white youths because of a racist comment made by one of the group. The fight leads to a shooting, and to Federico and Lourenço having to hide a gun. The gun—as guns always do in fiction—returns in the present day.
Lourenço’s teenage daughter Roberta is stopped at a roadblock as she leaves a protest. The police search her car and find the gun. She is arrested on terrorism charges, which doesn’t make sense to anyone, until it is revealed that the cop bringing the charges was part of the group of white youths Federico and Lourenço fought thirty years earlier. A coincidence like this might have felt clunky in the hands of a writer less skillful than Scott, but he gives it a sense of weary inevitability: the entitled white youth becomes an influential cop; the system replicates itself. After living for the past nineteen years in Brasília, Federico decides to return to Porto Alegre and dedicate his energy to pulling his niece unscathed from the oncoming train of the justice system. This is the central drama of the novel, the one most easily summarized; a tectonic slamming together of two timelines, whose reverberations ripple outwards through the lives of each character.
But for Federico the defining event of August 10, 1984 occurs that morning at the local army barracks, where he has to present himself for military service. After undergoing physical examinations in the barracks’ gymnasium, Federico and the other recruits are ordered to gather around the sergeant in charge. The sergeant forces the Black recruits to separate from the other recruits and line up against a wall. Given two chances to identify himself as Black, Federico does nothing. “I stay put,” he says. The sense of apartness Federico feels earlier in the book is reversed: he remains part of the group.
The sergeant cruelly abuses the Black recruits. His physical and verbal threats are so aggressive that one of the Black recruits punches him in the nose. Realizing what he has done, the recruit begins sobbing. His tears reveal to Federico “not his bravery, but his despair, the despair of someone my own age who knew he’d ruined his life, ruined his whole life by not allowing himself to be humiliated.”
Federico, too, chose not to allow himself to be humiliated. He did so by exercising the privilege of hiding his identity, of not being Black in a situation where being Black would have exposed him to violent abuse. But making such a choice is not so simple for him. In denying who he was, Federico betrayed his father and his brother, neither of whom could have made that same choice.
While the recruit who punched the sergeant seems to recognize that he might have ruined his life because of his undeniable action, Federico senses almost immediately that he has put his own identity in question because of his covert inaction. When he returns home from the barracks, he tells his mother he wants to fight racism, not just endure it, thus casting the course of the rest of his life as an act of atonement and an affirmation of his Black identity.
Phenotypes demonstrates how the traumas of growing up in a racist society can propel a person of color forward while never letting them escape their past. Federico, despite his success, feels a sense of futility about the work he has done; that he has “discarded an intolerable quantity of things that had been important to me over the course of the journey.” Despite the decades of energy Federico has sacrificed to counteracting the effects of white supremacy, the Black youth of Brazil still exist within “a reality hemmed in on all sides by the catastrophe that people call racism, by the psychic devastation it causes.”
Federico has set himself against a system omnipresent, invisible, and, oftentimes, deniable. It is also a system that has had five hundred years to fortify itself against attack, to refine its exploitative and genocidal project into subtler forms. Systemic racism is a “hyperobject”—a word coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton to describe global warming—which the writer James Bridle defines in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future as “a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety.”
Whether he wants to or not, because of his identity, Federico will always bump up against this project designed to hurt, limit, and ultimately destroy him and the people he loves. There is no final victory for the individual in this scenario. Yet the futility Federico feels—“treading water endlessly,” in his father’s words—in no way undermines the dedication he has shown and the lives he has undoubtedly changed. Instead, his dedication reveals the scope of the problem he has set himself against. That Federico has not changed an unjust world is not the point. That he chose, as the consequence of a prior choice, not to assimilate himself into it—to stand apart—is.
Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.
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