Impossible Brasil.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that America and Brazil have a lot in common: they both gained independence and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to embrace constitutional democracy; they both had a westward race for land and resources; they both have an uncomfortable relationship with slavery and their indigenous population; and they're both bloody huge. But Brazil doesn’t feel like the US. In the States, you somehow get the feeling that the immigrants have occupied the land so completely that they’ve effaced all but a few government-sponsored scraps of its pre-history; in my Hollywood-shaped imagination, every square inch of the U.S. is occupied by vast wheat fields, homely New England woods, Thoreau-style national parks, suburban enclaves like the ones in E.T. and the counterweight urban sprawls of the east and west coasts.

Brazil doesn’t feel quite so domesticated, so orderly and tame. In Brazil, it feels like the cities are a crust floating on top of impossible depths. Perhaps it’s the jungle which does that. A quick search reveals that Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, yet the population of Brazil is massively urbanised, with 78% living in the cities, and most of the big cities clingingfor safety to the Atlantic coastal region. Behind them waits the endless jungle, Heart of Darkness-style, and the equally endless plantations of corn, soy, tobacco and coffee which help power the Brazilian economy.

That sense of strangeness, of a wildness only partially contained, hits you in different ways. Sometimes it’s seeing a beautiful Indian place name on the highway, like Pindamonhangaba, Taubaté or Itaquaqucetuba. Sometimes it’s hearing a song you love in the morning sun of a strange café and having that sudden vertiginous glimpse of how far the inchoate strands of music and ideas can travel, across the jungle and the mountains and the sea. Sometimes it’s walking into a graveyard and finding a dead black hen with a cigar in its mouth, sacrificed as part of a macumba ritual, that strange, catch-all term for the syncretism of Catholicism, Candomblé and other imported and indigenous religions. Sometimes it’s the way you simply can’t tell where a Brazilian originally came from, whether Europe, Asia, Africa, or Brazil, combined with the fact that most Brazilians refuse to cling to and define themselves by their immigrant past like so many of their north American cousins.

Another way to try and convey the sheer enormity and sense of dislocation which Brazil induces in a foreigner is to consider how many languages contiguously evolved in Europe, and how many distinct cultural traditions these languages represent; all those revolutions and rivalries, those horrors and wonders; Norse gods, King Arthur, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jim Davidson, all crammed into a tiny, seething patchwork of warring principalities and fiefdoms and republics and picturesque scenes. Then you have to juxtapose that image with the fact that the whole of Europe fits inside Brazil, and yet Brazil has only one language and one overarching culture within which are swirled all the races, cultures, religions and music of all the millions of people who immigrated here and those who lived here for however many thousands of years (well, about eight thousand year) before the Europeans came.

It is this which makes Brazil so mind-boggling: the fact that it has so much richness and strangeness, but can never hope to reconcile all the various narratives. That’s not a bad thing. But it is, I don’t know, confusing; there’s always so much to take in, there are so many contradictions, so many examples of terrible inequality alongside wonderful, disarming instances of kindness, so many maddening incomprehensible accretions of old Brazil left behind by the glacial shift of history for you to trip over as you walk through modern streets. Perhaps that is both the tragedy and salvation of Brazil: it is too big to know itself, but it's big enough and strange enough to absorb the contradiction.