Nothing tires me more than awards. The arts that shaped me most: music, cinema, and football, seem to have been kidnapped by a calendar of trophies, red carpets, and celebrations that promise grandeur but always deliver the same liturgy of predictable applause. It’s curious how what was born to be a meeting becomes a competition, as if sensitivity needed a podium to exist.
In football, the absurd becomes almost comical: a sport that exists only because it is collective, yet insists on crowning individuals as if genius sprang up in isolation, without the sweat of the other ten. And we, used to swallowing the world as it is served to us, accept without flinching labels we did not choose. Global South, third world, periphery of the planet. We repeat those words like someone repeating a sentence. And we still treat art that comes from the North as if it carried a shine that ours does not. A French wine seems more worthy than a cold beer in a Latin bar, as if value were on the label and not in the body that drinks. This whole theater exhausts me. It is a tiredness that does not pass, because it is not physical. It is a weariness accumulated on the skin.
Since I was fifteen I have clung to the culture of Brasil and Bahia as someone trying to remember their own name after a blackout, as an attempt to understand the ground that formed me, the scent that shaped me, the rhythm that taught me to exist. And the more I look at the art around me, the more I realize that what sustains me has nothing to do with those imported images of white people walking through cold streets, wrapped in coats that were never part of my false life. There is no desire there, only distance. What calls me is something else: the body of the trickster in swim briefs at the edge of the beach, the sun-browned skin, the improvisation, the malice born of the sun and not of the snow. It is there that I recognize some truth. The rest tires me because it tries to convince me that I should aspire to a world that never included me.
There is a curious habit we carry without noticing: this impulse to speak in the plural when the prize is not ours, when the party is not ours, when the game does not even include us. Suddenly we are saying that “we lost the Oscar” or that “we lost the Ballon d’Or,” as if we were part of a family that never recognized us as kin. It is a habit that reveals more than it seems. It shows how much we have been trained to see ourselves through an outside gaze, as if validation only exists when it comes from a distant stage lit by people who know nothing of our lives. That plural tires. It weighs because it always places us in the position of those who wait to be chosen.
The Logic of Invented Superiority
The feeling of superiority that white Europeans carry is not born by chance. It rests on a long history of invented hierarchies, and the most tiring thing is to realize how often we are the ones who feed that fantasy. When we repeat that “they won” or “they lost,” we are accepting a game that was never ours. It is as if we are always running after an imaginary owner, waiting for a gesture of approval that never comes. This movement hurts because it reveals an old wound: the belief that value only exists when it comes from outside.
The search for external validation works like a distorted mirror.
The feeling of inferiority is cultivated by centuries of unequal comparison.
Exhaustion is born from the repetition of this cycle.
There is something sad in seeing so many people believe they need a foreign seal to exist. We do not need a Latin singer in the halftime show of the United States’ biggest sporting spectacle to remind us that we are Latin. And even when someone like Bad Bunny appears, whom many treat as a symbol of representation, that does not solve the issue. His music may be successful, but that is not what defines our identity. Art does not need a passport to be legitimate. By the way, his music is garbage, in my view.
White film festivals are not sacred temples. They did not invent art, and it is not our obligation to kneel before their criteria. The tiredness comes precisely from this insistence on turning their gaze into a universal measure. It is a fatigue that crosses generations, as if we were always trying to enter through a door that was never opened to us.
So then… in music we have Villa-Lobos, Radamés Gnattali, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Ernesto Nazareth, Francisco Mignone, César Guerra-Peixe; literature includes Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Socorro Acioli, Hilda Hilst, Reinaldo Moraes; cinema? Glauber Rocha, Eduardo Coutinho, Cacá Diegues, Ruy Guerra, Carla Camurati, Rogério Sganzerla, Anselmo Duarte. Who needs anything more?
If you don’t know them, that’s your loss.
