In this series of posts I want to both review and hopefully stimulate some discussion about the ground breaking Brazilian Jiu-jitsu history book: “Choque: The untold Story of Jiu-jitsu in Brazil”, by an author calling himself, Roberto Pedreira. This work is actually three books or volumes covering a time span from 1856 until the present, or at least 1999. The first volume: “1856-1949” came out a couple of years ago and the author has followed up on that with the release of the next two volumes at timely intervals.
When I first got wind of “chocque”I was very excited. As a professional Brazilian Jiu-jitsu instructor and someone who has always been interested in history, having studied it at the university level, the combination of the two was irresistible. Unlike so many others in the early Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community I had never entirely accepted what certainly seemed like a historically inaccurate and heavily mythologized version of the development of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu that we had all been taught.
Long before kid Peligro’s “The Gracie way” came out in 2003 I had been trying to get more details and facts about the origins of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu from my instructors who included older members of the Gracie family. I really liked the quality of Peligro’s book, but it seemed little more than to put into written form the oral traditions of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and to cite some historical events without really putting them into historical context. I could not really describe his book as a “scholarly” work and so it became another example of what had always been a frustrating experience of trying to find the documented historical facts.
No one I trained with or read knew or seemed to care much about the objective historical evidence and facts. They had a well-developed semi-mythology that was to some degree or another loosely based on historical events, which served their needs well and that was all they seemed to know. Furthermore, that seemed to be all they wanted us to know or be interested in but as an independent thinking history trained kind of guy, that was never enough.
I can recall having one of my in-depth conversations about Brazilian Jiu-jitsu with Reylson Gracie back in the pre- UFC days of the very early 1990s. At that time Reylson Gracie was the highest Ranked Brazilian Jiu-jitsu instructor and member of the Gracie family in all of North America and one of the oldest sons of Carlos Gracie. Therefore, He should have been a wealth of interesting information about the history of his family’s system of Jiu-jitsu. At that time I was very surprised at how little he knew or cared about the actual facts and historical record.
For Example, I once asked Reylson Gracie: “what was the style of traditional jiu-jitsu that count koma had been trained in and taught your father?” Reylson paused and thought for a moment…then smiled in his charming way and said: “the best kind!” and moved on to another topic, (which was probably along the lines of how much money was he getting). These were the kinds of history lessons I usually got from the people who really should have been in the know (and not just the dough). Remember, Carlos Gracie himself was still alive back when I started Brazilian Jiu-jitsu so I did not think it was that hard to find out this kind of stuff…I appeared to be the only one who felt that way.
Hence, I could relate 100 percent to Roberto Pedreira when he wrote the following in the introduction to his Brazilian Jiu-jitsu history book:
“I realized that I hadn’t included a single concrete, specific, reliably referenced fact for anything that happened before 1951.” (In his first Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Book: “Jiu-jitsu in the South Zone”)…The only way to find out the truth about jiu-jitsu in Brazil was to go back to independent sources, and as far back as sources went. That is what “Choque” is about.”
I was nearly salivating when I read those words. Finely someone with enough interest in the topic, the necessary language skills and geographic access had done what we accurate-history-minded North Americans could never realistically do, but had dreamed of for decades. Pedreira had gone to the Brazilian newspaper archives and apparently gone through them page by page, Column by Column unearthing every reference to jiu-jitsu and relevant activities.
This must have been a herculean task and we should all applaud Pedreira for this alone. The result is a huge amount of previously unpublished and therefore unknown facts and information. Pedreira could have been the poster boy for our new “evidence based” approach to the history of self defense and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. He has supplied us with perhaps all the objective facts we are likely to find regarding the public record of early Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.
Or should I say Jiu-jitsu in Brazil, since there are many more players than just the Gracie family for which the term “Brazilian Jiu-jitsu” is usually associated with. Somewhat more than even I suspected when I wrote my post “Jigaro kano, the true founder of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu ?” and outlined an alternative, less-linear more cross fertilized, theory of the development of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Once again, my opinions about Brazilian Jiu-jitsu have been supported by the objective evidence but there are a lot more shocking revelations in this book than just how much jiu-jitsu had been developing without the Gracies.
Therefore, before I get into all the fascinating, and what one reviewer called “uncomfortable” revelations that the book contains, I think it is important to first evaluate the tone of the book. The book certainly contains all the objective, or at least reported, facts you are likely to uncover about who did what and when during the early years of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. However, a good historian has to ask himself are objective facts the same as an objective truth? The answer of course is that depends on how the facts are interpreted. It is in this area that I must be very critical of the book.
Considering how much I was looking forward to reading it, I have to say that on the whole it was a fairly unpleasant experience to do the reading. The reason for this disagreeable experience was simply the generally negative and all most “tabloid journalistic” slant the author seemed to put on everything. I found that very odd, usually cheap sensationalistic writers don’t go through all the trouble of examining so many actual facts.
In an interesting way the book and its author reminded me of the work of David Irving. Irving in many ways is a brilliant historian and bestselling author renowned for his pains taking research and his ability to find and get access to original sources that others could not. However, Irving is also a racist and anti-Semite. Yes, Irving’s books are meticulously researched history but they are also platforms for his personal agenda which at best is to be a Hitler apologist and at worst, a holocaust denier. Not surprisingly, these views have run him a foul of the law on more than one occasion and in more than one nation. The point being is that no matter how good David Irving’s research is or how rare his document discoveries are, his conclusions are always going to be suspect and denigrated because of his extreme biases.
As I read “choque” I had kind of the same experience as listening to a David Irving World War Two history tutorial. It was sometimes hard to know when the fascinating and little known documented facts ended and the biased personal inferences began. Other times it was not difficult at all because they were so clear.
Now don’t get me wrong, we are just talking about the history of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu here and I am certainly not accusing the author of anything as nefarious as being a holocaust denier. I am just using the example of David Irving to illustrate that if extreme bias can be built into an otherwise exceptionally well researched history book, in the league that Mr. Irving plays in, then we know how easy it would be to get away with this in the minor leagues of small niche history.
The main problem is that Pedreira’s opinions don’t seem to have even much of an attempt at scholarly detachment. As one reviewer describes the basic format of the book: “paragraphs are written with a recall of the facts as they would have appeared in the original newspaper article. Pedreira then fills in between with his thoughts on what may or may not have happened.” The problem is that his “thoughts” often seem to be the most “tabloid-esc”, pejorative interpretations he can come up with. As I mentioned, I found this quite odd and somewhat distasteful. He is certainly disrespectful of certain individuals but beyond that, his overall tenor seems to be strangely dismissive of all the hard won fights and training that went along with them. To me, this seemed almost schizophrenic that someone with so great an interest in a topic and life-style like Brazilian Jiu-jitsu would want to come across as subtly, and often not so subtly, contemptuous of it.
Therefore, I wanted to start with my first impression of Volume one before moving on to the actual content of the books. I feel what could have been the definitive historical work on Brazilian Jiu-jitsu instead becomes, like a David Irving book, highly suspect because of the author’s low standards of objectivity and personal motivations. The strange part, besides wanting to demean Carlos Gracie is that his personal motivations seem to be to make an inspiring topic as uninspiring as possible by overlaying it with all his negative and silly innuendo; great way to cell books.
Have I miss judged the work? If you have already read it, let me know what your take on it was since I wrote this post without ever having spoken to anyone about the book and would like to hear your take on it. Furthermore, If you have not read it, I heartily endorse the scholarship that reproduced the interesting facts but I must warm the readers that the author’s conclusions based on these documented facts are highly suspect. Ergo, reading the book, which I do recommend all non-“meat head” Brazilian Jiu-jitsu practitioners do , will be a bit of a pain trying to keep separate all the masses of documented facts from the cheap insinuations. Next time we will deal with some specifics.