STELA DO PATROCÍNIO'S FREEDOM OF SILENCE IN REINO DOS BICHOS E DOS ANIMAIS É O MEU NOME.

Inaê Silva Pereira Sodré - inaesodre@gmail.com.

Lydia Stevens lydia.sue.stevens@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT: This article intends to highlight the poetic speaking style of Stela do Patrocínio, a black woman and poet, who spent thirty of her fifty-two years in the Juliano Moreira mental institution in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her words were recorded, transcribed and organized by Viviane Mosé. Stela denounces the cruelty that was occurring inside the mental institution to silence and deaden the subjects. Violence was used in the name of reason and under our connivance. According to Descartes, the division of language places reason as sovereign and madness as subordinate within a culture, a culture that isolates the "mentally ill" to distinguish those who are "normal" simply because they are outside of the exclusionary walls of the mental asylum.

KEYWORDS: reason; madness; literature; representation of identity.

RESUMO: Este artigo intenciona evidenciar a fala poética de Stela do Patrocínio, uma mulher negra e poeta, que passou trinta anos no manicômio Juliano Moreira no Rio de Janeiro. Sua fala foi gravada transcrita e organizada por Viviane Mosé. Stela denuncia a crueldade que acontecia dentro do espaço manicomial para silenciar e mortificar o sujeito, a custo de violência, em nome da razão e sob a nossa conivência. A cisão da linguagem, por Descartes, coloca a razão como soberana e a loucura como subalterna dentro de uma cultura que isola os “doentes mentais” para marcar os “normais” por estarem fora dos muros excludentes do manicômio.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: razão; loucura; literatura; representações identitárias.

In the beginning was the Word, then the Word became Speech and Speech became a Body and that Body, in time, encompassed Language. Words designate things, translate our emotions, outline a piece of the intensity of life. Words represent the world. But the words used to understand and interpret our world, so full of tangible and probable truths, can decrease the possible meanings that the word is able to give.

Language, just like a river in time, divides itself and follows two paths in the history of thought. One flows into the dictionary and the other flows into poetry. Are the exact words from the vocabulary of reason sufficient to understand and interpret our world?

According to Viviane Mosé, reason is characterized by the capacity of all human beings to create and articulate words and thoughts. In other words, to unemotionally think in an organized and clear manner about causes and effects with no excesses or contradictions (MOSÉ 2012, p. 112). In the modern age or according to Michel Foucault, the Classical Age, or the 17th century, the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes defined Reason as the model of philosophical thought fundamental in exact mathematics. “I think, therefore I am” is the greatest maxim of Cartesian thought found in his work Discourse on Method about how to apply reason in the search for the truth in science in which doubt is used as a tool to investigate and understand the world. He believed this because, for him, even if one doubts fully, one cannot doubt that which one doubts because doubt is an act of thinking in a way that thinking itself cannot occur without a subject.

I realized that when I thought that everything was false it became necessary that I, the one who thought, was firm thing and, noting this truth – I think therefore I am – I was so firm and so certain that all of the extravagant suppositions of the skeptics was not able to shake it, I concluded that I was able to accept it with the scruples of the first principle of philosophy that I was seeking (DESCARTES, 2011, p.50).

What reason has wanted, since its platonic birth, is to reject a part of life; that which changes, that which makes no sense, that which dies. What reason wants is to produce a world of identities and truth, a predictable and clear world (MOSÉ, 2001, p. 22). Michel Foucault accused Rene Descartes of dividing language into two parts: Reason and Unreason. On one side, there was Reason as truth, conscience, clarity, normality, sanity and on the other side, Unreason was defined as error, obscurity, disorder (FOUCAULT, 1997, p.45).

The main concern of Descartes, in the face of a scholastic tradition in which the species was conceived as semi-material entities, semi-spiritual, is to discretely separate mechanics and thought, the body having been entirely reduced to mechanics (SARTRE, 2008, P.13).

According to Viviane Mosé (2012), Descartes reduces existence to thinking, values the world of ideas, searches for truth and excludes the body as a possibility of interpreting the world, thus excluding the intensities of life and the artistic language. And thinking in black and white is thinking in causes and effect, in identity, in an absence of contradictions. For rational thought to make sense, things must be rigidly in opposition to each other: ugliness against beauty, certainty against error, clarity against obscurity, normality against the abnormality, reason against silliness. He believes that the body, feelings and emotions are sources of errors and disorder (MOSÉ, 2012, p.130). Having said that, man needs to oppose feelings and perceptions and search for the truth as the essence of things that comes with thinking and ideas. Therefore, reason is not natural, it was invented at a specific point in time in our history. In other words, it was constructed through culture and is a product of our civilization.

Reason, as constructed by civilization, was founded by a group of practices governed by tacit or openly accepted rules. These practices, whether natural, ritual or symbolic, are intended to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior through repetitive discourse (HOBSBAWM, 2012, p.12). Standard grammar serves as an example of how the discourse of reason lasted in time. Standard grammar is based upon the idea of subject and predicate, in rules, in an absence of contradictions and in the “logic of exclusion”. According to Viviane Mosé:

This absolute, centered on the notion of Being, undergirds the belief in identity and the basis of all grammar, causing it to initiate a logic of identity in all writings that always excludes differences and which finds support in a subject in the position of a stable, single subject, and absent of body (Mosé 2012 , p . 53 ).

In order for rational thinking to sustain itself as a model of true discourse, besides repeating the “truth” of “correct speech” and “wrong speech” it sought to intern those who opposed it, in other words, all those who were against reason: those who were delirious, those who went overboard, those who were unstable, those who exceeded the established norms. As Foucault says:

To doubt Descartes discards the enchantment of the senses, crosses the landscape of dreams, always guided by the light of things that are true, but he banishes madness in the name of that which he doubts and that can not rave more than you can think or not to be (FOUCAULT, 2012, p. 47).

Michel Foucault, in his book The Order of Discourse, argues that the division of language is in the domain of discourse. It is through words that one recognizes the folly of the madman. It affirms that since the arcane Middle Ages that the madman is he whose discourse does not come across like the others or his word is worth nothing and does not exist, not possessing truth nor importance, not being able to testify on issues of justice, not being able to authenticate a deed or a contract and cannot, even in the sacrifice of the Mass, turn bread into flesh; or, on the other hand, strange powers are attributed to his words: speaking a hidden truth or predicting the future or seeing wisdom that the wise cannot see (FOUCAULT, 1970, p.10). According to Roland Barthes, in his book Aula, the power of objects is written through language (BARTHES, 1980, P.11). It is reason that imposes, judges, controls, sickens, silences, isolates, excludes, tortures and kills.

Among the earliest experiences of hospitalization, we have the leprosy asylums. These were built in the 4th century A.D. and were maintained as a place of segregation until the disappearance of leprosy in the 15th century, at the end of the Middle Age. These spaces lumped together not only lepers but also other society undesirables such as beggars, the poor, homosexuals, prostitutes and cripples among others (FOUCAULT, 2012, p.24). After leprosy disappeared, society needed to fill these empty spaces designed for isolation. The insane asylum was created to isolate mad people and all those who were different or strange represented in the figure of a madman. Those who entered the insane asylum encountered the valley of death. People died from the cold because they slept on the floor, without clothes or blankets or they were thrown out into the open. They died of hunger, from electric shock, from infection through drinking dirty water or from eating feces and rats. Many died of pneumonia and many others died on top of surgery tables as a result of lobotomies. Stela do Patrocínio was a witness to what happened in the asylum and denounced, poetically, the medical ‘care’ and more violent forms of ‘healing’ given to those who dared to disrupt the ‘norms’ of the institution. Or break the Order and or deviate from the Standard. Stela was able, through means of her words, to bear witness of her circumstances as a victim of a system that far exceeded it’s treatment of madness, that, according to the words of Michel Foucault “used the most bizarre forms of violence and torture as methods to control the body” (FOUCAULT, 1997, p.141). According Daniele Arbex (2013),

(…) for decades people were tucked away – often forcibly – into a wagon train that unloaded them in Cologne. There, their clothing was torn, their heads shaved, and their names were erased. Nude in body and identity and stripped of their humanity, men, women and even children became “ignored people”. They were epileptics, alcoholics, homosexuals, prostitutes, beggars, political activists, rebels or people who crossed someone who had more power. There were young pregnant girls, raped by their employers, there were wives who were confined so the husbands could live with their lovers, there were daughters of ranchers who lost their virginity before marriage. There were men and women who had lost their documents. Some of them were just fragile. About 30 of them were children (ARBEX, 2013, p.14).

Because of the exclusionary thinking of reason, there dwells in each one of us an empty insane asylum. But why does our culture exclude people? Why are certain feelings considered pathological? And ‘normal’…what is normal? According to George Canguilhem (2012), in his book, O normal e o patológico (The Normal and the Pathological), within the objective perspective the idea of normal is based upon statistical regularity, i.e. based upon the measurement of behavior and experience in a specific population one finds a parameter of normality. And those who deviate from this standard are considered outside of the normal. Moreover, from a subjective perspective, it is known that all human beings have a mind, a subjective life that governs their relationship with others and with their surroundings in such a way that this relationship with others implies pleasure and displeasure, frustrations and suffering. To suffer, just as being happy or sad is inherent in the human condition.

For Canguilhem, a normal relationship with someone implies an individual dealing with the other as an ethical subject, in other words, as an equal. And when he somehow deprives that person of being a subject, going further to treat him as an instrument of his pleasure, he will be exceeding the limits and stepping into the field of pathology. Therefore, any judgment that qualifies aspects of a relationship to a norm is subordinate to that which developed the norms (CANGUILHEM, 2012, p.80). In this sense it is doubtful if normality is outside or within the exclusionary walls of the asylums.

In Stela do Patrocinio’s book - Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome she presents the voice and words of a black woman, poet and internee of Juliano Moreira, a psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro in which she spent 52 years, held as a madwoman, a victim of exclusion imposed by rational thought, by science and by society. She was also one of the inmates who lived before and after the Psychiatric Reform in Brazil in 1980. Using poetic language, Stela do Patrocinio’s voice was heard, recorded and transcribed on paper. This book shows us the breaking of a secular silence imposed on ‘crazy’ people by the powers of an epoch and of a culture. Her works came out of an oral context and afterwards were transcribed into poems and text. Keenly conscious of her era, her space and her condition, Stela spoke and spoke and spoke:

Days weeks months year round/minute second every hour day afternoon all night they want to kill me/They only want to kill me/Because they say that I have an easy life/I have a difficult life/Then because I have an easy life/I have a difficult life/They want to know how it is that I am able to continue being born without easiness and with difficulty/ It is because of this that they want to kill me (PATROCINIO 2001, p.64).

Stela did not fit the established societal norms: she was black, a woman and poor. That said, as someone who was different in our patriarchal, slaveocratic, white supremacist and capitalist society, was she crazy or was she driven crazy? After a fall on Voluntários da Patria Street they took Stela to a first aid post. They gave her an injection, medicine, and electric shocks. They ordered her to take a shower. They ordered her to find a table, and a chair. They gave her a tray with rice, meat, beans and then called an ambulance and said, “Take her away!”. (PATROCINIO, 2001, p.49). “I am in an asylum of old people/in a hospital where everyone is sick/in a hospice/in a place for crazy people/crazy/nuts” (PATROCINIO, 2011, p.47).

Stela was admitted in 1962, at age 21 and remained for 4 years in the Pedro II hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the first insane asylum in Latin America. Later she was transferred to the Juliano Moreira Psychiatric Hospital where she remained until her death, victim of a general infection in 1992. This unique character was described in the words of Viviane Mosé: philosopher, poet, psychologist and psychoanalyst, holding a Masters and PhD in Philosphy from the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of 6 books of philosophy and seven books of poetry:

Stela was a survivor of the life-sucking process characteristic of an archaic and traditional psychiatric structure – the insane asylums. There, there was the erasure of individuality, of subjectivity, of desire and uniqueness. People were reduced to a faceless and shapeless lump. Time was the time of death. Treatment - a scientific word, - was reduced to the control of the body through violence to those who dared to challenge the order (MOSÉ, 2001, p.13).

Em Reino dos bichos e dos animais é meu nome, the title makes it clear that we are getting a look at the conditions in a psychiatric hospital: “First came the world of the living/Afterwards, of life and death/Then of the dead/Then of the beasts and the animals/Only the will remains/As a beast and as an animal” (PATROCINIO, 2001, p.116). Or else gives us a look a the “care” of the psychiatric physicians: “The medicine that I take makes me sick/I don’t like taking medicine that keeps me sick/I walk a bit and then stumble/I continue to stumble, almost falling and if I fall I pick myself up/I again walk a little/Falling” (PATROCINIO, 2001, p.54). In her poems it is as if she is describing the steps of a lobotomy:

I was operated upon many times/I’ve had various operations/I was operated on principally on the brain/I thought that I was going to be accused/If I have something in the brain/No, they said that I have a brain/a device that thinks well/That thinks positive/And that is the connection to another that doesn’t think/Who is not capable of thinking about anything nor work/They snatched that which is thinking/And what is not thinking/And they went to examine this device of thinking and not thinking/Connected one to the other in my head, in my brain/Functioning on top of the table/They are studying outside of my head/I am already the object of study/A category (PATROCINIO, 2001, p.69).

In 1989, Representative Paulo Delgado initiated the process that would progressively end the insane asylums and regulate the rights of the mentally ill, but the law of Psychiatric Reform was only approved in 2001. That law is also known as the Law of Paulo Delgado (FERREIRA, 2006, p.77). The Psychiatric Hospital was eliminated and gave way to a new model of treatment. The creation of the Center for Psychosocial Attention – C.A.P.S. – has as its goals the prevention of patients being shut away and forgotten in confinement as well as to put the patient in contact with their family as well as society as a form of social adjustment. In these centers the patient has psychological and pharmacological follow-up, besides integration in the unit with persons from the neighborhood or the city.

As reported by Goncalves & Sena (2001) and Ferreira (2006), Psychiatric Reform in Brazil occurred in the decade of the 1980s, at the time of the implementation of the Unified Health System (SUS). Stela benefited from this period since the doors that remained closed for centuries, were opened. We are dealing with a period of time, not too long ago, where mental patients were treated as irrational animals and, for this reason, were isolated, caged, chained and punished. And, like animals, they were guinea pigs for the progress of science. After the Psychiatric Reforms, a new era opened up. It was the time of giving voice to those who were silenced. Stela talked and talked and talked.

The words of Stela do Patrocínio were not bound by syntactic construction and composed another rhythm. The rhythm of haggard eyes. Words streaming out without taking a breath. And through this withheld breath, the poet saved on commas in order to imbue the rhythm of the river in her words. And into this world empty of so-called Unreason, empty of symbols, of dreams, of poetry, of art that Stela structured her new thoughts. Her dialogue organized itself in the tension between order and disorder. “Stela spoke like a speaker and her words unrolled as she talked. She spoke of her speech. And she spoke in her own style. Her extremely well-pronounced words were always charged with much emotion” (MOSÉ, 2001, p.28). Aware of herself and of her being in the world, Stela affirms her identity from the perspective of others”

I am Stela do Patrocínio, well sponsored/I am sitting in a chair nailed to a table/I am black and Creole/I am a black and creole woman/That’s what Ana tells me/I was born crazy/My country wanted me to remain crazy/The normal people were jealous of me because I was a crazy (PATROCINIO, 2011, p.66).

The book wasn’t written by Stela, despite the knowledge that she wrote on cardboard. Her words were spoken and recorded over two years, from 1986 to 1988, by the fine artist Neil Gutmacher and Carla Guagliardi. Afterwards they were transcribed by the psychologist Mônica Ribeiro and organized by Viviane Mosé. The organizer, in one of her statements in the book, says “This book is the result of a collective process, put together over time, in anonymity and nurtured with a feeling solidarity with those who do not have a tomorrow or yesterday” (MOSÉ, 2001, p.15). According to Viviane Mosé, Stela was diagnosed as a carrier of a psychopathic personality or top of hebephrenic schizophrenia generation psychotic actions”. And of her existence, Stela says:

I was pure gas, air, empty space, time/I was air, empty space, time/And pure gauzes, in that way, empty space/I had no training/I hadn’t graduated/I couldn’t get my head together/My arms, my body/My ear, my nose/Make a sky with my mouth, doing/Speech/My muscles, my teeth/I was unable to make any of these things/Couldn’t get my head together, couldn’t think of something/To be useful, to be rational/I didn’t have any place to pull in any of this/I was pure empty space (PATRICINIO, 2001, p.21).

The book was released in 2001 by the publisher Azougue Editorial under the genre “Brazilian poetry”. The layout and introduction was done by Viviane Mosé. The sections of the book are a “Thank You” section, “Epigraph”, “Summary”; “Feature”; “Introducing – Stela do Patrocino – A Poetic Trajectory in a Psychiatric Institution”, Part I – A Man called Horse Is My Name”, Part II – I Am Stela do Patrocínio, Well Sponsored”, “Part III – I Was Educated in the Gauzes, I had Color”, “Part IV – I See the World”, “Part V – The Wall is Still Not Painted Blue”, “Part VI – My Name is Kingdom of the Beasts and Animals”, “Stela on Stela – Interview”. In the interview of Stela do Patrocínio, conducted by Neli Gutmacher and Carla Guagliardi, they highlight some of the passages that give us an idea of what her experience was like in the insane asylum.

How is your day here in Cologne?

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday January February March April May June July August September October November December Morning afternoon night I continue grazing at will I continue to graze, grazing at will and I’m not even a horse. He already said that a man called horse is my name

Are you very sick here?

I am sick because I constantly take injections. Injections for the men and the liquid goes down

Who gives you these injections?

The invisible secret police who have no color.

What is the purpose of these injections?

To make one mentally ill.

On the days that you stop taking injections will you be cured?

I will be completely cured if I don’t take injections. If I don’t have electric shocks. If I don’t remain full of poisonous venom.

Do you study Stela?

I was educated by books Languages “Comment allez vous?” “Como voce está?” “Thank you very much” The coffee pot is full Ca va bien. The madam is well?

You are a teacher?

I am not a teacher but I worked learning letter for letter, sentence for sentence, page by page.

Your name is Stela. Do you know what Stela means?

Star. Star of the sea.

You are going to give us a poem?

No. I don’t remember any poetry.

Everything that you say is poetry, Stela.

It is only a story that I am telling, an anecdote.

(PATROCÍNIO, 2001, p.153).

The story of Stela had significant repercussions. The book My Name is Kingdom of the Beasts and Animals, put together by Viviane Mosé, became a finalist for the Jabuti Prize in 2002 and 2005. Her words were used in shows and musicals by the musician and fine artist, Cabelo. They were adapted for theatre in the monologue “Eyes of Stela do Patrocinio, dresses in blue, black shoes, white purse and…crazy” interpreted by Clarisse Baptista and directed by Nena Mubarac. Stela was portrayed in the movie theaters in STELA DO PATROCINIO – A WOMAN THAT SPOKE THINGS (documentary, 14 min, DV, RJ, 2006), produced by Marcio de Andrade. Her works have also been transformed into an opera by the composer Lincoln Antonio. The following poem comes from the title of the book:

My real name is coffin/ Burial/Body dead in the cemetery/skeleton/Insane asylum for the aged/hospital for everything disease/World of beasts and animals/ The animals: dinosaur camel tiger lion monkey dinosaur giraffe turtle/Kingdom of the Beasts and Animals is my name/A zoo/Thursday of Boa Vista ((PATROCÍNIO, 2001, p.118).

To Viviane Mosé, the work of Stela do Patrocínio brought in a new milestone in Brazilian literature, reviving it with major importance and significance. The work joins many other books containing the testimony of writers who related their experiences in the insane asylums. And it arrives with force, becoming part of history. In the chapter, titled STAR, Viviane Mosé begins and ends with an epigraph from the Cuban singer, Paulo Milanez, referred to by the Star Stela” What shines with its own light no one can put out” (MOSÉ, 2001, p.13).

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