Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil 9780520911567, 9780520075375, 9780520075368

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Prologue: Sugar House (page xi)
Introduction (page 1)
CHAPTER 1 O Nordeste: Sweetness and Death (page 31)
CHAPTER 2 Bom Jesus: One Hundred Years Without Water (page 65)
CHAPTER 3 Reciprocity and Dependency: The Double Ethic of Bom Jesus (page 98)
CHAPTER 4 Delírio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger (page 128)
CHAPTER 5 Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs (page 167)
CHAPTER 6 Everyday Violence: Bodies, Death, and Silence (page 216)
CHAPTER 7 Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death (page 268)
CHAPTER 8 (M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking (page 340)
CHAPTER 9 Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy of the Emotions (page 400)
CHAPTER 10 A Knack for Life: The Everyday Tactics of Survival (page 446)
CHAPTER 11 Carnaval: The Dance Against Death (page 480)
CHAPTER 12 De Profundis: Out of the Depths (page 505)
Epilogue: Acknowledgments and Then Some (page 534)
Notes (page 541)
Glossary (page 557)
Bibliography (page 567)
Index (page 589)

Citation preview

Death Without Weeping

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One hundred books /, published between 1990 arid 1995

bear this special imprint of the University of CaliforniaPress. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest as we celebraté the beginning of

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Founded in 1893

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Death _ Without Weeping The Violence of Everyday Life

in Brazil NANCY SCHEPER-~-HUGHES

University of California Press

, University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1992 by

The Regents of the University of California First Paperback Printing 1993 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without weeping : the violence of everyday life in Brazil / Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

p. cm.

“A Centennial book.”

Includes bibliographical references and index. | ISBN 978-0-520-07537-5 (ppb.)

1. Poor women—Brazil, Northeast. 2. Mother and infant— Brazil, Northeast. 3. Infants—Brazil, Northeast—Death. 4, Violence—Brazil, Northeast. 5. Brazil, Northeast—Social conditions. 6. Brazil, Northeast—Social life and customs. I. Title.

HV1448.B72N677 1992

, CIP

303.6'0981—dc20 91-12829 Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 O08 O7 06.

144 13 12 11 10 9 8 ,

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To George Louis and Anne Znojemsky Scheper, for the gift of life, and to Michael, Jennifer, Sarah, and Nathanael, for making that life worth living.

And to Seu Jacques, wherever you are...

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Contents Prologue: Sugar House xi

Introduction: Tropical Sadness 1 CHAPTER 1 O Nordeste: Sweetness and Death 31 CHAPTER 2 Bom Jesus: One Hundred Years Without 65 Water

CHAPTER 3 Reciprocity and Dependency: The Double 98 Ethic of Bom Jesus

CHAPTER 4 Delirio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger 128 CHAPTER 5 Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human 167 Needs

CHAPTER 6 Everyday Violence: Bodies, Death, and 216 Silence

CHAPTER 7 Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: 268 The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death

CHAPTER 8 (M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and 340 Maternal Thinking

of the Emotions |

CHAPTER g Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy 400 CHAPTER 10 A Knack for Life: The Everyday Tactics of 446 Survival

CHAPTER 11 Carnaval: The Dance Against Death 480

Notes 541 Glossary 557 Bibliography 567

CHAPTER 12. De Profundis: Out of the Depths 505

Epilogue: Acknowledgments and Then Some 534

Index | 589

I have seen death without weeping. The destiny of the Northeast is death. Cattle they kill, but to the people they do something worse. Geraldo Vandre, Disparada

Prologue

Sugar House | And our faces, my heart brief as photos John Berger (1984:5)

Connections os There was, however improbably, an artist living on our block, on South Third Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He inhabited a basement apartment, the kind below street level with iron bars across the windows, so that when one looked out all that could be seen were amputated legs and feet scurrying across pavement. How he painted in that dark, dank,

cold-water flat I’ll never know, but it obviously required great powers of imagination. We didn’t have a clue that the funny little man—Morris Kish was his name—was anything at all until he invited several neighbors to a “showing” in his flat. We children sat together, in the front, on straightbacked kitchen chairs, half expecting we would have to suppress giggles and then gales of laughter. For what could Morris Kish ever think to paint?

Morris Kish could think to paint a great deal, indeed, and I remember being lost in a swirl of colors and vivid impressions and impish magic, as he showed us what we never thought to see in the rundown, workaday world of Williamsburg. There was the bridge, of course, but a bridge teeming with humanity crossing and recrossing, bundled in long coats and sweaters, each face revealing a different story. There was the Saints Peter and Paul Church

carnival, not the dowdy one with dull paint-chipped carousel horses and abusive “carneys” that we knew but rather the carnival when, just before

, dawn and after the crowds had left, the carousel horses came alive and danced and played cards with each other. But what I remember most of all in those huge surprise canvases were the men of Berry Street and South First and South Second all rushing and converging together on the front gates of

the black monster that dominated our landscape, the DOMINO SUGAR refining factory, which we knew only as the “Sugar House.” Those of us who grew up at the foot of the factory—adults and children, workers and not— xi

xii / Prologue all responded to the movements of the beast. We woke to its shrill whistles, its humming and clangings were a permanent backdrop to all our conversations, we breathed its foul fumes, and finally we went to bed to the comforting sound of foghorns guiding ships and their precious cargo to its docks. The crude block of brown sugar coming from the tropics (darkest Africa, we imagined, for what did we on South Third Street in Brooklyn know?) would be purified and whitened, while our flats were dirtied and darkened by the damnable Sugar House soot. How, we wondered, could something so sweet and delectable come out of that noisy, smelly, dirty place? It was, I supposed, a mystery rather like the Holy Trinity, puzzling and a bit paradoxical but accepted, unquestioningly, on faith. This book takes me full circle from childhood to midlife, for it is, I think, no coincidence that my anthropology finally brought me “home” to Northeast Brazil and to those verdant but cloying fields of sugarcane (more akin, __ Claude Levi-Strauss was to write, to “open-air factories, than to a landscape” [1961:99]) to work with people who invariably describe themselves as having grown up “at the foot” of the cane. Foot of the factory, foot of the cane, we are all implicated (as workers and as consumers) in the vicious sugar cycle and in the miséria morta, “deadly misery,” it leaves in its wake. As a child

of the Williamsburg Eastern European (later Puerto Rican) slum, I was marked by the image of the Sugar House, and in writing about the cane cutters and their families of Bom Jesus da Mata, I am also trying to reach out

and touch the fading images of those sugar workers I knew as acchild and whose faces I remember but only, as it turns out, in the vivid and impressionistic paintings of Morris Kish. The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field,” a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own

destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary—but also deeply felt and personal—record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of draw_ ing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing. These are not ordinary lives that I am about to describe. Rather, they are short, violent, and hungry lives. I am offering here a glimpse into Nor-

Prologue / xiii destino society through a glass darkly. It entails a descent into a Brazilian heart of darkness, and as it begins to touch on and to evoke some of our worst fears and unconscious dreads about “human nature,” and about mothers and

infants in particular, one may experience righteous indignation. Why am I being served this? Death is never an easy topic, not for science, not for art. It is not surprising that Edvard Munch’s most famous expressionist painting, Death of a Child, was also the one that most outraged and offended his sophisticated cosmopolitan audience.

_ But lest we forget: the reading, the reflecting, and the writing are as

canvas. ,

nothing in comparison with the cost to those who have lived the stories told here. And these lives, these faces, although pained and as fleeting as photos, have also been touched with beauty and grace. I trust I have done them no further violence in the rough and impressionistic strokes I have left on this

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Introduction Tropical Sadness

1965 |

I don't remember the blood, except that later on, much later, I was trying to rub it off with spit and the palm of my hand. But my mouth was dry and the blood kept escaping me, sliding further up my arm, so that it wasn’t until that night, when Dalina the water carrier came, that I could finally erase it.

It was noon when they came to get me, the time when I could pull the wooden shutters closed and fasten the bar against the split doors and shut out the heat and the suffocating push and shove of Alto life. But they got to me this time anyway, even though the thick smell of coffee and black beans filled my

hut and the clatter of tin plates announced the start of the midday meal, because it was my comadre Tonieta who was banging on the back door, which

meant that she had had to squeeze herself along the ledge of the house balanced precariously on an eroded niche of Cruzeiro hill.

| “It’s Lordes,” she cried, “her time has come, and the parteira hasn't returned from Saturday market. You'll have to help.” And then we were running,

tripping up the hill, through litter-strewn backyards, under barbed wire clotheslines, past exposed latrines, digging our fingers into the moist dirt for le-

verage, knowing I shouldn’t do that, all the while arguing with Antonieta: “Why didn’t you warn old Mariazinha that Lordes’s time was near?” And I hardly remember saying, “Forca, forca, menina” (push hard, girl), __ give it all you've got, because she didn’t have-to, really, and suddenly the slippery, blue-gray thing was in my hands, cold and wet as it slid over them.

| I had to pull the tight, tense rope away from its scrawny neck, but the rope resisted and coiled in: my hands like an angry telephone cord. “Scissors, scissors,” I begged, but the old neighbor women shook their heads, looking absently from one to other, until Biu, Lordes’s second half-sister, arrived sheepishly with a pair that looked suspiciously like the ones that had disappeared from my medical kit some weeks earlier. 1

2 / Introduction | Lordes wasn’t crying, but the other one, the oh so little one, made pathetic, little mewing sounds. So little, I couldn't look. We had celebrated when Lordes found the job in the tomato fields, where she met Milton, but soon after, she came home with this belly. “Worms,” she said, but, of course, we knew better.

I laid it out on the lumpy straw mattress between Lordes’s spread legs, which had gone limp. It was dark; no windows, no door, just sticks and mud, with an opening at one side covered by Food for Peace bean sacks. Too dark to read the expression on Lordes’s pinched-in little face with her matted, sweaty hair pasted against cheeks and forehead. But not too dark to see that her hurt mouth hung, like her legs, loosely open and expectant of more pain to come. The smell of hot flesh and dried blood filled the single room of the lean-to, trapped in by the scrap-metal roof. But there was no water in the big clay jug,

just the pebbles and slime that gather at the bottom. Meanwhile, Valdimar slowly and patiently dug outside, and on hitting a rock, he stopped to call out, “Is it here yet?” The old women, in a semicircle around the fire and bent over a faintly squawking chicken, laughed and called back, “Stop digging, Valdimar. She's only a small woman, you know.” Inside the wings flapped madly one last time, knocking against a tin can. Then silence. The cord lay thin and cool, pulsating between my fingers. “Where's De-De with my medical kit?” I asked, but the women were more interested in bleeding the rest of the chicken for the birthing meal. Lordes squirmed on the mattress and began to thrash her arms about. I wouldn't wait for De—Nego De, as the moradores affectionately called the charcoal-black, impish little son of Black Irene—but I needed a piece of string. There was my old key string, knotted and dirty, but it would have to make do. Antonieta stood over me, anxiously biting her lips. My hand didn’t want to cut, but even under the dull edge of the scissors the cord was less resistant than I had expected, and the sensation of cutting hidden flesh was at my fingers and

up my spine, and I couldn't stop the pounding in my ears... . I called for help because the rest wouldn't come and Lordes's insides had gone slack. The old women were gathered around the baby now, tying it up in

scraps of satin, ribbon, and torn lace. So little I could not look. Outside, Valdimar's shovel again scraped against rock. My hands forced down on her soft belly, while Antonieta tugged. Lordes’s mouth was still open, but no sound emerged as the rest finally slid out. I took it up in my hands, whole, yet still in parts where it folded in toward the center, and handed it to the old women, who

wrapped it in a cloth, cleaner than what we had used to stop up Lordes’s bleeding, and they passed the placenta through the opening to the waiting Valdimar. As if he were the father, so tender he was for her. And it was blessedly cool and dark where I slid down. Cool and dark and

Introduction / 3

| last.... |

wrapped up in the hollow, hidden in branches of green and brown. Safe at Valdimar, his black face twisted by a susto into a smirking grin, is not really

always laughing. He is outside my door, calling softly, “Nanci, oh, Dona Nanci.” He has come to break the news, to tell me what I already know. My head hurts, and the wet cloth feels cool against the dense afternoon air. Will I come and eat chicken with Lordes and the others? No, I'll eat later, after we

| bury the baby in its mortalha, its little patchwork shroud. So tiny I still won't look. Lying in its cardboard shoe box, covered with purple tissue and a silver paper cross. (Valdimar has prepared it.) I am not deaf, gentle Valdimar. I have heard the bells of Nossa Senhora das Dores, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” and they, at least, have touched the void: de profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. What time is it? Has more than a day been lost? There is still so much to be done. My papers lie untouched where the wind has scattered them on the dirt floor. From the open shutter I can see Antonieta’s wash caught up in a pretty white bundle, cradled in a tin basin outside her hut. And it is June, the time of corn, and the tomatoes, too, hang ripe and heavy on their vines. So I slowly pick up the papers, and I watch Valdimar limp painfully up the hill. It is good to hear the milk goats knocking on the rocks outside my door. And even better to hear Antonieta’s husky singing, raggedly off tune, her hips

swinging in time to the erratic rhythm, on her way down to the river, the laundry poised gracefully on her head. And it is very good, indeed, to imagine Valdimar laughing and pretending to dance the forr6 to make Lordes smile. But it is best of all to hear the sound of the fat tomatoes as they split and fall, unpicked, from their vines.

1989

Lordes, who was sixteen years old at the time of my story, had eleven more pregnancies, several of these by the rascal Milton, before she finally left him for an elderly widower. Only five of her children survived early childhood, and one of these, an initially rejected and neglected little boy named Zezinho, grew up to become his mother’s favorite, her “elect” son, only to meet a tragic end later on. Gentle Valdimar established a family of his own, not with Lordes but with

, her hapless older sister, Severina (Biu), who was, for much of her life, a female worker in the cane. Biu had five children by Valdimar, two of whom died before Valdimar, unemployed, alcoholic, and depressed, hung himself

| from the short rope he often used to tie up stray goats in their backyard. Biu, stranded after the death of her common-law husband, left the shantytown with their three remaining children and traveled some sixty

4 / Introduction kilometers to the capital city of Recife, where they lived for a while as beggars near the bridge in the center of the downtown area. Before the month was out, she had lost two of those three children, one an infant who “collapsed,” she said, from the strain of living on the streets, and the other, an older girl, who ran off with a band of “wild” street children. Later, Biu returned to Bom Jesus and to the Alto do Cruzeiro, where, while working on a small plantation, she met Oscar, by whom she had ten more births and six surviving children. During the Sao Joao festivities in June 1987, Oscar deserted Biu, taking their bed and stove with him to set up housekeeping across town with a younger woman who, he explained to Biu, still had her teeth. Biu was forty-three years old at the time. Antonieta (Tonieta), the eldest of the three half-sisters, married “well” to a stable and devoutly religious rural man who left his parents’ little rocado (rented garden plot) in the countryside to try his luck in the interior town of Bom Jesus. He proved himself extraordinarily lucky indeed. The couple eventually moved off the hillside shantytown and into a more respectable working-class bairro in town. Antonieta’s family of ten children includes three filhos de criacao (foster children), one of whom was rescued from Biu

when her half-sister seemed “determined to kill” all of her children, as Tonieta put it, on the streets of Recife. Nego De (like Zezinho, his mother’s favorite son) grew up a malandro, a petty thief and a glue sniffer. After several run-ins with local police, time spent in the Federal reform school (FEBEM) in Recife, and a half dozen visits to the municipal jail in Bom Jesus, De turned himself around at the age of twenty. He got a job cutting sugarcane for a large plantation, and he joined the enthusiastic new padre’s “youth group for young criminals” at the local church. The local police were unimpressed, however, and they continued to harass Nego De and his distraught mother’s household.

Lordes, Tonieta, Biu, and their families and friends were my immediate

| neighbors when I first lived and worked in the hillside shantytown called the Alto do Cruzeiro from 1964 through the end of 1966, and their life experiences serve as a kind of divining rod that pulls me back always to a phenomenologically grounded anthropology, an antropologia-pé-no-chao, an anthropology-with-one’s-feet-on-the-ground. My experience of this small and tormented human community now spans a quarter century. And

this ethnography has its origins not in certain theoretical conundrums (although these are found here as well) but in practical realities and dilemmas—in the everyday violence that daily confronts the moradores of the Alto do Cruzeiro. And so it is best that I make the origins of this book, and of my relations to the people of the Alto, explicit at the outset.

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was I “9 : ” inthe 193 | the | ccuple s when man ut began t ranjin , r , O yidlwyi region workers | piary rce ot 7 navieira § , were rs in the 07wh * : t e] ] ae, *holdings, 17a t e ne 1V radqitio ’ sugarcal ed tor gen ior nal small holdi |mare?! erationsCasitional “conditis« ordeere they arginal plantati : squatters” (m Jhad na :tion ion lands. Shan radores conaicao) on zone . tytown i¢ao} O zone du S sprun ) , | ing this parti l | ung up t rough h of the sugar ind y accelerated pha plat ita-

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Introduction / 5 My story begins, then, in a specific relationship to the community, one generally thought of today in critical and enlightened anthropological circles as something of a stigma, just one step removed, perhaps, from having been a Christian missionary: I was a twenty-year-old public health/community development worker with the Peace Corps. (Because stigma and stigmata are generative themes of this book, my own stigmatizing origins in the field seem appropriate. )

Ours was the first group sent into the northeastern (Nordestino) state of Pernambuco, and we arrived on the coattails of a “bloodless” and “peaceful” _ military coup in the spring of 1964 that turned out to be not so bloodless or blameless as time wore on. Contracted to work as rural health extension agents for the Pernambucan Health Department, we were assigned to health posts in the “interior” of the state, the women to work as visitadoras, the men as “sanitary engineers.” Visitadoras were door-to-door frontline health workers in poor and marginalized communities, a concept not too far removed from Chairman Mao’s “barefoot doctors.” The engineers were “backyard” health workers mainly employed in digging pit latrines, although monitoring trash disposal and water supplies was also part of the job description. My first assignment, however, was not to a community per se but to a large public hospital in a town that I call Belem do Nordeste, located in the sugarcane plantation zone, the so-called zona da mata. The hospital served the impoverished cane workers (and their families) of the region. For the first few weeks I slept on a fold-up cot in the emergency rehydration clinic, where small babies mortally sick with diarrhea/dehydration were brought for treatment when it was usually too late to save them. That first encounter with child death left its mark on me, indelibly so. The hospital in Belem do Nordeste functioned without a qualified medical staff (and often without running water as well) for most hours of the day and

night, and the patients, both young and adult, were treated largely by untrained practical nurses with the assistance of hospital orderlies, who, when they were not washing floors, helped to deliver babies and suture wounds. My one lasting contribution to that first assignment, before leaving in a state of considerable ignominy, was to organize in February of that year a fated carnaval ball in the back wards of the hospital where the terminally ill, the highly contagious, and the stigmatized ill were isolated from other patients. When a hospital administrator arrived unexpectedly to find some of the more “animated” back-ward patients dancing in the halls and spilling out into the enclosed courtyard dressed in borrowed surgical garb and masks for their carnaval costumes, he was not pleased. My next assignment was to a more lively town in the extreme north of

, , Introductior / /

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