HENERY-DISSERTATION.Pdf (2.915Mb)

Celeste Sian Henery

2010

The Dissertation Committee for Celeste Sian Henery certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

The Balance of Souls:

Self-Making and Mental Wellness

in the Lives of Ageing Black Women in Brazil

Committee:

______João H. Vargas, Supervisor

______Kamran Ali

______Edmund T. Gordon

______Kamala Visweswaran

______Ann Cvetkovich

The Balance of Souls:

Self-Making and Mental Wellness in the Lives

of Ageing Black Women in Brazil

Celeste Sian Henery, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2010

This dissertation is dedicated to all those, past and present, who walk with me and are part of this journey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe my sincere thanks to my family, friends and advisors for their encouragement, guidance and investment in me. I am also grateful and indebted to the Meninas de Sinhá and all of the activists and friends in Brazil who contributed to this project and supported me over the past years.

In addition, I am appreciative for the following fellowships, which facilitated this research: Debra Herring Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and a Fulbright IIE Fellowship.

PREFACE

Being black, a woman, economically poor and mentally ill is almost predictive of a shorter life span and reduced quality of life. These facts are little discussed in the US, the Caribbean or Brazil – the site of my research. Moreover, the experiences that make- up these complex realities are even less known and virtually silenced, both socially and academically. It is this quiet and my interest in giving voice to these women’s lives that are the stakes for this dissertation.

This project is primarily situated and in dialogue with critical race studies and black feminisms, rather than the medical anthropological literature that its mental health focus may suggest. This was a choice but also a consequence of needing a comprehensive argument to dialogue and possibly challenge certain biomedical understandings and practices around mental health in the black community. Without adequate and consistent medical records, data and time to explore various perspectives in Brazil, I was not prepared to make wider claims than those asserted in the text. However to evolve this project, I would explore in greater depth the Brazilian psycho-pharmaceutical industry, the public health care system, and the intricacies of mental health care in Brazil.

The dissertation does suggest how mental illness in black communities, beyond the

African continent, is an area largely under-researched and overlooked. African countries have been the source of various studies primarily focused on the legacy of colonial medicine, traditional practices, and/or epidemiology. Breaking the silence around this topic, which remains taboo and threatening, is critical not only to combating anti-black

racism, but also for addressing the suffering of black people with mental illness who live with multiple stigmas and frequently do not receive adequate health care.

Clinical mental illness and the trauma of racism can share similar manifestations at the same time that they are two very different issues in need of redress on their own and interconnected terms. The trauma studies literature provides a critical point of discussion for looking at the longstanding and long-term impacts of anti-black racism on black people’s quality of life and experience. Yet, the affective lives of black people are caught in a long debated struggle in black American studies around what is airing the proverbial dirty laundry of black communities. In speaking of black people’s affective lives, I am referring to the world of feelings and emotions produced through the particular embodied experience of living blackness in societies structured around racialized understandings of human bodies, behavior and culture. The tension is around whether speaking of these internal worlds – the sadness, pain, confusion and anger of the experience of racialization – renders black people more socially vulnerable and potentially reinforces ideas of race. Black trauma studies delve into this domain, drawing on both the psychoanalytic and holocaust literature of the field that speaks directly to the racialized, genocidal, and trans-generational traumas. The fear of having black people’s suffering and what are deemed as negative emotions and associated behaviors pathologized and misused, is what has rightfully raised concern about how scholarship and information about black people’s lives should and can circulate. I too share these specific anxieties and more broadly believe that the political and social stakes of research need to be critically factored into what we, as scholars, choose to study, our methods and our writing – specifically in relation to marginalized populations. Yet I also suggest that

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the framing of this debate as a dichotomy elides, even surrenders, some of the potential of engaging the so-called darker or less trodden areas of black life.

While not a new revelation, Fred Moten reminds us of one of the conundrums of race by naming it the “troubled concept.” Moten explains, “race must do the work that would fulfill its destiny – this is to say, that it must be activated and is paradoxically always already activated in the work of its own self-destruction.” In other words, we always run the risk of affirming race as a truth even when we evoke and attempt to explain it as a social construct – a human idea. We too can become bound by the thinking and the world race has created. Acknowledging this entanglement is critical to this very predicament of how to do anti-racist work, how it can inhibit discussions and theoretical moves around race and specifically, how scholars should approach studying the lives and conditions of black people and, most pointedly, how it shapes and limits the ways we live.

One of the greatest risks of falling into the debate and not holding this conundrum present is homogenizing the black community. Over fifteen years ago, Gina Dent in her introduction to the volume entitled, Black Popular Culture, speaks to the benefits of not dichotomizing the debate and elucidating how greater understandings of black people are foreclosed by patriarchal and essentializing content:

…[R]ather than policing the bounds of black culture, these critics [in the volume] attend to the high and low, the progressive and conservative, the general and the particular. In doing so, airing our dirty laundry so to speak, they challenge the resurrection of communal privacy that relies on extending the paradigm of the bourgeois family to that of the “race.” And they go against the version of Afrocentrism that, in inscribing privacy at the level of the community, attempts to hide the gender relations that benefit “our men,” calling it the protection of “our women. Or, worse yet, that treat our cultural circumstances as so distinct and

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isolated from the larger community’s that the gender economy no longer applies (1992:7).

In bringing into the picture other types of hierarchies and potentially oppressive assumptions that co-exist in discussions of race, Dent, like the tradition of black feminisms, affirms the venture of scholars to study race and blackness in conjunction with our varied embodiments and identifications in order to complicate and extend the terms, paradigms and understandings of black peoples and “black cultures.” Black feminists have opened up the theoretical engagement of race to include the affective and psychic worlds of black racialization, often breaking dichotomies and shifting the focus away from the structural to the personal, the quantitative to the qualitative, while also maintaining the multi-dimentionality of black people in clear focus. This move has meant not only speaking about the intersection of race, with gender, class, and sexuality but also delving into the range of black women’s and men’s experiences, from the painful thinking and feelings around discrimination to subjective re-imagining of society and community. The objective, as Dent asserts, is to “not..polic[e] the areas over which our gaze may trespass, but rather, in making it clear that what we reveal there are the effects of the gaze” (ibid:7). Keeping one foot heavily planted in the domain of the debate is critical to any project on race, academic, social or political, as is seeing beyond its binds is part of re-envisioning blackness and our collective anti-racist struggle. One of the principal goals of the dissertation is to walk in the midst of this controversy and hopefully shift it by investing in the process of building new paradigms for researching and writing about black or other racialized and marginalized peoples.

I source and situate myself within black feminisms precisely because of their ability to adamantly hold onto racial analysis and criticism, while never drifting from other elements of human experience and particularly, others forms of marginalization, stigma and discrimination. Black racialization is a profound lived reality that deserves the level of nuanced analysis that disables it from being reduced to a single identity (black) or set of experiences (“the black experience”). My project aligns with the types of liberatory thinking, politics and exercises that US black feminist Hortense Spillers most convincing refers to as “freedom living” or creating and encouraging the types of expansive living that race confines. This understanding is also resonant with the vision of

Diaspora that Edmund T. Gordon asserts as a political project and consequently a conscious identification with common experiences of anti-black racism and the investment in a collective anti-racist political project. Diversifying meanings of blackness and understandings of black people’s lives are high stakes ventures; yet they are also necessary to anti-racist practices because they perform the work of expansive thinking and being, that are antidotes and challenges to the structuring and overdetermining nature of racial thinking. Doing the work of thinking about black people both within and beyond their blackness and race is the seemingly contradictory yet twin-like task needed as a practice of liberation.

* * *

I now want to shift my discussion about race to debates around Brazil. This project is situated in the larger work of African Diaspora Studies which is a field principally articulated by scholars working from the US. Many voices from across the

diaspora have contributed to the growth and importance of this theoretical and lived concept; however, in the case of Brazil, writings on Diaspora by Afro-Brazilians or others are few and far between. This silence, I suggest, has several elements pertinent to this discussion: the lack of black Brazilian scholars in the Brazilian academy and participating in academic discussions of race and blackness, and the nature of the debate around race in Brazil.

Race is truly a troubled concept in Brazil where the questioning of its value as an accurate, analytical category of analysis of social exclusion and human experience in the country encompasses a notable portion of the debate. Scholarship on race relations in

Brazil extends into the early 20th century when ideas of racial democracy were formulated and propagated. The acknowledgment of the black and highly mixed population during the early 1900s both affirmed and complicated notions of Brazilian racial difference, the physiognomic as well as the social and cultural. Scholars began affirming and quantifying the existence and nature of racism in Brazil during the 1950s and initiated greater critical analysis of social inequality in Brazil, which was taken up directly during Brazil’s process of re-democratization in the 1980s. Beginning with

Cardoso and more directly with the Lula administration, the government’s acknowledgement of race and race’s impact in society, on the discursive and structural level, provoked significant heated discussions of race at the popular level. Although discrimination and marginalization have constellated around anti-black belief systems, the merits of the concept of race are contested, both inside and outside of the Academy. I consider this change an opening as it has instigated possibilities for naming and complicating social phenomenon, specifically Brazil’s massive class and racial

inequalities. Without the vocabulary and concept of race, it is difficult to historically understand a social structure, hierarchy and culture created with racial thinking and logics. For this reason, race remains a critical tool for probing social relations and structure in Brazil.

However the debate, in the social sciences, seems to circulate around the nature of racism itself in Brazil and to a lesser degree whether race is a constructive category of analysis. A debate ensued around several academic claims principally made by black US based scholars and their research. Central to the debate was Michael Hanchard’s Black

Orpheus and his analysis of structural racism and racial hegemony in Brazil. He offered a new vocabulary and paradigm from which to articulate the dual existence and denial of race and racism in Brazil and argued for how class often comes to stand in for race as the source in inequality. Social scientists, primarily from the US, followed in Hanchard’s

Gramscian tracks, conducting ethnographic and sociological studies that have quantified and qualified how race is experienced in Brazil. This line of research came under intense questioning, principally by Brazilian scholars who have made claims of the misguided use of US academic lenses for examining Brazilian race relations, and a questioning of the deployment of race itself as effective for capturing the dynamics of cultural and embodied difference in the country. These debates highlight some of the stakes of race in

Brazilian social and academic debates as well in Diasporic and general academic scholarship transnationally.

I support this line of research that lays out the operations of race and anti-black racism in the country and focuses on how black people and others are mobilizing against institutionalized racism. I specifically am invested in the scholarship, notably of

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anthropologists, that have conducted ethnographies around the meanings of race and blackness in Brazil and focused on black political formations. Moreover, I contest the accusation that our nationalities and/or our black racial positioning renders us blind or insensitive to transnational hierarchies or even that they obscure our vision around race relations in Brazil –these are some of the identity politics that have been brought into debate. We scholars invested in anti-racist projects need to continue to attack racism by investing in its theoretical, social and cultural undoing, which requires the conceptual value of race as a point of entry, as pre-conditioned by the bind. That said, we must continue the work of exploring beyond the bounds of what race means specifically in the lives of black people as a liberatory practice, critical on its own terms. We must also re- imagine politics and the sites and registers of transformation that we research and we hope to see.

It stands to be noted that this debate gained specific attention but does not encapsulate the range of the national and international scholarship on race and the black population in Brazil. There is a rich history of literature on black cultural life in Brazil produced by scholars from around the world as well as a budding field of black studies in

Brazil. I situate my work as contributing to these traditions and the investment in the imagination, worldviews and living of black people diasporically.

The political intent of this dissertation is to understand how multiple forms of oppression shape internal landscapes as much as they do our external ones. My contention is that all too often racial analyses of racialization have the effect of quantifying its existence, while the vision I propose is to refocus on how to undo racism while creating wholeness, in these bodies, communities and societies. This is an

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infrequently articulated task, to be taken up in research questions, methods and writing, which holds the possibility to shift what we think of as racial politics. This suggested move is not new and does risk relativizing black suffering and oppression with others.

While this consequence is not my intent, I acknowledge it as a feared and real outcome.

Yet, my analysis, aware of the hazard, invests in the exploration of the larger hopes and dreams, insecurities and confusions that make up the types of human challenges that black people endure.

For me, this objective involves research that examines black imaginaries, utopias, feminisms, identities, generationalisms, and diasporas (within and beyond Brazil) as well as the continued study of blackness across class, sexuality, place of residence, etc. My own work attempts to recognize these simultaneous projects, but invests in making space for ventures of the former. Formal political mobilization and its study are means of waging the social struggle for black inclusion and against anti-black racism, but the relationship to our bodies, spirits, and what we know to be our selves is another route to our individual and collective growth, wellness, and liberation as black people. In sum, I hope that readers will approach this dissertation as a work in progress, that attempts to hold in tension the stakes of the debates around race aforementioned and that labors with experimental writing and analysis to widen and deepen the discussions about the lives, longings and conditions of black people in Brazil and throughout the Diaspora.

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The Balance of Souls:

Self-Making and Mental Wellness

in the Lives of Ageing Black Women in Brazil

Celeste Sian Henery, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2010

Supervisor: João Costa Vargas

The dissertation explores new understandings about the uses of emotional work in the social struggles of racialized people. This project is a case study that analyzes how a singing group of ageing black women organized to improve the mental wellness of women in a low-income, peripheral neighborhood of the city of Belo Horizonte. This grassroots effort was a response to the women’s use of anti-anxiety medication, specifically Valium, and an attempt to attend to the women’s ongoing issues not addressed through the use of pharmaceuticals. The dissertation examines these women’s self-making as a critical window into how the embodied experiences of the interlocking forces of race, class, gender, age and place of residence are lived in the demanding material and psychological conditions of these women’s lives and the nature of the

group’s healing work in their life narratives. Through considering these women’s self- making in discourses of madness, geographic landscapes of memory, musicality and performance, the dissertation investigates how the psycho-emotional transformations of these women illuminate the types of therapeutic work beneficial to anti-racist, sexist and age diversified modes of being and collective mobilization in the current social context of

Brazil’s re-democratization. It also considers the group’s re-conceptualization of blackness and mental wellness as exemplary of and contributing to the personal and social work of black women’s struggle and praxis. The research methodology includes participant observation, interviews (structured and un-structured), oral histories, documentary photography and archival research conducted during an extended period

(sixteen months) of fieldwork in Brazil.

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Introduction………… ……………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One: With My Sweat………………………………………...... 68

Chapter Two: Twice Tellings…………………………………………………………..125

Chapter Three: Singing and Shouting…………………………………………………..193

Chapter Four: Where They Walk...... 261

Chapter Five: Walking Without Masters…………………………………………….....318

Conclusion: Meditation on Black Women’s Praxis………………………………….....377

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...…….393

Vita………………………………………………………………...... 404

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INTRODUCTION

My mother often sang it for us: ‘Two madmen on the roads of life Fused together at the hands and the heart Would brave the countercurrent winds Singing of life in the realm of death Singing of love in the realm of hate They would walk a thousand miles without boots on their flat feet Towards the cardboard castles and the cities of sand And the contaminated kings would desert their kingdoms built of cards And would follow them on the roads of life Do you know why? Two madmen on the roads of life spoke to them of life’ …My mother always sang us that song (Liking 2000: 232-33)

The ‘crazy’ black woman is a familiar presence. She manifests in disparate locations. She wandered the streets of the San Francisco of my youth; she lays restless in the pages of novels of writers of the African Diaspora; she is the all but unstated essence the US media often evokes in discussions of poor black mothers and incarcerated black women. One particular crazy black woman who caught my attention years ago was a homeless, and most likely schizophrenic woman, who panhandled for years with her monotone refrain,

“spare some change…”

She lingered on the corner of an affluent block of Fillmore Street in San Francisco and the voices with whom she had a running dialogue were utterances of madness in the registries of normalcy and privilege that otherwise characterize the neighborhood. With dark skin, a sorrowful, absent gaze, her disappearance from the street every now and then hopefully marked the times when she was able to acquire some form of healthcare,

returning looking a little less lost, more present, only then to shift back again into seemingly one-sided conversations.

Some years later, I encountered her again in the pages of Chicano social critic,

Richard Rodriguez’s book Days of Obligation. Her presence is felt in Rodriguez’ daily life and is striking enough to become meaningful, if only descriptively so, amidst the collage of memory and experiences that his collection of autobiography-inflected essays discuss on the topics of Mexican-American identity, family, literature and California:

A black woman haunts California Street between the donut shop and the cheese store. She talks to herself – a debate, wandering, never advancing. Pedestrians who do not know her give her a wide berth. Somebody told me her story; I don’t know whether it is true. Neighborhood merchants tolerate her presence as a vestige of dispiritied humanity clinging to an otherwise dispiriting progress of “better” shops and restaurants (1992:34).

Rodriguez continues,

She now often parades with her arms crossed over her breasts in an “X,” the posture emblematic of prophecy. …gather her madness where she sits on the curb, chain-smoking, hugging her knees …(ibid:38).

Rodriguez calls her “the Lady of the Donut Shop,” an abject woman, who haunts, whose being is noticed but whose story, let alone her name, is not known, or in his case, not shared or speculated on. She exists as an image; her blackness, craziness and homelessness are counterpoints to the affluence, marketed sophistication and “sanity” of this neighborhood. Her arrival on this corner can be guessed at as one of the consequences of the under-funding of the public mental health care services during the

1970s, drug epidemics in San Francisco during the 1980s and the structural ways in which race, gender and class predispose notably poor black women’s day-to-day lives to perpetually unfold in the domain of the dependent and the unrelenting unpredictable.

My early encounter with this woman became the first of various encounters with similar presences, with her possibilities and her fabrication. And, I invested in a transnational project, because I found the idea and images of crazy black women circulating in the social world and imaginaries of Brazil. My first encounter occurred with the work of Malunga, a black woman’s NGO (non-governmental organization) in

Goiânia, Goiás that held workshops with the city’s primary, public mental health clinic.

There, NGO members noticed the overwhelming quantities of black women who would appear on the weekends after psychological breakdowns. Over time, observing and listening to these women’s stories and patterns, members realized that these women, all financially struggling and mostly black, were using the facility, whether consciously or not, as an escape from the overwhelming day-to-day pressures of raising children in conditions of economic poverty, sometimes alone and often suffering from domestic abuse. The activists theorized that these women were hyper-conscious of their social- structural position as economically struggling black women, knowing that they were underpaid and often mistreated because of the social devaluation of their bodies and labor. The activists also learned through workshops with these women that their ever- present awareness of their disenfranchised status compounded their already financially and emotionally desperate situations and the clinic became an outlet to gain some respite from their demanding circumstances. These women’s lives were the stories behind the images of madness, uncovered and then carefully handled by other black women. And their accounts revealed the complicated trajectory that led them to mental clinics, where they were often diagnosed and/or medicated as “crazy.”

From this first experience, came others. There are the images of black patients that line the walls of the museum of the famed, now defunct, Barbacena, a state run

“insane asylum” in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Shut down because of its nationally known record of abuses of the mentally ill, these images now lie in memory in the Museu de

Loucura (Museum of Madness) that stands in its place. There is historical documentation of high numbers of black women institutionalized during the 19th century, mostly for their gender deviant ways in another state run mental asylum named Juquery in Rio de

Janeiro.

Beyond the biomedical domain and the clinical joining of black people and mental illness, there are also the contemporary, popular evocations of “the crazy black woman.” The dance song Nega Maluca (Crazy Black Woman) gained attention for its derogatory associations. Yet as a common, not-always problematized caricature, the expression has also been the name, Nega Maluca, of various carnival blocos (parading troupes). Estamira (2004) is an award-winning documentary that was released while I was researching in Brazil and recounts the life of a black woman who makes her livelihood picking through trash in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Her charisma and intensity are exhibited against the backdrop of her clinical mental illness and her own perception that her torments are spiritual in nature.

In addition to these embodiments of so-called madness, there were the languages of “crazy” readily thrown around by black women activists and community members with whom I worked. They made innumerable self-references to being “crazy,” edgily laughing that people were going to “think they were crazy” for the ways in which they

lived their lives and did their politics.1 These histories, iterations and images became the hints and traces of a conjunction between black women and states of so-called madness, and the presence of an archetype of the crazy black woman began to take shape around black women’s various ways of being, their racialized bodies and perceived states of mind. There are historical currents in Brazil that specifically racialize mental illness and, more broadly, systematically silence black women’s expression of their own realities. In between these flows and beyond clinical statuses, black women’s own experiences, embodiments and affective spaces exist, and offer a window to the makings of this powerful archetype.

EXAMINING THE ARCHETYPE

The archetype of the crazy black woman draws our attention to the nameless images and stereotypes of black women cast over the years in Brazilian society. It evokes unsettling states of mind, awkward behavior and stares, as well as possible emotions of fear, threat, sadness and discomfort. This archetype hovers above, sometimes comes to be superimposed on and can even be claimed by black women. My invocation of this archetype is to bring varied dimensions of black women’s sentient lives into high relief against the flatness of the stereotypes that typically stand in black women’s places.

Early medical, anthropological and intellectual perspectives on black people share continuities with current perceptions of black women. Racial anxiety around the country’s largely mixed race and black population was a driving force in the growth of

1 Black Brazilian Activist Scholar Sônia Beatriz dos Santos (2008: 2-13) offers a personal account in her dissertation of the experiences, feelings and perceptions of “crazy” that circulate around black women’s ways of thinking and being. 5

the field of medicine in Brazil which was contending with rising disease and poor health conditions in the country during the 19th century (Peard 2000; Schwarcz 1999). Active at the turn into the 20th century, the medical establishment racially intoned public policies around which bodies could immigrate and who was compromising public health problems, specifically during the epidemic of yellow fever (Borges 1993; Chalhoub

1993; Stepan 1991). Black women’s bodies were intensely scrutinized and viewed as carriers of disease given that many were wet nurses and worked within people’s homes

(Graham 1988). Implicated into this realm of contemplation and research were some of

Brazil’s founding anthropologists, who in the northeast, investigated the pathology and believed degeneracy of the black population (Rodriguez 1939). The belief that black people were both pathologically criminal and mentally less developed was a widely accepted theory among doctors who dealt with the “insane” (Bastide 1972; Cunha 1986); and this notion was prefigured in the development of mental health institutions and practices in the country, but did not really take shape until the early 20th century (Arruda

1995). Race and racial degeneracy were central topics contemplated within the fields of health and mental health (Costa 1987) that ultimately were scientifically dismissed in the beginning of the 20th century (Stepan 1991). Black women’s physiognomy, for example, specifically dark skin and those features associated as more African, constituted the

“diagnosis” and explanation for their high rates of incarceration of black people in

Brazilian asylums in the 19th century (Cunha 1986). Biological meanings of race have been scientifically discounted, yet their residue, in the forms of pathological connotations of violence and mental incompetence associated with Afro-Brazilians, remain present and

active; and the continued state of abjection of black people in Brazil creates an environment that sustains these believed linkages.

One of the most pervasive racialized associations in Brazil is between black women, sexuality and labor. Black women are frequently related to sexually, either as hypersexual or un-desirable and consequently asexual; and/or they are seen through the demands and divisions of labor that are also implicated in these particular views of their sexuality.2 Black women’s sustained economic-driven dependence on domestic service positions joined with their precarious living situations are the contexts in which they struggle and negotiate the social meanings scripted onto their bodies. For example, the desexualization and “mammification” of dark skinned black women through their positions as nurse-maids have created several dominant stereotypes rooted in the context of the social relationships of slavery, but that are still active social references today.

Rodrigues (2001) lays out these archetypes, some more visible in the media than others: the mãe preta, the mammy figure; the mulata, the hyper-sexual and sensual “whiter” black woman for consumption; the negra de alma branca, the black woman with a white soul who penetrates dominant (white) society; the martyr, the sacrificial black woman; and more recently the muse. Rodrigues also cites the archetype of the “crioulo doido” described as a devilish figure who causes confusion and who is also named as the negra maluca, the crazy or mad black woman (Lahni et al. 2007:85). As stereotypes, they are tricky because their negative connotations are racial, while they are also culturally constructed as not necessarily derogatory in their intended use, but playing off visible differences in Brazil; consequently they are also often denied, notably in the media, as

2 See Giacomini 1988, Gilliam and Gillian 1999; Goldstein 2003; Schumaher & Vital Brazil 2006 7

having the potential to be racist in content and/or use (ibid). This denial is consistent with the ways in which these stereotypes, specifically the idea of the mulata and mãe preta, have had social significance in shaping Brazilian aesthetics and affirming national identity by giving currency to temperate perspectives on the history of race relations in

Brazil (ex. Freyre [1933]1986)).

However, the reality of most black women’s trying social conditions and economic struggles throughout Brazilian history, color aside, has been obscured. There remains a finite body of scholarship on both black women’s contemporary realities in

Brazil and the historical continuities between the perceptions, representations and treatment of black women that continue to interfere with, if not work against, their collective and individual wellbeing. The fact that there has been first, such strong pathological discourses around black women’s bodies and health, second, stagnant negative imagery of black women that obscures their subjectivity, and third, no widespread counter discourse to these representations to positively affirm black women’s heterogeneity, all suggest how black women’s social, medical, political and affective experiences today continue to be impacted by long lasting, delimiting social perceptions.

This interpretation directs where I want to head: to explore black women’s own histories, understandings and methods of how they have lived and generated wellbeing within their constrained social worlds. Hinged at the cross-roads of discourses of

“women,” “non-white,” “poor,” “favelada,” and the list could go on, the particulars of black women’s experiences in Brazil are rarely documented, neither conceived of nor manifested in the theoretical models, the statistical analyses, or the lay discourses that interpellate them into socially knowable quantities. Engaging with black women still

remains an act of seeing, not listening or using other senses to get at the complexity of their worlds. Therefore I attempt to rethink and examine black women’s thoughts, feelings and ways of being as windows into their subjectivity and how their lives contribute to understandings of gendered racialization, wellness and social transformation in Brazil and beyond. These crossroads of the unknown are also the spaces out of which the archetype of the crazy black woman emanates and why the archetype is a guiding metaphor I use to explore black women’s own sense and practices of wellbeing.

MENINAS DE SINHÁ

Questions about the archetype of the crazy black woman, its content, resonances and emerging questions provide a framework for my exploration of black women’s understandings of their wellbeing, bodies and minds. My work with black women activists and their often solitary efforts to help other black women made me particularly interested in black women’s emotional health and their practices of wellness – physical, affective and psychological.

On sharing these concerns with a friend who is a journalist, black and feminist, she directed me to Valdete, a grassroots activist and black woman who was assisting older women with their mental wellness in her low-income neighborhood in Belo

Horizonte. As it was recounted to me, she had created a singing group to help women deal with their depression. My friend was unsure of the exact nature of the group, but offered a phone number and reference. After a conversation with Valdete, several days later I went to meet her and the group.

Officially named the Meninas de Sinhá in 1998, the group is comprised of 34 women, most of whom are in their late fifties and sixties although some are in their seventies and eighties. The group took shape in the late 1980s when Valdete noticed women at the neighborhood health post leaving with small bags of medication. The health post was a half-block from the day care center for the neighborhood’s at-risk youth where she still works. She began asking the women, her peers (fifties and older) what was in the bags and learned that there were daily regiments of anywhere from 5 to 10 pills, mostly the anti-anxiety medication, diazepam (commercially known in the US as

Valium). The women explained that they were given and taking the medication for an assortment of bodily aches, sleeplessness and depression. After speaking to a colleague about what she could do for these women, she decided to call them to her house to chat.

As Valdete recounts, she was not a professional, but felt that medicine was not the answer to their problems. After talking with the women she said, “I understood that they needed self-esteem.”

At first, many women resisted Valdete’s offer by listing obligations in their homes and to their families, but reticently began partaking. Valdete was able to form a small group who did arts and crafts and, on Fridays, they would sing and play in the roda

(circle). She wanted the women to feel that the group was a space of recreation, rather than a source of work. Through the city government, she organized a stretching and movement class called body expression, which the women enjoyed, and Valdete noticed resonated with their lives; she said it “shook up/stirred their bodies and minds.” The women eventually publicly performed movements from their bodily expression class at a local cultural festival to much praise and thus kick started a performance and public life.

With Fridays as their “play” and singing days, they increasingly built a repertoire of cantigas de roda, ([folk] songs in a circle), recalled from childhood and encouraged by

Valdete as a mode of bringing youthful diversion and joy into their lives. They began performing mainly in schools with children; and since then, they have expanded their performances into hospitals, juvenile detention centers, cultural and musical festivals and events throughout Belo Horizonte and beyond.

Valdete is neither a doctor nor a psychologist, but took it upon herself to help these women. She is a local activist who works in what black Brazilian feminist activist

Jurema Werneck (2007:102-105) establishes in Brazil as long traditions of Ialodê, black women leaders who mobilize to improve the quality of life of black women through available means, while also sustaining their communities.3 Valdete’s shift away from biomedical approaches to a focus on collective well-being intones her understanding and confidence in her own experiential base and the collective one to find creative ways to make an intervention in these women’s health. Much like the activists of Malunga in the mental health clinic in Goiânia, Valdete spent time listening to the women relay their lives and concerns and the quality and texture of their emotional worlds.

Black women have been the principal agents fighting against the diverse ways in which the intersecting forces of race, gender, class and sexuality become oppressive forces that impact black women’s well-being and livelihood. 4 Their strategies of survival and wellbeing are complex and little known socially. Black Brazilian feminist, Vilma

3 For other examples see Burack 2004; Collins [1991]2000; Alexander 2005; James 1999; Lorde 1984; Nnaemeka 2004; Werneck 2007 4 See Carby 1982; Carneiro 2002; Crenshaw 1991; Iraci 2000; Nnaemeka 1998; Oliveira et al. 1995; Oliveira 1998; Oyewumi ed. 2005; Reddock 1998; Ribeiro 1995. For attention to sexuality see Alexander 2005; Combahee River Collective 1983; Harris 1996; Lorde 1984; Wekker 2006; White 2001 11

Reis, provocatively argues that black women’s survival is one of the foremost challenges to the Brazilian State, positing black women as the very contradiction of the State itself.5

The State’s continued dependency on the labor and social category of black women is coupled with black women’s socio-economic abjection sustained by the State. Black women’s ability to resist and persevere in these conditions is an indicator of their strategies, vaguely documented and difficult to conceptualize through patriarchal modalities of knowledge and theorization that center traditional criteria of education and economic growth for intellectual and social empowerment.

Drawing on their own experiences and research, black women scholars and activists give particular attention to how gendered racism, class and sexual discrimination breed psychic wounds in women that cause the trepidations and fears that disable women from living in full, expressive ways.6 This attention to the personal and embodied experiences behind the pains and drugs offers insight into the normative behaviors against which specifically, racialized and economically poor people’s ways can be read and judged within Western biomedicine.7 These interpretations can result in incommensurate biomedical approaches to helping people in difficult emotional and life spaces.8 This vantage like that of Valdete’s neither dismisses the therapeutic abilities of

Western medical frameworks nor forecloses the possibility that some of these women in the group may specifically have mental illnesses (as I will discuss later). Rather it explores the type of praxis and activism that black women individually and collectively

5 I draw on the content of a presentation she gave at symposium entitled, Brazil: Gender, Sexuality, Violence, and the Racial State held at the University of Texas at Austin, April 24-25, 2008. 6 Bairros 1995; Iraci 2000; Santos 2008; Souza 1983 7 See Bielh 2005, 2007; Gregg 2003; Oliveira 1998; Scheper-Hughes 1992 8 See Biehl 2005; Gregg 2003; Luhrmann 2000; Martin 2007 12

generate and sheds light on the particular social and emotional realities in which they continue to live, transform and be shaped by.

SITUATING THE PROJECT

With these women and background in mind, this dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of the transformative praxis of the group Meninas de Sinhá and its members.

It is a case study whose lens stays close to its subjects and within this intimate range in order to render these women’s affective worlds and experiences with a proximity and palpability that can hold the complexity of their lives. I chose this scope to analyze how these women, through the group, have transformed and what they, individually and collectively teach about the possibility for change, specifically in relation to such social forces such as race, gender, class, place of residence and age, that can have overdetermining effects and produce constricting experiences. I slowly build an argument for how these women’s lives reinforce the importance of the affective realm as a critical space of activism and transformation and the types of possibilities emotional work can generate for living in the world in ways in which one can experience their physical, psychic and emotional life as expansive and liberating.

Self-Making

Anti-black racism, gendered roles and class are intersecting forces that I suggest have centrally influenced and structured these women’s ways of being and thinking. As their histories reveal, these women were conditioned and expected to play certain social and familial roles and a relationship with self all of which are conditioned by racialized

and gendered notions of black women as bodies of service to others. This role emerged in the context of slave society and never was actively transformed, manifesting not only in black women’s overrepresentation in domestic labor but also the naturalization of this employment in Brazilian society. From the time they were little, these women were read by their family members, local communities, husbands and employers through the influences of hegemonic racialized, gendered and classed ideas of black women as working bodies with the emphasis on the physical rather than the affective or intellectual dimensions of the body. Through their participation in the group, the women learned new references and modes of being beyond the limits of their identities as poor women of color, their tropes and supposed capabilities. They new identifications, I suggest, are at times counter-hegemonic racial and gendered practices, but more broadly speaking have enabled them with more liberated forms of self-making.

I use self-making as the central analytical concept to ethnographically explore the lives of these black women in their third-age of life.9 It is an umbrella term through which to investigate the process of how these women have come to enact, envision and relate to themselves and their social worlds in transformed ways through their participation in the group. Scholars have turned to self-making as a concept for exploring the creative, often strategic, (self)imaginings, notably of racialized people as they navigate and draw on their social, cultural and historical worlds to produce new

9 I translate and borrow from the Portuguese term terceira-idade (third age) to refer to people in the phase of life characterized most basically by those older than 62. An English equivalent would be “senior (citizens),” but I use third-age to evoke the social and cultural ethos of a phase of life rather than senior, which tends to be structured around the rights and meanings of citizenship, notably in relation to labor, that change with numerical age. Senior also is invested with meanings of rank and status that are distracting to the open-ended transformational process of ageing I am building. 14

understandings, representations and enactments of self.10 Following Stuart Hall’s idea of

“practices of subjective self-constitution,” I conceive of self-making as the on-going way in which subjects respond to and engage with the ascriptions of their social positioning in their ways of being, thinking, feeling and identifying (1996:13). The concept of self- making helps reveal how individuals go about transforming themselves and what sorts of possibilities for living are opened up, which is distinct from a modern idea of “making” as a progressive building of political consciousness or collective mobilization.

I will argue that these women have self-made through a re-orientation around the potential in their lives, specifically their potential and ability to change as people.

Through their embodied experiences in the group, they have learned and felt life possibilities unhinged from the ways in which racial, class, gendered, residential and aged positioning have delimited how they have experienced and perceived possibility in their own lives. Moreover, they have begun to shift the meanings of the typically negative social ascriptions of their bodies as economically poor black ageing women, into affirming sources of potential. It is through these processes that they have come to embody and practice a new conception of health as an on-going investment in their living.

I probe their self-making through their emotional lives, using their feelings and moods as registers for the impacts of their life experiences. I use the term “affective realm” as an umbrella designation for speaking about their emotional, sentient lives, which can be distinguished from the realm of the cognitive or volitional. Emotions, feelings, and moods form different parts of this affective spectrum; feelings are

10 Hartman 1997; Muñoz 1999; Perry 2004; Vargas 2006 15

subjective experiences of emotional states such as joy, pain and anger and are also physical or sensate in nature. They are embodied emotion, whereas moods, as Jeannette

Bicknell notes, “do not have precise objects…are less intense than emotions, but at the same time they are pervasive and can colour a person’s entire mental outlook” (2009:x).

Anxiety and “blueness” are not necessarily tied to one event or thing but are moods that gnaw and can tire the human spirit. This vocabulary of affect helps to render how the complexities in these women’s lives manifest in their persons and to articulate the less visible impacts of how such forces as race, gender, age and class are embodied through time. Their feelings are critical registers of both the experiences of racial oppression and as sites where the work of self-making can be palpated. Moods and emotions are shifted by who one feels they have been, who they are and how one would like to feel as they move along in life. For many of these women, the group changed their vantages on themselves and brought new sensations and thoughts into their lives. Sadness and hopelessness seemed to reign when the group formed, even as it stood as a prospect of change and possibility. Reorienting these women around their own experiences and capabilities was a way of building self-knowledge that could facilitate self-making beyond the subordinating social ascriptions they struggled with and continue to confront.

This fraught process of self-making is their engagement with this affective realm which allows them to feel and respond to those emotions in new ways.

Race, Affect and Brazil

Theorizing race in Brazil involves illustrating how the concept continues to be a social fact that shapes institutional, individual and collective thinking, perceptions and

feelings. It is a language to capture how certain bodies have associations with such social elements as culture, space and modes of being linked to historical processes but in constant transformation. Racial analyses continuously have shifted to consider the changing meanings of race within national borders, particularly within the contemporary economic, social and discursive framework of globalization. The increased (hierarchical) movement and flow of bodies, capital, and information have been influenced by transnational corporate expansion, labor pools, multilateral organizations, and varied social movements. These emanations also have spread vocabularies and discourses of human difference, plurality, identification and citizenship. Moving through these routes and exchanges are the conflicting and antagonistic questions, protocols and debates about inequality, rights, profit and development that are similarly paralleled by ideas of culture, ethnicity and class that so too flow through these pathways and cross fertilize local and national meanings of race and identity in various national contexts. Within studies of the

African Diaspora, this shift has come to be represented in analyses of how race continues to articulate itself within the discourses and policies connected to neoliberal economic- social and national political strategies of inclusion (and exclusion). With a disjuncture between the widespread fixation on racial apartheid, the likes of South Africa or Jim

Crow in the United States, and the contemporary expressions of racism and race, the institutional and social articulations of race continue to be felt but divergently understood. This dissonance is part of what accounts for why in Brazil, in which overt

State mandated racial segregation did not occur, the language of race is contentious and currently, is intensely debated both academically and publicly. The United States and

Europe are no different in re-negotiating metamorphosing meanings of race, whether the

tenuous acknowledgment of a “mixed-race” category, the election of president Barack

Obama or the explosive intersection of non-white immigrant bodies and religious differences.

In Brazil, current academic discussions about race respond to and dialogue with energized national debates around race in the country. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, the initiation of a new constitution and, what is referred to as

Brazil’s process of re-democratization, there have been openings for political action and national engagement around issues of race in the country. The presidential election of

Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, the longtime, left leaning Worker’s Party candidate in 2002, furthered racial discourse through the continuation and augmentation of race-conscious policies initiated under Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s presidency and expanded through deliberate inclusion of black people in government positions, not to mention the audibility of race and the black population in his own public speaking.

The political struggle of black people to have their beings recognized as dignified minds and bodies as well as rights-deserving citizens extends into the founding of the country as a slave society with intensified national and political vocality at different points in history, most relevantly for this discussion, during this process of re- democratization. The repressive measures of the dictatorship successfully minimized anti-racist mobilization of black people in Brazil along with any other politicized discourse that challenged the stability of the State for the greater part of the 20th century.

Consequently, these past twenty plus years have provided a new political social context in which anti-racist politics and its enactors in Brazil have mobilized. Waves of black political action have included large-scale marches in the capital, national mobilization for

and participation in UN Conferences against Racism, debate and action around racial quota policies as well as a popular discussion and cultural foregrounding of the black population and the nature of racialization in the country at both the local and national levels. The social energy around race is heightened and political debates around the efficacy of quotas in education and civic institutions abound. These controversial policies have significantly politicized race in the past decade with the rhetoric of dealing with Brazil’s inequalities often framed around large class, economic disparities, rather than race. Anti-racist activists have also spread the discourse of race to critique the sustained persecution of African-based religions, police violence and social disenfranchisement of blacker bodies and the spaces in which they reside.

In national discourse, debates about the viability of the vocabulary of race and connected ideological frameworks continue about whether Brazilian inequality is truly racial in nature: Is Brazilian difference ethnic or racial? Should it even be noted?

Academic discussions have tended to circulate around Brazilian so-called racial difference or exceptionalism, which is a perspective derived from the particular, if not less pernicious encounter within Brazilian slave society and the consequent relationship between black racialized bodies and “white” people.11 This discourse often points to

Brazil’s large mixed race population as a symbol of the exceptional nature of the country’s social relations in which white, black and indigenous people have co-lived, intermarried and reproduced; the implications are readily minimized in public and academic debate. One of the central struggles of the black movement at large is to change

11 Much has been written about Brazilian race relations specifically in its relationship to those of other countries. For readings on the debates that have taken place around Brazil’s “exceptionality” see: da Cunha 1998; Ferreira da Silva 1998; French 2003; Fry 1995; Guimarães 1999; Sansone 2003; Segato 1998 19

the dominant narrative of the country on the history, the presence of black people and about racism, namely through the inclusion of their voices, bodies and perspectives. At the Zumbi +10 March, a commemoration and extension of the original march against racism held a decade before, one speaker asserted to the crowd and the surrounding ministries, that black people wanted the right to tell their own story in the country.12

Activists, specifically in the areas of education, have argued that the sustained exclusion of black voices and accounts, propagate black subordination and negative racialization

(Cardoso 2002; Ribeiro 1995; Werneck 2007). In spite of what João Costa Vargas (2004) calls the “hyperconsciousness of race” exhibited in unending discourses of racial-mixture and current politicized doubts about who is indeed black, there remains little social room or resonance for the articulation of the everyday ways in which racism is felt in the flesh.

There continues to be little psychic or discursive space for the felt experiences of racism and the challenges of racialized people’s experiences of racialization and its everyday meanings.

Racialization in its gendered, age, place, and class influences among other factors, is a lived phenomenon that shapes daily experiences and thoughts ranging from the

“empirical” of access to healthcare to the more nebulous, intangibles of where one feels in or out of place. Capturing, discussing or politicizing this affective dimension has largely been left to the individual or private realm differentiated from viable political expression or address. Structural analyzes of inequality and social apartheid convey a type of marginalization and oppression that one easily can imagine and correlate with

12 This march was held on November 15, 2005, in nation’s capital of Brasilia and was the 10 anniversary of the first march commemorating the 300 of “immorality” of Zumbi dos Palmares, (the famous maroon leader) and drawing attention to racial inequality in Brazil (Ribeiro 1995: 434) 20

stress, anxiety and even the anger that comes from living within these conditions. There are constant gestures to the psychological impacts of racism’s sting and continual bite evoked through the anxiety of such social states of economic poverty, imprisonment, residential segregation as well as the much less salient and describable feelings and moods produced through condemning stares, othering, and the nagging possibility of discrimination – a whole range of conflicting and staggering emotional states that Frantz

Fanon perhaps has most publicly and potently voiced. Much of racialization and racism, in fact, occurs in much less flagrant forms than it is popularly conceived or discussed.

What has been named in Brazil as “subtle,” “covert,” and “interpersonal” racism (rather than structural or societal) asks for analyses that examine the “indirect” ways it impacts people and how it is carried in the body. US abolitionist and one-time enslaved Fredrick

Douglass poetically captured this embedded quality lamenting, “If our dark cheek could reveal our feelings, words would be unnecessary to the beholder” (ed. Foner 1950:382).

Scholars and activists are often cognizant that the labor of liberation and of living fully is continual for oppressed people. Yet this fullness is not always rendered in the scholarly literature, political strategizing, mobilization, and in public life even less so. Brazil is no exception in this regard, as the limits on the affective dimension of race’s sting are readily intellectually deflated and masked throughout the Diaspora. Scholars have only recently begun to indulge the thoughts, actions and modes of living of structurally oppressed people inadequately represented or understood through the lens of political or social resistance.

This dissertation dialogues with and contributes to discussions of racialization in

Brazil and the Diaspora by using the language of race to principally explore how

oppression operates in the emotional domain. I understand and use race as an analytical category that enables interpretations of the ways in which social divisions, exclusions and inequality are produced, not only through institutions and state structures, but also through the encounters, thoughts and feelings that make up everyday life; racial meanings surge through how Brazilians self-make, interpellate bodies, space and behaviors. I foreground my racial analysis, due to its frequent fleeting and reticent academic and social handling in Brazil, but analytically attempt to examine it in a stream of other characterizing and structuring forces through which bodies are read, handled,

(self)identified and em/de-powered.

The affective dimensions of gendered racialization while difficult to quantify are deeply revealing about the sentient experience of oppression. Black women’s feelings are the registries of those assaults and some attention has been given to documenting these impacts in Brazil (Caldwell 2007; Souza 1983; Werneck et al. 2000). Souza (1983) posits the affective psychological process involved in living anti-black racial subordination and coming to acknowledge and understand it, through the idea of assuming blackness. Her attention to the emotional domain as a fundamental site of the impacts of a historical and social climate that negates blackness, both highlights and locates the emotional realm as central to the larger individual, collective and social struggle against racial oppression.

Black feminists such as Audre Lorde privilege black women’s affective lives because they convey how black women’s internal and sentient worlds are the spheres deeply set out of alignment by the pressures of living in the midst of racist, heteronormative, patriarchal societies. But less is discussed about how black women’s affective lives, as sites of mobilization, can and do play critical roles in greater collective, social change.

Feelings and sentiments around racial oppression underpin much of the social activism against racial domination, but are not often examined as individual catalysts of action in collective struggle.

My focus on the emotional domain and use of ethnography is to examine these women’s emotional aches as a dimension of black people’s full life experiences. The objective is to bring expression to the trying, tiring and depressing feelings of these black women’s everyday lives as they intersect, combust and even fade alongside and enmesh in the equally present feelings of joy, apathy, humor and optimism. I specifically unravel how the impacts of gendered racism on the body can produce sentient waves of

“madness” rather than prejudice or simply marginalization. The dissertation raises the question: can the repeated racially inflected affronts to the mind, body and spirit drive us crazy?

The literature on racial trauma, theorized in the US, is useful in examining the complexity of anti-black racism’s impacts on the emotional lives of black people.13

However its emergence from the theoretical foundation of the literature and history of the

Jewish Holocaust, and to a lesser degree segregation in the US South and its culture of terror, casts a long enough analytical shadow over experiences of racialization such that experiences of pleasure, celebration or even internal quiet have been unable to find sufficient or lasting voice. Various scholars, notably women, have spoken to the productive uses of trauma that liberate it from a defined state of perpetual upset or even victim-hood by showing how it can galvanize and orient people’s feelings into political

13 See Cheng 2001; Eng and Han 2003; Eyerman 2001; Hartman 1997; hooks 1995; Sheldon 2001 23

energy and ground.14 This body of literature spoken of in terms of Trauma Studies and sometimes under the rubric of Cultural Studies helps to address how the consistency, repetition and sustained impacts of racialization are traumatic in nature while also trying to find the full voice and dimension of these women’s emotions that include the celebration for example, of their children’s births as much as the pain of these same children’s deaths. An additional factor for using trauma studies as a set of tools rather than a theoretical framework is that the women in the group did not overly describe or characterize their experiences in the language or nature of trauma as contemporary scholars of trauma, both clinical and non-clinical.15 I want the fullness of their joys and sorrows in accurate dimension and proportion to their self-representation and lives, as I was witness.

Another means of contemplating their affective domain and actions is found in some of the more recent scholarship on agency addressed from the vantage of the production of the ordinary and everyday. Debates about agency, resistance and the

“weapons of the weak” extend into the 1970s when scholars searched for modes through which to discuss and document how marginalized people were not passive victims to their subordination and what sorts of conscious action and thought they manifested. This approach has been specifically applied in order to understand racialized enslavement and apartheid and how notably black people have resisted and fought against their racial subjugation.

Lauren Berlant’s recent work on agency has influenced my orientation by shifting the focus away from matters and actions of will (power) in relationship to normative

14 See Lorde 1984; Cheng 2001; Cvetkovich 2003 15 See Caruth ed. 1995, Felman and Laub 1992 24

living and citizenship and re-sculpting them around gestures of personhood and modes of belonging.16 She rethinks agency beyond the bounds of “democratic/capitalist power” and into the realm of the reproduction of ordinary life. In taking up agency envisioned within paradigms of sovereignty, her analytical move is to focus on ways of being (in capitalist society) as components of the production of life which is also a simultaneous move away from the representations of agency as acts always related to objectives or consequences which she observes as over-privileging intentionality. More than a mere critique of the categorized reading of agency within constructions of willful action,

Berlant is wary of investments in notions of intentional agency because of how they can overvalue and misconstrue intent and meaning behind less conscious, habitual or mundane action. Her interest in the ordinary is a shift away from normative living and a space in which acts and human day-to-day living can be considered and rethought away from their impacts, as power or response, and, “agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; embodying, alongside embodiment” (2007:759).

Berlant is interested in how these experiences and positionings are constructed and lived within the forces of domination and marginalization and economic, political and social life in the US, while also seeking to unveil the textures of subjectivity such as pleasure, numbness, sadness and quiet that are often unnoted in examinations of agency and examined or measured in response to and sometimes in friction with structures of power.

16 See the series of books Berlant has written about the politics of emotion, citizenship and agency, The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in America Culture (2009); Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004); Our Monica, Ourselves: the Clinton Affair and the National Interest (2001); The Queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). 25

Berlant like other scholars of contemporary (US) American life are shifting their analytical frameworks to the everyday and ordinary realm that are providing new openings to think about emotion in agency, and consequently from which to theorize how racialized women have and continue to live in the flows of social diminishment and individual liberation. Scholars engaged with theories of Affect, such as Berlant, Eve

Sedgwick, and Kathleen Stewart, have produced languages and lenses through which to look at the circuits and flows of power in their everyday forms and experiences to examine how subjects live within in or even reproduce them in the simple, yet complex acts of “mere” living and feeling.

Reconfiguring the analytical orientation of subjectivity around the repetitions, breaks, routines that shape and give meaning to people’s lives, provides insight into how these structures are felt, impacted and lived and, also influence people’s self-making. I examine race and class as forces that can pulse or surge through and shape the texture of people’s lives rather than exist as what Stewart describes as “dead effects imposed on an innocent world”(2007:1). This framework and its intellectual supporters, invest in an analysis of the confluence, combustions and possibilities of the present as the space/time of investigation. This approach need not dismiss or ignore the historical or social weight of power, hierarchy or inequality or their influences on the unfolding present, but rather asks us to intellectually hold the variances, unexpected moves, thoughts and seeming senselessness alive and able to reshape the so-called experience of the now.

These vantages help to guide an alternative analysis of the articulations of race and gender as meaningful and meaning-making lived forces that exert themselves in repeated, everyday ways. In the instance of racial oppression, the everyday helps capture

the states of crisis that are often not socially, legally or politically identified as such in

Brazil and many parts of the diaspora. These women’s everyday lives are filled with the material, the abuse, the hunger, and the deprival that characterize so-called crisis, but the register – the cultural national thermometer of what is accepted and deemed as crisis –is intimately influenced by what color, income, place of residence and age of those signaling attention. Shifting away from the language of crisis and into the fabric of everyday lived structural oppression helps develop new modes for the situated analysis of race and more broadly the intersectional oppression black women live throughout the diaspora.

Furthermore, the scenes of the everyday and the analytical lens of the present help to detail the confluence and operations of loaded forces, such as race, gender, age and class, in their predictable, unanticipated, but influential ways. In the current shifts around the meanings of race in contemporary US and Brazilian societies for example, these lenses offer a means of palpating how race currently is lived and expressed subjectively, highlighting the openings in analysis that emerge between what racial marginalization statistically tells us, how racialized subjects encounter their social difference and how they think about and experience this positioning. New critical race theorists, often writing from the intersections of cultural criticism, queer and performance theory, are addressing race in more processual and unstable ways that reveal it as a continued force, yet refracted and intersected by other meanings and readings of the body. These approaches focus on the experiences that constitute the felt experience of race.17 In the case of the ageing women in the group, there were times when they expressed feeling “blacker,”

17 See Harper 2000; Holland 2000; Muñoz 1999, 2006. 27

“older” or “younger.” I do not situate these shifting perceptions and possible actions as contradictions or necessarily as signs of opposing forces; I draw on these lenses to unpack the flows and sensibilities that uncover their ways of being and feeling in the world experienced through their social positioning and their participation in the group. To this end, I borrow the vocabulary of these theoretical moorings to guide my ethnographic analysis of the women and their group life.

This post-modern inflected approach to racial analysis explores how past events and concepts of race are still at work and embedded in the ways in which body language, that is, bodies as social text and meaning, are conjured, projected onto and understood.

Black activists and the oppressed communities they mobilize, continue to live through the everyday struggle, attempting to transform it, if not for a different social structure, at least for some more immediate individual peace of mind. In this regard, this work barrels, trips and maneuvers forward, acknowledging racial injustice, but attempting to release the expectations of what we have come to feel that history intellectually and theoretically should imply about race or racialization in Diaspora. Paralleling the nature of self- making itself, the analysis of their self-making is not only about self-development, but about casting or thinking forward into the space of possibility for different ways of being and for a different society. This vantage is less about the future per se, but rather a parallel present in which individual and collective psychic transformation occurs and enables us to gain a glimpse of another self, another mode of being and way of feeling, that helps to shift the current moment and possibility of how we live and experience it.

Working with the Tradition and Legacy of Black Feminism

Black feminist thinkers pioneered the social and intellectual space for this type of affective work, in practice and in writing. The contributions of black feminisms are vast, but have gained broadest attention by revealing, through exploring black women’s lives, how multiple forms of oppression are interlocking and often experienced in their intersection – hence the theory of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective 1983;

Crenshaw 1991). They have also approached theory and knowledge production from their enacted form, identifying and articulating a body of thought and informed practices energized specifically by black women leaders and more diffusely, the everyday practices of black women.

Less widely discussed are the ripple effects of how black feminisms enable and encourage us to theorize the vastness and multidimensionality of human experience specifically as it is lived by oppressed people. Black women are critical examples because of the all-too-often economic, racial, class and gendered discrimination they experience. However black feminisms as a theoretical body addressing the complexity of black women’s experience, illuminates the specificity of oppression without minimizing individuals to the sum total of their pains and abuses. Analyses guided by black feminist perspectives and theory have not always successfully held this duality, most likely not for a lack of trying, as this is both technically and politically difficult to execute. Effectively critiquing forms of systematic oppression can often overshadow and/or sit uneasily with accounts of pleasure, the mundane or the celebratory of the same peoples. My use and investment in the black feminist project and its tradition concentrates on how it has centered oppression within a multi-dimensional lived context of struggle and

transformation. The contributions of black feminisms that I wish to highlight, as illustrated through the lives of black women, have been to help see, acknowledge and mobilize around the particularity of our multiple and coexistent selves, as racialized, classed and creative women, without giving up our whole essence and its potential.

Drawing on these specific points, I situate this project within the black feminist tradition.

Metamorphosing to respond to the demanding conditions of black women, women of color, and issues of race and gender, various scholars whom I hail as both black feminists and claimable by the tradition, are expanding the conceptualization and theorization of black women on a greater continuum with women in the global south and are identifying points of dialogue and connection existent when looking through a transnational framework (White 2001). Black feminist writings have slowed down from their heightened articulations of the 1980s and 90s across the diaspora to the current state of rethinking and evolution. Drawing on local, national and global contexts to rethink connectivity beyond national and regional borders, has shifted the analytical energy of black feminist thinking. Black feminists have applied their analytics to other sites and conditions of marginalization and oppression that are connected to black women’s struggles but not singularly focused on them. Incarceration and prisons, geography, environment and bodies are critical current subjects of reflection to which black feminists have turned their attention.18 Black feminists have brought the insights of the operations of individual and structural oppression as well as a rigorous intersectional gender, racial and class analysis to new social dynamics, conditions and bodies.

18 See Gilmore 2007; James 2002; McKittrick 2006. 30

By elucidating these transformations in black feminisms, I include my work in its transition, politically aligning it with the stance against oppression and the ways in which black women have revealed subaltern visions of doing politics, living and creating liberation, which is significant in its own right to black and women’s social contributions, but more broadly to those of struggling peoples worldwide. Similarly, black women’s own relationship with the title of black feminism, particularly noted in Brazil, has also influenced my approach to move from the academic rhetoric of black feminism towards the essence and thrust of its praxis. I will discuss this in greater depth throughout the dissertation, but use it to characterize my invested but reflective and blended use of black feminist theory.

Ironically, black feminist thought in Brazil, with specific regards to the praxis in the US or other parts of the Diaspora, is more of an embodied practice than one of the academy. Women like Matilde Ribeiro, Nilza Iraçi or Sueli Carneiro who self-title as black feminists, have laid the groundwork for its written body. Yet its scholarship remains a less vibrant space than the “doing” because of the multitasking most black feminists undergo as teachers, workers, activists, intellectuals, mothers, partners, etc.

Emphasizing the same forms of multiple and intersecting oppression experienced by black feminists in the US, these Brazilian theorists are counterparts to and dialogue with those in the US, responding to racial, gender exclusion and differentiation experienced in political and social organizing and theoretical work by overwhelming white and economically stable, “mainstream” feminism in spite of their mutual concern with gender inequity and patriarchy; the thrust of their work however is to address the specific reality of the particularly grave situation of black women’s social positioning in Brazil.

In an effort to mobilize structural shifts, black Brazilian feminists’ writings tend to concentrate on black women’s circumstances from the standpoint of national organizing creating the bridge between the structural and institutional racism experienced by black women and their living conditions. Known black feminists are overwhelmingly the leaders and principal representation of the black women’s movement in Brazil, and have struggled to highlight issues of race, gender and economic poverty at the national, regional and international levels. Yet, black feminists whose energy is often bound in these social movements, share feelings of deflation around the consistent efforts and strategies to mobilize that have failed to render the type of change in black women’s economic and social circumstances initially hoped in the wake of the debates and policies engaging and invoking race in Brazil over the past ten years.19 While not characterizing the mobilization as a failure, these on-the-ground actors and theorists are struggling to rethink and re-shape black women’s political strategies in the shifting national and global landscape in which black women continue to labor to meet their families’ and their own basic material needs and lead dignified lives. Black Brazilian feminist Jurema Werneck addresses the complexity of strategizing around to these shifts, when even black women activists lack the political and economic means to secure basic resources which would enable them to mobilize in more generative ways. Calling for new modes of political articulation and solidarities in order to adapt to the new modalities and multiplicities of globalization, Werneck opens up the theoretical drawing board for new routes that parallel the assertions and summons of black feminists in other parts of the Diaspora in

19 For the contemporary state of black women’s organizing and politics see ed. Werneck n.d.; Werneck 2007. 32

this state of transition. Her summons is one for re-thinking politics, black feminism and means to creating social change.

I argue that this intensely local study, with an age group less examined provides a new vantage on the modes and orientation of how black women individually and collectively live through systems of oppression and their organic methods and practices of living in enriched ways. First, I draw attention to the fact that Valdete would not necessarily conceptualize her actions as theory or a strategy for anti-racist struggle at the national or international level; she would most likely cite it as an approach to well-being and the common good – two concepts she politically engages at whatever level of politics she can. She leaves her work untitled; her practices and the processes that emerge from them are not necessarily feminist, black feminist, black or even “of the oppressed.” This status poses some paradox and even ethical dilemmas for me in trying to conceptualize and label her actions. The undefined status of Valdete’s approach highlights the productive qualities of her way and vantages and refocuses the work on its effect. By not labeling practices or their so-called outcomes, there remains flexibility and something emergent and transformative in the process, making these women’s participation and experiences in the group a source of ‘becoming.’20 Her preoccupation is with the intention and the creation of experience, rather than set outcomes. The complexity of naming, specifically the power and privilege involved is illustrated in my very use of

Valdete’s name.21 Per her request, I write using her real name while I deploy pseudonyms for all other group members. Black women activists’, as well as most women of color’s work often involves rendering multiple facets of their lives public. Consequently, their

20 Hall 1996; Lorde 1984; Vargas 2006. 21 See Werneck 2007:99 33

names and bodies are frequently treated, by choice or not, as a source and basis of reference for their ideas, rendering their beings, not just their ideas, available for attack.

Ironically it is this type of detrimental exposure of black women’s bodies that black women have mobilized around. Thus my writing sits in tension with theorizing Valdete and the group within the legacy of black feminism and re-thinking the implications and significance of naming through her own praxis.

With this in mind, I claim that her example and that of the group presents new methods, processes and intentions for diverse social intervention. There are no bells and whistles of a blueprint of a social movement, but penetrating internal and external transformations and mental shifts that are spaces of affective vulnerability. M. Jacqueline

Alexander’s recent work Pedagogies of Crossing is influential in illustrating and theorizing how the affective domain is a space critically linked, through individual growth, reflection and transformation to the larger social and political concerns of oppression and domination. She situates oppression as an interconnected, global spectrum, but roots collective transformation in individual struggle to explore and develop one’s own path and work within community. She summons new visions for the types of recognitions, conversations, explorations and transnational solidarities needed between women of color while rethinking the geographic, political and intrapersonal bounds we create. Alexander’s work, I suggest, is emblematic of the efforts emerging in the expansion and metamorphosis of black feminisms and I draw on her emphasis on engaging our intersubjectivity which she brings light to as the recognition of the ways in which women’s lives and subjectivity are shaped through and embedded in shared forces of domination; these flows reveal our connectedness even as their connective possibility

may manifest in fractured, antagonistic and incommensurate consciousness. By emphasizing and asking us to recognize intersubjectivity, Alexander solicits the hard work of witnessing ourselves and our actions as refracted in the lives of others and rethinking the systems of knowledge that do the work of separating ourselves from others rather than joining us into collective struggle.

This call to our inter-subjectivity is for deep internal work on the one hand, and on the other, a highly collective process and investment guided and reinforced by

Alexander’s consideration of the need for psychic, specifically, spiritual work. By emphasizing the realm of the sacred, Alexander hones in on spirit as the often overlooked third element of a triptych of being, also including mind and body. Her attention to this realm is part of her praxis of intersubjectivity that she locates as holding the energetic space between our selves and community. Alexander characterizes the work in this sphere as a “meeting of self with self, a practice of alignment with the Divine”

(2005:321); this is the endeavor of finding a home within the body, surrendering to the non-material reasons of the connection of body, spirit and mind, forged in the Sacred.

One of the insights revealed through this process is that people are invited into meanings of and relationships with their bodies that, as Alexander suggests, inform and even supersede its material positioning. This understanding and dimension to material existence enables new systems of knowledge and epistemologies from which struggles in the material world can be waged and sustained and even lessen the brunt of hegemonic thinking that obscures human interconnection as well as limits and over-defines human existence in and through materiality. As a more encompassing theoretical framework that actively breathes in constant and new meaning, Alexander highlights the connective

space for where the affective domain enters as critical site of information and transformative potential for finding home in the body. I consider feelings and emotions as sources of meaning to explore the encounter between body, mind and the material world that includes our relationship with and interrelating to others. As such, emotional expression can elucidate the dimensions of our essence and can be generative of ways of growing our relationship to self and community. In this ethnography, I illustrate and claim how the group works with the affective domain to bring these women into a transformative relationship to self and simultaneously with their communities.

In this regard, these women’s affective vulnerability is a powerful state of potential for new ways of thinking and being that open up and encourage the liberties and freedoms of mind and body critical to the self-making witnessed in the group. My emphasis is on the type of emotional vulnerability that Valdete brought to the affective surface of these women in order to reflect to them their own power for intrapersonal and interpersonal change. Through the collective dynamic of the women and the use of music and dance, the group provides critical vehicles for these women to experience and express their emotional range. Their exploration and witnessing of their own vulnerability are where they learn about their own strength, power and the possibility to change. This contention follows what Angela Davis argues about black enslaved women’s strength – that it came from their own experiences of their labor and self-knowledge, rather than through slavery.22 It was within group members’ daily struggles to get-by and the work of relating to one another and learning to express themselves that they began to experience and encounter their own power of character.

22 Davis 1981 36

Building on a variety of writings on racial identity and social activism,23 I seek to contribute the subtler, and sometimes agonizing, process of emotional transformation that shapes the ways in which individuals feel, rethink and sculpt themselves and, consequently, their social world. Sometimes this process results in a person’s desire to share their own transformative power with others, which is one definition of political agency and activism; however, as I will illustrate, these transformations have other kinds of ripple effects that often are less visible and tangible, but are of critical value to individual and social well-being. Such adjustments create the potential for something larger than the individual struggle to be generated and take hold.

Black women diasporically have used oppression as an engine for envisioning, creating and realizing dynamic projects of individual and collective transformation. The

Meninas de Sinhá align with various black women’s ventures across the diaspora to improve black women and their communities’ well-being. There are paralleled efforts witnessed in Sweet Honey and the Rock in the US, Sistren in Jamaica and the Ki-Yi

Village in the Ivory Coast which offer just a few expressions of black women’s imaginings and desires to improve the quality of life of their communities through creative expression. These local projects bind together the individual work as part of the collective, communal work and are founded on having people, in most cases women, tap into their internal source(s) of power, what Werewere Liking calls, the Ultimate

Knowledge – self-knowledge ([2004]2007:423). I argue that the similarities of these undertakings enable us to look at the Meninas de Sinhá within a greater context of diasporic healing projects inspired by black women and authored by the community.

23Caldwell 2007; Hale 2006; Gordon 1998; Sansone 2003; Sheriff 2001 37

Such projects warrant attention, not only for how they elevate and appreciate the emotional spectrum into a site of mobilization, but also how they represent black women’s efforts to secure other black women and their communities in continued states of inequality and domination. They are also probable resources to combat racism and sexism, which continue globally to impact black women, and their ability to mobilize against these forms of sustained oppression.

FIELDWORK AND METHODOLOGY

Developing the Project

I now turn to my field site and methodology; and I offer several observations made at the outset of my research, which I hope will connect the theoretical and analytical underpinnings I have laid out thus far with my approach to creating and realizing this project, physically while in the field, conceptually and in writing.

In the summer of 2004, when I first visited with the group, I attended group rehearsals and interviewed several of the women to learn about their individual lives and how they came to join the group. Our time together brought several ideas into focus that not only led me to ask if I could develop my doctoral project around the group, but also guided how I conducted the research and relationships, and addressed some of the challenges of how to execute this project.

The first decision was to focus my study on the lives and narratives of those group members whose quieter ways and less politicized lives attracted less attention than

Valdete – a tireless grassroots activist and community leader residing in the neighborhood of Alto Vera Cruz where she and most of the group members have lived

since the 1960s. I will discuss Valdete’s life in greater detail in chapter one, but for now, it is a life that has been anything but easy or ordinary making for a riveting narrative of hardship, struggle and victory. Valdete is a charismatic dark skinned black woman, sixty-four at the time of our first interview (now seventy), whose public persona as activist, community leader and now singer is often juxtaposed with her “origins” as an economically, poor black woman. Her social and environmental work in her neighborhood and now singing group has attracted local and national attention. As a black woman from the “favela” who has gained much acclaim, her life narrative is compelling and inspirational as much as it is rife with material for analysis. The focus on her life story also can reproduce some of the oppressive social narratives that are part of the very forces of marginalization that her life has labored against. In the past ten years, there has been a consistent flow of local media coverage of the group and various people, particularly students, have conducted short research projects with the women.

Musicologists or ethnomusicologists visited, interested in hearing and analyzing the women’s folk music; there were social work and psychology students focused on the women’s therapeutic practices; and group members even met with psychiatrists in- training around their drug use and the group’s dynamics. There also have been other anthropologists.24 In all known cases, Valdete is the contact and reference for the group and in almost all of these instances she provides the connection and structure for attending rehearsals as well as the basic history of the group. She consistently encourages other members to participate and be spokeswomen, but students gravitated towards

Valdete and she was frequently the focus.

24 Caldwell 2007 39

Valdete makes a fascinating case study of hardship, activism and success and so, too, do group members. My project takes up the lives of group members, as ordinary women who make up the popular masses in their ways, beliefs and possibilities. They are not grand theorists or practitioners of collective mobilization, but have lived rocky lives and, in this “third” phase of life, have worked to transform themselves. My project appreciates Valdete as a member of the group who also has benefited from its transformational potential as well as in her unique capacity as activist and leader. Black women leaders often are notable in their perspicacity, vision, fearlessness, socio-political conviction and practices of collectivity. There are reasons why Valdete took it upon herself to imagine and generate this endeavor as opposed to the dozens of women who have passed through or are now members of the group. There remains important work to be done on the social and political formation of activists like Valdete, but I concentrate on how the group’s example offers insight into the emotional and collective work involved in personal transformations that can enable women to realize their desires and capabilities.

Valdete’s community efforts and her name recognition as a black woman activist positions her so that, outside of political differences, she is recognizable within the world of black feminist activists. As indicated, I came to hear about and make contact with the group through a black feminist I engaged with while researching black women’s non- governmental organizations beginning in 2003. This time line is important because it is the foundation of my own black feminist inspired methodology and shaped the questions and intellectual approach to this project.

I began researching how black women activists and their organizations were mobilizing around questions of the health of the black population. Based in Belo

Horizonte, I visited with local black activists and met representatives from organizations at conferences, as well as in their group spaces in several cities. My contact with

Malunga, the NGO in Goiânia, Goiás, heightened my interest in mental health issues, specifically those of black women. This NGO permitted me to read testimonials and watch videos of their work with women from a diagnostic mental health clinic; and from interviews with the NGO staff members about their experiences working on the theme of black women’s mental wellness, I learned about the intensity with which racism [their assessment] was bearing down on black women’s emotional and psychological worlds.

NGO members did not interpret these women as “crazy,” but believed they had developed strategies, conscious or unconscious, to find relief from the oppressive experiences of their everyday worlds. Malunga is one of the few organizations that has specifically investigated questions of mental health, and outside of several references to black psychologists, they indicated that there was not much research or work in the area.

NGO members’ words that these women were not “crazy” stuck with me, as well as their indication about the need for greater work in this area, which eventually led me to

Valdete.

I returned to Brazil in the summer of 2004, carrying my Masters report for discussion and to explore dissertation topics involving mental health. One of the key black feminist activists who participated in the research for my Master’s project facilitated my decision making for the dissertation topic by criticizing my analytical emphasis on black women’s NGOs as principal actors in social change. Her perspective

was that these NGOs reproduced the same political infighting of other NGOs, which limited their ability to work for change; her bottom line was that if I wanted to see black women impacting the lives of others, I needed to go to neighborhoods and look at community projects.

This assertion and the almost simultaneous introduction to Valdete were clear indicators of where I should head. Having black women activists guide my research path and the questions to be addressed enabled these women’s situated concerns to drive the project forth. This approach overlaps with those methods of activist anthropology as laid out by Charles Hale (2001), specifically the formulation of the research question and an investment in a particular social concern. In Brazil “the role of intellectuals” in black women’s movements remains a polemic and the often tense relationship between the

Academy and specifically black women activists and organizations; this dynamic forced me to not only tread with ease, but also allow for my possible research and even presence to be evaluated over time. Taking my cues from black feminism and feminists, I not only sought to develop a research project but to be reoriented by and work within black

Brazilian women’s socio-cultural, political and epistemic frameworks. This was not a surrendering of my own training, but recognition of their “situated knowledge” and understanding of the ontological shifts needed to explore black women’s non-dominant position in Brazil. This approach also responds to debates around non-national researchers transporting “outside” lenses to examine race relations in Brazil. Orienting my methods and research through these women both considers the country’s distinct historical formation and also points out how too often hegemonic ideas and enactments of race and racism, by non-nationals and nationals, guide research agendas as well as

foreclose non-dominant experiences and theories of Brazilian society, notably those of black women. Thus, black women activists, as political and social guides, provided me with multiple theoretical and epistemic vantages and tools through which to consider contemporary social currents in the country.

I am also a self-titled black woman and black feminist, which I shared with research participants. I used this identity and identification to hail these women.

Approaching these activists with my research interests was accompanied by discussions of my political, social concerns as a black woman feeling the impacts of growing up in an intensely racialized society and researching within another that is structured by multiple forms of division and hierarchy. While our lives are quite different – mine is shaped by the relative economic and class privilege of education and US citizenship – my hailing of them gained traction, I suggest, because of our overlapping experiences of gendered racialization, racism (particularly in Brazil) and its vast emotional reverberations in our lives as well as human affinities. Our discussions spurred and politicized our desires to address our challenges, whether by confronting the structures that sustain oppression, helping women to redirect and grow beyond these forces, or by producing research to better understand what needs to be done. This black feminist hail was critical to my methodology of building relationships with potential research participants and a research project that “mattered” to the parties involved. This approach marks the basis of doing diasporic research that posits what Edmund T. Gordon and Mark Anderson (1998) advocate as a shared political project, rather than a racial kin-based connection.

Research Site

Early observations concerning Valdete’s status relative to other group members suggest that some of the attention given to her is connected with her place of residence.

The women’s neighborhood of Alto Vera Cruz is by popular and local associations a favela, which I have purposely left vague to this point. I arrived at the group through black women and my interest in working with black women creating social change.

When Valdete invited me to visit the group, she appropriately provided me a bus number and walking directions to the school where she works. The bus ride took me to the periphery of the city then wound its way into the hills to what, on the surface, was clearly a low-income neighborhood. The idea of the neighborhood as a favela only starkly emerged from the mouths of people who lived outside of the neighborhood and they were shocked, even scared, of my field site. Since I was specifically interested in these women’s lives, my approach to the neighborhood was to let its meaning unfold through the context of the group and its participants rather than predefining or characterizing the space. I used my interviews to inquire about the area and residents’ perceptions and naming of it.

Over the course of my research, I initiated discussions about the meanings of favela and the nature of the neighborhood with its residents. As an activist who has mobilized around the neighborhood’s infrastructural growth and its social marginalization, Valdete did readily use the term favela. The women in the group and other residents also referred to the space as a favela, using different definitions and asserting it with different intents. Not all of the women in the group live in Alto, but all but one lives in adjacent areas, which also are primarily considered lower-income

neighborhoods, if not favelas. My interest is not in defining favelas, but explaining that my intent was to work with black women activists and this practice consistently led me to low-income spaces, often favelas. I rapidly realized the reality that if one wants to work with urban black populations in Brazil one most likely will wind up in low-income neighborhoods, which frequently carry the title of favela.

My need to assert this intent comes from the precedence of national and international research agendas that use the space, concept and bodies of “favelas” as the predefined research site. Even as scholars have both deconstructed the fixed idea of the favela and its residents, the term continues to operate in the research and social imaginary as a discernable social space associated with economic poverty and often anti-black racialization. 25 These research projects, just like residents, outline and claim these spaces in attempts to politicize the social conditions of urban places – an objective I too share.

But my approach is to represent the community and the space in which they live as a neighborhood, a concept of space and people, that I construct guided by the women’s interpretations of and life experiences in their residence. This representation breaks with the deeply racialized ideas of favelas that often convey the social conditions and relations of oppression and struggle as almost constitutive of the land and those residing there. For contextual purposes, the paragraph that follows presents a brief description of the neighborhood; chapter four explores the representations and associations in greater depth.

25 For writings on the deconstruction of the social idea of the favela see Caldeira 2000; Valladares 2005; Zaluar and Alvito 1998. 45

Alto Vera Cruz

Perched on a hilltop overlooking the city from the east, Alto Vera Cruz is one of the largest of the peripheral neighborhoods of Belo Horizonte with estimates of the neighborhood ranging from 40,000 to 90,000 residents.26 It is bordered on its backside by undeveloped land that encompasses the bounds of the municipality and is enclosed on its sides by other low-income neighborhoods, some of the most economically poor of the city.

Belo Horizonte is the third largest metropolitan area in Brazil and a major urban center founded in 1897. It is home to just over 2.4 million people of which, in 2000, close to 430,000 resided in favelas (IBGE as cited in da Costa and Ribeiro 2004). Alto represents one of the city’s 226 officially recognized favelas, vilas (another configuration of shanty towns), and conjuntos (public housing) in the city, which account for more than a quarter of the city’s population, over 500,000 people.27 While there is a deficit of statistics to quantify the black population in these areas, the zones of the city that encompass some of the largest favelas are over fifty percent black (Prefeitura de Belo

Horizonte 2000) and most of the city’s black population reside in low-income areas (da

Costa and Ribeiro 2004).

Over the past 30 years, Alto Vera Cruz has passed through various phases of basic infrastructural development, was impacted by a dominant drug-based economy in the

1980s and has become well known for its political and cultural activism. There are

26 The difference in these figures may be accounted for by whether or not the surrounding areas are being included. 27 This data is from a website, Favela É Isso Aí, dedicated to the artistic and creative production and participation of favelas and vilas in Belo Horizonte. It should be noted that on this website Alto Vera Cruz is written about as a neighborhood rather than a favela. See http://www.favelaeissoai.com.br. 46

numerous organizations and individuals dedicated to the development of the community’s social awareness, particularly around questions of discrimination and the empowerment of “residents of the periphery;” most of these projects use cultural production as a vehicle for attracting and engaging, specifically, local youth. The neighborhood is home to a young communist party, black cultural revival groups (e.g. capoeira, funk, reggae), a youth drumming troupe, as well as a well-known black city representative.

However, the community continues to live with the social constraints of many low-income urban neighborhoods in Brazil: high employment in low-wage labor matched with much unemployment, continued violence from a concentrated yet still present drug trade, a visible police presence (which is controversially looked at) and insufficient medical care. Statistics on this neighborhood, are difficult to attain and often minimal if not absent due to its standing as a less established “legitimate” neighborhood and its historical status as a favela. Thus, the information I provide was attained by searching multiple web-based resources, polling residents and through my own observations.

Long lines, inadequate medicine and inconsistent treatment (not enough doctors present) were the most frequent complaints about health care. Residents’ frustrations have turned violent, which I offer as one reading of the intensity of people’s sentiments towards the public health care the overwhelming majority of residents receive. A former health agent who worked door-to-door in the neighborhood collecting health data, specifically in one of its economically poorest sections, reported high rates of respiratory problems, specifically among children, because of the density and poor ventilation of the houses. She also cited the frequency of instances of dengue as an ongoing problem due to

standing water during the rainy season. Consistent with my research, she shared what she perceived to be high rates of depression among elderly people who were often house- bound. Women in the singing group also observed what they believed to be elevated rates of depression and anti-depressant use among younger women.

While I will argue that the group is deeply connected and local to this space, I construct the project around their life trajectory and the local neighborhood, rather than as a formation particular to Belo Horizonte. The women are mineiras – women who strongly identify with their birthplace and traditions in various parts of the interior of the state. Yet, in some ways, this project could have come about in other cities because of the similarities in life profiles of ageing women living in low-income neighborhoods in large metropolitan cities across Brazil. Given the marginalized status of ageing people in urban areas and those without resources, these types of community-based groups are forming and increasingly needed.28 In this capacity I examine the group both for its local particularities and its general contributions to national and diasporic interventions around practices and concepts of wellbeing and gendered racialization.

Fieldwork

During 2006 and 2007, I spent a total of sixteen months with the group mostly in their neighborhood of Alto Vera Cruz and around the city Belo Horizonte. As articulated, my project developed around working with the group as a whole and considering

Valdete’s life in her dual capacity of group leader and participant. Valdete as the “gate-

28 (Groisman 2001; http://www.casadesantaana.org.br/ 4.16.08)

keeper” of the group was pivotal in inserting me into group life and helping to interpret it.

She encouraged my work with the collective as a whole, initially asking members to allow me to interview them and visit their homes. I conducted and recorded interviews with Valdete over the course of my fieldwork and posed questions about various dynamics and/or her reflections on a particular situation, but in general, my method was to democratically participate in individuals’ lives and that of the group as was allowed.

On a weekly basis, I participated in their early morning group meetings on

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. These tri-weekly encounters included exercise, stretching class, rehearsal of their songs, drumming classes later on in my fieldwork, as well as ample opportunities for socialization and group discussions. I also joined women in their performance outings, which ran from about March (after Carnival) through the beginning of December. These typically local trips were to schools, homes for the elderly, health care centers and residences for incarcerated youth. They could last an afternoon, an evening or a full day. Since I did not reside in the neighborhood, my protocol was to attend group rehearsals and then travel with the women or meet the group at the place in the neighborhood. On lighter weeks, the group did two to three performances and on heavier ones there were scheduled events everyday. The group also conducted four trips to the interior of Minas Gerais to partake in various cultural festivals, which I discuss in greater depth in chapters three and five. The group’s invitation to me to join them on these journeys provided extra-ordinary opportunities to spend time with the collective and to study group life.

I also conducted extensive interviews with individual group members. With consent, I formally interviewed women recording their life histories as well as their

reflections on their participation in the group and its meanings in their lives. I also informally interviewed the women in the group, spending days and nights with women in their homes, running errands around the city, visiting relatives and alongside them in their movement around the neighborhood. A handful of the thirty-four women in the group expressed interest, in some cases, immediate, in the research and being interviewed. These women made up most of the principal participants in this project and are visible as such in the text. Without these specific women’s insights, patience, interest, this project and its candor around sensitive subjects would not have been possible. Other women required more time and increased comfort levels through daily interaction to be able to develop a relationship conducive to conversation beyond the group context. Often,

I was able to ask questions of and get to know individual women through group events, specifically the multiple day trips. When I was permitted, I also interviewed these women’s children and grandchildren about the group’s impact on their family member’s life, as well as their own experiences growing up in the neighborhood. Interviews were also conducted with musicians and members of the neighborhood community familiar with the women’s work.

My first observation was the contrast between interviewing the women and interviewing Valdete who is well versed in public speaking, highly familiar with recorded interviews and very skilled in dealing with people of all backgrounds. On the other hand, many of the women were timid and unsure of my background and beliefs. In spite of my expressed interest in all the women’s lives, many communicated to me after a connection had been established that they had believed that they had nothing special to offer, no meaningful information to contribute to my project. They were also concerned about my

perceptions and judgments about their material conditions and were reticent about inviting me to their homes. Many of these anxieties were fuelled by their readings of me as a US citizen; I was a graduate student, clearly of privilege who spoke adequate

Portuguese and had arrived by plane in Brazil at the age of twenty-eight. In spite of the fact that I was only as old as many of their children, I was referred to at one point as

“senhora” – a label of seniority and respectful deference much like the English lay use of

“ma’am.” This is one just illustration of how class [and color] articulated itself in the women’s self-making that I engage in the text; and I needed to honor and negotiate that reality during my time with the group.29

Blackness also came to bear on my work with these women. Most of the women are racially black – that is, they self-title as such and possess the physiognomical traits of blackness. Several self-title ambiguously, “Brazilian,” “mixed,” “parda.” At the same time, Valdete refers to group members as a whole as black women and I use that assertion and explore it as well as racial self-making around blackness in the group in greater detail in chapter five. The relevance of race in this circumstance revolves around the nature of the shared blackness that I was hailing, like Valdete, in this group. Their gendered blackness was central to my exploration of the mental well being of black women, but at the same time, our understandings of blackness were crosscut by many other social formations such as class, education, nationality and racialization. And yet the body politics of race made it such that I was consistently assumed to be a grandchild or daughter of one of the women, rather than a foreign researcher. I suggest this mis-reading derived from the combination of my brown appearance (not evocative of “white foreign

29 It should also be noted that I am a lighter skinned and ambiguously black woman who is rightfully mistaken as of Indigenous descent, as I have Amerindian ascendants. 51

researcher”), age difference, and the fact that I do in fact look similar enough to some of the women to be family. Similarly, dialogues around gendered blackness and racism, also reinforced shared political convictions and hopes for social change.

Perhaps the most compelling factor that shaped my work on this project was the difference between my own life experiences and those of the women, specifically reflected in the disparity of our ages. It was registered and articulated most, in my case, around the fact that I never had been married or lived a conjugal life, had no children and was unfamiliar with motherhood. We were all women, but the nature of our gendered experiences, highlighted in these points of distinction resulted at times in varying perspectives about what I could understand (childbirth, mothering), could hear (stories of sexuality and desire) or should hear (all of the details). Most women shared fluidly, I am sure with my age in mind and within their individual discretions. As researcher, I often thought about what it meant to be in my late twenties studying the reality of life through the vantages of sixty-plus years. There is no resolution or concise answer to this quandary, but I attempted to hold this question right below the surface of the investigative plane and in my writing.

Mental health and group members

The second observation and point of reflection is that there are women who have clinically been diagnosed with mental illness in their lives. One of the first interviews I conducted was with a member whose behaviors evoked some of the characteristics associated with bipolar disorder. Her dramatic shifts in mood were observed by group members, as was her endearing personality and highly admired spunk. She passed several

months after my first research period in 2004, but she offers an example of clinical mental illness in the group that is and has been present. As I discuss in chapter two, there are women who have had extensive mental health problems and my goal is not to question or minimize their suffering or diagnoses. Medicating was not completely a misplaced act, even though diazepam and the doses the women were consuming might have been. Their conditions were perceived by others and accommodated; usually people recognized when certain women were not well, if not a little crazy, acting and relating in socially non-normative and isolating ways. Yet even with these deviant, sometimes strange behaviors, group members did not tend to recognize these women as mad, but as in difficult emotional spaces that they could relate to without embodying the same modes.

I chose not to deeply elaborate on mental illness in the dissertation because without access to medical records, psychiatrists or prescriptions in most cases, it was difficult to explore these women’s experiences from a biomedical clinical perspective.

The women who spoke of being institutionalized said they did not know their official diagnoses, (which also may have been a case of not wanting to divulge), but in either case, moving into this highly personal and culturally sensitive territory would principally require more fieldwork than my time allowed and greater intellectual interest, as well.

My approach was to focus on how black women read and care for other black women with the vision of making a social difference. That said, I hold onto and concentrate on narrations of suicide, descriptions of depression and the simple fact that many of these women used, and some still use, psycho-pharmaceuticals as reminders of the archetype of the crazy black woman that circulates in this dissertation.

Risk

I mentioned risk in the past paragraphs and I want to briefly return to this idea for the greater sake of the social consciousness of this endeavor. Black women’s agency has always been a risky proposition in societies in which their challenge to structural racism, patriarchy and class entitlement places their bodies in jeopardy. Either proudly or rebukingly called renegades, black women’s bodies have swung from trees, been dismembered, sterilized and silenced for the risks they have taken to speak out, act out or just be. These physical risks are coupled with psychological risks that activists and everyday working black women alike engage with. The risks are taken in trying to feed children or get home alone at night, but also in attempting to remain whole, stay on

“higher ground” and in general preserve one’s dignity in oppressive social conditions.

Black women take risks every time they subvert the dominant paradigm, and similarly, when they function within it. Black women’s moves are almost always categorically in the domain of risk, since they seek to create spaces for themselves in society and existentially in the world.

While I would call my own physical and emotional risks minimal, there is conscious risk involved in this dissertation specifically in rendering these women’s lives vulnerable - vulnerable to academic critique through my own descriptions of their thoughts and their economic, geographic and affective experiences. They are vulnerable to the questioning of the ideas and methods that they have adopted and invest in. That said, they have been supportive of this undertaking from the beginning, granting me permission to hear and write about some of their most difficult experiences and memories, which some would prefer to soon forget. They have faith that their personal

histories, knowledge and wisdom are worth sharing and critiquing, learning from and living within, if only, in the pages of this dissertation.

THE IMAGES

I now turn to my photographs. Their presence in the dissertation came at the encouragement of advisors and was a welcomed way to speak in place of that which I struggled and, at times, found almost impossible to evoke or synthesize through written language.

In contrast to the simple decision-making of including the images, their creation stems from the negotiations of researcher and research participants in the field; or rather, their production, from beginning to end, parallels the range of human relations that occur in fieldwork. Fatigued by the overly intellectual emphasis of training for and doing research, I turned towards photography as a means of bringing a creative, emotive process to my work. This personal, right brain act was a means of documenting and remembering the women and my time spent with them. It was not conceptualized with ethnographic intent per se, but did however develop one.

I began taking pictures with an interest in individual and collective shots as well as to document their audiences and the spaces in which we all moved. The first outing I made with the group and camera was to downtown Belo Horizonte for a presentation they were giving at a union event. Upon asking if I could take photos, some began to reverse the request for photographs of themselves. Like many events, we wound up waiting for several hours before they sang. In that time, I entered in and out of small group conversations spread out across the stone seating on this central plaza. I listened to their

discussions and snapped shots, which captured their attention and generated various poses and looks. Initially frugal with the images because of the price of the film I was using at that time, I was struck and challenged by the demand and enjoyment in the act of shooting them. The women were bashful, reticent, captivated, a handful vainly posing and others laughing as I framed shots. This scenario repeated itself at the next couple of outings. Due to the expense and the growing interest, I was unable to take the camera to all events. However, I made the decision to purchase a better quality, digital camera in order to provide them with images that I could financially sustain. With time the women became accustomed to having me with camera and expressed themselves through interacting with it. In some cases, they would grow to be more comfortable with me as photographer than in conversation with me as researcher. This relationship transformed the photography into one of the dialogues I participated in and as one means through which the women presented themselves.

The story of the photographs – their desires for the images, their trepidations with being the photographic subject, their evolving comfort, and in many instances, pursuit of the lens – all provide an additional vantage from which to consider their self-making.

These images were the work of my mind’s eye that I am now, in writing, putting to use to intervene in discussions of the representation of black women. I explore how the photographs do this work although it was not produced with this analytical intent. This tension is productive, as I will discuss, because it provides traction for some of my understandings and proposals around how black women are literally viewed, but also perceived.

The photographic subject, black women and representation

These photographs, while my own sight, intuitively follow a trend that Deborah

Willis and Carla Williams (2002) detail as emergent from black women photographers’ concern and attempts to re-present black women. These artist/scholars reveal the extended history of black women as photographic and artistic subjects, and the more recent occurrence of black women as artist/photographer, engaging the legacy and production of their own image. The artistic representations of black women overwhelmingly follow the stereotypes of black women previously laid out in this introduction, but that Willis and Williams frame within the construction of aesthetic tropes: the naked black female (jezebel or National Geographic, the neutered black women or the mammy, and the noble savage, highlighting the naked body as the dominant portrayal (ibid:ix). Whether conscious or not, desired or not so, this image world is part of the landscape in which black women taking pictures and the pictures they take come to exist.

From the snapshots the women of the group often asked me to take with their automatic point and shoot cameras to the work of professional photographers such as

American Carrie Mae Weems, there runs a thread of self-representation that engages black women’s desires to be seen (if only by themselves) in their own way and through their own presentation of self and aesthetics. Jamaican writer Michele Cliff (1990) cites art as the principal space in which black women liberate themselves from their historic objectification as racialized and gendered bodies. She reflects, “My moving towards the study of the work – written and visual – of Black women has been a moving toward my own wholeness. My interest in this work is a deeply personal interest, because through

these words and images I begin to capture part of who I am” (1990:271). While the visibility of this search may distinguish that of professional artists from those of group members, I suggest that this drive to explore the self, specifically against the force of the ideas and images mapped onto black women’s bodies and minds, can also be highly individual, internal, public and collective acts. Black women have often been ethnographic subjects, willingly and unwittingly, photographed, painted and even exhibited for the consumption of the exotic, foreign, and the curious. The contemplation of own images has been one way in which we came to understand and react to our socially constructed position. As Williams and Willis assert:

[B]lack women photographers have used their own likenesses and those of other black women to create an autobiography of the body to develop themes of home, family, gender, representation, and identity in contemporary society. Their work reflects their self-awareness as social beings and critics, observers and participants, image-makers and interpreters (2002: 5).

Produced through the encounter between the deeply personal and analysis of the social world, the work seeks to rework the image and idea of black women through photography.

Black women’s presence in Brazilian visual culture emerged in the early photographs of 19th century Brazil. Ethnographic in nature, these photographs, most often shot by European photographers, documented enslaved and free black people highlighting particular physical traits and ethnic groups. Capturing scarification, height and facial differences, these taxonomic images were entitled with tribal names of the people represented and in some instances, made into “cartes de visites” or early postcards for visitors from the various metropoles.30 Deborah Poole (1997) recounts a similar

30 Azevedo and Lissovsky 1987: viii 58

image production and classification of racial others, namely indigenous peoples, in Peru, pointing out that “[i]n the field of ambiguity and fluidity that is “race,” photography and the visual technologies of “type” that preceded it played a crucial role in producing the

“truth” about race” (1997:214). These photographs, as Poole argues, illustrate how race was a prevalent force in the creation of the colonial visual worlds and one that has consistently perpetuated racial constructs and meanings over time. So too do the 19th century photographic portraits of Brazilian photographer known as Christiano Junior, who produced the largest archive of photographs of black people in Brazil during slavery, displaying the variety in racial blackness in Brazil with generic ethnic naming and the construction of the cultural-racial associations of dress, work and comportment of black people.31

Early ethnographic portraits initiated parts of the printed visual world of representation of black women that continues in television, film and in the frames of everyday public life. These representations constrain black women to embodiments of domestic workers and lascivious provocateurs and have largely made up the narrowly framed “visual economy” as Poole labels it that maintains the associations of black women and service. This Brazilian image world has gained notable international attention fabricated out of visuals of a devastated, yet unmatched natural world, scenes of urban violence and poverty patch-worked with the sights of glitter and sweat of dancing (often

31 See Azevedo and Mauricio Lissovsky 1987. As typical for the time, Christiano Junior would identify his black photographic subjects with broad ethnic names or the individual’s port of departure, giving such names as Congo, Mozambique, Minas, Cabinda, Angola. And as Manuela Carneiro da Cunha points out these ethnic physical denominations also had stereotyped personality or style associations (ibid: xxviii-xxiv). 59

black) bodies seemingly partaking in the endless festivities of the culture.32 These contemporary images of the country and its population, while marketed and propagated for financial profit and development, have readily masked and minimized not only the ways in which racism continues to configure life in the country, but the diversity of the experiences, landscapes and people of the nation. This backdrop is a critical screen on which to present these photographs in order to expand what is thought and known about

Brazilian society and Brazilians. Moreover, the construction of images and visual media in general remains a technology for fabricating social meaning, specifically around race and gender, that black people broadly and black women specifically do not have significant access to manipulate. Black women await the physical and intellectual opportunities to be critical photographic subjects and prominent artists for the enrichment of the visual artistic culture of Brazil and beyond.33

The Images and their production

As mentioned, I generated the images with creative intent although I have now turned to them with a critical, ethnographic eye. Anthropologists working with the media of photography point to the tension between ethnography and photography.

Anthropologist and photographer Corinne Kratz explains, “Photography has long raised questions about the boundaries between artistry and technical skill, art and science, fiction and reality….An ethnographic exhibition can blur boundaries between art,

32 I am borrowing Deborah Poole’s language of “Andean Image World.” 33 There are a growing number of black women photographers who have received public attention notably in the US but beyond as well. See Renée Cox (Jamaica born, USA), Elise Fitte-Duval (Martinique), Roshini Kempadoo (British), Joy Gregory (British), Ming Smith Murray (USA), Rosana Paulino (Brazil), Lorna Simpson (USA), Clarissa Sligh (USA), Maxine Walker (British), and Cynthia Wiggins (USA). 60

science, and history” (2002: 96-97). Raising concerns around the possible exoticizing and othering of people evocative of the spectator anthropological-like media such as National

Geographic magazine, Kratz uses this tension to discuss the gap in understanding that can occur between the artist and/or anthropologists’ intent behind their photographs and the viewers’ interpretations. While she asserts the attempt in her own work to challenge racial, ethnic, gender and national stereotypes and identity constructions, she foregrounds the disjuncture that occurs between this desired effect and the unpredictable if not ambivalent reactions of audiences.34 As is always the case with the exhibition of any art form, the range of reception contributes to the life of the creative work, and the artists’ intent exists in its own spirit; yet I intend these portraits to be what photographer Dawoud

Bey artistically terms as “credible descriptions” of the affect and women I photographed

(1995:111).

The desire behind the images was to re-present to the women qualities of unbounded human beauty. Contrary to popular notions of older people as unattractive and ailing, joined with the fact that I met the women not as grandmothers or mothers but as

“colleagues”, I sought to manifest the sentience of these women as they expressed and articulated themselves to me. This motivation was certainly a reaction to the intensity of racial, age and gendered stereotypes in Brazil and the Diaspora at large and I echo what

Willis and Williams note of photography as a “perfect medium for revisiting and re- interrogating the black female body” (2002:x). Similarly, the project was also driven by the contrast I experienced between these women’s negative self-perception with my

34 Kratz’ provides a detailed description of the varied reactions and controversies that emerged from the showing of her photographs and the broad complexities of representation and exhibiting ethnographic photographs. 61

impression of their grace. Seeking to render these qualities, I shot individuals up close, at a distance and in motion, without the intent of creating formal portraits but an archive of emotion, interactions and dynamics witnessed in the group. Providing these women with other representations of themselves was an objective of this archive.

Learning to see and read black women’s self-representation in their everyday lives was critical to detailing the textures and states of emotion and moods that were not always expressed in verbal language, but perceivable with the eye and body. Part of the intimacy of the photographic exchange, or one of the questions that emerges from that encounter and I attempted to render in many of the images present in the dissertation, captures the question that Kratz poses as central to the portrait and its photographic moment: “How do we know and show who we are and who others are?” This question is fundamental and embedded in this photographic archive and begs consideration in thinking thorough the process of these women’s self-making. Self-making often encompasses a physical and exterior transformation and one in our presentation. In this sense, much can be palpated if not learned from observing people in process. These images capture elements of who these women have become. My hope is that the moods and temperaments in the photographs reveal some of the qualities of intrapersonal and collective unfolding that are exuded and can be intoned.

Black women have used their flesh, movements and expressions as the unique canvas for portraying different articulations of their gendered and racialized selves. This presentation is not always a conscious, willing or transparent one, but creates waves of visuals that can be reflected upon and interpreted in the same way that one can stand in front of a Richard Avedon portrait and contemplate the personality vibrating off the paper

or thumb through a book of Sebastião Salgado’s images pondering the lives of the people beyond the moment of the snapshot. Photographing them over the years and showing them the images created a process of exchange in which, again borrowing Dawoud Bey’s reflections on photographing black subjects, I too “wanted the subjects in those photographs to be possessed of the power to look, to assert oneself, to meet the gaze of the viewer….to reclaim their right to look, to see, and to be seen” (Bey 1995:107).

Drawing on Willis and Williams’ definition of agency as “the act of confronting identity and taking control of the image”, these women, within the relationship of trust developed over time, used the interchange and everyday practice of having their pictures taken as opportunities to recast themselves in front of the camera, revealing different moods and expressions of self that I characterize as their process of self-making (2002:ix). I label and call attention to this act of agency because it exposes black women’s own consciousness of their limited representation and documentation, and highlights their participation in activities of their own desire and the sustained opportunity to re-present themselves in various ways to me. For some of these women, their engagement with the camera was enabling and they stared and engaged me, asking me to raise my camera to document them. At other times, they did not immediately know or care to look in my direction, or noticing and then going back to dancing and singing. The fact that they all do not directly stare at the camera characterizes empowerment not only as the strength of confrontation but also as inhabiting subtly, grace and the state of the understated. Yet their lack of eye contact also speaks to the social modes of being these women have been preconditioned to embodying and that some women, still quite shy, eased into as they related to the camera and my fieldwork. Allowing themselves to be photographed was a

symbol of this continuous transformation, and this agency is one of revealing their vulnerability as a source of their affective transformation and power.

The other process of exchange noted was that these women were able to derive pleasure in their own images and representation when they saw the photographs. By no means were the women always pleased with what they saw; they laughed and remarked that they looked “old,” or “just ugly as in real life.” Yet in other cases when women saw themselves in new ways, smiling or dressed up, they expressed surprise and joy that they were in fact “pretty” and never lost an opportunity to react to photographs of other women, negatively as well as positively, mostly affirming “good” pictures of fellow group members. Black Brazilian photographer Rosana Paulino explains in the context of

Brazil that, “women who overcome their negative self-image usually do so through a network of other black women, separate from the culture at large” (as quoted in Willis and Williams 2002:197). These reflections help to illuminate the women’s reactions to the work as well as the process of building positive self-images within the group. As anthropologist and photographer, I suggest that the photographs taken from this process mark a move away from the types of photography of black people taken historically to shock, intrigue or satisfy others.

Consequently, this photographic archive also provides a means to rethink blackness. Looking at the images from the theoretical vantage of race is a secondary act; after the pictures were shot and the writing half written, the photographs began to speak as testimonies of alternative ideas of blackness. As will be noted, the women do not necessarily possess the physical traces (skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc) associated with blackness conceived of as African descent. The images help to

deconstruct a language and idea of blackness based singularly in physiognomy in order to reconstruct it around concepts of living as discussed most directly in chapter five.

Experiences of race and blackness, like music, can be incommensurate with written words. As Poole illustrates, the visual world is a language and a domain in which to explore the construction and meaning-making of race and specifically blackness, rendering it less rigidly bound to the physical.

In a similar vein, these photos offer an opportunity to rethink and re-present the mind, specifically so-called “craziness.” Recognizing that curiosities will emerge around which women might have experienced mental illness or which faces go with which names, I hope the images provide a close look at and extended focus on human experience and its unraveling complexity as expressed in the body rather than simply diversifying what we think of as the mentally ill or racial blackness. By allowing what

Richard Brilliant asserts about portraits as bringing the viewer and represented into the

“same psychological space”, the photographs hopefully will hold the tension of such physical stereotypes around race and mental illness and simultaneously tune them down in order to connect to the lived and felt experience of these women (1991:15). In sum, these photographs help carry the writing along providing a visual of their moods, emotions and experiences in group dynamics as well as to convey moments in the process of self-making.

CHAPTER ORGANIZATION

As a brief road map to the dissertation, the chapters examine the women of this singing group’s process of self-making through different lenses. I have attempted to have

the chapters follow the progression of the group’s formation beginning with their histories, the states that led them to go in search of assistance and consequently medicine, and then the group dynamics, impacts and public life. I also have experimented with different styles of writing and uses of ethnography both for my own growth, but more as an effort to render the themes and arguments most vividly.

Chapter one focuses on the formative experiences that shaped the women’s self- making within dominant orientations of anti-black gendered racialization within classes and rural vantages. I explore how the women’s common formative experiences contributed to their low “self-esteem” and the emotional spaces in which they found themselves before the group.

Chapter two directly takes up the archetype of the crazy black woman exploring how the severity of the emotional states of some group members’ lives took them into the realm of suicide. This chapter suggests a re-reading of these women’s states of mind and actions from the vantage of black women, like the group, who offer understandings of the constraints black women live within and how their modes and forms of contending with these forces are too often read against normative orientations.

Chapter three moves from the individual histories of these women to take up the specific work of the collective and group life. It hones in on how music and dance are used as forms of therapeutic expression enabling the body to become a polyvocal vehicle of the articulation of these women’s complex sentiments and experiences. Music in many ways captures feelings and states of mind, which are perhaps difficult to convey through language. It argues that through enabling these women’s expression, their awareness and self-esteem are also bolstered. This dynamic is argued to be a process of self-making.

Chapter four explores the women’s relationships with their neighborhood as a critical site and expression of their self-making. In contrast to how their lives are officially recounted and evaluated, specifically as residents of a “favela,” I reveal how they narrate their lives through the landscape and space of the neighborhood and suggest how this act reveals the group’s affirmation of their life trajectories and experiential knowledge. Their narrations not only recount the ways in which these women relate to their present lives, but are also a counter-hegemonic (non-dominant) reinterpretation of their environment which provides visions of the potential of the neighborhood, particularly for younger, sometimes hopeless residents.

The final chapter, five, lays out how Valdete has guided the group around the orientation towards blackness, which is perhaps best revealed in their public life. I also examine how this orientation does and does not help them in their self-making around ageing. Situating these women’s praxis within the tradition of black expressive culture and diasporic healing practices suggests the possibilities of this individual affective work to the larger project of collective wellbeing and struggle.

CHAPTER ONE With My Sweat

On February 28, 2007, I joined Valdete at her invitation to attend a speech she was giving in one of Belo Horizonte’s adjacent municipalities. It was in honor of

International Women’s Day (March 8th) and she was speaking alongside a graduate student who recently had completed a master’s thesis in social psychology on Valdete’s life story. Valdete began her speech by saying her life was “common,” nothing extraordinary. I had heard her talk about her life many times and she began her life narrative with the account of the death of her parents when she was very young in her birth state of Bahia and her subsequent adoption by a middle class white family who moved her to the capital. She was one of the few black children in her middle-class neighborhood and worked in their home rather than going to school. She had no official birthday and no last name. She eventually assumed September 7th, Brazilian

Independence Day, as her own and threw herself her first birthday party by making money doing small chores for her neighbors. She also decided she would give herself the last name she never had and completed the necessary paperwork as a teenager to take ‘da

Silva’ – a common last name – as her own.

Eventually she ran away from the home that was not home, worked briefly as a nanny and was sent by her “affectionless” parents to a nunnery where she received the attentive care she longed for. In one-on-one interviews, Valdete spoke about the abuses she endured as a child that she does not publicly recount. Her public story extends into her marriage to a soccer player, her numerous children, her husband’s gambling addiction

and absence, her coping with raising children, and her residing and organizing in a

‘favela.’ It was in the neighborhood of Alto Vera Cruz, the “favela,” that she became a public figure, mobilizing around access to basic infrastructure and housing and politicizing people to exercise their rights and privileges as citizens. She talks about the singing group as a commitment to the women in the neighborhood and her greatest passion. She links these events into the story of her life.

The day of the speech, I heard Valdete recount for the first time what she would say as a little girl,

“I was not born. I appeared in a piece of cow shit.” Eu não nasci. Eu apareci numa bosta de boi.

From Bahia to Minas, middle class white family to favela, from nobody to someone.

Reverberating in this statement and Valdete’s story is that her struggles to survive is also an endeavor to render herself as whole and substantive in the face of the anonymity in which she was cast. “I am part of the family of the anonymous. I am a woman, black, poor and do not belong to a powerful family.”35 Maria Osmarina Silva Souza, the now resigned Brazilian minister of the Environment, captures her birth in the same family of anonymity that Valdete cites in her analogy of cow manure. I give particular metaphorical attention to the dark mass of invisible people, the black garbage dump that

Carolina de Jesus describes in the opening quote, as a contemplation of Valdete’s blackness, her racialization and the silenced history in which black people, but specifically black women in Brazil stir. Anonymity, in these women’s cases, can be argued as a condition of being black; for Valdete, it is the circumstances of isolation,

35 See Forbes Brasil (http://altino.blogspot.com/2006/12/caprichos-de-sonhadores.htp) (9.18.08)

without a point of emergence, a birthday, a name, a family or recognition in the world.

Valdete’s efforts to self-realize are bound to the social position and its projected ethos into which she was interpellated as a poor black woman. Race by analogy of manure, or presented through her black identity are foregrounded in her efforts to transform herself and the lives of others, conscious of her racial, gendered and classed position. She is a self-made leader, a woman whose agency in her own emotional, political and interpersonal propagation, is a direct response to how she was “being-made.”

Valdete’s life is an example of the self-making I explore in this dissertation and is the basis for the formation of the group; it is poetic in the stark literality of her acts of self-creation. However, it is the nature, quality and sites of her agency to feel like

‘somebody’ that refract the types of self-making, less dramatic than self-naming, but equally nuanced, undergone by group members in varying capacities and modes. Valdete rarely divulges her own needs, but she does voice her own vulnerabilities and observes in other black women what she has been through and knows. Her own insecurities are even manifest in the story she tells of wanting to do something for the women she observed with bags of medication, sharing that, “I didn’t have an education. So I thought, what can

I do for them?” At the same time she wanted to mobilize around the erosion of these women’s self-esteem, she also suffered from feelings of self-doubt around her own capabilities to alter their realities. Her personal struggles with her family were known by women in the neighborhood and stood beside her longstanding commitment to the quality of life of its residents. Many of the women remembered her from as far back as thirty years, seeing her collecting water at the communal well or canvassing the neighborhood on behalf of residents’ rights or the communist parties’ activities. In spite of widespread

political disinterest, group members think about Valdete as a woman with similar origins, dedicated to the neighborhood and they articulated indebtedness to her for having created the group and providing them with the space, care and a creative opportunity they rarely received in their lives. It was Valdete’s ability and desire to create the group that affirmed her stature as a struggling black woman who accomplished a degree of recognition as well as helping to energize the possibility of the group member’s transformations.

* * *

This chapter travels into these women’s vantages to reveal the dimensions of their life experiences and explore broadly their subjectivity leading up to joining the group. I argue that the types of roles and positions into which they were ascribed by their families, employers and society in general, reflect the gendered racial and class subordination that flow through and configure Brazilian society and its social relations. Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation (1971) continues to be a useful concept and vocabulary in describing how black women are ascribed these roles and how ideological systems read, signal and constitute (its) subjects. So too is his discussion of the practice of hailing articulate how systems identify and summon particular subjects. Both the notion of interpellation and the act of hailing capture the non-verbal elements of racialization, which operate through body language and affect. The qualities of these notions expand the theorization of racialization and racism to encompass affective experiences as well as intellectual ones. Drawing attention to this domain helps guide my emphasis on the

textures, the feelings and the sentient experiences around gendered racialization that these women have had both before and after participating in the group.

I do, however, tinker with the idea of hailing to characterize the formation of the group and the women’s identification with one another. Moving it away from Althusser’s

Marxian ideological framework, I draw on a Foucaultian idea of power in order to conceive of it as a counter-hegemonic act that subjects use to identify, influence and re- envision others. Using a hail, Valdete began inculcating them into a different social consciousness around their positionality and life possibilities. This process, as I will describe in this chapter and throughout the dissertation, forms part of a larger political practice of black women hailing other black women into alliances and solidarities into what Michelle Wallace calls a “conceptual community” of black women, forged out of the recognition of “how deeply we, as individual subjects, have had to become aware of the following painful fact: it is our job to fight for justice for black girls because no one else will” (2004:84).

In examining their earlier lives, I focus on these women’s formative experiences to reveal how they lived their gendered, racial and class positioning and how this registered in their affective worlds and self-conception. Many of their emotions in recalling their earlier lives register the impacts of living as economically poor, racialized women in Brazil. My objective is thus to sculpt a portrait of the accumulated feelings and experiences that give texture to and make palpable gendered, racialization in Brazil and the lives of this generation of black women. Rather than trying to isolate instances of racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination, I attempt to layer the dynamics of their engagement with the world incurred through their particular bodies, and highlight the stitching of these ascriptions into their sense of self.

Consequently, this chapter labors like the dissertation to analytically focus on the types of racial, gendered, class and sexual ascriptions the women experience while holding them in tension with the ways in which they experience, feel, confront and make sense of these scripting forces. I focus on the emotions that came up around their life experiences to explore their self-making in relationship to how they were socially positioned to perform roles of service and embody subservience. I give specific attention to their emotions of nostalgia, love and anger to consider how they self-made around the roles of daughters, mothers, wives and employees, which were those the women referenced most and with which they self-identified. These emotions are entry points into their subjective expressions of the ways in which they lived within interlocking racial, gender and class norms. In hearing how they experienced, felt and moved in relation to these ascriptions, black women’s sentiments and perspectives about living in intersecting meanings of race, gender and class in Brazil are voiced and offer alternative understandings of the currents of their self-making. Black women in Brazil have always lived within oppressive social worlds yet their subjective experiences are less told and their navigations and interpretations of their circumstances silenced both by society and quieted by themselves. Little is known on how women live within this silence and the nature of their own silence itself. Luiza Bairros explains,

Equally as strong as our silence is our other “speech,” transmitted through our black skin and realized through the braided hair of the helper. An image placed in our rightful terms, disconnected from the representations of submission attributed to us black women and men (1995:458).

Understanding these women’s lives and their presence in their terms is one effort in complicating the impacts of the social policies, historical narratives and hegemonic

ideologies that have obscured the living conditions and nature of black women’s daily struggles and lifeways in Brazil. Through this framework, this chapter provides the “back stories” to the formation of the group and the common experiential references points shared by group members.

AMBIVALENT BEGINNINGS

THE LITTLE BEAUTY OF MOMMY, THE BEAUTY OF DADDY, THE LITTLE BEAUTY OF JOSÉ MY HUSBAND. MOTHER OF MY SONS, AUNTY OF MY NIECES AND NEPHEWS, GRANDMOTHER OF MY GRANDCHILDREN AND ALSO, BEFORE, LONG AGO, GRANDDAUGHTER OF MY GRANDPARENTS, NIECE OF MY UNCLES AND AUNTS AND SISTER OF MY BROTHERS. 36

Like many of the women, Violeta’s life began in a small town in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. She narrates her story straight forwardly, keeping a smile on her face and asserting details as needed. We sat talking over fresh brewed coffee one morning in the home she began building when she was a fifteen year-old new wife and soon-to-be mother. 37 She began by saying she never knew her mother who died when she was an infant and spoke of the cruelty of her father who abandoned her in the town

36 Interspersed through this first chapter are segments from two narrative poems written by one of the group members. 37 These women narrated their stories in various locations. Most invited me into their homes, to eat meals, meet their families, conduct interviews or just talk. Some gave me an open invitation to come to their homes soon after meeting them, others it took over nine months of my presence with the group to say they would invite me to their homes at some point. In several instances those offers turned into visits and in others they remained as invitations and one of the conversations they would frequently have with me. What became clear through the development of trust and more candid relationships was that women were often concerned about my reaction to what they called their “humble” homes and food. I am not sure how much this point was the reason behind some women never having me over, but it is an important ethnographic point both for the spaces in which women revealed their oral histories and how those spatial dimensions was were part of their story as well as where women, whom I did not visit in their homes, shared with me about their lives. Most women were open to questions about their lives and experiences, they merely were revealed in a variety of spaces during my fieldwork and this is reflected in the ethnography. 75

square when she was nine years old. Her contorted middle finger still carries the mark of his brutality – he ran her hand through a sugarcane press. I often wondered about that finger and Violeta accents the telling of this story with it. She spoke to group members matter-of-factly about her father’s violence, often emphasizing with this finger. As she spoke, she would gaze at it and the plasticity of her stare, I later came to interpret, was the thin but effective veneer to a history of trials whose impacts she negotiates everyday.

Childhood is a phase of life that the majority of the women, like Violeta, said they never experienced and ambivalently spoke about. The playing, singing and freedom that they now enjoy and associate with the idea of childhood was present in only some of the women’s early years and was told in relation to the different ways of life in the interior.

For most, labor, responsibility and little play were the living conditions they described as framing their youth. The expectation of children to help support their economically poor families in Brazil was the norm of the time especially in rural life and continues to be in the face of controversially viewed child labor laws.38 Even today as Nilza Iraci (2000) forcefully writes,

Domestic labor still is, since black slavery in Brazil, the space the racist Brazilian society destined to be the proprietary occupation of black women. In this space, there are still relatively few gains for workers and the relationships are characterized by servitude. In many places, the forms of recruitment are predominantly neo-slave like, as girls are brought from the interior, on request, and submitted to sub-human conditions in domestic spaces.39

38In 1998, the Constitution was amended raising the minimum working age from 14 to 16 and working children would have to say in school. This legislation also banned minors from working in high-risk work until the age of 18. Numerous activists and parents in the neighborhood claimed that this change resulted in an increase of young specifically male children turning to the drug trade, because they had free time and economic need. For recent literature on the lived reality of Brazilian labor laws see Custódio 2007; Kenny 2007; Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego 2005 39 See http://www.cfemea.org.br/jornalfemea/detalhes.asp?IDJornalFemea=529 (04/14/09) 76

They started their working lives early, in some instances, by age five. Women, like

Jasmine, worked as day laborers on large farms or plantations or labored on their own land where their families were sharecroppers. She summed up her childhood as “a lot of suffering” comparing her life to that of a slave, an apt simile given the history of those times. She spoke of the bitter cold of the dawn in the mountainous, mining region where she picked coffee alongside her parents, six days a week. The weight of a full basket of the red beans and the fear of the snakes that were entwined in the trees’ roots were some of the vivid memories that still captivated her at age sixty-six. Generally the women spoke of the hard work that life in the roça (farms of the interior) entailed, from their long hours milling coffee or rice to harvesting other food staples, to their other incessant daily responsibilities, including washing clothes, cooking and often taking care of their siblings. Iris recounted that her doctor had told her that one of her kidneys was smaller than the other from carrying children on her hip beginning at age six. Similarly, Líria recalling moments of her own youth one cold morning in Belo Horizonte, had me caress the top of her head where her skull had flattened out from the countless loads of water she balanced on her head and its malleable cranium as a child. The contours of their bodies were testimonies to the labor they performed.

Dona Iris’ memories of her childhood concentrated on the responsibilities in the home her mother displaced on her as the eldest child and daughter. Her sister assessed

Iris’ life by saying that she “kept quiet” as she performed the roles traditionally expected of her. Jacinta summarized that Iris “did not have the right to live, not only in the city but the interior,” and in contrast to Jacinta’s life “rhythm,” Iris was to “live for her family.”

Indeed Iris spoke of virtually raising her other siblings, along with managing housework

when she was eight years old. Her mother would lock herself in a room to sew and Iris assumed the role of mothering her siblings. The bonds forged through this parental relationship still exist today and I was privy to it when her younger brother, now in his fifties, came from Rio de Janeiro to celebrate her birthday and stated to me how precious

Iris is to him; he considers her one of his two mothers. While Iris and Jacinta come from the same family, Iris speaks of her childhood in the interior and her adulthood life in the city in terms of the consistency of the demands placed on her and the growing amount of roles she assumed: daughter, mother, wife, grandmother, etc. There are neither praises nor laments for the varying periods or phases of her life. Iris’ narration related her life’s labor as both the successful fulfillment of what was expected of her as well her own affirmation of the extraordinary nature of her ordinary, rarely acknowledged.

As children, most of the women received minimal school-based education because of the economic demands on the family and gender roles. They spoke about this reality with mixed emotions acknowledging that it was common during their time, but not always what they wanted. Whether in the city or the interior, women recounted going to primary schools in plain, rustic classrooms with strict teachers and learning the basics of reading and writing but not becoming proficient in either. Their fathers often pulled them out of school by the time they were ten or twelve not wanting them to learn to write, fearing they would compose “love letters to boys.” The large majority of the women are functionally literate either from basic education they received as children or more often is the case, because they went back to school in the neighborhood as adults.40

40 Overwhelmingly their memories whether of lyrics, words, names or anything else they needed to retain, were robust invested in as their principal mode of retaining information. Writing was a different skill set and I was frequently asked to document names of places or events or to dial 78

Economically poor women and notably women of color historically have struggled to sustain access to education in Brazil and black women’s presence in higher education continues to be nominal. As 1999 data suggests, in a national household survey, black women between the age of 45-59 reported 3.41 years of schooling in comparison with 5.99 of white women, 3.59 of black men and 6.24 of white men; for those 60 and above, the numbers are more telling: 1.56 years for black women 1.82 for black men, 3.59 for white women, and 4.23 for white men (Henriques 2002:41). These age ranges represent those of the women of the group and as Henriques assesses, should be considered against the national average of 6 years of schooling (all ages) and mark the low increase across the population in educational levels over the 20th century that have only maintained racial inequalities in general slow growth (2002:42). Since the 1990s, the numbers of educated youth have improved both along the lines of race and gender, with specific increases in women’s education (ibid 41-42).

For women of these earlier generations, the economic demands of their family often were what drew them out of school to work. Orquídea recounted attempting to stay in school in the city, but ultimately dropped out because she had missed significant time working as a laundress and was held back several grade levels. The combination of the economic demands and her being much older than those in her classes resulted in her embarrassment and provoked her to drop out. Even Valdete, albeit formally adopted by a middle-class white couple in the city, still recounted not being put in school (she worked inside the home as a servant), resolving instead, to enroll herself. Her eventual exit was

phone numbers or read signs. Their requests were sometimes disparagingly explained with comments of being “stupid” because of their lack of education, but in general, it was matter-of- fact as most were not fluent writers or readers in Portuguese, including myself. 79

due to a struggle with her adoptive parents, who would punish her by not allowing her to attend school; she took herself out, discouraged by and frustrated with her parents.

These shared memories of the threat of love letters never written and these women’s short-lived experiences in schools humored them at times. In others they communicated their frustration with the norms and expectations of their lives as women to be uneducated and without decision-making power around many of the choice in their lives. In numerous cases, in spite of the economic hardship of their families, these women’s brothers were allowed to stay in school and sometimes were even sent away for an education. Aware of this gendered treatment, the women did not lament some fifty odd years later; rather they had pursued their desire for an education later in life as well as communicating their efforts to provide their children with greater access and educational opportunities.

With structural and social limitations on their education, black women’s social worth has been constructed around and appreciated through their work-value, specifically in maintaining the status quo of their domestic labor (cleaning and sexual) and investing

(not always intentionally or willingly) in economic, racial and gender hierarchies of white patriarchal privilege birthed with slavery. The roles in which they are cast are sites where the meanings of different bodies and their modes of being are constructed and understood. Their bodies are transformed into mechanisms of varied service, producing children who, all too often without the resources of education and connections, occupy and perform the same social functions of their parents. It is this social casting in homes, their own and others, jobs and family structures in which normative forces around gender and race are operative that positioned these women to be construed as bodies of service,

rather than thinking, reflective beings. In a Foucaultian sense, these women’s experiences reveal how there exists in Brazil a specific subject position of the “poor, black woman” into which those born non-white and gendered as female, live against the odds of being subjected or made into. Womanhood, for black women, is socially constructed around the ability to take care and be of service whether as mothers, wives and or employees.

Azaléia asked me to imagine a child taking care of a child. Like many of the women, she worked as a domestic laborer inside the homes of affluent land-owning families, cooking, cleaning and taking care of children. She specified that she lived inside the main home while the rest of the help lived in small quarters in the back. She attributed learning all of her domestic skills from these other servants, from cooking, to cleaning to washing clothes. She was treated well but ran away at fifteen when a young male friend asked her to marry him. She recounted this story various times when speaking about her youth and specified that this was an attempt to escape the hard work of domestic labor, rather than an act of love or even like. After two months, the police caught her and her young husband and she recounted being given a virginity test, the procedure of the day.

She prided herself on never consummating the marriage in spite of the public humiliation she experienced.

Hortênsia spoke with greater frustration and often contempt of the trials and acts of her early working life outside of her home. She is one of the shyest women of the group and her cynical speech about the world and her inability to economically advance bleeds through most of her reflections on her life. Matter-of-factly, she related leaving home because her family was struggling. One of the first times she discussed her early life with me, she spoke about her experiences in domestic service with Margarida and

me, as we sat in the back of the bus traveling to a performance on a hot, humid October afternoon. She winced as she sat down and spent some time rubbing her right knee, which consistently causes her pain and forced her to retire by age forty-two. I inquired about right knee and she responded by saying that both knees hurt but the right was the worse of the two. She did not cite one event but linked a chain of memories and comments on her working life as a cleaner in apartment buildings, homes and businesses and how her body now aches. She told of a house where she worked as a cook at age twelve where her daily responsibilities included cleaning and preparing the bedding, and specifically fixing dinner by six pm. While cooking on a wood burning stove, still typical in the interior today, she remembered breaking a piece of wood on her knee. At that time, she realized that she had injured it, but in spite of the pain, she finished dinner on time to serve the children before lying down. When her patroa, her female boss, arrived home, she inquired where Hortênsia was and the children informed their mother that she was resting because of the injury. The patroa went to her room frustratingly asking what was going on, demanding that her meal be served to her. Staring out the bus window,

Hortênsia recalled the woman calling her, “o pé de boi da casa” (the drudge worker and handywoman) asserting, “I want to be served.” She remembered the sharp pain when she got up from the bed that day. As Hortênsia spoke, Margarida instantly nodded and affirmed the experiences she identified with living in the interior, working on farmsteads and taking care of other people’s kids. She continued to nod and say, “I know.”

The traditions of domestic help and black women’s history are historically coterminous in Brazil extending into the colonial period and slavery and continuing to have a salient legacy today. As enslaved labor, black women’s roles, most often in white

families, are well documented, serving as the backbone of the home-life as nursemaids, cooks, and cleaners.41 Domestic work structurally remained one of the most viable job options for black women post-abolition. Due to the racial and class hierarchies emergent out of slave society combined with black women’s systematic lack of access to education, they continued in these work positions. Ely Souto dos Santos writing on how domestic labor is constructed from various social standpoints in Brazilian society, suggests that from the discursive context of social protection entities, domestic service is constructed as an isolated profession, lowest in the employment hierarchy and a job that is not one of intention, but one that, mainly women, are forced into for lack of other options

(1983:115). Beginning in colonial society, the separation of black women’s bodies within society reflects their very isolation and the specificity of the link between the jobs allowed and enslaved women’s bodies. These forms of isolation and options, Valdete touched on when speaking to crowds, “where else do poor, uneducated women from the favela work? In homes?!” The racial and class position of women historically have shaped their work options, their social positioning and the value ascribed to them.

Michael Hanchard’s now well-cited article on the “black cinderella”42 addresses and connects black women’s roles to their socially acceptable contexts in Brazil. He relates the story of the black daughter of the governor of the Brazilian coastal state of

Espírito Santo who was questioned and accosted for her presence in an apartment building’s elevator in 1993. She was falsely assumed to be a domestic worker because of her physical blackness and gender in the context of the elevator of this building. She

41 See Giacomini 1988; Graham 1988 42 For scholar’s discussion of black women and their acceptable contexts see Caldwell 2007, Gilliam and Gilliam 1999. 83

pressed charges and was crowned in the media with the title of black cinderella for what was considered to be her entitled or privileged protest. While this example gained notable media coverage, little contradiction is ever articulated academically or was publicly expressed in the field concerning the hyper-presence of black women in the streets of low-income neighborhoods, collecting cans, dressed in white divining buzios or frying acarajé. Economic poverty, hustling to make a living (whether sex labor, selling/collecting goods on the streets or scrubbing in homes) or religious prowess are salient socially constructed geographic, embodied and psychic sites of black women’s identity in Brazil where their racialized and gendered bodies are legible and legitimate.

In these spaces, black women’s bodies and womanhood are socially read for and through their labor: in their capacity to provide food, sex, a clean home or a glimpse into the spiritual realm.

These particular forms of interpellation of who black women are and where their bodies are deemed in/out of context and in/out of use reflects how racial, gendered, economic and sexual hierarchies of difference are spatially configured and naturalized in

Brazil. Katherine McKittrick identifies this process as a form of “geographic domination…worked out through reading and managing specific racial-sexual bodies”

(2006: xv). Rendered as images, not typically as sentient beings, black women have gained saliency through their roles in servitude emergent from racialized demands and divisions of labor also implicated in views of their sexuality. Black women are often interpellated as servants, assumed to be holding the lowest employment positions in any given work environment as well as hyper-sexual, commodified bodies available for

exploitation.43 These configurations of black women’s labor carry within them the inescapable paradox of human beings negotiating discourses and performance of the supra-human and the sub-human, the virtually enslaved. How black women physically and/or vocally maneuver within and move beyond the bounds of these social hierarchical fields is little discussed. “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name…..My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented”

(Spillers 2000:57). Much like the revelation-conclusion to which Hortense Spiller’s arrives about black women in the US, the women of group are overwhelmingly conscious of the roles they are expected to perform. Their oral histories reveal the range of their sense of over-determination, their resistances and their relenting as well as their use of their internal compasses to orient their selfhood. What is at stake with the transgression of these roles helps to reveal greater sensibilities around black women’s subjectivity and agency within and beyond their interpellated bodies.

FAR AWAY FROM MY CHILDHOOD. MEMORIES YES, BUT NOSTALGIA NOT AS MUCH. THERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY THE POOR DO NOT HAVE A CHILDHOOD BUT I DID HAVE ONE; IT WAS WELL LIVED WITH MY BROTHERS, MY UNCLES AND COUSINS AS WELL AS THE NEIGHBORS. LIVED IN THE COUNTRY. NOTHING BAD.

I turn to the ambivalence and nostalgia voiced into some of the women’s account of their young working lives as affective spaces that tap into their early self-making and the contexts in which this occurred. Acacia, a nimble, energetic sixty-nine year-old, remembered scrambling up trees, eating fruit and inventing toys out of rocks and leaves.

43 The shimmering flesh of dancing black female bodies captures a global audience and desire during Brazil’s world-renowned yearly Carnival celebration. The sex-tourism industry that merges those desires with living bodies and their commodification are now well-cited and well- recognized examples of this historical positioning of black women. 85

Yet, she held her appreciation of the moments of play in emotional tension with her mother’s struggle to provide enough food for her six children, recalling weevils rising to the surface of the pot of boiling rice, the handout of her wealthy uncle to his widowed sister. She described the conditions of most people as “poor” but also recounted her uncle bringing her family to live with him after the death of her father. She detailed the abundance of her uncle’s food, animals and land and then said, “and then look what he did!” he built Acacia’s mother and her children a small house in the middle of his pigsty.

Acacia, her mother and five siblings slept side-by-side in this shack. She summed it up by saying that, “It was a lot of suffering” and that her mother was “very poor, born poor.”

Acacia no less always made statements of feelings of pleasure and joy, telling how she adventurously scavenged for fruit and slept on the floor alongside her brothers. I will later argue, as exemplified by Acacia, that these women’s remembering and claiming of their pasts, both the difficult and satisfying, are registers themselves of the types of self- making encouraged by the group; for now, I suggest it provides an emotional reference for how they have self-fashioned over time.

More than just memories of weary or whimsical childhoods, this nostalgia elucidates the suture of their experiences of being-made and how they started to self- make. From their roles in service and the economic and psychological hardship many endured in these conditions, they self-conceive as independent, tough and durable women who asserted that they “arrived” in their fifties and sixties through hard labor and in spite of the obstacles they confronted. Their accounts of their early working lives included gaining trade skills and establishing a strong ethic of responsibility, which they then used to describe their careers as adults. They highlighted their memories of cultivating and

foraging for food and the general movement and action of their day-to-day lives, which were difficult but a source of pride. They consistently uttered in the same breath the daily hard work performed to eat, such as roasting coffee beans, milling rice or slaughtering a pig. The women built a sense of self-sufficiency through their labor whether planting their own food, foraging in the natural world or through their ability to wash and iron well. Acacia’s dual appreciation of the simplicity of her childhood and the recognition of her life of labor from childhood on, was present in her stories and reflected her memories of a childhood viewed through the lens of her life struggles and her participation in the group. Acacia emphasized that in comparison with her early years, her life is “paradise now” because she economically has her basic resources covered and is afforded choice.

Other women highlighted the abundance of food on farms in comparison to their urban trails as adults to earn adequate funds to purchase food they could plant and harvest on the farm. Their relative material resources varied during their child and adulthoods, but the women’s self-construction as industrious and independent women elucidates how their development of self was influenced by the demands the roles they were expected to perform and embody. Even in the case of Acacia, whose thoughts that everyone lived like she did conveyed less of a sense of social subordination, still articulated a trajectory of hard work and innovation to get her, materially and emotionally, where she is today.

Following this example, I suggest their nostalgia illuminates the creative elements of their self-making within their racial, gendered and classed positions. Acacia’s insinuation of her own partial naiveté during her youth regarding her belief that most people lived in similarly needy conditions, infers how her understanding of the implications of class difference (she was aware that she was “poor” and there were “rich”

people) facilitated a less hierarchized sense of her social positioning, that her contemporary knowledge of the complexities of access to resources living and working in the city no longer allows.

I examine nostalgia as an affective register of the freedom of movement and spirit present in these women’s early experiences. In those memories, there were understated laments about the lack of presence of these forces in much of their adult lives and the consequent joy in discovering them again in the context of the group. Those who expressed nostalgia highlighted these spaces of personal development and self-expression of their youth in the interior and particularly around the natural world. In these open spaces, they experienced freedom to explore, be creative and imaginative. Their meanderings in the woods stood in contrast to their daily responsibilities in homes and beyond in which they were treated in relation to and performed the roles of their services whether as domestic workers or daughters. Jacinta frequently spoke of the interior with a smile and recalled climbing mountains, bathing in creeks and wandering through the woods in the long skirts girls wore at the time. She navigated the natural world with local lore as her field guide and these fluid and energetic recollections of the folklore and the blooming flowers of the interior also stood in contradistinction to memories of her adult life that circled around the end of her twenty-nine year marriage and her unfaithful husband. She talked openly about both her single and married life in Belo Horizonte and the rural space of the interior, but she evoked a tranquility of a bucolic interior, counterposed with the anxieties of her adult, metropolitan life.

Tied into this nostalgia and the creative potential that seemed to run through it, their memories of music, song, and dance also conjured experiences of freedom,

exploration and expression. Acacia and Jacinta spoke of the traditions of singing and dancing that rural parties or Sundays, their days off, brought for all ages. The women remembered singing in groups at these events, sustaining the music through a call-and- response improvisation of verses. Margarida shared that after work and evening prayers, she and the other kids working on the farm were allowed to play and sing in a roda

(circle). She said this was a much-loved time of play that in recollections of her youth followed her statements around her daily life, which she captured in the following words:

“We were really suffering on the farm where I lived. We did not have liberty. When someone [new employees] arrived, we could not get to know them. We had to always stay there in the quarters.” The short but regular collective music-making was a space and time that stood out, during which Margarida and the other children could freely and playfully communicate with one another. As one of the earliest group activities, Valdete had the women recall these songs, cantigas de roda, from their childhoods. Jacinta contributed music to the group’s repertoire and, on occasion, would croon nursery- rhymesque songs as we spoke of her meanderings in the hilly region of her youth. It was the freedom of movement in dance and play, the humor and improvisation of song that comprised the critical moments and spaces of their self-expression and was revitalized in the realization of the group.

Through the freedom of self-discovery and a time un-structured by labor demands, the notion of childhood was constructed around feelings of amusement and release. This association was what was evoked when many women said they did not experience a “childhood” and informs why the idea in the group, of play and joy, is experienced as like a “childhood.” Some women stated that they were experiencing their

childhood for the first time in the group. For women like Azaléia and Jasmine, their stories portrayed their youth as a state of living and laboring in the demands and roles produced through the intersection of their class, racial and gendered bodies. As referenced in the section of narrative poem inserted throughout this chapter, the idea of a childhood itself is interpreted as a classed idea in Brazil.44 These women did not convert nostalgia for activities or events of childhood. This is not to say that they did not have times or spaces in which they exercised existential liberty, but rather to suggest that freedom of movement and thought unburdened by the increasing social expectation of their bodies as black women living in economic poverty did not configure into how they spoke of their experiences growing up. The stories of self and the memories they share with others carry the weight of the impact of the roles and set of demands that they performed for most of their lives. And, the talk of their sturdy backs carrying emotional and physical loads speaks precisely of the roles these women were interpellated into and expected to embody.

Since this is a project, like that of the group, that seeks to unshackle black women’s subjectivity in Brazil from debilitating stereotypes in order to enable their own accounts of experiences, I ask: what was it like carrying this weight and what happens when they can no longer sustain it? Absent from the narratives of women who did not reminisce about childhood were the elements of their youth that fulfilled their own non- material desires and human spirits. How did they reconcile the demands of the outside world with those of their inner ones?

44 See Hecht 1998 90

RELATIONSHIPS, LOVE AND ANGER

I RECEIVED A RIGOROUS EDUCATION FROM MY PARENTS, FROM MY GRANDPARENTS AND THE PARENTS OF MY PARENTS…

I now turn to the emotion of love as an affective conceptual realm to think about the variety of feelings they described around their intimate sphere of relationships in their lives. Their experiences with family members, husbands and even children offer another angle on how they self-made in relationship to their social ascriptions and interactions.

Strong and generally supportive familial relationships mediated the demands and toils of everyday life for some women. For those who recalled loving parents or grandparents, they were praised as formidable forces in these women’s oral histories.

Jacinta and Iris both recalled their father’s storytelling, his kind way with people and his

spiritually healing hands45 at the same time describing the physical demands he expected of his children in attending to their farm and home life. He was the eighth of nine children and the son of these women’s grandfather who was the child of a white landowner and his black servant. Jacinta spoke of the family reunion that brings together the descendants of this grandfather from all over Brazil, in spite of class and geographic separation. Jacinta and Iris’ mother and brother continue to live in the same neighborhood, which acts as a hub for family visits from various states. This strong sense of family provides critical emotional and economic support that many of the other women did not recount having.

Lilás’ father also emerged as an important figure in her personal formation. Her mother passed when she was young and her father and her paternal grandmother raised her in her mother’s absence. She spoke of him compassionately and said that her children were always excited when he would visit them in the city. Outside of her words of praise, she recalled two specific stories about his nature. In recounting her wedding that her father had arranged, she spoke of the delicate way her father, after a traumatic first sexual experience, approached her new husband and explained to him that both in sex and marriage he had to treat her with care and affection. As she inhaled from a burning cigarette in another conversation, she remembered during one of her father’s visits hiding outside her home to smoke and quickly stamping out a cigarette when her father strolled

45 Their father was a benzadeiro who aided the sick in their region. Benzadeiros or literally translated as blessers, provide blessings often with herbs, holy or infused water and their own energies to help heal people with illness, broadly conceived. While they were raised Catholic, their father’s practices, associated with animistic faiths in Brazil, were a source of tension in the family since their mother is a devout Catholic and their father’s faith extended beyond Catholicism into Afro and Indigenous complex of practices often condemned and scorned as paganism in the country. 92

outside. He asked what she was doing and then rhetorically inquired if she was still hiding the fact that she smoked. She sheepishly replied “No.” She laughed telling this story embarrassingly stating that she was a grown woman with kids when this happened.

These anecdotes paint memories of a father who, in contrast to the experiences of many of the women, took an active role in raising his children, specifically investing in their emotional lives. In most cases, the women’s fathers subscribed to patriarch social conventions enforcing women’s roles in the home and family, which also was true with

Lilás. But her stories speak of a father who attempted to temper his daughter’s subordination and abuse in his enactment of the social customs like marriage, linked to the economic demands and lifeways of time. The bond she spoke about as sharing with her father illustrates a relationship of humor and compassion, forged during her childhood, which instilled in her a sense of support that most likely influenced her approach to her marriages and the commitment she illustrates in how she has raised her own children and grandchildren.

One day, I commented on Lilás’ patience with her grandchildren, three of whom she was looking after while their parents worked, and she linked her caring for her children and grandchildren to a philosophy of family. She said, “Our children are our investment.” Her belief in her children as her future, I suggest, is an extension of a sense of family she osmosed from her father and grandmother; and this belief built within her a strong sense of purpose that, in spite of her economic and emotional struggles, has enabled Lilás’ sense of self to not be whittled away by the economic and health difficulties she has confronted. Lilás, Jacinta and Iris’ enumeration of their relationships with their fathers were instances in which these women gestured to how men had played

an influential and valuable role in building these women’s sense of autonomy and agency within patriarchal and hierarchical social structures and relations.

For various women, their family histories were brief or absent, sometimes too painful to speak of; others did not know much about their origins. Vacant and fractured pasts were often the starting points of these women’s oral histories. Valdete only had fleeting memories of her parents who died when she was a small girl in Bahia. Orquídea, one of the few women who grew up in the city, indicated that she knew her parents were from a small town in the interior, but not much else. Salgueira said it was rumored that she looked like her mother who supposedly had been murdered by a dynamite explosion in her home thirteen days after Salgueira’s birth; Salgueira was found alive in the home and taken in by her stern father and step-mother. She is a soft-spoken light skinned black woman who, by the end of my fieldwork, was comfortable enough to keep her head up and sustain some level of eye contact during our conversations. Violeta too did not know her mother, but described her as “lighter” woman than she, and that her darker color came from her father’s mixed heritage of African descent and more conspicuously of bugre, the term she used to reference indigenous people.46 She described the father who abandoned her, as a tall dark man with straight long black hair, who reappeared one day at the door of her godparents’ home. She did not recognize him at first and told her godfather that the devil was at the front door. Her father had come bearing a knife ready to kill her and Violeta explained that her eventual move to Belo Horizonte was partially due to her fear of him attempting to kill her. Her father’s contempt for her and others eventually led to his imprisoned and his own murder when she was in her twenties. The

46 Bugre is also defined as “wild, Indian; isolated people; and indigenous people from the south of the country [Brazil]” selvagem, índio; pessoa arredia. (isolated) Povo indigína do sul do país. (Francisco S. Borba. Dicionário de usos do Português do Brasil. São Paulo. Editora Ática, 2002:243) Jacinta also offered a descriptive definition of bugre as “black people with good hair and captured in the forest.” Several women spoke of their relatives as rumored to have been captured in the forest. 95

images of these women’s relationships to parents born out fire and violence are extreme and certainly cannot be argued as the defining experiences of their human relationships or the feelings of abandonment, fear and submission that go along. However, they do foreground how their formative relationships with parents, produced through the same matrix of forces of race, gender, sexuality and class, produced varying feelings of isolation, invisibility and a desire for love, if not simply attention, in their lives. As in the case of Violeta, this complex range of emotion generated her sense of self as highly independent but also as marginal. And as I will discuss in the following chapter, the pulls of these often divergent feelings led to her to cling to the mantra “I am not crazy,” in justification of her of state of mind and its experiential basis.

Most often, the women simply described their parents with flat affect as struggling to get by and not emotionally or physically present. Hortênsia casually remembered her parents as barely around, too busy working to survive, and neither nurturing nor affectionate. Azaléia spoke infrequently and minimally about her youth, and only brought up details about her parents when asked. She and her brothers lived under the strict rules of her mother, who managed small food allocations with threats of beatings, and an alcoholic father who she once said, “Treated his donkey better than his children.” She asked me if I knew what it was like to eat green bananas to “kill hunger,” a practice that she had used at various points in her life to get by. She never went into detail about either of her parents, but when I asked more directly about her mother, who she often called, “Poor thing,” she paused and reflected,

My mom worked a lot….It’s that, my mom Celeste….was extremely poor. She had no money and did not even have enough to eat. I think that even with all that I have been through, I don’t think I have gone through a third of what she did. My

mom did not even have a place to arrive to….She was a person who washed clothes with a brush, earned very little.

Acacia elaborated on her mother’s life with parallel statement: The days when there were clothes to wash [of families], [my mom] would go wash them, when there were not, she would go hoe fields. If she didn’t work we did not eat…She suffered a lot, a lot. I do not think I’ve suffered even a third or a half of what she did.

Along with the meager conditions and hardship of her mother, Acacia spoke fluidly about her youth, both the struggles and the moments of enjoyment. In contrast to Acacia,

Azaléia’s sparse discussions and short answers about her family life intoned that this was a time of her life she remembered as a particular suffering and not one to revisit or discuss. Even though both women did not necessarily speak of close relationships with their mothers (or fathers), they articulated empathy for their mothers’ suffering, recognizing the economic and social constraints in which their mothers’ lived through the reference of their own life experiences. While this appreciation was not a direct articulation of love and probably came to them later in life, it conveyed a sense of sadness around their unconnected relationships as mothers and daughters and as women, as well as around the strained conditions that they intone made these types of relationships not possible even as they could have been a point of communion.

I draw on Azaléia’s story because it illustrates a set of conditions and context in which these women’s outlook on the world, both past and present were created. They had neither the resources, time nor precedent perhaps to forge parent-child relationships of emotional support. The circumstances were recounted as ones of survival in which cultivating a child’s affective domain with love and possibility may have necessitated a luxury of time and energy as well as the potential of such a vision. The families the

women sought to build and continue to nurture can be argued as one of the consequences of their formative familial experiences. Most of these women financially support as well as emotionally anchor their children and grandchildren in spite of never having had those types of relationships with their own parents or grandparents.

In Azaléia’s case, the silence around this part of her life was paired with am openness about her adult trials, which she spent hours recalling at her kitchen table and over her stove. She was one of the women with whom I developed a close rapport and level of intimacy and she led me into her complex affective world in which she emotionally teeters on the impossibility of finding love again in this lifetime and where the mental space in which she once attempted to end her life is still sketched. She preaches her mantra, “Life is good and beautiful, you just have to know how to live it” but this is an exercise of the present and not one she could summon or recognize in her own past.

AND SO IT WENT DAY AFTER DAY FOR 45 YEARS OF CONJUGAL LIFE OF MUCH SADNESS AND JOY AS WELL.

These women’s marriages offer another angle from which to explore the feelings surrounding their relationships with their spouses and how these shaped their self- making. As one of the central configuring experiences of the women’s lives and in memory, their marriages took them into their youth, the customs of the interior of Minas

Gerais as well as leading them into the mixed affective spaces of their conjugal worlds.

Marriages for most were a venture, not based on individual personal sentiments or sexual desire, but to find a husband who could provide for the women and their impending family. The changes in dating and marriage conventions in society are evidenced in the 98

differences between these women’s granddaughter’s searches for partners based on desires such as “love.” Whether the women had feelings for their partners or not was in many ways beyond the purpose of marriage by most of their accounts and love was not necessarily a sentiment heavily used to describe their feelings in their marriages. This does not imply these women did not have interests or desires fulfilled or left unfulfilled by the marriage, or as I will get to, that some of the women were fond of and loved their husbands. In fact love did hover around their fantasies, perhaps even real desires, of what intimate relationships could entail, but which some did not feel they could know. My intent is to highlight how as young women, they experienced the onus of their roles as young women of color from economically struggling families as being positioned to depend upon a male spouse to financially support them and to birth the children they were expected to yield. Their desire and sexuality were constructed within the rigid framework of patriarchal, heteronormative ideas of family and the feelings they described, specifically in relationship to love, in many ways reflect their self-making around this positioning.

Whether initiated in the city or beyond, their marriages were overwhelmingly pursued through the social beliefs and practices of the time that women should marry men and have children beginning in their early teenage years. Almost all of the women married before the age of twenty, most commonly to someone of their father’s choosing.

These husbands-to-be came from poor or working class families, labored on plantations and farms and typically were at least several years older. Violeta’s godfather, the man who took her in after her abandonment, arranged her marriage to a young man at fourteen. Following the conventions of the day, the women had mediated contact and

conversation with their fiancées through their parents before marrying, which Iris recalled about her engagement. She and Jacinta did however offer that their father believed in their right to choose a partner. Nonetheless, Iris, perhaps because she was the oldest child, illustrates the gendered quality of directive power and the nature of its imposition within her family in a biographical piece about the events leading up to her wedding. She specified that her brothers and uncles were,

so harsh that dating in reality did not exist, it was furtive, fearful glances and what you knew of another was what others said, little or nothing did you know about the feelings or interest of the person in question and the resource was to send messages and it was like this that one day a neighbor who was like a brother said to me that Paolo sent him to ask if I would marry him and I said I will think about and then respond and I thought he was what everyone said was a good husband, honest and a hard worker, courageous, from a family that was friend’s with my parents and grandparents and a colleague of my brothers, and admired by my cousins, in sum, the whole family. Yes, he was the ideal person and I sent someone to tell him I accepted marrying him.

With this perspective of marriage, Iris agreed and wed in 1955; she summed up their marriage as a good union for building their home and raising their children, resisting discussing the sentiments of love within this context.

Women’s recollections of their marriages reverberated the dissonance between their roles and how they lived and felt within them. They did not resist marrying, as their economic conditions and familial structures did not enable or permit this. Yet, Violeta recalled directly telling her husband after their wedding ceremony that she “did not like him” and that they “were going to live as friends.” She then moved with him to the hills surrounding the city center of Belo Horizonte pregnant with her first of thirteen children.

They built a one-bedroom shack and lived conjugally until he died in 1994. Margarida in her soft voice and nervousness in the context of our first recorded interview, recounted

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being married to a man who she did not love while, to this day, desired another that was not a possibility due to their social positioning. She was arranged to marry her cousin and fifteen days after this plan and their “dating,” they wed in spite of the fact that she had never met him. She spoke of her conflicted emotions around the marriage as follows:

It was a comedy. It was too much. This thing of marrying people without liking them is terrible. It was truly awful Celeste…when we don’t love someone [pause] It’s very bad….[she paused again and smiled] but everything worked out.

She shared that she grew to like her husband and admitted to him several years before he passed in the late 1980s that she indeed had not loved him at the time of the their marriage to which he responded that he would never had married her had he known.

These testimonies reveal marriage not only as relationship into which they were positioned to enter into without desire, but also relationships in which they were also expected to perform physical intimacy irrelevant of their desires. These women’s sexuality was pre-scripted as heteronormative and to be expressed in the form of sex in their roles as wives; it was not constructed as an expression of their beings or a locus of their desires for contact, connection and intimacy. For those who spoke about their sexual relationships, several recounted their sexual initiation as traumatic experiences. Those women spoke about their wedding nights and how they were not told anything about sex prior to engaging in it. Lilás recalled hearing older women snicker about weddings nights, never sharing more than an impending unknown, but indicating she would soon find out. She laughed at her own naiveté and said she thought that marriage was going to be like living with her brothers. One morning, Lilás and Margarida both humorously imparted to group members their respective surprise at seeing an erect penis for the first time. They then jokingly spoke of the shock of penetration by men who they had barely

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spoken to, did not necessarily desire and offered them no affection in the act. For Lilás, this sent her scrambling out of her new husband’s home, running across dark fields back to her father’s house, and refusing to go back. Margarida recounted reluctantly moving in with her new husband and telling him she did not want him to touch her. He forced himself on her and she said the experience was horrible. She fled her new home through the window seeking solace under a nearby tree where she awaited the immanent death she believed was occurring do to the “ripping” sensation of the experience. “Whoof!” was how she sounded out the penetration and with a change in disposition, she laughed making a quick sharp forward motion with her hand. Whether in informal one-on-one conversations or in the context of the group, these women followed up these accounts with jokes about how long it had been since they had had sex with men. Yet this humor and the commiseration of the group buffered and diffused the force of their early physical experiences of domination and objectification of being uninformed, young women, without much socially afforded space for relationships through which they could express and experience their own desires. Similarly, these stories were not connected to their adult sexual lives and the continued abuses that some revealed they had experienced, as well as the fulfillment they too shared imparted in other relationships.

Their stories of sex and early marriage are expressions, contemporary reflections, that capture the physical and emotional tensions of having one’s life, scripted through social conventions in service of other people’s needs, desires and expectations. The women provided an intimate register of how their positionality came to bear on their realization about their choices, desires and bodies. Women, like Margarida, Azaléia and

Lilás cared deeply for their husbands yet their feelings of love emerged within the nexus

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of hierarchies and roles in which they were cast and lived. They love because and in spite of their roles. Their testimonies of experiencing infidelity, domestic abuse and alcoholic husbands were uttered in the same narratives of marriages that lasted until their husbands’ passing; only eight of the women’s husbands were still alive during my fieldwork.47 Jacinta, one of four women who had separated from their husbands, reflected on her love for her husband, relating that, “love is when you are willing to give everything and dedicate yourself to another person.” She joked that “she must have really loved her ex-husband because she had done everything for him.” Reflecting back, she said this was the case even though she decided not to marry for burning love or passion’s sake, but rather with the belief she could grow to love him. During another interview she said her father, who was a major influence in her life, always liked her husband and inevitably, her father’s investment in their marriage weighed on her own; perhaps it was her father’s passing that enabled her to eventually end her marriage.

At this point in their lives, widowed, divorced or otherwise, these women’s reflections on marriage carry many of their own critiques of the constraining feelings of that relationship and the ways in which their desires could only be explored beyond it.

Margarida expressed several different ideas of love concluding that she had never known love of one’s own desire. We sat in the late morning stillness of her shadow-cast living room and I asked what she thought about love. She responded,

Aye, I don’t know what love is. I never knew what love was…love for two. I never knew. I only know love for my children. For all that I tried, I didn’t love [him], I didn’t. Its really awful to live with someone who you do not like, you do

47 Four women said they separated from their partners and four openly spoke about simply co- existing with their husbands, sleeping in separate rooms and leading separate lives.

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not love…. [She looked down and back up melancholically smiling] Love must be the most wonderful thing in the world!

Intoning an idea of mutual love, or fulfilling love, I suggest that Margarida has in mind a notion of love as a feeling of desire and communion that Camelia suggested as almost impossible.

Camelia expressed cynicism around love after a group member inquired into her feelings for her male partner riding in a van to a performance. In her mid-sixties, Camelia is in a long-term relationship after the death of her husband. She responded that she did not believe in love and her relationship was less about love than it was about companionship. She said love was fantasy and something that only the rich could have through the new experiences and adventures that their resources could provide and thus sustain a sense of novelty through new shared experiences. She reflected that economically poor people have to constantly deal with the never-ending grind of daily life, which leaves little time or money to invest in their relationships; she explained that the mode of getting-by wears hard on a union. For both women, love was an elusive feeling. Equally as elusive was a life lived in love that both, Camelia more directly, linked to their social positioning that could not financially or through the prescriptions of marriage allow for such an emotional possibility.

Violeta’s account more than most highlights this differentiation between marriage and the feelings of love and desire. Widowed, she too is now involved with another man who lives with her. She did not label or define her relationship with this partner of more than ten years or speak about her idea of marriage, yet she specified that he lives in her house and she buys most things in the house in order to keep her life autonomous; as she

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sharply but no less humorously explained to me “if a day arrives when our relationship no longer works, he can walk out the same door he came in” because what was in the house would be hers. She also candidly and directly shared with me that she does not have sex with him [even though they sleep in the same bed and have other bedrooms in the house] at the same time, that she generally spoke of him as caring for her “better than anyone else has in her life.” Drawing on queer notions of desire that expand through and beyond the sexual (Ahmed 2006; McGlotten 2005), Violeta’s example reveals how these women may have sought the fulfillment of their desires, beyond the context of marriage, physical intimacy and even relationships with men. Moreover, these women’s rejection of marriage and, in Violeta’s case, her autonomy over both her home and her body intone a desire to no longer live in or relate through subordinating patriarchal dynamics. These women’s experiences of marriage as a structure of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and explicitly not a relationship of love, made them search out alternative spaces and relationships to realize their desires, of which the group, I will argue, is one of the principal sites of realization.

‘Must have loved’, ‘growing to love’ and ‘wanting to know love’ are sentimental utterances that reveal how their experiences of and possibilities for feeling love were crosscut by the same social forces of gender, race, class and sexuality that constructed the roles they were expected to fill. Some loved when they married, but most loved because they lived next to, stood by and supported their husbands and used the term “to love” to capture a wide emotional spectrum of the feelings produced in sustaining their marriages through performing their roles as wives, mothers, etc. In some instances, that did mean desiring and being deeply intimate with their husbands, but this was not what many

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intoned or directly expressed. Their articulations of love were embedded in their actions of giving of themselves to others, rather than sentiments that they explained as emerging from their experiences and contact with an individual. The tension between Margarida speaking of the difficulty of growing to love her husband and never experiencing love beyond that for her children, tunes our ears to the struggles in the women’s affective lives between the emotions they recognize and the feelings they experienced, still expressed in their longing and desires. It also reveals how the social currents that directed the flow of their lives from worker to wife to mother and so-on were those that propelled these women’s self-making around a structured life options that made moving freely within their desires and interests, like swimming up-stream, which some did in their own ways.

I THINK I SUCCEEDED IN FORMING INVOLVED CITIZENS [OF MY KIDS} IN THIS SOCIETY IN WHICH WE LIVE, WHAT WE REALLY ARE IS SHELLFISH WORN FROM [MOVING FROM] THERE TO HERE AND HERE TO THERE BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE CLIFF.

To conclude this section on love, I turn to their relationships with their children

(which I will throughout the dissertation) because of the ways in which they self-made through their roles as mother and the desires they expressed through their children.

Quoted in the previous section, Margarida spoke of the love for her children as the only love she knew. Most women had dedicated their adult lives to raising large numbers of children. For many their children were the reflection of their labor as was in the case for

Iris who, as mentioned, not only raised her own children but her siblings as well. And as touched on throughout this chapter, these women’s working lives were their investments in their children’s well-being and the hope that these children could lead a life less strained than their own. In their narratives, the women’s love for their children was 106

expressed with melancholy at times around their own roles as mothers and their (adult) children’s perceptions of them.

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Their kids’ education triggered a complex array of emotions about the limitations of their own life opportunities and what they hoped, as mothers, they could enable their children to accomplish. Azaléia expressed a mixture of sadness and disappointment that her children had not stayed in school to pursue higher degrees in spite of her own willingness to work as hard as possible to support them. She said, “Look Celeste, I always dreamed that my kids would be doctors, lawyers…and would study.” She made this comment following her own desire to be a judge qualifying it with the clause, “had my parents been able to send me to school….” These reflections on her own life were juxtaposed with her pride in her children’s completion of high school. Azaléia attempted to provide one of the main things she could never have due to her economic, gender and racial position growing up. Most women felt that their children’s lives overall were hindered by fewer social limitations than their own, such as changing gender conventions, increased access to a variety of resources and life choices. Yet the fact that they did not either see their options or pursue what they felt was a better education and consequent economic opportunities conjured a mix of sadness and disappointment that

Azaléia rapidly modified into an appreciation for the core values she had instilled in her children. She spoke of them as hard workers with individual gifts and wills, citing the specific example of the second of her four daughters. She shared that this daughter was training to be the first woman bus driver in the company where she was working; she had arrived at Azaléia’s house one night after work and had exclaimed, “look at my hands mom!” which were covered with oil and calluses from operating the bus. Azaléia said she

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told her daughter that this was “a good thing” and that she was “getting her things through her own sweat.”

Without family names or economic power, and specifically as black women, hard, honest labor and respect were the qualities these women had lived by and had attempted to pass on to their children as the essence of survival in their particular predicament as part of the mass of “anonymous” people. It is one’s own sweat and the conscience behind it that “the school of life” instructed women like Azaléia to recognize an invaluable combination of skills and the ones around which they self-made as women. This ethos was what secured these women’s senses of self, as previously suggested, and encompassed a set of values around which they self-fashioned away from the ascriptions that minimized their character. Violeta along with most women articulated their economic inability to provide for their children a private or higher education and one of

Violeta’s sons criticized her for it. With an intensity of emotion, Violeta recounted that he complained that she never had given him anything material, such as a house or an education and sorrowfully recounted offering as a response, “I am poor. I gave you everything I have: affection, dignity, and honesty.” She said these words slowly, purposely and sincerely, and then concluded, “I have nothing else to give you.” Violeta’s statement captured the discomfort of having to hear her son’s shaming words in spite of the pride and dignity she felt she has single-handedly built through a life of emotional and physical toil. This adult son, in his late thirties, like all of her male children, has struggled to find regular employment, which he assessed to me, as hard to maintain due to racial and residential discrimination. His verbal attack on his mother was rife with his sentiments of not being able to get ahead and a search for a person or site of

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accountability in order to explain his continued predicament. A desire for his life to be different and how his mother might have been an agent in that seemed to overpower him in his complaint to Violeta. This frustration may be indicative of his struggles to withstand the economic and racial marginalization and discrimination he has experienced; and he may well practice and value the ethics his mother attempted to model, understanding that they are immaterial. But in the confluence of their own self- doubts and unfulfilled desires, this exchange, recalled by Violeta, suggests how she continues to contend with her disappointments of how her material conditions were a relentless reminder of what she “could not” rather than what she wanted to offer. She and

Azaléia’s willingness to share their children’s criticism and their own longings suggest that these women are confident in what they have provided and modeled as mothers in spite of the discontent they may experience around their life’s possibilities. As Azaléia assessed in her own situation, “You do what you have the [economic and emotional] conditions to do.” Volition and self-regard were reflective resting points for these women’s recognition of how their racial, gender and class positions created social limitations to be negotiated and how tentatively one functions within these constraints as a full person.

WE ARRIVED FROM THE COUNTRY, WITH ONE HAND IN FRONT, ANOTHER IN BACK…IMAGINE WITHOUT A ROOM, WITHOUT LAND, WITHOUT MONEY, WITHOUT A PROFESSION AND A THIRD CHILD IN OUR ARMS.

This statement gestures to the experiences these women described arriving in the city in their early teenage years or twenties. The women’s migrations did not alter their social positioning but shifted and diversified the experiences of struggle and

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subordination. Many arrived just before or in the midst of a heightened wave of migration from the interior of Minas Gerais to the capital that accelerated in the 1970s. Spurred by significant expansion in the industrial-sector and the transforming economy away from an agricultural base, migrating people moved into and expanded Belo Horizonte, specifically its western region, where industrial jobs were concentrated.48 The 1973 arrival of the Fiat plant in the adjacent industrial city of Contagem and the general industrial growth during the decade were major forces in driving Belo Horizonte and its labor into the international economy.49 Although the women arrived during these large- scale movements of the period, they moved directly to their neighborhood in the eastern region of the city and attributed their resettlement as a search for better access to medical care, for work options and because they had family members who had sent for them which usually also intoned better economic opportunities in the capital. These arrivals necessitated finding a place to live, to work, and to embrace the reason why one moves to the city that she/he is now a part of and shaping. The economies of cities benefited from the (cheap) labor made available through these working bodies.

At the same time, these peripheral neighborhoods throughout the large metropolitan areas in Brazil, were read by the city and State governments as problems because of the often precarious sites and construction and growing associations and stigmas of these spaces with squalor, poverty and blackness. The link between crime and violence with these neighborhoods arose mostly in the 1980s, as some low-income neighborhoods became hubs for drug trafficking. I consider the history of their

48 For migration and settlement patterns in Belo Horizonte see Godinho 2003; Mendoça 2003; Oliveira et al. 2003; Rigotti and Vasconcellos 2003; Teixeira and de Souza 2003; Telles 1995 49 For a history of Belo Horizonte’s economic and industrial growth see Eakin 2002. 111

neighborhood and the concept of favela in greater depth in chapter four, but for now, I emphasize how the outside, classed and raced perceptions of these low-income neighborhoods are mapped onto their residents’ bodies, and how these places of residence become believed to be reflective of local human character.

Whether they worked in the home or beyond, these women’s lives were equally filled with the gender, racial and class ascriptions that came with their roles as wives – cooking meals, cleaning, washing and raising children. This domestic work was performed in a neighborhood with no electricity, with a well as the fresh water source, a river for washing and for some, a kerosene stove when not wood burning. In memory, they often would recount how much they were in movement during a day citing the distance of the nearest store in the adjacent neighborhood. The physical exertion of these responsibilities in and outside of the home is present in their varicose veins that are a frequent source of discussion and commiseration in the group’s social time. Routines of climbing the steep hills of the neighborhood with heavy loads, multiple pregnancies and long work days scrubbing floors are experiences of the women that they feel inscribed on their bodies.

The women generally spoke of their labor in the home with pride and the recognition of the gendered and sometimes patriarchal enforcement of it, but it was those who beyond the home that narrated their frustration, sometimes resistance and anger to their poor treatment and subordination within the city and work places. Many needed to work outside of their homes in addition to their domestic responsibilities to provide basic material necessities for their children. For the women who arrived without husbands

(already deceased) they and their children’s livelihood depended upon the women’s

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employment. Azaléia who did not initially work because of her husband’s beliefs, explained that she decided to because of the gnawing insecurity of how she was to buy food for the family or put shoes on her children’s feet. She stated, “I went right on by [my husband]. He died and I was employed. I continued working. I worked tons. I was able to get my things… buy the things my kids needed with my own sweat.” Azaléia was one of the few who spoke of their husband’s resistance, but many found it an imperative to work to survive and found labor as domestic servants in the city, working in various homes, sometimes for cleaning companies or as cleaners in businesses. Detailing their honest labor appeared to simulate the meticulousness with which they labored both in and out of the home. But for those who worked beyond their own home, their pride came accented with stories of humiliation that uneasily loomed alongside their sense of dignity. One day sitting at her dining room table, Azaléia told of her working life and fragile conditions.

She spoke with direct words:

I have gone hungry a lot in the streets…Sometimes when you arrive in buildings to work, there are bags of bread [typically day-old bread left out for domestic workers as a form of assistance]. But [in this one apartment where I worked] instead of putting the bread a little bit away from the garbage so you could eat it, they threw it in the garbage, you know! [silence] I went hungry a lot, I was very needy.... but my kids never went without [pause] If my kids thought about it, they would cradle and carry me around in their arms now! [I smiled, humored at the image evoked] I am serious [Celeste]!

In the same sequence of thought Azaléia relayed the mistreatment she confronted and underwent to provide for her family which she takes pride in as testimony of how she has

“arrived” in life. Also in speaking about their working life, Violeta and Hortênsia marked their stories of labor with similar events and indignant tones. Hortênsia shared several stories of her old patroa [female boss] and leaving that household after the patroa used

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money to entice Hortênsia out of her vacation, saying she needed her help, and then failing to ever pay her. In discussing how power is shaped by class and race in the relationships of domestic service in Brazil, Donna Goldstein writes, “Relations between domestic workers and their employers are a perfect site within which to explore how cultural practices are produced and reproduced, and what effects are created through this form of domination” (2003: 73). Hortênsia often assessed her own difficult circumstances specifically her working life in domestic service and those experiences by the group as what happens when “you are poor and black.” The intensity of her exasperation, I suggest, is a register of the force and repetition of this subordinating treatment she has come to expect through working as a domestic servant for most of her life and being a resident of a socially stigmatized neighborhood.

Yet the sentiments of indignation the women expressed were also held in tension with the personal relationships they developed with the families in which also bear the complicated marks of how the intersection of race, gender and class shape social relations. Magnolia, another widowed woman who singularly raised her kids expressed a similar conflicted relationship with her old patroa for whom she worked for many years as a nanny and cook and labeled as “like family.” She spoke about her with much affection, yet punctuated her narrative about her working in this home by saying that the woman would not do the paperwork necessary for her to receive social security funds.

She repeated, puzzled, “Why won’t she do it for me?” Domestic workers gained rights to social security, vacation and a set of parameters around the protection of their labor in

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1972, previously debarred through caveats in labor rights.50 However, as Magnolia’s example suggests the enforcement of these rights are inconsistently guaranteed and in spite of worker’s rights to legally protest, are not always pursued. Ely Souto dos Santos assesses this tension in relationship between domestic workers and their employers in the following way: “Within this modern context of labor relations, it is evident that the relation of domestic labor appears as out of date, archaic and outside of its time. What persists is a relationship of personal loyalty in a world where loyalties are ideological or union oriented” (1983:187). Drawing on Santos’ analysis, I suggest that what underpins the “out-of-date” personal loyalty of the relationships built around domestic labor are varying degrees of racial, gender and classed hierarchies embedded in the concept of this working relationship and secured through economic power and classed psychologies of racial hierarchy. The women not only were expected to perform the labor of domestic worker but also to perform a social role of caretaker and acquiesce to various forms of submission through the expectations of them as economically poor black women.

The women’s frustrations and angers fan out into a range of emotions around their simultaneous exploitation, their life circumstances and their affection for the people they worked for many years. They labored to perform their service without assuming the subordinating forces implied within them. Hortênsia revealed that she had intervened in a dispute between this same patroa and her husband, preventing the wife from being physically abused. She did not communicate this fact as a painful contradiction, in tone or in look, but nonetheless brought this event into the same story of her working experience, her subservient treatment and her loyalty and care for this woman. The range of complex

50 See texts on domestic labor and rights see: Heleieth Iara B. Saffioti (1978); Emílio Gonçalves 1973; Zarias Ary Farias 1983; Ely Santos 1983 115

feelings holds their labored process of self-making as independent thinkers and sensible and dignified women in the fray of these roles and the submissive postures they were expected to perform. Violeta affirmed her own ethics and agency, which she linked specifically with her class position, stating that “she did not like rich people” and was proud of her economic humbleness and disposition, which the women often equated with one another. Violeta, along with Azaléia and Hortênsia were the few women who recounted leaving jobs, illustrating how they had rejected their abuse. Dependent upon their bosses for their income and a set of subsidies and assistance, made walking away, at times from longtime employment, a difficult decision with potentially severe economic repercussions. They risked greater economic hardship to maintain less tangible valuables: dignity, pride and respect. At the same time, leaving jobs was a form of resistance that these women could exercise. Quitting a job was a complicated act of rejecting abuse and sometimes, jeopardizing their own and their children’s basic resources usually to maintain their dignity and sense of self.

The intensity of these women’s narratives around their exploitive work experiences captures how they uncomfortably come to expect and live with this type of treatment as another part of their individual struggles to provide for their families. Given that few women spoke of confronting their employers or leaving, their silence itself around their mistreatment was probably a quiet act of resisting the possibility of greater marginalization they would experience without a job. These women’s livelihood often depended upon them embodying, if not playing these roles, given the exploitive potential of the differences in their economic and social power from that of their employers.

Furthermore, these women took pride in the services they provided and quality of their

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work and their narratives speak to how they negotiated preserving their self-value. While it is hard to document the nature of their mistreatment as well as how they handled or confronted their employers given that these exchanges usually occurred in the confines of the home, I suggest that both the apparent silence of these women in the homes where they worked and in their narratives recounted, intoned a range of possible feelings of shame, defeat, or distance from the small and larger infractions against their persons they experienced throughout their lives.

***

These roles, relationships and their sentiments are windows into these black women’s self-making in the midst of intersecting social norms and ascriptions of where and how their bodies fit into society. While the meanings of these forces specifically of race, gender and class have changed, their salience in these women’s lives continue.

How skin color, phenotype and experiences of racialization translate into racial inequality in Brazil internationally continues to be a source of academic debate, in social movements and in quotidian life in the country as well.51 These discussions accept that anti-black racism permeates Brazilian society and that blackness is negatively stigmatized. Yet the nature of how racism operates and the extent of its structuring forces in Brazilian social inequalities remain in great tension. Only within this democratization period did federal and state policies attempt to specifically address racial disparities with much social critique. Embedded in these debates is a supposition that racial mixture is a productive force for both social and racial relations. While this discourse is a vestige of

51 See Henriques 2001 and Telles 2006 for assessment of racial inequalities in Brazil and footnote 22 of the Introduction for a larger set of references for the debates around race in Brazil. 117

early 20th century Brazilian nation-building projects, it discursively continues to have the social impact of positing that those individuals capable of whitening or identifying with whiteness through class or color privilege, will want to and will do so. This belief system is perennially studied and naturalized with both academic and social worlds, normalizing its own pro-whitening racial logics and muting questions of how blackness is lived, assumed and creatively invested in as a positive identity and ethos.52 It is this positive investment that I suggest underlies the group intervention, creating a context and new references through which these women self-make.

The principal thrust generating the group was Valdete hailing these black women from her neighborhood into a different relationship with themselves as raced, classed and gendered beings. She literally hailed them on the street asking about their medication and used those women to call others undergoing similar problems and prescription drug use.

She summoned them out of their homes to come participate in weekly talking circles and body expression. Valdete’s acts were met with resistance from both the husbands of these women and the women themselves at first. This resistance is bound up in the social- cultural struggles around the positioning of black women’s bodies and the roles they are expected to assume. Their husbands were neither accustom to the women leaving the homes nor functioning outside of the responsibilities of their domestic lives. And the women often complained that they “had things to do,” as an excuse for why they could not attend group gatherings. Audre Lorde explains, “And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger” (1984:42). Their interpellation as wives, mothers,

52 See Caldwell 2007, Perry 2005, Pinho 2006; Werneck org. 2000 118

grandmothers, domestic workers, as discussed, were identities around which they self- made, deeply linked to their capacities to serve others and quiet their own needs and sentiments. These subjectivities stood in direct conflict with those proposed by the group

– to play and express themselves.

In their new interpellation and hailing, the women recognized an identification of a possibility of what Valdete, as a black woman, and a group leader could offer in creating an unspecified but different mode of operation. Sonia Ferreira da Silva, a black feminist grassroots activist articulates the dynamic behind this hail as providing a mirror.

Through this mirror, they see a self-identified black woman, comfortable in her blackness and exercising power in choice and decisions while accomplishing goals set out for her.

Rather than a discourse of anti-racism or feminism, one of Valdete’s impacts was being 119

an embodiment of confidence, power and action that black women are not socially constructed to possess and embody in Brazil. This type of power and agency was synergized through the nexus of Valdete’s body politic of blackness and the experiences she was known to have had which are not associated with blackness and sparsely with women. What captured these women were the possibilities they intuited could come out of working with Valdete. While Althusser’s writes from the standpoint of State ideology and from a different geographic and historical perspective, he nonetheless captures the silent motivating components of interpellation and the process of hailing:

Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailing is such that they [the subjects] hardly ever miss their [wo]man…And yet it is a strange phenomena, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilty feelings’, despite the large number who have something on their conscience’ (1971: 174).

The women’s eventual participation in the group, I suggest, was triggered by this

“strange phenomena,” or rather a new prospect that resonated in the interchange between empowered black woman summoning another. It was not due to feelings that they must participate or owed Valdete something, as few neither knew her personally, nor did it secure friendships or bind women into a sisterhood. 53 Rather, they are women of color, living in a low-income neighborhood, and of a certain generation. They reflected to each other images of a set of experiences, sentiments that they had lived, felt, and embodied.

This generation of women, as their stories tell, was raised under similar conditions and in similar contexts making them aware of how their formative experiences were commonplace for their peers.

53 I directly asked members of the group if they considered other women in the group friends. The women overwhelmingly spoke of the other women as colleagues, often as family in celebratory moments, but rarely as friends. Certain individuals qualified one particular person in the group as a friend, but those relationships outdated both members’ participations in the group. 120

Their day-to-day lives and residence in an economically poor neighborhood also were cohering agents in the women’s awareness of their strife and stigmatization.

Therefore, the ‘strange phenomena’ of this hail is the nature of the affective traction

Valdete’s summoning gains in these women’s subjectivities. Their initial identification was an affective one, of possibility and freedom that most likely was only partial and tentative, as the women were adjusting to a different interpellation and the spaces and emotion in which they would come into contact. Again Lorde explains, “As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas” (1984:37).

The similarities of these women’s lives substantiated connections through which a conversation, um bate papo, could begin and spawn a collective project. “One would share with another, and that’s how that exchange began.” As Valdete’s explanation captures, these women reflected on their positions and simultaneously began seeing their lives within a shared struggle, refracted and cued through her own life and through the larger discussions the group would have. Over time, these discussions would explicitly address their existence within a nexus of raced, gendered and classed systems of oppression and finding themselves within those layers of ascribed meaning.54

This interpellation of these women affectively provided the basis for the project of self-making that I argue the group inspired individually in these women. The subservience and self-effacement felt in the roles and toils discussed in this chapter are what the group dynamic transforms. Valdete characterized these women as taught “to

54 The types of engagement with blackness, gender and social class undergone in the group are a central component of chapter five.

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look at the ground” because they were “raised to serve” everyone except themselves. She did not minimize these women’s experience in the interior, in marriage, motherhood or society as she experienced them and continues to live within them. She reads them through a lens of a tradition of black women who have much to contribute to society. The group environment un-writes and chips away at the ideas that formal education means stupidity, being from the interior means backward and that these women’s bodies rather than their minds, are the principal sites of contribution. The singing circle, the roda, was created as their space and Valdete wanted the women to experiment with their “vanity” initiating physical transformations such as raising their heads and making eye contact, which would produce different feelings and emotions. The group became a singing group but began with classes of body expression where they stretched, breathed and danced.

Verses from one member’s poems capture what dance and movement conjured in her.

Eu abraço meu corpo sozinho I hug my body alone me acalmo com muito carinho Calm myself with a lot of affection construo só para mim um mundinho Construct a small world only for me deixando fora o errado e dentro tudo certinho Leaving outside the wrongs and leaving in everything right

Learning to express themselves through their bodies and their embodied experiences was something with which they were not familiar. These body movement classes were the beginning of this process of encountering their physicality and presence and creating new emotional experiences.

The group’s foundation and Valdete’s own story are manifestations of the self- making black women labor through and the contexts in which they negotiate and to which they respond. These women’s trajectories are also a starting point for

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understanding the foundation of the group. During the question and answer period of

Valdete’s speech that I began this chapter with, a woman in the audience asserted, “What happened with her, already has happened to many. It’s just that many don’t go to battle

[for something more].” Not all black women fight and not all of the women found a mirror or the same image in Valdete, but as Sonia Ferreira da Silva’s theorization of the relationship between black women and their black women leaders explains, Valdete and spaces like the group serve to voice and project some of the collective imaginings of black women on the freedom to transform self and society in their own directions and ways. In essence, that is what I suggest Valdete’s hailing of the group members performed. She hailed the women of her neighborhood as women with gifts to share with society, re-reading these women’s lives outside of dominant representations, whether those of the media, the Academy, or institutions that historically have not invested in exploring the substance of these women’s existence. Furthermore, she re-scripted their lives within a history of struggle and context of subservience and domination in which the complexity of their experiences in these circumstances could be engaged rather than criticized or silenced. There is a productive tension that exists between these two different interpellations of black women that articulates the spaces in which black women maneuver: one of dominant society making black women into laboring bodies and a counter-interpellation that hail’s black women’s labor and everyday practices as both a history of strategic struggle in Brazil and as a group of people with a historical, interpretative knowledge base of notable value.

Articulating black women’s social anonymity to reveal its debilitating effects and its transformative possibilities parallels the move to bring the two forms of interpellation

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into emotional and intellectual collision, a crossroads of sorts. Anonymity is no longer the painful analogy of the garbage dump or manure but an instrument for discussing marginalization and a passageway for where creative possibility rooted in the struggle and the ache of black women’s existence can transform one’s relation to self and the world. The cross-roads, as the group illustrates, is the space in which the complexity of people’s lives can productively react with where they look to head. This reflective, generative arena, is one in which the women warily inhabited in the context of Valdete’s hail and the early formation of the group. Yet this space these women now embody and recognize as powerful and for its transformative potential. Life is good and beautiful, you just have to know how to live it. Seeing possibilities and routes through struggle are what black women’s lives have historically taught and consequently propose as the raw material of black feminist praxis. At its simplest, as Azaléia’s words carry, is a verbal act of self-making that is tried daily, but invested in through the dynamics of continuing to grow within the collective and music of the group.

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CHAPTER TWO Twice Tellings

With her robust voice, Violeta inserted a line about her insomnia – an abrupt shift in conversation topic and tenor to which I had grown accustomed. It was seven-thirty in the morning and the initial topic at this Wednesday pre-rehearsal casual conversation circled around rumors of fights and gunshots, some of the local occurrences that still capture these women as the neighborhood’s long-time residents. Violeta recounted to the attentive collective that she had woken up in the middle of the night and unable to sleep, headed outside to wait for the bus to descend into the city center on her biweekly routine of collecting cans.55 The women immediately jumped in relating their own handlings of insomnia and asked why she did not watch television or do chores inside the house. They also inquired if she felt afraid sitting alone in the neighborhood at night. She said no, replying that she waits on the steps of the Evangelic church, perched on a hill near her home, wearing her knit cap, and “sitting out there with the malandragem” – a street savvy charisma popularly invoked in Brazil that also intones illegal activities in the neighborhood; she joked that she even looks like a malandra – the female enactor of these skills.56 Violeta continued by saying that a gentleman from the church passed by

55 Violeta has collected cans and paper for most of her life to subsidize her income. She proudly states that her children were raised on “cardboard and paper,” and this money she now saves to take vacations, usually inviting a different grandchild or child to accompany her. 56 In order to have a more popular notion, I am including the Portuguese Wikipedia definition of Malandragem: Malandragem is defined as a group of used to take advantage in certain situations (advantages that often are illicit). It is characterized as a group of strategies used to obtain an advantage in specific situations (these advantages are usually illicit). It is characterized by ingenuity and subtly. Its execution demands skill, charisma, cunning whichever characteristics allow for the manipulation of people or results in order to obtain the best of these in the easiest way possible. Contradicting logical argumentation, labor and honesty, malandragem presupposes 125

while she was there, looked at her with a bit of fear or curiosity and asked what she was doing outside at that hour of the night. She told him she was waiting for the bus. It was three am and the gentleman stared at her, paused and indicated that the next bus was not coming until four ten. She laughed commenting that he looked at her as if she were

“crazy.” The women kept quiet.

Violeta’s storytelling, bravado and humor are often entangled with the stark struggles of her life and so-called craziness. Her insomnia, an experience/state shared and complained about by many group members, is particularly hard for Violeta given that she is a woman with endless energy who begins her days at dawn and retires to bed typically after the nine o’clock novella (soap opera). Perhaps it is her dozing on the couch that leaves her sleepless, but Violeta’s insomnia also could be literally read as an inability to sleep when a list of needs, mostly of family, grows and the ghosts of her past converge most nights around her bed.

On a brisk fall morning, accompanying her to the health post to get her prescribed tranquilizers, I asked if she took them to help her sleep and she responded, “No, being tired does that.” This medication acts as one of the ephemeral, but effective agents in easing her worries that often keep her awake at night. Getting out of the space that houses the memories of over fifty years of her life and even starting her working day in the pre- dawn, are practices that move her through the losses and pain that metaphorically posses her nights. For many of these ageing, mostly widowed women, these late night hours,

that these methods are incapable of generating good results. The person who practices malandragem (the malandro) acts like the popular Brazilian adage (8.30.08 – http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malandragem). A Malandra is the female personification of this archetype. 126

distanced from the music, dance and conviviality of the group, are times in which they contend with their pasts, losses and the selves they have struggled to secure.

Violeta’s presence on the church steps in the middle of the night is an image alive with the archetype of the crazy black woman, first invoked in the introduction. An (older) woman on the streets, in a ‘favela’, in the middle of the night, is unusual and by many

Brazilians’ conventional wisdom unsafe, if not crazy. However, it is precisely into this supposed irrationality and abnormality of her late night weighty ponderings that I will plumb. Violeta’s telling of the story suggests her own rationale for her actions while also implying her understanding of a perceived illogic, a shocking act that many people cannot make sense of. She spoke of the passerby giving her a look of “crazy” in spite of her explanation of waiting for the bus. Her recounting of this exchange and laughing about the look suggests that this perception of craziness offers a different affective and physical experience. Perhaps this space, for Violeta, a savvy, reflective woman, incites feelings of release, attention and unpredictability through which she traverses into the expanse that social abnormality affords. Her story opens up the possibility that she may even sense power in that archetype at the same time that it absconds the complex interlacing of experiences, sentiments, and rationales that make her acts resemble the mad and simply cannot be reduced to insomnia. Her example shines a light on the actions and thoughts behind what gets labeled as madness and summons the archetype of the crazy black woman into this chapter.

* * *

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In the larger narrative of the dissertation, this chapter is an attempt to examine these black women’s self-making through their associations and invocations of craziness.

It also explores how questions of mental wellness and the states of mind of these women were coalescing factors for the group. To conduct research with these women was to be encircled by humor, care and joy most of the time, but the pretext for the group and for these women’s individual lives requires entry into spaces of loss, grief, and recovery; and suicide seeped out as one of the darker areas that circulates in their histories. As a highly stigmatized act in Brazil, suicide was spoken about infrequently, but it was present in women’s families, remembered in the history of the neighborhood and viscerally felt when a public suicide, which occurred blocks from where I was living, turned into 128

popular discussion. Suicide is a grim, but potent realm in which to discuss these black women’s states of mind, specifically in relation to the group’s formation, because of the affective spaces mediating life and death through which it travels.

Thus, this chapter binds together three women’s stories about suicide: their personal narratives around suicide and suicide attempts. The three women, Violeta being one, were the only ones who spoke of suicide attempts in a personal context and their varied narrations provide several contrasting images and ideas of how women live and survive, literally and metaphorically through this experience. I treat suicide as an affective field through which these women pass and that lingers with them. Their stories corroborate this treatment as their suicide attempts were not narratives of an action that produced a breaking point from which they recovered and reemerged from depression or insanity. Rather what was revealed from their accounts of suicidal spaces is how these women are led not into their death, but into the realms in which they have lived and survived; that is, how they self-make in the framework of living (materially, psychologically and affectively) and, how the group has played a role in that process.

Black women develop an arsenal of modes and strategies to live within racial and gender subordination that are often overlooked and misrecognized. The energies and forces of the suicidal realm are distinct terrains in which to glimpse and wrestle with black women’s affective domain and the types of agency they involve and reveal. While this analysis certainly does not attempt to validate or enable suicide or its contemplation, there is a painful, intense form of agency that this process unveils. It is a space where self-annihilation is possible, but not necessarily the driving force. It taps into the breeds

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of agency Lauren Berlant conceives of as lateral and interruptive agency.57 Berlant un- pairs the theorization of agency from its frequent conceptualization as the acts of sovereign and intentional subjects, typically read into causal relationships with the normative. Although focused on the US, her analysis rethinks types of (exhaustive) “life- making” undergone within capitalist structural subordination present in Brazil that shape day-to-day lives. Berlant’s contribution helps to consider these women’s suicide attempts not so much as loud expressions of contempt for their suffering, their socio-hierarchical position or even life itself, but guides our eyes and ears into understanding these acts more in-line with a self-suspension, a relief from the grinding reality of their working and family lives, including the decision-making and problem-solving they constantly negotiate in strained economic, social and affective circumstances. To use a hyperbolic metaphor, it is an attempt to briefly die while continuing to live. Within these acts, there exists deep frustration with the ways in which these women live social marginalization and exclusion. However in order to understand one potential movement of black women into the space of the crazy, it is critical to grasp these ventures not as sprints into madness or rejections of sanity, but as practices, conscious and unconscious, of living more comfortably in strained and jagged contexts that do not have the prospect of “getting better.” The terrain of suicide, in these cases, is an interlude away from these women’s daily reality and I propose that the contemplation of this realm may be considered sound moments and states of relief that begin to blend and get dragged into interpretations of sanity or insanity.

57 Berlant 2007 130

Suicide is an act directly associated with mental illness. And while it is not my objective or within my skill base to diagnose or label these women’s psychological states, their acts are read both socially and biomedically as lying in the domain of the abnormal or the “crazy.” This raises several simple guiding questions: How were these black women’s living conditions driving them crazy? And, how do their ways of living appear crazy? When placed side-by-side, these questions generate the entangled state of black women’s subjectivity, over-determined and obscured by stereotypes that consequently come to compound the way that black women think, feel and act in the world. In addition, I want to shift away from a portrayal of madness as a state of the irrational as well as one that is entirely embodied and then subsequently emerged out of. Emily

Martin suggests how most people’s thoughts and emotional worlds dabble in the domain of the so-called irrational without being diagnosed with a psychological illness or it severely impacting their daily lives (2007: 8). Her work, among others, comprises current attempts to reveal the socio-cultural and medical beliefs behind constructions of such notions as irrationality and their individual and collective social implications in contemporary life.58

Using these socially unsteady and malleable lines of normality and rationality, this chapter explores how these women’s negotiations with the demands in their lives become viewed, treated and intersect with those of the crazy black woman. My concern with this hovering archetype is that it holds presence in their lives and both influences

58 See Biehl 2005; Lurhmann 2001; Orr 2005; Scheper-Hughes 2001

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and informs the parameters of how black women affectively transform. The haunt of the crazy black woman is both a metaphor for the social obfuscation of black women’s subjectivity at the same time that it is a lasting, collective energy and mnemonic of the complex and varied forms of black women’s existence in Brazil.

* * *

I now turn to Azaléia, Violeta and Hortênsia’s narratives around suicide. Violeta’s story anchors all three to my claims around the associations and implications of black women and craziness and it is the one I will elaborate the most; consequently, the analysis is weighted more heavily on Violeta’s narrative. However, I begin with Azaléia and then conclude with Hortênsia because their stories offer nuance to black women’s processes of self-making under the shadow of the archetype; and they help to ethnographically illustrate the nature and range of the women and the life stories of the group and its impact.

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OUR FLESH IS WEAK, IT CAN’T ENDURE IT…I AM A PERSON NOT POWDER - AZALÉIA

Azaléia was the first group member to speak personally to me of suicide. Her sharing came out of multiple tellings about her daughter’s depression. We formally and informally conducted interviews in her living room or in her kitchen while she cooked and cleaned. During the first interview,59 she told me of her second daughter’s depression. I asked about what had happened and she said that it began with her daughter’s dissolving marriage and this daughter’s husband’s voiced desire to separate.

Azaléia communicated how worried she was and brought out several photos to show me the differences in her daughter since I had yet to meet her. The first photo showed a brown twenty-something woman, dressed-up and smiling at a party. Azaléia characterized her daughter as always put together with make-up, like the glossy red lipstick she was wearing in the photo, and enjoyed being social. The second image was of the same woman seated in an old t-shirt, no make-up, her curly hair hanging about her face limp, and staring lifelessly at the camera. This quasi-comatose looking woman, highly medicated, was what her daughter had become. Even though she was improving, getting out of the house and paying more attention to her appearance, she continued using medication and functioning in a pained psychological state.

Concerned with her daughter’s stupor and the quantity of medication prescribed,

Azaléia recounted accompanying her to the psychiatrist to speak with him. She complained that the pills were making her daughter worse and she was taking too many.

59 I first conduced interviews with Azaléia during an exploratory research trip in 2004. She was one of the most responsive and active participants in the research, often offering me guidance about what women might be willing to talk about. And as one of the senior members of the group, she offered historical information about its evolution and membership. 134

She asked rhetorically if I knew what the doctor told her. She stated, “He said, ‘Am I the doctor or are you?’” She said she rebutted, “I have been through this. You are hurting her.” She continued:

‘Doctor, do you know why I am talking to you sir?….I am not a doctor, and I do not have an education. I am short and of color, but let me tell you sir, I have taken these pills before and was treated by a psychiatrist for many, many years and a psychologist for many years. And sir, today I do not take anything [medication] except for my blood pressure. But my response to sleeping medication….[She made a sweeping hand gesture] …throw them out! I took a lot. Many. I had depression. I even thought about suicide and tried. That is how it was [she paused quiet]. He changed the subject and lowered the dose for [my daughter]. This is how it works. One night I can’t sleep and take 50 mg. Then I need to take 100 mg. The doctor would change it to 100 [mg]. Who does this hurt? Me.60

When I asked her how she knew she was depressed, Azaléia said, “You can see it in the eyes.” This statement connected her daughter’s depression with her own; it took several accounts of her daughter’s struggles for her to speak of her own suicidal thoughts and acts, yet, she eventually revealed:

This period was a fight. It was an era that I told you I swallowed forty pills of diazepam at one time. I could bear no more. I had this washing machine. These days I cannot stand to look at it, do you believe it? I only had this tank and washed clothes with a brush…And when I did not wash them my eldest daughter did. She would trade off with me. All of us lived in three small rooms. I had to work… I was a widow with six children without a good place to live, without a house, without knowing if the roof was going to fall…on my children’s head and kill them all. Without conditions to fix it, very little money, a daughter in the house with problems. What could be done? Within two months of this all, a guy came and killed the women in my yard. So there was a lot going on in my head. My blood pressure was already rising, falling, rising, falling and I lived like this. Going to the public hospital, going to places I didn’t even know. I [had been] looking after my sick husband and the children. When it was not my sick daughter it was my skinny son who would not eat. I was worried....about what to do with him because I had to go to work….

60 This case came out of Azaléia narrating that she had gone to visit her daughter and found her completely drugged having taken 8 anti-depressants. She had monitored her daughter (who was then living alone) over the night without any medication and went to see the psychiatrist the following day where this exchange occurred. Following their discussion, Azaléia relayed that the psychiatrist reduced the prescription from a daily dose of sixteen pills to six. While she did not specify which medications her daughter was taking, I infer from the medications other women took, that it was a combination of anti-depressants or anti-anxiety pills and other medication used to control and balance side effects. 135

There was very little money and we were running out of everything, without money and barefoot children. All of this was collecting in my mind… [People] would tell me to give the house to someone, to leave. But I kept thinking, where would I go? To an asylum? So it was a lot on my mind. A lot of ideas. But none of them came out.

Azaléia’s words relay the sense of captivity and isolation her life circumstances and consequent depressed state generated within her. She was not a single mother, but her husband was an alcoholic and ill, leaving her to work fulltime while taking care of her children and the home. Some of these difficult work experiences, described in chapter one, bear repeating because they illustrate how her experiences were framed by her social, economic conditions. As part of a generation in which women were not widely educated, particularly economically poor and black women from the interior, her ability to earn a stable, sustaining income in the city was close to impossible. Domestic labor continues to be widely underpaid, even at the minimum wage, and Azaléia’s accounts testify to enduring humiliation as well as low pay. Women then and now struggle to generate enough income to feed, clothe and house their children, even in instances where their husbands are working.

Black women’s limited work choices and consequent economic difficulties are manifestations of their gendered, racial positioning; “boa aparência” (good appearance) specifically of women, continues to shape hiring practices and whose bodies are worthy of public roles (see Caldwell 2007: 65-67). Black women’s employment cleaning and serving can be read among other forces as the confluence of a lasting historical tradition of black women’s domestic servitude, the social construction of their physical inadequacy and with few opportunities to educationally and professionally advance. They continue to

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be overrepresented in domestic labor and bear the brunt of living with minimal pay and social stigma born of their skin and features, class position, where they live and how they earn their living. This context of racialized, economic and social pressure is the matrix of structural forces that Azaléia describes through her feelings of insecurity and desperation.

The layering of these various pressures caused anguish, instability and ultimately an emotional state of helplessness. She asked what was she supposed to do with hungry and sick children, a dilapidated house and insufficient resources to improve her situation.

Much of the economic weight fell on her shoulders after her husband became ill and she vented about his resistance to her working outside their home because of his patriarchal beliefs of the gendered norms of women as housewives. She shared in one of our final conversations, that she suffered domestic violence at his hand. At that time, Azaléia was only in her twenties and there was a significant age difference between she and her husband, who passed when she was twenty-nine. His death was not chronologically marked in her narrative of this phase of life, but was another event that compounded her situation. Azaléia recounted turning to alcohol as a way of trying to feel joy and to help forget her “problems.” She described herself as being overrun with troubles, with no solution and no way to confront it all.

I now return to one of the guiding questions: Might it be that Azaléia’s circumstances were driving her crazy? She spoke of living in a constant state of worry, accruing anxiety from which she found no relief. As symptoms or moods, these could be interpreted as a physio-chemical onset of depression. Although she did not narrate the historical moment in which she began therapy or taking medication, she spoke openly about her eight years of psychiatric and psychological treatment. In fact much of her

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narrative of transformation bridges the time with her psychologist with her participation in the group. Azaléia describes a state of growing despair about her conditions from which she could feel no solace or respite or find a solution. Valdete offered her own theorization of this psychological space forged of the pressure and demands these women experienced. She called it craziness, but differentiated it from “true madness” in which people might, for example, hear voices, run naked or generally are unable to live alone.

Jacinta too made a distinction as follows:

Before, people would call anything crazy. A person might have a psychiatric problem, but they are not crazy. For me, there is a difference. Crazy is throwing rocks and wandering around the streets, [they] will eat any old thing they can find – they are the real crazy ones. They have an aggressive manner and others do not, they are passive, but are mentally ill.

Valdete envisioned these same moments as high states of stress and referenced mental health problems as “an imbalance of the person” caused by pressures when their

“difficulties are very serious.”

She theorized this state from the women she observed in the neighborhood but articulated it through the example of forgetting. She gave a personal account of forgetting everything for twenty minutes. She was downtown, heading to work and contending with the stress of raising her children and making a living. All of a sudden she had no idea who and where she was. She was completely confused and looked around scared. She said she had other instances of this type of memory loss and said sometimes people enter this state and do not emerge. They stay lost and often wander.

Several of the women in the group also equated mental illness with the concept of wandering. Lilás spoke of being extremely depressed because of her economic stresses and low self-esteem. In response to my inquiry about whether she had had suicidal

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thoughts, she described a moment in which she related that she confronted the mental plane of madness and decided that she needed to literally walk away from her difficult life situation. She said she set out walking on the highway near her home wanting to know “how far she could go.” She walked all day without purpose until she had a momentary revelation that she had a family who needed her and she could not forego those responsibilities. Magnolia too shared a story of wandering into the forest kilometers from the neighborhood and sitting under a tree for a couple of days. She said she was trying to get away from her reality, but she had a flash realization that this was not

“normal” behavior and therefore went home. These acts of wandering by these women’s accounts are attempts to be free, without demands or purpose.

Drawing on Valdete’s theorization, I suggest that the forgetting and the act of physically losing themselves is a metaphor for these women’s loss, principally their loss of self. This loss is neither an unawareness nor a misrecognition of who one is; rather, it is a ‘losing sight of’, a deprivation of an affective and social structure in which one is able to experience living in and being hailed into human three-dimensionality. In contrast, black women are socially afforded only a limited range of behavior and affect, deeply engrained in their interpellation and performance of roles of servility, obedience, and, as I will argue, social madness. This last contrasting and disquieting status, like docility and accommodation, is the emotive possibility of the two dimensional social construction of black women, which gains traction when black women transgress historical-social roles into their own articulations and modes of living.

As I argue in chapter one, black women’s interpellation into roles of service not only has black women’s bodies myopically read in servile forms, but also conflates this

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type of work with their subjectivity. In other words, black women, are in essence nannies, cleaners and prostitutes; these jobs are roles and these roles are the imagined archetypes of black women in Brazil. Black womanhood and black femininity are collapsed into these professions, rendering black women’s self-expression audible or visible only through the roles they are socially constructed to substantiate. Katherine McKittrick keys us into the displacement of non-dominant (black) people’s (self) knowledge and one of its underlying assumptions in respect to black women: “…black femininity is altogether knowable, unknowing, and expendable: [black women are] seeming in place by being out of place” (2006:xv). McKittrick unravels how black women’s physicality, their bodies, stands in place of their thoughts, perspectives and essences. As a potential diasporic claim, but applicable in Brazil, black women are seen, but legible only through the contexts their bodies bring into purview – labor, marginality and blank (black) slate of projection.

This structured exchange, mind for body, at once over-determines black women as the essence of poverty and marginality and at the same time marginalizes the particular histories, structures and environments that reflect on or would offer a critique. There are no social ears to hear this affect from the subjective standpoint of black women because their subjectivity has been socially consumed by their roles and denied specifically within the domain of the feminine. Similarly, black subjectivity is non-viable since it is almost ossified by stereotypes and contested as sufficiently acknowledged and encompassed within a Brazilian identity or experience. When working as domestic help, emerging out of a favela, or singing and dancing for onlookers, black women’s bodies are legible through particular context and therefore, “understood.” Bringing black women’s voices

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into this sphere means interrogating the gendered nature of racialization, probing the meanings of normality and how certain personhoods are rendered imperceptible if not erased through the politics of their body.

Azaléia’s narrative reveals her negotiation with this social framework and her suicidal thoughts and gesture are spaces into which she wanders, contemplating and reacting to her crumbling sense of self. As she reaches the limits of her own labor, energy and drive, she is confronted with a sense of limited emotional or physical power in transforming her experiences and her feelings or her economic and familial situation. The psychological isolation that builds also makes it difficult for women like Azaléia to initiate and receive support. She explained, “We keep it all inside. [We] do not talk with others…..We don’t accept something better. We keep holding [all the sadness] inside and it turns into this. You enter depression.” She said you wind up bringing, “a bunch of problems onto yourself. No one brought them. It is me bringing them to me. Sickening my whole body.” At the same time that Azaléia explains the process of internalizing and not seeking support from outside, I argue that her comments reveal her awareness, as a black woman, of their own social expectations and stereotypes – their images of durability, longevity and emotional endurance. Cycling back on itself this notion has often made black women stay isolated clinging to narratives of their vigor, a force they posses, but one that too often overshadows their desires and vulnerabilities and translates them into weaknesses – a myth born out of the long history of demands on black women and a role of taking them on.

For survival’s sake and/or devotion, this model of black women’s unbreakable nature has ramifications in how black women attend to their own longings and even basic

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care. Azaléia individuates her depression attributing her growing sense of problems as of her own making. While there are ways in which these women’s thoughts and actions can compound their sadness and circumstances, creating this causal link intones a notion within Azaléia that she is responsible for her trying material and affective conditions. Her investment in family and community are two clear instances of practices of human interdependence, and therefore not the individual agency conveyed in her discourse. Her words speak to a complicated psychological bind evident in the very contradictory position in which Azaléia, and other black women, find themselves: having to believe that they can only help themselves. I suggest this is a product of experiencing limited social, economic, or affective communities of support as well as being taught and/or interpellated into this space of self-sufficiency. Black women’s problem solving, decision-making, caring and providing for, make up a way of life that has sustained them but can wear them out emotionally and physically. In the case of these women who lack viable places, persons or means of reinforcement, I suggest that the suicidal becomes a space that momentarily seems like a relief or respite from the abuses of a particularly grueling day, as perhaps was the case with Azaléia. It may also be a response to the more incessant daily struggles, and the ongoing moods of anxiety they inhabit, as was very likely the case to be seen with Violeta. The suicidal force is a risky prospect of release and quiet; it is a sensory and physical numbing to the realities of their lives that enters into their spectrum of options of relief, surrender, longing and deflation.

The intent to self-terminate and have finality are often theorized as evident in the actions and mechanisms used; jumping-off buildings or firearms are most often characterized as evidencing greater definitive intent and are gendered. Several articles in

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the Brazilian mainstream newspapers the Folha de São Paulo and Estado de Minas written on suicide in the country, cite men’s use of more definitive methods, such as firearms and hangings, which they suggest as performances of masculinity; in contrast, women are theorized as using less violent means like overdosing to call attention to their situation in the interest of intervention.61 Azaléia’s act would most likely be named as a suicidal gesture designed to signal a person’s feelings of desperateness. However, the stigmatization and silencing of suicide in Brazil make it an area of Brazilian social life not very well understood.62 This desire for deep tranquilization and seemingly for assistance leads to trying to understand what compelled Azaléia into that space.

The May 25, 1991 Estado de Minas article addresses the rising rates of suicide in the capital of Belo Horizonte and the state of Minas Gerais and accounts for these increases with the period’s economic and social crisis. The early stages of re- democratization was the backdrop for these rates in the early 1990s with the resignation and impeachment of Fernando Collor de Mello, the first popularly elected president of

Brazil in 1992 post-dictatorship, for allegations of corruption and the economic turbulence that produced another shift in currency, unemployment, inflation, and widespread social insecurity. According to another 1991 Estado de Minas article, in Belo

Horizonte, suicide attempts rose by over fifty percent since 1989 and in 1990, 150 suicides were reported of which 114 (76 percent) were by men. The gendered nature of suicide was also reflected in statistics of the World Health organization during that

61 See article “Incidência de suicídios cresce na Região Metropolitana de BH” in Estado de Minas 5/21/1991 and “Suicida não quer morrer, diz psicoterapeuta” in Folha de Sao Paulo 9/13/1993. 62 See “Cresce o suicídio entre jovens de 15 a 24 anos” in Estado de Minas 6/4/1998. 143

period, which reported that women made two out of every three suicide attempts, whereas two out of every three completed suicides were men.63

Under this social lens, Azaléia’s narrative and suicide attempt signal the complex arrays, uncertainty and ambivalence with which she was living in society and the different ways she had learned to function within them. I emphasize her vagueness about the details – how or when she put the pills into her mouth, what was going through her mind and body. On the one hand for Azaléia, it is an extreme act with loaded symbolic meaning. On the other, her narration only partially rendered it as an act of crisis, more pointedly, conveying the intensity of her daily experience rather than her exploration of her death. Azaléia’s attempt therefore, can be productively read within Berlant’s framework of the acts of liberal and capitalist subjects, specifically those in some of the more precarious social and economic positions, in which,

The body and life are…sites of episodic intermission from personality, of inhabiting agency differently in small vacations from the will, itself, which is so often spent from the pressure of coordinating one’s pacing with the pace of the working day, including times of preparation and recovery from it.64

In other words, rather than a choice to try and end one’s life, these are acts with unknown consequences that are more about creating distance from the intensity of what they are living than ending them; these are moments to quiet down and perhaps have “a less bad experience.” This abeyance is part of the immediacy that Berlant evokes in this conceptualization of agency that is not constructed around the long-term, but captures enactments and modes of the present. Her movement into this force is where she reacts to the circumstances in which she survives: her endless labor and financial struggle, her

63 As reported in article entitled “Suicídio terá prevenção em BH” Estado de Minas 8/14/1991. 64 Berlant 2007:779 144

children’s welfare, violence in her neighborhood, her loneliness. It is a wandering that parallels Valdete’s theorization of women’s meanderings under unabated stress. As

Valdete indicated, some women do not come back from going mad, but as her own story reveals it is a momentary lapse that these women remember as unusual and abnormal, but with a rationale.

The nature of the marginalization that these women endure has been a structured reality since birth and is typically endured, managed and resisted. Jacinta, Violeta, and

Hortênsia consistently used in conjunction the terms “preto e pobre” (black and poor) in describing scenes from society and specifically themselves. Jacinta assessed that “the majority of poor are black and ugly,” echoing these popularized uses of racial and class hierarchies of bodies that play out in their own thinking of society and the local biomedical or neighborhood community. Azaléia returned from the hospital after her overdose and picked up where she left off. The lack of response signals the social stigma that prevents suicide from being widely addressed or the suicidal from being noticed specifically when performed by racialized others and that most likely, the communities either were unaware of, unable to or did not know how to assist. The results however were the same, Azaléia, like Violeta and Hortênsia were left to deal with that experience and their everyday demands more or less alone. This provides insight into why they all narrate their stories not as a catalyst for change, but an illustration of where they have been. Its ordinariness is precisely what makes attacks against racism and structural positioning infrequent and the reaction and enactment of these suicide attempts can be seen within the same vantage.

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***

With madness as a possibility, Azaléia’s example illustrates how her suicide attempt and living conditions can be read both within and beyond the bounds of social insanity or abnormality. She did not lose her mind, but the emotional and material conditions to make her feel comfortable enough in her day-to-day life or even fully human. Her actions should not be reduced to or summarized by a title of mental illness or a social stigma of insanity; this labeling does little work in uncorking the myriad experiences and feelings that influence a person’s rationales, ways or improved mental health. While she contemplated going to an asylum, she also explained why she became suicidal, never entering the domain of madness. She highlighted this point by stating about doctors, “Today, [doctors] say, ‘This one is mad, we need to treat them like a crazy person’…I was treated for many years and I think that doctors are crazier than I am.”

Azaléia’s reasoning and assessment demonstrates her firm belief in her actions as stemming from a space of sanity and tenuous lateral agency rather than from insanity or inertia. Her experiences with the suicidal realm are a vast emotional confrontation with the living as Berlant’s theory suggests and a space evoked in the opening pages of Toni

Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, when the old black local healer Minnie Ransom rhetorically asks the young troubled Velma, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” This question, one that – “might strike the very note that could shatter Velma’s bones” (1980: 3-4) – evokes what Azaléia may have come into contact with in the realm of the suicidal. Her movement around death marks another instance of her literal and metaphysical survival and gestures to how the force of the space of suicide is part of her process of negotiating who she is and her life.

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The self-making I am theorizing in relation to the suicidal is not goal-oriented or linear, but a sinuous, continual negotiation of self that reshapes these women’s lives and how they express their reality. More in-line with Berlant’s intricate conceptualization of agency, the unsteady motion of self-making, encompasses these moments of finding ephemeral relief from demanding financial, familial, social and affective conditions. This sliding away, in the instances of the women, can be a little more paced, conscious and energized than Berlant’s theorization, but the numbing to and of the self she articulates, helps gesture to moments in the process of self-making that are not marked by robust living that overemphasize the making as a bettering or linear practice. It is not a way of living “on high” or being sentient on full blast. Self-making, often for marginalized people, notably black people, can be layered, day-to-day acts of managing the sharp angles of life that racialization creates and specifically the ones that cannot be anticipated.65 Self-making includes conscious ideological shifts and practices, but in the context of the lives of these women, I am attuned to a range of everyday negotiations of self that extend from surmounting the feelings of being ugly or useless when one looks in the mirror, to contending with fear in confrontation, or finding enough courage to sing in front of an audience.

This process of self-(re)creation, for Azaléia, I suggest is glimpsed/identifiable in her hardship and the growing recognition of its continuous negotiation. She moves away from the projections and into her vulnerabilities and fullness of her life struggles and possibilities. She consistently cited the day during psychotherapy that she decided to no longer assume other people’s problems. Her psychologist, with whom she remains in

65 For examples of these everyday forms of racialization and their complex negotiations see Gilliam and Gilliam 1999; Harper 2001; Holland 2005; dos Santos 2008; Vargas 2004 147

touch, assessed her depression by saying that the day she decided not to carry everyone else’s concerns she would begin the process of reclaiming her emotional life. She never listed the calendar dates of when she began consulting with psychologists and psychiatrists, but she spoke of eight years of therapy and crying through her weekly sessions until years later, making a change one day: she said she would no longer take on the stresses of others. In her own words she asserted,

Life is mine…this is what we have to think about in our lives…when I thought others were in control of my life, I was worried. I would live [for others]. What happens? You get depression…I let a lot of people interfere with my life….Now, I am sharing it – the good things. I only want to share the good thing.

That day, I suggest, symbolically illuminates, the slow process of self-building undergone before, but refracted and rendered more intricate through suicidal force. I believe that pain and loss are still active energies she navigates but are not dominant influences in the person she continues to become.

While it is impossible to know the labyrinth of Azaléia or any person’s emotional and psychological struggles, her entrance into the group is the context in which she developed some of the footing to “stop taking on other people’s problems.” She joined the group in its early stages and for the first time in her life, she shared a space with women who looked like her, grew up under similar conditions and shared similar life experiences. As many of the women would explain, she did not love the group at first, but her life trials were resonant with those of other members. These were women who were living under similarly intense economic difficulties, mostly raising children alone in the specific context of a neighborhood embroiled in the drug trade. These often unspoken connections they shared were many: fears of paying bills, putting food on the table and of

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their children’s welfare. Many worried about their sons’ involvement in the trade, their daughter’s teenage pregnancies, addiction and the possibility of their children’s early death. There were also losses of children, husbands, and neighbors and, most significantly, the sense of loosing themselves. These were the stories that Valdete eventually heard after gathering the women and asking about why they were taking medication. The parallels in the challenges these women faced created identifications of strife and getting by and they saw mirrors of themselves in each other.

I go back to the notion of mirroring and the hailing, introduced in chapter one, to theorize these women’s sensing and identifying their own experiences within other members of the group. For example, Azaléia was embraced by a community of recognition where she gained footing and understanding. There is no perception of craziness, but women laboring through extraordinary financial, social and emotional forces. Suicide attempts are signs of these women’s deflation under overbearing conditions where the demands outweigh their own emotional architecture, physical capabilities and support. I will discuss the intricacies of the group dynamics in greater detail in chapters three and five, but the connections created by the group enables women to be emerged in a space of affective resonance, relieving the burden of demand and most specifically the varied forms of interpellation of black, female bodies, most specifically the crazy black woman. They are in Minnie’s words able to, “Release…Let it go. Let the healing power flow” (1980:20).

***

The instructive power the group had in Azaléia’s life is evidenced in the support she provides for more recent members. She reads them inside out, that is, from the inside

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of what may appear to be the lost, sad, incomprehensible mad black woman. She is perceptive of and attends to women who are depressed and anxious, clearly evidenced in her ability to “see it in the eyes” of her depressed daughter who is also the most visibly negra, black, in skin color and phenotype, of her children.66 By moving through this space of the suicidal she has embodied knowledge of the dimensions of black women’s physical and emotional survival. This experience allows her to assert herself to her daughter’s doctor, in spite of her racial and class position. Her own incessant crying made it possible that she has cried enough to know and see what it means to be captivated by the feelings of despair and depression and the suicidal. From and with this, she has come to voice through a desire to help others she hails as in that same space. On two different occasions, I sat with Azaléia as she spoke with women from the group who were deeply saddened and increasingly despondent while dealing with the struggles of their children.

One woman had stopped showing up to group rehearsals and Azaléia encouraged her to return to the group and invest in herself. She recounted telling her, “Why are you going to stay here crying with your head down? It will only get worse. Look in the mirror, say you are pretty.” She affirmed what she told the woman by saying to me, “She is pretty!”

Azaléia’s acts and investment are based in her belief that “words sustain” people and from her enacted commitment to women recognizing their own ability to become more proactive. The power and desire to hail other women, as is also seen in the case of

Violeta, living in similar states of complex loss is part of the productive experience of the energy of suicide.

66 Azaléia is both interpellated and self-identifies with blackness, her husband was white and her children with the exception of the one that is depressed are fair skinned and phenotypically would most likely not be identified as of African descent. 150

That said, while the suicidal experience brought her into touch with her own vulnerability, her problems have not gone away. She continues to deal with two of her sons involvement in drug dealing, which has resulted in police visits to her home in the middle of the night and one of her sons living in hiding. The sight of the washing machine on her deck and the small house in her front patio where the woman was killed remain traumatic reminders of the painful events with which she cohabitates. She manages these ongoing stresses alongside the demands of her other children and bouts of solitude. Azaléia candidly elucidates her emotional course:

There are times when I am sad, low with my head [down] like this. I start to think about things. I leave, go out on the street and I am another person…There are people who look at me and say, ‘wow you look so happy.’ And really I am happy in the ways that I can be. There are times that I feel somewhat unsteady. With some words, depending upon the words I hear, it can become worse. But you have to stay quiet, you can’t open your mouth or cry...You have to look in the mirror…Express yourself! Because before, my life was a confusion. I don’t want to return or see. I don’t want to take this to people either. Because there are people who need more that we do.

Azaléia made shifts in life and views it as a balancing act, where some days are worse than others. Yet she emphasizes the investment in the process of finding balance saying,

“Life is good and beautiful, but it depends upon us.” No other woman in the group devotes as much time to visiting and speaking with other members going through harder life moments and she uses this mantra as a guide post for how to live in the ceaseless flow of challenges. She is a dependable listener for group members and other folks in the neighborhood.67 She looks at her fellow group members as colleagues and women who

67 On several occasions, I either arrived at Azaléia’s house with someone from the community sitting at her dining room table talking or she would tell me stories of people who had either recently come over or she had visited who were hurting with problems in their lives. During the last several months of my fieldwork, she had been talking with a local couple struggling with their long marriage due to the mixture of her husband’s alcoholism and their economic concerns. 151

have walked and confronted similar hurdles as she. Singing and performing with the group provide one vehicle for not losing the equilibrium that Valdete locates as mental health because they bring them into contact with people “who need more than [they] do.”

The ability to offer words, whether spoken, danced to or sung, creates critical opportunities to share the life experiences and knowledge they have acquired and embody. In this sense, words are not just uttered, but I interpret and expand to become affective gestures of recognition and empathy. They provide moments of profound identification and self-recognition that is both vibrant and resonant for the recipient and affirming for the giver. Their giving to others and each other transforms their experience into wisdom and this exchange does the work of making black women’s subjectivity encountered, felt and textured.

* * *

…There was Marininha de Bananeira, descendant of slaves, she was a big black woman, strong and half crazy. Sometimes, she would enter into crazy phases and no one would stop on the road because they were afraid of her. She never hit us, or anything. She would come out shouting, tearing leaves from the coconut trees, yelling the names of the boyfriends that she fictitiously was involved with. And people would say, “Look at crazy Maria, close the doors!” and all the kids would close them. There were phases when she was well, she would walk, converse normally and then there were other phases of the moon, when she would moon, she would have crises of madness…

* * *

Similarly, when visiting family members or friends, Azaléia consistently took time to talk to the elderly of the house or family members who she was informed were not well. She often relates experiences from her own life as the basis for interest and emotional intervention. 152

march for the “18th of May: the day of the fight against asylums”

VIOLETA

Violeta’s story offers another angle on the question of self-loss, craziness and agency. She first mentioned suicide during my initial visit. We chatted as she ran errands during the day and after spending the night at her house, we began a formal interview documenting her life story in the morning over coffee. About a half-an-hour into the interview, she matter-of-factly told me of her granddaughter’s death, abruptly leaving the small dining area and bringing back a glossy, headshot of the black “beauty.” With the photo in sight, she explained how Junca had committed suicide and then returned to other memories of her life. 153

She spoke of her granddaughter’s suicide several more times. One warm April morning before leaving for a performance, the women sat around talking and their conversation about depression turned into one of suicide. Violeta referenced her granddaughter’s act and assessed that “the only people who do that either do not love other people or do not love God.” Many of the women in the group had attended the granddaughter’s funeral and relayed both the horror of what had happened and the ghastly sight in the casket. But when asked the why of the suicide – why did Junca do it?

– no story prevailed making her death witnessed but leaving Junca’s own reasoning unclear.

Some sense of the why emerged sitting in the home of Amaranta, Violeta’s second oldest daughter and the mother of the deceased. I was invited by Violeta to a birthday party she was throwing for her daughter at her home in a neighboring municipality about an hour and a half trip by bus. We took several buses to the sunny, low-income neighborhood which was a mix of dirt and paved roads, open fields, single- story cinderblock houses and a vibrant street life that Violeta participated in by calling out hellos to local vendors and residents. Two of her daughters live in this satellite neighborhood to the capital, where many one-time residents of lower incomes neighborhoods in Belo Horizonte have found affordable and available housing or land on which to build. These spaces also typically provide some of the calm that their old neighborhoods, most often due to the drug trade, inconsistently possessed.

The sisters live within a ten minute walk of each other, but as Violeta pointed out to me, Amaranta lives in the economically poorest part of the neighborhood with pot holed dirt roads, noticeably smaller and more precarious housing and some neighbors

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who struggle to eat on a daily basis. Amaranta is now paraplegic having first lost the movement of her legs apparently from a misapplied epidural during one of her children’s births. There was a period where she recovered and hobbled with a cane, yet she has been unable to work and survives off her small disability check, her son’s meager and inconsistent earnings when he is employed and most dependably, her mother’s assistance.

Because Amaranta’s mobility is limited to a wheelchair, which is hard to maneuver in her neighborhood, Violeta made weekly trips to visit her daughter bringing her food and support, as she now virtually lives in bed.

Sitting on a couch in Amaranta’s gunshot style house of about four small rooms, I heard another account of Junca’s suicide. Laughter and animated stories blended into the rhythmic pagode (a popular derivative of samba) echoing from the small cemented alleyway running alongside the house where the family had gathered around the barbeque to celebrate Amaranta’s birthday. Violeta had rolled her from her bed into the cemented alley to eat and socialize. I was sitting in the living room with a family friend who along with a cousin, brother, sister-in-law and several nieces, had made the trip across town.

This friend asked about my research and in a natural lull in our conversation she gestured to the photo of Amaranta’s daughter that sat alone on the top shelf of a sparsely filled entertainment center. She asked if I knew what had happened, first commenting on how sad it was. I replied that I knew of the suicide, but left it at that. She nodded, looking just to the right of the structure standing opposite us and said that Junca had burned herself where the shelving now stood. Her voice grew a little quiet as she told the story seemingly out of respect for the weight of the loss rather than being overheard talking about it. She explained that the daughter had called someone from the window of the

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home, asking the person to buy her alcohol. After dowsing herself in the fluid, she walked in front of her bed-ridden mother, begged for forgiveness for not being a better daughter to her paraplegic mother and lit a match. She burned several meters from the foot of the bed. The family friend reiterated that Amaranta’s flesh burned into the floor, walls and the furniture nearby and pointed to a darkened area on the cement floor with her foot. A woman in the group recalled that the Junca had grown irreconcilably depressed after her boyfriend left her; and in the moment of her immolation she had simply asked her mother for a hug. This member followed up by saying however, that she was not exactly sure what occurred, but that Amaranta never walked again after the loss.

The traumatic death of her granddaughter was one of the first things I learned about Violeta; and the granddaughter’s memory, like that of Amaranta’s ability to walk, loomed in the home with the smoke of the barbeque. A male cousin who came for the festivities, was taken by the weight of the confluence of the loss, its mark on the space and the joy being conjured that day. Leaving the alley and conversation, he retreated to the couch where I was sitting and let flow an emotional build-up that other visitors were mostly likely experiencing. As his voice choked, he wistfully expressed how moving it was to see Amaranta happy, outside, enjoying the party in spite of what had occurred.

How could she be so joyful, so sanguine with the past that she carried? He criticized family members, her other brothers and sisters, who did not show up or get in touch; he felt they were so consumed with their lives and comfort, that in spite of caring for their sister, they could not bring themselves to viscerally face her in the flesh and celebrate her survival. His profound sadness moved in and out with his breath and he apologized for his “unmanly” stream of emotion. He then shared his disbelief about how Violeta did it:

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work, economically and emotionally care for Amaranta and virtually all of her adult children, and stay calm and steady.

The loss of Violeta’s granddaughter is a particular dimension of Violeta’s life that needs to be held in focus in hearing Violeta’s considerations of ending her own. In sharp contrast with the ease and boldness with which she recounted her granddaughter’s suicide, she told her own story only once during my fieldwork.68 In July 2006, the group traveled to the interior of the state of Minas Gerais to partake in several musical festivals and visit with communities in the region. One of the final scheduled encounters took place with a small black community, the descendants of a quilombo (maroon community) living outside one of the larger towns in the interior. The mid-morning meeting took place in an unadorned small school with the women and several men of this local community where high rates of alcoholism and depression were explained by a local social worker as growing as a result of a lack of employment and the community’s marginalization. The alcoholism had compounded the racial stigmatization that the group already endures as quite dark skinned (preto) people. In this psychological and material context, the women in the community were explained as specifically struggling with issues of self-esteem in the face of early childbirths and women’s subjugation. The goal of the encounter was to encourage the women to create networks of support, most specifically to assemble a group that could invest in their quality of life as women.

With the reserved community members sitting in a horseshoe configuration,

Valdete and other willing group members shared their personal stories of struggle and the role their participation in the group had played in improving their lives. She emphasized

68 As mentioned, she spoke of her granddaughter’s suicide both in the public context of the group and in private interviews with me. 157

the need for women to get out, talk and have a space to converse. She said there are a lot of demands for housewives, so it was important to have a space specific for them. She explained that women get used to having their heads down and taking and obeying orders and that the group had helped to change how they carry themselves and build their self- esteem, emphasizing that, “Friendship is health.” Although it was hard to get an affective register on how they were hearing and absorbing the information, the women in the audience sat quietly and attentively while Valdete spoke.

Violeta volunteered to speak and while she is vocal in the context of daily group activities, I had yet to hear her open up publicly. She narrated a bit of her life history, her early marriage and economic hardships and then indicated that she had spent time in a mental hospital. “I lived as a crazy person.” She was hospitalized at a public facility in

Belo Horizonte with her new born child and was given shock therapy. She said she had entered into despair at one point and contemplated walking her children in front of a bus.

She had gathered them up and taken them downtown to one of the main thoroughfares of the city ready to end it all. There was an unnamed intervening force, but she continued that in another instance, she had bought gasoline in order to burn her family and herself in their home. Violeta added texture and desperateness to her story saying that she was living in a two-room house with over five of her children sleeping crosswise on a single bed with no idea of how she was going to feed them on a daily basis.

Circulating in her pool of memories, Violeta spoke again of being in the hospital and insisting to the doctor that she was not crazy. She said, “I would tell him, ‘I am not crazy!’ It did not matter what I did: they would shock me if I took my clothes off or sat still.” Her voice stayed firm and reiterated that she was not crazy, others just did not

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understand her problems. She explained her state indicating that that she never conversed with people and simply had no conversation. Her husband eventually encouraged her to get out of the house and the day she finally did, she found him dead on her return home.

Stated humorously and with a smile, this comment brought about a significant amount of laughter and chuckles from the audience. Transitioning back into the moment, Violeta reflected that she was a completely different person – one who cried and was sad all of the time. After joining the group, she concluded, “Now, I think I am wonderful!”

***

The invocation of suicide in Violeta’s narratives, like Azaléia, is accompanied with the complexities of her life, most specifically the economic hardship and emotional losses that all too often are connected to these women’s social positioning. Her life parallels the struggles for basic subsistence and emotional isolation relayed by Azaléia and most women interviewed. Violeta’s mother passed when she was very young as did her fraternal twin. Her severe father abandoned her in the streets and after being raised by her godparents, she was married to a man who did not provide her with much emotional support. Building a new life with her husband and children in Belo Horizonte as a teenager, literally meant constructing a home in the hills of the periphery from bottom up, finding employment without much schooling and raising her family.

Violeta’s physical loss of family members and self suggests the spectrum of emotions in which her negotiations with craziness took root. There was the loss of her biological family as mentioned and then those of her own children. Most women had children succumb to illness after a couple of months or years of life. Inadequate health

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care and disease were central factors in making the loss of children a frequent reality in most women’s lives. Violeta lost three infants to illness, one through adoption and one daughter remains missing. Lilás lost three of her children while in the advanced stages of pregnancy. She birthed dead twins and, after taking time to exhale, confided that it was the saddest day of her life. These types of losses are some of the less spoken of binding experiences of group members as women and account for spaces of enduring grief that have been deepened by sustained calamities, specifically in the instance of Violeta.

More than just the physical death of others, Violeta’s despair articulated in her narrative of suicide is her self-loss. As William Styron writes in Darkness Visible, a memoir of his mental illness, “Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression…The loss of self-esteem a celebrated symptom (1990: 56).” Indeed, Violeta narrated her early life around her losses, but without alluding to or speaking much resentment. Violeta did not narrate her suicidal thoughts as the consequence of the sum total of her losses and many women who lived through the death of loved ones and economic struggled did not mention suicidal thoughts or acts. Violeta describes a slow erasure of self, captured in her saying she was not being seen or heard. Commenting on the psychological tolls on older women’s working conditions, psychologist Sylvia Lesser describing a study on older women’s demanding working condition as domestics in their youth indicates, “Th[eir] biggest pain was solitude: they did not share with anyone the force they were making, the anguish or fear they experienced” (2001: 222). Whether or not there were people around to support her, although her narrative tells otherwise,

Violeta’s life experiences have concretized in a sentiment that she was alone and had only herself for support. This mind-frame is deeply embedded in the myth of the all-

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bearing black woman, the mãe preta or mammy, and one that black women are all too often materially forced to assume to survive in spite of a sense of aloneness and self- denial. The onus of this emotional space is evoked in her saying that she was “not crazy”, she just needed someone to converse with and presumably hear and witness her. She juxtaposed this yearning and her isolation with her institutionalization, which, I suggest, was an attempt to illustrate both the desperate space in which she found herself (both before and while in the hospital) and how it was not engaged and then discounted in the context of the biomedical analysis of her state of mind. She recounts being given shock therapy, institutionalized and most likely highly medicated – all common practices in

Brazil until the anti-asylum movement began to take root and was finally legislated in

2001.69

The mental health care system in Brazil underwent significant revisions over the past thirty years generated principally by a political and social movement around the humanization of mental health care. This campaign was most notably influenced by and framed around the work of the Italian psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia, during the 1970s whose instigation of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in Trieste, Italy, had a ripple effect in the world.70 Basaglia and the movements he inspired rallied around the concept that persons with mental illness are citizens and should be integrated into society.

In Brazil, the containment of the mentally ill began with the opening of mental hospitals in the 19th century to account for the malaise of the European émigrés who became homesick in adjusting to their newfound home in the proverbial “tropics.” Mental health

69 For account of the history of the changes in the mental health system see Amarante 1995; Tenório 2002 70 Scheper-Hughes and Lovell, ed. 1987 161

care before this period was inconsistently taken up by churches, but many people suffering from mental illness, without adequate resources, roamed the streets and cities, stigmatized and unassisted. Mentally ill, the formerly enslaved, poor and downtrodden people formed part of a street life of the 1800s associated with filth and disease, which the State would focus on cleaning up in the early twentieth century.71 While there is insufficient space here to elaborate on the origins of the Brazilian public health system, it was permeated by strong racialized, gendered and classed rationales about which bodies spread illness and which should be protected from the outbreaks of the time. These associations continue to produce the residues of visions and associations of the threats of black bodies, specifically poor, black women, in public spaces.

The paltry treatment of the indigent, mentally ill, and often black people generally, continued in the asylums, which were founded at the turn of the 19th into the

20th century (Arruda 1995). The idea of the hospital as a psychological retreat and remedy from the social inciters of mental illness had since passed with the asylums, as they increasingly became known as spaces of grave violations of human dignity and physical care. Minas Gerais was home to one of the most famous asylums, the Centro

Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Barbacena, which was the site of a landmark journalistic exposé of the grave abuse of patients in the country’s “insane asylums.”72 A May 18th

Folha de São Paulo article speaks of the psychological and physical neglect of residents including inadequate clothing and food that led to both conspicuous illness and death.73

Furthermore, articles in both the Estado de Minas and O Tempo reported that the State

71 see Borges 1993; Chalhoub 1993 72 See Firmino 1982 73 See article entitled “País desmonta ‘indústria’ psiquiátrica” 162

had gone as far as selling deceased patients’ bodies to medical schools for substantial profit.74 Now defunct and a museum preserving this sinister history, Barbacena is a touchstone for what these articles named as the “psychiatric industry” the Brazilian State sponsored and symbolizes State practices of indiscriminate and de facto institutionalization and social abandonment.75 Several of the women recounted visiting two of the public mental hospitals in Belo Horizonte, which were funnels for Barbacena even in the late 1980s, and they recounted the large numbers of black patients who, overwhelming economically poor, are consequently some of the main users of the public health system.

While hardly documented or recognized, terreiros and centers of religions of the

African matrix have provided an unmatched place for black and poor populations to gain mental health care. It bears noting that these places historically have provided consistent affective-physical and spiritual assistance to the Afro-descendant population in Brazil whereas mainstream society has not invested in its most marginalized members, or non- members. While I am unaware of whether Violeta ever sought aid beyond biomedicine,

(other women did76), her institutionalization at one of the public hospital’s of Belo

Horizonte echoes this history.

74 See “E o governo revive a ‘Nau dos Insensatos’” Estado de Minas, September 23, 1988; “Psiquiatra afirma que Minas vendia cadavers para estudos” O Tempo, May 24, 1998. 75 Several Newspaper articles describe the abuses and history of Barbacena. See “Manicômios do País internam sem motivo” Estado de Minas, September 19,1992 and “Os esquecido” Estado de Minas, June 3, 2001. 76 No one openly spoke about currently practicing or frequenting Afro-Brazilian spiritual centers. I was told by one member of another’s practicing of “macumba” (conjure practices associated with mal intent) when she said she was dealing with curses, which had been placed on her. This member is now Evangelical and does not regularly participate in group activities. I was also told that there were no known terreiros of Candomblé in the neighborhood or Umbanda centers. There was one known spiritualist center that some of the children of the women had visited or 163

The specific events that led to Violeta’s institutionalization may reveal a more complicated history of mental illness. The terms of her institutionalization were vague; she did not release this information fluidly with me, which I will address in brief. She also did not specify at what age she was institutionalized, but I inferred that she probably was in her thirties. Her son’s schizophrenia and her granddaughter’s suicide may hint at a predisposition to mental illness and render her suicidal thoughts within the framework of clinical depression or another one of the major severe mental illnesses more or less globally acknowledged for their “irrefutable reality” (Luhrmann 2000:13).77 Violeta gave birth to and gave up a daughter for adoption during this period specifying that the child was better off with another family because of her precarious state. These biomedical analyses provide important information about her state of mind and her potential craziness.

That said, my concern with her narration of her suicidal thoughts and institutionalization is with her actions rather than a clinical psychological reading. More in line with the types of analyses that the women provided around mental illness and these women’s behavior, I am interested in how the women give meaning to or live under the associations and invocations of craziness and, as anthropologist Emily Martin advances writing on manic depression, “to offer different kinds of descriptions of the experiences and actions….descriptions that allow such people to belong fully to the human condition rather than to an outer sphere of “irrationality” (2007: 29). In this vein,

frequented. Several women shared that they had practiced for a while or at least attended a service there. 77 Some of the major mental illnesses are: Bipolar Disorder or Manic Depression, Major Depression/Clinical Depression and Schizophrenia. They have become known as the major disorders because they are theorized as globally observable. 164

Violeta’s testimony, like Azaléia’s, is a partial account of how she experiences her overdetermination, specifically when she was hospitalized and her state medicalized. Yet, many of Violeta’s losses and traumas, including the death of her granddaughter, occurred after her time in the mental hospital, raising questions around how she confronts these ongoing conditions and the relationship to the title or interpellation of the crazy over the course of her life.

To get at how she lived with both her struggles and her negotiations with the label of crazy, I turn to her interaction with the women of the quilombo and why she decided to tell her story since I had neither heard her share these accounts in the context of the group, in public nor in the quiet of one-on-one interviews. Having established a familiarity and ease with her, I commented to Violeta about these unknowns of her life as we walked up a dirt road to town after the encounter. She turned to me and responded:

“They say that sometimes…telling a story is like living it twice.” She quieted and affirmed that it was worth retelling these parts of her life if they might help others.

Violeta volunteered her story believing that there was something that her experiences with the suicidal, mental overload and broader life difficulties as a poor woman of color, could invest in improving the quality of life of these women of the quilombo. It was not just an act of empathy but an identification with the struggles they endure, the mental spaces they inhabit and the potential readings their bodies can evoke.

Familiar with these physical and mental registers of isolation and despair, her self- revealing was an act of hailing these women through a set of embodiments that come under the shadow of the specter of the crazy black woman. These are the particular

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intersectional racial, gendered and class experiences that black women have in the

Brazilian social sphere, within their families and their homes.

It was not that these women were simply racially black, but it was how their physical bodies come to bear on their experiences in the social world and, consequently, their internal discussions and beliefs. The social economic conditions alone of these black women produce day-to-day living that is about sustaining those around them and the practices and flows of their daily lives lead them through the psychological impacts of the socio-cultural world in which their bodies are given meanings. Violeta directly expressed her class frustrations, venting on various occasions how she hated rich people and took 166

pride in being poor. Her emphasis was more on the values of humility and the hard work she associated with economically poor people, rather than on having economic capital.

Whereas inferences of race in Violeta’s stories were scattered, her sensibility around race is present in how she moves, sees and responds to the world.

Women like Violeta’s daily trips to work or a to see a doctor in the city center exemplify how gendered racial associations with class position map onto and impact them as they move. Jacinta described her own neighborhood as having “no shortage of black people,” but the mere descent on the bus from the hills to the city center took them into the middle class and elite homes where the women by and large worked in service alongside other workers (rather than residents or employers) who were also black. No woman interviewed recounted working for a black employer, describing them all as

“branco” white; Violeta did reference being solicited by a man to use her looks to prostitute herself as a “mulata” to make a living, rather than carting paper. As mostly users of the public health system, few women interviewed had seen a black doctor (never at the neighborhood health post) which gives wait to the assessment that the public health system is considered one of the spaces where Brazilian race and class segregation are clearly visible (Estado de Minas 1988; Oliveira 1998). Violeta’s circulation in this landscape of hierarchical racial and classed differences creates and reinforces embodied understandings of race’s affect on her interactions and narrations, and raise questions about how it expresses itself in her state of mind.

Looking upon this room full of black women, many with drinking problems, and generally in a state of depression, Violeta recognized in their lives the conditions that deliver too many poor black women to a place of great trial and often isolation. Their

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blackness may have gone unnamed in the discourse, but I suggest that Violeta’s willingness to divulge her story emerged out of a deep space of embodied recognition of where the women emotionally were standing and where they may head.

Violeta used the label of crazy to address how her actions were interpreted and specifically the internal impacts of that characterization. She spoke of being unable to do anything to prove to doctors that she was not crazy in spite of having a rationale behind her actions and feelings. In parallel, Fanon writes, “Thus my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with “real reason” ([1952]1967:132). She offers her own example to these women to suggest that they too may have a reason behind the why and how of their behaviors and state of mind that goes beyond what biomedical and social interpretations might articulate. Her example and story specifically facilitate for the women of the quilombo, the reality of a woman who looks like them, had similar experiences to them and who carved out a space in which she is at greater ease and finding enjoyment in her life. Violeta indirectly stated that her time in the hospital did not change her feelings or her problems, which she recognized were not going to be fixed through biomedicine. She found a new way of being, which the collective of the group profoundly helped to bring into being. She intoned to these women that they were susceptible to heading down this path of isolation, yet offered and reflected an image of normality for their experiences, understanding that they needed help while also reinforcing that they were not necessarily crazy.

As her narration suggests, her time in the clinic did not remove the problems of her daily life. The insinuated title of crazy neither assisted nor improved her circumstances. In fact the intensity and infrequency with which she spoke of her

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institutionalization and treatment suggest that she had to find new ways of handling the everyday struggles and challenges that arose recognizing the few outlets for dependable support. She spoke very little of this time chronologically, but through piecing together her story, it was a period in which the emotional and physical demands on her increased.

Violeta on various occasions and in diverse contexts shared the ongoing trials of her children. She told the story of rescuing and taking care of one of her daughters who was held captive and physically abused by her husband. Another one of her daughters disappeared when Violeta was in her late 30s78 and, as is already known, Amaranta is handicapped. Violeta dealt with the schizophrenia of one of her sons who circulated in and out of mental hospitals. This son and several others were involved with drugs both as users and for working in the trade and consequently, Violeta’s life and property were threatened because of her sons’ business practices and addictions. Her husband died during this period and she became responsible for her household specifying that she inherited the gendered male role she named as “head of the household.” Since meeting

Violeta, two of her sons were put in prison – the one with mental illness is in prison for a seventeen year sentence and she loyally visited him every other week. There was also the death of her granddaughter.

This long durée of difficulty suggests what type of intervention the group had in assisting her, if not just distracting her or providing her with momentary, but consistent other reality. Like most women interviewed, Violeta cites the group as playing a major role in her life and her willingness to speak to the women of the quilombo supports the

78 During my fieldwork, this daughter called Violeta’s home one day when she was out of the house. This was the first word Violeta had heard from or about her in seventeen years. Apparently she was alright, but never called again while I was there.

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idea that these types of networks possess considerable therapeutic benefits for women.

But on a more human spectrum, Violeta’s struggles continue and she has found ways of relating to the title she was given. How does the specter of crazy configure into the changes she has made in living?

***

Violeta’s encounter with labels of clinical madness revealed that the so-called crazy person, while stigmatized and controlled in the hospital, had some possibilities for expression in the social. Similar to Azaléia, Violeta too was affected by the territory of suicide, but in a much different manner. One day she dramatically told of desiring earlier in her life to be a mendicant, trading what she owned and knew, to sleep under one of the central archways of the city with a cheap blanket and able to keep to herself. She laughed, leaving some women silenced and others humored, which was probably the desired effect. Paralleling the story that Violeta recalled of sitting on the steps of the church and the insinuation of crazy, these bold public statements of embracing and embodying the abnormal draw attention to the expression of Violeta’s negotiations with the bounds of social normativity.

While my overall analysis considers how black women live within these norms, in this instance I am interested in how Violeta expresses her rejection of normativity and social expectations. For example, Violeta has been criticized by group members for the pride she takes in collecting cans on the streets.79 On numerous occasions, she asserted to the group how she proudly raised her kids through collecting cardboard and now cans. In

79 Violeta collects cans for a living now and takes pride in the income she is able to generate. She collects cans mainly to help support her children and grandchildren and to purchase other non- basic goods for herself, including vacations. 170

one informal interview, Violeta articulated “the ignorance” of another group member who tried to make Violeta feel ashamed for collecting on the streets, the insinuation being that this was lowly work stigmatized rather than to be celebrated. Violeta also asserted her disinterest in and resistance to chemical relaxers, flat irons and dyes that wipe out her short curls and hide her whitening hair. She specified to group members one early morning that she adamantly told her haircutter she wanted nothing to do with these products or processes to which some women’s glances or giggles communicated their surprise, distaste or desire for Violeta’s sense of self, effortless beauty and general way of making audible her negotiations with the world. In fact, Azaléia and Violeta are among the few women in the group that do not chemically process or iron their hair and even though almost all of the other group members do not wear their hair naturally and sat quietly as Violeta spoke, most articulated their admiration of both her stance and her hair.

The topic of black women’s hair and its politics are a well-addressed subject across the diaspora because of its symbolic power of anti-black normativity and internalized racism.80 Violeta’s disregard for conventions around hair and beauty are less dramatic but no less noted expressions of how she rejects norms with which she disagreed and specifically the stigmatization that people attempt to read in or judge her by. Her candidness about her thoughts and beliefs are also an attempt to be socially understood as independent and unconcerned with social norms. These were practices that some group members found off putting, but this too did not bother Violeta.

Black women’s self-assertion, specifically from this generation of women, is transgressive and wayward to their racial, class, and gender positioning. Group members’

80 See Banks 2000; Caldwell 2007:81-106; Candelario 2000; Cooper 2006:132-134; Pinho 2006 171

reactions to Violeta and her body politics are registers from women who have undergone and live similar social scrutiny and marginalization about the fears and implications around black women’s socially transgressive actions. Through the normative social lenses conditioned by white, elite fears, acts that appear to overstep bounds of social convention for black women move them into characterizations of abnormality: those not sound in mind or body, and those not healthy – sanus – or the insane. There is a convergence of the range of the abnormal and the performance of black women’s bodies and voices. As black women physically and/or vocally trespass beyond the bounds of these roles, they challenge social hierarchical fields planted in slavery and still in the process of being weeded out.

What is at stake with these transgressions can be considered in two-parts for the purposes of this argument: first, they delineate the social spaces in which black women gain some agency and subjectivity within and beyond their interpellated bodies. That is, they suggest that black women think, feel and respond to their social positioning and reality (which should come as no surprise), even when nonsensical to the normative eye.

Second, they reveal how black women’s subjectivity and agency are historically read through the lens of transgression itself and as such, always run the risk of being reduced to insanity and/or social exclusion or containment. As seen, many of these women’s acts and modes, lie in the domain of the ordinary and extraordinary, but begin to be read in the realm of the abnormal, the field of the crazy, specifically in the context of the biomedical world, which is a space particularly marked by racialized and classed-based thinking. I contend that both in spite and because of this bind, Violeta began to recognize the social power of craziness and exploring the space abnormality opens up for free

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thought, self-expression and various forms of agency. This process is a summoning of the crazy black woman’s ghost that runs the risk of further stigmatizing female blackness as part of the domain of the abnormal.

Violeta’s contact with the space of suicide, a force that is enmeshed in metaphorical and literal madness, and her subsequent institutionalization, suggest how she came into contact with the implications of socially perceived madness. She is conscious of the difference between real craziness and the wandering that Valdete theorizes. She encountered a medicalized notion of crazy during her institutionalization that resulted in the controlling of her body rather than the exploration of her psychology or affect. From her vantage it was not about what she said or even did, rather it was who she was perceived to be. While I am not arguing that there was a purely racially motivated diagnosis, I am suggesting that the often myopic lenses through which black women’s bodies are looked upon and understood are conditioned by currents of racialized thinking that specifically reads (rather than listens to) black bodies and their movements and voices within discourses of threat, helplessness, malfunction and abnormality. Emily

Martin makes a similar observation in the US in writing about the diagnosis of a young black male patient, seen as clearly bipolar by a medical professor for his students.

Examining the racialization of various mental states, she writes about the diagnosis:

The disallowed combination is to be manic, powerful and black all at once. This bind is not a product of medical categories alone, but of medical categories working in combination with cultural categories that define race in relation to human capacity in historically specific ways (2007:127).

Race in Brazil is also deeply tied into social constructions of capacity and Violeta’s disobedience, that is the refusal to submit to the label of crazy or that she was

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unconscious of her behavior, asserted a form of her own power, disconcerting to and ultimately pathological for the doctors diagnosing her. The intensity with which she spoke of this episode, that she was not crazy, intones this sense of being judged, being read from the outside in. She was affronted with her over-determination, no matter what she claimed. Consequently, already under the biomedical label of mentally ill and the stigma of abnormality that it carries, she slowly released herself from the social expectations of her black female body as the role of unfailing servant attentive to people and social norms. To live within the normative bounds expected of black women, as

Azaléia’s story exemplifies and corroborates, was driving Violeta crazy.

In returning to the assemblage of ethnographic vignettes, moments are captured from a phase of her life in which her self-making is energized by a tug-of-war between the overdetermined body of a black woman, as only wife, mother, and domestic worker, and the sentient freedom tasted in and dismissed as the (black) body of the lunatic.

Beyond the hospital, in the social sphere, madness, as the epicenter of the abnormal, is a title under which all behavior is possible precisely because it is so stigmatized. João Biehl

(2005) theorizes the state of social abandonment of people in Brazil, many the mentally ill, who are constituted as existing outside of normative social bounds and consequently left to die. Violeta’s recollection of her mendicant fantasy marks an earlier expression of her greater search for a space in which she could have disengaged from the social realm in roles of service, even if that meant performing and embodying the abnormal or even the label of crazy. Transgressing the normal, in her case, living outside of the demands placed upon her that overwhelmed her own emotional needs, meant discovering and constructing new ways of living, speaking and functioning that are in line with her own

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thinking and beliefs. The embodiment of the crazy is a resistance to Violeta’s interpellation as a two-dimensional black woman and as a mad woman; yet, at the same time, they draw her closer to the specter of the crazy black women.

The double-edged tension produced through these enactments helps to unpack the types of agency that Violeta experienced and enacted, and the tenuous nature of the archetype of the crazy black woman. Laurent Berlant’s notion of lateral agency again is helpful in characterizing elements of her actions. Violeta’s self-making is at once about resisting multiple forms of interpellation and yet about getting by, negotiating the day-today feelings of being overwhelmed, shamed, and the disappointment she experienced in her family, working life and in the hospital. The suicidal gestures were earlier expressions of the search to manage those emotions. Her subsequent actions and concerns were attempts to create a buffer zone, a space of numbness that tones down the intensity of her losses, sadness and maybe even the voices, whether psychotic or just her internal dialogue. This quest for the space of tranquility is visually manifest in her sitting in the still of the night alone and, also contrastingly, in her fully packed daily schedule. These are two polar modes of numbing, moving through and addressing the demands while trying to keep affective distance. In this capacity, her actions are based on emotional preservation and fulfillment which society does not provide.

The approximation of crazy also generates a living space for her to exercise her own norms and values that do have implications beyond her. Whether captured in the story of sitting on the church steps or wanting to live as a mendicant, Violeta enacts a range of being in the world that shares the common denominator of desire. She wears her hair the way she wants and asserts this freedom to the group. The women’s silence

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around her declarations testify to how her assertions, whether in content or voice, are trangressions perhaps of the ways in which women are to express themselves and/or beauty norms as well as literal denouncements of the constrained physical rights and bodily articulations of (black) women. While not frequently made in the group, this claim and practice is not so much crazy, as it insinuates Violeta establishing her own ideas and standards, which often run against the conventional. Yet, Violeta’s case suggests that she is aware of the possibility of her presence to invoke the crazy and can wear the stigma like a scar.

This type of expression stands in contrast, as many women recounted to me, to the way Violeta acted when she first joined the group; she was remembered as worrying and crying incessantly about her life circumstances. Group members expressed amazement in how much she has changed and how she manages the extraordinary demands in her life with tranquility. The group has played a central role in this transformation, but most group members, in spite of participating at her side, have not found the same independence in voice, style and expression; many are self-described as still very shy and continue to walk with their heads down.

Chapter three discusses the group dynamics that have facilitated this process of self-making and individual and collective empowerment, but for the sake of the present argument, I suggest that Violeta’s articulations and positions that go against the grain are models of black women’s empowerment and are ambivalently desired by other women in the group, hence the silence with which some often react to Violeta’s public assertions.

Thus, I propose that Violeta’s self-expression can be analyzed within the subjective agency that Berlant is writing to expand, which is a form of empowerment that is about

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will, “practical sovereignty” and attacking social normativity. As the case of the quilombos reveals, Violeta is compelled enough by her own experience to share them with others; and the group has provided vehicles for her to discuss what this sort of personal work can spawn and the following example more clearly suggests.

***

About a month later, the women gathered for a group meeting to evaluate the recent trip. They went around the circle sharing their thoughts and when it came time for

Violeta to reflect she said she wanted to share a story. She said that after their presentation to the people of the quilombo, she approached a quiet young black woman sitting alone with her infant with a sad look in her eye. She responded to Violeta’s inquiry saying that she did not like talking with people. When Violeta asked why not, the woman answered that she had problems “with her head” and that she went to Belo

Horizonte for psychiatric help on a regular basis. Violeta encouraged her to talk, indicating that sometimes when people discuss their problems, they can look at them differently, experiencing them as not as bad as they may have thought. She began telling the young woman a little about her own life, sharing that she has a paraplegic daughter, another daughter who was missing and a son in prison. At this point, Violeta paused, placing her hands at her heart in sign of prayer and then covering them over her face. Her voice quaked and tears streamed from her eyes. She recuperated her voice, although it was a bit soft, and picked up the story again, saying that the young woman turned to her and asked, “how do you stay so full of joy with so many problems?” The young woman voiced that she no longer felt she had problems in comparison with Violeta; she would no

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longer complain and would go in search of the same state of contentment. Violeta wiped her tears away and grew quiet. I looked around the room and noted that many of the women were already wiping away their own tears.

I offer this final ethnographic moment of Violeta because her storytelling and tears shed some light on how she reflects on her life and suggests how the group contributes to that process. Her release captures her own sense of acknowledgement from a young woman with whom she had resonated and who appreciated Violeta’s experience.

Her “twice telling” of her story is an act of testimony, which Dori Laub defines as

“inherently a process of facing loss – of going through the pain of the act of witnessing, and of the ending of the act of witnessing – which entails yet another repetition of the experience of separation and loss” (1995:74). Violeta’s tears, melancholic and cathartic, signal the young woman’s act of being witness to and affirming the pain and value of the event twice told. Furthermore, Violeta hailed this young woman with her story because the young woman was living in a space of sadness and supposition of craziness with which Violeta deeply identified and she recognized that this woman had no guidance much like herself. Her ability to offer a perspective on an existence that is not overdetermined by her body, conditions or biomedical labels validated her experiences and the incessant work Violeta engages in to function beyond the expectations of society, both as crazy and as a body only of service.

These small, jolting forms of affective strength which run through her enactment, voicing and discussion of the abnormal are ephemeral and often only discursive forms of power, but they are also generative and inspire the type of self-reflection and questioning that Violeta confronted with the label of crazy. Valdete communicates her desire to have

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the group, “mess with people[‘s minds and bodies].” Violeta’s life story alone, from her institutionalization to her granddaughter’s suicide, in the wake of her humor and presence, has an impact just through the types of extreme loss and struggle it tells. Her body and voice help to re-signify black women’s bodies within a domain of social normality that simultaneously challenges what notions of normativity underpin Brazilian society. The ripple effect put into movement by Violeta’s words and presence may be more individual than collective, internal than social and may provide an unsteady tool in effectively producing social change around black women’s precarious circumstances.

That her story and time could capture this young woman is a form of affective power that

Violeta is both reminded of and taken aback by and participates in the group to exercise and affirm.

Violeta’s self-expression, while transformative, is neither completely joyous nor completely free because it is coupled with the archetypal energy of the crazy black woman. Archetypes are known to be two-sided, inviting both negative and positive qualities.81 The experiences of isolation in feeling, thinking and acting in one’s way provided by this social liberation, sadly parallel the spaces of isolation black women experience living in the confines of their own interpellation. Thus the toll paid for self- realization, because of the social conditions in which black women function, is high, making Violeta’s tears also manifestations of emotional vulnerability and melancholia even as her general joviality and pragmatism render her all the more impressive and confounding.

81 For a discussion of some of the archetypes of black women in Brazil and their varied qualities see Rodrigues 2001 179

Perhaps the place of Junca’s suicide in her life best refracts Violeta’s attempts to make meaningful her struggles as she moves into the coda of her life. Violeta lives with the haunt of her granddaughter’s deliberate decision to not survive, a young black woman who was confronting many of the same difficulties as she and perhaps could not find a way to be well. Violeta talks about Junca’s suicide in a way that she does not speak of her own attempts because this would mean re-experiencing the weight of the decision to continue on and what surviving in the space entails. And this resistance speaks to the pain, power and despair she has lived. Junca’s loss still haunt’s her as the symbolic memory of what she was unable to do for her children, grandchildren and others. This sadness can be seen in Hortênsia, who I discuss in the next section, for what she did not or could not accomplish, producing feelings of regret. This may carry the meaning of

Violeta’s comments about storytelling as living events twice. Remembering is often too painful and while the memories and the sadness fade, they do not necessarily go away.

Her play with postures and discourses of madness may go beyond sadness and into biochemical imbalance, but, in all possibilities, her affective journey informs and guides her struggle in the unarmored, stripped state of black women’s social position, where her life energy continues to be consumed with basic self-preservation. Perhaps this is why we find Violeta sitting on the church steps under moonlight.

***

…There was one woman who would stay sitting in her little home where she lived in the country. The little house of this woman was covered by overgrowth and nothing was clean. We would pass by and she would be there sitting. Did she live alone? She lived alone. Was she black? She was. And one day there were vultures flying. People went to go see her. There was rock and rope tied together around her neck/ She threw the rock and died. We do not know the “why” of this, but there must be one. She lived there alone, they said she did not have a mother or father. She did not have anyone…

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***

HORTÊNSIA

I now turn to Hortênsia’s narration of a suicide attempt, along with those of

Violeta and Azaléia, to explore some thoughts on black women’s mental health and self- making. It was only through time that I built sufficient trust with Hortência that she began sharing fragments of her life with me. She has a reserved demeanor and her placid stare were facades of her self-declared deep shyness. Her plunging limp and the painful grimace she would initially make when standing-up were the sources of our first conversations. Yet over the course of fieldwork, sitting next to her on bus rides and hearing snip-its of her memories here and there, she increasingly told me more about her life trajectory, her solitude and struggles.82

Hortênsia joined the group within the last six years and often kept more to herself than she did circulate in the midst of the discussions. One of our first extended conversations occurred when I saw her alone, peering off the deck of our hotel in a small city in the interior of Minas Gerais. It was early afternoon and the women had free time before a singing rehearsal. I stopped by her side and a conversation flowed from the townscape to the interior and into her life. She shared of the hardships she had been through and how her parents were never really present. She left the house when she was about ten years old. Recounting a life of working for others, she eventually said she had

82 She lives alone in a small house and said on numerous occasions that she wanted to have me over but was worried about my reaction to her home. It months of trust building for her to raise the idea of me visiting her house. As a (US born) foreigner and having a comparatively elite background, several of the women voiced their anxiety about what I would think or say about their “humble” homes. I assume that this was a concern, voiced or thought, that many of the women shared and invitations to their home were prized interpersonal and research-oriented moments of trust and connection.

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been depressed and had tried to commit suicide on various occasions, summing up life as a “large joke” and chuckling to herself.

Hortênsia’s suicide attempt passed as simply from her mouth as most of the other moments of her life. I include this fleeting revelation because it, like the others, addresses the affective and physical journeys the women continue to make. In addition, her narrative does not progress linearly as if from bad to good, which could be inferred from those of Violeta and Azaléia. Hortênsia reveals the space of struggle that these women negotiate even as they grow within the group. Paired with the first, the following brief and final vignette about Hortênsia provides a greater context through which to examine black women’s subjectivity, self-making and the archetype of black women’s lunacy.

About four months after her mention of suicide, I hit an uncomfortable chord with

Hortênsia. I sat with the women one warm Friday December morning before rehearsal and inquired about how the women were planning to spend the upcoming Christmas holidays. Some answered that they would spend them with their families. When I asked

Hortênsia, who was sitting off to the side, she quieted and spoke softer saying she would spend the day alone. I queried about what her children had planned and she said that her son had his own festivities and her daughter would probably be joining him. Tears welled in her eyes and I put my hand on her shoulder, apologized, feeling that I had moved the terrain from a simple question into one of prying. She looked off into the distance and said that she did not like this time of year because it always reminded her of, “everything that [she] had not achieved in life.” She smeared her tears across her cheeks and remained hunched over. She did not sob and did not look at me, but continued by saying that one of her sister’s used to invite her to holiday functions, but now only falsely extends

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invitations, which she always declines. She said she remembered times when she was younger and had no real responsibilities.

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***

Hortênsia’s narrative is a portrait of woman struggling with the complex emotions of her structural position and in contrast to Azaléia and Violeta her words and mode of being are possessed by the languages and feelings of sadness and longing (despair, anguish). Her narrative of suicide and her later telling of a sense of failure emerged in the context of a series of stories of her working life. She followed up the sequence in which she spoke of suicide attempts with an account of going hungry for several weeks while waiting for a paycheck. Drinking sugary coffee and scraps of bread, she told of the difficulty of working through this time, but placed her emphasis on the fact that her earnings were stolen the day she received them, en-route to pay overdue bills. She said she was paralyzed and cried in a complete state of despair, not knowing how she was going to pay for anything or even eat. On the back of her dispirited uttering on the holidays, she vividly recounted standing in water all day in flip-flops washing the garage of one of the apartment buildings where she worked. This episode was layered onto a memory of harvesting rice patties as a child and pulling the leeches from her legs hours after the work in the field had begun. She spoke of how these hard times had worn on her body, but noting that in that era, no one knew of the risks. These accounts orbited around the ethnographic descriptions previously cited and highlight the strenuous labor and treadmill of survival that Hortênsia’s life story presented. Her continued poverty and body aches are what she speaks of in relation to feelings of not having achieved what she wanted; this lends to the idea that the state of her broken body and economic troubles are all that she has to show from her life. Only once did she nostalgically speak of her past and dancing to US black soul artists in her late teens. The large majority of her

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recollections and current dispositions were downcast; her affective life trajectory spoke to the consuming effect of her working life on her body and mind.

I introduce her narrative because it offers insight into the feelings of sadness, disappointment and even anger that powerfully express themselves in these women’s affect even as they participate in the group. Sorrow, the mixed emotion of loss, grief, misfortune and disappointment, is an affective space through which many of the women move on a daily basis. For Hortênsia these emotions are consistent and influential even though she did not recount the extreme human losses of women like Violeta. The group collectively acknowledges and validates these feelings while working to emphasize these women’s achievements and possibilities, specifically through the conduits of song, dance and the investment in the well being of others. The group provides a support basis for women’s development, but the inner struggle they embark upon (or not) is their own.

In many ways, Hortênsia’s narratives of suicide and a sense of failure reveal her disappointment and frustration around the limits of, what she felt, the social world would economically or affectively provide for her in that body. The circulating sense of impossibility of blackness as a poor woman left her at best disenchanted, but more likely, without a sense of redemption for this life. It is the repetition of a working life that did not bring her the returns in finance or feelings of satisfaction or appreciation that has made her loss of self the most visceral form of privation and resentment audible in her reflections. Unlike many women, Hortênsia vented about the mistreatment she received and what she felt were the trying conditions of racial structuring that Frantz Fanon describes as “I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me, but of my own appearance.” ([1952]1967:116). She is keenly aware of discrimination in Brazil and one

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of the few women who spoke of it in the language of race. She often commented on the group’s marginalization as black women from the favela and when performing at venues of and for the middle class and elite she would say to me that they were being laughed at and ridiculed. On various outings, she frustratingly commented on the lack of professionalism with which the women were handled, specifying that it was because they were poor, black and seniors – the group’s waiting unanticipated long hours to be picked up or to perform, their scant accommodations, and not getting paid by people or groups she interpreted as capable of paying, all were instances in which race, class, age and gender made the women susceptible to this contemptuous treatment and abuse.

While she loyally participates in group activities, publicly calling attention to and embodying blackness in a prideful way, some of the work of the group, made Hortênsia uneasy revealing her reticence to expressing forms of pride in blackness. Conscious of their racialization, she did not like drawing attention to their racial positioning by singing songs in their repertoire about black people’s enslaved history in Brazil, intentionally designed to inspire sentiments of race-based esteem. She identifies as black, but resists the focus on their racialization and the possibility of seeing blackness as something other than all that is negative. I also suggest she is aware of the meanings of black social transgression previously discussed in the case of Violeta and does not want to be seen as crazy. Many women at performances would jokingly ask me what I was going to say to people in my country about my time with this group of “crazy old ladies.” This question was always expressed in jest in the context of the women being playful with each other but captured the imminent threat of the meanings of transgression that Hortênsia, in particular, remained captivated by. She never joined the women in their more playful

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moments, most likely for a host of reasons, but her self-consciousness, a self-disciplining built into her from childhood and coded by racial, gendered and classed sociability, hindered her exploration of the freedom of movement and expression the group enables.

The encouragement of individual expression through the collective is part of the atmosphere of exploration and esteem the group creates and which Hortênsia uncomfortably moves within. The space and vehicles of music, dance and the collective enable the women to give testimonies of their trying lives and to have them witnessed by each other and wider audiences on a regular basis; this act, as trauma focused psychiatrist

Dori Laub suggests, may enable the women to repossess their losses to certain degrees or come to the “realization that what life is all about is precisely living with an unfulfilled hope; only this time with the sense that you are not alone any longer….living with you through the unfulfilled hope (1995:74). Hortênsia, in contrast to Azaléia and Violeta, did not articulate this type of validation and import of the exchanges in and with the group and does not speak much about her past more generally. And, her continued frustration and sadness are powerful catalysts for her isolation, which I suggest already took her into the realm of the suicidal and the mad. More like Azaléia, the suicidal is a space of the experience of over-determination and being driven mad in contrast to the way in which

Violeta encountered a different quality in it – the possibility for a more full-bodied form of self-awareness and expression.83 While I am not claiming that Hortênsia does not search for new ways to relate to people and the process of living within her material and affective conditions, the way in which she currently speaks of her own trajectory and

83 I always sensed, and heard tense words and tension between Violeta and Hortênsia and can only hypothesize that their different approaches and outlooks produced judgments on both sides.

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space carries the weight of a life she feels she has little influence in and possibly even suffocated by.

Hortênsia’s approximation to the crazy perhaps never concretized in a biomedical diagnosis, but I contend is evoked in the isolation she has experienced and currently lives.

Hortênsia did not talk about doctors or the medical establishment regarding her depressed state or suicide attempts. She offered no details as to when and what she did to try and end her life, which might offer insight into the nature of her intent or her movement within the space of the suicidal. Whether mere suicidal gestures or incomplete acts, her encounter with the suicidal seems to bleed into a story of barely living. Sadness and regret are the loudest feelings that she ruminates on during her prolonged states of solitude. The structural conditions of these women, of perpetual physical and mental struggle, create an environment in which resentment and despair can be engrossing.

Hortênsia’s narratives and demeanor continue to evoke great melancholy and her reflection on a past without achievement and possibility is the dominant narrative of a future predicted as equally structurally barred in by her positionality. Her powerful sentiments on the one hand speak to the strength of the limitations she has experienced throughout her life, and on the other, make aware a painful psychological space resulting from those trials that complicate the possibility for emotional transmutation.

The specter looms hard over Hortênsia revealing the quiet madness of isolation and sadness. This space of craziness, sorrow and solitude, was precisely what Azaléia and

Violeta narrated as driving them into the space of the suicidal and, for Violeta, was one of the truths laying underneath her label of “crazy.” Yet she realized that there was no social acknowledgment of what she had to deal with in life. She simply received the label of

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crazy and consequently maneuvered within the social inevitability of black women’s madness. Learning to disregard the normative catalyzed her continued search for new modes of being and expression. In contrast, Hortênsia’s frustration about her current position, eats away at her mental health and stymies her process of embracing new ways of articulating herself beyond the roles she feels constrained by. This resistance intones both a recognition of the implications of black women’s transgression and the weight of

“being well.” Violeta and Azaléia testify to the hard work of re-learning “how to live life” outside of the ways in which they were brought up to relate and serve others and the loneliness that accompanies it. But they have found modes of self-expression that enable their minds and actions to be validated and appreciated on their own terms as they continue to manage the demands placed upon them. This is an affective space that

Hortênsia, with the assistance of the group, is most likely in the process of inhabiting.

REFLECTIONS

Summoning the crazy black woman into this analysis is hailing these women’s lives into a larger discussion of black women’s mental wellness. Throughout this chapter,

I have interspersed alongside Azaléia, Violeta and Hortênsia’s narratives several stories of “crazy” black women told to me by group members when I inquired about incidents of suicide, and mental illness. They are passed-on women whose memories conjure the different emotions and expressions explored: isolation, despair, frustration and longing. I treat them as ghosts – the haunts of interpellated bodies of black women who were not well, as Miss Minnie would say, and who never had a chance to speak from where they came and through what they had passed. They bring the past realities of black women

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into the present moment of analysis of women’s lives that, from the outside, reveal similar behaviors, faces and positions. When Maria “moons,” is she crazy, or did she, like

Violeta, find some release or freedom in speaking and embodying the mad? For the woman on the porch, was suicide the outcome of solitude or sadness presumably like

Violeta’s granddaughter? Hortênsia continues her journey to create balance in her inner personal world where the pains of her past, her on-going economic and health struggles, and the possibilities offered to her in the group converge, yielding a dizzying sense of loneliness, failure and inconsistent validation. When sitting home alone with her sadness highly palpable and bleeding into her daily perspectives, where will her solitude take her?

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Writing about these dead women among the living is also an attempt to keep their presence felt. These were black women who were virtually forgotten, remembered mostly for their “craziness” and crazy acts, but not for what they had to live and who they were as beings. I was taken by the speed with which the women remembered these characters, their circumstances and the empathy they expressed. The association between black women and craziness was evident in how rapidly an archetype manifested. I believe there is a point of identification between the women who told the stories and their protagonists.

The women of the group hailed the subjective experiences of these women, recognizing and identifying with their believed struggles.

Like the hailing that takes place in the group, the women did not conjure these passed-on women through mental illness or un-wellness, but the experiences, misinterpretations, weighted memories of their struggles and the creative survival through which they have labored. This is central to the black feminist project being identified and developed here and reflected in the group: to generate subjectivity and humanizing people’s experiences, while encouraging the risk taking involved in individual and collective liberation through self-construction. These women’s own courage and an understanding of the power to self-make serves as a threat and inspiration in their ability to influence others into action. Giving voice is enabling and these acts have political consequences, specifically in their ability to reveal the operations of normative thinking and its labeling power, and to knock them down as guideposts.

What happens when black women assert their subjectivity, transgressing the roles in which they are recognizable? Black women’s expressed thoughts and acts are subtly and boldly reviewed against the racial, classed and gendered expectations and notions of

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abnormality, which makes them susceptible to the label of “crazy.” This classification emerges as a way to make sense of and make understandable black women, specifically when they do not perform the roles they historically have been interpolated into. There is the craziness that potentially inhabits every black woman’s body when she speaks something that others do not want to hear and her body suggests something that others perhaps do not want to see. She can be angry, insular, absent, violent, labeled as “crazy,” and perceived as existing in a space, a world of her own. She can even feel crazy reading her own thoughts, feelings and behaviors through normative lenses of sanity. Madness itself looms as one of the possible effects of the pernicious stereotypes of black women, a broad label used to explain black women’s behaviors, statements, appearance and even, the ways in which they have learned to get by.

In conclusion, there does exist madness in black women’s search for freedom.

Beyond biomedical diagnoses and social registers, black women’s continued existence, the preservation of their families and communities have often meant being what was socially considered abnormal and carving out their own paths under extreme living circumstances as racialized women. Some, under Valdete’s theorization, wandered into literal madness, while many, as these examples suggest, live their craziness as a deep sadness and state of isolation. Blackness in Brazil has never found a home in notions of normativity, even as black bodies and African-energized cultural manifestations are widely present in narratives and the lived reality of Brazilian society both past and present. An understanding of this is embodied, more often than it is consciously voiced, in the ways in which black women cling to and attempt to perform social conventionality, even as their situations, their very bodies, may edge them towards madness.

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CHAPTER THREE Singing and Shouting

EU QUERO IR PRA RODA

Eu quero ir pra roda (I want to go to the circle) Eu quero ir pra roda (I want to go to the circle) Eu quero ir pra roda (I want to go to the circle) Eu quero ir pra roda (I want to go to the circle) Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Eu vim lá da Bahia, vim brincar (I come from there in Bahia, I came to play) E hoje eu vou pra roda com as meninas de sinhâ (And today I go to the circle with the meninas de sinhá) Cheguei, lavei, passei, costurei, cancei, mas fui dançar (I arrived, washed, ironed, sowed, got tired, but went dancing) Cheguei, lavei, passei, costurei, cancei, mas fui dançar (I arrived, washed, ironed, sowed, got tired, but went dancing) Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia Êh ôia êi ôia ô ia ia

Continued loss, heartache and anxiety are some of the perpetual emotional hardships that the women experience and have found support for in the context of the group. Music has provided an expressive voice for the range of those weighty sentiments

(cumulatively described over the previous chapters) that draw the women together. The group implicitly was founded to understand these complex feelings and assist with the impacts of the difficulties in their lives. While Valdete did not individually know these women’s histories, she witnessed the large quantities of medication many of her peers in

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the neighborhood were given at the local health post. Not believing that medication was the likely answer or the end of the story, she gathered the women to inquire into what had led them to seek assistance and receive medication. As she recounts in most of the public contexts in which she is asked about the “why” of the group, “I would pass by the health center and it would make me extremely sad to see those women leaving with bags full of medicine…In talking with them, I saw that it was not sickness…they did not need to take medicine. They needed something more…self-esteem.” The issues the women revealed – sleeplessness and anxiety from worry and fear revolving around their finances, their overworked states, their children’s needs and problems, did not result from illnesses, which could be resolved by medication. Valdete asserted that the women’s feelings of being overwhelmed and aching because of the varied challenges they were facing were, in effect, issues of self-esteem.

Through her own experience, Valdete recognized that these women needed to develop and reinforce the internal and external resources necessary to manage the everyday and unexpected challenges of the particular structural constraints impacting them, instead of receiving a diagnosis or medication with its sleeping or numbing effects.

As an ageing black woman who had experienced many of the same struggles as the women, Valdete relied on a methodology she believed could facilitate the internal growth of the women in the neighborhood. This approach initially meant simply having a conversation. With time and observation, the women’s gravitation towards and enjoyment of song transformed them into a singing group that eventually would turn its music into a collective social contribution.

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With this background in mind, this chapter examines how the group develops these women’s self–esteem by providing them with an environment, the time and the means through which they could express their larger selves in the world. I also explore the interpersonal dynamics of the group that shape the women individually and collectively. This process reveals the critical role of emotional work as a tool in developing self-awareness and affective transformation specifically in improving the quality of life of black women. I explore the intimacies of that process and point out the subtle transformations that mark subjective experiences and forms of emotional growth.

The incorporation of music into the group provided a critical vehicle of expression for these women’s emotional life histories and ongoing experiences -- initiating and enhancing their ability to feel differently about their circumstances and possibilities as they age. These women had lived without modes of self and collective expression for most of their lives, and Valdete drew on a long tradition of black expressive culture to guide them in voicing and fashioning themselves.

How this type of process unfolds and is approached often is shied away from and held as controversial by both political activists and academics looking at anti-black racism. Yet the stories and images of this chapter convey how affective work inspires self-making and how self-making, in turn, is a form of health. These women’s stories provide insights into how the growth of individual black women both informs and contributes to the collective healing of black people, women and ageing folks in general.

To do this, I have assembled a mosaic of ethnographic vignettes and images to capture some of the emotional spaces these women negotiate, inhabit and conjure. This approach renders women’s affective architecture not only as an ongoing site of work, but

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also as structural reinforcement, renewal and transformation, enabling them to enrich their senses of self and the experience of living from a conscious place of growing self- knowledge. The photographs serve as visual representations of their affective lives that text and words alone cannot capture or insufficiently evoke. I stage the chapter around two central ethnographic scenes that while a bit disparate, are striking moments that stand out as evocative of how the group helps sustain and move these women through their own struggles. These moments, both extraordinary and part of the flow of their everyday lives, individual and group, portray Valdete’s interactions as well as individual women with one another. They also illuminate how Valdete’s notion of building these women’s self-esteem is a practice of self-making critical to individual and reciprocally collective wellbeing that I suggest can shape healing practices throughout the diaspora.

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BREEZY MORNING, APRIL 2006

En route to an early Wednesday morning practice, from the back of the bus I watched Zinia enter and sit in the front seats reserved for seniors. From her residence lower down on the hill, she too was heading to meet up with the group. She discovered I was on the same bus only when we both got off on the main street and walked towards the plaza. Strolling side by side, she whispered that she could not stay long because she had to go see her son who had been incarcerated again, in a nearby municipality. This was not the first time she had discussed her son with me. She had quietly shared updates since she first confided in me of his imprisonment.84 It had been three months and the reason why he was back in prison was still unknown to her. She was clearly stressed about the situation and was anxious about her visit.

We arrived at the plaza, and as women trickled in for practice, Zinia started to talk to Valdete who was sitting in the midst of other women. Zinia informed Valdete that she would be leaving early and explained about her son. Valdete instantly commented,

“Oh how this woman has suffered!,” while raising her gaze to make eye contact with members sitting nearby. Other women nodded their heads and listened. Valdete asserted that Zinia had done everything within her means to help her son and bravely had tried to protect him. She spoke in a partially raised voice, and recounted that Zinia had ventured into rough neighborhoods at night knowing no one, to search for him. Zinia, who is a nervous and shy woman, sat with her head down in witness and quiet to Valdete’s words.

84 Zinia initially confided in me about her son’s imprisonment, pulling me aside to tell me what had occurred. I noted this information in my field notes, but there were ethical questions about if and in what capacity I might be able to use it. Over time, Zinia publicly spoke to the group and me about this son as she distanced herself from the responsibility for his circumstances, but did remain anxious at times for how his actions might have repercussions in her life. 197

Valdete also quickly said that it was time to “Stop” and directing her gaze to Zinia, she softly emphasized, “You need to think of yourself because I know how hard this is. The only way to help him is to help yourself and have faith in God.” Valdete continued by saying that she wanted to tell Zinia a story about her own struggles with her own son.

Valdete’s strife with her eldest son’s drug addiction was locally widely known because of her recognition and activism in the neighborhood. She offered one occasion in which she had desperately searched for a clinic that would help him get clean, but nothing worked. She told how his desperation had led him to using her bankcard for drug money and how she had hurt during those days. Her worries with her son had negatively impacted her own wellbeing; she could not sleep or eat and the situation was overwhelming her. One night, she explained, she got on her knees to pray to God that this situation was making her lose her faith; she was suffering so much with this son and was without a sense of what to do. She announced to us, that she informed God, “I am handing him over to you. If you want to take him, take him. Take him because I don’t know what to do anymore. He is in your hands.” She recounted praying throughout the night. She added that she had never had such a tormented night, but a week later her son came to her crying and told her he wanted her help. She said she explained tersely to him, “I am not going to do it for you. You have my support and help, but you have to do it for yourself. You have to go find a clinic and get better, because I can’t take this anymore.” Her voice softened and she asserted, “I would go without food to pay for his therapy or to get him better, but I could not do it for him.” He found a facility and started treatment, but left after nine months. Even though he did not stay at the clinic for the

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recommended amount of time, Valdete expressed that he began to feel better, had found a job, kept away from drugs and was living in another city.

After a pause, Valdete reflected on her own experiences visiting this son in prison and the poor treatment of mothers. She said the guards treated them not as people but as the mothers of criminals and prisoners, showing them no respect. Zinia broke her relative silence to affirm this point and spoke of being strip-searched, bodily probed and then paying money to the guards to watch her belongings while she visited with her child. On one occasion, Valdete recounted arriving at the prison and waiting in front of the guard while he read the newspaper. He only looked up at her when he was finished to ask what she wanted.

Valdete continued to talk to Zinia, telling her about the impacts of the drugs on her son’s body and life. She reflected that the cocaine impacted his nerves and he is now somewhat distant and aloof. His addiction had also rendered him scared and paranoid and on various occasions he would run throughout the house fearing that people were following him. He would jump out the kitchen window, run through and over neighbors’ houses; they would then call saying that they had seen him or he was in their house. One time he repeatedly told her that a man with a yellow shirt was trying to get him in spite of her attempt to quiet his anxieties. She also laughed about how she used to observe people snorting cocaine in broad daylight on the plaza near her home when it was a soccer field and a central trafficking space. Sharing this with a bit of humor and old exasperation,

Valdete then commented, “He always walked with a Bible under his arm at the same time he was snorting cocaine.” Summing up she said, “Thank God, he never stopped working.

He was never violent with us – although he was with his wife.”

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She told these stories to group members and specifically Zinia who listened diligently, responding with nods and “reallys?” fully attentive to what Valdete was saying. Valdete repeated that she knew Zinia was aching, but in order to help her son, she had to be firm and say she was done with coming after him; he had to help himself.

Zinia was not going to buy him anything, pay for him to get out of prison, or raise another finger. Valdete even told her to not accept any collect calls in her house. Valdete went through the list of the assistance that Zinia had already provided to her son with no change in his behaviors. Zinia nodded, saying, “Yes, I know, I need to be strong, to be firm. I am going to say all of these things to him. I am going to tell him he needs to do this for himself.” Zinia thanked Valdete for all of her help and advice and then asked

Valdete to repeat what she should say to her son. Valdete went through these words again, which Zinia loyally repeated.

The point that Valdete emphasized through her stories was that Zinia needed to have faith in God. Zinia replied, “Yes, you need to” and confirmed that God had been good to her and answered her prayers. She chirped in joy two times with a smile coming over her face, and then inquired about going to church. Valdete responded that while she does not go to church every Sunday or follow a strict life of religious ritual she has always had a strong faith. She said every morning she prays saying she confides in God’s plan that the day will turn out the way it should. At night, she prays thanking him for helping her. Looking to Zinia, she emphasized this faith and the basis of all of this was compassion and giving to others what you would want. She articulated the biggest act of giving is of oneself, at the same time that one needs to do the same for oneself.

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Valdete offered several more short anecdotes of feeling overrun and using her faith as a compass through those times, before drawing the twenty-minute discussion, joint storytelling and teaching moment, to a close. She reiterated how hard community work has been in her own life, but called it fundamental. Zinia thanked her again and said she felt better and stronger, now knowing what to say to her son.

Rosa, like all the women, had listened intently to Valdete’s words, and at the conclusion of her specific attention to Zinia, Rosa related to Valdete that she too was not feeling well. This event occurred months before Rosa’s husband had passed and she was his caretaker. Anxious because of her husband’s health, Rosa spoke of moments when her mind drifts off animating her explanation with body language. She also shared that she was taking pills to sleep. Valdete explained that she probably was worrying and putting so much energy into caring for her husband that this was manifesting in her body. Rosa listened and then offered another gesture characterizing her moments of aloofness.

Valdete recommended that Rosa see a doctor. She also indicated that her own interpretation of Rosa’s state was that it was coming from the relief of pressure and fear from her intense period of physical and emotional demand. Several times, Valdete recommended that Rosa see a biomedical doctor, since Rosa had not yet done so.

Valdete got up and Zinia said how much she appreciated this help and advice:

“May God pay you.” Moments later, I asked Valdete if Zinia came to her before for advice and she said no, this was the first time in six years. Valdete said she did not usually have time to do this sort of feedback and guidance because everyone was there and waiting. Valdete passed back by and Zinia commented that this was the first time that she got this type of invested help. She said, “It was so good I could cry!” to which

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Valdete responded, “Don’t.” You need to be strong.” Valdete encouraged her to come to her house on Sunday to talk more when other women in the group come by to visit, chat, cry and discuss how and what they are living through.

* * *

As Valdete noted, these one-on-one moments in the context of the group are rare, but they elaborate the enactments of collectivity, autonomy, and voice that underlie the group and the critical forms of interaction the women experience. There is usually not enough time for individual, specific responses to the twenty to thirty members present on a daily basis. This moment was also unusual because as Zinia shared this was the first time she had approached Valdete for specific guidance. However, the exchange opened up opportunities for other women to verbalize their own concerns and Valdete used it to address the women collectively. This exceptional exchange reveals; some of the central premises of the group’s work, namely, how the group conceives of and develops self- esteem.

The group has always been greater than just reducing or eliminating the women’s use of anti-anxiety medication. What attracted Valdete’s attention to these individuals was what their medication blanketed. Valdete does not condemn pharmaceuticals as is evidenced in her discussion with Rosa, but she desired to improve the quality of the women’s lives and their ability to live them in conscious and active ways. Valdete often publicly jokes in her explanations at performances concerning the founding of the group, that she invented folk remedies to try and lead these women away from medication; she chuckles when she tells of recommending an “old cure” for insomnia of putting a leaf of lettuce under one’s pillow before going to bed. “It could have been collards, but lettuce

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came into my head.” Because of her belief that pharmaceuticals were not addressing the women’s underlying problems, this was a small-scale experiment to examine their sleeplessness as well as an opportunity to have the women disassociate from their growing dependence on drugs. She relays this story humorously, but makes the point that these women had come to see medication as their only outlet for sleep or rather, a space of quiet and relaxation from the pressure in their lives.

Her understanding of their life circumstances and their use of medication was relational; she assessed their inability to sleep, their instances of bodily aches and worry in connection to, if not directly stemming from, problems with their children, insufficient funds with mounting bills, abusive relationships with husbands, co-living with violence and fear, and for many women, various forms of personal loss, namely the death of loved ones. The demands on these women, normalized through the patriarchal, raced and classed expectations of them as wives, mothers, employees and broadly as women, created minimal social dialogue around their social and material conditions. The women had little reference for collective spaces or even critical voices from family, friends or colleagues to converse about their concerns. In addition, their pathological reading of the intensity of these demands, that is, seeing their circumstances as something physiologically or psychologically abnormal, led them to the biomedical domain to be treated and/or cured. A mere lack of time and outside perspective may have been the most imposing blinders or disablers to alternative understandings of their situations.

Having no recognizable outlet in which to voice or redress their states of mind other than the health post, these women turned to biomedicine as a recognizable place of treatment,

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when their anxieties, manifested as physical symptoms, were consuming their ability to emotionally and sometimes physically sustain their life demands.

Similar to the women in Alto and concomitantly to it, a study in another low- income, peripheral neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, found that the majority of women in this neighborhood of forty-thousand were also using Diazepam.85 A 1990 Estado de

Minas article covered the research of William Pereira a clinical psychologist, who described women in the neighborhood’s drug use as the direct result of their “overload,” from being housewives, working outside of the home and often raising their children single-handedly on extremely low salaries. He assessed these women as entering in a state of “violent physical-psychological stress” that is relieved by drugs. He detailed the experience in the following way: “They come with pain everywhere: and go in search of pleasure that will help take them out of the sickness. The medicine works…It’s a psychic pleasure” (ibid). Yet he asserts that this pleasure is short lived as the realities of their material conditions and “infinite” problems are not easily resolved by medication; poor diet, living circumstances, and only one health post limit the types of impacts doctors can have and extend beyond medical or psychological interventions. Pereira’s study is an informative psychological analysis of the uses of diazepam during the same historical period, highlighting the life and emotional circumstances that led particularly women to seek out medication. Moreover, this research insinuates that there were limited local support systems for residents in low income, peripheral neighborhoods to deal with the material or emotional challenges in their lives. It is impossible to confirm a racial and age based profile of the women in the neighborhood of Pereira’s study without the

85 Diazepam is the chemical name of the drug commercially marketed and sold by Roche Pharmaceuticals as Valium. 204

demographic data of that community. It remains difficult to find demographics specifically racial and gender specific about low-income neighborhoods in Belo

Horizonte. Yet the national figures create a picture of the economic, racial hierarchy in

Brazil, which also tend to map onto who lives in the most precarious and already stigmatized as “poor” spaces, such as favelas.86 In 1999, black people represented 45% of

Brazil’s population, but were 64% of the economically poor population and 69% of the indigent (Henriques 2002:23). These figures suggest, without defining the racial demographic of the neighborhood where Pereria conducted his study, how racialization may have fit into the nature of the problems they experienced and their particular senses of frustration, helplessness and stress. Attention to the particularities of the racial, gendered and age based qualities of these women’s experiences of suffering also are informative of the type of healing they psychologically needed.

Approaching the task of how to help through conversation and time, recognizing the women’s problems through their own accounts and co-living with them, led Valdete to understand their needs in terms of self-esteem. Reading the situation from a different set of premises not based on an empirical approach to solving a problem, curing them, or believing something was inherently wrong with these women, enabled Valdete to invest in their emotional states outside of biomedicine and something that she could help to change. She used her own life experiences and knowledge-base to initiate a space of recognition and investment in how these women were feeling.

86 For an article on racial inequality and favelas in Belo Horizonte see “Escravos da desigualdade” in the Estado de Minas 5/13/2002. 205

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Valdete’s experiences are critical to understanding both her emphasis on “self- esteem” and her role in the formation of the group. Her own story of living in a state of namelessness, virtual invisibility and searching for human recognition comprised a lived reality and, most pointedly, a host of emotional challenges that she used as a framework through which to approach these women’s turning to medication and to provide an alternative. This embodied technique to understand and take measures to improve the life conditions of her community is consistent with black women’s activism in Brazil and the type of personal and collective work theorized as central to healing practices needed to face oppression.87 Her observations and subsequent identification and familiarity with the struggles of the women provided a critical lens and scope of reference that doctors in the community did not have, and I am suggesting that these factors allowed her to assist these women in unprecedented ways.

The reality that the women were similar in age, generation and place in life was central to why the particularities of their discomforts were not addressed. The scope of their anxieties encompassed the responsibilities of their roles, as well as the strains of their physical bodies, which had undergone considerable physical abuse, many having begun their working-lives in manual labor by age five (whether as housewives or as workers outside of the home). The continuing (over)use of and stress on muscles, joints and bones are common among this generation of women of similar racial and class positions, who grew up in the physically involved conditions of rural life and the types of employment opportunities available to them without much education. One of the ways in which the women note generational differences is reflected in their articulation of how

87 See Alexander 2005: 287-332; Werneck 2007 207

their children have it “easy” compared to them - whether it is in greater access to buses, prepared foods or washing machines for example. The women appreciate many of the labor saving modern conveniences of daily life, at the same time that their economic circumstances constrain their access to these conveniences.

Hortênsia and other women explained how different understandings of health and health information also influenced their sense of body-age. She and Acacia reflected on the exposure of their bodies to the elements and chemicals while working both in the interior and in domestic work. They remembered picking rice and working in fields barefoot, standing in water for much of the day and constantly removing splinters and leeches from their feet. Hortênsia also spoke about cleaning homes with strong cleaning agents all day without gloves or protection. She said that, at that time, people did not know these chemicals impacted their lungs and skin. Neither the women’s bodies nor their own general accounts exposed all they had been through, since their living conditions growing up were typical for their racial, gender and class position. It is evident that these women’s histories came to bear on their health in ways that their numerical ages did not reflect, except when looked at from their generational perspective. I suggest that the psychological tolls of their physical pains combined with the stresses of their everyday living worlds were incommensurable with the doctors’ diagnoses or their possibility of effectively grasping these women’s states of mind. Consequently, the particular meanings and complexities of these women’s described pains could easily have been missed or misread in a health system marked by minimal material resources, time and consciousness.

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These configurations of forces, specifically when manifest in the lives of ageing, racially and economically marginalized people in Brazil, are not systematically factored into diagnoses of the medical establishment, or society at large. Yet, these gendered racial and classed forms of social thinking were integrated in the ideological and scientific formation of medical institutions in Brazil.88 The pathologizing of black bodies as carrying disease or resistant to it along with theories of black criminality and intelligence are limited but significant examples of how the medical and social scientific communities have participated in interpreting non-white bodies in Brazilian society not in terms of wellness, but of (dis)ease, social, physical and parasitic.89 Sustained institutional racism in the medical establishment, its personification, operations and pedagogy are sites in need of and under investigation.90 But given the parameters of my research, my concern is specifically with drawing attention to how the needs of ageing black women are addressed outside of the social and emotional contexts and conditions in which they exist and historically have labored.

In general, black women have received little help, medical or otherwise, to face the physical, psychological or social problems they confront. And, the assistance they institutionally receive typically comes from people who have minimal training, contact and exposure to the nexus of complexity and the structuring forces that configure these women’s social positioning in the world.91 The statistics of black women’s continuing socio-economic exclusion, poor health conditions and low life expectancy sit alongside

88 For a history of the intersection of racial thinking in the birth and development of the medical establishment in Brazil see Costa, [1976]1981, Maio and Santos 1998, Peard 1999, Schwarcz 1999. 89 See Borges 1993; Chalhoub 1993, Peard 1999, Rodrigues 1939, Schwarcz 1999. 90 See Kalckmann et al. 2007 91 See Costa 2001; Delfino et al. 2002 209

an only recent shifting perspective on race being an informative vector of social analysis.92 This reality is perhaps what the doctors may not fully have understood, but perceived, specifically in providing services to these women. Without the power, knowledge or training to effectively impact their economic or affective lives, providing medication for women may have been the only intervention available given their range of understanding and the therapeutic resources available. Without other methods, individual doctors, specifically psychiatrists, could offer to women a way to rest, find ease or temporarily “forget” the layering of histories of gendered violence, structural, classed racism, and family lives that render the demands on these women superhuman – a combination of pressures that psychically can unbalance anyone. This understanding supports Pereira’s assertion that the situation of the women in his study is one produced through and revealing of the Brazilian State of the early 1990’s and the lack of attention to health as a social problem rather than the fault per se of medical professionals. But in introducing racialization as another lens through which to understand their circumstances and treatment, I suggest that the types of care the women received and the nature of their concerns were complicated by racial, class and gendered inflected perspectives on health and wellness.

Women’s accounts of their experiences in the health center broadly suggest disconnected forms of local therapeutic care.93 Many reported either positive or neutral

92 For data on black women’s health see Oliveira 1998 and for changes in the need for the inclusion of race as a vector in health research and analysis, see Almeida-Filho et al. 2003; Cassia et al. 2007 93 I was unable to interview either psychologists or psychiatrists who worked in the region during the period. There were very high turn over rates of psychiatrists and many women did not recall the names of various professionals (psychiatrists or psychologists) with whom they had consulted. One group member developed a semi-personal relationship with her female 210

assessments of the psychologists in the neighborhood and the adjacent health post, although there were repeated criticisms and distaste for psychiatrists in general.

Psychiatrists were deemed as cold, quiet and simply there to give medication. In addition, by all accounts, the therapists were white, non-residents of the neighborhood and very likely of a different class position. While this positionality might socially affirm their education and professional status in the minds of the women and may not have been of particular import to some of them, it raises questions about what psychological understandings the therapists, particularly when male, provided for these women.

Critiques have been raised about the impacts of these types of disconnects between psychological professionals understandings of the reality of their clients particularly in the public health system.94 Delfino et al. (2002) raise questions about how racial thinking comes to bare on the psychoanalytic method, one of the founding theoretical models of psychotherapy in Brazil. They provocatively inquire into how negative racial perceptions of black people prevalent in society impact the therapeutic process of transference with black subjects, given that analysts historically have been overwhelmingly white in Brazil.

Following this logic, gender and class both factor into this exchange, given how constitutive they are of identity formation in Brazil. Figueiredo also questions the sets of assumptions underlying therapies used by practitioners that can complicate and disconnect them from their clients, particularly in the psychological services of the SUS in Brazil whose users are overwhelming low-income. Collectively, these arguments psychologist with whom she visits from time-to-time. She expressed her desire for me to interview the psychologist who could provide a testimony to the changes in her mental state and more broadly, life outlook. While the interview never occurred, her continued relationship and her desire for testimony do offer a positive, effective instance of the work of psychotherapy in the lives of the women. 94 See Figueiredo 2001; Kalckmann et al. 2007 211

provide interpretations of what may not have been factored into the therapeutic work these women most likely received. These discussions offer some support for why the group dynamic initiated by Valdete may have had more traction, drawing on multiple shared reference points.

While Valdete did not have biomedical training she did have personal experience with psychotherapy and a psychologist which she critiqued and, I suggest, influenced the rationale used in the formation of their group and its dynamic. The arguments above may explain, on one level, Valdete’s discomfort with her personal experience with psychotherapy, which should be noted, was neither sustained nor extensive. She articulated several specific criticisms of psychotherapy - the singular one-way exchange between patient and therapist and the concentration in counseling on remembering the negative and trying elements of people’s lives. I will elaborate on the latter in my discussion of the use of the music in the group, but now I will address the importance of the collectivity and exchange dynamic of the group.

Valdete’s objective centered on improving the quality of life of the women and later, to bring joy and play back into their life experiences through music and dance. Her efforts were formed in relation to her own and the member’s experiences with the health center, even though she did not use the language or concept of therapy as a model or an approach. Moreover, uncovering, isolating and/or defining a problem was not of specific concern within the group as much as was creating an environment for and enabling these women to speak freely and be heard by their peers. As a community organizer, Valdete firmly supports notions of the common good and quality of life, two guiding principles in her grassroots activism and mobilization. With significant practice in creating community

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and collectivity, particularly in the geographic region, Valdete sought to build an environment with fluid, balanced exchanges that worked against the hierarchical silencing that she contended with as a black woman and a woman stigmatized by her neighborhood of residence, negotiating a range of people from other residents to city officials. In summoning her peers – racialized, low-income, similarly aged women from the neighborhood – a space for them took shape, which was most likely, the first experience of the kind for these women.

Between their home and work lives, they circulated and functioned in environments where they had little voice or engagement. As domestic servants or cleaners, they often performed the unspoken code of silence that socially intones the classed, boundaries of service labor. Even in their own homes, the responsibilities of maintaining the household often led them to be engrossed in work, whether cooking, cleaning or washing, when not attending to children or their husbands. While these roles did not necessarily silence them, their households remained environments in which their thoughts and sensibilities, let alone their time, revolved around the conditions of others, leaving little viable places for the engagement of their emotional lives. In visits to their homes for interviews, they would typically assume the responsibilities of cooking and cleaning, playing host for my visit. However, in tension with the idea of the home being these women’s domain, as a gendered space of liberation, when it came to conversing, they often deferred to their children, grandchildren and sometimes spouses. This format initially was disconcerting since they would sit quietly, often in the corner of the room, as their children spoke of their lives even as all parties in the room knew that I was there to interview the group members. The women seemed unfazed by this dynamic and I too

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came to expect it, after repeatedly witnessing the phenomena and the roles they easily assumed. Their silence and yielding to others both verbally and spatially, sitting or standing slightly removed from the conversation, bore the marks of these women’s socialization as unimposing, providers. Raised and continuing to function in patriarchal family dynamics and postures, their affective expression in their homes was frequently subdued and this dynamic was most visible with women who shared their houses with adult children, husbands or even grandchildren. Their unchallenged quiescence not only revealed a mode of relating widely accepted and consistent within these families, but moreover, the ways in which these women’s ways of feeling about themselves were also represented in their ways of being.

Against the backdrop of these dynamics in their homes, one of the fundamental constructions of the group was the creation of an autonomous collective space for these ageing women. Valdete drew these women out of their homes and into the presence of one another to discuss and probe their use of medication. It was a space for ageing, low- income women of color, which was not of qualifications, but of positionalities felt through a host of shared experiences that shaped how they have existed and think about the world. Valdete founded a space outside of the home for these women to exhibit and explore themselves. The group would later help these women transform their home lives, but it was started with the simple idea of giving them a space, as Valdete said, “This space is yours.” Common life events and modes of living were what contributed to, if not bred, the types of emotional pressures they felt, and in most instances led them to use medication. In the collective atmosphere, they spoke about what they were experiencing and began dialogues with women undergoing similar trials. They acquired an

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environment that created a sustained opportunity for conversation, reflection and reinforcement for their individual lives.

One of the major interventions, I suggest, was the development of the praxis of taking care of themselves as a means to reinforce their ability to invest in others. The goal was not to judge the types of work they do in the home as housewives or the engrained practices of giving, but to reinforce the importance of the women’s work in their homes and with their families by praising their commitment to and investment in the lives of others. The conceptual shift was to make these women conscious of and responsive to the psychological and emotional pressures of feeling like they had to put everyone’s needs above their own. More than the women’s enactment of these roles, their preoccupation with fulfilling them while ignoring their own states of mind and bodies, elucidates how they had self-made around their capacity to give. The understanding cultivated within the group was that women did not have to assume responsibility in the home for everyone’s needs, wants, and expectations; whether personally or externally imposed, they were impossible to fulfill. In practice, this new position required subtle shifts in their modes of handling the expectations and needs of others. For example, as grandmothers, their jobs were not to play mother to grandchildren, whose mothers or fathers (their daughters and sons) were not inclined to take full responsibility for their own children. Since many of these women were retired and home all day, it was often the case that they looked after, if not became fulltime mothers to grandchildren whose parents would take advantage of what was perceived of as their mother’s free time. Some children did take advantage of their mothers’ availability as retired homemakers, while in other instances, group members became de facto caretakers of grandchildren because of the parents’ need to

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work, their health conditions, and in some cases because the parents had died. In all instances, the women were assuming these responsibilities as their duties without reflection or consideration of the particular tolls. While the reality of some situations did not always permit these women to opt out, the development of the group provided a time and place for these women to focus on their own life conditions and desires for at least several hours a week, with the idea that they would slowly integrate their new modes of being and consequently feeling, into new lifeways.

* * *

Valdete’s interaction with Zinia provides a window into the types of exchanges that take place in the group and are emblematic of the texture, tone and manner in which the group dynamics were built. Valdete’s account of her own efforts to assist her son exhibited identification with and reinforcement of Zinia’s own trials. Valdete walked through the frustrations, fears and helplessness of mothering an adult child with a severe addiction, providing a framework – the roadmap – of how she reflected on and managed her situation in practice. This mode of listening to a concern and then sharing her own experience with a similar situation is at the heart of the learning and reinforcing of the group that Valdete simply articulates as: “One would share with another, and that is how the exchange began.” This collective exchange and learning contrasts with what Valdete characterized as the unequal exchange in psychotherapy in which one person tells about their life, often including the difficulties and intimacies, without any information reciprocally provided. The act of listening was not complimented with the therapist’s divestment of accounts and feelings from their own life. Without a sense of who the other

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person was, Valdete felt this to be an awkward form of interrelating that I would further characterize as lacking emotional proximity.

Valdete’s critique of therapy also related to the modes of exchange in these women’s homes in which women listened, advised and helped other family members, but rarely gained the attention or investment in return. By generating a space outside of the home, the group slowly challenged the family dynamics and domestic lives by having these women create time for themselves and protect that time from the demands of the rest of their lives. Iris said, “I used to stay around for everyone else’s needs, now I take care of my responsibilities say bye and am off to the group.” In addition to gaining a space for their own interests and care, they began learning to put limits on their time and energy, which meant challenging some of the expectations of them in the home. At a most basic level, the unadulterated idea was questioned that if not at work, they should be in the home providing for someone else.

Partaking in a (black) women-led, collective endeavor that takes women’s emotional wellbeing as its driving force is a rupture from the racial, patriarchal configurations of their home lives and social positioning that configured and conditioned their lives to revolve around the needs and emotions of others. The idea that economically, poor, ageing women of color should prioritize and take time out of their weekly schedules to engage in emotionally sensitive exchange and play, reorders the priorities these women were raised to follow and society expects of them, around their own well being, encouraging a sea change in their outlooks and practices. Their initial resistance to the group – leaving their homes and responsibilities to attend encounters with other women – provides a tangible example of their immersion in demanding yet

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familiar social roles and how, in spite of their harried and upset states, it was unsettling to move into this new mode of dialogue and atmosphere. This initial comportment, narrated to me through some members’ memories of the formation of the group, was visible during my fieldwork with the more recent members, who would show up infrequently and were reticent in their interaction with other women often quietly keeping to themselves. During individual interviews, women shared with me their own feelings of doubt with the group, elaborating that they thought it was “weird.” Yet in most instances95, the women stuck with it, feeling instead of necessarily thinking that this was meaningful. These more recent members were continuously encouraged by others to show up at the next rehearsal and travel on group outings. Needless to say this is a different collective context from that of the group’s initiation when all members were experiencing these dynamics for the first time.

While having time for themselves outside of their homes was novel on its own terms, the recognition and construction of time and energy devoted to these women’s well-being was a radical shift in perspective to address their health and wellness. Through spending the time in the group and among peers, women began to feel how investing in themselves was beneficial and critical to sustaining the rest of the demands in their lives.

They lamented, and expressed suffocating under the weight of their own feelings of isolation, grief, hopelessness, and uncertainty, individually generating modes of living

95 Several members recalled women who stayed in the group for a very short period of time. But most members who left the group, exited because of religious reasons, physical conditions that no longer allowed them to be on their feet as much, or they moved out of the neighborhood. Valdete and other members shared that women who were Evangelicals were often made to leave the group because of the aversion of dancing within the Evangelical Church. Only one member in the group is an Evangelical who asserts that she personally was alright with continuing to dance. For impacts on Afro-Brazilian religion see (Vagner Gonçalvez da Silva org. 2007). 218

with the demands and circumstances within their lives. The medication was one of the resources they drew upon, as Pereira’s study also theorized, to minimize and quiet some of the intensities and extent to which they had to emotionally feel, most notably, the discomforts and insecurities of their realities.

The work of integrating their mental and physical health began with the basic conception that their physical concerns – their sleeplessness and bodily aches – were emotional aches they were registering in the body. In shifting the language from vocabularies of illness, treatment, and cures, Valdete had the women begin to speak in terms of their lives, their concerns, desires and states.

Within this space of peers, the women were connected through the particularities of their gendered, classed, racial and aged positions. In concrete terms this meant they were able to talk and hear about issues spanning domestic violence, being widowed, raising grandchildren, losing children, the rising cost of food, and the difficulties of consistently having very little money and controlling hypertension/high blood pressure.

These women related, identified and commiserated with the experiences that their social positioning often exacerbated if not generated. Women frequently used the language of class and less frequently of race when feeling out of place, such as when moving into spaces they experienced as elite – nice hotels, private schools or performance venues where the circulating public typically were affluent. More often they synthesized experiences of classed racialization as economically poor black women, into their feelings of being criminalized and shamed, for example by prison guards who, when they went to visit their sons, they recounted as treating them rudely and blaming them for their sons’ actions. They recognized they were mutually interpellated and hailed by the guards

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for the intersection of their blackness, gender, class and their associated criminality, seemingly affirmed by their sons’ predicaments. The strength and familiarity of these experiences of discrimination connected these women’s positionality and their identification with one another even as the languages of race and class terms were inconsistently used. This powerful system of exchange between the women corroborates the complicated feelings of isolation, worry and aches they often experienced alone, and helped them unlearn the idea that their individual suffering had no greater meaning or modes of transforming. They began to learn about and reflect on the difficulties in their lives through the lenses of others. The group revealed to the women that they had options, the ability to face their struggles and their personal lives in alternative ways, and to make some of their fears and demands more manageable.

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Complicated situations with children were a common stress that pervaded group members’ lives; and central to the conversation between Valdete and Zinia was a son involved in drugs.96 Whether as users, dealers or both, sons’ links to a (drug) world that the women saw as having no positive outcome, came up in numerous personal interviews although not always in group conversation. The worries around their children, spanned from fearing their sons’ self-destruction or violence from their addiction, to desperation that their sons might turn on them, their families, be imprisoned and even die. Finding herself with a son who was using and perhaps selling drugs, Zinia was terrified that he was going to be killed and since he lived with her, she was fearful that the drug world would come into her one bedroom home. The anxiety of the potential of this situation weighed heavily on her and during a five-day trip to the interior in July, she spoke to me on several occasions of her worry about what was going on in her home while she was away. Both Dalia and Violeta also lived with constant concern about their sons’ addictions. Dalia’s son was an alcoholic and violent, terrorizing her frequently with verbal threats and destroying her home where he too lived. Violeta had two sons involved in drugs: one addicted and in prison and the other continuing to live in the area, most likely dealing. Azaléia too worried about her sons who she believed were involved in some capacity. One lived underground and only visited her occasionally; and the other

96 While there are clearly women users and dealers in the neighborhood, none of the women in the group spoke of their daughter’s involvement with drug dealers or drug use. One woman assessed this difference by saying that the fear with daughters and granddaughters was more of teenage pregnancy or their getting romantically involved with drug dealers. One granddaughter was involved with a dealer who was imprisoned. The granddaughter had broken off the relationship when the young man went to prison, but upon his release which was to happen before I left, the grandmother worried not so much about the safety of her granddaughter, but of her granddaughter’s then current boyfriend. That said, women are involved in the trade in spite of the traffic’s perception as a male world. See Athayde and MV Bill 2007 222

lived nearby and she was learning to disengage because of his temper and verbal aggression. Salgueira cried about her son, who was imprisoned in connection with drugs.

He maintained a good relationship with his mother, which made her suffering all the worse in his absence. For others it was the agonizing efforts to keep their grandsons from that world whose allure in an economically struggling region was a viable option and a magnet of employment for young men with limited education, material desires and social stigmas that impact their ability to find employment. Quieting the worry around a woman’s son was something the group could assist with through providing distraction and empathy, but also by engaging women to become conscious of their unproductive sense of guilt and helplessness.

Azaléia learned to not personalize her sons’ actions or take responsibility for their predicaments. In the ethnographic vignette, Valdete provided support, however women typically play critical roles for each other, relating, counseling and guiding. Azaléia was aware of Salgueira’s imprisoned son and Salgueira’s unusually shy, detracted behavior over the course of several practices led Azaléia to approach her at her home. She related empathetically interrogating Salgueira:

Did you put him in prison? Did you take him over there [she gestured into the hills] to hide? No. [pause] I asked her, ‘Did you make him use drugs?’ No. The problems [I had] in my house were serious, you known, but if it were not for [the women in the group], I think I would have already been over there in the graveyard, living there, rather than here.

I visited Azaléia on a day when Salgueira had gone to Azaléia’s house for support as a follow up to their previous discussion. Azaléia affirmed, “You cannot take responsibility for your son…Take care of yourself, look at yourself. Do what you can and live!” As one of the older members of the group, Azaléia has built up confidence in her ability to

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handle complicated situations by confronting and working on them as a process. She unlearned the idea that she needed to or could assume responsibility for her children’s ways through slowly confronting how the stress of that perspective had led her into depression, taking prescription medication and contemplating suicide.

The women’s emotional preoccupation around their children exposes the multiple dimensions of the types of frustrations, concerns and negotiations with which they have contended. Speaking about their children mostly incites reflections of pride, but also contemplations, sometimes sadness, around their unrealized hopes. Camelia, Violeta and

Azaléia, all spoke about how their financial situations left them with few social options as young parents and Dona Maio articulated a sense of failing her adopted daughter. On one bus ride, she shared with me that when this daughter was a small child, a well-off North

American couple, who were friends of the family for whom she worked as a domestic worker, solicited adopting the child and taking her to live with them in the United States.

She explained that at the time, she like many people in the neighborhood feared what they heard through media reports and rumors, that Brazilian children from low-income neighborhoods were being stolen and sold, either into slavery or for body parts. Dreading this possibility, she refused the offer specifying how hard the decision was to make given how little opportunity she felt she could provide this young girl. At my side, she gazed out the window silently shaking her head, then saying that today she feels she made a mistake, having not done what was in the best interest of her daughter who lives with and takes care of her, working outside the home as a domestic laborer.

The topic of their children’s social, economic circumstances joined an array of guilt, indifference and sadness around what, as mothers, they had realized for their

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children and consequently how they felt about themselves. Few spoke of it as their personal faults, but expressed hopes of not having their children struggle in the way that they had as they articulated their never-ending economic demands. Maio’s belief that her daughter would have had a “better” life had she chosen to give her up, lingers as a reminder of the reality of her social-economic conditions and her life in review, which constellates around sentiments of failure, severe disappointment and loss of something that could have been. The women’s feelings of powerlessness to provide a different life or relocate into a “safer” residential space registered in their consciousness their own lack of executive power of voice and status to possess the political clout or the attention necessary for interventions by the State to provide regulatory services to minimize violence and/or support economic-social development. With few opportunities for higher wages, these women, similar to what most of their daughters and sons now do, struggled to broaden their children’s economic prospects through education, job exposure, contacts or connections.

Working with the circumstances of indecision and feelings of being overwhelmed, the group helps reveal how women like Azaléia and less so Maio struggle with and can surrender to an idea of responsibility for and control over the outcomes of others. The collective space outside of the home provides an opportunity to hear other women contending with this sense of responsibility and slowly, much through Valdete’s counsel, learn to value their own efforts and dedication while not being accountable for the problems or conditions of others. Having support and perspectives on how to handle the complex circumstances in which they found themselves, such as a with a child involved with drugs, reinforced their ability to help other people, distancing themselves if

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the case necessitated it, and calling on guidance and aid in order to not feel isolated in their struggles. The challenge to not always assume responsibility and the wide array of feelings that come with that level of demand were what had led many of them to the doctor. Working on this change of mindset began elucidating the affective components that Valdete’s interpreted as the need for “self-esteem.”

***

Having women encounter and invest in their emotional lives required risk and venturing into new dynamics of socialization. Their initial reticence and slow development of the collective were palpations of the risks in this endeavor. What Valdete recognized through her own experience is what Audre Lorde writes about in the personal:

“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger” (1984:42).

Lorde’s concern specifically with having black women probe their internal worlds for creativity and possibilities yet unexplored is also an observation and criticism of the racist and patriarchal ethos in the US that educates black women to be silent and think or numb their way out of feeling. For Lorde, sharing one’s feelings is a human need and the repression of this expression (self)enables black women to be objectified, exploited and I would add, rendered crazy in their muteness. Bringing light, space and voice to this affective realm jars the overemphasis on black women as working bodies, existing throughout the diaspora and begins the process of having black women unlearn states of

“resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, [and] self-denial” that make them feel powerlessness to transform themselves or their surroundings (Lorde 1984:58). As ageing

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women, they have accrued years of experiences to contemplate, which meant transferring their attention and energy from the suffering of their labored pasts to their emotions around these experiences. From a diasporic perspective, this act signs the type of affective wisdom Audre Lorde speaks about in the ‘Erotic,’ and is representative of the self-knowledge that Werewere Liking ([2004]2007:423) posits as women’s “Ultimate

Knowledge.” It encompasses the alterative epistemologies through which black women have mobilized and guided their communities in Brazil (Carneiro 2000; Werneck 2007).

And it is what I suggest Valdete was getting at in her statement about “self-esteem.”

Through this collective autonomous space, these women undertake the process of valorizing their experiences and enabling possibility of their own self-realization through the depth of awareness of their ability to feel, think and live in new ways. Self-esteem is the work of self-recognition and audibility that gendered racism, specifically defeats in black women. It is delicately affirmed and enhanced individually through this peer collective as well as tempered through the mutuality set forth in the group.

One of the processes I analyze as self-making is realized both in the more pronounced moments of exchange and also in the experiences they create and share in their daily lives. They listen to each other talk about their aches and what errands they need to run or whatever is on their minds on any given day, (which usually involves something related to their home or family). Some engage with more enthusiasm and presence than others; some are accused of talking too much, while others are noticed as

“very quiet.” Passing comments of frustration are vented since women have varied personal perspectives of each other. Few used the language of friendship to describe their relationships with their colleagues, which was the term most commonly employed to

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refer to each other. Yet the women’s time together opened expression as an affirming experience, which enabled them to articulate sentiments and outlooks. Some women continue to self-silence, but I suggest that this is a sign of women in the process of recovering themselves. Zinia’s decision to ask Valdete for guidance captured a moment of expression toward finding news ways of living with her situation. The women’s collective singing and dancing in a circle is another form of expression that disarticulates the hierarchical forms of relating they are socially accustomed to, and values the voice and participation of all members, in spite of personality conflicts, jealousies and sadness.

Moments of individual trial or upset, as shown in the case of Zinia, tell of the work of the group as a support and guiding force and the following ethnographic vignette brings into focus how they help one another in their continuing collective process of self-making.

Music is the hallmark vehicle Valdete has deployed for these women’s individual and collective expression.

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BRISK MORNING, JULY 2006

At the end of a July morning rehearsal, Valdete announced among other logistics, the passing of Rosa’s husband. He had grown increasingly sick with heart problems over the past months and as his caregiver, Rosa attended group events with less frequency and increased anxiety and tears. She was one of the few women with a living husband and as his passing became imminent she had expressed deep affection for him through frequent comments about his good nature and ability to provide. His deteriorating health took its toll on her and she struggled to sleep and calm her worry.

After announcing the death, Valdete encouraged the women to attend the wake at nine am to lend some support to Rosa. At the end of rehearsal, I joined several of the women to head to the cemetery with its sweeping view where most of the women’s lost- ones are buried. Pooling resources to cover women without sufficient money for bus fare, we took the short ride, which many often walk, arriving fifteen minutes later. Walking through the gates and up a short road, our small group headed towards several simple one-room, open front structures where bodies lay in repose. In front of us, a handful of the women from the group were standing in a circle chatting and laughing just as they were a half hour before at practice. Joining the huddle Orquídea paused to say hello and gestured to the structures behind where I now could see various coffins and mourning families encircling them. She pointed to the section just up from where we were specifying the area of Rosa’s husband’s viewing. Orquídea humorously and grimly added that she had made the mistake of going into the adjacent structure where a young man’s body rested.

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I followed Begonia to Rose who stood at the head of an open coffin. Begonia greeted and embraced Rosa, who desperately rubbed her husband’s face as if to find some last breath of life in his still body. I greeted her, and she stood open armed, calling me by name, saying she was happy to see me and thanking me for coming. Through tears she expressed how hard and painful this was. She kept me close for minutes, releasing her embrace when her daughter showed up to introduce me to the thirty-something year old. With a calm exterior, her daughter smiled, said, “Hello,” then turned to her mother and indicated that her mother needed to return to the group because “life must go on.”

Several group members who were standing alongside nodded in agreement, stating that they were there for Rosa if she needed anything. They urged Rosa to go on the group trip to a cultural festival the following week, which the daughter affirmed.

Our small cohort headed back to where the other women were standing, some waiting to attend the burial. In the meantime, stories were told about other wakes all the while maintaining a light air. Stories flowed about loved ones, husbands, children and other family members buried somewhere on this multiple city block cemetery. Peonia shared that her husband and son were there explaining that her teenage son had fallen on his bike and banged his head. She indicated that she had come early to visit both of their graves. I also knew that Orquídea’s beloved oldest son was laid to rest there although another member had mentioned that she does not visit the site. Dália too had spent time at her eldest son’s grave; he had been murdered a little over year before.

Many of the women’s parents, siblings, children and neighborhood friends rested in this space, making it a landmark, given its size and presence in the area. In parallel

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conversations, some women chatted peacefully with each other as others without solicitation spoke of the family members that silently, but vividly surrounded us.

After thirty minutes of standing around, Lantana expressed that she had not eaten breakfast and that if she were to attend the burial, with the emotion and weeping, she would not be able to handle it. Unsure of the timing of the internment, others followed her lead, indicating that they needed to get back home to prepare lunch and go about their respective days. I inquired if Valdete was going to show up; Begonia explained that she would not be coming because she did not like cemeteries, but had already visited

Rosa in her home. We walked to the bus stop, parted ways with various women and I spent the better half of the day with Begonia in the city center making plans for the upcoming trip to the cultural festival.

Rosa did not make the trip, but returned several weeks later in early August. She came to the Wednesday morning exercise class and rehearsal. Everyone had words of condolence, going specifically to her, as they came in the door to greet and offer their support. They hugged her, empathized with her sadness and loss, and then specified her need to move on. Candeia gave a longer hug, as did Anis who simply said “Find strength in God.”

Peonia too greeted Rosa, and then looking her in the eye, shared, “I have lost my son and my husband…it’s hard but you have to continue.” She explained both of their passings and advised Rosa that she needed to live her own life and join the group on the following trip. Listening quietly, Rosa expressed her suffering and discomfort. Peonia acknowledged, “No, it’s not easy. It is not easy.” With a small nod and an attempt at a

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smile, Rosa dropped her head and moved into the small circle of women singing and swaying.

In many ways, the group serves as a sanctuary from the losses, worries and pains of the women’s everyday lives and memories, as music making opens unmatched modes of self-expression. Music and dance have been recognized as having therapeutic value and readily perceived as powerful agents in enabling people to articulate, energize and mobilize themselves. The formalization of Music Therapy occurred in the 1940s in the

US and Europe, but various scholars have examined its effects on the human body in relationship with its uses in society.97 The formalization of this tradition, namely the more recent scientific minded and systematized approach to using music as therapy, quantifies and suggests the value of music is in its expressive power and its ability to stir and transform individuals affectively. 98 Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have affirmed the vast social uses of music from the spiritual to more recent interest in socio- political production.99 Following these concerns rather than the physiological or clinical vantages in music therapy, my approach is what a practitioner referred to me as “organic music therapy,” that is, people’s informal use of music to ease, better and enrich their own and other people’s lives.100 This standpoint follows Valdete’s inclination towards music from her observations of what activities the women gravitated towards and enjoyed, and her larger mission of improving their self-esteem. She often said she wanted

97 Davis and Thaut 1992; Schullian and Schoen 1848 98 For examples see Sutton ed. 2002; Kenny and Stge Eds. 2002 99 See Barz 2006; Moore 1997; Olaniyan 2004; Rose 1994 100 I thank musician (cellist) and informal music therapist Michael Shay for a conversation we had on organic practices of music therapy with elderly and youth. 233

to help the women play and give them back childhoods they never experienced because they were too busy working. The informality of this method neither counters its therapeutic nature nor does it disqualify its theoretical significance. Instructively, it signals and is consistent with Valdete’s praxis of visualizing and interpreting the women’s lives from her own experience removed from the medical, curative lens.

Valdete incorporated into her practice of creating self-esteem activities designed to bring back joy and play into the women’s lives. This notion bears on the second of

Valdete’s criticisms about her experience with psychotherapy: “Therapists have patients recall painful moments from their pasts.” Speaking about this and her construction of the group, she shared wanting the women to remember the joys and positives of their lives, in some instances, by having them recall childhood moments and activities of play. Her assessment was that when therapists ask the women to recall their frequently painful histories, the women suffered instead of transitioning into calmer, relaxed affective states.

Valdete does not discredit the practice of exploring and analyzing one’s past experiences as evidenced in the first ethnographic example. Her objective in working with these women was to use their memories and histories in ways that created enjoyment and fun.

These are difficult affective places to collectively induce and quantify, given the range of the women’s personalities and individual histories. Yet, generating a forum and a vehicle through which women could celebrate their lives and create a sense of fulfillment, she felt, would help build their self-esteem. In developing their songs and dances, a space was created in which they could exercise, in all senses, their voice.

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THEY TRADED SADNESS, DEPRESSION, AND SOLITUDE FOR MUSIC AND DANCE – Valdete

These women’s gravitation towards music became an entry point into their pasts and an opportunity to reframe how they feel and think about their life trajectories. The gravitation was most likely an unintended consequence of the group, but deserves note because it is one of the critical ways the impact of the group can be palpated in their emotional lives. Valdete introduced hobbies including rug weaving and crochet and had women participate in “body expression”, a class that used movement as a form of emotional articulation; in her own words, she wanted “to mess with their bodies and minds.” Valdete explained that through this class the women became familiar with their

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bodies; some learned about their anatomy for the first time, others were freed to move as they chose. She also observed that movement and singing captivated and inspired the women, noting early on that “the roda” had special significance in their lives. She dedicated one day a week as music and play day, which always had widespread participation, and gave the women a homework assignment of recalling and bringing songs from their childhood to the group. Some were able to remember them, others asked mothers and siblings for help. A considerable number of songs in the group’s repertoire came from one woman who tape-recorded her mother, bedridden and in her nineties, faintly singing songs from her youth.101 In revisiting these songs, the women began to

“rescue” the musical and cultural traditions of their grandmothers and their regional lives.

These practices have become central to their collective work in communities and their own self-making.

These songs, cantigas de roda (songs of the circle), are the genre of music the group is now collectively known for singing. The songs are a tradition of music and performance with roots in the socio-cultural history and life of people in the interior of

Brazil. They popularly are known as forms of circles of kids’ play (brincadeiras de roda, ciranda) that involve choreography, humor and collective singing. These songs are spoken of as part of “folk” traditions characterized out of the circular play in which both kids and working people relaxed and whose roots are tied to both European contradance

101 I interviewed this member in 2004, whom spoke of recording songs with her mother. She has since left the group. In public, she shared with me that she needed to work and no longer had the time to participate even though she continued to value the members and the group’s work. Various group members indicated that she was one of the group members who left because she was Evangelical and the belief within the denomination that dance was not allowed. 236

as well as African inherited traditions of movement and collective celebration.102 While these songs often have known lyrics, the call and response format of these cantigas inspire improvisational singing and uses of metaphor that are highly dynamic and playful exchanges. These songs maintain a jovial tone, but can also speak to people of all ages, drawing on the carefree play and humor of children while sometimes, articulating more adult life experiences. The songs configure into a range of musical traditions of the interior, sung for both play and work and a variety of differently classed people, which also implies race.

Minas Gerais has a rich musical tradition emerging from its vast rural areas and the musical traditions, specifically of its large African descendant population. The economy and population of the state of Minas Gerais developed around a notable colonial mining industry. Large numbers of enslaved Africans supported this natural exploitation and are represented in the presence of quilombos (maroon communities) throughout the state and the substantial population of African descent, which the 2002 census reported as

47.7% of Minas’ population. This presence initially brought to sustain the mining and agricultural growth of the region, has also left its cultural traditions, sustained in nationally known congados (ritual communities or brotherhoods) and well known annual festivals that take place in Contagem and Minas Novas, among others places. Black traditions in the interior have fused with a diverse mix of cultural practices over the past centuries and have made this region the site of growing attention in recent state efforts to encourage popular culture.

102 Pimentel 2004; Rezende 1968. 237

During my fieldwork, the group made three trips to the interior of Minas to partake in festivals celebrated and attempting to preserve the artistic traditions of the state.103 One of those trips included an opportunity to visit with a singing group with whom the women strongly identify – the “Lavadeiras” whose name “washerwomen” designates their work and also informs the music they sing. These women who formerly washed clothes in the river running through their home city of Almenara, located in the far north east of the state, recently built a cooperative washhouse. They sing songs both in praise of their work and the environment and to pass time while they work. One member of the Lavadeiras articulated during a joint event, that other washerwomen passed these songs down to them having learned new music from men passing in canoes, canoerois, as they paddled through town. Music from different geographical regions and the stories of people’s lives, earning their livelihood on and along the river, were passed through these encounters on the water, from mostly men to these women who transformed and even reinterpreted the music, if only through their vocal ranges.

Similar to the Lavadeiras and the history of their music, those singing “cantigas” included all classes, but often were developed by the laborers, the popular peoples who deployed music as a source of play on the weekends as well as for pleasure and distraction in labor. Historical accounts and drawings often reflect this tradition, specifically in the lives of enslaved Africans who while working sang what are sometimes called vissungos or work songs.104 These chronicles reveal how music and

103 Minas Gerais is known for its ceramics from the region called the Valle do Jequitinhonha, located in the northeastern part of the state, and for its musical contribution to MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) and “folk” culture. The state is also, perhaps, even better known and more appreciated for its cheese and numerous artisan cachaça (cane liquor) production. 104 For more on vissungos, see Rezende 1968: 65-66. 238

performative traditions of collective worships and diversion often took place on Sundays, days off and included songs whose lyrics, overtly and covertly, were creative expressions of their affective and physical lives. Music was a unique, sometimes the singular outlet, to raise questions and negotiate the nature of humanity and life in which they were constricted. Paul Gilroy (1994) suggests two of the characterizing elements of Black

Atlantic life are the shared experiences of racial terror and musicality as a vehicle of expression of the experiences of living in extraordinary oppressive circumstances. In the context of slavery and post-slavery, constrained economic and social conditions, moments of play and self-expression were limited and cherished as times of release, relaxation and communion with other people and with the larger forces.

The space of the circle, which is the formation of the tradition of songs these women sing, is, in various Brazilian traditions, a spatial-structural manifestation of that play and energy. It is highly present within Afro-Brazilian expressive culture, perhaps most widely witnessed in capoeira, a sacred game of embodied knowledge, tradition, strategy and play, and in the spiritual practices of Candomblé and other religions of the

African matrix. Looked at within these traditions, the circle is a spatial metaphor of the universe and demarcation of fields of different consciousness105 and Valdete too noticed that the circle “had a lot of presence in their life.” A local musician who works on developing cultural projects in the neighborhood and with these women pointed to the social elements embedded in cantigas de roda that come from life in the interior. He explained,

[These women] rescue a musical and cultural universe. When they came to the city, I think they lost a fundamental element of the way that they lived in the

105 Talmon-Chvaicer 2008:142-149. 239

interior, of relationships between people, of festivals. [These cantigas de roda] have a strong musical character and also a strong social character which is to be part of a group.

He assessed these women’s singing as bringing back a different way of life and relating, encoded in their music and its formation itself. The circle of their songs creates and reinforces social interchange; the musician described the meaning of the circle in the following way:

[The circle] spirals and grows. It has a dynamic in which one comes in with a verse and another builds on it creating a movement. It is not something that stands still in the same place. It’s not a broken record stuck in the space place a monotonous repetition. The circle is something dynamic and alive.

This interplay between space, sound and interaction reinforces the freedom of articulation and movement in the otherwise deeply constrained circumstances, historically and specifically, in these women’s lives. These songs brought them in touch with these forms of collective play that some were familiar with in childhood, that have largely been absent from their adult and more broadly urban lives. As Carneiro specifies about black culture in Brazil, “The ludic element is not a factor of exhibition without a basis: it is an authentic factor of the culture. Leisure and joy are the good integrated into life” (2000:

40). From these understandings, generating and singing in a circle was an important collective space act of reinforcement of the women’s bodies as the principal site of expressive liberation.

The strength of these traditions and the women’s resonances with them reveal the work that music specifically as outlets and acts of expression provide for people living in oppressive material and emotional conditions. Ageing people in capitalist oriented societies including Brazil in which the lifespan of the body’s labor potential outlines its

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social relevance, commonly experience this sense of social silencing. Similarly, the cultural emphasis placed on youthful beauty and productive bodies has sent out a complicated message and lived reality for how older citizens, particularly black and economically poor, can contribute to, exist and even thrive in societies already imbibing a set of hierarchical racial, gender and class based assumptions and expectations for specific bodies. How older people feel about their status and worth is an even less addressed matter that local interventions, such as the group, have emerged to engage.

The affective suppression, notably of ageing black women in combination with their demanding life circumstances, makes music and dance critical sites of expression which can initiate a form of collective healing where self-making in (self)conscious and empowered ways becomes possible. Audre Lorde, whose writing is overwhelming dedicated to black women’s self-discovery, voice and ultimately freedom, writes about poetry in a way that I suggest holds true for music with these women: “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives” (1984:37). This may also be why Lorde thinks of poetry as the art of black women and following Valdete’s intervention, why music has been so readily used in Brazil and throughout the Diaspora by movements against anti-black racism.

THE WORK OF MUSIC

Music provided these ageing women an environment and activity through which they could inspire feelings of joy and fulfillment rather than lament, grief or fatigue. As described, these songs and singing tradition are playful and celebratory in nature,

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providing moments and dynamics with childlike or cathartic release. The element of diversion was integral to how Valdete conceptualized her intervention and the group members’ gravitation towards it. She wanted to stimulate experiences that conjured the carefree, experimental and social nature of childhood that many of the women did not have because of the responsibilities of their working lives they assumed at a young age.

For some, their early years were filled with positive memories, which they nostalgically spoke about; in those few cases, as children they had time to play and had not yet started working or taking on the demands of an adult. Even those whose early years were filled with labor, women like Margarida, Acacia, and Violeta turned to the moments of song and dance as enjoyable and play-filled moments of their youth. Jacinta summarized that she felt everyone could benefit from a second childhood, especially given some of the struggles she experienced as an adult. Ample time to socialize, engage in creative activity and move without restrictions are elements of what both defines play and makes it a critical time for experimentation, creativity and exploring within the collective.

This metaphoric re-living of childhood began the work of drawing the women’s attention to elements of life that moved them away from feelings of inertia and dejection by inspiring feelings of pleasure and moments of ease and possibility. In one of their well-known songs Pião, one member enters the middle of the circle and dances to the instructions of the chorus (those in the circle), which have her spin and dance. Then, she is called to trade-out with another person from the circle. This song, whether sung and role-played with audiences of adults or children, or just by the women at a typical morning practice, consistently inspired laughter and playfulness that they did not often describe as part of their everyday lives, specifically before joining the collective. Group

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encounters provide women with consistent hours every week of this type of socialization, distraction and fun with peers to which they could retreat from the demands of their lives.

I emphasize the dependability of the group as a “quality over quantity” life register for its significance in providing them time for their recreation and fulfillment.

Women now come to the group less because of medication and more because of the struggles they are going through in their families. After years of being the primary caretaker of her sister, Orquídea explained joining the group after this sister passed following a long battle with cancer. She expressed that she had known about the group and was interested in it, but only had time after her sister’s death. Several years after joining, it was group members who went to her home on mother’s day after she found out that her son and grandson had been in a car accident. Her son died at the scene and her grandson was in a coma for about nine months before passing as well. A cap and a pair of bent glasses rest upon two large wood-framed speakers that still sit just inside of

Orquídea’s front door. She explained that the glasses were her husband’s who also had died years before and that the hat and speakers were her son’s – he was planning to take them with him to his radio show scheduled the night of his passing. Orquídea took a short time away from the group before returning. For women in crisis or states of depression, the group atmosphere is one of energy and celebration, founded around and empathetic to the profound emotions and states of suffering linked to grief, loss, trauma, devastation, numbness and the slow recovery of self. In this context, women do not have to speak or explain their situations, but partake in the movement, song and relating.

As witnessed on several occasions, returning to and/or participating in group activities is not necessarily an easy space for women in pain. It took weeks for Rosa to

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return to the group after her husband’s death and at that morning rehearsal, Margarida commented on Rosa’s need for reinforcement from other group members. She told several women sitting nearby, that the group needed to visit Rosa at her home in order to support her. “She is very sentimental. We need to visit her as a group and then later we can go in pairs.” Margarida turned to me and stated, “When God took my child, that is what they did [for me].” Like Rosa, Margarida was absent for several months during the renewed grief she experienced around the anniversary of the death of her son that had occurred several years before. She eventually returned, still distant, with empty eyes and spoke of continuing to use anti-depressants to ease the isolation and profound sense of loss within her. Margarida is one of the women who has been in the group the longest and speaks of it as “precious.” A retired widow, Margarida lives with her daughter who works most of the time, and sits in her home alone, which contributes to her sense of loneliness and sadness.

This is a state in which many women as ageing people find themselves; their children and grandchildren are not always interested, do not take the time to converse or spend time with them. Often they do not identify with the emotional space of reflection these ageing people inhabit, in spite of the fact that they typically live together.

Emotional solitude whether from sadness or contemplation of their lives or a recent loss was one of the many conditions that brought them to a doctor and, subsequently, to the group. Beyond the initial awkward or detached feelings a woman might experience when joining or returning to the group, the singing and dancing provide embodied joy and temporary cathartic forgetting that most of these women have few opportunities to realize. Their hardships, which resonate in the collective, are also engaged individually

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through singing and dancing. These elements of collective exchange and often laughter have established an environment that women begin to experience as enjoyable and, critically, their own.

THOSE WHO SING PRAY TWICE” Camelia

Words alone have not been sufficient to give meaning to the complex array of sentiments circulating in people living phases of emotional struggle and contending with different forms of oppression. Art and music enable the creative translation and articulation of emotions into other forms. On the day that Rosa returned to practice after her hiatus following her husband’s death, she listened to women’s condolences and 245

words of empathy, but found solace in the movement and singing. Women’s gravitation to the circle and song as a unique space of release was also evident when Margarida rejoined the group following months of depression. She reappeared at practice on a

Monday and was greeted with a wave of hellos. During rehearsal, she sang loudly, danced energetically and laughed during the pauses in the music. Her playfulness and projected singing articulated an array of emotions that would be hard to formulate or release in words and would require an audience, a witness, to provide a sense of return for that level of expression. Coming to voice one’s feelings about the loss of a child was not an expectation of the group or necessarily its function because Valdete did not overstress talking about their emotional lives. Music and dance, through their enactment, were deemed vehicles of expression equally powerful to language and probably better suited for the affective manifestation of the women’s anguish, relief or sense of peace.

Azaléia once commented about the process of singing, “Sometimes we are singing and sometimes we are shouting, truly shouting.” There are moments when women sing through certain songs pushing their emotions through vocal chords and lyrics and illustrate what Achille Mbembe suggests is their “willingness to blur the distinction between sound and noise” traveling into the world screams (2006:74).106 Discussing

Congolese music, he writes about noise, sound and screams as emerging from the darker spaces and emotions that are artistically conjured out of the terror and brutality of

Congo’s colonial past (2006: 74-75). Mbembe details how these sounds, what he calls,

“sound forces,” are in fact other modes of communication that travel and echo through bodies: “There is nothing more complex than verbalizing that which involves the non-

106 He is writing in reference to the idea of the scream from the text, “Le cri de l’homme Africain J.M. Ela 1980. 246

verbal, or describing sound, something which in essence is neither linguistic in nature nor involves purely spontaneous practice of language” (2006:63-64). By their own account, some women shout, allowing their emotional histories, heartaches, scars, and hopes to be experienced, felt and heard through the songs. Like the “cries” of black people that

Ethiopian scholar Ashenafi Kebede calls “half-sung and have-yelled” that were the emotional ornamentation that shaped the evolution of black spirituals in the US (Darden

2004:43-44), the varied sounds of these women’s singing intone a range of emotional planes projected and felt through the music. Sometimes their voices blend into one another and when they open their mouths, some sing faintly and can barely be heard.

They can also project or call a verse and have attention given to them. New members usually sing the softest and Valdete often encourages them to sing louder, so she can hear them.

The beauty heard in the song and the anger, sadness or rage reverberating in the shout, are equally electric with feelings of different natures and origins. The vivacity and humor emitted in some of the songs are met with the pain and tremble of voice in the chanting of others. This spectrum of emotion encompasses what scholar Albert Raboteau has pointed to in the black singing tradition of the US as “sad joyfulness.” Raboteau underscores how this music holds the pain of people’s suffering, but more notably their sense of hope and possibility. DuBois echoes this phenomenon when he writes about spirituals, “Through all the sorrow…there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence

([1903](1989):214). The women bring this range of sentiment and moods to the music as they carry with them the thoughts, memories of struggle into their embodiment of joy,

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celebration and release. Their songs, in their lyrics and tradition, conjure joy and play.

They also encompass the multiple levels of interplay the women enact between the singer’s lived, affective and dream worlds. The cantigas de roda playfully speak to the daily problems, negotiations and humors of life. Songs like Alecrim (Rosemary) provide an image perhaps from their youth in the countryside and evoke the scent of rosemary wafting through the fields, whereas Dona Maria humorously has the chorus sing to Dona

Maria to leave her bad husband and come live with them. The play from the standpoint of the singer adds to the celebration and emphasizes this woman’s opportunity and encouragement to leave a “no good” husband for another suitor, or better life, with another woman or man. Within these women’s interpretation of this song can be heard the tension of their own trying marriages, the possibility of a more fulfilling life (without men, perhaps with a woman or a different man) and the companionship experienced in the group. These women imbue these songs with meanings that come from their own lives and the group, the music and the songs are opportunities for them to experience an ongoing range of freedom of expression and movement. “Music gives voice to unspoken sentiments,” is what ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz succinctly states (2005:190). And the women’s music, as powerful vibrations of intense feeling, is a testimony to their process of understanding and healing themselves. Audiences have become part of why and how they sing and a witness to their work, but fundamentally they sing for themselves.

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HEALTH AS SELF-MAKING

Self-esteem is challenging to quantify and register in these women’s lives.

Moreover, already rendered emotionally vulnerable particularly through gendered racism and economic limitation, black women have struggled with sharing their affective domain since it has historically been misread, condemned, and repressed (Rose 2003; Werneck ed. 2000). By developing multiple forms of expression, the group creates different modalities through which the women can give voice to their emotional worlds and have this experience manifested in physical transformations.

A bold demonstration of this register was visible in Palmeira, a soft-spoken woman who I met on our first trip to a musical festival four months into my fieldwork.

She had moved to an adjacent municipality months before I arrived for fieldwork and infrequently came to rehearsal because of the distance and expense. On this meeting, her entire head was wrapped in a scarf and when she later removed it, there were bald spots amongst her short curls. Palmeira joined the group after her mother was brutally murdered at home in her shack in a nearby hillside neighborhood by, according to witnesses, a highly drugged man. Palmeira was devastated by the loss and group members who lived nearby and knew her brought her to the group to gain support and comfort in her grief and deep depression. Three years after joining the group, she and her husband bought a small plot of land in another municipality and built a home where they now reside. A combination of factors including fear of the drug activity immediately around their old home and a desire to have more room than their shack motivated them to

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relocate. She now lives about a one to two hour bus ride each way from her old neighborhood with a ten reais fare.107

Palmeira recounted that the group provided her bearings to work through her bereavement. She expressed that because of her new living arrangement she felt isolated from everything familiar, and lonesome without the group and its activities. She entered into a “depression” that she equated with the loss of her mother and her hair began falling out in handfuls. She made an appointment with a psychiatrist explaining to me that she was in a similar state of anxiety and sadness after her mother’s murder. After describing her move and situation to the psychiatrist, the doctor decided that rather than give

Palmeira a prescription for medication, she wanted her to participate in group rehearsals and outings as much as she could financially manage. This was to be her medicine.

Consequently, Palmeira started appearing more often at weekly rehearsals and attending most of the group trips and with her newly growing hair volunteering that her feelings of loneliness that triggered memories of the loss of her mother, had subsided. She summed up her time with the group with the following language: “The group is health. You feel

107 At fifty, she is retired but not officially old enough to receive the benefits of seniors (60), such as ride for free on city buses, like over half of the women in the group. The ten reais she pays to travel to the neighborhood is significant, given that the average woman in the group receives a pension/social security of about two-to-three hundred reais a month (about a 100 to 150 US dollars) which may be their only source of income. As part of my methodology, I opted to not ask questions about specifics of finances, specifically about how much they made or currently make. Given the sensitive nature of my research, I felt probing their financial world would contribute to the types of examination of these women that while partially informative, concentrate on their “poverty” and the quantifications of these women’s lives in registeries of social services, employment and health, at the expense of a more complex rounded view of their personhood. These types of analyses also use the “favela” as a framework for coming into contact with and interest in particular subjects, which sits uncomfortably with my methodology and the practices it seeks to disrupt. That said, I wanted to have a sense of their individual income and opted to ask Valdete for an estimate. In some instances, women solicited this information themselves, but since they fall within Valdete’s estimates and for the sake of the continuity of their information and with my methodology, I am not including those specific numbers or people. 250

loved, you feel happy, you feel good.” Reconnecting with and embodying the familiar consistently experienced in this women’s collective was critical for her well-being.

As a visual of an affective life, Palmeira’s body captured and represented the states and conditions of her sentient flesh. Her body created a compelling vehicle of expression and manifestation for the range of emotions stemming from the particularities of the experiences of loss and later renewal. The body and how it is lived and felt offer palpable registers of emotion and her psychiatrist read her body as manifesting her emotional state. This particular reading may exemplify shifts in clinical training, philosophy, the prescription of psychotropic (mood-based drugs) and/or a more sensitive 251

practitioner. More acutely, it reaffirms the group’s vision and approach to health as a dynamic process of emotional and physical wellness.

Iris’ statement – “The group is our health” – informs the ways in which these women generally experience the group and what for them constitutes and creates health.

Group members did not define health as a state related to being sick or illness and, to the surprise of health workers on one occasion, spoke of it in the positive, as joy, fun, and pleasure. Valdete even named friendship as health. The importance of this understanding is reflected in the source of Valdete’s praxis – her experience – as well as in the group’s therapeutic premise. Valdete’s praxis of visualizing and interpreting these women’s lives from outside of the medical curative lens and through her own experience, enabled her to observe how these women felt limited ability or opportunities to change their states of mind and bodies. Aware of how these ageing women were positioned, read and lived, through race, gender, class, and age, Valdete believed they needed emotional reinforcement to handle and navigate the pressures that relentlessly come from the outside world, but were also churning in their affective ones as well. Self esteem or a positive and confident vision and sense of self, would develop around shifting their vantages on who they were, how they lived and what they were capable of; these would enable them to begin to experience the full range of their emotions and their bodies in conscious and self-realizing ways. Carneiro recognizes the central role of the expressive body in fortifying oneself through the atmosphere and impacts of racial oppression; she theorizes, “In their most complicated forms, rhythm and harmony impregnate black movement. It is black health. An instance of a victorious fight” (2000: 41). The group enriches their lives by transforming their notion of health into something worked at and

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lived through their bodies and minds, rather than something that one possesses or is determined by forces outside of oneself. Moreover, health and well-being are produced by energizing their bodies through music, play and joy, which as Carneiro writes, are the embodied characteristics of liberty and a different ontology historically integral to black modes of living in Brazil and diasporically.

This generative dynamic understanding of the importance of these women’s affective world as crucial to shifting their notion of and literal wellbeing is a significant marker of the nature and contribution of black feminist praxis that is evident in the group’s work. To privilege black women’s knowledge, is first to render it audible amongst the many dominant voices and perspectives that intentionally or unintentionally silence it, and, in this instance, is fundamental to rethinking ideas of and approaches to health, wellbeing and quality of life. Returning to the writings of Audre Lorde, they inform us about the fruits of black women’s process of self-discovery: “For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative… (1986:58).” These women’s wellness was at the heart of the concept of the group and through this premise and its reference the methods came forth. The sentience of their bodies they initially sought medication to quiet is now the tool through which they engage and express their states of being and mind. The group as a praxis engenders a notion of health that does not sit outside of social conditions, but responds to them. More expansive notions of wellness and health are increasingly used and developed internationally by black women and other oppressed groups because of how oppression registers in bodies in ways largely not considered or understood in biomedicine. This

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group illustrates how the creative process is self-affirming exemplifying how a person develops new skills and tools to build confidence around their ability and self-perception.

Acts of expression and ingenuity are the substance of self-making and engender the women’s sense of possibility and continued opportunity for transformation.

POSSIBILITIES FOR SELF-MAKING

Rosa’s husband’s funeral was not the only one the women collectively attended.

Many were present for Violeta’s granddaughter’s funeral and they have also laid to rest other group members. In the earlier days of the group, there were greater numbers of older women in their seventies and eighties and the group has experienced some of their passings. Even though many are in their late sixties, they are ageing women and with their varied health problems, including diabetes, stroke and hypertension, physical incapacitation and even death are potentialities. In August 2006, Dona Treva a less consistent member died on the bus en route to an afternoon performance. I happened to be out of town the day this occurred, but was at the first rehearsal following her death when various women shared with me their accounts of Treva’s relatively quiet death on the bus. She looked younger than her eighty years and her death was deemed of natural causes. Her age and distance from the group helped to ease the shock, but women discussed her passing noting that the trip had ironically been her first outing after a long hiatus from group events. Valdete expressed that she had asked for permission to attend because of her absence, specifying that she just wanted to be in their company and did not need to perform. Some women commented that the group was a good space in which to die.

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Geranea had explicitly requested to be buried in her group clothes, which occurred at her funeral in 2004. A very petite, raspy-voiced black woman, I had interviewed her only months before her passing. She too had her fair share of struggle from caretaking her sick husband to negotiating her own, mental health, most likely bipolar disorder. She was an energetic woman who, as Valdete chuckled, “had days that she was wonderful and days that she was completely crazy.” On the more difficult days,

Valdete remembered her threatening to quit, but she said those moments would pass and the rest of the time, Geranea was an active member of high spirits, admired by her peers.

Her fondness of and dedication to the group was evident in her requests for her burial.

Jacinta remembered many group members showing up to the funeral, in their outfits and singing as her coffin was lowered into the ground. A deeply personal commemoration, it provides another moment and gage of the group’s work in their affective lives.

In the midst of these funerals, I wondered if Valdete had attended them and more broadly the variance in texture and substance of these women’s emotional transformations. I never received an explanation for Valdete’s dislike of cemeteries. My own line of questioning brought me to think about her emotions and what the embodied experience of being present in cemeteries or at funerals evoked in her. Was she uncomfortable being surrounded with the elements of death? What exactly did she feel?

Was it an assortment of unidentified emotions or was it an encounter that was just too intense? I wondered if she too was working through her own losses, perhaps still quiet, and like Orquídea, not visiting her son’s grave. Were these commemorative places of death too laden with memory and confrontation for her? Did she simply not wish to or was unable to manifest her feelings in that space? These varied lines of questions do not

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provide an answer for Valdete’s distance, but they help to point back to the issue of black women’s ability to unmask and vocalize their feelings and the continuing nature of the individual and collective work of the group.

Even as the leader and women’s reference, Valdete too struggles with the demands of her day-to-day life and her negotiations with her own sentient experience.

Valdete is even keeled and possesses the needed skill of manipulating her voice to do the politically and socially engaged interpersonal and collective work of an activist. She is readily conscious of when she raises her voice or stays quiet and how her changes in mood can impact others. On numerous occasions, I heard her grow sharper in tone, like a parent, condemning some of the interpersonal fights in the group because she felt they were destructive. She was even brought to tears several times in sharing her frustrations around these dynamics, which members responded to in dead silence and with tears themselves. Her smoking was one of her most expressive elements that signaled her need to settle or calm herself in tense moments. I was surprised to find out that her habit and subsequent addiction to cigarettes had only started in her forties, precisely as a nervous or rather, settling if not numbing habit. The demands on these women have not lightened up and they continue to face hurdles with their children and loved ones’ deaths. Some still medicate to help them sleep on harder nights or during harder days, but in general their disuse of medication is a concrete change that manifests these women’s sense that they can work through the varied situations and emotions that they encounter.

This sense of affective equilibrium and the work towards it is the praxis of the group and their wellbeing. These women’s testimonies and bodies tell stories of survival, but the group has helped re-frame their lives, and more importantly, their way of feeling

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and being as living. Surviving is a state and way of self-making around losses and one’s relationship to death, both physical and emotional. With these women’s participation in the group, their material conditions and experiences have not changed, yet by having the complexities of their situations acknowledged, expressed, and reflected on, they experience the depth of their own capacity to feel and feel differently. They liberate their notions of what is possible, and who they can be.

These women are works in progress and that is what makes exploring their self- making as older people a complicated, yet informative task. Through their efforts and the ongoing nature of the group, their self-making is continuous and opened-ended. In

Camelia’s language, “We fall and rise again like a hawk, go flying and dip.” These women’s becoming is not necessarily destined for anywhere in particular. They move and flow much like the approach of the group, which looked to what the women enjoyed and towards their affinities. This is what black feminist Hortense Spillers (1998) calls

“responsible freedom” the capacity, specifically for black people to live and imagine ourselves in new and undefined ways. Valdete’s approach brought concepts and desires to the table but let the always emerging situations of these women’s lives and desires shape their collective trajectory. This model, which I am framing as within a black feminist praxis, allows for the critical unexpected changes that individually, collectively and socially occur and shape how the group moves. The flexibility and specificity of the objective –a dedication to wellness – enables the methods to change along with and in the capacity of the women.

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In conclusion, I want to quietly turn to my use of photography in fieldwork and in this chapter as one of the central methods through that I was able to witness and

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document elements of change in the women’s affective lives. The ways in which these women interacted with the camera over the course of my fieldwork was its own register of their security and confidence, sadness and distance. My ethnographic explorations through photography focused on studying the beauty of ageing black women in a society in which specifically old age, but also black features are constructed outside of popular beauty ideals and worse, into the domain of the dislikable. My efforts did not limit beauty to a notion of the physical but sought to capture their affective spectrum and the allure of its presence. This vision emerged from watching these women’s initial shyness with the camera, simultaneous to their desire to have images of themselves. In addition, their repeated comments of their own “ugliness” challenged me to listen to the sources of those beliefs, reasoning that they were racial in nature, having to do with their age and continued articulations of self-doubt.

Zinia was one of the women who first drew my attention to the meaning of photographs and what they could encompass both for the women and my research. She is a shy woman who expressed her sense of awkwardness facing the camera. The attention put on her through the intimate interaction with my lens initially made being the subject of a photograph an uncomfortable space for her. She, like many of the women, inquired with a certain innocence why I would want to photograph her since she was so “ugly.”

She would often look down unable to look directly at me with or without my camera.

Over the course of a year and a half of research and the consistency of both my own presence and that of the camera, she began smiling when she became conscious that the lens was on her.

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A magazine write-up about the group captured this change in her. Valdete brought to rehearsal the article about the group, which was accompanied by a picture of Zinia.

She was electric as group members joined to look at the most recent written public attention the group had received. Reflecting on the image of herself, she commented that she looked “pretty” and while showing me, she said, “You taught me how to do that. To smile.” The camera played a small role in developing and then documenting Zinia’s physical change over time; but it was her ability to smile to and for others that perhaps, is one of the subtlest and fleeting, but no less poignant registers of the group’s work.

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CHAPTER FOUR Where They Walk

“Do you believe that space can give life, or take it away, that space has power?”1

The engine grunted as the driver downshifted to ease the bus into the slope of the hill. It was seven-thirty in the morning and there were few riders. The same yellow buses heading inbound to the city center were packed with standing riders securing themselves on their way to work or to one of the hospitals at the buses’ final stop. I was en route to visit with Dona Lilás who lives in one of the largest neighborhoods on this mountainous range encasing the southeastern part of the city. Lilás and I planned on a time and she said she or her son would meet me at the bus stop. With views of the snaking roads from the cement patio in front of her home, Lilás could watch the bus’ approach at various points on the hill and calculate its arrival at the closest stop.

With narrowing streets, the bus slowed down, negotiating the road as a shared space with walkers and residents’ conversations. As we climbed, riders got on and off as the landscape shifted around the morning street life in these now familiar neighborhoods.

Young girls in spandex, flipflops with toenails done, old men in doorways, shower-fresh folks waiting for the bus, bustling bakeries and lively kids entering walled-off schools.

We kept climbing as painted cinder block homes increasingly went without paint and the construction more precarious and denser. The sweeping view of the city alternated with that of rolling hills with every turn of the bus. On this section of the bus route one travels within the neighborhood to go home or to visit a friend; on the slopes there are two-room

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houses in the making, make-shift housing on littered land, storefront bars with the retired, the unemployed, alcoholics or any combination of the three; there are fruit and vegetable stores waiting for their deliveries and large homes with sunset views and two car garages.

The popular music of pagode or funk often provides the soundtrack to these neighborhood rides or simply the cadence of a storytellers’ narrative or friendly small talk as one coasts along.

Those familiar sights and sounds made me aware that the loop was about to close into Lilás’s stop. The bus hurdled down the steep roads that lined this less densely populated area. Winding in the curve of the canyon, the vista of the city was no longer visible and neither was the rest of the neighborhood. I observed a put together twenty- something woman with pungent perfume a row behind me as we were the only people on the bus. I assumed she probably was heading to the public hospital that was both the last stop on this outbound leg and one of the principal reasons one would ride this bus if not a resident of these neighborhoods. She got up, bracing herself on the seatbacks with the sway of the bus. As she found her balance and set her gaze out the window, she asked me what neighborhood we were in. I responded that it was Taquaril. She looked at me, gazed back out the window and uttered simply, “It seems like the end of the world.”

Punctuating this statement with a short laugh, she sat back down as the bus came to a screeching stop at the bottom of the hill. I offered a minor smile of human acknowledgment before exiting the bus to greet a smiling Dona Lilás who, with cigarette in hand, stood peacefully awaiting my arrival.

* * *

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This chapter begins in the crossroads of hills and streets where these women created their lives; it is an effort to write their stories from the inside out. For many, the neighborhood is the principal environment through which they created their daily routines. They treat it as more than a geography: it is a set of relationships and a way of living in the world, which is perhaps why several of the women asked if they could talk about their lives through walking me around the area. We left their homes with the tape recorder in my pocket and wandered streets and trails, sometimes stopping to sit and observe at different sites. I returned to some of these spaces in other capacities and some

I never revisited; but what I was left with was an understanding of how these women, as racialized and gendered bodies, imprinted this environment and in turn, were able to draw on their connections with it to cultivate their self-making.

Far from the cliffs of the world’s edge, this area feels like, smells like, and looks like home to Lilás and group members. Like Lilás, most of the women arrived in Belo

Horizonte and moved directly to these hills where they watched the city grow below and around them. Lilás moved her family to Belo Horizonte in the early 1980s to seek medical care for her husband whose gastritis ultimately turned into a painful and fatal stomach cancer. Like many, she sold their land and possessions, not out of desire to live in the city, but because of the infra-structural resources, such as medical care or work possibilities that were minimal in the interior. They settled in the city on undeveloped land, constructed rustic homes and went in search of work.

Migration to the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte and into the states of Rio de

Janeiro and São Paulo increased in the 1960s during the expansion of the industrial and agriculture sectors in this southeastern region (Rigotti and Vasconcellos 2003: 44). In

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addition, the drought-fraught northeast of the country contributed to this dislocation and provided a source of labor for growing industries, which were augmenting under the military dictatorship (1964-1985). These employment opportunities sustained flows of people to Belo Horizonte through the 1980s, both expanding the city horizontally and vertically as well as intensifying the stratification along socio-economic spatial lines

(Mendoça 2003: 119). Zones west, north and east of this planned city’s center expanded mostly with migrating people. Carrying lifeways and few belongings, these newcomers settled in the more affordable areas that frequently lacked basic infrastructure. A 1959 city report indicated that 47. 3% of Belo Horizonte’s population lived outside of the city center in these areas and already were reported as having unsatisfactory living conditions

(ibid 120). Most of the women in the group had moved in order to access the matrix of the benefits of the urban environment: roads, hospitals, electricity, medical care and schools. Once settled, these communities quickly had to mobilize, beginning in the late

1950s, to stop government projects that sought to remove people from less developed areas; this activism lasted until the repression of the military dictatorship that took power in the mid sixties (Navarro 2003: 292-295). Most of the women arrived later in the 1960s and 70s but like earlier migrants, they brought with them aspirations and visions of a different life with which they founded the neighborhood.

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Landscapes of Memory

Allan Shelton’s autobiographical narrative The Dreamworlds of Alabama is an archaeological work that excavates how memory, emotion and land become densely packed together forging the intricacies of people’s life stories in their texture and breadth.

His text is an account of his formative years growing up in a small, rural town in

Alabama, as well as a reflection on the act of remembering, of constructing the layers of his life, both in years and in emotions, out of metaphors of the natural world and the life cycle of organic matter. It is gritty and mud-drenched writing and content in which his words are like our trawl digging and prodding through thick flashbacks and the entanglement of experiences and feelings in the subterranean world of roots both

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metaphorically and literally. He produces a sensory-scape of images, scents and the feel of phases and experiences of his earlier life ambivalently remembered. His stories take on a sometimes dizzying and/or dreamlike quality because we journey into the places in which memories are formed and reformed and how these spaces, in turn, are transformed by the ways in which they are lived in and remembered.

Shelton’s rendering of the relationship between human and spatial landscapes resonates with how the women live in and relate to their neighborhood. These ageing women and their environment have developed and grown together and as some of the neighborhood’s oldest residents, they are part of the landscape: a dynamic, breathing element of its history. Their varicose veins are visible evidence of the trails they etched into the hills climbing to get water or descending to buy food. And those paths, some now paved or constructed upon, provide a blueprint of the neighborhood and the labor and bodies that walked out its configuration. Women planted gardens, gave birth and built additional rooms to their houses, laying more cinderblocks and paving more dirt with new lives. They organized and energized to bring power lines onto their streets, which economically struggling residents then diverted rhyzomatically, spreading it into other homes. Their children’s lives have been lost in the neighborhood: some have tragically fallen from buildings under construction and some were shot dead on street corners and doorways. These losses stain the ground in residents’ memory, sometimes receiving acknowledgments such as, “that is where so and so passed.” These women’s bodies and movements recall times in the neighborhood some residents want to forget, but most now, don’t know. And the women’s walking memories create oral histories and three- dimensional, living maps of where people, land, actions and emotions collide and

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reconfigure in gendered, racially and socially significant ways. In Shelton’s words, “The fit or coordination is more than an ecological adaptation. It is radicalized habitus in which the two landscapes are sewn together by the same “set of needles” (2007:61). Since joining the group, the transformations in these women have begun to change the sensory- scape of the neighborhood and I explore both this embedded relationship, and how it reflects who these women are becoming.

The women’s relationships to their pasts and to their neighborhood are particular dynamics through which they elaborate their new senses of self and the ways in which they are now oriented to live. Their narratives illustrate how they self-make in relation to the everyday activities that have made up their lives: cleaning, cooking, washing, caring for, etc. The group affirmed their labors and struggles as black women, valorizing their histories and shifting the way they recount them. The group and the self-making it enables allows these women to affectively express the experiences of living in a raced, classed and gendered body and how their group participation has re-oriented their modes of being in the world and their relationship with their gendered, racialized and classed positions. Their narratives open up new interpretations, meanings and consequently affirm the alternative ways of living in their own environment that positively reinforce who they are.

As a result, the women take us into and create geographies of the experiences of ageing as black women. The moments and images represented are as much about recounting these women’s stories and venturing into their lives as they are a way to interpret how they speak about and look onto the world from a gendered, classed, raced, and geographic vantage. They render the lucid and creative ways in which they describe

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their journeys and realities. The expression inspired in the group influences the individual modes of sharing their stories of transformation and general outlook on self and living.

Their storytelling, often a response to my questions about their pasts, their losses, and their participation in the group, generated an assortment of scattered images and twists and turns that left me having to juggle one storyline to make sense of another. These responses were layered, rarely linear or chronological and their meanings embedded in analogy or anecdote. In earlier fieldwork moments, when my impatience, growing exposure to their style, and our different Portuguese, led me to prematurely repeat questions that I assumed I had not posed clearly, they often laughed and said they were answering my questions. I learned to hear how one story could in fact tell another and how lyrical parables from the past, metaphors of cultivating gardens and the details of a mundane event, wove the webs of their lives that delicately were strung through time, across space and in between people. These connected the variety of emotions and experiences they lived before and after entering the group. I have attempted to move through their narratives drawing on ways that flow like their storytelling, experiences and the manners in which they relate to and have transformed within their worlds. I also hope, the meanings in this tracing do not get lost in translation.

WALKING WITH IRIS “Stay here with me,” she said looking out on the neighborhood. From the roof of her multiple level home, we were scanning the panoramic view of the sprawling landscape of the city and hills. She gestured at various routes in the cityscape below retracing with her eyes and fingers a series of trails, paths, and roads that no longer exist, but once led her from her first shack in Belo Horizonte,

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which collapsed in a rainstorm, to the house her husband constructed here in the neighborhood on the weekends. Sixty-eight at the time of this conversation, she was twenty-one in her memories, had three children, two alive, one had passed and she was pregnant again. “I came on foot bringing food for him from over there, [she pointed]…I carried a belly, a baby and [with] the other [child] running behind, poor thing…I climbed, turned there, took that road…coming out over there…[her finger stopped gesturing to one area] passing the train, climbing [the hill] there, [again, she pointed with a finger]…I will show you where I have been… [and I] arrived with hot food!” She smiled and verbally retraced this trip two times, word-for-word. Her repetition reflected her pattern of speaking three years after a major stroke. Words escape her and she described them as getting stuck just above her heart, unable to come out. She confirmed that they are all there but bemoaned how they ache and make her nervous when lodged in her chest.

Arm-linked-in-arm or my hand cradled in hers, she led me through spaces where she went about her daily responsibilities as housewife, mother of eight and day-time caretaker to many children in the neighborhood. She made stories flow from these byways, which configured most of her daily working home life. We walked.

She pointed to a small, cemented alleyway forged between multiple-storied uneven homes, tightly built alongside one another. She noted that this alley once was a trail that she used to travel between her current home, when it was being constructed, and her home of the time. “This was all woods,” she recalled.

We did not venture down the cemented trail, instead we moved along the main road and then descended the backside of the hill. She repeated that this space once was forest and returned to the subject of raising kids. “Today, we are afraid of people…before

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we feared animals.” Before, she would walk down these trails, sometimes at night, to take a child to the doctor. She would arm herself in the event that she ran into a “fiery” dog.

“Many bad things are happening. When its not one, its another.” Iris stopped to say hello to a teenage girl on the street and continued, “Its hard to be here because we see that people are afraid of running into other people.”

From the aerial-like view of the neighborhood from her rooftop, through the streets, and down several blocks, she stood me before a still life of her old home. It was a large uneven rectangular plot of land on a steep hill. The earth was eroding in some areas where the heavy rains that fall in Belo Horizonte at the turn of the year had altered the terrain. Several large trees were clustered together and chickens pecked their way through scattered trash in an uneven grassy area.

“This was mine. Down there below was my hole. Here on this soil.” Leaning into me, she guided my gaze past the semi-cleared area, on down to an overgrown green patch on the bottom slant of the plot. There was no longer any construction, but she outlined a small house with her finger where she lived for nine years after her first home collapsed and she labeled the now overgrown area “her hole.” The trail she had traced from her rooftop and forged by her husband’s weekend outings led to this space.

Higher-up from “the hole” was another cleared area where a one-room house once stood in which they first lived and then rented out. She referenced with trees and plants where they built a twenty-three meter well that they slowly constructed, digging deeper into the earth while balancing her husband’s income with the demands of their growing family. She pointed out another shorter trail that led out to a main pathway that she, like

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most women in the neighborhood, visited daily to get water from a communal well on the adjacent hill.

“In that time, I would enter the alley…no…the trail, I would pass, there, at the bottom [She gestured to the bottom right area of the lot]. That was my house; I left there passing the river…there is a river over there - dirty, lots of crap. Over there, I would exit to the other side and up to the top. This was all forest. Over there, water sprang…up there on top, water ran. You could get water there. No one lived around there. It was all forest.

There were cows, horses, goats, lots of goats. ….All the housewives would get water and wash clothes. And since I did not like to go there to wash clothes, I would carry water to wash [them] in the house…My husband and I would make one, two, three trips. He would go with me when the sky was dark. We’d climb there and after three trips he would make another one or two trips while I made food for him to carry to work. The kids were still asleep. The sky was already getting light and he would leave. I still would make another trip to get more water. I would make seven trips if possible. Then, I would start to wake the kids to give them breakfast. I would take water to wash clothes. I would take out the dirty water, the second wash and when it came time for the final wash which was cleaner, sometimes, I would go [to the well] again, before I would put them to dry.

Seems like a lie?! carrying water from way up there….Dona Maria, Dona Rosa. Over there...where that house is now [her extended arm raised to point], we turned over there. I will show you. In the middle of the path, carrying a child, a belly with a child and clothes on your head. Everything.”

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Having lived in the neighborhood for the majority of their lives, the women remember the spaces through a history of the dynamic relationship between their trajectory and the environment they inhabit. Iris’ narrative reveals the labor, events and sentiments of their lives, which many do not see and she wanted me to experience beyond the construction or paved roads. The streets we walked on were founded on trails blazed by these women’s feet as they went about their working days. Their routes traced out the patterns of circulation to wells, riverbanks, to collect firewood, to the bus stop and back home. I often struggled to visualize these spaces before the dense housing that now pushes up against the city’s borders. But these women clearly see the land in its other incarnations gesturing to the whereabouts of old landmarks such as the well, by 272

referencing houses or stores that now obscure where they once were. From her kitchen window that looks down and out over the city, Dona Jacinta guided me in memory along routes that now are built over by houses; these paths once moved through woods and across streams and she recalled that it would take about an hour to arrive at the hospital several neighborhoods over. She remembered making this trip early in the morning to take her sick child to the doctor, but still made it to work in the city center later that day.

The journey to the hospital now can easily be made by bus, but the change only occurred after most of these women’s children were grown. The environment is a living map of these women’s histories.

The women offered a blueprint, layer by layer, of the neighborhood as founded in the footprints of black women and their labor. As women, the normative expectations of the time were that they would work as housewives taking care of the home and children.

Roughly a quarter of the women were housewives but all of the women worked taking care of households and children, both other people’s and their own. Black women’s long history in domestic service in Brazil extends into slavery where their labor and bodies maintained all elements of their owner’s domestic sphere, in addition to their own quarters and families. The strength of this legacy is evidenced in the continued association of black women’s bodies with domestic service, the stigmatization of the work and the sustained economic marginalization of black women that have made domestic labor one of the most readily available forms of employment for them.108 Those members of the group who were not singularly housewives, typically left their work in more affluent and white households to return to the neighborhood to sustain their own

108 For writing on black women and domestic labor see (Goldstein 2003; Graham 1988). 273

homes and families. These long days of service for others, both in the neighborhood and beyond, create a geographic pattern, rhythm and ethic of black women’s work that I suggest in part gave shape to the neighborhood.

One characteristic of this labor, reiterated in these women’s lives, is that while it is spoken of as domestic it is neither contained by nor mapped onto the home. The demands and necessities of their roles and responsibilities in this work had them travel into the streets and fields, which are often constructed as public. Whether black wet nurses traveling to and from homes or enslaved African women washing clothes in central fountains in the streets of 19th century Rio de Janeiro, black Brazilian women’s domestic work as Historian Sandra Graham (1988) has shown has been constituted through service in fluid movement from homes to the streets and with a particular force and abuse of their own bodies. Many women told me stories of first seeing or meeting other group members while washing clothes at the riverbank or the well, recalling the physical exhaustion of those days. Jasmine and Valdete collectively remembered climbing the hills with their children and a huge bundle of heavy clothes. The massive river, now concreted into a canal, was remembered as a social space of women laundering. They forged new trails to find kindling to keep their woodstoves going, to cook and feed their families and walked well-worn paths to the distant, but closest food store. Thus, I argue these spaces and lifeways of the neighborhood bear the imprint of black women’s social dynamics, rooted in their work ethic and human interdependence, which were essential elements in the neighborhood’s development.

Of course these women were not the only bodies present or responsible for the growth of the infrastructure. Men performed most of the construction of homes and

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building in the area, but husbands typically worked outside of the neighborhood foregrounding the women’s movements and routines in the spaces. Children are a lively component of street life. During the 1970’s, when the majority of the women were raising children, there were no schools immediately in the area, so their school-age children left the neighborhood during the day. Thus, the presence and movements of these black women running a home before piped water, sewers and gas stoves, create a different idea of how the space was lived and imagined by these women.

This vision elaborated through these women’s walking narratives inspires a critical rethinking of the history of the place and how it intertwines with these women’s self-making. What is created is a living environment out of the topography that has significantly changed – a common discussion topic in the group. When Iris ran into the young woman on our walk and spoke about people in the neighborhood now “being afraid of people” rather than animals, she marks the changes that have taken place most specifically the implications of the drug trade in the 1980s. For these women, trafficking in the area began re-gendering the streets into male dominated spaces of surveillance and sometimes threat, principally due to men’s involvement in the trade and the circulation of the military police. The presence of addiction and violence changed these women’s affective and spatial relationships to the neighborhood. Fearful of seeing or knowing too much or getting in the way of trade activities, women moved with a sense of risk and intimidation.

Jacinta spoke of the shift occurring around 1979 and how fearful she was of encountering trade activities. Her house is still perched on a small hill looking onto a well-trodden street in the neighborhood. She laughed, remembering how she would

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pretend nothing was going on when noticing men dealing and using drugs across the street while washing and hanging clothes to dry in her front yard. Internally, she explained, she would be terrified, but went about her activities and life as if “ you were afraid of nothing!” Similarly, Jasmine, on our first interview, connected her increased sense of isolation and depression, which eventually led her to the group, to the imposing stress the trade created in her life as she struggled to take care of and provide for her children. She said she would lock her children in the house when she was at work in order to try to keep them safe; and when she could not walk them to school because of her work hours, she paid a woman from her limited earnings to accompany the kids to and from school, fearful that something might happen to them. She recounted leaving her house physically quaking about the potential for violence she experienced walking to and from the bus stop everyday.

It was principally in the late 1970s and 1980s during the process of Brazil’s re- democratization and increased economic poverty that drug activity grew rapidly in socially and economically marginal areas. These women witnessed how power struggles, increased access to guns, and State corruption resulted in casual and visible homicide and how addiction and young men’s involvement in the trade, sometimes their sons, revolted them as much as they did society at large. Residents’ fears of random violence or being caught in the middle of violence in the neighborhood align with those of mainstream society but residents, in contrast, had and continue to deal with living and raising families with the potential of it. Hortênsia candidly recounted in one of her more talkative moments, that one of the few times she ever took a hand to her son was when she was concerned he was getting involved with drugs as a teenager. She said she mustered the

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strength and courage needed to venture in the middle of the night through the maze of alleyways in search of her son, finding him, taking him home and with tough love asking him about what kind of life he wanted. She lives in a small alley in which, on numerous occasions during my fieldwork, she described hearing or seeing police chasing after men, even having men hop the cinderblock walls that surround her house, demanding to be given refuge from police. The particular fear of this alleyway is not indicative of most spaces in the neighborhood, but it reveals how trails, which this alley most likely once was, have been transformed not only through pavement but in the human dynamics that contour the affective lives, interactions and texture of the neighborhood environment and how these women experience and live within and outside it.

Beyond Jacinta and Hortênsia’s memories and isolated comments, the women generally did not speak in-depth about the climate of the neighborhood during that period. Based on the stories they told about their personal lives at that time, those were particularly stressful years in their lives; speaking on the atmosphere and events in the neighborhood may have been emotionally too painful and it may have made them wary about telling a non-resident, foreign (read-privileged) researcher information that could lead to judgment and further stigmatization. Yet their silence about their movement and agency in the neighborhood parallels the changes in their perception of the space.

For the women, moving in and out of the space of the neighborhood increasingly meant confronting the growing stigmatization, deepening the link between place of residence, race and class. The women spoke lightly, almost nostalgically of the associations between the iron-rich red dirt of the area and their neighborhood, nicknamed

“Red Foot” during that early period. They remembered carrying towels with them when

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they went into the city in order to wipe the red dust from their shoes; everyone knew who came from the neighborhood because of this red dirt. In contrast to the marker of the red soil, they spoke of their treatment over the years as “poor black people” or “faveladadas” with indignation. Those who worked beyond the neighborhood spoke and vented anger about the discrimination they encountered working in homes and businesses in the city, as black, economically poor and residents of this peripheral neighborhood.

What these stigmas represent is another history and view of the neighborhood and its residents, often told through lenses of non-residents. The visions of neighborhood long time residents, specifically women, challenge the stigmas and those who produce them and more importantly re-align conceptualizations of gendered racialization, environment, community, and social change at large. I argue that the group by inspiring affective transformations in its members has helped to re-shape the pace, temperament and perception of the neighborhood as a space and as an environment. Women through their histories and current presence, as well as their participation in the group provide a counter-narrative to this dominant history.

THE ‘FAVELA’ AND THE WOMEN’S NEIGHBORHOOD AND COMMUNITY

I engage a discussion of favelas to draw attention to the dominant narrative against which these women’s lives are all too often constructed. I do so at the risk of over energizing the idea of their neighborhood as a favela, which is not productive to the work this group inspires. Much more than the simple associations of place and body, the favela has been a construction of space, identity, and values that historically have held different meanings for the residents and those who live beyond. The origins of the concept comes

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from squatters’ settlements in Rio in the late 19th century and over the past century became the popular label for low-income urban neighborhoods which now are visually characterized by their densely packed homes, their locations in precarious or peripheral spaces of cities and minimal roads and infrastructure109; historically, they have also been socially labeled as sites of poverty, destitution and more recently drugs and violence.

Valladares (2005:23-28) marks the shift from the language of cortiços, typically illegal collective housing that lacked basic infrastructure, to favelas, as paralleling the State’s localization in the early 19th century, of what was believed to be social ills, such as disease, poverty and moral disorder that threatened the country’s modernization. This

State concentration initiated the “problematization” of the favela, as a location and environment that has since captivated public, political and academic attention.110

One example of this and pertinent to my discussion of these women is the now- famous autobiography of Carolina de Jesus, published in 1960. It is a collection of diary entries of a single black woman migrant raising her children in a favela in São Paulo.

Initiated as a journalistic piece, Carolina’s voice and reflections were brought to print in the city’s principal newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, exposing, literate, middle-class

109 According to Valladares (2005:24-36), the word favela became popularly used in association with the Morro da Favella, a squatters’ camp of ex-soldiers that settled on one of Rio’s hills (Morro da Providência) after their return from the battle at Canudos and attempt to seek late payment for their service. Valladares also explains that while the word favella is by definition the name of a tree, which has been theorized as growing on and naming both a hill in Bahia near to where the war of Canudos was fought as well as the hill (Providência) in Rio where these ex- soldiers settled. In this historical, symbolic context, Valladares asserts that the fixation on the word favela also called attention to the growing (intellectual) imaginary around the particularity of the space by way of analogy of the community at Canudos and its strategic resistance and threat to the Republic. This hermeneutic value for intellectuals she notes was also accompanied with the generalization of the term favela, specifically in Rio, to speak of the residential configuration of a group of shacks without or with minimal infrastructure and typically located on hills. 110 See Valladares 2005; Valladares and Medeiros 2003. 279

readers and beyond, to what life in a favela was like and the rationales of its residents.

Favelas were spaces and continue to be constructed as off limits to non-residents through class fears and projections that pathologize poverty into a situated culture of violence.

Carolina’s writings created a virtual pathway and tour of the life and mind of what readers wanted to know about “faveladas,” the residents; her candid self-reflection about her struggles, the conditions in the space and her interpretations of other residents could easily reinforce readers’ stereotypes. In addition, many of her entries expressed the depth of her wanting to leave the place, which the book contract resulting from the popularity of this journalistic piece, eventually made possible. Her exit from and reflections on this space continue to run the risk of affirming popular hegemonic narratives of these areas as unalterably mired in penury.

Consequently, Carolina’s story is read more as a painful curiosity of a poor woman’s life in a destitute place than how intersectional forms of oppression create, animate and maintain her place of residence and the stigma and fear around it. Her individual account of her life and flight from the neighborhood obscures the larger context of the economic inability of most other residents to improve their quality of life in situ. She vividly describes the misery of people’s conditions and certainly represents the space as one where residents would want to flee and was incapable of being transformed. In many ways, her dismal portrayal affirms the worst stereotypes of the squalor, violence and hopelessness of the favela, her accounts also testify to the real difficulties she faced, offering a critique of inequality and social marginalization. In sharing her own sense of being overdetermined by living in a favela, Carolina offers some powerful criticisms of the ways in which race, class and gender structure society

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and place of residence: “Life is just like a book. Only after you’ve read it do you know how it ends. It is when we are at the end of life do we known how our life ran. Mine, until now, has been black. As black as my skin. Black as the garbage dump where I live”

(1960:168). Reading the text in this respect situates her existence and struggles within a context of the labor and conditions of black women in Brazil during the mid 20th century and how their lives are imbricated in various geographies and struggles. Moreover her writing offers a broader social critique of Brazil in the 1950s that uses a racial lens. She makes multiple references to her complicated relationship with blackness, at times being frustrated by her stigmatization, and at other moments appreciating the legacy of people from which that depreciation comes. Her life story is a window into black women’s self- making, their histories and experiences, and how their existence contributes to ways of knowing and living in the contemporary world, rarely told on their own terms. When reduced to “faveladas,” black women’s lives undergo another form of minimization in which they are conceived of as contributing nothing to greater social knowledge or development beyond what they share about the too often materially poor spaces in which they live and the devalued work they perform.

More recent scholarship has attempted to illuminate the forces that create the conditions that people like Carolina live in. There is a shift in focus of studies on favelas to address the types of social inequality and oppression that these communities experience and efforts to deconstruct the fear around them.111 Of particular note is the recent and novel scholarship that has given specific attention to the racialization of the urban space of the favela as well as voiced to residents’ experiences of and perspectives

111 For an ethnography specifically on the operations of urban classed and spatial fear in Brazil, see Caldeira 2000. 281

on the struggles in their residential communities.112 There is also a continuing effort to represent residents as fluidly living across city life and in relation to other communities, rather than as segregated entities, often posited in older analytical frameworks.113 Studies have increasingly focused on the social and cultural formations emerging from the areas, specifically in regards to the improvement and self-articulation of their neighborhood as classed and raced people.114 A growing number of writings by community members also discuss their neighborhood’s social conditions and actions and debate the representation of their communities.115

Yet simultaneously, the favela persists as a specific site of study and continues to be enveloped in the language and conception of being a problematic social formation.

Alberto Paranhos, the principal representative of the UN-Habitat from Rio, stated in an

October 7th 2003 article in the Rio based Brazilian newspaper O Globo, “If [things] continue in this rhythm, cities will be inhabitable in 15 years because of the violence and precariousness.” His comments were his response to the 2003 United Nations report titled, “The Challenge of the Slums” that assessed that by 2030 over two billion people would be living in slums globally.116 The report projected that 924 million people already live in slums and called attention to the changing demographic of the “urbanization of poverty.” Brazil is cited throughout the report for its favelas and it offers several case studies (Rio and São Paulo) to discuss the country’s interventions around favelas in these

112See Goldstein 2003; Oliveira 2001; Perry 2005; Sheriff 2001; Vargas 2006 113 For studies that examine of the conceptual segregation of these communities and residents see Goldstein 2003, Perlman 1977, and for their connections and networks with other communities see Junior 2003; Vargas 2003 114 See org. Burgos 2000; Pardue 2008; Perry 2005 115 See Bill and Athayde 2006; Junior 2003, Silva 1997 116 Also see Estado de São Paulo, October 7, 2001; Estado de São Paulo, November 13, 2001

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cities. The report encourages the need for participatory programs of inclusion, but the language remains that of a problem, as evidenced in the comments of Paranhos, as a threat to urban life. The concerns around violence, deemed problematic, are founded, but the spatialization and localization of “the problem” does not shield residents of these neighborhoods from associations with the concerns of violence, economic poverty, and illegal activity. In the instance of Brazil, this focus is particularly captivating given the de-emphasis of the sustained and pervasive racialized social inequalities in Brazil, notably in its cities, in conjunction with the continued popular representations and discussions of favelas as distinct yet also homogenous spaces. My principal goal is not to enter directly into this debate, but to highlight some of the language and spatial frameworks from which residents’ lives are frequently assessed.

In writing alongside this debate, I present these women’s examples as generating a counter-narrative of neighborhood formation, the urban environment and its transformation. In these women’s stories, there is a three-dimensional meeting of space, landscape, human life and meaning. Group members’ relationship to their neighborhood disarticulate these types of hegemonic conceptualizations of “favelas” as static, fixed places and make a case for how they are environments, connected with others in the city and expressions of and continuous with human thought and action. These women’s lives suggest why the improvement and investments in environment are deeply affective labors as much as they are physical ones. Changing places does begin with a shift in vision of them (hooks 2009). And, I suggest that given the ways that race marks bodies and space, the relevance of this lens is critical to transforming racialized people’s particular process of relating to themselves and the world given the endless ways in which they viscerally,

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psychologically, and affectively experience and are shaped by oppressive forces

(thoughts, feelings, actions, statements and systems).

Paths, choices, possibilities, all that is important for us to think about the future of Alto Vera Cruz. Many other histories will be constructed and certainly, will inhabit the chosen places as references for residents. The community of Alto Vera Cruz knows where its history lives and feels responsible for it.

FAMILY Iris described her husband, whom she married when she was sixteen, as a

“hard-worker,” a trait cultivated in him by his mother and the one she and her family most frequently used to characterize him. She said he is calm like her. It is also the quality she names as why she married him and what has sustained the building of their family even as he drifts off into the unknown worlds of Alzheimer’s disease. For most of his life he worked seven days a week providing for his family. Iris said she has never

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made any money in her life, but administrated the family’s money; her husband loyally gave her his pay to safeguard and manage. She always ran the home including renting out the one bedroom house on this land. They had all kinds of renters she explained, those,

“that don’t even say goodbye and there are those that have done everything but tear out their soul to say thank you, thank you…” “Go with God” was her wish to all and she commented that you see a lot of fighting today with people killing each other. She smiled and sizing up the property called it bad, but hers at the time.

She guided my eyes to fix on the other side of the hill as we walked down into the canyon. On the way she noted a house where another member of the group lives. Unable to recall her name, she referenced her as the one whose son was killed on her front doorway. Birds were chirping and children were screaming, playing in the street. A motorcycle bawled as it labored up blocks of dramatic incline. We kept walking over the river and up the trail on the other bank where she had repeatedly pointed to before. This whole area was forest and the rivulet ran clean. You could get water.

Looking back at her plot of land from another hill she turned to me and said, “It’s sweat and blood that we used to work here. Digging out the hole, you could catch a finger or cut an arm. You bleed!! So, I say that blood comes with it…to do anything. We take earth, take sticks and blood comes in the work. For my husband and I and the majority of people here, to buy anything, it had to come from far away…Not even a car passed by here [at the time]. Everything came with a lot of difficulty….truly.”

There was a clear view of the stagnating river, the houses that reluctantly line its banks winding into the mountains; their white plastic pipes hanging out over the water; tall trees left to grow throughout the neighborhood; people flowing up and down the

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backside of the hill attending to their responsibilities on foot, roof top flower gardens, distant music and laughter.

I asked her about how her idea of happiness might be different from that of youth.

“Happiness,” she explained, “is when a person gets to a point and thinks that they do not need to run so, so much…. everything is hard…. But that, is only in the sky, only in the sky, right?! No, not down here…” She looked out at the hill appearing mesmerized by her memories. “How many times…with a baby in the belly, with my health and a bucket of water, [I would go] from down there, to up there, where I used to get water.”

***

The neighborhood is integral to the women’s self-making not only as the space in which they have resided or the site of the group’s formation, but how it manifests in these women’s lives and consequently generates a different narrative of the space and its history. As we walked, Iris had me imagine what it felt like climbing a hill in mid-eighty degree weather and move through the patterns of her daily life for years. As we traveled the neighborhood through her eyes, Iris was able to re-present the flows of her life and convey her sentiments about its components. More than any other woman interviewed, her narratives articulated and emphasized the degree of her dedication to serving others and, at times, illustrated the extreme nature of her sacrifice. Standing in front of the still life of her old home, she recounted how she had had all her teeth removed by her thirties, in the interest of taking better care of her children. She explained that she could economize her time and energy by pulling her teeth out rather than paying for the necessary dental work. As I have argued, the foregoing of black women’s own desires and even needs to serve others in conjunction with the naturalization of these

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expectations and the economic and social demands in their lives have led them to not always challenge these structures, but find different ways to survive and thrive within them. She highlighted this decision to recount what she has passed through, her rationale and moreover, her commitment and selfless mode of living. Climbing the hills and walking the routes was another way of conveying the texture and feeling of her lifestyle and her varied sentiments around her everyday life in that space.

In the midst of bird song and people’s daily movements, Iris’ revisiting of these places with me conveyed the penetrating level at which she is working out her past and her own complicated relationship with her existence after her stroke. She told me that she had a major fight with God frustrated with how her stroke had transformed her speech, her memory and her coordination. She is a poet who can no longer write; and although she managed a home single-handedly for years, her family will not leave her at home alone for fear that she might forget something, like a pot, on the stove. Her sentences are made complete through the words of her younger sister Jacinta, the same sister she virtually raised growing up in the interior where her parents worked as sharecroppers.

Jacinta brought her to the group in the early 1990s, shortly after its founding and Iris explained that it took awhile to participate in it regularly. However, being in the group, she learned to prioritize herself, gained a realm of autonomy as well as a sanctuary away from the demands and the work at home. She related that this new way of living was taken away from her with the stroke and, in its aftermath, she cried, yelled and cursed, confronting God about the “why” of this occurrence.

Iris’ current struggle is adapting to the altered capabilities of her body, specifically her speech. Without the control of language she once possessed, comments

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and thoughts often become only partially verbalized and she depends upon the attention of others to assist her in retrieving her fleeing words. Yet within these dimensions of communication, Iris created another way of being in which she pairs gestures, her fragmented language and environmental references to share her observations of the tragic, the celebratory, and the ordinary of her world in the neighborhood. In our walking tours, she created a window into who she was before and who she has become since joining the group.

Walking from her old home, across the small canyon to the other hill, Iris reflected on the qualities of her life and the person who she has become. The final thoughts she offered while standing in front of the lot of her first residence in the neighborhood were about her union with her husband and their labor that supported and sustained their family until today. In a later instance, Iris dismissed my question about the meanings of love in her marriage, emphasizing the family and the stability, while meager at times, that it has provided. Partially indicative of the motivation in marriages during the 1950s of women from the interior of similar economic positioning, her distancing from the emotions of individual desire, simultaneously spoke of an affective realm of her life that she keeps close to herself, even though she is effusive about her general affection and loving concern for her family and humanity. What Iris reinforced and illustrated as representative of herself were her experiences and sentiments around her work and social ethic. Both her husband’s and her own dedication to earning their living and making a life through their own sweat are central to the value structure of their youth and essential to the notion of ethics and values that most of these women were raised to live by and continue to assert as their guiding principles.

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These modes of being and relating are narratives that are reflective of how these women contend with what they were expected to be, who they are and who they feel they should be. The group’s affirmation of their life’s work and investment in their emotional growth has made them conscious of their self-making process. Iris’ narrative of self- sacrifice and her modes of being reflect the strength of this generation of black women’s interpellation as bodies of service and an ethic surrounding this commitment.117 Iris is a non-confrontational woman who in the group dynamic tries to quell fights by either articulating the importance of unity as one of the group’s founding premises or simply stays out of debates. During our interviews about her family life and time with the group, she maintained this highly gendered and generational sensibility and disposition - staying calm, giving, and being quiet. While on group outings, she often kept to herself, especially now that her speech has been impacted by the stroke. She self-describes as a loner while reflecting that she wished this was not her nature, but works to accept it. Iris was always one of the first women to share positive remarks and affection with other group members. Her range of modes of living capture her self-making around a posture of selflessness and a process activated by the group of living in a conscious, self- observant way. Iris’ reflection on her sense of isolation at once is accepted as “her nature,” but also something that she has worked to change because of the joy she experienced of having people to converse and circulate with outside of the home.

Becoming more aware of the forces that have shaped her, including having her own efforts in that process acknowledged through the group, enables Iris to tell her story

117 My sustained and dependable presence in all group activities was acknowledged and applauded by women as serious, committed work, even as the concept of fieldwork and the process of the PhD were less understood – how is one paid to go to another part of the world and study people in their everyday life? 289

valuing her ethics and the contributions of her labor and perspective to shaping who she is becoming today. Her desire to walk me through this history was both an enactment of and testimony to her process of reconciling, affirming and transforming her lifeways.

***

Iris wound together the story about the intensity of her daily work with her reflections on the changes in space to gesture towards a changing ethic in the neighborhood and how she too has shifted with and within it. Moving away from the plot of land to continue the tour, she observed the smaller points of the neighborhood, which brought to light the tragic, the celebratory, and the ordinary of the history and reality of this place. She matter-of-factly pointed out another group member’s home where she has lived for years, while joining the group more recently. Iris registers this space not only through her association with Dalia and the group but also as the site where Dalia’s son was murdered, supposedly in connection with a drug addiction. Killed on the front door way, the death in the intimate yet public space of the opening to her house is embedded in

Dalia’s trauma from witnessing her son’s dead body. The shock of that sight was evident in the numerous times she recounted his violent death to me. This loss and its site, which now are bound into spatial memory and were recalled for me by various people in the neighborhood, stood before me as an event and a feeling of profound grief triggered by the space and Iris’ life story. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart theorizes these encounters between subjects and the forces that move through their everyday actions, environments and worlds, in the following way:

Like a live wire, the subject channels what’s going on around it in the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces,

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sensations, perceptions, and expressions, it’s a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits. Things happen. The self moves to react, often pulling itself someplace it didn’t exactly intend to go (2007:79).

Iris’ forgetting of Dalia’s name, even when standing before her house, was most likely her drawing another blank because of her stroke, but the spatial memory of the murder highlighted the changing relationships with the space and environment and how these women contend with the on-going challenges and change, notably the ideological differences across generations operating in the neighborhood. These women have come to understand that transformation can occur through a range of modes, from violent impacts of human intentionality to inevitable, or coincidental processes, and they have unpredictable outcomes. With a similar yet extreme force, the incident and its memory drove Dalia, in her profound despair, to join the group in search of solace.

Similarly, on a narrative walking tour with Acacia, a siren drowned out her story as an ambulance turned onto the road in front of the church’s stoop where we were sitting. Overpowering the accounts of her youth in the northwestern interior of the state of Minas Gerais, the vehicle picked up speed as it climbed into the hills and Alma’s eyes followed it as she winced at the loud cry. Speaking over the fading noise she reflected that this was the type of car in which she took her son Márcio, now thirty, to the hospital.

At the time, he was four and the meningitis that began crippling his body was misdiagnosed in a public hospital. She cringed at the high-pitched sound of the siren, calling it awful and that she remembers it well anytime one passes in the neighborhood.

Márcio is severely crippled, lives with Acacia and is entirely dependent on the physical assistance of others. Acacia said that when she first joined the group six years before, she used to feel that she could not leave him and, in this way, she could not live her life; she

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said this made him feel at times like a “problem.” But with the assistance of her other children who help Márcio in his daily life without the full use of his arms, legs or voice, she realized that he did not compromise her ability to take part in the activities and events she wanted to and that he had never been a “problem.”

Reflecting on the way they have lived their lives and the changes that have occurred within and outside them joins together the practices of expression exercised in the group, with that of self-contemplation as they think about their trajectories and states at a different stage of life. Regret is not a dominant emotion in Acacia or Iris’ sense of self nor does it haunt their lives because of past ways of relating to others. Acacia’s shift in perspective around her son revealed her process of learning to take care of herself as part of her ethic of giving, relaying a sense of confidence and growth around the practice of this understanding. However, for Iris, elements of regret remained in the ways she spoke about, for example, her decisions to have her teeth removed as a convenience. In more nuanced and sticky ways, Iris acknowledges where she has mis-stepped and how this has impacted her physically and emotionally. Valdete recounted that she spoke of her misgiving of mothering her children too much, especially her boys who she waited on hand and foot. In retelling a conversation Valdete had had with Iris around their roles in their families, Valdete had affirmed her own son’s (as well as her daughters’) ability to cook and clean and be self-sufficient in all capacities to which Iris responded that she had made a serious error by assuming responsibility for and attending to all of her sons’ needs; she thought that by liberating them of these types of work, they would be free to live fuller lives than perhaps she felt she had. Iris exposed a larger spectrum of dissatisfaction and sorrow around her stroke and her feelings of desire for death once she

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became conscious of the transformations in her body. Her mental shifts in prioritizing her own desires and needs, which have also turned into physical changes such as her significant weight loss, co-exist now with her acceptance, sometimes agonizing, of her verbal and physical constraints. Iris’ tumultuous contemplation of her stroke and Acacia’s vision about her son’s state bridge the ways these women are now contemplating the forces of change, revealing their processes of finding meaning in the upheavals and challenges of their lives.

Yet in these daily struggles with her speech, expression and sometimes movement, the group provides a space where Iris has continuity with her “old” life as she did walking through the neighborhood. Iris’ movement from the old plot, relocating us to view her old home and the neighborhood from different angles created a literal and metaphorical shift in perception looking at the space and her life trajectory. In the group, she expressed feeling free while singing and dancing in the middle of the other women, even though some members have had tentative responses to her distorted voice and movement. In contrast, her family members have translated her altered mode of being into a more far-reaching incapability or dependency. Although her singing voice and dance have been impacted, the quality of people’s voices has never been a determinative factor in group membership or performance. She partakes in outings when she can, while monitoring her health through a variety of doctors’ visits and speech therapy. Staying active in the group and attending rehearsals and performances reinforce in her a sense of purpose and give meaning to her life in ways that many women in the group articulated contending with at this stage of their lives.

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Like the group, the neighborhood is an essential living repository of some of Iris’ accomplishments and self-realizations as mother, wife, and a community and group member. She showed me a community garden that she helped cultivate and in which she educated children and mothers from the area on nutrition. From this garden she led us to the new lookout and she returned to her discussion of the rhythms of her life when she lived on the now vacant plot of land. These spaces of movement and memory recall for

Iris her lifeways of what she characterizes as her former self now trapped within her altered body. She ventured into the energy and chemistry of her labor – the blood and sweat that it took to build a life – that through her repetition and intensity she verbally rebuilds in her altered state and sense of self.

There is nostalgia in Iris’ slightly romanticized narratives, but it is textured by multiple sentiments bound into how she is reconciling these disquieting social and personal transformations. Although I had known and conversed with Iris many times, on our first recorded interview I asked for permission to record and her response was:

We live not knowing what we have lived. I never studied, never traveled far and always served. If someone wants to say something, it is worth it… to have them say we existed in this world. Because otherwise we die and it seems as if we were not here and we were, for better or worse, pretty or ugly, knowledgeable or unable to read. But I lived, I lived 68 years and when I die it all ends.

Iris expressed a fear of being forgotten like the history of the old ways of life embedded in the landscape. Her personal anxiety is also one of the larger social shifts, visible in the neighborhood, away from the types of work ethic, dedication to family, collective mindfulness and respect that underlie her own history and what she has attempted to live by. I suggest that the changes in her body are amplified through the shifts in the landscape and dynamics of the neighborhood and she increasingly lives under a sense of

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separation from the activities, work, the daily interactions and routines and a general communal sensibility through which she has come to embody and take pride in as a black woman and a longtime resident of the region. A feeling of independence that was cultivated and manifest through the group dynamics and activities is harder to maintain since she needs assistance and is treated as dependent in her family. Iris now only attends group events when her sister does which she expressed to me as necessary, but also saddening since it means she does not participate as frequently.

The sense of a loss of reference and history is intimately bound with the changes in the neighborhood and is a phenomenon that many women in the group and of her generation bemoan. The values and memories are shifting in the same ways the land is now cleared and polluted. Iris’ discussion of her blood and sweat, and in other moments tears, addresses the types of physical and emotional labors she has been through while juxtaposing a reality, which the neighborhood, its residents and specifically youth have moved away from. The repetition of lives of labor and giving were a frequent form of marking the sentiments of frustration and lament of many of the women concerning the changes that have taken place in the neighborhood that render it hard for them, at times, to recognize it. As they sit before rehearsal in the morning, on buses and during free time on group outings, the women’s conversations point to their sense of change naming problems they are experiencing with their children or grandchildren and more often to the discomforts in their bodies as ageing women. They gaze onto and reflect about the neighborhood through its everyday dynamics: young girls’ scanty clothing, an older resident’s passing, families’ coping, their aching bodies in the cold wind that whips through the neighborhood in the colder months. The cautionary warning around

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happiness as a fleeting state that should not and cannot be a life goal (since it is only a divine achievement) underpinned the observations of change Iris, for example sees. In part, her words responded to my generation’s modern-inflected, capitalist orientation of happiness as a life “goal” echoed in the life pursuits and discourse of other younger members of her family whom I interviewed. For Iris, these shifts around the purpose and expectations of one’s life have paralleled a demise or an unfurling of the ethics of honest labor and collective investment she, like many of the women, have attempted to practice and teach. Their lifeways have otherwise been enacted quietly under the radar and now are visibly harder to perceive and thus Iris senses, are at risk of being forgotten.

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Iris’s remembering and tracing of her life through the landscape is an act of working through the anxieties of her current state and valorizing her efforts and contributions realized throughout her existence in the neighborhood, in its land and through its people. Staying attuned to how human agency can shape environments, these women have come to recognize how their modes and approaches to life have helped to shape the neighborhood. The presence of the women first at the health clinic getting medication and now in the center square either practicing or sitting to leave for an outing form part of the physical landscape of the neighborhood in the same way their life histories form part of its sensory-scape and history. Their chatter and laughter and then music is a regular part of the morning cadence and audio of the space for people walking by, local residents and of course the old men who pass their mornings conversing on the benches under the tree. During the morning rehearsals out in the square, I was often approached by other residents while I sat observing, who expressed that they had followed the group for a long time admiring the desire to be a part of the group and how their music made them feel. As a fixture of the neighborhood, these women’s dancing and song impact other residents’ days inviting them to pause for several minutes to listen before continuing on route to the bus-stop, hopefully brightening their work day, or even, as was the case for many women spectators, drawing them into emotional spaces and inspiring feelings of hope, beauty and sadness recognizing the well known struggles of the members and the inspiration they embody as senior women, “survivors” and residents of the neighborhood, who have found success and respect in the public eye. These projections encompass residents’ dreams of self-realization under the economic constraints and stigma that they experience as overwhelmingly non-white and living in

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the neighborhood. But it is precisely this unspoken effect, that is, how these women make visible the possibility of not having one’s life over determined by race, gender, class, age or place of residence or others’ ways of being, that highlights both how they have self- made and relate to the space, and the meanings of what neighborhood as community and collective development can be.

THROUGH WITH WINGS Holding a hand at her waist level, she said she had a picture in mind of her son when he was young, about “that tall” and who now is a grandfather and lives in the US. “Minds change,” she explained, relating how this eldest son probably will not move back to Brazil. In spite of her wanting him closer and him truly missing

Belo Horizonte and Brazil; she said, “He has everything.”

As we continued to gaze out over the canyon and the backside of the neighborhood, she reflected on how marriage has changed and chuckled in disbelief at how people get together and divorce with ease. One day they are with one person and separated the next. Other relationships end up in death, where fights between women and their male partners have led to these women’s murders. Iris pointed to the hills stretching behind us away from the city indicating that that was where bodies were dumped. She knew one of the girls and commented that these days people die for such small things and how sad it is to live right now. In a fluid turn of phrase she said that all over the world there are bad people, robbery and murder. People feel they have to kill someone else to live. Others, she theorized, are so angry about it they go and kill someone else. She said there is a lot of this in the neighborhood; it’s the same on all sides. It’s now about prayer, she said, “All over the world people are praying.” She paused momentarily, continuing

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on by pointing to another trail. “That is where you would get water. A lot of people would go there.”

We retraced our steps down the trail observing that people, who had already passed on, walked in these spaces. A wiry black woman maneuvered down the hill with a heavy load in a bag secured on her left shoulder by her thin muscular arms. She greeted

Iris in passing and Iris told me, once we had walked by, that this woman lived on the banks of the river and had suffered a great deal in life.

The fiery inflections of a charismatic sermon grew as we came up on one of the neighborhood’s many evangelical churches. “I go more like this…[gesturing a wave like motion with her hand] like running water.” She stuttered to explain that it was like her going out with the Meninas who call her: “Let’s go, Let’s go!” She said this is the way she moves and relates to the spiritual, not because of God or because of her strong faith.

“No, the whole world is of God. The whole world loves me. I love the whole world. For me, the world would be this [kind of] world where no one fights, no one kills, no one is pretty or ugly, white or black. I would love it like this. I want it like this…all good. I have always been like this.”

Iris took deep breaths as we climbed, concentrating on the walk up the hill in her ageing body. She returned a hello to some folks standing near the open storefront of the church. A couple of paces beyond the church and with the overpowering amplified voice of the pastor reverberating around us, she said, “sometimes those people will say “oh my child, surrender yourself to Jesus.” I say, “I already am of Jesus.” She smiled and breathed. “You have to pass through with wings, pass through with wings…. I don’t fight

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with anyone.” The smell of night blooming jasmine was strong in the air and upon my commenting on it she showed me which house sheltered the hidden fragrant tree.

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* * *

Moving from thoughts of her son in the United States to her understanding of the divine, Iris’ observations of the changing landscapes of the neighborhood are the meditations of an ageing woman on her ambivalence around the transformations in an environment central to her life’s work and meaning. Iris’ return to her daily movements and labor through our walking tour portrayed how her memories and sensibilities are mapped onto the landscape as much as they are embedded in it. While her footprints remain, Iris is disconcerted by the shifts in human interactions she experiences living in what she observes as a shifting social dynamic. These women contend with having their foundational work in the area built over through the lack of recognition of the values of contributing to and creating one’s environment, which they have been guided by and are affirmed through their group.

Iris’ remembering of her older son’s absence looking out at the hills is an expression how these changes manifest in both the neighborhood and its residents. Her son went in search of work in the US in the 1990s during a period of inflation and unemployment and has been there for over a decade. He calls frequently, visits annually and wishes to return to Brazil but believes that he will only be able to accrue some economic security in order to move back to Brazil through continuing to work in the US.

His son, Iris’ grandson, lives with him abroad and is not inclined to return. While Iris accepts their decisions, she is saddened by what is expected to be his permanent distance, especially as she grows older, having confronted her mortality with her stroke. Most of her children have left the neighborhood, in her own description, so they can live in nicer homes, such as apartments, and have access to better schools for their children. Many

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women, specifically with younger kids or living with their older grandchildren, are facing these young people’s desire to move outside of the neighborhood and even the country, because of their sentiments about opportunity around the local economy of employment and remuneration, their stigmatization and the general economic conditions in Brazil.

The desire to leave often overpowers young people’s inclination to stay and help transform the local social and economic dynamic. Opportunity and possibility for a better material life are framed as existing outside of this environment. Most younger residents interviewed felt strongly about the connections they have in and with the space, but they are also conscious of, if not upset by, a sense of powerlessness to the marginalization they experience as residents and through the projected class and racial associations. The gendered nature of this experience of marginalization expressed itself in men as apprehensive of the threat of their criminalization and abuse and a lack of economic opportunity beyond drugs. Young men get involved in drugs and, as these women’s sons’ examples illustrate, this reality comes to bear on these women and their families’ emotional and physical lives; these conditions have led to rising numbers of incarcerated young, often black men and their death.118 In the instance of younger women, they articulated a sense of feeling stymied, unable to pursue the types of employment desired and some resistant to working in labor like their mothers as domestic servants. Azaléia assessed in a discussion about her own daughter’s depression that there were a lot of depressed women in the neighborhood without much motivation or desire. This assertion at least partially explains why younger women in the neighborhood asked Valdete to start

118 See Celso and Bill 2006 and Soares, Bill and Celso 2005. 302

a singing group for them. These cases offer a vision of some of the more devastating of dynamics that configure into, among others, these changing human and spatial relations.

While I do not have adequate room to deeply elaborate on these younger perspectives, I use them to offer a brief point of comparison and contrast to the women’s vision of how the environment configures into personal and collective transformation.

Younger people interviewed had an ambivalent relationship with the neighborhood having grown up in the space as drug trafficking impacted its everyday social life and, as more forcefully articulated in their narratives, with the area and its residents’ stigmatization from non-residents, specifically those with greater economic mobility and unfamiliarity with the area. Young people, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty, generally affirmed the neighborhood as a positive space, appreciating the family-like familiarity and sociability of the community they grew up in. But they also articulated feeling the brunt of the stigma of their home-space as dangerous and a “favela”, and the consequent criminalization and dehumanization of the residents. They spoke of the impacts of the stigma specifically at school, finding employment, and socializing beyond the neighborhood. Their sense of overdetermination by their place of residence was sharper than that of the older women; these young people not only wanted to be released from economic poverty, but also the stigma of the imposition of an idea of black urban poverty and/or “favelada” which in many ways seemed to be the pivotal force shaping their relationship to the space, and with which they contend when thinking about themselves.

Many have pride in where they come from, at the same time they indicated that they were unable to state and often obscured where they live because of anxieties about

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how they would be perceived and treated. Expressed feelings of constraint, even marked with inklings of hopelessness, were followed with sentiments that moving to a neighborhood less stigmatized, if economically possible, was one of the few realistic ways, in the future, of how they could materially improve their lives – the principal area of their lives they felt were impacted by their place of residence.119 Others, while sharing similar ambivalences, did not assert their desire to move out, but vented about their frustrations of social stigma in the country more generally and shared what they wished to accomplish without locating it in a particular space or environment. Almost all expressed wanting to help change the perceptions of the space and several have invested their time in local projects and politics. One grandchild in his early twenties who had

“run with the wrong crowd” in search of economic opportunity and almost died, is now committed to transforming the neighborhood from within. In an interview he firmly stated,

The dream that I have is not to move…It’s difficult…[but] one thing that I learned in the periphery is that the solution to the periphery is inside [it]…putting the military, you can put everything here, the solution is us here who live here and who know how to act. We are the ones who are going to change [this place].

119 Almost all of the younger interviewees wanted at one point or another to improve their economic conditions and in some instances, this meant a lot move out of the neighborhood. Moving out for them was a sign of class ascension and there would be no reason to stay there if you were able to afford something better. Some said they would live nearby in one of the neighborhoods, close to their parents, but where they would be better off. Several young men and women remembered saying they were from Vera Cruz as opposed to Alto Vera Cruz in an attempt to class as higher. The class embarrassment or shame they were made to feel for living there sat uncomfortably with their love and identification with the neighborhood and at times even was a benefit, for example when dealing with kids from other favelas. One young man gave an example of having kids from another favela mistake him for a middle class man and attempt to con him because of his nice dress clothes only to completely leave him alone once they found out he was from Alto. Young people’s relationship with the neighborhood is conflicted, especially in their pursuit of a better life. 304

He now runs a music project for youth to offer a different vision of life and opportunity, particularly to dissuade adolescent boys from making choices similar to his own early choices.

In fact, the neighborhood is a reference in Belo Horizonte for its political, cultural and social activism and mobilization around the rights of residents of neighborhoods of the periphery. Valdete has actively campaigned to improve the quality of life of the community since the 1970s, recounting the repression they faced as organizers during the military dictatorship. The florescence of activism in the neighborhood occurred, according to Valdete, during the mayorship of Patrus Ananias (1993-1996), of the

Worker’s Party (PT), whose tenure invested in the development of the city through social programs particularly geared towards marginalized citizens and areas. Known for his interventions around hunger programs and food rights, he also implemented the participatory budget in which citizens gained decision-making power in how public funds were to be used. Inspired residents in the neighborhood mobilized to improve roads, water systems, sanitation and community centers as well as public housing projects, in which Valdete had principally participated. Alto Vera Cruz has successfully mobilized to gain funds for infrastructural improvements in the neighborhood and a public housing project where many family members of women in the group live. This local financing however stands in contrast with the federal government’s omitting of Belo Horizonte under the Cardoso presidency of the 1990s to receive funds from an urbanization program designed specifically to help develop favelas in other major cities of the

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country.120 This exclusion drew media attention and in several April 11, 2001 Estado de

Minas articles this decision was denounced by state politicians as a “political retaliation,” given that from 1990-1995, the population of favelas grew 4% per year when that of the city was only increased by 0.5%. That said, what Valdete remembered most significantly of that period and linked with the positive changes in the neighborhood was what she asserted was Patrus Ananias’ investment in the periphery.

Since the 1990s, cultural formations, such as capoeira and percussion groups, have formed to sensitize and provide creative opportunities for local youth to become aware of their Afro-Brazilian heritage and questions of racial discrimination. Much of the funding comes from sponsorships born out of the federal Lei Rouanet, popularly known as the Lei de Incentivo a Cultura (the cultural incentive law) in 1991, which created tax breaks for business investment in cultural production. During my fieldwork, Telemig, one of the major telecommunications companies was one of the principal sponsors in Belo

Horizonte.121 More recent youth groups performing hip-hop and break-dance have joined the women’s singing group in receiving such funding. The neighborhood is racially diverse, but does have a large black population whose politicization is reflected in their arts.122 The women’s group is one of the oldest and perhaps most well known cultural

120 According to a 2001 article in the newspaper Estado de Minas, this program was called Brasil Legal and was focused on favelas in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador. Only one favela in Belo Horizonte would indirectly benefit from these federal monies. 121 Telemig has since been bought out by Vivo another telecommunications company and now is known as Vivo Minas. 122 A local rapper, name Renegado (Re-negated) has become a reference for the contemporary political and cultural activism of neighborhood, uses his name to speak about the racial marginalization of black people experienced first during slavery and now sustained through their stigmatization as residents of low-income neighborhoods in which his humanity has been denied again. 306

formation from the neighborhood, recognized for calling attention to the lives of black women, mental heath and the rights and care of senior citizens.

Captured in her activism and investment in the neighborhood, Valdete has played a central role in inspiring the idea, paralleled in the group, that change can come from within, and that the neighborhood, like people, can metamorphose. Hence, Valdete mobilizes to have people build their lives in the neighborhood to cultivate it instead of moving out. In theory, this is a concept that younger adults, for example, affirm, but more challenging for them was to put this thinking into practice, given what they experience as the material effects of the stigma and social hurdles they continue to face as its residents.

Conscious of how material conditions often weigh more in (young) people’s perceptions of the neighborhood than their affective ties, Valdete also speaks to the types of union and mutual support the neighborhood has historically cultivated because of economic necessity and the residential intimacy of houses close by and familiarity with neighbors.

While Valdete continues to explain and reinforce this concept, the neighborhood, in qualitative ways has changed notably over the past twenty years. It was commonly articulated across age and gender that the intensity of the drug trade has dramatically reduced, particularly in comparison with nearby neighborhoods. Moreover, various women spoke of property costs rising through a local form of gentrification in which some residents have accrued resources and built more extensive property in combination with working people who have moved in because of the neighborhoods relative affordability, consequently displacing economically poorer residents who now are said to have moved to more affordable areas in the adjacent neighborhood, usually deeper in the hills and often with less infrastructure. Some of the younger adults worried about their

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financial ability to purchase property locally at the same time that they remain concerned about the stigmas of the neighborhood and whether they want to stay.

The local shifts in real estate value and the changing demographic of the neighborhood (although employment opportunities remain few) have also come to be reflected in changing perspectives and representations of the neighborhood. As a non- resident and foreigner, I was consistently met with cautionary fear-based advice from acquaintances (most of whom had never spent time in or visited the neighborhood) about my movements in the region, and on several occasions I was met with resistance from taxi drivers to take me there. This highly subjective experience however was juxtaposed with a shift in nomenclature and perception in the newspapers about the neighborhood. In reviewing a sampling of newspapers on favelas and “the periphery” of Belo Horizonte from the 1980s through 2007, the neighborhood went from being referred to through the label of favela to no longer being cited as such in the most recent articles.123 It was unclear what marked the specificity of this shift although a 2001 article on the favelas of

Belo Horizonte cited it but cites it as “presenting a mixed situation” that has “an organization close to that of the formal city” (Rose 2001). In general, the region continues to be considered the periphery, both literally and symbolically of the city, and gains negative media attention around drug trafficking, violence, and social problems.

Yet, this shift in representation is a small and positive affirmation of the community’s

123 I used the newspaper archive at the library at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Belo Horizonte. I went through a newspaper collection, mostly dating from the post-1988 period and arranged by thematic subjects. I combined searches on “favelas,” “neighborhoods of Belo Horizonte,” “Crime” to find these articles. It is worthwhile noting that there was no listing for Alto Vera Cruz in the “Neighborhood” file; all references to Alto found in the “Favela” or other non-geographic/residential listings. 308

efforts to change the public image, most notably by simply building their own concept of community.

LANDSCAPES AND LIFEWAYS – THEIR TRANSFORMATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

As Iris nostalgically recalled her son, she too located the problems in the neighborhood not simply as local issues but those of the larger society. She acknowledged the interconnectedness of issues whether at the local, national or global level, noting the changing modes of human relationships and anger. She mourned the increased violence and the wider social and cultural shifts she witnesses and reflects on as she ages. Understanding the phenomena of destructive human relationships, whether divorce or physical violence, as more indicative of individuals and changing worldviews than a place or a group of people, Iris refuted violence as a classed and raced enactment

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while also holding how women are often the unacknowledged victims. By calling attention to the old black woman slugging the bag down the hill, she spoke at once to the gendered, racial and classed basis of social inequality and as well how this expressed itself in the continuity of the suffering of black women throughout the transformations in this local setting and in the wider world. Iris did not call my attention to romanticize her, but as a reminder of some of the deepest forms of economic, racial, gendered and age oppression in the neighborhood that are not a source of desperate social concern in the ways that “violence” or drug trafficking have gained media attention.

The image of the skinny, overloaded woman was not valiant, but for Iris, was a living symbol and embodiment of older lifeways in the neighborhood that women of the group identify with and practice. What the women reflect back and illustrate specifically to other residents is a counter-hegemonic notion of this neighborhood that is rooted in the beliefs, values, labor and desire of these ageing black women’s lives. As some of the oldest residents, these women remember a time when there were new migrants with longings for a better life for their families, greater ethics and collectivity, and much less violence. Just as they witnessed the changes that they lament, their long sight opens up the possibility that things will transform and the methods and modes of thought that Iris described through our tour are resources for a praxis to enrich the quality of life in the neighborhood.

These ageing black women’s lives and their narrations offer the feeling and idea of possibility, released in their particular understandings of the fluidly and connection between people and their environment. This sense of possibility emerges in interconnection to their understanding of change even while they maintain a tentative

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relationship to it. Common to the narratives of most women, the group’s work on self- esteem brought them to consider and experience their emotional lives and through their enhanced feelings and embodied expression of themselves they began the process of conscious transformation. Learning how to release, shift their gaze inwards and away from the registers of others, enabled them to produce and live in ways that were guided by other signposts, namely the traditions and ethos from which they come. bell hooks refers to this practice as an “aesthetics of existence” learned from old black folks who understood that “life giving” worlds had to be created. Her conception of this aesthetics emerges not only in relationship specifically to houses, but also to spaces more broadly and is “rooted in the idea that no degree of material lack could keep one from learning how to look at the world with a critical eye, how to recognize beauty, or how to use it as a force to enhance inner well-being” (2009:121). For hooks, part of this aestheticism requires learning the art of seeing, creating, and inhabiting space. The women had already

“learned to see” in their environment which sustained the value of their modes of being as older black women, mostly from the interior. Water and electric systems, homes and children are all manifestations of their labors in that environment and how they came to reflect on what was made possible through their work and conscious action. The landscape reflects how they continued to negotiate larger forces beyond their control and a visceral register of the possibility revealed through conscious transformation. This affective and psychological journey is the work of self-making gazed at from the relational space of people and their environments.

For the neighborhood, the group models the complex, yet no less possible, transformative process that starts from within. Moving like water is Iris’ metaphor of how

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she has come to the journey of self-making and going with wings is a method and a course of transformation that perhaps, most profoundly she had to embrace through her stroke and the uselessness that she feels within her new body and mind. Her struggle with these changes and those in her environment as well as how she labors to contend with them, represents the possibility of seeing and imagining beyond that which is visible, tangible or lived. Iris’ narrative and navigation of the neighborhood – the pause and reflection – recall how she has gone about shaping the neighborhood by transforming herself and the space through their interconnections. From her vantage, she has created a better life for her kids; they are all educated, some have college degrees and as articulated, several of her children own property. Even as she notes that these changes sometimes make people and dynamics distant and even unrecognizable to her, she retraces the old and familiar footwork and trails, pointing out the old black woman as a symbolic counter-weight of continuity of the traditions she and this generation of women embody. Vocally projecting a world with reciprocal love and specifically without racial lines is a vision that Iris does not see or experience fully, but whose elements of community and support, through analogy, she expresses as present in her group.

THE BALANCE OF SOULS In one last vision of the encounter of black women’s ethics, labors and their environment, I go back to a Sunday afternoon in which I accepted the offer of a home-cooked meal and beer at the home of one of Azaléia’s adult daughters. In her late 30s, Lys is divorced, has two children and cleans homes both in the neighborhood and beyond. She owns her own house where she lives with her young sons in an adjacent neighborhood that topographically is fluid with the one of the group.

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I met Azaléia and we took the bus to Lys’ house deeper into the hills. From that stop, we walked from paved to an unpaved road that climbed up a canyon. The rains had cut through the road creating undulations in the dirt where trash collected and inevitably made any car’s ascent a bumpy ride. Lys’ house was about a quarter of a city block up the hill, next door to a small curbside bar of two tables. We ate lunch on her patio and she suggested since her mom was in tow, that we should visit a friend nearby. Climbing up the steep dirt road in front of her house, higher into the hills, we made our way onto a path that wove around several houses and then descended the open face of another canyon staggered with precarious homes and yards. As we approached a small cinder block home, Lys called out a friendly “hello” alerting Dona Elena that we were arriving.

A petite black woman in her sixties came out of the door in a skirt, blouse, flip-flops and with a full-faced smile looking up at us, came to greet us with open arms. She was particularly happy to see Azaléia. With hugs and a short introduction to me, she ushered us inside her house for coffee. She put water on the stove and had us sit opposite on a single bed lining the other wall, where her son sleeps. Dona Elena asked Azaléia about the group and she in turn updated about her work life in peoples’ homes and changes in the immediate area like the proposed plan to build a road through the same canyon face where she lived. The sole access at the moment was either through the road we walked up or by hiking the steep, man-made trails that snake down the face of the canyon to the road at the base of the mountain. The community had already successfully organized to get the city to pave the road we walked up and the work was set to begin in the following months.

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Elena walked us outside of her home to point to where the road would start. We all took a moment to gaze at the panorama of the massive mountainous area that stretched out on all sides of us. The hills surrounding and below us were peppered with small homes, some stacked on top of each other and less dense areas with space between the little abodes. Looking out, Elena spoke of the developments in this region and hoped that slowly adequate infrastructure would come: roads to move in and out with ease, sewage for all homes and community areas where both kids and adults could play or socialize.

Just below us several children were kicking around a soccer ball on a small flattened out area on the hillside. We watched the game as Elena explained that there used to be a small garden in the area where the kids were playing but that it had not been cultivated and without a space to play, the kids had taken it over. She continued by saying that one day she noticed that there was a plant still growing strong and at risk of getting trodden by these kids’ game. She explained that she walked down to it, dug it up and carried it away to plant it elsewhere. She gestured cradling the plant in her arms and remembered that it was like “the balance of souls,” uprooting and moving it to give it life in a nearby place. She smiled saying that kids watched, giggling at her as they had yet to learn the importance of all living things.

* * *

The balance of souls is the delicate act that these older black women model for the community and is the practice of their self-making in relation to their environment and community. Dona Elena, another black woman in her sixties with a similar trajectory, is not a member of the group but embodies a similar praxis to the women of living in the landscape as an extension of self. These older black women’s lives have generally not

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been constructed around their individual goals, but conceived of in collective ways around their families, their community, and the environment. This neighborhood, as landscapes and rooted memories, is what sustains these women and through it they recognize the roads they have taken, the trials they have had and continue to survive, and it is the environment in which they have learned and recycled those discoveries, of self and others, back into the space and its people.

This integration reflects the significance of the group, as emergent from and now a force in the neighborhood. The critical role of the neighborhood, as a place and a set of relations, is revealed in the variety of oral histories and modes of recounting them.

Because their stories are not rigidly structured by the passing of time, they render how their pasts live in their present and how the neighborhood is integral to their trajectories and who they have become today.

The moments and experiences written also reveal how they have lived gendered racialization; they highlight not only the material conditions that black women have historically confronted, but also offer insight into the varied affective ways they respond to these circumstances. The impact of race as an ordering, segregating and psychologically influencing force is omnipresent in the neighborhood giving rise to who resides in it and how specifically these women embody, move within and relate to it.

Their stories are saturated with the structural implications of gendered blackness and its historical bind with economic poverty and their lives in the neighborhood encompass these constraints. The trails and riverbanks are dynamic environments that secure one end of an unbroken chain that connects black women’s long history of labor since slavery.

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Yet, these women’s example also suggests ways in which to think about the types of actions, methods and possibilities for transforming environments. Valdete and the group bring consciousness and exposure to a concept of neighborhood as a relationship of collectivity for which residents are responsible and can invest in. This conceptualization affirms the neighborhood as a place, a group of people, and set of relations worth developing, by continuing to live there and contributing to its improvement. This politics specifically refutes the idea that the neighborhood is just a space that is unalterable and should be moved beyond through economic ascension, revealing how a “better life” or in

Valdete’s terms, the quality of life can be collectively built where they are now.

Furthermore, their example is critical to the young adults in the neighborhood who, at times, have to labor to feel a sense of possibility. Without the long vision of these older women, the neighborhood has a sense of being a fixed environment rather than a source and a place of possibility. The neighborhood is flattened into a simple spatial and stagnant geography in which they live without adequate tools to strategize around or combat their marginalization. The idea that change and consequently possibility are forces generated beyond their environment threatens youth’s feelings of hope, worth and inhibits their own sense of momentum.124 And, their repeated experiences of discrimination run the risk of affirming this perspective and inciting or compounding this disposition.

Refocusing collective practices within the health and growth of the space and its transformation is a praxis that comes out of these black women’s histories and self-

124 It is critical to note that their idea of possibility is deeply linked to economic and material conditions rather than self-realization. However, I would argue that what the example of the women offers is that a notion of quality of life that begins with the transformation of self, extends and works towards improving the material conditions of all. 316

making through their environment. Certainly this cannot be the only force, but the community is a vital base for conceiving of working towards cultivating a domain that benefits all people. The group, as elder black women, has brought attention to this through their public engagement with their own health as a means of beginning to invest in the community. The group’s work exemplifies transformation through the synergetic relationship of people with their surroundings, which requires figuratively, both this internal and external work. Like the process of black women’s self-making I have been developing, the neighborhood is constructed in the friction and uneven crossroads of its residents’ lives and the imposing anti-black stigmas and connotations that surround them and the space. Yet, the group manifests the types of individual and collective self-making that impact how social change can be conceptualized, instigated and is embodied.

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CHAPTER FIVE Walking Without Masters

For the first time in 1998, the women made themselves public as works in progress. They were asked to participate in a cultural event in their neighborhood and performed the movements of their corporal expression classes in front of an audience of hundreds of mostly local folks. Valdete recalled the women’s anxiety before the event, afraid of the reaction and potential ridicule of the youthful crowd to their simple presentation. While she recounts being nervous as well, she kept it to herself, reinforcing the value of their work. Their short demonstration set to music was met first with silence and captivation and then applause and even tears. As Valdete recounts, the mixed crowd was impressed and humbled by a group of older women, some their grandmothers, passionately moving onstage. Valdete said she never forgets how one member after hearing the group praised as a group of “artists” quickly turned to Valdete and affirmed,

“See, we are artists!” With this first event, knowledge of the group spread locally and the women began developing their music into a repertoire after they increasingly were solicited to perform. Since then, the group presents anywhere from two to seven times per week while maintaining their weekly group rehearsals, as time for themselves.

Valdete welcomed this evolution as an opportunity to continue to have the women build their self-esteem and turn their individual and collective processes into “social work,” as they now call it. Bringing joy to other people through their music is how group members define this social labor. It is a celebration of music, play, creativity and human connection offered to old people, children, college students, the incarcerated and other

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musicians and audiences. They teach quietly, through their presence, what older black women from the urban periphery can actualize, embody and model. Yet their growth is also about exposing and challenging their persons, through learning to move a new muscle group in dancing, making eye contact and singing louder or engaging in social experiences and spaces with a diverse, sometimes unfamiliar groups of people. Their trips to prisons, elite schools, asylums and political events were spaces in which these women did not always easily flow and thus could trigger a host of emotions as they confronted these milieu and the suffering and life circumstances of others. These were opportunities in Valdete’s words, “to mess with their bodies and minds” and to relate to people who were in challenging and sometimes tragic circumstances of their own.

Shaking up, remembering and creating new references and possibilities for women are the constant work of the group. Through new practices, approaches, and connections, Valdete has influenced these women’s modes of perceiving and ways of being that Sara Ahmed names as a process of re-orientation. She writes, “The hope of changing directions is always that we do not know where some paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow, makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer” (2006:554). Older black women singing on stage, in normative terms and in this sense, appears queer as much as it is also a (re)orientation of these women around other epistemologies and references that emerge from the experiential base of black people. This is not a complete structure, model or guide, but rather tendencies that manifest as feelings, practices and sensibilities towards other ways of being, which I will begin to describe as an orientation towards blackness.

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Consequently, this chapter brings together ethnographic moments that crystallize how the women’s public group life facilitates their continued process of self-making, particularly around this orientation. The group has created opportunities for the women to experience their value and growth by constantly having them move in new spaces and interact with different people. By not titling the process or the method, this exchange constitutes the potential for emotional emancipation through self-making and is emblematic of the way the group orients around blackness. Within this orientation, there exists the possibility of a spectrum of transformation.

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I. ORIENTATIONS TOWARDS BLACKNESS & SELF-MAKING

Sarah Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology proposes orientations as conceptual means of thinking about how we act, how we move, how we think and even how we feel in relation to social cues and norms. They guide not only our bodies, but the spaces and environments in which bodies circulate. Ahmed points specifically to how hegemonic orientations, which are heteronormative, direct people towards a straight life, one aligned with dominant modes of being and living. Non-normative orientations can rupture with the straight, or hegemonic conceptions and modes of being, both reorienting subjects around potentially counter-hegemonic tendencies, as well as creating moments and experiences of disorientation for them. She characterizes this process as becoming “unaligned,” most frequently with (hetero)normative codes, modalities and environments. Ahmed theorizes the potential of these sometimes “queer”, often fleeting moments, to open up new non-straightening orientations and to reveal new modes of relating and being in space and time.

In drawing on Ahmed’s thinking, I use the word queering to invoke how new and non-hegemonic orientations open up possibilities for transformed desires, the main thrust or re-orientation Ahmed’s work compels. She encourages us to think about desire within the framework of heteronormative, dominant orientations and how queer desires disrupt the desires that orient a straight life. Ahmed suggests that queer desires reveal how one can extend differently into space (2006:564). After all, desires are the forces that move people towards and away from certain bodies and places and thus can be a productive space from which to rethink our movements and gravitations.

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Desire in fact is the guiding emotion of the group. It was Valdete’s desire to help the women that instigated their coming together and since then, the nature and activities have sprung from the collective longings. They were overwhelmingly not socialized to think in terms of what they wanted or hoped for, nor did they have the resources or time to fulfill materials wants. For most of their lives, their desires have been compromised, inconsistently balanced, and often not acted upon in the facing of their own necessities as well as the demands of others. They also kept the expression and formation of the desires to themselves as these longings too have been impacted by their social worlds. In contrast, the group engages and cultivates these women’s desires. This practice was a rupture within the labor and demands of their home and working worlds and the group is a space where desire is a guiding notion that catalyzes their self-esteem, expression, and possibilities for new ways of living.

I work with the notion of (re)orientation to speak about liberating ideas of desire that come from what Ahmed might situate as the crossroads of our unlearning of our straightened tendencies and our personal gravitations. The group’s desire to spread joy and help others is fundamentally the effect of the group’s practice of conjuring and enabling desire and its expression as a force in these women’s lives. While not the only force at work, it speaks for a realm of black women’s emotional worlds that continues to be rendered silent and often invisible through the ways in which black women continue to live in multiple forms of oppression. Recent scholarship helps to voice how women live their desires and this chapter contributes to that endeavor by looking at desire as mobilized through the sensual body, not just the sexual, and the tradition of black people’s dynamic use of the body’s sentience and its multiple modalities of expression to

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self-make beyond racialization.125 Valdete, I suggest, guides these women to express and work towards their desires, which they can mobilize for their own transformation, and experience the types of liberation of spirit from the constraints of racialization that

Hortense Spillers (1998) calls “responsible freedom.” What they have learned are the possibilities emergent from the activation of desire in producing orientations that confront if not challenge straightening forces. The pushes and pulls of orientations, as seen in the group, opens up possibilities for new meanings of the significance of blackness, and for disrupting and bringing consciousness to a plurality and freedom of ways of being black and simply human.

Embodiment – Racialization and Identity

Thus far in this dissertation, I have spoken more about how these women live their racialization and less on their relationship to and identification with physical blackness. I begin with a brief profile of a group member to conjure the idea of orientations in the members’ individual and collective lives. Camelia is a coffee-skinned woman and a more recent member, who had been in the group about five years at the time of my fieldwork. She is chatty, but nervously so, a woman who says she only worked through her conflicted sense of self, as a much older adult. While open, she is shy and lives an unsettled life, moving back-and-forth between her children’s homes; these dimensions made acquiring her life story difficult. From the snapshots of her life captured in conversations riding in buses, waiting for performances and in other quieter moments,

Camelia’s stresses were consistent, from the loss of her husband years before to adult

125 For contemporary writings on this theme of desire in the theorizations and lives of black women, see Alexander 2005; Rose 2003; Wekker 2006. 323

daughters with living troubled lives; there was the unnamed companion, whom she stated she could not love because their relationship was not about a fantasy of love like on the television, but who provided emotional and perhaps financial stability, along with the group, in her otherwise constantly fluctuating life.

Valdete, as in so many instances, is the keeper and transformer of Camelia’s heartache, who Camelia often visits on the weekends, speaking one-on-one about her anxieties and circumstances. Valdete said Camelia cries a lot when she visits coping and managing the demands in her life. She expressed empathy for Camelia’s living conditions encouraging her to participate in the public budget process to acquire her own housing.

Since joining the group, Camelia testifies that she has come into her own in several ways: she speaks of herself as black, finding beauty in her kinky hair126: the most

“ugly” and implicitly socially shaming heritance of her black father; and, she also writes music for the group. On several occasions, she reflected on her hate for her hair and accredited her friendship with Valdete as ending a lifetime feeling of “ugliness,” and inspiring within her a personal sense of beauty and an interest in Brazil’s black,

“African” history. She frequently ties up her hair with a scarf, in part, because she now thinks that headscarves make for a beautiful style. She also grew up seeing scarves on the heads of black women as a sign of economic poverty and domestic servitude, but now can don scarves with a sense of aesthetic and vanity. The scarves also hide a large stress- related bald spot on the back of her otherwise hair-covered head. She writes music on an ongoing basis often focusing thematically on Afro-Brazilian subject matters. Many of

126 I use the word kinky to maintain the racialized significance of hair descriptions. A possible other word choice would be curly, but this lacks the black, racial reference that the politics of hair and its racialization hold within the Brazilian social context. 324

these songs are now part of the group’s active musical repertoire. Camelia has a sweet melodic voice widely praised by other women and is most comfortable with her guitar singing a variety of musical styles from pagode to samba, ballads to children’s songs.

Women like Camelia who now identify as black have spent parts of their lives in ambivalent relationships with their bodies, with their identities and with how they identify to others. In many instances, in the public act of self-identifying, women like

Camelia often call themselves “parda” or morena, both “mixed” categories.127 These women’s racial formation overwhelming has been guided by hegemonic conceptualizations of blackness, as the physical markers of African descent, encompassing one end of a racial continuum, and where whiteness, an elusive yet fixed idea of a European Aryan or Iberian body, holds the other. Built into this spectrum of race is also a value structure of associations between blackness as a sign of the undesirable, both physical and social. Consequently whiteness is the hegemonic racial orientation in Brazil guiding how people think and feel about their bodies, minds and lives. Physical whiteness is central to the hegemonic idea of a straight life in Brazil, which as Ahmed posits, is also heteronormative and creates the references in society as to what people should tend towards. For women like Camelia, markers like hair that situated her closer to blackness were painful and charged experiences of embodiment that reminded her of her blackness and its undesirability, even ugliness, hegemonically angled to be perceived as compromising. The inability in blackness, to embody the white ideal, to which people are socially oriented, makes challenging the potential in life associated with living within a white body (beauty, class privilege, self-love and pride). Fanon’s

127 See Harris 1964; Sanjek 1973 325

well-repeated words on the paradox of blackness speak to this existence: “I am given no chance. I am over determined from without”([1952]1967:116). The orientation towards whiteness and the ability to enact or embody it is an interpretation of others. Moving towards whiteness requires a tending away from blackness, a dis-identification with blackness, notably of identity. As Ahmed explains, “To become straight means not only that we have to turn toward the objects given to us by heterosexual culture but also that we must turn away from objects that take us off this line” (2006:554). Blackness is something that must be overcome if not rejected which is why hair treatments, like hot combs and chemicals, are how women like Camelia have moderated their physical blackness, even as they are unable to meet white ideals.

While Camelia has come to see herself as black and identify as such, there exists a range of bodies and racial self-titling in the group. There are very dark skinned women with physiognomy associated with people of African descent; they are socially unmistakably black yet may not have consistently self-titled as such during their lives.

Moreover, they are not the first to assert their blackness, which I would suggest is a matter of self-evidence, but also that such a social voicing has not been cultivated and may be uncomfortable if not inconsequential or previously injurious. There are also those who are quite light skinned like Camelia and even lighter with straighter hair. These women embody the so-called racial mixture around which Brazil built its national identity beginning in the Vargas era of the 1930s. They racially self-described as “mixed” or “Brazilian.” Others spoke about being of indigenous descent correlating their dark skin with Amerindian ancestry. Most commonly, women made specific references to black family members.

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For some of the women racial blackness was a social fact carrying with it social consequences that they embodied long before joining the group. Jacinta and her sister spoke of their strong sense of blackness not only as their bodily appearance but also as a pride in their family and their ancestors. They come from a large family that recounts the history of their paternal grandfather who was the “illegitimate” son of a white landowner and a black servant. In many ways, he roots both the family and his wife who was an indigenous woman. A photo of this woman hangs in Jacinta and Iris’ mother’s home. The pride in this lineage is translated into a consciousness about anti-black racism, a pride in embodying blackness, as well as a strength in what the embodied struggle of black people provides for character and direction. In Jacinta’s words,

A person has to accept their blackness. This is not going to change. You have to learn to live with your blackness and be happy. There is a lot of discrimination. There is a lot of rejection but a person cannot get beaten down because of this. Ninety-nine percent of Brazilians are black. They might not be dark skinned, but they are black. Sometimes they don’t accept this, but they are. Beyond the color of skin. I think that black people because of race, origins and our ancestors have come with the stigma of being different, rejected, excluded from society and that we have less chances in everything. We know this and live it in the flesh, but we have to fight for it not to be this way. You cannot say, “It’s this way” and, “forget about it all because black people are like that, black people don’t achieve anything.” Its not that way. It is difficult, but not impossible. And we have pride when we see black people in universities or as [government] Ministers, when we see Benedita da Silva, who was the governor of Rio de Janeiro. We feel that pride in knowing that black people are conquering their rightful space. Black people are getting rid of the stigmas that say that black people are stupid, cannot learn anything, and only are good to work in farms, only are good to push carts, to be slaves. This stigma is changing. Black people are equally capable, the only difference is that [their] skin is black, but their reasoning and intelligence are the same, if not better.

Jacinta was one of the few women who spoke this directly about racial pride and the understanding of racial struggle as ongoing. Azaléia was another woman who condemned her mistreatment as a black woman, as well as particular acts as racist in content. In the

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affirming and appreciating of her body as black, she claimed she always specifically liked her curly hair and accepted her darkness and difference. She lived within blackness comfortably but did not relate this to an idea cultivated in her family. In contrast, although Iris and Jacinta are sisters, Iris relayed her blackness as almost an essence. She laughed at my inquiry if she considered herself “black” replying, “I do not consider myself [as black], I am black. I’m positive [of that]!” She continued by explaining that while her grandmothers and grandfathers were mixed, at the “end” of it all – they were black and raised as such.

What I suggest is that Valdete orients the women in the group towards blackness through providing the women new narratives and histories of (black) people in Brazil.

‘Somos negros” (we are black people) was a collective affirmation and a call Valdete made in front of various audiences in Belo Horizonte and the interior, racially and socially positioning and locating the women. She most frequently would use the language of race at events celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture or history and would sing songs from their repertoire, such as Zumbi dos Palmeiras, Mãe Preta (‘Mammy’ or Black Mother) and O Negro (the Black Person) [more recently she composed and added songs] that articulate the struggles experienced by black people. At events in low-income neighborhoods, she often would speak directly about racial blackness and the marginalization of people on the “periphery”. She would call out in the voice of the black collective to audiences in the neighborhoods who were overwhelming non-white, specifically black. This hailing of the women and audience members as black marked the power of black identification noted by scholars and their possibilities for black solidarity in spite of the predominance of the discourse of racial mixture and Brazilianess.

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The foregrounding of embodied blackness was also present during one of the trips to the interior of Minas, previously discussed in chapter two. The women met, conversed with and sang for and with women from a quilombo, a maroon community, where there are high rates of alcoholism, unemployment and general despair specifically among women. On this occasion Violeta shared, and I heard for the first time, the experience of being institutionalized and her treatment as “crazy.” In a quiet moment after the performance, Violeta stated that she only divulges such painful experiences when she feels others can benefit from it. Then Palmeira, Jacinta and Azaléia, all self-identified black women, also volunteered to speak about their hardships, to extend from their experiences of loss, how the group had helped their health. These women offered their testimonies to encourage other women to form a group as a means of collectively supporting each other’s sobriety, while creating a space of expression, understanding and mutuality. As evidenced in Violeta’s divulgence, her willingness to expose herself was recognition of and identification with these women’s suffering as extending from their similar social positioning.

Their physical blackness was operative and I suggest that it was encompassed within Violeta’s larger orientation of blackness in which she responded to an experiential field of racialized suffering that did not require a verbalization of how one self-titles, but rather an understanding and a willingness to relate to and assist others in their own struggles. Valdete later pointed to the maroon community’s suffering and ancestry bringing the women’s racial, gender and class positioning into focus as salient points of identification between the two groups of women. Reflecting back on this experience,

Valdete later spoke with the group about the importance of continuing their work with

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maroon communities. She asserted at the group meeting on the trip, “We are all descendants of black and Indigenous people” to which the women quietly nodded. She said they needed to visit these communities to see how other people live and continue to suffer, relating that there were a lot of people who had a lot less than they did. While racial positioning and blackness were not discussed as the reasoning behind visiting or continuing to work with these communities, they became articulated points of connection orienting the women in relation to this community. Since most of the group members were born in the interior, they were familiar with black rural economic poverty and the accompanying difficult social conditions of rural life. Jacinta spoke extensively about several black families in the area where she grew up in the 1950s as the poorest in the vicinity and relatively segregated. She said they were direct descendants of enslaved people in the region and worked on local farms and, while they were not overtly mistreated, they lived in abject poverty and in their own segregated spaces. This familiarity with precarious and grinding conditions of rural and urban life and the racial observations as to who lives in these circumstances exposes both a sensitivity towards and empathy for how anti-black gendered racism operates in the country.

The identification with blackness whether as a self-title or as Camelia’s process of coming to consciously embody one’s blackness is what Souza (1983) calls “turning oneself black” in Brazil. Accepting oneself as the racialized other object and all of its layered meanings is processual, as Souza illuminates, but also a project of self-making that opens up the possibility to begin deconstructing and healing the impacts of the imposition of racial inscriptions. As evidenced in Camelia’s self-image, she shifted her focus of disdain for her kinky hair as a physical marker of blackness to appreciating and

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cultivating an aesthetic and creative production emerging from how black women live their lives. This transformation holds these two interconnected yet identifiable concepts of blackness: one of the black (African) racialized body and the other as an orientation around ways of being and epistemologies found in the lives and experiences of black- racialized people. The group focuses on these two elements by recognizing the labors of these women’s lives, the reasons why they need self-esteem and the music they sing.

Continued scholarly and social debate around the nature of racial identification and what constitutes blackness often ignore the duplicity and interrelation of these different senses of blackness. It is often through moving into the space of the experiences of anti-black racialization that the identification with blackness (a way of naming and claiming those experiences) can and do occur.

This identification with and approximation to blackness became salient on one of the trips to the interior while staying at a hotel in a small town in northern Minas. Upon checking out of the hotel, the women were accused of stealing some of the hotel’s plain white towels. The claim of robbery was based on the fact that the towels in the rooms were not equal to the number of guests. However, the women had complained since the day we arrived, that there were insufficient towels in the rooms. Valdete had recommended not making a production about this to the hotel since she always requests that women bring their own towels, which they had. Hence, when two cleaning women of the hotel, both young and white, insisted that towels were “missing,” the women in the group became agitated and some furious with the insinuation of theft. Acacia as well as

Xica both made declarations of being accused because they were “poor and black” and

Xica added that their color did not mean they would steal. Both of the women’s

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articulation recognized the accusation as coming from a basis of classed racialization, almost inextricably linked in Brazil. Acacia is a light skinned woman who when asked how she identified, in terms of color, unsurely said “Brazilian.” Yet she also affirmatively said that she was “not white” when I inquired her about “race”, and cited scattered memories of her father as “moreno.” The non-white is important because it gestures to both an experiential range of discrimination and conscious rejection of the dominant racial social position. This status was reinforced when Acacia and the other women were accused of stealing and in the collective, she responded by claiming blackness and being poor. There is no way to tell whether Acacia’s non-whiteness or “Brazilianness” will one day turn into calling herself black or if she already does in particular situations. Yet in the collective, she identified clearly with the experiences of racialization and the general blackness of the group.

This orientation around black bodies, heritage and experience suggests that

Valdete values racial consciousness in orienting group members towards blackness. The claiming of a black identity seems to be one of the possible outcomes of her orientation and one she affirms without making it an objective. After all she wanted to make them

“feel better” and to give them “self-esteem,” but she also knows from her own experience that these are highly conditioned by gendered racism. Acacia’s example suggests how moments of the process of “making oneself black” can take place and be affirmed simply through the collective body of the group being identified as black. Women like Camelia who refer to themselves as black, experience a pride and confidence in the verbalization and identification with the cultural, political and embodied possibilities of blackness.

Blackness is revealed as more than the state of non-whiteness.

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Leaving these women without title or label creates the flexibility of position that makes this orientation around blackness a possible space for women like Acacia to move into. The group-like orientation is not about exclusion or inclusion but a commitment to improving and encouraging desire in women who, irrelevant of their racial or class position, have been both racialized and classed because of the ways in which class and race speak the other. I do not want to minimize the value of self-titling as black or

Valdete’s investment in her community which is made up of predominately women of color. As a researcher working against the backdrop of the continued scholarly and social debates around the nature of racial identification and what constitutes blackness, I found myself less concerned with these questions of black self-titling than how activists like

Valdete were working with black populations around their experiences of anti-black racialization. Valdete has the women engage with the multiplicity of their identities as black women, third-age, mothers and grandmothers, women who have experienced problems with mental health etc. Thus, she has them participate in a range of performances representing this panoply of identifications pertinent to their work and what they represent. This means, for example, that they have consistently attended the annual march for the de-institutionalization of mental health in Belo Horizonte (which they led in 2007). They also work with children, honoring their idea of playing and their roles as grandmothers/elders. They attended women’s marches and created their own gender specific events. They consistently attend numerous celebrations and festivals around May

13th as well as November 16th both days tied to black liberation and go to the Movimento

Sem Terra (the Landless Movement) events in support of rural workers. These are all in addition to talking with students whose interests range from psychology, to social work,

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musicology to anthropology. Rather than defining what they are, participating in all of these events encourages and enables these women to self-make through their desire and the varied nature of their life experiences.

Beauty

The women’s performances create opportunities for them to embody and express a multidimensional sense of their beauty that slowly manifests within the complexities of racial blackness and the orientation I am positing the group develops. As revealed by

Camelia and others, living in a black female body holds the challenges of contending with gendered racism, and as these women age, the social devaluing of ageing bodies.

Race and age both shape popular notions of physical beauty and consequently how these women have felt and now feel about themselves.

On a physical level, their ability to feel beauty has been challenged by normative standards of beauty guided by white ideals and more recently through their construction around youthful bodies. For most of these women’s lives, their limited resources, work demands and self-perceptions worked against their physical maintenance and the development of a personal aesthetic. Many recounted never investing in their beautification through the popular forms of wearing make-up, painting their nails, dressing in bright colors or in thinking about feeling and creating beauty. Their thoughts around aesthetics revolved around a belief as well as a sentiment of ugliness. They often did not have explanations for why they felt this way; now that they are older, they often attribute their unattractiveness to ageing, however when reflecting on other times in their

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lives, their hair was one of the principal markers of their believed unattractiveness. As evidenced in the case of Camelia, the women had spent most of their lives disliking kinky hair, which most have. Reflective of dominant notions of beauty in Brazil the distaste for many physical traits associated with blackness, or African heritage, oriented these women to believe in an inherent unattractiveness and to either try to physically improve themselves by whitening (mainly straightening their hair in this case) or to simply forego

“beauty,” thinking of it as an unattainable ideal.128

Valdete instigated the performance outfits as a practice in beauty and the confidence building that comes from positive self-imagining. She encouraged women’s vanity by having them take care of themselves emotionally and physically and by making their performances opportunities to dress in colorful clothing, make-up and jewelry. They wear bright red blouses and long floral printed skirts that are filled out by the rounder women and fan open on all as they dance. They tie their hair back and cover their heads with scarves made out of the same material as their skirts. Most don large golden earrings and flashy ornate fake jeweled studded necklaces and beads. With matching colored sandals, lipstick and sometimes perfume, the women decorate themselves for their audiences. Valdete indicated that she only wanted them to be bright and call attention.

Therefore, their outfits were a way to publicly embody their beauty and an alternative aesthetic. Their blouses, skirts and head-wraps stylistically recall Bahianas, the appearance of the street merchants, mostly black women, of the city of Salvador, in the northeastern state of Bahia. Bahianas, known for their white-laced regalia of long skirts, blouses, necklaces and hair coverings, also have historically been and are

128 See Caldwell 2005; Goldstein 2003: 121-122 335

comparable in image to filhas de santo, that is, the indoctrinated of Candomblé. This evocation is not lost on the women’s audiences, and on numerous occasions the women have been thought to be palm readers, benzadeiras (those who offer curative blessings) and macumbeiras (those who manipulate black magic or dark forces). At one performance, evangelical church members cleared the room in fear of what was believed to be their mystic practices according to various group members’ accounts. The women in general joke about this reading of their presentation; some might perhaps even feel slightly empowered by the effect they invoke. Rarely have they experienced their physical blackness as an embodiment of something captivating or beautiful.

This expression of beauty is not about normative appearance, but about decoration and adornment as enhancements of the body and its presence. Many women recounted never using bright colors before expressing that they were not considered suitable for black people. Malunga, the black women’s organization in Goiás previously mentioned, works on building and inspiring black women’s sense of beauty and indicated that black women with whom they have worked commonly held the belief that bright colors do not suit them. While the historical origins of this idea are not specifically known, it forms part of the imposition of hegemonic notions of normative (non-black or African derived) beauty and aesthetics and the submission of black expression and representation around which black activists have mobilized. Similar to Malunga, black organizations have used aesthetics and the body as critical sites of black expression and the politicization of blackness – developing and promoting alterative fashion, hairdos and more broadly self- representation.129 Calling attention to the body rather than away from it, is part of the

129 See Pinho 2006; Schumaher and Vital 2006 336

performative work color does and is what can confront and engage questions of anti- black racism. While Valdete does not assert a blatant politics around the women’s aesthetics, her use of clothing as an additional vehicle of expression and as an adornment of the body are other markers of how she orients around the non-normative, specifically the practices and ethos of politicized black people as a way of living more fully in the world.

Dancing and swaying are also expressions of how the women live and feel beauty.

Movement is a sentient experience through which they create, experience and model joy and play. The ability to move in relation to their desire and express themselves physically is a liberating and humanizing experience in itself that their shows enable. There are changing musical set lists and some gestures that go along with specific songs, but above all the women are encouraged to dance since their dance is more about energy than synchronization. In this capacity, their bodies guide their experience and inspire a range of feelings to be expressed physically. This movement is what Ahmed characterizes as the possibilities of queer orientations that enable us to move into space differently. Their performances are dynamic interchanges in which they can experience and express the spectrum of their affective realm and invest that release into the pleasure of others. This enables them to connect to people in various ways. On a trip to one asilo, the women gathered older residents and guided them to dance, bringing some onto their feet and others to move in place. “Healing wounds by touch, where touch is part of the work of decolonization” is how M. Jacqui Alexander characterizes these types of transformative human interaction, which at this event, brought abandoned elderly women to dance, sing, and remember their pasts and feel the value in their living. Singing and dancing to

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applause and smiles reinforces to these women their own ability to generate joy in others.

As Jacinta expressed about the effect of performing during hard phases of loss in her life:

When we are on stage singing, [and] people [were] applauding, my tears would be streaming, but I was there strong and this helped me get over [the divorce and sense of loss], because in spite of all of my sadness, all of my problems, I could give a little joy and happiness to a lot of people – bring a little joy to others.

Feeling valued and recognized provides a sense of beauty not contingent on a physical ideal but upon the feeling of being meaningful to self and others. They receive this feedback through applause, the hugs of children after shows and more broadly media attention. The investment they put into themselves is acknowledged and recognized by others and that reinforces a feeling of elegance grown from the work they have done over the years and continue to do for others.

These women have thus come to experience beauty as a physical practice of self- embellishment and liberation as well as an act of giving of self. This sense comes from their learned ability to see and feel themselves as knowledgeable and valuable people with something to offer others. Beauty in this orientation is constructed as feeling and embodiment not dictated by outside forces, but by one’s own practices of cultivating and giving of self. When they dance and sing, they feel a sense of liberation and a sense of joy that they can provide for others. Carneiro (2000) asserts the understanding of the body, as a principle site and medium for liberation, as one of the greatest gifts of black

Brazilian traditions. Azaléia expressed, “I leave my joy there,” suggesting her embodied act of singing and dancing as a transmission process to others. These women know through their hardship and for some depression, that feeling joy can be a hard won fight.

The women’s ability to provide contact and an experience can do the emotional work of

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evoking feelings that words alone do not always have the capacity to generate. Material forces do not bind their desires; their desires are bound by their own potential to create a meaningful experience for themselves and others, which can have transformative effects.

Labor, Memory and Experience

Beyond its physical trappings, blackness, in the group, is an orientation that invests in the experience and labor of these women. Valdete invested praise and meaning into the lives that black women historically have led. Her language was not of race, but of ancestry and that the women and the country were emergent from black and indigenous people. This type of roots statement is reminiscent of Brazilian national discourses of the

“mixture of the three races”130 or “the three racial streams”- a discursive characterization of the “meeting” and fusion of European, Indigenous and African peoples, prevalent in other parts of the diaspora. Yet Valdete did not draw any attention to racial mixture, mestizagem, or whitening. Her invocation of this historical trajectory invested in what they have embodied: the work they have performed and the experience base they provide.

Valdete consistently applauded these women’s labors as housewives, family caretakers and domestic workers, and affirmed their committed labor, often underappreciated, which they performed almost always for others. She offered this acknowledgment while creating opportunities for these women to invest in and develop their lives beyond their homes and the gendered ideas of who, what and how they ought to be. By critiquing the

130 National discourses of union and fusion have been used throughout the Diaspora often as political response to racial strife and hierarchy For Brazil see Parker 1991:120; Prado 1972[1928]; streams – Skidmore [1974]1993:34; for other parts of the Diaspora see de la Fuente 1998 (Cuba); González 1993:9 (Puerto Rico); Thomas 2004 (Jamaica); Wade 1995 (Columbia); 1997 (Latin America) 339

gendered, classed and raced roles, rather than the labor itself, Valdete enabled the women to experience their working lives, often sacrificial, in a lateral and vertical continuum with their forbearers (parents and grandparents) and peers. She valorized these women’s work as critical contributions that socially and financially are not given much worth and aligned them with the labors of women in general. Breaking with market driven concepts of labor-value and the racial, gendered and classed associations that make certain bodies suitable and poorly paid for certain jobs, she implicitly challenged Brazil’s socio- economic hierarchy and re-oriented the women around a vision of labor as a dignified act of giving of self that opens up opportunities to connect with others. Valdete embedded labor in a larger spectrum of collective acts of investment in a quality of life for all, not to be reduced to role-playing or wages.

The women’s public representation of pride in and memory of their own experience and labor was illustrated in their organization of a march through downtown

Belo Horizonte on the 8th of March 2007 in honor of International Women’s Day.

Valdete organized the bureaucratic details and the women prepared signs and costumes for the event. Days before the outing at rehearsal, she emphasized the origins of the holiday reminding the women of the connection between racism, sexism, and their own trajectory of labor and struggle. The women would march in honor of this cause and would do so by dressing as rural female workers. This performance would be symbolic of the clothing, labor, and contributions most of them enacted as younger women working and growing up on farms in the interior as well as by paying tribute to the women who continue to work in that capacity today.

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The women marched with long sleeved shirts, hats and full skirts of the day and carried hoes and signs bearing statements about the social importance of this labor and its performance by women; their physical blackness specifically was reminiscent of the often unspoken legacy of slavery as a practice that deeply bound agricultural work with black bodies and honored the embodied struggles black people have engaged in for society at large as well as their own survival. Standing around before the march began, the women explained how this type of clothing and straw hats helped protect their arms and legs from rough plants and the strong sun. Some of the women who were more typically quiet (many of the same who remained quiet during the hotel incident) were animated, recalling the hard daily labor of life on the roça. The work and struggles of their youth were a point of identification and through this march they were invited to feel pride and dignity not only in the labor performed, but in the struggle of rural and economically poor people. While the rural laboring (non-white) body is socially constructed as needed but is not praised, admired or found desirable in Brazil, these women were oriented around the value of dignity in the experience and struggles of rural people, black folks, indigenous people, and often women.

The women received their usual enthusiastic reception at the gathering following the march at the city’s downtown civic plaza. Their presence, as ageing black women from the periphery, always gains much admiration especially from working women. The group often performs in front of female crowds at events around gendered themes such as women’s health, women’s labor, or women and the arts. Female audience members consistently expressed their identification with the trials of these women’s lives as working mothers, housewives and broadly the oppressive patriarchy they experienced

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within their homes and in society. The classed nature of these identifications were sharp, both in lower income neighborhoods and in the interior where the experiences of women, particularly older women, found much resonance with the multiple struggles of these women as mothers, grandmothers and providers. In general the women in the audience vented about being under-appreciated as women and the feelings that they carried alone. A woman in a church singing group, after hearing the group’s back-story and relating it to her own group commented, “The problems are the same…We fight to continue… Being part of a group is health.” In these exchanges, both the audience members’ experiences and those of group were validated and the group’s raison d’être appeared to both affirm and inspire other women to pursue their own wellbeing, either through collectives, or changes in perspectives.

As a self-created third-age women’s singing group, the women, both black and with rural backgrounds, provide a potential mirror of possibility for other women. At one gathering with local women in a small town in the interior, a woman in the audience applauded the work of the group to which Valdete responded, “You can do what I did.

All you need is love, good will and roots music – the soul of the people.” This blueprint in many ways captures the group’s orientation around blackness and how these women’s experiences, desires and labor can create the possibilities for one’s own well being.

Sharing themselves is an act of individual self-making and the construction of the collective. For M Jacqui Alexander, “The fact of the matter is that there is no other work but the work of creating and re-creating ourselves within the context of community”

(2005:283). The women have learned that their lives and experiences have meaning and should be invested in. Greater than Ahmed’s idea of looking back (rather than at the

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linear – straight or future), Valdete has the women remember what they have lived through and created as sources of experience and knowledge that reorient around new ways of living.

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Singing as Storytelling

The women’s music opened up a vehicle of expression for their emotions but also an alternative way of communicating and therefore sharing their life stories and knowledge. Their dancing and singing make possible the expression of where they have come from, their experiences and the messages and values that they hold. Through their performances, wherever they go, these women make audible their reasons for starting the group, their class and place of residence and their investments in a social tradition.

Singing their music at rehearsals for themselves is one form of expression critical to how they create personal time, play and joy in their everyday lives, but singing for others is facilitated by the self-esteem they slowly work on through the group. What this sense of self provides is a confidence in the practices they engage: a different notion of health; the need for play for all ages; their knowledge and social contributions that emerge from the realities of their lives. The work of the group has enabled them to do this in the face of and because of experiences of subordination and minimization. They have felt and learned the affirming creativity and sense of possibility yielded within the black tradition’s use of the body, dance and music as a vital means of expressing and enacting, not just their ideas, but their experiences and sentiments.

The musical traditions in which the women partake connect them with a black musical cultural lineage in Brazil and with greater black Diasporic practices as illustrated in chapter three. Valdete has continually built a bridge between racial blackness and black cultural practices of which neither these women nor society are always conscious.

The rupture between experiences of racialization and Afro-Brazilian cultural inheritances has been a process undergone over time, most forcefully through strategic nation-building

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discourses of the 1930s. Previously criminalized African derived practices, such as capoeira, the social demonization of religions of the African matrix that continues today, and the broad surveillance of music and dance were common-place racialized censoring that disproportionately and intentionally incriminated and constrained black people’s self-articulation and collective challenges to their social oppression.131 The Vargas administration began a course of appropriating, integrating and naming non-European traditions as part of Brazil’s cultural richness and national cultural patrimony, quieting discussions of racial oppression through mobilizing ones of cultural and national mixture and unity. Indeed these cultural methods have always been a Brazilian formation, whether claimed, declared or not, yet the sets of experiences and the embodied process through which these manifestations took shape have been obfuscated, sometimes, omitted from popular cultural history, memory and consciousness, as rooted and energized through bodies’ suffering and pain.

The body as audible and visual voice is a critical vehicle of communication and manifestation. Black people’s use of music and dance are modes of expression for the deeply affective experiences of racialization. Music’s centrality to black political culture in Brazil as well as for other African descendant people throughout the Diaspora is a common and well researched area of scholarship.132 Locating the body and its multiple forms of articulation as central to the ways in which black people specifically in Brazil have worked towards liberation and done politics suggests new ways of listening, seeing and hearing that are a part of the orientation of blackness. The women in fact rarely speak the story of how the group formed. When publicly asked, they usually respond by singing

131 See Dias 2006; Talmon-Chvaicer 2008 132 See Browning 1998; Cooper 2004; Moore 2006; Olaniyan 2004; Rose 1994 345

the song that tells their story. It is a gesture that is sometimes met with quaintness by audience members, but it forces those interested to engage with the music and to visually and audibly confront the women’s bodies with an attention perhaps not previously exerted. This experience can be disorienting, for youth. Upon hearing their music, I listened to statements of “this is old people’s music.” For other audience members sets of emotions arose, that they were unable to name, yet were visible on their faces and which they shared with group members. The group’s encounters demand listening work or hearing “poor, black women from the favela,” which is generally welcomed. This engagement is not theorized as a political act, but rather a way to place people in contact, both performers and audience, into dialogue. Orienting around blackness in this capacity, is the practice of having our senses and bodies guided in unfamiliar, exploratory ways that invest in individual and collective consciousness and liberation.

While it was never Valdete’s objective to define the group, the women’s performances created opportunities for their self-making in a more conventional politicized fashion. The celebration and release of their first CD was held in their neighborhood. Along with other songs from their repertoire, the women performed O

Morro Não Tem Vez/A Favela, the hill, the bossa nova hit made famous by its writer the

Brazilian bossa nova, jazz composer and artist Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de

Moraes. The song is written about the morro – literally translated as the hill, but in reference to the favela – and melodically communicates the trial and conviction of its residents. In composers Jobim and de Moraes’s lyrics the social critique of marginalization is present, but the song sings quite differently out of the mouths of these women. At the event, they sang in collaboration with several young local black musicians

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(in their twenties) and were accompanied by berimbau players from a local capoeira group. They sang this song early on in the set to a crowd made up of family members, residents of the area and people who came from beyond to hear them sing. The women publicly perform outside of their geographic region more than within, and their singing of this song, from the standpoint of and to the residents of the “morro,” transformed it into an embodied statement of these women’s lives. In that moment, no grand connection was necessary for these women’s life labors and the conditions in which they grew and lived to be heard as in connection to black traditions or racialized experiences. The singing spoke to multiple forms of discrimination experienced by people living on the ‘morro’ and gained a particular meaning about these women’s trajectories with an audience full of people who know and are represented within that musical reflection. At the same time, their performance communicated how they create and live in spite of their complicated social and economic lives.

With the production of their first CD, the women embodied a different trajectory of living life and struggle and the possibilities that come out of the investment in one’s own labor and experience. Their success captivated residents in the neighborhood, specifically in the context of struggles for ideals of material gain and economic ascension. The women’s CD and performance that evening affirmed a different orientation around living. Their performance was a manifestation of their orientation around blackness captured in the ways in which their musical career has been guided by their investment in their individual and collective wellbeing, their environment and the cultural traditions with which they grew up. Through the process of singing cantigas de roda, performing at schools, prisons and senior homes and telling their story, they have

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invested in turning the personal project of well being, through their own enactment and creative production of it through music, into a social project of sharing joy and experience with others. In the context of the neighborhood, the women orient the community around the possibilities found within their experiences of marginalization and the productive, creative ways to express them. As discussed in chapter four, youth experience their positionality, both physical and social, as one of limitations specifically dictated by their outside environment. The women focus on what is possible as a means of their individual and collective change. This is the process of self-making that João

Costa Vargas calls, “the capacity – indeed the responsibility – that Black

[people]…invest themselves with as they utilize Black expressive modalities to not only celebrate their existence, but also to make sense of and transform the social world around them (2006:222). As taught in the group, Valdete reinstated the link between black experiences and the value in cultural traditions as a vehicle of expression, often unmatched for articulating experiences and conditions of gendered racialization and social marginalization, and moreover, in their performance investing in a larger process of social transformation. As grandmothers, mothers and elders of the neighborhood often looked at as “old” and “useless” in the words of one twenty-two year old, these women embody and perform a celebration of success that both triggers a sense of potential in youth while, at the same time, advancing alternative constructs of self-realization, possibility and the collective good.

What are the ways in which life is reflected on, celebrated, and enjoyed in the conditions of oppression? This is one of the founding questions implicitly responded to in diaspora and black cultural studies. In the context of slavery and the social formation of

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an orientation towards whiteness as well as anti-black racism, the quest for black humanity is foundational to black life and the creation of joy and meaning in circumstances of dehumanization. The on-going miserable conditions in which many black people economically and geographically dwell, in conjunction with the ways in which this ethos of finding meaning through suffering are sustained, create the framework for how the stresses, labors, joys and celebrations are placed in the same referential field of orientation.

Thus blackness, as an orientation, uses the experiential field to transform an identification with struggle into undefined possibility. In the same way racial blackness is not just suffering or victimhood, it also is the process of self-making around the experiences and recognition of living in spite of and through these conditions. The duality of suffering and wisdom is a connection written about in scholarship on diasporic black traditions.133 And it was exactly this point that Valdete spoke to in her approach to taking the women into the interior of Minas Gerais, a state widely known for its arid environment and consequent, agricultural and economic hardship. This act was intended to take these women into spaces of (re)memory in which the atmospheres of their childhoods and labors could be conjured through sights, sounds and people; this opportunity would not only have them discover new paths and news ways, but would also affirm alternative ontologies that I argue the group cultivates.

During a speech at one of the group’s presentations in the area, Valdete said that people acted as if culture was not part of the lives of people from this region, which is one of the economically poorest and least funded areas by the government. She asserted

133 See DuBois 1903[1996]; Raboteau 2002 349

that the group did not come to gaze at the poverty and misery that everyone emphasizes about the region. The group wanted to see the richness of the culture and people. She stated, “We don’t look with eyes of pain or [see] the unfortunate, but we look for wisdom…we are going [to the region] to learn.” Valdete’s statements reflect an understanding of an ethos of struggle that has historically produced what is known as

“popular culture” in Brazil. This is a concept that loosely defines the cultural, artistic production of everyday people inspired by the preservation of regional traditions and identities that are often socially devalued.134 Valdete’s declaration at this cultural festival placed the labor of the people of the region in a continuum with the performers giving worth to their life learning and situating them as sources of knowledge, wisdom and art.

She spoke to an appreciation of the aesthetics and artistic production of necessity and a classed, racial understanding of its fruition. While acknowledging the environmental factors of drought, migration and hunger in the area, Valdete focused on the cultural knowledge production that flows from the local range of experiences and traditions. This ethos – that there is wisdom in everyday experience – is emblematic of the undefined process of self-making and orientation encouraged by Valdete that acknowledges and looks for the creative possibility and potential in all lives.

134 This term is entrenched in a longer history of popular political expression around consciousness raising, revolutionary and liberatory engagement in the context and history of State domination and repression. For one discussion of the evolving meanings of popular culture see Abib 2005:48-65. 350

II. SELF-MAKING and AGEING

Some of the most disorienting, complex and revealing moments of how the women are self-making around their ageing occurred on their trips to asilos, homes for the elderly, abandoned, and mentally impaired. We visited various asilos some run by the state or city, but mostly assumed by catholic entities. The history of the church assuming the role of caring for the socially abandoned, namely the mentally ill, extends into the

19th century and, as observed through our trips, continues today. The facilities and their resources greatly vary as did the clientele, but in most cases, the residents are entrusted or simply left to be cared for by the institution. On all of our four trips to the interior, we visited these homes that were consistently the most difficult spaces for the women to enter and do their work.

* * *

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On our second trip to the interior in May 2006, amidst a free morning, late afternoon discussion with a third-age social group and a late night performance at the regional arts festival, the women made a trip to a home for the elderly and abandoned on the outskirts of this town of about 36,000. Our bus wound its way through the narrow roads lined by a mixture of small colonial homes with crumbling facades, newer constructions and open lots with flowering trees and chickens running about. The asphalted road eventually turned into dirt and we rumbled into the open space in front of several large, older constructions that sat atop a hill. One building was a withering church and the other, attached by a courtyard, had several open doors. About five people were sitting in front. The area offered a nice vista of the town and was enclosed by flowering plants and trees.

As the bus parked, the nun who ran the asilo came out to greet us. After descending from the bus into the afternoon heat, we gathered around this woman as she welcomed us and explained the layout of the asilo, a little about the residents and its limited, very limited resources. She emphasized how pleased she was to have the women perform and spend time with the people living there. She was enthusiastic and spoke with a smile and bright eyes, but shared the reality that the residents were abandoned by family members that did not or could not take care of them; this was the case for all the elderly, the disabled and the children that now reside there. She explained that the children and the adults were housed in separate buildings and the adults were subdivided by gender. After this quick introduction to which the women quietly listened, she led us towards the building that was the adult residence.

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As we walked closer to the building, the women began greeting the people we saw driving in. There was a severely handicapped man, maybe in his fifties or sixties, sitting in a wheelchair soaking in the sun who mustered a smile as we drew closer. There were also several older gentlemen sitting on a bench in the shade of the building’s shadow.

Several children also came running from the direction of another building to see who was visiting. Following their standard practice, the women began greeting people individually with the physical and verbal affection that I continuously saw them offer in their public life. They approached the men and women with smiles and “good afternoon” as well as with pats, caresses, hugs, and even a kiss on the hand, head or cheek.

After introductions and hellos to the folks sitting outside, the nun led us into a large open room where female residents sat and lay. A few were on their feet, perhaps anticipating our arrival. The room was dimly lit only by the sunlight streaming in through the two open front doors. To the left of the entryway, an old skinny black woman sat upright with eyes closed. Walking around the room would soon reveal that the oldest and most physically decrepit of the women lay sleeping on couches or resting quietly in chairs. Many were extremely thin, bearing withered skin, bones showing through the skin, and almost silent. The women of the group nevertheless moved around the room systemically circulating in a clockwise fashion. They greeted and conversed with the resident women with presence and affability, speaking in louder than usual tones and approaching the residents with a physical familiarity of touch and embrace. The expressions of some of the residents visibly shifted as group members approached them; some residents physically moved to greet the women while others could only partially budge because of the lethargy of their bodies.

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The women greeted all the residents and spent time sitting with several. All present in the room were visibly ageing people with grey hair and weakened bodies; a handful were most likely in their 80s and 90s. The nun explained that the ages of some of the residents were unknown because they did not always have specific information about these people’s lives due to the manner in which they came to the place. Several residents captivated group members, who inquired about their lives and then listened to their stories and pleasant memories mostly about the play and music of their childhoods.

Some members of the group sat with residents who were so frail that they were sleeping or simply staring. I observed group members spend time with these women caressing their heads, hands and faces. Iris crouched alongside a couch where an old, emaciated, dark-skinned woman lay sleeping. Iris’s gentle strokes to the woman’s arm did not wake her from her strained exhales. The attendant indicated that they thought she was close to passing as she was barely eating and spent most of her time in that state of deep rest. Cedra was with an older woman who was sitting upright in a chair just in the sunlight of the doorway. She sat at this resident’s side with the woman’s hand in hers and occasionally raised one hand to caress the side of the woman’s face. This woman’s grey stringy hair was messily pulled back and her skin was leathery and sagged from the bone.

She was partially awake, gazed out intermittently, and then her eyelids would close.

Palmeira also was talking with a woman who was wedged in the back of a large sitting chair. Palmeira leaned her ear close to the women’s mouth in order to hear the whispers coming from her mouth. She sat there for most of the hour-long visit in this intimate exchange.

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Towards the end of the visit, I observed that Cedra and Palmeira were both standing away from residents and other group members in an alcove of the room, discretely hiding their tears. I made eye contact with both of them and they started wiping their eyes as I approached. Cedra accepted my own grasp of comfort and when I asked whether she was crying for sadness or happiness she replied that she was sad. She attempted to smile and when she could muster up the words she said, “These people are not valorized.” Tears began to flow from her eyes again and she just shook her head.

Laughter emanated from another side of the room where two sisters who were residents chatted with a cluster of about five group members. The two sisters danced for the women of the group recalling songs from other times in their lives. This dancing received particular cheers from the women who clapped and also took some of the resident women for a spin. Valdete called for the group to play music. So they gathered in the center of the room around the sisters and sang in chorus. One of the sisters had a hand rattle and played as the women sang. Most women stayed upbeat keeping their voices strong, encouraging residents to sing and dance if they could get them on their feet. Several became excited and danced with the women.

After about fifteen minutes of dance and song, Valdete led the women outside to continue to sing for those who were outside and unable to move, all of whom were men. A smiling boy of about eleven was anxious to sing along. The women formed a circle around him, playing the tambourine and singing. He was mentally impaired and unable to communicate through spoken language with precision, but the women conversed with him through continuing to encourage him to play. He smiled striking the tambourine in beat and did not want them to stop, even after twenty more minutes of playing.

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Once the music ended (about half an hour later), the nun led us on a tour of the facilities. We headed into the residential area for men. There was a series of adjoining rooms filled with numerous beds, most like large cribs, that lined the walls. I followed

Valdete who stopped in front of one of the first cribs where a small, shrunken, bony man rested quietly on his side. The smell of urine and cleaning agents were strong in the area.

She leaned in and caressed the man’s head, saying hello. He rocked slowly but did not open his eyes or react in a notable way. Valdete spent about five minutes with the man before turning to me, smiling and with a wearied look said, “It’s hard,” then continued to the next bed. Almost all of the beds in these rooms were filled with men unable to move because they were either too sick, decrepit or crippled to be on foot. Some awoke and reacted with smiles and lifted arms to the presence of the women. The most reaction occurred when the women stopped to sing in a room where the men were mostly awake.

There was a general quietness to the women as they wandered through the halls. And as we moved through the rooms, it was evident that not all of the women had decided to walk through this section.

The nun eventually led us to a courtyard to visit and sing with the children who ranged in age from three to twelve. Most were black and several were mentally impaired.

There was even a set of siblings. The children who were orphaned or abandoned were smiling and articulating their enthusiasm with hugs and pleas for the women to sing with them. The woman gathered a small group of about eight children and danced with them in a circle. Using songs from their repertoire to make the kids laugh, they took turns singing and dancing. Some of the younger children were too shy to sing, dance or play.

The older ones, mostly male, were animated. One had latched onto Rodrigo, one of our

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trip organizers. After multiple songs, some of the women continued to play with the children, while others sat down to rest, tired from the intensity of the heat and the past hours of engagement. A few had already made their way onto the bus to sit down, while others were inquiring about when we were leaving. Shortly after, the women began hugging the children goodbye and made their way into the bus and sat quietly. Valdete,

Begonia and Rodrigo thanked the nun and another gentleman who help run the facility.

They, in turn, thanked Valdete, Begonia and Rodrigo for the time and care given to the residents. They indicated that their residents rarely had visits, either from family or others.

There was a general silence and quiet on the bus as we took the dirt road back down into the town to the next encounter with a third age social group. The women sat in stillness, with little of the usual conversation, looking out the windows, some closing their eyes to rest. Xixa, who sat near me, intercepted my scanning eyes and succinctly shared,

“This makes us cry.”

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The women’s group attempts to bring an embodied message to generate awareness around the rights and abilities of third-age people in Brazil. In the social context of an ageing population and early retirement, urban ageing people are left with feelings of uselessness. As the massive demographic shifts have brought people with rural upbringings to settle and age in the city, and the cultural and social practices around the roles of older people have come to be defined de facto through market demands.

Many of the women in the group who knew and had contact with their grandparents, recounted that their grandparents played active roles in the upkeep of the family, the subsistence farming and the home until physically unable to do so. The vision of older people being useless, in spite of the work that, for example, these women do in their homes and for their families, is a cultural transformation that has worked to construct older people as symbolically less relevant, obscuring their social worth around their perceived physical worth. The disproportionate focus on physicality and the body is evident in Brazil in its attention to physical ageing as much as it is in racialization.

Within the life of the group, ageing, specifically the ageing body, is frequently a source of empathy and humor. Everyday morning discussions topically moved around the sensations of the women’s bodies and the status of various conditions. The women commiserated about managing diabetes and shared notes on controlling their blood pressure. With the changes in seasons, temperatures and atmospheric pressures, the women registered greater stiffness and aches in the joints and bones that Hortênsia once characterized as, “indefinite pains.” On various days, physical discomfort deeply limited many women’s range of movement and participation, and they often grimaced and sighed when rising onto their feet, after sitting for too long or making quick motions. Violeta

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who has a particularly bad knee would limp to group events and asserted jokingly, “The only place for this knee is the cemetery.” Their discomfort, typically articulated in humorous ways, opened up further discussion about one another’s conditions. These frequently discussed ailments rarely got in the way of showing up to group outings or practice. As Violeta once commented, “If it was because of the pain, no one would

[attend].” Many commented that their pains usually would go away, or at least be forgotten when they were performing. Xixa, one of the oldest members of the group (in her eighties), often reflected about her own body providing a different reference concerning age for group members. While joking about her loss of coordination, she danced remaining upbeat, and her vibrant skinny body was a reassuring image of growing older that captivated other group members, who would constantly make comments about hoping to be like Xixa as they aged.

Although not as old as Xixa, these women referred to themselves as old. As sixty- six, Jasmine joked with a visitor, “We are the age of Christ!” While most group members, at the time of my fieldwork, were in their late sixties; the oldest member was eight-six and the youngest in her forties (although she is an exception).135 According to several of the women who had been in the group the longest, the overall age of the women had lowered. This sense of old mostly came from their physical states. Their hard and long physical working lives and their medical conditions make their bodies appear and feel old. Hortênsia pointedly addressed the disparity in her embodied feeling of age and its

135 Although there are not strict rules around the group, it is intended for people in their third-age. Salvia was welcomed into the group because of her alcoholism and the group members felt that the group might help support her in her sickness. Since many women have had husbands or other family members with problems with alcoholism, many expressed deep empathy with and hope for Salvia possible sobriety. Even though her in forties, Name stated feeling old and identifying with the group members. 360

social meanings when she recounted being asked to move from the fare-free seats in the front of the bus because she was not old enough at fifty-five. She snapped, “I may be fifty-five but my legs are one hundred.” This scenario and these women’s sense of being physically old correlate with the reality that in a 2000 study, black women had a life expectancy in Brazil of 69.5 years.136 This sense of physical age evidenced in their bodies may account for these women’s contemplation of their mortality, whether passenger or more recurrent, and the emotions that the trips to asilos may evoke.

Confronting older, specifically abandoned people brought out a range of emotions around these women’s reflections on ageing, including death. Death was a source of contemplation, mostly now as a conscious part of life that existed within the horizon of possibilities. One woman recalled her mother’s own gentle passing as her mother sat upright, dressed with lipstick and ready to go out of the house. She relayed that this was how she too wanted to go, softly and with ease. Salvia had a more ominous reflection on death indicating, “God is going to take me.” While she is a younger member, her alcoholism and the fact that her mother had died in her forties most likely added the force behind the strength of her focus and statements around dying. Beyond these women, comments about death were few and far between. As evoked at the asilo, the emotions that constellate around the meanings of the end of life were far more present.

136 See Pan American Health Organization 2007:133. This study cited the life expectancy of white women at 73.8 and white men 68.2 and black men at 63.3. 361

On numerous occasions, the women witnessed the residents of the facilities who appeared to be weeks and in some cases days away from death and often were moved.

Frequently, some of the women would express their concerns to staff of the facilities, while others quickly moved out of proximity of these drifting people. As indicated in the ethnographic example, women in the group engaged with women in the facilities, but when there was an opportunity to tour the space, specifically to go into the men’s quarters, many opted not to go. During our November visit to another asilo in the interior, we similarly encountered residents who seemed to be awaiting death. As we walked through the rooms to visit with bed-ridden residents, a handful of the women made their way through the facility visiting with everyone; while others lingered in conversation, 362

several quickly made their way outside to the courtyard to wait. Arruda rapidly engaged me in conversation, asking question upon question, seemingly unwilling to let me disengage. Her eyes were watery. Given that she had never approached me before in this manner, I suggest that she was managing the emotions triggered by the reality that some of the residents were dying, and, in effect, their living was a form of awaiting their death.

Many of the reactions of the women, regardless of age, did not appear to be tied to dying, but represented a deeper evaluation of living.

* * *

Cedra was one of the women who wept at the asilo, reflecting that the people were not valorized. Later in the evening on the day of the visit, I approached Cedra about what came up for her at the asilo. She said that it was difficult to witness the residents because it made her reflect upon her own life and that this could happen to her. Palmeira, who also was in tears, expressed the possibility and fear of finding herself in that abandoned state. Palmeira’s emotions were juxtaposed with the fact that she has a large tight knit family and her husband is alive and actively supportive of her participation in the group and mental wellness. The violence of the abandonment and the state in which these people found themselves may have evoked a range of memories and emotions about her own elderly mother’s murder and that fact that she lived alone before she died.

The frailty of life and conditions of living may have overwhelmed her in these close exchanges with residents of asilos, taking her into her grief and uncertainty. In contrast

Cedra’s reaction, I suggest, emanated from the precarious circumstances of her own life.

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Cedra joined the group several years before I began fieldwork at the encouragement of her friend and neighbor who is also in the group. She shared with

Cedra that she thought it might provide some support for her given the unsteady nature of her life. Cedra lives between two of her daughters’ humble homes where she sleeps on couches and contributes as she can. Having been an alcoholic and involved with destructive men for much of her adult life, her time participating in the group perhaps has been one of the most stable periods of her life because of the consistency of the collective. She has taken anti-depressants, and is self-described as nervous and agitated.

At nineteen, she suffered her first anxiety attack that included feelings of rage and continues to experience intense feelings of distress that she characterized as making her fingers tingle and her voice hoarse. She explained this reaction one morning when I inquired about her weakened, raspy tone. Although she has a decent relationship with one of the daughters with whom she lives part of the time, she has an extremely complicated past with the other whom I interviewed on multiple occasions with Cedra’s approval.

This daughter, Marilia, said that she feels it is her filial duty to take care of her mother but that her mother had, in fact, not been much of a mother, never having protected her kids, all women, from the chaos and abuses of her addiction. One of Cedra’s oldest granddaughters also relayed that her relationship with her grandmother had improved, but continues to be conflictive and triggers her resentment. Cedra, sixty-three at the time, acknowledged the pain she has caused others and spoke a lot about trying now to live with greater respect and care, creating harmony in the world. These feelings extended, at several points, into her mourning of the violence in the neighborhood and in the larger world. She grew quiet and cried at times. Against the story of her own life and the abuse

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she has inflicted, these candid moments as well as those in the asilos were ones in which the memories of her life bore down and she also felt the additional weight of her own vulnerability in light of her past.

Cedra, like all the women, has had an immensely complicated life and is a troubled person who revealed elements of herself at times. From the intense multi- generational interviews with members of Cedra’s family, her very human picture and story came into view. She recounted being given away by her biological mother to another woman who she said provided her with a “happy” childhood. She only met her biological mother again when she was nineteen after going in search of her out of the deep sadness flowing from the recent loss of the mother who raised her. Perhaps too painful to go into, Cedra recounted but did not detail her various pregnancies and births in her early twenties, or her working life in a factory in Belo Horizonte beginning at age twelve. Having moved to São Paulo and back by the time she was twenty-eight, she had four children with two different fathers. Her drinking and troubled relationships with her daughters may have begun before, but it was the period after she moved back to Belo

Horizonte that captivated her children and grandchildren.

Cedra’s fears of her own abandonment rise with her anxieties of not being valorized because of what she has done and what she cannot undo or seem to right. In her description of the meaning of this third phase of life, offered early on in my fieldwork,

Cedra evinced a complicated set of hopes, sadness and disappointments that I suggest by analogy, speak to her own contemplations and unrest around ageing and what her future will look like. When I asked her about what third-age meant to her, she replied, “It is when we start to live. Each morning when I open my eyes, I see the world as more

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beautiful.” She followed this up relating that she needed this mode of thinking thirty years before. She reflected that nature, the greenery and waterfalls, were the most beautiful things, but that one had to learn to see their beauty. She said that humans see but do not pay mind and wind up inventing, building and destroying these [natural] wonders. Cedra is not self-pitying nor does she complain about the situation in which she finds herself, but she does consider the changes that are possible in people and the environment. The group is a space where she is humanized and valorized, and where, in spite of her past problems and errors, she has found a space for transformation that has enabled her to come into a calmer more steady relationship with herself. The beauty that she sees in nature is the possibility for renewal and also a valuing of people as part of the larger natural world in spite of the destructive tendencies she points out in human beings.

These are visions that mentally and experientially came to her later in life and, in witnessing so many people abandoned in the asilos, she may have come to feel that these understandings and values may not be extended to her.

Cedra’s reactions and reflections are part of her search for some redemption as she lives with her own ghosts and attempts to find new ways through the group. She does not talk much and often keeps to herself in the collective. She rarely complains about activities or people, attends most events and while visibly moved by the asilos, made sustained physical contact and showed affection to the residents while some group members did not. She keeps close to Valdete and was often at her home as a stable place of quiet that she otherwise does not have. Cedra’s unsettled physical life is paralleled by her process of self-making in the fray of the pains she has caused and the complexities of her past. Even with her own agency, her conditions speak to the social challenges that the

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crossfire of racial, class and gender positioning pose. Building better relationships with her daughters was something she wanted, but did not seem to think as possible at the time. I surmise that she still feels the intensity of the emotional conditions that fuelled her drinking and neglect of her children, alongside those of wanting the past and her current relationships with several of her daughters to be different. The group offers the possibility for fleeting if not more durable feelings of redemption that come from the affirmation of her worth and capacity to give to others.

It is very likely that Valdete was cognizant of what had occurred and was transpiring in Cedra’s life when she first invited her to join the group. Valdete knew

Cedra for many years through recruiting her to lobby the city for financing for the public housing project in the neighborhood. It took years for Cedra to finally ask Valdete to participate in the group. While Valdete may not have been able to predict what types of interchanges and emotions could emerge from working with the elderly and abandoned, as someone whose life work as an activist is about transformation, she undoubtedly knew that the contact and interaction with people in these highly somber circumstances would

“shake” up group members and, in that capacity, help them grow. As Valdete asserted, the group’s work in the asilos is emotionally “hard” for her included. And consistent with

Valdete’s position of not defining the process, these events were presented as fluid with the work of bringing joy to the residents. The complexity of what it takes personally to conjure and bring elation into these spaces is work; and in this labor, members of the group would continue to confront the difficult parts of life. This Valdete believed would sustain the women’s process of self-making by raising their consciousness, inspiring compassion and affirming their own value in what they do. Moreover, their individual

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self-making would be relational, inspired by and continually generated through their collective experiences and the people they encounter.

In many ways the women recognized the collectivity they have by feeling the absence of it in these asilos. These places were filled with residents, but each more or less existed in their individual space, sharing a common roof and some stories here and there.

In fact the group’s music and dance brought movement, sound and diversion to these residents, which I believe is why they frequently shed tears when the group departed.

There was an absence of living, somewhat literally, but mostly metaphorically, in the silence, deep sleeping, aloneness and sense of human stagnation in these spaces that compounded their states of abandonment. João Biehl names these spaces in Brazil “zones of abandonment” that “make visible realities that exist through and beyond formal governance and that determine the life course of an increasing number of people who are not part of mapped populations” (2005:4). The women spoke of encountering states of human misery, in and near their neighborhood, but the desertion of people and their virtual anonymity, particularly of older people who had most likely cared for others, revealed a different state of humanity today. As women dealing with the physical process of ageing and celebrating third-age as a personal and social undertaking, confronting the underbelly of third-age as a process of isolated dying is an individual struggle. In many ways, these are moments when individual temperaments and histories are revealed and the types of self-making the group engenders are unclear. The group is rendered as a mere structure and framework of reference in which these women can continue to reflect and experience new orientations to move in the world in unaligned ways.

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Solitude is a predicament that they are familiar with, some having once experienced it as an impasse during economic and affective crises. Through the group the women have learned how to deal with solitude as a feeling, finding outlets for expression and joy in community. But the state of aloneness that some of them exist in are physical not emotional conditions. Azaléia who, as illustrated over the course of this project, has made major emotional strides through the group and is reflective and articulate about what she has learned, sat and wistfully spoke of a growing sense of solitude at this stage of her life: “I took care of my husband to his last hour and ran after my children. I now live alone.” She said that people had suggested that she move, but she said no. She continued,

I am going to stay by myself in my home. I am in charge and I do whatever I please, so I am not going...[she drew quiet] but living alone is really hard. Really it is. I am embarrassed to say it, but [the other day] I woke up tired and thought to myself that I wanted to stay inside. There are days like that when I want to stay around here.

There are days that Azaléia also shared that the feelings of her depression return and she makes herself get up and go out onto the streets to make contact with people. As evident in her style of living and being, Azaléia values her autonomy and her space, but with her children leaving the neighborhood and living their own lives, in addition to keeping her distance from her sons’ potentially illegal activities, she has moments where her state of living alone blends into one of being alone.

Many women absent of the company of a spouse and with grown children find themselves in this same mental space, with the group as one of the few dependable and constant forms of community they have. Rehearsals are morning activities and when they return home after practice or performances, there is considerable time and an

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environment for them to contemplate their solitude in relationship to their phase of life.

As touched on in other chapters, various women moved into this space in different capacities. Hortênsia spoke about her sense of aloneness during the holidays, reflecting back on all that she had not accomplished in life. I also have argued that Violeta’s dawns spent on the footsteps of the church are when she withdraws, remembering and possibly aching around her own past, present and future. Capturing one of the most sentient experiences of the meeting of solitude and ageing, scholar Albert Raboteau at the eve of his beloved stepfather’s funeral writes: “I sat alone, reflecting: My mother is dead, my two fathers dead; no generation stands between me and death. Lord have mercy upon us”

(2002:45). This poignant moment of recognition is one of the many, I suggest, that overtook some and passed through others at the asilos and probably at their own colleagues’ funerals. As the variance in examples infers, no singular feeling is evoked and those sentiments that move through their minds and bodies are refracted through the experiences that make up their individual lives. Yet through these encounters, these women are all moved to reflect on their own past, present and future, in relation to those of others.

Iris, who not only confronted her own mortality through her stroke, but also shared with me that she had wished for death, had her own public moment of reflection on the meanings of ageing. The day after we had traveled to the asilo, we visited at her home studio a well-know local black female artist of about the same age. The artist sang and danced with the women in addition to showing them her work, work space and various pieces of art that she had traded or been given. After a question and answer period, Iris approached the artist and clasping her arm said how much this encounter had

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meant to her. She explained that she had a stroke and that it was hard to talk, making it difficult for her to say all that she wanted to. Iris told the artist that she had known about her for a long time and had been looking forward to meeting her, praising her for the work that she does and who she is. She began crying and said that kids these days do not care anymore; they do not valorize older people and their history. She said she too has many stories to tell of other times, but no one wants to hear. Group members remained silent as Iris slowly shared these statements and the artist embraced and thanked her.

Iris reflected in an interview that death was not a worry of hers, specifying that she comfortably sat with it resting “in God’s hands.” However her experience of older people’s invisibility as social actors and agents, particularly by youth, was disturbing if not painfully felt. These women’s struggles with their sense of worth is evoked not only in confronting the elderly of the asilos, but in reflecting on their relationship to younger generations. The compassion and understanding they offer to residents of the asilos and with which the artist, notably a peer, engaged with them, is not commonly felt by these third aged women. They have lived through and adapted to the changing social context of Brazil and the various environments in which they have moved. Most do not scorn some of the broader social and technological transformations in the world, as these developments have greatly facilitated their lives. They have experienced increased rights as women, as their March 8th parade commemorated; the country is out from years of dictatorship; and, while various women expressed feelings that racial discrimination is slowly decreasing, they have raised daughters who have strong critiques of gendered, racial and class oppression. That said, the changes in human relations, specifically in the treatment of older people, are of concern because their voices and lives are generally

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sidelined. Moreover, they feel in and outside of the group that the dismissal of the third- age population is also a devaluation of accrued experience and knowledge and some of the values of respecting human life that withstand time. Having witnessed the rise in violent death over drugs and now social abandonment, they are bothered, some fundamentally upset, by how older bodies are becoming silenced and peripheral.

Self-making in the face of stigma is the group’s work and nothing new as a general experience for these women, but the challenges of ageing and the cultural shifts in views around it in Brazil are disorienting. These women’s self-making as older people is shifting as they encounter the differences between how they are viewed and how they feel, both physically and emotionally. Since my fieldwork, many of the women have turned seventy and because Valdete has not been able to have new people join due to the already large quantity of women that they currently manage. This cohort is ageing together finding their footing in the range of messages, some contrasting, around what it is and should mean to be and to be seen as “old” in Brazil. While they tend to joke about ageing through the dysfunction and unreliability of their bodies and sometimes memory, as Cedra’s and Iris’s stories reveal, there are numerous layers to what their age, their pasts and their relationships to their family mean at this phase of life.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Of all of the identities they publicly assert, the group affirms their “third age” most consistently and asserts “third age” as “the best years of life.” Similar to the idea of the “golden years,” Valdete characterizes these years as the period when you gain time for yourself without the responsibilities of raising children or a working life.

Furthermore, she affirms the ability to prioritize one’s own desires as earned through the hard work and sacrifice made for others for many years. Now, these women can partake in activities that they enjoy, such as the group and more broadly can lead lives in greater synchronization with their desires. Most have the time during their days to attend group rehearsals and outings, and a handful still work (formally and informally). Almost all of the women are responsible for preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning in their homes. In addition, almost all are active grandparents and some even are the caretakers of grandchildren. Valdete’s responsibilities are no less as she continues to work professionally at a local school and is raising and housing grandchildren. Yet her positive discourse encourages the women and other ageing people as they travel to continue to live in full ways and affirm their capability to be active and contributing members of society.

Reflecting back and remembering are acts of people of all ages, but for these women who are now in their third-age these contemplative gazes are standpoints, ways of seeing and relating to life. The group is a space that invests in and is geared towards life to come, both in the immediacy of the week and the upcoming years – Where next will they travel? What new songs will they learn? Will they make another CD? Yet in- between and during the routines of their days, cleaning their homes, watching

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grandchildren and attending different group outings and rehearsals, there are moments, conversations and nights where the end of their lives becomes a horizon point in reference to which they contemplate the meanings of where they have been more so than where they are going. There are indeed fleeting moments where death too comes into the spectrum of reflection, when a peer, family member or friend becomes deeply ill or passes. As the women age together the collective provides common understandings of the physiological changes that come with age in the same way that it has always provided support for the grief of loss and feelings of isolation and sadness. Even Valdete is registering this different phase of life, most visibly through a crisis and diagnoses of diabetes that could have killed her. The experiences of ageing are highly subjective and personal and they were not always discussed openly in the group. The collective continues to be a grounding base for these women, providing them outlets of expression and opportunities to have new experiences and contribute to others. In many ways they are navigating this process together, but its impacts in their individual lives trigger divergent emotions and thoughts that were articulated during time spent with them both in and outside of the group.

These trips to asilos were the spaces that brought to the surface the range of feelings the women contend with and how the group sustains the challenge of having these women grow as people, taking them into different affective fields. It is in these spaces that loss and death are evoked, but so too are abandonment, elation and redemption. The women went into these places to do their work: sing, dance and create joy. In fact, these encounters are less about speaking than they are quiet interchanges that require the forms of expression oriented around blackness and through the group: being

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present, relating, touching and caring for those no one else seems to care for. In a metaphorical, verging on literal sense, these women do the work that no one has done for them. Many residents, both black men and women, witness how people can be left without dignity and completely forgotten regardless of race and gender. This element of invisibility is arguably one of the conditions of blackness in Brazil and one that the group does not define but engages. For Valdete, becoming exposed to and interacting with residents of these facilities is critical to sustaining the women’s contact with the larger meanings of their personal and collective endeavors and finding new ways of living, connecting and contributing in the world. While this is not an overt political action by design, it makes a statement about compassion that comes from the knowing of what life can encompass: considerable strife, sorrow and bliss. This recognition and embodiment is one of the graces of older age and something that I believe specifically these ageing black ageing women offer.

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CONCLUSION

Meditation on Black Women’s Praxis

In April of 2008, Matilde Ribeiro one of Brazil’s first black women Ministers gave a talk at a symposium entitled Brazil: Gender, Sexuality, Violence, and the Racial

State.137 She anecdotally spoke of a Brazilian woman named Maria do Carmo who in the early 1990s gained international attention around her age of 123 years. Ribeiro recounted that, at the time, the municipality in the state of Minas Gerais where Maria do Carmo lived her whole life, was debating whether or not they were going to honor her with a citizen’s award. As Matilde told it, there was contention around the fact that this woman, while having lived a long life, had not done anything scholarly, artistically or socially remarkable per se. She was an economically poor black woman, a lifelong domestic worker and died in the same home in which she labored since the age seventy-two. While the township denied her any honor, the state of São Paulo did recognize her and Matilde was there when this petite, stoic woman walked a red carpet to receive her acknowledgment.

Ribeiro spoke of remaining curious about who Maria was and her long life. This was 1994, which made Maria’s birth fall in 1871, seventeen years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil. What life had this woman lived? Matilde said that she decided to find out more about Maria do Carmo and went to interview her, tape recorder in hand, in her small hometown in Minas. She spoke of being well received by Maria, who when

Matilde inquired about her age, riley said, “about fifty something.” She was lucid when

137 Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, April 24-25, 2008. 377

asked about her memories of her childhood and showed the scars on her back that were the markers of her racial, class position in that era. Maria shared the fact that she never married and spent her life taking care of various other families’ homes and children. She had never seen the ocean and was a virgin.

Matilde transformed her encounter with Maria into an anecdote for speaking about the remarkable qualities of black women’s lives in the face of how un-remarkably they too often are treated. She revealed this woman’s experiences as yet another financially struggling, black woman who lived a life in domestic service. Maria’s story is in many ways the unheard story of millions of black and other women who make up

Brazilian society and who through their economic situation, place of residence, race and gender have experiences and lives that, more often than not, are not given the complicated, nuanced understandings or even centrality in State constructions of the faces and souls of the nation. Ribeiro guided the audience to understand how beyond the length of Maria’s life, it was a window into a century’s worth of history, spanning abolition to a democratic Brazil. She had lived through the institution of slavery, the establishment of the republic, two dictatorships and the social transformations of a democratizing nation.

How was Maria not a historian and anthropologist of this dramatically changed country?

Matilde subtly drew the audience’s attention to this point, but what captured me were the affinities that existed and should be considered between Matilde and Maria.

What enthralled Matilde about Maria’s life so much so that she ventured from São Paulo to Minas to interview her? Matilde was a forty-something, educated professional, which economically, socially and publicly positioned her quite differently than Maria. The interest, I suggest, is forged in the affective and social spaces in which black women find

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themselves, past and present. Maria’s life conjures stories that Matilde most likely identified with, perhaps not of her own experience, but of her mother’s, grandmother’s or many of the black women with whom she has come into contact throughout her years in social work. She may have witnessed how black women in economic poverty are often rendered as lacking rich life content worthy of study or the types of State recognition that

Maria tenuously received. She may have even seen some of her own experiences in

Maria’s life: both women carry’s scars from public humiliation. Ribeiro gave this talk months after her own virtually forced exit from her post as Brazil’s Secretary of the

Promotion of Racial Equality (2003-2008) in February of 2008.138 The public scrutiny of

Matilde and the questioning of Maria’s worth magnify the skepticism and tension around black women performing roles or actions beyond those I have tried to suggest are their socially ascribed ones. At the same time, this scrutiny is a significant point of identification through which black women struggle. The nature of this recognition is perhaps at the heart of Matilde’s concern with Maria and her life, but how do we talk about these types of affinities and standpoints? What might they advance for individual and collective healing and broader social justice?

* * *

Matilde Ribeiro and Maria do Carmo’s stories and their intersection bring together several of the central themes of this dissertation and guide a discussion on what encounters between black women contribute to projects of individual and collective self- making and black women’s diasporas of struggle. First I turn to the overarching theme of

138 She left her ministry after an investigation by the government into expenditures on her government credit card. 379

black women’s so-called craziness in order to reflect on the shared, continued social and affective labors of black women.

Prior to Matilde’s financial missteps in government and stepping down, she had already faced public criticism for a statement made to the BBC in which she asserted that black people’s rejection of white people was not racism, but an explainable perspective given the types of social domination black people have experience under white racial hierarchies of economic and social power.139 Her statements to the BBC were the following:

It is not racism when a black person rebels against a white [person]. Racism is when an economic, political or numerical majority restrains or forbids the rights of others. The reaction of a black person not wanting to co-exist with a white person or to not like a white person, I find it a natural reaction, although I am not inciting this. I do not think it is a good thing. But it is natural that it happens, because those who have been whipped their whole life have no obligation to like those who have whipped them.140

Ribeiro’s statement incited public criticism, including labels of “incompetent,” “racist,” and deserving of being “imprisoned” for what were deemed to be her own racist remarks; most strikingly amongst the name-calling were statements of so-called madness.141 In one affirming response to a conservative journalist and blogger’s attack of Ribeiro’s

139 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2007/03/070326_ministramatildedb. shtml (4/21/09) 140 “Não é racismo quando um negro se insurge contra um branco. Racismo é quando uma maioria econômica, política ou numérica coíbe ou veta direitos de outros. A reação de um negro de não querer conviver com um branco, ou não gostar de um branco, eu acho uma reação natural, embora eu não esteja incitando isso. Não acho que seja uma coisa boa. Mas é natural que aconteça, porque quem foi açoitado a vida inteira não tem obrigação de gostar de quem o açoitou.” 141 See http://veja.abril.com.br/blogs/reinaldo/2007/03/ministra-matilde-ribeiro-tem-de-ser.html; http://www.apj.inf.br/site2/detalhe_noticia.php?codigo=4306; http://veja.abril.com.br/blogs/reinaldo/2007/03/ministra-matilde-ribeiro-tem-de-ser.html http://arquivaodocaxassa.blogspot.com/2007/04/lgica-da-ministra-doida.html (4.21.09) 380

perspective on racism posted on the website of Veja, a popular mainstream Brazilian magazine, the anonymous post read:

How good would it be if the Hutus, instead of cutting off the feet of this crazy woman [Ribeiro], would cut out her tongue! At least to relieve us of this stupidity. When will we start a work week without having to read so much madness? And to think that it is our hard earned money that is sustaining this rabble?142

I was captivated not only by the violence of this post, but also the language of crazy, which appeared in various bloggers’ reactions. While strong denouncements come as no surprise since government corruption typically is met with discourses of public outrage in

Brazil, the damnation-like criticism of her evoked more than an a difference of perspective but unveiled the gendered racialized lenses that are used to evaluate her work.

The lynch mob like sentiment galvanized on Veja’s on-line site illustrates how quickly black women’s disagreeable actions are condemned to the realm of the irrational. In fact,

State Deputy José Cândido from São Paulo publicly criticized the media’s representation of Ribeiro, specifically as crazy, claiming that they constantly represented her in photos crying and disheveled. During the process of her resignation, he charged, “Matilde was whipped by a slave hunting conservative media…which showed sexism and racism within the lines of communication” (Martin 2008).143 This process of public scrutiny took its toll and black women activists familiar with her spoke to me of her anxiety, growing state of depression and their concern for her well-being. Ribeiro’s education and

142 Tão bom se os hutus, ao invés de cortar os pés desta doida, cortassem a língua dela! Pelo menos nos livraria de uma sandice desta. Quando será que iniciaremos uma semana de trabalho sem ter que ler tanta loucura? E pensar que é o nosso dinheiro suado que sustenta esta corja! 143 “Matilde foi açoitada pelos capitães do mato da mídia conservadora. Mas as fotos, utilizadas tanto em veículos de amplitude nacional como as regionais, sempre a mostram descabelada, chorando e com uma cara de “doida” – o que demonstraria um sexismo e racismo por parte dos meios de comunicação. “Matilde é negra e mulher: um duplo preconceito”, afirmou o deputado. 381

government post did not make her less susceptible to be haunted by the specter of the crazy black woman.

* * *

In the face of these public representations and ascriptions such as craziness, the dissertation has attempted to reveal ageing black women’s subjectivity and their process of self-making in these constrained social and material conditions in Brazil. It reflects a shared concern, exemplified in Matilde Ribeiro’s account, with the invisibility of black women’s lives and their contributions. Bringing voice to black women and their labors remains a central struggle and objective within black women’s activism and scholarship on black women in Brazil and the greater Diaspora. My project with the women of Alto contributes to this labor of re-presenting black women through their own language and logics, and with a theoretical vantage that invests in black women’s social mobilization, both individual and collective. As Matilde spoke about Maria do Carmo, the many

Marias with whom I worked came to mind and acted as a contemporary reminder of when and in what capacity black women are appreciated and recognized as meaningful.

This project argues that ageing black women’s life experiences possess a wealth of knowledge especially when told in their own words. Ribeiro’s example gestures to what this work attempts to capture as the different epistemological bases of black women’s activism and what ageing black women often embody. Her concern with Maria do

Carmo’s long history of living and surviving was an attempt to unravel a particular vantage often looked through by older black women on the history of the country and in the face of great oppression. Maria do Carmo is not an activist per se, but within her 123 years was the will, potential, and desire to live. As I have argued, desire in and of itself

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was not an affective force cultivated nor encouraged in black women of this generation; and so its presence is marked in Maria’s life as an expression her own self-making and the often different epistemologies of black women.

Valdete’s orientation around blackness as I have also argued is illustrative of this epistemology. Her intervention in these women’s drug use and the range of emotions circulating around it grew out of her enabling of these women to offer their own explanations of their lives and work to change themselves. She recognized that the women were not necessarily crazy but had developed modes of existence and self- preservation within constrained resources and her desire was to have them discover and work with the resources they already had within them to improve their quality of life.

Reflected in Maria do Carmo’s dying in the same house where she worked as a domestic servant, Valdete was aware that the women, as of a certain age, race, class and from the interior, were socialized to give endlessly of themselves and moreover, not consider their own needs in the process. Thus, in building a group she created a space for them, where their desires propelled the group’s growth. This new context was symbolic of an ethos that specifically affirmed these women’s senses of self as shaped by the oppressive impacts of intersections of racism, classism and sexism, too often normalized, if not naturalized in their lives and society. She was conscious of negative associations with blackness and posited through black women’s experiences, blackness as a conceptual space of possibility emergent from the lived process of black people’s strife, cultural traditions, and process of self-realization.

As I have attempted to illustrate, the ethos Valdete oriented took the traditions of black experiences of struggle, as racialized, over-determined bodies, not only as its

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epistemic base, but as the site of self-making beyond social ascriptions. The body is the source and instrument for the types of expression, play and self-realization, that is – the potential for change – encompassed in livable, rather than utopian notions of freedom and liberty. Scholars writing on the black (radical) imagination reveal how the recognition and exploration of one’s humanity has been a guiding notion of freedom and epistemic standpoint lived by black-racialized people.144 In the group, Valdete oriented these women to dance, sing and take care of themselves. Her idea of expression was not a mere reinterpretation of psychodynamic therapy; rather she rejected regressive psychoanalytic inspired talking therapy that focuses on the remembering and communication of traumatic and painful experiences. In contrast she encouraged the remembering and expression of the positives in these women’s lives. Expression was not just about language and the mind, but an embodied act of articulating and manifesting a range of sentiments into animated forms. This affective expression eventually was theorized as the fuel for collective transformation and its inspirations in others. The women fundamentally danced and sang for themselves, but came to experience, that in that act, they could represent and incite change for others.

For some the group has catalyzed major changes but broadly observed it is source of support and understanding and generates the types of collective experiences from which these women, individually and as a group, grow. Women like Azaléia and Violeta manifest and testify to major transformations. For others, often more recent members, it is distraction, something that gets them out of the house, gives them free food on a regular basis and to travel to new locations. It offers relief from the demands and

144 See Kelley 2002; Robinson 2000; Vargas 2006 384

loneliness of their homes. When they are on the road I continuously noticed small shifts in their perception that made them want to continue participating at least for the new experiences with people and places they never imagined. This sense of possibility is part of the internal work, the self-making that transpires. As Valdete jokingly shared, she did not create the group to politicize the women since they are “too old.” So the objective is to invest in these women’s autonomy in this latter stage of their life. The “social work” they do – singing, dancing, telling their story and sharing joy with others – continuously connects them to the realities of other people and those, specifically who are less fortunate than themselves, in spite of all they have been through.

This ability to shape other people’s lives has significant meaning for their home neighborhood and in a larger sense to play an active role in society as ageing, black women socially perceived as incapable of this kind of agency. A local musician who worked with the group for years, summed up the symbolic power of the women as follows:

They became an example of the possibility of life. They re-learned to live. Usually at a certain age, its not easy to change and people do not have much perspective. [But] the[se women] say, “No, wait a minute, I am in my 80s but I am not dying. I am alive and hold space. For as much as my life has been bad, there is the possibility for change.” They are an example of this. All of the negative factors have bared down on them. Poor, black, women, in a machista structure, elderly, sick and suddenly they are enjoying life and have a lot of time to live. They are an example for the neighborhood, but also for the city.

Learning that they had something to say and gaining a vehicle for that expression demonstrates autonomy of voice and action that their publics are often taken aback and then inspired by. They publicly give meaning to their own experiences and re-envision how blackness, not simply as a physical state but a conceptual and perceptual one, is and

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can be who they are. This process undergone by individuals in the group is also one of redefining their notion of health, which members now characterize as “friendship” and

“the group.” Health is no longer read through the lens of illness, medication or controlled by outside forces, but manipulated and improved through the investment in their quality of life.

Within this understanding of health, black women’s mental wellbeing is connected to their everyday lives and struggles. The madness of black women is a misplaced gaze and label for those who most of the time are simply doing what they need to do in order to get by. The power of the discourse of crazy is revealed in the women’s own plays with insanity offering explanation for acts and desires that they often were aware fall outside of the norm. In some cases, like Violeta, they were conscious of their actions, asserting their agency and rejecting their labeling as ill. When Palmeira’s hair began to fall out, she too intuited she was heading down a path towards depression, which the women intoned can head into madness; she described the painful elements of her life that affectively were pulling her in that direction.

These women unveil the intense and uncomfortable affective spaces that black women inhabit, which can result from mental illness as well as be reductively read and aggressively treated as such. They also expose the harrowing socially stigmatized set of conditions that historically are linked with race and racialization. In this matrix of race, mental wellness and biomedicine, the group’s work suggests the need for greater research into the mental wellbeing of the black population in Brazil and the ways in which race comes to bear on diagnoses and the types of medical therapies offered, specifically to the users of the SUS, the public health care system, who are often black and/or economically

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poor. These women have put names, faces and histories to the specters of crazy black women throughout Brazil acknowledging their presences in society at large as well as their own connection to the archetype. Exposing this haunting provides another entry point into the types of gender racialization that are diasporic in their manifestation and are the continued sites of oppression in need of reflection and mobilization.

DREAM WORK OF BLACK WOMEN

I now switch gears to examine this group’s relationship and contribution to the history and knowledge production of black women, namely black feminisms. I return to the discussion first raised in the introduction around Valdete and her praxis of leaving her

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actions undefined. She does not self-title as a black feminist and her political thinking sits somewhere between not being concerned with and dis-identifying with the black, feminist and black feminist movements. She specifically critiques the black movement as only taking an interest in the neighborhood when they are in need of black residents’ support of a race-based issue. Her position inspires a discussion about what kinds of work black feminism as praxis does.

Internationally, black feminism is a title broadly associated with scholarship, whereas in Brazil, it is often linked with the leaders of the black women’s movement, often highly educated, politically active and writing on the topic – yet outside of the

Academy (see Caldwell 2005:150-176). Matilde Ribeiro, Sueli Carneiro, Lélia Gonzáles,

Luiza Bairros, Jurema Werneck are just some of the black feminists that have come up in this dissertation and who write in the name of black feminism. While some of these women have taught, they are best known for their political mobilization rather than academics.145 Black feminism discursively continues to need to be a distinct practice from other issue-based identities and theoretical orientations such as feminism in order to keep sight of the interlocking forms of oppression that crosscut black women’s lives and voices. Yet the difference in naming practices between black feminist activists of social movements and those grassroots leaders and organizers like Valdete, bears noting because as I will suggest, the name does not do much political work for the latter. An education is still a form of classed cultural capital in Brazil that black women NGO leaders often acquire and through which their organizations access financial resources and contacts not as easily approximated by local, community leaders who are frequently

145 For a historical look at various black women leaders and political organizers see Schumaher and Vital 2007: 327-377. 388

without formal education and economically poor. This educational and financial leveraging facilitates relative social power of negotiation and has given some black women and some of their NGOs, most importantly, autonomy of voice, but also political representation. Their lack of financial dependence on government funds contributes to their incremental growth and continued presence in the political scene. While they undergo their own marginalization and exclusion within racialized and gendered political hierarchies, they stand in a different socio-political position from women like Valdete and their collectives, which is reflective in the lack of resonance and coalitions that distinguish these black women and their vantages.

Even as Valdete is a well-known activist, her status as an economically poor, ageing black woman from the favela imposes a set of parameters around her political mobility. Valdete has successfully negotiated at the city government level on behalf of her community and their access to a comfortable, clean and safe environment in which to live. This notion of building community around the common good is a collective model that seeks to include and involve people of all ages, particularly women, into the process of mobilizing around improving the neighborhood and the quality of life of its residents.

Like the group’s work, it is a process of building awareness and reflection around residents’ connections to their space and to see themselves as part of a larger collective body. While I would claim Valdete’s egalitarian model across age, gender, race and class emblematic of black feminist praxis, I suggest that Valdete does not name her politics because titling them would not assist her objectives and moreover might compromise her mobility working with the city and its patriarchal politics and classed power structure. A black feminist journalist in Belo Horizonte familiar with Valdete contended in an

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interview that Valdete is highly aware of the context in which she organizes and lobbies and how she is viewed when negotiating with principally elite, white men and women that run the government and institutions from which she needs support. Her community, like many other black women activists, is her priority and her political profile is constructed around this environment. In working with both Valdete and black women’s

NGOs, it is in the negotiation of these two worlds and the standpoints around which they are formed that I suggest the rethinking of black women’s political and social dream work lies.

In her most recent work Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander poses the question: “What kinds of conversations do we, as black women of the diaspora, need to have that will end wasteful errors of recognition? Do we know the terms of our different migrations? Each others’ work histories? Our different yearning?” (2005:274). Like recent transnational multi-racial feminist coalitions’ call for discussions on black feminism and women’s transnational solidarities, Alexander emphasizes the most basic starting point of connection – conversations.146 Matilde’s interview and concern with

Maria do Carmo was one of these conversations and reveals a diaspora of black women that exists within Brazil. The differences in positioning between these black women lie behind the politics of naming and are spaces of crossing that Alexander posits as pointing to the divergences that need to be bridged through dialogue. Diaspora, I suggest, is a conceptual tool in framing potential connections between disparate women both across and within national borders.

146 Statement from the Global Women's Conference in September 2005 (http://www.coloredgirls.org/article.php?id=82 – 4/24/09) 390

Shared national-political spheres and a common socio-cultural ethos at large do not foreclose the diversity of black women and the particularities of their local or regional socio-political concerns in a country as vast and regionally distinct as Brazil. Differences in color, class, location (urban/rural) and sometimes sexuality more often get addressed as differentiating and dividing black women. But in researching across the wider points of the spectrum of black women’s activism, I suggest that fanning out ideas like class and color into those such as education, sexuality, place of residence, generation, health, and spiritual orientation for example, can shed light on some of the frictions that go unstated and consequently unaddressed within black women’s social and political perceptions of each other. Gendered racialization is a powerful social force ascription that activists struggle to have simply understood, but the political galvanization around it can also cast a shadow over other areas of dire concern for black women. Diaspora, as an analytical and theoretical framework, can be a sharper lens through which the investments and labor in creating coalitions and solidarities across black women can be approached. Diaspora is also a practice and an embodied concept always in the making; it requires that we do the work of having these conversations in order to begin to understand the lived differences that shape who we are. This may help to better address those outside forces that make us, black women, appear homogenous and comfortably live in more expansive ways.

From this standpoint, I posit mapping diasporas of black women’s praxis as one of the potential contributions of academics to black women’s local, national and transnational struggles, inquired into by Matilde Ribeiro. Identifying potential interlocutors can be initiated through our research projects and can generate both the needed dialogues as well as practices of creating Diaspora. During fieldwork, I brought

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black feminist activist Sônia Cleide Ferreira da Silva from Goiás to meet the community of women in Belo Horizonte. Interested in the women’s work given her own NGOs investment in black women’s mental health, provided an opportunity for her to talk with

Valdete and other women and she has since sought opportunities to bring the women to

Goiás for social and political events. In her own NGOs current work with quilombos

(maroon communities), she has used the women of Alto as a model for conducting health specific work with elder maroon women.

These conversations are starting points intended to incorporate our differences into the struggle. Focusing on the shared ways in which black women seek to create wellness in their communities, as a holistic project of mind, body and spirit, is a diasporic healing project that travels across communities, classes and nations. The women’s group offers us a different way of thinking about individual and collective wellbeing and through this work they present black women’s praxis as a flexible space in which to have these conversations and be transformed through them. Titled as black feminist or not, the group enables black women’s collective action to be seen as a praxis of reorientation around new ways of creating potential when seemingly it is gone or pre-scripted. These black women’s lives guide us to observe the multiplicity of epistemologies that exist and encourage their engagement for the individual process of self-realization and consequently social change. Never loosing sight of the importance of gendered racialization or black Brazilians’ particular historical struggle, the group helps to re-think our identifications around what we self-make as and around what we wish to become.

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VITA

Celeste Sian Henery was born in San Francisco, California. She graduated from Phillips

Academy at Andover and attended Princeton University from 1995-1999 where she received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. After several years of work and travel, she entered the graduate program in Anthropology and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Master of Arts in Anthropology in

2004.

Permanent Address: 3450 Sacramento St, 248, San Francisco, CA 94118

This manuscript was typed by the author.

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