A Specific Kind of Violence: Insanity and Identity in Contemporary Brazilian and South African Literature

Abstract

The recent histories of South Africa and Brazil share many commonalities. Most obviously, both have experienced a shared political history of democratic transition. Two somewhat similar forms of socio-political oppression and manipulation – military rule in Brazil (ended 1985) and South African apartheid (ended 1994) – have been replaced by democratic regimes and exceedingly optimistic hopes for the future. Yet neither transition has been as smooth as expected. Consequently, a liminal situation has been created, where past and present discourses compete for space. This has recently been explored in each country’s respective literatures: K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue are just two examples. This article will explore the common theme of madness in these novels to highlight liminality. In particular, I argue that the treatment of insanity denies the patient’s individuality and replicates the identity politics of the colonial situation. This, I suggest, reveals how postcolonial modernity in Brazil and South Africa relies on a continuing and normalised psycho-politics of otherness. Further, I will consider questions revolving around language, reliability and everyday emotions, focusing on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of global, national and local in both countries as they struggle to enter the modern world order. Ultimately, the only way we can alleviate madness and harness the social benefits of modernity and globalisation comes through accepting difference and understanding the specific individual circumstances of those we call ‘mad’.

Keywords:

• madness
• All Dogs Are Blue
• The Quiet Violence of Dreams
• liminality
• schizophrenia
• othering

Acknowledgements

This article is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Journal of Southern African Studies’ ‘Southern Africa Beyond the West’ conference, held in Livingstone, Zambia, in August 2015. I wish to thank all unnamed readers for their comments, and Rebecca Jones, Lyn Schumaker and Michael Wessels, who provided feedback on subsequent drafts.

Notes

¹ R. de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue (High Wycombe, &Other Stories, 2013), p. 48.

² S. Estroff, ‘Subject/Subjectivities in Dispute: The Poetics, Politics and Performance of First-Person Narratives of People with Schizophrenia’, in J. Jenkins and R. Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 299.

³ A. Kleinman, ‘Experience and its Moral Codes: Culture, Human Conditions and Disorder’, in G. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1999), p. 381.

⁴ J. Sadowsky, ‘Symptoms of Colonialism: Content and Context of Delusion in Southwest Nigeria, 1945–1960’, in Jenkins and Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity, p. 247.

⁵ I understand ‘schizophrenia’ as a blanket term where the primary symptom is a reduction in logical capacity that results in a break from ‘reality’. Secondary symptoms include hallucinations, delusions and emotional withdrawal. The illnesses described in the novels under consideration reflect these multiple symptoms.

⁶ W. Davies, ‘Brazil Truth Commission: Abuse “Rife” Under Military Rule’, BBC Online (December 2010), available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-30410741, retrieved 29 June 2015.

⁷ P. Sotero and L.E. Armijo, ‘Brazil: To Be or Not To Be a BRIC?’, Asian Perspective, 31, 4 (2007), p. 44.

⁸ Mercosur refers to a free trade agreement between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. The BRIC community became ‘BRICS’ when South Africa joined in 2010.

⁹ ‘Brazil’, World Bank (2015), available at https://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/BRA, retrieved 1 July 2015.

¹⁰ M. Ridenti, ‘Dilma Rousseff Impeachment: Brazil Threatens to Descend into a Disguised Police State’, The Conversation (13 May 2016), available at https://theconversation.com/dilma-rousseff-impeachment-brazil-threatens-to-descend-into-a-disguised-police-state-59341, retrieved 8 December 2016.

¹¹ T. Mbeki, ‘Mbeki: Presentation to FIFA on SA’s Bid for the 2010 Soccer World Cup’ (14 May 2004), available at https://www.polity.org.za/article/mbeki-presentation-to-fifa-on-sas-bid-for-2010-soccer-world-cup-14052004-2004-05-14, retrieved 10 July 2017.

¹² T. Penfold, ‘Public and Private Space in Contemporary South Africa: Perspectives from Post-Apartheid Literature’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 38, 4 (2012), pp. 993–1006.

¹³ J. Hickel, Democracy as Death (Oakland, University of California Press, 2015); L. Calvete, ‘Finding the South African Imaginary’, presentation at the University of Johannesburg, 28 March 2017.

¹⁴ B. Aretxaga, ‘Madness and the Politically Real: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World’, in M-J. DelVecchio Good, S.T. Hyde, S. Pinto and B.J. Good (eds), Postcolonial Disorders (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 43–61.

¹⁵ M. Foucault, History of Madness (London, Routledge, 1961).

¹⁶ For race, see, A. Mark, Making Race and Nation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998). For BRICS, see, O. Stuenkel, The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (New York, Lexington Books, 2015).

¹⁷ M. Loveman, ‘Making “Race” and Nation in the United States, South Africa and Brazil: Taking “Making” Seriously’, Theory and Society, 28, 6 (1999), pp. 903–27.

¹⁸ M.B. Plotkin, ‘Psychoanalysis, Race Relations and National Identity: The Reception of Psychoanalysis in Brazil’, in W. Anderson, D. Jenson and R. Keller (eds), Unconscious Dominions (London, Duke University Press, 2011).

¹⁹ A. Moreira-Almeida, ‘History of Spiritist Madness in Brazil’, History of Psychiatry, 16, 1 (2005), pp. 5–25.

²⁰ G. Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (New York, Borzoi, 1959).

²¹ Plotkin, ‘Psychoanalysis, Race Relations’, p. 132.

²² C.C. Garcia, Sheep in the Mist: A Study on Women and Madness (Rio de Janeiro, Rosa des Tempos, 1995), p. 98.

²³ E. Sánchez-Blake, ‘See the World Through My Lens: Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me Verá Llorar’, in E. Sánchez-Blake and L. Kanost (eds), Latin American Women and the Literatures of Madness (Jefferson, McFarland and Co., 2015), p. 90.

²⁴ S. Swartz, ‘The Black Insane in the Cape, 1891–1920’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 3 (1995), pp. 399–415; M. Vaughan, ‘Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9, 2 (1983), pp. 218–38.

²⁵ Swartz, ‘The Black Insane’, p. 403.

²⁶ S. Marks, ‘“Every Facility that Modern Science and Englightened Humanity have Devised”: Race and Progress in a Colonial Hospital, Valkenberg Mental Asylum, Cape Colony, 1894–1910’, in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society (London, Routledge, 1999), p. 270.

²⁷ J. Parle, ‘Witchcraft or Madness? The Amandiki of Zululand, 1984–1914’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 1 (2003), pp. 105–32.

²⁸ Vaughan, ‘Idioms of Madness’, p. 229.

²⁹ R. Keller, Colonial Madness (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007).

³⁰ Ibid., p. 171.

³¹ M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coat (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013).

³² R. Lucas, ‘In and Out of Culture: Ethnographic Means to Interpreting Schizophrenia’, in Jenkins and Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity, pp. 146–63.

³³ A. Kleinman and J. Kleinman, ‘The Transformation of Everyday Social Experience: What a Mental and Social Health Perspective Reveals about Chinese Communities under Global and Local Change’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 23, 1 (1999), p. 7.

³⁴ A. Kleinman and K-M. Lin, ‘Psychopathology and Clinical Course of Schizophrenia: A Cross-Cultural Perspective’, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 14, 4 (1988), p. 561.

³⁵ L. Sass, ‘“Negative Symptoms”, Commonsense and Cultural Disembedding in the Modern Age’, in Jenkins and Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity, p. 322.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 323.

³⁷ J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, ‘The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labour in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People’, American Ethnologist, 14, 2 (1987), p. 203.

³⁸ J. Jenkins, ‘Schizophrenia as a Paradigm Case for Understanding Fundamental Human Processes’, in Jenkins and Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity, p. 20.

³⁹ L. McGregor, ‘Kabelo Duiker’, Guardian Online (7 February 2005), available at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/feb/07/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries , retrieved 16 June 2015.

⁴⁰ The history of cannabis in Africa and Asia provides useful comment on social change and the pressures of modernity and globalisation. See Heaton, Black Skin, White Coat, p. 164.

⁴¹ Marks, ‘“Every Facility”’.

⁴² E. Corrin, R. Thara and R. Padmavati, ‘Living Through a Staggering World: The Play of Signifiers in Early Psychosis in South India’, in Jenkins and Barrett (eds), Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity, p. 140.

⁴³ K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Johannesburg, NB Publishers, 2010), p. 7.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 141.

⁴⁵ A. Carolin and R. Frenkel, ‘Sex in the Text: Representations of Same-Sex Male Intimacies in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams’, English Studies in Africa, 56, 2 (2013), p. 42.

⁴⁶ Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, p. 171.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 35.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 35.

⁴⁹ S. Viljoen, ‘Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction: Richard Rive’s Buckingham Palace, District Six and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams’, English Academy Review, 18, 1 (2001), p. 51.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, p. 419.

⁵² Ibid., p. 106.

⁵³ E. Sánchez-Blake and L. Kanost, ‘Introduction’, in Sánchez-Blake and Kanost (eds), Latin American Women, p. 7.

⁵⁴ Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, p. 122.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 141.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 21.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 102.

⁵⁸ B. Good, M-J. DelVecchio Good, S.T. Hyde and S. Pinto, ‘Introduction’, in DelVecchio Good et al., (eds), Postcolonial Disorders, p. 2.

⁵⁹ Arthur Kleinman notes how the breakdown of family structures has become increasingly evident in modernising Asia. See Kleinman and Lin, ‘Psychopathology and Clinical Course’; Kleinman and Kleinman, ‘The Transformation of Everyday Social Experience’.

⁶⁰ Viljoen, ‘Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction’, p. 50.

⁶¹ Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, p. 59.

⁶² Ibid., p. 14.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 59.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 37.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 133.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 145.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 190.

⁶⁸ P. Chesler, Women and Madness (London, Avon Books, 1972), p. 94.

⁶⁹ M. Crous, ‘On Men and Masculinity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams’, Journal of Literary Studies, 23, 1 (2007), p. 31.

⁷⁰ S. Irlam, ‘Unravelling the Rainbow: The Remission of Nation in Post-Apartheid Literature’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 104, 4 (2004), p. 711.

⁷¹ Viljoen, ‘Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction’, p. 52.

⁷² Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘The Madman and the Migrant’.

⁷³ M. Samuelson, ‘The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera’, African Identities, 5, 2 (2007), p. 252.

⁷⁴ Corrin et al., ‘Living Through a Staggering World’, p. 129.

⁷⁵ D. Bondar, ‘A Review of All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’, Literary Review (2014), available at https://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/all-dogs-are-blue-by-rodrigo-de-souza-leao, retrieved 4 July 2015.

⁷⁶ A. McDermott, ‘All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’, The Literateur (2013), available at https://www.literateur.com/all-dogs-are-blue-by-rodrigo-de-souza-leao, retrieved 1 August 2015.

⁷⁷ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 19.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 45.

⁷⁹ L. Kanost, ‘Homesickness: Lya Luft’s Exílio’, in Sánchez-Blake and Kanost (eds), Latin American Women, p. 57.

⁸⁰ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 25.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² D. Levy, ‘Introduction’, in de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 10.

⁸³ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 43.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 24.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 38.

⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 34.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 31.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 72.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 71.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 33.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 27.

⁹² Ibid., p. 42.

⁹³ Ibid., p. 28.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 42.

⁹⁵ Ibid., p. 71.

⁹⁶ Ibid., p. 22.

⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 29.

⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 58.

⁹⁹ Ibid., p. 35.

¹⁰⁰ McDermott, ‘All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’.

¹⁰¹ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 62.

¹⁰² Ibid., p. 55.

¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 69.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., p. 69.

¹⁰⁵ McDermott, ‘All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’.

¹⁰⁶ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 61.

¹⁰⁷ Levy, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.

¹⁰⁸ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 76.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 84.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., p. 50.

¹¹¹ Ibid., p. 50.

¹¹² Ibid., p. 80.

¹¹³ Ibid., p. 83.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., p. 64.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., p. 92.

¹¹⁶ Levy, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.

¹¹⁷ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 28.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., p. 49.

¹¹⁹ E. Sáanchez-Blake, ‘A Poetics of Madness: Laura Restrepo’s Delirio’, in Sánchez-Blake and Kanost (eds), Latin American Women, p. 103.

¹²⁰ Levy, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

¹²¹ McDermott, ‘All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’.

¹²² De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 95.

¹²³ McDermott, ‘All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão’.

¹²⁴ Corrin et al., ‘Living Through a Staggering World’, p. 129.

¹²⁵ S. Romero, ‘A Laboratory for Revitalizing Catholicism’, New York Times (14 February 2013), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/world/americas/in-brazil-growing-threats-to-catholicisms-sway.html?_r=0, retrieved 29 June 2016.

¹²⁶ De Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, p. 102.

¹²⁷ Ibid., p.75.