death without weeping

Death without Weeping NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES 8 s o 5 Most anthropologists acknowledge a special emotional bond that exists between mother and child, owing to the physical nature of pregnancy and birth, in whatever culture they may be found. But can these strong psychological bonds undergo significant changes in the face of severe economic and social conditions? In this article about mothers in a Brazilian shanty- town, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes examines how extreme poverty, deprivation, hunger, and economic exploitation can case mothers not to mourn the death of their children. She found that mothers living under these extreme conditions develop a strategy of [ delayed attachment to their children, withholding emotional involvement until they are ; reasonably sure the child will survive. Such a strategy—while appearing cruel and unfeeling to those of us in our comfortable, middle-class surroundings—is really an emotional coping strategy for mothers living with an extraotdinatily high infant and child mortality tate. Rather than seeing “mother love” as an absolute cultural universal, Scheper-Hughes suggests that, under these extreme conditions, it is a luxury reserved for those children who survive. This article, and the book on which it is based written in 1992, provide a thoughtful and wrenching analysis of how poverty and injustice can lead to the demise of a mother's basic hutnan right of weeping for her dead children. Scheper-Fughes reminds vs that cultures are not isolated, insulated entities that de- termine people’s behavior. Instead we ate compelled to look at the factors from the wider society—such as political, religious, and economic institutions—impinging on people’s - behavior. . : i T have seen death without weeping i ‘' The destiny of the Northeast is death Cattle they kill To the people they do something wotse — Anonymous Brazilian Singer -1955) e rer b “Why do the church bells ring so often” I asked Nailza de Arruda soon after I moved into a corner of her tiny mud-walled hut near the top of the shantytown cafled the Alto do Cruzeiro (Crucifix Hill). T was then a Peace Corps volunteer and a SOURCE: From Natural History, October, 1989, pp. 8, 10, 12, 14, 16. © 1989 by Nancy Scheper-Fughes. Reprinted by permission of the author. community development/health worker. It was the dry and blazing hot summer of 1965, the months following the military coup in Brazl, and - save for the rusty, clanging bells of N. S. das Dores Church, an eerie quiet had settled over the market

54 ARTICLE 8 town that I call Bom Jesus da Mata. Beneath the quict, however, there was chaos and panic. “It’s nothing,” replied Nailza, “just another little angel gone to heaven.” Nailza had sent more than her share of little angels to heaven, and sometimes at night I could hear her engaged in a muffled but passionate dis- course with one of them, two-year-old Joana. Joana’s photograph, taken as she lay propped up in her tiny cardboard coffin, her eyes open, hung on a wall next to one of Nailza and Ze Antonio taken on the day they eloped. Nailza could bately remember the other infants and babies who came and went in close succession. Most had died unnamed and were hastily baptized in their coffins. Few lived more than a month or two. Only Joana, properly baptized in church at the close of her first yéar and placed under the protec- tion of a powerful saint, Joan of Arc, had been ex- pected to live. And Nailza had dangerously allowed herself to love the little gitl. In addressing the dead child, Nailza’s voice would range from tearful imploring to angry recrimination: “Why did you leave me? Was your patron saint so greedy that she could not allow me one child on this earth?” Ze Antonio advised me to ignore Nailza’s odd behavior, which he understood as a kind of madness that, like the birth and death of children, came and went. Indeed, the premature birth of a stillborn son some months later “cured” Nailza of her “inappropriate” grief, and the day came when she removed Joana’s photo and care- fully packed it away. More thap fifteen years elapsed before I returned to the Alto do Cruzeiro, and it was an- thropology that provided the vehicle of my return. Since 1982 T have returned several times in order to pursue a problem that first attracted my attention in the 1960s. My involvement with the people of the Alto do Cruzeiro now spans a quarter of 2 century and three generations of parenting in a community where mothers and daughters are often simultd- neously pregnant. The Alto do Cruzeiro is one of three shanty- towns surrounding the large market town of Bom Jesus in the sugar plantation zone of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil, one of the many zones of neglect that have emerged in the shadow of the now tarnished economic miracle of Brazl. For the women and children of the Alto do Cruzeiro the only miracle is that some of them have managed to stay alive at all. The Northeast is a region of vast proportions (approximately twice the size of Texas) and of equally vast social and developmental problems. The nine states that make up the region are the poorest in the country and are representative of the Third World within a dynamic and rapidly in- dustrializing nation. Despite waves of migrations from the interior to the teeming shantytowns of coastal cities, the majority still live in rural areas on farms and ranches, sugar plantations and mills. Life expectancy in the Northeast is only forty years, largely because of the appallingly high rate of infant and child mortality. Approximately one mil- lon children in Brazil under the age of five die each year. The children of the Northeast, especially those born in shantytowns on the periphery of ur- ban life, are at a very high risk of death. In these areas, children are born without the traditional pro- tection of breast-feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult caretakers that exists in the interior. In the hillside shentytowns that spring up around cities or, in this case, interior mar- ket towns, marriages are brittle, single parenting is the norm, and women are frequently forced into - the shadow economy of domestic work in the homes of the rich or into unprotected and often- times “scab” wage labor on the surrounding sugar plantations, where they clear land for planting and weed for a pittance, sometimes less than a dollar a day. The women of the Alto may not bring their babies with them int6 the homes of the wealthy, where the often sick infants are considered sources of contamination, and they cannot carry the Little ones to the riverbanks where they wash clothes be- cause the river is heavily infested with schistosomes and other deadly parasites. Nor can they carry their young children to the plantations, which are often several miles away. At wages of a dollar a day, the women of the Alto cannot hire baby sitters. Older children who are not in school will sometimes serve - i

b 56 ARTICLE 8 women who took turns caring for one another’s children (in order to free themselves for part-time work in the cane fields or washing clothes) laughed at my efforts to save Ze, agreeing with Lourdes that here was a baby without a ghost of a chance. Leave him alone, they cautioned. It makes no sense to fight with death. But I did do battle with Ze, and after several weeks of force-feeding (malnourished babies lose their interest in food), Ze began to suc- cumb to my ministrations, He acquired some flesh across his taut chest bones, learned to sit up, and even tried to smile. When he seemed well enough, I retumned him to Lourdes in her miserable scrap- material lean-to, but not without guilt about what I had done. I wondered whether returning Ze was at all fair to Lourdes and to his little brother. But I was busy and washed my hands of the matter. And Lourdes did seem more interested in Ze now that he was looking more human. When I returned in 1982, there was Lourdes among the women who formed my sample of Alto mothers—still struggling to put together some semblance of life for a now grown Ze and her five other surviving children. Much was made of my reunion with Ze in 1982, and everyone enjoyed retelling the story of Ze’s rescue and of . how his mother had given him up for dead. Ze would laugh the loudest when told how I had had to force-feed him like a fiesta turkey. There was no hint of guilt on the part of Lourdes and no resentment on the part of Ze. In fact, when questioned in private as to who was the best friend he ever had in life, Ze took a long drag on his cigarette and answered without a trace of irony, “Why my mother, of course.” “But of course,” I replied. Part of learning how to mother in the Alto do Cruzeiro is learning when to let go of a child who shows that it “wants” to die or that it has no “knack” or no “taste” for life. Another part is learn- ing when it is safe to let oneself love a child, Frequent child death remains a powerful shaper of maternal thinking and practice. In the absence of firm expectation that a child will survive, mother love as we conceptualize it (whether in popular terms or in the psychobiological notion of maternal bonding) is attenuated and delayed with conse- quences for infant survival. In an environment already precarious to young life, the emotional detachment of mothers toward some of their babies contributes even further to the spiral of high mor- tality—high fertility in a kind of macabre lock-step dance of death. The average woman of the Alto experiences 9.5 pregnancies, 3.5 child deaths, and 1.5 stillbirths. Seventy percent of all child deaths in the Alto occur in the first six months of life, and 82 percent by the end of the first year. Of all deaths in the community each year, about 45 percent are of children under the age of five. ' ’ Women of the Alto distinguish between child deaths understood as natural (caused by diarrhea and communicable diseases) and those resulting from sorcery, the evil eye, or other magical or supernatural afflictions. They also recognize a large category of infant deaths seen as fated and inevita- ble. These hopeless cases are classified by mothers under the folk terminology ‘“child sickness” or “child attack.” Women say that there are at least fourteen different types of hopeless child sickness, but most can be subsumed under two categories— chronic and acute. The chronic cases refer to infants who ate born small and wasted. They are deathly pale, mothers say, as well as weak and passive. They demonstrate no vital force, no liveliness. They do not suck vigorously; they hardly cry. Such babies can be this way at birth or they can be born sound but soon show no resistance, no “fight” against the common crises of infancy: diarrhea, respiratory infections, tropical fevers. The acute cases are those doomed infants who die suddenly and violently. They are taken by stealth overnight, often following convulsions that bring on head banging, shaking, grimacing, and shricking. Women say it is horrble to look at such a baby. If the infant begins to foam at the mouth or gnash its teeth or go rigid with its eyes turned back inside its head, there is absclutely no s hope. The infant is “put aside”—left alone—often on the floor in a back room, and allowed to die. These symptoms (which accompany high fevers, de- hydration, third-stage malnutrition, and encephalitis) L

Yot F are equated by Alto women with madness, epilepsy, and worst of all, rabies, which is greatly feared and highly stigmatized. Most of the infants presented to me as suffering from chronic child sickness were tiny, wasted fam- ine victims, while those labeled as victims of acute child attack seemed to be infants suffering from the deliriums of high fever or the convulsions that can accompany electrolyte imbalance in dehydrated babies. Local midwives and traditional healers, praying women, as they are called, advise Alto women on when to allow a baby to die. One midwife ex- plained: “If I can see that a baby was born unfor- tuitously, I tell the mother that she need not wash the infant or give it a cleansing tea. I tell her just to dust the infant with baby powder and wait for it to die.” Allowing nature to take its course is not seen as sinful by these often very devout Catholic women. Rather, it is understood as cooperating with God’s plan. Often I have been asked how consciously women of the Alto behave in this regard. I would have to say that consciousness is always shifting be- tween allowed and disallowed levels of awareness. For example, I was awakened early one moming in 1987 by two neighborhood children who had been sent to fetch me to a hastily organized wake for a two-month-old infant whose mother I had unsuc- cessfully urged to breast-feed. The infant was being sustained on sugar water, which the mother referred to as soro (serum), using a medical term for the infant’s starvation regime in light of his chronic diarrhea. I had cautioned the mother that an infant could not live on soro forever. The two girls urged me to console the young mother by telling her that it was “too bad” that her infant was so weak that Jesus had to take him. They were coaching me in proper Alto etiquette. I agreed, of course, but asked, “And what do you think?” Xoxa, the' eleven-year-old, looked down at her dusty flip-flops and blurted out, “Oh, Dona Nandi, that baby never got enough to eat, but you must never say that!” And so the death of hungry babies remains one of the best kept secrets of life in Bom Jesus da Mata. DEATH WITHOUT WEEPING, 57 Most victims are waked quickly and with a minimum of ceremony. No tears are shed, and the neighborhood children form a tiny procession, carrying the baby to the town graveyard where it will join a multitude of others. Although a few fresh flowers may be scattered over the tiny grave, no " stone or wooden cross will mark the place, and the same spot will be reused within a few months® time. The mother will never visit the grave, which soon becomes an anonymous one. ‘What, then, can be said of these women? What emotions, what sentiments motivate them? How are they able to do what, in fact, must be done? What does mother love mean in this inhospitable context? Are grief, mouming, and melancholia present, although deeply repressed? If so, where shall we look for them? And if not, how are we to understand the moral visions and moral sensibili~ ties that guide their actions? I have been criticized more than once for pre- senting an unflattering portrait of poor Brazilian women, women who are, after all, themselves the victims of severe social and institutional neglect. I have described these women as allowing some of their children to die, as if this were an unnatural and inhuman act rather than, as I would assert, the way any one of us might act, reasonably and rationally, under similarly desperate conditions. Perhaps I have - not emphasized enough the real pathogens in this environment of high risk: poverty, deprivation, sexism, chronic hunger, and economic exploitation. If mother love is, as many psychologists and some feminists believe, 2 seemingly natural and universal maternal script, what does it mean to women for whom scarcity, loss, sickness, and deprivation have made that love frantic and robbed them of their grief, seeming to tumn their hearts to stone? Throughout much of human history—as in a great deal of the impoverished Third World today—women have had to give birth and to nur ture children under-ecological conditions and social arrangements hostile to child survival, as well as to their own well-being. Under circumstances of high childhood mortality, patterns of selective neglect and passive infanticide may be seen as active survival strategies.

regime of “liberation theology,” the bells of N.S. das Dores parish church no longer peal for the death of Alto babies, and no priest accompanies the procession of angels to the cemetery where their bodies are disposed of casually and without ceremony. Children bury children in Bom Jesus da Mata. In this most Catholic of communities, the coffin is handed to the disabled and irritable municipal gravedigger, who often chides the chil- dren for one reason or another. It may be that the coffin is larger than expected and the gravedigger can find no appropriate space. The children do not wait for the gravedigger to complete his task. No prayers are recited and no sign of the cross made as the tiny coffin goes into its shallow grave. When I asked the local priest, Padre Marcos, about the lack of church ceremony surrounding infant and childhood death today in Bom Jesus, he replied: “In the old days, child death was richly celebrated. But those were the baroque customs of a conservative church that wallowed in death and misery. The new church is a church of hope and joy. We no longer celebrate the death of child angels. We try to tell mothers that Jesus doesn't want all the dead babies they send him.” Similarly, the new church has changed its baptismal customs, now often refusing to baptize dying babies brought to the back door of a church or rectory. The mothers are scolded by the church attendants and told to go home and take care of their sick babies. Baptism, they are told, is for the living; it is not to be confused with the sacrament of extreme unction, which is the anointing of the dying. And so it appears to the women of the Alto that even the church has tumed away from them, denying the traditional comfort of folk- Catholicism. The contemporary Catholic church is caught in the clutches of a double bind. The new theology of liberation imagines a kingdom of God on earth based on justice and equality, a world without hun- ger, sickness, or childhood mortality. At the same time, the church has not changed its official posi- tion on sexuality and reproduction, including its sanctions against birth control, abortion, and sterili- zation. The padre of Bom Jesus da Mata recognizes DEATH WITHOUT WEEPING 59 this contradiction intuitively, although he shies away from discussions on the topic, saying that he prefers to leave questions of family planning to the discretion and the “good consciences” of his impoverished parishioners. But this, of course, side- steps the extent to which those good consciences have been shaped by traditional church teachings in Bom Jesus, especially by his recent predecessors. Hence, we can begin to see that the seeming indif- ference of Alto mothers toward the death of some of their infants is but a pale reflection of the official indifference of church and state to the plight of poor women and children. Nonetheless, the women of Bom Jesus are sur- vivors. One woman, Biu, told me her life history, returning again and again to the themes of child death, her first husband’s suicide, abandonment by her father and later by her second husband, and all the other losses and disappointments she has suffered in her long forty-five years. She concluded with great force, reflecting on the days of Carnaval ’88 that were fast approaching: No, Dona Nanci, [ won’t cry, and [ won’t waste my life thirking about it from morning to night... Can I argue with God for the state that I'm in? No! And so I'll dance and I'll jump and I'll play Carnaval! And yes, I'll laugh and people will wonder at a pobre like me who can have such a good time. And no one did blame Biu for dancing in the streets during the four days of Camaval—not even on Ash Wednesday, the day following Carnaval ’88 when we all assembled hurriedly to assist in the burial of Mercea, Biu’s beloved casula, her last- born daughter who had died at home of pneumo- nia during the festivities. The rest of the family barely had time to change out of their costumes. Severino, the child’s uncle and godfather, sprinkled holy water-over the little angel while he prayed: “Mercea, I don’t know whether you were called, taken, or thrown out of this world. But look down at us from your heavenly home with tenderness, with pity, and with mercy.” So be it.

ARTICLE 8 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Why don’t women in Bom Jesus, Brazil, grieve outwardly for their dead children? Do you think that mother, love is an innate human emotion? How do you think Scheper- Hughes would answer that question? Are there any possible sociocultural changes in the overall social structure of Bom Jesus, Brazil, that might be made to change the way mothers deal with the death of their children? 'RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET @. InfoTrac College Edition infotrac-college.com You can find further relevant readings by searching InfoTrac College Edition, an online library with access to thousands of scholarly and populdr periodicals. Below are suggested search terms for this article: * infant mortality rate ®» maternal love Anthropology Online: Wadsworth'’s Anthropology Resource Center academic.cengage.com/anthropology The Wadsworth Anthropology Resource Center contains a wealth of information and useful tools for students including information on careers in anthropology. R R eI T e