{"id":2022,"date":"2021-03-16T11:03:31","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T14:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/portfolio\/jessica-barbosa-pedro-sa-moraes-diana-kolker\/"},"modified":"2021-05-25T14:47:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T17:47:42","slug":"jessica-barbosa-pedro-sa-moraes-diana-kolker","status":"publish","type":"portfolio","link":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/portfolio\/jessica-barbosa-pedro-sa-moraes-diana-kolker\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"In Search of Judite: A Dialogue between Jessica Barbosa, Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes and Diana Kolker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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J\u00e9ssica Barbosa rehearsing for Em busca de Judith<\/em>. Photo: Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Search of Judith: A Dialogue between Jessica Barbosa, Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes and Diana Kolker<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1. Who is Judith?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

J\u00e9ssica Barbosa <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, December 2017 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dad, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How are you? How is everyone there? We’re fine here. Cicero just completed two months of life. It\u2019s been very beautiful to accompany the fast process of a baby’s development. I am completely dedicated to motherhood. Pedro’s support has been fundamental. He is discovering his fatherhood through experience. Yet, even though he is learning, he\u2019s also fully assuming the responsibility and donation of a dedicated father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mom has been a great companion too. She arrived the week Cicero was born. She took care of the midwives \u2013 making food all night, washing all the blood-soiled bed linen after delivery, and dressing her grandson for the first time, in clothes and a cap made by her. At the time of delivery, I saw my sister Geane giving birth, I saw my grandmother Ideuza. Many of my friends were present there with me. And it was at that moment that I gained strength and C\u00edcero was born. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then mom came back here to spend Christmas with us. It could not have been otherwise. She brought with her a book: Offere\u00e7o meu original como lembran\u00e7a<\/em> [I Offer my Original as a Memento] by Valter de Oliveira, husband of Nubia, my cousin, daughter of Uncle Antonio. I don’t know them yet, but I found the title of the book so beautiful … In that book I saw the photo of your mother Judith for the first time. Have you seen this photo? In a way I think I look like her, I see that Cicero has some of her features too. But I found her gaze a little sad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m curious to know more about her. I think the women in our family reveal a little about who we are … and sometimes it seems that life itself is a search for who we are, for something that reveals, that accounts for things, that translates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where did Judith come from? What are the names of my great-grandparents? I remember you telling me when I was a child that she died in a car accident when you were a baby. I also remember you saying that you had not been breastfed and that a stepmother, Aunt Elenita, your father’s second wife, had raised you and her other four children with my grandfather. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have decided to go in search of Judith. Of course, I know that in looking for Judith, in a present where she is no longer with us, is mainly looking for myself! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love you, Jessica<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo of Judith Alves Macedo by an unknown author from the archive of N\u00fabia Barbosa, cousin of J\u00e9ssica. It was used as an illustration in the book Offere\u00e7o meu original como lembran\u00e7a<\/em> by Valter de Oliveira, a history on the social function of photography in the interior of the Brazilian state of Bahia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes Carvalho<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after the birth of our son, J\u00e9ssica learned the true story of her paternal grandmother Judith for the first time. Finding this out amidst the pulsating beauty and fragility of maternal life, rubbed up against the limits of our sanity. The story of this mother, the mother of J\u00e9ssica’s father, removed from her son and committed to a mental asylum has now become unavoidable for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How many Judiths are there in the world, hidden away in the name of health or the law, with their selves torn apart? A couple with unconditional support from our family to celebrate every minute of our son’s childhood, we felt the scar of this mother, so close and so distant, and sensed the need to take on a mission to speak, through her, for so many injured mothers. To give voice to this the most fundamental of human urges, maternal love, outlawed by the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judith was born in Rui Barbosa, a small town in the interior of Bahia. The story goes that she was abandoned by her mother and married Ant\u00f4nio Barbosa, a financial administrator of the municipal district of Jacobina, at a very young age. She had four children, then a pregnancy of twins who did not survive, and then another, Jessica’s father, after which she was taken to a mental asylum where she remained until her death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judith’s image makes me think of my maternal grandmother, Dona Zez\u00e9, who also married very young. They say that her husband was enchanted with her, leaning on the balcony of the home of her mother Balbina, seamstress of the Salvadorian elite, illegitimate daughter of a mill owner and slave-concubine. Young women from poor or low class families had no choice. If luck presented them with the interest of a man in a stable economic situation, they had to raise their hands and offer their bodies and future to them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, a winning lottery ticket made my grandmother a landowner. Today there is a municipal school in Ipia\u00fa, in the cocoa region of Bahia, named after her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps only the lottery makes possible that, among so many Judiths, some become Maria Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia Moura Rolim. Laden down with questions, silences, and missing details, I first learned her name through my father. Julia was his maternal grandmother. She was admitted to a mental hospital in Recife, when grandma was still a child. Soon afterwards, my great-grandfather Manoel remarried the daughter of the man who had welcomed and helped him on his arrival in Brazil. Born in Portugal, my great-grandfather came to Brazil on the run from his own father, a very violent man, a patriarch. Manoel was very grateful to this family that helped him. It was this same gentleman, who welcomed my father in Rio de Janeiro, when he moved from Recife to here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, I remembered a conversation with a friend, Laura Gallo, in the corridors of the history faculty, about women being committed to mental asylums, motivated by questions of moral and disciplinary order.  A practice also deployed as an expedient means of facilitating economic interdictions, annulments of marriages, and redistributions of inheritances. It was a way of erasing women and removing from the scene those who got in the way of any ulterior motive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A while later, my father sent a scanned photo. It was her, Dona Julia. She wore a white dress and a veil. The garment showed only her hands, her wrists, and her face framed by her black and smooth fringe, close to her eyebrows. I look at the photo and her eyes don’t meet mine. In her hands, an open bible and a rolled up rosary, hanging lightly. Was it her wedding day? She looked no more than 16 years old. Her features do not resemble the features of my father’s family, of Portuguese descent. What justified the hospitalization? What motivated it? Where was your family? Who were they? What was your life like? When did you die?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned that her medical record was lost in a fire that destroyed the institution’s archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2017, I have been coordinating the pedagogical project of the Bispo do Rosario Museum of Contemporary Art (mBrac), located in the former Col\u00f4nia Juliano Moreira, Rio de Janeiro, [Juliano Moreia Colony] one of the largest asylums in the country. Immersed in that territory, I have met many women and men who lived through the horrors of the asylum. One of the main responsibilities of the museum, in addition to the preservation, research and exhibition of its collection, the main part of which comprises the work of Arthur Bispo do Ros\u00e1rio,  [artist and Col\u00f4nia intern for almost 50 years], is to break with the logic of the asylum by working together with former interns, health services users, and the local community through programs integrating art, education, and mental health care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One afternoon in 2018 J\u00e9ssica Barbosa came to mBrac to collaborate on the making of a short film. We met and talked about the projects of the museum\u2019s Casa B artistic residency program. Shortly afterwards, J\u00e9ssica got in touch about a residency project that would support the development of a play, motivated by the recent discovery that her grandmother Judith had been interned at Col\u00f4nia Juliano Moreira in Salvador when her father was just two months old. The discovery was made after seeing a book where Judith’s photo appeared. So, we set out Em busca de Judith<\/em>  [In Search of Judith].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photos of J\u00e9ssica Barbosa taken on the day of the first visit to Col\u00f4nia. Above the portal marking the entrance to the Juliano Moreira Colony, now the neighborhood known as Col\u00f4nia. Below the center where various former blocks where patients were interned (today no longer active) and the ruins of the manor house of the former mill that existed before the construction of the the hospital at the beginning of the 20th century.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Photos of J\u00e9ssica Barbosa taken on the day of the first visit to Col\u00f4nia. Above the portal marking the entrance to the Juliano Moreira Colony, now the neighborhood known as Col\u00f4nia. Below the center where various former blocks where patients were interned (today no longer active) and the ruins of the manor house of the former mill that existed before the construction of the the hospital at the beginning of the 20th century.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

2. Why search for Judith? <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

J\u00e9ssica Barbosa<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(a phone call from Salvador in early 2019) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi Diana, how are you? I am a little distressed. We tried to call the Col\u00f4nia Juliano Moreira in Salvador to get information about what my grandmother actually had. It was a whole day of calls, waiting, finally to hear the news that the files were burned during a fire in one of the asylum\u2019s buildings and that given the date of her death the files were lost. Then new versions of her story began to appear. And it seems to be a big puzzle that you won’t be able to put together. That they really erased this story and the way everything was done, it will be impossible to reconstruct. But I am here breastfeeding my son, you know? Wondering if when my grandmother was hospitalized, there was still milk in her breasts. And how hard it must have been for her, for my father, even though he was still a baby, for the older ones to have suffered this separation. Then I see an entire generation that fell ill, the generation of my father’s brothers. After my grandmother, two of her children also became ill. Many attribute it to her genetics, others to the fact that my great grandmother was a saint’s mother. That they went crazy because their grandmother was crazy and macumbeira [practitioner\/leader of Afro Brazilian syncretic religious rituals]. You know? I no longer know the directions in which this search is going.  But I see my grandmother’s story in so many other women, in many women who passed through Barbacena, in women who passed through the Col\u00f4nia Juliano Moreira in Rio, in a cousin of mine who almost lived the same story as my grandmother, in your great-grandmother J\u00falia… And then, as much as I have the feeling that this play seems like it will never happen, because of lack of money, or lack of anyone to be with our son so that we can rehearse, because a producer told me that this story of talking about the crazy grandmother will not interest theaters and cultural centers\u2026 as much as this all seems true, I keep wondering: WHY LOOK FOR JUDITH? And then I realize that Judith is me, it\u2019s you, it\u2019s your J\u00falia, it\u2019s Mother Celina de Xang\u00f4, it\u2019s Leide Bonfim and her ancestors. My search is not for my grandmother, but for this feminine who was imprisoned as an animal, this witch power that was silenced. In fact Diana, I think that, in the face of our creative force, we are very close to God, or better we are God, better still, we are Goddess. And in fact, the search for Judith is the search for that feminine. I am sure that it was men who went crazy, always so full of reason, so lacking in intuition and delicacy. No comparisons, this doesn\u2019t interest me. I think that looking for Judith is my own guarantee of health, it is ending certain cycles; it is having courage!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rio de Janeiro, March 4, 1979 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a few years of absence due to painful misunderstandings, my birth brought my mother’s older sister to Rio de Janeiro, who had been her strongest maternal presence in her childhood and adolescence. Angela, you have a clean belly, she was supposed to have said on seeing the white boy in the hospital nursery, you have a clean belly, I listened to the story in my childhood as if it were a very funny joke, look how backward my relatives are, you have a clean belly, clean belly! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is repeated, what we have escaped from, and what we return to is the territory. J\u00e9ssica comes from Bahia, the territory from which my mother’s family also comes \u2013 a family with dark skin, but socially and economically whitened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the only portrait of Judith to which we had access, the tone of her skin was painted until any trace of the black woman, daughter of a saint’s mother, was gone. In the portrait, she has a distant look in her eyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a white man. I grew up listening to and loving the samba that my parents played and sang at home and it was through samba that I trained as a musician, I hung out with the masters, learned about life. But it was only through J\u00e9ssica’s experience, the pain and the power of her ancestry, the connection between the future of our son and the past of her grandmother, that I realized the dimensions of the struggle that has spanned generations, and my responsibility as an ally. That’s why I’m looking for Judith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diana Kolker<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are crazy. What woman has not heard that phrase? There is now a term for this practice: gaslighting. And it is recognized as a form of psychological abuse, aimed at women, in order to manipulate, control, make one go crazy. In Brazil, until the middle of the last century, before psychiatric reform many women were committed to asylums until the end of their lives. Previously run by religious orders, these asylums became medical institutions driven by science. Asylums were a fundamental part of the hygienist and eugenicist project that guided urban reforms and the ideal of a modern Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. As apparatuses they were designed to discipline the population in order to produce subjectivities useful to the desired societal model. They fostered ideas that there was a natural role for women \u2013 the condition of wife and mother \u2013 and a physiological condition of moral fragility, which would require greater control of their passions and emotions and produced a medical lexicon that pathologized those who escaped such models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Maria Clementina da Cunha, analyzing cases of women who were institutionalized in the early 20th century, points out that the symptoms presented as indicators of madness coincided with: independence, \u201cintellectual hyperexcitation\u201d, extreme dedication to their professions to the detriment of \u201cnatural inclinations\u201d.1<\/sup>  The author also notes different patterns of institutionalization and treatment dependent on race, social class, and sexuality. Black women were the most affected in quantitative terms by the asylum institution and also in terms of \u201ctreatments\u201d aimed at them. A situation informed by theories of social degeneration, very much in vogue in the country, with black women being three times more vulnerable due to their gender, race, and class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, in searching for Judith we look for these women who had their lives stolen from them in the name of a nation project. Searching for Judith, we seek that this past does not extend into the present nor repeat itself in the future. In search of Judith, we take care of these open wounds, these pains, these losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Where to Look for Judith?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

J\u00e9ssica Barbosa <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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