
Listening Rehearsal/Essay: The falatório of Stella Patrocínio¹
Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias, Natasha Felix e Sara Ramos
Mediation: Diana Kolker
Diana Kolker: Good afternoon. So glad to welcome you all here! This event is a collaboration between the Education and Art Program of the Bispo Rosario[1] Museum of Contemporary Art (mBrac) and the Graduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts (PPGCA) at UFF (Federal Fluminense University), as part of the transdisciplinary seminar course “Shells, Sieves and Hems: Contemporary Artistic, Clinical and Care Practices” taught by Jessica Gogan, of whom I am a great fan–I never miss an opportunity to say that. Each partnership is very important and precious and an opportunity for us to reflect on the institution’s practices. This event today, which we are calling “Listening rehearsal/essay,” is importantly taking place literally within the exhibition Stella do Patrocínio: Show me that I am not alone, that there are others like me, similar to me and different. It is an invitation to listen to the voice of Stella do Patrocínio recorded in what she called her falatório (chatter) and to talk about the reverberations of her voice in our bodies.
Born in 1941 in Rio de Janeiro, Stella do Patrocínio, an Afro-Brazilian woman in her early 20s, was one day walking down a street in the city’s neighborhood of Botafogo when, in a manner similar to the artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario, she was arrested by the police and compulsorily admitted to the Pedro II Psychiatric Centre (CPPII) at the age of twenty-one. In 1966, she was transferred to the former mental institution Colônia Juliano Moreira (CJM), where she remained until her death at the age of fifty-one. The same asylum where Bispo was also interned and produced his works and where, after his death, the Bispo do Rosario Museum was inaugurated and that brings us here now.²
In 1986, as part of the movement to humanize practices in psychiatric contexts, the project Oficina de Livre Criação Artística (Workshop of Free Artistic Creation) was created at CJM in partnership with the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts (EAV). Conceived by psychologists Denise Correa and Marlene Sá Freire, with the guidance of the artist Nelly Gutmacher and the participation of artists Carla Guagliardi and Márcio Rolo, who were EAV students at the time, the project organized art workshops for inmates at the now-defunct Teixeira Brandão Centre (formerly the women’s inpatient pavilion). It was in this context that Carla Guagliardi and Nelly Gutmacher, at Carla’s suggestion, began recording their conversations with Stella–the impactful falatório (chatter), as Stella called it. Years later, Mônica Ribeiro de Souza, a psychology intern at the time, also recorded Stella’s speech on other cassette tapes (unfortunately lost) and partially transcribed some of the material. In 2001, after Stella’s death, the falatório took another form, as a book of poetry, entitled Stella do Patrocínio: Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome (Stella do Patrocínio: Kingdom of Critters and Animals is My Name) edited by Viviane Mosé. Since then, Stella do Patrocínio’s words have become well known, inspiring various publications, artistic productions, and academic research.
Stella’s presence in her falatório reinvents language in a dynamic flow. The audios of the falatório are reproduced in full in this exhibition as a modest attempt to capture something of Stella’s passage in the world by making her voice resonate: denouncing the normatizing, patriarchal, and racist society that used the medical model to exclude and silence people who differed in some way from the hegemonic model. Curated collectively by Patrícia Ruth, Rogeria Barbosa, Raquel Fernandes, Ricardo Resende and myself, the exhibition focuses on the spoken-word, written, drawn, sewn, embroidered, danced, performed, and sung – all mobilized by listening to Stella do Patrocínio’s speech, in an effort to challenge institutionalization and affirm Stella’s relevance in contemporary intellectual and artistic production. In dialogue with Stella’s falatório, as part of the exhibition, we also present the work of artists: Annaline Curado, Morena, Panmela Castro, Patricia Ruth, Priscila Rezende, Rosana Palazyan, Val Souza, Zahy and here today with us Natasha Felix, Rogéria Barbosa, and Vanessa Alves.
Today’s event, which purposely takes place in the context of the exhibition and now on these pages, was collectively woven together with three people deeply affected by Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório and who have been making great contributions to advancing our understanding and appreciation of Stella and the falatório and whom I will now briefly present in their own words [more complete mini bios can be read at the end of this dialogue]:
Sara Ramos is a researcher, editor, translator, and poet from Tocantins. With a master’s degree in comparative literature from UNILA (Federal University for Latin American Integration), she has great respect for words, whether written, spoken or embodied. She currently lives in Rio de Janeiro and is the author of the chapbook Pequeno manual da fúria (2022).
Natasha Felix is a poet and performer. In her performances, she investigates the interlocutions between the black body, the spoken word and intersections with other languages, such as dance, music and audiovisuals. Her work in the exhibition–she will speak more about it later–draws on her encounter with Stella and other important people in a kind of triangulation.
Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias works as an artisan, educator and doctoral researcher in Literary Theory and History at the Institute of Language Studies at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). She holds a master’s degree from the same institute, and is the author of Stella do Patrocínio, ou o retorno de quem sempre esteve aqui (Stella do Patrocínio or the return of who has always been here), 2023.
In the morning we talked a lot about the centrality of listening in the construction of this exhibition. This exhibition is an invitation to listen, especially to Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório. Also in the morning, Vanessa Alves, one of the artist residents invited as part of the exhibition, spoke about the curatorial remit for the residencies and her creative process based on her contact with Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório. I want to emphasize her words here again: not to look for ways of reproducing or translating the falatório, but rather through an affective relationship to seek out what words, force, and power of Stella remains in the body. Vanessa asked herself these questions: What of all this might she incorporate? What was she listening to? How does this listening reverberate in her work as an artist? So, our invitation to you is also an exercise of attention, listening, thinking, and feeling with the falatório. What of Stella’s voice and of the reverberations that Anna Carolina, Sara and Natasha will bring, what resonates and what becomes embodied in the body. The invitation is for each person to ask themselves: “Of all that has been said, what have I heard?” What resonates in my mind? OK? Good? Anything else you’d like to add?
Jessica Gogan: I just wanted to bring up a reflection of Saidiya Hartman – Afro American writer and academic whose work focuses on race. She talks about the importance of artists offering models for de-cluttering the archive: rearranging and transforming them in order to look at their contents from below, from the perspective of those in the basement, as it were, contesting the regimes of fact and truth. I think that today, with Sara, Natasha, and Anna Carolina, we are trying to bring about this powerful (dis)organization and to open up other ways of listening. I would also like to congratulate Anna Carolina and Sara for their research and Natasha for her moving performance at the opening of the exhibition. I’m very grateful for your collaboration and for the artists/researchers participating in the “Shells, Sieves and Hems” seminar series for being with us today. I’d also like to echo Diana’s introduction and say I am a big fan of Diana’s and the Bispo do Rosario Museum. It’s very rare to have this intersection, this poetic and critical entanglement of art, education and curatorship coupled with this drive to think about the institution in a new way. Thank you for this precious time together.
Sara Ramos: Before beginning I also want to first say thank you for the invitation and for all the work being done here at the museum; I’m very happy to be here today. Something that was really beautiful about the first personal contact between myself, Natasha, and Anna Carolina (Carol), is that we sat down together to listen to Stella. We had already been exchanging virtually, and the impulse for our first meeting was because of this movement of attentive listening and project of transcription. Carol’s work really guided our meetings, and she will be the one to start the conversations because her research provides a very interesting overview of Stella’s trajectory, the gaps, the archives, the institutional mediations, and the context as a whole.
Natasha Felix: Good afternoon. Thank you for coming, this kind of articulation is very important. I’m very happy to be here. I think this kind of collective movement is in fact what we do naturally when we think about Stella, we turn to the collective when we talk about her. Sara and I live together, that’s something I’ll talk about later. Carol lived with us for a while too. So, our encounter was a very strong thing for us, listening to Stella from the start brought us closer together, so having this network here is very important to be able to articulate together around a history that has undergone attempts of erasure. Stella’s memory itself has been systematically violated, and a history made worse by successive errors, and mostly errors of whiteness, within the system of whiteness. So, this revision is continuous and never-ending. Every time you go back to listen to Stella, you come across something different. There are so many connections that come up and they don’t stop, because this archive is actually a corrupt archive. So, we did a job of hacking this memory as well. When there are gaps, we hack to find ways of talking about the cracks. Here, the concern is to be more and more respectful of memory, especially of a person who is no longer with us. I remember the second time I came to the Colônia and the museum. Luis [Carlos Marques] was with us, an artist from [Ateliê] Gaia³, and we were talking about doing justice for Stella. I don’t know how to do justice is a line of hers featured in Linn da Quebrada’s song that we looped here before we started this conversation. Speaking about justice became a way for us to have a conversation with the Gaia artists. And Luis said: “The howl doesn’t end.” Then he shouted and said: “See? It doesn’t end.” So, there’s something about voice that lingers within the imagination, we have a responsibility toward that voice, a voice that is also a body – body, voice, and vice versa.
Ok so, myself, Sara and Carol, we will alternate speaking and also go with the flow of whoever feels like talking, it will be something of a freer conversation that way.
Anna Carolina Vicentini: Hello everyone. Unfortunately on the day of the event I was unable to attend in person and Natasha and Sara, two very dear women to whom I am very grateful, read a text that I had published in Revista Cult in 2020, which I called “Stella do Patrocínio, ou o retorno de quem sempre esteve aqui” (Stella do Patrocínio, or the return of someone who has was always been here).⁴ When we began editing the transcription of our conversation, I took the opportunity, thanks to Jessica, to revise and expand on what was presented that day, a topic which I’ve been working on for around eight years now. I’d also like to thank Diana and acknowledge her commitment to changing the discourse produced around Stella do Patrocínio and the falatório and also salute Rogéria, Lucas and Vanessa for their contributions to this rehearsal/essay of listening.
First of all, I am going to ask for your permission Stella, to talk about your life through my encounter with it, a joint historiography as it were. From the beginning of my research until today, it is clear that there have been important changes in relation to the reception of Stella do Patrocínio. As the text I wrote for Revista Cult can be accessed on the internet, I would like to take advantage of this space to produce another text, so that the seams of the conversations continue to be aligned, but with a little more freedom. The text read by Sara and Natasha the day of the event was intended to publicize the main results of my research. I was in a bit of a hurry to publish some information, because I thought that the version of Stella’s biography and the falatório published in 2001 could no longer operate among us as if they were true. So now that I’ve done my research and corrected those errors, I can tell this story.
Stella do Patrocínio was born on the 9th of January 1941 in Rio de Janeiro. She lived for twenty-one years in freedom. This part of her life is almost unknown, except for the memories of one of her nephews, with whom I spoke, and who lived with her for a few years. He said that she lived with notebooks, that she wanted to get other jobs and not just work as a maid, like her mother. He told me that Stella read and wrote very well, and she had a way of expressing herself that was very much her own, something that she shared with her mother, Zilda Francisca. The two had a very similar way of communicating.
Stella do Patrocínio had a few brothers, who died early, and two sisters. These siblings reached adulthood, married, and had children, but have also since died. On one morning, afternoon or evening in Botafogo, when Stella was on Voluntários da Pátria Street, at the age of twenty-one, she had a run-in with the police that would change the course of her life forever. She wasn’t alone, but with Luiz, a friend. The police arrested her by force and brought her to an emergency room, right there in Botafogo. It was August of 1962. Then they took her to a mental hospital in Engenho de Dentro that had hospitalized her mother, following a diagnosis of depression. Zilda had already lost three male children and she had ended up in the asylum because of depression. Stella and her sisters had grown apart from their mother.
But when Stella arrived at Engenho, Zilda was already at Colônia Juliano Moreira. Stella was soon transferred there too. Starting in 1966 the two were interned together in the same ward for women, Teixeira Brandão. Neither of them had any right to medical discharge. At that time, Colônia Juliano Moreira was intended for those people who did not have the right to medical discharge and would die there, functioning as a true “end of the line” of psychiatric hospitals in Rio de Janeiro.
They didn’t even give the family any notice of death. Stella’s nephew said that he went with his mother to visit Stella and Zilda, but on the day that they got there, and he can’t remember the approximate date, they told them that Zilda had died. She had already been buried as an indigent. They only told him because he had asked.
It was in the 1980s that things began to change, and now I’d like to point out that as I’m telling you about Stella’s biography, I’m also telling you about the history of asylums in Brazil. How they worked, how the police acted to sanitize cities by putting people in mental institutions. They said they needed to treat illnesses, but, in reality, they were imprisoning people, producing illnesses, taking away freedom, preventing patients’ rights to come and go, turning people into inmates, and even taking away their power of speech. Asylums were often denounced for mistreatment, torture with electroshock, and so on. A diagnosis meant being sentenced to hospitalization and also to silence, because everything a person with a diagnosis said was understood as untrue, as delirium, as something that should not be taken into account.
So, we can see this history of asylums is one that perpetuated violence within the same family. At the end of the 1980s, Zilda had already died, but Stella was still in the psychiatric hospital, having electroshock therapy, being watched over, sharing space with a throng of women in overcrowded wards where there was no privacy.
Stella, who used to study to try and get other types of work, was captured by the police, the same institution that still produces death and imprisonment today, especially of black people like Stella and Zilda. So, there was no time. The police arrived before Stella realized what she wanted, the asylum as well. They came to stop, control, interrupt.
All of this, these problems of the asylum, began to be discussed in the 1980s, when a movement began to gain momentum in Brazil. It was called the Anti Asylum Struggle (and also Antimanicomial Movement). This movement is still active today and continues to face various challenges, although now they are different. At the beginning of the Anti- Asylum Struggle, as it was called, the aim was to change the operationalization of psychiatric practice and knowledge and to demand, instead, spaces of mental health for populations that needed medical care. Asylums had been historically places of disease and deliberate torture. Stella do Patrocínio spoke of this too.
So, they began to realize that electroshock, overcrowding, punishment, vigilance, imprisonment, exploitation of labor, as well as serious abuses of authority and violence by asylum guards were recurrent practices in these places. There’s even a book about this called Brazilian Holocaust, which is the result of research by the journalist Daniela Arbex in a mental hospital in Minas Gerais. That asylum was responsible for one of Brazil’s great genocides. While there were anomalies, inhumane treatment was the rule, not the exception, in asylums. They were apparatuses of genocide, memoricide, and torture. It’s very painful to have to say this kind of thing, but this past needs to be told and those who were responsible for it held accountable.
The Colônia Juliano Moreira (Juliano Moreia Colony) was no different. This asylum, not only inherited the surrounding land, but also many of its former slave practices. I say this because, before it became an asylum, the place was a slave plantation. Just like the current Nise da Silveira Municipal Institute (formerly the Pedro II Psychiatric Hospital). That’s why the Anti Asylum Struggle wanted to transform these environments. They demanded, among other things, the humanization of mental healthcare practices within these institutions. The mistreatment was truly scandalous. Around the same time in 1980, the popular Globo TV Sunday feature program Fantástico aired a report on the conditions of Colônia Juliano Moreira. This report caused a lot of repercussions. TV viewers were shocked and subsequently various media outlets reported on what was happening in these institutions in Brazil.
And who were the majority of the interned population? Black people, especially women with low incomes and low levels of education, with little or no family ties. There’s no doubt that we’re talking about social hygiene, racism, sexism, class warfare, and other problems that are part of our national history. These are crimes, right? These are state crimes. They need to be named as such. I can’t call it by any other name.
In Stella’s institutional life, things began to change with the arrival of a project aimed at humanizing the asylum, thanks to the Anti Asylum Struggle folk who were now working at Colônia Juliano Moreira. They proposed creating an art project conceived as an open studio for artistic production. One of the assistants in this project began to record what Stella do Patrocínio was saying. This was Carla Guagliardi, who until recently kept the collection of cassette tapes featuring the falatório. I remember that it was when I asked for the files that she had them digitally transferred. The project only lasted a short time, from 1986 to 1988. Someone else also recorded the falatório as well, and this person did a great job, because as well as recording and talking to Stella, she also collected biographical data on her and looked for family members because she wanted Stella to be discharged. When we spoke, she told me that she wanted to give a past to someone who no longer had one. But she couldn’t find anyone at the time. This was between 1990 and 1991. I’m talking about Mônica Ribeiro de Souza, who at the time was working as a psychology intern at Colônia Juliano Moreira. Mônica was the first health worker to record in the hospital archives that Stella recited poetry. This challenged those judgements of her speech as coming from a place of delirium and that Stella couldn’t communicate, opening it up to another kind of listening. Many of the staff laughed at her for it. Mônica didn’t listen to their laughter and mockery. She was interested in actually getting a medical discharge for Stella, a chance to release her from the place where she should never have ended up. Mônica even typed up transcripts of conversations with Stella, took some things from Carla’s audios and made a little book, which she handed in as a report, called Versos, reversos, pensamentos e algo mais… (Verse, reverse, thoughts and something more). This was also the first time that the falatório was transcribed and formatted as poetic verse.
There’s a lot of the falatório in there that isn’t in Carla Guagliardi’s audiotapes. Here, there are other conversations, other directions. However, these tapes were lost, so now, only the written record remains. It was only between 1986 and 1991 that these recordings of the falatório were made. This is the intellectual legacy that we now have access to, that Stella do Patrocínio left us. There is also a notebook in which she wrote, drew flowers, traced her hands, and played tic-tac-toe.
Posthumously, almost ten years after Stella’s death, a philosopher–Viviane Mosé–edited the falatório, drawing on material organized by Mônica and recorded by Carla, and produced a book that ended up presenting Stella do Patrocínio as a Brazilian poet. Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome was launched in 2001 and published by Azougue. The book introduced Stella do Patrocínio to the literary market, outside of the asylum context.
But the way this happened seemed to repeat asylum narratives. For example, one thing that always bothered me was: why is the biography of a poet presented in a way that only talks about the actions of third parties and never about the poet herself? Why is her biography entirely associated with her involuntary interning? How is it that things are so readily consumed that the practices of the asylum, the reasons for her interning, her own words are not taken into account in order to present her trajectory?
Little by little, I realized that Stella is less tied to the asylum than those who talk about her. That’s because that space was always denied to her. Listen! Damn it! She’s talking! That’s what it’s about. Literature ended up producing another mode of framing. So, if the falatório, which is her voice, has been recognized without actually being heard, then that recognition is only partial.
Not even her name was spelt correctly. Not only the biography, but Stella’s name itself was mutilated. In the notebook where she made notes and drawings, she wrote her name in her own handwriting: Stella do Patrocínio with two Ls, not just one, as the book presented her. In other words, this woman, who was named a poet in 2001, became visible and invisible at the same time. Stella became a poet and a character packaged and authorized on the literary market. Narratives constructed not only in her absence, but also in denial of what she said.
Next, the book says that Stella did not receive visits, which is incorrect. This gives the idea that she had suffered family abandonment, something very different from being captured by the police and neglected by the asylum. The stories weren’t told properly. Again, I’d like to say that Stella herself recounts this moment on more than one occasion. The reason for her death was also presented in a questionable way. The book says that she refused to speak or eat, going into total mutism, but, in reality, she was suffering the consequences of an amputation, being a person with diabetes who suffered complications and went into a state of stupor before the coma that heralded her death on 20 October 1992. Stella was buried as an indigent, just like her mother. There are no remains. They had no right to a grave or even a [small mausoleum] drawer.
If the falatório is a counter-offensive, if it is a denial of the hegemonic discourses produced about asylum institutions, about Stella herself, and about racial, social and political tensions in Brazil, and it can be read in the light of all this, then it makes sense that literature, it’s history marked by various power plays, would silence her. Literature acted as another great sentencer of Stella, intending to be the final word on her, talking about her life trajectory in a way that placed all the responsibility in Stella’s lap. So, we need to look at all of this and put things into context, a task that can’t be ignored. This story needs to be told properly–and if it is told properly, it will bring to light a lot of shit about the powers of the state, the functioning of psychiatric hospitals, and our national education, among other things.
Finally, I must also mention that I realized–when comparing the book with the original sources used for its production–that, as well as inserting words, cutting out passages and reordering sentences, among other things, the editing team misidentified a few lines that were not actually Stella’s, but those of Ivonete Barbosa’s, another woman who was also interned at Teixeira Brandão during the 1980s. Ivonete had appeared in a documentary called Strultifera Navis, directed by Clodoaldo Lino. Her lines were presented in the book as a poem of Stella’s and ended up circulating and being cited several times in theater plays, literary magazines, and academic papers:
I was born mad
My parents wanted me to be crazy
Normal people were jealous of me
That was crazy.
However, at the timecode of 15 minutes and 45 seconds, Ivonete appears in the documentary Strultifera Navis, saying exactly these words. Her speech is actually longer. These lines were cut, transcribed, and versified into lines that were then used in the book Reino.
This discovery was quite important because there is no indication that Stella do Patrocínio praised madness. She never refers to her diagnosis with the term “madness,” but rather “mental illness.” This term she chose functions as a denial of her belonging in that environment. In addition, the invention of this self-designation of Stella as mad accompanies the erasure of the racial criticism that Stella also makes when narrating her capture.
The falatório is a reading against the grain of the archive. The book ended up instead launching a reading that operated against Stella, against her narratives, against her memory. So, we’re talking about a trajectory in which memory, oblivion, visibility, invisibility, silencing, intellectuality, objectification, recognition, and fetish are operating. All contrasts, no contradiction. They operate in Stella do Patrocínio’s trajectory at all times in dialogue with one another, encountering one another.
I deeply regret that my discourse here has to say this kind of thing, such as defending the need to listen to the falatório. Defending the obvious is a task I don’t enjoy, but I’m willing to do it when necessary.
To remember Stella, we can’t invent her. I’ll stop here, because there’s still a lot of ground to cover! Cheers.
Sara: Your work, Carol, in addition to all your documentary research–which is fundamental, especially when we talk about false archives and how they end up constructing discourses, narratives, and delirious proliferations about the other– highlights the core of the ethical problems of this construction of Stella. When we draw attention to the fact that this poem was included in the book without actually having been spoken by Stella, without ever having been part of the falatório, it is because this shows, in an odd way, how the production of cultural commodities overlapped with Stella as text. This use of textual violation was one of the ways in which this representation of Stella became salable: a mad black body that proclaims and praises its own madness.
Stella displays a racial consciousness in her speech that has long been denied. When we listen, we can hear this very clearly. Similarly, it is possible to see how all this discourse that elects a voice of madness was nothing more than a construction, the result of an alignment between the literary institution and the asylum institution. By listening attentively and passively, we were able to walk along with Stella and not fall into the traps of mistaken epistemic fantasies, which really invisibilize all the philosophy, poetry, oral literature, and other knowledge that she brings. The falatório has poetry, it has philosophy, it has social criticism, it has many facets. It is full of opacity, and cannot be summarized as just one thing. Something we always need to remember is that archives that present a single history about these bodies must be constantly combated.
Natasha: One thing we keep discussing is this nuance in the change of her status. From the status of madness, Stella moved to the status of poet, but without being detached from madness, so she became the mad poet. In order to be considered an object of interest in literature, it’s important that she has this mini bio, the context of having been a captured and imprisoned woman. But linking this discourse of madness to literature is also very much linked to a certain historiography, a literary tradition of consumption and a constant fetishistic and romanticized search for the madman. And we’re talking about a person who spent more than 30 years of her life condemned to the status of madness. Sara, you can also talk about the audios now being in the public domain. Here, we now have a new way of engaging with Stella’s story, which doesn’t depend on the book, a version that isn’t reliable or credible and isn’t compatible with her voice.
What Viviane Mosé proposed was a re-reading, another narrative for Stella’s falatório, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to what the falatório actually is. It’s important to say that I got to know Stella through the book, I had an erroneous introduction, like many people. It was the first contact for many of us. Now we have an opportunity for critical review, material that needs to be revisited, analyzed, and criticized, precisely because it brings us into contact with a fragmented narrative. The problem is that relying on the written text closes off our reading of Stella, distances us from her, and we end up not really listening to her. I had my first contact with this book six years ago. I’m 26 now, I was 20 almost 21 then, so it was all very new. At the time, I had the opportunity to do a performance at the Black Poetry show in São Paulo, drawing on fragments of Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome. The person who invited me asked me “what material, what poet do you have the most intimacy with right now for this theater performance?” I said Stella, because I was reading her a lot, I was memorizing. I like to talk about that moment because it’s something I will never repeat. Along with the performance, I had a sound accompaniment in addition to my voice. And in this accompaniment, there was the intentional use of reverb, which echoed when I spoke, connoting and reminiscent of this idea of the schizophrenic body. That was a choice mobilized by aesthetics alone. That choice was a mistake.
Now, six years later, especially after having had contact with Carol, then Sara, then other researchers such as Jota Mombaça, we now have other possibilities to read Stella. Ones that don’t limit us to this literary reading of romanticized madness. But we still have to be careful not to repeat this because we’re always susceptible to this narrative, it’s very introjected. So, this effort of organizing an exhibition that provokes other ways of seeing this material, this archival body, is important, where we are able to fabricate other relationships with this body, not just the voice. Anyway, since my contact with Carol and Sara everything has changed, it’s been a great process.
More recently I did a performance with Bianca Chioma, a poet from São Paulo, called Muito bem patrocinada (Very well sponsored).⁵ This performance was still based on Viviane Mosé’s text, as we didn’t as yet have access to the audios. At that point, Carol got in contact with me via Instagram and said: “Look, there’s a poem in the book that isn’t by Stella. I see that you’re researching Stella, doing performances and I’m following along. I think we need to talk”. When she sent me that message, I thought: Who is this girl? What is this? I said: “Here’s my WhatsApp now, let’s talk”. And then she showed me the documentary and I watched it 30,000 times until I realized that it really was another voice. “That’s the only poem in the book where Stella claims madness, she doesn’t do that in any other part of the falatório, on the four CDs, that doesn’t happen.” I said: “Fuck, who is this woman?” And that was that. Since then, we’ve exchanged a lot. During the pandemic, we spent days drinking and talking. We’d start at eight in the evening and finish at six in the morning, talking and getting closer to each other. Why did I start talking about this? Because of the issue surrounding this criticism, because it is formulated over time. So, I think that the book, at the same time as having this materiality that allowed more people to have access to this history, limits this memory. Now that we have access to the audios, I feel that the move we have to make is to focus on that, on those audios, because that’s where Stella announces herself. If we want to understand her as a poet, how does that come from orality? How does this come from the way she formulates language, this movement of “orilatura” [neologism of oral literature] of Leda Maria Martins, that is about voice, not paper. I think that’s more or less it for now. Sara, I think you can talk a bit about the public domain.
Sara: I too began in error. I started with the book, but I think so did the vast majority of us. From now on, perhaps this will change, the way that first contact with Stella occurs. But at first, when I came across that book, I wondered: what is this? It baffled me, it messed me up and I didn’t really understand why. There was a distrust there, but it was something impossible to name. During my master’s degree, I began a critical review of the literature to date on Stella that is for the most part a body of criticism anchored in the book, I began to feel uneasy. There’s everything. There is some very good work covering different fields, but some constants appeared, such as the contextualizing of Stella within a register of delirium and madness, or of a primal culture, of outlier culture, of what is instinctive, primitive, or savage, terms that the white Western tradition has always used when it wants to describe the affective and cultural work of the black population.
When I finally had access to these audios, and also through Carol’s work, which established an interesting comparative basis for thinking about what was different between the book and the audios, I was able to realize that this poem that we’ve already dealt with here as an example, is not an isolated example. The book’s entire textuality is built on cutting, dismembering, and collage. There are other verses that are not recorded anywhere else and that have been added there. All the critical work that has emerged from this book, even though we can criticize each text individually, is based on a false archive. So, in a way, you can’t pin the entirety of the problem on the works themselves, but rather on the whole colonial movement, which is the broad context in which they are inserted. What we can see is that every colonial apparatus generally has the same strategies: capture, dismemberment, and violation. This is what happened to Stella’s body, which was cut off from sociability, imprisoned in the asylum, violated in various ways, and all of these strategies also happened to Stella’s text, to her falatório. So, we see that the same tactics of colonial economic and social life, as well as the functioning base of institutions, are reproduced in cultural institutions, in literature, in museums, and in all these cultural spaces. And then, exchanging a lot with Carol, Natasha and Carla too, we realized that it was really urgent for Stella to be able to give back in some way, in her own voice and that these audios should not be only available in the public domain, for example, affiliated with a museum. If you make these audios available to a museum, for example, even though they are in the public domain, a researcher who wants to access them would have to go to a physical space and fill in a form in order to access them. Here, we understood the importance of public access, so that was the reason for the move to make these audios available alongside an academic paper, which coincidentally turned out to be mine, so that they could be associated with an online and institutional repository. They are currently available in the UNILA repository, which was the university where I completed my master’s degree.⁶
So, with this whole process in mind, we decided to transcribe the falatório. By doing this, the focus, as Natasha was saying, from here on out would be on the audio, because for a long time it had been written text as presented in the book and we could see how many problems that caused. The voice is another register, there’s modulation, there’s timbre, intrusions. It wasn’t a private space in which Stella and her interlocutor were talking; they were there in the Teixeira Brandão inmate pavilion, inside a mental institution that interned more than six hundred women, there was a lot going on. There was a lot of tension involved in that situation that we can only intuit, and intuit minimally, through the archival audio recordings. It is the closest we can get to living memory. There, we hear a voice coming from the throat, from a body. I think that the verse in the book, the written form, already takes away a little of the body, already depersonalizes it a little. And the idea of this transcription was for it to include everything, so we tried to keep as many of the traces of orality as possible, the interruptions, the external sounds such as a car driving past suddenly, a cat meowing, background music. We tried to keep all of this, bearing in mind that it’s a difficult task, that it’s an ongoing task and that there’s no way of having a definitive transcription of Stella’s falatório. That’s an impossible task. But we did it, above all, thinking that not everyone listens, and that not everyone has access to good audio equipment. For example, we kept changing it up, one time using a speaker, then another speaker, then one or two different headphones. We also tried to improve the quality of the audio, reduce the noise here, raise the volume there, that sort of thing.
Your voice is yours, it’s your identity. But that’s the thing about orality: a lot of things that none of the three of us had heard on our own, we were able to hear together, so that’s why I think this movement here, this “Listening rehearsal/essay,” can bring up a lot of interesting things. That’s the invitation, so if Natasha wants to add anything, I can go and find the files for us to listen to.
Natasha: I was just going to talk about the process and add that it lasted about three days. Each day we were transcribing and getting to know one another. It was like: “Hi, good evening. Sit down, put your headphones on.” And there were parts where we’d go back and we’d stay listening to the same bit for about 20 minutes: “No, go back, is it ‘if’ or ‘and’?” because that changes everything. Transcribing was an exhausting job of trying to get as close as possible to the voice. Would you like to add anything?
Sara: No, just to say that we made a list of transcription notes to identify these issues.
Natasha: Yes. We made a map with codes, a kind of navigational aid, so that people can more readily understand the graphic symbols and notes we used, be able to assign rhythm, and be aware of interruptions. This appears together with transcribers’ notes. We began the process of making this transcription and two months later we were living together. That’s what happened, that’s the story. Sara came from Tocantins, Carol from the interior of São Paulo, and myself, from Santos. So, this process intensified. When I received the invitation to participate and create a piece for the exhibition on Stella here at the museum, there were a lot of issues unfolding, including emotional ones. I chose to develop my contribution focusing on a specific part of the falatório where Stella talks about “malezinho prazeres” (lil’ evil pleasures).⁷ She says: “I’m a lil’ evil pleasures.” There is something about “lil’ evil” that marks a moment when Stella starts fabricating her own story in a very specific way and she creates this expression. I didn’t find any record of what “malezinho prazeres” might be. I came across the Revolt of the Males [1835 slave rebellion in Bahia], a carnival block party in Salvador called Malezinhos and that’s it.⁸ Stella uses the expression around the same moment that she says: “I want to do something bad. I want to get out of here”.
Sara: That’s the part with “malezinho”.
Natasha: Do you want to start the audio? That way rather than explaining, we’ll listen.
Falatório: [Stella in italics / Interlocutor regular font]
I don’t want to go. I’ve missed you so much, Stella. Today is Wednesday. That’s right, it’s the day I come to see you. They don’t want to let me through the gate any more. But we’re not going to the gate, we’re just going to sit in this outbuilding. Oh, I don’t want to go. Are you cold? (No, I’m not) It’s been very cold, but now it’s over. Did you feel cold tonight? Yes. You didn’t have a blanket? I did. You’re so sad today [interlocutor seems to be talking to someone else: no, don’t move, don’t move <it’s red>] It’s because I don’t know what to do with my life, that’s why I’m sad. And I keep seeing everything above my head above my body. All the time looking for me, looking for me and I’m already loaded with sexual intercourse, already fucked, making the whole world come and not coming at all.
Natasha: Oh, not that part. We separated three audios.
CD one, audio two, we lined it up.
Diana: That’s the one when she says she wants to turn the family upside down?
Natasha: Yes. She says she’s going to turn her family upside down. Anyway, I started from this specific passage, because listening to Stella is also very difficult, it requires a lot of willingness to relate to a speech that comes from someone who has been raped for a long time, their whole life. This is imprinted in her voice, there’s no other way, it is unavoidable. All the audios have this relationship, it’s very hard to listen to. So much so that the first time was a shock. It wasn’t a feeling of: wow, what a marvelous thing. It was anguish, while the reality of that specific situation and the time of that body is distant, our imagination mixes distances and proximities. The voice does that. Also, another thing that was going on at the time, parallel to thinking about my project for Stella’s exhibition at the museum, was that I was beginning to get to know my paternal grandmother, Antenora Francisca Santos.
I met Antenora in December last year. There’s a very complex family story about why we didn’t meet before, but we finally did meet. I had a dream during the pandemic that Antenora called me, and when I answered Stella spoke to me. So that was a trigger for me to take control of the situation and say: “No, I’m going to go after this person, I need to meet her. She’s here, she’s in me somehow and I need to understand what that is.” It took a few months, because of the pandemic, but in December last year I went to Santos and, over Christmas, I went to her house and our story begins here. This woman, my grandmother, this incredible black woman, dyke, pimp, debt collector, bar owner, who just recently was handing out leaflets for Leci Brandão,⁹ was a woman of many facets, and we really connected in a very beautiful way. So, when the museum invited me, I said: “I need to do this triangulation, there’s no way I can escape it. It’s in the air, I can’t stop thinking about it.” So here in the exhibition there’s a photograph of my grandmother that I took at one of our meetings, and the performance that I did on the opening day together with Saskia and Heleine Fernandes came from this place of what is a “malezinho prazeres.” So, what was the triangulation? My grandmother is a “malezinho prazeres.” She’s this person of invention, creativity, wildness, debauchery. Because in my reading “malezinho prazeres” has a kind of specificity, almost a debauchery in relation to that asylum violence. It’s a form of retort, like: “I’m going to kill the whole family and that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to jump over the wall because I’m ‘malezinho prazeres’, I do these evil things.” That’s what she says. But it’s not what she actually does, she’s creating that situation, as a retort, it’s a way of retaliating. And I feel that my grandmother was this person who incorporated this into her experience. So, parallel to this, I was reading Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman, that focuses on black women’s narratives from a perspective of fabulation, of creation, of the experimentality of life. I feel that my grandmother was very experimental, she led a very experimental life. The first time we met, I said: “Antenora, you know everyone”, because the gasman stopped to talk to her, the woman at the newsagent’s, I don’t know who else. Then she turned to me and said: “Natasha, if you don’t know Antenora, you don’t know anyone, not even God.” I looked at her and said to myself: “What kind of person is this?” This was one of my first contacts with her. So that stuck in my head. For the exhibition, photography isn’t something I usually relate to, I’m really into poetry, so it was a challenge. I think there was a desire to present an image because of her black gestures. Here [pointing to the screen behind her] we see Stella in a situation of freedom, she’s in another register, she’s wearing a beautiful dress, she’s in the middle of the street. Another narrative can be created looking at this, not just the photo inside the asylum. I did this research and two weeks before the exhibition opened, my grandmother passed away. So, it became even more important for me to do this performance, to do this piece the way it was unfolding. And I told her, I told my grandmother about my dream. And then I laughed, saying: “This is rubbish” and she looked at me very seriously, as an axé¹⁰ person, with a wholly other kind of relationship with the world. So, there are many affective layers to this story. That’s why I have such a respect for these histories in process as-it-were.
Falatório:
If I take the whole family upside down and legs up, put everything in the trash can and have an abortion. Will something happen to me, will they do something to me? If during the night again, I take the whole family upside down and legs up, throw from inside to outside, from up there down here, will anything still happen to me?
What are you afraid of happening? If I turn into a horse or a dog. No, that won’t happen. Everyone has these thoughts. Human beings have good thoughts and bad thoughts, that’s part of our life. Nothing will happen, you can think all you want. It’s all yours and your thoughts only, nobody can invade that. It’s your archive, your memory, your fantasy.
And I still think of it more like this, a lil’ evil. Hm. If I rip that heavy one in half, beat, beat, beat it on the floor, on the wall, throw it away, in the middle of the bush, or on the other side of the wall, it’s a lil’ evil. What’s that? A lil’ evil. Oh, right. You want to kill the family, don’t you, Stella? Kill the whole family. Make a car, kill them all and drive away. And who is this family? Your father, your mother─ No, it’s this family that’s living and persecuting me here in Teixeira. Oh, right. Who’s persecuting you? Look how many are with me Ah─ they’re alone, they’re pretending they’re alone, so they can be with me Hm. Don’t you feel good here? Do you feel persecuted? I feel persecuted because I’m very hungry, very thirsty, very sleepy, very lazy, very tired There’s nothing to do, right Stella? NOTHING, I rogue around, vagabonding like a dropout,¹¹ like a rogue. Yeah, that’s what’s wrong. Like a dropout, rogue, roguing, vagabonding, wandering like a dropout. And what would you like to do here, if you had a job to do, what would you choose? Eat, drink and smoke. But that’s not work, that’s not production. That’s because I LEARNED THE HARD WAY.¹² Who taught you the hard way? It was… the man who fucked me and had sexual intercourse with me, who bit, sucked, chewed, licked me and took a bite, and only if it was in my mouth… without me expecting it.
Sara: You can understand what the “malezinho” is, right? I think that when Stella elaborates on this “lil evil” pleasure, it reminds me a lot of some of Fanon’s texts, some of Mbembe’s statements. I feel that what Stella is working on here, as Natasha says, is a fabulation, but it’s the fabulation of violence against those who oppress you, a violence that can enter the register of violence that emancipates. None of this pacifist discourse, that love will solve all our structural and systemic problems, but rather of using violence, even if it’s through fabulation, art or poetry, as the protagonist of a plot whose aim is to escape in some way, to somehow escape from these bonds.
It’s a self-defense mechanism. What she has at that moment is her voice. There’s a dialogical reaction there, with a clearly defined hierarchy: there are the interlocutors, the interns, the artists, and Stella, a patient who can’t leave through the gate, who can only try to jump over the wall and undo the wall. She’s the only one who can’t get out, and this brings us face to face with the inequality between them. But at the same time as this hierarchy is visible – look, we’re so addicted to the register that privileges the gaze that I’m talking about visibility – we hear that Stella isn’t in a passive place in this dialogue, she’s always responding within those exchanges in her own way. When she doesn’t want to speak, she doesn’t speak, she refuses to speak, she speaks how and when she wants. And if we can’t hear that voice, I think we also deprive ourselves of hearing those answers that are given in those moments of tension. There is certainly a lot of affection involved. When we talk to Carla, we realize that these people had developed relationships, but there is still a hierarchy that is insurmountable and that culminates in tension, a tension that is imprinted on these voices.
Stella constructs a very clever language, in my opinion, which is precisely to escape these traps that the interlocutors often set for her. Something interesting that emerged precisely in the research process we were doing together is that we were able to notice some constants, some repetitions. They’re not always the same, they’re not repetitions of identity, they’re repetitions of difference. Stella uses the verb “agarrar” [grab, seize, catch, hold roughly] a lot, for example, especially to talk about certain situations of violence and trauma: to talk about when she was picked up on the street, when she was grabbed and kidnapped; to talk about a situation of sexual abuse within the institution; and she uses this same verb to talk about when the doctor at the CJM institution [Colônia Juliana Moreira] pulled out her teeth. Carol’s work made a very good point regarding this, noting that the institution didn’t provide the necessary hygiene conditions and, in order to save money on treatment, they ended up pulling out patients’ teeth. We also heard the same verb when she was talking about the family she worked for as a domestic servant. She says she was “grabbed in the district”, that the woman told her she had to be very domesticated and work as a maid. This was something that none of the three of us had heard on our own, but together we realized that it is a verb that is repeated in these contexts, in these similar and different situations. What I mean is that Stella creates a whole language, a whole repertoire to talk about the trauma of this black body. And something that really stands out, including in that part of the “lil’ evil” where she’s talking about her family, is that whenever Stella is talking about her family – and this is from the “reading” I’ve been doing – she’s not talking about her family, her blood, her relatives, not least because she was deprived of most of these relationships. She always brings up the subject of her family or the families she’s worked with, and obviously there’s a very complicated relationship there, or the scientist’s family, which is precisely the institution that is always watching over her body. I think it’s precisely a move to avoid referring to her family, in order to avoid a place of pain. We know that her mother was also in the Colônia and lived with her for at least ten years. And there’s a part… Do you think we should play that part about captivity?
Natasha: I think so.
Sara: Yes, I think so too, then we can listen a bit more and open up the conversation with everyone to see what comes up. I’ll look for that part now.
Natasha: Yeah. I think that even in this piece where she uses “lil’ evil” that we were listening to again yesterday, there’s this question: “If you had a job to do, what would you choose? Stella replies: “Eat, drink and smoke.” And then Carla says: “That’s not work”.
Sara: I think it’s Nelly [Gutmacher].
Natasha: Ah yes. “That’s not work” Nelly says and Stella responds that, “it is,” because I was forced to learn to eat, drink and smoke. So, there’s this specific relationship that work is forced labor. And when she talks about the time of captivity, it becomes clear that this is where the memory of slavery continues to reverberate. The memory of this record of slavery is directly associated with the memory of labor in Brazil. So, I think it’s also a key to reading beyond Stella and projecting this to other fields, and to reading Brazil through Stella. This is also necessary, isn’t it? I see it as anchored in these words. The work is forced, and it’s in a very subjective place, but it condenses this whole narrative. Then I think I’m also extending this idea to not only reading Brazil through Stella, but also through that of other artists who have been placed in this situation. We have incredible artists with different approaches and different mechanisms for creating languages who are out there formulating the world and we can approach complexity through their production. I think that a difficult game to play in this literary criticism, especially in relation to Stella, is that madness is an easy key with which to read the falatório contrasted with [the falatório as] this outlier register, outside the curve; of deviation. [If you take the easier route] in the end you don’t complexify what you’re talking about, you wrap it up and that’s it, it’s there. And there’s complexity there, there’s density, there’s volume in what’s being said, so much so that it’s a voice that reverberates between voices and crosses the ages. That’s it. Do you want to start it? I’ll play it.
Falatório:
Who are the people you like here? I don’t know. The children. Are there children here? … Are there? Where? All over the world. But here? Yes, all over the world. But I’ve never seen a child here. And you don’t like old people? I like everyone. I like everything that’s good. And you’re upright, honest and hard-working. You’re clean, you like cleanliness… and I don’t know who made you see smell pay sing think, have hair have skin have flesh have bones, have height have width, have the… the inside have the outside have the side the other the front the bottom top bottom, see, how can you see and hear voices. [external voices and noises] Oh Nelly, I’ve already said that I’m a slave from the time of captivity. I was from the time of your… but everyone is a slave to time, it’s not just you. We all are. Of the time of captivity? Of time. Of any time… what is time? Time is gas, air, empty space. Does time pass or do we pass? People pass.
Sara: I think you get it, right? This part about captivity is fundamental for us to think about how Stella’s falatório manages to operate a critique of time, a critique of memory, a language of the reverberations of trauma through the generations. I think that this evocation of captivity doesn’t have a tone of resignation or nostalgia for that space, but of a very clear awareness that these colonial forces are still at work and that they still need to be confronted, but that her interlocutor didn’t understand it that way. This says a lot about everything Grada Kilomba says about the politics of ignorance, that some have the right not to know and some don’t have that right, because they live what they live, because they go through what they go through, and some of us simply don’t have that right. We’ve brought more excerpts to listen to, but I also think it might be good for us to open up, talk and see what you think too.
Natasha: It’s a lot.
Rogéria Barbosa: I think what I”m going to say has everything to do with what you have been talking about. I’m going to read what I’ve just written, and then I’m going to tell you what happened: “They talk about my skin” I’ve just written it, OK? “…like carrion, I go crazy. They whiplash my ear. My flesh hurts. It hurts being the one who, when they bump into me, they start cleaning themselves and feeling my stench. This stench that wants to encounter. Your skin oppresses me. Your hair is your daydreams. I heal my scars on canvas, in my words to the doctor. Ah, I’m talking about intolerance and prejudice. Enough madam, enough sir, enough little miss, enough doctor. While they listen to me, my tears are painful. For a moment I fall silent and I say: never a black dog, never your servant, never will my mother or sister be able to leave aside the marks of intolerance of…My skin has a soul, my skin smells of flowers, of work and of love, because I repeat, I respect my color.”
Unfortunately, it’s not a beautiful poem, I say that because I don’t think it’s as beautiful as romantic poems should be. On Friday last, I was walking down the escalator in Bangu, and a white woman, excuse the term, a white woman brushed up against me, then she instantly swerved, started cleaning herself, cleaning herself, smelling herself, I was behind her and I was dumbstruck, I was dumbstruck. It’s something that my psychologist and I were talking about that day and this happened. I spent the whole week feeling terrible about it. Today I went to the counselor and I couldn’t talk to him. What happened? Because I was so withdrawn, even about his situation because he’s black too. So, your words, Stella’s falatório, the first time Diana introduced me to Stella’s falatório and I started reading, listening, I really identified with Stella, you know? I’m not going to go into it, but that’s what we go through on a daily basis, that being white, right, let’s say, not just white, but people with light skin, when they touch you, end up cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and smelling, you know. It’s something that’s going to mark you, it’s been marked, there’s no erasing it. I can imagine Stella, in her time, with all this intolerance, all this blackness, all this vexation that is prejudice, that is racism. So, it’s something for us to hear, not just as part of “oh, it’s the week of the 20th [November 20th Brazil’s official Black Consciousness Day] so it happened, everyone’s still breathing”, It’s not like that, people! It’s not even the astral hell that lasts until November, unfortunately this is real. I’m Rogéria Barbosa, my book was launched during Stella do Patrocínio’s exhibition. It’s there for sale, you can buy it, okay? And I am there [in the exhibition], there’s some of my work, there’s some books, and we’re there, I’m part of [the artist collective] Ateliê Gaia.
Diana: Rogéria Barbosa: artist, writer, marvelous person, and militant in the anti-asylum struggle. She is also one of the curators and inspirations behind this exhibition, and in the next gallery, you can see displayed a collection of her paintings. Take a look at her book too, which was launched at the exhibition opening, which as she reinforced, is available for purchase. She rocks!
Just going back to the proposal for today’s “Listening Rehearsal/Essay”, you don’t necessarily have to ask a question, but, as we suggested at the beginning, you can share what you’ve heard, what’s resonating, what’s staying with you as Rogéria just did. I had a question for you, Sara, which I think you’ve posed in many ways here, but in your academic work you talk about a “dome” narrative, one that has been soundproofed, that has to do with and relates to the way in which Stella’s words and the falatório havespread through institutionalized mediation – I think that’s the expression you use. You invite us to return to listen to Stella, I think the phrase even appears in your master’s abstract. It’s very much in line with what we’re trying to do here, with what we want and what mobilizes us. It’s this invitation… and this event here today also goes in that direction. We’re in an institution, but we also put pressure on these movements. I wanted to hear more about it. Can we say we are breaking the dome?
Sara: I remember that during my exam, Professor Fátima Lima said: “this dome is being shattered by the work you’re doing now.” Part of this work was trying to research a little more about the voice, and what helped me the most wasn’t literary theory, but rather other readings, other perspectives, and above all thinking about music, drums, and thinking about rhythm. I think I thought of this idea of the dome because it was the impression I had of this distorted archive. This archive that was built from a very specific agency that was intended around Stella’s trajectory, and which, in a way, encapsulated this voice. And when I say “voice”, I mean voice. This voice has been inaccessible and not of interest for a long time, longer than it should have been. And that generates all the aura surrounding the book, doesn’t it? The book became super auratized above all because we didn’t have that original file. What I also noticed was that there really was this construction of a Stella who was there in a dome, to be contemplated only by the eye and not by the ear. And by thinking about the voice and researching this, we come to realize that a whole tradition of metaphysics, this whole Western tradition, has tried to remove the element of sound and voice from systems of knowledge. The term logos, one of its meanings was speech, was telling. And from Aristotle onwards, the word logos began to be privileged only in the sense of connection. Since then, the gaze has always been favored as the sense of knowledge, and not the ear or the other senses. And the gaze has this side, our gaze is active, it’s haughty, we can choose where we look, we close our eyes, we open them whenever we want. But, the ear is passive, we are always in a position of passivity with the ear. And the author who most helped me to think about these elements of the voice together with philosophy was Adriana Cavareiro, who is Italian. Even when we’re asleep, we’re listening and being passed through. So, in researching the archives that we need to listen to, we have to abandon that active posture that we usually have. Rather than talking about active listening, I actually think we have to listen passively. In fact, a good exercise is to close your eyes and focus on this sense of listening, and we do that, don’t we? Sometimes when we’re trying to listen to something, we close our eyes to listen better, precisely because we listen better when we remove our gaze as the main sense. I think the idea of the dome was a bit about that, you have to shatter it to really hear the voice emanating from it, you really have to put your ear to it. So, the walls built here in the museum, with all the in-built speakers, really moved me. It’s nice because it requires a very bodily movement, you really have to go towards it, you have to put your ear to it.
Jessica: I was reading an interview with Saidiya that talks a bit about this paradox that you also brought up and also referencing Carol, when you say that Stella leaves the mental institution only to be captured by the institution of literature. She notes that in the archive of slavery, she found a fundamental paradox. That the recognition of the humanity and status of slaves as subjects often seemed to rather amplify and intensify servitude rather than conferring a small measure of rights and protection. How do we deal with these paradoxes? How can we think of ways of listening that are not just another form of capture?
Natasha: I’m thinking here. There’s a speech by Diane Lima. I don’t know if you all know Diane Lima, curator, thinker. She’s now curating the [São Paulo] Biennial [Lima was one of the curators of the 2024 São Paulo Biennial]. And she also looked into Stella’s falatório for a while. Diana [Kolker] can tell you more about this relationship, but she put together a research group of artists and thinkers centered around Stella’s falatório, which lasted for a specific period of time. And then Diane Lima gave this seminar and posed the paradox that Stella is the woman we see but don’t hear, which I think is a bit of what Sara was talking about just now, that our understanding of Stella is very much marked by the book, by the manuscript. It’s the platform for legitimizing history, and orality is excluded from this. There’s an impermanence – a false impermanence in orality, because it stays. It resonates, which is what Luis’ [Ateliê Gaia] scream was about, the scream doesn’t die, the scream doesn’t end, it may escape the place of the visible but it is also an archive, it also needs to be seen as an archive. And Diane talks about this, this need to listen to Stella, this person we don’t really listen to, we just watch. It’s also something to complexify because we have very few records of Stella, we have very few photographs. It’s still a very fragmented image of this body, extremely fragmented. Saidiya also brings up this issue when looking at the archive, the need to hack this system that works through the gaps. So here in Brazil we have a great lack of black and indigenous historiography, which has been dynamited over time, over the centuries, and in order to build these memories of the past and look at it, there is a need for creation. We were talking about this when we came here, about that text by Saidiya, which says exactly that. What was it?
Sara: It was about how we can elaborate or fabulate about a life while respecting what we don’t know.
Natasha: Yes, how can we fabulate about a life while respecting what we don’t know? And that’s one of the questions we need to ask about Stella’s story too. What is it that we don’t know? Because there’s a lot we don’t know. We start from not knowing. So, this construction of memory is a process that is subject to failure and also depends on a creative drive. Also, I think that if we go to another place in the question, I feel that we are at a very happy moment, in the sense that we are seeing more and more female artist researchers, especially racialised ones, dissident bodies that are seduced by the falatório, that are being seduced into getting involved with it and investigating it critically. There is a moment of abundance in relation to this – of effervescence. I think there’s an effervescence there that is becoming more and more articulated. When I say this, I’m talking about Jota’s [Mombaça] work, I’m talking about Leda’s [Martins] work, I’m talking about Sara’s work.
Sara: Ariadne’s.
Natasha: Ariadne Catarine dos Santos is a researcher from São Paulo, from USP [Universidade de São Paulo], who has also done research related mainly to the literary criticism around the book. There is this attempt to build something that is in the gap.
Sara: And to think that there are archives, and this is something that Saidiya also talks about, that are mere death sentences. It was no different with Stella, especially when you think about the fact that Stella was buried as a destitute person. Yes, Stella has living relatives and she had living relatives at the time of her death. But the institution itself managed to break these family ties, these social ties, and erase the history of these people, so much so that when you get to the 1980s and psychiatric reform tries to reverse this, almost everything is unrecoverable. That’s it. The whole apparatus of the institution and the way it mortifies these individuals and has mortified them for a long time also has to do with their family ties. She had living relatives. They didn’t stop visiting her. When I’m talking about archives, I’m also talking about medical records and the book, because the book also helped perpetuate this idea that Stella’s relatives didn’t look for her, which is a complete misconception. The family visited. The family went after her. But at some point, Stella’s own mother dies inside the institution and the family isn’t informed, they only find out on visiting days. This is also the result of Carol’s research. So, we need to think about how we deal with the death of our own and how we try to operate a narrative that honors this death too, and that promotes a place of rest in a certain way. When I stop to think about the context of Stella’s death, it’s very hard, because we are faced with a story that is crisscrossed by so much violence, and even at this moment of death, which should mean a moment of mourning. Her family had no right to this. And these archives also contribute to that.
Lucas Alberto: I want to say something. It’s not really a question though.
Sara: Good afternoon.
Lucas: Thank you. It’s been an incredible opportunity for me to have contact with research like this. The first time I heard Stella was in an audio recording in a class that I think Jessica was teaching and I think what always stuck with me was this question she asked this interviewer, who I don’t know if it was Nelly or Carla. I don’t know which audio it was, but it was something like: “I have to tell you my whole life. Are you interested in knowing about my life, but I don’t even know about my own life?” That became a very big issue for me. Then she continues: “Because I don’t know how you form a mouth with teeth, an ear that hears voices, a head that thinks”. When she asked this question, it was interesting because she got out of the position of being the one to undergo this kind of anamnesis, because at various times I was bothered by this audio format and the use of the question and of a kind of retaliatory response: “no, you’re not like that, you’re not like that, things aren’t like that”, an attempt to appease. And then I wondered to what extent this is also an issue when it comes to transcribing or thinking about what Stella says, if it’s always an answer and a doubt that someone brings to her in the form of a question. I keep thinking about what you’ve been saying…an interview. I’d never thought about it, whether this dimension of the interview has an effect, it seems a question for research. And to what extent this interview moves away from or closer to the notion of a psychiatric anamnesis. The interview is also an apparatus in the field of mental health. I don’t even know if there’s a way to elaborate on this, but this interview emerges as a problematic issue for thinking about this poetics that is being spoken about.
Natasha: What Sara also said, Stella uses discursive strategies to enable her to speak when she wants to. When people try to push her, she doesn’t give in, she keeps talking and she delivers what she thinks she has to deliver, it’s something that’s intuitive in the sense that she does it very naturally, you don’t feel her equivocating, she just goes off. And I think these are strategies she uses to get out of it. It’s a trap that’s placed there and she throws it back. And I have this feeling that at various times the person being interviewed takes a simplistic position, saying anything that comes to mind and Stella’s voice grows, she takes on a body. But it’s a signaling thing. As we now have easier access to the falatório, there will be research into this, into these interruptions. It’s not just her voice isolated in a box, now we have access to other movements in the space, the specific time, what that noise was, who was shouting there, at what moment, how she is. There’s a specific audio where you can feel that Stella was very agitated, she was upset, she was very distressed. I think it’s the fourth audio, the one with the “malezinho”. She talks a bit energetically in the sense that it left me a little confused as to how the conversation was being conducted in person. But now we have a different kind of relationship being built through this material, which we couldn’t access through the book. The thing about the interviewer, the interlocutor can be embraced, which wasn’t part of it before.
Sara: It’s a falatório that is at least co-authored, there’s always more than one person involved. And I keep remembering a very striking passage in which Stella talks about the invisible, the secret police, the colorless. From this passage alone, you can think about various things. I think, for example, about how our journalism, our communication, talks about the deaths of black bodies by police officers. We always see the faces of those who are dying, we never see the faces of those who kill. But if we remove the interlocution from this passage, for example, we remove the possibility of seeing all the nuances of these dialogues. One thing that happens a lot and that we noticed and tried to include in this transcript are the moments of laughter. Some of the laughter clearly comes from a place of condescension, of debauchery in relation to what Stella is saying. And one of these moments is when she says: “I’m putting the whole world inside”. At that moment, the direct interlocutor, who I think is Nelly at the moment, laughs, and Stella immediately replies: “I’m putting YOU in too”. She already has these strategies, like retorts.
Remembering the transcription process, it’s very difficult when you have more than one voice and when you have more than two voices, because at times they are interrupted by third parties, other people, and we don’t know who they are. We’ve asked Márcio Rolo, Denise Correa and nobody can say exactly who it is. And how do we give these people a name? Do we put a number on them? If we do that, we objectify them again. So, there was this difficulty and it’s a difficulty that has to do with the whole construction of the archive. Natasha was talking about how there are new works emerging. It’s exactly what Nêgo Bispo says, that it’s always “beginning, middle and beginning”; beginning, middle and beginning. I think that now we’re increasingly able to reach new beginnings and go elsewhere. I always say to my colleagues that I would have liked to have done more work on building from the falatório, really fabulating and going off in a thousand ramblings, but I ended up doing more work on… and I think Carol too, on the revision of the archive. We talk much less about Stella do Patrocínio with two L’s and much more about “Stela” with one L, built by the agency of madness. I feel that now we can speak with a little more freedom, a little more trustworthiness because of public access, because of this voice that is now circulating. And I think a lot of good things are going to happen.
Vanessa Alves: There’s a part where she says: “but I’ve already given you everything”; then the interlocutor asks another question, and she says: “and I have nothing to give you”. So, as I said in the morning, I didn’t read Stella first, I listened to her first. And I sewed together very specific words. By this I mean that I constructed a text for my performance drawing on Stella’s lines without changing her lines. But at the same time, after I read it, I said: “guys, I’m lost, because I don’t know if she was hearing what I was hearing.” I’m referring to the interlocutors who were asking Stella questions. That really sticks with me. She says: “I’ve already given you everything”. Here I, Vanessa, think she meant: “Is there anything else? Do I owe you anything else?” So, we questioned a lot about the feeling of those specific moments in each audio and I also read about the falatório and tried to understand. Did we understand who she was? That’s the point. I have an obligation to talk about theory, but I have an obligation to talk about her brother, about black people and women like Stella, a black woman who was made invisible. What I often hear in conversations is Stella saying: “Hi, I’m alive, I exist, I don’t like being here. Ask me another question. Talk to me in another way”. I felt like having another conversation, that’s how I felt about her. And so, I don’t know if I misunderstood, but I think Stella realized that what she was doing would later lead to other developments and that the artist who was there would have… the applause is for me, but I’m trying to say that the world was wrong, it made a mistake. Our colonization, the lack of respect. What Rogéria just said here is a pain that only those who have it know what it’s like. And Stella kept saying all the time: “listen to me, see me”. Being invisible isn’t easy. And then I keep thinking: how do we build new narratives and new theories to make this visible? Because for me to listen, I really need to listen, to stop and think. We’re here looking at a person’s life. Humanizing a chaotic universe, the construction of the system is chaotic. We had a lesson with Sandra Benites [indigenous curator featured in another dialogue that was part of the transdisciplinary seminar series]. She said: “The system is people and these people are not being human.” That’s what I got from Stella’s falatório: a real lack of humanity. Thank you very much for the space to speak here.
Diana: Can I pick up on that? Because then I’m going to talk about something that also comes from something you said, Natasha, which resonated with me when you talked about reading Brazil through Stella. And now I feel like talking about this with Vanessa Alves. Last year we launched the program “Stella Do Patrocínio: A history that Speaks,” curated by Diane Lima, which featured a listening study group led by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Diane Lima and ten artists. The program was mobilized by a sense of responsibility on the part of the museum with regard to the memory of Stella do Patrocínio. How does this institution reposition itself in the face of Stella and what was done to her? Is any reparation possible? What is the responsibility of the museum and the people who work here? What is the responsibility of the people who are in academia researching Stella’s falatório and her life, of the artists who are producing in some way impacted by what Stella said, enunciated, produced, evoked? And here too, with the questions Lucas brought up, I keep thinking that there’s no more trying to get more and more out of Stella. I think we need to listen to Stella, as Sara says to pay attention to the questions that Stella is throwing at us. How do we reposition ourselves based on this? I’m bringing some of what’s resonating with me and giving it back…
Natasha: Denise Ferreira says that reparation is impossible, the debt is unpayable. I keep thinking about this place of creation and realizing that time is actually [different] times that are intersecting, there is no commitment to linearity, this is where we are thrown. I think there’s a zig-zag, there’s a possible capoeira in time that allows us, from this relationship with a voice that echoes in other spaces simultaneously, this idea of simultaneity interests me a lot, of not being isolated, of things happening at the same time and what Stella says, your grandmother’s time, your great-grandmother’s time, but now I’m in your time. This is very fundamental. She’s talking about the origin of life, and at the same time she says that it began to exist when the guy pulled her down and raped her. So, there are various nuances to this relationship with origins and with life, with this pulse of life and death that are linked there, but it’s very strong that we are living with other temporalities simultaneously. I don’t think it’s a simple solution either, otherwise we end up in an emulation where it’s difficult to create materiality from it. But I’m thinking a lot about this commitment, even though materiality is something a little closer to the institution, the continued commitment to this historical revision, to this updating of memory, to this quest to fill in collective gaps, because that’s what we’re also seeing. Even understanding that we have this tendency to choose one person, Stella and Bispo do Rosario, who are two great names, two great figures in the history of the country, but parallel to them there are other people working, making, contemporaries of Rogéria, Patrícia [Ruth (another Atêlie Gaia artist)], there are a lot of people. And that’s talking specifically about the Bispo do Rosario Museum. But there’s also a remnant of a heroic narrative that we can’t get rid of; of the great figure. This is not trying to delegitimize or diminish the importance of Bispo and the importance of Stella, but rather to look to the other people who are here now producing and doing. This is something [Brazilian author] Conceição Evaristo says a lot: “I’m 70 + years old, I only started to be known when I was 70. Look at the people that are producing here now”. So, if we leave this field, this key of violence and when we talk about race we talk about violence, when we talk about Brazil we talk about race and violence, and if we instead engage with the spectrum of potential, of the experimentality of these lives that have a creative energy that is operating and producing knowledge. Producing knowledge. What did Stella do? She produced knowledge. What did Bispo do? Produce knowledge. He materialized knowledge, gave it plasticity. Stella gave plasticity to that speech. The voice is material, it’s not something that hangs there, it has weight. It’s gas, it has a dimension to it. So, it’s understanding that these stories aren’t competing with others, but are converging with other stories and other narratives that are here now. So, I think it’s an exercise in looking wholeheartedly at those who are producing now, including the role of the institutions. It’s also our role as individuals, but it’s also the role of the institutions to take a closer look and try to put an end to this hero narrative. The hero narrative can go too. I think that’s it, there are many figures out there with different languages, different proposals, different aesthetics, conceptualizations and themes.
Sara: Just to add to what you said, I think the things Stella elaborates on connect with what Vanessa was saying. She poses questions and is often talking more about us, about the institutions, than about herself. She also gives us this perspective of a spiral time, a cycle of situations and violence that are repeated, but resistance is also repeated, escape strategies are also repeated. I think that when we listen to Stella we can learn about escape strategies, this fugitivity, she is a great teacher of this escape. And I keep thinking about this idea of escape. It’s not about giving up, it’s about escaping the very logic between master’s and enslaved people, so she’s always managing to escape and get away from it, and I think we racialized people can learn a lot if we listen to her, and institutions can learn a lot if they listen to her. Let’s listen, let’s keep listening. Beginning, middle and beginning. I think that’s what Stella is.
Carol: To add to the questions that have been raised about the critical reception of Stella’s falatório, I would also like to quote Diane Lima from the online event “Stella do Patrocínio, a história que fala” (Stella do Patrocínio: The History that Speaks), organized by the museum, because she said that literature attacked the only weapon Stella had during all those decades of internment. That weapon that literature turned against was precisely the falatório. Literature acted just as the asylum acted against all the subjects it managed to imprison in a diagnosis.
The way Stella has been for the most part named and narrated says very little about her, but it says a lot about the literary institution, its historiography, its symbols of representation, its methodologies of analysis. Sara mentioned that my work was focused on understanding false archives, and it’s true. This was a big part of my research.At the time, I concluded that these false archives don’t tell the story of Stella’s life, but rather the elaborations, functions, and logics of the asylum. In them, it is possible to see how surveillance and the attempts to domesticate, control, and normalize were operated. The questions applied to patients as a means of diagnostic analysis revolved around distorted notions of hygiene – conditions that the asylum didn’t even offer – good behavior, docility, productivity, and so on. That’s why I went after her biography and gathered everything I could from the falatório. I wanted Stella’s narrative to be superimposed over that of the asylum. I wanted to understand, with Stella, what that institution was and what else it pointed toward. A lot came out of that.
That’s how I realized that, by not listening to or even reading Stella, critical discourse over the years has tended to repeat how the hospital files presented her, reproducing the diagnosis given by the asylum and once again silencing the fact that she said she was forced to be mentally ill after being captured by the police in Voluntários da Pátria street, when she intended to take a bus and couldn’t get on. All this because she was a black woman. So critical discourse produced via the book retold the story not of Stella, but of the asylum, curiously strengthening hospital narratives. By making Stella do Patrocínio an object of study and understanding the falatório as a confirmation of madness – that we must call here social hygiene, racism, colonialism and among other terms – what we have done so far is create a character with whom Stella do Patrocínio bears little resemblance. Her birth and death dates are the same, as is her passage through an extremely harmful, violent institution that relies on erasure, silencing, and mass subalternization of subjects who had names, histories, intellectual and social lives, family ties, and complexities that we will never be able to recover.
I say all this based on my research. Asylums are a crime of the state – reparations have not even been thought about. To this day, we don’t know the size of the exorbitant number of people imprisoned in these places, but we do know that the first measure of control in them is the assertion that those with a clinical diagnosis are unfit to speak. “No Mask”, Grada Kilomba’s essay on colonial slavery’s use of masks to silence, has a frightening contemporaneity in this sense.
The falatório was Stella’s principal weapon and escape mechanism. But Stella wasn’t always able to escape, even though she was a fugitive and found these escape routes. How are escape and capture operating in these institutions that lay claim to Stella? How is the falatório inserted into these complex contexts?
There is no possible reparation, but there is a commitment not to perpetuate those narratives and understandings that we have already realized are unfounded. Here, I would like to highlight the idea of research error, error of thought, distortion, violation of research ethics and vices of interpretation. Today, we know about some of the attempts to re-enact Stella do Patrocínio’s capture, and I believe that we are at a time when, as she did, we need to look for alternative routes. This escape, I think, can be found in our elaborations on the falatório.
The audios, which are only a part of the record of the falatório, do not represent the whole of what was recorded. There’s contrariness, oppositions and the gaps. There’s no completeness. What do we do with this past that didn’t give Stella a future? How can this past be recounted a little more honestly? What does it have to tell us? Stella was five hundred million and five hundred thousand years old, the age of the residents of the Teixeira Brandão neighborhood in Jacarepaguá. Hail Stella! Give us permission to learn from the falatório and make commitments that will no longer try to strip away your dignity, that of the Teixeira Brandão interns, and of the thousands of people who have passed through these criminal places of torture.
Aimé Césaire said it all: those who claim that there is a lack of humanity in others are not very human. Let tide turn, once and for all.
Diana: Let the tide turn! Never Again!
Unfortunately, we’ll have to pause our conversation here, but with the words we’ve heard reverberating in our bodies, I invite you to stay a little longer and join us at the Bistrô do Bispo. The people from our community center Pólo Experimental music workshop will be performing there. Once again, I’d like to thank our guests, everyone who came and I invite you to come back again. We always have our arms wide open to welcome you. Thank you, everyone!
***
Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias is an artisan, educator, and researcher. She is currently doing doctoral research in the program of Literary Theory and History at the Institute of Language Studies at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). She holds a master’s degree from the same institute and is the author of Stella do Patrocínio, ou o retorno de quem sempre esteve aqui (Stella do Patrocínio or the return of who has always been here), 2023.
Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha (Rio de Janeiro, 1983) is an educator and curator. She holds an undergraduate degree in history (PUCRS), specialty certificate in artistic pedagogy (UFRGS), and a master’s in Contemporary Studies of the Arts (UFF). Since 2017, she has been coordinating the artistic and pedagogic project at the Museu Bispo do Rosario Arte Contemporânea, where she also participates in curating exhibitions.
Natasha Felix (Santos, 1996) is a poet and performer. Publication highlight include: Use o alicate agora (Edições Macondo, 2018) and the anthologies Os nossos poemas conjuram e gritam, (Quelônio, 2019) and As 29 poetas hoje (Companhia das Letras, 2021). In her performances, she investigates connections between the black body, spoken word, and intersections with other languages such as dance, music and film. She is currently assistant curator at the Museu de Vassouras. Previously, she was artistic editor at Museu do Amanhã and curatorial assistant for Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.
Sara Ramos is a researcher, editor, translator and poet from Tocantins. She holds a master’s in comparative literature from UNILA. She has a lot of respect for words, whether spoken, written or embodied. She lives in Rio de Janeiro and is the author of Pequeno manual da fúria (2022).
¹ Despite the common spelling of Rosario with an accent, the museum has adopted Rosario without an accent in accordance with the artist’s birth certificate. Throughout this dialogue we have also adopted this spelling.
² With the death of Arthur Bispo do Rosario in 1989, the Colônia Juliano Moreira was faced with the challenge of deciding the fate of the works that the artist had produced during the forty-nine years he had been intermittently interned. All of his creations were housed in the then named Nise da Silveira Museum (at the time honoring the pioneering psychiatrist Nise da Silveira who in the late 1940s together with the artist Almir Mavignier developed studio workshops with schizophrenic patients and in 1952 inaugurated the Museum of Images of the Unconscious). Faced with this new mission, in 2000, eleven years after Bispo’s death, the institution changed its name to the Bispo do Rosario Museum, now honoring the main artist in its collection. https://museubispodorosario.com/museu/ Accessed September 2025.
³ Ateliê Gaia is a collective of artists who are mental health users and former inmates of the former Colônia Juliano Moreira, linked to mBrac. For more information: https://museubispodorosario.com/atelier-gaia-2/ Accessed September 2025
⁴ Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias. “Stella Patrocínio, or the return of someone who has always been here.” Cult Magazine, 22 September 2020. https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/stella-do-patrocinio-retorno-sempre-esteve-aqui/ Accessed September 2025.
⁵ The title plays with Stella’s surname “do Patrocínio” and “patrocinio” which in Portuguese means “sponsorship”.
⁶ Sara Martins Ramos. “Stella do Patrocínio: entre a letra e a negra gargante de carne” (Stella do Patrocínio: between lyrics and the black throat of flesh). Master’s thesis, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature, Federal University of Latin American Integration, 2022. The falatório audios are linked to Sara’s thesis. https://dspace.unila.edu.br/items/84d91349-d213-425f-975d-3d2da6e12b7c Accessed September 2025.
⁷ T.N. “Lil’ evil is Regina Alfarano’s translation of “malezinho prazeres” in the forthcoming English translation of the falátorio: Stella do Patrocínio: Falatório/Chatter edited by Marlon Miguel and Iracema Dulley (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025). PDF open access for more information see: https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-35
⁸ T.N. Prazer means pleasure is here used in the plural prazeres. Prazeres is also a common family surname. Malezinho is a neologism. Males is the plural of mal meaning bad/evil. Stella adds the diminutive “inho” meaning “little” a common linguistic trait of Brazilian Portuguêse, lending an informal and affective tone to everyday speech. The Revolt dos Malês happened on January 25th 1835 in Salvador, Bahia with more than 600 slaves. Its leaders arranged for the revolt to take place at the end of Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims. The Malezinhos Carnival Block group was named in the mid 90s after Stella’s death. So, this and the subsequent competition known as “malezinho” that selects the king and queen of Carnival would not have been known to Stella. However, there is an early Carnival Block group Malê Debalé also from Bahia that was founded in 1979 focusing on black movement and related sociocultural and educational activities. Again, as Stella was interned from the mid 1960s onwards, it is difficult to know whether something like this might have reached her. Other research points to a general usage of “males,” derivative of African languages, in Brazil in the 19th century, to designate black Muslims. They were often more educated than their master’s, and, despite their status as slaves, they were not submissive. Other references suggest that the malês stood out for their skills in trading and managing small businesses. In this way, this group of urban slaves had relative liberty and were also often smart in commercial dealings, which gave them a greater freedom. This sense of the “malezinho prazeres” as little evil pleasures, of not being submissive, of a certain liberty, certainly for someone involuntarily interned for over 20 years at the time, seems key to the expression might have meant to Stella at the time.
⁹ T.N. Leci Brandão is a singer, actor, composer of Brazilian popular music, activist, member of Communist Party, and since 2010 has served as parliamentary representative for the state of São Paulo. She is the first Brazilian singer to openly come out as gay and in her political work has championed equality, racial, indigenous, and LGBTQAI+ rights.
¹⁰ T.N. Axé comes from African Yoruba àse and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion meaning “good vibrations” and “spiritual power and energy” connected with the Afro-Brazilian deities known as “orixás” and their religious practitioners.
¹¹ T.N. Marginal can be translated variously as dropout, outlaw, hooligan, asocial, or unconventional figure. In Portuguese it also carries critical overtones of marginality, a figure who lives by their own wits, that may be alternately seen as hobo or radical drifter.
¹² T.N. “I learned the hard way” is Regina Alfarano’s translation of “Aprendi com força” in the aforementioned book project by Marlon Miguel and Iracema Dulley.