A Heart Too Full: The Weight of Love in Northeast Brazil
Author(s): L. A. Rebhun
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 107, No. 423, Bodylore (Winter, 1994), pp.
167-180
Published by: American Folklore Society
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L. A. REBHUN
A Heart Too Full:
The Weightof Lovein NortheastBrazil
Brazilian women'sfolk ailmentsexpressdisallowedemotions,especiallyanger,and
conflictsovertheirobligationto love theirhusbandand childrenselflessly.Linguistic
andfolkloristic evidenceis used to show that thefolk ailmentpeito aberto (open
chest) is a metaphorfor the burdenof having too many people with too many
demandson a woman's heart.
THE HUMAN BODY IS NOT ONLY A physical
entity but also an integral part of a
symbol system expressing both the microcosm of self and the macrocosm of
physical and social world. Social relations are often described with body
metaphors, and concepts of the body's nature are used to justify and sustain social
structures (Bourdieu 1977; Cowan 1990; Foucault 1978; Scheper-Hughes and
Lock 1987). In this essay I describe women, anger, love, and the body in
Caruaru, a city in Brazil's impoverished Northeast region.
Aspects of Emotion
Emotion is simultaneously body state, ideology, habitus, performance, set of
glosses, set of roles, and individual experience (Averill 1982; Ekman 1984;
Kleinman and Good 1985; Lutz 1982, 1988; Lutz and White 1986; Rosaldo
1984). Emotions, like thoughts, have related body states (Averill 1982). But they
are described, expressed, and experienced through language (Lutz 1982, 1988),
gesture and facial expression (Ekman 1984), and all the minutiae of practice that
make up culture (Bourdieu 1977). In addition, emotional proprieties are culturally delimited so that individuals feel morally obligated to express or to deny
particular sentiments in particular circumstances. While emotion is so culturally
constructed that its stimulus, definition, expression, and meaning vary widely
from culture to culture and within cultures over time, each cultural group
believes that the way it currently constructs emotion is natural and thus
immutable. Emotion discourse tends to support the status quo by portraying
sociomoral concepts as natural phenomena.
L. A. Rebhun is a postdoctoral
fellow at PreventionResearchCenter
Folklore
Copyright? 1994, AmericanFolkloreSociety.
JournalofAmerican
1{07(423):167-180.
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168
Journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
Many anthropologists have focused on the vocabulary of emotion in various
languages (see Lutz 1982; Lutz and White 1986); the relationship between
emotional expression and emotion glosses shows its interpersonal, performative
character (Crapanzano 1989; Hochschild 1983).' James Averill has shown how
emotion terms divide the emotion spectrum according to moral concepts,
lumping together or separating glossed emotions in a process isolated from
physiological manifestations of emotional arousal (1982). But speech is not the
only medium in which emotions are expressed. Folk ailments can be a kind of
metaphorical gloss in which the emotion is written on the body of the bearer
in the form of illness.
Emotion experience and expression vary by role within groups. Gender roles,
for example, contain both implicit and explicit emotional expectations, which
vary cross-culturally. Both sexes are imprisoned within the expectations of their
emotionally informed social roles. In Northeast Brazil, the woman's role is
largely defined by the obligation to love and the suppression of anger. In this
essay, I will be concerned with how both love (amor) and anger (raiva) are
expressed by women through the related folk ailments of mau olhado (evil eye)
and peito aberto(open chest), which shed light on women's attitudes toward their
bodies, their strength, and the web of emotions which shadows and informs
social relations. Mau olhado and peito aberto are part of a set of Northeast
Brazilian folk ailments which also include nervos (nerves), espinela caida (fallen
spine), and spirit attacks. These will be described in a subsequent essay. Here,
after describing Caruaru and the practice of folk Catholic healers (rezadeiras),I
will consider linguistic, social, and emotional aspects of mau olhado and peito
aberto. In the process I hope to illuminate how women in Caruaru view their
bodies and emotional obligations.
Research and Fieldsite
From December 1988 to December 1990, I conducted anthropological research in the interior of the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco. My data
are drawn from a combination of direct and participant observation and 120
tape-recorded interviews with women and men. These interviews started with
demographic issues such as birthplace and marital status, and then moved on to
emotional vocabulary, not only words informants class as dealing with emotion
(sentimento),but also the words they use to describe body states that they see as
integral to sentimento. Finally, the interviews included open-ended questions
to elicit life-history stories. I also interviewed religious healers and their patients
about emotion-related folk medical complaints, and observed healing practices.
I worked mainly in Caruaru (population 200,000) and neighboring villages,
located two hours by bus inland from the Pernambuco state capital of Recife.
Caruaru is the second-largest city in the state and as such is regarded as a
minicapital and a commercial center. It is most famous for its weekly market
fairs at which ceramic figurines and block prints depicting rural life are sold to
tourists, and food, clay dishes, and clothing are sold to locals. Although the
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Rebhun, The Weightof Lovein NortheastBrazil
169
tourist industry is more famous, the clothing industry is more economically
important, especially the blue jeans industry. Hamuche and Sabra have large
blue jeans factories in the city, and mostly female pieceworkers assemble and
topstitch jeans at home. Caruaru has a few smallfavelas (squatter settlements),
but most of the population lives in owned or rented houses in poor and
working-class neighborhoods, many of which are mixtures of legalized and
shanty-type housing.
Many inhabitants of Caruaru migrated there from the small farms and rural
homesteads to the east of the city (Agreste region) or the arid cowboy country
to the west (Sertio region). The city's folklore draws from these two distinct
geographicocultural regions. "Caruaruenses" retain the small-town outlook of
their origins: despite its relatively large population, Caruaru is organized like a
series of villages. Residents know their immediate neighbors very well, and city
blocks are often inhabited by single extended families. However, few people
have friends living more than a few blocks away. My informants are drawn from
the lower working class of Caruaru and its surrounding rural area and nearby
villages. They include housewives, pieceworkers, seamstresses, bakers, and clay
artisans married to factory workers, painters, mechanics, and peddlers.
The Rezadeira
Northeast Brazil is as heterodox in its medical as in its religious systems. As
in other Latin American countries, the majority of the population receives its
primary health care from folk practitioners. These include herbalists, lay pharmacists, popular doctors, and religious healers from the Catholic, Protestant,
Kardecist Spiritist, Japanese, and Afro-Brazilian traditions, as well as many
healers who use combinations of herbs, pharmaceuticals, and syncretic rituals in
their cures (Loyola 1984; Nations 1982, 1983; Nations and Rebhun 1988a; de
Oliveira 1985; Scott 1986). The majority of the Brazilian population is at least
nominally Catholic. Many consult folk Catholic rezadeiraswho use prayers,
advice, herbs, and pharmaceuticals in their treatments of common ailments. Of
rural origin, rezadeiras now flourish in cities, where crowding and poor sanitation increase sickness. And whereas rural Catholic healers are as likely to be men
(rezadores)as women (rezadeiras),in cities, most are women and the majority of
their patients are also women. The rezadeira not only treats ailments but also
serves as an example of piety and reinforces concepts of virtue.
The most common ailments brought to rezadeiras are mau olhado (evil eye),'
said to be caused by other people's envy or anger, and peito aberto (open chest),
said to be caused by carrying too much weight, although these do not constitute
their entire repertoire. While some rezadeiras specialize in such problems as
snakebites, choking, or veterinary diseases, all in addition treat at least mau
olhado, from which any living thing may suffer, and peito aberto, which is said
to affect older children and adults, especially women. There is a large literature
on evil eye, which is found in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Latin
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170
journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
American cultures (see especially Dundes 1981; Foster 1972; Maloney 1976),
but the less common peito aberto has received less attention in the literature.
Rezadeiras treat patients with ritual combinations of prayers and gestures (see
Nations and Rebhun 1988a:33). Waving a leaf in the sign of the cross over the
patient's body, they recite mixtures of common Catholic prayers and folkloric
invocations. For example, one rezadeira described her treatment for mau olhado:
I pray the Lord's Prayer, Apostle's Creed, Hail Mary, Hail Holy Queen, then olhado I pray like
this: I say, "With two you were put on," that's the two eyes, isn't it? "With three I take you
off," that's with the powers of the three people of the Holy Trinity. Pray this three times and
the olhado heals.
While praying, the rezadeira sways, trembles, sweats, and yawns. These signs
indicate that the "heat" of mau olhado is passing through the leaf and the body
of the rezadeira as it leaves the patient.
In cases of peito aberto, further treatment is required after the mau olhado
prayer. Thirty-four year old Cleide was a typical case:3
Cleide had been suffering from chest pains, a feeling of weight on her chest, and shortness of
breath. After praying over her for mau olhado, Dona Maria Rezadeira measured a string twice
against Cleide's forearm and then looped it around her chest, showing a gap of a few inches.
Exclaiming about how the measured portion of the string was not long enough to close over
Cleide's "opened" chest, she then tied it around the chest and, mumbling a prayer, made the
sign of the cross over the sternum and gently pushed inward on Cleide's breasts and ribcage.
Dona Maria then untied the string, measured it again against the forearm, and looped it once
more on Cleide's chest, this time showing that the string length was sufficient to tie. Declaring
Cleide's chest now closed, Dona Maria recommended that Cleide refrain from lifting weight for
a few days.
With her prayers and with the sign of the cross, the rezadeira not only "closes"
the woman's body against invasion by evil influences, she calls down divine
strength to support her. The gesture of the cross also serves to remind the woman
of the courageous example of Christ, whom she, as a pious Catholic, must strive
to emulate. The ritual heals because it acknowledges the woman's pain, offers
the presence of a supportive deity, and reminds the woman not only that her
suffering is not as great as it might possibly be but also that her suffering has
meaning and virtue. Even if her family does not appreciate or even seem to
notice the sacrifice that she makes for them, the ritual assures her that none less
than Christ himself notices and approves.
Neither mau olhado nor peito aberto are necessarily believed supernatural
phenomena. Mau olhado is attributed to the force of other people's envy, anger,
or resentment hitting the patient, entering her body, and causing sickness. There
is no act involved, such as casting evil eye; it is seen as a natural result of the
existence of envy and resentment, neither an act of malice nor a supernatural
phenomenon (cf. Dundes 1981; Foster 1972; Maloney 1976). One rezadeira
explained:
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Rebhun,TheWeightofLovein Northeast
171
Some people think that evil eye is a supernaturalthing, but it isn't. It's that no one likes when
others are angryor jealous. And we alwaysfeel the feelings of others in the same way that we
can see and hear. So we stay nervous, thinkingof what could happen.Everyone is afraidto be
abandonedor attacked.So the fear, the anger,the anxietycombineand the personstayssick. So
you have to protectwith the powersof God, calm, and also improvethe situationfor the person
to get better.
Anyone, male or female, can give mau olhado inadvertently, although
women are stereotyped as more resentful and thus more likely to cast mau
olhado than men. Even more than mau olhado, peito aberto has a mundane
etiology: it is said to be caused by lifting too much weight. Women are more
susceptible to peito aberto than men for a variety of reasons. The most
common explanation rezadeiras gave me was that women's bodies are open
because their genitals are open in form. Defloration, pregnancy, and childbirth open their bodies even more, while men remain with closed genitals
and closed bodies (cf. Robben 1988:115). This, however, does not explain
why the chest is considered open in peito aberto; mau olhado does not enter
by way of the genitals.
Rezadeiras also told me that carrying extra weight forces the chest open,
allowing mau olhado to enter, sickening the patient. Peso (weight) refers both
to physical heaviness and to seriousness. Carrying weight is certainly important in women's daily routine, which includes lifting, carrying, and manipulating many heavy objects. They carry food from the marketplace, they lift
and carry infants and children, they scrub and wring clothes heavy with water
and then lift them to hang, and they lift furniture out of the way to clean
floors. In houses that are not served by running water, women must walk to
public faucets or rivers and then carry heavy buckets of water back home.
Women also say that they carry responsibilities or troubles as a weight,
often described as a cross. It is not uncommon for women to refer either to
some chronic problem or their husband as "o meu cruz" (my cross). While
Latin women are often described as imitating the steadfastness, chastity, and
self-sacrifice of the Virgin Mary (Stevens 1973), they also imitate Christ, who
is believed to have sacrificed himself so that others might achieve redemption. Like Christ, women take upon themselves the burden of responsibility
for the welfare of those they love. Worrying about and accommodating
others' emotional needs while self-effacingly denying their own can be a very
heavy cross to bear.
But again peito aberto's localization of weight on the chest is curious,
because women carry heavy objects on shoulders, heads, and hips, not chests.
I believe that the localization of weight on the chest indicates that, like mau
olhado, peito aberto reflects the emotional consequences of the woman's role
and constitutes an embodiment of socioemotional conflicts. The weight
women carry too much of is emotional rather than physical. Folk speech and
metaphorical meanings attached to body parts offer clues to peito aberto's
emotional qualities.
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Journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
Linguistic Aspects of Peito Aberto
Brazilians like to boast that their language is one of the most complex on earth
because any one word or phrase can have several meanings. Peito abertois no
exception. Rezadeiras and their patients use the term to designate a sickness.
Here, peito aberto is linguistically contrasted with peito or corpofechado(closed
chest or body), into which evil influences cannot enter. They say the prayers
and cross-making of the rezadeira "close" the body of the patient so that the
force of mau olhado and other dangers cannot enter. The vulnerability of peito
aberto is contrasted with the shieldedness ofpeito fechado.4
However, outside the rezadeira's house the term is used like the English
"confront with bared breast" to refer to unprotected courage.5 To "enfrentarcorn
peito aberto"is to stand up to some threat with brave sincerity. And peitofechado
also has a more general meaning: invulnerable to mercy, pity, or love, as in the
English hard or closed-hearted.The peito is of course the location of the corardo
(heart), and the two terms can be used interchangeably. In Brazil, as in European
tradition in general, the heart is thought of as the seat of emotions, especially
those of love, excitement, compassion, and courage. Peito, like corapdo,can be
used as a synonym of courage, especially where the courage is a sign of moral
worth and emotional warmth: "eletemrn
muitocoragdo"(he has great heart [courage,
human decency]). The expression 'fazer de tripascorap8o"(to make heart from
guts) is used to mean to pluck up courage or to speak with great sincerity "from
the bottom of one's heart." And the phrases "no meu corardo"(in my heart) and
"no meupeito" (in my chest) both mean "in my emotions."
In the context of folk healing, a peito or corpo fechado is desirable because
the force of other people's negative emotions cannot enter the body and cause
sickness. But in daily conversation, a peito or corpo fechado is undesirable
because it indicates lack of compassion and invulnerability to the emotionally
based claims of others upon the closed-hearted individual. Closed-heartedness
is especially condemned in women.
Expanding Hearts
Women's hearts are truly not their own. Throughout their lives, women are
constrained to be preoccupied with and feel responsibility for the emotions of
others, at the same time that they are enjoined from experiencing the full range
of their own emotions. For example, bereaved favela mothers se conformam
(resign themselves) to the deaths of their infants, refusing to cry in order to allow
the spirit of the dead child to enter heaven unencumbered by earthly emotional
attachments. Folk belief portrays the mother's emotion as harming her "little
angel" (anginho):her tears are said to wet the angel's winding cloth or wings and
knock him out of the sky (Nations and Rebhun 1988b:160-163). Here grief is
seen as literally weighty, and the mother must free her child by suppressing her
own emotional expression.
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Rebhun, The Weightof Lovein NortheastBrazil
173
Folk speech expresses the belief that women's hearts and the chests that
confine them expand to accommodate greater numbers of loved ones. One of
the most frequently repeated sayings in Caruaru is corardode mutlhersemprecabe
mais um (there is always room for one more in a woman's heart). The phrase is
used in a variety of situations. For example, an invitation to lunch might be
accompanied by the statement mesa do pobrek comocoragdode mulher:semprecabe
mais um (a poor man's table is like the heart of a woman: there is always room
for one more), or a man might justify his infidelities by joking sou homemmas
tenho corardode mulher:semprecabe mais um (I'm a man but I have a woman's
heart: there's always room for one more). A promiscuous woman can be
described by comparing her open thighs to a woman's heart: a p'riquita dela &
como corardode mulher:semprecabe mais um (her pussy [lit. "parakeet"] is like a
woman's heart: there's always room for one more). In fact, anything open, easily
accessible, or expandable can be described with the phrase, although it is most
commonly used in connection with pregnancy or children; the idea is that
women are capable of loving an infinite number of children. A woman's heart
may already have been entered by her husband and previous children, but no
matter how crowded with beloveds her heart becomes, it will expand to
accommodate all who need it and have legitimate claim on it. But like the heavy
grief that prevents the little angel from flying, a woman's love has substance. It
takes up space in her heart, swelling her chest.
Love and Emotion-Work
Women do not only bear the burden of controlling their own disallowed
emotions, they bear heavy responsibility for the emotions of others. It is not
only the souls of dead infants which are freed by their mothers' management of
emotion: women's living children and husbands are also freed by the unacknowledged emotion-work that women do on their behalf. Emotions involve work
in three ways: (1) the Freudian sense of individuals cognitively working at
making repressed emotions conscious in order to relieve them (Freud 1917); (2)
the Goffmanian sense of working at surface presentation of the proper emotional
self (Goffman 1959); and (3) the Hochschildian concept of"deep acting," where
laborers must produce emotion in themselves as a requirement of their jobs
(Hochschild 1983, 1985).
In Caruaru, women's jobs center on being wives and mothers. Not only do
they cook, clean, and raise children, their paid work extends their domestic roles
into the marketplace as seamstresses, domestic servants, and bakers. Their
physical labor provides for the physical comforts of others; it is accompanied by
emotional labor that provides for the emotional comforts of others. In
Hochschild's terms, women deep act self-effacing compassionate concern as a
Goffmanian self-presentation of their good role performance. Their worry over
the emotional states of family members allows them to perform the Freudian
emotion work of cognitizing others' emotions and then acting to accommodate
or relieve them. Dulcilia Buitoni has described this feminine image as the
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Journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
"mulheroasis" (oasis woman) who provides physical and emotional comfort in
an arid social landscape and whose preoccupation is sign and proof of love
(Buitoni 1981:37-38). A Brazilian proverb states: A muiher feita de amor (the
woman is made of love). The woman's obligation is to love, and her love takes
the form of physical and emotional labor for her loved ones (Prado 1979).
As in other parts of Brazil, people in Caruaru see social roles as characterized
(cf. Robben 1989:577).
by obligation (obrigardo)and consideration (considerardo)
Obligations are the stated responsibilities of social actors toward one another,
and considerations are actions performed out of love or compassion-above and
beyond the call of duty. Officially, everyone has obligations and is free to act
with consideration. But actually obligation and consideration operate differently
for men and for women. This may be illustrated by the difference in use of the
word safado,derived from the verb safar(to escape from). Someone who is safado
has escaped from the normal rules and is both unashamed and shameless. A safado
man is considered mischievously devilish: his status increases by possessing
safadeza. But a safado woman is thought to be a menace to public morality: her
status and moral acceptability decreases with the degree of her safadeza.
Men are forgiven for operating without consideration: they can even get out
of most of their obligations without heavy consequences. But women do not
have the refuge of safadeza: not only are they held to their obligations, they are
expected to operate at all times with consideration. For women, consideration
is an obligation, and thus men and children take it for granted. No wonder
proverbs declare ser mae t sofer (to be a mother is to suffer) and ser esposa k sofer
(to be a wife is to suffer). A woman's obligation to self-effacingly feel compassion
toward, worry about, and suffer along with and on behalf of their loved ones is
as important a part of her work as providing physical comfort through cooking,
cleaning, and sexual services.
SuffocatingAnger
The obligation to nurture, to forgive, and to love requires that women avoid
openly expressing any emotions that assert the self. These include anger and
envy, the attributed causes ofmau olhado. Anger is a most problematic emotion
because, as a reaction to a perceived unjust threat, it asserts the outraged rights
of self against immoral others and holds potential for violence (Averill 1982)6
Many women fear that, if they were to give free reign to their anger, violence
would result. As one housewife said, "When I am angry, I really lose control.
I'm afraid of this." Women adopt different strategies for dealing with anger.
Some explode in the shouting and crying fits ofnervos, and are then discounted
as nervous hysterics, or shout their anger in the voices of spirits they believe
possess them. But many women suppress verbal expression of their anger all
together:
I don't say everythingthat I feel, that I suffer ... to not cause problems. .. I can't express,I
don't botheranyone, and I can't say what I want to say.
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Rebhun, TheWeightofLovein Northeast
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Women, in their role as comforter and socializer, are more responsible for the
maintenance of social harmony than men. Often even reactions to infuriating
events will be smothered by silence.
My neighborarrivedsaying [my husband]was cheating on me, me all shut up, I shut up, my
daughter,I didn'thavevoice. I saidnothing. I don't like to fight, I don't like to quarrel,exchange
words, I only like peace, I like union in my house, understandme.
Women often showed me small bruises on their thighs which they attributed
to the force of their blood boiling in their veins with suppressed anger.7 Preto
(black), the color of bruises, is used as a synonym for rage as in the phrasefiquei
preto (I was furious). Like bereaved mothers of infants who consciously suppress
their tears, angry women bite their lips, drink herbal teas, take tranquilizers, lie
down, or pray to avoid their anger's explosion in shouting or fighting. One
young mother explained:
When I have a problemof anger, I only get better if I leave and walk because if I stay in the
house I will stayeven angrier .... If not, we will come to blows;so I preferto leave a little, get
a cigarette,and go into the world disappearing.
Often, women deal with their anger by ostentatiously ignoring its object. One
housewife explained:
I make like she's not there. She passes,I don't look, don't even talk to her, freeze her out
completely... and the people know not to say the nameof Deannato me becauseI go, "Who?"
For me, that slut doesn't exist. . . . I took her out of my life.
The social fiction that the antagonist does not exist allows the angry woman to
exclude her socially while pretending that nothing is happening, since the
antagonist is treated as not present. Another version of this cold-cutting is
temporary silent treatment:
Who wins quarrelsis me becausesometimesI ask for money and he doesn't want to give it to
me; so I stayscowling [decarafeialit. "with ugly face"],passsome dayswithout speaking.When
I think thatno, it won't work, he says,"Takeit! Oxente!Whatajerkishwoman-any little thing
and she staysscowling!"So I win the battle.
Alternately, women may disguise anger in sarcasm, a practice called soltando
piadinhas (letting loose little jokes). For example, when Marilfi discovered that
her live-in boyfriend had a concubine in Centenirio neighborhood,
I began to let loose those little jokes at home, that to be a good woman you had to live in
Centenirio neighborhood.That only a woman who lived in Centendrioneighborhoodhad a
man to give somethingto her.... He didn't open his mouth to say anythingto me.
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Journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
Many women will gossip about the object of their anger to try to manipulate
their social networks against her while treating her with apparent friendliness
face-to-face.
There arelots of ladieswho when they don't like someone they stayjawboningon the sidewalk
about how bad she is, saying,"Oh, she did this, she did that,"gossipingabout the girl.
Or they will release their anger on someone powerless who represents the object,
usually a child.
Difficult life, I bear it, bear, bear, bear, but also I don't have patience. It gives me that hatred
locked inside of me, it staysthat locked inside, I stay with too much anger, angerat whatever
little thing, and I yell at the kids. I stayfurious[danadada vida,lit. "damnedoflife"] with them.
Caruaruenses have a hydraulic conception of anger (cf. Solomon 1984). Like
steam, it is said to rise from the boiling of its heat and hurt with its pressure
unless expressed. Women describe unexpressed anger as a suffocating weight:
When I'm angry at a person, I stay with a suffocationimprisonedinside of me....
up. I stay vibrating.
I stay shut
Suppressed anger goes unrelieved:
Who pardons, pardons but stays suffering inside in silence with hurt. I'm a good person-sympathetic, friendly-but I guard that anger my whole life long.
Here, the accumulation of suppressed anger raises blood pressure to the boiling
point, causing bruises. As suppressed rage builds, it collects its smothering weight
on the chest, causing the chest pains, heart palpitations, and the shortness of
breath typical of peito aberto. The accumulated weight of unshed tears, unspoken angers, and disallowed resentments, combined with the weight of loving
responsibility for the feelings of others make an unbearable load. With their
bodies already exhausted from the daily round of housework, many women feel
unable to carry this emotional load as well.
Informant statements suggest a movement of anger through and between
bodies. In mau olhado, a woman's own denied and suppressed anger leaks out
of her eyes, sickening others. It boils in her veins, appearing as bruises on her
skin. It also accumulates inside her chest, pushing out from inside to open the
chest, allowing others' suppressed, accumulated anger to flood in as mau olhado,
sickening her.
Women are seen as more susceptible than men to having their chests opened
by this accumulated smothered anger partly because they are less free than men
to release anger in shouting or fighting, partly because they are believed to be
more likely to experience resentment in general, and partly because their hearts
are believed to be already swollen with loving concern for others, leaving less
room for festering anger inside the chest. It is no accident that peito aberto is
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Rebhun, The Weightof Lovein NortheastBrazil
177
precisely the condition of having an expanded heart and chest. The heart has
expanded to accommodate too many beloveds at the same time the chest has
become swollen with smothered anger.
Conclusions
Northeast Brazilian folk concepts portray emotion as a dangerous and substantive force that not only accumulates at various points inside the body, but leaps
the divide between bodies through exit or entrance at certain body sites such as
eyes and chest. Emotions are said to take up space, and the body must change
shape to accommodate their presence. Love is seen as a kind of pregnancy of
the heart. Just as a woman accepts a man's semen into her genitals and shelters
his child in her swollen abdomen, she accepts concern for his and his child's
troubles into her heart, which becomes swollen with love. The peito aberto
healing ritual shows how literally this swelling is seen; emphasizing first the
string-measured size of the chest and then employing tying and squeezing to
push the chest back to size. The cross-making and praying of the mau olhado
healing ritual make a shield of sanctity to protect the woman from others' anger
and envy. The ritual emphasizes the divisive, evil nature of these emotions,
contrasting them with the divine love and purity that should underlie social
unity in a Christian society.
Peito aberto and mau olhado are diagnosed and treated together because they
form two sides of the same problem. In mau olhado the patient is suffering from
the ill effects of other people's disallowed resentment; in peito aberto she is
suffering from the metaphoric weight of her own emotional obligations and
disallowed resentments. To be virtuous, women must open their hearts to
others; but too much openness will burden them with the weight of managing
the emotions of too many people while denying their own. But while it is a
show of virtue to scold others for their emotional transgressions, a virtuous
woman cannot honorably assert herself by denying or bemoaning her emotional
obligations to others. The peito aberto healing ritual is subversive because it
sanctions a woman's closing her heart to others. Mau olhado can be openly
labeled as caused by others' envy and anger, because envy and anger are openly
disapproved, and so it makes sense that they would sicken. But peito aberto must
be disguised under the metaphor ofweight, because to openly state that a woman
is sickened by her "natural" obligation to love and not resent is too threatening.
By disguising the etiology under the metaphor of weight, the subversive nature
of the ailment is disguised.
The rezadeira's treatment ofpeito aberto and the imagery of women burdened
by crosses show that women not only emulate the passive image of Mary, the
chaste, suffering, self-abnegating mother, but also that of Christ who actively
turned his victimization into redemption not only for himself, but for all of his
beloved children. Emulating the martyrdom of Christ allows women to survive
emotionally, but human frailty all too often diverts self-sacrifice from redemption to neurosis.
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Journalof AmericanFolklore107 (1994)
Caruaruense women describe their suppressed anger as pressing suffocatingly
on their chests, boiling in their veins, and sometimes bursting forth from their
eyes to harm others. Their obligatory love and accumulating suppressed rage
expands their hearts, opening their chests and allowing others' envy and anger
to enter, sickening them. Armed with prayers and strings, rezadeirashelp women
hold together hearts too full of others' needs, too vulnerable to others' resentments, and too suffocated by smothered rage.
The case of peito aberto shows that emotion is expressed not only in words
but also in terms of body metaphors that may take the form of folk ailments and
be elaborated through religious imagery. Emotion in turn is itself shaped by folk
beliefs about propriety, role, and duty as well as folkoric associations of particular
emotions with specific body parts. While the exclusively linguistic emphasis of
much emotion research can produce useful insights, attention to folk ailments
shows that what remains unsaid verbally is often as important as what is said out
loud. These unspoken sentiments are most likely to be expressed in terms of the
folklore of the body and are often cast in a religious context. A complete
approach must utilize both linguistic and folkloristic evidence to reveal not only
what informants feel they must express but what they cannot bring themselves
to say directly. The researcher must cast the broadest possible net to capture the
full range of emotional nuance.
Notes
The research upon which this essay is based was supported by grants from the Fulbright
Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Social
Science Research Council, a Tinker Foundation Grant from the Latin American Studies Center of
the University of California at Berkeley, and a Hannum-Warner Travel Fellowship from Mount
Holyoke College, and was carried out in affiliation with the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco.
I am in the debt of Stanley Brandes, Alan Dundes, and Joan Ablon for their training and advice,
and of my parents for their constant support. In addition, Marilyn Nations and Nancy ScheperHughes helped shape my views of Northeast Brazil. This essay benefited from comments by Stanley
Brandes, Michael Gallo, Molly Lee, Michael Nunley, Cecilia de Mello, Maria Massolo, anonymous
reviewers, and especially Katharine Young and Barbara Babcock on earlier drafts; they are not
however responsible for its content. I wish to thank the women of Caruaru who welcomed me
into their homes and burdened their hearts on my behalf.
1The term gloss is generally preferred to definition in the emotion literature to indicate that
different languages have entirely different glossaries of emotion of which any given term makes up
a part; and also to emphasize that our understanding of emotion terms are translations that may not
reflect subtle differences in meaning between languages. In addition, not all felt emotions correspond to terms in the emotion vocabulary of any given language. Emotions may thus be referred
to as glossed or unglossedfor any given language.
2Evil eye is designated by a number of words in Brazilian Portuguese, including olhado (gaze),
olho gordo (fat eye), and olho grande (big eye). Mau olhado (bad gaze) is the most common of these
terms. References to evil eye are ubiquitous. Anything admired will be offered to the admirer who
is honor-bound to refuse it; children and especially infants are jokingly offered for adoption to
anyone who comes to the home: the idea is to force people constantly to deny that they want
coveted things. The phrase o seu olho gordo cegop'ra mim (your evil eye is blind to me) is often
written on truck bumpers and booths in the marketplace. Anyone is susceptible to becoming sick
from having been admired, but infants are considered especially vulnerable because they are weak.
d
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3All informant names are pseudonyms.
4The idea of closing the body to evil influences is not unique to Brazilian folk medicine but is
found throughout Latin America, as are evil eye beliefs and humoral pathology.
5The English to bare one's breastwould be expressed by the Portuguese word desabafar,which
literally means "to ventilate." This connotation is absent from the term peito abertoin Portuguese.
6Averill posits that the emotions of anger, envy, and jealousy vary neither in their experience
nor in their expression but rather in the nature of the perceived moral wrong that inspires them:
anger is a reaction to a perceived injustice to the self or selfs group, jealousy regards selfs loss to
another as unjust, and envy sees the good fortune of another as an unacceptable threat to the self's
situation. All three involve the ego's resentment of the power or the primacy of another to the ego.
They are thus incompatible with the female obligation to be compassionate and selfless. Averill's
discussion of anger, jealousy, and envy shows how linguistic categories break up the spectrum of
emotional experience in ways that are not necessarily congruent with any biological arrangement.
7I do not know what causes these bruises. I suspect they are created when women brace heavy
loads on their thighs for lifting or when children seated on their hips kick them. Many women also
suffer from circulatory problems and vitamin deficiencies. The bruises are very light and small and
usually occur on the outside of the upper thigh or inside of the arm either above or below the
elbow, where loads lifted with legs and carried in arms press most heavily. None of the women
who showed me anger bruises was a battered wife, or had bruises on any other area of her body.
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"WITNESSING" SOCIAL SUFFERING: Testimonial Narratives of Women from Afghanistan*1
Dossa, Parin
. BC Studies 147 (Autumn 2005): 27-49.
Abstract
A reading of testimonial narratives of Afghan women from a low-income housing area in
metropolitan Vancouver, British Columbia is presented. Their lives may be read within the context of
"social suffering" - a term that suggests three scenarios: existential suffering, institutional responses,
and the remaking of worlds by those who have been victims of structural violence and war (Das and
Kleinman 2001).
INTRODUCTION
IT is ONLY IN THE LAST DECADE that issues of violence and social suffering have received
substantive attention from anthropologists. The fact that both traumatic and everyday forms of
suffering have become endemic to our world may be one motivating factor behind this attention. But
there is also the issue of disciplinary rejuvenation. In anthropology, important questions have surfaced
in the wake of critical reflection on how we research and write about the people whom we study at
close range. Given the discipline's conventional interest in peoples of the Third World (read: the
colonized), anthropologists witnessed acts of violence and cultural genocide inflicted on local
populations. Yet we remained mute and chose to focus on the "cultures" of disappearing worlds.2 Such
a depoliticized stance gave us a comfort zone that we still enjoy as we continue to write for institutions
that support and reward us for our work. We rarely research or write for the people whom we study,
even if they are now mobile and live in our midst.
Taking a guarded approach, some anthropologists have argued that disciplinary constraints
could not accommodate rapid colonial interventions "so that by the time the anthropologists had
something to say it was usually long after the fact" (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 4). Other
anthropologists have taken a critical stance, suggesting that we must acknowledge the contradictions
that have been our longtime companions, salient among which is our complicity with colonialism (Behar
1996; Harrison 1991). This critique has given rise to two questions: (i) given the fact that our subjects
have been and continue to be among the oppressed, why were anthropologists slow to address various
dimensions of inequality (social, economic, cultural, and political)? and (2) why do we lack political
commitment? Further interrogation is warranted with regard to situations in which we come into
contact with social suffering: do we witness what we see and hear in the field or do we merely observe?
If we choose to act as witnesses, then how do we go about doing this?
In this article I address these questions through a reading of testimonial narratives of Afghan
women from a low-income housing area in metropolitan Vancouver, British Columbia. The narratives
form part of a larger study, which examines the impact of displacement and resettlement on the health
and well-being of aging Afghan women. The terms "health," "aging," and "women" suggest social
marginality. The health status of older women has been extensively researched because these women
are considered to be doubly disadvantaged: both being old and being a woman are constructed as social
burdens (Lock 1993). However, the research on aging racialized women who are subject to intersecting
inequalities such as gender, race, class, and age has been negligible. Their lives may be read within the
context of "social suffering" - a term that suggests three scenarios: existential suffering, institutional
responses, and the remaking of worlds by those who have been victims of structural violence and war
(Das and Kleinman 2001).
DILEMMA OF "CLOSE-IN CONTACT WITH FAR-OUT LIVES"
In Vulnerable Observer Ruth Behar, (1996, 2) problematizes the ethnographic method of
participant observation on the grounds that, at some point in time, we need to decide whether we
should "stay behind the lens of the camera, switch on the tape recorder, [and] keep pen in hand" or
whether we should follow the example of the fictive photographer, Rolf Carle, who threw aside his
camera and flung his arms around a girl whose heart and lungs had collapsed in an avalanche in
Colombia. Behar's response is to assume the position of a vulnerable observer so as to intertwine her
personal stones with her field research. While this merging may address the dilemma of what Behar
refers to as "close-in contact with far-out lives" (7), and even the problem of power dynamics in the field
(Wolf 1996), it does not touch on some key concerns. These concerns are revealed in the following
example.
Consider the picture of a vulture waiting to pounce on a Sudanese girl who has collapsed from
hunger. This image raises an ethical question: should the photographer, Kevin Carter, have saved the girl
rather than waited for the perfect pose, which earned him a prestigious award? When Carter committed
suicide he became famous and earned sympathy for bringing to the world's attention scenes of horror;
and yet the girl remained unnamed. The implicit message in the lone picture of the girl (also used widely
by international agencies to solicit funds to alleviate hunger) is that the West is the saviour of the
starving and deprived people of Africa. Like the little girl, the colonial narrative of exploitation remains
unnamed (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997). This brings into relief the need for what Razack (1998) and
Farmer (2003) refer to as "generous contextualization." This method allows us to see the link between
large-scale forces and biography, between here and there. It is at this level that we can witness stories
of suffering, provided we pay close attention to the particular ways through which the sufferers (those
who have been subject to political and structural violence) communicate their experiences. While we
cannot fully understand the pain of others, we can witness their stories. As Das (2001, 572) has
expressed it:
In the end one can say that while the ownership of one's pain rests only with oneself- so that no
one speaking on behalf of the person in pain has a right to appropriate it for some other use (e.g. for
knowledge, for justice, for creating a better society of the future) - there is a way however, in which I
may lend my body to register the pain of the other. The anthropological text may serve as a body of
writing which lets the pain of the other happen to it.
We need to problematize the exclusive emphasis on the anthropological text, keeping in mind
that the focus on the text is informed by institutional discourses. Within the research scenario the
power of the text is revealed in the labour-intensive paperwork that goes into research grant
applications and ethics approval - none of which reflects the reality and aspirations of the people we
study. In a clinical situation the medical text forms the basis for diagnoses of symptoms but not for
people's life trajectories. In the social service sector it is policy (rules and regulations) that informs
practice. There may be room for subversion but nothing leads to a fundamental transformation that
would make a difference in the lives of marginalized populations. In my research, setting the need for
social transformation concerned basic human rights (e.g., adequate housing, access to health care, and
opportunities for work), the attainment of which would have alleviated pain caused by violence, both
structural and political. By way of a modest beginning, I want to suggest a contextualized and layered
reading of Meena's testimonial narrative.3
I use the term "testimonial" in an expanded sense. While I focus on the story of one woman, the
voices of her cohort are not necessarily excluded. As I show below, opening up the boundaries of a text
constitutes one way for us to witness stories of suffering.
If these women have taken the initiative to witness their own stories,then what is our
responsibility as researchers and readers? We do not endure their suffering: we study it. This is why we
need to witness with the women and not for them; to do the latter would be to appropriate their stories
of suffering. But we must also recognize that the boundary between these two positions is blurred. I do
not think that the process of appropriation can be reversed; however, it can be minimized through an
active process of listening, which entails paying attention to alternative means of communication.
THE STUDY
The testimonial account presented here comes from narrative interviews with fifteen Afghan
women from a residential area in Burnaby, British Columbia, which, to maintain confidentiality, I call by
the fictive name of Valley View. I also change the women's names and identifiable markers. Each of
these fifteen women granted me two to three interviews, and five more women participated in a focus
group session. The women determined the interview schedule, depending on whether they wanted to
continue with their stories or whether they felt that other women should fill in for them. This mode of
collective storytelling is common among marginalized groups (Dossa 2004). Originally I had planned to
interview aging Afghan women, but young women came forward and stated that they considered
themselves to be old. War and displacement had deprived them of their middle adulthood. The women
were Convention refugees, sponsored by the state. Some had an elementary education, while others
had a mid-range education. Their length of time in Canada ranged from two to twelve years, which
enabled us to gain insight into their settlement experiences from an early to a relatively later period in
their lives. In the interview sessions I invited them to tell the stories of their lives, which included such
topics as being a newcomer to Canada, work and everyday life, encounters with social and health
providers, and managing health and illness. Group interviews were designed to encourage dialogue and
discussion among the women themselves as well as between the women and other parties (i.e.,
indigenous service provider, researcher, and research assistant). All the interviews were conducted in
the women's first language - Dari - and were subsequently translated and transcribed by two research
assistants: one Afghan and one Iranian.4
MEENA'S STORY: LAYING OUT THE CONTEXT
Meena came to Canada in 1998 with her second eldest daughter. Like other women in our
study, Meena came from another country (India) where she lived for seven years with her husband and
five children (four daughters and a son). Since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Meena
had lived through war and civil strife. A decade of Soviet presence (1979-89) resulted in Afghanistan
becoming a battle-ground for the Cold War (Rubin 2002, Montgomory 8c Rondinelli 2004). The United
States provided arms and ammunition to several hundred anti-community Jehadis (resistance fighters)
in order to drive out the Russians, thus converting Afghanistan into a land mine (Cooley 1999 ; Rashid
2004). During the time of the Soviet occupation, 1.5 million Afghans lost their lives, 2.5 million were
injured, and 1.1 million were internally displaced. Out of 5 million refugees, 2.6 million lived in camps in
Pakistan and Iran, where the living conditions were only marginally better than what was found in wartorn Afghanistan (Brodsky 2003). This is what Meena has to say about her country: "All our houses were
bombed. Several bombs came to our neighbourhood. I am not saying that the situation was bad only for
us. No - for everybody in that area. When they bombed a neighbourhood close to us, eighteen families
were killed." She continued: "Who can not be happy in their own country? Who likes to be homeless
and confused? Who? Don't you like your home country? Everybody likes to live in their home country so
far as there is peace, food and happiness" (interview data). Note how Meena engages the reader
through the use of the words "who," "you," and "everybody." As I show below, it is within this broad
social context that Meena acts as witness to her own story.
Meena related that her family had to flee Afghanistan in order to avoid the abduction of her
daughter by a mujahedeen (a fundamentalist anti-Soviet faction that ruled with an iron hand from 1992
to 1995). Following an incident during which a bearded man came to their house at 2:00 A.M. asking for
Meena's daughter, Meena's husband sold their house at a low price and used the money to get fake
passports for India. Their eldest daughter, who stayed in Afghanistan to continue her work as an airline
host, supported the family for a year until the Taliban forbade women from working outside the home
(even if they were supporting families). Meena's husband left the family in search of work and Meena
lost regular contact with him. She and her second eldest daughter were accepted into Canada on the
grounds that Meena was a "single mother" (her other daughters got married). When Meena came to
Canada she sponsored her husband. Five years have gone by, and the couple is still separated despite
the fact that the judge has accepted Meena's husband's application. The separation has caused Meena a
lot of agony. In response to our question regarding health, Meena observed: "This [my health] depends
on my need for my husband. He needs me and I need him. He is my husband. He is depressed. So all my
depression is about this. My illness is about this. I have cried and cried, shouted and screamed but no
one has listened to me until now" [referring to the research interview, November 2003].
Meena's everyday life is governed by her concern that her husband is not with her. She uses his
absence to tell a larger story of pain and suffering - one that is common to her cohort.
SPEAKING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Feminists have endeavoured to document the everyday lives of women, noting two points. First,
in order to benefit the capitalist system, women's everyday activities have been rendered invisible.
Without women's unpaid work within the private sphere and low-paid/ghettoized work in the public
sphere, capitalism would not be a viable enterprise (Fraser 1989; Smith 1984; 1987). This gendering of
everyday life reveals the workings of the larger system within a localized space. Second, women's
engagement with the materiality of everyday spaces has brought into relief the numerous ways in which
they subvert the system: this is critically important as it contains the seeds of social change (Dossa
1988).
Everyday life featured strongly in our interview schedule. In assessing Meena, what was
foremost in our minds was the image of a busy woman carrying a double load. But this image was not of
interest to her, although she looked after her two-year-old granddaughter, cooked for three people (her
daughter, her son-in-law, and herself), and did all the cleaning. Meena's everyday life was filled with one
worry: her separation from her husband:
I have become ill. I have got blood sugar. I am sick because of my stress for my husband. He is
my husband. We lived together. He is in India. He is sick as well. He is worried, lots of pressure. I went to
my doctor. She wrote a letter that I am sick. I am worried. I long for my husband and I am sad. I gave
them the letter. I have got depression. Doctor said so twice. We have sent them letters but I do not
know why nothing happens.
Meena stated that they have taken all the necessary steps to facilitate her husband
Mohammed's immigration to Canada. She has paid back the government loan she received for her air
ticket to Canada; she has obtained a letter of employment for Mohammed from an Iranian shopkeeper
(a friend); and she has submitted all the necessary documents. The latter includes a medical certificate
attesting to the fact that spousal separation has made Meena sick. Over the past five years, the only
response she has received from the immigration office is: "today, tomorrow, today, tomorrow, so we do
not know when he will come."
Attending to her wounds has become part of Meena's everyday routine. The term "wounds" is
of value as it blurs the boundary between Meena's diagnosed illness (high blood pressure and diabetes)
and the pain and suffering caused by over two decades of war and violence (which the women in our
study thought of as the "rape" of Afghanistan). This violation has been expressed in the form of wounds
on women's bodies.5 Meena speaks from her wounds when she says: "I have become ill. I have got
blood sugar. I am sick because of my stress for my husband." Her illness cannot be reduced to a clinical
diagnosis that silences the sociopolitical context. Meena is on medication, which places the onus on her
to get well and absolves societal institutions from responsibility.
Meena is not the only one who tends to her wounds on a day-to-day basis. Consider the
following two scenarios relayed by Leila and Salima, respectively.
I was at home once. We had made some food. I told my son to go to the bazaar and buy
something. He left and I went to wash my hair. I had washed all the clothes and cleaned the house. A
boy from the neighbour came and said, "Lady. Your son was taken from the road. They put him in a car
and left." I put on my burka and ran to the streets. I did not know where to go. The car had stopped
somewhere close to get other boys, ten to eleven years old. So I found the car and told that man: "Dear
father please. I will go on my knees but do not take my son." He said: "No. We have to." And I have seen
so many things. Our sons and children beaten, and slashed on the streets. So much cruelty we have
seen. No one can believe.
The poignancy of this event is highlighted by the disruption of what we regard as ordinary
activities: Leila's cooking and her son's going to the bazaar for a missing ingredient. It shows how war
and violence penetrate civil space, the end result of which is the drastic displacement of people and the
loss of civilian lives. Although Leila's son returned, it did not lessen her trauma as she witnessed his
friends being "beaten and slashed on the streets."
Salima stated: "God knows that we have seen the killings of people, our neighbours, other
people, relatives. seen them dying in their situation. I have suffered so much. Still when I see someone
without a leg, I suffer for that person. But what should we do? Go where?" With the onset of violence,
there did not seem to be any safe space within which the women and their families could continue with
everyday life as they had known it. All the women in our study had multiple stories that they recalled on
a daily basis for the simple reason that their wounds have not healed - not even in Canada, their new
country of settlement. Neglect and institutional insensitivity to their pain and suffering have given rise
to more wounds, which have become embedded in the bodies of the women. It is from these wounds
that they tell their stories. Yet, the women worked hard not merely to survive but also to live. Meena,
for example, went for walks and to the library (she loved reading). She also went to Surrey by bus. Being
a kindergarten teacher in Afghanistan, she wanted to earn money by baby-sitting. The extra money
would help her with household expenses, including her medicine. But she was afraid to take this job as
she was told that if she dropped the baby, owing to her dizzy spells, she would be sued.
Other activities that formed part of women's routine included going to a make-shift mosque on
Fridays, participating in the Afghan women's drop-in programs (organized by a resource-deprived
community centre), and keeping in touch with relatives in other parts of the world. But all these
activities may be considered to be "peripheral" as they did not address the fundamental issues with
which the women were confronted in their new homeland. Women's everyday lives were filled with
emptiness, which, on the surface, could be attributed to their experiences back home. Here are two
accounts, from Meena and Nargis, respectively.
They took everything from us. Everything was destroyed, even our homes were bombed. Three
or four times we had bombs in our house ... For a minute all our houses were shaking. Mirrors got
broken and shattered glass came like rain on our head. Blood everywhere and people were dripping in
blood because of all those ruins. So we had a very bad situation in Afghanistan. Many people lost their
legs, hands and other body parts.
Nargis stated that they lived in misery. "No electricity, no lamp, nothing. You cannot see. You
are scared. All the noise, all the bombs over our heads. So I had also illness at the time. My legs did hurt.
So we had so much misery. We had no choice but to leave the country, leaving everything behind: our
house, furniture, rugs, china, our life there."
It is important to note that stories of suffering can be pathologized. Kleinman and Kleinman
(1997, 10) make two points. First, "their [sufferers'] memories (their intimately interior images) of
violation are made over into trauma stories" (emphasis in original) by institutions that deal with asylum
seekers. Second, in the hands of medical professionals, these stories/real life events are converted into
images of victimization; that is, into images of passivity. Based on these observations the authors
contend: "We need to ask... what kind of cultural process underpins the transformation of a victim of
violence to someone with a pathology?" (ibid). For Kleinman and Kleinman a step forward is to ensure
that local participants are included in the process of policy making and program development.
This laudable goal, I argue, cannot be fully accomplished without listening closely to what the
participants have to say about their experiences of suffering and pain. And this listening is not merely
confined to hearing the words. This does not mean that we underestimate the power of words. After all,
the women in our study used words to build vivid images: "shattered glass," "dripping in blood,"
"missing legs and hands," "grief in my body," and so on. But we must also acknowledge that words do
not fully capture experiences of pain and suffering. Furthermore, the words and stories of marginalized
people are not valorized unless they resonate with the language of the dominant group. Hill-Collins
(2000, vii; 1990, 1st Ed.) puts it this way: "Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of
being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a
dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the
ideas of dominant groups."
In order to avoid diluting their experiences of suffering or risking having them be appropriated
by institutions, the women in our study took the stance of wounded storytellers - a position that allowed
them to witness their own stories. It is at this level that the women sought to engage the
reader/researcher so as to effect multilayered change, ranging from small acts to large-scale solutions.
The emphasis is not on the expert (anthropologist or health and service provider) as witness - a topdown approach - but, rather, on ethical listening, which focuses on speaking with our research
participants rather than for them. This is a significant move, especially in light of Spivak's (1988)
observation that the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized in institutions and ideology, leaving no
space for the subaltern to tell her own story.
THE WOUNDED STORYTELLERS: "AFGHANISTAN HAS BEEN DESTROYED"6
Acting as a witness to your own story of suffering and pain is an intricate process. People who
witness their own stories are aware of the need to speak in a different language - such is the extent to
which they have been silenced (Ross 2001). This alternative mode of communication, which is not
severed from dominant discourse, has a threefold function: (1) it ensures that the self is not constructed
as a victim; (2) it brings home the reality of suffering in ways that are socially visible; and (3) it tells a
collective story. This alternative mode of communication makes it possible for the sufferers to witness
their own stories. This is what gives the stories of wounded storytellers their power. As Frank (1995, 63)
expresses it: "What makes an illness story good is the act of witnessing that says, implicitly or explicitly,
'I will tell you not what you want to hear but what I know to be true because I have lived it.'" For Frank,
reclaiming a voice begins with the body, which, in turn, creates the self that connects with people who
may be motivated to effect change within their spheres of influence.
Afghanistan carries multiple scars, which are evident in destroyed buildings, lost lives, disabled
bodies, and dislocated people. The women in our study carry these scars on their bodies, and it is from
this space that they tell stories that are at once individual and collective. This impulse is also found in
the work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Mariam, a RAWA
supporter, has this to say:
RAWA has felt the pain and the miseries of the people of Afghanistan, especially its women, and
that is why they can be the real representatives of the women of Afghanistan. I don't think that other
women can be the true defenders of women in Afghanistan, like so many who have not spent their life
among people, who have not experienced the bitterness of the society with their skin, bone and flesh
(quoted in Brodsky 2003, 145).
Referring to the death of her husband, Nargis stated, "I was in pain, a lot of pain. But I was not
alone. Everybody lost someone: brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter. It was war. Everyone got
killed there. People got killed in huge numbers." Meena recalled the happy times when Afghans lived in
peace and had 200 guests at weddings - a marker of good times. "Now they [United States] say there is
peace in Afghanistan [angry tone of voice]; even if there is peace in Central Afghanistan, there is war in
the four corners of the country ... Who likes to be homeless and confused? Who? Don't you like your
home country? [she begins crying]."
The women in our study talked about the destruction of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion
(1979) to the present time. They also talked about Iraq. "Now they want to liberate Iraq. But look at the
women and kids getting killed or disabled. This is not liberation. Bush has destroyed the world" (Meena).
Our research participants were not content to speak only about Afghanistan. This is because, in the
aftermath of war, they migrated to the First World, which, they believe, must be held accountable for its
actions in Afghanistan (Dupree 1997; Goodson 2001; Kakar 1995; Mamdani 2004; Mahmood 2005;
Mahmood and Hirschkind 2002; Rubin 2002; Rashid 2004). As a settler society and as a longtime ally of
the United States, Canada is not exempt from blame, despite the fact that it presents itself as a kinder
and a gentler nation than its neighbour - one that could not possibly engage in any kind of violence
(Razack 2000). The women were left with the task of establishing a connection between the violence
they experienced in Afghanistan and the misery and neglect that they are subject to in Canada. Meena's
"failure" at the citizenship test implicates the society that has failed to heal the wounds of her body.
It is from the skin, bone, and flesh (i.e., wounds) that the women in our study told their stories,
and this is why they must witness their own testimonies (i.e., their collective story). For our part, we
need to listen (to unlearn the privileged status that we assume as experts) so that we dismiss neither
the multiple ways in which women speak nor their own initiatives for effecting change, however small
they may be. This is the context that informs my reading of two ethnographic moments from Meena's
testimonial narrative.7 My purpose is to show how Meena, like other women, acts as a witness to her
own story.
CITIZENSHIP TEST
I get dizziness. My eyes do not see well. I have done the citizenship test twice but I have failed. I
have read, borrowed all the books for citizenship test. I read them but I get dizzy ... How can I do this
test? I have gone to the judge twice. They asked me questions and I answered but then they told me to
study more. I failed, so you know if one is sick, nervous and sad, how can one not fail?
In this account Meena brings to light two scripts. In the first one she states that she has left no
stone unturned to ensure that she passes the citizenship test. But then she explains that it is not her
inability that is the issue. She points out that she is sick and that her condition is a result of a larger
social issue. She is not only sick: she is nervous and sad. She states: "There is much grief in my body."
This sentence effects a paradigm shift from clinical diagnoses to social pathology, a point that
anthropologists have brought home in no uncertain terms (Lock and Kaufert 1998). The judge is
unaware of her social situation. He asks her to study more. This is the second script, and it is a
depoliticized one. The onus is on the individual to get well, while society is absolved from its
responsibility to take any action.
In short, Meena's sickness/wounds tell a multilevel story. She is unable to pass the citizenship
test because society (i.e., the international community) has failed her on two fronts: in Afghanistan and
in Canada. It is her wounds that establish the link between the two. She bears the wounds of a war-torn
country and she bears the wounds of an indifferent host country.
Wounded storytellers initiate their own process of healing not only through the act of telling the
stories of their lives but also through identifying strategies that allow them to live as opposed to merely
survive. Given their vulnerable position in society - this is, after all, why they are wounded - these
women create strategies that point to spaces and areas where change can be effected, and they also
bring into relief the fault lines of the system. It is important to take note of both of these points if we are
to work towards incremental change from the grassroots level.8
SCATTERED SPACES: LIBRARY/CLINIC/BUS
When Meena discovered that there was a public library in her neighbourhood, she was
overjoyed. Her love of reading drew her to this place, apart from the fact that it made her forget her
sorrow over war-tor η conditions in Afghanistan and societal indifference in Canada. Although the latter
is a much-sought-after place (Canada presents itself as a land of opportunity), it could not meet Meena's
most basic needs: adequate shelter, access to services, and opportunities for work. Her $400 allowance
was barely enough, especially when she had to pay extra for medication not covered by her basic plan as
well as for the special diet that she needed in order to manage her health. The fact that no one
addressed the issue of her separation from her spouse caused her to become even more ill than she
already was.
On one occasion, when Meena was walking to the library she met an Afghan woman who
advised her not to go there as she might contract SARS. The woman told her that the librarian had
advised her to keep away from crowds because of her age (she was only fifty-six but she looked older as
war had taken its toll). In the eyes of the librarian, this woman looked seventy, as did fifty-eight-year-old
Meena. "So I came back. Now I will not go there this Monday, but next Monday I will go to the library for
sure."
It was because Meena and her friend were considered to be old and, therefore, more vulnerable
to disease than younger people, that the librarian felt the need to protect them. Their social
vulnerability and the fact that they looked old was masked by social factors. As noted above, the Afghan
community in Valley View has been rendered socially invisible. The fact that the librarian wanted to
"protect" these seemingly elderly women from biological disease but could do nothing to help them
alleviate their social suffering speaks volumes about how an exclusive focus on the diseased body masks
and silences social pathologies (Lock 1993).
The library incident brings home two other points. First, Meena's neighbourhood contacts are
limited to people from her own community. A superficial explanation for this would be that Meena does
not speak English. However, what this overlooks is the structural fact that there are barely any ESL
(English-as-second-language) classes available for Afghan women in Valley View. The reason for this
absence seems to be that these women are not breadwinners and that, therefore, any investment in
them would be a waste. Such is the thinking prevalent in a market-oriented society. Second, despite
Meena's "illness" (the dis-eased social body), she has taken the initiative to find a public place and to
engage in an activity that she enjoys. Meena's initiative must be built upon as it brings to light "a lively
engagement between people and place" (Professor Isabel Dyck personal communication, 23 September
2004).
VISIT TO A DOCTOR
About the doctor, the clinic is close to us. Thank God. I have learned and I go there by myself. I
understand Hindi and I talk to the doctor in Hindi. Now I can comprehend English as well. [She looks
happy] I say, "There is a [medical] problem." In the beginning, I took this or that person [Afghan] from
the mall or whoever else I found on the street. The young girls in the mall, I told them: "I have doctor's
appointment." So they came with me and talked with the doctor. But now, why should I lie? I am good
and I can take care of everything by myself.
We have much to learn from Meena's resourcefulness and initiatives, especially given the fact
that she has scant resources (material and/or social) from which to draw. It is interesting to note that
she makes use of the Hindi language, which she learned in a refugee camp in India. This is something
that health and social service providers do not pick up on as they pay little attention to the details of the
everyday lives of their patients/clients (i.e., local knowledge). It is these details that enable us to shift
from perceiving these sufferers merely as victims to recognizing their humanity. Recognizing that Meena
knows two languages (Dari and Hindi) and that she has taken steps to learn English on her own ("why
should I lie? I am good and I can take care of everything by myself"), Meena brings to the fore a
resourcefulness that is not always acknowledged by service providers. This should be the point from
which they start, rather than simply saying, "How can these aging women ever learn English?"
Of interest is the fact that Meena draws limited resources from the people around her.
However, these people are Afghan; she has no access to mainstream people. Again, there are structural
factors at work. Racialized minorities in Canada are demarcated into certain spaces, where they are
Othered and marginalized - a process that is compounded in the case of women (Bannerji 1995, 2000;
Agnew 1996; Dossa 2004). Meena is no exception. Her trips to the library and the clinic speak to the
spatial limitations of Afghan women in Canada.
TAKING A BUS
When we first came we lived in the hotel. An Afghan man taught us the bus to take. He used to
work in the Canadian embassy in India. He was a nice man. He knows English. He applied for our
telephone as co-signer. He told us go there, go there. So he taught us.
It was from this Afghan man that Meena learned about bus routes.
Once or twice people tell you where to go. But then I tried to remember the streets, the
numbers, the buses. And I keep doing the same: here is Nanaimo, here is Metrotown. I wrote down the
names and checked my notes. I told myself, one station, two stations, three stations, and I remembered
where to get off the bus. I went to Surrey, once, twice. I went there to learn. I taught myself where to
go. I went to a clinic to get an injection, and I learned everywhere like this. I go to Surrey to see all those
stores, Hindi stores and Arabic stores, to buy halal [lawful] meat. These are my happy days.
Meena debunks the myth that "aging" immigrant women stay home, are a social burden, and do
not know what to make of their lives in a foreign country because they are too old to learn (Dossa 1999).
The fact that Meena learned the bus routes speaks to the initiative that women take, despite numerous
constraints. In Meena's case, her constraints are illness, the language barrier, a foreign environment,
and financial limitations (Meena is only able to take the bus after she gets a discount to which she, like
other citizens with limited income, is entitled). The fact that Meena only goes to areas where there are
Hindi and Afghan stores speaks to the structural issue of accessibility and limited social spaces. While
one may be drawn to one's culture, and to a space that echoes the sounds and sights of one's homeland,
one must also question why racialized migrants do not feel at home in mainstream public places. The
issue is not cultural; it is structural (Anderson and Kirkham 1998).
Meena's narrative indicates that ESL programs should recognize her bilingual ability and that
this may require a different approach from that based on the assumption that immigrants only speak
their mother tongue (Dossa 2004). This is an important point as immigrants' exposure to multiple
languages and multiple cultures is often underplayed in Canada, a society that only recognizes two
official languages.9 Other languages are placed under the umbrella term "heritage" (read: are frozen in
time and placed within discrete, marginalized spaces). I speak Gujerati, Hindi, Swahili and English. Yet,
the interest of those in the public sector invariably focuses on whether I am fluent in English. Meena's
use of the limited public space at the clinic, where she looks for Afghans to help her with translation,
highlights society's inability to put into place inclusive communities where meaningful interactions can
occur.
While the women in our study endeavoured to remake their worlds in the best way they could,
they did not lose sight of the fact that they had a larger story to tell not only for themselves but also for
the people of Afghanistan. This was brought home to me in the two sentences that were on the lips of
all the women: "Afghanistan has been destroyed" and "the people of Afghanistan have been forgotten."
As one woman expressed it: "In Afghanistan, the war never stopped. It will not stop. It is now twentytwo years. They have made Afghanistan into pieces and splinters."
For our research participants, the issue of being forgotten was carried into their country of
settlement. As noted above, the women talked about how their basic needs were not being met in
Canada. These women took it upon themselves to tell two intertwined stories: the story of war
(Afghanistan) and the story of the war's aftermath (Canada). The most challenging task was to link the
two stories as Canada and other Western countries do not recognize their responsibility for waging their
wars (whether the Cold War or the War on Terror) on the soil of Afghanistan. To compound the
situation, the West has positioned itself as the saviour and liberator of the people of Afghanistan,
especially of Afghan women. For the West, Afghan women's liberation is measured in terms of whether
they can move around without their burkas (which it considers to be the symbol of their oppression).
The West has failed to address such substantive issues as women's education, the availability of waged
work, and women's rights in a society whose infrastructure it has helped to destroy (Rubin 2002;
Mahmood 2005; Mahmood and Hirschkind 2002).
In short, while one would want to argue that there is a substantive difference between the lives
of women over there and the lives of women over here - especially as the First World posits itself as the
saviour of the Third World and never as the source of its troubles - this is not the case. It is to highlight
this unarticulated connection between Afghanistan and Canada that these women engage in the act of
witnessing their own stories. Our reciprocal engagement must then be to recognize this connection,
which the women make through the language of everyday life and the language of their wounds.
Meena's husband is sick over there (Afghanistan/India); Meena is sick over here (Canada). The
"sick" bodies/wounds of the husband and the wife connect the two worlds, which are otherwise
deemed to be separate. Their separation speaks to the cruelty of dividing the world in ways where one
world (the West) presents itself as superior to and the saviour of the other for the purpose of
exploitation and control. This is the colonial narrative (Bannerji 2000), otherwise known as Orientalism
(Said 1978). It is at this level that I have presented my argument regarding the witnessing/writing of
stories of social suffering.
WITNESSING STORIES OF SOCIAL SUFFERING: A VIEW FROM THE HOME DISCIPLINE
Writing on hunger and terror among peasants in Brazil, ScheperHughes (1992) cautions us to
reflect on the issue of resistance. She argues that undue attention to the multiple ways in which the
peasants "survive in the cracks and crevices of daily life" does not allow us to capture "the horrifying
scene of savagery of scarcity and the brutality of police terror" (508). An exclusive focus on resistance,
she notes, can lead to romanticization where the oppressed are held responsible "for their collusion,
collaborations, rationalizations, 'false consciousness,' and more than occasional paralyses of will" (533).
On the other hand, documenting the larger scene, through which acts of brutality and terror are
exercised on the "helpless" peasants, victimizes the latter and misses the multiple ways in which they
exercise agency and assert their autonomy. Scheper-Hughes suggests that a middle ground - where
resistance is not romanticized and where suffering does not translate into lack of agency - offers a way
out of this dilemma.
Physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer (2003) adopts the position of advocate for the oppressed
and the poor, whom he defines as people who have been subject to both political and structural
violence. The latter includes lack of opportunities for employment, lack of decent housing, and lack of
access to education and health care. For Farmer, these exclusions constitute a violation of human and
health rights brought about by the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor both within and
between societies. The advocate's responsibility, then, is to delineate these scenarios, which are
brought about by such forces as globalization and the near-universal adoption of the market economy,
with its emphasis on cost-effectiveness and sustainability. Farmer argues that we need to work towards
removing the politicized gap between human rights discourse (with its emphasis on civil and political
liberties) and health rights discourse (with its emphasis on basic rights to food, health care, education,
and employment).
Working among the sick and the poor in Haiti, Russia, and the United States, Farmer documents
stories that bring home the reality of socially produced suffering and misery. He offers a model of
engaged scholarship that goes beyond mere research. He recognizes that, as we study and write about
social suffering rather than work towards alleviating it, we are implicated in the global production of
inequality. For Farmer, then, providing documentary evidence of violations of the rights of the world's
poor helps to expose the relationship between social injustice and suffering and illness. He contends
that, without this kind of broad analysis, we will end up managing social inequality rather than
addressing issues of violence and suffering.
Kleinman, Lock, and Das (1997) and Das and Kleinman (2001) contend that, in order to evoke a
particular kind of response, suffering must be understood within the social context within which it is
framed. The social context is multilayered. At one level, we are called upon to identify the social,
economic, and political factors that cause suffering; yet at another level we need to map the way in
which these factors, in the form of ideology and practice, become embedded within local and global
institutions. Designed to alleviate suffering, institutional responses accentuate it. Furthermore,
institutional responses silence everyday forms of suffering by normalizing them. How do we explain a
situation in which some forms of suffering are recognized only to be compounded, while other forms of
suffering remain invisible? As Cavell has observed: "withholding acknowledgment of pain is a societal
failure" (quoted in Kleinman, Lock, and Das, xvi). The study of social suffering, then, must contain a
study of society's silence towards it. While the authors recognize the importance of capturing how
sufferers remake their worlds, they emphasize the point that this focus should not be divorced from the
larger social and political contexts that researchers must delineate. In short, the authors urge the reader
to take into account local idioms of dismay and grief in the wake of powerful bureaucratic forces that
normalize suffering for political purposes. The issue here is to expose how institutions appropriate
suffering, reify and fragment it, and then cast a veil of misrecognition over it. "The vicious spiral of
political violence, causing forced uprooting, migration, deep trauma to families and communities ...
spins out of control across a bureaucratic landscape of health, social welfare and legal agencies"
(Kleinman, Lock, and Das, ibid, x).
The above works bring to light the tension between on-the-ground realities (the local) and the
broader political context - the source of suffering and oppression. Scheper-Hughes's middle-ground
approach is viable in so far as it provides a balanced perspective. Nevertheless, it suggests a division of
labour, with the experts taking care of the political perspective and the research participants providing
the raw data. The participants are not considered to be "experts" on political economy. Hill-Collins
(2000), Moore (1996, 2000), and Dossa (2004), among others, address this Cartesian tension. These
authors suggest that we must recognize our research participants as producers of knowledge in their
own right. This knowledge may not be exclusively expressed in the language of the dominant society,
where the experience of pain and suffering is diluted and silenced. Using alternative mediums of
expression, research participants undertake multiple tasks. They critique the larger system in their own
terms, establish the link between the individual body and the body politic, and remake their worlds in
relation to the larger society.
In the anthropological spirit, the above authors take pains to delineate the local worlds of their
research participants. But research participants are not positioned in order to provide context-specific
knowledge of their experiences. This task is left to the anthropologists - a task from which I, as author of
this article, am not exempt. Nevertheless, this article provides glimpses of how research participants tell
their own stories using the language of everyday life and the language of the body. I suggest that it is
within a framework of linkages between individual lives and the broader social and political contexts
mapped by research participants and researchers alike that the act of witnessing takes place. In sum,
witnessing stones of suffering must begin in the spaces that the participants have carved rather than in
the largely textual space created by the experts. Let us see how Meena and other women in our study
engage with the "person-is-political" paradigm considered as the preserve of the expert.
We have noted that Meena first identifies the concern that consumes her everyday life:
separation from her husband. Meena is well aware of the fact that mere words, even in the form of a
question as to why her husband is not able to join her, have evoked no response. Her longtime suffering,
like that of the other women in our study, has been silenced for the primary reason that the world's
acknowledgment of its involvement in the massive displacement of Afghan people would mean that it
would have to take responsibility for alleviating their suffering. As one woman informed us, not a single
family has been spared the pain of this long drawn-out war. The blame has been laid at the door of the
Taliban and other military factions, notwithstanding the fact that these armed factions were created by
the United States and its allies/enemies. The women were well aware of this scenario, which the world
has ignored.
The women took it upon themselves to tell, in their own terms, their stories of suffering and
pain, and this meant speaking from their wounds. It is within this context that Meena is able to tell a
powerful and multilayered story, using body language (the language of symptoms and suffering). She
notes that Afghanistan is also a wounded body, and she implicates foreign powers that have
systematically destroyed her country. Through her wounds, Meena also tells the story of indifference
and structural violence that she encounters in Canada. The wounds on her body speak of her isolation,
of the loneliness that she experiences on a daily basis, and of her struggle to meet her basic needs. The
fact that she became more sick after migrating to Canada speaks to the link between her body and the
political economy. Her speaking in her own terms should prompt us to acknowledge our complicity, as
global bystanders/researchers, in the pain and misery to which she is subject through circumstances not
of her own making. It is within this space created by the research participants that the act of witnessing
can take place, and this is the first step towards bridging the gap between theory and practice.
Witnessing stories of social suffering must prompt us to work from the grassroots level; this means
giving up the comfort of being mere observers. The last words go to Nargis: "We do not want to tell our
stories unless [they bring] about some results. But we should not let others speak for us. They [the
system/welfare workers] do not understand, and maybe our education is higher than that of the welfare
worker, but they give themselves permission to treat us like we are nothing."
Footnote
* This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
through the Vancouver Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the
Metropolis (RIIM) . For field research, including translation and transcription, I am indebted to Poran
Poregbal and to Gulalai Habib. Most of all, I want to thank the Afghan women who opened their hearts
and homes to share their experiences with us. I have benefited from the presentations I made at the
mini-conference and graduate seminar organized by Dr. Sue Wilkinson, Simon Fraser University, and Dr.
Isabel Dyck, University of British Columbia, respectively.
1 Testimonial refers to a collective story articulated to make a political statement.
2 This is not an across-the-board statement: there are exceptions (see, for example, Farmer
2003; Scheper-Hughes 1992).
3 It is important to emphasize the fact that Meena's testimonial narrative captures the situation
of other Afghan and other refugees from war-torn societies.
4 It is not a coincidence that I worked with an Afghan and an Iranian research assistant. To begin
with, Dari and Farsi are kin languages. Anyone who speaks Dari understands Farsi and vice versa.
Second, it is not uncommon to have Farsi-speaking health and service providers working with Afghan
women and men.
5 The use of body language is significant as it brings to light the intricate ways in which the body
of the national land is linked to the bodies of women. We may note that national narratives , are
gendered (Yuval Davis 1997; Nazmabadi 1998).
6 The term "wounded storyteller" comes from Arthur Frank (1995). It is the wounds, argues
Frank, that give a person narrative power, effecting a shift from a passive stance to an active one.
7 The "ethnographic moment" refers to a process that allows us to read the global in the local as
well as to explore how the local may affect the global.
8 The term "incremental change" comes from RAWA'S model of change, which incorporates
multiple dimensions: individual, family, community, and society. Here small-scale changes are not
dismissed as insignificant.
9 To valorize the languages spoken by racialized minorities would be to take a step towards
recognizing that we are dealing with people who have a history and a culture rather than with mere
immigrants and refugees who should assimilate quickly into mainstream society.
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