Nocturnal History of our Lady of the Slash-Knife, Brazil.
| Author | Dawsey, John C. |
In this essay I intend to revisit notes of field diaries made in a small ravine on the edges of the city of Piracicaba, Sao Paulo, where approximately one-hundred families from the North of Minas Gerais and other regions of Brazil built their shacks. As a reminder of the forces of geological and social erosions which are part of the history of the place, it was called "Devils' Hole". It also received a more lyrical name. I will call it Garden of Flowers. As for the couple which received me, I will call them Joana and Mister Z. They came from the state of Minas Gerais. Mister Z was a sugarcane cutter. So was Joana, until the birth of her grandsons and granddaughters.
During the 1970s, as a result of the oil embargoes and the end of the so-called "Brazilian economic miracle", the government invested in programs aimed at production of ethanol. The interior of the state of Sao Paulo was transformed into an ocean of sugarcane. And many people turned into sugarcane cutters. Multitudes of people came from different regions of Brazil to Piracicaba, as workers in cane fields, producing the sources of renewable energy to feed the automobile industries.
Why revisit these faded field diaries? Here, as you will see, can be found the scene of a crime. And a weapon: a machete for cutting sugarcane. I believe this crime, such as a scene that one may find in the type of theater imagined by Antonin Artaud, mobilizes, even today, many years after their register in field diaries, the shades or shadows of a nation.
If one were to do an archaeology of the Garden of Flowers, one would discover that the shacks which there exist were built over the ashes of an old peripheral area of the city of Piracicaba: the Slash-Knife District. With cycles and scythes provided by city government do "cleanse" the place, the first families arriving from Minas Gerais removed the weeds and woods and built their shacks from residual materials gathered at construction sites. But other people already lived in the area, in the woods, as part of the lower social stratum of the city.
Storytellers sometimes spoke of the origins of the place. The stories which they told sometimes looked like an inverted sort of myth of paradise. Mention was made of a primordial couple: male and female. However, in the style of creations stories of Ancient Mesopotamia, or of the stories of Lilith, the devil-woman of Biblical narratives, origin stories of the Slash-Knife District sounded like tales of horror: a woman brandishing a machete cut a man into pieces.
The fire was dying down. The Witch-Doctor told me a story: "Ten years ago there was only darkness. Only bushes. Weeds and woods. There were some eucalyptus trees. A guava tree. And this water hole. There was no asphalt. Nothing. Itapua [the adjoining neighborhood] was a sugarcane field. There were a few shacks made of mud and clay. One day, a woman cut a man, ripping through his guts with a machete, from below, between his legs, up above. She cut him into pieces. That's why they call the place Risca-Faca ["Slash-Knife"). The name caught on. The people who live here were all, as you could say, highly dangerous negos [derivative of negros, sometimes endearing, sometimes pejorative, may be used for people of different colors, including white] ... "Baby-Face" (Chupeta), "Devil-Boy" (Capeta), Bertaia, Fiao, Noel." (June 16, 1983). In this origin story, we encounter a body in pieces. If worlds of sense arise from the senses of the body, then this story may provoke a shudder. A man is cut into pieces. This doesn't sound, so it seems, like a story about a founder. What can one say of the woman? A devilwoman from hell she carries the stench of flowers of evil. Far from a creation story, we are in the face of destruction. In place of a couple coming into being, the couple is undone. In place of light and birth, only darkness and destruction.
In anthropological accounts about the creation of social webs in low-income urban populations, images of mothers are recurrent. Such images are sometimes charged with aura. And emerge at the center of webs of reciprocity capable of offering care and protection. The very forces of chaos, as if moved by the action of an unseen potterymaker, are transformed into cosmos. Amid inhospitable and uncertain landscape, where one can only live in danger, matrifocal forms of social life emerge. The resilience and vitality of such forms may be remarkable.
The image of the woman which emerges in the story of origins of the Slash-Knife, however, has little to do with the gift of life. Whatever aura may be associated with the image of a mother is dissipated. Here flashes a woman who brings death. Her gesture sinks in darkness. It's like a thing from hell. It has the stamp of something hideous, something bad, capable of shaking the images of saints and Our Ladies which can be found on altars of homes in the shacks of the Garden of Flowers.
Curiously, however, this gesture may also evoke images of saints, afraid of no man, such as Joan of Arc. One of the field notes refers to such an image kept beneath the bed of a woman:
When passing by the shack of Maria and Gabriel, I encounter Diolindia, a widow from the backlands of the North of Minas Gerais. She too had "fallen into Devils' Hole". She speaks with enthusiasm about a movie which she had just seen on television: "Joan of Arc! That's a real woman! A saint! Afraid of no man! She would put on armor and go into the fire of battle. She would defend her people. And go up against arrows, swords and cannon fire!" (January 21, 1984). In this presentation, I am especially interested in discussing a particular image: the "Indian woman lassoed in the woods". In one of her stories, Diolindia told an incident involving a discussion with the wife of her brother:
I'm a woman of destiny. That devil-woman tried to make me go crazy, but that's okay. I'm also a devil-woman. I'm the daughter of an Indian woman who was lassoed in the woods. My mother was Indian, a raging Indian who was not afraid of any man. She would go up against any weapon or nation. It would take a cannon to bring down that Indian woman of the woods!" (May 25, 1983). The image of the woman which erupts in the origin story of the Slash-Knife evokes one of the main characters of narratives concerning the making of people of the backlands of Brazil: the "Indian woman lassoed in the woods".
Montage
One detail deserves attention: the main characters of the field diaries of "Devils' Hole" including Joana and Diolindia--are devotees of Our Lady Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil. The lineages overlap: women of Devils' Hole see themselves as daughters of Our Lady and of Indian Women Lassoed in the Woods as well.
In various field diary entries the gesture of Our Lady of the Slash-Knife flashes:
"She grabbed me by the throat and slapped me in the face. I ran to the kitchen, got me a knife (peixeira) this big. The knife shining ... ! I said, "you're shining, but now you're going to turn red!" (...) I was going to rip her like this, bottom up, from the groin all the way up to the throat, not letting the head get in the way!" (September 9, 1983)
"I told...
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