Читать книгу Vita - João Biehl - Страница 15

Inequality

“A maimed statue.” Estátua entrevada. That is how Catarina described her condition in her dictionary. Entrevada means to be paralyzed; it also means to become dark or obscure, to grow clouded. The associations that follow this description are striking—in the eyes of the maimed statue, there is Catarina, along with her son, confronting officers and looking into the eyes of a machine:

Birth certificate

Catarina and Anderson

To be present in person

Policeman

Electoral officer

Eye to eye

Machine

To make meaning

On the next page of the dictionary, Catarina repeats the word “statue” and, writing in the imperative, demands to be addressed: “Call my address: Brasil, Brancil, Brecha, Brasa.”

Vita is Brazil’s address or destination. Brancil is a word Catarina made up; to me, it sounds like the name of a prescription drug. Brecha is a fissure, a wound, as well as the void that Catarina became. Brasa is a burning coal. It also suggests anxiety, wrath, and sexual tension.

The notebook in which Catarina wrote her dictionary had been distributed a few years earlier by the municipal government of Porto Alegre, considered a model of popular administration both domestically and internationally (Pont and Barcelos 2000; Abers 2000). The site of the World Social Forum, the city has become famous for its policies of social inclusion, most notably its “participatory budget-making.” The inside covers of the notebook outlined the consciousness-raising philosophy of the Workers’ Party under the title “Writing (Dis)Organizes Life”: “You, the people, are the main actors in the work we carry out. . . . Information invades our lives without asking for permission. All forms of the written word are a daily part of the city, but citizens are increasingly excluded from the content. This reality is in constant flux, blurring the conceptual lines between literacy and illiteracy. How much time is needed before we learn to critically engage with the written word?”

In this official text, the city’s secretary of education observed that at least twenty million people in the country were illiterate (some 15 percent of the population) and added that access to literacy and education was “a political project that questions the neoliberalism being implemented in the country and in our province. The democratic and popular government of Porto Alegre, in partnership with civil society, ensures the high quality of education and also guarantees access to health care, employment, leisure, sanitation, and housing.” The secretary concluded by explaining that this project, called “totalities of knowledge,” took its central inspiration from Paulo Freire’s argument that reading the world precedes reading the word: “Our literacy program develops critical citizens who have a choice, with the capacity to transform their own lives and the realities of the world.”

Catarina’s use of this discarded educational material to compose her dictionary ironically exposes the imaginary and selective quality of what is described here as social change. The truth is that Catarina and the residents of Vita remain excluded from this particular popular project as well as most others.

“Citizens are those who search for services,” explained Mariane Gross, a journalist and human rights activist working in the city’s security office, who was critical of what the policies of social inclusion have meant in practice. She argued that the Workers’ Party administration had been highly effective in creating novel “service counters,” which address various medical and social needs, within a limited capacity. This in turn generated a new culture of citizenship and “democratic experts,” as she put it. “Those who want access have to get registered, wait in line, and participate. But what if you don’t read the folder, if you don’t have friends who tell you about these possibilities? Individuals have also learned to use this structure to accumulate power in their communities.” Meanwhile, “on the way to the counter, others, particularly the young and unemployed, are recruited by parallel forms of commerce and government—that is, organized crime.”

In 1997, I presented some of my initial ethnographic findings from Vita at an AIDS workshop organized by Porto Alegre’s municipal government. I suggested that there were signs of a hidden and untreated AIDS epidemic in Vita, which could well be an indication of what was happening in Porto Alegre’s streets and ghettos (Biehl 1999b). At the time, a representative of the Ministry of Health voiced indignation about “such a degree of dehumanization” and asked the local officials present to consider “closing Vita in the name of public health.” The city’s health secretary promised that her office would definitely investigate.

But, as another top city administrator admitted, the pressure to produce quick results for this progressive administration too often led to the creation of commissions and the writing of reports: “In truth, problems are identified, but things are not solved.” The poorest urban inhabitants, by and large, remained in a “vacuum of response.” And, in this vacuum, new social units and economic activities emerged to care for the invisible. This was tragically apparent in the so-called geriatric houses that mushroomed throughout the city to shelter the elderly, the mentally ill, and the disabled—the “unproductive and useless,” as Mariane Gross described them. “We used to say that in each street of Porto Alegre there was a clandestine hospice, operating without legal authorization.”

In 1998, Gross began a campaign to publicize the tragic conditions in these institutions. “People are confined and have no adequate care. Some of these businesses are surrounded by barbed wire, like camps.” On July 2, 1999, for example, a fifty-eight-year-old man was bitten to death by dogs in a geriatric house in Porto Alegre. “Bits of skin were all over the ground,” Gross and her colleagues wrote in the annual report of the state’s Human Rights Commission (Comissão de Direitos Humanos 2000:108).

But human rights rhetoric was not strong enough to close down Vita and similar institutions. The city’s public health inspection service had also begun to investigate these businesses but was having difficulty finding judges who would support shutting them down, according to health professional Jaci Oliveira. “The judges tell us that these houses are doing good. After all, where would these people go if they were freed?”

Even if Vita had been shut down, it would most certainly have reemerged elsewhere in the city. For Vita is indeed symbiotic with various levels of government, and people like Catarina now have their destinies forged by a set of forces and a logic of exceptions that operate, in her words, “out of justice.”