A silent scream : trauma and madness in the early works of António Lobo Antunes (original) (raw)
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This article is an investigation of António Lobo Antunes' novel Conhecimento do Inferno under the interdisciplinary gaze of Health Humanities. It aims to explore the deeper relationship between literature and medical disciplines, in this particular instance, psychiatry. It analyses the two different discourses as 'master narratives' (medical discourse) and 'counter narratives' (literature and its images). Through the concepts of Madness and Hell, Lobo Antunes creates a novel very much align with the Anti-Psychiatry movement, a novel stemmed from the unhappy experiences he had when practicing psychiatry (he was a psychiatrist before dedicating his full time to writing). However, this doesn't mean that the bleak novel is without hope. It is by establishing a 'disease-subject' that Lobo Antunes' novel fulfills its role as a useful literary source for the betterment of psychiatry and the awareness of mental illness and its treatment/consquences. Ultimately, literature (specially this novel) can play an important part in the understanding of patients and in the evolution of modern medicine.
Wounds and History: Postcolonial Trauma in José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons
Is This a Culture of Trauma? An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2013
The principal aim of this chapter is to trace the presence of the post-colonial trauma of Angolan history in the overwhelming novel of José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons. After the long years of a brutal colonial war against the Portuguese in the 1960s, by arriving at the moment of the collapse of the Portuguese Colonial Empire and the independence of the country, Angola had toface a harsh and bloody civil war between 1975 and 2003. Until a certain point the book remains silent about this brutality of the national history, but the trauma enters the text unexpectedly. The novel articulates the uncanny experience that one cannot escape from the trauma, and as Ana Mafalda Leite points out, war inevitably becomes the central theme of contemporary literature in Angola. The strange and exotic novel of José Eduardo Agualua is narrated by a gecko. The narration of the gecko oscillates between dreams, reality, past, and present creating a floating and essentially magical world which tries to exclude the post-colonial trauma of the national history. This magical world collapses when the trauma enters the text. One of the female protagonists, Ángela Lucía literally carries the wounds of history on her body, the scars of the civil war - needless to say how strongly trauma is related, not just etymologically, but also metaphorically, to the wound. Through the scars, the past, the tragedy of national history, is present on the female body of the post-colonial subject. In this chapter I intend to explore how the individual trauma of the subject presented directly through the scars, is related to the national history of post-colonial Angola, and how the wounds of the body carry the wounds of history. Agualusa - the par excellence lusophone post-colonial writer - inscribes the trauma in a fantastic and oneiric horizon, emphasising that under the layers of the posterior created artificial memories (invented by the protagonist Félix Ventura), hides the sinister reality of history, and despite the exotic and magical atmosphere, no one can escape from the trauma of the past.
Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso, 2019
This article discusses the narrative of pain and trauma in witness and fictional works, taking as object of analysis memorialistic texts of the Italian writer Primo Levi, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and Guimarães Rosa's novel Grande Sertão: Veredas [The Devil to Pay in the Backlands], especially the memories described by its protagonist Riobaldo Tatarana. Therefore, we propose a multidisciplinary approach, with theoretical scopes of narrative and knowledge about affection and memory, taking into perspective the phantasmatic figures that these texts bring. The correspondences and approximations between the discourses in analysis reveal effective bonds that unite them, provided they are read under horizons that amplify their messages, redefine their contours and engage in symbolic encounters that enrich the perception of the production of the investigated authors. RESUMO Este artigo problematiza a narrativa da dor e do trauma em obras testemunhais e em trabalhos ficcionais, tomando como objetos de análise textos memorialísticos do escritor italiano Primo Levi, sobrevivente dos campos de concentração nazistas, e o romance Grande sertão: veredas, de Guimarães Rosa, em especial as lembranças descritas por seu protagonista, o personagem Riobaldo Tatarana. Para tanto, propomos uma abordagem multidisciplinar, com escopos teóricos da narrativa e dos conhecimentos sobre afeto e memória, tendo em perspectiva as figuras fantasmáticas que esses textos trazem. As correspondências e aproximações entre os discursos em análise revelam efetivos laços que os unem, desde que lidos sob horizontes que ampliem suas mensagens, redefinam seus contornos e apostem em encontros simbólicos que enriqueçam o olhar a respeito da produção dos autores investigados.
On bodies as object: a postcolonial reading of the ‘Brazilian Holocaust’
Saúde em Debate, 2021
The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform law reconfigured the mental health care model in the country, with the main repercussion being the change from an asylum treatment regime to communitybased treatment, carried out, mainly in the various types of Psychosocial Care Centers. The Brazilian Anti-Asylum Movement that denounced the corruption of the hospital model system and the violation of human rights in the asylums headed the demand for a change in the assistance model. For example, in the Hospital Colônia from Barbacena (MG), around 60 thousand people died, a fact portrayed in the book 'Brazilian Holocaust' by Daniela Arbex. In this essay, we will approach Arbex's work in the light of the post-colonial and biopolitical debate, which understands that the modes of production of banal evil found in colonized societies a form of action, perpetuation, and naturalization of the depersonalization of the human, bringing them closer to the notion of object. The present work aims at questioning the treatment given, in the past, to madness within the asylums, as a kind of manifestation of the banal evil in the Brazilian colonial context, at the same time as it predicts the resumption of the hospital model discourse, now in a new guise, in Brazilian public policies.
The aim of this study is to ascertain whether writing autobiographical literature may represent an effective therapy to a specific type of violence, namely the subtle psychological violence caused by the imposition of the fascist ideology. The article will focus on two works: L’Alba di un Mondo Nuovo (2005) by the Italian author Alberto Asor Rosa and Habíamos ganado la guerra (2007) by the Spanish author Esther Tusquets. These two works do not deal with what one would expect to find in works about violence and suffering experienced in fascist times in Italy and Spain, namely highimpact descriptions of atrocities and physical violence. On the contrary they present a very low level of physical violence. However, they do provide an accurate description of the psychological violence caused by the imposition of fascist habits and attitudes, which necessarily implied identity erosion and repression. The article will first consider the issue of getting communities to accept an intimate view of the suffering caused by psychological violence. It will then turn its attention to the importance of subjective narration and will finally consider the role that the subjective narration of events acquires both for the writers and the communities receiving their messages. This study is contextualised into the current trends in Spain and Italy that attempt to revisit a difficult chapter of their history, the fascist regimes, and all its painful implications. It will discuss an aspect that has always been considered too subjective and has been poorly analysed but that represents an essential step towards a more comprehensive depiction of violence and suffering in fascist times in Italy and Spain.
The article focuses on the connection between the early-modern roots of Portuguese millenarian mythology and the literature dealing with the trauma of the colonial war that put an end to the Portuguese empire in 1975. The analyzed texts of José Martins Garcia, Manuel Alegre, João de Melo, António Lobo Antunes, and Almeida Faria deconstruct the providential vision of Portuguese colonial empire exploited by the official propaganda of Salazar. They transcribe the grandiose, mythicized image of the Portuguese past into the categories of grotesque and phantasmal. Both soldiers and settlers transformed into refugees by the colonial war continue moving in the oneiric universe as traumatized subjects long after the end of the conflict. The literary deconstruction of the national mythology conducted by the writers, many of whom were ex-combatants of the conflict, may thus be seen as a collective therapy postulated by Eduardo Lourenço, leading to the healing of the trauma.
Histórias de guerra: uma leitura de crônicas de António Lobo Antunes e Mia Couto
2011
A proposta desta dissertação é analisar comparativamente a maneira como António Lobo Antunes e Mia Couto retratam a guerra em suas crônicas. Para isso, foram selecionadas narrativas publicadas nos livros: Livro de Crônicas, Segundo Livro de Crônicas e Terceiro Livro de Crônicas, do escritor português, e Cronicando, do escritor moçambicano. Ao abordarem episódios relacionados à guerra propõem também uma releitura do processo histórico de seus países e incitam seus leitores à criticidade em relação aos fatos retratados. A partir da articulação entre História e Ficção, os autores explicitam os mecanismos de sustentação da guerra e particularizam os efeitos do conflito nas relações humanas, dando-lhes perspectivas divergentes, notadamente, utópica e melancólica.