Local midwives and traditional heal ers praying women

Local midwives and traditional heal-
ers, praying women, as they are called,
advise Alto women on when to allow a
baby to die. One midwife explained: “If
I can see that a baby was born unfortu-
itously, I tell the mother that she need not
wash the infant or give it a cleansing tea.
I tell her just to dust the infant with baby
powder and wait for it to die.” Allowing
nature to take its course is not seen as
sinful by these often very devout Catho-
lic women. Rather, it is understood as co-
operating with God’s plan.
Often I have been asked how con-
sciously women of the Alto behave in
this regard. I would have to say that con-
sciousness is always shifting between
allowed and disallowed levels of aware-
ness. For example, I was awakened
early one morning in 1987 by two
neighborhood children who had been
sent to fetch me to a hastily organized
wake for a two-month-old infant whose
mother I had unsuccessfully urged to
breast-feed. The infant was being sus-
tained on sugar water, which the mother
referred to as soro (serum), using a med-
ical term for the infant’s starvation re-
gime in light of his chronic diarrhea. I
had cautioned the mother that an infant
could not live on soro forever.
The two girls urged me to console the
young mother by telling her that it was
“too bad” that her infant was so weak
that Jesus had to take him. They were
coaching me in proper Alto etiquette. I
agreed, of course, but asked, “And what
do you think?” Xoxa, the eleven-year-
old, looked down at her dusty flip-flops
and blurted out, “Oh, Dona Nanci, that
baby never got enough to eat, but you
must never say that!” And so the death of
hungry babies remains one of the best
kept secrets of life in Bom Jesus da Mata.
Most victims are waked quickly and
with a minimum of ceremony. No tears
are shed, and the neighborhood children
form a tiny procession, carrying the baby
to the town graveyard where it will join a
multitude of others. Although a few fresh
flowers may be scattered over the tiny
grave, no stone or wooden cross will
mark the place, and the same spot will be
reused within a few months’ time. The
mother will never visit the grave, which
soon becomes an anonymous one.
What, then, can be said of these
women? What emotions, what senti-
ments motivate them? How are they able
to do what, in fact, must be done? What
does mother love mean in this inhospita-
ble context? Are grief, mourning, and
melancholia present, although deeply re-
pressed? If so, where shall we look for
them? And if not, how are we to under-
stand the moral visions and moral sensi-
bilities that guide their actions?
I have been criticized more than once
for presenting an unflattering portrait of
poor Brazilian women, women who are,
after all, themselves the victims of severe
social and institutional neglect. I have
described these women as allowing
some of their children to die, as if this
were an unnatural and inhuman act
rather than, as I would assert, the way
any one of us might act, reasonably and
rationally, under similarly desperate
conditions. Perhaps I have not empha-