Stela do Patrocínio and the Margin of the Margin: Transgression of the Subalternized Voice of Madness

Abstract

This article discusses the poetry of madness as a form of transgression. The poetry/voice of Stela do Patrocínio, produced in a space for confinement: a hospice, represents the capacity that literature has to contribute to the opening of the world of oppression and violation of such spaces. The voice of the hospice represents a wandering language of a minority: a woman, black and crazy, who always positions herself as an escape from her own condition of production. The voice of Stela do Patrocínio represents this radicality in the face of the impositions of power, which conditions the poetics of confinement to not exist. The work under study tends to project itself as a break with this imposition on minority literature, a singular production contained in the voice born of confinement. Thus, the literature of the hospice forges and forces an escape as a condition of literature itself that, in the words of Barthes, “allows us to hear the language outside of power” (Barthes, 2010, p. 16). Literature, when produced in spaces of control, gives voice to the subject who is alien to “normality” – the mad subject, who becomes a power in contrast to the dominant language of medical science.