The torture of the body as an instrument of the sovereign power

Analysis of the exception camp established in the slave quarters of Engenho Nossa Senhora da Natividade in “Água de Barrela” by Eliana Alves Cruz

Abstract

This essay aims at analyzing the literary work Água de Barrela, written by the writer and journalist Eliana Alves Cruz, as a source of representation of the power relations existing during the Imperial Period in Brazil, which promoted torture and incarceration of African slaves. Since the literature is considered fiction, it is not possible to take it as the truth, but as a possibility of reality based on the representation concept proposed by the historian Roger Chartier (1999). Thus, the passages which picture the period were highlighted and analyzed to verify, by means of a literary work, how the narrative is composed and registers such power relations. For such work, some concepts were considered, such as the notions about body control and biopower proposed by Michel Foucault (2021), as well as its extension to the necropolitics proposed by Achille Mbembe (2018). The slave quarters (senzala) from the Engenho Nossa Senhora da Natividade were taken in this work as a camp in which prevails the state of exception and were analyzed according to the works of Giorgio Agamben (2002). The proposal which considers the slave quarters as a camp derives from studies in History and Philosophy and, in this work, the objective is to analyze in a literary work how such concepts can be verified. This specific place was created to incarcerate black slaves and to torture the body as a means to discipline by fear, being the sovereign power the one that decides who may live or die according to the control and production needs of the sovereign embodied as the slaveholder. Thus, black slavery in Imperial Brazil is here taken as an ancestral of the biopolitical camp identified in the totalitarian movements in the 20th century, having unfolded and suffered metamorphosis in the years ahead and represented by literature.