Dead-baby dreams, transfiguration and recovery from infant death trauma in northeast Brazil

Abstract

Maternal reactions to infant death in Northeast Brazil have been at the epicenter of anthropological debate since the 1980s. This ethnographic study of 45 death narratives by bereaved mothers collected from 1979–1989 in Pacatuba, Ceará, Brazil, refutes existing claims of mothers’ “selective neglect” and “indifference” towards sick babies and emotionally empty grief response. I argue that through dead-baby dreams—and their imaginary transfiguration—grieving mothers alleviate infant death trauma. Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, definitive loss, and personal guilt—the social seeds of depression—are reframed to deny death’s finality and exonerate mothers from crippling self-blame. By transfiguring lingering mental images of the tiny cold corpse, mothers remold the irreversibility and definitiveness of death, gaining a sense of control over its unpredictable “jolt.” In the politically oppressive Northeast Brazil—where social justice remains “an illusion”—mothers dream to preserve their own mental sanity and to recover from death’s cruel aftermath. Any interpretation of mourning behavior must be contextualized within the local moral world and its “assumed structure of reality” to avoid demoralizing grieving Brazilian mothers and compounding their suffering. “You see, the only thing a poor woman truly owns that no one can borrow, cheat, steal or rob from her … is her imagination!” (Dona Chiquinha grieving death of her 10 children, Pacatuba, Ceará, Brazil).