- * Este trabalho foi desenvolvido no âmbito do projeto “PSYGLOCAL – Sofrimento psíquico e direitos hu (...)
In heaven, too,
You’d be institutionalized.
But that’s all right, –
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare.
T. Roethke, Beyond Bedlam
1Many famous poets faced psychic suffering and institutionalization, as poet Theodore Roethke refers in the above poem, included in the poetic anthology Beyond Bedlam (Smith & Sweeney, 1997). Addressing the reader as an impersonal “you”, the opening statement sets up a disturbing proximity between heaven and total institution, as if it was impossible to think of an alternative ending (no matter the beginning) since: “in heaven, too,/ you’d be institutionalized”. But what immediately resolves this dreadful coincidence is the chance to “eat and swear” together; not just with inspired artists such as William Blake, Christopher Smart or John Clare, but also with their largely unknown “likes”.
2Inspired by these lines, this article develops a two-pronged argument, aiming, firstly, at historicising the existence of Mad/Disability literature in a transnational sense; and, secondly, at encouraging creative production in the context of psychiatric institutions, giving a political horizon to writing, as well as a therapeutic one.
3Specifically, the purpose of this work is not so much to establish once and for all what aesthetic criteria should be respected in order for a literary text to be considered an instance of Mad/Disability literature. Rather, it aims to provide an inclusive overview of expressive techniques through which poets with psychiatric experience have been able to bring their words “down to the level of things”. Thus, it contemplates various types of posture that in the aesthetic realm allow an individual to speak, both from conventional and alternative points of view.
4In doing so, considering the case of Portuguese literature, we will attempt to recognize the reterritorializing and deterritorializing drives (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) displayed in the poetics of some of its most famous authors with mad experiences (Ângelo de Lima, Florbela Espanca and Adília Lopes). In fact, while Mad/Disability Studies and Arts are well known and discussed in the English-speaking cultural world (Hirsch, 1974; Campbell, 2022), research in Lusophone literature in this area has been scarce, with a few exceptions, especially from Brazil (Silva et al., 2021).
5In the early 19th century, psychiatrists such as Pinel and Ben Rush already acknowledged the therapeutic value of creative activity, as being practical, manual and artisanal in nature. They called it “ergo-therapy”, with the accent being put on ‘work’ (Amarante, 2022; MacGregor, 1989). After the crisis of the moral treatment model, occupational therapy regarded the creative expression of psychiatric patients as a valuable aesthetic and alternative tool of treatment, often beyond the merely mechanistic view on creativity. Think, in particular, of Nise da Silveira‘s case (Amarante, 2021, 2022).
6Though such recreational initiatives have been part of psychiatry's history since its early foundations, research on creative work produced by patients in such contexts is usually limited to the visual field of expression, whereas the verbal and literary domains displayed in their prose and poetry, published in patients’ journals, anthologies or even literary newspapers is often neglected (Azumendi, 2015). Indeed, the Art Brut movement, as conceived by Jean Dubuffet in the 1930s-1940s, primarily challenged artistic institutions rather than psychiatric ones, despite emerging from artists subjected to extreme isolation and coercion. Dubuffet perceived institutionalization as a catalyst for raw creativity, untainted by formal Fine Arts training. While the movement did not directly critique psychiatric oppression, it represented a fundamental reversal of the dominant aesthetic paradigm of its time. However, interpretations that uncritically associate genius with madness often overlook the systemic conditions that shape these works, reducing the diversity of creative patients to mere irresponsibility and depriving their art of its capacity to critique prevailing institutional practices (Reaume, 2002).
7From then on, in psychiatric facilities, recreational or expressive activities have been increasingly offered to institutionalized populations, including drawing, photography, music, theatre or writing workshops. Artistic creation has become a more or less consolidated practice as a complementary part of the recovery process, albeit in a sporadic form and often perceived as ancillary to the hegemonic biomedical frame of madness as a “mental illness” (Reid et al., 2019). In fact, the therapeutic function of the expressive arts has long been a richly researched field, and also in the case of writing, poetry-therapy activities in both individual and group contexts are now commonplace (Ervedosa & Matos, 2009; Romm et al. 2023; Sampson, 2004). More recently, this therapeutic scope in writing has also been emerging outside the mental health care system, reaching broader groups (Chidiac, 2010; Van Goidsenhoven & Masschelein, 2021).
8However, a certain divide between a creative (artistic) and an expressive (therapeutic) function of literary activities occurred in psychiatric research, since the birth of poetry-therapy (Costa & Abreu, 2018; Pennebaker, 1995). It is often stressed that in situations of psychic vulnerability, writing and reading activities should be oriented towards the well-being and personal development of patients rather than the pursuit of a personal style or a specific community of readers. All the more so, considering that such initiatives often are addressed to participants “hitherto uninvolved in any writing practices” (Sampson & Hunt, 2005). However, beyond the aesthetic value of the product, writing is above all a process of meaning-making that embraces various subjectivities (McLoughlin, 2004), not only within the horizon of individual change aimed at by therapeutic processes, but also within that of social change aimed at by socio-cultural processes of empowerment (Amarante, 2024). According to Reid et al. (2019), this includes that of reclaiming a political approach to artworks produced in institutionalized settings or after one’s own lived experience of “madness” (Mad Art), since
When mad art is relegated to the therapeutic realm, understood only as a benevolent force in the lives of mad people, it is decontextualized and positioned as apolitical. [...] While the term “therapeutic interventions” suggests benevolence, this interpretation limits our understanding by failing to account for the institutional role that psy industries have played in managing, containing, punishing, and controlling populations read as deviant. (Reid et al., 2019, pp. 257–258)
9Literature has long been fascinated with madness and the extreme conditions of the human psyche, a tradition dating back to antiquity, from Plato’s Phaedrus onward (Scull, 2014). This literary interest evolved alongside psychiatry’s clinical perspective, which reframed madness as “mental illness”, sometimes with the active complicity of writers, other times not (Faas, 1988; Pizarro, 2015). Some scholars argue that literature not only engages with madness as a cultural reference but also integrates its phenomenology into its own tools of the trade (Foucault, 1970; Lecercle, 1990; Sass, 1992). In Madness and Modernism, L. Sass (1992) highlights similarities between literary conventions – especially in modernist and postmodernist poetry – and the speech patterns of schizophrenia as identified by psychiatry. These parallels include a preoccupation with the singularity of experience and the ineffability of thoughts and/or reality; an inclination toward a more authentic and introspective discourse at the expense of communicability; and the elevation of language as an autonomous entity. However, Mad/Disability literature does not merely mimic or express madness in literary form, and the above-mentioned parallelism stands less for reinforcing the “mad-genius myth” (Scull, 2014) than for mirroring the common contradictions of experience lived by any human being. Rather, the significance of these affinities lies in recognizing that they do not reflect a deficit of reflexivity but rather an excess – marked by hyper-reflexivity and a profound detachment from self and world, which may itself become debilitating (Sass, 1992). Later, we will examine in greater detail how some of the elements of this hypothesis also arise from a reading of the poetics taken into account here, in light of a prior discussion of what has been emerging as Mad/Disability Literature.
10On the basis of Mad/Disability Studies (Beresford & Russo, 2022; Faulkner, 2017), the category of Mad Art has appeared in the literary field under slightly different names, among which are those of Survivors Literature (Campbell, 2022; Llorens, 2014), Mad Poetics (Smith, 2018) and Psychological Disability Poetry (Nicki, 2015).
11These categories reflect an urgency tied to both the past and future of the consumers/ survivors/ (ex) patients’ social movement (c/s/x), reclaiming the historical link between madness and creativity – often unrecognized or silenced – while also serving as a pedagogical tool for reimagining madness and disability experiences through artistic and collective practices (Reid et al., 2019). Produced by people with lived experience and social movement activists, Mad/Disability Literatures comprise various forms of writing identified as radical in both an aesthetic and a political sense, against what has been referred to as the ideologies of “sanism” or “ableism” (Durgin, 2010; McEwan, 2018). They are thus rooted in the possibility of alternative expressions of what the common sense and the hegemonic biomedical discourses of science reduce to an “anomaly” of the human condition.
12As Nicki (2015) puts it, “psychological disability poetry embraces self-definition and displaces demeaning social projections of subhuman and inherently dangerous ‘mentally ill’ people with images of people who are atypical and/or struggling with serious hardship and very difficult life circumstances”. In spite of such struggles, however, Nicki (2015) claims that “this kind of poetry is distinctly different from poetry that is merely about emotional suffering [...]. Psychological disability poetry is distinctly different from confessional poetry”. In other words, if pain is a “problem” itself, writing is evoked to problematize such “problem” in front of an audience. This caveat should not be taken literally, depriving writing of lyrical-confessional expressive repertoires, but rather as a critical resistance to the mainstream and publishing market reception of artworks by people with lived experience (Mad Art), which relegates them to “therapeutic” expressive operations (Nicki, 2015). Even because, in order to successfully problematize a painful lived experience, one may need first to be more at ease with it (McLoughlin, 2004).
13By way of a concrete example, in Literatures of madness (Donaldson, 2018), McEwan cites Hannah Weiner, an American poet from the 1970s, for how her texts enact a “dis/humanist” literature. Relying on multi-vocal interruption devices, her writing blurs the ordinariness of words through the phenomenon of verbal-auditory hallucinations (García, 2010). Interruption – identified as the quintessence of impairment and, consequently, of disability – operates in her poetics through the use of both written and oral devices. In the collaborative reading of her Clairvoyant journal (1974), made possible by the two “voices” of Sharon Mattlin and Margaret DeCoursey, giving voice with the author herself to a pathologized experience in a radically alternative perspective, interruption does not contract a psycho-social symptomatology as much as an innovative practice, a new form of collaboration based on solidarity and interdependence.
14Thus, two paradigmatic aspects of mad/disability literatures(s) can be identified: the self-identification of the author within the c/s/x movement (Campbell, 2022), and the critique of liberal humanist notion of human nature, based on rational “independence” and/or physical “autonomy” (Durgin, 2010; McEwan, 2018).
15At the same time, giving an aesthetic form to lived experience, by means of poetic writing, also provides us with new ways of knowing and feeling, as Griffiths (2016) described in Tristimania, recounting her experience of Manic Depressive disorder: “in medicine I saw the science of pain but in poetry I saw pain’s art. Medicine has an anaesthetic relationship to pain – it wants to rid the patient of it. Poetry has an aesthetic relationship to pain – it wants pain to speak”. Beyond the formal investigations of post-ableist poetics (Durgin, 2010), the umbrella term Mad/Disability Literature(s) points to the necessity of inclusion of consumers, patients and survivors’ creative voices, both from the past and the present. In the following examples taken from Portuguese literature, we examine three different forms of writing that allow us to highlight both confessional and confrontational repertories of expression in relation to psychic suffering and/or psychiatric treatment.
- 1 In Portugal, other poets who experienced psychiatric treatment and confinement, such as António Gan (...)
16Taking our cue from the reflections proposed by Louis Sass (1992), in a Mad/Disability perspective, we will consider some of the most important poetic influences in the Portuguese literary canon – Ângelo de Lima, Florbela Espanca and Adília Lopes – without confining the scope of the investigation to these authors alone, which is still richly unexplored in the Lusophone cultural landscape1.
17All three poets are recognised not only for their works but also, more or less, for their iconic biographies, as they are known to have expressed psychic suffering in the poetic sphere or suffered psychiatric institutionalization (indeed, with very different histories in this sense). Some of these substantial differences can be deduced from a quick reference to their biographies.
18Ângelo de Lima (1872-1921), born in Porto, experienced a turbulent life marked by artistic brilliance and institutionalization. Expelled from a military boarding school in his youth, he later took part in a Republican uprising in 1891 and joined the warfront in Mozambique, being soon dismissed for misconduct. Returning to Portugal, he re‑enrolled in Fine Arts in 1894, the same year he made his literary debut. That year also marked the beginning of a series of internments, starting at the Hospital Conde de Ferreira (1894-1898). Diagnosed by Miguel Bombarda, he spent the last two decades of his life at the Rilhafoles asylum (1901-1921). Despite his confinement and his many lost artworks, he remained a prolific artist, contributing with drawings and poetry to various magazines, most notably Orpheu (1915).
19Florbela Espanca (1894-1930) – a pseudonym for Flor Bela de Alma da Conceição – was born some 20 years after Ângelo de Lima, in 1894, in the Alentejo region. Her writing, however, shows influences much more from decadent romanticism than from modernism. An illegitimate daughter of Antónia da Conceição Lobo and the Republican João M. Espanca, Florbela grew up apart from her father, who did not officially recognise her as his daughter until 18 years after her death. In Portugal, she was one of the first women to be allowed to enrol in high school and became a leading figure of early Lusitanian feminism. Her first short story, Mamã! (1907), appeared the year before her mother’s death at the age of 29. Her real debut, however, came in 1919 with the publication of Livro de mágoas, followed in 1923 by Livro de Sóror Saudade. She would have also published Charneca em flor (1931) while still alive in 1927 were it not for the lack of interest from publishers. The last three years of her life opened with a fatal accident involving her brother, which aggravated the poet's state of health to such an extent that she attempted suicide on several occasions during this period. With an emotionally stormy life marked by the loss of various loved ones, the poet would end her life on her own birthday, 8 December 1930, at the age of 36.
20Finally, we have Adília Lopes (1960-2024) – another literary pseudonym, that of Maria José da Silva Viana Fidalgo de Oliveira – who sadly passed away during the preparation of this paper. From a young age she suffered from episodes of schizo-affective psychosis, as diagnosed by psychiatrist Coimbra de Matos, during her early years at the University in Lisbon. This experience she herself has spoken openly about on several occasions (2002), and also in her poetic production, characterized by an often self-mocking, biting and colloquial stance. A prolific writer, her first publications include Um jogo bastante perigoso (1985), O poeta de Pondichery (1986) and Florbela Espanca espanca (1999), among the many other books she had been working on until recently.
21From these poets – whose poetics are as different from each other as were the societies they lived in – I will read some texts considering overall: the confessional (or thematic) dimension of the “dis/ease”; the identifying posture of the author; and, finally, the broad work on language, carried out on a linguistic and cultural level. In this way, I aim to emphasize how each of these authors reveals forms of creativity of a radical nature in relation to language and the experience of madness: in a certain confessional sense, traditionally romantic in approach (Florbela Espanca), and again in a certain experimental sense, more aligned with modernist (Ângelo de Lima) and post-modernist (Adília Lopes) sensibilities.
22Mostly known for his appearance in the second issue of the famous magazine Orpheu (1915) – edited by poets Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro – Ângelo de Lima was a poet and painter. Though his drawings and his poetic texts appeared in some magazines before his internment, it was during his institutionalization and posthumously that his works attracted the attention of critics. His fame is nowadays recognised, as much by critical anthologies and historical accounts (Braga & Lopo, 2023; Santos, 2015), as by film productions such as the documentary directed by Jorge Pelicano (2014), entitled after the poet’s most famous verse: “Para-me de repente o pensamento” (“Suddenly my thoughts halt”). Also, his writings have been very influential in the literary field, having been referenced in many poetic anthologies (Joaquim, 2016) and inspiring the names of new contemporary publishers’ in Portugal, such as Mariposa Azual or Douda Correria (Braga & Lopo, 2023).
23His poems present a difficulty that, if in part is shared with many other modern poems, on the other hand is unique to it. The following is one of the comprised poems in Orpheu’s second (and last) issue:
- 2 Since this sonnet’s neologisms and Italian and French influences make translation challenging, I pr (...)
EDD’ORA ADDIO... – MIA SOAVE!...2
Aos meus Amigos d’Orpheu
– Mia Soave... – Ave?!... – Almeia?!
– Mariposa Azual... Transe!
Que de Alado Lidar, Canse...
– Dorta em Paz... – Transpasse Ideia!...
– Do Acaso pela Epopeia...
Dorto... Stringe... o Corpo Elance
Vai À Campa... – Il C’or descanse...
– Mia Soave... – Ave!... – Almeia!...
– Não dói Por Ti Meu Peito...
– Não Choro no Orar Cicio...
– Em Profano... – Edd’ora... Eleito!...
– Balsame – a Campa – o Rocio
Que Cai sobre o Último Leito!...
Mi’ Soave!... Edd’ora Addio!...
24In the case of Lima’s writings, in fact, this difficulty is primarily attributed to his biography and, particularly, to his institutionalization (Guimarães, 1971; Vieira, 2002). In the preface to his anthology, Guimarães (1971) identifies three modes that embody a “deviation” from the normal use of everyday language, as in: a) the use of rare and obsolete words, mainly of classical register; b) anomalous terms that seem more like mutilated “signifiers” than real neologisms; and c) the absence or the compression of syntax, full of suspensions, capital letters and ellipses.
25However, Lima’s poetic compositions rarely thematize the experience of madness as such, the only text in Orpheu 2 referring to it being “Neitha-Kri” (Braga & Lopo, 2023). They thus demarcate a disjunction between poetic production and the experience of diagnosis and treatment; contrary to his prose texts and letters, where he wrote of his indignation at the internment and treatment and his vigorous denial of the diagnosis (Braga & Lopo, 2023). For example, in a piece called “Eu não estou doudo” (“I’m not crazy”):
- 3 In the original language: “Longo é explicar o meu caso, minúcia por minúcia – mesmo só o poderia fa (...)
Long enough to explain my case, minutiae by minutiae – indeed I could only do it with rest and in a place where for a day I would be sure of their non-action, – but here where I have to eat whatever they give me for lunch and dinner, they are by the above process masters of the organism and disturb the functioning of my brain, which suits them very well because this is my confusion – [...]. (Lima, as cited in Braga & Lopo, 2023, p. 187)3
- 4 Luís Vaz de Camões (1524-1579) was a national poet, still considered as one of Portugal’s greatest (...)
26This has led to the poetic texts of this phase (1901-1921) being interpreted as “spoken” by madness, in its most unreflected and spontaneous manifestation (Simões, 1999). And yet many of them, including the already mentioned “Para-me de repente o pensamento”, show something different: on the one hand, his ability to distance himself from his condition and return clear and impactful images of his experience of crisis (Vieira, 2002); on the other, an impeccable metrics, which moreover characterizes his entire poetic oeuvre (Braga & Lopo, 2023). This is also demonstrated by the text above mentioned “Edd’ora addio... mia soave”, as its structure is that of a typical sonnet of Camoensian4 descent (Joaquim, 2016).
27Ângelo de Lima joined the Orpheu on the occasion of the magazine's second issue, in 1915, but it should be noted that he had been publishing poems in magazines since 1894, and that over these twenty years his writing evolved in no small measure. Initially, the Symbolist writing of his father, Pedro de Lima, is thought to have influenced him. He too was interned in Conde Ferreira, where remained until his death in 1883, when Ângelo was 11 years old. But, as another Portuguese poet – Jorge da Sena – wrote, in respect to the latter: “in his schizophrenic paroxysm, [Ângelo de Lima] is one of the best poets of the transition from symbolism to the avant-garde” (as cited in Joaquim, 2016, p. 344). This is to suggest that, perhaps, even his oriental references (as widespread in Symbolism as in Portuguese modernism), highlight more than a simple adherence to aesthetic conventions, considering that these compositions were written in an asylum environment. The localities and deities invoked blur to a level of abstraction, all the more increased by the plastic deformations of their names, in which the references themselves, from Egypt or China, do not matter as much as the absence of a world to which those leaning towards their deciphering are exposed: “Whether it’s Egypt or China isn’t the most important thing here, but rather what these spaces translate: that they are windows to lost worlds” (Braga & Lopo, 2023, p. 55).
28In the context of his collaboration with the magazine Orpheu, famous is also the phrase Pessoa would use to remember him in 1935, 14 years after the poet’s death in Rilhafoles asylum: “not being ours, he nevertheless became ours”. Pessoa’s phrase is ambiguous, as pointed out by some (Ceccucci, 2015), since it establishes a distance between Lima and the rest of the group. At the same time, it sanctions the co-participation between the poetic style of Ângelo de Lima and the modernist project of the Orpheu magazine: “because it recognises that he is carrying out a similar kind of linguistic research and that he is starting from a similar philosophical position on the relationship between language and reality, words and things” (Braga & Lopo, 2023, p. 44).
29Since their first issue, the poets of the Orpheu had already been the target of harsh criticism from both literary critics and psychiatrists, whom Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro also knew for personal reasons (Pizarro, 2015). In fact, Pessoa addressed such criticism privately and publicly, bewildered by the comments that psychiatrists allowed themselves to make in the field of literature; in particular, those pronounced by an “anonymous neurologist” (in all likelihood, Egas Moniz). For example, he wrote: “what outrages me is not that these scientific fools have these opinions. It's that they enjoy, in our midst of idiots, enough prestige for these opinions to be given importance” (Pizarro, 2015). So that, even before Lima's debut, the poets and editors who collaborated with the Orpheu were already accused of insanity. As Pizarro (2015, p. 17) argues: “Pessoa perhaps didn't expect psychiatrists to pronounce on Orpheu, and was outraged by the diagnosis of mental alienation that hung over the magazine's contributors, although he knew that the magazine's reception would be misunderstood”.
30Pessoa burst out in these criticisms against Egas Moniz and Júlio de Matos in 1915 (who directed the Rilhafoles asylum, during the period in which Ângelo da Lima had been an inmate). The collaboration between Ângelo de Lima and the magazine Orpheu is therefore something that transcends literature, as it also concerns the cultural and social sphere in which madness takes on political significance. So much so that underlying the birth of this collaboration is, on the one hand, the poet's interest in obtaining permission to leave the asylum to interact with that group of artists who met at the Café Brasileira; on the other hand, the interest of the circle itself in contradicting the scientific authority of psychiatrists, finding in one of its institutionalized users the best possible response to the criticism ventured by such doctors, in a sphere that was alien to that of their specialization.
31For at least two reasons, Ângelo de Lima cannot fail to be included in the ranks of Mad/Disability literature: the first being that of having carried out an explicit resistance to the identification induced by the pathologization of his eccentricity; and the second, that of having responded to the institutional “silencing”, through these “windows to lost worlds” that, remaining open and unresolved today and continuing to critically participate in the imaginary of the psychiatric environment, elude the interpretative and exclusionary logics of the hegemonic gaze of psychiatry in culture and society.
32In contrast to Ângelo de Lima, Florbela Espanca did not suffer any psychiatric internment, but her poetic production is considered in Portugal as one of the utmost expressions of despair and melancholic suffering in literature, among the other things (Moreno, 2007; Silva, 2008). As mentioned earlier, the author committed suicide at the age of 36 with an overdose of barbiturate (Veronal), and depressive neurosis is often mentioned as being her clinical condition, as it has been read and interpreted by history and mental health scholars (Farias, 2019; Feitosa et al., 2019). To some extent, this was reinforced by the author herself, in light of some of her title choices, such as, for example, “Neurastenia”, in Livro de mágoas (Book of sorrows) (1919). As referred in a survey on depressive themes in Portuguese poetry from an issue of Psiquiatria Clínica (Alameda, 1993, p. 68): “Depression is pain, sorrow, boredom, anguish, fear, as Florbela Espanca tells us”. And the author’s text called to support this concise observation is something self-explanatory, taken from this book:
- 5 The following is my own translation: “Those who love me so much/ Don’t know what I feel and am.../ (...)
SEM REMÉDIO5
Aqueles que me têm muito amor
Não sabem o que sinto e o que sou...
Não sabem que passou, um dia, a Dor,
À minha porta e, nesse dia, entrou.
E é desde então que eu sinto este pavor;
Este frio que anda em mim, e que gelou
O que de bom me deu Nosso Senhor!
Se eu nem sei por onde ando e onde vou!!
Sinto os passos da Dor, essa cadência
Que é já tortura infinda, que é demência!
Que é já vontade doida de gritar!
E é sempre a mesma mágoa, o mesmo tédio,
A mesma angústia funda, sem remédio,
Andando atrás de mim, sem me largar!...
33Florbela’s poetic writing is generally considered neo-romantic, by virtue of certain stylistic characteristics resulting from recurrent devices in her texts, as well as a particularly successful adherence to the traditional form of the sonnet – inherited, particularly, from Antero de Quental and António Nobre – even though the author has always written in a largely isolated way in the literary panorama, without affiliation to any specific group. Out of the mad and brilliant writer, the identity associated with Florbela prevailed mostly in the latter aspect (Vilela et al., 2012), even if the former wasn’t absent, especially during the last years of her life when she was officially diagnosed (as cited in Farias, 2019). The mastery in control, in the measure of the verse, is evidence of an impeccable calculated and lucid arrangement of the subject matter. The neo-romantic devices of her poetics also include the confessional tone, in first person singular, giving voice to her experience.
34What characterizes Romantic poetic forms and unites them, in Sass’s perspective, is the anchoring on a certain “cult of the self” on the part of the poets, aimed at the “integration of opposites through a higher self-forgetfulness” (Sass, 1992, p. 37). And traces of this expressive element could be found not only in Florbelian production – for instance, in the sonnet “Amar!” (“To love!”), from the posthumous collection Charneca em flor (1931) (“I want to love, love wildly!/ Love for the sake of loving: here… there…/ This, That, The Other, and everyone…/ Love! Love! And not love anyone!”) – but also in many other poets of her time.
35However, Espanca’s lyrical confessionalism appears to evolve and take on more nuanced features, opening up to forms of dialogism in which a spectrum of various incarnations of the “feminine” participate, as in Livro de Soror Saudade (Book of Sister Saudade) (1923).
36This kind of confessional exposure also earned her the critical merit of an overt rebellion against the oppressive patriarchal context in which she lived, as a woman in a strongly socio-culturally conservative country. As Pazos-Alonso observes, it was during her adolescence that Portugal became a Republic and, in this sense,
it is worth highlighting that Republican reforms soon translated into some legal equality [...]. This resulted in one of the most progressive divorce laws in Europe at the time, from which Florbela herself would subsequently benefit: she was twice divorced and married three times in the space of twelve years. (Pazos-Alonso, 2022, p. 14)
37In 1918 – at the time when Florbela Espanca was preparing her first collection (Livro das mágoas) – Maria Adelaide da Cunha was interned in the Hospital Conde Ferreira on the basis of a document produced by three of the country’s most important psychiatrists (Egas Moniz, Júlio de Matos and Magalhães Lemos) on behalf of her abandoned husband, as a form of punishment. And that experienced by Maria Adelaide da Cunha was not an isolated incident, as proved in 1922 by an enquiry of the newspaper A Capital into the Hospital Conde Ferreira, where many other women were sent by their husbands (Moreno, 2007).
38Florbela never referred to the issue in her poems, but having also worked as a journalist, it cannot be ruled out that she was familiar with the book written by Maria Adelaide da Cunha herself, Doida não! (Cunha, 1920) if only because it was a national scandal – that of the couple’s affair of Diário de Notícias – that concerned the press itself.
39It is difficult to disentangle the reading of Florbela Espanca’s texts from the emotional spontaneity related to the heightened mental states one can evince, from the Romantic fashion of critical self-expression. Even if some texts may refer to forms of lived experience of psychic suffering, it is not only on the basis of its expression that her poetic work stands. As far as we can see from the socio-cultural context of the time and the fact that Florbela Espanca never suffered forced psychiatric treatment, her poetics seems to correspond to the desire of having her own will and passion known as “mad” – as a deviant and strongly alternative performance of femininity – much more than her own public identity.
40Yet, subsequently, we will see how another synthesis between confessional and confrontational poetic repertoires in a counter-hegemonic sense is possible, with reference to “madness” and the social order expected from language and/or literary conventions.
41The inclusion of Adília Lopes after these authors might now be surprising. Her poetry is indeed rarely discussed in what refers specifically to her experience of ‘madness’, although the author herself has never hidden her diagnosis of schizoaffective psychosis (Honda, 2018). Furthermore, in her writing we find references to psychiatric institutions on several occasions – such as in the poem “Hospital Júlio de Matos”, in Florbela Espanca espanca (Lopes, 1999) – or psychiatric drugs, as in Dobra (Fold): “I take Risperidone. Risperidone is a rude remedy. It makes me fat and slow. In body and mind” (Lopes, 2014, p. 647).
- 6 “I'm fat/ and I want to be/ fat/ but I don't want to/ be poor/ and I don't need/ to have cut off/ m (...)
42But Adília lives in a different time and society compared to Ângelo de Lima and Florbela Espanca. Unlike the former – with whom she shares a stylistic reception of the modernist tradition – she did not suffer internment; unlike the latter, she uses her confessional posture in a self-mocking and critical perspective of the experience of madness, as some readings denote, by turning it operative in literary production as well as in the public sphere (Baltrusch, 2019). However, the first characteristic that obviously distinguishes hers from the writings of Ângelo de Lima and Florbela Espanca is the post‑modern critique of the poetic self, such as in this text6 from Dobra (Lopes, 2014, pp. 478–479):
Estou gorda
e quero ser gorda
mas não quero
ser pobre
e não preciso
que me cortem
a cabeça
Maria a psiquiatria e a poesia
deram-me
uma cabeça nova
Engordei 43 Kg
de 86 para cá
agora
gorda como estou
já caibo
num quadro de Rubens
(segundo o Osório Mateus
no meu caso
era mais fácil
entrar para o quadro
de um pintor
que para o quadro
de uma empresa).
43In this fragment, the text suggests pungent questionings about taking medications and its (in)desired effects, such as “I’m fat/ and I want to be/ fat’: the need to tolerate such effects (and perhaps to desire them?) by virtue of that “normal” being who is endowed – thanks to religion, art or psychiatry – with a “new head”?
44Then the economic questioning related to the consumption of drugs follows: their price (“but I don’t want to/ be poor”) and the price paid by not taking them, which is resolved in the threat of (non-)employment in the following text, since, as paraphrased by Honda: “an overweight person can be passed over in selection processes in companies, just as someone suffering from mental illness does not correspond to the rational, discerning and reasonable behaviour expected of a professional in their work environment” (Honda, 2018, p. 14).
45Drawing inspiration from the title of the book Florbela Espanca espanca (1999), it is with the word “espancamento” (beating), as Silvestre has proposed, that one could define the operation the author makes on language: “a systematic and merciless battering of all available conceptions of the poetic and the regimes of its agency” (2001, p. 25). The critic refers not only to Adília Lopes’ reinterpretation of Florbela Espanca’s texts, but in general to her reinterpretation of the poetic phenomenon and the experience it gives voice to. It seems that life and poetic writing coincide, considering the way in which in her texts and adherence to everyday register language games becomes an excess of adherence that “re-establishes the continuity between the poetic and the non‑poetic through the most common language that characterizes both” (Silvestre, 1999, p. 42).
46This procedure, to the detriment of the sublime aura associated with the figure of Florbela Espanca, shapes Adília Lopes’ texts in a way that makes explicit a certain “disinvestment in the phenomenal content of the real” (Silvestre, 2001, p. 26). In the case of this analysis, this extends to the way the author considers her experience with mental health and psychiatric services. The inclusion of Adília Lopes in this short sample is justified by the way in which the author openly positions herself and works, through her “espancamento”, in favour of a constant questioning of both the biomedical conception of madness and the author's conception of genius (Honda, 2018).
47Recently it has been written that the author: “has assumed, in the Portuguese literary city, the role of madwoman of the house” (Marques, 2015). She herself had otherwise dealt with the difficulties associated with her illness, in an intervention on the newspaper Público called “Mental e mentol” (“Mental and menthol”):
When I make it known that I have a mental illness, I know that it is much easier for me to do so than, for example, for a nursery school teacher or a policeman. Being a poet, an artist, is, in this case, a visible shield that protects me. At least it seems that way to me. But being a poet doesn't give me a living and that's where being a poet and having a mental illness pose problems. One accepts a mad poet, that might even work as a lure, increasing the value of her texts (in my eyes, it doesn't increase anything). But a mad secondary school teacher? A mad librarian? A mad cultural figure? The poor, genius, mad artist is only accepted after he's dead. And after all, that's not my role. (Lopes, 2002)
48Rather than co-opting the experience of her neurodivergence to the publishing market, which frequently adopts an association between madness and poetic brilliance, the writer tackles a linguistic work on the ordinary life of an author’s experience. She thus resists the stigmatization of her condition as a pathological one, which only after the death of those who gave to “mental illness” a voice – as we saw in Ângelo de Lima’s case – if any, rewards an author.
49The aim of this work is not to establish the “madness” of the three authors – who, moreover, identified themselves in very different ways (de Lima refusing it as an imprisonment, Espanca embracing it on a literary level, and Lopes resisting the psychiatric stigmatization of “mental illness”). Rather, it aims to reclaim writing and creativity as a meaningful activity in the condition of psychic suffering and in response to psychiatric treatment, towards the creation of a Mad/Disability canon from the perspective of Lusophone literature. Bringing together the poetics and experiences shaped by these authors may prove of crucial importance by virtue of a richer history of the relationship between madness and writing, but also by virtue of their diversity in presenting a common “resistance to the dominant liberal humanist and ableist conceptions of mind and human subjecthood” (McEwan, 2018, p. 153).
50A modernist fashion alongside famous writers at the Orpheu; a feminist way of subverting the patriarchal conception of women; and, finally, an “unliterary” posture inside the literary field. Forms and expressions that are conveyed through the adherence to or invention of literary linguistic conventions, more or less accessible to the readerships of their time. What interests us from this heterogeneity are the confessional and confrontational repertoires that we can draw from it for militancy and for contemporary use of artistic expression in the psychiatric field, beyond its therapeutic rationale.
51Ângelo de Lima presents innovative forms from a literary point of view. Despite following recognisable conventions in certain aesthetic currents of his time (Braga & Lopo, 2023), in fact, they manifest a frayed and fragmentary imagery, characterized by a contemplative or invocative tone of entities and qualities unattainable to his readers. This could be linked to the modernist trend that Sass (1992) referred to as the “Apotheosis of the Word”, that is, when language turns itself into an entity. As Joaquim (2016) suggests, from a Poundian perspective, one could say that his poetry unfolds especially in a visual (phanopoeia) and sonorous sense (melopoeia), possibly lacking in a logical-semantic sense (logopoeia). In this sense, Ângelo de Lima would not seem to address anyone but those presences and entities evoked by the very sonorous dimension of the text, relying foremostly on melopoeia and its capacity to open up gaps of meaning from the accidental, pure contingency, rather than from the presence of a logical meaning (Ceccucci, 2015). But beyond this, it is necessary to stress that they also represent a form of response to the experience of institutionalization, since they provide access to a symbolic world alternative to that of the asylum, with its proper internal coherence and norms, and outside of its “normalizing” reach (Braga & Lopo, 2023; Guimarães, 1971).
52Quite different are the poetic repertoires that Florbela Espanca makes use of in her writing. The confessional vein that animates her sonnets, notwithstanding the fact that it most often treats its subject matter dysphorically, offers too much a reterritorializing aspect of “madness” in order to satisfy the criteria of inclusion for what, for instance, Nicki called “psychological disability poetry” (2015). The broad adherence to poetic conventions of her time and confessionalism convey to her readership the sensation of communicative transparency and a possible recognition of her own affective experience, or of the author’s craft, in the arrangement of it. Despite the fact that there is little account, in Florbela Espanca’s criticism, of her poetics in relation to psychiatry and the medical discourses of her time, her inclusion is due not only to the theme of melancholy throughout her poetry, but also to the benefit of the confessional strategies frequently found in the writing of psychiatric users (Crossley & Crossley, 2001; Zinnari, 2021). Such observations should not lead to the rejection of poetic self-expression from the proposal that has been named Mad/Disability Literature, but, on the contrary, promote awareness of how it offers an alternative knowledge of “psychic suffering” and the social construction of “madness” (Griffiths, 2016).
53Finally, the poetic writing of Adília Lopes manifests an original posture within contemporary Portuguese literature. Indeed, the author openly addresses her psychic condition and gives expression in her texts to a critical positioning also with respect to the relationship between genius and madness. The experience that is given voice to is still conveyed through confessional repertoires, as seen in the case of Florbela Espanca, but remarkably re-presenting the traits of the modernist sensibility that relate to the problem of the ineffability of experience and the insufficiency of words (Sass, 1992). The expression of experience, thus, is diluted in the exhaustion of linguistic games followed to such an extent that it becomes anonymous: the lines do not give back a univocal identity of Adília, nor the contours of a familiarizable experience. The social construction of “disease” and “illness” is thus challenged by the writing, captured flagrantly in its own constituent linguistic texture, or reproduced on itself in a self-referential and deterritorializing imagery. Referring back to the fact that, quite simply, “we all could be Adília, more than like Adília” (Silvestre, 2001, p. 26).
54On the one hand, their writings offer us possible insights into the experience of psychic suffering and what biomedical psychiatry refers to as “mental illness”, on the other, they offer stylistic devices that are re-appropriable, in the sense of a permanent questioning of reality from an emancipatory interpretation of its social construction. This includes the always-already possible creative participation of patients in writing workshops set in psychiatric contexts.
55There are several reasons underlying my choice to talk about these three authors. The first is to demonstrate that, within Portuguese literature, there is a creative pivot linked to the experience of madness and psychiatric treatment, as it is showed, for example, by the inclusion of Fernando Pessoa as a reference for “poems written out of mental distress” in Beyond Bedlam (1997) – the anthology mentioned at the beginning of this paper – or even Portuguese anthologies such as Edoi Lelia Doura (Helder, 1985) and Sião (Al Berto et al., 1987). A second one is an attempt to understand poetic writing as a form of knowledge and resistance that takes place in language, especially in the context of psychiatry, where it is frequently produced and shared with a primarily therapeutic function, but can also aspire at becoming a driving force for social change. And lastly, because in poems by consumers/(ex-)patients/survivors of psychiatry and writers with lived experience we encounter discursive and expressive repertoires which help us to discuss Mad/Disability Literature as a category. If the modernist sensibility presents us with the possibility of giving form to the hyper-reflexivity, alienation and detachment from self and world experienced in states both of creative inspiration and crisis, it is also true that lyrical confessional devices may reterritorialize lived experience in conformity with the biomedical knowledge of psychiatry or deterritorialize it, challenging the normality and normativity of communicative acts, especially in the cultural field of literary institutions.
56As Netchitailova (2019, p. 1510) argues: “madness should retain its aura of mystery, and it should always leave room for different views and stories, where some ‘mad’ people or ‘survivors’ want a place in the exploration of the unknown”. For this reason, I have sought to defend a perspective on Mad/Disability Poetry as a category that is not centripetal, i.e., not aimed at a strategic and centralized unification of past and present poetic writing produced by authors with lived experience, but inclusive and centrifugal: that is, one that takes advantage of the heterogeneity of its forms to encourage innovative experimentation in the expression and presentation of experience.
57As the former director of Survivors’ Poetry, Peter Campbell (2022) states, the aesthetic value encountered in the “artistry” of madness has played a role in the modification of psychiatry much more in the sense of reform than revolution. It is difficult to say once and for all whether and how Mad/Disability Literature provides cultural resources for the social emancipation of consumers/ex-patients/survivors of psychiatry and for the experience of madness they carry in advocating for better services or alternative practices in the field of mental health, however, in order to do so, it may prove useful to extend the issue in a transnational sense, comparing different cultural contexts as well as different forms of writerly agency in the face of psychic suffering and psychiatric institutionalization.