The Politics of Madness in Francisco Matos Paoli's Prison Poem, Canto de la locura

The Politics of Madness in Francisco Matos Paoli’s Prison Poem, Canto de la locura wanda rivera-rivera university of massachusetts, boston  The Puerto Rico of the late 1940s was dominated by the redemptive and apocalyptic oratory of the nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos and by the liberationist poetry of Francisco Matos Paoli. These two voices spoke of their respective citizenships, one in the lettered city of educated men and one in the city of God. The poetry of Matos Paoli and the oratory of Albizu Campos elaborated discourses of resistance to the repressive ‘‘Ley de la Mordaza’’ [The Law of the Muzzle], a group of laws that silenced and penalized the nationalist insurgents in the Puerto Rico of the late ’40s. Their words and actions embraced a critical stance against the criminalization of nationalist insurgents, which, ultimately , led to their imprisonment, and diagnoses of insanity.1 Subsequent official pardons granted to Albizu Campos and Matos Paoli had the same common denominator: the diagnosis of insanity issued by psychiatrists in the service of the state.2 The experience of imprisonment suffered by Matos 1 The declaration of insanity was part of a strategy to justify Muñoz Marı́n’s pardon of Albizu Campos. The New York Times reported him mentally insane on September 25, 1953. On September 28, however, Puerto Rican psychiatrist Luis Manuel Morales declared Albizu ‘‘crazy,’’ and submitted the diagnosis of ‘‘state of paranoia’’ to the Attorney General, José Trı́s Monge (El Mundo, September 29, 1953). And finally, on October 1, 1953, El Imparcial announced Muñoz Marı́n’s pardon of Albizu Campos. On the other hand, it would have been more dangerous for the Puerto Rican government if its most valuable political prisoner had died in the midst of a controversy around his being tortured with radiation to the point of death. Documentation of Albizu’s legal case, the history of the failed attempts by the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies in Puerto Rico, The United States, and Latin America to secure his release, and Albizu’s prison correspondence denouncing the conditions of his imprisonment in Atlanta have been compiled and studied in depth by Carmelo Rosario Natal, Albizu Campos: preso en Atlanta, historia del reo 噛51298-A (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Producciones Históricas, 2001). The declassified FBI files of Albizu Campos and other Puerto Ricans are also available online (http://pr-secretfiles.net/), for educational purposes, under the management of Ramón Bosque-Pérez, a researcher for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, New York. 2 The politics of madness in Puerto Rico is a term used by Carlos Gil in ‘‘If the People of Puerto Rico Should Go Crazy: la polı́tica de la locura en la era Muñoz.’’ Gil examines the rhetoric used by the colonial government to promote the Constitution of Puerto Rico in 1952, the juridical-psychiatric apparatus that imposed the diagnosis of mental disorders among the population, and the neuroleptic revolution of 1952 and its specific applications of psychiatric hospitalization in the context of political modernity in Puerto Rico. That essay 198  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.2 (2008) Paoli was conditioned by an unbalanced exercise of power in which the colonial government of Puerto Rico, its selected group of psychiatrists and judges, and their political prisoners suffered a failure of communication, mutual incomprehension , and ontological insularity. The colonial government played the role of the dominant group because it imposed its ethico-legal precepts and, ultimately, negated Matos Paoli’s claim for human dignity. Matos Paoli embraced the political, spiritual, and human dimension of poetry in order to restore his freedom in the very society in which it was lost. I will examine how literature, and poetry specifically, responds to the threats of the Law of the Muzzle. I posit that Matos Paoli’s diagnosis of madness was the result of a willingness, on the part of the colonial power, to assign to a colonized subject , Matos Paoli, a precarious otherness that demanded the explanations and interpretations of the police force, judges, and behavioral scientists of the state. This study, in that sense, proposes a political reading of madness in...