Chapter 5: The Creative Rituals and the Self-Construction of the convicts

This chapter aims to discuss how creative rituals of torment take part in the self-development of the convicts. An information survey was conducted at the Association for the Protection and Assistance of the Convicted (APAC), a criminal system that dispenses with police presence. We started from the concept of dialogical multiplication (Guimarães, 2013, 2017) as a guide for the interpretative analysis of the content of people’s narratives. We took into consideration rituals suggested by convicts for the board of directors of this institution: electing a monthly date when they would be detained in the cells, in order to recall the previous experience in the conventional prison, as well as perform artistic-religious presentations in the local community. Between the two contexts, APAC and the conventional prison, chaotic zones of mutual affection are created. In this chaotic zone, there is a field of affective and cognitive exchanges, full of noise, but also full of communication possibilities. One can construct a vision of oneself from a disciplining mechanism that sustains torment as inherent to one’s life course, complying with a religious precept of penance. We observed that choosing a ritual that favors the retrieval of memories of experiences in the conventional prison can be an attempt to construct the subjectivity of the person, since these experiences allow a resignification of the lived facts related to pain and suffering. We understand these creative rituals in the APAC method refer to symbolic actions that integrate past and present in a process of creative transformation of the experience of pain and suffering lived in the prison system, as an attempt to maintain dignity and challenge barbarism by transforming it into a scenario loaded with subjective values. Choosing to temporarily experience a kind of ritualized barbarism promoted the integration of the tensions within the self, creating possibilities for redefining the lived facts related to the pain of the people involved.