Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism [1 ed.] 9781443862837, 9781443853996

Citation preview

Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

Edited by

Gina Ponce de León

Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism Edited by Gina Ponce de León This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Gina Ponce de León and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5399-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5399-6

To the women of the world, and especially to Agavni, Nana, Gilda, Rocío, Natalia, Lali, Juanita, and Argenis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ....................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................ 6 Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Feminism of the Twenty-First Century Gina Ponce de León I: Breaking Gender and Sexual Conceptions ........................................ 6 II: The New Meaning of Madness ...................................................... 10 III: Feminist Crime Fiction and Motherhood ...................................... 13 IV: Feminist Discourse and Postcolonialism ...................................... 16 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 22 Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús I: The Function of Symbolic Covers as a Mirror Reflection of Intra-historia and Captivity ...................................................... 23 II: The Concept of Blackness in Light of the Intra-historia of the Protagonists and Poetic Voices ........................................... 25 Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 38 Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness in Latin American Feminine Literature Elvira Sánchez-Blake I: The Female Malady ......................................................................... 39 II: Madness and Literature in Latin America ...................................... 42 III: See the World through My Lens ................................................... 44 IV: A Poetic of Madness ..................................................................... 48

viii

Table of Contents

Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 53 Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Claudia Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves I: Feminine Crime Fiction ................................................................... 55 II: The Hispanic Sleuth ....................................................................... 58 III: Tuya .............................................................................................. 62 IV: Elena sabe .................................................................................... 69 Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 75 Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century: Transgression without Limits Gina Ponce de León I: Female Representation in Contemporary Narrative ........................ 76 II: Gender: A Social Programing ........................................................ 86 Conclusion ................................................................................................ 96 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 100 Contributors ............................................................................................ 106 Index ....................................................................................................... 108

PREFACE Women writers have been a presence in the Latin American literary tradition since the Colonial period and the genius of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In the nineteenth century, women authors of foundational fictions— novelists such as the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Soledad Acosta de Samper of Colombia, and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner—continued this tradition. In the early twentieth century, Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean Maria Luisa Bombal, and the Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra, among several others, continued the tradition of prominent women's writing in Latin America. Until the 1950s, most of these women writers were relatively ignored in the face of the supposedly canonical writers of the time, i.e. Rómulo Gallegos, Ricardo Güiraldes, and José Eustacio Rivera. In the 1960s, with the Cuban Revolution, the Boom of the Latin American Novel, and the rise of Latin Americanism as an academic discipline, what was once considered the traditional canon of Latin American literature has been vastly expanded. Feminist scholars, such as Jean Franco, Sara Castro-Klarén, Lucía GuerraCunningham and David William Foster, have brought to the fore Latin American women writers, as well as issues of gender in general. In the 1980s, women writers in Latin America, headed by the theoretically-driven postmodern feminist texts of the likes of Diamela Eltit, Sylvia Molloy and Helena Parente Cunha, were among the most prominent writers. The commercially-driven popular success of Isabel Allende, Ángeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel contributed to the aura of women's writing in this period. Thus, after the 1960s Boom and the 1970s Postboom came a second, now feminine, Boom of Latin American writing. It is in this context, after centuries of being ignored, and then assuming their respective voices in recent decades, that this important new volume appears. In it, Gina Ponce de León serves as editor and contributor for a volume containing insightful essays by Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús, Elvira Sánchez Blake, and Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves. These scholars maintain that twentieth century feminism was embedded in patriarchal ideology. In contrast, they argue that twenty-first century narratives in Latin America offer a new representation of women with innovative literary approaches. These innovative new texts are las Negras (2011) and Saeta, the Poems

x

Preface

(2011) by Puerto Rican Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Delirio (2004) by Colombian Laura Restrepo, Nadie me vera llorar (1999) by Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, Tuya (2005) and Elena sabe (2007) by Argentinian Claudia Piñeiro, El eco de las mentiras (2010) by Colombian Lucía Cristina Ardila, and Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (2009) by Colombian Margarita García Robayo. This book offers illuminating new readings of some of the most interesting and provocative women novelists of the twenty-first century. Raymond L. Williams University of California, Riverside

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With many thanks to the ones who traveled with me on this ideological journey, helping me (in different ways) in the assembly of this final product: Professor Carlos Hugo Zorrilla, Adam Schrag, and Fran Martens Friesen; the contributors to this book; Peter Simon for correcting the text; and last, but not least, Fresno Pacific University for giving me the time to achieve my objectives. Thank you all!

INTRODUCTION Latin American postfeminist narrative fiction of the twenty-first century explores transgression, madness and race, as well as the ways these ideas delineate boundaries, thus interrogating the notion of feminism. Latin American postfeminist narrative stresses interaction with the reader who possesses a “globalized” mind, which in turn is directly connected to a cultural, historical and political interpretation of the world. As Homi K. Bhabha affirms in the book The Location of Culture: Our existence today is marked by tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism … (1).

Bhabha’s statements allow us to talk about postmodern feminism in Latin America in the context of the postcolonial era. As Leela Gandhi asserts in her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction: Women have suffered a “double colonization”; the “third world woman” is a forgotten casualty of the imperial ideology, and native and foreign patriarchies (83).

Essayists in this book agree that Latin American postfeminist representations are exploring new gender directions within the frame of a new postfeminist discourse. This is evident in the work of twenty-first century Latin American female writers. Women in Latin America have not achieved the goals of the feminist movement, or have done so to a lesser degree, compared with women in western culture. Moreover, women’s discourses for equal rights recognition by the dominant male culture have largely been ignored. This book posits that the feminist movement of the twentieth century has failed in its basic objectives (equal opportunities regardless of race and gender), and is moving in new and unexpected directions. Some feminist representations of the first years of the twenty-first century prove it. The purpose of this volume is therefore to showcase the interrogations and new manifestations of female representation in Latin American literature.

2

Introduction

The new boundaries that women have transgressed are not coincidental; these directions belong to a newer era and especially, in Latin America, to Postcolonialism. It is relevant to emphasize that these representations are within the frameworks of this specific era because these contexts have created opportunities for minorities and marginalized groups to establish and express their sociopolitical struggles. Postcolonial dynamics are also part of a globalized world in which the possibility of learning and comparing regional ideologies nurtures the pursuit of individual objectives. Something that we clearly realize in the globalized world is that women have different histories, backgrounds, and objectives in their struggles, and different approaches to “patriarchy”. Nevertheless, regardless of what women’s objectives are, there is a common history that unifies them: patriarchy has always been present, in different manifestations, and with very different consequences. In order to understand the postfeminist narrative in contemporary Latin America, it is necessary to go back in history and outline the feminist movement of the twentieth century. As Elaine Showalter asserts in her edited book The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory: Since the late 1960s when feminist criticism developed as part of the international women’s movement, the assumptions of literary study have been profoundly altered (3).

Latin American feminism has followed the American and European feminist models, as well as their theoretical approaches. The Latin American feminism of the twentieth century is mainly based in the American and European ideologies which do not apply to Latin American culture. The American and European feminist theories are relative newcomers to the feminist movements. As is stated by Susan Sheridan in her chapter entitled “Feminist Knowledge, Women’s Liberation, and Women’s Studies”, in Sneja Gunew’s Feminist Knowledge: “Women’s Studies state that a major strategy for change has come out of the contemporary women’s movement in the industrialized west” (36). It is obvious, when considering women in Latin America, that the feminist movements of the west are not fulfilling the needs of the women of, what is called, the third world. Sheridan continues: … the movement has changed and diversified enormously since its beginnings in the late sixties, but that its lines of continuity are real and

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

3

demonstrable, and its tasks are still far from accomplished—it is no mere passing fashion (37).

Perhaps the feminist movement and its theoretical approaches have been constructed by ideologies that belong to another world politically, socially and historically different from that of Latin American women; consequently, there are issues to take into consideration when we study the twenty-first century Latin American narrative and postmodern feminism. It is relevant to recognize that Latin American feminism of the twentieth century was embedded in a patriarchal ideology. What we observe in the new representation of women in the narrative of this new century is a series of innovative approaches towards their representation and roles in the postmodern and postcolonial era. The previous statements comprise the thesis of this book. Our objective is to propose a framework toward the understanding of the Latin American Feminism in the twenty-first century: its ideology, struggles and definition. As an editor and contributor to this book, I present a chapter related specifically to the explanation of our own ideological understanding of these theoretical approaches. Each contributor uses a specific theory which can be read separately from the chapters in which the theoretical approaches are used to analyze the literary selections. Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús’ chapter focuses on the poetry and narrative work of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. The author has been considered one of the most important female writers in Puerto Rican contemporary literature. During her brief but poignant creative career, Arroyo Pizarro has pursued different and diverse thematic directions. In her first literary work, Origami de letras, she explored different topics related to historical passages and different world scenarios. During this period, she also wrote the historical novel, Los documentados, in which she explored the Caribbean illegal migration to Puerto Rico and other islands. In this novel she studied marginal discourses of migration within different historical and cultural angles. A second stage was devoted to the introduction of queer topics tied to historical and social themes. In this period she wrote Ojos de luna and different stories and poems dealing with historical and gender themes. In her third stage, the author has written openly about queer themes, mostly in her poetry and memoirs. Recently, Arroyo Pizarro has published a series of books dealing directly with the topics of Caribbean (African) female slaves. Hidalgo de Jesús in her chapter utilizes different historical and cultural discourses, including but not limited to, the concepts of intra-historia, “sucking salt”, female slavery, and women’s discourse to analyze las Negras (Black Females) and Saeta, the Poems.

4

Introduction

Elvira Sánchez-Blake’s chapter focuses on how madness and literature are intrinsically conjoined topics defined by that blurred line between genius and insanity. The figure of the “madman” or the insane has become a staple symbol, analogy and parable to signify a world in crisis, and at times, the mirror and catalyst of the critical consciousness of humankind. Sánchez-Blake explores the concepts of madness and literature in two contemporary Latin American novels from a woman’s point of view; Delirio (Delirium) by Colombian, Laura Restrepo, and Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry) by Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza. These writers are part of the postmodern movement that perceives reality through a different prism. Gaze and vision are some of the recurrent motifs in these novels, as if there was a particular connection between sight and madness, or as if madness would be the result of grasping reality from a different perspective. Sánchez-Blake studies the correlation between gaze, madness and literature and its relevance in the definition of boundaries between history and micro-history, the inside and the outside, reality and hyperreality and how they are located at the borderline of reason and unreason. Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves’s chapter focuses on the role of motherhood in the new postmodern female criminal novel. She analyzes the subversion of the genre in Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro, and explores the mother-sleuth main character in two of her novels, Tuya (All Yours) and Elena sabe (Elena Knows). For the theories surrounding the criminal novel she follows Leo Horsley’s work Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, exploring the history of the detective fiction written by women throughout the ages. For the feminist aspects of motherhood she bases her analyses on the psychoanalytic theories explored by Julia Kristeva. Interestingly, Kristeva concatenates the maternal role with the “abject” (what is horrible, perverse or repulsive). Moreover, Piñeiro’s mothers, while being in appearance traditional mothers, are in truth the agents of family crisis and catalysts to the destruction of their families and madness. Gina Ponce de León’s chapter centers on how the representation of women has taken an unexpected path in the contemporary Colombian novel. Rising from the failure of the feminist movement, women have surpassed the “victim” role to create their new world of resistance. This analysis argues that the discourse of feminist struggle has taken individual paths marked by personal histories, environmental issues, and the daily culture of oppression. This representation is a layout of the ordinary; the characters are placed into limits considered borderlines. These revealing borderlines, which include suicide, auto-flagellation and captivity, are issues that display the extremes of an unknown frontier for the women in our times. The specifically analyzed novels are: El eco de las mentiras

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

5

(The Echo of Lies) by Lucía Cristina Ardila, and Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (There Are Things That a Women Can’t Do Barefoot) by Margarita García Robayo.

CHAPTER ONE THEORETICAL APPROACHES: UNDERSTANDING FEMINISM OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GINA PONCE DE LEÓN FRESNO PACIFIC UNIVERSITY

As editor of the present book, I deem it necessary to first expose the literary theoretical approaches that guide the following chapters so as to be more clear and precise on the framework of the specific analyses therein. In this context, theory is an ideological posture that we adjust to our specific objectives. Owing to the topic we are dealing with, it may be controversial to use theoretical approaches that are born in a non-Latin American context toward the understanding and elaboration of feminism of the twenty-first century in Latin America. Nevertheless, the common ground of theory is a beginning to a more substantial dialogue which will permit us to establish a feminist representation that can be understood in the general context of feminist studies.

I: Breaking Gender and Sexual Conceptions In her chapter “Images of Afro-Caribbean Women Slaves in Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s literary work,” Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús studies the history of Spanish Caribbean female slaves, and how it is depicted in the works of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. Hidalgo de Jesús also questions how female slavery issues have been neglected for many years by historians and writers in the Caribbean. According to Hidalgo de Jesús, few studies or literatures have addressed themes that were deeply embedded in the life struggles of female slaves in the Spanish Caribbean. To establish the theoretical framework of her study, Hidalgo de Jesús uses the critical and theoretical works of Patricia D. Fox, Meredith M. Gasby, Genise Vertus,

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

7

Marie Ramos Rosado, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Suzanne Bost, Lesley Feracho, Laura J. Beard, and Myriam Yvonne Jehenson. Hidalgo de Jesús begins her analysis with a discussion of the concept of “blackness” in Arroyo Pizarro’s writings, and describes these writings as the main source for the study of identity in contemporary Caribbean literature. She contextualizes her discourse within the theoretical frame of Patricia D. Fox’s notion of blackness. Her book Being and Blackness in Latin America, provides an interesting argument on how the understanding and predictions of “conventional ends” in narrative, shape the specific context for literature dealing with blackness (4). In order to define it, she proposes a re-shaping of the functions of the experience of blackness, including identity, culture, and expression (9). Hence, these ideas of this world and behaviors have molded the images of slaves in the works of Arroyo Pizarro. Likewise, her portrayals of female slaves concur with those of Meredith M. Gasby, for whom the Caribbean holds “shared multilayered histories of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism of people of color in the West” (7). The majority of the Caribbean people have come to terms with the concept of blackness by accepting their black African roots and identity as part of their cultural migratory survival process. Gasby’s exposition on cultural and racial distinctiveness leans on the framework for discussion of Caribbean women’s migration found in the work of Arroyo Pizarro. In her narrative and poetry, the migratory journey of the female slave began in remote African villages when they were kidnaped for the purpose of being sold as slaves by other tribes. This reference comes into play while the new cultural and feeding habits of the slave are described in Arroyo Pizarro’s work. In that sense, the author expands the use of the term “sucking salt” proposed by Gasby, and its implication in the life of female slaves and of their predecessors. Gasby offers several cultural explanations on the cultural development of the term and its connection with survival techniques developed by female slaves during the “Middle Passage”, which is an important poetic and narrative element in Arroyo Pizarro’s work. The idea of a cultural migratory identity of displacement is also discussed by Genise Vertus in her essay “An Even Stronger Woman: The Enslaved Black Caribbean Woman”. She provides an insightful argument in regards to the idea that “enslaved women took part in every important fight against slavery. Slave women courageously fought against the restrictive bond of slavery. However, they did so in their own distinctive ways” (Vertus). In the case of the Spanish Caribbean, there are not concise data or studies emphasizing the gender, sex life and role of female slaves

8

Chapter One

in slavery societies. More to the point, Arroyo Pizarro not only emphasizes the roles of female slaves in the characterization of their characters and poetic voices, but also recognizes the lack of studies on the theme. Other historical facts related to the role of the female slave in the Puerto Rican slavery society are studied by Marie Ramos Rosado in her book La mujer negra en la literatura puertorriqueña (Black Women in Puerto Rican Literature). Ramos Rosado identifies several problems related to the study of Puerto Rican black women. Indeed, she mentions that: Se repite otro patrón muy común en nuestra literatura, la presentación estereotipada de negras como criadas y esclavas. Además las mujeres negras son reducidas al nivel de objeto sexual al cumplir el papel de criada sexual (Ramos Rosado 10). [Another common pattern is repeated in our literature, the presence of stereotyped black females, like servants and slaves. And black women are additionally reduced to the level of sexual objects when they become sexual servants (Ramos Rosado1).]

Based on her research, Ramos Rosado contends that only a few times in Puerto Rican literature are black women presented as main characters. Not surprisingly, Arroyo Pizarro places female slaves as main characters in her books. Drawing upon the descriptions of the female slave characters, she emphasizes the themes of the exploited and oppressed servant, slave, lover, mistress, prostitute and contextualizes it in a different literary scenario. Arroyo Pizarro’s creative production resonates with those of Ramos Rosado and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Concurring with Ramos Rosado’s postures, Terborg-Penn explores the fact that “women [slaves] in many ways were exploited and denigrated through rape and impregnation by slave owners” (11). Arroyo Pizarro agrees on this subject with Ramos Rosado and Terborg-Penn in exploring, in her books, the theme of exploitation of female slaves. She also argues that identity has had an important role in the development of the female mestizo and mulatto Caribbean culture. Hidalgo de Jesús brings to her thematic strand one of the most important issues of our study: the postmodern Latin American representation of women in Latin American narrative. Consequently, the postcolonial themes are giving us the chance to study and understand 1

Translation by Amarillis Hidalgo de Jesús.

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

9

Arroyo Pizarro’s goal in writing on female slaves’ discourses to break with the gender and sexual conception of female Caribbean/Puerto Rican slaves. This is precisely our topic within the feminist narrative of the postmodern times and the postcolonial era. According to Hidalgo de Jesús, the constant presence of the colonizer discourse in Latin American history has been deeply rooted in the colonized mentality of the people. Also, the colonization process of the Caribbean islands created a misconception of race in the region. Suzanne Bost sees this as: … racial and racist hierarchies [that] dominate Caribbean history, the uncertainty of racial differentiation based on skin color alone has created a social structure in which other characteristics such as class, language, cultural practices, and beliefs have come to signify race as much as color (90).

In the broader context of history, we must add displacement of cultural and linguistic discourses of the slave because of different languages and ethnic backgrounds. Posited in these terms, discourses of female slaves have been more controversial and socially hidden than those of their male counterparts. Female slaves were constantly sexually assaulted, physically and mentally abused, and even murdered by their masters. This forced them to create cultural and religious codes in order to be able to communicate with each other, and also to rebel against the patriarchal system which controlled their bodies and, sometimes, their mind’s strengths. In spite of daily confrontations with possibilities of cultural and linguistic disruptions of their own cultural legacy and life, the environment surrounding the female slaves definitely transformed their enslaved world. All that has been mentioned until now has been applied by Arroyo Pizarro to the development of the characterizations of her protagonists. The theoretical presentation of Hidalgo de Jesús introduces several postulates of asserting political, racial, and rebellious discourses. These discourses bring us to the theme of survival techniques developed by Caribbean female slaves in dealing with their masters’ oppression. According to Hidalgo de Jesús’ analysis, it is very important to pay close attention to the challenging cultural discourses proposed by Arroyo Pizarro within the voices of her characters or poetic voices, which she aims to analyze in her literature. In that light, Lesley Feracho’s arguments in Race, Hybrid Discourses, and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity redefine the roles of historical discourses in search of their identity. Now and again, Feracho touches the themes of historical forces, nationality, politics, and gender applied to texts dealing with confrontations of

10

Chapter One

socialization among cultures and the autobiographical process of searching to reconstruct the positioning of the self in a historical context. Attesting to the importance of class, race and gender, Myriam Yvonne Jehenson, in Latin American Women Writers, clearly defines different types of female discourses in Latin America, drawing upon her theories: “Women were essential to the development of the new culture in the centuries that witnessed the conquest of Latin America” (Jehenson 1). Not unexpectedly, the treatment of female slaves was harsher than the treatment of female indigenous people. They were also sexually exploited as an “everyday occurrence” (2). Based on those types of historical discourses, Laura J. Beard in Acts of Narrative Resistance talks about the histories of families “as the history of their nations,” (71) just as Jehenson did. She also connects those histories with autobiographical discourses, and also ties them to the development of human identity. Whatever the historical and literary point is for Arroyo Pizarro to write on women slaves’ discourses in Saeta (Arrow) and las Negras (The Black Women), there is no doubt that she is breaking with the gender and sexual conception of Caribbean/Puerto Rican female slaves. The representation of the female slave identity in her work also explains why her narrative and poetry queer themes interrelate with historical facts that enhance, and at the same time point out, the life of hardship of Caribbean slaves and their hidden sexual desires for the other and/or same sex. Hidalgo de Jesús’ purpose is clearly to challenge different cultural perspectives developed around the passive image of female Caribbean/Puerto Rican slaves. Her theoretical approach focuses on gender, history, and culture. In her analysis she integrates several theoretical components related to subversive, cultural and gender fragmentation discourses.

II: The New Meaning of Madness Elvira Sánchez-Blake’s chapter studies two postmodern Latin American novels. The first is Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), by Cristina Rivera Garza, a member of the new generation of Mexican writers, and the second, Delirio (Delirium), by Laura Restrepo. The two novels are considered postmodern narratives dealing with women’s roles in society as well as socio-historical-political issues. Therefore, women’s madness and literature will be addressed in the context of the postmodern movement that characterized the late twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century.

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

11

According to Sánchez-Blake, the writers use madness to raise critical awareness on social and political issues affecting regions in Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century. She compares, contrasts and analyzes insanity as a literary device as it corresponds to postmodern and feminist critical theories. Specifically, she explores how figures of the mad and mentally disturbed have been tools to subvert feminine marginalization and to reflect changes in women’s positioning, both at the individual and collective level. Cristina Rivera Garza, a member of the new generation of Mexican writers, proposes an alternative view of madness in Nadie me verá llorar. Sánchez-Blake analyzes how the author uses the “asylum” to reveal another side of Mexican history at the turn of the twentieth century. Parody, pastiche and fragmentation presented through alternate narrative techniques allow the reader to see into the complex dimensions of the socalled “mad,” “criminal” and “excluded” in contemporary Latin America. In Delirio, Laura Restrepo portrays a woman truly afflicted by mental illness whose power of second sight allows allegorical representations of Colombia’s multiple social, political and turbulent realities. Delirium depicts the mental collapse of the main character, Agustina, triggered by the crisis of values of a country under siege by political violence, corruption, chaos and falsehoods at individual and collective levels. Restrepo delivers a message that blurs the fine line of reason and unreason. The pathway to survive the horror and the chaos of the daily existence in this country is through what can be called the stage of hyperreality. Sánchez-Blake explores the relationship of women and madness, starting with Michel Foucault’s seminal work, History of Madness, which provides three essential arguments for this analysis. First, madness is seen as a human experience that builds on the consciousness of humankind. Second, madness is related to the emphasis on gaze, which according to Foucault, allows the insane to see what is concealed in the eyes of the “sane”. This resource opens the vast spectrum between vision and blindness, a recurrent literary theme of the madness motif. A third consideration is the blurry line between reason and unreason, an interrogation constantly present throughout the analysis of the texts selected for this chapter. The connection between women and madness is established through key feminist theories. Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady establishes a fundamental alliance between women and madness:

12

Chapter One … because women are situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind (3-4).

Showalter explores different theories of madness to conclude that changes in cultural fashion, psychiatric theory, and public policy have not transformed the imbalance of gender and power that has kept madness to a female malady. She contends that psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on penis envy as the main determinant of female psychosexual development, influenced the view of women’s fragile mind and predisposition to mental disturbances. R.D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry movement in the sixties, which protested against shock treatment, and promised to analyze women’s situation in the family and the society, not only failed in its theoretical effort, but may be the most sexist of all in its practice. Showalter’s debate has been central to understanding and advancing the exploration of women’s representation of insanity as a subversive feminist symbol and strategy. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, consider the literary text as the symbolic representation of the female author’s anger against the rigidity of patriarchal tradition. For them, madness was the price women artists had to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a male-dominated culture (81). They depart from the symbolic representation of the pen as a male tool, and therefore as inappropriate and alien to women. Women who attempt the pen cross boundaries dictated by nature. In this sense, all activities associated with writing, reading and thinking are not only alien but also inimical to “female” characteristics (8). Their analysis of Victorian literary texts, based on the complex social prescriptions causing women to become ill, will be central to this chapter. Sánchez-Blake also explores the correlation that exists between the witch and the hysteric according to Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément in The Newly Born Woman. The contribution of these authors to the debate on feminism uncovered what was hidden under repressed structures of language and society situating women in a marginal position of silence and exclusion. Cixous’s call for a woman “writing her body” has generated a revolution in feminism and female agency that has permeated and influenced women's literature in all hemispheres. Finally, Sánchez-Blake focuses on theoretical approaches related to the surge of postmodernism in Latin America: she mentions how Nelly Richard analyzes the crossovers between postmodernism and feminism. These crossovers are relevant for establishing the Latin American feminism of the twenty-first century. The narratives selected for this

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

13

chapter have been widely analyzed with regard to the idea of madness and literature from multiple perspectives by many Latin American specialists. Although Sánchez-Blake considers all these approaches, she is aware of the danger of falling into essentialisms such as the clinicalpsychoanalytical debates, or about categorizations and definitions of the mentally ill. Thus, her discussion departs from the cultural-anthropological connections of madness, society and representation in literature.

III: Feminist Crime Fiction and Motherhood In her chapter, Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves, using a dialogic approach, summarizes the beginnings of the detective novel and consequently the variations of the genre including the hard-boiled detective novel. Her study focuses on an Argentinean writer of crime fiction, Claudia Piñeiro and her unconventional female sleuths. As a wide theoretical background, she uses Leo Horsley’s study, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, because of its vast research of main and secondary sources, clarity, objectivity and the inclusion of obscure and well-known crime fiction such as the black and feminine detective narratives. Dávila Gonçalves’s main goal is to analyze the detective genre in Piñeiro’s work, focusing especially on an uncommon characteristic in her novels when compared to the typical female sleuth: the investigator as a mother. Although the element of motherhood in crime fiction is not unique to Piñeiro (Horsley explains that it is also characteristic of black feminine detective fiction), it is a first in Latin American female detective literature. To encompass the theoretical setting of her study, Dávila Gonçalves includes the critical psychoanalytic analysis made by Julia Kristeva in several of her essays such as “Women’s Time”, “Stabat Mater”, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident”, and her text, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. She believes Kristeva’s ideas convey an uncannily true background to Piñeiro’s novels because they present motherhood as viscerally tied to the “abject”—the horrible—one of the theorist’s main propositions. Dávila Gonçalves introduces her topic by giving a brief historical background to the classic detective novel and underscoring the work of the first female sleuth, Agatha Christie’s spinster investigator Miss Jane Marple. At the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of the detective novel, the investigator analyzed crimes using purely deductive reasoning; he or she followed clues, interviewed people and, at the end, the resolution of the crime or the enigma was always exposed. This changed later with the hard-boiled fiction in which the characters lived in cities, and the

14

Chapter One

detective, “a lone wolf”, was up against a corrupt system that tried to destroy him, therefore the need of guns and other “manly” help. Instead of being an intellectual type, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the hard-boiled detective was both forceful and vulnerable physically and emotionally, even sometimes falling in love with a femme fatale. Dávila Gonçalves points out there have been several female sleuths since Christie’s time, and she recognizes many of them in her study, acknowledging not only the diverse representation of women and nationalities but also the increase of this type of literature and the acceptance it has popularly received nowadays. She summarizes Horsley’s study of the transitions of detective female fiction from the 1960s onward, from a female detective that had to resist stereotypes, to the “chick dick” (a version of the hard-boiled male investigator) who had to be like a man to be respected, especially in the police force. According to Horsley, the female contemporary perspective in this type of narrative has “regendered” detective fiction and its sub-genres such as the police procedural, the thriller and the noir. It also rewrites the genre when it highlights the victim’s point of view and not only that of the sleuth’s. The new roles women have gained since the end of the twentieth century have helped mold a new female crime fiction. The interesting aspect for Dávila Gonçalves is that many of the feminine sleuths are single women, implicitly establishing, consciously or not, that a mother could not be a true detective owing to her family role. This stereotype is beginning to change among traditionally marginalized or underrepresented groups. Black and Hispanic women are gaining a voice in contemporary detective fiction and are modifying and transforming the genre to include renovated perspectives, contexts and concepts. Dávila Gonçalves explains how contemporary feminist crime fiction not only challenges the literary genre but also female stereotypes. She follows Horsley in his appreciation that the genre is transgressive because it shows how social and moral contexts change in time and how those changes are reflected in literature and that, therefore, the genre is continually being subverted. She asserts that, in recent times, while female writers revisit the detective fiction genre, they acknowledge present-day real situations, therefore writing a new female body. Contemporary narratives present many ambiguities due to unsolved crimes, show the citizens’ loss of empowerment, and highlight violence through the grotesque and the abject. Dávila Gonçalves comments that, during the eighties, Spain was in the vanguard of female crime fiction, publishing several serial novels with

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

15

female sleuth protagonists. For example, two writers, Catalan MariaAntònia Oliver and Alicia Giménez Bartlett, created detectives Liòna Giui and police officer Petra Delicado respectively. She also mentions others like Chicana writer Lucha Corpi and her detective Gloria Damasco, and Cuban-American, Carolina García Aguilera, and her private eye Lupe Solano. Interestingly, according to Dávila Gonçalves, in Latin American detective fiction there are more amateur sleuths, as in the Golden Age of the detective novel, than professional detectives. She theorizes that, while maintaining the enigma of the typical detective story, these novels do not follow the perceived “formula” of the genre so as to open more narrative possibilities and consequently be considered more “literary”, and therefore, more serious. This is an area of study that Gonçalves has been developing and still has multiple possibilities for future research. In her study she takes into account Horsley’s main four characteristics of the contemporary feminist crime fiction, which are the community, empathy with the victim, open-ended plots, and a strong female voice as the narrator or as the central character. She then proceeds to analyze two novels by contemporary Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro. Among Piñeiro’s literary production there are a series of critically acclaimed and original detective novels that transform the genre in subtle ways. Piñeiro starts with a subversion of the investigative role that is not common either in the male or the female genre: the role of a mother as sleuth. In two of her novels, Tuya (All Yours) and Elena sabe (Elena Knows), the mother is the axis of unraveling the truth of the narrative enigma. Gonçalves proposes that in these novels Piñeiro not only challenges the maleness of crime fiction, as other female authors do as well, but more interestingly the meanings of motherhood. The sleuths/mothers destabilize their genderimposed roles. She states that these are mothers full of paradoxes and contradictions because they have agency and are transgressors; they are both heroes and victims. For the representations of motherhood, Gonçalves uses the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach delineated principally by Julia Kristeva in the texts mentioned above. For analyses of the novels, she reviews Kristeva’s studies on the intrinsic desire of motherhood, the dark criminal side of the liberated woman, the abject and crises in families, the process of separation from the mother (the Lacanian symbolic order), and the feeling of solitude and exile from women’s own bodies, bringing melancholy and depression. Although the two novels are considered crime fiction because in both there are murders and two main characters that search for the truth of those crimes, the narrative language is different. While the central murder and the family crisis in Tuya are depicted ironically, Elena sabe is an

16

Chapter One

introspective piece with philosophical undertones. Nevertheless, both texts maintain one of the characteristics intrinsic in the hard-boiled detective fiction: social critique. In Tuya it becomes clear as the narration continues that the mother is part of the reason for the crisis in her own family, owing to her obsession with maintaining the appearance of a perfect household, even though her husband is unfaithful. Her increasingly eccentric behavior serves to expose the hypocrisy and debasement of the white, upper-middle class of Argentina. She transforms herself from an astute mother to a woman bent on saving herself at all costs. In Elena sabe, the author criticizes the exorbitant cost of medical expenses and society’s blind eye toward the elderly while unveiling the deep sadness of a mother searching for the assassin of her daughter. In the end, sickly Elena finds a truth that has been self-evident. In this novel, old age and sickness are metaphors for cruelty and abandonment, realities both Elena and the reader must face. The portrayal of postmodern and postfeminist female characters in crime fiction where ambiguity colors motivations, what is forgotten, and the truth, is well analyzed by Dávila Gonçalves. This summary of the main theoretical ideas underlined in her study serves as an introduction to her chapter.

IV: Feminist Discourse and Postcolonialism Postcolonialism embraces the necessary critical approaches that agree with the ideological interpretation of postmodern Latin American feminism today. As Michael Chapman states in his article “Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn”: … postcolonialism has come to describe heterogeneous, though linked, groupings of critical enterprises: a critique of Western totalizing narratives; a revision of the Marxian class project; utilization of both post-structural enquiry (the displaced linguistic subject) and postmodern pursuit (skepticism of the truth claims of Cartesian individualism); a marker of voices of pronouncement by non-resident, ‘Third-World’ intellectual cadres in ‘First World’ universities (7).

Nothing is more appropriate to defining postcolonial theory than the term “heterogeneous”, which is irrevocably linked to its description. In this critical framework this term defines the way feminist representation is taking shape in twenty-first century Latin American narrative. This theory can be used toward the portrayal of women’s struggles to find ways to survive the subordination under a patriarchal establishment. Chapman’s statement about the postmodern pursuit is one of the main issues of the

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

17

contemporary Colombian feminist narrative, specifically, the two novels analyzed in the chapter: El eco de las mentiras (The Echo of Lies) by Lucía Cristina Ardila, and Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (There are Things that a Women Can’t Do Barefoot) by Margarita García Robayo. Chapman’s “Third World” groups can be used to describe Latin American contemporary feminist narrative fiction, which is not only embedded in “Third World” categorization, but also by the definition of gender. Continuing with Chapman, another unavoidable idea to take into consideration when trying to establish an ideological approach to postcolonialism is the following: In its discursive categorizations—its Foucauldian acts of enunciation by which the postcolonial formulates the condition of its own possibility (see Foucault 1970)—postcolonial theory predominates as sense-maker, or event maker, over and above the experiential terrain to which its theory directs its diagnostic or emblematic or, too often, its obscurantist pronunciations (8).

This theoretical approach does not have an explicit definition of its exegesis as stated in the previous paragraph; nevertheless, it is precisely for that reason that this theory can be useful in describing how the subordinated groups are elaborating their own individual ways of representation. It is relevant to establish the context in which the feminist Latin American narrative of the twenty-first century appears. There is a need to clarify that its way of representation is due to its specific historical context. The postcolonial times are characterized by open expressions and the ideological struggles of minority groups oppressed by the dominant power. It is easy to guess that the ideologies that reacted against the oppression developed strength in their ideological representation during the postcolonial era. What makes possible today the recognition of marginalized and minority groups is cultural globalization. On the one hand, the media serves to extend the power of the dominant cultures, but on the other it also serves to differentiate and compare the factions that make up our society in the world. Minorities have sought their specificity and are in need of expressing their disagreement with the cultural and sociopolitical environment. Minority groups have finally found the time to raise their issues, and are in need of exposing their specific battles because the globalized media constantly displays what is happening in the world in which women live, and within which they must define themselves.

18

Chapter One

In Colombia, discrimination against minority groups has been disguised by the segregation manipulated by economic power, which leads to classism by exclusion. Social classes are then determined by economic power; what prevails in Colombian society in overcoming the social discrimination is the level of education and the economic capacity of its members. Logically the economic power and the level of education are governed by the social class to which people belong. The process of promotion in the social class becomes a “vicious cycle”. The ability to ascend in the social level has made minority groups raise objectives that are not specifically established by race or culture, but individual goals that are determined by the need to ascend in the social pyramid. We can affirm that the Colombian feminist narratives of the twenty-first century have developed from an individual and fragmentary struggle which is due to the historical context of postcolonialism and postmodernism. Novels in this chapter represent feminist characters that express an ideology against what has been called “europeizante” (Europeanization), a term used by José Antonio Figueroa in his dissertation entitled “El realismo mágico, vallenato y violencia política en el Caribe colombiano” (“Magic Realism, ‘Vallenato’ and Political Violence in the Colombian Caribbean”). The characters are shaped in the search of affirmation of an identity that has been denied by the dominant power that surrounds them. It is in a way an act of liberation of the marginal and marginalized culture of women embedded in the Europeanizing tradition that dominates from the colonial period to the present. Postcolonial times in Latin America, specifically in Colombia, are characterized by the acceptance of an identity formed by diverse races and cultures. In Latin America, cultures have gone through stages in which the search for identity was the main objective. An identity based on the mixture of races and cultures marks a fundamental difference from other colonized countries. We can say that this search for identity was expressed in the Latin American narrative during the twentieth century. What we find today is an identity charged with all its advantages and disadvantages and, at the same time, with an awareness of the European cultural heritage. This awareness of the cultural Europeanization allows women to articulate in the feminist narrative some issues of representation against the dominant power that is based on the cultural heritage that took shape in colonial times. The contemporary narrative allows one to appreciate new lines that respond to the postmodern era in which deconstruction and skepticism respond to the ideology of postcolonial times. For this reason it can be stated that the Colombian feminist narrative presents a thematic concern

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

19

that has to do with assuming a defined and specific identity in opposition to the traditional feminist movement and the Europeanized culture. Figueroa also uses the term, “humanismo periférico” (Peripheral Humanism) in his study (37, 38, 39). This term is relevant to understanding this chapter proposal. He explains: Algunas de las contribuciones postcoloniales permiten pensar en lo que se puede llamar un humanismo periférico. Igualmente, permiten discutir las afirmaciones recurrentes de que la modernidad es un modo particular de Europa que se impuso al mundo y que a las periferias les corresponde volver a su propia tradición como mecanismo de resistencia ante la avanzada colonialista de una modernidad que se considera exógena (Figueroa 38). [Some postcolonial contributions lead us to think in what can be called peripheral humanism. In the same way they lead us to discuss the recurrent asseverations about modernity as a particular European way that was imposed on the world and it is up to the peripheral societies to go back to their own traditions as a mechanism of resistance to the colonial imperialism of an outside modernity (Figueroa 38).]2

Peripheral humanism can be taken as the recognition of an “Europeanization” era, as awareness that this is based on the legacy of the colonial heritage that traditionally has repressed and undermined the idea of liberation and the quest for recognition. Continuing with the issues raised by Figueroa: Ciertas contribuciones postcoloniales permiten más bien indagar procesos en los cuales importantes estamentos sociales de las periferias claman por la modernidad a partir del ejercicio de la crítica a sus propias tradiciones culturales. Estos enfoques permiten reconocer el derecho al disenso y a la crítica cultural como una herencia humanista que se construye simultáneamente en el centro y la periferia de la modernidad. Algunos autores postcoloniales validan la centralidad de la crítica al tradicionalismo cultural ya que recono-cen que el propio tradicionalismo es una creación de la experiencia colonial o neocolonial (Guha 1997; Spivak). En estos casos, en vez de clamar por un sujeto que se refugie en su propia tradición se reconoce la deliberación, la duda, el escepticismo y la ironía sobre la propia cultura como condiciones para reposicionar a los sujetos de la periferia en el contexto del presente (38).

2

The rest of the translations in this chapter are the editor’s.

20

Chapter One [Certain postcolonial contributions allow searching for practices in which groups situated in the periphery are claiming for modernity based on the criticism of their own cultural traditions. These approaches are recognizing the right to dissent and to cultural criticism as an inheritance of the humanist tradition built simultaneously in the center and the periphery of modernity. Some post-colonial authors validate criticism toward cultural traditionalism, since they recognize that own traditionalism is a creation of the colonial or neo-colonial experience (Guha 1997; Spivak 1988). In these cases, rather than cry out for a subject that take shelter in its own tradition, it is valid to recognize deliberation, doubt, skepticism and irony toward culture by itself, as conditions for relocating peripheral groups in the present context (38).]

By setting Colombian literature in the postcolonial stage, it belongs to a peripheral western culture and needs to find the features that identify these colonized peoples of the west. As explained by Figueroa, this periphery can be interpreted and expanded in light of what Leela Gandhi exposed in her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical introduction: Ever since its development in the 1980s, postcolonialism has found itself in the company of disciplines such as women’s studies, cultural studies and gay/lesbian studies. These new fields of knowledge … have endeavored first, to foreground the exclusions and elisions which confirm the privileges and authority of canonical knowledge systems, and second, to recover those marginalized knowledge which have been occluded and silenced by the entrenched humanist curriculum (42).

Gandhi’s statement reinforces the idea that the western culture and “Europeanization” era are part of the environment of the colonized people of Latin America. The Colombian feminist representation avoids this duplication of history which has been the main cause for the failure of the feminist movement of the twentieth century. In the era of globalization, what does this mean for a specific social group, a country or a culture? It can be an opportunity to find or reaffirm identity, especially for the third world, colonized people. Through globalization, cultures have become specific and unique through what is seen as the comparative effect of globalization. This means that each individual must look at him or herself, identifying his or her own history in comparison with the history of others either in a positive or a negative way. In that sense, writers have perhaps become the agents of culture through the comparative power of globalization. For the Colombian feminist writers, perhaps, a value of the postcolonial stage may be the

Theoretical Approaches: Understanding Twenty-First Century Feminism

21

reaffirmation of their specific social identity. According to Lois Tayson in the book Critical Theory Today, A User Friendly Guide: In fact, because postcolonial criticism defines formerly colonized peoples as any population that has been subjected to political domination of another population, you may see postcolonial critics draw examples from the literary works of African Americans as well as from, for example, the literature of aboriginal Australians or the formerly colonized population of India. However, the tendency of postcolonial criticism to focus on global issues, on comparison and contrasts among various peoples, means that it is up to the individual members of specific populations to develop their own body of criticism on the history, traditions and interpretation of their own literature (417).

The postcolonial narrative has focused on groups that have been traditionally marginalized, for example, the Chicana and black women in the United States, and the various indigenous groups in Latin America. It is important to contextualize the present as an era of globalization with a new literary trend that can be called “postcolonial”, in the sense that the study of the literary works of each group is necessarily compared to the literary works of other human groups which leads to an ideological definition and identity. This type of globalization can be a positive influence since the constant dissemination of information keeps people in a state of informed judgment. Reprising the identity parameter, it can be affirmed that the literature of each human assembly, which falls within the scope of globalization, leads to a definition of the specific human group shaped through comparison and analysis of what that group is concerned about. The chapter, in which this theoretical approach will be used, will propose that the Colombian feminist representation of the beginning of the twenty-first century is searching in its own way for the liberation from the western and European ideology that has branded women since Colonial times.

CHAPTER TWO IMAGES OF AFRO-CARIBBEAN FEMALE SLAVES IN THE WORKS OF YOLANDA ARROYO PIZARRO AMARILIS HIDALGO DE JESÚS BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY

Very little attention has been paid to the issue of female slavery in the Spanish Caribbean. Most historians have approached the topic within the parameters of slavery as a general theme. Female resistance to the power of the master, love, husband, concubine, other slaves, and even female masters and slave society as a whole, has been a taboo subject in Caribbean history and literature. In the English Caribbean there are several studies based on the role of women slaves in the slave societies of the time. Unlike the Spanish Caribbean, and more specifically in Puerto Rico, very few studies have been made to uncover the role of black or mulatto women in narrative and history. In her work on the contributions of female slaves in the Caribbean societies of the era, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro points to the lack of Puerto Rican studies and literature dealing with this topic. She also focuses on the vexations, sexual exploitation, and the conditions of women slaves in Puerto Rico, and, to some extent, the Spanish Caribbean in general. In las Negras1 (Black Females)2 and Saeta, the Poems,3 Arroyo Pizarro explores and emphasizes the role of black women in the development of the mulatto Caribbean culture and society. In other words, the characters and poetic voices in the work of Arroyo Pizarro constantly live and recreate themselves through narratives, historical 1

All the Spanish quotations from las Negras were translated by Dr. Xaé Reyes, Professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, in the Neag School of Education and Latino Studies. 2 The author’s translation. 3 The original quotations from Saeta, the Poems were edited by Dr. Xaé Reyes, for stronger grammatical and syntactical clarity.

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

23

poetic and narrative discourses or epics on the human condition of slaves in the transatlantic slavery society of the time. For Luz Marina Rivas, “la historia nutre con sus referentes históricos a diversas formas de creación literaria” (40) [“history nourishes, with historical references, various forms of literary creation” (40)], and also reinvents “el pasado histórico a partir de obras ficcionales y no ficcionales” (40) [“the historical past from fiction and non-fiction works” (40)].4 Fernando Picó, on the other hand, states that “Los historiadores continuamente acudimos a los resortes de la literatura para exponer, argumentar, comparar, persuadir y resumir” (Rivas 35) [“Historians continually use literature as pretexts to explain, argue, compare, summarize, and persuade …” (Rivas 35)]. Similarly, Rafael Lapesa argues that “es raro que en la interpretación histórica no influyan subrepticiamente los sentimientos personales del autor …” (Rivas 35) [“in historical interpretation the influence of the author's personal feelings, are important …” (Rivas 35)], since all historical narratives have been investigated a priori for inclusion in literature or to be fictionalized in the same text. This leads to the creation of an intra-historia5 fiction which, according to Rivas, “subvierte la historia oficial porque propone nuevos caminos para la comprensión del pasado desde la perspectiva subalterna” (101) [“subverts the official story because it proposes new ways of understanding the past from a sub-alternative perspective” (101)]. Arroyo Pizarro, in both las Negras and Saeta, the Poems, not only subverts history but also reinvents it and inserts it in the intra-historia5 discourses to which Rivas refers, and which are also reiterated in the writings of Lapesa and Picó.

I: The Function of Symbolic Covers as a Mirror Reflection of Intra-historia and Captivity Arroyo Pizarro uses a portrait and a xerography on the cover of the books las Negras and Saeta, the Poems in order to contextualize the intrahistoria concept. Both elements are used as entities to open the Pandora's box of historical discourses in the texts. They also explain the emergence of speeches and poetic voices in the intra-historia discourses displayed in the narratives and poems. They are also used to explore and delve deeper 4

The Spanish quotes were also translated by Dr. Xaé Reyes. The concept of intra-historia used in this article comes from the term developed by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: it refers to the traditional life that serves as a decorative feature of history.

5

24

Chapter Two

into the themes developed during the course of her narrative/poetry. Luis Felipe Díaz, referring specifically to the cover of las Negras says, El título impone ya desde un principio la “l” minúscula tras la “N” mayúscula, implicando que incluso el orden gramatical no subordinará el actante principal en su narrar: las Negras. Se nos advierte con ello, además, la primordial supremacía y relieve ofrecidos a ese sujeto tan subordinado y marginado por la historia, por la letra, por la palabra de los cronistas e historiadores oficiales; pero que esta vez no se saldrán con la suya privi-legiando el Orden Gramatical de la cultura andronormativa nuestra (“las” es simple referencia gramatical-genérica y vacía de género; la importancia radica en “Negras”) (Reseña de las Negras). [From the beginning the title imposes the letter “l” in lower case followed by a capital “N” implying that even the grammatical order shall not subvert the voice of the principal narrator: Negras. We are warned thereby about the supremacy of the subject subordinated and marginalized by history, by writings, by the word of the official chroniclers and historians, but this time not getting away with favoring the grammatical order of our andronormative culture (the “las” refers to a simple generic grammatical gender reference, minimizing gender: the importance is placed on “las Negras”) (Review of las Negras).]

Applying Díaz’s thesis on the function of the picture in las Negras and its connection with major themes in Saeta, the Poems, one sees similarities in the treatment of the theme and its relation to the role of the xerography on the cover of the book. In the above-mentioned cover one can see an authorial linguistic and artistic game in the use of the words and the print through the subversion of the size of the words. In the title, the word Saeta6 is superimposed on the poetic of the poems. Moreover, the supremacy of the Christianized Spanish culture over the mulatto culture is doubly symbolized by the use of the word Saeta, which is imposed on the black culture represented in the poems. Referring to las Negras, Díaz argues that: La portada misma, con unas simples letras blancas que se leen arriba, seguida de la impresionante foto de una mujer de raza negra en la proyección de una imagen correspondiente al gusto por lo africanista, y no por lo comercial moderno que, como sabemos, ha solido apoderarse de la iconografía de la negritud. El fondo negro incluso no supera la piel 6

The word saeta has several meanings in Spanish: it is a song from Catholic Spain dating back to the Middle Ages; an arrow; hands on the clock; or the tip of the Sarmiento tree after being trimmed.

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

25

marrona del Ser que motiva los cuentos en toda su significación de la otredad y la diferencia, muchas veces impresionante por su deseo de alcanzar la mayor profundidad de esa “otredad”, del ser más oprimido en la historia nuestra, la mujer Negra. Luego de repetida la espectacular foto en la segunda página, se nos expone una marginal iconografía de un friso, no griego, sino de la cultura africana (Reseña de las Negras). [The cover itself, with simple white lettering at the top, followed by the stunning photo of a black woman projecting an image corresponding to the taste for Africanist, and not so modern issues, as we know, has a solid hold on the iconography of blackness. On the black background even the skin is brownish motivating stories on all meanings of otherness and difference, often impressive in its desire to achieve greater depth of that “otherness” of being more oppressed in our history, of the black woman. After the spectacular photo is repeated on the second page, she presents a marginal iconography of a frieze, not Greek, but of African culture (Review of las Negras).]

In contrast to las Negras, in Saeta, the Poems, the author reverses the use of color on the cover of the book: first, projecting the color contrast of the soft white with a xerography of a black woman, with clearer parts of skin tones and colorful attire; and second, highlighting the difference in skin color and nuances of color in both the hands and feet of the woman. With this, Arroyo Pizarro is symbolizing the body miscegenation of the mulatto. Unlike Saeta, the Poems, the letters of the title have changed from black to brown, symbolizing the mestizaje [the fusion of various cultures and races], and below the word Saeta, the image of the black race again emerges based on the use of lowercase letters in the subtitle of the poems. We can say that this is an author who uses codices and symbols through the integration of history in her narrative and poetic discourse. She does it within an intra-historia frame of discourses developed and woven into her stories and poems to infuse the discourse of blackness in her work. This discourse, as we have seen, is present from the covers of the books to the historical symbolism of the titles and content of the fictionalized history.

II: The Concept of Blackness in Light of the Intra-historia of the Protagonists and Poetic Voices Patricia D. Fox argues that “the understanding and predictions of ‘conventional ends’ in a narrative context shape the specific literature on dealing with blackness” (4). Fox attempts to redefine the role of the black experience in Latin American literature through expressions of culture and

26

Chapter Two

identity proposed by the authors in their works. This ideological sense of blackness and the ideological discourse of oppression are the elements defining the work of Arroyo Pizarro. In her work, images of slave women contrast with the aggressive behavior of human slavery complementing the characterization and poetic voices outlined in las Negras and Saeta, the Poems. Not only does Arroyo Pizarro create in her texts a binary of racial and gender oppositions, she also points to a differential treatment among people of the same race and same gender. This idea of otherness is presented in several of her stories and poems through different types of images, codes, and symbols. All of them are tied to several conceptions and also misconceptions about the role of slavery in Caribbean societies. Similarly, all the female characters are portrayed in a kind of survival competition from their initiation into womanhood to the end of their journey in the plantations. The ideological sense of blackness and the ideological discourse of oppression are in part the elements defining the work of Arroyo Pizarro. The images contrasted with the aggressive behavior of human slavery complement the characterization and poetic voices outlined by Arroyo Pizarro in las Negras and Saeta, the poems. To be more precise, in “Wanwe” the author brings out the concept of intra-historia, defined by Rivas as the “Construcción de personajes subalternos (frecuente la narración en primera persona) a través de los cuales se ficcionaliza la historia de lo cotidiano” (101) [“Construction of subalternative characters (often the first person narrative) through which she fictionalizes the story of the ordinary” (101)], to make the reader delve into the memories of the protagonist. In las Negras, Díaz posits that: En la primera narración la protagonista Wanwe nos presenta el momento de iniciación de las Negras en su ambiente selvático, en el cual es asaltada por el rapto del blanco quien la extrae de su ambiente natural y la coloca en una barcaza hombro con hombro, para esclavizarla luego de ser marcada como no-humana (Reseña de las Negras). [In the first story the protagonist, Wanwe, focuses on the female initiation process in their natural habitat. She is attacked by the white man who removed her from her natural environment and placed her in a shoulder to shoulder position, to enslave her after being marked as non-human (Review of las Negras).]

Thus, through memories, the reader witnesses the passage of initiation of the protagonists into the world of adults, the capture, and the images of other women who are going through enduring the bitterness of capture and being sold slaves by other African tribes:

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

27

La llevan al barco, en una canoa pequeña, en compañía de otras mujeres. Van atadas. Una de las mujeres tiene orejeras y un pendiente de nariz. No es de la casta de Wanwe y ni siquiera habla su idioma (las Negras 25). [They take the boat, in a small canoe, in the company of other women. One woman has pendant earrings and a nose ring. Not of Wanwe’s tribe and she does not even speak your language (las Negras 25).] El primer recuerdo también puede ser la aldea. El correteo de los chicos y las chicas, el juego de los hombros. En el rito del ureoré las niñas que se han criado como unidas, como hermanas duermen pegaditas una a la otra, formando una hilera que une a cada cual por el área de los hombros (las Negras 15). [The first memory can also be the village. The chatter of boys and girls, the shoulder game. In the ritual of ureoré girls who have grown up as united as sisters sleep close to each other, forming a line that unites every one by the shoulder area (las Negras 15).]

Díaz sees this as the presentation of the “historia de los rituales selváticos de la mujer” por parte de la protagonista, “en su iniciación para la adultez y el juego del destino” (Reseña de las Negras) [“history of the wild ritual of women” by the main character, “in her initiation to adulthood and the game of destiny” (Review of las Negras)]. On the one hand, in the story the narrator points out that: En vez del devenir al colocarla hombro a hombro a su amado, como había practicado en el ritual, es colocada hombro con hombro a otra esclava … Irónico resulta el juego entre casado y cazado, casarse y ser cazado y terminar con “las manos encadenadas” (Díaz 26). [Instead of becoming bonded with her beloved when placed side by side, as was practiced in the ritual, she is placed side by side with another slave … ironic game between married and hunted, to be married and be hunted and ending with “hands chained” (Díaz 26).]

And on the other, the image of the bonding is used to reinforce the survival theme in the stories. According to Marie Ramos Rosado, in Puerto Rican literature the image of black women is seldom as the protagonist. In fact, Ramos Rosado mentions that “… otro patrón común en nuestra literatura, la presentación estereotipada de negras como criadas y esclavas” (10) [“a common pattern in Puerto Rican literature is the stereotyped presentation

28

Chapter Two

of black women as servants or slaves. Black women are reduced to sexual objects when they are given the role of servant” (10)]. Arroyo Pizarro breaks with this tradition by focusing her narrative and poetry on the aggressiveness and desire for freedom of the slave woman, from the moment of capture to the first attempt to escape from the ship: “Sin que nadie lo note, de manera silenciosa, desrama con astucia las sogas de sus extremidades y acto seguido se lanza de la canoa … Los hombres imparten más fuerza en el amarre del cuello y la mujer tose, pero además lanza patadas” (las Negras 26) [“Without anyone noticing, silently, throwing lines of ropes and immediately launching the canoe … Men offer more strength in the neck knots and the women cough, but also kick” (las Negras 26)]. The same image is captured by the author in the poem “I Am a Hostage”: Mandingo took my group rhythmic upbeat drum playing my running is hurting my feet an escape That ends with a net over my head (Saeta, the Poems 27).

And the female rebellion reiterates in the poem “I Remember the Middle Passage”: … those two women Friends from the same village glitter in four pupils magic in four eyebrows they make a promise to each other barabtunbembón the light-skinned one bit the other in the neck both close their eyes (Saeta, the Poems 25).

The portrait of female slaves’ revolt presented by Arroyo Pizarro is part of the concept of “shared histories of multilayered colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism of people of color in the West” (Gasby 7) that has developed in the Caribbean. For most people in the Caribbean, argues Meredith M. Gasby, the concept of blackness has emerged through the acceptance of their cultural roots. These images are parallel to survival within a system of migration forced by enemy hands. In the story “Saeta”, for example, the slave Tshanwe passively resisted rape and molestation by the master, while Jaawi, another character, who is already accustomed to the situation, is unfazed by aggression:

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

29

El amo desprende la falda manchada de barro de Tshanwey con una mano, le abre las piernas. La vuelve a llamar Teresa. Palpa su pubis, y lo estudia con ávidos ojos … Empuja a la negra hasta el lecho, no sin antes retirar el mosquitero … La otra esclava, Jwaabi, se ha quedado de pie, en mitad del aposento, con las manos entrelazadas a la espalda. Espera sin pudor su turno (“Saeta,” las Negras 103). [The master follows the muddy skirt of Tshanwey with one hand, she opens her legs. Teresa called again. Touches her pubis, and studies it with eager eyes … Pushes the black woman to the bed, but not before removing the net … The other slave Jwaabi, has been standing in the middle of the room, her hands clasped behind her back. Waiting for her turn shamelessly (“Saeta,” las Negras 103).]

In fact, with this segment Arroyo Pizarro opens the door to the other side of the coin of slavery: the impassive face of another’s pain because, as raised by Rivas, “Hacer la historia desde los discursos de la intimidad propone otra manera de mirar lo histórico, reconoce que hay una perspectiva entre situar la mirada desde el centro o desde los márgenes, desde los hombres o desde las mujeres” (175) [“Shaping the story from the discourses of privacy proposed another way to look at the historical, recognizing that there is a perspective between gazing in a position from the center or from the margins, as men as women” (175)]. Let’s say, then, that human suffering can be seen from different human perspectives in these stories and poems: the slave and the enslaved. That is, the slave who has accepted her enslaved dehumanized condition, either because of fear or because she simply has assimilated into the system, or she is a captured slave who has resisted slavery and fought in different ways and forms the oppressive future that awaited her. That slave has also paid attention to the powerlessness that forces her to a death of peaceful resistance. Within this type of rebellion the narrative discourse in Saeta, the Poems and las Negras focuses on the fictionalization of human resistance. To keep fictionalizing the theme of human resistance, Arroyo Pizarro also uses images of starving slaves in the slave ship during the stage of “the Middle Passage” to give more accuracy to the historical argument, which becomes the inside story created by the poetic voice in her narrative related to the events lived and suffered on the journey. And, most of all, she emphasizes human pain, poetic solidarity, and quietness of the fellow travelers of different ethnicities, different cultures and languages. Rivas sees “la posibilidad de subvertir esos discursos para que trasciendan las vidas personales y se constituyan en discursos historiográficos otros” (176) [“the possibility of subverting these discourses to transcend personal

30

Chapter Two

lives and constitute other historiographical discourses” (176)], what is undoubtedly a project explored in an intra-historia narrative/poetry: They were beaten forced onto the ships forced to lie down like little fishes hands and feet chained Yoruba, Tuareg, Bandulunda, Logbo, Bakongo They use their excretory system indignantly They were chained wherever Mbundu Malimbo, Balimbe Egba, Ovimbundu, Cabinda, Pembes Practically ate nothing raped young girls and boys vibrantly colored No one can imagine cruelty many did not survive many died or became deathly ill we were poverty … (“They Were Beaten” Saeta, the Poems 44).

In Terborg-Penn words, “women [slaves] in many ways were exploited and denigrated through rape and impregnation by slave owners” (11). Not only were they raped and mentally abused by their masters, as shown by Arroyo Pizarro, but they were also murdered by their masters and other people from the community. As a matter of fact, many of the female slaves did not even understand the language of the masters and slave traders, nor the language or dialects of other slaves. That is why it was very difficult for them to defend themselves or to sympathize with the pain of others, as the narrative voice in “Tshanwey” states: Había sido separada de sus consanguíneos en su tierra natal, y apenas había sobrevivido el viaje en nao. Mucho menos entendía el lenguaje nativo de Jwaabi, ni el de los demás sirvientes que se hacían cargo del mantenimiento de la hacienda Pizarro puesto que casi todos venían de etnias diferentes dispersadas en el gran continente (las Negras 106). [She had been separated from their blood relatives in their homeland, and had barely survived the trip on the ship, much less understood Jwaabi native language, nor those of the other servants who took care of the maintenance of the Pizarro estate since almost everyone came from different ethnic groups scattered in the great continent (las Negras 106).]

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

31

This created a linguistic situation that interfered with, but did not impede, the development of a female bonding culture or even, more precisely, a culture of survival. Female slaves developed a sense of solidarity through gestures, sounds of drums, dances or cooking codes. They also helped each other in the adaptation process in the life of the hacienda [estate, ranch, or farm]. This brings us to what Myriam Yvonne Jehenson sees as the essentiality of women in “the development of the new culture in the centuries that witnessed the conquest of Latin America” (1). In the Caribbean the treatment of the slave woman was stronger and also more punitive in damages compared to what was imposed on the indigenous women, “They were sexually exploited as an everyday occurrence” (Jehenson 2). To be guarded against other hacienda employees or other slaves, these women were frequently forced to create/invent cultural and religious codes to communicate with the various ethnic groups so they could rebel against the slavery system. In this system, female slaves were subjected to the libidinous desires and physical and emotional abuses of the masters. These injustices are raised by the protagonist of the story “Matronas” [“Midwives”] in las Negras through her oral discourse, which becomes the entity that moves the narrative action and gives access to the different points of view in the text: Os juro que quise morir Fray Petro, “a ser usada como animal, Os juro que luego quise matar a todos padrecito. Eso me propuse. Eso nos propusimos las mujeres y corrimos la voz en los toque de tambores … Las noticias siguieron corriendo en cantares a lo balimbe, ovimbundu y el resto. Todas las que somos del Congo, y las que somos de Ibibio y las que somos de Seke o de Cabindala respondimos (las Negras 83). [I swear I wanted to die Fray Petro, “to be used as an animal, I swear I wanted to kill everyone then Father. I intended that. We sat and ran women's voice in drumming … The news continued to run in songs balimbe, Ovimbundu and the rest. All who are of the Congo, and were of Ibibio and we are in Seke or Cabindala responded (las Negras 83).]

Suzanne Bost sees this as: racial and racist hierarchies … [that] dominate Caribbean history, the uncertainty of racial differentiation based on skin color alone has created a social structure in which other characteristics such as class, language, cultural practices, and beliefs have come to signify race as much as color (90).

32

Chapter Two

In Arroyo Pizarro, female slavery history, cultural and linguistic displacement of the slave is presented through the various stages of life that arise in different languages and among groups of women of different ethnicities. Despite the difficulties they have to face, these women also suffer the loss of their cultural heritage, their previous life, and their natural environment. All of these issues definitely transformed the world of being enslaved which began in the times of boarding the slavery ship and were intensified in the migratory journey of the “Middle Passage” forcing the women to survive. The author uses these narratives to further illuminate their characters and poetic voices. This migratory journey begins in the remote villages of Africa where women have been uprooted from their natural habitat to become part of the forced journey into the world of slavery. This brings up another cultural element and narrative in the works studied, food habits. In this sense, the author expands the concept of “sucking salt” discussed by Gasby and its implications and ramifications in the lives of the slaves and their predecessors. It also raises several cultural explanations about the development of the “sucking salt” term and its connection to the survival techniques of the female slave during her “Middle Passage” between Africa and America, and their lives in the slavery plantation system in the Americas. All these elements are very important in the work of Arroyo Pizarro and are connected to the construction of an intra-historia, either through a narrative or through a poetic voice. It manifests itself through another self that functions as explicit narrator in the reconstruction of history of the protagonists. This is what Rivas calls speech privacy in which: … es posible apreciar un yo que se manifiesta en primera persona … Ese yo puede poner más su acento en lo individual … Pese a los distintos matices que adopte, su presencia se da a través de un desdoblamiento: el yo enunciador se separa de un yo enunciado. Un yo situado en un presente de la enunciación refiere a un yo distinto situado en el pasado …” (173) [“… it is possible to see a self that is expressed in the first person … that can emphasize the individual … Despite a nuanced take, their presence occurs through an unfolding: the self that separates the narratives from personal statements. One set in a present tense that refers to a distinct event set in the past …” (173)].

That is, Arroyo Pizarro’s intra-historia discourse has transgressed the limits of a narrative through the history and daily life of the protagonist. Moreover, the narrative/poetic voice is unable to focus her point of view in

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

33

the habitat of the free woman, in the woman captured, in the woman sold as a commodity in the slavery trade or the slave woman per se. In las Negras, to portray the struggle of the female slaves, Arroyo Pizarro values and recovers the historical memory of the female slaves during the intermediate step between freedom, future captivity and enslavement. The memories begin in the villages (in the case of “Wanwe” in las Negras and “Tshanwe” in Saeta, the Poems) and move through the slave ship (in the case of “Wanwe” in las Negras) in which they have been chained and subjugated. It is here when the concept of “sucking salt” is connected to the family and the community activity of hunting, and also with the time of capture. Wanwe: “Es posible que el primer recuerdo también sea el día del secuestro” (43) [“It is possible that the first memory is also the day of the kidnapping” (43)]. Moments later the same narrative voice says: “Nadie sabía que les atraparían. Así pues salen varias madres de cacería, sin sospechar nada, llevando a sus críos en la espalda. Lo único que se necesita es una pieza de tela resistente y mucha hambre” (43) [“Nobody knew that they were captured. So many mothers go hunting, suspecting nothing, taking their kids on their back. All you need is a piece of fabric that is tough and to be very hungry” (43)]. From there, it goes on to describe the ritual of the hunt, the participation of children in it, and how mothers carry their infants on their backs during the ritual: “Casi nunca se cae un niño mientras su madre se lo ata a la espalda o se va de cacería con los demás hijos” (44) [“Rarely does a child fall while his mother ties him to her back or goes hunting with other children” (44)]. Similarly through different narrative metaphors, the reader learns about the primitive fishing activity and processing and storage of the food: … las madres de la aldea se pintan las caras de amarillo y logran acumular comida cazada para varios días. Algunas logran con las pértigas atrapar peces que la crecida de las confluentes les ponen a disposición” (45). [“… the mothers of the village’s faces are painted yellow and manage to accumulate hunted food for several days. Some manage to catch fish, the rising waters make available to them” (45).]

It is important to note here that although not mentioned in the story, it is inherent that after the hunt the process of conservation/salting the food takes place. This is never achieved in “Wanwe” because the image is interrupted by the moment when she is hunted by other tribes to be sold as a slave:

34

Chapter Two Las presas atrapadas para la cena se caen, ruedan por la hierba, los arbustos con troncos sin ramificar o raramente ramificados y son arrastradas por las lluvias torrentosas del suelo. Los animales muertos ya han dejado de ser parte del botín, ya no son cena, acaso se convierten en carroña abandonada que seguramente será devorada por alguna otra bestia (46). [Dams caught for dinner fall, roll in the grass, shrubs with stems unbranched or rarely branched and are washed away by the soil from torrential rains. Dead animals are no longer part of the booty, and not dinner, perhaps become abandoned carrion that will surely be devoured by some other beast (46).]

Interesting to note is that this metaphor of carrion (rotting flesh) leads into the theme of captivity in “Wanwe”. Through her memories, the young Wanwe describes the feeding process in Africa through the images of primitive hunting of wild animals, such as boars and monkeys (babus), and primitive fishing after heavy floods in the rivers. For Laura J. Beard, this type of scene connects with the development of the history of families, which are part of “the history of their nations” (71). At the same time, it ties in with autobiographical discourses and the advancement of human identity: “Wanwe cierra los ojos y recuerda el aroma de las viejas, de su madre, de las hermanas, de las muchachas en el rito del ureorée” (29) [“Wanwe closes her eyes and remembers the smell of the past, her mother, sisters, and girls in the ritual of ureorée” (29)]. The ritual gives the reader different perspectives in the intra-historia narratives created by the narrator of the story of the female slaves, the interaction with other women/girls and rituals in tribal society. For Gasby, these rites offer a number of cultural of explanations which are closely related to the different modes of survival developed by the slaves during “the Middle Passage” elements, and which are very important in building the concept of female slavery in Saeta, the Poems and las Negras: Las colocan acostadas, unas cerquitas de otras en el sótano del barco. Tan pegaditas como si fueran a jugar el ureoré. Wanwe mira a sus dos compañeras de hombros, una a la derecha y otra a la izquierda. Todas respiran con el mismo espanto y vacilación (“Wanwe,” las Negras 12). [The lying place, close to another at the bottom of the boat. So close like playing the ureoré. Wanwe looks at her two companions’ shoulders, one right and one left. All the same breaths with fear and hesitation. (“Wanwe”, las Negras 12)]

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

35

I recall the waves The saltwater vomit The excretory pains While my fingers play with the timbers of the boat … (“I Remember Middle Passage,” Saeta, the Poems 25)

The mention of the metaphor of salt as an element that produces seasickness, “saltwater vomit”, (25) had already been invested in the flesh, metaphorically turned into carrion on the ground. The metaphor also refers to the meeting place of the slave catchers and their victims. In both texts the image of salt as a survival element attached to the rites of African cultural elements that were left behind in black Africa are those that mark the course of the new history of the African diaspora in the Americas. In fact, that history has been marked from the beginning by the narrator in the images of death presented in both texts. In las Negras the images of death are a constant. They appear in the narratives from the beginning through images of dead animals, female slaves murdered as a lesson, female slaves who rebelled and were thrown into the sea to be eaten by sharks or were imprisoned or beaten and then hanged to set an example to the other female slaves. In “Wanwe”, for example, the structure of the story is circular. It closes in an open-ended way establishing at the outset that Wanwe will not die carnally but part of her will die symbolically through the death of another woman: El capitán del nao amarra las piernas a la mujer que había intentado escapar en la orilla, durante el trayecto de las canoas … Cabeza abajo y amarrada también de las manos, varios hombres colaboran para lanzarla al mar … Wanwe piensa que va ahogarse, pero el poco tiempo que pasa sumergida le basta para saber que aquel final para ella no es posible. En vez de ese, será otro. Cuando momentos después vuelven a alzarla y ella es levantada por los pies como una guerrera de alabastro que parece inmortalizarse, su cuerpo ya ha sido partido a la mitad por los mordiscos de varios tiburones (“Wanwe,” las Negras 57-58). [The captain of the ship moored the legs of the woman who had tried to escape on the shore, during the journey in the canoes … Head down and also hands tied, several men collaborate to throw her to the sea … Wanwe, thinks she will drown, but the little time spent underwater is enough to know that this end is not possible for her. When moments later they lift her again and she is raised by her feet like an alabaster warrior that seems immortalized, her body has already been cut in half by the bites of various sharks. (“Wanwe”, las Negras 57-58).]

36

Chapter Two

The metaphor of death presented in the middle of the story continues and concludes at the end of the story, making the story one with a linear structure and an open end. For Díaz it is because “La autora maneja una narración de efectos fantásticos y míticos, ya que infiere que la abusada y violada heroína del cuento, tras morir, desde el bosque posee la capacidad de lanzar una saeta que se incrusta en la frente de Georgino, el amo” (Reseña de las Negras) [“She handles a narrative of great and legendary effects as inferred by the abused and raped heroine of the story, after death, since the forest has the ability to throw an arrow that is embedded in the forehead of Don Georgino, the master” (Review of las Negras)]. In “Tshanwe” the heroine refuses to die because dying is losing her cultural and linguistic identity; and losing the struggle for the liberation of her body, ended freeing her soul: Tshanwee no entiende y cae impotente al suelo … Siguen las instrucciones del conde de enterrarla en el lugar de los perros y los negros … Las gotas le reaniman los párpados y un chamán invisible la hace despertar. Namaqua y sus mujeres guerreras la amparan (“Tshanwe,” las Negras 125, 129-130). [Tshanwee does not understand and falls helplessly to the ground … Follow the instructions of the Earl of those buried in the place of dogs and Blacks … The drops will revive the eyelids and a shaman awakens invisible. Namaqua and the warrior women support them (“Tshanwe,” las Negras 125, 129-130).]

The images of other women are presented at the end of the story, as a conclusion to the process of torture, abuse and sexual molestation of the protagonist by the master. This happens to create a circular narrative structure that culminates in a closed ending. Such is the case of “Matronas”: Hago un recuento mental de palabras olvidadas. Replico sus sonidos. Articulo tocando el dorso de la lengua con la parte posterior del velo del paladar. Formo una estrechez por la que pasa el aire respirado. El aire no me llega … Soy una faringe que se ahoga; luna, energía, coraje, eternidad (las Negras 95). [I make a mental count of forgotten words. Replied to his sounds by touching the back of the tongue to the back of the soft palate. Structure formed by passing the air breathed. The air does not arrive … I’m a drowning pharynx; moon, energy, courage, eternity (las Negras 95).]

Images of Afro-Caribbean Female Slaves in the Works of Pizarro

37

In “Matronas” the three stories narrated have the element of death in different narrative strands, linguistic and symbolic: death by suffocation and drowning, death by asphyxiation by hanging and death by exsanguination. The three deaths are also the result of the abuse of power of the masters. But the narrative element that unites the three stories is the presence of gods, shamans or tribal traditions that were lost in time in the forced abandoned land. It is somewhat the representation of death of the protagonists which becomes the backdrop to the return trip but within a different space and narrative level. In the poem “I Remember the Middle Passage”, Arroyo Pizarro also alludes to the metaphor of death as a symbol of freedom and human dignity: The mother who smothered her baby boy out of compassion (Saeta, the Poems 25)

In these verses we are shown the first images of female resistance to what the uncertain future holds for the new life of the slave mother and her son. As Genice Vertus posits: “Enslaved women took part in every restrictive bond of slavery; however, they did so in their own distinctive way” (“An Even Stronger Woman”). This idea of resistance, cultural migration and sisterhood is very important in las Negras and Saeta, the Poems. Finally, it is important to mention that Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro has been able to portray in her narrative and poetry the history of the Caribbean/Puerto Rican female slaves. For the most part, in her books las Negras and Saeta, the Poems, the topics of intra-historia, life before and after slavery, “the Middle Passage”, “sucking salt”, struggles, rape, violence, and other themes emerge through the memories of the characters, their narrative discourses, and poetic voices. The constant entrance of different narrative voices, points of view, and poetic voices in the narrative and poems, recreate the diverse settings, and contexts which serve as the main connectors of life stories of the protagonists and their poetic voices. Without any doubt, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in Saeta, the Poems, and las Negras, has claimed and recovered a historical space denied to the female slave by the supremacist Creole culture of the time.

CHAPTER THREE BEHIND THE MIRROR: NARRATIVES OF MADNESS IN LATIN AMERICAN FEMININE LITERATURE ELVIRA SÁNCHEZ-BLAKE MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Throughout history madness has been a staple symbol, an analogy and a parable signifying a world in crisis and the mirror and catalyst of the critical consciousness of humankind. In this chapter I explore concepts of madness and literature in two contemporary Latin American novels, Nadie me verá llorar by Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza and Delirio by Colombian Laura Restrepo. These writers are part of the postmodern movement that perceives reality through another prism. Gaze and vision are recurrent motifs in these texts, as if there were a particular connection between sight and madness, or as if madness were the result of grasping reality from a different perspective. I analyze correlations between gaze, madness and literature and their relevance in the definition of boundaries between history and micro history, the inside and the outside, reality and hyperreality, and how these are located on the borderline between reason and unreason. In the book History of Madness Michel Foucault called the literature of madness a medium for raising the critical consciousness of humanity (27). He states how at the end of the fifteenth century fear of death and madness turned on itself into mockery and satire reflected in the poetics and artistic expressions of the times. Sebastian Brant’s poetic satire Ship of Fools (1494) depicts a series of ship voyages carrying the insane who were expelled from towns across Europe and condemned to wander endlessly, without destination. Then, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511), inspired by Brant’s text, “reverted madness into a spectacle of life, inserting it into the vices and absurdities of men” (Foucault 16). Following Erasmus, the literary and philosophical expression of the fifteenth century transformed

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

39

the domain of madness. According to Foucault, Cervantes and Shakespeare use mad characters to reflect a moral satire of the world in which they lived. Both testify to a critical and moral experience of reason and unreason developing in their epoch (17). However, by the sixteenth century the experience of madness was driven away by René Descartes’s rationalist discourse and relegated to the silence and confinement of asylums and hospitals for the mentally ill. For Foucault, the asylum was considered the great continuity of social morality, with its values of family and work, therefore becoming a formal instrument of uniformity and social denunciation. Correspondingly, the physician became the father, judge, family and law, the supreme authority exercising order and punishment (130-131). Foucault’s genealogy of madness provides essential arguments for this analysis. First, madness is seen as a human experience that builds on the critical consciousness of humankind. Second is the emphasis on the eye and the gaze, which permits the insane to see what is concealed within the eyes of the sane. This resource opens a vast spectrum between vision and blindness, a recurrent motif of literary madness. A third consideration is the blurry line between reason and unreason, a constant interrogation for the analysis of the texts selected for this chapter.

I: The Female Malady Although Foucault’s seminal book did not focus on women, his dissertation prompted feminist inquiries and new critical approaches. Elaine Showalter, for instance, defined madness as the female malady. She departed from the assertion that there is a fundamental gender alliance between women and madness “because women are situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind” (Showalter 3-4). Showalter demonstrated that cultural ideas about femininity shaped the definition and treatment of mental disorders, arguing that what was considered to be madness in women was instead a deviation from the traditional female role. She criticized psychiatric ideologies and clinical approaches that only further stigmatized women’s behaviors under rubrics of the mentally disturbed. Among these she mentions Darwinian psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the anti-psychiatry movement. Darwinian theories viewed insanity as a product of organic defect, poor heredity, and an evil environment (Showalter 18). Women’s psychology responded to their reproductive organs, while men were dictated by the mind. Accordingly, mental breakdowns occurred when women defied their own nature by

40

Chapter Three

attempting to compete with men or by seeking alternatives, or even additions, to their maternal functions and expectations. In the late nineteenth century psychoanalysis had introduced the concept of hysteria as a female malady. Showalter acknowledges that Sigmund Freud provided a leap over the biological determinism and moralism of Darwinian psychiatry. Nonetheless, Freudian theories still drew on the premise that mental disturbances were feminine manifestations of social deviant behavior. Furthermore, Showalter explored the R.D. Laing anti-psychiatric movement, which introduced the idea that mental illness must be examined within its social context. Laing’s theories offered new conceptual frameworks wherein femininity and madness became an intelligible strategy in response to the demands put upon women’s roles in a patriarchal society. However, like other psychiatric movements and approaches, Showalter remarks that “Laing’s techniques in practice were male-dominated and unaware of its own sexism” (123). According to Showalter, changes in cultural fashion, psychiatric theory, and public policy have failed to transform the imbalance between gender and power that relegated madness primarily to a female malady. Despite wide acceptance by psychotherapy, psychiatric modernism has significantly changed the cultural construction of female insanity. Showalter contends, “Psychoanalysis with its emphasis on penis envy as the main determinant of female psychosexual development, has not offered much scope for a revolutionary discourse on women and madness” (19). Even Laing’s anti-psychiatry movement, “which protested against shock treatment, and which promised to analyze women’s situation in the family and the society, not only failed in its theoretical effort, but may well have been the most sexist of all in its practice” (Showalter 19). Showalter’s debate has been central to understanding explorations into women’s representation of insanity as a subversive feminist strategy. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar corroborated Showalter’s claims in their study of nineteenth-century English and French women writers entitled The Madwoman in the Attic. They considered literary text as symbolic representation of the female author’s anger in response to the rigidity of patriarchal tradition, and madness as the price women artists paid in order to exercise their creativity in a male-dominated culture. Gilbert and Gubar departed from the metaphor of the pen as an exclusively male tool, and therefore alien to women. Those attempting to cross the pen-forbidden boundaries were punished or driven away. All activities associated with writing, reading and thinking were not only alien but also inimical to “female” characteristics. Gilbert and Gubar’s main proposition is that:

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

41

A woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of angel and monster which male authors have generated for her (17).

This angel-monster association acts as the central motif that directs the explorations of Victorian era literary texts. According to Gilbert and Gubar, the nineteenth century complex social prescriptions did not merely urge women to act in ways that would make them ill; these were the primary goals of such training, to become ill. Upper and middle-class women were defined as sickly, ill, and frail, and consequently, a cult of female invalidism was nurtured in England and North America (Gilbert & Gubar 54). Victorian era novels depicted those attributes. Such is the case of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the works by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson. Catherine Clément in the essay “The Guilty One,” in The Newly Born Woman provides an analysis of the sorceress and the hysteric as exemplary female figures. She recurs to the “tarantella”—a Southern Italian ritual—in which women are cured of an imaginary spider bite by a frenetic ceremonial dance lasting twenty-four hours. The dance is described as a “ferocious festival of metamorphosis which subversively, sardonically, with a tragic happiness expresses a tragic passion” (Gilbert, Introduction The Newly Born Woman xi). At the end, women are cured by the liberating frenzy and return to their family circle—the man’s world. In this way, Clément establishes the connection between the sorceress and the hysteric, the role of both figures being anti-establishment because they shake up and revolt the group. The sorceress heals, performs abortions, unties familiar bonds and acts against church cannon, while the hysteric generates chaos and introduces disorder into the family. As expressed by Gilbert in the introduction of The Newly Born Woman, both, the witch and the hysteric are contestants of culture: like the fervor that impels the tarantella, the misrule that governs witchcraft and the rebellious body language that manifest hysteria, are culturally stylized channels into which excess demonically flows—excess desire, excess rage, excess creative energy—only to be annihilated by the society that drove it in such directions (xii).

Sorcerers and hysterics, fairies and wicked witches, virgins and demons, mythical figures, angels or monsters, regardless of their nature, women who access knowledge and power end up being destroyed because they are dangerous to the establishment and because they represent a bond

42

Chapter Three

to nature and wilderness, the opposite of culture. Those are, in the words of Clement, “the ones who do not fit the symbolic order or who are in the interstices of symbolic systems: those are the people afflicted with what we call madness, anomaly, perversion …” (7). Thus, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, and Clément’s contributions to the debate on feminism helped uncovering what was hidden under repressive structures of language and society that marginalized women to positions of silence and exclusion.

II: Madness and Literature in Latin America The depiction of literary madness in Latin America has been a recurrent trope in master narratives of the twentieth century with several literary works depicting mad characters. Examples include Susana San Juan in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the neurotic Pablo Castel in El túnel by Ernesto Sábato, and José Arcadio, Macondo’s patriarch in Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez. Madness also portrays supreme power in stories of infamous dictatorships: El otoño del Patriarca (García Márquez) La fiesta del Chivo (Mario Vargas Llosa) and Yo el supremo (Augusto Roa Bastos). In more recent narratives, the figure of the madman/madwoman arises from the collective anxiety generated by turnof-millennium delusions of revolutionary wars, drug trafficking, sexual revolutions and globalization. New emergent literary movements McOndo, Crack, “Los enterradores” and other trends such as the “sicaresca”1 and the so-called “narco-literature”express anguish about the human condition under contemporary challenges. Even new digital cyber-literature bears an insanity trademark for the new millennium. Recent historical events such as military regimes and state violence perpetrated in Latin America have produced a considerable number of narratives reflecting the chaos of these critical periods in various countries. Simultaneously, postmodernism fostered an emergence of marginalized voices using discursive techniques associated with the language of madness and delirium. In this category—madness and postmodernism— women writers made their incursion into the Latin American literary forum. In the 1980s and 1990s, narratives by Latin American women denounced both domestic and political repression. Their works were part 1

McOndo, Crack, “Los enterradores” and the “sicaresca” were new literary trends emerging at the turn of the millennium across Latin America. Most of these groups rebelled against such fixed Latin American conventions of the twentieth century as the Boom or Magical Realism.

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

43

of the conjoined gender and power resistance movements opposing dictatorships, military regimes, while denouncing gender injustices at the societal level. These narratives slowly acquired recognition and legitimacy in the literary realm. They fostered a diversity of trends: searches for women’s identity, place, sexuality, bodies and memory. Furthermore, they addressed sociopolitical issues, becoming a new trend of feminism and political agency. Authors such as Cristina Peri Rossi, Albalucía Ángel, Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, Diamela Eltit, Luisa Valenzuela, Laura Restrepo, and Clarice Lispector have used madness to deliver messages about women’s roles in society and amid political oppression. Debra Castillo remarks that “[T]he insanity that derives from helplessness can convert itself into a fiction of empowerment” (115). The same can be applied to the political activity of women, mothers and daughters, victims of repression, like the Madres de la Plaza de mayo, who were officially considered “locas” (crazy) for crossing traditional boundaries of domestic space into the public realm. Therefore, penalized and labeled insane, these women became models by imprinting a new kind of political struggle. Their actions resonated across the continent in fighting repressive regimes for gender equality and political agency (Castillo 16). With the surge of postmodernism, women have gained access to the literary and artistic realms, taking advantage of the decentering cultural powers, recognition of the margins, and “the other” discourses. According to Nelly Richard: The crossovers between postmodernism and feminism in Latin America has been a necessary step for vital discussions, such as identity and power, margins and centers and for inscribing women’s difference into the problem of Difference (58).

Latin American women confront various challenges: from the personal to the political, from constructing identities as subjects to refuting categorizations and homogenizing essentialisms. In all, women with their respective points of debate (feminism, third world, postcolonialism) are part of that theoretical-cultural landscape of new expressions where they have nothing to lose and much to gain from the erosions and breaks in postmodern discourses (Richard 61). I submit that madness is a central literary device for challenging and confronting cultural impositions, and for exposing critical sociopolitical issues in Latin America. Specifically, I explore how figures of the mad have been a tool to revert feminine marginalization and to reflect changes in women’s positioning, both at the individual and collective levels. In this chapter, madness is treated as a literary device corresponding with

44

Chapter Three

postmodern and feminist critical theories in the two narratives of my analysis, Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry) and Delirio (Delirium).

III: See the World through My Lens Cristina Rivera Garza, a member of the new generation of Mexican writers, proposes an alternative view of madness in her 1997 novel Nadie me verá llorar. She uses the novel to submit a proposition, how to rewrite history from a different period perspective, but still with a dialogical, atemporal approach that allows the reader to establish a relationship with the subject of the story. Rivera Garza’s goal is not to portray the past or to take the reader on a journey to the past, but to make it contemporary.2 The author first explored the subject through her doctoral dissertation, “The Masters of the Streets. Bodies, Power and Modernity in Mexico, 18671930,” later publishing academic articles on the subject. More recently she extended her inquiry in the book La Castañeda: narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General. México, 1910-1930 (2010) [The Castañeda: Painful Narratives from the General Insane Asylum. Mexico, 1910-1930]. This book constitutes in her own words, a “restitution” and a “border crossing” between academic and fiction writing on the same subject.3 In the novel, Rivera Garza engages in an audacious, irreverent journey of dialogic interaction with history through the exploration of an individual life story, that of Modesta Burgos (called Matilda in the novel). Matilda 2

Rivera Garza, in an interview with Cheyla Rose Samuelson, explains her strategy: “How can we create a novel based on these historical documents that is not trying to portray the past, that is not trying to take the present day reader to the past, but that is trying to do just the opposite, to make the past contemporary? To use a language that might allow that transition instead of presenting a status quo, an established reality that might visit as tourists, somehow, through this travel agency that the novel becomes” (140). 3 In the prologue of La Castañeda, Rivera Garza explains: “Tengo una deuda de alrededor de quince años con este libro … primero fue una tesis de maestría y, años más tarde, de doctorado. Luego entre las páginas de este manuscrito salió otra cosa: su contrario … La novela logró su cometido, en efecto, pero a costa de la vida del hermano siamés que, escondido o desfalcado, o escondido y desfalcado, se dedicó a languidecer. Estamos, ustedes y yo, ante la restitución” (12), [“I have a debt of about 15 years with this text … first it was a Master’s thesis, and years later, a Doctoral one. Then, among the pages of this manuscript it became another thing: its opposite … The novel accomplished its task, indeed, but at the expense of the life of the Siamese brother that hidden or bankrupt, or hidden and bankrupt, decided to languish. We are, you and I, before the restitution” (12)].

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

45

undergoes a transformation from a country poor girl to an immigrant into Mexico City, where she becomes first, a disciplined housekeeper, then a prostitute, and finally an inmate at the hospital asylum, La Castañeda. Matilda’s story takes the reader across the radical transformation of Mexico during the “Porfiriato” to the modernization and through the critical period of the Mexican Revolution. The author confronts the reflection of history at the micro level—the asylum—with history at the macro level—the state—through the subject of madness as a reflection of gender, class and nation in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel’s focalization is through the photographic lens, a technique that plies the narrative with light and darkness, the visible and the invisible, and with the scopic at the center of the storyline. The plot centers on the story of photographer Joaquin Buitrago’s obsessive love for Matilda Burgos, a woman that he meets first as a prostitute, and then, in the asylum La Castañeda. Joaquin’s lens becomes the reader’s mediated access to the socio-historical context of Mexico at the onset of the twentieth century. The first line of the novel establishes the link between madness and photography as it opens with a question, “¿Cómo se convierte uno en un fotógrafo de locos?” [“How does one come to be a photographer of crazy people?”]. The strategy is to establish a constant dialogue through a series of questions, thus conforming to the Mikhail Bakhtin dialogical method used in discourse analysis.4 Repetitive questions such as “¿Cómo se llega a ser fotógrafo de putas?” [“How do you become a photographer of prostitutes?”], “¿Cómo se convierte en una loca?” [“How do you become a crazy woman?”], and others of that sort will function as markers in spatial and temporal jumps throughout the narrative.5 In the process, parody, pastiche and fragmentation alternate throughout the narrative allowing the reader to see into the complex dimensions of the so-called “mad,” “criminal” and “excluded” in Mexico. Rivera Garza’s narrative delivers a compelling message that corresponds to Foucault’s concept of madness and confinement. In an era that witnessed the demise of the thirty-year-old dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the outbreak of a revolutionary war that cost more than one million lives, and the rise of regimes that sought to rebuild the Mexican nation, the 4

See Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Discourse of the Novel” in The Dialogical Imagination. Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, Ed Michael Holoquist. Austin: University of Texas, 1981. 5 These questions are repeated several times through the novel. In this case, the questions are without citation because, as stated in the analysis, they work as markers in spatial and temporal jumps throughout the narrative.

46

Chapter Three

State saw the asylum as a segregation strategy to protect society from contagion. But without clear lines to distinguish madness from reason, such segregation was touted as an effective social control practice that displaced whomever was considered the rotten scum of society (Rivera Garza, “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone” 3-4). Confinement was thus a way to exert control on potentially dangerous members of society, just as Foucault documented in History of Madness. One of the issues at the core of Rivera Garza’s text is the definition of madness and who decides on the condition of insanity. Madness is associated with deviant behaviors, but in the case of women, insanity is diagnosed when normative models of femininity are at stake. That is the case of Matilda Burgos whose mental state is questionable. Matilda’s diagnosis is based on her sexual history, considered the true source of deviance and mental derangement. By presenting real women’s clinical histories from the archives of the Castañeda, Rivera Garza posits the question of whether insanity was declared merely based on perceived sexually deviant behavior. The detailed descriptions registered in the third chapter of the novel reveal the range of terminology used to diagnose women’s disturbances: from evil impulses to religious delirium and irrational jealousy, and from indigence to violence, the most persistent diagnosis being the ambiguous claim of “moral insanity”. In her thesis and articles, and subsequent book about the Asylum La Castañeda, Rivera Garza examines the prominent use of “moral insanity” to conclude that it was the main diagnosis and a marker of mental illness for women who did not fit the social and religious standards of the times. She explains that while most European and American psychiatrists were no longer using the term “moral insanity” to classify patients, it was one of the most frequently used diagnoses to describe women’s mental illness in Mexico (Rivera Garza, La Castañeda 123, 126). Therefore, anyone with a sexual questionable past, adulterous, exhibitionist tendencies or with behavior considered as “unleashing passions” was catalogued as insane. This arbitrariness corresponds with the assertions of Gilbert and Gubar, Clément and Showalter, that women who subvert the norms imposed by society are the witches, the monsters, the insane and the hysterical as opposed to the model of mother goddess, angel, virgin and fairy. Moral insanity is also presented along the lines of social and political injustice. Thus, rebels and political activists of the time such as Cástulo Rodríguez and Diamantina were considered mentally disturbed and confined to an asylum or disappeared from society. Through a well-crafted narrative, the novel exposes nearsightedness and blindness in the murky terrain of psychiatric practice. Characters in

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

47

the novel are always depicted as standing on the borderline between sanity and insanity. This ambiguity is achieved through the dialogue exchanges between the patient Joaquin Buitrago, and the asylum’s director, Eduardo Oligochea. They address each other in a contesting and continuous motion, deliberating subverting the relations of power of doctor-patient, and questioning who is in greater need of mental health treatment. In the same way Rivera Garza subverts the relationship of history and micro-history, sexual preferences, and social regulations by inverting values and by questioning normativity. Rivera Garza’s narrative does not judge. It exposes facts through real life stories and historical events. She transcends the fragile line of memory through the photographic artifice. It is her way of registering testimony: seeing the world through others’ eyes. And that is the role of Joaquin’s camera lens: to capture and preserve memory from the dark side of reality. In a way, photography as a language becomes the invisible sign, as given by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida: “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see” (6). In the same way, Nadie me vera llorar plays with the combination of light and dark, black and white, fixed images and blurred ones to depict this “invisible sign,” the one the reader does not see, but is still there. The text as a whole is a kaleidoscope of historical events and celebrities, places and locations in times and spaces revealing Mexico at the turn of century and its insertion into modernity.6 The narrative style attempts to reach snap shots in a technique described by Jorge Ruffinelli in these terms: Su novela se desenvuelve en torno a momentos particulares, aparentemente (o realmente) disgregados entre sí, sin la necesidad de esforzarlos a formar parte de un hilo cronológico tal como entendemos convencionalmente el discurso histórico (35). [The novel unfurls around specific moments, apparently (or in reality) disconnected among them, without the need to force them to become part of a chronological sequence within what we understand conventionally as historical discourse (35).]

6

Rivera Garza’s explanation of her thesis, later adapted for her novel: “This is a work intentionally full of rough edges, angles, sudden interruptions and arrests. This text does not tell a story the way it really was but tries to capture a few moment of danger in a kaleidoscopic montage that welcomes contradictions and challenges order” (as quoted in Ruffinelli 34).

48

Chapter Three

Following Walter Benjamin’s method, the story, according to Ruffinelli, focuses on the particular, not the general, and is told in nonchronological sequences in an attempt to disarticulate time and space, and to focus on the ethereal, the perpetual/fixed image that defeats both (970). How do you become a photographer of the mad? Joaquin’s camera lens registers and preserves history—not the official one, but the micro-history, the one that has gone untold, unseen and unwritten. Joaquin has learned to see and hopes that through his photographs someone will learn to see too. Through this assertion, the connection of madness and gaze conveys Foucault’s statement that … while the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary images, the fool, the insane, bears in his eyes the density of an invisible knowledge (22).

In the novel, the scopic field is widened through the lens of those considered insane, as they are the ones who have widened the angle of vision. Therefore, madness is symbolically as blurry as an out-of-focus photograph. At the end of the novel, the main character, Matilda, is given the choice of leaving the asylum to resume her life among those who are considered sane. However, in an interesting twist, Matilda chooses to return to the asylum, where she is “free” to be the person she has decided to be: free from society’s demands, impositions and regulations, liberated even from Joaquin, his love, his gaze, his imposing protection and his photographic obsession. This ending establishes the contradiction of the novel. The opposition between language and silence, darkness and light is summarized, “Pronto podrá regresar a su refugio, a ese lugar sin puertas que Eduardo Oligochea denonima locura” (Nadie me verá llorar 198) [“Soon she will be able to return to her refuge, to that place without doors that Eduardo Oligochea calls madness” (No One Will See Me Cry 198)]. The refuge is that place, where there are no eyes, no sense in language and no plot. Instead, it is the sum of irrationality.

IV: A Poetic of Madness If Cristina Rivera Garza delivers a message about Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century, in her novel Delirio Laura Restrepo uses madness to tell a truth about Colombian society entrapped by multiple forms of insanity at the turn of the millennium. Restrepo creates in her narrative a poetic of madness, casting insanity from the individual to the collective, from the social to the political, from the country to the continent. Reason

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

49

and unreason are expressed in all fashions by multiple actors in a polyphony of voices that transcend time and space. In Delirio, the narrative unfolds in vertical and horizontal axes in a dialectic of madness. The vertical axis reflects the individual and personal level while the horizontal axis carries the social and collective. Together both dimensions blend in the character of Agustina, who condenses the sum of all madness. Delirio combines past, present, and future in a series of events that revolve around a simple quest: why and how Agustina lost her reason. Like moons spinning around Agustina, at the center of the plot is her family’s system of falsehood, and grandfather Portulinus’s history of dementia on one side (the vertical axis). On the other side is Midas McAlister, the link with the underworld of drug trafficking and illicit money laundering in Bogota’s high class’ circles (the horizontal axis). The sanest character is Aguilar, Agustina’s partner, the one acting as the detective in the quest for discovery of the root of Agustina’s crisis. The novel is articulated through layers of narrations that superimpose on one another creating a puzzle. Restrepo exploits the stream of consciousness as a narrative technique with multiple interchangeable and intersecting voices that produce a sense of delirium in the reader resembling that of Agustina’s state of mind. Restrepo guides this quest by providing clues embedded throughout the text using myth, ritual and vision. The reader’s role is to be the active agent in a process of articulating and piecing together the riddle to decipher the enigma of Agustina’s madness. In her childhood, Agustina discovers that she possesses the gift of second sight el don de los ojos. This power is described as the ability to foresee the future, a sort of clairvoyance that usually manifests itself when she perceives danger that her father might lash out at her brother, Bichi. To protect him Agustina devises a strange ritual that combines purification through water with the contemplation of secret photographs. Women’s power of second sight is a recurrent motif in literature and a tropos through biblical and mythological reminiscences. It connects supernatural vision to a source of punishment. In Greek mythology, Cassandra’s prophetic gift allows her to foresee the destruction of Troy. However, she was unable to forestall the tragedy. As Gilbert and Gubar argue, clairvoyance is a tool to confront dispossession: Many literary works resort to women’s powers of sight to illustrate how those cut off from political power may exploit their passivity by becoming instruments compelled by higher forces, even as they are drawn to what constitutes a shortcut to authority through a personal relationship with spiritual powers presumably beyond the control of man (474).

50

Chapter Three

In Delirio, Agustina’s powers of second sight are the crux of her misfortune, just as they were for Cassandra. Agustina’s “gift of the eyes” develops in adulthood into the ability to foresee what is concealed to others. But there are threats her power cannot control, dangers from the outside. From childhood she understands that the external world is a constant threat and something from which she needs to be protected. The protector is her father, the center of authority and power, whom she adores and fears at the same time. However, Agustina’s powers are vulnerable to the presence of blood. She learns this in her youth when she is shocked to witness the death of a poor man at her front door. The vision of his bleeding body paralyzes her and makes her realize her vulnerability to blood. Then, when she had her first period, her mother became enraged at her lack of modesty. Agustina understands that the powers of blood are superior to hers, as the flow of blood is unstoppable and unspeakable. Only water can control the will of blood. In adulthood, Agustina’s gift of second sight is at the root of her mental breakdown. Her delirium is the result of a series of events that fall upon her sensibility and ability to see below the surface. She has been the recipient of the deceiving scheme surrounding her. At the family level, the world of appearances and falsehoods destroys Agustina’s perception of reality; at the social level, the horror of discovering Midas’s money laundering and drug trafficking business in which her own family is involved, causes her to have a breakdown. Agustina falls into a delirium for being alone in her ability of seeing beyond an apparently normal veneer. She cannot cope with the impression of discovering the truth, and loses her mental faculties in the process. Following women’s fate for seeing beyond physical reality, Agustina is punished for witnessing the unbearable and imponderable. All the elements that constructed her personality in childhood rituals, gift of second sight, and fearsintersect to create a shock that causes her outbreak of delirium. The resolution of the novel is perplexing and enigmatic. Did Agustina recover her reason? No one knows, but it is no longer relevant. The text as a whole confronts readers with the challenge of seeing or remaining blind towards the reality surrounding them. Henceforth, the novel operates in a specular fashion: the polyphony of voices face one another in a mirrored reflection by unveiling the inverse side of reality. They reflect and refract common realities for Colombians, who stopped seeing their own world, rather seeing instead the media representation of the country they want to see. The novel’s specular technique provides a warning premonition of what could become of a country and a region that insists in denying its

Behind the Mirror: Narratives of Madness

51

own true self. Restrepo assumes Agustina’s powers of clairvoyance when she foresees Colombia’s future: [Y] vinieron los utileros y alzaron con todo y ya cayó el telón, hasta el mismo Pablo un fantasma, y fantasmal por completo este país; si no fuera por las bombas y las ráfagas de metralla que resuenan a distancia y que me mandan sus vibraciones hasta acá, juraría que ese lugar llamado Colombia hace mucho dejó de existir (my emphasis; Delirio 327). [The stagehands have carried everything away and now the curtain has fallen, even Pablo is a ghost, the whole country itself is ghostly, and if it wasn’t for the bombs and the bursts of machine-gun fire that echo in the distance, the tremors reaching me here, I’d swear that the place called Colombia had stopped existing long ago (Delirium 305).7]

Colombia’s disappearance as a result of social madness becomes the text’s most urgent forewarning. Allegorically, Restrepo is fighting the dementia affecting the country, the region and the intricate powers, abetting the violence that results from refusing to apprehend and to confront plain realities. In mythical terms, Delirio is comparable to the tragedy of Cassandra: Agustina falls into madness when she deciphers a truth that connects past, present and future. She is unable to cope with such a truth, and falls into a self-inflicted chastisement, the same type of punishment given to Cassandra, according to the Greek myth. That is the enigma at the core of Delirio. Through a poetic of madness reflecting society in crisis at the personal and social level, Restrepo delivers a message that transcends the fine line between reason and unreason, an inscrutable chaos of a country living in a stage of hyperreality as a pathway to survive daily existence. The narratives analyzed in this chapter posit a questioning about a world at its limits. The writers’ common theme is the way they perceive and present reality through another prism. Gaze and vision are the recurrent motifs of both texts as they expose socio-political realities from an alternative perspective. Both texts expose the link between the eye and mental disturbances used as an artifice. While Rivera Garza uses the photograph to subvert the redefinition of boundaries between history and micro history, visibility and invisibility, Restrepo uses myth, ritual and vision to expose the blurry line between reality and hyperreality and to transcend the borderline separating reason and unreason. 7

The Spanish and English versions are from different editions: please see bibliography.

52

Chapter Three

Foucault defined literature of madness as a medium to raise the critical consciousness of humanity. Women writers in Latin America are using their literary tools provided by postmodernism. One of these tools is the allegory of madness as a literary artifice in several forms: to revert feminine marginalization, to reflect changes in women’s positioning in society, to raise awareness about a world in crisis, and to denounce social and political struggles in Latin America.

CHAPTER FOUR SUBVERSIONS OF MOTHERHOOD: THE SLEUTH IN CLAUDIA PIÑEIRO’S CRIME FICTION MICHELE C. DÁVILA GONÇALVES SALEM STATE UNIVERSITY1

Although she wasn’t the first, the most popular female sleuth was created in 1930 by British author Agatha Christie (1890-1976) when she introduced Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster, as an investigator of mysteries and crimes during what is now considered the Golden Age of the detective novel.2 The main goal of early detective fiction was either the detection of a criminal, usually an assassin, or the solving of an enigma. Deductive reasoning was the basis of the investigation of the mystery, and the detective, using keen observation, and interviewing witnesses, on occasion with the aid of a companion or a member of the police force, exposed the criminal at the end of the novel in a narrative full of suspense.

1

I would like to thank Dr. Keja Valens of Salem State University for her insight, help and suggestions for this paper. 2 Some early female sleuths are Loveday Brooke, created by Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1841-1910), and Miss Climpson, created by Dorothy L. Sayers (18931957), both British. On the other side of the Atlantic there are the Americans Amelia Butterworth by Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935), as well as Miss Pinkerton and Miss Rachel Innes created by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958). The best-known Golden Age authors of male detective fiction include the creator of the genre, American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) with his amateur sleuth Auguste Dupin; British Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) with the popular intellectual Sherlock Holmes; French writer Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) with the “gentleman thief” Arsène Lupin; and Belgian Georges Simenon (19031989) with police commissioner Jules Maigret. In addition, there is the well-known Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, also created by Dame Agatha Christie.

54

Chapter Four

After this first wave of the detective novel another sub-genre developed during the thirties and forties: hard-boiled fiction. In this narrative the detective was always a man, typically a loner, who roamed the city interviewing witnesses and solving crimes while meeting dangerous characters.3 This type of detective fiction is known for the use of social critique while demonstrating a more vulnerable detective. In contrast, the female characters in these novels were either damsels in distress that needed to be rescued, or femmes fatales, who provided the detective’s fleeting love interest. This wouldn’t change until several decades later.4 My interest is to study how the tradition of the detective novel has evolved among Hispanic female authors. It could be stated that in Latin American societies women, for the most part, didn’t necessarily follow their North American feminist counterparts, but rather maintained their consecrated roles of wives and mothers. However, in the literature it is evident that this has not translated into happy families. In this chapter I will be focusing on the postmodern Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro who has published five crime novels which subvert not only the detective novel but also other sub-genres such as the thriller. Her female sleuths are a series of non-typical characters which can include younger and older mothers, and high society wives. While playing with the popular formula Piñeiro insidiously provides social criticism of a decaying family structure, and therefore the hypocritical Argentinian upper-class society. The author showcases families in traditional settings, but actually they are more of an “imagined community” than a real one. Piñeiro’s main characters undermine and transgress the normative precepts of motherhood and the sacred role of loving mother, which can be understood in relation to Julia Kristeva’s æsthetic of the abject, which is what is horrible, murderous, and grotesque in life. Kristeva forewarned that the æsthetic of the abject would increasingly permeate the relationship of women and society, and it can be argued that that has become truer in developing nations such as Argentina, .

3

The writers most closely associated with this tradition are the Americans Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ross Macdonald. 4 Other British female detectives during the twentieth century are Cordelia Gray by P.D. James (1920), Anna Lee by Liza Cody (1944), and Catherine Sayler by Linda Grant (1951). From the United States there are Kinsey Millhone by Sue Grafton (1940), Blanche White by Barbara Neely (1941), Kat Colorado by Karen Kijewski (1943), Sharon McCone by Marcia Muller (1944), V.I. Warshawski by Sara Paretsky (1947), Tamara Hayle by Valerie Wilson Wesley (1947), Emma Victor by Mary Wings (1949), Pam Nilsen and Cassandra Reilly by Barbara Wilson [now Sjoholm] (1950), and Nan Hayes by Charlotte Carter (date of birth unknown).

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

55

especially after the military regime maintained silence throughout the years of the Dirty War (1976-1983) about the “desaparecidos”, the sons and daughters of hundreds of mothers who disappeared. How do two apparently completely opposite ideas, motherhood and the abject, come together in Piñeiro’s crime novels? This chapter analyzes this question in two of her novels because they particularly highlight the paradoxical aspects of being a mother. These are Tuya (All Yours) and Elena sabe (Elena Knows). Both exemplify postfeminist Latin American narrative, the re-writing of crime fiction with a new type of sleuth. For the analysis I will take into account Kristeva’s studies about the polysemic metaphor of motherhood and the representation of the abject discussed in her essays “Women’s Time”, “Stabat Mater”, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident”, and in her book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. But first, to better understand how Piñeiro subverts the detective novel, I present a brief summary of the progression of contemporary feminine crime fiction based on Leo Horsley’s historical research in his seminal work Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction.

I: Feminine Crime Fiction Horsley, using a dialogic approach, explains that in general during the sixties the female characters of female authored crime fiction had two options, either “resist or remained trapped within oppressive domestic circumstances” (253). He believes that in the seventies the crime novel failed to “harmonize surface images of female empowerment” with its inherent contradictions, but helped to expose gender stereotyping and crisis in the family (Horsley 253). In the eighties the “chick dick” arose, a hard-boiled female investigator who was not afraid of carrying guns. Horsley explains: She takes the autobiographical voice that is so important a feature of the hard-boiled and turns up the volume, producing a confessional, hectoring, self-lacerating, balls-out monologue that makes a show of hiding nothing from its audience. (263)

In addition to private eye novels, starting at the end of the eighties, the lesbian detective novel appeared, and furthermore, several series by black women writers also began to be published (Horsley 275-276). In the nineties the noir or crime novel surges with a female protagonist who “struggles simply to survive, to resist the binary opposition between male ascendancy and female debasement” (Horsley 282). From this decade, in what it is known in the literary world as the postmodern period, unsolved

56

Chapter Four

crimes and a persistent pessimism regarding society and its laws become more common. This is also the beginning of the abject rhetoric, where ambiguity, the grotesque and the loss of empowerment of citizens and police seeking justice are observed as a common trait. With regard to the new female investigators, Horsley clarifies: They imbue the male stereotype … with qualities intended to differentiate the new, female version from the old-fashioned, culpable male model … What change most markedly are the social and moral contexts within which these qualities are brought into play. (249)

One example of the “new breed” is the lesbian crime fiction by Barbara Wilson and Mary Wings, for instance. The genre generates what Horsley calls a “double unveiling”, because the novel inherently makes two revelations, one about the crime being investigated and the other the true sexual identity of the female sleuth (250-251). This “surprise” has been part of the genre, and other binary pairings have been used to innovate or, some might even say, destabilize the genre while playing with ambiguities regarding the criminal/victim and the detective/criminal. In addition: [b]y writing novels centering on the victim or the transgressor, writers offer kinds of awareness, accounts of society as seen from the margins, that act to expose the perspectives of those at the cent[er] (Horsley 252).

In many cases, the center of this feminist crime and detective fiction is from the point of view of a woman, and in this sense the genre is being rewritten, or “regendering” itself (as Horsley states), addressing the paradoxes and complexities of life and, even more, of our present-day society. Therefore, crime fiction focuses on female characters who are living under pressure of a patriarchal and, in many cases, violent society. Pertaining to this pressure, it can be argued that it also comes from a white-centered society. Taking into account the black female detective novel, Maureen T. Reddy explains: They expose the limits of that earlier white feminist revision of detective fiction by addressing issues of race and class as well as gender, with all of their series treating racism as a fundamental fact of life and as an absolutely central component of the dominant ideology. While the white feminist writers critique the intense masculinity of the hardboiled tradition, for instance, the women writers of col[o]r critique both that masculinity and the normative whiteness of the genre (202).

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

57

Crime fiction in itself not only challenges the literary genre but also female stereotypes, not idealizing the female character and showing how transgressive, fragmented and even demented, she can be. Crime fiction, therefore “offers readers disturbing and unconventional perspectives on contemporary reality” (Horsley 287). However, this regendering the genre of the detective novel does not involve only the investigator. Horsley affirms: “The revisionings of the female transgressor—and indeed victim—are as significant as the betterknown series which recast the investigative role” (244). The typical Manichean binary in male hard-boiled detective novels, the good and weak woman as the victim and the evil femme fatale, is contested in female detective novels: “Contemporary female crime writers … have been preoccupied with difference … Their investigators are women who set about resisting and ‘challenging the inherent maleness' of a genre” (Horsley 246). Certain critics, such as Kathleen Gregory Klein in The Woman Detective, show that some feminist writers have merely reproduced the male detective novel, specifically hard-boiled ones (Horsley 246). Nevertheless, this assertion has also recently been contested owing to the fact that female writers continue to rework the genre through innovation, especially among traditionally marginalized groups, and in many cases maintain the hard-boiled structure because it is conducive to social protest. Private investigators such as the gritty V.I. Warshawski, and Kinsey Milhone in the alphabetical mysteries, are heroines used by hard-boiled women crime writers “to comment on the failings of patriarchal institutions” (Horsley 249). And although they have been criticized as being too close to their male counterparts, they also subvert the stereotypical male qualities and, following Horsley’s argument, emphasize four distinctive characteristics of postmodern female crime fiction: the notion of being part of a community, empathy with the victim, open-ended plots, and a strong female voice for the narrator or the central character. Since the start of the feminist movement, it has been evident that there has been an increase of women writing crime and detective fiction and a new interest in female sleuths as protagonists (Horsley 243). Recently, female crime fiction writers have revisited and subverted all sub-genres of the literary tradition, among which are the detective novel, the noir, the thriller, the spy novel and the police procedural. This subversion of the original parameters, typical in postmodern times, has been categorized by some critics as “anti-detective” (William Spanos, Stefano Tani), or even metaphysical (Patricia Merivale, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Michael

58

Chapter Four

Holquist).5 I have a problem with this nomenclature because it tries to minimize the main outcome of the genre which is the desire to solve an enigma or murder, and the trajectory of the investigation carried out by a concerned agent. From the start, the genre has always been a malleable one, and its framework makes it apt for social critique (as I mentioned, one of the main points of the hard-boiled fiction), and in the case of female fiction specifically, for gender questioning and contextual discussions. The apparent uncertainty of the open endings of the new detective fiction does not pose a problem to the main resolution of the enigma/crime, which in most cases is achieved, although not explored to its ultimate consequences, in, for example, Hispanic crime fiction, and especially the novels of Claudia Piñeiro.

II: The Hispanic Sleuth By the sixties, female writers were publishing extensively in the Hispanic world. Critic Héctor Mario Cavallari summarizes this tendency: Se perfila … una marcada tendencia a desmitificar los esquemas ideológicos patriarcales que han privado a la mujer de autonomía y se manifiesta un deseo de liberar la existencia y el discurso femenino de sus restricciones históricas tradicionales. Frecuentemente, el impulso hacia el desplazamiento y el reemplazo de las configuraciones socioculturales de dominio se satisface, en esta nueva escritura de la mujer, mediante reinscripciones de los mitos y los rituales cotidianos, de la historia y la leyenda; por la sustitución de una “mitología alternativa” que se proyecta hacia las relaciones familiares y otras; y por un énfasis agudizado puesto sobre las propiedades discursivas suplementales del cuerpo femenino y del propio proceso de escritura (32). [It is shaping up … a strong tendency to demystify patriarchal ideological approaches which have deprived women of autonomy; and there is an explicit desire to liberate women existence and the female discourse of its traditional and historical restrictions. In this new writing of women, the impulse towards the displacement and replacement of the sociocultural domain configurations is satisfied through the re-writing of myths, everyday rituals, history and legends. The cultural domain proxy’s toward the substitution of an alternative “mythology” which is projected within relationship in general; and by an exacerbated emphasis on the discursive properties of the female body and the process of writing (32).] 5

Mónica Flórez analyzes these two concepts in her article “Elena sabe y los enigmas de la novela policiaca antidetectivesca/metafísica,” which focuses on Elena’s identity auto-discovery.

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

59

It wasn't until the eighties that female investigators in the Hispanic world first started to appear serially in Spain, with Maria-Antònia Oliver’s hard-boiled detective Liòna Giui, and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s police officer Petra Delicado.6 Up to the present Spain has produced the largest number of female detective writers in the Hispanic world, including the first lesbian detective, Isabel Franc’s Emma García, with her inseparable Montse Murals.7 Gianna M. Martella in “Pioneers: Spanish American Women Writers of Detective Fiction”, mentions Latin American female writers who sporadically wrote, or were otherwise instrumental in the production of mystery short-stories or novels earlier such as Silvina Ocampo, María Elvira Bermúdez, Syria Poletti and María Angélica Bosco.8 In Brazil there are the examples of Patrícia Galvão, Raquel de Queiroz, Maria Alice Barroso, and postmodern writer Patrícia Melo.9 Regarding Latino

6

Maria-Antònia Oliver, a Catalan, published Estudi en lila (1985), Antipodes (1988), and El sol que fa l’anec (1994). Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Petra Delicado series include Ritos de muerte (1996), Días de perros (1997), Mensajeros de la oscuridad (1999), Muertos de papel (2000), Serpientes en el paraíso (2002), Un barco cargado de arroz (2004), Nido vacío (2007) and El silencio de los claustros (2009). Let me say that I am aware that there are precursors in Spain of female writers who delved into the detective narrative such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Mercè Rodoreda, Maria-Aurèlia Capman and Lourdes Ortiz (Vosburg 58), but they wrote isolated texts with no continuing detective, such as Rosa Montero’s excursion into the genre with La hija del caníbal (1997). 7 Using her alter ego Lola Van Guardia, Franc published the trilogy Con pedigree (1997) Plumas de doble filo (1999), and La mansión de las tríbadas (2002), in which García was introduced as one of various characters. In 2004 she published Lola Van Guardia dice: no me llames cariño as a mystery novel with García as the main detective. 8 Silvina Ocampo, in collaboration with her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, published the novel Los que aman, odian (1943); Mexican María Elvira Bermúdez was the editor of detective anthologies; Italian-born Syria Poletti wrote the 1964 detective short-story “Rojo en la salina” in Argentina; and Argentinean María Angélica Bosco is considered to be the first woman to publish detective fiction in the country with La muerte baja por el ascensor (1954) and La muerte soborna a Pandora (1956). 9 Patrícia Galvão wrote several pulp fiction novels during the 1940s under the pseudonym King Shelter, which were published in the 1998 compilation Safra macabra; Raquel de Queiroz participated in a collaborative effort with ten male writers in O mistério dos MMM (1964); Maria Alice Barroso published Um nome para matar (1967) and Quem matou Pacifico (1984), and the prolific writer of criminal novels Patrícia Melo wrote O matador (1995), Elogio da mentira (1998),

60

Chapter Four

literature, the most prolific Latina writers of contemporary detective novels in the United States are Chicana writer Lucha Corpi with detective Gloria Damasco, and Cuban-American Carolina García Aguilera with private eye Lupe Solano.10 Following the precepts of the original detective novel, some recognized Latin American female writers have preferred the Golden Age model of the amateur sleuth as the investigator who tries to solve an enigma or a murder in texts that are not limited structurally to the popular known formula, opening themselves to many literary possibilities including delving into other genres such as diaries, metafiction, journalistic reports, and science fiction.11 In Argentina, Claudia Piñeiro is a contemporary writer and playwright who counts the following popular crime novels in her literary production: Tuya, Las viudas de los jueves, which received the Clarín prize and was also made into a movie in 2009; Elena sabe, which received the LiBeraturpreis prize; Las grietas de Jara, which received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize and is now also being made into a movie; and Betibú.12 In two of her novels Piñeiro brings an interesting aspect to the Inferno (2000), Valsa negra (2003), Mundo perdido (2006), Ladrão de cadáveres (2010), and Escrevendo no escuro (2011). 10 Lucha Corpi’s novels are: Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Cactus Blood (1995), Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999), Crimson Moon (2004), and Death at Solstice (2009). Carolina García Aguilera’s novels are: Bloody Waters (1996), Bloody Shame (1997), Bloody Secrets (1998), A Miracle in Paradise (1999), Havana Heat (2000), Bitter Sugar (2001), and Bloody Twist (2010). Other Latino writers are Argentinian-American Lidia Lopinto, who together with her husband Charles Lopinto published a series of eco-mysteries dealing with environmental crimes with the detective Juliana Del Rio teamed with Sean Ryan in the novels The Case of the Toxic Cruiseline: Agents Fight Pollution (2000), The Adventures of Juliana Del Rio: EPA/FBI - #1: The Case of Ocean Polluters in Alaska (2002), The Adventures of Juliana Del Rio: EPA/FBI - #2: The Case of the Toxic Train Derailment (2002), and Ecocide Files (2007); and Puerto Rican/Russian Jew Michele Martinez narrates the adventures of prosecutor Melanie Vargas in her novels Most Wanted (2005), The Finishing School (2006), Cover-Up (2007), and Notorious (2008). 11 Some examples are Puerto Ricans Ana Lydia Vega, with her female writer/sleuth in the short-story Pasión de historia (1987), Mayra Montero with a male reporter in the novel Son de almendra (2005), and Mayra Santos Febres with a male writer in the novel Cada miércoles seré tuya (2002). And Gail González analyzes the subversions of the genre in El umbral (1998) by Argentinean writer Graciela Montes in “La evolución de la novel policial argentina en la posdictadura”. 12 Piñeiro also has the unpublished novel El secreto de las rubias (1991), that won the La sonrisa vertical prize, two books for young readers, Serafín, el escritor y la

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

61

investigative role in crime fiction that is not common in white female crime fiction: the role of a mother as sleuth.13 In Tuya and Elena sabe the mothers are the axes of unraveling the truth of the narrative enigma. In these novels Piñeiro not only challenges the maleness of crime fiction, as other female authors do, but she also questions the established meanings of motherhood, especially in the Argentinian upper class context. The sleuths in Piñeiro’s novels do not replicate the formula either of male or female detective fiction: instead, they destabilize gender-imposed roles by mocking them. They are mothers full of paradoxes and contradictions; they have agency but they are also transgressors. Their maternal instincts can be either poignant or severely flawed, sometimes even causing what Kristeva might call “a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis” (Moi 206). In Tuya and Elena sabe Piñeiro subverts the image of motherhood in crime fiction. This subversion stems from the diverse faces of motherhood presented. First, there is the satire of the seemingly deranged woman in Tuya, in which her role as a wife ironically superimposes itself on her role as a mother as she tries to salvage a non-existent marriage. And second, there is the mortally ill elderly mother in Elena sabe who seeks her daughter’s assassin, who ultimately does not exist, and has to come to terms with her daughter's suicide. To understand how contemporary writers such as Piñeiro, represent motherhood, it is opportune to discuss some of its notions according to Kristeva’s Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Focusing principally on the role of the mother among past and present feminists, Kristeva admits in “Women’s Time”: The desire to be a mother, considered alienating and even reactionary by the preceding generations of feminists, has obviously not become a standard for the present generation. But we have seen in the past few years an increasing number of women who not only consider their maternity compatible with their professional life or their feminist involvement … but also find it indispensable to their discovery, not of the plenitude, but of the complexity of the female experience, with all that this complexity comprises in joy and pain (Moi 205). bruja (2000) and the award-winning Un ladrón entre nosotros (2004), plus an historical novel, El fantasma de las invasiones inglesas (2010), and various plays. 13 Aside from Latin American crime fiction, interestingly, the mother as sleuth has also appeared in black American literature: “Virtually all of the black women detectives are parents or otherwise have daily responsibility for children, a circumstance that ties them to black community concerns and sharply differentiates them from their solitary white counterparts” (Reddy 202).

62

Chapter Four

This is a key difference between “second wave” feminists and postfeminists. In the twenty-first century, motherhood is still a common goal for many women, especially in minority groups and developing countries.14 Perhaps that is the reason why sleuths in American black literature and some Latin American female writers are also mothers. There seems to be no impediment to the two roles of detective and mother working together. Nevertheless, Kristeva describes a dark side of this liberated woman: It must be pointed out, however, that since the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity of exceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, conspiracy and crime (Moi 204).

This is ominously true in contemporary female literature where the abject is presented in an attempt to understand sources of violence. In her novels Piñeiro plays with the different manifestations of motherhood and not only demonstrates the paradoxical turnings of it during the last decades but also illustrates the hypocritical conceptions of what is to be a mother in traditional patriarchal societies such as Argentina. Piñeiro seems to say that motherhood can be just a mirage with the real purpose of shining an ideal aura that showcases familial perfection before a patriarchal society that cares about little more than status and, when needed, the hiding of inconvenient truths.

III: Tuya In Tuya, Inés Pereyra the housewife, mother of Laura (Lali), is not really surprised when she finds a note with a heart drawn with lipstick with the words “Te quiero” [I love you] and signed “Tuya” [Yours] in the briefcase of Ernesto, her cheating husband. She starts following clues to discover who Ernesto’s lover was, and one night she follows him to a park and witnesses, from behind a tree, how he unintentionally kills his secretary when he pushes her: in falling, she hits her head on a log and dies instantly. Inés leaves the scene and afterwards realizes that she must think for both of them if her husband is to be free of the police; she provides him with an alibi, believing that Ernesto would be so grateful that 14

As a consequence, feminist Elizabeth Badinter has felt compelled to remind French women about the struggles of the second wave feminists in Dead End Feminism (2003) and How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (2010).

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

63

he’d be eternally faithful to her. Thankfulness, however, becomes increasingly constraining for Ernesto owing to his wife’s feelings of sleuthing superiority, as well as what he sees as her cumbersome delusional behavior and manipulation. Inés believes that: Mi inteligencia es de bajo perfil, es inteligencia en las sombras, sin alharaca … Inteligencia práctica, la que sirve para las cosas de todos los días. (34) [My intelligence is the lower-profile kind, intelligence from the sidelines, with no fanfare … It’s a practical intelligence, the one that’s useful from day to day (31).15]

The “perfect housewife” does not realize that while her sleuthing skills are apparently impeccable, her role as a mother is really non-existent, and her marriage is crumbling without hope. Is she delusional or simply perverse, as Kristeva would suggest, as a consequence of the imposed restriction of patriarchal laws?16 When Inés realizes Ernesto is straying again and is trying to get rid of her by incriminating her for the murder, she seeks revenge above all, revenge even at the cost of her own freedom. The murder and consequent family crisis in Tuya is depicted ironically through the actions of the amateur sleuth, following the precept of the original detective story, but in Piñeiro’s case the investigator is a mother, not a spinster or a chick-dick, with no specific qualification or tools for the role. It becomes clear that she herself is part of the reason for the crisis of her own family, because of her obsession with maintaining the appearance of her seventeen-year, perfect marriage and household. As the narration progresses, the reader obtains enough information to gather that the reason Inés married in the first place was because she fell pregnant, and trapped her husband who had never told her that he loved her. To salvage this relationship Inés turns into a pseudo-spy and seems to be living in a thriller:

15

All English translations of Tuya, and corresponding page numbers, are by Miranda France in the edition titled All Yours published in 2011. 16 Explaining Kristeva’s perception of motherhood, Vanessa Vilches-Norat states: “Kristeva concluye que lo maternal es el espacio de la perversión femenina por excelencia debido al masoquismo ambivalente de sufrir (parto, crianza) y el anonimato exigido cuando se transmite la norma social” (61) [Kristeva concludes that the maternal is the quintessential space of feminine perversion owing to the ambivalent masochism of suffering (childbirth, upbringing) and the required anonymity when social norms are transmitted (61)].

64

Chapter Four Lo único importante era mantenerse alerta, estar segura de que la relación [between Ernesto and Tuya] no avanzaba. Por eso empecé a revisarle los bolsillos, a abrirle la correspondencia, a controlarle la agenda, a escuchar del otro teléfono cuando él hablaba (12). [All that mattered was to be vigilant, to be sure that the relationship was not developing. So I started going through his pockets, opening his mail, keeping an eye on his diary, listening in on the extension when he was on the telephone (6).]

She investigates the house and finds all the incriminating evidence Ernesto had laid around and intuitively puts them in a safe place because “Una nunca sabe” (25) [“You never know” (22)]. In an interview published online with Alexandra Ávila, the author has stated that what interested her in this novel was the notion of creating suspense, which is a key element in both the detective novel and the thriller, although she admits this is not a typical detective novel. In fact the text is a palimpsest of other genres. It mainly contains Inés’s interior monologue, narrated by a third omniscient narrator, but the novel also includes chapters of pure dialogue, police reports, forensic information, Ines’s own detective notes, touristic information about Rio de Janeiro, encyclopedic notes on the meaning of proper names, a witness declaration, and a phrenology text. The satirical tone of the implicit author and the ironic subtext are obvious from the beginning. Indeed, Piñeiro’s narrative path is a dialogic one that at first seems random, but clearly serves as a scheme for the reader, who needs to turn into a detective to be able to reorder and fill in the gaps while digesting multiple clues. Inés establishes from the start that the absence of sex could be a problem in her marriage—there had been none for more than a month— but she did not want to rock the boat because it would be worse if her husband left just like her father did. Deluded, Inés comments: ‘Yo no voy a andar preguntando, si tengo dos ojos para ver, y una cabeza para pensar’. Y lo que veía era que teníamos una familia bárbara, una hija a punto de terminar la secundaria, una casa que más de uno envidiaría. Y que Ernesto me quería, eso nadie lo podía negar. Él nunca me hizo faltar nada. (9-10). [“Rather than start asking questions, I’m going to trust the evidence of my own two eyes.” And what I saw was that we had a fantastic family, a daughter about to finish secondary school, a house to die for. And that Ernesto loved me—nobody could deny that. He never deprived me of anything (3-4).]

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

65

She justifies the situation, and curiously analyzes the difference of the times: “Porque además uno ya no vive en los años sesenta, ahora uno sabe que hay otras cosas tanto o más importantes que el sexo” (10) [“Because, after all, we’re not living in the sixties an[ym]ore, nowadays people know there are other things that are just as important—or more so—than sex” (4)], a clear ironic commentary of the “new” postmodern woman who rationalizes that what the feminists started in the sixties is not so important in the present day. Analyzing the effects of irony in narrative, Israel Reyes explains: These ironies undermine the oppressive ideologies of their targets by taking their logic to its most absurd extremes, but in order to do so these ironies must speak the language of oppression (76).

Inés is living in an oppressive patriarchal situation without being conscious of it, so ingrained is the status quo in her psyche. She seems to be part of a backlash of the “second wave” feminist ideals because she is adamant that she enjoys her role as a wife and a mother. However, the implicit author pinpoints throughout the novel that this is only an appearance, a mirage: “Una tiene que ser coherente con la imagen que los demás se van formando de la mujer de un ejecutivo” (35) [“You have to fit in with other people’s idea of an executive’s wife” (33)]. What she does know is that she has to maintain the control of the family at all costs, being either a spy or an accomplice of murder, hiding evidence, or worse. Kristeva, in “Stabat Mater,” pinpoints this dark side of motherhood when she says: Feminine perversion is coiled up in the desire for law as desire for reproduction and continuity, it promotes feminine masochism to the rank of structure stabilizer (against its deviations); by assuring the mother that she may thus enter into an order that is above that of human will it gives her her reward of pleasure (Moi 183).

Inés ignores her daughter Lali because she doesn’t have time for her now that she is an adolescent, and also because Inés rationalizes that she has done everything for her since childhood, and furthermore, no one understands teenagers, anyhow. Inés starts looking at everything with a cold forensic eye, and later on the reader learns that she had been reading forensic documents to prepare herself for this task. This type of document is shown in the novel in italics, like in the following example:

66

Chapter Four La revisión del vehículo es decisiva. Hay que revisar con esmero carrocería y paragolpes. Si se comprueba que la tierra allí acumulada y la tierra de la escena del crimen son la misma, los agentes estarán ante una importante evidencia. (¡Limpiar a fondo los dos autos!) (27-28).17 [Close inspection of the vehicle is vital. The bodywork and bumpers must be scrutinized. If it can be shown that earth collected in these areas matches earth from the scene of the crime, the forensics will have discovered crucial evidence. (Clean both cars top to bottom!) (25).]

She even goes to what she at first believed was the lover’s apartment, and after carefully putting gloves on— a esa altura de mi vida llevaba vistas demasiadas series policiales como para andar dejando huellas por cualquier lado” (42). [“I had seen way too many crime drama series in my time to go leaving my prints everywhere” (41).]

—she inspects it. Inés finds nude pictures of Ernesto, two airline tickets to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a revolver; she takes all of them and hides them in the garage, still with her gloves on. These actions denote obsessiveness and planning, although the reader at first doesn’t understand exactly why. But she is not the only one. Inés’s increasingly eccentric behavior serves to expose the hypocrisy and debasement of the white, upper-middle class of Buenos Aires (a theme Piñeiro will expand upon in Las viudas de los jueves). She goes from being an astute mother with the admittedly sinister agenda of saving her husband from manslaughter, to a woman bent on saving herself at all costs, forgetting even her daughter, who deals with life on her own. In her relationship with her daughter Lali, Inés states from the outset: “Lali estaba en uno de esos días en que nadie la soporta, excepto Ernesto. A mí ya ni me afectaba, así era nuestra hija y estaba acostumbrada” (10). [“Lali was in one of those moods when nobody can stand her, apart from Ernesto. It didn’t get to me an[ym]ore; that’s just the way our daughter was, and I was used to it” (4).]

17 These forensic details are several times intercalated in the text as if the police had already found incriminatory documents in Inés’s home and rental car.

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

67

Later she says: “Las adolescentes sienten placer torturando a los padres … Son todas iguales, injustas, resentidas y tercas” (86), [“Teenage girls seem to take pleasure in tormenting their parents … They’re all the same: unfair, resentful and pig-headed” (86)]. Lali, seventeen and pregnant, only finds solace in her telephone conversations with her friend Paula in which she simply says that her mother didn’t exist. That emotional absence is confirmed by the fact that Inés doesn’t even realize that her daughter is pregnant. Lali, searching for help tries to call her boyfriend, but his mother picks up the phone and very delicately, but without any female solidarity, tells her that her “problem” is her own responsibility. When Lali decides to have an abortion she realizes that she needs a fake ID and money. Her plan is to steal the money from her mother, who in turn has stolen it from her husband. When Lali goes to look for the money, she instead finds her father’s lover’s letters, and she doesn’t know who is worse, her father for being unfaithful, or her mother for knowing this and accepting it. It seems the true feminist in the novel is the teenager, but it could be argued that her attitude changes at the end when she decides to have the baby. Nevertheless, when a compassionate stranger helps her and invites her into his home with his wife, Lali shows her independence and decides to choose a new family, disowning hers. Meanwhile, what Inés does not know is that all this time Ernesto has been playing her because he needed her support. “Tuya” is not Alicia, the secretary, although she had been his lover for seven years; it is, in fact, Alicia’s niece Charo. Inés had been deceived and mistaken the whole time; ultimately her sleuthing skills are not the best owing to her inherent blindness regarding her husband. Inés even admits: “Yo era muy tierna, siempre bien pensada, siempre confiando en el otro” (84) [“I was a bit of a soft touch, always thinking well of people, forever trusting them” (84)]. But after that wake-up call, she puts all her energy into understanding what has happened because, as every detective knows “yo no creo en las casualidades” (99) [“I don’t believe in coincidences” (101]. Inés then plans how to destroy Ernesto with the artifacts she has hidden, giving an anonymous tip-off to the police about the body deep in the lake in the park. Finally the “disappeared” body appears, in an implicit parallel with Argentina’s Dirty War and the slow process of unveiling what happened to the “desaparecidos”. Inés’s anger, however, is short-lived, and when Ernesto returns to her after spending a weekend in Brazil with Charo, his new lover, she realizes she has made a “mistake”. Inés then confesses: “Y en medio de tanta oscuridad, ver la luz y darme cuenta de qué era lo importante, cuando yo misma acababa de encender el fósforo para el incendio, me dio mucho miedo” (120-121) [“And in the midst of so much

68

Chapter Four

darkness, to see the light and realize what was important really scared me, because I had played a part in bringing disaster closer” (123)]. Is Inés a caricature of a madwoman whose ideals are out of context, the remnants of a lonely child abandoned by her own father, or a liberated woman who takes matters into her own hands? The abject, as a leitmotiv in this novel, comes full circle when the mother/sleuth voluntarily becomes an assassin, killing Charo in order to incriminate her husband. Some of Horsley’s characteristics of the postmodern female crime novel are apparent in this novel, while others are not, or are shown in an ambivalent form. First, Inés lives in her own world; she doesn’t have the notion of being part of a community, as Horsley states; therefore, she is different from the model of the feminine sleuth. She doesn’t need a companion or the help of the police. When Inés goes to the police it is because of revenge, as she is setting up her husband for the crime. A consequence of being part of a community is that there is a feeling of empathy among members of the group. In contrast, Inés watches without any feelings as her husband’s lover dies. It is not until after she feels betrayed by the next lover (Charo), that Inés feels for Alicia, thinking about the pain that the secretary had gone through in being betrayed by her niece. The open-endedness of the novel follows a postmodern characteristic, because the reader does not know exactly what is going to happen, but both spouses are murderers and it is expected that they will have to pay for their crimes, even if they are ironically charged for the incorrect ones. Lastly, there is a strong female voice in Inés; but the question arises whether it is reliable. Tuya is a postmodern text that parodies and subverts the detective/criminal novel and the notions of motherhood at the same time. The sleuth is a totally absent mother who has internalized the traditional patriarchal ideology of motherhood, and in fact blatantly mocks the sixties feminists, yet goes beyond her idea of the perfect family and slowly becomes so deranged that she becomes an assassin like her husband. Piñeiro’s multifaceted feminine discourse plays with the different layers of motherhood and paradoxically uses a supposedly typical mother who not only defends the abject in her life, as when she tries to save her husband from jail, but goes deeper into madness and debasement when she herself becomes responsible for a murder while her daughter is contemplating an abortion. The squeaky clean appearance of the traditional well-to-do Argentinian family dissolves into a contradictory world that itself mocks the feminist backlash of newer generations of woman. Piñeiro is telling us that the perfect family simply does not exist, and never did.

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

69

IV: Elena sabe In Elena sabe, Piñeiro brings forth another original sleuth and another contradictory layered representation of motherhood. In this case the investigator is an elderly mother, Elena, trying to discover the killer of her daughter Rita. The Argentinian critic Beatriz Sarlo has unfairly stated that this novel is an excuse for a specific sociological and political agenda, and that the literary part is inconsequential (Arce 19-20). I would say instead that the text is an homage to maternity, though not in an idealized way. The message in this regard is in fact double-faceted; the novel presents the pain and the love of being a mother, but also the honest articulation of another woman in the novel who does not want to become a mother. In its political/social context it shows the painful effects of ageing, Parkinson’s disease, the lamentable state of Argentina’s health-care system, and the indifference of a police system that ignores the deep sorrow of a mother who has lost a child. Elena doesn’t understand why the police force is not investigating what she considers a murder. This aspect of the novel reminds us of the mothers of the “Plaza de mayo”, with their deep pain of having lost their children during the Dirty War, and the consuming desire to know and understand what had happened to them. But there is at least one person who has compassion for Elena, the policeman in charge of the now closed case. Inspector Avellaneda patiently listens to Elena every time she goes to the station while she gives him clues and bits of information of what she remembers and finds. She is certain somebody killed her daughter because even though she was found hanging from the church’s bell tower, Elena “knows”, as in the title, that that cannot be true, because Rita never went out when there was a thunderstorm. She remembers that Rita’s father told her that the bell tower was the lightning rod of the town, and after he dies she never ventures to the church while it is raining. Elena knows the common supposition is that her daughter has committed suicide, but argues that she cannot have because “nadie puede rebatirle que Rita no se acercaba a la iglesia cuando amenazaba lluvia. No se acercaba ni muerta” (37) [“nobody could dispute that Rita didn’t go near the church when there was a chance of rain. She wouldn’t get close for anything”].18 This is plausible because the implicit narrator remembers several rituals about Rita’s life that resemble traits of an obsessive-compulsive individual:

18

All the translations of Elena sabe are the author’s.

70

Chapter Four No pisar la vereda de damero de la partera, no ir a la iglesia los días de lluvia y no acercarse a la casa de los Inchauspe ya eran bastantes complicaciones como para seguir agregando más (39). [Don’t step on the midwife’s damero plants path, don’t go to church on rainy days, and don’t approach the Inchauspe family’s home; there were enough complications without adding more (39).]

In the novel, a third person narrator details every thought Elena has in one single day. The reader is a participant in the memories of her life with Rita and the process she has gone through to find the killer while at the same time mourning the loss of her daughter. The reader also realizes Elena’s physical problem when there is a discrepancy between what her brain wants and what her body can no longer accomplish. But even with the inherent sadness of witnessing her own total physical decline, Elena is capable of self-deprecation. One example is when she draws a parallel between herself with Parkinson’s disease, and the dopamine in her brain, with a chasqui, the messenger of the Inca Empire who ran for miles to give the king’s orders to the whole realm. Elena’s brain had to give orders to the dopamine to run like a messenger throughout her body so she would be able to function properly. The lack of dopamine in her system is explained like this: Se trata de levantar el pie derecho, apenas unos centímetros del suelo, moverlo en el aire hacia adelante, tanto como para que sobrepase al pie izquierdo, y a esa distancia, la que sea, mucha o poca, hacerlo bajar … Pero no lo hace (13). [It’s about raising the right foot just a few inches above the ground, moving it forward in the air, thus overtaking the left foot, and at that distance, however much or little, putting it down … But she doesn’t do it (13).]

Her medication (Levodopa) is the only thing that can help Elena even just get out of bed. The strict schedule for taking the medicine is what governs both her day and the narration, and the routine is indispensable to her investigation because it allows her the minimal movement for continuing her search for the truth. During the narration, the difficulty Elena goes through to receive adequate, let alone compassionate, medical care becomes evident. Elena’s efforts to be a valuable member of society seem to be frustrated over and over again because it seems that for other people she no longer exists. Kristeva, in “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident”, explains:

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

71

A woman is trapped within the frontiers of her body and even of her species, and consequently always feels exiled both by the general clichés that make up a common consensus and by the very powers of generalization intrinsic to language. (Moi 296)

Although solitude, age and disease make any person feel exiled from the community of humankind and/or family, in Elena’s case the abject has also become part of her life with the murder/suicide of her daughter. At this point Elena is completely alone (a characteristic more closely related to the male loner of the hard-boiled detective fiction than even Inés in Tuya, who has at least her dysfunctional family at the beginning of the story), and with a crippling disease. To help Elena in her investigation, or in a sense to acquire the body she needs and doesn’t have because it has betrayed her (or following the detective fiction tradition, to have her Watson), she decides to find Isabel Mansilla, a woman that she and her daughter helped twenty years ago when Rita found her disoriented on the street, pregnant, and on the verge of having an abortion. This was her purpose on this specific day, to find someone who ought to be grateful to her and consent to help her. This part of the novel is enlightening because it exposes the traditional/religious ideology of maternity maintained in Latin America. In fact, in the ensuing dialogue Elena realizes that what she has always thought about “saving” Isabel is not how Isabel remembers that episode of her life, and Elena learns about her misconceptions of what it is to be a mother. After Elena reaches Isabel’s home with great difficulty, Isabel explains how she had the child Rita wanted her to have but was never happy as a mother because her marriage was a sham. She also confesses that her husband never loved her but only wanted to have a family with another man who was the love of his life. For the rest of her pregnancy the two men had had Isabel sedated and in bed, and the pictures they always sent to Elena and Rita at Christmas really depicted the only times they were ever together. Isabel states that her family life is only an appearance, a mirage, and that she had never been able to have any feelings, or even a connection with her daughter, just like Inés in Tuya. For Isabel, motherhood was more about missed chances: missed love, companionship and happiness. What, she in fact feels for Elena and Rita is resentment, not gratitude that would impel her to reciprocate. With an astonished Elena listening, Isabel blurts out that she must be Rita’s real killer because she so fervently desired her death. Elena and Isabel, two mothers, with totally opposing views of what that role constituted, cannot see eye to eye. Piñeiro is again putting forth the misconceptions of the

72

Chapter Four

ideal family and maternal feelings. To be a real mother is much more than to have children, stay home and take care of the kids. Slowly, in the same way Elena starts understanding other women including her adult daughter after her death, the reader gathers what her daughter had being going through. During the narration it becomes clear that the deceased Rita was a single woman who had a boyfriend her mother did not like because he was a hunchback (Elena used to call him “el jorobadito”), didn’t have children, but realized that she needed to become the “mother” to her sickly mother, something she was not able to fathom or achieve. Their relationship was therefore becoming more stressful by the day. An instance of this emotional and physical deterioration is when Rita gives her mother handkerchiefs to clean her constant drooling: El intento de su hija fue vano porque de todos modos podía encontrarse con su pañuelo babeado, hecho un bollo, por distintos lugares de la casa, arriba del televisor, sobre la mesa de la cocina, junto al teléfono, expuesto como un trofeo o como un recordatorio donde fuera que Elena lo hubiera dejado, sin expresa voluntad de molestar a su hija, pero haciéndolo (58). [Her daughter’s attempt was futile because, anyway, she would find her [mother’s] handkerchief crumpled with saliva in different parts of the house: on the TV, on the kitchen table, next to the phone, standing as a trophy or as a constant reminder wherever she had left it, without trying to annoy her daughter, but doing it (58).]

Rita did try to deal with the sickness, even attending a support group with her mother at the hospital, but it was all in vain because both realized that the hospital had “[o]lor a condena, piensa. Porque ahí vieron por primera vez lo que le esperaba. Antes creían saber, pero aquella tarde vieron” (61) [“the smell of doom. Because there they saw for the first time what was awaiting her. Before they thought they knew, but that afternoon they saw”]. That is when they both perceived that what was to come was going to be much worse. After this episode they started quarreling more, with Rita not even looking at the care home brochures Elena wanted them to talk about. Rita was obviously not able to accept her mother’s irremediable decay, and grew depressed. How can daughters maintain their contact with their mothers? In “Women’s Time” Kristeva says: “[a]girl will never be able to re-establish this contact with her mother … except by becoming a mother herself” (Moi 204). In Rita’s case just the allusion of her being the maternal figure

Subversions of Motherhood: The Sleuth in Piñeiro’s Crime Fiction

73

in this relationship was too disconcerting and anti-natural. Vanessa Kimberly Valdés states: Because of their sexual similarity, girls will always associate with the mother, and thus, have greater difficulty establishing an autonomy that involves symbolically killing this figure. The complexity involved for women establishing themselves as subjects free of their mothers’ results, Kristeva argues, in melancholy and depression (12).

The daughter, trying to be her own person, can only really seek the maternal separation through death. It is as if the separation of the Lacanian symbolic order will never occur until the daughter is either a mother herself, or one of them dies. Valdés states that Kristeva, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, “argues that a symbolic matricide is necessary to establish identity” (15). Consequently, “[w]hen this impulse is hindered, it inverts on the self” (Valdés 15). Kristeva explains: “There is no hatred, only an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills me secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness …” (Black Sun 29). Because Elena's daughter was incapable of “mothering” her mother, or dealing with her debilitating sickness, it is obvious she is torn by conflicting desires. Her identity is being fragmented, and she doesn’t understand her position in a new family order. The unloving, unadmitted desire for her mother's death, and therefore her liberation, inverts onto herself, and as a consequence she commits suicide. Or it could be that, as the Thomas Bernhard epigraph at the beginning of the book states, “El ser humano sólo era capaz de estar con otro ser cuando éste había muerto y se encontraba verdaderamente dentro de él” (Trastorno) [“You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you” (Gargoyle)]. After all her travels and questions and investigations, the dead child metaphorically returns to the womb to be better understood by her mother. Elena herself wonders: “Habré sido una buena madre?, quién puede saberlo” (172) [“Have I been a good mother? Who knows?”]. The true reason Elena could not comprehend the idea of her daughter’s suicide was that she herself was the reason for it, through Rita’s inability to deal with her sickness. Not acknowledging that she didn’t really know her daughter, contradicting her continuous statement that as a mother “Elena sabe” and, worse still, that she might be the cause of her suicide is too much to bear. Is Elena in fact implicitly a murderer? The mother here symbolically becomes the executioner; she gives life, but also takes it away. At the end, ironically, the feeble Elena was emotionally stronger than her offspring,

74

Chapter Four

and she confesses to Isabel: “Yo sí quiero vivir, ¿sabe?, a pesar de este cuerpo, a pesar de mi hija muerta, dice y llora, sigo eligiendo vivir, ¿será soberbia?” (173) [“I do want to live, you know? In spite of this body, in spite of my dead daughter,” she says and cries, “I keep choosing to live. Is that arrogance?”]. She has, in fact, understood everything. Following the characteristics of the postmodern crime fiction it is evident that, ironically, the physically weaker sleuth of Elena sabe has indeed a strong voice, and it can be argued that is the strongest voice of the two novels discussed here. Also, at the end of the text Elena has acquired empathy for Rita and Isabel and what motherhood means for them, and although the narration doesn’t explain what will become of her, the reader can surmise that Elena will be a part of an old-age community where she will live the rest of her days. The abject that has been surrounding her life doesn’t make her lose the lust for it. In an original way, Piñeiro’s double purpose in Tuya and Elena sabe is to subvert the detective novel, creating a new type of postmodern/postfeminist sleuth and narrative, and to problematize the romantic notion of maternal love, rethinking it while exposing the hypocrisies of family appearances. In this sense she uncannily exemplifies Kristeva’s notion of the abject, presenting murder and madness as part of each family’s history. Her protagonists, while appearing to be traditional mothers, are instead the true agents of their family crises and the catalysts for their ultimate destruction. Inés and Elena are characters with commonalities: they are two Argentinian mothers and sleuths who investigate family problems surrounded by betrayal and death; two women who follow the traditional roles of their patriarchal society but are unable to give and show love to their own daughters; two victims of life that deliberately—in the case of Inés—or inadvertently—in the case of Elena— also become murderers. Although they have both followed their society’s strict patriarchal formula for the traditional wife and mother, Inés and Elena feel powerless to sustain the charade while violence, murder and suicide surround them. But they have agency and in a transgressive way become investigators, both fighting for what they want: the truth. This need to find answers reminds us of the hundreds of Argentinian mothers that also seek the truth of their disappeared children, lost during the military regime. These mothers, real and fictional, with their still marginalized voices in Hispanic society, are demonstrating that women still have much to say, and Claudia Piñeiro is giving them a chance to do just that.

CHAPTER FIVE COLOMBIAN POSTFEMINIST NARRATIVE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TRANSGRESSION WITHOUT LIMITS GINA PONCE DE LEÓN FRESNO PACIFIC UNIVERSITY

The Colombian narrative fiction of the twenty-first century, which deals with the representation of women, makes a statement about the roads women have taken with the objective of subverting their traditional role inside the culture that surrounds them. Representation of contemporary women posits the need for a fairer society for sociocultural inclusiveness where the woman is an active and respected participant. Gender discrimination has been used to marginalize and minimalize the female human being. Women have been forced to establish their own objectives inside the patriarchal context and mark their own irreconcilable paths in the Latin American context. For this reason it can be stated that the Colombian feminist narrative presents a thematic concern that has to do with assuming a defined and specific identity in opposition to the traditional feminist movement and the Europeanized culture. The Colombian narrative has entered into the postmodern era; the representation of women is dealing with the failure of the feminist objectives of the twentieth century, which was to achieve equal opportunities in the political and socio-economic environment. When we look at the representation of female characters, we understand the meaning of what has been called “double colonization of women” and the meaning of the “women of the third world”. The “women of the third world” suffer a double colonization by being women and by living in a colonized domain. Among the variety of novels that confirm this specific representation of women in contemporary times, some few examples are: La novia oscura (The Dark Bride), and Delirio (Delirium) by Laura Restrepo; Para otros es el cielo (Heaven is for Others), and El prestigio de

76

Chapter Five

la belleza (The Beauty Prestige) by Piedad Bonnet, and El miedo a la oscuridad (Fear of Darkness), by Sandro Romero Rey. I will analyze two novels that demonstrate the contemporary struggles of women; however, these novels differ in the way they present female characters. The first one displays women looking for feminist objectives typical of the twentieth century and their failure to achieve it, and the second one represents women understanding failure as part of life, and situating themselves in their new context. The first approach is analyzed in El eco de las mentiras (The Echo of Lies) by Lucía Cristina Ardila; the second one is analyzed in Hay cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (There Are Things That a Women Can’t Do Barefoot) by Margarita García Robayo.

I: Female Representation in Contemporary Narrative The new representation of women is seen in some novels of the wellknown Colombian writer Jorge Franco. His female characters depict a new identity shaped by strength and conflicting attitudes toward the society that subjugates them. What is relevant in this writer’s novels is the powerful portrayal of females that have been suffocated in the extreme. In my article entitled “Transgression as an Objective in Jorge Franco’s Novels: Melodrama (2006) and Santa Suerte” (2010), which appeared in the journal Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, I analyze how in Franco’s novel Melodrama, the narrator, who is a male character, keeps himself away from the women he portrays in order to distance himself from what he does not like. It is significant to observe how the narrator utilizes the cultural contexts of Colombia and France respectively to place himself where, from his point of view, a beautiful, intelligent and successful male should be. The novel puts the characters at two opposite poles where men are obviously the “king” inside the society, and women belong at the other end. This other end represents women that have been “deterritorialized”, following the term “deterritorialization” used by Guilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature. Women, at the other pole from men in the novel, are foreigners who cannot speak French or whose accent is too heavy, and cannot survive inside the culture where they are clearly doubly marginalized. The other main character in this novel is a Colombian woman who has gone to extremes in her efforts to survive in Paris, where she moved looking for a better life. This novel represents women who look for their own and individual ways of liberation, conscious of their marginalization in their environment and determined to confront it. The following excerpt explains how the objective of the

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

77

narrator (in the two novels) is to show the extremes to which these women have been taken: La mujer que representa Jorge Franco en estas novelas está íntimamente unida a los temas primordiales de la posmodernidad; lo diferente, lo exagerado, lo satánico. Santa Suerte, es en este aspecto, una muestra relevante de la dirección que ha tomado la lucha de la mujer de la época contemporánea para subsistir dentro de un medio que la sigue ignorando. Sin embargo, hay que tener en cuenta que la mujer ya no pertenece a la época de la revolución feminista en la que la lucha se definía en la necesidad de reconocimiento; la lucha feminista contemporánea, podemos deducir, se ha ampliado y ha abandonado el concepto de “rol” … esto se ve claramente en las mujeres de Santa Suerte (Ponce de León 234). [Jorge Franco’s female characters are closely linked to the postmodern themes which are exaggeration, satanism and difference. Santa Suerte is a relevant sample of the direction that representation of women’s struggles has taken in contemporary times, where women need to survive within an alienating environment. However, we must take into account that women no longer belong to the twentieth century feminist revolution which is defined by the fight for recognition. The contemporary feminist struggle has been transformed, and has abandoned the concept of “role” … this is clearly seen in the women of Santa Suerte (Ponce de León 234).1]

Therefore: Basándonos en las novelas aquí estudiadas, podemos deducir que la lucha feminista del siglo XX no logró su objetivo; esto se hace evidente en los textos de Jorge Franco, en los que encontramos mujeres representantes de un grupo que reclama identidad dentro del contexto cultural. Es un grupo que se sabe observado y que se revela llegando a los límites expuestos para declarar la guerra al que quiera aceptarlo … Esto hace que se reconozca un asunto esencial como es la nueva conciencia que plantean las mujeres de Jorge Franco con el objetivo de reclamar el derecho a la identidad en el mundo contemporáneo (Ponce de León 235). [Based on the novels studied here, we can deduce that the feminist struggle of the twentieth century did not achieve its objective; this is evident in Jorge Franco’s narrative in which we find a group claiming identity within the cultural context. It is a group that knows it’s been observed and this is revealed by the limits they reach declaring war against whomever wants to accept it … This recognizes an essential issue which is the new aware-ness 1

All the Spanish quotes from El eco de las mentiras and Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza are the editor’s translation.

78

Chapter Five set forth by Jorge Franco’s women, with the aim of reclaiming the right for identity in the contemporary world (Ponce de León 235).]

In one of the novels analyzed in this chapter, El eco de las mentiras, by Lucía Cristina Ardila, one can see how women are in a stage of “deterritorialization” from their environment, and how feminism has entered a stage of revision in its objectives which are embedded in our contemporary times. As I point out: Jorge Franco ha representado a la mujer en una lucha contemporánea que la aleja del ya agotado feminismo del siglo XX, para situarla en un espacio irreconocible, extremadamente transgresivo que tiene el objetivo de especificar a la mujer del presente dentro de la batalla a muerte por el derecho a la identidad … Un estudio específico del tema de la mujer en la novela colombiana contemporánea, revelaría que ya se ha dejado la batalla feminista, los derroteros son diferentes, la mujer ha adquirido conciencia de su batalla personal, la autoestima no es el objetivo a rebasar y su autoreconocimiento es lo que la ha llevado a una cruzada con el medio al que se enfrenta el cual sigue trayectorias inesperadas (Ponce de León 235). [Jorge Franco has represented women in a contemporary battle that places them farther away from the already exhausted feminism of the twentieth century, and situate them in an extremely transgressive and irreconcilable stage, with the objective of portraying the women of the present in a battle to death for the right for identity. A specific study of the topic of women in contemporary Colombian novel would reveal that the feminist battle no longer exists; the paths are different; women have acquired awareness of their personal battles and self-esteem is not the goal to achieve because their self-consciousness is precisely what has taken them across the borderline following unexpected paths (Ponce de León 235).2]

Interestingly, Franco’s novels portray women that already acknowledge their feminist failure and are in the stage of confronting the world the way it is. Novels analyzed in this chapter, represent the feminist “dream” of the twentieth century, its failure, and how women are consequently in the struggle to find their own objectives by their own means. In El eco de las mentiras it is possible to find three different approaches towards the feminist representation. The first approach shows a woman who has struggled to succeed in the patriarchal environment and has achieved her objectives. The second one is the representation of men 2

All the Spanish quotes of “Transgression as an Objective in Jorge Franco’s Novels: Melodrama (2006) and Santa Suerte” (2010) are the editor’s translation.

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

79

who feel threatened by the empowered woman, when a female character “invades” the space that belongs to them (an environment which is primaryily the kingdom of the male gender within colonized western society). The third approach recreates the paternalistic method of men who share the women's environment, but do not understand their objectives, and surrounds the female character with a protectionist “chain” within which the female figures are trapped. In Franco’s Melodrama and Santa Suerte the representation of women focuses on lower class female characters who have no chance against the dominant power. In contrast, in Ardila’s novel, the women belong to the upper social class. Certainly today in women’s representation the paths are different, and are portrayed according to the social class in which women are situated. One could argue that the feminist struggle is ongoing, and, according to the quote above, women have acquired awareness of their personal battle. It is relevant to understand that in the contemporary feminist narrative, each representation (novel) has its specific objective and its specific individual issue. Each novel shows us a specific woman in an unresolved struggle in her sociopolitical and cultural context. This can be considered a widespread issue when we analyze a variety of feminist representations of the postmodern and postcolonial times in Latin America. Because of the failure of the feminist objectives of the twentieth century, the representation of women has reached unexpected limits that are out of the ordinary. Contemporary women therefore belong to a minority group that has been undermined in its struggle for recognition within the context of which women want to be part; on the contrary, their objective of acquiring recognition appears sidelined by the dominant power. El eco de las mentiras is a novel that questions the feminist proposal of the twentieth century. The narrator presents detailed characters, and exposes the patriarchal ideology which composes the environment faced by the two main characters. Only at the end of the story can it be observed how these characters are trapped by a vicious cycle that begins with the need to demonstrate the acquired “status”, and how that reached objective becomes the cause of their own destruction. This destruction has gradually been fueled by the context to which they belong; their environment does not leave any other option than to return to the point where the struggle originated; finally the two female characters abandon their objectives. The representation of the feminist fight and its failure in the “work” environment is the goal of El eco de las mentiras. In the second novel, Hay cosas que uno no puede hacer descalza, we can observe the portrayal of women as people establishing individual goals which trespass the

80

Chapter Five

patriarchal frame. The feminist failure and its theorization as well as the new issues of the feminist representation are the objectives of this essay. To achieve the stated objectives it is necessary to approach our historical context from the point of view of colonization and its consequences. Colombia belongs to the colonized countries. The colonization of Latin America was cruel and inhumane: we could say it swept away the culture of the Native American groups. It's not worth thinking that we would be able to recover something of what was the culture of pre-Columbian times as such—what we have today has been transformed. The Latin American culture that exists today is a mixture of races, ideologies and religions that were all transformed and assumed by the minority groups alienated by the ruling social class which in turn absorbed the western humanist ideology. Today in Latin America the leaders and drivers of sociopolitical and cultural power have been historically the bearers of the Europeanizing frames. As quoted in Leela Gandhi’s book, Postcolonial Theory—A Critical Introduction, feminist and postcolonial theory have until recently followed, according to Bill Ashcroft, “a path of convergent evolution” (82). She continues: “Both bodies of thought have concerned themselves with the study and defense of marginalized ‘Others’ within repressive structures of domination …” (82). Paraphrasing Gandhi, that similar development is the reason why these two lines of thought have been concerned with the study and defense of the marginalized groups within repressive structures of power, and in doing so, the two branches have followed a very similar theoretical trajectory (83). It is necessary to continue with Gandhi’s statements because it is basically the ideological approach of this essay: In a sense, the alliance between these disciplinary siblings is informed by a mutual suspicion, wherein each discourse constantly confronts its limits and exclusions in the other. In the main, there are three areas of controversy which fracture the potential unity between postcolonialism and feminism: the debate surrounding the figure of the ‘third world woman’; the problematic history of the ‘feminist-as-imperialist’; and finally the colonialist deployment of ‘feminist criteria’ to bolster the appeal of the ‘civilizing mission’ (83).

To illustrate what Gandhi means by issues of feminism and colonialism regarding the controversial topic “women of the third world,” the novel El eco de las mentiras represents not only the failure of the feminist struggle as such, but also the colonialist philosophy in which the characters are molded, and radically prevents the triumph of the feminist

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

81

fight. The “women of the third world” suffer, as mentioned above, a double colonization by being women and living in a world colonized by a Europeanizing humanist ideal. The humanist ideal established during the colonial times in Latin America is imposed by the sociocultural context. It is necessary to rely on José Antonio Figueroa’s dissertation about how the colonized countries are situated on the periphery of European modernity. Interpreting Figueroa, modernity belongs to Europe, and in Latin America the societies are trying to accommodate themselves to a “foreign ideology” which does not belong to them. In this process all societies in Latin America are situated at the “margins”. Latin American patriarchy is by itself a marginal ideology, so women are doubly marginalized. Figueroa’s study mentions how some postcolonial contributions permit us to talk about the “peripheral humanism” (38);3 there is a need to remember that it is precisely the postcolonial and contemporary era that permits the recognition of the failure of the feminist objective of the twentieth century. These issues can be seen in detail in Ardila’s novel. The Europeanizing humanist ideology to which the class in power belongs is presented in detail in the social context in which the protagonists Isabel and Sofia of El eco de las mentiras have entered in search of recognition by having earned a position of power. These two women have been pursuing a goal for their lives in their own history. The context of power marked by social class level is seen in the description of Sofia’s house, which she and her family have acquired as symbol of her new and powerful economic situation: Sofía le había pedido a la empleada que llevara comida a la habitación, que tenía una sala amplia con una mesita donde podrían acomodarse bien. Un par de semanas antes habían terminado de construir una casa enorme y lujosa en un terreno en la zona histórica frente al mar. Era la zona in, donde restauraron y construyeron las familias más ricas: los artistas y escritores más importantes del país y los extranjeros que venían a vivir o a pasar largas temporadas en Cartagena. Fue un gasto muy grande, pero acorde con el nuevo estatus económico que le dio a Sofía el nombramiento en la gerencia administrativa del banco más importante del país: El Banco del Caribe. Un cargo de primera línea, con un salario formidable (Ardila 24).

3

José Antonio Figueroa in his dissertation entitled “El realismo mágico, vallenato y violencia política en el Caribe colombiano” uses the term, “humanismo periférico” (37-39). This term is relevant to understanding the thesis of this chapter.

82

Chapter Five [Sofía had asked the maid to bring the food to the bedroom, which had a large living room with a table where they could sit comfortably. A couple weeks earlier they had finished building an enormous and luxurious house in a historic zone in front of the sea. It was the “in” zone, where the richest families, the most important artists and writers of the country and the foreigners came to live or to spend long seasons in Cartagena. It was a great expense, but was in accord with the new economic status that Sophia has acquired being named administrative manager of the most important bank of the country, the Caribbean Bank. A first-rate position, with a substantial salary (Ardila 24).]

The paragraph describes a house in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in the most expensive neighborhood of the city. Sofía’s house is now, according to her new status, “acorde con el nuevo estatus económico que le dio a Sofía el nombramiento en la gerencia administrativa” (24) [“according to the new economic status Sofia garnered by the administrative managerial position acquired (24)], by one who had become the administrative manager of the most important bank of the country. This position is obviously for a man, not for a woman. The family is in a new house they designed and built, and they are surrounded by the richest and most famous people, including the foreigners whose houses are for their summer vacations. Sofía and her husband come from Bogotá, the capital city, where Sofia has made a career that has taken her to the new position at the bank in the city of Cartagena. It seems they came from the middle class, and Sofia’s earned work recognition leads the family to the Atlantic coast. It should be noted that her new position seems to be linked to the place where she and her husband had designed the new house. The environment described in the novel is linked to Sofia’s new job. It is obvious that obtaining the job marks the need to live in a new place in line with the economic status that gave Sofia the appointment of “administrative manager”. It is relevant to understand that Sofia has entered a group marked by patriarchal power. The marked environment is observed in the size of the house in front of the Atlantic Ocean, which is the privilege of the powerful class. It is worth returning to the concept of “the woman of the third world” stated by Gandhi: The most significant collision and collusion of postcolonial and feminist theory occurs around the contentious figure of the ‘third world-women’. Some feminist postcolonial theories have cogently argued that a blinkered focus on racial politics inevitably elides the ‘double colonization of women’ under imperial conditions. Such theory postulates the ‘third-world woman’ as a victim par excellence—the forgotten casualty of both imperial ideology, and native and foreign patriarchies (83).

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

83

It is when we look at the female characters of the novel that we see that those “third-world women” are not only the victims of the upper-class and the (national) dominant power, but also victims of their own social and family environment. Both Sofia and Isabel (the other main female character) belong to a traditional family; their husbands are not of greater economic solvency, but the two female protagonists are the ones that support their families’ luxurious way of living. Sofia and Isabel represent the women of the third world because of their double struggle with the dominant power in the job environment, and with what is expected of the women in the family setting from the ideological and Europeanized humanist perspective. On the other hand, “doubly colonized women” who live in our sociocultural context which belongs to the colonized countries, fall into a conscious desire of finding themselves and who they are, when they see themselves doubly embedded in parameters that have been imposed by colonialism. This need of finding “who am I?” is born from the desire to establish a specific identity away from the framework established by the feminism of the twentieth century, which belongs mainly to other women in another culture. Especially in Latin America, cultural awareness has been elaborated through absorption, assimilation and acceptance of various cultures that have unified it throughout history. A key issue within this cultural identity is the role of women within a colonized society. Reviewing the outlined framework of the three approaches of feminist representation that appear in the novel and its surroundings, it is necessary to start with the feminist proposal (twentieth century), and its goal of obtaining equality against the dominant power. This issue can be observed in the two protagonists of El eco de las mentiras, Isabel and Sofia. They are women who belong to the dominant social class, are educated women with economic power and have reached what may be considered the summit of the careers they have chosen. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters titled with the name of each of the protagonists; we accompany them as they rise in their careers. They are women who are empowered by the education they have received to reach the maximum level of success. Isabel is the vice-president of a firm of architects designing urban renewal projects in major cities. And Sofia, as stated, has been named the administrative manager of the country's largest bank. One could say that these women have come to achieve the recognition of the ability to perform as well as men in the work environment, which could be interpreted as one of the goals of feminism in the twentieth century. Isabel and Sofia are two women at the top of the power structure, but at the same time represent the failure of the feminist struggle. This

84

Chapter Five

contradiction must be clarified by analyzing what is considered the new feminist fight of the postmodern era. For this it is necessary to ask about the traditional feminism that sought to rescue women from patriarchal ideology. According to Lois Tyson in her chapter “Feminist Criticism” in the subtitled section “Traditional Gender Roles,” women have interiorized the gender role: By patriarchal woman I mean, of course, a woman who has internalized the norms and values of patriarchy, which can be defined, in short, as any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles. Traditional gender roles cast men recognitions of own marginalization should be the starting point rational, strong, protective, and decisive they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive. These gender roles have been used very successfully to justify inequities, which still occur today, such as excluding women from equals access to leadership and decision-making positions (in the family as well as in politics, academia, and the corporate world), paying men higher wages than women for doing the same job (if women are even able to obtain the job), and convincing women that they are not fit for careers in such areas as mathematics and engineering (85).

This excerpt tells us in a generalized way about what can be considered the feminist struggle of the twentieth century. The primary feminist objective was detaching from the patriarchal rules by obtaining power through recognition in the workplace and through performance of the same kind of work as men. In the novel, this objective is worth noting: the main female characters have succeeded in obtaining certain jobs and performing well, triumphing over competitive male figures. The characters are strong women who can guide their co-workers in any situation towards the solution of any problem, women who are not associated with weakness. On the contrary, their labor production is of the highest quality and their confrontation with the working groups, formed mostly by men, is a great success. However, it is here where the fundamental contradiction of the feminist struggle that the novel proposes arises; the women have reached the highest position compared to the men of the same level and ability, but the sociocultural environment in which these women work is based on a patriarchal ideology and western humanism which is the main barricade for contemporary women. It needs to be emphasized that the in context which these woman inhabit it is not only the patriarchal context of the western culture, but also the marginalized colonial environment: the male characters that belong to this environment are not conscious of their own marginalization. In other words, men need to find their own cultural identity. Lack of identity could be an easy way to explain all kinds of

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

85

harassment in the work environment; nevertheless, lack of identity is only part of a bigger issue associated with colonial history, imperialism, patriarchy and finally third world countries. This topic needs much more research, and the present book is just a start. Rondón is the name of one of Sofia’s slightly subordinate coworkers; one could say that she is his boss. His looks are grotesque, and this character represents what is called “macho” in the context of the novel. He believes that he has the right to obtain what he wants despite Sofia’s desires. In other words, it does not matter what her capacity and capabilities are; she is a “woman” and that will not change. That is why he constantly harasses her, an issue that not only undermines her capacity for work but also humiliates her as a human being. As mentioned, the feminist struggle has been subjected in the narrative of the twentieth century to the social, political and economic environment of the dominant power belonging to a patriarchal ideology. My thesis arises from the notion that twentieth century feminism has not been able to change the alienating situation of women, and this is what is proved in several ways during the development of the novels. In their jobs the female protagonists have achieved maximum power, but have still not been able to obtain recognition of their value as human beings. And if we go further, it can be said that they work in a context marked by nonremovable, permanent and wrongly stigmatized conceptions of “gender”. The women’s struggle is then twice as hard, involving not only the need to be recognized as capable of performing the work like the men, but also in dealing with “gender” characteristics that are placed to eliminate their possibilities of success and recognition. I realize that this novel takes place between the contradiction that has marked the membership of a dominant social class, which is traditionally inserted in Europeanizing humanism and colonialist philosophy, and the women’s battle, which is to challenge western ideology and the powerful patriarchal endowment of European colonialism. This double fight is then enclosed in what Tyson calls “cultural productions” (83), which can be considered part of the patriarchal system in Latin America. At this time we can develop the issues raised at the beginning of this essay; the new postmodern feminism fight demands the redemption of women within all environments (nation, society, family), through a change of ideology that encloses the revision of “gender” inside colonized systems.

86

Chapter Five

II: Gender: A Social Programing The second point of view the novel presents is amenable to analysis through the lens of “gender”. The concept of gender is placed within the sociocultural environment in which the women characters are situated. This environment does not give Isabel and Sofia the opportunity to enjoy their exercise of power, nor does it give them the opportunity to exercise their achieved dreams. According to Tyson: Feminists don’t deny the biological differences between men and women; in fact, many feminists celebrate those differences as physical size, shape, and body chemistry make men naturally superior to women: for example, more intelligent, more logical, or more courageous, or better leaders. Feminism therefore distinguishes between the word sex, which refers to our biological constitution as female or male, and the word gender, which refers to our cultural programming as feminine or masculine. In other words women are not born feminine, and men are not born masculine. Rather these gender categories are constructed by society, which is why this view of gender is an example of what has come to be called social constructionism (86).

In the novel El eco de las mentiras, women who tried to prove their capacity for being successful in the work place where men also performed, end up quitting their jobs and accepting a simple life, and finally death. It seems that the aim of “success” these two women were striving for has vanished, and the reason lies in their inability to accept that their achieved position and empowerment are just a comedy performed by the society in which they live. My analysis states that the feminist failure that can be seen in the representation of the characters of this novel is owing to an issue that involves the sociocultural environment in which the women live and is inserted into the notion of “gender”. The representation of women in this novel is clear and passionate and shows women living in a colonial and colonized society, ideologically marked by western philosophy. Gandhi talks about this issue as follows: [S]tudents of postcolonialism tend to ignore (or forget) the long history of specifically Marxist anti-imperialist thought. Ever since the first decade of this century, Marxist thinkers, such as Lenin, Bukharin and Hilferding … have been urging the Western world to concede that the story of colonialism is a necessary sub-plot to the emergence of market society in Europe, and to the concomitant globalization of capital (24).

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

87

Gandhi explains further: Marxism has been unable to theorize colonialism as an exploitative relationship between the West and its Others … [I]t has also neglected to address sympathetically the historical, cultural and political alterity, or difference, of the colonized world and, in so doing; it has relinquished its potential appeal to post-colonialism thought (25).

Gandhi shows how “postcolonialism has inherited a very specific understanding of western domination as the symptom of an unwholesome alliance between power and knowledge” (25). Her assessments provide us with the tools to explain why the designation of “gender” remains immovable within the society women face, and in which they live. This environment essentially values the production of capital which is attached to the male image and power. This is not only an issue that remains in this colonized society, but it is an inherited history of colonized countries by an already industrialized and capitalist society which is linked to patriarchal society. In this way, what is considered “gender” within the social programming is one of the frames that are used to prevent the successful performance of women in their social milieu; in other words, it is one of the factors that alienate the women from feminist objectives. In Sofia’s case, for example, she is deceived by her boss. The following dialog clearly shows her disappointment. Sofía says: -Es con respecto a la promesa que usted me hizo cuando me pidió que liderara el proceso de fusión. -¿Qué te prometí? -Que si la etapa de negociación terminaba con éxito para el banco me haría un aumento significativo en mi salario. -A ver, Sofía. Te prometí que se lo pediría a la junta, pero nunca volvimos a hablar del tema y la junta no aprobó mi propuesta. -¿Cómo así? -Ellos no aprobaron eso porque no querían desnivelar las tablas de salario. Todos los gerentes ganan igual y si te hiciéramos un aumento a ti, tendríamos que hacérselo a todos. Sofía se quedó mirándolo en silencio. No podía creer que la hubiera engañado así. Le había entregado todas sus energías al éxito de esa negociación. Sostuvo la mirada de desconsuelo esperando que dijera algo más, pero no lo hizo, la palabra la tenía ella. Entonces le respondió: -Creí siempre que uno de los valores de esta compañía era la claridad.

88

Chapter Five -Sofía, cuidado con lo que dices. No tienes derecho a faltarme al respeto y si eso es lo que pretendes, mejor te sales ya de esta oficina (Ardila 48). [-It’s about the promise that you made when you asked me to head the merger. -What promise? -That if the negotiations ended successfully for the bank, I would have a significant salary increase. -Let's see, Sofia. I promised you that I would ask the Board, but we never talked about the issue and the Board did not approve my proposal. -How so? -They did not approve it because they didn't want unbalanced salary tables. All managers earn equal pay, and if I increase your salary I would have to increase it for everyone. Sofia looked at him in silence. She could not believe he had deceived her so. She had devoted all her energy to the success of this negotiation. She looked at him intensely with despair, waiting to say something more, but she did not. Then she answered him: -I thought one of the values of this company was clarity. -Sofia, be careful what you say. You have no right to disrespect me and if that is what you intend, you had better get out of this office (Ardila 48).]

The previous fragment is relevant to understanding the point I want to emphasize. Sofia has been deceived about the context of power to which she belongs. The proclamation of power in the context of the grievance she feels during the conversation is reinforced by the concept of “gender” posed by the novel. Sofia is a woman who triumphs, but she is just a woman, and that is the reason why her successes are ignored, and her boss’s promises can be broken without major consequences. On the other hand, the boss feels threatened when Sofia insinuates that he has broken his promises. For him she is undermining his power and his authority; her questioning is a threat. This cannot be permissible within the patriarchal society. Another issue that reinforces gender is the characterization of these two women who seem to have been created for the development of a soap opera. Sofia’s description is as follows: Sofía se puso el vestido más sexi que tenía: rojo, vaporoso y semitransparente. Y si se sumaba la brisa que hacía travesuras con su pelo negro y su traje … se podría decir que parecía una diosa (Ardila 235). [Sofia dressed in the sexiest dress she had: red, vaporous and semitransparent. And if you added the breeze that played mischievously

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

89

with her black hair and dress … it could be said that she looked like a goddess (Ardila 235).]

This scene takes place in Sofia’s house in Cartagena, which is situated in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in that city. The last approach that the novel raises can be set from the notion of “minor literatures”. There is a conflict that arises within the family group in which women live and which is closely linked to the concepts of “gender” and the authority of the patriarchate. It can be seen in Isabel and Sofia’s husbands who surround the environment of these women but do not understand their objectives and end up locking them in a “crystal palace” within which the women end up trapped. The term “deterritorialization” is one of the characteristics of the “minor literatures” defined by Deleuze and Guattari in the book Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature: The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. (18)

The term “deterritorialization” is appropriate to talk about regarding some narratives of the postmodern era in Latin American literature, especially when it’s about representation of women in the twenty-first century novel. Combining the postcolonial era, which allows ideological exposure of the minority groups and the conceptualization of the “third world-women,” together with the definition of “minor literatures”, I propose that El eco de las mentiras convincingly represents a new feminist representation as a way to expose the present colonial inheritance establishment. Following Deleuze and Guattari, the feminist representation is not specifically of the feminist subject; it also marks revolutionary instances, which in this case I will call “out of the ordinary” within the established feminist representation in Latin American narrative. El eco de las mentiras represents women in a world they thought they had conquered (twentieth century feminism), but the text puts them in an environment dominated by patriarchal ideology and turns them into “deterritorialized” characters because there is no place where they can feel they belong. The social context is even more constricting than the wellknown role of women as a servant or a mother or a teacher or a wife; they

90

Chapter Five

are none of those characters, and they are not the ones they thought they were. The environment faced by the protagonists is not only that of the work place, but also that of family setting. Characterization of the family male in this novel is a way of showing the failure of the women who dare to get into a world that does not concern them. It is interesting to see how the husbands of Isabel and Sofia operate as extremely protective men who create an environment that holds the woman in an urn. They represent the known male gender; these men are characterized by being present when women are sick and, concerned or anguished by what happens in the wife’s workplace. They are characters who sit beside the women on the bed to take care of them as if they were defenseless. This representation of men can be related with the image of a father. I have taken account, in this novel, of why feminism fails; it is obvious that the family context is essentially patriarchal. The following fragment shows how Isabel's husband feels that he has to protect her: Tomás se despertó el sábado a media noche, y se dio cuenta de que Isabel no estaba en la cama. Se puso la bata y salió a buscarla. La encontró doblada sobre la mesa del comedor revisando un plano. -Qué se supone que estás haciendo, habías prometido no volver a trabajar un fin de semana y menos a media noche. -Tomás, tienes que entender, esto es coyuntural. La reunión del lunes va a estar muy complicada. Isabel se sentía muy bien de salud y cada día se olvidaba más del tema. Había regresado a su ritmo endemoniado entre comités, juntas y viajes. Su tiempo libre volvía a reducirse. -Tú llevas años de coyuntura en coyuntura, siempre tienes una razón para trabajar veinte horas al día y siete días a la semana. Deberías aprovechar que es navidad y pedir unos días de vacaciones. -No puedo. -Si puedes. Pide un día … (Ardila 81). [Thomas woke up on Saturday at midnight, and realized that Isabel was not in bed. He put on his robe and went out to look for her. He found her bent over the dining room table reviewing a draft. -What are you doing? You promised not to work on weekends, much less at midnight. -Tomas, you have to understand, this is critical. The meeting on Monday is going to be very complicated. Isabel felt very good, health-wise, and every day she thought less about it. She had returned to her workaholic pace among committees, meetings and travel. Her free time had started shrinking again.

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

91

-You have lived years from critical moment to critical moment, and always have a reason to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week. You should take advantage of its being Christmas and ask for a few days off. -I can’t. -Yes you can. Request a day … (Ardila 81).]

This text is repeated many times in the dialogue of the two protagonists with their husbands; it is a constant in the narrative of the novel. This presents the uprooting of the female image in terms of the establishment of “normal” space for her work status. The text raises the question of “women” in the context of “minor literature” in the sense of political alienation in instances where decisions are needed in society. This poses an unmasking of the reality where women have been given opportunities, but have not taken advantage of them. In this sense a revolutionary approach in the postmodern world can be noted, an approach arising from the globalization of our era. Accordingly, I propose that the feminist struggle has not obtained the objectives set in the twentieth century and during the era of industrialization. The feminist struggle will not be recognized by the sociocultural environment until there is awareness among those subscribing to European ideology that their cultural values belong to a context formed marginally, and that must be removed from the denominators of western power. The dominant group must recognize that it has been, and still is, used for the marginalization of the individual values of the minority groups, among which are women. It is notable that the narrative of the twenty-first century represented in this novel, which presents the female image, shows us a single struggle that seems destined to fail. The failure is metaphorically depicted at the end by the death of the protagonists Isabel and Sofia. This novel raises a troubling issue for contemporary women: the feminist fight will not be a reality until the “patriarchy” ideology is transformed; for the feminist struggle has entered a vicious cycle that must be broken. El eco de las mentiras is an updated representation of women which proposes a new approach to the topic and makes obvious the feminist failure of the twentieth century and the need to establish new directions for the feminist struggle of the twenty-first century. With the novel Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza by Margarita García Robayo, there is another approach that in a way answers the issue of the previous novel. This novel presents nine women in independent stories but connected to each other buy one exclusive characteristic: these women are confronting the world with their own

Chapter Five

92

objective which is “being” in a world marked by false expectations of their performance. The feeling of reading this narrative is marked by the anguish manifest by the characters who understand that there is a need for pursuing something that has been historically denied for women. They understand the failure of the feminist movement and confront the reality, situating themselves in the “deterritorialized” world, where they have accepted being placed because there was no other choice. But the difference is the analytical acknowledgement of their situation. There is no need to be recognized or to be protected or to be rewarded: there is only a need to be. The novel features nine stories of women living alone and independently or on the verge of being so. Their performances seem to be assuming the reality of an inability to cope with the patriarchal system. They live surrounded by an elected solitude, accepted because of the impossibility of being understood in the sociocultural context. The title of the novel is a metaphor for the ideological concept the novel poses for the contemporary woman: There are things women can’t do barefoot. Ironically the stories are about women who metaphorically do everything “barefoot”. In other words “being” is only possible “barefoot”, as the stories imply. One example illustrating the book’s metaphor is Diana’s story. She arrives at her cousin’s house because she is invited for a dinner her cousin prepared to celebrate her being awarded a scholarship: Diana tocó el timbre de la casa de su prima, y apenas se abrió la puerta los niños se le abalanzaron encima. Marianita tenía un trajecito rosa pomposo, Federico una camisa a cuadros de manga larga y seguramente mucho calor. Parecían muñecos de torta. -Dejen a su tía que la van a ensuciar- decía su prima, que se había puesto un vestido de flores que ella nunca le había visto, tenía el pelo suelto, visiblemente espolvoreado con espuma “máximo volumen”, y estaba maquillada (García Robayo 77). [Diana rang her cousin’s doorbell, and just as the door opened, the children rushed over to her. Marianita wore an extravagant pink dress, Federico a long-sleeved shirt, and for sure he was burning inside it. They seemed like decorative cake figures. -Leave your aunt; you will mess her up- said her cousin, who was wearing a floral dress that Diana had never seen before … Her hair was visibly sprinkled with “maximum volume” foam, and she had on make-up (García Robayo 77).]

The story continues:

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

93

Diana recorrió la sala con la mirada y vio el mantel bordado de las fiestas y los muebles sin el guardapolvo que siempre tenían. Olía a ambientador de flores. Después se miró su jean desteñido y su camiseta simplona y dijo: -pero que elegantes están todos. Su prima se alisó la falda del vestido y empezó con eso de que, bueno, era una fecha especial: había que celebrar lo de su beca y había que hacerle una linda despedida familiar … Porque un mes se pasa volando, dijo, y porque ahora que se iba a volver “importante” quizá ya no tendría tiempo para ellos. “importante”, a Diana le irritaba que dijera cosas como esa. Cómo le podía hacer entender que la beca de estímulo para jóvenes tercermundistas se la daban a cualquiera que fuera tercermundista, incluso si no era joven, como ella; solo hacía falta declarar en un papel: soy subdesarrollada y un poco morocha y ¡chan! Merezco la acción afirmativa o los demando (García Robayo 77-78). [Diana looked at the living room and saw the embroidered tablecloth they used for parties and the furniture without the covers that they always had for protection. There was a flowery freshener smell. Then she looked at her faded jeans and her simple T-shirt and said, “How elegant all of you are.” Her cousin straightened her skirt and began with, “Well it is a special date: we have to celebrate the scholarship and have a family reunion to say goodbye …” “ Because a month flies by,” she said, and because now that she would become “important” she would perhaps no longer have time for them. “Important.” Diana was annoyed when her cousin said things like that. How could she make her understand that the stimulus scholarship for young third world people was given to anyone who was from the third world, even if the person wasn't young, like her. She just needed to declare: “I am underdeveloped and slightly dark” and bam! I deserve affirmative action or I’ll sue them” (García Robayo 77-78).]

What is interesting in this scene is the acknowledgement by the women of their reality inside the cultural context. Diana understands that she was given a scholarship because she belongs to an underdeveloped, third world country. It is not stated where the scholarship came from, but it is understood that is given to cover a quota for minorities. As Diana says, it is given for young third world people, and that even if she was not young she was a “morocha” woman, which means a woman of color in Latin America. This story states how Diana accepts her role and accordingly to the title of the book, she has to wear the shoes to be able to perform. This is part of the “things a woman can’t do barefoot”. She has to wear the stigma of her society, but she recognized it without falsifying the truth. On the other hand, there is her cousin, belonging to the lower middle class,

94

Chapter Five

and acting as if this scholarship were part of a “magnificent event”. She decorates the house and dresses the kids and herself in the context of how a woman should act and what she should do for the family. Diana is clearly shocked by her cousin’s attitude toward something she understands belongs to the idea of being a third world woman. In the context of this novel, women are in their “deterritorialized” world, and things can only be done if women get rid of the shoes, metaphorically represented by the “high heels” of oppression. At this point a comparison between Diana, and Isabel and Sofia of the novel El eco de las mentiras is justifiable: Diana is also conscious of her marginalization and confronts it in a defiant way. Isabel and Sofia are still thinking of the possibility of being recognized and valued by their male co-workers, and can’t understand the reasons for their failure to gain this recognition. It can be said that although these two women dressed appropriately for their masculine jobs in “high heels”, they failed because they could not understand the reason for their diminished power and oppression. Diana, on the other hand, is conscious of her own marginalized situation, and is also aware of her cousin’s mentality which represents the traditional woman, a mother and housewife, for whom Diana’s scholarship is the opportunity of acquiring a higher social level. This is not expressed clearly in the narrative, but it is evident in the way Diana’s cousin prepares the party, including the way the kids are dressed for Diana’s visit. In the end, it must be concluded that the contemporary Latin American woman is doubly marginalized by being a woman and living in a world colonized by a Europeanizing humanist ideal. But she has decided to ignore the existence of domination and act metaphorically “barefoot,” free of personal constraints. The feminist fight of the twentieth century which primarily established the need for recognition of being able to perform in a male environment and being able to acquire equal political, economic and social status has been denied, including in today’s context. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that if these contextual environments cannot change, it is because the patriarchal ideology, which implements such constrictions, has to be revised from within. In other words, in order to revise the women’s position in the sociocultural environment where they belong, it is clear that the specific sociocultural environment must be revised by first acknowledgment that in fact it was created as a peripheral establishment of the western civilization and Europeanizing sociocultural context. As previously stated in this chapter, lack of identity is the result of colonization, and the impossibility of returning to specific cultural origins is what establishes a double discrimination for women inside the periphery

Colombian Postfeminist Narrative of the Twenty-First Century

95

of the Latin American context. Women’s permanent harassment from the patriarchal society is part of a bigger issue associated with imperialism and the third world countries. It is necessary to revise the patriarchal ideology where the Latin American people are situated, already defined as peripheral, and it is necessary to revise how the peripheral context was shaped differently from what was defined as western ideology. The peripheral context is marked as part of third world societies. Patriarchal ideology and western civilization have been imposed on the Latin American people of both genders. In order to be liberated from that doubly peripheral context where women of the third world are situated, it is necessary to understand that there is no original ideology to rely on, but there is a mixture of different types of alienations that comprise what is called Latin America. Third world ideology must revise its own marginalization. At least, this revision can take women to the place where they can understand that there is no easy way to find recognition, but where they can be recognized as human beings over merely a gender construction. El eco de las mentiras is proof of the present and active patriarchal settings for the third world women, and the impossibility of been recognized inside the powerful enclosure of the high class of society that has specific rules for social male-female behavior marked for centuries in our colonized countries. Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza is a novel which portrays middle and lower-class women whose individual stories demonstrate how they have had to go with the flow of social expectations to be able to survive inside the patriarchy. Nevertheless, unlike in the first novel, women in this text are conscious of their own situation and confront it wearing the “high heels” of power to be able to survive; one example is Diana. In conclusion, my analysis states that the Colombian feminist representation at the beginning of the twenty-first century is searching in its own way for liberation from the western and European ideology that has branded women since the colonial era. Gender discrimination must be eliminated when it comes to the definition of a human being: women can reach the highest levels of achievement, without any consideration of what the gender markers for “female” or “male” contain. And, as also previously stated, feminist representation is not specifically of the feminist subject; in the contemporary globalized environment it marks revolutionary instances seeking for a new feminist ideology not only in Colombia but in Latin America as a whole.

CONCLUSION In trying to outline a framework toward the understanding of the Latin American feminist representation of the twenty-first century, its ideology, struggles and definition, it is essential to emphasize the necessity for the women of our time to be considered as individual human beings, and not as objects stigmatized by the definition of gender. In today’s globalized world, the specific gender social programming has become, more than ever, an issue to be resolved due, precisely, to the possibility of exposing the marginalized group’s struggles in our global society. As I commented in Chapter One, in the part entitled “Feminist Discourse and Postcolonialism”, a patriarchal environment has been established in Latin America since the time of colonization, and for the Latin American women, the feminist issue not only deals with the ideology of the colonized people but also with the fact of being women in third world countries. We need to keep in mind that twenty-first century Latin American feminism deals with the same sense of cultural, racial and social diversity that identify the Latin American domain. It means that the Latin American feminist representations portray women with different sociocultural specificities diverse as is the Latin American context. An example of these sociocultural specificities is found in the different cultures, races, and social classes portrayed by the female characters of the narratives analyzed in this book. Representations of Latin American women of the twenty-first century are embedded in a frame of establishing an identity which confronts the unavoidable history of sidelined cultures where women have been doubly marginalized. The identity issue has been an important topic in Latin American history and literature; nevertheless, it is particularly the main concern for present day Latin American feminism in which postcolonialism is the historical and cultural environment that permits the exposition of minority agendas. As a way of declaring these issues, and as a Latin American woman myself, my position inside the patriarchal environment has been marked by my personal, academic, and cultural scopes. As a Latin American woman in an academic position I must confess that my experience of confronting patriarchy has resulted in a constant need to prove my capabilities. As a Latin American woman, I must emphasize that I have suffered doubly, both because of my gender

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

97

and ethnic singularity within patriarchal environments. My experiences throughout the years have made me grow as a person and as a human being, but also, I have grown in the knowledge of the cultural, social and academic difficulties that a Latin American woman confront in reaching high levels of performance. The essays in this volume deal with women still looking, in the twentyfirst century, for their own space and their own identity within Latin American societies. They emphasize specific objectives dealing with the necessity to not only examine the issue for women’s equal opportunities in the sociocultural environment, but also to explore the notion of a new identity inside a context already marginalized by colonization. This last statement is relevant because in one way or the other, colonization has marked the Latin American environment. Among the topics examined are analyses of slavery, women’s madness, the subversion of traditional roles, and consciousness of marginalization. Representation of Latin American women slaves in Puerto Rico has found a way of recovering women’s denied place in history; their alienation was a consequence of patriarchal domination. By examining the facts from the time of slavery, the female slaves’ representations not only restore their existence (ignored for years), but also the recognition of their humiliating past. At the same time, the representations contain observations of resistance, cultural migration and sisterhood, as stated by Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús’ essay. The recognition, acceptance and willingness to survive the inflexible history of disgrace is a step forward and an opportunity for women to place themselves in today’s history. It is noticeable that identity is also seen in Elvira Sánchez-Blake’s essay which deals with “madness” and the grasp of reality from a different perspective. In a way, the idea of “boundaries” brings us to the essential exploration of the rebased limits contemporary women have been pursuing to reach their own identity. With the issue of “madness”, it is possible to say that women are driven to the borderline between madness and reality. It is relevant to see how gender has influenced the definition of madness, a topic well explained by Sánchez-Blake to establish fundamental approaches to contemporary issues of feminist representation. Something relevant from her analysis is how madness has been associated with women since the nineteenth century and since then has been promoting a negative definition of the female. In Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves’s essay we observe that there has been a need to subvert the male detective novel in the writings of Argentinian Claudia Piñeiro. But Piñeiro even questions the treatment of the genre in female crime novels. The notion of maternity is problematized in Piñeiro’s

98

Conclusion

novels in order to expose hypocrisies in the family environment. Women in these novels present female characters who, in transgressive directions, become investigators owing to their unwillingness to sustain the charade they have been performing by following their society’s strict patriarchal formula for the traditional wife and mother roles. Dávila Gonçalves mentions that this need of subversion reminds us of the hundreds of Argentinian mothers that still seek the truth about their disappeared children lost during the military regime. These mothers, real or fictional, are empowering themselves to show who they are in the marginalized society, which is also a way of searching for their specific Latin American identity. Although the novels analyzed in this volume are quite different, it is clear that there is a similar thread in the various societies represented, which is the inherent hypocrisy of patriarchal society. The chapter’s topics studied here show that Latin American ideologies marked by colonization have been converted into rules that have to be constantly challenged. Many Latin American people accustomed to the colonization frames are still blind to the hypocritical parameters perpetuated by their governments, society and culture. There is hypocrisy in the idea that black women are functioning well inside society; there is hypocrisy in the concept of connecting madness directly to women’s issues; and there is hypocrisy in the idea that women accept their established traditional roles without questioning them or trying to transcend them. Nevertheless, women’s growing awareness of their own marginalization is still being suffocated by social standards established by centuries that define what is acceptable and normal inside the culture. This block against acknowledging women’s rights is what caused the hypocritical condition of the women’s world inside Latin American cultures. Although it may seem a small achievement, the search for recognition socially, politically and culturally has given women the opportunity to emerge from behind the scenes and insert themselves into the public arena or permit them to achieve personal goals that correspond to specific groups with their specific objectives. In other words, the Latin American women of the twenty-first century are no longer dealing with the main goal of being recognized as equal to men, when taking into consideration their capacities and capabilities. They have no interest in demonstrating only that they are capable of achieving what they desire in a man’s world. This assertion could seem contradictory; nevertheless it is the dilemma that is shaping the twenty-first century Latin American feminist representation. Women today understand that the issue has to be resolved within the environment of patriarchy which has been carved in stone for

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

99

centuries. This means that women continue to fight the battle for positions of power, but at the same time, there is no doubt about their capabilities, and the battle goes further towards acquiring identity. The main issue is finding their identity inside colonized, third world countries, where females are marked by the history of a marginal and Europeanized male culture, which in turn, should recognize its own cultural periphery because it belongs to an already colonized context. In this way it is possible to say that women today are one step further than men in acknowledging that they are themselves in a marginal culture created by colonization. Women have been taken to the borderline, where they can see themselves apart from the imposed sociocultural inheritance of colonialism. The limits which have been imposed on women are giving them the opportunity of creating their own “new worlds” where they create their own reality, ideas and objectives. Finally, writers’ (female or male) constant uncovering of female sidelining in Latin American societies is carrying out through literature the exposure of the periphery. The literary tools used by women to revert feminine marginalization can be the way to encounter their own individual identities in the Latin American world as a whole. In the texts analyzed in this volume it is clear that the great diversity of Latin American women in its history and culture are voicing their own identity: from the African slaves to their black descendants, from the sane to the apparently mentally challenged, from typical mothers to activists, and finally from professional women to human beings that deserve respect.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arce, Rafael. “La genealogía del monstruo.” Los límites de la literatura. Ed. Alberto Giordano. Rosario: Centro de estudios de literatura argentina, 2010. 17-32. Print. Ardila, Lucía Cristina. El eco de las mentiras. Bogotá: Grijalbo, 2010. Print. Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda. las Negras. Carolina, P.R.: Boreales, 2012. Print. —. Saeta, the Poems. Carolina, P.R.: Boreales, 2011. Print. Ávila, Alexandra. “Claudia Piñeiro: ‘La novela policial debe tener mayor voluntad de verosimilitud.’” El universo. 7 October 2012. Web. 26 January 2013. Badinter, Elizabeth. Dead End Feminism. 2003. Trans. Julia Borrosa. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006. Print. —. The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Trans. Adriana Hunter. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Discourse of the Novel.” The Dialogical Imagination. Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1981. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. Beard, Laura J. Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas. Charlotte: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Print. Bernhard, Tomas. Gargoyles. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York, 2008. Print. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Prólogo,” “El cuento policial” and “Edgar Allan Poe de Edward Shanks,” Obras completas IV. Barcelona: Emecé, 1996. Print. Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas, Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas 1850-2000. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

101

Caputi, Mary. “Maternal Metaphor in Feminist Scholarship.” Political Psychology 44.2 (1993): 309-329. Print. Castillo, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Print. Cavallari, Héctor Mario. “Ilusión, realidad e imaginario femenino: la escritura de Liliana Heker.” Letras femeninas 26.1-2 (2000): 27-40. Print. Chapman, Michael. “Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn,” English in Africa 33.2 (2006): 7-20. Print. Chesler. Phylips. Women and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Print. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. Print. Close, Glen S. “The Detective is Dead. Long Live the Novela Negra!” Latin American Studies Association (LASA) XXV International Conference, 2004. Web. 9 January 2011. Coleman, Jenny. “An Introduction to Feminisms in a Postfeminist Age.” Women's Studies Journal 23.2 (2009): 3-13. Print. Colmeiro, José F. La novela policíaca española: teoría e historia crítica. Madrid: Anthropos, 1994. Print. Dávila Gonçalves, Michele C. “De Pulp Fiction a metaficción literaria: las transformaciones del personaje detectivesco en la narrativa policial brasileña.” Chasqui 34.2 (2005): 78-91. Print. —. “‘Elemental mi querido Watson:’ variaciones y transgresiones de la novela detectivesca en el Caribe hispano.” Anais das IX Jornadas Andinas de Literatura Latino-Americana (JALLA). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010. 1437-1441. CD-ROM. —. “En busca del Corazón de Voltaire: el detective epistolar de Luis López Nieves.” Voces del Caribe - Online Journal 2.1 (2010): 53-68. Web. Aug. 2010 —. “Siguiéndole las pistas a la novela detectivesca puertorriqueña.” Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura/ International Journal in Humanistic Studies and Literature 18 (2012): 77-90. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print. Del Gesso Cabrera, Ana María. “Certezas que conducen a incertidumbres (una novela de Claudia Piñeiro).” Amerika 7. 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Jan. 2013.

102

Bibliography

Díaz, Luis Felipe. “Reseña de Las negras.” Claridad, En Rojo. 29 October 2012. Web. 30 October 2012 Di Paolo, Osvaldo. “Cadáveres en el armario: el policial palimséstico en la literatura argentina contemporánea.” Diss. University of Kentucky at Lexington, 2011. Print. Figueroa, José Antonio. “El realismo mágico, vallenato y violencia política en el Caribe colombiano.” Diss. Georgetown University, 2007. Print. Flórez, Mónica. “Elena sabe y los enigmas de la novela policiaca antidetectivesca/metafísica.” Lingüística y literatura 58 (2010): 39-50. Print Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Fox, Patricia D. Being Blackness in Latin America, Uprootedness and ‘Improvisation. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2006. Print. Gadsby, Meredith M. Sucking SALT, Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Columbia Press, 2006. Print. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Print. García Robayo, Margarita María. Hay cosas que una no puede hacer descalza. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009. Print. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New York: Yale UP, 1979. Print. González, Gail. “La evolución de la novel policial argentina en la posdictadura.” Hispania 90.2 (2007): 253-263. Print. Gunew, Sneja, ed. Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Horsley, Leo. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1994. Print. Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin American Women Writers, Class, Race, and Gender. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Print. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Print. Kristeva, Julia. “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident. Trans. Séan Hand. Moi 292-300. Print. —. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. 1987. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Print.

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

103

—. “Le temps des femmes.” Les nouvelles maladies de l'âme. Paris: Fayard, 1993. 297-330. Print. —. Poderes de la perversión: sobre la abyección. 1982. México: Siglo XXI, 2001. Print. —. “Stabat Mater.” Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël, 1983. 225-247. Print. —. “Women’s Time.” Trans. Alice Jardin & Henry Blake. Signs 7.1 (1981): 13-35. Print. López, James. “Muertos incómodos: la apropiación satírica del género negro en México y Latinoamérica.” Hipertexto 13 (2011): 22-41. Print. Martella, Gianna M. “Pioneers: Spanish American Women Writers of Detective Fiction.” Letras femeninas 28.1 (2002): 31-44. Print. Moi, Toril, Ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print. Montero, Mayra. Son de almendra. Guaynabo: Alfaguara, 2005. Print. Oliver, Kelly. “Julia Kristeva’s Maternal Passions.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française 18.1 (2008-2010): 1-8. Print. Padura Fuentes, Leonardo. “Miedo y violencia: la novela policial en Iberoamérica.” Foreword. Variaciones en negro. Relatos policiales iberoamericanos. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2003. Print. —. Modernidad, posmodernidad y la novela policial. La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 2000. Print. Pellicer, Rosa. “Libros y detectives en la narrativa policial argentina.” Hispamérica 31.93 (2002): 3-18. Print. Pérez, Genaro J. Ortodoxia y heterodoxia de la novela policíaca hispana. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002.Print. Piglia, Ricardo. Crítica y ficción. Buenos Aires: Serie Ensayos, 1986. Print. Piñeiro, Claudia. All Yours. Trans. Miranda France. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2011. Print. —. Betibú. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011. Print. —. Elena sabe. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007. Print. —. Las grietas de Jara. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009. Print. —. Las viudas de los jueves. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005. Print. —. Tuya. 2005. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008. Print.Ponce de León, Gina. “La transgresión como objetivo en dos novelas de Jorge Franco: Melodrama y Santa Suerte.” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 29 (2011): 217-235. Print.

104

Bibliography

Priestman, Martin, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Ramos Rosado, Marie. La mujer en la literatura puertorriqueña. Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2003. Print. Reddy, Maureen T. “Women Detectives.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. London: Cambridge, 2006. 191207. Print. Restrepo, Laura. Delirio. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 2004. Print. —. Delirium. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2007. Print. Reyes, Israel. Humor and the Eccentric Text in Puerto Rican Literature. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005. Print Richard, Nelly. “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-Centering.” Boundary 2 20.3 (1993): 156-161. Print. —. Masculine and Feminine: Practices of Differences. Duke University Press, 2004. Print. Rieger, Branimir M. Dyonisus in Literature: Essays on Literary Madness. Bowlin Green: Bowlin Green University Popular Press, 1994. Print. Rivas, Luz Marina. La novela intrahistórica. Caracas: Ediciones el otro el mismo, 2004. Print Rivera Garza, Cristina. La Castañeda: narrativas dolientes desde el manicomio general. México, 1910-1930. México D.F: Tusquets, 2010. Print. —. Nadie me verá llorar. México: Tusquets, 1999. Print. —. No One Will See Me Cry. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Curbstone Press, 2003. Print. —. “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone: Inmates and Psychiatrists Debate Gender and Class at the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, Mexico, 1910-1930.” Hispanic American Historical Review 81.3-4 (2001): 653-688. Print. —. The Masters of the Streets: Bodies, Power and Modernity in Mexico, 1867-1930. Diss. Houston University, 1995. Print. Roucek, Joseph S. & V. F. Montesinos. “Aspectos sociológicos del relato policíaco, de misterio, crímenes y espionaje.” Revista española de la opinión pública 35 (1974): 57-103. Print. Ruffinelli, Jorge. “Ni a tontas ni a locas: notas sobre Cristina Rivera Garza.” Nuevo Texto Crítico. Vol. 21. N 41-42, 2008: 33-41. Print. Samuelson, Cheyla. “Writing at Escape Velocity: An Interview with Cristina Rivera Garza.” Confluencia 23.1 (2007): 135-145. Print. Santos Febres, Mayra. Cualquier miércoles soy tuya. Barcelona: Editorial Mondadori, 2002. Print.

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

105

—. Sobre piel y papel. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2005. Print. Sheridan, Susan. “Feminist Knowledge, Women’s Liberation, and Women’s Studies.” Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. Ed. Sneja Gunew. New York: Routledge, 1990. 36-55. Print. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. London: Virago Press, 1987. Print. —. ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Print. Tapia, Rosa. “'Mia o de naiden.' La reescritura de la violencia en Pasión de historia de Ana Lydia Vega.” Hispanic Review (2007): 47-60. Print. Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. Women and Slavery in the African Diaspora: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Historical Analysis. Sage 3.2 (1986): 1115. Print. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Valdés, Vanessa Kimberly. “Mothers and Daughters: Searches for Wholeness in the Literature of the Americas.” Diss. Vanderbilt University, 2007. Print. Vega, Ana Lydia. Pasión de historia y otras historias de pasión. 1987. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la flor, 2001. Print. Vélez, Diana. “Ana Lydia Vega’s Pasión de historia: A Text within Two Genres.” Latin American Studies Association Congress (LASA), Las Vegas, Nevada, 7-9 Oct. 2004. Web. 18 Nov. 2008. Vilches-Norat, Vanessa. De(s)madres o el rastro materno en las escrituras del Yo: a propósito de Jacques Derrida, Jamaica Kincaid, Esmeralda Santiago y Carmen Boullosa. Chile: Editorial cuarto propio, 2003. Print. Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism.’ New York: New York University Press, 1995. Print. Ziarek, Ewa. “At the Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva's Thought.” Hypatia 7.2 (1992): 91-108. Print.

CONTRIBUTORS Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves is an Assistant Professor of Spanish language and literatures in the World Languages & Culture Department at Salem State University in Massachusetts; she holds a Doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She published the book El archivo de la memoria: la novela de formación femenina en Rosa Chacel, Rosa Montero, Rosario Castellanos y Elena Poniatowska (1999). Her recent research interests range from Puerto Rican narrative and poetry to the detective novel, and she has published articles in anthologies and journals such as Exégesis, Chasqui, Con-textos, Voces del Caribe, Hipertexto, Tinkuy and the International Journal in Humanistic Studies and Literature. She is a poet and has appeared in poetical magazines and anthologies such as Poetas en el tiempo, Poetas sin Tregua: compilación de poetas puertorriqueñas de la generación del 80. Dávila Gonçalves is part of the Brazilian Projeto Editorial Banda Hispânica: Jornal de Poesia.“Acervo Geral—Porto Rico.” In 2011 she published Mosaicos, a compilation of four of her poetry books. Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús is a full professor of Spanish at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania; she holds a Doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently the President of the International Faculty Association and the Coordinator of the Spanish section. She has edited, co-edited, and co-authored the books La escritura de mujeres en Puerto Rico a finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI: narradoras, cuentistas, cronistas, relatoras / Essays on Contemporary Puerto Rican Writers; Race, Women of Color, and the State University System: Critical Reflections (with Vivian Yenika-Agbaw), Escritura y desafío: narradoras venezolanas del siglo XX (with Edith Dimo), and La novela moderna en Venezuela. She has published several articles, essays reviews, and book reviews on Latin America and Caribbean Studies. She has published some of her creative work in the anthology Florilegio: Antología de poetas iberoamericanos. Gina Ponce de León is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Chair of the Spanish Language and Culture Program at Fresno Pacific University; she holds a Doctorate from the University of

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

107

Colorado at Boulder. Ponce de León has extensive experience with curriculum development in Spanish and in the area of Latin American Studies. She is member of the Board of Directors of the NAAAS (National Association of African American Studies and affiliates). She has published several articles, has contributed with book chapters and published books based on theoretical approaches to Colombian literature. Her most recent publications are: El Carnaval de Blanco y Negros y la narrativa colombiana del siglo XXI: La carroza de Bolívar (2012), La novela colombiana posmoderna (2011), and “La transgresión como objetivo en dos novelas de Jorge Franco: Melodrama y Santa Suerte”, in Estudios de Literatura Colombiana (2011). Dr Ponce de León has also served on the editorial board of referees for National and International Journals. Elvira Sánchez-Blake is Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Michigan State University; she holds a Doctorate in Hispanic Literature from Cornell University, with specializations in contemporary Latin American literature and Women’s studies. Her publications include Patria se escribe con sangre (Anthropos, 2000, testimonials by women in the Colombian conflict), and Espiral de silencios (Beamount, 2009), a novel based on recent Colombian historical events. She also co-authored the anthology Voces Hispanas Siglo XXI: Entrevistas con autores en DVD (Yale University Press, 2005), and the critical edition El universo literario de Laura Restrepo (Taurus, 2007). Professor Sánchez-Blake also has published numerous articles in professional journals and collective editions.

INDEX “Middle Passage” .......................... 8 “Porfiriato” .................................. 47 “second wave” feminists ............. 66 “sicaresca”................................... 45 “third world woman”..................... 1 Ángel, Albalucía ......................... 45 Ardila, Lucía Cristina el eco de las mentiras Isabel Sofía ........................ x, 5, 17 Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda las Negras Los documentados Ojos de luna Origami de letras Saeta, the poems .. vii, x, 3, 6, 23, 39 Ashcroft, Bill ............................... 85 Austen, Jane ................................ 43 Ávila, Alexandra ......................... 68 Badinter, Elizabeth How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women ......................... 66, 106 Barthes, Roland ........................... 50 Beard, Laura J .................... 7, 10, 35 Benjamin, Walter ........................ 50 Bermúdez, María Elvira .............. 63 Bernhard, Thomas ....................... 77 Bhabha, Homi K............................ 1 Bioy Casares, Adolfo .................. 63 Bonnet, Piedad ............................ 81 Bosco, María Angélica ................ 63 Bost, Suzanne ....................... 7, 9, 33 Boullosa, Carmen .................45, 112 Brant, Sebastian........................... 40 Brontë, Charlotte ......................... 43 Brontë, Emily .............................. 43 Bukharin ...................................... 92

Cain, James M ............................. 57 Carter, Charlotte .......................... 57 Cassandra ...................52, 53, 54, 57 Castañeda, La ...........47, 48, 49, 110 Castillo, Debra ............................. 45 Cavallari, Héctor Mario ............... 62 Cervantes ..................................... 41 Chandler, Raymond ..................... 57 Chapman Michael........................ 17 Chasqui ..................................... 113 Christi, Agatha ............................ 14 Cixous ................................. 13, 107 Clément, Catherine ........ 13, 43, 107 Cody, Liza ................................... 57 Corpi, Lucha ................................ 64 Crack ..................................... 44, 45 Darwinian psychiatry ............ 41, 42 Deleuze, Guilles .......................... 81 desaparecidos ........................ 58, 71 Descartes, René ........................... 41 Detective ........ 60, 63, 107, 108, 109 Díaz, Luis Felipe ......................... 25 Díaz, Porfirio ............................... 48 Dickinson, Emily ......................... 43 Dirty War ........................ 58, 71, 73 Dupin, Auguste...................... 14, 56 Eltit, Diamela ......................... ix, 45 Emma, Franc ............................... 63 Erasmus ....................................... 41 Feminism v, vi, vii, 3, 6, 66, 91, 106, 107, 112 femme fatale .......................... 14, 60 Feracho, Lesley ....................... 7, 10 Foucault, Michel.................... 11, 40 Fox, Patricia D......................... 7, 27 Franco, Jorge ... 81, 82, 83, 110, 114 Freud, Sigmund ........................... 42 Galvão, Patrícia ........................... 63 Gandhi, Leela .................... 1, 21, 85

21st Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism García Aguilera, Carolina. 15, 63, 64 García Márquez, Gabriel ............. 44 García Robayo, Margarita .. x, 5, 17, 81 Gasby, Meredith M ..................7, 30 Gaze ................................... 4, 40, 54 Gender . . vii, viii, 6, 80, 89, 91, 100, 107, 109, 110 Gilbert, Sandra ... 12, 42, 43, 44, 49, 52, 108 Giménez Bartlett, Alicia .............. 62 González, Gail ............................. 64 Grafton, Sue ................................ 57 Grant, Linda ................................ 57 Green, Anna Katherine ................ 56 Guattari, Félix ......................81, 108 Gubar, Susan .................. 12, 42, 108 Gunew, Sneja ................................ 2 Hammett, Dashiell....................... 57 Hilferding .................................... 92 Holmes, Sherlock ...................14, 56 Holquist, Michael .................61, 106 Horsley, Leo .. . 4, 13, 14, 15, 58, 59, 60, 61, 72, 108 hyperreality ................ 11, 40, 54, 55 hysteria ...................................42, 44 Intra-historia ................... vii, 25, 27 Figueroa, José Antonio ...........19, 86 James, P.D ................................... 57 Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne .7, 10, 32 Kijewski, Karen........................... 57 Klein, Kathleen Gregory ............. 60 Kristeva, Julia...... 4, 14, 16, 58, 109 Lacanian ........................... 16, 65, 77 Laing, R.D ..............................12, 42 Lapesa ......................................... 24 Leblanc, Maurice......................... 56 Lenin ........................................... 92 Levodopa..................................... 74 Lispector, Clarice ........................ 45 Lopinto, Charles .......................... 64 Lopinto, Lidia.............................. 64 Macdonald, Ross ......................... 57 macho .......................................... 90 Madness vii, viii, 11, 40, 44, 48, 49, 51, 107, 108, 110, 111

109

Madres de la Plaza de mayo ........ 45 Maria Alice Barroso .................... 63 Martella, Gianna M ..................... 63 Martinez, Michele ....................... 64 Marxist ........................................ 92 McAlister, Midas ......................... 52 McOndo................................. 44, 45 Melo, Patrícia .............................. 63 Merivale, Patricia ........................ 61 Mexican Revolution .................... 47 Mikhail Bakhtin................... 48, 106 Moi, Toril .... 65, 66, 69, 75, 77, 109 Montero, Mayra ........................... 64 Montes, Graciela ......................... 64 motherhood..... 4, 13, 16, 58, 65, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 76, 78 Muller, Marcia ............................. 57 Neely, Barbara ............................. 57 Ocampo, Silvina .......................... 63 Oliver, Maria-Antònia ........... 15, 62 Ortiz, Lourdes.............................. 62 Pardo Bazán, Emilia .................... 62 Paretsky, Sara .............................. 57 Parody ......................................... 11 pastiche .................................. 11, 48 Patriarchal ................................. 100 Peri Rossi, Cristina ...................... 45 Peripheral Humanism .................. 19 Perkins, Charlotte ........................ 43 Picó, Fernando ............................. 24 Piñeiro, Claudia .... viii, x, 4, 13, 15, 56, 57, 61, 64, 79, 103, 106, 108 Pirkis, Catherine Louisa .............. 56 Poe, Edgar Allan.......................... 14 Poletti, Syria ................................ 63 Postcolonialism vii, 2, 17, 102, 107 postfeminism ................................. 1 Queiroz, Raquel de ...................... 63 Rafael Lapesa .............................. 24 Reddy, Maureen T ....................... 60 Restrepo, Laura ..x 4, 11, 40, 45, 51, 80, 114 Reyes, Israel ................................ 69 Richard, Nelly ....................... 13, 46 Rivas, Luz Marina ....................... 24

110 Rivera Garza, Cristina .. x, 4, 11, 40, 45, 46, 51, 111 Roa Bastos, Augusto ................... 44 Roberts Rinehart, Mary ............... 56 Rodoreda, Mercè ......................... 62 Romero Rey, Sandro ................... 81 Rosado, Ramos......... 7, 8, 9, 29, 110 Rosalyn, Terborg-Penn...............111 Ruffinelli, Jorge........................... 50 Rulfo, Juan .................................. 44 Sábato, Ernesto............................ 44 Samuelson, Cheyla Rose ............. 47 Santos Febres, Mayra .................. 64 Sarlo, Beatriz ............................... 73 Sayers, Dorothy L ....................... 56 scopic .....................................48, 51 Shakespeare................................. 41 Shelley, Mary .............................. 43 Sheridan, Susan ......................2, 111

Index Showalter, Elaine......................... 12 Simenon, Georges ....................... 56 social constructionism ................. 91 Spanos, William .......................... 61 sucking salt .............................. 4, 39 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth ........... 61 Tani, Stefano ............................... 61 The Case of the Toxic Cruiseline . 64 Tyson, Lois .................................. 89 Valdés, Vanessa Kimberly .......... 77 Valenzuela, Luisa ........................ 45 Vargas Llosa, Mario .................... 44 Vega, Ana Lydia.................. 64, 111 Vertus, Genise ............................... 7 Vilches-Norat, Vanessa ............... 67 West .................................. 7, 30, 92 Wilson Wesley, Valerie ............... 57 Wilson, Barbara ..................... 57, 59 Wings, Mary .......................... 57, 59