The Point

Thursday, February 15, 2007

The Heart is a Lamentable Hunter

I CAME TO A REALISATION/NON-REALISATION THE OTHER DAY about the music I listen to. For some reason, I am powerfully attracted to artists who are fascinated by the stories of where they come from. Lhasa, Tagaq, Amal Murkus... these women sing in languages I don't even know how to conjugate verbs in, but I can't stop listening.

I thought about that this evening at dinner with my grandma. Yes, I took my mom and my grandma out for Valentine's Day dinner. As horrible/adorable as that is, it was completely worth it for this moment right before we were about to put our coats on. It's generally hard to see any resemblance between them either physically or in personality, though they were both born back in Guyana. But just as we were about to head out, my mother turned to my grandmother and said, 'Are you wearing bifocals now?' To which she replied, 'Well, yeah, and?' And my mom put her face up close and said, 'So am I!' and showed her her brand new 'progressive lenses.' I asked if that meant they voted NDP and got a withering glare.

Ana Castillo seems like she's been consumed by the same questions for her whole life. One of the most renowned Chicana authors, her work straddles the intimacies and contradictions of lives straddling Mexican and American traditions, languages, and identities. Where Sandra Cisneros is a cold Chicago day though, Castillo's writing is more restless, more urgent, more hungry. Her 1986 book The Mixquiahuala Letters is a raw, candid series of snapshots in the vagrancies and heartaches of two women living through these questions of self and self-love and half-love.

The book is written as a series of correspondences from one woman, Teresa, to another, Alicia. Teresa is mestizo - chicana, hispanic, that sweet compromise between Indian and European (in the Latin American sense) - and Alicia is white as day (take that as you will), and both are helplessly drawn again and again back to Mexico, where they travel throughout the book not to meet anyone but themselves, not to lap up any beach but the landscape of their own bodies, their own capacities.

The words 'passionate' or 'fiery' come to mind when I think of Teresa, but neither is appropriate for her busty recklessness, her determination to become herself after she briefly entwines with man after man, her steely sense of never being able to be just one thing at one time. Imagine if Penelope Cruz in Volver met Malena, and they went drinking, and they started arguing, and they started shouting, and then this woman neither of them knows comes up, finishes their bottle of whiskey, and starts dancing with their boyfriends. This might approach Teresa.

The book is as much about the chasms between men and women as it is about their questions of being gringa or Indian, Mexican or Nuyorquina. Teresa and Alicia seem at best cynical about the prospects of genuine love. Most of the men that pass through their lives are sad, abrasive, or beautiful and heartless, which is not a completely inaccurate summary of our gender, but Teresa especially seems to chafe against the expectations of what being a man or being a woman means in these cultures.

'Alvaro Pérez Pérez,' she writes, 'was a self-proclaimed healer, an alcoholic, and in love.' One afternoon she waits for him to meet her in the main square of his hometown in Mexico to show her around. Sitting on a bench, she sits expectantly with all her bags for him to arrive, and when he does, he saunters casually over in dark sunglasses and sits down beside her without a word.

'We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch,' she says. 'When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles.'

In and out of fate, superstition, love and grief she and Alicia run, away and toward each other, not tourists but travellers, journeyers of the soul. But the journey they take, like so so so many, is back to themselves. I chew on this as I reflect on the most action I got on this Valentine's Day, and realise it was the Purity Test I took in The Gateway. I did shamefully well.

Ana Castillo photo credit: Steve Tienda. Photo contest results tomorrow.

A note: copies of The Mixquiahuala Letters are not easy to find above the 49th parallel. I ended up ordering mine used from Texas on Amazon (for about $2.00 Canadian, plus $8 postage). Worth it.

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posted by Christopher at 1:52 a.m.

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