Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Six: Blood Points
BEGINNING Women taught me to read from left to right. Women taught me the order of the alphabet and the sequence of numbers. They taught me that in the beginning the word was made flesh. At home, at school and at catechism, it was women who first taught me the order of the universe. I learned grammar, syntax and history; order, class and phylum; and I lerned to write cursive, pushing and curving ever to the right. Sense, I was taught, lay at the end of the sentence. To find it I had to attend to the subject, verb and object of syntax as well as to the past, present and future of tense. This was taught to me as a plan for life. To get to the sense of anything, I had to read it, and to read it, I had to follow the rules. The basic rule was simple: begin at the beginning and end at the end. Finding sense was the same as finding a place, and the process of understanding was the same as physically moving from origin to destination. This makes the reading of maps is especially rewarding, for there sense and place were one. I had been taught to value the continuous and the contiguous, to appreciate the next event in the novel, the next rest stop on the highway. One point leads to the next, and if I attended to their proper order, I would reach my desired ends. This point by point order provided the underlying structure for apprehending the world. A thing gained meaning because of its location in relation to the where and when of other things. Sense was predicated upon where something was in space, when it was in time, and what was around it. The order of spatial relationships is that of contiguity, so that to be beside or south means something quite different than to be far away or north. If something is desired, presence is better than absence; it is better that the loved one, for example, is beside you rather than in Ireland. Proximity has meaning for us, for without it, how else could sense be made of a saying such as, “poor Mexico, so far from god and so close to the United States”? The order of temporal relationships is that of continuity, so that now or always means something different than past or never. The enumeration of time is especially fortuitous in this regard, for it facilitates the placing of events in proper sequence. That the US took California from Mexico in 1848 and that gold was discovered there in 1848 means something. And if we factor in place, it is clear that it means something different south of the border than it does north. And so I follow the line, in space and in time, apprehending the world.
PART ONE In the small world of a book, I am faced with stories by women that I want to read. The thin yellow volume of Cuentos Chicanos is filled with an ascending sequence of contiguous pages. Next to each other, one after the next, lie two stories “Ghost Talk” by Ana Castillo and “Willow Game” by Denise Chávez. “Ghost Talk” begins on page 48 and continues to page 55; “Willow Game,” from 56 to 63. “Ghost Talk” begins with the demonstrative pronoun this, and “Willow Game” ends with punctuation, an ellipsis, …, . Between this and the ellipsis, two stories proceed. I come prepared to read and to get to the meaning of the stories in the way I’ve been taught. I begin at the beginning, ready to follow the narration of events from the first to the last. I read confident that the proper order of events can only proceed, like time and like cause and effect, irreversibly one way, to one end. But neither “Ghost Talk” nor “Willow Game” follow the rules. They seem to narrate little and instead rely heavily on some other order. What narrative there is seems there to introduce violence, so that it is as if narrative itself comes to signify violence. First “Ghost Talk.” I read “Ghost Talk” from beginning to end, but right away there is a problem. It begins with the same words with which it ends: “This is the city where it all happened/happens. The one move directors love so much.” At first this seems that, rather than progressing from A to Z, it goes from A back to A. But this is actually not so difficult: as long as the intermediary points follow in sequence, it is possible to imagine a journey that ends where it began. This can be imagined for a journey around the world as well as for a journey through a short story. That could explain the “happened/happens” too: what occurred in the past at the beginning, occurs again in the present at the end. But there is more. “Ghost Talk” does not really tell a story until the second half. It does not narrate events in a chronological sequence in the beginning but does something quite different. The first half of “Ghost Talk” follows the eye as it moves from point to point in the city, describing one thing then moving to the next. Time is confused because there is no apparent flow and because there is a retrospect from memory. The reading from beginning to end follows some sort of order, an order that is perhaps described as a spilling from one sentence over to the next: i catch a glimpse of her profile in a store window. Her hair is cut shoulder length, the Indian braid buried somewhere in a bureau drawer. It is the cut of a woman well on her way to conservative middle age, some days it is lustrous and sexy. You have sexy hair, the hair stylist says, running a comb lovingly through it, then corrects herself as if women are not supposed to say such things to women. My mother said i looked like Greta Garbo and Juana said i should be in an Italian move. (48) “Ghost Talk” spills forward this way, sentence by sentence, guided by the eye from city site to sight, by the mind through memory, and narrated by the i through a synecdoche of the body, in the “cut of a woman.” But then just past half way, the style changes abruptly and a sequential narrative ensues. At this point, on page 52, the story begins to make sense. The narrator tracks down her absent father with the intention to kill. The narrative sequence begins with attention to the body, to its parts, to its origin: i don’t have a square back like Indians do, and my legs are curved, not birdlike. But I think people don’t get past that. They focus on the narrow eyes, dark skin, the full lips and black straight hair. i don’t tell anybody my father was white. (52) The narrator is the daughter of a Mexican mother and a white father. We learn that he ignored her and mistreated her mother. She confronts him with a gun, but he falls victim to a heart attack. The sequence of events is easy to follow. It is a story of an avenging mestiza. It is about race, gender and generation politics. But that “Ghost Talk” ends where it began, that so much of the story is imagistic, that it simultaneously happened/happens, leaves me confused and denies me the ordered comfort I expect to derive from a narrative. In order to make sense of it as a whole, it is necessary, I think, to pay special attention to the transition paragraph. “Ghost Talk” shifts to narrative in a moment of self reflection, when parts of the body and the origin of the body are considered. Reflection upon the mestiza body forces a look back in time to that as the effect of its original cause, miscegenation. The story of mestizaje begins with the violent act of the while father, and “Ghost Talk” ends with violence directed at him. And in this, the narrative at the end of “Ghost Talk” provides the ultimate point for the whole of it. The story ends after the desire to know the body, its parts and origin, that is, it ends after the desire to narrate the body. The ultimate sense of it, after all, lies in the knot in which narrative, body and violence are bound. The story of the mestiza body is the sequence of blood in the site of blood. Immediately after “Ghost Talk” there comes “Willow Game.” Compared to “Ghost Talk,” “Willow Game” seems much more the traditional story. However, it also ends with a narrative twist, in the case of “Willow Game” there are actually two, which ultimately shapes the meaning of the story. But what is striking about “Willow Game” is how it moves from point to point. In the order of the narration, the temporal is subordinate to the spatial. Over and over, points are made because of some relation in space. The story is essentially the coming of age of a young girl. It is told in events, but more importantly, it is related on a neighborhood grid, a triangle marked by three trees: “Our house was situated in the middle of the block and faced outward to a triangle of trees that became both backdrop and pivot of this child’s tale” (57). Meaning accrues because of proximity to the Apricot tree, the Marking-Off tree, the Willow tree. Consider the description of the Marking-Off tree: The tree was a reference point, offering no shade, but always mediation. It delineated the Up world from the Down. It marked off the nearest point to home, without being home; it was a landmark, and as such, occupied our thought, not in the way the Apricot tree did, but in a subtler, more profound way. (58-9) The story continues this way, meaning is delineated across space, between points. In the plan of the narrator’s life, the Willow tree occupies a prime position. “There to our left is the Willow tree, completing this trinity of trees. How to introduce you to her?” (59). Certain events in narrator’s life originate outside the home in the house next door. When the Cardozas lived there, it was the “senseless boys, demon boys,” Mannie who “punched the hole in our plastic swimming pool,” and Jr., “who made us cry.” Later when the house was occupied by the Althertons, it was “Ricky with his senseless animal temper” who destroyed the Willow tree. In the secure grid around the young girl’s home, it is boys who act, who make senseless violence, and who, in the end, destroy the very structure of her world. “Willow Game” ends with the narration of two events that make final sense of the story. Neither fits in the time of the rest of the story, yet both reflect upon that time. The first event is related in a flashback, back to a more recent past than the death of the Willow tree: Much later, after the death of the Willow, I was walking to school when a young boy came up to me an punched me in the stomach. I doubled over, crawled back to Sister Elaine’s room, unable to tell her of my recent attack, unprovoked, thoughtless, insane. What could I say to her? To my mother and father? What can I say to you? All has been told. The shreds of magic living, like the silken green ropes of the Willow’s branches, dissolved about me, and I was beyond myself, a child no longer. I was filled with immense sadness, the burning of snow in a desert land of consistent warmth. (63) The second event is related outside the time of the story, in the present: “Today I walked outside and the same experience repeated itself; oh, no the same forms, but yes, the attack. I was the same child, you see…” (63). It is and important today, for it locates the repeated attack in the time of the present narration. It also offers a reason for the narration: the attack as an adult recalls the attack as a child, and the present is read in line with the past. Chronological sequence and narration confer meaning both because of the connections they make and because of the fact of connecting. After this, the story continues its narration of the present, telling of the planting of a new willow tree and describing a new spatial order: The Apricot tree died; the Marking-Off tree is fruitless now, relieved from its round of senseless birthings. This willow tree is new, with its particular joys. It stands in the center of the block… between…” (63). In “Willow Game” two narrative bits fall out of the temporal sequence and conclude the story. As they do they make a point about narration and time and meaning and violence. “Willow Game” posits that meaning can be construed spatially or temporally. The meaning derived from the narration of sequential events is, however, violent and senseless in the spatially oriented world of the young girl. Story itself is the sequence of violence. It is a knowledge, and it moves a child, crossing her over the threshold of adulthood. The meaning derived from the description of spatial relationships is that of contiguity. It envisions connections, proximity, geometry rather than the sequence of incident. Continuity is also a knowledge and can also afford the crossing from innocence: “I was a child before there was a South. That was before the magic of the East, the beckoning North, or the West’s betrayal” (56). In “Willow Game” narration is order of violence. To tell the story of oneself is to place in temporal order violent acts against the body and a violent act against a tree. Narration is itself the story of violence. Spatial relationships, on the other hand, extend body to house to tree. To make sense from point in space to point in space is to locate home, to know where the body is when violent events happen.
PART TWO For Zeta Acosta the blood site is Los Angeles. His is a story that moves from his first novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, to his second and last novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People. The story traces the movement of a body searching for sense. The transition between the books is accompanied by the physical movement west, from Texas to California. Brown Buffalo ends with the narrator leaving El Paso in search of the Chicano homeland; Cockroach People begins with his arrival at a riot Los Angeles. The move from El Paso to Los Angeles is significant in the geometry of Chicano space. It traces movement from the center to the western end point according to an arrangement of space along the lines of a cross. El Paso is the center point of the cross. It is El Paso del Norte; along the north-south axis, it is the crossing point between the US and Mexico. And with Ciudad Juárez, it is a single city cut by a river and by national politics. It is a crossing point in time too, for if we trace an origin of chicanismo in the pachuco, then El Paso is the Chicano birth place. The southern point of the cross is Mexico City, for it was the destination of the Aztecs who ventured south from Aztlán. It is also the site where the San Patricio brigade were either hanged or branded by the US Army for having deserted and sided with Mexico during the Mexican American war. The northern extreme is Chicago, the inhospitable, white realm of the dead the Aztecs called Mictlán. It is the “Chi-town” of “Ghost Talk,” where “Bigoted North Americans who forget where their grandparents came from say, Why don’t you go back to your country.” The east-west axis is the border. From El Paso it extends to the Gulf of Mexico, a river known as the Rio Grande in the US and as the Rio Bravo in Latin America. Its end point Brownsville where Juan Nepomuceno Cortina waged guerrilla warfare against yanqui conquerors. From El Paso west, the border is a fence, cleaving, not only the US and Mexico, but Alta and Baja Californias. Los Angeles lies at the terminus of the western line. In time too it marks the end point of Mexico: Los Angeles is the site of the last battle in the US conquest of northern Mexico. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles lies at the end of the birth line of Chicanos. Pachucos may have been born in El Paso, but it is in LA where Chicano culture became most defined. And it has been a definition outline in violence from the Zoot Suit riots, the Chicano Moratorium, to the Los Angeles Riots after Rodney King, in which the majority of people arrested were hispanos (though I think few Andalusians or Argentines). Brown Buffalo begins with the body, “I stand naked before the mirror. Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle” (11). It begins with a narration of the body, but it and narration itself are rendered problematic, for the body is uncontrollable and representation is suspect: I strain to vomit, pushing upward with my diaphragm, with as total control of the belly as any good clarinet player could have… but nothing comes except gurgling convulsions from down under…. “Jesus Christ, not even my body obeys me anymore!” But who really knows? Who can say for sure what causes ulcers? At the age of twenty-one six (6) different doctors showed me pictures of what they claimed were holes in my stomach. (12) The novel continues in a narration that tries to make sense of the body, that tries to make sense through narration, an endeavor whose ability to represent reality is suspect. The move toward sense is narrated in the move back home, to the birth place of the body, to El Paso. The search to define the body leads back to its source. Once there, however, the narrator finds that knowledge is allocentric, residing neither in the body of the self nor at its origin. He therefore turns his search for self definition toward the most concentrated site of chicanismo, toward Los Angeles. The necessity of this realization comes to him violently in response to hearing word of the Chicano Movement for the first time: The bomb explodes in my head. Flashes of lightning. Stars in my eyes. I see it all before me. That is exactly what the gods have in store for me. Of course, why didn’t I think of it first? I thank him, I praise him and I beg him to send me fifty bucks immediately. I will take the Greyhound to Los Angeles, call my cousin Manuel and have him put me up for a few days until I get the story from, who’d you say, the Brown Berets? God damn, why didn’t I think of that? (251) He plans the speech he’ll deliver to the Chicano militants in Los Angeles. It is a speech that distrusts the politics of language and of identity yet advocates both: Ladies and gentlemen… my name is Oscar Acosta. My father is an Indian from the mountains of Durango. Although I cannot speak his language… you see, Spanish is the language of our conquerors. English is the language of our conquerors…. No one ever asked me or my brother if we wanted to be American citizens…. They stole our land and made us half-slaves. They destroyed our gods and made us bow down to a dead man who’s been strung up for 2000 years…. Now what we need is, first to give ourselves a new name. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own…. I propose we call ourselves…the Brown Buffalo people. (253) Brown Buffalo ends with two paragraphs that announce, and seem to belong in, the next novel. In them, the narrator arrives in Los Angeles, the western end of the Chicano universe, the city “where it all happened/happens.” That Brown Buffalo concludes in California, oddly enough, makes the story end where it started, for it began in San Francisco. But it ends in Los Angeles, and with these words, it jumps across space and books to the Revolt of the Cockroach People: We were in Los Angeles. The most detestable city in the world. Soon I’d be at my cousin Manuel’s house in East L.A., the home of the biggest herd of brown buffalos in the entire world. We would eat tortillas and refried beans and talk of old times in Riverbank… and some time later I would become Zeta, the world-famous Chicano Lawyer who helped start the last revolution–but that, as old Doc Jennings would say, is another story. (255) That story explodes in the opening of Revolt of the Cockroach People. A riot develops from the Chicano demonstration at the celebration of Christmas mass by the Cardinal in Los Angeles. As in Brown Buffalo, the story begins with Zeta’s body beyond control. As the protestors are beaten by the police, Zeta walks unscathed: he is neither beaten nor arrested. The police do not touch him because he is the protestors’ lawyer. The difference between the two novels in this matter of control over the body is one of orientation: in Brown Buffalo, control was a problem for the individual; in Cockroach People, control is exercised, or not, among others. The move from El Paso to LA, from birth to communal action, has been accompanied by a shift in narrative focus. The matter of finding meaning is moved from the story of home to the story of revolution. It is as if the first venture, the narration of the origin, had proved unable to articulate meaning. It is as if another venture, another sort of narrative line, is propounded as replacement. Brown Buffalo concluded, but did not sufficiently provide meaning because a narration of the self undertaken as the search for origin proved untenable. Not only did continuity of self come up short, but the neat contiguity of home did as well. In Brown Buffalo there is a home grid reminiscent to the triangle of “Willow Game”: Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies, and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers, and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks. (Brown Buffalo 96) In Revolt of the Cockroach People, on the other hand, that narration structured by continuity and contiguity is supplanted by a response to history and place, as if in an attempt to forge a collective definition. In response to a demand in court to define Chicano, the narrator states: “Unlike the black American who cannot return to Africa, the mother country, the Chicano is within his own mother country. The international border at Juarez, at Tijuana, at Nogales, at Laredo… these lines are but reminders to the Chicanos of what their grandparents did to them… It was their own presidents, their own generals, who sold both the land and the people thereon to the United States Government for something like sixteen million dollars.” (237-8) Borderlines, narrative lines, blood lines: “these lines are but reminders to the Chicanos of what their grandparents did to them.” Just because the Viet Cong or the Chicanos temporarily lay down their arms doesn’t prove shit. For me personally, this is a kind of end. And a beginning. But who cares about that? I was just one of a bunch of Cockroaches that helped start a revolution to burn down a stinking world. And no matter what kind of end this is, I’ll still play with matches. It’s in the blood now. And not only my blood. Somebody still has to answer for Robert Fernandez and Roland Zanzibar. somebody still has to answer for all the smothered lives of all the fighters who have been forced to carry on, chained to a war for Freedom just like a slave is chained to his master. Somebody still has to pay for the fact that I’ve got to leave friends to stay whole and human, to survive intact, to carry on the species and my own Buffalo run as long as I can. (280)
BODY, BLOOD, HOME, REVOLUTION I conclude with the consideration of the move between two other books, Charley Trujillo’s Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam and Dogs from Illusion. These are narratives of violence, not the violence of the threat with a gun, the punch in the belly, nor the riot in church, but war. Soldados describes itself as “narratives of the Viet Nam War.” Trujillo edited this collection of testimonies by Chicano homeboys, including himself; all of whom left for Viet Nam and returned home to Corcoran, California. Dogs is a novel, the story of three Chicanos who go to Viet Nam and return home to Illusion, a town much like Corcoran. The testimony in the first book narrates reality: the stories are accounts of what happened, the violence is real. The second book tells the story from home in California through intense experiences in Viet Nam and finally back. Dogs is fiction, and there, home is an illusion. Soldados is comprised of nineteen narratives; Trujillo’s “Mutiny” is the sixteenth. Trujillo presents events in his life that took place during his tour of Viet Nam, from January to July, 1970. The story is presented as the relation of reality, and narrative serves the function of mirroring what happened, of presenting real events in the correct sequence. The where that that reality happened, Viet Nam, however, is surreal or perhaps hyperreal but nonetheless, other worldly. In describing a soldier’s life before Viet Nam, Trujillo states casually, “He had been a highway patrolman back in the world” (157). Home was the world, someplace other, back in time and back in space. In Viet Nam, events made no sense, “Time, space, and perception were no longer what they used to be, or pretended to be” (155). And the narration of the time and place of Viet Nam is full of violence and empty of sense: But the CO, out of his glory-seeking mentality, ordered a direct assault which led to more wounded and deaths than there should have been. He was such an idiot that he even wanted one of the guys to stab one of the dead Vietnamese with his bayonet in order to declare that he had stabbed him. In the wake of this, I ran up and began shooting at the dead Vietnamese in the holes, just as I had seen in the Hollywood movies. As I did this, some captain on a track started giving me some bull. I was feeling pretty strange and he didn’t know how close he came to getting shot. One of the dead Vietnamese had his body buried upside down in a hole with one of his legs sticking up. I tried to pull him by his leg to see if he had any money and the leg started to come off, so I stopped pulling on it. then someone threw a face at me. That’s how bad some of the North Vietnamese had been blown up by the grenades. (156) There beyond the world, the point to point movement of the story is that of walking point, breaking bodies into parts and trying to keep one’s own body whole and return home. Dogs begins in the sugar beet fields outside Illusion and ends there. Three friends, Ese, Chuco and Machete, are conscripted and go off to fight in Viet Nam. The adventures in Dogs come after those presented in Soldados; they follow as fiction after testimony. But the fictionality of the novel comes after the senseless reality of Soldados. In both cases there is violence rather than sense, and narrative comes to signify the sequence of violence. A fictive episode in Dogs can make as little sense in the real world as do the real events presented in Soldados: Machete then cuts the piece of rope that is holding the prisoner’s head up and the chin drops to his chest. He takes an extremely sharp machete and decapitates the prisoner. The dead falls like a bowling ball. He picks up the head and says, “Chihuahua, this head is heavier than I thought.” Then he throws it up with both hands toward the basket and the head falls through the hoop. “Two points, motherfuckers,” he says malevolently. (Dogs 104) Throughout Dogs, home remains elusive. It is deferred to the past and separated in space from Viet Nam. It is repeatedly recalled as the world where time and space were what they were supposed to be. And in the violent times and violent space of men at war, home is often recalled as the world of women. Home is the site of sense and the site where women remained. At moments when the present and local chaos seemed overwhelming, the Chicana body was recalled in an attempt to connect home. Sometimes the connection is physical, as in the talisman Ese carries of pubic hairs, at other times it as an image to keep alive. In one episode, Chuco is unable to reach his wounded and dying friend, Ro-Ro, but tries to keep him from passing out by evoking the memory of his girlfriend: “[A]cuerdate de las nalgotas de Nena que te esperan en Mexicali.” “¿Orale buey, como sabes que Nena has a big butt?” complains Ro-Ro. “You’ve only shown us her picture a million time. No te apures, I won’t let the gooks get to you cuñado,” Chuco reassures him as he lets out a burst of machine gun fire. (181) At one point, Ese and four others come across a group of Viet Cong, suprise them and attack. Afterwards, They find that all but one of the Vietnamese are dead. A female is wounded and seems to be dying. The soldiers look at one another thinking the same thing that Cadillac verbalizes, “Get it before it gets cold.” Though all are tempted to rape the woman, no one does. Three Bears shoos her dead instead. An exalted feeling of accomplishment and vengeance fills the GIs, except for Marlon. Ese asks Marlon, “How come you didn’t shoot?” “No quiero matar a nadie. Nada más me quiero ir para casa,” says Marlon without apology. “What’d he say?” asks Cadillac. “He says that he doesn’t want to kill anyone. He just wants to go home,” answers Ese. “I no like to kill,” says Marlon. (94) Back in the world things would be different. There would be less violence and in its place, sense. The body could be whole and alive, not subject to violent control. The soldiers envision the end of their tour of duty as the end of a senseless story. But in the final vignette of Dogs, “Last Episode: Home to Illusion,” Ese, Chuco and Machete return home to the sugar beet fields and home to an illusion. After surviving and killing for the US, Ese is hassled by the Border Patrol and beaten. The move from home and back again in testimonial and fictive narrative is a line written in blood. The home that was the real world is ultimately illusory. What can one say of a home to which twice as many soliders who died in Viet Nam took their own lives after returning to it? It is an illusion; it is riot in the church, the talk of ghost and the death of tree. The story of home is a violent recounting; it is the ordering of blood.
THE END Narrative is itself the line that establishes the authority of the line. It defines border; it structures history; it confirms home. Narratives are like flags, banderas, in a poem of Francisco X. Alarcón with that name: Banderas trapos imbéciles empapados en sangre
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |