Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature

8. Dead Women Healing: Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

 We have seen that when dead women return home in American literature , they allow—or sometimes force—a community to confront the presence of past injustices. But how, Chicana writer Ana Castillo asks, might such women advance the presence of justice, rather than merely mark its absence? For Castillo, the route toward a more just world turns out to be grief. Her 1993 novel So Far from God tells the story of Sofia and her four daughters attempting to live meaningful lives in Tome, New Mexico, a place of material poverty and political powerlessness “so far from God, so near the United States.”1 All four daughters die over the course of the narrative: La Loca passes away as an infant only to be resurrected at her funeral, Caridad is raped and horribly mutilated after leaving a bar alone, Esperanza is kidnapped and murdered while a Gulf War correspondent, and Fe dies of radiation exposure from dutifully performing her low-wage factory job. In Castillo’s world, however, death is rarely a finite event, but rather a new state of being. Three of the daughters remain active members of the community: La Loca resurrects to become a recluse who cannot stand the stench of the living, Caridad miraculously heals and trains to become an indigenous healer herself, and Esperanza returns as an ectoplasmic, transparent daughter. Fe, on the other hand, just dies. Who becomes a dead woman talking and who simply dies marks their degree of allegiance to the improbable world that Castillo imagines, one that harbors the capacity to value a “woman who lived alone with her four little girls by the ditch at the end of the road” (20). Thus, Castillo recasts what counts as a life in the first place. Feminist and human rights theorist Judith Butler frames this as a question of when life is grievable. “Without grievability ,” she argues in Frames of War, “there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life.”2 This continues her argument in Precarious Life that “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first 8 Dead Women Healing Ana Castillo’s So Far from God Dead Women Healing 127 apprehended as living.”3 Castillo counters such conditions by imagining a world that allows posthumous healing and radicalizes collective grief. Sofia goes so far as to create a counterpublic that can recognize dead women as active citizens, first in her capacity as the unofficial La Mayor of Tome, then as founding president of an international organization called M.O.M.A.S, Mothers of Martyrs and Saints. In this counterpublic, anthrophobic resurrected babies, de-mutilated lesbian healers, and transparent returned daughters are not only possible but central. In fact, they’re written into the bylaws. Castillo’s Telenovela Realism Like so many of the dead women talking in American literature, when each of Castillo’s dead women rejoins her community, she creates new possibilities while also prompting crises of belief. The first death and resurrection occurs in the opening passage when three-year-old Loca pops out of her casket, “as if she had woken from a nap” (23), then flies to the top of the church. As the disbelieving congregation looks on, the priest wonders if this is an act of God or Satan while asking his fold to pray for the girl. “‘No Padre,’ she corrected him. ‘Remember, it is I who am here to pray for you.’ With that stated, she went into the church and those with faith followed” (24). Loca joins such uncanny figures as the adult-talking toddler in Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and the baby-talking adult in Morrison’s Beloved. Loca shifts settled matters of faith and power in her community by upsetting not only who is supposed to say what but also the natural order of life preceding death—not the other way around. Loca herself acknowledges such matters of sequence: “Only in hell do we learn to forgive and you got to die first” (42). In Castillo’s world, a dead woman speaking from experience is prerequisite in a novel of healing, restoration, and perhaps Kushnerian forgiveness. Caridad’s return is equally miraculous. “She came home one night as mangled as a stray cat,” the narrator recounts, “having been left for dead by the side of the road” (32–33). After months of recovery at home in her destroyed body, which...