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Hispanic Review 75.3 (2007) 289-311

"I Carve Myself into my Hands"
The Body Experienced from Within in Ana Mendieta's Work and Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's Flowers
Clara Escoda Agustí
Universitat de Barcelona

Set in 1975 in the Bronx, Miriam's Flowers records the process of bereavement of a Puerto Rican family after their son gets trapped on train tracks when chasing after a baseball. In the play it is made clear from the beginning that the accident has been caused by the authorities' neglect towards poor neighborhoods and immigrant communities, who react to the "accident" by offering the family an economic compensation but do not invest in improving the neighborhood's conditions. In a revealing sentence, Miriam, the family's daughter and protagonist, describes the violence of poverty and how it has marked Puli's body, yet she mixes the description with a degree of fascination for the fact that the family, otherwise voiceless and invisible, has appeared in the papers: "How he was. All in pieces. I didn't wanna look at it, but . . . he's the first one of us ever been in the paper" (Cruz 55). Indeed, neither the government authorities nor Miriam's family address the violence of poverty and marginalization to which immigrant communities are subject and which accounts for the son's untimely death. As Miriam tells her lover Enrique in one of the first scenes, refusing to forget "Crows eat other crows, but are we supposed to go off eating all our dead relatives?" (65). Tiffany Ana López has pointed out that, in Cruz's plays, "violence [is] not eradicated but merely redirected. The conditions that led to the [accident] are never addressed by the adults in the community" ("Violent" 59). Indeed, Miriam's mother, for instance, does not acknowledge that her son has died: "I ain't [End Page 289] going to no funeral," she says, "Nobody dead" (54), yet she acquires the habit of spending more and more hours in a bathtub that is strangely reminiscent of Puli's coffin, which was "small and white, like a little bathtub" (55). Delfina shuts herself off from life and denies her daughter's living presence, adding to the invisibility Miriam feels with respect to the society that marginalizes her.

The aim of this essay is to show how, in order for Miriam to become visible both within her family and for the larger, American society, and in her attempt to find a new language that may express and represent grief, the protagonist begins a process of "critical re-signification" of the Hispanic woman's role and identity (López, "Violent Inscriptions" 186), through a series of performances which remit to the practices of body art. Like a performance artist—using her own body as a matrix on which to inscribe and through which to enact this critical re-signification—Miriam masochistically engages in different performances, having sex with strangers in order to express her grief over her brother's death. Indeed, she will turn her sexual experience into an artistic performance through which she can fragment her body and empathically bond with her brother. The references to body art do not restrict themselves to the experience of fragmentation offered by her sexual performances, but many of them also include direct interventions on her own body as, for instance, when she clips off body parts or carves pictures into her arms that make her feel "like spring inside" (85). She later cuts into her mother's arm, with the aim of replacing negative social encodings "imprinted" on her mother's body so that "they'll treat [her] like a saint" (83). It is a search that Miriam undergoes privately—but this search becomes public—that is, actually becomes a performance, as the character recounts her experiences to other characters in the play. Most importantly, the performative and public nature of theater allows Miriam's inner search to become an...

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