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1. Writing the Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics
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What happens when we refuse learned associations, dualisms, metaphors? We may begin to introduce unimaginable images and concepts into our poetics. —Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers Of all the writers to whom Ana Castillo is compared, perhaps the most frequent are Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Chilean Isabel Allende, arguably the two best-known proponents, or practitioners, of “magical realism.” García Márquez’s Cien años de la soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which was originally published in 1967 and has become synonymous with “magical realism,” contains the following passage , in which Remedios the Beauty ascends into the skies: She had just finished saying [“I never felt better”] when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheets so that she would not fall down at the instant that Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest flying birds of memory could reach her. (García Márquez 1970, 222–23) 21 1 Writing the Xicanista Ana Castillo and the Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics Ritch Calvin FIGURE 1.1. Ana Castillo, “Ourselves” [52.86.227.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:42 GMT) In Isabel Allende’s first novel, La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), which was first published in 1982 and has become synonymous with “feminist magical realism,” Allende describes one of the daughters of the Trueba family: Her gaze rested on Rosa, the oldest of her living daughters, and, as always, she was surprised. The girl’s strange beauty had a disturbing quality that even she could not help noticing, for this child of hers seemed to have been made of a different material from the rest of the human race. Even before she was born, Nívea had known she was not of this world, because she had already seen her in dreams. This was why she had not been surprised when the midwife screamed as the child emerged. At birth Rosa was white and smooth, without a wrinkle, like a porcelain doll, with green hair and yellow eyes—the most beautiful creature to be born on earth since the days of original sin, as the midwife put it, making the sign of the cross. (1985, 5–6) Ana Castillo’s third novel, So Far from God, published in 1994, has become synonymous with “Chicana magical realism.” It contains a passage that narrates the funeral service of the three-year-old Loca, during which the child is “resurrected” and “ascends”: The lid had pushed all the way open and the little girl inside sat up, just as sweetly as if she had woken from a nap, rubbing her eyes and yawning. “¿Mami?” she called, looking around and squinting her eyes against the harsh light. Father Jerome got hold of himself and sprinkled holy water in the direction of the child, but for the moment was too stunned to utter so much as a word of prayer. Then, as if all this was not amazing enough, as Father Jerome moved toward the child she lifted up into the air and landed on the church roof. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” she warned. (1994, 22–23) Each of these passages contains “characteristics” of “magical realism ,” which Patricia Hart defines as a narrative wherein the real and the magical are juxtaposed; this juxtaposition is narrated matter-of-factly; the apparently impossible event leads to a deeper truth that holds outside the novel; conventional notions of time, place, matter, and identity are challenged ; and the effect of reading the fiction may change the reader’s prejudices about what reality is (Hart 1989, 27). Furthermore, all three passages exhibit significant similarities in content: all three represent an unusually beautiful female character; all three...