'A Woman
Schooled in Latin': Rosario Castellanos, Ambassador of Mexico and
Chiapas
Review of 'Balún
Canán' (Novel Edited by Dora Sales Salvador:
First-Ever Edition on the Spanish Market)
Details: Rosario Castellanos, Balún
Canán
(1957). Edited by Dora Sales Salvador
(Universidad Jaume I de Castellón, Valencia region, Spain).
Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra
(Collection 'Letras Hispánicas'), 2004. Paperback,
393 pp. With introduction (pp. 9-118) and bibliography (pp. 119-128).
ISBN: 84-376-2181-X.
'Pero el quejido del indio
¿por qué no se
escuchará?' -
('Why will no-one hear the Indian's cry?')
Violeta Parra
'Señora del arco iris, moradora en
los dominios húmedos,
Señora de la luna, que vierte en la
tierra
Las aguas que nutren, Ixchel'.
('Lady of the rainbow, dweller in the wetlands,
Lady of the moon, who pours on to earth
The waters that sustain, Ixchel')
Maya prayer
I
On 7 August 1974, a Mexican woman aged 49 died in Tel Aviv, struck down
by an electric shock from a household lamp. Her name was Rosario
Castellanos. She was Mexico's ambassador to Israel, but she was also
much more than that - she was a writer (a poet, novelist, author of
short stories, dramatist and essayist), and she was also another kind
of ambassador, child of a family from Chiapas and spokeswoman for all
of the marginalised, subordinated and undervalued people of her region.
In 1998, no less a figure than José Saramago described her as
the 'embajadora de Chiapas' ('ambassador of Chiapas'), a writer who
'supo contar las vicisitudes de los indios y las tropelías de
los blancos' ('had it in her to narrate the sufferings of the Indians
and the abuses of the whites'): it is equally the case that
Castellanos, as an acknowledged pioneer of feminism in Latin America,
had it in her too to recount, with a delicacy-tinged bitterness, the
desires and misfortunes of the female population of her region and
nation, and in this sense she may further be termed the declared
ambassador of the womenfolk of Mexico. She was also the author of Balún Canán (1957),
the novel to whose first-ever edition on the Spanish market the present
review is dedicated.
Today, more than three decades since her tragically premature death,
Rosario's fame in her native land is established and undeniable. She is
even buried, cheek-by-jowl with the 'great men [sic]' of the Republic,
in Mexico City's National Pantheon. Personalities as diverse as Carlos
Fuentes and Subcommander Marcos have lauded her as the storyteller of
her state of Chiapas, where she grew up in the town of Comitán,
reading her work as a map - still essential today - for understanding
the realities of what is still a deeply conflict-ridden and problematic
part of southern Mexico. Despite this, and notwithstanding her
posthumous fame at home, until now not a single one of her works had
ever appeared under the imprint of a Spanish publisher: readers in the
peninsula had had to content themselves exclusively with imported
editions. Now and after all this time, the gap has been filled by
Ediciones Cátedra and the scholar Dora Sales Salvador: at last,
Rosario is there on the shelves next to Cervantes, Lorca or Neruda,
published in one of Spain's most prestigious collections of classic
Spanish-language texts. The series in which this volume appears,
'Letras Hispánicas', is known for its exceptionally high
quality, and within that tradition Dora Sales has produced a critical
edition of Balún Canán
which combines intellectual rigour and informative richness with a
visible commitment, expressed through empathy and engagement, to the
text of Rosario Castellanos' novel and its underlying world-view.
II
The reader will immediately ask, 'what do the words "Balún
Canán" mean?' In fact, as the novel's text itself explains, the
words of the title refer to a place, and mean, in the Maya language,
'The Nine Guardians': the reference is to the nine hills that surround
Comitán, and 'Balún Canán' is the old Maya name of
the locality. The choice of title thus in itself points to the strong
empathy which Castellanos felt for the original inhabitants of Chiapas.
The narrative is firmly located in both space and time. The events
happen in the town of Comitán and its environs, during the first
years of the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río
(1934-1940), the protagonist of the most radical wing of the PRI (the
Party of the Institutional Revolution, at that time still more
revolutionary than institutional) and the leading force behind both the
great anti-clerical movement and the agrarian reform that the Indians
deeply desired and the whites (or 'ladinos') as deeply dreaded. Life in
Chiapas as Rosario narrates it, with tenderness and compassion and
without lapsing into exotic stereotypes, is harsh, marked by the
ever-more explosive antagonism between whites and Indians, and also by
the sufferings of another subaltern group, namely women, whatever their
ethnicity. Rosario Castellanos, who called herself, not without irony,
a 'mujer que sabe latín' ('woman schooled in Latin'), was one of
the first Mexican female intellectuals openly to define herself as a
feminist: while always aware of her ambivalent position as a subaltern
member of a ruling class, she at all moments maintained an ideological
stance according to which both women and Indians were to be seen as
undervalued and vulnerable elements within a cruel and unequal social
order. In this novel, the female gender finds its main representative
in a young girl whose name we are never told, the offspring of a family
from the 'ladino' bourgeoisie.
The plot narrates the vicissitudes of the Argüello family, who
live in Comitán and own land in Chiapas. It is a traditionalist,
conservative kinship unit, whose members maintain the attitudes
expected of them regarding both relations with Indians and gender
matters. César Argüello, the proud, rigid landowner, and
his shadowy wife Zoraida have two children: Mario, the ever-privileged
male heir, and the unnamed girl. Events force the family into an
external crisis, manifested in the looming agrarian reform and the ever
more rebellious attitude of the Indians, which eventually mutates into
an internal crisis, with the death in the wake of a mysterious illness
of the precious heir Mario. Also narrated in parallel are various
events involving members of the extended family and other persons from
the white community. The life-experience of the book's true
protagonist, the young girl, is marked by her very close emotional bond
with her Indian nursemaid or 'nana', which is finally severed in a
traumatic parting, as well as by her far less equal relationship with
her brother, whose death leaves her scarred within by a damaging sense
of guilt.
On the narrative plane, we may, in the strategies employed by the
author, note a certain experimentalism which, however, in no way
impairs the accessibility or readability of the text. The novel is
divided into three sections: in the first and last, the narrating voice
is that of the young girl, while in the central part an omniscient
narrator speaks. Within this basic framework, there are also passages
pertaining to other narrative types, such as the epistolary mode and,
for several of the characters, the interior monologue. The result is a
polyphonic narrative in which no voice definitively prevails.
Throughout, and despite the harshness of the fictional events, a
redemptive role is played by language - by the finely-crafted,
aesthetically satisfying Spanish deployed at all points by Rosario, the
novelist who was, be it not forgotten, a poetess too. There are
frequent, indeed abundant Mexicanisms (not to mention regionalisms
peculiar to Chiapas), but these do not detract from what we may call
the universal, pan-Spanish character of the Castilian of a writer
always firmly in control of her native tongue. By way of example,
we may cite, among the many fine passages which could be chosen to
represent Rosario's narrative prose, the following (from a landscape
description communicated through the third-person narrator): 'Agua
donde se miró el mecido ramaje de los árboles. Agua,
amansadora lenta de la piedra. Agua devoradora de soles. Todas las
aguas no son más que una: ésta, con su amargo
presentimiento del mar' ('Water where the swaying boughs of the trees
gazed on themselves. Water, slowly wearing down stone. All waters are
but one: this one, with its bitter presentiment of the sea' - 293); or,
again, these words from a prayer put into the mouth of the Indian
nursemaid: 'Vengo a entregarme a mi criatura. Te la entrego. Te la
encomiendo. Para que todos los días, como se lleva el
cántaro al río para llenarlo, lleves su corazón a
la presencia que de sus siervos ha recibido. Para que nunca le falte
gratitud' ('I have come to hand over my child to you. I give her to
you. I place her in your hands. So that every day, as a jar is brought
to the river to be filled, you may bring her heart into the presence
which she has known from her servants. So that she may always know
gratitude' - 183). In moments such as these, the reader comes face to
face with a poetess whom we may legitimately compare in her
expressiveness, within the Spanish-language tradition, with that of
Emilia Pardo Bazán in the field of poetic prose, or, in poetry
as such, Gabriela Mistral or even, to appeal to a more popular
register, Violeta Parra.
III
The understanding from outside of the realities of Mexico as reflected
in Rosario Castellanos' text has been greatly facilitated by the
exemplary editorial work of Dora Sales, who provides a critical
apparatus comprising a full and multidimensional introduction, a
comprehensive bibliography, and copious notes glossing the novel's
numerous Mexicanisms. This apparatus has been enriched by the
cooperation of a number of experts on Mexican languages and cultures,
including specialists in the Maya language and members of the staff of
major national institutions in the shape of the UNAM (Universidad
Autónoma de México) and the Colegio de México.
Particularly significant here is the direct input offered by Gabriel
Guerra Castellanos, Rosario's son. It is common today in the world of
translation studies to speak of the translator's visibility, a concept
famously developed by Lawrence Venuti, and in this context one might
wish to extend that notion to propound the editor's visibility too.
This would certainly appear relevant in a case such as the present,
where the aim is, in a sense, to carry out, through the editor's
activity, a form of 'intra-language translation', rendering a Mexican
text fully accessible to readers in Spain. The peninsular reader may
share a common language with Rosario Castellanos in general terms, but
still stands in need of guidance if the goal is a full and accurate
understanding of both the many particularities of the Spanish of Mexico
and the cultural circumstances that frame them. In this connection, it
appears relevant to note that the editor Dora Sales is also a
translator who already has to her credit three excellent translations
into Spanish of English-medium novels from India, published with
success on the peninsular market. We may conclude that those who edit a
text like the present one have a major ethical responsibility
vis-à-vis the culture behind the work edited, and, on that
basis, further argue that this very responsibility justifies an
enhanced visibility for the editor. In this sense, the house practice
already operated for 'Letras Hispánicas' may be considered a
model to be followed, for the volume under review displays Dora Sales'
name with all due prominence, on both cover and title-page.
The bibliography occupies ten pages and includes all of Castellanos'
works in their Mexican editions, as well as a generous selection of
critical studies (publications and theses) in Spanish and English. The
footnotes to the novel text are highly informative and fully achieve
their goal of heightening Spanish readers' awareness of the linguistic
and cultural details of a world which may often be rather more foreign
to them than they realise. Flora and fauna, food and drink, folk
traditions, terms from the local languages: the notes shed light on all
these phenomena in model fashion. Thus, the reader learns that a
'zopilotl' is a 'ave vulturada de cabeza pelada y pico encorvado, que
se alimenta de cadáveres' ('vulture-like bird with a bald pate
and curved beak which feeds on carcasses' - 228n), and that 'comiteco'
is a 'bebida alcohólica típica de Comitán'
('alcoholic beverage typical of Comitán'), which is made 'al
pasar por un alambique pulque fermentado' ('by passing fermented
"pulque" through a still'), while the mysterious 'pulque' is, in its
turn, 'una bebida que se extrae de una clase de ágave' ('a drink
extracted from a type of agave' - 163n). Details may be as
important as the whole picture if cultures are to understand each
other, and here the foreignness of the Mexican text is fully
communicated - and illuminated without being denied - by Dora Sales'
enormously careful explicative work. At the end and in the cause of
intertextuality, the novel is complemented by the text of 'Primera
revelación' ('First revelation', 1950), a short story by Rosario
which may usefully be read as a prefigurement of some of the main
themes of Balún Canán.
The critical and biographical introduction ranges very widely,
encompassing such varied aspects of the novel as its historical
setting, the underlying social structures (Indians vs. whites), the
feminism issue, and the polyphonic and formal dimensions of the
narrative, while also paying due attention to Rosario's biography (a
full chronology is supplied). Concerning the feminist aspect, in
particular, we may note that in the arena of theory Dora Sales bases
her positions not on US feminism but on that of the Virginia Woolf of A
Room of One's Own and of
exponents of the French school such as Hélène Cixous and
Monique Wittig, placing special emphasis on Cixous' axiom: 'Write your
self. Your body must be heard' (43). In this context and in the light
of Rosario's own feminist essays, she locates the Mexican writer as a
member of a greater 'colectivo de mujeres libres' ('collective of free
women' - 39), committed to 'la construcción de una cultura
femenina posible' ('the construction of a possible female culture' -
36). Regarding the novel's intercultural dimension, the editor points
to the 'neoindigenista' currents that have been identified in Latin
American literature and suggests that Castellanos may be located in
that framework, by the side of such crucial figures as Miguel
Ángel Asturias, the Nobel laureate from next-door Guatemala, or,
in Peru, José María Arguedas. It may here be stressed
that Dora Sales' own doctoral thesis, awarded in Castellón and
recently published (2004) in Switzerland, offers, in Spanish, a
remarkable analysis of Los
ríos profundos/Deep Rivers, Arguedas' fictional
masterpiece, considered from a comparative viewpoint in relation to the
India-born Vikram Chandra's novel Red
Earth and Pouring Rain. The analogy with Arguedas, who, as a
deeply committed defender of the Quechua culture, was not only a
novelist but also a distinguished anthropologist, appears of particular
relevance if we recall that, as Dora Sales usefully points out, Rosario
herself spent several years working with the Instituto Nacional
Indigenista in San Cristóbal de las Casas, as well as
criss-crossing Chiapas with the Teatro Petul (thus mirroring, too, the
travels through the indigenous zones of Chile that marked the career of
another combative woman creator, Violeta Parra).
All in all, the introduction provides a multi-faceted and illuminative
portrait of a writer who was at all moments committed to the common
good, to a better future - who, as Dora Sales eloquently points out,
always protested against 'una situación injusta que le viene
dada y de la que ella, sin querer, forma parte' ('an unjust state of
things which was imposed on her and of which she was a part against her
will' - 55). In addition, it seems desirable to stress a particular
characteristic of this introduction, namely the especially fine
symbiosis created in it between text and commentary, novelist and
editor. Dora Sales has successfully absorbed the prose style of Rosario
Castellanos, expressing herself with a fluidity and affectivity that
come very close to the aesthetic charm and superb Castilian of the
Mexican writer herself. As an example of this laudable synergy, we may
quote the expressive words with which the editor concludes her
presentation - words which impress, not only through their emotional
charge but also through their stylistic power, achieving a resonance
and rhythmical harmony that are such that they could have been written
by Rosario Castellanos herself. Dora Sales finds in Rosario 'una voz
contemporánea que se actualiza de manera asombrosa, que sigue
tan vigente hoy como lo estuvo en su momento, ayudando a socavar
certezas instauradas por las infinitas redes de poder, manteniendo
alerta la capacidad de reflexión crítica y de
revisión de patrones establecidos, recordando que la libertad,
que para ser auténtica tiene que mostrarse respetuosa con las
libertades de los demás, es el derecho humano más
precioso' ('a contemporary voice of astonishing relevance to our time,
which speaks to us as closely now as it did then, helping undermine
certainties installed by the infinite networks of power, keeping alive
the capacity to think critically and rewrite established standards,
remembering that freedom, which is only truly itself if it respects the
freedoms of others, is the most precious of human rights' - 113).
IV
As we have seen, Castellanos' narrative maps out the course of two sets
of relationships, both conflictive and all but intractable, namely
those between indigenous and white communities, and between women and
men. To take the ethnic conflict first, we have to admit that from the
pages of this book it is hard to trace a way out of the dilemma.
Certainly, from an ethnoliterary vantage point, Rosario offers a number
of 'anthropological' details about the Indians' lives, including their
courtship and marriage customs. We learn that the fiancé has to
work a whole year for his bride-to-be's parents, and that she has to do
the same for his family while neither is allowed to set eyes on the
other for even the briefest instant. However, in practice intercultural
communication seems inevitably to fail. The overwhelming majority of
the 'ladino' characters have contempt for Indians in their entrails.
César, the landowner, sees the government's demand that he
educate his subalterns as a pointless imposition. He therefore gives
the position of schoolmaster to his illegitimate son Ernesto, who knows
not a word of the local language: the scene in which Ernesto 'teaches'
his pupils reading out texts from a popular almanac, in a Spanish which
means nothing to them, comes over as the direst parody of education.
For her part, Zoraida, despite her own subordinated condition, has
totally internalised the ideology of her ethnic group and ruling class,
and, despising the Indians quite as viscerally as her husband, believes
all they deserve is a sound whipping. Meanwhile, the members of the
indigenous community are, on their side, in a state of permanent
effervescence from which they are unable to achieve any real change.
They fight in vain for a school worthy of the name; they set fire to
the fields without managing to get control of the farm; and Juana, the
spouse of their stern leader Felipe, seems to have internalised the
social and ethnic hierarchies no less deeply than her oppressor
Zoraida. With things standing like this, the narrator declares: 'Los
demás callaron abatiendo los ojos como para no ver la choza que
los amparaba (…) Y cuando el granizo apedrea el techo de paja lo rompe.
Porque esto es todo lo que el indio puede hacer cuando la voluntad del
blanco no lo respalda' ('The others stayed silent, lowering their eyes
as if not to see the hut that was their shelter (…) And when hail
batters the straw roof it breaks it. For this is all the Indian can do
when the white man will not support him' - 216). The sole glimpse of a
possible real transcultural communication between the two opposed
groups is vouchsafed by the affective link, of great depth but too
utopian to last, that weaves itself between Zoraida's daughter and her
native 'nursemaid'. For the rest, today's readers may legitimately
sense in the interethnic relations portrayed by Castellanos the early
stirrings of the tormented, unresolved conflict that is still rife in
the Chiapas of our twenty-first century. The same lack of communication
appears in another text by Rosario, the short story 'El don rechazado'
('The Rejected Gift'), in which an indigenous woman refuses to accept
the apparent generosity of a naïve anthropologist. Dora Sales sums
up the problem with all clarity: 'Las consecuencias de la
incomunicación cultural son devastadoras' ('The consequences of
non-communication between cultures are disastrous' - 32).
If the ethnic barriers appear all but insuperable, the gender gap
scarcely fares better. As seen above, if Zoraida (of the dominant class
and ethnic group) and Juana (of the dominated ethnic group and class)
have something in common it is that, as married women both, they find
it unthinkable to question their subaltern condition. Both live it,
rather, as a fatality: for Juana infertility is an irreparable
disaster, while for Zoraida the death of her male child is no less a
catastrophe. Meanwhile, Castellanos' acute gaze also fixes on a
different segment of the female world, that of the single woman. The
plight of the spinster (or old maid) in traditional Mexican society was
a theme she explored elsewhere, in a short story such as 'Los
convidados de agosto' ('The August Guests') and in various poems, of
which we may take as representative 'Jornada de la soltera' ('The
Spinster's Day'): 'Da vergüenza estar sola. El día entero /
arde un rubor terrible en su mejilla' ('It is shameful to be alone. All
day long / a terrible blush burns on her cheek'). Balún Canán has a
number of spinster characters, and in all cases their lives end up as
blind alleys. The neighbour Amalia becomes a religious bigot, the
bearer of a sterile and dogmatic Catholicism. The destiny of Aunt
Francisca, who runs her own farm, might appear kinder, but she winds up
demented; while her sister Matilde, she too unmarried, drifts through
an ill-fated episode with the illegitimate son Ernesto into a similar
breakdown of her personality, and finally disappears, on the run to an
unknown destination. These women, in revolt yet fatally unstable, may
recall Sierva María in García Márquez's Del Amor y Otros Demonios/Of Love and
Other Demons, or the ill-starredly rebellious Reinerie in
another of Rosario's stories, 'Vals capricho' ('Capricious Waltz')'.
Whatever happens, female insurgency does not appear as a redemptive act
in itself, and may even lead to psychological and social obliteration.
If things are so harsh for the women of Mexico, the reader may ask
whether some redemptive role will fall in the end to the nameless girl
child who is the narrator of the novel's first and third parts.
Certainly, she finds almost the only human warmth she encounters in the
relationship with the Indian 'nana'; but the ethnic tensions finally
lead her mother to dispense with the woman's services. For an emblem of
a bond that was as beautiful as it was fragile, there remain the tiny
stones that the girl offers as a gift to a nursemaid who, when thrown
out of the house, does not stop to take them with her. At the end,
after the death of her brother and the irrational sense of guilt it
provokes in her, the girl seems all but broken: 'es mi culpa la que se
está pudriendo en el fondo de ese cajón' ('rotting at the
bottom of that coffin lies my own guilt' - 367). We may here recall a
parallel situation in a contemporary novel from India, The Dark Holds No Terrors by Shashi
Deshpande, where the main female character suffers from a similar guilt
syndrome in the wake of her brother's death. However, in Deshpande the
event is told at the beginning of the book, not the end, and in Balún Canán it feels
as if there is no way out for those who have had the misfortune, as a
pitiless society sees it, to be born female.
V
For all the harshness of the ending, what we know of Rosario
Castellanos' life suggests that she must surely have perceived some
glimpse of light for the women of her country. We may here wish to ask:
what will happen to the girl narrator? Will she become a fighting
woman, like her creator and like some of the female characters who
populate her poems? One might invoke the woman writer who appears in a
poem like 'Autorretrato' ('Self-Portrait'): 'Escribo este poema. Y
otro. Y otros. Y otros. / Hablo desde una cátedra' ('I write
this poem. And another. And another. And more. / I speak from the
chair'); or, indeed, the declared lesbian of 'Kinsey Report', who dares
speak of the male gender: 'A los indispensables (como ellos se creen) /
los puede usted echar a la basura / como hicimos nosotras' ('As for
those who think we can't live without them / you can trash them / as
she and I have done'). Models could equally be found in the more remote
Mexican past, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (another woman
quite literally 'schooled in Latin') to Ixchel, the powerful Mayan
goddess who presides over pregnancy, childbirth and women's healing
skills. Or will the girl end up repeating the fate of her
long-suffering mother Zoraida?
If there is anything that creates the hope that it will not be like
that, it is, beyond doubt, the advanced capacity for empathy that is
always present in Rosario's writing. The novelist lets her characters
speak and registers their sufferings - of Indians and of women -
without sentimentalisms and without retreating into facile victimology.
She shows how the subaltern can internalise their oppression and become
accomplices in their own plight; she reaches under the skin of people
whose ideas and world-view she does not share. Castellanos' narrative
is a remarkable example of literature as dialogue, as empathy; and it
is notable in this connection how Dora Sales' outstanding editorial
work succeeds, in deeply committed fashion, in communicating the
otherness of Mexico to a Spanish readership, creating a symbiotic
relationship between author and commentator which greatly facilitates
the effort of intercultural dialogue that reading this novel requires.
The reader of this edition of Balún
Canán will certainly gain a heightened awareness of the
realities of Mexico, discovering, through this exceptional narrative,
the voice of Rosario Castellanos - of that 'woman schooled in Latin'
who was the ambassador of Mexico, of Chiapas and of her country's
womenfolk.
**
Note 1: Balún Canán has been translated into English as
The Nine Guardians (trans. Irene Nicholson, New York: Vanguard
Press, 1959); all quotations from the novel translated into English in
the present review are, however, my own responsibility. The quotations
from Rosario Castellanos' poems are taken from the excellent anthology
Meditación en el umbral (Meditation on the Threshold), edited by
Julian Palley with a prologue by Elena Poniatowska (Mexico City: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1985); anthologies exist in English, but
the extracts translated are, again, my own versions.
Note 2: The text by José Saramago cited (original in Spanish)
may be found on Usenet in the newsgroup
<misc.activism.progressive> (17 July 1998) - '"Chiapas'": texto
de José Saramago leído por Salvador Távora en la
rueda de prensa del 4 de junio 1998 en Sevilla presentando la
Campaña Urgente "Refugiados de Chiapas"' ('"Chiapas'": text by
José Saramago read out by Salvador Távora at the press
conference held on 4 June 1998 in Seville introducing the Urgent
Campaign for Chiapas Refugees').
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