Abstract
Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel (1994) explores testimony to individual and localized sexual trauma linked to a transnational context. By situating the trauma her characters endure in a transnational context against a background of land appropriation and annexation, Face of an Angel addresses the wounding of incest in a way that recalls the trauma of colonization and racism, making the protagonist’s individual wounding representative of the collective and hence a model for a larger sociopolitical critique. Ultimately, by staging an appeal to the reader as witness, Chávez’s imaginative testimonial writing examines belated witnessing to paternal sexual abuse, whereby the intersection of the protagonist’s personal testimony to incest and stories of collective harm becomes productive as counter-historia, unsettling the logic of dominant narratives that exclude Chicana women’s experiences of sexual violence.
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Notes
- 1.
The incest goes unmentioned also in Lana Beth Ayres Franco de Araujo’s “Women and Men in Face of an Angel, by Denise Chávez: Chicano Universe through Gender Confrontation.” Revista Ecrita 20 (2015): 1–18.
- 2.
This chapter applies transnational in the Saldívarian sense as “a continuous encounter between two or more reference codes and tropes” (Saldívar 1997, 14), and specifically in relation to trauma processes that continue beyond nation-state borders.
- 3.
Face of an Angel has received only scant critical attention, and this is especially true when it comes to foregrounding trauma in the novel.
- 4.
Anna Marie Sandoval notes “Chicana feminism is viewed in the context of a larger U.S. third world women’s feminist discourse” (2008, 11).
- 5.
Also Irene Visser has commented that Western trauma studies would greatly benefit from “Culturally specific approaches to trauma from… non-Western theorists” including Chicana/o as “potentially fruitful directions for the future of trauma studies” (2018, 138). Chicana/o studies, on its part do deal with trauma, such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Juanita Heredia (2016), but do not necessarily engage with Western trauma theories. Visser perceptively argues that “[t]he cross-cultural human responses to trauma… find specific expression in diverse cultures” and that especially recent psychological studies on trauma corroborate “that many trauma-related syndromes are culture-bound”; “The American Psychiatric Association has officially recognized several of those disorders, in a revision to DSM-IV released in 2000. For example… the common human reactions of guilt and shame in trauma victims translate in specific forms of altered self-perception or even depersonalization that are often given local names, and whose precise meanings cannot be captured in translation, such as Latin-American ‘susto’” (Visser 2018, 127). Anzaldúa’s definition of susto is “a sudden shock or fall that frightens the soul out of the body” (1987, 38).
- 6.
See, for instance, Ewa B. Luczak, Justyna Wierzchowska and Joanna Ziarkowska’s In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race and Ethnicity (2012); Deborah Madsen’s Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory (2003); and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt’s edited volume Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (2000).
- 7.
This study follows Laura Halperin’s praxis in her Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance (2015) of mainly using the term Chicana/o because this term is generally acknowledged “as a grassroots alternative to the identity label Mexican American,” and of using the latter “when referring to subjects who do not explicitly identify with the type of grassroots politics that Chicana/o … connote[s]” (2015, 203, n. 5).
- 8.
The term “alter-Native” is here borrowed from Alicia Gaspar de Alba who coined it to refer to Chicana/o culture and identity as “an Other indigenous culture to the land base now known as the West and the Southwest” (2014, 93).
- 9.
La Malinche was an interpreter and mediator between the Spanish conquistadors and the Indigenous peoples during the invasion of Mexico in the early sixteenth century. She was given to Hernán Cortés and bore him a son and as such represents the mother of the mestizaje of mixed Indian and European blood. As Michelle Otero emphasizes, “Malinche was not Cortés’s lover. She was his property. He owned her. Their relationship wasn’t based on equality, but on domination. Where there’s domination, there is no love” (2006a). Writers including Anzaldúa (1987), Alarcón (1994), and Moraga (2000) have interpreted La Malinche as the raped mother of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Elizabeth Ordóñez links the predominating trope of rape in Chicana poetry with the figure of La Malinche; her words could also of course be true for the trope of familial rape in novels: “For if rape has become a powerful image of woman’s helplessness and subjugation before the sheer brute force of the male, then that universal trauma for all women becomes exacerbated in the Chicana experience by those remnants of the collective physical and cultural rape which she carries buried within her collective unconscious. The Chicana’s attitude toward her own sexuality must be colored by that original rape by European culture, as well as by the sexual violence which often exists in her immediate personal environment” (Quoted in Herrera-Sobek 1996, 254).
- 10.
Says Juanita Heredia, “nation-building in the United States and Latin America is often recorded as the efforts by men, often obfuscating the role of the marginalized in societies (i.e. black, indigenous, Asians, mestizos, women)” (2009, 4).
- 11.
Deborah Madsen in her essay on representations of gendered violence in recent Chicana writing focuses on how voice needs to be complemented with audience. “Gaining an ‘ear,’” is “key” to Chicana writings of gender violence: “The reception of Chicana representations of violence against women, and especially the interpretation of these representations, depends upon how they are heard. Survivor narratives always risk appropriation by conservative cultural mythologies that seek to naturalize representations of violence in order to reinstate the values that are threatened by the concepts of domestic and sexual violence. To battle such conservative patriarchal mythologies by simply rewriting them is to remain within the domain of mythology—the function of which is to naturalize all threats to the status quo… it is necessary to shift register from the mythological. In this way we attend to the brutal facts of violence against women and listen to these stories of suffering that we would prefer not to hear” (2008, 192).
- 12.
As Halperin argues in another context, silencing is a form of “traumatic violation” (2015, 20).
- 13.
Socolovsky, who incidentally follows the Caruthian/mimetic model of reading trauma in Face of an Angel, emphasizes that “the text more than hints at sexual abuse, but does not settle on it firmly” (2003, 191).
- 14.
Works includes the trauma memoir Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed (2006) by professor and sociologist Josie Méndez-Negrete. Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed was initially published in 2002 by Chusma House Publications, then in a revised form by Duke University Press. Negrete-Méndez labels it an autoethnography, self-reflective writing examining personal memories in relation to a collective past and experiences with social, cultural, and political meanings to increase the (cultural) understanding of Chicana life in the borderlands, telling a true story of how she and her sisters were sexually and physically abused (Josie was sexually molested and her sisters Mague and Felisa were raped and Mague impregnated at twelve) by their father.
- 15.
After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, La Malinche was reconceived in nationalistic writings as a traitor and a whore (Blake 2008, 41).
- 16.
For instance, in the narrative “Los derechos de la Malinche” (Malinche‟s rights) in her story collection The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (1993), Alicia Gaspar de Alba addresses sexual abuse as a feature of the Malinche story by rewriting La Malinche as a survivor of father-daughter incest. Writer and activist Michelle Otero, on her part, reconceives survivors of sexual violence, including herself, as La Malinche’s daughters, in her modern chapbook Malinche’s Daughter (2006b). Malinche’s Daughter is openly activist and a testimony for survivors of sexual and domestic violence which tells the story about the author’s journey to Oaxaca, Mexico, to guide a writing course for women who have survived sexual assault and domestic abuse.
- 17.
As Gaspar de Alba indicates, “Chicana feminists and particularly Chicana lesbian feminists have begun to transform the story of Malinche into a mirror of Chicana resistance against female slavery to patriarchy—be it the brown patriarchy of La Raza or the overarching patriarchy of the white father” (2014, 78).
- 18.
See, for instance, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) and Sally Patterson Tubach’s Memoirs of a Terrorist (1996).
- 19.
As Sommer puts it, “In Spanish, as in many Western languages, the word earth is regularly metaphorized as woman; that is, woman is substituted by the land, which is the prize of struggle between men as well as their material for reproduction” (1988, 128).
- 20.
All translations are my own.
- 21.
For Anzaldúa’s theorization of the seven stages in this process, see “Now Let Us Shift” (2002, 543−74).
- 22.
Cherríe Moraga has said that because Chicana lesbians refuse to accept patriarchy by rejecting heterosexuality and male dominance, they were of all Chicanas viewed by Chicanos as the worst Malinches/betrayers, and thus represent “the most visible manifestation of a woman taking control of her own sexual identity and destiny” (2000, 103). Significantly, Gaspar de Alba introduces the modern Malinche as a lesbian, underscoring that her Malinche aims for mastery of her past and future.
- 23.
Coatlicue’s daughter, warrior goddess Coyolxauhqui, is in dominant narratives of the myth responsible for plotting to commit matricide and fratricide as a result of her mother’s pregnancy with Huitzilopochtli. (For Gaspar de Alba’s “unframing” of the “bad” daughter/sister, see 2014, 193−201).
- 24.
The reader learns that Manuel lived in poverty in his “colonial hometown” (Chávez 1994, 7), and in this way Chávez comments on Mexico’s past as doubly colonized, emphasizing the consequences of hundreds of years of political and economic influence; first Mexico was colonized by Spain in 1521 and then in the mid-1840s invaded and annexed by the US, losing almost half of its territory. Lana Beth Araujo and Pionia Viana Guedes sum up the social discrimination and insidious forms of trauma both Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have undergone as a result: “Subjected to a past of oppression, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans learned that mestizaje was a drawback. Over the centuries, they learned that, due to their dark skin, their ‘unrefined’ culture and, consequently, their ‘short cognitive reach’, they needed the tutelage of the ‘more intellectually privileged’ Anglos whose ‘superiority’ was legitimized by their white European background” (Araujo and Guedes 2014, 66).
- 25.
See Anzaldúa’s theorization of the seven stages in the process of conocimiento, see “Now Let Us Shift” (2002), pp. 543−74.
- 26.
In this, la facultad resonates with “insidious trauma,” Maria Root’s term for experiences of cumulative humiliation including racism and sexism (Root 1992, 240). Insidious trauma “results in a construction of reality in which certain dimensions of security are not very secure; as such, the individual is often alert to potential threat of destruction or death and accumulates practice in dealing with threat, especially insidious experiences like ageism, homophobia, racism, and sexism” (1992, 241).
- 27.
The seventh stage of conocimiento, see Anzaldúa (2002, 568–74).
- 28.
Soveida explains the expression “ni modo” as follows: “that a person accepts what can’t be undone; in other words, there’s nothing you can do about it, let it go, accept it, might as well” (Chávez 1994, 288).
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Rodi-Risberg, M. (2022). Transnational Trauma and Testimonio in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel. In: Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96619-5_5
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