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Lucina Kathmann: The Woman Who Knows Latin (Inglés)Women writers in Mexico, like women writers the world over, and perhaps I should say all writers the world over, work against a background of many real and potential threats to their freedom of expression. I have written in the past about women who were victimized by censorship in the ordinary sense of the word, women writers such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was ordered to cease publishing in 1690 by Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Archbishop of Puebla, Mexico; women writers such as Myrna Mack Chang and Alaíde Foppa, one knifed to death and the other disappeared in Guatemala, silenced for their defense of the indigenous communities; women writers such as María Elena Cruz Varela and Martha Beatriz Roque, who were both imprisoned in Cuba for their writings critical of the government, and a host of other women writers, including Rigoberta Menchú and Claribel Alegría, who have been forced into exile, especially during the period of the Latin American dictatorships of the 70s and 80s. There is no lack of examples of women writers, including the finest, who have suffered all these forms of censorship. In the last few years the International PEN Women Writers Committee organized two conferences in Guadalajara on Censorship and Self-Censorship. At both of them, I heard the same comment, "Yes, governments and paramilitary groups do horrible things to women writers, but these dangers seem remote compared to what we do to ourselves. The problem that we fight every day is self-censorship." So I have begun to study another group of women writers, those for whom censorship comes from their own hearts. This group includes many outstanding women writers who have commited suicide, such as the Latin American writers: Alfonsina Storni, Delmira Agostini, Concha Urquiza, Violeta Parra, Julia de Burgos, Rosario Castellanos and Alejandra Pizarnik. (There are also many North American and European women writers such as: Carolyn Heilbrun, Edith Sodergran, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf.) I don't care about the forensic details of their deaths. I have included in this list writers whose deaths might not be suicide. Almost all of them died alone; few left explicit suicide notes. Nonetheless, the body of their work confirms their identification with unendurable pain and their obsession with the idea of suicide. I will cite especially the work of Rosario Castellanos. Suicide is a strange violation of freedom of expression, because perpetrator and victim are the same. But I am used to peculiar twists in investigating women writers. In the 80s, in the first meetings that led to the creation of the International PEN Women Writers Committee, we all noticed that the patterns of censorship women writers reported were different from patterns reported by men. Women writers complained against their governments, but they complained more frequently of members of their own families. One writer, since quite famous, said her husband had burned her first novel. A group from Nepal said they could not write about sex at all for fear their mothers-in-law would think them unfaithful or improper wives. I think that with the women I am talking about today, I am just going one step further, into the souls of the women themselves. In these cases, there are still difficult husbands, but they don't do the dirty deeds of censorship directly. Their incomprehension and thousands of years of oppression of women have been taken up into the mind of the woman herself. She becomes her own enemy. One of the recurrent themes in the poetry of these women writers is pain, unendurable pain. A haunting song by the Chilean Violeta Parra ends like her life: I curse the moon, the landscape the valleys and the deserts I curse every one of the dead And the living, from the king to his page the birds with their feathers moreover, I curse both palaces and sacristies pain takes control of me. I curse the word love with all its rubbish, so great is my pain. In Lamentación de Dido, Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos identifies with the character of Dido, queen of Carthage, who commits suicide after Aeneas abandons her. For Castellanos, Dido is pain itself. Ah, it would be better to die. But I know that for me death is not possible Because pain - and what else am I but pain? - has made me eternal ... What is this pain? It appears in hundreds of the poems of these women. It frequently appears as the pain of rejection or abandonment by a lover: My name is Dido... Dido the abandoned one, she who put her heart under the axe in a tremendous farewell. But it is not always tied to a specific event. In El otro, Castellanos suggests that she may simply have a vocation to pain, such as the personality type Dostoevski called "Suffering Souls": If life hurts us, if every day arrives Tearing up our entrails, if every night falls convulsed, murdered If we suffer the pain of someone, a person we don't even know... But it is not only a vocation for suffering. Castellanos' emotions also erupt in gratuitous hostility, and the victim is herself. I am a woman: a title difficult to obtain, in my case, and more useful This poem makes me very uncomfortable. How can I protest a poem? It expresses a feeling; can I protest a feeling? But I do, despite the absurdity of doing so. I protest the misogynistic feeling that inspires it, and that it expresses. I concur instead with another, opposed attitude, expressed by the very same writer in a book of feminist essays in which she criticizes and apparently rejects all the attitudes of society which she uses here to excoriate herself. "Woman, according to the definition of the classic authors, is a mutilated man." So begins one of the essays in Mujer que sabe latín, which protest keeping women ignorant and infantile in the name of purity, the depredations of fashion, foot-binding, corsetry and all the horrible things women have done to make themselves agreeable to men.This is the same issue that inspired Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, who also committed suicide, to a repetitive, poetic crescendo of indignation, which begins: You want me new you want me creamy you want me pearly In addition to the essays on the position of women, Mujer que sabe latín also contains essays on education of women in Mexico and on many important individual women writers. It is a classic for feminist studies. It is really hard to believe that the woman who wrote it is the same as the one that her poetry reveals. But the "other" Castellanos is definitely there, the woman who feels ugly, useless, who wonders if she even exists, who often appears to experience her creativity as a series of self-inflicted wounds. In Entrevista de prensa she writes: Why do you write? Because somebody (when I was little) said that people like me do not exist. Their bodies cast no shadow. Their names are among those that are forgotten. North American writer Erica Jong could be commenting on Rosario Castellanos when she writes: The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. In Rosario Castellanos' life, the dark side won in the fight between herself and herself. Fulfilling the prophesy, when Castellanos finally married, at age 33, she married a man who boasted that he never read her work. Of course, this marriage did not endure, yet she found its end intolerable. She plunged into despair and soon died electrocuted when a lamp dropped, or she pulled it, into her bathtub. The topic of suicide comes up explicitly in Castellanos work frequently. She says "We kill what we love" twice in the poem Destino*, and in the Privilegio del suicida she says: Whoever kills himself kills what he loves attains the innocence of water and is reconciled to the universe. In Recordatorio she appears to be complaining to anonymous authorities that she is still alive. Having produced a living son and thus completed her role in the reproductive cycle, she believes she is now useless: Gentlemen, have you not forgotten To pronounce the order for me to leave? But someone had told me she committed suicide, and I could not find anything about this in official sources, neither in encyclopedias nor online. Finally I began to suspect that there were efforts to avoid this question. There also was very little representation of the extremely dark nature of her poetry, her difficult and complex personality, though her poetic work shows this clearly. Articles, typically attributed to several writers, usually all male, focused on the relatively "safe" topic of her advocacy for the indigenous people of Chiapas. They also praised her poetry for its "lyric qualitites." They never mentioned pain. When they cited poems, they were comparatively tepid ones. By contrast, Castellanos' own work and commentaries by women writers told a very different story. Mexican writer Martha Cerda wrote to me, "I believe she committed suicide, though she already felt she was dead for some time." I think there are several reasons for this discrepancy. One is the Catholic church's teaching that suicide is a sin. People may think they are defending Castellanos from being labeled a sinner. Another is our society's unease with the expression of "women's issues" in any public sphere. Rosario's sufferings had an integral element of gender, they were the sufferings of a woman, in many cases precisely about being a woman. As I continued to read I started to realize: What people say and believe about women can get into their system to such a point that no intellectual effort can get it out. Maybe not all women, but some, including some of the most brilliant. They can die of it: words can kill.
*There are two poems called "Destino". The first line of this one is: "Matamos lo que amamos. Lo demás." Thanks to: Martha Cerda, for good advice and for sending me some books which are very difficult to obtain, also to Nicholas Patricca, Sareda Milosz, Víctor Sahuatoba, Robert Colucci, Pat Hirschl and Elizabeth Starcevic. REFERENCES:
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