LEE Have You Seeen Marie Paper

The English Literature Journal Vol. 1, No. 5 (2014): 169-173 Article Open Access

ISSN: 2348-3288

Spiritual reappropriation of community: Sandra Cisneros’ Have You Seen Marie? Euna Lee* Department of Hispanic Language and Literature, Seoul National University, Korea.

*Corresponding author: Euna Lee; e-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT In Have You Seen Marie? Sandra Cisneros narrates her rediscovery of the full meaning of community while coming to terms with her mother’s death. The story that combines autobiographical experiences with a fictional mediation deals with a short itinerary for searching for a runaway cat, Marie, in her neighborhood. Through this search, the narrator reencounters her neighbors and understands the pain of others through her unconditional hospitality, in the Derridean sense. Ultimately, Cisneros reunites with the presence of a mother who is embodied as the spiritual eternity of nature. In order to highlight how Cisneros reconfigures her community as an extension of her home, this paper examines how she draws on the accompanied illustrations as a medium to visually articulate the invisible message latent within the narrative’s unrevealed emotions. The illustrations help readers understand how the author reclaims traditional Mexican spirituality by embracing her neighbors as absolute others and nature as both her spiritual mother and an extended home.

Keywords: Sandra Cisneros; Chicana literature; spirituality; neighborhood; community.

INTRODUCTION In her recent book Have You Seen Marie?, acclaimed Latina author Sandra Cisneros returns to pervasive themes of feminine spirituality, in Latina/Chicana literature, such as wounds and healing, spiritual connections to the dead, and solidarity with one’s community. Indeed, she offers us a familiar glimpse into these recurrent topics through a meditation on death. Hence, the book has distinct allusions to both the literal and metaphorical significance of rediscovery through loss. In the story, a friend’s cat unexpectedly runs away, which leads the narrator on a whimsical search. The author rediscovers her inspiration for storytelling through this physical search, which evolves into an ontological meditation. Her search for Marie, the cat, is interwoven with the painful memory of her recently deceased mother. While overwhelmed by her absence, this short spontaneous journey through her neighborhood is soon transformed into a process of mourning and healing through reconnection with community and nature. Rather than merely documenting people in her community, fictionalizing them as characters in a story enables her to gain

insights about herself in the wake of death. Finally, she is able to transcend the overwhelming loss by reuniting with the presence of the spiritual eternity of nature, whose essence is the mother figure who encompasses the natural and communal surroundings that are the constituents of her home. This paper aims to show how the neighborhood is reconfigured as the extension of home, where the living present is intermingled with the dead past in a limbo of solace and mourning. As one of the most recurrent themes in Chicana texts, home is a place where spatial reappropriation occurs in multiple ways. This article examines how the community provides Cisneros an extended sense of home: allowing for re-encounters with others and an affinity with a spiritual mother rooted in nature. To a greater extent, the paper focuses on the illustrations, which are designed to convey connotative images of each anecdotal encounter. The illustrations are not only auxiliary, but also performative themselves. The images allow us to sense how Cisneros unconditionally embraces the neighbors as absolute others and how the transmission of her affection is visually represented at the very moment of reappropriating Mexican traditional spirituality. The

Received: 08 October 2014 Accepted: 19 October 2014 Online: 22 October 2014

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Euna Lee / The Eng Lit J. 2014, 1(5): 169-173

varying themes in the illustrations demonstrate both a physical and spiritual trajectory, which emerges from nowhere and shifts toward belonging. Unconditional hospitality for the otherness Have You Seen Marie? is an autobiographical fictional narrative created by fictionalizing Cisneros’ firsthand experiences. In reality, the author and her friend Rosalind embark on a frenzied search for Marie as they spend their day in the neighborhood along the nearby river. Cisneros briefly describes people they encounter in the streets and byways of San Antonio (and at times, the loss of their beloved people and animals) without revealing empathy for their wounds. On encountering an eclectic and quirky group in the neighborhood while putting up fliers about Marie, the narrator offers an ostensibly detached gaze at the people who are willing to help, but are all too preoccupied with their own daily existence. As evening descends, the narrator and her friend decide to search separately in different areas of the city. Agonized with despair, the narrator experiences a spiritual reunion with her mother, who is ubiquitous in the natural world. She ultimately makes peace with herself through embracing Mexican traditional spirituality and acknowledging the rebirth of new life within her self. The question to the neighbors “Have you seen Marie?” becomes an aural expression devoid of linguistic validity. The repeatedly asked question is gradually transformed into a resonant moan, which elicits Cisneros’ own sobbing echo of “Have you seen Mama?” reverberating along the river and trees. Although the last scenes of the book are reminiscent of the typical narrative style and metaphor of magical realism, Cisneros argues that she has no intention of resorting to it; rather, she wants the book to reveal that the beloved become spiritual allies irrespective of their virtual existence.i Drawing on Derrida’s ethical and theological concept of hospitality, I insist that Cisneros’ objective and verbal description of the neighbors does not signify a psychological or affective detachment. Rather, it can be interpreted as her ethical engagement with the otherness of the neighbor. The manner in which she encounters the neighbors is not meditated; in reality, the neighbors welcome her and her friend. Ironically, it is Cisneros who hosts them in terms of narratorial supremacy or representational subjectivity. She fulfills the role of host only by exposing herself to their existence, not by intervening in their stories. Thus, Cisneros’ unconditional and uncontaminated acceptance of the neighbor can be interpreted through Derrida’s theoretical proposition on hospitality. Similar to how the host foregrounds respect for the alterity of the Other in the concept of Derridean hospitality, Cisneros openly accepts this unexpected encounter with the neighbors without bearing a judgmental aloofness.

In Of Hospitality, Derrida proposes unconditional hospitality as the law: free of all constraints that are normally imposed on guests. He argues that hospitality calls for the welcome to be unconditional (29, 75): “Since the arrivant does not have an identity yet, its place of arrival is also de-identified: one does not yet know or one no longer knows which is the country, the place, the nation, the family, the language, and the home in general that welcomes the absolute arrivant” (34). In each encounter with her neighbors, Cisneros wholly welcomes and admits their otherness without interpolating a false sense of familiarity and participation. In effect, her reconciliation with the finiteness and the unintelligible in the world is articulated similar to how she renders herself completely vulnerable to the arrival of the neighbors. According to Derrida, abandoning all claims to property or ownership, be it epistemological, cultural, or national, can make unconditional hospitality conceivable. In the case of Cisneros’ hosting, the death of her mother adds an ontological sense of abandonment; in the afterword, Cisneros confesses, “I wish somebody had told me then that death allows you the chance to experience the world soulfully, that the heart is open like the aperture of a camera, taking in everything, painful as well as joyous, sensitive as the skin of water” (90-91). The helplessly accepted abandonment forced by the death in multiple senses makes possible this newly acknowledged mode of interacting with the neighbors, which fundamentally originates from respect for their otherness. Her encounter with the neighbors, in the end, leads her to rediscover the extension of a motherly presence; thus, the primacy of the interpersonal realm is transformed into spiritual reconciliation with death. Illustrations as visual representation of emotional transfer The illustrations that Cisneros incorporates, in collaboration with an internationally acclaimed visual artist Ester Hernandez, create a picture book for adults who regardless of their age, have psychologically experienced being orphaned. In order to create the “deliberately informal, rough-edged”ii images in the book, the illustrator focuses on the most essential bodily expressions, which visually capture the invisible messages latent within the narrative’s unrevealed emotions. For each illustration, visual projection and emotional recognition of the represented images are to be interpreted as affective reflections of Cisneros’ experiences. The images make her emotional engagement with others (including animals and plants) palpable, and thereby, decipherable. In the beginning of the book, the illustrations mainly focus on capturing the neighbors’ most characteristic features such as their gestures and facial expressions, which in turn, hint at Cisneros’ subjective, alternate version of reality. For instance, the cowboy next door who wants to help them

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next week and the old woman in her garden who offers them a can of Big Red soda are depicted matter of factly, albeit with a vivid touch of warmness and humor. The descriptive tone of the characters in the illustrations is an odd contrast to the urgency of finding the lost cat. Cisneros offsets the detachment created by her emotional restraint by juxtaposing a condensed representation of her sensory and affective engagement. The additional key visual intertext enriches the underlying tension, if not affinity, between the narrator and her neighbors. The illustrations portray a diverse emotional spectrum that includes humor, sadness, indifference, and despair, each of which coincide with the progress of the search. The humorous scenes include wedding cake mansions on King William Street, a dog staring at the women from a fence, a girl with tattooed arms in a glittering fiesta dress. Cisneros’ single-minded attention to an idiosyncratic detail of a character stresses the unutterable sadness of certain neighbors. While presenting Luli as a woman who “has witnessed too much grief for one lifetime and has a teardrop etched near her left eye to prove it” (38), the page hones in on a singular eye colored with vivid blue and red eye shadow. The decision to focus on one eye with one teardrop implies the narrator’s intention to participate in the woman’s pain and her intrinsic sense of empathy. On the other hand, the neighbors’ indifference and selfishness, which lie beneath the surface of the visual scene, are captured with a subtle implication of familiarity. Indeed, a woman reluctant to open her door for them is portrayed as someone whose pain the narrator has already identified, although the narrator only tacitly describes the woman’s act of slamming the door. The visitors are helplessly exposed to the woman’s pain; her enlarged face is the focal point of the illustration, suggesting that they see the wholeness of her existence without distinguishing between cognitive and perceptive understanding. The illustration serves to unravel the narrator’s understanding as encapsulated within the narration, which suggests her unconditional receptivity. In terms of the deliberate transfer of emotion in Hernandez’ visual representation of others, Cisneros rejects the role of “voyeur”, to use Sontag’s theory, which refers to one who derives pleasure from witnessing something from which she remains removed. According to Sontag, photographs in “The Image-World” provide a convenient way to impose a new reality that is based on distance, non-participation, and voyeurism. To say simply, Sontag critically sees “the detachment created by the medium of photography of the viewer from experience or event and, on a large scale, of all viewers from the real world” (Takakjian 7). In contrast, Cisneros’ emotional engagement is the antithesis of Sontag’s analysis of the power of photographs to neutralized experience.

Rather, the illustrations in Cisneros’ story reveal a palpable, firsthand emotional response: specifically her susceptibility and vulnerability to others. Encountering the pain of others raises an awareness of the narrator’s own loss, which is expressed by her portraits in the illustrations. Her portraits enable her to transcend the dualism between self and other; for example, the portrait reflected in the surface of the river in tandem with the vision imagined by Hernandez, capture the moment in which she transforms herself into both sensed and sensible pain. After her despair is visually articulated, the narrator shows a dramatic moment of unexpectedly acknowledging her mother’s presence, who allows her to reconnect with the source of creative force that coincides with the traditional Mexican view of the world.iii In addition to personifying the universe as a woman in a roughly drawn illustration with only black, white, and blue colors, Cisneros circuitously touches on some cultural figures such as curandera(healer), Llorona(weeping woman), and the Aztec Goddess by implicitly alluding to their textual and religious images.iv The giant roots of an ancient Texas cypress are depicted with two legs wearing a green skirt, attesting to the “collective unconscious” of Chicanos: territorial reclaiming and survival. That is, superimposing the trunk of a tree with the narrator’s legs alludes to the Chicana philosophy of understanding endurance, not to mention longevity. In another image, the river god in the foreground represents the narrator’s communal path to healing. The river invokes Llorona, a desperately weeping woman in the river, and often symbolizes the cultural memory of a tragic destiny. However, in Cisneros’ account, the river is alternately represented as a male figure, which signifies planetary circulation and interconnectedness. In the last scene, a female character as the avatar of a strong mother and universe is imbued with the image of Aztec cosmetology. The motherly presence is depicted in a coarse drawing with minimized application of color, which effectively translates Cisneros’ multilayered messages: ontological and spiritual reconciliation, the fundamental source of life, and the communal spirit in dialogue with the cultural past. Community as spatial reconfiguration of spirituality Cisneros explains that creating this picture book was akin to making a documentary since the neighbors encountered represent virtually all ages, races and classes. She highlights that this book is an outcome of “a collective community effort” (92). Nevertheless, her portrayal of the neighborhood is contradictory to her stated intention of faithfully depicting reality; her kaleidoscopic sketch of San Antonio leads to the creation of a new portrait of the city. Indeed, this portrait reflects Cisneros’ spatial configuration of dynamism, which contributes to sustaining coexistence and organic unity in the city: “I had the idea all along



that this story should shatter stereotypes about my neighborhood and city. I wanted it to reflect the neighborhood the way I know it, with its diverse plants, people and animals. So my instructions to Ester specifically were to illustrate the story in an unexpected way, to surprise the reader by working against the official story.”v As she explains in the interview discussed above, the multicultural environment allowing for “funky architecture” or “rasquache” (93) mentioned in the book hints at her fascination with the aesthetic liberalism of the city. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that this unique community is most densely imbued with Chicano flavor and artifacts, despite the author’s effort to avoid a generalized characterization of a specific ethnic community. The stereotypical literary and cultural symbols employed do not enact ethnic modes of resistance but merely indicate an important feature of the community’s composition, which organically resonates from the Chicano heritage. The Mexican old town is represented by sensory images associated with Mexican food and colors, the statue of the Virgin de Guadalupe in the garden, and the catchy bilingual flyer. Cisneros distinguishes her representation from the way communities are typically depicted in Chicano/a texts by liberating schematized images that have been widely exhausted. The community that is at work in her thought and perception is free of a heavy-handed version of spatial resistance against political marginalization and cultural oppression. Furthermore, it is not overwhelmed by the predetermined articulation of aesthetic or ethical predilection. Indeed, Cisneros transcends the communities in Chicana textual representation by integrating a universal rendering of space with an ontological reflection. She goes beyond the prevalence of one ethnic group with a more heterogeneous example of communal life. She also unites home-centered Catholic ritual and spirituality with the mythic and indigenous traditions personified in nature. As a frequent theme of Chicana authors’ texts, familial lineage especially woven by female family members embodies the “spiritual mestizaje” in everyday life. “Spiritual mestizaje,” to use Theresa Delgadillo’s term, traces back to Gloria Anzaldúa’s analysis of the link between cultural practice and spirituality. Anzaldúa shows “spirituality, on the one hand, and subject formation and material and social relations, on the other hand, as mutually informing and intersectional” (Anzaldúa 179). Cisneros does not clearly state its symbolic and daily function but rather limits herself in delivering a visual message in an implicit way in this book. However, she examines what “spiritual mestizaje” entails as a way of being.vi Generally, motherhood in Chicanas’ texts is represented with multilayered religious imagery such as the Virgin de Guadalupe and the indigenous goddess. For instance, “Guadalupe represents a connection to an indigenous

heritage or to a female ancestry, a shared belief and experience, or simply the powerful of the divine in daily life” (Delgadillo 26). Similarly, in Cisneros’ story, the motherly presence is revealed through an intimate interaction with secular sanctity, which is comprised of many spiritual ramifications rooted in mestizo popular Catholicism. Similar to other Chicana authors such as Pat Mora, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa, who draw spiritual empowerment from the land’s creativity, Cisneros’ poetic self evokes the image of nature as a spiritual place of profound mystery and ancient vision. In their texts, domestic places such as gardens, patios and kitchens represent spaces, where living as well as dead characters (present and absent) contribute to the actualization of a collective union. To a great extent, Cisneros envisions the natural world around her residence as an extended home, where Chicano and universal spirituality converge. She imagines the community as a space that signifies an infinite extension toward the cosmos. The voices resounding through nature are reminiscent of indigenous female deities: “Here I am, I’ve been here all along, mijata” (83). In this text, the narrator discovers that the voice of the mother responds to her desperate search, strengthening Cisneros’ reconfiguration of the neighborhood as a place of spiritual belonging. “And when the swirling inside me grew still I heard the voices inside my heart” (82). Later she hears the sound of “mija (my daughter)” from the wind, trees, clouds and stars. Listening to voices in nature is not a simple act; it entails observing a palimpsest of voices and being an audience that perceives the correspondence between ancestors and descendants in the present. In Chicanas’ texts, generally, being exposed to the richness of the voices not only means connecting with the family heritage, but also relating its engagement with habitual spirituality, which quite often intermingles with the sounds of nature. As Mora shows in her poems, she has “learned [that] wisdom, ritual, solutions” spring “from the land. All are essential to curanderas, who listen to voices from the past and the present, who evolve from their culture” (Mora 126). Mora’s explanation is pertinent to Cisneros’ deployment of the vibrations of nature, which as the collective perpetuity, serves to be a pivotal medium of awakening Cisneros’ interior spirituality. In Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, Mary Pat Brady provides a concrete account of how Chicanas explore the spatialization of subjectivities through reclaiming the land, the past, and sociopolitical power: “Chicanas write with a sense of urgency about the power of space, about its (in)clement capacity to direct and contort opportunities, hopes, lives. They write also with a sense of urgency about the need to contest such power, to conquer it with alternative spatial configurations, ontologies, and genealogies” (Brady 9). This quotation



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illustrates how nature is perceived and understood in Cisneros’ text. Her representation is similar to the spatial reconfiguration in literary and artistic terrain, where space is discursively reproduced in parallel with the reshaping of subjectivity. Cisneros readmits the personified nature imbued with eternity to reconstruct herself as its constituent and as a storyteller surviving in a dialectic of generation and geography. CONCLUSION As the author explicates, Have You Seen Marie? is based on a Mexican-indigenous view of the world, which finds value in the continuation between life and death. Tracing the sense of connection rooted in the neighborhood is a way of enacting rebirth, which is achieved through story making/telling. The neighborhood is a microcosmic reflection for Cisneros, which ultimately represents her discovery of life’s wholeness. Cisneros reveals her effort to reconstruct a community more faithful to reality, paradoxically by evading the objective depiction of real community. Her ontological solidarity with the community can be glimpsed with a deciphering gaze at the illustrations, which are laden with her emotional and psychological engagement. Thus, the illustrations are not simply a medium to aestheticize the narrative’s message; rather, they produce a space for the installation of a new

community that is based on Cisneros’ affective relationship with her neighbors. REFERENCES

1. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

2. Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

3. Cisneros, Sandra. Have You Seen Marie? New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

4. Delgadillo, Theresa. Spiritual Mestizaje. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

5. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

6. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001. 7. McCracken, Allen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space

of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999.

8. Mora, Pat. Nepántla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

9. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: a Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson: The University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

10. Takakjian, Cara (2007). “On Photography by Susan Sontag”. [Online] available. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic148217.files/TakakjianSontag.htm.

***** Notes

i In the interview with Take Two at http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2012/10/22/28938/sandra-cisneros-latest-a-picture-book-to-help-with/ ii https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sandra-cisneros/have-you-seen-marie/ iii In ancient Mexican perspective of world, the mother goddess who represents the earth is also known as ‘mother of gods’, who gave birth to the universe. iv Cisneros has explored a lyrical narrative to articulate her knowledge of both individual and community psychology embedded in ethnic belief and practices. She attests to “the power that comes from this integration of myth, legend, and history that infuses Chicana writing and the Chicana writer” (Rebolledo 94). v In the interview with Daniel Olivas at http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/three-questions-for-sandra-cisneros-regarding-her-new-book-have-you-seen-marie vi In her previous books, Cisneros fictionalizes non-official religious practices or spiritual representations in daily lives for “contemporary feminist ends” (McCraken 135). In this book, she is more inclined to universal ontological meditation, rather than illustrating Chicano/a transgressive religiosity.


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LEE Have You Seeen Marie Paper