coldhearted scientist وداد

Cross posted at Seminario Permanente de Teoría y Crítica:

In [a book] [a critic] distinguishes between silencing, a condition imposed from outside, and silence freely chosen. She further suggests that the latter can take two forms: using silence as a weapon or breaking silence with hipocrisy. The interplay between silencing and silence . . . characterizes Elena Garro‘s life and work. After being imprisoned for her activism on behalf of the Indian peasants in Chihuahua and Morelos, taunted by the press, rejected by the left for allegedly betraying the leaders of a planned 1968 coup, and barred from publishing houses that were controlled by her powerful ex-husband Octavio Paz, Garro left Mexico for the United States in 1971. She moved on to Spain, where her Mexican passport was confiscated, and finally settled in France.

These events had a profound effect on Garro’s literary career, her attitude toward authorship, and the creation of the writer/artist protagonists of the works published after a thirteen year hiatus. Garro initially, however, remained silent in response to personal and political persecution, to misrepresentations of her words and actions, to the limitations of her broken health and to the demands of single parenting.

[When] Garro again wrote and published, she wrote of loneliness, loss, fear and persecution while denouncing the silencing of the female authorial voice and the sado-masochistic underpinnings of male-female relationships. Garro’s protagonists, as the author herself, suffer the negative consequences of female authorship and other creative activity. In these novels, Garro implicitly denounces the hypocrisy of the Latin American leftist intellectual who takes upon himself the social, political and economic privileges of the previous aristocratic elite and who represses the female narrative voice even as he claims to express alternate (more real) realities than those of official discourse. While Garro’s protagonists decry male control of authorship, and their own forced silence, they reclaim their own right to author-ity as they create a different reality. . . .

To address the problems confronting the female author/creative artist, Garro creates an alternate discourse characterized by omission, marginal perspective, ambiguity, displacement and troping. Through this discourse, Garro and her protagonists appropriate silence as they appear to submit to injuctions to [it] . . . while at the same time telling the story of the silencing of the female writer. . . .

–Marketta Laurila, “Decapitation, Castration and Creativity in Elena Garro’s Andamos huyendo Lola [We are Fleeing Lola].” In Literature and the Writer, ed. Michael Meyer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 19-41. Section quoted is from 19-21.

Axé.