Ladies Gallery: The Literary Construction of a Fragmented Voice
A.
Me alegra mucho que Carmen Dolores Hernández haya vuelto a reseñar el trabajo de Irene Vilar. Ver: AQUI. Pero hay dos detalles que llaman mucho la atención:
1.No menciona el título de las segundas memorias de Irene Vilar (Impossible Motherhood: a Testimony of an Abortion Addict), elemento clave en esta reseña.
2. Señala que "la historia de Irene no acaba con el fin de su matrimonio. Llega hasta el momento actual, cuando se encuentra felizmente casada y con dos hijas". Esta oración me confunde porque parece indicar que el primer esposo de Vilar es el padre de sus hijas, lo cual no es así.
B.
Publico una presentación que se enfoca en las primeras memorias de Irene Vilar: Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets. Lo comparto porque el fallecimiento reciente de su abuela, Lolita Lebrón, ha desencadenado una serie de discusiones interesantes e importantes, y considero que los libros publicados por su nieta deben ser leídos y analizados críticamente, ya que enriquecerán nuestras reflexiones colectivas e íntimas. ¡Su voz es esencial!
C.
“Ladies Gallery: The Literary Construction of a Fragmented Voice”
presented at the panel Writing Across the Caribbean Diaspora,
Conference: Global and Local Languages
organized by the American Association of Comparative Literature
Harvard University, March 26-29, 2009.
Dedicated to my grandmother Carmen Bonilla Gómez
Personal Introduction:
Today I will share with you a few snapshots taken from a thesis recently completed for a Master Degree in Puerto Rican literature at the Center for Advanced Studies, Puerto Rico. Hoping to present a coherent overview of an extensive work, I have divided this presentation into 9 segments.
I chose to study Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets by Irene Vilar, granddaughter of nationalist leader Lolita Lebrón, because it reveals the intricate way in which a young Puerto Rican woman reclaims her fragmented voice through the act of writing, while exposing the contradictions inherent in the construction of an “authentic” Puerto Rican identity. (1)
Besides, this memoir – unlike any other autobiographical text written by a Puerto Rican in the past decade – presents the demystification (or humanization) of a public figure (Lolita Lebrón) that currently stands as the Mother of the Fatherland, even for individuals that do not subscribe to the independence’s ideology.
1. About this memoir:
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, published Irene Vilar’s first memoir in 1996. At that time, it was entitled A Message from God in the Atomic Age. This title was “borrowed” from an enigmatic document written by Lolita Lebrón, which records three of the many spiritual visions she has received through the years.
In 1998, the year that marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Puerto Rico, this book was published again as Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets. As Benigno Trigo points out in his analysis, during the 19th century, the Ladies Gallery was the room designated for affluent women who wanted to listen to the congressional sessions. (2)
Vilar’s autobiographical text is an attempt to break the lure of madness as well as the deadly cycles that trapped three generations of Puerto Rican women: the author, her mother Gladys Mirna and her grandmother. However, it must be stated that these repetitive forces are contextualized within the framework of Puerto Rico’s colonial history. Dates exemplify the magnitude of the patterns that mark these women’s lives.
On March 1st 1954, the author’s grandmother Lolita Lebrón, led three nationalist men in an armed attack at the United States House of Representatives aimed to remind the international community that Puerto Rico was still under the United States’ imperial control. In her biography La Prisionera, Lebrón expressed that she had planned the assault and was prepared to sacrifice her life for the independence cause. She served 25 years in the Alderson Federal Prison Camp, West Virginia.(3)
Two years before President Jimmy Carter pardoned Lebrón, Irene Vilar (8 years old then) witnessed how her mother Gladys Mirna threw herself out of a moving car. Paradoxically, Gladys also died on March 1st, 23 years later, in 1977. During an interview with a New York Times’ reporter, Vilar suggested that her mother’s tragic act was the only way of expressing her autonomy and originality. The writer sensed that her mother lived under Lebrón’s heroic shadow and felt great pressure because of it.
Gladys Mirna’s suicide – possibly interpreted as the demise of a sacred Fatherland – also launched Vilar into exile. From then on, the author felt displaced, uprooted and profoundly affected by melancholy. Her disjointed past as well as the feelings of abandonment and guilt led her to several suicide attempts.
On February 1st, 1988, Vilar was admitted into a psychiatric institution in New York State. There – within the vague limits of sanity and madness- she focused on her extraordinary capacity to recreate the past. This healing process enabled Vilar to realize the following: “Perhaps my mother's death was not necessarily my doom, but my redemption…. Mother has died. Therefore, I Am. Not a nation, it is true, but a presence that remains. A book."
2. Why was it published in English?
According to what Vilar declared in La Plaza, a television series produced (here) in Boston, her decision was solely based on her emergent artistic interests in the English language.(4)
Vilar also shared with writer and cultural critic Ilan Stavans, La Plaza’s former host, that she personally asked Gregory Rabassa (acclaimed translator of Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector and Gabriel García Marquez, among others) to translate her manuscript; and her request was accepted.
In reaction to these statements, Stavans declared that publishing a memoir in English, knowing that Puerto Ricans in the island may not be able to read it, seemed like a “twisted kind of censorship”; and Vilar added the adjective: perverse.
3. Intimate & Public realms: Two sides of the mythical coin
At first glance, this book seems to include two independent plots. On the one hand, we find the family story intertwined with a panoramic historical account of the island. (5) On the other hand, we encounter a dense text about Vilar’s experience in the mental institution; and this particular section follows the narrative structure of a diary. However, in subtle as well as more obvious ways, both narrative and temporal discourses presented in this memoir are well bridged.
Her poetic and nonlinear writing resembles a collage composed by countless literary references, interviews, fictionalized fragments of Puerto Rican history, police reports and diary entries. Thus, the intimate and the public realm are presented as corresponding - and at some levels, fused elements - not as contradictory poles.
4. The literary self-representation:
James Olney, an expert in autobiographical studies, explains that language enables us to create and organize the metaphors that serve as meaningful links between our past and new experiences.(6) These metaphors become resources of knowledge, regardless of their veracity, and allow us to develop new mental patterns.
As part of my thesis, I argue that Irene Vilar uses the symbol (or the metaphor) of the mirror, similarly to earlier suicidal writers such as Sylvia Plath (7), to confront her fragmented “self” and use literary mechanisms to recreate it.
According to Sidonie Smith, the “self” is a cultural and linguistic fiction constituted by narrative processes and historical ideologies regarding identity (8); and certainly Vilar’s literary “self” is inhabited by a collision of cultural, political, religious and maternal voices that seem to be harmonized only through the act of writing. The author describes this process in the following way: “And just as those voices eventually become you as you write, you, in turn, to make your story meaningful, become part of those voices, a closing of the circle that is endurable only as you write.
5. Blurred boundaries of reality, fiction and madness:
Ladies Gallery is not an effort to present an indissoluble, coherent and complete view of the truth. Unlike conventional autobiographical texts, this is a fragmented recreation of the past that aims to legitimize Vilar’s version of her family story. At no time, does Vilar hide the fact that her literary self-representation is very much influenced by literature (9), dreams, invention as well as her chaotic emotional state.(10)
There are plenty of times where the writer fuses specific memories with passages from other literary works. As an example, I will talk about the association established between her first trip to Syracuse and the excursion thoroughly described in the short story “La guagua aérea,” (The Flying Bus) written by Luis Rafael Sanchez in 1983. Here, this fusion is achieved by the incorporation of the unforgettable character from Sanchez’s story that finds a way to travel to the United States with a burlap sack full of crabs. According to Juan Flores, the crabs that escaped from the bag, scaring the stewardess, might represent the acts of resistance articulated by Puerto Ricans living in the United States as a response to the cultural clashes.(11) However, in Vilar’s memoir there is no room for the festive mood that prevails in “La guagua aérea,” and such a defiant act is not permitted. In her memoir, this emblematic character is presented on a different light. He prefers to stay in Puerto Rico when the guard prohibits him to travel with his best friend, the crab. Defeatism succeeds.
6. A hybrid and fluid Identity:
Vilar’s migratory experiences in New Hampshire, Castellón de la Plana, Spain and New York led her to deflate the myths constructed to praise a nation’s image. It also enabled – or forced - her to challenge the static views of national identity, while coming to terms with its fluid and hybrid qualities. The following passage validates, once again, from a personal perspective, what has been continually analyzed by academics interested in the construction of Puerto Rican trans-national identities:
“The girl in turn dreamt of guava trees, which in her imagination grew so high that they broke the ceiling. She didn’t need to walk anymore or think about lightness or weight, nor did she need to reconcile them. That’s it! She said to a face in the mirror that was her own face. She would simply swing herself from one tree to another across the rooms and hallways. This has been her greatest fantasy: to live swinging from tree to tree and walk without leaving tracks."(12)
There are many key elements in this surreal passage. I will mention three of them:
1. The guava tree establishes an interesting dialogue with Esmeralda Santiago’s autobiography, When I was a Puerto Rican. In both texts, la guayaba points towards the view of the traditional Puerto Rican nationality that undergoes a transformation in the migratory process.
2. The broken roof may signify an ideological divergence from the myth that presents the house as the space reserved for the nationals: that is for “those legal citizens that share the characteristics mandated by the official national history”.(13) Attempting to exit the house also alludes to the disentanglement from the domestic roles assigned to the women who are viewed as the “the keepers of the nation’s future”.(14)
3. The third element is the writer’s vivid imagination. Without such an essential force Vilar would not have been able to face the multi-layered and devastating effects of colonialism as well as her grandmother’s and mother’s sacrificial acts.
7. Women in the Fatherland
As mentioned earlier, in my investigation I focused on Vilar’s relationship with the reflections found in real and metaphorical mirrors. And, perhaps the most vexing image appears to be the one embodied by her grandmother, Lolita Lebrón.
During the 1940’s Lebrón joined the New York committee of the Nationalist Party, led by Pedro Albizu Campos: one of the most radical political figures of the 20th century who also happens to be the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard University.
Albizu Campos denounced the illegality of the United States occupation of the island as well as the racist imposition of the “official American” culture. Also, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, this devoted catholic leader stood firmly against the sexual and reproductive health policies implemented in Puerto Rico. These policies, mostly promoted by Eugenicists and neo-Malthusians, encouraged dubious and unethical scientific experimentations.
In the past years some Puerto Rican scholars have dared to question the conservative, Hispanophile and religious aspects of Albizu Campos’ discourse. Recent studies have also revealed that some feminists, social workers and nurses from that period were in favor of the implementation of these birth control policies. They argued that it contributed to the betterment of women’s health conditions.(15) In addition, scholars like Carmen Ana Pont and Laura Briggs have criticized his view of motherhood. Pont, for example declares that Albizu not only defined the maternal role as a divine mission but also as a mandatory act to bring forth the soldiers that will defend Puerto Rico and its culture.(16) Briggs, in turn, argues that women’s sexual “deviance” has been correlated to the failure of the nationhood.
Although Irene Vilar does not reject motherhood, she refuses to incarnate the metaphor that binds all women to a maternal role. Moreover, the author brings together crucial historical accounts to reveal that some of her grandmother’s actions were not in accordance with her grandmother’s public image as Mother of the Fatherland. For example, Lebrón embraced the “men’s” role by leading an armed attack, refused to remain in an unsatisfactory relationship with Gladys Mirna’s father, migrated to New York City alone during the 1940’s and chose not to raise her children. Also, Lebron’s alleged mysticism defies the religious and patriarchal conventions that do not validate women’s direct contact with “God”, particularly if there are no intermediaries.(17)
8. U-turn not the Promised Land:
Irene Vilar’s demystification of Lolita Lebrón – the Mother of the Fatherland (18)- is certainly a way of disassociating herself from the political, cultural and religious postures defended by Albizu’s Nationalist discourse as well as other (less militant) Puerto Rican nationalist tendencies. Vilar becomes a pariah by blurring the alleged distinctions between the “private” and the “public” realm, and discussing personal information that humanize the heroic image of her grandmother. That is why I contend that if Lebrón is the Mother of the Fatherland, Irene Vilar is the pilgrim that makes a u-turn while attempting to reach the Promised Land, or the glorified state that nationalist militants strive to attain by decolonizing Puerto Rico.(19) (Ironically, during a conversation between Vilar and Lebrón, the later expressed that she wrote like Moses.) (20)
I employ the expression U-turn to establish an analogy with the arguments exposed in La Carreta Made a U-turn, published by Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera in 1979. As Juan Flores indicates, Laviera questions those ideological views that measure the authenticity of our “Puerto Ricaness” according to our Spanish language proficiency.(21) The poet also proposes the legitimization of our multilingual expressions (for example, spanglish and code-switching), because these are manifestations of our resistance to adopt the United States’ dominant culture.
I must clarify that Vilar does not take Laviera’s posture, at least not explicitly. (22) Besides, Vilar does not define herself as a Nuyorican. Still, her decision to publish a memoir in English can be judged as a provocation to the various Puerto Rican nationalist discourses that view the so-called “native” or “maternal” language as an essential characteristic of a bona fide(23) national identity. This conservative and purist posture upheld by many influential scholars during the 1930’s (and not just Albizu) is still safeguarded by Puerto Rican nationalists as well as politicians, cultural activists and scholars that do not necessarily share a common ideological ground.
Clearly, these linguistic conventions are not transversally applicable to all Puerto Ricans. During the televised interview, Vilar gave one convincing example of the double standard: Island-born Puerto Ricans studying in the United States have argued that Vilar is contributing to the disappearance of their language/culture. (24)
Yet, whoever takes this position is not taking into account that more than half of the population of Puerto Rican descent lives outside the Island, and that a large number of them only speak English; or as Carlos Pabón (a post-modernist scholar) argues, these upper middle class students presume that only they can enjoy the privileges of knowing the “colonizer’s language” without losing their identity. (25)
In closing, I consider the process of translation as a linguistic boundary utilized by Vilar to distance herself from a visceral creation.(26) After all, this text became the depository of the suicidal self. The choice of language, like Gladys Mirna’s suicide, is a mirror that reflects the writer’s rejection of a traditional ideology.
9. Gathering the pieces:
Publishing a memoir could be an “act of literary and cultural authority”, as long as there is an audience that reads it. (27) In this case, its important to mention that Ladies Gallery is hardly known in the Island, and it is not currently sold not in any of the main bookstores. One bookseller even mentioned that this memoir was only available shortly after it first came out, and that it was highly criticized by some Island-based Puerto Rican scholars during informal discussions.(28)
I also should state that this memoir not discussed in many graduated courses regarding the literary work of Puerto Rican writers in the United States. (29) Thus, I hypothesize that the book’s invisibility is very much related with its transgressive content. After all, Vilar’s literary self-representation “defies the standards established by the Puerto Rican discourse that strives to construct a nation as if it were a family”.(30)
To conclude, I would like to restate that Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets exemplifies how the autobiographic discourse can impact the intricate creation (an unending recreation) of our subjectivity, memory, and collective myths. But as Jerome Brunner advises, no autobiography (in this case, no memoir) “is completed, only ended.” (31) In other words, this book can only present one of the numerous literary recreations of Vilar’s fragmented voice.
Very soon Vilar’s second memoir will be published. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict will be available via Amazon.com on September 22, 2009: a day before El Grito de Lares, and a day after the commemoration of her brother’s burial. It would be interesting to investigate the changes in the author’s self-representation. Indeed, this new textual portrait could reinvent or even destroy the blurred reflections exposed in this compelling book.
Footnotes:
1. It also questions its political ambivalence. That is, the Puerto Rican nationhood – due to our colonial dilemma - has been excluded from Latin American as well as from the Caribbean imaginary, and even thought we are United States citizens by birth right we are not considered North American.
2.Trigo, Benigno. Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2006, page 119.
3. Puerto Rican Nationalist leader Blanca Canales Torresola (1906 – 1996) was also incarcerated in this federal prison, after leading the Jayuya uprising on October 30, 1950.
4. When Rosario Ferré offered the same explanation for using the English language, she was fiercely criticized. To summarize, her “artistic interest” was perceived by many as a political strategy to promote Puerto Rico’s annexation. Pabón, page 97. Interestingly, Ferré symbolically consecrated this memoir by writing a blurb that appears on the back cover.
5. The writer covers historical accounts from the mid-19th century (period known for the consolidation of “official” Puerto Rican identity) to early the 1990’s.
6. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1972, page 31.
7. Freedman, William. “The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'” en Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, Num. 5, October 1993, page. 152-69. See: http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/freedman.html
8. Smith, Sidoine. “Hacia una poética de la autobiografía de mujeres”. In: Vanessa Vilches. Escrituras Femeninas. University of Puerto Rico, ESGE 4151, August 1998. ID#108, DOC# 4151, PAGE #69.
9. Madame K, is a Jewish patient that reflects Vilar’s nomadic condition, may also exemplify the incorporation of another literary work. This real (or perhaps imagined) character reminded me of K, the Jewish from The Castle written by Franz Kafka en 1922. According to Hanna Arendt, K is a pariah. He belongs neither to the “town” nor to the governing class.
10. Shoshana Feldman argues that such mental and corporal chaos (clinically called madness) can also be viewed as “the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived the very means of protest of self-affirmation.” See: Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, page 5.
11. Flores, Juan. “Creolité” en el Barrio: la diáspora como fuente y desafío. In Nueva Sociedad, # 201, January - February, 2006, page 118. See: http://www.nuso.org/upload/articulos/3315_1.pdf
12. Vilar, page 271.
13. Altagracia, Carlos D. “Espacios de poder: La construcción del cuerpo de la nación”. In: Carlos Pabón. El pasado ya no es lo que era: La historia en tiempos de incertidumbre. San Juan: Ediciones Vértigo, 2005, page 72.
14. Abreu Torres, Dania. El Cuerpo Incorrecto: Cuerpos y confrontaciones en la narrativa de Mayra Santos Febres. Masters Thesis, University of Florida. 2004, page 6.
See: http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0004874/abreutores_d.pdf
15. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, University of California Press, 2002. page 140.
16.Pont, Camen Ana. Le regard intime: du souvenir prive à la mémoire collective. L’écriture autobiographique portoricaine. Tesis Doctoral Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle U.F.R. D’études Ibériques et Latino-Américaines, 2003.
17. According to Schmidt, women mystics develop profound and heroic, and stand along the margins of the patriarchal religious system. Schmidt, Aileen. Mujeres excéntricas: la escritura autobiográfica femenina en Puerto Rico y Cuba. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003. page 171.
18. I use Fatherland instead of Motherland to make a linguistic statement in the translated version of my work, for patria derives from the Latin term “pater” which means father. Ironically, as Carlos Gil suggests, the fatherland has been portrayed as the sick mother that must be rescued by her courageous son Gil Carlos, “De la madre enferma albizuista a la cura de adelgazamiento”. In Irma Rivera Nieves & Carlos Gil. Ensayos de cultura y política en la postmodernidad, San Juan: Editorial Postdata & Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995, page 122-123.
19. Puerto Rican Nationalist poet Clemente Soto Velez wrote a poetry book, entitled La tierra prometida (The Promised Land) in 1979. The Promised Land seems to be equated with Lares (the Holy Land): this town where pro-independence fighters strived to establish the Republic of Puerto Rico on September 23, 1868.
20. Vilar, page 263.
21. Flores Juan. “La carreta made a U-turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture in the United States en Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Texas: Arte Público Press, 1993, page 157-178.
22.Today, Nuyorican literature has been incorporated into the Puerto Rican literature canon as a distinct literary form done by a particular group that is different from the Island-based Puerto Ricans. There is still a notion of “otherness”. Pabón call this a “domesticated incorporation”. (Nación Post-Mortem, page 93)
23. I chose the term “bonafide” to highlight the work of Nuyorican poet and musician Bonafide Rojas.
24. This argument resembles the ones expressed by scholars during the1930’s, which were against bilingualism in Puerto Rico. See: Idioma, bilinguismo y nacionalidad, (Chapter 5) by Roamé Torres-González. José de Diego, José Juan Beauchamp (writer), José Padín (Commissioner of Education 1930-1937) and Juan José Osuna (Dean of Education Department at the University of Puerto Rico 1922-1943) also strongly advocated that the Spanish language was an essential element of the Puerto Rican nationality.
25. Pabón, page 99.
26. Benigno Trigo also states that Rosario Ferré translates her work to distance herself from personal losses. Page 63-175.
27. Smith, ID#108, DOC# 4151, PAG #65.
28. Interview with Eddie Ortiz, main bookseller de La Tertulía in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. August 25, 2008.
29. It must also be considered that autobiographical works, particularly those written by women, have not been easily accepted by the Puerto Rican literary canon. See: Guzmán Merced, Rosa. Las narraciones autobiográficas puertorriqueñas: invención, confesión, apología y afectividad. Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas. 2000
30. (My translation) Gelpí, Juan. Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico. San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993, page 176.
31. Brunner Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, page 74.
***Agradezco a la Dra Rosa Guzmán Merced por dirigir esta tesis, y a la Dra Carmen Ana Pont por realizar tan admirable investigación sobre las memorias de Irene Vilar.***
Me alegra mucho que Carmen Dolores Hernández haya vuelto a reseñar el trabajo de Irene Vilar. Ver: AQUI. Pero hay dos detalles que llaman mucho la atención:
1.No menciona el título de las segundas memorias de Irene Vilar (Impossible Motherhood: a Testimony of an Abortion Addict), elemento clave en esta reseña.
2. Señala que "la historia de Irene no acaba con el fin de su matrimonio. Llega hasta el momento actual, cuando se encuentra felizmente casada y con dos hijas". Esta oración me confunde porque parece indicar que el primer esposo de Vilar es el padre de sus hijas, lo cual no es así.
B.
Publico una presentación que se enfoca en las primeras memorias de Irene Vilar: Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets. Lo comparto porque el fallecimiento reciente de su abuela, Lolita Lebrón, ha desencadenado una serie de discusiones interesantes e importantes, y considero que los libros publicados por su nieta deben ser leídos y analizados críticamente, ya que enriquecerán nuestras reflexiones colectivas e íntimas. ¡Su voz es esencial!
C.
“Ladies Gallery: The Literary Construction of a Fragmented Voice”
presented at the panel Writing Across the Caribbean Diaspora,
Conference: Global and Local Languages
organized by the American Association of Comparative Literature
Harvard University, March 26-29, 2009.
Dedicated to my grandmother Carmen Bonilla Gómez
Personal Introduction:
Today I will share with you a few snapshots taken from a thesis recently completed for a Master Degree in Puerto Rican literature at the Center for Advanced Studies, Puerto Rico. Hoping to present a coherent overview of an extensive work, I have divided this presentation into 9 segments.
I chose to study Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets by Irene Vilar, granddaughter of nationalist leader Lolita Lebrón, because it reveals the intricate way in which a young Puerto Rican woman reclaims her fragmented voice through the act of writing, while exposing the contradictions inherent in the construction of an “authentic” Puerto Rican identity. (1)
Besides, this memoir – unlike any other autobiographical text written by a Puerto Rican in the past decade – presents the demystification (or humanization) of a public figure (Lolita Lebrón) that currently stands as the Mother of the Fatherland, even for individuals that do not subscribe to the independence’s ideology.
1. About this memoir:
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, published Irene Vilar’s first memoir in 1996. At that time, it was entitled A Message from God in the Atomic Age. This title was “borrowed” from an enigmatic document written by Lolita Lebrón, which records three of the many spiritual visions she has received through the years.
In 1998, the year that marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Puerto Rico, this book was published again as Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets. As Benigno Trigo points out in his analysis, during the 19th century, the Ladies Gallery was the room designated for affluent women who wanted to listen to the congressional sessions. (2)
Vilar’s autobiographical text is an attempt to break the lure of madness as well as the deadly cycles that trapped three generations of Puerto Rican women: the author, her mother Gladys Mirna and her grandmother. However, it must be stated that these repetitive forces are contextualized within the framework of Puerto Rico’s colonial history. Dates exemplify the magnitude of the patterns that mark these women’s lives.
On March 1st 1954, the author’s grandmother Lolita Lebrón, led three nationalist men in an armed attack at the United States House of Representatives aimed to remind the international community that Puerto Rico was still under the United States’ imperial control. In her biography La Prisionera, Lebrón expressed that she had planned the assault and was prepared to sacrifice her life for the independence cause. She served 25 years in the Alderson Federal Prison Camp, West Virginia.(3)
Two years before President Jimmy Carter pardoned Lebrón, Irene Vilar (8 years old then) witnessed how her mother Gladys Mirna threw herself out of a moving car. Paradoxically, Gladys also died on March 1st, 23 years later, in 1977. During an interview with a New York Times’ reporter, Vilar suggested that her mother’s tragic act was the only way of expressing her autonomy and originality. The writer sensed that her mother lived under Lebrón’s heroic shadow and felt great pressure because of it.
Gladys Mirna’s suicide – possibly interpreted as the demise of a sacred Fatherland – also launched Vilar into exile. From then on, the author felt displaced, uprooted and profoundly affected by melancholy. Her disjointed past as well as the feelings of abandonment and guilt led her to several suicide attempts.
On February 1st, 1988, Vilar was admitted into a psychiatric institution in New York State. There – within the vague limits of sanity and madness- she focused on her extraordinary capacity to recreate the past. This healing process enabled Vilar to realize the following: “Perhaps my mother's death was not necessarily my doom, but my redemption…. Mother has died. Therefore, I Am. Not a nation, it is true, but a presence that remains. A book."
2. Why was it published in English?
According to what Vilar declared in La Plaza, a television series produced (here) in Boston, her decision was solely based on her emergent artistic interests in the English language.(4)
Vilar also shared with writer and cultural critic Ilan Stavans, La Plaza’s former host, that she personally asked Gregory Rabassa (acclaimed translator of Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector and Gabriel García Marquez, among others) to translate her manuscript; and her request was accepted.
In reaction to these statements, Stavans declared that publishing a memoir in English, knowing that Puerto Ricans in the island may not be able to read it, seemed like a “twisted kind of censorship”; and Vilar added the adjective: perverse.
3. Intimate & Public realms: Two sides of the mythical coin
At first glance, this book seems to include two independent plots. On the one hand, we find the family story intertwined with a panoramic historical account of the island. (5) On the other hand, we encounter a dense text about Vilar’s experience in the mental institution; and this particular section follows the narrative structure of a diary. However, in subtle as well as more obvious ways, both narrative and temporal discourses presented in this memoir are well bridged.
Her poetic and nonlinear writing resembles a collage composed by countless literary references, interviews, fictionalized fragments of Puerto Rican history, police reports and diary entries. Thus, the intimate and the public realm are presented as corresponding - and at some levels, fused elements - not as contradictory poles.
4. The literary self-representation:
James Olney, an expert in autobiographical studies, explains that language enables us to create and organize the metaphors that serve as meaningful links between our past and new experiences.(6) These metaphors become resources of knowledge, regardless of their veracity, and allow us to develop new mental patterns.
As part of my thesis, I argue that Irene Vilar uses the symbol (or the metaphor) of the mirror, similarly to earlier suicidal writers such as Sylvia Plath (7), to confront her fragmented “self” and use literary mechanisms to recreate it.
According to Sidonie Smith, the “self” is a cultural and linguistic fiction constituted by narrative processes and historical ideologies regarding identity (8); and certainly Vilar’s literary “self” is inhabited by a collision of cultural, political, religious and maternal voices that seem to be harmonized only through the act of writing. The author describes this process in the following way: “And just as those voices eventually become you as you write, you, in turn, to make your story meaningful, become part of those voices, a closing of the circle that is endurable only as you write.
5. Blurred boundaries of reality, fiction and madness:
Ladies Gallery is not an effort to present an indissoluble, coherent and complete view of the truth. Unlike conventional autobiographical texts, this is a fragmented recreation of the past that aims to legitimize Vilar’s version of her family story. At no time, does Vilar hide the fact that her literary self-representation is very much influenced by literature (9), dreams, invention as well as her chaotic emotional state.(10)
There are plenty of times where the writer fuses specific memories with passages from other literary works. As an example, I will talk about the association established between her first trip to Syracuse and the excursion thoroughly described in the short story “La guagua aérea,” (The Flying Bus) written by Luis Rafael Sanchez in 1983. Here, this fusion is achieved by the incorporation of the unforgettable character from Sanchez’s story that finds a way to travel to the United States with a burlap sack full of crabs. According to Juan Flores, the crabs that escaped from the bag, scaring the stewardess, might represent the acts of resistance articulated by Puerto Ricans living in the United States as a response to the cultural clashes.(11) However, in Vilar’s memoir there is no room for the festive mood that prevails in “La guagua aérea,” and such a defiant act is not permitted. In her memoir, this emblematic character is presented on a different light. He prefers to stay in Puerto Rico when the guard prohibits him to travel with his best friend, the crab. Defeatism succeeds.
6. A hybrid and fluid Identity:
Vilar’s migratory experiences in New Hampshire, Castellón de la Plana, Spain and New York led her to deflate the myths constructed to praise a nation’s image. It also enabled – or forced - her to challenge the static views of national identity, while coming to terms with its fluid and hybrid qualities. The following passage validates, once again, from a personal perspective, what has been continually analyzed by academics interested in the construction of Puerto Rican trans-national identities:
“The girl in turn dreamt of guava trees, which in her imagination grew so high that they broke the ceiling. She didn’t need to walk anymore or think about lightness or weight, nor did she need to reconcile them. That’s it! She said to a face in the mirror that was her own face. She would simply swing herself from one tree to another across the rooms and hallways. This has been her greatest fantasy: to live swinging from tree to tree and walk without leaving tracks."(12)
There are many key elements in this surreal passage. I will mention three of them:
1. The guava tree establishes an interesting dialogue with Esmeralda Santiago’s autobiography, When I was a Puerto Rican. In both texts, la guayaba points towards the view of the traditional Puerto Rican nationality that undergoes a transformation in the migratory process.
2. The broken roof may signify an ideological divergence from the myth that presents the house as the space reserved for the nationals: that is for “those legal citizens that share the characteristics mandated by the official national history”.(13) Attempting to exit the house also alludes to the disentanglement from the domestic roles assigned to the women who are viewed as the “the keepers of the nation’s future”.(14)
3. The third element is the writer’s vivid imagination. Without such an essential force Vilar would not have been able to face the multi-layered and devastating effects of colonialism as well as her grandmother’s and mother’s sacrificial acts.
7. Women in the Fatherland
As mentioned earlier, in my investigation I focused on Vilar’s relationship with the reflections found in real and metaphorical mirrors. And, perhaps the most vexing image appears to be the one embodied by her grandmother, Lolita Lebrón.
During the 1940’s Lebrón joined the New York committee of the Nationalist Party, led by Pedro Albizu Campos: one of the most radical political figures of the 20th century who also happens to be the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard University.
Albizu Campos denounced the illegality of the United States occupation of the island as well as the racist imposition of the “official American” culture. Also, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, this devoted catholic leader stood firmly against the sexual and reproductive health policies implemented in Puerto Rico. These policies, mostly promoted by Eugenicists and neo-Malthusians, encouraged dubious and unethical scientific experimentations.
In the past years some Puerto Rican scholars have dared to question the conservative, Hispanophile and religious aspects of Albizu Campos’ discourse. Recent studies have also revealed that some feminists, social workers and nurses from that period were in favor of the implementation of these birth control policies. They argued that it contributed to the betterment of women’s health conditions.(15) In addition, scholars like Carmen Ana Pont and Laura Briggs have criticized his view of motherhood. Pont, for example declares that Albizu not only defined the maternal role as a divine mission but also as a mandatory act to bring forth the soldiers that will defend Puerto Rico and its culture.(16) Briggs, in turn, argues that women’s sexual “deviance” has been correlated to the failure of the nationhood.
Although Irene Vilar does not reject motherhood, she refuses to incarnate the metaphor that binds all women to a maternal role. Moreover, the author brings together crucial historical accounts to reveal that some of her grandmother’s actions were not in accordance with her grandmother’s public image as Mother of the Fatherland. For example, Lebrón embraced the “men’s” role by leading an armed attack, refused to remain in an unsatisfactory relationship with Gladys Mirna’s father, migrated to New York City alone during the 1940’s and chose not to raise her children. Also, Lebron’s alleged mysticism defies the religious and patriarchal conventions that do not validate women’s direct contact with “God”, particularly if there are no intermediaries.(17)
8. U-turn not the Promised Land:
Irene Vilar’s demystification of Lolita Lebrón – the Mother of the Fatherland (18)- is certainly a way of disassociating herself from the political, cultural and religious postures defended by Albizu’s Nationalist discourse as well as other (less militant) Puerto Rican nationalist tendencies. Vilar becomes a pariah by blurring the alleged distinctions between the “private” and the “public” realm, and discussing personal information that humanize the heroic image of her grandmother. That is why I contend that if Lebrón is the Mother of the Fatherland, Irene Vilar is the pilgrim that makes a u-turn while attempting to reach the Promised Land, or the glorified state that nationalist militants strive to attain by decolonizing Puerto Rico.(19) (Ironically, during a conversation between Vilar and Lebrón, the later expressed that she wrote like Moses.) (20)
I employ the expression U-turn to establish an analogy with the arguments exposed in La Carreta Made a U-turn, published by Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera in 1979. As Juan Flores indicates, Laviera questions those ideological views that measure the authenticity of our “Puerto Ricaness” according to our Spanish language proficiency.(21) The poet also proposes the legitimization of our multilingual expressions (for example, spanglish and code-switching), because these are manifestations of our resistance to adopt the United States’ dominant culture.
I must clarify that Vilar does not take Laviera’s posture, at least not explicitly. (22) Besides, Vilar does not define herself as a Nuyorican. Still, her decision to publish a memoir in English can be judged as a provocation to the various Puerto Rican nationalist discourses that view the so-called “native” or “maternal” language as an essential characteristic of a bona fide(23) national identity. This conservative and purist posture upheld by many influential scholars during the 1930’s (and not just Albizu) is still safeguarded by Puerto Rican nationalists as well as politicians, cultural activists and scholars that do not necessarily share a common ideological ground.
Clearly, these linguistic conventions are not transversally applicable to all Puerto Ricans. During the televised interview, Vilar gave one convincing example of the double standard: Island-born Puerto Ricans studying in the United States have argued that Vilar is contributing to the disappearance of their language/culture. (24)
Yet, whoever takes this position is not taking into account that more than half of the population of Puerto Rican descent lives outside the Island, and that a large number of them only speak English; or as Carlos Pabón (a post-modernist scholar) argues, these upper middle class students presume that only they can enjoy the privileges of knowing the “colonizer’s language” without losing their identity. (25)
In closing, I consider the process of translation as a linguistic boundary utilized by Vilar to distance herself from a visceral creation.(26) After all, this text became the depository of the suicidal self. The choice of language, like Gladys Mirna’s suicide, is a mirror that reflects the writer’s rejection of a traditional ideology.
9. Gathering the pieces:
Publishing a memoir could be an “act of literary and cultural authority”, as long as there is an audience that reads it. (27) In this case, its important to mention that Ladies Gallery is hardly known in the Island, and it is not currently sold not in any of the main bookstores. One bookseller even mentioned that this memoir was only available shortly after it first came out, and that it was highly criticized by some Island-based Puerto Rican scholars during informal discussions.(28)
I also should state that this memoir not discussed in many graduated courses regarding the literary work of Puerto Rican writers in the United States. (29) Thus, I hypothesize that the book’s invisibility is very much related with its transgressive content. After all, Vilar’s literary self-representation “defies the standards established by the Puerto Rican discourse that strives to construct a nation as if it were a family”.(30)
To conclude, I would like to restate that Ladies Gallery: a Memoir of Family Secrets exemplifies how the autobiographic discourse can impact the intricate creation (an unending recreation) of our subjectivity, memory, and collective myths. But as Jerome Brunner advises, no autobiography (in this case, no memoir) “is completed, only ended.” (31) In other words, this book can only present one of the numerous literary recreations of Vilar’s fragmented voice.
Very soon Vilar’s second memoir will be published. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict will be available via Amazon.com on September 22, 2009: a day before El Grito de Lares, and a day after the commemoration of her brother’s burial. It would be interesting to investigate the changes in the author’s self-representation. Indeed, this new textual portrait could reinvent or even destroy the blurred reflections exposed in this compelling book.
Footnotes:
1. It also questions its political ambivalence. That is, the Puerto Rican nationhood – due to our colonial dilemma - has been excluded from Latin American as well as from the Caribbean imaginary, and even thought we are United States citizens by birth right we are not considered North American.
2.Trigo, Benigno. Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2006, page 119.
3. Puerto Rican Nationalist leader Blanca Canales Torresola (1906 – 1996) was also incarcerated in this federal prison, after leading the Jayuya uprising on October 30, 1950.
4. When Rosario Ferré offered the same explanation for using the English language, she was fiercely criticized. To summarize, her “artistic interest” was perceived by many as a political strategy to promote Puerto Rico’s annexation. Pabón, page 97. Interestingly, Ferré symbolically consecrated this memoir by writing a blurb that appears on the back cover.
5. The writer covers historical accounts from the mid-19th century (period known for the consolidation of “official” Puerto Rican identity) to early the 1990’s.
6. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1972, page 31.
7. Freedman, William. “The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'” en Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, Num. 5, October 1993, page. 152-69. See: http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/freedman.html
8. Smith, Sidoine. “Hacia una poética de la autobiografía de mujeres”. In: Vanessa Vilches. Escrituras Femeninas. University of Puerto Rico, ESGE 4151, August 1998. ID#108, DOC# 4151, PAGE #69.
9. Madame K, is a Jewish patient that reflects Vilar’s nomadic condition, may also exemplify the incorporation of another literary work. This real (or perhaps imagined) character reminded me of K, the Jewish from The Castle written by Franz Kafka en 1922. According to Hanna Arendt, K is a pariah. He belongs neither to the “town” nor to the governing class.
10. Shoshana Feldman argues that such mental and corporal chaos (clinically called madness) can also be viewed as “the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived the very means of protest of self-affirmation.” See: Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, page 5.
11. Flores, Juan. “Creolité” en el Barrio: la diáspora como fuente y desafío. In Nueva Sociedad, # 201, January - February, 2006, page 118. See: http://www.nuso.org/upload/articulos/3315_1.pdf
12. Vilar, page 271.
13. Altagracia, Carlos D. “Espacios de poder: La construcción del cuerpo de la nación”. In: Carlos Pabón. El pasado ya no es lo que era: La historia en tiempos de incertidumbre. San Juan: Ediciones Vértigo, 2005, page 72.
14. Abreu Torres, Dania. El Cuerpo Incorrecto: Cuerpos y confrontaciones en la narrativa de Mayra Santos Febres. Masters Thesis, University of Florida. 2004, page 6.
See: http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0004874/abreutores_d.pdf
15. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, University of California Press, 2002. page 140.
16.Pont, Camen Ana. Le regard intime: du souvenir prive à la mémoire collective. L’écriture autobiographique portoricaine. Tesis Doctoral Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle U.F.R. D’études Ibériques et Latino-Américaines, 2003.
17. According to Schmidt, women mystics develop profound and heroic, and stand along the margins of the patriarchal religious system. Schmidt, Aileen. Mujeres excéntricas: la escritura autobiográfica femenina en Puerto Rico y Cuba. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003. page 171.
18. I use Fatherland instead of Motherland to make a linguistic statement in the translated version of my work, for patria derives from the Latin term “pater” which means father. Ironically, as Carlos Gil suggests, the fatherland has been portrayed as the sick mother that must be rescued by her courageous son Gil Carlos, “De la madre enferma albizuista a la cura de adelgazamiento”. In Irma Rivera Nieves & Carlos Gil. Ensayos de cultura y política en la postmodernidad, San Juan: Editorial Postdata & Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995, page 122-123.
19. Puerto Rican Nationalist poet Clemente Soto Velez wrote a poetry book, entitled La tierra prometida (The Promised Land) in 1979. The Promised Land seems to be equated with Lares (the Holy Land): this town where pro-independence fighters strived to establish the Republic of Puerto Rico on September 23, 1868.
20. Vilar, page 263.
21. Flores Juan. “La carreta made a U-turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture in the United States en Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Texas: Arte Público Press, 1993, page 157-178.
22.Today, Nuyorican literature has been incorporated into the Puerto Rican literature canon as a distinct literary form done by a particular group that is different from the Island-based Puerto Ricans. There is still a notion of “otherness”. Pabón call this a “domesticated incorporation”. (Nación Post-Mortem, page 93)
23. I chose the term “bonafide” to highlight the work of Nuyorican poet and musician Bonafide Rojas.
24. This argument resembles the ones expressed by scholars during the1930’s, which were against bilingualism in Puerto Rico. See: Idioma, bilinguismo y nacionalidad, (Chapter 5) by Roamé Torres-González. José de Diego, José Juan Beauchamp (writer), José Padín (Commissioner of Education 1930-1937) and Juan José Osuna (Dean of Education Department at the University of Puerto Rico 1922-1943) also strongly advocated that the Spanish language was an essential element of the Puerto Rican nationality.
25. Pabón, page 99.
26. Benigno Trigo also states that Rosario Ferré translates her work to distance herself from personal losses. Page 63-175.
27. Smith, ID#108, DOC# 4151, PAG #65.
28. Interview with Eddie Ortiz, main bookseller de La Tertulía in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. August 25, 2008.
29. It must also be considered that autobiographical works, particularly those written by women, have not been easily accepted by the Puerto Rican literary canon. See: Guzmán Merced, Rosa. Las narraciones autobiográficas puertorriqueñas: invención, confesión, apología y afectividad. Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas. 2000
30. (My translation) Gelpí, Juan. Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico. San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993, page 176.
31. Brunner Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, page 74.
***Agradezco a la Dra Rosa Guzmán Merced por dirigir esta tesis, y a la Dra Carmen Ana Pont por realizar tan admirable investigación sobre las memorias de Irene Vilar.***
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