Grieving by Cristina Rivera Garza Reviewed by Shannon Nakai

Grieving

Written by Cristina Rivera Garza

The Feminist Press, 2020

182 pages

Reviewed by Shannon Nakai 

From birth to death, the universal experience linking human existence across our diverse world is grief and suffering. No one escapes the ubiquitous presence of pain, nor are we able to furnish a satisfying answer as to its meaning and purpose. In Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (The Feminist Press, 2020), Dr. Cristina Rivera Garza executes a multifaceted exploration in both Mexican and global contexts. A formidably expansive collection of essays written over the course of several decades, Grieving incorporates the voices of fellow novelists and poets, philosophers, journalists, anthropologists, transcontinental migrants, drug lords, politicians, bereft mothers, and Mexican #MeToo warriors. Some essays showcase Rivera Garza’s creative prowess, as she experiments with language and structure through found poetry, proverbs, journalism, even fables; others manifest a more academic approach, considering ideologies, etymologies, sociocultural histories, political criticisms (particularly against neoliberalism), art, gender-based violence, geographies, and the physicality and spiritualities of grief. Eloquently translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker, Cristina Rivera Garza’s incisive discussions examine the collective culpabilities of human actions that have perpetuated and exacerbated social damage, as well as the methods of resistance and healing its sufferers have found. Grieving is a colossal odyssey into the human narrative—past, present, and future—and what it means to grieve and to survive.

The book opens with a shrewd distinction between “terror” and “horror,” as Rivera Garza presents graphic, Tarantino-esque gore that has become something of a shellshocked norm for the contemporary Mexican people, who are constantly subjected to bodies that disappear or become dismembered. Desynthesized is not an accurate description for the reaction of citizens forced to partake as victims and witnesses. Rather, Rivera Garza lays the groundwork for the systematic way in which the politics of grief silence the oppressed:

……………..Bewildered and immobile, the horrified are stripped of their agency, frozen in a scene of

……………..everlasting marble statues. They stare, and even though they stare fixedly, or perhaps

……………..precisely because they stare fixedly, they cannot do anything. More than vulnerable—a

……………..condition we all experience—they are defenseless. More than fragile, they are helpless. As

……………..such, horror is, above all, a spectacle—the most extreme spectacle of power.

She later indicts former President Calderón’s war on drugs as the catalyst and vehicle for the current aggrandized violence, naming it a “war on Mexicans,” specifically Mexican women reduced to bloody statistics (a shocking ten women murdered and another 4,320 raped daily). When searching “woman” throughout Grieving, the word is often connected to a (severed) body part or an identifying article of clothing. Interestingly, “women” offers more empowering statements, as collectively women voice outrage, throw glitter bombs on abusive police, cross borders, identify as feminists in public protests, and launch viral campaigns against their attackers. Communality is a recurrent point in Rivera Garza’s essays, which canvas the people’s response to immobile or corrupt people in power, border politics and racism, unapprehended murderers and a former President’s cold pronouncement “Why should I care?”, the rape of both humans and ecosystems, and the light that the current pandemic has shed on our understanding of and need for community. “It is impossible to grieve in the first-person singular. We always grieve with and for someone.” Rivera Garza blurs the lines between the individual and corporal, as well as between national and universal experiences: seamlessly she links the trauma in literary tragedy to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and later to her sister’s femicide at the hands of an ex-boyfriend who has yet to be arrested. Kant, Japanese mushrooms, American pharmaceuticals, Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, Juan Rulfo, Bosnian graphic novels—all are amassed in the global scope of grief. In the section Writing in Migration, she relates the fascism in Bosnia to Mexico: “It is difficult not to associate the hunger for power, the cynicism and ineptitude of governing institutions, the prevailing rein of corruption and impunity, with the current reality of the country I was born in.” It is likewise difficult not to associate the pain and suffering of our nation’s southern neighbor with ourselves, especially as other essays speak to disturbingly familiar subjects within grief as testaments and warning signs.

In the compelling essay “Nonfiction,” her taxi driver relates the near “unbelievable” story of female passengers he has transported to hotels, only to recognize them in homicide news featurettes days later. Among many stories, this highlights the urgency of gendered violence in Mexico, as Rivera Garza reminds the reader that Mexican women did not receive the right to vote until 1953. Thus, in a language that assigns genders to nouns, suffering adopts a feminine significance, as it is often women who bear the brunt of violence and grief sans a public voice for resistance. “The word zozobra is a feminine noun. It means restless, affliction, and distress of the spirit that does not settle or of the risk that threatens, or of the illness that is already being suffered.” Grief, then, like desire, “contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am.” The women in Rivera Garza’s essays are migrants, fighting to remain on the same soil as their children; they are grieving mothers championing for justice for their sons slain in the Ciudad Juárez bloody massacre of 2010. They are workers negotiating the hours they can safely remain out of doors before their bodies are taken, raped, and mutilated. Thus, navigating grief becomes an act of navigating a sense of self: who am I in a global context that would and can do such actions upon my body? The very act of existing becomes a risk: 

……………..[W]alking alone in Ciudad Juárez was a dangerous feat. Attending school. Going to work.

……………..Running. Visiting friends. Grocery shopping. All seemingly harmless daily activities became

……………..time bombs, massacres waiting to happen, if carried out by a woman’s body. Walking as a

……………..woman implied a risk. 

Rivera Garza makes it clear, however, that this is not an issue specifically tied to location; one cannot displace or escape the issue. Those who leave thus leave behind the tangibility of their absence for those who stay (referencing Alejandro Santiago’s 2501 Migrants sculptures that are silent, tangible testaments to the migrants whose ghostly presence remains despite the absence of the body). The situation of undocumented migrant workers in the U.S. is nothing recent, as Rivera Garza’s essays record events dating back to Elvira Arellano’s 2006 deportation order. Yet, her poignant lens on grief itself lends its own sense of urgent immediacy. She addresses the xenophobic empire that compels the situation of migrants to leave uninhabitable homes and then polices them for leaving, dialoguing closely with other nonfiction published the same year (I recall Let’s Talk About Your Wall, edited by Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Quintero; and The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio). Yet, she also considers how the current COVID-19 pandemic contributed to our burgeoning understanding of migration: 

……………..In addition to doctors and nurses, we depend on those who harvest lettuce and eggplants,

……………..the grocery-store cashier, those who clean the bodies of the elderly, those who fix washing

……………..machines, those who deliver mail. The rest of us couldn’t be here, digitally fulfilling our

……………..roles, if there weren’t men and women out there, bent over vast vegetable fields, risking

……………..their lives to, paradoxically, keep living.

She observes how the pandemic forced our gaze upon the marginalized and overlooked; sequestered in our private spheres, we acknowledge the necessity of domestic work, often assigned to women, like migrants—marginalized persons at last deemed essential. Cristina Rivera Garza’s Grieving locates the active empowerment and resilience in responsive action. Grief is not simply the emotion that follows suffering, but a deliberate move toward strengthening the roots of human connectivity.

And this is the importance of suffering, for where suffering lies, so, too, does grieving: the deep sorrow that binds us within emotional communities willing and able to face life anew, even if it means, or especially when it means, radically revising and altering the world we share. There, where suffering lies, so, too, does the political imperative to say, You pain me, I suffer with you, I grieve myself with you. We mourn us. Yours is my story, and my story is ours, because from the start, from the singular—yet generalized—perspective of we who suffer, you are my country, my countries.

Shannon Nakai is a poet and book reviewer whose work is featured in The Cincinnati Review, Atlanta Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Heavy Feather, Cream City Review, Cimarron Review, Image, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize nominee, and MFA from Wichita State University (where she now teaches literature and creative writing), she has lived in Illinois, Pennsylvania, England, and Turkey, and now keeps busy playing music with her composer husband, chasing her two young kids, eating too much Thai food, and teaching herself Spanish. Follow her on Twitter @shanviolinlove.

24 August 2021