In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata Review by Victoria Livingstone

 In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata

Translated by Robin Myers

Review by Victoria Livingstone 

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Publication Date: May 9, 2023

ISBN: 1566896754

Pages: 160

In Linea Nigra (published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation in 2022), Jazmina Barrera describes the recent surge of literary texts on motherhood as a sort of “rupture, counter-canon books.” This counter-canon, which includes books such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (2016), blur genre and highlight the intellectual and artistic value of motherhood narratives. The most recent book to join this growing counter-canon is Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation, translated by poet Robin Myers and published by Coffee House Press in May 2023. Zapata, who founded the Mexican publishing house Ediciones Antílope with Barrera, writes “to shatter the vow of silence that isolates the painful parts of motherhood.”

In Vitro subverts genre from the first page. Zapata opens the book, a work of nonfiction, with the explanation that she alternates between narrating her own experience and sharing the stories of others so that she can claim she’s writing fiction. The chapters are brief, sometimes as short as a single sentence, and interspersed with images, such as a reproduction of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa, a table with data detailing stages of embryonic development during in vitro fertilization, and a series of sketches: egg and sperm in a petri dish, an embryo, a uterus with a fully formed fetus.

In Vitro is a memoir of fertility treatment, pregnancy, and early motherhood; yet it is also about grief. Throughout the book, Zapata refers to the deaths of her parents. She draws surprising connections between death and childbirth. “Being an orphan and having a child,” she writes, “are similar in the certainty that you’ll be vulnerable forever.” When describing her pregnancy, she compares the growth of the fetus to the tumor that killed her mother. After giving birth, Zapata thinks about her mother’s ashes, “the shards of white bone mixed with gray dust: six and a half pounds of flesh, of remnants, of possibility.” Such analogies draw attention to the deeply transformative—and frightening—aspects of becoming a parent.

References to loss appear in other contexts as well. Zapata repeatedly describes feeling haunted; “this is actually a ghost story,” she tells us. The brevity of the chapters leaves ample white space that calls attention to the theme of absence. The phantoms are her dead parents, but also the more abstract losses that can accompany pregnancy and motherhood. Pregnancy is “an episode of The Twilight Zone,” she writes, in which “an otherworldly being takes violent possession of me, makes me disappear.” Zapata extends her reflections on loss to other forms of erasure. Her mother’s surname, for instance, is “missing,” lost when a Sephardic ancestor immigrated to Mexico and married. Zapata recounts that her mother spent years searching for her Jewish surname, but was unable to recover this part of her identity.

Many of the author’s reflections deal with the ways in which women’s writing has long been suppressed. For instance, she gives an overview of nüshu, a “secret women’s language” from the Hunan province of China. Nüshu “was passed down through generations of women in the form of embroidered shawls, vases, and hidden writing on the inner folds of paper fans. This discrete calligraphy was the only way they could communicate at the margins of the male gaze.” Zapata trusts her readers to link seemingly disconnected sections. After the chapter on nüshu, she writes, “I sketch my daughter’s body across my belly in slow lines, as if printing inscriptions into clay tablets.” These female languages, spanning continents and centuries, are deeply connected.

Zapata describes mothers—her own and others, but also women who never wanted children, those who wanted them but couldn’t have them (stories that are “practically impossible” to find), and women whose pregnancies ended in tragedy. Among these stories is that of Mexican artist Paola Livas, who sold her eggs at twenty years old to fund a school project and feels haunted by her “non-child.” “It’s my house,” Zapata writes of her book, “but other women walk these halls.”

Throughout In Vitro, Zapata reflects on the ways in which women’s narratives have been dismissed. She describes a male doctor who minimizes her struggles with infertility, telling her that the problem is her nerves and her “crazy head.” That sort of disregard, she writes, is another form of erasure. Until recently, fertility treatment was not often discussed openly, certainly not in the detail Zapata includes. In one chapter, the author admits to feeling embarrassed to tell friends about the invasive procedures she is undergoing. However, she understands the need to honor women’s voices, including her own, and describes each stage of in vitro fertilization, from the initial consultation to the painful progesterone injections that follow embryo transfer.

A text as poetic and experimental as In Vitro requires a talented translator, which Zapata has in Myers. Some of the most poetic lines come up in connection to water (fittingly, the translation has a jellyfish on the cover). When Zapata describes peering through the glass bottom of a boat, Myers translates into rhythmic and alliterative prose: “off we go, glimpsing the flutters of fish fins through murky glass.” In her translator’s note, Myers describes her goal of making the English “both hard and supple” as if she were “whittling a block of wood into a fish.” Myers’ translator’s note is intensely personal, a fitting touch for a book so directly in conversation with other women.

Historically, mothers have been denigrated or idealized, and pregnancy has often been portrayed as harrowing or joyful, not both. Zapata wants a child and fears motherhood. She understands that pregnancy is wonderful and terrifying, and that motherhood represents a loss and a gain. In Vitro is a complex and candid memoir, a welcome addition to the counter-canon of literature on motherhood.

Isabel Zapata is a Mexico City-born writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection Una ballena es un país and the bilingual essay collection Alberca vacía. Her work in English translation has appeared in World Literature Today, Waxwing, The Common, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is a co-founder and publisher of Ediciones Antílope.

Robin Myers is a poet, translator, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek, The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills, and Copy by Dolores Dorantes, among others. As a poet, she was included in the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology.

Victoria Livingstone is a writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Off Assignment, Joyland Magazine, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic literature and teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is writing a book on motherhood. You can find her on X @ToriaJL

13 September 2023