If writing ever makes you feel lonely, consider Cecile Pineda’s work. You won’t find solace there. You will find a model of courage, of an artist living “at the edge of Being,” the phrase she uses in a 2004 interview with Jeff Biggers in The Bloomsbury Review. Pineda never offers readers the comfort of genre, of managed expectations. She never feigns a coherent, well-organized world or self. For her, the world is mutilated and nonsensical, and the self is shattered. She writes as she lives, balancing between life and death, always a soldier at the tip of the spear, never a general safe at the back of a fray. Didion could point to a center that wasn’t holding. Pineda would not, even to the point of madness.
What does madness feel like? In her memoir, Entry without Inspection: A Writer’s Life in El Norte, published in 2020, two short years before her death, she compares it to being “…evicted from yourself.” As she explains, your world vanishes. “There’s nothing left to fall back on, no sense of who you might be or where you might have come from or what dues you may have paid. Nowhere is your country, no one is your kin.” The burden of his undocumented status, that feeling that “[n]owhere is your country, no one is your kin,” lies at the heart of what she terms her “cultural deracination”:
My father made the decision to deprive me of a language (Spanish), in a sense to cut out my tongue. But he was not stupid. He understood this country, he respected the weight of its racism; the vacuum presented by its aspiritual culture. He made a conscious decision that I would speak French (my mother’s language) in place of Spanish. But I am fiercely proud—especially in the face of California State Proposition 187—of claiming my place as the child of an illegal.
Her mother is French. Her father is Mexican. Her father cuts away one of those two native tongues in order to protect her. She sutures her tongue, claims her place as a Chicana, only to find herself separated from the broader culture. Here is the “estrangement” that forges her identity as a writer living “at the edge of Being.” The title of her memoir refers to her father’s immigration status. He fled the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and crossed the border under an assumed name. Her memoir begins and ends with her father’s passage across the border and the resulting eclipse of his identity and hers.
Pineda drapes the story of her life over a ten-day arc, the story of Jean Blum, a Holocaust survivor and the whistleblower who drew national attention to the deaths of immigrants detained by ICE, immigrants like her father, who sought asylum but were criminalized instead, charged with “entry without inspection.” The connections between Blum’s story and Pineda’s are not random, though to readers demanding explanations, transitions, or sustained argument, Pineda throws down the gauntlet. Make what you will of these intersections between Blum’s story and mine, she seems to say; between the racism that ignited Hitler’s followers and the racism that ignites dehumanizing US government policies and border militias alike. She and Blum share “the story of a life in search of itself, stamped by an absence, an absence for many years without name, the name of family separation….” History repeats itself in untidy patterns, as does the intolerance, the bigotry, and the cynical scapegoating that drives violence. Yet the single voice ultimately makes a difference.
Pineda was an iconoclast who challenged assumptions about Latina identity and the representation of that identity in narrative form. Asked by Francisco Lomelí to reflect on how she came to be a writer, Pineda points to her years of work as a theater director and dramaturge:
I got to script words on the actors in my company, often drawing from physical and verbal work that emerged from developmental rehearsals. I learned how to train actor-writers, to elicit words from them which [provided the score] of a given performance piece. In other words, without knowing it, I was learning the creative discipline I would eventually draw upon in my fiction: writing with the body, making use of visceral impulse to break silence, to find my voice.” (Imagining a Community: An Interview with Cecile Pineda by Francisco Lomelí, February 23, 1996)
She turned actors into characters and used the “visceral impulse” to speak. She wrote with the body, drawing on the ideas of Luisa Valenzuela and Clarice Lispector, trying to feel what she could not imagine.
Pineda finds herself in a position women writers have often expressed: a content without a form, a consciousness without a narrative shape. Faced with that absence, Virginia Woolf, for example, in A Room of One’s Own, strings together the history of women writing, focusing on the agility with which each worked to represent her experience in a patriarchal society. The novel Woolf describes is malleable. In her words, square, pagoda shaped, budding with wings, arcades, and domes. However, this narrative “shape,” she reminds us, “is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being.”
Thus for Woolf, the integrity of a novelist depends on conviction, the writer’s certainty that he (Woolf uses the masculine pronoun) is telling the truth. “What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, [for women novelists] to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.” The image of an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter crossing the street rises in her mind’s eye and she stops to describe what she imagines:
The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.
Tell your truth, Woolf argues. A woman’s experience is as valid as any other. When your historical circumstances change, so will your consciousness, so will the truth you tell. And in case her primarily male audience has missed the point or is tempted to say she can’t write logically, at the very end of A Room of One’s Own, she offers the linear, logically sustained version of her argument on “Women and Fiction.”
Woolf not only argues for a new form of writing, she has actually shattered the conventional expectations of an essay, a form that historically develops alongside the natural sciences as a way of testing, trying out ideas (“to essay”) and disseminating them. Woolf has imagined and conveyed a new hybrid form, an essay that also tells a story about a narrator (Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael). (A good contemporary, non-literary example of this hybrid is Oreskes & Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View of the Future, which combines science fiction and history.)
Difference demands hybridity. So much of what Woolf wants to say about the topic “Women and Fiction” is not represented in a patriarchal society but rather conjoined by the force of grammar (“and”), as if to insist that the relationship between “Women” and “Fiction” not only exists but thrives. Woolf builds the bridge, actually conjoining both sides. She tells a story that is hybrid, both nonfiction and fiction, allowing argument and plot to intersect, demonstrating over and again how neither biography nor history records the details that capture her imagination.
“Latina letters will be with us for a very long time, as long as there remain folks who refuse cultural homogenization, who celebrate their diversity,” Pineda told the San Antonio Express-News. Gloria Anzaldúa, another very important Chicana writer, defies homogenization, articulating the barbaric history contained within the web of bone and flesh that is her body. She transits between psyche and collective history, between viscera and culture, something palpably evident in the figures and cadences of her credo:
I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture–una cultura mestiza–with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.
As the subtitle of Borderlands/La Frontera confirms, she is “The New Mestiza.” If her entry is denied, she will stand and claim that threshold, designing and constructing it into a mestiza culture, one predicated on the very liminality and hybridity that has always defined her. Creative resistance is possible through hybridity.
In retrospect, it seems reasonable that, finding themselves alone in their endeavors, women writers would locate their integrity in what Pineda described as the “visceral impulse,” using her body to leverage herself against the silence and so finding her voice. This is the body of her experience. It is the body of her writing, too. Pineda’s novel Face, a finalist for the 1985 National Book Award, begins with a newspaper article about a Brazilian barber whose face was disfigured in an accident. The barber decides to reconstruct his own face. Cutting and stitching together a new face became a metaphor for Pineda, in her life and in her art.
The death of her mother, the decision to close her theater company, the feeling of being ostracized, out of synch with Reagan’s America, when greed, normally one of the seven deadly sins, became quite fashionable–all of these contributed to her sense that, in her words, she was “writing from the bottom of the social ladder, looking up.” She was also reinventing herself as an artist: “I really [felt] I would die if I did not write. Face is about repairing my life stitch [by stich]. [Writing it] had all the intensity of needing to survive” (brackets original, Francisco Lomelí).
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