Spring 2003 Vol. 10, Issue 2
By Ana Castillo
Penguin/Plume, 1994
Review by Ann Folwell Stanford, PhD
Associate Professor, School for New Learning
DePaul University, Chicago, IL
Ana Castillo's So Far From God tells the story of two packed decades in the life of a Chicano family living in a little New Mexico town. Sofi and her four daughters live a life that is both traditional and strange. Their stories raise, among other things, the question of how illness and death are embedded in social and political realities, as well as how narrative frequently poses interpretative challenges.
Sofi's youngest, La Loca, age 3, is pronounced dead following a seizure. At her funeral, La Loca rises out of her casket and is resurrected. "The lid had pushed all the way open and the little girl inside sat up, just as sweetly as if she had woken from a nap, rubbing her eyes and yawning. '¿Mami?' she called, looking around and squinting her eyes against the harsh light. ... as Father Jerome moved toward the child she lifted herself up into the air and landed on the church roof." La Loca has come back to pray for the townspeople and lives to become an adult.
Esperanza, the oldest, is a news broadcaster and is sent to Saudi Arabia to cover a war. During her time there she is killed. ("Tortured," La Loca tells her mom two weeks before the army sends an official letter). Later in the book, Esperanza appears many times in "ectoplasmic" form to individual members of the family (except the hyper-rational Fe).
Fe despises Esperanza's "La Raza" politics, and seeks material security above all else. She marries her accountant cousin, Casimiro, and acquires "the longdreamed- of automatic dishwasher, microwave, Cuisinart, and the VCR, which she had bought herself with her own hard-earned money from all the bonuses she earned at her new job." Fe's job involves cleaning parts for the weapons industry, where all the women workers get severe headaches daily (and receive ibuprofen from the factory nurse), miscarry and have hysterectomies at young ages. But the women are afraid to speak up because the pay is "too good."
As she is promoted, Fe works with more and more dangerous chemicals and her symptoms become unbearable. She is diagnosed with cancer and calls the medical treatment "torture." A chemotherapy catheter (to treat liver and lung cancer) is misfed to her brain. This causes Fe to go "around feeling for seventy-one days and seventy-one nights like her brain wanted to pop out of her skull and ... they only kept insisting that it was all due to stress." Fe's illness and death are rooted in realities of the plant's deliberate deception, the illegal exposure of its workers to lethal chemicals, and the complicity of the weapons industry.
The promiscuous, heavy-drinking Caridad, who is beaten and mauled, and barely put back together at the hospital, is later mysteriously cured - made whole and beautiful again - and she becomes a healer. With the tutelage of doÑa Felicia, the curandera , Caridad learns about diagnosis and natural remedies, "... many had as much to do with the body as with the spirit; and aigre, which could be translated to a number of things, the most common being gas."
On a pilgrimage with doña Felicia, Caridad falls in love with a nameless woman, but then drops out of sight for a year, living in a cave as an ascetic, longing for "la Woman-on-the-wall." Instead of the isolation she craves, people flock to her looking for miracles. She finally returns home to continue as a healer. She also becomes a channeler, giving voice to thoughts from the spirit world.
Later, she and "la Woman-on-the wall" find each other and end their lives "flying off the mesa." To the surprise of everyone, there were "no morbid remains" at the bottom. "There was nothing. Just the spirit deity Tsichinako calling loudly with a voice like wind, guiding the women ... down, deep within the soft, moist dark earth where Esmeralda and Caridad would be safe and live forever."
As an adult, La Loca spends long hours at the stream below the family's house playing her fiddle and talking to a gauzy woman who looks quite a bit like the mythical La Llorona. Loca falls ill and Dr. Tolentino (who attended Northwestern University Medical School) diagnoses full-blown AIDS. He offers a "tratamiento" to make Loca more comfortable, if Sofi and Loca wish. Using only holy oil and his hands to open Loca's abdomen, he pulls out a blood clot, cystic fibroids and an ovarian tumor. Just a slim red mark across Loca's belly remains. As La Loca sickens, a mysterious "Lady in Blue" (who no one else sees) visits her, "just making her feel better when she couldn't get out of bed no more." One night the Lady appears and sings as Loca goes to sleep in her arms, smiling as she closes her eyes for the last time.
I can't possibly do justice to Castillo's wonderful book in the small space of this review, and it is important to say that it is not a "representational" book; that is, it does not necessarily represent "Latino" experiences of illness. What the novel does do, however, is to draw on Latino culture and traditions as it explores how illness is frequently embedded in social and political contexts, as well as the interesting question of how the reader untangles the many threads of narrative complexity - how do we know what is "real?" And what is one to do with uncertainty? Castillo's characters provide lively, thought-provoking, and even hilarious ways of approaching such questions.
in collaboration with
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
The opinions expressed in the journal, Lahey Clinic Medical Ethics,
belong to the individual contributors and do not represent the institutional position
of Lahey Clinic on any subject matters discussed.
