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Article Excerpt
Where I live as woman is to men a wilderness. But to me it is a home.
--Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (162)
I'm Bitch. Beast. Macha. iWachale! Ping! Ping! Ping! I break things.
--Sandra Cisneros, "Loose Woman" in Loose Woman (115)
Near the end of Estela Portillo Trambley's 1975 short story, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle," the protagonist Beatriz prepares to bury the man she has just killed: Robles, her abusive common law husband of more than twenty-five years. She debates this drastic decision with her reluctant accomplice Sofia, who, despite being another of Robles's victimized women, remains remorseful about their act. While Beatriz sees killing Robles as necessary to protecting their bodies and home, Sofia is unable to reconcile the violent ending to Robles's cruelties with the guilt that she feels. Repeatedly, she questions Beatriz's Christian faith, wondering aloud if Beatriz believes in God at all. In responding to Sofia's challenges, Beatriz confirms a spiritual connection, but of a different kind:
Oh, Sofia, look at all the gladness God made. This house, this yard, is a piece of his heaven.... I believe in the greenness of the earth.... No, Sofia, [I am] not evil. I love order around me more than anything. Yes, there's a wildness in me from all the things that happened in our lives, the sadness, the loneliness, the violences. They grow inside us--mix--and become something I cannot explain. (69) (1)
Drawing on this "mix" by suggesting that the female body's experience of patriarchal oppressions is consistent with the kinds of exploitation suffered by the environment, Trambley explores the imposed relationship between the two in "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle." Specifically, she justifies her protagonist's aberrant response to her desperate situation by manipulating the social implication that woman and nature are subordinate to the relationship that man and culture hold. In addition, Trambley addresses the unexamined violence toward women present in Chicano/Mexican culture by treating female sexuality as a central topic in her fiction.
While ecofeminism and Chicana sexuality were typically not discussed together in the 1970s when Trambley was writing, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle" reveals a sophisticated deconstruction of the female as nature/male as culture dualism in order to address the gender politics underpinning the Chicano/Mexican community. This essay examines the ways in which Trambley challenges the gendering of this dualism and the physical and emotional violence inherent in maintaining its boundaries. If woman is nature, argues Trambley, it is a nature that has been exploited and commodified by men and male culture, and one that ultimately has the power to overwhelm, poison, and subsume its (male) human aggressors and their attempt to impose a false and one-sided sense of order. Trambley uses the trope of woman as nature to critique the violence, inequality, and exploitation underneath patriarchal concepts of nature. At the same time, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle" re-imagines the ways in which "home" has been understood and functioned politically and artistically. In response to experiences of social and political alienation, the Chicano Movement relied on a creative rearticulation of a home both within and outside the borders of the US (e.g., Aztlan), yet it also reinscribed a certain homelessness generally imposed on women within a patriarchal culture and, more specifically, within Chicano culture.
Such marginalization has left Chicanas pressed to discover their own "sitio y lengua," as Emma Perez contends. Perez argues that the need for a distinct site and language of resistance arises in response to the hostile conditions that many Chicanas experience from within their community. Oppression, she asserts, gives way to an "intimate place where theory is born" ("Sexuality and Discourse" 166). Evolving from the oppressed subject's lived experiences, the ongoing construction of Chicana language and theory also takes root in its very contention of the oppressor's definition of space. This challenge makes intersecting Chicana literature with ecofeminism particularly compelling. In her study of ecofeminist literature, Stacy Alaimo notes the strategic approach employed by numerous North American women writers; "ensnared within inhospitable landscapes," these writers have "negotiated, contested, and transformed the discourses of nature that surround them" (1). Describing a stance similar to what Prrez advocates for Chicanas, Alaimo argues that ecofeminist literature seeks to dismantle patriarchal control over women by appropriating nature as a place and concept of counter-resistance.
The opening epigraphs to this essay illustrate the parallels in Chicana and ecofeminist literature that can occur when site and language are appropriated as a means of subversion, following Perez's and Alaimo's suggestions. The unrestrained rage of Cisneros's speaker emerges from being branded a "bitch, beast, macha." Reinterpreting the meaning and purpose of these out-of-bound roles, she reinvents herself as a formidable woman whose agency is predicated upon her outsider status. Likewise, by embracing a world opposite to what man knows, or more precisely, opposite to what man is, Ursula Le Guin unleashes the potential implicit in exploring the undomesticated comers of patriarchal domain. There, she indicates, the definition of woman is reconstituted as a form of shelter and becomes an escape from male dominance. Like Trambley, both Cisneros and Le Guin envision women whose rebellious natures are born from transforming the patriarchal environments that previously sought to contain them.
Suffering from the deep isolation of years of domestic abuse, Beatriz rationalizes murdering her husband by comparing her violent actions to the necessary wilderness in nature. Similarly, nature becomes Beatriz's guiding spiritual force because its cyclical renewal of life offers her redemption and hope. Provoking, and ultimately, exploding the conventional tenets of the woman/nature parallelism, Trambley mounts a persuasive case for her character's actions by recalling how nature harbors both reckless abandon and soothing tranquility: a paradox that women are often accused of and expected to embody. The violence foregrounded in the story thus becomes the key to Beatriz's liberation because the visceral experience of her subjugation demands an equally material act to counter its effects. Throughout the story, Trambley suggests not the replacement of one form of brutality with another, but rather the altering of a marginalized position by transforming its very forces into avenues for escape.
Beatriz's need to resort to a striking vehemence as a strategy for empowerment and survival was one rather familiar to Trambley at the time she wrote the story. Male-centered in focus and shaped by the Movement's nationalist ideology, 1970s Chicano literature and literary criticism lacked the vocabulary for addressing female oppression and more often exercised a language of exclusion and betrayal toward women. In fact, in many cases, Chicano writers and critics unconsciously repeated the same kind of rejection and silencing of Chicana texts that Chicano literature as a whole faced within the arena of mainstream literary criticism. As critic Angie Chabram-Dernersesian argues, the nationalist but gender-blind literature of the Chicano Movement often duplicated a process of marginalization:
[a] scenario emerges with the predominant male-centered authoritative discourses, which promised to include Chicanas in the cultural record of the practices of ethnic resistance if they accepted their exclusion as female subjects and dwelled only on their ethnic similarities with Chicano males. Along with nationalism's self-deceptive mirror, which promised Chicana women a transparent reflection of themselves through the images of others, these promises rarely materialized. (40)
Echoing what Gayatri Spivak terms "epistemic violence," in regard to the silencing that can occur internally within subaltern communities, early masculinist Chicano literature and literary criticism worked against the goals of cultural empowerment when it only represented a patriarchal perspective (202-06). Chicana writers thus discovered that their work held a vital importance: they had to write their characters into the culture's literary imagination in order to write themselves into its public consciousness. Moreover, in expanding the Chicano literary corpus to include their experiences, their words allowed them to "reconnect Chicanas to themselves, to each other, and to others," thereby creating a space/home of their own (Chabram-Demersesian 42).
In 1968, Trambley...
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