‘I Am Myself, You See’
By Elizabeth Huergo | September 28, 2017 |
The Guadalupe Series by Yolanda López, via almalopez.com
Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe is a three-part series, a post-modern triptych by Yolanda López in which she casts herself, her mother, and her grand-mother as the iconic Mary. I return to the work repeatedly, each time tumbling through its surface and back like a latter-day Alice searching for the sides of a round mushroom, remembering the Caterpillar’s question and Alice’s response.
“‘Who are you?’” he asks.
“‘I can’t explain myself,’” she tells him, “‘because I’m not myself, you see.’”
López offers us the question of identity in a manner as insistent and paradoxical as the Caterpillar. Each panel of her work is an image of the Virgin. Each panel is also an image of a working-class woman who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders; whose work and sacrifice gives birth to the possibility of redemption.
There, in the space between the iconic (the Virgin Mother of Christ) and the everyday (Mary, the girl who found herself pregnant and alone), López reveals to us the problem of every story-teller who finds herself situated on a cultural margin:
What is the relationship between aesthetic form and identity?
What is the relationship between history and self?
That, after all, is what artists do, whatever their chosen medium:
They turn the world on its head and ask, demand that we look again and consider our tacit complicity in the suffering of others. They tilt at windmills. They insist the right-side up of this world is all too often neither up nor right; that invisible people and their incoherent lives really do matter.
López shatters the icon in order to reveal the living form underneath: the untold stories and unquestioned we have been complicit in forgetting. Then she picks up the pieces and recasts the sacred in achingly personal terms, offering us an image specific to Chicana and Latina identity. This Virgin belongs to López–not the Church, not the members of the upper-crust preening in the front pew. She is not an image of feminine purity and passivity, a primer to all the “darker” people of this earth about the value of self-restraint, of silence and humility. This is the portrait of a woman who has borne circumstances she could not change. She has clay feet. She has made life-altering mistakes and suffered devastating losses.
López’s image of the seamstress as Virgin Mother is especially resonant for me. My mother was a seamstress from the age of 15 to her reluctant retirement at age 80. Born in 1930 in Remedios, Cuba, my mother grew up in (one phase of) the political and social convulsions set in motion by US colonialism. For the first 29 years of her life, my mother witnessed more insurrection, torture, killing, and economic and social instability than the average citizen of the US does in a lifetime. But that’s history–which is to say, in the idiom of American English, who cares?
How many US citizens, well-educated and well-fed, know this story of a migration northward triggered by US intervention? Who can tell this story above the roar and pull of another story, the one about American exceptionalism?
I fall once again through the surface of “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe.” In exile, my mother held our family together with the power of her work ethic and faith, so much so that work seems like a form of prayer to me. My father, too, had an extraordinary work ethic. I don’t remember him ever having fewer than two jobs. Crushed by the weight of his losses, of a life and a place and time he loved, he sought his escape in a bottle. My mother, though–she sat down at her sewing machine, every burst of stitches like a bead in a rosary. My parents were/are invisible. Their stories don’t exist beyond the seat of my own heart.
History, once distilled into stone, bronze, canvas becomes monumental, which is why, in Argentina, the mothers of the disappeared (a collective Piéta) have refused monuments to their lost sons and daughters. Story concretized becomes mirror-like–a warming fantasy of order about a shining city on the hill. López points to a fragile tale told never or infrequently about economic policies meant to disenfranchise people and then criminalize their movement northward, evicting their children, born here, from an ancient ground once theirs. The story rises, chafes against pristine, white marble surfaces; it rises again and again, promising a shift in consciousness and a deepening sense of moral agency.
And I find hope in that gift López offers us, as writers–whatever our ethnic and racial identify, whatever our creed or distance between ourselves and the story of our migration to the US. She demands that we find the sides of a deceptively smooth, round narrative surface because we have an obligation to connect our stories to a flesh and blood history, both social and political.
“Who am I?” López asks. “I am myself, you see.”
What visual images inspire your writing? How does your writing challenge standard stories about the world around us?
Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. The Death of Fidel Perez is her first novel. You can learn more about Elizabeth on her website, and by following her on Twitter.
Hi, Elizabeth:
Welcome to Writer Unboxed. That’s an incredibly powerful post. Thank you. It brought to mind, among many other things, two quotes.
The first from Simone de Beauvoir: “She who writes from the depths of her loneliness speaks to us of ourselves.”
The other is a bit longer, about refugees from another Catholic island. Some of my ancestors came from there, and helped me decipher through the lens of history what it means to be myself.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful post.
The island it is silent now
But the ghosts still haunt the waves
And the torch lights up a famished man
Who fortune could not save
Did you work upon the railroad
Did you rid the streets of crime
Were your dollars from the white house
Were they from the five and dime
Did the old songs taunt or cheer you
And did they still make you cry
Did you count the months and years
Or did your teardrops quickly dry
Ah, no, says he, ’twas not to be
On a coffin ship I came here
And I never even got so far
That they could change my name
Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
To a land of opportunity
That some of them will never see
Fortune prevailing
Across the western ocean
Their bellies full
Their spirits free
They’ll break the chains of poverty
And they’ll dance
In Manhattan’s desert twilight
In the death of afternoon
We stepped hand in hand on Broadway
Like the first man on the moon
And “The Blackbird” broke the silence
As you whistled it so sweet
And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
I danced up and down the street
Then we said goodnight to Broadway
Giving it our best regards
Tipped our hats to Mister Cohen
Dear old Times Square’s favorite bard
Then we raised a glass to JFK
And a dozen more besides
When I got back to my empty room
I suppose I must have cried
Thousands are sailing
Again across the ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Postcards we’re mailing
Of sky-blue skies and oceans
From rooms the daylight never sees
Where lights don’t glow on Christmas trees
But we dance to the music
And we dance
Sometimes I think it is a writer’s responsibility to cause readers whose circumstances may not have necessitated the question “Who am I?” to ask it. And perhaps point them toward their answers.
It was easier to finish my debut novel once the image to be the cover coalesced into something very personal from the book. A sense of yearning and of being onthe outside is at the core of the image – and the novel.
Thank you for the images – I grew up in Mexico, surrounded by the people portrayed. My middle name is Guadalupe.
Elizabeth, I found your essay challenging – in places almost jarringly so. But your posits and questions stripped my thinking back to a place of renewed perspective not just on the truth I’m pursuing through my work, but on the importance of its pursuit, and of how I chose to spend my days on this earth.
Thank you. The challenge and the clarity are much appreciated. Your voice is such a wonderful and vital addition to the conversation here at WU.
Elizabeth,
Welcome to Writer Unboxed. Your essay was powerful. The paragraph about your mother and father pulled at my heart until it ached with empathy.
In an earlier paragraph, you stated, “But that’s history–which is to say, in the idiom of American English, ‘Who cares?'” Please don’t think that’s the thought of all of us. Some of us feel it should be, “But that’s history, which is to say, ‘We need to learn from it.'” We need to encourage those in these unique positions to tell their stories, and when they do, read and take heed of their message. For just in the short content of your essay, I learned of atrocities I’d never known heretofore.
Thank you for a wonderful enlightenment.
Elizabeth, thank you for your powerful words. The history of colonialism is so vast, the myth of our exceptionalism so ingrained, that we (I) don’t see them until someone shakes us and points. I have been watching the Burns/Novick series on Viet Nam and coming smack up against the lying, the arrogance, the hubris, and the enormous cost to so many, much of which cannot even be quantified. I’m by turns enraged, astonished, embarrassed and awed by what I’m hearing from the mouths of people calling themselves leaders. But it is the pictures, the images, that have cracked me open and made it hard to breathe. And I believe that the reason I write is to challenge the standard stories about the world, most of which, since I can remember, I’ve found to be insane. Again, thank you for a moving post. And welcome!
Elizabeth, I enjoyed your essay and the arresting art of Yolanda Lopez, esp. since I often pray to be clothed in Mary’s virtues. I loved all three depictions of Mary, but esp. in the dailyness of the sewing as she crushes the serpent. It brought back memories of my mother too. I wonder how many women and men have provided for their families with the humblest of jobs just to give their children a better life. It’s a reminder too, to be faithful to the small, humble, daily work. The rewards come, sometimes years after. My own writing goes against the grain of the popular culture so I suspect it will be many years until I see my reward, but I am pleased to have done what I can with the gifts I’ve been given.
The work of Bouguereau is so fresh and lovely; it always inspires me to do my best. His pieta reminds me that out of great sorrow you can create beauty (his wife and child had died and the sorrow expressed in Mary pierces the soul). There’s one little painting of Christ falling, bloodied and I think of the wound on his shoulder that he spoke of to St. Bernard. Below that I have our Lady of Guadalupe.
Beautiful and I am grateful for your questions. The creative process comes alive when we search our own stories to build on the ones we are creating. And the images, I recognized their source. Amazing and as everyone is saying, powerful.
Elizabeth,
Thank you so much for this elegantly written and perceptive post. The tragedy is that so many stories remain untold. I appreciate your having the courage to tell yours.
What a powerful story and relevant in multiple ways. And of course, I return to Lopez’s work over and over myself. I loved seeing your connections.
Wow! You bring out so many important ideas in your post, Elizabeth. You’ve set me thinking about identity and history. Also about the different kinds of cultural margins. While privileged in many, many ways, my own cultural margin, the one from which I write, is of having been one of the despised “greedy needy”: a single parent relying on public assistance for my and my children’s survival.
Your last question touches the core of my mission as a writer. I write to open up the stereotypes that keep us from seeing each other fully. Invisible people do matter! I trust that as our empathy grows, so too are our various sorts of communities strengthened.
Thank you for introducing me to López’s art. I love the triptych, both the idea and the execution, and will look for more by her.
Typical Elizabeth: intelligent, witty, mesmerizing…