Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations, Trans. by Esther Allen, Penguin Classics, 1998.
Thirty years before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas brought this little-known corner of Mexico to the world's notice, Mexican author Rosario Castellanos created a similar rebellion in her 1962 novel The Book of Lamentations. Castellanos has framed her story, which is set in the 1930s, around an actual 1860s uprising of Maya Indians against the Chiapan white ruling class. History and fiction meld seamlessly, mainly because conditions in the Chiapas Castellanos knew as a child hadn't changed much in the intervening 70 years; as late as the 1920s, impoverished Indians still served as mules, carrying white landowners strapped to their backs. The book's title is apt; Castellanos casts an unflinching eye on the effects of oppression, ignorance, and misery. The central characters, motivated variously by desperation, superstition, or ambition, may not be admirable, but they are all too human. In the end, a rebellion culminating in the grisly crucifixion of a child is doomed to failure. Although The Book of Lamentations is not a pleasant book, in an age where history seems increasingly to be repeating itself in Asia, in the Balkans, in Mexico, and elsewhere, it is a deeply instructive one.
The crucifixion of a child at the hands of his own people is an atrocity almost too horrific to contemplate, let alone comprehend. In The Book of Lamentations, however, Rosario Castellanos renders the twisted spirits of the crucifiers so convincingly that the boy's ritual murder -- reported to have been committed by a Mayan mob at the height of an armed peasant rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas -- seems not only believable but inevitable. Out of historical fact and psychological insight, Castellanos's novel creates a convincing anatomy of oppression as timely and disquieting today as it was when it was first published in the Spanish 35 years ago.
Because of the 1994 peasant uprising in Chiapas (which may well have occasioned Esther Allen's fluid English translation) many readers will need little introduction to the plight of the campesinos there, descended from the proud and accomplished Mayas but now largely uneducated, desperately poor, and indignant. The Book of Lamentations is set some 60 years ago, and is based on events from the rebellions of 1712 and 1868. Although today's ongoing uprising lacks the violence of its precursors, it was triggered by similarly stark inequities. Castellanos, who was born into a wealthy white family in 1925, writes about a period in Chiapas that she knows firsthand. She was raised on her family's ranch, primarily by Mayan servants, and came to abhor the rigid social and economic structure that enriched the landed minority and reduced the indigenous majority to abject servitude. Nevertheless, she harbored no illusions about the purity of the oppressed. From her early childhood until her teens -- when her family left Chiapas for Mexico City -- she observed up close the way oppression can warp its victims, leaving them meek, masochistic, and prone to cruelty and madness. As a consequence, her book is refreshingly free of the Dances with Wolves breed of romanticism that has marred so many portrayals of America's indigenous peoples. The parallels, too, that she draws between oppressed women and oppressed races are similarly unsentimental. The novel begins with a Mayan girl's rape by a white man -- which stigmatizes her and forces her into the protection of an ilol, or seer, named Catalina -- and culminates in the crucifixion of the child born of that violation, whom Catalina has raised. There are dozens of compelling characters -- white, mestizo, and Mayan -- but the drama of racial and cultural clash, and, finally, madness, centers on Catalina and her husband Pedro, a village leader obsessed by the idea of justice. The seed of rebellion is planted when Pedro hears of and believes in the Mexican president's promise of land reform; but it doesn't take root in the Mayan community until after Catalina falls into a trance and tells a credulous crowd how three deities who have taken the form of rocks have assured her that the dead gods have revived and justice is at hand. "The ilol twisted like a reptile being hacked apart with a machete," Castellanos writes.Frozen in terror the others watched her, trembling at the imminency of a revelation. . . . None of those who stood around the ilol could understand either her evocation of past events or her prophecy. But all were infected with a wild jubilation that begged their hands to turn it into action. At last! At last! The period of silence, inertia, submission has ended. We are going to be reborn, like our gods! When the landowners and their lackeys in the Catholic Church learn of the rocks' revelation and the fevered rebelliousness it has galvanized, they try to counter the threat on several fronts. First, a priest goes to the cave and confiscates the sacred stones, thereby undermining Catalina's credibility. Then, a cabal of wealthy rancheros attempts to buy off and intimidate the government official responsible for implementing the new land-reform policies. Finally, as their fear mounts, they muster their armed forces and request reinforcements from nearby states and from Guatemala. In painting the political machinations of powerful men bent on protecting their privileges, Castellanos uses a palette even richer than Joseph Conrad's for Nostromo, and she wields a finer brush. But she saves her true masterstrokes for the campesinos. Hungry for power yet suspicious of it, pessimistic and blindly hopeful by turns, they undermine each other and alienate their allies. In the end, the desperation that once drove them proves their undoing. Addled and eager to propitiate any deity that might assist them, they descend into a drunken savagery even more mindless than that of their cruelest enemies. - Anne Marie Donahue
Originally published in 1962 and widely acclaimed as one of the great Latin American novels (now in English for the first time), this epic story of class conflict is the major work of the late Mexican author (192574), whose other best known fiction includes The Nine Guardians (1959) and City of Kings (1960--not reviewed). In a vivid style (beautifully translated) that blends realistic narrative with incisive sociopolitical commentary, Castellanos traces the events leading up to a rebellion by the oppressed Mayan Indians of Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas (formerly Ciudad Real) against their highborn ``Ladino'' masters. The story is set in the 1930s, though it was inspired by Mayan uprisings in 1712 and 1868. Its greatest strength is a gallery of arresting characters, drawn with bold strokes and thrust into dramatic interaction. Among the most important: Catalina Diaz Piulia, a Mayan leader and prophetess all but destroyed by the devastation she helplessly foresees; Fernando Ulloa, a government employee entrusted with overseeing land redistribution, and inevitably caught between the masters he serves and the Indians with whom he identifies; Fernando's faithless wife Julia Acevedo, a sexual predator whose unrestrained appetites will prove her undoing; Father Manuel Mandujano, an ambitious young priest whose imperfect faith and charity are memorably skewered in a truly penetrating characterization; and wealthy, privileged Idolina, whose patient plan to revenge her father's murder will resonate to the very last page. Castellanos's fiction--a skillfully executed panorama that doubtless influenced such later and better-known novels as Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World--has an excitingly swift pace that actually increases in the final fifty or so pages, where a long-simmering resentment explodes into coruscating, cathartic violence. An essential addition to our list of distinguished fiction by Latin American writers--perhaps one of the greatest of them all. - Kirkus Reviews
What could be more timely than a new translation of a novel by a neglected Mexican author, Rosario Castellanos (1925-74), who predicted the current unrest in Chiapas more than three decades ago? Unfortunately, ''The Book of Lamentations,'' first published in Mexico in 1962 and now rendered into English by Esther Allen, is more interesting as a literary artifact than as art. Some of the more lurid details of an 1860's uprising by the region's Tzotzil-speaking Maya Indians have been incorporated into this account of class combat set in the 1930's. A Mexico City bureaucrat sent to Chiapas to enforce the Government's new land redistribution policy encounters resistance from the ruling Ladinos, non-Indians whose vast estates are threatened, and arouses only distrust from the Tzotzils, even though they stand to benefit from his actions. Smoldering resentments between the two sides, fueled by language barriers and clashing religious practices, are ignited by a Ladino priest who is murdered while attempting to smash the idols that the Tzotzils are worshiping. The author knows her subject well (her family was forced from Chiapas by the land reform policies), and she captures both the stifling provincialism of the local society and the unrelenting prejudice to which the Tzotzils are subjected. But there's not a likable character in the book: the Ladinos are arrogant, vain and corrupt; the Indians drunk, superstitious and fearful. And although the writing at times has a poetic fluency, the plot is slowed by clunky pacing and an overreliance on exposition rather than action. - EDIE JAROLIM
Letizia of reading interrupted led me to The Book of Lamentations (Oficio de tinieblas) by Rosario Castellanos. Last year, when I noted that Elena Poniatowska had won the Cervantes Prize, Letizia asked if I knew of any other modern Mexican women writers. I needed to ask some of my better-read friends, and the writer most often mentioned was Castellanos.
A native of Chiapas, the southern state best known today for the 1994 Zapatista uprising led by Subcomandante Marcos, Rosario Castellanos was a poet, novelist and journalist who came to prominence during the Latin American Boom. Perhaps because so many writers of that generation achieved worldwide recognition—García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes and Asturias—Castellanos, one of the few women writers of the generation, was somewhat overshadowed.
Perhaps, too, her style conflicted with the magical realism they espoused. For Castellanos was a realist, a feminist, and a champion of indigenous cultures that remained largely voiceless in the worlds of politics and literature.
The Book of Lamentations, her last novel, was published in 1962. It is a work of her maturity, solidifying and extending themes she explored in her early stories, novels, and poetry.
Using a third-person omniscient voice more reminiscent of the great 19th Century novels of Tolstoy and Balzac than the narrative experiments of the Boom, Castellanos creates a sweeping epic about the age-old conflict between the Ladinos (descendants of Spanish blood) and the Maya, specifically the Tzotzil-speaking people of Chiapas.
Borrowing a grisly incident from an uprising in 1869, Castellanos places her story in the era of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), whose ambition was to fulfill the promise of the Revolution by distributing land to the poor and indigenous peoples of Mexico.
The Ladinos, however, still owned the land, maintained power through corrupt local magistrates, and stubbornly resisted any change. As portrayed by Castellanos, their ingrained racism and blindness to the plight of the indigenous poor is reminiscent of attitudes in the Deep South before integration.
By modernizing the incidents leading up to the rebellion and its dramatic outcomes, including a gruesome crucifixion, Castellanos depicts a recurring story of domination and submission that began with the Conquest and foreshadowed the political agenda of the still unresolved Zapatista rebellion.
A one-time member of the provincial land-owning class, Castellanos moved to Mexico City as a young girl. She wrote poetry from an early age and after studying at the national university worked for the National Indigenous Institute. From this remove, she preserved a compassion for the victims of her story, Ladino and indigenous alike. Power, blindness, and cruelty are not endemic to one side alone.
Castellanos described herself as natively shy and emotionally distant; she perceived herself as an outsider who found escape in writing. This helps explain her taste for narrative omniscience and her pessimism that there would ever be a bridge between the two cultures she wrote about. Her fine novel in the end is a tragedy, as the epigraph she chose, a quote from the Popol Vuh, foretells:
Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) was a Mexican essayist, poet, and novelist sometimes associated with Spain’s generación de 50. Her writing rubbed its heel into social and aesthetic convention, and its mark can still be seen in contemporary Mexican poetry. Only a couple of books are widely available in English translation: Esther Allen’s fantastic The Book of Lamentation (from the original Oficio de tinieblas), a selected poems, and A Rosario Castellanos Reader (edited by Maureen Ahern), a book I’m not familiar with. These three from a writer who published over fifteen books of prose and about as many of poetry and plays. This is a writer whose influence can be compared to César Vallejo’s, but whose poems have only been translated sporadically. - Steve Dolph
A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays, and Drama, Ed. and trans. by Maureen Ahern University of Texas Press, 1988.
Thinker, writer, diplomat, feminist Rosario Castellanos was emerging as one of Mexico's major literary figures before her untimely death in 1974. This sampler of her work brings together her major poems, short fiction, essays, and a three-act play, The Eternal Feminine. Translated with fidelity to language and cultural nuance, many of these works appear here in English for the first time, allowing English-speaking readers to see the depth and range of Castellanos' work.
In her introductory essay, "Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contexts, Voices, and Signs," Maureen Ahern presents the first comprehensive study of Castellanos' work as a sign or signifying system. This approach through contemporary semiotic theory unites literary criticism and translation as an integral semiotic process. Ahern reveals how Castellanos integrated women's images, bodies, voices, and texts to feminize her discourse and create a plurality of new signs/messages about women in Mexico. Describing this process in The Eternal Feminine, Castellanos observes, "...it's not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own. It isn't even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves."
Rosario Castellanos, The Nine Guardians, Readers International, 1992.
The Nine Guardians is crowded with the magic and malice of warring gods and men.
Castellanos (1925-1974) has written a haunting novel set against the Mexican Revolution. She gives much of the narration over to a seven-year-old girl, who introduces characters simply yet vividly like a series of candid snapshots. The girl observes her rather remote parents--Cesar Arguello, a wealthy landowner whom she can describe only up to his knees, and his wife, who spends her time caring for a local hunchback so as to assure her place in heaven. Contrasted with them is Nana, the nurturing Indian servant who has cared for the girl and her younger brother, Mario, since birth. As the Indians rise up against the landowners and demand their rights, Castellanos suggests that the rest of society should do the same against the fetters of male supremacy. The author does not take sides between men and women, however; both are responsible for perpetuating the unhealthy state of their lives. Ultimately, while their father struggles to hold on to some scrap of the ranch for Mario's future, both children become the innocent victims of their moral and social inheritance. And Castellanos ( Another Way to Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos ) paints it all with graceful, honest strokes. - Publishers Weekly
Rosario Castellanos, Another Way to Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos, Trans. by Myralyn F. Allgood, University of Georgia Press, 1990.
A champion of women's rights and an outspoken critic of the oppression of the Mexican Indian by the Ladino (white people), Castellanos wrote highly personal works that drew deeply upon her experience as a white, Mexican female in Chiapas. The struggles of the natives against harsh social conditions were apparent to her from childhood. Allgood here translates and assembles selections of Castellanos's poetry, fiction, and essays representing these themes. The poetry, presented bilingually, moves from her earlier intellectual works to lighter works and deals with basic human concerns. The fiction emphasizes the parallel conflicts of men versus women and non-Indian versus Indian. The essays, written for the Mexican paper Excelsior , reveal her perceptive views on a range of issues. This is the only work of Castellanos currently available in English, making it a worthwhile addition to both Spanish literature and women's studies collections. - Mary Ellen Beck
"It is time that the English-speaking public had an opportunity to experience the work of this versatile and dedicated writer," Myra F. Allgood says in a preface to Another Way to Be, selected works of the late Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos. Allgood, editor and translator of this collection, has pulled together a sampling of poetry, essays and fiction that amply reflects Castellanos' reputation as a steadfast commentator on the plight of the country's indigenous population, particularly of the Indians in her home state, Chiapas. Castellanos, whose many honors include being named Mexico's woman of the year in 1967, and in 1971, being appointed ambassador to Israel, was also an outspoken feminist. Those views also are represented here. So, too, are her humor and wide-ranging insights, displayed particularly in the selection of essays, many of which first appeared as columns in Excelsior, Mexico's major newspaper. Ms. Allgood's commentaries often have the stilted tone of a dissertation, but fortunately, she seems able, in her work as translator, to let Castellanos' own voice prevail. Over all, it's an inviting voice - one "the English-speaking public" should hear more of. Ms. Allgood has done readers a service by bringing attention to this markedly capable writer. This book seems a must for libraries and bookstores that carry a range of titles in women's studies, Latin American studies, journalism, literature. -- From Independent Publisher
Rosario Castellanos, The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos, Graywolf Press, 1989.
This bilingual volume of thirty-four poetic titles is a small sampling of the poetic production of one of Mexico's fmest twentieth-century feminist authors, Rosario Castellanos. The poems included were selected from an anthology entitled Poesta no eres tti prepared by the poet two years before her untimely death in 1974. The Selected Poems contains the titular poeni of the anthology, "Poesia no eres td," in whose concluding lines one discovers a basic tenet of Castellanos' personal dynamic: the need to resolve her anguished solitude through the existence of ..el otro" (the other): "Con el otro la humanidad, el difilogo, la poesia comienza." (With the other humanity, dialogue, poetry begin.) In the opening stanza Castellanos expresses doubt about the validity of her own existence even through "the other." "Porque si tu existiera tendria que existir yo tambien. Y eso es mentira." (Because if you existed I'd have to exist too. And that's a lie.) Yet, in spite of this need for completion, in the short poem "El Otto" Rosario demonstrates ambivalence as she recoils against the ever present one who provides "everything we'd need to be whole: "Lo que 61 respira es lo que a ti te asfixia lo que come es tu hambre. Muere con la mitad mfis pura de tu muerte." (What he breathes is your suffocation what he eats is your hunger.Dying, he takes with him the purest half of your own death.) Even in these few poems of The Selected Works, one can glimpse the difficulties inherent in Rosario's personal history. Much remains unresolved even to her friend, the novelist, Elena Poniatowska-especially the question of Rosario's possible suicide. Rosario Castellanos led a busy public life culminating in her final diplomatic posting to Israel on behalf of the Mexican government. Her literary life included eight volumes of poetry as well as numerous essays, plays, novels, stories, and newspaper colunms. The peripatetic Castellanos traveled widely and worked among the Indians of her natal province, Chiapas; her Indianist novel, Baltin Candn was translated into English, German, and French. In spite of this intense level of activity, as Poniatowska noted, one finds "death at every page" of Castellano's poetry. Even in a poem entitled "El Resplandor de set" Rosario seeks "To be no more / No ser ya mfis." In "Dos Poemas" she welcomes death as an escape from "this hermetic cell they call Rosario" and "el nudo de mi sexo atormentado / knot of my tormented sex. There is much more to discover about Rosario Castellanos, including her usage of Nahuatl symbolism to represent Mexico's search for itself and her mysticism reflective of medieval Spain. This slim volume is a good beginning and can serve scholars of feminist literature and well as those seeking to enhance their understanding of contemporary Mexican literature. The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos is recommended for libaries as well as bookstores. -- From Independent Publisher
A writer of multiple talents, Rosario Castellanos (Mexico, 1925-1974) wrote memorable social novels in which modernity cruelly conflated with indigenous Mexico (such as The Book of Lamentations, translated by Esther Allen), as well as satirical poems that demonstrated she was not afraid of laughing at herself. Her “Eternal Feminine,” a theater play included in The Rosario Castellanos Reader, translated by Maureen Ahern for Texas University Press in 1988, is a veritable tour de force. At a beauty parlor, women´s heads remain under sci-fi-like hair dryers as they dream with an alternative history of the world. The murmurs of Eve, La Malinche, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contribute to a scathing and relentless subversion of gender stereotypes, transforming the main character forever. A feminist at heart, Castellanos died accidentally while trying to turn on a lamp. - Cristina Rivera Garza
A classic of Mexican literature since its publication in 1962, this historical epic appears in its first English translation with fortuitous timing. It takes place in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas, where, since 1994, Mayan rebels known as the Zapatistas have won sympathetic media attention for their grievances against the Mexican government. Castellanos (1925-1974) takes events that occurred in 1712 and 1868 and resets them in the 1930s to create a complex tale of race, class and gender. Constructing an entire provincial society, she portrays macho landowners, exploited Indians, submissive wives, misguided politicians and corrupt religious officials clashing with one another and among themselves in a thirst for power. At the center of the landowners' elite circle is political aspirant Leonardo Cifuentes, who incites fear and hatred of the Indians, claiming they pollute the region's civic, moral and religious values. The indigenous community, long abused by the landowners, revolves around Catalina, an ilol, or prophet, who instigates a rebellion when she creates a cult around three stone idols. The major confrontation occurs at Easter, when indigenos crucify a boy conceived in a rape of a young Indian girl by Cifuentes years before. The novel features intriguing interior monologues and indirect discourse, but the third-person omniscient narration doesn't quite unite the many characters and plot lines or satisfactorily compress the immense volume of historical detail into digestible form. Still, this is an always panoramic and often moving novel that brings Mexico's turmoil to complex, tragic life. (Dec.) FYI: In 1974, Castellanos was electrocuted while trying to plug in a lamp in Israel, where she served as Mexico's ambassador. - Publishers Weekly
The crucifixion of a child at the hands of his own people is an atrocity almost too horrific to contemplate, let alone comprehend. In The Book of Lamentations, however, Rosario Castellanos renders the twisted spirits of the crucifiers so convincingly that the boy's ritual murder -- reported to have been committed by a Mayan mob at the height of an armed peasant rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas -- seems not only believable but inevitable. Out of historical fact and psychological insight, Castellanos's novel creates a convincing anatomy of oppression as timely and disquieting today as it was when it was first published in the Spanish 35 years ago.
Because of the 1994 peasant uprising in Chiapas (which may well have occasioned Esther Allen's fluid English translation) many readers will need little introduction to the plight of the campesinos there, descended from the proud and accomplished Mayas but now largely uneducated, desperately poor, and indignant. The Book of Lamentations is set some 60 years ago, and is based on events from the rebellions of 1712 and 1868. Although today's ongoing uprising lacks the violence of its precursors, it was triggered by similarly stark inequities. Castellanos, who was born into a wealthy white family in 1925, writes about a period in Chiapas that she knows firsthand. She was raised on her family's ranch, primarily by Mayan servants, and came to abhor the rigid social and economic structure that enriched the landed minority and reduced the indigenous majority to abject servitude. Nevertheless, she harbored no illusions about the purity of the oppressed. From her early childhood until her teens -- when her family left Chiapas for Mexico City -- she observed up close the way oppression can warp its victims, leaving them meek, masochistic, and prone to cruelty and madness. As a consequence, her book is refreshingly free of the Dances with Wolves breed of romanticism that has marred so many portrayals of America's indigenous peoples. The parallels, too, that she draws between oppressed women and oppressed races are similarly unsentimental. The novel begins with a Mayan girl's rape by a white man -- which stigmatizes her and forces her into the protection of an ilol, or seer, named Catalina -- and culminates in the crucifixion of the child born of that violation, whom Catalina has raised. There are dozens of compelling characters -- white, mestizo, and Mayan -- but the drama of racial and cultural clash, and, finally, madness, centers on Catalina and her husband Pedro, a village leader obsessed by the idea of justice. The seed of rebellion is planted when Pedro hears of and believes in the Mexican president's promise of land reform; but it doesn't take root in the Mayan community until after Catalina falls into a trance and tells a credulous crowd how three deities who have taken the form of rocks have assured her that the dead gods have revived and justice is at hand. "The ilol twisted like a reptile being hacked apart with a machete," Castellanos writes.Frozen in terror the others watched her, trembling at the imminency of a revelation. . . . None of those who stood around the ilol could understand either her evocation of past events or her prophecy. But all were infected with a wild jubilation that begged their hands to turn it into action. At last! At last! The period of silence, inertia, submission has ended. We are going to be reborn, like our gods! When the landowners and their lackeys in the Catholic Church learn of the rocks' revelation and the fevered rebelliousness it has galvanized, they try to counter the threat on several fronts. First, a priest goes to the cave and confiscates the sacred stones, thereby undermining Catalina's credibility. Then, a cabal of wealthy rancheros attempts to buy off and intimidate the government official responsible for implementing the new land-reform policies. Finally, as their fear mounts, they muster their armed forces and request reinforcements from nearby states and from Guatemala. In painting the political machinations of powerful men bent on protecting their privileges, Castellanos uses a palette even richer than Joseph Conrad's for Nostromo, and she wields a finer brush. But she saves her true masterstrokes for the campesinos. Hungry for power yet suspicious of it, pessimistic and blindly hopeful by turns, they undermine each other and alienate their allies. In the end, the desperation that once drove them proves their undoing. Addled and eager to propitiate any deity that might assist them, they descend into a drunken savagery even more mindless than that of their cruelest enemies. - Anne Marie Donahue
Originally published in 1962 and widely acclaimed as one of the great Latin American novels (now in English for the first time), this epic story of class conflict is the major work of the late Mexican author (192574), whose other best known fiction includes The Nine Guardians (1959) and City of Kings (1960--not reviewed). In a vivid style (beautifully translated) that blends realistic narrative with incisive sociopolitical commentary, Castellanos traces the events leading up to a rebellion by the oppressed Mayan Indians of Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas (formerly Ciudad Real) against their highborn ``Ladino'' masters. The story is set in the 1930s, though it was inspired by Mayan uprisings in 1712 and 1868. Its greatest strength is a gallery of arresting characters, drawn with bold strokes and thrust into dramatic interaction. Among the most important: Catalina Diaz Piulia, a Mayan leader and prophetess all but destroyed by the devastation she helplessly foresees; Fernando Ulloa, a government employee entrusted with overseeing land redistribution, and inevitably caught between the masters he serves and the Indians with whom he identifies; Fernando's faithless wife Julia Acevedo, a sexual predator whose unrestrained appetites will prove her undoing; Father Manuel Mandujano, an ambitious young priest whose imperfect faith and charity are memorably skewered in a truly penetrating characterization; and wealthy, privileged Idolina, whose patient plan to revenge her father's murder will resonate to the very last page. Castellanos's fiction--a skillfully executed panorama that doubtless influenced such later and better-known novels as Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World--has an excitingly swift pace that actually increases in the final fifty or so pages, where a long-simmering resentment explodes into coruscating, cathartic violence. An essential addition to our list of distinguished fiction by Latin American writers--perhaps one of the greatest of them all. - Kirkus Reviews
What could be more timely than a new translation of a novel by a neglected Mexican author, Rosario Castellanos (1925-74), who predicted the current unrest in Chiapas more than three decades ago? Unfortunately, ''The Book of Lamentations,'' first published in Mexico in 1962 and now rendered into English by Esther Allen, is more interesting as a literary artifact than as art. Some of the more lurid details of an 1860's uprising by the region's Tzotzil-speaking Maya Indians have been incorporated into this account of class combat set in the 1930's. A Mexico City bureaucrat sent to Chiapas to enforce the Government's new land redistribution policy encounters resistance from the ruling Ladinos, non-Indians whose vast estates are threatened, and arouses only distrust from the Tzotzils, even though they stand to benefit from his actions. Smoldering resentments between the two sides, fueled by language barriers and clashing religious practices, are ignited by a Ladino priest who is murdered while attempting to smash the idols that the Tzotzils are worshiping. The author knows her subject well (her family was forced from Chiapas by the land reform policies), and she captures both the stifling provincialism of the local society and the unrelenting prejudice to which the Tzotzils are subjected. But there's not a likable character in the book: the Ladinos are arrogant, vain and corrupt; the Indians drunk, superstitious and fearful. And although the writing at times has a poetic fluency, the plot is slowed by clunky pacing and an overreliance on exposition rather than action. - EDIE JAROLIM
Exactly twenty years ago, the world became aware of the Zapatista rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Though the immediate reason for the revolt was the NAFTA treaty that opened the floodgates for US-manufactured goods into Mexico, it was one among a series of previous revolts in the area since the 18th century. Rosario Castellano’s farewell novel before her death at the age of 49 in 1974 is based on these revolts and located in the early 20th century. The title of the novel recalls the Jewish text also called The Book of Lamentations,a collection of poetic laments about the destruction of Jerusalem.
The proclamation of land reforms by the PRI party in early 20th century forms the background to the events depicted in the novel. Spurred on by an honest and gritty land inspector, Fernando Ulloa and the millenarian prophecies of an Indian woman, Catalina Diaz Puilja, the indigenous Tzotzil-speaking Mayan people of the region rise up against the Ladinos, the landowners of Spanish descent. The end is a bloody defeat of the rebels and Fernando’s calamitous death at the hands of the Ladinos- led by Leonardo Cifuentes, the devious representative of the land-rich ranchers. These three characters form the fulcrum of the story, though there are at least a dozen important characters in the novel.
The childless Catalina childless is the wife of Winikton, a respected judge in his community.
When Marcela, an Indian girl from her community is raped by a Ladino, Catalina schemes so that the pregnant girl is married to Catalina’s retarded brother. Catalina then becomes the godmother to the son, named Domingo. Later, Catalina begins to have visions and her prophecies, her perceived closeness to the ancient gods, lead her community to consider her to be an illol, which it seems is someone with access to the gods.
Catalina, is not just an illol, but also a childless woman symbolizing the inefficacy of the rebellion to make way for a successful conclusion.
Ah, how well she knew herself, how long she had endured herself. A childless woman. The nut that does not break open to make way for the growth and fullness of the seed. The rock, ugly and immobile. The fist that imprisons the bird and strangles it death rattle.
The novel, like Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The War at the End of the World”, highlights how the mind of the subaltern works and how it internalizes the superiority of the conqueror. The image of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross and blood streaming down leads them to concoct the myth that the white man has drunk this god’s blood, and hence become invincible.
They nailed him to a cross and killed him and drank his blood. Ever since then, no one can beat them.
The Chamulas work out a counter to this powerful god in a truly Mayan way.
Catalina proclaims Domingo as the god that has come to help the Chamulas. He is then, like Christ, nailed to a cross — alive, and his blood is partaken by the Indians. This leads them to believe that they are now invincible, and begin their revolt in earnest.
While pillaging one of the village ranches, they come across a foxy rancher who proves the fallacy of their belief by challenging one of the young Indians to face the bullets from his gun. The boy fearlessly steps forward- certain in his belief that he will not die because of the blessings of the new god. But when the gun is fired, he dies, throwing the insurgents are into confusion and disarray.
Besides the three key characters, the dozen or so other characters add much to the story and help to understand not only the era, but how different people reacted to the times. Despite the formidable array of characters, there are really no heroes in the novel.
The Ladino characters are cunning and determined to hold on to their power by any means, while the Indians lack confidence; even when they revolt, they make no effort to grab power. Fernando Ulloa, the land inspector who inspires the revolt is an un- heroic tragic character who is disowned by both the groups. He is un- heroic because he betrays the Indians when he understands that he cannot influence the course of events as they race towards a predictable end.
The pessimism notwithstanding, the novel presents “a panoramic sweep of a Diego Rivera mural weaving”, as a reviewer at amazon.com puts it. This is supplemented by a superb translation by Esther Allen which makes for an easy read, as if the novel had been originally written in English. A glossary of some non- English words would have helped.
Considering that the novel is located in the same area as the Zapatista revolt, it is quite surprising its leader sub- commandante Marcos did not mention the writer or the novel in his famous interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though he did not forget to count the right- wing Mario Vargas Llosa, “despite his ideas,” as one of the writers who influenced him and his generation. This novel certainly belongs to the other great novels of The Boom generation, for which Garcia Marquez collectively won the Nobel Prize, as Carlos Fuentes once put it.
“The Book of Lamentations” brings to mind novels like “The War at the End of the World” and, in some ways “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” (both by Mario Vargas Lllosa), which depict similar millenarian and radical revolts in Latin America. While many of those revolts failed, recent events in Latin America underscore that not all of them were in vain. The Bolivarian Revolution continues.
- readerswords.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/the-book-of-lamentations-by-rosario-castellanos/Letizia of reading interrupted led me to The Book of Lamentations (Oficio de tinieblas) by Rosario Castellanos. Last year, when I noted that Elena Poniatowska had won the Cervantes Prize, Letizia asked if I knew of any other modern Mexican women writers. I needed to ask some of my better-read friends, and the writer most often mentioned was Castellanos.
Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974)
A native of Chiapas, the southern state best known today for the 1994 Zapatista uprising led by Subcomandante Marcos, Rosario Castellanos was a poet, novelist and journalist who came to prominence during the Latin American Boom. Perhaps because so many writers of that generation achieved worldwide recognition—García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes and Asturias—Castellanos, one of the few women writers of the generation, was somewhat overshadowed.
Perhaps, too, her style conflicted with the magical realism they espoused. For Castellanos was a realist, a feminist, and a champion of indigenous cultures that remained largely voiceless in the worlds of politics and literature.
The Book of Lamentations, her last novel, was published in 1962. It is a work of her maturity, solidifying and extending themes she explored in her early stories, novels, and poetry.
Using a third-person omniscient voice more reminiscent of the great 19th Century novels of Tolstoy and Balzac than the narrative experiments of the Boom, Castellanos creates a sweeping epic about the age-old conflict between the Ladinos (descendants of Spanish blood) and the Maya, specifically the Tzotzil-speaking people of Chiapas.
Borrowing a grisly incident from an uprising in 1869, Castellanos places her story in the era of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), whose ambition was to fulfill the promise of the Revolution by distributing land to the poor and indigenous peoples of Mexico.
The Ladinos, however, still owned the land, maintained power through corrupt local magistrates, and stubbornly resisted any change. As portrayed by Castellanos, their ingrained racism and blindness to the plight of the indigenous poor is reminiscent of attitudes in the Deep South before integration.
By modernizing the incidents leading up to the rebellion and its dramatic outcomes, including a gruesome crucifixion, Castellanos depicts a recurring story of domination and submission that began with the Conquest and foreshadowed the political agenda of the still unresolved Zapatista rebellion.
A one-time member of the provincial land-owning class, Castellanos moved to Mexico City as a young girl. She wrote poetry from an early age and after studying at the national university worked for the National Indigenous Institute. From this remove, she preserved a compassion for the victims of her story, Ladino and indigenous alike. Power, blindness, and cruelty are not endemic to one side alone.
The 18th Century church of San Juan Chamula is the site of a critical scene in Castellanos’ novel.
While other Boom writers explored the metaphorical uses of magical realism, Castellanos kept to the constraints of realism to tap the truly magical perspective of the Maya. In the Mayan world, sacred stones can talk and a wooden cross—that strangely syncretic symbol—may suggest cultural redemption through violence. The power of myth, as told in the classic Mayan book of creation, the Popol Vuh, lives on in oral tradition. Time is circular, and death leads to life and death again. As a poet thinking in metaphor, Castellanos understands these beliefs, but as a novelist she remains an outsider looking in.
This outsider’s perspective also empowers her sharp criticism of the Ladinos she knew so well—the hypocrisy, ignorance and contempt that prevailed in the provincial world she left behind.Castellanos described herself as natively shy and emotionally distant; she perceived herself as an outsider who found escape in writing. This helps explain her taste for narrative omniscience and her pessimism that there would ever be a bridge between the two cultures she wrote about. Her fine novel in the end is a tragedy, as the epigraph she chose, a quote from the Popol Vuh, foretells:
Whereas your glory is no longer great; Whereas your might exists no more —and though without much right to veneration— your blood will still prevail a while… All the children of dawn, the dawn’s offspring, will not belong to your people; Only the chatterboxes will yield themselves to you. People of Harm, of War, of Misery, you who did the wrong, weep for it. - Tom Gething
Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) was a Mexican essayist, poet, and novelist sometimes associated with Spain’s generación de 50. Her writing rubbed its heel into social and aesthetic convention, and its mark can still be seen in contemporary Mexican poetry. Only a couple of books are widely available in English translation: Esther Allen’s fantastic The Book of Lamentation (from the original Oficio de tinieblas), a selected poems, and A Rosario Castellanos Reader (edited by Maureen Ahern), a book I’m not familiar with. These three from a writer who published over fifteen books of prose and about as many of poetry and plays. This is a writer whose influence can be compared to César Vallejo’s, but whose poems have only been translated sporadically. - Steve Dolph
A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays, and Drama, Ed. and trans. by Maureen Ahern University of Texas Press, 1988.
Thinker, writer, diplomat, feminist Rosario Castellanos was emerging as one of Mexico's major literary figures before her untimely death in 1974. This sampler of her work brings together her major poems, short fiction, essays, and a three-act play, The Eternal Feminine. Translated with fidelity to language and cultural nuance, many of these works appear here in English for the first time, allowing English-speaking readers to see the depth and range of Castellanos' work.
In her introductory essay, "Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contexts, Voices, and Signs," Maureen Ahern presents the first comprehensive study of Castellanos' work as a sign or signifying system. This approach through contemporary semiotic theory unites literary criticism and translation as an integral semiotic process. Ahern reveals how Castellanos integrated women's images, bodies, voices, and texts to feminize her discourse and create a plurality of new signs/messages about women in Mexico. Describing this process in The Eternal Feminine, Castellanos observes, "...it's not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own. It isn't even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves."
Rosario Castellanos, The Nine Guardians, Readers International, 1992.
The Nine Guardians is crowded with the magic and malice of warring gods and men.
Castellanos (1925-1974) has written a haunting novel set against the Mexican Revolution. She gives much of the narration over to a seven-year-old girl, who introduces characters simply yet vividly like a series of candid snapshots. The girl observes her rather remote parents--Cesar Arguello, a wealthy landowner whom she can describe only up to his knees, and his wife, who spends her time caring for a local hunchback so as to assure her place in heaven. Contrasted with them is Nana, the nurturing Indian servant who has cared for the girl and her younger brother, Mario, since birth. As the Indians rise up against the landowners and demand their rights, Castellanos suggests that the rest of society should do the same against the fetters of male supremacy. The author does not take sides between men and women, however; both are responsible for perpetuating the unhealthy state of their lives. Ultimately, while their father struggles to hold on to some scrap of the ranch for Mario's future, both children become the innocent victims of their moral and social inheritance. And Castellanos ( Another Way to Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos ) paints it all with graceful, honest strokes. - Publishers Weekly
Rosario Castellanos, Another Way to Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos, Trans. by Myralyn F. Allgood, University of Georgia Press, 1990.
A champion of women's rights and an outspoken critic of the oppression of the Mexican Indian by the Ladino (white people), Castellanos wrote highly personal works that drew deeply upon her experience as a white, Mexican female in Chiapas. The struggles of the natives against harsh social conditions were apparent to her from childhood. Allgood here translates and assembles selections of Castellanos's poetry, fiction, and essays representing these themes. The poetry, presented bilingually, moves from her earlier intellectual works to lighter works and deals with basic human concerns. The fiction emphasizes the parallel conflicts of men versus women and non-Indian versus Indian. The essays, written for the Mexican paper Excelsior , reveal her perceptive views on a range of issues. This is the only work of Castellanos currently available in English, making it a worthwhile addition to both Spanish literature and women's studies collections. - Mary Ellen Beck
"It is time that the English-speaking public had an opportunity to experience the work of this versatile and dedicated writer," Myra F. Allgood says in a preface to Another Way to Be, selected works of the late Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos. Allgood, editor and translator of this collection, has pulled together a sampling of poetry, essays and fiction that amply reflects Castellanos' reputation as a steadfast commentator on the plight of the country's indigenous population, particularly of the Indians in her home state, Chiapas. Castellanos, whose many honors include being named Mexico's woman of the year in 1967, and in 1971, being appointed ambassador to Israel, was also an outspoken feminist. Those views also are represented here. So, too, are her humor and wide-ranging insights, displayed particularly in the selection of essays, many of which first appeared as columns in Excelsior, Mexico's major newspaper. Ms. Allgood's commentaries often have the stilted tone of a dissertation, but fortunately, she seems able, in her work as translator, to let Castellanos' own voice prevail. Over all, it's an inviting voice - one "the English-speaking public" should hear more of. Ms. Allgood has done readers a service by bringing attention to this markedly capable writer. This book seems a must for libraries and bookstores that carry a range of titles in women's studies, Latin American studies, journalism, literature. -- From Independent Publisher
Rosario Castellanos, The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos, Graywolf Press, 1989.
This bilingual volume of thirty-four poetic titles is a small sampling of the poetic production of one of Mexico's fmest twentieth-century feminist authors, Rosario Castellanos. The poems included were selected from an anthology entitled Poesta no eres tti prepared by the poet two years before her untimely death in 1974. The Selected Poems contains the titular poeni of the anthology, "Poesia no eres td," in whose concluding lines one discovers a basic tenet of Castellanos' personal dynamic: the need to resolve her anguished solitude through the existence of ..el otro" (the other): "Con el otro la humanidad, el difilogo, la poesia comienza." (With the other humanity, dialogue, poetry begin.) In the opening stanza Castellanos expresses doubt about the validity of her own existence even through "the other." "Porque si tu existiera tendria que existir yo tambien. Y eso es mentira." (Because if you existed I'd have to exist too. And that's a lie.) Yet, in spite of this need for completion, in the short poem "El Otto" Rosario demonstrates ambivalence as she recoils against the ever present one who provides "everything we'd need to be whole: "Lo que 61 respira es lo que a ti te asfixia lo que come es tu hambre. Muere con la mitad mfis pura de tu muerte." (What he breathes is your suffocation what he eats is your hunger.Dying, he takes with him the purest half of your own death.) Even in these few poems of The Selected Works, one can glimpse the difficulties inherent in Rosario's personal history. Much remains unresolved even to her friend, the novelist, Elena Poniatowska-especially the question of Rosario's possible suicide. Rosario Castellanos led a busy public life culminating in her final diplomatic posting to Israel on behalf of the Mexican government. Her literary life included eight volumes of poetry as well as numerous essays, plays, novels, stories, and newspaper colunms. The peripatetic Castellanos traveled widely and worked among the Indians of her natal province, Chiapas; her Indianist novel, Baltin Candn was translated into English, German, and French. In spite of this intense level of activity, as Poniatowska noted, one finds "death at every page" of Castellano's poetry. Even in a poem entitled "El Resplandor de set" Rosario seeks "To be no more / No ser ya mfis." In "Dos Poemas" she welcomes death as an escape from "this hermetic cell they call Rosario" and "el nudo de mi sexo atormentado / knot of my tormented sex. There is much more to discover about Rosario Castellanos, including her usage of Nahuatl symbolism to represent Mexico's search for itself and her mysticism reflective of medieval Spain. This slim volume is a good beginning and can serve scholars of feminist literature and well as those seeking to enhance their understanding of contemporary Mexican literature. The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos is recommended for libaries as well as bookstores. -- From Independent Publisher
A writer of multiple talents, Rosario Castellanos (Mexico, 1925-1974) wrote memorable social novels in which modernity cruelly conflated with indigenous Mexico (such as The Book of Lamentations, translated by Esther Allen), as well as satirical poems that demonstrated she was not afraid of laughing at herself. Her “Eternal Feminine,” a theater play included in The Rosario Castellanos Reader, translated by Maureen Ahern for Texas University Press in 1988, is a veritable tour de force. At a beauty parlor, women´s heads remain under sci-fi-like hair dryers as they dream with an alternative history of the world. The murmurs of Eve, La Malinche, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contribute to a scathing and relentless subversion of gender stereotypes, transforming the main character forever. A feminist at heart, Castellanos died accidentally while trying to turn on a lamp. - Cristina Rivera Garza
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