Dissociation & Resilience at their most elemental

Reading Beast / Meridian, I thought about what Lidia Yuknavitch, one of my writing teachers, has said about writing traumatic scenes. She said (essentially): “When something is too much for you to write, you can use nature as your metaphor to convey the brutality and impact of the event on your body. You can let the earth tell the story for you.”

Villareal perpetually employs images from the natural world throughout these gorgeously devastating poems, but I’m thinking especially about “Dissociative States” and how the poem evolves. The first stanza is starkly realist: “1 It’s February 16 Houston 1993 & the call from MD ANDERSON is a guillotine ring 2 each word Papi says si, ándale pues, si aqui está & so he has to break the news the experimental treatment has failed 3 SE MURIÓ.” But after the story takes a “skip in the record,” the metaphor of the poem takes over, just like emotion overtakes her body.

11 & we are in pain because our umbilical cords have grown back & root themselves to objects of vice 12 but mine is a braid snaking out of myself 13 to find its root in the pines 14 so when Mami begins to float above us & above the arroz boiling in floodwater & above the half-blue tv 15 & above Tio Janiver drinking himself to death 16 & above her empty bed ever-missing my father 17 & thousands of crushed cigarettes 18 that tender umbilical cordon attaches itself to the rotting foreclosure so that she might not drift away.

The metaphor grows like roots, snaking itself around everything in the room, even un-birthing the author, re-attaching the umbilical cord, so that she can once again be united with her mother. Through metaphor, we feel the depth of her yearning and despondence and we witness the web of chaos overtaking her family...

18 every solid thing becomes itself backward 19 & we crane our necks to try & see where we are going 20 & we must have left something behind 21 what was backward is now forward & the trees press their thrashing branches into the glass & break in & drag me by the hair 22 & the floodwater boils over onto the stove top 23 & a blue crab crawls out of the pot.

24 I call to someone, try to warn, but I am suspended tighter still 25 my hair tangled up in leafy branches, toenails twisted into roots ---

As her emotions flood her body, we experience them as a literal flood -- as a storm, as natural devastation. She is in the rawest state of grief and feels like her world as she knows it is ending, and so she writes about her grief as the end of the world. It’s funny, because even these words “storm” and “end of the world” can be such clichés – if Villareal had described her experience of grief in that way, it would have felt as empty & hollow. So instead Villareal inhabits the worlds of these metaphors. We are right there with her as it happens. The thrashing branches and boiling water overtaking the room. Reading this poem in particular was a reminder for me of what clinical or psychological or even “emotional” language – like “she felt sad” or “she was traumatized” or “she was in a state of deep grieving” – keep at bay, keep dammed up behind the floodgates...

The other crucial aspect about nature as metaphor is that nature is always in a state of transformation. The girl from “Dissociative States” becomes so tangled with the tree that she transforms into one. This is both an expression of her agony and also a metamorphosis of sorts. We see this again even more explicitly in “The Way Back.” Abandoned by her white lover, the girl “lets her sadness flow into the river” and “begs to be made the moon, to lure all suns with her song into the darkness.... She runs through the forest in the old way, her grief becomes passage – into the land, into her body, into the waters of herself and all the mothers before her. Beneath the surface of the river she hears their voices, in the rustle of the trees she begins to know the world.” Her grief is the portal. And it’s a fruitful one, as painful as it may be -- her loneliness “manifests as flowers that burst from her antlers” and she “fashions a crown of constellations, links their stories into a halo.” She writes their stories into the sky, and in this way, she transforms yet again, and “repairs[s] the seams between worlds along its meridians.”

“The Way Back” isn’t about a Latinx girl who suffers, but ultimately it’s okay because she learns how strong she really is – the way that a bad movie or book review routinely depict and limit the stories of women of color. It is not a story of easy healing, or resilience for the sake of an “empowering!” and “tearjerker!” Blockbuster movie. It’s a story of resilience at its most elemental.