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Aiiii aiiii aiiiii
She is crying for her dead child
the lover gone, the lover not yet come:
Her grito splinters the night
-- Gloria Anzaldua, "My Black Angelos,"
Borderlands/La Frontera(1)
"If I were asked what it is I write about," Sandra Cisneros commented in a lecture in 1986, "I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention."(2) Poverty, the unrecorded lives of the powerless, the unheard voices of "thousands of silent women," are some of the ghosts that haunt The House on Mango Street,(3) dedicated in two languages, "A las Mujeres/To the Women." Cisneros's narrator Esperanza chronicles the unhappy histories of "the ones who cannot out," women immobilized by poverty, cultural and linguistic barriers, restrictive gender roles, and domestic violence. Gazing out of windows they cannot open, standing in doorways they cannot exit, woman after woman on Mango Street is trapped at the threshold or boundary of a room or house not her own. Marin moons in the doorway, "waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life." Mamacita "sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show," afraid to go outside because she doesn't speak English. Because Rafaela is young and beautiful, her husband locks her in her room each Tuesday night while he plays dominoes. Minerva comes over each week "black and blue" with the "same story." Sally claims her father "never hits
her
hard," but she marries to escape, only to sit alone in her husband's house "because she is afraid to go outside without his permission." She looks "at the walls, at how neatly their comers meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake."(4)
The story of Cleofilas in Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" extends and revises such histories, opening a borderland space where old myths take on new resonance and new forms and where new stories are possible. Haunted by the legendary wail of la Llorona, Cleofilas seeks a language to articulate her own story and the stories of the mute feminine victims of male violence in the newspapers. As Adrienne Rich writes in "Natural...