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Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.
REGIONAL WRITERS
IN REVIEW
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A Tale of Casas Grandes by Kathleen Alcalá Chronicle Books, 1997 Hardcover, $22.95 |
The time is the mid to late 1870s and Zacarí as Carabajal has gold fever. He compulsively abandons his family and leaves his home city of Saltillo, southwest of Monterrey, to go prospecting in the deserts and mountains of northern Mexico.
His father, Julio, is on a quest as well, but an interior one. Their family has been living as hidden Jews for 13 generations, outwardly Catholic in order to avoid persecution, but secretly honoring the sabbath, celebrating the Jewish holy days, and praying for the coming of the Messiah. Julio retreats each day into a wonderful library of Jewish texts that his family has furtively amassed over hundreds of years. That is where he studies the Cabala, practices numerology, and seeks through magic to influence his estranged son's future.
Yet it is, Zacarías's mother, Mariana, who sees more clearly in spiritual matters. As a child she was stoned by neighborhood children because she was Jewish. For nine days after the attack she was in a visionary trance. She recovered, but has never spoken again. Her silence stems from her visions of angels during the trance, and it has sharpened her insight: "She grasped the meaning of the look that accompanied the word, smelled the rot beneath the perfume of a flower, saw the spider beneath the rock. Mariana saw in every wing beat, every iridescent color in a feather, the meaning of the world."
Around this mystical core Alcalá skillfully wraps adventures and romances in order to create an exciting, multi-textured story. Alcalá's vivid characterizations are accomplished in short scenes with quick changes - short story techniques she first developed in her accomplished 1992 collection, Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist. In fact the first chapter of this novel appeared as the last story in that collection. At times, however, Alcalá's attempts to convey in English the politeness of 19th century Mexican Spanish conversation turn stiff and artificial. But when she is describing the visions that each member of Zacarías's family are vouchsafed Alcalá's writing is perfectly luminous.
Zacarías discovers gold, and much more. Through the friendship of a Lagunero Indiian family, Zacarías enters the ancient mountain pueblo city of Casas Grandes and proves himself to be the encomberto, the hidden one, that his father had prayed for yet never recognized.
Alcalá is a Seattle-area author and woman of letters. She is a co-founder, editor, and publisher of the multi-cultural literary magazine Raven Chronicles. She has been also been a long-time editor at the Seattle Review. Her next tale of Casas Grandes is sure to be artful and intriguing.
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A Christian Science Childhood by Barbara Wilson Picador USA, New York, 1997 344 pages, hardcover, $25 |
Some months ago I walked by the Christian Science Church on Central Park West. The weekly lesson inquired: Are Sin, Disease and Death Real? I stopped. "You bet they are!" I roared.Like Barbara Wilson, I had a Christian Scientist mom. Like Barbara Wilson's mother, my mom tried to heal herself of cancer solely by working with Christian Science practitioners, church-trained faith healers. No medical attention. Here our paths diverge - but may both our routes remain less well-traveled. Wilson's mother died of cancer and madness when Wilson was a 13 year-old in Long Beach, California. The daughter of practitioners, Wilson's mother discovered a lump in her breast and attempted suicide. The little time left to her was a weave between grim mental institutions and awkward efforts at living with the family, Barbara, her younger brother, and father, who was not a Christian Scientist.
Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood is Wilson's wrenching account of her childhood, her mother's decline and Wilson's painful experience of being other. It is the autobiography of an artist, as Wilson is a novelist and co-founder of Seattle-based Seal Press and Women-in-Translation. The book is insightful and passionate. Wilson's research is careful and impressive; her storytelling is compelling. Wilson explores personal and church history, and new age dicta, which, arguably, spring from Christian Science.
Wilson's parents moved from Battle Creek, Michigan to Long Beach, California in the fifties. Battle Creek, as readers of T. Coraghessan Boyle's Road to Wellville know, was a hot bed of alternative healing, if not ingenuous quackery, and mild Christian Scientists, so quietly wacky, nestled there nicely, often siphoning off dissatisfied clients of Kellogg's Sanitarium.
Wilson's narration of her girlhood nicely evokes everydayness; her descriptions of her mother are Proustian. "I climbed into the stuffed rocking chair with my mother and pressed my face against the V of her blouse where the freckles faded into the shadow between her breasts and the smell was strong, of tears and heat and Pond's Cold Cream." Wilson analyzes a memory I also have, of a mother who reads daily. Christian Science is a reader's religion, but not a scholarly one. Its texts are not cryptic in the way of the Talmud or the Tao. Mrs. Eddy said clearly - as clearly as she could - what she meant. What Christian Scientists have done for the hundred years since is parrot and rehash those thoughts. The endless reading and studying isÉ like mass hypnosis, a means of keeping the faithful under Mrs. Eddy's spell. Christian Science is not a vivid religion, and would have stymied, say, James Joyce. Think of the fire and brimstone priest in Portrait of the Artist alongside little-smile Christian Scientists at the podium. Yet Wilson brings it to life.
Both as child and adult, Christian Science's founder Mary Baker Eddy was often sick. She left a trail of unresolved and angry disputes as she shifted between marriages and rented rooms. The religion she created "dismiss(es) the material world as unreal," and bypasses the issue of evil through simple reclassification. Evil is Mortal Mind, discussion ended.
I have two additions to Wilson's research. Eddy was influenced by Swedenborg (like the Transcendentalists) but distorted his philosophy and excised his name from Science and Health after its first edition. And while it is true that Spiritualism, a seance movement in the 1800s, collapsed when the press gleefully revealed seances were faked, much of the information Spiritualists disseminated concerned non-barbarous health care for women and children. Eddy unwittingly helped the AMA and media crush patient-centered medicine, as Anna Braude relates in her readable, scholarly Radical Spirits. One quibble. Occasionally Wilson is so immersed in the excision of memory and pain, and relating her process, she forgets the power of concise detail.
With Blue Windows, Southern California-ists can add another tome to the list of superb sense-of-place memoirs. Compare and contrast with Straight Life by saxophonist and addict Art Pepper. There's all kinds of religions and all kinds of drugs.
My mother allowed an easily treated cancer to invade her cheek over 20 years. She covered the knobby encroachment with bandaids. Even when the cancer stank, no Christian Science practitioner suggested my mother see a doctor. She did, finally; got several operations, was heartbroken her religion failed and deceived her. She was denied admittance to a Christian Science rest home because she'd had the operations. When I went to a reading room for a fact-check, I repeated my mother's story to the attendant. "Oh, yeah, well," he responded. Reading Blue Windows offered insight into my childhood, and into denial, the number one killer in America, and for that I bless Barbara Wilson.
Sarah Sarai received a 1994 Seattle Arts Commission grant in scriptwriting. She has just finished writing a novel, My History of Healing (Whatever) in America, and lives in New York City.
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