“The iliac crest. From there, from Ilion, from her crest, Odysseus departed on his return to Ithaca after the war,” Cristina Rivera Garza’s narrator muses at the end of her novel, which was recently translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker. Odysseus’ epic journey sits at the dawn of a narrative tradition plotted over centuries from that immemorial land of Ilion – or Troy – in a story which begins and ends with the conflicts and concerns of men. As she launches her own narrative quest from a different iliac crest, Garza also charts a history built on a masculine regime of language, and its writing and unwriting of experience.
The Iliac Crest opens at the nameless narrator’s “lost house by the sea”, where he is visited by a woman who claims to be the real-life Mexican author Amparo Dávila, and an ex-lover who he christens “the Betrayed”. The two women occupy his home, filling it with the exclusivity of their feminine bond, with the secret language which our protagonist “[can]not infiltrate”. Things continue in this strange fashion until the certainties constructed by several chapters of “I suppose this is something that men will understand,” and “We hope that the women believe it,” and “I am a man who is frequently misunderstood” abruptly unravel. The narrator has laid down careful and repeated markers of his manhood, his distance and difference from the female sex, but then Amparo Dávila appears “surreptitiously” one night, “crawl[s] catlike” towards him as in a dream, and announces: “I know your secret […] I know you are a woman.”
From this point on, his identity loses its firm contours, his being spills out into unmapped territory, reaching towards a deeply buried womanhood which fills him with “fear”. Having spent its first pages establishing strong boundaries between its men and its women, the novel then sets about rendering its dichotomies fluid and uncanny. And at the same time as she interrogates divisions between gender, Garza considers more physical boundaries between lands and peoples. She herself has lived between Mexico and the United States for much of her life, and writes in her author’s note that: “Borders are a subtle but pervasive force in this book”. These are borders which erase the Other, enabling the narrator to half forget the “spectral groups of migrants chained by their ankles on the road to nowhere,” questioning: “Did I really see the body parts washed up on the shore?” as if, even in their visceral physicality, they were never really there.
These shadowy “migrant” figures haunt The Iliac Crest’s pages without ever managing to secure its full attention, and the same dissociating inexactitude is employed with the novel’s female characters. Our narrator gradually blends the identities of the woman, referring to them as “the Invaders” and thus discarding the distinction of their names for the approximation of a common noun. The selves behind the label become vague, their voices muffled and imprecise.
It is in this way that Garza so masterfully probes language’s simultaneous construction and deconstruction of experience, continually posing the question: do these words lead us to understanding, or away from it?
After Amparo Dávila calls him a woman, our protagonist looks desperately at himself in the mirror and “ha[s] to move several times to see my reflection move in unison to convince myself it was really me. I touched my sex and, with evident relief, confirmed my penis and testicles were still in place.” The ‘evident’ nature of his relief suggests that he is searching his own reflection for the emotions he should feel innately, scouring the face before him for the person that is slowly peeling away from his ‘I’. In these passages, Garza interrogates the idea that language is at the root of identity, the force which both reveals people and makes them disappear. And this erasure is specifically, repeatedly targeted at women. On first meeting Amparo Dávila, the narrator admits that “I noticed her hip bone […] the name of which I could not recall’ and reaches the end of the novel before eventually remembering its title – ‘ilium’ – and that ‘the pelvis is the most definitive area to determine the sex of an individual.” Throughout the narrative, this hip bone, this defining, palpable indicator of her womanhood, goes without a name, is deprived of defined linguistic markers and is thus unimagined by the text.
When the protagonist goes in search of the ‘true’ Amparo Dávila, she warns him that: “We need certain words to fathom what we are. If those words are taken from us, as they have been, we’d only spit out lies.” Words, whose meanings have been shaped by centuries of patriarchal control, tend to dictate and contain expression, diminishing female experiences just as they claim to elucidate them. There is no better example of this than the real-life Amparo Dávila, a writer whose stories of female protagonists surrounded by insanity, danger and death began to be published in the 1950s, but whose body of work was largely eclipsed by the male authors of the age.
But, as Garza writes in her author’s note: “When disappearing becomes an epidemic, especially among women, this book reminds readers that there is always a trace left: a manuscript, a footprint, a dent, an echo worthy of our full attention”. And it is in its unspooling of the historic, patriarchal monoliths of linguistic meaning that The Iliac Crest argues so beautifully for the stories which fall into the unseen spaces of our literary canon.
Words by Emma Morgan
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