The Point of Suffering

Why should we follow Henriquez into this nightmarish underworld? Does she lead us like Virgil into Hell so that we may enter Purgatory and possibly Paradise? If Dante’s journey had stopped in Hell, his masterpiece would have taken on a distinctly sadomasochistic tone. Instead, he completes the journey to restore dignity and hope to humanity.

My own personal reaction to Henriquez’s tale was one of revulsion. I had to stop reading once it became clear to me how Maribel’s and Mayor’s romance would end. I could think of no reason to continue this dismal journey, which would never climb back out of the pit. To inflict this much pain on myself felt unholy and perverse.

In retrospect, I had to detach from the characters to stomach the plot. This robbed them of their emotional weight and reduced them to two dimensional objects, like cardboard puppets on a Punch and Judy stage. The story ceased as tragedy, and became something common and reprehensible, similar to malignant gossip.

Clearly this was not Henriquez’s intent. I am not sure just what her intent was, and I wonder if she also suffered from such ambiguity. Why else would she compromise two promising stories? It seems almost that she herself was miserable and wished to make her readers miserable.

I Would Die if I Were You

Emily Rapp Black uses this phrase for the title of her book about art and truth-telling. She explains how her own personal tragedy became the grist for creative expression. Suffering from a birth defect and undergoing amputation of her left leg as a child, she struggled with numerous fittings for a prosthesis and became the object of ridicule, and maybe worse, sympathy. Later, the early death of her son deepened her grief.

Rapp Black expands the meaning of this phrase with the following unstated postscript: Since I would die if I were you, you should be dead. This brutal logic underscores the insensitive, inept gestures of the more fortunate to offer both condolence and establish their own superiority. Such condescending attitudes only further the suffering of the victim.

The antidote to this poisonous ignorance is for the writer to present suffering with authenticity and sensitivity. Readers enter into the suffering person’s life, feel it deeply, and see with an inner eye. By contrast, authors who fail and represent trauma untruthfully violate this sacred duty. They abuse their authorial privilege.

Henriquez unwittingly commits this offense in the way she handles her characters. She does not take us into their inner lives to validate their worth as human beings, but regards them as objects of sympathy, implying that we would die if we were them, so logically they should be dead.

Ironically, this may explain the victimization of immigrants in our modern social and political climate: I would die if I were an immigrant like you, so you should be dead. All the oppression and hate towards these unfortunate outsiders follows logically.

Henriquez misses this profound insight. She could have added a powerful frame of meaning to her narrative had she realized what she was doing and made it more explicit, so that readers could see their own attitudes towards immigrants not as enlightened concern but as subtle condemnation. This would have forced readers to view something morbid in their own beliefs.

Instead, she baldly reports the murder of Arturo with minimal insight into the motives of the killer, relying perhaps upon widely held tropes of redneck hatred towards immigrants. As a result, readers can hardly believe Arturo is dead, just as Alma has trouble accepting the fact. From a dramatic and narrative standpoint, this is a huge jump, one that seems rushed and forced at the climax of the story to add shock value and promote hysteria.

Why We Write About Suffering

Rapp Black devotes a chapter in her book to this question. Why would a person choose to revisit the most painful parts of her life, the endless operations as a child and later the tragic death of her infant son from a neurological disease? The answer: to understand those events in some way, and to create meaning where none exists naturally.

Rapp Black not only serves herself and her deepest needs, but in the very act of disclosing something so primal about herself, she establishes a link with everyone else who has suffered. Readers take not a morbid fascination in the suffering of others, but instead recognize a common thread of human existence. We are somehow fundamentally similar, members of the human race, and subject to the trials of the human condition.

Henriquez aborts this bonding between writer and reader, between one victim and another, between all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or circumstance. She falls short of the deepest truth-telling that Rapp Black exhibits, treating her characters as objects for dramatic effect. She undermines our trust via her documentary format, acting more as a tabloid reporter than a sensitive and compassionate participant.

She invites the morbid fascination of those who revel in the misfortune of others, just as hungry wannabes delight in the travails of the rich and famous. She exploits the twisted motives of the more fortunate in their quest for "wokeness," people who contort their arms to pat themselves on the back for being so honest about their insensitive participation in an oppressive social structure.

Self Flagellation

Certain Medieval Christian sects would parade down village streets dressed in rags, chanting and whipping themselves. They sought to atone for the sins of all humanity by making themselves miserable. They perceived the gross injustice of their world and sought relief from realizing that they participated in the crime through punishing themselves. They purified their strong sense of judgment by sentencing everyone to Hell.

Our current ideological quagmire offers similar opportunities for self flagellation. We painfully perceive injustice but see no easy way to prevent it, and instead adopt a sense of agency for which we must be punished. This serves a complicated purpose: to avoid a feeling of impotence while at the same time reclaiming a higher moral stature.

This curious phenomenon may have motivated Henriquez to write her novel and may have fueled the book’s sales. When we experience cognitive dissonance we seek any means to ease the pain. One way is to punish ourselves by wallowing in the muck, and then treating ourselves to a hot shower. We have done our moral penance, and can now perhaps enter Purgatory.

Rapp Black proposes an alternative. Write truthfully. Connect on a fundamental level through our common experience of suffering. Treat others not as objects for derision nor as objects for sympathy, but as fellow human beings engaged in a struggle for survival, and on a quest for meaning.

Entering the Realm of Fantasy

When Henriquez ends her book with Alma and Maribel’s return to her former home in Patzcuaro, Mexico, she slips into an unreal dimension. While we may accept Alma’s heartache for home, she gives up the chance of special education for Maribel that drove her to the United States in the first place. She does not explore the possibility of finding employment to reinstate her visa, which she may have been able to do with adequate support from family, friends and neighbors. After all, Alma is a good cook of authentic Mexican food.

Instead Alma dreams of flying her husband’s body back to Mexico so she can bury him in the Panteon Municipal and celebrate his life / death on el Dia de Muertos, preparing pan de muerto and calabaza en tacha for him to eat in his new spirit existance. While Alma may believe in this logic, Henriquez cannot expect her readers to follow. Yet the author forces the dream by having the neighbors chip into a fund, accumulating the astonishing $5000 necessary to realize this fantasy. All of this is even more incredible given the bleak financial environment of 2008-2009, when people of all types lost their jobs, homes, and faith in the American Dream.

Henriquez employs her magic wand one more time on the trip back to Mexico. She abruptly restores Maribel to her former self. This transformation defies the psychological momentum of Maribel’s regression after being separated from Mayor the first time, and yet again from both him and her father, post-climax. There is no coherent chain of mental development from that state of decline to the miraculous return of the once-vivacious girl.