“내 상처에 네 손을 넣어라”: 체리에 모라가의 Heroes and Saints가 말하는 몸 없는 물질성

Abstract

With the playwright’s proses that energetically emphasize the recovery and redefining of Chicanx identities and motherland, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints usually has been interpreted as a play that represents political and religious possibilities enabled by bodiless Chicana divinity. Cerezita Valle, the play’s heroine who does not have a body under her neck due to prenatal pesticide poisoning, transfigures herself as La Virgen de Guadalupe in order to purge the polluted Madre Tierra(mother-land) and exhort the people of San Joaquin Valley to form joint confrontation. Her absent body, a powerful symbol representing Madre Tierra, expands boundlessly and works as a useful vehicle for delivering urgent political messages, incorporating diverse and divergent Chicanx communities. This article concurs with the previous studies that read Cerezita’s bodiless body as a Chicanx hero-saint who represents the encompassing and caring mother-land required by mestizas living in a world polluted by pesticides and global capitalism. However, this article also argues that Cerezita’s body cannot be read only as an immaterial symbol. Cerezita is a complicated figure which reformulates various dichotomies: political hero and religious icon, Virgin Mary and La Malinche, and ethereality and corporeality. Moraga transfigures Cerezita into La Virgen de Guadalupe with a heavy price; the playwright highlights that Cerezita yearns for female sexuality and desire, thus making it clear that the heroine should be reduced to a religious/political icon only when she painfully abandons her disabled physical corporeality. Nevertheless, by doing so, the play makes the audiences recognize Cerezita’s bodily materiality on stage that cannot be seamlessly packed up into compelling metaphors. The bipolar, ambivalent vibration of the heroine illuminates the possibility of imagining the concrete and the indefinite simultaneously, suggesting the countermeasure against and the ethical representation of the prevalent ‘slow violence’ of the global environmental crisis.