Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative by Christina Garcia Lopez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative by Christina Garcia Lopez Danielle López Chicanx studies, indigenous spirituality, ancestral knowledge, brujeria, embodied spirituality, feminism, healing, colonialism christina garcia lopez. Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 211. Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative highlights the current counter-narrative power of Chicanx ancestral knowledge, seeking to correct the ways in which Western thought has delegitimized spirituality. Garcia Lopez engages the many Chicanx scholars who call for more [End Page 264] inclusive and grounded approaches to the study of spirituality, paying homage to authors, artists, and intellectuals already revered for their essential contributions to Chicanx literature. Audiences familiar with Chicanx literature will note the roster of influential authors such as Dr. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, and appreciate the inclusion of exciting new voices in the genre. However, Lopez does not limit the scope of her research on the decolonization of narratives to traditional academic literature; rather, she extends her discussion expansively into nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children's books, and novels, and offers revelations about how these, too, are sites for raising a critical consciousness of embodied spiritualty. The book, which also engages fields of religious studies, Indigenous studies, feminist studies, sociology, environmental studies, and philosophy, shows how all intersecting fields of knowledge can benefit from inclusive and holistic methodologies that include decolonized narratives across multiple worldviews. She urges further efforts to disrupt Western epistemologies by fully articulating ancestral and spiritual knowledge systems, to reach a deeper understanding of embodied spirituality as a tool for social change. The book presents readers with an array of frameworks of embodied spirituality in Chicanx narratives, showing how they produce liberating subjectivities. The imperative to do this work stems from a larger project of reading Chicanx literature, specifically, the active reading of the works where the spiritual is celebrated as an immersive modality of knowledge. In order to provide a context for culturally relevant modalities of knowledge that are crucial to all scholarship, Garcia Lopez urges us to witness how the works presented in the book use narratives that evoke healing spirituality to further the process of curing the mind, body, and spirit from still-existing colonial wounds. Through the analysis of characters, aesthetics, sensate experiences, and cultural nostalgia, Lopez unveils the beauty of cultural adaptation and border crossing—including crossing of borders between human and nonhuman worldviews—in narratives by Chicanx authors and people of other intersecting communities. In Chapter 1, "The Body in Trauma: Healing a Collective Susto," Garcia Lopez introduces a critical reading of Dr. Gloria E. Anzaldúa's essay "Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—La sombra y el sueño" (2002), in which the traumatic events of 9/11 are considered alongside the embodied spiritual healing ritual os susto. Anzaldúa creates an imaginatively decolonized process of healing through collective consciousness of trauma within the community of those who experienced, witnessed, and endured life forever altered by the attacks. This text is read in connection [End Page 265] to the 2004 monologue "Panza Brujeria," a part of Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga's The Panza Monologues where the force of collective healing turns the shame of the panza into a source of strength to overcome the terror caused by the trauma of the George W. Bush era. The joint context of both works supports the suggestion that the colonial wound can be remedied by making the site of the wound a space for transformative renewal in synthesis with the elements of nature. Chapter 2, "The Ritual Body: Feminism and Spiritual Inheritance," discusses domestic and interpersonal relationships presented in a specific story of ancestry that helps to reclaim the body as a site of feminist and spiritual strength. Showing how the inheritance of feminine knowledges can be worked to remedy the patriarchal wound, Garcia Lopez sets the motifs of the narrative within a ritual time-space where the patriarchy is broken up by the powerful embrace of gifts that the protagonist accepts as a priestess inheriting the abundant domestic and...