Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza Michael Jimenez (bio) Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. Feminist Press, 2020. Pp. 184. Cristina Rivera Garza's book of essays Grieving opens with violence in Mexico against journalists as a context to comprehend global horrors against the bodies of the most vulnerable. In this sense, Garza's book is another study of the horror in recent Mexican history that has led to a deeper analysis of femicide. The subtitle would make Mexico the wounded country. However, Garza does not isolate violence in Mexico but looks at its global connections. She asks: "Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope" (7)? This is a personal question for Garza, who lost her younger sister to domestic violence (8–9). As she comments, "the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me" (72). The rage from this event, in light of the callous indifference and ignorance of elected officials toward our contemporary horrorism, fuels the essays of Garza's book. The forgetfulness toward violence comes with ignoring history. Garza declares: "Awake, history hungrily moves through the city streets or countryside. Sleepless jaws. History reminds us, as always, that we are mortal. That there are things left unresolved" (27). In a short poetic essay, "Horrorism," Garza builds off concrete history to espouse an "ontology of vulnerability" that does not allow [End Page 113] human beings to forget that we are beings-in-relation, charged with caring for one another (98–99). She continues this train of thought about vulnerability in an essay titled "Mourning," featuring the theoretical work of Judith Butler (135–38). The Other person can't help but change us, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, questioning the stability of the individual self in the first place. For example, it is impossible to think that Garza would be the same after losing her sister to violence. Garza points out that this is especially relevant for women's history: "It was a world founded on women's silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women—their demise—to keep functioning" (153). One way to deal with this forced silence is public mourning. The public nature of this event makes us "more vulnerable" and "more human" (138). Garza leans on the classic works on pain and horror by Elaine Scarry and Adriana Cavarero. The fact that these are not new studies reveals that the "frightening grind of femicide" has been around "for decades" (151). However, what differentiates Garza's book from others is the inclusion of literary and historical sources from Latin America. For example, one essay, "Writing in Migration: A Desedimentation with Chilean writer Lina Meruane," features a juxtaposition of Meruane's experience with Garza's (139–46). The comparison begins with both sets of grandparents and their migratory journeys; Meruane's traveled from Palestine to Chile and Garza's from Mexico to the United States. Garza utilizes this idea as a way to discuss how language, both bodily and verbal, carries over to their progeny. This is oftentimes an unconscious inheritance. Both Meruane and Garza physically return to the place of origins and attempt to retrace the steps. The closing section of this chapter has some of the best lines in the book. Here is just a sample: "There is always someone who has migrated before.… There is no tabula rasa. We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common" (146). As in the Meruane chapter, Garza's work continually circles back to Mexico, yet many essays have a global scope. In "Writing against War," Garza links the violence in Mexico with the war in Bosnia, wondering if both stories of violence will ultimately be forgotten (147–50). In addition, Garza references the people disappeared during the Cold War with special focus on the mothers of the disappeared. In short, femicide and the grief that accompany it are a worldwide problem that should not be separated by fictitious borders. On the one hand, what I find compelling about Garza's method...