In Love and Battle: Reflections on Ivelisse Rodriguez's Love War Stories

Abstract

In Love and Battle:Reflections on Ivelisse Rodriguez's Love War Stories Maia Gil'Adí (bio) Ivelisse Rodriguez, Love War Stories, Feminist Press, 2018. I will learn to love myself well enough to love you (whoever you are), well enough so that you will love me well enough so that we will know exactly where is the love: that it is here, between us, and growing stronger. —June Jordan, Civil Wars I. Love me love me say that you love me Rodriguez's Love War Stories is a meditation on love in all its vectors: as a site of delight, pleasure, pain, self-abnegation, danger, and fulfillment. Crucially, all stories center Latinas—and in the case of "The Summer of Nene," the queer Latino/Latinx—as they investigate their position within the larger matrixes of interpersonal relationships and the legacies of coloniality and geopolitics, especially in relation to Puerto Rico. This move is profoundly political. Since the 2016 election, women—especially women of color—have seen themselves in increasing danger, the Latinx community in the U.S. feeling the repercussions of racism, xenophobia, and jingoism. The pejorative language used by the Trump administration does not bear repeating, but I refer to it here in order to highlight how Love War Stories foregrounds the importance of loving the Afro-Latinxs and bodies usually elided from typical narratives, both in "high art" and popular culture. In many ways, Rodriguez's collection echoes Audre Lorde's 1988 rallying cry, where she argues that "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." While the seemingly trite subject of "love stories," like their sister the rom-com, might evoke in the reader a series of clichés, Rodriguez's ten stories illuminate how an investigation into the many facets of love is, actually, a profound and philosophical endeavor. Here, the Latina matters: to love and lose is a central manifestation of existence within an oppressive and racist culture that tells us we are not worthy of care. The stories of this collection, however, reflect how dealing with romantic love acts as an aperture for investigating the self, our relationship to our race, nation, and hemispheric geopolitics, and perhaps most importantly, a reflection on familial kinships and historical trauma. Central to "Holyoke, Mass.: An Ethnography," for example, is a coffee table book, The Boys and Girls of Holyoke, depicting photographs and statements from the characters as children describing their future dreams of being doctors, nurses, and lawyers. Interlaced within this "ethnography" is another that describes the history of Holyoke as working-class American town: the paper mills of the 1850s, Irish and Polish immigration during this same time period, and Puerto Rican immigration almost a century later. Veronica, the protagonist, underscores the limitations and possibilities inherent in this type of environment. Unable [End Page 180] to project herself into a future of upward class mobility, Veronica desires to find possibility of escape in love, thinking that "the future isn't written[,]" a thought that "fills her with sadness, and just a small pocket of hope." Hope and desire runs through the entire collection, but is often undercut in poignant ways, here by foregrounding the lasting trauma of diaspora and poverty. The narrative questions Veronica's possibilities by asking if she "ever sat down and thought for just one second that perhaps love doesn't exist. Because who has she ever known that has ever been in love? Not her parents, not her neighbors, and most certainly not her friends. How is it that you can believe in something when you have never seen proof of it?" If, perhaps, hope remains unfulfilled in some of the stories of Rodriguez's collection, Love War Stories itself performs as an optimistic enterprise within the literary marketplace. Notably, her collection proves that not only is it possible to pass the Bechdel test in fiction, it is imperative to do so. The short story collection, in fact, focuses predominantly on female characters, leaving male ones to the periphery or as instruments for a female exploration of the self. Only in "The Summer of Nene" are male characters at the forefront...