One Good Reason

Abstract

American Religion 1, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 150–151 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.09 One Good Reason for G. R.-O., 1942–2004 Elizabeth Pérez because the soap was dirty because the water was dry because the only penises you ever saw belonged to relatives because your childhood home was haunted by the holy ghost because, although born with a clitoris, you were raised as a girl because “public toilet” was a contradiction in terms because you grasped this immediately because, after watching a vampire movie, you disappeared from mirrors because, no matter what the Bible says, substance resists translation into language because your American social security number had no recurring digits because, at the end of the day, there is no such thing as the perfect Cuban sandwich because your shopping carts never had more than three functioning wheels because it was impossible to mail letters with food stamps because once, reading “jaguar” in Borges, you thought of the car, not the animal because you loved us Elizabeth Perez 151 There is no argument here, about dis/ability, gender/sexuality, purity/danger, precarity, immigration, media, cuisine, citizenship, capitalism, Latinidad—and least of all religion. Born in Guantánamo, my aunt died alone in Miami, leaving a modest library, a souvenir scarf from her pilgrimage to the Virgin of Montserrat, and a statue of Santa Bárbara shattered at the wrist (with Scotch tape propping her goblet upright). In high school, I borrowed G. R.-O.’s prized anthology of English literature and defaced the title page with Virginia Woolf’s words in hot pink letters: Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? When we recovered the book after her death, a second inscription had appeared beneath the first, in midnight cursive. “Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” ...