Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse - Softcover

Castillo, Ana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931896208 ISBN 13: 9781931896207

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 2005

Synopsis

2006 Independent Publisher Book Award for Story Teller of the Year Winner

Watercolor Women / Opaque Men is a wild and raucous narrative of a single, working mother, the daughter of Chicano migrant workers, and her struggles for upward mobility. With a remarkable combination of tenderness, wicked humor, and biting satire, the main character, Ella-or "She"-moves toward establishing her sexual identity (she has affairs with both men and women) and finding her rightful place in the world while simultaneously raising her son to be independent and self-sufficient.

Reminiscent of the picaresque novel, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men contains episodes that range from the Mexican Revolution to modern-day Chicago and reflects a deep pride in Chicano culture and the hardships immigrants had to endure: "In my familia we don't / pretend. / We're not / Mixed blood. There are no buried / Spanish titles beneath /anyone's tombstone." Nor does Castillo tolerate the pretensions of others. Pomposity, arrogance, and narrow-mindedness are the targets of her satiric pen.

In a strong rhythmic and colloquial voice, Castillo explores these issues of love, sexual orientation, and cultural identity, taking to heart the words of Mama Grande: "You will always be your most reliable resource."

About this title

About the Author:

 

Ana Castillo is indisputably one of the most important Chicana authors writing today.  She has written 17 books, the most noted being Peel My Love like an Onion and So Far from God. Born in Chicago of working-class parents, she went on to earn a PhD in American studies at the University of Chicago. Both as a journalist and literary author, she has been a major force in the struggle for economic justice, women's rights, and civil liberties. She has also won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award. At present, she lives in Anthony, New Mexico.

From The Washington Post:

It's a bold or a foolish decision to write a novel in verse. Few enough people pick up novels; fewer still read poetry in any form. Combine the two, and you risk sacrificing the propulsive possibilities of narrative prose to the elliptical insights of verse. Who'd trade a robust narrative and well-fleshed-out characters for a handful of lyrical moments?

You don't really have to in Watercolor Women/Opaque Men, Ana Castillo's new novel in verse, although its hybrid literary form tries to contain more multitudes -- of characters, historical and mythological episodes and socio-political commentary -- than it has room for. Like Castillo's previous books, Peel My Love Like an Onion and So Far From God, this one centers on the lives and loves of Latino women -- in this case one woman, the archetypal Ella. She was born to Mexican workers who came to the United States for "la pizca" -- "the picking they did/ season after season" in the growing fields that, for people like them, have also been killing fields.

Castillo writes feelingly of those who work themselves to death, the children like Ella forced to toil alongside their too-soon-old parents:

Forget

The sun that caused fevers,
blistered lips and feet,
made you see spots for years after,

Forget
the beans we had for supper again,
the last baby that died soon after birth,

The tío suffering of tuberculosis
when each morning he rose with the rest, coughing, coughing.

Ella doesn't forget, though. She doesn't forget her parents, happy together in their short, hard lives. She doesn't forget her great-grandmother, Mama Grande, and her tales of the Mexican Revolution:

"I made my living in a saloon after that.
We danced with the Federales,
Los Carranzistas, Villistas, Colorados.

"We danced with Zapatistas,
Ay, you know, hija?
It didn't matter."

Ella discovers, however, that it -- your politics, your sexual orientation, the color of your skin -- does matter in a world where "Righteous White Boyz" take brown-skinned lovers because "they loved the idea of la otra -- / dark woman as primal symbol of true courage/ and indomitable strength."

Ella runs away from fields and family. She marries young, has a kid, has an affair with a woman, leaves her husband, has other affairs with men and women, supports herself and her son cleaning offices and doing whatever else she has to do. These episodes play out, each episode recalled or evoked, in three-line stanzas that land like perfect little revelations of truth -- "You can forget everything/ about your life/ when you ride the train" -- or wander off into thickets of myth that leave the reader peering around for some sort of authorial direction back to the story:

She fits now and belongs to nowhere --
ella, who the devil left for dead.
She and I sleep together,
Whether on sacks of wheat or a proper bed.
We sleep the sleep of Xochiquetzal
in Tamoanchan

Who is all flowers and song,
and dreams of her Rain God.
Tlaloc, furiously calling.

Aztec gods, got it -- now where?

Despite Ella's understandable rage at those "Righteous White Boyz" who see in her an archetype of primal strength, she (or her creator) feels free to indulge in stereotypes of her own. The white lovers she takes are far from opaque: They're transparent caricatures (patronizing, uptight, ashamed), while the Mexican Indian amor shines as a model of humble, earthy virtue and devotion. And the political asides about the plight of migrant workers and the heartlessness of American life feel just as stale as they are true, although in these times certain truths about power and oppression bear repeating. Ella herself is a pillar of strength, a -- to use a word that now feels as old as any Aztec god but far less interesting -- survivor. She may paint in watercolor -- one of the references embedded in the book's title -- but she's not going to wash away. Still, it's hard to see Ella sometimes behind those three-line stanzas, and hard not to wonder whether she'd have been less of a watercolor if she came to us via prose. Is the obliquity of verse Castillo's attempt to recreate in words the experience of being brown-skinned in a culture that makes too many assumptions about identity without bothering to find out about the person under the skin? Maybe, but that explanation feels too neat. As it is, Ella remains something of a mystery, even to her own son.

That relationship is one Castillo does full justice to:

But this woman --
they had met head to head
when he was twelve.

Then he passed her right up
like a bamboo shoot
on a damp summer day.

She didn't care.
She stuck her finger high
in the air, right in his face,

The other hand at the waist.
They could be anywhere
and she'd give him

That stare,
that he read as a warning equivalent to the sign in front of a nuclear power plant.

Only she
could do that to him.

And that's as true an experience of mothers and children as you'll find anywhere, brown or white, in verse or in prose.

Reviewed by Jennifer Howard
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1931896208
• ISBN 13: 9781931896207
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160