Memories of Discarded Objects
I always feel a special connection with movies about little brown boys—especially when they’re Mexican—because I see so much of myself in them. I see myself in them not so much because they are brown or little boys, but because they are part of a culture and an experience which I shared, and the physical embodiment of a little brown boy carries with it the essence of what it means to be me, and the way in which I viewed the world when I was so young, and the way I view the world now. I went downtown last week to watch the movie Bless me, Última, based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya. It’s a movie about an old woman, and the importance of healing, acceptance, and goodness. It’s also a story about what Gloria Anzaldúa calls la Frontera—the border, a part of the United States which is originally and historically and today remains culturally a part of Mexico—and about a little Mexican boy. So, in effect, it’s a story about Mexico, like my childhood. However, unlike my childhood, it’s told in English, not in Spanish.
This is something which left me feeling kind of uneasy. How can a movie about Mexico be in English? When so much of Mexican culture is tied in with Mexican languages—whether that is Huastec or Mazahua or Otomi or Spanish—how can we write a book like Anaya’s and create a movie like Bless me, Última, without it being told in that tongue? This is not the first time this question of language has been raised. A lot of discussions about literature after the colonial era, and about writers from the ‘Global South’ writing in the colonizer’s language—Albert Memmi writing in French, Ayi Kwei Armah in English, for example—focus on whether the writer can dismantle colonialism while writing in the colonizer’s language. I’m not interested here in questions about what audience they can reach, or taking down the master’s house with the master’s tools. Rather, perhaps Armah and Memmi and many other wrote in these colonizing languages because the language in which we speak is not as important in understanding who we are, and in conveying our thoughts.
Language is undoubtedly very important in shaping how we think and interact with each other. Certain things can be expressed in a language, certain emotions felt in a language, that can’t be felt in others. But when I watched Bless me, Última, so much of the person that I am was in that little brown boy, a little brown boy who spoke Enlish, not Spanish. And when I stop and think about it, I realize that I don’t remember the things people said or the language in which they said it in when I think about my childhood in Mexico. I remember the ideas of what these people said, I feel the love that they gave me in whatever language it was given to me, the education which I engaged in and not the language in which it engaged me. Now, after being outside of Mexico for as long as I was inside the country, I remember some of the things people used to say to me in my childhood in English, although they were said to me in Spanish.
This last summer, I went back to my home in Mexico after eight years. The things that I remembered were not the language people were speaking—although it did comfort me to hear the particular crispness of Mexican Spanish. Instead, when I walked into the house, I remembered the sound the light switches made, the way the grass smelled outside, the snails stuck to the wall of the garden, the hardness of a pillow, the scratchiness of a blanket, the squeak of a bed, the feel of a chair. At my grandparents house, I remembered the smell of my grandfather, my grandmother’s touch, the sound of the chairs as they scraped across the clay floor. I remembered the taste of my grandmother’s cooking, and the sound of my aunt’s voice. I did not remember the language in which they talked to me. I actually needed a bit of time to become accustomed to Spanish, and to Mexican Spanish, once again.
So, when I watched Bless me, Última, the things people said were familiar. The features on Ultima’s face—Ultima is the old woman who is the healer—and her actions and her tenderness were familiar to me, despite that she spoke in a different language. Inevitably, over time, language will fade, and we’ll forget the sound of words in our mouth. Spanish, at first, felt clumsy and creaky, yet nevertheless emotive. But where I stored my ideas of what it means to be me was not in the language, but in the houses and the objects that are discarded by others. A broken old chair is imbued with a million memories that no language can carry. A certain smell can have the emotions and thoughts that a word or a phrase cannot. For me, it is where I store these memories, in these meaningless objects, these small cracks that are discarded and forgotten by others, and not how these memories were conveyed, that moves me to understand the the little brown boy, as well as the older version of that little brown boy that writes this today.
