Hello, Project Novocaine!
A few days ago, I was perusing the Albuquerque Museum, walking through the exhibit dedicated to La Malinche and talking about our Mexican heritage with my Tía Letty. There is so much I am desperate to know about Mexico, land of my ancestors, including the languages: Nestled on my bookcase is an introductory grammar and small pocket dictionary of Nahuatl.
But the trip to the museum was a fateful one, and I soaked up all the art on La Malinche herself. Her story is a complex one in Mexico. Was she a traitor or a survivor? Questions and attempts to reclaim her story swirl about and smear throughout history, from novels to textbooks to statues that dredge up controversy. Some of the artwork in the exhibit branded her a whore, a woman purring at the knee of the conquistadors. Mother of mestizas or weapon of downfall in favor of colonialism? It is a big question, and I confess that at present, I am still in my nascent stage of research on this figure. My opinions are inchoate.
For a long time, I have had a book in my head.
The story concerns the human personification of war coming to Spain to inflict bloody civil strife on the country and the world at large (after all, the Spanish Civil War was referred to as the “dress rehearsal” of World War II). In my imaginings, his wife was a meek and timid woman, but this has all changed with an assignment for my fiction workshop course. In the assignment, we were to take a passage of writing and switch the point of view. I had a paragraph or two of scribblings of the book, and, working with that, I moved the passage from its native first person to the second person.
What I found was what I needed to know about this character, this wife of war. I read the first person and second person passages to my classmates, who all agreed that the second felt more accusatory, as though the woman being referenced by this ghostly chorus of You had done something damaging. My classmates were correct, of course, but at that moment, I realized that this meek and timid woman was not so, that she was a 1930s La Malinche herself. Bride of colonialism? Bride of war.
I have to say, it opened up the possibilities for this story, for whatever it is I want to portray, and I am calling the story by its code name for now, Project Novocaine (in honor of the fact that tonight I shall be getting an injection of novocaine to uproot a cavity). I have set aside a flower journal and my favorite Sharpie roller pens to work on this piece, beginning today, sitting in the late summer sun, sipping my tea.
La Malinche’s exhibit is no longer at the Albuquerque Museum, or else I would cruise over there with a journal. The conversations I had with Tía Letty remain with me. Upon seeing young girls dressed in Day of the Dead makeup and dresses, the two of us confessed to one another that there is so much we need to know about our homeland.
In third grade, my elementary school hosted a day wherein students were to wear clothes from their heritage. Kailee and I wore Mexican dresses and sombreros topped our heads. I do recall going to school as proud as could be, for, as someone who was severed from the Spanish language by circumstances growing up, I have often felt that I must fight for my love of my ancestry. Tía Letty has been helping me with my Spanish. I am not sure yet how to thank her. This is part of life, and it does make me thrilled to learn more.
La Malinche. Project Novocaine. It all begins today.
