Do Women Exist? Feminicidios, Literature, and Erasure

You've probably heard about the Juárez murders.  In the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, over 400 young women have been abducted and killed since 1993.  They are usually young and single, often overworked and underpaid employees of the maquiladoras (the foreign-owned factories in the city), and their often raped, often tortured, often mutilated bodies are found in the desert where they've been tossed. 

The lack of police and governmental response has become an international scandal.  The governor of the state of Chihuahua once suggested that the victims were probably prostitutes and then offered the blasé suggestion that women carry whistles and their car keys to protect themselves--clearly out of touch with the fact that the targeted women were financially unable to own cars.  Most were between the ages of 12 and 22.

In protest, numerous activists, artists, and writers have responded, like the feminist collective Malaleche, like creative writers Alicia Gaspar de Alba with her novel Desert Blood:  The Juárez Murders and poet Marjorie Agosín with Secrets in the Sand:  The Young Women of Juárez, and journalists like Diana Washington Valdez with The Killing Fields:  The Harvest of Women, Teresa Rodriguez with her book The Daughters of Juárez:  A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border,  and Stephanie Elizondo Griest with a chapter of Mexican Enough. 

You might remember Bordertown, the 2006 movie for which Jennifer Lopez was awarded the Artists for Amnesty prize at the Berlin Film Festival by Amnesty International--and for which director Gregory Nava received death threats during production in Juárez.  Several documentaries have also been made about the murders, including Lourdes Portillo's Señorita Extraviada, Lorena Mendez's Border Echoes, and Alex Flores and Lorena Vassolo's Juárez.

Is it a coincidence that most of the work on the murders comes from Latinas?  I'll go out on a limb here and say it's not.

The government and police have responded to international pressure and exposure, but the murders remain unsolved.  The murders continue. 

Turns out, deceased literary darling Roberto Bolaño, as we learn on the front page of today's New York Times Book Review, "s[a]nk the capital of his great book," an 898-page tome titled 2666, into the murdered Mexican girls and women as well. 

Reviewer Jonathan Lethem, whose review of the novel is comparably long--it covers the front page, page 10, and page 11 and opens with a yawningly lengthy description of a Philip K. Dick story--praises Bolaño's weighty achievement.  (We begin to hear about the book itself in the third column of page 10, if you decide to read the review and want to skip ahead.) 

He praises the book effusively:  it's a "master statement," a "supreme capstone" for Bolaño's "vaulting ambition."  The review ends giddily:  "Now throw your hats in the air." 

Personally and generally speaking, I'm always a little skeptical when I see the word master used as a positive term, and I was sorry to see that Lethem sees the world as "increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national," when I, a dreamy post-nationalist, find the concept of a future WU liberating, beautiful, and exciting, not threatening.  (Okay, so it's utopian.  So I can dream.) 

But what struck me about the review were Lethem's literary touchstones.  Bolaño, he claims,
 

stand[s] in relation to the generation of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes as, say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike, and Roth.

Hmm.  I started to get a familiar feeling.  Lethem goes on.  We get a "Lovecraftian shadow."  We learn that Bolaño includes
 

digressive outbursts of lyricism as piercing as the disjunctions of Denis Johnson, David Goodis or, yes, Philip K. Dick, as well as the filmmaker David Lynch.

The book is "[i]n the manner of James Ellroy," and contains "the greatest ranting monologue this side of Don DeLillo's Lenny Bruce routines in Underworld."  Its "nearest comparison may be to Haruki Murakami's shattering fugue on Japanese military atrocities in Mongolia." 

Really? 

At one point in the review, Lethem takes a moment to critique "our" (our?) "deplorably sporadic appetite for international writing," so I suppose Murakami et al. are his compensatory gestures on that score.  (We also get a couple of nods to Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the painter who did those fruit-and-veggie faces.)

But I found myself wondering where the women were.  Does Lethem read any?  Which?  Does none of them do anything stupendous enough to use as a point of comparison in an encomium?  Does none of them "sound[ ] the moral depths" of "verifiable tragedy and injustice"?

It's weird to me that Bolaño anchors his 898-page novel (two dull rants by male characters of which Lethem quotes at breathlessly admiring length) with a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez.  Bolaño's work is serious:  it's about dead women. 

And it's weird to me that Lethem doffs his hat to that dead-women seriousness while never tipping it to the women writers of our time (or any time). 

The spatial privileging is weird to me, too:  Lethem on Bolaño got the front page, folks, and he got a huge word count for his thoughts.  Somebody decided that.  Oh, the bigness.

After sharing my concerns with a friend about the way Lethem went about his review, I sighed and said, "Well, but I'm sure it's a great novel, though."

She drew me up short.  "See, that's the difference," she said.  "We say, 'I'm sure it's a great novel.'  We give them the benefit of the doubt.  But when a book by a woman of color comes out and it gets a lot of attention, do you think they say, 'Well, I'm sure it's a great book, though'?" 

Or do they say, Well, we all know why she won that prize/received that award/got that position?

You know, I don't want to be cynical.  But I read these creamy reviews of male authors or rhapsodic eulogies for male authors, and they feel like a boys' club.  The culture-makers that write them rewrite a world, a context, in which no women writers or artists exist.  When they look up at night, the constellations are all male.

And I start to wonder if the literary achievements of women--despite decades of feminist criticism and scads of ardent readers--aren't metaphorically just lying out there in the desert, waiting for someone besides us to care.