La Avenida Burrard

For some reason and a body to remember with doesn't draw me in or provoke me as much as the novels by Cisneros and Alvarez. I can't quite pin-point why. However, the novel does bring up some interesting questions pertaining to nationality and national identity, the choices people make when choosing where to put their roots down, dislocation and generation gaps. Like Cisneros, who often let the reader "overhear" conversations between characters on the phone or read texts written by the characters like the little notes of prayer, Rodriguez shows communication between mother and daughter in a one-sided phone conversation and through letters. This seems to emphasize the distance between the characters because their communication is not a single body composed of two voices, but two voices in isolation, separated by a gap that is at the same time technological, geographical and emotional.

Rodriguez's stories don't come off as fragmented as those by Cisneros, but they are still quite varied in tone and content. Some present the current lives of the characters (ex. "black hole"), others relate isolated memories of nostalgic or traumatic episodes (ex. "adios piazzolla" "i sing, therefore i am") and still others tell stories that reveal the Canada or Chile experienced by the characters (ex. "saudades"). The violence of "i sing, therefore i am" was unexpected and brutal, but it reminds you why this immigration, this fork in people's lives, this book took place, due to the Pinochet dictatorship and the horror it caused for countless individuals and families. Though these people try to overcome the past so that it does not poison and cripple their current lives, it never fades completely, for as the title suggests it is not only the mind that remembers but the body.

The place imagery in the book is especially vivid for me because I've been to many of the Chilean locations as well as the Vancouver ones. I enjoyed the dream scene where "Stanley Park would show up by the ocean in Vina del Mar, or the Alameda would replace Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver." I liked how this fusion of places reminds us how the city is experienced so differently by its inhabitants, especially by immigrants, they imbue it with new meanings and make associations that others would never think of. It was interesting to hear Canada described from an immigrant's perspective, from a person that imagines Canada as a Switzerland that doesn't quite make the final cut in National Geographic, from a person who describes one of Canada's greatest shames, the residential schools and their legacy, with the sad and resigned observation that terrible treatment of Indigenous peoples is common across the Americas.

Incidentally, I just thought of another fact that, whether by chance or design, draws the course material together. Both the first and the last books we read in this course are written by women with a Spanish mother tongue who explicitly expressed their fears about writing in English - if it would be possible, legitimate, and well received. Maria Ruiz de Burton was worried that her English text would be picked apart for faults if readers knew that English was not her mother tongue and Carmen Rodriguez had to be encouraged by fellow writers to write in English, although she does not give her reasons. Despite these barriers, both felt the need to communicate with an English-speaking audience. I guess that relates to overarching questions in this course which could be who is Latino literature in the US/Canada written for, why is it written, who are considered legitimate authors and what does their language choices have to do with this?