Eat The Mouth That Feeds You

Eat The Mouth That Feeds You. Carribean Fragoga. City Lights Books

Carribean Fragoga’s debut collection of ten short stories, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, can take the reader by pleasant surprise as their author, who presents herself as “a passionate writer, journalist and artist,” on her website, deftly wields irony, imbues fantasy into a tough reality, and amplifies women’s voice. This slim but dense volume of fine prose introduces Fragosa’s Macondo, South El Monte in San Gabriel Valley, California, into Chicana literature. The author, who majored in Chicana/o studies, affectionately describes the place that fed to her imagination, in an interview to Hector Tobar, as a working class, industrial, primarily Mexican, multi-ethnic suburb. In the collection, South El Monte, clearly identified in one of the stories, “Sabado Gigante,” which denounces a corrupt TV presenter and his show through the audience’s rebellion, appears as a place where violence, lawlessness and corruption reign. It is also the place in which women are determined to survive where the personal destiny subtly intersects with the collective.

“Mysterious Bodies,” a story about abortion is a good case in point. Against a background of drug trafficking, it describes the experience of an unwanted pregnancy by a young couple. In this highly ironic narrative, a pharmacy employee and DIY trafficker in stimulants and depressants who caters to local youth and delinquents of any sort discovers the abortive qualities of a downer and sells it to the couple whose quotidian is cleft by this powerful drama. The mystery of the new life, and of life in general, is intimated through the transformation of Angelica’s body by the new growth from the moment the cluster of dividing cells moves to line up the uterus. The narrative conveys the terror of being invisibly invaded by this unsought-for mystery, “their angry hunger could not be appeased and they continued to spread and mount, bursting into voracious mollusks, clams and barnacles that gnawed incessantly at her throbbing meat” (43). If Angelica’s helplessness has a visceral dimension, Eduard’s terror is external and embodied by Angelica’s father “a terrible giant ranchero with blond hair, spewing furious foam at the mouth as he approached him with merciless brutality” (48).

Nevertheless, Eduard’s experience is also endowed with a metaphysical streak as he pictures how he will be crushed by another mystery, whose symbols are worn by Angelica’s father, “on that mystical screen Eduard saw two monstrous gold chains descending over his head. First he saw a breathtaking medallion of the Virgencita de Guadalupe, with her lovely little merciful face (…) and just as he began to feel a sense of comfort and relief, a tremendous crucifix interrupted his peace, with razor thorns finely carved into the agonized face of Christ” (49). In this context of unforgiving patriarchy reinforced by religion, the Virgin Mary’s sight which evokes the Lady of Guadalupe’s four apparitions, is permeated with irony. Another powerful instance of irony in the story is related to Eduard’s experience of the loss of another baby, a baby iguana he loves the most among the reptiles he breeds for his job but has to separate from to obtain the abortion-inducing pills, “He petted the sleepy reptile affectionately with his finger, nudged its tiny snout with his lip before handing it over to Alex with the money. ‘Take good care of my baby,’ he said.” (49). Interestingly, the story could be used in abortion debates by the two sides, pro-choice or pro-life. The narrative is crowned by the very moments this medical abortion occurs when the lining of the womb breaks down and the pregnancy is terminated, and is marked by violence, ambivalence and ambiguity, as these Nirvana-inducing pills finally produce the desired effect in fear and trembling, pain and ultimately relief, “Her skull cracked, her cranium was splitting, pulled into a knowing void, a relentless hole, an unquestionable core, a wonderful exhalation” (50).

The cannibalistic quality that characterizes “Mysterious Bodies,” is more prominent in the title story which features a visceral relation between a mother and a daughter recounted by the mother.

The daughter starts by eating clay, a tradition in Mexico, but then turns to family letters which she devours while drinking ink but not finding the answers she is looking for she finally eats up the mother in small bites. This act leads the mother, spurred now by the same need to look for answers, to the fantasy of eating her own mother. The story, a forceful foray into the nature of maternal/filial love, or simply love, could be read as an allegory of writing as the mother wonders whether all this paper would “spell out beautiful poems or complicated songs, the kind you never want to end” (38). In fact, orality in this enigmatic story strongly conjuring up the life and death drives, brings in Freudian and Kleinian concepts such as introjection and incorporation. It can certainly delight psychoanalysis-savvy readers, and may finally evoke the cannibalistic nature of writing.

The female body is also brought under narrative scrutiny in “Ini y Fati,” another fantastical story that relates a quaint friendship between two children, Fati, a mistreated, helpless girl, and a child saint, two-centuries-old Ini, who had been stabbed to death by her father. The child martyr saves Fati from a lightning bolt, and takes her under her wing because “she saw a version of herself” in the helpless girl (87). She amazes Fati with miracles and astounds her with her suggestion “to do away with God” and “the all-powerful fathers” (96) thus making her aware of the paternal violence in her own home, “she remembered all those times she was sure he’d kill her mother” (91). Ini’s mission to save women from their own self-defeating desperation, “Desperation: She knew how it could drop women to their feet, drop them dead even” (92), seems to find fertile ground in Fati’s mind. In the enigmatic ending, Fati cradles in her arm “the doll that had been made in” Ini’s “likeness” (86) and sings a lullaby to her under the all-soaking rain.

Male violence and female response to it are also the theme in “Tortillas Burning.” The female first-person narrator abandons her abusive husband and runs with her baby son for their life thus finding herself destitute. Just like the rest of the stories, “Tortillas Burning” is steeped in Mexican culture and tradition. It is this culture and tradition that the character may use to survive. The emblematic title takes its full meaning at the ending when the narrator in her flight leaves behind the tortillas burning, which reminds her of her grandmother’s advice, recounted at the beginning of the story, on how to use a tortilla to keep clean if she loses everything.

Likewise, the first story in the collection, “Lumberjack Mom,” tackles the issue of the attachment to the past signified by the lime tree whose seeds were “lovingly” smuggled in the US by a family of Mexican immigrants and planted in their new home. A symbol of their double roots, the tree appears as the locus of love and union smoothly transplanted in the new ground, “Together, we watched the tree grow” (3), and gradually reflects the family’s crises. When the father finally goes and the family falls apart, the tree is chopped down and uprooted by the mother and abandoned wife whose unleased anger is first directed at ferocious gardening and then at chopping down old furniture. As her children fail to turn her into a lumberjack and divert her anger away from the house, she finally acts out her destructive desire and tears down the lime tree in a fit of uncontrollable agony and wrath, “Without breathing, we watched our mother drop the ax over the bed of thorns and grip the trunk’s limp fiber with both hands. She wrenched it free with one long grunt that became a scream at the end” (13). The pathos in the depiction of the character’s disarray evokes a modern Medea who spares her children but destroys what they hold most dear, the tree they cherish, symbol of their double roots and full life.

It is certainly women’s experience that is at the center of the collection and more particularly the way they relate to each other, which is not necessarily peaceful and harmonious but marked a strong kinship. Both “The Vicious Ladies,” and “Crystal Palace” lead to a final epiphany which is built on women’s unique interaction. It is also a female narrator who as the witness of her own death watches her body move and disintegrate in the closing story, “Me Muero.” As the author states in the above-mentioned interview reminding the reader of the universals, “There is no escape from the imagery of death.”

Eat the Mouth That Feeds You will particularly appeal to scholars of women’s studies, Chicana/o studies, transcultural studies, but also to the general reader for whom literature is still a way to relate to the world.

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