If I know one thing from reading Sandra Cisneros's pristine "The House On Mango Street", and now "Woman Hollering Creek", I know that she is a writer whose combination of stream-of-consciousness prose and Latina feminine (and at times, feminist) subject manner are impervious to easy absoprtion. Some episodes stick out more than others, but you know the ones you barely remember somehow played a role in refining or putting into context the more meaningful segments of work. So it is, with "Woman Hollering Creek", a book it took me just a few reading sessions to take in, a quarter of the short stories/episodes/monologues can I recount with any accuracy, however, knowing that there is a whole there that is completely fragile and withering with every word I write about it.
It bears mentioning that "Woman Hollering Creek" is a much more adult story than Cisneros's most popular and widely-read "The House On Mango Street", a teen coming-of-age story accessible to multiple crowds (is, in no way, strictly a teen book). The stories of childhood contained in the first two sections ("My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn" and "One Holy Night") take a sometimes-nostalgic, sometimes-brutal look at the pre-adolescent and adolescent perspective on life (and the limitations for a younger person) and love (for the budding woman), but only, it seems, with the way this book is organized, to put the heart-busting let-downs of adult love into context of what was. And they only make up 1/4 of the book, leaving us to "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman", the tales of grown love, fractured and unforgiving.
The most striking of the stories in the latter third of the book are the ones who feign love story writing in search of something more revelatory. The story that bears the collection's title, "Woman Hollering Creek", takes a simple enough premise of a woman loving a man, dropping everything to join the man, only to see time expose him, as she is abused, emotionally and physically, and put in a situation of poverty and sadness. The story lacks the conceptual innovation of some of Cisneros's most interesting episodes, but she can get away with it because of the authenticity she writes with. She paints the soul with words, and she paints it in settings and contexts she knows intimately (or, at minimum, the state of humanity she knows intimately). She takes places we've never been to, such as the creek the story is named for, and makes it dramatic, piercing, and we see it parallel the mayhem this woman in the story has been through. Then, when she does sew together an anthology of prayers written for a variety of reasons ("Little Miracles, Kept Promises") with the wishes of a young non-conformist who seemingly brings the author to such amazing revelations in the progression of possibilities for the young minority woman (while also beckoning some understanding for the traditions of the past), the stories begin to lean on each other. Where one woman falls, another realizes her potential.
But mostly, the stories lean on each other in their sense of survival and loss and loneliness. Where "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman" is a snippet of two people scared of their own voices, destined to never meet, is a picture-perfect scene of profound aloneness, "Eyes of Zapata" -- though the piece that drags and lulls in a wallow of self-pity for the narrating lost lover of the popular/infamous Mexican revolutionary, and the least memorable story of the lot -- is such loneliness from someone you knew too well. The shorter bits such as "Bread" and "Los Boxers" provide sweet and bitter interludes between the more major stories, and if the longer stories leave you off with more severe emotional reactions, the little bits and pieces between are shots straight to the cardiac. As a whole, you are left feeling quite fulfilled, especially with the extraordinary "Bien Pretty" going from stinging story of the artist paving her own path and having her love unexpectadly jet for Mexico in the midst of her uncertainty as to the direction of their relationship, to coming with a fierece resolve to live the fuck out of life, no matter what. A sentiment that will break you down and fill you up with flames, if you're open.
Then again, Cisneros's work demands you're open. Open to its beauty, and to the salt it throws in wounds, demanding you feel and feel strong. You may not absorb it completely and wholly in a completely literate sense, like you won't remember every single line, or the creepy man's name in "One Holy Night", but you better remember to feel. Dream, be agitated, love, be motivated. Whatever you feel.
"We're going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live."
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