CODING COERCION

The domestic violence in Mango Street labors with the threatened and actual child sexual abuse in the selections cited here, as well as with the scenes dependent upon themes of racism, disappointment, and loss. Renato Rosaldo refers, in the opening of his "Fables of the Fallen Guy," to Esperanza's assertion that "the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong" (Rosaldo 84). Rosaldo notes that Esperanza, "as if along a line of free associations" (85) links herself to her great-grandmother, as they were both born in the Chinese year of the horse; Rosaldo interprets this to mean that "Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis from a presumed rider, the horse woman, to the beast itself, a wild horse of a woman" (ibid.). While this is rather pleasing imagery of strength and self-determination, it focuses on the equestrian symbolism, rather than that of the constrictive gender roles adduced by Esperanza. To clarify this point, there is the epigraph to the second section of her poetry collection My Wicked Wicked Ways, in which Cisneros quotes a salient line from Maxine Hong Kingston: "Isn't a bad girl almost like a boy?"

And a boy is, in traditional Chicano/Mechicano culture, autonomous. The most compelling emblem of both Esperanza's connectedness and autonomy is, therefore, situated in her continuing affirmations that she will write, that she will become an author. The cycle ends with the vignette "Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes." Here, the growing Esperanza asserts: "I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head. . . I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoes take. I say, 'And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked" (109). Yet, while telling "a story about a girl who didn't want to belong," Esperanza finds that the telling, itself, is liberating: "I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free" (109-110). The release to her own autonomy does not, however, signal the end to her connectedness to who and where she has been. The final lines of the book are:

Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?
They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out. (110)

The emblem of story-telling figures strongly in the recuperative phases of Alma Villanueva's poem cycle "Mother, May I?" (1978). In the early poems, however, as in "Part I, 'The Dead'," the figure of the female child in sexual molestation is drawn from the perspective of the young girl, in tones by turn angry and muted:

-- I'd been showing
off that day, twirling in circles
pretending
I was kidnapped from a king
and queen
pretending
I was rich
because my dress was so beautiful.

he put me down.
he took off my dress.
he took off my t-shirt.
he took off my panties.
and then he said
-do you want to suck something
good?-
and I thought it must be bad.
it must be licorice because
I hate it because
he hates me and
he wants me to eat
something bad and maybe
if I eat something bad
he'll let me go. so I said
-o.k.-
he put it in my mouth
and it didn't taste like anything.
it hurt my mouth but I
wouldn't cry and then
he made me lie down
and the stickers hurt
and I was getting all dirty
and I knew if I cried
he'd kill me. then
he put his fingers
there
and it hurt
and I almost screamed
but I didn't because I knew
he'd kill me. and
he touched me all over
and I lay there
and I didn't cry.
and I knew he could kill me if
he wanted to.
and I didn't care anymore.
he said
-if I let you go, do you
promise not to tell
anyone? because
if you do
I'll kill you.-
I didn't care.
I just said
-I promise.-
And when he let me go I didn't run
I walked.
and when my aunt saw me she said
Peggy told her and the police were
finding me and I told her
-I always have to do the dirty
work.-
and I didn't cry.

it was then I decided to become a boy. (312-13)

The figure of the appendage or accouterment that holds a particular fascination for males occurs frequently in texts utilizing the point-of-view of a child character who has been sexually violated: here, the dress is deemed to have first attracted the attention of the rapist, just as the shoes in Cisneros' "The Family of Little Feet" are understood to be instruments of female sexuality. Too, there is the familiar echo here of the punitive consequences for feminine attractiveness: the speaker moves directly from a certain rapture with her own sense of loveliness, to a rapid, yet detached, account of the sexual assault.

Trauma scholar Judith Lewis Herman notes that:

The child entrapped in this kind of horror develops the belief that she is somehow responsible for the crimes of her abusers. Simply by virtue of her existence on earth, she believes that she has driven the most powerful people in her world to do terrible things. Surely, then, her nature must be purely evil. The language of the self becomes a language of abomination. (105)

In the child's assertion that "I always have to do the dirty work," Villanueva's speaker links the actions against her body directly with her concept of self. This shifting of culpability from the attacker to victim is common among survivors of child sexual abuse, as well as rape survivors, as will be discussed in the next section of this work.

Judith Lewis Herman proffers the theory that individual responses to trauma follow a "dose-response curve," within which: "There is a simple, direct relationship between the severity of the trauma and its psychological impact" (Herman, op cit., 57). With respect the specific trauma of child sexual abuse, Herman observes:

The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological. And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and reveal their origins; they speak in a language of secrets too terrible for words. (96)

The child-logic of trauma, as inscribed in Villanueva's poem cycle, is particularly evident in the child's response to the attacker's question, "Do you want to suck something good?" The speaker reflects that this offering "must be licorice because/I hate it because/he hates me and/he wants me to eat/something bad/ and maybe/if eat something bad/he'll let me go. so I said/-o.k.-/he put it in my mouth/and it didn't taste like anything/it hurt my mouth/but I wouldn't cry" (vide supra). The transformation of the idea of the hateful licorice, to the hatred the child feels the man has toward her, to the willingness to "eat something bad" is sustained in an emotional cadence, when the penis is introduced, but the speaker, upon recognizing she her mouth is not filled with licorice, but something worse, still does not name what is happening to her. The penis, as in so many works from the child perspective, remains the distanced, indirect object, "it." The reader is reminded that a similar construction is employed in Cisneros' "Red Clowns," in which the child narrator relates: "It wasn't what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it's supposed to be." (10)

Finally, the resonance of the last line of this Villanueva poem with the Kingston quote employed as an epigraph by Cisneros centralizes a recurrent motif in the writings of Chicanas. No "father-fixation" or reification of the phallus, this motif of masculine preference is more a recognition of socioculturally-constructed masculine privilege. Less so in the works of African-American and Native American women, who have undergone riveting changes to their traditional family and gender structures in the last two centuries, but this motif reverberates throughout the works of Latinas, Asian American and Anglo-European women, as examined in the earlier section of my work on sexual mythologies.

How female children "participate" in sexual acts, the literature authored by women maintains, is not through those mythologized habits of "seduction," but through the fear and self-blame described by Judith Herman. The "child-logic" of Villanueva's work represents a common thread in the works on child sexual abuse by women of color.

The rending uncertainty of this perspective in the face of adult manipulation is also the theme of Sherley Anne Williams' 1974 short story, "The Lawd Don't Like Ugly." (11) In an introduction by Susan Koppelman, for the anthology Mothers and Daughters, where this story is collected, the editor finds that, "The irony of Williams's story lies in the apparent brutality resulting from Miss Ead's tender regard for the girl becoming a woman. But perhaps by making clear to Queenie the essential connection between economics and sex, Queenie's own innocence and budding self-love are protected" (242). Yet this story, like the other poems and narratives in this section, pivots on the potential for "seduction" in the body of a female child.

Q.T., the protagonist of William's narrative, is the child of a Black migrant farmworkers. Although she knows much about distance, the immediacy of relations with others, as well as self-knowledge, eludes her: Q.T. does not even have her own first name. Eventually, she is befriended by a neighbor-woman near her most recent residence. This woman, called Miss Ead, builds a trust with the child, and determines that her first name shall be Queenie (260-61). The bond between this woman and child strengthens, throughout the story, and Queenie becomes more comfortable in confiding the difficulties she experiences in relating to other children, particularly with respect to her obvious poverty. She suffers in her longing for "penny loafers and Bonnie Donne socks" (260).

One night, when Queenie is sleeping over at Miss Ead's, she is introduced to a new man, Duncan, Miss Ead's companion. When Miss Ead sends her to bed, she goes only reluctantly, until Miss Ead intones, "Now you know, the lawd don't like ugly, Queenie; you go on to bed" (261). Chastised, the child follows this directive and, lying in bed,

Her eyes caught the outline of a dress hanging on the closet door. It was a present from Duncan. "Ead done told me what a good girl you been so I brung you a present," he said as he kissed her forehead. Q.T. accepted the kiss, trying to conceal her impatience. When she was finally allowed to open the package, the dress wavered before her eyes and seemed for a moment to be one of her dreams come true. The dress, green with white stripes and a large, lace edged collar, felt good and looked good on her. . . .Q.T. had bounced up and down in her excitement, and imagined herself in the dress on the first day of school. The picture danced before her eyes. (261)

The dress here, as in Villanueva's poem, signals the oncoming of unsuspected male aggression. Queenie is lost in thought about her "new self," when Duncan enters the room.

She hadn't heard the door open and the squeaking of its hinges startled her. "Miss Ead?"
"No. It Duncan." He stood silhouetted in the door, shoes in hand.
"What you want?"
"I comin to bed." He closed the door and moved toward the bed, unbuttoning his shirt.
"You supposed to sleep on the couch, ain't you?"
"No, I supposed to sleep right here."
By this time, Duncan had pulled off his clothes and was slipping into the bed. As Q.T. felt his weight depressing the bed, she began to scream. "Miss Ead. Miss Ead, Duncan trying' to get in bed wid me. Miss Ead. Miss-" Duncan put his hand over her mouth, whispering, "Shut up." Q.T. wiggled away from him and stood up in bed, dragging the covers with her. . . . "Stop it Duncan. You ain't even supposed to be here. Miss Ead." (262)

As the two struggle in the bed, Q.T. continues to call for her friend, while still threatening to harm Duncan if he does not let her be. Finally, Q.T. throws a lamp, and Miss Ead appears, just as Duncan is caught in the chest by the child's projectile. Duncan falls back, cursing Miss Ead: "God damn it Ead. . .Damn it, I thought you said she know what was goin on" (263). Miss Ead directs him angrily to "git on outta here and let me talk to her" (ibid.).

When Duncan departs, Miss Ead explains a new set of "facts" to Q.T. Rocking the panicked child, she begins her "talk": Duncan is a good man who "can do lots for you -- if you let him. But it a give and git world, and if he do for you, you gotta do for him too. You ain't really losin that much when you let him sleep in here no way" (263).

Q.T. asks if all he will do is "sleep." Ead promises she won't let Duncan hurt the girl, and there is a pause. "The lady at church say it wrong for a boy and a girl to do that," Q.T. reveals, "in low voice" (264).

"That right, it is wrong for a boy and girl," Miss Ead agrees. "But . . .Duncan a man. Now I gon tell him to come back, okay?"
When Q.T. remains silent, Miss Ead repeats, "Lawd don't like ugly. Now you be a pretty girl" (ibid.).

Duncan returns to the room, and Queenie remembers the dress, along with more pretty clothes to come. She turns her face from him. "Turn out the light, Duncan," is the last line of the story (264).

Perhaps, unlike the girls in Cisneros' "The Family of Little Feet," Queenie is not yet "tired of being beautiful." This representation of the "child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome" is queried, in Dael Orlandosmith's "She's Come Undone"(12) (1994), where the repercussions of child sexual abuse are starkly defined:

where little girls keep secrets
under sheets soaked in semen
& blood
under shower water that didn't
seem to wash her clean enough &
there weren't enough powders & perfumes
to smother his smell. . .
. . .
his smell on her fingertips
& between her legs no
matter how hard she washed (110)

The implementation of these "occluded," "fragmentary," "contradictory" or "confused" narrative and poetic patterns are not limited to texts by women of color on the subject of child sexual molestation; rather, as in Herman's study, these narrative devices are implemented in works by authors from every ethnic background, and by both male and female writers, in centralizing the child's perspective. Raymond Federman's 1979 "experimental" novel The Voice in the Closet, for example, is a lengthy manuscript lacking entirely in punctuation or standard typography; the end result is that the text resembles, visually, the rectangular confinement of the closet in which the Jewish child narrator is kept to avoid capture by the Nazis. The rushing of words together, without pacing by punctuation, produces the confused, yet emotionally charged, pattern basic to Herman's study.

In the prose poem "The Shower," by Linda Smuckler (1988), a small girl "at the level of that" (the penis), is taken into the shower with her father, who encourages the child to masturbate him, under the guise of "washing" (367). Although the child intuits that it "feels like a lie" (368), and although she tries several ploys to stop the "game," such as wanting to leave to use the toilet and asking for the temperature of the water to be turned up, the father's voice interjects, "it's something men do" (ibid.). First the father washes his child, and she believes "he washes up my legs feet first up into my crotch washing me because I am dirty" (368). As the child performs the mirror ritual of "washing" her father (at his bequest, "my turn now"), the pacing quickens to a panic, and as the father nears orgasm, he clutches his small daughter so tightly: "I am choking I can barely move my arms. . .I am choking I try to say I'm done he calls done to me what? not letting go I drop the washcloth and grab his hips and push away the thing springs out after me. . ." (368-69). Having left the shower, the frightened child stands in horror as she "hears his breath and suddenly he shouts like he has hurt himself his breath is fast like he is getting mad he will come after me I made him turn it up" (369). In hearing her father reach orgasm, the child believes he is shouting in pain, because she "made him" turn the water up. The absence of conventional punctuation here, with device of double spacing between the child's interior monologues, external speech, and her father's replies, typographically supports the sense of fragmentation and panic in the speaker's voice.

These devices, in the main, inscribe the experiences of trauma and remembrance. The impact of the works, however, may be -- for both author and reader -- recuperative. Judith Herman explains that, "A narrative that does not include the traumatic imagery and bodily sensations is barren and incomplete. The ultimate goal, however, is to put the story, including its imagery, into words" (177).

While Judith Lewis Herman addresses herself to the therapist-patient relationship, Rosaldo reminds us, in his study of resistance, of Américo Paredes' mandate regarding "the inextricably intertwined realms of culture and politics" (op cit.). Herman suggests:

In the telling, the trauma story becomes a testimony. . . .Testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial. . . .Richard Mollica describes the transformed trauma story as simply 'a new story,' which is 'no longer about shame and humiliation,' but rather 'about dignity and virtue'" (181). (13)

I would add that, in studying the iconography of the female child in sexual "seduction," the works by women authors of color truly interrogate, abrogate and, in even larger ways than Rosaldo imagined, transform the idea of pureza in the realms of the body politic, the historicized body, and the body of difference.