Enduring Love
In three-line stanzas, the tale of a Chicano woman in Chicago struggling to make a life.

Reviewed by Jennifer Howard
Sunday, December 25, 2005

WATERCOLOR WOMEN/OPAQUE MEN

A Novel In Verse

By Ana Castillo

Curbstone. 269 pp. Paperback, $15

It's a bold or a foolish decision to write a novel in verse. Few enough people pick up novels; fewer still read poetry in any form. Combine the two, and you risk sacrificing the propulsive possibilities of narrative prose to the elliptical insights of verse. Who'd trade a robust narrative and well-fleshed-out characters for a handful of lyrical moments?

You don't really have to in Watercolor Women/Opaque Men , Ana Castillo's new novel in verse, although its hybrid literary form tries to contain more multitudes -- of characters, historical and mythological episodes and socio-political commentary -- than it has room for. Like Castillo's previous books, Peel My Love Like an Onion and So Far From God , this one centers on the lives and loves of Latino women -- in this case one woman, the archetypal Ella. She was born to Mexican workers who came to the United States for " la pizca " -- "the picking they did/season after season" in the growing fields that, for people like them, have also been killing fields.

Castillo writes feelingly of those who work themselves to death, the children like Ella forced to toil alongside their too-soon-old parents:

Forget

The sun that caused fevers,

blistered lips and feet,

made you see spots for years after,

Forget

the beans we had for supper again,

the last baby that died soon after birth,

The to suffering of tuberculosis

when each morning he rose with the rest,

coughing, coughing.

Ella doesn't forget, though. She doesn't forget her parents, happy together in their short, hard lives. She doesn't forget her great-grandmother, Mama Grande, and her tales of the Mexican Revolution:

"I made my living in a saloon after that.

We danced with the Federales ,

Los Carranzistas , Villistas, Colorados .

"We danced with Zapatistas ,

Ay , you know, hija ?

It didn't matter."

Ella discovers, however, that it -- your politics, your sexual orientation, the color of your skin -- does matter in a world where "Righteous White Boyz" take brown-skinned lovers because "they loved the idea of la otra --/dark woman as primal symbol of true courage/and indomitable strength."

Ella runs away from fields and family. She marries young, has a kid, has an affair with a woman, leaves her husband, has other affairs with men and women, supports herself and her son cleaning offices and doing whatever else she has to do. These episodes play out, each episode recalled or evoked, in three-line stanzas that land like perfect little revelations of truth -- "You can forget everything/about your life/when you ride the train" -- or wander off into thickets of myth that leave the reader peering around for some sort of authorial direction back to the story:

She fits now and belongs to nowhere --

ella , who the devil left for dead.

She and I sleep together,

Whether on sacks of wheat or a proper bed.

We sleep the sleep of Xochiquetzal

in Tamoanchan

Who is all flowers and song,

and dreams of her Rain God.

Tlaloc , furiously calling.

Aztec gods, got it -- now where?

Despite Ella's understandable rage at those "Righteous White Boyz" who see in her an archetype of primal strength, she (or her creator) feels free to indulge in stereotypes of her own. The white lovers she takes are far from opaque: They're transparent caricatures (patronizing, uptight, ashamed), while the Mexican Indian amor shines as a model of humble, earthy virtue and devotion. And the political asides about the plight of migrant workers and the heartlessness of American life feel just as stale as they are true, although in these times certain truths about power and oppression bear repeating.

Ella herself is a pillar of strength, a -- to use a word that now feels as old as any Aztec god but far less interesting -- survivor. She may paint in watercolor -- one of the references embedded in the book's title -- but she's not going to wash away. Still, it's hard to see Ella sometimes behind those three-line stanzas, and hard not to wonder whether she'd have been less of a watercolor if she came to us via prose. Is the obliquity of verse Castillo's attempt to recreate in words the experience of being brown-skinned in a culture that makes too many assumptions about identity without bothering to find out about the person under the skin? Maybe, but that explanation feels too neat. As it is, Ella remains something of a mystery, even to her own son.

That relationship is one Castillo does full justice to:

But this woman --

they had met head to head

when he was twelve.

Then he passed her right up

like a bamboo shoot

on a damp summer day.

She didn't care.

She stuck her finger high

in the air, right in his face,

The other hand at the waist.

They could be anywhere

and she'd give him

That stare,

that he read as a warning equivalent to the sign

in front of a nuclear power plant.

Only she

could do that to him .

And that's as true an experience of mothers and children as you'll find anywhere, brown or white, in verse or in prose.

Jennifer Howard, a former contributing editor of Book World, is a staff writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education and a contributor to the forthcoming "DC Noir."