Cristina Rivera Garza, The Iliac Crest

Cristina Rivera Garza’a 2002 novel The Iliac Crest (trans. into English in 2017 by Sarah Booker for the Feminist Press) has a similarly dreamlike quality to her 2012 novel The Taiga Syndrome. I don’t think it would be more correct to call these fictions “nightmarish,” since dreams can be disturbing enough, even those that offer us hope or insight. Part of the strangeness of Garza’s fiction also comes from how well she sees genre not as something into which you pour a story, but as something that you can scavenge for effect. If I was forced to shelve The Taiga Syndrome in Borges’ Library of Babel (an infinite structure with infinite books) I would put it in with the detective books, with Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but also in with the poetry books of Gabriela Mistral and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. There must be a room like that in Borges’ building.

We’ll be reading an essay by Garza on the importance of publishing more women authors later in the semester. But having just read The Iliac Crest I was struck by her author’s note at the beginning and wanted to quote it here because it touches on some of the things that we’ll be talking about:

From “A Note from the Author” (vii)

Borders are a subtle but pervasive force in this book. I was born on the eastern tip of the US-Mexican border and lived between San Diego (California) and Tijuana (Baja California) when I wrote The Iliac Crest. There are questions you cannot escape when approaching immigration: Who are you? Where do you come from? Anything to declare? Awareness of geopolitical borders soon leads to questions about the many lines we cross — or don’t, or aren’t allowed to — as we go about our daily lives. Our bodies are keys that only open certain doors. Our bodies speak indeed, and our bones are our ultimate testimony. Will we be betrayed by our bones?

While women’s voices throughout the world continue to be silenced and those in power continue to argue for the irrelevance of gender equality, characters in this book understand that gender — and what is done in the name of gender — can be lethal.