So Far from God - Essay Example

So Far From God Ana Castillo’s So Far From God is a heavily symbolic tale of a remarkable Chicana mother, Sofi, surviving the death of her four daughters ― Esperanza (Hope), Caridad (Charity), Fe (Faith), and La Loca (The Crazy One). While the names of the first three daughters represent the three foremost Christian ideologies, the fate of these characters is the direct opposite of the embodiment of each ideology. The story tells about life, death, sexuality and the link between two worlds: the world of the living and the spiritual kingdom. Each of Sofi’s four fated daughters takes a different route (Gannon). The first child, Esperanza, is the most successful and liberated daughter, and a devotee to the Chicano movement for the betterment of Chicano’s lives. In spite of her kindness, she dies meaningless during news media coverage of the Gulf crisis. The reader is left hopeless in finding salvation in Esperanza’s death (Gannon). The second child, Fe, is a strict follower of the Chicano patriarchal tradition of marriage and submission to the husband. She marries Casimiro, and together they map a perfect future. She leaves her work as a bank employee for a high-salaried job at an arms factory which exposes her to toxic chemicals and eventually leads to her death from cancer. The faith that Fe places in the fundamental principles of society and its culture entirely defeats her, hence a meaningless faith (Gannon). The third child, Caridad, leads an immoral life after her husband abandons her, flirting with men resembling Memo. As punishment from the spirits, she is viciously raped and damaged by the mysterious "Malogra." Caridads charity towards men is ruthlessly punished but she heals miraculously and later becomes a faith healer and during a sacred mission, she finds Esmeralda, the woman of her dreams. They fall in love and disappear forever after jumping off a cliff while being pursued by Caridad’s obsessed stalker (Gannon). The death and resurrection of Sofi’s youngest child, La Loca, is the most interesting of the sisters’ stories. The whole town immediately accepts her return from the dead and believes La Loca to be gifted with the miraculous powers of healing, thus they name her "La Loca Santa." Later, she dies of AIDS despite her intact virginity and none-participation in any activity that may cause contraction of the disease. What triumphs after the tragic deaths of the three Christian ideologies ― faith, hope and charity ― and the miraculous La Loca, are the strength and wisdom of Sofi (Gannon). Political Ideology The novel, told in a Mexican-American tradition, collapses the restrictions and repressions of Hispanic patriarchal cultural society to liberate its characters from the confinements so that they can become individuals. The author highlights the concept of the Hispanic home: that the women should stay in the background while the men dominate the foreground. Castillo easily dispels this cultural norm with humor, “magical realism” and the exploration of each character’s feelings, emotions and personalities. Castillo succeeds in bridging the cultural gap between Hispanic men and women in a white and non-Hispanic world. So Far from God is crazy and influential. Its wit proves a powerful political message - that in a world of male domination and harsh realities, women survive not just during life but likewise after death (Gannon). The Inter-Connectedness of Life and Death Death is the endpoint at which deliverance happens for the faithful. Castillo’s novel does not entail termination in death. Sofi’s daughters die, however their deaths are not a regret nor are they saddening as they should actually be. This could be attributable to Castillo’s masterful application of frivolous language and peculiar events prior to the tragic deaths of each daughter. In Caridads demise, the author tells us that, "...the end of Caridad and her beloved Emerald, which we nevertheless will refrain from calling tragic" (p. 190). Caridad’s death is not heartbreaking, which is contrary to reason. Typically, the death of a major character is really depressing, however, the first experience of La Loca’s unreal death in the very beginning of the novel, would surely make the succeeding deaths unreal too. Such scene as far-fetched as the resurrection and odd journey of the little La Loca is unforgettable as a testimony that death is transient in Castillos novel. It is through Castillo’s created setting that the readers seek for answers about the credibility of any episode in the novel. This is the “unexplained” in magical realism. There is nothing that could possibly pacify our decisive aspiration for realism, hence the admission of an indivisible fusion between illusion and reality (Peake). Magical Realism So Far From God reunites both spiritual and religious angles through magical realism. The need for compromise comes from the motivation to aspire for a redesigned American cultural individuality. Similarly, this spiritual restructure uses some of the same methods of disassembling harmonized perspectives and using language and methods discovered outside the standard American literature. The particular use of language in Castillo’s novel provides exclusive hybridized approaches towards spirituality. So Far From God challenges religious stances to death. Is there a possibility of life after death? Did La Loca really rise from the dead? Why are the bodies of Caridad and her Esmeralda never found? Is there validity to any of the stories in the novel? While most religions try to answer these questions, Castillo purposely left them unanswered. It is the deficiency in answers that additionally builds a rift between the ideas expressed in So Far From God and customary religious principles. Oftentimes, this answer is a materialization of living during the era of the Messiah: Keep your faith in the Messiah and you will find the answers when you die. However, this does not hold true for Castillo’s novel. Moreover, a conventional representation of God appear objectionable to Sofi, as she articulates her dissatisfaction during confession: "God gave me four daughters and you would have thought that by now I would be a content grandmother, sitting back and letting my daughters care for me, bringing me nothing but their babies on Sundays to rock on my lap! But no, not my hijitas! I had to produce the kind of species that flies" (p.84)! Sofi further clarifies to the puzzled priest that, aside from La Loca, one daughter flies to the mountains and another daughter flies in jet aircrafts to distant countries, and that the only one that stays on earth is Fe, the second child. The priest’s unfeeling response is that she ought to "be thankful for that much" (p. 85).   This shows the authors opinion that Catholicism does not cope with the unbelievable and strange realism experienced by her community. Fe dies of cancer she acquired from the toxic chemicals in the factory she worked for. She asserts that she "...had only wanted to make some points with the company and earn bonuses to buy a house, make car payments, have a baby, in other words , have a life like people do on T.V." (p. 189). The outcome of Fe’s death is awful and unfair which leads us to wonder why her perpetual devotion to the company cost something as valuable as her life. We, the readers, question her unrelenting and unbroken loyalty in the great capitalist company just as we question the intrinsic price of faith in a foundation as sacred as Catholicism (Peake). Chicana Feminism and Hybrid Spirituality Castillo’s So Far From God principally denotes feminism. The story spins around the lives of five female characters. In most academic spheres, spirituality in Chicana feminisms has been avoided. Strange rituals have often been justified through economic situations, structured stories or different social interactions. Spirituality is not merely religiosity but likewise it is inseparable from the cultural, economic, and political changes in society. However, these ethnographies seem always more focused in the explanation of an individual’s unfounded beliefs. There could be more than what we see in the practice of traditional spirituality (Garrido). Spirituality may be defined in reference to Catholic saints, holy images or scriptures; however Chicana feminists express their spirituality beyond the church’s territory. Although Anzualda (1999) implies that “Institutionalized religion fears trafficking with the spirit world and stigmatizes it as witchcraft” (p.59), in Castillo’s novel, she noticeably identifies her spirituality as interconnected with institutionalized religion. So Far From God joins institutionalized religion with a spirituality that realizes surrounding the self and body and covering all phases of daily life. Theresa Delgadillo (1998) claims that in Castillo’s novel, the characters’ reinterpretation of Christianity is through native elements. Although not in its clean institutionalized structure, Delgadillo states that the four daughters — Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca — employ “hybrid spirituality” (Garrido). The novel, according to Delgadillo (1998), “does not attempt to fuse divergent spiritual and religious practices into a unified whole. Instead, the novel emphasizes differing traditions and practices coexisting in the same world as aspects of the multiple subjectivities that define its characters” (p. 889). Even as Castillo by no means define spirituality, it is obvious that the religious covers manifold unions with humanity, and spirituality does not require intercession by institutionalized religion. All five women in Castillo’s novel share a house where animals come in and out and their presence communicate what the humankind is striving to tell the characters: that they can be cured by plants provided by the earth and that La Loca’s portrayal has a direct bond with the blessed that obviously the town priest does not have (Garrido). Spirituality, for many Chicana feminists, is a motivational force and basically a way of daily life. The incorporation of spirituality is seen in the daily lives of Chicana feminists, as well as in their activities and social changes. Spirituality definitely allows understanding of the complexities in life, and for the Chicana feminist, it is more than a way of continued existence. It becomes a routine that infiltrates each phase of humanity. In So Far from God, Sofi, Esperanza, Fe, Caridad and La Loca perform spirituality as a personal and political struggle. La Loca and Esperanza’s practice of hybrid spirituality connects with their political battle, which is comparable to the practice of freedom spirituality (Delgadillo). So Far From God demonstrates how each character conquers the barriers of Hispanic patriarchal cultural limitations and Chicano Catholicism. The novel highlights the idea of a Chicano home and how it deals with the men and women in the story. Through the use of unique imagery, spirituality and magical realism, the author triumphs in forming a unity between women characters and the readers. The key is the application of humor, and by taking those circumstances which are the inevitables in the life of Chicano women, as identifiers of their social positions. The endurance of the human spirit and the female spirit is what the author clearly wants to impart to the readers. Each of Castillo’s female characters embodies political, theological and social ideologies: Sofia, the mother, personifies wisdom; Esperanza symbolizes hope; Caridad represents charity; Fe signifies faith, and La Loca represents spirituality as well as humor. The novel is a food for the hungry soul that brings the reader into the realization that forgiveness of those who have sinned against us is as far as we can go as human beings and as morality dictates. Forgiveness, the gift of charity, unending faith, strength and wisdom and the power of humor float within the reader’s heart long after the book have been read. Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Second Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Print. Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. New York: Penguin, 1993. Delgadillo, Theresa. “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God” Modern Fiction Studies. 44.4 (1998): 888-916. Gannon, David J. “Extraordinarily mystical, very unusual.” Amazon Customer Reviews. 2002. 17 April 2012 Garrido, Anahi Russo. Chicana Feminism and Spirituality: A Force of Mobilization. n.d. 17 April 2012. Peake, Robert. Deconstructing Religion Through Magical Realism. n.d. 17 April 2012. Read More