20 minute read
Rewriting Western mythology
by Emma Athena? Can ‘Woman of Light’ rewrite the Western mythology Kali Fajardo-Anstine introduces readers to a Denver they’ve never before seen.
Luz Lopez gazes into the tea cup, studying the leaves and “their soaking shapes.” The Platte River rushes at her back and all around, Denver’s chile harvest pulses, crowds moving through “the city’s liquid center illuminated in green and blue lights.” It’s 1933 and the 17-year-old sees three foreshadowing images inside the cup: a clam, an owl, a brick. She glances up at her client, a white woman tightly bundled, then peers back down to witness “something strange, off-putting, the tea leaves seeming to drift like a blizzard over golden plains until Luz saw a place she hadn’t before,” and her vision snaps to something so startling she suddenly lies, gives her client vague answers about what she sees, what it means. Luz, protagonist of Woman of Light, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut novel, dips in and out of that which lies beyond the edges, sees scenes as they might have or could have happened at various points within the arc of five generations in Colorado—not unlike like the author herself oscillates through time in the storytelling of Luz becoming a woman, losing her brother and navigating 1930s Denver as a laundress-turned-law-office-secretary with her complex family histories in tow. The story’s root curls around the last generation before contact is made with Anglo peoples in southwest Colorado. The vines of the family’s DNA then reach toward Denver, slowly unfurling one generation at a time like flowers toward the sun. Luz arrives in the Mile High City at age 11 from
Huerfano, the town where her mother landed after leaving the Lost Territory, the region where their indigenous ancestors tried mixing with Anglos but were cheated and brutalized. (“Again and again her husband explained … no human being can possess land. Again and again Simodecea watched as new tents went up throughout the property, the canvas shacks fluttering her eyesight like the blurred edges of reality just before a person faints.”)
Reviewer Jill Murphy:
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, & Boulder Book Store
OF LIGHT from Page 16
Mexican sharpshooter Simodecea, Luz’s grandmother, is another strong female character (classic Fajardo-Anstine, readers of the writer’s short-story collection Sabrina and Corina will note) who is often thrust into protection mode, forced to rely upon her instincts and deep inner wisdom—part of the “real intelligence” the girlfriend of Luz’s aunt once describes, “that comes from our grit, our ability to read the world around us.” It took nearly 15 years for Fajardo-Anstine to publish Woman of Light, hotly anticipated after Sabrina and Corina won a 2020 American Book Award (among other accolades) and garnered glowing reviews from the powerhouse pens of Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros, whom Fajardo-Anstine thanks in her acknowledgements for Woman of Light. The 35-year-old author grew up in Denver, dropped out of high school, got a GED, then dropped out of her first master’s program and received an MFA from the University of Wyoming. “[Writing] this book taught me to look at our city and our space in a generational way—in a way that’s textured and deals with history over a long period of time,” Fajardo-Anstine says. “I didn’t just move to Denver and decide that I wanted to set stories here, I’m a person who has Indigenous ancestry. My family has been here since time immemorial in some ways, and they’ve been in Denver proper since the 1930s—it’s the backbone to my understanding of the entire world.”
As such, the novel’s spine is “a multicultural, foundational Denver—a Denver that speaks many languages, a Denver that’s many classes—a look at the city that I don’t think many readers have ever seen before,” she explains. “It’s important to think about readers across the world experiencing Colorado from the perspective of a mixed-race Chicana of Indigenous ancestry.” In Luz’s world, violence is around every corner, and it’s the type of violence that sets Fajardo-Anstine apart from what’s largely dominated the concept of “Western literature:” tales told about Anglos and Indians in and around the Rocky Mountains mixing men with
booze and rugged landscapes with horses. “So much of our identity as a Western space has been defined by the cowboy narrative, the myth of the stoic outlawed cowboy figure,” Fajardo-Anstine says. “This is going to be the first time somebody is coming to the American West in a way that is not the stereotype mythology.” Instead of the sensationalized Bonnie-and-Clyde violence that Fajardo-Anstine ironically inserts as a simmering backdrop to the novel, Luz’s brother receives a “beating that sounded like bones garbled in a sack” for speaking Spanish at school; a young woman fears “the things I will be forced to do in order to feed myself and Mama” after her brother is murdered by police officers; Simodecea feels “her husband’s swampy shallows on her fingertips” as he dies in her arms after a suited man arrives and “gun blasts sprayed bullets across the land.” “Better get used to it,” another of Luz’s aunties advises, stitching the face of her brother after a white mob used bricks to bash his skull during a party in town. “I won’t make you fix him this time but it’ll serve you to learn.” In effect, Fajardo-Anstine portrays the rippling, compounding effects of Anglo settlers on so-called Colorado; between scenes bubbling with new love and hope for better futures, she forces the reader’s gaze to hold on the worst of it. Luz and her steadfast aunt Maria Josie learn, in most cases, it’s best to bury the past, stomp good and hard on it, then use the solid ground for a big step forward. For Fajardo-Anstine, the past is more elastic. The time period that frames Woman of Light—1860s to 1930s—is “a mirror for today,” she says. Maria Josie indeed comes home often with hands nicked and scratched after long hours laboring at the nearby mirror factory. As Fajardo-Anstine loops between decades, she doubles back to fill in plot texture, then glances forward, tantalizing what’s to come—it’s like the mirror’s been dropped, a kaleidoscope spread of stories arranged together, aesthetic and dynamic enough to conjure a quote from Joseph Conrad, which Latin American literary giant Mario Vargas Llosa once used to describe the work of Gabriel García Márquez: “Circles,
READERS across the world experienceing Colorado from the perspectrive of a mixed-race Chicana of Indigenous ancestry,” Fajardo-Anstine says.
circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles.” Thanks to her parents, Fajardo-Anstine says her childhood was “steeped in books.” Her mother is a writer, her father an avid reader. “When I would get depressed, my dad would actually leave books outside of my door, as sort of like a treat,” she says, and as one of seven children, “reading was something I could do alone.” Besides Garcia Marquez, she grew to love authors like Sylvia Plath, Khalil Gibran and Elizabeth Bishop. Since elementary school she’s been writing stories, and when she turned 16, she started working at West Side Books in North Denver, where she’d continue working off-and-on until age 30. Enmeshed in words, Fajardo-Anstine absorbed everything she could, feeling authors like Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter and Alice Munro weave themselves into her “craft DNA,” describing the women as her literary ancestors: “Writers whose style and prose have made an imprint on me.” Like Munro relies on Ontario as a vivid backdrop for her fiction and Morrison uses configurations of space and community to impress alienation or belonging, Fajardo-Anstine digs into Denver through the senses—insects chirping, factories whizzing, people gossiping, building upon the scene-setting strength she exhibits throughout Sabrina and Corina. Some chapters in Woman of Light—like “Women Without Men” and “La Llorona”—could stand alone as satisfying short stories, but larger themes clearly bind the chapters. The inverted evolutionary trajectories of voice and sight throughout the female lineage, for example: While their ability to see into the edges of life strengthens over time, as the women grow farther from their pre-Anglo matriarch, the Sleepy Prophet of the Lost Territory, their voices weaken. Once a “musical sound in their throats,” life in a small shared apartment in Denver leads “a growl ... trapped inside [Luz’s] bedroom, inside her throat.” There are times when “she’d open her mouth to speak but could only picture white moths fluttering from her lips.” Early in the novel, the protagonist contemplates “the rich, the doctors and lawyers, businessmen and silver-tycoons” and realizes she “often felt she and her people were only choking on their leftover air.” Fajardo-Anstine, by contrast, is taking a big gulp and shouting herself far and wide with Woman of Light, an energy she infuses in a pivotal scene shortly after Luz and her brother leave their mother at the Huerfano mining camp and arrive in Denver to live with their aunt Maria Josie. The young siblings are crossing blocks, writing a map of the city into their minds when they run into one of the neighborhood’s most complex characters, who points to the mountains and tells them that way will always be west before pointing to the plains, which always run east. Then he gets them to shout in unison, “THIS IS MY CITY!” timidly at first, with the young girl soon amassing courage: “They yelled together until their voices boomed, high and arching, rattling streetcar cables and smoggy windows, soaring between stone tenements and factory tufts. This, she repeated, is ours.” So, too, Fajardo-Anstine claims her voice and her words, printed on pages and now translated into languages around the world—for language matters; it crafts history. If lived experiences accumulate like silt on river banks, the so-formed clay is shaped by language and hardened by time; history is constructed by human hands. It matters which palms, eyes and spirits do the sculpting. One western Colorado town, for example, currently has a brochure on its website, attached to the “Historical Information” section, which reads: “With the departure of the Ute Indians, a resilient bunch of settlers and entrepreneurs took up residency in the new town.” Words can wield violence, too, and Fajardo-Anstine has no patience for euphemisms. When Pidre (the Sleepy Prophet’s grandson, Simodecea’s husband) is walking through a bustling fairground for the first time in his life (soon after Anglos have expanded across their valley), the suffocating knot that Fajardo-Anstine has been trying to unravel is pulled taught: “It was in that moment that Pidre realized he had entered the strange world of Anglo myth,” she writes. “Pidre came from storytelling people, but as he passed a big top devoted to the reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, he couldn’t help but think that Anglos were perhaps the most dangerous storytellers of all—for they believed only their own words, and they allowed their stories to trample the truths of nearly every other man on Earth.”
ON THE BILL: Kali Fajardo-Anstine— Woman of Light Book Launch.
7 p.m. June 7 and 8 (in conversation with CPR’s Ryan Warner on June 7, and author Steven Dunn on June 8), Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., Denver. Tickets: Free, tatteredcover.com
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A safe space to fashion identity
‘Slay the Runway’ offers Boulder County teens an opportunity to design clothing and explore self-expression
by Matt Maenpaa
DETAILS, DETAILS: Slay the Runway— Creating Safe Spaces for LGBTQ+ Youth Expression
June 28-July 8, multiple locations. Email E
MATT MAENPAA
EVENTS EVENTS
If your organization is planning an event, please email the editor at crockett@boulderweekly.com
June 3-4, Dairy Arts Center, Gordon Gamm Theater, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Tickets: $20-$30, thedairy.org
Danse Etoile Ballet premiers two contemporary ballets at the Dairy Arts Center June 3-4. Inspired by the relationships architects and dancers share with gravity, In a Dialogue with Gravity and its people. In the second act, “Matisse’s Gardens,” the forms, colors and space of Matisse’s famed cutouts forms the foundation for this contemporary ballet.
Boulder County Plein Air Festival
June 3-June 11, Chautauqua Park, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder. Schedule at openstudios.org/boulder-plein-air-fest
This year’s event is open to any artist from Colorado, age 15 and older, and to alumni of Open Studios’ past Boulder Plein Air Festivals. Registration is required to submit art for the event’s awards competition and sale on June 11. Capture any Boulder County scene by making art en plein in the medium of your choice between June 3 and 11, then level are invited to participate.
Peace Through Music
6 p.m. Friday, June 3, Unity Columbine Spiritual Center, 8900 Arapahoe Road, Boulder. Tickets: $10-$30
Unity Columbine Spiritual Center presents a Stevie Sister Carmen and Musical Ambassadors of Peace. This year’s event, held on the Foss Hall patio and Columbine sets, starring Spirit Voices, Columbine Choir, VOCE, the PTM Mass Choir and Unity’s “Band of Wonder” (Janis Kelly, Makaysha Rain, Marcy Baruch, Chris Carvalho, Craig Schwartz, Dan Steelman, Larry Thompson and Zane Cupec), plus a third dance set by the M.A.P. All-Stars and Into The Mystic. All this plus food, drink and arts/crafts/merchandise booths, a family art project, kid’s activities and more.
Buddhist Arts and Film Festival
June 3-5, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. All event single tickets are $14, all access pass $50
The Buddhist Arts and Film Festival is a three-day, Buddhist-inspired event showing nine inspiring, beautiful Tsetan. Films include Looking for a Lady With Fangs and a Moustache, Precious Guru, Becoming Nobody, Beyond Two Worlds, Dharma Rebel and Carving the Divine.
Taste of Louisville
9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, June 4, Historic Downtown Louisville
This is an opportunity to taste the “quality of life” in Louisville. served by your favorite local breweries, arts and craft booths, kid’s entertainment, and informational booths from local merchants.
10:30 a.m. Saturday, June 4, Chautauqua Park, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder
KGNU Annual Plant Sale
9 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday, June 5, KGNU Radio, 4700 Walnut St., Boulder. Free
Colorado Shakespeare Festival: ‘The
Two Gentlemen of Verona’
June 5-Aug. 7, Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, 277 University Ave., Boulder. Tickets $22-$81
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Cultural Day at The Museum of Boulder with The Latino
Chamber of Commerce
Noon-5 p.m., Saturday, June 4, Museum of Boulder, 2205 Broadway, Boulder
‘Tales from theTipping Point’ by Betsy Tobin
8 p.m. Saturday, June 4, BookCliff Vineyard Wine & Tasting Room, 1501 Lee Hill Drive, No. 17, Boulder. Price: $35—ticket price includes a glass of wine.
Allen Ricca— ‘Catching Hell’
6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 9, Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder. Tickets: $5, boulderbookstore
In Catching Hell Catching Hell
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Rainbow
It didn’t take long for Judy Garland to get started. Born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Celebrating Judy Garland’s centenary Rapids, Minnesota, on June 10, 1922, Garland strode onto the vaudeville stage with her sisters in 1924, solidifying her future as an entertainer. In ’34, the trio adopted the stage name “The Garland Sisters,” and in ’37, young Judy sang a song to a portrait of Clark Gable in
by Michael J. Casey
MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1938 and became an overnight success. The Tiffany studio had signed Garland to a contract only two years prior—her screen debut was Pigskin Parade—and two years after Broadway Melody, Garland would step into those iconic ruby slippers for a movie with no equal: The Wizard of Oz. Oz, playing Dorothy Gale as a young girl caught between childlike innocence and adolescent yearning. Just listen to her contralto voice quiver as she delivers “Over the Rainbow.” Hardly anyone watching Oz in ’39 knew the life Garland was leading—and would continue to lead— backstage, but they could feel it. When Garland sings, you feel everything. But as legendary as the backstage tales and gossip are, what continues to entrance audiences is the magic Garland captured on screen, which is why both TCM and The Criterion Channel are celebrating Garland’s centenary all June long. For those with TCM in their cable package, Garland is June’s “Star of the Month,” Oz is on the schedule (June 10), as is Pigskin Parade and Broadway Melody of 1938, both June 3—the same night you can catch Garland’s successful series of girl-next-door pictures co-starring Mickey Rooney. For you streamers out there, The Criterion Channel’s Garland celebration features 13 of her signature performances, including a personal favorite: 1948’s The Pirate, starring Garland alongside Gene Kelly—the second of their three pairings. The whole picture is a hoot, but the scene where Garland’s Manuela learns that Kelly’s Macoco is celluloid this side of Citizen Kane. She could sing, she could act, she could dance and she could scat. She could break your heart with a chord and lift your soul with a smile. Some stars fade, but Garland’s never will.
On the Bowery
And while you’re on The Criterion Channel, why not give something completely different a try? Shot in stark black and white like a moving Weegee photograph, Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery dropkicking American movie making out of the studios and onto the streets. The story here is of an alcoholic (Ray Salyer) down on New York’s skid row. It’s partly scripted but totally authentic—the bridge between documentary and neorealism. And it’s terrifying in its frankness. How Rogosin got the camera into these areas is a stroke of genius. How he depicts these derelicts is a stroke of grace. It’s not a movie that gets enough praise. But thanks to a restoration in 2006 by L’Immagine Ritrovata and a subsequent home video release by Milestone Films, On the Bowery continues to reach new audiences. And the timing couldn’t be better for more to discover it on The Criterion Channel as a new generation of Americans grapples with another homelessness crisis brought on by substance abuse.
For more movie reviews, tune into After Image, Fridays at 3 p.m., on KGNU: 88.5 FM and online at kgnu.org.
by Rob Brezsny
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