At the Tip of Which Stigma Appears: Estilo/Style de Dolores Dorantes
Estilo de Dolores Dorantes es una lucha para existar.
Dolores Dorantes’s Style is a battle/a fight/a struggle/the struggle/to exist/ for existence/for being.
The problems of translation are legion, as we who live within its double mirrors know: a constant misalignment of lenses, a constant stream of imperfect possibilities and inadvertent exclusions. This book, Estilo/Style, as it is presented by Kenning editions in dual language format and with an excellent afterword by Jen Hofer, the author of the English text, foregrounds rather than conceals these problems. Even the book’s visual codes are switched: the cover includes only the word “Style;” the title page incluye los dos idiomas, pero la primera mitad del libro is only in Spanish. These signals contrast, like the lenses at the optometrist slipping in and out of focus. Do not expect that it will be resolved. Instead it will be interrogated, elided, clashed, held up to brutal light: Estilo/Style accuses, with pointed finger, and dares, with mocking eyes, exposing the complex traffic of gender, politics, and power con resistencia y amenazas. It is in this way manifesto, declaration, and lament.
Estilo/Style begins with a definition helpfully pointing you away from its title’s most basic interpretation (mode) and toward a less evident and more specific one, the botanical, and specifically a part of the flower’s reproductive apparatus, one that extends beyond the ovary itself. This image does much to explain the cover’s pointed and beautiful use of Henry Darger’s dramatically creepy Waves Lure Them From Stand, in which little girls with little phalluses line up nude under lightning strikes; it also underpins the sexuality that lurks in Dorantes’s phrasing (“Vas a terminar encima de nosotras / You will end up on top of us”). These definitions recur at intervals through the book and appear to be lifted from a dictionary except for the middle of three, which addresses the reader, tú, thus: “si buscas conscientemente un estilo, terminas adoptando una careta… (if you consciously seek a style, you’ll end up taking on a mask…)” and it is here that the book seems to hang, in between consicousness of voice and ignorance of self, in between assertion and reflection, entre la denuncia y la agrésion.
Pero si Estilo/Style es una resistencia, no es una revolución. There is too much in this book of the document, of the bearing witness. Somos testigos al crimen, a la corrupción, a la imposibilidad o la inexorabilidad del cuerpo femenino contra la máquina de las politicas corruptas. ¿ Como ordenar esta resistencia ? Dorantes portrays a resistance that is neither glorious nor dramatic, but obdurate, silent, boiling. Siempre hervir. Estilo/Style falls, like the lines of girls it continually evokes, in neat rows of texts, numbered and arranged as a prose poems addressing a tú who is both powerful and frozen, impotent and abusive, as in Darger’s image of the uniformed man atop a tiny naked form. Vamos a ver.
Empezamos con la sección 6 : Queremos que nos tapes la boca. “We want you to cover our mouths.” A throbbing of contained violence, in the sky, in the air. Dorantes’s language is bald, precise, weighty: la carne azul del cielo. We become aware that we are part of a chorus of mouths with one object.
7- Tortúranos en otras realidades. Is it an incantation or a dare? So many imperatives: close, destroy, enter, torture, take, bring, convert, capture. As if the land is being raped again for our pleasure. And then, fervor. But whose?
Eight mirrors seven, but instead of imperatives the verbs move to have this shadowy tú — both victim and malevolence — as their object. Abordarte, buscarte, mancharte. These brusque and beautiful verbs, in Hofer’s English, shift from heart to hands, the “we” is now asking rather than taking: No somos ni dolor ni cansancio ni muerte : “We are not pain not exhaustion not death.”
Throughout these short bursts of command and cajolement, Dorantes’s language remains lambent and economical in its music. The patterns of song in her cuáls and cons and ques provides certain pleasure, and Hofer’s English finds its own chant of which and with, exposing the weft of this network of girls, this army of girls calling out their erstwhile leaders, emerging from under the muddy boots of presidents to force men to meet their gaze. Las niñas llevamos tu máscara de presidencia perfecta. “We, the girls, wear your mask of perfect presidency.” (You have ended up wearing a mask.) The difficulties of translation are minute; the difficulties are momentous. We, the girls? We girls? Girls, we? Hofer’s decisions are considered, and yet each decision is a refraction, or, as she writes in her afterword, and in a different context: “I use one or the other tranlsation, hoping the double resonance will retain, however subterraneously.” Hofer, again: “there is the electrified space between two beings. Or more. Between two modes. Or more. Between two terms.”
To read Estilo/Style is to inhabit that electrified space. Language is a mine. A girl is a mine. Either may explode at any time. Ben Ehrenreich writes, “this book burns with a rage that does not hope for healing.” Dorantes finishes, “It will wait to find you as if it were coincidence.” Estilo/Style does not explode these mines. It pinpoints them, digs them out, holds them up to the light, still live, waiting for the inevitable flash. We are on tenterhooks. We are raw. Somos a flor de piel. Claro.
