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Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women

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This book is one of the earliest English-language anthologies I've seen dedicated to the work of Latin American women writers. It was published in 1986 and contained 19 short stories by as many authors from six countries in the region. Argentina, Mexico and Brazil were best represented. For Argentina, for example, the writers were Silvina Ocampo, Beatriz Guido, Marta Lynch, Angélica Gorodischer, Alejandra Pizarnik, Vlady Kociancich and Liliana Heker.

The oldest writers were Cuba's Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991), Argentina's Ocampo (1906-93) and Uruguay's Armonía Somers (1914-94). The youngest were Albalucía Angel (1939-) from Colombia, Kociancich (1941-) and Heker (1943-).

The stories were written or published between 1949 and 1985. There were pieces from each decade of that period, with works from the 1960s and 80s being the most frequent. More than two-thirds of the stories were translated by the editor himself, Alberto Manguel.

In his introduction, Manguel said he published the book because comparatively few female writers from the region were being translated at the time, even several decades after European and North American readers had grown interested in the region's literature. For the English-speaking world, Latin American lit had become identified almost exclusively with writers like Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes and Puig. He wanted to show English speakers what they were missing, claiming that Silvina Ocampo was among the best stylists then writing in Spanish, Marta Lynch was one of the best-selling novelists in that language, and Lydia Cabrera was Cuba's best-known female writer.

He claimed that most Latin America fiction shared a predilection for either magical realism or political realism. If magic realism means a blending of hallucination and reality, or the application to reality of exaggeration and absurdity, then it described the style of the works in this collection by Somers, Lispector, Kociancich, Arredondo, Dávila, Poniatowska, Ocampo, Garro, Fagundes Telles and Guido.

The atmospheric story by Somers, for example, involved a murderer on the run, reaching the end of the line in a shack on the outskirts of town during a thundering rainstorm, engaged in a delirious conversation with an image of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The story by Fagundes Telles contained a pet baby tiger kept in a penthouse apartment, using the animal's behavior to convey the psychology and problems of a beautiful woman. That by Poniatowska was a humorous piece about a loving woman who had no problem being married to five men and attracted all who met her, even after the state put her on trial. It poked fun at double standards at work in relations between the sexes, plus the boredom and futility of those employed in the government bureaucracy. The dreamlike piece by Dávila contained the narrator's memories from childhood, when her family dined on animal-like growths taken from their garden:

"Sometimes I would see hundreds of little eyes glued to the dripping window-panes. Hundreds of black, round eyes. Shining eyes, wet with tears, begging for mercy. But there was no mercy in our house. No one felt moved by our cruelty. Their eyes and their cries would follow me -- as they follow me even today -- everywhere I went."

The story by Garro involved a woman who appeared to belong to both the modern day and the time of the Spanish Conquest, with a husband in the present and a wounded Indian lover in the past, and the two realities penetrating each other. Other than this piece, the stories in the collection avoided complicated shifts in point of view or time like those found in writers from the region like Asturias, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Rulfo, Donoso, Sarduy or Arenas.

Works in the anthology written in a completely realistic style, focused on the thoughts of a character facing political interrogation, the class relations between people that are made clear brutally to a child, or the destruction of an Indian tribe in the Mexican highlands, included the pieces by Angel, Heker and Castellanos. For me, these three were among the strongest in the book. The piece by Castellanos suggested her fascination with the struggle between the Indians and those who displaced them:

"Now, in Ciudad Real men no longer live according to their whims or their needs. In the planning of this city of white men . . . what ruled was the intelligence. The streets cross each other in geometrical patterns. The houses are of one and the same height, of one and the same style. . . . Now the city's splendor was a thing of the past. Decay gnawed at its very innards. Men with neither temerity nor vision, full of their own importance, deep in the contemplation of the past, gave up the political scepter, let go the reins of commerce, closed the book of intellectual endeavors. . . . Ciudad Real became nothing but a presumptuous and empty shell, a scarecrow that only scared the Indian soul, stubbornly attached to fear . . . . And through the ugliness and decadence, the superstitious soul of the defeated could still make out the mysterious sign of the omnipotent [white] god."

In addition to the magical and political, there was a straightforwardly realistic story in which a narrator told of her situation as a single woman set up in an apartment by a married man a few blocks from his wife and children and, obliquely, her feelings (Lynch). This work was one of the few read from the region that discussed concretely such a contemporary situation. There were also realistic stories that contained a darkly humorous anecdote involving a wife and her jealous husband, possibly drawn from real life (Rachel de Queiroz) and a narrator's naive description of her mother's efforts to help someone less fortunate (Dinah Silveira de Queiroz).

Other types were a folktale in which the wife of a lazy farmer used her intelligence and sex appeal to outwit a band of monkeys (Cabrera). And a rare work of science fiction (Gorodischer) in which a narrator described a visit to the earth and its inhabitants, long after his race had fled the planet.

A work in the collection that wasn't exactly hallucinatory but couldn't be called entirely realistic either was "The Bloody Countess," described as the only published prose work by poet Alejandra Pizarnik. In this piece, a narrator discussed with evident fascination the story of the Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, describing her sadistic crimes in detail, with images of mirrors, cages, an iron maiden and other paraphernalia. The story considered various motives for the countess' violence, related to melancholy, eroticism and fear of aging and death, and ended with the judgment "She is yet another proof that the absolute freedom of the human creature is horrible." The story employed the style of a short story/essay used earlier by Borges, though the sensibility and subject differed greatly from his.

At the time this anthology was published, criticisms were made that it lacked a balanced, up-to-date view of the political realities faced by women in the region, and that too much space was given to women who saw their lives in terms of their relation to men. The narrow selection of countries was also questioned, as was the omission of writers like Marìa Luisa Bombal, Carmen Naranjo and Luisa Valenzuela. The criticisms have some validity, but the collection was still worthwhile.

Readers who enjoyed this book might also like Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real (1990), which had a greater number of stories and writers and therefore a larger scope.

Other anthologies devoted to female authors include Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America: New Translations (1983), Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983), Spanish American Women Writers (1983, hard to find), Women's Fiction from Latin America: Selections from 12 Contemporary Authors (1988), Landscapes of a New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1989), Women's Writing in Latin America: An Anthology (1991), Scents of Wood and Silence: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers (1991), Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women's Fiction (1991), Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (1995), Out of the Mirrored Garden: New Fiction by Latin American Women (1996) and Cruel Fictions, Cruel Realities: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers (1997).

The present anthology's title, Other Fires, referenced a line of poetry by Pizarnik. A publisher in France had stated that in Borges he could see a fire burning on the other side of the Atlantic; she referred to "other, all-consuming flames," built by women, that weren't yet visible to some. Here's something from the story by Pizarnik that showed how she could write when she wasn't depicting violence:

"An unchangeable color rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the color of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. . . . But there are fleeting remedies: . . . pleasures, for instance, can, for a brief moment, obliterate the silent gallery of echoes and mirrors that constitutes the melancholic soul. Even more: they can illuminate the funeral chamber and transform it into a sort of musical box with gaily-colored figurines that sing and dance deliciously. Afterwards, when the music winds down, the soul will return to immobility and silence."