Ostensibly, with Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza has written an account of her sister’s murder at the hands of her on-off boyfriend, Ángel Gonzáles Ramos, back in 1990. In many ways, this is what the book’s about: from the viewpoint of the present day, we’re offered a retelling of the series of events that led up to Liliana’s murder, the murder itself, and its aftermath.
And yet, this book seems less about those events than about the very impossibility of their expression. While on one level being a book about the femicide of a young architecture student in Mexico City, this is also, and perhaps even more pressingly, a book about the inability of language to convey, let alone contain, something as incomprehensible as the murder of a beloved sister by her partner.
Rivera Garza writes; “Was there, in her world, in ours, a language capable of identifying the early warning signs of what was to come?”
And, later: “Neither Liliana, nor those of us who loved her, had at our disposal the insight, the language, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger. This blindness, which was never voluntary but social, has contributed to the murder of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico and beyond.”
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The book is constructed of extracts from Liliana’s own writings (letters, diary entries, notes in margins) and transcriptions of conversations with friends and family, interspersed with Rivera Garza’s attempts at sense-making. She writes of her painful mission to trawl through her sister’s ephemera, in the hope of unearthing clues that might indicate what was to come. The process is at once a self-evisceration and a final coming to peace.
This is a woman who has lived intimately with her grief for many decades, as she makes clear: “Living in grief is this: never being alone… There are always other eyes seeing what I see, and imagining the other angle, imagining what these senses that are not mine could make out through my own senses is, all things considered, the best definition of love I know.”
No longer is she a mere statistic, a victim in a sad but unmoving second-hand account, but a person, with her own interiority, her own foibles and hopes
Unfortunately, this quotation also neatly demonstrates one aspect of the main underlying issue of this book – namely, that of Rivera Garza’s personal contributions. In this case, to blithely claim, in a book that discusses in minute detail the problems surrounding controlling behaviour in a romantic relationship, that the best definition of love she knows is feeling oneself never alone, always imagining another’s presence, seems not well thought through.
Later, after using a quote from Liliana’s writing as a chapter title (“How I Wish We Were No Longer Fairies In A Land Of Ice”), she analyses, inexplicably yet at length, the significance of fairies: “Fairies come in all kids of shapes and sizes but stand as quintessentially feminine in the popular imagination. Whether as demoted versions of angels or as variously rendered demons, fairies remain magical beings with supernatural powers, including, at times, sparkling wings…”
Made tangible
Rivera Garza also peppers the book with broad declarations of her feminist leanings. Retelling a toast made by herself and a friend, she writes: “We are going to topple it, we say, echoing so many women’s voices. Patriarchy will not fall on its own; we have to tear it down. Together, we say.” This is admirable, but somewhat vague. Rivera Garza is much better when she sticks to the facts, and the book is undoubtedly at its finest when she lets Liliana, and those around her, speak for themselves.
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Through the inclusion of Liliana’s writings, Rivera Garza achieves the difficult task of making her sister tangible to the reader. No longer is she a mere statistic, a victim in a sad but unmoving second-hand account, but a person, with her own interiority, her own foibles and hopes. Although most of Liliana’s writings are (despite Rivera Garza’s hyperbole – at one point she describes a decidedly juvenile poem as using blank space to “devastating effect”), just the usual melodramatic musings of a young woman, it’s in fact their very ordinariness that brings her so violently to life. Her writings make it abundantly clear that she could have been someone we knew.
This is a book, then, about femicide, and about language. But, ultimately, it’s a book about silence. Its very existence both addresses and actively contests the culture of unsayability that allows femicide to keep occurring (in Mexico, at a rate of 10 women per day). As a burst of sound into that silence, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a worthwhile act of defiance.
