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Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street (Image: Tina Tiller)
Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street (Image: Tina Tiller)

BooksFebruary 15, 2024

Why you should read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street (Image: Tina Tiller)
Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street (Image: Tina Tiller)

Writer Tracey Slaughter on one of her favourite ever novels.

The House on Mango Street a classic American novel taught in almost every school in the USA and which has sold over six million copies is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and its author, Sandra Cisneros, is on her way to the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts as a headline guest in the festival’s writers programme. Mega fan, author and creative writing teacher Tracey Slaughter lays out why we should be clamouring to get our hands on a copy of The House on Mango Street – and why the opportunity to see Sandra Cisneros live and in person is such a thrill.

I’m calling this piece Why you should read The House on Mango Street – but the word “read” seems far too inert for what happens when you open the pages of this book, take in its wonders. You’re spilled instantly into the title street, pressed breath-close among its inhabitants, hunting with neighbourhood kids through its secrets and litter-glints, its parched backrooms and brokedown stretches.

There’s an early encounter where the child narrator learns to see her home, with a jolt, through the scrutiny of an observer who spots her playing out front of its boarded-up bulk. “Where do you live?” this passer-by interrogates, and when the child simply points out “There,” every harsh thing she needs to know about her place in the world is delivered back in one stressed syllable: “‘You live there?’ There… The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there.” It’s a lesson in division, in distance, though, that this novella overturns, collapses instantly – if you, as reader, take up the invitation to follow this child into her world, her street, you’re not going to get the chance to stand at this onlooker’s remove, make squeamish judgements from its vantage (if you have ever been privileged enough to live on hills and “sleep so close to stars” you can get away with feeling you “have nothing to do with last week’s garbage or fear of rats.”) You’re not going to get the choice. This book’s going to pull you into its lived textures – its raggedy hallways and junkstore dreams, its “couches that spin dust in the air when you punch them,” its “beercans and cats and trees talking to themselves” – and you’ll learn, close-range, that “There” is not nothing, but everything

It’s hard to think of an author more gifted than Cisneros at setting into oscillation all the atoms of place. Mango Street looms, streams, shines in this writer’s hands, and her people leap from its details. You feel its characters, sole and skin, the alleys they chalk up and skip through, the clattery tenement steps they count, the images that seize their play, deepen their breathing, widen their eyes. You loop the stairs and skulk the corners, you slink the “skinny aisles” of stores, you shimmy the trees “all around, the neighbourhood of roofs, black-tarred and A-framed, and in their gutters, the balls that never came back down to earth…and there at the end of the block, looking smaller still, our house with its feet tucked under like a cat.” The structure and language might seem simple, as the child narrator leads you in a linkage of swift vignettes in and out through the doors on her street, but make no mistake – though you’ll follow Esperanza’s footsteps effortlessly, there’s a masterclass unwinding in her tread. 

It is, for one thing, a masterclass in flash fiction, moving in a sequence of irradiated glimpses – long before theorists had pinned down this mode of fiction, Cisneros had instinctively made it her own. One thing she proved is that it’s a form always ready to run off into the bodies of kids, to live in their minds, limbs and eyecorners, a form that can follow all their quivers and clambers, fast enough to mirror their tracks, as they make memory, story and myth from the particles of sense that flicker past them. On Mango Street there’s a luminous scene where the kids play at naming the clouds – “that wide puffy cloud that looks like your face when you wake up after falling asleep with all your clothes on” or “the kind that looks like you combed its hair” – and it’s beautifully sculpted as a metaphor for Cisneros’ book, where people blow through like clouds too, caught indelibly in each flash-chapter as if framed before dissolve in a slice of sky, “no two exactly alike”, vast, streaked, trembling, holding their personal rain, warm-smelling, pieces of god. 

Various cover and poster art designs for The House on Mango Street.

It’s hard to name a writer, too, whose lines are more perfectly gauged to catch character energy, whose syntax models more vividly that words have muscle, mood, movement, that voice is a verb. If you can scuff, pedal, creep along Mango Street with the same force you once swooped the asphalt of your own childhood, that’s because Cisneros’ prose is bodily, electric with the lives she pitches you into the midst of. Her sentences move with the rhythms of those who dwell there, the strange neighbours, the instant friends, the shady legends, even the animals, like the dog who “runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes.” They eavesdrop in backyards with mix-and-match sisters, and capture the lightning-speed crisscross of childhood chat, where spats and dreams escalate, taunts sizzle, schemes hatch and crash. When she walks you the 21 out-front steps and slanted floors of Meme Ortiz, the journey is voiced in little-kid lines “all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose).”

If you want to know character, start at their feet, let their feet teach you how their sentences move – it’s a lesson Cisneros planted in me that’s never left: “The mother’s feet, plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the linoleum roses, down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares. 5, 6, 7, blue sky.” Later in the book, when the group of girls are gifted a cache of blousy grownup shoes, “the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg… spotted with satin scars where scabs were picked,” but they still experiment with giggly tee-tottering “down to the corner so that the shoes talk back to you” – and the lusty but perilous sway in Cisneros’ prose finds them sampling the “yes, no, maybe so” of hips as they go on exploring their pre-pubescent sashay: “You gotta be able to know what to do with hips when you get them… You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know – like if half of you wanted to go one way and the other half the other.”

Cisneros’ lines ripple with precarious desire – shoes like this lead to danger zones in the neighbourhood, fates especially electrified for girls. Yet “everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt.” When you scope out the yard of “the bad Vargas” brood, the sentences “bend trees and bounce between cars and dangle upside down from knees and almost break like fancy museum vases you can’t replace,” the same way the uncountable kids do, their bone-tired mother distracted “all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying,” so “nobody looked up not once the day Angel Vargas learned to fly and dropped from the sky like a sugar donut, just like a falling star, and exploded down to earth without even an ‘Oh’.” Cisneros’ lines thrum with energy then brim with tragedy, swing between restless momentum and frames of stark arrest, halting suddenly up against moments and events that flood the child-gaze like a stain. 

All this is of course to say – you must read and re-read The House on Mango Street. Don’t wait: go there. When I think of Cisneros, I think of other unmatched women writers, of Toni Morrison, of Jayne Anne Phillips, of Joy Harjo, of our own Patricia Grace. In another dazzling episode, Esperanza is struck in the junkstore by the eruption of a music box: “Then he starts it up and all sorts of things start happening. It’s like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones. It’s like drops of water. Or like marimbas only with a funny little plucked sound to it like if you were running your fingers across the teeth of a metal comb.” Each “box” of words in Cisneros’ groundbreaking flash springs to sudden life like this, as she brushes your fingers, to the point of singing, across the surfaces of Mango St.

Sandra Cisneros will appear in several events (House on Fire, Glorious in her skin, First penned) at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts’ Writers Programme between Friday 23 and Sunday 25 February. Information and tickets are online. The House on Mango Street can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!
‘The sea-witch is an older woman of dubious morality, or in Ursula’s case, genuine evil.’ (Design: Tina Tiller)
‘The sea-witch is an older woman of dubious morality, or in Ursula’s case, genuine evil.’ (Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksFebruary 11, 2024

The octopus on my side-butt

‘The sea-witch is an older woman of dubious morality, or in Ursula’s case, genuine evil.’ (Design: Tina Tiller)
‘The sea-witch is an older woman of dubious morality, or in Ursula’s case, genuine evil.’ (Design: Tina Tiller)

An excerpt from a longer essay called ‘Reborn as a sea hag’, from Airini Beautrais’ highly anticipated forthcoming essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon.

It’s only once I arrive at the studio that I realise my chosen placement is going to require me to go without pants the whole day. There is something vulnerable about being naked from the waist down, with someone you don’t know very well. But my tattooist is easy to talk to. We’ve lived in some of the same places. We talk about our academic backgrounds, our work, our hobbies. A tattoo artist, like a beauty therapist, a massage therapist, a hairdresser, a nurse, is used to working with all kinds of human bodies, in a way that those of us who don’t touch people for a living can’t easily comprehend. As the sun starts to go down, my skin feels more sore, and the hip bone of the side I have been lying on all day starts to ache. The suckers come last, fiddly and repetitive. It must be tiring, tattooing people all day, I say, and the tattooist agrees. 

The octopus on my side-butt is not a direct reference to either Hans Christian Andersen’s sea-witch or Disney’s eight-legged Ursula: those are just the examples nearest the surface when one goes diving. There are a lot of stories about mermaids, but very few where the sea hag is the protagonist. I was drawn to the sea hag as an emblem of female power. Instead of being an object of male desire, she is an independent figure, a maker of potions, someone to be feared. The octopus has also been associated with various mythological monsters. Folklorist F.T. Elworthy likened the octopus to the Gorgons; Medusa and her sisters. Drawing on figures from pottery, he argues that “in these curling objects we may recognise what must have been as familiar as they were dreadful to the ancients living on the coast; not snakes, but the writhing tentacles of the horrible Octopus.” He goes on to say: “Those who have studied that monster, the Octopus, at close quarters, as I have, will find no difficulty in appreciating the awfully fascinating glance, in the baleful eye of that odious creature, an eye in itself conveying the most frightfully malignant expression of any living thing upon which I have ever looked.” Freud saw the Medusa as representing the genitalia of the mother, eliciting fear of castration. “This symbol of horror is worn on her dress by the virgin goddess Athene,” Freud writes. “And rightly so, for thus she becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires.”

Left: the tattoo part way through. Right: the healed and completed tattoo 18 months later. (Photos: Supplied)

Even after four waves of feminism, the value systems of a traditional patriarchal society are still very present. In a hetero-patriarchal worldview, the idealised woman is young, virginal, compliant and selfless. She has a neat and tidy vulva that has never been penetrated, and has never given birth. As she cannot simultaneously maintain this state and fulfil the purposes of sexual provider and mother, she must be constantly replaced. In such a value system, the body of the promiscuous woman is seen as ruined and debased, and the post-partum body as unpleasantly altered and undesirable, subjected to immense pressure to revert to its maiden state via weaning, weight-loss and surgery. There is no winning for a woman in this system: the body’s divinely appointed job is to bear children, but its reward for doing so is renewed hatred and disgust. This disgust is often internalised. I am frequently saddened by social media posts and articles by otherwise feminist women, lamenting the exact number of kilograms they have gained, or displaying a begrudging kind of self-acceptance, with the caveat that they hope to be smaller in a year or two.

The idea of the octopus came to me on a walk at South Beach in Whanganui. While our kids and Oscar the dog ran through the dunes playing hide-and-seek, a friend and I talked about our love lives, as we often did. I was being ghosted again by an on-off boyfriend, after admitting I thought some of his writing featured misogynistic tropes. For the hundredth time, I was done with him. And I wanted something symbolic to ensure I wouldn’t go back, to him or anyone like him. Once, on another beach, he’d made a joke about accidentally seeing my genitalia, and “getting the fright of his life”. I might as well embrace that Freudian fear, I thought to myself. Writhing tentacles on my leg, a Medusa’s head, would help filter out anyone who was terrified of vulvas.

The sea-witch is an older woman of dubious morality, or in Ursula’s case, genuine evil. The nameless Little Mermaid, and Ariel, are young and pure of heart. But there doesn’t have to be a dichotomy. They are all creatures of the mythical ocean, belonging to a diverse family of characters. In the same way they transcend beautiful versus ugly, good versus bad, appealing versus terrifying, the mermaid, the sea-witch and their mythological cousins also complicate the virgin/whore dichotomy. The fish tail could be seen as a sexual fetish. The lack of legs and therefore lack of human genitalia (logically, a mermaid has a cloaca) could symbolise unattainability. Or the creatures of the sea could represent female sexual agency and the destruction of men through desire. Or they could be darker still: the aquatic being could be something monstrous from the very depths, a Grendel’s mother. The sea monster could more broadly represent any sexuality or gender identity that does not conform to patriarchal, heterosexual norms.

Like the Medusa and Grendel’s mother, the Sirens and the Lorelei, depictions of water creatures over the past two centuries span a broader spectrum than the romantic feminine characterisations of Andersen’s and Disney’s versions. Fake mermaids made of monkeys and fish, crafted in the nineteenth century, and housed in various museum collections, are testament to the idea of the mermaid as a creature of horror. In her movie Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle plays an older mermaid who has sex with a younger mermaid and a male diver. New Zealand filmmaker Adam Stevens’s 2003 short film Delores features a fishing crew who accidentally catch an injured, angry and foul-mouthed mermaid, whose strong smell makes them vomit. In the video for his song ‘Music for a Sushi Restaurant’, Harry Styles plays a singing squid man who is discovered washed up on the beach. WWE wrestler John Cena had a cameo in the 2023 Barbie movie as ‘Kenmaid’, a merman with billowing blond hair.

A still from short film, Dolores, about a fishing trip that results in pulling up an angry mermaid whose strong smell makes the fishermen vomit.

To my mind, possibilities are the greatest things stories can offer us. Being told the same story over and over, on the other hand, with no alternatives, serves to solidify power. The evil old witch versus the beautiful young princess is one of the most harmful of these narratives. It reinforces a tendency to categorise women as attractive and unattractive, or, more crudely, “fuckable” and “unfuckable” in a way that undermines a person’s humanity. I can’t go back and relive my childhood, replacing folk tales and Disney movies with a diet of books and films about strong women who followed their dreams and demanded respect. But I can continue to explore alternative narratives. I can’t determine how other people see my body, but I can determine how I respond to other people’s perceptions.

The tattooist cleans my skin and applies a balm, then carefully wraps the octopus. I drive back to the airport, get on a plane, sit in the tiny seat with my hip aching. It is not a painful ache, more a pleasant one, like the rough tingle you feel in your hands after a day working in the garden. I am tired, but endorphins flow through my blood. I am happy. At home, I peel away the tape and the wrap, wash off the plasma and surplus ink in the shower. There is my body: naked, human, alive and imperfect. Tentacles writhe around my hip, as if the octopus has suckered onto me. I am a woman, and a mother. I am no longer young. Never, never again do I want to be fucked by someone who hates any part of what I am, who finds me disgusting, who views me as an object or a repository. The octopus’s eye looks out of my leg, keen, watchful, powerful.

Photo: Rob Caven

The Beautiful Afternoon: Essays by Airini Beautrais is out in March. You can pre-order your copy from Te Herenga Waka University Press here

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