{"id":3529,"date":"2019-02-26T20:40:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T20:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=3529"},"modified":"2019-02-26T20:40:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T20:40:06","slug":"ghosts-in-the-trees","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/ghosts-in-the-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts in the Trees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Day of All<\/em> Saints<\/em> by Patricia Grace King
\n<\/strong>Miami University Press, 2017
\n<\/strong>Paperback, 96 pages, $15.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

Winner of the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patricia Grace King begins her novella\u00a0Day of All Saints<\/em>\u00a0with an image of ghosts: \u201cGhosts in the trees. Mart\u00edn wants to rip them all down. If he could, he\u2019d bury them deep in the flowerbed that he\u2019s uprooting, or stomp them into the grass.\u201d These ghosts, Halloween decorations that adorn a yard in Chicago\u2019s affluent north side, are anything but playful; rather, they represent the suppressed memory of trauma, specifically the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, which haunts Mart\u00edn Silva de Choc, and, indeed, the pages of this stunning short novel. It follows King’s two previous fiction chapbooks,\u00a0The Death of Carrie Bradshaw<\/em><\/a> (Kore Press, 2011), and\u00a0Rubia<\/em><\/a> (winner of our very first Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Prize here at\u00a0The\u00a0 Florida Review<\/em>, 2012). Her work is growing in power, and here she draws on her three years spent in Guatemala working with refugees of that country’s civil war.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although the primary narrative, set in Chicago in the 1990s, unfolds over the course of a single day, King skillfully weaves in flashbacks that take place in Guatemala City. There, Mart\u00edn, a young language instructor, lives with his grandmother, Do\u00f1a Ana, and his aunt, Rosa, in the El Incienso barrio, to which he moved when he was four, as \u201ccivil war ripped through the rest of the country.\u201d In the first of these flashbacks, Mart\u00edn falls in love with a US foreign exchange student, Abby, even as her social, economic, and national privilege cause her to fetishize, to romanticize through a Eurocentric lens, the very neighborhood in which Mart\u00edn lives. \u201cThis feels Mediterranean<\/em>, somehow,\u201d says Abby, \u201c\u2018If you just nearly shut your eyes \u2026 If you look through your lashes.\u2019\u201d Indeed, the crux of the work hinges on how Mart\u00edn and Abby, though in love with one another, cannot communicate in a meaningful way due to their different cultural identities and experiences. Do\u00f1a Ana, in telling of her former life in the Ixc\u00e1n in the 1970s, echoes this difference when she juxtaposes Guatemalan culture with US culture. Of her own culture, she says,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And I had my own small diversions: nights I sang with the neighbors, down at the P\u00e9rezes\u2019 house\u2014the P\u00e9rezes had a marimba\u2014and the priests\u2019 visits on weekends. They came regularly then, to say Mass on Saturday and to hold Spanish classes for us women, since back in the highlands we\u2019d mainly spoken K\u2019ich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She follows this observation with one of US culture during the same era: \u201cIn America, what were they doing\u2014roller-skating? Donna Summer? Don\u2019t look so surprised; I know who she is. Electing Se\u00f1or Ronald Reagan, too, weren\u2019t they? Who sent our Army so many guns.\u201d This cultural difference, and its underlying significance, permeates the work and is ever-present in Mart\u00edn and Abby\u2019s relationship. When they move to Chicago, their bond becomes tenuous, and their different social positions and histories more starkly defined. As Abby attends art classes at a university, Mart\u00edn works as a day laborer. And while Abby has her own past trauma related to her mother, she ultimately has the privilege of security. When she leaves Mart\u00edn, haunted as he is by the brutal deaths of his parents and extended family members, she finds safe haven in the home of her mother on the north side. Mart\u00edn, however, bewildered and alone in a new country, finds himself without such material and emotional sanctuary.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

King writes a story within a story within a story, and she does so in lyrical language with details so vivid that the reader cannot help but enter the picture she paints. In the primary narrative, Mart\u00edn searches for and then finds Abby at her mother\u2019s home, and in the secondary narrative, Mart\u00edn and Abby fall in love in Guatemala. In the tertiary narrative, Do\u00f1a Ana, over a dinner prepared for Abby at home in El Incienso, begins the story that is the heart of the text\u2014the traumatic events that occurred in the Ixc\u00e1n and that haunt Mart\u00edn and his remaining family members.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This narrative, begun in a flashback sequence, ultimately enters the primary narrative as Mart\u00edn faces the ghosts of his past, who appear before him in a memory long suppressed. He can no longer banish these ghosts, nor can the reader, who encounters them, and the world they inhabit, at every turn. They are \u201c[t]he heat [of the Ixc\u00e1n, which] was this thing that sat down on your skin and would never let you up. And the mud\u2014you would sink in it up to your knees. You could lose your own shoes in that mud.\u201d They are \u201c\u2018[t]he fog on those mountains \u2026 something you miss when you\u2019ve left them\u2014how it flies from the peaks like white laundry.\u2019\u201d These ghosts drift through the text, hovering on the periphery of the psyche in both Mart\u00edn and the reader.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Day of All Saints<\/em>, King makes a thoughtful social statement about cultural difference and First World privilege: as Mart\u00edn observes, \u201cHalloween: a day of no real significance in Guatemala. What matters, instead, is El Dia de Todos los Santos, Day of All Saints, one day afterward.\u201d However, she does so without ever allowing that statement to overwhelm the true focus of the story: Mart\u00edn\u2019s strength and fortitude, indeed the strength and fortitude of his family, the other residents of El Incienso, and the citizens of Guatemala, which shine throughout the course of the text. King\u2019s characterization of Do\u00f1a Ana; Aunt Rosa; Don Gustavo, Aunt Rosa\u2019s romantic companion; and Ernestina, the young woman of Ixc\u00e1n who chooses to leave behind her village and her birth name in order to fight for the resistance, is honest, nuanced, and deeply affecting, largely because of how King understates their sacrifices.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, Mart\u00edn is the character who most affects the reader, not, solely, because the narrative is focused through him, but because of the complexity of his character. He is a man in love with a foreign woman, a woman who wishes to heal the wounds of his past in the same way that she wishes to heal a wound on his hand, but he is also a man deeply connected to his place of origin, his remaining family members, and his fragmented history. He haunts us, as does the ending in which, hunched against the trunk of a tree in the Palm Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, he confronts the ghosts of his past that have now entered his present. It is closing time at the conservatory, but this room is the ever-present Ixc\u00e1n, where the guerillas, dressed in \u201ccamo-green,\u201d await to aid survivors of the army\u2019s ruthless actions, and he is trapped there \u201c[a]mong the wet trees.\u201d He knows that \u201csoon the people in green will come for him too,\u201d with a green-aproned conservatory attendant poised to tell him, \u201c\u2018Sir, it\u2019s time to go now.\u2019\u201d Where will he go when he leaves the Palm Room? One hopes to a sanctuary of his own creation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These ghosts . . . represent the suppressed memory of trauma<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3543,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[1044,1045,311,1046,1047,1048,1049,1050,8],"class_list":["post-3529","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-day-of-all-saints","tag-gretchen-comba","tag-jeanne-leiby-memorial-chapbook-prize","tag-kore-press","tag-miami-university-press","tag-patricia-grace-king","tag-rubia","tag-the-death-of-carrie-bradshaw","tag-the-florida-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGhosts in the Trees - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/ghosts-in-the-trees\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ghosts in the Trees - 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