Rosarita
Art, Violence, and Ghosts in Rosarita
It keeps happening. I keep guilting myself for not reading books that I think will help me understand every part of the current chaos cycles in the world. That I should feel guilty whenever I pick up a book which might allow me to breathe for just twenty minutes. How can anything get better if I don’t stay informed? If I am pulled immediately into a story or struck by its beautiful prose then I must not be reading right.
But also, how can I understand anything if, in the breath I try to take, a thousand other things that spark fury, frustration, and helplessness keep happening? Luckily, whenever I set out yet again, to ruin reading (and by extension writing) for myself, I read the work of an author like Anita Desai – powerhouse seems a fairly mousy description of her literary talent – whose words remind me that the power of literature doesn’t rest in its insistence of a one-to-one translation of a particular context which tells the reader that they should feel either one way or another.
Rosarita, Desai’s newest novel, is the story of Bonita, a young Indian woman from New Delhi who has come to San Miguel, Mexico for Spanish immersion courses. One day in the Jardín, she is confronted by the woman Vicky who becomes The Stranger and later, The Trickster. The Stranger claims to have known Bonita’s mother, Sunita. Except, The Stranger calls her Rosarita. Rosarita, insists The Stranger, was once a great artist who had travelled from India to learn from the great painters of Mexico.
The mother that Bonita knew was a woman who followed generations of wives that ran households and served the needs of insufferable businessmen with positions of the highest importance in their tiny social circles. Unlike Grandmother however, who took pride in running a household that her husband couldn’t complain about, Bonita grew up seeing a dutiful wife and mother during the day and a woman buckling under the weight of trauma in the darker, lonelier hours.
Still, “a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at home, of a woman seated on a park bench – and yes, it could have been one here in San Miguel – ” pulls Bonita from her misgivings and sends her on a journey through Mexico; a search for ghosts and perhaps the answers to a different life that might have later only existed in the sealed boxes among which her mother used to lay at night.
Themes of womanhood, memory and trauma, and what it means to find our place in the world surge through the veins of this brief, beautiful story. Bonita, determined to escape the fate of the women in her family, immerses herself in the study of languages in order to find freedom. Desai, the daughter of a German mother and a Bengali father grew up speaking several languages and understands that language can be simultaneously freeing and entangling. The beginning of the book felt incredibly relatable: that moment when you, as the child, realize that your parents are just people who happen to have kids. That another person existed before parenthood defined them.
Although Rosarita speaks of two specific moments in history, there are images that could be reflected in many others. Parallels are the reason Bonita ends up in Mexico. In India, Bonita attended a lecture about the connection between artists of the Mexican Revolution and Indian artists in the freedom movement around the time of Partition. An image of trains used in Mexico, jolts Bonita’s memories, recalling her images of trains between India and Pakistan, transporting refugees, bodies drenched in blood. She wonders if such trains were a part of her mother’s memories. Like many families, Partition remains a buried trauma.
Did I mention that Desai’s writing is also damn beautiful? It’s heavy with folktale and at other times it’s more like a dream, interrupted by painful splices of reality. One of my favorite scenes is set in a glittering colonial mansion where the ghosts unravel the power of The Trickster, once so vibrant and dominating a figure in her layers of colorful clothing and jewelry.
Unfortunately there seems to be no foreseeable end to plunging myself constantly into the endless cycle of news updates, interviews, analyses, opinions and podcasts. But even as someone who’s constantly reading, I still need to be reminded that a part of literature’s power is to take us outside of ourselves. Being lost in a story is not shameful, it’s important to our healing and sanity. So find yourself a few cozy, uninterrupted hours to settle down with Rosarita and observe with Bonita’s eyes, the pigeons in the Jardín nodding to each other like old gentlemen and the marsh crocodiles with their heavy-lidded gazes from the edge of the mangrove forests and feel the fear and anticipation as Bonita searches for her mother’s ghost.