Understanding Francisco Goldman by Ariana E. Vigil

Author:Ariana E. Vigil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611179217
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Love, Loss, and Literature

Say Her Name

If Goldman mined the depths of violence and impunity in Guatemala for his 2007 book, his next book necessitated a no less harrowing process, examining the origins of his own unspeakable grief and loss. His 2011 novel, Say Her Name, details the death of a young woman, Aura Estrada, from the perspective of her lost and bereaved spouse, Francisco Goldman. Although the names of the characters match those of Goldman and his late wife, the book is a work of fiction, albeit one based on events in the author’s life.1 Like his narrator, Goldman fell in love and married the younger, Mexican-born Estrada. The two met when she was working on her Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Columbia University. They wed in Mexico in August 2007, when Estrada was twenty-eight and Goldman forty-seven. Less than two years later, while on vacation in the beach town of Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico, Estrada suffered a fatal injury. A wave crushed several of her vertebrae and damaged nerves connected to breathing. She was air-lifted to Mexico City but died within twenty-four hours. The two had been married just shy of two years; Estrada was three months past her thirtieth birthday. Following her death Estrada’s mother and uncle blamed Goldman for her death. They excluded him from their lives, retaining Estrada’s ashes and seeking to hold Goldman criminally responsible for her death.

While all this information appears in the book, Goldman insisted, sometimes in the face of opposition, that his is a work of fiction. The author refused the term memoir, explaining that he “made things up in order to be able to tell the truth.”2 He went on to say that he “never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory is fictionalized anyway.”3 In a 2013 conversation with Junot Díaz and Daniel Alarcón for Radio Ambulante, the author suggested that the intense interest in memoir is a particularly U.S. phenomenon. He linked the phenomenon to a consumer market that, owing to popular personalities such as Oprah Winfrey, has become accustomed to the genre and a particular format that involves confession and absolution. As evidence of the national origin of this interest, he said that the genre of the book was never once mentioned by Latin American or European reviewers. He also offered another explanation for his own hesitation to employ the memoir format, explaining that for his generation, memoirs are closely related to testimonios.4 A hybrid genre that tells the story of a larger community focalized through one person’s experiences, and related specifically to issues of political consciousness-raising and social justice, testimonio for Latina/os and Latin Americans of Goldman’s generation is represented by important books such as the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (My Name Is Rigoberta Menchú) and the Nicaraguan Mario Payeras’ Los días de la selva (Days of the Jungle). Despite Goldman’s protests, however, discussion of the book as a memoir has persisted. A

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