Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
15th Eurasian Conference on Language & Social Sciences, Vilniaus, Litvanya, 25 - 26 Şubat 2023, ss.79
In the light of trauma studies, the present study examines three distinct contemporary texts of Chicana writing,
which utilize folkloric, mythological, spiritual, oral and performance rituals to heal wounded female bodies and
traumatic identities of rupture. The common denominator in these texts is the recurrent female prototype who is
maimed psychologically and/or somatically due to the trauma caused by their liminal identity on the literal and
metaphorical terrain that lies between Mexico and the United States of America, through an ongoing history of
colonization, racism, sexism and cultural genocide. In the end though, these texts offer transformative attempts of
curing the diseased individual, who initially remembers, and then reconstructs and finally works through her
traumatic experiences, to create an invigorating perspective of healing, both at the individual and societal levels.
By examining Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), and
Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1983), the present study offers a history of the folkloric, oral and
written strategies and recipes of remedies which these writers utilize as an act of liberating the female agency from
her traumatic state, eventually offering alternative means towards wholeness. The transformative act of healing
then becomes indistinguishable from a new refiguration of the borders that separate the hitherto normative
paradigms of race, gender, history, language, body, and even the textual genre itself, seeking an answer to the
vexing question: To what extend does the individual have the agency of narrating and acting his or her will to reimagine liberatory tactics so as to transform the haunting memories into a liberatory vision of healing?