Chapter 3 - Gulf Atmospherics: Huracán and the Visceraless State

Summary

[…] this is what you do when you can't afford an abortion, when you can't have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you.

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Tell me, oh tell me, oh tell me how many creatures you’ve sucked dry? Not a one, not a single one, it's only you now I want to try.

“La bruja,” son jarocho sung by Salma Hayek in Frida

When Patricia Yaeger wrote in Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930–1990 that “the foundation or basis for this world is made out of repudiated, throwaway bodies that mire the earth” (15), she could have been addressing legacies further south and across deeper time. Peoples of the Gulf have long been reduced to the “bare life” conditions articulated by Agamben, “precarious life” per Judith Butler, “the biopolitics of disposability” as Henry Giroux observed (via Foucault) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (175). Gulf inhabitants have sustained an inner life within economies of enslavement and extraction (gold, sugar, cotton, oil, tourism) and amidst an atmosphere of hyperviolence, with its heat, hurricanes, and vulnerability to climate change. Precariousness of life is revealed in contemporary gothic from the region: an embodied gnosis that Yaeger called “the unthought known” (12).

The literature of this space, for critic Richard Gray, presents a “regional rhythm” so thick with “the weather of the landscape and the weather of the mind” (26) that “ ‘Southern Gothic’ seems almost a tautology” (27). He may have been thinking of Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eudora Welty's “The Winds,” Linda Hogan's Power, and the flooded creeks of Yoknapatawpha. But this regional rhythm moves from sources beyond borders and beyond the gothic, stretching back to when “Heart of Sky, named Hurricane,” shaped the creation of the world (Tedlock, Popol Vuh 65). The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel also accounts for beginnings when “[t]he yearbearer winds / Spoke” (235) and prophesied a period of tragic destiny brought by aliens, “Christianizing us / And then treating us like animals. / That is the pain in the heart of God” that brought “Christianity here / To this country, / The plantation country / Of Yucatán” in “the year 1539” (Edmonson 242).