Felicia Fahey
Bates College
Email: ffahey@bates.edu

"Performative Novels : Coitus Sagradus and the Language of Sexual Spiritual Transgressive Acts "

In the last decade, one of the most interesting characteristics of Latin American novels authored by women, is the recourse to representations of secular spiritual practices as a form of resistance to violence and repression. Laura Restrepo's Dulce compañía, a novel that represents, amongst other live acts, the spiritual ritual performance of sexual union between, on the one hand, a renegade angel from the poor town of Galilea whose mixed racial identity remains ambiguous, and on the other hand, a white, middle class, female reporter, who initially intends to investigate the angel's appearance but in the process is seduced by the angel. In addition to looking at the transgressive character of this erotic representation of hieros gamos, a sacred marriage ritual, I am interested in looking at the fertile cross between the novel and performance as two distinct artistic mediums. What does it mean and what is involved in the representation of transformative live acts of spiritual-erotic contact within the boundaries of the novel? How do such live acts push on language in a way that eludes narrative representation, and how might this elusive constitute a productive liminal space for the rethinking of spiritual narrative identities?
Dulce compañía takes place in Colombia, a nation known as one of the most religiously repressive Roman Catholic countries in Latin America. The civil war, now referred to as La Violencia (1946-1958) was characterized by violent religious persecution and the killing of an estimated 300,000 Colombians. In the years following La Violencia,the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Colombia has been slow in responding to the struggle for religious freedom. This has been particularly unfortunate given that the struggle for freedom has recently been intensified and complicated by a number of factors including the growing population, the militarization of the nation state, the political power of evangelical Protestants and the practice and teaching of non-violence by religious organizations. Furthermore, churches throughout the country are divided in their response to violence and religious persecution. Some support oppressive governments and policies, while others actively speak out and seek alternative responses through peace education and training in non-violent action and conflict resolution. Within this context, Laura Restrepo's Dulce compañía, explores how a transgressive ritual performance orchestrated by a group of poor residents living on the periphery of Bogotá attracts pilgrims and reporters, and eventually paramilitaries. Before the paramilitaries are able to intervene and apprehend the Angel, new spiritual meanings and sources of hope are spurned through a number of spiritual ritual acts. Here I examine the oppositional enactment of "hieros gamos" a ritual performance that leads to social, sexual and spiritual transformation.
Dulce compañía centers on the experiences of the protagonist, named Mona, who presents herself as a nonconformist in a conformist society. Mona is journalist for an popular magazine "Somos", but she aspires to one day "write things worth writing" (15). Through Mona we gain an ironically critical perspective of her experience of national life in Colombia. Mona describes herself as an agnostic citizen in a Catholic nation-state and she portrays the president and the elite class as deeply invested in preserving the status quo of their own privilege through economic, militaristic and religious oppression.
A change of events occurs one day when Mona is unexpectedly sent to investigate the case of a fallen angel in the poor neighborhood of Galilea on the outskirts of the city. This is no doubt a reference to Galilee where Jesus conducted his ministry and performed miracles. Despite the fact that Mona's journey to Galilea is professional, she is ultimately swept up in a transgressive pilgrimage and spiritual ritual that leads to her profound personal transformation. Upon arrival in Galilea, Mona is observed by the trio, a group of three religiously unaffiliated women, who have made a spiritual spectacle of the fallen angel, and taken charge of the pilgrimage that is drawing people there. Attracted by her outsider otherness, the trio chooses to incorporate Mona in their theatrical design to create new spiritual myths in Galilea through a ritual performance. Their efforts are simplified when during the pilgrimage, Mona becomes seduced by the angel.
Dulce compañía makes a number of efforts to represent spiritual performances in a novelistic form. For lack of space here, I have chosen to examine the two performative acts that define the scene of pilgrimage in Galilea: the production of a scene of sacred contact with the angel and a ritual procession. Both are orchestrated by a transgressive female trio from Galilea.
Contact with the Divine Warm Up Performance #1
Throughout the world, the sacred has long inspired pilgrims to leave home, travel great distances and endure hardship. As a spiritual journey and encounter, the pilgrimage has traditionally served to confirm the individual's commitment to the sacred but also to patriarchal religious institutions. In Dulce compañía, the pilgrimage retains a sacred force due to the presence of the angel and his performance of miracles, and due to the trio's acts of spiritual reverence for the Angel. And yet the trio's performative acts of spirituality call into question the cultural authority of the local Catholic priest who views Galilea as his parish. As female, spiritual practitioners who administrate the pilgrimage as they wish and in synchrony with their own spiritual beliefs, the trio oversteps Catholic doctrine. Most importantly, they give the surrounding communities a sense of hope and belief that has been repressed by the priest. As a result, the trio gains tremendous power, drawing people from far and near. This infuriates the local priest and he subsequently declares war against them, calling upon the military at one point to break up a ritual.
In Dulce, the high point of the pilgrimage performance consists of the unveiling of the angel. This act constitutes a staged spectacle and an orchestrated ritual performed together by the trio and the Angel. Upon arrival at the sacred site, the trio leads the pilgrims in prayer and a series of Ave Marias, and they must then remain in a waiting room until the angel is prepared to be viewed. Finally upon entering the cave where the angel has been placed, the pilgrims must remove their shoes and repeat the phrase "Santo, Santo, Santo". The effect of the pilgrimage on the community is salubrious. Many pilgrims describe the advent of miracles in their homes and all of those who seek the angel regain a sense of belief and hope. For the Angel constitutes a "power that is more concrete, accessible and credible than that of a judge, police officer or senator, not to mention that of the president of the country" (62). Through this experience the pilgrims learn that "believing is better than not believing." The contact with the angel affects their lives in real ways.
In her professional visit to Galilea, Mona is skeptical about the validity of the sacred spectacle, and she participates in the preparatory "acts of faith" as though she is politely following protocol. But once she lays eyes upon the Angel, she is thoroughly drawn into the liminal space created by the spiritual spectacle. She experiences an alteration of her surrounding reality, an alteration that she refers to throughout the novel as an erotic-spiritual awakening. At this point the novelistic narrative records the difficulties of representing "live acts" particularly as they involve contact with a spiritual or sacred force. Nonetheless, Restrepo wrestles with and partially dislodges the binaries and categories in which the spiritual and supernatural worlds have been enclosed. She does this by describing the experience of contact in terms of a number of similes:
He was almost nude, and he was dark. And fearfully beautiful...But he was just a boy, and nonetheless I was sure that he was also something else, a creature from another sphere of reality....He moved with a slow undulation like water beings or like mimes, and his attitude was humble and majestic at the same time, like a deer...he burned like a slow fire, and a shining incandescent light seemed to emanate from his skin. (42)
By illustrating Mona's difficulty in describing the force of the Angel, Restrepo highlights the extent to which the spiritual realm but also the liminal experience is better expressed through poetic language. The Angel of Galilea appears human and yet his "humble yet majestic" qualities make it both possible and difficult to place him within human social categories. The Angel appears to Mona as both creature and force, as the embodiment of animal, human, artistic and elemental forms. He undulates, shines, emanates and hypnotizes. By using language to associate all living organisms with the spirit, Restrepo articulates an understanding of the spirit as a force that runs through and connects all living forms and the elements of life. This experience is not merely spiritual but erotic. The glowing light and heat that emanate from the Angel's dark skin seduces Mona. Mona is sexually and spiritually awakened by the dark Angel, a religious renegade and representative of the poor residents of Galilea and surrounding communities. This seduction initiates Mona's transgressive pilgrimage.
Hieros Gamos: Performance #2
During her participation in the spectacle Mona is chosen, unbeknownst to her, as the protagonist of a ritual performance that is meant to have a mythic effect on the pilgrims and inhabitants of Galilea. Mona wholeheartedly participates in the trio's plan to transgress and reformulate religious practices by submitting to the performance of "hieros gamos" with the Angel. The trio envisions this performance of "hieros gamos" as an act of great symbolic meaning that is orchestrated by and for the village of Galilea. Eager to establish new religious myths that will define the new community that has developed around the pilgrimage, the trio stages the sexual encounter between the Angel and Mona through a spiritual procession that culminates in the act of sacred sexual union. Suddenly, Mona finds herself swept into this ritual procession as the Angel's lover. She is dressed, adorned and placed in a throne to be carried, as in a pageant, to the top of a mountain. After a long procession through town, the two are deposited at the mountain top altar. Mona and the Angel become enraptured with one another, the two consummate their love, thus fusing the erotic with the sacred and bringing together their socially distanced bodies in a union that "is a sacrament":
Holy my soul and holy my body, both well loved and enjoyably accepted. Holy maternity and holy sexuality, holy penis and holy vagina, holy pleasure, blessed orgasm, because they are clean, and pure and holy and the sky and the earth are made of them, and because they have suffered persecution... Blessed be the sin of the flesh forever, if it is committed with such desire and love. (97)
Again, Restrepo calls attention to the difficulty of representing live, sacred acts by breaking with novelistic discourse. Much like a crying out or an orgasmic declaration, this oration creates a definitive, performative rupture in the narrative of the text so as to signify the powerful impact of the live sexual act between Mona and the angel. At the level of language, it marks a celebratory rather than repressive spiritual rediscovery of sexual bodies, wrestling them from negative Christian associations with filth, pain, denial and sin. In addition to naming the sexual parts of the human body, rather than repressing the utterance of "penis" and "vagina", she employs the religious term "holy", meaning free of Catholic sin, to characterize this anatomy and the pleasures they produce and enjoy.
The act of "hieros gamos" represents a reformulation of the most powerful biblical myths defining humans' sexual and spiritual behaviors. This symbolic resignification of the human-divine sexual union by the trio represents an erotic reenactment of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary particularly where the sexually matured female replaces the asexual virgin. The representation of mutual male and female desire, passion and fulfillment in this revision also explodes the Church's portrayal of the Virgin Mary, Christ, Magdalena triad, one of the sources of long expired gender and sexual practices centered on the construction of a purity/ promiscuity dichotomy. Finally, Mona's conception of a baby girl suggests that the returning savior will be a racially mixed female.
In both representations of spiritual live acts, Restrepo enacts what McCracken has described as the "deployment of forbidden speech and repressed vision"(149) as a way of reclaiming spirituality. This celebration of belief, rapture and bodily joy and creation challenges the very basis of sin and in particular "the sin of the flesh" as an absurd form of oppression that has nonetheless lead to internalized self-loathing and the denial of the erotic spirit. She turns religious language in on itself by revealing the contact with the spiritual force as an erotic experience and by representing the sexual act as one of spiritual liberation. Her vision furthermore inverts the material/spiritual and the sexual/spiritual divides. All forms of life are infused with spirit, and all anatomies, including the sexual organs of the human body, are capable of containing this spirit.
Restrepo's representations of performative, spiritual acts counters repressed social visions as well. She upsets the elevation of man over woman, the exclusion of the material body from the spiritual force, and the racial divide that places taboos on sex between people from different socio-racial backgrounds. Again, this transgressive encounter is both spiritual and social, and leads to a spiritual and social mestizaje that signifies the subversive reformulation of the childhood prayer, "Guardian angel/sweet company/don't leave me alone/at night or by day." Indeed Mona gives birth to a young girl who is born with her eyes open (like Areliano of the Buendía family) and with a "profound clairvoyance" like that of her angelic father. Mona's daughter is therefore the first of this new, mixed race of angel-humans that will no longer live enclosed within the engendered, hierarchical and repressive laws of the Church or in the segregated spaces that divide distinct racial and social sectors.
As for Mona, her submission to the seduction of the pilgrimage performance prompts significant subjective transformation and leads her to dwell and form oppositional alliances in the marginal interstices and frontiers of the nation-state. Mona discovers a sense of spiritual orientation and integrity in a politically distorted world. The pilgrimage Mona has undertaken leads to socio-geographical changes in Mona's daily life practices, for it leads her away from her conformist routines and insular social enclaves. As a result, Mona's irony and sarcasm give way to compassion and an activism of caring. She chooses to leave her middle class neighborhood every afternoon in order to raise her daughter amongst her new family and friends in Galilea who are "sensitive to angels." While the Angel is simply the incarnation of the greater force that organizes this sacred space, the birth of Orphelia nonetheless symbolizes the possibility of new encounters and practices of recognition and opposition in locales transformed by spiritual encounters and acts. Here performance constitutes the starkest and most powerful examples of such practices and encounters. The performance of the pilgrimage in the peripheral village of Galilea transformed by the trio, represents hope, the ever-present possibilities for change and renewal, and the faith that human lives can be transformed by newly signifed forms of contact with the powerful forces experienced through spirituality, eroticism and the creative desire to change the place we live in.
Epilogue
At the end of the novel, Mona tells the audience that she has published her descriptions of the pilgrimage and her experience of spiritual contact with the Angel of Galilea amongst the collection of "notes" that constitute the novel in hand. This reflexive gesture calls attention to the author's act of writing performance into the novel and to the protagonist's desire to "write things worth writing." Both author and her protagonist insist that performance must be written into narrative identities as a way of inscribing new myths, new signifying spaces. These spaces rupture the institutional and political barriers that attempt to control the spiritual, erotic and creative powers to resist and transform. By illustrating that writing can be a space that bridges the poor and the middle class, Restrepo suggests that writing can constitute a space for coalitions and oppositional alignments.
Thus as a conclusion I would like to reflect on the implications of Restrepo's experimental work that tries to write performance into the novel form. If critical approaches to modernity in Latin America, as elsewhere, have been signaled in the cultural sphere by the mixing of genres, the mixing of categories of art (high/low, plastic/written, visual/aural) that in turn represent new cultural ethos and identities, then Dulce compañía contributes in new ways to these efforts, attempting to bring together highly disparate mediums and thereby call into question the institutionalization and appropriation of cultural and personal experiences and expressions. In this experimental mode of developing genres within genres, (cultural practices within cultural practices) Dulce compañía plots the interlude of the mundane, material world by the angelic spiritual realm and the written page by the liminal space of performance.