[In the following essay, Huerta debates how Giving Up the Ghost has evolved from its first staged reading in 1984 and how it deconstructs female subjectivity.]

Cherríe Moraga's first play, Giving Up the Ghost, was originally presented as a staged reading at the Foot of the Mountain Theatre, in Minneapolis, in 1984, directed by Kim Hines. The world premiere of another, more fully developed version of this play was produced by San Francisco's gay/lesbian theatre company, Theatre Rhinoceros, in 1989, co-directed by Anita Mattos and José Guadalupe Saucedo. This version became a part of Moraga's trilogy, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, published in 1994. Giving Up the Ghost is the first play about lesbian desire, written by a lesbian, to be produced and published.¹

In her review of the San Francisco production, Catalina Cariaga wrote that the play was initially “… a set of poems—women's voices emerging from Moraga's collective unconscious … Moraga allowed these voices to settle into three distinct characters.”² Actually, the three women on stage represent two characters, Marisa and her younger self, known as “Corky,” played by two distinct actors, and the third woman, Amalia, Marisa's lover. Focusing her analysis on the relationship between Marisa and Amalia, Cariaga writes: “Neither is quite sure how or why the love between them has come to be or if it should or will last. They either ignore or avoid these questions. Each is filled with too many inner conflicts—‘ghosts’ to overcome” (Cariaga, “Poetics,” np.).

Although this play has been produced in only a few venues, because of the importance of the author and because it has been published twice it has generated a great deal of interest from several literary and theatre critics. Like most writers' first plays, the initial publication of Giving Up the Ghost has the aura of autobiography, the resonance of a soul on fire, eager to share the flames.³ I use the term “fire” because the play suggests a burning. A burning of old ideas, an incineration of outdated attitudes; but most especially, a burning of passion. In the first version of Giving Up the Ghost Moraga created a beautifully simple, yet considerably complex series of monologues delivered unabashedly to the audience, with very little interaction between the three women on stage. Together, these characters revealed the beauty of understanding and respecting one's self, despite society's rejections.

In Erik MacDonald's words, “through these roles, the play critiques the cultural oppression of Chicanas and analyzes individual and cultural problems of lesbian identification.”⁴ When Moraga published the revised version in 1994 she wrote: “This current version is based to a large degree on the Theatre Rhinoceros production” (Moraga, Heroes, p. 4). She had begun to explore dialogue as opposed to monologue and her directors, Kim Hines, Laura Esparza, and especially Anita Mattos and José Guadalupe Saucedo, undoubtedly informed her playwriting as they worked with her and the actors. The 1994 version is much more “complete” as a dramatic text, than the first series of poems.

In the first version there is no actual plot other than the eventual acknowledgment by Marisa of her ability to survive. Mostly, the three women talk to the audience, listed by Moraga as “The People,” in the Cast of Characters; the playwright's attempt to make the collective viewers active participants in the play. The actors looked at one another, acknowledging the other's presence, but there was very little “dramatic” tension or interaction between them. No debate. The debate was with the society that has given these women few options other than to conform to or rebel against patriarchal condemnation. Corky/Marisa is the central figure, the autobiographical character who narrates her journey from a young, tomboy-like Chicana who knows that she is “difernt,” to the older Marisa, who has accepted her lesbian desire and wishes to express it with the older Mexican, Amalia. Amalia mourns a lost male lover, a simple man from a Mexican village. It is the man's ghost that tears Marisa and Amalia apart, leaving Marisa to mourn her other ghosts, including Corky, as she picks up the pieces of a lost relationship.

A sample of the kind of language and thought in this play may illustrate its honesty and force:

It's odd being queer.
It's not that you don't want a man,
you just don't want a man in a man.
You want a man in a woman.(5)

Yet this is not an angry outcry against men, but more of a sincere attempt to share some of the experiences a woman can go through, passing from childhood to womanhood, from innocence to wisdom. And, from naiveté to cynicism as in the rape scene described by Corky. In one of the most arresting accounts of sexual violation I have ever encountered in a play, Corky tells how, at the age of twelve, she was raped. The narrative is a mixture of comedy and pathos, told with such truth that it is an actor's dream. When a man whom she thinks is a school custodian asks her to help him fix a desk, Corky agrees and finds herself underneath the drawer, supposedly holding it for him. Eventually, he coerces his way into a sexual penetration:

Then he hit me with it
into what was supposed to be a hole (…)
But with this one
there was no hole
he had to make it
’n’ I see myself down there like a face
with no opening
a face with no features
no eyes no nose no mouth
only little lines where they shoulda been
so I dint cry.
I never cried as he shoved that thing
into what was supposed to be a mouth
with no teeth
with no hate
with no voice
only a hole. A Hole!
(gritando[shouting])
He Made Me a Hole!(6)

In her analysis of this scene, María Herrera-Sobek concludes: “… the rape scene encodes a political metaphor for society's marginalization of women. It traces, in a few powerful lines, the socialization process visited upon the female sex which indoctrinates them into accepting a subordinate position in the socio-political landscape of a system.”⁷ In her study of this play, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano also comments upon the rape scene as startling evidence of the woman's penetrated position:

Up to the time of the rape Corky had thought it could never happen to her because she had denied her femaleness, rejecting the role of chingada [the fucked one] and identifying with the chingón [fucker], the active, aggressive, closed person who inflicts the wound. The rape brings home Corky's sex to her as an inescapable fact, confirming her culture's definition of female as being taken.⁸

In her review of the San Francisco production Cariaga also draws attention to the rape scene. Cariaga quotes from a speech by Norma Alarcón in which she discussed “the re-occurring topic of rape in the work of women writers … ‘Perhaps,’ she [Alarcón] said, ‘it expresses the forcefulness of their negation from the literature of the dominant Anglo culture’” (Cariaga, “Poetics of Chisme,” np.). From the symbolic rape of women as writers to the actual retelling of a rape in Moraga's vision, the taboo topic is finally exposed for what it is: a political act. As Corky puts it, her “hole” had no voice. After Corky has shouted out her last line (as quoted above), Marisa wraps a rebozo around her shoulders and holds her. Marisa then takes over the scene with the following dialogue which is no longer in verse:

I don't regret it. I don't regret nuthin'. He only convinced me of my own name … And then, years later, after I got to be with some other men, I admired how their things had no opening … only a tiny pinhole dot to pee from, to come from. I thought … how lucky they were, that they could release all that stuff, all that pent-up shit from the day, through a hole that nobody could get into.⁹

In her analysis of the first version of Giving Up the Ghost, Tiffany Ann López sees the rape monologue as “the play's core scene because it synthesizes the process of seeing, touching, and naming that is necessary to her characters' process of healing.”¹⁰ López also points-out the fact that after the rape monologue Corky “disappears from the rest of the play, a narrative shift that symbolizes how such acts of violence against women serve to erase them, literally, from the social text” (173). López chooses to discuss the first version of this play because she believes that the characters are more involved with the audience, making it more “artistically confrontational” (p. 176, footnote 3). López is also better able to make her point about Corky's disappearance in the first version since there is non-verbal interaction between all three women after the rape in the second version. Yet, even in the second version, Corky soon disappears from the text and the stage, supporting López's assertion that Corky's disappearance represents the erasure of the raped woman by her community.

According to Sue-Ellen Case, Giving Up the Ghost was exceptional beyond the Chicana/o community, making groundbreaking statements that reverberated in the feminist movement as a whole. “Within the feminist community,” Case writes, “the play was exceptional for its material and multiple identity construction, in contrast to the few white lesbian plays which had appeared, without class or race specificity—taking for granted the bourgeois, white lesbian as normative” (Case, “Seduced and Abandoned,” p. 99).

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano echoes Case in her analysis of the various subjects being de-constructed in this play. “The representation of female desiring subjects in Giving Up the Ghost is culture-, class-, and race-specific; their subjectivity as sexual beings is shaped in dialectical relationship to a collective way of imagining sexuality. The text explores the ways in which Chicanas, both lesbian and heterosexual, have internalized their culture's concepts of sexuality” (Yarbro-Bejarano, “Female Subject,” p. 145).

The “ghost” that the title refers to is multiple. Amalia cannot let go of her dead lover's ghost; Marisa cannot let go of Amalia; nor can she let go of her younger self, Corky. In the process of telling us her story, Marisa does, in fact, let go of her cultural taboos. Marisa reveals for the listener/observer, her frustrated desires and in so doing, revolts against and rejects the proscribed behavior expected by her community. Although it is clear from the beginning that Marisa/Corky is a lesbian, we are never quite certain what Amalia's sexual orientation is.

Unlike the naive and one-dimensional representation of lesbian desire in Day of the Swallows, Moraga writes from experience and can thus present us with multiple sexual identities. In doing so, Moraga paints characters that are complex in their psychology and not easily categorized nor analyzed. In Norma Alarcón's words: “Moraga puts into play the concepts ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (and the parodic ‘butch/femme’), with intuitive knowledge that they operate in our subjectivities, so that it is difficult to analyze them.”¹¹

Finally, Cherríe Moraga's Giving Up the Ghost is a milestone in the history and evolution of a Chicana/o dramaturgy, gay or straight. Like Edgar Poma's Reunion, this play exposed (and exposes) its audiences to topics they might never have encountered in public spaces otherwise. Granted, the majority of audiences who witnessed Moraga's first play were women, gay and straight, and as Latinas they could only rejoice in seeing their sisters and mothers, aunts and cousins on stage as women. Desiring women. Lustful and lusty women fighting their demons. Marisa may have lost Amalia, her Mexico, but she gained a deeper understanding of herself, as did the people who allowed these characters to come into their lives, if only for an evening.

Notes

1. The earlier version of Giving Up the Ghost is published singly by West End Press, Los Angeles, California, 1986. The version produced by Theatre Rhinoceros is in Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, pp. 1-35. All references to this play are from the 1994 edition but citations will give page references for both versions below.

2. Catalina Cariaga, “The Poetics of Chisme,” “Poetry Flash” [Berkeley, CA] No. 195, June 1989, np.

3. Yarbro-Bejarano refers to the characters of Corky and Lupe (Shadow of a Man) as embodying “some autobiographical elements of Moraga's early struggles with Catholicism and sexuality.” Yarbro-Bejarano, “Moraga's ‘Shadow’,” p. 98.

4. Eric McDonald, Theater at the Margins: Text and the Post-Structured Stage (Michigan, 1993), p. 153. He is writing about the first edition of this play.

5. Moraga, Heroes, p. 21 and Giving Up the Ghost (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1986, 1992), p. 29.

6. Moraga, Heroes, p. 29 and Moraga, Ghost, pp. 42-43.

7. María Herrera-Sobek, “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction,” in María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes (eds.), Chicana Criticism and Creativity: New Frontiers in American Literature (Albuquerque: New Mexico, 1996), p. 249.

8. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “The Female Subject,” p. 147.

9. Moraga, Heroes, p. 29 and Moraga, Ghost, pp. 43-44.

10. Tiffany Ann López, “Performing Aztlán: The Female Body as Cultural Critique in the Teatro of Cherríe Moraga,” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Michigan, 1999), p. 169.

11. Norma Alarcón, “Making ‘Familia’ From Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena María Viramontes and Cherríe Moraga,” in María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes (eds.), Chicana Criticism and Creativity: New Frontiers in American Literature (Albuquerque: New Mexico, 1996), p. 229.