“On September 11, 1961, a twelve-year-old girl named Ana María Mendieta boarded a KLM flight to Miami with her fourteen-year-old sister.” Thus, began a narrative-essay project I left unfinished about the Cuban-American artist. I had come across her name while doing research for my doctoral thesis on the culture of the insular Hispanic Caribbean. By then, the hegemony of identity was beginning and the most strident recoveries of Ana Mendieta did not seem to focus so much on her artistic work as on the circumstances of her death. Her tragic end was and remains exemplary in sustaining feminist activism: a young “Latina” artist murdered with impunity by an older white artist connected to the upper echelons of New York. What was formally and solely established about her death, however, was that on September 8, 1985, Ana fell from a 34th-floor window in Greenwich Village after a fierce argument with her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. She was only 36 years old.
I admit, however, that although I was also drawn to that story, what I found particularly striking was the fact that Ana and her sister Raquel were only two of the fourteen thousand children who between 1960 and 1962 were taken from their homes to be “saved from communism.” I had never heard of the so-called Operation Peter Pan/Pedro Pan in which so many unaccompanied Cuban children were sent to the United States at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. As I began to explore what happened to the Peter Pan children, it seemed to me that everything was much more complex to judge than Ana’s violent death in New York; a probable femicide similar to many others that happen daily without finding justice for the victims. I wondered, what does it mean to leave under the unfulfilled promise of returning home the following year? How much fear can a mother and a father have to let their young children leave alone intending to protect them? What can a middle-class Caribbean girl experience when she suddenly loses her home, her family—her father, moreover, was imprisoned for years—, her language, her dives in the Caribbean Sea with her cousins, her schoolmates, her lively Christmas parties, and her birthdays with colored candles? How does a person crash against the pavement of that inclement nothingness that is the American Midwest when they are twelve years old? Which nun, which orphanage, which foster home, which gringo family will make the loneliness, the snow, and the cold more tolerable?
I came to Ans’s work a little later than to the story of her life. The magnificent tributes paid to her by another Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, led me to review some videos and photographs from the seventies and eighties. I had the impression that through Ana’s life and work in the field of earth-body art, I could peek into certain aspects that the reflection on exile had overlooked. In particular, there was the question of whether we can speak of the existence of childhood exile as a distinct phenomenon. Or whether, for example, there would be a kind of experience of exile that is always childlike, even if we are adults. How do you banish someone who doesn’t even have a recognizable political consciousness? Although I never finished my narrative essay project, over the years certain events have reminded me of some of the concerns that the figure of Ana raises in me: children alone in cages on the U.S. border, or radio voice recordings of young people looking for their parents after the end of the civil war in Angola, a war in which Cuban troops also participated. In fact, in the same years that Ana was developing her performances and videos, the forced recruitment of children for the war was a common practice in Angola. But Ana had no way of knowing this; even today there is very little information about the Cuban intervention in that African conflict. Nor did she need to. She had herself, or rather, she presented herself. And it was with that raw material that the question of her exile is raised to me today as a matter of orphanhood. I believe that, beyond wanting to define an identity certainty in tune with feminism or with the Latin American, African, “Latin” and even Cuban; her artistic sensibility led her more than anything else to a philosophical interrogation that preceded any subjective label. This is what she sensed in one of her 1983 notes when she wrote “There is no original past to redeem: there is the void, the orphanhood, the unbaptized earth of the beginning, the time that from within the earth looks upon us.”
Orphanhood, emptiness, timelessness, and rootlessness lead me to the story of Peter Pan and his childhood weightlessness, the escape from home to reach that limbo that is the arrest of time. Neverland. In Ana’s case, it is as if the rest of her life was at play in that detention as a lonely child, everything that follows the tearing apart. It is about perceiving the rupture, in Ana’s words, “like pulling a young tree out of the ground. One can hear how the root breaks.” In that sound of breaking that never ceases to fade and that I associate with the word “revolution,” there is a promise of permanent levitation in which there would be no vertigo, no fall, because the roots that pull downward would be eliminated. I imagine this idea as the eternal flight of a 1961 KLM, in which Ana and her sister Raquel are still two Cuban girls separated from their soil. Beneath their feet, there is nothing but a void the size of trauma. An emptiness that is the principle of determination of the self and with which Ana reconnected creatively and emotionally both in her artistic proposals and in her 1980 visit to Cuba. But these reconnections with a founding emptiness are not free from death drives. Sooner or later, the promise of flight seems to come to an end. Despite Peter Pan himself, we are not immune to the force of gravity.
Noticing these dualities between flight and fall, the generative and death, other questions arise for me: how does one bridge the gap between one’s own tender body and a hostile nature like Iowa’s? What could be more desolate than stripping naked or leaning against a tree that all too soon will be blackish, bare, leafless, under a leaden, dirty canopy that every year expels bone-wrenching snow? Honestly, can there be anything truly religious about becoming a bird, transfiguring ourselves into ephemeral blood and fire, or simply, into a smiling mustachioed man? Is it worth the effort to find a throbbing earth to rest our feet?
I have no answers. Ana’s life and work seem to coexist in an extreme suspension as a form of negotiation with the emptiness of uprootedness. They involve a constant tension that implies, on the one hand, turning that emptiness into a form of aggregation, of nourishing dissolution with the earth, but on the other, running the risk of its violent repetition, of psychic and corporal rupture to let oneself be carried away by the abduction of the abyss. Perhaps that is why in many of Ana’s works the idea of sacrifice, the play with elements such as blood, the vegetable, animal, and naked body, and even her recreation of rape and murder, alert us to the fragilization induced by exile. I think we can consider Ana’s artistic work as a utopian bet for a kind, loving, almost maternal landing on Earth. To conceive it as the longing for a nature that welcomes us in the face of emptiness. Perhaps his last pieces sculpted in pieces of trunks during his stay in Rome can be seen today as an incipient path that would have allowed her to leave the vertigo and escape from the threat of painful dissolution. In these sculptures, we appreciate fragments of trees without roots that gain a certain capacity of mobility and, simultaneously, shelter several silhouettes, including the human one, as if they could remain inhabiting the heart of the trees.
In these years in which Ana Mendieta seems to have become fashionable, I admit that I fear that she may end up becoming one of the many figures reduced to identity marketing; a “Latin” Marilyn Monroe, multiculti. It is not difficult for me to imagine the selfie current of some activists undressing on any (preferably tourist) beach to exhibit bodies that have lost all transgressive capacity. I am anticipating the opportunism, the glamorous trivialization, the narcissistic identification with a woman constrained to her physical beauty and victim status. Hopefully none of this will happen. In the meantime, I suggest continuing to reflect on her work and life through less obvious connections in literature, art, psychoanalysis, and philosophical thought to think about exile. I advance a magnificent recent reference that may be suggestive to ruminate on these themes of uprooting, orphanhood, emptiness, and childhood: the film Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet.
