Islas’s sensibility is both more rigorously conventional and more lyrically acute than many other Chicano novelists. His work eschews politics for the most part and focuses exclusively on the family. But the way in which he focuses on the family leads to an ethnopoetics, among other things, that gives coherent expression to the suppressed identity of the Angels, to the “pagan, servile, instinctive” side. For the Angels’ india reminds us that life and death are part of the same mystery, as in the seemingly ironic name of the family’s matriarch: Encarnacion Olmeca de Angel. Indian and European create a dialectic, as does the protagonist’s situation as “insider” and “outsider.”19 But The Rain God also tells us that life and death are a great circle. Beginning with death and ending with death, the novel emphasizes extinction as part of the circle of life, but it is still seen as part of a unity underlying and informing an indigenous vision.
For Islas, this idea of the unity between life and death has its origins with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In the early stages of its composition, The Rain God was titled “Day of the Dead,” after the Mexican celebration that dates back to 300 BCE. Day of the Dead reflects a death-accepting culture, one that reintegrates the departed and helps them complete their mythic journey to the underworld.20 Like those pre-Columbian peoples, Islas made an offering (consisting of words instead of food) to help his dead make their journey to their final resting place, which above all else is the space created by art. In Dancing With Ghosts, Islas biographer Frederick Luis Aldama makes it clear that Islas was exorcising his demons through the writing of a novel that obsessed him for years. However, we can grasp an equally deep dimension of The Rain God by viewing Islas’s obsession as the making of an indigenous “flowery” death, that is, a religious vision, a return to origins, both poetic and true.
When Islas died in early 1991, The Rain God had been out for only six years. It was the first book of a proposed trilogy that Islas never finished. That same year the second installment, Migrant Souls, was issued, and though not as compelling a novel as the first, both taken together provide a clearer picture of what Islas had possibly imagined or intended in setting himself the task of composing a trilogy based on the fictional lives of a Mexican American family from the Southwest. What is significant about these works is the kind of artistic exploration of the Chicano subject that Islas achieved. As the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade says so well in one of his poems, the recovery of family history represents a “pathetic traveling across the lost kingdom.” Islas recognized this too. The journey is pathetic (in the root sense of pathos as suffering) not only because the past is forever lost, and therefore unchangeable, but also because human beings often find themselves needing to hold on to the past, however troublesome it may be, as they face the uncertain future.
In excavating the past, Islas discovered a way to answer the undying human need to give meaning to “the accidents of life,” a theme sounded throughout The Rain God and echoed in the subsequent verses of Nezahualcóyotl’s rain god poem quoted before:
Filled are the bowels of the earth
with pestilential dust once flesh and bones,
once animated bodies of men who sat upon thrones,
decided cases, presided in council,
commanded armies, conquered provinces, possessed treasure, destroyed temples,
exulted in their pride, majesty, fortune, praise and power.
Vanished are these glories, just as the fearful smoke
vanishes that belches forth from the infernal fires
of Popocatepetl.
Nothing recalls them but the written page. (162)
Chaos—a recurrent theme in much Chicano literature, as in Nezahualcóyotl’s elegiac verse—inspires both fear or uncertainty and techniques for living fully, such as we find in myth, poetry, and other intense forms of human expression. Although Nezahualcóyotl’s tone is negative, there is nevertheless a consolation, even a resilient spirit in that qualification of knowledge: “Nothing recalls them but the written page.” The written page is indeed one way of getting at the truth of what is beyond, because writing at its best is a search enabled and ennobled by the power of heart and mind combined—the aim of all those ancient poets and wise men who made “flower and song” in the face of mortal uncertainty and inevitable loss.
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