(champagne)papi

 This week's novel felt like perhaps the most personal we have read so far this term. It is about a girl and her father, among a litany of other children, and a bunch of other people who see him as a sort of father figure. While reading it, I thought of two other books, one of which we read earlier on in the term (Pedro Paramo) and one that I read back in high school (Lullabies for Little Criminals.) 

The main connection between these three works is the fatherly aspect. In Pedro Paramo and Papi, both characters - who are also the title of each book - play a paternalistic role to their communities in a very materialistic sense. Pedro Paramo controlled all the food and everything else in the village, such that when he died everyone perished. Papi had a similar characteristic too, in that he provided for the whole community (at a price). Not only did he provide for the narrator's community, but to most places he went. 

As for Lullabies for Little Criminals, a story that was also (partially) about the main character and her father, the dad was kind of absent. I hesitate to call these dads deadbeat because I know there was some fatherly affection but I also don't think affection is enough. Papi frequently places the narrator lower on his list of priorities compared to business partners and girlfriends, so I guess he is a deadbeat.

The author pretty much nails how to convey the voice of a young girl who is starting to learn what it's like to experience trauma, and we as readers are taken along for the whole ride with her. We also see the narrator in the early stages of becoming a "pick me," basically a girl whose self-esteem is based on male validation and being "not like the other girls." I don't criticise her too harshly because she's only little but the whole attitude of needing to feel more important than the other daughters and her craving to be like her father is sad because of all the self-esteem issues she'll probably have as she gets older, and also she'll probably just be annoying too. She will almost definitely benefit from some therapy.

Question for you all! If you were the narrator's therapist (either as a child or when she's older,) what advice would you give her? Be as silly or serious as you'd like.

Comments

  1. Daniel OrizagaApril 3, 2023 at 5:30 PM

    Thank you for your comment, which reminds us of reading Pedro Páramo. There may also be points in common with Cartucho or Memorias de Mama Blanca. But here, in "Papi", we see how time has passed and the social structure has changed. Even among family relationships, the degree of "commodication" has reached breaking limits. Capitalist chaos can be seen in all aspects, even in infantile fantasy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Julia WApril 5, 2023 at 4:23 PM

    Hey!
    Your title of this weeks blog made me laugh so hard lol! Besides that- One of a therapist's most important roles might be to provide the narrator with a safe and supportive atmosphere where she can analyze and process her feelings. This can involve listening to what she has to say, accepting her feelings, and simply replying in a way that makes her feel understood and appreciated. The girl has to be helped and supported in developing healthy coping mechanisms for the numerous traumas and hardships she faces throughout the novel, in my opinion, which is extremely important.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the next 50 years of solitude

Finishing this book was like a whirlwind (though not as dramatic as the literal whirlwind at the end of the story of course.) I still find it an impressive feat that Garcia Marquez managed to fit 7 generations in a single novel without it being a Tolstoy-length monstrosity. This half of the story was a bit easier to wrap my head around, having got through the first half. However, a lot of my initial thoughts carried through. In my last blog post, I mentioned nominative determinism being the idea that your name somewhat dictates your character, and I could definitely see that in Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula's son - the one who was born with a pig's tail. They briefly considered giving him a name that hadn't been used before in the family, but decided against it, calling him Aureliano all over again and oh look he's got a tail and the family curse prevails. If they could "simply" untether themselves from the family curse and the seemingly neverending cycles the
Read more

i got stuck in the labyrinth

 Truth be told, this was not the book for me. I disliked this one as much as I enjoyed the previous one. I definitely see the playful aspect of the book, and I can see why other people have enjoyed it - having read some of the blogs that are already up - but I think this style of play just isn't very compatible with my reading. The title of the book definitely makes sense to me though; reading it felt like going round and round a maze, momentarily feeling like I understand what's going on before turning the corner and seeing that I was going in the wrong direction the whole time. Perhaps if I were to read some of the stories a second time I would be able to better digest the themes and the happenings, but for the most part I felt like I was trying to grasp at straws to understand what was being said. All that aside, the two stories that were marginally easier for me to follow were Funes the Memorious and The Shape of the Sword. Perhaps it was to do with my mindset at the time o
Read more

I, Rigoberta Menchu

 I, Rigoberta Menchu is probably one of my favourites of the term so far. I believe it's the first (and only?) non-fictional text of the term - although this is partially debated a la Jon's lecture - because it's not a novel, but a testimonial about life as an Indigenous K'iche' Maya woman and her family in Guatemala during the civil war. The subject matter of this book was not completely foreign to me; having read and studied some of the impacts of colonialism and its impacts on Indigenous people, past and present, I think I came in to reading the story with a fairly good sense of what to expect. That said, I'd never read anything specifically about the case in Guatemala, so there was definitely much to be learned there. I can't say that I was completely surprised by what I read in the book, because I was already primed to expect absolutely horrible brutality. Nonetheless, I found the reading experience tough and sometimes found myself skimming over the mos
Read more