On Diaz, ii.-- Dona Marina, Somewhere

La Malinche, she is everywhere present, unsteady, constantly moving, transforming, just under the few words, relatively speaking, allotted her in Diaz’s story. Sold by her own mother/step father/ brother, she appears in one town after another, accumulating languages, accumulating lovers/owners/husbands/companions, accumulating meanings, still accumulating meanings, now. Under Diaz’s pen, she becomes Joseph, whose Biblical story perhaps at once suggests itself to Diaz and shapes Diaz’s memory. Sold by her family, wrested from her homeland Dona Marina becomes a stranger, an outsider, intruding but still noble, still intelligent, still beautiful (she is Yusuf of the Qur’an, whom the women stab their hands over in love- coincidence?- probably, but still…). She is still capable of acting, her blood still runs noble. It is all- all these wrenching transformations/translations- for the good (but whose good? her people’s? her’s? what is her good, anyway? the Spaniards’?), for her cultural/geographic migrations, her accumulated strata, are the key to everything. She is the Prologue, the Genesis that enters into the end of the story, her bones are borne on and on in Mexican history, have yet to come to rest.

She is Joseph, her accumulated wisdom, stored up in the unhappy prisonhouse of her pre-Spanish, pre-Christian days, wisdom that she presents to the Pharaoh, wisdom through which she interprets/translates the dream-world that spins madly out more and more the closer they come to the Floating City; yet when the Hispano-Tlaxcala alliance reaches their goal, she largely fades into the background. When at last, having reached her apogee of power and nobility, she rediscovers her traitorous family, she, Joseph-Marina, weeps and embraces them. All is well: the breaks, the weight of the accumulations, disappear in love and forgiveness. But this comes early in the narrative; before the gates of the great city, she disappears. But her bones live on, like Joseph’s, her people (but who are her people?) finding themselves in a new land,  a restless land itself.

She is one of the heroes of this tale, indeed one of the few unambiguous heroes, maybe the only one. She is a Joseph-figure, but she is more than a Joseph figure: she is in a long line of women praised for ‘manly virtue’; in battle she does not fear, and her loyalty is unswerving. Her place in the world is at once clear and at once ambiguous: not only can she translate, she can melt back into her ‘native’ milieu, and receive knowledge- interpret the shape of things- that others cannot have. Again, like Joseph, she is between multiple worlds, and not just ‘indigenous’ (which is, of course, multiple worlds in reality) and Spanish.