World-Building

World-making: How to represent what can't be seen by the angle

World-building. One of my very favorite things to study when I read for craft (which is always, now - can't shut it off).

Grande has her work cut out for her, building not one, but two worlds: Iguala and El Otro Lado. What struck me (first) was Grande's ability to build a world of El Otro Lado before she went - before we, as readers, went there with her. One would think a child's opinion of a place they have never been would be impossible to communicate with any real weight, but after reading the first part of this book, one would be proven wrong. Grande's narrator, living in Iguala, yearns for her parents so fervently that El Otro Lado, the very place keeping them captive, takes on a physical, spatial presence in the narrative. El Otro Lado is not just a concept; to the reader (to me), the faraway place felt as real and tangible as a snowglobe in my hands. The fact that this is accomplished - the world built purely via imagination within the narrative - floors me.

How does she do this? A massive factor is the existence of the unfamiliar within the familiar (Grande's parents in El Otro Lado), plus the narrator's intense, umbilical dual-feeling of connection and separation. Pathetically watered-down example: I don't know what it feels like to have allergies. It means nothing to me when I see the symptoms in Mucinex commercials. But when a person I feel close to has that experience - my poor sister comes to mind immediately, hangjawed and runny-eyed - I am somehow closer to grasping that unfamiliar. There are some things you can experience by proxy, I think, when your connection with another person is truly intense enough. That boosted Grande's ability to perceive and subsequently communicate El Otro Lado in a big way.

That world is also built over long distance via the things that find their way back: the gifts, the letters, the stories, the mothers. These things give El Otro Lado a presence in Iguala - its own culture, even: a culture of yearning, envying, coveting, waiting, and leaving. The entire time I read the narrative section set in Iguala still, I felt that El Otro Lado was not only just beyond the Mountain with a Headache: it was there, in Iguala - in the cab driver's questions, in Élida's nice clothes, in Betty's otherness, in the Man Behind the Glass.

I find it worth mentioning the act of world-rebuilding, when time has passed and the narrator's angle of perception/discovery has shifted. After Grande has left Iguala and lived in Los Angeles for nine years (nine years? eight? ten? number probably inaccurate on my part), the revisited Iguala requires an overhaul of world-building. It is largely the same village as that which Grande left as a child, but she has changed so much in the years since - become Americanized, lived with a virtually new set of parents, quite literally grown up. Sometimes world-building is not so much a sketch of location/setting/culture, but of the character who perceives it. This is one of those cases. Rebuilding Iguala in the narrative as a more desolate, more run-down, more squalid place the second time around doesn't say much about the town; it speaks volumes about Grande and the distance that has grown between her and the place she is from.