World-Making

In the Distance Between Us, Grande juxtaposes people, place and memories, using the power of duality, to deepen the world she is making. We understand what it was like to not have parents through the “props” (the glassed picture of father and shampoo smells that reminded them of mother) from when their parents were there. We understand America based on how it is not Mexico (and vice versa). We understand the child narrator more deeply by getting outside of that angle and having the adult narrator contextualize. 

One of the most powerful juxtapositons used is around memory: Reyna Grande’s breaks the angle through the simple words “Back then.” Much of her ghost narrators begins this way. “Back then, I had never heard of schizophrenia.” “Back then, the trains would come by carrying…” Some of my favorite uses of this are also page 229, “Back then, I hadn’t know what exactly he’d meant by that…my lack of English kept me silent” and page 40, “Back then, not only whereas teeth crooked…” Also, my absolute favorite, “Back then I didn’t know any better than to believe this, so I made the knot in my throat loosen so the egg could slide down” (62). 

These sentences are world-making because they show that another world exists in which those moments have been better understood or in which they have changed in some way. We are getting numerous worlds at once, heading towards the future while already developing and understanding that future. It gives me a sense of stability in reading the piece that I haven’t felt while reading any other book. It didn’t at all take away the surprises and my interest, rather, it made me trust Grande to take me to this place she has promised already. It becomes its own journey of crossing borders and spaces and memories alongside her. 

To deepen these examples, I want to focus on examples where this adult/ghost narrator steps out from her cloak without using “Back then.” These examples are important because these all allow Grande to give us a fuller, more fleshed out world in a more slippery way than telling us “back then.” Such as on page 273 when she is able to zoom into the future and tell us that Carlos never went back to college after his marriage/divorce. It is important that his decision to drop out is contextualized and deepened by its forever-remifications. Or page 275, equally as amazing, when she speaks to how her Mami’s devaluing of her younger siblings education lead Betty to gang affiliation and being a teenage mother. These sifting/shifting moments of time are important because the reader built memories with Grande and understand the weight of both of these sibling failures. 

It didn’t take long for me to begin to see that memory-making was how Grande pulled off the world-making. She always was making the memory. My examples: Her hot blooded scorpio sister could get stung by the scorpion, her scorpion sting, the sting of jealousy like scorpions. Her first kiss with the boy with velvety eyes like the mountains back home, the place of broken beauty without her parents, being with a parent that would beat her and ruin the memory of it, the kiss, with the boy who reminded her of home. The image of the kerosene method to remove lice juxtaposed with her father helping her remove the lice, and especially with the memory-making scene on page 203, where Grande details from wormlessness to laundromat dryers beeping a fascinating narrative around the difference between Mexico and America. 

This breaks the angle and is world making because Grande is still underneath the ironing board. Such as when those grunts are happening outside her childhood bedroom (grandpa’s bedroom, page 15) and when they find that dead man after crossing the border (154). Moments I find the most fascinating and skillful are page 31 when she is able to state that, “I don’t think he (Papí) really had much of a childhood” one paragraph after the adult/ghost narrator is speaking (page 31, “I have seen it (Iguana) grow more than 110,000 inhabitants”). This becomes more than breaking the angle. It is multiple angles at once. It is the world making aspect we crave to create in our stories. 

I feel like page 64 will be the most quoted part of this book. “I know now what she had wanted me to see back then: the banks of the canal lined with trash and debris floating in the water, the crumbling adobe houses, the shacks made of sticks, the children with worm-pregnant bellies running around with bare feet, the piles of drying horse dung.” 

“…But what I saw back then I saw through the eyes of a child-a child who had never been anywhere, a child who was still innocent enough to see past the things later in life she could not. What I saw were the velvety mountains around us, the clear blue sky, the beautiful jacaranda trees covered in purple flowers, bougainvilleas crawling up fences, their dried magenta petals whirling in the wind. … I realize that it didn’t matter what I thought of Iguala. Without my parents here, it was a place of broken beauty.” This is the duality of Mexico/America, where Reyna describes Iguala through both the perspective she had as a child and that she carried as an adult. Here is where I would argue that this world-making that Grande is so fluent in is rooted in memory-making with the reader.