There’s a song that has come up on a playlist we listen to that always makes us stop whatever we’re doing to all say o! this song! What is that!?
It’s La Llorona, by Ángela Aguilar1. Her voice and phrasing—the cries of lament that are so clear—it feels like it’s piercing my heart every time I hear it. And I knew why when I learned more of its history.
It’s the story of a woman in white who wails alongside rivers and lakes—a ghost story that most likely has pre-Columbian roots and is widely told throughout Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America—as well as across the US. The story has various iterations as every folktale does—but most commonly, it’s the story of a woman who was very beautiful, but poor, who fell in love with a traveling aristocrat or wealthy man. They have two (sometimes three) sons, but he soon abandons her to marry an aristocratic woman. La Llorona, in despair and penniless, drowns her children and then herself. Her ghost now haunts the rivers and lakes looking for her children, mistaking living children for her own and repeating the story—a haunting that becomes a cautionary tale for children to not stray out after dark, or linger near water. And for women to stay within the bounds of her society.
Like so many stories, La Llorona—the crying woman—is a tale of a woman who wails, keens, and screams for her children, for her life. Either shrieks of rage for being abandoned, for having to destroy lives that are also abandoned without hope of a future—or the saddest lament at being left unable to provide for herself and children, for being made an outcast among her own people.
Much has been written about the folktale’s legacy, and how it has become a flashpoint for the experience of women in Mexico, and in Chicano/Mexican-American communities. In many places today, the story is now one that finds women feeling profound empathy for this ghostly woman and her cries. A shift from previous generations, where the story of La Llorona was thought of as a more horrific figure, a monster who was punished for not following the norms of what a woman should be. Women are either angels or monsters. There is no in-between.
When I first heard the song and its story I became a bit obsessed with it. All I could feel was empathy for a woman who has no choice—who was forced into despair without recourse.
The story of a woman in white, a ghostly wailing woman, is startlingly common throughout folklore. When I heard La Llorona’s story I thought of the banshee—that piercing scream of a ghostly woman who is mourning already for one about to be dead. Those who hear the cry of the banshee know that someone’s death will soon follow.
But mostly I thought of another tale of a woman’s lament—that told in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s stunning book A Ghost in the Throat. She frames the experience of being a new mother, a wife, with that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill—an eighteenth-century Irish woman whose lover is slain as a result of horrific penal codes imposed by British colonial rule. The work is a caoineadh—which Ní Ghríofa defines as “a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn.”
The Caoineadh of Airt Uí Laoghaire, was composed by Eibhlín in the eighteenth century, but it was known orally for decades until its most complete version was transcribed from the memory of a woman, Nóra Ní Shíndile, who died near age 100 in 1873. The poem is a traditional Irish lament—when Peter Levi gave his inaugural address as Oxford Professor of Poetry he called it “the greatest poem written in these lands in the whole eighteenth century.”2
Eibhlín writes after her love’s death:
O, my steady companion!
Never could I have believed you deceased,
until she came to me, your steed,
and your heart's blood smeared from cheek
to saddle, where you'd sit
and even stand, my daredevil.
Three leaps, I took—the first to the threshold,
the second to the gate,
the third to your mare.
Fast, I clapped my hands,
and fast, fast, I galloped,
fast as ever I could have,
until I found you before me, murdered
by a hunched little furze
with no Pope, no bishop,
no clergy, no holy man
to read your death-psalms,
only a cumpled old hag
who'd draped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.
As Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Dominion of the Dead:
…it was perhaps through grief that the human voice gained its first articulations.3
No one seems to know exactly what the origin of La Llorona is precisely—there are elements that may have been a part of European traditions, carried to Mexico by the Conquistadors. There are also elements that are tied to the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, who sacrificed her own son at a crossroads and still cries out, haunting at night, calling for her son. She is often depicted as a warrior with spears—perhaps because of a parallel with women who died in childbirth, who were considered fallen warriors, having done battle with the gods to bring a new child into the world. These women were known as Cihuateteo, depicted with skeletal faces who also haunt crossroads for their children.
Another tie, however, is another famous woman in Mexican history—La Malinche. A Mayan woman born around the year 1500, her story often relays that she was sold as a slave by her mother to Aztec tribes, and was then ‘given’ to Cortés as the Spanish invaded what is now Mexico. A woman who could speak many languages, she became Cortés’ translator and may have also aided him in preventing attacks. She is often considered a shameful memory of a woman who turned on her own people—but as her people, including her mother, had turned on her, it may have been her own revenge she was after, not a victory for Cortés. La Malinche had a son with Cortés, who is thought to be the first Mexican child—born of both Indigenous and Spanish parents. Cortés later left La Malinche and had her married to another Spanish invader.
La Malinche’s legend, like La Llorona, has taken on different shapes over time—as a warning to never turn on your own people, as the mother of Mexico, as a woman who navigated and survived the invasion of her homelands when so many died. Her story and La Llorona’s share similar threads, and in some versions La Llorona is even named as La Malinche—an Indigenous woman who was the lover of a Spanish soldier, who when returning to Spain threatened to take their son with him—at which point La Llorona/La Malinche went mad—with anger at the betrayal, or with insanity in her despair—killing her son so that he wouldn’t be taken from her, so they could one day reunite in the spirit world. The children in these stories become the dispossessed—victims of two worlds that could not reconcile themselves to live peacefully.
Like Medea and the story of Madame Butterfly—stories that also share parallels with La Llarona and La Malinche—these are stories of women being pulled between two worlds, on the border between an old world and a new, from safety into exile, from her own lands and culture into conflict with another. La Llorona is forced to the unthinkable when she is abandoned by a lover who is not of her lands; Eibhlín—who also had two sons and another growing within her when her husband is slain—is forced to face the tragedy of loss committed by British colonial invaders of her homelands; and La Malinche navigates between the conquerer and her own lands. These are all conflicts and tragedies borne of colonization—of women whose bodies were colonized and then left in despair, of lands that were wracked by the forces of invasion, conquering, and colonial rule. Laments and cries of despair for a world that demands either a woman’s complacency or her rage to the point of madness at a world that would place her in such situations of grief.
The haunts and laments of women have been going on for centuries, crying for their lands, their children, their lovers, their still-to-be-sought justice. As Harrison writes, such stories haunt because they are unfinished—they lead us to revisit injustices that have yet to be righted:
…the legacies handed down from the past lie not behind us but run out in front of us.4
It is not surprising that La Llorona has become as a figure of feminist resistance, where women in Mexico dress as La Llorona in white and ghoulish face, to protest the enforced disappearance of their sons. Like the women of Akhmotova’s Requiem, women are the ones who wait, who lament, who whisper it over generations. They are a warning call that the need for justice needs to be made into something horrific and holy. For people to be haunted by what has been done to women, to lands, to generations that were intended to follow but which the world has made no space for.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes:
A body holds so much beyond the visible. Before it was ever transcribed or translated, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire was preserved in oral folklore, reverberating through a succession of female bodies, from female mouth to female ear, over year and years and years.5
Stories of women’s despair, of being at the borders between worlds—geographically, culturally, bodily, figuratively—continue to haunt, to mourn, to lament, to call for justice. These are laments that are carried in women’s bodies, in the lands that they come from. Like fairy tales, folktales are relayed orally for generations, forms of story that
...belong to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration…6
In her book Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon writes:
…it is precisely the experience of being haunted in the ‘world of common reality,’ the unexpected arrival of ghosts or wolves or eerie photographs, that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized, self and other, and in those ways gives to reality a different coloring. The ‘reality-testing’ that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real.
What would happen if we chose to confuse reality and story, could admit these haunting tales are not just stories but are real? Would we then find a way to right them, to honor them rather than having to relive and witness these stories over and over?
What pierces me when I listen to La Llorona, or read Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, or learn more about the derision of La Malinche, is the resounding fury and ache of women—whose lover abandons them or is killed, the ache of children lost, of a world that has taken pieces away of different identities and left women, children in the borderlands of a world that refuses to honor their existence as whole people.
I feel that same sense of fury in La Llorona’s cry when I read about the latest restrictions on abortion pills, of women initiating an abortion with a pill and showing up in the ER only to be arrested for inducing abortion, of pharmacies so swiftly bowing to the ‘pressure of red states.’ I feel that ache and fury when I read and signed my name to protest the appalling coverage of trans people in the NY Times, and of politicians who would apparently erase trans people, and how such rhetoric affects trans children that have only recently been able to transition to their own identity, to finally feel at home in their own bodies, only to have it be threatened and condemned once again as something to fear and to ban as other.
It is an ache that continues and will continue to haunt—like the women writers of gothic fiction, these tales are the ways that these stories get told and continue in each generation—stories of those who are marginalized and reduced to the borders of the world at large, made to haunt at the edges and demand to be heard. They are unforgettable, that is the gift of what it means to haunt. We wish to not be haunted, but cannot be until we can find justice for the wrongs that have been done to them. As Jaques Derrida wrote, in Specters of Marx:
To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right…to…a hospitable memory…of a concern for justice.7
I feel that each time I play La Llorona or read Eibhlín’s fiery anguish—I read and listen to invoke a sense of both anger and healing. To feel the ghost in the throat and to give it voice, to scream its ache.
As Gordon goes on to write:
To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize…that it could have been and can be otherwise.8
To listen with a steely sorrow to the haunting laments of women—to mourn and know that it could have been otherwise—and hope that it still can be.
The fact that Aguilar was barely 16 when she recorded it is part of what adds to its pathos—a young girl singing with such emotion—the ache of generations of women who have had to mourn and rage, as she herself becomes a woman in society.
As quoted in Ní Ghríofa, Doireann. 2020. A Ghost in the Throat. Tramp Press. p. 37
Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2003. Domion of the Dead. University of Chicago Press. p. 62
Ibid. p. 95
Ní Ghríofa, Doireann. p. 37
Ibid. p. 74
As quoted in Gordon, Avery. p. 58
Gordon, Avery. p. 57
Ah, "Ghost in the Throat", almost forgot, thanks for the reminder - will ordered it now.
La Llorona such a gorgeous ballad, thank you for the clip.
You also sent me searching for this poem to share with you (sorry about the ads). https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-banshee/
Yeats speaking with his old storyteller friend, Paddy Flynn:
"I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, "Am I not annoyed with them?" I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. "I have seen it," he said, "down there by the water, batting the river with its hands."
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler). The Celtic Twilight
Lastly, something to hang your hope on, this opinion written by a minister in Great Falls, MT.
https://dailymontanan.com/2023/03/06/drag-is-prophetic-and-thats-why-they-want-to-ban-it/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=2d551c96-8263-456a-b24f-f4862f76cab3
Oh, one more last thing, I so appreciate your work on this newsletter, reading it is always a highlight. Thank you