Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MIGDALIA CRUZ – FUR, A PLAY IN NINETEEN SCENES – 1995

The duplication of Michael and Nena, the main characters, into Dream Michael and Dream Nena enables the author to reveal their hatred and to make Dream Michael kill Dream Nena, which Michael does not do with the real Nena who dies but in a different way:

“(Dream Michael, isolated in a pool of light, speaks to Citrona. He stands over a smoldering pile of pink rags that was once Dream Nena.)

DREAM MICHAEL [in Spanish translated as follows] (I killed her. Now we can be together forever. She didn’t deserve you. I know you wanted me. It was in your eyes . . . you didn’t have to say a word . . .)”

The story itself is not that meaningful. Michael has two females under his control. Citrona, a wild animal he wants to turn into his spouse, and Nena who is the trapper he needs to take care of Citrona who is a wild animal after all, and all that it means.

Michael is in love with Citrona, the very hairy animal she is, Nena is in love with Michael and Citrona is in love with Nena. Citrona finally gets permission from Michael to court Nina and Nina accepts to play the game if Michael accepts to marry her. But it all goes wrong. Citrona kills and eats Nena. So Michael is going to be able to get Citrona. But the end of the play is Michael’s scream from off stage where he had followed Citrona. We can imagine the cannibalistic ending and since Citrona represents the wild women of the colonized Indian nations, she is depicted as hairy and cannibalistic. That sounds simple-minded, primitive. A cannibalistic “ménage à trois.”

But the play is a metaphor. There are two types of women.

1-       Hairless and servile women who love men;

2-       Hirsute and beastlike cannibal women that eat all they love and what’s more prefer women for love. Men are only perishable libidinous objects that do not really deserve love. We mean of course the colonizers, the hairless civilized white men

Michael uses both types and in spite of Nena who loves him, he loves the animal, the beast. The animal female was made such by her own mother, and her own mother sold her to Michael. The mother is thus seen as the real monster that procreates a monster she sells as soon as she can for a profit. We have to understand the text may speak of Citrona’s mother generically, meaning all mothers. This discourse against mothers seems to be present in many Chicano/a plays.

Women are just objects, instruments, desirable objects or useful slaves. It is transmitted from mother to daughter and it becomes a curse.

There is no hope with men because they are just dirty pigs who only want a wild encounter with the wild animals they keep in cages. Men like boys will be men just like boys.

But the wild animal woman has the last word, or the last tooth bite. She kills Nina with a letter opener from her very own mother given to her by Michael (premeditating the end). And then she kills Michael and she eats him after having eaten Nina.

There is no hope for humanity, but unluckily quite a future even though hopeless, since the women men want end up eating them up, hence getting rid of them. Is this a metaphor of a future without men? Maybe though it sounds then all the more hopeless and vain since soon there will be no men to help make more men who are the delicatessen luxury of these women.

This cannibalistic theme is remarkable in many of these plays, associated to women and even mothers. The point is to know whether it is a parable of the desired liberation of women, or if it is a parable of the longed for liberation of the colonized from the colonizers and colonization. As such then women would be the agent of that liberation and their cannibalism would be the very realization, materialization of the Post Colonial Trauma Stress Syndrome all the colonized are the victims of.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU