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Week 12: Papi by Rita Indiana

 Hello blog readers,


This week I read my final book for Span312. This week I read Papi by Rita Indiana, which was quite an entertaining read. This novel was a bit all over the place but very interesting. The unnamed daughter was really well characterized. Her narration brings me back to other books we have read in this course, such as Mama Blanca’s memories and Cartucho, because those also had childlike narration. I think this book was especially similar to Cartucho because we saw how the children in that book viewed death and trauma, just like how this girl is dealing with death and trauma. Throughout this course, I have come to enjoy that narration style, especially with this book. I got to think about when I was an eight-year-old girl and how special my father was too. In fact, I loved my father so much that I chose to live with him after the divorce of my parents. It’s effortless to idealize a parental figure as a child, which is what this girl did toward her Papi.


I didn’t think Papi was a good father. I mean, he left his daughter on multiple occasions. The hardest one, I think, is when he completely left her hanging when they had plans to go to the beach, and she had a tough time with that, not eating and sitting there and waiting for hours. She was traumatized throughout her childhood because of the appearance and disappearance of Papi. So when Jon asked what kind of father is he to her? I would have to say not a good one. Father-daughter relationships can have a powerful bond, and I think she is very attached to the idea of him and loves him even though he keeps disappointing her. I also think she has a tough time with Papi’s death because all her life, her mom and others would say he’s dead to me, or I wish he would die, so when he actually died, it was hard for her. However, she tries to play it off in the story as if it’s not hard for her by thinking she is Papi. We see this in the quote, “I was exactly the same as Papi. I was Papi. I am Papi” (129). 


I am also still trying to figure out if Papi is real or if all this was just her imagination. Being a child’s perspective makes the narration unreliable in a sense. I think this girl has some psychological issues if she’s actually going and killing her dad’s girlfriends, so for the sake of reality, I think she just imagines these all in her mind. Since he abandoned her, she can project any idea of him that she wants and have these mythological ideals. That’s why halfway through the book, I thought this must be her imagination.


For my question, I want to know what you thought about the way this girl mourns her father’s death. I mean, she literally swallows her dad’s tooth that she steals from his corpse to have a piece of him? How she mourns is strange, and with the swallowing of the tooth, Jon mentions that she consumes Papi and becomes her. Do you think Papi is a person, an imaginary character, or a role?

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Comments

  1. Daniel OrizagaApril 3, 2023 at 8:34 PM

    As Dr. Arturo Victoriano said in the conversation with Dr. Beasley-Murray, this novel has several dimensions and it may be necessary to read it more than once in order to understand it a little better. Of course, Papi is not a model character. The border between reality and fantasy is blurred at various times and even temporality is affected. Finally, the distance between Papi's body and the narrator is also broken: the corpse (or false corpse, if there are those who prefer to see it that way) is an object of scrutiny. Like the monsters in horror movies, the living corpse returns to occupy its symbolic or even religious place, as in Freud's theories.

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  2. Alyssa AlmerlingApril 4, 2023 at 3:36 PM

    Hi Melika! Great blog post this week! This is also my last book in Spanish class! very bitter-sweet (: To answer your first question, the way she mourns is a little unusual but we can relate it to are more "normal" context. When my dad passed away, I held onto his sweaters and wore them to keep him alive in me. Just like the daughter is taking something of her fathers, instead she swallows it which is more strange than just wearing but they are the same idea. Grief is a struggle, especially for kids who are just understanding and learning about the world. For the daughter and myself, we both held onto things to keep the memory of our fathers alive because we had trouble letting go. Her ways of doing this is are more strange then mine, but grief does make people do things that they would not normally do.

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