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December 2020

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

Don’t ever pray for love and health, Mother said. Or money. If G-d hears what you really want he will not give it to you. Guaranteed. When my father left my mother said, get down on your knees and pray for spoons.

Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement

Say a prayer for spoons…

This is a book about young girls being stolen from their families by drug cartels and then sold on to the highest bidder. It’s not a true story, in the individual sense, but it’s based on true stories. These girls, like Paula in the book, really do exist. They are systematically kidnapped, but they never come back. They are voiceless.

After reading the book, I read in an interview a line where Jennifer Clement states, “I know if cars were being stolen there would be greater outrage.” She points out how single dramatic events hit the news, but the everyday silent plight of these women fails to gain attention. These girls come from poor, vulnerable communities with limited educational resources and may only speak their indigenous language, not Spanish. Clement has decided to speak on their behalf, through a young Mexican girl with the unlikely name of Ladydi (Lady Di).

Say a prayer for ladders…

I bought the book because I’m making an effort to read more by Latin American women, but then I left it on the bookshelf for a while as its content seemed rather frightening. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a novel, even a 222-page short novel, about systematic sex-abuse. It seemed unlikely to be a comfortable read and I doubted that it would make me laugh. On the laughter part, I was wrong.

Say a prayer for punctuation…

The book is the work of Jennifer Clement whose life has been split over the two sides of that troublesome border of Mexico’s north. Her book is set entirely in Mexico where she lives, but was written in English with an English sense of style. This is noticeable as the paragraphs and sentences are super short. It stands in contrast to the other books I’ve been reading by Latin American authors. Paragraphing is out of fashion in Latin America.

However, like many Latin American authors, Clement doesn’t use quotation marks to frame speech. Previously, if you’d asked me if quotation marks were important, I’d have said yes. However, since reading a few books without them, I’ve come to think of them as a stylistic choice. Your pedants might complain, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow. You seem to know when someone is speaking.

Based on my wider reading and a conversation with a fellow book lover, it seems that these punctuational deviations stem from the pen of James Joyce. Read a little around the topic of Latin American literature and you’ll stumble over Ulysses.

Say a prayer for mockingbirds…

Prayers for the Stolen reminded me of reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school. Ladydi reminded me of Scout and I found myself reflecting on the choice of a child protagonist. How do you persuade the reader that the narrator is a child, without the writing itself being simplistic? Clement does this particularly well. Her sentences are often simply structured, and you can read a few paragraphs without coming to a comma, not because she’s missing out commas, but because her structures don’t require them. She’s generous with the simple words like ‘and’ and ‘but’ and so creates an easy flowing text, but with surprising quirks that keep you alert. Ladydi’s voice is naive and uneducated, but never boring: child-like, but never childish.

The very next morning Julio, the gardener, walked through the front door and I fell in love.

He walked right into my body.

He climbed up my ribs and into me. I thought to myself, Say a prayer for ladders.

I wanted to smell his neck and place my mouth on his mouth and taste him and hold him. I wanted to smell the smell of garden and grass and palm tree, smell of rose and leaf and lemon flower. I fell in love with the gardener and his name was Julio.

Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement

Say a prayer for shelves…

You know instinctively that Clement reads and writes poetry. This childlike voice of Ladydi reminded me of The God of Small Things and how Arundhati Roy also creates the innocence of childhood linguistics with playful rewriting of the dictionary and a throwaway tumbling of images, metaphors crammed into adjectives.

Though you couldn’t see the river from the house anymore, like a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem house still had a river-sense.

A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Because I loved Julio, the cars and trucks outside on the street sounded like rivers. … Cement walls became mirrors. My small ugly hands turned into starfish.

Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement

And it’s this innocence, this flavour of pictures, this childlike perspective which makes the book so readable. In an interview, Clement said:

Even in doing the research for Prayers for the Stolen, I was also always looking for the poetic experience and how the divine coexists with the profane or beauty with ugliness. I also wanted the novel to have enchantment.

And she succeeded.

Say a prayer for magazines

Before writing the book, Clement spent a decade researching. She interviewed women in hiding: the wives, daughters and girlfriends of drugs traffickers. And she interviewed women from Mexico City’s Santa Martha Acatitla Prison during art therapy sessions. The inmates used collage as a way of giving voice to their own stories – a scene enacted towards the end of the novel.

So, although I picked it off my shelf, out of curiosity – I’d been thinking about punctuation – I must have forgotten my intention… I sat down on the bed below my shelf and kept reading until I was halfway through. It was the style that kept me there, the rhythm of Ladydi’s tale flowed and despite the context, I didn’t find myself recoiling and turning away (as I had in Laura Restrepo’s Delirium a few weeks earlier).

Pray for the stolen…

I loved how Jennifer Clement reaches out her gentle hands in a gesture of humanity to sections of society typically treated so inhumanely. Her characters weren’t playing at being likeable, some were drug traffickers or murders, some were painfully naive and others criminally deluded, and yet… although they’d all broken the law, you couldn’t help but find your heart aching for them.

It’s a true skill, I think, to maintain such tenderness.


Further reading and listening:

Open Book – Jennifer Clement – BBC Sounds

Pitt Chronicle interview

Deutshe Welle interview

The Guardian also has a review, however it’s inaccurate, thus I’d avoid reading it.

Is dreaming of grammar making me crazy?

I wonder if anyone else dreams about object pronouns and possessive determiners? I guess such nightly tussles are one of the hazards of what I do, all the writing and teaching muddles my brain with an excess of prancing words.

Sometimes this quarantine feels like being buried in grammar books

I began my sojourn in England studying for the CELTA. Since my return, I have been teaching students from the total beginner whose English consisted of a few song lyrics to the advanced student whose speaking skills surpass some non-native teachers I’ve worked with. I don’t, therefore, start with a list of grammatical concepts that I will teach week-by-week; I respond to the grammatical problems my students face in that moment. This means that having recognized a student has a problem and that this is a persistent problem I go from class to grammar book and back again.

Sometimes students say things that simply don’t sound right, but I have no idea why. I record their phrasing and then try to break their structures apart, refer to the grammar books, conduct a search of the Internet, compare American and British forms and see what I can do about creating some form of exercise for the student to practise with. In the midst of this, I dream.

Everyone seems to have their own idea of what’s right

A lot of my challenges come from the way many grammarians have historically discussed the English language. Everyone has their own take. Consulting my books I discover there are several perspectives on the gerund: Scott Thornbury suggests, for example, that we don’t use the word gerund, but use the phrase ‘ing form’; John Seely’s account of the gerund is ‘see verbal noun’; those oft-quoted Americans, Strunk and White, are sticklers who (in their rule 10) state that a gerund requires a possessive pronoun whereas a verbal participle requires an objective pronoun; Seeley says that 90 per cent of the time people use an object pronoun before a verbal noun… Don’t fret, it is irrelevant whether, or not, you understand that last sentence. All I wish to convey is that the books disagree.

One of the consequences of having so many perspectives on a core feature of the English language is that each of my students comes to me with a different set of terminology. In English, a gerund is a noun. However, the word gerundio in Spanish refers to a participle which functions as a verb (or sometimes an adverb) but never as a noun. If my students should start trying to solve this terminology problem by themselves, they will run into confusion.

It’s provided me with a headache

Another conflict occurs between my English and the English that my students are trying to learn, and which, ideally, I am trying to teach. Sometimes I hesitate in the middle of a sentence having realized that I’ve switched a was for a were, an I for a me, or a progressive participle for a past participle as in ‘I was sat’… which is dialectically not incorrect, but nor is it helpful for the student. I stop, explain and correct my mistake. What I would love, is if someone could give me a glossary of terms I use in weird ways, so that I knew where I was leading my students astray.

As I have no such guide, I find myself in an investigation into how I personally speak

The process of trying to understand my idiolect can make me sound quite idiotic. I’m not talking to myself like a human, I’m parroting phrases back to myself. I repeat myself with slight changes in emphasis and phoneme, attempting to pronounce what I say naturally, whilst aware of what I’m doing makes me change how I speak and, hence, sabotages the experiment. As a result, I replicate my uncertainties, going over and over the same combinations of words, and not getting very far at all. Modelling the language is nigh impossible if you’re overthinking it. Especially if you’re not the most confident in your pronunciation in the first place. I fear confusing my students. This fear, it seems, leads to weird dreams.

If you felt like this text lacked examples:

  • Building houses is hard work: a gerund and a noun.
  • A house is a building: a non-gerund noun.
  • I am building a house: a verb as a present participle in the present continuous.
  • I was building a house: a past continuous form of the verb which (and this makes total sense) uses a present participle.

And as for the title… if you got that ‘dreaming of grammar’ is a gerund phrase (or should we call that a verbal-noun phrase) but ‘making’ is a verb then you’re doing well.