A 17th-Century Nun’s Feminist Manifesto

Culture and entertainment musts from Gisela Salim-Peyer

Latest Mar 3, 2024 0 54 Add to Reading List

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Gisela Salim-Peyer, an assistant editor who has written about the fantasy of heritage tourism, the Venezuelan government’s project to redeem a dead rapper, and Italy’s millennia-old ambition to build a bridge to Sicily.

Gisela fell in love with Mexico City and Mexico’s national anthropology museum on her first visit last spring, was transfixed by the opening paragraph of Juan Rulfo’s novel, Pedro Páramo, and views the 17th-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as the last word on everything.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Culture Survey: Gisela Salim-Peyer

The last museum show that I loved: Last year, I went to Mexico City for the first time and loved it in a very different way than I do other world capitals. In New York City and London, many of the best things are from elsewhere; you can get food from any country in the world. In Mexico City, everything I loved—the cuisine, the architecture, the textiles, the design, the art—was Mexican. Mexico, I learned, is a big, proud universe of cultures that wants to celebrate itself.

In 1964, the government moved the National Museum of Anthropology to the forests of Chapultepec, in Mexico City, giving it a home more worthy of its enormous, varied collection of Mesoamerican artifacts. This spectacular building is the biggest museum in the country and—in my opinion and many others’—one of the greatest museums in North America. There’s a courtyard with a concrete roof somehow suspended on top of a fountain. There are gardens with monumental sculptures, and each feels like a secret revealed. In the middle of the central gallery is the Aztec sun stone.

Walking through those halls, I remember thinking that in nearly every other country I had visited, the star national museum sought to display treasures from as many other places as possible, with some of the biggest galleries set aside for Egyptian or Greek or Italian art. I really liked Mexico’s way of doing its star museum: It doesn’t aim to contain the whole world. [Related: What comes after the British Museum?]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Speaking of Mexico, Natalia Lafourcade sings to my spirit. I don’t know how else to say it. Her music makes me want to feel all the sadness I would otherwise escape from.

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of listening to her, here’s a selection of her most melancholic hits:

“Hasta la Raíz”: about origins and memory
“Soledad y el Mar”: literally, “solitude and the sea”
“Lo Que Construimos”: about breakups—a reflection on what it means that something you build with another person can just vanish
“Para Qué Sufrir”: also about breakups, and about people who love each other without making each other happy

The best novel I’ve recently read: Speaking more of Mexico—since I have just decided that the country will be the theme of this culture survey—if you haven’t read Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, you really should. It’s the kind of book they make Mexican schoolchildren read, so some of my Mexican friends are ambivalent about it; because of that, I never thought to read it.

Then, one day, I read the first paragraph (translated here by Margaret Sayers Peden):

I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything. “Don’t fail to go see him,” she had insisted. “Some call him one thing, some another. I’m sure he will want to know you.” At the time all I could do was tell her I would do what she asked, and from promising so often I kept repeating the promise even after I had pulled my hands free of her death grip.

Then I read the whole novel, which is under 200 pages, and it’s great. We follow the narrator into a town where everyone is dead, but the dead are still very talkative. I like the dialogue, which is full of slang and speed and jumps in chronology. In some moments, it felt like the voices were coming from inside my head. [Related: The Hill of the Comadres (from the March 1964 issue)]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: When I was in high school, my best friend, sitting next to me in class, underlined a few lines from a poem in our Latin American–literature textbook and passed the book silently to me, sustaining eye contact to see my reaction. My school was very all-girls Catholic, and the poem, which was not required reading, broached the topic of sex work. We, or at least I, felt slightly rebellious for even reading it.

The section my friend underlined read:

Who is more to blame,
though either should do wrong?
She who sins for pay
or he who pays to sin? (translated by Michael Smith)

The poem, I later learned, is a classic—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Hombres Necios que Acusáis” (“You Foolish Men”), a succinct feminist manifesto written by a 17th-century Mexican nun. Sor Juana’s ideas—on sex, on women, on men—have often informed my opinion. To me, she has the last word on everything. [Related: Philosophy’s big oversight]

The Week Ahead

Love Lies Bleeding, a romantic thriller starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, and Ed Harris (in theaters Friday)
Anita de Monte Laughs Last, a new novel by Atlantic staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez (out Tuesday)
The Regime, a new HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet that chronicles a year in the palace of a crumbling European regime (premieres tonight at 9 p.m. ET)

Essay

A photo of Alicia Keys ripped in half — William H. Kelly III / Jackson State University / Getty

Why the Best Singers Can’t Always Sing Their Own Songs

By Marc Hogan

Almost one-third of the way through Usher’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Alicia Keys appeared, attached to a billowing red cape and seated at a matching piano. As the Grammys-festooned pop and R&B singer-songwriter gently played the opening arpeggios of one of her biggest hits, 2004’s “If I Ain’t Got You,” something small but unexpected happened. Instead of easing into the song with the first verse, Keys skipped straight to the chorus—and right on the dramatic opening note, her famously velvety-smooth singing voice noticeably cracked.
In the immediate aftermath, viewers were strikingly quick to pounce on Keys—in the press as well as on social media—for her perceived vocal transgression. Adding to the furor, the sound of Keys’s voice cracking was edited out in the official video uploaded by the NFL. An otherwise-fleeting memory had seemingly fallen prey to pop music’s version of the Mandela effect (a phenomenon where people collectively misremember events). And, as a result, Keys’s performance became a lightning rod for casual music critics and prophets of technological dystopia alike.

Read the full article.

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