Piñata Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“Now, looking at the face of her people’s apocalypse, a real manifestation of a culture lost and buried by violence and conquest, she saw the unconscious terror her people had felt centuries ago. The pain of erasure, the fury born from helplessness, and the grief of so much lost had twisted this powerful goddess, this woman warrior, into a demon of revenge. Yoltzi sang to it as her grandmother had sung to her.”
Leopoldo Gout’s 2023 horror novel Piñata is a jaw-dropping contribution to the exorcism story sub-genre, playing with tropes we know and bringing in new scares that distinguish it among its counterparts. It’s about cursed artifacts, colonization, ancestral interconnectedness across time and space, rage, femicide, and sisterhood.
A unimportant aside: I also enjoyed the Animal Crossing references (I once had Apollo on my island, too!)
Carmen and her two daughters, Izel and Luna, travel to Tulancingo, Mexico to renovate an old abbey into a profitable hotel. Carmen brings her daughters, hoping they’ll reconnect with their roots, but when things start to get weird, she wonders if she made the right decision. After a strange accident on the worksite, a secret enclave housing rare, ancient artifacts is revealed and young, curious Luna steals one, known as a piñata or a tlapalxoktlis. Soon thereafter, the family is visited by odd phenomena— swarms of aggressive black butterflies, an old woman chanting outside their house, and Luna becoming less and less like herself. Carmen is fired after the accident, and thinks they’ll find normalcy again back home in New York, but she’s sorely mistaken. Things only get worse.
Unlike the more mainstream version of piñatas which we see when Carmen and the girls go to the birthday of a coworker’s child, the traditional piñatas are clay pots made of “blood, hair, clay, entrails sewn with fibers and shaped like demons.” To break them can be an act of violence or a celebration, depending on ceremony and purpose. When Luna takes the one home, she is slowly possessed by a Tzitzimimeh, “…goddesses of the night sky, massive beings who lived in the darkness of the cosmos, their very joints composed of whole stars. If a new sun failed to rise at the dawn of the new century the Tzitzimimeh would descend and devour the earth. They were warrior women who’d died during childbirth…”
With help from Yoltzi, an indigenous woman who sees the strange spiritual landscape around the family, can they stick together through violence and uncertainty? Can the women survive or will they too fall prey to the violence of history?
The book’s position on rage is complex but driven by empathy and a knowledge of history, of truth. Particularly, the rage of women in the face of rampant femicide in Mexico, which is positioned as the inevitable end result of the Spanish conquest.
“Her eyes stopped on the front pages morbidly showcasing mutilated bodies, gunshot and knife-wound victims. It was so common that the grotesque had lost its ability to shock, to move, to anger. Women, so many murdered women, up to ten in one day across the country, people said. It seemed more and more unbelievable, the brutality of their murders. This much hate had to come from somewhere. All that resentment, animosity, and frustration the country and the world had been hoarding for so long, it had to come from somewhere crueler, more sinister, more ancient— a sweeping force that planted the desire to leave everyone motherless, sisterless, daughterless. A homicidal force set on ending women altogether.”
The prologue takes place during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. We witness the destruction, the apocalypse, as it happens, led by the friars. One of the worst of the friars encounters a Tztitzimimeh, who violently kills him, cultivating both a sense of satisfaction and dread to start off the book.
Satisfaction? Yes, when the vile friar is murdered, I both appreciate and fear the Tztitzimimeh. I appreciate the removal of a violent man who is an extension of a colonist empire AND I fear the blood thirstiness of the demons being turned on our protagonist and her family. A similar fate befalls a group of boys at Luna’s school, centuries later, who bully her and racially harass her, and, like with the friar, we can’t help but find satisfaction in their karma.
The author leans on the audience’s rage in the face of genocide and racism, evolving into a hunger for justice, one that in a way, mimics the revenge of the Tzitzimimeh. Unlike many exorcism stories, we are in some ways rooting for the demon. Gout primes us to sympathize with the rage of the spirits, even though we know how possession/exorcism stories go— the evil must be expelled. Readers know what’s coming, but the book flips us on our heads when the Catholic priest character meant to perform the exorcism is killed. When he faces down the demon, the power of his religion is not strong enough to stop the spirit’s rage against him and his ancestors. So what happens in an exorcism story when the exorcist is removed? You either find a replacement or the possessed is lost.
I enjoyed the alternative approach from western, Christian exorcisms once the priest was out of the picture. The exorcism scene, where Yoltzi saves Luna, presents a kind of expulsion guided by love, not the urge to conquer. When we think of exorcism scenes, we picture a priest throwing holy water on a writhing body strapped down to a bed, shouting prayers, pummeling the demon into submission, into expulsion. Rather, in Piñata, the Tzitzimimeh isn’t conquered. Yoltzi sings a calming song. Yoltzi is guided and supported by her ancestors all around her as she strives to save Luna. The exorcism is reliant not on wielding the power of God, rather connecting with ancestors— it’s a healing journey. In the end, it’s not the silencing of rage that wins. Rather, we are witnessing something being born, rage that will rise up, a righteous anger that will burn down the vestiges of colonization and spark a new era of returning and remembering.