Bearing the Burden to Neverland: Exorcising Demons of Otherness with Healing Incantations of Magical Realism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.

In three works that span a panorama of American heritage and culture, three
ethnic women writers carry their burden of subjugation, repression and pain
to Neverland through storytelling as well. This Neverland is a distant
imaginative magical land in which stories of abuse and accounts of
oppression turn into narratives of power and healing in which our women
writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Naylor and Laura Esquivel do not
narrate their texts, but rather serve them to the reader as a delicious meal.
They do this through a mixture of food recipes, magical banquets and
metaphysical ceremonies. With their Magical Realist narratives, the three
writers present their readers with three delicious banquets of harsh reality
with a sprinkle of magic. Their meals are beautifully served as only a crafty
enchantress could do to entertain her dinner guests. With their well-measured
touch of magic, the reader is taken in a fantastic experience. In their
narratives, the effect of vibrant magic within their realist narratives vary:
sometimes they use it to ease the pain of horrific experiences, other times they
spark hope in an otherwise hopeless condition, or they simply manage to
engage the reader in a process of Aristotelian catharsis that arises pleasure,
entertainment and pain. And similar to Shahrazad’s feminine defensive
technique, they attempt to fight otherness they had personally and
professionally fell victim of through what women have always resorted to:
imagination and storytelling. In the three novels, storytelling is combined with
magic in a feminist approach employing the technique of Magical Realism.
This paper is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to a quick
exploration of Feminism—with special emphasis on ethnic Feminism--and
Magical Realism and their historical implications. This will be explored
within the American milieu in which ethnicity is of a special nature. The
second part will be devoted to the study of the selected works of the three
writers in order to apply the basic elements of Ethnic Magical Feminism on
these works concluding with the common experience, pain and hope
expressed in these works.