Prayers for the Stolen

In one sense, Ladydi starts her teenage years and graduates from school with a sense of hope. She enjoys her first kiss, a “sky-scraper kiss” (62), with her teacher Jose, whom she considers desirable, though this incident demonstrates an abuse of power by the teacher. One year later, she has a job lined up working for a wealthy family in a new city beside the ocean. However, this incipient sense of possibility is clouded by the darker realities of what is happening to Ladydi’s friends and her naivety over her own situation. Craving male affection, Ladydi misinterprets her kiss with Jose as a positive event, rather that the abuse of power that it is. Her sense of positivity about a new life is further problematized by the trauma she uncovers related to two people close to her. The first of these is Paula, who was kidnapped, raped, trafficked, and assumed to be dead. These horrors, which Ladydi can only imagine, become more real and traumatic to her when Paula returns around the time of Ladydi’s graduation and reveals the brutality of what happened to her. As Rita says, it is as if “the coffin has been opened and she walked out of it” (71). As this comment suggests, not only did Paula survive an apparent death sentence, but she emerged from that experience as a radically transformed person who seems to have shrunk into herself. She is no longer a young woman full of dreams, ideas, and interest in the world around her. Instead, she has regressed to the level of a helpless, vacant infant, detached and uninterested in anything. As Ladydi observes, seeing her behind her mother, “she was like a white vaporous creature. She held a baby bottle in one hand. She was naked” (79).

This impression is also reinforced when Ladydi sees Paula sitting beside a tree. As she notes, “insects were crawling up her bare legs under the cloth” (74), and “she didn’t seem to notice the feeling of insects crawling on or biting her skin” (76). Paula has no interest even in her own basic bodily comfort or safety. The reason for this detachment becomes clear as she explains the ways that she was traumatized by her treatment at the hands of McClane and his cronies. As she says, “I was a plastic water bottle… something you pick up and take a swig of” (76). She was dehumanized and used for their benefit. This was not only through being repeatedly raped by McClane and the other men, but also by the other responsibilities that were forced upon her. For example, she was conscripted into packing the excrement of tigers and lions around drug parcels to prevent their detection by drug-sniffing dogs. Further, “the constellation of cigarette burns all over her body” (80) hints at other forms of abuse. While Paula states that these were self-inflicted as a strategy to allow others to identify her as stolen if she were found dead, her explanation is not entirely convincing. Clement leaves open the possibility that Paula’s burns were self-inflicted during episodes of self-harm, as a means of coping with her trauma and a desperate cry for help, rather than a plan related to identification.

While Paula’s story upsets Ladydi and casts a shadow over her hopes for the future, the case of her own mother does so even more. Rita used to be a “songbird” (101). As Ladydi says, “the radio was on all the time and she’d sway, twirl, and spin to Juan Gabriel or Luis Miguel’s songs as she cleaned the house” (101). When she went to visit Ladydi’s father at the hotel where he worked, this all started to change. She suspected that he was having an affair with one of the waitresses there. Worse, this discovery cemented Rita’s sense of inadequacy, because the waitress in question was curvaceous and “full” (99), while she was “very skinny” (99). As Ladydi says, “from then on my mother could no longer listen to love songs” (100-01), and the radio remained permanently turned off.

Her mother’s anger grew through the years as she learned of her husband’s further infidelities. This was before he finally left, after which she heard about his new family in the US. These circumstances pushed Rita toward both kleptomania and alcoholism. Indeed, her obsessive desire to steal indicates her desire to constantly reclaim, in symbolic form, what was taken from her: the love that abandoned her. These conditions eventually culminate in her struggles with mental illness and her eventual collapse, as shown in her increasingly irrational claims to Ladydi. As she says, “my mother threw her head back and rolled her eyes… Some days I pulled, tore with my teeth, the skin around the sides of my fingernails and gave them to you to eat” (89). Her sense of reality becomes increasingly frayed and disjointed. This reaches a climax when she shoots Maria, Ladydi’s half-sister, because she thought she was Ladydi’s father. Her pain and trauma have almost led her to murder someone. Ladydi is desperate to escape from such an erratic, angry person and situation. At the same time, as in relation to Paula, she feels guilt and responsibility for the broken individuals and community she must also leave behind.