76 pages • 2 hours read
Kali Fajardo-AnstineSabrina & Corina: Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sugar Baby
In “Sugar Babies,” Sierra’s sugar baby symbolizes her struggle to form her own identity in the wake of her mother’s abandonment and social forces which seek to route her into a specific lane of being. The sugar baby school assignment lays bare the institutional production and maintenance of the compulsory American ideological apparatus of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. Within that apparatus, the woman is supposed to be the primary caretaker of children. Sierra’s own mother rejected this role and scarred Sierra in the process.
Therefore, when Sierra is placed in a pantomime of this role, designed to prepare her for the day in which she will be expected to fill that role for real, she also rejects it. Instead of playing the role of the nurturing and motherly female, she treats her sugar baby with gleeful glibness, flippancy, and sarcasm. Ironically, she rejects her own play-baby, even though (or, perhaps, because) she was rejected by her mother at a young age. The sugar baby, then, becomes a symbolic avenue for Sierra to work out multiple forms of trauma: the trauma of abandonment, and the trauma of simply being a girl within a system that relentlessly imposes a set of strictures and requirements upon that identity.
Ghost Sickness
In “Ghost Sickness,” the ghost sickness is itself a motif that aids Fajardo-Anstine in making nuanced assertions about Ana’s experience in neocolonial America. When Professor Brown first mentions the condition, she terms it a “culture-bound syndrome.” She defines ghost sickness as a delusion supported by a minority of Indigenous peoples, who are now rightfully relegated to obscurity through the clarifying and guiding light of Western science. However, when Ana later experiences ghost sickness, and learns of Clifton’s death through supernatural means, the reader knows that Brown’s assessment of the ghost sickness is patently wrong. Using this motif, Fajardo-Anstine communicates that the spiritual legacy of Navajo identity and cultural transmission is too powerful and large to ever be eradicated or defined by the academic discourses and psychological violence of neocolonialism. While the tenets of neocolonialism doubtlessly exercise incontrovertible material realities, they cannot ever contain that which they fail to know and understand—no matter how much they purport to provide authoritative understandings and categorizations.
The Pillows
In “Tomi,” Manny assumes that Natalie took all the pillows in the house with her when she abandoned the family. However, at the end of the story, Tomi reveals that he has been hiding and hoarding the pillows, one of which he shares with Cole. The pillows, then, symbolize the failure of communication, connection, and honesty within Manny and Natalie’s adult relationship—as well as Tomi’s small, childish claim to power. Tomi is clearly being neglected and forgotten by his parents, who are struggling to get their own needs and desires met within a context that presents many obstacles. Tomi’s act of stealing and hiding the pillows, and then not correcting his father when he automatically assumes that it was Natalie who took the pillows from the house, represents the fact that he, as a child, can only lay claim to inconsequential displays of power—premised in dishonesty and deception. It can be argued then, that Tomi’s pillow theft represents a kind of initiation into the world of adults exemplified by his parents’ trifling and immature actions. Although one would expect the world of adults to be more advanced, the motif of the pillows communicates that it is not.
