"a testament to sacrilege" is an autofiction that handles queer identity, monstrosity, religious trauma, and mental illness. Refusing to bend into traditional narrative structure, the work instead fluctuates between the known and the not-known; a work that acts as wet cloth in either a balm or a drowning. What makes a monster? What does it mean to be good?
Weaving narrative prose, essay writing, and memoir, “a testament to sacrilege” follows three phases in the life of the narrator and Mouse - a dissociative state the narrator is able to access only through trauma. Focused on the power of feminine relationships in the face of violence, the 40,000-word collage uses erasure text to simulate the experience of OCD as it is felt by the author. While the work is necessarily delicate, it is also hopeful - Mouse and the narrator learn to work through recovery. While the narrator is inevitably able to overcome her past, “a testament to sacrilege” is not interested in the specifics of suffering: instead, it is interested in what it takes to survive that suffering.
The initial opening to “a testament of sacrilege” was the recipient of the 2021 Harvey Swados Fiction award.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:englmfa_theses-1169 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Creators | Perez de Alderete, Raquel M |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ |
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