Longing for induction

Now that I’m on the other side of having handed in the first draft of my thesis, I’m thinking a lot about all of the things: form, structure, voice, character development, relationships, place, geography, socio-political implication. But perhaps more than anything, I am finding myself concerned with the feeling of a work. So I’ve been doing something a little bit different while reading Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost A Woman. Rather than map theme, or source her use of imagery, or follow my normal compulsions, I’ve been instead tracking my emotional reactions through the text, and simply noticing what has brought me into or kept me out of the story. In the following I will document some of my reflections.

I didn’t emotionally enter the work until the bottom of page 50, when young Esmeralda finds sanctuary in the candy store of the elderly couple outside of Junior High School 33, after she is beaten up. There is something about the kind of vulnerability that opens up/is exposed, in the exchange between young Esmeralda, as the wife cleans her wounds, and the old man exclaims his anger at the injustice of the incident. Something about the way in which they notice her wounds gestures towards a kind of care that she does not receive at home (even under the guard of over-protective of her mother). That moment of incredible tenderness elevates the isolation her character is experiencing, and makes visible a deep need that her character is wrestling with, to which words have perhaps been applied earlier in the work, but the directness of which drains emotional impact. This tiny scene represents a gentle use of juxtaposition for the way it is set against the entirety of her life. The softness unveils a whole world of feeling that the character has been bottling up and hiding, even from us as readers. There is a release, and that release makes room for a moment of direct contact with the heart of that character’s experience. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t see the struggle or stakes until page 50, but it is in that moment that my heart communes for the first time, and the most.

What this makes me wonder about is the way in which Santiago is perhaps unintentionally Indicating throughout parts of this memoir. Indicating, that approach so shunned within Method Acting, is defined, in part, as, "behaving or emoting without being connected to a truthful impulse." (http://www.jbactors.com/actingreading/actingencyclopedia.html#IAnchor)

What page 50 cued me so poignantly into was a sensation of emotional disconnect particularly through earlier parts of the work, in part as a result of the flitting between moments in time/scene, the half-constructions of characters, and the introduction of events that seemed as though they could hold potent emotional consequence (Franky’s illness and death for example); each that were afforded little treatment. I had a sense that specters lurked through out the disconnected scenes, where a whole world of human feeling was living, but I couldn’t tap in.

Other elements that contribute to this are the many moments in the work where Santiago mobilizes over-explanation – intellectually – and/or repetition of simple language that simply reiterates an idea or a feeling that has already been stated/explored, which for me stunted revelation of meaning, felt heavy handed, and generated an energy that made me feel as though her narrator was withholding and/or not trusting the scenes, environment, bodies, to hold the story she was intending us to encounter through the text.

For example, “So in addition to having to wait ten years after graduation to make a living in my art, I also had to find a new name, since Esmeralda Santiago was clearly to long to fit on a marquee, hard to remember, and definitely foreign.” (68) when the implication was already present in the paragraphs preceding.

It felt defended.

Another aspect of the work which created distance for me was the use of generalities. For example, Puerto Rico is a dominant fixture in this work as a source of identity and against which her life in NYC is continually placed against, and yet, Puerto Rico is given so little definition, rolling hills, mud, sand, images that feel static and one-dimensional. It’s not that I don’t believe the attachment is there, but it is that the language and nuance she chooses to utilize don’t transport me into the center of that feeling of longing. The loss is that I don’t know what these places then truly mean to the character. An example of this: “The skyline of Manhattan receded like an enormous wall between us and the rest of the United States.” (42) I don’t know how to locate the feeling in this because I don’t know what she is attempting really to indicate.

I wonder if part of Santiago’s strategy was an attempt to accurately portray the perspective of the character of for example her 14 year-old self – that perhaps was not tuning into nuance but rather reacting to large ideas/images/feelings without much specificity…

I also wonder what forces Santiago was responding to, perhaps consciously and perhaps unconsciously that guided her to build the work with so many walls to protect it – which I understand could be a natural defense resulting from the risk that it takes to offer stories normatively set outside of/expressly unwelcome within the canon of dominant American narratives.

So many more thoughts, but I’ll leave it here.