Santiago is constantly inhabiting contradiction. This book is crafted so that we may inhabit this muddled middle-ground where we feel what it means to be stuck in the in-between. As the story progresses and the narrator grows older, we are consistently confronted with new instances of this feeling so as to emphasize its ever-presence in her journey to understand herself. Santiago's narrative voice is extremely earnest. It does not stand at a distance from the reader, but is rather willing to show us those spaces within herself where she is least comfortable and least resolved.
She questions the appropriate expression of sexuality and wonders how to manage just the right mix of two extremes she is warned not to be:
"There was a midpoint between a puta and a pendeja that I was trying to figure out, a safe space in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families...One false move, and I ran the risk of becoming one or being perceived as the other"(15).
She grapples with how to be faithful to her home country while living/surviving in her adopted one:
"Mami made it clear that although we lived in the United States, we were to remain 100 percent Puerto Rican. The problem was that it was hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and Americanized began"(25).
She wrestles with a racial identity at the center of two extremes that is never simply read by others:
"I wasn't black, I wasn't white. The racial middle in which I existed meant that people evaluated me on the spot"(242).
We (the readers) grasp the weight of these dualities on young Negi when she invites us into her "secret life"of imagined in dreams where she is blissfully absolved of her duty to constantly straddle these polarities. In it she has no particular identity, her skin is "no particular color," and she speaks "every language in the world" so that she is "never confused". To young Negi, this lack of confusion, represents a huge relief from the burden of her every day life where she is tasked with somehow rising above her current circumstances while never abandoning her roots.
Earnest is a good description for the narrator's voice. She's driving her story somewhere but because the ending's ambiguous, we don't get to know how she decides to take control of her life. Your observations about the complexities are apt. The dualities never go away.
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I agree with everything above and just wanted to add that she grows up in New York with this duality that allows her to blend in with the "white" Americans that she encounters at school and at work outside of the home. Her Mami also cooks both American and Puerto Rican food for her kids, and there is this struggle between Esmeralda and her when they go shopping or when clothing is involved.
ReplyDeleteFor example, towards the beginning chapters her mother wants her to dress conservatively and modest (like she does) but Esmeralda only wants this revealing yellow dress that all the American girls are wearing at school. Also, at her dance in the chapter called: "It must be a sin to be so disrespectful to the Virgin" she accidentally wears a see-through costume when playing the Virgin Mary on stage, and her whole family is embarrassed by it.
Also, the chapter "Pearls bring tears" where Tata disapproves the pearls her granddaughter wears on a date, borrowed from her friend Regina. Later, at the end of the book she gets this pink dress with fake pearls on it and Tata is still as superstitious saying that she would have had to cut them off the dress if they were real pearls because "pearls bring tears." Pearls are "bad luck" in Tata's eyes, and this shows that the more Modern American styles are conflicting with a more conservative old-fashioned style of clothing by her family. There is this constant opposition between the two cultures, and the narrator is the mediator between the two opposing forces time and time again.
Duality is key in this work. It is one of the most intriguing elements - particularly in the realm of language and body. What I found challenging was the way constructions of the world, and characters, that were part of the dualism, often lingered in caricature, which weakened the impact of the story of all of that navigating... a kind of helplessness... or resign. The work is attempting to bear a lot; as Elmaz has cued us in, it being the first PR memoir; at the same time she does not let us feel the stretch.
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