Imploding the Miranda complex in Julia Alvarez's how the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

Imploding the Miranda complex in Julia Alvarez's how the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one's experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it (Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart). In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Miranda enjoys all theprivileges of her father's reign over the island, yet she alsoacknowledges that "I have suffered/With those that I sawsuffer!" (1.2.5-6). She is, as explained by Laura Donaldson, atonce the sole heiress of Prospero's magical powers and the jointvictim of his tyranny as she suffers with the sailors being tossed bythe tempest and the two surviving natives to the island. As StephenGreenblatt's new historicist reading has revealed, TheTempest's debt to William Strachey's account of the 1609Caribbean shipwreck shipwreck,complete or partial destruction of a vessel as a result of collision, fire, grounding, storm, explosion, or other mishap. In the ancient world sea travel was hazardous, but in modern times the number of shipwrecks due to nonhostile causes has steadily illuminates the long history of the moraluncertainties raised by colonialism in the West. (1) Attending to issuesof gender, Donaldson's work, shows that Miranda has inherited morethan the guilty conscience Noun 1. guilty conscience - remorse caused by feeling responsible for some offenseguilt feelings, guilt trip, guiltcompunction, remorse, self-reproach - a feeling of deep regret (usually for some misdeed) and the fat wallet of her male peers. Infact, she even shares Caliban's fate as both have been relegated tothe role of the other, in her case, however, that otherness includes notonly the burden of oppression and powerlessness but also the burden of"the benefits and protection offered by the colonizing father andhusband" (1992, 17). She is at once a victim and an heir of theforces of colonialism. It is this complex inheritance that Julia Alvarez studies,exorcizes, and memorializes in her autobiographically based novel, Howthe Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Unwilling to represent thesemi-fictional family's history through the binary paradigm ofvictim/oppressor, Alvarez instead utilizes the flexibility andinclusiveness of the genre of the novel to reify reify - To regard (something abstract) as a material thing. what Donaldson hascalled the Miranda Complex--the condition of occupying the seeminglycontradictory roles of victim and heir simultaneously. While criticshave explored the theme of victimization victimizationSocial medicine The abuse of the disenfranchised–eg, those underage, elderly, ♀, mentally retarded, illegal aliens, or other, by coercing them into illegal activities–eg, drug trade, pornography, prostitution. in the novel and have alsoanalyzed its inclusiveness in terms of Caribbean history andAlvarez's own biography, using Donaldson's Miranda Complex tocomplement such analyses confirms the salience sa��li��ence? also sa��li��en��cyn. pl. sa��li��en��ces also sa��li��en��cies1. The quality or condition of being salient.2. A pronounced feature or part; a highlight.Noun 1. and interrelatedness in��ter��re��late?tr. & intr.v. in��ter��re��lat��ed, in��ter��re��lat��ing, in��ter��re��latesTo place in or come into mutual relationship.in ofissues including loss, guilt, polyphony polyphony(pəlĭf`ənē), music whose texture is formed by the interweaving of several melodic lines. The lines are independent but sound together harmonically. and creativity. As a briefcontext in Caribbean post-colonial theory will reveal, the novel'sstructure and its inclusiveness work together to place the Garciafamily's own story within a larger panorama of what Martinicantheorist Edouard Glissant has called a "shared reality," acollective understanding that is the only source of generativity left tothose whose history has been erased or buried by colonialism (1989,149). Furthermore, by refusing to classify the Garcias clearly asvictims or victimizers, Alvarez enables her characters to tell manytruths and to acknowledge gaps in the truth; in addition, she insiststhat her readers experience the shared reality of Caribbean identityalong with the Garcia girls and their intimates. Through a complicated family tree--one she features at thebeginning of the novel--Alvarez traces the history of the Garcia familyback to Miranda's time, back to the Conquistadores, the benefactorsof what Alvarez calls the "golden handcuffs" that encircle en��cir��cle?tr.v. en��cir��cled, en��cir��cling, en��cir��cles1. To form a circle around; surround. See Synonyms at surround.2. To move or go around completely; make a circuit of. herown wrists and which she then bequeaths to the four sisters of the novel(1998, 156). Including chapters focusing on each member of the familyand its intimates, the novel's heteroglossic structuresimultaneously belies and highlights its themes of loss and violation:(2) on the one hand, the many voices that Alvarez captures, both infirst person and through her third person narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. , bear witness to thecomfort and the strength the Garcia girls find in female solidarity andthe richness of their shared Dominican experience; on the other hand,that polyphony illuminates the universality of the pain born by thevictims of oppression. Since the golden handcuffs worn by privilegedwomen of color not of the white race; - commonly meaning, esp. in the United States, of negro blood, pure or mixed.See also: Color tell only part of the story, her novel includes a complexrecipe of many voices and many silences, silences which provide themeans of balancing the necessity to "dig deep" into memorywith the need to memorialize me��mo��ri��al��ize?tr.v. me��mo��ri��al��ized, me��mo��ri��al��iz��ing, me��mo��ri��al��iz��es1. To provide a memorial for; commemorate.2. To present a memorial to; petition. the truth of history's irrecoverablelosses and of the Garcia family's role in a cycle of violence andvictimization (Glissant 1989, 64). Confirming Glissant's reflections on Caribbean identity,Alvarez's characters find themselves paralyzed by their memories orconfounded by the absence of memories. He has explained that "theCaribbean writer must 'dig deep' into [collectivememory]" in order to uncover what remains of a "commonexperience broken in time" (1989, 63-64). Offering the oppositionalmodel to which Glissant's work responds, his countryman FrantzFanon Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) was an author from Martinique, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. has argued against historical excavation as the source ofidentity: "I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek therefor the meaning of my destiny" (1967, 229). It is between these tworecommendations that Alvarez's alter-ego, Yolanda, and her familyfind themselves navigating. While the truth must be exposed, it alsocannot be exposed: like the history of the Arawaks or the Haitiansslaughtered in the 1937 massacre, Dictator Rafael Trujillo'svictims--including the Garcias--share an irrecoverable past. (3) Thus,in order to maintain verisimilitude, Alvarez uses silence to conveypolitical and personal paralysis, to evoke the truths which cannot becommunicated verbally. Like her sisters in the Arpillera Movement inChile, (4) she uses the symptoms of paralysis to reveal the irreversibleeffects of a history of violation on the human psyche and to demand thather readers experience those effects alongside the characters: hersilences, omissions and nonverbal communications demand thereader's empathy with an immediacy and a presence that transcendMiranda's sympathy for the shipwrecked sailors at the same timethat the novel highlights the Garcias's own complicity in thehistory of violence. Although, like Miranda, Yolanda sympathizes with the suffering ofothers, including the disenfranchised living in her homeland, she cannotidentify completely with them due to her privilege; nor does sheidentify completely with Americans or even with her own extended familyon the island. Her identity remains fractured, and throughAlvarez's literary mosaic, what she fundamentally reveals is that,unlike Miranda, who depends on her father to fill in the gaps of herpast, Yolanda must take on the responsibility of attempting to invent orwrite her own past into being. In so doing, she fulfills Fanon'sinsistence that Caribbeans "recapture the self" through an actof self-creation (1967, 231) and honors Glissant's additionaladvise regarding the collective nature of this self-creation: "Thecollective 'We' becomes the site of the generative system, andthe true subject" (1989, 149). Yolanda must actively expose whattruth survives to be exposed in the hopes of someday empowering herselfand others. At the same time she must also acknowledge that the manyvoices from which she and her family draw strength and verbal potencyare not sufficiently nurturing to pierce the gaps and silences that arethe legacies of the handcuffs worn by even the most privileged victims.As Yanick Lahens has remarked, colonialism has relegated Caribbeanwriters to a state of limbo as they suffer from an "internalexile" that haunts their work (1992, 740). They are, in a sense,orphaned by the inability to recover the whole truth regardless of howfar they dig. Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses of the past;however, through the exploration of Miranda's complex, what theycan do is to transform Trujillo's "mandate of silence"into a revolution of truth-telling and self-invention (Alvarez 1998,109). Silence, in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, is acommunicative power as conspicuous as a riot and as stealthy stealth��y?adj. stealth��i��er, stealth��i��estMarked by or acting with quiet, caution, and secrecy intended to avoid notice. See Synonyms at secret. as theunderground movement in which (like Alvarez's own father) patriarchCarlos Garcia Carlos Garcia can refer to: The former major league baseball player, see Carlos Garc��a. The Filipino poet and former President, see Carlos P. Garcia. The Argentine pop star Carlos Alberto Garc��a Moreno, see Charly Garc��a. has participated. Using absences to memorialize what hasbeen lost, Alvarez reveals the collective burden born by all who havesuffered from the "collective drift to oblivion" (Glissant1989, 210). Digging deeper not to recover an irrecoverable past, but toacknowledge that it is irrecoverable and demand her characters'ownership of their complicity in that loss, the author turns the Garciagirls' inheritance of the Miranda Complex into a eulogy. Althoughthe Arawak culture no longer survives to tell its story and the heirs ofthe Conquistadores do, Alvarez's use of omissions and reversechronology Reverse chronology is a method of story-telling whereby the plot is revealed in reverse order.In a story employing this technique, the first scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot. ensures that the Garcia family's history will not be oneof pure hegemony, but also one of responsibility, inclusiveness and thepainful truth of their complex inheritance. Through her storytelling,she stays true to a past marked by a drift to oblivion so strong thatdestiny cannot be found there, following Glissant's advice to digdeeply into memory and acknowledging the truth of Fanon's warnings.If Caribbean history needs to be re-membered, as Glissant argues, thenwhat Alvarez achieves is to turn the Garcia girls' inheritance ofthe Miranda complex into a means of memorializing the absence ofcollective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims andperpetrators alike. As the following sections detail, it is thenovel's structure, its gaps and omissions, its pervasive themes ofloss and alienation, and its inclusive nature that effect thismemorializing of a collective past riddled with irretrievable histories. In terms of its overall structure, How the Garcia Girls Lost TheirAccents is more than an "attempt to insert a silenced self intohistory"; in fact, its form is fundamental to its ability tomemorialize the permanence of loss and silence (Lima 1995, 119). As weshall see, its structure illuminates the Garcias's own complicityin the suffering rooted in colonial history. Alongside informationalomissions within the chapters themselves, a topic to which I willreturn, the reverse chronology and the resulting gaps that occur betweenthe chapters signal the irretrievable losses the family and allDominicans have suffered. "The implosion implosion/im��plo��sion/ (im-plo��zhun) see flooding. im��plo��sionn.1. of Caribbean history, (ofthe converging histories of our people)," explains Glissant,"relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single Historythat would run its unique course" (1989, 66). In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , thesingular History of the West is replaced by the converging histories ofmany peoples, many voices, so that meaning-making only occurspluralistically. The linear journey that characterizes traditionalWestern literature must be shattered for the purposes of attacking theWestern hegemony, revealing the truth of what has been lost and creatinga new vehicle of communication through silence and absence on the onehand and through inclusiveness on the other. In her reverse chronology,Alvarez highlights the potentially paralyzing effects of her mission: todig deeply into history is to risk being pulled in by its gravity. WhenFanon warns Caribbean writers not to seek their destinies in the past,he adds: "I should constantly remind myself that the real leapconsists in introducing invention into my existence" (1967, 229).While Alvarez's characters suffer from a stifling of their owninventive powers, the novel itself graphically illustrates the dangersof digging deeply: failing to recover truth and losing oneself in thefruitless effort to do so. As the novel falls into the past, itssilences have not only to speak, but to scream like the aching mothercat of the novel's final chapter, with the voices of all whosehistories have converged or imploded in the "psychic torture"of loss (Glissant 1989, 23). The novel's reverse chronology challenges not only the notionof a single history but also the genre's "tacit modernistassumptions of a coherent identity and a true self" (Nas 2003,132). Speaking of French Antillean women's writing, ElizabethWilson explains how "the journey [of exile] often takes the form ofjourney-as-alienation. Self-knowledge often leads to the destruction ofself" rather than self-awareness, as is typical of traditionalWestern novels (1990, 47). Where a Western male hero has traditionallydeveloped through an increasing "understanding of his separatenessfrom others" in a journey toward independence, for a Caribbeanwoman writer--whether French or Spanish--the very form of the journeymust be redefined, and in the case of Alvarez's novel, redefined toeschew the linear progression toward independence and instead to embracethe discovery of the relationship (the convergence) of self with othersand of the present with the past (Gilmore 1994, 29). Thus, the familytree at the novel's beginning forecasts more than its politics, forit also serves as a synecdoche synecdoche(sĭnĕk`dəkē), figure of speech, a species of metaphor, in which a part of a person or thing is used to designate the whole—thus, "The house was built by 40 hands" for "The house was built by 20 people." See metonymy. for historical gaps and collectiveexperiences that can never be retrieved, no matter how many voices areincluded. Beginning with the family tree, Alvarez uses gaps generously toensure that the reader will empathize em��pa��thizev.To feel empathy in relation to another person. with her characters' feelingsof uncertainty and loss. The genealogy documents the girls'maternal side enjoying a clear (though morally troubling) lineage datingback to the Conquistadores, but the paternal side's heritage isillustrated only by an ambiguous dotted line, punctuated with questionmarks, dating back to the same progenitors. Equally ambiguous is theinclusion of "33 other known Garcias," signaling both theanonymity of the known and the allusion to the unknown others. The gapsand omissions in the family tree recall Glissant's aforementionedmetaphor of historical implosion or convergence, demanding that thereader interpret the novel within a collective and historical contextand remain sensitive not only to presence, but to absence as well.Accordingly, that absence is felt immediately as the reader turns thepage to the novel's first section, which covers the years1989-1972. The shift from the familiar format of the family tree to that ofreverse chronology sets the stage for Yolanda's homecoming in thefirst chapter. Five years have passed since she has visited herhomeland. In those five years, her Spanish has deteriorated, and she isincreasingly uncertain about her future. But like the family tree, thesepersonal losses also serve as signs for larger ones. When the narratorexplains that Tia Flor granted asylum to her family members during"who-knows-which revolution," she calls attention not only tothe non-linear history Glissant has revealed but also to what MikhailBakhtin has called the centrifugal forces, the multiplicity andinclusiveness, at work in modern novels (Alvarez 1991, 5). Of course,Bakhtin's analysis of multiple contexts and multiple meaningsforecasts post-modernism and postcolonial novels such as Alvarez's,with their refusal to exclude, to classify or to resolve. Thus,Bakhtin's literary analysis and his insistence that meaning-makingis a dialogic process that occurs in a multifaceted context complementsGlissant's broader theories: where Glissant sees Caribbean historyas an implosion of many memories, Bakhtin sees the novel as a"tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies," thetendency toward centralization and the tendency toward decentralization de��cen��tral��ize?v. de��cen��tral��ized, de��cen��tral��iz��ing, de��cen��tral��iz��esv.tr.1. To distribute the administrative functions or powers of (a central authority) among several local authorities. or inclusiveness (1981, 272). Clearly, Alvarez employs both tendenciesin her effort to convey a complex truth, yet for her, both implosion andexplosion yield loss and uncertainty so profound that even theheteroglossia In linguistics, the term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single linguistic code. The term translates the Russian raznorechie , the multitude of voices in the novel, cannot convey thedepth of the collective pain. The first chapter, whose content I will explicate further below,highlights Yolanda's feeling of shame regarding her own inabilityto navigate this tension, or life in the hyphen hyphen:see punctuation. , as Alvarez has calledthe experience of a Dominican-American, thus signaling that the gaps inthe family tree will haunt the entire novel in terms of both structureand theme. (5) Immediately, the chapter exposes the irrecoverabledistance between herself and her heritage, between herself and thosewith whom she could identify. The shame she feels when she tips Jose,the boy who helps her find her way home from the guava guava(gwä`və), small evergreen tree or shrub of the genus Psidium of the family Myrtaceae (myrtle family), native to tropical America and grown elsewhere for its ornamental flowers and edible fruit. grove, revealsher own distance from her homeland. When she "tries to distract himby asking what he will buy with his money," she only perpetuatesthe gaps that have separated her from the boy and that have separatedboth from their history: the language gap, the economic gap and thehistorical gap imposed by the legacies of colonial rule, genocide anddespotism despotism,government by an absolute ruler unchecked by effective constitutional limits to his power. In Greek usage, a despot was ruler of a household and master of its slaves. (Alvarez 1991, 23). What the family tree forecasts, the firstchapter fulfills as Yolanda remains trapped in her golden handcuffs,identifying neither with the boy nor with the nearby billboard'sgolden-haired Palmolive woman, whose mouth is "still opened as ifshe is calling someone over a great distance" (23; cf. Castells2001, 40). Here, in this final line of the chapter, the words "asif"--which will recur in the last lines of each of the first twosections of the novel in order to complement the structural gaps withverbal ambiguity--reveal Yolanda's predicament: she is no more sureof the Palmolive woman's motives than she is of her own will tostay on the island. What she does know is that "distance" isat the heart of both uncertainties. Because of the novel's structural gaps, the reader is leftwith equal uncertainty regarding the passage of time and the events thattake place between chapters. As Chapter One ends and Chapter Two,"The Kiss," begins, a traditional causal sequence of events isabsent. The readers, of course, do not know if Yolanda decides to stayin the Dominican Republic Dominican Republic(dəmĭn`ĭkən), republic (2005 est. pop. 8,950,000), 18,700 sq mi (48,442 sq km), West Indies, on the eastern two thirds of the island of Hispaniola. The capital and largest city is Santo Domingo. or return to New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of with her family, butthat uncertainty pales in comparison to the ongoing sense ofdisconnection caused by the abrupt shift to a new time and place in eachchapter. In the second chapter, Alvarez highlights the readers'sense of loss by half-heartedly assuring them that the girls'"devotions were like roots; they were sunk into the pasttowards" their father (Alvarez 1991, 24). The theme of thechapter--familial violation and vengeance--challenges the narrativeassurance and bespeaks the seemingly endless lineage of violations andrevolutions, recalling the earlier conflation (database) conflation - Combining or blending of two or more versions of a text; confusion or mixing up. Conflation algorithms are used in databases. or befuddlement Noun 1. befuddlement - confusion resulting from failure to understandbafflement, bemusement, bewilderment, mystification, obfuscation, puzzlementconfusedness, disarray, mental confusion, muddiness, confusion - a mental state characterized by a lack of regardingTia Flor's reaction to "who-knows-which revolution."Moreover, the assurance implodes because the past, in terms of thenovel, comes last, undermining any ability to sink into it through alinear progression. The past and the present, the personal and thepolitical, the silence and the word--all seem to be lost in the gapsbetween the chapters, the gaps in history, the "as if's"of Alvarez's prose. Echoing uncertainty and inability to communicate across variousgaps, the final chapter of the novel's first section, "TheRudy Elmenhurst Story," concludes as Yolanda takes "a longmessy swallow [of Bordeaux], as if I were some decadent wild woman whohad just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover" (Alvarez 1991, 103).The narrator's tone is as complex as it is in the beginning of"The Kiss," where she promises that the girls sink their rootsinto the past, for once again, what is absent is at least as potent aswhat is present. Yolanda is not a "wild woman" and she has notdismissed a lover. Just as the Palmolive woman opens her mouth as if tocommunicate, Yolanda drinks as if to signal her liberation andcertainty. Although she has dismissed Rudy Elmenhurst, she has neverbeen his lover and has instead refused his advances only to end upfeeling "self-doubt" instead of self-assurance or integrity(103). Her failure to open the bottle of wine easily and her posturingin the role model of a wild woman reaffirm the same lack of identityexposed through the distance between Yolanda and both Jose and thePalmolive woman (Castells 2001, 40). Indeed, as this chapter advances(or retreats) to the novel's second part, two years remaincompletely unaccounted for An inclusive term (not a casualty status) applicable to personnel whose person or remains are not recovered or otherwise accounted for following hostile action. Commonly used when referring to personnel who are killed in action and whose bodies are not recovered. , so that the uncertainty Yolanda feelsregarding her identity explodes into the larger historical uncertaintythat the family and their countrymen suffer collectively. Alvarez highlights the historical connection to the losses thefamily suffers through a symbol appropriate to the youth of the Garciagirls: a Barbie doll Barbie dollpopular dress-up doll; extremely conventional and feminine. [Am. Hist.: Sann, 179]See : Fads dressed as a Flamenco dancer, a gift to Sandi froma family friend. At the close of the second section, when Sandi tellsMrs. Fanning, "'Gracias,' ... as if the Barbie doll hadto be true to her Spanish costume," this third pivotal "asif" reveals the complex alloy composing Alvarez's goldenhandcuffs (1991, 191). On an island where the few native Arawaks whosurvived then suffered the encomienda encomienda(ānkōmyān`dä)[Span. encomendar=to entrust], system of tributory labor established in Spanish America. Developed as a means of securing an adequate and cheap labor supply, the encomienda was first used over the system and lost their culture andtheir ethnic identity to Spanish Conquistadores, Sandi's Flamencodoll's ability to be true to her costume is as complex asYolanda's ability to enact the role of an angry lover.Barbie's costume echoes with the self-doubt Yolanda expresses atthe end of her brief final encounter with Rudy and recalls the ambiguousdotted line on the Garcia family tree. All bear witness to a feeling ofalienation, which, as Ricardo Castells explains, "is oftensymbolized by either silence or by an absolute failure tocommunicate" (2001, 34). Thus, the silences, the gaps between thechapters, the missing years and the "as if's" make thegirls' personal losses and Trujillo's mandate of silence morepresent in their absence than they would have been had Alvarez tried toarticulate the irretrievable. Alongside these gaps between the chapters and the accompanyingambiguities, specific textual omissions resonate with lost history andlost voices to highlight the agony belonging to the Garcias and theirfellow Dominicans. The forces of heteroglossia function as theycustomarily do to add depth and context to the feelings of theprotagonists, but in this case, they also reveal that the blood of theConquistadores belongs to their heirs and their victims alike. Thus,those who have enjoyed privilege and those without it suffer together ina history of loss. In silence and in absence, Alvarez offers up arevolution of truth-telling. In "I Came to Help," sheconfesses that "the way we really change things is often throughvery simple action, small and quiet enough not to draw too muchattention" (2003, 211-12). At once painfully diminutive andshockingly potent, the omissions serve to reify the collective burdenborn by all who have been silenced: absence does indeed speak foritself--though not as quietly as Alvarez suggests. In fact, the silencesguarantee that Alvarez's readers will be pained by threeparticularly potent omissions of either subject matter or truth, thusobligating their understanding of her characters' losses. Namely, the absence of Laura's inventions, the absence ofYolanda's Teacher Day address, and Yolanda's memory of achildhood mishap indicate the hardships of living in the hyphen and thecosts of the prohibitions and violations the family suffers. The firsttwo acts of silencing, in particular, reveal what Alvarez means in herautobiographical essays when she describes her golden handcuffs assymbolizing "those positions of privilege that often trap us womeninto denying our bodies, our desires, our selves" (1998, 156).While the private stories of the four girls and their intimatesillustrate this denial, the omissions and the violations their storiescontain also act inclusively or centrifugally to embrace colonialhistory, or more precisely, what Glissant has called"nonhistory," the erasure ERASURE, contracts, evidence. The obliteration of a writing; it will render it void or not under the same circumstances as an interlineation. (q.v.) Vide 5 Pet. S. C. R. 560; 11 Co. 88; 4 Cruise, Dig. 368; 13 Vin. Ab. 41; Fitzg. 207; 5 Bing. R. 183; 3 C. & P. 65; 2 Wend. R. 555; 11 Conn. of history in the traditional sense(1989, 62). Since all three losses mentioned above are also linked justas clearly to the family's privilege as they are to its pain, theomissions suggest the intricacies of a history in which the perpetratorsof violation suffer an intense sense of exile and homelessness and thusshare a sense of violation with those whom their ancestors have made tosuffer. Centripetal centripetal/cen��trip��e��tal/ (sen-trip��e-t'l)1. afferent (1).2. corticipetal.cen��trip��e��taladj.1. Moving or directed toward a center or axis. forces reveal the private emotional costs of bothprivilege and violation, but they also coexist with centrifugal forcesrevealing historical and public costs. The novel foregrounds many lossesthrough its omissions: Carla's inability to express herself clearlyto the policeman after being sexually accosted ac��cost?tr.v. ac��cost��ed, ac��cost��ing, ac��costs1. To approach and speak to boldly or aggressively, as with a demand or request.2. To solicit for sex. , Yolanda's failureto communicate with her husband, Sandi's failure as a young artist.However, what Laura's inventions, Yolanda's speech and thechildhood memory of a particularly salient omission of truth share istheir affiliation with the family's privilege and with the on-goingtheme of violation. Beginning with Laura, she, more than her husband, embraces theopportunities America offers and finds ways of reveling in the mythicland of opportunity. Unlike Carlos, who is haunted by nightmares fromhis past as a revolutionary, Laura, as the wife of a man compelled bytradition to maintain his family's social standing without hereconomic help, is free to take in "the wonders of this newcountry" (Alvarez 1991, 133). Though she fears her daughters'becoming too American, she sits up at night inventing items like thoseshe sees in department stores This is a list of department stores. In the case of department store groups the location of the flagship store is given. This list does not include large specialist stores, which sometimes resemble department stores. , items to make a housewife's lifemore comfortable and leisurely. In other words, her inventions are hermeans of understanding her new world. They signal, like her"mishmash mish��mash?n.A collection or mixture of unrelated things; a hodgepodge.[Middle English misse-masche, probably reduplication of mash, soft mixture; see mash. of mixed-up idioms and sayings that showed she was'green behind the ears,' as she called it," her attemptto integrate herself, to define herself in the new country (135). Likemany believers in the American Dream, she imagines herself anentrepreneurial millionaire only to be disappointed when she sees herlatest invention, a suitcase on wheels, already on sale in a newspaper.At that point, she gives up: "What use was it trying to competewith the Americans: they would always have the head start. It was theircountry, after all" (140). While the family's privilege hasbrought them safely into America, they remain in political and emotionalexile, and Laura's inventions rank among the casualties of thatexile. In fact, Laura's efforts and her failure to invent"gadgets to make life easier for the American moms" onlyexpose what it is to be exiled (138): "To be exiled is to be fromhere and from elsewhere, to be at the same time inside and outside,settled in the insecurity of a painful and uneasy situation"(Lahens 1992, 736). Her attempts to bring ease to American moms onlyhighlight her own disease, her own insecurity despite the economicprivilege she enjoyed in her homeland. While Laura begins her entrepreneurial adventure with suitablegusto, self-assured that "she would prove to these Americans what asmart woman could do with a pencil and pad," the suitcaseadvertisement in the New York Times does more than thwart her ambition(Alvarez 1991, 139). When she sees it, she startles her husband from atroubled sleep Troubled Sleep (or La mort dans l'ame, in the original French) is a 1949 novel by Jean-Paul Sartre.Originally translated as "Iron in the Soul". It is the third part in the trilogy Les chemins de la libert�� (The Roads to Freedom). that exposes the larger context of her failure: he wakesasking, "'?Que pasa?' What is wrong? There was terror inhis voice, the same fear she'd heard in the Dominican Republicbefore they left.... In dreams, he went back to those awful days andlong nights, and his wife's screams confirmed his secret fear: theyhad not gotten away after all; the SIM [Trujillo's secret police]had come for them at last" (139). (6) No longer is Laura a potentmember of the de la Torre La Torre is a municipality located in the province of ��vila, Castile and Le��n, Spain. According to the 2004 census (INE), the municipality has a population of 357 inhabitants. family; instead, she, like the victims her ownancestors, is now a powerless victim of forces she cannot control. Ifher story, like so many of the others alludes to the trauma of exile,then it also alludes to a more distant past, a past in which herancestors profited (Oliver 1993, 211). Like Miranda's, Laura'sprivilege is in some sense at the root of the cost she presently incurs:she too is subject to exile because of the actions of the men in herlife and in her nation's past, and she too identifies with thesuffering of the powerless now that she ranks among them. Having learned from her own powerlessness, Laura finds the strengthto "take up her pencil and pad one last time" when sheencounters one with even less power to overcome her fate (Alvarez 1991,141). For her daughter, she stands up to the complex legacies andrealities of tyranny that have thwarted them both, simultaneouslyacknowledging her privilege and using it to resist oppression openly.When Yolanda is asked to deliver a speech honoring her teachers, she isat first terrified ter��ri��fy?tr.v. ter��ri��fied, ter��ri��fy��ing, ter��ri��fies1. To fill with terror; make deeply afraid. See Synonyms at frighten.2. To menace or threaten; intimidate. : "She still had a slight accent, and she did notlike to speak in public" for she bears both the weight oftraditional prohibitions against vociferous women and the fear of her"classmates' ridicule" (141). Inspired by WaltWhitman's poetry, however, she finds herself in language and"[takes] root in it," in some sense turning her back on theradical "devotions" that have indebted her to her father andhomeland (141; 24). Only in English, she feels, can one declare,"'I celebrate myself,'" and just as boldly asWhitman, she begins writing "recklessly" and passionatelyuntil "she finally sounded like herself in English" (142-43,emphasis in original). In America, she concludes, "people could saywhat they thought" (145). Yet her discovery of her voice, her birthas a writer, does not go unchallenged by her father. When she reads himthe speech, he is horrified hor��ri��fy?tr.v. hor��ri��fied, hor��ri��fy��ing, hor��ri��fies1. To cause to feel horror. See Synonyms at dismay.2. To cause unpleasant surprise to; shock. by her Americanization. And when Laura leapsto her defense, he thinks to himself: "It was bad enough that hisdaughter was rebelling, but here was his own wife joining forces withher" (145-46). Becoming "vengeful" and "mad,... hetore the speech into shreds," revealing what he feels is hisrightful authority in the family structure (146). Buoyed by her mother's support, Yolanda reacts defiantly toher father, and "in a low, ugly whisper" that parallels hisrage, "pronounced Trujillo's hated nickname: 'Chapita!You're just another Chapita!'" (Alvarez 1991, 147). Afterseeming narrowly to escape a beating, Yolanda retreats to her room withher mother, and they concoct con��coct?tr.v. con��coct��ed, con��coct��ing, con��cocts1. To prepare by mixing ingredients, as in cooking.2. a second speech, one full of "stalecompliments" and "polite commonplaces," for which she ispraised by her teachers (148). With pieces of it coming from one of herfather's speeches rather than from Walt Whitman, the "barbaricyawp" has been transformed into palaver. So empty are her wordsthat they are omitted from the text. In fact, the reader never knows thecontent of either the replacement or the original speech, so that theirabsence is as present as the absence of Laura's inventions. Theomission of Yolanda's speeches, perhaps even more glaring than theloss of Laura's inventions because it is a verbal one, signifies anutter violation of Yolanda's voice, of her creativity and of heridentity; the omission is the antithesis of Fanon's call forself-invention. Like Laura's, Yolanda's optimism is thwarted,her self-expression denied. In the space of absent speech, in the hyphenbetween the U.S. and the Dominican Republic, Yolanda has lost her voice,so that the genesis of a writer's life is simultaneously exposedand concealed in the spaces between the words, between her own wishesand her father's traditions and between those traditions and theblood of the Conquistadores. In Something to Declare, which clearly identifies the author withher protagonist and connects the private experiences of women with thehistory of the Caribbean The history of the Caribbean reveals the significant role the region played in the colonial struggles of the European powers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. , Alvarez admits, "We could go places inEnglish we never could in Spanish" (1998, 64). Elsewhere, sheconfesses to an interviewer, "I had never been raised to have apublic voice" (Bing 1996, 38). Whitman, however, inspires Yolandato open her mouth, even if that means that she will challengetraditional gender roles and "broadcast [her] disobedience"for all the world to hear or read (Alvarez 1998, 123). Yet Carlos'sreaction and the absence of the original speech undermine her sense ofagency. When Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach claim that"Latina discourse ... fills in the omissions, flourishes betweenthe gaps, and exposes its contradictions," the optimism embodied intheir verbs reveals only one side of the truth while the other siderests in the nouns (1989, 13). The celebration of filling, flourishingand exposing is certainly present in Alvarez's work. Celebratingher ability to thrive in the intersection between two cultures, shereminds her readers repeatedly, "I'm a hyphenated person ...interested in the music that comes out of a language that hears bothlanguages" (Rosario-Sievert 1997, 33). But while her music is aspowerful as Yolanda's speech seems to have been, folded into it arethose omissions, gaps and contradictions that reveal loss, pain andcomplexities that blur the lines between the victim and the oppressor OPPRESSOR. One who having public authority uses it unlawfully to tyrannize over another; as, if he keep him in prison until he shall do something which he is not lawfully bound to do. 2. To charge a magistrate with being an oppressor, is therefore actionable. ,so that all involved (even the reader) suffer the pain of irretrievableloss. Where Michelle Cliff Michelle Cliff (born 24 October, 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng, and Free Enterprise.Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems, and works of criticism. claims that to describe her journey, "Imust begin at the very beginning, with the origins," echoingGlissant, Yolanda's origins as a writer have been erased, creatingan absence that serves as a potent and tangible reminder ofhistory's irrecoverable voices and Fanon's caveat againstseeking identity in history (1988, 58). The loss of Yolanda's voice exposes the layers underneathCarlos's act of violation. Overtly, Carlos plays the role of thetyrant, recalling Prospero's power over Miranda's sexualityas, in the present case, the father controls Yolanda's verbalproductivity. Yolanda's identification of Carlos with Trujilloexposes the connection blatantly as the missing speech recalls thesilences imposed by the "fear of lurking spies" in thehomeland (Alvarez 1991, 145). Her anger has an immediate source, butbehind Carlos's vitriol vitriol:see sulfuric acid. and behind his violation of hisdaughter's words lies his own victimization. He suffers too, andhis past exposes not only the history of loss, but also thefamily's own complicity in the perpetuation of violence. Indeed,Laura's alliance with Yolanda and Carlos's ironic adoption ofthe role of the tyrant (whom he has risked his life to overthrow) revealthe extent to which all of them would forever "be haunted by bloodin the streets and late night disappearances" (146). Furthermore,as their own cruelties to each other reveal, the losses and silences areirrecoverable, in part, because the cycle which generates them persists.When Frederick Douglass notes that the institution of slavery is astoxic to the slave owner's soul as it is to the soul of the slave,what he concludes is that only a complete revolution in thought, a new"sacred cause" and a means of expressing it, can break thecycle (2001, 31; 86). For Alvarez, silence is that means. The blood ofthe Conquistadores will continue to stain and haunt both theperpetrators of violence and their victims until both the privileged andthe dispossessed understand that the cost of the loss is greater thanany potential gain. In fact, Yolanda's dream of recovering Edenwith her return to the mythic guava grove of the first chapter provesthat the past cannot be retrieved--either in myth or through migration."Diversion," concludes Glissant, "leads nowhere,"and any attempt to return to a mythic origin results in exactly the kindof psychic torture Yolanda suffers (1989, 23). It is revolution, not arecapitulation recapitulation,theory, stated as the biogenetic law by E. H. Haeckel, that the embryological development of the individual repeats the stages in the evolutionary development of the species. of history with different heroes and new victims, thatthe family's experience demands. The hopes embodied in Laura's pencil and pad are replaced bythe truth--the truth that only the blank space Noun 1. blank space - a blank area; "write your name in the space provided"space, placesurface area, expanse, area - the extent of a 2-dimensional surface enclosed within a boundary; "the area of a rectangle"; "it was about 500 square feet in area" can reveal. As inChile's Arpillera Movement, the lost, the dead and the wounded arepowerfully memorialized through absence. Thus, like the Haitianresistance literature Myriam Chancy chanc��y?adj. chanc��i��er, chanc��i��est1. Uncertain as to outcome; risky; hazardous.2. Random; haphazard.3. Scots Lucky; propitious. explicates, Alvarez's novel"displace[s] Western ideology" and reconstitutes itself as adistinct form, one that acknowledges all sides of a history of privilegeand victimization through an implosion of many experiences (1997, 9).Unlike many Chilean women who suffered in poverty and completepowerlessness, Yolanda and Laura also include within their silence theirheritage of power, truthfully representing their own place in a historyof brutality. As Carlos is haunted by memories of the dictatorship,Yolanda is haunted by memories of a childhood defined simultaneously byprivilege and powerlessness. And it is only through telling her storyand acknowledging both her losses and her own use of privilege to winbattles that Yolanda eventually embraces her own sacred cause, her owntruth--the oppressors of yesterday become the victims of today, andwithin her own reverse chronology, the opposite must be true as well.Accordingly, the third omission to be described, an omission of truth,is one perpetrated not by Carlos or by the forces of colonial history,but by Yolanda herself. Even before leaving the Dominican Republic, the blend of privilegeand powerlessness defines the girls. In different ways, Alvarez'sgolden handcuffs bind the girls to a brutal past and a future of exile.Where Sandi is able to enjoy art lessons but eventually finds that"when the world filled me, I could no longer draw it out,"Yolanda suffers a more subtle loss that signals the end of her innocence(1991, 254). Like Sandi's art lessons, the gifts that theirgrandparents bring the girls after trips to the U.S. reveal their statusand the ongoing threat to it. While her grandfather fills a prestigiousposition in the United Nations, he fills it only because Trujillo"was jealous of anyone with education and money, and so Papito wasoften sent out of the country on bogus business" (226). The bloodof the Conquistadores has become a mixed blessing, though for thechildren, as Yolanda assesses, "the height of violence for us wason the weekly television Western imported from Hollywood" (227)."As for the violence around us," she continues, "theguards' periodic raids, the uncles whose faces no longer appearedat the yearly holiday gatherings, we believed the slogan at stationidentification--'God and Trujillo are taking care ofyou'" (227). Her innocence, of course, will meet its end: inthe same way that her unconsummated relationship with Rudy Elmenhurstand her marriage resonate with a sense of the violations her family hassuffered on the island, so is Yolanda's first sexual experiencesimilarly painful. In fact, within the context of her family compound,it also serves as a synecdoche for the layers of violations reachingbackward not only into colonial history but also into Yolanda's ownsoul. As Lucia Guerra Cunningham explains regarding Latina writers,"in a peculiar syntax of memory, recapturing the hidden signals ofthe house of childhood is also an act which sheds valuable light onnational identity" and its destruction (1990, 13). For Yolanda andher sisters, there is no idyllic past to which to retreat. As a child, Yolanda experiences two salient prohibitions: oneagainst wandering to the outskirts of the family compound, which adjoinsthat of the dictator's own daughter, and one against indulgingsexually. The first prohibition is reinforced by the memory of the timewhen Yolanda and her cousin Mundin "had set off a firecracker justas [Trujillo's grandson] paraded by with his nursemaids. Papito hadspent that night down at the SIM headquarters" for their misdeed(Alvarez 1991, 233-34). Thus, the coal shed near the property line isforbidden. Just as for bidden is any sexual indulgence. In her catechismclasses, Yolanda learns from Sor Juana that young ladies must"guard [their] bodies like hidden treasure" (235). Yolanda,then, bears one prohibition relating the world at large and one set ofprohibitions relating to relating torelate prep → concernantrelating torelate prep → bez��glich +gen, mit Bezug auf +accher own body and its ideal future as a virginbride, and when both of these prohibitions are broken simultaneously,Alvarez foreshadows the pain caused by the chaffing of the goldenhandcuffs Yolanda and her sisters will wear for the rest of their lives. When Mundin confronts Yolanda with a proposition to give her thewondrous new ball of modeling clay his grandfather has brought from theU.S. if she will "show [him she's] a girl," Yolandaaccepts, bringing on the end of both her sexual innocence and herpolitical innocence (Alvarez 1991, 233). Along with her little sister,Yolanda enters the forbidden coal shed at her cousin's request andconfesses as she pulls down her underpants, "I steeled myselfagainst his intrusive glances" (235). Though she armors herselfagainst this first penetration, she is once again violated when"all Mundin did was shrug his shoulders with disappointment.'You're just like dolls,' he observed, and divided hisball of clay equally between Fifi and Yolanda" (235). Enraged thatthe exchange has not gone as promised (she expected to secure all of theclay), Yolanda is silenced when the children hear Mundin's mothercalling for them outside. Using another bribe, Mundin promises to giveYolanda his anatomical Human Body doll if she will protect him fromtrouble. But this bribe, like the first, will not work out well for her,and by the time this drama has drawn to its close, Mundin'sproposition has illuminated to Yolanda her sexual vulnerability and herability to play two roles: the role of the victim and the role of theperpetrator A term commonly used by law enforcement officers to designate a person who actually commits a crime. . Though she does not understand why at this point, Yolanda does knowthat any mention of Trujillo's guardia, who regularly search theircompound, yields terror in the adults; consequently, when she invokestheir presence for her own and Mundin's protection, she unknowinglywields her own power over her family with her lie. To protect the cousinwho has just violated her, Yolanda blurts out to her aunt, "We werehiding.... The guardia--" (Alvarez 1991, 237). She does not evenhave to complete a sentence before her aunt's fear consumes her andrelieves the children of otherwise imminent punishment for theirmisbehavior. Yolanda is no longer the victim of Mundin's bribes orof his gaze; in fact, she is now the victimizer victimizerPsychology A victim who, having been physically, sexually, emotionally abused, reverses the role and abuses others , using her power to hurtothers with her omission of truth. In the same way that Miranda benefitsfrom her father's power over the island, Yolanda benefits from themagic of a little bit of well-used knowledge. She knows herfamily's weakness and uses it against her aunt. At the story'send, Mundin's mangled Human Body doll, its tiny organs having beenscattered on the floor, recalls the possible fates of the missing unclesand highlights the metaphorical mangling of Yolanda'sinnocence--both sexual and political. At the moment of her lie, sheenters the adult world where knowledge and power are used to privilegesome and dominate others. Yolanda's new-found complicity in the violence of Caribbeanhistory is confirmed by the presence of the gardener, Florentino. On hisknees, picking up the scattered pieces of the now-forgotten Human Bodydoll, Florentino serves as a reminder of the family's wealth asYolanda and her aunt converse. His small role and his posture capturehis powerlessness, which exists both in contrast to the Garciafamily's status and in unison with their vulnerable politicalstate. He, like their two maids, Chucha and Gladys, (all of whom areidentified only by their given names), suffers an unknown fate as thenovel moves backward in time. In contrast, although both the Garciafamily history and the family tree are riddled with gaps and omissions,there is enough text in both places for the silences to speak, to tellthe stories of this family's pain. Simultaneously, then, Alvarezilluminates the losses that the family and their servants suffercollectively with all Dominicans and acknowledges her family'srelative privilege in contrast to Florentino's helplessness. Inthis chapter, Yolanda parallels Scheherazade, whose story she has justbeen given by Tia Mimi. Significantly, Yolanda reads the tales inEnglish and is captivated cap��ti��vate?tr.v. cap��ti��vat��ed, cap��ti��vat��ing, cap��ti��vates1. To attract and hold by charm, beauty, or excellence. See Synonyms at charm.2. Archaic To capture. by the power of the heroine's use ofwords and by her use of silence and subterfuge sub��ter��fuge?n.A deceptive stratagem or device: "the paltry subterfuge of an anonymous signature"Robert Smith Surtees. . For Scheherazade, ofcourse, refusing to complete her stories saves her life. It is she,perhaps, who teaches Yolanda/Alvarez to use silence as a means ofrevolution, as a means of exploring the implosion that characterizes herpast and acknowledging both what is forever lost and, eventually, whatcan be gained from the processes of invention. While structural features including the novel's reversechronology and its frequent textual omissions, like those explicatedabove, reify the themes of loss and exile as well as the theme ofprivilege, its inclusiveness highlights the personal and culturalpervasiveness of this sense of loss, and ultimately, the wholefamily's complicity in the history of violence. Of course,Yolanda's character provides the most intimate portrait of pain,but as we shall see, the historical context of her feelings crystallizesthrough the novel's secondary characters, whose stories reveal thedepth of the suffering shared by the privileged and the powerless alikeand reify Glissant's notion of converging histories. The fracturednature of Yolanda's identity, as explicated by Julie Barak amongothers, ensures that the reader understand the personal cost ofcollective pain; (7) simultaneously, Alvarez's inclusion of thestories of typically marginalized characters challenges the tradition ofthe West's "ambition of imposing a 'single'historical time" on others (Glissant 1989, 92). "One of themost disturbing consequences of colonialism," Glissant explains,"could well be this notion of a single History, and therefore ofpower" which has been imposed on others (93). But what Alvarez doesis to use the internal emotional turmoil of the Garcia girls, andYolanda in particular, as the fulcrum fulcrum:see lever. of decentralizing ripples ofhistories, voices and silences belonging not just to the privileged few.Private costs reveal public and political costs born by both thepowerful and the powerless, so that the relationship between thembecomes as clear as it is in Frederick Douglass's portrait of Mrs.Auld auld?adj. ScotsOld.Adj. 1. auld - a Scottish word; "auld lang syne"old - of long duration; not new; "old tradition"; "old house"; "old wine"; "old country"; "old friendships"; "old money" , who suffers morally for embracing the role of a slave mistressjust as Douglass suffers physically, emotionally and intellectually.Where, as Glissant notes, "In The Tempest the legitimacy ofProspero is thus linked to his superiority, and epitomizes thelegitimacy of the West," Alvarez's portrait of the costs ofprivilege and powerlessness in Yolanda's psyche is only thebeginning of her portrait of privilege (75). And it is that truth, thetruth of the golden handcuffs, that Alvarez most effectively illuminatesthrough Yolanda's attempts and failures to identify with others andto find wholeness within herself. After all, Alvarez's imperativeto understand histories rather than History in all its hegemony isitself yet another painful legacy of colonialism. As gaps and silenceshave memorialized what is forever lost, Yolanda's mangled identity,like the mangled Human Body doll, reveals the intimate human cost of ahistory of violation while the additional voices of servants like Gladysand Chucha link Yolanda's suffering to that of the less privileged. While Alvarez might find living in the hyphen provocativeartistically, it is not a space of contentment for Yolanda, whoseexperiences most vividly illustrate the theme of alienation. Asdiscussed above, when her alter-ego returns to the Dominican Republic inthe first chapter, her failure to thrive Failure to ThriveDefinitionFailure to thrive (FTT) is used to describe a delay in a child's growth or development. It is usually applied to infants and children up to two years of age who do not gain or maintain weight as they should. in the hyphen is clear: Yolandacan barely communicate with her own family in her "haltingSpanish," yet she has felt just as alone in the States (Alvarez1991, 7). Heading out on her journey for guavas, she passes theaforementioned billboard advertising Palmolive soap. On the billboard,"a creamy, blond woman luxuriates under a refreshing shower, herhead thrown back in seeming ecstasy, her mouth opened in a wordlesscry" (14-15). As Castells has noted, "the blond hair and thepale skin of the Palmolive woman are potent reminders of Yolanda'sincomplete assimilation into her adopted country," yet her failureto identify with the young boy, Jose, bespeaks an equal sense ofalienation from her homeland (2001, 40). Indeed, the "wordlesscry" of the woman on the billboard forecasts Yolanda'srepeated inability to communicate and to connect with those around her,including Jose's guardian. Highlighting Yolanda's distancefrom her fellow Dominicans, the unnamed woman who accompanies Jose fearsthat "the dona will get hot, her nice clothes will get alldirty" and hopes she will let the boy fetch the fruit for her(Alvarez 1991, 16). After the car suffers a flat tire and Jose returnsto his home for help, Yolanda's alienation from her homeland iscompounded when two men approach. Her fear paralyzes her, she perceivesthe men as "dangerous," and her only escape is into Englishand the role of the helpless American (20). But this role does not fiteither, and when she tries to tip the two men for fixing her tire,"the English words are hollow on her tongue" (21). Furtheringher distance from both cultures, she finds upon her return that Jose hasbeen punished for what adults thought were his lies about a"dominicana with a car ... out at this hour getting guayabas"(22). In other words, others have confirmed her distance from herhomeland, a distance rooted in her privilege. As Barak has noted,"Alvarez's title is ironic" because although the sistersnever lose their accents, neither do they return seamlessly to theirhomeland (1998, 176). In fact, what Yolanda finds is that she "cannever recover [her] cultural origins through a return, real orsymbolic" (Christian 1997, 112). While the privilege of the Garciafamily has enabled both its political flight to safety andYolanda's return, it has disabled her ability to reconnect to theisland and its people. In The Tempest, Gonzalo's Golden Age speech is undermined byProspero's despotism, but in Alvarez's novel, the mythicreturn to Eden is undermined by the nature of Yolanda's failure toidentify with anyone living there and by her own adoption of the westernmyth of her homeland as a paradise. (8) She has been so infected bywestern History that she borrows the ideals of the conquerors todescribe the richness and the "plenty" of the island at thesame time that her vision is also tainted by the fact that "therustling leaves of the guava trees echo the warnings of the old aunts:you will get lost, you will get kidnapped, you will get raped, you willget killed" (Alvarez 1991, 13, 17). As William Luis explains, theguava grove represents Yolanda's desire to experience a"mythical past associated with her childhood" or a universalage of innocence; however, the guavas finally act like Eve's apple,forcing Yolanda's expulsion (2000, 843). Until her car suffers aflat tire, signaling her failure to reintegrate re��in��te��grate?tr.v. re��in��te��grat��ed, re��in��te��grat��ing, re��in��te��gratesTo restore to a condition of integration or unity.re naturally, Yolanda doessee her homeland romantically, through western eyes. All around her are the foothills, a dark enormous green, the sky more a brightness than a color.... Here and there a braid of smoke rises up from a hillside--a campesino and his family living out their solitary life. This is what she has been missing all these years without really knowing that she has been missing it. (Alvarez 1991, 12) But even through the romanticism of the description, her lossprevails in the repetition of the word "missing" and throughthe suggestion that she does not know herself and does not understandher own needs. Moreover, the singular "life" shared by thefamily she imagines contrasts with the distance that has developed inher own family. The wealthy and the powerful, the oppressors ofyesterday, or in this case their descendants, have indeed become thevictims of today. Thus, Yolanda mourns her loss of identity at the sametime that Alvarez forecasts broader themes by highlighting heralter-ego's distance from the less privileged through her fear, herinability to communicate and even her brand of western romanticism. While the family tree at the novel's opening andYolanda's failure with Jose and the two good Samaritans provideovert signs of her privilege and its costs to her personally, movingbackward in time connects this personal sense of alienation to nationaland political costs which are further highlighted by the novel'sheteroglossia. Yolanda's privilege brands her as an alien, yet sheknows she does not belong in America either, thus confirming heridentification with Eve, the outcast, and the cost of her inheritancefrom the West despite the socio-economic privileges that the blood ofthe Conquistadores has bequeathed to her. As Native American authorLeslie Marmon Silko Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. has noted, Europeans are an "orphanpeople," and Yolanda, by extension, finds herself orphaned as well(1991, 258). Though the Garcias eventually become political targets andsuffer tragic losses of their own, Alvarez begins the novel withYolanda's inheritance of alienation to provide a lens through whichto see and evaluate the suffering of the past. The suffering of thepresent is rooted in the past, and even though many roles have changed,what remains constant is that people fail to communicate, to empathizeor to coexist peacefully with each other. As the novel'sinclusiveness of the less privileged will reveal, Yolanda'sexpulsion is, in part, an inheritance of the sins of her fathers. Here,the original sin original sin,in Christian theology, the sin of Adam, by which all humankind fell from divine grace. Saint Augustine was the fundamental theologian in the formulation of this doctrine, which states that the essentially graceless nature of humanity requires redemption is conquest, and since Yolanda is born of the privilegeof her heritage, she also bears the cost of its brutality. But asAlvarez foreshadows by beginning the novel with the family tree,Yolanda's suffering also illuminates both the association with andthe distance between those who have suffered from their privilege andthose who have suffered for a lack thereof. Gladys, the Garcias's pantry maid, sleeps with the other maidsin a small dark room on a cot. In what Carla describes as a "highsweet voice," Gladys sings popular tunes, Christmas music and NewYork merengue merengueCouple dance from the Dominican Republic or Haiti, danced throughout Latin America. Originally a folk dance, it has become a ballroom dance, where it is danced with a limping step, the weight always on the same foot. Varieties include the jaleo and juangomero. that reveal her own dreams of ah escape to the States, anescape which in her mind would enable her to transcend "theexploitive world of the Dominican caste system Noun 1. caste system - a social structure in which classes are determined by heredityclass structure - the organization of classes within a society " (Mitchell 1999,174). But while she keeps her modest life savings in a mayonnaise jar,the girls enjoy expensive gifts from F.A.O. Schwarz in the U.S. One ofthese gifts is a mechanical bank which is made in the likeness of theVirgin Mary Virgin Mary:see Mary. Virgin Maryimmaculately conceived; mother of Jesus Christ. [N.T.: Matthew 1:18–25; 12:46–50; Luke 1:26–56; 11:27–28; John 2; 19:25–27]See : Purity , who begins her ascent to heaven with each coin Carlainserts. When Carla no longer finds the bank amusing, having receivedmany new toys after it, she gives it to Gladys but does not tell herparents for fear of seeming ungrateful. Carlos's reaction uponfinding the bank in the maids' room is to fire Gladys even afterCarla has admitted giving it to her. Soothing his daughter's guilt,he says, "'We're just going to have to get betterpresents,'" emphasizing her privilege and ignoringGladys's helplessness (Alvarez 1991, 273). "'Wecan't trust her,'" he announces bluntly, and Gladys issuddenly jobless, foreshadowing Carlos's own predicament when hecan no longer practice medicine after moving to the U.S. (273). Thebank, returned to Carla, gets stuck with the Virgin "halfway up,halfway down," as useless now as is the mangled Body Human doll inthe earlier chapter (274). Moreover, because of the structure of thenovel, Gladys's fate remains unknown, incommunicable in��com��mu��ni��ca��ble?adj.1. Impossible to be transmitted; not communicable: an incommunicable disease.2. . Here, thepower Prospero enjoys because of his magic resonates in the magicalqualities of the expensive bank while the legitimacy of power is overtlymocked in the lack of sacredness of the mechanized Ascension,illuminating that Carlos's power is just as illegitimate as thebank's mystery, as Prospero's tyranny, as Trujillo'sregime or as the conquest of the Caribbean. What the reader neverknows--Gladys's history--bears witness to the fact that the Garciasthemselves have participated in a history of oppression. As in theomission of Yolanda's lost speech and Laura's incompleteinventions, Alvarez again mourns the waste of human creativity, thistime, embodied in Gladys's singing. Even more overtly historical is the fate of Chucha, the Haitianmaid who serves the family for thirty-two years. The legacy of wealthobtained by a history of barbarity and enslavement en��slave?tr.v. en��slaved, en��slav��ing, en��slavesTo make into or as if into a slave.en��slavement n. comes to theforeground in the chapter named, appropriately, "The Blood of theConquistadores," where the fate of Chucha and that of the Garciastell of national tragedies. Here, Fifi recounts when Chucha "hadjust appeared on my grandfather's doorstep one night, begging to betaken in" when Trujillo's army was ordered to execute Haitiansin the Dominican Republic (Alvarez 1991, 218). Thus, the danger that theGarcias attempt to escape in exile ties them to the layers of Caribbeanhistories. "In order to 'whiten' (blanquear) his country,Trujillo ordered the massacre of all Haitians in the Dominican Republic.In October 1937, an estimated 25,000 Haitians were slain by hisagents" (Tenenbaum 1996, 5.273). (9) Later, for his part in theunderground movement against the dictator, Julia Alvarez's owngrandfather was incarcerated, while each night, black Volkswagens of theSIM sat in her driveway to survey her father's activities (Alvarez1998, 6; Alvarez 1987, 79). Though friends and relatives lost theirlives, Alvarez explains that "what kept my father from beingrounded up with others each time there was a purge--for peopledisappeared for less of an offence than acquaintance withtroublemakers--was his connection with my mother's powerfulfamily" (1987, 80). In the novel, the Garcias are equally indebtedto Tio Vic for saving their lives, but their physical safety once in NewYork does not put an end to the nightmares of the missing people orrestore the untold stories of women like Chucha. Chucha's role is complex, as her ethnicity, her status, herpowerlessness and her potency reveal as much about Dominican history asthey do about the Garcias. Within the tradition of Dominican literature,Alvarez's characterization of Chucha as a "Haitianblue-black" runs the risk of appearing "tragicallypathetic" (1991, 223; Williams 2000, 135). As David Mitchell David Mitchell may refer to: David Mitchell (bishop), d. 1663 David Mitchell (Royal Navy officer) (c1642-1710), British admiral of the late seventeenth century. David Brydie Mitchell (1760-1837), American politician (Georgia). David Mitchell (builder) (born c. confirms, despite the potency of the character, Chucha takes on the roleof a stereotypically helpless servant when she "is left to mournher kind keepers and worry over their turbulent departure fromhome" (1998, 35). She foresees the guardias violating the Garciahome by "smashing windows and carting off the silver" (Alvarez1991, 223). Once again, as after the massacre, she will be the one leftto suffer true powerlessness while the wealthy and lighter-skinnedGarcias escape to safety. In the home where she has spent most of herlife, she foretells that in the future "only silence remains, deepempty silence" as her only companion (222). Still, despite the factthat the future she foresees for herself "articulates the nowlargely cliched cli��ch��dalso cliched ?adj.Having become stale or commonplace through overuse; hackneyed: "In the States, it might seem a little clich��d; in Paris, it seems fresh and original" role of the loyal domestic slave" and despite thefact that her own fate counts among the personal losses of the novel,Chucha does enjoy the magic powers of Prospero (Mitchell 1998, 35).Indeed, her first-person narrative See also: First personFirst-person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one character, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, using words and phrases involving "I" and "we". and use of the future tense future tensen.A verb tense expressing future time.Noun 1. future tense - a verb tense that expresses actions or states in the futurefuture crystallize crys��tal��lizealso crys��tal��ize ?v. crys��tal��lized also crys��tal��ized, crys��tal��liz��ing also crys��tal��iz��ing, crys��tal��liz��es also crys��tal��iz��esv.tr.1. the novel's theme of alienation as she warns the familyabout living in the U.S. among people "too pale to be theliving" (Alvarez 1991, 221). Though the girls do find some physicalsafety and the freedom to return to their homeland for visits,Chucha's predictions bear much truth for the familypsychologically, thus empowering her by foregrounding her gifts.Accordingly, despite her family's privilege, when confronted withexile, Laura "sees ... as if through the lens of loss" (212).Uncertainty prevails once again through the same "as if" thatthe narrator uses to conclude the first two sections. Laura "thinksof her ancestors, those fair-skinned Conquistadores arriving in the newworld.... Look at what they started," she thinks to herself--whatthey started Fifi will call a competition for "the most haunted Most Haunted is a British paranormal television programme based on investigating purported paranormal activity. It is shown on the satellite and cable channels Living, Living2 and Virgin 1 (Formerly Ftn), primarily for the UK market. past" (212; 217). Moreover, Chucha asserts control over her ownfuture through her visionary powers. As Ellen McCracken has explained,Chucha "has foreseen this moment when the entire house would becomelike a coffin and has taken control of her own exile by burying herselfeach night in the real coffin she has chosen for herself" (1991,110). She attempts to overcome the burdens of her own past by choosingthe nature of her tomb. Of course, her potency is nourished further by the fact that, dueto the novel's chronology, the readers already know that theGarcias do indeed live "a bewitched be��witch?tr.v. be��witched, be��witch��ing, be��witch��es1. To place under one's power by or as if by magic; cast a spell over.2. To captivate completely; entrance. See Synonyms at charm. and unsafe life" in NewYork, where psychological dangers will replace physical dangers (Alvarez1991, 223). Furthermore, Chucha's use of the future tense todescribe what the reader already knows creates an eerie, timelessquality that universalizes their suffering, linking it overtly with herown. She continues, "I feel their losses pile like dirt thrown on abox after it has been lowered into the earth. I see their future, thetroublesome life ahead. They will be haunted by what they do anddon't remember" (223). Indeed, the whole novel is haunted byFifi's inability to recall the last day on the island, by the"33 other known Garcias" along with the unknown and the lost,by the Haitians massacred, and by the indigenous people killed andenslaved by the Conquistadores whose descendants now live in exile. Likethe cycle of loss, the dialectic of privilege and oppression offers up apotion po��tionn.A liquid medicinal dose or drink.potiona large dose of liquid medicine. in which pain is the main ingredient and which only the power ofinvention--as Fanon has invoked--mitigates the future that Chucha seesfor herself and the Garcias. In the final chapter, Alvarez solidifies the relationship betweenprivilege and a history of shared pain through a childhood story fromYolanda's haunted past. When a strange hunter warns her not to takea kitten from its mother, he explains that "'to take it awaywould be a violation of its natural right to live.... It woulddie'" (1991, 285). But Yolanda feels uncertain of his adviceas she knows he is preparing to hunt birds, perhaps mother birds, andwhen she hears him fire, she knows his hypocrisy without knowing itsname. When she then decides to take the kitten home, in her childish yet(from the perspective of the kitten) omnipotent way, she perpetuates herfather's tyranny over her and her sisters, Trujillo's crimesagainst her family, and the violence that her ancestors perpetrated onthe natives. Yolanda forcibly removes the kitten from her mother,possibly fulfilling the hunter's warning, and denies the kitten theonly source of safety and sustenance she has known. Later, plagued byguilt, she pounds her toy drum to drown out Verb 1. drown out - make imperceptible; "The noise from the ice machine drowned out the music"make noise, noise, resound - emit a noise the kitten's mews.Here, the "BOOM BOOM" of the drum serves much like thesilences and gaps of the previous chapters and the babble to whichYolanda is reduced as an adult: it reveals the unutterable emotions ofloss and suffering that unite Yolanda, her family, Chucha and all thevictims of colonial history (287). At night, Yolanda is terrorized bynightmares of the mother cat seeking its lost offspring, recalling herfather's nightmares of the SIM's effort to find him and hiscompatriots. She suffers the same fear that causes her father to tear up to rip up; to remove from a fixed state by violence; as, to tear up a floor; to tear up the foundation of government or order s>.See also: Tear her Teacher's Day speech and responds the same way: by denyingvoice. She joins her ancestors and her father in the legacy ofoppression: as she will blame him for his tyrannous behavior, now sheblames herself for an act which also involves the silencing of hervictim. Just as Carlos becomes like Trujillo, she becomes like herfather, and the reverse chronology where her father's tyranny overher precedes hers over the kitten creates the illusion of a causalrelationship where there is no linear causality, but instead, aninescapable cycle. The blood of the Conquistadores runs thick as themother cat reappears nightly in Yolanda's childhood dreams toremind her of her own complicity in a history of violation. After moving to the U.S., Yolanda explains that the "catdisappeared altogether" from her dreams for many years, but thelast paragraph of the novel condenses decades into a few sentences sothat space and time implode To link component pieces to a major assembly. It may also refer to compressing data using a particular technique. Contrast with explode. (Alvarez 1991, 289). Accordingly, in thenovel's final line, the cat returns, "her magenta mouthopening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of[Yolanda's] art" (290). As Luis has noted, the nightmaresreveal the trauma Yolanda has experienced due to her forced exile (2000,847); however, they also reveal her understanding that her history ispart of many histories, part of many stories of loss so overwhelmingthat only the visceral wailing of an animal can convey their truth, atruth complicated by the fact that Yolanda identifies both with thekitten--the victim of removal--and with the architect of that removal.As in the first chapter, where she sees a version of herself both in thePalmolive woman and Jose's female guardian, her multifaceted yetincomplete identification with victims and oppressors alike reaffirmsher lack of a singular identity and reifies what Glissant calls the"subterranean convergence of our histories" (1989, 66). Inother words, she, like many fellow Caribbeans, identifies superficiallywith too many victims and too many oppressors, so that the centrifugalforces ultimately leave her with no identity of her own. TheConquistadores, Trujillo, Carlos and Yolanda all have played the role ofthe oppressor, and they have all also been, in some sense, victims ofthe poison that violence spreads to all who suffer it and to all whoperpetrate per��pe��trate?tr.v. per��pe��trat��ed, per��pe��trat��ing, per��pe��tratesTo be responsible for; commit: perpetrate a crime; perpetrate a practical joke. it. As her description of her attempts at intimacy willreveal, the blank spaces left by the desecration of the past have bornan individual shattered into too many pieces to re-member. Like her false posturing after the end of her relationship withRudy Elmenhurst, the pieces in which Yolanda finds herself after hermarriage testify to the centrifugal forces tearing her apart and to theself-proclaimed wound or emptiness remaining at her center of her art.Yolanda/Yo/Yoyo/Joe finds herself at the edge of sanity, unable to findintimacy because she does not know herself. When she can no longerunderstand her husband's words, when his words sound like nonsenseand all she can do to respond is repeat the same "'babblebabble babble,"' Yolanda reveals the same unspeakable lossthat she does in the final chapter (Alvarez 1991, 78). Unlike Whitman,Yolanda does not know the words to the song of herself because thosewords have disappeared with missing uncles, with Gladys and with Chucha.Yolanda quotes Frost, Stevens and Rilke but has no words of her own.Instead, her "head-slash-heart-slash-soul" can only convey itsfeelings through babble, which is much akin to silence (78). Only hervision of a black bird swooping down to attack her therapist, anothervictimization, releases some language from her: "The words tumbleout, making a sound like the rumble of distant thunder.... 'Doc,rock, smock'" (85). Her utterances are still nonsensical. AsJoan Hoffman explains, her babble optimistically illustrates the factthat "there is still much to say"; however, Yolanda foreverremains "a troubled soul haunted by the island of her birth; she isneither able to return to its bosom nor to completely escape itsclutches" (1998, pars. 25; 27). Her babble, the cat's wail andthe Palmolive woman's cry all echo with the same sense of anguishthat is the origin of the gaps and silences in the text. In imagery asin structure, Alvarez honors both Fanon and Glissant by reinventing thehistory of her homeland without sacrificing the truth of the losses itsdenizens have suffered collectively. Like the empty bowls “Empty Bowls” is an international project to fight hunger, personalized on a community level. The concept for “Empty Bowls” is simple. Participating artists create and donate ceramic bowls, then serve a simple meal. and the partnerless dancers in the Arpilleraof Chile's seamstresses, the novel's missing words and missingstories generate its theme, but the theme is not one of loss alone; itis also one in which Miranda faces the costs of her family'sprivilege. In other words, Alvarez uses absences and unspeakableness toexpose the complexity of her characters' inheritance, aninheritance shared by all who have been shaped by the legacies ofwestern expansion. In Almanac of the Dead Almanac of the Dead is a novel by Leslie Marmon Silko, first published in 1991. Plot introductionAlmanac of the Dead takes place against the backdrop of the American Southwest and Central America. , Leslie Marmon Silko explainsthrough a storyteller that the theory of the Big Bang big bangModel of the origin of the universe, which holds that it emerged from a state of extremely high temperature and density in an explosive expansion 10 billion–15 billion years ago. was"consistent with everything else that he had seen: from theirflimsy attachments to one another and their children to theirabandonment of the land where they had been born," westerners andthose who have inherited their culture all share the same fate ofalienation as do Adam and Eve Adam and EveIn the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the parents of the human race. Genesis gives two versions of their creation. In the first, God creates “male and female in his own image” on the sixth day. , "wandering aimlessly aim��less?adj.Devoid of direction or purpose.aimless��ly adv.aim because theinsane God who had sired them had abandoned" and expelled them(1991, 258). For Silko, then, the Garcia family tree does not reach farback enough: the suffering born by Chucha, Carlos, Yolanda and so manyothers reaches beyond the history of the Conquistadores back into thebook of Genesis Noun 1. Book of Genesis - the first book of the Old Testament: tells of Creation; Adam and Eve; the Fall of Man; Cain and Abel; Noah and the flood; God's covenant with Abraham; Abraham and Isaac; Jacob and Esau; Joseph and his brothersGenesis , back to the Creation and the Fall, which Yolandare-experiences herself in the guava grove at the novel's beginning.As Silko continues, "the Europeans had not been able to sleepsoundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard.They," like their heirs in Carlos and Yolanda, "suffered fromnightmares and frequently claimed to see devils and ghosts" (718).Where Silko's storyteller calls the Europeans orphaned people,Chucha adds that "nothing would quite fill that need" that thegirls suffer after their exile (Alvarez 1991, 215). Their past, hauntedby the "river of bodies" left by the Haitian massacre and bythe massacre of the natives hundreds of years before, will forever keepthe Garcias orphaned spiritually (218). Through Yolanda, Alvarez hasconveyed sensitivity to the fact that her history is one of many, thather powerlessness and her privilege, her voicelessness and her voice,contain a truth that has the potential to transform silence andalienation into revolution and a new subjectivity. As Chucha concludes,the Garcias will "invent what they need to survive" (223). Asecond genesis Second Genesis is a 1986 science fiction novel by Donald Moffitt.In the previous novel, The Genesis Quest, the alien Nar species discovered radio transmissions containing the genetic codes and cultural records of a species called Humanity, transmitted from a , born of awareness and empathy and responsibility, may bein the making if silence can be seen as a means of fulfillingFanon's call to invent one's own existence. Through hersilences, Alvarez implodes the Miranda Complex, undermining westernHistory's linear nature in order to reveal through Yolanda'ssuffering and through her guilt, both the private and the universalcosts of Prospero's tyranny. (10) Notes (1) Strachey, explains Greenblatt, "tells the story of a stateof emergency and a crisis of authority" (1988, 149). InStrachey's report and in The Tempest, "the deepest fears lienot with the human or natural resources of the New World but with thediscipline of the English colonists and common seamen. And the principalquestions--whether obedience is willing or forced, whether religiousobservance is sincere or feigned--suggest an interest in innerstates" and moral standards (150). Strachey, for instance, fearsthat the "riot and sloth sloth(slōth, slôth), arboreal mammal found in Central and South America distantly related to armadillos and anteaters. Sloths live in tropical forests, where they sleep, eat, and travel through the trees suspended upside down, clinging to " that plague the English countrysidemay doom the colonists to starvation (1964, 66). (2) See Bakhtin: "language is heteroglot from top to bottom:it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictionsbetween the present and the past, between differing epochs of thepast" (1981, 291). (3) Dictator from 1930 until his assassination AssassinationSee also Murder.assassinsFanatical Moslem sect that smoked hashish and murdered Crusaders (11th—12th centuries). [Islamic Hist.: Brewer Note-Book, 52]Brutusconspirator and assassin of Julius Caesar. [Br. in 1961, Trujilloearned his early military training through the U.S. marines, rosequickly to the rank of general in the Dominican army and, Napoleon-like,seized power from President Horacio Vasquez (Kryzanek & Wiarda 1988,33; Galindez 1973, 9-10). For thirty-one years, he ruled despotically:"All political parties, newspapers, radio stations, trade unions,and private associations that did not agree with him ceased to exist.Persistent opponents were bribed, jailed, murdered, or driven intoexile" (Tenenbaum 1996, 5.273). A number of Alvarez'srelatives numbered among the lost, but her nuclear family enjoyed enoughprivilege to escape safely into exile in the United States United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , thusproviding the foundation of the novel. (4) The Chilean Arpillera, hand-sewn illustrations of thecountry's sufferings during General Augusto Pinochet's regime(1973-89), "represent a constant dialogue with the missing: therelationship of the women with their creations has become a thread thatconnects the dead with the living" (Agosin 1996, 15). Aside fromeasily recognizable symbols of loss, empty bowls of the hungry, womendancing la cueca sola and allusions to mass graves hidden in the desertexemplify the use of absence to convey a powerful political point andthe depth of the women's suffering. (5) "'I am a Dominican, hyphen, American,' [Alvarez]once said. 'As a fiction writer, I find that the most excitingthings happen in the realm of the hyphen--the place where two worldscollide or blend together" (Stavans 1994, 552). Elsewhere, shereiterates that her "stories come out of being in worlds thatsometimes clash and sometimes combine" (Rosario-Sievert 1997, 33).While Alvarez shares the fertility of living in the hyphen in herinterviews, clearly the liminal liminal/lim��i��nal/ (lim��i-n'l) barely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. lim��i��naladj.Relating to a threshold.liminalbarely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. position Yolanda experiences is at leastas alienating as it is exciting. (6) "Long after we had left," recalls Alvarez in hercollection of essays, Something to Declare, "my parents were stillliving in the dictatorship inside their own heads. Even on Americansoil, they were afraid of awful consequences if they spoke out"(1998, 108). Their fears were not illegitimate, for in New York City New York City:see New York, city. New York CityCity (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. ,"a Columbia University Columbia University,mainly in New York City; founded 1754 as King's College by grant of King George II; first college in New York City, fifth oldest in the United States; one of the eight Ivy League institutions. graduate student named [Jesus de] Galindezwas kidnapped and murdered after refusing to sell his thesis--an exposeof the regime--to SIM agents" (1987, 83). On February 27, 1956,Galindez presented his doctoral dissertation to a committee of faculty,and thirteen days later he disappeared. Although the details of hisdisappearance have never revealed themselves, "Galindez was almostcertainly kidnapped in New York, taken to the Dominican Republic, andmurdered, all on order of Trujillo" (Martin 1973, ix; cf.Crassweller 1966, 312-14). His dissertation has since been published;see Works Cited below. To Alvarez and her sisters, as children who hadbeen shielded from the terrors of Trujillo's reign, the losses werepersonal, not public, and at the same time, the new opportunities in theU.S. tempting. "Overnight," recalls Alvarez, "we losteverything: a homeland, an extended family, a culture, and yes, asI've already said, the language I felt at home in" (1998,139). And yet, sooner than she would have expected, writing in English"bridged these two worlds," providing her with a means ofturning exile into a liberation of voice (139). (7) Barak (1998), Luis (2000), Hoffman (1998), Mitchell (1999) andCastells (2001) all illuminate the fractured identities of the Garciagirls within the context of their lives in the hyphen. Of course,critics have concluded that "to speak of a 'self' in ourpostmodern world is no longer fashionable, since we exist in a state ofcontinuous construction and reconstruction," but for a minorityauthor, the sense of deconstruction becomes one more assault in a longhistory of assaults on personal and collective identity (Durante 2001,6). See also the studies by Ellen McCracken (1999) and Karen Christian(1997). (8) The idealist among the newly shipwrecked, Gonzalo imagines theisland as a paradise where the land will provide as it did before theFall. Such descriptions, recalling Eden or Virgil's pastorals, arecommonplace in early travel narratives from Christopher Columbus'sconviction that "the earthly Paradise truly lies here" (1969,224) to Walter Raleigh's celebration of deer that "came downfeeding by the water's side as if they had been used to akeeper's call" (1984, 98). For detailed analyses, see Campbell(1988) and Kolodny (1975). (9) Estimates of the death toll range from 5,000 to 25,000(Crassweller 1966, 156). On the reaction in the U.S., see Roorda (1996,301-19). (10) A shorter version of this paper entitled "Loud Silencesand Original Endings: Narrative Design in Julia Alvarez's How theGarcia Girls Lost Their Accents" was presented by the author at the31st convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association, Buffalo,New York, April 2000. Works Cited Agosin, Marjorie. 1996. Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: TheArpillera Movement in Chile 1974-1994. Trans. Celeste Celeste is a woman's first name. Celeste may also refer to:in Music Voix c��leste, a Pipe Organ stop. Celesta, a musical instrument Other Spanish/Portuguese for Sky Blue, Light Blue, Baby Blue Kostopulos-Cooperman. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press The University of New Mexico Press, founded in 1929, is a university press that is part of the University of New Mexico. External linkUniversity of New Mexico Press . Alvarez, Julia. 1987. "An American Childhood in the DominicanRepublic." American Scholar 56: 71-85. ______. 1991. How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York:Plume-Penguin. ______. 1998. Something to Declare. New York: Plume-Penguin. ______. 2003. "I Came to Help: Resistance Writ Small." InWomen Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America Latin America,the Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and French-speaking countries (except Canada) of North America, South America, Central America, and the West Indies. and the Caribbean, ed.Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez. Cambridge: South End Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. MichaelHolquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Universityof Texas Press. Barak, Julie. 1998. "'Turning and Turning the WideningGyre': A Second Coming into Language in Julia Alvarez's Howthe Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents." MELUS MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 23: 159-76. Bing, Jonathan. 1996. "Julia Alvarez: Books that CrossBorders." Publishers Weekly 16 (December): 38-39. Campbell, Mary B. 1998. The Witness and the Other World: ExoticEuropean Travel Writing, 400-1600. Ithaca: Cornell University Cornell University,mainly at Ithaca, N.Y.; with land-grant, state, and private support; coeducational; chartered 1865, opened 1868. It was named for Ezra Cornell, who donated $500,000 and a tract of land. With the help of state senator Andrew D. Press. Castells, Ricardo. 2001. "The Silence of Exile in How theGarcia Girls Lost Their Accents." Bilingual Review 26: 34-42. Chancy, Myriam J. A. 1997. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels byHaitian Women. New Brunswick New Brunswick, province, CanadaNew Brunswick,province (2001 pop. 729,498), 28,345 sq mi (73,433 sq km), including 519 sq mi (1,345 sq km) of water surface, E Canada. : Rutgers University Press Rutgers University Press is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in Piscataway, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University. The press was founded in 1936, and since that time has grown in size and in the scope of its publishing program. . Christian, Karen. 1997. Show & Tell: Identity as Performance inU.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cliff, Michelle. 1988. "A Journey into Speech." InMulti-Cultural Literacy, ed. Ricke Simonson and Scott Walker Scott Walker can refer to more than one person: Scott Walker (singer) (born 1943), singer Scott Walker (politician) (born 1967), county executive of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Scott Walker (boxer) (1969-2004), boxer . St. Paul St. Paulas a missionary he fearlessly confronts the “perils of waters, of robbers, in the city, in the wilderness.” [N.T.: II Cor. 11:26]See : Bravery :Graywolf. Columbus, Christopher. 1969. The Four Voyages of ChristopherColumbus Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was a navigator and an admiral for the Crown of Castile whose voyages to America greatly expanded European exploration and colonization of the continent (Vikings had previously had a colony at current New England, and there is significant . Ed. and Trans. J. M. Cohen J. M. (John Michael) Cohen (February 5,1903 - July 19, 1989) was a prolific translator (into English) of European literature. Born in London, he was a graduate of Cambridge University. . New York: Penguin. Crassweller, Robert D. 1966. Trujillo: The Life and Times of aCaribbean Dictator. New York: Macmillan. Cunningham, Lucia Guerra. 1990. "Rite of Passage rite of passagen.A ritual or ceremony signifying an event in a person's life indicative of a transition from one stage to another, as from adolescence to adulthood. : LatinAmerican Women Writers Today." In Splintering Darkness: LatinAmerican Women Writers in Search of Themselves, ed. Lucia GuerraCunningham. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press. Donaldson, Laura E. 1992. Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender,& Empire-Building. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. External linkUniversity of North Carolina Press . Douglass, Frederick Douglass, Frederick(dŭg`ləs), c.1817–1895, American abolitionist, b. near Easton, Md. The son of a black slave, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white father, he took the name of Douglass (from Scott's hero in The Lady of the Lake . 2001. Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass, an American Slave Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. . New Haven: Yale University Press. Durante, Robert. 2001. Dialectic of Self and Story: Reading andStorytelling in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: RoutledgeUniversity Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles LamMarkmann. New York: Grove Press. Galindez, Jesus de. 1973. The Era of Trujillo: Dominican Dictator.Ed. Russell H. Fitzgibbon. Tucson: University of Arizona (body, education) University of Arizona - The University was founded in 1885 as a Land Grant institution with a three-fold mission of teaching, research and public service. Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory ofWomen's Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley:University of California Press "UC Press" redirects here, but this is also an abbreviation for University of Chicago PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. . Hoffman, Joan M. 1998. "'She Wants to Be Called YolandaNow': Identity, Language, and the Third Sister in How the GarciaGirls Lost Their Accents." Bilingual Review 23: 29 pars.<http://www.ebsco.com>. Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experienceand History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University. ofNorth Carolina North Carolina,state in the SE United States. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (E), South Carolina and Georgia (S), Tennessee (W), and Virginia (N).Facts and FiguresArea, 52,586 sq mi (136,198 sq km). Pop. Press. Kryzanek, Michael J., and Howard J. Wiarda. 1988. The Politics ofExternal Influence in the Dominican Republic. New York: Praeger. Lahens, Yanick. 1992. "Exile: Between Writing and Place."Callaloo cal��la��loo?n.1. The edible spinachlike leaves of the dasheen.2. A soup or stew made of these leaves or other greens, okra, crabmeat, and seasonings. 15: 735-46. Lima, Maria Helena. 1995. "'Beyond Miranda'sMeanings': Contemporary Critical Perspectives on CaribbeanWomen's Literatures." Feminist Studies 21: 115-28. Luis, William. 2000. "A Search for Identity in JuliaAlvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents." Callaloo23: 839-49. Martin, John Bartlow. 1973. Forward to The Era of Trujillo:Dominican Dictator by Jesus de Galindez. Ed. Russell H. Fitzgibbon.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. McCracken, Ellen. 1999. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space ofPostmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mitchell, David T. 1998. "Immigration immigration,entrance of a person (an alien) into a new country for the purpose of establishing permanent residence. Motives for immigration, like those for migration generally, are often economic, although religious or political factors may be very important. and the ImpossibleHomeland in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost TheirAccents." Antipodes: Journal of Hispanic Studies of the Universityof Auckland Not to be confused with Auckland University of Technology.The University of Auckland (Māori: Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau) is New Zealand's largest university. 10: 25-40. ______. 1999. "The Accent of 'Loss': CulturalCrossings as Context in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls LostTheir Accents." In Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing CulturalIdentity in a Multicultural Context, ed. Timothy B. Powell. NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nas, Loes. 2003. "Border Crossings in Latina Narrative: JuliaAlvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents." Journal ofLiterary Studies 19: 125-36. Oliver, Bill. 1993. "From Tangents to Trespass." NewEngland Review The New England Review (NER) is a quarterly literary journal published by Middlebury College. Founded in New Hampshire in 1978 by poets Sidney Lea and Jay Parini, it was published as New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly 15: 208-12. Ortega, Eliana, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. 1989. "At theThreshold At the Threshold, whose son Lil E. Tee won the 1992 Kentucky Derby for W. Cal Partee, died March 23 of a stroke at Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine in West Lafayette, Ind. The 21-year-old stallion stood at Wayne Houston's Stoney Creek Horse Farm near Mooreland, Ind. of the Unnamed: Latina Discourse in the Eighties." InBreaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, ed. AsuncionHorno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott and Nancy Saporta Sternbach.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press The University of Massachusetts Press is a university press that is part of the University of Massachusetts. External linkUniversity of Massachusetts Press . Raleigh, Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh, Sir Walter(both: rŏl`ē, răl`ē), 1554?–1618, English soldier, explorer, courtier, and man of letters. . 1984. Selected Writings. Ed. Gerald Hammond.New York: Penguin. Roorda, Paul Eric. 1996. "Genocide Next Door: The GoodNeighbor Policy Good Neighbor PolicyPopular name for the policy toward Latin America pursued in the 1930s by U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a marked departure from its traditional interventionism, which was abhorrent to Latin Americans, the U.S. , the Trujillo Regime, and the Haitian Massacre of1937." Diplomatic History 20: 301-19. Rosario-Sievert, Heather. 1997. "Conversation with JuliaAlvarez." Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 54 (Spring):31-37. Shakespeare, William. 1969. The Tempest. In The Complete Works, ed.Alfred Harbage. New York: Viking. Silko, Leslie Marmon.1991. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin. Stavans, Ilan.1994. "Las Mariposas." Review of In theTime of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez. The Nation 7 November,552-56. Strachey, William. 1964. "A True Reportory of the Wreck andRedemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight...." In A Voyage to Virginiain 1609, ed. Louis B. Wright. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia. Tenenbaum, Barbara A., ed. 1996. "Trujillo Molina, RafaelLeonidas Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas(räfäĕl` lāōnē`thäs tr ." In Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture. 5vols. New York: Macmillan. Walker, Alice. 2000. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. NewYork: Ballantine. Williams, Claudette M. 2000. Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics ofColor in Spanish Caribbean Literature. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1990. "Le Voyage et L'espace Clos:Island and Journey as Metaphor Aspects of Women's Experience in theWorks of Francophone Caribbean Women Novelists." In Out of theKumbla, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Lawrenceville,NJ: African World Press. Jennifer Bess is an assistant professor of Peace Studies at GoucherCollege in Baltimore, Maryland. Her recent publications include studiesof the works of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Jhumpa Lahiri.