Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez`s

Imploding the Miranda Complex in
Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia
Girls Lost Their Accents
Jennifer Bess
A diary like this, with so many blank
pages, seems to reflect a Ufe permeated
with gaps, an existence fuU 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 literaUy to be no words for it
Jennifer Bess is an assistant professor of Peace Studies at
Coucher College in Baltimore,
Maryland. Her recent publications include studies of the works
(Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a
Broken Heart).
of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)
and Jhumpa Lahiri.
I
n Shakespeare's The Tempest, Miranda enjoys
afl the privileges of her father's reign over
the island, yet she also acknowledges that "I
have suffered/With those that I saw suffer!"
(1.2.5-6). She is, as explained by Laura
Donaldson, at once the sole heiress of
Prospero's magical powers and the joint victim of his tyranny as she suffers with the
saflors being tossed by the tempest and the
two surviving natives to the island. As
Stephen Greenblatt's new historicist reading
has revealed, TTie Tempest's debt to Wifliam
Jennifer Bess 79
Strachey's account of the 1609 Caribbean shipwreck illuminates the long
history of the moral uncertainties raised by colonialism in the West.i
Attending to issues of gender, Donaldson's work, shows that Miranda has
inherited more than the guflty conscience and the fat wallet of her male
peers. In fact, she even shares Caliban's fate as both have been relegated to
the role of the other; in her case, however, that otherness includes not only
the burden of oppression and powerlessness but also the burden of "the benefits and protection offered by the colonizing father and husband" (1992,17).
Sbe is at once a victim and an heir of the forces of colonialism.
It is this complex inheritance that Julia Alvarez studies, exorcizes, and
memorializes in her autobiographicafly based novel. How the Garcia Girls Lost
Their Accents. UnwiUing to represent the semi-fictional family's history
through the binary paradigm of victim/oppressor, Alvarez instead utihzes the
flexibflity and inclusiveness of the genre of the novel to reify what
Donaldson has called the Miranda Complex—the condition of occupying
the seemingly contradictory roles of victim and heir simultaneously. While
critics have explored the theme of victimization in the novel and have also
analyzed its inclusiveness in terms of Caribbean history and Alvarez's own
biography, using Donaldson's Miranda Complex to complement such analyses confirms the salience and interrelatedness of issues including loss, guilt,
polyphony and creativity. As a brief context in Caribbean post-colonial theory wifl reveal, the novel's structure and its inclusiveness work together to
place the Garcia family's own story within a larger panorama of what
Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant has called a "shared reality," a collective
understanding that is the only source of generativity left to those whose history has been erased or buried by colonialism (1989, 149). Furthermore, by
refusing to classify the Garcias clearly as victims or victimizers, Alvarez enables
her characters to tell many truths and to acknowledge gaps in the truth; in
addition, she insists that her readers experience the shared reality of Caribbean
identity along with the Garcia girls and their intimates.
Through a complicated family tree—one she features at the beginning
of the novel—Alvarez traces the history of the Garcia family back to
Miranda's time, back to the Conquistadores, the benefactors of what Alvarez
cafls the "golden handcuffs" that encircle her own wrists and which she then
bequeaths to the four sisters of the novel (1998, 156). Including chapters
focusing on each member of the family and its intimates, the novel's heteroglossic structure simultaneously belies and highlights its themes of loss and
violation:^ on the one hand, the many voices that Alvarez captures, both in
first person and through her third person narrator, bear witness to tbe comfort and the strength the Garcia girls find in female sohdarity and the richness of their shared Dominican experience; on the other hand, that polypho-
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ny illuminates the universality of the pain born by the victims of oppression.
Since the golden handcuffs worn by privileged women of color tell only part
of the story, her novel includes a complex recipe of many voices and many
sflences, sflences which provide the means of balancing the necessity to "dig
deep" into memory with the need to memorialize the truth of history's
irrecoverable losses and of the Garcia farruly's role in a cycle of violence and
victimization (Glissant 1989,64).
Confirming Glissant's reflections on Caribbean identity, Alvarez's characters find themselves paralyzed by their memories or confounded by the
absence of memories. He has explained that "the Caribbean writer must 'dig
deep' into [coflective memory]" in order to uncover what remains of a "common experience broken in time" (1989, 63-64). Offering the oppositional
model to which Glissant's work responds, his countryman Frantz Fanon has
argued against historical excavation as the source of identity: "I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny" (1967,
229). It is between these two recommendations that Alvarez's alter-ego,
Yolanda, and her family find themselves navigating. Whfle the truth must be
exposed, it also cannot be exposed: like the history of the Arawaks or the
Haitians slaughtered in the 1937 massacre. Dictator Rafael Trujiflo's victims—including the Garcias—share an irrecoverable past.^ Thus, in order to
maintain verisimilitude, Alvarez uses silence to convey political and personal
paralysis, to evoke the truths which cannot be communicated verbafly. Like
her sisters in the Arpillera Movement in Chfle,'* she uses the symptoms of
paralysis to reveal the irreversible effects of a history of violation on the
human psyche and to demand that her readers experience those effects alongside the characters: her sflences, omissions and nonverbal communications
demand the reader's empathy with an immediacy and a presence that transcend Miranda's sympathy for the shipwrecked saflors at the same time that
the novel highlights the Garcias's own compUcity in the history of violence.
Although, like Miranda, Yolanda sympathizes with the suffering of others, including the disenfranchised living in her homeland, she cannot identify completely with them due to her privflege; nor does she identify completely with Americans or even with her own extended family on the island.
Her identity remains fractured, and through Alvarez's literary mosaic, what
she fundamentafly reveals is that, utflike Miranda, who depends on her father
to fifl in the gaps of her past, Yolanda must take on the responsibility of
attempting to invent or write her own past into being. In so doing, she fulfifls Fanon's insistence that Caribbeans "recapture the self" through an act of
self-creation (1967,231) and honors Glissant's additional advise regarding the
collective nature of this self-creation: "The collective 'We' becomes the site
of the generative system, and the true subject" (1989, 149). Yolanda must
Jennifer Bess 81
actively expose what truth survives to be exposed in the hopes of someday
empowering herself and others. At the same time she must also acknowledge
that the many voices from which she and her family draw strength and verbal potency are not sufficiently nurturing to pierce the gaps and sflences that
are the legacies of the handcuffs worn by even the most privileged victims.
AsYanick Lahens has remarked, colonialism has relegated Caribbean writers
to a state of limbo as they suffer from an "internal exile" that haunts their
work (1992, 740).They are, in a sense, orphaned by the inability to recover
the whole truth regardless of how far they dig.
Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses of the past; however,
through the exploration of Miranda's complex, what they can do is to transform Trujiflo's "mandate of sflence" into a revolution of truth-telling aiid
self-invention (Alvarez 1998, 109). Silence, in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accents, is a communicative power as conspicuous as a riot and as stealthy as
the underground movement in which (like Alvarez's own father) patriarch
Carlos Garcia has participated. Using absences to memorialize what has been
lost, Alvarez reveals the coflective burden born by afl who have suffered from
the "coflective drift to oblivion" (GHssant 1989,210). Digging deeper not to
recover an irrecoverable past, but to acknowledge tbat it is irrecoverable and
demand her characters' ownership of their complicity in that loss, the author
turns the Garcia girls' inheritance of the Miranda Complex into a eulogy.
Although the Arawak culture no longer survives to tefl its story and the heirs
of the Conquistadores do, Alvarez's use of omissions and reverse chronology
ensures that the Garcia family's history wifl not be one of pure hegemony,
but also one of responsibility, inclusiveness and the painful truth of their
complex inheritance. Through her storytefling, she stays true to a past
marked by a drift to oblivion so strong that destiny cannot be found there,
following Glissant's advice to dig deeply into memory and acknowledging
the truth of Fanon's warnings. If Caribbean history needs to be re-membered, as Glissant argues, then what Alvarez achieves is to turn the Garcia
girls' inheritance of the Miranda complex into a means of memorializing the
absence of coflective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims and
perpetrators alike. As the following sections detail, it is the novel's structure,
its gaps and omissions, its pervasive themes of loss and alienation, and its
inclusive nature that effect this memorializing of a coflective past riddled
with irretrievable histories.
In terms of its overafl structure. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is
more than an "attempt to insert a silenced self into history"; in fact, its form
is fundamental to its ability to memorialize the permanence of loss and
silence (Lima 1995, 119). As we shafl see, its structure illuminates the
Garcias's own complicity in the suffering rooted in colonial history.
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Alongside informational omissions within the chapters themselves, a topic to
which I will return, the reverse chronology and the resulting gaps that occur
bet^A^een the chapters signal the irretrievable losses the family and all
Dominicans have suffered. "The implosion of Caribbean history, (of the converging histories of our people)," explains Glissant, "relieves us of the linear,
hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course"
(1989,66). In other words, the singular History of the West is replaced by the
converging histories of many peoples, many voices, so that meaning-making
only occurs pluralistically. The linear journey that characterizes traditional
Western literature must be shattered for the purposes of attacking the
Western hegemony, revealing the truth of what has been lost and creating a
new vehicle of communication through silence and absence on the one hand
and through inclusiveness on the other. In her reverse chronology, Alvarez
highlights the potentially paralyzing effects of her mission: to dig deeply into
history is to risk being puUed in by its gravity. When Fanon warns Caribbean
writers not to seek their destinies in the past, he adds: "I should constantly
remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into my
existence" (1967, 229). While Alvarez's characters suffer from a stifling of
their own inventive powers, the novel itself graphically illustrates the dangers
of digging deeply: failing to recover truth and losing oneself in the fruitless
effort to do so. As the novel falls into the past, its silences have not only to
speak, but to scream like the aching mother cat of the novel's final chapter,
w^ith the voices of all whose histories have converged or imploded in the
"psychic torture" of loss (Glissant 1989, 23).
The novels reverse chronology challenges not only the notion of a single history but also the genre's "tacit modernist assumptions of a coherent
identity and a true self" (Nas 2003, 132). Speaking of French Antillean
women's writing, Elizabeth Wilson explains how "the journey [of exile]
often takes the form of journey-as-alienation. Self-knowledge often leads to
the destruction of self" rather than self-awareness, as is typical of traditional
Western novels (1990, 47). Where a Western male hero has traditionally
developed through an increasing "understanding of his separateness from
others" in a journey toward independence, for a Caribbean woman writer—
whether French or Spanish—the very form of the journey must be redefined, and in the case of Alvarez's novel, redefined to eschew the linear progression toward independence and instead to embrace the discovery of the
relationship (the convergence) of self with others and of the present with the
past (Gilmore 1994, 29).Thus, the family tree at the novel's beginning forecasts more than its politics, for it also serves as a synecdoche for historical gaps
and collective experiences that can never be retrieved, no matter how many
voices are included.
Jennifer Bess 83
Beginning with the family tree, Alvarez uses gaps generously to ensure
that the reader will empathize with her characters' feelings of uncertainty and
loss. The genealogy documents the girls' maternal side enjoying a clear
(though morally troubling) lineage dating back to the Conquistadores, but
the paternal side's heritage is illustrated only by an ambiguous dotted line,
punctuated with question marks, dating back to the same progenitors.
Equally ambiguous is the inclusion of "33 other known Garcias," signaling
both the anonymity of the known and the allusion to the unknown others.
The gaps and omissions in the family tree recall Glissant's aforementioned
metaphor of historical implosion or convergence, demanding that the reader interpret the novel within a collective and historical context and remain
sensitive not only to presence, but to absence as well. Accordingly, that
absence is felt immediately as the reader turns the page to the novel's first
section, which covers the years 1989-1972.
The shift firom the familiar format of the family tree to that of reverse
chronology sets the stage forYolanda's homecoming in the first chapter. Five
years have passed since she has visited her homeland. In those five years, her
Spanish has deteriorated, and she is increasingly uncertain about her future.
But like the family tree, these personal losses also serve as signs for larger
ones. When the narrator explains that Tia Flor granted asylum to her family
members during "who-knows-which revolution," she calls attention not
only to the non-linear history Glissant has revealed but also to what Mikhail
Bakhtin has called the centrifugal forces, the multiplicity and inclusiveness, at
work in modern novels (Alvarez 1991, 5). Of course, Bakhtin's analysis of
multiple contexts and multiple meanings forecasts 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 meaningmaking is a dialogic process that occurs in a multifaceted context complements Glissant's broader theories: where Glissant sees Caribbean history as an
implosion of many memories, Bakhtin sees the novel as a "tension-filled
unity of two embattled tendencies," the tendency toward centralization and
the tendency toward decentralization or inclusiveness (1981, 272). Clearly,
Alvarez employs both tendencies in her effort to convey a complex truth, yet
for her, both implosion and explosion yield loss and uncertainty so profound
that even the heteroglossia, the multitude of voices in the novel, cannot convey the depth of the collective pain.
The first chapter, whose content I will explicate further below, highlights
Yolanda's feeling of shame regarding her own inability to navigate this tension, or life in the hyphen, as Alvarez has called the experience of a
Dominican-American, thus signaling that the gaps in the family tree will
haunt the entire novel in terms of both structure and theme.^ Immediately,
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the chapter exposes the irrecoverable distance between herself and her heritage, between herself and those with whom she could identify. The shame
she feels when she tips Jose, the boy who helps her fmd her way home from
the guava grove, reveals her own distance from her homeland. When she
"tries to distract him by asking what he will buy with his money," she only
perpetuates the gaps that have separated her from the boy and that have separated both from their history: the language gap, the economic gap and the
historical gap imposed by the legacies of colonial rule, genocide and despotism (Alvarez 1991, 23).What the famfly tree forecasts, the first chapter fulfifls
as Yolanda remains trapped in her golden handcuffs, identifying neither with
the boy nor with the nearby biflboard's golden-haired Palmolive woman,
whose mouth is "stifl opened as if she is cafling someone over a great distance" (23; cf. Castefls 2001, 40). Here, in this final line of the chapter, the
words "as if"—which wifl recur in the last lines of each of the first two sections of the novel in order to complement the structural gaps with verbal
ambiguity—reveal Yolanda's predicament: she is no more sure of the
Palmolive woman's motives than she is of her own wifl to stay on the island.
What she does know is that "distance" is at the heart of both uncertainties.
Because of the novel's structural gaps, the reader is left with equal uncertainty regarding the passage of time and the events that take place between
chapters. As Chapter One ends and Chapter Two, "The Kiss," begins, a traditional causal sequence of events is absent. The readers, of course, do not know
ifYolanda decides to stay in the Dominican Republic or return to NewYork
with her family, but that uncertainty pales in comparison to tbe ongoing sense
of disconnection caused by the abrupt shift to a new time and place in each
chapter. 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 past towards" their father (Alvarez 1991,24).The theme of
the chapter—famihal violation and vengeance—challenges the narrative assurance and bespeaks the seemingly endless lineage of violations and revolutions,
recalling the earlier conflation or befuddlement regarding Tia Flor's reaction to
"who-knows-which revolution." Moreover, the assurance implodes because
the past, in terms of the novel, comes last, undermining any abflity to sink into
it through a linear progression. The past and the present, the personal and the
political, the silence and the word—afl seem to be lost in the gaps between the
chapters, the gaps in history, the "as if's" of Alvarez's prose.
Echoing uncertainty and inability to communicate across various gaps,
the final chapter of the novel's first section, "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story,"
concludes as Yolanda takes "a long messy swaflow [of Bordeaux], as if I were
some decadent wild woman who had just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover"
(Alvarez 1991, 103).The narrator's tone is as complex as it is in the begin-
Jennifer Bess 85
ning of "The Kiss," where she promises that the girls sink their roots into t:he
past, for once again, what is absent is at least as potent as what is present.
Yolanda is not a "wild woman" and she has not dismissed a lover. Just as the
Palmolive woman opens her mouth as if to communicate, Yolanda drinks as
if to signal her liberation and certainty. Although she has dismissed Rudy
Elmenhurst, she has never been his lover and has instead refused his advances
only to end up feeling "self-doubt" instead of self-assurance or integrity
(103). Her failure to open the bottle of wine easily and her posturing in the
role model of a wild woman reafSrm the same lack of identity exposed
through the distance between Yolanda and both Jose and the Palmolive
woman (Castells 2001,40). Indeed, as this chapter advances (or retreats) to the
novel's second part, two years remain completely unaccounted for, so that the
uncertainty Yolanda feels regarding her identity explodes into the larger historical uncertainty that the family and their countrymen suffer collectively.
Alvarez highlights the historical connection to the losses the family suffers through a symbol appropriate to the youth of the Garcia girls: a Barbie
doU dressed as a Flamenco dancer, a gift to Sandi from a family friend. At the
close of the second section, when Sandi tells Mrs. Fanning, "'Graaas,'... as if
the Barbie doU had to be true to her Spanish costume," this third pivotal "as
if" reveals the complex alloy composing Alvarez's golden handcuffs (1991,
191). On an island where the few^ native Arawaks who survived then suffered
the encomienda system and lost their culture and their ethnic identity to
Spanish Conquistadores, Sandi's Flamenco doll's ability to be true to her costume is as complex as Yolanda's ability to enact the role of an angry lover.
Barbie's costume echoes with the self-doubt Yolanda expresses at the end of
her brief final encounter with Rudy and recalls the ambiguous dotted line
on the Garcia family tree. AU bear witness to a feeling of ahenation, which,
as Ricardo Castells explains, "is often symbolized by either silence or by an
absolute failure to communicate" (2001, 34). Thus, the silences, the gaps
between the chapters, the missing years and the "as if's" make the girls' personal losses and Trujillo's mandate of silence more present in their absence
than they would have been had Alvarez tried to articulate the irretrievable.
Alongside these gaps between the chapters and the accompanying ambiguities, specific textual omissions resonate with lost history and lost voices to
highlight the agony belonging to the Garcias and their fellow Dominicans.
The forces of heteroglossia function as they customarily do to add depth and
context to the feelings of the protagonists, but in this case, they also reveal
that the blood of the Conquistadores belongs to their heirs and their victims
alike. Thus, those who have enjoyed privilege and those without it suffer
together in a history of loss. In silence and in absence, Alvarez offers up a revolution of truth-teUing. In "I Came to Help," she confesses that "the wayiwe
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really change things is often through very simple action, small and quiet
enough not to draw too much attention" (2003, 211-12). At once painfully
diminutive and shockingly potent, the omissions serve to reify the collective
burden born by all who have been silenced: absence does indeed speak for
itself—though not as quietly as Alvarez suggests. In fact, the silences guarantee that Alvarez's readers will be pained by three particularly potent omissions
of either subject matter or truth, thus obligating their understanding of her
characters' losses.
Namely, the absence of Laura's inventions, the absence of Yolanda's
Teacher Day address, and Yolanda's memory of a childhood mishap indicate
the hardships of living in the hyphen and the costs of the prohibitions and
violations the family suffers. The first two acts of silencing, in particular,
reveal what Alvarez means in her autobiographical essays when she describes
her golden handcuffs as symboUzing "those positions of privilege that often
trap us women into denying our bodies, our desires, our selves" (1998,156).
While the private stories of the four girls and their intimates illustrate this
denial, the omissions and the violations their stories contain also act inclusively or centrifugally to embrace colonial history, or more precisely, what
Glissant has called "nonhistory," the erasure of history in the traditional sense
(1989,62). Since aU three losses mentioned above are also linked just as clearly to the family's privilege as they are to its pain, the omissions suggest the
intricacies of a history in which the perpetrators of violation suffer an intense
sense of exile and homelessness and thus share a sense of violation with those
whom their ancestors have made to suffer. Centripetal forces reveal the private emotional costs of both privilege and violation, but they also coexist
v\dth centrifugal forces revealing historical and public costs. The novel foregrounds many losses through its omissions: Carla's inability to express herself
clearly to the policeman after being sexually accosted, Yolanda's failure to
communicate with her husband, Sandi's failure as a young artist. However,
what Laura's inventions, Yolanda's speech and the childhood memory of a
particularly salient omission of truth share is their affihation with the family's privilege and with the on-going theme of violation.
Beginning with Laura, she, more than her husband, embraces the opportunities America offers and finds ways of reveling in the mythic land of
opportunity. Unlike Carlos, who is haunted by nightmares from his past as a
revolutionary, Laura, as the wife of a man compelled by tradition to maintain
his family's social standing without her economic help, is firee to take in "the
wonders of this new country" (Alvarez 1991, 133). Though she fears her
daughters' becoming too American, she sits up at night inventing items like
those she sees in department stores, items to make a housewife's hfe more
comfortable and leisurely. In other words, her inventions are her means of
Jennifer Bess 87
understanding her new world. They signal, hke her "mishmash of mixed-up
idiopis and sayings that showed she was 'green behind the ears,' as she called
it," her attempt to integrate herself, to defme herself in the new country
(135). Like many believers in the American Dream, she imagines herself an
entrepreneurial millionaire only to be disappointed when she sees her latest
invention, a suitcase on wheels, already on sale in a newspaper. At that point,
she gives up: "What use was it trying to compete with the Americans: they
would always have the head start. It was their country, after all" (140). While
the family's privilege has brought them safely into America, they remain in
political and emotional exile, and Laura's inventions rank among the casualties of that exile. In fact, Laura's efforts and her failure to invent "gadgets to
make life easier for the American moms" only expose what it is to be exiled
(138): "To be exiled is to be from here and from elsewhere, to be at the same
time inside and outside, settled in the insecurity of a painful and uneasy $ituation" (Lahens 1992, 736). Her attempts to bring ease to American moms
only highlight her own dis-ease, her own insecurity despite the economic
privilege she enjoyed in her homeland.
While Laura begins her entrepreneurial adventure with suitable gusto,
self-assured that "she would prove to these Americans what a smart woman
could do with a pencil and pad," the suitcase advertisement in the New York
Times does more than thwart her ambition (Alvarez 1991, 139). When she
sees it, she startles her husband from a troubled sleep that exposes the larger
context of her failure: he wakes asking, "'^'Qwe jjasa.''What is wrong? There
was terror in his voice, the same fear she'd heard in the Dominican Repubhc
before they left . . . . In dreams, he went back to those awful days and long
nights, and his wife's screams confirmed his secret fear: they had not gotten
away after all; the SIM [TrujiUo's secret police] had come for them at last"
(139).^ No longer is Laura a potent member of the de la Torre family;
instead, she, like the victims her own ancestors, is now a powerless victim of
forces she cannot control. If her 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
her ancestors profited (Oliver 1993, 211). Like Miranda's, Laura's privilege 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 her life and in her nation's past,
and she too identifies with the suffering of the powerless now that she ranks
among them.
Having learned firom her own powerlessness, Laura finds the strength to
"take up her pencil and pad one last time" when she encounters one with
even less power to overcome her fate (Alvarez 1991,141). For her daughter,
she stands up to the complex legacies and realities of tyranny that have
thwarted them both, simultaneously acknowledging her privilege and using
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it to resist oppression openly. When Yolanda is asked to deliver a speech honoring her teachers, she is at first terrified: "She still had a slight accent, and
she did not like to speak in public" for she bears both the weight of traditional prohibitions against vociferous women and the fear of her "classmates'
ridicule" (141). Inspired by Walt Whitman's poetry, however, she finds herself
in language and "[takes] root in it," in some sense turning her back on the
radical "devotions" that have indebted her to her father and homeland (141;
24). Only in English, she feels, can one declare, " 7 ce/eirate myself" and just
as boldly as Whitman, she begins writing "recklessly" and passionately until
"she finally sounded like herself in English" (142-43, emphasis in original).
In America, she concludes, "people could say what they thought" (145).Yet
her discovery of her voice, her birth as a writer, does not go unchallenged by
her father. When she reads him the speech, he is horrified by her
Americanization. And when Laura leaps to her defense, he thinks to himself:
"It was bad enough that his daughter was rebelling, but here was his own
wife joining forces with her" (145-46). Becoming "vengeful" and "mad, . . .
he tore the speech into shreds," revealing what he feels is his rightful authority in the family structure (146).
Buoyed by her mother's support, Yolanda reacts defiantly to her father,
and "in a low, ugly whisper" that parallels his rage, "pronounced Trujillo's
hated nickname:'Chapita! You're just another Chapita!'" (Alvarez 1991,147).
After seeming narrowly to escape a beating, Yolanda retreats to her room
with her mother, and they concoct a second speech, one full of "stale compliments" and "pohte commonplaces," for which she is praised by her teachers (148). With pieces of it coming from one of her father's speeches rather
than fi-om Walt Whitman, the "barbaric yav^^p" has been transformed into
palaver. So empty are her words that they are omitted from the text. In fact,
the reader never knows the content of either the replacement or the original speech, so that their absence is as present as the absence of Laura's inventions.The omission ofYolanda's speeches, perhaps even more glaring than the
loss of Laura's inventions because it is a verbal one, signifies an utter violation
ofYolanda's voice, of her creativity and of her identity; the omission is the
antithesis of Fanon's call for self-invention. Like Laura's, Yolanda's optimism
is thwarted, her self-expression denied. In the space of absent speech, in the
hyphen between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic,Yolanda has lost her
voice, so that the genesis ofa writer's life is simultaneously exposed and concealed in the spaces between the words, between her own wishes and her
father's traditions and between those traditions and the blood of the
Conquistadores.
In Something to Declare, which clearly identifies the author with her protagonist and connects the private experiences of women with the history of
Jennifer Bess 89
the Caribbean, Alvarez admits, "We could go places in English we never
could in Spanish" (1998, 64). Elsewhere, she confesses to an interviewer, "I
had never been raised to have a public voice" (Bing 1996, 38). Whitman,
however, inspires Yolanda to open her moutb, even if that means tbat sbe will
challenge traditional gender roles and "broadcast [her] disobedience" for all
the world to hear or read (Alvarez 1998,123). Yet Carlos's reaction and the
absence of the original speech undermine her sense of agency. When Eliana
Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach claim that "Latina discourse . . . fills in
the omissions, flourishes between the gaps, and exposes its contradictions,"
the optimism embodied in their verbs reveals only one side of the truth
while the other side rests in the nouns (1989, 13). The celebration of filling,
flourishing and exposing is certainly present in Alvarez's work. Celebrating
her ability to thrive in the intersection between two cultures, she reminds her
readers repeatedly, "I'm a hyphenated person . . . interested in the music that
comes out of a language that hears both languages" (Rosario-Sievert 1997,
33). But while her music is as powerful as Yolanda's speech seems to have
been, folded into it are those omissions, gaps and contradictions that reveal
loss, pain and complexities that blur the lines between the victim and the
oppressor, so that all involved (even the reader) suffer the pain of irretrievable loss. Where Michelle Cliff claims that to describe her journey, "I must
begin at the very beginning, with the origins," echoing Glissant, Yolanda's
origins as a writer have been erased, creating an absence that serves as a
potent and tangible reminder of history's irrecoverable voices and Fanon's
caveat against seeking identity in history (1988, 58).
The loss ofYolanda's voice exposes the layers underneath Carlos's act of
violation. Overtly, Carlos plays the role of the tyrant, recalling Prospero's
power over Miranda's sexuality as, in the present case, the father controls
Yolanda's verbal productivity. Yolanda's identification of Carlos withTrujiUo
exposes the connection blatantly as the missing speech recalls the silences
imposed by the "fear of lurking spies" in the homeland (Alvarez 1991,145).
Her anger has an immediate source, but behind Carlos's vitriol and behind
his violation of his daughter's words lies his own victimization. He suflers
too, and his past exposes not only the history of loss, but also the family's own
comphcity in the perpetuation of violence. Indeed, Laura's alliance with
Yolanda and Carlos's ironic adoption of the role of the tyrant (whom he has
risked his life to overthrow) reveal the extent to which all of them would
forever "be haunted by blood in the streets and late night disappearances"
(146). Furthermore, as their own cruelties to each other reveal, the losses and
silences are irrecoverable, in part, because the cycle which generates them
persists. When Frederick Douglass notes that the institution of slavery is as
toxic to the slave owner's soul as it is to the soul of the slave, what he con-
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eludes is that only a complete revolution in thought, a neu'"sacred cause" and
a means of expressing it, can break the cycle (2001, 31; 86). For Alvarez,
silence is that means. The blood of the Conquistadores will continue to stain
and haunt both the perpetrators of violence and their victims until both the
privileged and the dispossessed understand that the cost of the loss is greater
than any potential gain. In fact,Yolanda's dream of recovering Eden with her
return to the mythic guava grove of the first chapter proves that 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 kind of psychic torture Yolanda suffers (1989, 23). It is
revolution, not a recapitulation of history with different heroes and new victims, that the family's experience demands.
The hopes embodied in Laura's pencil and pad are replaced by the
truth—the truth that only the blank space can reveal. As in Chile's Arpillera
Movement, the lost, the dead and the wounded are powerfully memorialized
through absence. Thus, like the Haitian resistance literature Myriam Chancy
explicates, Alvarez's novel "displace[s] Western ideology" and reconstitutes
itself as a distinct form, one that acknowledges all sides of a history of privilege and victimization through an implosion of many experiences (1997, 9).
Unlike many Chilean women who suffered in poverty and complete powerlessness, Yolanda and Laura also include within their silence their heritage
of power, truthfully representing their own place in a history of brutality. As
Carlos is haunted by memories of the dictatorship, Yolanda is haunted by
memories of a childhood defined simultaneously by privilege and powerlessness. And it is only through telling her story and acknowledging both her
losses and her own use of privilege to win battles that Yolanda eventually
embraces her own sacred cause, her own truth—the oppressors of yesterday
become the victims of today, and within 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 privilege and
powerlessness defines the girls. In different ways, Alvarez's golden 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 their
grandparents bring the girls after trips to the U.S. reveal their status and the
ongoing threat to it. While her grandfather fills a prestigious position in the
United Nations, he fiUs it only because Trujillo "was jealous of anyone with
education and money, and so Papito was often sent out of the country on
Jennifer Bess 91
bogus business" (226). The blood of the Conquistadores has become a mixed
blessing, though for the children, as Yolanda assesses, "the height of violence
for us was on the weekly television Western imported from Hollywood"
(227). "As for the violence around us," she continues, "the guards' periodic
raids, the uncles whose faces no longer appeared at the yearly hoHday gatherings, we believed the slogan at station identification—'God and Trujillo are
taking care of you'" (227). Her innocence, of course, will meet its end: in the
same way that her unconsummated relationship with Rudy Elmenhurst and
her marriage resonate with a sense of the violations her family has suffered
on the island, so is Yolanda's first sexual experience similarly painful. In fact,
within the context of her family compound, it also serves as a synecdoche
for the layers of violations reaching backward not only into colonial history
but also into Yolanda's own soul. As Lucia Guerra Cunningham explains
regarding Latina writers, "in a peculiar syntax of memory, recapturing the
hidden signals of the house of childhood is also an act which sheds valuable
light on national identity" and its destruction (1990,13). For Yolanda and her
sisters, there is no idyUic past to which to retreat.
As a child,Yolanda experiences two salient prohibitions: one against wandering to the outskirts of the family compound, which adjoins that of the
dictator's own daughter, and one against indulging sexually. The first prohibition is reinforced by the memory of the time when Yolanda and her couSin
Mundin "had set off a firecracker just as [Trujillo's grandson] paraded by with
his nursemaids. Papito had spent that night down at the SIM headquarters"
for their misdeed (Alvarez 1991, 233-34).Thus, the coal shed near the property line is forbidden. Just as forbidden is any sexual indulgence. In her catechism classes, 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 of prohibitions relating to her
own body and its ideal future as a virgin bride, and when both of these prohibitions are broken simultaneously, Alvarez foreshadows the pain caused by
the chaffing of the golden handcuffs Yolanda and her sisters will wear for the
rest of their lives.
When Mundin confronts Yolanda with a proposition to give her the
wondrous new ball of modeling clay his grandfather has brought firom the
U.S. if she will "show [him she's] a girl,"Yolanda accepts, bringing on the end
of both her sexual innocence and her political innocence (Alvarez 1991,
233). Along with her httle sister,Yolanda enters the forbidden coal shed at her
cousin's request and confesses as she pulls down her underpants, "I steeled
myself against his intrusive glances" (235). Though she armors herself against
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.
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and divided his ball of clay equally between Fifi and Yolanda" (235). Enraged
that the exchange has not gone as promised (she expected to secure all of the
clay),Yolanda is silenced when the children hear Mundin's mother calling for
them outside. Using another bribe, Mundin promises to give Yolanda his
anatomical Human Body doll if she will protect him from trouble. But this
bribe, hke the first, will not work out well for her, and by the time this drama
has drawn to its close, Mundin's proposition has illuminated to Yolanda her
sexual vulnerability and her ability to play two roles: the role of the victim
and the role of the perpetrator.
Though she does not understand why at this point,Yolanda does know
that any mention ofTrujillo's guardia, who regularly search their compound,
yields terror in the adults; consequently, when she invokes their presence for
her own and Mundin's protection, she unknowingly wields her own power
over her family with her lie. To protect the cousin who has just violated her,
Yolanda blurts out to her aunt,"We were hiding ... .The^ guardia—" (Alvarez
1991, 237). She does not even have to complete a sentence before her aunt's
fear consumes her and relieves the children of otherwise imminent punishment for their misbehavior. Yolanda is no longer the victim of Mundin's
bribes or of his gaze; in fact, she is now the victimizer, using her power to
hurt others with her omission of truth. In the same way that Miranda benefits from her father's power over the island, Yolanda benefits from the magic
of a little bit of well-used knowledge. She knows her family's weakness and
uses it against her aunt. At the story's end, Mundin's mangled Human Body
doll, its tiny organs having been scattered on the floor, recalls the possible
fates of the missing uncles and highlights the metaphorical manghng of
Yolanda's innocence—both sexual and political. At the moment of her lie,
she enters the adult world where knowledge and power are used to privilege
some and dominate others.
Yolanda's new-found complicity in the violence of Caribbean history is
confirmed by the presence of the gardener, Florentino. On his knees, picking up the scattered pieces of the now-forgotten Human Body doll,
Florentino serves as a reminder of the family's wealth as Yolanda and her aunt
converse. His small role and his posture capture his powerlessness, which
exists both in contrast to the Garcia family's status and in unison with their
vulnerable political state. He, hke their two maids, Chucha and Gladys, (all of
whom are identified only by their given names), suffers an unknown fate as
the novel moves backward in time. In contrast, although both the Garcia
family history and the family tree are riddled with gaps and omissions, there
is enough text in both places for the silences to speak, to tell the stories of
this family's pain. Simultaneously, then, Alvarez illuminates the losses that the
family and their servants suffer collectively with all Dominicans and
^
Jennifer Bess 93
acknowledges her family's relative privilege in contrast to Florentino's helplessness. In this chapter, Yolanda parallels Scheherazade, whose story she has
just been given by Tia Mimi. Significantly, Yolanda reads the tales in English
and is captivated by the power of the heroine's use of words and by her use
of silence and subterfuge. For Scheherazade, of course, refusing to complete
her stories saves her life. It is she, perhaps, who teaches Yolanda/Alvarez to
use silence as a means of revolution, as a means of exploring the implosion
that characterizes her past and acknowledging both what is forever lost and,
eventually, what can be gained from the processes of invention.
While structural features including the novel's reverse chronology and its
frequent textual omissions, like those explicated above, reify the themes of
loss and exile as well as the theme of privilege, its inclusiveness highlights the
personal and cultural pervasiveness of this sense of loss, and ultimately, the
whole family'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 crystallizes through the novel's secondary
characters, whose stories reveal the depth of the sufFering shared by the privileged and the powerless alike and reify Glissant's notion of converging histories. The fractured nature ofYolanda's identity, as explicated by Julie Barak
among others, ensures that the reader understand the personal cost of collective pain;' simultaneously, Alvarez's inclusion of the stories of typically
marginalized characters challenges the tradition of the West's "ambition of
imposing a 'single' historical time" on others (Glissant 1989,92). "One of the
most disturbing consequences of colonialism," Glissant explains, "could well
be this notion of a single History, and therefore of power" which has been
imposed on others (93). But what Alvarez does is to use the internal emotional turmoil of the Garcia girls, and Yolanda in particular, as the fulcrum of
decentralizing ripples of histories, voices and silences belonging not just to
the privileged few. Private costs reveal public and political costs born by both
the powerful and the powerless, so that the relationship between them
becomes as clear as it is in Frederick Douglass's portrait of Mrs. Auld, who
suffers morally for embracing the role ofa slave mistress just as Douglass suffers physically, emotionally and inteUectuaUy. Where, as Glissant notes, "In
The Tempest the legitimacy of Prospero is thus Hnked to his superiority, and
epitomizes the legitimacy of the West," Alvarez's portrait of the costs of privilege and powerlessness in Yolanda's psyche is only the beginning of her portrait of privilege (75). And it is that truth, the truth of the golden handcuffs,
that Alvarez most effectively illuminates through Yolanda's attempts and failures to identify with others and to find wholeness within herself After all,
Alvarez's imperative to understand histories rather than History in all its
hegemony is itself yet another painful legacy of colonialism. As gaps and
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College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
silences have memoriahzed what is forever lost, Yolanda's mangled identity,
like the mangled Human Body doll, reveals the intimate human cost ofa history of violation while the additional voices of servants like Gladys and
Chucha hnk Yolanda's suffering to that of the less privileged.
While Alvarez might find living in the hyphen provocative artistically, it
is not a space of contentment for Yolanda, whose experiences most vividly
illustrate the theme of alienation. As discussed above, when her alter-ego
returns to the Dominican Republic in the first chapter, her failure to thrive
in the hyphen is clear:Yolanda can barely communicate with her own family in her "halting Spanish," yet she has felt just as alone in the States (Alvarez
1991, 7). Heading out on her journey for guavas, she passes the aforementioned billboard advertising Palmolive soap. On the billboard, "a creamy,
blond woman luxuriates under a refreshing shower, her head thrown back in
seeming ecstasy, her mouth opened in a wordless cry" (14-15). As Castells has
noted, "the blond hair and the pale skin of the Palmolive woman are potent
reminders ofYolanda's incomplete assimilation into her adopted country," yet
her failure to identify with the young boy, Jose, bespeaks an equal sense of
alienation from her homeland (2001, 40). Indeed, the "wordless cry" of the
woman on the billboard forecasts Yolanda's repeated inability to communicate and to connect with those around her, including Jose's guardian.
Highlighting Yolanda's distance from her fellow Dominicans, the unnamed
woman who accompanies Jose fears that "the dofia will get hot, her nice
clothes will get all dirty" and hopes she will let the boy fetch the fruit for her
(Alvarez 1991,16). After the car suffers a flat tire and Jose returns to his home
for help,Yolanda's alienation from her homeland is compounded when two
men approach. Her fear paralyzes her, she perceives the men as "dangerous,"
and her only escape is into Enghsh and the role of the helpless American
(20). But this role does not fit either, and when she tries to tip the two men
for fixing her tire, "the Enghsh words are hoUow on her tongue" (21).
Furthering her distance from both cultures, she finds upon her return that
Jose has been 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 her homeland, a distance rooted in her
privilege. As Barak has noted, "Alvarez's title is ironic" because although the
sisters never lose their accents, neither do they return seamlessly to their
homeland (1998, 176). In fact, what Yolanda fmds is that she "can never
recover [her] cultural origins through a return, real or symbolic" (Christian
1997, 112). While the privilege of the Garcia family has enabled both its
pohtical flight to safety and Yolanda's return, it has disabled her ability to
reconnect to the island and its people.
Jennifer Bess 95
In The Tempest, Gonzalo's Golden Age speech is undermined by
Prospero's despotism, but in Alvarez's novel, the mythic return to Eden is
undermined by the nature ofYolanda's failure to identify with anyone living
there and by her own adoption of the western myth of her homeland as a
paradise.^ She has been so infected by western History that she borrows the
ideals of the conquerors to describe the richness and the "plenty" of the
island at the same time that her vision is also tainted by the fact that "the
rustling leaves of the guava trees echo the warnings of the old aunts: you wiU
get lost, you will get kidnapped, you will get raped, you will get killed"
(Alvarez 1991, 13, 17). As William Luis explains, the guava grove represents
Yolanda's desire to experience a "mythical past associated with her childhood" or a universal age of innocence; however, the guavas finally act like
Eve's apple, forcing Yolanda's expulsion (2000,843). Until her car suffers a flat
tire, signaling her failure to reintegrate naturally,Yolanda does see her homeland romantically, through western eyes.
AH 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 loss prevails in the
repetition of the word "missing" and through the suggestion that she does
not know herself and does not understand her own needs. Moreover, the singular "life" shared by the family she imagines contrasts with the distance that
has developed in her own family. The wealthy and the powerful, the oppressors of yesterday, or in this case their descendants, have indeed become the
victims of today. Thus, Yolanda mourns her loss of identity at the same time
that Alvarez forecasts broader themes by highlighting her alter-ego's distance
from the less privileged through her fear, her inability to communicate and
even her brand of western romanticism.
While the family tree at the novel's opening and Yolanda's failure with
Jose and the two good Samaritans provide overt signs of her privilege and its
costs to her personally, moving backward in time connects this personal sense
of ahenation to national and pohtical costs which are further highlighted by
the novel's heteroglossia. Yolanda's privilege brands her as an ahen, yet she
knows she does not belong in America eitber, thus confirming her identification with Eve, the outcast, and the cost of her inheritance from the West
despite the socio-economic privileges that the blood of the Conquistadores
has bequeathed to her. As Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko has
noted, Europeans are an "orphan people," and Yolanda, by extension, finds
herself orphaned as well (1991, 258).Though the Garcias eventually become
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College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
political targets and suffer tragic losses of their own, Alvarez begins the novel
with Yolanda's inheritance of alienation to provide a lens through which to
see and evaluate the suffering of the past. The suffering of the present is rooted in the past, and even though many roles have changed, what remains constant is that people fail to communicate, to empathize or to coexist peacefully with each other. As the novel s inclusiveness of the less privileged will
reveal, Yolanda's expulsion is, in part, an inheritance of the sins of her fathers.
Here, the original sin is conquest, and since Yolanda is born of the privilege
of her heritage, she also bears the cost of its brutality. But as Alvarez foreshadows by beginning the novel with the family tree,Yolanda's suffering also illuminates both the association with and the distance between those who have
suffered from their privilege and those who have suffered for a lack thereof.
Gladys, the Garcias's pantry maid, sleeps with the other maids in a small
dark room on a cot. In what Carla describes as a "high sweet voice," Gladys
sings popular tunes, Christmas music and New York merengue that reveal her
own dreams of an escape to the States, an escape which in her mind would
enable her to transcend "the exploitive world of the Dominican caste system" (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 of these gifts is a mechanical bank which is made in the likeness of
the Virgin Mary, who begins her ascent to heaven with each coin Carla
inserts. When Carla no longer finds the bank amusing, having received many
new toys after it, she gives it to Gladys but does not tell her parents for fear
of seeming ungrateful. Carlos's reaction upon finding the bank in the maids'
room is to fire Gladys even after Carla has admitted giving it to her. Soothing
his daughter's guilt, he says,"'We're just going to have to get better presents,'"
emphasizing her privilege and ignoring Gladys's helplessness (Alvarez 1991,
273)."'We can't trust her,'" he announces bluntly, and Gladys is suddenly jobless, foreshadowing Carlos's own predicament when he can no longer practice medicine after moving to the U.S. (273). The bank, returned to Carla,
gets stuck with the Virgin "halfway up, halfway down," as useless now as is
the mangled Body Human doll in the earlier chapter (274). Moreover,
because of the structure of the novel, Gladys's fate remains unknown, incommunicable. Here, the power Prospero enjoys because of his magic resonates
in the magical qualities of the expensive bank while the legitimacy of power
is overtly mocked in the lack of sacredness of the mechanized Ascension, illuminating that Carlos's power is just as illegitimate as the bank's mystery, as
Prospero's tyranny, as Trujillo's regime or as the conquest of the Caribbean.
What the reader never knows—Gladys's history—^bears witness to the fact
that the Garcias themselves have participated in a history of oppression. As in
the omission ofYolanda's lost speech and Laura's incomplete inventions.
Jennifer Bess 97
Alvarez again mourns the waste of human creativity, this time, embodied in
Gladys's singing.
Even more overtly historical is the fate of Chucha, the Haitian maid who
serves the family for thirty-two years.The legacy of w^ealth obtained by a history of barbarity and enslavement comes to the foreground in the chapter
named, appropriately, "The Blood of the Conquistadores," where the fate of
Chucha and that of the Garcias tell of national tragedies. Here, Fifi recouiits
when Chucha "had just appeared on my grandfather's doorstep one night,
begging to be taken in" when TrujiUo's army was ordered to execute Haitians
in the Dominican Repubhc (Alvarez 1991, 218). Thus, the danger that the
Garcias attempt to escape in exile ties them to the layers of Caribbean histories. "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 his agents" (Tenenbaum 1996, 5.273).^
Later, for his part in the underground movement against the dictator, Julia
Alvarez's own grandfather was incarcerated, while each night, black
Volkswagens of the SIM sat in her driveway to survey her father's activities
(Alvarez 1998, 6; Alvarez 1987, 79). Though friends and relatives lost their
lives, Alvarez explains that "what kept my father from being rounded up
with others each time there was a purge—for people disappeared for less of
an offence than acquaintance with troublemakers—was his connection w^ith
my mother's powerful family" (1987, 80). In the novel, the Garcias are
equally indebted to Tio Vic for saving their lives, but their physical safety
once in New York does not put an end to the nightmares of the missing
people or restore the untold stories of women like Chucha.
Chucha's role is complex, as her ethnicity, her status, her powerlessness
and her potency reveal as much about Dominican history as they do about
the Garcias. Within the tradition of Dominican literature, Alvarez's characterization of Chucha as a "Haitian blue-black" runs the risk of appearing
"tragically pathetic" (1991,223;Williams 2000,135). As David Mitchell confirms, despite the potency of the character, Chucha takes on the role of a
stereotypicaUy helpless servant when she "is left to mourn her kind keepers
and worry over their turbulent departure from home" (1998, 35). She foresees the guardias violating the Garcia home by "smashing windows and carting off the silver" (Alvarez 1991, 223). Once again, as after the massacre, she
wiU be the one left to suffer true powerlessness while the wealthy and
lighter-skinned Garcias escape to safety. In the home where she has spent
most of her life, she foretells that in the future "only silence remains, deep
empty silence" as her only companion (222). StiU, despite the fact that the
future she foresees for herself "articulates the now largely cliched role of the
loyal domestic slave" and despite the fact that her own fate counts among the
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College Literature 34.1 (Winter 2007]
personal losses of the novel, Chucha does enjoy the magic powers of
Prospero (Mitchell 1998,35). Indeed, her first-person narrative and use of the
future tense crystallize the novel's theme of alienation as she warns the family about living in the U.S. among people "too pale to be the living" (Alvarez
1991,221).Though the girls do find some physical safety and the freedom to
return to their homeland for visits, Chucha's predictions bear much truth for
the family psychologically, thus empowering her by foregrounding her gifts.
Accordingly, despite her family's privilege, when confronted with exile, Laura
"sees ... as if through the lens of loss" (212). Uncertainty prevails once again
through the same "as if" that the narrator uses to conclude the first two sections. Laura "thinks of her ancestors, those fair-skinned Conquistadores
arriving in the new world . . . . Look at what they started," she thinks to herself—what they started Fifi will call a competition for "the most haunted
past" (212; 217). Moreover, Chucha asserts control over her own future
through her visionary powers. As EUen McCracken has explained, Chucha
"has foreseen this moment when the entire house would become like a coffin and has taken control of her own exile by burying herself each night in
the real coffin she has chosen for herself" (1991,110). She attempts to overcome the burdens of her own past by choosing the nature of her tomb.
Of course, her potency is nourished further by the fact that, due to the
novel's chronology, the readers already know that the Garcias do indeed live
"a bewitched and unsafe life" in New York, where psychological dangers will
replace physical dangers (Alvarez 1991, 223). Furthermore, Chucha's use of
the future tense to describe what the reader already knows creates an eerie,
timeless quality that universahzes their suffering, linking it overtly with her
own. She continues, "I feel their losses pile like dirt thrown on a box after it
has been lowered into the earth. I see their future, the troublesome hfe ahead.
They will be haunted by what they do and don't remember" (223). Indeed,
the whole novel is haunted by Fifi'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 and
enslaved by the Conquistadores whose descendants now live in exile. Like
the cycle of loss, the dialectic of privilege and oppression offers up a potion
in which pain is the main ingredient and which only the power of invention—as Fanon has invoked—mitigates the future that Chucha sees for herself and the Garcias.
In the final chapter, Alvarez solidifies the relationship between privilege
and a history of shared pain through a childhood story fi'om Yolanda's haunted past. When a strange hunter warns her not to take a kitten from its mother, he explains that "'to take it away would be a violation of its natural right
to live . . . . It would die'" (1991, 285). But Yolanda feels uncertain of his
Jennifer Bess 99
advice as she knows he is preparing to hunt birds, perhaps mother birds, and
when she hears himfire,she knows his hypocrisy without knowing its name.
When she then decides to take the kitten home, in her childish yet (from the
perspective of the kitten) omnipotent way, she perpetuates her father's tyranny over her and her sisters, TrujiUo's crimes against her family, and the violence that her ancestors perpetrated on the natives.Yolanda forcibly removes
the kitten from her mother, possibly fulfiUing the hunter's warning, and
denies the kitten the only source of safety and sustenance she has known.
Later, plagued by guilt, she pounds her toy drum to drown out the kitten's
mews. Here, the "BOOM BOOM" of the drum serves much like the sileilces
and gaps of the previous chapters and the babble to which Yolanda is reduced
as an adult: it reveals the unutterable emotions of loss and suffering that unite
Yolanda, her family, Chucha and all the victims of colonial history (287). At
night, Yolanda is terrorized by nightmares of the mother cat seeking its lost
offspring, recalling her father's nightmares of the SIM's effort to find him and
his compatriots. She suffers the same fear that causes her father to tear up her
Teacher's Day speech and responds the same way: by denying voice. She joins
her ancestors and her father in the legacy of oppression: as she will blame
him for his tyrannous behavior, now she blames herself for an act which also
involves the silencing of her victim. Just as Carlos becomes like TrujiUo, she
becomes like her father, and the reverse chronology where her father's tyranny over her precedes hers over the kitten creates the illusion of a causal relationship where there is no linear causality, but instead, an inescapable cycle.
The blood of the Conquistadores runs thick as the mother cat reappears
nightly in Yolanda's childhood dreams to remind her of her own compHcity
in a history of violation.
After moving to the U.S.,Yolanda explains that the "cat disappeared altogether" from her dreams for many years, but the last paragraph of the novel
condenses decades into a few sentences so that space and time implode
(Alvarez 1991,289). Accordingly, in the novel's final line, the cat returns,"her
magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center
of [Yolanda's] art" (290). As Luis has noted, the nightmares reveal the trauma
Yolanda has experienced due to her forced exile (2000, 847); however, they
also reveal her understanding that her history is part of many histories, part
of many stories of loss so overwhelming that only the visceral wailing of an
animal can convey their truth, a truth complicated by the fact that Yolanda
identifies both with the kitten—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 the Palmolive woman and Jose's female guardian, her multifaceted yet incomplete identification with victims and oppressors alike reafiirms
her lack of a singular identity and reifies what Glissant calls the "subterranean
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convergence of our histories" (1989, 66). In other words, she, like many fellow Caribbeans, identifies superficially with too many victims and too many
oppressors, so that the centrifugal forces ultimately leave her with no identity of her own. The Conquistadores, Trujillo, Carlos and Yolanda all have
played the role of the oppressor, and they have all also been, in some sense,
victims of the poison that violence spreads to all who suffer it and to all who
perpetrate it. As her description of her attempts at intimacy will reveal, the
blank spaces left by the desecration of the past have born an individual shattered into too many pieces to re-member.
Like her false posturing after the end of her relationship with Rudy
Elmenhurst, the pieces in which Yolanda finds herself after her marriage testify to the centrifugal forces tearing her apart and to the self-proclaimed
wound or emptiness remaining at her center of her art. Yolanda/Yo/
Yoyo/Joe finds herself at the edge of sanity, unable to find intimacy because
she does not know herself.When she can no longer understand her husband's
words, when his words sound like nonsense and all she can do to respond is
repeat the same "'babble babble babble,"'Yolanda reveals the same unspeakable loss that she does in the final chapter (Alvarez 1991, 78). Unlike
Whitman, Yolanda does not know the words to the song of herself because
those words 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-sour can only convey its feelings
through babble, which is much akin to silence (78). Only her vision of a
black bird swooping down to attack her therapist, another victimization,
releases some language from her: "The words tumble out, making a sound
like the rumble of distant thunder ... .'Doc, rock, smock'" (85). Her utterances
are still nonsensical. As Joan Hoffinan explains, her babble optimistically illustrates the fact that "there is stiU much to say"; however, Yolanda forever
remains "a troubled soul haunted by the island of her birth; she is neither able
to return to its bosom nor to completely escape its clutches" (1998, pars. 25;
27). Her babble, the cat's wail and the Palmolive woman's cry all echo with
the same sense of anguish that is the origin of the gaps and silences in the
text. In imagery as in structure, Alvarez honors both Fanon and Glissant by
reinventing the history of her homeland without sacrificing the truth of the
losses its denizens have suffered collectively.
Like the empty bowls and the partnerless dancers in the Arpillera of
Chile's seamstresses, the novel's missing words and missing stories generate its
theme, but the theme is not one of loss alone; it is also one in which Miranda
faces the costs of her family's privilege. In other words, Alvarez uses absences
and unspeakableness to expose the complexity of her characters'inheritance,
an inheritance shared by all who have been shaped by the legacies of west-
Jennifer Bess lOi
ern expansion. In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko explains through
a storyteller that the theory of the Big Bang was "consistent with everything
else that he had seen: from their fiimsy attachments to one another and their
children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born," westerners and those who have inherited their culture all share the same fate of
alienation as do Adam and Eve, "wandering aimlessly because the insane God
who had sired them had abandoned" and expelled them (1991, 258). For
Silko, then, the Garcia family tree does not reach far back enough: the $uffering born by Chucha, Carlos,Yolanda and so many others reaches beyond
the history of the Conquistadores back into the book of Genesis, back to the
Creation and the Fall, which Yolanda re-experiences herself in the guava
grove at the novel's beginning. As Silko continues, "the Europeans had not
been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full
mihtary guard. They," like their heirs in Carlos and Yolanda, "suffered fi-om
nightmares 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 the girls suffer after their exile
(Alvarez 1991, 215). Their past, haunted by the "river of bodies" left by the
Haitian massacre and by the massacre of the natives hundreds of years
before, will forever keep the Garcias orphaned spiritually (218). Through
Yolanda, Alvarez has conveyed sensitivity to the fact that her history is one
of many, that her powerlessness and her privilege, her voicelessness and her
voice, contain a truth that has the potential to transform silence and alienation into revolution and a new subjectivity. As Chucha concludes, the
Garcias will "invent what they need to survive" (223). A second genesis,
born of awareness and empathy and responsibility, may be in the making if
silence can be seen as a means of fulfilling Fanon's call to invent one's ovvn
existence. Through her silences, Alvarez implodes the Miranda Complex,
undermining western History's linear nature in order to reveal through
Yolanda's suffering and through her guilt, both the private and the universal costs of Prospero's tyranny.^^
Notes
^ Strachey, explains Greenblatt, "tells the story of a state of emergency and a crisis of authority" (1988, 149). In Strachey's report and in The Tempest,"the deepest
fears lie not with the human or natural resources of the New World but with the
discipline of the English colonists and common seamen. And the principal questions—whether obedience is willing or forced, whether religious observance is sincere or feigned—suggest an interest in inner states" and moral standards (150).
Strachey, for instance, fears that the "riot and sloth" that plague the English countryside may doom the colonists to starvation (1964, 66).
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College Literature 34.1 [Winter 20071
^ See Bakhtin: "language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past,
between differing epochs of the past" (1981, 291).
-^ Dictator from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, Trujillo earned his early
military training through the U.S. marines, rose quickly 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 into exile" (Tenenbaum 1996, 5.273). A
number of Alvarez's relatives numbered among the lost, but her nuclear family
enjoyed enough privilege to escape safely into exile in the United States, thus providing the foundation of the novel.
^ The Chilean Arpillera, hand-sewn illustrations of the country's sufferings during General Augusto Pinochet's regime (1973-89), "represent a constant dialogue
with the missing: the relationship of the women with their creations has become a
thread that connects the dead with the living" (Agosin 1996, 15). Aside from easily
recognizable symbols of loss, empty bowls of the hungry, women dancing la cueca sola
and allusions to mass graves hidden in the desert exemplify the use of absence to
convey a powerful political point and the depth of the women's suffering.
^ "'I am a Dominican, hyphen, American,' [Alvarez] once said. 'As a fiction
writer, I find that the most exciting things happen in the realm of the hyphen—the
place where two worlds collide or blend together" (Stavans 1994, 552). Elsewhere,
she reiterates that her "stories come out of being in worlds that sometimes clash and
sometimes combine" (Rosario-Sievert 1997, 33). While Alvarez shares the fertility of
living in the hyphen in her interviews, clearly the liminal position Yolanda experiences is at least as alienating as it is exciting.
^ "Long after we had left," recalls Alvarez in her collection of essays. Something
to Declare, "my parents were still living in the dictatorship inside their own heads.
Even on American soil, they were afraid of awful consequences if they spoke out"
(1998, 108). Their fears were not illegitimate, for in New York City, "a Columbia
University graduate student named Qesus de] Galindez was kidnapped and murdered
after refusing to sell his thesis—an expose of 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 his disappearance have never revealed themselves, "Galindez was almost certainly kidnapped
in New York, taken to the Dominican Republic, and murdered, all on order of
TrujHlo" (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
had been shielded from the terrors of TrujiUo's reign, the losses were personal, not
public, and at the same time, the new opportunities in the U.S. tempting.
"Overnight," recalls Alvarez, "we lost everything: a homeland, an extended family, a
culture, and yes, as I've already said, the language I felt at home in" (1998, 139). And
Jennifer Bess 1O3
yet, sooner than she would have expected, writing in English "bridged these two
worlds," providing her with a means of turning exile into a liberation of voice (139).
7 Barak (1998), Luis (2000), Hoffman (1998), MitcheU (1999) and Castells
(2001) all illuminate the fractured identities of the Garcia girls within the context of
their lives in the hyphen. Of course, critics have concluded that "to speak of a 'self
in our postmodern world is no longer fashionable, since we exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction," but for a minority author, the sense of
deconstruction becomes one more assault in a long history of assaults on personal
and collective identity (Durante 2001, 6). See also the studies by Ellen McCracken
(1999) and Karen Christian (1997).
^ The idealist among the newly shipwrecked, Gonzalo imagines the island as a
paradise where the land will provide as it did before the Fall. Such descriptions,
recalling Eden or Virgil's pastorals, are commonplace in early travel narratives from
Christopher Columbus's conviction that "the earthly Paradise truly lies here" (1969,
224) to Walter Raleigh's celebration of deer that "came down feeding by the water's
side as if they had been used to a keeper's call" (1984, 98). For detailed analyses, see
Campbell (1988) and Kolodny (1975).
^ Estimates of the death toU range from 5,000 to 25,000 (Crassweller 1966,156).
On the reaction in the U.S., see Roorda (1996, 301-19).
^^ A shorter version of this paper entitled "Loud Silences and Original Endings:
Narrative Design in Julia Alvarez's How the Garda Girls Lost Their Accents" was presented by the author at the 31st convention of the Northeast Modern Language
Association, Buffalo, New York, April 2000.
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