Monday, August 22, 2011
Garcia Girls question
The Garcia girls travel to America with their family, fleeing the Trujillo regime. Despite the fact that their flight is as a family, their journeys create significantly different effects in each sister. Choose one sister whose changes most strike you and explain why her changes are most striking.
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Yolanda loses her sense of self, and her identity as a Dominican woman. Her self is so bastardized by love, which is found in an American man, that she becomes allergic to her Spanish name. As a child Yoyo is profoundly aware of the power of sounds, using them to affect her and her family. When gifted a drum she sculpts both aggravation and laughter from her mothers: “…I brought down an apocalyptic, apoplectic, joy-to-the-great-world drum roll that made Mamita throw her head back, and laugh out loud, girlish like, my mother plugged a finger in each ear, like hands at the dyke, a great flood of scolding about to come out of her mouth…” The immense, poetic description of yoyo’s drumroll defines the poet in her character. At this young age Yoyo is able to construct complex emotion from sound. The reactions she evokes are equally polarized, reflective of yoyo’s character. Sound and poetry in Yolanda’s life also take on this contrasting nature. After coveting and taking a kitten from its mother’s brood Yolanda fears losing an eye as a maid has, in the mother cat reclaim her baby. Therefore she covers up the baby creature’s meows with the sound of her drum. She uses sounds to avoid losing sight. Alvarez carries this behavior into the rest of Yoyo’s life. Sound motivates Yoyo in a way that no other thing can. Yoyo justifies taking this kitten for the adults in her life are hypocrites, and she takes the kitten from its mother in an act of rebellion. A definition of hypocrisy might be saying one thing and doing another, or saying “white” and acting “black”: conflicting and double meanings abound. This very essence of hypocrisy creeps into her as she loses her self. She is confronted with the fracturing of her completeness. She fantasizes that her doctor might save her self : “ He would save her body-slash-mind-slash-soul by taking all the slashes out, making her one whole Yolanda.” Yolanda has lost her identity and her humanity. She is so twisted by America that she has lost her name, it instead becomes Joe. Her Spanish identity has lapsed to where she is allergic to her Spanish name. However, she is also reactive to English. Despite her slashes and crises she is still some amalgamation of American and Dominican. The word love in both English and Spanish aggravates her skin. Words instill and break Yo’s, or Joe’s, humanity. Yolanda’s madness is so very incredible and odd; it is an expansion of the cracks in her “art” that sprung up as a child. Simply because drums are played in another country does not mean that it is not the sounds of America that break a woman. Without America Yo would not have been warped by American words. Yo’s changes are not as distanced from humanity as Sandra’s are, however hers are painfully human. She breaks apart as a person, while Sandra leaves her humanity. Yolanda’s character and mental facility is more striking because it is often painted in black and white. What makes it incredible, or at least unique, is that in this black and white madness she is still pagued by gray: the space between her cultures. She views her words as both black and white. They have the capacity to hurt and to heal.
ReplyDeleteSofia’s changes are the most striking in the book. With each location switch, Sofia alters her attitudes.
ReplyDeleteAs the youngest, she starts as the most innocent and naïve. This is demonstrated when she goes to the coal shed with Yoyo and her male cousin. After hearing Yoyo bargain for clay by agreeing to show “that she is a girl”, Sofia drops her clothes to her hips, thinking it is her “belly button in question”. (P.234) In contrast, her older sister has learned from the nuns and her aunts to be protective of her body. Sofia is too young to be suspicious.
Because she is the baby of the family, she has the least connections to her Dominican roots when the family escapes to America. In fact, she has little memory of the day her family left home. “I’m the one who doesn’t remember anything from that last day on the island because I am the youngest and so the other three are always telling me what happened that last day.” (P.217) Her only true memory is of Chucha, the Haitian cook who practices voodoo, in sharp contrast to her family’s Catholic heritage. With the weakest attachment to her birthplace, she is the sister who is the most open to changes in America.
Sofia becomes experimental while attending boarding school; she both fools around with guys and smokes Marijuana. This is a turning point in Sofia’s life, she transforms from a typical Dominican girl to a stereotypically defiant American teenager. When she is forced to stay in the Dominican Republic because of her behavior, she changes again. When the family originally left for America, Sofia was the least Dominican; after returning to the Dominican for six months she is the most Dominican of the four sisters. She begins a relationship with a typical Dominican man while trying to follow the Dominican customs for the relationship. Her sisters refer to this as her trying to be “all island”. When her sisters cause Sofia to be returned to the States and separated from her boyfriend, she calls them “traitors”. Sofia is no longer sweet and naïve, instead she is independent and angry at her sisters’ interference, the most distant sister in the family.
The ultimate change for Sofia is defying her father by marrying Otto. Her transformation is again connected to location as she meets her German husband in Columbia, and goes to Germany to marry him. She becomes a wife and mother, unlike the other sisters. Sofia changes from the baby in the family into the first to begin the next generation.