In silence and in absence, Alvarez offers up a revolution of truth–telling. In ‘‘I Came to Help,’’ she confesses that ‘‘the way we really change things is often through very simple action, small and quiet enough not to draw too much attention.’’ 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 symbolizing ‘‘those positions of privilege that often trap us women into denying our bodies, our desires, our selves.’’ 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. Since all 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 with 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 affiliation 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 free to take in ‘‘the wonders of this new country.’’ 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 life more comfortable and leisurely. In other words, her inventions are her means of understanding her new world. They signal, like her ‘‘mishmash of mixed-up idioms and sayings that showed she was ‘green behind the ears,’ as she called it,’’ her attempt to integrate herself, to define herself in the new country. 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.’’ 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: ‘‘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 situation’’ (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. When she sees it, she startles her husband from a troubled sleep that exposes the larger context of her failure: he wakes asking, ‘‘‘¿ Que´ pasa? What is wrong? There was terror in his voice, the same fear she’d heard in the Dominican Republic 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 [Trujillo’s secret police] had come for them at last.’’ 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 from 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. 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 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.’’ 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. Only in English, she feels, can one declare, ‘‘‘ I celebrate myself, ’’’ and just as boldly as Whitman, she begins writing ‘‘recklessly’’ and passionately until ‘‘she finally sounded like herself in English’’ (emphasis in original). In America, she concludes, ‘‘people could say what they thought.’’ 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.’’ Becoming ‘‘vengeful’’ and ‘‘mad, . . . he tore the speech into shreds,’’ revealing what he feels is his rightful authority in the family structure.
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!’.’’ 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 ‘‘polite commonplaces,’’ for which she is praised by her teachers. With pieces of it coming from one of her father’s speeches rather than from Walt Whitman, the ‘‘barbaric yawp’’ 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 of Yolanda’s speeches, perhaps even more glaring than the loss of Laura’s inventions because it is a verbal one, signifies an utter violation of Yolanda’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 of a 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.
Source:
Jennifer Bess, Sara Constantakis – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 31, Published by Gale Group, 2010