Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Changing Seasons—Summer to Fall: The Struggle I Undergo Each Year
I am sitting in the grass and pine straw in the sun beneath a pine tree in the disc-golf field between the BAC and the US-45 Bypass, between the Lifeway Christian Stores building and the woods near the soccer fields. It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon, four o’clock to be precise. Blue sky (Carolina blue to be exact, even though if Dad were here he’d ridiculously argue that it’s Duke blue) without a cloud to be seen. I can just see one clock face of the belltower, and the jutting lightning rod shooting into the sky like the pointed tip of a bayonet. The grass is still green, although on my walk over here I tread upon several blades that were beginning to turn brown. An American flag in vivid color is fluttering its red and white stripes in the winds, its blue square full of starts partially wrapped around its pole by the chapel. I can just see the night-spotlights of the baseball field above the treetops. Although the sun is still quite warm on my skin, Fall is in the air—that crisp smell that hints of frost soon to come. When I walked by the fountain earlier today, I caught myself looking for the changing color of the leaves. Indeed, in ove of the red maples by the fountain circle I spotted one lone cherry-red leaf amidst the sea of green. I couldn’t help myself—I had to pause and take a picture with my phone. The air feels clean and the sun less harsh, yet I have mixed feelings about the return of the Fall. I dearly love the summer, and I hate to see it go, yet there is a sort of expectancy about the changing of the season that I relish. A hope of things to come. A nearing to a finish line. Of death so that there can be rebirth. I knew the summer must come to an end, but somehow I’m never prepared to let it go. I’m never quite ready to hide my skin under layers of fabric, to dread setting foot outdoors into the chill air, to switch the thermostat to heat from cool. I love the outdoors, the sun on my skin, I hate the cold and would much rather seat. To me, this changing of the seasons brings holiday celebrations of family and giving and love. Such a struggle I have with the passing of the summ
Una comparación de las escrituras de Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago y Isabel Allende: sus transiciones y motivaciones
La literatura de latinoamericanas que han mudado a los EE. UU. de su patria después de la juventud ha recibido mucha atención recientemente. Aunque tuvieron que luchar contra mucha oposición y la crisis de identidad, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago y Isabel Allende han escrita una abundancia de literatura influyente que muestra su viaje a quienes son hoy día.
En primer lugar, Julia Álvarez nació en 1950 en la República Dominicana donde vivía por su primer diez años hasta que sus padres fueron exiliados por razones políticas y se mudaron a Nueva York (Kevane 19). Más tarde ella fue a Middlebury College donde ganó su licenciatura en el inglés y después su maestría de la Universidad de Syracuse en la escritura (Ibid). Después de su graduación, se hizo a ser una escritora bastante prolífica. Publicó su primera colección de la poesía Homecoming en 1984 y lo expansionó y republicó en 1996 (20). Una de sus obras más importantes How the García Girls Lost Their Accents fue publicada en 1991, y es el cuento de madurar de cuatros hermanas dominicanas que trasladan a los EE.UU. (19-20). Trés años después, en 1994, ella escribió su obra más famosa ´´In the Time of the Butterflies´´ sobre las experiencias de algunas hermanas debajo de la dictadura de Trujillo en la República Dominicana (20). Escribió otras obras incluyendo El Otro Lado (1995), ¡Yo! (1997) y Something to Declare (1998) que todos describieron la transición entre dos países y culturas (Ibid).
Segunda, en 1948 Esmeralda Santiago fue nacida la mayor de once hermanos en Santurce, Puerto Rico (Gac-Artigas 245). Cuando tenía trece años en 1961 ella mudó con su madre y siete de sus hermanos menores a Brooklyn, Nueva York, los Estados Unidos, donde su abuela materna ya residía. Aunque movieron por un cambio de situación económica y para escaparse de la padre de los niños, encontraron que la vida en Brooklyn para los inmigrantes no era tan diferente que su vida en Puerto Rico. Sin embargo, Esmeralda Santiago subió éstas dificultades y asistió en el Performing Arts High School en Manhattan. La Universidad de Harvard-Radcliffe le aceptó y ella graduó en 1976 y fue a Sarah Lawrence College para ganar su diploma de maestría. No se hizo una escritora inmediatamente pero, cuarenta años después, en 1994, publicó su primera obra Cuando era puertorriqueña en inglés, y después la tradujo al español (Guzmán 146). Éste es un libro basado en hechos reales que describe su niñez en Puerto Rico hasta su traslado a los EE.UU. Publicó la secuela Casi una mujer en 1999, pero durante el intervalo entre éstos libros ella se publicó El sueño de América en 1996. Entre sus libros recurren algunos temas como
la búsqueda de la identidad personal, la búsqueda de la identidad cultural, la búsqueda de la identificación y la traslación de los sueños a través de los personas en una familia resultado en una situación socio-económico-cultural, en una familia víctima de las corrientes que azotan Puerto Rico, resumen de la cotidianidad de miles de puertorriqueños que abandonan la Isla tras el sueño de una vida mejor. (Gac-Artigas 245). Por eso, sus obras han recibido un buen compenetración entre sus lectores que buscan por el entendimiento de los inmigrantes o por sus propias identidades afuera de sus patrias.
Tercera, Isabel Allende nació en Lima, Perú en el 2 augusto 1942 a Tomás Allende y Francisca Llona Barros (Cox 1). Su padre era ´´uno de los secretarios de la embajada´´de Chile (Allende 47). Aunque sus padres le habían dicho a la madre de Isabel Allende que no debiera casarse con él, se casaron. Cuatro años después se les divorciaron por causa de su matrimonio desastroso aunque tenía tres hijos juntos (Cox 1). Por eso, después del divorcio, Isabel Allende creció en la casa de sus abuelos maternos y nunca más conoció a su padre. A pesar de esto, ella tenía contacto con el primo de su padre, Salvador Allende (Allende 176). Según ella, él ´´fue la única persona de la familia de Allende que permaneció en contacto con [su] madre después que [su] padre se fuera`` (Ibid). Salvador Allende actuaba un papel importante en la vida de Isabel porque él asistió en su primera boda como un testigo y el representativo de la familia de su padre, pero, también, fue su padrino (Cox 2). Porque su abuelo maternal no creía en la educación continuada de la mujer, después de que se graduó del colegio, Isabel Allende empezó a trabajar como secretaria por el Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) a las diecisiete años de edad. También tradujo las novelas de romance al español y narró por una programa de televisión por el FAO para ganar dinero extra (3). Se casó con Miguel Frías en 1962, y ellos recibieron una subvención para visitar la Europa y estudiar en Bélgica el ano siguiente, Juntos tenían dos hijos durante su visita en Europa— Paula y Nicolás s(3-4).
En 1966 volvieron a Chile donde Allende escribió una columna por una revista feminista Paula, y también escribió dramas y por la televisión y unas revistas para niños (Cox 4). En 1972 ella se le conoció a su héroe Pablo Neruda quién le dijo que debe ser una novelista porque escribió hechos inexactos como periodista. En 1970 su padrino ganó la presidencia como el primer presidente marxista en el Oeste, pero el 11 septiembre 1973 Agosto Pinochet condujo un golpe de estado en lo que murió Salvador Allende y que tiró el país en confusión. Dos días después del golpe de estado, Allende empezó a participar en actividades ilegales, las cuales proporcionaron suministros a los pobres y también ayudaron los refugiados políticos que esconderse y huirse del país (Ibid). Eventualmente, Allende y su familia tuvieron que huírseles de Chile en un exilio voluntario a Venezuela para salvar sus vidas. Durante su estancia de trece años, la familia se vino abajo y Allende y su esposa divorciaron después de su matrimonio de 25 años (5-6). Casi dos mesas más tarde en San Francisco, California durante un gira de libro, Allende se le conoció a su segundo esposo, el abogado William Gordon. Se casaron el 17 julio 1988 después de que ella se mudó a los EE.UU. para vivir. Ella se desarrolló en la que Pablo Neruda le dijo a ella años antes y se hizo una escritora tan prolífica. Durante su exilio Allende publicó tres libros: La casa de los espíritus (1982), De amor y sombra (1984), y Eva Luna (1987). Tenían gran éxito alrededor del mundo, y aun en Chile, aunque fueron censurados allí. Desde su traslación a los EE.UU. ha escrita muchas otras obras como El plan infinito (1991), Cuentos de Eva Luna (1992), Paula (1994), Hija de la fortuna (1999), Retrato en sepia (2000), Mi país inventado (2003) y La isla bajo del mar (2009) entre otros (Jehenson 100).
La transición de latinoamericanos a estadounidenses no es fácil de ninguna manera. Por muchos latinoamericanos es una lucha que pelearon para guardar sus identidades con sus patrias, pero al mismo tiempo que encontrarse sus propios lugares y identidades en los Estados Unidos. Al principio, el lenguaje produce tal vez el problema más difícil por los inmigrantes. ¿Cuál idioma deben usar? ¿Necesitan mantener la lengua de su patria o deben cambiar al uso de la lengua común del país en que viven actualmente? Según Bonnie Urciuoli en Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, & Class, ´´Hegemonically, Spanish itself is regarded as a barrier to class mobility because it displaces English. Accents, ´broken´ English, and ´mixing´ become signs of illiteracy and laziness, which people are morally obliged to control through education´´(26). El lenguaje directamente influye en la colocación en la clase y la raza.
Para los escritores, éstas preguntas suben en la importancia y la dificultad de contestar. Algunos deciden que escribir en su idioma materno, pero otros que usar el inglés. Por ejemplo, porque su educación fue fundamentalmente en el inglés, Esmeralda Santiago es más cómoda que escribir en inglés en vez de su lengua materna, el español. Según ella, ´´Mi idioma literario es el inglés, porque en ese idioma fue que desarrollé mi voz literaria``(Gac-Artigas 249). Aunque tradujo por si misma Cuando Era Puertorriqueña del inglés al español, ella no quiere traducir sus otras obras al inglés porque sabe que hay gente mejor calificadas para esto. También ella piensa que traducir es que re-escribir, y ella quiere desarollar nuevas ideas en vez de los ya realizadas (Ibid). En otros casos los escritores escriben en el español. Por ejemplo, Isabel Allende escribe en el español solo, y tiene traductores que traducen sus obras a otros idiomas. Según John S. Christie en Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the Borderlands, ´´In Latino fiction, Spanish is the language of emotion. English is reserved for the practical, the necessary… the blending of languages becomes both the source of imaginative, linguistic experiments and the most direct and obvious spectacle of Latino hybridity´´(72). A veces no se puede expresar a si mismo en un idioma sin usar algunas palabras del otro. Por ejemplo, en sus escritas Esmerald Santiago usa palabras españoles entre el inglés cuando no puede determinar una traducción apropiada (Kevane 135).
Otro problema que escritores encuentran es la idea de la escritura femenina versus la masculina. Éstos tipos de hablar reflejan la cultura de Latinoamérica, la cual es una sociedad machista ante toda. Según Myriam Yvonne Jehenson en Latin American Women Writers: Race, Class, & Gender,
In a society where the natural condition of the male is to be aggressive and that of the female to be self-sacrificing, Latin American women often see themselves primarily as nurturers. Despite extreme poverty, extreme child-bearing, and abusive treatment by men, women find their lives worthwhile because they are mothers. (7)
Por eso, para una mujer que escribir va contra la cultura latinoamericana. Cuando van a los Estados Unidos, esto cambia, y escritoras latinoamericanas tienen la oportunidad a dar voz a su género, pero ya tienen que luchar contra el machismo de su cultura que queda con ellas. Las mujeres que habían sido mencionadas encima ya hicieron realidad a esto por sus obras, y pelean activamente hoy contra los estereotipos en que aun sus madres cayeron. Por ejemplo, en sus obras, Julia Álvarez muestra la convención que madres esperan que sus hijas les emulen a pesar de que si la harían no tendrían control de sus recursos ni de sus maridos cuando ellos les engañan con otras mujeres (Henoa 14) Es un círculo vicioso. Lo que es más, la mayoría de escritoras latinoamericanas son mujeres que tienen el dinero por la educación, el viaje, y para experiencia en otras culturas que no son totalmente dominadas por los hombres (16).
Más que todas otras cosas que encuentran, escritoras latinas tienen una inmensa búsqueda de la identidad, no sola literaria como escritoras, pero, también, por si mismas en la nueva cultura. El lenguaje determina la identidad porque causa el lector que considerar las deficiencias en la lente cultural por la cual ven el mundo (Christie 72). Aunque éste puede ser cierto, muchas latinoamericanos encuentran que los estadounidenses no quieren cambiar sus lentes, y entonces los latinoamericanos tienen que cambiar sus lentes para tener un lugar en los Estados Unidos, pero también tienen que retener las lentes de las culturas de sus patrias. Mucha ficción latino habla del tema de ´´entre mundos.´´ Éste término refiere al marginalidad y prejuicio cultural que sufren los inmigrantes latinoamericanos, y también a la transición de sus sueños y expectaciones por la vida entre sociedades (105). En muchas de sus narrativas, Julia Álvarez usa sus personajes para buscar por el centro de la identidad entre los mundos de los Estados Unidos y el país natal. Ella explora los problemas de ´´identity confusion, ambivalence, and plurality created by gender, class, and national oppression´´ (Henoa 2). Muchos latinos preguntan a si mismos si son ya latinos de sus propias patrias o si son estadounidenses. La puertorriqueña Esmeralda Santiago dice que, cuando vivía en los Estados Unidos, d ella sentía como nunca había dejado de la Isla (Kevane 132). En contraste, Julia Álvarez dice que, después de la muerte de Trujillo (el dictador en la República Dominicana), ella y su familia se dieron cuenta de que fueron ´´Dominican Americans´´porque no fueron cambiado totalmente a ser estadounidenses del corriente dominante, pero no fueron dominicanos reales ninguna más. Fueron como híbridos (22).
Además de todos éstos problemas que encuentran, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, y Isabel Allende escriben por muchas diferentes razones y en muchas maneras únicas. Primer, sus estilos son diferentes. Julia Álvarez escribe la ficción en el inglés y en el español. La mayoría de sus obras son cuentos de madurar que representa la crisis de identidad que sufren los inmigrantes latinoamericanos. Al otro lado, Esmeralda Santiago escribe cosas basadas en hechos reales, pero en el inglés. Su primer obra y su séquela es el cuento autobiográfica que ´´provee una perspectiva fresca y natural de una niña que necesita aprender a ser parte de dos tierras y disfrutar de ser dos personas en una``(Gac-Artigas 251). Siguiente Isabel Allende implementa la ficción que lleva la influencia de la realidad pero también contiene elementos fantásticos. Aunque ella principalmente escribe la ficción, ella también ha escrita libros basados en hechos reales, como su libro Paula sobre la muerte de su hija. En su ficción Allende representa los sentimientos y las emociones comunes entre toda la humanidad en la historia del mundo, como la justicia, la búsqueda por la verdad, la pasión, el amor, el odio, y la violencia (Pinto 39). Una táctica que implementa Allende es que ella intenta que socavar la seriedad de sus temas. Distrae de la seriedad por el erotismo y el fatalismo(Jehenson 101-102).
Los propósitos por qué escriben discrepa entre cada autora. Según Julia Álvarez, ´´My mother and all the women in my family were great story-tellers, so I grew up in a folk culture where stories were very important´´(Kevane 20). Además de los cuentos, ella ha escrita mucha poesía en la cual Walt Whitman y Emily Dickinson tenían la influencia (22-23). Lo que es más, su familia fue exiliado a los Estados Unidos de la República Dominicana por razones políticos, no económicas, y ella querría describirlo. En el tiempo de las mariposas, por ejemplo, es un libro bastante político. En sus obras como ¡Yo! y How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Álvarez se le ocupó con las cuestiones de la identidad para los inmigrantes latinas.
Siguiente, Esmeralda Santiago empezó a escribir cuando se dio cuenta de que no había literatura que describe la situación de inmigrantes como ella. Fuera muchos libros sobre otros jóvenes pero no sobre los jóvenes latinoamericanos (y específicamente puertorriqueños) que han traslado a los Estados Unidos. Ella dice que
I think my task is to give voice to people who don´t have the skill, ability, time, or craziness that I have. My characters will always be those people who can`t speak for themselves. There was no one telling my story. I don´t want that to ever happen to any child or any woman. To see yourself as nonexistent is the worst kind of insult that a person can have. (Kevane 133).
Aunque su razón primario de escribir es que dar voz a los insólitos, también tenía influencias actuales en otros escritores. Cuando estaba en Puerto Rico durante su educación primaria, Luis Pales Mates y Luis Llorens Torres le influyeron. Desde su inmigración a los Estados Unidos y sus estudios allí, ella le había influenciada por los escritores latinoamericanos Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral y Rubén Darío. Como dice Lucía Stecher Guzmán sobre la autobiografía en su artículo Entre Peras y Guayabas: Construcciones Identitarias de Esmeralda Santiago,
Así como para las mujeres, también para los miembros de las llamadas minorías o sectores marginales, la escritura y lectura de autobiografías estimula una serie de procesos de conocimiento, reconocimiento, identificación, introspección, que fortalecen la conciencia de la propia valía, así como la confianza de poder asumir roles de agentes activos en sus historias y las de su entorno social.
Santiago no solo escribe por si misma, pero también por otros así como ella que necesitan recibir una voz por la experiencia identitaria que ella describe por el volver a contar de su propia vida.
Isabel Allende escribe por muchas de las mismas razones como las otras pero también con sus propios propósitos. Para ella, escribir es una manera de preservar la memoria, ni solo la historia pero también las leyendas, los mitos y las supersticiones de la gente. Ella ha preservada muchos de éstos por sus libros fantásticos (Cox 26). También, Allende dice que ´´I suppose that it is from feelings of loneliness that questions arise that lead one to write, and that books are concieved in the search for answers´´(12). Puede verlo en la construcción de su libro más famoso La casa de los espíritus porque empezó cuando ella escribió una carta a su abuelo moribundo que transformó en una novela de casi 500 páginas(Pinto 24-25). Tal vez la razón para escribir más importante para Allende es que ella da voz a su género por sus escrituras. En la América Latina, las mujeres no han tenido la voz, y fue una cosa subversiva que desvanecer el silencio (Cox 26-27). A pesar de esto, ella no quiere tener el valor literario por su género porque ella quiere igualar la situación de los marginados, ambos mujeres y hombres, para mejorar el mundo (Pinto 32, 39-40). Según Harold Bloom, sus personajes repiten cuentos para preservar la memoria por la repetición, la cual les otorgan poderes (95). Finalmente, Allende escribe por si misma. Dice que escribir ´´was a kind of therepy for me, a way of drawing out all the sadness that had built up inside, of trying to share the painful experience that I didn´t go through but so many other Chileans did´´(Pinto 29).
En conclusión, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, y Isabel Allende han encontrado muchos obstáculos en el sendero al éxito, pero han tenido éxito a pesar de todo. Han escrito un legado colectivo que representa la memoria de su gente por la posteridad. Aunque el trabajo que contestar todas las cuestiones y resolver todos los problemas no está terminado ya, éstas tres mujeres trabajaron mucho por el resuelto de problemas de inmigración y identidad.
Obras citadas
Allende, Isabel. Mi País Inventado: Un Paseo Nostálgico Por Chile. New York: Harper
Collins, 2003. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom´s Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2003. Print.
Christie, John S. Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the
Borderlands. New York: Garland Pub., 1998. Print.
Cox, Karen C. Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.
Print.
Gac-Artigas, Priscilla. Reflexiones: Ensayos Sobre Escritoras Hispanoamericanas
Contemporáneas. Vol. II. New Jersey: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2002. Print.
García, Pinto Magdalena. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin:
University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Guzmán, Lucía S. "Entre Peras Y Guayabas: Construcciones Identitarias De
Esmeralda Santiago." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, U.P.R. XXXIII.1 (2006): 139-53. Print.
Henao, Eda B. The Colonial Subject's Search for Nation, Culture, and Identity in the
Works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen, 2003. Print.
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender.
Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Print.
Kevane, Bridget A., and Juanita Heredia. Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with
Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2000. Print.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race,
and Class. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. Print.
En primer lugar, Julia Álvarez nació en 1950 en la República Dominicana donde vivía por su primer diez años hasta que sus padres fueron exiliados por razones políticas y se mudaron a Nueva York (Kevane 19). Más tarde ella fue a Middlebury College donde ganó su licenciatura en el inglés y después su maestría de la Universidad de Syracuse en la escritura (Ibid). Después de su graduación, se hizo a ser una escritora bastante prolífica. Publicó su primera colección de la poesía Homecoming en 1984 y lo expansionó y republicó en 1996 (20). Una de sus obras más importantes How the García Girls Lost Their Accents fue publicada en 1991, y es el cuento de madurar de cuatros hermanas dominicanas que trasladan a los EE.UU. (19-20). Trés años después, en 1994, ella escribió su obra más famosa ´´In the Time of the Butterflies´´ sobre las experiencias de algunas hermanas debajo de la dictadura de Trujillo en la República Dominicana (20). Escribió otras obras incluyendo El Otro Lado (1995), ¡Yo! (1997) y Something to Declare (1998) que todos describieron la transición entre dos países y culturas (Ibid).
Segunda, en 1948 Esmeralda Santiago fue nacida la mayor de once hermanos en Santurce, Puerto Rico (Gac-Artigas 245). Cuando tenía trece años en 1961 ella mudó con su madre y siete de sus hermanos menores a Brooklyn, Nueva York, los Estados Unidos, donde su abuela materna ya residía. Aunque movieron por un cambio de situación económica y para escaparse de la padre de los niños, encontraron que la vida en Brooklyn para los inmigrantes no era tan diferente que su vida en Puerto Rico. Sin embargo, Esmeralda Santiago subió éstas dificultades y asistió en el Performing Arts High School en Manhattan. La Universidad de Harvard-Radcliffe le aceptó y ella graduó en 1976 y fue a Sarah Lawrence College para ganar su diploma de maestría. No se hizo una escritora inmediatamente pero, cuarenta años después, en 1994, publicó su primera obra Cuando era puertorriqueña en inglés, y después la tradujo al español (Guzmán 146). Éste es un libro basado en hechos reales que describe su niñez en Puerto Rico hasta su traslado a los EE.UU. Publicó la secuela Casi una mujer en 1999, pero durante el intervalo entre éstos libros ella se publicó El sueño de América en 1996. Entre sus libros recurren algunos temas como
la búsqueda de la identidad personal, la búsqueda de la identidad cultural, la búsqueda de la identificación y la traslación de los sueños a través de los personas en una familia resultado en una situación socio-económico-cultural, en una familia víctima de las corrientes que azotan Puerto Rico, resumen de la cotidianidad de miles de puertorriqueños que abandonan la Isla tras el sueño de una vida mejor. (Gac-Artigas 245). Por eso, sus obras han recibido un buen compenetración entre sus lectores que buscan por el entendimiento de los inmigrantes o por sus propias identidades afuera de sus patrias.
Tercera, Isabel Allende nació en Lima, Perú en el 2 augusto 1942 a Tomás Allende y Francisca Llona Barros (Cox 1). Su padre era ´´uno de los secretarios de la embajada´´de Chile (Allende 47). Aunque sus padres le habían dicho a la madre de Isabel Allende que no debiera casarse con él, se casaron. Cuatro años después se les divorciaron por causa de su matrimonio desastroso aunque tenía tres hijos juntos (Cox 1). Por eso, después del divorcio, Isabel Allende creció en la casa de sus abuelos maternos y nunca más conoció a su padre. A pesar de esto, ella tenía contacto con el primo de su padre, Salvador Allende (Allende 176). Según ella, él ´´fue la única persona de la familia de Allende que permaneció en contacto con [su] madre después que [su] padre se fuera`` (Ibid). Salvador Allende actuaba un papel importante en la vida de Isabel porque él asistió en su primera boda como un testigo y el representativo de la familia de su padre, pero, también, fue su padrino (Cox 2). Porque su abuelo maternal no creía en la educación continuada de la mujer, después de que se graduó del colegio, Isabel Allende empezó a trabajar como secretaria por el Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) a las diecisiete años de edad. También tradujo las novelas de romance al español y narró por una programa de televisión por el FAO para ganar dinero extra (3). Se casó con Miguel Frías en 1962, y ellos recibieron una subvención para visitar la Europa y estudiar en Bélgica el ano siguiente, Juntos tenían dos hijos durante su visita en Europa— Paula y Nicolás s(3-4).
En 1966 volvieron a Chile donde Allende escribió una columna por una revista feminista Paula, y también escribió dramas y por la televisión y unas revistas para niños (Cox 4). En 1972 ella se le conoció a su héroe Pablo Neruda quién le dijo que debe ser una novelista porque escribió hechos inexactos como periodista. En 1970 su padrino ganó la presidencia como el primer presidente marxista en el Oeste, pero el 11 septiembre 1973 Agosto Pinochet condujo un golpe de estado en lo que murió Salvador Allende y que tiró el país en confusión. Dos días después del golpe de estado, Allende empezó a participar en actividades ilegales, las cuales proporcionaron suministros a los pobres y también ayudaron los refugiados políticos que esconderse y huirse del país (Ibid). Eventualmente, Allende y su familia tuvieron que huírseles de Chile en un exilio voluntario a Venezuela para salvar sus vidas. Durante su estancia de trece años, la familia se vino abajo y Allende y su esposa divorciaron después de su matrimonio de 25 años (5-6). Casi dos mesas más tarde en San Francisco, California durante un gira de libro, Allende se le conoció a su segundo esposo, el abogado William Gordon. Se casaron el 17 julio 1988 después de que ella se mudó a los EE.UU. para vivir. Ella se desarrolló en la que Pablo Neruda le dijo a ella años antes y se hizo una escritora tan prolífica. Durante su exilio Allende publicó tres libros: La casa de los espíritus (1982), De amor y sombra (1984), y Eva Luna (1987). Tenían gran éxito alrededor del mundo, y aun en Chile, aunque fueron censurados allí. Desde su traslación a los EE.UU. ha escrita muchas otras obras como El plan infinito (1991), Cuentos de Eva Luna (1992), Paula (1994), Hija de la fortuna (1999), Retrato en sepia (2000), Mi país inventado (2003) y La isla bajo del mar (2009) entre otros (Jehenson 100).
La transición de latinoamericanos a estadounidenses no es fácil de ninguna manera. Por muchos latinoamericanos es una lucha que pelearon para guardar sus identidades con sus patrias, pero al mismo tiempo que encontrarse sus propios lugares y identidades en los Estados Unidos. Al principio, el lenguaje produce tal vez el problema más difícil por los inmigrantes. ¿Cuál idioma deben usar? ¿Necesitan mantener la lengua de su patria o deben cambiar al uso de la lengua común del país en que viven actualmente? Según Bonnie Urciuoli en Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, & Class, ´´Hegemonically, Spanish itself is regarded as a barrier to class mobility because it displaces English. Accents, ´broken´ English, and ´mixing´ become signs of illiteracy and laziness, which people are morally obliged to control through education´´(26). El lenguaje directamente influye en la colocación en la clase y la raza.
Para los escritores, éstas preguntas suben en la importancia y la dificultad de contestar. Algunos deciden que escribir en su idioma materno, pero otros que usar el inglés. Por ejemplo, porque su educación fue fundamentalmente en el inglés, Esmeralda Santiago es más cómoda que escribir en inglés en vez de su lengua materna, el español. Según ella, ´´Mi idioma literario es el inglés, porque en ese idioma fue que desarrollé mi voz literaria``(Gac-Artigas 249). Aunque tradujo por si misma Cuando Era Puertorriqueña del inglés al español, ella no quiere traducir sus otras obras al inglés porque sabe que hay gente mejor calificadas para esto. También ella piensa que traducir es que re-escribir, y ella quiere desarollar nuevas ideas en vez de los ya realizadas (Ibid). En otros casos los escritores escriben en el español. Por ejemplo, Isabel Allende escribe en el español solo, y tiene traductores que traducen sus obras a otros idiomas. Según John S. Christie en Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the Borderlands, ´´In Latino fiction, Spanish is the language of emotion. English is reserved for the practical, the necessary… the blending of languages becomes both the source of imaginative, linguistic experiments and the most direct and obvious spectacle of Latino hybridity´´(72). A veces no se puede expresar a si mismo en un idioma sin usar algunas palabras del otro. Por ejemplo, en sus escritas Esmerald Santiago usa palabras españoles entre el inglés cuando no puede determinar una traducción apropiada (Kevane 135).
Otro problema que escritores encuentran es la idea de la escritura femenina versus la masculina. Éstos tipos de hablar reflejan la cultura de Latinoamérica, la cual es una sociedad machista ante toda. Según Myriam Yvonne Jehenson en Latin American Women Writers: Race, Class, & Gender,
In a society where the natural condition of the male is to be aggressive and that of the female to be self-sacrificing, Latin American women often see themselves primarily as nurturers. Despite extreme poverty, extreme child-bearing, and abusive treatment by men, women find their lives worthwhile because they are mothers. (7)
Por eso, para una mujer que escribir va contra la cultura latinoamericana. Cuando van a los Estados Unidos, esto cambia, y escritoras latinoamericanas tienen la oportunidad a dar voz a su género, pero ya tienen que luchar contra el machismo de su cultura que queda con ellas. Las mujeres que habían sido mencionadas encima ya hicieron realidad a esto por sus obras, y pelean activamente hoy contra los estereotipos en que aun sus madres cayeron. Por ejemplo, en sus obras, Julia Álvarez muestra la convención que madres esperan que sus hijas les emulen a pesar de que si la harían no tendrían control de sus recursos ni de sus maridos cuando ellos les engañan con otras mujeres (Henoa 14) Es un círculo vicioso. Lo que es más, la mayoría de escritoras latinoamericanas son mujeres que tienen el dinero por la educación, el viaje, y para experiencia en otras culturas que no son totalmente dominadas por los hombres (16).
Más que todas otras cosas que encuentran, escritoras latinas tienen una inmensa búsqueda de la identidad, no sola literaria como escritoras, pero, también, por si mismas en la nueva cultura. El lenguaje determina la identidad porque causa el lector que considerar las deficiencias en la lente cultural por la cual ven el mundo (Christie 72). Aunque éste puede ser cierto, muchas latinoamericanos encuentran que los estadounidenses no quieren cambiar sus lentes, y entonces los latinoamericanos tienen que cambiar sus lentes para tener un lugar en los Estados Unidos, pero también tienen que retener las lentes de las culturas de sus patrias. Mucha ficción latino habla del tema de ´´entre mundos.´´ Éste término refiere al marginalidad y prejuicio cultural que sufren los inmigrantes latinoamericanos, y también a la transición de sus sueños y expectaciones por la vida entre sociedades (105). En muchas de sus narrativas, Julia Álvarez usa sus personajes para buscar por el centro de la identidad entre los mundos de los Estados Unidos y el país natal. Ella explora los problemas de ´´identity confusion, ambivalence, and plurality created by gender, class, and national oppression´´ (Henoa 2). Muchos latinos preguntan a si mismos si son ya latinos de sus propias patrias o si son estadounidenses. La puertorriqueña Esmeralda Santiago dice que, cuando vivía en los Estados Unidos, d ella sentía como nunca había dejado de la Isla (Kevane 132). En contraste, Julia Álvarez dice que, después de la muerte de Trujillo (el dictador en la República Dominicana), ella y su familia se dieron cuenta de que fueron ´´Dominican Americans´´porque no fueron cambiado totalmente a ser estadounidenses del corriente dominante, pero no fueron dominicanos reales ninguna más. Fueron como híbridos (22).
Además de todos éstos problemas que encuentran, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, y Isabel Allende escriben por muchas diferentes razones y en muchas maneras únicas. Primer, sus estilos son diferentes. Julia Álvarez escribe la ficción en el inglés y en el español. La mayoría de sus obras son cuentos de madurar que representa la crisis de identidad que sufren los inmigrantes latinoamericanos. Al otro lado, Esmeralda Santiago escribe cosas basadas en hechos reales, pero en el inglés. Su primer obra y su séquela es el cuento autobiográfica que ´´provee una perspectiva fresca y natural de una niña que necesita aprender a ser parte de dos tierras y disfrutar de ser dos personas en una``(Gac-Artigas 251). Siguiente Isabel Allende implementa la ficción que lleva la influencia de la realidad pero también contiene elementos fantásticos. Aunque ella principalmente escribe la ficción, ella también ha escrita libros basados en hechos reales, como su libro Paula sobre la muerte de su hija. En su ficción Allende representa los sentimientos y las emociones comunes entre toda la humanidad en la historia del mundo, como la justicia, la búsqueda por la verdad, la pasión, el amor, el odio, y la violencia (Pinto 39). Una táctica que implementa Allende es que ella intenta que socavar la seriedad de sus temas. Distrae de la seriedad por el erotismo y el fatalismo(Jehenson 101-102).
Los propósitos por qué escriben discrepa entre cada autora. Según Julia Álvarez, ´´My mother and all the women in my family were great story-tellers, so I grew up in a folk culture where stories were very important´´(Kevane 20). Además de los cuentos, ella ha escrita mucha poesía en la cual Walt Whitman y Emily Dickinson tenían la influencia (22-23). Lo que es más, su familia fue exiliado a los Estados Unidos de la República Dominicana por razones políticos, no económicas, y ella querría describirlo. En el tiempo de las mariposas, por ejemplo, es un libro bastante político. En sus obras como ¡Yo! y How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Álvarez se le ocupó con las cuestiones de la identidad para los inmigrantes latinas.
Siguiente, Esmeralda Santiago empezó a escribir cuando se dio cuenta de que no había literatura que describe la situación de inmigrantes como ella. Fuera muchos libros sobre otros jóvenes pero no sobre los jóvenes latinoamericanos (y específicamente puertorriqueños) que han traslado a los Estados Unidos. Ella dice que
I think my task is to give voice to people who don´t have the skill, ability, time, or craziness that I have. My characters will always be those people who can`t speak for themselves. There was no one telling my story. I don´t want that to ever happen to any child or any woman. To see yourself as nonexistent is the worst kind of insult that a person can have. (Kevane 133).
Aunque su razón primario de escribir es que dar voz a los insólitos, también tenía influencias actuales en otros escritores. Cuando estaba en Puerto Rico durante su educación primaria, Luis Pales Mates y Luis Llorens Torres le influyeron. Desde su inmigración a los Estados Unidos y sus estudios allí, ella le había influenciada por los escritores latinoamericanos Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral y Rubén Darío. Como dice Lucía Stecher Guzmán sobre la autobiografía en su artículo Entre Peras y Guayabas: Construcciones Identitarias de Esmeralda Santiago,
Así como para las mujeres, también para los miembros de las llamadas minorías o sectores marginales, la escritura y lectura de autobiografías estimula una serie de procesos de conocimiento, reconocimiento, identificación, introspección, que fortalecen la conciencia de la propia valía, así como la confianza de poder asumir roles de agentes activos en sus historias y las de su entorno social.
Santiago no solo escribe por si misma, pero también por otros así como ella que necesitan recibir una voz por la experiencia identitaria que ella describe por el volver a contar de su propia vida.
Isabel Allende escribe por muchas de las mismas razones como las otras pero también con sus propios propósitos. Para ella, escribir es una manera de preservar la memoria, ni solo la historia pero también las leyendas, los mitos y las supersticiones de la gente. Ella ha preservada muchos de éstos por sus libros fantásticos (Cox 26). También, Allende dice que ´´I suppose that it is from feelings of loneliness that questions arise that lead one to write, and that books are concieved in the search for answers´´(12). Puede verlo en la construcción de su libro más famoso La casa de los espíritus porque empezó cuando ella escribió una carta a su abuelo moribundo que transformó en una novela de casi 500 páginas(Pinto 24-25). Tal vez la razón para escribir más importante para Allende es que ella da voz a su género por sus escrituras. En la América Latina, las mujeres no han tenido la voz, y fue una cosa subversiva que desvanecer el silencio (Cox 26-27). A pesar de esto, ella no quiere tener el valor literario por su género porque ella quiere igualar la situación de los marginados, ambos mujeres y hombres, para mejorar el mundo (Pinto 32, 39-40). Según Harold Bloom, sus personajes repiten cuentos para preservar la memoria por la repetición, la cual les otorgan poderes (95). Finalmente, Allende escribe por si misma. Dice que escribir ´´was a kind of therepy for me, a way of drawing out all the sadness that had built up inside, of trying to share the painful experience that I didn´t go through but so many other Chileans did´´(Pinto 29).
En conclusión, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, y Isabel Allende han encontrado muchos obstáculos en el sendero al éxito, pero han tenido éxito a pesar de todo. Han escrito un legado colectivo que representa la memoria de su gente por la posteridad. Aunque el trabajo que contestar todas las cuestiones y resolver todos los problemas no está terminado ya, éstas tres mujeres trabajaron mucho por el resuelto de problemas de inmigración y identidad.
Obras citadas
Allende, Isabel. Mi País Inventado: Un Paseo Nostálgico Por Chile. New York: Harper
Collins, 2003. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom´s Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2003. Print.
Christie, John S. Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the
Borderlands. New York: Garland Pub., 1998. Print.
Cox, Karen C. Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.
Print.
Gac-Artigas, Priscilla. Reflexiones: Ensayos Sobre Escritoras Hispanoamericanas
Contemporáneas. Vol. II. New Jersey: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2002. Print.
García, Pinto Magdalena. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin:
University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Guzmán, Lucía S. "Entre Peras Y Guayabas: Construcciones Identitarias De
Esmeralda Santiago." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, U.P.R. XXXIII.1 (2006): 139-53. Print.
Henao, Eda B. The Colonial Subject's Search for Nation, Culture, and Identity in the
Works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen, 2003. Print.
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender.
Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Print.
Kevane, Bridget A., and Juanita Heredia. Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with
Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2000. Print.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race,
and Class. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. Print.
Isabel Allende: "Dos Palabras"
Isabel Allende ha recibido mucha atención por sus obras literarias. Su libro Cuentos de Eva Luna contiene una colección de cuentos que ella escribió principalmente en Los Ángeles en los meses después del casamiento con su segundo esposo mientras ella las organizó su casa y su familia. Aunque no tienen la riqueza de detalles y episodios de sus novelas, los cuentos cuentan breves historias que reflejan la vida actual de Isabel Allende durante no solo su tiempo en Chile, pero también representa su exilio en Venezuela y su vida corriente en los Estados Unidos. Dos palabras es un ejemplo excelente de ésto.
Antes que puede entender la importancia de Dos palabras, necesita conocer algunos aspectos de la vida de la autora, Isabel Allende. Ella nació en 1942 en Lima, Perú, la hija de uno de los secretarios de la embajada para Chile (Pinto 23). Sus padres, Tomás Allende y Francisca Llona Barros, se casaron a pesar de que sus padres pensaron que su casamiento sería un desastre. Fue desastre, y se lo disolvieron solo cuatro años después, pero no sin tres hijos (Cox 1). Por eso, Isabel Allende crecía en la casa de su abuelo maternal en Santiago, Chile sin conocimiento de su padre (Mi país 47-48). El único pariente paternal con que ella tenía contacto fue su sobrino segundo que también era su padrino, Salvador Allende, quien sería elegido como el presidente socialista de Chile en 1970 (176). Después del colegio, a la edad de diecisiete, Isabel Allende trabajó por el Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) porque su abuelo pensaba que mujeres no debieran recibir enseñanza superior (Cox 3). Para ganar dinero extra, Allende tradujo novelas románticas y también narró una brevísima programa de televisión por el FAO (4). En 1962 ella se casó con su primer marido, Miguel Frías, y, un año después, ellos se recibieron una subvención para estudiar en Bélgica y viajar por Europa. Durante su estadía en Europa ella se dio luz a sus dos hijos Paula y Nicolás. En 1966, cuando volvieron de Europa a Chile, ella escribía por la revista feminista Paula, y también por unas revistas de niños, la televisión, y las dramas. En 1972, ella se conoció a Pablo Neruda, quién era como un idilio literario de ella. Aunque le insultó con sus comentarios que ella fue una periodista mala que malhecho la realidad, él predijo que ella sería una gran novelista sin ser consciente (Ibid).
Con la elección de su padrino Salvador Allende en 1970, comenzó una nueva fase en la vida de Isabel Allende. Dentro de poco después, en 11 septiembre 1973, Agosto Pinochet, el líder de las Fuerzas Armadas de Chile, guió un golpe de estado contra la presidencia socialista de Allende en lo que se murió Salvador Allende (Erro-Perralta). Tiró Chile en un estado de confusión. En menos de dos días después del golpe de estado, Isabel Allende empezó a trabajar con grupos secretos que remitieron fundos y comido a los peores y los refugiados políticos del país (Ibid). Eventualmente, Allende y su familia tuvieron que huírseles de Chile en un exilio voluntario para salvarles sus vidas. Huyeron a Caracas, Venezuela donde vivieron por los trece años siguientes (Cox 5). Durante su estadía, la familia fracasó y Miguel Frías y Isabel Allende se divorciaron después de su casamiento de 25 años (Ibid). Pero su exilio no era totalmente fracaso. Según ella, ´´The truth is that I´m a journalist and I´ve always worked as a journalist. I never had a literary vocation until I left Chile``(Pinto 24). Durante su exilio Allende publicó tres libros: La casa de los espíritus (1982), De amor y sombra (1984), y Eva Luna (1987) (Jehenson 100).
La tercera fase de su vida empezó casi dos años después de su divorcio, mientras una gira de libro, cuando Allende se conoció a su segundo esposo, William Gordon, en San Francisco. Se casaron en 17 julio 1988. Ella mudó a los Estados Unidos donde ya reside y escribe libros de su patria y su gente basados en su experiencia personal. Mientras su vida en los Estados Unidos como recién casada, ella escribió Cuentos de Eva Luna, en lo que está el cuento Dos palabras, porque cuentos fueron más fáciles que escribir que novelas cuando no tenía mucho tiempo (Erro-Peralta). Ha escrita muchas escrituras desde, algunas de las que son El plan infinito (1991), Paula (1994), Hija de la fortuna (1999), Retrato en sepia (2000), Mi país inventado (2003) y La isla bajo del mar (2009) entre otros (Jehenson 100). Las obras de Allende son traducidos en 27 idiomas y han recibido gran éxito alrededor del mundo (Iftekarrudin).
En su escritura, Isabel Allende usa el erotismo, el fatalismo, y otras cosas así para distraerse de la seriedad de lo que representa. También usa elementos románticos en sus obras a pesar de que frecuentemente critica la política por la trama (Jehenson 100-102). Por todo eso ella no critica a un individuo específica, pero critica los problemas generales de su país y continente, incluyendo también los elementos autobiográficos. Según Allende, escritura ``was a kind of therapy for me, a way of drawing out all the sadness that had built up inside, of trying to share the painful experience that I didn´t go through but so many other Chileans did: the experience of a military coup, of all those years of repression´´(Pinto 29). Ella busca por la mejor manera en que dar voz a los marginados del mundo—los que han sufrido por un golpe de estado, las mujeres del mundo latinoamericano que son silenciadas por el machismo, y los que buscan por la identidad entre sus patrias y el país de su inmigración.
Dos palabras es un cuento sobre una pobre niña se llama Belisa Crepusculario. Durante los primeros doce años de su vida, la única cosa que ella tiene que hacer es ´´sobrevivir al hambre y la fatiga de siglos´´(Mujica 601). Durante una sequía, Belisa entierra sus cuatro hermanos y va de su lugar de nacimiento a la costa en busca de una vida mejor. A la costa ella descubre un periódico y aprende como leer y escribir. Porque ella se da cuenta de que ´´aparte de prostituirse o emplearse como sirvienta en las cocinas de los ricos, eran pocas las ocupaciones que podía empeñar. Vender palabras le pareció una alternativa decente´´(602). Así ella tiene un tenderete en que vende palabras. Lee un diccionario una vez pero ella lo tira porque no quiere vender ´´palabras envasadas´´a sus clientes y estafarles (Ibid). Un día, un guerrero se llama Mulato va al pueblo donde ella trabaja y secuéstrela y llévela a su capitán, el Coronel. El Coronel ha oído de ella, y, porque está analfabeto, quiere que ella escribir un discurso político por él para repetir durante su campaña por la presidencia del país. Ella lo hizo y
descartó las palabras ásperas y secas, las demasiado floridas, las que ofrecían promesas improbables, las carentes de verdad y las confusas, para quedarse sólo con aquellas capaces de tocar con certeza el pensamiento de los hombres y la intuición de las mujeres. (604)
Por sus esfuerzas ella carga solo un peso, y da como regalo al Coronel dos palabras secretas por su uso exclusivo. Durante su campaña, el Coronel se ganó la popularidad entre la gente del país. También, él repetía las dos palabras todo el tiempo que ella le había dado, y fueron como la memoria de ella. Enojado, Mulato va en busca de Belisa y vuelve con ella porque pensaba que le curaría al Coronel, pero al fin se dieron cuenta de que ´´no podía deshacerse del hechizo de esas dos palabras endemoniadas`` (606).
De muchas formas, Dos palabras está una autobiografía de la autora, Isabel Allende. Las letras del nombre Belisa pueden ser desmezclados para formar el nombre de la autora: Isabel (Umpierre). Según Luz María Umpierre en su artículo ´´Unscrambling Allende´s ´´Dos palabras´´: the self, the immigrant/writer, and social justice,´´ ´´Allende´s main writings had come after she migrated out of Chile where she, like Belisa, had had to run away from her place of birth for fear of death. It was in Venezuela that her writing of novels began.´´ Aunque peleó con discreción contra la dictadura de Pinochet así como Belisa peleó para sobrevivir el hambre, Allende tenía que huir de su patria para salvarle su vida como Belisa tenía que huir a la costa del mar.
En vez de dar una historia exacta de los eventos que pasaron en Chile debajo de la dictadura, Allende vuelve a contar la verdad pero de una manera discreta que da voz a los que no tienen voz. En Dos palabras la rechaza del diccionario por parte de Belisa lo representa ésta. Allende lo hace como notó Myriam Yvonne Jehenson anterior con el fatalismo y el erotismo. Por ejemplo, Belisa parece que ser destinada que vivir aunque sus hermanos se mueren. También, ella aprende como leer y escribir aunque esto está inverosímil porque, en la América Latina, si no tiene dinero no recibe la educación. Lo que es más, Allende usa el erotismo en el cuento cuando nota que Mulato siente algunos deseos para Belisa.
Siguiente, Luz María Umpierre también dice sobre Dos palabras que ´´the ability to empower [Belisa’s] clients with ownership is important if we take into consideration that the people who seek her are illiterate and poor.´´ El Coronel está analfabeto y viene a ella en busca de un discurso con el cual él se puede ganar la vota de la gente del país. En Latinoamérica mujeres no tiene mucha influencia en la política. Si tienen alguna influencia, usualmente son mujeres educadas de familias adinerados o son las esposas de hombres políticos (Aviel 170). Aunque Belisa es educada, ella va contra lo normal por ser una mujer pobre, soltera, y sin conexiones políticos antes de su secuestro. A pesar de esto, ella tiene el poder sobre él por su conocimiento de la palabra escrita.
Es interesante que Allende escoja una narradora por su cuento. Ella lo hace por la mayoría de sus obras, con la excepción de algunas narradores alternativos en algunos de sus obras, como en La casa de los espíritus. Según ella, ´´In my continent, women have been condemned to silence, and speaking up, having a voice, is a very subversive thing for a woman´´(Cox 26-27). Las palabras de Belisa imbuirla con el poder, y más importante el poder sobre el hombre el Coronel (Erro-Peralta). Ella ha encontrada el poder de palabras (Buedel).
Allende dice que ´´someone told me I write about feelings, values, and emotions that are common to all human beings at any point in history. Love, hate, justice, violence, the search for truth, for passions and obsessions``(Pinto 39). No solo por eso ella une gente en Dos Palabras. Ella implementa el poder de palabras para unir Belisa y el Coronel en el cuento así como unir la gente del país con el Coronel por el discurso que Belisa le ha dado (Levine).
En conclusión, Dos palabras es un buen ejemplo de la escritura de Isabel Allende. No solo es autobiográfica en carácter, pero también da voz a la mujer y el marginado mientras muestra el poder de la palabra.
Obras Citadas
Allende, Isabel, and Farhat Iftekharuddin. "An Interview with Isabel Allende." Short
Story Criticism 65 (2004): 3-14. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Allende, Isabel. Mi Pais Inventado. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2003. Print.
Aviel, JoAnn Fagot. "Political Participation of Women in Latin America." The Western
Political Quarterly 34.1 (1981): 156-73. JStor. Web. 23 Jan. 2010.
Buedel, Barbara Foley. "Magical Places in Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and Cuentos De
Eva Luna." West Virginia University Philological Papers 53 (2006): 108. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Cox, Karen Castellucci. Isabel Allende: a Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 2003. Print.
Erro-Peralta, Nora. "Isabel Allende." Modern Latin-American Fiction Writer: Second
Series 145 (1994). Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Jan. 2010.
García, Pinto Magdalena. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin:
University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender.
Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Print.
Levine, Linda Gould. "The Stories of Eva Luna." Short Story Criticism 65 (2004): 75
93. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Mujica, Bárbara. "Dos Palabras." Texto Y Vida: Introducción a La Literatura
Hispanoamericana. San Diego ;Philadelphia: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publ., 1992. 600-06. Print.
Umpierre, Luz Maria. "Unscrambling Allende's "Dos Palabras": The Self, The
Immigrant/Writer, and Social Justice." MELUS 27.4 (2002): 129-36. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Apr. 2010.
Antes que puede entender la importancia de Dos palabras, necesita conocer algunos aspectos de la vida de la autora, Isabel Allende. Ella nació en 1942 en Lima, Perú, la hija de uno de los secretarios de la embajada para Chile (Pinto 23). Sus padres, Tomás Allende y Francisca Llona Barros, se casaron a pesar de que sus padres pensaron que su casamiento sería un desastre. Fue desastre, y se lo disolvieron solo cuatro años después, pero no sin tres hijos (Cox 1). Por eso, Isabel Allende crecía en la casa de su abuelo maternal en Santiago, Chile sin conocimiento de su padre (Mi país 47-48). El único pariente paternal con que ella tenía contacto fue su sobrino segundo que también era su padrino, Salvador Allende, quien sería elegido como el presidente socialista de Chile en 1970 (176). Después del colegio, a la edad de diecisiete, Isabel Allende trabajó por el Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) porque su abuelo pensaba que mujeres no debieran recibir enseñanza superior (Cox 3). Para ganar dinero extra, Allende tradujo novelas románticas y también narró una brevísima programa de televisión por el FAO (4). En 1962 ella se casó con su primer marido, Miguel Frías, y, un año después, ellos se recibieron una subvención para estudiar en Bélgica y viajar por Europa. Durante su estadía en Europa ella se dio luz a sus dos hijos Paula y Nicolás. En 1966, cuando volvieron de Europa a Chile, ella escribía por la revista feminista Paula, y también por unas revistas de niños, la televisión, y las dramas. En 1972, ella se conoció a Pablo Neruda, quién era como un idilio literario de ella. Aunque le insultó con sus comentarios que ella fue una periodista mala que malhecho la realidad, él predijo que ella sería una gran novelista sin ser consciente (Ibid).
Con la elección de su padrino Salvador Allende en 1970, comenzó una nueva fase en la vida de Isabel Allende. Dentro de poco después, en 11 septiembre 1973, Agosto Pinochet, el líder de las Fuerzas Armadas de Chile, guió un golpe de estado contra la presidencia socialista de Allende en lo que se murió Salvador Allende (Erro-Perralta). Tiró Chile en un estado de confusión. En menos de dos días después del golpe de estado, Isabel Allende empezó a trabajar con grupos secretos que remitieron fundos y comido a los peores y los refugiados políticos del país (Ibid). Eventualmente, Allende y su familia tuvieron que huírseles de Chile en un exilio voluntario para salvarles sus vidas. Huyeron a Caracas, Venezuela donde vivieron por los trece años siguientes (Cox 5). Durante su estadía, la familia fracasó y Miguel Frías y Isabel Allende se divorciaron después de su casamiento de 25 años (Ibid). Pero su exilio no era totalmente fracaso. Según ella, ´´The truth is that I´m a journalist and I´ve always worked as a journalist. I never had a literary vocation until I left Chile``(Pinto 24). Durante su exilio Allende publicó tres libros: La casa de los espíritus (1982), De amor y sombra (1984), y Eva Luna (1987) (Jehenson 100).
La tercera fase de su vida empezó casi dos años después de su divorcio, mientras una gira de libro, cuando Allende se conoció a su segundo esposo, William Gordon, en San Francisco. Se casaron en 17 julio 1988. Ella mudó a los Estados Unidos donde ya reside y escribe libros de su patria y su gente basados en su experiencia personal. Mientras su vida en los Estados Unidos como recién casada, ella escribió Cuentos de Eva Luna, en lo que está el cuento Dos palabras, porque cuentos fueron más fáciles que escribir que novelas cuando no tenía mucho tiempo (Erro-Peralta). Ha escrita muchas escrituras desde, algunas de las que son El plan infinito (1991), Paula (1994), Hija de la fortuna (1999), Retrato en sepia (2000), Mi país inventado (2003) y La isla bajo del mar (2009) entre otros (Jehenson 100). Las obras de Allende son traducidos en 27 idiomas y han recibido gran éxito alrededor del mundo (Iftekarrudin).
En su escritura, Isabel Allende usa el erotismo, el fatalismo, y otras cosas así para distraerse de la seriedad de lo que representa. También usa elementos románticos en sus obras a pesar de que frecuentemente critica la política por la trama (Jehenson 100-102). Por todo eso ella no critica a un individuo específica, pero critica los problemas generales de su país y continente, incluyendo también los elementos autobiográficos. Según Allende, escritura ``was a kind of therapy for me, a way of drawing out all the sadness that had built up inside, of trying to share the painful experience that I didn´t go through but so many other Chileans did: the experience of a military coup, of all those years of repression´´(Pinto 29). Ella busca por la mejor manera en que dar voz a los marginados del mundo—los que han sufrido por un golpe de estado, las mujeres del mundo latinoamericano que son silenciadas por el machismo, y los que buscan por la identidad entre sus patrias y el país de su inmigración.
Dos palabras es un cuento sobre una pobre niña se llama Belisa Crepusculario. Durante los primeros doce años de su vida, la única cosa que ella tiene que hacer es ´´sobrevivir al hambre y la fatiga de siglos´´(Mujica 601). Durante una sequía, Belisa entierra sus cuatro hermanos y va de su lugar de nacimiento a la costa en busca de una vida mejor. A la costa ella descubre un periódico y aprende como leer y escribir. Porque ella se da cuenta de que ´´aparte de prostituirse o emplearse como sirvienta en las cocinas de los ricos, eran pocas las ocupaciones que podía empeñar. Vender palabras le pareció una alternativa decente´´(602). Así ella tiene un tenderete en que vende palabras. Lee un diccionario una vez pero ella lo tira porque no quiere vender ´´palabras envasadas´´a sus clientes y estafarles (Ibid). Un día, un guerrero se llama Mulato va al pueblo donde ella trabaja y secuéstrela y llévela a su capitán, el Coronel. El Coronel ha oído de ella, y, porque está analfabeto, quiere que ella escribir un discurso político por él para repetir durante su campaña por la presidencia del país. Ella lo hizo y
descartó las palabras ásperas y secas, las demasiado floridas, las que ofrecían promesas improbables, las carentes de verdad y las confusas, para quedarse sólo con aquellas capaces de tocar con certeza el pensamiento de los hombres y la intuición de las mujeres. (604)
Por sus esfuerzas ella carga solo un peso, y da como regalo al Coronel dos palabras secretas por su uso exclusivo. Durante su campaña, el Coronel se ganó la popularidad entre la gente del país. También, él repetía las dos palabras todo el tiempo que ella le había dado, y fueron como la memoria de ella. Enojado, Mulato va en busca de Belisa y vuelve con ella porque pensaba que le curaría al Coronel, pero al fin se dieron cuenta de que ´´no podía deshacerse del hechizo de esas dos palabras endemoniadas`` (606).
De muchas formas, Dos palabras está una autobiografía de la autora, Isabel Allende. Las letras del nombre Belisa pueden ser desmezclados para formar el nombre de la autora: Isabel (Umpierre). Según Luz María Umpierre en su artículo ´´Unscrambling Allende´s ´´Dos palabras´´: the self, the immigrant/writer, and social justice,´´ ´´Allende´s main writings had come after she migrated out of Chile where she, like Belisa, had had to run away from her place of birth for fear of death. It was in Venezuela that her writing of novels began.´´ Aunque peleó con discreción contra la dictadura de Pinochet así como Belisa peleó para sobrevivir el hambre, Allende tenía que huir de su patria para salvarle su vida como Belisa tenía que huir a la costa del mar.
En vez de dar una historia exacta de los eventos que pasaron en Chile debajo de la dictadura, Allende vuelve a contar la verdad pero de una manera discreta que da voz a los que no tienen voz. En Dos palabras la rechaza del diccionario por parte de Belisa lo representa ésta. Allende lo hace como notó Myriam Yvonne Jehenson anterior con el fatalismo y el erotismo. Por ejemplo, Belisa parece que ser destinada que vivir aunque sus hermanos se mueren. También, ella aprende como leer y escribir aunque esto está inverosímil porque, en la América Latina, si no tiene dinero no recibe la educación. Lo que es más, Allende usa el erotismo en el cuento cuando nota que Mulato siente algunos deseos para Belisa.
Siguiente, Luz María Umpierre también dice sobre Dos palabras que ´´the ability to empower [Belisa’s] clients with ownership is important if we take into consideration that the people who seek her are illiterate and poor.´´ El Coronel está analfabeto y viene a ella en busca de un discurso con el cual él se puede ganar la vota de la gente del país. En Latinoamérica mujeres no tiene mucha influencia en la política. Si tienen alguna influencia, usualmente son mujeres educadas de familias adinerados o son las esposas de hombres políticos (Aviel 170). Aunque Belisa es educada, ella va contra lo normal por ser una mujer pobre, soltera, y sin conexiones políticos antes de su secuestro. A pesar de esto, ella tiene el poder sobre él por su conocimiento de la palabra escrita.
Es interesante que Allende escoja una narradora por su cuento. Ella lo hace por la mayoría de sus obras, con la excepción de algunas narradores alternativos en algunos de sus obras, como en La casa de los espíritus. Según ella, ´´In my continent, women have been condemned to silence, and speaking up, having a voice, is a very subversive thing for a woman´´(Cox 26-27). Las palabras de Belisa imbuirla con el poder, y más importante el poder sobre el hombre el Coronel (Erro-Peralta). Ella ha encontrada el poder de palabras (Buedel).
Allende dice que ´´someone told me I write about feelings, values, and emotions that are common to all human beings at any point in history. Love, hate, justice, violence, the search for truth, for passions and obsessions``(Pinto 39). No solo por eso ella une gente en Dos Palabras. Ella implementa el poder de palabras para unir Belisa y el Coronel en el cuento así como unir la gente del país con el Coronel por el discurso que Belisa le ha dado (Levine).
En conclusión, Dos palabras es un buen ejemplo de la escritura de Isabel Allende. No solo es autobiográfica en carácter, pero también da voz a la mujer y el marginado mientras muestra el poder de la palabra.
Obras Citadas
Allende, Isabel, and Farhat Iftekharuddin. "An Interview with Isabel Allende." Short
Story Criticism 65 (2004): 3-14. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Allende, Isabel. Mi Pais Inventado. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2003. Print.
Aviel, JoAnn Fagot. "Political Participation of Women in Latin America." The Western
Political Quarterly 34.1 (1981): 156-73. JStor. Web. 23 Jan. 2010.
Buedel, Barbara Foley. "Magical Places in Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and Cuentos De
Eva Luna." West Virginia University Philological Papers 53 (2006): 108. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Cox, Karen Castellucci. Isabel Allende: a Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 2003. Print.
Erro-Peralta, Nora. "Isabel Allende." Modern Latin-American Fiction Writer: Second
Series 145 (1994). Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Jan. 2010.
García, Pinto Magdalena. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin:
University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender.
Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Print.
Levine, Linda Gould. "The Stories of Eva Luna." Short Story Criticism 65 (2004): 75
93. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Mujica, Bárbara. "Dos Palabras." Texto Y Vida: Introducción a La Literatura
Hispanoamericana. San Diego ;Philadelphia: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publ., 1992. 600-06. Print.
Umpierre, Luz Maria. "Unscrambling Allende's "Dos Palabras": The Self, The
Immigrant/Writer, and Social Justice." MELUS 27.4 (2002): 129-36. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Apr. 2010.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Isabel Allende & Eva Luna: Fictional Reality and the Breaking of Patriarchal Codes
Isabel Allende. Many connotations are associated with this famous name. Some recall the name of her ancestor, Salvador Allende, and his controversial presidency in Chile. Most, however, know her as the Latin American novelist famous for her unique writing style that protests against the patriarchy that has long hindered Hispanic woman from gaining a voice, not only in their own countries, but around the world. Her 1987 novel Eva Luna serves as a semi-autobiography of the author, giving an insightful look into the woman who has revolutionized Latin American literature and feminism.
Isabel Allende was born on 2 August 1942 to Francisca Llona Barros and Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomat and the first cousin of Salvador Allende (Erro-Peralta). At a very young age, her parents divorced, forcing Allende and her mother to live with her maternal grandparents (Ibid). Growing up in the home of her grandparents Allende benefitted from intellectual freedom as well as access to a large home library (Pinto 23). In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende revealed that her mother was the most important person in her life (Ibid). Although she passed away when Allende was quite young, her grandmother was also influential in her life; she bequeathed to her granddaughter a legacy of great storytelling (Erro-Peralta).
As a child, Allende also extensively travelled the world after her mother remarried to another diplomat (Erro Perralta). At age fifteen she returned to Chile to complete her high school education (Ibid). Then, after graduating at age sixteen, she worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for the United Nations before discovering her aptitude for journalism (Ibid). While working for a television program, writing children’s stories, producing children’s plays, and editing the successful children’s magazine Mampato, Allende found time to write a column called “Impertinentes” (Impertinences) for Paula, a reformist women’s magazine (Ibid). In 1962, Allende married Miguel Frías- her childhood sweetheart (Pinto 24). They went on to have two children together.
On 11 September 1973, in a military coup d’ état, General Augusto Pinochet took over Chile and established a regime that lasted until 11 March 1990 (Dorfman 1). Days later, Pinochet ordered the Chilean Air Force to bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende resided, completing the coup with the assassination of Chile’s democratically elected president (20). The betrayal involved in this act was atrocious, as President Allende had promoted Pinochet to the position of Commander in Chief of the Army of Chile just nineteen days before on 23 August 1973 (22). During the reign of terror that seized the country, the government used the National Stadium for several months as a concentration camp in a gross transgression against human rights (1-2, 14). There, they interrogated, tortured, and killed more than two thousand Chileans, who came to be known as the desaparecidos (disappeared)—people whom they catured in brutal police raids who were in the least suspected of supporting Salvador Allende or opposing Pinochet’s regime (Ensalaco 19). In many cases, it remains unknown even today why various individuals were executed and others freed after their tortuous incarcerations (73). Frequently, the government disposed of the executed by flying over the ocean to dump the bodies in the sea, or in rivers (74). In the years that followed, unemployment rates reached almost 70 percent, in large part due to Pinochet’s habit of selling profit-producing public enterprises at substandard low prices to private buyers (Dorfman 43-44).
During an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende describes her family’s struggles during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship. “The military coup split my life in half with the blow of a hatchet,” Allende described (26). At first, the Chileans did not fully understand what was going on; neither did they entirely know what a military coup was, or what torture entailed, except in referenced to the Middle Ages or the Inquisition (26-27). Most believed that after a few days, the soldiers would return to their barracks, there would be another election, and democracy would be reinstated; but this was not to be (Allende, Mi Pais 187-88). “I’m not very brave,” Allende admitted, “and after a few months I came to believe that any direct action [against the regime] would mean an enormous risk for me and for my family” (Pinto 26-27). However, according to an article by Nora Erro-Peralta, “Confronted with the repression and violence instituted by the military dictatorship, she joined the efforts of church-sponsored groups in providing food and aid to the needy and families of victims of the regime.” Allende explained to Pinto that she and her husband picked Venezuela for their self-exile because, as a journalist, Allende needed to work in a Spanish-speaking country. Also, Venezuela was the only country under that category where they could easily obtain passports, where the economy was doing well enough that foreigners could obtain jobs, and where no fascist dictatorship dominated (Pinto 27).
When they first moved to Caracas, Venezuela, Isabel Allende suffered from the well-known problem of writer’s block, and so she decided to work for several years as a teacher and then as an administrator (Erro-Peralta). Eventually, she was hired at a leading Venezuelan newspaper, El Nacional, as a reporter and satirical writer. It was not until she heard about the imminent death of her grandfather that she wrote her first novel, which began as a letter, encouraging him to never give up hope for life, and ended as a 500 page novel entitled La casa de los espiritus (Ibid). The novel was initially banned in Chile because of Pinochet’s censorship, and so it was smuggled into the country, sometimes even in diaper bags; later, however, the regime lifted the ban and her books became bestsellers in her native country (Pinto 38-39).
Eventually, Allende and Frías divorced because he was forced to work in another part of Venezuela away from Isabel and the children, causing their marriage to disintegrate (Allende, Mi Pais 195). In 1988 she remarried to an American lawyer named William Gordon. He who is from California, where they now reside (Hunter). Eva Luna and her subsequent novels were written from the United States, but not without considerable influence from her prior residences. Well-known for her talent in interweaving fiction and reality through her writing, critics “single out [Allende] for her dedication to combating the traditionally patriarchal dominance of Latin American history and tradition by attesting to the significant role of that region’s women, and by emphasizing the importance of family relationships, storytelling, memory writing, survival, and the courage to defy and oppose gender and class divisions” (Ibid).
As Barbara Mujica so accurately stated, reading Eva Luna gives “that sensation of peeling an onion.” The episodic novel closely resembles the picaresque genre, while also serving as a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, for the protagonist, Eva Luna (Erro-Peralta). Allende’s writing holds strong emotional appeal, using personal anecdotes to depict the societal and political concerns of Chile as well as other similar countries (Perricone 83). Although her narrative “embodies, contradicts, or transcends the patriarchal system through the characterization of Spanish American men,” she also uses highly romantic male and female relationships in her stories (83-84).
Eva Luna is set in Venezuela, the place of Allende’s exile from Chile, and in many ways serves as a tribute to her place of asylum from Pinochet’s regime (Ruta). Furthermore, “Eva Luna is Allende’s allegorical representation of her acceptance of the condition of her exile and of her profession as a writer of fiction” (Ramblado-Minero 54). Through the novel, she metaphorically analyzes the advances she made as a Latin American female author (64). She even admitted in an interview that it was only through writing the novel that she finally began to accept herself for who she is as a woman (Rodden 79). In an interview with Farhat Iftekharrudin, Allende stated, “I think that in a weird way, Eva Luna is me or I am Eva Luna. She is a storyteller, and she creates herself.” Nora Erro-Peralta explains that Eva Luna “learns the power of words and how to spin tales that first serve as an escape from a life of abject poverty and eventually pave the road to love, fame, and fortune.”
Eva Luna is conceived when, as a treatment, her mother Consuelo, a housekeeper for the elusive embalmer Professor Jones, sleeps with an elderly Indian gardener who is suffering from a snakebite (Hart 164). Making love to the Indian was Consuelo’s first act performed of her own initiative and against the patriarchal society in which she lived (Davies &Jones 70). By naming her daughter Eva without having her take the Indian’s last name, Consuelo ignores the traditional patriarchal code of assuming the father’s surname. When people protest her decision, she allows Eva to take on the name of her father’s tribe (Luna) as her last name (Diamond-Nigh 137-138). Through Eva Luna, Allende depicts aspects of her own childhood growing up with an absent father. “You will never find a loving father in my books,” Allende once stated (Foster 80). Women in her books are strong and know what they want from the beginning, without the help of men (Ibid).
Consuelo dies when Eva Luna is still young, but not before she passes on her legacy of storytelling and fantasy in much the same way as Allende’s grandmother. To explain her love for the sea, Consuelo invented a story that she was the daughter of a Dutch sailor when, in reality, missionaries found her on the floor of a forest and brought her to live in a convent (Lang 116). According to Susan de Carvalho, “Eva Luna learns from her mother to fantacize, to use her own private world as an escape, a space in which she has the power to create and control her own reality” (77). Similarly, according to Linda Gould Levine in her article Weaving Life into Fiction, “[Allende’s] unbridled imagination and sense of dramatic exaggeration continually refashion real-life experiences and events, even her own, perhaps because like her character, Eva Luna, she tries to live her life as she ‘would like it be, as in a novel’” (2).
After the death of her mother, Eva is left in the charge of the household cook until the death of their benefactor, Professor Jones, forces them to find another home. Eva finds employment at age seven with an old maid and a bachelor who are brother and sister; one day, however, finally weary of the woman’s constant nagging and the man’s sexual advances, Eva flees the home under the pretense of shopping at the market. Now homeless and on the streets, Eva meets a boy named Huberto Naranjo, who teaches her the art of pick-pocketing as well as other means of survival. Eventually, Eva decides to return to her previous employers because of the assurance of food and shelter that she has there. This time, she charms the cook, Elvira, with her story-telling abilities, becoming like her granddaughter. Later, Eva is fired, and moves around for a time, working a variety of jobs. In a particularly interesting episode, she works for a minister who, each night in his bedroom, relieves himself in a felt-covered chair with a chamber pot in the seat. Her job is to clean up his mess each morning. Ultimately fed up with his laziness and the stench of her duty, one morning Eva dumps the contents of the chamber-pot over the man’s head before fleeing the house forever.
At the end of her resources, she searches the city for her old friend who helped her in her time of distress several years earlier—Huberto Naranjo. He takes her to the proprietor of a brothel, la Señora, telling her that Eva is his sister and an excellent storyteller who should be used only for this purpose. There, Eva meets a transvestite named Melecio, and they become close friends. During her stay at the brothel, Eva begins her education. When police shut-down the brothel, Eva is forced onto the streets once more. A Turkish merchant then takes her to his home in the jungle to care for his sickly wife, where he sexually abuses Eva and then later accuses her of murder when his wife commits suicide. After staying in jail until she is proven innocent, Eva once again meets Melecio, who has undergone extensive surgery to be converted into a woman, and who is now called Mimi. Eva continues her education while simultaneously working in a factory. Her renewed friendship with the now guerrilla commander, Huberto Naranjo, sparks into romance for a while until he tells her that he is fighting a “man’s war” in which she cannot participate.
After rejecting sexual advances from another factory worker, Eva leaves and begins a new job script- writing for television soap operas. When Huberto Naranjo and other guerrilla soldiers are imprisoned, Eva aids them in their escape, and then carefully weaves her experiences into her television scripts. She soon meets a German photo-journalist named Rolf Carlé (whose story has been told in third person intermittently throughout Eva Luna’s first person narrative) who has fled his country to escape the shame he feels because of his father’s participation in the Nazi atrocities of World War II. A romance ignites between the two that takes reader through the remaining episodes of the novel.
Eva Luna and Isabel Allende are comparable on many levels. First of all, they both tell stories to survive. Similarly to Eva, when her daughter Paula contracted an fatal disease, Allende told stories in the hospital in exchange for food (Ramblado-Minero 66). Next, Allende’s exile from Chile to Venezuela is comparable to the episode in which, after finally finding a home of equality and acceptance, Eva is forced to leave the brothel ad her friends there and live in the jungle. The police who raid the brothel represent the Armed Forces of Chile who took over Chile as part of Pinochet’s regime took (67).
Later, Eva is unable to voice her support of Huberto Narjanjo and the guerrilla forces because of the repression of free speech; however, she uses her storytelling capabilities to write her opinions into her scripts in such a way that she cannot be indicted. Similarly, although in large part because Isabel Allende was related to the assassinated President Salvador Allende but also because of Pinochet’s regime, she was unable to voice her sympathies through journalism without jeopardizing her safety. It was not until she began writing novels that she truly began to speak out against the atrocities in Pinochet’s regime. Allende displays the impact her exile to Venezuela had on her life through her novel, as Eva Luna is constantly seeking a home and a job in which she can freely develop her own personal identity as a Latin American woman and storyteller. Eva Luna writes similarly to Allende, too. As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “For Eva, the first writing experience is an exercise of memory, in which she recollects her mother’s legacy and her own experiences in order to manipulate them according to her own will” (70). Likewise, in an interview, Allende stated that “A novel is made up partly of truth and partly of fantasy. The author uses something of experience and knowledge and something of his or her own angels and demons to create a personal vision of life…Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality” (Agosin 48). Allende’s writing is a remembrance of her past, but with a spin— she rewrites the history of her novels to contradict the standard patriarchy through strong protagonists like Eva Luna.
In Eva Luna, after receiving an education, the protagonist is opened up to many opportunities that did not previously exist. The same is true of Allende and other Latin American women. Studies show that, in Latin American coutries, education and socioeconomic status directly correlate in Latin American countries to political involvement among women (Aviel 157). Furthermore, most Latin America women work until they are married, and afterwards only ten percent continue their jobs, which amounts to a thirteen percent total of active women in the Latin American workforce as a whole (158). The majority of Latin American countries did not grant women suffrage until after World War II; but even though they now have the right to vote, most women do not participate in elections unless education opens their eyes to civic duty (158). Even then, Chilean women vote separately from men, who frequently influence the way in which they vote (159). Additionally, because their patriarchal society considers motherhood to be the sole responsibility of the females, “the most important problem for [Chilean] women was their economic situation and the second most important problem was marriage” (160). Without this basic understanding of the role of the family in the lives of Latin American women, it is impossible to understand the struggles they have overcome to gain a voice. In 1968, official surveys revealed that more than 84 percent of Chilean women did not participate in organizations, such as the one Isabel Allende’s aided during the early months of Pinochet’s rule (161). Allende worked to make changes in the patriarchy and to create awareness of the plight of marginalized Latin American women, but she did so alone, without joining a larger radical organization.
In conclusion, through her novels Isabel Allende not only reveals many aspects of her personal life and the difficult events of her past, but she also works against the traditional Latin American patriarchal codes to pave new for Latin American women. However, it seems that her ultimate goal in writing is equality without marginalization in “a more just and free society”, as she explains that feminism is not a war against men, but a joint effort of the genders to create such a world (Pinto, “Chile’s” 73). As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “In Eva Luna, the social worries of the author are represented in the main character, a servant’s illegitimate child who will prosper in life through her own work, but with her social origin ever present” (145). Allende, likewise, is constantly dogged by critics who distrust the work of Latin American women, but she continues to write her stories, winning over thousands of readers of multiple tongues.
Works Cited
Agosin, Marjorie. "Pirate, Conjurer, Feminist." Trans. Cola Franzen. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 44-52. Print.
Allende, Isabel. Eva Luna. New York: Harper Collins, 1987. Print.
--- Mi Pais Inventado. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.
Aviel, JoAnn F. "Political Participation of Women in Latin America." The Western Political Quarterly 34.1 (1981): 156-73. Print.
Carbalho, Susan De. "Escrituras y Escritores: The Artist-Protagonist of Isabel Allende." Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 75-82. Print.
Diamond-Nigh, Lynne. "Eva Luna: Writing as History." Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 133-44. Print.
Dorfman, Ariel. Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. New York: Seven Stories, 2002. Print.
Ensalaco, Mark. Chile Bajo Pinochet: La Recuperacion de la Verdad. Madrid: University of Pennslyvania, 2000. Print.
Erro-Peralta, Nora. "Isabel Allende." Ed. William Luis and Ann Gonzalez. Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers 2nd ser. 145 (1994). Print.
Foster, Douglas. "Isabel Allende Unveiled." Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 77-85. Print.
Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UPes, 1989. Print.
Hunter, Jeffrey W., ed. "Isabel Allende." Contemporary Literary Criticism 264 (2009). Print.
Iftekharuddin, Farhat. "An Interview with Isabel Allende." Ed. Janet Witalec. Short Story Criticism 65 (1997): 3-14. Print.
Jones, Anny B., and Catherine Davies. Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Lang, Peter. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende's Novels. Ed. Sonia R. Rojas and Edna A. Rehbein. Vol. 14. New York: Peter Lang & American University Studies, 1991. Print. XXII.
Levine, Linda G. "Weaving Life into Fiction." Isabel Allende Today. Ed. Rosemary G. Feal and Yvette E. Miller. Pittsburg: Latin American Literary Review, 2002. 1-28. Print.
Mujica, Barbara. "The Life Force of Language." Contemporary Literary Criticism Select 47.6 (1995): 36-43. Print.
Perricone, Catherine R. "Allende and Valenzuela: Dissecting the Patriarchy." South Atlantic Review Spanish American Fiction in the 1990s 67.4 (2002): 80-105. Print.
Pinto, Magdalena G. "Chile's Troubadour." Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 53-76. Print.
--- Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Trans. Trudy Balch and Magdalena G. Pinto. Austin: University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Ramblado-Minero, María de la Cinta. Isabel Allende's Writing of the Self: Trespassing the Boundaries of Fiction and Autobiography. Vol. 77. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003. Print.
Ruta, Suzanne. "Lovers and Storytellers." Ed. Janet Witalec. Short Story Criticism 65
(2004): 10. Print.
Isabel Allende was born on 2 August 1942 to Francisca Llona Barros and Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomat and the first cousin of Salvador Allende (Erro-Peralta). At a very young age, her parents divorced, forcing Allende and her mother to live with her maternal grandparents (Ibid). Growing up in the home of her grandparents Allende benefitted from intellectual freedom as well as access to a large home library (Pinto 23). In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende revealed that her mother was the most important person in her life (Ibid). Although she passed away when Allende was quite young, her grandmother was also influential in her life; she bequeathed to her granddaughter a legacy of great storytelling (Erro-Peralta).
As a child, Allende also extensively travelled the world after her mother remarried to another diplomat (Erro Perralta). At age fifteen she returned to Chile to complete her high school education (Ibid). Then, after graduating at age sixteen, she worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for the United Nations before discovering her aptitude for journalism (Ibid). While working for a television program, writing children’s stories, producing children’s plays, and editing the successful children’s magazine Mampato, Allende found time to write a column called “Impertinentes” (Impertinences) for Paula, a reformist women’s magazine (Ibid). In 1962, Allende married Miguel Frías- her childhood sweetheart (Pinto 24). They went on to have two children together.
On 11 September 1973, in a military coup d’ état, General Augusto Pinochet took over Chile and established a regime that lasted until 11 March 1990 (Dorfman 1). Days later, Pinochet ordered the Chilean Air Force to bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende resided, completing the coup with the assassination of Chile’s democratically elected president (20). The betrayal involved in this act was atrocious, as President Allende had promoted Pinochet to the position of Commander in Chief of the Army of Chile just nineteen days before on 23 August 1973 (22). During the reign of terror that seized the country, the government used the National Stadium for several months as a concentration camp in a gross transgression against human rights (1-2, 14). There, they interrogated, tortured, and killed more than two thousand Chileans, who came to be known as the desaparecidos (disappeared)—people whom they catured in brutal police raids who were in the least suspected of supporting Salvador Allende or opposing Pinochet’s regime (Ensalaco 19). In many cases, it remains unknown even today why various individuals were executed and others freed after their tortuous incarcerations (73). Frequently, the government disposed of the executed by flying over the ocean to dump the bodies in the sea, or in rivers (74). In the years that followed, unemployment rates reached almost 70 percent, in large part due to Pinochet’s habit of selling profit-producing public enterprises at substandard low prices to private buyers (Dorfman 43-44).
During an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende describes her family’s struggles during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship. “The military coup split my life in half with the blow of a hatchet,” Allende described (26). At first, the Chileans did not fully understand what was going on; neither did they entirely know what a military coup was, or what torture entailed, except in referenced to the Middle Ages or the Inquisition (26-27). Most believed that after a few days, the soldiers would return to their barracks, there would be another election, and democracy would be reinstated; but this was not to be (Allende, Mi Pais 187-88). “I’m not very brave,” Allende admitted, “and after a few months I came to believe that any direct action [against the regime] would mean an enormous risk for me and for my family” (Pinto 26-27). However, according to an article by Nora Erro-Peralta, “Confronted with the repression and violence instituted by the military dictatorship, she joined the efforts of church-sponsored groups in providing food and aid to the needy and families of victims of the regime.” Allende explained to Pinto that she and her husband picked Venezuela for their self-exile because, as a journalist, Allende needed to work in a Spanish-speaking country. Also, Venezuela was the only country under that category where they could easily obtain passports, where the economy was doing well enough that foreigners could obtain jobs, and where no fascist dictatorship dominated (Pinto 27).
When they first moved to Caracas, Venezuela, Isabel Allende suffered from the well-known problem of writer’s block, and so she decided to work for several years as a teacher and then as an administrator (Erro-Peralta). Eventually, she was hired at a leading Venezuelan newspaper, El Nacional, as a reporter and satirical writer. It was not until she heard about the imminent death of her grandfather that she wrote her first novel, which began as a letter, encouraging him to never give up hope for life, and ended as a 500 page novel entitled La casa de los espiritus (Ibid). The novel was initially banned in Chile because of Pinochet’s censorship, and so it was smuggled into the country, sometimes even in diaper bags; later, however, the regime lifted the ban and her books became bestsellers in her native country (Pinto 38-39).
Eventually, Allende and Frías divorced because he was forced to work in another part of Venezuela away from Isabel and the children, causing their marriage to disintegrate (Allende, Mi Pais 195). In 1988 she remarried to an American lawyer named William Gordon. He who is from California, where they now reside (Hunter). Eva Luna and her subsequent novels were written from the United States, but not without considerable influence from her prior residences. Well-known for her talent in interweaving fiction and reality through her writing, critics “single out [Allende] for her dedication to combating the traditionally patriarchal dominance of Latin American history and tradition by attesting to the significant role of that region’s women, and by emphasizing the importance of family relationships, storytelling, memory writing, survival, and the courage to defy and oppose gender and class divisions” (Ibid).
As Barbara Mujica so accurately stated, reading Eva Luna gives “that sensation of peeling an onion.” The episodic novel closely resembles the picaresque genre, while also serving as a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, for the protagonist, Eva Luna (Erro-Peralta). Allende’s writing holds strong emotional appeal, using personal anecdotes to depict the societal and political concerns of Chile as well as other similar countries (Perricone 83). Although her narrative “embodies, contradicts, or transcends the patriarchal system through the characterization of Spanish American men,” she also uses highly romantic male and female relationships in her stories (83-84).
Eva Luna is set in Venezuela, the place of Allende’s exile from Chile, and in many ways serves as a tribute to her place of asylum from Pinochet’s regime (Ruta). Furthermore, “Eva Luna is Allende’s allegorical representation of her acceptance of the condition of her exile and of her profession as a writer of fiction” (Ramblado-Minero 54). Through the novel, she metaphorically analyzes the advances she made as a Latin American female author (64). She even admitted in an interview that it was only through writing the novel that she finally began to accept herself for who she is as a woman (Rodden 79). In an interview with Farhat Iftekharrudin, Allende stated, “I think that in a weird way, Eva Luna is me or I am Eva Luna. She is a storyteller, and she creates herself.” Nora Erro-Peralta explains that Eva Luna “learns the power of words and how to spin tales that first serve as an escape from a life of abject poverty and eventually pave the road to love, fame, and fortune.”
Eva Luna is conceived when, as a treatment, her mother Consuelo, a housekeeper for the elusive embalmer Professor Jones, sleeps with an elderly Indian gardener who is suffering from a snakebite (Hart 164). Making love to the Indian was Consuelo’s first act performed of her own initiative and against the patriarchal society in which she lived (Davies &Jones 70). By naming her daughter Eva without having her take the Indian’s last name, Consuelo ignores the traditional patriarchal code of assuming the father’s surname. When people protest her decision, she allows Eva to take on the name of her father’s tribe (Luna) as her last name (Diamond-Nigh 137-138). Through Eva Luna, Allende depicts aspects of her own childhood growing up with an absent father. “You will never find a loving father in my books,” Allende once stated (Foster 80). Women in her books are strong and know what they want from the beginning, without the help of men (Ibid).
Consuelo dies when Eva Luna is still young, but not before she passes on her legacy of storytelling and fantasy in much the same way as Allende’s grandmother. To explain her love for the sea, Consuelo invented a story that she was the daughter of a Dutch sailor when, in reality, missionaries found her on the floor of a forest and brought her to live in a convent (Lang 116). According to Susan de Carvalho, “Eva Luna learns from her mother to fantacize, to use her own private world as an escape, a space in which she has the power to create and control her own reality” (77). Similarly, according to Linda Gould Levine in her article Weaving Life into Fiction, “[Allende’s] unbridled imagination and sense of dramatic exaggeration continually refashion real-life experiences and events, even her own, perhaps because like her character, Eva Luna, she tries to live her life as she ‘would like it be, as in a novel’” (2).
After the death of her mother, Eva is left in the charge of the household cook until the death of their benefactor, Professor Jones, forces them to find another home. Eva finds employment at age seven with an old maid and a bachelor who are brother and sister; one day, however, finally weary of the woman’s constant nagging and the man’s sexual advances, Eva flees the home under the pretense of shopping at the market. Now homeless and on the streets, Eva meets a boy named Huberto Naranjo, who teaches her the art of pick-pocketing as well as other means of survival. Eventually, Eva decides to return to her previous employers because of the assurance of food and shelter that she has there. This time, she charms the cook, Elvira, with her story-telling abilities, becoming like her granddaughter. Later, Eva is fired, and moves around for a time, working a variety of jobs. In a particularly interesting episode, she works for a minister who, each night in his bedroom, relieves himself in a felt-covered chair with a chamber pot in the seat. Her job is to clean up his mess each morning. Ultimately fed up with his laziness and the stench of her duty, one morning Eva dumps the contents of the chamber-pot over the man’s head before fleeing the house forever.
At the end of her resources, she searches the city for her old friend who helped her in her time of distress several years earlier—Huberto Naranjo. He takes her to the proprietor of a brothel, la Señora, telling her that Eva is his sister and an excellent storyteller who should be used only for this purpose. There, Eva meets a transvestite named Melecio, and they become close friends. During her stay at the brothel, Eva begins her education. When police shut-down the brothel, Eva is forced onto the streets once more. A Turkish merchant then takes her to his home in the jungle to care for his sickly wife, where he sexually abuses Eva and then later accuses her of murder when his wife commits suicide. After staying in jail until she is proven innocent, Eva once again meets Melecio, who has undergone extensive surgery to be converted into a woman, and who is now called Mimi. Eva continues her education while simultaneously working in a factory. Her renewed friendship with the now guerrilla commander, Huberto Naranjo, sparks into romance for a while until he tells her that he is fighting a “man’s war” in which she cannot participate.
After rejecting sexual advances from another factory worker, Eva leaves and begins a new job script- writing for television soap operas. When Huberto Naranjo and other guerrilla soldiers are imprisoned, Eva aids them in their escape, and then carefully weaves her experiences into her television scripts. She soon meets a German photo-journalist named Rolf Carlé (whose story has been told in third person intermittently throughout Eva Luna’s first person narrative) who has fled his country to escape the shame he feels because of his father’s participation in the Nazi atrocities of World War II. A romance ignites between the two that takes reader through the remaining episodes of the novel.
Eva Luna and Isabel Allende are comparable on many levels. First of all, they both tell stories to survive. Similarly to Eva, when her daughter Paula contracted an fatal disease, Allende told stories in the hospital in exchange for food (Ramblado-Minero 66). Next, Allende’s exile from Chile to Venezuela is comparable to the episode in which, after finally finding a home of equality and acceptance, Eva is forced to leave the brothel ad her friends there and live in the jungle. The police who raid the brothel represent the Armed Forces of Chile who took over Chile as part of Pinochet’s regime took (67).
Later, Eva is unable to voice her support of Huberto Narjanjo and the guerrilla forces because of the repression of free speech; however, she uses her storytelling capabilities to write her opinions into her scripts in such a way that she cannot be indicted. Similarly, although in large part because Isabel Allende was related to the assassinated President Salvador Allende but also because of Pinochet’s regime, she was unable to voice her sympathies through journalism without jeopardizing her safety. It was not until she began writing novels that she truly began to speak out against the atrocities in Pinochet’s regime. Allende displays the impact her exile to Venezuela had on her life through her novel, as Eva Luna is constantly seeking a home and a job in which she can freely develop her own personal identity as a Latin American woman and storyteller. Eva Luna writes similarly to Allende, too. As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “For Eva, the first writing experience is an exercise of memory, in which she recollects her mother’s legacy and her own experiences in order to manipulate them according to her own will” (70). Likewise, in an interview, Allende stated that “A novel is made up partly of truth and partly of fantasy. The author uses something of experience and knowledge and something of his or her own angels and demons to create a personal vision of life…Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality” (Agosin 48). Allende’s writing is a remembrance of her past, but with a spin— she rewrites the history of her novels to contradict the standard patriarchy through strong protagonists like Eva Luna.
In Eva Luna, after receiving an education, the protagonist is opened up to many opportunities that did not previously exist. The same is true of Allende and other Latin American women. Studies show that, in Latin American coutries, education and socioeconomic status directly correlate in Latin American countries to political involvement among women (Aviel 157). Furthermore, most Latin America women work until they are married, and afterwards only ten percent continue their jobs, which amounts to a thirteen percent total of active women in the Latin American workforce as a whole (158). The majority of Latin American countries did not grant women suffrage until after World War II; but even though they now have the right to vote, most women do not participate in elections unless education opens their eyes to civic duty (158). Even then, Chilean women vote separately from men, who frequently influence the way in which they vote (159). Additionally, because their patriarchal society considers motherhood to be the sole responsibility of the females, “the most important problem for [Chilean] women was their economic situation and the second most important problem was marriage” (160). Without this basic understanding of the role of the family in the lives of Latin American women, it is impossible to understand the struggles they have overcome to gain a voice. In 1968, official surveys revealed that more than 84 percent of Chilean women did not participate in organizations, such as the one Isabel Allende’s aided during the early months of Pinochet’s rule (161). Allende worked to make changes in the patriarchy and to create awareness of the plight of marginalized Latin American women, but she did so alone, without joining a larger radical organization.
In conclusion, through her novels Isabel Allende not only reveals many aspects of her personal life and the difficult events of her past, but she also works against the traditional Latin American patriarchal codes to pave new for Latin American women. However, it seems that her ultimate goal in writing is equality without marginalization in “a more just and free society”, as she explains that feminism is not a war against men, but a joint effort of the genders to create such a world (Pinto, “Chile’s” 73). As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “In Eva Luna, the social worries of the author are represented in the main character, a servant’s illegitimate child who will prosper in life through her own work, but with her social origin ever present” (145). Allende, likewise, is constantly dogged by critics who distrust the work of Latin American women, but she continues to write her stories, winning over thousands of readers of multiple tongues.
Works Cited
Agosin, Marjorie. "Pirate, Conjurer, Feminist." Trans. Cola Franzen. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 44-52. Print.
Allende, Isabel. Eva Luna. New York: Harper Collins, 1987. Print.
--- Mi Pais Inventado. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.
Aviel, JoAnn F. "Political Participation of Women in Latin America." The Western Political Quarterly 34.1 (1981): 156-73. Print.
Carbalho, Susan De. "Escrituras y Escritores: The Artist-Protagonist of Isabel Allende." Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 75-82. Print.
Diamond-Nigh, Lynne. "Eva Luna: Writing as History." Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Isabel Allende. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 133-44. Print.
Dorfman, Ariel. Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. New York: Seven Stories, 2002. Print.
Ensalaco, Mark. Chile Bajo Pinochet: La Recuperacion de la Verdad. Madrid: University of Pennslyvania, 2000. Print.
Erro-Peralta, Nora. "Isabel Allende." Ed. William Luis and Ann Gonzalez. Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers 2nd ser. 145 (1994). Print.
Foster, Douglas. "Isabel Allende Unveiled." Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 77-85. Print.
Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UPes, 1989. Print.
Hunter, Jeffrey W., ed. "Isabel Allende." Contemporary Literary Criticism 264 (2009). Print.
Iftekharuddin, Farhat. "An Interview with Isabel Allende." Ed. Janet Witalec. Short Story Criticism 65 (1997): 3-14. Print.
Jones, Anny B., and Catherine Davies. Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Lang, Peter. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende's Novels. Ed. Sonia R. Rojas and Edna A. Rehbein. Vol. 14. New York: Peter Lang & American University Studies, 1991. Print. XXII.
Levine, Linda G. "Weaving Life into Fiction." Isabel Allende Today. Ed. Rosemary G. Feal and Yvette E. Miller. Pittsburg: Latin American Literary Review, 2002. 1-28. Print.
Mujica, Barbara. "The Life Force of Language." Contemporary Literary Criticism Select 47.6 (1995): 36-43. Print.
Perricone, Catherine R. "Allende and Valenzuela: Dissecting the Patriarchy." South Atlantic Review Spanish American Fiction in the 1990s 67.4 (2002): 80-105. Print.
Pinto, Magdalena G. "Chile's Troubadour." Conversations with Isabel Allende. Ed. John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas, 2004. 53-76. Print.
--- Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Trans. Trudy Balch and Magdalena G. Pinto. Austin: University of Texas, 1991. Print.
Ramblado-Minero, María de la Cinta. Isabel Allende's Writing of the Self: Trespassing the Boundaries of Fiction and Autobiography. Vol. 77. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003. Print.
Ruta, Suzanne. "Lovers and Storytellers." Ed. Janet Witalec. Short Story Criticism 65
(2004): 10. Print.
My Paso Fino (A Memoir)
Clicking with my tongue and raising the whip ever so slightly with my right hand, I sent Rio to the left around the red metal ring. His feet seemed to never touch the ground as he moved from the paso fino walk to the intricate paso corto gait of his breed. With its icy blasts, the wind whispering through the trees lifted his silky mane that never tangles, giving him a wild and untamed looked. Glancing at the skies, I wondered if it would snow, covering the ground with powder the color of Rio’s coat. I shivered in apprehension, and turned my full attention to the task at hand.
After a few turns around the edge of the ring, I moved the whip to my left hand to see how well Rio was paying attention to me. Snorting at the loud sound of the dual-mufflers of the early 90’s Pontiac Grand Am that sped by on the country road bordering the field, Rio ignored my subtle command to change directions. Okay. The time had come to pay attention, to get down to business. It was time to whip Rio into shape. Establish control. Demand respect. Show the beautiful but young and green-broke Paso Fino who was boss and bridge the gap that hindered him from being a good partner.
Pushing him to his fast, four-beat gait, the paso largo, my vision narrowed, focusing in on the muscle tone that covered his shoulders and hind quarters, which carried him careening around the ring almost as quickly as the Grand Am that had sped by moments earlier. Within seconds, all I could see were flaring nostrils, gliding muscles, and glossy mane and tail floating through the still, cold air. Sweat glistened on the sleek white coat that sported tiny flecks of barely perceptible brown interspersed at regular intervals throughout the graceful hide of my Paso Fino, Rio. Colors whirred by and blended into one at the edges of his white coat as we turned about the ring, around and around and around. I was at the center, barely moving in a circle as he floated rapidly around me, yet he was the focal point, the true the center, the object of all my attentions and the concentration of all my senses. The effect was almost dizzying as the horse and I became like one.
Rio tested the limits by periodically trying to come into the center of the ring to stop and change directions before I gave the command, but I scolded Rio and moved my body according to the language of his species, the nonverbal language he knows, to send him loping on as I instructed. Despite the tunnel vision and incredible focus I had on him, my thoughts drifted to memories of the times I’d almost hated this infernal horse, and I wondered how we were now so much alike, so one, in complete and perfect understanding of one another. I remembered the time he’d knocked me flat on the ground in an attempt to steal the bucket of food from my hands before I was ready to give it to him. Oh, I had been furious, ready to sell the little fiend and have him off my hands!
Growing up with horses, I had always been unquestioningly in control and never afraid of these large beasts that weighed endless hundreds of pounds more than I. At that moment though, when the fierce and hungry aggression of my little but feisty Paso Fino took me off my feet, I felt a moment of fear. It angered me because I had never been one to feel fear. Today I would win back my confidence, gain my control, and demand the respect of this spirited gelding.
Duh-duh-dah-dum, duh-duh-dah-dum, duh-duh-dah-dum… as I heard the rapid, four-beat cadence of Rio’s hooves on the ground, I couldn’t wait for the moment when I could feel that smooth and even rhythm beneath my knees, and I relished the thought of how wonderful that wild and untamed speed would be when it was a controlled power under my direction. This time, as I switched the whip to my left hand, Rio immediately whirled around, changing directions to canter to the right around the ring as naturally if there were a fork in the river that he was navigating. We were getting there. He was listening. He was paying attention to my every move. He was giving me the respect I demanded.
I recalled the anger I felt towards him not many weeks before when he had been so defiant and difficult to saddle and bridle, and nearly impossible to ride. I felt a twinge of remorse as I remembered how infuriated I had become with the beast, only to later find out that he had been bitten on the underside of his jaw by the baby Copperhead snake I had killed right outside of his stall not long after. I had completely mistaken his behavior as defiance and rude impulse, when, in reality, he was hurting and didn’t understand what had happened to him or how to convey his pain to me.
It wasn’t like that now. Now we understood each other perfectly. I breathed to the tempo of his flaring nostrils. My heart beat to the wild yet peaceful sound of his hooves moving in their unique way around the ring. We were one now. As I dropped my whip, stopped moving, and yelled “Whoa! Whoa there Rio!” The graceful horse stopped immediately, lowering his head in a sign of submission and obedience as he walked to stand behind me in the ring. As I walked in tight circles or drunkard-like zig-zags around the pen, Rio followed me and emulated my every turn. This was it. This was what it was all about. I demanded respect, and now he gave it in full. I knew that with a flick of my whip and the click of my tongue he would go instantly careening around the ring again as I instructed. He would remain at whatever speed I commanded without stopping until I said so- even if it were for days on end, not because of fear or out of drudgery, but because he understood me and no longer needed to assert himself.
As I mounted onto his bare back, it felt as if the horse and I were molded into one creature, never to be separated again. Leaning down to open the gate, I directed him through it with my knees. Then, away we galloped into the fields that surrounded the barn, moving rapidly towards the horizon. The sun was setting in a vibrant array of colors that made the wintry clouds look like cotton balls dipped in paint. My hair whipped in the wind in just the way I had watched Rio’s mane earlier. When finally I slowed him down and we halted near the pond to look at the gentle ripples from the wind and the reflection of the sunset in the water, I was breathless with the exhilaration of the oneness and control that two wild and untamed sprits could experience through simple understanding. We meandered back to the barn, and when I slid gently off his back to the ground, Rio lowered his head for me to rub his face in encouragement. I knew at that moment that I had a companion and a confidante that would remain loyal to me until the day he dies. No more anger, frustration and misunderstanding. Now I knew his language and he knew mine. Now we understood each other utterly and completely. He knew what I expected and wanted to give that in return. Now he would listen to me, and I, in turn, would tune in to his wave link. I had a friend for life.
After a few turns around the edge of the ring, I moved the whip to my left hand to see how well Rio was paying attention to me. Snorting at the loud sound of the dual-mufflers of the early 90’s Pontiac Grand Am that sped by on the country road bordering the field, Rio ignored my subtle command to change directions. Okay. The time had come to pay attention, to get down to business. It was time to whip Rio into shape. Establish control. Demand respect. Show the beautiful but young and green-broke Paso Fino who was boss and bridge the gap that hindered him from being a good partner.
Pushing him to his fast, four-beat gait, the paso largo, my vision narrowed, focusing in on the muscle tone that covered his shoulders and hind quarters, which carried him careening around the ring almost as quickly as the Grand Am that had sped by moments earlier. Within seconds, all I could see were flaring nostrils, gliding muscles, and glossy mane and tail floating through the still, cold air. Sweat glistened on the sleek white coat that sported tiny flecks of barely perceptible brown interspersed at regular intervals throughout the graceful hide of my Paso Fino, Rio. Colors whirred by and blended into one at the edges of his white coat as we turned about the ring, around and around and around. I was at the center, barely moving in a circle as he floated rapidly around me, yet he was the focal point, the true the center, the object of all my attentions and the concentration of all my senses. The effect was almost dizzying as the horse and I became like one.
Rio tested the limits by periodically trying to come into the center of the ring to stop and change directions before I gave the command, but I scolded Rio and moved my body according to the language of his species, the nonverbal language he knows, to send him loping on as I instructed. Despite the tunnel vision and incredible focus I had on him, my thoughts drifted to memories of the times I’d almost hated this infernal horse, and I wondered how we were now so much alike, so one, in complete and perfect understanding of one another. I remembered the time he’d knocked me flat on the ground in an attempt to steal the bucket of food from my hands before I was ready to give it to him. Oh, I had been furious, ready to sell the little fiend and have him off my hands!
Growing up with horses, I had always been unquestioningly in control and never afraid of these large beasts that weighed endless hundreds of pounds more than I. At that moment though, when the fierce and hungry aggression of my little but feisty Paso Fino took me off my feet, I felt a moment of fear. It angered me because I had never been one to feel fear. Today I would win back my confidence, gain my control, and demand the respect of this spirited gelding.
Duh-duh-dah-dum, duh-duh-dah-dum, duh-duh-dah-dum… as I heard the rapid, four-beat cadence of Rio’s hooves on the ground, I couldn’t wait for the moment when I could feel that smooth and even rhythm beneath my knees, and I relished the thought of how wonderful that wild and untamed speed would be when it was a controlled power under my direction. This time, as I switched the whip to my left hand, Rio immediately whirled around, changing directions to canter to the right around the ring as naturally if there were a fork in the river that he was navigating. We were getting there. He was listening. He was paying attention to my every move. He was giving me the respect I demanded.
I recalled the anger I felt towards him not many weeks before when he had been so defiant and difficult to saddle and bridle, and nearly impossible to ride. I felt a twinge of remorse as I remembered how infuriated I had become with the beast, only to later find out that he had been bitten on the underside of his jaw by the baby Copperhead snake I had killed right outside of his stall not long after. I had completely mistaken his behavior as defiance and rude impulse, when, in reality, he was hurting and didn’t understand what had happened to him or how to convey his pain to me.
It wasn’t like that now. Now we understood each other perfectly. I breathed to the tempo of his flaring nostrils. My heart beat to the wild yet peaceful sound of his hooves moving in their unique way around the ring. We were one now. As I dropped my whip, stopped moving, and yelled “Whoa! Whoa there Rio!” The graceful horse stopped immediately, lowering his head in a sign of submission and obedience as he walked to stand behind me in the ring. As I walked in tight circles or drunkard-like zig-zags around the pen, Rio followed me and emulated my every turn. This was it. This was what it was all about. I demanded respect, and now he gave it in full. I knew that with a flick of my whip and the click of my tongue he would go instantly careening around the ring again as I instructed. He would remain at whatever speed I commanded without stopping until I said so- even if it were for days on end, not because of fear or out of drudgery, but because he understood me and no longer needed to assert himself.
As I mounted onto his bare back, it felt as if the horse and I were molded into one creature, never to be separated again. Leaning down to open the gate, I directed him through it with my knees. Then, away we galloped into the fields that surrounded the barn, moving rapidly towards the horizon. The sun was setting in a vibrant array of colors that made the wintry clouds look like cotton balls dipped in paint. My hair whipped in the wind in just the way I had watched Rio’s mane earlier. When finally I slowed him down and we halted near the pond to look at the gentle ripples from the wind and the reflection of the sunset in the water, I was breathless with the exhilaration of the oneness and control that two wild and untamed sprits could experience through simple understanding. We meandered back to the barn, and when I slid gently off his back to the ground, Rio lowered his head for me to rub his face in encouragement. I knew at that moment that I had a companion and a confidante that would remain loyal to me until the day he dies. No more anger, frustration and misunderstanding. Now I knew his language and he knew mine. Now we understood each other utterly and completely. He knew what I expected and wanted to give that in return. Now he would listen to me, and I, in turn, would tune in to his wave link. I had a friend for life.
St. John's
“Guys, pack your bags because next week we’re going on an overdue family vacation to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands!” my dad announced after a lengthy discussion with my mom about whether or not the four of us kids could miss a week of classes. . Just two weeks before on November 2, 2004, my dad, Justice Paul Martin Newby, was elected to an eight-year term on the North Carolina Supreme Court after a long and arduous campaign against seven other candidates. Now, finally, our family was getting away from the hustle and bustle of political life to enjoy a week of relaxation and family time on a tropical island.
After a long flight with a layover in Miami, my family landed in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands ready for a weeklong vacation with our close family friends the Wilsons. The sun began to set as we rode the ferry from St. Thomas to St. John. The Wilsons, who had arrived a couple days earlier, met us at the ferry-stop with our rental car for the week, which was also the standard island taxi— a small white Ford pick-up with benches in the back and a blue canopy-cover to protect passengers in case of rain. All ten of us piled on and headed to the villa that we rented for the week. The neighborhood was full of beautiful villas of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and the streets were lined with rhododendrons and other tropical flowers in full bloom.
Inside, much to the relief of everyone’s on-edge emotions, the villa was beyond spacious. In addition to the large community area, kitchen, and dining room upstairs, there were three large bedrooms—one for each set of parents and another for the three boys to share. “You girls get a room all to yourselves downstairs!” Dr. Wilson announced as he led his daughter Stacey, my sister Sarah, and me out the back door and down a set of stone stairs to the heated pool. A set of double glass doors on the other side of the pool and surrounding patio opened into our room. It was huge—nearly the size of the community area in the floor above it. The two queen-sized beds were neatly made, and the curtains drawn back from the sliding glass doors that enclosed three sides of the bedroom. As the last rays of sun slowly faded from the horizon, everyone convened on the upstairs back porch that overlooked a magnificent bay to plan our week’s activities after moving our things in.
For the rest of the week, we spent our days in the sunshine and water, enjoying the sights and the aquatic activities. “Don’t you want to put on some higher SPF sunscreen?” my mom asked me everyday. “No thanks,” I always replied as I slathered on dark tanning oil, determined to return to my high school for that last week of November with a tan as dark as I usually had in the summer.
Although I was too young to fully appreciate all that surrounded me during our vacation, two elements of the island culture have stuck in my mind to this day. First, the kitchen of our villa was stocked with all varieties of complementary rums, liquors, and beers. It looked like the whole alcoholic beverages aisle from Kroger along with parts of the liquor store had been misplaced in our cupboard. Apparently this was commonplace hospitality on the island. My parents, the upstanding Southern Baptists that they are, do not drink. One night, they called us children into the kitchen where they proceeded to open a particularly potent bottle of rum and require us each to taste it. They presumed that when you are fourteen, sixteen, twelve and eight, and rum alone is your first drink you are going to hate it. “See, it doesn’t even taste good at all!” I remember my mom emphasizing. “Now when people offer you alcohol you can say you’ve tried it and therefore have plausible deniability that you do not like it,” my dad chimed in his most judicial sounding voice. It seemed like they went on for an hour talking about the evils of such drinks.
In addition to the drinking culture, were the hand-crocheted tams that all of the island men wore over their long dreadlocks. They even made imitation headpieces with fake dreadlocks attached to the tams. My dad bought one as a joke. It was striped red, yellow, black, and green. Although many of the islanders could have passes for Bob Marley, even with the tam-wig apparatus, my balding father had no chance at such a disguise.
The salt water was clear as glass and warm enough to snorkel as long as you kept moving. Coral reefs dyed the ocean floor in many areas a vibrant crimson and provided excellent hiding spots for a wide variety of sea life. In the shallower areas were all sorts of Angelfish and other smaller, bright-colored and uniquely shaped fish. Although we had several underwater cameras, they could not capture the beauty of the place. One afternoon, my dad, brothers and I swam out quite far into one bay. All of a sudden, my dad grabbed my arm and silently pointed off to the right. Not far off was a school of nearly twenty squid. Their translucent bodies left inky-smudges in the glassy water as their slender tentacles propelled them along to a nearby outcropping of coral.
The next day, we drove for nearly an hour to the other side of the island to another bay that a native had recommended to us for snorkeling. It had stormed the night before, and so the surf was up, the wind was blowing, and the waves were crashing. It was difficult to get past the breakers, but after fighting our way out, we realized that the bottom dropped of sharply. With a few kicks of our flippered feet we were in water twenty to fifty feet deep depending on the exact location where you were. It was incredible. My siblings and I learned to swim practically as soon as we could walk so the depth was not frightening; however, when some fish that seemed larger than we were swam past several feet below us, my heart raced a bit. Several stingrays glided past, fascinating me to no end with their wingspans that seemed larger than my own. That was before Steve Urwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed when one of their barbs pierced his heart. Because of the cool wind blowing off the ocean and the cooler temperatures of the deeper what that the sun had not yet fully warned, I became chilled and decided to swim to shore, a decision I later very much regretted. My dad and brothers stayed out for at least an hour more and were able to see two sea turtles and a nurse shark with her offspring.
Sadly, at the end of the week, we were forced to pack our bags, say goodbye to our lovely villa, and return home. We almost missed the ferry back to St. Thomas to catch the plane home. I kept my fingers crossed as we sped to the ferry landing, much to my parents chagrin. I never have understood why they were in such a hurry to return to the harsh world of reality of political life.
After a long flight with a layover in Miami, my family landed in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands ready for a weeklong vacation with our close family friends the Wilsons. The sun began to set as we rode the ferry from St. Thomas to St. John. The Wilsons, who had arrived a couple days earlier, met us at the ferry-stop with our rental car for the week, which was also the standard island taxi— a small white Ford pick-up with benches in the back and a blue canopy-cover to protect passengers in case of rain. All ten of us piled on and headed to the villa that we rented for the week. The neighborhood was full of beautiful villas of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and the streets were lined with rhododendrons and other tropical flowers in full bloom.
Inside, much to the relief of everyone’s on-edge emotions, the villa was beyond spacious. In addition to the large community area, kitchen, and dining room upstairs, there were three large bedrooms—one for each set of parents and another for the three boys to share. “You girls get a room all to yourselves downstairs!” Dr. Wilson announced as he led his daughter Stacey, my sister Sarah, and me out the back door and down a set of stone stairs to the heated pool. A set of double glass doors on the other side of the pool and surrounding patio opened into our room. It was huge—nearly the size of the community area in the floor above it. The two queen-sized beds were neatly made, and the curtains drawn back from the sliding glass doors that enclosed three sides of the bedroom. As the last rays of sun slowly faded from the horizon, everyone convened on the upstairs back porch that overlooked a magnificent bay to plan our week’s activities after moving our things in.
For the rest of the week, we spent our days in the sunshine and water, enjoying the sights and the aquatic activities. “Don’t you want to put on some higher SPF sunscreen?” my mom asked me everyday. “No thanks,” I always replied as I slathered on dark tanning oil, determined to return to my high school for that last week of November with a tan as dark as I usually had in the summer.
Although I was too young to fully appreciate all that surrounded me during our vacation, two elements of the island culture have stuck in my mind to this day. First, the kitchen of our villa was stocked with all varieties of complementary rums, liquors, and beers. It looked like the whole alcoholic beverages aisle from Kroger along with parts of the liquor store had been misplaced in our cupboard. Apparently this was commonplace hospitality on the island. My parents, the upstanding Southern Baptists that they are, do not drink. One night, they called us children into the kitchen where they proceeded to open a particularly potent bottle of rum and require us each to taste it. They presumed that when you are fourteen, sixteen, twelve and eight, and rum alone is your first drink you are going to hate it. “See, it doesn’t even taste good at all!” I remember my mom emphasizing. “Now when people offer you alcohol you can say you’ve tried it and therefore have plausible deniability that you do not like it,” my dad chimed in his most judicial sounding voice. It seemed like they went on for an hour talking about the evils of such drinks.
In addition to the drinking culture, were the hand-crocheted tams that all of the island men wore over their long dreadlocks. They even made imitation headpieces with fake dreadlocks attached to the tams. My dad bought one as a joke. It was striped red, yellow, black, and green. Although many of the islanders could have passes for Bob Marley, even with the tam-wig apparatus, my balding father had no chance at such a disguise.
The salt water was clear as glass and warm enough to snorkel as long as you kept moving. Coral reefs dyed the ocean floor in many areas a vibrant crimson and provided excellent hiding spots for a wide variety of sea life. In the shallower areas were all sorts of Angelfish and other smaller, bright-colored and uniquely shaped fish. Although we had several underwater cameras, they could not capture the beauty of the place. One afternoon, my dad, brothers and I swam out quite far into one bay. All of a sudden, my dad grabbed my arm and silently pointed off to the right. Not far off was a school of nearly twenty squid. Their translucent bodies left inky-smudges in the glassy water as their slender tentacles propelled them along to a nearby outcropping of coral.
The next day, we drove for nearly an hour to the other side of the island to another bay that a native had recommended to us for snorkeling. It had stormed the night before, and so the surf was up, the wind was blowing, and the waves were crashing. It was difficult to get past the breakers, but after fighting our way out, we realized that the bottom dropped of sharply. With a few kicks of our flippered feet we were in water twenty to fifty feet deep depending on the exact location where you were. It was incredible. My siblings and I learned to swim practically as soon as we could walk so the depth was not frightening; however, when some fish that seemed larger than we were swam past several feet below us, my heart raced a bit. Several stingrays glided past, fascinating me to no end with their wingspans that seemed larger than my own. That was before Steve Urwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed when one of their barbs pierced his heart. Because of the cool wind blowing off the ocean and the cooler temperatures of the deeper what that the sun had not yet fully warned, I became chilled and decided to swim to shore, a decision I later very much regretted. My dad and brothers stayed out for at least an hour more and were able to see two sea turtles and a nurse shark with her offspring.
Sadly, at the end of the week, we were forced to pack our bags, say goodbye to our lovely villa, and return home. We almost missed the ferry back to St. Thomas to catch the plane home. I kept my fingers crossed as we sped to the ferry landing, much to my parents chagrin. I never have understood why they were in such a hurry to return to the harsh world of reality of political life.
A Child Placed
From the moment your coming was announced, you only knew love. You were only with us for a brief three days, but you will be in my heart for the rest of my life. You were surrounded by enough love to fill a lifetime. My arms are empty but my heart is full. Adoption means in the Bible “a child placed.” Truly God lead me in the selection of your adoptive parents. I want you to know that I love you, you touched my life and I will never be the same. I do not understand, but I trust.
I just found out that I’m pregnant and I have no idea what to do or think. The baby is due in January 1990, the 13th to be exact. I still have another three semesters at the University of West Virginia before I can graduate. What am I going to do? What will my parents, Ray and Jackie, say?
You are loved by your birth mother and your grandparents. I thank the Lord for my parents. My mom and I have gotten very close through this and I’m thankful for that. Many girls in my situation don’t have parental support, and so I’m thankful for my loving, giving parents.
What will Dennis think? Will he want anything to do with the child I carry inside of me? Will he want to marry me? Would I even consider marrying him? What if he wants me to abort? Should I raise my tiny, beautiful baby girl or give her up? How is this going to affect the remainder of all of our lives?
For some reason God wanted you to be formed with the genes from Dennis and I. God is the Father and He will be your Father. I know this is His will. He is the Creator, the Father, and He allowed you to be created, and I believe that He will be your Father and that He will watch over you just as He has watched over me and kept me strong.
Well, he decided he wanted nothing to do with the baby or me once he found out. I just don’t get it. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. I’ve decided to give you up for adoption through Bethany Christian Services. Three days after your birth, they will place you in a foster home until Dennis agrees to sign the papers allowing your adoption into a wonderful family that I have lovingly picked out from among Bethany’s registry.
Dennis signed the papers on February 26th. I’m so thankful that Dennis cooperated so willingly. I just cannot understand his disinterest in knowing about you, what you look like, etc. His own flesh and blood, his first child, and he has no idea what a beautiful little girl you are. I suppose that disassociating himself from you and me is his way of dealing with it—pretending that you don’t exist and that I don’t either.
The adoption is to be closed. For my baby’s first year I will receive monthly photos and notes from her adoptive mother via Bethany Christian Services. After that, I won’t hear anything until she turns eighteen—and even that is indefinite. I am writing her a letter that Bethany will mail her on her eighteenth birthday. I will explain why I gave her up, tell her how much I love her, and let her know how to get in touch with me if ever she feels she wants to.
It doesn’t seem fair at times that I won’t know anything for 18 years. But, would it be fair to you to grow up in a single parent home? No. It is so hard to remind myself to be selfless not selfish! God led me to place you with your family. The decision to give you to your parents and brother was a very difficult and painful decision to make. It was a decision made only after many hours of prayer, counsel, and long thought. You are not a child “left on a doorstep” by any means. The decision to give you up for adoption was not a financial decision, rather, it was a decision made out of love for you and based on God’s will. I had to give you the best chance I could possibly give you in this life and that chance involved being reared by two loving parents, not just one. I do not understand, but I trust that God has a special plan for you. You are in my thoughts and prayers daily, not only for your welfare, but also I pray that one day we will be reunited. Until that reunion, however, I commit you to God’s care, for He can care for you as no one else can.
I just found out that I’m pregnant and I have no idea what to do or think. The baby is due in January 1990, the 13th to be exact. I still have another three semesters at the University of West Virginia before I can graduate. What am I going to do? What will my parents, Ray and Jackie, say?
You are loved by your birth mother and your grandparents. I thank the Lord for my parents. My mom and I have gotten very close through this and I’m thankful for that. Many girls in my situation don’t have parental support, and so I’m thankful for my loving, giving parents.
What will Dennis think? Will he want anything to do with the child I carry inside of me? Will he want to marry me? Would I even consider marrying him? What if he wants me to abort? Should I raise my tiny, beautiful baby girl or give her up? How is this going to affect the remainder of all of our lives?
For some reason God wanted you to be formed with the genes from Dennis and I. God is the Father and He will be your Father. I know this is His will. He is the Creator, the Father, and He allowed you to be created, and I believe that He will be your Father and that He will watch over you just as He has watched over me and kept me strong.
Well, he decided he wanted nothing to do with the baby or me once he found out. I just don’t get it. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. I’ve decided to give you up for adoption through Bethany Christian Services. Three days after your birth, they will place you in a foster home until Dennis agrees to sign the papers allowing your adoption into a wonderful family that I have lovingly picked out from among Bethany’s registry.
Dennis signed the papers on February 26th. I’m so thankful that Dennis cooperated so willingly. I just cannot understand his disinterest in knowing about you, what you look like, etc. His own flesh and blood, his first child, and he has no idea what a beautiful little girl you are. I suppose that disassociating himself from you and me is his way of dealing with it—pretending that you don’t exist and that I don’t either.
The adoption is to be closed. For my baby’s first year I will receive monthly photos and notes from her adoptive mother via Bethany Christian Services. After that, I won’t hear anything until she turns eighteen—and even that is indefinite. I am writing her a letter that Bethany will mail her on her eighteenth birthday. I will explain why I gave her up, tell her how much I love her, and let her know how to get in touch with me if ever she feels she wants to.
It doesn’t seem fair at times that I won’t know anything for 18 years. But, would it be fair to you to grow up in a single parent home? No. It is so hard to remind myself to be selfless not selfish! God led me to place you with your family. The decision to give you to your parents and brother was a very difficult and painful decision to make. It was a decision made only after many hours of prayer, counsel, and long thought. You are not a child “left on a doorstep” by any means. The decision to give you up for adoption was not a financial decision, rather, it was a decision made out of love for you and based on God’s will. I had to give you the best chance I could possibly give you in this life and that chance involved being reared by two loving parents, not just one. I do not understand, but I trust that God has a special plan for you. You are in my thoughts and prayers daily, not only for your welfare, but also I pray that one day we will be reunited. Until that reunion, however, I commit you to God’s care, for He can care for you as no one else can.
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