I wrote this book mostly to see if I could try to answer these questions, but also because I wanted to bring all those aunts back from the dusty past so that they could become a part of the lives of all my readers. What does it mean to come from another country and become an American? What does it mean if you are born here but your parents or grandparents came from somewhere else? What does it mean to be a little different from the people around you? What does it mean to be a family if your parents break up and your extended family is living far away? And finally, what happens when you’ve got all these questions in your head, and your crazy, smiling, funny, well-meaning, sometimes annoying, sentimental, and magical aunt Lola from the Dominican Republic comes to visit you in Vermont? I thought about a lot of the questions I was asking when we settled down in this country. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. I rolled up all those remembered aunts into one aunt. Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. Years later, I wanted to write those memories down. I left all those aunts behind on the island, but I carried my memories of them in my head. When I was ten, we moved to the United States. Homecoming is Alvarezs first published collection of poetry, a work of great subtlety and power in which the young poet returned to her old-world childhood in. There was Tía Idalita, who was always smiling, and Tía Claudina, who hardly ever smiled, and Tía Laurita, who was sentimental-you had to be careful not to hurt her feelings, and Tía Fofi, who made our clothes and could work a little magic. And Tía Lulú, who told funny stories and loved to play practical jokes on people. There was Tía Rosa, who was a wonderful listener and a great cook. There was Tití, who was always reading books, and who knew the definition of any word without having to look it up in the dictionary. I don’t know about you, but I grew up with so many aunts in the Dominican Republic. At the end, Alverez states that the whole house, and the whole wedding were really from the sweat of the servants who have nothing.To readers of How Tí a Lola Came to (Visit) Stay The series of images relating to Tio’s wanton spending compared to the poverty of the servants is the biggest tension in this poem–monogrammed wedding bells, a dancefloor covered in talc, chinese lanterns, a marzipan cake that looked exactly like the family ranch, champagne kept semi-cold over blocks of ice, every image of a thing is unnatural and overdone–even the image of the groom melting into the frosting is apt, because this celebration is not really about him (notice how he’s barely mentioned through the whole poem). She has a vision that the fields were burning, though she did not understand it at the time, she saw the possibility of revolt sometime in the future. They serve, they make it happen, but they sit on the back stairs eating out of their hands. The whole house is made of sugarcane, cut by the servants–also notably the servants are locked out of the festivities. He offers her the whole place (I’m guessing in marriage, though who knows.) She realizes looking back later that she did not notice the servants, that she had to be re-educated to do that, or at least to understand how she is blind to them. In the meantime she is forced to hang out with her uncle who is disturbingly flirtatious and more than a little tipsy. So we’ve got the bizarre huge wedding that is made to impress some Americans run by a group of invisible servants to do the work. The whole poem reads like a whirl of magical and disturbing facts–her cousin’s family spent a huge amount of money to do the simplest things, like wade in the river which required an armor truck and the river to have been cleaned (and that’s just the beginning)–she was trying to impress “a bewildered group of sumburnt Minnesotans,” her husband’s people. In “Homecoming” Julia Alvarez talks about her experience at a family wedding in the Dominican Republic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |