I'm enjoying Julia Alvarez's book. I can relate to it a lot. One thing that stands out to me in this book is "el juego de las palabras". This is enhance in chapters specially dedicated to Yolanda/Joe/ Yo since she's a poet/writer/not. I like he play with the Slash thing as well. I thing this is significant when you she says maybe "I should get rid of the slashes between mind, heart/soul, and just right Yo" looking at the body as a whole, as an interlinked system. Mind, heart, body all make Yo. It's also interesting how one person can have different nicknames, ones that they like and ones that they dislike and ones that one wishes to be called but is never called, in Yolanda's case "sky".
I was filled with rage when the grandpa paid more attention to the little born baby boy and no attention to his grand daughter. I can so relate to that, because I know a lot of traditional conservative family friends that wish all the best careers for the little boys and a good husband (with money) for the girls. I have feel
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Delara, I'm really glad you mentioned Alvarez' usage of the slashes. I really enjoyed her implementation of slashes to indicate the fragmentation that has emerged in the identities of the Garcia daughters. Their immigration from the Dominican Republic has left them feeling displaced. The girls feel as though they no longer belong anywhere. Their childhood now only exists in their memories as a mythical past, while their present life in the United States is one with which they will never feel any complete or genuine unity. The girls experience a multiplicity of self, particularly Yolanda as she struggles to feel connected to any of her many nicknames, that complicates their troubling search for identity.
I was also really unhappy when I read that the grandfather payed more attention to the grandSON instead of to his grandDAUGHTER. I think this is something that reaches into the core of many cultures. I'm half Indonesian and I just remember going there and having everybody fawn over my male cousin, who is, well, a deadbeat, instead of my female cousin who is actually doing something with her life.
I feel like Yolanda's playfulness, and sometimes difficulty, with language is important in a few ways. First, it shows that language shapes culture (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), that language sets limits on expression and therefore shapes people's thought processes and therefore their culture as a whole. A nation working within the same confines of language will have the same expressions of culture. So when the girls speak a different language than their parents, this reflects also a different culture and way of thinking from their parents. They have in a way been swallowed up by America by the English language. Language is also important in that words are pale imitations of the things they represent, and so humans are further confined by language, because it is virtually impossible to express perfectly, exactly, a concept because words do not contain real sensory expressions...words aren't visual or auditory, they don't provide a smell etc. Words only provide us with a template from which to imagine something, but what we imagine is never even close to the real thing. In the novel, there are walls between people because of language...it's a very important theme.
i had just been musing about yolanda's relationship with john when i read your post, and was glad to see you mention her desired nickname "sky", or "cielo". when we spoke in class of the importance of language in their relationship, this very example crossed my mind, and i thought that it indicated a significant gap between them. it comes up during a conversation of theirs in the park and leads to this, which i found quite interesting: "and yo was running, like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual john could not catch her, even if he tried" (p 71). i love that simply having access to another language, and therefor, another world, another set of experiences and comparisons, can set two people apart so greatly. it doesn't work to the advantage of the relationship here, but it is nonetheless a little present for yolanda, something she can hold onto and will never lose, like a security blanket of sorts. john's mind isn't compatible with yolanda's and i think it has less to do with the fact that he doesn't speak spanish in particular, and more to do with the fact that he lacks this second layer of comprehension and analysis.
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