Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

29 Pages·2007·1.76 MB·English

Imploding the Miranda Complex in
Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia
Girls Lost Their Accents
Jennifer Bess
Jennifer Bess is an assistant pro- A diary like this, with so many blank
pages, seems to reflect a Ufe permeated
fessor of Peace Studies at
with gaps, an existence fuU of holes. But
Coucher College in Baltimore, perhaps that is what happens when one's
experience is so intensely different from
Maryland. Her recent publica-
anything dreamed of as a child that there
tions include studies of the works seems literaUy to be no words for it
(Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a
of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)
Broken Heart).
and Jhumpa Lahiri. I
n Shakespeare's The Tempest, Miranda enjoys
afl the privileges of her father's reign over
the island, yet she also acknowledges that "I
have suffered/With those that I saw suffer!"
(1.2.5-6). She is, as explained by Laura
Donaldson, at once the sole heiress of
Prospero's magical powers and the joint vic-
tim of his tyranny as she suffers with the
saflors being tossed by the tempest and the
two surviving natives to the island. As
Stephen Greenblatt's new historicist reading
has revealed, TTie Tempest's debt to Wifliam
Jennifer Bess 79
Strachey's account of the 1609 Caribbean shipwreck illuminates the long
history of the moral uncertainties raised by colonialism in the West.i
Attending to issues of gender, Donaldson's work, shows that Miranda has
inherited more than the guflty conscience and the fat wallet of her male
peers. In fact, she even shares Caliban's fate as both have been relegated to
the role of the other; in her case, however, that otherness includes not only
the burden of oppression and powerlessness but also the burden of "the ben-
efits and protection offered by the colonizing father and husband" (1992,17).
Sbe is at once a victim and an heir of the forces of colonialism.
It is this complex inheritance that Julia Alvarez studies, exorcizes, and
memorializes in her autobiographicafly based novel. How the Garcia Girls Lost
Their Accents. UnwiUing to represent the semi-fictional family's history
through the binary paradigm of victim/oppressor, Alvarez instead utihzes the
flexibflity and inclusiveness of the genre of the novel to reify what
Donaldson has called the Miranda Complex—the condition of occupying
the seemingly contradictory roles of victim and heir simultaneously. While
critics have explored the theme of victimization in the novel and have also
analyzed its inclusiveness in terms of Caribbean history and Alvarez's own
biography, using Donaldson's Miranda Complex to complement such analy-
ses confirms the salience and interrelatedness of issues including loss, guilt,
polyphony and creativity. As a brief context in Caribbean post-colonial the-
ory wifl reveal, the novel's structure and its inclusiveness work together to
place the Garcia family's own story within a larger panorama of what
Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant has called a "shared reality," a collective
understanding that is the only source of generativity left to those whose his-
tory has been erased or buried by colonialism (1989, 149). Furthermore, by
refusing to classify the Garcias clearly as victims or victimizers, Alvarez enables
her characters to tell many truths and to acknowledge gaps in the truth; in
addition, she insists that her readers experience the shared reality of Caribbean
identity along with the Garcia girls and their intimates.
Through a complicated family tree—one she features at the beginning
of the novel—Alvarez traces the history of the Garcia family back to
Miranda's time, back to the Conquistadores, the benefactors of what Alvarez
cafls the "golden handcuffs" that encircle her own wrists and which she then
bequeaths to the four sisters of the novel (1998, 156). Including chapters
focusing on each member of the family and its intimates, the novel's het-
eroglossic structure simultaneously belies and highlights its themes of loss and
violation:^ on the one hand, the many voices that Alvarez captures, both in
first person and through her third person narrator, bear witness to tbe com-
fort and the strength the Garcia girls find in female sohdarity and the rich-
ness of their shared Dominican experience; on the other hand, that polypho-
80 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
ny illuminates the universality of the pain born by the victims of oppression.
Since the golden handcuffs worn by privileged women of color tell only part
of the story, her novel includes a complex recipe of many voices and many
sflences, sflences which provide the means of balancing the necessity to "dig
deep" into memory with the need to memorialize the truth of history's
irrecoverable losses and of the Garcia farruly's role in a cycle of violence and
victimization (Glissant 1989,64).
Confirming Glissant's reflections on Caribbean identity, Alvarez's charac-
ters find themselves paralyzed by their memories or confounded by the
absence of memories. He has explained that "the Caribbean writer must 'dig
deep' into [coflective memory]" in order to uncover what remains of a "com-
mon experience broken in time" (1989, 63-64). Offering the oppositional
model to which Glissant's work responds, his countryman Frantz Fanon has
argued against historical excavation as the source of identity: "I am not a pris-
oner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny" (1967,
229). It is between these two recommendations that Alvarez's alter-ego,
Yolanda, and her family find themselves navigating. Whfle the truth must be
exposed, it also cannot be exposed: like the history of the Arawaks or the
Haitians slaughtered in the 1937 massacre. Dictator Rafael Trujiflo's vic-
tims—including the Garcias—share an irrecoverable past.^ Thus, in order to
maintain verisimilitude, Alvarez uses silence to convey political and personal
paralysis, to evoke the truths which cannot be communicated verbafly. Like
her sisters in the Arpillera Movement in Chfle,'* she uses the symptoms of
paralysis to reveal the irreversible effects of a history of violation on the
human psyche and to demand that her readers experience those effects along-
side the characters: her sflences, omissions and nonverbal communications
demand the reader's empathy with an immediacy and a presence that tran-
scend Miranda's sympathy for the shipwrecked saflors at the same time that
the novel highlights the Garcias's own compUcity in the history of violence.
Although, like Miranda, Yolanda sympathizes with the suffering of oth-
ers, including the disenfranchised living in her homeland, she cannot identi-
fy completely with them due to her privflege; nor does she identify com-
pletely with Americans or even with her own extended family on the island.
Her identity remains fractured, and through Alvarez's literary mosaic, what
she fundamentafly reveals is that, utflike Miranda, who depends on her father
to fifl in the gaps of her past, Yolanda must take on the responsibility of
attempting to invent or write her own past into being. In so doing, she ful-
fifls Fanon's insistence that Caribbeans "recapture the self" through an act of
self-creation (1967,231) and honors Glissant's additional advise regarding the
collective nature of this self-creation: "The collective 'We' becomes the site
of the generative system, and the true subject" (1989, 149). Yolanda must
Jennifer Bess 81
actively expose what truth survives to be exposed in the hopes of someday
empowering herself and others. At the same time she must also acknowledge
that the many voices from which she and her family draw strength and ver-
bal potency are not sufficiently nurturing to pierce the gaps and sflences that
are the legacies of the handcuffs worn by even the most privileged victims.
AsYanick Lahens has remarked, colonialism has relegated Caribbean writers
to a state of limbo as they suffer from an "internal exile" that haunts their
work (1992, 740).They are, in a sense, orphaned by the inability to recover
the whole truth regardless of how far they dig.
Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses of the past; however,
through the exploration of Miranda's complex, what they can do is to trans-
form Trujiflo's "mandate of sflence" into a revolution of truth-telling aiid
self-invention (Alvarez 1998, 109). Silence, in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accents, is a communicative power as conspicuous as a riot and as stealthy as
the underground movement in which (like Alvarez's own father) patriarch
Carlos Garcia has participated. Using absences to memorialize what has been
lost, Alvarez reveals the coflective burden born by afl who have suffered from
the "coflective drift to oblivion" (GHssant 1989,210). Digging deeper not to
recover an irrecoverable past, but to acknowledge tbat it is irrecoverable and
demand her characters' ownership of their complicity in that loss, the author
turns the Garcia girls' inheritance of the Miranda Complex into a eulogy.
Although the Arawak culture no longer survives to tefl its story and the heirs
of the Conquistadores do, Alvarez's use of omissions and reverse chronology
ensures that the Garcia family's history wifl not be one of pure hegemony,
but also one of responsibility, inclusiveness and the painful truth of their
complex inheritance. Through her storytefling, she stays true to a past
marked by a drift to oblivion so strong that destiny cannot be found there,
following Glissant's advice to dig deeply into memory and acknowledging
the truth of Fanon's warnings. If Caribbean history needs to be re-mem-
bered, as Glissant argues, then what Alvarez achieves is to turn the Garcia
girls' inheritance of the Miranda complex into a means of memorializing the
absence of coflective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims and
perpetrators alike. As the following sections detail, it is the novel's structure,
its gaps and omissions, its pervasive themes of loss and alienation, and its
inclusive nature that effect this memorializing of a coflective past riddled
with irretrievable histories.
In terms of its overafl structure. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is
more than an "attempt to insert a silenced self into history"; in fact, its form
is fundamental to its ability to memorialize the permanence of loss and
silence (Lima 1995, 119). As we shafl see, its structure illuminates the
Garcias's own complicity in the suffering rooted in colonial history.
82 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
Alongside informational omissions within the chapters themselves, a topic to
which I will return, the reverse chronology and the resulting gaps that occur
bet^A^een the chapters signal the irretrievable losses the family and all
Dominicans have suffered. "The implosion of Caribbean history, (of the con-
verging histories of our people)," explains Glissant, "relieves us of the linear,
hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course"
(1989,66). In other words, the singular History of the West is replaced by the
converging histories of many peoples, many voices, so that meaning-making
only occurs pluralistically. The linear journey that characterizes traditional
Western literature must be shattered for the purposes of attacking the
Western hegemony, revealing the truth of what has been lost and creating a
new vehicle of communication through silence and absence on the one hand
and through inclusiveness on the other. In her reverse chronology, Alvarez
highlights the potentially paralyzing effects of her mission: to dig deeply into
history is to risk being puUed in by its gravity. When Fanon warns Caribbean
writers not to seek their destinies in the past, he adds: "I should constantly
remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into my
existence" (1967, 229). While Alvarez's characters suffer from a stifling of
their own inventive powers, the novel itself graphically illustrates the dangers
of digging deeply: failing to recover truth and losing oneself in the fruitless
effort to do so. As the novel falls into the past, its silences have not only to
speak, but to scream like the aching mother cat of the novel's final chapter,
w^ith the voices of all whose histories have converged or imploded in the
"psychic torture" of loss (Glissant 1989, 23).
The novels reverse chronology challenges not only the notion of a sin-
gle history but also the genre's "tacit modernist assumptions of a coherent
identity and a true self" (Nas 2003, 132). Speaking of French Antillean
women's writing, Elizabeth Wilson explains how "the journey [of exile]
often takes the form of journey-as-alienation. Self-knowledge often leads to
the destruction of self" rather than self-awareness, as is typical of traditional
Western novels (1990, 47). Where a Western male hero has traditionally
developed through an increasing "understanding of his separateness from
others" in a journey toward independence, for a Caribbean woman writer—
whether French or Spanish—the very form of the journey must be rede-
fined, and in the case of Alvarez's novel, redefined to eschew the linear pro-
gression toward independence and instead to embrace the discovery of the
relationship (the convergence) of self with others and of the present with the
past (Gilmore 1994, 29).Thus, the family tree at the novel's beginning fore-
casts more than its politics, for it also serves as a synecdoche for historical gaps
and collective experiences that can never be retrieved, no matter how many
voices are included.
Jennifer Bess 83
Beginning with the family tree, Alvarez uses gaps generously to ensure
that the reader will empathize with her characters' feelings of uncertainty and
loss. The genealogy documents the girls' maternal side enjoying a clear
(though morally troubling) lineage dating back to the Conquistadores, but
the paternal side's heritage is illustrated only by an ambiguous dotted line,
punctuated with question marks, dating back to the same progenitors.
Equally ambiguous is the inclusion of "33 other known Garcias," signaling
both the anonymity of the known and the allusion to the unknown others.
The gaps and omissions in the family tree recall Glissant's aforementioned
metaphor of historical implosion or convergence, demanding that the read-
er interpret the novel within a collective and historical context and remain
sensitive not only to presence, but to absence as well. Accordingly, that
absence is felt immediately as the reader turns the page to the novel's first
section, which covers the years 1989-1972.
The shift firom the familiar format of the family tree to that of reverse
chronology sets the stage forYolanda's homecoming in the first chapter. Five
years have passed since she has visited her homeland. In those five years, her
Spanish has deteriorated, and she is increasingly uncertain about her future.
But like the family tree, these personal losses also serve as signs for larger
ones. When the narrator explains that Tia Flor granted asylum to her family
members during "who-knows-which revolution," she calls attention not
only to the non-linear history Glissant has revealed but also to what Mikhail
Bakhtin has called the centrifugal forces, the multiplicity and inclusiveness, at
work in modern novels (Alvarez 1991, 5). Of course, Bakhtin's analysis of
multiple contexts and multiple meanings forecasts post-modernism and post-
colonial novels such as Alvarez's, with their refusal to exclude, to classify or
to resolve. Thus, Bakhtin's literary analysis and his insistence that meaning-
making is a dialogic process that occurs in a multifaceted context comple-
ments Glissant's broader theories: where Glissant sees Caribbean history as an
implosion of many memories, Bakhtin sees the novel as a "tension-filled
unity of two embattled tendencies," the tendency toward centralization and
the tendency toward decentralization or inclusiveness (1981, 272). Clearly,
Alvarez employs both tendencies in her effort to convey a complex truth, yet
for her, both implosion and explosion yield loss and uncertainty so profound
that even the heteroglossia, the multitude of voices in the novel, cannot con-
vey the depth of the collective pain.
The first chapter, whose content I will explicate further below, highlights
Yolanda's feeling of shame regarding her own inability to navigate this ten-
sion, or life in the hyphen, as Alvarez has called the experience of a
Dominican-American, thus signaling that the gaps in the family tree will
haunt the entire novel in terms of both structure and theme.^ Immediately,
College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
the chapter exposes the irrecoverable distance between herself and her her-
itage, between herself and those with whom she could identify. The shame
she feels when she tips Jose, the boy who helps her fmd her way home from
the guava grove, reveals her own distance from her homeland. When she
"tries to distract him by asking what he will buy with his money," she only
perpetuates the gaps that have separated her from the boy and that have sep-
arated both from their history: the language gap, the economic gap and the
historical gap imposed by the legacies of colonial rule, genocide and despot-
ism (Alvarez 1991, 23).What the famfly tree forecasts, the first chapter fulfifls
as Yolanda remains trapped in her golden handcuffs, identifying neither with
the boy nor with the nearby biflboard's golden-haired Palmolive woman,
whose mouth is "stifl opened as if she is cafling someone over a great dis-
tance" (23; cf. Castefls 2001, 40). Here, in this final line of the chapter, the
words "as if"—which wifl recur in the last lines of each of the first two sec-
tions of the novel in order to complement the structural gaps with verbal
ambiguity—reveal Yolanda's predicament: she is no more sure of the
Palmolive woman's motives than she is of her own wifl to stay on the island.
What she does know is that "distance" is at the heart of both uncertainties.
Because of the novel's structural gaps, the reader is left with equal uncer-
tainty regarding the passage of time and the events that take place between
chapters. As Chapter One ends and Chapter Two, "The Kiss," begins, a tradi-
tional causal sequence of events is absent. The readers, of course, do not know
ifYolanda decides to stay in the Dominican Republic or return to NewYork
with her family, but that uncertainty pales in comparison to tbe ongoing sense
of disconnection caused by the abrupt shift to a new time and place in each
chapter. In the second chapter, Alvarez highlights the readers' sense of loss by
half-heartedly assuring them that the girls' "devotions were like roots; they
were sunk into the past towards" their father (Alvarez 1991,24).The theme of
the chapter—famihal violation and vengeance—challenges the narrative assur-
ance and bespeaks the seemingly endless lineage of violations and revolutions,
recalling the earlier conflation or befuddlement regarding Tia Flor's reaction to
"who-knows-which revolution." Moreover, the assurance implodes because
the past, in terms of the novel, comes last, undermining any abflity to sink into
it through a linear progression. The past and the present, the personal and the
political, the silence and the word—afl seem to be lost in the gaps between the
chapters, the gaps in history, the "as if's" of Alvarez's prose.
Echoing uncertainty and inability to communicate across various gaps,
the final chapter of the novel's first section, "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story,"
concludes as Yolanda takes "a long messy swaflow [of Bordeaux], as if I were
some decadent wild woman who had just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover"
(Alvarez 1991, 103).The narrator's tone is as complex as it is in the begin-
Jennifer Bess 85
ning of "The Kiss," where she promises that the girls sink their roots into t:he
past, for once again, what is absent is at least as potent as what is present.
Yolanda is not a "wild woman" and she has not dismissed a lover. Just as the
Palmolive woman opens her mouth as if to communicate, Yolanda drinks as
if to signal her liberation and certainty. Although she has dismissed Rudy
Elmenhurst, she has never been his lover and has instead refused his advances
only to end up feeling "self-doubt" instead of self-assurance or integrity
(103). Her failure to open the bottle of wine easily and her posturing in the
role model of a wild woman reafSrm the same lack of identity exposed
through the distance between Yolanda and both Jose and the Palmolive
woman (Castells 2001,40). Indeed, as this chapter advances (or retreats) to the
novel's second part, two years remain completely unaccounted for, so that the
uncertainty Yolanda feels regarding her identity explodes into the larger his-
torical uncertainty that the family and their countrymen suffer collectively.
Alvarez highlights the historical connection to the losses the family suf-
fers through a symbol appropriate to the youth of the Garcia girls: a Barbie
doU dressed as a Flamenco dancer, a gift to Sandi from a family friend. At the
close of the second section, when Sandi tells Mrs. Fanning, "'Graaas,'... as if
the Barbie doU had to be true to her Spanish costume," this third pivotal "as
if" reveals the complex alloy composing Alvarez's golden handcuffs (1991,
191). On an island where the few^ native Arawaks who survived then suffered
the encomienda system and lost their culture and their ethnic identity to
Spanish Conquistadores, Sandi's Flamenco doll's ability to be true to her cos-
tume is as complex as Yolanda's ability to enact the role of an angry lover.
Barbie's costume echoes with the self-doubt Yolanda expresses at the end of
her brief final encounter with Rudy and recalls the ambiguous dotted line
on the Garcia family tree. AU bear witness to a feeling of ahenation, which,
as Ricardo Castells explains, "is often symbolized by either silence or by an
absolute failure to communicate" (2001, 34). Thus, the silences, the gaps
between the chapters, the missing years and the "as if's" make the girls' per-
sonal losses and Trujillo's mandate of silence more present in their absence
than they would have been had Alvarez tried to articulate the irretrievable.
Alongside these gaps between the chapters and the accompanying ambi-
guities, specific textual omissions resonate with lost history and lost voices to
highlight the agony belonging to the Garcias and their fellow Dominicans.
The forces of heteroglossia function as they customarily do to add depth and
context to the feelings of the protagonists, but in this case, they also reveal
that the blood of the Conquistadores belongs to their heirs and their victims
alike. Thus, those who have enjoyed privilege and those without it suffer
together in a history of loss. In silence and in absence, Alvarez offers up a rev-
olution of truth-teUing. In "I Came to Help," she confesses that "the wayiwe
86 College Literature 34.1[Wint8r 2007]
really change things is often through very simple action, small and quiet
enough not to draw too much attention" (2003, 211-12). At once painfully
diminutive and shockingly potent, the omissions serve to reify the collective
burden born by all who have been silenced: absence does indeed speak for
itself—though not as quietly as Alvarez suggests. In fact, the silences guaran-
tee that Alvarez's readers will be pained by three particularly potent omissions
of either subject matter or truth, thus obligating their understanding of her
characters' losses.
Namely, the absence of Laura's inventions, the absence of Yolanda's
Teacher Day address, and Yolanda's memory of a childhood mishap indicate
the hardships of living in the hyphen and the costs of the prohibitions and
violations the family suffers. The first two acts of silencing, in particular,
reveal what Alvarez means in her autobiographical essays when she describes
her golden handcuffs as symboUzing "those positions of privilege that often
trap us women into denying our bodies, our desires, our selves" (1998,156).
While the private stories of the four girls and their intimates illustrate this
denial, the omissions and the violations their stories contain also act inclu-
sively or centrifugally to embrace colonial history, or more precisely, what
Glissant has called "nonhistory," the erasure of history in the traditional sense
(1989,62). Since aU three losses mentioned above are also linked just as clear-
ly to the family's privilege as they are to its pain, the omissions suggest the
intricacies of a history in which the perpetrators of violation suffer an intense
sense of exile and homelessness and thus share a sense of violation with those
whom their ancestors have made to suffer. Centripetal forces reveal the pri-
vate emotional costs of both privilege and violation, but they also coexist
v\dth centrifugal forces revealing historical and public costs. The novel fore-
grounds many losses through its omissions: Carla's inability to express herself
clearly to the policeman after being sexually accosted, Yolanda's failure to
communicate with her husband, Sandi's failure as a young artist. However,
what Laura's inventions, Yolanda's speech and the childhood memory of a
particularly salient omission of truth share is their affihation with the fami-
ly's privilege and with the on-going theme of violation.
Beginning with Laura, she, more than her husband, embraces the oppor-
tunities America offers and finds ways of reveling in the mythic land of
opportunity. Unlike Carlos, who is haunted by nightmares from his past as a
revolutionary, Laura, as the wife of a man compelled by tradition to maintain
his family's social standing without her economic help, is firee to take in "the
wonders of this new country" (Alvarez 1991, 133). Though she fears her
daughters' becoming too American, she sits up at night inventing items like
those she sees in department stores, items to make a housewife's hfe more
comfortable and leisurely. In other words, her inventions are her means of
Jennifer Bess 87
understanding her new world. They signal, hke her "mishmash of mixed-up
idiopis and sayings that showed she was 'green behind the ears,' as she called
it," her attempt to integrate herself, to defme herself in the new country
(135). Like many believers in the American Dream, she imagines herself an
entrepreneurial millionaire only to be disappointed when she sees her latest
invention, a suitcase on wheels, already on sale in a newspaper. At that point,
she gives up: "What use was it trying to compete with the Americans: they
would always have the head start. It was their country, after all" (140). While
the family's privilege has brought them safely into America, they remain in
political and emotional exile, and Laura's inventions rank among the casual-
ties of that exile. In fact, Laura's efforts and her failure to invent "gadgets to
make life easier for the American moms" only expose what it is to be exiled
(138): "To be exiled is to be from here and from elsewhere, to be at the same
time inside and outside, settled in the insecurity of a painful and uneasy $it-
uation" (Lahens 1992, 736). Her attempts to bring ease to American moms
only highlight her own dis-ease, her own insecurity despite the economic
privilege she enjoyed in her homeland.
While Laura begins her entrepreneurial adventure with suitable gusto,
self-assured that "she would prove to these Americans what a smart woman
could do with a pencil and pad," the suitcase advertisement in the New York
Times does more than thwart her ambition (Alvarez 1991, 139). When she
sees it, she startles her husband from a troubled sleep that exposes the larger
context of her failure: he wakes asking, "'^'Qwe jjasa.''What is wrong? There
was terror in his voice, the same fear she'd heard in the Dominican Repubhc
before they left .... In dreams, he went back to those awful days and long
nights, and his wife's screams confirmed his secret fear: they had not gotten
away after all; the SIM [TrujiUo's secret police] had come for them at last"
(139).^ No longer is Laura a potent member of the de la Torre family;
instead, she, like the victims her own ancestors, is now a powerless victim of
forces she cannot control. If her story, like so many of the others alludes to
the trauma of exile, then it also alludes to a more distant past, a past in which
her ancestors profited (Oliver 1993, 211). Like Miranda's, Laura's privilege is
in some sense at the root of the cost she presently incurs: she too is subject
to exile because of the actions of the men in her life and in her nation's past,
and she too identifies with the suffering of the powerless now that she ranks
among them.
Having learned firom her own powerlessness, Laura finds the strength to
"take up her pencil and pad one last time" when she encounters one with
even less power to overcome her fate (Alvarez 1991,141). For her daughter,
she stands up to the complex legacies and realities of tyranny that have
thwarted them both, simultaneously acknowledging her privilege and using