Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

These chapters introduce two more key characters: Cofer’s mother and father. We learn a little of their history, discovering that Cofer’s father joined the US Army shortly after the couple married and was stationed in Panama for the next two years, missing Cofer’s birth and infancy. We also see Cofer meeting her father for the first time and learn the story of her falling in the fire, something that is discussed again at the end of the book, where it provides further insight into the unreliability of memory. Although they were fiercely in love and determined to marry while extremely young, Cofer’s parents were very different in character and temperament. Cofer draws comparisons between this and her own experiences of growing up in two cultures. She notes that her parents’ “marriage, like my childhood, was the combining of two worlds, the mixing of two elements—fire and ice” (39).

Indeed, the duality between her parents’ characters and attitudes introduces the theme of bicultural upbringing because the differences between her mother and father are reflected in their differing relationships with US and Puerto Rican culture. Cofer’s father largely abandoned Puerto Rico and was determined that the family should assimilate into US culture. As far as he was concerned, Cofer recalls, “We were going to prove how respectable we were by being the opposite of what our ethnic group was known to be—we would be quiet and inconspicuous” (64). In this we can identify shame about his country and culture of origin and a desire not to challenge but to simply distance himself from racist mistrust of Puerto Rican immigrants. This could not be more different from Cofer’s mother, who refused to integrate, treating the United States as a temporary penance she must endure while holding Puerto Rico in her heart as her true home. When they moved out of El Building and away from the Puerto Rican immigrant community, she missed the sounds, sights, and smells that reminded her of home, and retreated into herself. For her, their “new home was truly in exile,” and she “lapsed into silence herself, suffering from La Tristeza, the sadness that only place induces and only place cures” (64). As such, Cofer’s upbringing is bicultural because she lived between the US and Puerto Rico and because her parents had such radically different relationships with the two countries.

We can see this reflected in Cofer’s own experiences. At times, she appears, like her mother, to be extremely grounded in Puerto Rican culture. She speaks of the island in sensual terms, recalling the “the smells that filled Mamá’s house,” which placed her in a time when she “could still absorb joy through [her] pores” (62). Additionally, she remembers Christmas in Puerto Rico “by the way it felt on [her] skin” (61). Despite this sensual, almost carnal love for Puerto Rico, her experience of both her homes was marked by a sense of longing for the other. In part, this was actually a longing for a different time in her life, shaped by a child’s belief that “if you don’t like the present, you can always return to the past” (52). However, it is important to note that Cofer was actually learning that the places of her life were not fixed in this manner; they were changing, and the way she related to them was changing too. Attending school for the first time in Puerto Rico is an example of this. At this point, Cofer wanted to be “living the dream of summer afternoons in Puerto Rico” (51); she wanted to live in the Puerto Rico of her infancy, a fixed place of play and adventure and stories. However, because she had to attend school, her relationship with Puerto Rico changed, and so she began longing for her life in Paterson, assuming that the peace and quiet of her time reading in the apartment would be there, waiting unchanged for her return. Her effort to avoid school by claiming not to speak Spanish provides an interesting reflection on this changing relationship. As a child Cofer associates Spanish with her earlier experiences of play in Puerto Rico, noting, “It was the language of fun, of summertime games. But school that was a different matter” (52). In other words, she associates Spanish with a fixed point in her childhood memory and does not want it to change, to become a language of school, learning, and rules.

Ironically, it was actually Cofer’s ability to speak English, as well as her experience living in America, that quickly led her to be “crowned ‘teacher’s pet’” (56). When she did return to Paterson, however, she experienced the opposite. She had forgotten much of her English while speaking Spanish in Puerto Rico and found herself an outsider, alienated by her reliance on sign language and getting into trouble because she did not understand her teacher’s instructions. These difficulties around language highlight the complexities that surround her bicultural upbringing and her sense of displacement and belonging.

Cofer’s poems also reflect these complexities. In “Schoolyard Magic” she recalls a moment of feeling connected and vital again in the alien cold of Paterson. At the start of the poem, she is cold, “burrow[ed] deep into [her] clothes” (67), an almost claustrophobic experience for someone used to Puerto Rico’s heat. However, she watches other girls jump rope with such energy that her “own skin responds” (67) to the heat of their exertion, warming her, allowing her to emerge from the cocoon of her winter clothing to experience the passionate play of her childhood in Puerto Rico. In this, she finds release and belonging that lets her “blood answer the summons of their song / drawing my hands free from all my winter folds, / I clap until my palms turn red, / joining my voice to theirs, / rising higher than I ever dared” (67).

“El Olvido,” which immediately follows, reflects on the other side of Cofer’s growing sense of belonging in Paterson. Here again, the idea of heat is significant, a sensual association with Puerto Rico and her childhood. Cofer asserts, “It is a dangerous thing / to forget the climate of your birthplace” (68), to become disconnected from an aspect of your upbringing that is grounded in another place. In many respects, this reflects her mother’s fear about assimilation and losing touch with Puerto Rico. Cofer considers how she adopted this fear when she suggests that it is “dangerous / to disdain the plaster saints / before which your mother kneels / praying with embarrassing fervor / that you survive in the place you have chosen to live” (68). Cofer is at once detached from her mother’s fervent connection to Puerto Rico and enmeshed in it. It is her mother’s fear that, in this “forgetting place,” “you will die / of loneliness and exposure” (68), but it is Cofer’s belief that to lose this fear is itself dangerous.

Elsewhere, Cofer reflects on the importance of staying connected to Puerto Rico while away in Paterson and the role stories play in this. She recalls begging Mamá to tell her more stories prior to her departure from the island. Reflecting on it now, Cofer realizes, “Mamá’s stories were what I packed—my winter store” (63). She desperately desired to maintain her link to Puerto Rico and her joyous childhood there, and she found that stories helped maintain that connection. Mamá’s stories transport Cofer and the other children, “making us forget the heat, the mosquitos, our past in a foreign country, and even the threat of the first day of school looming just ahead” (76). Importantly, these stories continue to do so while Cofer is in Paterson, serving as a vibrant and vivid link to the land of her birth.

When Cofer begins making up her own stories, to feel that power herself, she starts with tales of María Sabida. This provides another reflection on the complexities of gender in Puerto Rican society and the way stories are used to educate and inform. María Sabida represents a traditional form of celebrated womanhood in Puerto Rico. She represents “the ‘prevailing woman’—the woman who ‘slept with one eye open’” and whose “main virtue was that she was always alert and never a victim” (76). Such tales celebrate female ingenuity and cunning but also warn of the necessity of these traits and the danger posed by men in a patriarchal society. In Mamá’s stories María Sabida is “by implication contrasted to María la Loca, that poor girl who gave it all up for love, becoming a victim of her own foolish heart” (76). The warning here is even more explicit, but again, these stories highlight the complex and difficult position of women in Puerto Rican society. In keeping with patriarchal traditions, these stories make women like María la Loca responsible for their own mistreatment by men, but they also allow for, and celebrate, the autonomy of those women who subtly defy gendered expectations.

We can contrast this even further with the figure of the Black Virgin. The Black Virgin symbolically represents a traditional way of life and a belief system dating back to Spanish colonial times. However, she also represents hope for marginalized women. As Cofer observes, “Being a woman and black made Our Lady the perfect depository for the hopes and prayers of the sick, the weak and the powerless” (44). Like stories, the Black Virgin does not necessarily change the systems of oppression that leave certain groups marginalized, but she does represent hope for respite and an opportunity for the voiceless to be represented and supported within their suffering. In this sense, she embodies the complicated and contradictory position of women in Puerto Rican society of the period: She is marginalized, but she is also celebrated and even revered.

Cofer reflects on these themes in the poem “Quinceañera.” Recalling the discussion of bleeding as a new born baby in the previous poem, “They Say,” this poem recounts the experience of menstruating for the first time and the misogynistic taboos associated with menstrual blood. Cofer notes, “I am to wash my own clothes / and sheets from this day on, as if / the little trickle of blood I believe / travels from my heart to the world were / shameful” (50). Across many patriarchal societies, menstrual blood is seen as dirty and sinful, symbolically representing the supposed dangers of female sexuality and womanhood. However, Cofer overtly challenges the hypocrisy and misogyny of these beliefs, arguing, “Is not the blood of saints and / men in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s hands / not bleed into your eyes from His cross?” (50).