Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

Mamá’s house is highly symbolic. It is the center of Cofer’s world when she is living in Puerto Rico, the place where all her memories are focused and around which her stories revolve. It is the place where the family came together and where Cofer heard the tales and cuentos that so shaped her understanding of life, gender, and the power of words. As Cofer phrases it, “It is the place of our origin; the stage for our memories and dreams of Island life” (23). Significantly, Cofer is not only talking about herself but also about her whole family; Mamá’s house is the center of the world for all of them. Indeed, it is symbolic of the family itself. Originally a small shack on stilts, rooms were added each time Mamá became pregnant, so the house grew almost organically, expanding in a slightly shambolic way alongside the family. Importantly, the center around which these new rooms orbited was always Mamá’s room. This room, where Mamá slept alone and tended to the needs of her extended family, is the very “heart of the house” (23). As the house represents the family, Mamá’s room symbolically reflects both the authority Mamá holds and the central role she plays in the family. Her room is the heart of the house just as she is the heart of the family.

At the center of Mamá’s town is an ancient church, high on a hill, accessible only by climbing numerous steps. It was founded on the site where a miracle is said to have occurred. Back in the Spanish colonial period, a woodcutter was being chased by a bull but was saved when an apparition of the Black Virgin appeared before him. As such, the Black Virgin represents the deep roots of Puerto Rican Catholicism and the significance placed on maintaining a traditional way of life. Even as the village expanded and changed, becoming surrounded by modern buildings and new facilities, characters like Cofer’s mother held to this traditional lifestyle, keeping their eyes turned toward the church of the Black Virgin and away from the urban sprawl.

The Black Virgin also serves as a symbol of hope for marginalized women, many of whom take regular pilgrimages to the church. As Cofer observes, “[b]eing a woman and black made Our Lady the perfect depository for the hopes and prayers of the sick, the weak and the powerless” (44). She is seen as an intermediary for those who have no voice, especially marginalized women of color. In this sense, she represents the often-contradictory status of women in Puerto Rican society and in Cofer’s tales. Like them, the Black Virgin is marginalized, but she is also celebrated and revered as a marginalized woman with a link to God himself.

Cofer employs blood as a symbol in several poems. Most often it reflects menstrual blood and is used to explore themes of growing up, the loss of childhood innocence, and the status of women in patriarchal society. In the poem “Quinceañera” Cofer uses her first experience of menstruation as a means to explore the misogynistic taboo associated with menstrual blood. She writes, “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). The belief that menstrual blood is dirty and dangerous appears across many patriarchal cultures, and in some Christian traditions it is associated with sin, the fall, and the dangers of women’s sexuality. However, Cofer challenges the hypocrisy of these beliefs, arguing, “Is not the blood of saints and / men in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s hands / not bleeds into your eyes from His cross?” (50). In this, she uses menstrual blood to symbolically highlight the misogyny that permeates some schools of Christian theology and patriarchal cultures like the one in Puerto Rico.

Blood is also highly significant in the poem “Holly.” In Chapter 11 an adolescent Cofer felt constricted by the controlling concern of her Puerto Rican relatives who monitored her as though she “carried some kind of time-bomb in [her] body that might go off at any minute” (139). Situated at the end of the chapter, “Holly” reflects this time of transition into adulthood and the concern of relatives by exploring Cofer’s concern for her own daughter and her wish for her daughter to maintain her childhood innocence a little longer. This concern is explored symbolically through the preservation of holly that Cofer and her daughter have gathered. Cofer wishes to preserve the holly, to stop the leaves and berries from withering, but her daughter is unconcerned by such things. The poem ends by describing the berries and how, “as we crush them with our winter boots, / they stain the floor like blood” (150). The symbolism is less overt here, but the red color of the crushed berries represents blood and alludes to menstruation and the step toward womanhood that Cofer’s daughter will soon take regardless of any effort to preserve her childhood innocence.