Mother-Daughter Relationships in Cristina Garcias Dreaming in Cuban - Essay Example

?First Lecturer’s Homework I am still my mother’s daughter: Examination of Difficult mother-daughter relationships in Cristina Garcia’s “Dreaming in Cuban” Dreaming in Cuban is a novel discussing the connections as well as differences among three different generations of women from the Del Pino family which follows their tribulations before, during after the Cuban Revolution. This novel, the first one written by this author, covers the difficult mother-daughter relationships that each of the families goes through revealing the traumatizing and long lasting impact of the cultural and societal clashes between strong-willed and headstrong female members of one family. The book provides an insightful view of the how the attitude and presence of a strong mother figure with whom a young lady in the most formative and creative stage of her life has intense and deeply felt differences shapes the views, opinions and outlook of impressionable young females in a family. A lot of times these influences in real lifesubtly, almost imperceptibly, play themselves out in the writer’s output in the shape of the characters that they create in their writings. The political and the cultural environment that one is exposed to during their impressionable years manifest themselves in the type tenor and tone of their creative works. This paper looks at the difficult and tumultuous mother-daughter relationships in Cristina Garcia’s “Dreaming of Cuba” amid the traumatizing political, cultural, social and personal conflicts presented in the book. It looks at the character and personality flaws in these women that manifest themselves in their lives and contribute to the tortured experience of being a Cuban American woman. It intends to look at how each female character’s difficult relationship with her mother results in an even more disastrous and calamitous relationship with their daughter and the factors that play a role in ensuring that this continues to happen throughout the novel. The book is written in a changing form that includes narrative written in the third person but also parts that are written in the first person by some of the characters as well as through letters, in a way that weaves these various styles of prose, making for a very interactive and dynamic format that is both confounding and at times blurry crossing the bounds of time from 1959 to 1972 but not in any chronological order (Davis 62). The book looks at three generations of a Cuban American family, starting with the first character Celia del Pino, the family matriarch, who, while working as a Havana department clerk falls in love with a married Spaniard lawyer, Gustavo Sierra de Armas who abandons her and to whom she writes a monthly letter (which she never ever mailed) for a period of 25 years. She eventually gives these letters to her granddaughter, Pilar Puente who becomes the custodian of this part of the history (Payant 166). The book looks at the idyllic kind of life that the Cubans lived before the revolution, which happened when Garcia was only one year old, and which she therefore has no real recollection save for what she was told by those who lived through it. It looks at the role of the mother figure, starting with Celia who has to steer her family through this period in life. Celia decides to marry a local man,Jorge del Pino, on a rebound relationship after the disappointment of the departure of her lover. She starts a family with Jorge who doesn’t really love at first, and undergoes tumultuous psychological experiences where the relationship between a headstrong young lady and her in-laws comes to the fore. Garcia interweaves a complex tale of the impact of the political changes in the Cuban history and how this is brought home to the family in the stresses and strains that the various familial relationships undergo. The experience of many a Cuban American with the island from which they came after the ravages that were hoisted on their land as a result of the revolution is one of nostalgia, longing and need for reconciliation. Indeed, the writer’s own life and experience shows the dichotomy of life for the Cuban American, especially those born in Cuba but who find themselves living and growing up in the United States. They find themselves unable to fit in with the American culture since their language and cultural links with Cuba are still fresh in their minds yet they also have a keen sense of desire to integrate into the society of the land that they emigrated to but whose ways they still feel alienated to. In a way this also mirrors the twisted relationship that the daughters in the Garcia’s book, Lourdes and Pilar feel towards their mothers. They have a need to reconcile with their mothers, each of whom they have a very strained relationship with and whose genesis they later in life understand and relate to; by which time they find it is too late to regain the lost opportunities of having a real mother-daughter relationship. Celia’s relationship with Lourdes is strained right from the beginning when the sheer mental and psychological trauma of her abandonment by her Spaniard lover, her subsequent rebound and marriage to Jorge Del Pino and the really horrible life that she had to face in the hands of her mother-n-law and sister-in-law leads her to hating her unborn child, and her mental breakdown brought on by all this convolution (Weaver 58). Lourdes grows up hating her mother and never really understanding or even trying to understand her actions and the pressures that Celia delPino lived under. Eventually when she dos learn of the truth about her mother’s life she tries to reconcile with her. The strains on a mother-daughter relationship that having a culturally strong matriarchal system go on to be compounded in Lourdes own relationship with her daughter, Pilar. The lack of male role models in her life, in a society where the male-female relationship is usually heavily tilted in favor of the male results in the internal turmoil that wreaks havoc in Celia’s life (Weaver 58). Her abandonment by her mother at an early age is the root cause of her mental disorder, execrated by yet another abandonment by her married lover and finally by the betrayal of her husband Jorge who leaves her in the cruel hands of his mother and sisters and Celia finally loses her mind when her daughter is born, providing her husband with the excuse to not only commute her to a mental institution but also to forge a relationship with the daughter to the almost total exclusion of Celia (Weaver 60) . This abandonment leads to Lourdes’s outlook of life which leads to her similarly tumultuous relationship with her own daughter Pilar, who author Cristina Garcia stronger identifies with in her book. The cultural traumas faced by the generation of Cuban Americans who try to find their “roots” in Cuba and try to understand the journey of their forefathers from the island to “exile” in America is one that Garcia tries to explain and understand through the character of Pilar Puente (Vasquez). Pilar decides to travel back to Cuba in order to get in touch with the Cuban part of her identity and in order to better relate to the new world that she is in, in much the same way as Cristina Garcia, after being raised in New York, has a yearning for knowledge and understanding of the cultural history of herself and her people that leads to the birth of the book. Pilar being the only link that Celia has to her heritage becomes the custodian of her letters, her oral history of the culture and world that she lived in (Saez 132). The need for reconciliation that the Cuban Americans have is fuelled by the deep sense of abandonment of their old way in Cuba, not only the occasion of the revolution that changed their lives so fundamentally but also the feeling of emptiness and lack of real identity that being in the new world of the US drops them in (Saez 135). Pilarenjoys a psychological link with her grandmother that goes deep and from which the book gets its title, with Pilar saying that she understands what it is that her grandmother dreams, representing the nostalgia with which the Cuban exiles view their motherland (Leonard 194). After her birth, Celia symbolically stops writing her letters to Gustav, saying that she now has someone who will remember everything that happened to her, which shows the relationship, not so easily understood in the western world that grandchildren have with their grandparents, which normally skips one generation (Leonard 196). This sort of relationship is found even in African society and binds the generations together.This relationship is similar to the symbiotic link that Garcia feels to Cuba, the land that she came from, when she grows up in America, much like Pilar, and after her work with the New York Times, hence the need to write a book about her Cuban roots. This feeling of connectivity to her alter ego, Pilar is what draws Garcia to understanding the link between her American ness and her real cultural and familial roots on the Cuban island. Cristina also feels, like Pilar that she has the burden placed on her by her grandmother to tell the tale of their history and to try and understand how the Cuban way of life impacts on the life in their adopted land. This coupled with her trying to understand the history and reality of her mother-daughter relationships is what led her to the writing of the book and her research into the history of the land where the revolution happened just after she left (Davis 60). It is an evaluation of the relationships with their mothers and an evaluation of the personal and communal tragedies that influence such relationships that leads to a re-examination of their community history as well as an appreciation of community history and also a reinstatement of linkages with their families and the wider place of their gender in their cultural grouping (Davis 60). The experiences of the immigrants in the United States are also reflected in the writing of Cristina Garcia, including in Dreaming in Cuban. Leaving one’s own country and adapting to life in a new country leaves one with a yearning and an emptiness that no amount of new experiences can fill or assuage. Leaving a land of origin means that one has to adapt to leaving their friends, leaving their culture and customs and leaving a way of life that has been ingrained in one’s psyche for generation after generation. That is the feeling that Pilar has in her adopted land and in the New York area that she found herself living in. Despite the fact that she left Cuba at a relatively young age, she still feels attached and remains in awe of her Cuban homeland and she therefore can relate to the isolation and deep alienation that immigrants feel while in their adopted land (Johnson 24). This is a feeling that Cristina, having herself made the same journey from the Cuban to the American way of life can not only relate to but also identifies with strongly. Despite the depiction of the United States as the brave new world where all are welcomed and where all feel – or should feel – that they are able to settle in and make the most of their lives, the impact and circumstances of immigration are always traumatic. For Lourdes.Pilar’s mother, the trauma that accompanied her escape to the United States, after having been raped by soldiers, has the impact of making her very protective of her daughter, which leaves Pilar even more confused as she does not understand the root cause of this (Johnson 28). This need to reconcile the picture of the land that one flees to as an escape from a particularly harsh reality in one’s life with the new pressures of being in a new place, with new customs, rules and responsibilities is one that every emigrant has to deal with and it can be quite confusing and confounding as Pilar and her mother found. Acceptance of one’s circumstance and the fusing of the land of origin with the land that the Cuban American is resident in is another theme that Cristina Garcia explores and examines in her book, with the final generational member of Celia del Pino’s family, Pilar finally accepting her fusion of both the Cuban and the American cultures, where she finally admits that the America of New York is where she belongs to not in place of but more than Cuba (Harris74). She finally appreciates and understands that she, being both the product of and the culmination of the fusion of the two cultures and way of life she has become in a way a new creature and that she now has an opportunity to chart out the course of her life with a new set of eyes where she is able to look out for herself and those that follow on after her with a renewed look, starting with her revision of the look of the statue of liberty that she displays in her painting (Harris68). This brings with it the culmination of the journey of the generations of Celia Del Pino, through the revolution and their escape to the relative freedom and hope that is the American dream. With Pilar, the three generations of the women that the story weaves finally come to their epic end, resulting in the creation of this hybrid creature that is able to rid itself of the pain of the past and be able to approach the future with a renewed sense of hope and looking for fulfillment in their new life. In a way it marked Cristina Garcia’s re-birth as a Cuban American – neither Cuban nor American – a hybrid that is ready to make her mark on the literary scene. Dreaming in Cuban is therefore for all intents and purposes her announcement for all and sundry to see – “I am here!” Works Cited Davis, Rocjo G. "Back To The Future: Mothers, Languages, And Homes In Cristina Garcia's `Dreaming In Cuban'." World Literature Today, 74.1 (2000): 60. Web. 20 July 2013. . Harris, Allison N. Paradox of the Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Cristina Garcia’sDreaming in Cuban. N.p., 2012. Web. 21 July 2013. . Johnson, Cynthia. "Post-Emigration: Mental and Emotional Unrest." LOGOS: A Journal Of Undergraduate Research, 3. (2010): 24-30. Web. 20 July 2013. . Leonard, Suzzane. "Dreaming As Cultural Work in "DonaldDuk" And "Dreaming In Cuban.".Melus, 29.2 (2004): 181-203. Web. 20 July 2013. . Payant, Katherine B. "From Alienation to Reconciliation inthe Novels of Cristina Garcia." Melus,26.3 (2001): 163. Web. 20 July 2013. < http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-83042397/from-alienation-to-reconciliation-in-the-novels-of>. Saez, Elena Machado. "The Global Baggage Of Nostalgia In Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming In Cuban."Melus,30.4 (2005): 129-147. Web. 20 July 2013. < home.fau.edu/emachado/web/garcia.pdf?>. Weaver, Melanie B. Meeting the Madwomen: Mental Illness in Women in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Hijuelos’s Our House in the Last World, and Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban.N.p., May 2012. Web. 21 July 2013. . Vasquez, Mary S. "Cuba as Text and Context in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban." Bilingual Review, 20.1 (1995): 22. Web. 20 July 2013. . Read More