Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

Gender and biculturalism are significant intersecting themes in these closing chapters. Returning to Puerto Rico as a teenager, her last visit until several years later, Cofer encounters the rules of femininity on the island more starkly. The carefree innocence and communality she remembered from her childhood was replaced with a sense of confinement and instructive restrictions. She learned that “an adolescent girl was watched every minute by the women who acted as if you carried some kind of time-bomb in your body that might go off at any minute” (140). Once again, we see rules governing female sexuality that are intended to protect young women from the dangers of life in a patriarchal society but that are still highly restrictive and controlling. This reflects the duality common in patriarchal societies that see women as both in danger and dangerous; young women are treated as both at risk of becoming victims and as a threat to the men around them who are incapable of controlling their actions. Reflecting on this, Cofer notes, “Somehow my body with its new contours and new biological powers had changed everything: half of the world had now become a threat, or felt threatened by its potential for disaster” (140).

There are more positive aspects to the changes she encounters, however. Cofer became aware of the extra levels of meaning in the women’s talk, of the greater power in their stories. While their traditional roles may appear more controlled than those of American women, they also have a traditional means of subverting and criticizing these roles and building up female solidarity. Indeed, as she grew older, Cofer began to identify “the subtext of sexual innuendo, to detect the sarcasm, and to find the hidden clues to their true feelings of frustrations in their marriages and in their narrowly circumscribed lives as women in Puerto Rico” (142). In this way, she came to understand the deeper complexities of gender in Puerto Rican society and how women find autonomy and support each other in difficult circumstances.

Cofer also contrasts her experiences of romance in two cultures. She enjoyed the elegant, slow courtship in Puerto Rico but scared off one suitor by breaking the complex rules of romance and brazenly initiating a kiss. When she attempted to navigate dating back in America, she missed and romanticized the leisurely pace of Puerto Rican courtship, and writes evocatively of “the sensuousness of allowing your heart to set its rhythms at its own pace” (147). However, she also remembers the downside of Puerto Rican romance, reflecting on Nora, a young woman who became pregnant but was abandoned by her partner. However much Cofer may idealize the slow rhythms of courting in Puerto Rico, she can see the harsh realities from an outsider’s perspective and is haunted by “how dead [Nora’s] eyes looked, as if she had no vision of the future” (147). In this incident she sees both the failings of patriarchal gender relations and the function and importance of the warnings she found in the women’s talk and stories.

The poem “Holly” offers an interesting parallel to the protectiveness of the Puerto Rican women. Written for Cofer’s daughter Tanya, it explores a desire to protect her, to preserve her childhood innocence. Cofer wonders if she ever told Tanya that “at your age / a grown-up kiss was forced on me / behind my grandmother’s house / by a fourteen year old boy I caught / stealing her grapefruit?” (149). Like her grandmother and others before her, Cofer reflects, “I’d like you to be innocent of such a kiss / for a few more years, Tanya, / to have more days like the crisp, cool morning / when you picked armfuls of wild holly / at your grandmother’s Georgia farm” (149). These lines provide another parallel to earlier chapters. The desire to preserve a certain moment in time and space—here a morning spent gathering holly with Tanya—recalls Cofer’s own childhood desire to keep Puerto Rico a place of childhood play and innocence rather than a place of school and rules. The references to holly also bringing about a brief return to the symbol of blood, as Cofer discusses the berries and how, “as we crush them with our winter boots, / they stain the floor like blood” (150). As before, blood is symbolic of menstruation and puberty, of the loss of childhood innocence that Cofer wishes to prevent for her daughter.

Gender and biculturalism recur as key themes when Cofer discusses visiting her mother, who has moved back to Puerto Rico and “gone completely ‘native,’ regressing into the comfortable traditions of her extended family” (151). This causes conflict between Cofer and her mother because her mother’s increasingly traditional views clash with Cofer’s more “Americanized” attitudes toward family, work, and gender roles. Cofer uses bilingualism to symbolically explore this clash of cultural views, noting, “My trouble with Mother comes when she and I try to define and translate key words for both of us, words such as ‘woman’ and ‘mother’” (152). The issue between them is not that they literally do not speak the same language; rather, it is a case of having to “translate” the cultural meanings and expectations attached to certain loaded words. They find an unexpected common ground in the story of Kiki and Marino eloping together. In this tale of a man who was raised as a girl and learned “how to handle fragile things,” they discover “a new place to begin our search for the meaning of the word woman” (160). What is most significant about this point of connection is that it does not offer any clear answers or any overt resolution to their differing views on what constitutes womanhood. It simply reminds them that there are many diverse experiences, complexities, and complications—and many different stories—and they are all valid and worth exploring.

The book’s final chapter mirrors the discussion of memory and unreliability from the Preface. Cofer again clashes with her mother, this time over the way Cofer combines memory with imagination to find a higher “truth” in her writing. Of her mother, Cofer writes, “she accepts my explanations that what I write in my poems and stories is mainly the product of my imagination” (163), but she is angry that Cofer remembers falling into the fire on the day of her father’s homecoming. As Cofer remarks, her mother “wants certain things she believes are true to remain sacred, untouched by my fictions” (163). The emphasis that these are simply things that she believes to be true, just as Cofer believes her own version of events, reflects Cofer’s open understanding of truth and her view of memory as an emotional jumping-off point rather than a guide to factual details. Cofer’s mother shows her numerous photographs from the time, asking if there is any evidence of her burns and insisting that her account is “nothing but the truth” (165). Cofer neither concedes nor overtly questions this; she simply declares, “But that is not how I remember it” (165).

She closes the book with a poem that explores the event from her point of view, again cementing the book’s mission statement and her intent to reflect a truth that may or may not be factually accurate. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this is the insistence that “There is a picture of me / taken soon after: my hair clipped close to my head, / my eyes enormous—about to overflow with fear” (167). This appears to directly contradict her mother’s insistence that none of the relevant photographs show any evidence of Cofer falling into the fire. Setting these seemingly contradictory moments next to each other highlights Cofer’s desire to embrace the unreliability of memory and the importance of combining memory, imagination, emotion, and connection to find a higher “poetic truth” (11).