Here is my first essay about a close reading of a passage situated on pages 21 and 22 of Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, it is entitled Bounded Suffering. Here it is:
Bounded Suffering
In 1959, Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Mouvement revolted against the dictator Fulgencio Batista whose government was supported by the US. Born during the Cuban revolution, Cristina Garcìa, a Cuban-born American, wrote Dreaming in Cuban in 1992, telling the story of a Cuban family after the revolution, that still has, nowadays, consequences. This family is composed by Celia and Jorge who have three children: Lourdes, Felicia and Javier. In the second chapter, from the first paragraph on page 21 to the beginning of page 22, Garcìa presents a portray of Jorge and the consequences for Lourdes, his daughter and Rufino, her husband. Through hyperboles and similes, the reader can understand the suffering this three characters feel and the different links between them.
Analyzing the passage from “Lourdes’ agility” to “she wasn’t sure what”, we can admit that Rufino suffers and his agony contrasts with the well-being of Lourdes, his wife. In these two paragraphs, Lourdes is described entirely with figures of speech. The simile “her legs looped and rotated like an acrobat’s” (21) displays her flexibility and her good physical shape. It is emphasized by two hyperboles functioning as well as metaphors comparing her to a machine: “her neck swiveled with extra ball bearings” (21) and “Lourdes’s mouth and tongue were like the mouths and tongues of a dozen experienced women” (21). However, this second paragraph contrasts sharply with the one that follows. Unlike Lourdes’s good physical shape, her husband, Rufino, suffers physically and psychologically. The words “ached” (21), “exertions” (21), “arthritic” (21) and “begged” (21) are all linked to the theme of the suffering. Moreover, the simile “his joints swelled like an arthritic’s” (21) reinforced the pain in Rufino’s body. The meaning of this last quotation contrasts with the meaning of the simile “her legs looped and rotated like an acrobat’s”. However, there is, as well, a parallelism in the structure of these two sentences. Rufino’s suffering contrasts with Lourdes’s well-being, and they are therefore linked.
Lourdes hides herself behind her fake well-being: deep down, she suffers in a way his family cannot imagine. In fact, for her, moving to the United States of America did not only meant leaving Cuba, but as well leaving the loss of a child and a brutal rape behind her. Earlier in the story, we learned that “her appetite for sex and baked goods increased dramatically” (20). Moreover, “the more she took her father…, and for Rufino” (20), and she certainly had to take him a lot to the hospital because he had cancer. These two sentences reveal that her desire for sex and her eating obsessions are linked to her father’s suffering and to the exile in the US. In the first paragraph, we learn through the simile “she submitted to them like a somnambulist to a dream” (21) that she has no “control” (21) of “her cravings” (21). However, she has control of her husband because she has a “bell” (21) to ring him. She always wants him to have sex with her, she “led him by the wrist to their bedroom” (21) and that makes him suffer. Lourdes’s cravings have control of her, and she has control of Rufino. Therefore, Lourdes’s cravings have directly control of Rufino, and Lourdes, despite appearing healthy and having a strong character, is submitted and suffers as well. Her rape, her insatiable sexual desires and her eating disorders are all indicators of her suffering.
Jorge, despite his whole existence taking care of himself, has suffered during his life and especially at the end of it. The last paragraph of page 21 from the beginning to “microbios” (21) helps up identifying what kind of man he is. Jorge was “a fastidious man, impeccable, close-shaven, with razor-sharp” (21) and this description shows that he took good care of himself and perhaps too much. He certainly suffers from mysophobia because he never walks “barefoot” in order to avoid “microbios”. Moreover, for him, “they are the enemy!” (21). However, it is a hyperbole because “microbios” are certainly not more dangerous than the revolution. Even the word, “microbios”, put in italics because borrowed from Spanish means microbes and is probably written in Spanish in order to underline that Jorge used to say it all the time. In the text, this word is followed by a dead metaphor: “the very word lit a fire in his eyes” (21) which emphasizes his hatred towards “microbios”. The hyperbole “culprits of tropical squalor” (22) accentuates it once again, because they are not the only responsible for the filth Jorge and his family live in. However, despite avoiding the “microbios” his entire life, he died from cancer. More importantly, the passage from “Lourdes lifts her dead father’s gnarled hands” (21) to the end of the paragraph shows that cancer made him suffer a lot. The simile “his fingers are […] stiffened haphazardly like branches” (21) presents him not as human anymore, but part of nature, of a dead nature. The hyperbole “his skin is so transparent that even the most delicate veins are visible” (21) makes it seem as if he were a ghost. This is reinforced by the oxymoron: “The vast white bed obscures him” (21). The color white cannot obscure anything or anyone. It demonstrates that he is even more white or “transparent” (21) than the white itself and therefore it emphasizes his sickness and his pain. Consequently, we can see that Jorge, despite being really careful about his health during his life, has suffered a lot and is now dead.
Through a variety of figures of speech, this passage presents us the suffering of three characters of that novel and their relationship. Even if their sufferings are different, we can say that they are bounded because one helps to understand another. It would be interesting to analyze how Lourdes’s suffering evolves once she gets back to Cuba, her roots, reminder of her rape and lost child.
Vincent Konzelmann