Years after the Cuban Revolution, the teenage girl Pilar Puente wants to escape the United States to go back to the place where she was born and where her grandmother lives; Cuba. On her way to Miami, where she hopes to find a boat going to the island, she delivers her thoughts about the world in which she grew up and how it is ruled by a minority of people. By having a close reading of the passage going from the second paragraph to the end of the third one on page sixty of Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, the reader is confronted to the reality that the dictatorship of only a few people over everybody’s life in the 1970’s was. Full of figures of speech, this passage emphasizes how reduced is our liberty of behaving. By making use of similes, metonymies, rhetorical questions, hyperboles and irony, the young protagonist is endowed with the voice of a feminist blaming the whole American system.

In the second sentence of the second paragraph, Pilar does a simile by comparing the mannequins of the Miracle Mile shops to “astronauts’ wives” (60). This figure of speech does not only intend to describe how the mannequins are looking but the young adolescent is mocking the hairstyle they are wearing. For her, the beehive looks like an astronaut’s helmet and is totally ridiculous. By linking this second sentence with the first one of the paragraph, one can understand that, for Pilar, what is considered as being fashionable seems very old and not innovative at all. However, what seems to shock the young girl is the fact that women would still consider this as being the new trend and are ready to spend money for it, as well as being fit enough to suit these clothing. This point of view is therefore reinforced by the third sentence, in which Pilar uses the ambiguous metonymy of the beehive to describe how shameful was the hairstyle in vogue at that time. By questioning who would find a beehive attractive, one can understand it by being the actual hairstyle, or taking it literally so Pilar would really ask how is it possible that somebody finds a real beehive attractive and wants her head to look like it. This metonymy reinforces Pilar’s point of view by pointing out what she really thinks of this haircut.

In the fourth sentence of the paragraph, Pilar expresses how angry and disgusted she is by thinking of who decides what is trendy and what is not. One can link this idea to what the young girl says earlier in the novel, when she questions “who chooses what we should know or what’s really important?” (28). She is revolted by the idea that only a few people, especially men, can decide “what’s really important” (28) or what women have to wear to be seductive. The hyperbole of “torture” (60) emphasizes the teenager’s vision of the fashion industry. It helps the reader grasp her feelings about the people who lead and dictate other’s behavior, and, in this case, women’s. One can figure out that, according to Pilar, things would have been a lot different if women were sitting in these “fashion control centers” (60). Women would not have to make all these efforts and to suffer this “torture” that the appearance is for modern society. Throughout the passage can be found other terms referring to suffering, such as “wince” (60) and “bruise” (60), which support the young girl’s voice. Pilar also repeats “new ways” (60) two times, what emphasizes the impact of her words on the reader. These “new ways to torture women” (60) are the evolution of the trend that women have to follow in order to keep up with society. After giving an anecdote about one of her friend’s mother, the young protagonist makes use of a rhetorical question in order to hit the reader’s mind directly and make him think about who is dictating the way women have to dress and what they need to like.

The third paragraph of the page sixty is very poetic. It begins with the simile “the sky looks like a big bruise of purples and oranges” (60). The sky often has the connotation of divine forces that should guide human’s behavior, especially in poetry. In this image, one could understand that, despite being beautifully colored, the sky is suffering. To emphasize this point of view, the sky is personified as suggested in the third sentence. Pilar explains how, in a land where there are not too many people, the sky would have a great impact on them, as she explains that it “announc[es] itself in a way you can’t ignore” (60). By saying that the sky can announce itself, she gives it a human, or even a divine feature. She ends the paragraph by explaining how less important is the sky, so the divine, in big cities like New York. The world leaders living there are getting more important than the sky and have a bigger impact on citizens’ mind. They are so powerful that they can compete with the sky itself.

In this passage, Garcia gives the reader the chance to question himself about who takes the decisions, about who dictate our world. Through Pilar’s mind, she denounces the injustice of the whole system, ruled by a minority of people. By using several figures of speech, she reinforces the young protagonist’s point of view and increases her impact on the reader. Her words remind us that we are not totally free in our ways of thinking and behaving and that everything is decided by only a few leaders, who can even compete with the sky.

In Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban as in a lot of other postcolonial works can be found supernatural events like ghosts or visions. These supernatural events happening in a realistic context are also called magical realism. In this novel, all of the three generations of the family Del Pino women encounter such events and are able to communicate with their relatives, even though they are not living in the same country. In this story, magical realism helps protagonists to overcome physical boundaries and to see or hear each other. It keeps all three women closer, even if there have been altercations between them in the past. Magical realism reveals to the protagonists what had been kept secret and what they have not been able to hear and see.

Although it is not the first time that a character is confronted with a supernatural event, the moment when Celia “closes her eyes and speaks to her granddaughter, imagines her words as slivers of light piercing the murky night” (Garcia 7) marks the first time that a character is able to interact with another one by telepathy. As Maria Rice Bellamy suggests in her book titled Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction, “Pilar remains closely connected to Celia and Cuba through telepathic conversations that overcome the physical distance between New York and Cuba” (Bellamy 79). It is therefore by means of magical realism that these two protagonists are able to communicate together even though thousands of kilometres separate them and they have not seen each other physically since Pilar and her family left Cuba. Telepathy helps them to keep in touch and to stay close with each other. As a proof that telepathy really exists between Celia and her granddaughter, the young girl says that she “hear[s] her speaking to [her] at night, just before [she] fall[s] asleep” (Garcia 29). This communication, as said before, brings the two women closer to each other as Celia tell her granddaughter that “she wants to see [Pilar] again” and that she “tells [her] she loves [her]” (Garcia 29). These conversations are so strong that it is part of what motives Pilar to take the trip back to Cuba.

These visions can also lead to communication in another way than by having a spoken conversation. Sometimes, the protagonists are only able to see the others but not to hear them. It is the case for Celia, at the beginning of the novel, when Jorge, her deceased husband, “emerges from the light and comes toward her, taller than the palms, walking on water” (Garcia 5). Here, three points can be seen which immediately set the story into the magical realism category. Jorge is seen as a gigantic person, walking on water and, above all, he is supposed to be dead. Communication is difficult, as Celia can only see her husband’s mouth move but she “cannot read his immense lips” (Garcia 5). Here, the communication is broken, as Celia is not able to understand Jorge. However, as Bellamy specifies, “Garcia uses alternative forms of connection, specifically total recall and dreams, to create relational bridges between characters even when they do not consciously seek them” (Bellamy 80). As she explains, the protagonists are communicating even if they think that they cannot understand each other. It is unconscious. Another example is found when Pilar has an “image of Abuela Celia underwater, standing on a reef” who “calls to [Pilar] but [she] can’t hear her” (Garcia 220). In her work titled Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas, Shannin Shroeder links this vision to “Celia’s walk into the ocean at the end of the novel” (Shroeder 70). Again, this vision helps the two characters to communicate, even if no pronounced word is understood.

Lourdes also encounters such unnatural events, especially when her deceased father “greets [her] forty days after she buried him” (Garcia 64). Although she fears this first meeting with her father and comes back home with a “presentiment of disaster” (Garcia 65), the other times she sees him will benefit her. According to Bellamy, the use of magical realism “facilitate the interaction of people distanced by ideology, geography and even death” (Bellamy 79). It works for Lourdes on every point Bellamy makes. As her father finally reveals her that her mother loved her and that her sister Felicia died, he finally persuades Lourdes to “go to them” (Garcia 196). This communication between Lourdes and Jorge therefore helps her to get closer to her Cuban family, distant to her geographically. In addition, she meets there her mother Celia, who is also distant to her ideologically. Celia is militating in favour of Fidel Castro’s regime but her daughter is completely against it. She even called Lourdes a “traitor to the revolution” (Garcia 26) when the latter decided to leave Cuba to go to the United States. This marks how much they have distant ideology. Finally, the fact that she has conversations with her deceased father makes her interact with somebody distant to her because of death. In his book titled Postcolonial Literature, Justin D. Edwards writes that writer Toni Morrison “asserts that the literary use of haunting offers the possibility of representing ‘unspeakable things unspoken’” (Edwards 119). In Dreaming in Cuban, the moment when Jorge reveals to Lourdes what really happened between him and Celia marks a haunting scene of a ghost revealing what had not been spoken during Jorge’s life.

Throughout the novel, multiples supernatural events happen and help the protagonists to interact together. Magical realism allows them to overcome every boundary of any nature. Even if the characters are very distant in a geographical way, political beliefs and even if they are separated by death, these supernatural events build bridges allowing them to communicate together. It gives them the power to speak about what is unspeakable in their life and tighten the links between them.

Works Cited:

Bellamy, Maria Rice. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015: 76-102

Edwards, Justin D. Postcolonial Literature. New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2008: 118-128

Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993

Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004: 69-82