In Cristina García’s “Dreaming in Cuban”, the reader is challenged by a multiplicity of characters. Each protagonist has a different story and thus is sharing distinctive opinions and feelings. The relations are one of the key features of the novel; they shape the narration trough unions and separations and allow the story to take form. The mother-daughter associations are one of the main issues of the story and therefore offer different analyses, exposed in majority by female characters. The relationship between Lourdes Puente, the mother and Pilar Puente, the daughter, is dissident and continually opposing them throughout the novel. This essay will focus on Lourdes’s rejection for ambiguity and her search for authenticity depicted trough her own history and trough her daughter’s point of view. Her storyline highlights the fact that she maintains her opinion and do not deviate from her saying; this makes her a major character representing a major theme, the one about her loyalty to reality, critically opposed to ambiguity.
Unlike Derek Walcott, a poet from Saint Lucia, Lourdes’s character does not question her identity or where she belongs when “Walcott cannot for instance, lay claim to a singular, unambiguous and unmixed identity” (Edwards 139). Lourdes “wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which [she] claims never possessed her” (García 73). It shows that she put Cuba aside without having an ambivalent identity; she knows where she belongs now, Brooklyn is her finality and made her who she is, unlike Cuba who shattered her. Her daughter Pilar does not share the same pattern; she can be defined as a hybrid character linked to Walcott’s definition. “Hybridity, he suggests, can lead to a sense of dislocation and a lack of belonging” (Edwards 140) which is representative of Pilar, she does not know where she really belongs, does she have to stay in Brooklyn with her mother who does not share her views or does she has to see for herself and discover her past, that is the point. Pilar’s hybridity is opposed to Lourdes’s reject of ambiguity.
Pilar’s depiction of her mother trough the novel is essential in order to circle Lourdes’s thinking and personality. The statements made during the story by Pilar guide the reader’s understanding of Lourdes; she does not let any room for ambiguity to exist. As Pilar states, her mother’s “views are strictly black-and-white. It’s how she survives” (García 26). Others events, related by Pilar are representative of Lourde’s marked frankness; the time when she presents her boyfriend Max to her parents is once again the occasion for the reader to witness the firmness of Lourdes. Indeed, when she wanted Max to get out, Lourdes told her daughter in Spanish to get him out, but, regardless of knowing that Max was able to speak Spanish, “she simply repeated what she said in English: Take him away” (García 134). Lourdes’s frankness is determinant; it shows that she will not let anything or anyone intimidate her. “Even Pilar couldn’t denounce her for being a hypocrite” (García 128). That quotation underline even more the fact that Lourdes’s repulsion for ambiguity is well known like the time when Pilar states: “If I don’t like someone, I show it. It’s the one thing I have in common with my mother” (García 135). Here again, trough Pilar’s statement, the reader can see that Lourdes’s behaviour stays unchanged.
In the two previous paragraphs, the depiction of Lourdes showed the reader her temper and her authenticity. Her relation with Pilar is perturbed by the fact that the two characters do not share the same points of view. The hybridity of Pilar enters in conflict with her mother rejection of ambiguity; Pilar “is, in other words, ambivalent, for [she] questions the assumptions of authenticity” (Edwards 140-141). Authenticity here represented and endorsed by her mother. The fact that “Lourdes abhors ambiguity” (García 65) demonstrates that it is why she cannot keep her employees at the bakery more than a couple of days or that she cannot have a sane relation with her family and more precisely with Pilar. Lourdes is fixed on her thoughts and has no place for doubt or hesitation: “Telling her own truth is the truth to her” (García 177), she believes only what she decides to believe, what she judges to be sane and trustworthy. Lourdes “decides she has no patience for dreamers, for people who live between black and white” (García 129), no place for ambiguity nor ambivalence. She tends to search for authenticity so that there is not a single doubt allowed, she “prefers to confront reality” (García 128).
Ambiguity is a trait that is shown by characters in the novel, it can either be represented by Celia’s love for Gustavo depicted through the letters she never sent, or Rufino’s fidelity towards his wife. But the most important factor linked to this ambiguity, is the one regarding Pilar’s hybridity and her constant questioning of belonging. Lourdes’s rejection of ambiguity is a major issue depicted by her behaviour all along the story; she criticizes and condemns everything she considers fabricated, oriented. She believes what she sees and what she has actually lived; experience is crucial in the case of Lourdes. The past she left with Cuba is a strong one, burdened of history and marked by her childhood; she has suffered from the lack of Celia’s affection, and is therefore representative of the relationship related and presented to the reader. The mother-daughter relation between Lourdes and Pilar is therefore crucial because it opposes Pilar’s hybridity and thus ambiguity, not positioning herself, to her mother who is condemning and judging ambiguous positions by stating clearly her thoughts. Lourdes character leaves no space for ambiguity, and therefore, makes the choice to confront the reality, only to embrace one face of its truth, the one she knows.
Bibliography:
- Primary material :
García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York : Ballantine Books, 1993.
- Secondary material :
Edwards, Justin D. Postcolonial Literature. England : Palgrave, 2008.