Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

The Preface introduces the theme of memory, particularly the idea that memories of childhood are often blurred and unreliable. In doing so, Cofer essentially presents herself as the unreliable narrator of her own stories. Indeed, she leans into this idea, making it an artistic statement or a mission statement for the book. As she notes, she is “not interested in a merely ‘canning’ memories” (13) but strives for a higher “poetic truth” (11). She is less concerned with her stories being factually true than she is with using them to explore the emotional resonance of memory and the power of stories to teach, to excite and examine our passions, and to foster connection.

This understanding of the power of stories recurs throughout the book, as does the focus on stories being embellished and expanded rather than “true” in the strictest sense. We see it paralleled in the cuentos and other tales discussed in the first chapter. This is particularly present in the “true” stories of townspeople. Cofer recognizes that the details of these stories vary with each telling but that, ultimately, “the name, or really any of the facts, were not important, only that a woman had allowed love to defeat her” (20). A story’s message or lesson—its higher truth—is more important than the specific factual details. Most of these stories are intended to give lessons on gender and cultural expectations of womanhood. As Cofer observes, although the women’s stories are ostensibly told “as if to each other,” they are “meant to be overheard by us young girls, their daughters” (14).

This is another of the book’s recurring themes: the ways girls are taught the rules of womanhood. As the book progresses and explores Cofer’s time in America as well as Puerto Rico, this idea intersects with the theme of bicultural upbringing to explore cross-cultural attitudes and standards of femininity. For the opening chapters, it remains concerned with Puerto Rican stories and Puerto Rican attitudes toward sex and gender.

These stories show what it means to be “to be a woman, more specifically, a Puerto Rican woman” (14). Sometimes these stories are celebratory, but often they are warnings, like the story of María la Loca, whose mental health declined after she was jilted at the altar. The impact of this cautionary tale from childhood is apparent in Cofer’s exploration of the woman—or a similar character—in her poem “The Woman Who Was Left at the Altar.” In Cofer’s telling, the woman “calls her shadow Juan, / Looking back often as she walks” (22). This, then, is a woman haunted by her past who cannot stop looking back, figuratively or literally; the memory of the man who jilted her is as inescapable as her own shadow. She sees his face in the “hungry / yellow eyes” of the dogs who follow her, and she symbolically “takes him to the knife time after time” each time she kills a chicken to sell to her neighbors (22).

The opening chapters also introduce two key characters: Cofer’s maternal grandparents, Mamá and Papá. Mamá is a particularly significant character, a powerful matriarch with a gift for storytelling who serves as the center of Cofer’s world while she is in Puerto Rico. Several of the book’s themes and symbols revolve around Mamá. Indeed, even Papá is considered largely in relation to her. The theme of stories is especially tied to her. Cofer explains that she “saw her as my liberator and my model” and that “her stories were parables from which to glean the Truth” (18). This, then, is one point from which Cofer’s attitude to storytelling and the truth originates; Mamá set her on the path that ends with this collection of tales. Cofer reflects that the sights, smells, and sounds she experienced while listening to the women tell their stories “are forever woven into the fabric of my imagination, braided like my hair that day I felt my grandmother’s hands teaching me about strength, her voice convincing me of the power of story-telling” (19). The symbol of braiding hair illustrates the theme of storytelling, the way themes and connections are wound together; the way these tales and Mamá’s influence are braided into Cofer’s life, memory, writing, and other influences, like Virginia Woolf’s writing on childhood memories. It also reflects Mamá’s influence and authority. The process of braiding was painful and “made [Cofer’s] eyes water,” but because Mamá “detested whining and boba (sissy) tears, as she called them, [Cofer] just sat up as straight and stiff” (16). Even as a child, Cofer recognized that this reflected Mamá’s authority. She would not sit still to have her hair braided by her mother, but this was because she “instinctively knew that [her mother] did not possess Mamá’s matriarchal power to command and keep everyone’s attention” (15).

Mamá’s central role is further reflected in her home. Her home, which is known to everyone as Mamá’s house, is the heart of the family and the setting around which all of Cofer’s memories of Puerto Rico revolve. Along with the neighboring mango tree, it is the place where stories are told, where women gather to exchange wisdom, and where countless family interactions take place. Indeed, as Cofer phrases it, “It is the place of our origin; the stage for our memories and dreams of Island life” (23). Just as Mamá is the heart of the family, Mamá’s room is the “the heart of the house” (23), an emotional center around which all family life coalesces. Indeed, the house grew almost organically around her, with Papá adding a new room every time Mamá became pregnant with another child.

It is not only her storytelling and matriarchal authority that make Mamá such a remarkable and influential figure. She stands out, for the young Cofer and for the reader, because of her commitment to living her life as she pleases. Her assertion of her right to sleep separately from her husband to avoid wasting away through pregnancy is a particularly strong example of this. Cofer notes that in “Puerto Rican society, the man is considered a small-letter God in his home” (31). Despite this patriarchal climate and its restrictions on female autonomy, and despite the control of sexuality ordained by their Catholic faith, Mamá still takes the bold move of asserting her “right to own and control her body” (28). In the poem “Claims” Cofer assert that Mamá “had made a pact / with man and nature and kept it. Now like the sea, she is claiming back her territory” (29). That is to say, Mamá felt she had given enough of her life to bearing children and now could reclaim some autonomy and a longer life to share with those she loved. Cofer’s admiration for this loving, giving, independent spirit is apparent as she observes that, because of her choices, Mamá “still emanates the kind of joy that can only be achieved by living according to the dictates of one’s own heart” (28).

Mamá’s assertive, unsentimental decision is in keeping with her practical, no-nonsense character, something that sets her apart from Papá, the poet and spiritist. Mamá has limited patience for such esoteric interests, and this is partly why she assumed such authority in the house and family. As Cofer notes, Papá’s sensitivities and more metaphysical leanings were the key reason Mamá “decided that her husband should ‘wear the pants’ in the family only in the literal sense of the expression” (31). What we learn about Papá in this context in also instructive. In such a patriarchal setting, he could easily have resisted his wife’s assertion of authority. However, as “a gentle, scholarly man, [he] preferred a laissez-faire approach” (31) and simply pursued his interests in private. He was accommodating and unassuming; he had great passion for, and belief in, his poetry and spiritist practices but did not feel a need to force them on others.

Despite this acquiescent outlook, Papá was still a powerful and interesting figure. In his work as a spiritist, he functioned almost like a therapist for people grieving or struggling with life and loss. Indeed, as Cofer explains, “[w]hat Papá performed in his room was a ceremony of healing” (32). After he saved their son from imprisonment on a farm in the US, even Mamá began to “respect, if not quite publicly acknowledge, her husband’s gift of clairvoyance” (35). It is not clear to what degree Cofer believes in these spiritual matters—as she admits, “Whether he ever communicated with the dead I cannot say” (32). She recounts the story of him saving his son as though it is true, but this does not mean it is factually true; she may again be offering the reader the higher poetic truth of stories.