Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Jennifer Bess Jennifer Bess is an assistant pro- A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a Ufe permeated fessor of Peace Studies at with gaps, an existence fuU of holes. But Coucher College in Baltimore, perhaps that is what happens when one's experience is so intensely different from Maryland. Her recent publica- anything dreamed of as a child that there tions include studies of the works seems literaUy to be no words for it (Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) Broken Heart). and Jhumpa Lahiri. n Shakespeare's The Tempest, Miranda enjoys afl the privileges of her father's reign over I the island, yet she also acknowledges that "I have suffered/With those that I saw suffer!" (1.2.5-6). She is, as explained by Laura Donaldson, at once the sole heiress of Prospero's magical powers and the joint victim of his tyranny as she suffers with the saflors being tossed by the tempest and the two surviving natives to the island. As Stephen Greenblatt's new historicist reading has revealed, TTie Tempest's debt to Wifliam Jennifer Bess 79 Strachey's account of the 1609 Caribbean shipwreck illuminates the long history of the moral uncertainties raised by colonialism in the West.i Attending to issues of gender, Donaldson's work, shows that Miranda has inherited more than the guflty conscience and the fat wallet of her male peers. In fact, she even shares Caliban's fate as both have been relegated to the role of the other; in her case, however, that otherness includes not only the burden of oppression and powerlessness but also the burden of "the ben- efits and protection offered by the colonizing father and husband" (1992,17). Sbe is at once a victim and an heir of the forces of colonialism. It is this complex inheritance that Julia Alvarez studies, exorcizes, and memorializes in her autobiographicafly based novel. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. UnwiUing to represent the semi-fictional family's history through the binary paradigm of victim/oppressor, Alvarez instead utihzes the flexibflity and inclusiveness of the genre of the novel to reify what Donaldson has called the Miranda Complex—the condition of occupying the seemingly contradictory roles of victim and heir simultaneously. While critics have explored the theme of victimization in the novel and have also analyzed its inclusiveness in terms of Caribbean history and Alvarez's own biography, using Donaldson's Miranda Complex to complement such analy- ses confirms the salience and interrelatedness of issues including loss, guilt, polyphony and creativity. As a brief context in Caribbean post-colonial the- ory wifl reveal, the novel's structure and its inclusiveness work together to place the Garcia family's own story within a larger panorama of what Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant has called a "shared reality," a collective understanding that is the only source of generativity left to those whose history has been erased or buried by colonialism (1989, 149). Furthermore, by refusing to classify the Garcias clearly as victims or victimizers, Alvarez enables her characters to tell many truths and to acknowledge gaps in the truth; in addition, she insists that her readers experience the shared reality of Caribbean identity along with the Garcia girls and their intimates. Through a complicated family tree—one she features at the beginning of the novel—Alvarez traces the history of the Garcia family back to Miranda's time, back to the Conquistadores, the benefactors of what Alvarez cafls the "golden handcuffs" that encircle her own wrists and which she then bequeaths to the four sisters of the novel (1998, 156). Including chapters focusing on each member of the family and its intimates, the novel's het- eroglossic structure simultaneously belies and highlights its themes of loss and violation:^ on the one hand, the many voices that Alvarez captures, both in first person and through her third person narrator, bear witness to tbe com- fort and the strength the Garcia girls find in female sohdarity and the rich- ness of their shared Dominican experience; on the other hand, that polypho- 80 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007] ny illuminates the universality of the pain born by the victims of oppression. Since the golden handcuffs worn by privileged women of color tell only part of the story, her novel includes a complex recipe of many voices and many sflences, sflences which provide the means of balancing the necessity to "dig deep" into memory with the need to memorialize the truth of history's irrecoverable losses and of the Garcia farruly's role in a cycle of violence and victimization (Glissant 1989,64). Confirming Glissant's reflections on Caribbean identity, Alvarez's characters find themselves paralyzed by their memories or confounded by the absence of memories. He has explained that "the Caribbean writer must 'dig deep' into [coflective memory]" in order to uncover what remains of a "com- mon experience broken in time" (1989, 63-64). Offering the oppositional model to which Glissant's work responds, his countryman Frantz Fanon has argued against historical excavation as the source of identity: "I am not a pris- oner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny" (1967, 229). It is between these two recommendations that Alvarez's alter-ego, Yolanda, and her family find themselves navigating. Whfle the truth must be exposed, it also cannot be exposed: like the history of the Arawaks or the Haitians slaughtered in the 1937 massacre. Dictator Rafael Trujiflo's victims—including the Garcias—share an irrecoverable past.^ Thus, in order to maintain verisimilitude, Alvarez uses silence to convey political and personal paralysis, to evoke the truths which cannot be communicated verbafly. Like her sisters in the Arpillera Movement in Chfle,'* she uses the symptoms of paralysis to reveal the irreversible effects of a history of violation on the human psyche and to demand that her readers experience those effects along- side the characters: her sflences, omissions and nonverbal communications demand the reader's empathy with an immediacy and a presence that tran- scend Miranda's sympathy for the shipwrecked saflors at the same time that the novel highlights the Garcias's own compUcity in the history of violence. Although, like Miranda, Yolanda sympathizes with the suffering of others, including the disenfranchised living in her homeland, she cannot identify completely with them due to her privflege; nor does she identify completely with Americans or even with her own extended family on the island. Her identity remains fractured, and through Alvarez's literary mosaic, what she fundamentafly reveals is that, utflike Miranda, who depends on her father to fifl in the gaps of her past, Yolanda must take on the responsibility of attempting to invent or write her own past into being. In so doing, she ful- fifls Fanon's insistence that Caribbeans "recapture the self" through an act of self-creation (1967,231) and honors Glissant's additional advise regarding the collective nature of this self-creation: "The collective 'We' becomes the site of the generative system, and the true subject" (1989, 149). Yolanda must Jennifer Bess 81 actively expose what truth survives to be exposed in the hopes of someday empowering herself and others. At the same time she must also acknowledge that the many voices from which she and her family draw strength and ver- bal potency are not sufficiently nurturing to pierce the gaps and sflences that are the legacies of the handcuffs worn by even the most privileged victims. AsYanick Lahens has remarked, colonialism has relegated Caribbean writers to a state of limbo as they suffer from an "internal exile" that haunts their work (1992, 740).They are, in a sense, orphaned by the inability to recover the whole truth regardless of how far they dig. Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses of the past; however, through the exploration of Miranda's complex, what they can do is to trans- form Trujiflo's "mandate of sflence" into a revolution of truth-telling aiid self-invention (Alvarez 1998, 109). Silence, in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, is a communicative power as conspicuous as a riot and as stealthy as the underground movement in which (like Alvarez's own father) patriarch Carlos Garcia has participated. Using absences to memorialize what has been lost, Alvarez reveals the coflective burden born by afl who have suffered from the "coflective drift to oblivion" (GHssant 1989,210). Digging deeper not to recover an irrecoverable past, but to acknowledge tbat it is irrecoverable and demand her characters' ownership of their complicity in that loss, the author turns the Garcia girls' inheritance of the Miranda Complex into a eulogy. Although the Arawak culture no longer survives to tefl its story and the heirs of the Conquistadores do, Alvarez's use of omissions and reverse chronology ensures that the Garcia family's history wifl not be one of pure hegemony, but also one of responsibility, inclusiveness and the painful truth of their complex inheritance. Through her storytefling, she stays true to a past marked by a drift to oblivion so strong that destiny cannot be found there, following Glissant's advice to dig deeply into memory and acknowledging the truth of Fanon's warnings. If Caribbean history needs to be re-mem- bered, as Glissant argues, then what Alvarez achieves is to turn the Garcia girls' inheritance of the Miranda complex into a means of memorializing the absence of coflective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims and perpetrators alike.

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