The Only Way In is Out

Frailty, thy name is woman!
-----Hamlet, scene ii

It’s been long that the academia especially those in sociology believe that self-recognition and identity are consolidated by dialectic interactions within one’s community. People spliced their mentality via the images that mirrored by their significant others----their parents. In this case, the controversial Freudian argument about one’s fetish with his or her heterosexual parent ----Oedipus complex backs the genuine conflicts that rooted in Oscar’s family, which he called it fuku (family curse) and his sister despised it as Life, so cruel yet so true.
“These breasts have always embarrassed you and when you walk in public with her you are always conscious of them...Your father could never get enough of them, she always brags. But given the fact that he ran off on her after their 3rd year of marriage, it seemed in the end that he could.”(P.52) There is a sense of melancholy hided in the sarcasm, that is, the loneliness of a first-born daughter. Under her mother’s punch either physically or mentally, she yearned for a father with both hate and love, a new dictator who would abandon her mother but take her and her brother away with the circus. The absence of the father symbolized the incomplete sovereign of both Lola’s family and her value of the world.
With the excuse of her mother’s cancer, she went astray and anarchy only to find her own identity, the sense of security and self-esteem that neither her family nor her country could ever offer. Unconsciously, she tought that her mother’s illness was just her chance to revenge, and that’s why she joked fuku equals to life, cynically yet bitterly.
Traumatic life as they have had, she was struggling to distract herself to go off the track of her family’s endless tragedies epic. Keeping adding threads that are totally discords, she changed for the sake of change. At the same time, she fight her way out in burying and repressing her painful memories deep in her unconscious mind.
Throughout the novel there are no other refined feature paragraphs like this chapter, which are sensitive, monolithic and sentimental. The monologue in these paragraphs are hamletic, combined with Spanglish prattles and even a little bit hysterical madness, since foreign yelling always has the insane effects to the reader acoustically.
The unadulterated purity is poured all over between the lines. Like the declaration of freedom, Lola articulated her longing for love and intimacy in the idioglossia in order to find her own voice and her own way out. At the same time, she acts dorky like a typical alternative punk girl in a way to demonstrate her strength to her mother and her uniqueness to the community.
“A punk chick. That’s what I became.”(P.54) ----an American label with the hardcore of the Dominican composure. She ran away, however, because of a boy, which is a self-evidenced fact that proved her unconscious inferiority as a female in her home culture, although a respectful virgin. She murmured and mourned with distraught hesitations and madness. Like fuku replied, a boy dropped by as a perfect dealer at the right place and right time. Then, she just traded her virginity in an American way to abandon the curbs and discriminations she felt in Dominican traditions which chains women in their family and community but encourages young males in sexual initiations. Ironically, when she did lost her virginity, she felt guilty and emasculated. “…as soon as I lost my virginity I lost my power…”(P.65) What she complained even more was the indifferences of her family when she compared with the White People who lost their cats. Finally, the clash of cultures burst, blazed but died out even faster. After the embarrassed yet dramatic reconcile with her mother, she found that the essential difference of love lies only in the ways of expression. “…And that’s when it hit the force of a hurricane …I was waiting to begin.” (P.75) Once again, Lola found her way at the crossing as fuku continued its magical spelling in her doomed miserable life. And this crossing was just another life and death question posted by her mother----her elder self. However inevitable, this time, she knew, since fuku is just like destiny, thus “The only way out is in”, and vice versa.

Summer 2009 @ DukeReads Project