Doors are first introduced in connection with the dead in "Learning to Talk." In creating the backdrop for the speaker throughout the book, the speaker describes growing up code-switching between English, Spanish, and the inarticulable, "Hard knocks at the door / bring pieces of English / brother dead sorry" (16). Dream-catchers on the wall cannot protect the speaker from the muertos that her family's door lets inside. Hernández-Linares ushers in the concept of death and language simultaneously, the motif of the door allowing this company inside the book and into the speaker's life.
The next poem, "Too Much Girl," introduces the second function of doors, and is the place where this motif is expanded the most fully. Within this poem, the speaker is trying to exist within academic institutions that reduce her existence to stereotypes "The reporter from The Globe writes me / into a slum" (18) and exploits her body "I took a job building pantheons for those / who enter through the ivory / and don't return. My back bends / under the unscripted chronicle" (19). The academic discourse that makes up the atmosphere around her is represented as banal, reductive, and yet where the illusion of opportunity is upheld. Part two of this poem exists as one stanza, and demonstrates the diminishing effect of much of academic inquiry made by privileged intellects that live and have no connection to the communities that they study,
In examining a concrete experience or subject with a scientific gaze, this poem argues, the subject is lost. In being blocked out of this "ivory" world, the speaker is only able to enter when she falls ill. When in an institutional setting--what I'm assuming is a university hospital due to the mixture of "professor" imagery and medical imagery--the speaker observes, "I am present in a building / that I could not enter once. Doorknobs / taunt me" (20). In this setting she is further stripped of agency and made to be a "specimen."
But is a door a door
define door,
unhinge it, pour microscopic lenses over the grain,
find the core, until there is no more door
(19)
On page 37, in "Sweat," which gives detail to the lives of women sewing endlessly in garage sweat shops, "Their discarded countries are pieces of the past / that they throw out at the end of an endless day, / when the crooked door stops letting light through" (38). The speaker chronicles the lives and dreams of women who live within her community, who are shut inside stuffy coffin-like confines, unable to access daylight and freedom, working their fingers to nubs. The door of opportunity for these women, like in the previously mentioned poem, is shut.
What I appreciate about following this motif is how Hernández-Linares is able to complicate really common imagery. An image as simple as a door can open up into a complex, multi-layered motif, one that gets more complex as it reappears throughout the text.
Thanks SO much for navigating the poems through a motif! This is something I hope gets brought up in class (both specifically on the doors motif as well as motifs within poetry and how poets create multiple meanings). Doors were entrapment, doors were glued shut, doors were illusions, doors were insincere gestures to be assimilated/accepted, doors were anything but a place to merely enter and exit as one pleases. "little girl don't go outside something burning in front of the door." And these "shut doors" came off as a silencing, you don't even have to close anyone's mouth, just keep a barrier up. BUT at the end of her poems, (actually right from the beginning and throughout) it was clear that it is in poetry, in songs, in prayers, in our shared words, that bring the most hope out of living in a world of closed doors.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great get. I love motifs. Probably to the point of obsession. I love what you do with the doors here and how they show up in the poems. She is motif driven as well tongue, hands, roads etc.
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