Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

“The aroma of coffee perking in the kitchen, the mesmerizing creaks and groans of the rockers, and the women telling their lives in cuentos 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.” 

Mamá’s storytelling has a profound influence on Cofer’s writing. Her sensual memories of listening to tales and fables is inseparably woven into her understanding of the power of stories. In many respects these early experiences set her on the path to writing Silent Dancing.

“As each of their eight children were born, new rooms were added. After a few years, the paint did not exactly match, nor the materials, so that there was a chronology to it, like the rings of a tree, and Mamá could tell you the history of each room in her casa, and thus the genealogy of the family along with it.” 

The house where Cofer spent her time in Puerto Rico was known to everyone as Mamá’s house. It is symbolically significant, representing the center of the family’s world and the stage for their stories and memories. It also represents the family itself, having grown almost organically in conjunction with the number of children. Finally, it represents Mamá’s crucial role within the family because these new rooms all orbited Mamá’s room, which was the heart of the house just as she was the heart of the family.

“Being a woman and black made Our Lady the perfect depository for the hopes and prayers of the sick, the weak and the powerless.” 

The centerpiece of Cofer’s family’s village is a church raised on the spot where a vision of the Black Virgin is said to have saved a woodcutter from a bull in Spanish colonial times. In Cofer’s treatment the Black Virgin becomes symbolic not only of a traditional way of life and a long-standing belief system, but also a figure of home for the oppressed and abandoned. She is a marginalized woman like them who can intercede with God on their behalf.

“Is not the blood of saints and

men in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s hands

not bleed into your eyes from his cross?” 

In the poem “Quinceañera” Cofer discusses how her first menstruation meant that she was expected to wash her own sheets and clothes, as though her blood was tainted. This reflects widespread beliefs that menstrual blood is dirty and dangerous, and Christian traditions that associate it with sin, the fall, and the supposed dangers of women’s sexuality. However, Cofer highlights the hypocrisy and misogyny of such beliefs, setting menstrual blood in contrast with revered forms of bloodspilling.

“‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair. I can’t go to school here. I don’t speak Spanish.’ It was my final argument, and it failed miserably because I was shouting my defiance in the language I claimed not to speak.” 

At first, Cofer’s protest that she cannot speak Spanish while actually speaking Spanish seems nonsensical, a moment of childish desperation to avoid attending school. However, she explores this further to highlight that she associated the language with an earlier time, a childhood of innocence, fun, and play. Thus, her protest was less about being unable to speak the language and more about her fear of “losing” the language to the rules and regulations of school.

“The smells that filled Mamá’s house at that time have come to mean anticipation and a sensual joy during a time in my life, the last days of my early childhood, when I could still absorb joy through my pores—when I had not yet learned that light is followed by darkness, that all of creation is based on that simple concept, and maturity is a discovery of that natural law.” 

A highly poetic writer, Cofer frequently grounds her descriptions in the senses. This is particularly true of her descriptions of Puerto Rico, which are saturated in the sights, smells, sounds, and sensations of a childhood spent at play. The warmth, rich smells, and vibrant colors often starkly contrast with the cold and sterile atmosphere of her time in Paterson.

“Unlike El Building, where we had lived on our first trip to Paterson, our new home was truly in exile. There were Puerto Ricans by the hundreds only one block away, but we heard no Spanish, no loud music, no mothers yelling at children, nor the familiar ¡Ay Bendito!, that catch-all phrase of our people. Mother lapsed into silence herself, suffering from La Tristeza, the sadness that only place induces and only place cure.” 

Cofer’s father insisted that the family assimilate into US culture, seemingly feeling shame for the traditional culture and customs of his fellow Puerto Ricans. His desire to move the family away from the Puerto Rican immigrant community in Paterson was a source of considerable distress for Cofer’s mother. Like Cofer, she thrived on the sensuous connection to Puerto Rico, and losing the sights, sounds, smells, and language that reminded her of home caused her to become withdrawn and anxious.

“I instinctively understood then that language is the only weapon a child has against the absolute power of adults. I quickly built up my arsenal of words by becoming an insatiable reader of books.” 

Although bilingual, in her early childhood Cofer often lost some of her ability to speak English or Spanish while immersed in the other culture and language. After finding her inability to speak English deeply alienating and a cause for punishment from US teachers, she began to see words not only as the building blocks of stories but as a way to assert and defend herself.

“[…] dangerous

to disdain the plaster saints

before which you mother kneels

praying with embarrassing fervor

that you survive in the place you have chosen to live:

a bare, cold room with no pictures on the walls,

a forgetting place where she fears you will die

of loneliness and exposure.” 

Cofer’s mother was extremely anxious about living in the United States. She refused to assimilate, remaining fervently devoted to her native culture and fearing what might happen to her if she did not return home. Spending so much time as a link between her mother and wider US culture profoundly shaped Cofer’s sense of identity and led her to internalize some of her mother’s anxieties and warnings.

“In the last few weeks before the beginning of school, when it was too hot for cooking until it was almost dark and when mothers would not even let their boys go to the playgrounds and parks for fear of sunstroke, Mamá would lead us to the mango tree, there to spin the web of her cuentos over us, making us forget the heat, the mosquitos, our past in a foreign country, and even the threat of the first day of school looming just ahead.” 

After being away from Puerto Rico for several months, Cofer found that she craved Mamá’s stories even more than she had before. On her return to the island, she found them even more transportive and came to recognize stories’ power to take a person out of their life and ground them in a sense of place.

“María Sabida became the model Mamá used for the ‘prevailing woman’—the woman who ‘slept with one eye open’—whose wisdom was gleaned through the senses: from the natural world and from ordinary experiences. Her main virtue was that she was always alert and never a victim. She was by implication contrasted to María la Loca, that poor girl who gave it all up for love, becoming a victim of her own foolish heart.” 

Although seemingly told to the adult women around her, Mamá’s stories were usually intended to educate the young girls who sat at their feet. The intended lesson was often a combination of how to be a socially acceptable Puerto Rican woman and how to navigate the complexities and dangers of life in patriarchal Puerto Rican society. These lessons were frequently achieved by contrasting celebrations of women’s wit and wisdom with warnings about women who allowed themselves to be fooled by men or by the callings of their own hearts.

“My cousin has grown up in Paterson and is in her last year of high school. She doesn’t have a trace of what Puerto Ricans call ‘la mancha’ (literally, the stain: the mark of the new immigrant—something about the posture, the voice, or the humble demeanor making it obvious to everyone that that person has just arrived on the mainland; has not yet acquired the polished look of the city dweller).” 

The pressure to assimilate into a new culture is so pronounced that the immigrant community developed a name for the “stain” on those who fail to achieve this. Importantly, however, this pressure directly conflicts with an equally intense pressure to conform to traditional models of behavior, especially for women and girls. These contradictory expectations shaped the experiences of Cofer and other immigrants, creating a sense of fragmentation and dislocation.

“English was my weapon and my power. As long as she lived in her fantasy that her exile from Puerto Rico was temporary and that she did not need to learn the language, keeping herself ‘pure’ for her return to the Island, then I was in control of our lives outside the realm of our little apartment in Paterson.” 

Cofer’s varying ability to speak two languages had some significant outcomes for her. At times, she lost fluency in one language after being immersed in the other for several months, which lead to alienation and sometimes even punishment from teachers and peers. At other times, she thrived, such as when her ability to speak far more English than her mother put her in a position of power, giving her more authority than she would otherwise have experienced.

“And Providencia was like an ‘idiot savant’ in a game of chance that these women tried to control very carefully; Providencia’s careless bets made them very nervous, for to her losing meant winning. She simply did not care about the rules.”

The Puerto Rican women around Cofer were the arbiters of acceptable femininity and womanhood who decreed how they and other women should behave. This can be seen as both conforming to the patriarchal standards of the time and as teaching young girls how to navigate the dangers of such a society. In a setting such as this, those who do not conform to the standards, like Providencia, are seen as dangerous, with the potential to upset the whole delicate balance.

“Sal, we are as alone as you: Locked inside the bodies of strangers, unable to touch the ones we love most.” 

Cofer remembers feeling sorry for Sal, a gay man who worked as a super in her apartment block, because he struggled to find love and connection. However, as her father became increasingly withdrawn and distant, haunted by the things he saw on active military service, Cofer realized that Sal’s alienation was really something they all experienced.

“It is not unusual for an adolescent to feel disconnected from her body—a stranger to herself and to her developing needs—but I think that to a person living simultaneously in two cultures this phenomenon is intensified.” 

Cofer’s transition into adulthood was particularly difficult. She experienced the same sense of fragmentation and confusion that most adolescents encounter, but she did so within a tangle of contradictory pressures from two different cultures. Exposure to both American liberalism and traditional Puerto Rican gender roles and expectations meant she was perpetually unsure how she was supposed to behave as a young woman.

“I lived in the carefully constructed facsimile of a Puerto Rican home my mother had created. Every day I crossed the border of two countries.” 

Her mother’s refusal to speak English or assimilate into US culture was, in one sense, empowering for Cofer: it meant that she had an authority beyond her years. However, it also reinforced her sense of suspension between two worlds, standing on the border between her mother’s Puerto Rico and the surrounding US culture.

“As we approached but did not touch others,

our habit of movement kept us safe

like a train in motion—

nothing could touch us.” 

Her family’s circular migration meant that Cofer never felt entirely settled in one place. This prevented her from developing a true sense of belonging in either the United States or Puerto Rico. However, she also reflects on the fact that this was a protective move, albeit a double-edged one: The threats of different cultures could not touch her, but this came at the cost of never fully connecting with those around her.

“Somehow my body with its new contours and new biological powers had changed everything: half of the world had now become a threat, or felt threatened by its potential for disaster.” 

As a child Cofer experienced some aspects of the tension between American and Puerto Rican attitudes toward gender. However, she felt this contrast far more starkly when she returned to Puerto Rico as an adolescent for the first time. More used to the liberal attitudes of America, and to the solitude of their isolated life there, she finds the controlling concern of her Puerto Rican relatives repressive and constricting.

“I still took pleasure in listening to the women talk about their lives, and I still relished and memorized Mamá’s cuentos, but by then I was beginning to recognize the subtext of sexual innuendo, to detect the sarcasm, and to find the hidden clues to their true feelings of frustrations in their marriages and in their narrowly circumscribed lives as women in Puerto Rico.” 

Although she found returning to Puerto Rico as a young woman difficult, Cofer also discovered a far greater depth to the traditional Puerto Rican attitudes toward gender. Although the women did conform to patriarchal standards, Cofer was by then old enough to understand how their talk allowed them to subtly subvert the rules and support each other by building up complex patterns of female solidarity.

“My trouble with Mother comes when she and I try to define and translate key words for both of us, words such as ‘woman’ and ‘mother.’” 

Even as an adult, Cofer still clashed with her mother about their different understandings of womanhood. Once fully resituated in Puerto Rican culture, her mother’s outlook became even more traditional, and she regularly criticized Cofer’s life choices. Cofer employs the idea of speaking different languages to highlight this difference, suggesting not that they did not understand the words but that they had to “translate” the different cultural meanings associated with them.

“Yet he would never forget the lessons she learned at the río—or how to handle fragile things. I looked at my mother and she smiled at me; we now had a new place to begin our search for the meaning of the word woman.” 

The story of Kiki and Marino’s elopement offers an unexpected point of common ground between Cofer and her mother. Significantly, this connection is not based on the story offering any conclusive answer to what “womanhood” means. Rather, it reminds them that there are multiple forms of womanhood, multiple experiences and stories, and these are all valid and all contribute to a wider understanding of the concept.

“Her memories are precious to her and although she accepts my explanations that what I write in my poems and stories is mainly the product of my imagination, she wants certain things she believes are true to remain sacred, untouched by my fictions.” 

Despite growing up immersed in the same oral traditions as Cofer, Cofer’s mother is more protective of her memories and actually grows angry with her daughter for presenting an alternative version of her father’s homecoming. Nevertheless, Cofer does not allow this to dissuade her from presenting her own version of events.