The first two books that we have been assigned to read are Barnacle Love by Anthony de Sa and Thirty Seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences by Jan Zwicky. I am about two-thirds into Barnacle Love and I am really absorbed in the narrative of Manuel and his son Antonio. I started reading it first over the book of poetry by Zwicky because I haven't even been able to purchase her book yet. I do not know why it is not available at the bookstore, but every time I check they tell me to come back another time. Hopefully the professors let us know how we can get our hands on the book in our class tomorrow night.
So far, I am really enjoying reading De Sa's story about a family's immigrant experience in Canada. The story of Manuel and his journey from the Azores islands of Portugal to Canada and the experiences he has along the way is really poignant for me because of my own family's experience with immigration.
My parents, sister and I moved to Canada when I was one year old. It was 1991 and El Salvador had been destroyed in the 1980s by a violent civil war. My mother's sister (Tia to me) had already established a life in my home town of Kitchener so that made it so much easier to make the decision to leave El Salvador and move to Canada in search of a better life. Since I was only a baby at the time, I of course do not remember this important time that changed my future forever. However, I almost feel like I do have my own vivid memories, just from years of listening to my parent's stories and memories. Reading the first half of the book where Manuel is the protagonist reminded me of the struggles that my parents also experienced in moving halfway across the world. They too had to leave their families and everything they had grown accustomed to. But their story is different to Manuel's because their reasons for moving were not selfish. As my sister and I were still young children, we still had the chance to live safer, more prosperous lives. And so they moved for us. Reading De Sa's beautiful book has reminded me how much my parents sacrificed for our futures and has inspired me to keep trying to make them proud and take advantage of every opportunity I am given.
Thank you Anthony de Sa for writing such a stirring novel.
Below I have included a poem that I once wrote on my thoughts of immigration in the style of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" that I think relates with the themes of immigration in De Sa's novel and how the dreams it promises are not always fulfilled.
Sueños frustrados
I am not you, I am not you
Ya no, soy tu
Locked in your chains and handcuffs,
At home and when you came here,
Doing what was expected of you.
Freedom, I chase after you.
I run across borderlines
With one suitcase packed full of Hope
Expecting to find something else
From what I am used to.
Didn’t fly over ocean Atlantic
To land somewhere completely new,
But your feet are on foreign land and you’re a Spic
Fumbling over rosary beads, you
Pray to
Build una vida en este pais
Despite your idioma.
Your tongue, tongue, tongue
That doesn’t move the way you want it
To, does it?
The sun never shines as bright here,
Everything is duller, less clear.
In this place, you chase
What you envisioned before you
Actually arrived here.
It died in an explosion.
Tick, tick, tick, tick
The dream was too weak
To outlive majority views
And everything brand new.
Start running, start running
From what they expect of you
You’re not like them, you’re not who they are.
I may look a lot like you
Pero yo no soy tu.
The wind blows differently here than in El Salvador,
But this place is where I grew.
And despite my reluctance to accept it
I have grown to fit I have grown to fit
My shiny new white costume.
Maybe I am the one who
Has climbed too far up to see my roots
And the dirt they’re planted in.
We climbed into a plane that flew
Too high and far before I knew
My identity, my role.
Slowly, slowly I’ve learned the rules,
But as I learn them I want to break them.
I won’t follow, I won’t
Every example set by you.
It’s hard to tell what’s less natural:
To try to create someone new
Or act like a breathing stereotype
Of what’s expected of someone like me.
Brown immigrant girl who
Has been misplaced early in life,
Placed among strangers, people who
Have blank faces and forced smiles
That are fake, fake, fake, to you.
I am deceived like a fool.
And I am still lost in a maze
But no longer is everything new.
I have learned to see right through
Those who see not what is true,
But only a wetback leech in brown
They see colour and I see right through
Past skin, into, into
To their black black hearts, so untrue.
Inside, human feeling is askew.
The further you go into
These bodies their hatred seeps through.
Pero no dejes que el odio
Infecte your own sangre
Cause once it’s there it’s hard to forget.
Recuerde tu primer sueno.
Although you may run from who you are
And nowhere feels like it’s home to you
Laugh at fortune’s travel agency
And smile at where you live now
At least por ahora, it’s where you belong.
