Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

Mamá was Cofer’s grandmother on her mother’s side. Cofer’s time in Puerto Rico was spent at her home, a place that is central to Cofer’s physical and emotional connection to the island. Indeed, as Cofer describes it, “It is the place of our origin; the stage for our memories and dreams of Island life” (23). Mamá’s room was “the heart of the house” (23), the other rooms having grown organically around it as more children were added to the family. This reflects Mamá’s central role within the family. A powerful matriarch, she long ago “decided that her husband should ‘wear the pants’ in the family only in the literal sense of the expression” (31). The center of her own world, Mamá had a powerful influence on the young Cofer, who saw Mamá as her “liberator and [her] model” (18). This is partly because Mamá was so committed to living by her own rules. Having given birth to several children, she decided to stop having any more so she could channel her energy into living a long, full life. Accordingly, she exiled her husband to a separate bedroom and slept alone, asserting her “right to own and control her body” (28). In the patriarchal society of Puerto Rico, this was an extremely bold move, but one that meant, even many years later, she “still emanates the kind of joy that can only be achieved by living according to the dictates of one’s own heart” (28), which Cofer finds deeply inspiring.

Perhaps even more significant, however, is Mamá’s influence on Cofer as a writer. Mamá was an engaging storyteller who knew numerous traditional cuentos, or fables, and was strongly grounded in a living oral tradition. It was through her that Cofer first understood the power of stories. As Cofer observes, Mamá’s stories could make the children “forget the heat, the mosquitos, our past in a foreign country, and even the threat of the first day of school looming just ahead” (76). Even while Cofer was away in the US, these stories still exerted a powerful influence, tying her to her place of birth. Indeed, each time she was due to leave Puerto Rico, she became increasingly greedy for her tales, remarking that “Mamá’s stories were what I packed—my winter store” (63). More than this, Mamá’s stories demonstrated that tales do not have to be factually accurate to be true. Instead, “her stories were parables from which to glean the Truth” (18). In this sense, Mamá was the first person to show Cofer that stories can aspire to a higher truth of wisdom and to timeless lessons passed on through the oral tradition. This greatly influenced Cofer’s own storytelling, effectively setting her on the path that led to her write Silent Dancing.

While Mamá was a practical and formidable matriarch, her husband, known to Cofer as Papá, was “a gentle, scholarly man” (31) who enjoyed writing poetry and served his community as a spiritist. Mamá had little patience for such things and was not shy about expressing her disinterest and disapproval. Although Papá could have challenged this—in the traditionally patriarchal society of Puerto Rico, a man was considered the ultimate authority in his home—he “preferred a laissez-faire approach” (31) and kept his interests out of her way. He was unassuming and extremely accommodating, feeling no need to exert his authority or force others to recognize and validate his passions. Importantly, his caring and selfless attitudes extended to his work as a “a Mesa Blanca spiritist” (30), which he believed allowed him to communicate with the dead. He used this ability to serve as something like a therapist or grief counsellor, helping those who had lost loved ones find peace and acceptance. Indeed, as Cofer notes, “[w]hat Papá performed in his room was a ceremony of healing” (32).

Cofer’s mother was deeply tied to Puerto Rico. While Cofer’s father was keen to leave Puerto Rico behind and assimilate into US culture, Cofer’s mother was determined to keep “herself ‘pure’ for her return to the Island” (104). She refused to learn English and spent as little time as possible out the family’s apartment, which she decorated to resemble a Puerto Rican home. When the family first moved to Paterson, they lived in an apartment block populated by other Puerto Rican immigrants. While her husband wished to escape this area, she found it comforting to be “surrounded by her language” (90) and the sights, sounds, and smells of her home. When the family eventually moved to another district with far fewer Puerto Ricans, she struggled with the transition, feeling that her “new home was truly in exile” (64). Without the familiar sounds and Spanish language around her, she “lapsed into silence herself, suffering from La Tristeza, the sadness that only place induces and only place cure” (64).

Indeed, much of her time in Paterson is marked by sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. Cofer explores this in the poem “The Way My Mother Walked,” which describes “the morse code of her stiletto heels sending / their Mayday-but-do-not-approach into / the darkened doorways” and explains how “Alleys / Made her grasp my hand teaching me / the braille of her anxiety” (99). Some of this anxiety was passed on to Cofer, as she reflects in the poem “El Olvido,” in which she suggests that it is “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” (68). Indeed, her mother’s refusal to assimilate into US culture (combined with her father’s insistence that they do so) frequently heightened Cofer’s sense of disconnection and displacement. At a young age, Cofer took on the role of “interpreter and buffer to the world for her” (103), making her position between two cultures even more starkly apparent. In fact, in having to move between the pseudo Puerto Rican world her mother built around herself and the wider American culture, Cofer “crossed the border of two countries” (125) several times every day.

Later in life, their relationship around gender expectations is particularly fraught due to these cultural differences. At least partially raised around US attitudes toward female autonomy and less traditional family structures, Cofer finds her mother’s immersion in Puerto Rican attitudes problematic and controlling. This became especially pronounced after her mother permanently returned to Puerto Rico following her husband’s death and went “completely ‘native,’ regressing into the comfortable traditions of her extended family” (151).