“If we had jazz, would we have survived differently? If we had known our story was a blues with a refrain running through it, would we have lifted our heads, said to each other, This is memory again and again until the living made sense? Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness? Because even though Sylvia, Angela, Gigi and I came together like a jazz improv—half notes tentatively moving toward one another until the ensemble found its footing and the music felt like it had always been playing—we didn’t have jazz to know this was who we were. We had the Top 40 music of the 1970s trying to tell our story. It never quite figured us out.”
Systematic inequality operates as a strong force in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), and Sandra Cisneros’ The House of Mango Street (1984). Both novels feature the coming of age of an adolescent girl who is dealing with the difficulties of sexual awakening, systematic racism, and gender-based violence. Both novels seem to be concerned with the violence that can prey on a community from the inside and destroy it from within. Semi-autobiographical in nature the two novels paint a harrowing journey of [respective] teenage girls who are fighting to find a community they can call their own and untangle the generational trauma that has been passed down to them.
Another Brooklyn is about a young adolescent girl growing up in 1970s Bushwick – and how she is struggling to process with grief, loss, and decades worth of generational trauma. Woodson aims to deliver a “black girl narrative” which “didn’t exist when she was younger – and she’s always wished she had books like this to read.” Her narrative about four black girls in Bushwick – where Woodson grew up – is flush with details that were lovingly crafted by an author who desperately wants to connect with her audience. “I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible again.” Woodson dares to write experiences that echo her own, and as Ron Charles remarks in his review, Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. “Another Brooklyn” is another name for poetry.”
The House on Mango Street also tells a story about being an adolescent girl. Cisneros writes about a teenager who is growing up Mexican-American in 1960s Chicago and how she fights against sexism,and classicism to become more than the House on Mango Street. Esperanza is weighed down by the gendered expectations her community places on her – as she watches the women around her are traumatized by systems held up by the patriarchy: abused, worn down by poverty, and kept hostage by their husbands. She yearns to be free. Cisneros notes that she wrote The House on Mango Street because she wanted to see her experiences on page – and that community had never been “portrayed with honesty,”.
“White people we didn’t know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away. A pale woman with dark hair covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the passenger side, her shoulders trembling.” (pg 21)
White flight is an issue touched in both novels – in passages like this, Woodson highlights how minority communities are misunderstood and continuously labelled as dangerous or eroticized by white communities. This robs them of the chance to truly enjoy their childhood, and at a young age they are either sexualized or labelled a danger. While detailing how the white families start moving out, and away, there is a gradual sense of indignity directed towards the outraged and ‘frightened’ families. “We knew the sticks for stickball games weren’t weapons…We knew the songs the boys sang Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! White boy! were just songs, not meant to chase white people out of our neighborhood. Still, they fled.” (82-83).
I guess it was the time for the night shift or middle shift to arrive because a few people came in and punched the time clock, and an older Oriental man said hello and we talked for a while about my just starting, and he said we could be friends and next time to go in the lunchroom and sit with him, and I felt better. He had nice eyes and I didn’t feel so nervous anymore. Then he asked if I knew what day it was, and when I said I didn’t, he said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn’t let go. (54 – 55)
The sexualization, and exoticization of Esperanza is mentioned multiple times throughout the novel. Sexual harassment, and the possessive need to control a women’s sexuality is perpetual theme throughout. Husbands feel as if they must lock away their wives, and men assault younger girls – all which perpetuate, and affirm the cycle of violence that incurs on women – effecting women of color disproportionately. In passages like this, Cisneros attempts to frame the despair that women feel, cataloging the entitlement, encouraging those who dare to defy, yet comforting the women who are stuck in this systemic cycle. “On Tuesday Rafaela’s husband comes home late because that’s the night he plays dominoes. And then Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at.” This violence not only affects the women but corrodes the men and encourages them to take advantage of women’s vulnerabilities.
