Finding fruit in The House on Mango Street. A novella by Sandra Cisneros.
Some time ago, I came across a slight dilemma where I really wanted to buy new books but I’m still stuck with my old secondhand ones that I either got from Shopee, swapped in book swaps or stolen from please steal these books shelves (they actually encourage this, don’t worry). My solution was to put a stack of books, maybe six or seven in a pile and every time I finish a stack, I would reward myself with a new, more expensive book from my favourite bookshop in town.
The House on Mango Street is the first book that I purchased with this system. I’ve always come across the book from various book lists and its prominence became a pestilence that I needed to squash. At the same time, it makes it an intriguing book to read. It is coming from a Latina voice in America, published at a time when these voices were severely under-represented, and on this note alone it had become a significant book. Still, I opened this book with no expectations and after having finished the book, it left me with a tepid lukewarm feeling. Not great, not bad, just thereabouts.
Scheming an escape from Mango Street
Clocking at 110 pages, with short chapters which take up a lot of negative space, this is one of those books that you could read in a single sitting. Is it really the best way to approach this book? Probably not. The language Cisneros used is languid, fluid, simple. It is after all, the perspective of an adolescent girl: Old enough to be interested in boys and old enough for men to be interested in her.
Esperanza’s family, forced to move out to the outskirts of town had to settle in a house that wasn’t really their dream house:
“It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom — Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.”
We learn a fair bit already about the inhabitants of the house from this small passage: that they are underprivileged, that the house they are settling in is far beyond their fantasies but a house nonetheless that they had to make do with, that they expect to do better one day, with no timeline, as in the case of owning a car.
Gradually, we learn a little about the neighbourhood through Esperanza’s experiences. She gradually makes friends around the neighbourhood and at school. Her friends and acquaintances in the street are of ethnic origins, just like her. The original inhabitants of the street are moving further along, because of the diaspora of the ethnic minorities there. It is a place that though seem innocent enough, is filled with tension beyond the scope of racial boundaries.
Esperanza is in that delicate age between childhood and adulthood, where sexuality is becoming more tumescent without her being immediately aware, a time when her looks enabled her to become a contributor to her family, getting a job in the photo finishers where she had an unwelcome adventure with a Chinese man. Those around her, neighbours and their relations are not much older and have already started to experiment with adulthood.
But where there is comfort in familiarity, there is also the discomfort of lethargy. Esperanza knew that she does not belong there even at a young age, that she was made for a life elsewhere. The book is her reflections on becoming a person she wants to be, to liberate herself from Mango Street.
A house built with the bricks of poetry
With a repertoire more notable for her poetry than her novels, Cisneros constructed The House on Mango Street with much poetry. The vignettes that we consider as chapters are similar to prose poems, often no longer than a page and giving us a slight insight of the subject matter, whether they be Esperanza’s own name, her mother’s scent, the erratic nature of her friends or the men trying to make her.
Though the centrepiece of the novel is built on the house, the land and nature the house is constructed on is equally as important. The sky is prominent, signifying the unfulfilled hopes and possibilities innate in Esperanza. The skies are the aspiration, almost like a blank canvas:
“You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky.”
On the other side, the trees and roots keep her embedded to the ground:
“Their strength (the trees) is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.”
I suppose Esmeralda is akin to the tree, entrenched where she was (at least for now) but as she grows older, her ambitions grows in correspondence to her sense of origins. This was her ultimate resolve: to escape from Mango Street but to come back for those who couldn’t.
I think for the size of it at about 100 pages, it works just fine. Any more than it would be overstaying the welcome. Yet, I’m not sure that within that hundred odd pages whether I build a rapport with Esperanza. I know that I should care more about her story, but somehow I was left indifferent. I would argue that the form of the novel, with its loosely interconnected short vignettes failed to construct this connection with the narrator.
Though I wanted to like the book immensely, it fell short. And perhaps this is because I was setting up the author to fail as I could breezily read the contents of the story within a couple of short hours, but failed to finish the twenty odd pages of introduction over three days. Though it came from the same voice, and the introduction was written by the author twenty-five years after the novel’s original publication, I felt the voice of the introduction to be self-indulgent with Cisneros addressing herself in the third person. I found that a bit sappy.
It’s a book that has a reputation, but I find a bit overrated. Yet, there are passages here of poetry written by Esperanza that stunned me:
“I want to be / Like the waves on the sea, / Like the clouds in the wind, / but I’m me. / One day I’ll jump / out of my skin. / I’ll shake the sky / like a hundred violins.”
In eight lines, Esperanza summarised her person succinctly with more beauty and stark truth than the whole book combined. I guess it isn’t a bad idea to seek for Cisneros’s poetry.
