Reactions to Sandra Cisneros

I read The House on Mango Street for my freshman English class as a summer project (what else?). It was short, and most people accused me of being lazy when I told them that was my choice. What they didn't know was that I had already tried several of the other books on the list, and I was choosing my favorite to do my project on. What they didn't know was that inside that thin little volume was more power, more punch than in any of the others I had read. In such sparse language, with such naive narration, Sandra Cisneros brought me into a world that before I could have never known, never empathized with. And isn't that the point of reading? Isn't it supposed to expose us to things we'd never dreamed of before?

After four years of letting Sandra Cisneros lie dormant in the back of my brain, I picked up my textbook, and yet again, Cisneros opened my heart and mind to feelings we both share, yet we have such different backgrounds. In "Eleven," everyone knows what it's like to wake up on your birthday and not feel a year older. Every insipid person you meet who realizes it's your birthday asks, "What's it feel like to be older?" And of course you bite your tongue and answer politely, but it's there. You don't feel like your age until days or weeks later. Someone asks you, "How old are you?" What do you say? You never seem to get it right. Too old, too young, it's never the right age.

And it's true that within us, we're all the ages we've ever been at once. I'm eighteen, and I have seventeen other years full of life experiences and emotions that I carry with me. It feels immature here at college to be lonely for home, for the comfort and safety of it. Is that my 10-year-old self raising its ugly head? We all have days where we need to put our heads down on our desks and cry or have someone hold you. That's not pathetic; we have all our years riding around with us. I love how in this paragraph Cisneros uses so much polysyndeton. It makes it seem like she's rushing through what she's saying, gushing it all out at once before she forgets. It lends to her style of naive narration.

Her similes in the third paragraph are so simplistic yet more fitting than any eloquent author would try to create. She boils it down to the most straightforward comparisons, once we all know and understand. The imagery is perfect. I smiled.

And of course, on her birthday, an embarrassing event happens. It's happened to all of us. Our birthday is supposed to be our day, our one perfect day that's all our own. We don't have to share. It belongs to us. But, as always, something inevitably walks along to ruin it. My heart reached out to the narrator at that point (it was vaguely and horribly reminiscent of my ninth birthday). On that day, too, I had to remind myself that there was a cake waiting at home and gifts and flowers. It had to boost me through the rest of the day when all I wanted to do was climb into a deep, dark hole and never come out. Yet this year on my eighteenth birthday, I felt nothing at all. In all years previous I had woken up with a happy, warm feeling of "Hooray! It's my birthday! Yay!" But I suppose this year signified I'm an adult. It was just another day full of the average things of everyday life. Nothing special. Yes, I had fun, but it was unremarkable apart from the fact I turned eighteen.

"The House on Mango Street" reminded me so strongly of the Great American Dream. A beautiful, nice, large house is the family's green light at the end of the dock. If the parents can provide this house with three bathrooms and a basement and a big yard, their children's lives will be better than their own. I felt sympathetic at this point, but I could not empathize. I've only moved twice in my life; I've always lived in a house. My family is small, and we've always been lucky in where we lived. But for her family, nothing was as they'd hoped or dreamed. All of it was a letdown and a disappointment. How do you handle something as disheartening and discouraging as that? Do you keep dreaming? Or do you let go?

And the end of the story was utterly horrifying--that moment when you see yourself or your life through someone else's eyes and you have nothing to feel except shame and embarrassment. Suddenly you are forced to look through the lenses of someone else's perspective, and you only want to turn away from what you see. But you have to look. As terrifying as it is, you have to look.