The Use of Narrative Sequence and its Effect in Getting Home Alive (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-13-2013)

Joseph Melanson

U.S. Women’s Multicultural Life-Writings

Prof. Koplewitz

11 December 2012

The Use of Narrative Sequence and its Effect in Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales

In the book Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales, a daughter and mother and collaborate to tell their respective struggles for finding and developing their own respective identities. Their collaboration is told through various literary forms like poems, stories, and essays. The entries of the Morales and Morales book are not continuing, do not complement one another, nor are they chronological as is found in a typical linear narrative approach. The entries of the mother and daughter instead express how the mind works, moving about through different periods of their lives as they occur, intertwining not only their individual experiences, but their separate but distinct experiences as well, in the overall narrative.  The approach of the book also allows both authors to tell a universal story through a sequence of multiple of voices, relating the stories of the people who influenced them, and shaped their experience. The narrative strategies that both Aurora Morales and Rosario Morales choose, through poems, essays, and stories, allows them a broader range of expression to relate their individual respective narratives sequence of identity creation is always in process. This range of expression that Morales and Morales use allows them sequence of mental experience, the sequence of shared reality with others, and the sequence of personal identity creation.

In Getting Home Alive, the Morales women demonstrate through their writings the sequence of mental experience, or how the mind is amalgamation of lived experience, rather than a straightforward narrative with a fixed beginning, middle, and end.  In her essay “Hace Tiempo”, mother Rosario shows how one’s mental experience is only ever known to the individual, how the mind can go backwards and forwards through time. The mind blends memories and recollections, with various thoughts and ideas, the mind a narrative jumble and blend that only puts itself into order for others through what it chooses to reveal, and what the meanings the mind can make of its woven experience. “Hace Tiempo” occurs over an undisclosed period of time, with Rosario Morales recalling her youth of growing up “in apartments” (28). Now her and her husband live in their first house, bought from money that came from his inheritance. Rosario Morales recalls “the rain on the roof, pit pat pat, just those first drops before the storm” (28). “How loud they are”, Morales recalls, “I can hear each separate drop hit the tin roof like a pebble falling” (28). The first home of hers is dark and gloomy, “dark all day, darker if the lights fail, the small glow of a candle in the gloom of these brown wooden walls – at two in the afternoon” (28). The very air here too makes her uncomfortable, as it is “’wet as a saturated sponge”, turning her clothes “clammy: cold and always a bit moist” (28). This dreary and damp weather of Ithaca, N.Y. where Morales and her husband reside causes Morales to “daydream fireplaces and the hot tropical sun my friends back home fantasize for me, hot tubs followed by big towels and freshly ironed sheets, and even underwear creased from the iron, all things warm and dry” (28). Rosario Morales then goes into the future to her and her husband’s decision to move to Puerto Rico. Not only to escape the bleakness of Upstate New York weather, her disinterest in her studies at Cornell, her husband’s impending graduation and his being urged by the college that he “should go to graduate school somewhere else”, but the most important factor of all was the war in Korea, and the looming probability that he would be drafted, or “jailed any day for refusing to fight” (29). The reason for escaping to Puerto Rico in particular, was because Morales had been raised there, and her husband “wanted to know it” (29). Morales, at this point of existence in her recollection, lets the reader know about the outcome of her desire and ambition to leave, “we would go”, one short sentence tells us, the following sentence tells us the outcome of their determination, “we did”. (29). Before moving on to the experience of Puerto Rico, she returns to her place within the  recollection of the experience of Ithaca. “God, I hate the smell of kerosene”, Morales writes, as it “gets over everything, penetrates and never comes out again”, and “even my skin smells of it” (29). As she is cooking a meal, Morales writes about a little neighbor girl that used to live next door to her at the home in Ithaca. Morales shows us the discomfort that the girl brings out of her. “Her eyes travel from the counter to shelf to pots to wall to floor to me, picking up and storing details”, Morales writes, this girl causing her to feel “lumpish and out of place”, wishing she “wouldn’t stare so” (30). The girl who remains nameless in this piece, either because Morales forgot it or chooses not to acknowledge the name in this recollection, first comes to her in search of some herb that grows near Morales house. This herb that the girl searches for is supposed to cure a cold, either a true herbal remedy that she has been told about, or part of a little girl’s fantasy world, Morales never lets us know. The girl is granted permission to pick this “yerba buena” yet lingers to observe Morales as she prepares dinner for her family, only taking off as Morales goes where the girl can’t follow: the outhouse” (31). Morales now flashes to another place where they had moved, to a farm in the coffee region of San Felipe, in Southern California. California is more agreeable to Morales over Ithaca, “it’s bright and sunny and smells so good, of grass smells and coffee roasting” (31). At this point in the piece, Morales is pregnant, her husband is suffering from the effects of hepatitis. Morales is so much more happier in California, among “my plants, my house, my neighborhood” (33). Morales then moves on to another recollection within the same narrative, to 1955, “pregnant again” after she’d already “miscarried one, and I nearly lost this child” (33). Morales has either a dream or a fantasy, she doesn’t say which, of a “big stout woman in a Nazi uniform” who is involve in an operation in which they are operating on her daughter’s brain after they have taken the “top of her skull off” (33). Morales then flashes to her experience after having delivered her daughter, pregnant again she is now “so tired, so sleepy” (33). Morales describes this moment in her recollection as a tiredness that seems like a “dense heavy feeling that starts at the top of my head, weights my eyelids down, slows my arms, and when it hits my legs, I have to lie down” (33-34). Despite Morales exhaustion, she still has to maintain her home, taking care of her daughter, taking care of herself for the sake of the unborn child within. “I’ve got to fatten up”, Morales writes, but “how, I don’t know” as she doesn’t “feel like eating most of the time”, but “at least I’m not throwing up any more”, and “I’m not losing weight” (35). Morales is alone in the remainder of this moment, except for her daughter, and the requirements of her role of motherhood, the need to prepare dinner for the three of them: Morales, her daughter, and the unborn child within her. Taking a break from her cooking, Morales writes, the food needing twenty minutes to cook she pushes “open the lower half of the door to sit on the step in the warm sun, watch Lori play with sticks in the dirt, and wait” (36). This moment in Rosario Morales narrative piece shows how the mind experiences as a mixture of the past, present, and future, a blend that only gets sorted out by the individual to the individual’s best capacities. Our minds, in Aurora Morales piece shows, are a blend of experience of time that goes from recollections and memories, to our hopes and aspirations of the future, occurring in our ever-present experience of now. If Aurora Morales had chosen to obey narrative convention, she would have had to more clearly distinguish these several experiences that she blends together, into several distinct stories that would have had to been put into a certain order, thus giving her narrative a less personal feel to her particular experience.

The Morales women use a narrative strategy of sequence that illustrates the dimension of shared reality of individuals, an experience that while it may coincide with the presence of others, our internal experience may not correlate to others in the experience of our shared reality. In “Kitchens” Aurora describes cooking in her own kitchen, flashing back to the women of her past, teaching her how to cook. As she prepares her meal, Aurora Morales relives the experience of growing up around maternal role models, who hand down this important and necessary ability to a girl who will more than likely be in need of it one day when she has her own mouths to feed. “Mine is a California kitchen, full of fresh vegetables and whole grains, bottled spring water and yogurt in plastic pints, but when I lift the lid from that big black pot, my kitchen fills with the hands of women who came before me” (77). As she goes through the various activities that go into making the meal, she ruminates on the women who taught her this “magic, a power, a ritual of love and work” (38). Aurora Morales demonstrates in this piece that we are just the culmination of developed skills of generations and generations of people, and everything we do is only what has been passed on to us, only brought out of us in either how the world requires us to behave. If Aurora Morales constructed this in a typical, straight-forward narrative sequence she would have had to completely flesh out the individuals that she writes about, these maternal influences, putting them in their respective times and places of her existence, as well as giving more development to her own place and time, making the moment seem more like a recording of history than a recording of shared experience with others.

The third use of narrative sequence that the Morales women use demonstrates the sequence of identity creation. In her essay “Destitution” on pages 94-95, mother Rosario recalls the fear of poverty, an influence that Morales believes she inherited with her birth. “I was born in August 1930”, Rosario Morales writes, and “I have always feared destitution, always” (94). “Even before I was born, the fear seeped in with my nutriments through the thin capillary walls of my placenta into my heart” (Morales 94). Morales tells the story of her mother having to marry late in her teens, a necessary decision as the family was now destitute after losing the family store.  “The older girls all found husbands in a hurry”, Morales writes of her aunts, and her uncle, “the older boy” had to settle for the practical job of being a policeman, sacrificing his dream of being a social worker (94). Morales relates how her mother was “shipped to the United States within hours of the marriage ceremony, landed in New York in time for the crash, arrived to recurrent joblessness, discrimination, poverty, fear” (94). Morales was conceived within this stressful and uncertain time and realizes that her birth may have been just another burden for her family to carry in this new land of uncertainty. Rosario Morales relates how this origin in her parents has informed he her core identity with the fear of poverty. “I could live in luxury: yachts and champagne, diamonds up to my eyebrows, and I would worry about food, about a roof over my head, about whether the money would run out” Rosario writes, “the Depression is part of every cell of my body” (94). Rosario Morales writes “my mother drank it in her teen years in Naranjito, those years of increasing poverty in the colonies before the stock market crash” and her father “migrated to New York, escaped long before he married, leaving the pan for the fire” (94). “Their anxiety was the breath of life to me, their hunger flavored my milk” (Morales 94). Because of this difficult time in her parent’s life Rosario Morales writes, “I don’t have many stories” as the family’s history “was too painful, too frightening, too omen-ous” (sic) (94). When questioned about this time “my mother often slipped quickly over the events, hinting” and my “father never spoke of it at all” (95). Rosario Morales in this moment in their book shows the sequence of how our identity forms, bits and pieces of influences from family and other people that informs how we choose to be within the world. If Rosario Morales had attempted to follow literary conventions these events would have had to be more fleshed out, names and faces given to her relatives, more details would have had to be given to the events of their past, rather than the briefest hint and summary. This piece by Rosario Morales, in this use of sequence, shows us how events and circumstances unconsciously yet strongly inform who we are, decisions and actions of others influence us, rather than us being a separate observer that we sometimes think that we are.

            The Morales women through the use of poems, essays, and stories, demonstrate the sequence of mental experience, the sequence of shared reality with others, and the sequence of how our identity creates itself. The writings of the Morales women show how mental experience exists in its own sequence, or rather without any kind of sequence but how we give it sequence in how we relate ourselves to ourselves, and others. The Morales women’s writings show that despite occupying the same time and space, our internal planes of experience never completely match those with whom we are spending our time with. The Morales women, through their writings, show the sequence of how our identities form from events and circumstances, not only those of which we are cognizant of, but of other influences barely known to us, help to form the concept of ourselves that we hold in our minds, as well as coloring decisions and behaviors that we make later in our lives.

Works Cited:

Morales, Aurora Levins, and Rosario Morales. Getting Home Alive. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. 1986. Print. 


GRADE: 95
Greetings, Joseph. Your approach to exploring narrative sequence, non-linearity, and the proximity of the inner consciousness and sensory awareness of mother/daughter in the text, allows the reader to see the actual results of this non-linearity through the textual examples. I am glad to see the level of detail in your focus upon specific moments, whether the young girl, herbs, outhouse, or the kitchen and foods, or the sense of nostalgia or expectation, hope or disappointment, as conveyed in the stories. Each author's voice is quite unique, and yet as mother and daughter there is a generational set of influences that are present in the texts. The movements of the mind in non-linearity of experiential living, an impressionistic and sensory world view, are elucidated quite well in your examples and your narrative analysis. One other area that might be of interest for exploration is the entire concept of how'time' utilized- i.e. in the non-linearity how is time shaped, does it move in a straight line a circle, etc. - is there a larger metaphor involved.

Thank you for your fine essay and for your conscientiousness in completing your essays.  All best,  PRof LK