Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home: How the Garcia Girís Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez

Abstract

The condition of exile, as described from the exile’s own perspective, introduces a different set of issues in relation to the notions of home and nostalgia. For the culturally displaced person, selfdivision is inevitable. Torn between preserving her language of origin and acquiring the language of her adopted culture to facilitate assimilation, the exile may harbor ambivalent feelings toward both her home of origin and her adopted domicile. The culturally displaced person constructs her identity in relation to two distinct, if not also antithetical, sites in time, space, and memory. As Amy Kaminsky phrases it, “Whether forced or voluntary, exile is primarily from, and not to, a place. It thus carries something of the place departed and of the historical circumstance of that place at the moment of departure, making the exiled person no longer present in the place departed, but not a part of the new place either… Language tells us that exile is its own location: people living out of their homeland are ‘in exile.’ ”1 Moreover, nostalgia for one’s homeland is virtually inevitable, as the exile appraises present circumstances against a vanished past that encompasses conflicted meanings of place and, frequently, language. As Kaminsky adds, “Exile writing is a discourse of desire, a desire to recuperate, repair, and return”2KeywordsDominican RepublicMother TongueAmbivalent FeelingCultural DisplacementAmerican PeerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.