We Live by What We See at Night (Criticism)

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• Born in 1928, Piri Thomas was a Puerto Rican immigrant who grew up in Spanish Harlem in New York City. After a life of racial discrimination, street fighting, drugs, and a prison sentence for shooting a police officer, Thomas wrote his now-famous account of growing up as an outsider in America, called Down These Mean Streets. Originally published in 1967, a thirtieth-anniversary edition came out in 1997 with a new afterward discussing the worsening conditions on the streets of Spanish Harlem.
• Martín Espada’s fifth collection of poetry, Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems (1996), contains a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, and work experiences. This is a mixture of personal and political poems in which he addresses the bread of imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice.
• The Spanish-American War does not always receive as much attention in history books as other conflicts. In Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War and Its Aftermath (1993), James C. Bradford and others address the issue and show that this war was actually America’s emergence as a world power.
• The classic novel Native Son by Richard Wright, first published in 1940, tells the story of a young black man in the Chicago of the 1930s who strikes back angrily and violently against the poverty and racism he faces on a daily basis. Some critics have claimed that American culture was changed forever after the publication of this graphic, provocative, and challenging book.

frustration of discrimination and sometimes violent racial attacks. The inability to secure jobs with good wages causes most to lose hope of reaching the goals of prosperity and happiness that everyone in America is supposed to attain — this, of course, in light of the millions of Americans themselves who live with hunger and poor housing conditions every day of their lives. Most people in other lands do not see that side of America and cannot even imagine it. To them, the United States is truly that land of milk and honey where everyone lives in big houses, drives big cars, and buys whatever the heart desires. Those who live here, obviously, know better, and it does not take long for reality to set in for those who arrive with a distorted image.

“We Live by What We See at Night” suggests that Espada’s father must have been dreaming an American dream before he left Puerto Rico for the United States. And if it was a mistaken image that lured him from home, it was also dreams that became his solace once the truth of day-to-day life in a New York barrio became impossible to deny. As the poem indicates, the visions that the mind conjures while asleep can be both beautiful and comforting, but an agitating reminder of real life still haunts an otherwise peaceful sleep. This is implied in the words “flickered” and “interrupted.” It seems the father’s rest is sometimes fitful, as though there is a tug of war between the clear image of the mountains and their sudden disappearance as the picture flickers on and off in his mind. The serene view of the river is also plagued by “interrupted dreaming,” as though reality keeps banging on his mind’s door to get in. But the poem is not an altogether unhappy one. Nor is it completely angry and accusatory. In its back-and-forth tone the poem mirrors the duality of an immigrant’s life, and it is this duality that causes so much stress and discontent. It is also what makes the word “exile,” with its dubious meaning, so important in the poem.

The title of the collection in which “We Live by What We See at Night” first appeared is Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction. Even stronger than exile, eviction leaves no room for doubt about whether a removal is forced or self-imposed. As a tenant lawyer in Chelsea, Massachusetts — a poor suburb of Boston heavily populated by Hispanic immigrants — Espada certainly encountered his share of battles between immigrant renters and the landlords who served eviction notices for whatever reasons. As a poet, Espada compares this expulsion from one’s house or apartment to the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States after the island came under American control. And the numbers who left home were especially high during the period of “Operation Bootstrap” when many islanders got caught up in the frenzy of a new Americanized way of life in the 1950s. Whether this migration is equal to an eviction depends upon who is asked. But regardless of the debate, one thing is for certain: the feeling of displacement was very real for the new arrivals, and it was exacerbated by the animosity and mistrust that greeted them from the first day in America.

Included in this same Espada collection are many other poems depicting the emotional and physical hardships of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. Consider these lines from one called “Toque de queda: Curfew in Lawrence:” “The mobs are gone: white adolescents / who chanted USA and flung stones / at the scattering of astonished immigrants, / ruddy faces slowing the car to shout spick / and wave beer cans.” This sad and violent scene is played out over and over on the streets of New York and Boston and in any other city or town where people of different colors and from different cultural backgrounds encounter one another. Given this ominous fact, it is easy to see why a native Puerto Rican may have a “craving for that island birthplace” and why it has “burrowed” itself just as deeply in the soul of the immigrant as his “thirty years’ exile” has tried to dig out.

Possibly the most discouraging aspect of “We Live by What We See at Night” is the fact that it was written in the 1980s, refers to times in the 1950s, and could just as easily be written today to describe some immigrants’ lives on American streets at the outset of the twenty-first century. While several anti-discrimination laws have been passed and diversity issues appear regularly in newspapers and on talk shows across the nation, day-to-day life has not changed much for some. In all fairness, many Americans will point out instances of forced reverse discrimination and their feelings of outrage over the English language taking a back seat to Spanish in some school districts. Understandably, many citizens feel threatened by a continuing influx of people from all over the world into the United States, which has added greatly to problems of overcrowding and poverty in American cities. And some say it is time to close the door. But even if new immigration laws were passed to limit or stop (a very unlikely prospect) the movement of foreign citizens into the United States, those laws would not apply to Puerto Ricans. As members of an American commonwealth, the islanders are free to come to the mainland whenever they like and to return just as easily if they choose to do so. But in spite of any speculation about future laws, an answer to long-standing problems between cultures and races is not likely to be found in legal actions anyway. And until a Puerto Rican immigrant can lie down in his bed in New York at night and dream of the life he is living in America, he will need to find comfort and peace in living with his dreams of the land he left behind.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “We Live by What We See at Night,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Doreen Piano

Piano is a Ph. D. candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she analyzes how cultural identity is transferred from generation to generation through the act of remembering.

Historically, the United States has been a place of new beginnings for millions of people from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. In fact, the “immigrant experience” is part of our cultural heritage as Americans. With its promise of economic prosperity, personal liberty, and upward mobility, the United States offers many immigrants the chance to make their lives, as well as their children’s lives, better than it was in the “old country.” Yet, as much as America has been described as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” expatriation, along with its attendant assimilation into an alien culture, can be a difficult experience, especially for those who still long for their homeland. In fact, the lingering memories of life before immigration and the traditions and values of the “old country” can be clung to fiercely. Therefore, for many immigrants, memories of their former homeland are an important source of cultural transference to their offspring who are first generation Americans. In his poem, “We Live by What We See at Night,” Martín Espada explores the psychic landscape of the immigrant experience in the United States, revealing how cultural identity is transferred from generation to generation through the act of remembering.

Told from the son’s point of view, a first-generation Puerto Rican “born in New York,” the poem examines both the son’s and the father’s relationship to the “old world” of Puerto Rico by contrasting it to the “new world” of New York where his father now lives. The stark contrast between these two worlds is expressed in the descriptions the narrator uses. For example, the poem opens with a lengthy periodic sentence that builds up several images of Puerto Rico as a world that is tranquil, natural, and deeply familiar to the father. Thus, in the first stanza, “the mountains of Puerto Rico,” the “moist green light,” and “green bamboo hillsides” all reveal an intimacy with the landscape

that only comes from having lived there and remembering what it was like. In addition, the image of “the bridge built by your grandfather over a river” illustrates how leaving the homeland also involves breaking family ties by leaving one’s country of birth. To the narrator’s father, Puerto Rico has become an “imagined geography,” an alternative landscape that provides him with solace from the harsh world he confronts in the United States. Thus, compared to “waking to East Harlem rooftops or Texas barracks,” the memories of Puerto Rico’s natural beauty lull the narrator’s father into a dream world that is peaceful and vibrant. In this way, Espada contrasts the rural images of Puerto Rico to the harsh image of the immigrant’s current residence in a metropolitan environment to show the psychological strain that many immigrants undergo when leaving their homeland. Often what they have given up can never equal what they now have.

Espada emphasizes the idea of “imagined geographies” by referring to the memories of Puerto Rico that his father has while sleeping or dreaming. They flicker in his sleep and are glimpsed but not completely seen. For the immigrant whose life may not have turned out in the United States the way he or she had expected, the dreams of a better life are now superseded by fragmented memories of what life was like back home. These memories may have faded, but they are indelibly a part of a past that can never be forgotten. Yet these memories seem to surface only in a dream state. They create an impression of hope in what appears to be dreary circumstances by providing a space for the father to revisit his past. However, the dark side of these alluring images is that they produce a “craving for that island birthplace.” They make the father restless and unsatisfied. Even after thirty years of exile, these memories are as “constant as your pulse.” By holding on to these memories, the father may be unconsciously refusing to embrace his life in the United States.

Thus, in the first stanza, Espada reveals the troubled psychic landscape of the father, who dreams of returning yet knows that, either for economic or political reasons, he cannot. The desire for the homeland is emphasized by Espada’s repetitious use of the subordinating conjunction when that opens each phrase in the first stanza. In addition, because these yearnings occur when his father is dreaming, a reader senses that actually returning to his homeland is an impossibility. Thus, the father draws on these memories of the homeland for sustenance and comfort when the day-to-day circumstances of his life are most likely difficult and harsh. Images in the poem that provide glimpses of what life is like for him in the United States are few but telling. For example, “East Harlem rooftops” suggest living in a crowded ghetto that offers little in the way of vistas or natural beauty.

However, at the same time that these memories reveal a separate reality to the one that the father lives during the day, they also promote a sense of pride in cultural heritage and family history. Despite his separation from his homeland of Puerto Rico, the father refuses to repudiate his cultural background. For many immigrants, assimilating into mainstream culture requires sacrificing their heritage, their native language, and their customs in order to be accepted as Americans. Yet the father seems to resist assimilation by relaying the memories of life in Puerto Rico to his son. In this way, the father provides the narrator with a sense of his cultural identity as a Puerto Rican despite his being “born in New York.”

The second stanza reveals the effect that the father’s memories have had on the narrator. The inheritance he has been given is not economic or material gain but pride in his cultural make up. Compared to the grim environment of the inner city, the memories that his father shares with him allow him to escape momentarily to an imaginary geography, as when he writes, “years before I saw Puerto Rico, I saw the mountains looming above the projects.” In this way, father and son are joined by the commonality of their cultural heritage. It transcends the dire material circumstances of their lives and gives them something to “see at night.” As the “we” in the title suggests, both father and son dream of the homeland that offers them an alternative reality to the one they live during the day. Interestingly enough, the poem is dedicated to Espada’s father. This dedication offers the reader a hint that the poem’s content may be autobiographical and may reflect on the poet’s own relationship with his father. The poet Robert Creeley, in the introduction to Espada’s book Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction, claims that “it is the literal community and person of Frank Espada who so invests his own son’s commitment. It is his father’s family and relationships that preoccupy the son finally.”

The power of this poem lies in its ability to reveal how cultural heritage binds father and son through the contrasting of two different environments — the natural beauty of Puerto Rico to the inner city of New York. The distinction he makes between these environments is, he suggests, like night and day. The night offers an alternative reality that daylight cannot. The verb “to see,” which Espada uses repeatedly in the second stanza, engenders the dreams that his father has in the first stanza. For the son who has never been to the father’s homeland, it is not difficult to imagine what life is like there as he has come to know it through his father’s dream-like memories. These memories provide him with a vision of an alternate reality to the reality of the projects in Brooklyn; they are something he can see with his eyes closed.

Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on “We Live by What We See at Night,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

“In its back-and-forth tone the poem mirrors the duality of an immigrant’s life, and it is this duality that causes so much stress and discontent. It is also what makes the word ‘exile,’ with its dubious meaning, so important in the poem.”