In her bi-lingual grief poem, “Lexicon of Exile,” Aleida Rodriguez speaks in the voice of a Cuban immigrant as she describes the irrevocable loss of a childhood home, an event which creates a giant chasm within, a split self and a new language and identity for her people. As memories of her childhood surface, despite being told “you will not remember this,” she is compelled to speak.
To evoke the pain and disjointedness of this loss and the memories, Rodriguez creates a skeleton, a three-part structure in free verse to support the emotional arc of the poem. Thus, this ternary poem traces the loss, bewilderment and new identity forced upon exiles. The first four stanzas reveal the sadness of looking back on what is forever lost, moving into the next three stanzas depicting a bewildering new life. Then, in the last stanza that begins with the word “teletypes” on a line of its own, Rodriguez creates a metaphor to describe how the exiles integrate past and present into a “single sky.”
Written in eight stanzas of non-rhyming free verse and in varying lines, Rodriguez uses the lexicon of trees and nature to create both a social identity (Spanish-speaking Cubans driven from their motherland during the Cuban revolution) and a self (exiled Cubans, male or female) in space and time. Speaking mostly in first person point of view, she describes place, her former home in Guines, Cuba using vivid imagery such as “childhood’s cerulean sky, fat with meringue clouds,/” and active verbs such as “crank,” “scroll,” “pull.”
The poem is written in high-diction, using polysyllable and bilingual language where the primary speech acts are description and narrative. Using anaphora, the poem begins with the repeating line, “There is no way I can…” which is repeated four times in the poem, at the beginning of the first four stanzas. There are metaphors, for example, “Earth’s language is a continuous current, / translating the voices of my early trees along the ground,” which substitutes the word “trees,” for “years,” to portray a deep sense of loss.
Then, in the fifth stanza, Rodriguez uses a switch in agency (from first person point of view to “The trees fingering their dresses…. / to describe her new home in Los Angeles and to establish a comparison of past and present. This line is also an example of personification, “Trees fingering their dresses.” She also intersperses Spanish words into the poem to describe birds and trees of her homeland, such as “sinsontes outside my windows,” and English words for the birds and trees in her new home, such as “scrub jays and mockingbirds and linnets.”
The poem reaches its climax in the last stanza, which is one long sentence of nine lines, the longest stanza of the poem, which creates an emotional tension and a change in tone, from matter of fact to almost breathless that differs from the beginning stanzas, which are shorter sentences of generally four or five lines. Another interesting feature of the poem is that there are only two lines which are a single short sentence: “You will not remember this,” the last line of the second stanza, stated as if it was spoken to all children; and the line “I can’t afford not to listen” situated as the third line of the sixth stanza. This somewhat parallel structure adds emphasis to these lines.
Rodriguez effectively uses imagination, by using a woodpecker to teletype out the last nine lines and she also plays with the skeleton of the poem by varying the stanza lines from four to five, and then nine for the finale. As a “road not taken,” the poem could have been written in third person or second person point of view, as in “There is no way you can crank a dial,/ scroll back the scenery,” or “There is no way she can crank a dial,/ scroll back the scenery.” However, using the first person point of view pulls the reader in as speaker so that as a reader we empathize with the plight of the exiles.
Syntax: Very deliberate choice of word order such as using the word “and” to add rhythm as in “scrub jays and mockingbirds and linnets.” The line: “the cluck of coconuts high in the arc of the palm trees” using the word “cluck,” which ties in with the line above which mentions “chicken coop.” The phrase “pointillistically studded,” is interesting for its internal rhyme of the “st” sound. “yellow vowels,” is a metaphor.
“lambent,” which means shiny, “cerulean” which means blue, “sinsontes,” which is Spanish for mockingbirds,
Alliteration:
“Childhood’s cerulean sky” with the soft “c” sound.
the “s” is repeated in word endings: “scrub jays and mockingbirds and linnets.”
“l” sounds are repeated: “ciruelas, narangas agrias, the mamoncillos….”
“ing” is repeated often: “smelling the sour blend of rice and milk / fermenting.”
“t” sounds in “lambent/ turquoise on a white sand palate,/”
Anaphora: “There is no way I can…” is repeated four times.
Apostrophe: “You will not remember this.” Also dialogue
Assonance: the “a” sound in “no way I can crank…” “scrub jays…..” “no way” in close proximity.
Consonance: “perch sinsontes…instead of scrub jays…” where “sinsontes” rhymes with “jays.” Many rhymes playing off the repeated phrase of “There is no way,” as in “way” rhymes with “jay,” “sinsontes,” “play,”
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